British and American Literature. Учебно-методическое пособие

Перевод В. Топорова

ЗАПОВЕДЬ

Владей собой среди толпы смятенной, Тебя клянущей за смятенье всех, Верь сам в себя, наперекор вселенной, И маловерным отпусти их грех; Пусть час не пробил, жди, не уставая,

Пусть лгут лжецы, не снисходи до них; Умей прощать и не кажись, прощая, Великодушней и мудрей других.

Умей мечтать, не став рабом мечтанья, И мыслить, мысли не обожествив; Равно встречай успех и поруганье, Не забывая, что их голос лжив; Останься тих, когда твое же слово Калечит плут, чтоб уловлять глупцов, Когда вся жизнь разрушена, и снова Ты должен все воссоздавать с основ.

Умей поставить, в радостной надежде, На карту все, что накопил с трудом, Все проиграть и нищим стать, как прежде, И никогда не пожалеть о том, Умей принудить сердце, нервы, тело Тебе служить, когда в твоей груди Уже давно все пусто, все сгорело, И только Воля говорит: “Иди!“

Останься прост, беседуя с царями, Останься честен, говоря с толпой; Будь прям и тверд-с врагами и друзьями,

Пусть все, в свой час, считаются с тобой; Наполни смыслом каждое мгновенье, Часов и дней неумолимый бег, – Тогда весь мир ты примешь во владенье, Тогда, мой сын, ты будешь Человек!

Перевод М. Лозинского

ЕСЛИ...

О, если ты покоен, не растерян, Когда теряют головы вокруг,

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Иесли ты себе остался верен, Когда в тебя не верит лучший друг,

Иесли ждать умеешь без волненья, Не станешь ложью отвечать на ложь,

Не будешь злобен, став для всех мишенью, Но и святым себя не назовешь,

Иесли ты своей владеешь страстью,

Ане тобою властвует она,

Ибудешь тверд в удаче и несчастье, Которым, в сущности, цена одна,

Иесли ты готов к тому, что слово

Твое в ловушку превращает плут, И, потерпев крушенье, можешь снова –

Без прежних сил – возобновить свой труд,

Иесли ты способен все, что стало Тебе привычным, выложить на стол, Все проиграть и вновь начать сначала, Не пожалев того, что приобрел,

Иесли можешь сердце, нервы, жилы Так завести, чтобы вперед нестись, Когда с годами изменяют силы

Итолько воля говорит: “Держись!“,

Иесли можешь быть в толпе собою, При короле с народом связь хранить И, уважая мнение любое, Главы перед молвою не клонить,

Иесли будешь мерить расстоянье Секундами, пускаясь в дальний бег, – Земля – твое, мой мальчик, достоянье!

Иболее того, ты – человек!

Перевод С. Маршака

5. Here is an extract from the article Mr Bernard Shaw written by Chesterton. Read it and find the proof of this characterization of the playwright in Shaw’s works:

“You may attack his principles as I do; but I do not know of any instance in which you can attack their application. If he dislikes lawlessness, he dislikes the lawlessness of Socialists as much as that of Individualists. If he dislikes the fever of patriotism, he dislikes it in Boers and Irishmen as well as in Englishmen. If he dislikes the vows and bonds of marriage, he

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dislikes still more the fiercer bonds and wilder vows that are made by lawless love. If he laughs at the authority of the priests, he laughs louder at the pomposity of men of science. If he condemns the irresponsibility of faith, he condemns with a sane consistency the equal irresponsibility of art. He has pleased all the bohemians by saying that women are equal to men; but he has infuriated them by suggesting that men are equal to women. He is almost mechanically just; he has something of a terrible quality of a machine”.

6. Speak on the debate character of Shaw’s plays. Analyze one of them.

Chapter IX

BRITISH LITERATURE BETWEEN

TWO WORLD WARS

Twentieth century literature is remarkable for a great diversity of artistic values and artistic methods. Fundamental political, economic and social changes on the British scene deeply affected the creative writing. At the end of the XIX and the beginning of the XX century English literature was also deeply influenced by writers, poets and dramatists who made persistent attempts to break away from established literary conventions. These trends gained an especially strong impetus after the holocaust of World War I, which acted as a catalyst that initiated the modern period in literature; it accentuated the senses of general cultural catastrophe and individual spiritual crisis. In the article The Contemporary Novel (1914) Wells wrote about “a definable difference between the novel of the past and what I may call the modern novel. It lies in the fact that formerly there was a feeling of certitude about moral values and standards of conduct that is altogether absent today”. The writers of that time inspected a restless era when right and wrong were in dispute and individuals felt free to pursue their own codes, sometimes with dangerous consequences for themselves and others. So many of those writers who wanted to express their disillusionment and hopelessness, but unable to form a clear conception of how to change things, limited their protest to extravagance of form, relegating the rational meaning to the ground.

The writers experimenting with poetic form have received the much debated and still not clearly defined title of “modernists”, as distinct from traditionalists. In British poetry this trend is particularly associated with the Irishman Yeats (1865–1939), whose poetry has been discussed in the

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previous chapter. In 1923 the poet received the Nobel Prize for literature. In prose Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Aldous Huxley and David Lawrence are the prominent modernist writers. Modernism reflects the impact upon literature of the psychology of Freud. It rejects the traditional framework of narrative, description, and rational exposition in poetry and prose, in favour of stream-of-consciousness presentation of personality, a dependence on the poetic image as the essential vehicle of aesthetic communication, and upon myth as a characteristic cultural principle.

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) has always been regarded as one of the principle exponents of Modernism. She is a representative of the new literary trend known as “stream of consciousness” – the attempt to convey all the contents of a character’s mind – memory, feelings, intuitions, thoughts – in relation to the stream of experience, as it passes by. The term was coined in 1890 by William James in his book Principles of Psychology. Woolf’s novels Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse established her reputation as an original modernist. The books are narratives moving between the heroes’ thought processes and those of the onlookers. In the novel Orlando she uses androgyny – her hero is first male, then female. According to feminist criticism such presentation of characters means her escape from gender polarity.

In Mrs Dalloway she describes one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway and of others closely or tangentially related to her. The readers slide into the consciousnesses of Clarissa, her husband, her rejected suitor of many years before, a mentally unstable victim of the war and his Italian wife, a working-class woman, and others. The novel organizes itself around the events of Clarissa's day in Westminster and the West End, punctuated by Big Ben, and around the meetings and passings of the various characters, most of them eventually to land up at Clarissa's evening party, if only as the subject of conversation. The writing is poetic and evocative, and the management of the significant incidents is superb: for instance, the early sections of the novel organize themselves around a magnificent car proceeding through the West End bearing Greatness - of what precise kind no one can say, but it seems like a reassertion of stability, order and traditional values after the chaos and slaughter of war. A superb comment on the fragility of this reassertion of middle-class values comes in the scene where the crowd, waiting outside Buckingham Palace for a glimpse of the Royal car, has its attention diverted by a stunt plane in the sky, doing advertising sign-writing, so that they miss the arrival of the car. A similar moment occurs at the end, where the Prime Minister, arriving at Clarissa's

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party and causing a frisson of something between patriotism and snobbery, is perceived by Clarissa's old suitor to be no more impressive than a grocer: “You might have stood him behind a counter and bought biscuits”.

Virginia Woolf saw the duty of the new generation of writers in “breaking the windows of stifling and stuffy over-furnished rooms of contemporary middle-class fiction and letting in the fresh air of experiment”. Her main aim was the projection of mental process, the subordination of observable actions to private thoughts and feelings, which, in her understanding, form the real flux of living.

The novels of Virginia Woolf are often set against James Joyce’ Ulysses, which is used as a touchstone to reveal their supposed limitations and comparative conventionality. This is unfair. One can not regard Virginia Woolf's range of characters as limited as is sometimes suggested; her wide use of symbols helps to reconstruct deep passions.

James Joyce (1882–1941) is an Irishman, who wrote poetry, drama and prose. His first published work was a volume of verse, Chamber Music (1907). In his literary work he was influenced and got strong support from the American Imagist Ezra Pound and Yeats. The main thing in Joyce’s theory is that the artist is bound to reject the values and tastes of the man in the street, and must, if necessary, alienate himself from the life around him. Yet with all this rigorous withdrawal and self-exclusion, Joyce's work concerns itself, as no other great novel does, with the man in the street, and the streets themselves.

When Joyce, for his first novel, uses the cliche painter's title A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man we are meant to note that it is A portrait – not The: it selects aspects to illuminate a theme; it does not present the whole personality, but takes a slanted look at aspects of it. The Artist acknowledges the book's personal application, but insists on the larger application as well: it is about what it is to be an artist. And the last part of the title insists that the book is about a phase of life that is over and done with, that can be looked back on with a fair degree of objectivity. Some critics call this novel a bildungsroman – a novel of education because it concentrates on the protagonist’s upbringing.

The first pages recreate with immediacy the sensations and thought processes of infancy, with Stephen Dedalus becoming aware of his five senses, his gradual apprehension of his immediate environment. This environment is established concretely in the early sections, and gradually enlarges itself, but it is impressed on us from the beginning that it has dual aspect: it is both the setting that contributes to making Stephen what he is,

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and the force that imprisons him and that eventually, as an artist, he will be impelled to flee from. From the beginning the voices around him urge him to apologize, to conform, confess, fit in; they put before him images to aspire to - to be a gentleman, a good Catholic, a good Irishman. Only half of him listens to those 'hollow-sounding voices, his deeper urge is escape into his imaginative world, to commune with the insubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. In the course of the book Stephen casts off his religion, which presents itself as both fascinating and terrible to his imaginative boy's mind. But he comes to see that in general life in Ireland presents perils for the creative spirit - not just the danger of suppression, which the Catholic-Puritan temper of the Irish church has presented for all the country's imaginative artists of this century, but the danger of irrelevant diversion of energies and sympathy. For Stephen, in the true Romantic tradition, the essential condition of being an artist is “freedom” – “the mode of life or of art whereby your spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.” It is to find, or rather achieve, that freedom that Stephen leaves Ireland at the end of the book.

Joyce’ most famous novel is Ulysses. Together with his other novel Finnegan’s Wake, it revolutionized the structure of the novel, decisively influenced the development of the “stream of consciousness”, or “interior monologue” (the inner movement of consciousness in a character’s mind without the obvious intervention of the author) and pushed language and linguistic experiment to the extreme limits of communication. Ulysses, published in Paris in 1922, was banned in England until 1936 for its alleged obscenity. The story shows, in immense detail, 24 hours in the life of Leopold Bloom, a lonely Jew of Hungarian origin, living in Dublin – a man with numerous casual acquaintances and a wife whose fidelity he distrusts. Another important character in the novel is Stephan Dedalus, whom we know from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Meticulously detailed, constructed on a framework incredibly complex yet kept out of sight – each section parallels or parodies a section of Homer’s epic The Odyssey, each has its own part of the body, its own musical motif, and so we seem to enter directly, without authorial intervention, into the flux and muddle of the characters’ actual thoughts, and the novel moves insinuatingly from descriptions of characters, into their minds, and out again. After an inconclusive meeting at the end of the day between the two male principals, the novel ends not with them, but with Molly Bloom, Leopold's unfaithful Penelope, as she recollects the events of her day and her life in an unpunctuated drift towards sleep. Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly hardly resemble Telemuchus, Odysseus and

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Penelope, but modern life requires its own forms of heroism – the heroic efforts of mind to distract itself while it tries to reconcile its conflicts. Parallels with Homer focus upon the themes of fatherhood and betrayal, which are universal to both past and present, but the irony is in the disparity between the ancient heroic and the modern mundane. There is no direct comment, the changing style of the chapters keeps pace with Stephen’s own growth – he begins to realize that his growth as an artist depends on his growth as a man.

Finnegans Wake moves from the wakening consciousness of Ulysses to a world of dream and nightmare. The book is set in Dublin and the events take place within one night but incorporate the whole of human history. There are allusions between the heroes and Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel. The book is divided into 4 sections, corresponding to the four seasons and the Four Ages of Man. It also reflects the universal myth of fall and redemption. The fragmentary quality mirrors the free-associating nature of the dreaming mind.

Dubliners is a collection of stories, but in fact it is a fragmentary novel: “My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the center of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness…” The first three stories are the first person narrations; the boy protagonist is a little older in each story, so we assume this is the same boy, though there is no evidence for it; the narration reveals an older, more experienced consciousness. At the end the boy sees himself as “a creature driven and derided by vanity”, and in this way it grows into the third-person narration, used in the stories concerned with adolescence.

In all his works Joyce depicts the psychic movement of his characters, creating a chaotic play of sensations and emotions in arbitrary succession of seeming relevance of a unifying idea. Joyce’s influence upon later writers has been considerable. But even Virginia Woolf, an experimentalist herself, admitted how difficult she found to read Joyce.

Joyce had an opponent, Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), a British artist, novelist and critic, the founder of the Vorticist movement, a Modernist movement in British art and literature, linked to Imagism and Futurism. Lewis considered modern art to be out-dated, accused vanguardist writers of romanticism, sentimentalism and socialism, adhered the rude force of expression. In 1928 he published the first book, The Childermass,

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of a proposed tetralogy The Human Age. It is a very eccentric work, a surrealist fantasy, in fact. It opens with the magnificent topographic description of Hell where the protagonists of the book find themselves at the beginning of their comic odyssey into the Afterlife. In the course of their journey towards the Purgatory, they pass through a number of different “time-zones”. Among other things the work satirizes Einstein’s theory of relativity, as well as the “stream of consciousness” method. Lewis, despite all his ambitions, has never got the same acknowledgement, as James Joyce. Later he associated with the British Fascist party, and the literary world rejected him.

The distinguishing marks of the novels of D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) are very different.

In his best works he moves from the banal to the metaphysical. He usually questions the stability and unity of the “self”. The influence of Freud’s ideas upon his works is very strong.

It is often said that Sons and Lovers (1913) shows the working-class finding their voice in fiction: for the first time they are depicted from the inside, by one of themselves. In a limited sense this is true: D.H. Lawrence was the son of a miner, and he grew up in the typical environment of the industrial working class. On the other hand D. H. Lawrence had very little in common with working-class people. He was somehow inside working-class life, but not of it.

Sons and Lovers is the story of the struggle of Mrs. Morel, a woman who has married “beneath her”, first against her life-loving, vital, drunken husband, then to gain and hold the love of her sons. Paul struggles against the Oedipal situation he is involved in, first with the sensitive, repressed Miriam, later with the more sensual Clara. At the end of the novel, after the death of his mother, he seems totally broken, only waiting to go into the darkness to follow her. Then, in the final paragraph, which suggests possibilities but solves nothing, he turns back to the lights of Nottingham, and walks towards life and the future. It is impossible to ignore the pressures of autobiography in the book. The novel Sons and Lovers is often compared to Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man published only a year later. Both novels use the artist’s experience as a way of exploring the limits of the provincial communities. The novel is stylistic innovatory and symbolic.

The Rainbow (1915) is a psychological novel of how parents transmit their unresolved problems to their children. In this generation family saga Lawrence is interested in the tension between the old and the new, in un-

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conscious physical and psychological forces, in “a woman becoming individual, self-responsible, taking her own initiative”.

In the novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) Sir Clifford’s physical and psychological injuries symbolize the debilitated state of post-war Britain. Sir Clifford is an industrialist, and the environmental damage of his mines contrasts with sexual regeneration of Connie and Mellors. It also represents the conflict between intellect and animalism. The full text of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published only in 1960 because of the detailed descriptions of sexual union and uncompromising use of fourletter words. In spite of all that Lawrence was a moralist, believing that modern man was in danger of losing his ability to experience the quality of life. He tended to primitivism and depicted the physical world of nature with fresh immediacy and vividness.

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) began as a poet, but then he turned to prose. In his works he analyzed the ideas, mores and personalities of the age with iconoclastic virtuosity. His first volume of stories was published in 1920 and it was very well received. In 1921 his famous novel Crome Yellow appeared. It is full of witty dialogues and cynically funny observations; the author not only satirizes Ottoline Morrell’s literary circle but also reveals the author’s concern for human isolation and egotism, the search for love and balanced philosophy of life. This country-style satire brought him a reputation for precocious brilliance and cynicism and gave him a stature as a sophisticate with wry awareness of the ills of the world. It is a discussion novel. This novel was followed by Antic Hay (1923), which shocked the audience with a debunking tone, despair and open treatment of infidelity, drugs, jazz and drunkenness amongst London bohemians. The writer managed to recreate the atmosphere of the time with its spiritual emptiness, dislocated social values and modernism in arts. Point Counter Point (1928) is Huxley’s fictional masterpiece, another “discussion novel”, full of artists, scientists, politicians, who represent and argue through problems and philosophies of the time. The contrapuntal form of the novel operates by short scenes and frequent abrupt transitions between sets of characters.

Huxley’s novel Brave New World was published in 1932. Its genre is that of a satirical dystopian science fiction novel of ideas. Dystopia is a portrait of imaginary societies, worse than our own, intended to dramatize unhealthy values and trends in the present and to warn against future developments. Novel of ideas is a type of fiction in which action is less important than explicit discussion between the characters. The theme was

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not new; much can be said about intertextuality – relationships that exist among the texts. For example, the discussions between Mond and John remind us of Christ and the Great Inquisitor scene from The Brothers Karamazov; the idea of a World State set up after the existing order has been wrecked by war and economic collapse was borrowed from Well’s utopian fiction and from Zamyatin’s famous novel We. Besides, one can feel the influence of Voltaire’s Candide as John is also a naïve central character who lives through the series of fantastic events, which, together with his reflections upon them, helps us to think about current moral and political issues. Unlike We, Brave New World offers a contrasting model of centralized social control – one, which is based not on terror but on pleasure. The citizens of The World State are artificially conceived and manipulated into believing themselves to be happy. They can not imagine any other goal besides their personal well-being. John is sometimes taken to be a spokesman for Huxley’s own views, championing the natural life of the reservation against the artificial life of the world state. But in the Preface Huxley points out that the Reservation is as repulsive as the World State. He raises such important themes as: dehumanization – a number of trends in modern world are eroding the idea of human beings as unique individuals; true and false science; death. The latter is felt in the imagery of the book: Huxley writes about “corpse-colored rubber” of the workers’ gloves, hanging corpse. For him dehumanized life is a kind of living death. But on the other hand death is inevitable and one has to come to terms with it in order to be human.

The book lacks any positive message. But it is a brilliant satire on modern capitalist society. It is seen in the language and style of the novel. The use of ellipsis and parenthesis, informal sentence structures takes us rapidly from one idea or character to the next. Parody (imitating of something intended to ridicule its characteristic features) is another stylistic device. Huxley imitates the language of the upper-class slang, pop songs and science. In fact, the book started as a parody of Wells’ Men Like Gods.

Later, in 1948, after nuclear tests, Huxley wrote Ape and Essence, in which he discussed the aftermath of nuclear war.

Huxley is often called a “novelist of ideas” and a representative of the 1920s. Many critics say that his books up to 1939 assure him of a place amongst the major English social satirists.

So, the revolutionary changes are seen most clearly in the genre of the novel and in poetry. Nevertheless, this was, too, the first great age of the

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