British and American Literature. Учебно-методическое пособие

lonia (1937), a mixture of personal memoir and political analysis of the war. During World War II he worked as a journalist and a reviewer.

Orwell’s reputation as a novelist was established with the publication of Animal Farm (1945). It is a political fable, which recounts in the allegorical form the aftermath of the Russian revolution, and partly illustrates a belief in the universal tendency of power to corrupt. The most effective writing in the book deals with the attempts of those in power to rewrite history, to redefine what is true and what is false.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, is one of the most formidable works of fiction and Orwell’s most pessimistic work. In the state of Oceania one can recognize the traits of fascism, Stalinist purge or Chinese cultural revolution, in fact any totalitarian regime. Like Evgeny Zamyatin or Huxley before him, Orwell divides the heroes of his dystopia into two groups. Winston Smith, the protagonist, sees the salvation of his fellow citizens in living according to the laws of Nature. The author creates the image of Big Brother, the successor of Ford from Huxley’s Brave New World, of Thought Police, Ministry of Truth. All citizens speak Newspeak – a deliberately impoverished version of English – and it drastically reduces their scope of thought and feeling. They watch the only TV programme, and it emphasizes the disastrous consequences of mass-media under totalitarian regime.

Orwell has often been accused of plagiary. Indeed, as it has been mentioned, the novel has much in common with other dystopian novels. On the other hand, throughout the whole history of literary development, there were authors who put forward the themes, and other authors, who developed them.

William Golding (1911–1993) achieved an instant success with the publication of his first novel Lord of the Flies (1954), a very symbolic book, like his next works. The plot of it is based on the plot of R. Ballantyne’s adventure story The Coral Island (1857) about a group of boys, who after the shipwreck could organize themselves into a kind of a Victorian God-fearing society. The comparison of the plots only deepens the terror of Lord of the Flies. The book is in fact a story of civilization, but in reverse. Wrecked on a desert island in some future nuclear war, a group of boys tries to rule themselves orderly, but stepby- step they regress to tyranny, superstition, blood-thirst and a horrifying man-hunt. It is a book with a firm, uncompromising vision of man, “original sin”, of the violence submerged beneath man’s stable, tolerant life-style.

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Golding addressed the theme of the harsh brutality of men in a diversity of historical contexts and settings in the subsequent works. In many of his books the writer presents isolated individuals or small groups in extreme situations dealing with man in his basic condition, creating the quality of a fable. The hero of his other novel Pincher Martin (1956) is a shipwrecked sailor, cast up on a jagged rock in mid-Atlantic. At first sight it seems a realistic story about the heroic struggle of Pincher Martin in order to survive. But as he summons his physical energy, Martin starts to realize that in the past he had used it to lie, cheat and exploit his fellows, so his physical struggle turns into psychological exploration. At the end of the book it becomes evident, that the sailor had been drowned almost immediately, so the whole experience becomes an illusion, in which case Pincher Martin’s ordeal perhaps took place not in time but in eternity, and the rock symbolizes Purgatory.

Golding got Booker Prize for Rites of Passage (1980). The text of the novel is presented as the main hero’s journal of the voyage. The ship is portrayed as the world in small; Captain Andersen is presiding like a god – a metaphor that is often underlined. The miniature society is maintained more threatening here than in other Golding’s novels.

Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990), a recognized post-modernist, first got his fame as a poet during the war. But his reputation mainly rests on tetralogy The Alexandria Quartet. It raises two important themes: the disruption of neocolonialism and writer’s creative work. It is impossible to give a summary of the novels, as the plot is not so important for the author, he is more concerned with his aesthetic principles. May be this is why his characters never become three-dimensional creations and there is a startling gap between the brilliant ideas ascribed to the characters and their actual behaviour.

Durrell called his work “a relativity poem”. In it he gives his interpretations of theories of Einstein and Freud in using different narrative perspectives on a single set of events and personalities. The tetralogy has been both praised and condemned for the poetic opulence of the prose.

Alan Sillitoe also started his literary work as a poet and published his first volume of verse Without Beer or Bread in 1957. His political fable The General (1960) was much praised. It deals with a general who captures an entire orchestra and allows them to play one final concert; the music destroys a soldier in him, and he begins to lose his war. His first novel, which got critics’ acclaim, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,

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appeared in 1958 and was followed by the novella The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner in 1958. Later, in the 1970-80s he published several other poems, novels and essays but his main literary fame stays with the first two novels, which were widely translated into other languages. Sillitoe is often thought of as a working-class writer. But at the same time his protagonist Arthur Seaton, lathe operator from a bicycle family (the novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) provided a prototype for another literary trend – that of The Angry Young Men. Seaton escapes from the working-class milieu through marriage and through becoming a chargehand, the way John Braine’s artisan hero Joe Lampton does in Room on the Top. It is typical for the English working-class novel in general that its central characters are deeply untypical of working-class life, because they are peripheral to it or have escaped from it or are “drops-out” from it.

Many critics say that Sillitoe’s work declined the further he got from his source of inspiration, but this is a condescending over-simplification. Certainly some of his later work is very disappointing, but Widower's Son (1976), a mature and compassionate novel, is comparable in quality with his early work, and the title story of his collection Guzman Go Home is as brilliant a piece of virtuosity and ventriloquism as one has seen in the modern short story. A dreary English pair, from the fringes of the art world, are stranded in a Spanish village and forced to listen to the speeches of Guzman, an ex-Nazi who has taken refuge in Franco's Spain. It is an exercise comparable to a Browning dramatic monologue, where the indefensible is defended, and where the hopelessly tarnished character seems infinitely more alive and attractive than the upright and rightthinking.

The term Angry Young Men has been arbitrarily imposed upon some British playwrights and novelists of the mid-1950s. It is important to note that this movement was not clearly defined. Far from it: they attacked one another in the press and some were even reluctant to appear between the same covers with others whose views they violently opposed. But they had one thing in common – an attitude of non-conformity to the established social order. The Angry Young Men expressed their anger with society through their characters, an anger modified by the fact that it was expressed from the point of view of men who themselves belonged to that society. The novels of Kingsley Amis, John Braine, William Cooper, Thomas Hinde, Peter Towry, John Wain, and Keith Waterhouse are frequently more significant as demonstrations of certain social phenomena than as works of fiction. As literature, the novels are too limited to allow

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the kind of projection that results in satisfactory art; although even as social commentaries, they are generally too narrow to make possible the range of experience we expect from fiction, light or otherwise. Narrow range, superficial analyses, irresponsible and aimless protagonists, antiheroic acts, anti-intellectualism, slapstick comedy – these are the qualities suggested by these novelists of the 1950's.

Primarily, the protagonists of these novelists are not really angry. They are, however, dissatisfied – with themselves, with their social status, with their work, with their colleagues, with the shabbiness of daily life, with their frustrated aspirations for self-fulfillment, with the competitive spirit.

John Wain’s novel Hurry On Down (1953) is about an Oxford graduate, Charles Lumley, who has to change many professions: from a win- dow-cleaner to an author of humorous sketches. Charles wishes both to stand outside society and to find a niche in it – provided that it is one that carries no obligations of commitment, reflecting at the end of the novel: “Neutrality; he had found it at last. The running fight between himself and society had ended in a draw”.

Joe Lampton, the protagonist of John Braine’s Room at the Top and Life at the Top is eager to make his way into the upper class and in order to obtain his goal he marries Susan Brown, the daughter of the richest man of the town. For that he betrays his love, Alice Aisgill, who commits suicide. In the second book Joe gets disappointed in his bourgeois way of life, he understands that he has lost his integrity.

Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) remains the most vigorous and effective example of the protest, especially in the passages that expose academic racket and pseudo-culture that accompanies it. The novel is about a university lecturer on probation who permanently finds himself in a predicament: he abuses his chief, Professor Welch, gets drunk at his party, quarrels with the Professor’s son. During his own lecture Jim imitates the Dean and Professor Welch, turns the lecture into a show. Lucky Jim is perhaps the best illustration of this kind of novel not because Amis consciously started a school or even created a fixed pattern, but because his Jim is a representative of the younger “heroes“ of that decade. Jim is part of the world of librarians, teachers, or civil servants. He became a symbol of the new generation, and many young people recognized themselves. These Jims of the fifties feel anger as much against themselves for being trapped as against those who have trapped them. Educated to discontent,

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they find nothing in society that appeals to them. Despite their intellectual pretensions, their intellect bores them. In spite of all weaknesses of the novel Jim becomes an honest non-hero who revolts against hypocrisy.. Amis went on to explore other aspects of aesthetic cunt and snobbery in the novels That Uncertain Feeling (1955) and I Like It Here (1958).

The best expression of the mood of The Angry Young Men can be found in the passionate misanthropic dialogues of Jimmy Porter, the hero of Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, which was staged in 1956 and became a symbol for all the other works of The Angry Young Men. In fact, it is more right to call Jimmy as anti-hero, or non-hero because his attractiveness lies in his inability to perform heroic or generous deeds. The play has a realistic surface – the family life of the Porters. From this point it can be called “a kitchen-sink drama” as its main focus is on family quarrels, problems of ordinary bourgeois or working-class way of life. But its brilliance and immediate popularity lies in its polemic character and the bitter rhetoric. Osborne is an excellent phrase-maker and managed to reflect contemporary neuroses and dissatisfactions. He gives an authentic picture of a post-war society. The play Look Back in Anger marked a turning point in the modern English theatre. In the play Luther based on the life of Martin Luther, the leader of the Reformation in Germany, Osborne portrayed a sense of physical and spiritual uncertainty, of self-torment, the challenge to imperial authority and at the end the break-down into sentiment.

One of the directions of English drama of the post-war period is represented by Theatre of the Absurd. This term was coined by the British critic Martin Esslin to characterize the work of certain key playwrights in the 1950-60s. Their works are based on the philosophy of existentialism and inspired by Camus’s essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). The later bombing of Hiroshima only deepened the scope of the Hollocaust: the man is a stranger in an irrational universe, deprived of illusions or purpose, and hence subject to a metaphysical or moral anguish, or “feeling of Absurdity”. Theatre of the Absurd negates any logic in human existence and reproduces “Stream of Consciousness” – the internal verbal, imaginative and perceptual activities of a character. The dialogues lack any sense to show that man is alone and communication is impossible. The first and key attempt to give dramatic definition to this sense of mind was made by Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953). Beckett (1906-1989) was an Irish, who moved to Paris, and there made fiends with James Joyce,

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whose works influenced him greatly. As far as he settled in Paris, he wrote his novels and plays in French. Waiting for Godot established him as an original and important dramatist and became one of the most prominent works of the XX century. It involves two days from the life of the tramps, Vladimir, who is more optimistic, and Estragon – a pessimist, self-pitying man. They are waiting for some Godot, meanwhile playing verbal games, philosophizing, speculating about the future. The phrases they exchange are very short and senseless. Here, in symbolic terms, Beckett shows the uncertainties of human existence and the vanity of human effort. The dialogues of the play are very long, but Beckett overcomes this difficulty by making his characters forget everything: Estragon cannot remember anything, while Vladimir, possessing a better memory, distrusts what he remembers. There are several interpretations of the play. Some critics say that Vladimir and Estragon symbolize humanity waiting for the return of a saviour. The tree, under which they are waiting, can represent the tree of death, the tree of life or the tree of knowledge.

Another play, Krapp’s Last Tape, shows an old man, who is listening to the recorded voice of his younger, more cheerful self. This voice talks about his beliefs, spiritual health, romantic inclinations. Krapp hears his own words, said at the age of 39: “Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back…” At the end of the play there is the author’s remark: “Krapp is left motionless staring before him” – a visible example of the vanity of human wishes, the sadness of human loneliness.

The play Happy Days opens with the sight of a woman embedded in a pile of earth. She addresses some Willie, who is visible to the audience a few times. These setting and meaningless speech are designed to show the human helplessness and pointless existence.

Some of Harold Pinter’s plays are considered to be close to Theatre of the Absurd, such as The Caretaker (1960) or The Birthday Party (1958). The plays are surreal, but at the same time the language is ordinary and idiomatic. Their complexities are not easily summarized. Pinter shows ordinary, weak people and they cause readers’ compassion. World in his plays is not chaotic but poorly organized. Harold Pinter and Becket are united by the distinction of a style entirely their own, in which language is used with the precision of poetry (which Pinter began by writing). Pinter's work is none the less more circumscribed than Beckett's, more deeply rooted in the social world, its anxieties, self-doubt and violence. In Pinter's early work, the so-called comedies of menace, the social origin of his drama was often heavily overlaid; the

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situation of his characters, though defined by a recognizable environment - for example, the seaside boarding-house in The Birthday Party – was obscure; and the violence which occurred was the result of dimly realized terrors. In more recent plays – Betrayal (1983), One for the Road (1984) and A Kind of Alaska (1984) – the social ambiance has become clearer, and Pinter's feeling for character in relation to social type as defined by class and profession less opaque.

As Pinter is more concerned with type and class than Beckett, the boundaries of his plays are more tightly drawn. His plays are enacted in rooms - social and personal spaces in which his characters are trapped by circumstances, which may or may not be of their own making. As in Beckett's plays, we are confronted with effects, of which the causes may be unknown. Intensity in the stage-action often derives in Pinter's plays from everyday objects (a drum, a bucket, a bed), which are identified with private territories. Pinter has described himself as a very traditional playwright who insists on having a curtain in his plays. These curtains have a metaphorical meaning: they conceal the problem of who we are, or how our present relates to our past, how the memories relate to desire, and fears to the need of self-assertion.

Betrayal (1983) is Pinter's most naturalistic play, and the one in which his control of form is most obviously displayed. A triangular relationship is seen from its end to its beginning, like a film run backwards. The action is not concerned with what happened, but with the precarious identities of three characters, for whom deceit, lies, betrayal are also needed forms of selfdefense. If, in the end, Betrayal seems a little too calculated, A Kind of Alaska succeeds in that combination of the actual with the suggestive where Pinter's art is most effective. Deborah has lain asleep for twenty-nine years with encephalitis lethargica. With the discovery of L-dopa her doctor awakens her, and she attempts to re-cross the boundary to the waking world, to a present as much changed as she has aged. She makes a brave, almost a miraculous attempt to rise from her bed, to walk alone, then to dance; but in the end the attempt to readjust to the reality of those about her - of her sister, and her family – is too great. All they have told her, she thinks she has in proportion. But who she is in this hall of reflecting glass, she does not intend to find out. “I certainly have no intention of looking into a mirror.” This line recalls what Pinter himself once said: “I had – I have – nothing to say about myself, directly. I wouldn't know where to begin.”

Pinter has described himself as a very traditional playwright who insists on having a curtain in all his plays, and who writes curtain lines for that reason. The curtains are metaphorical too; what they conceal are the

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themes to which Pinter has kept returning: the problem of who we are, of how our present relates to our past, how memories relate to desire, and fears to the need for self-assertion.

Throughout his work Pinter's language has many of the qualities of poetry – he uses the specific to express a range of meanings and feelings, to which his audience will respond at different levels, and in different ways. John Holloway, an English literary scholar, writes: ”Pinter’s plays have been remarkable for their unnerving repetitions, flair for switching dialogue into absurdist ritual with undertones of violence, bewildering inconsistencies in what the characters say, scenes where non-communication between the actors is more significant than communication, and kaleidoscopic transitions between dialogue, half soliloquy and dream-world isolation”.

Peter Shaffer is another recognized dramatist of the period under consideration. He is known all over the world due to the play Amadeus. In it Salieri's appalled recognition that he is not “beloved of God” as Mozart is, and that compared to Mozart's his music is worthless, dramatizes the anguish of the artist capable of recognizing genius in a contemporary; it compels him to plot Mozart's death. As in all Shaffer's major plays, a drama of ideas is conceived in terms of an action concerned with a crime. Shaffer's strength lies in the largeness with which the play is conceived and in its theatrical realization; his weakness in the development of the ideas that give life to it.

Tom Stoppard is another talented playwright. In one of the interviews he said that his aim was “to achieve the perfect marriage between ideas and farce of high comedy”. In his plays he widely uses conceits, parody, puns in combination with serious material. He also said once that he writes plays because “dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself”. One of his most popular plays is Rosenkratz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966). The main characters are “the attendant lords” from Hamlet, who meet the players on their way to Elsinore, exchange ideas, play word-games, move into the action of the play from time to time, and gradually feel trapped by its plot. Though they know about the death warrant Hamlet has substituted for the one issued by Claudius, they go to a fate, they feel predestined by some hostile power, which is beyond their understanding. Here one can feel the influence of The Theatre of Absurd, though amended by Stoppard’s wit.

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Tasks

1.Speak on the main trends in the development of English post-war literature.

2.The theme of the future in the post-war English literature (Orwell, Golding and others). Speak on the difference in their approach to this theme.

3.Speak on the genre modifications of the post-war novels of Graham Greene. Analyze one of his novels.

4.What unites the works of The Angry Young Men?

5.Theatre of Absurd: its philosophy, development and authors.

Chapter XI

BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS

The feminist movement coincided and coalesced with the radical changes of the late sixties, but it survived longer; and its results – in practical and in literary terms – were infinitely more valuable. Britain produced few propagandist feminist novelists, high on ideology, analysis and “'solutions.” The older generation of women novelists – Edna O'Brien, for example, or Penelope Mortimer – had in fact been doing this for years. The late sixties was a period for larger themes and canvases raised in the books of women writers. The younger feminists did not very often depart from the traditional areas of women's writing: marriage, home, children, the fight to assert individuality. To that extent it may be said that Olivia Manning has succeeded in it more than any of them.

Olivia Manning (1911–1980) and her husband, the British Council official, moved to Rumania, and then to Greece, Egypt and Jerusalem on the eve of World War II. Her experience is reflected in her Balkan and Levantine trilogies with historical events, but also with the personal conflicts of her own early married life. She does not try to disguise the autobiographical nature of her novels. The first trilogy centres on the lightly disguised pair, Guy and Harriet Pringle, he – a British Council lecturer in a Rumanian university. By the end of the second volume the inexorable German stranglehold over Rumania has forced them to flee to Greece; by the end of the third, German invasion has meant a nightmare voyage to Egypt. In the second trilogy, they are closer to the theatre of war. Feeling, rightly, that she could not base a further series entirely on the marital ups and downs of Guy and Harriet, Manning diversifies interest with another cen-

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tral character. Simon Boulderstone, a young British soldier fighting in North Africa. Though this presents some structural problems, what cannot be doubted is that Manning proves herself a brilliant military novelist. An interesting comparison here is with Evelyn Waugh, whose Sword of Honour trilogy (1952–61) covers some of the same ground, and was surely an inspiration to Manning. Waugh, himself a combatant, presents a wonderful picture of the pressures and hysteria of battle but the overall strategic pattern eludes the reader.

Doris Lessing has always been keen on psychological novel. Her first book, The Grass is Singing, was published in 1950 and gained immediate success. It is about the painful relationship between a white farmer’s wife and her black servant. But Doris Lessing’s major achievement remains

The Golden Notebook (1962) and the Children of Violence sequence, both solidly autobiographical. Lessing was taken up by the seventies feminist movement as some kind of its spiritual leader, but this emphasis seriously distorted her achievement. Women's role and potential are always seen in Lessing in the largest possible social context, and are part, not the whole, of her analysis and vision. The Children of Violence sequence sometimes repels in its early stages by the self-absorption of its central character, but there can be no doubt about its impressive scope, passing from racialism in a colonial possession, through post-war communism to (in the last volume) an age in which nuclear catastrophe is imminent. The form of The Golden Notebook is fluid, experimental. The central character, Anna Wulf, is a novelist in a state of writer's block and a person near breakdown, ravaged and uncertain in her sexual, familial and social relationships, disillusioned in her political commitment. The literal progress of her crisis is interrupted by excerpts from her notebooks of different colours, which fictionalize her life, relate it to her political stance and to cataclysmic world events, and provide material for her course of psychoanalysis. The fragmentary, blocked life is righted in the final golden notebook (not, perhaps, the most satisfactory part of the novel). The whole provides a multi-dimensional portrait of this particular woman, and of the pressures on women, particularly feminists, in the later twentieth century - all seen in the context of world events, which are both shaping our lives and taking away individual powers of decision. This book was hailed as a landmark by the Women’s Movement. As Joan Didion, an American novelist and essayist, observes, Lessing is a writer who has been drawn in different directions by her “impulse to final solutions.” It seems irrelevant at this point to ask whether The Golden Notebook quite comes together to

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