British and American Literature. Учебно-методическое пособие

form a consistent artistic whole: it was – and still remains years on – an immensely important book for our times.

Margaret Drabble has been the most admired and popular of the younger generation. Her success has been attributed to all sorts of reasons but the right one, her immensely involving gift of narrative. It is very easy to take an extract from Drabble prose and pull it to pieces, pointing to the loose syntax, the repetition, or the tired vocabulary. In isolation the demonstration looks unanswerable, but put the extract back into the novel and you find it works perfectly well. For what distinguishes Drabble is the compulsive nature of her narrative voice. She is like a stranger telling you a story on a train, telling it with no apparent artifice, yet riveting your attention and establishing through her story a close and warm relation with you, the listener. Drabble’s subjects have been traditional (The Ice Age was an unsuccessful exception), but in her treatments she has never gone in for easy options or the sentimental way out. In A Summer Birdcage she describes the intellectual and sexual rivalry between a highly sophisticated Oxford graduate and her elder sister, asserting the right of women to be intellectuals. In Jerusalem the Golden we sympathize with the heroine from an arid, love-starved Northern home, understand her enthusiastic embracing of swinging London and the glamorous chic of the Denham family. But we see the hardness she has acquired in her determination to cast off her childhood world. Drabble has never lost the backbone which is the relic of her Puritan upbringing, and it gives an unfashionable moral toughness to her books. It means, too, that she always makes things hard for herself artistically. The two central characters of The Needle's Eye are a “poor little rich girl” figure who years before has featured in a scandalous elopement, and a lawyer specializing in defending Trade Unions involved in “closed shop” disputes. It is difficult to think of two figures less likely to arouse sympathy or involvement, yet Drabble compels us into both. And in her treatment of them she never takes the expected line. Her heroine has given away her money to a poor African state, but done it so ineffectually that it has evaporated in corruption – yet her action is approved. Her ex-husband is trying to get their children away from her, so they can be “better” educated, bur he and his motives are treated with understanding. In the end, the heroine, who has acquired something approaching saintliness in the course of the narrative, goes back to her husband, knowing that she will be less happy, less good, a worse mother as a result. Her motives are complex, but among them certainly is a George Eliotish feeling that one does not dodge one's mistakes, that all real relationships involve hurt. Here, as in all her best books, Drabble combines a

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sharp eye for the contemporary scene with an almost Victorian insistence that a life without moral standards is meaningless, chaotic, degrading. It is often said that Drabble’s novels are traditional in form, displaying the author’s allegiance to the Realist tradition of George Eliot and Arnold Bennett.

Amoral imperative of any sort would hardly know what to do with itself in the world of Beryl Bainbridge. Her books are peopled with sloppy women, half-hearted lovers, families that seem strangers to each other – all made funny by a style that is most engaging, relating the outrageous as if it were the everyday. For into her world of muddling-on, of low expectations and lower achievements, there erupts violence. And the eruption is treated as normal. The recurring theme is the unpredictable nature of real life. The banal things become surreal in her novels, and her comic descriptions present the absurdity underlying human behaviour.

A Quiet Life, the most autobiographical of her books, depicts a “normal” suburban family, in a “normal” home – but this normality presents threats of danger and injury, and the impotent furies of “father” become like the ravings of a Fascist dictator. Bainbndge is the poet of half-hearted, absurd relationships. The first chapter of Injury Time, with the telephone conversation of the dyspeptic businessman and his two-evenings-a-week lover, is pure Bainbridge. Never was there a love affair that involved less passion, or that seemed so certain of imminent collapse: “He knew at once it was Binny, because when he said Hello there was no reply, merely a sort of offended breathing.” Bainbridge characters, unlike Drabble’s, never aspire to any sort of moral wholeness, or to ecstasy. If they have a moment of vision (as the central character in Winter Garden (1980) has a vision in Petersburg of the scene of Pushkin's death in a duel, hears the clashing of swords), we know that eventually the vision will be undercut (the duel was actually with pistols). Nor will Bainbridge's books ever have an ending as such: the characters’ life is wry, funny, second-rate, and what will go on after the novel finishes is more of the same.

Human relationships, especially male-female ones, are hardly more satisfactory in the novels of Fay Weldon, but the style of conveying them is very different. Realistic surface, reader identification, mean nothing to her: she goes all out to avoid them by the style of her story-telling – full of artifice, studded with repetitions that almost gain the status of ritual chants, an ostentatious balancing and patterning, and a constant addressing of the reader. Her novels are like tapestries or icons, and they convey

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their message through their design. Her style is Jane Austenish irony, possessing sardonic wit. She is also very funny. Her novels are novels about the wrongs of women, but she does not demand sympathy or compassion. She invites ridicule, anger and contempt. Only through them is there any hope of change. Her novels are battle-grounds of exploiters and exploited, but she asks no easy sympathy for the latter. In Praxis (1978) the most totally outrageous character becomes the feminist who changes Praxis's life. Weldon sees no future in shedding easy tears in the path of people like the narrator's dead mother in Female Friends: “The soles of her poor slippers, which I took out from under the bed and threw away so as not to shame her in front of the undertaker, were quite worn through by dutiful shuffling. Flip-flop. Slipper-slop. Drifting and dusting a life away.” Here we see Weldon is a dazzling stylist, a mistress of brittle artifice, and perhaps the funniest writer of her generation. In Growing Rich (1992) and Affliction (1994) she continued developing her tradition of realistic dialogue.

Iris Murdoch set a new direction in the literary development. Her novels are dramatized philosophical debates on the nature of good and evil, on free will and determinism. Her first novel, Under the Net (1954), fits into the humorous pattern set by Kingsley Amis in Lucky Jim and John Wain in Hurry on Down. Her Jake Donaghue of this novel is akin to Amis's Jim Dixon and Wain's Charles Lumley, in that he maintains his own kind of somewhat dubious integrity and tries to make his way without forsaking his dignity, and increasingly difficult accomplishment in a world which offers devilish rewards for loss of integrity and dignity. Jake is an angry middle-aged man who mocks society and its respectability. He moves playfully around law and order; he does small things on the sly – swims in the Thames at night, steals a performing dog, sneaks in and out of locked apartments, steals food. In this novel Murdoch reveals a talent for creating farcical incident in a style primarily descriptive rather than dramatic. She gives detailed descriptions of the appearance of her characters, their physical actions, the physical world they inhabit.

Already in her second novel, The Flight from the Enchanter, Iris Murdoch turned to the unexplained, the dimly-suggested supernatural. Many of her later novels were to explore the hinterland between the solid world of everyday and a mysterious, unknowable world that impinges on it. In fact she introduced the elements of a new trend, that of magic realism, she mixed up realism with strange and miraculous episodes and powers, and treated these events as quite ordinary. This trend culminated in The

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Sea, the Sea (1978), a long, sensuous, tantalizing novel of memory and quest, in which reality and illusion are delicately poised, and the supernatural at times assumes palpable form.

Her novels are characterized by deep psychological characteristics, like in Bruno’s Dream or Accidental Man. For Murdoch, there are basically two kinds of people. There are those for whom life is desperate; they are deeply committed to whatever they are engaged in, and they can see nothing else. In their steadfastness, they may become grim and morbid. Then there are those for whom life has not settled into any fixed pattern; they are flexible and mobile, desirous of variety and willing to make changes. In the novel The Bells, for example, the first group is represented by Michael Meade, the leader of a lay religious community located near an Anglican Order of nuns. In the second group, there is Dora, an easily distracted young wife, a female Jim Dixon, who comes to the community with her youthful friend, Toby Gashe. The conflict in part of the novel concerns the relations of the spirited, sensual, and unintellectual Dora with her husband and later with the community, whose spirit is so completely different from her own. Dora's attitudes represent this world, while the community's are a microcosm of the other. The clash between the two is inevitable, and Murdoch chooses to define the conflict in terms of burlesque – a practical joke will demonstrate Dora's need for self-expression at the expense of the community. The joke centers around a bell, a bell that comes with a legend from the past. In the legend, the bell of the then Benedictine order of nuns fell into the lake, the result of the Bishop's curse. The curse itself derived from the infidelity of a nun and her refusal to confess. When the bell flew into the lake, the guilty nun, overwhelmed by the demonstration of God's power of punishment, flew from the Abbey and drowned herself in the lake.

The present community at Imber is planning to install a bell of its own, and it occurs to Toby Gashe and Dora that a bell they have located at the bottom of the lake should be substituted for the new one. The one at the bottom, they feel, is the bell of the legend; the substitution will provoke astonishment and also provide them with entertainment.

Running parallel to this course of action, in which Dora seeks fun in order to escape from her boorish and possessive husband, is the attempt of Michael Meade to find his own depth without destroying himself. Michael, the spiritual leader of the community, who takes his turn preaching the weekly sermon, is something of a figure of fun. His passionate twists parallel those of Dora, who is both attracted and repelled by her husband. Her marriage is just such a combination of duty and discipline on the one

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hand, and a need to break out into chaotic excitement on the other. She is vigorous and physical, while her husband is reserved. Accordingly, they hate each other and their “modern“ marriage is a compromise that Dora is unwilling to maintain.

Murdoch attempts to gain her chief comic effects by juxtaposing the calm surface of the religious community with the turbulent and effervescent emotions boiling beneath, by contrasting the ideals of the community with the reality of people's lives. The entire conflict, however, is softened so that neither comedy nor an indication of tragic event is evident. The comedy, when it does appear, is in terms of details and small incidents; one, for example, that occurs when Dora steps off the train at Imber with a butterfly in her hand and forgets her baggage; or the scene when she cannot find her shoes in the grass and the entire community is alerted to the search.

Verbal skill, incisive conception of some characters, ability to convey humor and sadness, awareness of the large world, a philosophical point of view – all these qualities are admirably present in Iris Murdoch's work.

Murdoch was not the only novelist who tried to import into the novel the sort of freedom from realistic shackles that had hitherto been enjoyed mainly by the very special sub-genres of “Gothic” or “ghost” story. Many, if not most, of the novels of Muriel Spark mingle the real and the paranormal: in Memento Mori a mysterious voice, unexplained, warns the old people in the novel that they must die; in The Ballad of Peckham Rye the central character of the story, Dougal Douglas, acquires the conventional attributes of the devil, including horns. Even when these novelists remain, apparently, within the real world they manage to import a flavour of mystery, of the unknown. In Murdoch's A Severed Head, a Restoration com- edy-style sexual dance involving much changing of partners, the figure of Honor Klein acquires a sinister power much beyond what might be explained by her profession of Freudian psychiatrist. And in Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) the cavalier treatment of time, the constant shifting backwards and forwards in the lives of the Edinburgh schoolgirls and their form mistress, gives the novel a fluidity and endows the author with a more than usually God-like omniscience.

Jean Brodie is the teacher of every school-child’s dream – fascinating in herself, cavalier towards school authorities and discipline, scornful of littleness, meanness and the duller institutions of childhood: “For those who like that sort of thing,” she says disdainfully of the Girl Guides, “that is the sort of thing they like.” As the novel moves on we gradually see that

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Miss Brodie is a Fascist of private life, one whose apparently “advanced” notions cover a very primitive form of power lust. She plays God with the lives of her pupils, determining in her mind their futures, and she would be dangerous were it not for the fact that, in Spark's treatment of them, schooldays seem to be the most irrelevant days of our lives. At puberty the girls cast off her influence effortlessly, and take directions quite unsuspected by her. The sad, final picture of her is horrifying.

The story Portobello Road is related on behalf of a dead woman, which is made clear from the very beginning: “I must explain that I departed with this life five years ago…But I did not altogether depart this world.” It is her friend George, who killed her and went mad after that.. Every Saturday he comes back to the place of murder and sees his victim in the busy crowd. She also comes there. So the writer mingles the notions of life and death in order to show hypocrisy and emptiness of people who surrounded the narrator during her lifetime. Looking at a photo of herself and her friends the woman remarks: “…I don’t think we were any of us so lovely as we look in it”.

The books of the late fifties and early sixties are Spark's great achievement. They are to an extent morality comedies about human passions, vices and virtues, wishes and inclinations. It was only with Loitering With Intent (1981), when she ceased dealing with the hideously boring international super-rich and returned to an English setting and the period of her early writing days, that she regained some of her power to charm the readers.

Many critics say about existentialist ideas permitting the works of Muriel Spark. Her fascination with the demonic and the perverse aspects of human behavior manifests itself in many of her books. But despite the seriousness of many of her themes, Spark’s books are witty, satirical, even eccentric. Her distinctive elegant style, her use of the element of fable or parable has influenced a whole generation of post-war writers.

Angela Carter (1940–1992) is considered to be another master of magic realism, though her works are not restricted only by it. Her knowledge of folklore was immense, and she reflected it through the prism of fashionable psychoanalytical theories. Her brief career began with Swiftian fables charged with sex, sadism and other marketable ingredients, which made them irresistible to many, distasteful to some. The great advance came with Nights at the Circus (1984), a chronicle of the life and adventures, natural and supernatural, dealing with Fevvers, a female Victorian circus performer who can fly. There is a comic episode with the

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tigers in a circus when they wonder why they always do as they are told: '”For just one unprotected moment, they pondered the mystery of their obedience and were astonished by it.” Later, the same tigers disappear into broken mirrors when their train crashes: “On one fragment of mirror, a paw with the claws out; on another, a snarl.” Fearful asymmetry: these tigers have come from Blake’s poetry. Her ability to evoke and adapt the traditional forms of fantasy was brilliantly deployed in the collections The Bloody Chamber and other stories (1979). The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman (1972), which developed further a characteristic neoGothic ambience, often influenced by unintrusive feminine sensibility. The Bloody Chamber and Fireworks are interpretations of Gothic novels and fairy tales of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. She reworked the content, rendered the tales for adults’ apprehension. The stories are abundant in metamorphoses and fantastic creatures.

Tasks

1.What do all British women-writers have in common?

2.Speak on the reflection of Murdock’s philosophical views in her novels.

3.Here is the beginning of the novel The Sandcastle by Iris Murdock. Its protagonist Mor, whose family life is far from being happy, falls in love with a young painter. What devices does the writer use to show the alienation between husband, wife and children and to build up the atmosphere of the novel?

“Five hundred guineas!” said Mor's wife. “Well I never!” “It's the market price,” said Mor.

“You could articulate more distinctly,” said Nan, “if you took that rather damp-looking cigarette out of your mouth.”

“I said it’s the market price!” said Mor. He threw his cigarette away. '”Bledyard would have done it for nothing,” said Nan.

“Bledyard is mad,” said Mor, “and thinks portrait painting is wicked.” “If you ask me, it’s you and the school. Governors that are mad,” said

Nan. “You must have money to burn.”

'”Shall we wait lunch for Felicity?” asked Mor.

“No, of course not,” said Nan. “She always sulks when she comes home. She wouldn't want to eat anyway.” Felicity was their daughter. She was expected home that day from boarding school, where an outbreak of measles had brought the term to an early conclusion.

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They seated themselves at the table at opposite ends. The casement windows were open as wide as they could go upon the hot dry afternoon. They revealed a short front garden. Beyond the garden lay the road where the neat semi-detached houses faced each other like mirror images. The housing estate was a recent one, modern in design and very solidly built. Above the red-tiled roofs, and over the drooping foliage of the trees there rose high into the soft midsummer haze the neo-Gothic tower of St Bride's school where Mor was a housemaster. It was a cold lunch.

4. Here is the beginning of Muriel Spark’s novel A Far Cry from Kensington which sets the atmosphere for the whole novel. Can you define its form? What can you say about the narrator?

So great was the noise during the day that I used to lie awake at night listening to the silence. Eventually, I fell asleep contented, filled with soundlessness, but while I was awake I enjoyed the experience of darkness, thought, memory, sweet anticipations. I heard the silence. It was in those days of the early fifties of this century that I formed the habit of insomnia. Insomnia is not bad in itself. You can lie awake at night and think; the quality of insomnia depends entirely on what you decide to think of. Can you decide to think? - Yes, you can. You can put your mind to anything most of the time. You can sit peacefully in front of a blank television set, just watching nothing; and sooner or later you can make your own programme much better than the mass product. It’s fun, you should try it. You can put anyone you like on the screen, alone or in company, saying and doing what you want them to do, with yourself in the middle if you prefer it that way.

5. Compare magic realism of Muriel Spark and Angela Carter.

Chapter XII

RECENT BRITISH LITERATURE

The dominant preoccupation of those novelists who attempted the larger canvas in the sixties-eighties was a re-examination of Britain’s past, of her imperial greatness and her periods of moral authority. It was a reexamination prompted, obviously enough, by Britain's shrunken international role, her chaotic political life, her determined self-denigration throughout these decades. Thatcherism had influenced this period greatly in all areas of life.

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There was a large degree of consensus among creative artists of all kinds (apart from a few elderly figures such as Kingsley Amis) which opposed the government, in particular its policies in education and towards the arts. This opposition sometimes gave writers the air of being voices crying in the wilderness.

The career of Ian McEwan (1948–) offers an interesting and encouraging commentary on recent fiction. His first two short story collections

First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1978) were an immediate success. After the brilliant and macabre The Cement Garden (1978), where a group of children secretly bury their dead mother rather than report her death to the authorities, McEwan returned, in The Comfort of Strangers (1981), to the world of erotic fancies, cleverness and cruelty of his earlier work. The book was immediately listed for the Booker Prize. His later books The Child in Time (1987), The Innocent (1990), and Black Dogs (1992), display his interest in the grotesque and the violent. These chronicled, in extraordinarily supple prose, episodes of sexual awakening, casual cruelty, social decay. His transition to the novel was an uneasy one. Too often he chose to write prose that was unemphatic to the point of dullness to recount events of a sensational or horrific nature. Perhaps the most successful of the novels is The Comfort of Strangers. A young couple, in a loving but slightly stale relationship, walk the streets of Venice on a holiday that has lasted too long and become routine, even boring. The maze of streets – confusing, disorientating, full of dead ends – seems to mirror the point the relationship has reached. Their encounter with a Venetian who apparently wants to take them under his wing introduces them to a milieu quite different from the tourist trails, a world where power and cruelty dominate, though this is conveyed for the most part through sinister hints. At first the encounter seems to stimulate their decaying love for each other, particularly in its sexual side, but as the sinister hints begin to harden into uncomfortable realities they find themselves headed towards disaster. This is an unnerving book in which the atmosphere, setting and character fit together and hold the reader in a grip of tension.

To these may be added several of the works of Anthony Burgess (1917–1994), a rich, productive, idiosyncratic writer, who produced fictions that are like none of his contemporaries' fictions, and often like none of his own previous ones. Through his books stride the figures of great men – Keats in Abba, Abba, Napoleon in Napoleon Symphony, Marlowe in A Dead Man in Deptford (1992), practically every notable in twentieth-

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century cultural life in Earthly Powers (1980). In the latter novel Burgess mingles these real characters with the fictional ones to give an international panorama of the XX century. He achieved an unlikely popular success with A Clockwork Orange (1962). Taking as his starting point the violence of modern Western society - and intellectuals’ tolerance of violence was to be vividly exemplified in that very decade – Burgess projected a nightmare futuristic world of gang violence and institutionalized violence. He did so in a language invented for the purpose, a dazzling conflation of jargon and slang. The central character, a teenage thug, is both monster and victim. He and his friends embark on orgies of violence and destruction, in one of which a woman dies. In prison the boy is selected as a guinea-pig for aversion therapy, and, considered as a successive subject, he is released. In the street he is recognized and attacked by his former victims. In hospital Alex (that’s the boy’s name) finds himself the center of political propaganda over the therapy. The novel ends with Alex, enjoying classical music, accompanied by the images of violence. He considers himself “cured”. The novel is about moral choice, most explicitly proposed by the repeated “What’s it going to be then?” at the head of each of its three sections. As in all good Utopian novels or dystopias, the reader's emotions are disturbed, his preconceptions upset, in ways that no realistic novel can achieve.

A.N. Wilson (1950–) has been providing elegant and thoughtful fictional entertainments for nearly two decades now, while simultaneously developing a public persona as a “young fogey” – a three-piece-suited man of unfashionable views. In his books he is observing the contemporary scene or recreating a historical one. In Gentlemen of England (1985) Love Unknown (1986) he brings to life the sexual tensions of lateVictorian England in his portrait of an empty marriage and an ill-starred, slightly ludicrous love affair. It is a satire on romantic love. The Healing Art (1980) has a simple but striking central situation: a woman is diagnosed as suffering from cancer but refuses the modern treatments for it. As the novel progresses we realize that there has been a medical error, and she has been mixed up with a woman who has been mistakenly diagnosed as cancer-free. The subject is handled sympathetically, and Wilson, through his clear-eyed understanding of the predicament and issues, manages to build up the qualities of popular fiction. In The Vicar of Sorrows (1993) the writer raises the theme about the nature of religious belief and the conflict between faith and worldly desire and treats it in a mildly sa-

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