British and American Literature. Учебно-методическое пособие

tirical manner. The novel is about Francis Keere, an Anglican vicar who falls in love with a beautiful “New Age” girl.

Who was Oswald Fish? (1981) is a rumbustious, capacious novel in the comic Dickensian mode. It encompasses several worlds, but it hinges on Fanny Williams, an earthy, generous, loud woman who has had her five minutes of fame as a model and pop-star in the sixties, and who now runs a chain of boutiques merchandising pseudo-Victorian tat. She is both exhilarating and irritating. Her obsession with the one architectural masterpiece of Oswald Fish brings her into conflict with a Birmingham civil servant. Very quickly the two become lovers. As the novel progresses we find that not only the civil servant and Fanny herself but almost everyone else of importance in the novel, including her black homosexual lodger, are related to the Fish family - a joyous and wholesale extension of Dickens’s coincidental discovery of hidden relationships. There are a lot of implied comments on modern lack of spirituality and comparisons with the Victorian Age. The climax is predictable and the conclusion perfunctory, and one sometimes has doubts whether Wilson is completely at home in all the worlds he deals with, but these are doubts for after the book has been put down. It ends appropriately with a comic epitaph for an era: Mrs Thatcher on the steps of Downing Street intoning in a voice “the product of goodness knows how many elocution lessons” the words of St Francis of Assisi. Thus ends, he seems to say, the sexy, wayward, iconoclastic era of the sixties and seventies.

Martin Amis (1949–) developed other directions, from stylized novels of sexual decadence such as Dead Babies (1975) to more searching analyses of nuclear madness and global decay. London Fields (1989) was one of the most admired novels of the decade. It is set in a London of the nearfuture, one experiencing a growing breakdown of law and order, an environmental crisis and burgeoning sickness and deformity – familiar themes in the seventies and eighties fiction, but used with a chilling casual mastery here. The central thrust of the plot traces Nicola Six as she progresses (like the central character in Muriel Spark's novella The Driver's Seat) to her destined and desired fate as “murderess”, each stage plotted with the meticulousness of a crime writer, and with a “surprise” solution that will astonish no reader of Agatha Christie. The “nasty” as they so often are, Martin Amis's novels always seem to be literary artifacts, pieces on the printed page, rather than convincing pictures of imagined worlds.

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One of the strongest elements in the eighties fiction was the embracing of what came to be called “magic realism”, discussed in the previous chapter. The major influence here were the South American writers, particularly Gabriel Garcia Marquez -though it is worth reminding that in Britain writers like Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and Fay Weldon were making extensive use of the supernatural and other magic elements long before the South Americans were being widely read in Europe. Magic realist novels and stories have, typically, a strong narrative drive, in which the recognizably realistic mingles with the unexpected and the inexplicable, and in which elements of dream, fairy-story or mythology combine with the everyday, often in a mosaic or kaleidoscopic pattern of refraction and recurrence. So, one can say that the narrative treats a supernatural manifestation as quite ordinary, not to be distinguished from the most mundane events.

John Fowles’s first book The Collector (1968) brought him immediate recognition. Then he became preoccupied with existentialism, which affected his later novels. The Magus (1966) is full of mystery, fantasy and obsession. The mythological dimension of the novel suggests magic realism. The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), the most known novel of the writer, centers on the Victorian romance between a governess, isolated by the local community for her former liason with a French lieutenant, and an aristocrat. The novel with its three alternative endings heralded a new era in English fiction. It is enriched by the formal innovations Fowels has borrowed and reinvented from post-war European literature.

Another writer of magic realism is Salman Rushdie (1947–). Being born in Bombay, into a Muslim family, he draws on the allegorical, fablemaking traditions of both East and West. Many critics say that the socalled Magic realism most confidently took its place in the English novel tradition with his novel Midnight’s Children (1981). The book is built around a strong and attractive central idea: the children born on the stroke of midnight as India gained its independence. It combines allegory, fable and fantasy with detailed realism. In Shame (1983), Rushdie explores the fictionality of all histories, getting himself pretty much lost in the process; but in The Satanic Verses (1988) he demonstrated the historicity of certain fictions, the power of narrative to make the world, to convert authoritative interpretation into the appearance of irreducible fact. The miraculous survival of two passengers from an air crash and their subsequent adventures and metamorphoses are chronicled with wonderful stylistic grace. The late

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Ayatollah Khomeini, the then ruler of Iran, sentenced Rushdie to death for this book, which was proclaimed alleged blasphemy by Islamic fundamentalists. The author had to hide under police protection. But the book is more about existential transformation and perpetual change, with contemporary Britain as its focus.

Tasks

1.What characterizes the development of recent English literature? Define its main problems and forms?

2.Ideas and images in the works of “magic realism”. Analyze some work of one of its representatives.

3.Here is an extract from Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, which describes Alex’s feelings after his victims’ attack on him. What can you say about the author’s idea of the future? What part does the language play in rendering this idea?

I jumped. O my brothers, and I fell on the sidewalk hard, but I did not snuff it, oh no. If I had snuffed it I would not be here to write what I written have. It seems that the jump was not from a big enough height to kill. But I cracked my back and my wrists and nogas and felt very bolshoi pain before I passed out, brothers, with astonished and surprised litsos of chelovecks from the streets looking at me from above. And just before I passed out I viddied clear that not one chelloveck in the whole horrid world was for me and that that music through the wall had all been like arranged by those who were supposed to be my like new droogs and that it was some veshch like this that they wanted for their horrible selfish and boastful politics. All that was in like a million millionth part of one minoota before I threw over the world and the sky and the litsos of the staring chellovecks that were above me.

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PART II

Chapter I

THE BEGINNING.

THE BIRTH OF ROMANTICISM

In 1607 the English made their first successful settlement at Jamestown. At Yorktown, just across the peninsular, in 1781, Cornwallis’ encircled army surrendered to General Washington. It marked the beginning of the USA. Though the colonists came from Europe, they shared experience that set them apart from England and Europe. First of all it was Puritanism and this religion laid a curse upon literature and arts from which America is still suffering. In literature Americans distrusted the highly coloured. A plain style was commended, without any allusions. Perhaps the dominance of the Bible also helped to widen the chronological gulf between colonial and English literature. Fiction had no ornament in New England even in the form of allegory. Though New England authors were often highly erudite men, they were not always acquainted with the works of their great English contemporaries. None of them have ever equaled Milton, Dryden or Pope. Poetry was chiefly represented by hymnody and balladry. Of course there were some lucky exceptions. One of the best poets of the end of the XVII century was Edward Taylor (1664–1729). He was a metaphysical poet, and his poems remained in manuscript until 1937, when their considerable quality was at last recognized. No other poet of Puritan America displayed such verbal riches, as Taylor in his poem

God’s Determinations Touching His Elect:

Who laced and filleted the earth so fine

With rivers like green ribbons smaragdine?

Who made the seas its selvedge, and its locks

Like a quilt ball within a silver box?

Who spread its canopy? Or curtains spun?

Who in this bowling alley bowled the sun?

In the XVIII century the most memorable literature was mainly the political prose written by the Founding Fathers, the men who led the revolution of 1775–1783 against Britain and wrote the Constitution of 1789. They shared many of the philosophic, scientific and rationalistic beliefs of

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the Age of Reason. Their aim was to produce in America just and free society. The Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Paine in 1776 is a largely effective piece of prose. Not every writer could command his eloquence: “Now is the seed-time of continental union, faith and honour. The least fracture now, will belike a name engraved with a point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak, the wound will enlarge with the tree, ad the posterity read it in full, grown characters…” Benjamin Franklin’s Way to Wealth (1758) and the aphorisms of his Poor Richard’s Almanac (1733–1758) are still highly estimated. In his books he gives guidelines on how to lead a useful and virtuous life. Though Franklin was mainly a self-educated man, he was an active public figure, founding the American Philosophic Society and the academy that became the University of Pennsylvania. He also helped draft The Declaration of Independence.

If early American literature was more European in spirit it broke with Europe in the first half of the XIX century. Ralph Woldo Emerson (1803– 1882) wrote his celebrated American Scholar address in 1837, in which he proclaimed that “we have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe”. In fact it became America’s Intellectual Declaration of Independence. A talented poet Philip Freneau asked despairingly:

Can we never be thought

To have learning and grace

Unless it is brought

From that damnable place?

Namely Britain. A little later Edgar Poe had announced that “we have now at length arrived at the epoch when our literature may and must stand on the merits or fall through its own defects”.

But American literature is also indebted to various folklore sources. It should be remembered that the continent was inhabited by the natives – the Eskimos and the Indians, who had many legends, which varied from tribe to tribe, but also had much in common. Among them there are bestiaries; legends about twin brothers who are either rivals or act together to obtain talismans for their peoples; legends about great Indian leaders who tried to unite their tribes. Many Indian folk tales assert the unity between Man and Nature and say that one should listen to the voice of Nature and learn from it.

The folklore of the North differed from that of the South. The first twenty slaves from Africa were sold to work on the plantations of Virginia

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in 1619. They brought their folklore, which spread in the oral tradition. Those were the tales about witches, hunters, sly animals, numerous proverbs and sayings. The African folklore mixed up with the folklore of the whites who inhabited that region: the Dutch, French and Spanish. African blues and spirituals put their imprint on the development of American love poetry, as well as later they contributed much to the songs of protest.

The difficult life of white newcomers gave rise to the new type of folklore, that of frontier and cowboys. The heroes of this folklore are brave, strong, industrious people with a good sense of humour. There are many stories about David Crocket, Mike Fink, and others. Some of the folklore characters were real people, like the brothers James, who lived in the Wild West and their deeds remind us of Robin Hood.

The reflection of the folklore of the native population of America, African slaves as well as the legends about new heroes can be found in American literature, especially of the Romantic period.

In 1836, Emerson founded the highly influential Transcendental Club to discuss quasi-religious philosophical ideas. Transcendentalism is a mixture of mystic idealism and Wordsworthian reverence to nature (Emerson met Coleridge, Wordsworth and Carlyle during his visit to England). One of the cornerstones of the philosophy is the slogan: ”Nature is the incarnation of thought. The world is the mind of the precipitated”. This philosophy was derived from a close study of Platonic and neoPlatonic ideas, and from long meditation. It didn’t believe that men were good and wise, but demanded that they be better – more candid, more equable, more capable of seeing. The new philosophy rejected both Puritanism (being a pastor in Boston, Emerson resigned, feeling unable to believe in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper) and the newer faith of Unitarianism, which in turn rejected the notion of the Holy Trinity. Transcendentalists regarded both religions as negative, cold and lifeless. In his books Emerson was very sincere. He had a gift of stripping an occasion to its essence. In English Traits (1865), a perceptive study of the English national character, Emerson gives his version of the Norman Conquest: “Twenty thousand thieves landed at Hastings”. This book echoes with Defoe’s pamphlets.

All that influenced the development of American literature in general, and Romanticism in particular. Romanticism appeared in American literature in the years of social unrest that followed the Revolution of 1775– 1783. Romantics depicted life as a struggle between vice and virtue, and insisted that virtue should defeat evil. Another feature of American Romanticism was that the writers, having created characters, wanted through

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them to bring moral judgment on the nation as a whole, disregarding the existence of different sections of population. The enigma of life assumed fantastic forms in literature, and it paved the way for allegory, symbolism, grotesque and parody. Romantic prose was also characterized by an intricate intrigue, a dynamic movement of events and sudden changes in a hero’s life.

The early period of American Romanticism, the 20s and 30s of the XIX century began with the romances and short stories of Washington Irving (1783–1859) who was in fact the first man-of-letters from the US to win an international reputation. His contemporaries abroad and at home often called him as “American Goldsmith”. Irving managed to elaborate his own fluent and refined style. He didn’t describe only contemporary scene, but dug into folklore. He studied German folklore, his studies resulting in Rip Van Winkle, The Devil and Tom Walker, The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow, then passed over to that of Spain (Legends of the Ahambra). Those were very rich sources, and Irving studied them eagerly. His own land was short of such material. Irving also introduced realistic details into fantastic narration, displaying a peculiar manifestation of romantic irony. His works raised social problems. For example Rip van Winkle awakens after twenty years of fast sleeping and sees that nothing has changed in his village despite the end of the War for Independence.

Irving traveled out into the Indian country and wrote A Tour on the Prairier about his experience.

Washington Irving is also the author of historical books and biographies. His History of New York became an American classic. The book is full of humour, a parody on a serious history. The main hero, an old gentleman Diedrich Knikerbocker describes how America was peopled, supposing that it was “by a strolling company of Norwegians”. Irving also wrote articles and essays. In his declining years Washington Irving wrote Life of George Washington and a biography of Oliver Goldsmith.

Irving’s books were widely read both in Europe and America. They stimulated interest in the European culture in America, and European readers enjoyed them for their beautiful style, humour and romantic treatment of the subjects. His historical novels represent the optimistic period in the development of American historical novel.

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) was also optimistic in reflecting the history of his country. He left a very large literary heritage, consisting of 32 novels, a history of the US Navy, many articles on social problems and 10 volumes of his travels to European countries. In Europe Cooper was often called as American Sir Walter Scott, though he didn’t like this

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comparison. The two writers were very different: Scott was a monarchist and a Conservative, while Cooper was a democrat and a Republican. Scott saw the end of the historical development in his own time, and Cooper considered himself a witness of a new era. It was rather difficult for Cooper to write historical novels because in them he described the recent past, so he chose the events little known to give food for his imagination. Almost all his novels are historical adventures, full of dramatic and romantic incidents and containing conflicts between society and the individual, settlements and the wilderness, civil law and natural rights of American Indians. His novels include the historical romance The Spy about the War of Independence constructed after the model of Walter Scott’s historical novels: the exploits of the hero are closely connected with the historical period described, though the hero of the novel does not meet many historical characters for the reasons mentioned above (their children and grandchildren were still alive); five Leatherstocking Tales about Natty Bumppo, the main theme of which is the destruction of nature and the ruin of Indians; and a trilogy consisting of Satanstoe, The Chainbearer and The Redskins depicting the fight of tenants against the lords of the manor.

The movement of all Cooper’s novels possesses the elementary and yet fundamental virtue of activity. Their end is never really in doubt, but one wants to know what will happen next; fortunes change very quickly. One might apply to it Cooper's own words on the gait of one of his characters: 'There was nothing elastic in his tread, but he glided over the ground with enormous strides, and a body bent forward, without appearing to use exertion or know weariness”.

Why, then, of his many writings are only the Leatherstocking Tales at all popular, and why are these nowadays considered as literature for children? It can be noted, first, that some of his plots seem off-centre. In them we are provided with conventional heroes and heroines, but also with other characters of far greater interest, who steal most of the action. In The Spy, for instance, Harvey Birch is never adequately linked with the other characters. Cooper was both an American novelist and American gentleman, so he could not bring himself to make an orthodox hero out of anyone who was of inferior social status. At times he resorts to grotesque expedients to prove that his chosen ones have the necessary social qualifications. In The Pioneers, Elizabeth Temple can have no truck with Oliver Edwards while he is thought to be a half-breed; but when he is found to be the grandson of old Major Effingham, and therefore “a white man” in all senses of the term, the story proceeds to a happy end: Oliver wins Elizabeth.

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With Natty Bumppo the difficulty becomes crucial. So long as he is a free agent he can be admired, and serve as a hero. But he does not belong to Indian society, and he can never integrate into white society without too closely defining his status. He can, thus, never marry. Of the two chances given him, that in The Deerslayer is reasonably plausible; if Judith Hutter is in love with him, his refusals to consider matrimony are explained by the simple fact that he is not in love with Judith. But in The Pathfinder Natty falls in love with Mabel Dunham, the daughter of an army sergeant. She is more refined than one might expect, because she has been in the care of an officer's widow. Natty is illiterate; his origins are immitigably humble. So Natty must be rejected by Mabel.

Natty inhabits a kind of vacuum. His world is, on the whole, made wonderfully interesting. But it is insubstantial. The Cooper gentleman is dull; the Cooper non-gentleman cannot be incorporated in a complete situation, since uncouth society in America could not, in Cooper's day and especially for someone of Cooper's temperament, be considered a proper subject for a novel. As a result, Natty's moves constitute an evasion of society, a series of renunciations. Compare the Leatherstocking Tales, or Cooper's sea-stories, with the novels of his contemporary, Balzac. Balzac's is a dense and actual world; Cooper's, by contrast, is a mythological place, where in earlier times the knight-errant might have performed. It is the element of myth that makes the Bumppo stories more than mere adventure narrations. But in later times this element was to grow fainter and fainter; the adventure lost significance. In other words, the logical extension of Leatherstocking is the cowboy-hero: the simple manly person who must, according to the genre, ride off into the sunset, as he cannot marry the rancher’s daughter because he has no status in the “polite society”.

Cooper‘s The Deerslayer was strongly criticized by Mark Twain in the article Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences. Mark Twain accused Cooper of being inaccurate with details, and the poor use of English: ”A work of art? – he wrote, – It has no invention; it has no order, no system, sequence or result; it has no life-likeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality…”

On the other hand, Wilkie Collins called Fenimore Cooper “the greatest artist in the domain of romantic fiction yet produced by America”.

Henry Wordsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was another American Romantic who wrote about Indians. The Song of Haiwatha published in 1855 is a narrative poem reproducing American Indian stories about the life and death of Haiwatha, a historical figure who lived long before the arrival of the whites. The author also used the legends of different tribes

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because he wanted to make a synthesis of them. Many parts are completely imagined, but the composition makes them genuine: the narration is given on behalf of the musician Nawadaha, like in old Indian legends. In him many readers recognized Henry Schoolcraft, the author of books about Indians. The Song of Haiwatha is one of the most beautiful pieces of American poetry. The poem is full of implicit metaphors – one thing is described as being another thing, thus carrying over all the associations. The originality and novelty of its literary form, the unknown poetic world of Indian folklore, the brilliant mastery of versification attracted readers’ attention all over the world. In his poetry Longfellow widely used adaptation. The Indians in the poem are real not because he knew many of them or lived among them to gain some experience, but because they are the product of a romantic rather than a creative imagination. Like Washington Irving, he supplied America with its own folklore. He wrote: “The national ballad is a virgin soil here in New England, and there are great materials”.

Longfellow’s political lyrics occupy an important place in his art. Here the collection of Poems on Slavery should be mentioned as well as Psalm of Life. The latter proclaims the ideas of humanism:

In the world’s broad field of battle,

In the bivouac of Life,

Be not like dumb, driven cattle!

Be a hero in the strife!

At his time Longfellow was ranked almost on the same level as Tennyson.

But there were critics of the thumping metre and long-winded narrative style of the poet. Lewis Carroll wrote a parody by describing in detail Haiwatha’s efforts at photography:

From his shoulder Haiawatha

Took the camera of rosewood –

Made of sliding, folding rosewood –

Neatly put it all together.

In its case it lay compactly,

Folded into nearly nothing;

But he opened out its hinges

Till it looked all squares and oblongs,

Like a complicated figure

In the second book of Euclid.

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