British and American Literature. Учебно-методическое пособие
.pdfNorman Kingsley Mailer is one of the most outstanding writers of the middle of the XX century. His work has been much discussed ever since his first novel The Naked and the Dead. Its publication in 1948 became an important event in American literature. There had previously been thoughtfully realistic novels about the American army in the war. But The Naked and the Dead struck a new tone – the tone of the 1950s – in its obliteration of the “gallant knights in armor” view of the American soldier, its uncompromisingly truthful picture of what, front-line combat means, and how soldiers actually lived, thought and spoke. Concentrating on one brief campaign, the conquest of an island in the Pacific, it tried to consider the battle in epic terms of the movement of history.
The genre of his works is rather unorthodox, mixing journalism, autobiography, political commentary, and fictional passages in a wide range of styles. In extreme form, Mailer’s career illustrates a fascinating duality in the outlook of present-day America. In The Naked and the Dead Mailer shows, that there were fascist-minded officers in the American army who presumably were fighting fascism. But not true is the view of fascism as running the whole show and the democratic traditions as impotent and doomed. Yet it is this that the novel says, with cumulative impact. That is why Mailer is labeled as “existentialist”.
The leading fascist types in the novel are two. Major General Edward Cummings has a keen, militaristic mind, is contemptuous of most people, and talks a kind of Nietzschean Hitlerism: “The only morality of the future is a power morality, and a man who cannot find his adjustment to it is doomed. There's one thing about power. It can flow only from the top down.” The other is Sergeant Sam Croft, formerly in the National Guard, whose first victim had been a striking worker, shot in a “labor dispute.” Mailer portrays him as a cold killer, the kind of “good soldier.” The main anti-fascist is Lieutenant Robert Hearn, son of a well-off family and a Harvard graduate, who had taken part in left-wing political activity during the late 1930's but had never felt at home in it. Mailer portrays him as already disillusioned, Dos Passos’ style: “All the bright young people of his youth had butted their heads, smashed against things until they got weaker and the things still stood.” There were, of course, such soldiers in the army, but they do not represent the army as a whole. Mailer’s existentialism led him to recognize only a few chosen ones who are rebels as himself. But his rebellion takes up the strange forms of defiance against any conventions: drugtaking, violence, etc. The writer tries to impose his own views on the rest of America. Here we face with another manifestation of duality – a contrast between “high” and “common culture”.
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The novel Barbary Shore (1951) deals with a former Communist pursued by the FBI, The DearPark (1955) is a picture of a movie-making milieu, the novel An American Dream (1965) raises the problem of crime and punishment. They are symbolical novels in which Mailer expresses his disillusion with the political left. The style of the novels is superb though they lack fresh air as the writer cuts himself off the source of his strength, his social experience and sympathies.
James Baldwin (1924–1987) also belongs to existentialistic literary trend. He was an Afro-American and his first novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953) represented a new stage in the literary depiction of an Afro-American. Drawn from his own childhood, it is a powerful portrayal of an Afro-American family in New York's Harlem, centered around the church. The book is written with a poetry reminiscent of James Joyce's
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It achieved rich and profound psychological insights into the fourteen-year-old boy, his brother, his father, his mother and his aunt. In a way the book was an answer to Faulkner's implication that the Negroes were “primitives,” and only the cultured white gentry had tragic conflicts and complex minds. Baldwin's memorable characters are a permanent addition to the stock of real and significant personages with which American literature has enriched the knowledge of the land, its history and people.
The truth upon which Baldwin firmly rests is that the liberation of the Afro-American people, their achievement of full civil, social, political and human rights, and full opportunity for their own development, is a necessity not alone for the Negroes. It is equally necessary in order to save the white people from their own degradation, the destruction of whatever democracy they live by, the loss of whatever freedom they possess. But what is typically existentialist is Baldwin's dissociation of this truth from the class forces in society that are an integral part of it, the lack of faith that the masses of people, as history presents them with its inexorable questions, will, find the right answers, the tendency to seek a solution from the enlightened “few.”
Vladimir Nabokov is a post-modernist. He was born in Russia, started writing in Russian in the 1929–1930s: Король, дама, валет, Защита Лу- жина, Камера обскура, Дар. At that time he lived in Germany. In 1940 he moved to the USA. The first novel written in English was The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941). Nabokov was equally excellent both in Russian and in English. He translated his works into English himself. Invitation to Beheading is one of the best manifestations of his post-modernism. The pro-
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tagonist of the novel, Tsintsinnat, is condemned to capital punishment. The main issue of the book is the reason of the condemnation: he is not like others and that’s why he is dangerous. The author uses three types of narration: classical (descriptions); rendering of inner emotions through direct and indirect speech (dialogues, diary entries; mixture of direct speech with exclamations, addresses to nobody (maybe to the protagonist’s double). Reality is mixed up with unreality. The style reflects the author’s idea that life is dream. The theme of unreality, of “some other world” permeates all Nabokov’s novels. His other theme is the theme of fate that governs the lives of people. His heroes who try to oppose fate usually suffer a defeat.
The novel Lolita (1955) is a beautifully written, fascinating story with penetrating psychological characterization not only about nympholepsy, but the transforming power of art. The novel is not pornographic because much of eroticism is comic and the language is very expressive.
The novels Pnin and Pale Fire represent Nabokov’s attempt to assimilate his Russian life experience to that of the USA.
Many of Nabokov’s articles and novels are devoted to the theme of literature. His translation of Pushkin’s Eugine Onegin is a masterpiece of the art of translation. The collection of his lectures Nikolai Gogol analyzes the works of the famous writer from a new point of view. The novel Дар is about Chernyshevsky, and its protagonist, according to Nabokov’s words, is Russian literature.
Jerome David Salinger is best known for his novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), and for some years after World War II he was considered the voice of the post-war generation. He also wrote quite a number of short stories, which appeared in the magazines. Salinger speaks for a young urban American of middle-class parentage. As in the works of Hemingway, the people he admires are above all sincere. Holden Caulfield, the hero of The Catcher in the Rye, whose only certainty is that he can detect a phoney, has a passionate devotion to the few genuine people in his life. A crimson cap he always wears is a symbol of his rebel. The main issue of the novel is the conflict between man and society: Holden rebels against society because the society lives in the world of phony illusions. He escapes from his privileged school because it brings up the phony illusions, and life is not an equal game, there are many unlucky people. The writer expresses the idea of Rousseau that a society spoils a human being who is initially good: only children are really free and honest. Later another writer, Harper Lee, will develop the same theme in his novel To Kill a Mockingbird, in which the children, Jim and Jean-Louise, can not accept
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injustice. Still another theme is that of escape and search for the truth, Holden wants to become a catcher in the rye to save children from falling down. The idea to be useful for people brings him back to people, as “a man alone can do nothing”. Here one can see the parallel with Huck Finn.
The language of The Catcher in the Rye is the authentic reproduction of the speech of American adolescents. It is rooted in American folklore. The constant repetition of “really” stresses Holden’s sincerity; “hate” emphasizes his disgust for phony; the phrase “I’m crazy” underlines the boy’s normality. The use of complex words is an evidence of his sophistication.
In the cluster of stories that deal with the eccentric Glass family – Franny and Zooey – the situation is more intricate. The brothers and the sisters in the family are highly intelligent, but their dilemmas are of the same order as Holden Caulfield’s. They are disgusted by the frauds of everyday life and by the catchwords that are supposed to constitute the framework of belief.
Another type of literature associated mainly with the 1950s was produced by the “Beat” writers. Sometimes the group of these writers is called The Beat Generation. They manifested their despise for corruption and commercialism of modern society. They obviously have much in common with Salinger – a rejection of conventional behaviour, a deep restlessness, a search for truth and love. In origin it is the phenomenon of the San Francisco region, but it quickly spread to New York and other cities. In fiction the best-known practitioner is Jack Kerouac. He called America a “prig’s paradise”, referred to it as a prosperous and lifeless civilization. In one of his articles he expressed the philosophy of the Beats: “…a generation of crazy illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, curious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way – a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction.” The Beat writers used their own “hip” vocabulary, combined with phrases borrowed from Buddhism and other Oriental philosophies. Kerouac and his followers celebrated “the First Person Singular”: “myself” as the proper subject of literature; “my own” spontaneous impressions as things possessing unique value. Kerouac’s first and best book On the Road (1952) is a fast-moving, semi-autobiographical novel about the frantic wanderings across America of the narrator Sal Paradise, a young writer, and his friend and hero, Dean Moriarty, in search of freedom and excitement. In fact Sal Paradise is Kerouac himself and Dean
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Moriarty represents the portrait of his friend Neal Cassidy. The idea of the novel is the search for fulfillment through indiscriminate immersion in experience. The novel is written in anti-authoritarian tone and relates the stories about cannabis smoking and other means of intoxication. The novel was written on a roll of paper.
Allen Ginsberg is the most prominent poet of the “Beat” generation and the hippy culture. His poetic attacks on modern corruption, authoritarianism, his public homosexuality and belief in Zen Buddhism made him a cult figure among the hippies. He used rhymed forms occasionally, but his most impressive poems are written in the manner of free verse and convey his visionary political philosophy or autobiographically discursive commentary. He has a highly developed sense of the absurd, that is why he is classified as “a great comic poet”. Among Ginsberg’s most known collections are Planet News (1968), The Fall of America (1972), Mind Breaths (1978).
The poet played a prominent role as a protester against the war in Vietnam.
James Baldwin (1924–1987) is a classic of Black American literature. In almost all his works the author is preoccupied with issues of race and interracial social and sexual relationship. One of his most famous and mature novels is Another Country. It deals with the lives, destinies and feelings of a group of people linked by their love for Rufus, an AfroAmerican singer. Rufus’ tragic love for a white woman and his suicide reflect the racial tensions in American society. But the novel is more complicated, it shows us all other characters in their development.
Saul Bellow was born in 1915 into the family of Russian emigrants. He has always been a leading exponent of realism. All his works are devoted to the exploration of modern predicament. In the novel Herzog (1964) he raises the problem of national identity. Its main character, a university lecturer Moses Elkanah Herzog is totally assimilated into Western Christian culture. He is on the brink of divorce from his second wife and reaches the point of near insanity. He starts writing letters on current political issues to his friends, relatives, imagined personalities and people who are dead (Spinoza and Napoleon). With their help he wants to understand why he has failed to be happy. He even negotiates with a changing self-image, which centers mainly on his Jewish heritage. Herzog wants to reconsider his present in relation to the past tradition. The tension between religious and secular concerns is echoed in many of his other novels. The
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Dean’s December (1982) has an apocalyptic note. This novel is gruesome vision of the USA. The author is convinced that there are forces in modern America, which threaten the sanctity of the individual.
In 1960s there appeared Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) – a brilliantly sustained satire on modern warfare. He served as a bombardier in the air force during World War II and reflected his experience in this book. It is about the nature of war and patriotism, but it also represents the relationship of the individual to society. Heller creates a remarkable gallery of comic characters, each of them satirizing some particular aspect of American life: business enterprise, the civil and military bureaucracy. The famous philosophical “catch” has passed into the language to describe a situation of deadlock, composed of two mutually exclusive sets of conditions. The paradox of it is expressed in the words of one of the characters, Doc Daneeka about the other character, pilot Orr: “Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions and sane, if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.” His other novel, Good as God (1979), is a surreal and comic satire about Jewish New York and Washington politics.
Kurt Vonnegut is one of the few who demonstrated the immense possibilities of science fiction by going beyond the conventions of the craft. His Cat’s Craddle (1963) is dazzlingly imaginative and meaningful. This book is a complex narrative of human selfishness, which causes the end of the world. His other novels include Player Piano (1952) – against postwar conformity; Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) – directed against wars, God Bless You, Mr Rosewater (1965). In the latter novel Vonnegut depicts an alcoholic millionaire’s realization that the only practical utopia lies in aiding and understanding the world’s wretched, lonely and ignorant. In all these novels Vonnegut mingles science fiction, realism, fantasy and satire.
Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children’s Crusade is a semiautobiographical novel. Like Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut was a prisoner-of- war and saw the Dresden air-raid, which ruined the city almost completely. The book is about the postwar successful life of Billy Pilgrim who is then suddenly hijacked by a flying saucer, taken to the planet Tralfamodore and placed in a zoo there. The novel mixes up the realistic and the science fictional and besides being anti-war and anti-fascist, it is a bitter satire on human nature.
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Ursula Le Guin is also a science fiction writer whose works are more traditional for this genre than those of the above-mentioned writer. In one of her first novels, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), she says about an ethnologist who gets to an unknown planet inhabited by humanoid transsexuals. They challenge his gender-bound view of reality. Here the author expresses her feminist outlook. The Lathe of Heaven (1971) presents metaphysical questions about nature of reality. The Earthsea Trilogy (1968–1972), written for children, was highly acclaimed. It envisages an oceanic world dominated by magic. The main theme of all three books is coming to maturity. A protagonist undertakes a travel, at the end of which he (or she) becomes a grown-up person. The same structural principle is in any fairy tale. Labyrinth is also an important symbol, especially in the second book of the trilogy The Tombs of Atuan – the heroes look for their selves in the labyrinth of their souls. The names play a very important part - they reflect the nature of the characters. For example, the name of Prince Arren means “sword”. According to mythology, a sword cuts off everything evil and fruitless, symbolizes justice. Mythological archetypes of Light and Darkness, Life and Death reflect the World equilibrium. Le Guin is an adherent of a yin-and-yang principle. The trilogy was followed by Tehanu (1990), in which readers could know more about the adventures and heroic deeds of the same heroes. The books remind of Tolkien. The author considers him to be her teacher.
John Updike is both a poet and a prose-writer. His main theme is the investigation of family life, the sacred in daily life. One of his first books, The Centaur (1963) represents the dual narratives of the realistic memories of Peter Caldwell’s student days and an adaptation of the Greek tale of Chiron the centaur. But his most famous work is The Rabbit Tetralogy: Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest. It is a domestic tragi-comedy dealing with Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, who rebels against the constraints of society, flees from his wife and son to unite with Ruth, but soon he flees from pregnant Ruth either. In the second book he tries to live according to outdated laws, meets the rich hippy Jill, starts living with her and a young Vietnam war veteran. The neghbours, outraged by such behaviour, burn the house with Jill inside. In the end of this book Harry reconciles with his wife. In the third book his son Nelson repeats the misdeeds of his father, abandoning his wife. The fourth book deals with Nelson’s return to his wife, though their life together is a disaster as he is involved in drugs. So Harry (Rabbit) returns to save the family business.
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The Witches of Eastwick is a satirical novel of a small town, which receives a visit from someone who can be the devil incarnate.
Tasks
1.What are the main tendencies in the development of American literature of the 1950–70s?
2.Read the beginning of Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, given below and answer the following questions:
– Does it set up the mood for the whole work?
– What are the relations between Holden and his relatives?
– What can you say about Holden’s brother?
– Analyze the language. What role does it play?
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They're nice and all – I'm not saying that – but they're also touchy as hell. Besides, I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy. I mean that's all I told D.B. about, and he's my brother and all. He's in Hollywood. That isn't too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every weekend. He's going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe. He just got a Jaguar. One of those little English jobs that can do around two hundred miles an hour. It cost him damn near four thousand bucks. He's got a lot of dough, now. He didn't use to. He used to be just a regular writer, when he was home. He wrote this terrific book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish, in case you never heard of him. The best one in it was "The Secret Goldfish." It was about this little kid that wouldn't let anybody look at his goldfish because he'd bought it
3. Read the poem of Allen Ginsberg and say which words and phrases bring out the contrasting attitude. How would you describe the contrast?
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UPTOWN
Yellow-lit Buldweiser signs over oaken bars,
“I’ve seen everything” – the bartender handing me change of $10, I stared at him amiably eyes thru an obvious Adamic beard – With Montana musicians homeless in Manhattan, teen age
Curly hair themselves – we sat at the antique booth & gossiped, Madam Grady’s literary salon a curious value in New York – “If I had my way I’d cut off you hair and send you to Vietnam” – “Bless you then” I replied to a hated thin citizen hurrying to the
barroom door upon wet dark Amsterdam Avenue decades later –
“And if I couldn’t do that I’d cut your throat” he snarled farewell, and “Bless you sir” I added as he went to his fate in the rain,
dapper Irishman.
Can you find any analogues in Russian poetry of that time? 4. What are the main characteristics of the “Beat” literature?
Chapter VII
THE AMERICAN THEATRE
The American theatre of the XIX century was represented mainly by the Negro minstrel shows and burlesque performances, both usually organized into three parts, each with its characteristic routines and vulgarities. Later there appeared the American equivalent of the Victorian musichall – a vaudeville – a theatrical piece, usually comic, the dialogue or pantomime of which is intermingled with dancing. The plays themselves were imported from Europe or were adaptations of the well-known novels, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin or The Gilded Age. The American theatre, therefore, lagged behind the Continent. Drama came into being in the beginning of the XX century.
Eugine O’Neill (1888–1953), America's foremost playwright, did a great deal to establish the modes of the modern theatre in the United States. His work illustrates, therefore, some of the main trends in modern American drama. One of its most striking features is the combination of deliberately drab prose realism and of boldly inventive expressionist technique. It is as though Henrik Ibsen and Berthold Brecht had come together in the same person. Expressionists tried to project inner emotional and psychological
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states, often used the grotesque, disjunctive language. When O'Neill began to write, American drama still had to make for itself the discoveries that Ibsen had indicated a whole generation previously.
The first necessity was to establish an Ibsen-like realism, in place of the theatrical conventions that dominated the American theatre. Instead of elaborate drawing-room or scenic sets, O'Neill substituted (in such plays as Bound East for Cardiff and The Moon of the Caribbees) the deck of a tramp steamer. Instead of complicated plots, full of coincidence and highminded stubbornness, O'Neill offered a seaman dying unheroically in his bunk, or an unromantic debauch with native women and native liquor. Instead of sophisticated dialogue, O'Neil’s rough characters spoke in the authentic idiom. Although O'Neill has moved a long way since Bound East, a late play like The Iceman Cometh (1946), set in a Bowery saloon, shows that his sense of common speech has been one of his more permanent assets. His feeling for politer speech has never been so sure, as he said in a letter about his Mourning Becomes Electro: “It needed great language ... I haven't got that. And, by way of self-consolation, I don't think, from the evidence of all that is being written today, that great language is possible for anyone living in the discordant, broken, faithless rhythm of our time. The best one can do is to be pathetically eloquent by one's moving, dramatic inarticulations!”
In consequence, most of his plays are disappointing to read. They seem flat on the printed page, and at a casual glance their detailed stage directions – when they call for realistic settings – might not seem very different from the directions for the kind of play O'Neill's father had acted in. But there are all kinds of differences. O'Neill considered himself a serious playwright. His realism, though it may occasionally appear stale, began as a fresh attitude to the possibilities of drama. So did his expressionist tendencies, which began to reveal themselves quite early in his writing. The Moon of the Caribbees (1918), for example, was gruffly matter-of-fact; yet the offstage native chanting foreshadowed more ambitious efforts on his part at expressionism. Beyond the Horizon (1920) was a realistic, or naturalistic, play; but The Emperor Jones, produced in the same year, combined Brecht with Ibsen, though O’Neill never considered himself to be an expressionist. In the play we see a number of shadowy Negro figures, among whom Brutus Jones, the protagonist, in his delirium of fear passes backward in time to his primeval Congo origins. Several subsequent plays employed expressionist devices. In All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924), O'Neill introduces the theme of negro-white relationships with a contrasted street-scene: “People pass, black and white, the Negroes
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