Современная литература Великобритании и США. Учебно-методическое пособие

1. Literature of England ...............................4

2.5. Томас Пинчон ...............................186

The symbol of the post-war era was the creative activity work of the patriarch of English critical realism, Charles Percy Snow (1905–1980). A huge cycle of his novels called “Alien and Brothers” covers a period of time half a century long. The writer observed a wide social spectrum of British society: politicians, scientists, university teachers. The cycle is united by the personality of the main character named Lewis Eliot, lawyer and scientist, who plays an important role in the formulation

The search for a balance between the visible and the imaginary, the real and the ideal has always attracted attention of the outstanding English novelist Anthony Powell (1905–2000), who completed the epopee in twelve volumes “Dance to the Music of Time” in 1975 – one of the largest canvases of manners and everyday life in modern English literature. The author unfolds a picture of the life of high English society and refined bohemia. The story stretches over four decades, and the cycle itself was created over a quarter of a century. The accomplishments of the author is his success in solving the most difficult problem a writer faces: he managed to achieve authenticity in the portrayal of characters. At the same time, his creative method became the embodiment of a peculiar philosophy that implies the presence of two inseparable sides in human life: visible and hidden. The alternative life becomes a reflection of the metamorphoses that occur in the minds of other people. The human experience, according to Powell, is really only a dream of some higher being whose existence we are not aware of. Life as a text, a person as a novelist who creates this text – this idea embodied in the literary heritage of Powell brings the English classic closer to the ideologists of postmodernism. Powell’s characters are drawn with a high degree of persuasiveness. From time to time a reader might find himself thinking that such human types are hard to meet in “real” life. At the same time, the author constantly reminds us that his characters are the ones due to the will and the intention of the author.

From 1952 to 1965 the “Sword of Honor” trilogy was created, which included the novels “Men at Arms” (1952), “Officers and Gentlemen” (1955) and “Unconditional Surrender” (1961). In this cycle the English author depicts war in dark colors as the embodiment of inevitable evil. Stupidity, ignorance, and violence in the army become the main objects of his ridicule and merciless analysis. Nevertheless, the darkest situations in Waugh’s works always have a comic flavour. The source of this comedy is in the absurdity of situations that help to shade and ridicule the absurd in human nature.

The heroes of the novels of K. Amis “Lucky Jim”, J. Wayne “Hurry on Down”, J. Brain “Room at the Top”, plays Osborne “Look Back in Anger” have some common features. These young people from Kingsley Amis’s novels, for example, Jimmy Dixon from the novel “Lucky Jim”, are representatives of the middle intelligentsia, who graduated from provincial, “redbrick” universities. To protest against the mores and customs established in the middle-class environment, they are pushed by the hopeless boredom and melancholy of a monotonous existence. In the novel “The Anti-Death League”, Amis rises to satirical generalizations, reaching the subtlety of comic art, reminiscent of the best works of E. Waugh. In Wayne’s “Hurry on Down”, Charles Lumley consciously rushes “down”, to people who earn their daily bread honestly and modestly. The main pathos of the work is an aversion to the main punishment of that world – money. Wayne defines the problem of a young man who doesn’t know how to adapt to life in which no one is going to welcome him with open arms. The Joe Lampton’s behaviour in Brain’s “The Way Up” is defined by the affluent existence of the hilltop town well-to-do residents. The image of Lampton is a product of the bourgeois provincial environment. His desire to climb “to the surface” is due to the ideas of “high” and “low”, which are brought up in a small town.

The genre of science fiction itself in English literature can be judged by the work of its best representatives – J.G. Ballard and M. Moorcock. The creative evolution of both prose writers reveals some similarities. Early in their careers, Ballard and Moorcock wrote traditional science fiction. But in the future, they managed to cross the barriers of this genre in order to preserve the freedom of the author’s imagination, the intellectual content of prose – the qualities necessary for this type of literature. Critics have noted the pattern according to which writers who create their literary works in the genre of science fiction, sooner or later come to the historical literature forms. Proof of this is the novel by J.G. Ballard “Empire of the Sun” (1984), which takes place in a Japanese concentration camp. M. Moorcock, in turn, released a series of novels set in England the late XVI century.