English Literature

p> In form the book is mostly a never-ending stream of Bloom’s consciousness (he is not an intellectual person, his impressions are very incoherent). The book has a very rigid form. Joyce describes in many details every moment of the day: actions, feelings & thoughts. But apart from it Joyce deepens into human consciousness… he tries to render something which doesn’t depend on people’s mind, he tries to penetrate into human psyche, impulses which govern, move them. Each chapter corresponds to the certain episode in Homer’s “Odyssey” & each chapter has its own style.
It witnesses that Joyce was a virtuous of the English language. ”Ulysses” has 18 episodes, each of them tracing the deeds & the thoughts of three people during one day in Dublin. The book is a mosaic. It consists of different & not quite linked together parts. There is almost no plot. Joyce still puts the idea in it to describe symbolically man’s wandering in the chaos of life & floating with the stream of his thoughts. The humanity is lost & confused about all the contradictions of modern life, people waist their lives in this chaos, their existence is sensless & purposeless. The three main characters present three eternal types of human beings – common person, an artist, a woman. Bloom stands for the symbol of a typical bourgeois person. He is very limited & content with down-to-earth pleasures.

The book caused a storm of outrage. It was banned in Britain & America for more than ten years. Now it is praised for technical experimentation & stylistic brilliance. The book attracted attention to the stream of consciousness technique. In general it evoked controversial responses.

Even before completing “Ulysses” Joyce wrote “Finnegan’s Wake” – a novel. If “Ulysses” is considered to be a daybook, “Finnegan’s Wake” is a night book. Joyce tried to present the whole human history in a dream of a
Dublin innkeeper Earwicker by name. The style is appropriate to a dream, the language is shifting & changing, the words blur & glue together, this suggests the merging of images in a dream. This technique enables Joyce to present history & myth as a single image. The characters stand for eternal types, identified by Earwicker himself, his wife & the three children.

The work masks the limit of formal experiment in the language.
“Finnegan’s Wake” is considered to be a closed book. It is very sophisticated. Joyce loses the thread of narration sometimes… attempted in the sound of words, construction of a sentences, to render the meaning of what he was talking about (e.g. images of woman & the river are merging; the rhythm – gurgling, flowing water). What unifies these two books – both of them express Joyce’s positive credo: he asserts that life is eternal, human society does change but the change has a circular character.
Everything is renewed, nothing can be destroyed. Joyce starts the work with the continuation of thoughts & the beginning of them is at the end. Man must believe in the city (symbol of Dublin).

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1889 – 1965)

Thomas Stearns Eliot is considered today’s genius in poetry.
Quintessence: refine sensibility – the essential quality of the poet. “Our civilization comprehends great variety & complexity; & this variety & complexity playing upon a refined sensibility must produce various & complex result. The poet must become more & more comprehensive, more & more allusive, more indirect in order to force, to dislocate if necessary language into his meaning” – said Eliot. This is an account of what a modern poet should do. He must be finely tuned to the world to be able to express the various & complex. The poet can distort the language, to use it figuratively.

Extremely was influential figure in literary circles. Editor, poet, playwright, critic – he came from a prosperous American family, his father was a rich manufacturer & his mother wrote poetry. He was brought up in St.
Louis Missouri. He was educated in private school & attended Harvard to get his degree in philosophy in 1906. Then left for Paris. There he attended lectures of Henry Bergson – “Subjective Idealism Philosophy, Theory of
Intuitivism”. Being in Paris he read much on French symbolist poets. The symbolist movement was one of major influences upon his poetry. The goal of art is to express the unique personal emotional responses to a certain moment in human life through indefinite illogical, sometimes private in meaning symbols. Eliot returned to Harvard & there he read widely in
Sanskrit & oriental philosophy (had a powerful influence on him). In 1915 he decided to give up philosophy to remain in England & to begin writer’s career. In 1916 he completed his Ph.D. theses, but never received a degree.
He married & settled in England permanently.

The beginning of his literary career starts from 1910 when he wrote “The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. It was published in 1915 in magazine
“Poetry”. The poem is written in a very simple style. Then he made a collection “Prufrock & Other Observations”. This was compared with “Lyrical
Ballads” of Wordsworth & Coleridge. This work inaugurated the age of modernism in poetry. There is no plot in the story. It’s a dramatic monologue but of the new kind. It sounds like a stream of consciousness of a person who walks up the street of London. The protagonist is Alfred
Prufrock. He is an antiromantic hero, rather timid, self-centred. The tone is very ironic, images are startlingly fresh. The title suggests that some feeling should be shown to the other person. The poem starts as a dialogue:

Let us go out – you & I…

Critics argue that you & I are two sides of one & the same person. Eliot says that “YOU” is a companion of Prufrock. We should pay attention to the epigraph: “The truth will remain under”. This means that the speaker can persuade himself to talk only if this will never be heard. It is his own dramatic monologue. Prufrock is intensely preoccupied with himself.
Probably he signs his love song to himself… (though it doesn’t matter much)

We can understand “love-song” in ironic sense because the whole poem is an elaborate rationalization for not seeking love. Love cannot exist in this ugly senseless chaotic world. It is a miracle, hopeless yearning of person for the vitality. The whole scene makes us see that love is not possessive in this world. Repulsive attitude of the narrator towards what he sees – images of a pair of ragged claws, mermaids singing each to each.
Leitmotif:

В гостиных дамы тяжело

Беседуют о Микеланджело.

It means that they talk of what they pretend to know.

The poem is full of allusions. The epigraph is quite important, taken from Dante’s “The Divine Comedy”. The end of poem is pessimistic. It is one of the most understandable of his poems.

“The Waste Land” (the poem (1922) in ”Dial” & “Criteria”[GB]). The poem consists of 5 parts & their titles speak for themselves:

“The Burial of the Dead”

“A Game of Chess” – an allusion of a medieval play, where the action was as if in two playings.

“The Fire Sermon” – the postulates of oriental religion.

“The Death by the Water”

“What the Thunder Said”

In terms of forms the poem is a collage of fragments of memories, overheard conversations, quotations put together only by the implied present of a sensible person (= a refined sensibility = a modern poet), upon whom all these complexibilities & varieties of human world are hipped
& who staggers under the burden of them. We can say that the mind of the poet is heavily packed with cultural tradition. A poem abounds in highly sophisticated allusions:

. “The Tempest”

. Anthropological account of “Grail”(“Грааль”) legend– a legend connected with Christianity – a cup from which Christ drank;

. from “The Divine Comedy”;

. alluded & used words from operas of Wagner;

. refers to the story of crusification;

. uses French symbolists;

. as well as scraps of popular culture – music-hall songs, slang words, contemporary fashion;

He hips everything together. This bits & pieces are set into a matrix of flowing stream of consciousness of a man. The dramatic portrait of a single mind becomes the portrait of an age. Eliot provided 52 notes for “The Waste
Land” when it was first published. The poem was opposed violently but there were also admirers. They said that Eliot gave a definite description of their age. Now terms “lost generation”, “post-war disillusionment”, “jazz age”, “waste land” are used parallelly For many contemporary writers & critics “The Waste Land” was a definite description of the age.
Civilization was dying. Critics regarded it as the disillusionment of a generation. Eliot protested against that. The term “waste land” is used in literature alongside with the term “lost generation”.

He also employed the myth of dying & reviving king – what the poem expresses is the need of salvation & this is expressed in 3 Sanskrit words
(give, sympathize & control). There are many barbarisms in the poem.

In 1925 he published another poem in the same tonality. “The Hollow Man” develops the major themes & images of “The Waste Land” – problems of spiritual bareness, the problem of loss of faith in contemporary generation. The poem is a set of recurrent symbols. The meaning depends on cumulative effect of the individual images. The idea of spiritual sterility in the image of Hollow Man – grotesque caricature of man, their behaviour is mimicry of human activity. The poem is very short. It is easily read but not so easily understood. There are 5 parts in the poem. Other images –
Death of the Kingdom. The life of the Hollow Man – is more shadowy & less real than the life beyond the grave. Religion is substituted by simple rituals devoid of all true feelings & emotions. The end-of-the-world
(apocalyptic) motive is very strong in the poem. The picture is very pessimistic. The poem ends hopelessly:

This is the way the world ends,

Not with a bang but a whimper…

Eliot’s development after “The Waste Land” was in the direction of literary, political, religious conservatism. Classicist in literature, royalist in politics & Anglo-Saxon in religion he developed more composed lyrical style.

His mature masterpiece is “Four Quartets” (1944) which is based on the poetic memories of certain localities of America & Britain. This is a starting point for his probing in the mystery of time, history, eternity, the meaning of life. It deals with one single question of what significance in our lives are ecstatic intense moments when we seem to escape time & glimpses of supra-ordinary reality (it resembles Joyce’s “Epiphanies”.
There are two epigraphs that give clues to the answer. The epigraphs are very important.

The first comes from Heroclitus. It contrasts the general wisdom of the race with moments of private individual insight. It shows the dualism of individual existence. First of all individuality is apart of a body of mankind, located in history & tradition. Secondly, it is a unique personality. Each person embraces both & this predetermines the reaction to intense moments.

The second is short – “The way up & the way down are one & the same”.
This is another duality, two ways of apprehending the truth. The first one is an active embrace of ecstatic experience (the way up), the second one is a passive withdrawal from experience into self (the way down).

The poem got a reputation of a great obscurity due to a philosophical richness but at the same time it is intensely musical. He tries to make it closer to music by the motives that return like the tones in music. It is not by chance that the poem is called “Four Quartets” – 4 instrumental voices in the quartet. In his essay “The Music of Poetry” he explained this usage of recurrent things.

From 1926 he experimented with poetic drama “The Cocktail Party”. But his dramas remain unpopular because drama needs plot.

Eliot received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949 as recognition of his innovations in modern poetry. He also wrote critical works “The Sacred
Wood”, “The Use of Poetry & the Use of Criticism”, “On Poetry & Poets” – most influential literary documents.

David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930)

Lawrence was very much influenced by Freud’s conception of human personality. He is considered to be a modernist but he didn’t experiment with form. On the outside he worked within the confines of English novel tradition but he broke from the understanding of human relations that were accepted in critical realism. He was the first who touched upon the problem of marrying, the relations between sexes, he didn’t hush down the contradictions between them. His main concern was to liberate a person from all the constrains which were put by the society upon him. There was so much taboos, hush-hush attitudes to this topic, that …

He is compared to Eliot. Both started from similar points that civilization threatens human beings, it is hostile to man. Civilization is sick, it destroys people morally & bodily. What Lawrence can suggest instead? His religion was belief in blood & flesh as being wiser than the intellect. This belief became one of his main themes. He interpreted human behaviour & character from this standpoint. All his writings were underlined with a deep discontent with a modern world. And this fact unites him with other modernists. Civilization is on the wrong track. Science, industrialization produced a race of robots. Civilization is evil. The only way out – the way back – to re-awaken our emotional, irrational layers of consciousness. He was little concerned with social problems. Lawrence’s treatment of character is based on the assumption that 7/8 are submerged & never seen. He explored the unconscious mind that was not always seen but was always present. He is fumbling for the words to describe strictly indescribable. He enjoyed popularity in his lifetime. His first works are:

“The White Peacock” 1911

“Sons & Lovers” 1913

They were well received. Critics thought that there appeared one more working-class writer. His late works were received with shock & opposition because of his frankness to the questions of sexuality, relations of men & women. These themes suffered from late Victorian prudishness. He was the first to describe sexual relations using common words not…

“Sons & Lovers” is considered to be autobiographical. Lawrence was brought up in miner’s family in Nottinghamshire. His mother was cultivated ex-school teacher. She married beneath herself & so she tried to develop ambitions in her children. The book centers around Paul Morel & his mother’s relations. His mother made him fatally unable to love another woman. “There was something in his life that blocked his intentions.” The relations that he explores within the Morel family remind us of the relations in his own family. He must get it clear & get away with it. By giving this story a form of a novel Lawrence tried to liberate himself of his ties with the past. Sometimes it is considered an illustration of
Freud’s theory of Oedipus complex.

We consider Lawrence a modernist not because of his innovations in form
& style but by his attitude to human beings (human behaviour is biologically determined). “Blood & flesh being wiser than intellect”.

Lawrence is a very prolific writer but his books were uneven in quality
– 15 novels & volumes of short stories. The best of them are:

“The Rainbow”(was also condemned as obscene one)

“Women in Love” 1920

“Kangaroo” 1923

“The Plumed Serpent” 1926

“Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (1929) was subjected to obscenity trial. It was banned for oscine vocabulary till 1960. “His urgency in seeking out the deepest core of his characters’ being lead him to employ a language overfraught with portentous vocabulary – repeatedly, ineffectually gesturing at dark, mystic, passionate, but ultimately vague & ungraspable emotions.” Critics considered this work to be his greatest one.

Sexual aspect wasn’t the only one though very important. It was a part of his concept of personal development.

American Modernism.

It appeared in the first decade of the XX when the group of poets appeared in the USA who tried to bring modernists’ ideas. The most active of these poets were Ezra Pound & Thomas Eliot. American modernism doesn’t mean geographical terms. Many American writers created their works in
Europe (mainly in Paris). Ezra Pound said: “Paris is a lab of ideas”.
Modernists:

Ezra Pound

Gertrude Stein

John Dos Passos

Ernest Hemingway

Partially William Faulkner

Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972)

A famous poet, publicist & translator. He studied in the University of
Pennsylvania (studied Roman languages). But he had a very brief career as a teacher & in 1908 he left for Europe. He walked all the way from Gibraltar to Venice where the first collection of his poems appeared – “A Hume
Spento”. During 2 years from 1908 he gained his popularity. His collections were:

“Canzoni” – songs

“Ripostes” – leisure

“Lustra” – light
The poems impressed the readers by the original form, new expressiveness & metrical faction. He is the founder of imagist’s school (opposed traditional Victorian verse). The poets’ aim was to be precise & clear in word usage. They did not accept thematic limitations, were responsible for exploding the traditional form, tried to find form to substitute it. There was a trend in imagism – wordism – the model for the XXth century poetry.
Its features:

V Mechanistism

V Technisism

V Specific rhyme
Much attention was paid to the metaphorical images. These ideas influenced young poets like Robert Frost, Thomas Eliot, and W. Butler.

Pound edited magazine “Little Review” where new names & works were introduced. It is believed that he revolutionized English versification. He tried to capture the intonation of monological speech. His poems have a peculiar form of masques. His poetry is dressed in the bright clothes of
Latin, Greek, Japanese, Anglo-Saxon, etc poets.

Translations are the best part of his legacy. They were also thoroughly polished masques. He developed interest Japanese poetry. He liked the
Japanese way of presenting the most abstract idea through a concrete image.
So he introduced idiomatic poetry when any nation could be rendered through the combination of concrete images. This principle was employed in “The
Cantos” epic poem, which he started in 1925 & continued almost up to the end of his life. He called it “неисчерпаемый свод стихотворных форм”. The synthesis of his ideas of works, autobiography, aesthetic & poetic principles & reflection of the urgent & poetic issues. “The Cantos” are uneven in quality. Some fragments are difficult to understand. To facilitate the process of reading “The Index of Cantos” was published. In
1925 Pound moved to Italy & became interested in politics & economics. He devoted much time & effort to discuss economics & politics.

“The ABC of ECONOMICS”

“What Is Money For?”
He supported the fascist regime. After the war he was arrested & charged in prison, but was considered to have mental disease & spent 22 years in mental hospital. In late 50’s he was let free & went to Italy where he died. But he continued to write even in hospital. “The Cantos of Pizza” is a very painful reevaluation of the things passed. The famous critic Malison said: “He chose a wrong position above the society & that’s the problem”.
He was the poet who transformed the form of English verse – thus his achievement was great.

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

Gertrude Stein is remembered because of her influence on the writers to come, not for her works. She doesn’t enter anthologies of English or
American literature. She was born in USA, her childhood was spent in
Europe. She studied psychology in Harvard. Her teacher was William James.
She conducted several experiments on automatic writing but she was interested only from psychological point of view. However, she did not become a psychologist yet this influenced her writing. In 1903’s she left for Paris & remained there almost all her life. In 1909 she published the novel “The Three Lives”. It consists of three parts describing the lives of three women. The work was unnoticed in that time. But that time she got acquainted with famous artists: Picasso, Matisse. New tendencies in painting (cubism, abstractionism) impressed her very much.

Abstraction tendencies dominated in her artistic works. She claimed that only Spanish & American writers were able to realize abstract notions in literature. This abstraction must be expressed by the deformity of the form. She was the only representative of literary abstractionism. Her desire was to get rid of the content of words (of the meaning) so that she could be able to concentrate on the plastic properties of the language & its syntax. She was going to capture inner & outer reality in the most precise & objective form.

Literature must not awake any associations: associative emotions are invalid. Everything that is the result of emotions cannot be the gist of literary work, cannot be material for prose & poetry. They must consist in the precise rendering of internal & external reality. The words must express the reality directly, she tried to devoid them of any meaning. But she forgot that the painter & the writer use different media for their arts. But if colours have no meaning the words obviously possess it. She wanted to create pure literature by using pure words, no one else tried to do that before. She emptied the words of the thought & created almost her private language & that was the extreme. It showed how far one could go in violating the language.

Another novelty – the new concept of time. She tried a new method of narration – “continuous present”. Instead of the narration she creates a composition where a story is presented as if happening at the present moment, not as a consequent unfolding of the theme as we perceive reading.
She did acknowledge that such a category as time in literature would transform into continuous perception of the present moment. So she tried to put this theory into practice in her book “The Making of Americans”.

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