Ramona Hosu Literatura Engleza A Sec XX

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Universitatea Petru Maior din Trgu Mure 2010

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Universitatea Petru Maior Trgu-Mure

DEPARTAMENTUL I.F.R.D.

RAMONA HOSU

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ENGLISH
LITERATURE

LITERATURA ENGLEZ a
SECOLULUI XX

NOTE DE CURS, TEXTE CRITICE I ESEURI

Ediie revizuit

Pentru uzul studenilor
2009-2010

3

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from
being like this. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind
on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad
impressions trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved
with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an
incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall,
as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or
Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the
moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if
a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could
write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base
his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention,
there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love
interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps
not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors
would have it. Life is not a series of gig-lamps
symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-
transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning
of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the
novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and
uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or
complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the
alien and external as possible? We are not pleading
merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that
the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom
would have us believe it.

(Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction in The Common
Reader)

4

Is our identity inside us, like the kernel of a nut?
Most of the perspectives presented in this book are
implicitly dedicated to the proposition that personal
identity is not inside us. There are two types of
argument. The first is that identity is relational, meaning
that it is not to be found inside a person but that it
inheres in the relations between a person and others.
According to this argument, the explanation of a
persons identity must designate the difference between
that person and others: it must refer to the inner life of a
person but to the system of differences through which
individuality is constructed. In other words, personal
identity is not really contained in the body at all; it is
structured by, or constituted by, difference. The second
type of argument is that identity is not within us because
it exists only as narrative. By this I mean two things: that
the only way to explain who we are is to tell our own
story, to select key events which characterise us and
organise them according to the formal principles of
narrative to externalise ourselves as if talking of
someone else, and for the purposes of self-
representation; but also that we learn how to self-
narrate from the outside, from other stories, and
particularly through the process of identification with
other characters. This gives narration at large the
potential to teach us how to conceive of ourselves, what
to make of our inner life and how to organise it.
(Mark Currie, Postmodern Narrative Theory)

5

FOREWORD

In its explication of literary form and text, beginning with
Modernism/ Postmodernism and the Visual Arts, the modernist novel
to modernist drama, poetry, utopia/ dystopia, construction/ de-
construction of identity, narrative/ narration/ nation, the course
presents the relatively more significant twentieth-century English
writers who encompassed in their work the Modern and Postmodern
Period.
The course has ten themes and their reading would induce the
reader the impression of having a very precise classification of the
representative writers. By means of categorization and classification,
the course is meant to surpass mere historical approaches to literature,
and to propose certain themes for explication and interpretation of
literary texts.
The themes do not constitute a history of Modernism and
Postmodernism but they provide a comprehensive history of literary
form. Each chapter ends with a sample student essay, which could
be of great use for reading and understanding modernist,
postmodernist and contemporary literature, providing guidance for
writing.
I wish to thank all my students with whom I was in constant
exchange of ideas and beliefs. I am particularly indebted to Petru
Anca, Liliana Dan, Kalman Attila, Szasz Annamaria, Horea Ignat,
Alina Micu, Iszlai Emese, Laura Mogos, Andreea Sanpalean, Diana
Carnatiu, Antal Erika, Doina Bita, Calin Blaga, Carmen Bichis, Ada
Ognean, Gabriela Demeter, Simona Brad, Roxana Roman, Erna
Cismas, Simonfi Arpad, Ciuchina Veronica .

Ramona Hosu

6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. MODERNISM/ POSTMODERNISM AND THE VISUAL ARTS ....... 8
1.1. MODERNIST PAINTING .......................................................................... 8
1.2. THE ARTS AFTER 1945 ........................................................................ 12
2. CULTURE AND THE WORLD. ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY .......................................................................... 15
2.1. THE SOCIAL AND CULTURAL BACKGROUND....................................... 15
2.2. METAPHYSICS AND MODERNISM ........................................................ 19
2.3. MODERNISM AND/OR POSTMODERNISM .............................................. 29
3. THE MODERN/IST NOVEL (1). IN BETWEEN TRADITION AND
INNOVATION; IDENTITIES AND CULTURES ................................... 44
3.1. HENRY J AMES, DAISY MILLER ............................................................. 45
3.2. SAMPLE STUDENT ESSAY.................................................................... 50
3.3. D. H. LAWRENCE, THE RAINBOW ......................................................... 57
4. THE MODERN/IST NOVEL (2). THE FORM OF THE
MODERNIST NOVEL ............................................................................... 67
4.1. J AMES J OYCE, A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN ................ 75
4.3. VIRGINIA WOOLF, TO THE LIGHTHOUSE .............................................. 80
5. IN BETWEEN THE MODERN AND THE POSTMODERN.
UTOPIA/ DYSTOPIA ................................................................................. 85
5.1. GEORGE ORWELL, NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR........................................ 90
5.3. WILLIAM GOLDING, LORD OF THE FLIES ............................................. 95
6. POSTMODERNISM AND THE NOVEL. NARRATIVE,
NARRATION, NATION AND POLITICS ............................................. 101
6.1. J OHN FOWLES, THE FRENCH LIEUTENANTS WOMAN ......................... 104
7
6.2. MARTIN AMIS, TIMES ARROW .......................................................... 108
6.3. KAZUO ISHIGURO, THE REMAINS OF THE DAY .................................... 115
6.4. SALMAN RUSHDIE, MIDNIGHTS CHILDREN ....................................... 121
7. THE MODERN/IST & POSTMODERN/IST POEM. ....................... 127
7.1. MODERN POETRY .............................................................................. 127
7.2. T. S. ELIOT, THE WASTE LAND ........................................................... 128
7.3. SAMPLE STUDENT ESSAY.................................................................. 130
7.4. POETRY AND IMAGE, IMAGINATION, IMAGERY, THE IMAGINARY .. 132
7.5. DYLAN THOMAS, FERN HILL ............................................................. 134
7.6. TED HUGHES, PIKE ........................................................................... 137
7.7. SEAMUS HEANEY, PUNISHMENT ........................................................ 140
7.8. ROGER MCGOUGH, FART .................................................................. 142
8. MODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM AND DRAMA ........................ 146
8.1. MODERNISM AND DRAMA ........................................................ 146
8.2. SAMUEL BECKETT, WAITING FOR GODOT .......................................... 147
8.3. SAMPLE STUDENT ESSAY.................................................................. 149
8.4. DRAMA AND CONSTRUCTING/ DE-CONSTRUCTING
IDENTITIES ........................................................................................... 153
8.5. HAROLD PINTER, THE CARETAKER .................................................... 155
8.6. TOM STOPPARD, ARCADIA ................................................................. 157
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................... 162

1. MODERNISM/ POSTMODERNISM AND THE VISUAL
ARTS

1.1. MODERNIST PAINTING

Painters were the first to explore the revolutionary possibilities of
Modernism and it would be impossible to understand completely the
development of literary Modernism without some notions about
modern art.
As Glen Macleod states in The visual arts (Levenson, 194):
The great progenitor of modernist revolt was the impressionist
movement in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first
official exhibition devoted to artists rejected by the established
Academy was the Salon des Refuss (1893), famous for the scandal
it caused by showing Manets Le djeuner sur lherbe. Theat
paintings offence both against bourgeois morality (showing a nude
woman with two fully clothed men at a picnic) and against academic
standards (the flatness of his technique, the lack of careful modelling)
anticipates the uncompromising posture of modernist paintings to
come. The Impressionists, whose name was first applied to them as a
term of derision, established the pattern of the avant-garde: an elite
group of artists, scorned but heroic, leading humanity into the future
through their prophetic vision. The foundation in 1884 of the Socit
des Artistes Indpendents, whose exhibitions had no jury and were
open to anyone, marked the coming-of-age of this anti-academic
tradition that was essential to the development of modern art (p.
194).
The first major modern art exhibition was Manet and the Post-
Impressionists in London, at the Grafton Galleries in 1910. The
exhibition was organized by Roger Fry and it focused mainly on
Gauguin, Van Gogh and Czanne. The second exhibition included
cubist works as well. In trying to explain the innovations of Czanne
and the other Post-Impressionists, he came to the conclusion that the
essential aesthetic quality has to do with pure form. He soon
developed [] a method of analysing art solely according to its
formal characteristics. In this view, subject matter is irrelevant to
9
aesthetic considerations. Frys formalist art theory was attractive
because it could be applied democratically to any work, from any
period or culture, no matter what the subject and no matter how
abstractly it was treated. The influence of formalist criticism spread
rapidly as modern art developed further and further away from the
European tradition of representational art. A purely formalist
interpretation of modern art history soon became (and remained, until
recently) the orthodox version. Frys critical emphasis on form in the
visual arts has also had far-reaching influence in the realm of modern
literature: in the ascendancy of the New Criticism from the 1930s
through the 1950s, and in the formal experimentation that has
characterized most avant-garde poetry in English since the 1910s
(203).
New York was the place where The International Exhibition of
Modern Art was held; the exhibition contained 1300 works of
European and American artists. Its leading figure was the French
expatriate, Marcel Duchamp, whose most notorious act while he
lived in New York occurred in connection with the first annual
exhibition of the Society for Independent Artists in 1917. [] In order
to test the sincerity of the hanging committee (of which he was the
head), Duchamp entered a work pseudonymously. Called Fountain
and signed R. Mutt, it was an ordinary porcelain urinal. The work
was rejected and Duchamp resigned in protest from the committee.
Fountain is the most famous example of the art form Duchamp
called the readymade. In creating a readymade, the artists select an
ordinary, mass-produced object and displays it as a work of art. []
The viewers automatic first reaction, Is it Art? cannot be answered
without addressing the complex philosophical question, What is art?.
As Duchamp put it, I was interested in ideas not merely in visual
products. I wanted to put [art] once again at the service of the mind.
In doing so, he laid the foundation for the later developments of Pop
Art, minimalism, and conceptual art (210).
Cubism begins in 1907 with Les demoiselles dAvignon, of Pablo
Picasso. It depicted the female nude in very simplified flattened
shapes; the painting disturbed many painters because of its
deliberately primitive distortions and because of its utter disregard
for conventional standards of beauty (198).
10
There are two types of Cubism: Analytical Cubism and Synthetic
Cubism. The former is a watershed in the development of modern
painting primarily because it invents a new kind of pictorial space.
The centuries-old tradition of deep perspective is replaced by a
shallow space between figure and background. The eye is not led back
into an imaginary distance, but is held on the paintings surface. []
Cubism introduces a new way of representing three-dimensional
objects. Instead of reproducing the object according to realistic
conventions dating from the Renaissance, the painter is free to break
apart the object and distribute its pieces about the canvas as the
composition requires. The painter can show the back and the front of
the chair at the same time, for instance, or paint a face with one eye
viewed frontally and the other profile (200). Synthetic Cubism adds
back elements to their canvases: colours, letters and words are
introduced and the viewer is invited to compare verbal and visual
signs. Gradually, real objects were put into works: a cigarette
wrapper, a piece of fabric or wallpaper or rope, a sheet of music or a
newspaper article [] This technique, known as collage, is a
revolutionary invention because it breaks down the boundaries
between art and life, causing the viewer to ponder various kinds and
degrees of artifice. [] The cubist techniques of fragmentation,
multiple perspectives, and juxtaposition are part of the standard
modernist repertoire, from Eliots The Waste Land to Stevens The
Man with the Blue Guitar [] Without the invention of Cubism,
Pounds Cantos and Williams Paterson probably would not exist as
we know them, as Macleod states (Levenson, p. 201-202).
According to Wilhelm Worringers Abstraction and Empathy, the
history of art can be analysed due to 2 opposing impulses: (1)
empathy, reflecting a secure, confident relation to the world and
resulting in an organic, humanistic art like that of ancient Greece and
Renaissance Italy; and (2) abstraction, reflecting an anxious, fearful
relation to the world and resulting in a stylised, geometric art, as in
African, Egyptian, and Byzantine art (204). Wassily Kandinsky
thought of abstract art as an attempt to discover a reality behind
appearances. The term abstract can be applied to a bewildering
variety of modern art. It can refer, on the one hand, to any form
abstracted (to any degree) from nature; and, on the other, to purely
abstract forms without any reference to nature. It can cover the full
11
range of shapes from biomorphic (for example J oan Mir) to
geometric (for example, Piet Mondrian) (205).
Dada was an international movement founded in Zurich by
Tristan Tzara. A work may be cubist in style but Dada in spirit []
Dada is a nose-thumbing challenge to all convention. It is the purest
embodiment of the destructive element that is an essential part (though
only a part) of modernism. Outraged by the massive carnage of World
War I, the Dadaists rebelled against all established institutions and
traditional values indeed, against reason itself since, as the guiding
principle of Western civilization, rationalism had led directly (in their
view) to the wholesale destruction of war. The nonsense-term Dada
was an appropriate name for this exuberantly anarchic movement. The
Dadaists made artworks from found objects and chance occurrences;
gave nonsense lectures and poetry readings, concerts of noise, and
bizarre theatrical productions (209-210). The representatives of the
movement in painting were Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia.
Surrealism was the trend that followed Dada which finished with
its commitment to anarchy and disorder. Andr Breton stated in The
Surrealist Manifesto: I believe in the future resolution of these two
states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, in a
sort of absolute reality, or surreality, if one may so speak (in,
Macleod, in Levenson, 212-213). Their claim was to set loose those
irrational powers of the unconscious mind. One favourite method
they used to disrupt conventional thinking was to create unexpected
juxtapositions, as in the classic example from Lautramont: the
chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a
dissection table (213). Salvador Dal is the most practitioner of
veristic surrealism (213).
Surrealism stood for the irrational, for literary content and
figuration; abstraction stood for rationalism, formalism and non-
objectivity; as Macleod states (Levenson, 194): The ancient parallel
between literature and the visual arts i.e. painting, sculpture, and
architecture becomes newly relevant in the twentieth century
because writers patterned their literary experiments on parallels
drawn from the visual arts.

12
1.2. THE ARTS AFTER 1945
*

Abstract painting dominated the Visual Arts since the 1950s.
Representational Arts are replaced by Abstraction.
The Contemporary Period speaks about pluralism in art. There are
more tendencies that coexist. There is no predominant artistic
direction or trend.
The 20
th
century arts are labelled as Modern (1900-1950) and
Postmodern (1950- present). Some do not accept any term like
Postmodernism but consider it late Modernism.
There are 5 important references:
1. Abstract Expressionism
2. Pop Art and Non-Figurative Painting
3. Minimalism and Post-minimalism
4. Other directions
5. Present, current problems: Postmodernism, Architecture,
Feminist Art etc.

1. Abstract Expressionism
It is a non-figurative type of painting. It was the most
important direction in art in 1960 and it appeared in New York
transforming it in the artistic centre of the world.
a) Action painting
b) The picture of the Coloured Field.
Keywords: universal order, gesture, dance, psychic energy,
contemplation, iconicity, symbols of the subconscious.
Painters concentrated on the physical process of the painting,
thus resulting a dynamic type of painting. (J ackson Pollock).

*
From J ones Arthur F., Introducere in arta, Editura Lider, Bucuresti, 1992;
Carrassat, Patricia Fride R. and Isabelle Marcade, Curente in pictura, Editura
Aquila 93, Oradea, 2001; Little, Stephen, isme Sa intelegem arta,
Enciclopedia Rao, Chilvers, Ian, Dictionary of Art & Artists, Grange Books,
2005, Fineberg, J onathan, Art Since 1940 Strategies of Being, Laurence
King Publishing, 2000
13
Figurative Painting- A Modernist Art: one of the painters
went back to silhouette: Francis Bacon, the tendency of 1960 included
figurative painting as well.

2. Pop Art and Non-Figurative painting
It was one of the major orientations of the 1960s. It departed
from the Abstract. The artists concentrated on the mass-media and on
ordinary images from the commercial mass and common world. There
are artistic techniques derived from advertisements.
- Andy Warhol-invented the can soups and the Coca Cola
bottles.
Optical art - having roots in science and being based on optic
illusions, forgetting the ultimate effects. Optical art was connected
to the kinetic art.

3. Minimalism and Postminimalism
It was an important trend in sculpture in the 1960s. It uses
basic structures and it also uses geometric simplification of the
composition of things and it is based on the instinct impression of the
viewer.
- less means more- most of the time impersonal art.
Key words: simplicity, austerity, sterile, innovative raw materials.
Conceptual Art - Conceptualism
- The idea itself is art; artists often used objects that were only
instruments in their trying to render the idea.
- As part of Postmodernism we have several trends that rejects art as
merchandise and within the trends there are: -Land Art- geometric
forms made most of the time in nature.
- Sights- use prefabs in order to transmit an idea; they are temporary
constructions; the impression of the viewer is not on the object itself.
- Installation - pieces of art are made inside, in enclosed rooms and
somehow similar to pieces made outside.

4. Other directions
Happening as art
At the end of the 1950s- artistic performances were played outside
with audience. Alan Kaprow invented the term and it refers to events
where the contribution and the presence of people is necessary.
14
Photorealist Painting and Photorealism
It appeared after the 1970s. It gave up non-figurative art. They
are connected with the photographic image. They are also called
super realists and they borrowed very much from Pop Art.
Neo-expressionism - 1978 New York
It is figurative art also, known as bad art using primitive styles,
clumsy drawings and heavy compositions.
Key words: lack of refinement, primitive, emotional, figurative.
Photography, film and video.

5. Current problems
Art faces today a multitude of problems that go beyond any
notion of style trespassing disciplines, combining art and sciences.
Therefore the opinions about up-to-date art are divergent regarding the
stylistic identity of the contemporary era.
Postmodernism - any tendencies after the 1960s. (some say
after the 1970s). This is a reaction against the values and authority of
the Modernist art. Postmodernism recreates some of tradition. (e.g.
fashion)
Historicism and Deconstruction
- Historicism - artists that use old style in order to borrow stylistic
elements and adapt them to the present requirements.
- Deconstruction de-composure of the elements of the modern
piece of art
- Postmodern architecture the 1970s.
Key words: electiveness, relativism, deconstructivism, mass-media.
Art in public places: art financed by the government, street
art and graffiti, identity construction art.

15
2. CULTURE AND THE WORLD. ENGLISH LITERATURE IN
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

2.1. THE SOCIAL AND CULTURAL BACKGROUND
*

In The Double Image Alan Bullock states (58-70): Trying
to look back, then, at the years as they appeared to the people of the
time, I find myself turning to two contrasting pictures: One is a
photograph of a London street-scene taken in the summer of 1904; it
shows a busy crossing in front of the Royal Exchange. Along the
pavements under the gaslamps, businessmen in top hats and frock
coats rub shoulders with clerks in bowler hats, a ragged newspaper
boy with his placards, and one or two women with long skirts and
large hats, carrying parasols; the roadway is crowded with handsome
cabs, brewers drays, wagons and horse-drawn buses the animated
everyday scene on any day of the week in the largest and wealthiest
city in the world, caught suddenly and pinned down in black and
white. The second is a picture, Les Demoiselles dAvignon, painted
by Picasso in 1907, a painting fertilized by Spanish and African
influence which has been called the first truly twentieth-century
painting: five naked women painted in a series of geometrical
lozenges and triangles, with total disregard of anatomy and
perspective, a famous point of distillation in Cubism. To translate
into words the meaning and associations instantaneously conveyed by
this double image is to convey something of the span of experience
represented by the period between the turn of the century and 1914.
(1)The first picture is a visual shorthand of the bourgeois
civilization which reached its apogee at the beginning of the twentieth
century [] The half-century before the First World War was the
most remarkable period of economic growth in history, not excluding
our own time. In the years 1870-1913 the expansion of the
international economy, measured by increase in industrial output per
head, was more rapid than ever before or since [] Overlapping with

*
From Bullok, Alan, The Double Image in Bradbury, Malcolm and J ames
McFarlane, Modernism 1890-1930, Penguin Books, 1991
16
this great industrial expansion was a technological revolution which,
in the 1890s and the 1900s, produced a series of key developments
that remain the foundation of the technology of the twentieth as
distinct from that of the nineteenth - century. These were: the internal
combustion engine, the diesel engine and the steam turbine;
electricity, oil and petroleum as the new sources of power; the
automobile, the motor bus the first London motor buses appeared in
1905 the tractor and the aeroplane; the telephone, the typewriter and
the tape machine, the foundation of modern office organization; the
production by chemical industry of synthetic materials dyes, man-
made fibres and plastics. Industrialization had been accompanied by a
great increase in urban populations.
Alan Bullock continues listing the factors that contributed to
the shape of twentieth-century European and American society:
urbanized, industrialized, and mechanized (60-61). With Ford in the
USA ad William Lever in Britain, the secret of successful business
was grasped, i.e. mass production for a mass market. The advertising
business went hand in hand with the mass entertainment industry. In
1895, the Lumiere brothers invented the cinematograph and Marconi
the wireless telegraphy; the first motion picture, the Nickelodeon
appeared in 1905 in Pittsburgh. The media had been created.
Europe is seen as having dominated the world politically and
economically. It was the great age of imperialism, based on material
superiority and on the cultural and racial superiority of the white
races of Europe. To go on with Bullock: The transformation of
Europe by industry and empire during latter part of the nineteenth
century produced far- reaching social and political changes. At the
top, the traditional European elites, based on birth and the ownership
of land, survived by accommodating themselves to the upward thrust
of new groups drawn from industry, banking and the professions. The
great estates of the European aristocracy, all the way from Scotland to
Hungary, from Spain to Russia, were still intact [] Below the top,
Europe remained a society governed by class distinction, with
undisguised inequality between rich and poor. The difference
between the leisured and the working classes found expression not
simply in their clothes, their food, their housing and their education,
but in their appearance and mentality. The poor who thronged the
overcrowded slums of the big cities were a lower order of humanity
17
and treated as such, valued only as the vast pool of surplus labour on
which the social as well as the economic system depended. By 1900
the workers had learnt to organize and to protest [] up to 1914 there
was no serious revolt against the existing order[]
When ending the presentation of the first picture to stand for
the early twentieth century background, Alan Bullock concludes: If
this picture of Europe before 1914 appears unattractive, it is because,
in concentrating the main features into a few paragraphs, one distorts
the cultural texture. Despite periodic threats of war, strikes,
suffragettes, fears of social conflict, the middle and upper classes of
England and Western Europe enjoyed a freedom and a security
almost impossible to recapture today [] And, curiously, this is not
the antithesis of the other factors: open, uninhibited acceptance of
inequality, power and wealth, class and racial superiority. Indeed one
of the strongest impressions left on the external observer examining
this world of the 1900s is of an age remarkably unselfconscious, self-
confident, far less troubled by the anxieties, fears and fantasies, the
self-consciousness and guilt which [] have found such vivid
expression and subscription in Europe since then(62).
(2). The second picture (Picassos Les Demoiselles
dAvignon) is a move away from the tradition in the representation
of the human form, a profound cultural shock, one that had, however,
been assimilated, become a new tradition, by 1914 () Examining the
achievements in painting (Matisse, Cezanne, Braque, Picasso,
Duchamp, Brancusi, Klee, Gris, Modigliani, Mondrian, Kandinsky,
Munch) , architecture and design (Perret, Tony Garnier, Robert
Maillard, Adolf Loos, Peter Behrens, Walter Gropius) music
(Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, Shoenberg, Bela Bartok) and literature
(Strindberg, Henry J ames, Conrad, Gide, Proust, Valery, Apollinaire,
Thomas Mann, Kafka and Hesse, Rilke, Yeats, Lawrence, Pound,
J oyce), the 1900s do not seem as remote as they were when
examining mundane life (Bullock, 64) and these seem to be closer to
our contemporary history.
What happened in science before 1914 seems to resemble the
situation of arts (66). Apart from biology and genetics, the revolution
in physics is one of the greatest intellectual achievements of this
century. And Alan Bullock enumerates: Roentgens x-rays,
Becquerels radioactive properties of uranium and the Curies of
18
radium, J . J . Thomsons electrons in the structure of the atom,
Rutherfords model of the atom as a small, positively-charged
nucleus containing most of the mass of the atom, around which the
electrons moved. The classical theory of physics was thrown into
confusion and Max Planck reformulated it in the quantum theory of
energy. Einstein also published his theory of relativity in 1915.
Thus, in the twenty years between 1895 and 1915 the whole picture
of the physical universe, which had appeared not only the most
impressive but also the most secure achievement of scientific thought,
was brought in question [] Finally we might note that the same
radical exploring attitude found among the painters and the physicists
of the 1900s was also being applied to the study of man and of
society (66). Alan Bullock lists here Freud and psychoanalysis,
Adler and J ung; Max Weber and Emile Durkheim laying the
foundations of modern sociology.
What does this catalogue of names and dates add up to?
asks Bullock (68). And he provides an explanation: first, the activities
mentioned represent only a minority within that minority that is
interested in the arts and ideas and the dominant literary, musical and
artistic taste and the scientific outlook at the same time, was founded
on 19
th
century models; second, most of them had precursors and the
year 1900 is only an artificial boundary line; thirdly, innovation did
not come to an end with WWI. Many of those involved in these
movements were certainly convinced that they were living at the
beginning of a new age [therefore, the impact of Modernism is, from
this point of view, similar to the one of Romanticism or of the
Renaissance]. They believed, rightly, that they were developing new
ways of looking at the physical universe, both artistically and
scientifically, new ways of understanding man and society, new
forms of expression for what they saw and felt, which were different
from any that had gone before [] the artists, the writers and the
thinkers of the 1900s with their more highly developed sensitivity
were responsive to rends and conflicts social, moral, intellectual,
spiritual already beginning to appear over the horizon, and sought
new forms, new languages, in which to project these in advance of
their time (69).
The impact of the new in early 20
th
century is much similar
to the new that marks early 21
st
century, the world in which we live.
19
This is what Alan Bullock also admits when concluding his essay on
The Double Image:
What these radical new developments in art, thought,
literature, science have in common is their awareness of the future.
What they had to say was listened to and understood by only a
minority at the time; only ,later, when the War had swept away the
old order of European society and finally destroyed its values in a
way which everyone could see, was it recognized that the imagination
of the painters and poets, the scientists and the thinkers of the 1900s
had reached out to see in advance the world (which they were helping
to create), that improbable, disturbing, fragmented world in which we
still live (70).

2.2. METAPHYSICS AND MODERNISM
*

When juxtaposing Modernism and the scientific study of
existence and thought, there are three names to refer to: Marx, Freud
and Nietzsche. The intellectual formation between 1910 and 1925 is
associated with these three names that explained how new thought
was assimilated at the time, turning human life into a fundamentally
hermeneutic activity.
Marx had analysed the external realm of social and economic
process and referred to the false consciousness by which the
advantaged classes rationalized their own condition. Das Kapital
provides an analysis of the cultural manifestations of capitalism.
Freud investigated the inner realm of the psyche and showed
how, through the process of sublimation consciousness may act as a
sophisticated barrier to recognizing the true nature of instinctual
desire. This is not just a personal problem to be diagnosed but the
basis of civilization.
Nietzsche diagnosed the whole tradition of Western
metaphysics from Socrates onwards as a subtle form of falsehood

*
From Bell, Michael, The metaphysics of Modernism, in Levenson,
Michael (ed) The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, Cambridge
Univeristy Press, 1999, pp. 9-32
20
reflecting an inner suppression and outer domination; to him,
Christianity was a gigantic fraud perpetrated by the psyche on itself.
Modernism is perceived as a new cultural moment that
propagated new forms of artistic expression. The shift is in the cultural
and political interpretation of the same metaphysics. Modernist
literature is concerned with the question of how to live within a new
context of thought or a new world view.
Science: The modernist generation was concerned with the
relation between literary form and modes of knowledge and
understanding. In the 19
th
century, the paradigmatic form of truth was
provided by natural science. Fiction modelled itself whether literally
or metaphorically on science. Zolas naturalism was the culminating
example. Because of Einsteins relativity theory and Heisenbergs
indeterminacy, before the turn of the century, science began loosing
some of the epistemological self evidence. The last two decades of the
century saw the most intense unease about realistic form. Fiction was
away from representational verisimilitude. In mid 19
th
century,
physical science founded itself on empirical observation. Yet,
scientific inquiry addressed itself to astronomical and subatomic
scales, so observation became problematic. The last decade saw a
running controversy as to whether the basic material of the universe
behaved like waves or like particles; Pearson said that science does
not explain the workings of the universe but describes what happens
in given conditions. Therefore, science is a construction of the human
mind before it is a reflection of the world. With Eddington, the
modern physicist lives in two worlds at once; for him the table is a
solid place for writing but also a mass of moving particles through
which, given the appropriate technique, it would be possible to
penetrate without disturbance. This introduces the concept of double
awareness so much characteristic of modernist literature.
The human world: Martin Heidegger defines Modernity as
the age of the world picture, i.e. the world becomes picture.
Relativistic consciousness is the defining characteristic of modernity.
The awareness of living simultaneously on a human and nonhuman
plane problematizes the human as a world view. The relative status of
the human was a recognition of Modernism itself. Lawrences The
Rainbow and Women in Love rejected the old stable ego of humanist
ethical characterization as he only cared about what the woman is
21
what she IS inhumanly, physiologically, materially - what she is
as a phenomenon (or as representing some greater , inhuman will)
instead of what she feels according to the human conception
(Lawrence in Bell, 13). My great religion, states Lawrence, is a
belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect.
The linguistic turn: Modernist literature is concerned with
the construction of meaning and it emphasises the nature of its own
medium: language. Rather than describing or reflecting the world, the
modernists language was seen to form it. Ferdinand de Saussure
elaborated the course in General Linguistics in 1916 and he focused
on the synchronic and structural dimension: the linguistic sign stands
in an arbitrary relation to its external referent while meaning is created
relationally within the system of language itself; this is opposite to the
Adamic model of meaning as giving names to pre-existing things and
it seems that we only come to have things by creating names for them.
In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) Wittgenstein states that
the limits of my language mean the limits of my world. J oyces
Ulysses has an episode devoted to language: Oxen in the Sun. This
creates a parallel between the growth of English language through a
succession of literary prose styles and the development of a foetus.
The organic evolution of language is a parodic, rather than real,
parallel of foetal development since the episode is demonstrating that
historical and personal styles are subsystems, or codes within the
language. In the 20
th
century, language itself became a pervasive
metaphor; language forms reality.
Sexuality and Liberation: Sexual liberation and liberation
through sexuality were conscious and central projects of the time. For
male writers and thinkers, it might be mode of liberation; for female
writers, sexuality was another mode of suppression. The immediate
explosion of sexuality in the modernist period largely hid the time
bomb of gender that exploded later, in the 2
nd
half of the 20
th
century
and it still continues today.
Aesthetics and Being: Modernism is importantly not
aestheticist but a turn against an earlier generations aestheticism. The
category of the aesthetics can be understood through Nietzsches
transformation of Schopenhauers thought: (1) Schopenhauers
pessimistic philosophy in The World as Will and Idea (1818) saw
human consciousness as evolved by nature to achieve its own blind
22
purpose in the same way that wings or claws have done; for him, all
human purposes are an illusion, and the only dignified posture for the
individual intelligence is mental withdrawal from the whole process;
the artistic experience was the principal means to this end; art gives
intensity with detachment. (2) Nietzsche always accepted
Schopenhauers nihilism; It is a dream. I will dream on., he said.
Only as a conscious dreamer, or as an aesthetic phenomenon are the
human existence and the world eternally justified. Artistic beauty,
instead of standing in opposition to natural impulse, is merged with
the attraction of sexuality as part of a procreation affirmation. Life,
like art, is a purposiveness without purpose; it is lived for its
intrinsic value rather than for some transcendental end. Aestheticism
saw life in opposition to art; but, as Nietzsche said: reality/life is
fiction/art. For Heidegger: art is an intuition of Being; the function of
art is pre-eminently the expression of Being.
Literature and Criticism: T. S. Eliot said about Henry J ames
that he had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. This implies
that truth is to be found not in philosophical ideas but in a close
scrutiny of experience and of language. The effect of this was to place
a philosophical burden upon imaginative literature and upon literary
criticism. Modernism turned literary criticism into an academic
discipline, sustained by a belief in literature as a primordial
concentration of values not to be reached by other means. Literature
turned to be the active means of questioning and discovering
fundamental values, truths and understandings.
A central philosophical feature of Modernism is its claim for
literature itself as a supreme and irreplaceable form of understanding.

The Matrix of Modernism
*
Recent surveys on literature promote a history of literature
understood as a communicative process between author (writer)-
reader-history, and, consequently, the problem of reception has
become an obligatory task, providing a new perspective on language
and meaning.

*
From Berce, Sanda, English Literature the 20
th
Century, Unpublished
lectures on Modern and Postmodern Literature for students in the 3
rd
year of
study, B, 1996, Faculty of Letters, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
23
19
th
century writers used language as a transparent medium for
rendering social reality, which was their major concern. 20
th
century
writers tend to foreground the medium itself with its signification (the
signifying medium)a display of verbal artifice. Literature becomes a
verbal game. Novelists, painters openly declared their independence
from any mimetic constraints. Therefore the modern artist does not
represent a pre-existing reality (as referred to the text of the novel) but
presents a new set of relations, a kind of model through which to order
the worlda matrix of world making. The independence of any
mimetic constraints had a tremendous impact upon arts because it
stimulated inter-relatedness. There was no limit in the way they re-
presented reality.
The years 1900-1910 meant the beginning of a real
communication of the spiritual with reason: arts on the one hand,
science on the other hand. The artists assumed that conceptual
knowledge does not represent anything, but it projects form upon
reality. One of the first writers who discovered that important change
occurred was Thomas Hardy. In 1926 he concluded that he did not
anymore belong to the age he was living in, but to an outmoded era
which pleaded for changing everything, including the belief that there
was a beginning and an end in all, especially in writing. Aristotle, in
his Poetics mentions the interest in subjectivity, uttering that mans
opinion about himself radically changed due to his concern with the
life withinand this proved to be the main change of the 20
th

century. Therefore, the stylistic features of modernist writings were
definitely not accidents of taste. They were not merely isolated or
arbitrary phenomena. It is a new poetics, part of a major intellectual
development, which produced these significant changes. Thus, the
main characteristics of the style that supported this new poetics were
abrupt juxtaposition, irony, paradox, and emphasis on the impersonal
and the sensibility for the anatomy (structure) of the text.
Outside the written text, the new stylistic features shaped out a
specific matrix: the Matrix of Modernism. Stanford Schwartz in his
The New Modernity, the Matrix of Modernism (1985) refers to the six
components of the intellectual development. They interrelate in such a
way that he called for a matrix. It is a network within which every
constitutive element is important as it brings in its own value. All the
elements stand for the validity of the matrix:
24
1) The tendency of the intellectuals to sharply oppose factual
reality, which is empirical exposure to mental reality, which is
the life of consciousness. Basically they favoured mental reality
against the former, as the objective world is less important. This
might be a recuperative tendency after the industrialisation of the
years between 1880-1900;
2) A general shift in the development of human sciences; from the
19
th
century paradigm of development which was mainly generic
(a tendency to classify everything) to that of structuralism
(concentrating on the structure of a system and the relations
between its elements, the synchronic dimension of the system,
rather than on the individual elements themselves, in their
diachrony or temporal dimension);
3) The opposition between concept and experience or between
conceptual abstraction and immediate experience. A very
important philosophical discovery was reached: there is a realm
beneath the form that organises daily existence. Different notions
were attributed to this realm-sensibility/sensation: flux of
sensation, real duration, stream of consciousness (Henry
J ames), chaos of sensation (Nietzsche). All these notions tend
to define the immediate experience of the individual, an
experience of dissolution;
4) If these people favoured inner reality, they had to formulate a
new theory of knowledge. Their epistemology is an insertion of
Platonism, or the idea that reality lies in the immediate flux of
sensory experience and not in the rational order beyond it. The
influence of the new epistemology appeared as an elaboration on
the idea of concept. Concepts are instrumental constructions or
instrumental devices for organising reality and not copies of
eternal forms of sensation (as in Plato). Far from representing
reality beyond the sensory stream, concepts are only instruments.
For two millenniums, scientists had assumed that Euclids
elements had given form to the structure of physical space and
for the first time, the new geometry proved the invalidity of
formalisation through preconceived structures. The influence of
epistemology in literature appeared with the fifth element of the
matrix;
25
5) The revolution of language was a discovery and a development
of intuitive language. In the written text (literary and non-literary
or philosophical text) intuitive language means manipulating
form in excess or using expressive devices. The metaphor is a
vehicle and a form that unifies sensory particulars pointing the
differences between particulars. The second expressive device is
ambiguity. It establishes surprising relations between various
meanings of a single unit. The third expressive device is paradox
that unifies seemingly opposite elements. Irony reveals
underlined differences between things that are only apparently
similar;
6) Two important ideas were formulated by Nietzsche: there are no
concepts representing reality, and that the most elementary
concept is fiction, which is a human construct because it serves
particular means, interests and values. In 1873, Nietzsche in his
On Truth and Lies on Nonmoral Sense dissolved the tradition
between truth (conceptual abstraction) and fiction (figurative
inversion). He called the intellectualism for a subversion of
Platonism, which is a conquest of the metaphysical through
which useful fiction is converted into eternal essence. With
Friedrich Nietzsche figure gets priority over the concept and it
blurs the difference between cognition and imagination. The
how to represent of poetry becomes important. The narrative
form is displayed as an artefact meaning an utter liberation from
mimetic constraints and thus opening for literature a new line of
development with which words and their meaning make up the
world of the text.
Modernism is in relation with new ideas or with what
modernity considers as modern aspects of the age. The term describes
the intrinsic qualities manifested in the mood of the age, both latent
and manifest qualities. The later ones were the abruptness, shocking
expression, the restlessness of the spirit, the dissatisfaction with the
old, and the old-fashioned or the outmoded. Basically, the modern is
perceived in the age as a negative force, but on global scale modern
means progressive. Modernism is most often used to define the
fashionable ideas or the sort of innovation that betrayed the more
solid values of tradition. Within the age, it is represented as an attack
upon tradition, this being abandoned and this abandonment being a
26
necessary condition of arta positive force. Modernist writers
thought about themselves as being different from those of the early
decades of the 20
th
century whom they accused of being dependant on
the conventions and norms of the past.
Modernity as proved historically is defined as an
irreconcilable opposition between sets of values. For instance time is
considered to be objective (the objective presence, the time of
conversation) and this one is opposed to the personal, subjective and
imaginative duree (the private time, the time of the self). Matei
Clinescu in Five Faces of Modernity (1987) defined modernity as
the identity of time and self. This is the foundation of the modernist
culture, the utter expression of a crisis (of political, philosophical and
religious nature) produced by the isolated self against the de-sacred
time of social activity. For the late modernists, time consciousness
reflected in modernist culture abandoned social justification and it
ended by being the expression of relativism. Time consciousness
functions as an intellectual myth and the myth of subjective time is
assumed by Matei Clinescu as being the source for the growth of
kitsch. When this appeared it was received as an attack on modernist
values but in fact it was the fight of modern tendency towards
relativism thus a positive phenomenon. Kitsch was a new view on
art, art as consumption, art against the fear of border, as a need for
escaping, an impulse to change, art as a play and display of our fears.
That is only why the relationship between modernity and its own
forms (avant-garde, decadence...) reflect directly intellectual attitudes
towards the problem of human time and space.
The outcome is a new sense of history as experienced and
valued culturally. It means that modernism and its literature display
faces of modernity and these define modernism as dual, ambiguous,
ambivalent. In its commitment to innovation, rejection of authority,
of tradition, in its experimentalism, modernism is modern. In its
reflection of progress, modernism is anti-modern because the
modernists made out of modernism another dogma, functioning as an
excuse to prevent progressive knowledge. The anti-modernism of
modernism took manifest shape in two important directions: the
critique of rationality and the sense that modern civilisation brought
about the fragmentation of what was once unity. The validity of
modernity stands for the unity of diversity.
27
The AngloAmerican literary history has a peculiar
classification because of retrospectively performing on modernism.
There are four important tendencies:
1) David Lodges The Two Types of Modern Writing (1977); the
contemporary literature (starting with 1900 and on) can be
classified into two groups: modernist literature and anti
modernist literature;
2) Frank Kormodes The Sense of an Ending (1984) in the same line
with Northrop Fryes The Secular Spirit; there are two ages of
modernism: early modernism with the sense of order vehicled by
the spirit of the past (W.B.Yeats, T.S.Eliot, Marcel Proust) and
late modernism with order is denied because it is reversed by
irony, dialogism, parody and paradoxtherefore writing
becomes its own problem and its own impossibility (J ames
J oyce, Virginia Woolf);
3) David Lodges After Bakhtin (1990); fiction in the last 150 years
has three phases and these three phases overlap both
chronologically and formally: classic romanticism (early
modernism), modernism proper (19201940) and
postmodernism (literature after World War 2
nd
);
4) Ihab Hassans The Postmodern Turn (1987); he relates
modernism to postmodernism and his book is an exploitation of
the prefix post.
Writers looked back at the Victorian Age as an epoch of
hypocrisy and dull spirit while the Victorian ideals appeared to them
as mean and superficial because economically determined. The result
was a sharp sense of change and of the transient (transfer, mutability)
a restless desire to question everything. This is utterly determined as a
spiritual crisis of confidence in the dissolution of old patterns because
of WWI. It has not only historical results but also spiritual
consequences reflected in mans idea about himself as either a person
to whom things happen and he cannot provide any reaction or as a
person who will exhaust himself. In literature this crisis shaped out
the writers inability to reach a commonly accepted picture of man
seen as a variable in this world appearing under different phases, such
as: a pray to instinctual desire, man as an outcome of economic and
social forces, a child of sin because of his instinct for money and
property (Wells, Galsworthy); man self-devoted either under the
28
pressure of morality (the fanatic of Huxley) or under the one of
immorality (the hedonist of Woolf, J oyce).
WWI influenced the evolution of European humanity. It
stimulated a change of outlook. It meant the scattering of romantic
ideals: man is rational, man is powerful, the individual is the power of
all things. The individual response to the change of outlook was
selfish and individualistic because of his need to recuperate himself
as a personality since no individual can ever stand to acknowledge
that he is weak and he was defeated. Selfishness and individualism
attacked institutionalised rules in two ways: rising against any
manifestation of authority and, fighting against dogmatic attitude,
individualism developed sensibility and the awareness that there are
other realms the individual can conquer: the mind, the thought, the
sensual experience, the invisible reality of his inner being. It is a
revolution in thought and feeling. It turned the writers concern from
the objective to the subjective. They found out the image of the
individual as an anti-heroic figure. Anti is a positive intrinsic
feature of the individual to refuse heroism.
In the discoveries of the age, there is a sense of being as
presence. Thus, important ideas were new in the field of psychology
(1). One of the contributors was Sigmund Freud for whom human
actions were motivated by forces on which one has no or little
control. In other words, human beings actions originate and can be
analysed through ones psyche due to the power of the subconscious.
William J ames published in 1890 The Principles of Psychology. He
defined consciousness as not being a unit since it flows, since it is a
stream of thought. He also claimed that the conscious and the
unconscious embody the individuals active life. The German
expressionism (2) provided the idea about the atmosphere of
unreality and the dark quality of human actions. The French
symbolism (3) influenced the English school of poetry (T.S.Eliot,
Samuel Butler). The European existentialism (4) brought forth the
idea about the anxieties of the modern man, the inadequacy of human
reason to explain the enigma of the universe. The four influences
were an attempt to codify the irrational aspects of mans nature
and to process mans desire to invest experience with meaning in
a world in which meaninglessness produced anxiety, loneliness,
discomfort, in one word, alienation. All these influenced the writers
29
on determining them to transcend the force of the rational age and to
outlook the emotional life of man since the most honestly asserted
wish was to know who am I? and what is the nature of my
experience? This is a form of their ars poetica and is replaced by
another question, what is the nature of this world I live in? and
which is my place in this world? It is a shifting from epistemology
to ontology.

2.3. MODERNISM AND/OR POSTMODERNISM

The Modern Period in English and American literature begins
in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I and ends in 1945 with the
conclusion of World War II. The term modern in the phrase Modern
Period should not be confused with modern as it is more commonly
used, that is, to refer to recent or contemporary times. The Modern
Period is noted for works characterized by a transnational focus,
formal or stylistic unconventionality, or interest in repressed sub- or
unconscious material; it includes works written in just about every
established genre (as well as in new, hybrid forms) by writers such as
W. H. Auden, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner,
Robert Frost, J ames J oyce, D. H. Lawrence, Doris Lessing, Marianne
Moore, Eugene ONeill, Ezra Pound, Dorothy Richardson, George
Bernard Shaw, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos
Williams, Virginia Woolf, and W. B. Yeats. [] Many English
writers not usually associated with the Georgian Age had also been
deeply disturbed by the so-called Great War and, more generally, by
the increasing chaotic and absurd nature of modern life, but they
expressed their alienation through radically unconventional,
experimental literary forms or highly unusual subject matter rather
than through traditional styles and realistic representations.
Virginia Woolf experimented with stream of consciousness, a
style of writing reflecting a characters flow of perceptions, thoughts,
memories, and feelings. Stream of consciousness narrative often
exemplifies the way in which the modern mind attempts, consciously
or, more commonly, unconsciously, to find or make coherence in a
fragmented, apparently senseless world (Murfin, 218). It is a
30
technique used by novelists to represent a characters thoughts and
sense impressions without syntax or logical sequence. Four main types
have been identified: soliloquy, omniscient narration of mental
processes, and both direct and indirect interior monologue. The phrase
stream of consciousness was first used by William J ames in his
Principles of Psychology (1890) to describe the random flux of
conscious and sub-conscious thoughts and impressions in the mind. A
parallel description can be found in Bergsons account (1889) of the
lan vital, popularised in England by George Bernard Shaw.
Literature can show many examples before both J ames and Bergson of
the attempt to capture inner consciousness, notably Laurence Sternes
Tristam Shandy (1767). But stream of consciousness becomes
important as a technique with the rise of modernism in the 20
th

century. It can be seen in the works of J oyce (who claimed to have
inherited it from Edouard Dujardins Les Lauriers Sont Coupes,
1888), Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf and, among Americans,
William Faulkner (Ousby, The Wordsworth Companion to Literature
in English, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 895).
J oyce turned to myth and Yeats created his own strange visionary
mythologies or symbol systems in order to express the psychological
dis-ease of modern life or to wrest meaning from an otherwise
meaningless cosmos (Murfin, 218-219).
As The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms (ed.
Murfin, Ross and Suprya M. Ray, Bedford Books, Boston, New York,
1997) mentions: Although many English and American writers of the
Modern Period rejected realism, a significant minority did not.
English writers including D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and Graham
Greene adapted realistic narrative convention to represent new
literary subjects, ranging from orgasm (Lawrence) to colonial India
(Forster) to postcolonial Mexico (Greene). American novelist Willa
Cather wrote a type of fiction often termed genteel realism, for its
effort to depict life as it really is and yet avoid vulgar or otherwise
unpleasant or depressing subject matter. []
Works by a number of innovative English and American
dramatists also appeared during the Modern Period. Of the former
group, George Bernard Shaw (author of Saint Joan, 1923) had written
plays during the preceding Victorian and Edwardian periods, and
J ohn Galsworthy (The Skin Game, 1920; The Forsyte Saga, 1906-
31
1921) had become famous for realistic novels that bridged the
Edwardian and Modern Periods. []
The distinction between English and American writers of the
Modern Period is difficult to make, as exemplified by the fact that one
of the most important American writers of the period (Eliot) became a
British subject, and one of the most important British writers of the
period (Auden) became a U. S. citizen. It is equally difficult to
distinguish between English and American writers of the Modern
Period on one hand and their Continental counterparts on the other;
Proust experimented with stream of consciousness, and the German
writer Thomas Mann used mythology to reveal disturbed psychic
conditions. Similarly, one can compare the themes and formal
experiments characteristic of modern literary works with those evident
in musical works, paintings, and sculpture produced during the period
between World War I and World War II. Like neoclassicism and
romanticism, modernism was in fact transnational, even
transcultural movement that encompassed all of the arts (Murfin,
220).
Modernism had its roots in the 1890s (the fin de sicle), a
transnational period during which artists and writers sought to liberate
themselves from the constraints and polite conventions we associate
with Victorianism. Modernism exploded onto the international scene
in the aftermath of World War I, a traumatic transcontinental event
that physically devastated and psychologically disillusioned the West
in an entirely unprecedented way. A wide variety of new and
experimental forms and techniques arose in architecture, dance,
literature, music, painting, and sculpture.
As a literary movement, modernism gained prominence during
and especially, just after the First World War; it subsequently
flourished in Europe and America throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
Modernist authors sought to break away from traditions and
conventions through experimentation with new literary forms,
devices, and styles. They incorporated the new psychoanalytic
theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl J ung into their works and paid
particular attention to language both how it is used and how they
believed it could or sought to be used. Their works reflected the
pervasive sense of loss, disillusionment, and even despair in the wake
of the Great War, hence their emphasis on historical discontinuity and
32
the alienation of humanity. Although modernist authors tended to
perceive the world as fragmented, many such as T. S. Eliot and
J ames J oyce believed they could help counter that disintegration
through their works. Such writers viewed art as a potentially
integrating, restorative force, a remedy for the uncertainty of the
modern world. To this end, even while depicting disorder in their
works, modernists also injected order by creating patterns of allusion,
symbol, and myth. This rather exalted view of art fostered a certain
elitism among modernists.
Modernism encompassed a number of literary endeavours and
styles, many of which became known as movements in their own
right, such as Dadaism, expressionism, formalism, and surrealism.
Modernist works are often called avant-garde, an appellation that has
also been applied to more radically experimental postmodernist
works written in the devastating wake of World War II. Many literary
scholars distinguish between old (or modernist) avant-garde works
and new (or postmodernist) ones. A modernist surrealist work is
easily differentiated from a postmodernist Absurdist one (Murfin,
220-221).
The Postmodern Period is less coherent and less well defined
than any other literary eras, a period usually said to have begun in
both England and North America after World War II. The Postmodern
Period follows the Modern Period in English and American
literature, which began around 1914. Both modernist and
postmodernist works tend to express feelings of anxiety and
alienation experienced by individuals living in the twentieth century,
but postmodernist works tend to be even darker, suggesting the
meaningless of the human condition in general through radically
experimental works that defy conventions of literary cohesion and
even coherence. Postmodernist novels fitting this description are often
referred to as antinovels. [] The postmodern era, with its potential
for mass destruction and its shocking history of genocide, has evoked
a continuing disillusionment similar to that widely experienced during
the Modern Period. Much of the postmodernist writing reveals and
highlights the alienation of individuals and the meaningless of human
existence. Postmodernists frequently stress that humans desperately
(and ultimately unsuccessfully) cling to illusions of security to conceal
and forget the void on which their lives are perched.
33
Not surprisingly, postmodernists have shared with their
modernists precursors the goal of breaking away from traditions
(including certain modernists traditions, which, over time, had become
institutionalised and conventional to some degree) through
experimentation with new literary devices, forms, and styles. While
preserving the spirit and even some of the themes of modernist
literature) the alienation of humanity, historical discontinuity, etc.),
postmodernists have rejected the order that a number of modernists
attempted to instil in their work through patterns of allusion, symbol,
and myth. They have also taken some of the meanings and methods
found in modernist works to extremes that most modernists would
have deplored. For instance, whereas modernists such as T. S. Eliot
perceived the world as fragmented and represented that fragmentation
through poetic language, many also viewed art as a potentially
integrating, restorative force, a hedge against the cacophony and
chaos that postmodernist works often imitate (or even celebrate) but
do not attempt to counter or correct.
Because postmodernist works frequently combine aspects of
diverse genres, they can be difficult to classify at least according to
traditional schemes of classification. Postmodernists, revolting against
a certain modernists tendency toward elitist high art, have also
generally made a concerted effort to appeal to popular culture.
Cartoons, music, pop art, and television have thus become
acceptable and even common media for postmodernist artistic
expression. Postmodernist literary developments include such genres
as the Absurd, the anti-novel, concrete poetry, and other forms of
avant-garde poetry written in free verse and challenging the
ideological assumptions of contemporary society. What postmodernist
theatre, fiction, and poetry have in common is the view (explicit or
implicit) that literary language is its own reality, not a means of
representing reality.
Postmodernist critical schools include deconstruction, whose
practitioners explore the undecidability of texts, and cultural
criticism, which erases the boundary between high and low
culture. The foremost theorist of postmodernism is Francois Lyotard,
best known for his book La Condition postmoderne (The Postmodern
Condition) (1979). []
34
Postmodernist poets include J ohn Ashberry, Richard Howard,
J ames Merrill, Maureen Owen, Maxine Chernoff, and J ori Graham.
Harold Pinters The Homecoming (1965) and Edward Albees Three
Tall Women (1994) are examples of postmodernist theatre. Robert
Wilsons Einstein on the Beach (1979) has been called a
postmodernist opera. Postmodernist novels include William
Burroughs Naked Lunch (1962), Donald Barthelmes Come Back Dr.
Caligari (1964), J ohn Barths Lost in the Funhouse (1967), Thomas
Pynchons Gravitys Rainbow (1973), David Shields novel Remote
(1996) and Kathy Ackers Empire of the Senseless (1988), which
includes the statement Get rid of meaning. Your mind is a nightmare
that has been eating you: now eat your mind (Murfin, 296-298).
The Oxford Paperback Encyclopaedia (Oxford University Press,
Oxford, New York, 2000) defines post-modernism as the concept that
came into common use in the 1970s in the context of post-modernist
architecture. In post-modernist buildings, warmer more familiar
vernacular materials, such as red brick, replaced the brutal undressed
concrete of modernism. However, more generally, post-modernism
opposes all systems of thought and meaning from traditional religion
to scientific reason, Freudian analysis to Marxism anything with
claims to absolute truth. Post-modernist writings (such as Salman
Rushdies Satanic Verses (1988) and Umberto Ecos Foucaults
Pendulum (1988)) are characterized by their emphasis on the
meaningless of all higher truths, a constant merging of fact and
fiction, reality and image. Post-modernisms critics express scepticism
about what they see as its pretentious jargon and its cynical and
superficial approach to understanding the world (p. 1090).

POSTMODERN POSTMODERNISM CANON
*

Postmodernism was first introduced in the public debate in
Architectural Criticism in the 1970s in America. It was the language
of architecture that tried to defy the austere and technocratic modern
urban planning.

*
From Berce, Sanda, Modernity in Contemporary English Fiction, Editura
Dacia, Cluj-Napoca, 2002, pp 63-89
35
In trying to explain the term, it should be mentioned that its
no break from modern past but Modernism is marked by a crisis of
representation. As a consequence, the timelessness of modern
architecture is opposed to the historical order of post-modern
architecture. Therefore it was a historical movement.
Postmodern European Architecture builds on the historical
character of the European city. It is not based on functionalism but on
contextualism.
Postmodern Pluralism - Buildings
- diversity of style;
- there are some ideological definers for the term: double
coding, pluralism, preference for semiotic over the functional,
over active participation, design ideas.
Connection between architecture and literature
In the 1980s, the discourse of other arts began to influence the
literal fields in order to explore and define the literary phenomena.
Therefore, in the early 1980s, critics and art journals promoted a
debate on the postmodern and associated it with a new political
direction. It was a new policy. They insisted on the coded nature of
the real and of its representation.
The faces of Postmodernism
As a term, Postmodernism was applied at 4 different levels:
1. It was defined as an artistic strategy in the 1960s.
2. It was defined as a counter culture.
3. It was defined as a new historical era.
4. It was defined as a new sensibility.
There are several names related to Postmodernism:
Charles J enck: Postmodern Poetics and the New
Rules-1980
J ean Franois Lyotard: La condition postmoderne
J . Habermas : Modernity vs Postmodernity 1981
Modernity- an Incomplete Project
1983
Matei Calinescu: Cele 5 fete ale modernitatii
Ihab Hassan: The Postmodern Turn
Linda Hutcheon: A Politics of Postmodernism:
History, Theory, Fiction
36

Postmodernism is for Matei Calinescu a face of modernism
because it reveals some tricking likeness with modernism particularly
in its opposition to the principle of authority.
Under different influences such as new technologies,
photography, virtual reality, computer science, Postmodernism
appeared as Antirepresentationalism, anti-narrative, Deconstructivism.
In the 1970s, it was perceived as a move-away from
representational narrative and it was seen as a term of metafiction (a
self-reflexive strategy of the J oycean type).
With time, the other arts and media (electronic means of
communication, new technology) complicated the picture in the sense
that art, the idea of art as institution (being a modern creation) is
confronted with a crisis of representation, meaning that it defines
space as multi-pluri-dimensional. Space is perceived as an interplay of
signification. Reading turns into two issues:
- Political act of democratization (celebration of the death of the
author - the subject rise of the reader).
- The end of the representation raised questions of authorship
and subjectivity. It matters who is speaking or writing, why
and to whom. This supposes the request of new rules of
understanding, explaining and interpreting and requested a
canon behind new art.
There are 11 canonical rules that explain the contrast of the old and
new rules regarding meanings, values, and forms. These rules define
the world as fragmented and marked by pluralism and inflation. It is
disharmonious harmony, which asks for another issue here: the one of
the question of beauty and harmony.
1. It refers to the idea of the fragmented unity, of unity in
diversity, of a different whole. The notion emerged as a
creation of a pluralist society which is juxtaposing tastes and
world views.
2. Cultural and political pluralism: celebration of difference, of
otherness, of heterogeneity, the mixing of different languages
that engages different cultures, tastes, functions.
3. Urban contextualism - buildings that fit into and extend to
urban context.
37
4. Anthropomorphism - which is incorporating ornament
suggestive of the human body and the historical continuity-
relation with the past and present. The Past Freudian age of
the unconscious is perceived as the source of anamnesis (the
juxtaposition of opposed fragments meant to construct
meaning and harmony). The genre is known as a narrative
without a plot.
5. A return to content: very diverse, the subject matter is culture,
from social commentary to metaphysical speculation, from
painting of nature to portrayals of psychological nature.
Intertextuality is a strategy for this matter.
6. The double coding - irony, ambiguity, double meaning and
coincidentia compositorum Heraclites- the concept of
reading the present in the past or of reading the past in the
present.
7. Multivalence: by using several codes, the result is making
different forms, themes, narratives and interactions as an
aesthetic effect.
8. The displacement of convention: tradition reinterpreted.
9. The displacement of convention: reconstruction of
conventions.
10. Elaborating new rhetorical figures: paradoxes, oxymoron,
ambiguity, double coding, disharmonious harmony,
amplification, complexity, contradiction, and irony.
11. The return of the absent centre: the insistence of bringing
margins to the centre.

MODERNISM VERSUS POSTMODERNISM
*

Postmodernism differs from contemporary. Although the
prefix post shows that it seems to transgress modernism, it is not a
synonym because post-modernist values as a state of mind appeared
with some writers of the 17
th
and 18
th
century: Cervantes, Laurence

*
th
rd
year of
38
Sterne. The frequency increased after 1960 when it was accepted as
the utter change in literature and arts. Postmodernism was first a style
in architecture (the Glass Pyramid from the Louvre). Ihab Hassan
called postmodernism a state of mind, an expression of the crisis of
cultural authority. In means of expression, a crisis develops
subversive techniques and in terms of meaning, it tends to define the
concept of the otherness. Literature concerns with defining the
boundaries that are valued by the dominant cultural authority. The
aim of postmodernism is to discentre the humanist notion of
individuality and the coherent essence of the self that exists outside
any ideology. Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism;
History, Theory, Fiction (1988) considers postmodernism an
assertion of identity through difference. Culture is a flux of
contextualised identities by gender, ethnic reasons, class, education,
social role and sexual preference. The main themes of postmodernism
are:
(1) the questioning of all models;
(2) the dis-centring of the world and of religion;
(3) the rejection of elitist aesthetics and experimental formalism;
(4) the disruption of all discursive boundaries;
(5) the obliteration of the frontier between high-culture and low-
culture; the analysis of populist culture;
(6) the resistance to meaning and the interpenetrating of meaning
that resulted in an utter relativism.
All these issues of postmodernism are grounded on the age of
postmodernity.
There are 8 features of postmodernity:
(1) communication and mobility became central; there was a radical
difference between the Western and Eastern world after World
War 1
st
and 2
nd
;
(2) displacement of the values of community by communication;
(3) the industrial society was replaced by a post-industrial society,
production based on raw materials was replaced by processing
pure information (cybernetics, computer science, management,
consulting);
(4) transition from Gutenbergs era to virtual image, or virtual TV;
these images are not physical presence; narrativity is replaced by
computer games; reality is simulated by multiple networks;
39
(5) there is a definite reconsideration of malefemale relationship,
a replacement of the patriarchal society by the Big Brother
Community(George Orwells 1984 (1949);
(6) the tension between multiculturalism and globalism increased
after 1989; the later, which is purely American tensed the former
and the result was a third term, universalism that manifested
itself through localism;
(7) the disappearance of great narratives and the replacement with
local narratives; (i.e. the replacement of Marx with Nietzsche);
(8) the discentering of the ego reflected in literature in a parodic
game with history and the conclusion of some analysts that they
live in a post-historic society, the end of history (but history has
no ending, it is only our vision about past, present and future,
which is reconsidered with discontinuity, with fragmentation;
its the split of our multiple ego as we live in our own empire of
dissimilarities.
In the arts, postmodernism rose against all types of issues because
human value is revealed through its diversity and it carries with it a
paradox. This paradox is produced by a tense-conscious civilisation
that is unable to attack any values of time. It appears to be designed
to save time but it seems to kill it through the disruption of time
consciousness, which makes time more bearable in an empty and
meaningless present.
Modernism and postmodernism share 3 characteristics: (1)
changeability; (2) urge for novelty; (3) the commitment to destroy in
order to create.
From modernity to postmodernity
Postmodernism asks the individual to face some terrible
dangers of the transition from the visual culture to the total culture,
the culture of an electronic technology. In order to self-assert as
human beings, we must return to an oral tribal culture. It is what
Marshall McLuhan called the global village of our planet in his very
famous book, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962). He also mentioned the
costs of emotional experiences showed by the individuals in this
global village, one of them being terror. This is a normal state of any
oral society because in it everything affects everything. Because of
terror, our ordinary conventional attitude seems suddenly grotesque
and familiar institutions or associations seem at times menacing and
40
malignant. Ihab Hassan (1987) refers to dehumanisation when he
speaks about the future of modernism and postmodernism. Illusions
replaced realism not only in art, but also in life, meaning the end of
the old conceptions about reality. History has been turned inside out.
Writing takes the place of the history real occurrences and every
statement is an author in embryo. Dehumanisation splits the world
into blocks, nations, tribes, clans, parties, languages...This is viewed
as a new diversity and as the prelude to the world totalitarism upon
smaller groups, which is the prelude to the world unification. The
debates upon postmodernism started in 1979 with J ean-Francois
Lyotard and J urgen Habermas. Der philosophische Diskurs der
Moderne (1985) was followed by The New Conservatism (1989) and
by Die Moderne Ein unvollendetes Projekt (1994). J urgen
Habermas books are a pleading for a new concept and a new
definition of modernity by attacking old, young, and neo-
conservatism (as he referred to it). J ean-Francois Lyotards La
Condition postmoderne. Rapport sur le savoir (1979) refers to an
another age we are living in. That is modernity disintegrated because
the principal value of a new consciousness that is shaped out in this
age is dissident. Dissident is a guiding principle because of the lack
of credibility, because of the fact that the universalist conceptions of
the great ideological fairy tales from which the modern project had
derived were completely annihilated by reality and also by the
chances that occurred in the human consciousness and thinking. The
basic chance that occurred is the transition of knowledge from
mythical (modern) to projective (postmodern). The traditional culture
deeply rooted in mythical thinking was replaced by a multi-
prospectivism, heterogeneity, and localism. All the major mythical
stories of emancipation developed by modernism are secularised form
of the Christian paradigm. First, the Hegelian idea of emancipation of
mind from self-alienation to dialectics and the concept of the spirit of
the age cannot be accomplished as proved by the projective
postmodern type of knowledge. Second, the Marxist story of
emancipation from exploitation through a revolutionary struggle is a
utopia. Third, the capitalist story of humanity and emancipation from
poverty to the market economy was also annihilated by the projective
way of thinking.
41
Postmodernism is considered to be a new face of
modernism, having a strong family resemblance, but postmodernism
covers a new reality, a new mental structure and a new world view,
which is contradictory and negativist. Postmodernism is characterised
in negative terms: disruption, discontinuity, indeterminacy. It is a
positive cultural dominant, fundamentally contradictory, but positive
because of the debates it encourages upon the boundaries of artistic
convention, because of the attitude between fiction - non-fiction, of
the extension of life into art, of the parodic inquiries in history, the
ironic discontinuity that is tackled within the space of
postmodernism. The space of postmodernism is one of debate, of
partisanship, betrayal and reconciliation, and, therefore, a space of
coherence, unity and revolution. The type of space is called the
paraliterary space. It is no space of unity, but a unity in diversity. This
boundary between fiction and nonfiction encourages the intertextual
relation with the traditions and conventions of the literary genres
involved. In short, paraliterary as space encourages borderline forms
and subgenres. The second important boundary was that of historical
and narrative continuity. History is defined as a narrative of past
events. The third one was that of displacing the centre, the centre
becomes marginal and ex-centric marginal (i.e.literature is divided
into class oriented, race oriented, Asian, American, gender oriented
feminist, ethnic oriented local, sexual oriented...). The significance
of the centre displacement stands in the fact that culture
acknowledged itself to no more be a monolith, but to be
heterogeneous and diverse. The fourth important boundary cross is
that of hierarchy and the rejection of any binary opposition and
hierarchical values. The fifth: the modern concept of alienated
otherness was replaced by the concept of difference; culture is
replaced by cultures because of the consumer society, the local and
the regional are stressed and thereafter postmodernism asserted itself
as an antitotality and anticlassification.
Postmodenism challenged some dogmatic aspects of
modernism, and three are the most important:
1. The modernist view of the autonomy of art, the
modernist deliberate separation of art from life;
42
2. The modern expression of the individual sensibility,
subjectivity and glorification of the self; with
postmodernism: a glorification of the multiple self;
3. The idea that culture is not mass culture, not bourgeois
culture but an elitist culture; postmodernism is an
expansion of populist forms of culture and reclaims to
satisfy all needs and tastes from electronic games to soap
literature, without excluding the elite productions.
Postmodernism encouraged and developed some modernist
strategies:
1. The self reflexive experimentation;
2. The ironic ambiguity that provides an ironic way of
reading;
3. The modernist contemplation of mimesis, of
representation in particular, which is developed in
postmodern art similarly, but not identically.
Like modernism, postmodernism retained its own
contradictions and foregrounded them within a system of order which
is not hierarchical and which accepted all kinds of orders and systems
in our world on condition that we create them.
Postmodernism is considered to be a human construct, history
itself is viewed as a human construct, and the main difference
between the previous age and the age we are living in is that we
accept and develop ourselves in the new logic: the logic of both
and, which is inclusive, and that of either or, which is exclusive.
Modernists issued their programme in the rationalist and therefore
antihermeneutical way, while postmodernists adapted themselves to a
more flexible and self-conscious dialogic attitude, aware of the
advantage of a certain weakness, and sure of their position of logical
uncertainty. All these were grounded on the influence of a German
physicist on philosophy, Werner Heisenberg and his quantum theory
and the uncertainty principle in Physics and Philosophy. With the
quantum theory, he violated common sense saying that light can be
simultaneously a particle and a wave. He assumed that traditional
concepts such as space, time, causality, substance have been
considered categories of mind since Kant, and not aspects of reality
outside light. Heisenberg considers them aspects of reality. In the
case of uncertainty, he defined a principle. There is a fundamental
43
limit in humans ability to know; this limit is not a technical one and
thus it cannot be overcome in time because it is built into the nature
of things. It stimulated scepticism around the possibility of objective
observation. Thus the uncertainty principle asserts that there is always
an element of unpredictability in science because there is no
possibility of pure objective observation of all phenomena in nature.
In short, modern science through physics involved a new
understanding of the world, which violated the Aristotelian logic - the
ground of the ancient European civilisation. There are three laws in
nature, according to Heisenberg: (1) the law of identity, (2) the law of
contradiction and (3) the law of the excluding middle, which was
replaced in postmodernism by the terms probability, possibility (a is
both a and b, b is both a and b). This imposition of the law of
probability, possibility influenced philosophy to such an extent that it
made ontology replace epistemology. The ontological scepticism
viewed as a transition from the possible to the actual is a negotiation
of the direct observation, a complete revision of our understanding.
The consequences appeared in the discrepancy between reality and
representation in literature. There are two major lines of development
concerning this discrepancy: (1) complete uncertainty about identity
and motivation; representation varies according to the context; (2) the
relationship between reality and illusion; illusions take upon reality.
There is an effect of estrangement that separates life and art to ensure
an aesthetic distance and the audience assumes from the very
beginning that the representative reality is an artefact. There is an
unstable gap between the world and the way this world is reflected
through artificial means of expression.

44
3. THE MODERN/IST NOVEL (1). IN BETWEEN TRADITION
AND INNOVATION; IDENTITIES AND CULTURES

Anthropology and the primitive; the colonial other
*
Primitivism is as old as civilisation and as a literary
convention, primitivism allows the civilised to inspect itself through
an imaginary opposite; Primitive people are a simpler version of the
civilised; the circumstances and the social organisation made them
different; by thinking of their circumstances, one could imagine their
frame of mind. Some works of literature reflect a set of
circumstances of some long ago-labelled primitive people framing
their mind at the same time. In the first decades of the 20
th
century, a
new conception of the primitive was developed. For anthropologists,
the primitive man was believed to have a different way of thinking
and of relating to the universe. The primitive man was believed to
have had a psychological continuity with his world (the practice of
magic for instance). His sense of space and time were different from
ours; rather than being objectively measurable, they followed the
contours of the psyche and of the sacred. They generated a whole
opposed world view, totally unscientific; it is their age of the world
picture, as Heidegger would say. The universalism of the primitive
mind had a progressive force against the home culture; the primitive
acquired such a value of radical difference (see J ames Frazer, The
Golden Boughs, 1915, and Lucien Levy, How Natives Think, 1922)
:
Anthropology grew up in the era of colonial expansion and
had given scientific endorsement to the colonial mission; the post-
Socratic conception of civilised culture was questioned and the
primitive alter ego was to come into discussion; a changing attitude to
the colonial other reflects a changing self-perception in the
European. Freud was fascinated by the primitive life and artefacts and
the relationship of consciousness to the unconscious; in his
metaphorical discourse, he reflects the structure of colonialism with
the unconscious as the region to be colonised and controlled by the

*

45
ego. In 1930, he published Civilisation and Its Discontents, which
affirms that civilisation was built on the suppression and sublimation
of instinct; it is the white mans burden externally and internally. C.
G. J ung and D. H. Lawrence, on the other hand, would argue that the
instinctual real became destructive only because it was repressed
rather than respected; there is a homology between psyche and
empire, or internal and external liberation; there are three literary
moments to gradually expose the relationship I/the other or the
coloniser/the colonised, consciousness/unconscious:
(1) J . Conrads Heart of Darkness (1899) states that darkness lies not
in Africa but in the human, European heart;
(2) Lawrences The Rainbow (1915) speaks about Skrebenskys
African experience as making contact with his repressive and
unacknowledged inner self; it is the same with H. J ames Daisy Miller
whom id offered a very European set of circumstances to reveal her
true American nature;
(3) E. M. Forsters A Passage to India (1924) reflects the internal
psychological conflict between Christianity and Islam and Hindu.
These texts emphasise the idea that external liberation would
bring internal liberation, therefore inner recognition.

3.1. HENRY JAMES, DAISY MILLER
*

Henry J ames accused his contemporaries of not placing at the
very centre of the their novels a slice of life, but they simply
transcribed life objects and subjects of reality. He praised J oseph
Conrads method of telling the story: the indirectness and the
interpolation between author and subject matter through a screened
consciousness perceiving the events of the novel in such a way as the
story unfolds itself in the narrators words and discourse. By
describing Conrads method, he described his own aesthetic method.
The question of all questions for Henry J ames was What is reality in

*
th
rd
year of
46
the novel? Foe J ames, the mirror of all art is not to reflect nature and
the world, but to portray consciousness itself. All critical
commentaries of the age assessed two things that go with his personal
contribution: * the portrait of consciousness (the mirror of all art is to
illuminate the mind within); * his inner reality alleged outer
resemblance as if the outer world reflected into the inner reality and
not into the reality around.
Henry J ames was certainly the first to realise that the interior
drama may be rendered through language, that the word with its
plurisignificance may be moulded and it is capable of embodying
mental and physical movements. That is why he was an influential
writer who clarified the ideas about the priorities of the writer. Novel
writing required very firm principles and controlling aesthetics to
govern seemed to him at times only practice. He did not want to fall
under the mistakes of his contemporaries who unfolded only a raw
and undifferentiated reality as the utter expression of shapeless and
lack of significance. He provided selection and prospective cast of
worked- out narrative strategies through a structural central character
through whose perception the material of his fiction can be focused.
He imagined the persona of his writing as an optical device, focusing
and reflecting better; the most polished side is oriented in the middle
of the light. The subject (character and narrator) is considered an
optical device.
Critics and historians of English literature consider that there
are three phases in Henry J amess work:
1. The first phase is extended up to the period of his play writing:
the social historians period. His 1880s novels belong to this
period: The Bostonians, Princess Casamassima, The Tragic Muse
The main characteristic is the reporting of the surface life and the
conventional point of view. The familiar critical viewpoint upon
Henry J ames was that he had no grasp of politics or economics.
These three novels prove that his characters had such interests
and committed themselves to drastic actions.
2. The second phase is the one of the psychological atmosphere.
The cultivated American observer belonged to a bourgeois milieu
and he lived on an income derived from some form of business
activity left vague by J ames. These characters turned their backs
on the commercial world and were not so actively committed.
47
They attempted to enrich their experience through the society and
the art of Europe. Their interest in the spiritual development
helped them bring in America new qualities of aristocratic and
fashionable value, but they brought in Europe such habit of their
mind as purity, morality, timidity and prudence. Henry J amess
characters of the second phase remind of Flauberts character, the
hero of Leducation sentimental. He confessed that he followed
Flaubert in pattern. This hero type is sensitive, cautious, afraid of
life and sometimes demonstratively ironic.
Daisy Miller
What Maisie Knew
The Turn of the Screw
The Awkward Age
3. The third period includes his great novels:
The Portrait of a Lady
The Ambassadors
The Wings of the Dove
The Golden Bowl
Critics have also distinguished the beginning of a 4
th
phase of
his two unfinished novels:
The Ivory Tower
The Sense of the Past
For the first time, consciousness became the centre of the
subject. Henry J amess questioning about what is reality and how
reality can be better represented betrayed the writers preference for
the reflected field of life, or, as he called it, the spreading field of the
human scene.
From the point of view of his narrative, one can distinguish 2
stages:
1. Vision communicated converts and displays a narrative which
is an illustration of what Gerard Genette characterised and
defined: the point of view from the perspective of who sees =
mood & who speaks=voice. That is why Henry J amess
theoretical preoccupation concentrated upon a focaliser of a
character whose point of view oriented the narrative. Critics
consider the focaliser one of the most important inventions of
the modernist years.
48
2. A transitional phase between 19
th
century realism and the
modernist mood. As a writer of transition, Henry J ames was
extremely interested in giving a written form to the intensity of
perception, and also to give a written form to the nature and
the source of the individual vision. As compared to the 19
th

century writing, is still an authorial voice. His voice is
extremely aloof, and, as his focaliser, Henry J ames is a
screened consciousness. The shift from the objective authorial
infallibility to the subjective experiences is possible because of
the reflection of an individual perceiver that is transferred
through the screened consciousness of a writer.
DAISY MILLER
1. Reality: objective reality documentation & the reality of
the individual mind; inner reality is rendered by language;
the word with its meaning is able to embody mental
activity. Henry J ames is aesthetising life in art. Art is
inclusion and confusion; it is discrimination or selection
because it renders scraps of reality.
2. Another sign of Henry J ames modernism is the fact that
he displaced the traditional narrative form from the
external to the subjective; life was not taken from an
omniscient point of view; the new form is due to
indirectness of style, of narrative. For the modernist, the
relation between mind and reality was mediated by the
artist; the type of reality in the novel is not objective, and it
is vehicled by a literary convention, called narrator. It is an
eye, both a witness and a protagonist. Winterbourne is a
focaliser, a point of view and in the same time he has his
own role in the story.
3. As a rule, any story is a matter of direct and indirect
presentation differing from exploration or reflection. With
Henry J ames, exploration is used. J ames story is a
matter to be shown; it is dramatised reality, it cannot be
defined as a report, it is a detailed image of a
character(narrator>focaliser>point of view) in the act of
thinking, judging and dramatising (reflecting). The story
is dramatised mental awareness.
49
Impressionism. Winterbourne is a collector of impressions;
his mental awareness was unstable, accepting the others
alterity. No character is central. Winterbourne is a centre
(the shift between centre & margins is a feature of
modernism; when the margins take the place of the centre
and viceversa, the writing is a postmodernist one).
4. Narrative is both description and narration, mimesis of
characters and events, and mimesis of objects and
characters. With Henry J ames, the narrative is altered by
the second value of mimesis; description is no more
decorative, but exclamatory. It presents the characters
thoughts simultaneously in space and time. Description
loses its autonomy and it gains a dramatic importance.
Simultaneity is dramatisation because characters and
objects are juxtaposed. J uxtaposition is the method used by
Henry J ames.
5. The construction of the novel, its composition has a double
value: (1) the relationship between the parts, scenery and
the characters scenery or background; (2) One character is
the central reflector, the unifying factor of the work, the
only character who survives throughout the story, the
witness of Daisy Millers drama. In terms of narrative
discourse, the unifying factor is not the central reflector,
but the strategy, which means a highly aesthetising vision
of reality. The text is a combination of patterns, or models,
and copies, or items. The multiplication of items is realised
through omission. The strategy of omission has three
characteristics: (1) the delay; the whole story is the
postponement of a proposal, creating the state of
expectation; (2) the scanning eye; J ames scans the story
with a camera fly in order to find reality beyond the
objective surface of facts; (3) The suspect atmosphere
which goes hand in hand with the delay, but it means
Henry J ames apparent impossibility to inform the reader
more than the narrator does. The reader seems to be more
informed than the narrator, being able to get into or out of
the story. (E.g. the value of the banal that induces the sense
of the queer: the hat is a banal object, but worn by a
50
woman, it turns into a very important thing, part of a ritual;
the experience of the Coliseum symbolising the remains of
the past, the place where Daisy Miller got the flu...)
6. There is no plot in Daisy Miller, but Daisys indirect
portrait and Winterbournes indirect psychological portrait,
which is weak and wicked, not balanced because the
character is not able to decide for himself, emotionally, he
is unstable.
7. The text is a novella, a short novel within which subplots
are not developed. There are no subplots in Daisy Miller,
but a sequence of events left unresolved. There is no
denouement. This is replaced by Winterbournes distorted
impression about Daisy Miller.

3.2. SAMPLE STUDENT ESSAY

Petru Anca, History-English

1.Essential Biography: Henry J ames (1843-1916)
Henry J ames was born on April 15, 1843 in New York City into a
wealthy family. In his youth J ames travelled back and forth between
Europe and America. He studied with tutors in Geneva, London, Paris,
Bologna and Bonn. At the age of 19 he briefly attended Harvard Law
School, but preferred reading literature to studying law.
From an early age J ames had read the classics of English, American,
French and German literature and Russian classics in translation. His
first novel, Watch And Ward (1871), was written while he was
travelling through Venice and Paris. During his first years in Europe
J ames wrote novels that portrayed Americans living abroad.
The outbreak of World War I was a shock for J ames and in 1915 he
became a British citizen as a declaration of loyalty to his adopted
country and in protest against the US's refusal to enter the war. He
died in Rye on February 28, 1916.
2.Modernism Context and Background
The modernist writers proposed a type of literature centred on
the self and its subjective manner of relating to reality to
counterbalance the nineteenth-century novelistic conventions that
51
were already perceived as limiting, restricting to the expression of the
complexity of life.
1

By focusing on the self and on their art, the modernists meant
to produce a stable mental and artistic force to be placed at the centre
of a tormented and disorderly universe.
2

The letters exchanged by H. G. Wells and Henry J ames reveal the fact
that they disagreed on the purpose and practice of their art.
They both shared the belief that the novel as an art form remains
indispensable to the understanding of the twentieth-century
*
Henry J ames' theory of the novel, and especially that of the point of
view, plays a considerable part in the definition of the new
conventions of the modernist novel. J ames pleads in favour of fiction
being autonomous thus entitled to exist in its own rights and by its
own rules.

civilisation. To both writers literature-novel is ultimately a form of art.

"Only a short time ago it might have been supposed that the English
novel was not what the French call disputable. It had no air of having
a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it-of being the
expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison".
(Henry J ames -'The Art of Fiction')

J ames states that the changes of the century require new forms of
expression. For him the novelist is a keen observer endowed with
imagination. the novelist should be in perfect control of his medium,
of language and form. The novel deals with "all particles of the
multitudinous life".

3.Some Commented Fragments

The fragments in question are the following:

*
Anca Mihaela Dobrinescu - The Discourse of Modernism (Lectures in the Modernist English Novel),
Editura Universitatii din Ploiesti,2004, page 16
2
page 18

52
A

"Tell me your name, my boy," he said.
"Randolph C. Miller," said the boy sharply. "And I'll tell you her
name. ()
"Her name is Daisy Miller!" cried the child. "But that isn't her real
name; that isn't her name on her cards." ()
"Her real name is Annie P. Miller," the boy went on. (...)
"My father's in Schenectady. He's got a big business. My father's rich,
you bet!"

B

"I have always had," she said, "a great deal of gentlemen's society."

"She is a young lady," said Mrs. Costello, "who has an intimacy with
her mamma's courier."

"The girl goes about alone with her foreigners. As to what happens
further, you must apply elsewhere for information. She has picked up
half a dozen of the regular Roman fortune hunters, and she takes them
about to people's houses."

"That girl must not do this sort of thing. She must not walk here with
you two men. Fifty people have noticed her."

"Elle s'affiche"

(At the party) "Is there anyone I know?" she asked. "I think every one
knows you!" (replied Mrs. Walker).

"I am afraid your habits are those of a flirt," said Winterbourne
gravely.
"Of course they are," she cried, giving him her little smiling stare
again. "I'm a fearful, frightful flirt! Did you ever hear of a nice girl
that was not?"

C
53

The only thing I don't like," she proceeded, "is the society. There isn't
any society; or, if there is, I don't know where it keeps itself. Do you?
I suppose there is some society somewhere, but I haven't seen
anything of it. I'm very fond of society, and I have always had a great
deal of it. I don't mean only in Schenectady, but in New York. In New
York I had lots of society.

"They are the sort of Americans that one does one's duty by not--not
accepting."
She is very common." .
"She has that charming look that they all have, ()I can't think where
they pick it up; and she dresses in perfection--no, you don't know how
well she dresses. I can't think where they get their taste."

"They treat the courier like a familiar friend--like a gentleman.()He
probably corresponds to the young lady's idea of a count.

"I haven't the least idea what such young ladies expect a man to do.
But I really think that you had better not meddle with little American
girls that are uncultivated, as you call them. You have lived too long
out of the country. You will be sure to make some great mistake. You
are too innocent."

"They are hopelessly vulgar, ()they are bad enough to dislike, at any
rate; and for this short life that is quite enough."

D

"She was the most beautiful young lady I ever saw, and the most
amiable"; and then he added in a moment, "and she was the most
innocent."

"How did YOUR injustice affect her?"
"She sent me a message before her death which I didn't understand at
the time; but I have understood it since. She would have appreciated
one's esteem."
54
"Is that a modest way," asked Mrs. Costello, "of saying that she would
have reciprocated one's affection?"
I have taken the liberty of choosing and commenting some fragments
from the book, in order to underline certain aspects and themes of the
novel.
They are divided as follows:

A-labelled fragments

These fragments represent the conversation between Mr.
Winterbourne and Randolph, Daisy Millers younger brother.
Noteworthy in this fragment is the simplicity and subjectivity with
which the boy addresses Mr. Winterbourne, a man whom he had never
encountered before.
He feels he is not talking to a complete stranger, his sociability
seeming out of the ordinary.
Mr. Winterbourne is American but he has spent most of his life in
Geneva mainly because of studying. Even though the Millers are from
America as well, he sees this boy very open and sociable, feeling that
he had spent far too much time away from his hometown and has
forgotten these typical American values.
He sees the Millers as products of his own homeland, yet they
somehow seem to differ from what he thinks are typical to Americans.
And it is this very differential thought that leads him to drawing
false conclusions about Daisy Miller, only to discover at the end of the
novel that he had wronged.

B-labelled fragments

I have chosen these fragments to be more representative in this section
because these reflect various persons thoughts and feelings about
Daisy Miller. These conversational bits are all connected to
Mr.Winterbourne because it is upon these dialogues that he tries to
make an overall image of Daisy Miller.

55
Although she has a good opinion about herself, claiming she is more
than five years old and giving the impression that she can fit into any
kind of society.
To the nowadays-reader, these quotes dont give the impression of a
lady, as this term has decayed and fallen a long way from its basic
meaning in modernist times, but rather of a controversial and
materialist flirt and nothing more. (May I say it.?)
She is constantly surrounded by gentlemen, has an intimacy with her
mammas courier, goes about alone with her foreigners, she has
picked up half a dozen of Roman fortune hunters these all point to
a woman deprived, maybe by education, of all common sense.
It is this image of her that goes around European circles, being a main
topic of gossip.
Even though she learns that she is being talked about, she is not
worried at least because she applies the take me as I am policy.

C-labelled fragments

The main idea of these fragments is that they are all characterised by
the clash between American innocence and spontaneity and
European propriety and custom.
3
These two nations are strongly opposed to one another primarily in
terms of society.

The word Innocent appears 11 times in the novel, with a deeper and
deeper meaning as the word is found.
The innocence mostly refers to Mrs. Daisy Miller because even
though some say she is uncultivated, the reader almost always comes
to the conclusion that she is not stupid, just innocent.

Miss Daisy Miller looked extremely innocent. Some people had told
him that, after all, American girls were exceedingly innocent.

The word innocent here becomes a symbol, a whole even, a word
that best describes the American society.

56
He had known, here in Europe, two or three women--persons older
than Miss Daisy Miller, and provided, for respectability's sake, with
husbands--who were great coquettes--dangerous, terrible women, with
whom one's relations were liable to take a serious turn.

This fragment tends to prove that Daisy is the young and innocent
American who finds her values in conflict with European
sophistication.

Rousseau believed that natural man's innocence and purity was
destroyed by the rigid rules
of formalised civil society.

The word Europe and its derivatives appear 14 times in the novel,
whilst America and its derivatives appear 60 times.
This only tends to underline that Henry J ames tries to convey to the
reader why he swore loyalt
3

y to his adopted country and protested
against the US's refusal to enter World War I. He may have felt the
need to write America far more times than Europe because he still
had respect for his native country.
D-labelled fragments

The last two fragments which I have included are a part of the
denouement.
The denouement comes in contradiction to everything that has
happened so far.
It is here that we find out that all of Mr. Winterbournes jealousy was
in vain. Giovanelli claimed : She was the most beautiful young lady I
ever saw, and the most amiable ,and she was the most innocent.
Mr. Winterbourne could now have peace because he had learned that
Mr. Giovanelli and Daisy werent having an intimacy as he had
suspected a long while before.

3
Henry J ames-Daisy Miller, taken from the preface by Alfred Stevens, The Milennium Collection,
year unknown
57
Giovanelli also claimed that he was sure she would have never
married him in the first place because they were only good friends and
nothing more.

Not only did we find out that Daisy was innocent as she herself
claimed to be, we have also learned from Winterbourne that she
would have appreciated one's esteem.
Although she had always been surrounded by gentlemen, none of
them was capable of giving her what she needed the most-affection.
This leads us to think that she died not by the fever, but rather from
Winterbournes rejection.

Bibliography:

1.Henry James biography: http://www.online-
literature.com/henry_james/

2.Henry James Daisy Miller (e-version): see reference 1

3.Henry James Daisy Miller (the novel) ,The Milennium
Collection, year unknown

4.Anca Mihaela Dobrinescu: The Discourse Of Modernism
(Lectures in the Modernist English Novel), Editura
Universitara din Ploiesti,2004

3.3. D. H. LAWRENCE, THE RAINBOW
*

A radical change in the whole sense of time occurred. It is the era
of the clocks final triumph in ordering life. This beginning coincides
with the formative creative years of Lawrence, Woolf, J oyce. Social
time sense influenced them. It was an age when population moved
away from rural labour to towns, to factories, agriculture was replaced

*
th
rd
year of
58
by the ethics of the working class. Lawrence sums up the progress in
time and history from seasonal time (collective time) to the
individualized fragmented time.
The Rainbow, 1915, charts this process of gradual fragmentation
in the one organic agricultural community. This type of community
emerged into a scale of events oriented around an individual who is
separated from nature and the full unity of society. The continuity of
the family emphasized by the symbolical biblical connotations is
subverted in the second half by the impact of the meantime upon the
same family. The last representative, Ursula, lives completely outside
the circle, uncertain, alone, deprived of common values: I have no
father, no mother or lover. I love no allocated place in the world of
things. I do not belong to my home, or to Nottingham, or to England,
or to this world. They, none of them, exist. I am only tangled in them.
But they are all unreal to me. Ursulas words express the spiritual
crisis of confidence of Lawrences generation, a displaced generation
that was in search for unity but could not understand at that time that
unity is really vivid and alive only in diversity. That is why Lawrence
found his aesthetic way to unity by defining human life as coexistence
of the individual, nature and society, and at the same time natural
landscape at the level of vision and hope perceived by the same
category of people. The perception is the new germination Ursula
speaks about, the germination of a society who begins to believe in the
redeeming power of relationship. The ability to restore the spirit and
nature of a whole civilization relies in mutual understanding and
interhuman communication.
DH Lawrence wrote under Freuds influence, of his principle of
Eros & Thanatos, the death wish and the love principle. Lawrence
thought as possible that human race might be replaced by an improved
species.
Critics seemed not sure whether to consider Lawrence a modernist
writer or not. The uncertainty is rooted in the inability of Lawrences
contemporary critics to understand that the space he wrote about is
another space than theirs. It is the space of our emotional life. David
Daiches said: in his nature, in the nature of his novels, Lawrence was
at least as revolutionary as J oyce. DH Lawrence was anti-canonical,
but only if we read him today because he rejected the canons of
method in the novel and abandoned objectivity.
59
He is the creator of FID (Free Indirect Discourse) in the English
modern literature. He addressed his readers a competition with the
readers acknowledgment that characters in the novel always stand for
the writers mouthpiece. In his earlier works (e.g. The White Peacock -
1911), Lawrence appeared to the public to be very close to the
traditional writing. Sons and Lovers (1913) is a novel of personal
education typical for the late Victorian fiction and very popular in
Victorian times going along the line of bildsungsroman. It is in this
novel that he showed an interest, extended throughout his later career,
in the individual psyche and in the biological man. His interest in
these areas were due to his wish of emphasising in the narrative form
the strong forces, the desire that usually rule over human mind and
cannot be fully grasped because they are in the characters
subconscious. This idea was fully framed out in The Rainbow (1915)
where the main character speaks about another centre of
consciousness excluding rationality. However, there is a paradox in
this work, because profoundly modern techniques (stream of
consciousness) could not be used with his characters because the most
crucial experiences are not conscious at all. Transcription of inner
voices does not have to gain access to aspects of their experiences that
cannot be reached. That is why the presence of the writer in the
narrative was necessary for the purpose of remaining detached from
the characters reporting and dramatising because they cannot really
know themselves. Thus, beginning with DH Lawrence, FID can be
defined as a sort of authorial omniscience, defined in 1928 in Lady
Chatterleys Lover as a method endowed with revealing the most
secret places of life, the passion secret places. With this method, DH
Lawrence shared the modernist trend from objective to subjective. It
was not only a matter of mood and voice, which is an intrinsic quality
of FID, but it is a matter of language overwhelmed with specific
vocabulary that can be defined as vague, ambiguous, mystic, dark
(obscure) and passion-al. With this type of language, he
communicated experience beyond thought. The solution found by DH
Lawrence is a report of characters feelings and their dramatization in
symbolic episodes that are simultaneously endowed with suggestion
and significance about the unconscious forces that structure the
characters relationship. His problem was that of adapting language
and style in order to represent movements of the psyche: stream of
60
consciousness is replaced by the flow of feelings technique,
narratively represented by the characters voice, partly mediated by
the authors voice. In his FID, the narrator takes on the speech of a
character whenever the narrator prefers, and the character speaks
through the voice of the narrator, thus the two instances are then
merged. This merger is possible when the characters voice is silent
because of being the expression of the inner voice, of thought or
psyche, and when narration transcribes unspoken or incompletely
verbalized thoughts. That is why the ego completely disappears in DH
Lawrences narrative, as he himself admitted in a letter written to a
friend in 1914: You must never look in my novels for the old stable
ego. In conclusion, DH Lawrence is the first modernist writer who
destabilised the writers ego through FID. He thus dissolved any
secure sense of identity in the voice of the character and of the author
a complete fusion between the authors voice and the characters
voice. The ego is relatively stabilised in the manner of the Victorian
omniscient narrator who seems to view from the outside and who
reports the characters condition. DH Lawrence is there speaking of
the characters past and present. This Lawrence is different from the
Victorian type of tradition because of his prophetic tone and style due
to the vague, ambiguous, mystic language. DH Lawrence used the
FID in three ways, for three purposes:
- as a means of illuminating the mind within, but DH Lawrence
is an intermediary stage between objective Victorian and
subjective modernist writings;
- it prepares DH Lawrences full entrance into the characters
psyche and subconscious; yet he cannot completely abandon
the authorial voice because he writes about experiences,
sensations that cannot be rationalised, framed and there is
need of an outer objective voice;
- it shows DH Lawrence as a destabilised ego proving that the
author is infallible.
Lawrences works can be classified as follows:
An early age: The White Peacock
Sons and Lovers
His mature novels: The Rainbow
Women in Love
Lady Chatterleys Lover
61
The Mexican Experience: The Plumed Serpent
The Woman Who Rode Away (short-story
collection)
Mornings in Mexico (essays)
The essays explain his type of writing and they official-ized his
ars poetica: The Morality and the Novel
Fantasia of the Unconscious
Apocalypse
The story method does not contain facts but a repetition with
symbolic variation of recurrent experiences in the individuals life.
The individual and his/her experience are dissipated to fragments in
order to emphasize the impersonal forces dominating the individuals
life a poetic mode of utterance. The discourse is not moving forward
to construct a mimetic, represented image of reality, but it moves
forward to unfold a deeper significance of the same fact this fact has
thus a metaphorical meaning. The vehicle for this type of subjective
dramatisation of objective experiences, standing for a complex of
feeling and thought, goes beyond reference and the limit of discourse
through images, juxtaposition, repetition, and the whole structure of
the novel. Consequently, its value is creative and heuristic because it
serves to discover the realities it creates. It is an iconic type of
metaphor because it is meant to reinforce mental experience and it
cannot be referred to some of the public realities.
The semantic metaphor with DH Lawrence requires a cognitive
process; it originates in the creative process of juxtaposing references
that are found in the long-term memory. It is not only a cognitive
process, but emotion and catharsis function cognitively by finding out
what it creates and by creating what it finds out. It basically works at a
mythic level asserting thus DH Lawrences interest in symbolic
indirection.
The Rainbow renders episodes of DH Lawrences life: the
working class background of miners; his father was a representative of
this category; his mother was uneducated, she was instructed in her
family being a piano player, having a poetic mind and being very
sensitive; the mother father relationship was a result of two different
mentalities, temperaments and social classes; as a child he sided with
his mother, later, as a young man he understood his father. Freuds
reading overlapped on his early experience and he conceived a theory
62
about biological cooping in life. He sided with the ancient Greek
conception about balance in nature, restoring the individual and his
biological complexity. There are two important essays that frame his
ars poetica: Morality and the Novel in which he explains the moral
code of his aesthetic view on the individual as a biological entity, and
Fantasia of the Unconscious in which he follows the Freudian line
the individuals psyche is made up of three areas, the id (instinctual),
the ego (reason), and the superego (morality). Pagan values shifted to
Christian values; thus Lawrence focused on pagan, Christian and
secularised symbolism. Being accused of pornography, Lawrence
explained that when the artist is interested in revealing the changing
rainbow of our living relationship, the artist is moral; The rainbow is
always a symbol of the peace, a pledge of the unbroken faith between
the universe and the innermost. The innermost is a combination of
emotion, psyche and sensuality, the last one taking control over the
other two. The unique individual was faced with choices: he tried to
cope with his sense as a social meaning and his meaning as a unique
subject. He searched to find the balance and to overcome the
contradiction between the individual and the social being. He wrote in
Fantasia of the Unconscious: I am I not because I am at one with all
the universe, but because I am other than all the universe. It is my
distinction from all the rest of things which makes me myself. Man
and woman can reach fulfilment only when they are physically and
spiritually bound to a sense of oneness. This sense of oneness is
rendered through different patterns of the imaginary, different arches
of the rainbow: the real, natural rainbow, the phoney arches of the
rainbow, asserted for lack of resolution, dissatisfaction, instability and
degradation. There are three false arches: (1) nature itself (not the
rainbow itself) the vision of Tom who raised his eyes while working
on the field and saw the spire of the church and the ground, an
imaginary rainbow as the first sign of degradation; (2) the church as a
building Will finds the dissatisfaction, and the church as a symbol of
new germination: Eros and Thanatos (chapter 7); (3) the world of
silence Ursula and her queer dream of horses, the male principle
dominating her (chapter 16). The final rainbow is a real one.
The sense of the unconscious translates some impersonal forces.
There are four ways of representing the unconscious:
- the use of recurrent symbols, built in the narrative imageries;
63
- the un-specificity of time and place a-temporality in the
novel;
- the rhetorical repetition that works upon feelings, and it is
affective;
- the ambiguous use of words.


Horea Ignat, History-English

For the next three years she [Ursula] would
be more or less dependent on her parents again.
Her training was free. All college fees were paid
by the government, she had moreover a few
pounds grant every year. This would just pay for
her train fares and her clothing. Her parents
would only have to feed her. She did not want to
cost them much. They would not be well off. Her
father would earn only two hundred a years, a
good deal of her mothers capital was spent in
buying the house. Still, there was enough to get
along with.

The modern novel is, in fact, a collection of memories, where
the writer deals with one major problem which is how to link those
memories together to achieve coherence within the novel. It is
important, therefore, to understand that modern novel lacks form. If
Henry J ames was in between Victorianism and Modernism but
rejecting them both, we can, beyond any doubt, say that D. H.
Lawrence belongs to Modernism. He was less concerned with the
social aspects of the 20
th
century and the differences between social
classes. Yet, it is not clear whether Modernism is the evolution of
Victorianism or the devolution of it. If Lawrence was influenced in
any way, the person who influenced him was Thomas Mann.
Nevertheless, Modernism is a self-conscious break with the past and a
search for new forms of expression.
64
The novel as an epic form is the most adequate medium to
transmit ideas that are accepted by the reader and usually revealing the
idea and the sense of change: not only its direction but also the
significance of the inter-human relationship (the changing rainbow of
our living relationship). It is obvious to everyone that The
Rainbow is a symbolic novel, beginning with the title. But a symbol
may induce different meanings to different people. The meanings of a
symbol are not exhaustive.
The rainbow implies a communication between the individual
and the cosmic background, the universe, and a communication
between the individual, its fellow- mates and between them, in fact the
divergent tendencies between the individual and the world. A
transcendental meaning is given to the rainbow, with two poles,
reaching the depths of the unknown and Heaven. The innermost has a
double value: it is the unconscious, and the life of the unconscious in
the sense that Freud mystified the problem. There is perfect
equilibrium between body and mind. Neither body (desire) nor mind
(intellect) is dominant. The author himself explained the notion of
morality: the life of the body not being oppressed by that of the
mind. His conception about the body is that a living body is not
insistence but mere realization. D. H. Lawrence assumed that he was a
modern man and felt free and proud to write about his modernity.
The rainbow is an unbroken arch that unites the individual
with the universe and that with the innermost. This idea is typically
Lawrencian: that the individual is unique but at the same time, as a
unique personality, he is forced to deal with choices which are not
always of his own making For the next three years she would be
more or less dependent on her parents again. The individuals
ability to develop, on one hand his potentialities, and, on the other, his
sense as a social being, depend on those choices. The individual in
Lawrences artwork is isolated by the community, whenever his
choices are not accepted by the community. The meaning of
Lawrences search was to find harmony between humans
potentialities and universe and to fight back the contradictions
between the individual and the social being.
Only in the knowledge of simple-ness the individual is given
the sense of identity. This is a bit dramatic if not tragic: the
individuals oneness is in fact the individuals simple-ness.
65
The rainbow is, as a symbol, a pledge for rightness and
continuity and its real value is in the continuity that changes from one
life story to another, in our case within the Brangwen family.
Lawrence does not write about realities we are very familiar with
unless we are conscious that the life of the characters is such a reality.
The novel is made up by three stories which critics refer to as
repetition with variation that is, in other words, that we are
described a familys evolution but on three different stages. First stage
is still linked and in connection with the Victorian principles, the
second one is slowly but surely moving away from the Victorian
principles and the last one is, beyond doubt, a modern inter-human
relationship, as exemplified in the quotation above. Lawrence might
have wanted to tell us that a human being cannot be turned into a
pattern for he or she is unique. A shift from the traditional orthodox,
classical, patriarchal relationship to a new type of relationship (a
modern one- in the third part) is obvious with the emergence of the
false arches of the rainbow. Starting with the second generation of the
Brangwens, the characters already fell free to do whatever they like.
They are representatives of the modern individual of the 20
th
century.
Their freedom and imagination is the germination of transformation of
mentality that Lawrence embodied in Ursula and Anton Skrebensky.
She did not want to cost them much. They would not be well off.
We are no longer dealing with one characters destiny as we
were, for example, in Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre or Thomas
Hardys Jude the Obscure for destiny is no longer to decide
characters deeds and evolution but they are self-conscious and able to
hold the reins of their own life. As a matter of fact in The Rainbow
biology is replacing theology. At its time, the novel was considered
immoral and was suppressed only two months after it had been
published (suppressed in November 1915).
Lawrence was, above all, a moralist concerned with moral
principles and problems. His characters are (Anna and Will more or
less but Ursula definitely) able to face the world outside their parents
limited one. The fact is that Lawrences characters are able to take on
new responsibilities and goals no matter the social class they come
from. The sexual act is described differently comparing to the
Victorian novels, but sex is not and cannot be the answer to all the
complex problems of modern society. Although we are not concerned
66
with one characters evolution, as mentioned above, The Rainbow is
a triple Bildungsroman (that is, by means of definition, a novel about
the moral and psychological growth of the main character). In the first
part Tom is by far the most important character to follow, in the
second part both Anna and Will are equally important, but in the third
part Ursulas predominance is obvious and she can take decisions for
her own. She is no longer dependent on her parents whilst she is very
young. In general, with the emergence of modern society womens
importance, rights and privileges grew considerably.
It would be reasonable to assume that the purpose was
reached: the break with the past and the emergence of new forms of
expression. To put it in just one word, the symbol of the rainbow is
evolution.
67
4. THE MODERN/IST NOVEL (2). THE FORM OF THE
MODERNIST NOVEL

As Virginia Woolf said in Modern Fiction (in The Common
Reader):
Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being like
this. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.
The mind receives a myriad impressions trivial, fantastic,
evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides
they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they
fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the
accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came
not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and nor a slave,
if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his
own work upon his feeling and not upon convention, there would be
no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the
accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond
Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig-lamps
symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent
envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the
end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this
unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or
complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and
external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and
sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little
other than custom would have us believe it.
Art and the Novel
The question is to define the nature of mans experience as
revealed by modern art. Marcel Proust and D.H.Lawrence expressed
their belief in the reality of art, in the workings of the imaginary.
With Proust real life, which is for him the life laid bare and
illuminated, does only appear in writing, in literature. Literature
functions as illumination of the mind devoid of any extrinsic


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influence of the world of objects. Lawrence remarked that art and life
are for the artist reality and unreality, the interrelatedness between the
empirical and the invisible, which is aesthetics. Two issues are
important with Proust and Lawrence: (1) modern art is explained
through the enactment of the workings of the mind and it is also the
negotiation of the form of emplotment which makes modern literature
be exploration represented and not reproduced; (2) the criteria of
modern art are in a way dogmatic because they reduce the artistic
endeavour to four intrinsic qualities: beauty, goodness, truth and
utility (Baudelaire). It is an aesthetising view of reality. Aesthetising
view means that art is real because it implies other processes of
shaping out and moulding reality or life into models, patterns,
pictures, which are all images. This picturing is circumscribed to the
idea of negotiation of form and it is a means for the individual to self-
assert, to become central in his writing. That is why one of the central
themes is the relationship between art and life and/or artist and
reality. In 1913, DH Lawrence in his Sons and Lovers questioned the
artists belief in the power of art to represent reality. Paul Morel
believes firmly in the healing quality of his drawings, paintings and
in his negotiation through form between his mind and reality. In 1916
J ames J oyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man writes about a
character who does not act in his novel, he only thinks and speaks
about art and writing. To be mentioned also: Virginia Woolfs The
Waves (1931), Aldous Huxleys Point Counter Point (1928), Dorothy
Richardsons Pilgrimage (1914-1938; a sequence of 12 novels). All
these writers reflect what Proust called the way in which artistic
impressions are formed or the prospective of the imagination in art.
The debate about art and life increases with the debate about the
novel as art and genre. This debate called into two problems: (1)
David Lodge in After Bakhtin assumed that the major problem is the
idea of the author as a constituted individual subject or the author as
the only source of his work; (2) the novel as a literary formthe
mimetic function of art and the ability of verbal art to represent the
world in detail. A novel can be true to life by merely creating a
reality effect, an effect of illusion, and an illusion of reality, of
very-similitude [Paul de Mans Allegories of Reading (1979)]. The
form of languagethe meaning of words, mediates this illusion of
reality. Literature, unlike everyday language, is the only form of
69
language free from the fallacy of immediate expression. The self-
reflecting mirror effect is a means through which a work of fiction
asserts its separation from empirical reality (a divergence of a sign
from a meaning, which depends, for its existence, on the constituted
reality of this sign). Readers degrade fiction by confusing it with the
reality from which it has forever taken leave. Fictional reality took
grip of the real reality because a floating signifier of the language
replaced the signified. That is why the perceiving of the new writing
is obsessively form-centred (explosion of form) or author-centred
(overextension of authorial presence). This is the foregrounding of
the act of writing, of authorship into the boundaries of the text. The
author was the main issue of the debate about the validity of
representation in art as well as of mimesis in literature. The author
was not dead because the aim was to reveal through the means of
expression on which the writer had authority. The canonical genres
suppressed the dialogic quality of language in the interest of
expressing a unified world-view that was monologic. The novel, as a
literary form, and only the novel did justice to the dialogism of
culture by means of three basic features developed through
modernism: (1) it was discursive polyphony; (2) there was its subtle
and complex interweaving of types of speech; (3) with its
carnivalesque vision of reality and irreverence for all types of
repressive monologic and authoritative ideologies. Dialogism meant
the relationship between the characters discourse and the author,
between all these discourses and the discourse outside the novel as
the world itself, as a world of words. Samuel Becket spoke about the
autonomy of language. As a young man, being an associate and
assistant of J ames J oyce and sharing a relentness urge to test and
extent the scope of words, he said that literature, as our whole life, is
a question of word and of nothing else. Words are left independent
of their signified for their floating signifier. Marcel Prousts love for
words is expressed in his belief that real life is illuminated or laid
bare in literature. It is so because the words themselves have vitality
due to their meanings. The word is a vehicle through which reality
melts away in Woolfs To the Lighthouse (1927), or it becomes only
a fragment of reality, a strain between the world and the word as in
J oyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Stephen
Dedalus expressed the central modernist preference for an inner
70
world of individual emotion, a sensible world of words. Language
comes close to offering more in itself and it definitely implies the first
victory of the word upon the world. The modernist writing is a
concentration of meanings, which might have been used in the
realistic writing too, but it also means the rise and fall of words with
their actual meaning and significance. This is because of the outbid
made from it. Art and the artist became self-aware. In To the
Lighthouse, Virginia Woolfs character, Lily Briscoe is concerned
with the incorporation of her aesthetic self-conscience into her
paintings. Words broke up the thought and dismembered it. Lily is
interested in using different methods with her paintings: to use the
brush in such a way as to find a figurative analogy between colour
stokes of brush and word meaning, submitted to a narrative process.
With J oyce, we have a step in front. Word and/or world became love
of words and/or love of world. Ulysses is a self-reflexive novel; its
means of representation exploited the linguistic source. Finnegans
Wake is indeed a world made up of words and this is approached in
progress while the novel is read. In 1979, in his The Dismemberment
of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature, Ihab Hassan called
Finnegans Wake a monstrous prophecy about our postmodernity. It
is about the relationship between reality and word, which is no longer
a matter of negotiation but a certainty since the world is self-
contained and the communication between the inner and outer world
is obvious. The word becomes a world in itself.
The development of the novel
In the last decades of the 19
th
century, prose became a
medium for daily life as well as for literature. Prose was particularly
sensitive to what was going on. Between 1920 1940 there are
several commentaries: * prose, epic in general, is extremely
responsive to violent and changeful historical events, and it seems to
be the only one able to shape out the new vision of this reality; *
prose is changeable in terms of form, but it is also flexible and
adaptable to change; the novel seems to posses a certain coherence no
matter how changeful it is in form; this coherence appeared in
particular patterns of evolution along the ages. After World War I
prose, the novel appeared to be the only able to become increasingly
international in outlook, and the study of the novel needs to take into
consideration this particular aspect of fiction in English literature
71
because the implications of contacts with other languages and
cultures are of tremendous importance, and to a certain extent even
destructive; * the richness and diversity of the 20
th
century life was
reflected by prose in its whole complexity through various
experiences in scope and form that have been framed by the novel
and mediated through variable voices and perspectives on reflection.
Literature was progressively invaded by the feeling that any
material gain must be balanced by spiritual laws. Thus the spiritual
crisis of political, religious, and philosophical nature reflected the
material gains of the period under discussion. The first material gain
was urbanisation and it implied an extension of social relations, and a
change of pattern in social relationship from the rural community to
the urban community; for the economic man community relationship
is governed by money since rich people are money owners, factory
owners; there is a new hierarchy governed by finances and money.
The impact of social and economical change was reflected in the
individuals psychological motivations, which were thought only in
terms of interest. Money encouraged the development of arts, and the
first government project for cultural development appeared in
England at the beginning of the 20
th
century when the English
industrial world was prosperous. The interest in the self, in the
personal ego is a new outlook of man as part of the natural world
because World War I was a lesson about will and heroism, and after it
the hero turned into a person. The influence of these aspects in the
novel stands in the inability of the novel to arrive at the commonly
accepted pictorial man and to define man as a discontinuous
fragmentary entity, as a devoid self.
Any classification of the modernist novel is impossible. The
subject matter of the novel defies any category, from the poetic
perception of life to the dynamic action and the psychological novel,
from the traditional social novel to the scientific romance; the novel
was submitted to the contrast of the realistic project. The
consequence was that realism was acknowledged to be only a critical
construct, which was the gain. The aim was to capture the whole man
alive, with his subjects and his inner world because human
experience cannot be framed since it is a continuous relationship
between the self and the world, and between the mind and the world,
72
a transaction of the mind with the nonliniarity of the flow of time and
existence. Three major factors influenced modern literature:
1) The breakdown of public agreement about what is
significant in experience;
2) The new timing, the new chronologies, and the
explanation of time through fragment, flow, and
disruption changed entirely the perception of reality and
conceived intuition and intelligence as being superior to
objective time;
3) The new view on the nature of consciousness;
consciousness is highly personal as it is reflected in sum
of associations resulting from unique past and personal
psychic experience.
Space and Time
The new perception of time claims it to be fractured and non-
serial. The lack of seriality is determined by the conditions of the
humans. Italo Calvinos definition of time mentioned a shattered
dimension: the dimension of time has been shattered since the end of
the First World War. We cannot live and think except in fragments of
time and these fragments go off along their own pass and
immediately disappear. But we discovered long ago that the
continuity of time can be comprehended only in the novels in which
time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have
exploded. In the Victorian Age, time in the novel was not stopped but
progressive. This is reflected in the chronological continuity, in the
construction of the novel and in the frequent and almost abusive use
of the Buildungs Roman called today Great Ground Narrative. For
the modernist writer, history and time flow is no more progressive but
a nightmare, and the clock itself is accepted as a threatening
technology since it has expanded the sense of fragmentation and
discontinuity. The writers attempt was to render the dark energies of
historical and personal nightmare into shattered structures and
complex chronologies. It is an endeavour to frame time, to give it a
meaning. The absence of progress in history and human timing
opened possibilities for distortion, and if the modern tendency was to
radicalise form, the postmodern one was to satirise form in order to
expose the incapacity of form to connect with reality. Many
contemporary researchers of the new view confirmed the fact that the
73
effects of it upon literature have been inescapable at all times. *
Friedrich Nietzsche in an essay called Premises of the Machine Age
(1880) suggested that the machine, the railway, the telegraph, the
print as well as media his term, the press will influence the
existence of mankind to such an extent as to take the individual out of
his time (subjective) and timing (objective). * Frederico Thomaso
Marinetti, the Italian futurist, was referring in 1913 to the complete
renewal of human sensibility brought about by the great discoveries
of science, such as the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the
train, the bicycle, the automobile, the motorcycle, the aeroplane, the
cinema, the great newspapers...The various means of communication,
information, and mobility would influence the human psyche. Its
response to these discoveries is that the Earth has shrunk because of
speed. Time and Space died yesterday because we have created the
eternal and omnipresent Speed. Obviously they have existed in their
conventional form: space as place, as setting, and time as chronology.
The interrelatedness between Space and Time, according to the new
view required a new place in reality for them. The adopted concept is
Space Time, and it suggests new forms of thought, new ways of
thinking. The individual life was a point of light; the transition from
birth to death is described as a luminous geometrical figure in space
time. The relationship Space Time determined the break-up, the
dissolution of any type of convention and construction.
Modernist fiction. The main features
Modernist fiction is not new in subject or theme, but it is new
in the nature of what it represented. It is for the first time in the
history of mankind that literature becomes negotiation between
reality and vision, between the objective world and the imagined one.
This was followed by a sense of unreality and uncertainty in the way
in which reality is apprehended in thought. Vision is mediated by its
only co-ordinates, Space Time, and this replaces completely the so-
called realist description. Virginia Woolf defined the realist project
saying that it entailed faithfulness and less interest in the perceiver.
She rejected solidity and likeness to life, and she also rejected the
fabric of things replacing the things with the observable. In her
famous essay Modern Fiction (1919), she commented upon the
purposes of fiction: Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically
arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope
74
surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it
not the task of the novelist to convey this... with as little mixture of
the alien and external as possible?
There are four main features of modernist fiction:
1) The focalisation of a novel in the minds of private
narratives and characters. The principle of the novel is privacy of
narration and subjectively oriented opinion. The display of the inner
mental world is performed at the expense of the external social
experience. The most celebrated technical device of this type of
fiction is stream of consciousness, defined by Virginia Woolf in her
Modernist Fiction (see the quotation above).
2) The different perception of time: time as a nightmare
vs.time as continuity& progress. The Victorian fictionalised type was
serial and chronological. The new fictionally rendered type pleads for
the abandonment of serial and chronological convention of
arrangement and focused on a concentration of spacial experience
within a single day of consciousness (Virginia Woolf). With the
modernists, time is conventional and they made a project of inventing
other forms of ordering as they discovered that human mind cannot
exist outside order. The new type of ordering means slicing,
shredding and organising chaos, chaotic order and disorder, as well as
monotony; in other words: flow and flux, life flows altogether with
time, life is a flow.
3) The interest in the nature and form of art. The nature of art
extends itself whenever the scrutinises of the novels strategies are at
stake. With the modernist (and not the post-modernist), this means
self-reflexivity because the writers presence in his writing is
disguised by a form of authorial extension.
4) The competition between the factual world (the world of
facts and objects) and the word with its meanings, with the final
triumph of the word. The language itself, the meaning and
significance, as well as the nature of narrative imagination become
central subjects with modernist writers.

75
4.1. JAMES JOYCE, A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A
YOUNG MAN
*

As an artist, J ames J oyce was the archetype of rebellion as he was
against any type of frustration and disintegration determined by any
type of totalitarian attitude. He grew in an austere naturalist and
religious background of the Irish, catholic community; he was
destined to priesthood but he deserted as a teenager the J esuit
institutions he was asked by his family to attend and he gradually
became hostile to Roman Catholicism. In 1904 he left Ireland forever,
never to return again.
His work begins with a collection of poems, Chamber Music
(1907). This is followed by Dubliners (1914), a collection of short
stories. Starting with this volume, J oyce is interested in both accuracy
and lyricism. It is a notion that he borrowed from Cechov as he also
admitted that it is the Russian story-type that raised his interest in
mans life from childhood to adolescence and maturity. This volume
initiated his main theme that is reiterated and developed throughout
other works: the focus on the individuals spiritual development.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), written in two
drafts, the first entitled Stephen Hero and finished in 1906, is about
inward changes, autobiographical qualities. It shaped out in a sketchy
manner J oyces aesthetic conception based on Toma dAquinos
requirements for art: integritas, consonantia, claritas. It announced
J oyces interest in the interior monologue, which is the inner
verbalising or the polyphony of the discourse. The novel is like a
musical composition, establishing motives and making them run
through the whole work. It introduced the writers preoccupation for
the mythological.
Here is Stephen Dedaluss aesthetic stasis: <<An aesthetic
image is presented to us either in space or in time. What is audible is
presented in time, what is visible is presented in space. But, temporal
or special, the aesthetic image is first luminously apprehended as self-

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bounded and self-contained upon the immeasurable background of
space and time which is not it. You apprehend it as one thing. You see
it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness. That is integritasThis
supreme quality is felt by the artist when the aesthetic image is first
conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant
Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that
supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the aesthetic image, is
apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its
wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis
of aesthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac
condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase
almost as beautiful as Shelleys, called the enchantment of the heart.
Stephen goes on, incidentally, to develop a theory of the
depersonalisation of the artist []But what is particularly interesting
is, first, the remarkable emotional force which in their context in the
Portrait these apparently abstract passages have they are part and
parcel of Stephens own life-adventure and, secondly, their
connexion with the famous climax of the book in which Stephen,
having uttered his devils vow of non serviam and rejected utterly
the claims of church and state, sets forth upon his life of silence, exile,
and cunning to encounter the reality of experience and to forge in the
smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
The contradiction so powerfully expressed at the conclusion of A
Portrait of the Artist is embedded deep in the whole of J oyces life
and achievement. He leaves Dublin in 1904, to return to the city
endlessly in every page he writes. It is the non-juring exile,
indifferent, paring his fingernails, so insistently outside the struggle
that two world wars and the achievement of his countrys
independence fail to arouse his comment, who takes upon himself the
task of expressing the uncreated conscience of his race.>>(Ford, 1982:
320-321)
Ulysses (1922) is a mock parody of Homers work and it is
important as an inter-text. J oyce used a number of formal systems that
are basically psychological, scientific and hallucinatory as a kind of an
enactment of the imaginary. Ulysses is a paradox of realism. In spite
of hallucination, day dream, sleep-walking, and psychic realities, the
novel is full of realistic dimensions because he wrote about real
people in a real town, both constructed with microscopic
77
representations of themes, patterns and habits of human life.
Finnegans Wake (1939) is his last novel, a verbal record of a dream
state. The book is important for its exploitation of language: A Dublin
English, word play, ballads, old songs; all developed the notion of the
dialogic and the pluri-vocal, a universal language spoken and
understood everywhere.


Kalman Attila, History-English

"Mr.Dedalus gave a snort of contempt.
-Ah, John, he said. It is true for them. We are an
unfortunate priest-ridden race and always will
be till the end of the chapter.
Uncle Charles shook his head saying:
-A bad business! A bad business!
.............................................................
Dante broke out angrily:
-If we are a priest ridden race we ought to be
proud of it! They are the apple of God's eye.
Touch them not, says Christ, for they are the
apple of My eye.(...)
-Didn't the bishops of Ireland betray us in the
time of the union when Bishop Lanigan
presented an address of loyalty to the Marquess
Cornwallis?
.............................................................
-God and Religion before everything! Dante
cried. God and Religion before the world.
........................................................
O grave where is thy victory?
O death, where is thy sting?
Every word of it was for him. Against his sin,
foul and secret, the whole wrath of God was
aimed. The preacher's knife had probed deeply
into his disclosed conscience and he felt now
78
that his soul was festering in sin. Yes the
preacher was right. God's turn had come. Like
a beast in its lair his soul had lain down in its
own filth but the blasts of the angel's trumpet
had driven him forth from the darkness of sin
into the light. The words of doom cried by the
angel shattered in an instant his presomptuous
peace. The wind of the last day blew through his
mind, his sins, the jewel-eyed harlots of his
imagination, fled before the hurricane,
squeaking like mice in their terror and huddled
under a mane of hair."

First published in 1916 the novel had a difficult history. The
revised version of "Stephen Hero" the novel was rejected by a number
of English publishers, but finally appeared in America.
It can be regarded as an autobiography. The places, scenes
presented in the book are similar to those from J oyce's life. He
attended Clongowes Wood College, Christian Brothers school,
Belvedere College, his family went bankrupt .All these can be found
in the novel as well. But the "Portrait ..." is not just a simple
autobiography, but it's also a kind of Bildungsroman. It follows
Stephen's spiritual, artistic, and psychological development, but also
the development of his consciousness, from boyhood to manhood.
In this development religion, the church has a very important role.
This is where we get to the chosen fragment. It is well known that
J oyce descends from an Irish catholic family. The author's mother was
a devout Catholic but the father was anti-clerical. This will influence
J oyce's life. The problem can be found in the novel as well. Stephen's
father bursts out in Chapter I against the Irish Catholic church and it's
servants. He is against catholic priests because he thinks that they
betrayed Ireland, and worked together with the Protestant British to
realise the union of Ireland with England. Priests are not to be trusted,
they will not bring happiness to there people but sufferings. Dante is
the one who tries to defend the Irish clergy saying that they are "God's
eye". Dante is the representative of blind religion: you have to
follow the church without asking questions, because priests are God's
79
representatives on Earth. The motto what every devout catholic should
follow is "God and Religion before everything."
A more important issue is how Stephen's religiousness evolves.
Although he is attending religious schools his piety is superficial, or
maybe he does not understand what Religion is.
Stephen lives in a world of steadiness, religiousness, but also of
monotony. He seeks "help" in the rooms of Dublin's prostitutes. These
sensual experiences become heavy sins for Stephen after the event.
This event is none other than a sermon, held on the day of St-Francis.
The priest's presentation is a real theological lecture on different kinds
of sins and the way they will be punished. The description of Hell
reminds us the frescoes from medieval cathedrals depicting in vivid
colours the sufferings of sinners. The Hell presented by the priest is a
transposition of these frescoes in words. The reader can almost feel
the pain, the heat that tortures these poor souls. You can almost smell
sulphur. Stephen, after this sermon, identifies himself with the sinners
suffering in Hell. The places were he sought pleasure become similar
to the horrible places presented by the priest. He feels like a fallen
angel. His fallen state is suggested by the words "Every word of it was
for him. Against his sin, foul, and secret, the whole wrath of God was
aimed. "He decides he has to change, he has to flee from his guilt.
This refuge will be Religion. He tries to achieve this by praying,
attending church, and of course by giving up his visits to the Dublin
prostitutes. But the change is very difficult, he transforms women in
guides that will help him go through this transformation. These female
figures are Virgin Mary, E-C-, or Dante Alighieri's Beatrice. In his
search for redemption, Stephen goes through every step that a sinner
has to go through. His sins become painful, they haunt him day and
night. The only solution is to confess. But that is not so easy, he is
ashamed of his sins, he doesn't want to confess to his "teachers". The
confession finally will take place in a little chapel on the outskirts of
Dublin, near the places where he had sinned. Once the confession
done, he feels like a free man. But he realises that this rigorous
devotion and prayer has nothing to do with his soul, his piety was and
is superficial. "To merge his life in the common tide of other lives was
harder for him than any fasting or prayer and it was his constant
failure to do his own satisfaction which caused in his soul at last a
sensation of spiritual dryness together with a growth of doubts and
80
scruples. His soul traversed a period of desolation in which the
sacraments themselves seemed to have turned into dried-up sources."
This spiritual dryness becomes the main feature of Stephen's
religiousness, and at the same time of the Roman Catholic church
which forbids its followers sensual experience, and induces fear, fear
from what is considered inadequate by the church.
His superficial piety induces in error his teachers who suggest him
to become a J esuit monk. But Stephen rejects the offer "The chill and
order of the life repelled him (...) His destiny was to be elusive of
social and religious orders. The wisdom of the priest's appeal did not
touch him to the quick. (...) The snares of the world were its ways of
sin. He would fall".
Stephen falls back to everyday reality. The loss of piety and belief
is not the end because for Stephen a new road begins, he discovers his
artistic vocation, which will mark him for the rest of his life.

4.3. VIRGINIA WOOLF, TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
*

Virginia Woolf excelled by the type of stream of consciousness
she created. Henry J ames inter-mingled stream of consciousness with
other narrative techniques. He focused his fiction around the mind and
experience of a single individual. DH Lawrences stream of
consciousness expended itself into free indirect discourse in order to
allow narrative an extensive and flexible contact with the inner voice
of characters. Virginia Woolfs stream of consciousness implied a
basic transformation of the language in as far as syntax is concerned,
an evolution in fictional language, and the natural shift from objective
to subjective. Virginia Woolf developed the new narrative form in
which the working out of consciousness splits away from external
reality and the object world because splitting life into fragments is the
only fruitful exploration. Her studies completed after World War I
provided her with the feeling that reality is a complex lying beneath

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the surface of things, but she was also provided with the idea that the
human brain is not only location but also a target of space and time.
That gave her the notion that the human brain might be a wanderer
through time. These are the root, the origin, and the source of the 2
qualities she claimed as a novelist:
- the permanent interest in the character, not in a realist manner,
but in his/her inner eye: the others are but deem reflections
who act upon the consciousness of the main character;
- the feeling of community, the notion that every one of us is a
part of a fluid life and the unifying factor is the connecting
incidents and characters we come across in our experiences as
well as in our own consciousness moving up and down.
The image about the quality of an artist gave her the idea that as a
writer she could dig tunnels in her characters pasts and presents
through stream of consciousness. That is why from an objective
authorial report, she reached the notion of narrative that is an
unexplained mentioning of characters and events with suggestive
frame of reference in her characters mind. What is also typical about
Virginia Woolf is that voice never replaces the author completely, but
it displaces the author.
To the Lighthouse (1927) stands for the development of indirect
speech, and for communicating inner experience through indirect
speech. The consciousness of the narrator joins the consciousness of
the character. It is considered the best achieved masterpiece of the
exploration of consciousness through indirect discourse. The capacity
of the character and the narrator to reach the flesh of the mind is
opposed to the inner monologue because the character is mentally
dissociated from the moment free to flow. The inner life exists so
richly that nothing could be said to equal it and Virginia Woolfs task
as a novelist is to convey this varying, unknown, and uncircumscribed
spirit. Eager to sense the significant as it flies, the writer proved a
complex vision of an individual as a definite image of many lives
lived simultaneously. It is a cosmical survey of experiences meant to
render the nature of human personality and its relationship with time
and death. Characters are tied together by only one incident: the visit
to the lighthouse. They are constructed in terms of place, their plan
voyage, and in terms of time. There is minimal action. The novel
works through stream of consciousness and imagery to create an
82
atmospheric and impressionistic record of the characters moment-by-
moment experiences, tracing the conflict between male and female
principles and making a statement about time, death and artistic
transcendence. The mood at the end of the novel is one of muted
optimism and triumph in which the two events, the visit to the
lighthouse and the completion of the painting, are linked in Lilys
mind: He has landed, she said aloud. It is finished.
Other novels are not less important but are for Virginia Woolfs
work stages in the development of her poetic technique. Jacobs Room
(1922) was based upon the life and death of her brother, Thoby, and a
broke away from the realistic mode of her early writing. Like Mrs
Dalloway (1925) it fulfilled the purposes of fiction laid down in her
essay Modern Fiction (1919): Life is not a series of gig-lamps
symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent
envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the
end. It is not the task of the novelist to convey this with as little
mixture of the alien and external as possible? With To the Lighthouse
and The Waves (1931) she fully established herself as a leading
exponent of modernism. Orlando (1928), a fantastic biography which
traces the history of its androgynous protagonist through four
centuries, is unlike any of her other novels and was the greatest
commercial success. It was an experimental novel, a sort of cosmical
survey on English literature.
Best known as one of the major innovative novelists of the 20
th

century, Virginia Woolf contributed also to the recognition and
development of feminist criticism.


Szasz Annamaria, History-English

With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair,
with cyclamen and wild violets what
nonsense was he thinking .She was fifty at
least; she had eight children. Stepping
through fields of flowers and taking to her
breast buds that had broken and lambs that
83
had fallen; with the stars in her eyes and the
wind in her hair- He took her bag.
Goodbye, Elsie, she said, and they
walked up the street, she holding her parasol
erect and walking as if she expected to meet
someone round the corner, while the first time
in his life Charles Tansley felt an
extraordinary pride; a man digging and
looked at her; let his arm fall down and
looked at her; let his arm fall down and
looked at her; Charles Tansley felt an
extraordinary pride; felt the wind and the
cyclamen and the violets for he was walking
with a beautiful woman for the first time in his
life. He had hold of her bag.

There are three major influences on the changes of attitude and
techniques in the modern novel.
First, there is the novelists realization that the general
background of belief, which united him with his public in a common
sense of what was significant in experience, had disappeared. Thus,
the public values of the Victorian novel, gave way to more personally
conceived notions of value, dependent on the novelists intuitions and
sensibilities rather than on public agreement.
Secondly, another influence on the changes in attitude and
technique in the modern novel was a new view of time; time was not a
series of chronological moments to be presented by the novelist in
sequence but as a continuous flow in the consciousness of the
individual.
Thirdly, this influence is closely connected to the new notions of
the nature of consciousness, which derived in a general way from
Sigmund Freud and Carl J ung. Consciousness is multiple; the past is
always present in it at some level and is continually colouring one s
present reaction.
The stream-of-consciousness technique, where the author tries
to present directly his character s consciousness without reporting it
in formal and quoted remarks is an important new technique of the
84
English novel. Moreover, this stream of consciousness led to the
essential loneliness of the individual and at the same time to lack of
communication.
Consequently, there can be said that the public gestures imposed
upon us by society never correspond to our real interior needs.
Reading the excerpt above, one feels Charles Tansleys
interior world, which is remarkably described in only a few lines and
an the same time his difficulty to communicate. All these happen
because as critics said the greatest modern novels are about the
difficulty, and at the same time, the inevitability of being human.
Our character is interested only in this woman, the exterior
world is not important any more. The person does not care about
society; he is interested only in his memories, thoughts and feelings.
As we read the text, we can feel the characters strong emotions, he
sees with his heart, a woman whom he considers the most beautiful he
has ever walked with. At this point, we - the reader - are face to face
with Charles Tansleys consciousness; his memories are fresh
because he remembers that this is the first time that he walks with
such a lovely woman. This makes him very happy because he feels an
interior beauty and peace, which make him very proud. We are
witnessing the character insecure interior world, and this is the
incapability of expressing his feelings. We read only his thoughts,
which are not expressed through communication
Although this short extract is a lively and happy at the first sight,
there is something strange like a cool breeze, and this can be the
sadness of the memories in every persons consciousness and the
incapability of expressing all our feelings and thoughts in a rushing
and complex modern world.

85
5. IN BETWEEN THE MODERN AND THE POSTMODERN.
UTOPIA/ DYSTOPIA
*

We are living in world in which nobody is free, in which
hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest
and to remain free.
(George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937)

The decline of utopia and the rise of its nightmare cousin
is parallel to the history of the surrealist century, which is at once the
partial fulfilment of nineteenth-century dreams and their negation.
(Chad Walsh, From Utopia to Nightmare, 1962)

According to The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary
Terms, dystopia (dys-/dus- [lat/gr roots meaning bad or abnormal]
+topos [gr root meaning place]) is a modern term invented as the
opposite of utopia and applied to any alarmingly unpleasant imaginary
world, usually of the projected future. The term is also applied to
fictional works depicting such world. It is a significant form of science
fiction and of modern satire. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy
defines the term as a negative utopia. It is a place where everything
goes wrong instead of everything being perfect.
A more complete definition of dystopia (a word invented by
Anthony Burgess), however, can be obtained by comparing the two
genres in question.
As mentioned before, in its effort to create a convincing world
placed somewhere in the parallel present, utopia had abolished
history. Such society seem to be caught between past and future,
coming from nowhere and not going anywhere and it does not need to
do so since it had already achieved the stage of happiness and
perfection. Dystopias deal with future societies reflecting the chief
preoccupations and questions of the 20
th
century: what would our
future problems be from a social and political perspective? Where is
mankind heading to and how can its future be influenced?

*
From Dystopia and Orwell, a graduation thesis written by Iszlai Emese,
History-English, and co-ordinated by lecturer Ramona Hosu in 2005
86
The main difference between utopia and dystopia is that the
latter strongly questions the pattern for a perfect world suggested by
classical utopia. It makes use of the same techniques and does not
ignore invention ether but the intention implied is not the same: what
we get is despair and misery instead of social welfare, the end of
mankind, as we know it instead of thriving communities.
Alexandru Ciornescu (Viitorul trecutului. Utopie si
literatura, Bucuresti, Editura Cartea aromaneasca) defines dystopia as
a utopia reaching negative conclusions. Servier sees it as a utopia with
reversed purposes. Dystopia is heading to the opposite direction;
nevertheless it borrows literary methods from utopia. The very reason
of their existence lies in the same ground. They both rebel and fight
against a tainted, intolerable present of a decadent civilisation. But
here all comparisons stop because while the utopians present a set of
solutions to the best society possible, dystopians pitilessly analyse
the future effects of such solutions applied to a society- and the
conclusions they reach in most cases are not favourable. Despite the
appearances, though, dystopia is not automatically against utopia.
What 20
th
century dystopia tried to do was to deconstruct the idealistic
image of a future utopia. It denounced not the principle of utopia,
happiness, but the means of constructing such a world.
However, the purpose [of dystopia] is not to present us the
best form of government. It does not construct for the sake of
constructing but in order to demolish. Its edifice stands as a negative
example and it is a symbol of what it should not come to. The writer
[] investigates utopian institutes in order to deprecate ours and
mock at our flaws [] Negative utopias are not interested in
solutions. (trans. aut.) (Ciornescu, 1996:203)
Thus, the distinctive feature of the 20
th
century utopian
literature is the one that gave up the dominant perspective of previous
utopias: faith in the institutions and progress. Progress is not the big
Benefactor any more acting for the welfare of the community the
suppression of the individual becomes the main preoccupation of the
totalitarian society. Raymond Trousson believes that the
representative works for 20
th
century dystopias are Edward Bulwer-
Lyttons The Coming Race (1871) and H.G. Wells The Time Machine
(1895). Ciornescu sees another writer as a model: Samuel Butler and
his Erewhon (1872) (the title is an anagram of the word nowhere, a
87
clear reference to Mores Utopia.) Constantinescu mentions other
similar works in the 19
th
century: After London (1885) by Richard
J effries, Caesars Column (1890) by Ignatius Donelly, Pictures of a
Socialistic Future (1893) by Eugene Richter. H.G. Wells (1866-1946)
made the transition to the 20th century dystopia of Huxley and Orwell.
The transition status of Wells works is given by the presence of
both the social and political themes fundamental to classical utopia
and scientific speculation. The theme of the human being as a product
of biological evolution was steadily gaining ground due to different
scientific theories. The Law of Entropy (Lord Kelvin, 1852) and the
transformist one (Thomas H. Huxley) were two scientific theories that
had an impact particularly on H.G. Wells. The latter formulated by
T.H. Huxley stated that the process of evolution was arbitrary and
trust in progress could not possibly be justified. Scientific progress
had brought the prevalence of materialism and causality, which lacked
finality, ethics but the sense of morale on the other hand had remained
unspoiled. As a result, mankind was prone to certain doom.
H.G. Wells embraces the collapse of western, capitalistic
civilisation in many of his works (e.g. The Time Machine foresees the
death of civilisation, When the Sleeper Wakes, 1899, imagines a
future, overpopulated London dominated by technology and in The
Shape of Things to Come, 1933, the reader is presented a society
shaped by sophisticated, high technology where the workers are
exploited by the government.)
Indisputably, H.G. Wells is the founder of modern utopia.
(Constantinescu, 2004: 105)
This is not static any more; class division is based on
psychological categorization (the creators, the mediocre, the vulgar,
etc.) rather than on production, the image of a totalitarian society
progressively taking shape (e.g. in The Men Like Gods, 1923).
What is important in modern utopia is the shift of stress from
social issues to the scientifically controlled evolution. The greatest
example of this is Aldous Huxleys Brave New World (1932), which,
according to Catalin Constantinescu (Paradigme literare ale utopiei,
Iasi, Editura Universitatii Al. I .Cuza), is more than a scientific
speculation of a possible future world; it is a sharp criticism of utopia.
It is not only a scientific dystopia but a political one as well, a warning
88
that totalitarian regimes, in their effort to make everybody perfectly
equal and subdued, end up breading robots deprived of their humanity.
Brave New World and Island (1962) helped shape the
profile of modern utopia. The first novel investigates the incongruity
between the general good and that of the individual, the morale of it
being the warning against the dangers of making everybody identical,
which kills any attempt of staying unique. The society in the Brave
New World is set in the future and the reference time is that of the
launching of Fords T model. The substitution of J esus and God by the
almighty Ford is not without impact since this shift of power
suggests that science and technology have become the most
significant spiritual values. However, it is important to mention that
the dystopian model offered by Huxley is not a plea against scientific
progress but against scientific progress to the prejudice of the
individual. (Constantinescu, 2004: 113)
Social stability and the general good are key concepts to
which Huxleys brave, new world owes its distorted image. General
good by all means inevitably degenerates the individual. It is not
difficult to appreciate the absurdity of the idea since there has never
been invented an arrangement that would gratify everybodys needs in
the same manner. The dangers that lie in totalitarian solutions
constitute the annihilation of any personal enterprise and the process
of dehumanisation becomes one with the loss of morality, God and
values.
<And that>, put in the Director seriously, <that is the secret of
happiness and virtue- liking what youve got to do. A conditioning
aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny. >
(Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932)
According to Ciornescu such society is based on the cycle of
purpose and means. In Huxleys case, the purpose of the sate is the
two interconnected concepts, stability-happiness that cannot be put
into practice without the profound change in the individual.
(Ciornescu, 1996: 219). The implement of mass happiness is
certainly a complex task but not impossible to achieve considering the
many alternatives technology has to offer: eugenics, dysgenics,
decantation, neo-pavlovian conditioning and, of course, soma.
Fords era had achieved utopia and this was almost perfect.
The confusion generated by individualism had vanished thus society
89
could declare itself a happy one. There was peace and happiness, a
booming economy that encouraged waste; loneliness, contemplation
and literature were highly sentenced. Love was limited to sex that had
become as ordinary and simple as a cup of coffee. Sex had nothing
shameful in it; what was appalling and ambiguous were the name and
the idea of motherhood. (trans. aut.) (Ciornescu, 1996: 220)
Totalitarian regimes cannot do without the means of
propaganda to achieve their main purpose, stability. In Brave New
World there is a Bureau of Propaganda and a College of Emotional
Engineering where they prefabricate emotions for public use.
Newspapers, television, radio and cinemas are all part of the
propaganda machine dedicated to create intellectual diversion (the less
serious thinking one does, the better). They all function for one
purpose: to create the perfect conditions to keeping the masses as
subdued as possible. Hypnopaedia is part of the educational system
and it is close to conditioning that is used efficiently in inducing
fundamental principles and content in the individual (among others,
class-consciousness, because Huxleys new world is not a classless
society). Due to the benefits of this excellent technique, discordant
voices are unlikely to be ever heard.
Thus, in modern utopia, everything seems perfect; all general
and main issues had been thoroughly covered, reassessed and
reshaped on scientific or political bases for the benefit of the masses.
If there still happens to remain a gap unfilled (like, for e.g. depression
in Brave New World) there is always some sort of quick, effective and
painless remedy to dispose of the inconvenience. Soma pills are the
equivalent of the alcohol and drugs of our world only they have
virtually become an institution. They have been designed to fight
possible depression, enhance euphoria and be a perfect substitute for
everything people would miss by provoking dream-like visions.
Soma is the ultimate means to correct the imperfections of the
system; it is to discourage personal inadaptability, social disturbances
and the spread of subversive ideas. Drugs have the power to comfort
people, compensate their problems, turn them into believers and
support charity. Lack of religion, art and culture is due to the
dominance of science; the rules of reason pervade every thought,
emotion and act. Unorthodox behaviour is extremely dangerous
because it threatens the well-established order of society. The old
90
world and the brave new one are not compatible because the world
advanced by Shakespeare (the model so much admired by Mr Savage)
is founded on completely different rules. One cannot make flowers
without steel and one cannot make tragedies without social
instabilities. This changed world has no flare for human tragedies that
are inevitable in a free society. The geniuses of the new world have
made sure that such unpleasant nuisance would never occur because
stability always comes first. People are happy, they can get what they
want and they never want what they cannot get. They are well off,
they are safe, they are never ill, they are not afraid of death, they are
blissfully ignorant of passion and old age, they are spared by such
curses as mother and father, they have got no wives, children or lovers
to develop strong feelings for. The new man is so conditioned that he
cannot help acting the way he is expected to. And should anything go
wrong, there are always the soma pills there to comfort him.
Mr Savage, a sort of freak-show in Huxleys Brave New
World has had a taste of both the uncivilized and civilized worlds,
which makes him qualified to express his opinion about them.
Having been brought up on Shakespeare he misses the point in the
new world. He is the discordant voice the new order does not need:
<Unorthodoxy [i.e. unorthodox behaviour] threatens more than the
life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself. Yes, at Society
itself>. (Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932)
Suicide is the only dignified way out. Orwell gave Winston
Smith a less grand solution to a rebel individual in a dystopian society:
compliance. Either way the individual does not stand the least chance
to accomplish something of his dream or to change anything in a
world he has come to hate.
Aldous Huxley founded scientific dystopia in Brave New
World which points to the victory of totalitarian state condemned by
Orwell in Nineteen-Eighty-Four.

5.1. GEORGE ORWELL, NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

George Orwell is the pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair (1903 -
1950). He was born in Bengal and educated in England at Eton. He
91
joined the Police in Burma but after five years he resigned in disgust
of imperialism. Back in London, he had several bad-paid jobs and
then became a regular contributor to The Adelphy from 1930. Down
and Out in Paris and London as well as Burmese Days were the first
books to reflect Orwells indignation over political injustice. They
were followed by A Clergymans Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra
Flying; In 1936 he produced a documentary about the unemployment
case in North of England. It was called The road to Wigan Pier and it
is a modern literary journalism that established his political outlook as
a democratic socialist. Homage to Catalonia followed and it was a
record of his experiences as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War.
Coming Up for Air reflects the writers frustrations and political
concerns. Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) are
his most popular books. They are pessimistic satires about the threat
of political tyranny and totalitarianism.
Released at a time when world power relationships, and popular
opinion with them, were suffering a painful change, Orwells books
played an important part in effecting a reversal of attitudes towards
the Wests wartime Soviet ally. Their authors hitherto uncomfortable
anti-Stalinism became all at once not only acceptable but fashionable,
and the way was opened for his subsequent gradual elevation into a
cult figure, a hero of our times, a secular saint [] Orwells works do
not have the integrality of art because the man himself did not have
the integrity of the true artist. When he wrote well, it was plainly,
without grace and sensitivity; when he wrote badly, it was crudely and
vulgarly, states D. S. Savage (Ford, 1983: 129).
Animal Farm is said to have performed two services for thousand
of readers. By cocking a snook at the Soviet colossus at a time when
it was barely permissible to do so it gave pleasurable release to their
suppressed feelings of fear and hostility; and by reducing Stalin,
Trotsky and Co., to nursery-animal proportions in its simple-sardonic
way, it presented them with an acceptably homely and comical image
of a frightening reality. The pessimism of the fable is not in doubt; but
its message that the revolution is futile and Utopia a pipedream could
be taken in more than one way ( 138).
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) presents a 1984 Britain that has
become Airstrip One in the super-state Oceania. This is at war with
Eurasia and Eastasia. The country is ruled by the Party and its non-
92
existent Big Brother. Yet, his image is everywhere. The agents of the
party are rewriting history and are redesigning language hoping to
control the thoughts of everybody. Winston Smith, the main character,
is a party operative. He keeps a secret diary and this is seen as a
thought crime. He falls in love with J ulia and eventually he is seduced
into self-betrayal by his superior, OBrien. He is in Room 101 where
there is mans ultimate horror and he is being interrogated. He
eventually surrenders his identity to the state and comes to love Big
Brother.
This brilliant and extraordinary bitter novel may be regarded as
the culmination of the loss of faith in mankind which infected British
futuristic fiction in the 1930s and was underlined by World War II. It
provides a heavily ironic commentary on the state of the world in
1948, exaggerating all its worst traits to a nightmarish extreme. The
development of world politics from 1948 to 1984 did nothing to
soothe the anxieties with which it plays (Ousby, 673).


Diana Carnatiu, Romanian-English

[...] A trumpet call floated from the
telescreen just above their heads. However, it was
not the proclamation of a military victory this time,
but merely an announcement from the Ministry of
Plenty.
''Comrades!" cried an eager youthful voice.
We have won the battle for production! The
standard of living has risen by no less than 2o per
cent over the past year. Workers marched out of
factories and paraded through the streets with
banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for
the new, happy life which his wise leadership has
bestowed upon us. Here are some figures. Food stuff
--"
The phrase "our new, happy life " recurred
several times. It had been a favourite of late with the
93
Ministry of Plenty. Parsons, his attention caught by
the trumpet call, sat listening with a sort of edified
boredom. He could not follow the figures, but he was
aware that they were in some way a cause for
satisfaction. Winston was smoking a Victory
Cigarette which he held carefully horizontal. The
new ration did not start till tomorrow and he had
only four cigarettes left. For the moment he had shut
his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to
the stuff that streamed out of the telescreen. It
appeared that there had even been demonstrations
to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration
to 20 grammes a week. And only yesterday, he
reflected, it had been announced that the ration was
to be reduced to 20 grammes a week. Was it possible
that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four
hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it
easily, with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless
creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically,
passionately, with a furious desire to track down ,
denounce and vaporize anyone who should suggest
that last week the ration had been thirty grammes.
Syme, too -- in some more complex way, involving
doublethink, Syme swallowed it . Was he, then, alone
in the possession of memory?
The fabulous statistics continued to pour out
of the telescreen. As compared with last year there
was more food, more clothes, more houses, more
[...], more [...], more of everything except disease,
are sub crime, and insanity. Year by year and minute
by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing
rapidly upwards.

Awareness possesses a multitude of faces: written or spoken,
explicit or implicit, obvious or subtle.
In any of the cases, the natural course of events is to be
cleared out of the threatening rusty spots or rusty coat before it is too
late.
94
Distorted reality holds the image of versatility.
The field of the organism, namely totalitarianism, gets its
fertilizers from this image from a rotten realit,y which as the
embodiment of falsity/fake-ness has easily grown wealthy, on account
of the true but unaware reality.
Under the mask of goodness and care the curtain of
abominable un-human --though ruled by humane beings --
domination, seizes on everything. No matter whether there is material
or spiritual.
The aim of Totalitarianism -- "Big Brother is watching you"
(the principal slogan) is to manipulate the psyche of the individuals --
which seen as a mass -- deserves but a decrepit/ degraded personality.
In this way people are subjects of the Party ideology inoculation,
becoming just a population to whom the Party can offer ineptitudes
without the fear that somebody might make him responsible for this [
hence A NEW TYPE OF human beings is brought up: one incapable
of distinguishing between truth and lie .] : "our new, happy life", "the
raising of chocolate ration to 20 grammes a week", "the need of Two
Minute Hate", the use of sex only to create "population" with the
prohibition of feeling any pleasure, the necessity of diminished
vocabulary--creating a new one: The New Speak.
The effective instrument of controlling people's compliance
with Party principles is the omniscient "telescreen", imposed to be as
natural as possible, part of their life (surrogate life). It occupies an
entire wall in each house, institution or pseudo-club; must be kept in
function permanently (with some exceptions represented by the
Interior Party members who are permitted to turn it out for 30
minutes) and provides performance: the observation/ supervising of
any movements, even of a unusual rhythm of breath, wherever a man
stays at any moment.
The totalitarian systems need of such a control upon bodies,
feelings and thoughts/mind traces its root in the fact that it hates
memory, people's thinking.
If a man guides himself through his reasoning faculty there
are few chances in being dominated. Thus an immediate failure of Big
Brother (the assumed head of the Party, which in the end turned out to
be an invention/ bogus), never seen in other situation than on a huge
poster stuck in any possible places. Soon its great care shows the real
95
altruism; to prevent people from becoming criminals, it has been
established that thinking is a crime named thoughtcrime.( therefore, to
avoid it, the mind should develop a blind stop whenever a thought
presented itself -- the process should be automatic, instinctive and in
Newspeak it is called crimestop). Newspeak - the future official
language of Oceania has been devised to meet the ideological needs of
Ingsoc, English Socialism - is not only to provide a medium of
expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the
devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought
impossible. The normal language, Oldspeak,, becomes a heretical
one.
Different from thoughtcrime is doublethinking.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory
beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. It
lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the party is to
use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that
goes with complete honesty. The Party intellectuals knows in which
direction his memory must be altered; he therefore knows that he is
playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also
satisfies himself with the idea that that reality is not violated. The
process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with
sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would
bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.

5.3. WILLIAM GOLDING, LORD OF THE FLIES

Much of William Gondings works (Lord of the Flies, The
Inheritors, Free Fall, The Pyramid, The Scorpion God, Darkness
Visible and Rites of Passage as well as The Paper Man) explores the
moral dilemmas at the centre of human existence. The characters are
placed in extreme situations to give a mythological dimension to their
lives. Golding was obsessed with the evil and the original sin and
these seemed to transcend the boundaries of orthodox Christianity.
<<Faced with the reality of concentration camps and mass
extermination, Golding concluded that these outward manifestations
of human society must have their source in mans nature, which he
96
saw as being unchanged along history, sub specie aeternitatis. He
pointed out that the aim of his narrative was to trace the defects of
society back to the defects of human natureThe shape of society
must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any
political system however apparently logical and respectable. His
conception on human nature which took a definite shape in the years
after the end of the war when he wrote his main fables on the human
condition was summed by the novelist himself in the following words:
I believed then, that man was sick not exceptional man, but average
man. I believed that the condition of man was to be a morally diseased
creature and that the best job I could do at the time was to trace the
connection between his diseased nature and the international mess he
gets himself into.
The novelist, besides describing the symptoms of the disease,
alongside facts, must also go beyond the surface and diagnose the
inner causes of the outwards manifestations. [] Golding thinks that
the novelist should point out what is basic in the human condition in
all times and not what represents the concern of the moment. []
In The Writer in His Age Golding described himself as a
citizen, a novelist and a schoolmaster. This latter capacity speaks for
the didactic intentions of the novelist. This is also borne out by his
statements in Fable where he explains that the lesson he wants to
teach has been embodied in a work that is witty, entertaining or
engaging in some way or another. The fabulist is a moralist. He
cannot make a story without a human lesson tucked away in it.
Arranging his signs as he does, he reaches not profundity on many
levels, but what you would expect from signs, that is overt
significance. By the nature of his craft then, the fabulist is didactic,
desires to inculcate a moral lesson. >>(Hollinger, Alexander, William
Goldings Fables and the Human Condition, Cavallioti, Bucharest,
2000, p. 4-5). The term fable lays the stress on the didactic purpose
of the text. The term myth would see the text as encompassing an
archetypal truth. As Alexander Hollinger states ( p. 6): <<When the
works are labelled as parables stress is laid on double-level writing,
the action of the plot having significance only in the light of the moral
idea it embodies. According to Virginia Tiger, the distinction between
parable and fable lies in the fact that in parable the moral image is
primary, while in fable the dramatic situation is primary. Karl
97
Frederick calls Goldings novels allegories. According to Vera
Calin, allegory implies a level of deeper significance and a surface
level which may be drama, a fable or a story. This double level of
significance makes Vera Calin conclude that the terms allegory and
parable are, to a great extent, synonymous.>>
Lord of the Flies (1954) is an inverted Victorian boys adventure
story, whose regular allusions to R. M. Ballantynes Coral Island
stress Goldings choice of savage knowledge rather than blithe
innocence as the conclusion of his fable.
Marooned on a desert island after a plane crash, a party of
schoolboys quickly degenerates into vindictive barbarism. The roguish
J ack emerges as a calculating and ruthless dictator, while the fat and
clumsy Piggy is taunted, tortured and eventually killed with the
Christ-like Simon. It is only when the boys are rescued by a British
destroyer that Piggys well-meaning fried Ralph realizes the true
extent of their depravity.
Golding has said that the genesis of his novel lay in the brutalities
he witnessed during his service at sea in World War II and in his
experiences teaching small boys for 13 years. His use of an obvious
but effective symbolism throughout the story allows it to work as an
allegory of humanitys fallen nature as well as a graphically realistic
scenario (Ousby, 563).


Laura Mogos, Romanian-English

[] A thing was crawling out of the forest.
It came darkly, uncertainly. The shrill screaming
that rose before the beast was like a pain. The beast
stumbled into the horseshoe.
Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!
The blue-white scar was constant, the noise
unendurable. Simon was crying out something about
a dead man in the hill.
Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!
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The stiks fell and the mouth of the new circle
crunched and screamed. The beast was on its knees
in the centre, its arms folded over its face. It was
crying out against the abominable noise something
about a body in the hill. The beast shruggled
forward, broke the ring and fell over the steep edge
of the rock to the sand by the water. At once the
crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, leapt
on the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore. There were
no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth
and claws. [] Presently the heap broke up and
figures staggered away. Only the beast lay still, a
few yards from the sea. Even in the rain they could
see how small a beast it was; and already its blood
was staining the sand. []
Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive
bright creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the
steadfast constellations, Simons dead body moved
out towards the open sea.

The fragment is from Wiliam Goldings Lord of the Flies. The
action of the novel takes place on a deserted island in the middle of
the Pacific Ocean. Some English schoolboys have survived a plane
crash caused by the war; they are innocent victims of adult violence.
Even from the beginning the theme of the novel is visible: unleashed
violence.
When the boys find themselves the only survivors of a plane
wreck, they must adjust to living in a world without adult authority
and rules; they must find a new way to organize their own society.
They confront forces of destruction on the island and in themselves
that they cannot understand. Their so-called government disintegrates,
giving raise to a brutal tribe, bent on destroying those who have tried
to form a powerful, and just society. Violence becomes an everyday
issue, unleashing primitive instincts. In the beginning the boys choose
a chief- Ralph- but as the novel progresses, they divide into two
groups. The larger group headed by J ack, turns into a savage tribe
motivated by the spirit of the Lord of the Flies. These savage
99
instincts lead the boys to murdering Simon, thinking that he is the
beast. Under the influence of this savage frenzy, and under the
influence of their own fear- that is the beast- J ack and his tribe jump
on Simon, without even thinking that the beast might be one of
them.
The schoolboyss transformation takes place gradually. The
first step in their transformation is the killing of a sow. J ack and his
hunters go hunting and let the fire burn out. When they come back
with the sow, and Ralph tells them about the ship and that they could
have been saved, J ack responds: You should have seen the blood!
The knowledge that they had power over a living thing, that they
could take away its life, made them feel like a long satisfaction
drink. The Lord of the Flies was already inside them, the evil
within them was unleashed (they were singing Kill the pig! Cut her
throat! Bash her in!). The Lord of the Flies seems to be a satanic
presence provoking evil. This satanic presence speaks to Simon,
informing him Im part of you, so in Goldings novel, the evil
comes from inside, it is a part of human nature, and in unusual
conditions it takes over mans will. The beast is in fact their own fear,
and by killing the beast, the boys kill the only thing that had a certain
power and control over their instincts. Lord of the Flies appears in
the Bible under the name of Beelzebub-the leader of the devils. This
satanic presence guides the tribe in a frenzy of unleashed instincts.
If we look at Goldings novel from a psychological point of
view, it can be said that the reaction of the boys to the conditions of
the island is somehow normal. Children, at a certain age are very
cruel- in normal conditions- and the lack of adult authority developed
their primitive instincts. The savage dance before Simons death is the
first step; they circle the beast, hit it, and they dont listen to what
Simon has to say. The image of the beast, on its knees, with its arms
folded over its face, in the centre of the circle, is one of a victim and
not of a fierce thing. J ack, the leader of this tribe, sees everything as a
game first. When he gets tired of Ralph telling him what to do, he says
Im not going to play any longer. Not with you. So, it can be said
that everything began from a game of competing with each other.
Ralph was their leader because he was a strong and athletic boy, and
not because he was intelligent. They all did what Ralph said, because
he was convincing; then they all joined J acks tribe because he
100
provided meat for them. Both Ralph and J ack had strong personalities
and the others followed them- the psychology of masses: the weaker
ones follow the stronger and more convincing one- and they arrive at a
point when they do things that they normally would not do. The
weaker boys are practically manipulated by J acks desire to kill: he
gives them meat if they do what he says. There is also the theory of
the common subconscious: the boys want the same thing deep inside,
although they do not admit it. Ralph and Piggy do not refuse the meat
that J ack gives them, on the contrary, they eat the meat, although the
two boys do not approve with what J ack did. Piggy and Ralph are the
only ones that still have a clear mind. After the hunters kill Simon,
Ralph begins to feel remorse, not like the others, that dont even talk
about it. The boys are led into this cruel and bloody game by J ack- his
passion for hunting and killing is somehow transmitted into the
subconscious of the others they have a ritual dance and song. J acks
tribe simulates a hunting scene, they hunt the beast and kill it, but this
time there is a victim to their tribal dance. They Kill the beast! Cut
his throat! Spill his blood! for real this time. After they kill the beast,
they notice how small a beast it was.
The killing of the beast is a symbolic act, because the boys
want and try to kill something that lies in themselves- their savage
instincts, the evil side of human nature, and their own fear of the
unknown- although they dont even realize. Before the killing scene,
they, more than once had long talks about the beast in the forest, but
they didnt know how to solve this problem. When their fears are out
of control, the Lord of the Flies is born in their minds- the symbol
of the duality of the human nature. Goldings novel suggests that the
first step in the battle against evil is a war waged against some of the
most powerful forces within the human soul itself.
101
6. POSTMODERNISM AND THE NOVEL. NARRATIVE,
NARRATION, NATION AND POLITICS
*

There is the clich that narratives are everywhere nowadays.
Commonly cited examples of narrative in everyday life are films,
music videos, advertisements, television and newspaper journalism,
myths, paintings, songs, comic strips, anecdotes, jokes, stories of our
holidays, and accounts of our day. In more academic contexts, there
has been a recognition that narrative is central to the representation
of identity in personal memory and self-representation or in
collective identity of groups such as regions, nations, race and
gender.
There has been widespread interest in narrative history, in the
operations of legal systems, in psychoanalysis, in scientific analysis,
in economics and in philosophy. Narrative is as inescapable as
language in general, or as cause and effect, as a mode of thinking and
being. According to Paul Ricoeurs Time and Narrative, it does not
seem at all exaggerated to view humans as narrative animals, as homo
fabulans the tellers and interpreters of narrative.
From discovery to invention, from coherence to complexity
and from poetics to politics could be the path to follow when
summarising the transition that took place in narratological theory in
the 1980s.
The first change, from discovery to invention refers to the
fact that narratology can be seen as a science that discovers inherent
formal and structural properties in its object narratives; due to
poststructuralism, the reading, however objective and scientific,
constructed its object. Structure became something that was projected
onto the work by a reading rather than a property of a narrative;
Structuralists pointed to the active role of the reader in the
construction of meaning. In short, poststructuralists moved away from
the treatment of narratives as buildings, as objects of the world,
towards the view that narratives were narratological inventions
construable in an almost infinite number of ways.

*
From Currie, Mark, Postmodern Narrative Theory, Transitions Series,
MacMillan, 1998, pp. 1-6; 71-96
102
The shift from coherence to complexity was part of this
broad departure from the view of narratives as stable structures. Like
the physicist, the chemist or the microbiologist, the role of the
narratologist was traditionally to uncover a hidden design which
would render the object intelligible. For the traditional critic, the most
profound hidden design in a narrative was its unity, the exposure of
which would be the revelation of the works formal, thematic
coherence. In other words, in the critical quest for unity, there was a
desire to present a narrative as a coherent and stable project. The
traditional narratologist could present a partial reading of the text
which saw it as a stable and coherent project; this reduced the
complexity or heterogeneity of the narrative suppressing textual
details that contradicted the scheme. Therefore, poststructuralist
narratology sustains contradictory aspects of the narrative through
deconstructing the stability and coherence of the authorial project and
the language in general. The deconstruction of narratology encouraged
the lack of respect for boundaries between literature and the real
world.
The transition from poetics to politics involves a debate on
several issues. First: the formalist and historicist theories for
approaching literature had been at war within literary studies through
most of the century. In the USA there had been a long period in which
the formalist approaches of New Criticism were dominant in literary
studies, emphasising the form of the narrative. Then, deconstruction
allowed for the reintroduction of historical perspective into
narratology, and this acted as a bridge toward a more political
criticism.
The transition from poetics to politics can also be seen as a
deconstructive legacy as deconstruction introduced new methods for
the unmasking of ideology. The term ideology became a point of
convergence for the interest of poststructuralists and Marxist criticism.
They both demoted the individual or subject as an explanatory
category and saw the individual as part of a larger social system. Thus,
language was seen as the unknowing reproduction of ideological
forma and values and not as an original act of undetermined creativity.
Both therefore approached literature as an ideological form despite the
individual intentions that authors may have held. Given these broad
similarities, any new reading procedures from deconstruction which
103
advanced the project of ideological unmasking were bound to be
seen as critical resources by politically orientated critics.
The transition from poetics to politics was possible in the
1980s because Formal & Historicist Theories converted as they both
saw the individual or the subject of the text as part of a larger social
system.

Formal Historicist the structure of the text

Post Structuralism New Historicism

IDEOLOGY

For Poststructuralists the language, the structure of the text is
a reproduction of some ideological forms and values. For a New
Historicism ideology the politics of class, gender, race that the text
stands for.
Therefore, these 2 theories apply to the text as ideological
form. All new reading procedures of nowadays make use of the
project of the ideological unmasking which means that these readings
are strictly connected to politically-oriented criticism. Therefore, by
converging formalist and historicist thought in the 70s and 80s, there
is no distinction between political commitment & apolitical
aestheticism. An example is given by the post-colonial criticism
(J .Conrad- Heart of Darkness)
Nation is a notion, a powerful political idea, an imagined
community to which individuals affiliate themselves.
Nation is located somewhere between a thing and an idea. The
Nation may be a notion but it is also an idea part of the material
experience of society comprising national institutions or experienced
as real as migration and wars.
The nation is the structure of exclusion in the attempt to
totalize. In the definition of nation there is a permanent tendency to
104
refer to itself by excluding, marginalizing those parts of the nation that
are not representative to its total essence.
Nation is discursive formation, a thing that only comes into
being through discourse, whether literary or not. All narratives tell
stories of a nation excluding or including the marginalized.
This is called socio-narratology, which sees narrative as
central to the experience of history, knowledge of history,
construction of individual and/or collective identity.

6.1. JOHN FOWLES, THE FRENCH LIEUTENANTS WOMAN

SAMPLE STUDENT ESSAY
DOINA MIHAELA BITA
English-French

J ohn Fowles novel underlines diversified topics like:
existentialism, sexual experience in the Victorian period, evolution or
varied issues considered taboo in those times.
There are three major characters which develop the plot:
Ernestina Freeman, Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, the latter
known as Tragedy or the French Lieutenants Woman. Those
three characters are very well organized in order to render the accurate
image of a Victorian love story couched within a post-modern self-
conscious meditation on authentic values
The characters are in some ways representatives for the 1867
social tendencies.
Ernestina Freeman (Tina) heiress of a merchant, the typical
Victorian woman, engaged to be married, high social class, over
protected, her only natural talent is her good taste for fashion
Her self-righteousness, the boredom of her social life and self
mistrust draw her to her worse nightmare, the end of her engagement.
The protagonist of the novel, Charles Smithson, a snob, the
typical Victorian man, manages to develop and escape the cruel and
rigid Victorian status. In order to achieve his interior peace he has to
pass several obstacles. The first impediment is his love for Sarah, the
second, breaking his engagement with Tina and last, Sarahs refusal.
105
Every obstacle he gets over leads him to a better understanding
of himself. He develops a sense of independence, realizing that his
love for Sarah is worth more than the shallow and formal attachment
to Ernestina.
Charles decision to end the engagement anticipates the end of
the Victorian period and the twentieth century destruction of the rigid
Victorian principles.
I called Sarah an antagonist of this novel; from the beginning
J ohn Fowles reproduces her image opposite with the rest of the
characters. She is an outcast, whereas Tina is worthy of the Lyme
society, her father was a low class farmer, Ernestinas father a high
class merchant.
Although the chapters in which Fowles conveys images and
actions of her are few, she is the centre of the novel, the one from
whom the other actions start.
Her tumultuous life led her to achieve her modern statute. Sarah
evolved beyond mens restraints placed on Victorian upper class
women (she remains single and has a lover). She can be considered a
liberate woman because of her independence of mind (in contrast with
Tinas dependence on a husband) and control of her own sexuality
(Ernestina is horrified at the simple thought of copulation).
J ohn Fowles gives several endings to the novel, one written by a
Victorian author which imagines Charles and Tina married and living
happily ever after and another written by a twentieth century author, a
bit stark, but real.
In the famous chapter thirteen the author stops the narration and
talks to the reader. He draws attention to our ages preoccupations and
intellectual limitations: we have sex thrown at us night and day as the
Victorians had religion. He also admits that in contrast with the
Victorian authors he has freedom as his first principle rather than
authority.
I think it inevitably follows, that as new species in the course of
time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer
and rarer, and finally extinct. The forms which stand in closest
competition with those undergoing modification and improvement
will naturally suffer most. (Darwin The origin of Species 1859, p.
324)
106
The quotation above foretells (in Fowles novel) the extinction of
the Victorian hierarchy (the bourgeois and the nobility, Charles and
Ernestina) and the beginning of the modern and liberated, class free
society, the society in which J ohn Fowles lived and wrote his novel.

ADA OGNEAN
History English

The French Lieutenants Woman is a Postmodernist book, that
has the setting predominantly Victorian. This novel reflects Fowles
preoccupations, his attitude towards sex life. A political and sexual
liberty has reached intensity, and this novel shows the freedom of the
vision at the end of the 60s of the 19
th
century, with the severe
attitudes of the Victorian period. The novel is inscribed in the literary
genre of the 19
th
century and succeeds in reproducing typical
Victorian characters, situations and dialogues. But Fowles perception
of the genre is touched with typical 20
th
century irony. Fowles aim is
to bring to light those aspects of the Victorian society that would
appear most foreign to contemporary readers: Victorian attitudes
towards women, economics, science and philosophy.
The title of a book is chosen to reflect the content of the book,
it should contain or it should give some clues about the book, it should
be the most important element of it. Or, sometimes, the title of a book
is chosen to attract the reader. But in this case, the title of the book:
The French Lieutenants Woman, I think is not representative. Sarah,
who is the French lieutenants woman, appears in the book less then
Charles Smithon. Often, the story is written from his perspective, not
hers. Sometimes, even the author sustains that he does not know what
happened to Sarah, but the events from Charles life are described
fluently and with many details.
Sarah Woodruff is called the French lieutenants woman. This
nickname doesnt suit her and she is identified with the French
lieutenants woman, but only in the first half of the book. After her
adventure with Charles, she becomes Charles mistress.
107
If it is not very representative for the book, why did the author
choose this title? Why the French lieutenant? Why did the author not
say the name of the French lieutenant? I think he has chosen to use
the nationality of his character and not his name, to be more
enigmatic, to be more romantic. Fowles wanted to create the
Victorian atmosphere beginning with the title.
If the character is French, why did the author feel the need to
introduce the next element of the title? Why lieutenant? Because the
character was not a lieutenant. He said that, at the time of the
shipwreck he was the first mate. Everything he said was though a lie. I
dont know who he was indeed. This is all I know said Sarah (chapter
20). The French lieutenant, Varguennes, is a mysterious character.
Nobody knows for sure details about his life, not even about his rank.
And, if this was a lie, why did Fowles use an untruth in the title of
such masterpiece? I think that he did that, because, for Sarah, he will
always be the French lieutenant. Another reason could be, to make
sure that Varguennes and Sarah would not be identified with
anybody . If the title had been The Frenchs Woman, the book
would not have had so much attraction and would not have raised so
much interest.
Perhaps this element of the title was a clue for the reader.
Varguennes was a sailor, a man of war from a foreign country, and the
possibilities for him to stay in England only for love are little.
The French lieutenant, Varguennes, is a character who appears
only in Sarahs story; he does not take part to the story. His role in the
narration had ended before the story of the book started. Varguennes
is a secondary character, who still, gives the title for this novel.
The last element of the title is woman. Why is Sarah called the
French lieutenants woman? Sarah has never been a woman in the
sense of a wife. She has been destined from the beginning (as she
predicted) to loneliness and in the end she has got used to it. my
past life made me get used to be alone. I always believed that I hated
my loneliness. Now I live in the middle of a world in which you can
easily avoid the loneliness. And I discovered that I cherish it, I care
about this loneliness, as it is a treasure of my own. I want to share my
life with nobody. I want to be what I am, not what a husband would
want me to become after a marriage, as benevolent and mild would he
be. (chapter 60).
108
More than her desire and her punishment for loneliness, Sarah
has never been the French lieutenants woman (although she lies and
says that she has been). She has never given herself to him. She has
rather been Charles Smithons woman. Sarah gave herself to him, she
gave him a child, and she changed his life. Charles gave up his
engagement with Ernestina Freeman, with whom he was in love,
bearing the shame and Mr. Freemans desire to sue him for the pain he
had caused to his daughter. Varguennes did not give up his marriage
for her, he did not respect his promise to her, he was not in love with
her like Charles.
In the book, Sarah was called Tragedy, the French
lieutenants woman, the French lieutenants whore, Charles mistress,
but in the end she still remains Sarah Woodruff and she is happy to be
like that, I never expected to be happy. And yet now I fell happy in
the present situation (chapter 60)
The French Lieutenants Woman, a Victorian Postmodernist
novel, presents a world dominated by illiberal conventions, suppressed
emotions and Charles and Sarahs fight against it. They are the only
characters that seek to be happy in a world in which they do not fit
and they do not feel like being a part of it. And maybe, the title should
have referred to them.

6.2. MARTIN AMIS, TIMES ARROW

GABRIELA RAFILA DEMETER
Romanian-English

SAMPLE QUOTATIONS:

In my sleep I had dreamed of a....No, it wasnt like that. Let
me put it this way: presiding over the darkness out of which I had
loomed there was a figure, a male shape, with an entirely
unmanageable aura, containing such things as beauty, terror, love,
filth and above all power. This male shape or essence seems to be
wearing a white coat ( a medics stark white smock). And black boots.
And a certain kind of smile. I think the image might have been a
109
ghost- negative of doctor number one. (Amis, Martin. Times Arrow:
12 )

Watch. Were getting younger. We are. Were getting
stronger. Were even getting taller. I dont quite recognize the world
were in. Everything is familiar but not at all reassuring. Far from it.
This is a world of mistakes, of diametrical mistakes [....] Still, Im
powerless, and can do nothing about anything. I cant make myself an
exception. The other people, do they have someone else inside them,
passenger or parasite, like me? Theyre lucky. I bet they dont have
the dream we have [...] It just seems to me that the film is running
backwards (Amis, Martin. Times Arrow : 15-16)

He is traveling towards his secret. Parasite or passenger, I
am travelling there with him. It will be bad, and not intelligible. But I
will know one thing about it ( at least the certainty brings comfort ). I
will know how bad the secret is. I will know the nature of the offence.
Already I know this. I know that it is to do with trash and shit, and that
it is wrong in time. (Amis, Martin. Times Arrow :73 )

There they go, to the days work, with their heads bent back.
I was puzzled at first but now I know why they do it, why they stretch
their throats like that. They are looking for the souls of their mothers
and their fathers, their women and their children, gathering in the
heavens awaiting human form, and union.... The sky above the Vistula
is full of stars. I can see them now....They no longer hurt my eyes
(Amis, Martin. Times Arrow : 131 )

Martin Amis was born with the microbe of literature in his
blood (his father, Kingsley Amis, was a novelist) and after attending
various schools and having a quite impressive journalistic career, he
started writing novels which made him not only an important literary
figure in Great Britain but also something of a celebrity in the world.
The novel which demonstrated Amiss literary talent was
without doubt Times Arrow-1991. The central character of the book
is a Nazi doctor who was a first hand witness of the horrors of the
Holocaust and later tried to escape from his past in America. The book
110
presents his life backwards, from his death in the United States to his
birth in Germany.
Martin Amis uses a very modern method of narration. The
story of the novel is told backwards and the narrator is not even the
main character of the book but his conscience/ soul- the I which
lives within each one of us and which has come to life on the day of
the doctors death. This soul/ conscience has no recollection of the
main characters past and it starts on a journey towards a terrible
secret.
At the beginning of the book the main character comes out
of the blackest sleep to find out that his body is entirely paralyzed.
The black seep may symbolize human existence- a sleep from
which people awake when they are near their final moments.
The search for identity is a major theme of this novel- as the
name of the character changes several times (Tod Friendly, J ohn
Young, Hamilton de Souza, Odilo Unverdorben) but this change of
the external identity cannot hush the voice of conscience- of the soul,
which remains the same.
The identity of a person is seen as merchandise. The
characters continuous attempts to change his identity do not offer him
the possibility to get rid of his past, of his mistakes, of his guilt.
Therefore the character learns that we can change our external
identity, but, deep down, we will forever be the same.
The idea that each one of us has a soul connected to our
conscience is at the basis of this novel. The soul wonders about the
reason of its existence, it feels powerless as the main character seems
not to be aware of its presence: The voice of conscience speaks in a
whisper. Nobody hears it. Nobody hears it. (Amis, Martin. Times
Arrow:56). The soul feels as a passenger or worse, only like a
parasite.
The guilt for an unknown offence is symbolized by the
characters repeated dreams and by his attempts to avoid seeing his
reflection in a mirror, as if by seeing himself he would be forced to
face his terrible deeds.
The image of a man in a white coat, wearing big black boots
will become a recurrent motif throughout the novel- an element of
mystery which will persist almost until the end of the novel.
111
Life is seen, in this novel, as a scene where everything has
been pre-arranged. People spend their life in eternal regrets about
things they havent done or hoping to go to places from where they
have just returned but to which they havent given the adequate
importance.
Human existence is seen as a non-stop preparation for death.
We all live only to learn how to die: They are doing what we all
have to do down here on earth: THEY ARE GETTING READY TO
DIE. ( Amis, Martin. Times Arrow: 87)
The novel depicts two different views on the condition of
women. The main character sees them as unimportant persons, toys
used only for his sexual needs and does not feel any intimate bond
with them; in his opinion: heres the weird thing about these
relationships with women: you get everything on the first date. Well,
every now and then its the second date, but generally its the first. (
Amis, Martin. Times Arrow:59) In total opposition, the soul-narrator
feels that not only biologically but also as a matter of principle ONE
WOMAN SHOULD BELONG TO ONE MAN.
Not only is the narrative of the book presented backwards
but also the conversations between the characters. The justification for
this approach of a conversation is given by the soul-narrator: I have
noticed in the past, of course, that most conversations would make
better sense if you ran them backwards. (Amis, Martin. Times
Arrow:60)
The characters dreams are dominated by the image of a dark
room where people are gathered and where something mortal will be
decided. It seems the image of the place of Last J udgement- the place
where the souls are gathered to be given the punishment or the reward
for their deeds. It is a symbolic image for the characters remorse and
his fear of facing the Divine J ustice.
The uncertainty of life is the one that produces fear and
brings to life all our hidden anxieties. The knowledge of the nature
of the offence would be a relief for the character as it allows him to
do something for the redemption of his soul, for changing all the bad
things he has done.
The main characters stop in Vatican-one of the holy places
of Christianity, before the final step in revealing his true identity, is
very symbolic as it hides a message of forgiveness. The fathers
112
words: We help those that need have a clear Christian Message:
God also forgives those who have done the cruellest deeds if they
repent.
The souls constant search, his desire for the world to make
sense ends in the final chapters of the book. The horrors of the
Holocaust are revealed in this final part of the novel from the
perspective of a first hand informer- the doctor who treated his
patients ( women, children, elderly people) with gas, electricity,
shit, fire and with ferocious dogs.
The characters personal life comes to light with the lost of
his baby-girl Eva, the lack of communion with his wife. As if in an
optimistic image of life, all these are left behind and the reader is
presented the first days of married life, the marriage ceremony, the
first emotions of dating and the discovery of the characters sexuality
in adolescence.
The last chapter of the book brings us to a point when the
world stops making sense. It is a world governed by the innocence of
childhood. The character is now a child and his dreams are only
governed by his mothers image. The author reinforces the idea that
every person is born innocent and that society and the historical
conditions are the ones that unleash the evil forces.
The story ends with the character waiting to be born. It
seems to be an optimistic end for a rather sad story as a birth always
symbolizes a new beginning and hope. In this case it is probably the
hope that the character will choose a different path in his life and
everything will be different.
But the destruction done by the war, the Holocaust and its
crimes are still obvious in the final words of the soul-narrator, trapped
in a person, without having the possibility to choose a good person:
And I within, who came at the wrong time- either too soon, or after it
was all too late.( Amis, Martin. Times Arrow: 173)
We all are prisoners in our existence. Some of us realize
too late that we have a soul which needs attention. But fortunately
there are some of us who manage to escape from the destructive force
of our daily existence and find the time to heal our souls with love and
affection towards others.

Bibliography:
113

1. Amis, Martin. Times Arrow: The Nature of the Offence.
Penguin Books, 1992
2. Words, Words, Words: A History and Anthology of
Literatures in English. The 20
th
century. Vol.3. La Spiga
Languages, 2003.

SIMONA BRAD
English-French

1. I am a crocodile in the thick river of his feeling tone. , and I
sense the heat of fear and shame. And Tods fear, when I
stop and analyse it, really is frightening. And inexplicable. It
has to do with his own mutilation. chapter 1, p.15
2. The Scheissekommando was made up of our most cultured
patiets: academics, rabbis, writers, philosophers. As they
worked, they sang arias, and whisteling scraps of symphonies,
and recited poetry, and talked about Heine, and Schiller, and
Goethe In the officers club, when we are drinking (which
we nearly always are), and where shit is constantly mentioned
and invoked, we sometimes refer to Auschwitz as Anus Mundi.
And I can think of no finer tribute than that. chapter 5,
p.133
3. With rapture and relief he elides with the larger unit, the
glowing mass. He sheds the thing he often cant seem to bear:
his identity, his guiddity, lost in the crowds promiscuity. My
presence is never tinier. But its the same story. Render up
your soul, and gain power. chapter 2
4. We shout and we droo, with the distorted faces of babies;
individually we have no power or courage, but together we
form a glowing mass. chapter 7, p.160
5. the stone and metal hydra called society. chapter 3, p.95

The Alienating Effect of the Mass

114
Times Arrow, by Martin Amis, is a novel about the
experiments that were made on J ews at Auschwitz during the World
War II and the impact that these experiments had upon one of the
doctors.
The novel presents not only the J ews mutilation, but also
the main characters the doctors own mutilation, the mutilation of
his soul.
For the meaning of this fact to be deeper and more obvious,
the story is said by the main characters conscience, in an opposite
direction.
But where does this mutilation come from?
I believe that it comes from the doctors continuous change of
identity. He wonders through all kinds of identity, losing his own
one. This leads, of course, to losing his conscience too.
TOD FRIENDLY J OHN YOUNG HAMILTON DE SOUZA
ODILO UNVERDORBEN
From the first fragment we learn about Tods (the last identity
of the doctor ) fear and shame. We also find out that this fear is
frightening and unaccountable and that it is related to his own
mutilation. But what mutilation?
In the second fragment we have the image of the
Scheissekommando and that of the officers club. On one hand we
see the J ews who are cleaning the privies while talking about Heine,
Schiller and Goethe and on the other hand we see the German
officers who are drinking. So, we have a sort of reverse of things,
meaning that the people who are obliged to clean the dirt talk about
wise things, while the officers who are supposed to be high educated
are people that are talking about shit.
Therefore we can talk about two kinds of mutilation: the
mutilation of the J ews and the mutilation of the butchers. But which
of the two is the worst?
In my opinion both leave deep marks one physic and the
other one spiritual marks.
And now another question rises: what can we do against the
stone and metal hydra called society? The answer is in the last two
fragments that I extracted from the novel. The mass, the shining
mass can help you live or can kill you.
115
The only conclusion I have at the end of my essay is that the
mass society - is able to change the individual. And this is
perfectly represented by this novel: Odilo UNVERDORBEN
(Whole, incorruptible) becomes TOD (death) Friendly. In this
continuous struggle named LIFE you have only two choices: to
survive with the mass or to be crushed by it.

6.3. KAZUO ISHIGURO, THE REMAINS OF THE DAY

ROMAN ROXANA
Romanian-English

A Harmful Time

-But that doesnt mean to say, of course, there arent
occasions now and then-extremely desolate occasions-when you think
to yourself: What a terrible mistake Ive made with my life. And you
get to think about a different life, a better life you might have had. For
instance, I get to thinking about a life I may have had with you, Mr.
Stevens. And I suppose thats when I get angry ever some trivial little
things and leave [] After all, theres no turning back the clock now.
One cant be forever dwelling on what might have been. One should
realize one has as good as most, perhaps better, and be grateful.
I do not think I responded immediately, for it took me a
moment or two to fully digest these words of Miss Kenton. Moreover,
as you might appreciate, their implications were such as to provoke a
certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed-why should I not admit
it?-at that moment, my heart was breaking... (p.239)
This fragment, from The Remains of the Day written by
Kazuo Ishiguro in 1988, is representative; the book contains a story of
human and political regret. The author gives the narrators role to
Stevens - the main character - developing a personal narrative
(R.Barthes). Tzvetan Todorov highlights the terrible importance of
the act of the narration and according to Hayden White narrative
could offer a possible solution to how humanity tries to translate
116
knowing into telling, that is, the problem of giving shape to human
existence.
Ishiguros narration is filled with Stevenss rhetorical method;
this method is associated with England giving the novel its greater
authority as one grounded in English culture.
The tone of the novel is nostalgic or wistful and the regret is
overwhelming. After 34 years of dedicated work at Darlington Hall
for the so much admired Lord Darlington, Stevens-an English butler-
discovers that he had a misguided view over his priorities in life.
Stevens puts his absolute trust in a man who makes drastic mistakes.
In his devotion to the perfect gentleman, Stevens fails having a
loving relationship (not only a working one) with Miss Kenton, now
Mrs. Benn. The decision of making a trip to the West Country of
England-at Miss Kenton-corresponds to the desire of travelling
towards the past, of turning towards himself. Stevenss road trip
symbolizes his life; at the end of both-his life and his trips road-he
discovers that nothing can be saved. This decision - of travelling -
marks the beginning of Stevens acceptance concerning his unwise,
wrong decisions from the past. The only way he still can choose is the
way of resignation; it seems to be late for major changes in his life: I
gave my best to Lord Darlington. I gave him the very best I had to
give and now-well-I find I do not have a great deal more left to give.
(p.242)
Miss Kenton, in her sincere words encompasses the essence of
the novel and of human life. She recognizes she took wrong decisions
in the past, but she also suggests that people usually realize this, when
its too late, when the present transforms into an irreversible past. It is
also suggested that no matter what people choose in their lives, there
will always be place for remorse and regret. Miss Kentons advice is
that people should be pleased with their present status.
In the evening of his life, Stevens reached an unfortunate
conclusion: that all his dignity, in which he strongly believed, was an
illusion. In spite of his hope, Miss Kentons words awake him to
reality: theres no turning back the clock now.
Stevens tries to make a parallel between him and Lord
Darlington: Lord Darlington wasnt a bad man [] And at least he
had the privilege of being able to say at the end of his life that he
made his own mistakes [] He chose a certain path in life, it proved
117
to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least.
As for myself, I cannot even claim that (p.243)
At the beginning of the novel, Stevens presents his ideas about
the dignity as being the essential ingredient of greatness. Under his
mask of formality, he denies his personal feelings and believes, he
loses his individuality and personal life allowing his master to control
his entire being. He trusts completely his employer, permitting him to
be a spiritual master; this is the cause of the following, impending
crisis from the moment he finds out that Lord Darlington sympathized
with the Nazis during the World War II. He tries to excuse his lord,
because it is hard for him to see his life principles falling through.
The psychological destruction of human beings is another
effect of the war beside the material, physical destruction. There are in
the novel both literal and figurative deaths: deaths of loved ones and
deaths of dreams and ideas. Every character loses something in The
Remains of the Day. At the same time, war requires a new beginning
and people must adapt. War also makes people aware of their mistakes
and consequences. From this point of view, Stevens appears as an old-
fashioned and formal man, who has to change to please his new
employer, Mr. Farraday. Now, Stevens becomes aware of the
importance of open mindedness, individuality and love, he chose the
first and the rest of his life appears as a consequence to his choice.
Anyway, after all there is no longer the demand that once was for
butlers. In Kazuo Ishiguros book, time is pitiless.
But still: for a great many people the evening is the most
enjoyable part of the day[] I should cease looking back so much,
that I should adapt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of
what remains of my day. (p.224)
The remains of characters day seem to be the only real. In his
lifes evening he becomes aware of lifes real values. Although he was
against bantering, being to serious, he found in it a meagre
consolation and realized that in joking lies the key to human warmth
(p.245) Stevens will continue to exercise the art of bantering until
he will have the sense of humour!

Bibliography:
Kazuo Ishiguro The Remains of the Day, Faber and Faber London,
1989;
118
Sanda Berce Modernity in Contemporary English Fiction, Editura
Dacia, Cluj-Napoca, 2002

ERNA CISMAS
English-French

The political arena in The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Steadily, then, over the two years or so following Herr
Bremanns death, his lordship, together with Sir David Cardinal, who
became his closest ally during that time, succeeded in gathering
together a broad alliance of figures who shared the conviction that the
situation in Germany should not be allowed to persist. These were not
only Britons and Germans, but also Belgians, French, Italians, Swiss;
they were diplomats and political persons of high rank; distinguished
clergymen; retired military gentlemen; writers and thinkers. Some
were gentlemen who felt strongly, like his lordship himself, that fair
play had not been done at Versailles and that it was immoral to go on
punishing a nation for a war that was now over.(Ishiguro, Kazuo;
The Remains of the Day, Faber and Faber, London, Boston, 1989,
pp.74)
The Remains of the Day deals with the old English aristocracy
in their tragic attempt to avoid war with Germany and this political
issue is framed through the perspective of Mr. Stevens, the head butler
at Darlington Hall, protagonist and narrator of the novel.
The above fragment introduces us into the political arena
along with other nations united by a common interest: the means by
which the harshest terms of the Versailles treaty could be
revised.(pp.75)
History plays a very subtle but significant role in the novel
and the period between the wars has a special significance. It is very
important for us to understand what the Treaty of Versailles is all
about so that we can better understand Lord Darlingtons motivation
to help Germany.
The Treaty of Versailles was drawn up at the end of World
War I and signed between Germany and the Allies. One of the more
important and recognized agreements required that Germany accept
119
full responsibility for causing the war and make reparations to certain
members of the Allies. (http://en.wikipedia.org) Germany was also
dispossessed of all its overseas and African colonies. The treaty was a
shock and humiliation that led to the collapse of the German economy.
The collapse was caused also by the staggering cost of the war itself.
Herr Bremann, the character mentioned in the above fragment
was a distinguished German soldier who had fought in the World War
I, and a very close friend of Lord Darlington. He shot himself after the
war most likely due to the miserable conditions in Germany caused by
the Treatys agreements. Thats why Lord Darlington was so affected
and the tragedy of his friend determined him to act: he assembled
leaders of a wide variety of nationalities to revise the Treaty of
Versailles, but none of those present under his roof were government
officials. Nonetheless, taking into account that they were distinguished
figures in their countries, he hoped they could influence people who
held official offices before Prime Minister Lloyd George and thus a
favorable revision could be made in an upcoming conference in
Switzerland. He is so eager to make his dream come true that he
cannot even realize that he is used by the Germans to exert their Nazi
influence on British heads of state and thus he appears as a nave
dreamer.
The naivet and lack of professionalism in a political arena
are not allowed and that is why Mr. Lewis handles these matters
without gloves in his speech:
You gentlemen here, forgive me, but you are just a bunch of
nave dreamers. And if you didnt insist on meddling in large affairs
that affect the globe, you would actually be charming.
Lets take our good host herehe is an amateur and international
affairs today are no longer for gentlemen amateurs.have you any
idea what sort of place the world is becoming all around you? The
days when you could act out of noble instincts are over. So much
hog-wash has been spoken here these past two days. You here in
Europe need professionals to run your affairs. If you dont realize that
soon youre headed for disasterLet me make a toast.To
professionalism. (Ishiguro, Kazuo; The Remains of the Day, Faber
and Faber, London, Boston, 1989, pp.102)
120
The above speech was the reply to Monsieur Duponts
challenge, the French representative who disregarded Mr. Lewis
preventions and let himself led astray.
During the conference everybody had carefully played its role on the
political arena even if behind its curtains disparaging remarks had
been made. It was now time for Mr. Lewis, the American gentleman,
to put the cards on the table and make the other nations aware of the
disaster they were heading for due to their lack of professionalism.
They were old-fashioned gentlemen who did not fully understand
what they were doing and whose noble instincts were out of date; they
did not fit in a modern world in which they had no idea how to make
official decisions.
As I mentioned, disparaging remarks had been made behind
the political curtain as Mr.Lewis had tried to influence the final
decision. He tried to enlighten Monsieur Dupont- whose presence
there was extremely important because the French were the most
intransigent as regards releasing Germany from the cruelties of the
Versailles treaty(p.76)- telling him how despicable his nation is
considered because of their position towards Germany.
It was Mr.Lewis who admitted that France could not be
blamed for their position as Alsace and Lorraine had been taken away
by Germans. Germany had to be punished and he counted on the
position of France.
All nations desired peace with Germany but they were blind to
see the Nazi intentions and thus Monsieur Dupont put the American
gentleman in a bad position revealing remarks that had been made.
Mr.Lewis frankness had been misinterpreted but later on he proved to
have been right. Lord Darlington ends labelled as a Nazi sympathizer
and a traitor, and as if ironically, the new owner of Darlington Hall is
an American gentleman- Mr.Farraday.
As the narration is given by a butler, Mr.Stevens, who is
observing everything from the outside of the political arena, we are
given only small pieces of information- references to the Treaty of
Versailles, the rise of Nazi and so on.
All the circumstances portrayed are Stevens's recollections of
them and the style flows from his voice. We are strictly limited to
knowing only what Stevens wishes to reveal.
121
Regarding the political issues, he is naive failing to see the
implications of the war and the Nazi intentions and thus his views
remain outdated.
The narrative of the whole novel is a fluctuation between past
and present incorporating Stevens knowledge with his attention to
detail and his navet to the events he recounts.

6.4. SALMAN RUSHDIE, MIDNIGHTS CHILDREN

SIMONFI ARPAD
Romanian-English

So I was brought to my mother, and she never doubted my
authenticity for an instant. Ahmed Sinai, toe in splint, sat on her bed
as she said: Look , janum, the poor fellow, hes got his grandfathers
nose. He watched mystified as she made sure there was only one
head; and then she relaxed completely, understanding that even
fortune-tellers have only limited gifts. (Tick, tock p.117)

Midnight's Children is Rushdie at his finest. The book is
surrealist fiction that deals with the history of India from 1910 to the
declaration of the emergency in 1976.
The major political events that take place during these years
are visualized through the eyes (and nose) of Saleem Sinai, born on
the stroke of Midnight August 15, 1947. One would wonder how
effective the narrator is, taking into consideration the following
question: are the missing 4 decades (almost) from 1910 up to his birth
credible? Obviously we are faced with an author who is fully
unreliable, and this little detail makes the novel so irresistible. Salman
Rushdie does not always accurately recount the historic events
throughout the pages of his novel. Few pages have to be read in order
for the reader to get accustomed with the intentional nature of his
mistakes. Identifying these mistakes is here and there too easy: among
such we find historical and biographical nonsense.
A solid memory is the perfect tool for reiterating events to
which the author was physically linked. This connection started
122
obviously from the moment of his birth or else from the moment in
which India stepped into a new era. Nobody questions the narrators
enormous talent hidden behind a complex narrative technique,
involving first person narrative style. The narrative style resembles
more of an oral than a written experience, due to the fact that the
language used, is highlighted by the usage of the informal second
person, by which the author directly addresses to other people: What
are you telling me! You are an Anglo-Indian? Your name is not your
own?
The influence of a stream-of-consciousness writing is also
visible: all that he does is to rephrase his own past experiences.
Returning from the point from which we started unreliability
of an irresistible magic realism genre we build up the events by
introducing a conclusion that can be taken as reliable: So I was
brought to my mother, and she never doubted my authenticity for an
instant.
From the day of his birth, the first sensory experience starts to
configure itself. This is the point when the author changes into being
plausible within his memories. Further on we discover that smells,
tastes, sights, and feelings abound in Rushdies description of life
experience. And yet 11 years must pass till finally Mary Pereira
confesses and shocks everybody, unveiling the hideous truth of her
action on the night when several other children (1001 children) were
born, marking thus the face of a new India.
It is terribly shocking to see parents overwhelmed by joy,
blinded because of a similar nose to the one of an ancestor, more on to
know about Aminas naivety in consulting a fortune-teller. The false
blueprint, the innocent cuckoo has nothing to do with the unfortunate
situation as once again years have to pass till he develops his special
abilities reading ones thoughts and by that time the mystery is
solved by the villain herself.
It would be foolish to expect the young mother to know
everything from the beginning. In fact no reader should blame Amina,
as no female representative of her family ever inherited the special gift
of an itchy nose , to prevent the owner in case his life was
endangered.
The drama of the protagonists life lies in the sense of
homelessness, exile and alienation that grows eventually given his
123
parents treatment of him. He is the only one equipped with enough
supernatural power, all the other characters being thus foreign
travellers in a land surrounded by magic and inhabited by Shivas&
Parvaties.
Under such circumstances, one should not be so easily
convinced that there was only one head - and that was the right
one.

VERONICA CIUCHINA
English-French

Midnights Children the Conflicting Sense of Individual
and Collective Identity

and now, at last it is midnight. The monster in the streets has
begun to roar, while in Delhi a wiry man is saying, At the stroke of
midnight hour, while the world sleeps, India awakens to life and
freedom And beneath the roar of the monster there are two more
yells, cries, bellows, the howls of children arriving in the world, their
unavailing protests mingling with the din of independence which
hangs saffron-and-green in the night sky A moment comes, which
comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new;
when an age ends; and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds
utterance
1

In fact, all over the new India, the dream we all shared,
children were being born who were only partially the offspring of
their parents the children were also the children of the time: fathered,
you understand, by history. It can happen. Especially in a country
which is itself a sort of a dream.
2

Midnights Children is a magical-realist novel that presents
the history of India through the perspective of Saleem Sinai, born at
the precise moment of Indias independence from Britain. Salman
Rushdie successfully combines in his narrative the recount of
historical and social events with supernatural elements and fantastical
occurrences.
124
The most intimate thoughts and emotions of Saleem Sinai are
expressed through the first person narration, Rushdies style being
greatly influenced by the stream-of-consciousness writing and
reflecting the rephrasing and reworking of a writers mind.
He also uses the informal second person narrative style, which
takes the form of a dialogue between two voices: that of Saleem, the
narrator, and that of Padma, representing the audience. Thus, the
narrative style resembles oral expression rather than written
expression.
The constant shift back and forth in time represents a
dominant element in the narration of Saleems life story. He often
refers to events far before they occur in the novel. It is as if the novel
were a fragmented puzzle that the reader must solve in order to get
meaning from it, since the narrator does not respect a chronological
logic in his narration, but rather follows the wave of his emotions.
The fragment presents the birth of two children, Saleem and
Shiva, in Doctor Narlikars Nursing Home. It is midnight, on August
15
th
1947, when a wiry man, J awarlal Nehru announces that: India
awakens to life and freedom
By comparing the birth of the children with the so-called
rebirth of India, the writer suggests the invisible link between
personal lives and national history. That is, not only were the
generation of midnights children witnesses of the crucial historical
events of their time, but they even influenced their course; for
instance, Saleem implies that he was responsible for the death of
Nehru as my fate was linked by my birthday to that of the nation
and the father of the nation was Nehru.
3

Emphasizing this generations role, Rushdie states that the
children of midnight were also the children of the time, meaning
that their life path will identify itself with that of Indias as a new
nation.
The colours saffron and green hung by the din of
independence are used as symbols of national and religious
affiliations. Saffron, prominently placed on Indias national flag, is
symbolic of courage and determination, meanwhile green, one of the
colours of the Pakistans flag along with white, represents the
countrys Muslim majority.
125
By putting these two colours together, the writer underlines
the diversity and mingling of different nations, religions and cultures
in the same land.
Despite the strength and determination of such great men as
Nehru, who were tired of being long suppressed by the British
rulers, the dream the author refers to represents the difficult, almost
impossible task of forming a new nation out of a land with
innumerable language, religion and cultural differences. In this sense,
India, like any other country that steps out from the old to the new,
will have to face throughout this process a period of struggles and
conflicts.
But what is the cause of all these conflicts and struggles?
Well, Rushdie brings forth throughout the novel a very
important issue, that of fragmentation of identity, omnipresent in the
characters lives, who in search for self definition have to solve the
puzzle of their own identities. It is the case of Aadam Aziz, Saleems
grandfather, who up to his death had felt a void inside him as a result
of his lack of faith in God; the cracking of his skin predicting the
loss of the sense of identity.
This loss of identity is expressed in the fragment by the
midnight hour, the writer suggesting through the darkness of the
night, the lack of identity that India and the generation of midnights
children will experience throughout their life path.
Further on, what is more important is that Rushdie transposes
the role of fragmentation in the formation of identity from his
characters to his nation, India, whose early days as an independent
nation were fraught with division and strife. The scene in which
Saleems geography teacher Mr. Emil Zagallo rips out Saleems hair
represents a good example of the way the author draws parallels
between individuals and nation. He compares the childs face with a
map of India, pointing out its features and pretending they are various
geographic landmarks. Rushdie also makes a comparison between
Indias struggles with its neighbouring peoples and Saleems struggles
with his family and the members of the Midnights Children Club.
J ust like India, Saleem searches to understand his own
fragmented identity, but being the child of multiple nations, religions
and languages, he often has a contradictory sense of self. Thus, he is
always in the search for parental figures.
126
Strangely enough, his biological parents Vanita and Wee
Willie Winkie are the least important ones for him. Many different
characters metaphorically father Saleem and each time he experiences
some kind of rebirth. This continual search for parental figures is
explained by the feelings of exile and homelessness as well as by the
fragmentation of identity that Saleem experiences.
Likewise, after gaining its independence, India has had a
double parentage; that is, the nation was shaped by both native and
colonial traditions.
All in all, we might say that Salman Rushdie uses his magical
realist novel as a pretext to bring forth the important issue of the lost
or fragmented identity of individuals as well as of a nation, both
fathered by multiple traditions and having different origins, and
therefore, its continual search.

Notes

1. Salman Rushdie, Midnights Children, Picador. 1981, 116.
2. idem, 118.
3. idem, 279.
127
7. THE MODERN/IST & POSTMODERN/IST POEM.

7.1. MODERN POETRY

Modern poetry seems to be in between Romanticism and
Postmodernism. Randal J arrell in Kipling, Auden & Co. (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980) <<insisted that modern poetry was
nothing but what romantic poetry wishes or finds it necessary to
become: Romanticism holds in solution contradictory tendencies
which, isolated and exaggerated in Modernism, look startingly
opposed both to each other and to the earlier stages of romanticism.
J arrell explained that any qualities associated with modern poetry
violence, disorganization, obscurity are themselves romantic
phenomena. And having uncovered this continuity, he wondered what
modern poetry could possibly become in turn: How can poems be
written that are more violent, more disorganized, more obscure more
supply your own adjective than those that have already been
written?>>(in Levenson, 101).
J ames Longenbach concludes: <<J rgen Habermas has suggested
that modernity is distinguished by the development of autonomous
spheres of science, morality, and art. As art came to seem divorced
from the culture at large, the work of the ivory tower rather than the
community, artists paradoxically put greater pressure on art to perform
substantive social work. This is the dilemma that the modern poets
inherited [] As Habermas points out, the dilemma often leads to a
false negation of culture: everyday life could hardly be saved from
cultural impoverishment through breaking open a single cultural
sphere art.[] Growing out of romanticism, growing into
postmodernism, this hope for the power of poetry was both the dream
and the nightmare of the Modernist>>(Levenson, 103)
In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel
between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a
method which others must pursue after himIt is simply a way of
controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the
immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary
historyInstead of narrative methods we may now use the mythical
method. It is, I seriously believe, a step forward making the modern
world possible for art (T. S. Eliot)
128
History, Myth and Tradition
*

: Modernists were interested in
what was going on in the world and in the nature of historical
understanding as such. A myth should be concerned with values that
are trans-historical and it should reflect the superhistorical spirit
(Nietzsche). Tradition is a largely unconscious inheritage being
continually modified within the self. For instance J ames J oyces
Ulysses, with its burlesque jostling of cultural structures, myths,
discourses and intellectual disciplines, it re-enacts in contemporary
terms an ancient tale of homecoming and thereby expresses a modern
sense of what the human home is: a construction within a void, a
recognition of the self-grounding character of the human world; this
would be the modernist use of myth as an emblem of the human world
as self-created. In Kafkas case, there is a permanent anguish in the
enigmatic simplicity of fiction that comes from a desire to find rather
than create a meaning.

7.2. T. S. ELIOT, THE WASTE LAND

Eliots early criticism is interestingly (perhaps even
productively) paradoxical, since on the one hand he insists on a kind
of scrupulous formalism, criticizing Matthew Arnold for his social
concerns; but on the other hand, Eliots critical formulations are
predicated on historical and political agendas, however implicitly. It is
as if Eliot wants simultaneously to say that his concern is only with
poetry but not merely with poetry: discussing Donne, he is discussing
the fate of Western culture. This is another version of the diminished
poets dilemma: Eliot wants to assert the kind of powers Shelley
claimed for poetry without sounding like Shelley. And this dilemma
would ultimately help to determine the shape of The Waste Land, a
poem that has never been read comfortably as both a lyric poets

*

129
personal lament and a sages pronouncement on the fate of post-war
Europe (Levenson, 120).
The Waste Land was published in 1922. It is based on radically
experimental technique. The title, suggested by J essie L. Westons
study of the Grail legend, From Ritual to Romance (1920), refers to a
dry and desolate country which can be revived by a fertility ritual.
Using this as his central symbol for European life after World War I,
Eliot explores the various aspects of its sterility in five sections: the
Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death
by Water and What the Thunder said. The method throughout is
deliberately fragmentary, abandoning traditional verse forms for free
verse to juxtapose monologues or overheard snatches of conversation
by the inhabitants of the waste land with allusions, not merely to the
Grail legend, but to previous literature (Shakespeare and Dante in
particular), religious teaching (the Bible, St Augustine, and the
Upanishads) and myth. The resulting heap of broken images both
intensifies the portrait of spiritual decay and hints at the possibility of
redemption. With its repeated chant of Shantih, which Eliot himself
suggested can be translated as The Peace which passeth
understanding, the ending is deliberately enigmatic. Much critical
interpretation of The Waste Land has concentrated on gauging the
extent of its pessimism (Ousby, 981).
In The Waste Land Eliot used the Mythical method, to be found
in Ulysses as well. All the fragmentary passages seem to belong to
one voice, recalling memories, meditating, crossing spoken and
unspoken thoughts; but the one voice pertains to a multiple personality
beyond time and place. He is Tiresias (who resembles Gerontion) and,
as such, suffers with the women he observes; he is the knight from the
Grail legend; he moves through London (Unreal City) and
Baudelaires Paris and a phantasmal post-war Middle Europe; he is
Ferdinand from The Tempest and a Phoenician sailor anticipating his
own shipwreck (and hence, conceivably, Dantes Ulysses as well)
(Ford, 1982: 360).
Eliots poems speak simultaneously in the <<three voices of
poetry that Eliot defined in a lecture with that title in 1953: the
voice of the poet talking to himself or nobody, the voice of the
poet addressing an audience, and the voice of the poet when he
130
attempts to create a dramatic character speaking in verse.>>(in
Norton, 1218).


Alina Micu, Romanian-English

The deconstruction of an entire civilization is suggestively
described by T.S. Eliot through the metaphor of The Waste Land,
describing the devastated world left by the First World War and the
modern man thrown in a world where nothing had the same
importance or significance as before.
Throughout the first part of the poem, The Burial of the Dead,
we have a feeling of universal ruin given by the sterility and deep
intellectual uncertainty, people felt after the war, when all certainties
collapsed. This entire part is complex and widely allusive as the
author expresses his view on the moderns world sterility both sexual
and religious, the world being nothing more than a A heap of broken
images. In this world the modern man has nothing else but himself to
rely on (life is a continuous self-reference) and unfortunately there is
nothing within him that could give him the access to a fuller life and
he is forced to live in a state of spiritual inertia. The lost mans
attempts to redeem the original world are clearly evidenced by T. S.
Eliot when describing the modern mans anxious search for spiritual
guidance. I think that this search is best described in the Tarot
passage:

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations. 50
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
131
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.

This consultation of a clairvoyant proves that the modern man
looks for spiritual enlightenment and that he has not lost completely
his faith in the supernatural, in the mythical. He feels that it is only
something beyond man that can redeem him. Madame Sosostris is
supposed to have the ability to consult the cards which once
symbolized a hope for those who consulted them. Because of this she
is considered the wisest woman in Europe and maybe humanitys
last hope for a new life. But she Had a bad cold, a metaphor which
suggests that she was also embodied in the worlds desert and
moreover the modern man has abused the gods. As a result of these
she can no longer see nor change human fate. Thus, the modern man
consulting her cards tries in a desperate attempt to achieve spiritual
guidance through superstition and is cheated even here. He will be
bitterly disappointed, a feeling spread through out the poem.
Allegorically, all the gods consulted are predicting an
unchangeable fate. The drowned Phoenician Sailor is the symbol of
the fertility cults. Now we see him warning the modern man to Fear
death by water, the thing he mostly needs as the water represents the
vital element of life. So what was once vital to life is now threatening
to destroy it, the modern man confronting himself with an overthrown
system of values. Madame Sosostris also finds the man with three
staves, whom Eliot associated with the Fisher King (see his notes),
whose mutilation has brought a Waste land to his kingdom. This is an
allegory used by the writer to show that the modern man has abused
the gods and has despised them, actions that guided to their violent
murder. The fact that in the modern times there are things not even the
initiated ones can see is suggested by the fact Madame Sosostris can
not find the Hanged Man. His absence is the climax of the gods`
denying man the revival as he (in Eliots symbolism) crucially links
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the fertility cults to Christianity and the tradition of spiritual
redemption.
In order to better suggest mans damnation Eliot leaves the
modern man with one god, the one-eyed merchant, implying that the
god to whom the modern man pays tributes is the money. In fact we
see at the end of this first part that even the clairvoyant works for
money, delivering horoscopes and we also witness the transformation
this god made in humans: distrust, Tell her I bring the horoscope
myself: One must be so careful these days.
The feeling of hope is denied to modern man and his fate is
forever written as we see crowds of people, walking round in a ring,
which implies the limited space modern man has to live in, never to go
beyond it. The ring man is forced to live in gives the reader a
feeling of despair, of hysteria and makes him suffer from
claustrophobia. The mans plain and monotonous life is suggested by
Eliot by anchoring the next fragment in the concrete world of London
commuters.

7.4. POETRY AND IMAGE, IMAGINATION, IMAGERY, THE
IMAGINARY
*

Image
- a visual, physical representation of something (e.g. a
photography)
- a mental picture of some visible thing;
- images involve: senses, movement, pressure
- image may also be used to mean idea or vision
- as an artistic term, image refers to an artistic representation of
the visible world (Monets Sunrise) and it also refers to the
mental impression conjured up by such a representation. To
write them the artist uses figurative language to produce
mental impression in the mind of the reader.

*
From Murfin, Ross and Supryia M. Ray, The Bedford Glossary of Critical
and Literary Terms, Boston and New York, Bedford Books, 1997; Berce,
Sanda, Modernity in Contemporary English Fiction, Editura Dacia, Cluj-
Napoca, 2002, pp 89-105-131
133
Imagination
- in the Renaissance, associated with poetry, understood as
opposite to reason.
- In the Neo-Classical period, the minds power to scale up
images.
- In the late 18
th
century- opposed to reason - a source of
aesthetic pleasure
- For Romantics, a greater value, greater than fancy (Coleridge
explains fancy as reordering in the mind of sensory images,
rearrangement of what exists, while imagination is creative
and is not mechanical fancy, it constructs something that does
not exist in the world.)
Imagery
- the actual language that the writer uses to convey a visual
picture (to create or represent a sensory experience)
- the use of figures of speech to express abstract ideas in a vivid
and innovative way.
- The central component of all imaginative literature and it is
often considered the chief element in poetry.
- Two types: literal and figurative imagery: (1) literal - purely
descriptive, representing an object or event with words that
appeal to the experiences gained through 5 senses; (2)
figurative - real thing perceived by senses; it means something
more abstract- symbolism. What is the real?
The return of the intellectual thinking at the beginning of 20
th

century meant the collapse of reason, crisis of representation and the
beginning of uncertainty and relativity. Albert Einstein- theory of
relativity; Werner Heisenberg- uncertainty principle.
Such scientific discovery brings an epistemological change in
literature as it invented a new type of fiction that challenged the
realistic representation and its verysimilitude. It was Ihab Hassan
who introduced the literature of silence that broke reality and
language. These theories attacked the Western concepts of right-
wrong; true-fiction, reality-imitation
The concept of the real was undermined and it comprises a
plurality of versions so the category of world becomes plural,
instable, problematic, entailing model of self-living on ontological
134
plans, thus resulting in the uncertainty of the self. Wittgenstein defines
reality as a man-made game with language.
The relation between mind and reality is negotiated by the
laws imposed by the mind. This marked the beginning of pragmatism;
Richard Rorty affirmed that truth is a linguistic art effect.
The readers task is to find beyond language the world as
perceived by the author. The reader re-interprets the authors world,
so the authors reality.
Images, imagination, forms and functions
Images built up living worlds. Images are sources of fiction
that draw us from reality and they are ways of penetrating our
sensibility in order to get us in contact with the world. So the image
makes the individual perceive a different form of reality to remind
him about the human limits.
All images live through the power of language, therefore, for
grasping the role of imaginary one must search for the meaning of the
words.
Imagination is a mediator between abstract thinking and
senses. Descartes found the non-voluntary imagination (illusionary
dreams and reveries) and then the imaginative intention (which allow
the soul to build its own representation in the absence of the real
object).
In the view of Gaston Bachelard the act of imagining is
defined as a way of escaping from the real present world.
The power of the imaginary manifests itself within the act of
fictionality (literature). Therefore, fictionality is the interaction
between the real and the imaginary. The writers intention is to unveil
reality in order to present what is fictive as real. The literary text is a
mixture of fiction and reality. The interaction between the real and the
fictive is mediated by a third element which is the imaginary.
The reader can easily enter the writers text by being able to mediate
with his own imaginary the real and the fictive. That is why a new
concept is that of the intrusion of the reader that takes control over the
text itself by way of the imaginary.

7.5. DYLAN THOMAS, FERN HILL

135
ANTAL (BARABAS) ERIKA-HAJNALKA
Romanian- English

Nothing I cared, in the lamb-white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow-thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Dylan Marlais Thomas lived between 1914 and 1953. The
young Thomas spent his boyhood holidays at the Carmarthenshire
farm of his aunt. These holidays became a source for much of the
poetry he wrote until the 1940s. Images and experiences from his
childhood fill his poem Fern Hill. (Allen, Derek, Words, Words,
Words A History and Anthology of Literatures in English, p. 426)
The theme of Dylan Thomass poem Fern Hill is the regret for
the loss of childhood. From the first line of the poem, the poet
expresses his memories but also his sadness: Now as I was young
and easy under the apple boughs, And once below a time I lordly
had the trees and leaves, than he talks about the happy yard, the
farm and fields high as the house. He is young and happy and he
pretends to be prince of the apple towns. There is a sense of joy and
sadness too, as he realizes that youth does not last: In the sun that is
young once only, time let me play and be/ Golden in the mercy of his
means. The poet remembers awaking each morning in the farm,
where he pretends to be huntsman and herdsman. He is happy under
the clouds, as the heart was long, / in the sun born over and over/ I
ran my heedless ways. Dylan Thomas is looking back at his
childhood as being carefree and happy because time let him do what
he wanted. The last three lines of the poem bring us to the reality and
sadness of life: Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his
136
means/ Time held me green and dying/ Though I sang in my chains
like the sea.
Through imagination, the feeling of interest and excitement
about the content, and through images we are able to understand the
real meaning of the poem. Many images, symbols, and metaphors are
used in the poem.
Both the sun and moon are temporal references for the poet,
all the sun long and all the moon long are images of day and
night. The poet repeats the colours green and golden many times
in the poem. Golden is the colour of the childhood and green appears
as grass and trees: Golden in the heydays of his eyes, Golden in the
mercy of his means, /and green and golden I was huntsman and
herdsman, the calves, In the sun born over and over, Before the
children green and golden.
The symbols are: And honoured among wagons I was prince
of the apple towns, and I was green and carefree, famous among the
barns, which means that the animals from the farm loved him.
The repetition of the line As I was young and easy at the
beginning and end of the poem is used to show his happy and carefree
childhood and also that the past is alive in present. But at the end of
the poem he regrets the loss of childhood: Time held me green and
dying/ Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
One metaphor is located in the last line of the poem: Though
I sang in my chains like the sea, meaning that the poet is imprisoned
by time and the chains, but also has power like the sea (Allen, Derek,
Words, Words, Words A History and Anthology of Literatures in
English, p. 428)
Dylan Thomas shows us, in this poem, a boy who sees the
farm and nature, as a place of overwhelming beauty and then a man
who remembers that time passes. Fern Hill it is a poem about Dylan
Thomass belief that we can love nature, no matter if we are young or
old, but the cruel reality is that we are aging and we have to learn how
to live with that.
The mood is not the same all through the poem. The poet is
happy in the beginning and sad at the end of the poem. The subject of
the poem is interesting and the poet intends to make the reader feel
that it is important to spend more time in nature and in meditation.
Bibliography:
137

1. Derek D. Allen, Rache J . Roberts, J ames Tierney, George
Whiteside, Catherine Wrenn, Fabio G. Malgarett, Words,
Words, Words A History and Anthology of Literatures
in English, La Spiga Languages, Milan, 2003.
2. http://www.freeforessays.com, Copyright 2002-2003.
3. Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners,
Macmillan Education, Oxford, 2004.

7.6. TED HUGHES, PIKE

Pike, three inches long , perfect
Pike in all part, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.

Or move, stunned by their own grandeur
Over a bed of emerald, silhouette
Of submarine delicacy and horror.
A hundred feet long in their world.

In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads-
Gloom of their stillness:
Logged on last years black leaves, watching up wards.
Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds

The jaws hooked clamp and fangs
Not to be changed at this date;
A life subdued to its instrument;
The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.

Three we kept behind glass,
J ungled in weed: three inches, four,
And four and a half: fed fry to them
Suddenly there were two. Finally one.

With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.
138
And indeed they spare nobody.
Two, six pounds each, over two feet long,
High and dry and dead in the willow-herb

One jammed past its gills down the others gullet :
The outside eye stared : as a vice locks
The same iron in this eye
Though its film shrank in death.

A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that had planted them

Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightfall I dared not cast

But silently cast and fished
With the air frozen on my head
For what might move, for what eye might move.
The still splashes on the dark pond,

Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath nights darkness had freed,
That rose slowly towards me, watching .

DOINA MIHAELA BITA
English-French

The poem Pike is part of the collection Lupercal, inspired from the
life and experience of the author. As a child he loved wandering in
nature, and enjoyed fishing and hunting.
Animals appear frequently in Hughes poems and the common
theme of these poems is the wildlife of the moors and its harsh
139
struggle for survival. Ted Hughes became fascinated by pike fishing
and the fish later became the subject of his poem Pike. This poem
describes the wild and mysterious aquatic life.
The main themes of this poem are the primitivism and the duality
of nature, as well as the power among species. The author gives a very
accurate description of the pike in its natural environment.
There are four stages of action in this poem: in the first one the
persona is invisible at the beginning. The reason for this is that the
author wants to render the scene that opens the poem as objective as
possible. In the first four stanzas Hughes vividly creates the image of
a pond, the place where the pike lives.
The pike is a predatory fish led by its natural instinct of
preservation; it kills other fish in order to survive. Its power comes
from the violent nature and ferocity Killers from the egg: the
malevolent aged grin.
The acoustic and the visual image fuse together in order to give a
clear impression to the reader: Pike in all parts, green tigering the
gold./ They dance on the surface among the flies
The duality of nature, one of the themes mentioned earlier, is
illustrated very clear in the second stanza: Over a bed of emerald,
silhouette/ Of submarine delicacy and horror.
The second stage of action is the experience of keeping fish
behind the glass. My opinion is that now, that he has described the
fish, he quietly observes their behaviour. J ungled in weed the fish
eat each other and in the end only one remains.
The third stage of action recalls the incident of the two dead pikes.
Ted Hughes emphasizes the violence and cruelty of animal nature,
characterized by the need to kill. And indeed they spare
nobody..The same iron in this eye
Finally, the last stage of action is the fishing experience which the
author made late at night. This experience took place in his childhood,
its memory Had outlasted every visible stone/ Of the monastery that
had planted them.
He resists the cold With the hair frozen on my head and the
sleep Frail on my ear against the dream for the pleasure of fishing,
he is very attentive for what might move, for what eye might move.
The adult Ted Hughes recalls a pleasant memory of a fishing
experience that he had as a child, but also expresses his own instinct
140
of preservation (through the pike-predatory fish) against the critics
of his time.
Ted Hughes says that Words that live are those we hear or
which we see.or which we tasteor touchor smell. Hughes
poem Pike conveys this type of living words through strong
metaphors, epithets and personifications.

7.7. SEAMUS HEANEY, PUNISHMENT

I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.
.
to store
the memories of love.
Little adultress,
before they punished you

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur
(Seamus Heaney, Punishment)

CALIN DANIEL BLAGA
English-French

In the poem, Seamus Heaney describes the beauty of a
womans corpse who was hung for being an adulteress. He can see the
preserved body lying in the bog. Although there are only remains of
141
the body, he can still see her beauty describing it in a grotesque
matter.
The author uses a language that creates a sort of intimacy
between them. The first two lines of the poem make the reader think
that he can feel the rope tightened around his neck and the wind gently
blowing, barely touching his naked front. This intimacy is so close
that it can only be encountered at persons very close to each other.
From here, there is only one step to physical pleasure, meaning
sexuality. The first two lines from the second stanza: It blows her
nipples / to amber beads, are very erotic and sexually charged, telling
us that he is very attracted to her, even aroused at her sight. Even in
death he cant help seeing her as erotic. His imagination comes into
play and helps him to see her how she looked like before her death. In
his mind he tries to resurrect her and is this image that resulted attracts
him sexually. Maybe he is also drawn by the sin she committed,
adultery. For most men this would mean she is an easy catch for
them. Adultress is also a sexually charged word. This crime can
only be done through physical or sexual intercourse, so the author
knowing she was killed for this reason increases his interest towards
her. He feels this, unlike other men who reacted violently towards her
sexual power, this is mainly the reason she was punished for. The
author feels empathy for her and even takes it higher, mentioning the
word love. He does not criticize her for what she did and does not
condemn her love for someone else. Through the language we can
sense an empathic identification for the girl.
From here, as I previously mentioned, he moves on saying I
almost love you. The impact of her imagined beauty is so strong for
the poet that he starts passing from physical pleasure to sentiment. He
has contradictory feelings for her, he does not even know exactly what
he really feels for her. He comes so close to saying he loves her and
this almost represents his will to attend an even higher level of
intimacy with her. Through this, he criticizes men who would punish
her, he included, for not being able to accept her feelings that enhance
her sexual power. Still, his masculinity is an impediment in the way of
fully understanding the female body. It is this why he calls himself
the artful voyeur. He can watch and observe, imagining only how she
felt, but not really experiencing her feelings with the same intensity.
He takes this comforting position where he cannot be punished, for he
142
cannot be caught. He remains hidden, not actually taking part in the
action, only watching, not doing anything physical to be accused of.
By being a voyeur, he senses a sort of passive obsession that
emphasizes her eroticism. Even from this position, he feels her body
and mind through the intimacy he managed to construct between
them.
Her death teaches him an important lesson by showing him
the inequality of desire. Only through imagination can he feel with the
same intensity as she did.

7.8. ROGER MCGOUGH, FART

He was lyin there so ier
Stabbed him. J ust the once.
In the stomach. Crashed out
on the sofa he was. After the pub.

He wasnt asleep. Some nights
hed pass out but most nights hed pretend.
Lie there he would, eyes closed.
Burp. Fart, like I wasnt there.

Eggin me on to say something.
And if I did. If I ever did,
you know, say what I thought
hed be up in a flash.

Because thats what he wanted
Me to say somethin. Lose my temper.
Id goaded him, you see. Asked for it/
You asked for it, hed say

Afterwards, in bed, me sobbin.
A fresh bruise on an old swellin.
Not on the face. He never hit me
on the face. Too calculatin.
143

Always the body. Somach, kidneys
He used to be one of you, see.
He knew where to hit.
Cold. Always in control.

But tonight, I took control.
Picked up the breadknife and consciously
he was getting ready to let one go
I could see that.

The veins on his neck standin out
Throbin. White against the purple
Eyes behind closed lids, flickerin
Waitin to jump out of me

So ier stabbed him. J ust the once.
He farted and screamed at the same time.
I know that sounds funny, but it wasnt
Not at the time. Not with the blood

He rolled of the sofa
Hunched on his knees, holdin the knife.
Not tryin to pull it out.
J ust holdin it like keeping it in

Then he keeled over and that was that
I put my coat on and came down here
And what I want to know is
Whats goin to happen to the kids?

CARMEN ANDREEA BICHIS
Romanian-English
THE ABUSED WOMAN

Fart is a poem that perfectly demonstrates McGough`s
144
ability to use dark humour for serious purpose. (Allen Derek, Words.
Words. Words, 453).
Because thats what he wanted
Me to say somethin. Lose my temper.
I`d goaded him, you see. Asked for it
You asked for it, hed say.
The poem presents the woman that is dominated, beaten and
subjugated by the man. The woman suffers and does not do anything
for her life or does something to improve her life. She suffers and
suffers until she realizes that she is so humiliated that she cannot
accept it anymore and than she takes control saying and making what
she wants.
It can be mentioned that the poem is about the fight between
sexes. This poem shows us that the man and the woman are not equal,
the man is superior. At the beginning of the poem the woman is naive
and manipulated by her husband. In the end she will change and she
will take revenge. She becomes a different woman who knows what
she wants.
The situation of the woman is presented at the beginning in a
comic way and at the end, in a tragic way. The main theme of the
poem is the maltreatment of women. The man is presented here as a
complex one, he does not understand the woman or her needs. He is
an uncommunicative person and he hits his wife telling her You
asked for it. I think that only those men who feel inferior or are
incapable of doing something with their lives hit their wives because
only than can they feel strong. They want to show their wives that
they have the control.
The man wants the woman to lose her temper because if he
hits her, he can protect himself in the eyes of other people, saying:
you asked for it. This is the perfect answer to the question Why did
you hit me?
The man makes the woman say something wrong (or only say
something) and then they begin to quarrel, he hits her showing her that
he is the head of the family and she is his servant.
When the woman said, Id goaded him, you see. Asked for
it I can say that she thinks that the husband is right when he says that
she asked for it, but this is not true. The woman is confused. She lives
in a beautiful lie and she refuses to see the true nature of her man.
145
He never hit me on the face ...He knew where to hit. This
man is too calculated because he knows where to hit a woman.
Nobody will find out that he beats his wife and he will always appear
as a kind man in front of everybody.
In the end the woman will stab him, but we do not know if the
man dies because McGough does not tell us. What she did is like an
escape from her marriage that was for her a yoke and something
tormenting.
I put my coat and came down here
And what I want to know is
What is goin to happen to the kids?
The woman decides to leave her husband because of being
humiliated. The child is a victim of their relationship and he is the one
who will be affected.
A possible answer of the final question Whats goin to
happen to the kids? is the fact that she will take care of them alone. I
think that the message of this poem is to make abused women leave
theirs husbands in order to live a decent and better life.

Bibliography
Allen Derek , Rachel J .Roberts, J ames Tierney Words Words
Words , La Spiga Languages, Milan, 2003

146
8. MODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM AND DRAMA

8.1. MODERNISM AND DRAMA

Christopher Innes in Modernism in Drama (Levenson, 130)
states: At first sight it might seem contradictory to include drama in a
discussion of Modernism. As a movement, Modernism has been
defined in artistic terms through the sculptures of J acob Epstein or
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky or
Whyndham Lewis, while in literary terms its usage has been restricted
to the works of poets and novelists: pre-eminently T. S. Eliot, Ezra
Pound, J ames J oyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. Indeed, in
the various critical studies of the movement published over the last
half-century, drama has been conspicuous by its absence; [] By
contrast, drama in the twentieth century has been highly international,
with English-speaking playwrights and directors responding to
innovations from Europe, and having their experiments picked up in
turn. It is also true that theatrical developments over the century do
not fit the same chronological frame as that for poetry or the novel,
where the tow decades from 1910 to 1930 are generally held to mark
the boundaries of the movement. By comparison, drama had already
staked out a disctinctively modernist territory by the turn of the
century with a work like August Strindbergs A Dream Play (1902).
[] writing for performance is very different to writing for a literary
magazine, or creating art in a studio. Any stage has a pre-set
architectural frame, which conditions the dramatic material and is
inherently resistant to change. Even an alternative space outside the
format of mainstream theatre establishes specific actor-audience
relationships that automatically become interpreted in conventional
terms, as the example of the Dadaists indicates. Nothing could have
been more iconoclastic than their Zurich performances during the First
World War, which assaulted bourgeois sensibilities through sound
poetry and nonsense dialogue, musical cacophony, and deliberately
tawdry non-representational costuming in minidramas that parodied
any aesthetic expectations. [] As a public event, performances are
not only more open to censorship, but subject to normative pressures
from the spectators as a group. There are also other basic elements of
theatre that compromise innovation. By contrast with other forms of
147
authorship, playwrights cannot communicate directly with those being
addressed, and so retain only a limited control over their creation.
Their work becomes literally interpreted by actors whose techniques
are normally already established, and therefore liable to mould the
final product in traditional ways. [] In addition, the nature of theatre
as both a group activity and to some degree a mass medium
contradicts such significant facets of Modernism as its stress on the
individual egoism of the artist and its elitism.
At the same time, the theatres intrinsic connection to physical
reality and social existence make some of the key modernist
principles inapplicable. On the stage, art could neither assert itself as
an autonomous activity, independent of external experience, nor aspire
to pure form. In sharp contrast to the modernist drive in poetry or
painting, imitation was always present, being the essential basis for
acting. Simply presenting a sequence of actions in a temporal and
spatial frame evoked the narrative method that Eliot rejected, along
with Kandinsky, whose declaration the the literary element,
storytelling or anecdote must be abandoned was picked up by Pound
and the Vorticists. Abstraction too proved possible to only a very
limited degree. Both the Dadaists and the Futurists attempted to distort
or disguise the human element by using sharply focused lighting to
fragment the performers figure and geometrical costumes to reduce
bodily shapes to cones, globes, cylinders, or straight lines. The Dada
cabaret tended to grotesque deformation []
One of the defining characteristics of the movement is an explicit
attempt to formulate a unified theory of modernity. To be complete
this would have to include drama, although taking into account the
nature of the theatre as an artistic instrument and as a social
institution, the qualities displayed are rather different than in poetry or
painting, even though theatrical performance includes both forms.
What in those types of art might count as traditionalist, even a reaction
against Modernism, may be an expression of the modernist spirit in
the theatre (Levenson, 130-132).

8.2. SAMUEL BECKETT, WAITING FOR GODOT

148
The theatre of the Absurd refers to twentieth-century works
that depict the absurdity of the modern human condition, often with
implicit reference to humanitys loss or lack of religious,
philosophical, or cultural roots. Such works depict the individual as
essentially isolated and alone, even when surrounded by other people
and things. Although drama has been the medium of choice for
Absurdist writers, the term may be applied to any work of literature
that stresses an existential outlook, that is, one depicting the lonely,
confused, and often anguished individual in an utterly bewildered
universe.
Because writers associated with this movement believe that the
only way to represent the absurdity of the modern condition is to write
in an absurd manner, the literature of the Absurd is as bizarre in style
as it is in subject matter. Conventions governing everything from plot
to dialogue are routinely flouted, as is the notion that a work of
literature should be unified and coherent. The resulting scenes,
actions, and dialogue are usually disconnected, repetitive, and
intentionally nonsensical. Such works might be comic were it not for
their obviously and grotesquely tragic dimensions.
The genre has its roots in such literary movements as surrealism
and expressionism and owes a great debt to the works of Franz Kafka.
It developed in France during the 1940s, in the novels and
philosophical writings of J ean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The
theatre of the absurd emerged around 1950 with Eugne Ionescos The
Bald Soprano (1958), La Cantatrice Chauve (1854), in which, not
surprisingly, there is no soprano, let alone a bald one. Equally
influential was Samuel Becketts play Waiting for Godot (1954), in
which two tramps wait in vain for someone who may not even exist
and with whom they are not even sure they have an appointment
(Murfin, 2).
In Act One, Estragon and Vladimir wait beside a leafless tree for
the arrival of Godot. In order to pass the time, they play verbal games
reminiscent of the cross-talk of music-hall comedians. When Pozzo
arrives, holding his slave Lucky with a rope, the tramps wonder if he
is Godot, but Pozzo denies knowing Godot. To the disconfort and
confusion of Vladimir, Estragon and the audience, he makes Lucky
dance and then think. The long tirade of Luckys thought is
allusive and incoherent. Master and slave depart and a boy arrives to
149
tell the tramps that Godot will not be coming that day but surely
tomorrow.
In Act Two the tree has leaves, but there little other evidence of
change as Vladimir and Estragon continue waiting. Pozzo enters
again, but blind and dependent on the guiding rope that blinds Lucky
to him. Lucky is now dumb, but Pozzo is unaware of any difference.
When they have gone, a boy, who may or may not be the same boy
but who claims to be his brother arrives with the same message. Still
determining to go, the tramps do not move. As one critic observed,
Nothing happens twice.
Waiting for Godot inspired a great variety of interpretative
criticism, much of it centred on the character of the cryptic Godot. The
plays allusiveness seemed mischievously to invite such speculation
by its allusiveness. Its real subject, though, is not Godot but waiting
(Ousby, 971).


Iszlai Emese, History-English

" Pozzo: (suddenly furious). Have you not done
tormenting me with your accursed time! It's
abominable! When! When! One day, is that not
enough for you, one day like any other day, one day
he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go
deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die,
the same day, the same second, is that not enough
for you? (Calmer.) They give birth astride of a
grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night
once more.(He jerks the rope.) On!" [...]
" Vladimir: Was I sleeping, while the others
suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I
wake, or think I do, What shall I say of today? That
with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall
of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed,
with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably.
150
But in all that what truth will there be? (Estragon,
having struggled with his boots in vain, is dozing off
again. Vladimir stares at him.) He'll know nothing.
He'll tell me about the blows he received and I'll
give him a carrot. (Pause.) Astride of a grave and a
difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the
grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to
grow old. The air is full of our cries. (He listens.)
But habit is a great deadener. (He looks again at
Estragon.) At me too someone is looking, of me too
someone is saying ,he is sleeping ,he knows nothing,
let him sleep on.(Pause.)I can't go on!(Pause.)What
have I said? [...]"

The "laugh of four continents", Samuel Beckett's Waiting for
Godot has become a classic piece of the drama which literature so
rightly calls "absurd". Once a revolutionary piece which failed to meet
the public's taste in the USA (New York) today "...Godot" is
considered one of the many similar literary works but which is a
"must" for the reader who wishes to dig deeper into the apparent chaos
of Modernism.
Modernist artists had very different conceptions of what exactly
this new trend was all about but they certainly agreed on one thing: art
and literature had come to a point where efforts to develop them had
failed. Times changed so dramatically, the humankind experienced
such horrors that literature as the world had known it was quite unable
to reflect the newly created situation in the world.
Beckett gets rid of all the conventions a traditional play should
consider according to its definition. That would most certainly explain
readers possible state of confusion while reading "...Godot" as the
mind trained on studying the classical drama finds it difficult to deal
with a literary work that utterly lacks a chronological plot, themes,
logical language and identifiable settings. There is no real beginning
and no real end, no story in a chronological sense which usually
implies a certain evolution of events and characters. There are no
heroes, the five characters in the play do not seem to have
accomplished or realized anything, there is no real dialogue as what is
said or uttered do not reflect the personality of the characters and
151
could easily be attributed to any one of them. As for the language
Estragon and Vladimir, the two bums, apparently excel having a
"conversation" on talking about things that do not really matter. It is
just about the passing of time:
" Estragon: (chewing.) I asked you a question.
Vladimir: Ah.
Estragon: Did you reply?
Vladimir: How's the carrot.
Estragon: It's a carrot.
Vladimir: So much the better, so much the better.(Pause.)
Estragon: I've forgotten.(Chews.)That's what annoys me.[...]"
Still Beckett decided to use the play format, an excellent choice
which creates an intensity of the many ideas that stay hidden behind
the clumsy, sometimes irrational conversations. Doing away with
traditional concepts of drama serves the play wonderfully as the
author has got the chance to present these ideas without the burden of
the cannon. We find ourselves in a post apocalyptic-like world, where
time and location does not really matter and man lives like animals. In
this oversimplified context some very basic questions pop up to puzzle
us but we would not deal with the Theatre of Absurd if it gave us the
answer to them.
The fragments chosen are from the second (and last) act .The
first one is Pozzo's reply related to questions about time and existence,
the second one is Vladimir's soliloquy which, in a way, continues the
idea expressed in Pozzo's "speech".
Existentialist ideas were pretty influential in the first half of the
20th century especially due to the horrible effects of the two world
wars. Basically existentialist philosophers argued that the universe had
no sense whatsoever and as a consequence life was meaningless and
absurd."...Godot" is considered an existentialist drama but in spite of
its subtle pessimistic overtones there is still one element that seems to
contradict this bleak outlook on life; and that is hope. Whether placed
in Pozzo, Lucky, Godot or death, the hope that deliverance of some
kind will eventually come to Vladimir and Estragon (and why not to
mankind) influences the atmosphere of the play considerably. To
repent was not an option, suicide-though there had been some
attempts- proved to be failure, Pozzo and Lucky turned out to be as
miserable as they had been, so Vladimir and Estragon's only choice is
152
to wait for something to happen. Mr. Godot fails to turn up night after
night thus the only thing that the two bums are left to do is hope that
he eventually would show up. This last hope seems to help them face
a new day which will probably turn out to be as difficult to bear as the
previous one. It is difficult not to see or feel some of the sufferings of
the characters which can be traced back to the idea of the original sin.
It is the tragedy of humankind to drag along the burden of its
existence and wait for some sort of salvation to come.
But the question still remains: how do the characters cope with
the burden of life? How do they manage to keep going on in spite of
their misery?
The answer is fairly simple. Beckett tempers with their memory, their
notion of time. A good way to bear the thought of another similarly
unbearable day is to forget everything that has previously happened or
been said Estragon has such a "brilliant" defence mechanism and he is
bent on rejecting all the time Vladimir's repeated attempts to bring
things into his mind.
On the other hand Vladimir seems to be obsessed with the notion
of time and he constantly tries to drag Estragon into his games of
memory because he knows that without the same collective notion of
the past their very existence is questionable. His insistence to find out
things from the past makes Pozzo become irritated proclaiming his
existentialist views on life. What happens and when things happen
does really not bear any significance since life itself is absurd. We
come from nowhere and we don't go anywhere so keeping record of
our actions can't possibly make any difference. Life is constant
suffering and no awareness of any mental history can change that.
It's not easy to keep track of time in such a hostile environment
where the evidences of the passing of it are chiefly circumstancial:
Pozzo's blindness, Lucky's muteness and the leaves on a previously
bare tree. In such conditions Vladimir's doubts and hesitations are
perfectly understandable. He ends up questioning his judgement, he is
not sure what is real and what is a dream any more. Past, future
become undistinguishable and blur, sufferings are buffered by the
power of everyday routine.
It is worth noticing that the characters' "conversation" reflects
their feelings and the situation they are in. They don't deliver long,
coherent, rational speeches but what they say are just fragments of
153
ideas produced by a confused, tired and often apathetic mind in a
world where words and communication play an insignificant part [for
what are words anyway?].
Waiting for Godot is about humanity in a non-human environment, it
is about the efforts to keep one's human identity in animal-like
conditions, it is about adapting to these conditions and experiencing
with resignation the degradation of one's faculties.

8.4. DRAMA AND CONSTRUCTING/ DE-CONSTRUCTING
IDENTITIES

Identity
*
- Identity is not given, it is constructed.
: - Identity is constructed, it is not something that comes
from the outside (19
th
century);
Definition: Identity is a complex and multidisciplinary process. It is
communication and/or behaviour. It is strictly connected to several
simple rules:
1. it makes Change possible
2. its target could be an individual or a group
3. it is the instrument of design, marketing, human resources,
politics etc
4. it is an economic resource as it coordinates what must be
done.
Identity can project 4 themes:
1. Who you are
2. What you do
3. How you do it
4. Whats the goal, where you want to finish
It is much visible in ones behaviour with oneself or with the others
(ex. United Colours of Benetton)

Identity and Postmodern Literature
**

*
From Olins, Wally, Noul ghid de indentitate Wolff Olins, Gower Publishing
Limited, 1995, pp.xi; 3;

154

Is our identity inside us like the kernel of a nut?
Personal identity is not inside us.
Arguments:
1). identity is relational- it is not inside a person because it is the result
of a relation between I and the other(s).
I =a persons identity depends on the difference between I and the
other(s).
Difference =it refers to the inner life of a person but also the system
of differences through which individuality is constructed. Therefore,
personal identity is not contained in the body at all; it is constituted by
difference.
2). Identity is not within us because it exists only as narrative to
say who we are, we tell our story =to externalize ourselves as if
talking to someone else self representation.
Oneself narrates not only from inside but also from other
stories, from outside, through the process of identification with other
characters.
A construction of identity implies narration in the processing
of conceiving ourselves, of our making an inner life.

Narrationcharacter
ourselvesI the reader constructs his/her identity by means
of characters =novel =literature.

We make reference about fictional characters that are not very
different from the inferences that we make about real people.
Therefore, the readers response to a text is manufactured by the
rhetoric of the narration.
Like the camera in a film, the perspective of a narrative is
always located somewhere above events, amongst them. Like the
camera, the narrative voice can move from one point of view to
another. Therefore, analyzing the narrative point of view is not enough
for identifying identity.

**
From Currie, Mark, Postmodern Narrative Theory, MacMillan, 1998, pp.
17-33
155
The analysis of point of view is a great triumph of the 20
th

century but it is only analytical terminology.
Therefore: How can techniques in narrative points of view
control the readers sympathy for characters?
Feeling sympathetic for a character feeling =sympathetic for
people in life.
There are 2 basic propositions about sympathy which apply to
narrative and life:
1. more sympathy for people that we know a lot about
2. we sympathize with people that other people judge
incorrectly.
In fiction we get sympathy through the narrator or through the
direct access to the minds of characters.
Much of contemporary fiction acquires its moral controversy
through the creation of sympathy for morally offensive characters.
Literature creates an intimacy between readers and moral
monsters purely through access to their minds.
A story should be analyzed for:
- its technical operations
- the structure of its multiple voices
- its control of access to the inner life of characters
- without any reference to the authorial intention? With reference to
intentio-auctoris as well.
The communication between a single-minded author and a
singular reader results not only in the analysis of rhetoric but also in
the analysis of ideology.

8.5. HAROLD PINTER, THE CARETAKER

ANDREEA SNPLEAN
English French

Harold Pinter is an English playwright, known for his so-
called comedies of menace, which humorously and cynically depict
people attempting to communicate as they react to an invasion or
threat of an invasion of their lives. (Microsoft Encarta 2006)
156
Pinter has been associated with the theatre of the absurd, with
dramatists like Samuel Beckett and Eugen Ionesco.
The Caretaker was first produced in London in 1960 and was
Harold Pinters first major success as a playwright. It received the
Evening Standard Award for best play of 1960.
The Caretaker has no plot, there is only something that
resembles a plot, but it is very incoherent and confusing, just like the
characters, it is difficult to understand their actions and motivations.
This also happens with the language, Pinter is noted for his unique use
of dialogue. The characters speak in broken sentences, repeat
themselves and pause a lot for no apparent reason, which exposes the
characters alienation from each other.
The play has three characters: two brothers, Aston and Mick,
and a tramp, Davies.
Aston is a man in his early thirties who was hospitalized in a
mental institution and undergone electric shock treatment. He lives in
a decrepit room with a leaky ceiling and full of junk. He invites
Davies, an old tramp, into his home, after saving him from a beating,
and asks him to stay, offering him a bed to sleep in and some money.
He becomes a sort of benefactor for him. Davies accepts the
arrangement, but only until he gets himself sorted out: gets some
shoes, the weather breaks and hell be able to go to Sidcup to recover
his papers from an old friend. Although he is homeless, he still
complains about the conditions of the room, he says he is used to
much better.
Mick, Astons brother, is a man in his late twenties. He is a
contractor and has an aggressive and domineering behaviour. It seems
that he has serious communication problems with his brother, most
probably because of the house they both own and because Aston is
jobless, he doesnt like to work, he is afraid of working. Micks dream
is to fix up the house and transform it into a palace, but because he
cant communicate with his mentally ill brother, because they are not
able to co-operate with each other, there is no progress being made on
the house. He doesnt like Davies intrusion into their lives and starts
to terrorize, to taunt and intimidate him. He wants to have control over
him, since he cannot control his brother, Aston, who has a quite
passive and indifferent character.
157
Davies is offered the job of caretaker of the house by both
brothers, first by Aston and then by Mick, who perhaps wants to
maintain in this way the control over him, or they both want him to be
the mediator of their relationship, to help them communicate with
each other and help repair the house they live in. But Davies cant
understand why anyone would want someone like him to be the
caretaker and he is afraid not to fall into a sort of trap, especially
because in the beginning Mick reacted violently to his intrusion. This
is one of the enigmas of the play and any answer to it is an
interpretation. Davies, being a leech, a parasite, and a cunning person,
tries to turn the brothers against each other, instead of helping them.
He allies with Mick and believes that together they can drive Aston
out of the house. His relationship with Aston slowly deteriorates up
until Aston asks him to leave, but Davies, firmly believing that Mick
wants to get rid of his brother, replies: Not me, man! You! But
when Mick finds out that Davies relationship with his brother broke
down, he realizes that Davies is no longer of any use to them and he
also terminates the relationship with him, under a false pretext. Davies
is forced to leave the house.
So, in the end, they all got back to where they started from. A
quite tragic ending if we think that it could have ended in another way,
they could have co-operated with each other, especially that it was in
their best interest. So why did they fail? Was it meant to end like this?
I guess this is why it is called an absurd play, and everybody is free to
give its own interpretations to it. Probably this is Pinters way of
keeping the audience involved in the action of the play.
All in all, I think that Harold Pinters The Caretaker is a great
play, a masterpiece of contemporary literature and I look forward to
seeing it on stage.

8.6. TOM STOPPARD, ARCADIA

ALINA CHIOREAN
Romanian- English
158
THOMASINA: When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the
spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture
of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backward, the jam
will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and
continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?
SEPTIMUS: No.
THOMASINA: Well, I do. You cannot stir things apart.
SEPTIMUS: No more you can, time must run backward, and since it
will not, we must stir our way onward mixing as we go, disorder out of
disorder into disorder until pink is complete ()
VALENTINE: It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again,
knowing almost nothing. People were talking about the end of
physics. the problem turns out to be different. We can't even predict
the next drip from a dripping tap when it gets irregular. Each drip sets
up the conditions for the next, the smallest variation blows prediction
apart, and the weather is unpredictable the same way, will always be
unpredictable. When you push the numbers through the computer you
can see it on the screen. The future is disorder. A door like this has
cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's
the best possible time to be alive ()
BERNARD: Don't confuse progress with personalities. A great poet is
always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There's no rush
for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle's cosmos.
Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God's
crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. ... If knowledge isnt
self-knowledge, it isnt doing much, mate. I can expand my
universe without you. `She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless
climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in
her aspect and her eyes.'
Tom Stoppard is one of Englands greatest playwrights,
alongside G. B. Shaw, J ohn Osborne, and David Hare. Yet, Stoppards
159
place is considered unique, for he writes plays, and creates worlds,
unlike other dramatists. In a career of thirty years, he has made his
audiences laugh, cry and think, all at the same time.
Arcadia premiered at the Royal National Theatre of Great
Britain in 1993, won the prestigious Olivier Award for best play.
Arcadia does not respect all the conventions of a traditional
play, and this fact made it famous and contemporary. While the play is
set in only a single location a large room in the Sidley Park manor,
estate of the Coverly family the action occurs in two different time
periods: the early 19
th
century and the present day; it is an algorithm
for a random conclusion.
The play deals with the nature of truth and history, mathematics
and chaos theory, English landscape architecture, and love.
Through juxtaposition, Stoppard can compare and contrast
characters and ideas from both time periods. The alternation between
the two eras shows the viewer the connection between the characters
of the 19
th
century and those from the present day. The characters
from the present are the descendants of those from the past. The entire
plot relies on the events of 1809-1812, when a young girl named
Thomasina Coverly was formulating theories decades ahead of their
time, and Lord Byron was writing the poems that would make him
famous. The past events and characters are deconstructed /
reconstructed in a new vision, a new dimension. The characters from
the present rediscover the past by searching for proofs or by making
suppositions.
Each period has several main characters that act like parallels to
those in the other period.
The fragments above were chosen to emphasize precisely the
contradiction of opinions and mentalities between the characters that
belong to the same period. On the other hand, the continuation of
ideas from one period to another should also be mentioned. However,
the characters from the two centuries never interact.
The conversation between Thomasina Coverly, the precocious
genius from Sidley Park, and Septimus Hodge, her tutor, is not quite
contradicting. Thomasina is attracted by mathematics and science and
gets bored when Septimus teaches her Latin. She is interested in
science even while eating her rice pudding and attempts to find
scientific explanation for the world around her. She sees the basis of
160
chaos theory in the movement of the jam in her bowl. The trails of jam
move toward a larger disorder that cannot be stirred back together by
going the other direction. Thomasina finds out from Septimus that this
move toward greater and greater disorder is known as free will or
self-determination. She also discovers that time is irreversible and
it cannot be changed or brought back: time must need run backward,
and since it will not, we must stir our way onward.
The beginning of the 19
th
century was a period of transformations
in science. The ordered universe of Isaac Newton was challenged by
the discoveries of Carnot in France, which suggest the universe is
running down into disorder. It is well-known that when chaos begins,
classical science stops. So, we may speak about the death of
Classicism and the birth of Romanticism, which is an important
theme in the play. The science of fractals, anticipated by Thomasina in
1809, must wait until the appearance of computers. After almost two
centuries, Valentine, a later family member, develops the same theory
of chaos, but into a new approach: It makes me so happy. To be at
the beginning again, knowing almost nothing. Thus, we can notice
the continuation of ideas through both time periods. Valentine, the
graduate student of chaos theory, thinks that the future is
unpredictable and we can never foresee what course our life will take.
So, we must live in the present.
However, not all share his vision. Bernard Nightingale, a self-
important lecturer in English poetry and aspiring authority on the life
and works of Byron, has no time for science. Stoppard uses devices as
irony and humour by putting his characters in confused situations. He
makes fun of Bernard, who creates theories to suit his fancy. He
believes that Byron killed Ezra Chater in a duel, but we find out later
that Chater died in Martinique of a monkey bite. Valentine has doubts
concerning his unscientific methods. Then, Bernard delivers a
passionate speech against science. He stresses the difference between
scientific methods and personalities. He thinks that what really
matters is self-knowledge and, above all, God is the supreme instance
that governs our destinies. And then, suddenly, we are stroke as he
quotes from Byron: `She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless
climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in
her aspect and her eyes. The shift from comic to serious worked:
Bernard illuminated a realm into which science cannot venture the
161
deeper realm of art. Then, how far can science and mathematics take
us in explaining the sense of life? I think we will find out the answer
in mixing both science and art. Otherwise, we will end like Septimus,
who was driven insane by Thomasinas theory of chaos. In Arcadia,
Stoppard blends science with human ideals. The message of the book
could be expressed in the following words: if the universe is a doom
machine, then as long as we live, we might as well dance.

162
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary sources:

Henry J ames, Daisy Miller
D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow
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