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THE FIRST HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY

POETRTY

The historical period of instability is also reflected in poetry that shows several currents of expression.

Georgian Poetry

The «Georgian poets», as the name suggests, were the poets who wrote during the early years of George V’s reign; though their poetry did not form a new homogeneous poetical school it showed many common characteristics. The Georgian poets tended to represent an imaginary world, pursuing in poetry an escape from a disappointing reality very much in contrast with their intimate aspirations. Deeply rooted in the past, the Georgian poets did not attempt to innovate poetical forms and celebrated in short lyrics – pervaded with a melancholic or nostalgic touch, and through simple, regular rhythms, and vague, imprecise images – themes such as love, nature and the beauty of the countryside, in opposition to the industrial civilization.

The Georgian Poetry refers specifically to the five anthologies edited by Edward Marsh between 1912 and 1922 and containing works by Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), Edward Thomas (1878-1917), W. H. Davies (1871-1940), Walter de la Mare (1873-1956), and others.

The most significant among them is Walter de la Mare who also wrote essays, stories and a novel, Memoirs of a Midget (1921). His best poems are The Listeners (1912), Peacock Pie (1913), The Veil (1921), The Burning Glass (1945) and Inward Companion (1950).

The literary movement loses interest with the breaking of the First World War.

War Poetry

The First World War itself produced an amazing body of poetry, unsurpassed in its tragic intensity and its portrayal of the horror of battle. The «War poets» was a group of poets who themselves fought in the trenches and described their experiences by giving an anti-conventional and anti-rhetorical representation of war as a source of suffering, violence and death; they attracted growing popular interest.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), the author of Collected Poems (1920), who died a few days before the armistice, Isaac Rosenberg (18901918), who wrote Collected Works (1937), and Siegfried Sassoon (18861968), the author of Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918) and Collected War Poems, are the greatest figures who show us the «waste land» of this destruction. In contrast with the high patriotism of Rupert Brooke’s (1887-1915) The Soldier (1915), the voices of Edmund Blunden (18961974), Edward Thomas (1878-1917), Sassoon, Owen and Rosenberg sound quietly desperate, critically conscious, angry, incisive, eager for change; the imagery is crude and realistic, without any concession to sentimentality or self-pity.

The Imagism

The 20th century, above all, is influenced by the birth of Symbolism: the movement reacted to Realism and Naturalism trying to represent the emotions and the personal experiences through suggestions and images, using the free verse and breaking the traditional and established metric system.

The Imagism took inspiration by Symbolism: it was a movement of English and American poets that flourished just before and during First World War, in revolt from Romanticism, and influenced by the «aesthetic philosophy» of Thomas Ernest Hulme.

Among its leaders were Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington (18921962), Amy Lowell (1874-1925), Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) and others; some of David Herbert Lawrence’s poems of this period may also be described as Imagist.

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In 1913 they published a «manifesto» in which they rejected the conventional poetical forms and advocated new methods of experimentation such as:

• the use of the common speech and exact, meaningful words, notdecorative;

• the creation of new rhythms to express new moods and a newreality;

• a complete freedom in the choice of subject;

• to treat the image with a hard, clear precision;

• to avoid vagueness and abstraction;

• the tendency to be short.

The Imagism aimed at presenting the content of consciousness in the most direct and truthful way, and through vivid images; it did not produce high examples of poetry, but it exerted a great influence on modern poetry and greatly contributed to give it new forms and meanings.

Left-wing Realistic Poets

Most of the poets of the 1930s reacted against the pessimism and scepticism which had characterized the previous decade and assumed a revolutionary attitude against the contemporary society. They did not aim at experimenting new rhythms or new techniques of versification, but derived much from their immediate predecessors, especially from Eliot, and the difference can be seen mainly in their political concerns.

They sympathized with Marxist ideals and their poetry deals with political and social themes, such as capitalist exploitation, considered the main cause of alienation and poverty, the struggle against the rising Fascism and Nazism, and the faith in revolution as a remedy to the present evils.

The most representative poets are Wystan Hugh Auden, Cecil Day Lewis (1904-1972), Louis MacNeice (19071963) and Stephen Harold Spender (1909-1995); they formed the so-called «Oxford Group» and their poetry reflects the sense of uneasiness and the anger against a society that they despise, but to which they belong by birth and education.

Auden, the leader of the group of «left-wing poets», is well remembered for his best known collection The Age of Anxiety (1947); Lewis’ most famous poems are Transitional Poem (1929), The Magnetic Mountain (1933) and The Whispering Roots (1970); MacNeice is mainly remembered for his Autumn Journal (1939), Holes in the Sky (1948) and The Burning Perch (1963); Spender is the author of Poems from Spain (1939), The Still Centre (1939), Ruins and Vision (1942) and Collected Poems (1955).

Besides Auden and his group, other poets such as Hugh MacDiarmid, the greatest Scottish poet since Burns, Edith Sitwell, William Empson (19061984), John Betjeman and Edwin Muir (1887-1959) emerged in the 1930s.

PROSE

Realism

The term «Realism» refers to a dominant trend in literature which represented scenes and situations based on truth and on observed facts of life without idealization. The movement originated in France with the novels of Émile Zola and the Goncourt brothers who, like scientists, used to describe reality with a clinical precision that revealed the hereditary and environmental factors governing human behaviour; French Realism developed into Naturalism.

Among the English writers who followed this trend we may quote

George Gissing, Herbert George Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy.

Bennett explores the darkness of modern civilization, giving a realistic, ultimately rather depressing view of the effects of industrialized society on human aspirations and behaviour. Most of his novels are set in the industrial Midlands of England around the «Five Towns», the Potteries of Staffordshire. His masterpiece, Riceyman Steps (1923), set in London, is a novel about failure, about lack of money, about resignation and eventual death by starvation.




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The «new novel»

In the course of the 19th century, the novel, enriched with romantic, realist and naturalist trends, established itself as a genre of unequalled variety; by the turn of the century it seemed that no more territories were available for further development, and the novel turned in upon itself and became concerned with precision of texture and form. It was in the second decade of the 20th century, with the decline of Naturalism, that a new movement towards a subtler representation of man and the world arose.

Writers such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad emphasized the characters’ inner life in their novels and they may be considered as precursors.

The conventions and the pretended objectivity of the traditional novel became objects of debates. Movements such as Realism and Naturalism, in representing the outward reality and exterior events, left the irrational world of unconscious unexplored, in a time in which the advancement of psychology and Freud’s theories on psychoanalysis had begun to throw a light upon it.

The new field attracted the interests of writers and the novel underwent a substantial change. The philosopher William James (18421910), the novelist’s brother, in defining the obscure world of the unconscious in his Principles of Psychology (1890) had asserted: «Consciousness does not appear up to itself chopped up in bits... It is nothing jointed; it flows. A river or stream are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described».

The term «stream of consciousness» was adopted to define a new narrative technique, and to mean the continuous flow of the mind, the voice of the ego, the «I» of struggles and alienation. The «new novel» was no longer concerned with a chronological sequence of exterior facts framed in a well constructed plot, but it was concerned with a mental process which tried to render the flux of thought in the characters’ minds; events and time lost their importance and the proper medium to express the working of the mind was the «interior monologue».

The most representative writers who used this technique are James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. By no means only a modern idea, this technique is not very far removed from the soliloquies of Hamlet and other characters in Elizabethan drama; in the novel, Laurence Sterne and Charles Dickens had experimented with it; in verse, the dramatic monologue is a more selfconsciously artificial version of it.

Drama

The revival of theatre

The 19th century literature, though rich in all genres, shows a weakness in the theatrical production. A great number of the plays written in the Romantic and Victorian periods were more worth reading as poetry than for acting, and no outstanding figure appeared in the English theatre between the time of Richard Brinsley Sheridan and the advent of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.

The first signs of revival can be found in the second half of the 19th century in the works of writers such as William Robertson (1829-1871), Henry Arthur Jones (1851-1929) and Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934), who attempted to convey a social message. But the most influential trends were to come from outside Great Britain. In the last years of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century, fundamental authors such as Bertolt Brecht, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Cˇechov, August Strindberg and Luigi Pirandello emerged respectively in Germany, Norway, Russia, Sweden and Italy.

Above all Ibsen’s works, such as Pillars of Society, A Doll’s House, Ghosts and An Enemy of the People, containing a flow of new ideas and daring views on moral and social questions aiming at social reforms, revealed as valuable models. They were translated and introduced into England by a group of admirers including Shaw, Edmund William Gosse (1849-1928) and the dramatic critic William Archer

(1856-1924). Ibsen’s plays represented the beginnings of modern European drama.

Under this influence the English drama was renewed; it lost all emotional elements to represent real situations drawn from contemporary social and psychological life, and in its new concern with real problems it was no longer a mere entertainment but a means to spread a useful and meaningful message.




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The Irish Revival

Another contribution to the renewal of the theatre came from the Irish Literary Theatre founded by William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory (1852-1932) in 1899. It became the Irish National Theatre Society in 1903, with Yeats as its president, and moved into the important Abbey Theatre Company in 1904. The Company aimed at reviving the Irish nationalism and culture, in fact poets and dramatists turned to Irish past and traditions for their subjects.

Apart from Yeats, the most representative figures of the Irish Revival are John Millington Synge (1871-1909), whose best known works are the comedy The Playboy of the Western World (1907) and the drama Riders to the Sea (1904), and Sean O’ Casey (1880-1964), who wrote Juno and the Paycock (1924), The Plough and the Stars (1926) and The Silver Tassie (1928).

The «Irish Revival» was more limited in range and influence than it purported to be, but added impact to T. S. Eliot’s experiments with poetic drama in raising the debate on the language of drama and the nature of the «dramatic», in an age where the theatre had long since ceased to be the fiery mirror of society.

GREAT WRITERS Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)

Life

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri (USA), in 1888, where his grandfather had founded the university. His parents came from New England, to which an English ancestor had emigrated during the 17th century. After school in Boston and Harvard University, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, and Merton College, Oxford. In 1914 he met Ezra Pound, who encouraged him to settle in England. He married an Englishwoman and stayed on. Eliot began to work for Lloyds Bank in 1917 when he also became assistant editor of «The Egoist», a monthly magazine, mouthpiece for the Imagist poets. In 1922 he founded a new literary quarterly review, «The Criterion»; The Waste Land appeared in its first issue. In 1925 he left Lloyds and became a director of «Faber and Faber», building up a list of poets (Auden, Barker, Pound, Spender and others) which represented the mainstream of Modernism in England. Eliot became a British citizen and was confirmed in the Church of England in 1927. His conversion to Anglo-Catholicism brought a deep change in his poetry, which acquired a new religious intensity. Eliot’s wife became mentally ill and he and her brother signed the order to place her in an asylum in 1938; a second marriage in 1957 was happy. Poet, critic and playwright, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Order of Merit in 1948. Eliot died in London in 1965.

Works

Poetry. In his early poems Eliot depicts a limited and monotonous world crowded by empty and inanimate figures; life is reduced to a repetition of actions and to formal intercourses without any sparkle of authentic feelings, to show the emptiness and decadence of modern life.

Among the works of this period we may quote the famous poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, written in 1911 and published four years later in «Poetry» (a magazine of verse founded at Chicago by the American poet and critic Harriet Monroe), whose main character is a frustrated person unable to face his problems, capable neither love nor sacrifice. The work describes an antihero, a modern knight who is wandering for the roads of his sordid city together with a man, whose name is not clear: a real person or simply his alter ego. The main figure throws his indecision and his insecurities in his interlocutor, spectator of his agony; it does not matter which is the reason of his anguish because he is always in search which lasts along the poem: a path whose difficulty does not come from outside but from man’s insecurity, because Eliot’s man is paralysed by his fears and he is therefore incapable to react.

Other very notable works are The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (completed in 1942).

The great author also produced minor poems such as Prufrock and other Observations (1917) and Poems (1919); between The Waste Land and Four Quartets he wrote a series of poems recording painful progress towards Christianity: The Hallow Men (1925), The Journey of the Magi (1927) and Ash-Wednesday (1930).

The Waste Land. Considered one of Eliot’s best works, The Waste Land established him decisively as the voice of a disillusioned generation. The poet represents the situation which existed in the period between the two Worlds Wars: after the collapse of old ideals no faith animated men and the poet becomes the interpret of a general sense of depression and futility, mood of emptiness and dejection. He uses myth, legends and symbols to express the vacuity of modern society and the search for new sources of life and resurrection.




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The long poem, which Ezra Pound helped reduce to half its size before publication, consists of six sections (each one has a somewhat cryptic title: The Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death by Water, and What the Thunder Said, together with Eliot’s own Notes) which explain his multicultural allusions and quotations, and express a general indebtedness to the Grail legend.

The Waste Land – world of «stony rubbish» (line 20) where nothing grows, and of «broken images» (line 22) where everything has collapsed into pieces – consists of a disjoined sequence of verse paragraphs instead of being, as long poems

are, narrative. They have a common denominator: a spiritual dryness, a desolate earth whose inhabitants are deprived of life and their actions are mechanic. The reader cannot easily follow the story because its extraordinary cultural symbolic and rhythmical complexity breaks into many directions, despite its conceptual and textual unity. Complex, erudite, cryptic, satiric, spiritually earnest, and occasionally lyrical, it became one of the most recognizable landmarks of Modernism.

He draws his inspiration from all kinds of sources, from western and eastern literatures, traditions and rituals which, across centuries, have made modern civilization what it is: «these fragments I have shored against my ruins», he writes at the end of the poem. There is the introduction of citations from foreign languages, references to persons or situations that presuppose an immense culture because they become universal symbols.

The famous opening lines of The Waste Land may well be taken as an ideal inscription to the whole poem. It starts with a reference to April as the cruellest month, when the reader thinks of April as the season of renewal. It is an inversion of the opening line of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where the traditional romantic imagery of spring is shockingly disrupted.

Eliot is defined «the most modern and the most traditional, the most influential and the most influenced poet» because, according to him, past and present must coexist and the artist must observe the past to give birth to a universal poetry. The poetry must be an instrument in order to express the feelings of the others, it must be objective and impersonal; the poet avoids therefore the use of the first singular narrator in order to privilege the inner monologue or the dramatic one. The stylistic revolution is necessary because the poet can complete his mission: to communicate and to describe the degradation of the contemporary world.

Four Quartets. In Four Quartets Eliot explores the significance of time, memory, experience, choice, perpetual solitude, pain and resignation, life and death, war, faith, love, happiness, self-discipline, old age and history, seen as a pattern of timeless moments.

The four poems, written at different times but finally published as one great poem in 1945, in spite of their complexity (internal division into five movements, and the different metres and rhythms used), have a clear unity. The unity derives partly from the technique of statement, repetition and reformulation borrowed from chamber music; partly from the four element patterns of air, earth, water and fire informing the imagery of each Quartet; and partly from the great recurring themes listed above, which are constantly explored by Eliot. Serenity and acceptance are the answers to the poet’s lifelong striving after understanding and faith, his «Paradiso» after the «Inferno» of The Waste Land and the «Purgatorio» of Ash-Wednesday.

Plays. Poems such as Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets show Eliot’s new position and attitude after his religious conversion; the themes of dryness, decay and death are replaced by the research for new sources of life and resurrection. In order to spread his new ideas and convictions to a larger public, Eliot resolved to turn to the theatre.

His attempt to revive poetic drama starts in 1932 with Sweeney Agonistes, followed by The Rock (1934), Murder in the Cathedral (1935) – in order to remember the murder of Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury (the choice to write a pièce in verse is dictated from the conviction that it was closer to the colloquial tone) – and The Family Reunion (1939), in which Henry, the main character, finds his way to salvation, through sacrifice and expiation.

Eliot wrote three comedies, The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1954) and The Elder Statesman (1959).

In The Cocktail Party the main character, Celia, represents the Christian hero who after an experience of desolation and sorrow discovers her true mission. She realizes the vanities of the world and her solitude, due to the fact that she moves in a level different from that of other people. In Eliot’s play there are three kinds of levels, each character is presented in his proper one: the hero’s level, reserved to those who have a full consciousness of the superior truth which enable them to redeem other people; the second level is reserved to those who have only intuition of the superior truth; and the third level which involves other characters whose degree of knowledge is limited to appearance and exteriority. The people belonging to the last level cannot go beyond the trivial aspects of everyday life and they can reach salvation in no way but the heroes’ sacrifice.

In the other two comedies the theme changes, and it is no longer sacrifice and expiation to rescue mankind but Love, which has the power to give a deep meaning to human life.




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In his early works Eliot has depicted an empty desolate world, without any hope of salvation; in the works of maturity he shows the triumph of the best qualities of men.

Essays. In addition to writing poetry and drama, Eliot wrote some influential pages of literary criticism. Among his critical works may be mentioned The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920), containing the essay on Hamlet in which Eliot coined the phrase «objective correlative»; The Metaphysical Poets (1921), essay on John Donne and George Herbert in particular, in which he gives an important insight into poetic tradition, and what he sees as the necessary difficulty of modern poetry; The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933); Elizabethan Essays (1934); and On Poetry and Poets (1957).

Modernist writer. Eliot represents one of the most important voices of the modern movement in poetry in England. The reader cannot easily follow his texts, most of them complex, chaotic, full of literary allusions and disrupting the logic that we normally expect to encounter in a literary work. In an essay, Eliot once wrote: «the immature poet borrows, the mature poet steals». In fact Eliot steals phrases and words from other authors; these fragments from other works testify how the post-war world had collapsed into fragments. Literary text relates to the world it reflects: writing in the past had a sense of wholeness, in modern age it is used as a disrupted way of expression.

The reader should just read and listen to the poem, let himself go, following the rhythm and not being worried about difficult bits which seem to escape his understanding. Eliot himself refused to suggest interpretations, when over-anxious critics insisted on explanatory footnotes; in this way the reader is allowed to bring his own connotations to the gaps, his own meanings to the unstated.

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

Life

Joseph Conrad is one of the greatest novelists in the English language, but was born in 1857 Józef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski in the Polish Ukraine, and only learned English during his long career onboard a ship, when he travelled around the globe in the Merchant Service. His father was exiled in Cracovia in 1860; respectively his mother and his father died in 1864 and 1868. From an early age he longed to go to sea and in 1874 he went to Marseilles to join the crew of a French vessel; it took him to the West Indies and Australia. In 1886 he became a British subject and a master mariner, and in 1894 he settled in England to marry Jessie George and devoted himself to writing. He published his first novel at the age of thirty-eight, writing in English, his third language, but he reached popularity and financial success only in 1913 with the novel Chance. He died in Kent in 1924.

Works

Production. His literary career is usually divided into three stages. His early novels, Almayer’s Folly (1895; the story of a white man whose life is demolished from the eager search of gold) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896; exotic setting whose protagonist is a white man destroyed by his slackness and killed by the woman he loves), are fairly immature works.

Conrad shows a full artistic maturity in The Nigger of the «Narcissus» (1897; the story of a man who dies of TBC), which was followed by other remarkable novels such as Lord Jim (1900; the story of a man who succeeds in redeeming after the blame), Youth (1902; report of a travel: the travel represents the passage from the youth to the maturity), Heart of Darkness (1902; the novel is an extended metaphor of a voyage to the dark heart of Africa, up the River Congo, and to the deepest heart of a man’s soul. Mr. Kurtz, the trader who has lived cut off from the outside world, has glimpsed the ultimate horror of existence), and Typhoon (1903; the story of a captain of a ship that succeeds in saving his crew). Conrad, throughout his career, used his own experience onboard ship to explore the deep unconscious of modern man.

The second phase of Conrad’s career is characterized both by an improvement in the techniques and by the subtle political themes he dealt with. In this phase he wrote Nostromo (1904; political novel against South Africa revolution), which is considered to be his masterpiece, exploring man’s vulnerability and corruptibility. The Secret Agent (1907; the story of a mediocre spy who is killed by his wife) and Under Western Eyes (1911; the story of a Russian refugee who falls in love with the sister of the man he has just denounced) are both novels with political themes which deal with the activities of Russian revolutionaries abroad.

In his third phase the sea turned again to supply the setting to his novels and short stories. He wrote Chance (1913; the story of a girl who, in order to save her father in prison, marries a man she doesn’t love; her husband dies in a shipwreck), Victory (1915; the tragic story of a hero who dies), The Shadow-Line (1917; the story of a young man who leaves with the ship, but he is hit from the tropical fever. The «shadow line» is the passage from the youth to the maturity), The Rescue (1920), and The Rover (1923).

Heart of Darkness. In the novel the writer abandons the third narrative person for the omniscient narrator, who knows all, and he takes part in the novel even to judge his characters. Therefore, also the two rivers, Thames and Congo, become protagonists: the novel begins and finishes on Thames like symbol of the end of the earth.




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Another frequent subject is the comparison between the developed and civilized European society and the enslaved African civilization.

The novel is based on Conrad’s personal experience, a travel in Congo, but at the same time it is a spiritual travel to discover himself. The first narrator is Marlow who describes the travel along the River Congo in order to look for Kurtz, an ivory merchant. Before leaving, Kurtz was a rich man, spiritually and morally corrected, who once in Africa heart, changes: he commits every crime, hidden by the power of the night. In point of death he realizes his deplorable behaviour, his cruelty, and he redeems.

Nostromo. Considered Conrad’s masterpiece by many critics, Nostromo is a metaphor of greed and corruptibility set in an imaginary country. In it the author finds another kind of «heart of darkness».

A silver mine becomes the symbol for all the corruption and materialism of the modern world. The novel has a main political, or public, theme, the relation-conflict between moral idealism and material interest. At the end, it is the latter which prevails and its corruptive power is represented by a stack of silver, that ruins everyone who touches it. The public theme is presented in terms of a number of personal and disruptive histories, each having a specific representative moral significance.

It is the careful working out of this moral significance that has given Conrad his high place in the great tradition of the English novel: Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and beyond. His novels and tales are dense, full of significance, and intent on probing deep into the consciousness of the modern world.

His narrative technique. A familiar figure in Conrad’s novels is Marlow, the narrator, whose commentary embodies a kind of Greek chorus, bringing the narrative of past action into the present, for the listener-reader to reflect upon.

In both Heart of Darkness and Youth, Marlow comes across as a rather younger version of Coleridge’s «ancient mariner». Certainly his experiences, as he recounts them to his listeners, have made him «a sadder and a wiser man», like the ancient mariner at the end of the Rime.

Conrad’s device of Marlow’s narration within a present-day framework means that the stories are structured in a kind of flashback technique, which has led to him being described as an Impressionist. Certainly his capacity to delineate the movement of the stories, the images and the emotions by portraying each character’s private vision of reality is a major contribution to modern fiction.

Conrad’s pessimism. In 19th century novels it was common to place confidence in the figure of the individual who is probably to act in a way that mitigates attention from the worst failings of society. However, in contrast, it seems that in Conrad’s stories we have moved on to a world where the individual can no longer make a difference by giving positive contributions, and where there is no room for moral behaviour.

Conrad’s heroes might have a family and a place of origin, but there is never any sense of their roots offering them strength or help. In early 20th century literature there is no way to be a part of a community and there is a sense of dislocated individuals in a cruel world. Conrad himself was an outsider, a Polish sailor with no home during his life at sea, who settled in England as a writer, using a language other than his native tongue.

In Heart of Darkness, the main character Kurtz, is a man with a reputation as an idealist, who rather than behaves as an apostle of western civilization, takes part in barbaric acts, including cannibalism. «Cannibalism» is a topic which often appears in other novels, such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Such extreme transgression is usually associated with non-European people; in fact Crusoe as a «civilized» man is shocked by the existence of cannibalism. Heart of Darkness inverts this scale of values because it is western people who are guilty of murder and cannibalism. For the first time in English literature, white civilization is associated with a behaviour which western imagination generally associates only with the uncivilized world. Kurtz’s conduct suggests that there is something absolutely wrong with supposed civilized people.

Conrad’s works offer a pessimistic vision of the frailty of the civilized order; this general collapse is associated with the First World War, cause of physical and moral destruction.




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James Joyce (1882-1941)

Life

James Joyce was born into a Catholic family in 1882 at Rathgar, Dublin. He was educated at a Jesuit school, and graduated from University College, Dublin, in 1902. In 1904 Joyce, well intentioned to become a writer, left Dublin to go to Paris for a year, where he lived in poverty, wrote verse and discovered Edouard Dujardin’s novel Les Lauriers Sont Coupés (1888), source of his own use of «interior monologue». He came back to Dublin for his mother’s death, then left Ireland again with Nora Barnacle, the woman with whom he spent the rest of his life. They lived in Trieste, where Joyce met and appreciated the Italian writer Italo Svevo, and Zurich; after the War, in 1920 they settled finally in Paris, where they spent about twenty years and Joyce wrote his famous works. He has been defined a «citizen of the world», but he remained an Irishman and a Dubliner at heart, depicting his home-town and country faithfully even after many years of absence. He died in Zurich in 1941.

Works

Production. Joyce began his literary career as a poet. His first published work was a volume of verses, Chamber Music (1907), showing the combined influence of the Romantic poets and the French Symbolists.

It was followed by his first prose work, Dubliners (1900; published 1914), which consists of a collection of 15 short stories, drawn from his experience and his keen insight into the attitudes of ordinary Dubliners, largely of the lower middle class, revealing, through a series of realistic sketches, the intellectual and spiritual stagnation which paralyzed his native town. The stories deal with four different aspects of life: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life; the most famous and interesting of these stories is the last one, The Dead, a little masterpiece.

The Dubliners was followed by his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), originally called Stephen Hero, published in 25 instalments in 1914-1915 in the «Egoist», dealing with the spiritual development of a young man. Stephen Daedalus, the main character, who is Joyce himself, recounts his feeling in a diary: a trick used by the author to play freely with time and the flux of changing emotions day by day. Stephen lives in an ordinary and trivial environment, too much in contrast with his inner aspirations: family, religion and academic learning cannot satisfy him. At the end, Stephen experiences what the author calls an epiphany, that is to say a moment of revelation, enabling him to discover his true task in becoming an artist, the only way to go beyond the mediocrity surrounding him and to achieve the deepest meaning of life. In this book Joyce relates his own experiences, but they are represented in an extreme objectivity. Though there is no breaking away from tradition, the techniques and the symbolism, which the author was to develop later in his works, are already present.

Exiles, a three-act play, was published in 1918.

Joyce displays his genius fully both as narrator and experimenter of new techniques in Ulysses (1922).

His last novel Finnegans Wake (1939) is written in a difficult style, making use of at least forty languages besides English, and a very wide range of allusions: it is a mystery for the average reader. The action of the novel is carried out in a night and it is always set in Dublin. Here the technique of the «stream of consciousness» is pushed so far to probe into the subconscious mental process of a sleeping character: Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, a tavern-keeper. His experiences and those of his wife Anna extend to the history of all humanity, and Earwicker’s mind appears as a sort of «universal conscience»: his name indicates not a single man but all men (H. C. E. means «Here Comes Everybody»).

Ulysses. Joyce worked for eight years, from 1914 to 1922, on Ulysses, the book for which he is best known, and which, in the opinion of many, is the most important work in English prose of the 20th century.

This is a very complex novel relating the events of a particular day (June 16th 1904) and centred on three main characters: Leopold Bloom, a middle aged Jew; his wife Molly; and Stephen Daedalus, encountered also in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce defined his book as a modern «Odyssey», where Leopold Bloom corresponds to Ulysses, his wife to Penelope, and Stephen Daedalus to Telemachus. Also the episodes related have their equivalent in Homer’s Odyssey, often in a mock-heroic and comic key.

Instead of the traditional plot, Joyce, to give a frame to his novel, used the Aristotelian principles of dramatic composition, consisting of a main action occurring at one time and in one place.




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The story, concerned with the experiences of the main characters, depicts the most ordinary aspects of life and tends to represent the human condition through an exposure of man’s inner soul, its animal instincts and secret desires. The novel evolution happens through the flow of thoughts of the personages: through what they think and what they feel, without no stylistic element that indicates the beginning of the speech of such personage or the answer of the other, Joyce abolishes the use of question mark or any sign of interconnection, because he is more interested in studying man’s mind than relationship between man and society. The interior monologue depends on the protagonist: for example, Stephen, who is an erudite man, will use a language which reflects his academic education; on the contrary, Bloom will make use of more dialectal expressions and a more modest language.

Joyce divided Ulysses into 3 Parts (The Telemachiad, The Odyssey, The Nostos) and 18 chapters or «episodes». The last episode, Penelope, finishes with a long Molly’s Monologue, who at the end of the day sums up all her life, the past and the present; all the men she had converge in one only: her father, her lover, her husband comes to exemplify into one, «He».

Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly are the anti-heroes, representing universal figures, respectively the universal but real father (Stephen, like Telemachus, is in search of a spiritual father and eventually may find him in Leopold Bloom, who has lost his own son and suffers from loneliness) and the universal and complete woman. Stephen is the archetypal «young man», the confused idealist in a dull and hostile world.

Linguistic technique. Joyce uses both linguistic and technical devices which

make him the most striking experimentalist in the field of the modern novel. He is, among writers, the one who stressed the importance of language. In his texts, multiple meanings and the sense of the complexity of experience are suggested by crossreferences, analogies and symbols, used often in combination with each other. The novelty does not consist only in the use of the «stream of consciousness», with whom characters’ minds wander from philosophical arguments to fond memories of the past to the present or immediate future, in a fascinating whirl of associations, but also in a variety of styles and linguistic innovations.

He used parodies, by imitating other writers and different genres, and the mythical methods to transcend a humdrum and local background. He created new words or deformed their original meaning as to reach particular effects, as well as his use of puns

and wordplays, foreign words and structures: this made him undoubtedly one of the most original modern writers. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Life

Adeline Virginia Woolf, daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, a distinguished philosopher and man of letters (founder of the «Dictionary of National Biography»), was born at Hyde Park Gate, London, in 1882. At the age of thirteen she suffered a breakdown upon her mother’s death; from then on the shadow of instability came like a cloud at different stages of her life. In 1904 her father died and the shadow appeared again. The same year was also the beginning of an intense intellectual period because Virginia moved to Gordon Square, Bloomsbury quarter, where she formed, together with E. M. Forster, R. Fry (18661934), D. Garnett (1892-1981) and other intellectual and artistic friends, the Bloomsbury Group. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, with whom she founded at her home (Hogarth House, Richmond), in 1917, the «Hogarth Press». Their policy was to publish new and experimental works; earlier publications were books of almost unknown writers at that time, such as Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude (1918) and T. S. Eliot’s Poems (1919). In 1941 she committed suicide drowning herself in the Ouse, the river near her home at Rodmell, Sussex.

Works

Novels. Her first novels were The Voyage Out (1915), a kind of journey fiction centred on a woman who in South Africa dies of tropical fever during a cruise, and Night and Day (1919), the story of two women; though traditional in form and essentially realistic works, they were more concentrated on the analysis of the characters than in plot and action.

Between the years 1920 and 1922 Virginia Woolf was influenced by the novels of the French writer Marcel Proust and the works of Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson and William James, and she experimented with new techniques in her Jacob’s Room (1922), using a series of disconnected impressions revealed by interior monologues to represent the character’s inner motivations. The novel evokes the life and death (in the First World War) of Jacob Flanders (related to the death of her brother Thoby in 1906).

In her essay The Modern Novel, from the collection The Common Reader, she wrote: «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». So, life being a subtle and complicated succession of experience, fiction must be infinitely adaptable and supple in order to catch the tones, the lights and shades of experience.




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Like Joyce, Virginia Woolf adopted the technique of the «stream of consciousness», though their achievements are quite distinct. Joyce was mainly concerned with experiments based on linguistic and stylistic innovations, while Virginia Woolf was interested in thought and in the contrast between the exterior reality and inner life.

Her novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) mark a further development in her poetic method to represent the flux of thought and impressions. Here plot and story-line have been abandoned and these novels can be defined as «mental voyages». Unity and coherence are provided by the poetic elements of the subjects dealt with, and the use of imagery to connect the different moments of experience; the three unities – time, place and character’s action – impose form to the subject matter.

Mrs. Dalloway relates the event of one day, the heroine’s birthday. In following Clarissa Dalloway’s stream of consciousness, the reader knows the most relevant events of her life. In her walking in London streets, the persons she meets and the places invest the substance of her previous experience, and her responses to ordinary events and her relations with other people reveal the most intimate essence of her personality, much more complex than appears at first sight under the impact of social conventions. In depicting the inner life of her character, Virginia Woolf tried to represent the effects of modern civilization on the personal and individual sphere.

In To the Lighthouse the authoress relates two long days, separated by ten short years, and presents a group of characters: the Ramsey family and their guests. The first part of the novel relates the event of one evening: the family is planning a trip to the lighthouse but they do not go because of the bad weather. The «lighthouse» acquires a symbolic meaning, its intermittent light expresses the sense of uncertainty of the human destiny, and a sense of searching for truth. Other recurrent symbols are the travel, as the passage from innocence to experience, and the sea, which protects and represents life and the inexorable flow of time. The family returns to their holiday home on the Isle of Skye ten years later; the passing of time is described in an impressionistic way through its effects on the empty house and on the characters. The novel, considered as Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece, expresses the difficulty and complexity of human relationships, different attitudes and reactions to exterior agents such as the natural environment and the action of time and death. Only the artist, represented in the novel by Lily Briscoe, can catch a glimpse of a complex reality.

Virginia Woolf wrote other important novels such as Orlando: A Biography (1928; it tells the story of a nobleman who becomes a woman), where Virginia plays with time, with character, with the whole nature of fiction. Her greatest commercial success, a symbolic biography of her lover, the writer Vita Sackville West, is in some sense an extended love letter. The malefemale hero-heroine goes through a series of fantasy adventures between Shakespeare’s day and the 1920s. The ancient home of the Sackvilles in Kent (Knole) inspired as well Virginia to write Orlando; Knole is very well described and becomes a character itself.

In the last years of life she wrote The Waves (1931; a desolate vision of life and the invocation of death), her most schematically experimental work, in which six consciousnesses become conscious at intervals through their lives; The Years (1937); and Between the Acts (1941), a highly experimental work which was published posthumously.

Essays. Virginia Woolf’s critical essays were published in several collections: The Common Reader (1925), The Common Reader: Second Series (1932), The Death of the Moth (1942), The Captain’s Death Bed (1950), and Granite and Rainbow (1958).

A Room of One’s Own (1929) is a classic of «feminist movement», an essay based on two lectures on Women and Fiction. It describes the sexual prejudices and social, financial and educational disadvantages against which women have struggled throughout history, stressing that women will be not able to write well and freely until they have the privacy and independence, represented by «a room one’s own». It traces the history of women’s contributions to English literature, even if rarely a woman writer has had room to write.

The other founding document of the feminist criticism is Three Guineas (1938), which points out Woolf’s opinion that tyranny at home, within patriarchy, is connected to tyranny abroad.

Virginia Woolf’s fortune. She was not considered one of the greater modernist writers until the 1970s. The rise in her reputation is connected with the promotion of «feminism» in academic life, first in American and then English universities. She was considered a model above other women writers, not only for her novels and opinions, but also for her letters and her life. She gave woman writers the impetus to express themselves having the habit of freedom to write exactly what they thought.




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David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930)

Life

David Herbert Lawrence was born in Eastwood, a mining village in Nottinghamshire in 1885. He grew up in considerable poverty. He attended school until 1898, when he was forced to give up his education and work as a junior clerk for three months. Subsequently he became a pupil teacher; taken up a scholarship at Nottingham University College, he graduated in 1908 receiving a teaching certificate. In the same year he moved to London starting his job of teacher at Davidson Road School. After the death of his mother in 1911, Lawrence became seriously ill and decided to give up teaching in order to become a full time writer. In 1912 he fell in love with Frieda von Richthofen, German wife of his professor at Nottingham, six years older than him and mother of three children, who will stay with him for the rest of his life. They eloped to Germany and got married in 1914. The years of war were spent in England; Frieda was denied a passport because of her nationality. In 1919 he and Frieda left for Italy. In 1922 he began his serious travels, going to Ceylon, Australia, America, Mexico. Being in an advanced state of tuberculosis, he returned to Italy in 1925, settling finally near Florence. He moved to France in 1929 and died at Vence, near Nice, in 1930. Lawrence continued throughout his life to develop his highly personal philosophy, many aspects of which would prefigure the «counterculture of the 1960s»; in fact, he was referenced in one of the most iconic films about those years, Easy Rider.

Works

Production. Lawrence’s poems, short stories, plays, essays, and a vast collection of letters make him one of the most prolific as well as one of the most fascinating of modern authors.

His first novel was The White Peacock (1911), followed by The Trespasser (1912).

While abroad Lawrence wrote Sons and Lovers (1913), a semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in a Nottinghamshire mining village and damaging effects of the industrialism on human relationships. Lawrence was the truly great writer to emerge from the working class, a miner’s son, and his childhood and adolescence coincide with the last period of the Victorian Age. The life in the villages built close to the coal mines, one of the aspects of the industrial revolution, was certainly a traumatic experience for the writer as a young man. The novel relates the story of a young man, Paul Morel, and his efforts to escape from the trap of industrialization and his mother’s overwhelming love (she educates the son to refuse the figure of the father and his job as a miner). The protagonist and the author himself suffer from Oedipus complex because they are influenced by their mother. In the conflict between his parents Lawrence prefers his mother, and later on he realizes the strong personality of his father; in fact all the male personages of the novel will be constructed on the base of the vitality and the joy of his father.

The Rainbow (1915) and Women In Love (1916; published 1921) expose the author’s dominant themes: his distrust of modern civilization, the conflicts and tensions that it produced on the individual, and the liberating force of «Love». Lawrence’s main characters express the fundamental human issues and contrasting attitudes to life. Some of them entrapped into intellectualism are cut from the truest sources of life, and in their confusion they pursue false idols such as social prestige and wealth. On the contrary, some others preserve intact their vital energies in relying in natural primitive forces and in the healing power of love, the only remedies to escape from the pernicious effects of modern civilization. His novels more than being based on a traditional plot and story-line achieve wider and more complex meanings through the use of themes and symbols, and their originality rests on the application of the methods of poetry to the narrative scheme.

Lawrence’s novels Aaron’s Rod (1922), Kangaroo (1923), and The Plumed Serpent (1926) show a deep psychological penetration in the greatest problems of modern society, and his visits to Australia and Mexico provided respectively the material for the two last novels.

His famous novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) underlines the author’s championship of sexual and emotional freedom.

Lawrence was also a poet; his verses were later collected in The Complete Poems (3 volumes; 1957).

Among his essays we may quote Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921), Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), and Studies in Classic American Literature (1923).

His reputation as a short story writer has always been high; the most famous small collections are The Prussian Officer (1914) and The Woman Who Rode Away (1928). The complete edition in 3 volumes was published in 1955.

His travel books are Twilight in Italy (1916), Sea and Sardinia (1921), Mornings in Mexico (1927), and Etruscan Palaces (1932).




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Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The novel was privately printed in Florence in 1928; an expurgated version appeared in London in 1932; the book was un-publishable in full in England until 1960. The main character, Constance Chatterley, is unsatisfied in her marriage to Sir Clifford, an intellectual confined to a wheelchair through injuries from the First World War; the consequence is her passionate love affair with Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper. The latter satisfies the needs of Lady Chatterley in clearly described sexual scenes, sacred in intention.

Lawrence is sceptical in the progress and in democracy; only man and his formation are important. The author aspires to an ideal community between those who still does not know development and technology, those who still have a tightened relation with the nature. He insists on the descriptions of the forest, the meeting point of the two lovers, but also a symbol of the luxury nature opposing to the mine. Sexual act, like the highest expression of man, is the way to escape from the modern life and industrialized society; it is fundamental to abandon whichever idea of possession to construct a relation based on equality and on distinction of the roles: sex without love is an empty experience which lacks of joy.

The writer refuses the «stream of consciousness» technique; through his intuition he can catch the essence of life and transport the reader in the centre of the events: the content, for him, is more interesting than shape.

His detailed description of sexual union and his use of four-letter words («fuck») were prosecuted and acquitted of a charge to be obscene; during the trial many important authors, such as E. M. Forster and R. Hoggart, defended Lawrence. The victory had consequences on writing and publishing in later years. Lawrence anticipates, and in part creates, the sexual revolution that was such a feature of the 20th century as a whole.

OTHER AUTHORS Henry James (1843-1916)

Of the many American writers who settled in Europe, Henry James and T. S. Eliot were the most distinguished and, indeed, both took British citizenship.

James managed to embrace two cultures, even if his own preference was clearly the European side. He is a more important writer in the tradition of the English novel than in the development of American literature. The central theme of his novels was always the flow of influences between the two continents, the contrast between old and new cultural values, between American innocence and European experience; in general it is the older which triumphs.

James, more than being interested in exterior events, was attracted by the inner life of his characters torn between the old and the new world, and this made him the precursor of the new trends which developed later. His concern for the inner aspect of things, though based on a scrupulous logic and almost scientific research, reveals a poetic and romantic vision of life. His works generally deal with high society and wealthy people, but under a brilliant surface they reveal a sense of scepticism which was typical of the decadent period at the turn of the century. James’ heroes are often victims of their good qualities; they suffer because of their isolation or succumb to coarse individuals.

His first novel Roderick Hudson appeared in 1876; it was followed by The American (1877), Daisy Miller (1879), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). The theme which characterized these novels is «the international scene», that is to say the impact of the European civilization upon American life and the conflicts caused by two different conceptions, above all the clash between American Puritanism and European tolerance.

The Bostonians was published in 1886: the book is often seen as explaining James’ disillusion with American society and his move to England, but the European society is no less criticized in his later works.

In his novels The Tragic Muse (1890), The Spoils of Poynton (1897), and The Awkward Age (1899) James abandoned «the international scene» in favour of English subjects and characters.

In his last three novels, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904), the writer resumed the early theme of the American in Europe, but his analysis of the characters and situations reveal much more subtlety and substance; they can be considered among his best achievements.

James was also a critic, author of several plays, sketches of travels and short stories; among more than a hundred stories, the most wellknown is The Turn of the Screw (1898).




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George Orwell (1903-1950)

George Orwell was the pseudonym of Eric Blair. He was born in India and served in the Imperial Service in Burma; his own experiences are related in his novel Burmese Days (1934), which already shows him as an enemy of Imperialism. After his return to England, disgusted with the hypocrisy and snobbery of the middle class, the class he belonged to, he sought a contact with the poor and the destitute, and the impressions of these years are expressed in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).

In 1936, when the Spanish Civil War broke out, he enthusiastically went to Spain to fight for the Republicans, but returned to England quite disillusioned with Communism, whose principles he had always supported, and defined it as a «totalitarian regime». Orwell expressed his bitterness in Homage to Catalonia (1938), where he describes his experience on the battlefield. The political analyses is intentionally meticulous and accurate (the barracks, the battlefield, the fellow soldiers…) because the author’s aim is fixing firmly in the reader’s mind the historical events as they were carrying out and as he was living. A complete reportage of the Spanish Civil War offers him the opportunity to act individually and above all to do it in favour of the poorest ones.Later, the author attacked Communism in Animal Farm (1945), a story about the animals of a farm, that, led by the pigs and the dogs, rebels against the farmer, Mr. Jones, throwing him out of the farm; it is a parody of the Soviet Russian society after the Revolution of 1917. The novel has the structure of classical tale with the stratagem of the anthropomorphic animals. In 1946 Orwell declared: «Animal Farm is the first book in which I tried, with full knowledge of what I was doing, to join the artistic and the politic aim into a complex one». The work is the only Orwell’s choral novel. The author does not seem to identify himself with any character, neither with the despot pig nor with the faithful horse that will be sold to the near slaughter house after years of hard work.

This novel gained Orwell a wide reputation and it was followed by Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), an apocalyptic vision of life in societies under totalitarian regimes (like the one installed by the revolution in Animal Farm), in which the individual has lost his natural feelings, autonomy and dignity. The novel is the story of the rebirth and the following annihilation of an individual, Winston Smith. The name is already symbolic: «Smith», the most common last name in England, makes him the most representative man; «Winston», the name that is doubtfully an allusion to Churchill, ironically emphasizes the degradation the man reaches. Big Brother’s Oceania represents a complete overturning of the world Orwell wanted to defend. «1984» is indeed 1948 inversion, the year the writer finishes the novel, and it represents one of the most valid example of «Dystopian novel». Everything is absurd and inverted in a world where the dream is the only way to keep in touch with reality, and the language itself is not a mean of communication. The «Newspeak» foresees any word a double meaning, insulting if it regards a rebel and praising if it regards the alley. The worst thing happens when the contradiction is not perceived by the conscience of the single one. It is the Party that imposes to reduce the speeches in order to prevent men any personal reflection.

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