. Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
. Hawthorne: The Use of
Symbols
. Oscar Wilde: The
Picture of Dorian Gray
. Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady
. Modernism and the Stream of
Consciousness Technique
The presentation of a character
can be 'direct' (through the description which the writer
makes of his/her personality
and appearance) or 'indirect' (when the reader has to infer the features of the
character from his/her actions, reactions and behaviour). Depending on their
role in the story there can be major and minor characters.
How can characters be
apprehented by the reader?
First of all, a
character is constituted by a combination of physical characteristics like
height, handsomeness etc. and like the way he/she dresses; of psychological
features like vanity, generosity, arrogance, prejudice etc. and of social
definition in terms of social status and of social or family relationships with
the other characters.
Secondly, a
character is sometimes given a name which focuses on one distinctive aspect of
his/her personality. For example in Clarissa
Harlowe the name "Lovelace", which sounds like "without
love" or "unable to love", immediately identifies the character
of the libertine seducer of Clarissa.
Thirdly, a
character is given individuality through the speech and thoughts that the
novelist attributes to him/her.
Finally a character
performs a role in the structure of the plot. If he disappeared, the plot
itself would be seriously impaired.
Characters and
events are the essential elements of any story and their interaction forms the
subiect matter of any fictional narrative. Their various combinations and the
relative predominance which is assigned to them in turn creates the most
remarkable differences between one novel and another. For example an adventure
novel will privilege action (the events) and will not waste much attention on
psychological characterization.
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FLAT CHARACTERS AND ROUND CHARACTERS
A further distinction can be made between
'round' and 'flat' characters. The former change their personality as the
narration develops and can even influence the plot; the latter do not change
throughout the story and are the so-called 'stereotypes'.
Flat characters are like photographs: they can be easily recognised because they are
always identical to themselves. They are characterised by one particular
feature, either physical or psychological or linguistic, and they never change
their behaviour or way of speaking, however the situation may change. They are
not subject to evolution. They can be also called types and they represent the
typical in human nature.
Round characters, on the other hand, are modified by events and in their turn modify
events; they have a multiplicity of features that make them life-like; they
grow and evolve in parallel with the progression of the story.
AMERICAN
RENAISSANCE
The centre of
American cultural life in the 19th century remained in New England, where the
influence of Puritanism was still very strong. Towards the middle of the
century, a group of intellectuals and writers developed the 'New England
Renaissance'. The term did not indicate the rebirth of something, but the
beginning of a truly American literature, with themes and a style of its own. The
great literary output of the period constituted a sort of reaction against the
Puritan doctrine. However, the Puritan heritage can still be traced in the
flourishing of symbols, emblems, and in the use of allegory that writers such
as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville widely employed in their works.
HAWTHORNE: Life and works
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts on July 4, 1804.
His Puritan ancestors had settled there during the 17th century and had been
directly involved in two of the town's main historical events, including the
infamous witch trials of 1692.
Hawthorne lost his father at the age of four and spent the early years
of his life in domestic seclusion because of his poor health.
He also started to write short stories. These allegorical stories
focused on the theme of the moral conflicts imposed by the Puritan code and
gained him a local reputation
His masterpiece, The Scarlet
Letter, appeared in 1850.
Hawthorne was not interested in the realistic description of contemporary
society, he preferred what he called "a neutral territory, somewhere
between the real world and fairy-land where the Actual and the Imaginary meet
The Scarlet Letter: the plot
The novel is set in Boston, in Puritan New England, during the 17th
century. The first chapter is a long preamble on the Salem Custom House where,
in a deserted room, the author finds a piece of gold-embroidered scarlet cloth
in the shape of the letter A. With it there is a manuscript telling the story
of Hester Prynne.
Hester is sent to Massachusetts by her husband, an English scholar who
plans to join her later. Once in Boston, she has a love affair with the young
Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale and bears him a daughter, Pearl. Adultery was
severely punished by Puritan law, so Hester is first kept in prison, where she
gives birth to her baby. She is then publicly shamed and condemned to wear a
scarlet letter A (for Adulteress) as a sign of her guilt. Nonetheless she
refuses to reveal the name of her child's father.
Meanwhile her husband, whom she thought dead, arrives in Boston and
decides to take his revenge. He forces Hester to keep his real identity secret
and, pretending to be a doctor, Roger Chillingworth, begins to torment the
suspected Dimmesdale.
Hester leads a solitary life with Pearl in a cottage on the outskirts of
the town and becomes a needlewoman. Through her skilful work and her modest
submission she wins the respect of the community. Some even say that the A on
her dress stands for 'Able'.
Unable to confess, Dimmesdale is torn by guilt and becomes ill. At the
end of the story he publicly confesses and, after showing a scarlet letter A
imprinted on his naked chest, he dies in Hester's arms.
Chillingworth dies a year later, leaving his fortune to Pearl. She goes
abroad with her mother and marries a European aristocrat. Hester returns to the
town and spends the rest of her life doing charitable work. When she dies the
letter A is used as a heraldic device on her tombstone.
The Characters
There are only four main characters, the other people are just perceived
as a crowd with the function of a chorus, gathered in the village square, in an
old house or in a shop.
Hester Prynne is impulsive and passionate, she lives in public shame
like an outcast, but by this isolation she gains strength and purity. Reverend
Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth represent two sides of the human will: the
active side and the passive one. Chillingworth is the villain of the story, he
joins intellect and will to achieve his revenge. His only aim is to guide and
observe Dimmesdale's and Hester's agony. He commits what Hawthorne considers
the worst of sins, that is, the violation of the human heart. Dimmesdale, on
the other hand, is all intellect without any will. He is passive, sensitive and
refined; he lives under the pain of the shame deriving from his having sinned
in the face of God.
Little Pearl is a strange, elf-like creature with an incredible energy.
She represents freedom, intuitiveness and a poetic view of the world. She is
the image of innocence and acts as a saviour to her mother.
Themes
Hawthorne explores the influence of the Puritan view of 17th-century New
England on American life; this enables him to deal with crucial issues in man's
existence. His main concern is not simply with sin, but with its relation to
guilt; he finely observes and vividly portrays the torments of a guilty
conscience, he focuses on the moral and psychological effects of sin.
The Use of Symbols
Authors sometimes
use symbols in their novels to represent different objects, people or
ideas.
In "The Scarlet Letter" Nathaniel Hawthorne creates
the symbolism of the letter "A" to have different meanings. As the
novel unfolds, the meanings of the letter "A", on Hester Prynne's
bosom, change from Adultery to Able to Angel. Hawthorne described the letter "A", on Hester's
bosom, as a symbol of adultery, a sinful label. She
was brought out in public to show everyone what was embroidered on her chest.
After offering many hours of time and service to the sick, poor and
troubled Hester began to gain respect from the town's people who finally
refused to interpret the scarlet "A" by its original signification.
They said that it meant "Able”. The letter on her chest changed from the
meaning of shame to something she could be proud of. Once the novel nears the
end Hawthorne again makes the letter "A" stand for an “Angel”. So
Hester looked at the "A", lying on her bosom, with better thoughts. At the end of the book it came out to be a positive meaning.
The purpose of this is to show that objects in stories can have more
than one meaning.
Hawthorne's symbols are traditional and derive from the Bible, Spenser,
Shakespeare, Milton: light and darkness, the dark forest where witches practise
their rites and illicit lovers meet is opposed to the stern Puritan town. The
central symbol is the letter “A” worn on Hester's bosom. Such letters were
actually worn in colonial New England: for example D stood for Drunkard, and I
meant Incest. They provided Hawthorne with the combination of moral and
material he was looking for.
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MELVILLE: Life and works
Herman Melville was born in New York in 1819, into a wealthy merchant
family. At the age of twelve, however, he had to leave school because of his
father's death and the difficult financial conditions of his family. He took
various jobs and in 1839, following his restless
nature, he signed on a merchant ship and from then on he travelled widely
and experienced all kinds of adventures.
In 1841, he sailed on his first voyage as a member of the crew of a
whaling ship. At that time
whale-hunting was a flourishing industry in America, but life and discipline on
a whaler were hard. So in 1842 Melville deserted the ship and spent some time
in the Marquesas Islands (nowadays belonging to French Polynesia), where he
came in contact with the way of life of the Typees, a tribe thought to be
cannibal. He then escaped to Tahiti, and later to Hawaii, where he joined a
U.S. ship and returned home.
His experience at sea provided the material for almost all his novels
and stories. He began to attend the literary circles in New York, and made
friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne, who encouraged him to adopt a more complex
and symbolical narrative form.
In 1851 he published. Moby
Dick, his masterpiece. The novel met with cool reception and marked the
beginning of the decline of Melville's popularity. When he died, in 1891,
Melville had been almost completely forgotten by the American and British
readers. His literary reputation revived in the 1920s. Since then he has been regarded
as one of the most important voices of American literature.
Moby Dick:
the
plot
Ahab, the captain of the whaler Pequod, has devoted his life to hunt and
kill a white whale, called Moby Dick, which had bitten off his leg during a
previous whaling expedition.
The crew of the ship consists of people of mixed races and religions
like the wise and cautious first mate, Starbuck; the superstitious Queequeg, a
Maori whom Ahab has hired because of his skill with the harpoon, and the cabin
boy, Ishmael, the narrator, joins them in Nantucket before the departure of the
ship. The story is based on the hunt for the whale, which is eventually seen
and then chased for three days. Finally Ahab wounds Moby Dick. In its rage the
animal destroys the Pequod and its crew. Only the good Ishmael is not caught in
the vortex of the sinking ship and manages to float upon a coffin. He survives
to tell the story.
Influences on Melville
Such a malicious whale had in fact haunted American whale hunters for
years. Melville had read Narrative of
the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whaleship Essex (1820)
by Owen Chase, which told how such a ferocious whale as Moby Dick had sunk the
'Essex' just south of the equator. This narrative may be the germ of Melville's
novel.
The novel is full of literary and religious echoes; Ahab's voyage reminds us of the wanderings of Ulysses, and there
are parallels with the biblical history of Jonah, who refused to obey the
destiny God had decided for him and was punished.
Ishmael is the only one who survives because he recognizes the beauty of
the whale as a creature of God, and is bound to tell his story. The influence
of the English Romantic poets can be seen also in the symbolical use of nature, in the
interest in primitive experience, in the figure of Ahab, a titanic hero
fighting against heaven.
Captain Ahab
The character of Ahab has
been approached by the critics from two different perspectives. A major
assumption is that Ahab's vengeful quest for the great whale is a blasphemous
activity which takes two main forms: the first is the idea that Ahab equals
himself to God. The second type of blasphemy is a rejection of God altogether
for an alliance with the devil: when Ahab receives his harpoon he asks that it
be baptized in the name of the devil, not in the name of the father.
According to other critics,
Ahab is the voice of the instinctive spirituality of the New World which
rejects the tyranny of Nature over Man.
The meaning of the white whale
Through Ishmael's
description of the Sperm Whale Melville approaches the problem of its
superiority over all other creatures from a variety of standpoints, whether
biological or historical. The excellence of the whale serves to place Ahab's
quest for Moby Dick-as a very hard task in which he is doomed to
failure. An entire chapter is devoted to the whiteness of the whale: Ishmael
defines it as absence of colour and thus finds the whale to lack meaning. Moby
Dick is far more than a natural creature; Ahab hates him as the personification
of the evil in the world, an active, impersonal force man has to contend with..
It could also represent a sort of mirror in which Ahab and his crew look for
their own image, the embodiment of mankind's quest for a reason for existence.
But the white whale is also a symbol of the hidden and mysterious forces of
nature, a wonderful and powerful nature, capable of sudden and incredible acts
of destruction. Therefore the hunt stands for the archetypal conflict between
man and nature in an age in which nature was seen as 'commodity' and whales
were considered a source of oil, meat, whalebone, and the valuable spermaceti
oil.
Pessimism
However, Moby Dick is also very 'American'
because it reflects some of the features of the new nation. A mixture of races
united by the search for an ideal, exploring the mystery of the sea; emphasis
on the strength and experience of the American whale hunters and democratic
sympathy with the dignity of their work. Yet, Melville's work is rather marked by pessimism deriving from the
destruction of illusions, the clash between the ideal and the real.
Language and style
Melville enriched
the traditional structure of the novel, based on a main plot and one or more
sub-plots, with a wide variety of techniques. So, the language of the novel
ranges from everyday, colloquial speech to a highly symbolical and figurative
style.
In the first pages of Moby Dick there are even some
dictionary definitions of the whale, together with what the animal is called in
thirteen different languages, then there are about 80 quotations taken from
various sources, referring to whales. The book contains a detailed description
of the anatomy of the whale, and of the tools needed to hunt, kill, and cut it
(he had been a member of the crew of a whaling ship).
Melville's reading and
appreciation of Shakespeare can be seen in the dramatic techniques of some
scenes where he uses soliloquy, dialogue, asides, and "stage
directions" to convey the setting and action.
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The Aesthetic Movement developed in the universities and intellectual circles in the last
decades of the 19th century. Born in France, it reflected the sense of
frustration and uncertainty of the artist, his reaction against the materialism
and the restrictive moral code of the bourgeoisie, his need to re-define the
role of art. As a result, the French artists withdrew from the political and
social scene and 'escaped' into aesthetic isolation, the "Art for Art's
Sake".
The bohemien embodied his protest against
the monotony and vulgarity of bourgeois life, leading an unconventional
existence, pursuing sensation and excess, cultivating art and beauty.
This doctrine was imported into England although the roots of the
English Aesthetic Movement can be traced back to the Romantic poet John Keats.
The main implication of this new
aesthetic position was that art had nothing to do with morality, and need not
be didactic.
Oscar Wilde reflected the 'decadent' taste.
A number of
features can be distinguished in the works of these decadent artists:
. excessive
attention to the self;
. hedonistic and
sensuous attitude;
. disenchantment with contemporary society;
Decadence must be seen as a European movement. The main representatives
of Decadence in Italy were Gabriele d'Annunzio (1863-1938) with his novel Piacere (1889).
OSCAR WILDE:
life and works
Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. After attending 'Trinity College
(Dublin), he was sent to Oxford where he gained a first class degree in
Classics and distinguished himself for his eccentricity. He became a disciple
of Walter Pater, the theorist of Aestheticism in England accepting the theory
of 'Art for Art's Sake'. After graduating, he left Oxford and settled in London
where he soon became a celebrity for his extraordinary wit and his dress as a
`dandy'.
The term 'dandy'
referred to a man who boasts about his appearance even though he is wearing odd
and ordinary clothes.
Vanity extravagance, refinement were linked to the
more positive idea of the dandy. From England this trend spread in France where
it was connected to those artistic movements, such as symbolism and
aestheticism, which rejected the capitalistic outlook. Reinforced by the French
influence, dandyism reappeared in England towards the end of the 19th century
with the figure of Oscar Wilde.
In 1881 Wilde was engaged for a tour in the United States where he gave
some lectures about the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetes. On his arrival in
New York he told reporters that Aestheticism was a search for the beautiful, a
science through which men looked for the relationship between painting,
sculpture and poetry, which were simply different forms of the same truth. The
tour was a great success for Wilde, who became -
famous for his irony, his attitudes and his poses.
On coming back to Europe in 1883, he married Constance Lloyd who bore
him two children. At this point in his career he was most noted as a great
talker: his presence became a social event and his remarks appeared in the most
fashionable London magazines.
In the late 1880s Wilde's literary talent was revealed by a series of
short stories and the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). After his first and only
novel he developed an interest in drama. In the late 1890s he produced a series
of plays which were successful on the London stage (The Importance of Being
Earnest 1895). However,
both the novel and Salome (1893),
a tragedy written in French, damaged the writer's reputation, since the former
was considered immoral, and the latter was banned from the London stage for
obscenity.
In 1891 he met the
young and beautiful Lord Alfred Douglas, whose nickname was
Bosie, and with whom Wilde had a homosexual affair. The boy's father forced a
public trial and Wilde was convicted of homosexual practices and sentenced to
two-years of hard labour. While in prison he wrote De Profundis, a long letter to Bosie published posthumously in
1905.
When he was released, he was a broken man; his wife refused to see him,
and he went into exile in France, where he lived his last years in poverty. He
died of meningitis in Paris in 1900.
OSCAR WILDE: THE REBEL AND THE DANDY
Wilde adopted 'the aesthetic ideal, as he affirmed in one of his famous
conversations: "My life is like a work of art". He lived in the
double role of rebel and dandy. The dandy must be distinguished from the
bohemian: while the bohemian allies himself to the rural or urban proletariat,
the dandy is a bourgeois artist, who, in spite of his blatant
unconventionality, remains a member of his class. The Wildean dandy is an
aristocrat whose elegance is a symbol of the superiority of his spirit; he uses
his wit to shock, and is an individualist who demands absolute freedom. Since
life was meant for pleasure, and
pleasure was an indulgence in the beautiful, Wilde's interest in beauty — clothes, words or boys — had
no moral stance. He affirmed in the Preface of his novel "There is no such
thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That
is all". In this way he rejected the didacticism that had characterised
the Victorian novel in the first half of the century.
OSCAR WILDE: ART FOR ART’S SAKE
The concept of "Art for Art's Sake" was to him a moral
imperative and not merely an aesthetic one. He believed that only "Art as
the cult of Beauty" could prevent the murder of the soul. Wilde perceived
the artist as an alien in a materialistic world, he wrote only to please
himself and was not concerned in communicating his theories to his
fellow-beings. His pursuit of beauty and fulfilment was the tragic act of a
superior being inevitably turned into an outcast.
The Picture of Dorian Gray:
plot
The only novel by Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was written in 1891. The novel is set in London at the
end of the 19th century.
The painter Basil
Hallward is fascinated by the beauty of a rich, young man whose name is Dorian
Gray, and wants to fix it for ever
in a portrait. His friend Lord Henry Wotton, an aesthete who believes in
nothing but beauty, proceeds to
initiate Dorian into the cult of aestheticism. Dorian is so enchanted by his
own beauty as it appears in the portrait that he wishes to preserve his beauty
for ever while the portrait ages in his place. By some strange magic that is
what happens: with the passing of time, while Dorian's youth is preserved
intact, the portrait begins to show not only the marks of age but also those of
the immoral life he is leading under Lord Henry's influence.
Entirely emancipated from Lord Henry's patronage, Dorian becomes more
and more involved in ambiguous adventures and also provokes the suicide of
Sybil, the girl who loved him passionately.
While the young
man's desires are satisfied, including that of eternal youth, the signs of age,
experience and vice appear on the portrait. Dorian lives only for pleasure making
use of everybody and letting people die because of his insensitivity. When the
painter sees the corrupted image of the portrait, Dorian kills him. Later
Dorian wants to free himself of the portrait, witness to his spiritual
corruption, and stabs it, but he mysteriously kills himself. At the very moment
of death the picture returns to its original purity, and Dorian's face becomes
"withered, wrinkled, and loathsome"
Allegorical Meaning
This story is
profoundly allegorical; it is a 19th-century version of the myth of Faust the
story of a man who sells his soul to the devil so that all his desires might be
satisfied. This soul becomes the picture,
which records the signs of experience, the corruption, the horror and the sins
concealed under the mask of Dorian's timeless beauty Wilde plays on the
Renaissance idea of the correspondence between the physical and spiritual
realms: beautiful people are moral people; ugly people are immoral people. His
variation on this theme is in his use of the magical portrait. The picture is
not an autonomous self: it stands for the dark side of Dorian's personality,
his double, which he tries to forget by locking it in a room.
The moral of this
novel is that every excess must be punished and reality cannot be escaped; when
Dorian destroys the picture, he cannot avoid the punishment for all his sins,
that is, death. Finally the picture, restored to its original beauty,
illustrates Wilde's theories of art: art survives people, art is eternal.
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POINT OF VIEW
Suppose you are
watching the initial scene of a film in which a room is the setting. The camera
may either take a panoramic view (= wide angle = obiettivo grandangolare) of
the room or can slowly approach a door (zoom in), get into the room, linger on
some details of the furniture or of the walls and finally take a panoramic view
of the whole room. The camera can be considered to represent the point of view
in a novel.
In the case of the
panoramic view of the room, the camera represents the omniscient narrator's
point of view; in the second case it represents the point of view of a
character who has a partial and gradual perception of what surrounds him/her.
The point of view
is, therefore, the angle from which a story or an episode or any aspect of the
fictional reality is presented and narrated. It can be fixed — in this case it
is generally the narrator's point of view —, or it can shift from the narrator
to a character or from one character to another.
It is essential to define the difference between the narrative voice and the point of view. Read the following examples:
The wind caught the houses
with full force.
Paul heard the wind catching
the houses with full force.
In both sentences the narrative
voice is the same, but the point of view differs: the first statement seems to
lack a precise point of view, but we may say the point of view adopted is that of an external narrator. In
the second statement the point of view is Paul's since the narrator says what
Paul hears.
The point of view does not simply refer to the description or perception
of facts and events, but also to their interpretation. Read these examples:
Mrs Morel was a puritan.
Her husband thought Mrs Morel
was a puritan.
Even in this case the narrative voice is the
same, but the point of view differs: in the first sentence it is the narrator's
(narrative voice and point of view coincide); in the second the point of view
adopted belongs to the character of her husband.
To sum up:
. narrative voice
and point of view do not always coincide;
. the narrative
voice belongs to the person who is speaking, be it an internal or an external
narrator;
. the point of view
regards the person who, inside the story, sees the facts, thinks and judges;
. indeed the point
of view may vary more often than the narrative voice.
. The point of view
can be fixed and therefore restricted, or it can be shifting from the
narrator's to the character's, or from one
character's to another's, as often happens in modern fiction.
HENRY
JAMES
Henry James,
though American born, was the
most European writer in his
soul and in his art. His first theme was the study of the
American people, eager for knowledge and self-fulfilment, so different from the
conventional and often corrupt European
society. In his mature phase he
studied the individual mind, trying to penetrate the inner development of a character. The author
stands apart, while the unfolding of a
personality is seen from different perspectives, from different
points of view.
THE
LIFE
Henry James was born in New York City on
April 15, 1843. His father was a
cultured man, his elder brother William was a psychologist and philosopher. He
spent his early years and boyhood in the United States, with several sojourns
in Europe. At first he wrote short stories for magazines and reviews; when he
was only 25 he was considered the best short story writer in America.
In 1870 he
revisited Europe and went for the first time to Italy, which provides the setting for many of his novels. Back from Europe he
lived in Boston for two years (187072), but in 1872 he returned to Europe,
where he remained, living mostly in Italy, until 1874-
In 1875 he returned
to New York, but the rich European culture attracted him so deeply that in the
same year he realized that Europe was the place his mind and soul had chosen.
His choice was England, where he settled in 1876, with periodic trips to France
and Italy. He returned to America only twice, in 1881 and in 1904, but all his friends were now in the sophisticated European world, with its old traditions,
its love of art and culture, its refined though sometimes corrupt and ambiguous
way of life.
He never married;
he was not interested in the social changes of his time or in public affairs.
He only cared for his art.
He died in London
on February 28th, 1916.
THE PRINCIPAL
FEATURES AND THEMES:
Henry James played an important role in the
disappearance of the narrator, a choice which he himself fully realised in his
later works and which other novelists, like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce
would realise in different ways.
In James' novels
the narrator tends to be replaced by a character who interprets the story from
his/her point of view. The troubled experiences he
describes are nearly always seen through the eyes of the central character.
James broke with the Victorian tradition of fictional realism, in which an
external omniscient narrator recounted events and described characters which
were in his control.
He concentrated on
the individual mind, trying to reach the truth of events without commenting on
them, but making us participate in their development. The various characters
project from themselves their thoughts and impressions, their point of view. The author apparently does
not exist, and the reader feels present and invited to add his personal
opinion. Sometimes the same occurrence is narrated by several witnesses, and
from different points of view.
In this technique,
Joyce and Virginia Woolf were his great successors, artfully hiding themselves.
Henry James was a remarkable
innovator in fiction, and laid the foundation for the modern psychological novel.
In his earlier
works, James's realism concentrated more on detailed descriptions of people and
their place in society. His later fiction instead embodies what has been called
'psychological realism' that is, an exploration of states, feelings, dilemmas
of existence, the complexity of human relationships and the study of the human
soul in all its most minute aspects. In many ways, James might therefore be
considered the forerunner of the modern psychological novel. He is modern in
the way in which he deals with the ambiguity behind appearances, with his
characters making moral choices but discovering their mistakes too late and in
the absence of well-defined values. The leitmotif of James's novels may be
considered a tragic vision of evil and betrayal ending with the obsessive
analysis of selfishness and moral corruption.
. The importance of "point of view", or the perspective from which the story
is told. The narrator's point of view is not a definite judgement, but only a
view of certain facts. The reader must therefore be careful and discover
whether the "point of view" corresponds to the real truth;
. The study of the inner development of a character. All
action proceeds from the psychology of the individual. External events are of
relatively minor importance in James's novels; what is important is human
behaviour in certain situations, and the lasting consequences of this
behaviour;
. The author is to stand apart, without expressing any comment or explanation; the reader is involved in the story
and follows the unfolding of the characters of a novel through their manners,
their points of view, their conscious and unconscious thoughts and the opinions
of witnesses. These theories, together with his works, were the basis of the
modern psychological novel and of new narrative techniques;
. The use of the "dramatic method": very often we have the impression of following the scenes of a play;
Henry James presents the place, describes all the details of the setting, and
then uses the dialogue as the chief means of moving the plot forward. In this
way, the characters reveal their intentions and motives.
. The study of Americans in Europe (the
so-called "international theme"). The Americans are innocent and
unconventional; they are ignorant of European formalities and conventions.
Their freedom, innocence and vitality make them commit errors of tact, and lay
them open to the rapacity and ruthlessness of some sophisticated Europeans;
Henry James deals
extensively with the contrast between the American character and the European
character in his works. This is not surprising since he observed this contrast
throughout his life as an American who spent most of his life in Europe. James
describes Americans as naďve, energetic, practical, sincere and spontaneous
people, who value the individual above society. On the other hand, Europeans
are sophisticated, lethargic, formal and insincere; they value society above
the individual. This theme is especially interesting in The Portrait of a Lady because most of the characters in the novel
are Americans who have been living in Europe for different periods of time. For
example, Osmond has lived most of his life in Europe and has become European in
character.
Henry James's
language and style are quite personal, very often, especially in his late
works, elaborate and even tortuous; but they enable him to explore the nuances
of complex characters and to enter into their inner lives.
The Portrait of a Lady
The Portrait of a Lady is considered by many critics the masterpiece of
James's first period and is certainly the best-known of his
novels.
Isabel Archer is immediately
presented as a round character in a variety of ways such as:
. the
narrator's direct words, e.g, use of evaluative adjectives: "charming and
slim";
. other people's
words or thoughts referring to her e.g.
Lord Warburton imagines her to
be "the independent young lady ";
.
the report of the girl's behavior;
.
the girl's own words in the dialogues.
In this sense the novel is an example of the
individual-oriented fiction which had become common in the
second half of the XIX century mainly because of an increased
interest in psychology and in the exploration of personality, besides the affirmation of individual rights both in economic and political
terms.
The
passage also illustrates the role that Henry James played in the disappearance
of the narrator, a choice which he himself fully realised in his later works and which other novelists, like Virginia Woolf and James
Joyce would realise in different ways.
Plot (The Portrait of a Lady)
It is the story of a young
American woman, Isabel Archer, who has lived since birth in Albany (New
York), but is brought to England by her aunt, Mrs
Touchett, a rich refined lady; Isabel lives with Mrs Touchett and
her husband, a retired banker, and their son Ralph, a clever and
generous young man, but of delicate health.
Isabel
is intelligent, and eager to live a life based on
absolute values, on deep experiences, on the
fulfilment of her idealistic principles. She is offered the chance to live a
quiet, serene life, but refuses offers of
marriage from an English aristocrat,
Lord Warburton, and a young New England
entrepreneur, Caspar Goodwood. Life with
them would be too quiet, too sterile. Ralph Touchett, who loves her hopelessly and admires her intelligence, would like to see her fulfil her
ideals, and wants to give her the
means to attain complete freedom:
wealth. Money would place her beyond
all restrictions and free to choose the life she aspires to.
After a short time Mr Touchett dies, and
Isabel inherits 60,000 pounds, a large sum which makes her a rich woman. But
what the old Mr Touchett had foreseen ("Doesn't it occur to you that a
young lady with 60,000 pounds may fall a victim to fortune hunters?")
really happens. She meets a shrewd lady, Madame Merle, who tempts the
unexperienced Isabel with the image of an attractive gentleman, Gilbert Osmond,
an aesthete, lover of arts, extremely refined, who is, Mme Merle says, ready to
marry her, love her devotedly, and make her live an intense and intellectually
passionate life. Isabel believes her, and ends by loving and marrying him, though
Ralph uselessly tries to warn her.
Ralph is a clever,
generous and good-natured man, who sees things as they are. He realizes that
Isabel is making a terrible mistake, but, above all, he feels that she has
betrayed the faith he had in her moral and intellectual qualities.
He had wished to
make her rich in order to give her freedom. He has probably made a mistake; he
has seen in his cousin a person free and resolute, as she really is, but also
more mature and experienced. He had planned the destiny of another person, and
this is dangerous or impossible.
Isabel has two
reasons for marrying Osmond: the first is her passionate desire to acquire
deeper knowledge and to develop her mind — and she believes that Osmond may be
a loving and passionate guide. But the second reason is her desire to serve, to
use her money in the service of a beloved person; the bitter irony of the
situation is that she does not know that Ralph had given her his own money,
that he had wanted her to be rich so that she might use her wealth "to
meet the requirements of her imagination".
A short time after
her marriage Isabel realizes that she has made a terrible mistake. Osmond soon
reveals his real self, his egoism, lack of sensibility, profound hollowness.
Instead of the portrait of an American, innocent, passionate girl, eager for
intellectual sensations, greater knowledge and existential fulfilment, Henry
James now gives the portrait of a woman whose character has been radically
transformed by the negative experiences of her life, by the sterile result of
her idealistic principles. She is now living in Rome, with her husband and his
illegitimate daughter, who is (Isabel learns too late) the child of Mme Merle,
Osmond's former mistress. She has no real intimate friends; Osmond, after trying
in vain to change her wild, passionate nature, leaves her alone for whole days
and she feels that he now hates her just for that nature that he has not been
able to subdue. She lives in a grey isolation, in a kind of mental and physical
captivity, silently imposed by the man she had admired and trusted. Life has
become "a dark, narrow alley with a dead wall at the end". Too late
she realizes that the man who has deeply loved and loves her still is her
cousin Ralph, and when she learns he is dying she goes to England to be with
him in his last days. Here Mrs Touchett tells her that it was Ralph who gave
her half of his money, as he wanted to make her free and independent.
When she first sees
him, he is lying almost unconscious; only on the evening of the third day does
he speak to her for the last time. This is a dialogue of love, of the most
generous, passionate, deep love ever expressed in English literature.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
THE SHORT
STORY
The term short story is generally applied to
almost any kind of fictitious prose narrative briefer than a
novel, capable of being read in one sitting, as Poe said.
This brief section analyses the features of the short story as a genre distinct from the novel. Although length is the obvious distinguishing
feature which separates the novel from the short story, it is by no means the
only one. Edgar Allan Poe, besides writing remarkable short stories, was
the first theorist on the genre.
PARTICULAR FEATURES OF
THE SHORT STORIES
The
short story typically limits itself to a brief span of time, and rather than
showing its characters developing and maturing, it shows them at some revealing
moments of crisis, whether internal or external.
Since the setting is often simplified or
circumscribed, much skill of the short-story writers has to be devoted to
rendering atmosphere and situation convincingly. Very often they will use a
key-note to elicit the reader's curiosity and interest.
Short
stories rarely have complex plots;
the focus is upon a particular episode or situation rather than a chain of events.
The plot usually develops according to a regular pattern:
In the introduction the author usually presents the
setting and the characters.
The key-note — usually an incident, a
crisis or, as often occurs in Poe's tales, an animal or an object arouses the
reader's interest and serves as a
catalyst to the development of the story.
The climax often comes unexpected and has
the function of creating surprise in the reader.
The conclusion of the story can vary: it can
imply a change as regards the
initial situation, the solution of the conflicts, the achievement of the
character's aim, his/her failure or even death; it can re-establish the initial situation; it can be open, leaving the conflicts
unresolved. In this case the story is meant to continue beyond the limits of
fiction.
In about two centuries, the short story has
developed into different forms and many famous writers have written collections
of stories that represent an important step in their careers, such as James Joyce.
Illustration for The Murders in
the Rue Morgue. by Guido Crepax, 1963.
The fantastic tales of Edgar Allan Poe have
inspired illustrations in different artistic styles, including contemporary
cartoons: in the sequence details from the tale are strikingly highlighted.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
THE MODERN NOVEL
The English novel was essentially bourgeois
in its origin and throughout the 18th and the 19th centuries it was firmly anchored in a social world with the gain or
loss of social status as its favourite theme. The novelist used to make
digressions, address the reader, comment on his own performance, and he was
faced with a relatively easy task: he was expected to mediate between his
characters and the reader, relating in a more or less objective way significant
events and incidents in chronological order. The existence of accepted values
and standards of behaviour led to the presentation of a social pattern which
was familiar territory to both reader and writer. The novel remained basically
unaltered till the second decade of the 20th century when there was the shift
from the Victorian to the modern novel.
This change was
characterised by a gradual but substantial transformation of British society,
which in a few years passed from the comfortable, prosperous world of the
Victorians and Edwardians to the inter-war years marked by unrest and ferment.
This was an important period because the urgency for social change and, from a
literary point of view, the pressing need for different forms of expression
forced novelists into a position of moral and psychological uncertainty. Their
role consisted in mediating between the solid and unquestioned values of the
past and the confused present. This new 'realism, influenced by French and
Russian writers (Marcel Proust, the author of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu; Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy)
tended to shift from society to man,
regarded as a limited creature whose moral progress was dramatically inferior
to his advance in technology.
Two other factors
contributed to producing the modern novel: the new concept of time (a subjective perception of time) and the new theory of the unconscious deriving from the Freudian influence.
The novelist rejected omniscient narration and experimented new methods
to portray the individual consciousness; the
viewpoint shifted from the external world to the internal world of a
character's mind. The analysis of a character's consciousness was
influenced by the theories about the simultaneous existence of different levels
of consciousness and sub-consciousness, where past experience is retained and
the existence of the past in the present determines the whole personality of
each human being. In other words, if the distinction between past and present
was almost meaningless in psychological terms, then there was no use in
building a well structured plot, in leading a character through a well arranged
chronological sequence of events. It was not necessarily the passing of time
that revealed the truth about characters. It might unfold in the course of a
single day, as in James Joyce's Ulysses
and in Virginia 'Woolf's Mrs
Dalloway, by observing the character performing a common action, or by
what Joyce called 'epiphany, that is the sudden revelation of an
interior reality caused by the most trivial events of everyday life.
The stream of consciousness technique or the interior monologue was introduced to reproduce the
uninterrupted flow of thoughts, sensations, memories, associations and emotions
in a flux of words, ideas and images quite similar to the mind's activity.
MODERNISM AND THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS TECHNIQUE
The 1910s seem to
mark a dividing line in the history of the novel. Indeed, the years following
this date were characterized by an actual revolution in English literature,
which some critics have later characterized under the general definition of
Modernism. The term may be misleading, since it can be applied to all the
artistic movements of the early years of the century (Futurism, Imagism, etc.).
As far as English fiction is concerned,
however, "Modernism" usually refers to
those novelists who actually experimented with new forms and who, while
focusing on the mental processes that develop in the human mind, tried to
explore them through what is called the "stream-of-consciousness" technique.
This new technique
applied the theories to literature developed by the philosopher Henry Bergson
(1859-1941) and the American psychologist, William James - the brother of Henry James - (1842-1910).
Bergson's
conception of what he called "durée", or duration, proposed that inner time has a duration which
eludes conventional clock time, thus turning the old conception of time from a
sequence of separate points into an unbroken continuum.
The American psychologist William James (1842-1910)
coined the phrase "stream of consciousness" to define the continuous
flow of thoughts and sensations that characterize the human mind. This
definition was applied by literary critics to a kind of 20th-century fiction
which focused on this inner process. Introspection was already present in
19th-century novel. Characters were presented as social beings but also as
individuals with a moral and emotional inner life. At the beginning of the 20th
century, writers gave more and more importance to subjective consciousness and
understood it was impossible to reproduce the complexity of the human mind
using traditional techniques; so they looked for more suitable means of
expression. They adopted the interior
monologue to represent, in a novel, the unspoken activity of the mind
before it is ordered in speech.
The
character stays fixed in space while his/her consciousness moves freely in time: in
the character's mind, however, everything happens in the present, which can
extend to infinity or contract to a moment. This concept of inner time, which
is irregular and disrupted with respect to the conventional conception of time,
is preferred to 'external time'.
Interior monologue is often confused
with the stream of consciousness, although they are quite different. In fact
the former is the verbal expression of a psychic phenomenon, while the latter
is the psychic phenomenon itself. The stream of consciousness refers to the
mental activity itself, while the interior monologue is the instrument used to
translate this phenomenon into words. To do so, the interior monologue often
disregards logical transitions, formal syntax and even conventional
punctuation, so as to reflect the apparently disconnected and chaotic sequence of
thoughts.
While the
psychological novel dealt with the "rational communicable" area,
stream-of-consciousness fiction is, by contrast, concerned with that area which
is beyond communication. There are, in fact, two levels of consciousness: the speech level, which can be
communicated either orally or in writing, and the pre-speech level), which has no communicative basis and is not
"rationally controlled or logically ordered". An obvious analogy
would be that of an iceberg, of which only the top is visible, while the
greatest part is submerged. Stream-of-consciousness fiction is concerned not so
much with the part of the iceberg that is visible, but with the part that lies
below the surface. To this purpose, the novelist must explore what initiates or
constitutes the mental process (e.g. memories, dreams, sensations, intuitions,
etc.) and analyse how this process works (i.e. through the use of symbols,
associations of ideas, etc.).
The methods used to
depict consciousness (a hard task for a writer, since consciousness is private
and fluid, often combining past, present and future) include cinematic devices
like " video editing (montaggi video)", "flashbacks",
"fade-out" and "slow-up", or such devices as the story
within a story, the use of similes and metaphors or special forms of
punctuation (parentheses, dashes, etc.).
In England this
narrative technique was exploited by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf although in
different ways: Virginia Woolf, in
fact, used a more repetitive style and the so-called indirect interior monologue (i.e. a monologue introduced by such
clauses as "he thought", "he decided", etc); James Joyce, on the other hand, went
further in his experimentation by using the direct interior monologue, whereby he shifted abruptly from
thought to thought, without any apparent connection of verb, subject or even
punctuation. As for Joyce, also for Virginia Woolf subjective
reality came to be identified with the technique called 'stream of
consciousness'. However, differently from Joyce's characters who show their
thoughts directly through interior monologue, sometimes in an incoherent and
syntactically unorthodox way, Woolf never lets her characters' thoughts flow
without control, and maintains logical and grammatical organization. Her
technique is based on the fusion of streams of thought into a third-person,
past tense narrative.
Similar to Joyce's 'epiphanies' are Woolf's ‘moments of being’, rare
moments of insight during the characters' daily life when they can see reality
behind appearances.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
JAMES JOYCE
Joyce was an
Irishman, like so many other major figures in "English" literature. Joyce's life and
works are in a sense the same thing, since his entire development as a
personality is also the development of his works as style and form. If we look
at his works in their order of composition we are in fact looking at his life.
He set all his works in Ireland and mostly in the city of Dublin. His
achievement was to give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people doing ordinary things and living
ordinary lives. His works did not have to express the author's point of view, but
they had to express the thoughts and experiences of other men. Joyce thought
that the artist ought to be "invisible" in his works. He advocated
the total objectivity of the artist and his independence from all moral,
religious or political pressures. Joyce
used different points of view and narrative techniques appropriate to the
several characters portrayed.
Joyce was a Modernist writer.
Apart from rejecting Irish nationalism, at the same time he set all his novels in Dublin, the
capital of the country he had grown up in. He spent nearly all his adult life
abroad, choosing voluntary exile in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, and becoming the
most cosmopolitan of Irish writers in his openness to the influence of other intellectual traditions.
Like other European
writers of the time, in fact, he was deeply interested in all aspects of
culture, including Freudian
psychoanalysis, and the experimentation that was affecting all fields of
art.
As a result of his interest in experimentation, he
created a new kind of dream language, a
mixture of existing words, inventive word combinations, and nonexistent words,
to provide a dense multi-layered prose that can be read on endless levels of
significance. Syntax is disordered, punctuation non-existent, in this immense
river of words. James
Joyce was almost blind. This physical problem was compensated by his sense of
ear, and the sound of words was very important to him. In order to appreciate
Joyce more and to enjoy the particular sound devices used by him, his works
should be read aloud.
For the sake of convenience, Joyce's
literary production is usually split into two periods, the turning point
coinciding with the writing of Ulysses.
The first period of his work is marked by a realistic technique. The
plot is quite linear in its development and rich in detail; the syntax is
logical and the language, far from being cerebral and distorted, reflects
everyday speech.
But it also goes
beyond the earlier stories by developing a more compassionate view of the lives
of its characters, as well as moving away from the rigorously realistic and
objective presentation of their lives. Here we see Joyce moving towards a more
intimate study of his characters' inner lives, in a way that was to be far more
fully developed in the "stream-of-consciousness" technique of his
later novels.
Joyce meticulously collects
and analyses the impressions and thoughts that an outer event, at a given
moment, has caused in the inner world of the character. The facts become confused, they are always explored
from different points of view
simultaneously. It follows that Joyce's stories and novels open in medias res with the
analysis of a particular moment, and that the portrait of the character is
based on introspection rather than on description. Time is not perceived as objective but as subjective, leading to
psychological change. Thus the accurate description of Dublin is not strictly
derived from external reality, but from the characters' minds floating.
As his works did not have to
express the author's point of view, Joyce used different points of view and
narrative techniques appropriate to the several characters portrayed.
His style, technique and
language developed from the realism and the disciplined prose of the Dubliners, through an exploration of
the characters' impressions and points of view, through the use of the free direct speech and the
epiphany to the interior monologue
So language broke down into
a succession of words without punctuation or grammar connections, into infinite
puns, and reality became the place of psychological projections, of symbolical
archetypes and cultural knowledge.
In the first phase of his
activity Joyce follows the rules of traditional technique, sequence of time,
use of common speech, richness of detail. The acute analysis of his characters is often enlightened by the so-called
"epiphany",
or sudden revelation, a moment of insight
into the inner truth of our
actions. In his second phase Joyce turns to experimentation, rejecting time
sequence, logical syntax, common punctuation, using the form of the "interior monologue" , by which he
reveals hidden thoughts , inner feelings,
lost memories of his characters.
Epiphany - The style of the collection is essentially realistic, with a
scrupulous cataloguing of detail, the ability to create a sense of place — the
Dublin which provides the setting for the stories — and remarkable moments of
sudden insight, which are one of the characteristics of Joyce's art. He called
these moments of insight "epiphanies".
The original
meaning of the term "epiphany" is, of course, the showing of the
Christ child to the Magi; but Joyce adopts this expression to signify a sudden revelation, the moment in a
novel or story when a sudden spiritual awakening is experienced, in which all
the petty details, thoughts, gestures, objects, feelings, etc., come together
to produce a new sudden awareness. In other words, there is an epiphany when
details, or "moments", buried for years in one's memory,
suddenly surface in one's mind and, like old photos, start a long, often
painful mental labour.
One of the best
examples of "epiphany" can be found in The Dead.
One of the most
significant works of this period is Dubliners.
The fifteen stories which the book contains were all written by 1905,
except for The Dead, the most
ambitious piece, which was written in 1907.
The Dead is the
last of the stories in Dubliners. It
forms the climax to the theme of decay and stagnation that runs through all the
stories. The work is an acute analysis of Dublin's life. Joyce himself wrote of
it: "I wanted to write a chapter on the moral history of my country, and I
chose Dublin for the scene because the city seemed to me the centre of paralysis".
The last story, The Dead can be considered Joyce's
first masterpiece. It stands out from the other fourteen stories in the
collection because, however similar in theme, it is denser, more elaborate, and
more remarkable; it is at once the summary and climax of Dubliners.
What holds all
these stories together is a particular structure and the presence of the same
themes, symbols and narrative techniques.
The Plot - The story can be
divided into two main parts. The first takes place at a dinner party shortly
after Christmas. The second is a kind of musical coda, in which the central
character, Gabriel Conroy, meditates in a hotel room on what has passed, and is
overwhelmed by the futility of his own life as well as those of the men and
women whose company he has just left.
The first section
is set at the house of Kate and Julia Morkan, Gabriel's aunts, two elderly
unmarried sisters who every year hold a party for their family, friends and
pupils (the two old ladies give music lessons for a living). Joyce skilfully
makes them representative of contemporary Ireland, including the different
generations, different religious denominations (Catholic and Protestant) and
political sympathies.
The last passage of The Dead constitutes the final section of the story and the actual moment of vision that Joyce
calls an "epiphany" . It is also at this point that we understand that the title The Dead refers not so much to the young seventeen-year-old boy who lied for Gretta's sake
, as to Gabriel himself, to his aunts , to all the guests at the party and, on a larger scale, to all the people of
Ireland.
After his wife's story, in
fact, Gabriel sees the events of the evening in a new light.
The memory of this story merges with other events of the evening in
Gabriel's realization of how little his life amounts to, either in passion or
intellect, all summed up in his silent
thought: "Better pass boldly into that other world, in the
full glory of some passion, than fade
and wither dismally with age".
The climax of the passage coincides with Gretta's words "O, the day I heard that, that he was
dead!" and Gabriel, "shy of intruding on her grief ”, walking
"quietly to the window". There follows a short lapse of time, after which the vision, or epiphany, takes place. Gabriel is now
in bed, lying beside his sleeping
wife, but the scene loses any precise temporal connotation and assumes a tone
of universal, eternal truth.
Gretta's recalling Michael starts a
process of self revelation in Gabriel; he slowly discovers himself as if in a
mirror. Confronted with the young
boy's devastating passion, he realizes his own deficiency and how fully his own "identity" has faded out into a "grey impalpable world"
of respectability and mediocrity.
He also feels the striking contrast between his own prudence and indecision and Michael's courage . In the
end, Gabriel expands his feelings of helplessness into a vision of his country and
countrymen as the living dead.
The story (and the whole book) ends
with the image of the snow quietly falling upon the city. The symbolism of the
scene is evident and can be variously interpreted. The snow may, in fact,
visually represent the hopeless solitude and incommunicability of man or
the isolation and alienation of the
artist in Dublin and in Ireland. In this sense we are led to indentify Conroy with Joyce himself, or rather with what
Joyce would have become if he had not left a city (and a country)
paralyzed by old traditions and by an
obsolete culture, and symbolically turned, in the story, into a white vast cemetery under the snow falling alike "upon all the
living and the dead".
Narrative technique
The omniscient narrator and the single point of view are rejected: each
story is told from the perspective of a character. Narrated monologue, in the
form of free direct speech and often of free direct thought, is widely used: it
consists of the direct presentation of the protagonist's thoughts through
limited mediation on the part of the narrator, and allows the reader to acquire
direct knowledge of the character. The linguistic register is varied, since the
language used in all the stories suits the age, the social class and the role
of the characters.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
JACK KEROUAC
Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922. Son of French-
Canadian immigrants, he decided to be a writer. He developed a spiritual
tendency in his character that would last throughout his life. The fact that
Kerouac was a spiritual 'seeker' is perhaps the most vital aspect of his life.
In post WWII Eisenhower America, Jack Kerouac chronicled the wild rebellious
culture of 'the Beats' in the late 1950s and early 1960s, paving the way for a
more accepting American society and the tolerance of alternative lifestyles
enjoyed today.
At the end of the war he began travelling back and forth across the
States, and in New York he started lasting friendships with the poet Allen
Ginsberg (1926-1997), the experimental novelist William Burroughs (1914-1997)
and the intellectual Neal Cassidy. This circle, along with a few other friends,
became known as the centre of the 'Beat' movement.
The influence of Cassidy on Kerouac was enormous; his total lack of
inhibitions, his enthusiasms, a sort of permanent wild excitement; his love of
adventure made Kerouac idolise him and consider him the archetypal hero. With
Cassidy Kerouac started his first hitch-hiking crossing of America, which was
to inspire his best- known novel On the Road, where he chronicled all
that had happened during his journey with Cassidy. The publication of this novel
in 1957 marked the beginning of Kerouac' s success: the book became a huge
best-seller and the 'Bible' of the Beat generation.
Kerouac became more and more addicted to alcohol and drugs. On the
Road was followed by other books.
The 1960s were Jack Kerouac's decade. His books were widely read on
college campuses; young people imitated him, hitchhiking around the country.
Kerouac's fame dwindled toward the end of his life, and alcoholism damaged his
health considerably. In 1969, Jack died from internal bleeding caused by
cirrhosis of the liver. He was only 47.
The term 'Beat Generation'
The Beat writers were a small group of close friends first, and a
movement later. The term 'Beat Generation, which gradually came to represent an
entire period in time, was invented by Jack Kerouac in 1948 and introduced to
the general public in 1952 when one of Kerouac's friends wrote an article,
'This is the Beat Generation, for the New York Times Magazine.
The 'Beats' were a group of young people who reacted against the spread
of capitalism and puritanical standard middle-class values of established US
society and preached the gospel of freedom - in all its forms - peace and
tolerance. The young people were looking for the spiritual, to rebel against
the American values and the rigidity of the American culture.
Kerouac explained many times that by describing his generation as beat
he was trying to capture the secret holiness of the oppressed.
The Beat Generation became very popular even in Italy thanks to Fernanda
Pivano, a close friend of Kerouac and all the other beat members.
The beatniks
It was a journalist of the San Francisco Chronicle who created the term 'Beatnik' in 1958.
The `nik' suffix was borrowed from `Sputnik,' a satellite that had just been
launched by the Soviet Union, striking fear into the hearts of many Communist-
fearing Americans.
Kerouac was called
the Father of the Beat Generation, this was the generation that preceded the
hippie generation of the 60’s. The Beat Generation was defined by listening to
Jazz and Bebop music. Jack Kerouac’s
writing method used the breathing technique of Jazz musicians where words were
improvised in a long monologue without using the period but separated by the
dash where the phrases between the dashes resembled improvisational jazz licks
and took on a rhythm that was all their own.
The beatniks
advocated escapism and created a so-called underground
culture, which included jazz (bebop), highly appreciated because of its
spontaneous flow and its freedom of expression, poetry and the oriental
philosophy of Zen Buddhism. They had their meeting place in the City Light
Bookstore in San Francisco founded by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953.
Here the Beat poets and novelists used to read their works in public.
A new language
Both Kerouac and
Ginsberg wrote about what they felt and thought during a particular experience,
which sometimes coincided with the moment of writing. They used the so-called
'hip language’, which was vital, alive, authentic and individual, as opposed to
conventional language, which was too dull, conservative, boring, and inadequate
for expressing their new intense experience of reality.
The famous Route 66
The structure
On the Road was rejected by
many as a morally objectionable work. Kerouac, through his first-person
narrator, Sal Paradise, enthusiastically describes the adventures that make up
the book's narrative, including stealing, heavy drinking, drug use, and sexual
promiscuity. To many critics of the time, Kerouac's novel signaled the moral
demise of a generation.
Kerouac was inspired by Melville, as he reveals while interviewed by
Fernanda Pivano, On the Road is commonly considered to have inspired the hippie
generation of the 1960s.
The novel is the story of a friendship and a
diary-like account of Kerouac's wanderings across North America with Neal
Cassidy. It lacks a central plot, since its structure is
episodic. However, some structural elements give it
cohesion:
the theme of the journey, symbol of the escape from the
city and from one's own past;
the narrator Sal
Paradise, who stands for Kerouac himself;
the character of
Dean Moriarty, who stands for Kerouac's friend Neal Cassidy. Sal idolizes him
for his cowboy style, his ease with women and his exuberant joy in living.
the same group of friends who reveal a chronic restlessness, an uneasiness that
manifests itself in a desire to get going and keep moving. They do not always
have a destination in mind and find nothing at the end of their journey.
More recent critical studies also evidence
considerable interest in Kerouac's “spontaneous prose” method, viewing it as an
extension of the stream-of-consciousness
technique used by James Joyce. The narrative takes the form of an interior
monologue about the characters thoughts. It also disregards syntax and
punctuation. It is spontaneous and informal.
The protagonist
The hero of
the book is Dean Moriarty, a fictionalised Neal Cassidy, who lives for `kicks',
as he describes those moments of intense experience and pleasure, free from all
the social and economic restraints. He symbolises the desperate attempt of the
post-war generation to live every moment with extreme intensity so as to
overcome the sense of void and fear. It is only on the road that Dean and Sal
Paradise live wild and free. The music the two friends and the people they meet
during their journeys are described in a detailed and fascinating way
Style
Kerouac's style is 'spontaneous' and episodic.
According to him writing meant expressing whatever came into the mind: a
thought, an idea, a scene or an episode, ordered as the mind recalls. The
unsophisticated language used in this novel has been defined `hip talk' (which
is 'street language'), and identified with the language of jazz musicians in so
far as it is based on spontaneity and on mostly monosyllabic words.
Scroll – script of On the Road
Rare
document:
Kerouac reading and speaking about himself, the Beat
Generation and On the Road - on The Steve Allen Show:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LLpNKo09Xk
Jack Kerouac, Interview (doc,
subtitled in italian)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD4ofEoUpxE
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IAN McEWAN
web:
Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ian-McEwan-Website/305499726425
Life and works
Born in 1948, Ian
McEwan started writing in 1970, after studying at the University of Sussex and
at the University of East Anglia.
In 1975 he
published his first collection of short stories which are concerned with
degenerate or dislocated behaviours, followed by novels of psychological
penetration.
McEwan also wrote a
play for television.
McEwan lives in London.
Atonement:
plot
Atonement starts as a classic
family saga, set in a British country house in 1935. 13-year-old Briony Tallis
decides to become a writer. Her first experiment in narrative technique
involves telling an odd incident she witnesses from her bedroom window from
three different points of view. It concerns her sister Cecilia who takes off
her dress and steps into a fountain in the presence of Robbie Turner, the son
of a family servant. Robbie has been educated at Cambridge under Mr. Tallis's
patronage, and wants to become a physician. He and Cecilia are in love but
Briony suspects that Robbie Turner is forcing her sister into doing obscene
things. When her young cousin Lola is harassed in the garden Briony accuses
Robbie of the act, out of revenge and perhaps jealousy. Robby is imprisoned and
expelled from the family's estate. Cecilia, who believes in his innocence, breaks with her family.
The second part of the novel takes place in Normandy
in May 1940. Robbie is serving as a soldier, after his prison sentence. We
follow him as he retreats, with the rest of the British Expeditionary Force,
through northern France to Dunkirk. The only thing that keeps him alive is his
hope to be united with Cecilia who meanwhile has become a nurse. Briony, now
eighteen, has realized that she made a mistake and is tormented by remorse.
In part three Briony works as a trainee nurse at a
London hospital, where the hard labour is a form of atonement for her. The
novel ends in 1999 when the ageing Briony, now a successful novelist, becomes
aware that she is developing progressive vascular dementia. Soon, her ability
to remember and grasp reality will desert her. But she is in peace because she
has finished to write her latest version of Robbie and Cecilia's story. Her
atonement seems complete until we learn that Robbie died in France and Cecilia in a bombing, and that the happy ending we
read was simply Briony's atonement for what she did.
The structure of the novel
Atonement is a complex novel
in terms of form. Jane Austen's influence can be seen in the story of the
relationship between two sisters but it places itself in a realist tradition
with its deep and vivid characterization. It displays a Modernist interest in
consciousness and in the use of shifting perspectives.
The third-person narrative is attributed not to an
anonymous authorial voice but to Briony, a character within the story. The descriptive
richness is one of the striking features of the novel with detailed imagery of
water and vegetation, and with divergent perspectives, flashbacks,
overlapping narratives, replayed scenes.
The weather plays an important role especially when
the author uses the heat wave to suggest high-running passions. Heat hangs over
the first part of the novel
and shapes its action when Robbie and Cecilia become lovers and are interrupted by appalled
Briony; when the mysterious act of violence and Briony's crime of false
testimony are committed.
Believing is seeing
Through the character of Briony McEwan presents the figure of the child
and the writer at the same time, in the sense that they both specialise in
fashioning worlds from their own imagination. This is one of the author's most
insistent messages, which he summarizes in his novel Enduring Love simply
as "believing is seeing", which means that imagination fails when it
works more with the products of opinion than observation.
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