2 2 C o l o n i a l E x p e r i e n c e i n t h e W o r ks
o f 2 0 t h C e n t u r y B r i t i sh A u t h o r s
(J. Conrad, , R. Kipling, E. M. Forster, D. Lessing, G. Orwell, and G. Greene)
J o se p h C o n r a d
[see C. under ‘13 Neo-Romanticism’]
R u d y a r d Ki p l i n g
[see K. under ’13 Neo-Romanticism’]
E ( d w a r d ) M ( o r g a n ) F o r st e r
[see F. under ’18 The Birth of Modernism’]
‘ N e w M o r a l i t y ’ ( 1 9 6 0 s – 7 0 s )
-= an abstraction of the general change of attitudes in society, esp. twd women
-incl. also new patterns in women’s employment, esp. professional employment
Germaine Greer (b. 1939), The Female Eunuch (1970):
-stimulated a newly outspoken and often provocative feminism
-G.: the ‘first feminist wave’ incl. genteel suffragettes, the 2nd wave as repres. by the novel incl. ‘ungenteel middle-class women…calling for revolution’
Doris Lessing (b. 1919), The Golden Notebook (1962):
-one of its M characters: ‘The Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution – they’re nothing at all. The real revolution is, women against men.’
-the rev. begins with a heightened alertness to the narrow repres. of women’s roles and women’s consciousness in society and its lit.
D o r i s L e ssi n g ( b . 1 9 1 9 )
E a r l y P e r i o d :
-conc.: the growth of political awareness amongst native blacks and white settlers in colonial East Af.
Children of Violence (1952 – 69):
-= a 5-vol. novel sequence
-conc.: the developing political commitment and the later disillusion of the F protagonist Martha Quest
-M. carefully placed as: ‘adolescent, and therefore bound to be unhappy; Br., and therefore uneasy and defensive; in the fourth decade of the twentieth century, and therefore inescapably beset with problems of race and class; F, and obliged to repudiate the shackled women of the past’
-M. learns her radicalism in colonial Af. x but: also unlearns the Stalinist assumption about world rev.
-The Four-Gated City (1969):
-= the last and the most experimental vol. in the sequence
-opening: amid the fragmented political aspirations of Br. anti-nuclear campaigners
-concl.: in the y. 1995 and 2000 after a devastating atomic war
-M. discovers a hope for the future on a remote Scott. island settled by a group of mutant children with its mental powers enhanced and its social vision reintegrated by the effects of radiation
M a t u r e P e r i o d :
-conc.: the rejection of conventional realism in favour of what she called ‘inner space fiction’
The Golden Notebook (1962):
-relates the concept of mental fragmentation to the disintegration of fictional form
-attempts to come to terms with an intelligent woman’s sense of private and public diffusion
-shapes the narrative around a series of notebooks, the Black, Red, Yellow, and Blue, kept by a woman writer Anna Wulf to analyse different aspects of her life and order her life accord. to neat categories, both private and public
-A.’s evolving perceptions of herself produce an inevitable and welcome formlessness:
(a)finds herself incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests her = ‘a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life’
(b)finds the private and public diffusion symptomatic not of social, mental, or ideological disease x but: of personal liberation
-concl.:
(a)gives up the struggle against the ‘banal commonplace’ that ‘women’s emotions are all still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists’
(b)finds her bid for freedom fulfilled in the new, if still insecure, value of a woman’s creativity
G e o r g e O r w e l l ( 1 9 0 3 – 5 0 )
L i f e :
-b. Eric Blair, in Ind.
-sent to En. for education, won a scholarship to the foremost private boarding school
-> 1st became aware of the difference btw his own background x the wealthy background of his schoolmates
-joined the Imperial Police in Burma
-> 1st gained a sense of guilt about Br. colonialism and a feeling he must make some kind of personal expiation for it:
(a)accepted a pseudonym as a way of escaping from the class position in which his birth and education had placed him
(b)underwent an extremely difficult experience as a teacher in Pairs and a tramp in En. x did not have to suffer the dire poverty, had influential friends to help him x but: did so because ‘part of my guilt would drop from me’
-retained his characteristic independence of mind on political and social questions: scorned ideologies, never joined a political party x but: regarded himself a man of the uncommitted and independent left
-disillusioned with the Soviet Communism: Stalin betrayed the human ideal for him
-saw a social change necessary and desirable for the capitalist countries of the west x but: the ‘socialism’ in Rus. = a perversion of socialism and a wicked tyranny
W o r k :
-due his independence consid. politically misfit x but: a brilliantly orig. writer
F i c t i o n :
-began with fictional analyses of the narrowness and idiocies of the Br. at home and abroad
-saw the Br. as smug imperialists and even smugger domestic tyrants
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933):
-< his own experience of a dire life in ill-paid jobs and common lodging-houses
-x but: manages to find delight in the comfortable and familiar En. of “bathrooms, armchairs, mint sauce, new potatoes properly cooked, brown bread, marmalade, [and] beer made with hops”
Burmese Days (1934):
-< his own experience of Burma
-= a fiercely anti-colonialist novel
A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935)
Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
The Road to Wigan Pier (1937):
-< his own experience of the unemployed in the north of En.
-set in a singularly uncomfortable and unfamiliar En.
-explores the untidy ugliness of industrialism, the urban life scarred by unemployment and poverty, and the contrasts btw the rich x the poor
Homage to Catalonia (1938):
-< his own experience of the Sp. Civil War on the Republican side
-strongly criticises the Communist part in the Civil War
-> roused a great indignation on the left: leftists believed they should support the Soviet Union and the Communist Party in the struggle against international fascism
Animal Farm (1945):
-= an animal fable
-satirises the manifest failure of Communist ideals in Rus. against the background of a fictional speculation of how a perversion of socialism could develop
-sentimentalises the working class strength and good nature (the carthorse Boxer) x but: makes a fine choice of pigs as the undoers of the animals’ rev.
-pigs = at times look suspiciously human, traditionally associated with greed and laziness, and proverbially supposed to be incapable of flight
-their rev. remains earthbound, their aspirations too much resemble those of their enemies
-incl. the corruptions and distortions of language serving Napoleon to his dictatorial ends [see also his Nineteen Eighty-Four]
-> banned in the USSR and its satellites until after the rev. of the late 1980s
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949):
-= a savagely powerful dystopia
-set in a totalitarian En. in which the government uses the language of socialism to cover the tyranny systematically destroying the human spirit
-language = one of the principal instruments of oppression, controlled by the Ministry of Truth, and conc. with the transmission of untruth into ‘Newspeak’
-the slogans of the party on the facade of the Ministry = ‘War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.’
-makes purges and vaporisations ‘a necessary part of the mechanics of government’ to create the world with no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement
-blends:
(a)the Stalinist Rus.
(b)the bomb-scarred post-war Br.
(c)Franz Kafka’s (1883 – 1924) dark fantasies of incomprehension and impersonal oppression
(d)Aldous Huxley’s (1894 – 1963) dystopian vision of an ordered scientific future
-< C. Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend > an individualist society obsessed by the power of money and typified by the phrase ‘scrunch or be scrunched’ (was among the 1st modern critics to take D.’s fiction seriously)
N o n - f i c t i o n :
-an outstanding investigative social journalist, regularly publ. in left-wing periodicals
-an acute observer, generaliser, and an open-eyed crosser of class boundaries
“Shooting an Elephant” (1936):
-= an anti-colonialist essay
“Looking Back on the Spanish War” (1943):
-< his own experience of personal discomfort and political disillusionment in Sp.
-criticises both intellectual pacifists x those who dismiss as sentimental his contention that ‘a man holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him’
-provokes those insisting on a division of history into right causes defended by heroes x wrong cause supported by villains
-concl.: his escape not from victorious Fascists x but: from persecution by one of the warring fractions of the split Sp. Left
“Politics and the English Language” (1946):
-= one of his most influential essays
-explores the decay of language and the ways to its improvement
-dismisses political language as ‘designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable’
-argues for the plain E as ‘an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought’
“Why I Write” (1947):
-claims every line he had written since 1936 had been ‘directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism, and for democratic socialism’
G r a h a m G r e e n e ( 1 9 0 4 – 9 1 )
L i f e :
-experienced a singularly unhappy and suicidal adolescence
-entered the Rom. Church (1926)
W o r k :
-wrote 26 novels, 9 vol. of short stories, and many miscellaneous articles
-blamed for seemingly ‘un-English’ prejudices in his time: a semi-devout x but: believing Rom.-Cath., a devout anti-imperialist, and a critic of both Br. and new Am. imperialism
-recurring themes:
(a)a colonially wounded world beyond Eur.
(b)a gloomy sense of sin and moral unworthiness
(c)a commitment to outsiders and rebels
1 9 2 0 s – 3 0 s P e r i o d :
The Man Within (1929):
-the title: from Sir Thomas Browne’s (1605 – 83): ‘There is another man within me that is angry with me.’
-introd. the recurrent 2-sidedness of his protagonists, complicated by dangerous self-destructiveness
Brighton Rock (1938):
-the protagonist = Pinkie, a Cath. and a gangster
-fascinated by the conc. of ‘Hell, Flames, and damnation’ x but: seems to be intent on courting his own eternal destruction in the face of ‘the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God’
1 9 4 0 s – E a r l y 1 9 5 0 s P e r i o d :
-= his finest work
-< the WW II > added sharpness to his fictional perspectives and preocc.
-the angry and self-destructive ‘other man’ moved his fiction in a more distinctively agnostic direction
-the Cath. Christianity:
(a)for him: a single ray of heavenly hope over the dark abysses of human depravity, despair, decay, and pain
(b)for his characters: God and his Church as distant as evidently ‘appallingly strange’
-characteristic settings: troubled and disorienting topographies
-characteristic protagonists: Cath., all of them ruins, or at best ruinous
The Power and the Glory (1940):
-set in the violently restless Mexico
-the protagonist = a whisky-priest in the anti-clerical Mexico
-conc. as much with doubt and failure as with faith
-> enriched the E language with the phrase ‘whisky-priest’
The Ministry of Fear (1943):
-set in the phantasmagoria world of the twilit, blitzed London
-incl. the tormented protagonist’s frenetic hallucinations when hiding underground during an air-raid
The Heart of the Matter (1948):
-set in a flyblown, rat-infested, and war-blighted West Af. colony
-the protagonist = Scobie, a suicide
-accuses God of ‘forcing decisions on people’ and blames the Church for having all the answers
The Third Man (1951):
-set in the precarious, ‘smashed, dreary’, and partly subterranean Vienna
-the Cath. Vienna, its citizens, its displaced refugees, and its military occupiers = all wrecked, divided, and guilt-ridden
-> coexists with its more brilliant variant of a film-script written by G. himself
The End of the Affair (1951):
-set in the blitzed London
“The Destructors”
L a t e 1 9 5 0 s + P e r i o d :
-= more ostensibly political novels
-x but: none of them of quite the same edgy power as his former writing
The Quiet American (1955):
-set in Vietnam
Our Man in Havana (1958):
-set in Cuba
The Comedians (1967):
-> provoked an international scandal: the Haitian Government brought a case against it for is having damaged the Rep.’s tourist trade
A Sort of Life (1977):
-= an autobiog. memoir
-claims with a characteristic note of pessimism: ‘Success is only a delayed failure.’
-x but: achieved both commercial and critical success and became by far the best known and most respected Br. novelist of his generation