( 2 5 ) P o s t - W a r N o v e l
(George Orwell, Graham Greene, Lawrence Durrell and the Angry Young Men)
T h e T w e n t i e t h C e n t u r y
[See Topic 13]
T h e 2 0 th C e n t u r y F i c t i o n
[See Topic 15]
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
[See Topic 23]
L a w r e n c e D u r r e l l ( 1 9 1 2 - 9 0 )
L i f e :
-b. in India, resided successively in En., the Mediterranean and Egypt
-< D. H. Lawrence: shared his antipathy to Br. reserve
-< H. Miller: the two led a long correspondence
The Black Book: an Agon (1938):
-< H. Miller's liberating infl.
-privately printed in Paris (its overt eroticism precluded its publ. in Br. for 35 y.)
"Alexandria Quartet": Justine (1957), Balthazar, Mountolive (both 1958), Clea (1960):
-< inspired by his stay in Egypt
-= a series of interlocked fictions describing interconnected unfulfilling love affairs
-presents dusty, sweaty, multi-layered Alexandria as a phantasmagoric Eliotic place where ancient splendours melt into modern inconveniences
-formally experimental: rather than moving from one point to another, the narrative stands above time "turning slowly on its own axis to comprehend the whole pattern"
"Avignon Quintet": Monsieur (1974), Livia (1978), Constance (1982), Sebastian (1983), Quincx (1985):
-attempts to break down preconceptions of time
-assaults inherited prejudices in favour of fictional realism
‘ A n g r y Y o u n g M e n ’ ( 1 9 5 0 s – 6 0 s )
-the 1944 Education Act made uni education available for the working-class students and produced a new breed of articulate uni graduates
-= a group of young radicals bitterly opposing the Br. Establishment and conservative elements of society in their time
-aimed to communicate rather than to experiment, and did so often in a comic mode
-shared their preocc. with the awkward self-consciousness of provincial, lower-middle class En., and the upward mobility of a grammar-school educated intelligentsia
-neither a uni education nor a marriage to a wealthy girl allowed for the integration into the conservative genteel upper-class society
-incl. Kingsley Amis (1922 – 95), John Osborne (b. 1929), John Braine (1922 – 85), John Wain (b. 1925), Alan Sillitoe (b. 1928), & oth.
-> often annoyed by The Angry Young Men label = sometimes referred to as The New University Wits
-all turned more serious after their initial work and the group fell apart
‘ C a m p u s N o ve l ’ ( 1 9 7 0 s – 8 0 s )
-develops the line establ. in Br. fiction by Philip Larkin’s Jill (1946)
-shares the uni or college setting or the conc. with wayward academics in wider world
(a)the campus novel of the Angry Young Men
(b)the campus novel of their less radical contemporaries, incl. Tom Sharpe (b. 1928), Malcolm Bradbury (b. 1932), and David Lodge (b. 1935): reflects the academic ambitions and tensions of the rapidly expanding world of higher education in the period
-reforms of the late 1980s and 1990s had changed the once relatively leisurely culture of academe x but: the 1970s and 1980s academics / authors of the ‘campus fiction’ then had sufficient time to write and produce telling period pieces
Ki n g sl e y A m i s ( 1 9 2 2 – 9 5 )
L i f e :
-received uni education and became a lecturer of E at Cambridge
-served in WW II
-youth: a radical member of the Communist Party x middle age: a conservative anti-Communist, disillusioned with the USSR
-father of Martin A.
-a lifelong friendship with P. Larkin
-knighted to Sir K. Amis (1990)
W o r k :
A n g r y Y o u n g M e n F i c t i o n :
-= a gifted comic and satirist
-preocc. with the upward mobility in uni environment
-got increasing vehement in One Fat Englishman +
-increasingly supplanted comic exuberance by gloomy farce in The Old Devils +
Lucky Jim (1954):
-= his 1st novel, dedicated to P. Larkin
-a seminal work [= a work from which oth. works grow]: the 1st E novel to feature an ordinary man as anti-hero
-a comic account of a young would-be-radical lecturer’s resistance to the earnestly pretentious and complacent culture of a provincial uni
-the protagonist = Jim Dixon, a typical ‘angry young man’, himself of middle-class orig. x but: an estranged critic of the middle-class social and cultural pretentiousness
-to get well along with his repudiating professor attends his would-be-cultural party, pretends to be writing a scientific thesis, etc.
-x but: the class distinctions prove unbreakable and he fails
-concl.: leaves with an attractive blonde for his new job in the capital city
-> won him wider pop. recognition
That Uncertain Feeling (1955), I Like it Here (1958), Lucky Jim’s Politics (1968):
-resuscitated the comic character of Jim Dixon
Take a Girl Like You (1960)
One Fat Englishman (1963):
-an account of a Br. visitor’s experience in an Am. college
-the M protagonist = a typical example of an Englishman attempting to resist the Am. way of life
Ending Up (1974)
Jake’s Thing (1978)
The Old Devils (1986):
-an account of the life of a group of retired friends and their wives
-> won him the Booker Prize
The Russian Girl (1992)
Sc i e n c e - f i c t i o n :
-interested in sci-fi, esp. in dystopia, as a critic
-> coined the term ‘comic inferno’ for humorous dystopia
The Green Man (1969):
-= a supernatural horror-novel
-> adapted by BBC for TV
The Alteration (1976):
-= an alternate history novel [= a sub-genre of sci-fi set in a world in which history has diverged from history as it is generally known]
-set in a parallel contemp. Br. in which there has been no Reformation and the Papacy still wields supreme power
Russian Hide and Seek (1980):
-= an alternate history novel
-set in a near-future Br. conquered by Rus. after WW II
also wrote:
-poetry, associated with ‘The Movement’: author of Bright November (1947), A Frame of Mind (1953), A Case of Samples (1956), & oth.
-non-fiction: author of a critical study (1975) and a biography of R. Kipling (1956)
-detective fiction: author of a study of Ian Fleming’s (1908 – 64) spy James Bond and of a fictional Bond adventure novel
J o h n O sb o r n e ( 1 9 2 9 – 9 4 )
L i f e :
-expelled from public school after striking the headmaster
-> outbursts of anger occurred throughout his whole life
-became an actor, a stage manager, and playwright
W o r k :
-freed the theatre of the formal constraints of the former generation
-shifted emphasis on the language, theatrical rhetoric, and emotional intensity
1 9 5 0 s P e r i o d :
Look Back in Anger (1956):
-< largely autobiog.: his living and rowing with the 1st of his 5 wives in their cramped accommodations while she was betraying him with another
-= a new kind of drama challenging the middle-class virtues of ‘the well-made play’
-revolutionary not in form or politics x but: in its conc. with ‘the issues of the day’, its rancour, its language, and its setting
-no more the country drawing-rooms with its platitudes and its sherry x but: the provincial bed-sitters with its noisy abuse and its ironing-board
-no more the theatrical illusion of a neat, stratified, and deferential society x but: the dramatic repres. of untidy, antagonistic, and disenchanted characters grating on one another’s, and society’s, nerves
-the protagonist = Jimmy Porter, the only character of the Angry Young Men to embrace anger as his life philos.
-succeeds to marry a wealthy girl, ends up in an uneven marriage, and gives way to his anger in a tyranny of his wife
-the play polemic rather than realistic, puts emphasis on the language: verbal attacks on the uni graduates employed in second-rate jobs, their unfulfilled emotional life, the society, etc.
-produced by the E Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre (London)
-> shocked its 1st audiences into responsive attention
-> supplied the name for the ‘Angry Young Men’ movement
-> won him the award for the most promising writer of the y., and turned him from an indistinctive playwright struggling for his living into a wealthy and famous ‘angry young man’
The Entertainer (1957):
-< Brecht-inspired
-employs the metaphor of the dying music-hall tradition the moribund state of the Br. Empire
-> filmed
The World of Paul Slickey (1959):
-= a musical
-satirises the tabloid press
1 9 6 0 s P e r i o d :
-his reputation begins to decline x but: his successful plays still outnumber the failures
Luther (1961):
-conc.: the life of the archetypal rebel Martin Luther (1483 – 1546, leader of the Reformation)
-[Protestant Reformation = a 16th c. movement to reform the Cath. Church in western Eur.]
Inadmissible Evidence (1964):
-conc.: a frustrated solicitor at a law firm
-uses his characteristically soaring rhetoric venom to powerful effect
-endows the story with complexity, ambiguity, and richness x but: criticised for lacking the immediacy of his earlier plays
A Patriot for Me (1965):
-conc.: the turn-of-the-c. homosexuality
-> won him the prize for the best play of the y.
The Hotel in Amsterdam (1968):
-> won him the prize for the best play of the y.
1 9 7 0 s P e r i o d :
-his social vision gets out of fashion, his plays decline in quality ends up as a writer having lost both his way and his audience
also wrote:
A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1991):
-= his 2-vol. autobiog.
-revives the familiar acidity of language to lay low all his enemies in the theatre, his family, or society at large
J o h n B r a i n e ( 1 9 2 2 – 8 6 )
L i f e :
-left grammar school without a School Certificate (obtained it later)
-employed in various odd jobs, became a librarian
-got involved with a local theatre
-> inspired the themes of his Room at the Top & oth. novels
-suffered from TBC, treated in a sanatorium
-> inspired his The Vodi
-determined to become a writer, left his librarian job, and contrib. to various periodicals x but: struggled for his living until his Room at the Top
-> won him fame and fortune
W o r k :
-author of some 15 books of fiction and some non-fiction
-x but: chiefly remembered for his 1st novel
1 9 5 0 s P e r i o d :
Room at the Top (1957):
-= his 1st novel
-< the Faustian theme of a young man selling his soul for riches and paying a terrible price
-puts emphasis on writing from observation / experience: rejects exotic ‘literary’ environments in favour of a less glamorous setting and instead emphasises the psychology of the protagonist
-offers a sharp picture of Northern life in the period obsessed with wealth and social status
-set immediately in the post-WW II y. x but: narrated in retrospective
-the unscrupulous and opportunistic protagonist chooses to marry wealth and success rather his true love and has to come to terms with the disenchantment by the spiritual emptiness he finds in the ‘top’ society
-concl.: the death of both his true love and his ‘true and authentic self’
-> won him immediate recognition
-> successfully filmed (1959)
Life at the Top (1962):
-= a sequel
1 9 6 0 s P e r i o d :
-none of his subsequent work attracted comparable attention
The Vodi (1959):
-< draws heavily on the time he spent in a tuberculosis sanatorium
The Jealous God (1964):
-< also strongly autobiog.
The Crying Game (1968), First and Last Love (1981), The Two of Us (1984), & oth.
‘ T h e I n kl i n g s ’ ( 1 9 3 0 s – 5 0 s )
-= a loose discussion group mostly of Oxford academics, mostly Christians
-held for the purpose of reading and discussing the members’ unfinished lit. compositions
-emphasised the value of narrative in fiction, the values of Christianity, and encouraged the writing of fantasy
-incl. John Wain, J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel) Tolkien (1892 – 1973; author of TheHobbit and The Lord of the Rings), C(live) S(taples) Lewis (1898 – 1963; author of The Chronicles of Narnia), Warren Lewis (1895 – 1973, C. S. Lewis’s brother), & many oth.
J o h n W a i n ( 1 9 2 5 – 9 4 )
L i f e :
-received Oxford education
-became a freelance journalist and author
-held the lectureship post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1973 – 78) & oth.
W o r k :
-a poet, novelist, playwright, and lit. critic:
(a)poetry: author of dry, cerebral, and witty poems associated with ‘The Movement’
(b)prose: novels and short stories
(c)drama: radio plays
(d)criticism: studies of Samuel Johnson (1709 – 84), Arnold Bennett (1867 – 1931), W. Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), & oth.
(e)also author of many nwsp and radio reviews
-member of ‘The Inklings’
Hurry on Down (1953):
-= his 1st and most famous novel
-an account of the picaresque career of an unsettled uni graduate’s deliberate flight down the social scale into increasingly unpropitious occupations (a window-cleaner)
-= turns his life against conventional society
-> together with K. Amis’s Lucky Jim and J. Braine’s Room at the Top a leading example of the fiction produced by the ‘Angry Young Men’
The Contenders (1958)
Strike the father dead (1962):
-the title: the lower-case letters indicate his non-conventional manner
-a jazzman rebels against his conventional father
The Smaller Sky (1968)
A Winter in the Hills (1971):
-= a rampageous comedy
-a linguist makes researches in North Wales
Young shoulders (1982):
-= a sensitive study of juvenile bereavement
-a young boy faces the death of loved ones
Where the river meets (1988) and Comedies (1990):
-= Bildungsromanen
-< draws on his knowledge of Oxford