The Twentieth Century

Wa y s In
The instructor who turns to this last section of the instructor’s manual, devoted to
the twentieth century, will either be fresh and sparkling as a new semester or a year-
long course unfolds, or else catching a second wind after traversing prior centuries
or periods. You may be teaching a course with the relative luxury of being focussed
on the twentieth century alone, as for example in surveys of Modern British prose
and poetry, or in classes on modernist literature, both of which generally begin
with Joseph Conrad or possibly let Oscar Wilde get in under the century’s wire; or
you may be perusing these pages rather breathlessly and short on time, with
twentieth-century literature only part of a longer course with a syllabus encom-
passing several centuries—for you, this literary period, like the twentieth century it-
self, quickly draws to a close. Whether your course has the comparative freedom
of the former in terms of time and pace, or if it is on the tight schedule of the lat-
ter, with no time to dawdle over lesser lights, there are a few general principles to
keep in mind in addressing the twentieth-century section of the Longman Anthology
of British Literature, and some common pedagogical goals on the fast track or the
slower, leisurely path, that we hope will invigorate your teaching.
Modern British literature (that is, post-Victorian, twentieth-century British lit-
erature) rejoins or embraces world literature, in a way that British literature ac-
complished at several of its peak periods, but not at all. William Shakespeare is an
English writer, to indicate the obvious, but Shakespearean drama and poetry have
had and continue to have world-wide audiences, scholarship, and cultural impli-
cations. The epic poetry of John Milton has had similar, if slightly less powerful,
reverberations across many other literatures and tongues; the British Romantic
poets opened up Romanticism for Europe in general and then, as Romanticism
spread as a movement, they created a literary style, and a cultural politics, which
traveled across the globe. Twentieth-century British literature in many of its facets—
its prose, poetry, and drama—has the same global distinction and global dissemi-
nation, and the same innovative stature, as these past exemplars. Stating this fact
is not meant to create a hierarchy within British literature, labeling some of its pe-
riods or productions “greater” than others by virtue of their being more widely
read, or more influential, outside Britain itself. All questions of value aside—and it
would be absurd to judge Donne’s poetry or Johnson’s prose or Austen’s novels as
less great, or even less “universal,” than they manifestly are, only for not having

511
512 Introduction

leapt over the divisions of language and nation quite as nimbly—it is still the case
that twentieth-century British literature happens to contain many of the premier
names in modernism regardless of nation or language: Conrad, Joyce, Woolf,
Eliot, Beckett, Yeats, and Lawrence. They constitute a formidable line-up no other
single country can match across the key genres—and genders—of modernism.
Teaching the twentieth-century section of the Longman Anthology, then, has as a
great plus the chance to watch British literature set many of the standards that ul-
timately will count as “modernist art” around the world, and to see English litera-
ture in action as a foremost innovator on the world scene. One common thread in
the following guides to teaching the individual works or authors of the last section
will emphasize ways the selections from this period can stand alone as a study in
modernism, a compact modernist lineage. The changes occurring in the novel, in
poetry, and in drama in the twentieth century—how they become “modern” in for-
mal terms—can all be witnessed at their height in the authors of this section, who
offer a lexicon of modernist literature just as experimental, powerful, and influen-
tial as Picasso’s paintings or Einstein’s physics for the lexicon of modernist art and
modern science, respectively. The most dynamic—and true—way to present the cen-
tury’s literature is at that high level of technical innovation and lasting human im-
port: British literature in the twentieth century alters the forms and the roles of art.
Modernist form is by no means the only hallmark of twentieth-century British lit-
erature, but it is to be meaningfully discerned even in writers whose works, however
monumental, might appear to have more than one foot set in a previous century. The
two extraordinary writers in the section who most bear this out are George Bernard
Shaw and Thomas Hardy, both Victorianists by birth, education, and literary train-
ing, yet each of whom stakes a claim to modernism in unique ways: Shaw in the de-
centered, ensemble nature of his drama, and Hardy in the old-fashioned echoes
within his very modern poetry. What makes something “modern,” then, whether
work of art, idea, or even person, is and should be a constant refrain in teaching the
twentieth-century canon. One path through the Anthology selections, then, would in-
volve extracting the modernist nugget—the works of Conrad, Hardy, Yeats, Eliot,
Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, and Lawrence—and using the Perspectives sections as sur-
rounding and deepening contexts: in other words, foregrounding the era’s literary ex-
perimentation and achievements. Exploring the modernist “nugget” just described
need not be only a formal enterprise—if the basis for our anthology holds, aesthetic
choices are never divorced from cultural, historical, and political roots. One of the
most exciting approaches to the modernist canon embedded in the section would be
to tease out the complex literary geographies modernism contains, starting with
Conrad’s foreignness and tracing modernism through the diverse cultures, classes,
genders and regions of its development. Another pathway to adopt as a supplement
to the primarily literary-historical route would focus on key issues emerging in the pe-
riod, which spill over into the literature and also arise from within it: one such issue
is the encounter with difference and diversity brought about by the loss of empire,
through the challenges of independence movements and struggles, including
women’s suffrage and trade unionism. Under such scrutiny, “British” modernism
quickly reveals its fragmentation and its “otherness”; consider a syllabus which inves-
 Introduction 513

tigates how modernism came to be such an off-center movement in cultural terms,

and why the greatest modernist writers in its tradition are women, or Irish, or work-
ing-class, or foreign-born. Modernism stands revealed as a veritable encounter with
difference—in some cases literally, as in encounters across race, culture, or class; in
some cases metaphorically, as Virginia Woolf insists on the productive silences of
women’s voices and lives. Wyndham Lewis’s work sketches a modernist recoil from
the masses; D. H. Lawrence’s writing explores the intertwining of sexuality and power
in class terms. England’s cultural “opposite” for six hundred years had been its colony
Ireland; in the twentieth century, Irish writers are the fountain of British modernism.
The writing of these modernist giants—Wilde, Shaw, Joyce, Yeats, Beckett—is itself an
encounter with the Other, as their works hold up “the cracked looking-glass of a ser-
vant,” in Joyce’s phrase quoting Wilde’s, in which to mirror the history of English lit-
erature and the legacy of colonialism. A course set up in this way, in other words one
that took modernism as a complicated and a divided phenomenon, a series of rich
encounters with differences inside and outside, would flow quite readily into the post-
World War II and the contemporary parts of the Anthology: Conrad’s modernist lin-
eage could (and should) be traced through Naipaul, Rushdie, and Churchill, while
Yeats’s poetic modernism travels through to Auden, Larkin, the Irish poets Heany
and Ni Dhomhnaill, ending with Derek Walcott’s voyage back to Conrad.
At the heart of the twentieth-century section is Virginia Woolf’s work: she is at
the center of the volume because its editors see her writing as the quintessential
representative of British modernism. Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway gives students the best
example of the trajectory of the modernist novel, in a work that refers repeatedly
to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, within a narrative that highlights the global predica-
ment of modern Western societies, and underscores the place of women in mod-
ern culture. Moreover, Woolf’s intricate prose and the audacious structuring of
the novel stand as a model of modernist experimentation. In addition to includ-
ing this novel, the Anthology provides an extensive selection from Woolf’s well-
known works of social thought, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, and sev-
eral short fictions. The amplitude of the Woolf selections, allows an instructor to
link Woolf’s writing with the lineage of female writers who precede her in the an-
thology, and to connect her prose writing with the important documents of cul-
tural thought—Milton, Johnson, Wollstonecraft, Mill, Carlyle, Arnold, Wilde,
Pearse—that form a major current of British letters, sometimes oppositional, some-
times not. Gender is an explosive feature of the twentieth-century section and now
has its own Perspectives section, Regendering Modernism; male writers like
Bernard Shaw, who argues for women’s equality no less passionately than Woolf
does, D. H. Lawrence, whose story The Horse Dealer’s Daughter centers on female
sexuality, or Caryl Churchill, who depicts fluid sexualities and the pressures on im-
migrant women in particular, can be read with Woolf, West, Bowen, Mansfield,
Rhys, Gordimer, and others for a multi-faceted exploration of gender and sexual-
ity as a profound force in modern literature and life.
As any instructor knows, one of strongest techniques for teaching is the creation
of cross-references, so that issues or themes or styles accumulate force as they are re-
peated with a difference in works that cross-reference or allude to others. The twen-
514 Introduction

tieth-century section has a built-in engine for cross-reference in its first selection,
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Critically accepted as the first modernist literary
work, Heart of Darkness reverberates through all the prose fiction, much of the po-
etry, and some of the drama, even including the play, Cloud 9. Conrad’s brief but
monumental novella refers back to the travel writing of the nineteenth century in
its narrative thrust, points forward to the postcolonial voices narrating their own
further journeys, incorporates in its astonishing style of poetic density the develop-
ments in imagery and rhythm made by poets like Hopkins, Hardy and others, and
draws on the visual sophistication of the modern painters revealed and revered in
the art criticism of Ruskin, Pater, and, later, painters in the color illustrations such
as Vanessa Bell. Most of the streams of critical interest in the twentieth century con-
verge in Conrad’s work, and those that seem to remain frustratingly outside it—for
example, the modern awakening of women’s self-awareness and self-determination—
can be provocatively introduced by virtue of their absence in this rich text.
Britain is one of the few European countries to experience a revolution on its
own soil during the twentieth century: the revolt for Irish independence reached
its goal in the formation of the Irish Republic in 1922. The twentieth-century sec-
tion of the Anthology provides ample selections from Irish literary and political doc-
uments—many of the latter works of literature in their own right—in order to allow
the specificity of its Irishness to emerge from writing often lumped under the san-
itized heading of British literature. The Anthology consistently emphasizes the lin-
guistic, cultural, and political complexity of Great Britain from medieval times,
and illustrates in its selections, commentaries, maps, and perspectives sections the
complicated traffic between and among England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland,
and, later, farther-flung colonial possessions in Africa, the Caribbean, Southern
Asia, Australia, and the subcontinent. The Irish case is perhaps the most fully de-
veloped one in the Anthology, and since it did lead to the formation of a separate
nation in the twentieth century, a thoughtful literary case history centering on
Irish/English literary relations could make a powerful, interesting, and coherent
syllabus in and of itself. Wilde, Shaw, Parnell, Collins, Pearse, Yeats, Joyce, Bowen
and Beckett could form an internal unit on modernism in art and politics. Wilde’s
defiant aestheticism and flouting of bourgeois norms takes on a different light
when seen as a form of artistic polemic against English social norms and control;
Yeats and Joyce offer two completely distinct paradigms of what political “action”
might mean, and conceive of modernity in oppositional ways; Beckett’s Irishness
takes him to Paris and to a hiding place within the French language.
The relationship between literature and national identity, or between literature
and politics, could also be a strong focus for teaching this section. Wyndham
Lewis’s Manifesto articulates a politics—verging on fascism—no less than an aesthetic
program; Shaw’s Pygmalion is a political essay in charming disguise, which counters
Lewis with a form of pragmatic democratic socialism. The poetry of Owen, Sassoon,
Rosenberg and others in response to the Great War is especially resonant seen in
this light. The two sui generis memoirs of that section—David Jones’s In Parenthesis
and Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That—are luminous interconnections of the artis-
tic and the political, the self and history. Evelyn Waugh’s stories Cruise and The Man
 Joseph Conrad 515

Who Liked Dickens scathingly etch the decline of what he saw as England’s natural
aristocracy; P.G. Wodehouse vaults over social unrest to make class distinctions
mostly a hilarious matter of language on holiday. George Orwell comments on the
role of the committed or partisan writer, and the modern self in light of fractured
or tormented histories, as do W. H. Auden, V. S. Naipaul, Ni Dhomhnaill and
Heaney, in divergent ways. The vivid multiculturalism of Britain today, with its
“Black British” citizens, its non-white immigrants, its openness to Europe as well as
its Irish, Scottish, and Welsh communities, is signaled in works by Caryl Churchill,
Angela Carter and James Kelman.
The above paragraphs have described several pathways into the rich materials
of the section, suggesting modes of organization—literary language and form, cul-
tural issues and themes, historical contexts and events, and their dynamic interac-
tion around specific texts, writers, or even styles. In what follows, ideas for teach-
ing individual works intersect with these broader agendas, even as they harken
back to other periods or literary forebears.

Jo s e p h C o n r a d
Heart of Darkness
This deceptively slim text was a fateful event in the history of fiction, a novel that
set modern fiction on an entirely new course. To teach the novel is to examine
what makes this a radically new narrative style, and how its innovations are linked
to the historical circumstances of its production, to the story of how it came to be.
The global history of imperialism that engenders this novel and pervades it is in-
separable from the distinctive techniques of writing that distinguish it as a specifi-
cally modernist novel. The two tracks in pursuit of Heart of Darkness ultimately con-
verge and tie together. Because the novella is so pivotal to the twentieth-century
section, inaugurating post-Victorian literature, announcing British modernism,
and reverberating in literary or thematic ways in virtually all the writing that fol-
lows it in the Anthology, this entry in the manual is longer than most, and includes
a full-fledged interpretive reading of the text, as well as background for under-
standing it in critical and historical terms, to provide a possible paradigm for teach-
ers of the text in the context of twentieth-century British literature.
Heart of Darkness is the story of a voice, of Marlow’s voice as it issues forth from
the gloom of the shipboard of the Nellie as she lies becalmed, waiting for the turn
of the tide to begin traveling back to London, where she is moored. His voice seem-
ingly issues from the darkness—first of all, because it is growing dark on ship, with
night falling as the story unfolds. Moreover, Marlow is left in partial darkness as a
character—never fully described, never given a personal history—so that human per-
sonality and character is shadowy and “flat,” a silhouette. He has become nothing
more, and nothing less, than a ribbon of sound. Conrad’s tale moves back to one
of the oldest forms of narrative, the personal tale, the story of the eyewitness, the
testimony of memory, and in that sense Heart of Darkness certainly is a return to
an old-fashioned mode, to what Walter Benjamin called “the art of the storyteller.”
516 Joseph Conrad

In that same move, however, Marlow’s “living voice” is also directed toward an au-
dience, the mostly silent companions he has on ship, the men who go by the
names of their professions, the Director (a version of the CEO), the Lawyer, the
Accountant. Tell students to imagine that Michael Eisner, Bill Gates, and Michael
Jordan are all listening to Marlow on the deck of Steven Spielberg’s yacht, to get
the effect of power and privilege Conrad intends. Marlow’s voice, then, is as hal-
lowed in narrative history as the voice around the campfire, telling tall tales, or the
tradition of the seaman’s “yarn” that begins in literature with Homer’s Odyssey;
Conrad intends these parallels too. Yet in being a voice out of the darkness, di-
rected to a shadowy assemblage of the forces of power in modern society in the
“greatest city in the world,” Conrad also gives the ancient tradition a very modern
twist: Marlow’s voice is like the disembodied sound of the gramophone, Edison’s
new invention that was taking the world by storm. Marlow is an ancient mariner
or a troubador type, but he is also a phonograph recording, a piece of modern
technology, a technical “ghost.” The ear is emphasized over the eye—just as it will
be in other modernist writing, as for example in Joyce’s Dubliners and Ulysses. As
the narrator says, “we knew we were fated, before the ebb began to run, to hear
about one of Marlow’s inconclusive experiences.” Hearing and telling are the
ground of the story, while seeing is always a precarious achievement and a much
less certain business. Marlow doesn’t claim to be an eyewitness to Kurtz’s and im-
perialism’s crimes, although he was, because seeing is not believing. He relies on
telling, listening, hearing.
Conrad’s narrative “trick” is to make us, his readers, feel as if we are listening
to the story, not reading it with our eyes. We have to “hear” its voice, just as
Marlow’s listeners did. One fascinating project for students is to trace the refer-
ences to sight and sound, to the “oral” versus the “written” across the whole novel.
The narrative, then, could be looked at abstractly as the alternation of presence
and absence; the presence of spoken words in time makes absent their written ver-
sion, or at least postpones the sense that they are written—that’s the “trick”; a
speaker takes over the narrative with his voice, and his voice overrides the fact that
he is absent or unseen to his listeners as he speaks. Paradoxically, the goal here is
“to make [us] see,” as Conrad’s famous preface states. “Only make them see,” he
yearns of his readers, who have to “hear” first in order to then “see” in their mind’s
eye, to transcend the absence of everything but words so that we may pass into a
realm of vision beyond the words. Conrad tries to use prose in a negative fashion,
in order to transcend writing and thereby embody direct utterance and vision—in
other words, the voicing or sound that is so crucial to Heart of Darkness is a way of
proposing a path out of words, written words with their inability to open out and
to tell. Written words threaten to lie flat and inert and ignored on the page; spo-
ken words can thrill, persuade, or horrify as they almost enter the body of the lis-
tener. Every experience begins with the relation of speaker to hearer and hearer to
speaker: we are listening as much as we are reading, our reading is meant to take
us through to a point where what we hear is Marlow’s voice. Conrad’s complex
book leads us through sound to sight, taking the “long way around,” in a sense, be-
cause the mark of modernity is a doubt that words can capture and reproduce re-
 Joseph Conrad 517

ality. The problem lies not only with words, which suddenly are seen to be much
more than transparent windows onto ideas or thoughts—words are playing their
own complicated game with us, as the philosopher Nietzsche among others dis-
cerned, whose thought about language was a strong influence on Conrad.
“Reality” also is no longer felt to be certain, has vanished as a possibility. This
arises partly because modern life makes reality hard—if not impossible—to deter-
mine: images are more real than real things at times, space and time are altered by
technology, “reality” could be microscopic or telegraphic or x-rayed, or hidden in
the unconscious. And, most perplexingly of all, a sense of what is real, or true, is
not necessarily shared by people, whose perspectives or blindness can create their
very reality. Heart of Darkness envisions a sharing of “truth” between speaker and
listener that could escape some of the blindness of language. That attempt,
though, seems bound to fail; Kurtz, for example, is reduced to a talking insub-
stantiality, rather than a man: “he was just a voice.” The darkness we are asked to
enter in Heart of Darkness is a dark space where Conrad hopes that the language
humans so excruciatingly use as a barrier to truth, and an obstacle to sharing what
is real between ourselves, will somehow vanish, leaving in its place the complete
absorption of teller and listener into an imaginative truth they share. This is one
important sense of the darkness that so pervades Heart of Darkness: it is also a way
of pushing beyond the constraints of language to suggest a shared substance, a neg-
ativity that becomes something, a darkness that can be inhabited as the shared
space of memory and truth. And nonetheless, as is of course obvious, the novel is
made up of words, and cannot escape using words to try to effect the very escape
from them. This impasse or paradox begins to account for the importance of the
voice, which helps to insist that the words are entering our minds in some other,
almost telepathic way. “After Heart of Darkness,” the critic Marvin Mudrick says,
“the recorded moment—the word—was irrecoverably symbol.”
Conrad embeds the method of this story into its own frame. Let’s step back for
a moment and acknowledge how complex that frame is; we don’t have Marlow as a
first-person narrator who takes over at the beginning of the story and operates ever
after with authorial control, narrative certainty, perfect knowledge or at least self-
knowledge. We’re taken off-balance from the start by the fact that the narrative of
Marlow’s voice is framed by another narrator, never named, who sets up Marlow’s
discourse for us. The narrative makes concentric circles, with Marlow’s in a sense
being surrounded or circumscribed by that of the narrator. This invisible narrator
is not a “voice,” but a presence on the page, and has no omniscience, no authority,
no ability to testify that language can convey truth and total exposition. This nar-
rator who establishes the opening for Marlow’s voice is not superior in knowledge
to Marlow or to us; he is also a listener—and he is decidedly not Joseph Conrad.
Students can be shown how unusual the lack of authorial omniscience is—the van-
ishing of the eighteenth-century asides like “Dear Reader,” and the nineteenth-cen-
tury moral commentary of Eliot or Hardy or Dickens is decisive. In this way the
novel thoroughly sets aside any internal claim to total knowledge, to capturing re-
ality, to presenting a wholeness that can be completely revealed in the language of
the work. Instead, we are insinuated into the text and reminded of its provisional-
518 Joseph Conrad

ity. This move has many consequences: authorial omniscience is abandoned—even

the text is seemingly dependent on what Marlow will say next. A passage has been
made from the “closed text” of realism, as many literary critics have described it, i.e.
the realist novel that can be finished, or summed up with a moral, or provided with
a clearly tragic or happy ending, to the open text, where what is being told or nar-
rated cannot be finalized, closed, or defined, since the meandering voice narrates a
journey without a definitive ending, or final meaning.
The famous lines about how Marlow’s open-ended story differs from the
“seaman’s tale,” a tale with a kernel of meaning inside it like a nut within a shell,
are the best single source for explicating Conrad’s new method. A reader of Heart
of Darkness can’t hope to bore in and extract a nugget of truth, to peel away a husk
and extract the solid meaning within. The almost mystifying image Conrad’s nar-
rator gives for the nature of Marlow’s storytelling is that of a moonlit glow bring-
ing out a shimmering haze, where two insubstantialities are set in conjunction
with one another. The meaning that surrounds what is being told like a vapor is,
then, greater than the individual words within the sentences. The impression, in
the sense of sensory impression, that is imparted by teller to listener, or reader, re-
lies on the consciousness of the teller, not on some supposedly external reality,
firm and fixed. When one probes this language, tries to open it up or make it a
formula, one puts one’s hands into a retreating mist. This isn’t because Conrad is
being opaque or deliberately difficult; his new mode of writing, which even his
early readers recognized as “modern,” casts a net of words that fans out in a di-
aphanous way. To use another simile—Conrad’s style is like the many ripples pass-
ing over the surface of a pond when a stone has been thrown, because he con-
ceives of language and knowledge in new ways. Heart of Darkness lodges us within
a voice that knows that the teller is not separate from the tale, that what is told is
the stream of consciousness. These impressions are not easily available, straight-
forward, complete, true or false. The Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” in-
cluded in the volume states some of these artistic intentions directly.
Every word, then, in Heart of Darkness becomes a kind of charged particle, re-
ceiving its valence from the words that surround it and also from its repetition over
time. Individual words accrete meanings that shift and change in this work, that are
as indeterminate as the misty halo, not because of some obscurity or desire to
thwart the reader, but because the process of arriving at the “truth,” insofar as that
is possible, must shake language, or words, from their fixed moorings, must let
words open out the way a radiance surrounds a misty reflection. The words in the
book are “symbolic,” but not in the older critical understanding of the symbol as a
permanent meaning carried by a word or image throughout a work. Conrad’s words
are incredibly important—none of them is chosen casually, none of them is “merely”
descriptive. When we talk about symbols in the older way, we usually envision going
on some kind of a symbol hunt, tracking down the meaning of a word or image and
then fixing it in amber, or stuffing it and mounting it on the wall in order to say—
yes, this symbol eluded us for a while, but we finally bagged it. The metaphor of
charged particles opening the paragraph was meant to evade this sense of finitude
or completion. For example, taking the images of light and dark that naturally sug-
 Joseph Conrad 519

gest themselves as vitally important to Conrad’s text, one can see that they are in-
determinate, unfixed, never resolving themselves into neat identifications or dis-
crete meanings, but instead operating as fields of force in the text, moving in and
through Marlow’s account, where the “meaning” is never stated or defined, because
it is being made, being spoken. “Dark” and “light,” “white” and “black,” seemingly
clear-cut terms that are opposites to one another, in Conrad’s lexicon reverse their
meanings, or subtly exchange places. “Whiteness” can become an immensely dark
moral blankness, while “blackness” can suggest revelation and truth. We have to
hang on Marlow’s every word, because with each word the story is created anew, the
relations of the words and images to one another is altered and transformed.
The narrative form of Heart of Darkness makes a deliberate havoc of any simple
scheme based on the quest, because the quest presupposes a final ending, reaching
the goal or grail at some point. Marlow has set out on a quest of a sort—to make a
trip up the river, incidentally encountering the Kurtz he has come to hear so much
about—but the narrative doesn’t rest on the unfolding of that search. Instead, the
narrative becomes retrospective, a looking back over in memory, to find in mem-
ory an understanding of what the experience might have meant. Unlike a quest,
where the hero finds what he is looking for, or at least, like Ulysses, finds his way
back home, Marlow’s journey is incomplete, fragmentary, and inconclusive. At the
same time it is crucial for Marlow to make us see, as he sees or doesn’t see. The
journey of the telling takes precedence over and displaces the actual journey to
Africa and back, because it is not a matter of recounting an incident and then pro-
ducing a moral out of it, but rather exploring the nature of the perception and the
memory of that event, whose moral is only achieved in group awareness. Marlow
is as much in the dark as we his listeners are; what the novel is built out of, then,
is its words. Just as the mist surrounds the halo, so will Marlow’s words, his voice,
become ghostly, until he is described as an ivory fetish, a blankness himself as he
speaks the tale; just so will all aspects of the journey as they are described also take
on a spectral glow, phantom-like at some level, unreal in the sense that their mean-
ing is being made out of the ghostly medium of words. In that mist of inter-
connection we look to find what we can see behind the words of this text. Thus as
one moves through it, much of the account can be read as having the unreality of
a dream—“we live, as we dream, alone,” Marlow says. The Anthology includes the
song lyric “We Live, As We Dream, Alone,” by the important punk band Gang of
4, in part to cite how widespread the cultural references to Conrad’s masterwork
are, in high art and in popular art, in fiction, film, and even popular music. The
song zeroes in on one profoundly modern, or modernist, aspect of Heart of Darkness,
which is the feeling of loneliness experienced by Marlow and, by extension, all
modern people. No human community shares his, or our experiences, and
Marlow, like the singer of Gang of 4’s ballad, must provide whatever meaning or
truth will emerge from his life on his own. Modern loneliness is summed up too
in the phrase T. S. Eliot borrowed from Conrad for his poem on modern existence
“The Hollow Men.” In the absence of shared values and common goals, in the face
of ambiguity, alienation, and solitude, human beings become hollow, become
empty. Marlow, however, is not an example of a “hollow man”—he is still trying to
520 Joseph Conrad

tell the story which, if his listeners hear it, will redeem such loneliness and replace
the hollowness of amorality. The question for Marlow, as it is the question for
Joseph Conrad, is whether artful language can draw people together long enough
to accomplish ethical community.
The book spins out a ghostly line of narrative, with a shimmering, poetic sur-
face of words, but is also completely rooted in historical detail—thoroughly realis-
tic, if we want to use that word. In teaching the book in relation to the Anthology
as a whole, emphasizing the historical particularities is as important as giving full
recognition to Conrad’s stylistic daring and modernist methods. Instructors
should make use of the maps, which show the extent of the British empire by the
turn of the century. The travel writing section of the nineteenth-century section is
replete with the overtures to imperialism which bore fruit later in the century, and
makes a strong companion piece with Conrad. Many of the subsequent selections—
those by Forster, Waugh, Woolf, Greene, Bowen and Mansfield and Sackville-West
no less than those by Naipaul, Rushdie, Rhys, Gordimer, Heaney and Walcott—are
vital intertexts with the history and ideology recorded so enduringly in Heart of
Darkness. For what Conrad writes about in Heart of Darkness is true history:
Marlow’s journey replicates the exact and horrifying conditions to be found in the
Belgian Congo as they actually existed at the time, despite the fact that neither he
nor Conrad ever names the country or its colonial rulers; every aspect down to the
nuances of tribal differentiation is present in Conrad’s work. How are these two
aspects of the text compatible: its radical inconclusiveness and yet its precise real-
ism, meticulously and subtly conveyed? Moreover, Conrad himself had made a voy-
age up the Congo nine years before the writing of Heart of Darkness, as a ship cap-
tain commissioned by a trading company in Belgium, much as Marlow happens to
be given a job. Conrad’s trip lasted six months, and involved bringing back a
trader, Klein, who had become sick at his “station” and then died on board the
ship Conrad commanded. The history of the so-called Congo Free State Conrad
writes of but does not name is as follows: In 1876, King Leopold of Belgium who,
in response to the smallness of his kingdom and the spirit of the age, had been
looking around for an empire for some time, promoted the formation of the
“International Association for the Suppression of Slavery and the Opening up of
Central Africa.” At its founding international conference in Brussels, he an-
nounced: “To open to civilization the only area of our globe to which it has not yet
penetrated, to pierce the gloom which hangs over entire races, constitutes, if I may
dare to put it this way, a Crusade worthy of this century of Progress.”
Leopold had in mind a crusade in the only large area of Africa not already
claimed by the chief colonial powers—England, France, Germany, and the
Netherlands—and in the journalist-explorer Henry Morgan Stanley he found a
comrade and co-conspirator to help him acquire it. Stanley set up a chain of sta-
tions along the upper reaches of the Congo River. The association’s concern with
free trade, human betterment and the abolition of slavery was purest propaganda;
as soon as possible, Leopold used shameless economic and political exploitation
to carve out this territory, setting the other great powers against each other, and
then in Berlin in 1885 won international recognition as the sovereign ruler of the
 Joseph Conrad 521

Independent State of the Congo. He became the sole ruler of an empire of a mil-
lion square miles; so ruthless was this empire that three million African lives were
lost; finally, in 1906, Leopold was forced to divest himself personally of his hold-
ings in the face of international outcry.
That is not to imply that there was a happy ending as a result, or self-determi-
nation for the Congo; merely that this style of individual or private imperialism
was ended. Leopold had maintained the Congo Free State under completely dif-
ferent conditions than the other African colonies held by England, Germany,
France and Holland. All exports from the Congo ports, and imports too, were so
heavily taxed that trade could not be set up by any other countries; this turned the
Congo into a warehouse of wealth for Leopold, whose intentions were not to col-
onize the Congo but essentially to strip it bare of all its resources, in particular
ivory, wood, and important minerals. To accomplish this Leopold simply turned
every “subject” into a slave; the men who Marlow sees dying under the trees in
such numbers are those who had been rounded up as slave labor to create the rail-
road Leopold hoped would facilitate the emptying of the country: it had no use as
a means of modernization, as there was no place to “go.” The laborers were not
fed, and so died in massive numbers when they had worked as long as they could.
The very railroad Conrad describes in Marlow’s reminiscences took eight years to
build and was, interestingly, masterminded by a brilliant black engineer from the
United States, George Washington Williams. Conrad, who was active in anti-im-
perialist circles, wrote often about the cause in journals and newspapers, and
spoke in lectures before professional and humanitarian societies, was to call
Leopold’s sixteen-year reign “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the
history of human consciousness.” Heart of Darkness shows these slaves or workers
dying of starvation and overwork, holding thin pieces of wire, whose meaning
seems to mystify Marlow; Conrad knew well what he was writing about, as Leopold
had established these lengths of wire as a form of fake currency, having bundles of
wires handed out to the slaves, and thereby claiming to pay them as workers, when
in fact there was no food to buy, and no value to the wire currency even if there
had been any food. The tone of harsh irony Marlow adopts at the absurdity of
these cruel manipulations of language—slaves as “workers,” men who won’t accept
slavery as “criminals,” useless wire as “money”—anticipates all modern critiques of
politics and language, from Orwell to Rushdie. No settlements other than the sta-
tions were set up; other than these stations the primary force in the country was
the militia sent out to conscript workers by burning their villages and destroying
tribal living areas. The enormity of this genocidal process is hard to take in, hard
to register, and it is that difficulty which Conrad speaks to in Heart of Darkness.
Marlow refers in a famous passage to the nature of the imperial project, that it is
nothing more nor less than taking land away from those who have flatter noses than
most white Westerners: “Only the idea redeems it.” Recall that this is early on in his
oral narrative, at a point when it is still crucial to keep the attention of his listeners,
to draw them in by articulating a notion they might be thought to share. The first
section of his tale is, in fact, an attempt to connect and then to reverse the trajectory
of imperialism as it begins to be his subject; looking out over the Thames, he recalls
522 Joseph Conrad

that England, too, now a seat of imperial power, was once a “place of darkness,” that
it, too, was a wilderness conquered, invaded and penetrated by the Roman empire
and civilization. He imagines two possible personas for this Roman stage, one a con-
fident boat commander, the other a young citizen forced to travel out to wild Britain
because of financial problems at home in Rome, and of their sense of the savagery
and darkness of the England they visit. The unnamed narrator in the prologue ar-
ticulates the glories of Britain in the first flush of imperialism, when adventurers and
explorers like Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake set sail to bring back loot, or
to found colonies, when imperial exploits were part of dazzling personal adventures
and discoveries. It is Marlow, and of course Conrad, who suggests that present-day
imperialism bears little resemblance to those days of buccaneering glory, ironically
reversing the terms of light and darkness so that the sheen of Renaissance golden
treasure becomes the dark heart of modern British empire.
Conrad took great pains to differentiate the types of imperialism present in his
time, the height of British empire-building, when Britain quite literally ruled the
majority of the world. Leopold’s gangster imperialism he deemed the worst type,
whereas he found somewhat better the colonial type practiced by Britain in India,
for example, where British people settled, and cities, railroads, schools, and courts
were built, ostensibly for the benefit of some of the native subjects, as well as the
ruling British. At the time, the support for empire was near universal, so that by
making such thoughtful distinctions Conrad was already branded a radical. Fifty
years later, making any distinction whatsoever in the degrees of harm caused by im-
perialism struck many people as intolerable acceptance of a vile political practice,
and Conrad received blame as an apologist for imperialism, even though he had
worked so hard to confront it, study it, and criticize it. Historical hindsight is re-
sponsible for many such judgments, and these are understandable, especially when
imperialism was being challenged and overthrown. Conrad’s book cannot be read
as simple imperialist apology, though, if it is looked at in fairness as the extraordi-
nary work of anti-imperialism it was in its day, and if its bitter ironies are fully un-
derstood. Class discussions which revolve around the simple binary of Heart of
Darkness as imperialist and racist, or neither of those things, will probably not re-
solve much. A better approach arises in and through the literary selections which
follow in the Anthology—especially those post-World War II—as they enter into vi-
brant dialogue with Conrad, sixty or more years later. It should be noted, too, that
while the major African writer Chinua Achebe branded Conrad’s book “racist” in
the 1950s, at the dawn of the African novel in English, on the grounds that
Conrad had spoken for Africans but had not let them speak for themselves, sub-
sequent African writers and theorists of postcolonial literature and culture have ac-
knowledged that Conrad had little choice. He wrote in a vacuum, from the only
possible “side” he could know. The many adaptations of Heart of Darkness by con-
temporary African and African-diaspora writers from Achebe to Ngugi wa-
Thiongo, Soyinka and Emecheta among others, have been the most fruitful and
productive response to the issue of voice.
Still, Marlow holds out the slim hope that those forms of imperialism that sin-
cerely are motivated by an idea—of improvement, justice, or “civilizing mission”—
 Joseph Conrad 523

may be better than those forms awash in murder and hypocrisy. But if it is “the
idea behind it [imperialism] that redeems it,” what is that idea, who has it, where
is it confirmed? Marlow makes a distinction among imperialisms when he remarks
on the colorful world map of empire hanging in the otherwise sepulchral offices
of the Company that “a jolly lot of work gets done” in the red areas. Work is sacred
to Marlow, and red is, of course, England’s color in the imperial banner sweep-
stakes—the very notion that the spaces on a map are colored according to whom
they “belong” is an extraordinary inversion of the logic of color, and this para-
graph about the map is, with the exception of the description of the Russian’s har-
lequin clothes, the only outburst of color in the somber chiaroscuro of the text.
The book discriminates among imperialisms, not to support or admire one or the
other, but to show the differences that exist, and perhaps to express hope that
Britain will change its views on the efficacy of the “work” done in imperial con-
texts. Marlow describes his early boyhood relation to the map of the world and
how he wanted to inscribe himself on the blankness at the heart of the imperial
map. His desire to do so is also a fateful one; the snake-like river virtually uncoils
itself from two-dimensionality and snares him, charms him, as he says. Here one
can see the crossing over of the two tracks of analysis: the utter factuality of that
imperial map, rendered precisely as it existed in history, and yet the dynamization
of that map by the psychic forces of memory and consciousness at the same time.
Conrad through Marlow shows us how seductive the very “blankness” was to
Western eyes, who sought to know it in boyish innocence, leading to effects as
grave and ghastly as the Belgian Congo takeover.
The railroad scene at the company station juxtaposes the crisply insane
European clerk, who has made a fetish of whitening his laundry and wearing daz-
zlingly white garb no matter what the hardships on his African laundress, with the
dying African men, diversely given the label of enemy or criminal by the
Europeans at the station, one of whom has tied a bit of white yarn around his neck
as a fetish or talisman, Marlow presumes. Marlow’s narrative shows that the white
station clerk’s infernal whiteness is no less a “fetish” or primitive talisman than is
the piece of yarn, which is no less ambiguous than any European self-decoration.
He must move under the cliches of imperialism and racism, which would equate
“black” with “savage,” tunnel into it by using these phrases ironically, as a way of
getting to the heart of colonial language. The indeterminacy of darkness as the
trope of Africa is the metaphor for its unknownness, the location of moral ab-
sence, the site of plenitude and discovery. Only against the darkness can one see
the mist that makes the halo, or the spectral moonshine. The difficulty and the
challenge to language in this first modernist work in English, is to make it at one
and the same time both clear and fuzzy, both darkly ambiguous and brilliantly
lucid, and brilliantly ambiguous and darkly apparent. Only out of a negativity can
anything be revealed, a negativity so complex it shifts the entire terms of the mod-
ern novel. The people in the book, at least the Europeans, are negative too, as
Marlow says of the bricklayer he meets, “empty inside, with nothing but a little
loose dirt” there, or “they were nothing,” as he says of the pilgrims. Language takes
on uncanny forms, or is described in talismanic or fetishistic ways, as if Conrad
524 Joseph Conrad

were deliberately adopting the worst criticisms Europeans made against African na-
tives and colonial others and turning them against Western customs; for exam-
ple,when Marlowe describes the way the word ivory rings in the air “like a god to
be prayed to”; or the way the “little smile of the manager of the inner station is a
kind of seal set on his words”; or the ways that, since they have no shared language,
Marlow regards the Africans as gestural hieroglyphs, whose every movement of the
hand is a carefully wrought form of speech.
As Marlow makes his way along the river, heading toward Kurtz’s station, with
several of the pilgrims irritably and gun-happily in tow, his crew made up of pre-
sumed cannibals and their dwindling stores of dead hippo meat, again and again
the landscape that surrounds them, the wilderness, as Marlow thinks of it, is de-
scribed as having a face, a face whose features cannot be seen, but a face nonethe-
less. The anthropomorphizing of the jungle, turning it into a human figure with
an implacable face, is crucially related to the voice that is Kurtz’s “gift.” “I could
see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a
murmur. All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about him-
self. I wondered whether the stillness on the face of the immensity looking at us
two were meant as an appeal or a menace.” And a little later, “Somehow it didn’t
bring any image with it.” The face that isn’t a face; this figural language begins to
establish the wilderness as a mysterious place that will not speak itself, that refuses
to reveal itself by any act of voice, and the silence that surrounds Marlow is not at
all the silence of, let’s say, the proverbial forest when no one is there to hear the
tree fall, but a silence that is utterly meaningful because it constitutes a refusal to
speak. This form of silence is evidence that the wilderness could speak, because
against its majestic and even pregnant pauses the speech of humans is a jabber, an
irrelevance, a mistake. So desirous of breaking through to the meaning of that si-
lence does Marlow become that the novel begins to use the words that derive from
the vocabulary of truth and knowledge—there is a veil that Marlow wants to pierce,
a veil that hides the face he wants to gaze upon for the truth that presumably lies
behind. These aspects introduce the gender questions an instructor will want to
highlight, and to connect to selections by Bowen, Woolf, Lawrence and others, in
terms of the relationship between women and truth.
This dialectic of speech and silence, of darkness and revelation, is complexly
mapped out in the novel; one place to look for its complication is in the painting
Kurtz has left with the young aristocrat at the central station, which he shows to
Marlow. This painting is an allegory, in the style of that period’s salon painting,
but it is also an allegory that reverses expectations. “Then I noticed a small sketch
in oils, on a panel, representing a woman, draped and blindfolded, carrying a
lighted torch. The background was somber, almost black. The movement of the
woman was stately, and the effect of the torch-light on the face was sinister.”
Traditionally, it is the figure of Justice who is depicted blindfolded, carrying the
scales, while the figure of Truth with her torch looks out with unfettered gaze from
her representations in paint or in stone. Nietzche’s Genealogy of Morals pointed out
that the icon of truth veiled as a woman was the impetus behind philosophical
speculation; here that image is extraordinarily changed, the woman blindfolded
 Joseph Conrad 525

while her torch is nonetheless carried aloft. Something is awry with the “truth” of
what Europeans, and Kurtz, are doing in Africa. A woman symbolizes truth (light)
turned to blind darkness. The Western white women in the novel—Marlow’s Aunt,
Kurtz’s Intended—are “blind” to the truth, because they have been prevented from
seeing it. They live, blindfolded in a sense, within the “beautiful lies” of imperial-
ism, never recognizing the actual truth revealed by the lit torch of Marlow’s story.
Their very morality and goodness is a kind of screen or shield, keeping them from
seeing “the horror, the horror” beyond.
The mask, too, is an important substitute for the desired speaking face of
truth: a mask figures that possibility, but also implacably takes it away. As Marlow
approaches the village where Kurtz has been living, under the guidance of Kurtz’s
disciple, the young Russian seaman, he makes a visual discovery. Using a pair of
binoculars, he scans the enclosure ahead, where he had seen a series of poles
topped with what he thought were ivory balls, totems on a stick. As the super-
visual acuity of the binoculars permits him to see, these balls are actually heads
Kurtz has had impaled around his encampment, dead faces, if you will, all of
whom—and the personal pronoun is unavoidable—have their heads turned away
from Marlow’s gaze, withholding themselves from it. Except one. That head he
does indeed gaze upon, but this head’s eyes are closed. However, it is smiling; “the
shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth . . . smiling continually
at some endless and jocose dream. . . .” Another dead end, in a sense: despite the
aid of the binoculars, Marlow cannot succeed in entering that line of sight, and
the head keeps its own secret, its own dreamy counsel. The binoculars too are not
irrelevant to the dynamic of the entire book; almost cinematically, we are swept
across Marlow’s line of vision, we see with him through these devices, distanced
from what is to emerge by technological power.
In this anthropomorphic landscape, where the world refuses to speak itself,
Kurtz’s voice is the sole source of truth; Kurtz is voice, is speech, is talk, against the
stillness of the wilderness for Marlow and the others—whereas for those on the
other side of the bank, the Africans, there is no wilderness, there is no silence.
Again and again the text refers to the presence of the colonizers, to the pilgrims
and even to Marlow himself as a “fantastic invasion.” Out of the jabber of their
speech Kurtz, however, is said to be all eloquence, to have the gift of expression,
and it is to this hope and indeed fetish that Marlow begins to cling. His world of
rivets and hard work had kept him safe from the hallucinatory strangeness and in-
deed the horror of his encounter with what the company has made of this place,
for a time; Marlow uses the Victorian ethos of the nobility of work to forget the si-
lence; he vanishes into the world of rivets as long as he can, until that world is
punctured as truly as the helmsman’s side is punctured by the spear. Marlow comes
to suspect that even work is conforming to a system whose grasp is so vast it can-
not be comprehended by individual effort, which holds out no redemption—what
has Marlow’s devotion to the duty of repairing the ship’s bottom done but bring
them to Kurtz’s outpost, to replace Kurtz’s “unsound methods” with the equally
brutalizing corporate extractions of ivory the manager is going to institute? Kurtz,
then, is not just a single “bad apple,” to be weeded out so that the merry work of
526 Joseph Conrad

imperializing can go on. Kurtz is the voice of that imperial project speaking itself
and knowing itself—he is the one person who will admit to the horrible truth of
what is being done.
Kurtz is a voice—we need to take that very seriously. What he has done has con-
sequences, yes, but they aren’t neatly identifiable as timeless or universal patterns,
and especially not as some kind of regression to “savagery.” The novel explores the
notion of regression, of going back in time to some primordial state, when, for ex-
ample, it says: “we were wanderers on a prehistoric earth”; its use of such
metaphors results from its collision with and against the theory of progress that
had arisen out of Social Darwinism, a theory Darwin himself argued against. Kurtz
is a mouth—the first time Marlow actually lays eyes on him, from afar, he is being
carried on a stretcher, shouting, and his mouth is a black hole. “He wanted to swal-
low this, swallow all the air, swallow all the earth.” Marlow can barely hear his
voice, but it reaches him faintly, and he sees Kurtz physically as having become an
ivory fetish, a piece of the ivory his gaping mouth has wanted to swallow.
One of the most famous quotes in the book addresses the nature of Kurtz: “All
Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.” He is one-quarter English and one-
quarter French, with the other halves of each parental side left mysteriously miss-
ing; all Europe has made him, though, because all of Europe’s imperial discourses
have combined in him. His eloquence consists in intermingling all the discourses
of Sweetness and Light, Civilization, Power, Truth, and Good which the English,
French, Germans and so on had employed to justify the progress of empire. Kurtz
specialized in “burning noble words,” a “magic current of phrases.” These words
belong, Marlow says, with the dustbin of progress, among the “sweepings and the
dead cats of civilization.” Marlow can scarcely remember what Kurtz says after he
hears him talk, and can hardly remember the speech of Kurtz’s he reads after the
latter’s death: it’s all a cloud of verbiage. What he does remember, and so does
everyone who reads Conrad’s book, is what Kurtz scrawled as the postscript, so
electrifying, simple, and “true” it is like a lightning bolt, a phrase that flashes up
against the rhetoric and illuminates it: “Exterminate the brutes.” Notice the post-
script is in the grammatical form of a command, an exhortation, an order: Kurtz
“forgot” to pretend that there was an idea behind it to redeem it—he just wrote
what was happening—“kill them all.” Marlow hates this postscript, but recognizes
he must tell the story of extermination everyone else, besides himself and Kurtz, is
denying. When this passage arrives in the story Marlow, sitting on the boat deck,
lights a match, and it goes flickeringly out. And Marlow, too, as the bearer of this
terrible news, yellows and withers and becomes ivory-like, a hard fetish, an idol be-
fore his listeners. The tale, and the novel, is a flickering illumination; Marlow is
trying to tell the untellable, the catastrophic, where no one can believe it. Marlow
describes his audience, as well as the readers of the text, when he refers to them as
lodged “between the butcher and the policemen, afraid of the gallows, the insane
asylum, and of scandal.” Will they listen? Will we?
The Intended is described as “the echo of Kurtz”—she is the echo of his voice,
not really a person. As Kurtz speaks his final words, “the horror, the horror,”
Marlow again experiences the tearing of the veil over truth, and pledges his loyalty
 (George) Bernard Shaw 527

to Kurtz, because he has uttered the truth. After this, Marlow is an outcast among
the other pilgrims, and he has to return to Europe, taking the relics and effects of
Kurtz with him, as if in expiation. It is there he learns that Kurtz is, in a sense, the
figment of an imperial imagination, a figment of language; no one can even tell him
what Kurtz was famous for—journalism? painting? or for being a speaker, a fascist
mass speaker without any particular politics except those of extremism? Marlow has
gone to see the Intended; her apartment is as tomb-like as the Company offices, and
as sinister: not because the Intended is evil, but because she is an allegory come to
life. The Intended is the woman in the picture at the station, painted by Kurtz,
blindfolded Truth in a glare of horrible whiteness. When Marlow yields to her pleas
and tells her that Kurtz’s last words were “her name,” one might think that this is
the lie Marlow hates to tell, a face-saving fiction that operates to keep a woman in
the beautiful, blind world of truth. Marlow in fact tells the literal truth: her name—
blindfolded Truth—is the horror; horror is the name for her. The horror isn’t just
in Africa, in the Congo, in Kurtz’s outpost: the horror is back home, here in our
language, in the words we use to name or to conceal what we are doing. Marlow
temporizes for the sake of his audience, but it is as imperative that they hear, as well,
what he has told the Intended and why. The Intended is “an ashy halo out of which
dark eyes glowed”—she is the story itself, the glow around the haze, that “seems to
lead into the heart of an immense darkness.”
Conrad did not learn English until he was twenty, and yet we start the forma-
tion of the modern British novel with his work. Why? Because all Europe went
into the making of it; because the linguistic exile or displacement effected on
Conrad as a writer is in fact the displacement, the sundering, of speech that Heart
of Darkness enacts. Marlow is one individual seaman, the most old-fashioned of
narrators, the storyteller, and yet it is his burden to tell what is kept silent, to tell
of a new world of immense power, exerted in language a world away. Joseph
Conrad brings this new modern story into English, and correspondingly brings
English literature into modernism.

( Ge o r g e ) Be r n a rd Sh a w
Bernard Shaw’s work almost teaches itself: the “didactic” tendency of all his writing
draws its readers (and, in the case of his plays, his viewers) directly into the debates
and issues he finds at the heart of art. The effervescent brilliance of his didactic
streak makes Shaw’s educational mission a delightful experience, and Shaw never
writes as if he is preaching to the already converted. His writing seldom if ever de-
volves into simple moral admonitions, but Shaw did truly believe that the words of
verbal art could make things happen in society. His plays, reviews, and essays put
him at the forefront of a society in change. The Shaw section is rich with teaching
opportunities that connect his work to other parts of the Anthology. A teacher will
want to point out the subtlety of Shaw’s arguments for art, and his careful adjudi-
cation of realism and Romanticism. Shaw should accompany Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce
as an example of Irish writing in exile, or in extremis; Shaw’s satirical gifts shine with
528 (George) Bernard Shaw

their truest glow when placed with Swift’s essays, since Swift’s passionate defense of
Ireland in the face of its incredible poverty and misery was shared by Shaw.

Pygmalion
Pygmalion is an utterly fascinating play, and the teaching opportunities it sparks
are as manifold as those of the twentieth century volume as a whole. Shaw’s play
is that rich: it is an important, indeed classic, commentary on modernity and gen-
der, focusing as it does on the tutelage of Eliza Doolittle, flower girl turned culti-
vated, independent modern woman; it is as innovative in its own way about lan-
guage, authorship, and the work of art as are the modernist experiments of Eliot’s
The Waste Land, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Pygmalion echoes the
modernist form of those works as well by its use of the “mythic method”—after all,
the story of the sculptor Pygmalion and his statue turned to life Galatea was a piv-
otal myth of art and its creation for more than a thousand years, and it resonates
in the twentieth century both formally and in terms of its revised content: it be-
gins to mean something new when the Galatea figure, in this case Eliza Doolittle,
chooses not to marry her Pygmalion, Henry Higgins, and in fact is more necessary
to him than he to her by the end of their relationship. And then there is the mod-
ern fact of Shaw’s play and its transmutation from literature to film. Well within
Shaw’s lifetime, and with his ardent approval, Pygmalion was made into a celebrated
film; even before that, though, Shaw’s clever stage directions embrace the cine-
matic and underscore the modernist blurring between genres and media. Of
course Pygmalion had yet another popular cultural incarnation in the stage musical
and then hit film My Fair Lady, with Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison becom-
ing the archetypal Liza and Henry Higgins in the public mind.
Pygmalion looks forward and backward in the anthology, and among the
twentieth century offerings. It gives an uncanny glimpse into a London still beset
by Victorian mores even into the Edwardian age, a city that has new motor-cars
and buses on its streets and an underground railway, even as horse-drawn car-
riages continue to transport the aristocracy. The phonograph and the telephone
are crucial to its plot, and even newer media like the cinema are apparent, just
as class distinctions and accents are as rigidly drawn as before. Women are agi-
tating for their freedom and independence (with Shaw’s vociferous political sup-
port), and suffragettes and shop girls alike insist on moving around the city and
earning their own income; Pygmalion reveals that at the very same time, women
are considered to be a form of male property, passing from father to husband,
whose independent acts cause them to be viewed as prostitutes or eccentrics. The
first public performances of Pygmalion took place in German in Vienna, Austria
in 1913, rather than in England in English, because Eliza’s vehement curse “Not
bloody likely” in Act III was so shocking for the period, and Shaw’s whole point
was to have a woman’s voice articulate an “unwomanly” but commonplace oath
for all to hear. Shaw’s plays insist on displaying what is real, what people really
say and do, not out of an old-fashioned “realism,” but with as much boldness as
the theater of Ibsen, Artaud, or Brecht. His anti-idealism was meant to uncover
 (George) Bernard Shaw 529

in particular the gender and class oppression that keeping things “out of sight,
out of mind” helped to further.
Eliza Doolittle is an adorable character most people find deeply endearing;
Shaw’s play has her make as violent, unsentimental, and un-idealized a transforma-
tion as that of Nora’s slammed door in The Doll’s House. When times seemed ripe to
present Pygmalion in London, the beginning of World War I prevented its opening,
but by 1914 it had become a huge success. Students should be shown that Shaw’s
play is as modern a “blast” as Wyndham Lewis’s BLAST, and that it is as much a man-
ifesto, too. The difference between these manifestoes is that Shaw was dialectical—he
liked to share power with his characters and his audiences, and he considered stage
plays to be the occasion for a shared, even if conflicted, conversation.
Among the many things to get across to a class about Pygmalion is how much
the text of the play subverts expectations. Shaw takes his readers and his audience
into the play, and with great wit and incisive seriousness he withdraws as the au-
thority figure. Shaw’s fingerprints seem to be all over Pygmalion and his other plays,
but in fact this theatrical work is a philosophical experiment in undercutting the
supposed absolute authority of the author, the stability and “truth” of the written
text, and the inferiority of the reader or audience. On the contrary, Pygmalion is an
interactive play, one that begins with a preface and ends with an extraordinary
non-dramatic prophecy of how things will end after the events of the play. At times
the stage directions almost give up, asserting that only the cinematic can convey
the atmosphere of the scene; at other times, the page looks as graphically playful
as a comic strip, as when Pickering and Higgins “speak together” in Act III in a
point-counterpoint of dialogue that was later turned into one of My Fair Lady’s
songs, because it is like spoken chamber music. There is no absolute ending, no
closure, and no simple villains or virtuous characters. Students need to be shown
that Shaw’s experiments with language and with form are radical and breath-
taking, and the opposite of “didactic.” Instead, his play is a strange hybrid, a
modernist work that although it bows to realism is as transgressive and eerie as a
Beckett play.
The primary reason for this revolutionary effect is Shaw’s emphasis on the mu-
tability of language. The core of Pygmalion is what various characters call “new
speech.” This is an elastic term that encompasses a kind of speech that transcends
class boundaries and gender roles, an imaginative, radical mode of self-expression.
When students read the Preface to Pygmalion, its preoccupation with phonetics
and pronunication and new alphabets might seem dusty, fussy, or even crackpot.
Persuade them to hold on, though; Shaw joined a line of nineteenth-century lan-
guage experimenters who dreamed of a universal language, a common alphabet, or
at least a global, shared dialect. This dream has never been realized, and perhaps
it never could be. The point is, though, that Shaw’s interest in language and in
“new speech” was revolutionary: he saw how much language created self, and the
divisions between people, whether of class or gender or race. All of these were
anathema to him, and so in the charming fable of a Cockney flower girl who learns
to speak anew, and be someone new as a result, is a powerful critique of the idea
of an unchanging “essence,” of fixed identities, and of levels of hierarchy.
530 (George) Bernard Shaw

That is at the heart of the play in the figure of Eliza Doolittle, whose speech
change transforms her into an entirely different person. One theory of language pre-
vailing until the twentieth century derives from Plato; it claims that truth is fixed and
eternal, and that language merely mirrors or copies truth, but can never become it.
Henry Higgins is a Platonist about language at some points in the play, as for exam-
ple when he declares that Eliza was always a duchess underneath—it only took his art
and his science to make that “visible” in her speech. Shaw’s play has neither pure he-
roes/heroines nor absolute villains: Henry Higgins is an example of this, in that he
brings about a life-transforming event, and offers a brilliant contribution to moder-
nity, yet remains something of a chauvinist brute, a snob, and a manipulator. Eliza
sees through him, and protests his exploitation of her with all the passion Shaw ad-
vocated that the oppressed—whether workers, women, colonized peoples or the
poor—draw upon in trying to change their circumstances. Nonetheless, Eliza must
love Henry Higgins, in a daughterly way, it would seem. Audiences began to hope for
and, in the film versions, to demand that Eliza and Henry become a romantic cou-
ple at the end of the play. A wonderful pedagogical tactic is to stage yet another de-
bate wherein students argue for or against this kind of “happy” ending. Why did
Shaw leave the matter unresolved in the stage play, yet add his long, almost short-
story-like appendix recounting Eliza’s marriage to Freddie and her gradual success in
all her endeavors? Here too, Shaw puts the emphasis on dialectics—on complex ideas
that shift back and forth, rather than on absolutes or one, singular “truth.”
A facet of Pygmalion that ties it to almost all the selections in the twentieth cen-
tury anthology, and that also makes it as modern and contemporary as it can be,
is Shaw’s realization that fashion, style, performance and costume are the basis of
modern personal and social identity. Instead, in play after play, with Pygmalion as
perhaps the most lasting cultural example, (harmlessly apolitical in the later musi-
cal and film My Fair Lady), Shaw showed how women could aspire to modernity,
equality, and self-fulfillment.
Shaw, despite his Fabian socialism and his prominent political role as a founder
of the Labour Party, never believed that instant joy and harmony would emerge with
the destruction of private property. Far from it—he saw that all the foibles, selfish-
ness, desires, and aggressions people have in such abundance would always exist, and
that we have to forgive each other for these. What is needed is a modus vivendi, a way
of living whereby people can achieve the maximum amount of freedom without im-
pinging on other people—and that means freedom for all, inside and outside the
home. Shaw very perceptively viewed the modern world as too complex and layered
for instantaneous revolutions, or for the triumph of the proletariat. Instead, he re-
alized that changes would come by alterations in how the middle classes live, love,
and work. This strand of Shaw’s thinking has affinities to the essays by Orwell which
follow, and is the mirror opposite to Wyndham Lewis’s disgusted response to the
masses and their tastes in his Manifesto. If one goal of modernism was to shock the
everyday person, or to raise art to an elite, difficult plateau, Shaw’s writing refused
to become modernist. He seems to have been confident that however “difficult” the
art or the ideas behind it, it could be shaped so that ordinary people might under-
stand it, or begin to. Dialogue, not manifesto, is the hallmark of his art.
 Thomas Hardy 531

Faith in dialogue led Shaw to his true calling, as a dramatist. In theater he saw
the formal conditions for bringing language alive on stage, and for setting up con-
frontations in language that could explore the inherent conflict in ideas as dia-
logue. To bring the difference between Shavian drama, for all its magnificence, and
modernist drama into the starkest perspective, teach Shaw’s play with the theater
work of his fellow Irishman, Samuel Beckett. While Shaw’s drama is unsentimen-
tal, and is highly innovative in its lack of full-fledged “characters” and its decen-
tered musicality, look to Beckett for a dramatist who questions Shaw’s fundamen-
tal dramatic premise: that drama is dialogue, communication. Beckett’s plays ask
whether “communication” between people in general, between characters on
stage, and even between a play and its audience is possible in any sense. Rather
than the talky, dense fabric of Shaw’s dramatic writing, he strips theater down to
its silences, to the gaps in communication, and to the essential loneliness of
human beings in language. If Shaw’s plays are like symphonic music, with many
dissonant sounds, Beckett’s plays are like avant-garde jazz, each character con-
demned to an improvisatory solo the other characters may never understand, or
even hear. Shaw’s playwrighting style shows that he had a fundamental compact or
contract with his audience: the argument of the play, however unresolvable or
complex, would be transmitted in all its complexity. Beckett’s theater illustrates a
more somber view of the possibilities of art: we may feel trapped or stuck on stage,
waiting for an argument that can never really begin. Surprisingly, though, the dark
quixotic humor of Beckett’s theatrical world owes a great debt to Shavian repar-
tee—the cosmic comedy of being at cross-purposes was transmitted directly from
one Irish playwright to the other.
Shaw’s glorious humor is on display both in the play and in the letters included
in the section, and it would be a loss not to explore the nature of his comedy by
way of comparison. In the twentieth-century section the very different comic
modes of Evelyn Waugh and P. G. Wodehouse could be compared to Shaw. Shaw’s
comedy is more Shakespearian, in fact—it embraces the world and hopes to revi-
talize it through laughter, while Waugh’s admittedly hilarious work is an acid-
tongued denunciation of what he saw as inferior and grotesque. Wodehouse’s end-
lessly pleasing verbal mirth lacks a satirical or transformative thrust at all—one
doesn’t go out to change the world high on “Plum’s” humor, whereas one very well
might after a dose of Shavian wit. These comic pieces of Shaw’s are rife with the
most sophisticated intellectual and artistic theory, and yet they are staggeringly
funny, perhaps because Shaw considers us all to be in the same human boat. If we
can laugh at our common predicament, we may then be able to stop fighting long
enough to change it.

T h o m a s Ha rd y
Thomas Hardy’s poetry was far less formally bold or innovative than his fiction
had been, or at least it seems so on the surface: the appearance is deceptive, how-
ever, and therein lies the challenge in teaching it. His poetry has a Victorian flavor,
532 Thomas Hardy

even those poems he wrote late in his long life, penned simultaneously with the
great modernist poems, such as Eliot’s The Wasteland, which we know was tapped
out on the typewriter, and which changed the poetic landscape. Why are Hardy’s
poems important, given their anachronistic quality? What makes Hardy a great
poet of the twentieth century, when his fellow Victorian poets, Tennyson and
Browning, had long since been replaced by poets mapping a new poetic territory?
And perhaps most pressing for the instructor, how to best teach Hardy’s poetry
when it may strike a student reader as either quaint or hard to read?
One successful route of entry into Hardy’s poetry might be to show students the
extent to which it creates a self-sufficient world, a poetic universe following the nat-
ural laws of the imaginary countryside he invented in his masterful novels. His first
collection, Wessex Poems, supposedly takes root in this same creative landscape. Help
students get the lay of this land, and they are likely to sympathize with Hardy’s po-
etic project: preservation and reclamation, almost ecological goals of recycling and
nourishing a place and a tradition. The old-fashioned aspects of Hardy’s poetry
arise in homage to the old-fashioned aspects of England’s rural countryside; the po-
etry preserves a vanishing age, a vanishing vocabulary, and a vanishing culture. To
preserve a poetic past in the amber of one’s own making is clearly a far different
thing than to be a relic of a bygone poetic age. Hardy’s poetry can look and read at
first glance as if it were “left-over,” traditional poetry that has been taken out of its
author’s drawer many years after composition. In fact, Hardy’s poems deliberately
hover in a past time, as his novels deliberately unfold in a past place.
A constant feature of the Wessex novels involves a character or characters walk-
ing across one of the myriad tracks or pathways devised for foot travel, a spiderweb
of paths connecting obscure villages and solitary cottages with one another. Hardy
invented his own geography for Wessex, but the footpaths really existed, and were
the most important trails carved into the landscape by travelers over many years.
Such footpaths are called ley lines in folk culture; ley lines are not only a means of
getting from place to place on foot, they are thought to be lines of energy drawn
across the land. Ley lines gather their energy over time, as hundreds of people grad-
ually wear down a shared path, and leave traces of themselves in the form of mem-
ory and tradition. Ley lines are often celebrated in folk songs and in oral tales, and
they are part of a religious or spiritual approach to the land itself. Referring to a
pre-Christian folk mythology of spirits animating the land, ley lines are tracks of
wisdom and sometimes even magic power. The pagan customs of worshipping land
as a living being were sustained in rural England, as in virtually every rural region,
even as late as the nineteenth century. When Hardy’s characters walk the ley lines
of Wessex, they are doing more than walking—they are communing with the gods
of the earth.
We can circle back to Hardy’s poems through the ley lines. Poetry has long had
an association with walking, after all; the meter of a poetic line is measured by its
feet, and the meter of a poem, or its rhythm, is often called its gait, as if the line it-
self were doing the walking. The lines of Hardy’s poetry are extremely carefully
measured, and cut with precision—Hardy is not a writer of “free verse” or blank
verse. To unfold the metaphor of walking further is to imagine Hardy’s carefully
 Thomas Hardy 533

designed lines (he was an architect once) as ley lines made of words. With archi-
tectural care, Hardy’s words are wrapped into complicated structures, lines with
precise foot counts, lines whose poetic paths are well-trodden and well-used.
And then there is the nature of the words Hardy uses. Many critics of Hardy’s
poetry comment on his “archaic diction” or the “ancient word-store” of his poems.
An instructor should make sure that students are not put off by Hardy’s use of
“hath” and “doth” and so on, imagining these to be stilted remnants of upper-class
British diction. Hardy’s “haths” and so on were more often country speech, a gen-
tler rural dialect. For a writer whose novels were accused of indecent subject-matter
and undue frankness, this may seem paradoxical. However, if we take seriously
Hardy’s aim of preserving the key lines of his British rural past, by preserving them
in literary form and by translating them into poetic stanzas, we can also see his im-
petus toward the preservation of the rural treasure-house of words. This does not
mean, of course, that Hardy was a naive poet, or that Hardy was simply copying
down folk poetry. His poetry is sophisticated and learned, and is part of the British
Romantic tradition, with a strong influence by Wordsworth. Romantic poetry had
privileged the usages of the vernacular too, as his famous collection of Lyrical
Ballads makes clear: the “ballads” were an oral, sung folk poetry, turned into lyric
poems by the alchemy of the poet’s written words.
One of the monumental cultural events Hardy encountered as a young man in
London was the controversy over Charles Darwin’s revolutionary scientific text, The
Origin of Species. Published in 1859, Darwin’s book charted the development of
species over time, which he famously termed evolution. His discovery altered for-
ever the modern relation to time, and destroyed the narratives of divine providence
and human uniqueness. In many ways, Hardy’s novels register the Darwinian revo-
lution, as these ideas (which Hardy, like most others, fundamentally accepted) set
off on a collision course with older notions of a divine plan for individual human
beings. Evolutionary ideas became pervasive in many fields of study; linguistics was
one such field that also caught Hardy’s attention. Linguists like Max Muller pro-
posed that languages also underwent evolution, and that rural areas were places
where adaptations in language could be seen as they happened. Industrialization
and urban life changed what Muller and Hardy saw as the organic relationship of
country language to country life. Thomas Hardy’s poetry contains the words that
once were as organic and vivid as the practices of country life, words whose energy
has been altered by the passage of time and changes in a rural way of life. Show stu-
dents the signs of Hardy’s erudition—his scientific, architectural, technological and
critical sophistication is apparent throughout his poetry. He juggles this scholarship
and modern knowledge with the folk knowledges and the intense sense of ani-
mated, almost pagan wonder at life and landscape he found in country folk.
Hardy’s magnificent body of poetry refers to a landscape (Wessex) whose coun-
terpart is fast disappearing; leafing through the pages of Hardy’s vast Collected
Poems (1919), for example, one finds lyric poems predicated on hearthside embers
(when, in London, electricity and coal were the fuels), thorn birds and vixens
(rarely encountered in cities), circles of “elders,” “sweet maids” in a time of
women’s suffrage and coquettish modern girls, “cyder” spelled in the old way, and
534 Thomas Hardy

“hostelry.” The tight lines Hardy uses, the ley lines of yore, hold fast and bind up
words that also threaten to vanish or lose their meaning outside the context of a
living, thriving countryside.
An astonishing poem like During Wind and Rain exhibits all these features of
Hardy’s wonderful poetry. In four symmetrical stanzas, with precise scansion and
strict meter, the poem is built around a repeated line “Ah, no; the years O!” or
“Ah, no; the years, the years.” Gesturing toward the song-form of a country reel,
even the first line of the poem establishes lyric or song as the heart of an oral cul-
ture: “They sing their dearest songs—.” The action of the poem involves a host of
quaint, outmoded activities, as “elders and juniors” and “men and maidens” in-
teract in a landscape whose paths and gardens they collaborate on making “neat”
and “gay.” Weather and the flight of storm-birds are the markers of time and place;
summer trees and rotten roses delineate the passage of seasons and years, as they
do for country folk.The very vocabulary of the poem sings of a communal life
whose harmonizing voices are no match for the snatching hand of time, nor for
the “high new house” whose furniture sits incongruously out on the lawn, even in-
cluding the ominous clock, whose measurement of time had never been needed
before, when the sun and the moon gave time its compass. The “brightest things
that are theirs” cannot suspend the losses of time, and as the poem ends, its
lament “Ah, no; the years, the years” segues into a picture of the carved names of
the merry men and maids as raindrops trace their shapes on the gravestones mark-
ing their places in the earth: “Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.” It
is not an accident that Hardy chooses “plough” as the word for the course of the
raindrops. Ploughing is the agricultural labor which was the basis of this way of
life, now gone along with its people. Ploughing also makes marks or inscriptions
in the earth, as do ley lines or pathways, as do written words in the lines and feet
of poetry. Hardy allows us to momentarily see these tombstones with their carved
names as the substitute for the poem itself, and the poem, incorporating time,
death, and loss into its words, as a tombstone. His poetry hallows what is gone, as
it traces the names on the blank page before us.
Thomas Hardy’s poetry lyrically laments what time has done to England: made
it unrecognizable. Because it performs this act of preserving the rhythms and the
words of another time and place, turning away from modernity while knowing po-
etry is not strong enough to stop time, Hardy’s poetry became important for all the
modern poets writing in English, especially those, like Thomas, Eliot, Larkin and
Heaney, who emphasize landscape. The hallmarks of modern identity students
have captured in reading Joseph Conrad are invoked in Hardy’s poetry, too: the
lonely human subject, self-aware, floats over the poems, many of which are lyrics.
That is, they are said (or sung) by an “I,” a self who takes stock of his impressions,
an “I” who feels lonely in the universe. As Hardy’s novels make clear, his is a world
without providence or faith, a secular vista whose scientific developments and sci-
entific truths he accepts, but whose bleak rationality gives no comfort. Hardy’s po-
etry articulates the sense of loss and loneliness as human beings are thrown back
onto themselves, in a universe whose machinery does not include their happiness,
or even their significance. Hardy’s poetry may be most richly appreciated if his po-
 The Great War: Confronting the Modern 535

etic forebears—Herbert, Donne, Cowper, Gray, even Clare—are referred back to by

the instructor, and his inheritors, like Auden with his scrupulous poetic form and
yet modern ease of diction, are set alongside his poems.
The poem Convergence of the Twain is a superb starting place in Hardy’s corpus
for today’s students, since it is the greatest poem ever written about an event made
topical and urgent again—the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. As a poetic subject it
is perfect for Hardy’s style, and as an event it captures the very issues which crys-
tallize in all his work: the operation of blind fate or destiny, the inevitability of suf-
fering, the inhuman reaches of technology, the need to commemorate what has
been lost. Memory is the strongest human power, for Hardy the source of all cre-
ation, and Hardy the poet devotes his poetry to the task of remembering. This be-
comes achingly poignant in his war poetry, as in his elegies. Hardy was appreciated
as a fine war poet, yet his verses on World War I are rarely taught in conjunction
with the young English poets of our World War I section, many of whom were sol-
diers who died in the trenches. In part this is because Hardy’s poetry does make a
world—a world riven by the war, just as his society was, but a world able to en-
compass his specific war poems as part, not all, of its landscape. Thomas Hardy was
elderly when World War I arrived, and could not himself have served. But his po-
etry, like his prose before it, had anticipated in its bleak rigor the mechanization
of life and the absence of the gods that became so clear and so shocking to the so-
ciety at large when war began. Hardy’s poetry has the unenviable distinction of hav-
ing known in advance how much would be lost—human lives, a way of life, a well-
trodden human path. “Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.”

PERSPECTIVES

T h e Gre a t Wa r : C o n f ro n t i n g t h e Mo d e r n
Blast
One way to begin talking about Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist Manifesto
is to talk a little bit about manifestos generally, and literary manifestos more specif-
ically. In this volume of the Longman Anthology, it is possible to trace a brief history
of literary manifestos beginning with Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads and
Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry, and including (later in the century) texts like Eliot’s
Tradition and the Individual Talent, Woolf’s Three Guineas, and the debate across the
years between Orwell and Rushdie, Inside the Whale and Outside the Whale. Among
modernist manifestos that we did not have the space to include, most important
would probably be the manifesto establishing the poetic movement called Imagism,
also written by Pound (A Retrospect).
Manifestos always throw down the gauntlet, issue a kind of challenge: they an-
nounce that, according the issuers of the manifesto at least, the rules of the game
have changed. Part of the fun in the Vorticist Manifesto is that it takes advantage of
536 The Great War: Confronting the Modern

modern developments in typography and printing to make concrete its challenge

to the British artistic establishment. To wit: the Vorticist Manifesto isn’t simply a de-
claration of artistic revolution; in the audacity of its design, and the rhetorical ex-
cess of its language, it seeks to enact that very rebellion within its oversized pages.
While we have sought to reproduce Blast’s striking design, students will appre-
ciate the opportunity to see a copy of the genuine article. Fortunately, this is fairly
simple since the Black Sparrow Press has produced an inexpensive, good-quality
oversized facsimile, complete with puce covers and bold, blocky, broken type.
One piece of evidence that the challenge issued by Pound and Lewis has been
taken up by later artists—and taken up only half-seriously, even as the manifesto it-
self has its tongue firmly in its cheek—can be found on Morrissey’s solo debut, Viva
Hate (Sire/Reprise, 1988). Morrissey, former front man of the influential ’80s
British band The Smiths, sings in “Hairdresser on Fire” about the emotional and
metaphysical import of his hairdresser in terms that recall Pound and Lewis’s
praise in the manifesto:

Can you squeeze me

Into an empty page of your diary
And psychologically save me?
I’ve got faith in you.
I sense the power
Within the fingers
Within an hour the power
Could totally destroy me
(Or, it could save my life).

While Lewis and Pound praise the hairdresser because he is a working-class proto-
type of the new Vorticist artist, “trim[ming] aimless and retrograde growths / into
CLEAN ARCHED SHAPES and / ANGULAR PLOTS,” Morrissey at the same time turns
the hairdresser into a kind of therapist/personal advisor.

Rupert Brooke
The Great Lover
In this poem Brooke weds the delight in the sensual physicality of life, which he would
have experienced in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, with the celebration of
earthly existence one finds in the early poetry of Yeats, in a poem like “The Stolen
Child.” Brooke rolls out a litany of life’s blessings, or “benisons” as he describes them
in the poem; in its overabundance of material detail, “The Great Lover” recalls as well
the poetry of the American Walt Whitman, himself a great lover of life. The opening
lines make clear that this celebration of life’s gifts takes place under the shadow of
death, and Brooke wrote it while shipping out to the military service which would
claim his life; but the message of the poem is, in the phrase that another American
poet, Ezra Pound, would later use in one of the most beautiful of his Cantos, “What
thou lov’st well remains, / the rest is dross / What thou lov’st well shall not be reft
from thee / What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage” (Canto LXXXI).
 The Great War: Confronting the Modern 537

The Soldier
If you have discussed a number of other sonnets during the term, you will want to
consider the implications of Brooke’s use of the form for his tribute to the British
Tommy. The insistent patriotism of the poem is perhaps its most noteworthy fea-
ture; it helps to suggest the zeal with which Britain entered into the war, and sets
a high-water mark against which we can read the disillusionment and bitterness of
the remainder of the section’s poems.

Sigfried Sassoon
Glory of Women, They, The Rear Guard, Everyone Sang
While Lawrence’s wartime writing is irreverent toward British pieties—he takes spe-
cial delight in the disgust occasioned among the British officers by his “native” cos-
tume, for instance—Sassoon’s poetry introduces a bitterly ironic note into the per-
spectives section. Glory of Women makes its ironic points about the inhumanity of
modern warfare by attacking a group of faceless, naive women; one issue the class
may want to discuss is whether or not the poem’s misogyny is necessary for its suc-
cess. Was it only women who misunderstood the true nature of the war, and un-
thinkingly prolonged it by celebrating a myth rather than reality? Is this misogyny
the bitter harvest of what T. E. Lawrence calls diathetics—propaganda?
“They” is similar to “Glory of Women” in a couple of respects. First, it reiter-
ates the complete separation of the rhetoric deployed on the home front from the
realities of the Western front; in hearing the (presumably well-meant) information
disseminated by the Bishop, we begin to have a better idea where the half-baked
notions of the women in “Glory of Women” might have come from. And like that
other poem, “They” depends on a mordant irony to make its point, only here it’s
more dramatically staged: one verse paragraph, without authorial intrusion, gives
the propaganda view of the soldiers’ experience, and the second—with no kind of
transition furnished—gives the lie to the first.
“The Rear-Guard” consists primarily of the first-person narrative of a common
foot soldier, making his way through underground tunnels rather than the more
celebrated trenches. In the poem, Sassoon employs the symbolic journey through
the underworld so important in much modernist literature—the most prominent
example, perhaps, being Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” in which travel
on London’s underground subway is economically likened to Persephone’s jour-
ney in the underworld. Part of what this short poem accomplishes is to make quite
vivid the idea that “War is hell.”
Everyone Sang serves to balance somewhat the presentation of Sassoon; though
hardly an upbeat poem, it does suggest the possibility of at least a momentary re-
treat from the horrors of war in nature, and places the “unnatural” military activ-
ity within a larger, natural context.

Wilfred Owen
Anthem for Doomed Youth, Strange Meeting, Disabled, Dulce et Decorum Est
Like Glory of Women, Anthem for Doomed Youth is a sonnet: but while Brooke’s poem
employs the form in a straightforward manner, Owen derives a certain ironic
538 The Great War: Confronting the Modern

charge by playing off the traditional associations (love, beauty) that cling to the
form. Likewise, the poem plays traditional religious imagery off against the reali-
ties of war; church bells are usurped by machine-gun fire, bugles replace the choirs.
The poem’s closing lines do suggest, however, that though the anonymity of mod-
ern warfare threatens to reduce death to a simple beastly fact, nature herself keeps
vigil and keeps (after a fashion) rites for the dead.
Strange Meeting borrows its macabre tone from the ancient tradition represented
by Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead (though the poem is properly a monologue), and
recalls scenes like Odysseus’s visit to Hades in the Odyssey. In a letter to his father,
Ezra Pound had announced that “Live man goes down into world of Dead” was to
be one of the three recurring motifs of his magnum opus, The Cantos; James Joyce,
too, includes a “Hades” encounter in his twentieth-century versions of the Odyssey,
Ulysses, and the opening section of T. S. Eliot’s most famous poem, The Waste Land,
closes with the image of a dog digging up the bodies of the dead. Clearly, something
about this topos was powerful for modernist writers.
This wrenching poem should require little in the way of contextualization; the
“disabled” war veteran—tucked away conveniently out of sight, so as not to make the
civilian population uncomfortable—has become a common figure in subsequent lit-
erature, including the figures of Luke Martin (John Voight) in the 1978 film Coming
Home and Lt. Dan (Gary Sinise) in the 1994 box-office smash Forrest Gump.
Perhaps the best-known of all the poems to emerge from World War I, Dulce et
Decorum Est skillfully weaves together a brief but compelling battle narrative while at
the same time seeking to impose an ethical imperative on its readers. Warfare, when it
is not brutally violent and sadistic (as in the gas attack of stanza 2), is instead brutish
and dreary. Again, T. E. Lawrence’s enthusiastic support of the military use of propa-
ganda (diathetics) has severe repercussions here—in part because the propaganda is most
effective when not limited to the enemy, but used against one’s own people as well.
British singer/songwriter Kate Bush has explored these themes in a number of her
songs—most notably “Experiment IV,” in which the military experiments with musical
propaganda: “They told us all they wanted was a sound / That could kill someone from
a distance.” This track, along with another song critical of British militarism, “Army
Dreaming,” is included in her “greatest hits” compilation The Whole Story (EMI, 1986).
The British comedy troupe Monty Python presents a comic take on military propa-
ganda in a sketch included in the very first episode of their television series Monty
Python’s Flying Circus, called “The Funniest Joke in the World” (The Complete Monty
Python’s Flying Circus: All the Words NY: Pantheon [1989], vol. 1, 10—14).

Isaac Rosenberg
Break of Day in the Trenches, Dead Man’s Dump
The overriding tone of Break of Day is again irony, though an understated, situa-
tional irony, very different from the bitter tone of Dulce et Decorum Est, for in-
stance. In the war to save civilization, apparently, it is only vermin that can act civ-
ilized; this rat’s-eye view of the war (and of course, the speaker has been reduced
to inhabiting dank muddy trenches, himself like a rat) suggests that while hu-
mankind is locked in a blind fury, only inhuman creatures retain any wisdom.
 The Great War: Confronting the Modern 539

“Dead Man’s Dump” eschews the quiet understatement of “Break of Day in

the Trenches” for a more aggressive, violent presentation. The scene again invokes,
though indirectly, the tortures of the damned: a scene from Dante’s Inferno, seem-
ingly, though set in Western Europe. The suffering of these men suggest one rea-
son that T. S. Eliot chose as an epigraph to The Waste Land—a poem which, while
set in a post-war Europe, is saturated with the war’s horrors—the words of the Sibyl
of Cumae: “I want to die.”

David Jones
from In Parenthesis
Jones’s piece is quite difficult for most beginning students to get a handle on; its
mixture of “voices”—the voices of the military establishment, of British and Celtic
mythology and legend, of factual newspaper reportage, etc.—makes the poem every
bit as difficult for a first-time reader as Eliot’s The Waste Land, the poem to which
it owes its most obvious debt. One way to help students through the textual con-
fusion of the poem is to have the students “dissect” an especially dense passage:
take a pen or pencil and draw angle brackets around the various voices or textual
threads that make up a given paragraph. This exposure of the polyphonic nature
of the text should lead quite naturally into a discussion of both the various sources
that Jones employs, as well as the goals of such a strategy. Given Jones’s acknowl-
edged use of Eliot’s poem, some side-by-side comparison may prove helpful; one
possible result of such a procedure is not simply an explication of In Parenthesis, but
simultaneously a discovery of just how much World War I imagery and anxiety is
buried beneath Eliot’s classical façade.
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, published in the same year (1928) that Jones
began working on In Parenthesis, uses the same image (the space of the war as a
parenthesis, as Jones writes in the footnote to his title) in the novel’s middle chap-
ter, “Time Passes.” A brief examination and discussion of Section VI of that chap-
ter (198—202 in the Harcourt edition)—which includes, for instance, the rather
clinical observation that “[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were
blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay whose death, mercifully, was in-
stantaneous.]”—may help to suggest what Jones was trying to accomplish both with
this metaphor, and with the relatively distanced and flat affect that the poem
largely adopts.
Finally, this may be the first opportunity of the semester to discuss the mod-
ernists’ use of what T. S. Eliot called the “mythical method”—“manipulating a con-
tinuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity” (“Ulysses, Order, and
Myth”). This aspect of the poem suggests obvious links with The Waste Land,
Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and a number of Yeats’s poems.

Robert Graves
from Goodbye to All That
If we might have jumped to the conclusion that the war seemed folly primarily to
the enlisted men, Graves helps to correct that impression. The tone of these se-
lections is “semi-facetious,” to use the term Graves employs to describe his lecture
540 The Great War: Confronting the Modern

to the troops on “How to be happy though in the trenches.” The writing is irrev-
erent toward the pieties of the British propaganda effort, especially coming from
one of the British army’s best and brightest; and Graves’s writing derives much of
its power from the stark contrast between the life of an officer and that of a Tommy
in the trenches. As he writes, “We [in the officer’s mess tent] talked more freely
there than would have been possible either in England or in the trenches.”
The notion of propaganda, introduced explicitly in Lawrence’s writing, is again
operative here; without labeling it as such, Graves quietly juxtaposes Western
Front propaganda and reality, attempting to revisit some of the fictions visited
upon the British public by the British war propaganda machine. Similarly, he
damns the prejudice and brutality of British officers and soldiers not by outright
condemnation, but rather through silent, dramatic presentation of the men’s
thoughts and deeds, presented (seemingly) in their own words.

Sp e e c h e s o n Iri s h In d e p e n d e n c e
Charles Stuart Parnell
At Limerick (31 August 1879)
One of the great documents suggesting the impact of Parnell on early twentieth-
century Irish thought and art is the famous Christmas dinner scene in Joyce’s A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; in the characters of Mr. Dedalus and Mr. Casey,
on the one side, and in the family friend Dante on the other, students will see
quite dramatically what the two sides of the debate looked like, and sounded like.
An audio recording of this scene is available on the Caedmon set James Joyce:
Readings (Caedmon 71—6527).
This speech at Limerick is of course quite early in Parnell’s political career, but
is remarkable for both its firm resolve and simultaneously the gentle tactics it urges
upon the farmers of Limerick. Parnell is well on his way to becoming an imposing
nationalist leader, but both the tenor and content of these remarks mark him as a
gentleman. The strategy adopted is what we would now call “economic sanctions”;
it is in fact that old Irish strategy of the boycott, which derives its name from
Charles C. Boycott (1832—97), the English estate manager in Ireland against
whom the practice was first put in place.
Before the House of Commons (23 February 1883), At Portsmouth, After the
Defeat of Mr. Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill (25 June 1886)
In the speech before the House of Commons, Parnell tries to defend himself against
the campaign being waged against him by conservative MP’s; by branding him as an
extremist, these opponents hoped to silence Parnell and stop the momentum en-
joyed by his Home Rule movement. At this stage Parnell remains, as he had de-
clared himself in the speech delivered at Limerick, “confident as to the future.”
In the speech delivered at Portsmouth Parnell, perhaps surprisingly, remains
optimistic about the future of his Home Rule movement; while they have experi-
enced a temporary setback, victory, he believes, will ultimately be theirs. The scan-
dal over his affair with Kitty O’Shea, however, put a stop to all progress for some
 William Butler Yeats 541

time. In this address, Parnell rather cleverly addresses the British working citizen,
and stresses, through coded language, the fact that members of the British work-
ing class have more in common with their Irish brothers than with their English
masters (hence the strategic trotting out of titles: Lord Beaconsfield, Lord
Carnarvon). This almost Marxist rhetoric was employed, much more explicitly, by
participants in the Easter Rising, especially James Connolly.

Easter 1916. Proclamation of the Irish Republic

An obvious exercise here, for American students, is to compare the Irish declara-
tion of independence to ours, one of its obvious sources and inspirations. While
taking the courageous step of addressing itself to all Irishmen and Irishwomen—
and explicitly insuring voting rights for women within its short compass—the doc-
ument is at the same time a product of the Irish nationalist iconography which de-
picted Ireland as the shan van vocht, the “poor old woman” who must be rescued
from British oppression and persecution by Irish martyrs, themselves always men;
thus a very traditional gender hierarchy is reinscribed.

Padraic [Patrick Henry] Perse

Kilmainham Prison (2 May 1916)
Perse’s speech is characterized most strongly by its courage, a feature no reader
should need underscored. That courage is underwritten in part by Christian im-
agery of innocent sacrifice; whether consciously or no, Perse frames his discourse
with references to the sacrificial lamb, even to the point of suggesting in the last
sentence that if they kill him, the spirit of freedom which lives in him will be res-
urrected within the Irish people.

Michael Collins
The Substance of Freedom (5 March 1922)
A wonderful tie-in for this selection is Neil Jordan’s 1996 film Michael Collins. The
film is helpful not only for the light it casts on Collins himself, but it provides won-
derful background for the independence movement as a whole; Liam Neeson, as
Collins, delivers passages from this speech in the film. And for as long as it’s up,
make sure to visit the Warner Brother’s Web site dedicated to the film: http://www
.MichaelCollins.com. It’s beautifully put together, with a detailed biography, a
photo archive of Collins’s life, as well as an illustrated tour of Dublin locales im-
portant to Collins’s life and career.

Wi l l i a m Bu t l e r Ye a t s
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
One of Yeats’s best-known and most beautiful poems, Innisfree owes an obvious debt
to Romantic poems like Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey and Coleridge’s This Lime-Tree
Bower My Prison, in which the poet laments the fact that he has been separated by
542 William Butler Yeats

circumstance from the consolations of the natural landscape—only to discover, by

poem’s end, that he has gained the power to travel there imaginatively. Yeats here
begins to makes something distinctly Irish of this English genre, introducing Irish
vocabulary and geography to the England of the Romantic imagination.

Who Goes with Fergus?

In this poem, Yeats blends the torpid feel of the British poetry of the ’90s—an artis-
tic scene in which his father, John B. Yeats, was a minor participant—with Irish
mythology, in the process making something vital and contemporary of Ireland’s
founding narratives. In this project, he joined folklorists like Douglas Hyde and
his friend Lady Augusta Gregory, attempting to instigate a Celtic Revival for
Ireland—a literary and artistic project which was always meant to stir a nationalist
political conscience within the Irish people, as well.

No Second Troy
Yeats here uses what T. S. Eliot would later call the “mythical method”—“manipu-
lating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity” (“Ulysses,
Order, and Myth”)—to talk about his love for, and exasperation with, his obscure
object of desire Maud Gonne. In this particular case, the mythic overlay serves to
suggest a framework for understanding Gonne’s penchant for “rhetoric” and vio-
lence, and to hint as well that such a stance is a matter of fate rather than personal
will. Yeats’s use of myth in the poem, though relatively simple, can be compared
to similar strategies in The Second Coming, Leda and the Swan, and Byzantium, as well
as texts by other authors like Eliot’s The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses.

The Fascination of What’s Difficult

This poem from 1910 sounds a theme that Yeats will repeat with variations until
he dies: the day-to-day concerns that keep the poet from his true work. His reso-
lution to “find the stable and pull out the bolt,” however, was in retrospect pre-
mature: he continued to be involved in the common public life until the very end
of his life, knowing in part that the myth of the ivory tower was no life at all.

September 1913, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

Both these poems are deeply rooted in specific historical circumstances, which it
will help students to have illuminated. “September 1913” is part of a sequence of
five poems (the others being “To a Wealthy Man. . . ,” “To a Friend Whose Work
Has Come to Nothing,” “Paudeen,” and “To a Shade”) connected to a controversy
involving the art dealer Hugh Lane, who was also a nephew of Yeats’s friend Lady
Gregory. Lane wanted to donate his important collection of modern European
painting to the city of Dublin, on the condition that the city would construct a
suitable gallery for hanging the pictures; the city refused for a number of reasons,
 William Butler Yeats 543

not least of which the fact that Lane himself, the paintings, and the architect who
had designed the gallery, were less than pure Irish. For Yeats, the controversy (like
the Irish people’s treachery against Charles Stewart Parnell) was yet another in-
stance of the narrow parochialism of the Irish.

The Wild Swans at Coole

There is a logic for comparing this poem, too, with Tintern Abbey, for both articu-
late the poet’s changing response to a beloved place over time; in both poems, the
unchanging aspect of the landscape serves as a still point by which the growth, or
aging, of the poet can be measured. When Yeats declares in lines 14—16 that “And
now my heart is sore. / All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight, / The first time
on this shore . . . ,” we can hear an echo of Easter 1916—a poem which, though writ-
ten just before Wild Swans, was not published until a few years later; the similar
wording suggests that the Easter Rising has changed Yeats—changed, changed ut-
terly—while the natural beauty of Coole Park remains unchanged.

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

“Irish Airman” is in a sense a belated WWI poem; the airman in question, Major
Robert Gregory, was the son of Lady Gregory, who was shot down in Northern
Italy in January 1918. The attitude of the Irish in general to WWI was somewhat
distanced, and the rebels used the circumstance of the British being distracted to
launch the Easter Rising; Major Gregory here represents for Yeats the kind of
olympian indifference to one’s fate best expressed in “Lapis Lazuli.” Hence the
poem is both philosophically and politically polemical.

Easter 1916
Perhaps the best-known and best-loved text associated with Irish independence,
there is no small irony in the fact that while the poem counsels against blind
adherence to any ideology and myopic worship of any nationalist martyrs and
heroes, these are the purposes for which the poem is most often recited. The
poem is on one level about the ways in which Ireland was changed by the revo-
lutionary violence of Easter 1916; but it is also about the human cost exacted
by participation in such violence, where flesh-and-blood human beings are
“Enchanted to a stone / To trouble the living stream.” The final “change”
comes at the poem’s conclusion, where Yeats predicts, with stunning accuracy,
that the names of the rebels will be repeated as a litany by the Irish school-
children of the future whom they helped to make free—and in being reduced to
a simple honor roll, the human complexity of their lives, the contradictory mo-
tives that propelled them, are lost. The final irony, which Yeats perhaps could
not foresee, is that it’s not just the names of these patriots that are recited: it is,
precisely, Yeats’s poem which counsels against the unthinking “murmur[ing] of
name upon name.”
544 William Butler Yeats

The Second Coming

This short poem probably rivals Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a source of phrases
and metaphors with which we describe our experience of modernity. In this poem,
of course, one is confronted head-on with the problem of Yeats’s complicated
mythology; The Second Coming is the first of Yeats’s poems presented here which may
appear virtually indecipherable without making some reference to Yeats’s occult sys-
tem, as enunciated in A Vision (1925). Two elements of that mythology will proba-
bly suffice to explicate the poems we’ve included here. First, Yeats understood
human history to be constructed of alternating 2000-year cycles, each new cycle
characterized by values and beliefs antithetical to those of its predecessor. One era
runs from 2000 B.C. to 1 A.D.; it begins with Zeus’s rape of Leda (see Leda and the
Swan), and is brought to an end—and its successor, the Christian era, announced—
by a structurally parallel “annunciation,” the conception of Christ in the womb of
the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit, who comes to Mary in the form of a dove. In
1919 this Christian era is, according to Yeats’s reckoning, nearing its end; the era to
come, announced no doubt by some other kind of birth, will be of a nature com-
pletely antithetical to the values we currently hold near and dear. The second im-
portant point of Yeats’s mythology for student readers of these poems is that Yeats
envisioned these cycles of history as interlocking three-dimensional cones; students
will benefit from looking at the illustration of “The Gyre & Its Images” in T. R.
Henn’s The Lonely Tower: Studies in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats (London: Methuen
[1965]). Yeats’s reliance on these cones suggests a good deal of the imagery of this
poem in particular: the widening gyre, for instance, as well as the lack of a center.

A Prayer for My Daughter

It may be interesting to discuss with your students to what extent they find A Prayer
for My Daughter a sexist, or even a misogynist, poem; one way to get at this would
be to consider what Yeats might have said differently were the prayer instead for
his son. According to a strange kind of logic, this poem about the birth of his
daughter becomes gradually something like a eulogy, or elegy, for Maud Gonne. In
effect, the best advice Yeats can give his young daughter is not to be like Gonne.

Sailing to Byzantium
Clearly a poem of Yeats’s middle age, it might be interesting to contrast it to the
earthy discourse of Crazy Jane, who is not ashamed, nor stoops to make apology,
for her body—its wants, needs, desires.

Meditations in Time of Civil War

This poem is Yeats’s great argument for the importance of tradition, and for the
need for a monied and educated aristocracy that would keep such traditional val-
ues alive. Together with Yeats’s peasant poems and plays, this suggests two impor-
 William Butler Yeats 545

tant poles in Yeats’s thinking; and while he was Romantic in his interest in the life
of common people, he was not so Romantic as to wish away all distinctions of class
and merit. Like the poem that follows in the Anthology, the Civil War backdrop
seems to have suggested to Yeats the possible annihilation of all that was best in
Irish culture, in the name of a misguided “democracy.”

Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen

The poem remains striking for its honesty: for Yeats the Civil War, as World War
I that had preceded it, serves as a powerful reminder of the dark side of human
nature—a potential, even penchant, for evil that Romantic philosophy had failed
to account for. One of Yeats’s most powerful poems, it is marred by an unneces-
sarily outré reference at the close: a concrete example for students of the perils of
an over-reliance on myth and legend.

Leda and the Swan

Yeats sees Zeus’s rape of Leda as another (anterior) version of the visitation of the
Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit—an interpretation which seemingly excuses the vio-
lence of the scene depicted here. Two rhetorical features of the poem, at least, will
engage the students’ interest (or fury). First, his insistent use of rhetorical questions
will strike some readers as a dishonest way of disguising his own sympathies in the
poem; crudely put, at least one strain of the poem asks whether Leda was asking for
it, and whether she enjoyed it. The connection to contemporary debates about rape
and other intimate violence should be clear; more and more of my students every
year object to the poem’s seeming sanctioning of the rape. Second feature: the poem
is surely one of the century’s most unromantic sonnets (it’s a somewhat disguised
sonnet, but a sonnet nonetheless). Does Yeats intend an ironic comment by couch-
ing the poem as a sonnet—the quintessential love poem? Or, again, does he use the
sonnet form to make a covert argument about right and wrong in this rape case?

Among School Children

Another of Yeats’s meditations on aging—on the costs exacted, and on the benefits
of mature wisdom. In the last stanza, especially, we can see Yeats feeling toward the
great synthesis of mind and body that characterizes his feisty, energetic last poems.

Byzantium
Yeats worked hard to make this later poem parallel very closely, in its structure, the
earlier “Sailing to Byzantium”; the main difference, as John Unterecker has shown,
is that the scene in the earlier poem is described from the position of an outsider,
while in “Byzantium” the point of view is that of an initiate. For Yeats, Byzantium
represents the full flowering of the culture of the first millennium A. D., one of
the end-points in his interlocking gyres of history.
546 William Butler Yeats

Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop

Crazy Jane is one of the strongest and most vivid of Yeats’s female characters; un-
like the various incarnations of Maud Gonne in the poetry, however, she is not
criticized but admired. Unimpressed by the pieties of traditional religion, she
quests for a bodily wisdom, and eschews all purely intellectual abstractions—a po-
sition that Yeats himself, at this point in his life, is trying to emulate.

Lapis Lazuli
Perhaps the greatest of Yeats’s poems—a perfectly cut gem, like the stone it describes.
This poem clearly marks itself out as a product of Yeats’s mature years; the almost
stoic acceptance of the whole range of what life has to offer strikes a new note in
Yeats’s oeuvre. The thinking in this poem is much indebted to the Nietzschean doc-
trine of tragic wisdom—that one must learn to love, rather than to resist, one’s fate
(the opposite of the disease Nietzsche called ressentiment). Unfortunately, students
will perhaps have to be reminded that “gay” does not (in 1936) connote “homosex-
ual,” but again is probably taken from Nietzsche, whose influential volume Die
Frölische Wissenschaft is normally translated The Gay Science (i.e., philosophy).

The Circus Animals’ Desertion

Probably one of the best poems about writer’s block in the language. The poem is
useful for the truncated tour of Yeats’s poetry that it provides, as well as running
commentary; in this very late poem, Yeats makes the courageous decision to strip
away the fantastic and Romantic trappings that have brought him so much success
in the past, and to return to basics: the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. It was
a decision he had announced as far back as A Coat (1914), in which he declared
that it was time to put off his “coat / Covered with embroideries / Out of old
mythologies / From heel to throat,” resolving instead to “walk naked”; this poetic
nakedness, however, proved to be the work of a lifetime.

Under Ben Bulben

Traditionally the last of Yeats’s poems, and the one containing his epitaph, which
was indeed carved on his headstone in Drumcliff churchyard. The poem reaffirms
Yeats’s belief in the ongoing presence of the dead—in the memories of the living,
if not in more tangible form; and in writing what amounts to an elegy for himself,
Yeats helps to insure that he will continue to live in the Irish mind. He leaves, too,
what amounts to a set of instructions to the writers who would succeed him, in
section 5. Considering the poem an elegy for argument’s sake, it makes an inter-
esting contrast to Auden’s rather grudging elegy, In Memory of W. B. Yeats.

Ja m e s Joyc e
Araby
A few general strategies will help students come to terms with these difficult
stories. To begin with, Joyce said in correspondence that his goal was to betray
 James Joyce 547

the paralysis of the Irish people; all of the stories touch on some form of paral-
ysis, whether emotional, psychological, physical, or moral, and none more ex-
plicitly than “Araby,” especially its closing tableau. Second, Joyce sometimes
used the concept of “epiphany” — roughly, “revelation” — to talk about one of the
major strategies of the stories. In the second and third stories presented here,
the only possible “epiphany” would seem to take place in the reader: the pro-
tagonists of these stories clearly remain blind to their own paralyses until the
end. More controversy surrounds the conclusion of The Dead, which we will dis-
cuss in due course.
It makes sense with “Araby”—indeed, perhaps with all the Dubliners stories—
after having read it through, to start at the end. The conclusions of these stories
are uniformly vexing, and yet seem as well to bear a great deal of interpretive
weight: with “Araby,” its fair to ask what the protagonist has learned, or what has
happened to him, to wring from him the overwrought final sentence of the story.
What, precisely, is vanity—and what about his experiences leading up to the bazaar,
and at Araby itself, has forced this conclusion upon him? What about the protag-
onists’s relationship to women—his aunt, “Mangan’s sister” (whose name we, and
perhaps even the protagonist, never learn), the shopgirl at the bazaar? Can stu-
dents detect any passages in which the protagonist is being criticized, his foibles
being treated ironically? Finally: Joyce said that the narrative goal of these stories
was to give the Irish people a look at themselves in his nicely polished lookingglass.
In looking at the mirror this story holds up to us, do we recognize ourselves? In
what ways might we be like the story’s callow narrator?

Dubliners: Eveline
A few general strategies will help students come to terms with these difficult sto-
ries. To begin with, Joyce said in correspondence that his goal was to betray the
paralysis of the Irish people; all of the stories touch on some form of paralysis,
whether emotional, psychological, physical, or moral, and none more explicitly
than Eveline, especially its closing tableau. Second, Joyce sometimes used the con-
cept of “epiphany”—roughly, “revelation”—to talk about one of the major strategies
of the stories. In the first three stories presented here, the only possible “epiphany”
would seem to take place in the reader: the protagonists of these stories clearly re-
main blind to their own paralyses until the end. More controversy surrounds the
conclusion of The Dead, which we will discuss in due course.
One simple strategy for engaging students in the moral and ethical problems
that the story poses is to have them answer one question: Should Eveline have
gone with Frank, or was she right to stay behind? Why? Careful exploration of the
story should show that in fact Eveline has probably done the right thing—we read-
ers don’t really know much about this guy Frank, and Eveline doesn’t seem to ei-
ther—but she makes her decision for all the wrong reasons (primarily fear of the
new). No explicit moral judgments are pronounced in the story; instead, through-
out the collection, Joyce uses the characters’ language, or the language used to de-
scribe the characters, to suggest to readers where our sympathies should lie. In this
story, for instance, when Eveline at the quay asks God to show her what her duty
548 James Joyce

is, the jig’s up: she’s already made her decision. No one elopes with an exciting
young man out of “duty.”

Dubliners: Clay
The stylistic device called “free indirect discourse” is important to a full apprecia-
tion of this story. In free indirect discourse, the (ostensibly) third-person, objec-
tive narration takes over the thought patterns and speech idioms of the character
being described; in this fashion, the writer is able to convey the qualities and con-
tours of a character’s mind, without having to resort to first-person narration, and
to having the character give voice to all kinds of observations that she would never
make to herself in real life. The first four paragraphs of Clay are written in free in-
direct discourse; part of what’s fascinating about the story is that after this
“biased” introduction, it’s very difficult to tell what, of the rest of the story, may
have been influenced by Maria’s own desires—such as, for instance, the story’s
close, which attempts to let Maria out of an embarrassing situation with the min-
imum of fuss.

Dubliners: The Dead

This closing piece from Dubliners is Joyce’s best-known story; it’s also the collec-
tion’s longest by a good bit, and dividing the story into three main parts helps
to focus class discussion. The first section is made up of the conversation and
events leading up to the dinner (the night of the story is the Feast of Epiphany,
or Twelfth Night); the story’s middle section comprises the dinner, and Gabriel’s
after-dinner speech; and the closing section includes the breaking-up of the
party, Gabriel and Gretta’s journey to the Gresham Hotel, and the climactic
scene that plays out there.
In the opening section, the main points of interest are the three blows that
Gabriel’s quite substantial ego suffers at the hands of women at the party.
First, his indelicate questioning of Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, is coolly re-
buffed; next, Gretta playfully makes fun of Gabriel’s love of all things
European to his two aunts—and the playfulness is lost on Gabriel; and finally,
Gabriel endures some teasing at the hands of an old schoolmate, Molly Ivors,
on the subject of the Celtic Revival, and Gabriel’s somewhat less patriotic po-
litical convictions.
Still hurting from these slights, Gabriel launches into the speech he has pre-
pared, ostensibly to honor his aunts. Perhaps because his ego has been bruised,
however, we see that the speech serves primarily to shore up his own sense of self-
importance; the aunts, and their hospitality and generosity, are really of no par-
ticular interest to Gabriel—as we see when he praises them in classical imagery that
they cannot understand. Part of Gabriel’s irritation during the speech seems to be
due to the fact that Molly Ivors, against whom Gabriel wishes to score points dur-
ing his speech, has fled; indeed, he has changed the text precisely to put her down—
but she has escaped into the night.
 James Joyce 549

In the final section, Gabriel hopes to repair the damage of the day through a
romantic tryst with Gretta at the fashionable Gresham hotel, away from the dis-
tractions of home and children, and away from the criticism of friends and family
and the party. When Gretta confesses that Mr. D’Arcy’s song has called to mind a
boy she once loved, Gabriel’s romantic scenario is shattered, and the story comes
to an emotionally powerful, but rather ambiguous, climax.
The controversy over the story’s conclusion centers on whether or not Gabriel
has had an “epiphany”—whether the day’s events, and his wife’s revelation, will
show him that a change of heart is needed; or whether, instead, he is hardening
his heart against his wife and against anyone who would challenge his image of
himself. Recent critics are more inclined toward this cynical reading; for many
years, however, the trend was to see in this closing story an optimistic ending to an
otherwise bleak and despairing collection.

Ulysses: [Chapter 13. “Nausicaa”]

Chapter 13, the “Nausicaa” chapter of Ulysses, is unique for its split personality:
halfway through the chapter, the narrative point of view switches abruptly, and
without warning, from the young Gerty MacDowell to the novel’s protagonist
whose wanderings the final fifteen chapters trace, Leopold Bloom. As a result, the
chapter offers a perfect opportunity to talk about voice, style, and point of view, as
well as (Joyce’s take on) the differences between female and male perspectives on
fashion, sexuality, love and desire.
Joyce is famous for adopting a different literary style for each chapter of Ulysses;
for this chapter, which takes as its mythical prototype Odysseus’s encounter with the
Phaeacian princess Nausicaa in Book 6 of The Odyssey, Joyce adopted for Gerty what
he dubbed a “namby-pamby jammy marmalady drawersy (alto là!) style with effects
of incense, mariolatry, masturbation, stewed cockles, painter’s palette, chitchat, cir-
cumlocutions, etc. etc.” Gerty’s section is narrated in that first-person/third-person
hybrid that Joyce learned from Flaubert, called “free indirect discourse”; we do not
get Gerty’s narrative with Gerty as the narrator, quite, but instead seem to have an
intimate access to Gerty’s thought process mediated by the commodified languages
of fashion and advertising, as well as the turgid prose characteristic of late-nine-
teenth century women’s fiction. Critics seem almost evenly divided regarding the
tone of Gerty’s section: some feel the “shopworn” prose belittles and diminishes
Gerty as a character, and even suggests that women’s consciousness in general is a
pastiche of second-hand opinions and sentiments. Other critics—among whom the
editors of this section would count themselves—believe instead that a careful read-
ing of the chapter shows Gerty’s consciousness to be no more, no less commodified
than anyone else’s, and this is one of Joyce’s great achievements in Ulysses: to sug-
gest that we’re all beholden to the narratives we consciously or subconsciously in-
vest ourselves in, be they the narratives of fashion and romance (Gerty MacDowell),
or those of cuckoldry and jewishness (Bloom), or those of Irish nationalism (the un-
named “Citizen” of the “Cyclops” chapter), or those of anti-Semitism (Mr. Deasy in
the “Nestor” chapter), and so on. In fact, we would argue, Joyce’s depiction of Gerty
550 James Joyce

MacDowell is not at all derriere-guard, but instead evidences a postmodern under-

standing of the constructedness of all identity, and the complicated role that com-
modity culture plays in such a process.
The prose of the second half of the chapter is recognizably the “stream of con-
sciousness” style of Leopold Bloom—but recognizably such only to those who have
encountered it earlier in Ulysses, and hence not to students reading chapter 13 in
isolation in this anthology. So while students encountering Gerty’s narration in
the first half of the chapter will be at no greater disadvantage than other readers
of the novel, they will perhaps need some background on Bloom, background that
would have been assembled in reading chapters 4–12 (chapters 1–3 focus on
Stephen Dedalus). Bloom is a salesman, selling advertising space in two Dublin
newspapers to various merchants and commercial concerns. More important, per-
haps, he is a Jew in turn-of-the-century Dublin, where less than 1% of the popula-
tion was Jewish, and quite virulent anti-Semitism was not uncommon. But even
without a detailed knowledge of Bloom’s character, students can infer a great deal
by juxtaposing the two very different perspectives on the beach scene presented by
Gerty and Bloom. And if Bloom’s background in merchandising tends somewhat
to turn Gerty into a “piece of (damaged) goods,” the larger logic of the chapter sug-
gests that this isn’t a personal foible alone, but part of the reification of the human
that inevitably takes place under capitalism.

Finnegans Wake
Our audio CD includes a recording that Joyce himself made of the conclusion to
the most beautiful chapter in the Wake, “Anna Livia Plurabelle.” Joyce’s high tenor
voice conveys the quarrelsome speech of the two old Irish washerwomen in a tour
de force of verbal music.

T. S . El i o t
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Eliot’s first “famous” poem, like the rest of Eliot’s work, has attracted a great deal
of critical commentary; by all accounts (excepting, perhaps, that of Arthur Waugh,
below), the poem is a remarkable achievement for a young man recently graduated
from Harvard (the poem was written in 1910—11). Too often, though, the “under-
graduate” nature of the poem is overlooked, as it is read through later work like
The Waste Land; and surely it’s worth pointing out that Prufrock is a figure not just
of pity but of comedy. “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across
the floors of silent seas”—indeed!
The Canadian band Crash Test Dummies have a playful but finally respectful
version of the song—reading its themes of ennui and alienation into a contempo-
rary context, with echoes of the poem thrown in as grace notes— called
“Afternoons and Coffee Spoons,” on the album God Shuffled His Feet.
 T. S. Eliot 551

C O M PA N I O N R E A D I N G S
Arthur Waugh: Cleverness and the New Poetry;
Ezra Pound: Drunken Helots and Mr. Eliot
These readings are salutary primarily as a reminder of how very much this new po-
etry threatened the literary establishment when it was first published—and the
venom with which Pound and others were willing to strike back when attacked.
Irreverent literary texts were seen as a potent threat in the ’teens and twenties, in
a way that perhaps only rock-and-roll and film are perceived in our time (the reli-
gious controversy over Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses notwithstanding).

Gerontion
Like Prufrock, Gerontion is an old man, created and inhabited by a young poet; this
contrast explains in part the power and fascination that both poems hold. In the
draft materials for The Waste Land that Eliot sent to Ezra Pound for his considera-
tion, Eliot had considered using Gerontion as a preface to The Waste Land; though
the decision was ultimately made to separate the two poems, they do share some ob-
vious stylistic and thematic connections, and a discussion of Gerontion might be
used to prepare students for the greater difficulty of The Waste Land. Looking back
to Prufrock, students might be encouraged to think about the differences, as well as
similarities, in the situations and outlooks of these two aging gentlemen.

The Waste Land

The Waste Land is of course vast and complex, and a tremendous challenge to teach
in the course of a British Literature survey. There are many different possible, and
fruitful, approaches; themes to be emphasized will depend to some extent on what
texts and themes the course has emphasized to this point, and what will be im-
portant in the second half of the course.
The poem’s textual history is not only important but quite interesting; Valerie
Eliot’s edition of the manuscript, complete with Ezra Pound’s marginal comments,
will help students to appreciate that Eliot’s masterpiece didn’t come to the mar-
ketplace immaculate and fully formed, but instead went through a difficult birth,
with Ezra Pound as midwife. This insight can be especially valuable to student writ-
ers, who sometimes suspect that “real” writers work in complete isolation.
As with Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle, hearing the text in the author’s own
voice(s) is a wonderful aid to comprehension. In an earlier draft Eliot had called
the poem “He Do the Police in Different Voices”; and his recording helps to dis-
tinguish some of the many voices that wander in and out of the poem. One inter-
esting approach to Eliot’s orchestration of various and varied voices is to have the
students “dissect” an especially dense passage: take a pen or pencil and draw angle
brackets around the various voices or textual threads that make up a given para-
graph. This exposure of the polyphonic nature of the text should lead quite natu-
rally into a discussion of both the various sources that Eliot employs, as well as the
552 T. S. Eliot

goals of such a strategy. If you have made such an analysis of Jones’s In Parenthesis,
you may want to have your students turn back to that poem to consider the simi-
lar strategies the two poems employ.
Students may want to talk about the status of Eliot’s notes: with the exception
of the strange marginalia that Coleridge added to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
no well-known precursor of Eliot’s notational strategy comes to mind, and stu-
dents may well want to debate the “validity,” as well as the efficacy, of all of Eliot’s
extra-poetic apparatuses: the notes, but also the epigraph, dedication, and section
titles. What are we to think of a poem that embeds so much of its interpretive ap-
paratus within the poem itself?
For teachers interested in the influence of modernist texts on artists in other
media, the early ’70s rock band Genesis (headed up by Peter Gabriel) did a song on
their album Selling England by the Pound called “Cinema Show”—a loose adaptation
of the scene in The Waste Land between the typist and the young man carbuncular,
as well as Tiresias’s commentary upon that scene. The song succeeds quite well in
capturing the feeling of the passage, in the form of a miniature rock opera.

Journey of the Magi

In Eliot’s version, we are privy to all the contradictory feelings as the wise men of
the New Testament nativity story realize that the epiphany they have had, of the
newborn Christ, makes them somewhat discontent to return to life as usual. The
story of the wise men is the source for the term “epiphany” that Joyce liked to use:
the wise men (or magi) arriving at the stable at Bethlehem is the original epiphany.
As the speaker of Gerontion asks, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” The
scene described here can be productively compared to the scene of epiphany at the
close of Yeats’s The Second Coming, as well as his own poem on this same story, The
Magi (which may have influenced Eliot).

Four Quartets: “Burnt Norton”

Eliot’s Four Quartets are supremely the work of a mature poet. When he comes
to write the quartets Eliot is solidly middle-aged, and has become solidly
Christian in his beliefs, after an earlier syncretism made popular by the com-
parative anthropological work of scholars like Sir James Frazier and Jessie
Weston, both acknowledged influences behind the religious amalgam of The
Waste Land. Whereas Eliot used the writing of Christian mystics in his earlier
poetry, here he approaches, experientially, a kind of mystical stance; whereas
the earlier poetry excelled at hard-edged, almost clinical description and diag-
nosis of his times (“like a patient etherised upon a table”), in Burnt Norton Eliot
dreams of transcending language through language. The result is some of the
most beautiful poetry Eliot ever wrote—not a poet often associated with the cel-
ebration of beauty; the poem’s recurrent image of the rose-garden, for instance,
helps to make solid what otherwise threatens to disappear in clouds of vaporous
generalizations.
 Virginia Woolf 553

One way to measure how far Eliot’s poetry (and philosophy) had come since
The Waste Land is to compare the conclusion of the earlier poem—which counsels
a stoic detachment from the fallen world of the Waste Land, with the similar coun-
sel at the end of section 3 of Burnt Norton. The opening of section 5, and the image
of the Chinese jar, owes an obvious debt to Keats’s Grecian urn and Yeats’s lapis
lazuli, and can be fruitfully set alongside those poems for the sake of comparison.

Tradition and the Individual Talent

It has been suggested by some that this essay is the most influential text in
twentieth-century Anglo-American literary criticism, and the most influential text
Eliot ever wrote; if one or both of those claims overstate the case, it’s not by much.
Very early in the modernist period, Eliot’s essay served not just to reiterate the
modernist battle cry of “make it new,” but to remind his readers, as well as his fel-
low writers, that the only way to make it new was to keep always in one’s sight the
monuments of the tradition. The essay is a masterpiece of persuasive critical writ-
ing, produced by a poet who (not yet thirty) has at this point written almost no im-
portant poetry, and is newly arrived in England as well.
The essay’s two most important and suggestive points are, first, the argument
that the new work proves its importance by reconfiguring our understanding of its
forebears, and second, that the artist, when doing his work properly, maintains a
perfectly “impersonal” stance toward his material. This latter notion owes some-
thing to Keats’s concept of negative capability.

V i r g i n i a Wo o l f
The editors of the Longman Anthology hope that Virginia Woolf will be a pivotal
part of any course that includes the twentieth-century material. She is one of its
major female authors, if not the major woman writer across the two volumes, and
her work is central to modern British literature by any measure. As has been men-
tioned in the introduction to this section of the instructor’s manual, if one addi-
tional novel can be assigned for this period, it is hoped that it will be one by Woolf.
The section is set up so that Mrs Dalloway would fit with virtually all the literary
and critical agendas animating the Anthology, thematically encompassing for the
century which saw Britain’s empire wane and the cultural margins of empire re-
turn to constitute its center. Mrs Dalloway prophesies this change, and in a sense
enacts it, making its major character a British woman in the thick of the social tur-
bulence of war, empire, immigration, urbanization, and class warfare. The book
has a further element to recommend it, in that a film adaptation of it starring
Vanessa Redgrave as the eponymous heroine, written and directed by the actress
and Woolf scholar Eileen Atkins, has been released. While the film does not in
any way substitute for a reading of the novel, it can nonetheless supplement the
Woolf section by the visual excitement of its London and country settings, allow-
ing students to grasp the modernity of Woolf’s themes.
554 Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf is a triple or quadruple threat as a writer, since she is a prose

master in fiction and nonfiction, a lyrical poet in her style, and was an arbiter of
English literary history and style as an essayist and as an autobiographer in her su-
perb Diaries. As a diarist she has ties to Defoe, to Pepys, and to the great nineteenth
century autobiographers, such as Cardinal Newman. As an essayist and reviewer
she stands with Dr. Johnson, with John Stuart Mill and Mary Wollstonecraft, with
Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin and several of her Bloomsbury co-
hort. As a novelist and short story writer her peers are Joseph Conrad, James Joyce,
George Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and few others in English. As a specifically mod-
ernist writer, only Joyce and perhaps Beckett can compare in the English language
modernist tradition for formal innovations. Virginia Woolf is an astounding
writer, and the Anthology attempts to showcase most of these facets of her work.
Woolf’s gender is critical to studying her work, if only because as her literary
writing accumulated in her lifetime she also had to argue for the right to be taken
seriously as a writer. Nineteenth-century writers like Jane Austen, the Brontë sis-
ters, George Eliot, and others had decisively entered the canon of English litera-
ture during Woolf’s lifetime, so she was not arguing in a vacuum or a wilderness.
Instead, she saw and pointed out the cultural lag which allowed those female au-
thors entry into the pantheon of serious writers, yet perpetuated a hierarchy of fe-
male inferiority in education, employment, and personal freedom. It is an irony
that many of Woolf’s phrases for this gap or lag continue to be household words
long after her death: to have a “room of one’s own” is still a political and cultural
goal of women in Britain and the United States, and the words crop up in news-
paper headlines, in journalism, and on the Web, despite all the social changes and
accomplishments in equality since Woolf wrote her essay. In other words, genuine
equality for women is an ongoing issue, and Woolf’s two long essays on the sub-
ject remain pertinent in political terms, no less than in the history of social
thought to which they belong as sterling examples. Students should read Mrs.
Pankhurst’s speech to get a sense of Woolf’s own context, and they will want to
read Mary Wollstonecraft, J.S. Mill and the introductions to the Romantics sec-
tion and the nineteenth-century volume for much more edification.
Partly because Woolf was a woman, her writing has sometimes been seen as less
universal, less political, or less strong for often centering on what look like do-
mestic settings: the room of one’s own, the family house of To the Lighthouse, the
party Mrs Dalloway spends the day preparing, and so on. Jane Austen’s books ex-
perienced the same criticism; swirling around plots of marriage and located in
country houses or resort towns, Austen’s work was thought to ignore the impor-
tant historical issues of its time—the Napoleonic wars, and so on. Later critics have
caught up with readers in discovering the acute immediacy of Austen’s plots, and
the ways her prose style and narratives alike investigate the economic and social
arrangements of the rising British middle class. Virginia Woolf’s fiction is every bit
as imbricated in the major issues of its period: imperialism, class conflict, women’s
independence, and sexual autonomy are only some of its concerns. Woolf argued
that the British literature of the later nineteenth and the early twentieth century
was retrograde in holding to the certainties of realism. Influenced by and fasci-
 Virginia Woolf 555

nated with new discoveries in science, with socialist politics, with psychological
models of the personality that accepted the importance of fantasies, dreams, and
memories, Woolf developed a style that was anti-realist. She avoided neat and tidy
endings, abhorred moral or sentimental judgments, and argued that a fluid sense
of self, open to dreams, to sexual feelings, and to the darker sides of human char-
acter, should find its way into open-ended literary works. Woolf believed that an
aesthetic style was also a politics: the breaking down of authorial authority was as
powerful to her as questioning the unquestioned domination of a family by the fa-
ther—in fact, these were one and the same action to her. Literary “rules” had no
basis other than custom, and in the main literary rules upheld a straight and nar-
row, masculine notion of the world and women’s place in it. By defying literary
rules, and by creating literary spaces within language where the rules were of her
own making, Woolf was convinced that both the individual readers of that writ-
ing, and the society surrounding those individuals, could be changed. She also
wanted to challenge the unspoken rules, the rules of silence and taboo. Woolf’s
prose is lush and sensual; her characters inhabit a fluid sexuality, where desires are
freely voiced, and often break the rules of social and sexual convention.
Woolf’s story The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection shows her style at its
most poetic and most sophisticated literary height. Remind students that one of
the oldest, if not the oldest, metaphors for art is the mirror—art “holds up the mir-
ror to nature,” and so art is a reflection, or a representation, of reality. This story
is a meditation on art and its powers, and a commentary on the mimetic or mir-
roring view of art. It should be read in tandem with the great Romantic theories
of art as mimesis, including Coleridge, and the influential theories of art produced
by Ruskin and Pater, among others. In a deceptively “ordinary,” domestic scene
Woolf stages a complex rumination on art’s power to create, and to destroy. She
focuses on a scene without any characters in it—the “lady of the house” is not in
sight at the beginning, and she never receives a name. It is Woolf’s language which,
in its rich metaphors, brings personification and animation to the garden, the hall
glimpsed from the doorway, and the mirror hanging in the hall, the fatal lens of
art-making. Nothing in this very short story is actually “seen” in straightforward
description. Woolf tricks and seduces us by her language into accepting a “reflec-
tion” of language as if it were reality—the reality of the setting and the woman in
it. The imagery and metaphors of the convoluted sentences she uses begin to con-
tain indirect, oblique hints of violation, of violence, and even of rape. Woolf’s
story implicates its readers in the spellbinding power of reflection, since a reader
is aching to know what is in the letters on the little table in the hall, dying to know
who the woman is, what her story may be—even how she looks. All of this is ac-
complished solely through words, as if by magic. Woolf implicates herself as a
writer too—this eery fable about art and representation is not a simple gender para-
ble, where the “male gaze” of writing has harmful aspects which female writing
would not share. It seems crucial to point out to students that Virginia Woolf
never makes such simplistic dichotomies; The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection
illustrates that Woolf does not contrast male with female writers per se. She sees all
art, and all writing, as potentially insidious or dangerous, as much as it is creative
556 Virginia Woolf

and productive: what, after all, gives us the beautiful garden, its flowers and vines,
the absent lady and the gleaming mirror, if not literary art? One explanation for
this paradox at the heart of her ghostly story (with links in theme to Christina
Rosetti’s Goblin Market) is Woolf’s appreciation for the flip side, or back side, of
language: she wants to give silence its due. Virginia Woolf’s literary style embraces
the silence behind language. Silence was equally important for Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness; Woolf mentions his novel innumerable times in her own writ-
ing. Conrad’s understanding of silence was more one-sided than Woolf’s; since
women have been silenced so literally in the cultural record, Woolf saw great po-
tential in silence, along with death and darkness. Fruitful things can dwell in si-
lence, just as the earth gives rise to a riot of flowers and fruits from its silent, in-
visible depths. Woolf’s story provides a metaphor for silence as the handmaiden
of literary art. The only twentieth-century writer to create as much from silence as
Woolf was Samuel Beckett. Woolf recognized that many things of immense cul-
tural value had been lost to silence—virtually anything or anyone which fell outside
the “rules,” including not only women, although women most of all, but also the
lower classes, colonial subjects, homosexuals, Jews, people of color. Woolf did not
rush to “represent” all of these in her writing, since, as her story shows, she is sus-
picious of the urge to represent others in art. She does, however, leave open spaces
in her writing, so that the silences which mark such people as outside the norm,
outside the “rules,” can gather.
Her novel Mrs Dalloway indicates how sensitive Woolf was to London as the
center of a commercial and a political empire, and to the complexity of everyday life
as a whirl of impressions, fantasies, memories, and even resistances. While Mrs
Dalloway is merely “shopping”—an activity scorned by many as a feminine frivolity—
Woolf’s writing style compares itself to a shopping expedition: creative, fragmen-
tary, open to suggestion. The tiny details are what makes shopping, and the tiny de-
tails of Woolf’s prose gather momentum and strength. Ultimately, Woolf proposes
that literature, like life, is not a solid, fixed reflection, but a quicksilver mirror, dap-
pled and darkened, a mirror in motion. T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land had con-
templated just such a fragmentary view of modern life and modern art; the poet
laments that his poem is a collection of scraps, “these shards I shore up against my
ruin.” Virginia Woolf sees ruin in war, in social inequality, in violence and in en-
forced silence. Yet her diagnosis of modernity, despite these terrible evils, and her
literary response to it, is entirely different. Woolf and women like her had very lit-
tle stake in a system that had placed them outside politics, education, cultural
achievement, and the public sphere. Whereas Eliot saw the collapse of tradition
and religion, the downfall of the father (in church, state, and family) as sole au-
thority, as responsible for the ruinous conditions of fragmentation, Woolf exulted
in the fragmentary, the momentary, the new. Her writing begins on the scrap heap
of modern culture—she couldn’t have written what she did in Victorian times. Her
gender had long been thrown onto the cultural scrap heap, in any event, so for all
her love of the English literary tradition and its great masters, Woolf seizes on frag-
mentation as an opportunity. Virginia Woolf’s modernist writing puts aside literary
dreams of control, mastery, or totality—which is not to say that it isn’t ambitious, po-
 Virginia Woolf 557

litical, and intense. Instead, in exquisitely lyrical and yet rigorous prose, she explores
the silences, the neglected spaces—park benches, shops, parties, hospital rooms—
and the momentary, fragile links between human consciousnesses.

Mrs Dalloway
Modernism is envisioned as an international, primarily European, urbanism, in
other words the idea of modernity is the idea of the city, a city rooted in national
identities, myths, and power, but breaking free of that horizon precisely at the level
of modernist cultural practice. The place of women in the city, and the city seen
as a space by and for women, however, considerably complicates modernism’s
urban focus. Concentrating on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, but also with refer-
ence to “A Room of One’s Own” and Orlando, this entry for the Instructor’s
Manual is meant to illuminate Woolf’s great novel, but also to show how the mod-
ern(ist) city is figured there in ways at odds with the now customary notions of met-
ropolitan experience under modernity—shock, fragmentation, dissolution, nostal-
gia. With an emphasis on consumption, viewed as an active, even productive or
creative process, Woolf’s texts are a prism of the multiple presences of women in
the metropole, or capital city of London, and consequently this major emblem of
modernist Europe, the city, is viewed quite differently in her novel. Within this dif-
ference there is by no means a singular “woman’s” city or a single “female” mod-
ernism—instead, the richness of urbanity, of the presence of the city in Woolf’s
writing, establishes new directions for modernism, and multiple vectors for the
women within the modern metropole implies liminality of identity, and its multi-
plicity: the ultimate result of the fluidity of identity, sexuality, and consciousness
in Mrs Dalloway is the destabilizing of our conceptions of the metropole/periphery
split. Woolf’s novel recasts our ideas of what is central, what on the margins,
whether that be in terms of gender and its masculine/feminine division, or of em-
pire, where “center” and “periphery” are technical terms referring to the power at
the heart of the imperial city; of nation or region, as in London appearing to be
the very center of England, but shot through with the marginal—Scottish servant
girls, Irish landladies, working-class intellectuals, Italian war brides; in regard to
sexuality, where “proper” heterosexuality would seem to inhabit the center, yet in
the novel is knocked off-center by the same-sex desires that infiltrate so many rela-
tionships. Finally, Mrs Dalloway questions the impregnable center of the English
literary tradition, the British novel, and the English language, by Woolf’s writing
from the margins—female, unorthodox, uncompromisingly lyric prose.
If, as Raymond Williams persuasively demonstrates, modernism is character-
ized by an international, cosmopolitan metropole, with a floating bohemia or
avant-gardist cafe society, a migratory modernist work force, then Virginia Woolf’s
greatest work decisively fails to register this, since her book is set squarely in one
place, London, on one June day, occupied largely with the doings of a middle-to-
upper class matron preparing for a party that evening. Some critics have been de-
ceived by this appearance, and relegate Woolf’s novel to the domestic settings or
the embroidery hoop of narrative circumference within which her texts work their
558 Virginia Woolf

inscriptions. We may choose, however, to envision her writing as a material mod-

ernism engaged throughout with the dilemmas of the urban and of modernity,
concerned actively with politics, the city, the empire, the world. Mrs Dalloway spins
around the core of consuming, often very literally in the form of shopping, a fe-
male-coded activity that is thought to be the opposite of manly production. In Mrs
Dalloway “production” in the sense of masculine order, heritage, and power has led
to World War I, to the inequities of the British empire, and to the dominating the-
ories of its villainous doctors, theories personified by Woolf as the social forces of
Conversion and Proportion. To this “center” of coercion and control—London’s
economic power, its government, its male arbiters of social and psychic health—
Mrs Dalloway escapes to the margins, to seemingly trivial acts of consuming,
fraught with all its mysteries, its possibilities, its sacred rites.
We are led to expect “shock” as the objective correlative for the modernist
urban experience; certainly a work like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land creates an at-
mosphere of shock and dislocation for its vision of modern London, and “shock”
was the term that both Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, two of the most im-
portant theorists of modernity, gave to the new experience of urban modernity.
The poet Charles Baudelaire, for example, used the metaphor of an electric shock
to describe the confusing, painful, and yet often pleasurable intensity of the mod-
ern city and human reaction’s to the modern world. In The Transparent Society
Gianni Vattimo links shock with Heidegger’s term for the modernist art work’s ef-
fect, Stoss, or the blow, and arrives at a definition for modernist aesthetic experi-
ence: “the focal point for art corresponding to this excitability and hypersensitiv-
ity is no longer the work, but experience. . . the phenomenon Benjamin describes
as shock, then, does not concern only the conditions of perception, nor is it to be
entrusted to the sociology of art. Rather, it is the manner of the work of art’s ac-
tualization.” In other words, Vattimo claims that modernist works of art are them-
selves experiences, and that their “shock value” lies in showing the positive sides
of modernity. Woolf’s novel embraces this experience and enters the fray, taking
sides in one of the primary disputes of modernism by repudiating the notion that
modernity and its shocks are only alienating, dehumanizing, or degrading, and that
the nature of mass culture, modern spectacle, and consuming behaviors is always
negative or “fallen.”
The character of Septimus Smith is indeed a victim of modernity, suffering
from a mental illness brought on by the war, whose very name “shell-shock”
would seem to undercut the idea that shock or the modern metropole can be any-
thing other than destructive. The book’s sympathy with Septimus, and its covert
praise of his suicide as an act against the forces of “normality” in the form of Dr.
Bradshaw, however, depends on seeing the city and modernity in new ways and
from new perspectives: Septimus’s “insane” point of view, his working-class back-
ground and his apparently unimportant life are all celebrated in the book, as he
becomes a stand-in for Eliot’s Fisher-King, a force of renewal. This transpires
because of the obliquity, or off-centeredness, of Woolf’s approach to the urban
and to modernity in general: her metropole, unlike, say, Walter Benjamin’s, has
women and other marginal people at the heart of it, and thus reconfigures the
 Virginia Woolf 559

stage of the commodity, consumption, and gender. The society of the spectacle is
not simply a society of appearance manipulated by power, where the refraction of
goods in myriad shop windows makes for a dazzling, illusionary surface over the
stark reality of hegemony. “This is also the society in which reality presents itself
as more fluid, as weaker, as soft, where experience can acquire the characteristics
of oscillation, disorientation, and play,” Vattimo notes, and since he is speaking
of modern social form, or “reality,” and not of Woolf or her writing, the adjec-
tives fluid, weak and soft are not any summing up or privileging of the “femi-
nine,” but descriptive of an alternative understanding of the effects of the advent
of mass culture and the media. Essentially, Woolf’s writing already contains or en-
acts just such an exploration.
The dual possibility—both negative and “alienating” and positive or creative—
of this cultural terrain is brought out in the famous episode of collective trans-
fixing as a scattered group of people in a London park look up to watch as a sky-
writing plane emits its puffy, magic script across the sky, “Glaxo. . . Creemo. . .
Toffee,” writ large in the air for the wonderment and puzzlement of the onlook-
ers in the park. “The clouds to which the letters E, G, or L had attached them-
selves moved freely, as if destined to cross from West to East on a mission of the
greatest importance which would never be revealed, and yet certainly so it was—
a mission of greatest importance.” The words West and East are capitalized, a
portentous reminder of the pan-European nature of the first World War and the
importance of airplane technology to its devastation. But this airplane is not the
mere replica of that other engine of destruction, the war-plane. Here the air-
plane, for good or ill, is an ineluctable feature of modernity, capable of hiero-
glyphic play, of hierophantic writing, and able to draw people together. “It was
toffee; they were advertising toffee, a nursemaid told Rezia. Together they began
to spell t . . . o . . . f . . .” This fluid sky-writing, emblematic of all writing under the
sign of mass culture, and a figure for the modernist writing of Woolf’s own
book, prompts an unfurling of the personal history of various women in this
city, especially Mrs Dempster, a figure left out of most accounts of modernity,
urbanism, and shock, but decisively included here: “Ah, but that aeroplane!
Hadn’t Mrs Dempster always longed to see foreign parts? She had a nephew, a
missionary. It soared and shot. She always went to sea at Margate, not out o’
sight of land, but she had no patience with women who were afraid of water. It
swept and fell. Her stomach was in her mouth. Up again. There’s a fine young
feller aboard of it, Mrs Dempster wagered, and away and away it went, fast and
fading, away and away the aeroplane shot; soaring over Greenwich and all the
masts; over the little island of grey churches, St. Paul’s and the rest till, on either
side of London, fields spread out and dark brown woods where adventurous
thrushes hopping boldly, glancing quickly, snatched the snail and tapped him on
a stone, once, twice, thrice.” Mrs Dempster’s experience is not comfortably to be
written off in the vocabulary of reification or alienation, nor is she just a victim
of the modern mass cultural spectacle. On the contrary: via the unexpected
medium of the evanescent toffee advertisement Mrs Dempster has entered a
geopolitical reverie. Her metropole is sexed by way of the skeins of consumption,
560 Virginia Woolf

which are not riveted, mechanical, or restricting, but offer a cast-out line to an-
other way of envisioning her circumstances.
Woolf reverses the expected trajectory of international metropolitan mod-
ernism in fascinating ways. A pivotal refrain in the book is the rather garbled
crooning song, “the voice of an ancient spring spouting from the earth,” emitted
by the chthonic old woman who sits at the park entrance, one of Woolf’s old
woman figures, half working-class crone, half mythologized primal earth mother.
The song she sings has thankfully been identified for us by numerous commenta-
tors as “Allerlei Seelen” or “All Souls,” a European high art fragment that recircu-
lates through the old woman, a sexing (in the sense of grafting onto) of the metro-
pole. The old woman’s “ee um fah um so, foo swee too eem oo” refrain is the
transformation through consumption of the otherwise abstract modern artifact,
and its re-entry in the culture of London on that day, in the form of an old
woman’s song, as another form of currency.
Clarissa Dalloway has a special relationship to the metropole or “center,” in
part because she lives in the heart of London, is married to a diplomat, and grew
up on a classic 18th-century estate in the countryside. Her name, too, is borrowed,
perhaps, from Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, one of the first novels. Clarissa
Dalloway also has a special role in the book as a hostess—she is a shopper and a
consumer, exactly the modern gender roles assigned to women of her class.
However, while consumers and especially female consumers are the subject of
much cultural disapproval, one thing that is so exciting and fresh about Mrs
Dalloway is its refusal to do so. What is often labeled a marginal, trivial act—shop-
ping, consuming, preparing for a party, taking care of a family’s needs, and so on—
becomes the heart of this novel. Clarissa’s parties, it goes without saying, are
bound up in extensive acts of literal consumption, the purchase of flowers and can-
dles and food and clothes. But of greater significance is the placement of Clarissa
at the core of the book, a meditation on urban modernity. Clarissa tentatively and
tenuously reverses the “disenchantment of the world” characteristic of modernity,
according to the great sociologist Max Weber, who argued that the nature of
modernity was an ever-encroaching rationality, bureaucracy, and calculation. The
world becomes “disenchanted,” in his lovely phrase, in that everything that doesn’t
concern money or statistics or power politics slips away, whether it be personal
touches or rural customs or belief in fairies and folklore. Clarissa re-enchants her
world, or at least tries to defy its disenchantment, by the generosity of her gendered
acts of consumption, where consumption is reformulated as the nature of the gift.
This appears paradoxical, in that gift-giving looks like the reversal of con-
sumption, the taking in or appropriation of something through an act of ex-
change. Nonetheless, Clarissa’s consumption has this perverse or unexpected
valence, and it is linked by the text to the nature of modernist writing and
Woolf’s writing in particular. “I threw a coin once into the Serpentine,”
Clarissa famously says, comparing this to the suicide of Septimus Smith as a
form of sacrifice, giving the gift of his death to the city of London not as a sol-
dier in the European war, but as an ex-centric denizen of the city itself. And on
the verge of his suicide, Septimus is gendered female, when he decorates the
 Virginia Woolf 561

party hat as his penultimate creative offering. The sexing of the metropole in
this fashion is not meant at all to suggest that, for example, men are unable to
take up this relation to the city or to consumption. Rather, this is a way of fig-
uring the dynamics of the modernist city, where, to put it very baldly, shopping
is not the root of all evil—nor, one hastens to say, is it utopian. The processes
and procedures of modernity, however, are accorded weight and positive possi-
bilities, in contradistinction to the dehumanization often attributed to the
modern city. The city of women—Clarissa’s London, for instance—is the site not
only of all the hierarchies and divisions of the gendered social world, but also
their liquefaction in gifts of consumption.
In Mrs Dalloway the English subjects depicted throughout the book are ex-
centric to the metropole in multifarious ways, whether by dint of having spent
twenty years in India like Peter Walsh, repatriating as a World War I veteran in
the case of Septimus Smith, being Italian, coming down from Scotland in hopes
of escaping poverty there, or in less tangible ways, as for Richard Dalloway, pillar
of the metropolitan establishment, but secretly wishing to be a farmer, a man with
rural longings. Even Sally Seton, Clarissa’s dearest friend and for one brief mo-
ment the object of her romantic love, is marginal, unusual; she is at the time of
the story a married mother of five sons, living in the country, but she was an in-
tellectual, a radical, a bold and brilliant young woman who even now has defied
the class system by marrying a business man who worked his way up in life. People
all over the world are linked to London because of the British Empire; Mrs
Dalloway diagnoses the injustices and wrongs of the empire, but shows that even
people and cultures pushed to the margins are central in their significance and
experience to modernity. London is a shadowy city of great power and exclusion,
yet also a city of joy, of transformation, of women. Clarissa’s daughter Elizabeth
travels the city on the open-air upper deck of a bus in the memorable next-to-last
scene; she, unlike her mother, seems headed toward a profession, is uncomfort-
able with the role of debutante her father wants her to play, loves the city and its
freedom, has compassion for those who, like her mentor Miss Kilman, are
unloved and on the outskirts.
The novel ends with the party Clarissa gives; in it, through her, her friends and
even foes have come together, spark memories and find themselves anew in talk-
ing about her. She is almost magical in her “sea-green silver” dress, like a mermaid
as well as a middle-aged woman. Clarissa’s party is also her life, a whirling shim-
mering scatter of conscious moments, possibilities, gifts of love and thought she
showers. “It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was,” are the last two lines, the first
spoken by Peter Walsh and the second perhaps by us, the readers. What Clarissa
“is” is as uncertain as are all our individual selves. This book encompasses so much
historical loss, dislocation, personal compromise, grief and yet exultation.
Clarissa’s party is a gift whose recipients don’t even recognize it—the truest form of
gift there is, tossed without expectation of thanks or of reciprocation, like the coin
into the Serpentine. Not all truth and knowledge comes from production, ruling,
coercing, defining. Clarissa’s consuming gift is her gift to the world she inhabits,
priceless and beyond measurement.
562 Regendering Modernism

PERSPECTIVES

Re g e n d e ri n g Mo d e r n i s m
Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando
The brief excerpt from the middle of Virginia Woolf’s famous book, Orlando,
serves as the introductory and exemplary text to this Perspectives section on gen-
der and modernism. It does so not only because Woolf is quite clearly herself the
exemplary modernist writer who “regendered” modernism by the sheer power of
her texts, and the centrality of gender to her work; the section of her novel Orlando
is in some ways an allegory of the process of re-gendering, in a sense, taking gen-
der newly into account.
Modernism was by no means the first literary movement or school to carry
implicit or explicit questions of gender, nor the first where female writers par-
ticipated as creative and ground-breaking innovators. The rest of the anthology
amply demonstrates how important women writers have been to canonical and
non-canonical literature, and even in their absence, the degree to which gender
is a formative structure within language and literature as a whole. We include
this special Perspectives section to highlight the special relationship modern
writing has with, on the one hand, broad social and cultural changes in the un-
derstanding of men and women, and on the other, the paralleling of modernist
literature with revelations and revolutions in gender roles and the knowledge of
sexuality and desire. In a general way modernist writing is characterized by its
movement into interior, psychic space, its rendering of the quicksilver patterns
of consciousness and the equally powerful force of unconscious drives and
wishes. Freud made it evident that, as he described it, conscious awareness of
the self was but the visible part of a far more extensive iceberg, whose under-
water dimensions are an apt analogy to the superior role of unconscious ele-
ments in the mind. Human beings, Freud showed, are “split” subjects, split into
unequal parts and forever blocked from complete self-awareness or self-
knowledge. Selfhood became for modernity a fluid affair, an almost literary,
ever-fluctuating script that drew no distinctions between conscious and uncon-
scious, present and past, self and other. Freud’s theory mapped the movements
of desire, as desire went undercover and returned in the form of memories,
wishes, thoughts, repressions, dreams, sublimated creativity, and the ability, as
Freud put it, “to work and to love,” a more realistic hope than simply expecting
to be “happy.” Desire can be viewed as simply the most available source of
human energy, and far from being used up in sexual activity, its primary reason
for being is to keep human beings directed toward life and away from death.
The interior fiction of identity each person constructs, then, circles importantly
around gender, since the bottom line of self-definition, in social and cultural
scripts that control even one’s entry into language, is to be able to say “I am a
girl” or “I am a boy.” Freud’s psychoanalytic work illustrated that such declara-
tions are not only comprised of constant performances of what such gendered
 Regendering Modernism 563

identities mean, but also that they take place along a spectrum, where the
“normal” shades into the so-called “perverse,” and where both sexes share gen-
der elements and fantasies.
This fluid model of the self and necessarily of gender becomes pivotal to mod-
ernist writing, writing that tries to capture the evanescence of self-awareness just as
it turns away from fixity and absolutes. This section contains separate works that
address the innovations in language, style and subject that marked a renewal of in-
terest in gender, as contrasted to biological sex. Much of the rest of the anthology,
however, is as deeply invested in experiments with gender: Shaw’s Pygmalion has
rich affinities with Woolf’s Orlando and with Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine; D.H.
Lawrence is as alert to the flow of desire and the gendering of power as is E. M.
Forster or Thom Gunn; Eavann Boland experiments with the gender of language
with the same intensity as does Angela Carter. This Perspectives section teaches as
a distinct and discrete grouping, though, in that each of the pieces emanates from
the investigation of gender and self-hood so well-represented by Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando, whose main character is both man and woman, heterosexual and homo-
sexual, self and other.
Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, was most famous for his writing and
direction of a vast Victorian project, the Dictionary of National Biography, a reference
work in numerous volumes that provided a capsule biography of the great and im-
portant figures who were seen as making up British social life: its major writers, its
political figures, its educators, explorers, reformers and journalists, its diplomats
and its scientists. The Dictionary turned lives into neat formulations of achieve-
ment and into standard evaluations of greatness, both linked to the desire to com-
pile a national list that could also be said to define a national identity. Lives were
seen as part of a larger cultural project or destiny, and the idea of placing these bi-
ographical sketches in alphabetical, dictionary form is, if you think about it, also
something quite strange. Listing people in place of words, the dictionary then gives
the impression that, for example, there are no other famous lives between f and g,
that there is a kind of fictitious totality which the alphabet format provides. In
some ways, it helps to form the very idea of a nation, where it even makes sense to
compile a collection of these life stories under one heading. This major life’s work
gave enormous cultural power to Leslie Stephen, in the sense that he could be an
arbiter of someone’s importance to the national life; the connection to an imper-
ial consciousness is also very direct, because it only became necessary to have such
a reference work at the point that Britain was through its empire spreading itself
out over the globe. People have often read Orlando as a jeu d’esprit, concentrating
on its playfulness, its dedication to Vita Sackville West, its glossy surface and con-
stantly ironic tone. If we consider, though, as we must, that Woolf is taking on a
form brought to its national, imperial, Victorian height by her own father, then
the textual politics of Orlando becomes something else again. Its status as a spoof
is a serious one, for it takes on, seemingly in jest, all the principles of such biogra-
phies and really looks at what they do to constitute a sense of a person’s life. Along
the way, Woolf’s novel presents an intertwined investigation of sexual, interna-
tional and textual politics.
564 Regendering Modernism

Orlando is subtitled “A Biography,” and clings to that premise throughout its

improbable unfolding, improbable because it becomes apparent that a biography
of a person who won’t neatly die within one historical “age,” won’t even conform
to the ultimate sanctity of biography, that is, identifiable sexual identity. This
throws a huge monkey wrench into the works, since Orlando the character begins
as a man and is described in those terms, but then becomes a woman and opens
up all the established categories of representation. Moreover, the “biography” is
wrapped around the literary tradition of England, since Orlando is a writer, whose
writings we never really get to read, and is involved in the lives, if only in passing,
of the writers who are said to “sum up” their respective periods, to stand in for
them, almost. Finally, the biography also is from its opening words interlaced with
Britain’s imperial identity, with its gradual building up of a mercantilist empire to
its ultimate political installation of an imperial state—Orlando doesn’t just witness
this, but takes part in it in many ways. This construction of the mock biography
helps to show us how indissolubly linked these elements are in cultural discourse.
Orlando is not a text in which we identify with the hero/heroine, or are moved by
the characters’ losses and courage, as happens in Mrs Dalloway; we are kept on the
surface of this life because the process of biography itself is in question, the ways
that selves and genders are put together in culture. And running throughout this
is the interrogation of patriarchy—simply put, why it is that the “norm” has been
taken to be male, and that all the positive cultural terms—rationality, art, power,
action, strength, purpose, and even fame are taken to be masculine traits.
Orlando begins with the character Orlando as a boy, slicing off the head of a
Moor, a desiccated severed head, we soon learn, part of the family bounty from the
grandfather’s trips to foreign places. This head grins at Orlando with its shriveled
lips, and in that gaze begins to confound the placement of self and other the text
will set thoroughly at odds. The questioning continues, for example, in the section
where Orlando goes to Constantinople as the Ambassador. This part is reflected
to us in bits and pieces only —as the very vocal narrator says, only “charred frag-
ments” of history remained. The opulence and merriment of the Arabian court
where the male Orlando enjoys his time as Ambassador, the extravagance of the
royal party leading even to his marriage with the gypsy Rosita Pepina, are all oblit-
erated in a very significant stroke, wherein this male Orlando is looked back at, as
it were. Following a strange courtly allegory, a Masque that one could show stu-
dents is an ironic take-off on courtly masques in Shakespeare and other early writ-
ers, three graces come before Orlando and then withdraw, upon which Orlando
stands revealed as a woman. It seems not to be a coincidence that this transfor-
mation should have taken place on foreign, exotic soil, in the land of the Other,
since after all, Woman is seen as the ultimate Other in patriarchal culture.
Orlando suddenly becomes a beautiful object, drawn out almost magically (or
through literary magic) of the immensely beautiful surroundings and their lavish
strangeness. It is as if this splitting off of Orlando into femininity has come about
because of a kind of surplus of exoticism, of which femininity can readily become
a part. It also signals that the biography of this supposed person, Orlando, is not
going to rest content with the exploits of a swashbuckling Duke; suddenly we are
 Regendering Modernism 565

on the other side of the looking glass, an unfamiliar place, except perhaps in fic-
tion. It is clear how hard it is to tell the story of the British empire and its noble
deeds if the protagonist is a woman, how hard it is to connect the elusive self with
a national identity when in a foreign place. Orlando goes out to the gypsies in her
new incarnation, as a woman, although what she seeks is solitude and contempla-
tion. But her desire for England drives her back home, and she leaves on the ship
The Enamoured Lady, anything but in love.
While the newly female Orlando will survey, from the deck of the ship, an
England suddenly made orderly by the arrival of the 18th century, there is more
disorder now in the text than it can cope with, because the issue of sexual identity
cannot easily be resolved. Initially, Orlando is simply no different, except anatom-
ically, but then an internal doubling occurs, and Orlando knows life from two
sides—prompted, in fact, by being back in England, where there is a need to see
how much a woman is created by the social order and how much stems from some
innate “womanliness.” The argument of this text, or what it enacts, at any rate, is
the costumed nature of sexuality, its performative aspects. Gender is like a form of
theater; obviously there are unique biological experiences, such as giving birth for
women, or experiencing sex with different physical organs, but beyond those, the
display of sexuality is a matter of clothing, in a sense. A woman’s experience is not
created by any innateness, nor by an “essence” that is womanly, but by the social
construction of women. Orlando even feels a rush of anger against her own former
category, the male side of things, while at the same time the text suggests a double
state for all human beings. More sex changes occur further along in the novel,
when Orlando has been wearing women’s garb for a considerable period of time,
and the book ends in the modern period, with Orlando in love with modernity
and the city, waiting for a husband who likes to wear pearls.
These flips back and forth across the central divide of gender are also played
out in the main “plots” of the biography, in order to suggest the difficulty of mak-
ing even a simple statement about someone’s love affairs or their desires. The
Archduchess Harriet is a case in point. She comes on the scene early on in the
Elizabethan period, an ungainly 6’2” of love for Orlando (then a man), laughing
rather maniacally, and evaded by Orlando in his then repulsion from her. Later in
the 18th century the Archduchess is back, except this time it is revealed that she
had been playing a part, and was really the Archduke, madly in love with Orlando
as a man and adopting this ruse to be able to woo him. Now that Orlando is a
woman, the Archduke is willing to propose marriage, although this little perfor-
mance is not accepted by the female Orlando. There is a confetti of sexual posi-
tions and desires going on here, on both sides of the Archduke’s masquerade.
Orlando almost prophesies transgendered and transsexual identities that had not
become surgically or socially possible until very recently.
The entire biography of Orlando, male and female, is wrapped up with writ-
ing; ironically, Orlando carries the manuscript of her poem “The Oak Tree”
around in one form or another for several hundred years. The work is begun in
the Elizabethan age in Orlando’s flush of enthusiasm for the immortality of liter-
ature, until he is rudely disabused of this notion by the poet Nick Greene. Greene
566 Regendering Modernism

is scathing about the literary value of the present age and criticizes Shakespeare,
Donne, Jonson, Marlowe, and so on for their inability to hold up next to the great
classical past. Literary value is shown to be as subjective and fluid as gender. The
text oscillates wildly back and forth between the act of writing and the act of being
written, the act of writing and the act of reading. There is a hilarious scene when
Orlando goes with Sasha, his early love, to a street fair, there to see a puppet show
of Shakespeare’s Othello; in the very next passage, without knowing it, Orlando
acts out Hamlet in his obsession with death and the futility of all action. But
Orlando won’t die, can never die or reach closure, and thus allow the act of biog-
raphy to really begin. Obviously, one of the most important features of biography
is that the life it traces has ended, making a narrative complete. In Orlando, no
final judgment is able to be made, and this stymies the whole operation of fixing
and embalming an identity. Modernism, too, refuses closure, refuses simple end-
ings, whether they be “happy” or sad. Modernist works like Mrs Dalloway end on
an open note; Joyce’s Ulysses famously ends without punctuation and in a pas-
sionate rush with Molly Bloom’s “yes I will Yes” and then is over.
The fetishizing of men leads to the denigration of women’s lives and the repe-
tition or the reproduction of a social system that uses the worship of art for con-
servative rather than liberating ends.
The Victorian age is horrific to Orlando, and points to a kind of constricting,
narrowing, dominative aspect that in Mrs Dalloway was presented as Proportion
and Conversion, an age where his/her liminal status as man—woman is even less
tolerable than before. The empire is ushered in, and this has everything to do with
the conditions of sexuality under Victorianism. Soon, imperceptibly, Orlando the
woman finds herself subject to the blushing fits which characterize the age and,
much worse, to the desire to marry, the ultimate paradigm of conformity. The
book takes up most savagely its critique of the ways that an ideology of marriage
and the family came to be so dominant, with such appalling results, and how this
was related to the spectacle of Britain as an imperial society.
Orlando does succumb to the pressure to marry, but is able to do this in such
a unique way that it obviates all the control mechanisms of the century, since
Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine (obviously a playfully ironic name) is more like
a woman than a man, is never in England, and is not part of Orlando’s real life, her
writing. The book ends with an open future, an open page, before her, an allegory
for the regendering that perhaps only literature can accomplish in the modern age.

Vita Sackville-West
Seducers in Ecuador
In some ways, Seducers in Ecuador is the perfect cautionary tale for Western tourists
and even students and faculty off to acquire spring-break tans in tropical places like
Key West and Aruba, wearing RayBans to ward off the fierce glare, and, in that
sense, becoming like Arthur Lomax in Vita Sackville-West’s tale, a prisoner of spec-
tacles. Lomax’s trip to foreign ports of call leads inexorably to his death by hang-
ing back in a grimmer and greyer England; most tourists have nothing like this to
worry about as they contemplate much-needed voyages to tropical climes. Still, the
 Regendering Modernism 567

relation of this text to travel, empire, and gender is one of the compelling reasons
for including it in the anthology and in the Regendering Modernism Perspectives
section. Vita Sackville-West’s tale is an ironic parable of an empire, England, in the
process of regendering itself.
There are other key contexts that help to situate this work an instructor needs
to embroider upon first. It may seem that after Ulysses or Mrs Dalloway that writing
itself had undergone an apocalypse and nothing remained to do with words on a
page. The revolutionary reverberations of Joyce’s and Woolf’s texts are still ringing
in students’ ears, but an important thing to point out is that their modernist tex-
tual experimentation was a highly specific cultural act, that it had meaning not just
as an experiment in modernist art but as very committed political texts originating
out of the colonial context and its collision with language. One of the main lines
of change we have been tracing in the anthology has been what makes British liter-
ature British, in other words, why is this tradition composed so strikingly of people
from non-British or at least non-English backgrounds, or by those with a highly
marginal relation to the nation itself, whether by politics or sexual orientation or
by gender or race or class. Joyce’s Ulysses went as far as it is perhaps possible to go
with a challenge to the English language as an instrument of oppression and an in-
strument of change and renewal—his very mode of writing has been called a version
of écriture feminine, women’s writing, by French feminist theorists including Julia
Kristeva, who is under no misapprehension about James Joyce’s biological mas-
culinity, but whose claim is that the fluidity of the language in his texts approaches
a feminine, rather than masculine, sensibility. Vita Sackville-West is not mounting
a challenge to the supremacy of English nor tunneling inside writing itself to carve
out a new consciousness of modernity. Next to that project this story is somewhat
slight. It is, however, revelatory of a kind of displacement that enters all British
modernist writing and that is especially valuable to investigate as the product of a
female writer, perhaps only possible emanating from a female sensibility.
Far from being an outsider figure like Conrad, or Lawrence, or Joyce, Sackville-
West was brought up in, literally, the largest house in England, an Elizabethan es-
tate called Knole that is approximately Brideshead Revisited times two. Set squarely
in the ruling elite of Britain, poised within its aristocracy with all the feudal trap-
pings of merry old England on a vast acreage, she grew up as a confident posses-
sor of what may be the ineffable quality of Britishness, which was her birthright.
She later lost the house when, on her father’s death, it went to her male cousin by
the immutable laws of gender and property. That sense of usurpation—of having
something taken away solely because, in this case, one was female, became para-
mount to Vita Sackville-West. Her entitlements remained almost unimaginable to
most of us; she had a perfectly fine, enormous house called Sissinghurst instead,
was wealthy in the extreme, and, through her marriage to Harold Nicholson, was
part of ruling circles socially and diplomatically until she died in 1962. But her in-
tersection as a writer with the world of modern British literature, her occupation
of a strange niche within the Bloomsbury group, and her accomplishments as a
female writer who helped to change the texture and aims of British literature are
key to the section: her work shows how much this modernist literature was predi-
568 Regendering Modernism

cated on a relationship, suppressed or acknowledged, with the rest of the world,

with Britain’s status as an imperial power and as such, as the ruler of an empire of
English, too—since under the British flag English was disseminated to the colonies
and was taught rigorously there. The first advanced college courses in English lit-
erature were, in fact, developed in India for Indian students, meant to teach them
to absorb Englishness and thus loyalty to the British culture that ruled them. Vita
Sackville-West spent a large part of her adult life in Persia, now Iran, and wrote
some of the first and best books and essays about that culture in English, a part of
the vast imperial administration of English, but a marginal, insidious voice within
its world of writing. Even at the veritable center of power and empire, there is mar-
gin, at the metropole, there is periphery, to use two terms from the theory of colo-
nialism that help to describe the uncanny as well as exploitative ties between the
ruling country and its colonies. The center comes to depend on the margin, in lin-
guistic and psychological ways, and one could argue that if the modernist center
was also masculine, it depended on its female or queer margins for much of its en-
ergies. Seducers in Ecuador is a neat presentation, unconsciously perhaps, but deliv-
ered with great zest, of this predicament.
Show students that the story is dedicated to Virginia Woolf, one of West’s clos-
est friends, so close indeed that, according to her, they went to bed together twice.
The physical extent of their relationship is unimportant; certainly its emotional in-
tensity was powerful, and even more so, Sackville-West’s debts to her friend
Virginia’s writing. Orlando is dedicated to and “about” Vita; it is, as is everything
Woolf wrote, lyrical, rich, and extraordinary. Sackville-West realized her strengths
did not lie in style or writerly genius. Instead, she could offer something to the
modernist table, too, a small gift, but crucial, the gift of her elite sensibilities put
to subversive use by her ironic stance as woman, a bi-sexual, a feminist, and a critic
of Britain’s empire. Sackville-West had a propensity for donning men’s clothes
and, with her ample checkbook in hand, leaving her husband and two sons for a
month or two of deliciously decadent rampaging in Europe and the Middle East;
she lived out an aristocratic version of the sexual and intellectual freedoms com-
manded by Bloomsbury circles.
Bloomsbury is an important phenomenon within the study of 20th century
British literature, and other than West both E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf on
our anthology syllabus have to be rooted within it too—not to wholly explain their
literary being nor as the only way of reading their texts, but to help to explain in
the larger historical sense what a language community can provide, what work it
can do in generating literary responses. It’s hard to pin down the elusive
Bloomsbury Group or to give any definitive explanation for what they were about,
because of course one is dealing with a group of people with loose alliances over
time, not an institution or a group that can be pinned down. This group of
friends, rivals and colleagues was centered in London as an outgrowth of friend-
ships made at Oxford and Cambridge that then also expanded to include the non
Oxbridge-educated, especially the Stephens sisters, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa
Bell. Other prominent members besides Forster were Lytton Strachey, the biogra-
pher, Maynard Keynes, the economist, Leonard Woolf, Roger Fry and Clive Bell,
 Regendering Modernism 569

who worked in art and art criticism, Duncan Grant, Bertrand Russell, Lady
Ottoline Morell, and students of the philosopher G.E. Moore. These people don’t
cluster to form one school or one program, but nonetheless, with their iconoclasm
and their anti-imperialism within limits, their prolongation of a kind of university
life well past its ending, with their sexual nonconformity—Bloomsbury as such is
reported to have begun when Vanessa Bell said to someone else entering the room
where a group was gathered to talk—“Is that sperm on your skirt?”—homosexuality
and round-robin affairs, their devotion to free thought and to an anti-national,
anti-Victorian stance, they do constitute a strong cultural force within British life,
one that has been thoroughly mythologized.
Arthur Lomax’s life is transformed by the wearing of sunglasses, first the blue
pair he buys in London to prepare for going to Egypt on Bellamy’s yacht, and then
the amber, green and black pairs he acquires at Cairo. Ultimately, he is unable to
look at the world without them, and they do provide him with an entirely new in-
sight into things, into truth, however much the colors of the lens change what
seem to be the real hues of life. It is in fact the saddest thing that happens to him,
even worse than being tried and hanged, when the police take his spectacles away
when he is arrested in Paris. Twice in the tale the adjective “quixotic” is applied to
Lomax’s extraordinary behavior under the sway of the glasses, and this is a give-
away of sorts. Lomax is a new incarnation of Don Quixote. “Quixotic” is now used
to mean an attempt to do something idealistic, despite the obvious impossibilities.
Lomax is a Don Quixote because just as the Don picked up the romances of
chivalry, was overwhelmed by them, and then read the world through the lens of
the romantic page, treating the world as text, and in the blunt encounters that re-
sulted, saw the power of the text to utterly transform and even refigure the “real,”
so the colored glasses produce a new sense of the world. This world is one where
chivalrous behavior or loyalty and honor go without saying—Lomax will marry
Miss Whitaker in a flash because she merely sets him up to believe that she is preg-
nant with the child of a bounder who has gone off to Ecuador to hide amongst his
exploits, and he will agree to poison Bellamy because Bellamy has begged him to
put him out of his supposedly terminal misery. So far, there are indeed echoes of
the behavior Don Quixote engaged in that made him thought to be so mad, but
other aspects also enter in. The world becomes skewed by an altered sense of vi-
sion, by a covering or veil that makes everything different—Lomax even says that
he thinks he would go mad without the spectacles, and cannot bear to take them
off, even when he has returned to England. Don Quixote imbibed his world view
from literature, and then was himself turned into a piece of writing, as he and
Sancho Panza became characters in a text whose author they meet on the road.
Nothing quite so metaphysical happens to Lomax, but his story encapsulates a
kind of encounter that is earth-shaking. This is not just an accident of sunglasses,
but that it is precisely because he has to shield his eyes from the hot colonial sun,
as it were, that he is given this vision, a vision that, on the one hand, turns him
into a person others think is mad, bad, and dangerous to know (famously said
about Oscar Wilde) and that, on the other, gives him the “half-dozen pictures” he
wants to remember out of the seventy or eighty pages or years of life most people
570 Regendering Modernism

have. His changed vision is the product of the colonial eyestrain, or the sun that
only mad dogs and Englishmen go out to confront. Once you think of it that way,
everything in the story is hooked to that inexorable logic, because there are inti-
mations everywhere of what it is like to go elsewhere, to see other things, under
the auspices or the regime of the imperial flag—even when the people are not in
the slightest degree aware of it. For example, Arthur Lomax is as distant from
Frantz Fanon, the theorist of colonial revolution, as it is possible to be—he hasn’t
broken through to any glimpses about empire or its problems at all. He accepts the
status quo unquestioningly. What has happened, though, is that under the ur-
gency of taking in these other sights and places he has been thrown out of the life
course, the almost zombie life course, of his previous existence, and is set in a shat-
tered world where anything can happen. Under the spectacles, Lomax is utterly
without ego—it is egoism that, Mr. Bellamy tells him, he himself suffers from, and
one can also see that Miss Whitaker partakes of this as well.
All these British people are in need of the tropics or of exotic locations in some
way: Miss Whitaker must use them to invent a lover who has romantically taken ad-
vantage of her, to escape from the desolation of her bed-sitting room and her lack
of friends and prospects. Bellamy is a Nietzschean figure who is so colossally bored
he steers the yacht into a deadly storm off the Mediterranean coast, and sets up
Lomax to kill him when, in fact, there is nothing the matter with him at all. This
egotism is important to the Bloomsbury connection, because one of the key touch-
stones for the Bloomsberries, as they were called, was G. E. Moore’s ethical philos-
ophy, which posited a detached, secular ethics that involved an understanding of
the self’s position in relation to the social. This story works out some of that—in a
completely non-philosophical way, to consider how it is that Lomax could stand on
the other side of egotism altogether—he almost has no personality at all.
When Lomax gets his glasses he sees Miss Whitaker, for example, as having
tears like Ethiopian jewels, whereas we know she is quite ordinary and plain; when
he stands on the deck in the storm off the Illyrian coast he wears his amber ones,
and the world is bathed in the mists of Elizabethan conquests and the glamour of
gold—like the opening evocation of Heart of Darkness. One of the most salient
scenes in the novella, and a scene to discuss with students, is set in Artivale the sci-
entist’s Parisian workshop; he studies butterflies, and has turned his basement into
a simulacrum of the tropics, with butterflies and their larvae disporting about. He
talks to Lomax about Bellamy and the fortune, and then Artivale—whose name
seems to refer to “art” and “truth” or its “veil” at once—demonstrates his most cru-
cial link to the unquestioned assumptions of empire, class, race and gender. This
basement tropical zone contains black female workers, “imported,” so the text says,
and the echo of slavery and empire is there, several black women to serve him,
since only they can stand the heat of this work in the warmth needed to preserve
the butterflies. As blue butterflies circle about their heads Lomax tells Artivale that
he will give his fortune to him to use for “the good of humanity,” another ab-
straction that Artivale and we the reader must question, especially given the ways
that the two men think nothing of exploiting black women, who are as invisible to
them as they can be. Of course the text contains another irony, in that the money
 Regendering Modernism 571

supposedly left to further scientific progress will be taken away by some old maiden
aunts who will use it to advance the civilizing missionary work of British empire.
Lomax’s attempt to divert the money to another cause—the science of blue butter-
flies— has fallen back to perpetuating empire. What is so ironic is that Artivale’s
laboratory in Paris is empire writ small—science masquerading as impartial, but de-
pending on the labors of “others”—black, female, subservient—to accomplish. Note
for students how the word “civilized” constantly appears in the early sections of the
text, and show them how it accumulates irony. The company of British strangers
keeps together only because they see each other as examples of the “civilized”
world. In their inevitable brush with what lies outside themselves everything is,
through Lomax, unveiled.
Miss Whitaker speaks of Lord Carnavon, the real-life discoverer of
Tutankamen’s tomb: “He would be alive today if he had not interfered with the
tomb.” This tossed-off reference to one of the great archaeologists and accompa-
niers of empire has fateful echoes, since Lomax will be hanged, and it is in his trial
that Bellamy’s tomb is interfered with. But how is Lomax like Lord Carnavon? He
doesn’t even find the antiquities of Egypt exciting—he hates the Sphinx, for exam-
ple, but the installation of the sphinx in the text is deliberate and important. The
Sphinx is traditionally given female gender, and women’s wisdom is referred to cul-
turally as mysterious, or “sphinx-like.” Vita Sackville-West quietly disputes this, and
shows how for English people so culturally blinkered, that oracular icon can no
longer give off knowledge in a world that has been eviscerated by tourism, by the
empire, by these differences and displacements. These colonial places are now en-
tirely like tombs. Lomax and the others stay with their own kind, go with the
tourists to the hotels and so on, but they don’t have a life that isn’t made up out
of these encounters with sameness. Miss Whitaker is a debased version of the
sphinx herself, with her silence and her riddles about pregnancies and brothers
and friends that don’t exist.
It is a high point of the text when, as a result of the trial, she is submitted to
an examination and is found to be virgo intacta. Her body and also Bellamy’s
corpse and then Lomax’s body are subjected to the Law, to the surveillance of the
rules that don’t take into account the tropical world that glimmers behind the
glasses. Her virginity is the final disproof of marriage, used by the court to demon-
strate, ironically, the final proof of Lomax’s guilt. The fortune that Bellamy wills
to him had been made through colonial speculations; it is thus in a manner of
speaking like the tomb that Carnavon entered. The fortune was tainted with em-
pire, and Miss Whitaker’s virgin body was “unconquered” by a male seducer, hid-
ing in Ecuador or anywhere else. She told a lie that paradoxically revealed the truth
underneath British law and propriety—better to be a seduced and “fallen” woman
than a person who dares to put on “queer spectacles” and see the world in new
ways. When Artivale tries on Lomax’s spectacles, he doesn’t like them, but says “By
Jove, what a queer world! Every value altered!” He means that things look strange
or queer with the spectacles on, and that their color alters the color “values” one
ordinarily sees. Vita Sackville-West’s wonderful story, however, contains a hidden
meaning for this line. The “queer world” opened up is just the world as other eyes
572 Regendering Modernism

see it, a world whose values and meanings are diametrically opposed to the confi-
dent propriety of those who refuse to at least try to see things from another per-
spective. Nietzsche made a famous claim about philosophy and its search for
truth—“truth is a woman!” he declared, meaning that philosophy was largely an at-
tempt in words to see beyond the “veil” of female mystery, to conquer and control,
to dictate values and propose absolute knowledge. There is none of that masculine
truth, that singular white Civilization available in Seducers in Ecuador. Things break
down, go queer, turn blue or amber or misty mauve. The female writer Vita
Sackville-West casts a cold eye on British “truth” and offers up a new world
through the lenses of her powerful and mordantly funny tale.

E. M. Forster
The Life to Come
E. M. Forster’s literary writing has the same fidelity to subjective experience and
the dawning of awareness. While Forster did not make the same experimental
leaps in style that Woolf did, in order to convey the momentariness of con-
sciousness and the elasticity of time, he nonetheless took “standard” Victorian
plot lines and stretched them beyond recognition. In his novels the British social
classes do not stay in their places, but converge and conflict, breaking ranks for
love or sex or politics’ sake. His many female protagonists are not content with
marriage proposals or childbirth; he daringly makes one female main character an
intellectual and—gasp—a German; he traces the erotic bonds of men across class
lines; he takes his characters to places like Italy or India where their British pro-
priety and timidity about life is subjected to rude shocks, which produce painful
growth and even glimpses of happiness. Forster was like his fellow Bloomsburyites
in being strongly critical of British empire and imperialism in general, and Forster
didn’t just speak this, he lived it. Venturing to Alexandria, Egypt as a Red Cross
worker during World War I, and later on his many extended professional trips to
India, he saw firsthand the execrable toll of imperialism, on those it dominated
and on the dominating culture itself. The hypocrisy of the British Empire main-
tained that its mission in the colonies was a beneficent one—noble, just, kind, and
imbued with the British sense of “fair play.” Forster’s writing, whether literary or
critical, sniffed out these hypocrisies at home and abroad and challenged them.
Like Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas, he judged that the hierarchy that elevated
the British above their supposedly inferior subjects in the empire was the same
one that denied rights to women, proscribed homosexuality, and kept the under-
class in its place at home in Britain. His writing on India, then, with its sparkling,
deft prose, joins his magical literary work in mounting a subtle but general cri-
tique of the social forces that have erected a false god: the white, male, upper-
class, heterosexual, rugby-playing, cigar-smoking Briton as the supreme peak of
humankind. Sir William Churchill brought the stereotype to life, yet transcended
it in his command of the victorious World War II forces. Afterward, Britain re-
pudiated Churchill despite the victory, voting in a Labour government. E. M.
Forster’s lifework predicted the transition in values, as Britain as a whole became
just that much closer to Bloomsbury’s ideal.
 Regendering Modernism 573

“The Life to Come” should make it clear to students that gender relations and
their transformation also includes gender and sexuality, and the rupture of nega-
tive views of homosexuality. Forster died just as the Gay Liberation movement
began, but his literary work throughout the century was an enormous intellectual
and artistic contribution to a revisionary understanding of men, women, hetero-
sexuality and homosexuality. Forster’s story was among many of his explicit works
that could not receive publication earlier in his life, when despite the sexual revo-
lutions apparent in Joyce, Lawrence, and many other writers, overt homosexuality
remained coded and secret, in part no doubt because the laws that sent Oscar
Wilde to prison simply for “being” gay were still on the books.
The story explores its subject with quiet irony—that is, it argues indirectly that
hatred of homosexual desire stems from the same hatred of Otherness that lies
behind colonial racism, because it too operates out of a fear of finding the loathed
quality of Otherness in oneself. Students may not get the tone at first reading,
since the story is filtered through the self-deluding perspective of the missionary
preacher who comes to this colonial outpost to convert the natives to
Christianity, but finds himself struggling to control his own truest desires. The
Reverend Paul is a naïve young man who does not at first see how much the
Christian missionary project he pursues is linked to imperial control of the native
population and their valuable land. In reality, the religious conversions he is di-
rected to get for the British church are paving the way for British political control
and economic penetration. The story exposes the ugly underside of what many
supporters of empire liked to call its “civilizing mission.” The mission to “civilize”
is bogus both because the native culture and religion are perfectly civilized al-
ready, without white, British interference, and also because the church mission-
aries are just the thin edge of the wedge of colonial takeover. Read this story with
Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s account of his boyhood missionary education, for example.
To imagine that one is civilizing people requires a racist notion that they are in-
ferior savages; the story shows that this is the basis of the missionary intervention,
but it backfires on the Reverend.
The Reverend never has enough enlightenment or self-awareness to admit to
his own racism. Confident that the native chief Vithabi is inferior to him in every
way, he is nonetheless instantly sexually drawn to him, and they become lovers
without the Reverend ever naming their actions to himself. It is important to stress
that what is morally flawed in the story is NOT the homosexual activity and in-
deed love between the missionary and the native chief, but instead the inability of
the Reverend to acknowledge this love and the equality of his lover. Instead, he re-
treats from him in fear and self-loathing, and casts all his self-hatred into redou-
bled energy to convert these heathen inferiors. To admit that he is a gay man with
desires for the chief would be to have the whole precarious construct of male su-
periority, colonial conquest, racism and sexism collapse.
The amazing ending or climax of the story is also an allegory of self-deception.
The Reverend has settled for his closeted, self-hating life of missionary activity that
largely serves to make the native community pliant and childlike. When Vithabi is
dying, his fears recede a bit and he goes to try to get this man, his own former lover,
574 Regendering Modernism

to deny their past. This Vithabi will not do—in fact, in his religious universe, he
wishes to free the Reverend from his bonds and to allow the two of them to unite
after death in a return to the love they once shared. The Reverend finds himself
in a last moment of shock and, one hopes, self-realization, the object of a “sacri-
fice”—but not a sacrifice on the altar of savage violence. The blade that comes
down to kill him where he lies is a repetition of the sexual act that once promised
to free the Reverend to see things differently—native peoples, his nation and
church colluding in empire, and above all, himself. He didn’t then, and lived a life
of repressed conformity and actual destruction of the native culture. There is,
then, an ironic kind of poetic justice in his death at Vithabi’s hands, a poetic jus-
tice for what he has done to them but also to himself. “The Life to Come” plays
on both senses of this phrase: in Christian terms, the “life to come” is heaven, and
it is thought to be more important than life on earth, which is just its prelude. The
life to come is equally important in Vithabi’s theology, but it is a life that honors
the genuine love expressed on earth. Finally, Forster’s title, with its echoes of both
sexual climax and religious resurrection, makes a political point, too. In the life to
come on earth, perhaps there will not be such waste of love, solidarity, and com-
munity as has happened in the homophobic, racist and imperial society con-
structed so unwittingly by the poor Reverend Paul.

Rebecca West
Indissoluble Matrimony
Since the plot of Indissoluble Matrimony is set in motion by marital tensions caused
by the women’s suffrage movement, West’s story can be taught fruitfully in con-
junction with Virginia Woolf’s famous text on women’s rights, A Room of One’s
Own, as well as Emily Pankhurst’s Address, included as a Companion Reading.
West’s story also raises many of the same issues as does Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway; on
the other hand, while many of the interpersonal tensions are similar to those
raised in D. H. Lawrence’s stories like The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter, students will
quickly see that these two authors have very different sympathies and loyalties in
the battle of the sexes. The revulsion that George Silverton betrays for his wife’s
self-confident sexuality, for instance, is held up by West for ridicule; Lawrence’s
men feel this same revulsion, but we’re invited to share, rather than criticize, it.

Katherine Mansfield
Daughters of the Late Colonel
One productive way of reading Mansfield’s story is to contextualize it with
Nietzsche’s 1882 declaration, “God is dead.” Daughter of the Late Colonel functions
at least in part as an allegory: the daughters, like all twentieth-century citizens, find
their “father,” the “colonel”—the one from whom they had been used to taking or-
ders, the one who imposed rules and a structure that made life meaningful and re-
warding—suddenly dead. The story can thus be read as a parable of the loss of cer-
tainty, the loss of a “center” that Yeats laments in The Second Coming, that has
seemed to many of the century’s most prescient writers to characterize our age. The
story is also reminiscent in its atmosphere of Henry James’s haunting The Beast in
 Regendering Modernism 575

the Jungle, as well as looking forward to Samuel Beckett’s landmark drama of inac-
tivity, Waiting for Godot (1953).

Jean Rhys
Mannequin
Jean Rhys is a fascinating writer in twentieth century British literature, in part be-
cause well before the “wave” of commonwealth reintegration she emigrated to
England from her Caribbean birthplace. While Rhys was nominally “white,” her
life in the Caribbean marked her forever as a Creole in British eyes, an outsider
who was suspicious as an Anglo-Caribbean with perhaps black blood in her fam-
ily’s past, as a woman who had an outspoken cultural affinity (explored wonder-
fully in her novels) with all things Caribbean, from the people to the landscape,
and certainly as a woman making her own way in the world. Like the characters in
her story, Rhys came to England with no money and no education, and worked as
a model, a dancer, an “escort,” a typist and so on, all while she avidly wrote the sto-
ries and novels that only in her old age were seen as the vital contributions to lit-
erature and women’s writing they are.
Jean Rhys is most famous for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea, a book that rewrites
Jane Eyre from the point of view not of Jane Eyre, shy governess, but of Bertha
Mason, the Creole first wife of Rochester, the one who goes mad when taken back
to England and who haunts the estate and finally burns down Rochester’s English
country house. For Charlotte Bronte this madwoman in the attic was simply that,
a threat from outside, from the wild Sargasso Sea, a possibly black “savage” woman
who keeps Rochester from all that is white, English, and good (namely, Jane her-
self). Rhys shifted the lens, an act that is characteristic of every writer in this
Perspectives section. She demanded that new angles of vision, new sorts of narra-
tives, and points of view once despised as Other for their gender, class or race
come into literary voice.
“Mannequin” has the sour, understated quality of all Jean Rhys’s prose.
Students should be made aware that even its subject matter was considered outra-
geously risqué at its time—these are girls and women who are working, making
money, and under their own control. That they are constantly subjected to male
exploitation and violence is made evident, but that they have to live and do what
it takes, despite so-called “morality,” is paramount.
Mannequin is of course the French word for model, and Jean Rhys’s story has
a wonderful continental flavor. She shows that women on their own financially
could hardly get adequate jobs in sexist England; there is consequently much cir-
culating back and forth from France to England to the rest of Europe on the part
of these restless girls. Happy endings—the typical fictions of marrying a rich man
or finding true love—are shown up in Rhys’s daring prose for what they are—fic-
tions. She speaks through the voice of her heroine, Anna, who is as lost and des-
perate and strong as the other girls. The kind of social morality that would label
her a “loose woman,” a “slut” or prostitute, because she is a woman on her own,
is exactly the logic Pygmalion puts on display and explodes. It is also clear that hav-
ing sex for money is something these models have to do—and it differs only in de-
576 Regendering Modernism

gree from traditional marriage. “Mannequin” is a much quieter piece of work, but
it too probes the gender inequality that makes the female point of view almost in-
visible culturally and literarily, too. Anna is struggling for a “room of her own,”
barely managing, and yet her desires, ideas, and inadequacies are never idealized
or sentimentalized. That is perhaps the break-through of Jean Rhys’s fiction: it re-
fuses to sentimentalize women or men. The emphasis on clothes, costume, and
self-fashioning we have seen from Shaw to Woolf to Churchill suffuses this story
about fashion models, clothes, style, and gender. Models are “objectified” by the
fashion industry and by male approval, yet modeling also permits Anna and the
others to change their identities, and to have whatever freedom and creativity they
can grab onto. A mannequin is in some senses a silent, effaced statue, something
like the statue Galatea, who nonetheless came to life. There’s no magical
Pygmalion or Henry Higgins figure for most women, the story adds. Anna’s life is
both frozen and objectified by her mannequin staus, a wax doll, and yet her non-
idealized woman’s voice is also on display in Jean Rhys’s subtle and bitter story.

Angela Carter
Angela Carter was a contemporary of the playwright Caryl Churchill, although
Carter died in her early fifties and thus had her writing life cut short. She ends the
Perspectives section because her fiction so wonderfully pursues the regendering
theme; while Carter wrote in a postmodernist period, from the late 1960s until the
1990s, she was a self-declared feminist writer, exploring the gender divide and di-
recting her work to its erasure. She self-consciously followed in Virgina Woolf’s lit-
erary footsteps, not by writing like Woolf, but by placing gender questions at the
heart of her work. Her story “The Heart of the Forest” is just such an excursion.
Angela Carter’s mode of writing descended through Gothic foremothers—
there is a large strain of Gothic plots and non-realist characters flowing in her sto-
ries especially. The Gothic has been known to be related to women from its in-
ception, not only because many of the first Gothic novelists were women, but
because the Gothic is pervaded with questions of the family and women’s place in
it, with reproduction, incest, and death. Carter’s other main literary source came
from fairy tales. She saw these tales as incredibly powerful in creating social scripts
that people clung to subconsciously—Little Red Riding Hood, for example, may be
dismissed as “merely” a fairy tale, but it is repeated so widely throughout the cul-
ture that rare is the woman who doesn’t hear the refrain “beware the big bad wolf”
when she sets out on independent adventures. Carter wanted to deconstruct fairy
tales and generate new ones with a gender twist. Her fairy tales were so vivid that
many were adapted for the screen; “The Company of Wolves” is the film made
from her re-telling of “Little Red Riding Hood.”
“The Heart of the Forest,” then, is not a realist or naturalistic story, but an al-
legory and a fairy tale, another way, as morbid and sexy as Carter’s work often was,
to tell the story of origins. The forest is in some ways the Garden of Eden, for
whose loss Eve’s supposed curiosity and “weakness” has been made culturally re-
sponsible. Carter is having none of that. She makes her characters, the sister and
brother pair, both versions of a fairy-tale like Hansel and Gretel, going into a men-
 D. H. Lawrence 577

acing forest, and Adam and Eve. In the blender of her mordant, audacious wit, she
seeks new patterns that are not gendered in old ways, to account for knowledge
and power. Another influence on the story is Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute; trans-
formation and enchantment are also possibilities in this gender fable.
The story is a fable, a parable, and an allegory all at once. It compresses many
of the narratives of knowledge or truth that have been told in literature and folk-
lore for thousands of years. Carter brings in philosophers of the Enlightenment,
for example, not by name but by allusion, as in calling her male character Emile.
Emile was the title of a work by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an exploration of educa-
tion. In it, Rousseau claims that only men need education, and that the best edu-
cation starts in early childhood with exposure to nature. Carter pokes holes in this
paradigm—“nature” is rarely pure or even untouched by culture, and in fact Emile
is learning what men have been taught for aeons. Carter’s twist on the tale is to
give the “fruit of the tree of knowledge” an incest motif. The story is not meant to
be a shocking “real” description of brother/sister incest—it’s an allegory of arriving
at knowledge shared between men and women, where women are not the culprits.
Take all the details of the story and consider them not as realist details, but as part
of a fable that seeks to retell the education into truth. For Angela Carter, in the
past “truth” has come at too high a price—whether by eliminating women alto-
gether, blaming them, or ruining their adventures. Her incestuous pair go to the
heart of the family and propose an androgynous solution to the mystery of what
lies at the heart of the forest. Along the way, the power over nature and suppos-
edly inferior beings, whether these are women or animals or native Others, is ques-
tioned. The mysterious ending leaves the allegory open—does there exist a way to
tell the story anew? Can truth and knowledge be recognized in a egalitarian way?
Carter’s tale becomes an almost religious parable by its close—beckoning us into a
forest we would rather avoid.

D . H . L a w re n c e
D. H. Lawrence’s writing can still shock. The flavor of scandalous modernity sur-
rounding his work makes him both an easy sell and a hard sell to students. Some
may batten on the “bad boy” image his writing conveys, with its whiffs of class rage
and its glamorous foreign settings; others may be incensed by his sexual and cul-
tural politics, or at least by what may appear to be their flagrant political incor-
rectness. In either event it should be possible to prompt lively discussions on
Lawrence’s artistic methods, on his pivotal role in modernism, and on the lasting
shock waves of his uncompromising art. There isn’t a tame version of D. H.
Lawrence to be had; his new readers need to be prepared for its invigorating out-
rage as much as its aesthetic power.
The Anthology includes all four facets of Lawrentian modernism: his poetry, his
“travel writing,” his fiction, the latter in the form of two short stories, “The Horse
Dealer’s Daughter” and “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” and a snippet (in Surgery for
the Novel—Or a Bomb) of his considerable and important critical writing. Even in
578 D. H. Lawrence

his criticism Lawrence’s voice is wild and untamed: works like his Studies in Classic
American Literature or Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays might sound dry and
scholarly, but are in fact as outrageous and idiosyncratic as Lawrence’s fiction. Of
the latter Lawrence wrote in a letter in 1914, just as he was starting the book: “Out
of sheer rage I’ve begun my book on Thomas Hardy. It will be about anything but
Thomas Hardy I am afraid—queer stuff—but not bad.” “Sheer rage” was the motive
for much of Lawrence’s writing on every subject, as was his propensity to make his
subjects “anything but” what they nominally appeared to be.
“I don’t like little islands,” Lawrence once wrote with typical spleen. He wasn’t
referring to England in that comment, but might as well have been, since the rel-
atively small island of Great Britain was incapable of holding him. Among the
modernists collected in the Anthology Lawrence is the sole world traveler: Joyce and
Beckett lived in self-imposed exile in Europe, Auden took American citizenship,
T. S. Eliot took British citizenship, but no one else traveled the globe as if they had
been shot cannonball-fashion right out of their native land. Lawrence didn’t live
in England, but he didn’t live anywhere else either, or not for long. His restlessness
and peripatetic writing practice is important to stress to your students, if only so
that they can identify with his search for places to become himself. Surely they will
have sympathy with what Lawrence stated was his desire “only to be.” The pil-
grimages so many Westerners now make to Nepal or the Ganges, for example, the
treks to Macchu Picchu or Tibet, the interest in Eastern religions and in spirtitual
guides like Carlos Castaneda, have a serious counterpart in Lawrence’s searching
art. Lawrence was modernism’s rolling stone: his special places were Italy, specifi-
cally Sicily and Sardinia (he was called by the Italian name Lorenzo), Greece,
Australia, Mexico, New Mexico, and a host of other ports of call. He wrote: “One
can no longer say: I’m a stranger everywhere, only ‘everywhere I’m at home.’” To
emphasize the rootlessness of much of Lawrence’s life underscores something spe-
cial about his literary art—it moves rapidly and even dangerously across the land-
scape of English literature. The first sentence of Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia is
“Comes over one an absolute desire to move.” The subject of Lawrence’s writing
is to trace the movements of desire wherever they may lead.
The center of his circle of wanderings was Eastwood, his birthplace, a grim
mining town in Nottingham, England. The pervasive ugliness of life there—ugli-
ness in a spiritual sense as well as in the physical surroundings of poverty and grim,
grueling labor—injected Lawrence with his life-long rage, as it did with his under-
standing of beauty. People condemned to such lives as his parents and relatives
hungered for beauty, even when they couldn’t afford it or didn’t understand it.
The unplayed piano sitting in many working-class parlors was a mute symbol of
this longing, a longing which had brought Lawrence’s own art into being. “What
was the piano but a blind reaching out for beauty?” he asked. The point of this ref-
erence makes clear that beauty and art were not, for Lawrence, simply the luxuri-
ous icing on the cake of life: they were part of a life and death struggle in which
art and beauty were life; a struggle most people, through no fault of their own, were
going to lose. Lawrence’s anger makes more sense when it is seen as the flash point
of creation.
 D. H. Lawrence 579

The first poem included in the Anthology is The Piano, and when read in light of
Lawrence’s comments on his home life, the picture of a small boy positioned be-
neath the piano is far more than an endearing childhood memory. The poem
speaks of “the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside,” and of “the
hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.” If students imagine a pam-
pered middle or upper class parlor where a family is gathering, they need to think
again. Only on Sunday is there time for the piano, since every other day is a work-
ing day; on Sundays the only music permitted is hymns. The power of those hymns
played on the parlor piano by “the mother who smiles as she sings” is not merely
religious. The intensity of the poem rests on how special and rare the music was in
the life of its narrator and his family; the instrument of the music, that is, the piano
itself, provides a refuge from the everyday that is also highly charged with desire: the
small boy hidden underneath it is in intimate contact with his mother as he presses
her “small, poised feet” on the pedals. The rich delight of their intimacy melds with
the infusion of music and song: mother and son share a moment out of time—out
of the daily grind of time, that is—transfigured by the homely art of her music-mak-
ing. The poem refers to “the glamour of childish days is upon me” not because, as
students may think, those childhood surroundings were glamorous or wealthy.
“Glamour” means the power of fairies to cast a spell; in other words, the potent
memory of those days casts its spell of reverie over the narrator, who is locked in
the enchantment of memory, impervious to the singer who has now “burst into
clamour with the great black piano appassionato.” The rhyming of “clamour” and
“glamour” is inspired—literally. Clamourous, loud music is transmuted into the
spirit of past days as if by fairy magic. The “flood of remembrance” he experiences
is as passionate, if not infinitely more so, than the musical marking of the unheard,
if clamorous, score being sung in the present. The sensual and even ejaculatory
“flood” of memories casts down the narrator’s “manhood” in several senses—he no
longer is conscious of his present age and maturity, since the past of his boyhood
has him in its spell; his adult sexuality is overmastered by the pull of the past, so
that he is not aroused by the passionate singer but wholly present in a memory of
his mother’s warmth and closeness. The closing line continues the ambiguity: “I
weep like a child for the past” suggests that, like a child unashamed of its tears, he
weeps for what is now gone, but also that he weeps as a child does for what is past
in its short life. The confusion is intentional—the poem suggests that we can’t sort
out the present from the past, nor resist the past’s “glamour.”
Thomas Hardy’s poetry is the best comparison to Lawrence’s in general, not
only because Lawrence considered Hardy his master in both poetry and prose, but
also because the differences between these two past-worshipping, memory-obsessed
poets is so striking. Hardy’s poetry doesn’t dissolve the thin membrane between pre-
sent and past. For Lawrence, it is porous, because the man of the poem is really no
more than the exalted child under the piano, forever banished now from his
mother’s skirts and the pure sway of her music, weeping for the comfort and whole-
ness he has lost. Hardy like Lawrence was a self-educated artist; Hardy like Lawrence
was “rescued” by his mother when she recognized his intelligence and got him
placed in school, instead of sent out at an early age to labor. Both owed their liter-
580 D. H. Lawrence

ary art to the prescience of their mothers and to the maternal bond; only Lawrence
is willing to so explicitly sexualize that all-important tie to the mother. His poem
moves into a past where a socially deprived mother and son create a self-sufficient
world unto themselves in and through a piano, a symbol of both art and desire. The
piano (as an extension of the mother’s music) both “mans” and “unmans” the nar-
rator simultaneously. Formal similarities are just as important between these two
poets. Show students how much Lawrence accomplishes within the four-line stanza
format; spend time looking at the rhymes he makes out of the homely vocabulary
of simple language. This poem and Lawrence’s others have the same fidelity to form
and to rhyme that Hardy’s perhaps grander poems do; Lawrence is willing to em-
phasize the singing voice in his poetry, as was Hardy, but less willing than Hardy to
bring abstractions and complex references into the poems. What he does include
in the “insidious mastery of song” that “betrays him back” is direct reference to de-
sire, to sexuality, and to rage. For example, the title of the poem Tortoise Shout refers
mind-bogglingly to the male tortoise’s cry of orgasm. The “tortoise in extremis” is a
symbol of the power of sex to “crucify” us: the round wholeness of a tortoise shell
deceptively hides its reliance on another being—a female tortoise—for completion
and wholeness. Yet the moment of completion and union is far from serene or ful-
filling—the tortoise’s cry at their moment of consummation is reminiscent of
Christ’s agony on the cross, because it manifests the terror of separateness at the
heart of our being. Lawrence boldly juxtaposes the natural world (turtles) with tran-
scendent myth (Christ on the cross) to hint at the human state. No more than tor-
toises are humans able to be complete and whole in and of themselves. Sexuality is
necessary, but it is a form of “crucifixion,” in that humans are left hanging (the hor-
rible pun is inevitable) in their desire for one another. “Sex” is at the heart of the
mystery of human existence, in this poem as in Lawrence’s work as a whole, not be-
cause of any focus on the sexual act or on sexual pleasure for its own sake. Lawrence
deplored sexual hedonism—he wrote about his relationship to his wife Frieda that
“Fidelity to oneself means fidelity single and unchanging, to one other one.” No,
sex is metaphysical, going beyond the physical to the spirit: it “breaks us into voice.”
In other words, sexuality is at the core of our being, and giving voice to ourselves,
like the tortoise’s shout, is a painful yet triumphant shout. Sex is the empowering
ground of our being, but it is also always godforsaken—we can never be complete
within ourselves, and will always long and yearn for a completion by another that
never arrives. The darkness of this view returns in Snake, whose narrator confronts
an ominous snake come to drink at his water-trough. Debating internally whether
to kill the snake, yet drawn by its majesty—“he seemed like a king to me”—the nar-
rator clumsily throws a log at it, and the snake retreats, leaving the poem’s speaker
guilty of “a pettiness” he longs “to expiate.” The pettiness lies in his fear of the snake
and his need to get rid of it; the snake itself, like a “dark king of the underworld,”
is that part or principle of life we fail to honor and confront at the peril of our own
petty natures.
“Cypresses” is a good example of Lawrence’s “primitivism”—his romantic fasci-
nation with premodern peoples and cultures. In his essay “Indians and an
Englishman,” for instance, Lawrence writes: “I don’t want to live again the tribal
 D. H. Lawrence 581

mysteries my blood has lived long since. I don’t want to know as I have known, in
the tribal exclusiveness. But every drop of me trembles still alive to the old sound,
every thread in my body quivers to the frenzy of the old mystery. I know my de-
rivation. I was born of no virgin, of no Holy Ghost. Ah, no, these old men telling
the tribal tale were my fathers. I have a dark-faced, bronze-voiced father far back in
the resinous ages. My mother was no virgin. She lay in her hour with this dusky-
lipped tribe-father. And I have not forgotten him.” Cypresses are, among other
things, famous for their longevity; healthy trees can live as long as a thousand
years. Lawrence imaginatively stretches this life-span even further, and imagines
that the trees he views were looking on during various classical scenes, including
the suppression of the “primitive” Etruscans by the civilizing Romans. Lawrence’s
fascination with the primitive can be fruitfully compared to Conrad’s, as can his
belief that we “civilized” people have to some degree lost the ability to comprehend
the primitive, to decipher its secret language: “Is there a great secret? / Are our
words no good?”
Bavarian Gentians is perhaps a poem about following the snake, dangerous as it
might be, into that underground, the realm where art gets made. Lawrence
rewrites the myth of Persephone in this short poem. Persephone’s mandatory stay
underground with the lord of Death is usually thought to be the tragic part of her
narrative; the happy and fruitful part of the cycle occurs when she emerges each
spring into the light and into her mother’s arms. Lawrence suggests that creation,
like sex, partakes inevitably of the dark side. He proposes that the flowering
blooms of poetry—of literary art—owe as much to the workings of death and to
what is unseen or unconscious in our natures, as creative art does to the illumi-
nation of conscious awareness.
Lawrence’s “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” makes an interesting companion
piece to Katherine Mansfield’s “Daughters of the Late Colonel”; Lawrence and
Mansfield were friends, and both stories deal with the coping strategies of young
women who suddenly find themselves in radically altered family circumstances. If
Mabel’s strategy in this story is a desperate one, it is at least a strategy—something
the sisters in Mansfield’s story can’t seem to muster for the life of them. Then too,
the dramatic climax of the story, when Mabel is rescued from a rather banal
drowning by the young doctor Fergusson is just one of many memorable scenes in
Lawrence’s writing in which women, water, and sexuality are woven together in
provocative ways. For another, less happy incident, you may want to screen the
“Water-Party” scene from Ken Russell’s film adaptation of Women in Love—in which
a newly wed bride helplessly pulls her groom down while he’s trying to save her
from drowning. In both instances, a woman’s love—or is it lust?—is the undoing,
the “drowning,” of an innocent man.
“Odour of Chrysanthemums” is perhaps Lawrence’s best-known short story,
and is as well one of his most unsettling. One of Lawrence’s famous laws for read-
ers of fiction is “Trust the tale; don’t trust the teller.” But “Odour,” strangely
enough, is precisely the kind of story in which the “teller” (the story’s narrator) and
the “tale” (the plot-level events) are at loggerheads. For while the history of Walter
and Elizabeth suggests she’s more sinned against than sinning, by the end of the
582 D. H. Lawrence

story Lawrence has turned Walt into a sinless lamb of God without blemish—a very
obvious Christ figure. It will be useful to have students explore their shifting re-
sponses to Elizabeth as the storyline unfolds, and to think through the fictive meth-
ods by which Lawrence attempts to win us to Walt’s side in this battle of the sexes.

P. G . Wo d e h o u s e
Strychnine in the Soup
The exuberant dialogue and witty narration of this story recall the work of Oscar
Wilde; like Wilde’s plays, Strychnine in the Soup functions primarily as a light-hearted
social satire, and comically makes the point that in the modern world, it is the
thinkers (and artists) rather than the women and men of action, who have ascen-
dancy. Indeed, there is a kind of reverse Darwinism at work in the story’s plot: for
it is not the strong who survive and triumph, but instead our pipsqueak protago-
nist, who exploits Lady Bassett’s weakness for popular fiction to his own ends.

Gr a h a m Gre e n e
A Chance for Mr Lever
The theme of Greene’s A Chance for Mr Lever—or one of its themes—is again the
British imperial exploitation of remote areas of the globe; the story resembles
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in important ways. The story presents no unusual dif-
ficulties for students until its strange closing paragraph, which probably merits
some discussion; the irony of the story’s closing rivals the bitter cosmic irony of
some of Hardy’s best poems.

PERSPECTIVES

Wo r l d Wa r I I a n d t h e En d o f Em p i re
Sir Winston Churchill
Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat (May 13, 1940)
This first major speech of Churchill’s teaches us a great deal about what made him
such a powerful and charismatic leader during the darkest days of World War II. The
speech contains a number of features you may wish to discuss with your students.
Most prominent, perhaps, is the way he urges the serious nature of the engagement
to come: it is a “crisis,” promises to be “one of the greatest battles in history,” per-
haps “an ordeal of the most grievous kind.” In the face of this great challenge,
Churchill both counsels and exemplifies “buoyancy and hope.” The final paragraph
emphasizes especially the threat not just to the nation, but to the British Empire—an
entity which of course will survive the war only in part, and much weakened.
 World War II and the End of Empire 583

Reading a speech is rather like reading a play: while the most powerful oratory
remains powerful in transcription, it was created as a performance, and is most
fully appreciated in performance. We have included excerpts from this and an-
other great speech by Churchill on our audio CD.
Wars Are Not Won By Evacuations (June 4, 1940)
This speech provides an opportunity, if one be desired, to connect back to the ma-
terials in the perspectives section “The Great War: Confronting the Modern”; for
what Churchill is engaging in here is, in the very best sense of the word, propa-
ganda, discussed by T. E. Lawrence in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (and which will be
one of the objects of Orwell’s scrutiny in Politics and the English Language, below).
Students might be asked to compile a list of the terms and phrases used to describe
the German people, the German army, and Hitler; they are, not surprisingly,
highly-charged, emotionally evocative descriptions playing on longstanding stereo-
types of the Germans. The suggested power of language and of names is implied
even in the name of the newest British fighter plane, which Churchill proudly an-
nounces will be called the Defiant.
When it comes to recounting episodes of British valor in combat, Churchill
proves himself a masterful storyteller. The various engagements of the British
Expeditionary Force are told with an air of great suspense; and the fact that, in
Churchill’s telling, these stories all have a more or less happy ending helps to
reinforce the idea that Great Britain is God’s favored combatant (a notion that
language like “a miracle of deliverance” makes quite explicit). The quotation
from Tennyson calls our attention to the ways that Churchill employs British
literature and mythology in order to assert the nation’s preeminence in the cur-
rent conflict; in the manner of Tennyson in The Charge of the Light Brigade, per-
haps, or in some of Kipling’s nationalistic writing, Churchill combines re-
portage with legend, history with mythmaking. A keen student of history,
Churchill realized that history is made, not simply recorded, and must have rec-
ognized as well that his simple chronicles of the British military experience in
World War II will set the model for subsequent writing about the war.
Furthermore, while his immediate audience is the members of the House of
Commons, more importantly (through the press) Churchill is talking to,
reassuring and calming the fears of, the British people; and the down-home sto-
rytelling style that he adopts (“I will tell you about it”), reminiscent of FDR’s
fireside chats, is clearly better-suited to the populace than members of
Parliament. More importantly, perhaps, it is, because of Churchill’s unabashed
narrative bent and his gift for the memorable phrase, language that history
has remembered.
Part of what that powerful language was able to accomplish, of course, was the
kind of internal exile of “enemy aliens and suspicious characters of other nation-
alities” that Churchill advises toward the end of the address. American students
may better understand what is being proposed here (in a rather understated way)
by reference to the internment of Japanese-Americans in this country after the
bombing of Pearl Harbor, as well as (in his comments about “Fifth Column activ-
584 World War II and the End of Empire

ities” and a “malignancy in our midst”) an obvious similarity to the Communist

“witch hunts” of the 1950s led by Senator Joe McCarthy.

Stephen Spender
Icarus
The poem in some ways plays a trick on readers’ expectations; only when we arrive at
the final couplet do we realize that Icarus has been the vehicle, and not the tenor, of
the poem’s controlling metaphor, and the subject of the poem, who is compared to
Icarus, remains unnamed. It was a subject which also proved attractive to Auden,
whose later Musée des Beaux Arts (1938) approaches the myth rather differently, and
makes an interesting comparison. The American poet William Carlos Williams also
has an Icarus poem, which can be pulled in to make a triptych, and provoke a dis-
cussion on the role of the Icarus myth in modern poetry. One might argue, for in-
stance, that Icarus plays the part in the modern imagination that Prometheus played
for the Romantics; in this way, a link could be forged to both Shelley’s Prometheus
Unbound and Byron’s Prometheus, as well as more generally to the figure of the Byronic
hero. Indeed, if one is willing to make a stretch, Icarus in these poems becomes a type
of Lucifer, whose pride goeth before his fall; Stephen Dedalus makes this linkage ex-
plicit in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and a number of pertinent texts
are included in the “Frankenstein and Its Time” cluster. The Spender and Auden
poems, then, can be used as a kind of case study in the modernist mythical method.
What I Expected
The poem expresses quite effectively the disillusionment felt so poignantly by so
many during the years leading up to World War II. The poem can be opened up
for students by posing one simple question: what led the speaker to expect “thun-
der, lightning,” and all the rest? What is the paradigm, or ideology, that seems to
be coming apart in the face of the ’30s?
The Express, The Pylons
These two poems, together, suggest Spender’s complex and somewhat contradic-
tory attitude toward what might broadly be called “modernization.” In The Express,
the powerful train is an object of worship; she is mysterious, powerful—almost a
“great black god” in a world without god. The poem’s closing verse sentence goes
so far as to invert the Romantic valuation of nature over culture, arguing instead
that nature can never equal her beauty. In The Pylons, however, the ugly concrete
pillars used to suspend electrical or telephone lines throughout rural England are
“giant girls that have no secret”; they clearly represent the wave of the future, “so
tall with prophecy,” and yet they retain no mystery, and are anything but beautiful:
more like a scar on the natural beauty of the land.

Elizabeth Bowen
Mysterious Kôr
Mysterious Kôr is a mysterious story—mysterious in the sense that it acknowledges
that there is something ineffable, not accessible to logical analysis, at the core of
all human relationships. The foci of the story are two, and both are of historical,
 Evelyn Waugh 585

cultural, and literary interest: the position of two single, working women in
London during the war; and, more generally, the strange inversions and privations
of life during wartime. Pepita and Arthur—Pepita most especially—walk through
the moonlit, war-ravaged landscape of London like automatons, seemingly bereft
of their life scripts, and separated from their instinctual reactions and behaviors by
the new rules imposed by the war.
The story’s opening paragraphs quite graphically demonstrate the ways in
which wartime realities have usurped the natural rhythms of life: the moonlight of
the story’s opening sentence “drenche[s] the city and searche[s] it,” like an enor-
mous, infinitely bright searchlight; in the second paragraph, the clouds meta-
morphose into “opaque balloons”—seemingly the zeppelins introduced by the
Germans during World War I. And the military atmosphere takes over not just the
natural, but the human, environment; Pepita and Arthur, attempting to complete
a romantic stroll through the city as though nothing had changed since their
courtship began (before the war), suddenly “faced round to look back the way they
had come . . . as though a command from the street behind them had been re-
ceived by their synchronized bodies.”
The story does make use of the mythical method, after a fashion; the difference
is that the “myth” that Pepita, and Bowen, exploit is not an ancient one, but instead
part of the plot of H. Rider Haggard’s extremely popular adventure story She (1887).
Teachers may want to reproduce the short passages describing Kôr from the novel,
or perhaps show a short scene or two from the 1965 film She, starring Ursula
Andress. A couple of suggestions: the “shell shock” that Bowen witnessed first-hand
during World War I seems to become in this story a moral condition; even the
women who remain at home during World War II seem to be suffering from a kind
of shell shock (or Pepita, at least; Connie, by contrast, is an old-fashioned sort of
woman, who seemingly doesn’t let any of the spiritual malaise touch her). In what
ways might “going to Kôr” be like the psychological retreat that shell-shock victims
make? The story also demonstrates to some degree the ways in which the power re-
lations between the sexes have been changed by the wartime economy.

Eve l y n Wa u g h
Cruise
Two of the stories in this cluster of short fiction of the ’30s—those by Waugh and
Wodehouse, as well as the Monty Python sketch—are intended to remind students
of an aspect of British writing that is too often lost in scholarly anthologies: there’s
a lot of tremendously funny British writing. Indeed, many of the students in lower-
division literature courses, especially students with majors outside the humanities,
will have had as their first exposure to British literature the likes of Monty Python,
Benny Hill, Fawlty Towers, and other British comedies (not to mention the music
of the British Invasion and beyond).
Waugh’s Cruise is a wonderfully lighthearted satire on the self-satisfied stupid-
ity of some members of the privileged classes. Our postcard writer is a culture vul-
586 Evelyn Waugh

ture of the worst kind; she wanders from port to port taking in whatever Daddy’s
money is sufficient to buy, without letting anything that she sees change her: in-
deed, she seems primarily interested in a shipboard romance (as, in fairness, do the
rest of the members of her party). The story helps to suggest that the ugly Brit is
every bit as potent a stereotype as the ugly American.
It is also possible to do a darker reading of the story, however. The boorishness
of our correspondent and her family parallels, in important ways, the brutal in-
sensitivity of British imperialism as it lingers into the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s; the
cruise ship sails through the Suez Canal, a largely British project completed in
1854 and paid for by 120,000 Egyptians who died in forced labor while digging the
canal. In Waugh’s story, the British penchant for travel and travel writing merges
almost imperceptibly into the imperial quest for land; our postcard writer seems to
be master of all she surveys—and a wholly incompetent, and disengaged, master. In
her postcards, all the lands she visits are reduced to the stereotypes convenient to
hand: “This is a photograph of the Holyland and the famous sea of Gallillee.”
Indeed, all the foreign lands, and their peoples, are reduced precisely to postcards:
the leisure class’s equivalent of colonial possession.

C O M PA N I O N R E A D I N G
Monty Python: “Travel Agent”
The connection between the Waugh story and the Monty Python sketch should be
readily apparent; the tourist in the sketch wants to go on holiday not to learn
about places and people different from himself, but to have his prejudices con-
firmed, and to taste the comforts of home however far from home he might be;
Great Britain seems to have devolved from the empire on which the sun never sets
to a seemingly endless string of Watney’s Red Barrel franchises. Comic actor Eric
Idle puts in a virtuoso performance as the tourist, Mr. Smoke-Too-Much; it can be
heard on a few different Monty Python compilation recordings, and (even better)
seen on volume 3 of the Monty Python’s Flying Circus videotape collection
(Paramount Home Video 12545).

The Man Who Liked Dickens

The first connection to make with this story is its pretty explicit parallel to Heart
of Darkness. For while its setting is South America rather than Africa, “The Man
Who Liked Dickens” explores life in one of the unexplored areas of the world
map, a “white space,” in which the invading white man is king. In place of Kurtz
we find Mr. McMaster, whose name means, fittingly, “son of the master”; and the
story’s opening pages, when McMaster nurses Henty back to health, turn the nar-
rative of Heart of Darkness on its head. McMaster’s rather improbable Dickens li-
brary, in the heart of the primeval Brazilian forest, is an oasis of “civilization” in
the midst of “barbarism”—not unlike the hut of the accountant Marlow meets at
the middle station in Heart of Darkness. In this story McMaster, who believes in no
god, believes instead in Dickens: the narratives of Dickens’s novels become a vi-
 Evelyn Waugh 587

carious form of (quintessentially British) life in this alien environment. That

McMaster can treat Henty with such complete barbarity—as, apparently, he has
treated his previous “reader,” Barnabas Washington—ironically gives the lie to the
notion that reading the Great Books improves one’s moral character. In Apocalypse
Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s re-telling of Heart of Darkness, his Kurtz (Marlon
Brando) reads T. S. Eliot’s poetry while carrying out genocide; McMaster, in “The
Man Who Liked Dickens,” is likewise representative of the British imperial mind-
set, disguising his selfish designs behind a façade of British “culture.”
Evelyn Waugh’s first wife was named Evelyn; she also happened to be the daugh-
ter of Lord Carnarvon, the man who discovered King Tut’s tomb. Through this
close association and many others, such as his own journalistic jobs around the
world, Waugh was connected to the map of otherness I have contended is such an
integral part of modernism. Although Waugh upheld the traditional virtues, as he
saw them, of Western culture, he was always “ready to be startled” by the spectacle
of barbarism wherever he found it, and he spent much of his time going places in
order to glimpse that spectacle, looking for examples of man’s disregard of civilized
society. Believing barbarism was “ a dog to be stalked with a pinch of salt,” he “ went
to the wild lands where man had deserted his post and the jungle was creeping back
to its old strongholds.” It was in “distant and barbarous” places that his literary
sense came alive, “ at the borderlands of conflicting cultures and states of develop-
ment, where ideas, uprooted from their traditions, became oddly changed in trans-
plantation.” He stalked this division of savagery and civilization in Abyssinia, in
Kenya and in Brazil, as well as in England; he later felt he had found its epitome in
California, in Forest Lawn cemetery and the celluloid castle of Hollywood. “The
Man Who Liked Dickens” is set at that razor’s edge between savagery and civiliza-
tion, its modernism in dialogue with both Joyce and Woolf, and with its recreation
of Conrad, its own quite obvious undertaking of a journey to the heart of darkness.
Especially, I want to read the impulses that set this text on the track of the wilder-
ness, and to explore the satiric modernism which is at its heart.
In quite different ways, and at the risk of simplifying, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence
and Woolf are preoccupied with the excess of rationality or the deadness of intel-
lectuality which had left Western European culture without spontaneity, the will
drained. In each there is an attempt to suggest a route to immediate experience, to
a realm of sensation and depth that is figured as sexuality, or the unconscious of
writing, or the loosening of the bonds of rational thought and convention. In
Waugh’s work, the analysis is different— it is the inability to sustain a dialect be-
tween reason and will which has led to the stalemate of modern culture, the divi-
sion between mindless action and an enfeebled reflection tied to a nostalgia for
what is past. The gusto with which the “savage” comes to infiltrate Waugh’s work
is on the one hand a diagnosis of a problem in modern society and on the other
a leaning toward that which isn’t accomodated in his system.
Waugh referred to himself once as a “pure aesthete,” and despite his later de-
nunciations of modernist art his own quicksilver narratives are purely in the mod-
ernist vein, with their poised artificiality, their utterly withdrawn narrator, their
dizzying changes of scene, and, as in Lawrence, the absence of any “stable ego of
588 Evelyn Waugh

character.” Waugh’s text makes a flat canvas across which these figures are drawn,
taking up the glossy linguistic artificiality of Ronald Firbank, camp novelist extra-
ordinaire. While Waugh wants to avoid what he felt to be modernism’s perilous
Scylla and Charybdis of the overly abstract and the ludicrously mimetic, there is
never any return to traditional narrative style, to “realistic” characters, to narrato-
rial commentary. And the major influence on the technique of his story is with-
out doubt the cinema. His primary charge against modernist aesthetics, and in par-
ticular the work of Woolf and Joyce, was that it was overly subjective, and one can
see how ruthlessly the subjective is scooped out in favor of the energy of satire,
which can propose another underlying assessment of the matter at hand. Woolf
and Waugh begin writing from exacxtly the same premise: the nineteenth century
novel has died. Woolf’s response to this knowledge is to move inward, to what she
calls for in this passage: “Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary
day. The mind receives a myriad of impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or en-
graved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of
innumerable atoms . . .”
“For moderns, “ she also says, “ the point of interest lies very likely in the dark
places of psychology.” Their subject, one could say, was the self at the very mo-
ments where, by accident or by design, it eludes the conventions of society. The
mind has no access to objective truth, and what can be charted are the moments
of subjective longing, of desire transfigured in language. Waugh just as scrupu-
lously avoids the fiction of the “complete” or rounded personality of 19th century
fiction, and despises the 19th century novel for its sentimentality and the worn-out
furniture of realism. Waugh’s modernist technique is stripped away from an ide-
ology of modernism, and deployed for other purposes; it uses scattershot scenes, a
lack of realist detail and an absence of transitions, implausible characters who are
linguistic costumes more than anything else, to mount a diagnosis of the condi-
tions of modern life. An algebra of fiction, in Waugh’s words. One of the chief
concerns or problems for modernist writers was the lack of a belief that their world
was intelligible or coherent, that it could be written about. Woolf’s response to
this, for example, was to privilege the subjective moment of consciousness, not for
its coherence or for its ultimate truth, but as the evanescent register of conscious-
ness. Waugh avoids any register of consciousness; with a surreal narration, a coun-
terpointing of innumerable tiny scenes, paper-thin characters and the dissolving of
any claims of verisimilitude, Waugh pitilessly looks on at the world. Woolf had
urged, in a classic passage on the character Mrs Brown in the fiction of the
Victorian novelist Arnold Bennett that this fictional character should be released
from realist fiction by a smashing and crashing of the furniture of the novel; in
Waugh’s fiction the houses are falling left and right, among them Hetton in A
Handful of Dust. The fictional Mrs Brown also dissolves and fades into “the kalei-
doscope of dimly discerned faces” which made up, for Waugh, the truth of the
modernist age.
Tony is, in a sense, deserting his post, refusing to confront the savagery at the
heart of British life and instead vanishing into the outposts of another world, eager
to put the present behind him. “The seemingly-solid, patiently built, gorgeously or-
 Evelyn Waugh 589

namented structure of Western life was to melt overnight like an ice castle, leaving
only a puddle of mud.” The aimlessness and restless movement of the modern
world that made a concerted, heroic effort seem impossible was also, clearly, fa-
vored by an economic system that is run for the circulation and accumulation of
ever more commodities, goods and sensations, and the world of Waugh’s charac-
ters is an unceasing round of the dictates of such an economic system, with par-
ties and movies and redecorating and airplane rides and frenzied travel for the sake
of it. For those who want to resist this, it is imperative that they not pursue an ide-
alized and outmoded notion of Western culture, as Tony does; such an idealization
causes petrifaction, it removes the possibility of actually resisting conditions and
tends to turn these figures into completely disaffected and thus ineffectual wan-
derers. Without conviction, such characters can only be doomed, as is Tony, to the
assaults of modernity.
The story’s very construction is cinematic. Take in particular the use of mon-
tage—the sudden juxtaposition of utterly different scenes which is a primary tech-
nique of film, so that we can “go” from viewing one scene unfolding to seeing
something else that is happening elsewhere at an adjacent or the same time. In
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness the voyage is ironized by the words Marlow uses to re-
count it; the irony is provided by these sudden cross-cuttings which undermine the
stability of place or time and rocket the reader back and forth between these spaces
with the greatest alacrity. Scenes are spliced together with associational rather than
linear logic, and with radical editing as a trope of modern life. The discontinuity
and unreality of such life was virtually cinematic, for Waugh.
Film is ideally suited to the relativist, satirical sensibility, capable of suggesting
the shifting, fluid perspectives of a world without any fixed center and periphery,
actually or in ethical terms.
The relation of film to primitivism was also a direct one for Waugh; the text
shows that modern technocracy unwittingly promotes the reversion to a barbarous
sensibility, which for Waugh is characterized, quite unanthropologically, as an im-
mersion in the here and now incapable of perspective, distance and civilized
thought through time. Film fascinates at least in part because it seems to subvert
those very structures, and thus is also linked with a primitivism of sorts. Europe
can’t keep its pretense at civilization.
Waugh’s primitivism was unsound and ethnocentric, to be sure, but it is also
mythical, not a real assessment of other cultures, since what preoccupied Waugh
was the condition of the west, which he can’t, however, depict without invoking all
these other places, and putting them into counterpoint.
Waugh’s take on the question of subject and object can be compared to
Woolfs—in Woolf’s work, the two come ever closer and closer, so that the object is
penetrated by subjectivity and becomes an expression of it. Waugh holds these res-
olutely separate, and in fact uses his figurative language, the use of similes, to do
so—his similes, in contrast to Woolf’s, are classical ones, intended to keep com-
partments between subject and object, rather than figuratively blurring them
The riveting closing of “The Man who Liked Dickens” puts that juxtaposition
of the savage and shows that Tony’s fate is to be evicted from time. When last seen,
590 Evelyn Waugh

he has just awoken from two days of drugged sleep, having missed the search party
of Englishmen who have come looking for him by Mr. Todd’s clever ruse; his watch
is also gone, given to those same men as proof, along with the wooden cross, that
he has actually died. The search party returns to England where Tony is declared of-
ficially dead, and Tony becomes the permanent captive of Mr. Todd, who will keep
him to read and reread the works of Dickens to him endlessly. Tony is trapped in
one of the barbarous borderlands of the 20th century, between the menace of an il-
literate madman who has a sentimental attachment to Dickens. Mechanized speed
and the manipulation of goods for profit—this text is absorbed in these forces as
thoroughly as Woolf or Lawrence’s are. Last’s final fate is that of Western society—
the eye held hostage to the ear, a civilized man trapped because he can read, not by
primitive so-called savages, but by a barbarous man who is backed up by the tech-
nology of a gun. History is annulled, time and tradition swept away.
Tony has vanished into the far away, living the life of a Dickens novel.

George Orwell
Politics and the English Language
Like Inside the Whale, Orwell’s Politics essay is at its most effective as a critique of
what Orwell called “group think” in 1984: the ways that party-line thinking results
in foolish writing—which, in turn, reinforces foolish thinking. The argument
Orwell makes here—especially the stylistic foibles that he catalogs in the middle of
the essay—make up the backbone of Richard Lanham’s famous composition text-
book, Revising Prose; and it’s not difficult to see how Orwell’s prescriptions here
could be used as a sort of abbreviated Strunk and White.
An interesting exercise is to turn back a few pages and see how well Orwell’s
diagnosis of political language serves to describe the speeches of Winston
Churchill—or going back further, those of Perse, Parnell, and Collins. Students are
likely to conclude that the speeches anthologized here are memorable because they
largely avoid the solecisms Orwell outlines.
If the teacher is interested in suggesting the points where Orwell’s argument is
vulnerable, this can be done inductively by having students think for a minute
about the word “extramarital,” which Orwell singles out as one of his examples of
“pretentious diction.” What he has in mind, apparently, is that the good old-
fashioned English word “adulterous” will do just as well; if it was good enough for
Chaucer, it ought to be good enough for us. One might argue, though, that there
are good reasons for a new formation like “extramarital”: “adulterous” cannot help
but carry connotations of Biblical morality along with it, whereas a new formation
like “extramarital” is, at least for a time, free from such associations. In other
words: “adultery” is, literally, a sin; but an “extramarital” affair is simply one which
takes place outside the bounds of marriage—and its morality would be left up to
others to decide; it is surely a more objective, less evaluative term. Similarly, stu-
dents of literature who have spent a good portion of the term reading British po-
etry and prose of the early nineteen century may well want to argue that words like
“romantic,” “sentimental,” and “natural” have important philosophical meanings,
though Orwell writes them off as “meaningless words.”
 Dylan Thomas 591

Shooting an Elephant
Orwell’s brief essay is a classic exploration of the perverse logics of imperialism and
colonial domination—and, Orwell’s particular interest in this piece, the ways that
neither colonizer nor colonized is entirely free in this most unnatural of civil
arrangements. What is perhaps most remarkable is the complete honesty of the
writing: Orwell is willing to reveal his own racism (“sneering yellow faces”) and the
vanity which values saving face over the preservation of animal, and even human,
life (“I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right”).
Orwell is able to write with such disarming honesty about his role as an enforcer
of empire because he understands the situation structurally: he recognizes that he
is part of an evil system, and that his possible responses are tightly proscribed by
his circumstances. Orwell’s awareness—“I had already made up my mind that im-
perialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it
the better”—might be fruitfully compared with the attitude of Marlow in Heart of
Darkness, who also got a look at “the dirty work of Empire at close quarters.”

Salman Rushdie
Christopher Columbus. . . .
In “Christopher Columbus,” Salman Rushdie employs a fictional technique much
in evidence in postmodern writing: he reanimates the historical record with a far-
cical fictional imagination, and succeeds at the same time in exploring the power
struggles evident in the un-colonial enterprise of the Western imagination,
Columbus’s “discovery” of America. The story is comprised in part of the ques-
tion-and-answer pattern characteristic of the religious catechism; James Joyce, per-
haps the most important influence on Rushdie’s writing, was the first to bend the
catechism to fictional ends, in the penultimate chapter of Ulysses, the “Ithaca”
chapter. (One might also hear a faint echo of the famous ending of Joyce’s famous
novel—“yes I said yes I will Yes”—in the close of Rushdie’s story, in words spoken
by Columbus: “‘Yes,’ he tells the heralds. Yes. I’ll come.” Thus, in Rushdie’s twisted
version of imperial history, Columbus must “come” (as Molly Bloom may indeed
“come” at the end of Ulysses) before he can go; sexual consummation prefigures im-
perial consummation. Among other things, Rushdie’s story makes the point that
even the great knight of empire Columbus was a foreigner, an outsider, in
Isabella’s court.

Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas’s poetry usually appeals immediately to its first-time readers; its lyric
intensity and its musical rhythms galvanize even neophyte readers of poetry, while
the personal and yet universal issues Thomas’s poems raise are immediately recog-
nizable. His incantatory reading of Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, included
on our audio CD, provides a compelling introduction to his voice and verse. The
poetry meshes beautifully with other poets’ offerings in the twentieth-century sec-
592 Dylan Thomas

tion—Hardy, Yeats, and Boland in particular—while it is a superb complement to

readings in the Romantics, especially Keats and Wordsworth, and to Hopkins later
in the nineteenth century. The medieval and early modern Welsh poetry is ex-
tremely apposite, since Dylan Thomas was furthering a long tradition of Welsh
poetry, as well as fostering the English lyric poem, where John Donne and Andrew
Marvell are the best comparisons and companions for his work.
The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower is one Thomas poem that
can center a discussion radiating out into all the poetic forebears and styles
sketched above. The passionate “I” of its lyric speaks repeatedly of (his) “dumb-
ness” before the natural world’s force, a force which itself speaks through many
“mouths” of stream and wind and blood. Nature is personified, and yet imper-
sonal. The poem seems to refer directly to Wordsworth’s The Leech Gatherer in its
line “The lips of time leech to the fountain head,” where time too is a human
agent, a speaking subject or mouth with lips, lips that greedily try to adhere them-
selves to the fountain head at life’s source, just as the “I” of the poem does. At the
same time the line echoes the concerns with temporality found in Keats’s Ode on
a Grecian Urn and in Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress. While it rewrites the pastoral
genre in an almost violent vein—a post-Darwinian view of nature’s harshness in-
fuses the poem—there is an ecstatic element very akin to Hopkins’s divine land-
scapes, imbued with God’s animating power. Thomas Hardy’s verse forms seem to
cling to the lines “And I am dumb to tell the hanging man, How of my clay is made
the hangman’s lime,” and their aura of fatalism resembles Hardy’s poetic sensibil-
ity too. Yeats’ poetic presence can be glimpsed throughout the poem—which is not
to say that it is derivative of Yeats, or any of the other poets cited, but that it is, like
all poetry, a complicated hybrid of things that came before—in the majestic way a
whole world can be summoned up in the image of “the crooked rose,” in the bow
to the destructive side of an empowering nature, and in the cosmic implications of
humanity’s position: when the “I” looks up to the heavens at the end of the poem,
it is a speechless “I” in the face of time’s relentless pace, “how time has ticked a
heaven round the stars.”
If at all possible, the best way to teach the extraordinary radio play Return
Journey is to get a recording of it. Without hearing it in that form, one might for-
get that it uses modern technology to create a crucial part of its meaning. A radio
broadcast transmits disembodied voices, voices floating through time and space
without definite location. This piece is about a definite location—Swansea, Wales,
where the narrator is returning to find out if anyone remembers him in the town
he has left for good. He finds many who remember him, but none who recognize
him as the young man he inquires about, and in fact his last interlocutor tells him
with great authority that the boy is “dead.” Of course, the boy is dead, or at least
that version of his identity seems dead. The peculiarities of radio can convey the
sense of disappearance or death as no other medium could. Thomas’s formal bril-
liance in this work is reminiscent of the sui generis art form created by David Jones
in In Parenthesis, and the latter work would be terrific to read in conjunction with
it. Jones fuses poetry, narration, and drama in his memoir of World War I, and
many of the artistic issues of style, and the political issues of Welsh history, emerge
 Dylan Thomas 593

in Thomas as in Jones. Both writers need to find a style which can include ele-
ments from the great English literary tradition, while inflecting these with the dif-
ferent and in many ways oppositional artistic legacy of Wales. Welsh art was often
literally suppressed and censored over the centuries by the English, as were at-
tempts at Welsh independence, and by the twentieth century the Welsh language
was primarily relegated to cultural uses—songs, church music, poetry, and ballads.
Welsh identity was constructed, in English eyes, as fanciful, overly emotional, and
even magical—shading into the demonic. Welsh writers in English of the stature of
Jones and Thomas had to take into account the threatening power of Welsh lan-
guage for English speakers, who saw it as alien and transgressive, and had to reckon
with the still disturbing force of Welsh accents in English. Southern accents in the
United States, or what is called “Black English” dialect, are analogous in convey-
ing negative connotations or stereotypes to some American English speakers’ ears.
So the sound of the voices in Dylan Thomas’s Return Journey is all-important, and
cannot be fully captured on the page. National radio broadcasts, like national tele-
vision, demands that a standard English be spoken—we know this phenomenon in
the United States media as regional or ethnic dialects are suppressed in favor of
standard, “accentless” speech for news anchors or television hosts. Dylan Thomas’s
radio play is formally ingenious in linking its ghostly themes of self-forgetting and
death to the specificities of radio; Samuel Beckett, among others, would follow and
imitate his ingenuity. There is also a political aspect to the use of the radio
medium, however. The narrator in Return Journey cannot go back to Swansea and
inquire about the ghost of himself without encountering the Welsh “accents” that
BBC English forbids. The narrator has adopted a less regional form of speech, as
his life has taken him away from his community—he has lost his “accent,” and his
dialect as well. No wonder no one recognizes him—his voice patterns are as much
of a disguise as his age and his social status. Return Journey summons up the dialect
and accent of the narrator’s youth, as all the folks he speaks to respond to him
unself-consciously in their regional speech forms; the melange of Welsh voices
make up the play being broadcast on the BBC, which tended whenever it could to
eliminate accents. The British Broadcasting Network has only very recently begun
accommodating regional accents and dialects on its programs, and even now rarely
allows these to be heard on its news broadcasts. Its announcers speak a standard
upper-class British, whether they be from Scotland, Wales, or Yorkshire. Return
Journey is a sly and yet immensely poignant radio play, making a political point in
disguise by capturing the lost voices of Dylan Thomas’s youth and broadcasting
them in all their regional glory to an English nation never comfortable with the
audible marks of difference. Speech is a force that through the fuse of radio waves
drives the nation toward sameness, and death. Dylan Thomas’s writing certainly
insisted upon raging against the dying of that linguistic light.
The second edition of the anthology adds among other things Thomas’s as-
tonishing poem “Fern Hill.” Among the approaches to this poem that would
surely captivate students is reading it aloud with an emphasis on the way the de-
scription of a very local place—Fern Hill itself—with very specific memories for the
poet is enlarged as a space or zone for the intersection of consciousness with place.
594 Dylan Thomas

Compare Thomas’s technique of what could be called “poetic geography” to the

more sweeping, abstract landscapes in poetry by Hughes, Auden, Hardy or Larkin.
A crux of Dylan Thomas’s poetics lies in making a small spot on the Welsh coun-
tryside, a gentle, fern-covered hill, surge with lyric intensity and general applica-
tion. Students should pay special attention to the words for landscape features
Thomas draws upon, and how the poem almost burrows into the ferny hill of its
title to invest the local with sublimely immediate passion. Cultural geography and
the intense relation humans have to place is becoming ever more engaging in cur-
rent thinking; Thomas’s gorgeously detailed topographic poetry inscribes an ab-
sent place with surging fervor, and by doing so invests his poem with the forces of
place and time. Dylan Thomas in “Fern Hill” writes like a green fuse driving the
flowers of mind and memory back to a location its readers now forever share.

Sa m u e l Be c k e t t
Krapp’s Last Tape
Like most of Beckett’s work, Krapp’s Last Tape works by bringing an unusual
amount of pressure to bear on a minimal amount of verbal material. The text of
Krapp’s Last Tape is short and quite repetitive; indeed, the plot is primarily about
repetition—about our inability to avoid repeating the past, even our compulsion to
play again and again the “tapes” (as contemporary psychologists would say) of our
past, thus effectively erecting barriers to any more satisfactory future.
In a strange way, Krapp’s Last Tape, despite all the differences in mise en scéne,
could easily be a James Joyce, Dubliners-style story. In playing over and over the
birthday recording from his 39th birthday, Krapp is presented with the opportu-
nity to look himself in the eye—to see himself for the vain and selfish person that
he is, and to attempt to grow in consequence of that awful knowledge. But like
Joyce’s characters, he refuses that “one good look” in the looking-glass; continued
self-delusion—even if it requires a lifetime of alienation and loneliness—is easier
than admitting one’s faults and honestly facing them. Thus the play’s close, with
the 69-year-old Krapp insisting that he wouldn’t want the past back, finally suggests
the awful price he has paid for the macho “no regrets” philosophy he has lived by.
A brilliant performance is available on videocassette, from Smithsonian
Institution Press, in the Beckett Directs Beckett series: a production by the San
Quentin Drama Workshop starring Rick Cluchey. Watching the play, more
than anything else, will drive home its pathos, as well as underscoring the gen-
uine humor that underlies the play, including Beckett’s debts to Charlie Chaplin
and vaudeville.

Texts for Nothing

All of Beckett’s narrators are obsessed with the fact of their narrating; this is
nowhere more evident than in the Texts for Nothing. Text 4 performs an inquiry
into the nature of the self, and suggests that the “self,” the “I,” is simply a story
 Samuel Beckett 595

that we tell ourselves in order to create the illusion of unity of being—the sense of
a whole, integrated self. “Who says this, saying it’s me?,” our narrator wonders in
the first sentence. The suggestion is that some portion of one’s experience is al-
ways sacrificed in the forging (in both senses of that word) of the self; some part
that doesn’t seem to fit in with the overall story one wishes to tell ends up on the
cutting-room floor, edited out of the final text. But those censored passages that
the “self” tries to keep out have a nasty way of reasserting their rights, as Freud
taught us. Thus the monologue we overhear in Text 4 might almost be narrated
in the voice of Krapp—that part of Krapp that the self-confident, vain man who
works the tape recorder can’t allow, that thing of darkness he is unable, or simply
unwilling, to acknowledge his. This human tendency—the way that the host ego
that keeps our narrator down “tells his story every five minutes, saying it is not
his”—is the focus of Beckett’s late play Not I, in which the psychological mecha-
nism of repression is able to create a seemingly healthy self with which to meet
the world, but only at the cost of saying “not I” to a number of things that the
whole person had experienced. Text 4 is then, on one level, a parable about the
unavoidable but costly process of creating a self—about the violence and violent
forgetting that a life narrative visits upon lived experience. The “self,” Beckett re-
minds us, is a fiction—a character whom we create but, that creation accom-
plished, can no longer see.
Text 8, while continuing the focus of Text 4 on the creation of the self, broad-
ens its horizons somewhat to talk about the more general human drive to tell
stories. Throughout Beckett’s writing there is the strong message that humans are
condemned to tell stories, condemned to speech: to go silent is all that many of
Beckett’s characters dream of, but it is a dream that is approached but never quite
realized. To cease telling stories is to die; but as long as we have the breath of life
in us, that breath will be used to tell stories—and far too often, Beckett suggests,
used to tell stories about ourselves that prevent us from honestly facing who we are
and what we have done.

The Expelled
The Expelled, we learn in this story, includes all of us: we all suffer the originary act
of being expelled from the mother’s body at birth—an ouster which Beckett here
compares to the Christian notion of the Fall, through the narrator’s comic series
of falls—and spend the remainder of our time here on earth trying to get back on
our feet, and to write the story that will make sense for us of our being tossed out
of our ancestral home.
Making reference to Paradise Lost, and the doctrine of the fortunate fall, may
help students to see the paradigm that Beckett is playing with here; in this story,
of course, the Fall is made quite literal, our protagonist lying in a gutter as he be-
gins to tell his story, and he proceeds to fall and fall again throughout the brief
story (one of Beckett’s plays for radio is called All That Fall).
Like the characters in the Texts for Nothing, our protagonist here seems to be
forced to tell his story, punished by being forced to describe (“How describe this
596 Samuel Beckett

hat? And why?”; “I have always greatly admired the door of this house. . . . How to
describe it?”); like Charlie Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, life seems to our
protagonist a stiff sentence indeed, and he hopes to shorten his stay—to earn time
off for good behavior—by dutifully telling the stories that he thinks are demanded
of him.

W. H . Au d e n
W. H. Auden provided the skeleton key for reading his poetry in the many essays
and books of literary criticism he also wrote. The Anthology includes just such a
critical essay, Writing, in order to facilitate the interpretation of Auden’s poetic mis-
sion, and to compare his ideas of the goals of art to the critical writings other poets
produced in past eras. William Wordsworth’s “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Percy Shelley’s Defense of Poetry, and
even William Blake’s poetic rationales make productive companion readings.
Auden was a literary scholar along with being a practicing poet; his erudite un-
derstanding of the English literary tradition extended even to his passionate ex-
plications of its precursor forms in the medieval sagas. Within the twentieth-
century section itself, Auden’s essay, like his poetry, ought to be compared to T. S.
Eliot’s critical essay on poetic form and modern writing. The two critics, like the
two poets, have an intriguingly different diagnosis of modern poetry, and a simi-
larly divergent prescription for writing.
Eliot is famous for having insisted on the necessary impersonality of art. He
called for an impersonal style which sought an “objective correlative” to the subjec-
tive emotion of the artist. In other words, a poetic object was sought to correlate
with, and to replace, the explicit mention of subjective inner states. Out of this pre-
scription Eliot also created a canon of his favorite poets, those who had adopted the
“objective correlative” he championed—for example, the “metaphysical” poets, like
John Donne, who had been relatively ignored. The knotty conceits and cerebral
metaphors of poets like Donne exemplified the refined, impersonal poetry Eliot
mandated. While many critics have lately insisted that Eliot’s poetry, far from im-
personal, fairly seethes with references to his own experiences and emotional states,
there is nonetheless a huge contrast between Eliot’s criteria for poetry and Auden’s.
W. H. Auden kept the lyric or personal voice alive in his poetry. This is not to say
that it was openly confessional or autobiographical: Auden’s poems are not at all
like Anne Sexton’s or Sylvia Plath’s, for example. Still, poems like In Memory of W.
B. Yeats or September 1, 1939 hinge on personal experience and the voice of a per-
son narrating the history of his own time. Eliot’s poetry contains myriad splintered
allusions to all sorts of historical and personal experiences, of course, yet these are
filtered through a mesh of “objective correlatives”—quotes from other poems, im-
ages that refract the experience. W. H. Auden by contrast seems to stand or hover
in back of his poetry, not just a witness but an actor in its events.
The famous Musée des Beaux Arts does not revolve around a strikingly personal
personal experience, yet it exhibits Auden’s poetic signature. The poem transcribes
 W. H. Auden 597

a visit to an art museum, where the viewer—the poetic voice—is looking at a well-
known painting by Brueghel, yet is not fully aware of an ominous detail of it.
Hidden in a corner of the painting, the boy Icarus falls into the sea, the wings his
father Daedalus molded from wax having melted when Icarus brought them too
close to the sun. The Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus is a cautionary tale about
art: the father’s artifice was so skillful that the son, borne aloft on artificial wings,
overreached himself, and was drowned. So much else seems to be happening in
the painting, so much else draws the eye, that the poignant tragedy of Icarus un-
folds unseen. Auden’s poem draws a word-picture of the painting—this is a favorite
technique of the Renaissance, when the Latin phrase ut pictura poesis referred to
the ability of verbal art to mimic or imitate visual art. The classical and early mod-
ern rivalry between poets and painters was intense, and long-standing, with
painters claiming to be able to imitate the real, and poets claiming supremacy be-
cause their art, the art of language, could introduce the element of time. Keats’s
Ode on a Grecian Urn brings this old quarrel of ut pictura poesis into Romanticism,
when the frieze on the Grecian urn he depicts in his poem freezes time—the fig-
ures on its surface are forever dancing to the music of “slow time,” and the maiden
who is on the verge of her marriage yet who never gets there in the frieze is a “still
unravished bride of quietness.” Neither Keats nor Auden is interested in whether
painters or poets are better—they have entirely given up on that ancient and some-
what silly debate. What interests them both is the question of time: how poetry re-
lates to time, and staves off death by filling the void of time with language. Auden’s
words are able to draw our attention to a new part of the picture; there, unlike any-
thing that can actually happen on a picture’s surface, Icarus is in the process of
falling, as if the picture had become a motion picture. Does knowing that Icarus
is falling allow him to be rescued? Unfortunately, no. Words have the power to
“give life” to Icarus for an instant, just as his father’s ingenuity gave him the wings
to soar. Both modes of artifice or art, however, have no power to change things in
the face of time. Icarus will fall, the painting will remain, and Auden’s poem asks,
what will the poem have changed?
Musée de Beaux Arts shows how adept Auden is at borrowing things—in the case
of that poem, borrowing a topos from Renaissance defenses of poetry, and from
Romantic defenses of those defenses, and making it new. The highlight of Auden’s
poetic method is his love of, and talent for, pouring new wine into old bottles; that
is, using older metrical forms, like the sonnet and the aubade, and infusing them
with new poetic life. A serious inquiry into Auden’s poetry would require a rigor-
ous grasp of the techniques and the technicalities of English verse forms. Auden
may have violated T.S. Eliot’s idea of poetic protocol by inserting himself into his
poetry in a lyrical Romantic fashion, but he has no argument with Eliot’s love of
classical form, and no modern peer in his facility for remaking the patterns of
English poetry to fit the age of anxiety, atomic bombs, and free love. For example,
Lullaby follows its model poem Herrick’s To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time, echo-
ing its line “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” with the same scrupulous meter and
tight prosody. Auden is strict, never sloppy, and exacting in his verse and vocabu-
lary. By borrowing the older poem’s form, yet not its words and images, he imbues
598 W. H. Auden

that paean to love—and sex—with a heady modern sexiness, and an equal

poignance at the fleeting wings of time.
Love is perhaps Auden’s best poetic subject. This has been proven in popular
terms, anyway, in the pop culture of the 1990s, when Auden had a huge posthu-
mous success with his love poetry. After a scene in the British film Four Weddings
and a Funeral featured a character reciting an Auden poem aloud at a friend’s fu-
neral service, audiences found the poem overwhelmingly moving, and tried to find
out who had written it. Auden’s publishers heard about the demand for the poem
and reprinted it, along with others, as a new volume, Four Love Poems by W. H.
Auden, sold at bookstores and discount stores, with “includes the poem from Four
Weddings and a Funeral” emblazoned on its cover. It may seem ironic or even a lit-
tle seedy that it took a film to revive interest in Auden’s work for a wider public.
However, Auden would have appreciated the happy accident of coming to public
notice, whatever the circumstances. The poet who wrote Musée des Beaux Arts wor-
ried about how, and if, people would notice what art tried to show them. It is no
more strange that Auden’s poem proved to be so moving and powerful when read
by an actor in a movie, than that Icarus might fall to earth in a stationary paint-
ing. Life is always going on, and time hastening along; Auden believed that if the
words of a poem were strong enough, they could “stop time.” So precise and strong
were Auden’s words that they overpowered the film around them, and took on a
new life of their own.

St e v i e Sm i t h
Stevie Smith’s poetry almost teaches itself, especially when read where it is em-
bedded, within the largely male poetry of post-war poets such as Auden, Larkin,
and Hughes. Sylvia Plath’s individual poems, like those of the poets just men-
tioned, demand individual glosses, whereas Smith’s poems are best taught as a
group. This is not meant to imply that she is an unserious poet, but rather that her
greatest worth lies in the poetic voice she brought to the fore, a voice that insists
on an “I” without enlarging its own importance.
Smith boldly violated one of the unspoken taboos of modern poetry when she
added her sprightly, tensile line drawings to her poetry. For a thousand years or
more an artistic “war” has been waged between poets and visual artists, the latter
claiming that only they could render “reality,” the former insisting that the ad-
vantage literature has over poetry, in addition to the almost infinite permutations
of words, is its incorporation of time. Paintings can only freeze or stop time, the
critical argument went, whereas words need no secondary clues or illustrations of
what they can so elastically show to the mind’s eye. Into this long debate waltzes
Stevie Smith, who matches her poems up not only with visual art, but with repre-
sentational or figural drawings that dare to be personal, almost decorative, addi-
tions. Help students see how their immediacy, their almost improvisatory nature
is meant to collaborate with her poems—Stevie Smith is not intent, as was Auden,
for example, on establishing herself as a witness to the major historical events of
her time, nor was she interested in maintaining a lofty seriousness nor a “purity”
 Philip Larkin 599

of poetic word. My headnote in the anthology compares her instead to the recent
singer-songwriters Alanis Morissette and Chrissie Hynde, among others—Smith’s
poetic lyrics are about herself, her loneliness, her pain, her observations, her grasp
of everyone’s ordinariness. They dramatize and, with her sketches, bring to life a
persona that while desperate, is never bitter, while suffering is never just a victim.
“Not Waving But Drowning” attributes its own main line to someone else, and
then flips the poetic line to have the poet’s persona voice this scary but still comi-
cal plaint. Waving, after all, is such a sweet interpretation to make of a flailing
hand stretched above the waves—and of course Smith uses the play on hand-wav-
ing and ocean waves, too. Like her sketches, the poems are stripped down to the
tightest, thinnest line, the most economical stanzas, and despite this self-effacing
economics her poetry bursts with casual flair and immediate rapport with a reader.
Stevie Smith’s work does not articulate a “theory” of feminism, as perhaps could
be said of Sylvia Plath’s incisive poetry, with its controlled rage against Fathers
everywhere. Smith doesn’t rail or dramatize, she just insists on putting her heart
on the page, certain that others—women, yes, but men too, who are as lonely in
this life as anybody else—will have been struck by the absurdity, the sadness, and
yet the “pretty” aspects of the world. The poem “Pretty” is as bold as her others in
the same fashion—here is a female poet who dares to deploy the word “pretty,”
when the only proper poetic subject, according to the tradition of poetics, is
beauty. Prettiness is not ugliness, but not beauty either—it stands there unrecorded,
seemingly not a part of art, never reaching the heights of Beauty, where Truth also
resides. Pretty is in the eye of the beholder, much more so than beauty is, because
“prettiness” isn’t valued in the same way, and has to be given value by those who
find it and name it.
Stevie Smith’s poetry was highly popular, and that too was a strike against her.
Without in the slightest taking away from the admittedly great poets—Yeats, Eliot,
Thomas, Hardy and so forth— who occupy center stage in the tradition of modern
poetry, Stevie Smith makes room for herself and room for other readers, sophisti-
cated and not so, to read poetry differently. Well before it was fashionable, Stevie
Smith developed a kind of “confessional” poetry that honored her own emotions,
her own observations, her solidarity with others. She never, however, used poetry
to highlight herself or for narcissicistic purposes. Just as the vibrant female singer-
songwriters of today yoke words and music, so too did Stevie Smith yoke words
and image. Her poetry and her line drawings are both as light as air and inscribed
like a diamond, in recognition of what is both “pretty” and “drowning.”

Ph i l i p L a rk i n
Church Going
Much of Larkin’s poetry is concerned with the creation of a meaningful life after
the death of God; in Church Going, the speaker wonders why he is attracted to
houses of worship, largely empty, when he does not believe in the God they were
built to honor. The interior is described in terms that emphasize its emptiness and
600 Philip Larkin

silence; clearly, these empty churches are meant to symbolize the death of an older
order, one which, for all its shortcomings, did help to explain to people their place
in the creation, and a purpose for their lives. For the speaker, not just belief, but
even “unbelief,” has disappeared; both can create a kind of energy, a kind of pas-
sion, that he in his agnostic torpor cannot capture. In the poem’s conclusion the
speaker reaffirms the church’s importance—which lies not in its fulfilling the pur-
poses for which it was originally constructed, but rather serving as discrete, physi-
cal links in British history and tradition, another system of belief within which one
can find one’s place and purpose.

High Windows
The curse word in the second line of High Windows may present problems for
teachers of some students, in some parts of the country; though texts from Beckett
and Kelman are by turns vulgar and profane, there is something especially trou-
bling and unexpected about the “f-word” cropping up in a poem, especially in verse
as classically disciplined as Larkin’s. And that, of course, is precisely the point:
there’s nothing adventitious or cheaply sensationalistic about Larkin’s “fucking,”
but instead the harsh language suggests the violence of the speaker’s reaction to
what he thinks he sees. It’s important to point out that the speaker’s indictment
of this “couple of kids” is purely conjectural, borne of his own prejudices and envy;
a perfectly parallel passage, and one which may give students a better understand-
ing of the way that Larkin is here criticizing his speaker, occurs in the opening
paragraphs of Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, where a middle-aged college pro-
fessor, envious of his students’ monied families and healthy, tanned bodies, imag-
ines luggage full of all kinds of prohibited substances. Both DeLillo’s Jack Gladney
and Larkin’s speaker owe something to Eliot’s Prufrock, indulging themselves in
“pity parties” and imagining that while the mermaids sing each to each, they will
not sing to them.
Thus the speaker’s palpable self-pity is meant to undercut, at least to some de-
gree, the critique of modern sexual mores that the poem presents. In the same way
the speaker, with a disarming honesty, recalls as the poem closes that this is a time-
less strategy employed by the older generation against the younger; every genera-
tion of parents have thought their kids’ music was too loud, etc. The poem
achieves a fine balance between criticism of contemporary morality and a critique
of the nostalgia that helps the older generation sustain the illusion of its ascen-
dancy. Larkin has little time for either of these comforting illusions.

Talking in Bed
This brief and poignant poem is in part an indictment of sex without love—an in-
dictment which, unlike that delivered in High Windows, focuses primarily on the
speaker’s own life. The slippage of values is suggested economically in the last two
lines, where the quest to find and speak words “at once true and kind” devolves to
the depressing attempt only to speak words “not untrue and not unkind.”
 Ted Hughes 601

MCMXIV
Looking back over the distance of half a century, the speaker considers images of
the Edwardian and Georgian life that MCMXIV—1914, and World War I—brought
suddenly to an end. The closing stanza suggests what many other poets of the War,
including W. B. Yeats, had proposed—that the Great War marked the end of in-
nocence for the British Empire, and made post-War life a pale shadow of Great
Britain’s heyday. In another sense, the poem can almost be read as an epitaph for
Larkin himself; born in 1922—traditionally considered the banner year for British
Literary modernism—Larkin here (and much more explicitly in his preface to All
What Jazz) suggests that he was born into a world with which he had no sympathy,
and longs instead for a pastoral and traditional British culture which had disap-
peared permanently by the time of his birth.

Sy l v i a Pl a t h
As the anthology’s headnote to Plath’s work suggests, it is for all practical purposes
impossible to read Plath’s poetry apart from her tragic life story; her “confessional
poetry” makes lasting art of that tragedy. The first three poems collected here, “The
Colossus,” “Daddy,” and “Lady Lazarus,” are fruitfully read and discussed as a co-
herent cluster, picking up and enriching through repetition a group of images re-
lated to suicide, death, and patriarchal authority. The poems suggest, for instance,
that an accidental near-death experience at age ten was followed by a more deliber-
ate suicide attempt at twenty—and that the every-ten-years pattern would play out
again. “Dying / Is an art, like everything else,” Plath writes in “Lady Lazarus”; “I do
it exceptionally well.” The fact that Plath connected much of her despair to the
death of her father suggests connections to Mansfield’s “Daughters of the Late
Colonel” and even, perhaps, Lawrence’s “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter”; in those
texts, as in these three poems of Plath’s, the death of the father is both literal and
hugely metaphorical—the death of the father signifying the death of God, the death
of law and order and reason and purpose. The deliberately shocking use of
Holocaust imagery in “Lady Lazarus” (chillingly read by Plath on our audio CD) can
be seen within the wartime context provided by Churchill’s speeches.
The final Plath poem, “Child,” is every bit as dark as the first three—but melan-
choly where the others are angry or bitter. The poem manages three perfectly beau-
tiful and poignant stanzas, buoyed by the hope of innocent new life, before grind-
ing to a dark halt in the despairing final stanza.

Te d Hu g h e s
In the poetry of Ted Hughes, human beings learn what it means to be human only
through encounters—often painful, or disturbing, or violent encounters—with the in-
human. In “Wind,” the speaker is reduced to cataloguing the evidence of the violent
energy of nature; the poem’s final line echoes Christ’s famous claim that the very
602 Ted Hughes

stones call out God’s identity, though for Hughes they testify more to an impersonal
natural force than a personal God. “Relic” gives Hughes’s version of Tennyson’s na-
ture, “red in tooth and claw”; Hughes’s vision of nature is not that of the
Romantics—or better, perhaps, it’s Shelley’s nature, or Blake’s, not Wordsworth’s.
These themes are further developed in his powerful reading of his Second Glance at
a Jaguar, included on our audio CD. “Theology” takes its place in a long and vener-
able tradition of retelling the story of the Fall from Genesis; in Hughes’s version,
pride and effrontery (that of the serpent) is rewarded rather than punished. “Dust
As We Are” bears comparison to some of the poetry emerging from WWI, includ-
ing some of the poetry in this anthology, detailing the after-effects of war on those
fortunate enough to survive. The poem also depends on a stark contrast between the
masculine and feminine principles, the nuturing of the mother and the hard-won
wisdom of the father, as does “Leaf Mould,” which figures both the knowledge of na-
ture and the feel for poetic language as emanating from the mother. “Telegraph
Wires” conveys an apt image of the collision of the natural and the human worlds,
telegraph wires hung across “a lonely moor.” And though communication is thus en-
abled, it’s a complex mix: for while “towns whisper to towns over the heather,” so too
natural forces use the telegraph wires to communicate their inhuman messages, the
lines “picked up and played” by the winds like the aeolian harp celebrated by the
Romantic poets. Unlike the Romantics, though, there’s no suggestion that this is
spirit music: these are “the tones / That empty human bones.”

T h o m Gu n n
If Hughes’s poetry is largely about the agency of the inhuman, and human beings’
powerlessness in the face of it, Gunn’s poetry is intimately human in scale and
scope. In “Lines for a Book,” he celebrates the active life of the body over the con-
templative life of the mind, admiring those in history who have backed up thought
with action—“those exclusive by their action.” This admiration immediately dis-
tinguished Gunn from most of his contemporaries in the British poetry scene.
“Elvis Presley” celebrates a popular culture figure who succeeds in marrying
thought and deed, art and action, turning “revolt into a style,” and paving the way
for a generation at war with the proprieties of their elders. In “A Map of the City”
Gunn revisits the topos of a poem like Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” but privi-
leges the city and its dangers and possibilities over the hill upon which he stands;
what others would call “urban decay” Gunn sees as “ground of my delight”—“I
would not have the risk diminished.” This romantic, indeed implicitly erotic, love
of danger boils below the surface of “Black Jackets” as well. The fact that this biker
bar is virtually indistinguishable from one of the Bay Area’s gay leather bars is not
an accident, for while Gunn had not yet publicly come out as a gay man, his poems
dealt increasingly with homoerotic material. But even in his openly gay poems like
“The Hug,” love and desire and sex are universalized, so that every reader can read
him- or herself into positions which finally aren’t “gay” or “straight,” but instead
profoundly human.
 V. S. Naipaul 603

“From the Wave” represents Gunn’s growing infatuation with his adopted
Californian home, celebrating as it does the hedonist, active lifestyle he champi-
ons starting with “Lines for a Book.” For teachers interested in spending time on
prosody, it’s worth making the point that Gunn here combines a “slack,” pop-cul-
ture topic with carefully controlled prosody: a poem of classical proportion,
singing the praises of surfing. Indeed, the overall effect of Gunn’s worship of the
surfers is to turn them into classical gods, marbled bodies “half wave, half men,”
underscoring the discipline involved in this seemingly spontaneous activity. “The
Hug” comes from Gunn’s first book focusing on the AIDS epidemic, The Man
With Night Sweats; and while the context, both historical and biographical, make
clear that the lovers are men, the poem exploits gender ambiguity (as does Auden’s
beautiful “Lullaby”) to emphasize what’s universal about this emotional experi-
ence. “Patch Work” works as an allegory of the poetic process, suggesting that
poets are mocking birds, patching together bits and pieces of others’s songs; as if
to prove the point, Gunn gestures broadly to Shelley’s “To a Sky-Lark” and Keats’s
“Ode to a Nightingale,” both echoing and redirecting those poets’ work. “The
Missing” again makes the point that we are defined by those with whom we are in
relation and that, as Donne wrote centuries before, implicitly indicting the
“straight” audience’s indifference to AIDS: “Any man’s death diminishes me, be-
cause I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the
bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” We are all incalculably diminished by “the missing.”

V. S . Na i p a u l
All the selections from V. S. Naipaul’s work stem from his autobiographical writ-
ing. They will connect well with other selections that stress the memoir or the first-
person story; what is especially important for students is to recognize what is so un-
usual about Naipaul’s narrative. He writes in majestic English prose about the
arrival in England of a young man who is the product of a complex colonial his-
tory. This is a return journey of sorts—Conrad’s character Marlow, a British sea-
man, travels to Africa and then makes his way back to tell a harrowing story of
what empire has wrought. Naipaul starts “out there,” and finds his way to the heart
of darkness at the imperial center, where he makes his way as a writer.
It’s not only what he writes about, but how he writes, that makes Naipaul so dis-
tinctive and distinguished. Unlike his younger colleague in distinction, Salman
Rushdie, who also came from “elsewhere” to make a lasting mark on modern British
literature, Naipaul’s prose models derive from classically British models. Rushdie’s
writing is self-evidently modernist; a cosmopolitan in style as well as in background,
his influences are James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
whereas Naipaul’s writing displays no modernistic pyrotechnics. His prose is nour-
ished by nineteenth-century realist writers—Eliot, Austen, Thackery and Dickens
among them—and by the scrupulous style of Matthew Arnold, Cardinal Newman,
and Thomas Carlyle. Joseph Conrad is a major influence running through Naipaul’s
writing, since it is symbolically charged and rich with poetic imagery. If Naipaul were
604 V. S. Naipaul

being placed in a modernist category, it would be in the Conradian section, where

realist narrative is still discernible under the narrative innovations, rather than in the
company of out-and-out experimentalists like Woolf, Joyce or Beckett. The chiseled
gravity of his essays owes something to T.S. Eliot’s crisp prose in Tradition and the
Individual Talent, and his polemical tartness owes something to the moral urgency of
George Orwell’s voice in Politics and the English Language.
Naipaul has refused to be categorized as a postcolonial writer, although he is
one in a sense, and has refused the mantle of multiculturalism. Nonetheless, the
settings for many of his novels, and of his nonfiction, have been places still found
“exotic” by many Westerners, British and Americans alike. Naipaul has not avoided
or ignored these places—the Caribbean, Africa, India, Latin America—in his writ-
ing, but he has not made a simple division between the evils of imperialism—the
British—and the virtues of resistance—Britain’s colonial subjects. Contrast Graham
Greene’s story with V. S. Naipaul’s writing: both writers are animated by ethical
questions, above all, and see writing as a calling of moral seriousness. Greene’s sto-
ries and novels, like a latter-day Conrad’s, are mostly set in exotic places, where the
Greene anti-hero, a flawed but good man, is finally able to express his religious and
political solidarity with the oppressed local population. Naipaul’s exotic locales just
do not include this opportunity for romanticized self-redemption; his colonial char-
acters usually throw the request for solidarity with them right back into the startled
British face, often at gunpoint. Well-meaning British travel writers, and sometimes
would-be heroes, from Richard Burton to T. E. Lawrence, make an excellent con-
trast to Naipaul’s literary universe too. Naipaul’s monumental writing emanates
from an in-between place, neither here nor there. He has witnessed the end of
British empire as one of its subjects, yet he neither idealizes nor glamorizes the af-
termath of the national independence movements.
One fascinating pairing would contrast V. S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott as
Caribbean writers who have enlarged the territory of English literature in differing
ways. Walcott’s Caribbean heritage melds white British and African diaspora an-
cestors, and his writing parlays those roots; Naipaul’s Caribbean inheritance is by
way of a further or double dislocation, since his Indian ancestors had been
brought from one British colony to serve in another, far away. As a Trinidadian,
his ethnic background put him at some distance from the Afro-Caribbean major-
ity, yet was no less colonial in its origins. Putting them together will demonstrate
conclusively that no singular identity as a British Caribbean or Anglophone
(English-speaking) Caribbean writer exists. Their styles, their subjects, their genres,
their influences, and their politics could not be more diverse.
Another great Caribbean writer, the political theorist and physician Frantz
Fanon, wrote a hugely influential book on colonialism called Black Skins, White
Masks. His thesis was that colonialism was so dehumanizing and dominating a sys-
tem that it affected the personal identity of everyone it touched: it caused some
colonial subjects to denigrate themselves as the colonizers had, and thus to idealize
them and even imitate them, while hating themselves. Fanon, a psychiatrist from
Martinique, described the psychological condition of putting on a “white mask” in-
side the self, identifying with whiteness, with colonial values, and even with colo-
 Caryl Churchill 605

nial superiority, in a distorted form of self-hatred of what the colonizers had re-
jected as “bad.” V.S. Naipaul has written (in Mimic Men especially) of this distorted
mimicry, and of how destructive it has been individually and socially in a postcolo-
nial world. However, his entire body of work stands as a refutation of those who
would claim that his artistic gifts are in themselves an “imitation” of Britishness,
and not “authentically” Caribbean or third world. Naipaul’s work never feels the
need to disguise its own power, nor to pretend not to be “British”—in the sense of
being part of the central tradition of the finest British literature. The pressures on
him to do and think otherwise, which come from both sides of the colonial divi-
sion, and both sides of the political fence, are evident in his work, and in his mem-
oir. It is a testament to his lasting place in British letters that V.S. Naipaul has made
a literature out of resisting those pressures either to conform or to mimic.

Ca r y l C h u rc h i l l
Churchill’s Cloud Nine is a comic maelstrom of racial, sexual, gender, religious, and
imperialist energies and antagonisms; it touches on some of the most troubling as-
pects of post-Cold War, post-Imperial British life and culture, while deploying a
theatrical style sometimes bordering on farce (reminiscent of Joe Orton). The
highly stylized result is one of the period’s most incisive texts, juxtaposing the re-
strictive Victorian-era colonial project with the 1970’s “permissive society” within
which Churchill wrote the play. One of the points of comparison Churchill is able
to bring out is that for all its vaunted “permissiveness,” the 1970s was indeed a
good deal like the 1870s in one important respect: the British Empire, under the
symbolic leadership of a strong, humorless, and seemingly asexual female political
leader determined to set a high moral tone, was in fact seething with barely re-
pressed and anarchic sexual energy.
A teacher using Cloud Nine as one of her concluding texts in a British literature
survey would do well to take a cue from Churchill’s own prefatory note to the play,
in which she expresses her interest in “the parallel between colonial and sexual op-
pression.” For convenience sake, we will break down the remainder of discussion
here to those topics indicated in our opening sentence:
Race. Set in “a British colony in Africa in Victorian times,” Act I contains the
bulk of the play’s meditation on the politics of race under empire. Joshua, the fam-
ily’s black servant, is played by a white actor—because, as Churchill explains, white
is what Joshua wants to be. He is both treated as an inferior by members of the rul-
ing British family, and is full of self-loathing: his divided consciousness finds no
point of similarity or kinship with the other African household servants, as Joshua
instead identifies wholly with his oppressor (even to the point of refusing to grieve
the death of his own parents). Joshua’s sexuality is somewhat ambiguous; by some
characters, he is treated as a “savage,” and since less than human, not a sexual
being; so that the extramarital affairs of the whites are barely hidden from him. At
the same time, when the polymorphously pleasure-seeking Harry Bagley suggests a
tryst, Joshua seems neither very interested nor repelled: “That’s all right, yes.”
Joshua is a prime example of the deeply contradictory images ascribed to black
606 Caryl Churchill

men in western culture: both outside the ken of appropriate sexual desire and, at
the very same time, a deeply fetishized “primitive” sexual object (with obvious par-
allels to the situation in E. M. Forster’s “The Life to Come”).
Sexuality and Gender. Most remarkable for its time, when homophobia was per-
haps the most acceptable form of discrimination in Thatcherite Great Britain, Cloud
Nine dwells with real intensity and insight on questions of sexual identity, the social
construction of sexual roles, and sexual politics. In Act I, the famous (if stereotypi-
cal) outlines of “Victorian morality” are ostensibly in place—everywhere respected in
appearance, everywhere violated in private. Clive, steadfast and stalwart husband,
carries on a sexual relationship with the widow Mrs. Saunders; meanwhile his wife,
Betty, attempts in vain to inflame the ardor of the bisexual Harry Saunders, and at
the same time keeps at arm’s length the advances of her maid Ellen—only to leave
Clive in the second act, and explore a lesbian relationship with Lin. For each of the
play’s women—with the possible exception of Betty’s mother Maud—must discover,
in the course of their maturing, that desire is an active force that can be claimed by
a woman for herself; this in contradiction to the widespread Victorian belief that sex-
ual pleasure is exclusively a man’s prerogative. (Betty’s extended description of her
post-divorce discovery of the pleasure of masturbation would have to be read in this
context.) Both Betty and her daughter’s friend Lin—and seemingly, by the play’s end,
Victoria as well—have thrown off marriage partners who dominated and subordi-
nated them, much as (by 1972) most of the former possessions of the British Empire
had thrown off their protective “spouse.” Like the Dark Continent, men secretly re-
alize that women, with their own appetites, are “voracious,” as Clive says of Mrs.
Saunders—voracious, and threatening: “You are dark like this continent,” he tells her,
“Mysterious. Treacherous.” The uncertain boundary between child and adult sexu-
ality—so troublingly evidenced in a figure like Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice
books, but also photographer with a penchant for slightly risque (by contemporary
standards) portraits of little girls—also crops up in Cloud Nine; the sexual relationship
between Harry Bagley and young Edward is a clear example, but even the matronly
Maud’s nursery rhymes carry a pederastic (and incestuous) edge: “Clap hands, daddy
comes, with his pockets full of plums. All for Vicky.”
In one of the play’s keener insights into the sexual mores of the swinging six-
ties and seventies Churchill shows, through the adult relationship of Edward and
Gerry, that gay relationships, though ostensibly outside the strict boundaries of
traditional morality, can quickly fall into the very same cliched gender dynamics as
heterosexual relationships. This failure—though at the play’s end Gerry, who had
walked out on Edward in disgust over his traditional domesticity—is but one aspect
of the larger problem the play points toward: how to build satisfying modes of per-
sonal relationships after having torn down the unsatisfactory models of our fore-
bears. As Betty, of all people!, says in her last extended speech: “If there isn’t a right
way to do things you have to invent one.”
Religion. Though the references are brief, Churchill succeeds in suggesting
that the western Judeo-Christian tradition is complicit in the patriarchal oppres-
sion seen throughout the play; Joshua’s alternative cosmogony, sketched out in the
first act, points the way to a different understanding of man’s and woman’s place
 Whose Language? 607

in the larger scheme of things than that suggested in the creation stories of
Genesis, while the Biblical story of the Fall is invoked in Act II as proof positive of
women’s moral and intellectual inferiority.
Imperialism and Empire. The play opens, in Act I, with a somewhat ironic
paean to the British Empire, “Come gather, sons of England”; the speeches then
given by the principal characters give undisguised voice to the patriarchal politics
which play out both within the microcosm of the British family and the macro-
cosm of the British Empire (“The empire is one big family,” Clive blithely de-
clares). The disguised motives behind imperial conquest are rendered in the same
double register in which Conrad speaks of the Europeans bringing to Africa both
a lamp and a sword; here, all sing of how “the forge of war shall weld the chains
of brotherhood secure”—a dramatic irony that prepares an audience for the riot of
contradictory and hypocritical statements and actions to follow. Then too, Harry’s
description of British settlements “up the river” which are distinguished by “a lot
of skulls around the place but not white men’s I think” must call to mind Marlow’s
horrified description of Colonel Kurtz’s compound at the Inner Station in Heart
of Darkness. In one of the plays most scathing suggestions, the entire imperial
project is likened to a confidence game, a con: “Come along everyone,” Clive ex-
claims, “you mustn’t miss Harry’s conjuring trick”; whence from his sleeve Harry
produces the union jack, to “general acclaim.”
There are quiet suggestions that the Empire is in decline—that, as Betty inno-
cently suggests, “sometimes sunset is so terrifying I can’t bear to look.” Clearly,
Clive’s reign over the Africans is somewhat precarious, even if he stiffly insists that
he “look[s] after Her Majesty’s domains.” At the same time, though—and following
hard on the heels of this speech of Clive’s—we learn that Edward is “minding” a
baby doll for “Vicky” (his sister Victoria, not Queen Victoria—and yet the ironic
parallel is clearly suggested). On some level, Clive’s imperial rule is another version
of Edward’s caring for his sister’s doll.

PERSPECTIVES

Whose Language?
Seamus Heaney
Though it’s a truism about poetry in general, it’s probably especially important to
say about Heaney: that poetry is meant to be heard, and that his poems need to be
read aloud. Audio tapes of Heaney reading some of these poems are available; but
even more simply, students should be encouraged to read these poems to one an-
other, for much of what fascinates Heaney, especially in the early poems, is the
sound of words, the feeling of words shaped and held in the mouth.
“The Toome Road” juxtaposes the human scale of small-town life in rural
Ulster with the military transport used to enforce the peace and sustain the
Union. The “omphalos” in the poem’s final line is both “navel,” as the footnote
608 Whose Language?

suggests, but perhaps more specifically a reference to the tower occupied by

Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan in the opening chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses: like
Yeats’s tower at Thoor Ballylee, a symbol of Irish art. “A Postcard from North
Antrim” also deals with the Northern Irish “Troubles,” and the inextricable way
that the personal and the political are entangled one in the other.
“The Singer’s House” indulges one of Heaney’s recurrent interests, that in
place names: specifically, the possibility that the sound of a place name might
evoke some essential reality about the place, through repetition and meditation. In
“The Skunk,” Heaney manages the very tricky proposition of analogizing his wife
to a skunk, and succeeds in having the comparison come off as affectionate, even
apt. The poem is probably richer for those who know Robert Lowell’s “Skunk
Hour,” as Heaney clearly does.
“Punishment” is one of Heaney’s most powerful and disturbing poems, one of
a loosely affiliated series of poems growing out of his encounter with P.V. Glob’s
work on the “bog people”—immaculately preserved human bodies brought out of
peat bogs in England, Germany, and Denmark, some of them dating back nearly
two centuries. Some of the bodies seem to have been ritually prepared human sac-
rifices, as for example that evoked in Heaney’s poem; more information about
these archaeological finds, and some haunting photographs, are to be found in
Don Brothwell’s The Bog Man and the Archaeology of People. In “Punishment,” the
similarities between the (inferred) circumstances surrounding the death of this bog
woman and the sectarian terrorism carried out by the IRA in Northern Ireland.
Like Boland’s poem “The Journey,” Station Island reprises Dante’s journey to the
underworld with his guide Virgil—though in this instance Heaney’s guide is the
shade of the nearly blind James Joyce. The attitude toward the Irish language, and
the appropriateness of English for the Irish writer, might be compared to that of
Boland in “Mise Eire”—and contrasted to that of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill in her
essay, “Why I Write in Irish.”
“In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge” explores the logic of an Irish solider fighting
in support of British interests in WWI; the wisdom of this decision is not as easy
to decide as the narrowly nationalist rhetoric Heaney is surrounded by would sug-
gest. The poem makes an interesting companion piece to Rupert Brooke’s “The
Soldier,” who is made proud at the prospect of dying in foreign parts as a forfeit
for his country’s freedom. Finally “Postscript” returns to the Hughes-like nature
poetry of Heaney’s earliest work, suggesting the capacity of the natural landscape
to astonish and to revivify—to “catch the heart off guard and blow it open.” The
terrorist echo of the poem’s closing line serves to make the advice both more pow-
erful and more menacing.

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
Feeding a Child
Ní Dhomhnaill here plays on a couple of meanings of the phrase “feeding a child”:
her child is literally fed at her breast, but is also, or will soon be, literarily fed on
the stories of her people and her culture: no less important food, the poem sug-
gests. In the poem’s repeated questions “Do you know . . . ?”, “Of all these things
 Whose Language? 609

are you / ignorant?”, the mother/poet/speaker paradoxically is able to give voice

to the stories she fears her child needs to hear. The importance of these stories is
suggested especially in the closing lines, where the speaker insists that the myths
and legends of the Irish people are not about other people and other times, but
about themselves.
Parthenogenesis
The concept of parthenogenesis—the development of an egg without fertilization—is
here the concept that links immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary to the Irish
legend, in its many variants, of the childless woman got with child by the sea-shadow.
Standing between these two versions of the same archetypal story, at least for an Irish
poet, is Yeats’s retelling in Leda and the Swan; it’s worthwhile to direct students back
to Yeats’s poem at this point, as well as to the account in the Gospel of Luke (1:26—
38) of Mary’s visitation by the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. The Irish poet Yeats
demonstrates the universal quality of Mary’s conception, by comparing it to the
Greek myth of Leda and Zeus; Ní Dhomhnaill here allies the myth to a uniquely Irish
version. The “sea people” that the poem speaks of—the half-human, half-seal selkies
of Celtic myth—were the subject of the John Sayles film The Secret of Roan Inish—hardly
required viewing in this context, but a delightful film, and one which evokes quite
vividly the rugged beauty of the West of Ireland, and the Gaeltacht.
Labasheedy (The Silken Bed)
The genre of this poem might be made clear by comparing it to Christopher
Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to His Love; at the same time, the poem depends
in part for the vividness of its imagery on the Old Testament Song of Solomon, with
its rich sensual images translated into an Irish landscape and an Irish idiom.
As for the Quince
This puzzling poem partakes of an air of mystery which, as Ní Dhomhnaill ex-
plains in her essay Why I Write in Irish, may be a unique feature of writing in Irish;
it is a mode that has been employed quite successfully by Paul Muldoon, for in-
stance in the poem Why Brownlee Left. Such poetry insists, finally, that there is
something ineffable, a-rational—mysterious—about experience (and in this case,
human behavior and motivation), and that it is not the job of the poet to make
mystery comprehensible, but rather to bear articulate witness to it.
The poem also has a humorous pop culture motif running through it; the
brand-name reference (Black & Decker), the slangy feel of the language (“left me
so zonked”), and the Raymond-Chandleresque tough talk that the “bright young
thing” spouts all give the poem a refreshing colloquial energy.
Why I Choose to Write in Irish, the Corpse That Sits up and Talks Back
Ní Dhomhnaill’s essay is at once so confident and so self-deprecating that it’s hard
to see where students might need any real explication. Instead, you may wish to lo-
cate the essay’s central claim—that “minority languages like Irish” have a “unique
and unrepeatable way of looking at the world”—and ask your students whether or
not they find it compelling. Does Ní Dhomhnaill’s analogy to biological diversity
seem reasonable?
610 Whose Language?

Ngugi wa Thiong’o
To approach Ngugi’s polemical argument about the need for African literature to
be written in African languages, an excerpt from his passionate book on postcolo-
nialism, Decolonizing the Mind, it might help to turn to an earlier section of the
Longman Anthology and find one of the poems that Ngugi refers to in his essay.
Wordsworth’s “Ode on a Daffodil,” a poem that describes a quintessentially English
landscape, is among the choices, although a Shakespearean sonnet, a selection from
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, or a Tennyson poem will do as well. Have students imag-
inatively enter the subjective position of a young student from a village in colonial
Kenya, surrounded by the African landscape, its unique animals and plants, its huts
and unpaved roads and herds of cattle, sitting in a dusty missionary school under
scorching sunlight, memorizing such a poem. If they perform this “thought experi-
ment” they will be closer to seeing what Ngugi means about the sheer distance be-
tween African realities and the assumptions and expectations of English poetry. In
general, such poetry assumes a middle-class, white audience, or takes on the lyric
voice of such a person, unlike the everyday life of a young African boy like Ngugi,
for whom the issues of survival, hunger, poverty, and encounters with a hostile if
stunning natural world are commonplace. Ngugi’s intention is not to critique
British literature as out of touch, inferior to indigenous oral traditions, or a thin
veil over an ideology of conquest. Nonetheless, his essay describes how alienating
and humiliating the imposition of even the greatest literary heritage can be, when
it is accompanied by the certainty that everything African is inferior, degraded, or
even sub-human. The violent ways that his school—and the entire British colonial
government in Kenya—prohibited speaking in his native Gikuyu, and rewarded only
the study of English, has parallels in the anthology in the experience of Irish,
Scottish, and Welsh writers also, whose languages were either forbidden by law or
extirpated by years of privileging English. The Irish, the Scottish, and the Welsh
peoples, however, shared a landscape, a climate, certain ways of life, customs, and
folklore with the English, which doesn’t of course mitigate the pain and the vio-
lence of their cultural conflicts with the latter, nor the loss of their languages. It
does mean that there were always fewer echoes of home present in English litera-
ture to the Africans who learned English and became intellectuals, writers, and
artists in a tongue not their first. By contrast to Ireland or Wales or Scotland, Africa
as a whole had symbolized darkness and savagery to Europe, and in Conrad’s Heart
of Darkness students will have read how Conrad reverses the stereotypes of light ver-
sus dark, white versus black that remained unreversed stereotypes that were fully in
place in Ngugi’s boyhood homeland.
The title of Ngugi’s work of political theory provides another glimpse of
what is at stake—for if most African nations had succeeded by the second half
of the twentieth century in becoming independent nations, and throwing off
the colonial yokes of Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Portugal,
to name a few, to truly “de-colonize,” Ngugi argues, requires an inner indepen-
dence, a freedom of the mind and soul. Ngugi seeks this in language itself.
Until the once-suppressed languages of African colonies become the vehicles
 Whose Language? 611

for literature and thought at the highest level of excellence, he says, there will
still be a colonial flag planted in the minds of Africans. The great modern
works of literature and theory from Africans in the later twentieth century have
been written in English, French, Portuguese and sometimes in Arabic, rather
than in Swahili or Yoruba or Gikuyu. It is not a problem of having too few out-
standing writers, but of having the majority of African literature be written in
European languages. Ngugi himself came to prominence as an African writer in
English, as did Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and many others. He suggests
that for Africa to genuinely step beyond the old colonial legacy, writers like him-
self will need to put theory into practice and adopt their native African lan-
guages as their literary tongues.
Nuala ni Dhomhnaill argues something quite similar in her essay in this vol-
ume, and follows her desire to keep Irish alive by writing poetry in Irish and hav-
ing others translate it. There are political reverberations to her argument as well,
but students may find some stark differences. Irish is now a mandatory subject in
Irish schools, and while few speak it as a mother tongue, the Irish-English facing
pages of a poetry collection like ni Dhomhnaill’s can be read by many and appre-
ciated by a wide circle of English-only readers. Ngugi’s stance has been applauded
by many in Africa and outside it, yet there are also many who question the realism
behind his position. For one thing, Africa is a vast continent with so many lan-
guages and dialects that even within the body of African languages none is domi-
nant; in Kenya, not everyone can read or speak Gikuyu, for example, so Ngugi’s
work in that language will have to be translated multiple times for African audi-
ences. A lively discussion could be prompted among students by having a debate
with members of the class assigned each side of the argument. Critics of the Ngugi
side have commented that what is lost in the attempt to emphasize African lan-
guages, however laudable the goal, is a sense of cosmopolitanism, a mission to ex-
change culture, literature, thought and so on around the globe by acknowledging
the impossibility of nativist or provincial enclaves. On the one hand, the attitude
that English is global may lead to complacency and smugness in countries like the
U.S., famous for its xenophobia, its lack of interest in the outside world, and its
confidence that American English should be the world’s lingua franca by fiat. That
non-cosmopolitan world-view is obviously narrow, blinded, and arrogant—and calls
for Ngugi’s decolonization process.
The result of European colonialism is that modern African literature is written
in European languages like English. This is a different predicament from that of
British writers such as Naipaul and Rushdie; Naipaul’s first language was English,
and although it was disconcerting to have English literature taught as the standard
of beauty, truth, and realism in his diverse Caribbean birthplace, there is no other
language Sir Vidia can or would turn to—and he has given British English his own
sounds. The same is true for Salman Rushdie, whose audience in English is global,
even in Pakistan and India. What Ngugi wa Thiong’o points out is another lesson,
another struggle altogether, a battle for independence that may entail abandoning
English. There may be more people who read Ngugi’s newest literary work in
English than read it in Gikuyu, but for him, it makes a world of political differ-
612 Whose Language?

ence which language his writing is translated into: English has become that sec-
ondary language, with Gikuyu the proudly original source of his creativity.

Nadine Gordimer
What Were You Dreaming?
Part of what’s so engaging about this story is that at several points along the way,
we’re sure we know what kind of story this is. And we’re constantly being proved
wrong. The first section, narrated by the “Coloured” hitchhiker, creates the im-
pression of a somewhat cunning young African, and the two well-meaning, if
somewhat naive, Britons who stop for him out of some condescending sense of
“white liberal guilt.” The hitchhiker, having summed up his hosts quite quickly,
plays up to their expectations, telling probable stories rather than the sometimes
improbable truth about his life and situation.
But if the passenger suspects that the whites’ heads are full of stereotypes about
black (and coloured) South Africans, we quickly learn that he operates out of just
as narrow a set of assumptions about these whites—assumptions which, in the case
of the white woman, turn out to be quite unfounded. She knows who he is, and
what he’s doing; while the passenger sleeps in the back seat, after the story breaks
midway and the narrative point-of-view shifts to third person, we hear both the
simplified version of the truth that she tells her tourist companion, as well as the
more complex truth that she figures out for herself. She realizes that their passen-
ger isn’t what he appears to be; but she also knows that if he’s lying, he’s doing so
in an attempt to “translate” the hardship of his life into an idiom that will be com-
prehensible to English men and women unfamiliar with the realities of life in
South Africa. The only solution, seemingly, is for both the Africans and the
English to take the time to live in one another’s cultures, to gather knowledge
about one another first-hand; while she is thinking about the half-truths that she
must concoct for her companion that he might understand better, if not perfectly
well, she thinks, looking at his tourist’s sunburned arm: “there is the place
through which the worm he needs to be infected with can find a way into him. . . .
Complicity is the only understanding.”

James Kelman
Home for a Couple of Days
One thing that the common comparison of Kelman to both Beckett and Kafka
overlooks is that both Beckett and Kafka present a vision of human despair
undergirded with a fundamental humor; “Don’t presume,” Beckett would say,
“one of the thieves was damned; don’t despair—one of the thieves was saved.”
Kelman’s is an altogether darker vision; even if his characters don’t face the ex-
treme, even allegorical, misery that Beckett’s characters come up against (buried up
to one’s neck in a pile of sand, exposed to the hot sun, watching one’s husband
crawl up the pile with a pistol), their options, and their resources, seem if anything
more strained. A more apt comparison on this score would be James Joyce, to
whose story A Little Cloud Kelman’s Home for a Couple of Days bears more than a
surface resemblance.
 Whose Language? 613

The dialect, and Kelman’s representation of it, may prove something of an ob-
stacle at first; you may want to have students try their hand (or tongue) at reading
some dialogue aloud, to get a feel for Kelman’s Glaswegian speech rhythms. With
a little practice, one develops an inner ear for the writing.
There is of course an air of mystery hanging over much of the story—Why did
Eddie leave for London? Why has he come back? Has he in fact been in prison?
Kelman is careful not to dispel these mysteries, and students should be encouraged
not to spend too much time on fanciful solutions to problems the story itself re-
fuses to answer.
Instead, Kelman seems to want us to stay on the literal level of the story: a
world in which men of all ages sit in pubs drinking, waiting for the next dole check
to come through; where new curtains in a pub, and a friend drinking in a differ-
ent establishment, signify that a city like Glasgow has changed tremendously in
three years. By the story’s conclusion, we’re apt to believe not that Eddie Brown
has just been released from prison, but that he’s just landed back in it.

Eavan Boland
In “Anorexic,” Boland adopts the persona of a young woman suffering from anorexia
nervosa, disciplining the unruly and unholy female body by starving it into submission,
and in the process effacing the secondary characteristics of female sexuality. The poem
is an acerbic exploration of the strange logic of anorexia, in which a woman carries
out the sexualized torture which the culture at large both sanctions and absolutely de-
nies. Instructors may wish to introduce Muldoon’s poem “Aisling,” as well, which
moves the act of self-starvation into both the male and the Irish political realms.
Boland’s “The Journey” allies itself with the great journey poems of the Western
tradition: Virgil’s Aeneid (explicitly through the epigraph), Dante’s Divine Comedy.
As Dante is guided in his journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven by the poet
Virgil, so Boland imagines herself in the capable hands of Sappho, the classical fore-
bear of women’s poetry. The poem might be discussed in light of Woolf’s sugges-
tion in A Room of One’s Own that women writers must learn to think back through
their poetic mothers, and construct a useable women’s literary history.
“The Pomegranate”—beautifully read by Boland on our CD—also imaginatively
reinhabits mythic terrain, in this case the story of Persephone and Hades (hence
another myth of the underworld), which Boland implicitly likens to the story of
the Fall in Genesis by her focus on the pomegranate—a version of Eve’s apple.
Imaginatively identifying herself both with the lost daughter and the bereaved
mother (and with Hades as well?), Boland writes again about the power of think-
ing through literary history and through myth. So too with “A Woman Painted on
a Leaf,” which adopts and adapts the story of the Sibyl of Cumae. The sibyl fore-
told the future and inscribed her verse prophecies on leaves; they were set at the
mouth of her cave and, if not collected and read, were scattered by the winds. The
poem closes with Sibyl’s words, “Let me die”: she was granted by the god Apollo
eternal life, but not eternal youth. In wishing for a poem “I can die in,” the speaker
echoes the Sibyl’s words—and we come to recognize that the poet is herself “a
woman painted on a leaf,” in this case the leaves of her books of poetry.
614 Whose Language?

In teaching “Mise Eire”—a poem as resolutely set against the kind of senti-
mental, nationalist nostalgia as is Yeats’s “Easter 1916,” or the writing of Joyce—
teachers may want to present an English translation of Padraic Pearse’s “Mise
Eire,” to which Boland’s poem responds:
I am Ireland:
I am older than the Old Woman of Beare.
Great my glory:
I that bore Cuchulainn the valiant.
Great my shame:
My own children that sold their mother.
I am Ireland:
I am lonelier than the Old Woman of Beare.
Great my pain:
Enemies ever torturing me.
Great my sorrow:
Dead the people in whom I put hope.
Joyce said of this kind of sentimentalized nostalgia, that the Irish too much loved
to hug their chains; in her poem Boland rejects the notion that a return to the
Irish language itself will somehow undo the historical suffering of the Irish people:
“I won’t go back to it.”

Paul Muldoon
Paul Muldoon’s poems will pose pretty significant difficulties for many students—es-
pecially, perhaps, those who are good readers of poetry, adept at “translating” a poet’s
elusive or seemingly ambiguous language into a more-or-less coherent “reading.”
Muldoon’s work largely resists this kind of paraphrasing; his poetry is most often
structured around scenes of real mystery, and insists that the mystery be experienced,
and accepted, rather than mastered. When we agree to wrestle with Muldoon’s
poems, we must do so knowing that we will lose (and therein, we will win).
“Cuba” takes as its occasion the famous Cuban Missile Crisis—the “missiles of
October,” 1962. The first two stanzas of the poem unfold rather smoothly: a nar-
rative in which the small daily events that make up a life (a dance, breakfast-table
quarreling) are juxtaposed against a crisis of world-historical dimension; Muldoon
derives some mild humor from the fact that the Irish seem to have less confidence
in one of their own (JFK) than even the Americans do. The poem takes an unex-
pected turn in the last stanza, where those same everyday acts—in this case, a ca-
ress—turn the tables on the prurient inquest conducted by the priest.
“Aisling” takes a traditional Irish poetic form and deploys it to explore a very
contemporary problem—the hunger strikes carried out in Northern Ireland in sup-
port of the IRA’s demands for independence from the United Kingdom. The
poem manages successfully to combine the graphic, clinical details of slow death
 Whose Language? 615

by starvation (“a lemon stain on my flannel sheet”) with the mythological air of the
traditional aisling; the fact that advanced states of starvation cause the sufferer to
hallucinate serves in the poem as a kind of physiological bridge between the body
and the spirit. Instructors will probably want to connect discussion of this poem
to another poem about anorexia, Boland’s “Anorexic.”
In “Meeting the British” Muldoon reflects contemporary concerns about the
British role in Northern Ireland through the colonial experience of the Americas.
Similar in some ways to Rushdie’s “Christopher Columbus,” the poem imagines
its way back to a still-innocent moment in the British imperial project, before the
full force of its domination had been experienced. Marlow, in heart of darkness,
talks about the Roman ships that had sailed up the Thames, bearing with them
“The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires”;
Muldoon’s poem closes with a very literal rendering of this last phrase, with the
British introducing to the French-speaking native Americans smallpox, against
which they had no resistance.
“Sleeve Notes” is a loosely organized and loosely associational group of lyrics
provoked by twenty-one rock albums. Muldoon himself was born right around the
birth of rock & roll, and the history of rock largely parallel to his personal and po-
etic history; in this cycle of short poems, then, he explores the cultural, political,
historical and aesthetic influence of rock on his poetry. The albums referred to are
listed chronologically, from 1967 through 1994, and by registering his reactions to
each of them, Muldoon creates an imaginative personal, national (note the pres-
ence of the Irish band U2, Ulsterman Van Morrison, and Irish “wild goose” Elvis
Costello, born Declan MacManus), and international history of the period. Since
much of this music was made before our students were born, it will be helpful to
audition some of this music, and display some of the cover art, to fuel classroom
discussion. As you move toward the end of the sequence, some of the albums—be-
ginning, perhaps, with Nirvana’s Bleach—will evoke a more personal response from
at least some of your students, which can be put in dialogue with Muldoon’s poems.

Derek Walcott
A Far Cry from Africa
Walcott’s punning title suggests both that the speaker hears, from afar, the an-
guished cry of Africa, but also that the Africa of the western imagination is often
“a far cry” from the reality of Africa. The poem dwells and does its work in the
space between these two meanings, investigating the ways in which propagandistic
language allows us to commit violence against others, and how Walcott’s own dual
allegiances force upon him an awareness of this hypocrisy.
Wales
Describing the Welsh landscape in grammatical and poetic terms, Walcott asserts
a similarity between the way that language is used in Wales—with its native Welsh
falling into disuse, the linguistic situation of Wales is similar to what Ní
Dhomhnaill describes in Ireland—while asserting that “a language is shared / like
bread to the mouth,” ultimately holding the people together. This faith is based
616 Whose Language?

on the fact that the English-speaking Caribbean, like Wales, will continue to forge
an identity simultaneously through its two linguistic traditions.
The Fortunate Traveller
The word “fortunate” of the title comes to have a number of ironic resonances by
the poem’s end, and not just because it plays on Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate
Traveller: the speaker of the poem is “fortunate” in that his creature comforts are
well attended to both by the government agencies that support him and by the for-
eign bodies that attempt to bribe him, but the sharp contrast between the luxuries
he enjoys and the misery he sees all around him makes it difficult for him to feel
especially fortunate. (“‘You are so fortunate, you get to see the world—’ / Indeed,
indeed sirs, I have seen the world. / Spray splashes the portholes and the vision
blurs.”) His simple charge is to show mercy, or charity, as the New Testament teach-
ing requires; the protagonist realizes, however, that it is quite possible to dispense
charity (aid, relief) without a spirit of charity undergirding the operation—and in
fact, the more suffering one sees, the more one is deadened to the pain of others,
and the more difficult true Christian charity becomes.
The poem brings up the false charity that has propped up various colonial pro-
jects throughout history, including the Belgian ivory trade in the Congo that is the
subject of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; various of Conrad’s pilgrims, too, spoke of char-
ity, but instead robbed the continent blind. “The heart of darkness is not Africa. /
The heart of darkness is the core of fire / in the white center of the holocaust.”
Midsummer: 50 (“I Once Gave My Daughters, Separately, Two Conch Shells”)
The writing of youth is compared to separate stones dropped into the sea, which
lie separate on the sandy bottom; but as one’s career and life progress, those sepa-
rate stones start to form lineaments between themselves—form constellations that
surprisingly resemble those of the tradition one has (unconsciously) inherited, or,
as in Walcott’s case, those of parents that we have imbibed at a pre-logical level.
Midsummer: 52 (“I Heard Them Marching the Leaf-wet Roads of My Head”)
The invasion of the English language is imagined as a military invasion, trampling
the native language into the mud; Walcott, the poet, declares that his occupation
“and the Army of Occupation / are born enemies.” Thus the poet with dual lin-
guistic citizenship, like Walcott, is in a difficult position, as he had explored in A
Far Cry from Africa. The solution, in this poem, is to appropriate the materials of
English into his own language—to pin the poppies of English to his blazer, to let
them bleed and stand by, articulating their death.
Midsummer: 54
(“The Midsummer Sea, the Hot Pitch, this Grass, These Shacks That Meet Me”)
Another poem on the same theme: Walcott’s vexed relationship to the English lan-
guage and to the British literary tradition. The reference to “the sacred wood” in
the third line is, among other things, a veiled allusion to T. S. Eliot’s criticism, and
the way that his critical pronouncements for decades set the fashion, and made
and broke reputations, among British poets; his first critical volume was called The
Sacred Wood (and contained the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent).