Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Also by Nicola Allen

MARGINALITY IN THE CONTEMPORARY BRITISH NOVEL

Also by David Simmons

THE ANTI-HERO IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut
NEW CRITICAL ESSAYS ON KURT VONNEGUT
Reassessing the
Twentieth-Century Canon
From Joseph Conrad to Zadie Smith

Edited by

Nicola Allen
University of Wolverhampton, UK

and
David Simmons
University of Northampton, UK
Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Nicola Allen and
David Simmons 2014
Individual chapters © Contributors 2014
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To Philip Tew, whose encouragement and enthusiasm
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Contents

Acknowledgements ix
Notes on Contributors x

Introduction 1
Nicola Allen and David Simmons
1 Snags in the Fairway: Reading Heart of Darkness 13
David Bradshaw
2 ‘Hasn’t got any name’: Aesthetics, African Americans and
Policemen in The Great Gatsby 27
Nicolas Tredell
3 Urban Spaces, Fragmented Consciousness, and
Indecipherable Meaning in Mrs Dalloway 43
Andrew Harrison
4 D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the
New Century: Literary Canon and Bodily Episteme 56
Richard Brown
5 A Handful of Dust: Realism: Modernism/Irony: Sympathy 75
Richard Jacobs
6 Studied Ambivalence: The Appalling Strangeness of
Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock 91
Susie Thomas
7 “Come Down from Your Thinkin’ and Listen a Minute”:
The Multiple Voices of The Grapes of Wrath 109
Jennifer Butler Keaton
8 Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses Revisited 122
Linda Wagner-Martin
9 Time, Space, and Resistance: Re-Reading George
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four 134
Lawrence Phillips
10 Lucky Jim: The Novel in Unchartered Times 146
Nicola Allen and Wasfi Shoqairat
11 Six Myths of On the Road, and Where These Might Lead Us 161
R. J. Ellis

vii
viii Contents

12 ‘Hundred-per-Cent American Con Man’: Character in

Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 175
David Simmons
13 Herzog’s Masculine Dilemmas, and the Eclipse of
the Transcendental “I.” 187
Gloria L. Cronin
14 Beyond Postmodernism in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark 206
Claire Allen
15 Gender Vertigo: Queer Gothic and Angela Carter’s
Nights at the Circus 221
Sarah Gamble
16 Whole Families Paranoid at Night: Don DeLillo’s White Noise 235
Martyn Colebrook
17 Hooked on Classics: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
25 Years On 250
Sonya Andermahr
18 Remembering and Disremembering Beloved:
Lacunae and Hauntings 266
Gina Wisker
19 Embracing Uncertainty: Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha
of Suburbia and The Black Album 281
Susan Alice Fischer
20 Samad, Hancock, the Suburbs, and Englishness:
Re-reading Zadie Smith’s White Teeth 294
Philip Tew

Select Bibliography 310

Index 312
Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all of the contributors for their excellent work
and persistence with what was, at times, a very difficult project to bring to
fruition. Extra thanks are due to Lawrence Phillips, Nicolas Tredell, David
Bradshaw, and Richard Brown for their suggestions of other possible con-
tributors. The collection was originally conceived during conversations with
Philip Tew and Steven Barfield, and we owe a debt of gratitude to them for
providing inspiration for the project. We would also like to thank Palgrave
Macmillan for making the book possible and being so supportive of the proj-
ect from the beginning of our relationship with them. We owe a huge debt
of gratitude to our families who have always provided love and encourage-
ment throughout the long process of putting the collection together.

ix
Notes on Contributors

Claire Allen is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of

Northampton; she has published several articles and chapters on British
and American twentieth century and millennial fiction. Her recent publi-
cations include: ‘Young Protagonists in the Contemporary London Novel:
Hanif Kureishi and Rupert Thompson’, in Literary London (December 2008)
and ‘Wampeters and Foma? Misreading Religion in Cat’s Cradle and The
Book of Dave’, in David Simmons (ed.) New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut
(2009). She has also made regular contributions to the Routledge Annotated
Bibliography of English Studies.
Nicola Allen is Lecturer in English at the University of Wolverhampton.
Her recent publications include: Marginality in the Contemporary British
Novel (2008), ‘The Frankfurt School and Chuck Palahnuick’s novels;
Lullably, Survivor and Haunted’ (co-written with David Simmons) in Critical
Engagements (Autumn/Winter 2009), ‘The Bald and the Beautiful: Shaven-
headed Women in Jim Crace’s Being Dead (1999) and The Pesthouse (2007)’
Critical Engagements 2:2 ( July 2009), ‘Slime and Western Man: Lovercraft in
the Time of Modernism’ (co-written with Gerry Carlin) in New Critical Essays
on H. P. Lovecraft, edited by David Simmons (2013), ‘The Lapsarian World
and Social Class in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials’ in Critical Perspectives
on Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials: Essays on the Novels, the Film and the
Stage Productions, edited by Katherine Cox and Steven Barfield (2011), ‘“The
Perfect Hero for His Age”: Christopher Boone and the Role of Logic in the
Boy Detective Narrative’, in Michael Cornelius (ed.) Essays on the Fiction of
Boy Detectives (2010).
Sonya Andermahr is Course Leader for the MA in Modern English Studies
and Reader in English Literature at the University of Northampton. She
has published extensively in the field of twentieth-century literature and
is an expert in contemporary women’s writing, especially Anglo-American
literature, modern British fiction, and feminist theory and pedagogy.
She is a member of the UK Network for Modern Fiction Studies and the
Contemporary Women’s Writing Network. She is also Associate Editor of
Critical Engagements: A Journal of Criticism and Theory and Associate Editor
of Contemporary Women's Writing. Her recent publications include: Trauma
Narratives and Herstory (co-edited with S. Pellicer-Ortin, 2013), Angela
Carter: New Critical Readings (co-edited with L. Phillips, 2012), ‘Gender
and the student experience: teaching feminist writing in the post-feminist
classroom’ in: A. Ferrebe, and F. Tolan, (eds.) Teaching Gender (2012).
‘Mourning, melancholia and maternal loss: Kim Edwards’s “The Memory
x
 Notes on Contributors xi

Keeper’s Daughter” in Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women’s

Liberation, 37 (1) (2011).
David Bradshaw is Professor and Chair of the English Faculty Board at
Worcester College, Oxford. He specializes in late nineteenth and early
twentieth-century literature. As well as The Hidden Huxley (1994), he has
edited a number of novels, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Women
in Love, Decline and Fall, The Good Soldier and Brave New World. He has also
edited A Concise Companion to Modernism (2003), A Companion to Modernist
Literature and Culture (2006: with Kevin J. H. Dettmar) and The Cambridge
Companion to E. M. Forster (2007), and has written many articles on litera-
ture, politics and ideas in the period 1880–1945, especially in relation to the
work of Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and W. B. Yeats.
Richard Brown is Reader in Modern Literature at the University of Leeds.
The main focus of Richard’s research is modern literature and especially the
work of James Joyce and selected contemporary British novelists. As well as
a wide variety of articles and conference papers in these and other areas,
Richard has published four books on Joyce: James Joyce and Sexuality (1985),
James Joyce: A Postculturalist Perspective (1992), Joyce, "Penelope" and the Body
(2006) and, most recently, the 450-page Companion To James Joyce (2008),
which combines new readings of Joyce’s texts with essays placing his work
in various cultural contexts around the world. Since starting it in 1980, he
has been co-editor of The James Joyce Broadsheet, a journal which continues
to publish articles, book reviews, illustrations, news and other material
connected to the work of Joyce, three times a year.
Jennifer Butler-Keaton studied Professional Writing and Women’s Studies
as an undergraduate and received her MA in English from the University
of North Alabama in 2009. Her graduate focus was American literature,
and her thesis topic was heteroglossia in the works of John Steinbeck. She
has also presented conference papers on a variety of pop culture topics,
including The Colbert Report, Firefly, and Lost. She is currently the Program/
Publicity Coordinator at Florence-Lauderdale Public Library in Florence,
Alabama. Among her projects is an annual interdisciplinary series on a
scholarly topic. Her most recent project is a series celebrating the 75th anni-
versary of The Grapes of Wrath and includes presentations from literature
and history scholars, film screenings, and theatrical performance. She has
helped launch several library programs, such as television premiere parties
and public discussions on popular films. She has also taught English at the
University of North Alabama and Columbia State Community College.
Her non-profit work includes serving on the boards of directors for Rape
Response and Florence Main Street.
Martyn Colebrook received his PhD from the University of Hull for a the-
sis focusing on the works of Iain Banks. He has wider research interests in
xii Notes on Contributors

contemporary American literature, transgression and contemporary culture,

and apocalypse fictions. Martyn has also published a number of chapters
on topics including Paul Auster, J. G. Ballard, Don DeLillo, The Gothic,
Terrorism, novelistic representations of the Yorkshire Ripper, and Scottish
Crime Fiction. He is currently editing a collection of essays focusing on
Jeanette Winterson and co-editing one on Iain Banks.
Gloria L. Cronin teaches African-American, Jewish-American, Women’s and
Twentieth Century Anglo-American literatures, Postcolonial literature, and
Contemporary Theory at Brigham Young University. Professor Cronin is co-
editor of The Saul Bellow Journal and has served as Executive Director of the
International Saul Bellow Society since 1991. She has published widely in the
fields of Jewish-American and African-American literatures. In 1990 she was
one of three founders of the American Literature Association, which she con-
tinues to serve on as Board Member and Executive Director. She has served
the National Endowment for the Humanities, and for the past 15 years she
has run a variety of Symposia for the American Literature Association.
R. J. Ellis did his first degree and PhD at Exeter University, and has taught at
Exeter University, Staffordshire University, University of Wisconsin, Leicester
University and Nottingham Trent University. In the summer of 2010 he was
a Visiting Fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University and
in the Spring of 2011 a visiting Fellow at IFUSS in the University of Illinois
Urbana Champaign. He has written over 80 articles and books, mainly in
his central research areas, The Beats and Beat Writing and African-American
Writing and Culture. He is a Fellow of the English Association and is cur-
rently Chair of the British Association of American Studies Library and
Resources Sub-Committee. He is also the Research Coordinator for American
and Canadian Studies, University of Birmingham and an Editorial Advisor
and Commissioning Editor (American Texts) for Trent Editions. He was the
Curator of the ‘Jack Kerouac : Back On the Road’ exhibition at the University
of Birmingham’s Barber Institute, featuring the famous 1951 original manu-
script ‘scroll’ of Kerouac’s On the Road (displayed in Britain for the first time).
The exhibition ran between 3 December 2008 and 28 January 2009.
Susan Alice Fischer is Associate Professor of English at Medgar Evers College
of the City University of New York. She is Associate Editor of the journal
Changing English: Studies in Reading and Culture, published by Taylor &
Francis in the UK. Her recently published work includes essays on women’s
London novels and on Rachel Lichtenstein’s Rodinsky's Room. She is working
on a book on contemporary women writing about London. She received her
PhD at the University of London Institute of Education and her first degree
at the Università degli Studi di Salerno (Italy).
Sarah Gamble is a specialist in contemporary women’s writing and gen-
der theory. She has a particular interest in the work and career of Angela
 Notes on Contributors xiii

Carter: she is the author of Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line (1997)
and Angela Carter: A Literary Life (2005), and the editor of The Fiction of
Angela Carter: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (2001). She is also the edi-
tor of The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism (2001, 2008).
Recent projects include a monograph on Angela Carter and the Gothic for
University of Wales Press, and a study of twenty-first-century women writ-
ers, co-written with Professor Lucie Armitt of the University of Salford.
Andrew Harrison is Lecturer in English Literature and Director of the
D. H. Lawrence Research Centre in the School of English at the University of
Nottingham. He has published widely on Lawrence and literary modernism;
he is currently writing the volume on Lawrence for the Blackwell Critical
Biographies series. His recent publications include: ‘The regional modern-
ism of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce’ in N. Alexander. and J. Moran (eds),
Regional Modernisms (2013), ‘Meat-lust: An Unpublished Manuscript by
D. H. Lawrence’ Times Literary Supplement (29 March 2013), and ‘The White
Peacock and “The School of Lorna Doone”’ D. H. Lawrence Review 38:1 (2013).
Richard Jacobs graduated from the University of Oxford and was Head of
English at a sixth-form College in Horsham before joining the University
of Brighton, where he is Principal Lecturer in English Literature in the
Faculty of Arts (School of Humanities, Falmer). His published work includes
A Beginner’s Guide to Critical Reading: an Anthology of Literary Texts (2001),
alongside many articles on English literature and English in education.
Lawrence Phillips is Head of Regent American College and Professor of
English and Cultural Criticism. He has written widely on the literary repre-
sentation of the urban (particularly London), Victorian writing and empire
(particularly in the work of Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London), and
contemporary British Fiction. He is the author or editor of six books and
numerous peer-reviewed chapters and essays. Lawrence is the co-editor of
the Bloomsbury/Continuum series Studies in the City, associate director of
the UK Network for Modern Fiction Studies, and co-editor of the journal
Critical Engagements: A Journal of Criticism and Theory.
David Simmons lectures in American Literature and Screen Studies at the
University of Northampton. He is the author of The Anti-Hero in the American
Novel: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut (2008). He has also published
several edited collections and articles as well as chapters on American fic-
tion, film and television. He has written on a wide range of issues relating
to popular twentieth-century American Literature including the Anglophile
tendencies of H. P. Lovecraft (Symbiosis, 2007), and has edited a collection
entitled New Critical Essays on H. P. Lovecraft (2013); he has also written on
1960s fictional reconfigurations of the cowboy figure (Paperback Westerns:
A Collection of Critical Essays, 2008); and the novels of Chuck Palahniuk
(Chuck Palahniuk: Beyond Fight Club, 2008).
xiv Notes on Contributors

Wasfi Shoqairat teaches English Literature at Al-Hussein bin Talal University

in Jordan. He was awarded his PhD in English Literature in 2006 for a thesis
which researched representations of Arabia and North Africa in twentieth-
century English novels and prose. His research interests include the modern
novel, postcolonial studies, and cultural theory. His publications include
‘Anglo-American Identity and Romanticizing Arabia: Wilfred Thesiger’s
Arabian Sands and Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky’ (2010), and ‘Between
Orientalism and Post-modernism: Robert Irwin’s Fantastic Representations
in The Arabian Nightmare’ (2011).

Philip Tew is Professor of English (post-1900 Literature) at Brunel, elected

Director of the UK Network for Modern Fiction Studies, Director of the
Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW), co-editor of both Critical
Engagements and of Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations.
He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the Royal Society
of Literature. He was invited to join the editorial board of the US-based
journal, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. His monographs include:
B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading (2001), The Contemporary British Novel (2004),
Jim Crace: A Critical Introduction (2006), and Zadie Smith (2009). To date he
has edited four collections in the field of contemporary British Fiction:
Contemporary British Fiction, with Richard J. Lane and Rod Mengham (2003);
British Fiction Today: Critical Essays with Rod Mengham (2006); Teaching
Contemporary British Fiction (special issue of Anglistik und Englischunterricht)
with Steve Barfield, Anja Muller-Wood and Leigh Wilson (Universitätsverlag
Winter, 2007); and Re-Reading B. S. Johnson with Glyn White (2007). He is
also co-editor of several book series, including Palgrave Macmillan’s New
British Fiction Series and the new Continuum Handbook Series. He has
numerous other publications in various fields.

Susie Thomas teaches for Delaware University in London. She has written
Willa Cather (1989) and also on Aphra Behn and Jennifer Johnston. She
has published extensively for Literary London, which is the first and only
journal to provide a common forum for scholars and students engaged
specifically in the study of London and literature.

Nicolas Tredell has written 18 books on topics that include Shakespeare,

Dickens, Conrad, Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner, C. P. Snow, Martin Amis, and
literary and film theory. His most recent books are a study of Dickens’s Great
Expectations and David Copperfield (2013), and a monograph, C. P. Snow:
The Dynamics of Hope (2012). He has also contributed around 300 essays,
articles, reviews and interviews to journals in the UK and USA (including
the Independent newspaper, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary
Supplement, PN Review, the Review of Contemporary Fiction and Victorian
Poetry). He is currently Consultant Editor of Palgrave Macmillan’s Readers’
Guides to Essential Criticism.
 Notes on Contributors xv

Linda Wagner-Martin is Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English at

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She previously taught at
Michigan State University. She has won teaching awards and has been a spon-
sor of many women’s groups on both campuses. She has been a Guggenheim
fellow, a Bunting Institute fellow, a senior National Endowment for the
Humanities fellow, and (twice) a resident at the Rockefeller Foundation Study
Centre in Bellagio, Italy. She has been president of a number of professional
groups, including the American literature division of the Modern Language
Association and, currently, the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Among her
fifty edited and written books are biographies of Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein,
Ellen Glasgow, Barbara Kingsolver, and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald; The Oxford
Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995) and its accompany-
ing anthology (1996 with Cathy N. Davidson); Telling Women’s Lives: The
New Biography; and The Modern American Novel, 1914–1945 (1990) followed
by The Mid-Century American Novel, 1935–65 (1997). Among recent books
are The Portable Edith Wharton (2003) and William Faulkner: Six Decades
of Criticism (2002). She is presently completing a study of the 1930s in
American literature.
Gina Wisker is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Higher Education at
the University of Brighton where she teaches literature, and is head of the cen-
tre for learning and teaching. Gina’s specialisms are in postcolonial, women’s
writing and the Gothic, particularly horror. Gina has written numerous essays
on the Gothic and horror of Angela Carter, Slyvia Plath, Nalo Hopkinson,
Toni Morrison, women writers from the Caribbean and the Far East, includ-
ing Erna Brodber, Catherine Lim, Beth Yahp, and many essays on contempo-
rary women’s vampire writing. Her books include Horror Fiction (2005), and
Margaret Atwood: An Introduction to Critical Views of her Fiction (2011). Gina also
writes on postgraduate learning and supervision: The Postgraduate Research
Handbook (2nd edn, 2007) and The Good Supervisor (2012).
Introduction
Nicola Allen and David Simmons

The twentieth century was not exactly filled with optimism when it came to
the novel. The form was believed to be in crisis at several points; with vari-
ous noted critics suggesting that it was ‘dead’ or at the very least ‘irrelevant’.
José Ortega y Gasset’s Decline of the Novel (1925) was the first in a series of
meditations on the subject of the novel’s future, largely aimed at predicting,
documenting and analysing its demise. Walter Benjamin continued this
trend when only five years later in his 1930 essay Krisis des Romans (Crisis
of the Novel) he suggests that the novel is ‘the most extreme and vertigi-
nous, the last and most advanced stage of the old bourgeois bildungsroman’
(304). In the 1950s and 1960s, contributors to the discussion included Gore
Vidal, Roland Barthes, and John Barth, and in the 1970s (amongst others)
Tom Wolfe predicted that journalism would displace the work of novelists,
who (he felt) had become disconnected from the social realities of American
post-war life. He characterised authors in an unremittingly caustic tone, as:
‘all crowded into one phone booth . . . doing these poor, frantic little exer-
cises in form’ (94). Indeed, in a century that famously saw a proliferation of
different movements and schools within literature the prediction that the
novel was at an end, or was somehow stunted by what were perceived to be
narrow Victorian bourgeois roots, sometimes seemed to be the only shared
belief amongst any (though never all) practitioners and commentators on
the form.
While critics throughout the twentieth century discussed the novel’s
(lack of ) continuing relevance based on its plot ties to the lived experiences
of a decidedly Victorian, decidedly middle-class existence, more recent
criticism has suggested that the form itself might be exhausted. In his influ-
ential book After the War: The Novel and England Since 1945 (1993) literary
critic D. J. Taylor lambasts twentieth-century fiction by comparing it to its
Victorian ancestor, and finding it wanting. In the introduction to his book
Taylor reminisces about one afternoon when he sat alone in his father’s
study ‘discovering’, for the first time, the delights of Charles Dickens’s
Dombey and Son (1848). Taylor proposes perhaps a rather romanticised
1
2 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

notion that the reading experience should be akin to the ‘discovery’ of

a ‘hidden treasure’, an experience which he feels has been lost in the
twentieth century, and he attacks what he regards as the illegitimacy of the
descendants of the greatest examples of Victorian fiction, railing against
the work of contemporary authors such as Martin Amis and labelling them:
‘the bastard great-grandchildren of a once unsullied family’. He insists of
Victorian writers such as Dickens that ‘no modern writer – certainly no
modern English writer – can hold a candle to them’ (p. xiv).
Fuelling Taylor’s critique is the concept, common to many of the other-
wise often diverse individuals and groups who attacked or expressed anxiety
concerning the novel throughout the twentieth century, that the writing of
literature has become a ‘profession’ – something carried out by eminently
respectable middle-class individuals who are intent on making a living –
rather than being driven by more noble desires to challenge hegemonic and
ideological structures and create work of great critical and artistic merit. Yet,
it is important to note that a wealth of critical material exists which explores
prose writing in the twentieth century and the important developments in
technique, form and content taking place in the novel during this period.
Richard Bradford’s, The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction (2007);
and Nick Bentley’s Contemporary British Fiction (2008) both discuss the
novel within the context of twentieth-century developments. While John
Brannigan’s Orwell to the Present: Literature in England, 1945–2000 (2003)
and Katharine Cockin and Jago Morrison’s The Post-War Literature Handbook
(2010) as well as Brian Finney’s English Fiction Since 1984: Narrating a Nation
(2006); Jago Morrison’s Contemporary Fiction (2003) and Dominic Head’s
The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000 (2002) offer
cogent readings of literature during the last fifty years of the twentieth cen-
tury, documenting a wealth of post-war innovation in the form. There have
been then no shortage of significant individuals and critics who have sought
to defend the twentieth-century novel or who regard it as worthy of study
and have created a significant (and rapidly expanding body) of academic
work on the fiction of the last century.
In addition to those listed above, Alan Sinfield’s Literature, Politics and
Culture in Postwar Britain (2004) as its title implies, suggests a symbiotic rela-
tionship between literature (and especially prose fiction) and the broader
political and cultural life in post-war Britain and thereby insists upon the
continued importance and relevance of the novel as a force to explain,
describe, and perhaps even, drive change. Sinfield’s book ends with a dis-
cussion of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), which situates the novel at
the forefront of a new kind of existentialism. Similarly, in the US Kathleen
Fitzpatrick in The Anxiety of Obsolescence (2006) refutes many of the claims
made by Gassett and others, proposing that comments about the death of
the novel are part of an attempt to entrench it as an elitist art form, separate
from television and film.
 Nicola Allen and David Simmons 3

Perhaps, most significantly, in The Modern British Novel (2001) the noted
literary critic Malcolm Bradbury also takes an oppositional view to Taylor
and his ilk. Looking at the state of the novel as we approach the end of
the millennium Bradbury refuses to share the kind of pessimism that has
provoked others to a denunciation of the form. There is, he claims, after
100 years of the modern novel, no signs of exhaustion. On the contrary
Bradbury believes there is growth and renewal, enough of both to take us
confidently forward into the third millennium. For Bradbury the novel not
only survived in the twentieth century, it actually prospered:

In the twentieth century the novel acquired a new experimentalism, a

new psychological complexity and a new raunchiness. Today, as popular
commercial product and a form of inquiring art, it is everywhere . . . The
novel over the twentieth century served many functions, at many levels;
it attracted to itself many great writers, and many kinds of writing. (p. xii)

Bradbury’s statement makes grand claims for the twentieth-century novel,

but these are fairly consistent with the ways in which the form has been per-
ceived during the last century. Perhaps we might wish to complicate some
of the claims – the newness to which he alludes could also be regarded (in
a longer context) as a return to pre-Victorian realist tropes within the form;
nonetheless, we might wish to construe such ‘developments’ within the
form. This collection gathers together essays which demonstrate an implicit
agreement with Bradbury, the chapters in this book similarly dispute the
notion that the novel reached its natural end-point during the twentieth
century; they chart the development of long prose fiction, and in so doing,
suggest myriad ways in which the novel continued to metamorphose and
transform itself, being adapted, developed and (in some of its incarnations)
actually growing in status and in aesthetic credibility – finally solidifying its
position as one of the principal art forms of the Western world.
In many ways the twentieth-century canon is fraught with the same
pressures and fissures brought about by the many (sometimes divergent/
competing) movements, both aesthetic and cultural, which are often used
to define the century more broadly. The increasing awareness of the lack
of representation in conventional art-forms for groups from ethnic minori-
ties, women, lesbian, gay and bi-sexual readers and writers, the working
classes and other minority groups was fuelled by culturally based move-
ments that originated in post-war consensus politics. Many of these move-
ments came to fruition in the widening of access to higher education that
began in the 1960s and 1970s and found support within the more inclusive
publishing industry and academy – one which incorporated and included
texts which were the products of the popularisation of ideologies such
as Marxism, Feminism and Gender Studies, Postcolonial studies, and the
advent of the broader interest in critical theory within the academy. This
4 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

also came to incorporate the ‘fashions’ and trends of the late twentieth-
century ‘Postmodern’ aesthetics, and later included revolts against these
movements. Such developments made for a lively and productive twentieth-
century academy, and, ultimately, impacted on what is, for the most part, a
much more socially diverse canon than that of the century before.
Marginalisation – through gender, class, race, sexuality and national
affiliation – became pivotal themes through which twentieth-century
fiction sought to address broader cultural trends; and the fact that the
twentieth-century canon is so hotly contested in many ways reflects the
opening out of the form (and the academy) that happened in this (all be it
too brief) widening of academic and novelistic discourse, and the variety of
voices represented therein. Indeed, the twentieth century was witness to a
proliferation of small presses from the now famous modernist presses such
as Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, Harriet Shaw Weaver’s Egotist
Press, the Black Sun Press and Hogarth Press to later presses such as Exact
Change, FC2, and Graywolf Press in the US. In the UK, Onlywomen Press
specialised in lesbian writing, and Sheba showcased black, working-class
and lesbian writers. Virago similarly championed modern classic texts in its
series of the same name, which showcased fiction by female authors that
had sometimes been overlooked at the time of their initial publication, or
had since fallen into partial obscurity (such as works by Sylvia Townsend
Warner and Leonora Carrington) but which Virago considered could now
be given the epithet ‘classic’. More recently these independent presses have
sometimes become imprints within larger publishing houses but many
remain independent. Though perhaps the limited extent to which either
Townsend or Carrington are taught within the academy (and the subse-
quent impossibility of their inclusion in a collection that is geared around
the most widely taught texts) suggests that there is still work to be done
when it comes to the formation of a truly representative canon. Indeed, this
democratisation of the canon has been perhaps less far-reaching than many
had hoped. For example, a number of sources have proposed that one of
the most important events in the twentieth century for the novel was Allen
Lane’s ‘paperback’ revolution, which began in 1935 with the establishment
of Penguin Books (through which Lane sought to sell quality fiction for the
same price as a packet of cigarettes). This endeavour that combined with
ever growing literacy rates in the twentieth century meant that for the first
time literature was both desired by and (relatively cheaply) available to the
masses; this did not mean that the processes surrounding the formation of
the twentieth-century canon can be considered to be much more inclusive
than any previous era; for example, a 2009 survey revealed that working-
class students make up only nine per cent of the students at Oxbridge
(http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/oxbridge-
colleges-fail-to-attract-workingclass-students-576302.html). It would be remiss
to propose that the ingrained partiality present in Western hegemonic
 Nicola Allen and David Simmons 5

cultural systems does not impact upon the kinds of texts that still make it
into the canon. Nevertheless, the twentieth century saw greater strides taken
towards liberating the canon from being the sole preserve of middle-class
white men than ever before.
During the twentieth century the very availability of the novel made its
content cause for concern. D. H. Lawrence’s banned novel Lady Chatterley’s
Lover (1928) threatened once again (as Joyce had done before him) to bring
sexually explicit content to the masses. By the 1930s and the 1940s, as part
of the wider Naturalist movement in US fiction, John Steinbeck produced a
series of documentary style texts that sought to expose the hardships faced
by the poor and dispossessed working classes, but to do so in ways that
eschewed Victorian romantic idealism and often found disfavour with those
moral guardians that wished to see the hegemony remain unchallenged.
By the latter half of the twentieth century writers such as Angela Carter,
Jeanette Winterson and Hanif Kureishi were producing fiction that was
still cause for shock. Like Lawrence before them, these writers continued to
deliberately defy categorisation at the level of form as well as causing con-
troversy because of their subject matter. In the US the popular interrogation
of deep-seated gender and racial inequalities during the 1960s had created
a space for writers such as Toni Morrison, whose work often brings together
these twin strands to focus on issues of representation itself.
Many of these authors were met with a great deal of support amongst
emergent academic movements (such as Women’s and Postcolonial studies)
within the wider academy during the twentieth century. Even figures who
have come to symbolise the conservative nature of the academy such
as F. R. Leavis exhibited a certain kind of radicality in the early part of
the twentieth century; Leavis famously drew the attention of the British
authorities when he proposed to teach passages from James Joyce’s Ulysses
(1922) whilst it was still banned in Britain. Leavis perhaps therefore finds
a place within a broader trend within the study of twentieth-century fic-
tion whereby practitioners and commentators would often consciously
seek to reclaim and validate lost, ‘overlooked’ or controversial writers as a
means of substantiating their own ideological platform. Alice Walker’s ‘In
Search of Zora Neale Hurston’ (1975) provides one such example of this.
Walker reclaimed Hurston’s work as an early example of black female fic-
tion, which, although it had been initially overlooked by the canon, was
reinvigorated and reclaimed by Walker who believed that Hurston’s writing
continued to resonate with the experiences of black women writers of the
1970s. These examples of reclaimed voices are evidence that much progress
has been made in democratising the canon but they are also suggestive of
a broader need to continue to reclaim once marginalised voices from the
past. Indeed in selecting to include only the most taught texts in UK and US
institutions this collection found itself limited from furthering such a cause.
Furthermore, in seeking to present an accurate picture of the texts that are
6 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

currently taught in universities this collection does not suggest the broad
and eclectic canon that we would like to see and that, in reality (perhaps
now more than ever) still needs to be fought for.
Instead, this collection aims to deliver a critically informed ‘snapshot’
of twentieth-century texts that are widely taught in the Anglophone
University system. It cannot, and does not, claim to be exhaustive, how-
ever, one of the driving motivations behind this collection was to provide
undergraduate students with a comprehensive selection of essays that they
might take forward with them as they explore and engage with what is an
interesting and much contested body of writing. It is hoped that the chap-
ters herein will offer intellectually rigorous analyses of established canonical
works by a germane variety of writers. In any such collection there are of
course notable omissions, and in compiling this particular text we chose to
exclude writing by Irish and Canadian novelists, not because they should
be deemed as any less canonical than those that we include, but because of
the wealth of excellent critical material on such writers that already exists in
the works of critics such as David Pierce and William H. New; and because
it seems time to respect the uniqueness of writer’s respective canons, rather
than to simply subsume them into the categories of British and American
fictions. This book also collates original critical material that moves the
debates surrounding canonical texts forward in some manner and includes
new applications of philosophical and critical thinking to the twentieth
century’s most established texts. The innovative nature of the approaches
that are taken in each chapter represent the very latest thinking by leading
scholars in their respective fields; who, cognisant of established knowledge,
are able to shed new light on a selection of widely discussed and written
about novels.
The chapters in the book are presented chronologically, and we start
at the beginning of the twentieth century with David Bradshaw’s chapter
‘Snags in the Fairway: Reading Heart of Darkness (1902)’ which considers
Conrad’s often controversial novel. In this chapter, Bradshaw outlines the
contribution Conrad’s text makes to readers’ understanding and expectation
of narrative in the twentieth-century novel, regarding texts such as Heart
of Darkness as key when it comes to defining the twentieth century novel’s
uniqueness from its predecessors. Bradshaw suggests that Conrad’s novel
distinguishes itself from nineteenth-century texts, not because of what
it conveys, but rather, by what it does not reveal to the reader: ‘it was in
coming to terms with unreliable narrators like Marlow [ . . . ] that the need
for textual disambiguation began to muscle in on the gentle art of reading
and the novel as we know it today began to take shape’. By the 1920s that
shape had begun to reveal itself, and In ‘“Hasn’t got any name”: Aesthetics,
African Americans and Policemen in The Great Gatsby’ Nicolas Tredell revis-
its F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece of American Modernism. Tredell reminds
the reader that, as with many of the novels discussed in this collection; the
 Nicola Allen and David Simmons 7

text leaves not just its own presence on the world, but also a vast critical,
pedagogic and publishing industry. Indeed, in the case of Gatsby, the novel
even supports a leg of the tourist industry, with fans still attempting to trace
the road to West Egg. Tredell emphasises that despite the various industries
the text ‘supports’, and the numerous ways in which critics have engaged
with Gatsby in the twentieth century; the novel’s dramatisation of the
promise of a more open society may be its most significant lasting legacy.
In the first of our essays to address British modernism at its height, entitled
‘Urban Spaces, Fragmented Consciousness, and Indecipherable Meaning in
Mrs Dalloway’ Andrew Harrison demonstrates the relevance of the relation-
ship between the spatial and the temporal within Woolf’s famous work.
Focusing on the nature of Clarissa’s partial rendering of her world, Harrison
argues that the novel’s political content cannot be separated from the
ambiguous nature of its central character and her mediating consciousness.
Richard Brown’s chapter ‘D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the New
Century: Literary Canon and Bodily Episteme’ focuses on another author
often included in the roll call of great British modernists. The chapter places
Lawrence’s novel in the context of the work of twentieth-century thinkers
such as F. R. Leavis and Michel Foucault. Brown discusses one of the most
infamous books of the twentieth century and acknowledges Lady Chatterley’s
place as one of the defining texts of the last century, highlighting the novel’s
influence on constructions of masculinity, language and taste.
Richard Jacobs’ chapter ‘A Handful of Dust: Realism: Modernism/Irony:
Sympathy’ considers Waugh’s fourth novel in the light of its realist as well as
its modernist counterparts and demonstrates the eternal appeal of the novel
as well as detailing its close fit with the difficult age of its conception. Jacobs
assesses the text’s impact on the reader and analyses some of the novel’s
intertextual and inter-canonical relations. Susie Thomas also discusses
a text that has begotten more than one film, when she revisits Graham
Greene’s Brighton Rock (1938) in her chapter ‘Studied Ambivalence: The
Appalling Strangeness of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock’. Thomas suggests
that Greene’s obsession with the Brighton trunk murder should be regarded
as confirmation of Greene’s belief in the worthiness of the unconscious as a
source of inspiration, rather than as evidence of some aspect of his character.
She suggests that the text not only resonates with the era of its conception,
but speaks also to a contemporary generation which perhaps freed from
religious constraint still remains contained by the ever present threat of the
ASBO and an endemic fear and suspicion of the young.
In Chapter 7 of this collection, Jennifer Butler Keaton revisits Steinbeck’s
epic novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) to provide a stimulating reading of
the novel that situates it within the canon as a literary artefact, rather than
simply a compassionate polemic. Butler regards the text as an example of
a Bakhtinian dialogic engagement with sociological themes, reminding the
reader that Steinbeck and Mikhail Bakhtin shared a belief in the potential
8 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

for language to provide the oppressed with opportunities to reclaim their

voices. Keaton seeks to remind us that social activism and literary merit are
not mutually exclusive. The implicit social impetus behind many examples of
the novel in the twentieth century is also discussed by Linda Wagner-Martin
in her chapter on William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942). Wagner-Martin
traces the book’s history alongside the U.S’s journey to racial maturity, pro-
posing that Go Down, Moses speaks to an abiding need to recognise, and
attempt to right, implicit and explicit injustice whenever it appears.
The years following the end of the Second World War witnessed writers’
engagement and responses to a world that seemed to some estranged and
forever changed. In Britain the city of London (as well as other urban centres
such as Coventry) had suffered badly in the Luftwaffe’s bombing campaigns,
many parts of the capital had been all but destroyed and writers such as
George Orwell found inspiration for futuristic dystopian narratives in the
bombed out landscapes that the Blitz produced. Lawrence Phillips provides
a stimulating psycho-geographical reading of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1948) in which he regards Orwell’s London as the city of perpetual resist-
ance against the forces of totalitarianism represented by Big Brother. The
city itself forms part of the ‘proles’ resilience to the effects of their corrupted
and corrupting government.
The immediate post-war period also saw immense social change in Britain
as the Welfare State aimed to even out some of the worst social inequalities
present within society. A new breed of writers came to the fore, and brought
with them an emphasis on the ‘middlebrow’ text, which was often aimed
at entertaining rather than elevating the mind of its reader. Kingsley Amis
is perhaps the most (in)famous proponent of this style of writing in Britain
and Nicola Allen and Wasfi Shoqairat discuss the social aspect of Lucky
Jim (1954) within the context of a Bataillean understanding of the role of
laughter in rebellion.
The next three chapters all examine the work of noted writers who
emerged, to varying degrees, out of the tumultuous changes taking place
in American society during the middle of the twentieth century. R. J. Ellis’s
chapter on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road discusses a much mythologised and
sensationalised novel, the central idea of which has become widely roman-
ticised by many who have not necessarily read the text itself. Ellis explores
how a canonical reading of Kerouac’s novel feeds on its mythical status and
interrogates the text’s relationship to constructions of the post-war genera-
tion’s sense of identity. David Simmons revisits Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over
the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) in the light of the current re-ignition of interest in
the immediate post-war period, brought about by the gradual erosion of the
established critical hegemonies of postmodernism and post structuralism.
Simmons focuses on Kesey’s countercultural hero Randle P. McMurphy and
offers a reading which repositions the novel as a counterpoint to the sup-
posed individualism of many of those within the Beat generation. Finally,
 Nicola Allen and David Simmons 9

Gloria L. Cronin charts Saul Bellow’s move from left-leaning to neo con-
servative ideologies in the novel Herzog (1964) and provides insight into
the novel’s reception since its initial publication. Like Ellis and Simmons’
respective chapters, Cronin similarly provides a convincing case for
Bellow’s text to be regarded as ‘a rich repository of morphing and troubled
American masculinities’, which are constructed in all their complexity using
techniques outside of the realist’s toolbox.
In her chapter on Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) Claire Allen re-values a
text that stands outside the boundaries of realism. Allen argues that it is time
to revisit Gray’s most famous novel, in order to investigate its postmodern
experimental techniques from a twenty-first century perspective, and to
consider Lanark in light of developments within critical and theoretical
approaches to postmodernism.
Perhaps one of the abiding legacies of twentieth-century fiction is the
rise of serious fantasy, especially as it is embodied in the magical realism
employed by authors such as Angela Carter whose work routinely encom-
passes both the events of everyday life and the dimensions of the imagina-
tion. In ‘Gender Vertigo: Queer Gothic and Angela Carter’s Nights at the
Circus’ (1984) Sarah Gamble demonstrates that the character of Fevvers,
and by extension Walser, can be read in the context of twentieth-century
debates surrounding the relationship between the gothic monster and the
human, she argues that Carter’s characters resist clear-cut dualisms in order
to situate themselves within the messiness of an evolving intelligibility that
we can perhaps situate within a postmodern framework. The prescience of
postmodern ideas and thinking to the late twentieth-century novel also
feature prominently in Martyn Colebrook’s chapter on White Noise (1985).
Colebrook cogently analyses one of Don DeLillo’s most discussed novels
through the prism of postmodern theory, proposing that DeLillo inter-
rogates the contemporary media infused landscape to comment upon the
effects the influx of technology is having on our identities as autonomous
individuals in late-capitalist society.
In her chapter on Jeanette Winterson’s novel Oranges Are Not the Only
Fruit (1985) Sonya Andermahr revisits perhaps one of the most written
about texts of the late-twentieth century. A landmark publication in many
ways, the novel has been much discussed since its publication in 1985.
Andermahr makes a case for its deserved status as a ‘classic’ text and regards
the text as a seminal ‘creation’ narrative that both sits within and yet
sometimes breaks free from a postmodern aesthetic. Gina Wisker revisits
another text considered as central in the exploration of minority issues,
Toni Morrison’s most famous novel, Beloved (1987). Wisker highlights how
the novel’s insistence upon layering narratives and its relationship to the
complex history of slavery and concepts of motherhood make it a text
that is vast in its scope and ambition, and yet does not stop at the level of
polemic, but in fact challenges our reading practices. Wisker argues that in
10 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Beloved Toni Morrison troubles the way we might be used to reading, and
enables a profound new vision of what the novel might encompass to come
to the fore. In her chapter, ‘Embracing Uncertainty: Hanif Kureishi’s The
Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album’ Susan Alice Fischer also reassesses
a novelist whose work has often been regarded in terms of its attitudes
towards race and liberalism in the western world, Fischer highlights the
radical role that laughter plays in Kureishi’s two most seminal novels. In
keeping with many of the novels included in this collection which utilise
comedic means to convey a serious message, Fischer suggests that Kureishi
uses humour to reinvigorate the form of the novel and to prioritise pleas-
ure in the reading experience whilst simultaneously engaging the reader
in an exploration of some of the most culturally sensitive issues that the
twentieth century had to offer.
Author and critic James Wood coined the term ‘hysterical realism’, when
reviewing Zadie Smith’s millennial novel White Teeth (2000) in his article
‘Human, All Too Inhuman,’ The New Republic Online (30, August 2001). Wood
uses the term to define novels that engage primarily with ideologically
driven, issue-led narratives and are (in his view) less concerned with ‘feeling’
and more concerned with ideology. Smith responded with a reply in The
Guardian, on 13 October 2001 entitled ‘This is how it feels to me’ in which
she outlines her parameters for realism:

there are still books that make me hopeful, because they function as
human products in the greatest sense. Bellow’s Seize the Day, Melville’s
Bartleby, Nabokov’s Pnin – works that stubbornly speak and resonate,
even in these image-led, speechless times. But it is a trick of the light that
makes us suppose these books exist in soulful opposition to more recent
examples of ‘dialectical devilry’. These books are works of high artifice,
and there isn’t a decent novel in this world that isn’t; their humanity
derives from their reverence for language, their precision, their intellect
and, more than anything, from their humour. (http://www.theguardian.
com/books/2001/oct/13/fiction.afghanistan)

In his chapter on White Teeth (2000) Philip Tew revisits this famous millen-
nial novel and suggests a reading of Smith’s work that seeks to understand
its dual celebration and interrogation of the complex ‘muddle’ of contem-
porary British identity. Tew embarks upon a comprehensive reading of the
text, seeking to move beyond the essentialisms concerning ethnic identity
that previous (primarily postcolonially) focused readings have encouraged.
Tew cites Smith’s own insistence that her work is ‘not really one thing, it’s
lots of different things’ (Gerzina 267), and suggests that in addition to her
discussion of race, other cultural interests and observations have informed
Smith’s text which should not be elided in favour of a dominant cultural
reading practice.
 Nicola Allen and David Simmons 11

Tew’s chapter indicates that the boundaries and limits of the twentieth-
century novel, as well as those of the tools we use to discuss it, are still being
fought over. The twentieth-century novel still owes much to its predecessors
and perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of this collection is Tew’s
suggestion that on the eve of the new millennium while the novel was still
a site for polemical activity, this does not negatively impact on the literari-
ness of the political text. In his review of White Teeth Wood noted Smith’s
quasi-Dickensian style, and perhaps in some ways this aligns her to the
kind of tradition that Taylor longs for, and suggests that despite the cries of
its demise, despite the attempts to radicalise the form, in one key respect
a line of inheritance can be discerned between nineteenth, twentieth and
twenty-first century ideals concerning the socially transformative poten-
tial of the novel. This all hints at a readership ready to engage with the
twentieth-century novel on fresh terms – ready to transgress boundaries
of popular and high/serious fiction and prepared to push the novel into
new and exciting directions but with an established aim at heart. As Zadie
Smith, our final twentieth-century author notes, now, more than ever,
‘literature is – or should be – a broad church’ (http://www.theguardian.com/
books/2001/oct/13/fiction.afghanistan).

Works cited
Benjamin, Walter Selected Writings: 1927–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Belknapp, 2005)
Bentley, Nick Contemporary British Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008)
Bradbury, Malcolm The Modern British Novel (London: Penguin, 2001)
Bradford, Richard The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction (Malden, MA and
Oxford: Blackwell, 2007)
Brannigan, John Orwell to the Present: Literature in England, 1945–2000 (Basingstoke
and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
Capote, Truman, quoted in Charters, Ann, ‘Introduction’, Kerouac, Jack, On the Road
(London and New York: Penguin, 2000) vii–xxiv
Cockin, Katharine and Jago Morrison, The Post-War Literature Handbook (London:
Continuum, 2010)
Finney, Brian English Fiction Since 1984: Narrating a Nation (Basingstoke and New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)
Fitzpatrick, Kathleen The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of
Television (Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006)
Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook, ‘Zadie Smith with Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina,’ Writing
Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk, Susheila Nasta (ed.) (London and New York:
Routledge, 2004): 266–78
Head, Dominic The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000
Cambridge: CUP, 2002.
Marr, Andrew ‘Death of the novel’ The Observer, Sunday 27 May 2001 pp. 13–14 avail-
able at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2001/may/27/artsandhumanities.
highereducation
12 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Morrison, Jago Contemporary Fiction (London: Routledge, 2003)

Shaffer, Brian W. Reading the Novel in English 1950–2000 (Malden, MA and Oxford:
Blackwell, 2006)
Sinfield, Alan Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, 2nd edn. (London:
Continuum, 2004)
Smith, Zadie ‘This is how it feels to me’ The Guardian, Saturday 13 October
2001 pp. 20–1 available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/oct/13/fiction.
afghanistan
Taylor, D. J. After the War: The Novel and England Since 1945 (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1993)
Walker, Alice ‘In Search of Zora Neale Hurston’, Ms. Magazine (March 1975): 74–89
Wolfe, Tom, interviewed by Bellamy, Joe David, ed. The New Fiction: Interviews with
Innovative American Writers (Urbana: University of Illinois press, 1974): 75–96
Wood, James, ‘Human, All Too Inhuman’, The New Republic Online. 30 August 2001,
available at: http://www.powells.com/review/2001_08_30.html
1
Snags in the Fairway: Reading
Heart of Darkness
David Bradshaw

Although there are many ‘infernal sly old snag[s]’1 for the reader of Heart of
Darkness to negotiate, like Marlow’s navigational challenge on the treach-
erous River Congo, there is always a way forward for the alert and probing
reader. Even before Marlow’s tricky and tenebrous tale has begun, for exam-
ple, the frame narrator provides us with a means of shedding light on it. The
crew of the Nellie, he discloses, are ‘tolerant of each other’s yarns – and even
convictions’ (3; italics added), so when he launches into his full-throated
panegyric on the River Thames in the sixth paragraph of the novella, it may
be supposed that his friend Charlie Marlow approves of what he says. As he
warms to his account of the Thames as a launch pad of imperial ambition,
the frame narrator’s sentiments become increasingly lofty, his language
grows ever more purple and his chest ever more puffed out with national
pride, yet it is crucial to bear in mind that the British pluck and plundering
he celebrates are entirely of a piece with the single-minded ruthlessness that
has driven Kurtz ever deeper into the interior of the Congo on behalf of his
Belgian paymasters:

Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame they all had gone out on that stream,
bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within
the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not
floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth? . . .
The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires. (5)

On the basis of this passage alone the reader might wish to conclude that
one of the most unshakeable ‘convictions’ shared by the crew of the Nellie is
a belief in the British imperialist mission, whether prosecuted by ‘sword’ or
‘torch’, and his jingoistic cast of mind also explains why the frame narrator
concludes the novella’s second paragraph by referring to London, proudly, as
not only ‘the biggest’ but also ‘the greatest town on earth’ (3; italics added).
Moreover, the notion that the frame narrator’s ideological leanings might
well illumine Marlow’s is given a considerable boost when Marlow himself
13
14 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

begins to speak: he commences his tale of African exploitation by evoking

the Roman invasion of Britain. Marlow draws a vivid picture of ‘civilised’
Romans encountering Celtic ‘savages’ in surroundings that would have
seemed incomprehensibly alien to them and yet which sound remarkably
like a cold-climate version of the Congo Free State, the vast personal fiefdom
of King Leopold II of Belgium, which Conrad journeyed within between
January and June 1890 and which disturbed him so profoundly: ‘Here and
there a military camp lost in a wilderness . . . cold, fog, tempests, disease,
exile and death – death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush’ (6).
In the late nineteenth century much was made of the British Empire being
the Roman Empire redivivus, so the fact that Marlow begins his tale about
the ‘Scramble for Africa’ by bringing to mind the Roman conquest of Britain
is noteworthy in itself, but he goes on to make an important distinction
between the Romans and the Victorian Britons. What saves ‘us’, the British,
Marlow argues, is our ‘devotion to efficiency’. The Romans, he suggests,
were more conquerors than colonists, out for what they could get, whereas
British empire-building has a more grand and noble purpose. ‘The conquest
of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a
different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty
thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only.
An idea at the back of it, not a sentimental pretence, but an idea . . . ’ (7).
And what is this ‘idea’? Well, when Marlow sneers at the Eldorado Exploring
Expedition because ‘[t]o tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their
desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars
breaking into a safe’ (30), we might be tempted to conclude that his use of
‘idea’ and ‘moral purpose’ are interchangeable. And if this is so, is Marlow’s
desperate desire to rescue Kurtz from himself and his Belgian employers at
least partly explained by Kurtz’s almost British sense of ‘moral purpose’ in
Africa? ‘Each station’, Kurtz believes, ‘should be like a beacon on the road
towards better things, a centre for trade of course but also for humanising,
improving, instructing’, an elevated and almost ‘British’ vision of the colo-
nial project that is dismissed as a ‘pestiferous absurdity’ (32) by the Manager
of the Central Station, but which lies close to Marlow’s heart.
As he sits in the Company’s waiting-room before his interview (and note
how Marlow’s progress from the outer room in which the two women sit
knitting via the waiting-room to the inner ‘sanctuary’ of the ‘great man
himself’ (10) anticipates his three-stage journey from coast to Kurtz) Marlow
cannot fail to observe ‘a large shining map’ (10) of Africa on the wall.
Predictably, he relishes ‘the vast amount of red’ on show – ‘good to see at
any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there’ (10) –
and is utterly contemptuous of the colonialist aspirations of other European
nations. No country is mentioned by name at this point in the novella, but
Conrad’s first audience would have been thoroughly familiar with the carto-
graphical colour-coding Marlow describes, so that when he says in reference
 David Bradshaw 15

to the map ‘I was going into the yellow. Dead in the centre. And the river
was there . . . ’, readers would have known that his destination is the Congo
Free State and that the city in which his interview is about to take place
must be Brussels.
As a boy, we are told, Marlow had ‘a passion for maps’ (7), he would ‘lose
[him]self in all the glories of exploration’ (8), and it is striking that even after
witnessing the chaotic ineptitude, casual viciousness and sheer brutality of
the Outer, Central and Inner Stations, his core belief in the ‘glories’ of the
imperialist endeavour remains remarkably unshaken. Returning to the coast
on his steamer and with Kurtz discoursing beside him, Marlow envisages the
stretch of river they are floating down as ‘the forerunner of change, of con-
quest, of trade, of massacres, of blessings’ (68; italics added). The eldorado
of Africa and the genocide of Africans are all too easily elided in his mind
and this quintessential colonialist mishmash (massacres and conquest; trade
and blessings) sounds more like another sound bite from the gung-ho frame
narrator or a titbit from the unhinged Kurtz’s report for the Society for the
Suppression of Savage Customs than the balanced reflection of a man who
genuinely believes that British colonialists are motivated by a more right-
eous calling than were the Roman invaders of Britain.
Sailing down the west coast of Africa on his way to Kurtz, Marlow belittles
the colonialist ventures of Britain’s continental competitors. He mocks the
French and Germans with equal gusto, summing up their settlements in
the Ivory Coast and Little Popo (at that time the capital of German Togo)
as no more than ‘a sordid farce’ (13), before going on to describe a French
man-of-war firing aimlessly ‘into a continent’: ‘Pop, would go one of the
six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke
would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech – and noth-
ing happened’ (14). The utter inanity of this bombardment prefigures other
acts of brainless ineffectuality in the novella, such as the ‘objectless blasting’
(15) at the Outer Station and the jittery pilgrims ‘squirting lead’ (45) into
the jungle, both of which are presumably carried out by Belgians. Yet the
main reason Conrad does not make their nationality explicit, I would argue,
is not just because the coloured map has done that for him, but because
Conrad, unlike Marlow, did not wish solely to denounce the horrors of the
increasingly infamous Congo Free State (as he had done explicitly in ‘An
Outpost of Progress’ (1898)), but to critique the mess, mayhem and hypoc-
risy that lay at the dark heart of the African scramble tout court. The guiding
irony of the novella is Marlow’s racist conviction that British colonisation
is efficient, purposeful, principled and exemplary, whereas Britain’s conti-
nental rivals are no more than incompetent ninnies. Conrad, on the other
hand, was aware that all European colonisation in Africa was being driven
by a craving for commodities, territory and prestige, and that any degree of
intervention by the European powers brought with it not just disruption but
often devastation.
16 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Nevertheless, while Conrad’s critique of imperialism takes in Europe as

a whole, Heart of Darkness was one of the key texts that helped to expose
the particular vileness of the Congo Free State, and alongside the yellow-
coloured area of map with its great, snaking river, Conrad provides other
details about the Company’s Belgian provenance that would have struck
a chord with a contemporary reader but which are rather less resonant
today. For example, one of the few colleagues Marlow warms to in Africa
is the ‘lank bony yellow-faced’ (29) foreman of the Central Station. We are
told that ‘the passion of his life was pigeon-flying. He was an enthusiast
and a connoisseur. He would rave about pigeons’ (29). This hobby and the
foreman’s obsessive interest in it could not have indicated his nationality
more precisely: modern pigeon-racing had its origins in Belgium and by the
late nineteenth-century the pastime was synonymous with that country.
Similarly, when Marlow returns to ‘the sepulchral city’ (25, 70) of Brussels
he makes uncomplimentary remarks about both its cuisine and its beer, two
things for which the city was (and is) actually renowned.
Marlow’s scornful attitude towards continental Europeans, and above all
Belgians, is almost as striking a feature of the text as his derogatory com-
ments about black people and may be sourced to the same sorry showcase of
late-Victorian bigotry. The ‘plumpness’ (10) of the Company’s chief execu-
tive, for example, sets an appropriately tubby model for his employees in
Africa: they are perfectly moulded to serve a ‘flabby, pretending, weak-eyed
devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly’ (16; see also 21). Equally appropriately,
the work-shy time-waster who accompanies Marlow on his overland trek
to the Central Station is described as being ‘rather too fleshy and with the
exasperating habit of fainting’. When he catches a fever he has to be carried
in a hammock, which proves an ordeal for those who must lift him up as
he weighs ‘sixteen stone’ (20), while the leader of the Eldorado Exploring
Expedition ‘carrie[s] his fat paunch with ostentation on his short legs’ (31).
Yet another ‘pilgrim’ is described as ‘a little fat man with sandy hair . . .
who wore . . . pink pyjamas tucked into his socks’ (39–40), and in general
Marlow’s Belgians are ‘unwholesome’ (41) and effeminate, with even the
chief accountant, who is at least dedicated to his job, pilloried as a ‘scented’
(18) ‘hairdresser’s dummy’ (18). Interestingly, Marlow’s short, effete and
podgy Belgians seem to have been drawn from the same stock prejudice that
prompted Agatha Christie to make her dapper Hercule Poirot so attentive
to his toilette, and they are but one of the many racial stereotypes that mill
around within Marlow’s Anglocentric head: ‘jolly lager-beer’ (10) drinking
Germans are also to be found in that constricted cranial space.
The Outer Station is a scene of ‘inhabited devastation’ (15), and from
Marlow’s perspective, a proud citizen of the first country to develop a
national railway network, nothing could be more indicative of Belgian
lack of backbone than a railway track going nowhere and a railway truck
lying abandoned ‘on its back with its wheels in the air. One was off’ (15).
 David Bradshaw 17

Similarly, Marlow tells us that the Manager of the Central Station ‘had no
genius for organising, for initiative, or for order even’ and his Station is in
a ‘deplorable state’ (22). Charlie Marlow, on the other hand, ever conscious
of his nation’s work ethic, engrosses himself in his salvage of the steamer
in an effort to keep his ‘hold on the redeeming facts of life’ (23). Indeed,
according to Marlow, all the sound and substantial work in the novella is
accomplished by men who are English or who have a degree of Englishness
in their make-up. The large canoe shipment of ivory which arrives at the
Central from the Inner Station, for instance, has been in the charge of
‘an English half-caste clerk’ (32). Dismissed as a mere ‘scoundrel’ by the
Belgians, Marlow feels this young man has ‘conducted a difficult trip with
great prudence and pluck’ (32). A similar ‘singleness of intention, an hon-
est concern for the right way of going to work’ (38) is evident in the pages
of An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship written by a ‘Master in His
Majesty’s Navy’, a volume that Marlow handles with ‘the greatest possible
tenderness’ (37), while the devoted harlequin’s taste for ‘English tobacco’
(63) endears him in a brotherly way to the pipe-smoking Marlow, who is
ever ready to contrast the spunk, focus and determination of the British
with the chubby flaccidity of their Belgian counterparts and the clueless-
ness of other continental nations.2 In this respect it is important to bear in
mind that although Kurtz has been ‘educated partly in England’ (49) and
‘[h]is mother was half-English’ (49), he has become, in his fanatical craving
for ivory and general moral abandonment, the degenerate embodiment of a
continent: ‘All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’ (49). And to his
un-making, as the patchwork clothing of his faithful harlequin makes plain:
‘blue, red, and yellow – patches on the back, patches on the front, patches
on the elbows . . . ’ (52). The harlequin’s particoloured attire is the shabby
counterpart of the colour-patched map in Brussels that details the African
possessions of the European powers.
However, Marlow’s conviction that the British do things properly while
her continental competitors are incompetent, self-serving amateurs shows
him to be sublimely unaware of or simply unmoved by the intense ques-
tioning of Britain’s national efficiency that had been gathering pace during
the last quarter-century. As G. R. Searle and others have shown, ‘efficiency’
had become a charged word by the fin de siècle and it was imbued with even
greater poignancy following the debacle of December 1899, when Boer
guerrillas inflicted three defeats on units of the supposedly peerless British
Army in the space of a week. In fact, it took the British three long years to
defeat the Boers and Arnold White’s Efficiency and Empire (1901) was one of
a number of anguished responses to what was widely perceived as nothing
less than a national calamity. By the time Heart of Darkness re-appeared in
book form in 1902, in other words, few within the governing class were
prepared to believe, as Marlow believes whole-heartedly, that the British
were paragons of ‘efficiency’.3
18 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

With Heart of Darkness open before him, Chinua Achebe accused Conrad
of being a ‘thoroughgoing racist’,4 but while it is simply undeniable that
the novella is riddled with offensive language and despicable slurs about
black people, should it be Conrad who stands indicted of racial intolerance?
It is Marlow, after all, who frequently uses the word ‘nigger’ (e.g., 9, 19, 23,
24, 26, 30, 45, 66) and repeatedly voices racial prejudices that were all too
common at the time. Some Africans are said to have faces ‘like grotesque
masks’ (14), while others have a ‘rascally grin’ (16) and ‘rolling eyes’ (35,
40): even the helmsman, dying in agony, is described as having a ‘menacing
expression’ (46). Kurtz’s ‘witch-man’ is demonised as ‘fiend-like’ (65) by
Marlow, the African jungle is felt to be coeval with ‘the earliest beginnings
of the world’ (33), and the cannibals on his steamboat are said to belong
to ‘the beginnings of time’ (40). Indeed, Marlow seems to regard Africa and
its indigenous peoples not just as out of step with the march of nineteenth-
century progress, but pariahs from the family of evolved mankind. He even
goes so far as to compare his transit from the Central to the Inner Station as
being like a journey ‘on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect
of an unknown planet’ (35). The jungle is said to draw Kurtz to its ‘pitiless
breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts’ (65) and to shelter
mere ‘rudimentary souls’ (50), ‘monstrous’ (36) and ‘inhuman’ (36) crea-
tures more akin to ‘prehistoric man’ (35) than Homo sapiens. As the cries of
the tribal witch-men, ‘words that resembled no sounds of human language’
(67), and the ‘deep murmurs’ of their fellow tribesmen create what Marlow
can only describe as a ‘satanic litany’ (67), Kurtz’s ‘barbarous and superb’
(67) paramour is more than likely shot by the departing pilgrims (67).
Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that this appalled (and appalling)
contempt for black people is another ‘conviction’ shared by all five men
on the Nellie. ‘Perhaps you will think it passing strange this regret for a sav-
age who was no more account than a grain of sand in a black Sahara’ (50),
Marlow says to his companions on the yawl, referring to the helmsman
whose blood has filled his shoes and whose functionality he misses, if not
the man himself.
So the obvious response to Achebe’s highly influential reading of the
novella, and one that a number of critics have expressed in a number of
ways, is that it is not Conrad who spouts the many slights and smears about
Africans in the text, but Marlow. His inability to think of Africans as human
beings from the same planet as himself is typical of a European colonialist
mindset that led to genocidal massacres not just in the Congo Free State
but elsewhere in the world, such as the piecemeal extermination of the
Aboriginal inhabitants of the British colony of Tasmania in the second
half of the nineteenth century, while Marlow’s own presence in the Congo
and his employment on a steamer that also carries a British Martini-Henry
military rifle, exposes, once again, if not the complicity of the British in
the horrors of the Congo (and we must not forget that the City of London
 David Bradshaw 19

was even more of a global financial centre in 1900 than it is today, and
was the conduit through which the wealth of the Congo was channelled to
and from Belgium), then at least the frailty of Marlow’s distinction between
proper and improper colonialist conduct. While a reader does not have to
penetrate too deeply into Heart of Darkness to discover why Achebe feels so
affronted by it, it is Marlow whom he should have placed in the dock, not
Conrad. Marlow doesn’t actually kill any Africans in the novella, as do the
Belgians and Kurtz, but on the evidence of his sustained denigration of black
people he is unlikely to have thought twice about it had the opportunity
arisen. And while this kind of speculation takes us beyond the text, it is
similar to Achebe’s intervention, which has had such a profound impact on
both the reputation of the novella (especially in the USA) and the way it
has been read over the past thirty years. (For a useful overview of how critics
have grappled with the vexed issue of Heart of Darkness and race – including
the valuable contributions of Brantlinger’s Rule of Darkness (1988) and
Firchow’s Envisioning Africa (2000) to the debate and other relatively recent
approaches to the book of a political, philosophical, historicist, biographi-
cal, deconstructionist, postcolonial, contextual, feminist and masculinist
hue, and in particular the landmark engagement with the novella by Ian
Watt (1980) – see Goonetilleke (51–69).)
Consistent with his repeated stress on the alien horror of the Congo
Free State, Marlow has a noticeably ‘stay-at-home’ (5) imagination. For
instance, he says the dress worn by one of the women who sit knitting in
Brussels is ‘as plain as an umbrella-cover’ (10); the chief accountant’s books
are ‘in apple-pie order’ (18); the ‘two-penny-half-penny river steamboat’
(12) clangs under his feet ‘like an empty Huntley & Palmer biscuit-tin
kicked along a gutter’ (29), while a reach of the River Congo is described
as having ‘high sides like a railway cutting’ (39). Furthermore, Marlow
describes the chanting of the Africans as ‘[coming] out from the black flat
wall of the woods as the humming of bees comes out of a hive’ (63), his
choice of the homely ‘woods’ to convey the vast immensity of the Congo
jungle providing a particularly revealing insight into his right-little-tight-
little mind. Other similes catch the eye for what they might reveal about
Marlow’s personal history. He says at one point, for example, that the
‘woods were . . . heavy like the closed door of a prison’ (56). Does this
and the analogy he chooses for each of his shipboard friends having two
addresses – ‘like a hulk with two anchors’ (47) – suggest that he may have
a criminal background? And does this in turn help explain why ‘the ships
wouldn’t even look at [him]’ (7)? Quite possibly, because the jaundiced and
sunken-cheeked Marlow is curiously out of place among his professional
companions, each living with ‘a butcher round one corner, a policeman
round another, excellent appetites, and temperature normal’ (47; see also
49). They are affluent City types and Marlow is a ship-less mariner-cum-
loafer (hardly the British work ethic personified) before he discovers zeal
20 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

and purpose in recovering Kurtz and the imperialist ‘idea’ he has brought
into disrepute.
Marlow seeks to transform Kurtz into an enigma, to throw a haze of
verbiage over his unspeakable savagery, because he wants to save not only
the man but the moral concept of empire-building, and it is the frame
narrator, once again, who prepares the reader for Marlow’s rhetorical wiles
and verbal ruses by schooling us to question the reliability of authority
figures from the beginning of the novella. So while the opening paragraphs
of Heart of Darkness are notable for their precise use of nautical terminology –
‘yawl’, ‘flood’, ‘mizzen-mast’, ‘come to’, ‘offing’, ‘sprits’, etc. – the bare truth
is that the frame narration and the tale by Marlow it encompasses will only
be told because of the incompetence of the Nellie’s crew. The ‘cruising yawl’
has been forced to ‘come to’ because they have misjudged the tide, which
is now rushing up the Thames from the English Channel, whereas the crew
had intended to sail down river towards the open sea. Wholly reliant on
the tide and wind, the Nellie is stationary throughout the tale, losing the
‘first of the ebb’ (77) at the end. These are not the kind of blunders one
would expect from a quintet of seasoned sailors held together by ‘the bond
of the sea’ (3), but we are also told, significantly, that although on ‘the
whole river there was nothing that looked half so nautical’ as the captain
of the Nellie, he is in reality a bigwig in the City and he only ‘resembled a
pilot’ (3; emphasis added). He stands on the prow of the anchored Nellie
looking as immaculately turned out as he is pathetically redundant and in
his combination of apparent authority and actual unreliability he could
not be a more fitting figurehead for the novella as a whole. Indeed, the
bungling crew and the jingoistic frame narrator stand at the portals of this
tale like the heads on the stakes at the Inner Station: they warn those who
approach it to beware. And just as the captain resembles a pilot, but lacks
the authority of one, Marlow, we are told, ‘resembled an idol’ (3); but he
does not embody or disseminate the truth, like a deity; he is more like an
‘idol’ in the Biblical sense of the word: a false god. He says he ‘can’t bear a
lie’ (27) yet he is intent on propagating them, and far more significant than
his fib to the Intended is his interception of Kurtz as he crawls away from
the steamer on all fours and his removal of the ‘valuable postscriptum’ to
Kurtz’s 17-page report for the International Society for the Suppression of
Savage Customs (71). Marlow is determined to do more than censor and
sanitise Kurtz; he wants to redeem the man and the imperialist ‘idea’ that
drew Kurtz to Africa in the first place.
According to Marlow, Kurtz’s ‘sympathies were in the right place’ and per-
haps this is why he regards his report as ‘a beautiful piece of writing’ (50),
only marred by its postscript: ‘Exterminate all the brutes’ (50). He places par-
ticular emphasis on Kurtz’s eloquence, yet the reader is given precious little
evidence of this. The snatches of Kurtz’s conversation that Marlow reports
are on the whole banal, yet we are told that the pages of his report are
 David Bradshaw 21

‘vibrating with eloquence’. The terse barbarity of the postscript, however,

makes this less credible – and not least because it is almost certainly Kurtz’s
ghastly recommendation to his superiors as to how they should continue
his endeavours after his death. Kurtz’s final words are equally unambiguous
once Marlow’s mystification of them has been set to one side. ‘The horror!
The horror!’ (69) could be ‘a judgment upon the adventures of his soul on
this earth’ (69), ‘an affirmation, a moral victory’ (70), as Marlow wishes us to
believe, but from all the textual evidence at our disposal it is far more likely
to be the last, bitter outburst of an unregenerate racist bigot (like Marlow
himself), a man painfully conscious of having lost his ‘civilized’ bearings in
the ‘savage’ interior of the so-called ‘Dark Continent’.
Kurtz is a workaholic, ‘an extremist’ (72), who has long lost sight of the
distinction between purposive exploration and murderous appropriation,
a man whose appetite for his job has degenerated into an insatiable mania
for ivory. Yet to what use is all this ivory put? Well, at the beginning of the
novella there is a reference to dominoes (‘bones’, 3), which at that time
tended to be made of wood or ivory, at the end of the tale, there is mention
of the Intended’s piano with its presumably ivory keys, and roughly around
the middle of the text Marlow tells us that Kurtz’s bald head was ‘like . . .
an ivory ball’ (48), reminding us that another use of ivory at this time was
the manufacture of billiard balls. The violence and disruption involved in
removing the ivory from the Congo and the sometimes trivial uses to which
ivory was put (and especially in Britain, where billiards was particularly pop-
ular at the end of the nineteenth century) could not offer a more damning
indictment of European depredations in Africa. Fittingly, when Marlow first
encounters the sallow and fading Kurtz he looks like ‘an animated image
of death carved out of old ivory’ (59) and immediately before he utters his
final words a tormented mix of emotions plays across his ‘ivory face’ (69).
Marlow has sworn ‘not to disclose any trade secrets’ (10, 57) and the ren-
egade monstrosity of Kurtz is the biggest trade secret of them all: ‘“Mr Kurtz’s
reputation is safe with me”’ (62), he says at one point. Kurtz’s greatest fault,
perhaps his only fault in Marlow’s eyes, is that he has strayed way beyond
‘permitted aspirations’ (65); he has taken to excess what Marlow has taken to
heart. But is anyone listening to Marlow as he tells his tale? Or does Conrad
further signal his distance from the seaman’s words, his racism, and his
blindly patriotic outlook, by suggesting Marlow’s audience is less spellbound
than slumbering during his yarn? For although the crew’s miscalculation of
the tide at the beginning of the novella is grossly inept, it could well be that
their failure to catch the first of the ebb at the end has a more mundane
explanation. Rather than being wrapped up in Marlow’s story, it seems pos-
sible that no fewer than three of his four associates have been put to sleep
by it. The frame narrator assures us that the crew of the Nellie is accustomed
to hearing about Marlow’s ‘inconclusive experiences’ (7), but, quite possibly,
this does not prevent all but the frame narrator himself from nodding off
22 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

soon after Marlow’s tale has begun. That not one of them ‘took the trouble to
grunt even’ (5) following Marlow’s delphic opening statement may be a sign
of the crew’s breathless expectancy, but it could just as easily indicate either
that they are asleep already, or their speechless dismay at the onset of another
of his wordy stories. Marlow’s is ‘the speech that cannot be silenced’ (36) and
his companions know full well that he will continue to speak whether they
are listening or not. Certainly, all but the frame narrator could well be dozing
towards the end of Part I of the novella: ‘There was not a word from anybody.
The others might have been asleep’ (27). Apart from a bit of enigmatic grunt-
ing, an ambiguous sigh and an interjected ‘absurd’ (47), Marlow receives no
feedback whatever from his auditors, and he self-centeredly assumes that
these noises indicate his listeners’ dissatisfaction with certain details of his
monologue rather than their uninterest in the whole of it, while his tale’s
conclusion is marked by an equally tell-tale silence during which ‘[n]obody
moved for a time. “We have lost the first of the ebb,” said the Director sud-
denly’ (77). ‘Suddenly’ may indicate he has suddenly woken up. The frame
narrator tells us that for Marlow:

the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a
haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made
visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. (5)

Just like today, ‘moonshine’ was a synonym for ‘moonlight’ at the time the
novella was written, but it was also being used increasingly to mean ‘foolish
or visionary talk’. By suggesting that Marlow’s audience prefer to shut their
eyes rather than open their ears, Conrad may be underlining his authorial
view that his Buddha-like seaman is but a trafficker in moonshine.
Just as his narrative inspires a ‘faint uneasiness’ (27) in the mind of the
frame narrator, so the reader is given many indications of Marlow’s less than
perfect ability to read his own experience. He says ‘[t]he essentials of this
affair lay deep under the surface, beyond my reach and beyond my power
of meddling’ (38), and for once he is being frank with the reader. Heart of
Darkness centres on the dog-eat-dog world of middle management. The
manager of the Central Station ends up as top dog because, unlike Kurtz, he
never becomes ill. He survives as the fittest in a Darwinian struggle which
Marlow observes but never quite sees. ‘Today’, the brickmaker tells Marlow,
‘[Kurtz] is chief of the best station, next year he will be Assistant-Manager,
two years more and . . . but I daresay you know what he will be in two years’
time’ (25). Marlow observes that intrigue, slander and malice are rife among
the Belgians; that they are motivated solely by the lure of percentages and
that there is an ‘air of plotting’ (24) about the Central Station; he notes
that ‘constant quarrels . . . about precedence’ lead the manager to order ‘an
immense round table’ (22) at which he presides as first among unequals,
 David Bradshaw 23

but Marlow overlooks the skulduggery which stares him in the face: the plot
to deprive Kurtz of life-saving medicines until it is too late for them to be
of any use. He tells us that ‘nothing came’ of the Belgians’ ‘backbiting and
intriguing against each other’ (24), but how wrong he is. He tells us that
he did not see the true significance of the sunken steamer at the time and
the reader wonders whether he has quite grasped its real meaning in ret-
rospect. By nature cautious and calculating, the manager’s view is that ‘Mr
Kurtz’s methods [have] ruined the district’ (57). His solution is to sabotage
the steamer in the hope that by the time it is salvaged and the rescue party
reaches the Inner Station, Kurtz will have died of his illness. The manager’s
guess is that it will be about three months before Marlow can raise and
repair the wrecked steamer. ‘That ought to do the affair’ (23), he reflects
ominously. The truth, as the Russian harlequin tells Marlow further on in
the novella, is that Kurtz has been ‘shamefully abandoned’ (58).
Marlow’s need for rivets, both metal and mental, is chronic. When he
becomes too insistent about his need for more of the iron kind the manager
suddenly draws his attention to the rogue hippo that is alleged to stalk
the Central Station at night. Marlow tells his comrades that he ‘wasn’t dis-
turbed’ (28), but he does not seem to have realised that the manager is hint-
ing that he might ‘accidentally’ find himself being trampled by the beast
unless he becomes less zealous in his salvage of the steamer; significantly,
there are innumerable rivets at the Outer Station but none at the Central
Station, despite Marlow’s repeated pleas for them. And the more insistently
Marlow demands rivets, the more the Manager emphasises the threat of the
hippopotamus: ‘No man – you apprehend me? – ’, the Manager observes to
Marlow, ‘no man here bears a charmed life’ (28). But still Marlow does not
seem to see what he is driving at, whereas one of the main reasons Kurtz
attempts to crawl back to the Inner Station from the steamer is because he is
all too aware of the danger which awaits him at the Central Station, where
the ‘old hippo’ (28) would be the least of his worries. With the dying Kurtz
on board and the steamer bound down river, Marlow comments that the
manager ‘took us both in with a comprehensive and satisfied glance: the
“affair” had come off as well as could be wished’ (67). But the reader senses
that Kurtz has not been taken in like Marlow has been taken in. His opaque
and wordy arabesques mask not just his determination to salvage Kurtz and
the imperial ‘idea’, but also his failure to comprehend the ‘covert plot’ that
has unfolded around him.5
Heart of Darkness flickers between illumination and obscurity, darkness
and light, and ‘registers its manifold preoccupations in a title which by sig-
nifying a geographical location, a metaphysical landscape and a theological
category, addresses itself simultaneously to Europe’s exploitation of Africa,
the primeval human condition, an archaic aspect of the mind’s structure
and a condition of moral baseness’ (Parry, 20). Yet the sequence of descrip-
tive switchbacks at the opening of the novella that contrast the ‘luminous’
24 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

offing (3) to the east of the moored Nellie with the gloom gathering over the
‘monstrous town’ of London to the west of it suggest Conrad may also have
shaped his African tale with a more specific African context in mind. In late
1890, the year in which Conrad journeyed up and down the Congo and in
which the explorer H. M. Stanley published In Darkest Africa, London had
been denounced as the vicious heart of ‘Darkest England’ by William Booth,
first General of the Salvation Army. The controversy generated by Booth’s In
Darkest England continued to engage public interest for much of the ensuing
decade and it was still lingering in the air when Conrad began writing his
tale in 1898. Heart of Darkness, it seems more than likely, is at one level a
contribution to the Darkest England rumpus.
As well as decrying Britain’s failure to deal with its grotesque social prob-
lems at home at a time when it was vigorously exporting British values
abroad, Booth’s book, among other things, sets out his proposal to remedy
vice and poverty by means of city and farm colonies for the homeless,
the fallen and the destitute. T. H. Huxley, ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, on the other
hand, was a vigorous opponent of any form of social interventionism and
vilified Booth’s scheme in letters to The Times from December 1890 to the
end of January 1891 that were published in book form later in 1891 under
the title Social Diseases and Worse Remedies and were also reprinted in his
Evolution and Ethics (1893). The Darkest England controversy, therefore,
was in full spate when Conrad arrived back in London from the Congo at
some point in January 1891.6 Almost immediately, he suffered some kind
of nervous breakdown, and he remained either in hospital or convalescent
in London until May 1891, but he could not have failed to be aware of the
furore Booth’s book had caused and it is this controversy, quite possibly,
that accounts for the fact that no fewer than five of the novella’s first seven
paragraphs conclude with the frame narrator’s gaze (and so the reader’s
attention) being tugged away from the brightly illuminated offing to the
murkiness which thickens over the heart of the Empire. By choosing a
frame narrator who breaks off from monitoring this gathering gloom to sing
the praises of the imperial Thames and extol the deeds of those who have
sailed down it to make London the ‘greatest’ town on earth, before turning
his eyes to the gloom once more, Conrad introduces his anti-imperialist
theme. In his narrow-minded ability to switch undisturbedly from gloom to
glory and back again the frame narrator personifies the kind of chauvinistic
Englishman who could exult in the adventures of those ‘messengers of the
might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire’ (5) who had
helped build the Empire, yet who is blind to the evils in his own back yard.
Marlow’s mind works in exactly the same way: he condemns the Belgians
and other continental Europeans at every opportunity, yet is oblivious to
the shortcomings of the British Empire and the inefficiencies and social evils
at its heart. Marlow, in fact, was just the kind of blinkered, empire-obsessed
Englishman that In Darkest England, at one level, was aimed at.
 David Bradshaw 25

The 1899 magazine version of the novella was called ‘The Heart of
Darkness’ but by the time it was revised and reprinted in 1902 the definite
article had been dropped. Like its early reviewers, some readers may be
content to link the title solely with the dark and impenetrable Congo jungle
that lies at the heart of equatorial Africa: Kurtz’s Inner Station is situated, we
are told, at ‘the heart of an impenetrable darkness’ (47) or, more simply, at
‘the heart of darkness’ (35, 67). Alternatively or in addition, the title might
be taken to refer to Kurtz and ‘the barren darkness of his heart’ (68), the
‘impenetrable darkness’ (68) of his final days. Then again, it could refer to
Brussels. When Marlow returns to the city it seems to him a necropolis, ‘a
city of the dead’ (11). The street in which the Intended lives is said to be ‘as
still and decorous as a well-kept alley in a cemetery’ (73) and the piano in
her family’s drawing-room stands in a corner ‘like a sombre and polished
sarcophagus’ (73). The word ‘sarcophagus’ means ‘flesh-eating’, ghoulishly
re-uniting the Intended with the ravening Kurtz, his mouth wide open
on his stretcher, giving him ‘a weirdly voracious aspect as though he had
wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him’ (59).
When Marlow arrives in front of the Intended’s house he recalls this vision
of the open-mouthed Kurtz and goes on to bring to mind the circumstances
of his removal from the Inner Station and of a drum beating ‘regular and
muffled like the beating of a heart, the heart of a conquering darkness’
(73). Finally, as we have seen, at yet another level the title may draw the
reader’s eye to the novella’s other capital city, London, the dark heart
of England and the British Empire. But if darkness in this novella is far
more impenetrable than some wispy period brume and envelopes all these
meanings at once, it cloaks, above all, the dark heart of Charlie Marlow.
And it was in coming to terms with unreliable narrators like Marlow and in
attempting to circumvent the snags he brings to the narrative fairway (such
as his deliberately jumbled chronology and his persistent use of obscure and
billowy phrases) that the need for textual disambiguation began to muscle
in on the gentle art of reading and the novel as we know it today began to
take shape.

Notes
1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong, Norton Critical Edition,
4th ed. (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2006), p. 34. All further page refer-
ences are to this edition of the novel and are incorporated in the main body of the
essay.
2. On ‘Marlow’s Victorian Ethic’ of Work, see Watt, pp. 148–51.
3. See Suzanne Raitt, ‘The Rhetoric of Efficiency in Early Modernism’, Modernism/
Modernity, 13, No. 1 (Jan. 2006), pp. 89–105, and Evelyn Cobley, Modernism and the
Culture of Efficiency: Ideology and Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
26 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

4. In the first version of his critique, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness, Massachusetts Review, 18 (1977), pp. 782–94, Achebe denounced Conrad
a ‘bloody racist’. The revised version of Achebe’s essay is reprinted in the Norton
Critical Edition of Heart of Darkness, pp. 336–49.
5. See Watts, esp. pp. 119–21.
6. For a comprehensive account of Conrad’s Congo journey and its devastating
personal aftermath, see Najder, pp. 123–46.

Works cited
Booth, General (1890), In Darkest England and the Way Out. International Headquarters
of the Salvation Army.
Brantlinger, Patrick (1988), Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914.
Cornell University Press.
Firchow, Peter Edgerly (2000), Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad’s
‘Heart of Darkness’. University of Kentucky Press.
Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A. (2007), Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkeness’. Routledge.
Huxley, T. H. (1891), Social Diseases and Worse Remedies: Letter to ‘The Times’ on
Mr Booth’s Scheme. Publisher.
Najder, Zdzislaw (1983), Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle. Rutgers University Press.
Parry, Benita (1983), Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary
Frontiers. Macmillan.
Searle, G. R. (1971), The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and
Political Thought, 1899–1914. Blackwell.
Watt, Ian (1980), Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Chatto and Windus.
Watts, Cedric (1984), The Deceptive Text: An Introduction to Covert Plots. Harvester.
White, Arnold (1901), Efficiency and Empire. Methuen.
2
‘Hasn’t got any name’:
Aesthetics, African Americans and
Policemen in The Great Gatsby
Nicolas Tredell

In the final years of the last century, a Guide to Gatsby criticism concluded
that ‘it is difficult to imagine a time when there will not be readers and crit-
ics who will want to take the road to West Egg, past the valley of ashes, to
Gatsby’s blue lawn and to the compelling vision of the fresh, green breast
of the new world’ (Tredell (1997), 166). As we move into the second decade
of the twenty-first century, there are still plenty of readers and critics taking
the Gatsby road, even though they are likely to be aware, or to discover, that
it is a highway with many hazards, perplexing forks and misleading or absent
signposts. Gatsby certainly remains a canonical text, in the sense that it is still
widely taught, written about, discussed, quoted and used as a benchmark – to
claim that a novel is an up-to-date version of Gatsby endows it with instant
charisma. A vast critical, pedagogic and publishing industry rests on this
slender work which hardly seemed set for canonical status in Fitzgerald’s
lifetime – eight copies still languished unpurchased in the publisher’s ware-
house at the time of his death in 1940. Its canonical standing has recently
been confirmed by the publication, in the Modern Language of America’s
‘Approaches to Teaching World Literature’ series, of Approaches to Teaching
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (2009) which collects essays from twenty-four
contributors on topics which include ‘Teaching The Great Gatsby in the
Context of World War I’, ‘Using a Heraclitean Approach in Teaching The
Great Gatsby’, ‘Teaching the Medieval in The Great Gatsby’ and ‘Using Music
to Teach The Great Gatsby’. The fertility of Gatsby, its openness to a variety
of interpretative approaches, is also exemplified by Lois Tyson’s Critical
Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide (2nd edn, 2006), which uses Gatsby to
illustrate the eleven critical perspectives which it aims to explicate, from
New Criticism to Postcolonial Criticism. But it is Tyson who also identifies a
problem with Gatsby which might seem to compromise its canonical status:

Almost all the theories I used [in this book] have led me to conclude,
in effect, that the novel is ideologically flawed in some way. If I put all
these flaws together, I come up with a statement something like this: ‘The
27
28 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Great Gatsby is a classist, sexist, homophobic, racist, colonialist novel that

romanticizes the evils of capitalism [and] glorifies dysfunctional love.’ (455)

Faced with these perceived ideological flaws, Tyson summons aesthetics as a

counterweight. Yes, Gatsby is ‘ideologically appalling, a fact we mustn’t forget’;
but it is also ‘one of the most moving’, ‘exquisitely written’, ‘lyrically beauti-
ful’ and ‘masterfully crafted’ of literary works. Rather than seeking to escape
or resolve this ‘contradiction’, Tyson tries ‘to sustain’ it as she continues ‘to
appreciate both the incomparable artistry of The Great Gatsby and the theories
that show me the multiple layers of its disquieting subtext’ (455, 456).
For Tyson, then, the identity and interchangeability of beauty and truth
which is affirmed at the end of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ – an equa-
tion which might have appealed to Fitzgerald, a keen Keatsian – is replaced
by an irresolvable estrangement. Beauty has no cognitive function and
political and ethical truth cannot partake of the aesthetic. To some extent,
this is a fruitful contradiction but it also seems, finally, like an abstrac-
tion from a complex reading experience in which the ideological and the
aesthetic are intermixed. It is useful here to invoke a concept which Hugh
Grady has applied to a text not wholly different from Gatsby, Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream:1 that of ‘impure aesthetics’ – ‘aesthetics con-
ceived as creative of an imagined realm separate from empirical reality, but
one that draws its materials from that reality’ (275). An approach based
on this idea contributes to ‘a new appreciation of the specifically aesthetic
content’ of a work and ‘a deeper understanding of [its] imbrication [ . . . ]
with the social, the political, and the historical, in its original context and
in our own’ (277). Such an approach also makes it possible to think about
‘art’s utopian potential – its ability to create visions of the nonexisting, to
embody desire and not just received ideas’ (276) – a potential which is surely
very relevant to Gatsby, which both examines and enacts the capacity of
the imagination to create visions of possibility and embody desire even as it
shows how vision and desire may be compromised, by received ideas and a
range of other forces. Gatsby’s ‘extraordinary gift for hope’ (6), his sense that
‘the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing’ (77) become,
at the end of the novel, not only an individual but also a collective endow-
ment (‘tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further’ (141, italics
added), even if it is constricted by its exclusion of ethnic others (symbolized
by the ‘obscene word’ which Nick erases from the ‘white’ steps of Gatsby’s
deserted house (140; see Will (2005)) and by the exploitation of the natural
environment (the ‘vanished trees which had made way for Gatsby’s house’
(140)). Gatsby’s profligate parties, shadowed by violence and corruption,
nonetheless adumbrate a liberating mode of multitudinous sociability that
transcends parochial limits.
An ‘impure aesthetics’ approach helps in grasping the intermixture and
interanimation of the ideological and the aesthetic in Gatsby. Moreover,
 Nicolas Tredell 29

it helps to open up the aesthetic range of Gatsby. For Gatsby is not only
‘beautiful’; its beauty, like that of Rilke’s beauty in the Duino Elegies which
is ‘nothing / but beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear’ (60) moves
towards the sublime; and the novel can also encompass an aesthetic of
trauma and tragedy, and of the uncanny and the absurd. These aesthetic
modes are linked with the ideological concerns of Gatsby and this essay pur-
sues those linkages in two areas of the novel: its representations of African
Americans and of the police.

Gatz and Gates

One of the bravura aesthetic passages in Gatsby is also one of the most
ideologically charged: the description, in chapter four of Gatsby, of Nick
Carraway’s famous ride into New York in ‘Gatsby’s gorgeous car’ (51), driven
by the thirty-two-year old man who himself, Nick remarks near the start
of the novel, had ‘something gorgeous about him’ (6). The dominant aes-
thetic mode in this description is, of course, a modernist, kinetic one; we
enter a travelling kaleidoscope of colour and angle and light. But there are
moments which, if one stopped the car, froze the frame, could exemplify
an aesthetic of contemplative stasis, the reiterated experiencing of an origi-
nary moment of desire, like looking at Keats’s Grecian Urn: ‘The city seen
from the Queensboro bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its
first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world’ (55). It
is this combination of a kinetic and static aesthetic that helps to account
for the exhilaration of the passage. A combination of stasis and kinesis is
evident, however, not only in its aesthetics, but also in its epistemology.
There are moments when it seems possible to know the truth with certainty
but at other moments the prospect of authoritative knowledge appears to
dissolve in flux. During ‘that disconcerting ride’ (51), Gatsby offers to tell
Nick nothing less than ‘God’s truth’’ about his life and then constructs an
autobiography which combines a crass or perhaps deliberate mislocation of
San Francisco in the middle-west;2 a brisk bricolage of cultural clichés (‘it
was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines’ (53)); and plausible
artefactual evidence (the Montenegrin medal, the Oxford photograph). This
makes Nick, in one of the recurrent oscillations of his feelings about Gatsby,
fluctuate between incredulity and total belief.
As they near the city, however, Gatsby, whatever doubts his backstory may
have raised, gives positive proof of his present connections. As his car, enter-
ing the urban labyrinth, ‘twist[s] among the pillars of the elevated [railway]’,
Nick hears ‘the familiar “jug-jug-spat!” of a motor cycle’ and ‘a frantic police-
man’ draws alongside the glorious chariot. Slowing down, Gatsby takes a
white card from his wallet and waves it before the policeman’s eyes; the lat-
ter immediately says ‘Right you are’, tips his cap and assures Gatsby he will
know him next time (54) – a state of epistemological certainty in regard to
30 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Gatsby never vouchsafed to Nick during his New York summer, when he can
never be sure that he will know who Gatsby is next time, or even from one
minute to the next. Nick, a Yale man, asks Gatsby whether the white card
was the Oxford photograph, apparently making the questionable assump-
tion that evidence of distinguished academic affiliation would be enough to
establish an identity worthy of respect in the policeman’s eyes; but Gatsby
tells him that he was once able to do the police commissioner a favour, and
the latter sends him a Christmas card every year. The possibility that Gatsby
might be humbled by a close encounter with the police, that his triumphal
progress into New York might be interrupted, is smoothly averted.
Reading this passage at the start of the second decade of the twenty-
first century might bring to mind a more recent real-life close encounter
between an upwardly mobile American with academic credentials and the
police. On 16 July 2009, the fifty-seven-year old African American Harvard
critic and scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. – like Gatsby, an example of an
American success story, but a real rather than fictional one – was arrested
at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts by Sergeant James Crowley, who
was responding, with a colleague, to a 911 call reporting men breaking and
entering the residence. Gates had returned from a trip to China and, find-
ing his front door jammed, tried to force it open with his driver’s help. The
details of what exactly happened between Gates and the police will always
remain controversial, but clearly Gates had no Christmas card from the
police commissioner, or any similar document, to establish an identity that
would ensure that the police officers concerned saluted and moved on. He
did apparently show his Harvard I.D. but this evidence of his membership of
an elite academic institution seemed to be as ineffectual as Gatsby’s Oxford
photograph might have been if he had shown it to the motorcycle police-
man. But Gates, like Gatsby, was not without influential connections; not
least a third, and pre-eminent, example of an American success story: the
44th President of the United States, Barack Obama. Asked at a press confer-
ence of 22 July 2009 about the incident, the day after a charge of disorderly
conduct against Gates had been dropped, Obama remarked that the police
action was ‘stupid’ – a comment that elevated the growing public debate
about the incident to national proportions and to the highest political level.
To bring together the encounters with the police of Gatsby and Gates is
to highlight the differences and similarities between the moment of Gatsby
and that of early twenty-first century America. Both Gatsby and Gates – and
of course, and perhaps supremely in the present time, Obama – are sym-
bols of American possibility, of the American dream. In his victory speech,
Obama instanced his electoral triumph as an example which should con-
vince ‘anyone out there who doubts that America is still a place where all
things are possible’. All three changed their names, though Gatsby’s entailed
a rejection of his biological father, that of Gates affirmed an identification
with the biological father, and that of Obama hovered between the two
 Nicolas Tredell 31

poles: James Gatz became Jay Gatsby at the moment which will lead to him
pledging himself to the first of his surrogate fathers, Dan Cody (76); Gates
changed his name from Louis Smith Gates to Henry Louis Gates, taking
on all three of his father’s names (205–6); and Obama, while a student at
Occidental College, Los Angeles, stopped using the nickname Barry, which
his father had also used in the USA, and began to be known by his given
forename, Barack (104). Gatsby, Gates and Obama also have in common
the occupancy of houses to which their right has been questioned. Gatsby’s
‘huge place’ (71), the stage set for his extravaganzas, is one which has been
obtained by illegal means and it cannot, in Tom’s eyes, erase a past in which
Gatsby’s only possible access to a house that was not only large but also an
authoritative sign of membership in an elevated social class – a house like
that of Daisy’s family home in Louisville – was as a delivery boy (‘I’ll be
damned if I see how you got within a mile of her [five years ago] unless you
brought the groceries to the back door’ (102)). And for Henry Louis Gates,
according to the literary critic and theorist Stanley Fish, it was not the first
time his right to occupy a house had been doubted. Writing in the New York
Times on 24 July 2009, soon after the Gates contretemps, Fish recalled that
one of Gates’s first actions when he came to Durham, North Carolina, about
twenty years ago, to take up a position at Duke University, was to buy ‘the
grandest house in town (owned previously by a movie director)’ – a rather
Gatsbyesque move. Of course, Gatsby’s house was bought with the fruits of
crime whereas Gates’s purchase was bankrolled by the legal and relatively
unexceptionable proceeds of teaching literature. Furthermore, Gatsby’s
acquisition of a grand house is to be understood in the light of his desire
to become the kind of person whom Daisy might marry and to put himself
into geographical and social proximity to her: as Jordan tells Nick, ‘Gatsby
bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay’ (62). One of
the lights in which Gates’s purchase might be seen is provided by a fact
to which his memoir, Colored People (1995), refers at least four times (12,
21, 27, 202): that in his native city of Piedmont, West Virginia, people of
colour were not allowed to own property until the 1970s, a state of affairs
that meant he spent his childhood in rented homes and that particularly
irked his mother, who ‘came to believe early on that the key to wealth and
comfort in America was owning property’ (202). But Gates’s purchase of the
grandest house in Durham did not, according to Fish, ensure his recognition
as its rightful owner: during the renovation which Gates initiated imme-
diately after he had bought the house, workers and delivery truck drivers
‘would often take Gates for a servant and ask to be pointed to the house’s
owner’ (New York Times (24 July 2009)). And whereas Obama’s occupancy of
the White House is, in the nature of the American constitution, necessarily
temporary, there are those who doubt his right to occupy it – for example,
as Fish points out, those who tried to demonstrate that Obama was born in
Kenya and was not really a US citizen.
32 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

While Gatsby in July 1922, in contrast to Gates in July 2009, was able to
pass himself off to the police as a man to be respected, he finally foundered
on the hard rock of class and old(ish) money, Gates, bristling with scholarly
and academic credentials, found that these initially counted as nothing
in an encounter with the police, even if he was quickly able afterwards
to deploy the class and media power which his professional, intellectual
eminence and social connections gave him. Both Gatsby and Gates then,
are examples, not only of possibility, but also of the multitudinous barri-
ers which can set limits to it. It remains to be seen what the limits may be
to the sense of possibility embodied in Obama on the day of his election
victory. Both Gates and Obama, however, exemplify the end of a process
feared by Tom Buchanan during the drunken afternoon at the Plaza Hotel
which precedes the climax of Gatsby’s tragedy: ‘Nowadays people begin by
sneering at family life and family institutions and next they’ll throw eve-
rything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white’ (101).
But even Gatsby, who signifies the beginning of that process for Tom, might
exemplify the end Tom adumbrates. A significant strand of recent criticism –
see, for example, Meredith Goldsmith (2003) and Carlyle Van Thompson
(2004) – has linked Gatsby with narratives of ‘passing’, of the attempt of
‘light-complected’ African Americans to ‘pass’ as white (the adjective ‘light-
complected’ is a favourite of Gates in Colored People). Gatsby could literally
be passing – as Thompson points out, we know nothing ‘about the race
or ethnicity’ of his mother (88); but it is not necessary to posit a specific
ethnic origin for Gatsby to suggest that he is trying to pass socially, letting
‘the invisible cloak of his uniform’ hide his origins during the war when he
first gets to know Daisy (116), and then striving to pass as a member of the
wealthy upper class who would be acceptable as Daisy’s husband.
Jay Gatsby is a kind of mimic man; Goldsmith compares him to the
‘parvenu protagonists’ who attempt to imitate ‘racial and national iden-
tities’, ‘through the apparatus of speech, costume and manners’, in the
works of African American novelists such as James Weldon Johnson, Walter
White and Nella Larsen and such Jewish-American writers as Abraham
Cahan, Anzia Yezierska and Mary Antin (444). Gatsby’s performances,
often breathtaking in their daring and scope, do not, finally, quite come
off; his modes of behaviour sometimes reference the past rather than the
present and sometimes, more scandalously, they imitate, as Goldsmith sug-
gests, ‘African-American and ethnic modes of self-definition’ (443). In the
contexts in which he is eager to impress, his behaviour, like his ‘elaborate
formality of speech’, ‘just miss[ . . . ] being absurd’ (40). And this element
of vertiginous performance in Gatsby, the sense of a tightrope walker who,
for all his apparent poise, often comes dangerously close to missing his
footing – and does of course miss it, hopelessly wrong-footed by Tom, in
the debacle at the Plaza Hotel – contributes to a sense of the uncanny in
the novel. Even when the performance is at its best, Gatsby is never quite at
 Nicolas Tredell 33

home in his roles, just as he is never quite at home in his house. Springing
‘from his Platonic conception of himself’ (77), Gatsby lacks the support of
any family or community and can seem to lack substance.
In Colored People, Gates expresses a qualified admiration for people who
claim, in all seriousness, ‘that they have transcended any attachment to
a particular community or group’ but says that he ‘always want[s] to run
around behind them to see what holds them up’ (xv). Ever since Maxwell
Perkins’s observation, in response to the earlier version of Gatsby, that
Gatsby is ‘somewhat vague’ (xvii), a significant proportion of readers and
critics have evinced a similar desire to run around behind Gatsby to see what
holds him up. Moreover this desire is strengthened by those quasi-Brechtian
moments in which Gatsby seems to draw attention to his own artifice by
taking it to extremes (his brightly coloured suits, his extravagant car) or by
deliberately subverting it (locating San Francisco in the Middle West). These
elements in Gatsby’s performances – their uncanny, absurd, self-subverting
qualities – contribute to the aesthetic quality and complexity of Fitzgerald’s
work. Like the novel of which he is the eponymous hero, Gatsby is by turns,
and sometimes simultaneously, beautiful, sublime, kinetic, static, uncanny,
absurd and self-subverting.

Crossing Blackwell’s Island

Shortly after the encounter with the motorcycle cop in The Great Gatsby,
Nick and Gatsby cross the Queensboro Bridge in triumph but their progress
is perturbed by a harbinger of death and ethnic difference: a dead man passes
in a hearse, followed by two carriages with drawn blinds for the family and
‘more cheerful carriages’ from which the friends of the deceased ‘looked out
at us with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of south-eastern Europe’. Here
tragedy, as an aesthetic experience and genre which echoes existential loss,
is explicitly referenced in the adjective ‘tragic’ but set at a distance, associ-
ated with a European provenance and a different ethnicity. Nick is able,
with gracious condescension, to be ‘glad that the sight of Gatsby’s splendid
car was included in their somber holiday’ (55). The next encounter seems
more difficult to handle. It takes place as Gatsby’s car crosses Blackwell’s
Island and the verb ‘crossed’, as Bryan R. Washington indicates (43), seems
especially significant at this point where Nick and Gatsby are crossing into
a zone where ethnic stereotypes will be momentarily inverted. The name
of the island is also significant. By the year in which Gatsby is set, 1922,
Blackwell’s Island had in fact been renamed ‘Welfare Island’ and contained
a charity hospital and penal institution; but the retention of the older name
whose first syllable would have been, at the time, a derogatory racist term
and whose second syllable could imply prosperity could be seen, as Carlyle
van Thompson suggests, as alluding to ‘the upper-middle-class black people
who do “well” socioeconomically’ (93).
34 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

The name also functions to cue the sight that immediately follows: a
limousine ‘driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish Negroes,
two bucks and a girl’ (55). Here the white/black hierarchy is dramatically
inverted; moreover, not only do the African Americans have a white chauf-
feur, but they are also ‘modish’, in the fashion, unlike Nick, or indeed
Gatsby, whose attire is, it may be, too vulgar, loud and feminized (his pink
suit). The term ‘bucks’ also implies that the African American males in the
limo are sexually potent, an implication which both mobilizes a racist myth
and marks out, by contrast, the uncertain masculinity of Nick and Gatsby.
The contrast is sharpened by the term ‘yolks’ which, linking with ‘eggs’’,
endows the African Americans with a potential fertility which seems denied
to the two men in the monstrously long car who have such difficulties with
girls. The uneven male–female ratio in the limo might also suggest, mobiliz-
ing a sexist myth, that these men dominate the woman in their lives in a
way which is much more difficult for Nick, or Gatsby, or even Tom.
Nick tries to put the African Americans in their place by laughing at them
and processing his perception through a racist stereotype of rolling eye-
balls that might have come from a story by a writer who much influenced
Fitzgerald in the writing of Gatsby, Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’
(1899; 1902): ‘I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us
in haughty rivalry’ (55). But this burst of laughter is unusual for Nick and
suggests a heightened state of excitement and disinhibition. The phrase
‘I laughed’ occurs only twice in Gatsby, and this is the sole occasion on
which Nick amplifies it by adding ‘out loud’. When the phrase appears
earlier in the novel, it denotes Nick laughing in response to Daisy’s laugh
(10), and on the two other occasions on which Nick laughs, he does so with
others, once at a Gatsby party (‘everybody laughed’ (41)) and once with
Jordan as Tom drives them to New York in Gatsby’s car (95). But as they
cross Blackwell’s Island, there is no sign of Gatsby laughing at the African
Americans in the limo, perhaps because he is, in his extravagant self-display,
not so far from them as Nick might like to think. In this respect, it is sig-
nificant that, earlier in the journey, Nick has come close to laughing at
Gatsby himself; it was only ‘[w]ith an effort’ that he ‘managed to restrain
[his] incredulous laughter’ at Gatsby’s tale of living ‘like a young rajah’ and
‘trying to forget something very sad that had happened to [him] a long
time ago’ (52); This suggests that Nick has come close to placing Gatsby in
the same category as the African Americans, as over-the-top performers; the
African Americans release a laughter that Gatsby has already threatened to
provoke, and in laughing at them, he is also laughing at Gatsby.
Moreover, Nick’s uneasy laughter shifts immediately into a sense of pos-
sibility into which his sight of the African Americans seems to have fed:
‘Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,’ I thought;
‘anything at all . . .’ (ellipsis in original). It is still Gatsby who pre-eminently
embodies this sense of possibility for Nick: ‘Even Gatsby could happen,
 Nicolas Tredell 35

without any particular wonder’ (55); and, just as Gatsby’s car upstages the
African American’s limousine, so Gatsby himself is elevated by Nick into
a superior symbol of the remarkable; but the African Americans nonethe-
less seem to function in a similar symbolic way and might be seen, today,
as a harbinger of a social change which would issue, on 20 January 2009,
in an African American president making his way to the White House in a
motorcade.

Death on Main Street

The African Americans in the limousine do not attract the attentions of the
police, but there is one significant encounter between an African American
and a motor cycle policeman in Gatsby. It occurs in chapter 7, in the sec-
tion in which Nick describes the immediate aftermath of Myrtle’s death.
In this part of the novel the aesthetics of trauma and tragedy prevail. In
Wilson’s garage, the motor cycle policeman is taking down names ‘with
much sweat and correction’ (108) and his problems in spelling the name of
a witness – he gets as far as ‘Mavrog’ – are highlighted in Nick’s narrative.3
This could seem patronizing on Nick’s or Fitzgerald’s part – the Ivy League
man employing the stereotype of the dumb cop – but it could also be seen
as portraying the difficulties of a conscientious, hardworking police officer
in a society full of onomastic complications which relate to wider complica-
tions in regard to identity. But the policeman never completes the spelling
of ‘Mavrog’s’ surname because Tom Buchanan, exercising both physical
and class power, interrupts him, temporarily usurping his role and putting
himself in the position of interrogator. When the policeman takes up his
questioning again, he does so in response to Michaelis’s observation that
there were two cars, ‘[o]ne comin’, one goin’ and then makes another ono-
mastic query, about the name of the place they are in, which is truncated
even more abruptly than his notation of ‘Mavrog’s’ name by the response:
‘Hasn’t got any name’ (109). This absence of the name of a place – a place
crucial to the novel – is significant in a novel with so many names of places
and people.
It is not, however, quite the case that the place is entirely anonymous;
Nick has earlier christened it with a sort of generic name when, near the
start of chapter 2, he calls it ‘a kind of compact Main Street ministering’ to
‘the waste land’ of the valley of ashes (22). In the intertextual field of 1920s
American fiction, the use of the term ‘Main Street’ resonates with one of the
inaugural novels of the decade, Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street: The Story of Carol
Kennicott (1920), a book which focuses on that kind of hinterland briefly
and negatively registered in the ‘wheat’, the ‘prairies’ and the ‘lost Swede
towns’ which Nick invokes in his memories of going home from prep-school
and college but which are dismissed in advance, by a pre-emptive ‘not’,
from his idea of the ‘middle-west’ (137). Lewis bitterly satirizes Main Street
36 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

but inevitably, by focusing on it as the topic of his long novel, by vivify-

ing it through evocations of place and character, by making it the place
which stirs Carol’s energies but which she cannot reform and to which she
eventually returns, he endows it with a distinctive presence.
In Gatsby, by contrast, Fitzgerald attenuates Main Street to ‘a small cement
block of yellow brick’ (22). Since Fitzgerald had, two years before, written
a play, The Vegetable or from President to Postman (1923), which ‘specifically
invokes’ L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (Wixson, 14), this yellow brick
block might be the ‘yellow brick’ road to Oz (Baum, 15) cut off at both ends,
going nowhere, turned into a kind of anticipatory echo of a Carl Andre
sculpture, reduced to a minimalist rectangle which cannot compete with the
city seen from the Queensboro Bridge, ‘rising up across the river in white
heaps and sugar lumps’ (54). Furthermore, yellow is the colour of an alien
race in T. Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against World-White
Supremacy (1920), which is generally held to be the book to which Tom
Buchanan refers when he cites ‘“The Rise of the Coloured Empires” by this
man Goddard’ (14). Yellow may also, as Carlyle Van Thompson suggests,
figure as a sign of miscegenation, as in the pejorative term for pale blacks,
‘high yella’ (97). The denigratory invocation of ‘Main Street’ in Gatsby func-
tions, perhaps, both as an implicit attack on Lewis’s choice of subject matter
and a sign of the impotence of Main Street when it is brought into close
proximity with the city and with Wall Street. This impotence is humanly fig-
ured in George Wilson, who is economically impotent and who is also, it is
implied, sexually impotent; the man who, Myrtle believed before their mar-
riage, knew something, not only about gentlemanly codes of behaviour but
also about the processes that lead to procreation, but whom she now sees
as incapable even of masochistic fetishism (‘I thought he knew something
about breeding but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe’ (30)).
The absence of anything other than what is, in the intertextual web of
Gatsby, a belittling generic name for the yellow cement block that borders
the valley of ashes, is symptomatic of the unequal power relations the
novel depicts, and in this respect it links up with the absence of anything
other than a racially generic designation for the figure who enters the
text immediately after the policeman is told that the place they are in
‘[h]asn’t got any name’. This is a ‘pale, well dressed Negro’ who ‘step[s]
near’ (109) – nearer, perhaps, in this confused post-accident situation than
he might otherwise do to white people, particularly a white policeman, in
this era. His paleness, however, might help to make such proximity more
acceptable, bringing him closer in complexion to whiteness (suppose the
African Americans in the limousine which Nick saw crossing Blackwell’s
Island had turned up at this point as witnesses to the accident or its after-
math – the dynamics would be very different). That paleness could also, of
course, suggest that he might be an incarnation of the intermarriage – or at
least intercourse – of black and white so feared by Tom Buchanan In other
 Nicolas Tredell 37

respects, however, he might seem a more assimilated figure than Gatsby;

his sartorial style, given what we might infer to be Nick’s criteria of being
‘well dressed’, is rather old-fashioned: no caramel or pink suits, no brightly
coloured shirts.
Nonetheless, this African American is perhaps dangerously observant, cor-
rectly identifying the colour of the car that killed Myrtle. The policeman asks
him to come closer and to give his name, but the questioning is interrupted
by Wilson saying ‘You don’t have to tell me what kind of car it was’ (109) –
he does not need to know about the car because, at this point, he thinks he
knows the name of the driver – Tom Buchanan – though Tom acts quickly
to dispel this idea. We never do learn the African American’s name, another
significant absence in this onomastically profuse novel in which names are
so plentiful and important, and he is never mentioned as a witness at the
inquest, although his correct identification of the colour of the ‘death car’
and his remark that it was travelling at fifty or sixty miles an hour when it
passed him, might have seemed to qualify him to make an appearance. We
have, however, already been told in an earlier flashforward that Michaelis,
the Greek owner of the all-night restaurant, was the principal inquest wit-
ness, and we learn at the start of chapter 10 that Myrtle’s sister Catherine
also took the witness stand; but no other witnesses are mentioned. Ralph
Ellison has remarked:

How ironic it was that in the world of The Great Gatsby the witness who
could have identified the driver of the death car that led to Gatsby’s
murder was a black man whose ability to communicate (and commu-
nication implies moral judgement) was of no more consequence to the
action than that of an ox that might have observed Icarus’s sad plunge
into the sea. (503)

Whether the ‘black man’ could have identified the driver is open to ques-
tion; the ‘text suggests that the eyewitness saw the car, rather than the
driver’, as Goldsmith points out (462); and it might be difficult to achieve
a watertight identification of a driver in a car going at fifty or sixty miles
an hour – though the eyewitness might have at least been able to identify
the driver’s gender and thus exculpate Gatsby. But it remains the case that a
potential source of further information and clarification is not pursued. The
‘pale, well dressed Negro’ disappears from the story, and his disappearance
parallels those other characters sometimes endowed with paleness – Gatsby
himself and George Wilson – who are physically absent through death at
this stage of the novel.
The last mention of this African American, however, creates a momentary
link between him and Nick; they are the only people near enough to Tom
to hear him telling Wilson that he was not driving the yellow car (as he had
been when he was driving into town, after exchanging cars with Gatsby,
38 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

and stopped at Wilson’s garage for gas). Tom’s words to Wilson constitute
another piece of significant evidence and the fact that it does not seem to
come up at the inquest extends the link between the African American and
Nick: neither takes the witness stand to say what he knows. The African
American’s knowledge is only fragmentary but it could still have opened
cracks in the cover-up story which is being presented at the inquest; Nick,
of course, knows much more, more than anyone else, and he could explode
the cover-up story in a few minutes; but he too stays silent. The absence
of the African American and of Nick from the witness stand means that
each is, in his way – the African American inadvertently, Nick consciously –
contributes to shielding the Buchanans, omitting them from the story of
the deaths of Myrtle, Gatsby and Wilson so that their rich, careless way of
life may continue. Nick and the nameless African American are, in a sense,
secret sharers even though they only come together for a brief span of time
and neither learns the other’s name. Both share in a knowledge which is not
disclosed to the proper authorities.

The police and the polis

The police do not penetrate the smokescreen which Tom starts to release
almost immediately after Myrtle’s death. They are certainly present at the
crime scene: on the day and night of Gatsby’s death, and on the follow-
ing day, there is, as Nick puts it at the start of chapter 9, ‘an endless drill of
police and photographers and newspaper men’ (127). This triplet is repeated
a little later in the chapter, to emphasize, by contrast, the absence of any
communication or visit from Daisy, Wolfshiem, or Gatsby’s other associ-
ates: ‘neither a wire [from Daisy] nor Mr. Wolfshiem arrived, no one arrived,
except more police and photographers and newspaper men’ (129). Despite
the reiterated presence of the police, and of other potential agents of accurate
representation, photographers and newspaper men, there appears to be no
intense investigative activity to establish the facts of the case. It is possibly a
police officer who provides a version of events which is convenient for Tom:
‘Someone with a positive manner, perhaps a detective, used the expression
“mad man” as he bent over Wilson’s body that afternoon, and the adventi-
tious authority of his voice set the key for the newspaper reports next morn-
ing’ (127).4 The figure of the detective emerges in later nineteenth-century
fiction as the agent of truth; but here, an unnamed person who may be a
detective, provides, in encapsulated form, an exculpating fiction. It could
be that the police do not push their inquiry too far, or even promote a
heavily censored version of events (if the person with ‘a positive manner’ is
indeed a police detective) because probing inquiries could disclose connec-
tions that might be embarrassing for the authorities – what was the favour
which Gatsby did for the police commissioner, and is there a hint of possible
police corruption here? There is, of course, no conclusive evidence of such
 Nicolas Tredell 39

corruption in the text of Gatsby, but there is a strong sense of a cover-up that
is perhaps partly inadvertent and partly deliberate; and the text does show
that the greatest culprit, the one who knows most but stays silent, is Nick.
That Nick does not tell the police what he knows is significant because,
in the first chapter of the novel, he thinks of the police as an agency that
might be summoned to control a disturbing situation. When he is at Tom
and Daisy’s with Jordan, the phone rings again at the end of the meal and
everyone thinks that it is Tom’s mistress (Nick does not yet know her name)
on the other end of the line, Nick observes: ‘To a certain temperament the
situation might have seemed intriguing – my own instinct was to telephone
immediately for the police’ (16). Here the police are seen as an exterior
agency which is necessary to enforce morality because people at a high
social level such as Tom can no longer regulate themselves. But when Nick
does presumably telephone for the police, after the deaths of Gatsby and
Wilson, he hinders them by not telling them all he knows. The sense of the
police as an agency that could be necessary to enforce codes of behaviour
that people such as Tom cannot be relied upon to observe themselves is also
invoked in Myrtle’s account to Nick of how she first met Tom on the train
to New York and how, when they came into the station, ‘he was next to me
and his white shirt front pressed against my arm – and so I told him I’d have
to call a policeman but he knew I lied’ (31). Here is a situation which could
potentially be one of sexual harassment, a matter for the police, if Tom’s
attentions had been unwelcome to Myrtle. But in the case of both Nick and
Myrtle, the idea of calling the police is a notional one.
There is one other reference to the police in Gatsby, not to a policeman
but to a police dog. In chapter 2, when Myrtle insists on buying a dog, she
first of all tells the dog seller ‘I’d like to get one of those police dogs’ (24).
According to Ronald Berman, Myrtle is buying according to a plan and the
dog is the final component in the self she wants to construct. ‘The dog
makes the apartment and Myrtle complete, exactly as she has seen matron
and pet in advertisements’ (64). This may be so, but it does not explain why
she first of all fixes on the idea of a ‘police’ dog, a dog which would be, at
least implicitly, functional as well as decorative. The desire for a ‘police’
dog might suggest the wish for some force which could protect her and
police the boundaries between classes which she wants to uphold in order
to highlight her own supposed rise to a superior social position. As with
Nick’s desire, in chapter 1, ‘to telephone for the police’, there is here a sense
of an external enforcement agency – even if this time embodied in a canine
representative – which is necessary because established social codes are less
effective than they once were.
These references in Gatsby to the police might provide a further link
between the novel and T. S. Eliot’s major Modernist poem, The Waste Land
(1922). Eliot’s working title for the poem, in the typescript revised by Pound
and published in 1971, was ‘He do the Police in different voices’ (4, 5, 10,
40 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

11), a quotation from chapter 16 of Charles Dickens’s novel Our Mutual

Friend (1864–5) which refers to the ability of Sloppy, a foundling, to assume
different voices when reading out the newspaper reports of court cases
(246). Eliot’s title incorporated a pun on the Greek word for a city state,
‘polis’ and thus offered an implicit comment both on the technique of
the poem – its use of different registers to represent the modern city (and,
through that, the modern state) – and on the fragmentation of modern
urban life. Fitzgerald would not have known of Eliot’s original title when he
was writing Gatsby, but it is possible to make an intertextual link between
Eliot’s play on ‘police’/’polis’ and the references to the police in Gatsby’s
representation of the modern polis. The breakdown and fragmentation of
the manners of the polis as portrayed in Gatsby makes the police (in Nick’s
perspective) more necessary than ever, but in the novel, they are shown as
having limited power to bring malefactors to justice; whether it is for a pos-
sible traffic offence or manslaughter. Offenders are sometimes brought to
book but these are peripheral figures.5 As Gatsby tells Nick, the police can-
not get Wolfshiem himself for fixing the 1919 World’s Series – ‘He’s a smart
man’ (58) – or for any other crime: none of the central characters goes to
jail, or even gets arrested, in the novel. Perhaps it is this ineffectuality of the
police, as Nick perceives it, which contributes to his desire, when he comes
back from the East after the Gatsby debacle, for a more militarized, authori-
tarian, potentially fascist global order: ‘I wanted the world to be in uniform
and at a sort of moral attention forever’ (5).
The Great Gatsby, however, in its impure aesthetics, its juxtapositions of
the beautiful, sublime, utopian, uncanny, absurd, tragic and traumatic adum-
brates another possibility: of a society whose order emerges from its openness
and difference rather than from its exclusiveness and uniformity, in which
the vision of possibility crossing the Queensboro bridge is not the preserve of
Nick Carraway but is available to all. It is Gatsby’s dramatization of this prom-
ise – and of the risks and traumas which its pursuit may entail – which are
likely to give the novel continued aesthetic presence, thematic significance
and canonical force in the twenty-first century.

Notes
1. See, for example, Anthony Berret in Bryer and VanArsdale (2009) on the Wedding
March which Gatsby, Tom, Daisy, Nick and Jordan hear from their rented room
in the Plaza Hotel in chapter 7 of the novel: ‘did [Fitzgerald] want the reader to
recall that this march is part of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, inci-
dental music to accompany Shakespeare’s play? The word mid-summer appears
twice in Gatsby [once when Nick takes up with Jordan Baker again (47) and] once
in the scene when Gatsby and Daisy meet again [73], and Daisy watches for [‘the
longest day of the year’ (13)]. Shakespeare’s play operates on a contrast between
 Nicolas Tredell 41

town (Athens) and forest (where strange things happen, mainly to correct a bad
marriage arrangement). Do the New York/Long Island contrast and love themes in
Gatsby echo this?’ (198).
2. Richard Godden remarks that the ‘creator of a criminal network operating bond-
fraud on a national scale can surely manage better lies than the one about San
Francisco?’ (343–4) and Richard Lehan observes that it ‘seems implausible that
Gatsby, who three times circled the continent with Dan Cody, would not know
the location of San Francisco’ (132).
3. Some extant editions of Gatsby refer to the Greek café owner, who is usually called
‘Michaelis’, as ‘Mavromichaelis’ on one occasion (e.g. Oxford World’s Classics
(1998), 109; Penguin Classics (2000), 131). This can contribute to the impression
that ‘the man’ whose name the policeman is taking down is Michaelis himself, but
Matthew J. Bruccoli points out that they are different: the café owner ‘was named
Mavromichaelis in the manuscript. Fitzgerald changed it in proof to Michaelis but
missed this appearance. The man whose name the policeman is taking down
on pages 108–9 is not Michaelis; he is another witness – referred to as ‘the man’
[109] – whose name begins Mavrog – .’ (Cambridge University Press edition, p. 152,
note to p. 107, line 21).
4. The idea that Wilson was a ‘mad man’ (127) is echoed by Gatsby’s father, who uses
the same phrase – ‘It was a mad man [ . . . ] He must have been mad’ (130). At this
point Nick, who could show Mr Gatz the method in Wilson’s madness, changes
the subject by asking if Mr Gatz would like some coffee.
5. One of the guests at Gatsby’s parties named in Nick’s list, Snell, ‘went to the peni-
tentiary’ (49). The five people responsible for the fatal shooting of Rosy Rosenthal
were electrocuted, although Becker, the only one of the executed men named in
Fitzgerald’s text (56), was, in historical actuality, Charles Becker, a police lieuten-
ant (see Bruccoli’s note in Gatsby, 195), indicating the implication of a member
of the police in this crime. Tom’s friend Walter Chase spent a month in jail for
his involvement in Gatsby and Wolfshiem’s sale of grain alcohol in the drug-
stores they had bought (104) – since it was legal for drugstores to sell alcohol for
medicinal purposes, they provided an ostensibly legitimate outlet for illicit booze.

Works cited
Baum, L. Frank. The Wizard of Oz. London: Puffin, 1994.
Berman, Ronald. The Great Gatsby and Modern Times. Urbana and Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 1996.
Bryer, Jackson R. and VanArsdale, Nancy P., eds. Approaches to Teaching Fitzgerald’s The
Great Gatsby. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009.
Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. Ed. Stephen Gill. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts including the
Annotations of Ezra Pound. Ed. Valerie Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1971.
Ellison, Ralph. ‘The Little Man at Chehaw Station: The American Artist and His
Audience’. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. Ed. John F. Callahan. New York:
Modern Library 2003: 493–523.
Fish, Stanley. ‘Henry Louis Gates: Déjà-Vu All Over Again’. New York Times. 24
July 2009. Available online at: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/
henry-louis-gates-deja-vu-all-over-again
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1991.
42 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

—— The Vegetable or from President to Postman. Clifton: Augustus M. Kelley, 1972.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Colored People: A Memoir. New York: Vintage, 1995.
Godden, Richard. ‘The Great Gatsby: Glamor on the Turn’. Journal of American Studies,
16:3 (1982): 343–71.
Goldsmith, Meredith. White Skin, White Mask: Passing, Posing, and Performing in The
Great Gatsby’. MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 49:3 (Fall 2003): 443–68.
Grady, Hugh. ‘Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics: The Case of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream’. Shakespeare Quarterly, 59:3 (Fall 2008): 274–302.
Lehan, Richard. The Great Gatsby: The Limits of Wonder. New York: Twayne, 1995.
Obama, Barack. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Edinburgh:
Canongate, 2007.
—— Victory speech (5 November 2008). Available online at: http://www.timesonline.
co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article5086178.ece
Rilke, Maria Rainer. Selected Poems. Trans. J. B. Leishman. Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1964.
Stoddard, T. Lothrop. The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy Honululu,
Hawaii: Pacific UP, 2003.
Thompson, Carlyle Van. The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in the American
Literary Imagination. New York: Peter Lang, 2004.
Tredell, Nicolas, ed. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby: A Reader’s Guide to Essential
Criticism. Basingstoke and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997.
Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. 2nd edn. London and
New York: Routledge, 2006.
Washington, Bryan R. The Politics of Exile: Ideology in Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald and
James Baldwin. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1995.
Will, Barbara. ‘The Great Gatsby and The Obscene Word’. College Literature, 32:4 (Fall
2005): 125–44.
Wixson, Christopher. ‘Ragged Edges: The Curious Case of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The
Vegetable’. American Drama, 15:2 (Summer 2006): 48–62.
3
Urban Spaces, Fragmented
Consciousness, and Indecipherable
Meaning in Mrs Dalloway
Andrew Harrison

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway begins with the image of opening doors,
immediately connecting the spatial with the temporal, as the middle-aged
Clarissa’s voyage out into the streets of Westminster on a bright morning in
mid-June 1923 invokes the parallel time-frame in which her eighteen-year-old
self opened the French windows at Bourton on a similar June day in 1889,
plunging into the fresh country air. Inside her house, the rooms are being
prepared for her evening party, with the doors taken off their hinges, while
outside she walks the city streets to Mulberry’s florist shop, where she will
buy flowers to round off the preparations. The vivid spatial image of swing-
ing hinges, and of thresholds crossed, is inseparable from the temporal
process of remembering; in fact, the process of crossing and re-crossing
thresholds works on both levels, as Clarissa crosses Victoria Street, walk-
ing through St James’s Park into Piccadilly and along Bond Street, mov-
ing between scenes of urban bustle with a brief rural interlude, just as she
anticipates Peter Walsh’s imminent arrival at her party by recalling certain
hurtful phrases he had uttered at Bourton. Her mind moves with her body
from a feeling of satisfied elation at the early summer morning to the som-
bre remembrance of past experience and its associated feelings of dissatis-
faction, and back to the present moment, as she pushes through the swing
doors of the florist shop.
These opening pages seem to offer a condensed instance of Woolf’s experi-
mental style and interest in memory, consciousness and the fluid formation
of individual identity. Clarissa’s walk to buy the flowers draws together
reflections on all the major characters in the novel (Peter Walsh, Sally Seton,
Hugh Whitbread, Doris Kilman, Clarissa’s husband Richard, and her daughter
Elizabeth); its undulating spatial and temporal perspectives, ‘like the flap
of a wave; the kiss of a wave’ (MD 3), provide an early key to what Susan
Dick terms its ‘radial form’ (Dick 38). Critics invariably cite Woolf’s own
spatial images for her method of characterization in the novel: she referred
in her diary to the ‘caves’ she dug behind her characters, which would
‘connect’ in the ‘present moment’, and the ‘tunnelling process, by which
43
44 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

I tell the past by instalments, as I have need of it’ (Diary II 263, 272). Clarissa’s
imaginative expansions and contractions operate like the widening leaden
circles of sound emitted by Big Ben, radiating out from a monolithic but
unreal named centre and dissolving in the air. The intense moments and
fragmentary phrases which return to haunt her like the half-hourly chimes of
the clock lend structure to the novel and to our sense of ‘Mrs. Dalloway . . .
Mrs. Richard Dalloway’ (MD 11).
In recent years, however, the interconnections between the spatial and
the temporal in Woolf’s work have received renewed attention, addressing
an overbalance of interest in Woolf’s feminism, modernist aesthetics and
writing practise with an appreciation of several important social and histori-
cal contexts to her works.1 This new research is producing fresh insights into
Woolf’s relation to (for instance) technology.2 Unfortunately, in discussing
the author’s engagement with urban spaces, there is still a noticeable ten-
dency in critics to reinscribe her feminist concerns onto the cityscape, view-
ing its inhibiting structures as mere patriarchal impositions, easily subverted
by an intuitive and sympathetic feminine counter-culture. For example, in
her reading of Mrs Dalloway, Youngjoo Son (drawing on an earlier essay by
Masami Usui) uses the symbolism of the chimes of St Margaret’s shadow-
ing those of Big Ben to describe an anti-authoritarian utopian undercurrent
in the novel.3 Likewise, in her recent book, Women, Privacy and Modernity
in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing, Wendy Gan has argued that ‘the
public space of the city’ in this period could offer middle-class women
‘a refuge of public privacy away from the oppressiveness of home’, with its
‘enforced solitude’ and ‘fixity of identity’ (Gan 17). Applying this insight in
a brief reading of Mrs Dalloway, Gan argues that Clarissa Dalloway displays
‘a deep self-involvement when walking in the city’, and she views this self-
involvement as a liberating form of privacy, allowing Clarissa to remain
both ‘insular and undisturbed’. For Gan, the ‘urban mantle of privacy . . .
allows Clarissa to be herself’, or at least to experience ‘the multiplication and
fragmentation of selves’, while home is a place of ‘solidity and banality’
(Gan 56, 58–9).
The essentially feminist arguments of both Son and Gan draw on Woolf’s
later, 1927 essay entitled ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’, where the
city is described as providing a release for women from the fixed identities
of home.4 However, in reading Clarissa’s experience of streets and domestic
spaces through the later insights of her creator, they overlook the many
critical hints which effectively distance Woolf from her bourgeois protago-
nist. Thus, while Gan identifies in Peter Walsh’s rude awakening from his
fantasies about the beautiful female stranger in the street a critical engage-
ment with the figure of the flâneur, or a parody of ‘the romance of the
passante’ (Gan 54), she views Clarissa’s ruminative interiority not as a source
of potential error in need of an external check, but of a subtle, fragmentary
subjective freedom and self-realization.
 Andrew Harrison 45

It is possible, however, to embrace Gan’s broader point about the forms of

privacy afforded women in the modern metropolis while also recognizing
that the potential it offered for momentary self-realization entailed for both
genders a deceptive blurring of the boundaries between private fantasies and
social realities, or rather the subjective self and the social power structures
within which that self operates. Applying this lens to the novel, we might
see it not as a celebration of female self-realization on the city streets, but as
an exploration of those external structures which underpin the new urban
subjectivism, nurturing yet also checking our utopian flights of imagination.
In this essay I want to dwell on those moments when the ornate radial
structure of Mrs Dalloway gives way to instances of disruption: when the
deliberately constructed caves and tunnels are intersected by reminders of
a troubling social reality, or a darkness which lies outside the light shed by
the ‘luminous halo’ of consciousness (Essays IV 160). By focusing on the
anti-utopian elements in the novel, I hope to show that it consistently off-
sets its visionary moments through its concentration on the modern city’s
mysterious power structures. Instances of subjective connection are thrown
into question by the novel’s engagement with dominant spatial tropes of
division and hierarchy. I will ultimately suggest that a concentration on
urban spaces and the fragmented urban subjectivity of Clarissa Dalloway
necessarily causes us to relativize her shaping insights, complicating our
understanding of the novel’s political vision.
The first significant moment of disruption in the novel occurs shortly
after Clarissa enters the florist shop, as she chooses flowers with the
assistant, Miss Pym, still troubled by her reflections on Doris Kilman:

As she began to go with Miss Pym from jar to jar, choosing, nonsense,
nonsense, she said to herself, more and more gently, as if this beauty,
this scent, this colour, and Miss Pym liking her, trusting her, were a wave
which she let flow over her and surmount that hatred, that monster, sur-
mount it all; and it lifted her up and up when – oh! A pistol shot in the
street outside! (MD 14)

Clarissa’s dreamy crescendo is suddenly halted by the noise of a backfiring

car in the street. In a symphonic instant, the eyes of all the people in the
street turn to the vehicle, as voices speculate on the identity of its important
passenger: ‘Was it the Prince of Wales’s, the Queen’s, the Prime Minister’s?’
(MD 15). They cannot grasp the identity of the person within because a
blind has been drawn in the car window. The pistol shot is the first of many
motifs connecting Clarissa’s situation to that of Septimus Warren Smith, the
traumatized young war veteran struggling to come to terms with the death
of his officer-friend, Evans.
This interruptive moment in the novel leads to a shift of focus from
Clarissa to Septimus, as he struggles to cross the street. We are suddenly
46 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

made aware of a dominant source of power in the city, embodied in the

gliding of the car through Piccadilly, or the movement of the aeroplane in
the sky over Buckingham Palace, its smoke-stream spelling out the name
of some consumer product, equally mysterious to the amassed onlookers
(perhaps ‘Glaxo’, ‘Kreemo’, or ‘toffee’). The disturbing image of monarchic
or parliamentary prerogative, or of the powers of commerce and advertising,
‘[boring] ominously into the ears of the crowd’ (MD 21) makes us aware of
something outside the range of Clarissa’s thoughts, but which underpins
her dreaminess. Through the disruptive motorized intermediary of the car
and the plane, we are reminded of the structure of the government her
husband serves, and the disturbing momentum of a society which sent
Septimus to the Western Front. Early in the novel there is a telling reference
to ‘discreet old dowagers . . . shooting out in their motor cars on errands of
mystery’ (MD 5). Sir William Bradshaw, the Harley Street doctor who comes
to embody the coercive power of the British Establishment, is later identified
through the motor car parked outside his house: ‘low, powerful, grey with
plain initials interlocked on the panel’. The car allows Bradshaw to travel
‘sixty miles or more down into the country’ (MD 103), visiting the patients
at his nursing home in Surrey: an image of stealth in mobility which the
novel sinisterly connects to British missionary zeal in ‘the heat and sands of
India, the mud and swamp of Africa’ (MD 109).
According to Anna Snaith, Woolf’s multi-perspectival treatment of the
backfiring car playfully subverts the symbol of power by stripping it of a
name and dispersing it among various subjective observers. Snaith argues
that the scene is constructed ‘around a vacant centre’: ‘The voice of author-
ity is silenced, left without identity’ (Snaith 73–4). We might doubt, how-
ever, whether the force of this deconstructive gesture really manages to
undermine the objective but mysterious structures of power in the novel.
The inhabitant of the car deliberately obscures his or her identity by drawing
the blind, and the subjective responses of the onlookers arguably reveal not
a subversive irreverence toward the car but a sinister kind of enthralment.
The car’s timely reminder of the innate but compelling power structures in
English society and the wider British Empire relativizes Clarissa’s solemn
and exhilarating feeling of being ‘invisible; unseen; unknown’ among the
crowds of people in Bond Street (MD 11). If Clarissa is condemned to be
‘Mrs. Richard Dalloway’, throwing parties for her husband’s wealthy and
influential friends, then how much worse to be ‘Mrs. Septimus Warren
Smith’, transplanted from Milan to London and witnessing the mental
collapse of her shell-shocked husband, subjected to the stifling attentions
of Holmes and Bradshaw; or to be born ‘Doris Kiehlman’ and to have to
change one’s name, being turned away from teaching jobs because of the
anti-German feelings in war-time and the war’s immediate aftermath?
Another of the disruptive moments occurs when Clarissa returns home
to find a note on the telephone pad in which Lady Bruton invites Richard
 Andrew Harrison 47

Dalloway to lunch later that day. The note, which subtly contravenes unwrit-
ten social codes in its exclusion of Richard’s wife, makes Clarissa aware of her
age, and it leads her to reflect with a brooding obsessiveness on the ebbing
away of life’s glamour and passion: ‘the shock of Lady Bruton asking Richard to
lunch without her made the moment in which she had stood shiver, as a plant
on the river-bed feels the shock of a passing oar and shivers: so she rocked: so
she shivered’ (MD 32). The mood informs her perception of her surroundings:

Like a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower, she went, upstairs,

paused at the window, came to the bathroom. There was the green lino-
leum and a tap dripping. There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an
attic room. Women must put off their rich apparel. At midday they must
disrobe. She pierced the pincushion and laid her feathered yellow hat on
the bed. The sheets were clean, tight stretched in a broad white band from
side to side. Narrower and narrower would her bed be. (MD 33–4)

The mobile imagery of the passage follows her movements as she walks
up the stairs, passing the window and the bathroom before arriving at the
bedroom. Her eye pounces on the detail of the dripping tap as if hungry for
depressive symbols. The idea of bathing generates the metaphor of disrob-
ing, shedding richness and glamour, while she perceives her bed as tight and
narrow (a prelude to reflections on her earlier attraction to Sally Seton, and
her sexless marriage to Richard). The episode ends with her insight that what
she lacks is not beauty or intelligence, but ‘something central which perme-
ated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact
of man and woman, or of women together’ (MD 34). Although she can only
‘dimly perceive’ this truth, it receives some support from Peter Walsh’s later
reflection that ‘[t]here was always something cold in Clarissa’ (MD 53).
It is not a question of Clarissa being solipsistic; indeed, her mind fre-
quently seems full of the words of others, chastising her for perceived weak-
nesses. Rather, her mind is only conscious of a small social round, and the
novel is able to indicate the extent of her ignorance through its shifts of
emphasis. An ironic light is later shed on Clarissa’s depressive response to
her exclusion from Lady Bruton’s invitation to lunch, since Lady Bruton’s
invitation turns out to be motivated not by a simple social instinct at all, but
by a desire to advance her own political schemes. She invites Richard and
Hugh Whitbread to lunch in order that they might advise her and help her
to write a letter to the Times in support of her ‘project for emigrating young
people of both sexes born of respectable parents and setting them up with a
fair prospect of doing well in Canada’ (MD 119). Like Sir William Bradshaw,
Lady Millicent Bruton is one of those privileged few who aim to ‘propagate
their views’ (MD 109). Once again, the drift of Clarissa’s thoughts is set
against a powerful and disturbing political structure which she inhabits, but
whose significance she cannot grasp.
48 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

This focus on the mismatch between Clarissa’s thoughts and the wider
social context in which she operates is a recurring feature of Mrs Dalloway,
and it is echoed in the experience of the other important characters who
are struggling to reinvent themselves in the post-war period. The novel is
structurally preoccupied with the mind’s powerlessness when confronted by
changing social habits and historical circumstances: it is concerned with the
mind’s attempts to accommodate or counteract them. We might think here
of Peter Walsh’s detailed reflection on the liberalizing changes to English soci-
ety during the five years when he was away in India, 1918–1923 (MD 78–9),
and his readiness to embrace the change in sexual attitudes, or of Septimus
and his continual recourse to his pre-war attachment to his literature tutor,
Miss Isabel Pole, and his lost friendship with Evans. While Peter, who rather
likes ‘great motor-cars’ and has a ‘turn for mechanics’ (MD 53), seems able,
in spite of his continued mourning for Clarissa, to adapt to change, both
Septimus and Clarissa invest their identities in places or periods from which
they are separated by decisive events (the Great War and marriage), and they
respond to the unreality of the present time by inhabiting powerful imagi-
native worlds. So, while Peter responds to his tearful meeting with Clarissa
by giving in to his feeling of displacement and following a woman ‘across
Trafalgar Square in the direction of the Haymarket’, surrendering ‘only of
course for an hour or so’ to a youthful longing for excitement (MD 57),
Septimus and Clarissa seem intent on counteracting the changed condi-
tions around them. Septimus’s hallucinations show his writerly imagination
running riot, throwing together vivid scenes, poetic phrases and prophetic
insights in a pathetic attempt to find pattern and meaning in things. The
extent of Septimus’s mental alienation from the pre-war world is realized in a
suggestive image of his altered reading habits: in the first flush of his love for
literature, Shakespeare had proved a source of ‘intoxication’, whereas in the
present time his appreciation has ‘shrivelled’ and he now detects ‘the mes-
sage hidden in the beauty of the words’, feeling that Shakespeare ‘loathed
humanity – the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity
of the mouth and the belly!’ (MD 97). An uncritical immersion in literature
gives way to a paranoid projection of his inner chaos.
Clarissa’s privileged social position in the novel belies her similar emo-
tional attachment to the past, and her commitment to a dreamy escapism.
The 1890s time-frame represents for Clarissa a passionate, if conflictual,
existence before the ‘catastrophe’ of marriage and her move to the city. The
cataclysmic change is again realized through a description of the changes in
her reading habits. At Bourton, she and Sally Seton had read Plato, Morris
and Shelley, flirting with the forbidden fruit of socialist thought, while in
the present Clarissa reads Baron Marbot’s Memoirs, detailing the retreat of
Napoleon’s armies from Russia (a fitting symbol of her own retreat into the
past, away from the implications of her current life and up to her isolated
attic room). She is forced to reflect that ‘she scarcely read a book now’
 Andrew Harrison 49

(MD 9); the drift of her life seems to be reflected in the title of one of the
books she views in Hatchards’ bookshop in Piccadilly (‘Jorrocks’ Jaunts and
Jollities’ [MD 10]), or in the copies of Tatler strewn around White’s Club in
St James’s Street (MD 20). The motor car, aeroplane and telephone which at
different times disturb Clarissa’s chains of thought in the novel, bringing
mystification or unwarranted depression, suggest the extent of her mental
displacement from the knowable and secure world of her late Victorian
youth to the post-war world of her middle age. Not only have manners
and morals changed dramatically over that period of three decades and
more, but the sense of space has shrunk as modern means of travel and
communication have led to an acceleration in the pace of life. In Bourton,
Richard Dalloway rode a bicycle, daily life was structured by ‘letters, scenes,
telegrams’ (MD 70), and the most important social interactions happened
in secret in the vegetable garden or by the fountain; by contrast, London
in June 1923 is characterized by ‘the bellow and the uproar; the carriages,
motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging . . . the
strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead’ (MD 4). We might add to
this list the green trumpet gramophone which even the Warren Smiths can
afford to own (MD 155) and the motorized ambulance, which Peter Walsh
considers ‘one of the triumphs of civilization’ (MD 165). In what the text
terms ‘this late age of the world’s experience’, Clarissa ‘never wrote a letter’
and Peter Walsh only writes letters which are ‘dry sticks’ (MD 10, 7).
The paradigmatic modern experience is one of immersion in the moment:
‘to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing . . . what she
loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab’ (MD 9). The
polyphonic white noise of the capital serves to obscure its power networks
and communicative structures: a fact encapsulated in jarring juxtapositions
of the private and the public (‘The mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their
young. Messages were passing from the Fleet to the Admiralty’ [MD 7]).
Although Clarissa experiences a feeling of elation and freedom through her
immersion in the city streets, the price of this elation is precisely the loss
of the more knowable and graspable social world of her youth. Sally Seton’s
acts of transgression – walking naked across a corridor to fetch a sponge;
smoking cigars in her bedroom; raising the spectre of pre-marital pregnancy
over dinner – only have meaning and allure in a world where everyone
knows the unwritten codes (like Ellie Henderson’s sense that skirts should
not be tight, nor fall ‘well above the ankles’ [MD 186]). Sally’s passionate
defence of women’s rights in the face of the chauvinistic Hugh Whitbread
is briskly contextualized by Peter Walsh in 1923, when he remembers ‘an
argument one Sunday morning at Bourton about women’s rights (that ante-
diluvian topic)’ (MD 80). Clarissa’s psychological adherence to anachronistic
codes is subtly revealed in the intensity of her response to Lady Bruton’s
telephone message: she is emotionally bound to earlier forms of behaviour,
even while she enjoys the superficial freedoms of the modern metropolis.
50 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

The novel continually emphasizes this historical fragmentation in

Clarissa’s consciousness, and her fundamental inability to grasp her modern
social world, or to respond to it in an appropriate fashion. The historical
chasm separating youth from middle age, or Bourton from Westminster, is
realized spatially in the figure of those London parks which the characters
cross in the course of their travels through the city. Parks operate in the
novel like tunnels: they are liminal spaces connecting characters to each
other, and connecting individuals to their past experiences. As Peter Walsh
enters Regent’s Park, he immediately has recourse to his childhood: ‘odd, he
thought, how the thought of childhood keeps coming back to me’ (MD 60).
He falls asleep on a bench, only to awake with a start and recall in extraor-
dinary detail ‘Bourton that summer, early in the ’nineties, when he was
so passionately in love with Clarissa’ (MD 64). The extent of his temporal
displacement is emphasized by his amazement at the long summer even-
ing (MD 177): although Daylight Saving Time had first been implemented
in Britain on 21 May 1916, since Peter left for India after the war, this is
the first time he has witnessed its effects on civilian life in England. When
Clarissa enters St James’s Park at the start of the novel, she particularly notes
the special feeling on crossing this spatial threshold: ‘But how strange, on
entering the Park, the silence; the mist; the hum’ (MD 5). An oasis of rural
continuity in a city riven by change, the park acts on Clarissa’s senses just as
Proust’s madeleine had acted on the narrator of Á la recherche du temps perdu,
conjuring up ‘scene after scene at Bourton’ (MD 7).
Parks are potentially classless spaces in the novel, offering the opportu-
nity for chance meetings between characters from different social constel-
lations. Yet the novel offers a powerful spatial embodiment of the ‘separate
spheres’ ethos. Clarissa happily speaks with Hugh Whitbread shortly after
she enters St James’s Park, but she registers no other presence; on the other
hand, Peter Walsh, who must approach Hugh or Richard Dalloway to
secure a position, sees Septimus and Rezia, but does not talk to them. For
a character like Elizabeth Dalloway, who was born into the wealthy and
powerful Westminster set, but is starting to question its limits, the map of
London signifies different permissible and proscribed zones. Westminster,
her home, is associated with public service and ‘of course, there was in the
Dalloway family the tradition of public service’. By contrast, the Strand and
Fleet Street, into which she rebelliously ventures on the omnibus, stand for
business and private enterprise. She enters this space with some trepidation:

She looked up Fleet Street. She walked just a little way towards St. Paul’s,
shyly, like some one penetrating on tiptoe, exploring a strange house by
night with a candle, on edge lest the owner should suddenly fling wide
his bedroom door and ask her business, nor did she dare wander off into
queer alleys, tempting by-streets, any more than in a strange house open
doors which might be bedroom doors, or sitting-room doors, or lead
 Andrew Harrison 51

straight to the larder. For no Dalloways came down the Strand daily; she
was a pioneer, a stray, venturing, trusting. (MD 150–1)

The imagery of the excerpt reveals how Elizabeth perceives her trespass
into this part of London as slightly indecent. She is ‘penetrating on tiptoe’:
tentatively experimenting with a male role by considering a career as ‘either
a farmer or a doctor’ (MD 150).5 These careers carry with them, of course,
a disreputable association with lower bodily functions, and with bedroom
visits.6 By straying upstairs to the bedroom or downstairs to the larder she
will be traversing those binding codes which keep servants out of the sitting
room and masters out of the pantry. In her tightly circumscribed approach
to social rebellion she reveals just how much she has internalized her moth-
er’s values: as Lady Sally Rosseter, née Seton, notes, ‘Clarissa was a snob at
heart – one had to admit it, a snob’ (MD 208).
If the parks act as regulated contact zones in the novel, then the rigid
vertical organization of English society is realized in the depiction of
staircases, which also facilitate connections, but only in reference to hier-
archical structures. E. M. Forster exploits the symbolic value of staircases
when he refers in Chapter Six of Howards End to the ‘narrow, rich stair-
case’ of Wickham Place, which represents the upwardly-mobile cultural
life inhabited by the Schlegels and their circle, excluding Leonard Bast
and the clerk class: ‘They had all passed up that narrow, rich staircase at
Wickham Place, to some ample room, whither he would never follow them,
not if he read for ten hours a day’ (Forster 58). In Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa
is described through Peter Walsh’s critical focalization as occupying the
same elevated promontory: ‘How he scolded her! How they argued! She
would marry a Prime Minister and stand at the top of a staircase’ (MD 7–8).
The symbolism of high and low places operates throughout the novel. In
parallel scenes, Clarissa shouts over the banisters and down the staircase
to the retreating figures of Peter Walsh, and Elizabeth with Doris Kilman.
Both Walsh and Kilman symbolically occupy lower social positions in the
novel. However, while Clarissa acts on impulse to remind Peter of ‘my party
to-night!’ (MD 52), she asks Elizabeth to recall ‘our party to-night’, her altered
pronoun deliberately excluding ‘the odious Kilman’ (MD 138, 139). Peter
Walsh may be a somewhat disreputable outsider, but he still commands the
respect of his fellow guests in the dining room of his London hotel, with
‘his way of looking at the menu, of pointing his forefinger to a particular
wine, of hitching himself up to the table, of addressing himself seriously,
not gluttonously to dinner’ (MD 175). By contrast, in Regent’s Park, Peter
thinks of Septimus Warren Smith as merely ‘the young man in the overcoat’
(MD 77). In the climactic scene at the Bloomsbury lodging house of the
Warren Smiths, Dr Holmes brushes Rezia aside and climbs the stairs, while
Septimus throws himself out of the window and down onto his landlady’s
railings. While Clarissa twice connects with a lady who looks across at her
52 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

from an adjacent house, Septimus is stared at by a man ‘coming down the

staircase’ (MD 164).
The novel’s use of hierarchical spatial tropes should cause us to question
the nature and significance of Clarissa’s final feeling of ‘connection’ with
Septimus after she hears news of his suicide through Lady Bradshaw: ‘She felt
somehow very like him – the young man who had killed himself’ (MD 204).
If Clarissa and Septimus are aesthetically and thematically drawn together
through the juxtaposition of their separate plotlines and similar meditations
on the problems of sex and marriage, they are also separated by a less con-
scious, but equally structural, emphasis on the inequities of class and deep-
seated social divisions. In one of Clarissa’s flashbacks, she recalls riding on
the top of an omnibus with Peter Walsh, reflecting on her dissatisfaction at
her ignorance of the lives of the strangers walking below: ‘It was unsatisfac-
tory, they agreed, how little one knew people . . . Odd affinities she had with
people she had never spoken to, some women in the street, some man behind
a counter – even trees, or barns’ (MD 167). The progression in her thinking
from street women to a shopkeeper to inanimate objects says much about the
extent of Clarissa’s imaginative connection with the working people below
her. The affinities she dimly senses here seem odd in more ways than one.
We might recall Clarissa’s dismissive focalized reference early in the novel to
‘the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink
their downfall)’ (MD 4), or remember the fact that her daughter ‘had never
thought about the poor’ (MD 143). Anna Snaith refers to Mrs Dalloway as
‘anti-authoritarian because all narratives are valid. There is no hierarchy of
meaning’ (Snaith 76), but it is difficult to see how the perspectives of Edgar
J. Watkiss (with his loud and humorous reference to ‘The Proime Minister’s
kyar’ [MD 15]) or ‘Moll Pratt with her flowers on the pavement’ (MD 20),
or the anonymous ‘men without occupation’ (MD 21) outside Buckingham
Palace, can have any serious claim on our sympathy or attention.
While we recognize the gravity of Clarissa’s epiphanic imaginative con-
nection with Septimus at her party, then, we should also realize how this
moment cuts against the powerful tropes of separation in the text. Reading
through the complex, and in places obscure, train of Clarissa’s solitary
thoughts in the little room ‘where the Prime Minister had gone with Lady
Bruton’ (MD 201), we need to balance her perceptive insights against the
background of her earlier insensitivity. Clarissa can ‘see’ Septimus’s fall from
the window, ‘with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation
of blackness’ (MD 202), and she can intuit his plight at the hands of Sir
William Bradshaw, but to what extent should we believe in her ability to
understand his situation and interpret his actions?7 How should we inter-
pret the announcement that ‘She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it
away while they went on living’ (MD 204)?
These questions lead us to the central issue we must confront in assessing
the political implications of Mrs Dalloway. How are we to understand the
 Andrew Harrison 53

character of Clarissa Dalloway? If we accept Clarissa’s inability to ‘see life

steadily and see it whole’ (Forster 58), how should we relate to her particular
perspective in the novel? Critics have puzzled over this question since the
novel’s publication in 1925,8 and the ambiguity of Clarissa’s presentation
has been reflected in different ways in much of the subsequent criticism.
Some uncertainty in the text’s treatment of its main character is suggested
by comments made by Woolf herself shortly after its composition. She
claimed to find Clarissa ‘in some way tinselly’, and declared ‘some distaste’
for her (Diary III 32). At one point we are directly informed, in a sentence
which seems to merge focalization and authorial verdict, that her eighteen-
year-old self ‘knew nothing about sex – nothing about social problems’
(MD 36). The statement seems just as applicable to Clarissa at the age of
fifty-one. She cannot decide whether her husband, in his committee, is
debating the condition of Armenians or Albanians (MD 131), but the novel
alerts us to the importance of that distinction by showing us the edges of
her perceptions. As Trudi Tate has suggested, Clarissa’s ignorance of political
(and other) matters should trouble feminist readers, since her portrayal in
the text is clearly ambivalent. Though some recent commentators on the
spatial politics of Mrs Dalloway seem inclined to view Clarissa as a vehicle
for Woolf’s feminist reflections on the possibilities for urban self-realization,
Tate is right to note that her depiction in the text is ‘simultaneously sym-
pathetic and satiric’. In her words, ‘The text constructs [Clarissa Dalloway]
quite explicitly as someone with whom we identify and whom we are forced
to judge. If we fail to address both aspects of her function, then we miss
much of the text’s political force’ (Tate 470, 479).
In conclusion, it may be worthwhile thinking of Clarissa Dalloway in her
London setting as akin to Tiresias, the blind seer in Eliot’s The Waste Land,
who ‘although a mere spectator . . . is yet the most important personage . . .
uniting all the rest’ (Eliot 70). Like Tiresias, Clarissa ‘[throbs] between two
lives’ (Eliot 59) in her weary marital frigidity and her idealistic yearning for
the young Sally Seton; she brings all the characters together at the party,
and she unites the two plots through her identification with Septimus.
Clarissa is a blind seer in a more significant sense, too, since the novel is at
pains to identify not only her moments of insight, but also the moments
of snobbishness or insensitivity, and instances when her vision is obscured,
or when the meaning of something eludes her. Clarissa is not, of course,
alone in seeing the world partially, or projecting her own fantasies onto
the world around her, but as the novel’s central consciousness, and the
sympathetic representative of a waning conservative elite,9 we are liable to
afford her thoughts and utterances an authority which none of the other
characters can claim. The novel’s political content cannot be separated from
the ambiguous nature of its central character and her mediating conscious-
ness. Indeed, her relativizing potential might be said to redeem the novel’s
problematic formal insistence on the ‘doubling’ of Clarissa and Septimus,10
54 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

emphasizing the conflict between aesthetic cohesion and social division

played out in its pages. To reduce the novel to a demonstration of subver-
sive feminist utopianism is to sidestep its formal engagement with the divi-
sive politics of urban space, and to overlook its troubling, and unresolved,
engagement with both sympathy and complacency, insight and ignorance,
rebellion and conservatism.

Notes
1. See, in particular, the essays in Snaith and Whitworth.
2. See, for example, Leena Kore Schröder’s ‘‘Reflections in a Motor Car’: Virginia
Woolf’s Phenomenological Relations of Time and Space’, and Jane Lewty’s
‘Virginia Woolf and the Synapses of Radio’, in ibid., 131–47 and 148–63
respectively, and Caughie.
3. See Son 183–5 and Usui.
4. Virginia Woolf, ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’, in Essays IV 480–91.
5. We might compare Elizabeth’s suggestive language here to that of her mother,
when she tries to imagine ‘what men felt’ for women: ‘It was a sudden revelation,
a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded
to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the
world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of
rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary
alleviation over the cracks and sores!’ (MD 34–5).
6. Cf. D. H. Lawrence’s The Lost Girl (1920), in which Alvina Houghton’s decision
to train as a maternity nurse induces outrage in her father: ‘I can’t under-
stand that any young girl of any – any upbringing, any upbringing whatever,
should want to choose such a – such an – occupation. I can’t understand it’.
Lawrence 30.
7. At least one contemporary reviewer of the novel, P. C. Kennedy in the New
Statesman, 6 June 1925, found Clarissa’s imaginative connection with Septimus
at the party unconvincing: ‘the artificial link is purely redundant, purely
improbable, purely pointless’. Critical Heritage 165.
8. Lytton Strachey was among the first readers of the novel to note a ‘discrepancy’
in Woolf’s handling of Clarissa Dalloway. In her journal entry for 18 June 1925,
Woolf reports his response: ‘he thinks she is disagreeable & limited, but that
I alternately laugh at her, & cover her, very remarkably, with myself’. Diary III 32.
9. In his groundbreaking study of the historical contexts to Woolf’s fiction, Alex
Zwerdling argues that Mrs Dalloway criticizes a dying old order in England in
the post-war years, and the decline of political conservatism; the novel stra-
tegically employs Clarissa as its central consciousness, since she inhabits that
stymied culture (to her detriment), while also seeing its limitations and flaws.
Zwerdling suggests that Clarissa is a divided character, combining the unsympa-
thetic core values of old order figures like Hugh Whitbread or Millicent Bruton
with the empathetic qualities of outsiders like Sally Seton and Peter Walsh. See
Zwerdling 120–43.
10. Woolf described Septimus as Clarissa’s ‘double’ in her Introduction to the 1928
American Modern Library edition of Mrs Dalloway.
 Andrew Harrison 55

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and London: Garland Publishing, 2000.
Dick, Susan. Virginia Woolf. London: Edward Arnold, 1989.
Eliot, T. S. Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1975.
Forster, E. M. Howards End. [1910] London: Edward Arnold, 1960.
Gan, Wendy. Women, Privacy and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Lawrence, D. H. The Lost Girl. Ed. John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981.
Majumdar, Robin and Allen McLaurin, ed. Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. [Critical Heritage]
Snaith, Anna. Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations. Basingstoke: Palgrave –
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Snaith, Anna and Michael H. Whitworth, ed. Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and
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Son, Youngjoo. Here and Now: The Politics of Social Space in D. H. Lawrence and Virginia
Woolf. New York and London: Routledge, 2006.
Trudi Tate. ‘Mrs Dalloway and the Armenian Question’. Textual Practice 8.3 (1994):
467–86.
Usui, Masami. ‘The Female Victims of the War in Mrs Dalloway’. In Mark Hussey, ed.
Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality and Myth. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press, 1991: 151–63.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. [1925] London: Penguin, 1992. [MD]
The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. II: 1920–1924. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by
Andrew McNeillie. London: The Hogarth Press, 1978. [Diary II]
The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III: 1925–1930. Ed. Nigel Nicolson, assistant editor
Joanne Trautmann. London: The Hogarth Press, 1980. [Diary III]
Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. IV: 1925–28. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: The Hogarth
Press, 1994. [Essays IV]
Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. London: University of California
Press, 1986.
4
D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s
Lover in the New Century: Literary
Canon and Bodily Episteme
Richard Brown

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is probably D. H. Lawrence’s most famous book.1

Almost everyone knows it is a controversial novel. In fact it is one of the
best-known of those novels in English that are famous for being controver-
sial. It would surely be a bit naive to assume that this doesn’t impact on
the history of the discussion of Lawrence in university English departments
where the best known academic criticism used to shy away from Lady
Chatterley and prefer several of Lawrence’s other novels when it came to
studying his work. In our more biopolitical century the situation is some-
what different, maybe even reversed. Many of the things that once made
Lady Chatterley seem controversial or outrageous may now make it seem all
the more interesting and urgent to study. We are not as shocked by its sub-
jects as readers once were, or at least not in the same ways. We are more, not
less, interested in the politics of literary and cultural history and of course
in sex. In those contexts hitherto less noticed aspects of the novel can also
come to the fore and offer intriguing and significant directions for the cur-
rent and future discussion of the book that parallel movements of interest in
the period and in the subject as a whole. For these reasons even if we do not
think Lady Chatterley’s Lover is Lawrence’s greatest novel we recognise it as
one of the key books of its century and we may now turn to it first in ours.

From F. R. Leavis to Richard Hoggart and Michel Foucault

To help me expand and develop this point I would like to offer a brief his-
tory of its place in the canon, invoking the notion of an ‘epistemic shift’.
This is a notion that has long been familiar to academics in literary and
cultural studies but is still one that can usefully be explicated here and
applied directly to the subject at hand. Since ‘epistemology’ is the theory or
science of knowledge, by a reverse logic, an ‘episteme’ might be thought to
be the unit of that knowledge which it studies. Typically the term is used
by historians of knowledge and especially by those who like to see forms of
knowledge as more or less connected into some kind of system at any given
56
 Richard Brown 57

moment in time. Best known among such historians in the Humanities and
Social Sciences in Europe at the end of the last century was Michel Foucault.
The OED cites Foucault’s two classic works The Order of Things (in English
and French) and The Archaeology of Knowledge when it glosses the word in
this sense.2
This is especially convenient for my argument because another well-
known aspect of Foucault’s thought that relates to the epistemic shifting
that makes up early twentieth-century modernity is also highly relevant to
the case. Foucault was also the author of, amongst other things, a contro-
versial and pioneering History of Sexuality, one that challenged the assumed
break between ‘Victorian’ and ‘Modern’ attitudes to sex that had become
popular in English and American writings of the 1960s.3 In place of this
Foucault offered a longer historical perspective that redefined modernity
and reached back to the Enlightenment and ultimately to Classical Greece.
Instead of the change from Victorian repressions to modern liberality, which
sixties liberalism tended to invoke, Foucault saw an an accelerating con-
tinuum of knowledge and consequently power, which included the sexual
confessional and the newly emerging sexual sciences of the fin de siècle
with their taxonomies of the perverse. Foucault quoted Lawrence himself
to prove his point about sex and how it had become subordinated to the
regimes of ‘sexuality’.4
According to this model modernity becomes increasingly sexualised and
moreover the human subject is increasingly governed by the management of
sexual knowledges. Manifestly it is an idea of modernity which is related to
one of the other best-known theories of modern art, that of Walter Benjamin,
for whom the erosion of the sacred significance of art through the modern-
ising processes of industrialisation, mechanisation, mass production and
democratisation produces a new register of artistic significance that is based
on politics and the political.5 In Foucault the focus of interest and mean-
ing in this modern ‘episteme’ would be less on the political (in Benjamin’s
senses) and more on the biopolitical realm of sexuality and the body.
Seeing how this bodily episteme related to the study of English involves
much of the recent history of the subject. One of the mini-‘epistemes’ that
most defined the study of English Literature in English Universities when
Lawrence was first discussed was associated with the work of F. R. Leavis in
Cambridge in the 1930s and after. The well-publicised controversy around
the non-appointment of Colin MacCabe in 1981 showed the extent to
which a Cambridge-based scholar of modern literature felt the need to
throw off the entire Leavisite inheritance in favour of a mix of continental
European cultural, political and psychoanalytic theory to defend his inter-
ests in James Joyce and the cinema. The controversy showed Leavisism to be
an ‘episteme’ ruled by a set of values which was shifting and it is one that is
revealed when we look back at Leavis’s extreme preference for Lawrence over
Joyce in The Great Tradition (where Lawrence is hailed as ‘the great genius of
58 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

our time’ and Joyce as a ‘dead end’) but more relevantly for us here when
we look back at his treatment of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the book he wrote
on Lawrence.6
For Leavis, in D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955), The Rainbow and Women in
Love were the novels which ‘most demand attention’ (18), the former for its
‘social and cultural history’ and pre-eminently the latter for its ‘rare power
of having maintained a living fidelity to the concrete’ (163), for its ‘having
touched the whole pulse of social England’ (181) and having evoked ‘the
deeper life of the psyche’ (198). By contrast, though he quoted Lawrence’s
powerful polemical defence of the book, ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s
Lover’, and voiced approval of the defence of the physical life which is
announced in it, he barely treated that novel itself (which was still at that
time censored in England) beyond quoting from the pages in Chapter XI
where Connie rails against the degradation of Robin Hood’s England in her
horrified vision of the industrialised village of ‘Tevershall’.
Leavis did not apparently much like Lady Chatterley, though why that is he
leaves largely unsaid in the book, somewhat disingenuously claiming that
the pamphlet seemed to him to ‘compel more certainly a wholly approving
judgement than the novel it defends’ (73). In an article in the Daily Telegraph
explaining why he did not join the defence witnesses at the trial he said it
was because it was ‘a bad book’.7
We might compare Lady Chatterley with The Rainbow and Women in Love
and find it wanting in some ways, but many of its core values are deeply
congruent with those other books and with those which Leavis himself
sought to promote especially in such works as Culture and Environment, his
1933 study of the work, community and popular culture of modernity writ-
ten with Denys Thompson.8 So one can only assume that the extent and
manner of its privileging of the bodily and the sexual over the cultural and
educational were among the problematic elements.
When, after the trial, Penguin published the 1961 mass market edition of
Lady Chatterley, Richard Hoggart, who had defended the novel at its trial,
wrote the introduction. Hoggart’s argument neither refers to Leavis nor
resembles his approach to Lawrence but implicitly contrasts many of its
assumptions. For Hoggart the comparison for Lady Chatterley is not with
Lawrence’s other novels nor with the canonical tradition of the nineteenth
century but rather with such contemporary pulp fictions as the pseudony-
mous Paul Renin’s Can a Man Forgive (1947) and Luke Paradise‘s The Corpse
Wore Nylon (1950), from which he quotes a long extract which luridly
depicts a rape.9 These were two of the texts which Hoggart had been forced
by his publisher to disguise or creatively parody in The Uses of Literacy to
avoid being censored himself but here he quotes them directly and gives
their actual titles.10 Hoggart’s introduction directly compares the way these
books deal with sex and by implication argues that Lawrence does it better
than they do. It is the sex that makes Lady Chatterley a good book now.
 Richard Brown 59

In the grand frame I have outlined, Leavis and Hoggart might be thought
to represent contrasting strategic positions on the book in relation to the
Foucaultian ‘epistemic shift’. For Leavis, cautiously extending the bounda-
ries of an ethical literary value, Lady Chatterley is still a bit beyond the
borderline of what is acceptable in the institution. For Hoggart, facing a
different set of challenges, it presents an opportunity for widening access
to literary and cultural value that should be urgently embraced. Alongside
the Foucaultian shift that underlies this contrast, there is a fascinating
and significant movement from issues of ‘literature’ to those of ‘literacy’
which needed to be faced. On a simpler and more regional level, Hoggart
(first at Hull University, then at Leicester) implicitly speaks of and for the
North of England and, whilst much of modernism is implicitly London
and Bloomsbury centred, and traditional academia London and Oxbridge
focused, most English readers will quickly register Lady Chatterley as hav-
ing the distinction of being one of English literature’s most recognisably
Northern classic books. This regional focus brings particular attention to a
whole series of issues to do with the industrialisation of the landscape and
the human body, and work.11
Subsequent criticism and reception of Lawrence and Lady Chatterley has
rehearsed and reflected this in ways far too various to do anything more
than briefly sample here. To take one American academic history of the
novel in which Lady Chatterley’s Lover forms a central example, we might
select The Death of Literature by Alvin B. Kernan.12 For Kernan the Chatterley
trial deserves a whole chapter, in which the various defences of literary merit
from the trial provide the basis for exploring the precarious and developing
definitions of literature in the academy.
Another recent contribution to the debate about modernism and sex
which draws heavily on Lady Chatterley and further complicates and inter-
nationalises the Hoggartian model, comes from the critic Allison Pease
who suggests that modernism’s involvement with the history of censorship
was not accidental but that modernism programmatically legitimates the
inclusion into the literary area of the kinds of sexual material previously
preserved for excluded or policed genres of writing like pornography.13 For
Pease Lawrence’s novel, like pornography, constructs the body in sexual
pleasure as an aesthetic ideal and the main problematic element about this
in Lawrence’s case is his simultaneous disavowal of pornography itself.
Lawrence’s novel is frequently treated not despite but because it is about
sex. A look through The Year’s Work in English Studies for recent treatments
finds an account of an article in Modernism and Modernity by Loren Daniel
Glass ‘#$%^&*!?: Modernism and Dirty Words’.14 Glass discusses Barney
Rosset’s struggle to publish Lady Chatterley’s Lover in America and in the
process develops a broader discussion of its use of ‘dirty’ words, their his-
tory and their function in the early twentieth century as markers of anxi-
ety about social change. The essay’s attempt to ‘establish the centrality of
60 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

so-called dirty words [ . . . ] for any understanding [ . . . ] of Anglo-American

modernism more generally’ is, described by the reviewer, Andrew Harrison,
as ‘quite absurd’.15 And yet the end of Chapter XI in which Connie and
Mellors playfully and affectionately enjoy a lesson in the English vernacular
terms for the sexual body parts in a Northern dialect which they both realise
is partly made up, or the sections of Chapter XIV where they name their
body parts John Thomas and Lady Jane, are passages of the novel which
readers may love or hate these days but ones which could be recommended
to anyone who is curious about Lawrence to help them develop an interest
in what is distinctive about the book. I find these scenes enduringly inti-
mate and funny and complex and they connect deeply in the English tradi-
tion to the punning English language lesson undertaken by Katherine the
French princess in Act 3 scene 4 and Henry V’s robust wooing of Katherine
in Act 5 scene 2 of Shakespeare’s play as they do to international modernism
with the playful use of coded body words for body parts used by James Joyce
in the ‘Penelope’ episode of Ulysses.16 In both these cases I would argue the
‘dirty words’ aren’t blunt or reductively descriptive in their usage, as might
be assumed, but the fluidity and instability of referentiality itself is at the
bottom of their effect.
It is not only in the history of vernacular ‘dirty words’ that Lawrence’s
novel played its part but also in that of other emerging and problematic
languages for aspects of sexual experience with which even legitimate
medicine was slowly coming to terms at the time. Elsewhere in the OED
for example we find the editors acknowledging the part played by Lady
Chatterley in the history of the definition of the orgasm, citing Connie’s
reflections on the kind of orgasm she has with Michaelis in Chapter III
(‘She still wanted the physical, sexual thrill she could get with him by her
own activity, his little orgasm being over’) alongside the comparatively
negligible passing reference to ‘vascular turgescence’ among the discussions
of diseases of the nails and the like in Jonathan Hutchinson’s Archives of
Surgery for 1899.17
Many millions of readers will have read this passage and the succes-
sive chapters of Lady Chatterley which give their account of the first sex of
Connie and Mellors in Chapter X, their developing love-making in the hut
in Chapter XII, after eurythmic dancing in the rain in Chapter XV, and when
they share their controversial ‘night of sensual passion’ on the eve of her
departure for Venice with Hilda in Chapter XVI directly because of their con-
tributions to articulating the embodied experience of sex, including orgas-
mic pleasure in a variety of forms. However excited, outraged (like the 1970s
generation of feminists such as Kate Millet who specifically chose Lawrence
to take to task18), embarrassed, bemused, or, hopefully these days rather more
amused, they might have been by this, it will have enhanced their ability to
articulate their experiences of sex or, in a more Foucauldian language, to
negotiate their subjectivity within the frame of this new biopolitical frame.
 Richard Brown 61

Language and ‘cerebrating makeshifts’

So, for good or ill, literary history and epistemic shifting mean that we have
Lady Chatterley’s Lover as a canonical text and that is probably more because,
than in spite of, its famous focus on sex. Looking at the text broadly as a
symptom of literary history and epistemic shifting alone, though, may not
take us all that far into it and overly determined responses to certain themes
in it can produce a situation where the reader’s approach is narrowed and
curtailed. At the best of times what we call double entendre has a tendency to
quickly become a ‘single entendre’. And since the kind of epistemic shifting
we are talking about may well have shifted some way beyond the thresh-
olds once marked by the book, an active reading of it beyond the terms of
the censorship debate in ways that consciously deflect or refresh a reader’s
expectations, can offer the best strategy. It can also be refreshing to try to
read a novel so often supported by explicit authorial intention and one that
is at the centre of an authorial academic industry, beyond the expectations
of that authorial frame and alongside its modernist contemporaries, even if
Lawrence is often seen as marginal to that modernism.
To counteract epistemic overdeterminism we can see that Lady Chatterley
often now earns and holds its place in the early twenty-first century canon in
terms of a variety of contemporary concerns that more obliquely engage the
sexual, such as the theme of language and the fallacy of reading Mellors as a
symbolic ‘natural’ man. Reading the text in its contexts of the 1920s rather
than those of the 1960s and 70s, especially now that the recent upsurge of
modernist cultural studies, refreshes our sense of 1920s ‘modernism’ as a
subject matter as well as a literary form. We might in the course of this also
find ourselves exploring further shiftings of the bodily episteme through the
novel’s treatments of the body, disability, the environment and work.
James Joyce once jokily referred to Connie as ‘Lady Chatterbox’.19 It’s
not that she is an especially talkative character that is the interesting point
here so much as that the novel can come to life for readers when they
approach it as if its central subject is language. As Michael Bell says, it’s a
novel where ‘talk and sex are endlessly juxtaposed, superimposed, com-
pared to or substituted for each other’.20 This is evident in the smart, ‘free’,
pre-World-War-I conversation between the sisters about men and sex that
opens the novel; much as the conversation between Ursula and Gudrun
Brangwen opened Women in Love. For the sisters with their ‘aesthetically
unconventional’ international, Fabian, pre-Raphaelite education, it ‘was
the talk that mattered supremely’ (7). They are interested in sexual pleasure
as an ‘inevitable’ part of the cultured discussion and construe it in surpris-
ingly linguistic terms:

a queer vibrating thrill inside the body, a final spasm of self-assertion,

like the last word, exciting, and very like the row of asterisks that can
62 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

be put to show the end of a paragraph, and a break in the theme. (Lady
Chatterley, 8)

We get a clear picture of the bohemian mores of the age here and one that
is drawn from the young women’s points of view. Strikingly though, sex is
somehow like or is a part of language and it is this self-consciously modern-
istic analogy which begins an extended treatment of the language theme,
not only in its spoken but its written and indeed printed form.
Connie’s marriage briefly flourishes before the disaster of Clifford
Chatterley’s being ‘smashed’ in the war and she, though at first happy
enough to support him, finds herself growing restless and susceptible to the
encouragements of those, including her father and Clifford himself, who
suggest she take a lover. Michaelis is the lover she takes first, a successful
(or success-worshipping) Irish playwright from Mayfair, who visits their
country home of Wragby along with a group of other intellectuals whom
Clifford invites to help build his literary reputation. The ‘cronies’ as she
calls this group discuss sex as she listens on and Charlie May and Tommy
Dukes come up with the jazz-age idea that sex is ‘just another form of talk’
(33–4). However Connie is highly sensitive both to sex and to conversation
and it is how Michaelis talks about the non-simultaneous orgasms of their
love-making at the end of Chapter V that puts an end to their affair. The
more modern the analogies for sex in Connie’s mind – ‘water-ice’, ‘cocktails’
(64) – the more restless she becomes and the more she becomes attracted to
the physical presence of the gamekeeper.
It is the first sight of Mellors’s body that brings them together, and then
the powerful associations of the spring and the chicks and the touch of
their bodies in which her ‘knee’, ‘shoulder’, ‘back’ and ‘loins’ (115–16) are
separately named into a physical existence that her surprisingly postmodern
sense of being restlessly located in a ‘simulacrum of reality’ (18) had denied.
Mellors’s body parts are made strangely conscious here (‘the hand knew,
too, how to unclothe her where it wanted’, 116) as they become physically
intimate with overwhelming associations of naturalness and inevitability,
his ‘heart’ attempting to protect her before ‘the Mammon of mechanised
greed did them both in’ (119).
Yet it is also very clearly the contrast between his language use and that
of the other characters that intrigues and attracts her. What is more, the
sheer unnaturalness of Mellors as a character is explored through his use
of language. The recognition of this both develops the theme of language
and reveals the book’s modernity in ways that can surprise the assumptions
which many first-time readers still bring to the text.
Mellors is defined by his words. On his first entry, the narrative clearly
observes his falling into the ‘broad drag of the dialect’ when ‘there had been
no trace of dialect before’ and that ‘he might almost be a gentleman’ (47).
Clifford tells the story of his complex background, educated and advanced
 Richard Brown 63

in rank to Lieutenant during the war before adopting the gamekeeper role
after it (47–9 and then in Chapter VIII 92–3). Connie notes his slipping into
the vernacular and that he is a ‘curious kind of person’ (68) just as he realises
that she is not quite the stereotyped lady but ‘nicer than she knows’ (68)21
and she notices when he uses the vernacular and when not, which is clearly
known by Clifford to be ‘by fits and starts’ (92). She asks him outright ‘Why
don’t you speak ordinary English?’ (95) but doesn’t get a reply. During their
intimate dialogue at the end of Chapter XII it is the awkwardness, artificiality
and learned quality of the dialect rather than its natural or authentic quality
that underpins its use. This challenge to the assumption that Mellors is natu-
ral or authentic in any simple way can still surprise new readers though it
has been recognised, and occasionally connected, for instance, to the divided
dialect of his upbringing which is mentioned in the poem ‘Red Herring’.22
Once registered, it quickly becomes the more consistent and significant
thing about him. We get further background on his education and first mar-
riage from Ivy Bolton in Chapter X (145) and from his own mouth (200–2).
We see the books on his shelf as Connie realises he was ‘a reader after all’
(212) and the sense that his story makes him a composite and constructed
figure more than a natural being comes to a head in Chapter XVI where
Connie’s sister Hilda, having met Mellors and seen his ‘smallish, sensitive,
loose hand’ puts a more negative gloss on it claiming that ‘He was no simple
working man, not he: he was acting! acting!’ (243)
In the final chapter where Mellors writes to Connie he does so in his phal-
lic persona as ‘John Thomas’ but nevertheless in a fluent, educated English
written style without dialect. In this letter too and its emotive conclusion,
the novel’s thematic exploration of the gaps and connections between lan-
guage and reality, between language and the body and of the value of touch
has (almost) the last word, when he writes: ‘so many words, because I can’t
touch you. If I could sleep with my arm round you, the ink could stay in the
bottle’ (301). The unnaturalness or performed quality of Mellors’s personal-
ity which the novel describes and which forms part of Connie’s reaction to
him, seems at odds with the valuation of the natural over the artificial that
Lawrence’s novel would normally be assumed to propound. When Tommy
Dukes returns to Wragby in Chapter VII to complain of a modernity in
which: ‘We’re not men and the women aren’t women. We’re only cerebrat-
ing makeshifts, mechanical and intellectual experiments’ (75), it seems odd
to think that Mellors is, at least in part, a kind of cerebrating makeshift too.
Yet it gives the novel a suggestive connection to the complex explorations
of selfhood amongst its modernist contemporaries to think so.

Young in the 1920s

If developing an awareness of Lawrence’s modernist contexts and contem-

poraries can make Mellors a more interesting character then it can do the
64 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

same job with Connie and with Clifford and the novel’s themes which cen-
tre on them too. One shift in the bodily episteme noted by Jean Baudrillard
in America in the 1980s was from a concern with sexual liberation (as such),
to one with ‘finding one’s gender’.23
So strong was the critique of Lawrence mounted by 1970s feminism that
we might easily forget the extent to which there was also a vigorous and out-
spoken feminism of the 1910s and 20s with which Lawrence was engaged
even if controversially so. As we have seen, Lawrence’s narrative strategy is
to centralise the experience and consciousness of his female protagonists
and Hilda and Connie are presented as self-modernising women of their
time. They might be thought to be versions, of the ‘it’ girls of the 20s era
(albeit more deeply-educated versions), modern in their education, distrust-
ful of inherited assumptions about marriage and affection and frank in their
pursuit of experience including the experience of sex.24
There is an avant-garde or at least periodising quality about the book
in this regard that we might bring out by recalling a character like Olive
Strangeways (glimpsed in Chapter VII) ‘reading a book about the future’
which advocates test-tube babies (74). We might also here employ a com-
parison with Mina Loy, one of the bolder feminist and Futurist writers of
the age, who, like Lawrence, combined interests in literature and the visual
arts,. Though they are by no means identical there is a refreshing link to
be made between Connie’s ‘visionary experience’ of Mellors bathing in
Chapter VI (66) and some of the early poetry of Mina Loy. There is, for
instance, Loy’s poem about the Italian Futurist poet, propagandist and per-
former Filippo Tommaso Marinetti who was briefly her lover: ‘Sketch of a
Man on a Platform’:

Your genius
So much less in your brain
Than in your body25

They have in common a sense of the importance of the body as a site of

meaning and a reversal of the usual gendered orientation of the erotic gaze.
Lawrence would have come across Loy’s work, such as her poem about
Brancusi which was published in the same issue of The Dial as Eliot’s The
Waste Land. Loy went to art school in Paris, met Marinetti and another
Futurist Giovanni Papini in Florence and travelled to Mexico, with Dadaist
poet and boxer Arthur Craven, more than a decade before Lawrence went
there himself, so there might even be a trace of her in the character of Kate
in The Plumed Serpent. Her Futuristic ‘Feminist Manifesto’, though not pub-
lished at the time, can serve now as a startling bench mark and reminder
of the life-style modernity of 1920s avant-garde women, many of its ideas
sparkily animating aspects of Lawrence’s cronies’ debates.26 Odd though it
seems to say, in view of his much-discussed lapses, there is an exemplary
 Richard Brown 65

dynamic in some aspects of Lawrence’s gender politics, in his record of

these life-style debates, his re-orientation of the gendered gaze, his critique
of voyeurism and in the key ideas of tenderness and the democracy of
touch that underpin the novel whose earlier title was ‘Tenderness’. The
links between sex, gender and politics are inscribed in the ‘sense of rebel-
lion [that] smouldered in Connie’ (72) and her annoyance at those men
who, as she sees it, ‘have defrauded a woman even out of her own body’
(71) seem modern enough.
When Connie takes her clothes off and looks at herself in the mirror
and begins to repossess herself and her bodily regeneration at the start of
Chapter VII she performs a scene of self-recognition, self-fashioning and
self-empowerment that echoes throughout modernist writing and after it
into the postmodern continental psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan
and his ‘mirror phase’ in which the self comes to a dynamic constitution of
itself as whole emerging from a repressed childish phase of seeing the body
only as a series of disintegrated parts. Becoming a self is always thus a self-
modernising process suspended between fragmentation and integration for
Lacan and recalled throughout literary modernism.
To take just one comparison with a classic modernist text, there is the
scene in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway, which had been published
just a few years before in 1925, 27 where the heroine, early on in her daily
round, registers that ‘Women must put off their rich apparel. At mid-day
they must disrobe’ and experiences a moment of ‘some astonishing signifi-
cance’, ‘a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed’,28
a meaning that contrasts for her with a momentary domestic vision of her
husband, for all his power in the political world, stumbling upstairs with
his hot-water bottle.
Woolf’s sharp and semi-surreal metaphor of the ‘match burning in the
crocus’ resonates, as well as contrasts, with Lawrence’s novel, from Connie’s
‘burning’ to his description of Mellors as a ‘lonely pistil’ (85) and then
‘Burning Pestle’ (227) to the flourishing indigenous botany which fills his
text with crocus (85), daffodils (85–6), wood-anemone (93) and, as the spring
growth progresses, the dandelions, daisies, catkins, celandines, primroses,
hyacinths, forget-me-nots and columbines as images of the spring growth of
the woodland environment spread through the text (165).
Of course there are lots of differences between Clarissa and Connie and
what they feel about themselves and what they want to do about it, too
many for me to even try to indicate here, but quite directly relevant to
our notion of the epistemic shifting of the time is the way both texts find
in the meaning of the mirroring of the body, an idea of significance or
of meaning itself. Clarissa’s ‘astonishing significance’ and ‘inner mean-
ing’ seems directly echoed in Connie’s sense that her body was becom-
ing ‘meaningless’ (70), the word repeated with the familiar insistence of
Lawrence’s prose style.
66 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Invoking Loy and Woolf does something to indicate the extent to which
Lawrence’s novel can be refreshed by the renewed company of its female
contemporaries and maps into the gender debates of its time where the con-
trasts between, for example, such culturally and sexually rebellious figures
as Loy or The Egoist’s editor Dora Marsden and the more politically focussed
suffragists such as the Pankhursts is just one of the oppositions marked
out in the contrast between the characters of Connie and her sister Hilda
(who comes to distrust men in favour of what she sees as a more ‘complete
intimacy’ free from the taint of what she calls ‘slavery’ 253) that structures
the novel.
Connie’s rebellion is obviously different in kind from the more routine
fashions which Tommy Dukes satirises as ‘Fellows with swaying waists
fucking little jazz girls with small boy buttocks like two collar-studs’ (39),
a phrase picked up in turn as a symptom of modernity in Catherine O’
Driscoll’s recent Modernist Cultural Studies.29 Yet some juxtaposition with
her contemporaries within and beyond the novel can liberate Connie from
symbolic universalism into a more defined location within contemporary
debates about women and sex. As one of the convention defying women of
her time, Connie is, like the title of the autobiography of the prolific nov-
elist lover of W. B. Yeats (and long-time chairwoman of Shrewsbury Town
Football Club) Ethel Mannin, ‘Young in the Twenties’ with all the ethical
and cultural baggage which that represents.30
Of course it is the courage and the passion of the lovers that holds the
centre stage. Indeed so powerfully romantic and regenerative is its main nar-
rative that we might almost ignore the extent to which the novel charts a
world of marital breakdown and divorce, which includes Mellors and Bertha
Coutts, Ivy Bolton and her first husband (lost in a mining accident) and
Hilda and her husband as well as Connie and Clifford. It is the period entre
deux guerres when according to Jean Rhys’s Good Morning Midnight the young
people are ‘mad for pleasure’.31 Lady Chatterley may be especially shocking
since in it the experimental bohemian morals and discussions of Paris and
London are transplanted to the upper classes in provincial England (‘at once
cosmopolitan and provincial’, 6) where the mores of Jane Austen more than
those of Marinetti may still have been assumed to be the rule. Whether iden-
tified with lust-worshipping Futurists or austere suffragists within or outside
the text, Connie’s self-mirroring and self-construction says much about the
self-modernising agenda of its times.

War trauma, disability and work

Romantic readings of Lady Chatterley, which focus only on one of its cou-
ples do not always sit well, though, with fuller historical reading in terms
of modernity which might be accessed through more concentration on
the equally interesting, if not so immediately attractive, figure of Clifford
 Richard Brown 67

Chatterley. What is more, Clifford’s character and situation can speak to

the inscription and the shifting of the bodily episteme just as much or
even more than those of Mellors and Connie. The novel is set in a histori-
cal moment that is defined from the start by the First World War and its
aftermath of which the ‘bruise which only slowly deepens its terrible ache’
(49–50) is a prime symbol more embedded and more pointedly bodily than
the ‘bitterness of the war’ that Lawrence said he wanted to present in Women
in Love.32
The still larger biopolitical symbol may be Clifford’s physical disability and
for many readers this may now form as problematic an aspect of the book as
Lawrence’s representations of sex and gender once did, in an age that has been
called by one of its most prominent disability theorists, Lennard J. Davis, one
of ‘dismodernism.’33 We need only compare the familiar outraged and sym-
pathetic structure of feeling that underpins the picture of the disabled war
veteran in Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Disabled’,34 with the more complex range
of issues surrounding Clifford in Lady Chatterley that often cause him to come
across in a negative light at least from Connie’s point of view.
As well as the war, England, especially Northern England, is shown as
suffering deeply from the effects of industrialisation and mechanisation in
Lawrence’s novel. Clifford’s disability and also his conspicuous motorised
invalid carriage (‘a bath-chair with a small motor attachment’ 5) which
‘chuffed’ and ‘puffed’ and ‘pugged’ around the novel (41, 184, 186) is made
to do much of the work of speaking of that suffering too. Lawrence had
himself worked as a clerk in a surgical appliances factory (and used the expe-
rience in Sons and Lovers) so he may well have been familiar with available
models of bath chair.
The division and mutual alienation of the social classes, the destruction of
the natural environment and the modernisation of work are all symptoms
of the social situation that the England of the General Strike era fed into
Lawrence’s vision, seen in its starkest form in Connie’s car drive through the
1920s ‘Waste Land’ of Tevershall in Chapter XI of the novel and the ‘utter
negation of natural beauty’ and ‘utter death of the human intuitive faculty’
which she observes. As in one common reading of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste
Land, the England Connie sees is, by contrast with ‘Shakespeare’s England’,
one of ‘half-corpses’: ‘producing a new race of mankind, over conscious in
the money and social and political side, on the spontaneous intuitive side,
dead, but dead’ (153).
It is in the chapter following this vision that the wheelchair begins to
become a problem for Connie. Until that point it has arguably been one
of the more positive symptoms of modernity in the novel, from the first
page announcing a proud triumph over human limitation that the progress
of mechanical technology might bring and enabling Clifford to continue
with his work of managing the estate after the death of his father and elder
brother during the war. As a symptom of technological progress seen as a
68 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

transcendence and enhancement of the body’s limits the motorised bath

chair fits neatly with the discussion of the ‘prosthetic’ aspect of modernity
treated by Tim Armstrong in his Modernism, Technology and the Body and it
is a suitably ambivalent symbol of modernity, especially in the transitional
Chapter XIII, when his wheelchair fails to mount the hill in the wood and
Clifford is forced to seek out Mellors’s help and Connie is placed in a situa-
tion where she cannot help but compare the distinctive potencies of the two
men to Clifford’s disadvantage.
The cosmetic reconstruction of the broken or wounded body of the ex-
servicemen is discussed by Sander L. Gilman in Making the Body Beautiful
and reading through cultural texts Gilman mostly sees this wounded body
and mind as a sign of masculinity and heroism. It is, for example, for
Jake Barnes the stoical, embittered war-wounded writer-narrator of Ernest
Hemingway’s Fiesta/The Sun Also Rises published in 1926 and closely con-
nected to Lawrence’s writings of the time.35 But it is not quite so for Clifford
it would seem.
The progress of technology was in some ways an expression of the
empowered masculinity of the First World War era but also might point
to disturbing erosions of it. Technology associated with new mechanised
weaponry like the ‘landship’ or tank was part of the triumph of the new
but also proof of the outdatedness of the structures of physical bravery and
chivalric value and code that had accompanied traditional forms of war.
Trudi Tate, who has written on the tank, does not note the occasional resem-
blance between Clifford’s bath chair (such chairs were typically steered by a
tiller) and the ‘landship’ in the book (185) but she does note that Clifford is
remarkably untroubled by his war trauma so that he ‘can then function as
a symbol (mind without body; reason without passion) without demanding
too much sympathy from the reader.’36
Should we take that lack of sympathy for granted? Morag Shiach, for
example, begins by saying that Lady Chatterley is ‘famously about sex’ but
decides rather to discuss it as a novel about work – producing a subtler and
more sympathetic portrait of Clifford both as a war-veteran and a writer
more than as a stereotypically heartless and exploitative industrialist. He
is therefore a character potentially identifiable with Lawrence himself as is
Mellors, one suffering from neurasthenia brought on by work.37 Lawrence
himself was often, of course, ill. There’s another reading of Lady Chatterley
outside of the dynamics of the legitimated passion of the lovers which
might take an interest in Clifford and indeed his relationship with Ivy
Bolton as, however unconventional and unromantic it might be, an aspect
of their mutual economic and political empowerment that Connie and
Mellors cannot somehow attain.
At the start of Chapter XIII the discussion of Clifford’s wheelchair as supe-
rior to the horse and as comparable to the motor car introduces a reference
to the ‘Ford car’ which may be interesting not just as reference to the Ford
 Richard Brown 69

product (the first Model T came into production in 1903) but also to the
well-known system of improved industrial productivity known as ‘Fordism’
with its production lines of specialised and mechanised labour that max-
imised productivity, and increased profit. Such questions of work can bring
us full circle to the discussions of modern culture in Walter Benjamin and
Leavis and Thompson that I raised earlier in relation to the canon.38 As far
as Lawrence is concerned, Clifford, like Gerald Crich in the earlier novel,
takes an active modern interest in the improved management of the mines
and is especially interested in new machines as a way of compensating for
his own disability and implicitly the shortcomings of all human labour and
as a way of empowering himself. But Clifford like Gerald Crich is ultimately
both master and victim of the industrial system, of systems of masculinity
and the mechanised supports and extensions to bodily capability which he
and his wheelchair represent.
Clifford’s disability speaks, then, to themes of war and work and as a final
feature of the shifting bodily episteme with which I began. For most read-
ers now, disability will certainly figure most strongly as an important bodily
condition in itself rather than as a symbol of something else and it is pre-
eminently a condition where issues of cultural representation come into play.
At first Connie has wanted to be sympathetic to Clifford’s physical disability
but Michaelis scoffs at a fellow who is going ‘to trade on his disabilities’ (53)
and, for many readers the extent to which Connie or even the novel seem to
come around to this aspect of his values will make it difficult to approach.
Lennard J. Davis, writing on the curiously fractured body of the Venus de
Milo in his Enforcing Normalcy, produces a subtle explanation of the crea-
tion of the idea of the ‘disabled body’ and the reactions against it of the
supposedly normal in terms of the repressed fragmented body of Lacanian
psychology that precedes the making of identity and wholeness for all.39
From within this frame there might be a profound connection to be drawn
between Clifford’s disabled body and the fragmented linguistic and cultural
identity of Mellors and Connie’s moment of self-creation in front of the
mirror that we have seen as differing reactions to the bodily episteme. From
such contemporary perspectives the triumphant couple may even be seen
as being as much or more vulnerable to the enforcement of normalcy as
Clifford. Interestingly, Davis seems not yet to have produced an extended
analysis of Lady Chatterley itself though he recalled during his education:
‘I discovered the dirty books – in this case Lady Chatterley’s Lover and
Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County – and read them as carefully as
I read any text. It was through these works that the distance between reality
and fiction became dangerously narrow.’40
Deliberately narrowing that distance still further we might note that in the
‘real’ twenty-first century North-East Midlands, the place which Lawrence
made the Chatterleys’ wood is still there, still full of flowers and trees and
marked by signs Clifford himself might approve prohibiting trespass. But
70 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

there is a footpath that provides a good long walk around it and now the
railway is grown over and some of the coal mine shafts are replaced by lei-
sure pursuits including carp fishing in the lake. There is a public car park and
reasonably good disabled access in the pub nearby. Meanwhile part of the
wood is ‘trespassed’ by no less a modernity than that of the M1 Motorway
and by its endless passage of Ford and other cars which will mostly pass
through this famous fictional world quite unaware that they are doing so.
The twenty-first century scene may certainly remind us that the challenges
of maintaining the precarious balance between the conservation of the
natural environment and the wheelchair of progress have hardly eased up
in the century that has gone by since Lawrence’s day even if they are recon-
figured differently and that the negotiation between the natural and human
environments may be another aspect of the shifting biopolitical episteme.

* * *

By way of conclusion we might turn to another well-known aspect of

the thought of Michel Foucault about cultural modernity that frequently
underpins the contemporary literary- and cultural-critical episteme: his idea
of the author.41 Foucault is not interested in biography in the literal sense,
still less in elevating what the historical author him or herself might have
to say about the literary works they produced over the views of the reader
or critic. The authorial or ‘author-function’, for him, is defined by what
that author has come to represent through their works and the discussion
of those works, by what he calls the authorial ‘name’.
It seems that Lady Chatterley’s Lover can now occupy the more prominent
place in the modern literary canon because it more closely reflects that
Lawrentian name. It is one of the defining books of its century and ours and
that is in part because of the epistemic shifts of modernity towards an ever
greater emphasis on sex and the bodily as the centre of meaning but it may
also anticipate accompanying shifts that allow a wide range of other con-
cerns to come to the fore. We still need to read Lady Chatterley without being
entirely enclosed by the pressures of these shifts or by reductive assump-
tions about the Lawrentian and if we do so we can find it a novel which is
both intriguingly located in the debates of its time and capable of speaking
directly to ours. And it still may not even be Lawrence’s best novel after all.

Notes
1. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover Cambridge 1993 ed. Michael Squires
(London: Penguin, 1994).
 Richard Brown 71

2. OED online accessed 15 March 2010. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things [1969]
trans. (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970, X. iii. 365 and The Archaeology of
Knowledge, [1969] trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock Publications,
1972), IV. vi. 191.
3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (London: Penguin, 1979).
4. The History of Sexuality, p. 157. For more on Lawrence’s novel and Foucault see
David Ayers, English Literature of the 1920s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1999) or David Kellog, ‘Reading Foucault Reading Lawrence: Body, Voice and
Sexuality in Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ in D. H. Lawrence Review 28.3 (1999), 31–54.
5. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (Fontana, 1972).
6. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition [1948] (London: Peregrine, 1983), pp. 35–7. F. R.
Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1955).
7. F. R. Leavis, ‘The New Orthodoxy’ Daily Telegraph 17 February 1961. For a further
discussion of this and of Shaw’s contrasting idea that it should be required read-
ing, see Rachel Bowlby, ‘But She Could Have Been reading Lady Chatterley: The
Obscene Side of the Canon’ in Shopping with Freud (London: Routledge, 1993),
pp. 25–45.
8. F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment (London: Chatto, 1964).
9. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, with an Introduction by Richard Hoggart
(Penguin, 1961), pp. v–vii.
10. See especially The Uses of Literacy, pp. 213–16. See also Sue Owen ‘The Abuse
of Literacy and the Feeling Heart: The Trials of Richard Hoggart’ in Cambridge
Quarterly, 34.2, 2005, pp. 147–76.
11. Woolf’s famous objection to Arnold Bennett seems to inscribe a North–South
divide in English modernism from 1910.
12. Alvin B. Kernan, The Death of Literature (New Haven: Yale, 1990).
13. Allison Pease, Modernism, Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 160–7. ‘Lawrence effected the incorporation
of pornographic vocabulary and actions into serious literature, high art, through
attempting to re-inscribe aesthetic disinterest as a mode of bodily being’ (p. 164).
14. Loren Daniel Glass, ‘#$%^&*!?: Modernism and Dirty Words,’ Modernism and
Modernity 14: ii (2007), pp. 209–23.
15. The Year’s Work in English Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
Volume 87, No.1.
16. G. Wilson Knight forged a link between Lawrence and Joyce whilst Professor at
Leeds at the time of the trial with his discussion of the word ‘bottom’ and its
cognates, in ‘Lawrence, Joyce and Powys’, Essays in Criticism XI,. 4, 1961.
17. Jonathan Hutchinson, Archives of Surgery Volume 9 (London: West, Newman and
Co., 1899), p. 129.
18. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (London: Virago, 1977), pp. 237–45.
19. Letter to Harriet Weaver 27 September, 1930 (Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart
Gilbert, London: Faber, 1957, Volume 1, p. 294). Critical of the ‘usual sloppy
English’ of the start, he got Stuart Gilbert to read parts of Lady Chatterley to him
in Paris in December 1931 (apparently Connie’s vision of Mellors bathing in
Chapter VI or else the scene in the rain in Chapter XV) and presents himself to
Harriet Weaver as critical of its tendency to ‘propaganda’ (Selected Letters of James
Joyce, Faber, 1978), p. 359.
20. Michael Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), p. 209.
72 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

21. Mellors can be seen as ‘a man who has passed beyond class distinction to an
individual self-awareness’ (R. P. Draper) whereas Connie ‘shuffles from one realm
to another’ ( Julian Moynahan, The Deed of Life, Princeton, 1963, p. 141).
22. See for example Margaret J-M. Somnez, ‘D. H. Lawrence’s Language of Real Men?
Style and Dialect Shifting in The White Peacock and Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ in
Nurten Birlik (ed.) D. H. Lawrence and His Work (Ankara: Middle East Technical
University, 2003), pp. 31–46.
23. Jean Baudrillard, America, translated by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1988), p. 46.
24. One contemporary point of reference is Clara Bow, star of the film It (1927),
though serving mainly as a contrast, since Mellors voices negative views about
the ‘celluloid women of today’ (p. 119), Connie hates the ‘plaster and gilt horror
of the Tevershall cinema’ (p. 152), and Lawrence himself complains of the ‘coun-
terfeit emotion of the radio and the film’ in the ‘A Propos’ (pp. 312 and 315–16).
Clifford sees Connie at the end as ‘one of those half-insane, perverted women
who must run after depravity, the nostalgie de la boue’ (p. 296).
25. Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedecker, ed. Roger L. Conover (Manchester: Carcanet,
1997), p. 19.
26. See Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (New York: Farrar,
Strauss and Giroux, 1996).
27. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 33–5.
28. Mrs Dalloway, pp. 33–5.
29. Catherine O’ Driscoll, Modernist Cultural Studies (Gainesville: University of Florida
Press, 2010), pp. 72–4, 82.
30. Ethel Mannin, Young in the Twenties (London:Hutchinson, 1971).
31. Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight [1939] (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 75.
32. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 485.
33. Lennard J. Davis, ‘The End of Identity Politics and the Beginning of Dismodernism’
in Lennard J. Davis (ed.), The Disability Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2006),
pp. 231–42.
34. Wilfred Owen, Collected Poems (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966), pp. 67–8.
35. Sander L. Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
36. Trudi Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War, pp. 102–3
37. Morag Shiach, ‘Work and Selfhood in Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ in Anne Fernihough
(ed.), Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), pp. 87–102.
38. Walter Benjamin critiques the negative attitudes to popular culture in Aldous
Huxley’s Beyond the Mexique Bay (London: Chatto, 1949), which itself draws on
Leavis and Thompson.
39. Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body (London:
Verso, 1995), pp. 126–57. The chapter is included in the Norton Anthology of Theory
and Criticism (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001), pp. 2398–421.
40. Lennard J. Davis, Resisting Novels (London: Methuen, 1987) p. 8.
41. Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader
(London: Penguin, 1984), pp. 101–20.

Works cited
Ayers, David. English Literature of the 1920s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
Baudrillard, Jean. America. London: Verso, 1988.
 Richard Brown 73

Bell, Michael. D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1992.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Fontana, 1972.
Birlik, Nurton (ed.). D. H. Lawrence and His Work. Ankara: Middle East Technical
University, 2003.
Bowlby, Rachel. Shopping with Freud. London: Routledge, 1993.
Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. New York: Farrar, Strauss and
Giroux, 1996.
Davis, Lennard J. Resisting Novels. London: Methuen, 1987.
——. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body. London: Verso, 1995.
——. (ed.). The Disability Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2006.
Fernihough, Anne (ed.). Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. London: Tavistock Publications, 1970.
——. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock Publications, 1972.
——. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 An Introduction. London: Penguin, 1979.
——. ‘What is an Author?’. In The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow. London:
Penguin, 1984, 101–20.
Gilman, Sander L. Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Glass, Loren Daniel. “#$%^&*!?: Modernism and Dirty Words.” Modernism and
Modernity 14: ii (2007), 209–23.
Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy. London: Penguin, 1957.
Hutchinson, Jonathan. Archives of Surgery Volume 9. London: West, Newman and
Co., 1899.
Huxley, Aldous. Beyond the Mexique Bay. London: Chatto and Windus, 1949.
Joyce, James. Letters of James Joyce. Volume 1. Edited by Stuart Gilbert. London:
Faber, 1957.
——. Selected Letters of James Joyce. London: Faber, 1978.
Kellog, David. ‘Reading Foucault Reading Lawrence: Body, Voice and Sexuality in Lady
Chatterley’s Lover’. D. H.Lawrence Review 28.3 (1999), 31–54.
Kernan, Alvin B. The Death of Literature. New Haven: Yale, 1990.
Knight, G. Wilson. ‘Lawrence, Joyce and Powys’. Essays in Criticism XI, no. 4,
(1961).
Lawrence, D.H. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, with an Introduction by Richard Hoggart.
London: Penguin, 1961.
——. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Edited by Michael Squires. London: Penguin, 1994.
Leavis, F. R. D. H. Lawrence: Novelist. London: Chatto and Windus, 1955.
——.“The New Orthodoxy”. Daily Telegraph 17 February 1961.
——.Women in Love. London: Penguin, 1995.
——.The Great Tradition. London: Peregrine, 1983.
——. and Thompson, Denys. Culture and Environment. London: Chatto, 1964.
Loy, Mina. The Lost Lunar Baedecker. Edited by Roger L. Conover. Manchester:
Carcanet, 1997.
Mannin, Ethel. Young in the Twenties. London:Hutchinson, 1971.
Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. London: Virago, 1977.
Moynahan, Julian. The Deed of Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.
O’ Driscoll, Catherine. Modernist Cultural Studies. Gainesville: University of Florida
Press, 2010.
Owen, Sue. ‘The Abuse of Literacy and the Feeling Heart: The Trials of Richard
Hoggart’. Cambridge Quarterly, 34.2, 2005, 147–76.
74 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Owen, Wilfred. Collected Poems. London: Chatto and Windus, 1966.

Pease, Allison. Modernism, Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of Obscenity. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Rhys, Jean. Good Morning, Midnight. London: Penguin, 2000.
Tate, Trudi. Modernism, History and the First World War. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1998.
The Year’s Work in English Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. London: Penguin, 1992.
5
A Handful of Dust: Realism:
Modernism/Irony: Sympathy
Richard Jacobs

On the Sunday morning of his weekend visit to Hetton, John Beaver tells
Brenda’s fortune with cards.

Oh yes . . . there is going to be a sudden death which will cause you great
pleasure and profit. In fact you are going to kill someone. I can’t tell if
it’s a man or a woman . . . yes, a woman . . . then you are going to go
on a long journey across the sea, marry six dark men and have eleven
children, grow a beard and die. (36–7)

Brenda’s response is: ‘Beast. And all this time I’ve been thinking it was seri-
ous’ (37). In one sense it could not be more serious, for here, in typically
refracted and grotesque form, is the novel in miniature, as well as the first
in its menagerie of beasts. There is John Andrew’s death, from which Brenda
profits, or thinks she will profit, in her decision to leave her husband and
her home; there is Tony’s resultant long journey across the sea and later ‘stiff
growth of beard’ (173); there is Mr Todd’s profligate and bigamous father-
ing of ‘most of the men and women’ on his savannah (212); and there is
Tony’s presumed death and his actual living death. Here, too, is the first of
the novel’s skilfully patterned instances of card-games and fortune-telling
(merging with the beast motif in the game of Animal Snap played out at
the novel’s centre), which derive from Madame Sosostris in The Waste Land
(1922), the text which Evelyn Waugh evokes in the novel’s title and epigraph.
Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934), his fourth novel and widely agreed as
his best, recounts the betrayal of Tony Last by his wife Brenda, bored after
seven years of marriage and drifting into adultery with the callow John
Beaver. Tony’s consequent refusal to play the expected role of guilty party
leads to bitterly unexpected and cruelly ironic consequences at the novel’s
shocking end. This chapter will explore the relations between A Handful
of Dust and its literary predecessors, in the realist as well as the modernist

75
76 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

canon (Eliot, Conrad, Dickens, Flaubert). The first section will look at the
range of ironic techniques deployed in the novel, their function and effect;
the second section will consider the engagement of the reader’s sympathies;
and the third section will turn to intertextual and inter-canonical relations.
Waugh used the proleptic technique, as in Beaver’s fortune-telling,
locally and with more of a self-conscious shock-effect in his earlier novels.
Notorious examples include the schoolboy Tangent asking ‘Am I going to
die?’ (Decline 71) after being wounded in the foot by a starting-pistol (he
does) and Prudence replying ‘so you shall, my sweet’ to Basil Seal’s ‘I’d like
to eat you’ (Mischief 180) as they make love (he does). In A Handful of Dust
these moments, rather than local and single, are multiple and cumulative
and the effect is a more sombre inevitability, closer to the use of the tech-
nique in Shakespearean tragedy. So when, within half a dozen pages, John
Andrew prays at church ‘Please God make me see the kill’ (96), his father
writes to his mother ‘I hope he doesn’t break his neck’ (101), his nanny says
to him ‘You won’t see any death’ (102), and when he pleads to stay at the
hunt with ‘there mayn’t be another day. The world may come to an end’
(104) – after these, the reader in effect knows that ‘John’s fate was decided’
(105) which are the words used moments before the catastrophe.
This is the first aspect of A Handful of Dust that calls for comment when
thinking about its place in the canon. This chapter will examine its struc-
tural and formal intricacy, its extreme narrative economy, its highly pat-
terned deployment of prolepsis, repetition, paralleling, juxtaposition and
cutting-techniques (as in cinematic as well as dream-narrative), the word-
play behind the cool, understated surface of the prose (Mrs Beaver will ‘look
about for another suitable house to split up’ (54)): in a word, its textural
polish. For Waugh, issues of texture and structure were the key lessons from
modernism, as he made clear in 1930: ‘Modern novelists taught by Mr James
Joyce are at last realizing the importance of re-echoing and remodifying’
(Order 83). The specific formal techniques, illustrated below in turn, have
one end in common: to cause maximum pain for the reader. For instance,
Mrs Rattery describes her elaborate solitarily played card-game as ‘heart-
breaking’ because of a ‘stubbornly congested patch at one corner’, and this
is a painful re-figuring of the congestion at the corner of the road that led to
John Andrew’s death six pages earlier. In the same heart-breaking game there
is the ‘six of diamonds out of place’ (112) and keen readers of early Eliot (as
Waugh was) will connect that to the fortune-telling by cards in ‘Fragment of
a Prologue’ where ‘the six’ signifies ‘A quarrel. An estrangement. Separation
of friends’ (Eliot 125).
There is a ruthlessness about the deployment of irony in this novel that
has analogues elsewhere in early Waugh but never to this relentlessness of
effect, and it is a ruthlessness that corresponds to the ruthless plot and – in
the nicest possible way – the ruthlessness of its characters. Images of eat-
ing and animality are threaded throughout, from Mrs Beaver, purveyor of
 Richard Jacobs 77

chic, who ‘gobbled’ her yoghurt, to Reggie St Cloud, member of the House
of Lords, who spoke ‘blandly’ and ‘ate in a ruthless manner’ (7, 150, 149).
These are people who have learned what comes to Tony in his delirium: that
it is necessary to ‘kill in the gentlest manner’ (211). The textual ancestry of
this depiction of well-mannered ruthlessness includes Wharton’s The Age
of Innocence (1920), another bitterly realised social satire, where the tribal
community of old New York expel their kinswoman by ‘taking life “without
effusion of blood”’ (Wharton 201). The tribalism in A Handful of Dust is a
harshly portrayed version of the Bright Young Things in Waugh’s Vile Bodies
(1930): here it’s ‘Polly and Daisy and Angela and all the gang of gossips’ (59).
Gossip, for this tribal gang, is relayed by telephone, as in Polly’s first ques-
tion on the telephone after her party: ‘Good morning, darling, what’s the
dirt today?’ (53) The Wharton novel, set in the 1870s, was probably the first
to include the telephone as emblematic of modernity. The emotional impact
of Waugh’s novel, anticipated in this respect, but only in a limited way, by
Vile Bodies, is significantly structured by telephone conversations, examined
in more detail below, and which together emblematise the impersonalised
communication of modern man.
None of Waugh’s early novels are long but many writers would have made
this novel more ample, leisurely and discursive. This is a function of the
extreme economy of the narrative voice. Ian Littlewood refers, in relation
to narrator as well as characters, to the ‘refusal to be shocked, disoriented,
embarrassed or involved’ (14). The stripping back of scene setting, for
instance, to the two-word paragraph ‘Next morning’ (124) after the hor-
ror of John Andrew’s death enacts a kind of distaste for narrative itself in
its usual elaborations. In the ancestry here is Eliot’s ‘Rhapsody on a Windy
Night’ with the austere first lines of its stanzas, ‘Twelve o’clock’, ‘Half-past
one’ (Eliot 26), as well as the two-word paragraphs ‘He travelled’ and ‘He
returned’ in the penultimate chapter of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education
(Education 411). The moments leading up to John Andrew’s death are
introduced by the extraordinary words, ‘Then this happened’ (105), which
seem almost brutally awkward, as if refusing to play by the normal narra-
tive rules. David Lodge writes of Waugh’s ‘vision of . . . anarchy’ remaining
‘objective – morally, emotionally, and (perhaps most important) stylistically’
(5). The economy is developed from Waugh’s earlier three novels but it has
much more point and attack here, enacting a response to the stripping back
of feelings, communications and human relations that the novel dramatises.
Martin Stannard puts it well: the novel ‘documents nothing more assidu-
ously than the inability to communicate or share experience’ (Stannard 379).
One unsettling technique Waugh deploys in terms of economy is to exclude
passages of dialogue which, in retrospect, the reader knows must have taken
place and which carry crucial plot developments. Thus, when Beaver returns
after his visit to Hetton and casually tells his mother that Brenda ‘talked of
taking a flat in London’ (40) we feel betrayed in having to learn that through
78 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

him. The same effect is achieved on New Year’s Eve when, after Tony went
home early from a party, ‘Beaver and Brenda returned together in the back
of a car’ (64). Next morning Brenda tells Tony of her plan to attend lectures
in London. This must have been hatched during those intimacies. Madame
Bovary (1857) comes instantly to mind: that is, Emma’s notorious back of
a carriage trip with Leon through the streets of Rouen and the spurious
piano-lessons which then regularise their sexual liaisons. But the economy
of Waugh’s narrative denies us access to what Flaubert allows his readers. The
narrative economy in A Handful of Dust extends to the issue of mere syntax
and sentence structure. To the novel’s opening question (Beaver’s ‘Was anyone
hurt?’) his mother replies: ‘No one, I am thankful to say’, said Mrs Beaver,
‘except two housemaids who lost their heads and jumped through a glass
roof into the paved court. They were in no danger’ (7).
The syntax, and particularly the deliberate placing of ‘said Mrs Beaver’,
which has the effect of relegating what follows to an afterthought, enacts the
cruel indifference to housemaids, dehumanises them. It is worth a moment
to add that cruel indifference to maids and servants is not Mrs Beaver’s pre-
rogative only: in one of the novel’s more casual details of plot, Brenda casu-
ally dismisses Grimshawe, her long-standing personal maid, in the middle
of the 1930s slump, as soon as she acquires the flat. And the repellent Dan,
in Brighton, repels because of his first statement, an order to the hotel staff:
‘Take em up and get em unpacked and quick about it’ (140).
The answering of a question with ‘no one’ is echoed thirty pages later
when, this time, Beaver is the object of the enquiry. Brenda’s sister asks her
‘Who’s been to stay?’ and Brenda replies: ‘No one. We had a friend of Tony’s
called Mr Beaver last weekend’ (41). We are invited to compare the brutal
indifference in the one example to the guilty evasion in the other, where the
afterthought is a pretence: in terms of Brenda’s wilful indifference towards
Tony and his feelings, the comparison becomes even more pointed. It is,
after all, Mrs Beaver alone who realises that it was time Brenda ‘began to be
bored’ (9). And as soon as young married women’s boredom is mentioned
we are taken to Bovary again: as soon as he meets her, Rodolphe recognises
Emma’s boredom.
These two instances of ‘no one’ proleptically point forward to the pain-
fully repeated, almost choric refrain at John Andrew’s death: ‘“It wasn’t any-
one’s fault”, they said’ (107). This follows the novel’s most famous sentence:
‘Everyone agreed that it was nobody’s fault’ (106). Those last two words were
the original title of Little Dorrit (1857), which Tony is about to read when we
last see him. In the doctor’s words, ‘no one to blame, though’ (107), which
takes us to Emma Bovary’s suicide letter: ‘Let no one be blamed’ (Bovary 282).
Two further syntactically strategic sentences provide an economical
demonstration of the casually callous world of Brenda’s associates. ‘“God,
what a party”, said Marjorie, waving brightly to them all’ (42). The second
example has Brenda and her women friends returning from Hetton with the
 Richard Jacobs 79

button-holes that Tony had been at pains to select, despite his distaste for
them. As above, the adverbial phrase pretends to be a mere appendage: ‘“My
poor Brenda”, said Veronica, unpinning her carnation and throwing it from
the window into the side of the road’ (84).
The instances of proleptic patterning, to which we now turn, act like a
kind of grip on the novel’s sub-structure, with the effect of making the pro-
tagonists seem trapped in the impersonal machine that is the novel’s form.
At the start of the Hetton scenes Brenda, reading Tony the serial from the
newspaper, catches him out not listening and says: ‘I knew it [ . . . ] I shall
never read to you again’ (20). This light joke has a long reach, connecting
as it does to Tony trying to threaten Mr Todd with: ‘I have read for the last
time’ (218). It is the clash of tones, reflected in the stiff attempt at formality
in Tony’s language, which includes the quiet play on his own name that is
so jarring. The comic telephone exchanges between the drunken Tony and
Jock and the resentful Brenda, though providing a fortunate excuse for her
affair, are themselves anticipated by the scene in which Brenda calls Beaver
after their first evening together, getting him out of bed and up and down
two flights of stairs just to say good night to him (‘goodnight, bless you’),
which he clearly resents (52). ‘Goodnight, you sweet’ (60) is what Brenda
later says on the telephone to Tony.
The much-celebrated mistaking of names at the novel’s heart where
Brenda hears the news of John Andrew’s death and, realising that it is not
John Beaver, says ‘Oh, thank God’ and then bursts into tears (119) is itself
proleptically prepared for, its impact thus sharpened further. With the news
of the death on its way to Brenda, Tony says to Mrs Rattery: ‘with Brenda
John always came first . . . naturally’ (that last word is particularly loaded)
and ‘she’s seen so little of John lately. She’s been in London such a lot. I’m
afraid that’s going to hurt her’ (110). Waugh is also at pains to prepare in a
particular way for the scene, with important consequences for the reader’s
sympathies when we hear that Brenda has ‘been worrying all day thinking
[Beaver]’s had an accident’ (117): it is as if this goes at least some way to
allow for her terrible mistake later.
Getting names wrong is a bitter joke hitherto associated with Jenny Abdul
Akbar, whose predatory interest in Tony emerges as an indifference to learn-
ing his name (she calls him Teddy); furthermore she calls John Andrew
Johnny-boy and later Little Jimmy. John Andrew says to her: ‘You are funny
with names’ (89). The sentence carries a sharp charge when his mother
is funny with names in a very different sense. A further twist of the knife
has Brenda herself, discussing Jenny’s efforts with Tony and John Andrew’s
startlingly eroticised fascination for her, saying: ‘She’s got the wrong chap’
(91). At the news of the death she gets the wrong chap. The childish slang,
as always in Waugh, has bitter force, as in the chapter-heading ‘Hard Cheese
on Tony’. ‘Nasty medicine’ (212), says Tony, when Mr Todd, a father-figure,
makes him take it; the childish slang is touching, as Tony then begins to cry,
80 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

but it also returns us to Mrs Beaver and her gobbled morning-yoghurt, and
saying to her son: ‘Heavens, how nasty this stuff is. I wish you’d take to it’ (7).
In terms of repetitions, once we read that Brenda, in kissing, rubs against
Tony’s cheek in ‘a way she had’ (19) it becomes almost a matter of logical
necessity that within thirty pages she will kiss Beaver and rub against his
cheek in ‘the way she had’ (49), the shift from ‘a’ to ‘the’ quietly underlining
the betrayal. In a perceptive article, Ann Pasternak Slater calls this an exam-
ple of ‘the right thing in the wrong place’ (Pasternak Slater 52). Brenda’s way
of kissing is described as ‘like a cat’ (19) and, later, Jenny proposes curling
up in front of Tony ‘like a cat’ (87). In terms of literary ancestry, Jenny has a
‘sharp red tongue’ (86), is the only character who is heard speaking ‘sharply’
(89), and is observed running her tongue over her lips while collecting
melted butter. All this takes us to the cat in Eliot’s ‘Rhapsody on a Windy
Night’ which ‘Slips out its tongue / And devours a morsel of rancid butter’
(Eliot 27). The sharp red tongue and the predatory sexual appetite are vam-
piric, and in this way Jenny prepares us for the vampire-bats in the Amazon.
When the third chapter (‘Hard Cheese on Tony’) ends with the observa-
tion that Tony ‘had got into the habit of loving and trusting Brenda’ (126)
the expectation is that the phrase will be repeated, though that hardly pre-
pares the reader for the incongruity of it being attached to Tony’s divorce
lawyer, after the wounding understatement, ‘It was thought convenient that
Brenda should appear as the plaintiff. [On the novel and divorce-law reform
see Lurcock in Works Cited.] The lawyer warns Tony that they must prepare
for all contingencies, ‘for he had not had Tony’s opportunities to contract
the habit of loving and trusting Brenda’ (131). The endearment ‘my beauty’
is used twice in his novel, and to my knowledge nowhere else in Waugh.
Brenda says it to Beaver (60), thereby masculinising herself as Emma Bovary
does with Leon whom she treats as a mistress; it is a very painful repetition
when Ben then says it to John Andrew (102), who says he likes Ben ‘far
more’ than his mother (25).
The paralleling technique can have a startling effect. A (particularly
provocative) parallel, is set up between Marjorie’s malevolent and ‘very
unrepaying’ Pekinese dog Djinn (the name takes us back to Emma Bovary’s
beautifully sleek and communicative greyhound Djali) and the benevolent
but maligned Colonel Inch. Djinn is seen ‘gazing moodily at the asphalt’;
he then ‘got lost and was found a few yards away [ . . . ] staring at a shred
of waste paper’ (41). (Emma’s Djali, of course, gets genuinely lost and dis-
appears from the novel.) Colonel Inch would regularly lose his own hunt
and be ‘found [ . . . ] morosely nibbling ginger-nut biscuits’, ‘quite lost’ and
‘staring about him in the deepening twilight’ (101).
Reggie St Cloud and Therese de Vitre are bizarre reflections of each other.
Reggie ‘carried his burden of flesh as though he was not yet used to it; as
though it had been buckled on to him that morning for the first time and
he were still experimenting for its better adjustment; there was an instability
 Richard Jacobs 81

in his gait’ (147). This ‘fat young man’ (150), representative of all that is
holding Tony down, is as it were transfigured into the 18 year-old Therese,
representative of all that might, in a different kind of novel, set Tony free:
she ‘had not long outgrown her schoolgirl plumpness and she moved with
an air of exultance, as though she had lately shed an encumbrance and was
not yet fatigued by the other burdens that would succeed it’ (166). In a par-
ticularly unsettling way, Milly’s daughter Winnie, dubbed by Jock ‘the Awful
Child of popular fiction’ (136), is a transfigured John Andrew of whom the
doctor who attends after his death says he was ‘awfully fond’ (107).
‘Transfigured’ is the word that is used for Tony’s vision of the mythical
City – ‘a transfigured Hetton’ (164) – and trans-figuring becomes the struc-
tural principle driving the extraordinary pages that cut between the Brazilian
jungle where Tony is in delirium and London, the un-transfigurable city,
obstinately real, unlike Eliot’s London, the ‘Unreal City’ (Eliot 65). The cut-
ting is done to cause maximum pain and, again, it is the economy of the
method, the stripping back of the usual narrative baggage, that does the
work. The cutting technique has been anticipated earlier in the novel by
telephone scenes. On the first evening in her flat Brenda phones Tony, who
has sent her flowers.

‘It wasn’t you, was it?’

‘Yes . . . as a matter of fact.’
‘Darling, I did so hope it was . . . how like you.’
‘Three minutes, please.’
‘Must stop now.’
‘When are you coming back?’
‘Almost at once. Good night, my sweet.’
‘What a lot of talk’, said Beaver. (60)

Beaver had been ‘playfully’ trying to disconnect this call (60). At the start of
the disastrous evening in London a message from Brenda summons Tony to
the telephone in his club: ‘Darling’, he said. ‘Is that Mr Last? I’ve got a mes-
sage here from Lady Brenda’ (69). The ‘darling’ who speaks is Beaver. After
that drunken evening Brenda phones and Tony tries to get her to cancel one
of her appointments:

‘You couldn’t possibly chuck lunch or one of the lectures?’

‘Not possibly, darling.’
‘I see. You are an angel to be so sweet about last night.’

‘Nothing could have been so fortunate,’ Brenda said. (78)

And we realise with a jar that she was then speaking to Beaver and the
telephone has been put down; but we have no idea by whom or when.
82 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

The juxtapositions and cutting between Brazil and England have the
sharpest effect once Tony develops fever. In the jungle ‘It was late afternoon
when [Tony] first saw Brenda [ . . . ] But she did not answer him. She sat as
she used often to sit when she came back from London, huddled over her
bowl of bread and milk’ (195–6). This points forward to Mr Todd avoiding
Tony’s request for a boat to leave: ‘Mr Todd bent over the plate [ . . . ] but
made no reply’ (216).
The most jarring of these cuts comes when Tony in Brazil and Brenda
in London are shown simultaneously crying, both helpless and alone. It is
doubly poignant as the two of them are merged in a common activity, as if
children bonded in a common misery: ‘lying there, wrapped in his blanket,
he began to cry’ (201), as if truly together for the first and last time in the
novel. The cut that then occurs is quite dazzling in its literalising of Tony’s
delirium: ‘Now at last she broke down and turning over buried her face in
the pillow, in an agony of resentment and self-pity. In Brazil she wore a rag-
ged cotton gown of the same pattern as Rosa’s. It was not unbecoming. Tony
watched her for some time before he spoke’ (202).
It is as if the narrative is determined to be so scrupulously, gravely neutral
as to be relinquished of its obligation to comment or evaluate at all. This
is narrative as absence. In the light of our final example, another moment
in A Sentimental Education comes to mind. ‘Now the mob was attacking the
guard-house at the Chateau d’Eau, to liberate fifty prisoners who were not
there’ (Education 285–6). When Mr Todd finds the wildly delirious Tony the
narrative observes: ‘Then he began to talk to someone at Mr Todd’s side,
who was not there’ (210).

II

A Handful of Dust should be assessed by the extent to which Waugh is able

to evoke sympathy from the reader not only for Tony but also for Brenda.
The range of ironic techniques explored above may seem to preclude, for
the reader, anything other than a sense of futility in a bleakly cold, albeit
brilliantly executed and often wildly funny, cruel black comedy. A book
written (first in Russian) just a year earlier, Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark
(1932), another novel in the European adultery tradition – man leaves wife
and daughter for young schemer, daughter dies, he stays with his mistress,
he eventually dies in grotesque circumstances – is just that, a cold and
cruel black comedy in comparison with the Waugh and with the canonical
Nabokov novels that followed it.
The issue of sympathy in A Handful of Dust is delicately balanced from the
start. In the second chapter Brenda listens to Tony soliloquising about Hetton:

‘It’s a definite part of English life which would be a serious loss if . . . ’

Then Tony stopped short in his speech and looked at the bed. Brenda
 Richard Jacobs 83

had turned on her face and only the top of her head appeared above
the sheets.
‘Oh God,’ she said into the pillow. ‘What have I done?’
‘I say, am I being pompous again?’ (21)

That last question is typically revisited when Tony asks Milly in Brighton ‘am
I being a bore?’ (140). Once Tony and Brenda have made up, the narrative
adds: ‘(These scenes of domestic playfulness had been more or less continu-
ous in Tony and Brenda’s life for seven years.)’ (21) Brenda’s submerged cry is
her Emma Bovary moment, her version of the anguished ‘Why in the world
did I ever get married?’ which Emma ‘would ask herself again and again’ in
her solitary walks with Djali during the first months of her marriage (41).
For Brenda the sting in those delicately tonal brackets is the last two words
that give a sudden and painful glimpse of her life – how she has been acting
with what are later called her ‘pretty ways’ (27) – for seven years. After ‘What
have I done?’, and the clear sign that this is a question Brenda, like Emma,
has asked again and again, and for so long, it comes as a surprise to read, in
George McCartney’s well-regarded book on Waugh’s ambivalent relationship
with modernism, the assessment that there is nothing in the novel ‘to indi-
cate what Brenda may be feeling beyond a vague boredom’ (McCartney 81).
Brenda is 26: she was courted by Tony aged 18 and married him aged 19.
Mrs Beaver says ‘people used to be mad about her when she was a girl’ (9)
and her obtuse and sentimental mother says she was always ‘excitable’ (130).
Brenda talks of having given ‘girlish’ speeches for the Mayor (20). There is no
mention of her father, beyond a mention of his name. The suggestion is that
she has been indulged as the beautiful teenager (the more beautiful and the
older of two sisters) and that this continues to be her role in her marriage.
The reader sees no sign of her as a maternal presence for her son. Indeed, she
sometimes seems hardly solid at all, which is the word used about her ‘more
solid’ sister (40); Mrs Beaver refers to her ‘very fair, underwater look’ (9) and,
in a remarkable parenthesis which again is tonal and shows the influence of
early Eliot, she is ‘(a nereid emerging from fathomless depths of clear water)’
(19). In contrast, George McCartney reads this as evidence of Brenda being
‘provocatively opaque’ (McCartney 81). Elsewhere she is ‘fresh and fragile’
(40), as if the second word naturally follows from the first.
Used to being indulged, courted, as if etherialised, she drifts into the affair
with Beaver, on an impulse, as if as a game – ‘I happen to have a fancy for
him, that’s all’ (52) – a game in which she will play for once the dominant
partner or parent, teaching both Beaver and Tony the rules as she goes
along. She refers to Beaver as a ‘cub’ (53) and calls herself, a year older than
he, ‘an old married woman’ (48). Beaver appropriately says to her ‘You are
one for making people learn things’ (78). In a telling instance of this new
game it is said that ‘Brenda had begun to forget how amusing [Tony] could
be’ (96). In effect, she is a child with a new toy. After exhausting days in
84 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

London she becomes a ‘waif’ (40), a ‘Barnardo case’, and is pictured ‘nurs-
ing her bread and milk’ (45), which is her son’s evening meal. At the news
of John’s death she’s ‘like a small well-brought-up child introduced into a
room full of grown-ups’ (118). This has important consequences for our
sympathies, especially when she is increasingly abandoned by Beaver and
her friends – ‘It was August and she was entirely alone’ (201) – and ends in
despair and crying like an abandoned child.
Tony and Beaver are also not properly adult. Beaver lives with ‘mumsy’
(7) and she easily persuades him (in effect) to leave Brenda. In a detail that
comes close to eliciting some indirect sympathy for this ‘rather pathetic’
young man (41), we hear of the objects in his bedroom, none of them
really his, kept in ‘symmetrical order’, all of which ‘had stood in his father’s
dressing-room’ and all ‘suggestive of expensive Edwardian masculinity’ (8).
This is a mother’s-boy with an aggressively masculine father whose domi-
nance he still, almost literally, lives under. In a very telling detail Beaver is
said to write with ‘a large school-girlish hand’ (63). His father’s objects are
evoked again a few pages later when we hear of the parallel objects in Tony’s
bedroom and the contrast has some poignancy: Tony has amassed objects
‘representative of every phase of his adolescence’ (18). The list presented
includes a photograph of Brenda and John after the christening, and this too
is subsumed as belonging to a phase of his adolescence as if Tony is still in it.
The glimpses we are given of Tony’s early life, as the novel moves towards
its ending – those bracketed fragments of memory, one of them nicely
described by Valentine Cunningham as of ‘pre-lapsarian cycling holidays’
(Cunningham 352) – have the effect of structuring our sense of Tony as still
held within those moments. They increase our sense of his isolation, as if he
is a victim not only of the plot and the ironic patterns explored above, but
of his own past and, in particular, his own inherited pseudo-Victorian ideals.
The two roles that betray Tony most painfully have been well described by
Jed Esty in a fine study of modernism and national culture: ‘first as a manor
house gentleman in the era of suburbanization, then as a would-be jungle
hero in the era of imperial decline’ (Esty 222).
Tony’s ‘madly feudal’ attachment to Hetton (41), with his sense of ‘duty
towards one’s employees, and towards the place too’ (21), is (as the use of
‘one’ suggests) also a kind of game that he has inherited from his ancestors,
seriously felt, but one that has him ‘posing as an upright, God-fearing gentle-
man of the old school’. Brenda ‘teased him’ on such occasions and ‘Tony saw
the joke’ (32), but that’s the role he plays and it is part of his pseudo-medieval
and Victorian-Gothic refusal of real adulthood. That said, Stannard’s descrip-
tion of this decent man, alone in the novel in being devoted to family and
home, as ‘lamentably weak’ seems, in the light of his principled refusal to
play the role expected of him by Brenda’s family, very severe (Stannard 381).
The bedrooms in the Victorian-Gothic Hetton have Arthurian names, and
it is not difficult to see the ironic appropriateness of these to the protagonists
 Richard Jacobs 85

who sleep in them, or to connect the Arthurian Grail-legend with Tony’s

medieval-inspired search for the lost City. But the most poignant detail has
Tony returning to Hetton after the debacle in London and its chastening
aftermath: ‘That night he went into Brenda’s empty room to sleep’ (79). The
room is Guinevere where his parents were said to be ‘inseparable’ (18). In
effect, this is the sad little boy climbing into his parents’ (empty) bed, from
his own bedroom where as a child he was ‘subject to nightmares’ (18). It also
takes us again to Tony, alone, lost and sick in Brazil: ‘lying there, wrapped
in his blanket, he began to cry’, benightmared by a ‘constant company of
phantoms’ (201). And within a few pages he will enter his final nightmare
with the last of what Jeffrey Heath in his important book calls ‘mimicking
shadows’ (Heath 46), a parent from whom he will never escape.
This sense of the protagonists being children, locked into their various
games (Animal Snap the most telling miniature version), makes one ask if
there are any proper adults among the protagonists. There is one, Mrs Rattery,
dubbed the Shameless Blonde but a skilled aviator, horse-rider (she rides
astride like a man, and earlier she joins the workmen stripping the ceiling),
whisky-drinker and solitary card-player, detached, self-sufficient, benevo-
lently indifferent and in a sense presiding over the novel as proxy-novelist.
What follows is another very expressive use of parentheses.

(Mrs Rattery sat intent over her game, moving little groups of cards adroitly
backwards and forwards about the table like shuttles across a loom;
under her fingers order grew out of chaos; she established sequence and
precedence; the symbols before her became coherent, inter-related.) (111)

Mrs Rattery represents Waugh as novelist and, in the ironic way we can
have expected, her literary ancestors include the ageless and sexless Tiresias
presiding over The Waste Land, and the ominously knitting Fate-women at
the start of Heart of Darkness.

III

Early Eliot in literary modernism and Madame Bovary in literary realism are
the ancestors with which this novel seems most concerned to align itself.
Dickens can be seen as a more anxiously felt literary-Oedipal father, with
his novelistic roots in the Gothic. Waugh read or probably re-read The Waste
Land and other early Eliot poems in 1926 and found them ‘marvellously
good’ (Diaries 242). In 1930 Waugh praised his friend Henry Green’s novel
Living (1929) in connection with Eliot:

I see in Living very much the same technical apparatus at work as in many
of Mr T. S. Eliot’s poems – particularly in the narrative passages of The
Waste Land and the two Fragments of an Agon. (Order 83)
86 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

The second fragment has Sweeney saying to Doris ‘Yes I’d eat you’ in a ‘nice
little [ . . . ] stew’ (Eliot 130). This is a source for Black Mischief (1932) where
Basil Seal eats his lover Prudence – in a cannibal stew. And four years after
the novel, Waugh is describing the streets of London as fit only to serve ‘as
vast ashtrays for the stubs of a million typists’ (Order 61), where the language
is Eliot’s. But that disgust for raw humanity, pervasive in Eliot, sounds stri-
dent and unconvincing in Waugh: the instinctive sympathy that the novel
finds for its protagonists in their suffering, explored above, is where Waugh
and Eliot diverge. This sympathy in the novel is what William Myers calls
the ‘sudden intrusion of the human element’, and it’s a human sympathy
that is conspicuously absent from The Waste Land (Myers 42)
Nonetheless, the novel’s title invites the reader to consider its world as
un-regenerative and barren, a world whose genie (Djinn) stares at a shred of
waste paper, a world where Madame Sosostris sees in her Tarot cards ‘crowds
of people walking round in a ring’ (Eliot 64) and the delirious Tony angrily
objects that his (non-existent) listeners are ‘walking round in a circle’ (211).
It is a world desperate for a sign, as in Eliot’s ‘We would see a sign!’ (Eliot 39)
and in Waugh’s choric ‘But there was no sign [ . . . ] But there was no sign’
(198). There is no sign of a village, let alone a City to replace Tony’s lost
Gothic world that had ‘come to grief’ and from which ‘the cream and dap-
pled unicorns had fled’ (153). Eliot, desperate to ‘redeem / the time’ had
‘jewelled unicorns draw[ing] by the gilded hearse’ (Eliot 100).
The novel’s epigraph from The Waste Land (‘fear in a handful of dust’) sug-
gests a mortality-terror (ashes to ashes, dust to dust) and a more generalised
intimation of terror as the only appropriate response to the attenuations,
entrapments and anomie that Waugh’s novel articulates. This generalised ter-
ror was noticed by Waugh’s most astute early critic, Edmund Wilson, when he
described it as ‘the whole motivation of the book but of which the characters
are not shown to be conscious and upon which one cannot put one’s finger in
any specific passage’ (Wilson 143). The debt to Eliot also includes the novel’s
relations with the earlier modernist Heart of Darkness (1902) which provides
the epigraph for The Hollow Men (‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead’) (Eliot 87). The
Conrad novel stayed with Waugh through his career; its influence is also clear
in the autobiographical The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) where a journey
on board a ship turns into an allegorical journey into Pinfold’s dark inner
demons. Jerome Meckier, among many other readers, links Waugh, Dickens
and Conrad together, connecting for instance Tony’s shattering disillusion,
his ‘epiphany’ (Meckier 186), with Kurtz’s last terrible words.
Mr Todd is a version of Mr Kurtz, as the names suggest (Tod is German
for death, and Kurtz suggests curt or short). Kurtz can be read as mere elo-
quence, a voice in a hollow body: ‘he electrified large meetings [ . . . ] He
could get himself to believe anything – anything’ (Conrad 104). Kurtz is,
in effect, an embodiment of the performative principle, a ‘barren darkness’
hidden in ‘the magnificent folds of eloquence’ (85). He is very pointedly
 Richard Jacobs 87

described as ‘essentially a great musician’ (89). He is also like a novelist, one

that could electrify large meetings with his eloquence (Dickens as actor, say):
he is mouth as compulsive performance. Mr Todd is, in effect, an embodi-
ment of reception theory, a ‘flagrantly Dickensian character [ . . . ] demand-
ing to be feasted on Dickens to the end of his days’ (Myers 45). Despite his
parental power over Tony, Todd is also a grotesque return to the obstinately
demanding Winnie, the Awful Child. As Jonathan Greenberg argues in a
psychoanalytic reading, Todd is ‘infantile and needy; he demands to be read
to like a stubborn child’ (Goldberg 364): he is mouth as insatiable neediness.
Put another way, Kurtz is man as modernist emptiness and Todd is, as
Douglas Lane Patey adroitly observes when noticing the ‘metaliterary turn’
at the novel’s close, an ironic representation of realism’s ‘ideal humanist
reader [ . . . ] whose emotional receptivity and sympathetic understanding’
are ‘exactly what Dickens trusted would foster [ . . . ] moral amelioration’
(Patey 123). But there is nothing morally ameliorated about the murder-
ously insane Mr Todd. This issue has been most tellingly expressed by Jed
Esty in terms of imperialism:

Waugh cuts right to the absurdity of a culture that is frozen into repeti-
tions of a nineteenth-century identity disseminated to every corner of
the planet. Last’s fate as a zombified reader captures one aspect of the
British Empire’s legacy to English culture: a forced diet of the fetishized
markers of a vanishing Englishness. (Esty 222)

The debt to Bovary is less easy to anchor in Waugh’s biography but it seems
clear that Waugh’s ambitious fourth novel is designed to lock directly into
the European novel’s treatment of adultery as the master-plot of plots. The
contention here is that the ambitiousness and distinction of this novel asks
us to connect it not with others by Waugh (and any serious assessment of
Waugh and the canon is hampered by what has to be recognised as the
Brideshead factor – the sentimentalised Oxbridge snobbery of that novel
signifying ‘Evelyn Waugh’ in the popular cultural imagination) but with
two very different early twentieth-century novels, Wharton’s realist The Age
of Innocence (1920), satiric and edgily nostalgic, and Ford’s modernist mas-
terpiece The Good Soldier (1915), where adultery and a disappearing culture
are subtly counterpointed in richly ironic narrative complexity. Writing his
novel, Waugh knew how good it was and how different from his first three
novels: ‘I peg away at the novel which seems to me faultless of its kind. Very
difficult to write because for the first time I am trying to deal with normal
people instead of eccentrics’ (Letters 83).
‘Normal people’ reminds us of the Flaubertian ambition to realise, with
sympathy as well as disgust, the sheer ordinariness of boredom and habit
and the flight from them into fantasy and game-playing. The name Beaver
itself seems chosen, not only as an ironic evocation of animals famous
88 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

for building homes, whereas the gobbling Mrs Beaver – nicely described
as ‘perpetually busy with a fretful rodent voracity’ (Garnett 110) – looks
to split up houses, but also as flickering wordplay on the word ‘Bovary’.
The connection with Bovary and boredom is clear from the start and there
is a delicate allusion on the very first page. We hear of housemaids break-
ing glass while Mrs Beaver gobbles her nasty morning yoghurt with a
spoon: this is an attenuated and impoverished version of the scene at La
Vaubyessard in Madame Bovary where a servant breaks window-panes while
Emma is in rapture ‘eating a maraschino ice [ . . . ] her eyes half-closed,
the spoon between her teeth’ (47). Compared to the grand fantasies and
voluptuously eroticized passions of Emma’s early relations with Rodolphe
and then with Leon, Brenda like, eventually, Emma finds herself ‘rediscov-
ering, in adultery, all the banality of marriage’ (Bovary 258). ‘But it was only
Brenda’ (181) is the response in the Beaver household when Brenda phones
towards the end.
In emotional as well as socio-political and economic terms this is a world
in ‘slump’ (8), the word used in reference to Beaver’s unemployability.
When Beaver asks his mother to get Brenda a job and is asked why he replies
‘Just like everybody else, short of money and nothing to do’ (180). This is
not a novel that deals with the raw realities of the economic depression
of the mid 1930s but there is a deft current of submerged reference to its
human cost. Reading the newspaper to Tony at the start of the novel Brenda
casually refers to ‘Two more chaps in gas ovens’ (20): a historian of the
period notes that ‘Home Office statistics in the early 1930s indicated that
two unemployed men were committing suicide every day’ (Stevenson 287).
And in one of the novel’s bleakest sentences, ‘All over England people were
waking up, queasy and despondent’ (19).
The novel of the 1930s is haunted by the search for the father, as exem-
plified, at the start of the period, by Henry Green’s Living (1929), a novel
that delivers, in idiosyncratic modernist brilliance and with sympathetic
intensity, the raw realities of working-class lives ( Jacobs 392–3). Towards
the end of that novel, as a young couple are journeying to find the man’s
father, the woman’s substitute-father is seen restlessly unable to read Little
Dorrit.
Dickens’ powerful indictment of imprisoned hopes, the dark heart of
Victorianism, is the novel that Tony is about to read to Mr Todd after we
learn of his now terminally imprisoned hopes. Dickens frames Waugh’s
novel, from Pecksniff, mentioned derisively at the start of the second chap-
ter, to Dorrit at its climax in Brazil. Dickens for Waugh was, in effect, a
signifier for his own father, Arthur Waugh, publisher of the Dickens novels
for Chapman and Hall. Modernism and Eliot, as Stannard observes, were
deployed by Waugh as ‘the language of reaction against his father’ (82).
Arthur used to read Dickens to his family. Tony used to read to Brenda till
she admitted it was ‘torture to her’ (214). Tony used to read to his son.
 Richard Jacobs 89

Mr Todd’s father used to read Dickens to him. But there are no function-
ing father-figures in A Handful of Dust. Reggie St Cloud, the ‘Head of the
Family’, spends his time ‘desecrating’ tombs (147). The Reverend Tendril is
a comic irrelevance (and his niece’s motor bicycle was the catalyst for John
Andrew’s death): in his most extreme delirium Tony is pointedly said to
be ‘caught up in [ . . . ] tendrils’ (205). So it is all too appropriate that the
absent father is materialised as Mr Todd, father of ‘most of the men and
women’, with Tony as the son, ‘the old boy’ as the gang of women called
him, tortured by having to read to ‘the old man’ (212, 68, 214). And the
novel that he is reading ends with a young couple walking in the streets of
the City, ‘inseparable and blessed’ (Dickens 688): free from prison, in love,
and married.

Works cited
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: Bedford Books, 1996.
Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1988.
Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems 1909–1962. London: Faber and Faber, 1963.
Esty, Jed. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2003.
Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Trans. Margaret Mauldon. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004.
—— Sentimental Education. Trans. Robert Baldick. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.
Garnett, Robert R. From Grimes to Brideshead: The Early Novels of Evelyn Waugh.
Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1990.
Greenberg, Jonathan. ‘“Was Anyone Hurt?”: The Ends of Satire in A Handful of Dust.’
Novel: A Forum on Fiction 36.3 (2003): 351–73.
Heath, Jeffrey. The Picturesque Prison: Evelyn Waugh and his Writing. Kingston, Ont.:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1982.
Jacobs, Richard. A Beginner’s Guide to Critical Reading: an Anthology of Literary Texts.
London: Routledge, 2001.
Littlewood, Ian. The Writings of Evelyn Waugh. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983.
Lodge, David. Evelyn Waugh. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971.
Lurcock, Tony. ‘Evelyn Waugh, A. P. Herbert and Divorce Reform.’ Evelyn Waugh
Newsletter and Studies 35.2 (2004) http://www.lhup.edu/jwilson3/Newsletter_35.2.
htm accessed 5.3.2010.
McCartney, George. Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition. Edison: Transaction, 2003.
Meckier, Jerome. ‘Why the Man Who Liked Dickens Reads Dickens instead of Conrad:
Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.’ Novel: A Forum on Fiction 13.2 (1980): 171–87.
Myers, William. Evelyn Waugh and the Problem of Evil. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.
Patey, Douglas Lane. The Life of Evelyn Waugh: a Critical Biography. Hoboken: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2001.
Slater, Ann Pasternak. ‘Right Things in Wrong Places.’ Essays in Criticism XXXII
(1982): 48–68.
90 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Stannard, Martin. Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years. London: Flamingo, 1993.
Stevenson, John. British Society 1914–45. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
Waugh, Evelyn. Black Mischief. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000.
—— Decline and Fall. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.
—— The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Michael Davie. London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1976.
—— A Handful of Dust. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997.
—— The Letters of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Mark Amory. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1980.
—— A Little Order: A Selection from his Journalism. Ed. Donat Gallagher. London: Eyre
Methuen, 1977.
Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. New York: Norton, 2003.
Wilson, Edmund. Classics and Commercials. New York: Farrar Strauss, 1950.
6
Studied Ambivalence: The Appalling
Strangeness of Graham Greene’s
Brighton Rock
Susie Thomas

‘The water washed round the piles at the end of the pier,
dark poison-bottle green, mottled with seaweed, and the salt
wind smarted on his lips.
(Green 22, emphasis added).

Michael Shelden’s The Man Within: A Life of Graham Greene seriously pro-
poses Greene as a suspect in the unsolved case of a pregnant young woman
whose torso was found in the left luggage office of Brighton station in June
1934. Shelden’s evidence is culled from Brighton Rock and other fictions of
the 1930s as well as the ‘dream diary’ which Greene kept between 1965 and
1989, in which he continued to record nightmares of being found guilty of
murder and of incriminating body parts being discovered in railway stations
(244–51). There is something slightly absurd about Shelden’s accusation
but it illustrates, not the virulent misogyny for which Shelden condemns
Greene, but the powerful effect that Brighton Rock exerted on an otherwise
sober academic, previously best known for his biography of George Orwell.
Indeed Greene, who described himself as a manic depressive, seemed to pro-
voke extreme reactions in others. His authorised biographer, Norman Sherry,
devoted an unprecedented 1984 pages to his almost reverential account of the
man he called ‘one of the truly great writers of our time . . . whose life strad-
dled the century’.1 Greene’s obsession with the Brighton trunk murder shows,
neither his diabolical cunning nor his genius, but just how much this con-
summate professional, who regularly produced 500 words a day, trusted to
his unconscious as a source of inspiration, and how deeply Brighton Rock was
engraved on it. Forty years later Greene recalled: ‘I have never again felt so
much the victim of my inventions’ (Escape 79). It is a novel that tends to
haunt readers too, long after they have put it down.
The incipit (or opening line) of the novel announces the death of an
inky-fingered and down-at-heel journalist who has become mixed up with
rival racetrack gangs in an English seaside resort: ‘Hale knew, before he had
been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him’ (5). ‘They’
91
92 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

are Pinkie and his mob, Spicer, Dallow and Cubitt, who are avenging the
death of their former boss, Kite. The frightened Hale latches on to Ida,
whom he meets in a pub, but while she is having a quick wash and brush
up in the ladies’ lavatory, he is abducted and murdered. (Things go wrong
fast in Greeneland.) The beery, bonhomous Ida turns amateur sleuth in
order to avenge Hale’s death. The baroque plot has many twists and turns:
Ida discovers Pinkie has married a young waitress, Rose, because she is
a potentially incriminating witness (and a wife cannot be forced to give
evidence against her husband). Ida pursues Pinkie until he plunges to his
death, thereby saving Rose from the ‘suicide’ that Pinkie had planned for
her; but Rose is left (probably) pregnant and perhaps about to face the ‘worst
horror’, that Pinkie never loved her at all. Greene later referred to the novel
with characteristically obfuscating irony: ‘Brighton Rock began as a detective
story and continued, I am sometimes tempted to think, as an error of judg-
ment.’2 He originally published it as one of his plot-driven ‘entertainments’
before reclassifying it as a serious novel. Critics have identified Rose and
Pinkie’s Catholicism as the new, serious element and designated Brighton
Rock as the first of Greene’s Catholic tetralogy (followed by The Power and
the Glory (1940) The Heart of the Matter (1948) and the aptly named The End
of the Affair (1951)).
Despite a wealth of exegesis, Brighton Rock still defies classification. Even as
a detective story, a form which typically ties up loose ends and restores order,
it leaves the reader baffled: we know immediately whodunnit (Pinkie) and
why he did it (revenge) but, despite the many clues that are scattered across
the pages, we never find out exactly how the murder was committed. Several
critics have ingeniously suggested that Pinkie rams a stick of Brighton rock
down Hale’s throat, which then dissolves in the body so that the police con-
clude he died a natural death and close the case (Shelden 235). This makes
it the perfect murder. But anyone who has ever sucked on this seaside sweet
knows that it does not melt that easily. Greene plays with the reader, making
sure that we can never know how the deed was done: even Pinkie’s pursuer,
Ida, is not sure whether Hale was murdered or killed himself or was simply
terrified to death. As Pinkie says to Dallow: ‘You know we killed him and the
doctors knew he died natural. Work it out for yourself. I can’t’ (115). Bernard
Bergonzi suggests that Greene, ‘the notorious joker [ . . . ] deliberately
withheld a convincing final explanation’ (83–4).
This radical uncertainty runs all through the novel like the lettering in a
stick of Brighton rock, which may or may not be the murder weapon; and
may or may not be a metaphor for unchanging human nature, as Ida cat-
egorically insists: ‘bite it all the way down, you’ll still read Brighton’ (198).
According to Steve Chibnall it is Pinkie’s personal symbol: ‘he has expressed
his latent homosexuality by using a pink phallic object in a grim parody of
fellatio’ (63). Brighton rock is also Greene’s metaphor for reading: the sug-
ared letters are hard, indelible and immutable and their meaning remains
 Susie Thomas 93

finally impenetrable. This contrasts with Virginia Woolf’s sky writing meta-
phor in Mrs Dalloway (1925) in which the letters (advertising Kreemo toffee)
are fluffy and ephemeral and interpreted by the onlookers subjectively: as
a sign of God’s existence, as a symbol of scientific thought, or provoking a
longing for foreign parts. In Mrs Dalloway diverse meanings are attached to
floating signifiers, all apparently with the author’s blessing.3 We are accus-
tomed to associating literary modernism with the indeterminate and the
ambiguous but Greene eschewed self-conscious experimentalism in favour
of apparently straightforward popular genres. Nonetheless, in Brighton Rock
he created a readily accessible but ultimately indecipherable text: it is both
a page-turner and impossible to pin down. In what follows I explore some
of the many ways in which it can be read: as an autobiographical text,
an exposé of the evils of poverty, a tale of sexuality and the body, a chil-
dren’s story, a Catholic novel, and as a product of the 1930s which seems
particularly relevant to today.

Into the can(n)on’s mouth

If the fact that people want to read a novel and keep talking about it makes
it canonical then Brighton Rock’s position is assured. However, although
Greene’s work has attracted considerable critical commentary, it has never
acquired academic respectability. David Lodge has summed up Greene’s
liminal status succinctly: his ‘critical reputation was always insecure. He
was accused, on the one hand, of pushing Catholicism, and, on the other,
of a heretical and idiosyncratic religious outlook; he was condemned for his
use of melodrama and of popular forms such as the thriller; he was seen as
too popular to be a serious candidate for the canon.’4 Greene’s work did not
satisfy the Leavisite criteria, of high moral seriousness and felt life, which
were dominant in Britain in the mid-twentieth century. Queenie Leavis
considered Greene derivative of, and far inferior to, Joseph Conrad, who
was indeed an early influence, although sloughed off by the time he came to
write Brighton Rock (140). Greene was perhaps not only too popular but too
prolific to be taken seriously, producing ‘a staggering number of film reviews
(some 425), two travelogues, three autobiographical memoirs, three collec-
tions of short fiction, three volumes of critical essays, four children’s books,
eight stage dramas, twelve screenplays, and twenty-two entertainments and
novels’ (Nordgren 2005).
This abundance makes anointing one novel as canonical extremely dif-
ficult. Unsurprisingly, there is no critical consensus about the status of
Brighton Rock; a point that is neatly illustrated by two contrasting recent
studies. Murray Roston’s Graham Greene’s Narrative Strategies: A Study of the
Major Novels (Macmillan, 2006) does not even include it, while Bernard
Bergonzi’s A Study in Greene (Oxford, 2006) singles it out as a masterpiece:
‘Greene’s finest novel and among the outstanding works of British fiction of
94 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

the twentieth century’(101). Greene too offered almost bi-polar estimations

of his novel, describing it both as ‘an error of judgement’ (quoted above)
and as ‘the best I ever wrote’ (Escape 79). It is tempting to suggest that a book
about ambivalence which inspires so much disagreement must be the best
candidate for posterity.
Greene’s contradictory comments also alert us to the need to follow
D. H. Lawrence’s dictum: ‘Never trust the artist. Trust the tale’ (8). Greene,
an intelligence officer during the war (and a secret agent for long afterwards,
if Sheldon is to be believed) was a man of many masks. One of the very
few constants he espoused (even after he had given up a belief in God) was
that the child makes the man or, rather, that adults are recovering children.
Greene spent years trying to come to terms with his public school upbring-
ing and, in a wonderful example of literary alchemy; he bestowed the ‘hell
that lay about him in his infancy’ (68), on Pinkie.

The Boy on the couch

He looked with loathing into the past – a cracked bell ring-

ing, a child weeping under the cane – and repeated, ‘I’m
not afraid.’
(Greene 239)

Graham Greene underwent psychoanalysis at the same age (17) as Pinkie

commits his first murder. In A Sort of Life (1971), the memoir Greene wrote
as therapy during a period of depression in his sixties, he notes that analysis
did not ‘cure’ him but it allowed him to return to school ‘with the proud
sense of having been a voyager in distant seas’: ‘it was a life transformed’
(Sort 77). A Sort of Life is dedicated to his siblings, whom he calls ‘the survi-
vors’. Like Dickens’ obsession with the Marshalsea prison, Greene returned
repeatedly to the scene of the crime (but this was his school in Berkhamsted
not, as Shelden suggests, Brighton station). Just as Dickens was permanently
scarred by the shame of his father’s imprisonment for debt and his own
transformation into a grubby labouring boy, Greene was traumatised (it is
probably not too strong a term) by the divided loyalties of being a boarder
at the school where his father was headmaster. Physically puny, he was con-
stantly bullied by his fellow pupils, who suspected him of being his father’s
spy, but he could say nothing because he was bound by a code of schoolboy
honour not to squeal. Many of Greene’s contemporaries, most famously
George Orwell, wrote of the horror of English public schools. They offered a
classical education and a fast track to the top, but were also hierarchical, mil-
itaristic, philistine, punitive, competitive, not to mention generally smelly
and completely lacking in privacy. The horror was compounded for Greene
by the fact that there was no escape because school was also his home.
Moreover, he described his mother as ‘aloof’ and his father as ‘Quisling’
 Susie Thomas 95

(a fascist collaborator (Sort 59)). After several botched (and doubtless self-
dramatizing) suicide attempts Greene ran away from home, at which point
his parents took his unhappiness seriously enough to take the highly unu-
sual step of sending him to London to live with the psychoanalyst Kenneth
Richmond and his wife for six months, where he recovered.
At Berkhamsted, the dividing line between home and school was marked
by a green baize door: ‘If you pushed open a green baize door in a passage in
my father’s study, you entered another passage deceptively similar, but none
the less you were on alien ground’ (Sort 46). On one side of the door it was
domestic and safe; the other side was strange, and terrifying.5 It is a memory
he returns to again and again and frontiers, whether national or domestic,
became a hallmark of Greene’s fiction (as we will see in Brighton Rock) just as
prisons, real and metaphorical, dominated Dickens’ imagination.6 For both
Dickens and Greene, the child character is often called on to assume adult
responsibility in a world in which parents fail to protect their offspring.
For Greene too ‘a child learns about injustice early’ and Greene believed
that his experience of being bullied meant that he ‘belonged on the side
of the victims, not of the torturers’ (Sort 45, 47). Although Dickens did not
sentimentalise children, he saw the child as naturally good. Greene knew
from his own experience that children are both intensely vulnerable and,
in certain situations – whether public school or slum – capable of extreme
cruelty and violence; that victims can become torturers. Greene’s Mexican
travel book, The Lawless Roads, begins with his memories of school: ‘one was
aware of fear and hate, a kind of lawlessness, where appalling cruelties could
be practised without a second thought; one met for the first time characters,
adult and adolescent, who bore about them the genuine quality of evil’ (14).
Pinkie enters Brighton Rock trailing clouds of evil behind him like a figure
from a medieval Morality play or a Jacobean drama but he is also a terri-
fied child.7 Greene inverts the Romantic idea, expressed in Wordsworth’s
Immortality Ode, that ‘[h]eaven lies about us in our infancy’; in Pinkie’s
infancy, ‘hell lay about him’ (68). His upbringing in the slums of Brighton
deprived him of natural goodness early on. When he is forced to go back
there and he sees children playing in the street (the boys with guns; the girls
watching ‘surlily’; a child with a leg brace being pushed) he feels ‘the dread-
ful appeal of innocence’ but also knows that ‘there was not innocence; you
had to go back a long way further before you got innocence’ (141).
Greene vigorously denied that there was anything of himself in Pinkie.8
But the dynamics of fear, betrayal and torture at the heart of Brighton Rock
mirror the ‘flight, rebellion and misery during those first sixteen years
when the novelist is formed’. Pinkie can conceive of hell (‘Of course there’s
torments’ (52)) but has no conception of heaven, because nothing in his
wretched and loveless life could supply even a remote analogy. Greene
recalled that he ‘began to believe in heaven because I believed in hell, but
for a long time it was only hell I could picture with a certain intimacy’
96 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

(Lawless 14). The difference between Greene and Pinkie’s childhoods is not
simply one of class but that Pinkie has only known life on one side of the
green baize door. There is no escape for him except through ‘murder’ (143).
Greene found a father figure in Kenneth Richmond, who showed him a
way of channelling his fears creatively and who encouraged him to become
a writer as a way out of his adolescent hell. But Pinkie has no education, he
is condemned to the slums of Paradise Piece and the only one to show him
a way out is a petty gangster. One bitterly cold night on the end of the pier
(when Pinkie may have been close to suicide) Kite picked him up and brought
him back to Frank’s boarding house: ‘God knows why – [ . . . ] perhaps
because a man like Kite needed a little sentiment like a tart keeps a Pekinese’
(218). This may suggest repressed homoerotic attraction but it is the nearest
thing to fatherly affection Pinkie ever receives: he models himself on this
knife-wielding misogynist until he too becomes sealed in a habit of hate.
Critics often seem surprised that Greene tries to evoke sympathy for
Pinkie, who is repeatedly described as Evil (with a capital E), as if this were
evidence of Greene’s warped morality. But if the reader does care, this is not
necessarily sympathy for the devil but rather because Greene consistently
describes Pinkie as a terrified and therefore sadistic schoolboy. The Brighton
mob, like boarding school, is a male world: hierarchical and competitive,
with its own code of loyalty in which the unforgivable crime is to be a
squealer (85, 242). The physically puny Boy (as he is known) needs the brute
strength of Dallow: ‘he felt as a physically weak but cunning schoolboy feels
who has attached to himself in an indiscriminating fidelity the strongest boy
in the school’ (59). He constantly has to keep up a front: any sign of weak-
ness and he is done for. When he is unexpectedly beaten up by Colleoni’s
rival gang it was ‘as if one of the bullied brats at school had stabbed first
with the dividers’ (106). He is terrified of what Dallow and Cubitt will think
of his humiliation: ‘he had wept, begged, run’ (107). Just before his death,
his apotheosis into terrified schoolboy is complete. Rose catches a glimpse
of his face: ‘like a child’s, badgered, confused, betrayed: fake years slipped
away – he was whisked back towards the unhappy playground. [ . . . ]
[H]e shrank – shrank into a schoolboy flying in panic and in pain, scram-
bling over a fence, running on’ (243).

Peter Pan, Punk and the Asbo generation

In the hole were murder, copulation, extreme poverty . . .

(Greene 123)

In his second volume of memoirs, Ways of Escape (1980), Greene described

Pinkie as ‘the great champion of justice’: ‘The Pinkies are the real Peter
Pans – doomed to be juvenile for a lifetime. They have something of the
fallen angel about them [ . . . ] The outlaw of justice always keeps in his
 Susie Thomas 97

heart the sense of justice outraged – his crimes have an excuse and yet he is
pursued by the Others. The Others have committed worse crimes and flour-
ish. The world is full of Others who wear the masks of Success, of a Happy
Family. Whatever crime he may be driven to commit the child who doesn’t
grow up remains the great champion of justice. “An eye for an eye”’ (72).
This is of course one of Ida’s mottos and most readers assume that she is the
champion of justice in the novel. As the detective, it is her role to distinguish
right from wrong but Ida’s justice is primarily about maintaining the status
quo: ‘law and order, capital punishment’ (77). Pinkie, in contrast, is the focus
for the expression of a deep-seated rage at the social inequality of the 1930s in
particular and at the violence of capitalism in general. Ida accepts poverty as
part of life (‘the world’s all dandy’ (91)); it is Pinkie who provokes the reader
to a sense of outrage at the vacant lots: at ‘the houses that looked as if they
had passed through an intensive bombardment, flapping gutters and glass-
less windows, an iron bedstead rusting in a front garden’ (90). When Pinkie
goes to Rose’s squalid home the reader is tempted to concur with him that
‘nobody could say he hadn’t done right to get away from this, to commit any
crime . . . ’ (143); and to see such crimes as acts of class revenge. Although
there are no Happy Families in Brighton Rock, the novel does suggest that that
those who wear the mask of Success have indeed committed worse crimes and
been allowed to flourish. Colleoni, the boss of the rival mob, no longer has
to get his hands dirty; he stays in the gilded suite named after Napoleon the
Third and gets others to do the carving. The police are in his pocket, as Pinkie
discovers: ‘“Fine,” the Boy said. “A bogy doing Colleoni’s job for him”’ (67).
Indeed Colleoni has made so much money that he has become eminently
respectable; he is about to join the Establishment by going into politics: ‘The
Conservatives think a lot of him’ (159).
Neil Nehring points out that the Punk movement thought a lot of Brighton
Rock. The 1978 biography of the Sex Pistols by Fred and Judy Vermorel
‘liberally quotes Greene to create a parallel between his sociopathic hero,
Pinkie Brown, and Johnny Rotten, the Sex Pistols’ singer. Most horrific is
the linkage of accounts of razor attacks on both; more pointedly Pinkie’s ‘face
of starved intensity, a kind of hideous and unnatural pride,’ is paired with a
music periodical’s description of Rotten: ‘his eyes looked so glazed . . . that
you seriously wonder if there isn’t some pathological monster straining inside
him to get out’ (225). According to Nehring, Graham Greene’s hell is right
here on earth and Brighton Rock demonstrates his anarchist leanings.
The baton of Pinkie’s ‘awful resentment’ (‘why shouldn’t he have had
his chance like all the rest, seen his glimpse of heaven if it was only a crack
between the Brighton walls . . . ’ (228)) was picked up by the Punks, the
victims of depression in the 1970s, and would seem tailor made for today’s
Asbo generation on the council estates, with failing schools and rampant
unemployment, which still surround Brighton (Whitehawk’s school was
considered so appalling it has been closed down). One of the reasons why
98 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Brighton Rock shocks us 70 years on is because Pinkie is still only 17 and Rose
16 at the end of the novel. He has murdered twice and she has married him
knowing full well that he is a killer; she is also (possibly) about to become
a teenage mother. At the same time as it radically undermines fantasies
about childhood innocence, the novel conveys powerfully the child’s rage
at injustice. The fact that Pinkie is both a victim and an abuser provides a
perspective on our contemporary ambivalence about children in a tabloid
culture which demonises boys as feral and girls as sluts; in which abused
and neglected children who take to knives or get pregnant are reduced to
symptoms of moral breakdown in Broken Britain rather than as casualties
of a capitalist system.
Nobody could accuse Brighton Rock of exhibiting signs of bleeding heart
liberalism (indeed Ida is mocked for this) but Greene is clearly on the side
of the children of the poor, however vicious or slavish. Greene also seems to
suggest that there is a gender divide, evident in the scene of the children in
the street quoted earlier (the boys play with guns, the girls watch ‘surlily’).
Pinkie’s aggression turns outwards and is expressed by knives and the bottle
of vitriol that he fondles in his pocket (rather like the anarchist Professor
with his bomb detonator down his trousers in Conrad’s The Secret Agent).
Rose loves him sullenly despite the pinches and the threats. Pinkie is both
tortured and torturer but Rose seems at first glance to be simply a victim.
She is connected with other teenage girls whose brief obituaries are buried in
the pages of the novel: Peggy Baron, burnt and blinded by vitriol after get-
ting mixed up with the Brighton mob (49); Violet Crow ‘violated and bur-
ied under the West Pier in 1936’ (142); Molly Carthew who ‘killed herself.
Despair’ (114); and the pregnant Annie Collins, aged 15, who committed
suicide ‘on the railway track up by Hassocks’ (165). But on several occasions
Rose proves more formidable than Pinkie expects, which contributes to the
sense of loyalty he starts to feel for her. Despite Rose’s own innocence, she
quickly identifies his lack of sexual experience when he ‘inexpertly’ kisses
her: ‘You haven’t had many girls, have you?’ (112). And she arguably makes
a kind of existential choice to commit herself to Pinkie, appearing to ack-
nowledge the possibility that he may not love her, in her exchange with
Ida: ‘“He doesn’t love you.” / “I don’t care,” the childish voice stubbornly
murmured. / “What do you mean, you don’t care.” / “I love him”’ (123). And
although she very nearly becomes the subject of a brief obituary, she does
in fact survive; she may be pregnant (as Ida never has been and, at her age,
is unlikely to be) but perhaps ‘the worst horror of all’ (247) will not kill her.
Although Rose may not be the heroine of the novel, she proves to be more
than merely an innocent victim.
Pre-war editions of Brighton Rock also exhibited a darker side to Greene’s
rage at the Other who wears the mask of Success. Colleoni is a ‘small Jew’
with an ‘old Semitic face’; sniffed at by little Jewish bitches; his second in
command, Crab, was a Jew once ‘but a hairdresser and a surgeon had altered
 Susie Thomas 99

that’ (82). Although Bergonzi suggests that these references are merely
examples of the casual and unthinking anti-Semitism which was pervasive
in the 1930s, the novel’s evocation of an international conspiracy of Jews
wielding secret and corrupt power would not have been out of place in a
piece of Nazi propaganda (89). In this context the fact that Colleoni stays
at a hotel called The Cosmopolitan is sinister: ‘he looked as a man might
look who owned the whole world, the whole visible world that is, the cash
registers and policemen and prostitutes, Parliament and the laws which say
“this is Right and this is Wrong”’ (65). After the war, Greene silently turned
Colleoni into an Italian and deleted the anti-Semitic references, except for
the remark about Crab being ‘altered’. It is almost as if Greene left this in as
a metaphor for his own excision of ‘Jewishness’ from the novel.9

Modernists and Rockers

In his powerful polemic, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice
among the Literary Intelligentsia, John Carey argues that ‘the principle around
which modernist literature and culture fashioned themselves was the exclu-
sion of the masses, the defeat of their power, the removal of their literacy,
the denial of their humanity’ (21). Carey accuses Greene of committing
crimes of pride and prejudice against common humanity in Brighton Rock
and claims that ‘loathing of what the masses have done to England reverber-
ates throughout the novel’. According to Carey, Ida is ‘the character in the
novel on whom Greene’s distaste for mass civilization focuses’ (83). Carey
argues: ‘To the ordinary reader she might seem the heroine of the novel.
But Greene’s point is that Pinkie, being a Catholic, and evil, is more real
than Ida, and spiritually her superior’ (83). Greene is not only disgusted
by her fleshiness, ‘she is sentimental, likes cheap drama and pathos, and
cries in cinemas. She reads best-sellers – Warwick Deeping; Priestley’s The
Good Companions’. Carey concludes that Ida’s inferiority to a murderer is a
deliberate affront to readers: ‘a gesture of intellectual defiance, aimed at the
complacent, materialistic masses’ (84).
I will return to the question of the (supposed) spiritual superiority of
corrupt Catholics later, but first it is worth asking whether Carey is right
to see Greene as unequivocally contemptuous of mass civilisation. For a
start Greene was not a modernist and, while he may not have had much
respect for J. B. Priestley,10 he was a great admirer of popular novelists such
as Rider Haggard and John Buchan; moreover, he himself wrote bestsell-
ers. Although it seems as if there is no crime that Greene has not been
accused of by his detractors, it would be almost diabolically cynical to use
a mass form to deny the masses any humanity. In any case, I do not think
the charge will stand up. In contrast to Carey, Brian Diemert in Graham
Greene’s Thrillers and the 1930s proposes that Greene’s embrace of genre
fiction was primarily a reaction against the High Modernists’ contempt for
100 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

popular culture. Like Auden and Isherwood in the 1930s, Greene wanted
to create a serious literature without being highbrow; to be profoundly
entertaining. He certainly did not want to emulate the manner of Virginia
Woolf (whose narrative technique he did not admire). Instead, Brighton
Rock is cast in the form of a thriller, which he infused with a radical politi-
cal and social significance (Diemert 14). Moreover, Greene spent much of
his life in the cinema, as a reviewer of (mainly) Hollywood movies and as
a writer of screenplays for mass audiences. The film that makes Ida weep
is George Cukor’s adaptation of Dickens’ David Copperfield: inevitably it
simplifies a great (if occasionally sentimental) novel but the film is also a
popular classic.11 Greene recognised that ‘films have got to appeal to a large
undiscriminating public’ but, as Steve Chibnall argues: ‘the kind of cinema
he wanted to create would eschew a path to popularity paved in soothing,
muted inoffensiveness, in favour of one lined with honest vulgarity and
dramatic tension’ (28–9). A more nuanced thesis than Carey’s might state
that Greene (like the philosophers of the Frankfurt School) was opposed to
an anodyne commercial culture designed to make us feel that life is not so
bad, and favoured a popular culture that stirred up trouble and challenged
bourgeois conventions. It is Ida’s bourgeois complacency to which Greene
objects, not her love of singing popular ballads after a couple of pints of
Guinness in the bar.
Greene has fun satirising junk commercial culture, for example on the
pier, as the lonely Cubitt finds consolation in slot machine true romance.
Reading ‘Cupid’s Wings, Amor Lane’, printed on pink cardboard, Cubitt ‘was
deeply moved’: ‘it was literature: it was the way he’d like to write himself’
(156). But Greene also suggests something more complex about mass cul-
ture: the reverse of the Flaubertian irony that genuine emotion is debased by
the currency of romantic cliché; that we cannot find an authentic vocabu-
lary to express what we really feel. On the contrary, in Brighton Rock, the
first time Pinkie experiences real feeling for Rose is in the cinema, ‘slumped
grimly in the three and sixpenny seat’. As he watches the ‘two main char-
acters make their stately progress towards the bed-sheets’, in what seems to
be a generic romantic melodrama, Pinkie’s carapace begins to crack despite
himself: ‘suddenly, inexplicably, the Boy began to weep. He shut his eyes to
hold in his tears [ . . . ] – it was like a vision of release to an imprisoned man.
He felt constriction and saw – hopelessly out of reach – a limitless freedom:
no fear, no hatred, no envy’ (179). So Ida is not the only one who cries in
cinemas, and an epiphany can be had in the cheap seats.
Greene’s depiction of Brighton is similarly ambivalent. This seaside resort
is the place where the masses have fun, where 50,000 day-trippers come to
‘extricate . . . the grain of pleasure’. But Brighton is not simply a ‘loathsome’
example of what the masses have done to England. It provides a breath of
fresh air for the workers who visit it, as it did for Greene when he was sent
there as a child to convalesce, and later when he stayed there to overcome
 Susie Thomas 101

writers’ block. There is a genuine excitement and vitality in the novel’s

opening description:

They came in by train from Victoria every five minutes, rocked down
Queen’s Road standing on the tops of the little local trams, stepped off in
bewildered multitudes into fresh and glittering air: the new silver paint
sparkled on the piers, the cream houses ran away into the west like a pale
Victorian water-colour; a race in miniature motors, a band playing, flower
gardens in bloom below the front, an aeroplane advertising something
for the health in pale vanishing clouds across the sky. (5)

The Brighton that Ida ‘knows’ is the one that Greene knew (which is still
almost recognisable today): ‘two girls in beach pyjamas, the buses going by
to Rottingdean, a man selling papers, a woman with a shopping basket, a
boy in a shabby suit, an excursion steamer edging off from the pier, which
lay long, luminous and transparent, like a shrimp in the sunlight’ (72).
Greene said that he had to curb his enthusiasm for similes, because they
slowed down the plot – he called it shooting leopards – but luckily many
survived to stalk the pages of Brighton Rock (Sort 138).
But as so often in Greene’s work, the landscape is divided by a frontier,
which is largely invisible here but still deadly. Unobserved by the holiday-
makers, there is another Brighton and the ‘border’ between them is marked
by the ‘battlements’ of the Salvation Army Citadel (140). Behind the glitter
of the sea, the promenade and the pier, lie the slums of Paradise Piece and
Nelson Place. The focus of Greene’s attack is not on the pleasure-seeking
hordes but on the contrast between the grand facades of seafront hotels
(sheltering ‘respectable’ criminals) and the moral squalor epitomised by
the violated bodies of young girls buried under the West Pier or aban-
doned by the railway line. The novel exposes this other Brighton, what
Greene called ‘the shabby secret behind the bright corsage, the deformed
breast’ (140).
Ida too is a more complex character, and Greene a more conscious and
controlled writer, than Carey credits either with being. Yes, she is a repre-
sentative of conventional bourgeois morality: ‘she belonged to the great
middle law-abiding class, her amusements their amusements, her supersti-
tions their superstitions’ (80). Her compassion is like a ‘rank cheap perfume’
(233) and her aphorisms about wanting justice and not letting the innocent
suffer come ‘clicking out like a ticket from a slot machine’ (199). There may
even be a hint of T. S. Eliot’s Lil from The Waste Land in Ida who is mistak-
enly called Lily by the men in the bar at the beginning of Brighton Rock.
Ida consults the Ouija board, like the superstitious women who consult
Madame Sosostris and her wicked pack of cards in Eliot’s poem. But Ida was
also inspired by Mae West, who hardly seems a likely candidate for one of
the living dead in The Waste Land.
102 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Critics such as Carey and Shelden assume that to find Ida remotely sym-
pathetic is to read against the grain of Greene’s intentions. When Ida was
made into the heroine of the stage adaptation of Brighton Rock (by adopting
Rose at the end) Greene objected: ‘Ida is the real villain of the piece’ (Qtd,
Chibnall 20). Certainly, Ida’s bourgeois family values are not endorsed in
the novel. When she says that Rose needs her mother the reader winces at
the irony because Greene has shown us Rose’s moody mother acquiescing in
her sale. Ida’s characterisation creates a profound ambivalence in the reader,
which is often embodied in the difference between what the narrator says
about her (‘cheap’ is the defining adjective) and what the novelist shows
us, for example an act of unobserved compassion and common decency,
when Ida gives a quid to the shabby genteel Charlie Moyne (‘poor old gee-
zer’(39)). If we find Ida sympathetic this is not despite Greene; the author
knows that we will find her both attractive and repellent, just as we are both
sympathetic to and appalled by Pinkie.12
If Green drew on his childhood misery to create Pinkie there is also
something of the adult Greene in Ida. He too was a pleasure-seeker (for
confirmation simply consult Shelden’s index under ‘Greene: sex’ and credit
half of it). No doubt, like Ida, he relished ‘the soft gluey mouth in taxis’
(37). During his career as a journalist Greene reported from many scenes
of injustice: Batista’s Cuba, the Belgian Congo, Papa Doc’s Haiti, Vietnam,
Nicaragua. Like Ida he wanted to ask questions about what was really hap-
pening. According to Sherry he was motivated to do so in part by boredom:
‘his manic-depressive nature forced him to seek stimulation and diversion
through events reflecting the dangerous extremes of the day’ (xv). Like Ida,
perhaps he enjoyed exposing injustice: ‘it’s exciting, it’s fun, it’s living’ (37).13

‘Such tits’

Kite died ‘talking all the time about someone’s tits’.

(Greene 109)

The ambivalence in Greene’s creation of Ida’s character is political: her com-

placent bourgeois values clash with Pinkie’s rage at poverty and injustice.
But the constant references to her breasts suggest that this ambivalence
verges on the Oedipal. Ida is both maternal and erotic. Hale’s first thought
is: ‘You thought of sucking babies when you looked at her’ (7). She has ‘big
breasts’, he thinks, and ‘she could save my life’ (9). Ida seems to be every-
man’s dream: ‘She smelt of soap and wine: comfort and peace and a slow
sleepy physical enjoyment, a touch of nursery and the mother, stole from
the big tipsy mouth, the magnificent breasts and legs, and reached Hale’s
withered and frightened and bitter little brain’ (17). One by one, the mem-
bers of Pinkie’s gang are drawn to her. Cubitt, like Hale, seeks solace from her
‘large friendly bosom’ (160); when faced with Ida’s ‘big breasts ready for any
 Susie Thomas 103

secrets,’ Dallow also succumbs (233). The narrator, of course, feels nothing
but contempt: ‘She bore the same relation to passion as a peepshow’ (146).
The male characters in Brighton Rock long for a mother and seem, to a
man, to be terrified of sex. Poor Philip Corkery quakes in his pyjamas at the
prospect of Ida in ‘Bacchic and bawdy mood’(145). Will he be able to live up
to her expectations? At the hotel ‘she gazed around the big padded pleasure
dome of a bedroom with bloodshot and experienced eyes’ (146). The reader
is not surprised that Corkery turns out to be a disappointment: ‘Men always
failed you when it came to the act. She might as well have been to the pic-
tures’ (151). Kite, Dallow, Spicer, and Cubitt are all bachelors. Dallow has an
affair with Judy but does not seem to get much pleasure from it: ‘I started
something there all right . . . I sometimes wish I hadn’t’ (216).14 Apart from
Pinkie the only other married men in the novel are the blind and cuckolded
Frank, Rose’s miserable father, and the seedy lawyer, Prewitt, who married
for ‘uncontrollable passion’ twenty years before. Now his wife lives like a
mole in the cellar and Prewitt’s only pleasure is to watch ‘the little typists’
through the window and he has to resist the urge to expose himself ‘shame-
fully’ in the park’ (211).
Pinkie is haunted by the primal horror of having witnessed the Saturday
night ritual of his parents having sex: ‘He was filled with hatred, disgust,
loneliness: he was completely abandoned: [ . . . ] for the space of a few
moments he was dead’ (186). Although Freud thought that the child’s
narcissistic injury at being excluded from the primal scene is a universal
experience which does not necessarily cause a psychic scar, it takes Pinkie
most of the novel to get over it. Pinkie’s contempt for women and sexuality
is based on a terror of sex and his bitter virgin’s fear that he will not pass the
masculine sexual test: ‘That was what they expected of you, every polony
you met had her eye on the bed: his virginity straightened in him like sex.
That was how they judged you’ (90) He fails miserably, on his first attempt
with Sylvie in a back of a Lancia (135).
Witnessing (without understanding) his parents copulation, he conceives
of sex in sadomasochistic terms: ‘his father panted like a man at the end of
a race and his mother made a horrifying sound of pleasurable pain’ (186).
Pinkie is always pinching Rose in order to work ‘himself into a little sensual
rage’ (51). He also thinks of intimacy as a threat to his autonomy. At first
Pinkie is appalled by Rose’s lack of desirability: she is ‘as immature, simple,
as ignorant as himself’ (119). But gradually he begins to feel a connection
that is more than narcissism: ‘they were made for each other’ (126). He
begins, despite himself, to feel a kind of loyalty to Rose. When Cubitt calls
Rose a duchess ‘an extraordinary indignation jerked in the Boy’s brain and
fingers. It was almost as if someone he loved had been insulted’ (149).
Virginity is another kind of frontier in Brighton Rock for both Pinkie and
Rose. Pinkie tries to delay the awful moment: they go for a drink with the
others; he tries to book a room at the Cosmopolitan; he takes her to the
104 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

pier, where in panic and rage he records his message of love: ‘Goddamn
you, you little bitch’. But this hatred is not the sole emotion he feels for
Rose (although she could hardly be blamed for taking his words at face value
when she plays the record). After their wedding night, he has ‘an odd sense
of triumph’: ‘he had exposed himself and nobody had laughed’. It renews
his confidence (‘he could face anyone now) and ‘a faint feeling of tender-
ness woke for his partner in the act’ (182). Rose too feels as if she has crossed
a border into another country: she had ‘past the customs’ and ‘signed the
naturalization papers’ (192). It is a liberation: ‘She was accepted. She had
experienced as much as any woman’ (193).
Perhaps the tragedy of the novel is that Pinkie never has time to overcome
his ambivalence. After that first night with Rose, he has a dream: he is in
a playground and ‘sick with fear’ when he sees Kite’s reflection in a mir-
ror: ‘“Such tits,” Kite said and put a razor in his hand’ (186). Pinkie almost
overcomes this association of sexuality with violence: ‘he had held intimacy
back as long as he could at the end of a razor blade’ (133). Although Greene
suggests that there is a possibility of redemption (between the stirrup and
the ground) he is not a sentimentalist and sexual healing cannot overcome
the habit of hatred of a whole lifetime. In the pages before he attempts to
manipulate Rose into committing suicide Pinkie repeatedly fights off ‘a sort
of tenderness’ (220); a ’terrible tenderness’ (224), ‘tenderness stirred, but
he was bound in a habit of hate’ (231), ‘again he felt the prowling pres-
ence of pity’ (231). When the two upper class swells laugh at Rose, Pinkie
is defensive: ‘Tenderness came up to the very window and looked in’ (237).
As he drives through the rain he withstands the ‘enormous emotion [ . . . ]
with all the bitter force of the school bench, the cement playground, the
St Pancras waiting room, Dallow’s and Judy’s secret lust, and the cold unhappy
moment on the pier. If the glass broke, if the beast – whatever it was – got
in, God knows what it would do’ (239). We never have a chance to find out.

‘Now I was discovered to be – detestable term! – a Catholic

writer’ (Escape, 74).

There is perhaps a Catholic element to Greene’s disdain for pleasure in the

novel, which is made to seem thin and unsatisfying in comparison with pas-
sion (which is pleasure intensified by the prospect of damnation). Greene
converted to Catholicism after he met the woman who was to become his
wife, who was herself a convert. Although he became a Catholic in 1926, ten
years before the writing of Brighton Rock, this was the first novel in which
Catholicism became a major theme. According to Greene this was a weak-
ness: the novel is concerned with a ‘too obvious and open’ discussion of ‘the
distinction between good-and-evil and right-and-wrong and the mystery of
“the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God”’ (Escape 76–7). However,
while these preoccupations are very much apparent, nothing about them
 Susie Thomas 105

seems obvious. Indeed there has been considerable controversy about the
nature of Greene’s Catholic beliefs. Conor Cruise O’Brien did not think he
was the ‘right kind’ of Catholic: ‘too dark, complex, paradoxical’ and indi-
vidualistic (Qtd, Sherry 733). In Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination, Bosco
notes that Greene has been called a Manichean, Jansenist, Pelagian, Quietist
and existentialist (4). Some critics divide Greene’s work into Catholic and
post-Catholic novels; while Bosco claims that for 46 years Catholicism was
the pattern in the carpet of all Greene’s writing.
The only indisputable aspect of Greene’s use of Catholicism is that a belief
in God is not comforting but serves as a means of raising the stakes, of inten-
sifying the drama of individual existence. Greene argued that after the death
of Henry James ‘a disaster overtook the English novel’: ‘with [his] death the
religious sense was lost to the English novel, and with the religious sense
went the sense of importance of the human act. It was as if the world of
fiction had lost a dimension: the characters of such distinguished writers
as Mrs Virginia Woolf and Mr. E. M. Forster wandered like cardboard sym-
bols through a world that was paper thin’ (Qtd, Bosco 5). Challenging the
accepted view of James as a novelist without a religious sense, Greene argued
that on the contrary James’s work was preoccupied with the presence of evil.
Pinkie’s actions mark him out as a prime candidate for damnation. After
his death, Rose goes to a priest (not for absolution) but because she is trou-
bled by the fear that she has saved herself while Pinkie will be damned. The
priest says that ‘a Catholic is more capable of evil than anyone’ but also
that if Pinkie loved her that shows that there is some good in him and that
no soul is cut off from mercy (246). George Orwell objected strongly to the
concept of the ‘sanctified sinner’: ‘Greene appears to share the idea, which
has been floating around since Baudelaire, that there is something rather
distingué in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class night club, entry to
which is reserved for Catholics only, since the others, the non-Catholics, are
too ignorant to be held guilty, like the beasts that perish’ (107).Orwell specu-
lates that this ‘cult of the sanctified sinner’ was probably a reaction against
Chesterton (whose Father Browne is insufferably good). He also suggests
that it is (what Dickens would have called) dandyism: ‘when people really
believed in Hell, they were not so fond of striking poses on its brink’ (107)
Orwell argues that the doctrine of corruptio optimi pessima (the corruption
of the best is the worst) has the effect of suggesting that ‘ordinary human
decency is of no value’ (107). It is a legitimate criticism but, as I suggested
earlier, the problem with ordinary human decency in Brighton Rock is that it is
too closely allied with bourgeois convention, habit and complacency. Greene
believed that it was the job of the writer to be on the side of the victim; the
orthodox good character had no hold over his imagination. When the priest
utters the disturbing lines about the ‘appalling strangeness of the mercy of
God’ at the end of the novel, it is both a reminder to the bourgeois reader
not to be smug and a gesture of solidarity with other sinners.
106 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

The most powerful aspect of Greene as a Catholic novelist is that he har-

nesses a belief in God in order to lambaste a corrupt and cruelly indifferent
society. Greene’s Brighton in the 1930s is a fallen world and Pinkie is a fallen
angel who will not accept that the hell of extreme poverty was ordained for
him by God. The reader does not have to choose between seeing Brighton
Rock as either a Catholic or a political novel; it is both. Later Greene seemed
to think that the two should be kept separate and he told his fellow novelist
and Catholic convert, Evelyn Waugh, that he was planning to write a poli-
tical novel rather than ‘always about God’. Waugh responded: ‘I wouldn’t
give up writing about God at this stage if I were you. It would be like PG
Wodehouse dropping Jeeves halfway through the Wooster series’(Qtd, Ker
148). God served Greene very well in Brighton Rock but after The End of the
Affair he found that he did not always need him.

Brighton Rock afterlife

Ironically, when the Boulting Brothers were about to release the 1947 film
version of Brighton Rock, the studio wanted to change the name to The Worst
Sin. They were concerned that nobody would have heard of either Brighton
or its rock candy. Today many readers may feel that a Catholic sense of sin is
perhaps the least interesting aspect of both the novel and the film. Greene’s
title has spawned a host of imitators including Alex Wheatle’s powerful
urban crime novel, Brixton Rock (1999), which relocates the action to the
racially divided council estates of South London (more amusingly, there is
also a ganja boxing film, Brighton Wok). The novel is perennially significant:
in 1947, the Boy was the child of the bombsites; in the 1970s the Punks
saw themselves as the descendants of Pinkie and Rose: his ‘army of friends’
(200). Soon there is to be a new film version, by Rowan Joffe, who updates
it to the 1960s; the era of mods and rockers and Quadrophenia. Joffe has
said of his adaptation: ‘We’re making Brighton Rock as contemporary as we
possibly can because the story feels “modern”. It’s too alive, too vibrant and
too relevant to be contained in the late 30s.’15 While Helen Mirren is likely
to prove a more convincing Ida than Hermione Baddeley (whom Greene
complained was too mumsy), Brighton Rock seems not only relevant to the
1960s but absolutely alive now. It is a wake-up call to our too contained
Asbo generation.

Notes
1. Sherry’s reference to Greene in his interview with Don Swain (22 June 1989).
Available online at: http://wiredforbooks.org/normansherry/index.htm.
2. Greene, Introduction to Collected Edition, p. vii.
 Susie Thomas 107

3. As if to invoke Mrs Dalloway only to set it aside, a sky writing plane features in
the first paragraph of Brighton Rock but it is a more familiar sight by the 1930s
and Greene, like the busy bank holiday crowd, does not dwell on what it says –
it is simply ‘an aeroplane advertising something for the health’ – and its script
quickly dissolves into evanescent visual impressions of ‘pale vanishing clouds
across the sky’ (5).
4. Lodge quoted by Nicolas Tredell in PN Review 86 (July – August 1992), vol. 18, no. 6.
5. Greene, who was a great admirer of R. L. Stevenson, would surely have relished
the coincidence that in Stevenson’s seminal thriller about Good and Evil, The
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the border between Jekyll’s cabinet (where
he conducts his experiments) and the domestic area of the house is marked by a
‘red baize door’.
6. For more on this see Maria Couto, Graham Greene: On the Frontier.
7. For more on Jacobean revenge drama see Bergonzi, 90–91.
8. In an interview with Marie-Francoise Allain he vigorously denied any similarity
between himself and Pinkie (24). But in A Sort of Life Greene says that the only
criticism which is of any interest is one that would surprise the author (132).
9. For a detailed discussion of Greene’s anti-Semitism in this and other prewar
novels see Lowenstein, Loathsome Jews.
10. This may have had something to do with Priestley’s threat to sue Greene for
libel if Greene did not make changes to the satirical portrait of the best-selling
novelist, Quin Savory, in Stamboul Train (Shelden, 164–65).
11. It is interesting that Greene references this particular Dickens novel in which evil
is closely connected to the violation of young women (particularly Steerforth’s
seduction of Little Emily).
12. There are even moments when the narrator seems to be on Ida’s side. As she
walks through London (not Mrs Dalloway’s exclusive Bond Street but multicul-
tural Seven Dials) she engages in the life of the street: ‘the negroes were hanging
round the public house doors in tight natty suitings and old school ties, and Ida
recognized one of them and passed the time of day’ (37). Ida’s point of view is
inclusive and good-natured. We compare this to the way the children recoil from
the negro in Pavilion Gardens (99).
13. Nicolas Tredell sugests that there may possibly be an ambivalent link between
Ida and Joyce’s Molly Bloom: ‘One of Ida’s metonymies for “life” is “sunlight on
brass bedposts”’ (36) and this calls to mind Molly’s jingling brass bed; Molly also
shares an ample mammary endowment with Ida: cf. this passage from Ulysses:
‘She set the brasses jingling as she raised herself briskly, an elbow on the pillow.
He looked calmly down on her bulk and between her large soft bubs, sloping
within her nightdress like a shegoat’s udder. The warmth of her couched body
rose on the air, mingling with the fragrance of the tea she poured’ (Bodley Head
1992 edn, 76). Greene’s representation of Ida might be part of his anti-Modernist
campaign – but since Molly is also the creation of possibly the greatest ‘perhapsed
Catholic’ author in Anglophone writing, Greene’s implicit allusion to her might
not be wholly hostile – ambivalence again!’ (Email to author.)
14. Dallow seems to be single now but has been married – as he says to Pinkie on the
Boy’s wedding day, ‘I know how you feel [ . . . ] I was went married once myself. It
kind of gets you in the stomach. Nerves. Why, [ . . . ] I even went out and got one
of those books, but it didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t know. Except about
flowers. The pistils of flowers. You wouldn’t believe the funny things that go on
among flowers.’ (164).
108 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

15. Quoted in ‘Film: The Britih are Coming’, The Independent (8 January 2010). http://
www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/film-the-british-are-
coming-1861050.html

Works cited
Allain, Marie-Francoise. The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
Bergonzi, Bernard. A Study in Greene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Bosco, Mark. Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005.
Boston, Murray. Graham Greene’s Narrative Strategies: A Study of the Major Novels.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Carey, John. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary
Intelligentsia, 1880–1939. London: Faber and Faber, 1992.
Chibnall, Steve. Turner Classic Movie: Brighton Rock. London and New York: I.B. Taurus &
Co. Ltd, 2005.
Couto, Maria. Graham Greene: On the Frontier. Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave
Macmillan, 1990.
——. Brighton Rock. London: Vintage, 2002.
——. The Lawless Roads. London: Vintage, 2002.
——. A Sort of Life. London: Vintage, 1999.
Diemert, Brian. Graham Greene’s Thrillers and the 1930s. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 1996.
Greene, Graham. Ways of Escape. London: Vintage, 1999.
Ker, Ian. The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845–1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc,
Chesterton, Greene, Waugh. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003.
Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin in
association with William Heinemann, 1977.
Leavis, Q. D, ‘The Englishness of the English Novel’, English Studies (April 1981),
vol. 62, no. 2, pp. 128–45.
Loewenstein, Andrea Freud. Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Women: Metaphors of
Projection in the Works of Wyndham Lewis, Charles Williams and Graham Greene.
New York: New York University Press, 1993.
Nehring, Neil. ‘Revolt into Style: Graham Greene Meets the Sex Pistols,’ PMLA
(March, 1991), vol. 106, no. 2, pp. 222–37.
Nordgren, Joe. ‘Graham Greene’. The Literary Encyclopedia. 30 March 2005.
Orwell, George. ‘The Sanctified Sinner’, Graham Greene: A Collection of Critical Essays,
ed. Samuel Hynes. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1973.
Shelden, Michael. The Man Within. London: Heinemann, 1994.
Sherry, Norman. The Life of Graham Greene: Volume 3: 1955–1991. London: Pimlico,
2005.
7
“Come Down from Your Thinkin’
and Listen a Minute”: The Multiple
Voices of The Grapes of Wrath
Jennifer Butler Keaton

When John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, readers
embraced the novel’s plea to end the mistreatment of migrant workers who
had been forced to leave their homesteads and travel west for jobs. The nov-
el’s protagonists, the Joad family, revealed to Americans the injustice of the
wages and working conditions on large farms, as well as the cruelty toward
and dehumanization of these workers. The polemical power of Steinbeck’s
novel contributed to its overwhelming popularity, the Pulitzer Prize it earned
for Steinbeck, the success of John Ford’s film adaptation, and the book’s
place in the literary canon. However, that same power has also been a major
source of complaints about the novel: many critics see The Grapes of Wrath as
a historical relic, a work that had a major effect on American society during
its time but that suffers under literary analysis. For instance, Harold Bloom,
in the introduction to his 1987 edited collection on Steinbeck, says that the
author “is not an original or even an adequate stylist” (4). He defends The
Grapes of Wrath’s placement in the canon only because “Compassionate
narrative that addresses itself so directly to the great social questions of its
era is simply too substantial a human achievement to be dismissed” (5).
As Robert Demott summarizes the critical interpretation of the novel, “The
Grapes of Wrath has been less judged as a novel than as a sociological event,
a celebrated political cause, or a factual case study” (xxiv).
It is true that Steinbeck was more concerned that Grapes reflect the migrant
workers’ plight than contain any literary value. In the journal he kept while
writing the novel, Steinbeck wrote, “Honesty. If I can keep an honesty it
is all I can expect of my poor brain” (Demott 29–30). Because of his back-
ground as a journalist, John Steinbeck took a very mimetic approach to his
writing, insisting on representing reality as accurately as possible. In addi-
tion to his pursuit of honesty, Steinbeck also had a particular goal in writ-
ing the novel. Before writing Grapes, Steinbeck drafted L’Affaire Lettuceberg,
which also dealt with labor issues and critiqued the greed of the powerful.
However, Steinbeck was disappointed in the book and destroyed the manu-
script. In the biography John Steinbeck, Jay Parini suggests that the discarded
109
110 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

novel failed to examine labor issues with an even hand, as Steinbeck “had
apparently taken a satirical approach in that story, ridiculing the bankers
and businessmen and antilabor forces that combined against the interests
of the migrant workers” (201). Steinbeck did not object to L’Affaire being
“a mean, nasty book” but rather to its failure to serve his desired purpose,
saying in a letter, “I don’t care about its literary excellence, understand, only
whether it does the job I want it to do” (qtd. in Benson 376).
Does the fact that The Grapes of Wrath functions as mimetic literature
and had a specific social goal undercut its literary value? In this chapter
I argue that Steinbeck uses complex literary strategies to accomplish his
goal of accurately representing the dynamics between different groups of
people and to create public outrage over the treatment of migrant workers.
These strategies come to light when examining the work through the lens
of the dialogic theory of Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Through his
theories of dialogism, Bakhtin identifies the different voices present in any
given discourse and examines the interaction between those voices. Bakhtin
wrote Discourse in the Novel, which applies dialogic theory to the medium
of the novel, only a few years before the publication of Grapes, but because
Bakhtin had been exiled by Joseph Stalin’s communist regime, Discourse
was not published until 1975 and was translated into English in 1981. Since
Bakhtin’s dialogic theories are relatively new to the world, and even newer
to the English-speaking world, scholars still have much work to do in apply-
ing these theories to American authors, such as Steinbeck.
Steinbeck and Bakhtin provide an intriguing pair for comparison because
they both wrote in reaction to the extreme political, economic, and social
situations of their time. While Bakhtin was facing the rise of Stalin and his
communist dictatorship, Steinbeck responded to the relentless capitalism of
the Great Depression. The men also expressed similar philosophies, reject-
ing specific world views in favor of acknowledging multiple perspectives.
Neither man aligned himself with a particular political ideology, and both
avoided using what Bakhtin called authoritative, or monologic, discourse
in their writing, which he describes as language that “demands that we
acknowledge it, that we make it our own” (Discourse 242). Examples of
authoritative discourse can be seen anytime a person presents an opinion
as an absolute truth, without providing a reason for the listeners or readers
to agree and without acknowledging other viewpoints. On the other end of
the spectrum is Bakhtin’s concept of internally persuasive discourse, which
“is, as it is affirmed through assimilation, tightly interwoven with ‘one’s
own word.’ [ . . . ] The semantic structure of an internally persuasive dis-
course is not finite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that dialogize it,
this discourse is able to reveal ever newer ways to mean” (Discourse 346). In
other words, internally persuasive discourse aims to take into account the
audience’s point of view, by presenting an open discourse with which the
audience is invited to engage.
 Jennifer Butler Keaton 111

Bakhtin’s dialogic theory divides texts into the different languages con-
tained therein. To Bakhtin, however, languages were not defined or distin-
guished by grammatical structures. Instead, he viewed “language as a world
view” (Discourse 271). Each different perspective or ideology represented
within a text is its own distinct language, and the distinction between the
languages include class, authority, profession, political views, and – as later
scholars pointed out – gender. The combination of multiple points of view
within a discourse is what Bakhtin labels as heteroglossia. The Grapes of
Wrath is heavy with heteroglossia, as the voices of the various characters
constantly interact – sometimes cooperating, sometimes dominating one
another, and often just ignoring or misunderstanding each other com-
pletely. For instance, among the voices of the characters, Ma presents a
fascinating study of the gradual emergence of the female voice as the Joad
family is forced from their traditional homestead and the gender roles that
came with it. Early in the novel, Ma obediently defers to male family mem-
bers to make decisions, but as they approach California, she begins to voice
her opinions. At first, she confronts harsh opposition from the men, once
even wielding a jack handle as a weapon to get her way. By the end of the
novel, however, Ma is the undisputed leader of the family.
Other distinctions of language among the Joad party include age, religion,
and life experience (Tom’s perspective, for instance, is changed by his time
in jail). But to only examine the voices of the characters in The Grapes of
Wrath is to ignore a huge part of the book, as well as a major element of
Bakhtin’s dialogic theory. Bakhtin recognizes the value of analyzing the
characters’ voices only, but insists that such an approach fails to take into
account the importance of the narrative voice in the novel:

And it is possible [ . . . ] to select those purely dramatic elements of the

novel that lower the narrational aspect to the level of a commentary on
the dialogues of the novel’s characters. But the system of languages in
drama is organized on completely different principles, and therefore its
languages sound utterly different than do the languages of the novel.
There is no all-encompassing language, dialogically oriented to separate
languages, there is no second all-encompassing extra-plot (not dramatic)
dialogue. (Discourse 266)

Because Steinbeck’s writing does include an “all-encompassing language” –

the language of the narrator – no dialogic analysis of his work can be com-
plete without taking the narrative voice or voices into account. The narrative
voice is especially prominent in Grapes because of the structure of the novel.
Only half of the chapters in the book follow the journey of the Joads, while
the other chapters, often called interchapters, place the Joads’ story into a
larger context. Sometimes the interchapters show the struggles of migrant
workers as a whole, and sometimes they provide opposing perspectives,
112 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

which, juxtaposed with the Joads’ story, emphasize the extent of the Joads’
dilemma while also revealing its complexity. Chapter 5, for instance, func-
tions in all of these capacities through its generalized portrayal of the rela-
tionship between land owners and tenants and through its more specific
depiction of an argument between a farmer and a tractor driver for the
bank (both of these scenes will be explored later in this chapter). Although
these interchapters often contain their own narratives, they almost always
provide the narrator’s view of the events, adding an element of social com-
mentary. The voice of the narrator, though it may seem to exist just to relay
a story, is always more than simply a medium. As Bakhtin says, “there are
no ‘neutral’ words and forms – words and forms that can belong to ‘no one;’
language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and
accents” (Discourse 293). Therefore, the fullest dialogic analysis takes into
account the interaction between all the character and narrative voices.
One of the more interesting aspects of Grapes is the narrator’s treatment
of voices that oppose the protagonists. Steinbeck’s statements about L‘Affaire
suggest that the voices of the antagonists were not fairly represented in the
discarded novel, and that any dialogue from the antagonists very likely rep-
resented Steinbeck’s view of businessmen rather than the actual perspective
of those characters. In Grapes, Steinbeck occasionally uses the same device
to illustrate the mistreatment of migrant workers. For instance, when one
service station attendant expresses sympathy for the plight of the Joads and
the other “Okies” traveling west, a fellow attendant comments, “Them god-
damn Okies got no sense and no feeling. They ain’t human. A human being
wouldn’t live like they do. [ . . . ] Almighty, they don’t know any better
than what they got. Why worry?” (301). This scene provides a very different
perspective on the Okies’ situation, showing the point of view of someone
who does not sympathize with the Joads but rather chooses to reject their
humanity in order to avoid feeling guilt, pity, or responsibility. In saying
“Why worry?” the attendant reveals that he is rationalizing away any per-
sonal responsibility. Although the attendant’s point of view is present in
this chapter, it is not shown as being valid. This scene occurs approximately
midway through the novel and is juxtaposed against 300 pages of sympa-
thetic portrayal of the Okies that show that they do indeed have “sense” and
“feeling.” The attendant’s words therefore do not hold much weight other
than showing how misunderstood the Okies are, which makes the utterance
serve the narrator’s objective rather than the character’s.
This attendant’s comment is an example of one of Steinbeck’s most
employed dialogic devices: the hybrid construction. Bakhtin says that the
hybrid construction is “an utterance that belongs, by its grammatical (syn-
tactic) and compositional markers, to a single speaker, but that actually
contains mixed within it two utterances, two speech manners, two styles,
two ‘languages,’ two semantic and axiological systems” (Discourse 304).
When the attendant insults the Okies, the words “are permeated with the
 Jennifer Butler Keaton 113

ironic intonation of the author; therefore the construction has two accents
(the author’s ironic transmission, and a mimicking of the [ . . . ] character)”
(Discourse 318). Steinbeck arranges the voices to provide a narrative perspec-
tive that does not require explicit expressions of opinion. He makes the
wrongness of the attendant’s opinion of the Okies obvious to the reader
without ever having to say that it is wrong. Placed in the context of the
novel’s descriptions of the Joads’ struggles, these comments become noth-
ing more than the ramblings of someone who is selfish and out-of-touch.
The invasion of the “ironic intonation” of the narrator onto the voice
of a character is not the only way Steinbeck uses hybrid construction to
encourage readers to reevaluate the validity of particular utterances. The
interchapters provide the voice of the narrator more explicitly, but they are
still heavily hybridized. The interchapter that directly follows the incident
with the gas station attendants reflects on California’s history and rein-
forces the narrator’s objective through the imitation of an attitude similar
to the attendants’. Steinbeck’s narrator often adopts personas that represent
particular groups of people or particular viewpoints, without assuming the
voice of a particular character. In this interchapter, the narrator explains
how Americans took over the once Mexico-owned California and discusses
how the establishment of farming as an industry created the labor crisis. He
describes the situation that the Joads are entering, saying, “They imported
slaves, although they did not call them slaves: Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans,
Filipinos. They live on rice and beans, the business men said. They wouldn’t
know what to do with good wages. Why, look how they live. Why look what
they eat” (316). The speaker ironically expresses a viewpoint similar to the
attendant’s, but he is also an omniscient narrator who places the dilemma
at hand into a historical context. Not only does the narrator equate the
treatment of the migrant workers to that of slaves, he also shows that the
current situation is part of a gradual depreciation of the workforce’s per-
ceived value. All the while, this passage further emphasizes the absurdity of
the attendant’s statement. Just between these two passages, several voices
present themselves and interact in multiple ways, the ultimate effect being
the reinforcement of the injustice of the Okies’ situation.
The gas station attendant is only one example of a voice that opposes the
protagonists and that, through placement within the novel or hybridiza-
tion with the narrator’s voice, appears without sympathy. Steinbeck also
presents the views of those who, on the surface, appear to be responsi-
ble for the families’ poverty and homelessness. However, in contrast to
Steinbeck’s approach in L’Affaire, the author also provides the motivations
of those characters, thereby showing that they have valid points of view. For
instance, one interchapter, Chapter 5, describes a typical meeting between
a farming family and the landowner who is forcing them off the land. It
would have been easy for Steinbeck to portray the landowner as an enemy
who is only concerned with his personal wealth and who feels no concern
114 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

for the fate of the family, but Steinbeck instead portrays the owner’s duty as
a burden. The narrator says of the owners, “Some of the owner men were
kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry
because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they
had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold”
(42). In this hybrid construction, in which the owners’ voices are presented
through the narrator’s, no hint of irony is apparent. Steinbeck also does not
juxtapose the owners’ voices with other voices that contradict them. For all
the pain the owners’ actions cause the farming families, Steinbeck portrays
the owners sympathetically and not as the real root of the problem.
Even in the cases of those voices that Steinbeck does present ironically,
later narrative exposition often adds another dimension to how such voices
fit into the bigger picture. In Chapter 21, another interchapter, the narrator
gives an overview of the fear that the migrant workers instill in the towns
they travel to:

In the West there was panic when the migrants multiplied on the high-
ways. Men of property were terrified for their property. Men who had
never been hungry saw the eyes of the hungry. [ . . . ] And the men of the
towns and of the soft suburban country gathered to defend themselves;
and they reassured themselves that they were good and the invaders bad,
as a man must do before he fights. They said, These goddamned Okies are
dirty and ignorant. They’re degenerate, sexual maniacs. [ . . . ] The local
people whipped themselves into a mold of cruelty. (385–6)

In this passage, the narrator describes the motivations behind the hostility
that migrant workers have faced in California, hostility that the narrator has
to this point portrayed negatively. After all, what kind of people would want
to makes things worse for families who have already been through so much?
Although the narrator does not approve of the hostility – he still describes
it as “cruelty” – he avoids vilifying those who espouse that attitude. Instead,
the narrator explains the desperation and fear that drives the cruelty, even
going so far as to call it something “a man must do.” Steinbeck uses this
interchapter and the voice of his narrator to provide a new way for readers
to look at previously unsympathetic attitudes, such as that of the service
station attendant.
The Grapes of Wrath sometimes presents the voices that oppose the pro-
tagonists ironically, but at other times, as in Chapter 21, portrays those
voices as being legitimate and understandable points of view. Perhaps this
contradiction in the presentation of these voices stems from what Parini
calls Steinbeck’s “duality of attachments”:

He had a peculiar and noble sympathy for those who were cheated out of
their natural birthright and dignity. Injustice drove him wild; as his sister
 Jennifer Butler Keaton 115

Beth says, “Even as a child John sided with the underdog.” These radical
or, more precisely, liberal sympathies bound him, psychologically, to the
present struggle, whatever it might be; on the other hand, his philosophi-
cal and spiritual drive led him to posit a utopian moment, “the peace of a
classless community.” All progressive politics depend on this duality, and
Steinbeck (in his most activist period) seems to have drawn great energies
from this unusually generative conflict. (169)

On the one hand, Steinbeck’s main objective in The Grapes of Wrath is to

illustrate “the present struggle” – that is, the plight of the Joads and the
real-world migrant workers they represent – by giving voice to a world
view and a way of life that were being largely ignored. However, because
of his “duality of attachments,” Steinbeck also provides context for the
struggle, showing how various different voices fit into the world in which
the struggle is occurring. The world he presents is not the “classless com-
munity” he strives for, but by showing that even contradicting viewpoints
often stem from similar attitudes of self-preservation, he creates potential
for bridging the gap between the different voices. Bakhtin points out that
the “author is not to be found in the language of the narrator” but rather
in “the dialogue of languages” (Discourse 314). If readers look at the entire
novel as being a world view, with the interaction between all the different
voices creating the ultimate authorial voice, then Steinbeck’s duality of
attachments creates two world views, with the novel being on the side of
the struggling workers while also, for the most part, trying to avoid vilify-
ing the other voices. This split world view is divided just as the chapter
format is divided, with the Joad chapters providing an intimate focus on
the specific plight of the family, and the interchapters providing a more
distant and expansive perspective on the situation by placing the Joads’
story in a larger context.
Bakhtin says of the interaction between voices that “languages do not
exclude each other, but rather intersect with each other in many different
ways” (Discourse 291). Another way for languages in a novel to intersect is
for a character to serve as the voice of the narrator. In Grapes, this character
is Jim Casy. In The Novels of John Steinbeck: A Critical Study, Howard Levant
points out that Casy serves no “forthright narrative function,” but rather
exists as an allegorical Christ figure and to “make moral statements.” Levant
goes on to argue that Steinbeck is successful in his use of this character, say-
ing, “If the novel is to have more significance than a reportorial narrative
of travel and hardship, Casy’s spiritual insights are a necessary means of
stating a convincing philosophical optimism” (103). Casy is an ex-preacher
who no longer believes himself worthy to perform ministerial duties but still
searches for ways to serve humanity. He was unable to resist his sexual urges
for the women he preached to, but he loves people “fit to bust” and only
wants “to make ’em happy” (32). He frequently expresses his philosophical
116 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

opinions on various issues and does not exhibit the same intense sense of
privacy that often restricts the family’s speech.
Casy is not one of the Joads or even one of the migrant workers, but rather
is an observer just as the narrator is. In his observations, Casy frequently
echoes the sentiments of the narrator, serving as the narrator’s mouthpiece
within the Joad narrative. For instance, when a different gas station atten-
dant complains about migrant workers trying to trade their possessions for
gas instead of paying, Casy says, “It ain’t the people’s fault [ . . . ]. How’d you
like to sell the bed you sleep on for a tankful of gas?” (172). In this reply,
Casy echoes the main theme of a previous interchapter in which the nar-
rator addresses the heartbreak of migrant families who have to sell or leave
behind nearly all of their possessions in order to make the trip to California.
Steinbeck gives a general voice to the migrating families, saying, “Maybe
we can start again in the new rich land [ . . . ]. But you can’t start. [ . . . ]
The bitterness we sold to the junk man – he got it all right, but we have it
still” (119). Casy is the only character within the Joad narrative to explicitly
describe this particular hardship in a manner similar to the narrator.
Casy’s tendency to talk about the western migration beyond just how it
is affecting the Joads also parallels the voice of the narrator. At one point
during the Joads’ journey, Casy tells Tom his views on the migrant worker
situation:

“Tom, they’s hundreds a families like us all a-goin’ west. [ . . . ] They’s stuff
goin’ on and they’s folks doin’ things. [ . . . ] An’ if ya listen, you’ll hear a
movin’, an’ a sneakin’, an’ a rustlin’, an’ – an’ a restlessness. They’s stuff
goin’ on that the folks doin’ it don’t know nothin’ about – yet. They’s
gonna come somepin outa all these folks goin’ wes’ – outa all their farms
lef’ lonely. They’s gonna come a thing that’s gonna change the whole
country.” (235–7)

In addition to his wider outlook, Casy’s insistence that the plight of the
migrant workers is “gonna change the whole country” directly reflects the
opinions the narrator expresses in interchapters and, in fact, the polemical
message of the novel. For instance, in one of the last interchapters, the nar-
rator describes the anger of the starving families, saying, “In the souls of the
people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for
the vintage” (474). Not only is this statement significant because it is the
only instance of the book’s title within the novel, but it also presents a sense
of imminence that echoes Casy’s insistence that America is on the brink of
a transformation.
In addition to the concepts of heteroglossia and hybrid construction,
another vital issue in any dialogic study is whether a particular work uses
authoritative or internally persuasive discourse. Steinbeck offers his own
commentary on authoritative discourse in The Grapes of Wrath, in a passage
 Jennifer Butler Keaton 117

in which Tom comments on Casy’s loquaciousness. Tom begins, “For a fella

that don’t preach no more – ”, and Casy interjects, “Oh, I’m a talker! [ . . . ]
No gettin’ away from that. But I ain’t preachin’. Preachin’ is tellin’ folks
stuff. I’m askin’ ‘em. That ain’t preachin’, is it?” (128). In this statement,
Casy defines “preachin’” as an authoritative, monologic discourse, one
that makes statements about right and wrong that cannot be questioned.
Casy, however, wants to learn from the people, as he explains in one of the
first real speeches of the novel, in which he insists that he needs to go to
California, saying, “I ain’t gonna try to teach ‘em nothin’. I’m gonna try to
learn” (128). Later in the same chapter, the narrator describes a scene where
the Joad family gathers to discuss their plan for the journey, saying, “Only
the preacher was not there. He, out of delicacy, was sitting on the ground
behind the house. He was a good preacher and knew his people” (136). Only
a few pages after Casy insists that he is no longer a preacher, the narrator not
only reattaches the label Casy had shrugged off, but specifically calls him
a “good preacher.” The voice of the narrator enters the Joads’ narrative to
both contradict and reinforce Casy’s voice; he claims that Casy is a preacher
despite the character’s insistence otherwise, but in placing such confidence
in the character he adds authority to Casy’s voice. Through his interactions
with the voices of the characters, Steinbeck’s narrator questions what it
means to be a man of God, a redefinition reinforced when Casy’s eventual
sacrifice makes him a Christ figure, as he echoes Jesus by telling his mur-
derers “You don’t know what you’re a-doin’” (527). Steinbeck implies that
what makes Casy “a good preacher” is, in fact, the very behavior that Casy
insists is not preaching: his avoidance of “tellin’ folks stuff,” or speaking
authoritatively (128).
The narrator’s praise of a character who avoids authoritative discourse
would seem to imply a certain disdain for that type of communication,
but does Steinbeck’s writing reflect such an attitude? Steinbeck is, in fact,
internally persuasive rather than authoritative in his insistence that major
societal problems exist and must be addressed. In his sympathetic portrayal
of people suffering from these problems (such as oppression of female voices
and economic unfairness), Steinbeck shows readers why they should change
the way they think about certain social issues instead of simply telling them
that they should. He also frequently presents conflicts without endorsing or
vilifying either side. For instance, an early interchapter explores the work
of a man – who had once been a displaced farmer himself – who is now
employed by the “big shots” to drive one of the tractors that are plow-
ing through the farms of his neighbors and friends (51). A farmer asks the
tractor driver, whom he recognizes as being “Joe Davis’s boy,” “Well, what
you doing this kind of work for – against your own people?” The driver
responds by saying, “Three dollars a day. I got damn sick of creeping for
my dinner – and not getting it. I got a wife and kids. We got to eat. Three
dollars a day, and it comes every day” (50). The farmer – and the narrator,
118 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

by extension – does not blindly accept the driver’s excuse. Instead, the
farmer points out that, by insuring his own livelihood, the driver is destroy-
ing the livelihoods of others. However, the tractor driver insists that “Big
shots won’t give you three dollars a day if you worry about anything but
your three dollars a day” (51). The tractor driver is shown to have the same
motives of self-preservation as the farmer; they both value their own fam-
ily’s well-being over the other’s. Although this scene takes place in an inter-
chapter, the argument is presented in a straightforward manner without the
intrusion of the narrator. Bakhtin, in discussing the role of the author in
the novel, says that the author exists “as a third party in a quarrel between
two people (although he may be a biased third party)” (Discourse 314). This
conversation between the tenant and the tractor driver serves as an apposite
example of the author as third party. The narrator may be biased, giving
more weight to the tenant’s argument, which is to be expected since the ten-
ant more closely reflects the protagonists’ situation. But the narrator does
not definitively endorse either side in the argument, and readers are left to
decide on the matter themselves.
With so many voices constantly interacting, Grapes does not present
an either/or scenario when determining whether the novel is authorita-
tive or internally persuasive. For instance, Grapes frequently addresses the
importance of having an emotional and physical connection to the land as
opposed to simply “owning” land, and the novel clearly favors those with
that connection, as both the Joad chapters and the interchapters support it.
Grapes also has a running theme of people repeatedly denying responsibility
for their actions, instead insisting that someone or something else is actu-
ally to blame. For instance, the tractor driver tells the tenant that he has no
choice but to tear down his friends’ homes because it is the only way he can
earn his three dollars a day. Earlier in the same interchapter, when a land
owner is evicting a farming family, the blame falls squarely on the “system”.
As the tenant desperately looks for someone to blame, the owner repeatedly
insists that the bank is responsible, and that “the bank is something more
than men [ . . . ]. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it”
(45). This interchapter leaves it unclear whether the owner is accurate in his
description of the bank or if he is just searching for a scapegoat to alleviate
his own guilt in the situation.
Louis Owens points out in John Steinbeck’s Re-vision of America that a major
commonality in many of Steinbeck’s works is the “theme of commitment,”
which he says “is the chief ingredient in the creation of the Steinbeck
hero,” especially in The Grapes of Wrath (102). In the context of this dialogic
analysis, Steinbeck’s theme of commitment becomes an example where the
voice of the author can be gleaned from his body of work. While Steinbeck
consistently blames faulty systems – rather than specific people – for the
tragic events detailed in his works, he also implies that the only way to
fix those systems is through the actions of people who are committed to
 Jennifer Butler Keaton 119

the wellbeing of all of humanity. Steinbeck uses an internally persuasive

method of convincing his readers of the reality of various social problems,
and he uses similar methods for presenting the theme of commitment. Ma’s
determination to keep her family together along with Casy’s commitment –
concluding with his Christ-like sacrifice – to the migrant workers both
emphasize this theme. Seeing Casy’s sacrifice causes a change in Tom, too.
By his own admission, Tom starts “talkin’ like Casy,” and he says that he has
come to agree with Casy that “a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y
a piece of a big one” (572). By pointing out Casy’s influence on him, Tom
recognizes his own hybridization with the preacher’s language.
The concept of all humans being pieces of one big soul suggests an inter-
dependence among all people, one that would require a great deal of com-
mitment to others to maintain. Tom tells Ma that he must leave the family
in order to fight against the injustices that have led to starving and homeless
families and the deaths of people like Casy. He goes on to give one of the
most well-known speeches in American literature:

“I’ll be ever’where – wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so

hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a
guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when
they’re mad an’ – I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’
they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’
live in the houses they build – why, I’ll be there.” (572)

Not only does Tom promise solidarity with those who suffer, but the positive
progression of the speech suggests his commitment to a particular outcome,
where children always have supper and families can sustain themselves
through their farming. In “The Rhetoric of American Protest: Thomas Paine
and the Education of Tom Joad,” Kurt Hochenauer says of this speech, “By
turning his anger outward to benefit a larger community, Tom makes a final
commitment to his society” and that “Tom Joad has transcended his own
personal constraints, and has embraced an all-encompassing mythology –
the story of American protest” (392, 393). Steinbeck had already empha-
sized the importance of commitment by having the character who most
represented the narrator’s voice, Casy, dedicate and sacrifice his life to help
migrant workers. By having the novel’s primary protagonist come to the
same conclusion as Casy, Steinbeck solidifies commitment as the principal
theme of Grapes.
Steinbeck’s consistent endorsement of certain points of view – such
as the prioritizing of a connection with the land and the idealizing of
active commitment – is authoritative in that the author leads readers
to particular conclusions instead of leaving the issues open-ended. This
authoritative quality might suggest that Steinbeck failed to eliminate the
heavy-handedness that plagued L’Affaire Lettuceberg. However, even when
120 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

readers are led to a specific conclusion, Steinbeck still makes his case
through heteroglossia rather than through monologic statements. Although
the narrator’s voice does occasionally rise to the top of the stratified hierar-
chy of voices contained in the novel, those other voices are always below
it, supporting the narrator’s agenda. Without those other discourses, The
Grapes of Wrath would have been no different than L’Affaire, in which only
pro-labor voices were presented sympathetically. Instead, Steinbeck created
a novel that is internally persuasive because it gradually builds up to its
conclusions through the presentation of multiple points of view.
At one point in The Grapes of Wrath, Tom, perplexed by Casy’s thoughtful
and talkative nature, asks Casy to “come down from your thinkin’ and listen
a minute,” and Casy replies, “Listen all the time. That’s why I been thinkin’.
Listen to people a-talkin’ an’ purty soon I hear the way folks are feelin’”
(340). Throughout the novel, Steinbeck displays not only how listening to
individuals’ voices can reveal their feelings, but also how combinations of
voices can reveal human truths, especially when as many voices as possible
are included. Clark and Holquist state that “Bakhtin’s early work expresses
most clearly the task which occupied him throughout his life, that of turn-
ing his dialogism into a full-fledged world view” (ix). Similarly, Steinbeck,
through his experimentation with heteroglossia, encourages the world view
that the best strategy for solving societal problems is to make sure all voices
are heard.
In Discourse in the Novel, Bakhtin explains what he believes is the purpose
of studying language:

Discourse lives, as it were, beyond itself, in a living impulse [ . . . ] toward

the object; if we detach ourselves completely from this impulse all we
have left if the naked corpse of the word, from which we can learn noth-
ing at all about the social situation or the fate of a given word in life. To
study the word as such, ignoring the impulse that reaches out beyond it, is just
a senseless as to study psychological experience outside the context of that real
life toward which it was directed and by which it is determined. (Discourse 292)

Just as Bakhtin saw little purpose in words that had been severed from
their attachment to social situations, Steinbeck also tied his writing to his
social objectives, saying, “My whole work drive has been aimed at making
people understand each other” (qtd. in Demott xl). Both men saw language
not as simply a way to express ideas or as a set of symbols to be arranged
eloquently by poets, but as a complex and flexible system that not only
reveals the social stratification among its speakers, but also is the key to
any restructuring of that stratification. Steinbeck wrote of L’Affaire, “I don’t
care about its literary excellence, understand, only whether it does the job
I want it to do” (qtd. in Benson 376). Steinbeck and Bakhtin shared a belief
in the potential for language – and, in Steinbeck’s case, the responsibility of
 Jennifer Butler Keaton 121

writers – to provide the oppressed with opportunities to reclaim their voices.

Robert Stam says that Bakhtin encouraged “the subversive use of language
by those who otherwise lack social power” (18). If The Grapes of Wrath is
guilty of social activism, it is a charge that neither Steinbeck nor Bakhtin
would object to, nor does it invalidate its status as a dialogic experiment that
successfully changed public perception not through monologic propaganda,
but through the intricate relationships of multiple voices.

Works cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Discourse in the Novel: The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist.
Austin: U of Texas P, 2006. 258–422.
Benson, Jackson J. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. New York: Viking,
1984.
Bloom, Harold. “Introduction.” John Steinbeck. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea
House, 1987: 1–5.
Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.
Demott, Robert, ed. Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath. New York:
Penguin, 1989.
Hochenauer, Kurt. “The Rhetoric of American Protest: Thomas Paine and the
Education of Tom Joad.” Midwest Quarterly 35 (1994): 392–404. ProQuest Research
Library. ProQuest. Web. 2 Jan. 2009.
Levant, Howard. The Novels of John Steinbeck. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1974.
Owens, Louis. John Steinbeck’s Re-vision of America. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985.
Parini, Jay. John Steinbeck. New York: Holt, 1995.
Stam, Robert. Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 1992.
8
Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses Revisited
Linda Wagner-Martin

When Faulkner’s novel appeared in 1942, the title page was completely mis-
leading. Go Down, Moses and Other Stories – though it was reasonably well
reviewed – had never been intended as a story collection. As Faulkner wrote
later to his agent, “I remember the shock (mild) I got when I saw the printed
title page . . . nobody but Random House seemed to labor under the impres-
sion that GO DOWN MOSES should be titled ‘and other stories’ . . . Moses
is indeed a novel” (Blotner 1102). For the author, however, continuously
short of money, worried about the Second World War, and facing another
return to scriptwriting in Hollywood, his latest book and its reception would
neither keep him awake at night nor make him wealthy.
For anyone who watched the reviews, however, the range of response was
surprising. There were some good reviews, in the midst of the carping about
whether or not the book was a novel. Milton Rugoff acclaimed “The Bear” as
great a work as Melville’s Moby Dick.1 The privileging of Ike McCaslin and his
philosophy of renunciation began with Lionel Trilling’s influential review in
The Nation. But for the most part, Go Down, Moses was never included in the
“Big Five” Faulkner line up: his great novels were consistently said to be The
Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and
The Hamlet (books published between 1929 and 1940).
Critical interest in Go Down, Moses began to change a decade after
Faulkner’s death (1962) and a decade after the United States began to come
to racial maturity. During the 1970s, critics started to see Go Down, Moses as
one of Faulkner’s first extended commentaries about white and black families
in the South; and more to the point, as a text about the secure white families
like the McCaslins and their black “shadow” families which for centuries had
been ignored. Even though Cleanth Brooks had said as early as 1963 that
“The judgment passed upon slavery generally in Go Down, Moses is a wither-
ing one” (248), few readers had followed his somewhat understated lead. An
established author’s treatment of race was seldom the focus of critical interest.
Part of the interpretative problem was that, even for a writer known as
the most innovative of America’s modernists, Faulkner’s writing strategies in
122
 Linda Wagner-Martin 123

Go Down, Moses seemed new. Instead of extensive stream of consciousness,

there was what seemed to be the ribald Southern humor of the opening
segment, “Was.” Instead of the contrapuntal dialogue scenes heavy with
innuendo, there was the meditative sonority of Ike’s soliloquies – and of
the hunting story, “The Bear.” Instead of an overall tapestry of hectic juxta-
position, there was the relentless hammering of Rider’s grief for his wife in
“Pantaloon in Black,” the “inferior” segment that, according to Trilling, had
no business being included in the book (632).
In 1942, when Go Down, Moses was published, readers resisted. They had
spent fifteen years learning to “read” Faulkner’s works (and they did not yet
have the incentive of his having won the Nobel Prize for Literature, which
came in 1949). They did not yet have before them Richard Poirier’s conten-
tion that most great literature requires new reading skills (77), or David
Madden’s matter-of-fact analysis:

The techniques fiction writers use are in themselves expressions of mean-

ing and conveyers to the reader of experience; that is true especially of
innovative writers . . . . One may see in Faulkner’s careful and full revi-
sions the stress he placed on the use of innovative techniques that in
themselves would express the emotional, imaginative, and intellectual
meaning. (109)

That Faulkner’s work seemed to be tied inherently to the South also created
difficulties for a range of readers. Admittedly, the South was a bifurcated
set of cultures. When Richard King wrote about the uses of memory in
literature, for example, he admitted that Faulkner’s writing gave readers
the dilemma of being forced “to call into question the value of culture alto-
gether, to suspect that the claims of the past are deadening, life-threatening
claims.” And if this is the state of mind concerning the cultures of the South,
then of what value is memory: “How can we remember and represent what
is dismembered and absent?” (138).2 David Minter links the complexity
of Faulkner’s vision to not only this bifurcation of the South but to the
narrative strategies he was, in response, compelled to choose. In Minter’s
assessment, once Faulkner realized that no story was ever finished – nor was
that story a linear one – he had to convey “signs simultaneously of what
was possible, approximations of supreme order and closure, and of what was
impossible, namely, the attainment of perfect order and closure.” Minter
calls this Faulkner’s “discovery of the reiterative bent of his imagination”
(132). And Minter calls the author’s style in Go Down, Moses, his recreation
of “a medleyed voice” (147).
The issue of whether or not Faulkner had sympathy for his black char-
acters existed during the 1970s as a conundrum best explained through
further study of his narrative techniques. In work by Joanne V. Creighton,
J. E. Bunselmeyer, James Early, and other textual critics, however, the shape
124 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

of Faulkner’s aesthetic was of more interest than his racial commentary.

Dirk Kuyk, Jr., emphasized the Negro spiritual of the title and the novel’s
balancing on ritual (“like threads in the book. Small-scale, finite patterns of
action, they are twisted into the strands of the plots,” 184). For any casual
reader, Kuyk’s text can be seen as a study of Faulkner’s aesthetics but he also
emphasizes that ownership – of land, of human beings – is being questioned
in Go Down, Moses, and concludes on the basis of the novel that “sharing
must eventually supplant ownership” (188).

Race and folklore: “Was” and comedy

Perhaps because Faulkner’s 1940 novel The Hamlet had been read as a com-
edy (with a sense of relief from even the most traditional critics – despite
some macabre and even lewd plot devices), many readers saw the opening
of Go Down, Moses as possessing a similarly comedic start. After the single-
sentence description of Ike McCaslin (“uncle to half a county, father to no
one” 3), the narrative presents the frustration of Buck and Buddy McCaslin
when they learn that Tomey’s Turl has escaped – to run to Tennie, his
beloved on the Hubert Beauchamp place. The novel begins with a frantic
(and unsuccessful) hunt, the mixed-blood McCaslin heir (who is three-
fourths white) chased by dogs as he runs to the Beauchamps: the hunt as
comedy is an ironic start for what seems to be a nostalgic memory of life
in Mississippi, life among the McCaslins, white and black. At odds with the
book’s title, at odds with what any reader would have known about how
unsportsmanlike hunting people in the untrackable woods could be, the
presumed comic “Was” provides not comedy but an ironic distancing from
the tragedy of race that readers might have expected in 1942.
The chase is funny. The repartee between the bachelor twins Buck and
Buddy sounds as if Mark Twain were writing it (one of Faulkner’s touch-
stones for comedy was Twain’s essay “How to Tell a Story”). The slowly
revealed plot of Sophonsiba Beauchamp as she aims to “catch” Buck’s
behavior is wry and comic. Faulkner’s emphasis on his role adds a more
palatable texture to the race story (as does the reader’s knowledge that Ike
is the son of the Buck–Sophonsiba marriage, and that he is only recounting
this particular chase and its outcome: the real narrator is Cass McCaslin,
who was a boy of nine at the time of the narrative, whereas Ike, obviously,
was not yet born).
The varieties of the “hunt” are also funny; Sophonsiba plays the British
landed gentlewoman with her colored silk trophy and her prim manners.
The dogs are after the fox interminably, including in the bedroom when the
twins are looking for their single, shared necktie. The reader is surrounded
by the motion of these various hunts, but as Thadious Davis has pointed out
repeatedly, this is a book about “masculinist sport and games interconnected
with property and law” (129). It is a book about power, white people’s power,
 Linda Wagner-Martin 125

and all the critical attention to Ike McCaslin and his struggles over property
cannot disguise the fact that the narrative center of the novel – emotionally
and narratively – is Tomey’s Turl (whose love for his Tennie also provides
the basis for Rider’s grief at Mannie’s loss in “Pantaloon”). In Davis’s radical
reading of Go Down, Moses, she provides the missing center of conflict that
repeats some of the strategies that Faulkner had used throughout his 1929
novel, The Sound and the Fury, a book about Caddie Compson who seldom
appears in the text – and seldom has any language for what happens in that
work. Davis suggests that:

I locate Tomey’s Turl, rather than Isaac McCaslin or his ancestor Lucius
Quintus Carothers McCaslin, as a figure of transgression and hybridity at
the center of this project. His given name is Terrell, but that he is most
often called Tomey’s Turl seems appropriate because that name retains
his social history, positions him outside of McCaslin domination, and
refigures his mother who died giving birth to him . . . . Born in slavery in
June of 1833, “yr stars fell,” Tomey’s Turl is the son of Tomasina and the
grandson of Eunice. (130)

Davis goes on to spell out the ancestry of both this character, a slave,
and of Ike McCaslin: “Tomey’s Turl is both the son and the grandson of
Carothers McCaslin, who violates his own daughter Tomasina and fathers
her son”. The naming of Tomey’s Turl creates a word game reminiscent of
the Sphinx’s riddle. “His lineage is embedded in the ‘facts’ recorded riddle-
like in the McCaslin commissary ledgers and ‘decoded’ by another grandson
of Carothers McCaslin, Ike McCaslin, who functions as a detective solving
a crime puzzle” (131).
Because much of the “decoding” of this history has been seen as depend-
ent on the white McCaslin family, Davis’s focus here on the slave character,
the victim of the egregious sins of the white father (and grandfather) brings
important emphasis to Go Down, Moses. It calls readers to attend to the black
folklore that dominates the text (not only the hymns and the strong charac-
ters as Faulkner presents them all), but to see that the strands of narrative – for
all their white speakers – repeatedly underscore and expand upon the lives
of the black characters.
The erstwhile comedy of “Was” becomes embodied in the poker game
(games, as Buddy must save Buck from Hubert in the second sequence).
Modeled perhaps on a painting Faulkner much admired, Paul Cezanne’s The
Card Players, in which the intricacy of what each man held, was his bet real
or bluff, and the indeterminacy of some hands being left unknown carried
forward the sense of games and rules, known to only certain players. But at
the center of even the poker games sits Tomey’s Turl, chosen to be dealer in
these all-important transactions. Innocent as Cass as he watches the deal-
ings, innocent of power as Tomey’s Turl is, the narrative of the card game is
126 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

far from innocent. By having either Buck or Buddy at the table (not both),
Faulkner coalesces the two into a single identity in Hubert’s mind. Hubert,
frightened of having to play either of them, becomes aligned with them
because they are the landowner white men involved in a high stakes game.
The three white characters are, then, aligned against Tomey’s Turl, who
gives the explanation for both his running away and his complicity with
Sophonsiba’s plot in his seemingly off-handed remarks to Cass, “anytime
you wants to git something done, from hoeing out a crop to getting mar-
ried, just get the womenfolks to working at it. Then all you needs to do is
set down and wait. You member that” (13).
Just as the hunt positions Tomey’s Turl as the black male threat to the
order of the white man’s world – he cannot be caught; he comes into civili-
zation on his own terms, and he is a sexual being – so Faulkner uses female
characters as the nexus of his humor. Despite what Tomey’s Turl has told
Cass, despite Sophonsiba’s eventual marriage to Buck, Faulkner shows the
idyllic quality of men’s lives which are lived without women.3 The South
Faulkner gives the reader, imaged in the various plots within “Was,” is a
mélange of appearance and reality. Seen through Cass’s eyes, the South
retains its honor and comfort; life is less ramshackle than Faulkner shows
it to be in the adult reader’s perception. The two-leveled narrative carries
information about male culture in the South just as it carries information
about the decline of the southern aristocracy. When Buddy rescues Buck
from the marriage trap, bluffing his way into the straight that so frightens
Hubert, Cass sees it as a tribute to his uncle’s poker skills. The reader might
see it as well as the true McCaslin willingness to use chicanery to get what-
ever they want. But primarily, what Cass learns from the only glimpse into
his past that he narrates for the reader, is that men stick together, men face
out against the social customs that would force them into marriage and
paternity. He learns from this, and from other male behavior, that singleness
is the desired state, that male bonding is the all-important connection, and
that, in some cases, even a black male slave is preferable to a white woman.
The ridicule that Miss Sophonsiba takes in the text is quite outspoken; she
becomes the consistent comic ploy.
Transferred as it is to Ike’s own life in later segments of the novel, a man’s
disdain for his wife’s sorrow when she pleads for children stems from his
conditioning to see that all women use men for their own ends. Ike trans-
lates her tears as she wishes to continue her family line; he interprets her
wish for a child as a continuation of her insistence that he claim the land
that would have been his inheritance from his family, again so that the
child would inherit McCaslin property.4 By writing his own economic text
to interpret woman’s desire, Ike shows that his education has been faulty.
He views life as a panorama of romantic shows, men chasing other men to
force them to cohabit with women (as the plot to sell Tomey’s Turl, or to sell
Tennie the other direction, suggests); and men rescuing each other from the
 Linda Wagner-Martin 127

handcuffs of marriage, not only Buddy’s rescuing Buck but both McCaslins’
rescuing Tomey’s Turl from being sold to Hubert.
At the close of the two poker games, Hubert can return to his waiting sis-
ter and apologize that the games had gone against him. He has the perfect
excuse – both Buck and Buddy are better at poker than he. And Faulkner’s
denouement to “Was” shows as well that the reputation of Buck and Buddy
for being poker sharks is another fabrication of Southern legend, of these
twinned and inseparable brothers who defy all convention in their disrepu-
table life styles. Buddy cooks and is the wife of the pair; Buck manages. In
truth, neither does much, but their façade of bachelordom allows them to
do whatever they want.
In young Cass’s eyes, “Was” makes clear that Buck and Buddy can do
no wrong. Cass’s life – and Ike’s by implication, becomes the male-defined
odyssey of men bonded through their experiences in nature. The autumn
hunting season, taken out of contemporary time and moved back – in geog-
raphy as well as in custom – fifty years, becomes the high point of each of
Ike’s long years. He lives to go on the hunt, though eventually he cannot
even go into the field. His life has crystallized around this male activity: he
erroneously thinks that this is the important part of a man’s life. Much of
the narrative of Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, then, becomes an attempt to
educate Ike McCaslin.

“Pantaloon in Black” and the mystery of the human heart

Among commentary about Go Down, Moses (beginning with reviews and

continuing forward), a persistent question is, Why Rider? The protagonist of
the third segment of Faulkner’s novel seems unconnected to the McCaslins.
So if the novel is an intricate expose of the McCaslin family, why did
Faulkner include “Pantaloon” at all?
The pantaloon, the fool for love from French and Italian literature, gives
Rider, a black man working in the timber and the lumber yard, a classic
mask for his earth-shattering grief at the time of his young wife’s death. In
his madness, Rider finds himself complicit with the hostile white culture,
who cannot understand his sorrow, and he searches for ways to, in effect,
kill himself.
Part of the difficulty readers have with Rider and his insurmountable
grief is its contrast to the emotional distance they have experienced with
Ike McCaslin.5 It is also because of the poignant stillness that this segment
radiates. In the words of James A. Snead, Rider’s agony is set against the
busyness of much of the novel – the “overriding metaphors of the bear-
hunt, the slave-hunt, and the treasure-hunt” (180). Juxtaposed with such
activity, which forces the reader’s attention towards plot rather than charac-
ter, Rider’s “Wordsworthian” sorrow (in the words of Cleanth Brooks) seems
almost unbelievable. Brooks says simply that Rider displays a “capacity for
128 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

grief and an intensity of emotion that put to shame the man of cultivated
sensibility” (254). Structurally, both the intensity of grief and the inabil-
ity of the white culture to comprehend that grief parallels the emotional
intensity of the title story, “Go Down, Moses,” which Faulkner chooses to
close the novel. In that segment, the grief of both black women and white
over the execution of Samuel Worsham Beauchamp, alias “Butch,” remains
inexplicable to the white male observers. What resonates for the reader is
the consciousness of a grief that cannot be palliative. The way to alleviate
some of that sorrow is through the ages-old hymns like “Go Down, Moses”:
the language of sorrow is sound, not words.
“Pantaloon in Black” is Faulkner’s most eloquent evocation of human
pain, and since Rider is a working man, a strong physical presence, Faulkner
gives us his Herculean rage in graphic imagery: “flinging the dirt with
that effortless fury”; “handling himself at times out of the vanity of his
own strength logs which ordinarily two men would have handled with
canthooks”; “the man [Rider] moving almost as fast as a horse could have
moved”; “rode the log down the incline, balanced erect upon it in short
rapid backward-running steps” and a closing sequence from jail, “throws
the cot against the wall and comes and grabs holt of that steel barred door
and rips it out of the wall, bricks hinges and all, and walks out of the cell
toting the door over his head like it was a gauze window-screen” (133–53).
Before the anguish of loss, however, Faulkner has been equally descriptive
about the dailiness of the couple’s happy life, fueled with the good money
Rider is capable of earning. A common Saturday for Rider and Mannie
involves the following:

The first hour would not have passed noon when he would mount the
steps and knock, not on post or doorframe but on the underside of the
gallery roof itself, and enter and ring the bright cascade of silver dollars
onto the scrubbed table in the kitchen where his dinner simmered on the
stove and the galvanized tub of hot water and the baking powder can of
soft soap and the towel made of scalded flour sacks sewn together and his
clean overalls and shirt waited, and Mannie would gather up the money
and walk the half-mile to the commissary and buy their next week’s sup-
plies and bank the rest of the money in Edmonds’ safe and return and
they would eat once again without haste or hurry after five days – the
sidemeat, the greens, the cornbread, the buttermilk from the well-house,
the cake which she baked every Saturday now that she had a stove to
bake in. (134)

In this single sentence, the author conveys the pace of the pairs’ satisfaction
with their living. Then in contrast to this tranquil rhythm, Rider bereaved
is Rider without breath. As he hyperventilates, his distorted sense of himself
becomes jagged: he “just can’t quit thinking” (154) and after burying his
 Linda Wagner-Martin 129

wife, he disappears into the forest for his pre-death meditation. His death
comes less than three days later, after he has found a way to murder the
crooked white overseer-dealer, and then is hanged by that man’s relatives.
Rider’s vision of Mannie walking in their house is one of the unsettling
effects of her death, but his grief is not other-worldly. It is, rather, of a
piece with the sorrow that stems from his all-too-human loss. And it ties
into the somewhat controversial dedication Faulkner wrote for the novel:
“To Mammy/CAROLINE BARR/Mississippi (1840–1940) Who was born in
slavery and who gave to my family a fidelity without stint or calculation
of recompense and to my childhood an immeasurable devotion and love”
(preface page). To separate this language from the characterization of Ike
McCaslin’s wife (and Ike himself) in the novel creates a kind of parallel
with Faulkner’s idealization of Rider and Mannie’s love: no calculation of
recompense, a love without stint, an immeasurable devotion. “Pantaloon in
Black” becomes Faulkner’s love letter to the small black woman who reared
him, devotedly.
During the decades since the novel appeared, however, decades marked
by various periods of race consciousness and gender awareness in the US,
the author’s dedication to his Mammy has been considered patronizing. For
the fullest description of why this dedication was so meaningful to Faulkner
(and why he seemed to have no self-consciousness about either the dedica-
tion or his giving the burial service for Caroline Barr in his own home),
Judith L. Sensibar’s Faulkner and Love (2009) places the author’s growth to
thinking more progressively about race – even or especially race in the
South – in full context.
Sensibar draws from various psychoanalytic readings of Faulkner as child
and then as adult and lover – troubled by his attraction to dark women, dis-
tant from more suitable white women – to explain why the early childhood
patterns of physical comfort were, for him, raced, and why they gave rise
to lamentations. As this biographer explains, Faulkner’s “eulogy is central
to the argument of this novel. It is part of what transforms Go Down, Moses
into his first elegy for this black woman, one that mourns a loss he could
never consciously acknowledge”:

Racialized maternal loss and its devastating effects on identity forma-

tion are the ghosts that haunt the psyches of Faulkner’s white fictional
children and adults. This is a fact that Go Down, Moses never lets readers
forget. I am using maternal loss here to signify both the loss of the black
“mother” and the whole constellation of familial relations that are also
destroyed when the white child accepts his education into racism. (90)

Rather than make any attempt to find the model for Rider and Mannie,
Sensibar more cogently sees that narrative as the elaboration of Faulkner’s
pain: just as the character of Caddie in The Sound and the Fury was said to
130 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

have grown from the image of a young girl with muddy drawers climbing a
tree, so Faulkner’s great story of loss, absence, and resulting madness may well
have grown from the author’s private – and certainly non-fictional – grief.

“The Bear” – Part IV

Critics agree that “Pantaloon in Black” was among the first segments
Faulkner wrote for his 1942 novel, and that the added fourth part of “The
Bear” (after its original publication as a story) was the last segment – the
concluding piece that opened out the riddles and mysteries of the cumber-
some narrative and simultaneously answered most of the reader’s questions.
A complicated tapestry of motifs and tropes, Go Down, Moses touched the
sins of the white South while it etched patterns of the violations of the
black South. As Hans Skei had pointed out in the 1990s, “The strength
of Faulkner’s best short stories [‘The Bear’ and its fourth section] is their
combination of the realistic, detailed everyday world, and the sudden, at
times epiphanic, experience of the self in a much larger context” (65). As
Ike reads the almost illegible ledger, what most critics assume is the master
narrative for the novel, his tenuous progress through the barely disguised
“facts” of the McCaslin history becomes the reader’s own hesitant progress
to understanding. The reader thus parallels Ike’s coming to that same hor-
rific knowledge.
The iconic character that supports our first tentative, then angry, reading
of the ledger is Eunice, Tomasina’s mother, who eventually commits suicide.
In Go Down, Moses, her never-expressed story creates a scaffolding for the
“Delta Autumn” woman’s equally poignant dialogue with Ike McCaslin –
as well as for much else. Bereft of language, Eunice’s behavior translated
by others into the sub literate expression within the ledgers, still managed
to serve notice to the white patriarchy that her days of servitude were
over. Her silence condemned the actions she saw around her. Like Rider,
Eunice insisted by her death that she would no longer accept other people’s
narrative in place of her own.
Following feminist readings of Faulkner’s works, the character of Eunice
became key to the impact of the novel as a whole. But as critic Minrose
Gwin has written so authoritatively, Go Down, Moses in all its parts continu-
ously avoids definitive statements. Faulkner’s “gaps” are consistently linked
with the African American women characters.6 For all the brilliance of the
author’s achievement in the novel, Gwin ends her essay with apt questions,
based on her lack of success as reader in filling in those troublesome gaps:

I am still wondering what Tennie Beauchamp was thinking when she

watched Hubert Beauchamp’s unnamed mistress get sent packing down
the road. I would like to learn what young Molly Beauchamp held in her
mind when she was nursing those two babies, and whether Tomasina
 Linda Wagner-Martin 131

ever knew why her mother drowned herself. I want to know if Nat ever
got her porch and well. I want to know the “Delta Autumn” woman’s
name. (96)

During the 1980s and the 1990s, partly because of feminism, critics accepted
the powerful recasting of the McCaslin history that Part four of “The Bear”
made possible. But then, as if the ease of agreement about the convolutions
of Faulkner’s novel – centered as it was in the shadowy silences connected
with the lives of both Eunice and Tomasina – was somehow in itself offen-
sive, Noel Polk and Richard Godden began unpacking the contents of the
scenes in which Ike read the ledgers. As Polk describes their work in 2002:

We argued that Isaac’s reading of those family ledgers is in fact a delib-

erate if not completely conscious misreading, a misinterpretation of a
document that provides him the excuse he needs to renounce. It’s a
misreading ‘not completely conscious’ because of a crucial fact about his
father that he tries to but cannot suppress from his reading, a fact both
hidden and revealed in the ledgers. (164)

Polk and Godden’s contention is that the brothers Buck and Buddy are
linked through their homosexuality – and their homosexual relationship,
as evinced in the narrative about Percival Brownlee, the homosexual slave
Buck had purchased (165). In their reading, the McCaslin name is better
defended through a screen of miscegenation than it is through queer behav-
iors, and therefore Ike grasps onto what would still be excused as honorable
history in southern eyes.
John T. Matthews’ assessment as late as a decade ago was that critics were
not even yet claiming a stable “place” for Go Down, Moses in the oeuvre
of Faulkner’s writing. Faulting the novel for what he terms its “garrulity,”
finding that its narrative complexity “seems to overwhelm it,” Matthews
yet insists that the centrality of the title story, “Go Down, Moses,” with its
chronicle of Butch’s death, funeral, and – throughout – victimization, is truly
the core image of the novel (21). This short story provides, in Matthews’
words, “Faulkner’s studied conviction that economic exploitation and racial
oppression composed a double coil around the modern South” (25). By pro-
viding a complementary grid, an economic one, for interpreting the crimes
of slavery, Matthews helps to broaden the appeal of Go Down, Moses, and
move it from a historical commentary into the twenty-first century in ways
that only enhance the power of Faulkner’s 1942 novel.
Appearing as it does on many graduate school reading lists, taught
in countless literature courses that combine stylistics with race theory,
included nearly always in lists of the “great” Faulkner novels, Go Down,
Moses has won a great deal of critical acclaim in its almost seventy years
of existence. The irony of its changing critique is, at least in part, that the
132 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

text itself – like its author’s intention – has never undergone change. What
Go Down, Moses speaks to is the need for readers to recognize, and attempt
to right, implicit and explicit injustice when it appears in the language (or,
perhaps, in the silences) of Faulkner’s unforgettable characters.

Notes
1. Besides the disappointment over its form (still just “stories” said Malcolm Cowley
in his New Republic review for June 29, 1942, p. 90), critics complained about “sen-
timentality” (Kate O’Brien, Spectator, October 30, 1942, p. 418), about Faulkner’s
obvious “artistic exhaustion” (Philip Toynbee, New Statesman and Nation, October
31, 1942, p. 293), and about his usual emphasis on “miscegenation, rot, murder,
and ruin” (John Temple Graves, Saturday Review, May 2, 1942, p. 16).
2. King illustrates this premise by differentiating between Ike McCaslin and Quentin
Compson, pointing out that the McCaslin family is “fundamentally flawed.” It has
not grown weak, as has the Compson’s; it remains “still too strong.” The phrase
“Fathers will” can be read many ways (152); to this the Morrises’ reading of this
novel as well as of Absalom, Absalom! emphasizes that “sins of racial violence are
supplementations of the primal sin against the father, the violation of the prohibi-
tion of sexual union with the (m)other. Racism is a version of paternalism” (231).
3. During the 1980s and 1990s, extensive criticism was published about the roles
women play in the novel as a whole (see Gwin, Roberts, Muhlenfeld, Sensibar,
Wagner-Martin, and others).
4. Written to close the new fourth part of “The Bear,” the brutal narration of Ike’s
unnamed wife’s use of sex to bribe him to accept his family property is one of the
most chilling scenes of Go Down, Moses.
5. Louis Rubin, Jr., recognizes that Ike’s relinquishment of his property is “a retreat
from involvement in the world” (88); Daniel Hoffman says bluntly “the blacks in
Yoknapatawpha county are capable of qualities of love unattained by the whites”
(134); Leon Forrest ties the difference between the character of Rider in his grief and
Ike in his nostalgia about memories of grief to Faulkner’s “willingness to confront the
racial agony of the South, and to eloquently lift this travail to stage center” (212).
6. There is extensive commentary on Lucas’ role in “The Fire and the Hearth” over
Molly’s playing the wet nurse to Zack Edmonds’ child Roth as well as to her own.
Here Lucas is featured as black man subordinated to all white men: this lengthy
section, however, pays scant attention to Molly as character.

Works cited
Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. 2 vols. New York: Random House, 1974.
Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. New Haven: Yale UP, 1963.
Bunselmeyer, J. E. “Faulkner’s Narrative Styles,” William Faulkner: Six Decades of Criticism,
ed. Linda Wagner-Martin. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2002. pp. 313–31.
Creighton, Joanne V. William Faulkner’s Craft of Revision. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1977.
Davis, Thadious M. “The Game of Courts: Go Down, Moses, Arbitrary Legalities, and
Compensatory Boundaries,” New Essays on Go Down, Moses, ed. Linda Wagner-
Martin. pp. 129–59.
 Linda Wagner-Martin 133

Early, James. The Making of Go Down, Moses. Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1972.
Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses. New York: Random House, 1942.
Forrest, Leon. “Faulkner/Reforestation,” Faulkner and Popular Culture: Faulkner and
Yoknapatawpha, 1988, eds. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: UP of
Mississippi, 1990. pp. 207–13.
Gwin, Minrose, “Her Shape, His Hand: The Spaces of African American Women in Go
Down, Moses,” New Essays on Go Down, Moses. pp. 73–100.
Hoffman, Daniel. Faulkner’s Country Matters: Folklore and Fable in Yoknapatawpha.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989.
King, Richard H. “Memory and Tradition,” Faulkner and the Southern Renaissance:
Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1981, eds. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson:
UP of Mississippi, 1982. pp. 138–57.
Kuyk, Dirk, Jr., Threads Cable-Strong, William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses. Lewisburg,
PA: Bucknell UP, 1983.
Madden, David. “Quentin, Listen!” Faulkner and War: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha,
2001, eds. Noel Polk and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2004. pp. 102–19.
Matthews, Jack. “Touching Race in Go Down, Moses,” New Essays on Go Down, Moses,
21–47.
Minter, David. Faulkner’s Questioning Narratives: Fiction of His Major Phase, 1929–1942.
Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001.
Morris, Wesley with Barbara Alverson Morris. Reading Faulkner. Madison: U of
Wisconsin P, 1989.
Muhlenfeld, Elisabeth, “The Distaff Side: The Women of Go Down, Moses,” Critical
Essays on William Faulkner: The McCaslin Family, ed. Arthur F. Kinney. Boston:
G. K. Hall, 1990. pp. 198–212.
Poirier, Richard. A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature. New York:
Oxford UP, 1966.
Polk, Noel, “Reading Blood and History in Go Down, Moses,” History and Memory in
Faulkner’s Novels, eds. Ikuko Fujihira, Noel Polk, Hisae Tanaka. Tokyo: Shohakusha,
2005. pp. 163–82.
Roberts, Diane. Faulkner and Southern Womanhood. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994.
Rubin, Louis D., Jr., “The Dixie Special, William Faulkner and Southern Renaissance,”
Faulkner and the Southern Renaissance: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1981, eds.
Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1982. pp. 63–92.
Rugoff, Milton, “The Magic of William Faulkner,” New York Herald Tribune Books. May
17, 1942, 1.
Sensibar, Judith L. Faulkner and Love, The Women Who Shaped His Art. New Haven:
Yale UP, 2009.
Skei, Hans H. “Beyond Genre? Existential Experience in Faulkner’s Short Fiction,”
Faulker and the Short Story, eds. Evans Harrington and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: UP of
Mississippi, 1992. pp. 62–77.
Snead, James A. Figures of Division: William Faulkner’s Major Novels. New York:
Methuen, 1986.
Trilling, Lionel, “The McCaslins of Mississippi,” The Nation, May 30, 1942. pp. 622–3.
Wagner-Martin, Linda, “Go Down, Moses: Faulkner’s Interrogation of the American
Dream,” Faulkner in America: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 1998, ed. Joseph R. Urgo
and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2001. pp. 136–52.
——, ed. New Essays on Go Down, Moses. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.
9
Time, Space, and Resistance:
Re-Reading George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Lawrence Phillips

If, having fixed the original form in our mind’s eye, we ask
ourselves how that form comes alive and fills with life, we
discover a new dynamic and vital category, a new property
of the universe: reverberation.
Eugène Minkowski, Vers une Cosmologie (1936)

It has long been a critical commonplace to observe that the narrative envi-
ronment of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) is strongly influenced by the
‘blitzed’ landscape of immediately post-war London, and then little critical
attention is paid to the subtle contribution of narrative setting, place and
space in the novel. The temptation within such readings is often to simplify
what is a rich and complex novel – a risk perhaps of being identified with
the dystopian genre – particularly so in the way place and environment
convey an, albeit ambivalent, promise of hope that carefully tugs against the
devastating re-education of Winston Smith and the closet rebel Julia. This
critical stance is exemplified in Bernard Bergonzi’s observation that it is a
‘limitation of Nineteen Eighty-Four that it cannot be read out of the context of
its origins in the way that Animal Farm (1945) can’ (100). George Woodcock
takes this contextual emphasis further by directly relating Orwell’s wartime
experience of London to the novel:

But in Nineteen Eighty-Four, with true polemic genius, Orwell made a vir-
tue of his weakness of invention by setting the dread world of the future
in an even more decayed version of the wartime London in which he and
I walked in the last decades of his life. There are the rundown, unrepaired
1930s blocks of flats, the tumbling shored-up buildings, the vacant lots
with fireweed, the rockets unpredictably crashing down, and even, served
in the canteen at the Ministry of Truth, a stew with ‘amongst its gen-
eral sloppiness, cubes of a spongy pinkish stuff that might have been a
preparation of meat,’ which astonishingly resembled a wartime dish that

134
 Lawrence Phillips 135

Orwell and I and some of our friends would eat when we went for lunch
to the Bodega in Fleet Street. (24)

By emphasising the verisimilitude of setting and experience, Woodcock

also ties the novel remorselessly to context but takes this strategy of limi-
tation further by introducing a biographical element. In turn, he feels the
need to acknowledge technical flaws in Orwell’s ‘invention’. Both Bergonzi’s
and Woodcock’s observations carry the implication that Nineteen Eighty-Four
is at the very least a flawed and, in comparison to Animal Farm, the lesser
work. Ironically, Orwell has even been criticised for an inaccuracy of con-
text, a lack of alignment of the novel with ‘the historical and political cir-
cumstances to which it alludes’ (Sinfield, 101). But in a novel that presents
a society predicated on control – of people, ideas, and history – the incom-
pleteness of the control of space is perhaps a surprisingly consistent feature
of the narrative alongside a comparable inability to effectively limit the
potential of memory. These tactics, I will argue, are acts of desperation, of
panic rather than a vista of totalising control; the state apparatus of INGSOC
exists to repress the consequences of a fractured and imprecise impression
of control rather than to signal its completeness and the hopelessness of
resistance. Moreover this limited control is carefully replicated within the
narrative. This promises more than a second-rate dystopia defined by and
limited to its historical context. Instead, what emerges is a novel of aes-
thetic complexity and subtlety evident from the fascinating manipulation
of narrative and narrated space.
Of course any text has encoded within it author experience but it is an
abstracted experience that is no longer defined by its original experiential
context even if that were absolutely recoverable in the first place. Likewise,
while context is significant it is also abstracted within the text, it cannot
be the absolute limiting factor of art; there is always a facet of the text that
defies such definition. This is, no doubt, why Henri Lefebvre writing from a
solid Marxist-materialist tradition distrusts the literary text in his discussion
of the production of space:

Clearly literary authors have written much of relevance, especially

descriptions of places and sites. But what criteria would make certain
texts more relevant than others? . . . The problem is that any search for
space in literary texts will find it everywhere and in every guise: enclosed,
described, projected, dreamt of, speculated about. What texts can be
considered special enough to provide the basis for a ‘textual analysis’? (15)

Yet literary texts are representations of space as much as they are representa-
tions of context and therein lies the problem for Lefebvre. A representa-
tion considered as an abstraction, or a discourse, or metaphor even, sits
uneasily within a materialist philosophy. This is why Lefebvre is as equally
136 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

discomforted by the conceptual gap that opens up with the inevitable

relationship between conceptual space and actual space: ‘The quasi-logical
presupposition of an identity between mental space (the space of the phi-
losophers and epistemologists) and real space creates an abyss between the
mental sphere on one side and the physical and social spaces on the other’
(6). Lefebvre articulates from a different perspective a notion that is also
troubling Bergionzi and Woodcock; by seeking to define Nineteen Eighty-Four
by historical or biographical context they neatly sidestep dealing aestheti-
cally with a problematic, thence challenging, text. The ‘abyss’ identified
by Lefebvre is, arguably, where art unfolds a status that both Bergonzi
and Woodcock would deny Nineteen Eighty-Four – in terms of ‘limitation’
(Bergonzi), or ‘weakness of invention’ (Woodcock) – by perusing its social
and historical context. However, the linguist Paul Werth observes that ‘con-
ceptual space is modelled on actual space’ and ‘this concerns our mental
representations of places and routes; finding our way through the physical
world reported by our senses must depend on mental maps’ (7). This is a
conundrum interrogated through Nineteen Eighty-Four. Not only is this a
challenge to the reader in terms of the London of the text, or a naive belief
in the factual nature of history and an overstated sense of the power of
surveillance, but the very basis of the struggle between Winston Smith and
the Party who are engaged in a battle of definition between mental space
and ‘real’ space; or the ‘mental sphere on the one side and the physical and
social spaces on the other’. This discursive struggle encompasses each of
these arenas: the Party seeks to control epistemological space through its
control of the historical record (Winston counters by asserting memory),
physical space through the panoptic power of the view screen (Winston
counters by hiding, stealth and evasion), and social space by seeking to
control the social interactions of Party members at least (which the love
between Winston and Julia effectively subverts). It is a struggle though
rather than a foregone conclusion because as much as the forces aligned
against Winston seem formidable, the totality of those forces is severely
limited even if they triumph at the conclusion of the novel.
Indeed, it is worth considering on whose terms that triumph takes place.
It is a presiding irony of Nineteen Eighty-Four that when Winston decides to
commit a physical act of defiance it is through the initiation of a diary. This
first act is of course both the beginning of the novel but really the begin-
ning of the end for Winston. The physical committing of the act draws him
remorselessly into the clutches of the Party. The novel is not, then, the story
of Winston’s rebellion but of his capture. Given that he is thirty nine and it
is clear that he has harboured doubts about the ‘truth’ asserted by the Party
for some considerable part of those thirty nine years, this is a story about
the end of a successful period of rebellion if success is to be measured by the
evasion of detection and capture. Winston has been left free to think what
he will for the vast majority of his life. By contrast, the beginning of his end
 Lawrence Phillips 137

is quite deliberately calculated as he reflects after writing repeatedly on the

page, ‘DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER’:

He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since the writ-
ing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial
act of opening a diary, but for a moment he was tempted to tear out the
pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.He did not do so, however,
because he knew that it was useless. Whether he wrote DOWN WITH
BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no differ-
ence. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on
with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the
same. (20–1)

What is intriguing about this passage, and Winston’s decision to start a diary,
is that it is a conscious act. Knowing the consequences he chooses to start
the diary and, defying his panic, continues with it. Starting the diary does
make a difference as he exercises choice; much like later it is clearly he who
has captured the attention of Julia and O’Brien. While he goes on to reflect
that ‘thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever’, he
had done so for many years. While choosing not to acknowledge the deci-
sion to himself – indeed, he prefers to reflect he would have been captured
anyway – the initiation of the diary is an open act of defiance in a way that
his unexpressed thoughts were not. This is not solely because the diary and
his writing are a physical artefact; it is a text that embodies an alternative
discursive space to that dominated by the Party. It provides an independent
means for Winston to structure and focus his thoughts, in Werth’s terms a
‘mental map’. Moreover such maps ‘are built up not only from what we can
perceive . . . but also on our memory of previous occasions, our knowledge
of similar situations, and inferences that we can draw between all of these
sources’ (7). Winston has initiated a thought process to coalesce his ideas,
memories, and interpretation of the physical manifestation of the discursive
world around him.
Diaries have a contentious relationship to formal history. The former,
by definition, are an impressionistic, subjective record of near events that
includes factual material. The latter is typically presented as an objective
interpretation of factual events and information. Winston’s choice of a
diary brings this apparent opposition to the fore. Contrasted with his job
of falsifying the factual record of the past, his diary gives prominence to
memory and feelings. Moreover, while his feelings are near events as he is
only now exploring them, his memories are not since he most powerfully
dwells upon his childhood. This is therefore a diary of emotions; an emo-
tional history to counter the Party’s manufactured past. Yet Winston’s dedi-
cation to the diary reveals an only limited conceptual understanding of his
actions: ‘To the future or the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are
138 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

different from one another and do not live alone – to a time when truth exists and
what is done cannot be undone’ (28; italics original). What is done cannot be
undone; merely the record of it can be expunged. On the one hand Winston
has stumbled upon the limits of the Party’s control of the past when con-
fronted with memory, but then reveals himself to be very much a product
of the Party’s ideological training in his belief that the truth, meaning, is
immutable. While he notes the loss of structure – ‘You remembered huge
events which had quite probably not happened, you remember the detail of
incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were
long periods to which you could assign nothing, (32) – nothing the Party
could muster has quite the profundity of the memories of his mother which
the discipline of the diary enables him to reassemble sketchy as they might
be. Yet the diary is not the only structuring principle available to Winston.
While the names of countries had been changed and the borders on maps
redrawn, ‘London, he was fairly certain, had always been called London’
(32). It is significant then that emergent memories of his mother are very
much conditioned by their location in London:

One of his early memories was of an air raid which appeared to take eve-
ryone by surprise. Perhaps it was the time the atomic bomb had fallen
on Colchester. He did not remember the raid itself, but he did remember
his father’s hand clutching his own as they hurried down, down, down
into some place deep in the earth, round and round a spiral staircase
which rang under his feet and which finally so wearied his legs that he
began whimpering and they had to stop and rest. His mother, in her slow,
dreamy way, was following with his baby sister – or perhaps it was only
a bundle of blankets that she was carrying: he was not certain whether
his sister had been born then. Finally they had emerged into a noisy,
crowded place which he had realized to be a Tube station. (33)

The deferred realisation of location in this passage intensifies the disorienta-

tion of the event. The child’s view of the bizarre descent underground, the
panic, the weariness, but the significance of feeling as opposed to factual
evidence signifies the importance of the event to Winston. There are no
dates and little information other than the mention of the atomic bomb
which while intriguing to the reader is a commonplace to Winston. The
location, a Tube station being used as an air raid shelter, immediately recalls
the use of the deep-cut underground stations in this way during the Second
World War, but it is also a generic London space so much so that the child
Winston’s realisation of where they were is almost banal given the extraordi-
nary disorientation of their journey to the platform level. Yet this shapes the
memory into a recognisable activity in an identifiable place from a jumble
of emotions. The impressions become a memory in which he can be with
his family in however fraught and desperate circumstances. The memory
 Lawrence Phillips 139

itself, even if quite uninformative viewed factually, is important to Winston

on those grounds and is inimical to the aims of the Party. Like the activity
of writing the diary, mapping his memories through the fabric of the city
stimulates recollection and brings such impressions into focus as memories.
The city itself serves Winston much like the textual discipline of the diary
becoming the means to coalesce, shape and focus memory. As Anthony
Vidler observes: ‘Space . . . has been increasingly defined as a product of
subjective projection and introjections, as opposed to a stable container of
objects and bodies’ (1). The Party has limited control over physical space
and virtually no control over subjective, mental, space unless it affects
physical behaviour in which case it can be detected, much like the diary
the London that surrounds Winston in many respects stimulates and helps
codify his thoughts creating a mental map for some of his more significant
questions. As well as working in tandem with his text, the diary, to recover
memories of his own past, the city also provokes questions about the
Party’s control of the historical record and thence their version of the past.
Winston’s view from the window of his flat early in the novel sets the terms
for this questioning:

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he
well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry
of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy land-
scape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste – this was London,
chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces
of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should
tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there
always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides
shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard
and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in
all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the
air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places
where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up
sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no
use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a
series of bright lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly
unintelligible. (8–9)

On the one hand this passage seems to support Woodcock’s proposition that
Orwell relied heavily on the ruins of post-war London for his setting, and
certainly the shored-up houses, the gaps left by the bombs and even the
shanty towns that had been built in response to the immediate post-war
housing crisis are present. The precise detail of the willow-herb (Epilobium
angustifolium or fireweed) which thrives on ground subjected to fire adds
to this impression. However, the purpose of the passage is not to reinforce
140 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

this resonance for the reader. The propaganda of the Party is based on an
insistence of constant material progress since the revolution. The city that
confronts Winston belies this assertion. While the Party may be dedicated
to obsessively rewriting the recorded record, the material world around
Winston prompts the equally insistent question: ‘has it always been quite
like this’. The idea of decay is simply inimical to the Party line but out of the
window here it is. Moreover, London offers a physical record of buildings
that pre-date the Party’s revolution such as the ‘rotting nineteenth-century
houses’ and ‘sagging garden walls’ which are still in use. Winston’s block of
flats, Victory Mansions, is itself part of this pre-revolution fabric and visibly
crumbling. The material spaces around Winston and every other inhabit-
ant of the city force a consciousness of decline in dramatic contrast to the
Party line. Thence the need for doublethink of course, but that need is little
more than a reflection of the contradiction that is the condition of existence
in INSOC’s London. It also clearly does not work otherwise Winston con-
fronted with the view of the city from his window would not try ‘to squeeze
out some childhood memory’: it makes him think. As Frederic Jameson
argues: ‘the ideal schizophrenic’s experience is still one of time, albeit of the
eternal Nietzschean present. What one means by evoking its spatialization is
rather the will to use and to subject time to the service of space’ (154). The
‘time’ of the Party’s history exists as pure abstraction, as pure text, and thus
eminently and perpetually malleable; a past continually rewritten accord-
ing to the dictates of the present. The only way to manage the perpetual
contradictions this creates is the schizophrenic practice of doublethink. Time
articulated in space, grounded in the material, is a direct challenge. To recall
Werth, this encourages a ‘mental map’ built up not from what is perceived
but what is remembered which forces the need for knowledge. Winston’s
perception of the physical age of the city and his sense of its palpable decay
initiates the demand on his memory which, while not immediately respon-
sive, ultimately brings to the surface of his consciousness his family in a
pre-revolution London seeking shelter in the city’s Tube system.
The city also exerts an attraction of the Party’s own making. Alongside
the crumbling fabric of the city there exists the relative scarcity of the basic
necessities of urban life which in Winston’s case leads to the purchase of the
diary: ‘He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk shop . . . and
had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Party
members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops (“dealing on the
free market”, it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there
were various things . . . which it was impossible to get hold of in any other
way’ (11). Yet by tacitly allowing members of the Party to traverse the city
through necessity rather than simply look upon it as a passive landscape,
the power of the city space to encourage questioning and thence memory is
immeasurably enhanced. By traversing the city, Winston and his colleagues
gain some measure of the relative freedom of the proles. This everyday
 Lawrence Phillips 141

experience of the city embodies (quite literally) the potential for resistance
to and subversion of constraint and control. As the French academic Michel
de Certeau argues in his influential study of space and everyday life:

The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below,’ below the
thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk – an elementary form of
this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmanner, whose bod-
ies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being
able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen;
their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms.
The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in
which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility.
It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized
by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings
compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped
out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to
representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other. (93)

Much of what de Certeau suggests as the urban experience, of networks,

moving and intersecting contradict a society predicated on control and
surveillance. The lived experience of the city is one of creation, of giving
meaning through practice, patterns the Party fitfully tries to disrupt through
air raids. It is a catalyst for encoding Winston’s own jumbled recollections
into the shape of memory.
The need to venture into the city leads Winston to the diary and thence
his deliberate material rebellion. And he is persistently drawn back, most
notably in search of other memories from the time before the eternal pre-
sent of the Party. This draw recalls Ferdinand Braudel’s famous observation
that, ‘Towns are like electrical transformers. They increase tension, acceler-
ate the rhythm of exchange and ceaselessly stir up men’s lives’ (382). As a
result, Winston is stirred up enough to seek out an exchange of memory
and experience with the proles, those ‘ordinary practitioners’ to whom the
Party is a less overt controlling mechanism. Constantly fed an exception-
ally insipid machine-manufactured popular culture, pornography, alcohol,
and the selected assassination of those showing leadership potential, their
potential is considerably dampened but it remains a leitmotif of Winston’s
rebellion, ‘If there is hope’ he writes in his diary, ‘it lies in the proles’ (64; italics
original). Conscious that ‘Within twenty years at the most . . . the huge and
simple question, “Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?”
would have ceased to once and for all to be answerable’ (83), Winston once
again ventures into the city and enters a prole pub and engages in conversa-
tion with an old man in an attempt to both access the memory of the past
held by the proles and to act on his faith in them. It is not a success. For
one thing it is apparent that Winston has a complete inability to modify his
142 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

spoken register, an outcome of the effective separation, and thence aliena-

tion, of the classes that the identification of inner and outer Party members
and the proles represents. For another, his job falsifying the official record
while on the one hand egregious also makes him an intellectual. To falsify
history one has to be something of an historian which determines how
he frames his questions – completely over the head of the old man – and
leads to frustration with the result that: ‘A sense of helplessness took hold
of Winston. The old man’s memory was nothing but a rubbish-heap of
details. One could question him all day without getting any real informa-
tion. The Party histories might still be true, after a fashion: they might even
be completely true’ (82). Yet what Winston describes is exactly the nature of
his own memories. The old man’s ‘mass of details’ are triggered by specific
experiences in identifiable places. The word ‘lackey’ triggers the memory
of an incident in Hyde Park; another about the class arrogance of the
wealthy provokes another on ‘Boat Race night’ in Shaftsbury Avenue (81–2).
Expecting a fully-formed historical narrative, Winston misrecognises lived
experience as memory made comprehensible by city locations much like
the memory of his family sheltering in the Tube station. Time and patience
would elicit the information he wants, but he lacks the ability and arguably
the conceptual framework either to recognise or interpret the information
he has gathered. Thanks to the importance the Party places in the historical
record as a means of controlling the past, present and future he is unable
to recognise a counter discourse based on memory even though his own
practice, his rebellion, begins to map one.
What he fails to see in others he continues to demonstrate in his own
process of memory recovery and questioning actuated by the city. A potent
textual symbol of this is the significance of the nursery rhyme ‘Oranges
and Lemons’ triggered by Winston’s recognition of a city building, the
church St Clement Danes, represented in a picture hanging in the room
over Mr Charrington’s shop. In fact it is Charrington who provides the
first two lines of the rhyme that so fascinates Winston: ‘Oranges and lem-
ons, say the bells of St Clement’s/You owe me three farthings, say the bells
of St Martins’ (88). As we learn later Mr Charrington is a member of the
thought police and this is part of a strategy of enticement that will lead
to Winston and Julia’s arrest as was, no doubt, the earlier sale of the diary.
Yet, as already noted, Winston, even if only subconsciously, has chosen to
give his dissent material form so this process is oddly consensual. This does
not diminish the symbolic import of the rhyme. It is, of course, already an
encoded collective memory, or perhaps more specifically, a manifestation
of a form of folk history. It is itself a mental map embodying a social net-
work built around the City of London’s medieval churches and it is a con-
sciousness of this – even if the original meaning in unlikely to be accessible
to Winston – that draws him to it. Misrecognising this in the old man’s
reminiscences, he does seem to have learnt something significant from the
 Lawrence Phillips 143

encounter. He is grasping at a social network, an encoded memory, from a

pre-Revolutionary London:

Winston wondered vaguely to what century the church belonged. It was

always difficult to determine the age of a London building. Anything
large and impressive, if it was reasonably new in appearance, was auto-
matically claimed as having been built since the Revolution, while
anything that was obviously of an earlier date was ascribed to some dim
period called the Middle Ages. The centuries of capitalism were held to
have produced nothing of any value. One could not learn history from
architecture any more than one could learn it from the books. Statues,
inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets – anything that might
throw light upon the past had been systematically altered. (88)

There is something instinctual about Winston’s attraction to the rhyme.

It is what it stands for as a synecdoche for an entire lost way of life in the
city, rather than the recovery of its absolute meaning ‘that might throw
light upon the past’. The material history embodied in architecture and the
city’s street grid ultimately preserves more than the rewritable textual his-
tory. It anchors encoded memories like the rhyme or people’s memories. In
this the rhyme is the textual equivalent of the pre-Revolutionary buildings.
Instinct also informs Winston’s attraction to Charrington’s room: ‘the room
awakened in him a sort of nostalgia, a sort of ancestral memory. It seemed
to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like this, in
an arm-chair beside an open fire with your feet in the fender’ (86). Instinct
is of course pre-rational and an open rebellion against the discursive (ir)
rationality that the Party dominates. It is also the initial basis of Winston’s
and Julia’s relationship, first as sex and then their self-identification as a
couple. Indeed, one might unfetter Raymond Williams’ phrase (which owes
something to Orwell’s writing) and observe that Winston has identified a
structure of feeling in the texts (in de Certeau’s sense) and fabric of the city.
Of course the symbolic weight of the rhyme is Janus-faced since Winston
never learns of the children’s game that attends the singing of the song.
A group of children decide to play ‘Oranges and Lemons’. Two children
become the ‘chopper’ by holding hands and forming an arch. They secretly
decide which one of them is ‘Oranges’ and which one is ‘Lemons’. The other
children go through the arch in a line, circling round behind the arch, and
going through again, singing the rhyme as they go. At the last line of the
rhyme the ‘choppers’ bring their arms up and down in a chopping motion
over each child that goes through. The game can get quite nerve-racking for
the children at this point, and they often run through as fast as they can.
The child caught in the middle at the last word of the rhyme is out. This is
of course a parable of the ‘game’ that Winston has entered with the Party
and anticipates his eventual capture. Significantly it is O’Brien, his future
144 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

torturer/re-educator, who completes the stanza that Mr Charrington, the

agent of the thought police, begins. His ‘Yes, I knew the last line’ (158) sig-
nals he foresees the end of the game. However, it is a game that Winston has
entered willingly. So has Julia by abandoning her policy of transient rather
than permanent relationships. Like the child playing out the rhyme, they
are caught by being tethered, caught in the middle as the last word of the
rhyme is out. Goldstein’s book operates in this way as well by finally giv-
ing Winston what he wants; an explanation of the ‘system’ encoded in the
medium, formal social history, that he has internalised. In this respect, the
immobility of the flat above Mr Charrington’s shop is on the one hand their
doom, but by exercising choice, by choosing to give material expression to
a rebellion they had been harboured internally for years, it is also a kind of
martyrdom. Once taken up by the apparatus of the Party the remainder of
the novel is a remorseless lesson in physical and psychological torture and
it is this that conditions memory of the novel as a whole. Yet by ignoring
the conscious and deliberate physical rebellion of Winston, by allowing the
destruction of Winston’s identity to determine the implication of the novel
is to ignore the potential for hope that it also embodies. By choosing this
path he and Julia enact a ritual which reasserts a life in the city based on
memory and association rather than domination and control. This itera-
tion is ultimately suppressed, but the iterative capacity of the process itself,
ensures that in its repetition it still survives. The Party has failed to eradi-
cate the threat, it merely contains it. Mr Charrington’s shop must be one
of many forms of trap the Party maintains in the city on the off-chance of
snaring those of the Party who are drawn into the city by choice or necessity
and become ‘ordinary practitioners’ writing their stories through the city.
While Winston and Julia are captured, how many more remain walking the
city? So long as people are drawn into the city by necessity, or memories,
or just to escape, the process will continue. It may not of itself overturn the
Party, but it ensures that its rule of objective and subjective, material and
abstract space is not complete. Ultimately, the city encodes in its street plan
and palimpsest of buildings a form and structure of life that was not created
by the Party. Despite the looming totalitarianism of the towering ministry
buildings, so long as its streets are walked, so long as people are both actu-
ally and symbolically in motion tracing the text of the city, they remain in
de Certeau’s words, ‘below the thresholds at which visibility begins’ and
beyond Big Brother’s myopic gaze.

Works cited
Bergonzi, Bernard, Wartime and Aftermath: English Literature and its Background
1939–1960, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993
 Lawrence Phillips 145

Braudel, Ferdinand, Capitalism and Material Life 1400–1800, London: Harpercollins,

1973
de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1988
Jameson, Frederic, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London and
New York: Verso, 2009
Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1997
Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983
Sinfield, Alan, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, London and Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: The Athlone Press, 1997
Vidler, Anthony, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture,
Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2001
Werth, Paul, Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse, Harlow and
New York: Longman, 1999
Woodcock, George, Orwell’s Message: 1984 and the Present, Madeira Park (Canada):
Harbour, 1984
10
Lucky Jim: The Novel in
Unchartered Times
Nicola Allen and Wasfi Shoqairat

Kingsley Amis’ satire on academic life, Lucky Jim (1954) was published at a
time of almost unprecedented and (as yet) never repeated social upheaval
in Britain. Clement Attlee’s landslide Labour victory in 1945 had led to the
introduction of a comprehensive program of reform, including the introduc-
tion of the National Health Service, child benefit and old age pensions, an
increase in the amount of social housing and the nationalisation of several
of Britain’s industries. His government also presided over the decolonisation
of a large part of the British Empire. This transformation of British society
was intended to be profound; the labour party manifesto of 1945 states that
‘The nation needs a tremendous overhaul’ (Labour Party Manifesto 1945)
and changes in the political landscape were soon accompanied by changes
in the artistic and cultural life of Britain. The so called ‘Angry Young Men’
popularised ‘kitchen sink’ realism as the Modernist era fell into decline.
David Lodge describes this as a struggle between ‘contemporaries’ (Kingsley
Amis, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe etc.) and ‘moderns’ (William Golding, Iris
Murdoch, Lawrence Durrell etc.) and he notes in Language of Fiction (1966)
that the immediate post-war era represented a debate on ‘the meaning of the
word ‘life’. Lodge explains that ‘Life to the contemporary is what common
sense tells us it is, what people do [ . . . ] To the modern, life is something
elusive, baffling, multiple, subjective’ (245).
Lodge places Lucky Jim very firmly into the category of a ‘contemporary’
rather than a ‘modern’ text, rightly noting that the book prioritises ‘common
sense’ over everything else. Its tag line that: ‘nice things are nicer than nasty
ones’ (140) stands as testament to this thesis. As Lodge argues, however, the
book is more than simply an example of the triumph of a ‘contemporary’
style over a ‘Modern’ one. Instead, it seems to embody something of the
relationship between England’s past as a culturally dominant, imperialist
force and its uncertain, Americanised, and yet (still) culturally distinct future.
Amis’ first novel represents a more sustained engagement with its age than
perhaps any of its contemporaries. Lucky Jim owes its genesis to the conflu-
ence of three epochal moments in Amis’ life; firstly Amis’s visit in 1946 to
146
 Nicola Allen and Wasfi Shoqairat 147

the Senior Common Room at Leicester University, secondly, The Education

Act of 1944, and thirdly, the advent of the ‘redbrick’ university. The first of
these events are a matter of personal history, whilst the second and third
are of wider, national importance, and were themselves designed to chal-
lenge and radicalise the established social order. While these moments in
twentieth-century British history form the backdrop for the novel, they
are, in fact, rarely explicitly discussed by any of the characters, and yet the
underlying structuring principle of Lucky Jim is undoubtedly that of a ‘fish
out of water’. The plot details the life of Jim, a working class grammar-school
boy, who has become a university lecturer and is now finding it difficult to
make sense of the academic world. Jim is struggling to secure his position
at the university, and is finding it almost impossible to develop a personal
life away from his working-class ‘roots’. He is emotionally blackmailed by
Margaret, a fellow lecturer who exploits Jim’s naivety and his sense of duty
when she fakes a suicide attempt in order to trap Jim into a relationship
with her. Jim is also attracted to his boss’s son’s girlfriend, Christine, but
implicitly feels that she is somehow ‘out of his reach’: ‘The sight of her
seemed an irresistible attack on his own habits, standards, and ambitions:
something designed to put him in his place for good’ (39).
The novel encompasses, in almost equal measure, a centuries old practice
of English comedic fiction which dates back to Restoration drama and a
uniquely twentieth-century, primarily American genre; that of the campus
novel.1 Yet, even though the novel forms a very early version of the genre,
it does much to prove itself distinct from its American counterparts. Amis
displaying an unwavering, and very stereotypically English preoccupation
with issues of class that distinguishes his novel from the rest of its ilk; he
switches the focus, and the source of the comedy onto the staff of the his-
tory department, rather than the students, and he typically eschews the
kind of experimentation that we find in the other most famous ‘break-
away’ example of the genre, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin (1957), in favour of
an English comedic tradition. Blake Morrison quotes Amis in The Movement:
English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s (1980) describing his novels (in direct
opposition to any form of experimentalism) as: ‘believable stories about
understandable characters in a reasonably straightforward style. No tricks,
no experimental foolery’ (299). Amis’ deliberately anti-experimentation
stance distanced him from many of his contemporaries, such as Eva Figes,
B. S. Johnson and Christine Brooke-Rose, and yet his typically and deliber-
ately provocative disavowal of experimentation did not prevent Amis from
exploring and stretching the novel as a literary form.
Journalist Aida Edemariam also regards Amis’ novel as more than an exam-
ple of one man’s insistence on an anti-experimentational style; she regards
his text as the begetter of an English tradition, proclaiming Lucky Jim to be
the ‘template’ for the campus novel’s mutations from its American genesis
into its British incarnation.2 Lodge and Edemariam are not alone in regarding
148 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Lucky Jim as the quintessential British campus novel of the twentieth century.
Amis utilises comedy in the novel as a means for delivering his satiric attacks
on the university community. He challenges some of the conventions of
the form but his novel still constitutes a recognisable ‘campus novel’; the
action being largely confined to the events that concern a small number of
colleagues in the history department at a ‘Red Brick’ institution.
From a practical point of view, the attractions of the campus for an author
wishing to provide the reader with a microcosm of a society that is both
complex and in flux are easy to define, Edemariam explains:

It is a finite, enclosed space, like a boarding school, or like Agatha

Christie’s country-houses (the campus murder mystery being its own
respectable sub-genre); academic terms, usefully, begin and end; there are
clear power relationships (teacher/student; tenured professor/scrabbling
lecturer) – and thus lots of scope for illicit affairs; circumscription forces
a greater intensity – revolutions have been known to begin on campuses,
though that doesn’t seem to have happened for a while. And it’s all set
against the life of the mind. (Edemariam)

Yet, Amis breaks with many of these conventions despite his novel being an
early example of the form. Lucky Jim contains only vague references to the
students of his campus; they do not form the predominant focus of the social
satire. Instead the narrative is especially critical of the senior members of the
department, whom he depicts as privileged individuals who endeavour to
maintain the academic status quo in their favour through the exploitation
of junior colleagues. Academia itself comes under vigorous attack within the
novel; Jim ponders his own research, and is unsettled by what he finds there:
‘It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its
funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-
problems’ (14). The novel refuses pretention to a degree that sometimes leaves
even its focalised central character as little more than a target for the novel’s
biting satirical attacks. Jim is not only uncomfortable in his role as junior aca-
demic, he is as aware of his own failings as he is critical of those around him.
The novel is focalised through Jim and he often articulates his frustra-
tion with the potential discrepancies that are inherent in the relationship
between the cultural practices that are prized by academia (such as a knowl-
edge of Latin or an appreciation of Mozart) and the practicalities of doing a
job of work. Jim’s basic, yet practical philosophy that: ‘nice things are nicer
than nasty ones’ (140) is set against the rambling, pretentious preoccupa-
tions of Jim’s boss Professor Ned Welch, who delights in showing up other
people’s lack of sophistication:

‘They made a silly mistake though,’ the professor of History said, and
his smile, as Dixon watched, gradually sank beneath the surface of
 Nicola Allen and Wasfi Shoqairat 149

his features at the memory. ‘After the interval we did a little piece by
Dowland,’ he went on; ‘for recorder and keyboard you know. I played
the recorder, of course, and young Johns . . . played the piano. . . . Well,
anyway the reporter chap, must have got the wrong story, or not been
listening or something. Anyway, there it was in the Post as large as life:
Dowland, yes, they’d got him right; Messers Welch and Johns, yes; but
what do you think they said then?’
Dixon shook his head. ‘I don’t know professor,’ he said in sober verac-
ity. No other professor in Britain he thought, set such store by being
called professor.
‘Flute and piano.’
‘Oh?’
‘Flute and piano; not recorder and piano.’ Welch laughed briefly. (1)

These constitute the opening lines of the novel and episodes such as this,
(which recur throughout the novel), serve to emphasise Jim’s status as an
outsider and ensure that the reader is constantly aware of the text’s interac-
tion with both the specific changes happening within the post-war educa-
tion system in Britain, (Jim does not have a familial history of attending
university to draw upon, and has to learn as he goes along) as well as a more
implicit preoccupation with pondering the nature of societal change. Amis
works hard to set the novel up from its opening lines as one in which the
reader is also posited as an outsider to the world of his boss (Welch).
In Amis’s vision, luck presupposes human attempts at design in such a
way that Jim can be supplied with an unlikely happy ending, this in itself
may satisfy the reader’s human desire to see the ‘underdog’ triumph; but the
book’s emphasis on luck (the novel’s title reinforces and reminds the reader
that Amis is in no doubt about what it is that one needs in order to triumph
in the new Britain) leaves the reader uncertain as to how s/he should read
Amis’ rendering of the triumph of the everyman over the moribund, per-
verse and supposedly dying ‘system’ that the Welchs represent. The comedy
within the novel usually describes a movement from an oppressively stable
world into one of chaos and violence, but interestingly, the narrative voice
remains ambivalent towards both worlds. Jim’s almost constant hangovers
form a handy symbol for his inability to move forward and his painful expe-
riences of the present.

The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he
resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty
thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His
mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night,
and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been
on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police.
He felt bad. (61)
150 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

To put it figuratively (although not poetically) – the new dawn is constantly

undermined by the ‘hangover’ from the night before. In Kingsley Amis
(1989) Richard Bradford describes how Lucky Jim contains a narrative which
embodies as well as describes a multiplicity which Amis suggests results from
the contradictions inherent in an era that attempts to achieve ambitiously
liberal and socially progressive levels of social change, whilst preserving a
kind of ancient heroic ideal. For Bradford, the novel itself tends to the mul-
tiple perspective, and he suggests that the novel seems to struggle to contain
more than one competing version of Jim:

It is as though there are two Jims: one inside the narrative, struggling
with his own impatience, frustration and feelings of contempt; the other
controlling and orchestrating the narrative, ensuring that the reader will
share his perspective – on the idiocies of the Welchs and the pretensions
of Bertrand and Margaret. (12)

This comment suggests that equally multifarious readings are possible,

and the history of the critical attention that the novel has received (being
loved and hated in almost equal degree) bears this out. Since its original
publication, Amis’s novel has been the subject of much praise, even from
those who would, in later years; posit themselves (with Amis’s own agree-
ment) as his opposite numbers politically.3 Gareth Jenkins notes of Amis
in the quarterly journal of the Socialist Workers Party: ‘His ear for voices,
for mimicry of a certain type of speech, gave his early fiction – particularly
Lucky Jim – real energy’ (http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj70/
amis.htm). Eric Jacobs notes in The Spectator’s obituary: ‘He was above
all quick-minded, verbally agile, terribly funny, a vigorous persecutor of
bores, pseuds and wankers and a most tremendous mimic’ (Spectator, 28
October 1995, 28).
This praise for Amis and for Lucky Jim is tempered, however, by the fact
that in his later life, Amis himself, and his most famous text, have (often
retrospectively) been subject to sometimes scathing attacks from authors
and critics alike. Writing in 2005, Alice Ferrebe suggests in Masculinity in
Male-Authored Fiction, 1950–2000: Keeping it Up (2005) that Amis’ novel is
part of a backward looking trend that only appears ‘new’ when the reader
merely undertakes a superficial reading of the text:

In an era of accelerated social change, the text of Lucky Jim [ . . . ] work[s]

to reinscribe masculine superiority by inculcating masculine principles
of selfhood through [its] narrative technique. This project is amplified
by an interpretative community intent upon reading the literary heroes
of contemporary works as in some way ‘new’ and excitingly realist,
when the values they represent are in fact profoundly traditional and
protectionist. (38)
 Nicola Allen and Wasfi Shoqairat 151

Amis’ novel has in recent years come under repeated attacks of Ferrebe’s
kind by critics who insist upon regarding his fiercely individualist stance as
being innately gendered. A. S. Byatt criticises the novel for being both sexist
and anti-intellectual: ‘I don’t see why the campus novel has to consist of
farce, I find it baffling’ (quoted in Edemariam). Byatt has much more time
for what she calls ‘true’ comedy, in Terry Pratchett’s Unseen University, or
in Lodge’s Nice Work (1988), which she feels have more respect for a profes-
sion based on serious thought. It has similarly been noted by critics such as
Dominic Head that the book is not as radical as it might first appear. Head
reminds us that Jim’s deliberately philistine philosophy that ‘nice things are
nicer than nasty ones’ (140) although intended to represent ‘common sense’
can easily be regarded as being too simplistic.4
In an interview with Edemariam, Lodge defends the novel suggesting that
it would be better regarded within the much older British tradition of the
pastoral, than alongside its American cousin the campus novel:

This is an older tradition, again. ‘I compare it to pastoral,’ says Lodge. ‘If

you think of a comedy such as As You Like It, you get all these eccentric
characters, all in one pastoral place, interacting in ways they wouldn’t be
able to do if they were part of a larger, more complex social scene. There’s
often an element of entertaining artifice, of escape from the everyday
world, in the campus novel. Quite interesting issues are discussed, but
not in a way which is terribly solemn or portentous. (Edemariam)

Whilst it is disingenuous to forgo or discount the problematic nature of

the novel (perhaps especially for female readers), or its almost untenable
position as an engagement by a highly educated mind with what amount
to philosophical issues in a way that seeks to align itself with a (hypocriti-
cally) purely anti-intellectual stance, Lodge is right to defend it as an almost
unique example of the resurgence of an older English tradition which
seeks to realign elements of the farce with a deliberately anti-experimental,
neo-realist style, and which acknowledges its debt to, but ultimately works
against both the provincial English and American Campus novels.
In recent years a number of critics have begun to acknowledge a certain
duality in the text. Alan Sinfield notes that: ‘Lucky Jim (1954) features both
subversive irreverence and a fantasy of social advance’ (232). It is this dual-
ity that seems to be both the cause of the controversy surrounding the text
and an integral part of its appeal. In that it manages to encompass both
traditional and potentially radical aspects it somehow anticipates the era of
Welfare capitalism whilst also looking backwards in certain of its set pieces
to the traditional stage farce of previous centuries. It seems to call for a less
moribund meritocracy, and in this appears to be in step with contemporane-
ous socialist movements of the post-war era, whilst all the time it implicitly
hints at what the author seems to already believe will be the inevitable
152 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

failure of such an ideal. The comedic elements of the book are the key to
its success but they also belie the complex, epochal nature of the histori-
cal moment of its conception, and chart Amis’s (often complex) reactions
to the changes that he observes, as well as bearing witness to the author’s
frustration that amidst so much change, so much remains the same. Jim
finds himself in a new university which seems to have eschewed the new
meritocracy and rigidly sticks to the old class system:

How had [Welch] become Professor of History, even at a place like this?
By published work? No. By extra good teaching? No in italics. Then how?
As usual, Dixon shelved this question, telling himself that what mattered
was that this man had decisive power over his future. (8)

The novel serves as Amis’ own wry acknowledgement of a process that

George Orwell describes in England Your England (1941) in a somewhat
more consolatory tone during the height of bombing during the Second
World War:

The country houses will be turned into holiday camps, the Eton and
Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an
everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past and, like all
living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet
remain the same. (159)

For Orwell, who was writing whilst ‘highly civilized human beings are fly-
ing overhead, trying to kill me’ (138) the idea of an eternal England, which
transcends even the deepest traditions of the privileged English classes, is
a possible means of consolidating the emotional fight against the rise of
Fascism in Europe. For Amis, this same eternal quality to the traditions of
Englishness is a complex issue, and whilst it may be appealing in certain
circumstances it also potentially forms a barrier to real social change. In
What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Questions (1970) Amis suggests that:

The ideal of brotherhood of man, the building of the Just City, is one
that cannot be discarded without lifelong feelings of disappointment
and loss. But, if we are to live in the real world, discard it we must. Its
very nobility makes the results of its breakdown doubly horrifying, and it
breaks down, as it always will, not by some external agency but because
it cannot work. (207)

Jim’s inability to find a reaction that he feels adequately expresses his feel-
ings: ‘all his faces were designed to express rage or loathing. Now that some-
thing had happened which really deserved a face, he had none to celebrate
it with. As a kind of token, he made his Sex Life in Ancient Rome face’
 Nicola Allen and Wasfi Shoqairat 153

(250) is symptomatic of the text’s wider acknowledgement of the unchar-

tered territory that Amis has Jim embark upon.
Sinfield suggests that Amis ‘aspired to rise in society rather than to change
it’ (232) and this is no less true of Jim, but Amis reinscribes this lack of
political or collective action in his protagonist in terms of a personal and
individualist agenda. The novel suggests that since Jim finds himself in a
world that will not provide him with the order and justice that he has been
promised, then the resulting sense of individualism that this induces will
have to suffice as a means of rebellion. Amis suggests that Jim often seeks
a community that he feels he can belong to, and perhaps would become
involved in some sort of collective action should the opportunity arise;
though his redistributionism remains politically vague, he does counter
Bertrand’s right wing attacks on ‘soak the rich’ policies with the comment,
‘If one man’s got ten buns and another’s got two, and a bun has got to be
given up by one of them, then surely you take it from the man with ten
buns’ (51). Jim fails to find a peer group that will accept him however; until
Gore-Urqhuart and Christine Callaghan rescue him from his isolation at the
academe. Whilst Jim shares a taxi home with Christine, Amis reveals to the
reader the level of isolation that Jim habitually feels. The taxi ride provides
Jim with a level of human contact which is so unfamiliar to him that he can
not quite believe it is real. As Christine falls asleep resting on Jim’s shoulder
it is not only his desire for her that fuels his initial incomprehension of
the situation, but rather a general lack of human warmth in his day to day
contact with his colleagues and peers:

Dixon’s heart began to pound a little. He now had all the evidence he
wanted that she was there; he could sense her breathing, her temple
against his jaw and her shoulder under his hand were warm, her hair
smelt of well brushed hair, he could feel the presence of her body. It was a
pity it wasn’t set off by the presence of her mind. It occurred to him that
she’s done this merely as a manoeuvre to arouse his desire, and arouse it
for no purpose other than somehow feeding her vanity. Then he rejected
so familiar and contemptible a notion. . . . More than ever he felt secure:
here he was, quite able to fulfil his role. (146)

This passage charts a change in Jim’s perception of himself, as he moves

from suspecting fraud on the part of Christine: ‘It occurred to him that
she’s done this merely as a manoeuvre to arouse his desire, and arouse it for
no purpose other than somehow feeding her vanity’ (146) to a comfortable
acceptance of his new role (as her partner) which he feels he can fulfil.
In the end Jim does not ‘break into’ the world of academia, but rather
circumvents this world in order to take up a prestigious position working for
the famous Gore-Urquhart; a position that Bertrand Welch (the Professor’s
son) had hoped to secure for himself. However, Christine’s uncle, who
154 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

reveals a tacit respect for Dixon’s individuality and attitude towards preten-
sion, offers Jim the coveted assistant job in London. Jim literally has the last
laugh, at the end of the book when he and Christine bump into the Welchs
on the street; Jim cannot help walking right up to them, with Christine
on his arm, and exploding in laughter at how ridiculous they seem. Gore-
Urquhart explains to Jim why he chose him over Bertrand: ‘I think you’ll
do the job all right, Dixon. It’s not that you’ve got the qualifications for this
or any other work, but there are plenty who have. You haven’t got the dis-
qualifications, though, and that’s much rarer’ (234). As such, Jim’s triumph
over the Welchs and his personal ‘happy ending’ replete with the obligatory
‘getting the girl’ forms an attack on the world of middle class privilege mas-
querading as ‘culture’.
In this attempt to radicalise the otherwise personal space of the novel,
Amis’ text is symptomatic of a larger trend. Sinfield explains thus:

Established writers appreciated that they were being challenged [in the
1950s] through class and culture together. In Encounter Spender wrote
of ‘a rebellion of the lower middle brows’ (November 1953), and Evelyn
Waugh complained about ‘the new wave of philistinism . . . grim young
people . . . coming off the assembly lines’ (December 1955). Somerset
Maugham, in the Sunday Times in the same month attacked grant-aided
students such as the protagonist of Lucky Jim: ‘They have no manners,
and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament . . . They
are scum.’ (233)

As a first generation graduate, who finds that his tastes, income and cultural
habits do not match his surroundings Jim is pushed to the margins of the
academe and has to battle just to stay in the precarious position of junior
lecturer, which itself provides very little income and almost no job security.
The (limited) social mobility that he feels it is his duty to accept, involves
complex emotional responses on the part of the novel’s protagonist. In addi-
tion to the constant threat that he might be ‘thrown out’ of the university,
and dismissed from his newly elevated social status, Jim also has to fight his
own urge to ‘run’ or to sabotage his own ‘success’:

If Welch didn’t speak in the next five seconds, he [Jim] would do some-
thing to get himself flung out without question – not the things he’d
often dreamed of when sitting next door pretending to work. He no
longer wanted, for example, to inscribe on the departmental timetable
a short account, well tricked-out with obscenities, of his views on the
Professor of History, the Department of History, medieval history, history,
and Margaret and hang it out of the window for the information of pass-
ing students and lecturers, nor did he, on the whole, now intend to tie
Welch up in his chair and beat him about the head and shoulders with a
 Nicola Allen and Wasfi Shoqairat 155

bottle until he disclosed why, without being French himself, he’d given
his sons French names. (85)

The narrator, here, charts a movement from a fairly ‘civilised’ revolt in the
form of writing inflammatory material to one that is physical and violent
but which also relies on the evocation of laughter in the reader. We are
reminded that this is no longer what Jim actually wants to do but the exag-
gerated comedy forms a ‘safe’ way into an acknowledgement of his desire
for rebellion. In the passage above we can see an example of this kind of
movement from the sphere of the known into the unknown world of Jim’s
imagined physical rebellion against his boss. Amis uses laughter and the
comedic to offer an alternative world, all be it an imagined one. As the novel
progresses Jim’s escapades become more outrageous and potentially more
damaging to himself until he positively self destructs during the ‘Merrie
England’ lecture. Professor Welch and his friends are devotees of the Merrie
England legend,5 and Jim’s lecture turns into a debunking of the whole con-
cept (a position almost certainly reflecting that of Amis). Jim ends by sug-
gesting in a rather nihilistic tone that:

‘The point about Merrie England is that it was about the most un-
Merrie period in our history. It’s only the home-made pottery crowd, the
recorder playing crowd, the Esperanto . . . ’ He paused and swayed, the
heat, the drink, the guilt at last joined forces in him. (227)

Jim’s apparent disregard for the world of academia and the pursuit of a
supposedly more ‘worthy’ type of knowledge, particularly his penchant for
rejecting previously revered cultural figures such as Mozart, and his attitude
towards Professor Welch, whom he believes has not earned the privileges
that he enjoys (‘How had he [Welch] become professor of history, even at
a place like this? By published work? No. By extra good teaching? No in
italics. Then how?’ (8)) implicitly links Jim with a more radicalised version
of the world.
The laughter that is engendered in the novel allows Amis to produce a
space of possibilities which then draws attention to the lack of those pos-
sibilities in Jim’s ‘real’ world: as French philosopher Georges Bataille notes:
‘In every case when we laugh we pass from the sphere of the known, from
the anticipated sphere, to the sphere of the unknown and of the unforesee-
able’ (Bataille 135). Thus, laughter becomes a weird and wonderful tool –
allowing an otherwise almost impossible break from ‘the order’ but then the
question ultimately remains – how much further does an individual want
that break to extend? Jim constantly imagines a complete fracture from the
reality of his present position only to immediately undermine the possibil-
ity of such an escape: ‘More than ever it was the moment to dart into the
street and fail to return. But economic necessity and the call of pity were a
156 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

strong combination; topped up by fear, as both were, they were invincible’

(26). Here, it is not just that economic necessity make this desired disap-
pearance unsustainable, Amis reminds us that ‘pity . . . topped up by fear’
(26) combine to make it too frightening a prospect to realistically consider
taking action.
There is then a bifurcation of effect in Lucky Jim. Amis’s novel appears to
represent a world of unprecedented change, whilst simultaneously encom-
passing the author’s feelings of rage, fear and frustration at how little has
actually changed. Lucky Jim, becomes then a safer outlet for Bataille’s insist-
ence that: ‘The strangest mystery to be found in laughter is attached to the
fact that we rejoice in something that puts the equilibrium of life in danger –
we even rejoice in the strongest way’ (Bataille 144).
Lucky Jim is nothing if not a safe place in which to articulate an endorse-
ment of this kind of rejoicing at something that puts the equilibrium of life
in danger, whilst also encompassing an acknowledgement that this can usu-
ally only happen in the imagined space of the novel. Amis notes the impor-
tance of this function of laughter in a letter of 19 June 1946 to Philip Larkin:

I enjoy talking to you more than anybody else because I never feel I am
giving myself away and so can admit to shady, dishonest, crawling,
cowardly, unjust, arrogant, snobbish, lecherous, perverted and generally
shameful feelings that I don’t want anybody else to know about; but
most of all because I am always on the verge of violent laughter when
talking to you. (The Letters of Kingsley Amis 73)

A comparison with Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pnin can prove useful here.
Nabokov’s novel came just one year after Lucky Jim and is set in the same
calendar year that Amis’s text was first published, yet in so many ways it
marks a significant departure from Amis’ fervently non-experimental stance,
and rather peculiarly, despite its insistence upon experimentation as a route
out of the provincial novel’s potential for stagnation, in itself can be seen
in terms of a return to some of the staples of the genre. Chapter 6 of Pnin
begins with the lines:

The 1954 Fall term had begun . . . Again in the margins of library books
earnest freshmen inscribed such helpful glosses as ‘Description of nature’,
or ‘Irony’; and in a pretty edition of Mallarmé’s poems an especially able
scholiast had already underlined in violet ink the difficult word oiseaux
and scrawled above it ‘birds’. (102)

In his introduction to the Everyman’s library edition of Pnin (2004) David

Lodge describes the passage above as ‘a kind of campus novel in miniature’
(xiii). He goes on to suggest that ‘Aficionados of the campus novel will
hug themselves with glee at this beginning. Academic institutions are in a
 Nicola Allen and Wasfi Shoqairat 157

sense always the same’ (xiii) and so, by implication are campus novels; in
Nabokov’s sketch of university life, it is the students (and in particular their
scholarly naivety), rather than the staff, that form the basis of the comedy.
These lines create a world for the reader which is easily recognisable and
quite carefully stratified. As Edemariam notes, this style persists within the
campus novel well into the late twentieth century and beyond:

The details of the scene change; the first paragraph of Don DeLillo’s
White Noise, for instance, is saturated with late 20th-century excess: ‘The
station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through
the West campus . . . students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to
begin removing the objects inside . . . ’ Or, as Malcolm Bradbury put it in
the first line of The History Man: ‘Now it is autumn again; the people are
all coming back.’ (Edemariam)

The rest of Nabokov’s novel forms something of a departure from the stock
imagery which is evoked by the lines quoted above. Both Pnin and Lucky
Jim therefore, however radically different they might first appear to be, Pnin
with its formal and aesthetic experimentalism, and Amis’s famous anti-
experimental stance, contain passages which would largely fit with critic
Bernard Bergonzi’s concept of the wider changes that comedy in the novel
underwent in the twentieth century:

The tradition of nineteenth-century realism, which underlies most con-

temporary fiction, depended on a degree of relative stability in three
separate areas; the idea of reality; the nature of the fictional form; and
the kind of relationship that might predictably exist between them . . . it
goes without saying that for many twentieth-century novelists and critics
this assumption is no longer credible. (quoted in Bradbury 3)

Amis’ text follows the traditional pattern of a comedy based upon real-
ism to a point, and contains the happy ending that Amis felt his readers
deserved, but this happy ending is not ‘achieved’ by virtue of the hero-
ism of the novel’s protagonist, rather it is a matter of luck alone. Thus
(as Bergonzi suggests twentieth-century novelists often do) Amis subtly
destabilises the tradition in which he situates his novel, evoking the eas-
ily rationalised world of formulaic comedy, in order to show a mismatch
between this and the ‘real’ world, which he wishes to condemn for its
petty snobbishness and inequalities. When Margaret Drabble concludes
A Summer Birdcage (1963) with the suggestion that it is impossible for her
female author protagonist to write a text like Lucky Jim (insinuating that
this is because she is female and therefore cannot live in the world that
the text evokes) Drabble rather misses this element of Amis’ text. Surely
Amis’s text always implicitly suggests that the events of the novel are not
158 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

open to anyone living outside of the world of the novel in the first place,
regardless of their gender.
Head notes: ‘Jim Dixon of course is ill-suited to academia, but operates
as an outsider, wreaking comic havoc from within institutional life. [ . . . ]
A Summer Birdcage [ . . . ] gently rebukes the mode of farce, the luxurious
option employed by Kingsley Amis’ (87). Head suggests that Drabble’s text
reminds the reader that there is a double standard here that relies upon the
idea that Jim has more freedom as a man than Drabble’s protagonist, Sarah
Bennett, does, as a woman, despite the fact that Sarah is more academically
able and is more engaged with her subject than Jim. This in itself relies upon
the reader understanding farce in such a way that it becomes almost devoid
of anything other than the ‘luxurious’ comedy that Head refers to.
This stance (taken by Drabble and described by Head) denies the undoubt-
edly political elements of Amis’ farce and unfairly prioritises gender inequal-
ity above issues of class. It also refuses to view the novel in its true, complex
context. Amis eschews experimentalism in favour of farce, but the novel also
contains an acknowledgement of the fact that the formulaic conventions of
farcical comedy separate it from the limitations of the ‘real world’. Thus, the
novel implicitly acknowledges that although the happy ending is essential
in order to fulfil the requirements of the form, it in no way expresses a state-
ment about ‘real world’ possibilities any more than the conventions of sci-fi
or any other ‘fantasy’ genre would. Rather, like these genres, Amis’s farce
allows for the exploration of ideas that are not presently possible in reality.
A ‘real world’ version of Jim’s success is as impossible as Sarah’s in A Summer
Birdcage. Instead of employing farce for purely a-political comedic purposes
Amis utilises the formulaic, traditional and deliberately anti-experimental
aspects of Lucky Jim in order to demonstrate the restorative and maverick
options that the traditional (expressly non-experimental) form can offer, the
gaps between what is believable and what is not, form a politicised, complex
commentary that moves beyond the closure that the conventional happy
ending might seem to imply.

Notes
1. Until the 1950s university novels were not that common. Beerbohm’s Zuleika
Dobson, for example, had appeared in 1911. Yet, with the emergence of a newly
educated readership, three such novels appeared in the 1950s and became well
known: The Masters (1951) by C. P. Snow, Lucky Jim, and Eating People is Wrong
(1959) by Malcolm Bradbury. The campus novel itself was born out of the post-war
years, with the publication of texts such as Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe
(1952), Randall Jarrell’s riposte to McCarthy’s text Pictures From an Institution
(1954), and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin (1955), but as a genre it enjoyed a rather
short-lived popularity and had declined, in terms of both esteem and the number
 Nicola Allen and Wasfi Shoqairat 159

of examples being published by the dawn of the millennium. Amis’ choice of a

peculiarly American genre is perhaps rather apt, given America’s cultural domi-
nance in the post-war twentieth century international sphere
2. See Aida Edemariam’s article ‘Who’s afraid of the campus novel?’ The Guardian,
Saturday 2 October 2004 available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/
oct/02/featuresreviews.guardianreview37
3. As a young man at Oxford, Amis briefly joined the Communist Party. He later
described this stage of his political life as ‘the callow Marxist phase that seemed
almost compulsory in Oxford’. (See ‘Amis’s Socialism and the Intellectuals’, cited
by Leader, 2006, p. 366). Amis remained nominally on the Left for some time after
the war, declaring in the 1950s that he would always vote for the Labour Party.
(Leader, 2006, p. 366). But he eventually moved further right, a development he
discussed in the essay ‘Why Lucky Jim Turned Right’ (1967); his conservativism
and anti-communism can be seen in such later works of his as the dystopian novel
Russian Hide and Seek (1980)
4. See Dominic Head’s The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
5. ‘Merry England’, or in more jocular, archaic spelling ‘Merrie England’, refers to
an English autostereotype, a utopian conception of English society and culture
based on an idyllic, pastoral way of life that was allegedly prevalent at some time
between the Middle Ages and the onset of the Industrial Revolution.

Works cited
Amis, Kingsley. What became of Jane Austen? And Other Questions. London: Jonathan
Cape, 1970.
Amis, Kingsley. The Amis Collection: Selected Non-Fiction 1954–1990. London:
Hutchinson, 1990.
Amis, Kingsley. Kingsley Amis: Memoirs. London: Penguin, 1992.
Amis, Kingsley. The Letters of Kingsley Amis, ed. Zachary Leader. London: Harper
Collins, 2000.
Bell, Robert H., ed. Critical Essays on Kingsley Amis. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998.
Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern British Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993
Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern British Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001
Bradford, Richard. Kingsley Amis. London: Edward Arnold, 1989.
Bradford, Richard and Owen, Peter. Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis. London:
Edward Arnold, 2001.
Dirda, Michael. ‘Kingsley Amis’s Troublesome Fun’. The Chronicle of Higher Education
22 June 2007.
Drabble, Margaret. A Summer Birdcage. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1963.
Edemariam, Aida ‘Who’s afraid of the campus novel?’ The Guardian, Saturday 2
October 2004 available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/oct/02/features
reviews.guardianreview37
Ferrebe, Alice. Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction, 1950–2000: Keeping it Up.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Fussell, Paul. The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1994.
Head, Dominic. The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Hilfer, Tony. American Fiction Since 1940. London: Longman, 1992.
160 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Jacobs, Eric. Kingsley Amis, a Biography. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995.
Jenkins, Gareth. ‘Why Lucky Jim turned right’ – an obituary of Kingsley Amis’ Issue
70 of International Socialism, quarterly journal of the Socialist Workers Party (Britain)
Published March 1996 Copyright © International Socialism available at: http://
pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj70/amis.htm
Labour Party Election Manifesto 1945 available at http://www.labour-party.org.uk/
manifestos/1945/1945-labour-manifesto.shtml
Laskowski, William. Kingsley Amis. New York: Twayne, 1998.
Leader, Zachary (ed.). The Letters of Kingsley Amis. London: HarperCollins, 2000.
Leader, Zachary. The Life of Kingsley Amis. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006.
Lodge, David. ‘The Modern, the Contemporary, and the Importance of Being Amis,’
Language of Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966.
Marr, Andrew. A History of Modern Britain. London: MacMillan, 2007
McDermott, John. Kingsley Amis: An English Moralist. New York: St. Martin’s – now
Palgrave Macmillan, 1989.
Morrison, Blake. The Movement: English poetry and Fiction of the 1950s. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1980.
Moseley, Merritt. Understanding Kingsley Amis. Columbia, SC: University of South
Carolina Press, 1993.
Orwell, George ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ in Essays. London: Penguin, 2000.
Ritchie, Harry. Success Stories: Literature and the Media in England, 1950–1959. London:
Faber & Faber, 1988.
Sinfield, Alan. Literature Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain. London: Athlone Press,
1997.
11
Six Myths of On the Road, and
Where These Might Lead Us
R. J. Ellis

Jack Kerouac and On the Road (1957) are invested in so many layers of sen-
sationalized myth that it has become difficult to grasp anything about them
not shaped by this celebrity. The novel, just like Kerouac’s life, has assumed
an iconic status, defined by a reputation which derives from a reading that is
partial: both incomplete and one-sided. It is a reading that centres upon the
book’s reputation as an autobiographical text typed out in a spontaneous
rush on a continuous scroll of paper, depicting a new life-style, centred upon
cars, driving, sexual promiscuity, and the celebration of wild ( jazz) music.
What more, one might ask, might any reader ask for, in the decades follow-
ing World War Two, as increasing car ownership, a rise in casual sex and
new forms of fast music all insinuated themselves increasingly insistently
into the weft and weave of the world’s western cultures? This essay wants
to explore how this canonical reading feeds on the related myths its themes
address, rather than on how the novel carefully deconstructs and interro-
gates these cultural changes and how it represents performatively post-war
identities in change but not transformed. Whilst On the Road certainly
deals with the sort of post-war speediness that was to lead to Paul Virilio
formulating his theory of the ride, the journey, the drive, it is worth recall-
ing the Interstate Highway Act was not passed until 1956 (Virilio, 1986).
Things are just not as simple as the dominant, mythologized, speed-based,
Wild Western-infused reading of the text suggests. On the Road’s canonical
reputation needs adjusting.
One way of defining this is to examine a widely-syndicated photograph
of Kerouac taken by a photographer from Mademoiselle magazine just after
he came down off Desolation Ridge in the Cascade Mountains, following
twelve week’s employment in a fire-watch look-out for the Forestry depart-
ment in 1957. In this photograph Kerouac looks like the very image of a Beat
rebel, with his long, dishevelled hair and check shirt. But his appearance was
such because he had just returned from his lengthy mountain fire-watch,
and the photographer, who had detected the tide of attention flowing
towards the Beats, captured a far-from-typical picture of Kerouac. However,
161
162 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

it fitted the growing image of the “Beat rebel” and in particular the way this
rebellion was beginning to be constructed in the media – making the Beats
ideologically suspect. Indeed, they were soon to be re-christened Beatniks –
named after “sputnik” (launched in 1957), in a re-labelling intended to dis-
credit them by associating them with Russian communism. What is hardly
ever seen in reproductions of this picture is a large crucifix that Kerouac was
wearing (given to him by Gregory Corso at their reunion after his fire-watch
interlude). This was – and is – almost always cropped out by editors, since it
fails to fit the stereotype of the un-American rebel.
Kerouac was enraged by this censorship, viewing it as a denial of his
identity. But his Roman Catholicism failed to fit the media construction
of the Beatnik, and was not the reason why this “king of the Beats” was to
become lionized. Kerouac was so depressed by his image that it accelerated
his decline – indeed, he was eventually reduced to stating that “I can’t stand
to meet anyone anymore. They talk to me like I wasn’t me”.1 I want to delve
beneath the mythic representation that flows from this, by critiquing six
myths about On the Road that help underpin this image.
First, let us take the claim that Kerouac composed the scroll in a rush of
inspiration in a process of spontaneous composition, drawing on his incred-
ible memory and fuelled by either coffee (in Kerouac’s own account) or
Benzedrine, according to Ginsberg (whom Kerouac sought to refute when
making his claim about coffee).2 This myth at first seems to stand up well.
Kerouac did compose On the Road – in his estimate, a novel of 250,000 words –
over a twenty-day period in 1951. There are accounts of how Kerouac was
soaked in sweat as he typed away on his Underwood (Haverty Kerouac, 2000:
202). But it is worth recalling that Kerouac, as well as being very accurate,
was also a lightning fast typist, capable of over 100 words per minute – that
is to say, up to 6000 words per hour. Over a twenty day period, going flat out
for six hours a day, Kerouac could well have written a novel three times as
long. He simply was not typing flat out. In the same way, though he certainly
relied heavily upon his acute memory, he additionally drew upon the jour-
nals that he had kept during his travels, and he also referred to letters from
his friends – particularly Neal Cassady.3
When re-evaluating this first myth, we also need to dismiss the claim
that On the Road owes its characteristics and genesis to a drug – whether
this be caffeine or Benzedrine. Coffee was certainly used to sustain him,
and he may possibly have used some Benzedrine – though much less than
Allen Ginsberg later implied. But the novel does not owe its genesis primar-
ily to these stimulants; rather it is the product of Kerouac’s preceding hard
practice at typing out what he wanted to write swiftly and accurately.
A second myth is that he composed On the Road by typing it on a con-
tinuous roll of tracing paper so that he never had to break off from typing
in order to feed paper into the platen. This myth is standing up poorly. The
scroll in fact consists of eight short rolls of tracing paper taped together. It
 R. J. Ellis 163

also seems more probable that he typed out the novel on these eight rolls
before they were taped together, using standard sticky-back plastic tape,
after he had typed them up. Each separate sheet of the scroll is numbered,
and this numbering was most likely added in order to aid the final act
of assembling the scroll.4 Furthermore, the scroll shows clear signs that
Kerouac constantly had to pause to adjust the position of the rolls of paper
in the platen. What was going on was far from non-stop typing.
A third myth tells us that Kerouac abhorred making any revisions to the
scroll. This is certainly untrue. There are many deletions, crossings out,
pencil marks and additions to the scroll. It also seems probable that Kerouac
began to retype the scroll on bond before doing anything else – before, even,
taking the scroll to a publisher. In other words, Kerouac always recognized
that revisions would be needed and he may well have started to do this even
as he typed out the scroll.
It is also probably inaccurate to say that as soon as the issue of revision
was raised Kerouac would roll up the scroll and stride out of the room. If,
as seems probable, the idea of revising the typescript was brought up by
Robert Giroux at Farrar Strauss and Giroux, Kerouac did not storm off. The
famous meeting was quite long and it is even possible that Kerouac also took
a second version of the novel along, already retyped onto ordinary paper
(Theado, 2009: 8–34). More important to this meeting was Giroux’s lack of
conviction concerning the novel’s quality – which certainly would have dis-
turbed Kerouac. Perhaps the reason why this myth has taken hold so firmly is
that in 1958 and 1959 Kerouac published “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”
and “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose”, which both make much of
the need to compose without after-thinking (Kerouac, 1958; Kerouac, 1959).
But both these short reflections on the writing process were published after
On the Road was released. Both are tainted by hindsight, and refer not to On
the Road so much as some of the more radical experimentation to be found
in, say, Visions of Cody (1972), Old Angel Midnight (1993) and other work – for
example his poetry of this time,5 though the original composition of some
of these did fall hard on the heels of the scroll’s composition.
A fourth myth claims that the final version of On the Road is different
from the scroll, to which Kerouac had referred when typing out his final
version, only because during the final stages of its preparation for publica-
tion a whole raft of changes were smuggled through behind Kerouac’s back.
This seems to be much exaggerated. Some editorial changes of this sort
were made – in an inevitable process – and Kerouac led such a peripatetic
life-style at the time that the copy-editor, Helen Weaver, found him hard to
contact. But it is also true that he was closely involved for most of the time,
that Weaver herself felt a substantial allegiance to the integrity of the text
upon which she worked, and that Kerouac, in Malcolm Cowley’s words “did
a good deal of revision, and it was very good revision . . . [though] he would
never admit to that”.6
164 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Fifthly, we must reassess the claim that Kerouac was in search of total
honesty and absolute authenticity – a quest leading him to produce a very
different way of writing – a “heart-breaking fire ordeal where you can’t go
back”, in Kerouac’s own words (Kerouac, 1965: 238). What Kerouac found
was that such total authenticity was just not there, available, waiting to
be seized. Rather, any such romantic quest was constantly frustrated by a
raft of social, personal and publishing constraints, pre-shaping “meaning”
so that it constantly had to be re-negotiated. Authenticity, Kerouac found,
remained elusive, even mythical, even as he sought to transcribe it.7 And
the writing mode and narrative constructs that he evolved was just not so
totally new.
This is manifest in how even the scroll exhibits a clear structure. On the
Road’s detailing of four round-trips by Sal interweaves bildungsroman and
buddy motifs within a picaresque form, pivoting around a vortex-movement,
as the description of each trip Sal undertakes becomes progressively more
cursory and his friendship with Dean more fraught. Furthermore, Sal’s
attempts to find an undefined “IT” fail, and his trips always end in deflated
returns to New York. What all this points to is that On the Road is a more
carefully-structured novel than is generally recognized, operating within rec-
ognizable paradigms. Similarly the way it is written owes much to Kerouac’s
high regard for Proust and, in particular, Dostoyevsky, not to mention James
Joyce. Plainly the influence of Don Quixote (1605, 1615) is also substantial,
as is that of Moby Dick (1851), as On the Road explores the insane adven-
tures of a mad[dened] leader and his more cautious companion. Kerouac’s
writing style, relatedly, was also not unique but an adaptation, shaped by
his encounters with Burroughs’s flattened-out writing style, and the prose
directness of the untutored correspondence of Neal Cassady (the latter the
more dominant, because of the recent impact of some of Cassady’s corre-
spondence upon Kerouac).8 What Kerouac was producing was an amalgama-
tion of various influences – and these influences were legion, as anyone who
has seriously studied Kerouac soon recognizes.9
Sixthly, we might want to note that (as Oliver Harris has pointed out to
me) by referring to the roll of paper on which Kerouac typed out On the
Road as the “scroll” we mythologize it, for Kerouac himself never used the
word, nor did his friends in correspondence with him at the time. The label
“scroll” carries with it the connotations of a sanctified and holy text, which
is exactly what we are driven to regard it as, so long as we buy into the five
myths that I have laid out above.
I must finally concede, however, that there is more than a residue of truth
in these six stories: Kerouac may not have been typing flat-out, but the
composition of On the Road as (more or less) a single paragraph is extraor-
dinary, and when unrolled, as both Ginsberg and Kerouac recognized, it
does resemble the road itself unrolling for the reader. Even if not typed out
on one continuous 120 foot roll, it was nevertheless typed out in twelve to
 R. J. Ellis 165

twenty feet lengths, as Kerouac explored a new mode of composition: the

muscular rush Kerouac sought emerges in the direct and often breathless
prose style the scroll helped make possible. It is true that the scroll was to be
revised substantially, but it is also true that, given the long lapse of time –
from 1951 to 1957 – the differences between the scroll and the published
novel are few. Kerouac’s editor at Viking, Malcolm Cowley’s recognition of
the extraordinariness of the writing contributed to this continuity, but even
more so did Kerouac’s resistance to change. Having conceded this, it is also
correct to say that – however “good” Kerouac was at “revision” – Kerouac
was also helped by Cowley: some of the changes that emerge between the
scroll and the published novel seem to be the work of collaborative discus-
sion between Kerouac, Cowley and perhaps Weaver.
What we end up with, then, is in many ways, a book that is, despite its
unusual gestation, more conventional than one would expect, yet also a
book that carries more than a trace of its author’s visionary typing mara-
thon. It is, if you like, a typescript roll which is also something of a scroll. Yet
saying all this does not even begin to scratch the surface of the complexity
of the novel’s compositional history.
This history complicates any response to On the Road – not least because
Kerouac worked on the text for such a long period that it became some-
thing of a historical novel, so helping Kerouac himself become aware,
self-reflexively, of the ways in which, as he revised and added to his 1951
version, markedly different On the Roads were coming into being – not only
because of his constant rewriting, but also because of what others learned of
these and then made over into myths. Kerouac widely broadcast amongst
his acquaintances the fact that he had composed the novel in a three-week
rush of writing. He also later gave an interview with Alfred Aronowitz pub-
lished in the New York Post on 10 March 1959, which quoted him as claim-
ing that it “took me 21 days to write . . . on one long roll of paper with no
periods, no commas, no paragraphs, all single-spaced” (Aronowitz, 1959: 4).
This interview is frequently cited at face value, even though the On the Road
scroll is quite conventionally punctuated. Yet, the extended version of this
interview, published in 1970, eleven years after the Post first ran the inter-
view, reveals a different story: what Kerouac said in 1959 is, in fact: “I wrote
On the Road on a roll of Cannastra’s drawing paper . . . It was . . . all one big
paragraph. I had to retype it so they could publish it. . . . that’s the way to
tell a story – just tell it!” (Aronowitz, 1970: 103). There is no mention here
of punctuation being omitted. Simply put, some punctuation was always
present – but in 1959 a myth of spontaneous outpouring was born and still
persists. Indeed, some of Kerouac’s later alterations show traces of his aware-
ness of how this myth was growing even before the book was published. The
addition of the words “exploding like spiders across the stars and in the mid-
dle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’ What did
they call such young people in Goethe’s Germany” (Kerouac, 1957: 9) adds
166 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

little to the famous words, “and I shambled after as usual as I’ve been doing
all my life because the only people who interest me are the mad ones, the
ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same
time, the ones that never yawn, or say a commonplace thing, but burn,
burn, burn like roman candles” (Kerouac, 1952: 113). One can see what
Kerouac is doing: adding to Sal’s following of a rambling stream of thoughts
a few new meanders evoking spontaneity (when, perhaps, the original sen-
tence needed tightening up, if anything, stripping out such dubiously elit-
ist sentiments as “never yawn, or say a commonplace thing”). Yet post hoc
diffusion results instead. Kerouac also widely broadcast pre-publication the
idea that his publisher had commented that a continuous scroll would be
difficult to revise and that this was something he did not want to do (par-
ticularly because he believed The Town and the City (1950) had suffered from
his publisher’s alterations) even as he worked hard at numerous revisions.
Alongside this confusing, deceitful self-publicity, the Beats, as a loosely-
affiliated group, were gaining fame, and even notoriety, especially by par-
ticipating in a 1955 reading at San Francisco’s 6 Gallery, contributing to the
novel’s growing reputation. By August 1957 the San Francisco Chronicle jour-
nalist William Hogan was noting the enormous amount of pre-publication
attention On the Road was receiving (Hogan, 1957: 28). Yet also, between
1951 and 1957, especially at first, the revised writing Kerouac was produc-
ing for an expanding On the Road was often markedly more experimental
than that found in either the scroll or the final version of the novel. John
Clellon Holmes recalls how Kerouac at the time was “writing long, intricate
Melvillean astonishing sentences obsessed with simultaneously describing
the crumb on the plate, the plate on the table, the table in the house, the
house in the world” (Holmes, 1968: 78) in the process of trying to capture
a line of thought:

[Cody was] estimating how he himself got there, not only the world but
the bench, not only the bench but the part of the bench he filled out. Not
only that but how he got there to be aware of the saliva and the part of
the bench his ass filled out, and so on in the way the mind has; at all of
which now because it wasn’t his best idea of what to do in a poolhall . . .
even in the roaring noise and even though among all these Saturday
feet he couldn’t quite see the exact spot he had studied, though he knew
there were new cigarette butts and spit on the spot now . . . (Kerouac,
1960: 39–40)

This last sentence unrolls for another seven lines, in what is (as Holmes
senses) something of a parodic copy of Proust:

[I] would recall for each room in succession the style of the bed, the posi-
tion of the doors, the angle at which the daylight came in at the windows,
 R. J. Ellis 167

whether there was a passage outside, what I had in my mind when I went
to sleep. (Proust, 1913: 6)

Kerouac wrote so much material in this sort of experimental mode that he

was finally compelled to separate much of it off, leaving it out of On the Road
and incorporating much of it into another book, Visions of Cody – largely
completed in 1952 but only published in excerpted form in 1960 and not
in full until 1972.
At the core of Visions’ experimentation are the lengthy tape-transcript
sections, recorded by Kerouac with Neal Cassady in (drug-fuelled) conver-
sation and transcribed more-or-less faithfully. These tape transcripts, and
the companion “Imitations of the Tape” section, make up a large part of
Visions of Cody – over 150 pages. If set to one side, a much shorter Visions of
Cody remains, conspicuously ending with a revamped, compressed, helter-
skelter, experimental version of the travels of Kerouac and Cassady: On the
Road on speed, as it were. As Kerouac (narrating as Jack Duluoz) explains
in Visions of Cody, what he wants to do with this speeded-up version of On
the Road was to tell “the voyages again . . . each in one breath” (Kerouac,
1972: 337).
Excerpts from Visions of Cody (1960), published very much earlier than the
uncut version (which did not come out until 1972), is generally dismissed
as second-best: a bowdlerized text, worth little attention. Kerouac, however,
carefully signed every single issue of the 1959 print run of 750 copies, which
suggests some degree of authorization.10 Excerpts from Visions of Cody deserves
much more notice than it usually receives. Indeed, this “rescue text”, as
Excerpts might be called, given that the uncut work was deemed unpublish-
able (Ginsberg in 1952 called it “a holy mess . . . [Kerouac] did everything
he could to fuck it up”),11 even claims that it itself, rather than On the Road,
offers the “complete Cody”. The background to and origins of Neal Cassady
are extensively explored in Excerpts from Visions of Cody (almost as much as
in the full 398 page version). Furthermore, the 1959 Excerpts preserve most
of the best of Kerouac’s writing in the full Visions. For example, the most
interesting segments of the otherwise over-long tape transcripts, in which
Duluoz and Cody discuss the loss of spontaneity that inevitably occurs in
the process of transcription, still feature in Excerpts, alongside much of the
“Visions of Neal” notebooks that Kerouac wrote in 1951–52.
So, when celebrating On the Road’s achievement, Excerpts from Visions of
Cody demands attention as an important supplement. But the full 398 page,
1972 version of Visions – again, like the 1959 version, largely completed in
the three to four years surrounding the composition of the scroll – provides
further insight into Kerouac’s most famous text. In the 1972 Visions of Cody,
the homosocial dimension to Sal Paradise’s attraction to Dean – or, in this
instance, Duluoz’s attraction to Cody – becomes very much more apparent,
famously in the “fag Plymouth” scene shared by both books.
168 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

In the 1957 On the Road the Plymouth’s driver is portrayed, in some highly
negative stereotyping, as a timid, skinny homosexual. Cassady unsuccess-
fully seeks to manipulate this “effete” homosexual to his pecuniary advan-
tage, but without offering anything other than an ambiguous commitment
readily reneged upon if the homosexual’s money is not forthcoming. The
1957 On the Road is in fact somewhat oblique about what is going on. It
notes how the “fag” began by saying he was “very glad we had come along
because he liked young men like us, and would we believe it, but he really
didn’t like girls and had recently concluded an affair with a man in Frisco
in which he had to take the male role and the man the female role”, so
establishing that he is a homosexual. But when the “fag” asks “what Dean
thought about all this”, things are a lot less clear. Though Dean warns the
“fag” first “that he had once been a hustler in his youth” and asks him “how
much money he had”, nothing happens:

The fag became extremely sullen and I think suspicious of Dean’s final
motives, turned over no money and made vague promises for Denver.
He kept counting his money and checking on his wallet. Dean threw
up his hands and gave up. “You see, man, it’s better not to bother. Offer
them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become
panic-stricken.” (1957: 209)

The 1972 Visions takes things much further, depicting Cody as subjecting
the homosexual to vigorous anal intercourse: “Warning him first that he
had once been a hustler in his youth, Neal proceeded to handle the fag like
a woman, tipping him over legs in the air and all and gave him a monstrous
huge banging” (1951 [2007]: 307). This act is framed by many of the more
oblique words found in the 1957 version,12 but the scroll’s central image of
a “monstrous huge banging” still carries an impact. However, Visions of Cody
is by far the most direct, most graphic and least restrained:

That night the gangbelly broke loose between Cody and the skinny
skeleton, sick: Cody thrashed him on rugs in the dark, monstrous huge
fuck, Olympian perversities, slambanging big sodomies . . . subsided
with him for money; the money never came. He’d treated the boy like
a girl! “You can’t trust these people when you give them (exactly) what
they want.” . . . at one point Cody has thrown him over legs in the air
like a dead hen. (1972: 358–9)

Perhaps it is after all not so surprising that Visions of Cody was not to be pub-
lished until 1972. The change between 1957 and 1972 over what could be
acceptably published plainly played a part in creating this pronounced dif-
ference (the trial of Naked Lunch (1959), just to take one dramatic example,
had occurred in 1965).
 R. J. Ellis 169

Just as telling as this increase in graphic directness is the way that the
depiction of the narrator’s response changes. In On the Road we are only told
that “I was in the bathroom” (1957: 209). In the scroll version, however, the
narrator is watching: “I was so non-plussed all I could do was sit and stare in
my corner” (1951 [2007]: 307). This, of course, is the version that Kerouac
was no longer seeking to publish. However, he was still seeking a publisher
for Visions of Cody, and now his narrator no longer stares, but instead tells
us he only peeks: “that made me sick . . . I sat in the castrated toilet listen-
ing and peeking” (1972: 358–9). It is only the scroll version that depicts
the narrator staring rather than hiding (“in the bathroom”) or “peeking”.
Kerouac’s difficulty in facing up to his bisexuality, carefully hidden in the
1957 published On the Road, becomes quite apparent in this contrast.
Kerouac was, however, prepared to face up to the bisexuality of his friend,
as the censorship constraints causing gender uncertainties to fall to the cut-
ting room floor some time between 1952 and 1957 steadily weakened. So, in
1960 Cassady’s (Cody’s) ambiguous sexuality is baldly revealed:

Cody . . . loves to mimic women and wishes he was a sweet young cunt
of 16 so he could feel himself squishy and nice and squirm all over when
some man had to look and all he had to do was sit and feel the soft
shape of his or her ass in a silk dress and that squishy all over feeling . . .
and finger himself and wait for hubby who has one sixteen inches long.
(1959: 109–10)

Such extrapolations between On the Road and Visions of Cody are legitimated
by the way in which the latter is enmeshed with On the Road. Both were
composed in the late 1940s/early 1950s, and both deal with a society still
coping with the return of World War Two veterans. This helped render
sublimated homoerotic interactions more acceptable after the war than
before it, as when, for example, buddy relationships were very commonly
foregrounded in popular cultural forms (in Westerns, war stories and mov-
ies, and some “screwball” comedies). Sal’s and Dean’s relationship in On the
Road and Visions of Cody engages with such mainstream cultural trends, but
the scroll, to an extent, and Visions, forthrightly, casts an acid light on their
evasions.
Ironically, such changing attitudes to homosexual relations in the late
1940s were also accompanied by the development of a medical model
of homosexuality as pathological, whilst increasing demands for female
autonomy caused further anxiety – laying the grounds for a more puni-
tive, McCarthyite-fuelled level of intolerance in the 1950s. Even so, though
a post-war “baby boom” soon developed and home-making became
increasingly mass-commodified in suburban developments, often in large
“Levittown” estates, not unlike the one where the Cassadys ended up liv-
ing, disruptions to such domestic order persisted. A substantial minority
170 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

would not assume their ascribed gender-roles, home-building stereotypes

or sexual identities. This minority was left adrift in what was often a repres-
sive climate, compelled to congregate where “deviant” behavior survived,
especially in larger cities. The field of sexuality in this post-war period was
complex and contradictory, and this is the context in which to view its
representation in the early versions of Visions of Cody and On the Road.
Though such fluidity was short-lived, as the birth-rate rose and as more
passed through college, benefiting from the GI Bill of Rights and as what
the dominant culture represented as “traditional” norms broadly reasserted
themselves, when Kerouac rushed into his rapid typing-out of On the Road
in 1951, he was very much recording what was still a contemporary allure – in
a moment during which other Jacks and other Neals negotiated their life-
styles and sexuality uncertainly and inchoately. In this sense the scroll
On the Road offers a troubled, unreliable diagnosis of a key aspect of such
unstable, shifting post-war realignments. Yet by the time it was published
in 1957, half a decade later, On the Road had become something of a his-
torical novel, and one, of course, inevitably affected by this later temporal
framing. The suburbs and the Southwest, the South and the west Coast
had grown in affluence, somewhat at the expense of the vitality of the
East’s and mid West’s city centres, and systematic efforts had been made in
terms of cultural promotion and policy measures to restore and maintain
ideologically and materially conventional gender and sexual boundaries.13
This reframing impacted upon how the 1957 novel’s exploration of the
topics of sexuality, class and conformity could be couched – it was to
become much more cautious, in a more entrenchedly conservative, post-
McCarthy period.
The sort of risky directness the scroll features, as, for example, it depicts
Evie Parker standing up to the cops whilst Jack and Neal almost look for-
ward to “getting the hose in the backroom” (Jack Kerouac, 1952: 348), was
excised, and almost all the radical literary experimentation later largely col-
lected in Visions was excluded – such as the extraordinary “Imitation of the
Tape” section, in which a series of pastiches and parodies imitating various
writing styles (including William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway) self-
reflexively recognize their failure to do any better at revealing Cody than
the transcripts, as all attempts become a “mo-dific-ation” of the originary
experience, itself always already a modifying. Visions explicitly and repeat-
edly recognizes the futility of its attempt to deliver the “complete” Cody
(Kerouac, 1960: 36). The claim that Kerouac naively searched for authentic-
ity by embracing spontaneity needs to be rejected – not least because it runs
exactly counter to what Visions of Cody asserts is achievable.
The extent to which On the Road in its 1957 guise is very far removed from
being a spontanteous outpouring can be readily conveyed by examining the
book’s ending closely. Famously, Carr’s dog, Potchky, chewed off the end of
the scroll, which had to be recomposed later. Kerouac noted in handwriting
 R. J. Ellis 171

on the end of the scroll, ‘DOG ATE (Potchky – a dog)’ (1951 [2007]: 401).
The new ending Kerouac had to add shows clear signs of how Kerouac’s later
editing made the novel less hard-hitting than the 1951 scroll: Sal’s narrative
in the published, 1957 version finally dissolves into sentimental nostalgia –
heavily influenced by Thomas Wolfe and drawing upon an exchange with
one of Neal Cassady’s children in 1954 (after the scroll was completed and
its ending eaten). In Some of the Dharma, Kerouac notes a conversation he
had with Neal and Caroline Cassady’s children:

“Why is the mountain sitting there?” (man asks children)

Jamie: “Because nobody’s on there and we’re not supposed to climb on it
because the dirt’ll fall off.”
“Who made the mountain?” (man)
They: “God made it”
Man: “Who is God?”
Cathy: “Us” And right then Cathy sayd: “He wants to play with the
fence.”
Man: “Who?”
Cathy: (showing Bear toy) “Me. Dont you know that I am Poo Bear?”
God is Poo Bear. (Kerouac, 1997: 17–18)

We know this conversation took place in February 1954, when Kerouac

was staying with the Cassadys in San Jose, because in a May 1954 letter
sent to Carolyn Cassady, after Kerouac had returned to the east coast, he
wrote: “Let me know about the little ones who know that God is Pooh-
Bear” (Kerouac, 1995b: 111). If Kerouac came to think of God as “Poo[h]
Bear” after talking to the Cassady’s children, then the idea could not have
been part of the 1951 scroll version of On the Road, but only added to the
manuscript at least three years later. The 1951 version therefore could not
have ended like this:

don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be droop-
ing and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the
coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups
the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s
going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old,
I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of old Dean Moriarty, the father we
never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. (1957: 309–10)

The plangent tone of this passage differs markedly from the tone of the
scroll typescript, which is generally more direct and descriptive.
Indeed, On the Road, is almost conservatively well structured. At its core,
the twin[n]ing of Sal and Dean draws substantially upon conventional
buddy relationships, as Kerouac deftly reworks elements of the picaresque
172 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

bildungsroman form. To argue that this cannot be the case, because the
book is autobiographical and that this (the book’s narrative) is what really
happened, portrayed exactly as it happened, cannot stand up. Kerouac him-
self did not hold to this view, taking his cue from Marcel Proust’s: “The
picture . . . in our own minds which we believe to be . . . authentic . . . has
in reality been refashioned by us many times over” (Proust, 1913: I: 675).
As Visions repeatedly makes clear, “authenticity” is illusory. Sal’s encoun-
ters with this impasse establish just why he ends up almost ignominiously
retreating from exposure to the demands of the postwar road in the back
of that archetypal US consumer icon, a Cadillac, hired by his friend, Remi:

“D’you think I can ride to Fortieth Street with you?” [Dean] whispered.
“Want to be with you as much as possible, m’boy, and besides it’s so
durned cold . . . ” I whispered to Remi. No, he wouldn’t have it . . . So
Dean couldn’t ride uptown with us and the only thing I could do was sit
in the back of the Cadillac and wave . . . Dean, ragged in a motheaten
overcoat he brought specially for the freezing temperature of the East,
walked off alone, and the last I saw of him he rounded the corner of
Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again. (Kerouac,
1957: 308–9)

Postwar America is deeply alienating: the American West, now always-

already informed by the commodity code, has become a space where “rot-
ted . . . covered wagons” sit “near a Coca-Cola stand”, and Sal is swept off
in the epitome of conspicuous consumption, leaving Dean behind. That
Dean’s signifier of movement, his hitchhiker’s thumb, is broken in the
latter third of the book is plainly symbolic. Sal may have asserted early in
the novel that Dean knows he has “gotta go”, but On the Road has clearly
established by its end that no escape is now possible from “Paper America”
(Kerouac, 1957: 106). Kerouac, Lucien Carr noted, had “an emotional
awareness of class”,14 and this theme is often overlooked in a book where
class wars keep breaking out: between Dean and the White/Temko set in
Denver (54); between “college-boy” Sal and the Chicana cotton-picker,
Terry (82–109); between the “fat” middle class businessmen celebrating
Wild West Week and the Native Americans “solemn[ly]” watching them
with “stony eyes” in Cheyenne (32); between the paedophilic “moneybag
Americans”, Sal, Dean and Stan and the South American prostitutes in their
Gregoria “pornographic hashish daydream” (276, 281, 283); and between,
ultimately, Dean and a surprisingly-often besuited Sal. In this terrain, the
book punctures one further myth, that of escape – from all these postwar
socio-economic developments – into a now-bankrupt myth of freedom. Sal
learns it just is not possible; mobility is increasingly coming to mean social
mobility, upwards: getting places. Dean, beaten down, is getting nowhere in
his constant movement.
 R. J. Ellis 173

Notes
1. Jack Kerouac, quoted in Dittman, 2004: x.
2. The debate continues over the role of coffee and amphetamines and their rival
claims. See, for example, Beatty, 1957, reprinted in Maher, 2005: 51; Haverty
Kerouac, 2000.
3. See Sandison and Vickers, 2006, for an account of this sort of borrowing.
4. This numbering was seen by me during the scroll’s unrolling at the start of its
display at the Barber Institute at the University of Birmingham, December 2008.
Further details were provided in conversation with Jim Canary, the scroll’s cura-
tor during its display. Part of what follows is the consequence of conversations
held by the author with Jim Canary, with Matt Theado, and with Oliver Harris
during December 2008, most specifically at a conference held in the University
of Birmingham at that time. My thanks to these interlocutors.
5. See for example, “San Francisco Blues” (1954), reprinted in Kerouac, 1995a.
6. Malcolm Cowley, quoted in Gifford and Lee, 1979: 206.
7. For a discussion of “authenticity”, see Griffiths, 1995: 237–41, London: Routledge.
8. See Cassady, 2004: 17–285, especially the “Great Sex Letter”, 7 March 1947,
pp. 17–19, and the “Joan Anderson Letter”, 17 December 1950, pp. 244–55. After
receiving such letters as these, particularly Cassady’s “Joan Anderson letter”,
Kerouac began writing letters in a related style. See Kerouac, 1995: 246–306.
9. See, for example, Nicosia, 1983 and Ellis, 1999.
10. Hindsight is probably at work again. At the time Kerouac is rubbishing the 1959
version of Visions of Cody, somewhat strapped for cash, he is also anxious to bring
out the full Visions of Cody as a new book.
11. See Allen Ginsberg, Letter to Neal and Carolyn Cassady, 3 July 1952, in Ginsberg,
2008.
12. The fag began by saying he was very glad we had come along because he liked
young men like us, and would we believe it, but he really didn’t like girls and had
recently concluded an affair with a man in Frisco in which he had take the male
role and the man the female role. . . . The fag said he would like nothing better
but to know what Neal thought about all this. . . . And after all that the fag turned
over no money to us, tho he made vague promises for Denver, and on top of that
he became extremely sullen and I think suspicious of Neal’s final motives. He kept
counting his money and checking on his wallet. Neal threw up his hands and gave
up. “You see, man, it’s better not to bother. Give them what they secretly want and
they of course immediately become panic-stricken” (1951 [2007]: 307).
13. See Kuznick and Gilbert, 2001, particularly their introduction (pp. 1–13) and the
essay by De Hart, pp. 124–55.
14. Lucien Carr, quoted in McNally, 1979: 67.

Works cited
Aronowitz, Alfred G. 1959 “The Beat Generation”, New York Post (10 March): 4, 64.
Aronowitz, Alfred G. 1970. “Would You Run Away from Home to Become a Beatnik if
You Knew that the Man Who Wrote On The Road Lived with His Mother?” US – The
Paperback Magazine No. 3, New York: Bantam Books (May): 100–21.
Beatty, Jerome. 1957. “Trade Winds”, The Saturday Review, 28 September.
Burroughs, William. 1959. The Naked Lunch. Paris: Olympia Press. Rpt. as Naked Lunch,
New York: Grove Press, 1965.
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Cassady, Neal. 2004. Collected Letters, 1944–1967, ed. Dave Moore, London: Penguin.
De Hart, Jane Sherron. 2001. “Containment at Home: Gender, Sexuality and National
Identity in Cold War America”, in Kuznick and Gilbert, pp. 124–55.
Dittman, Michael. 2004. Jack Kerouac: A Biography, New York: Greenwood Press.
Ellis, R. J. 1999. Liar, Liar! – Jack Kerouac, Novelist, London: Greenwich Exchange.
Gifford, Barry Gifford and Lee, Lawrence. 1979. Jack’s Book: Jack Kerouac in the Lives
and Words of His Friends, London: Hamish Hamilton.
Ginsberg, Allen. 2008. The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, ed. Bill Morgan, New York: Da
Capo Press.
Griffiths, Gareth. 1995. “The Myth of Authenticity”, in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader,
ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, pp. 237–41. London: Routledge.
Haverty Kerouac, Joan. 2000. Nobody’s Wife: The Smart Aleck and the King of the Beats,
Berkeley: Creative Arts.
Holmes, John Clellon. 1968. “The Great Rememberer”, Nothing More to Declare,
London: Andre Deutsch.
Hogan, William. 1957. “A Bookman’s Notebook: San Francisco Scene”, San Francisco
Chronicle (13 August): 28.
Holmes, John Clellon. Nothing More to Declare, London: André Deutsch, 1968.
Kerouac, Jack. 1952. On the Road. Unpublished typescript. First edition published as
On the Road: The Original Scroll. New York: Viking Penguin, 2007.
Kerouac, Jack. 1957. On the Road. New York: Viking.
Kerouac, Jack. 1958. “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”, Evergreen Review, Vol. 2 No. 5
(Summer): 72–3.
Kerouac, Jack. 1959. ‘Belief and Technique for Modern Prose’, Evergreen Review Vol. 2
No. 8 (Spring ): 57.
Kerouac, Jack. 1960. Excerpts from Visions of Cody. New York: New Directions.
Kerouac, Jack. 1965. Desolation Angels, New York: Coward-McCann.
Kerouac, Jack. 1972. Visions of Cody. New York: McGraw Hill.
Kerouac, Jack. 1995a. Book of Blues, New York: Penguin, 1995.
Kerouac, Jack. 1995b. Selected Letters of Jack Kerouac, vol. 1 1940–1956, vol. 2 1957–1969,
Ann Charters, ed., London: Viking Penguin.
Kerouac, Jack. 1997. Some of the Dharma. New York: Viking Press.
Kuznick, Peter J. and Gilbert, James, eds. 2001. Rethinking Cold War Culture,
Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, 2001.
Maher, Paul Jr. 2005. Empty Phantoms: Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac,
New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2009.
McNally, Dennis. 1979. Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation and America,
New York: McGraw Hill.
Mikelli, Eftychia. 2009. “Constructions of Identity and Otherness in Jack Kerouac’s
Prose”, PhD diss., Durham University, May 2009.
Nicosia, Gerald. 1983. Memory Babe. Rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
Proust, Marcel. 1913. Rpt. as Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, trans. C. K. Moncrieff
and Terence Kilmartin, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
Sandison, David and Vickers, Graham. 2006. Neal Cassady: The Fast Life of a Beat Hero,
Chicago: Chicago Review Press.
Theado, Matt. 2009. “Revisions of Kerouac: The Long, Strange Trip of the On the Road
Typescript”, in What’s Your Road Man?: Critical Essays on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road,
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Virilio, Paul. 1986. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. Mark Polizzotti,
New York: Semiotext(e).
12
‘Hundred-per-Cent American
Con Man’: Character in Ken Kesey’s
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
David Simmons

Though Christopher Gair points out in The American Counterculture (2007);

that ‘oddly . . . recent studies of 1960s counterculture have largely erased
literature from its history,’ (142) Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
(1962) has proved to be something of an exception to this rule. Indeed, the
last few years have seen the publication of what amounts to a groundswell
of academic work concerning Kesey’s novel. The current resurgence of atten-
tion that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest has attracted is perhaps a result of
a concurrent re-ignition of interest in the immediate post-war period and
its literature, brought about by the gradual erosion of the established critical
hegemonies of postmodernism and post-structuralism. As these categories
have been challenged, especially in an Anglo-American context, the desire
to fill the interpretative void left behind has led a range of academics to
reassess Kesey’s novel, offering a more comprehensive positioning, which
contextualises the text as a significant, socially informed, literary object.
It is noticeable that an increasing amount of recent criticism on the novel
speaks to a wider understanding of an American canon in which texts exist
as human and cultural artefacts.
Though there has been a steady trickle of output on the novel in every
decade since its publication in the 1960s, critical interest in One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest has only recently grown to the extent that it is possible to sug-
gest that a concerted re-evaluation of Kesey’s text is taking place. The 1990s
saw the publication of George J. Searles’ edited collection A Casebook on Ken
Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1992), and Barbara Tepa Lupack’s
Insanity as Redemption in Contemporary American Fiction (1995), however, it
was not until the 2005 Penguin Modern Classics reissue of the novel that
this renewed sense of critical interest in the text was fully consolidated.
Though Robert Faggen notes towards the beginning of his introduction to
the republished edition, that Kesey’s ‘temperament was too anarchic and
mischievous to recommend a sociological or political agenda,’ (x) he never-
theless proceeds to approach the text from a culturally focused viewpoint.
Indicating a desire to move away from the often more aesthetic concerns
175
176 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

of post structuralism and postmodernism, Faggen discusses the relevance of

historical events to the construction of Kesey’s novel; including the develop-
ment of the atom bomb, the McCarthy witch hunts, post war developments
in psychiatry; ‘the sociological literature of the 1950s’ (xii), and the Kinsey
report. Faggen’s introduction also contains a renewed focus on character,
with the critic detailing the ideological significance of Chief Bromden, Big
Nurse and McMurphy. Indeed, despite the writer’s comments at the begin-
ning of his introduction, Faggen’s conclusive assertion that ‘In One Flew Over
the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey turned the mental ward into a symbol of the tricks
of control afoot in postwar American society,’ (xi) indicates that his concerns
lie with identifying the social and political momentum behind the novel. In
this chapter, I will argue that this constructivist approach has come to define
the nascent body of contemporary criticism on the novel, providing a notice-
able point of departure from some of the previous work published about, not
only Kesey’s text, but literature of the period more generally.
It is worth stating here that much of the criticism of the US novels
produced during the 1960s and 1970s tended to focus on offering a post-
structuralist, postmodernist reading of the novel born from the kind of
deconstructionist theory found in Jacques Derrida’s ‘Structure, Sign and
Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ (1966) and Roland Barthes’
‘The Death of the Author’ (1968). Indeed, such was the success of these two
thinkers that many of the central principles of their work came to domi-
nate subsequent literary discussion. Deconstructionist theories are most
prominently embraced in the concepts of ‘Metafiction’ and ‘Surfiction’
that Raymond Federman and Robert Scholes popularised during the 1970s.
Yet the deployment of these terms amongst the work of noted critics, such
as Federman, Scholes, Ronald Sukenick, Tony Tanner, and (more recently)
Helen Weinberg, worked to emphasise the fragmentary, often nihilistic
qualities of the post-war American novel, suggesting that its primary pur-
pose was to reflect, and in doing so reinforce, the passivity engendered by
a particular, absurdist view of contemporary society; as Weinberg proposes:
‘The focus of this novel’s world view is on this disjunction. To live acqui-
escent to the terms of this world is to be passive; to allow the nonbeing of
worldly routines and reasons to encroach upon the life of the self and its
possibilities for true being is to become a victim’(4).
Such post-structuralist criticism suggests that the protagonists of the post-
war novel exist in the absurd tradition of Kafka’s characters, embodying
similar qualities such as ‘arrest, guilt, self-victimization, alienation, and the
inability to use freedom positively and creatively’ (Weinberg, 5). Yet, while
this stance seems to speak to something that is reflected in the work of some
major post-war American writers, such as Thomas Pynchon and John Barth,
it also risks sidelining the positive and socially engaged elements of equally
important work by authors such as Kesey, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and
Thomas Berger.
 David Simmons 177

This is not to say that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest does not pose
some difficulties for a twenty-first-century reader. In particular, critics have
pointed out the novel’s often seemingly negative depiction of both African
Americans and Women, a bias that echoes the ideological underpinnings
of sectors of the 1960’s American counterculture whose own peculiarly
conservative views on issues such as race and gender often seemed at odds
with the professedly radical politics of liberation they espoused; as Doug
Rossinow notes of this dichotomy in relation to the New Left’s attitudes
towards women: ‘in their quest for sexual authenticity they often cast
women in the role of sexual helpmeets, albeit newly uninhibited ones’
(Rossinow 117). While parts of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest undoubtedly
appear to share such a prejudiced viewpoint, with the protagonist being fore-
grounded as a distinctly white masculine and heterosexual saviour, the nim-
ble critic might offer both the novel’s sympathetic portrayal of Bromden’s
partial Native American ethnicity, and the favourable presentation of the
Japanese-American nurse and the prostitutes that are brought onto the ward
by McMurphy, as pertinent examples which help to counter overly hostile
accusations regarding the novel’s problematic sexism and racism.
While taking issue with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s sexual politics,
in The American Counterculture Gair offers a reading that follows some of the
work done by Faggen in bringing the social impetus behind Kesey’s text to
the fore. Gair’s analysis depicts the text as a pivotal example of both the
counterculture’s desire to question social conformity, and representative of
the movement’s evolving methodologies; noting that the novel stands as
‘an example of the counterculture’s changing strategies for resisting social
control’ (152). Gair goes further in teasing out the political elements of the
text, discussing both the central character’s role as a kind of countercultural
Christ figure and the novel’s engagement with a drive towards a more
humanitarian reconfiguration of American society, which would allow for
the realisation of the full human potential of the self. Indeed, so great is the
novel’s engagement with the utopian concerns of the counterculture, that Gair
is able to suggest that, with the ending of the book, Kesey offers us ‘possibly
the most optimistically utopian vision of the nation’s future to emanate from
the counterculture’ (154). Gair rereads the novel’s climax – in which
McMurphy attacks Nurse Ratched, is then lobotomised, and subsequently
smothered to death by Bromdem – as an embodiment of the countercul-
ture’s own desire to achieve liberatory action, freeing them from the con-
straints of technocratic hegemonic systems so that they might return to a
more utopian engagement with the land.
Aligning himself with the contemporary wave of criticism that re-
evaluates and foregrounds the socially engaged aspects of Kesey’s text, Scott
McFarlane in The Hippie Narrative (2007) articulates, explicitly, the move
away from previously entrenched postmodernist and post-structuralist
approaches, devoting an entire concluding chapter of his book to examining
178 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

the continuing ‘energeia and profluence of traditional narrative’ in post-war

writing. McFarlane proposes that ‘rather than engage in a postmodern dis-
cursiveness’ (235) in which a ‘being-within way of thinking . . . is held cap-
tive to a sometimes indecipherable, discursive language,’ (236) the critic and
reader should attempt to recognise that the ‘the genuine cultural production
of a literary work is inherently constructivist’ (236). According to McFarlane,
this emphasis on the creativity involved in the production of the novel as a
form was shared by the counterculture, whose movement sought to adopt
such a sentiment in their day to day lives: ‘The Hippies of the late’ 60’s were
railing against mainstream society in a highly deconstructivist manner,
but . . . the phenomenon evolved into one where those Hippies found con-
structivist adaptations’ (233).
Given the nature of McFarlane’s approach to literature in general, it is
not surprising that his specific reading of Kesey’s text is one that focuses on
the importance of narrative and the novel as a cultural artefact. Indeed, to
an extent, McFarlane singles out One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; seeing the
novel as an exemplar of these trends. He notes that ‘Cuckoo’s Nest is more
deliberately and traditionally crafted’ (23) than some of the other texts he
discusses, stating that ‘the novel was also, very much, a product of its time’
(26). McFarlane proceeds to draw out a number of the novel’s cultural points
of reference, believing, as he does, in the pertinence of a more culturally
informed interpretation: ‘Any analysis of Cuckoo’s Nest should factor in the
societal-historical of the time period’ (31). McFarlane pays particular atten-
tion to the novel’s autobiographical elements and suggests that previous
critics have chosen to overlook Kesey’s incorporation of some of the prob-
lematic issues facing his hometown of Oregon in the book: ‘Often missing
in discussion about Cuckoo’s Nest is how profoundly his work reflected the
societal pressure of modernization in the Pacific Northwest’ (27). McFarlane
concludes his chapter on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by expanding his
reading of the novel as autobiographical, proposing an intrinsic link between
Kesey’s own social consciousness and his construction of the text, drawing
out biographical connections between the novel’s author and it’s central,
rebellious character: ‘Kesey captured – through his metaphorical depiction of
an insane asylum – much broader societal forces institutionalizing the human
spirit . . . Kesey assumed a McMurphyesque role in working to catalyze a style
of life that challenged the sterility and conformity of modern America’ (35–6)
In my own book, The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Heller to Vonnegut
(2008) I share this desire to reread Kesey’s novel in a more politically and cul-
turally informed manner. Taking issue with the dominant image of the 1960s
novel as being best understood in terms of experimentalism, which can
often elide the more socially engaged aspects of the novel, I argue that, due
to an over reliance on a system of convenient taxonomies engendered by the
dominance of post structuralist and postmodernist analysis, what has been
produced is a significant, yet also partially distorted, account of literature
 David Simmons 179

from the post-war era. These approaches to the post-war novel have tended
to focus on particular literary techniques conducive to post-structuralist and
postmodernist readings, such as; ironic narrative voice, the use of nihilistic
humour, and the decomposed and decentred subject. While these elements
are certainly present within a text such as Kesey’s, it is misleading to consider
these aspects in isolation. Perhaps, in their attempts to focus on particular
(partisan) readings that seek to define the period’s literature through hegem-
onic critical discourses, scholars have inadvertently neglected or passed over
many of the other (often equally central) aspects of the text. Indeed, rather
than negate the validity of viewing a text such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest through a more culturally informed lens, the previous dominance of
such a comparatively narrow approach to the post-war US novel, almost calls
out for it, confirming the need for a more fully-rounded understanding that
accounts for the reasoning behind the novel’s production.
The need for a more culturally cognisant reading informs my approach
to the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in this chapter. Consequently, I read
Kesey’s work against such established critical interpretations of the postwar
American novel by focusing upon its more social, political and humanist
properties. Written during the 1960s and tapping into many of the concerns
of the contemporary counterculture, this chapter will examine the ways in
which One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest explores issues and themes pertinent
to the movement such as identity politics, the changing nature of heroism,
and the seemingly corrupt nature of those in authority.
The novel is set in an Oregon asylum ruled over by the authoritarian ‘Big
Nurse’, a tyrannical and matriarchal figure who controls every aspect of her
male patients’ lives through fear and intimidation. The Big Nurse allows her
orderlies to abuse the patients on the ward; in fact she actively encourages it,
and uses electro-shock therapy as a means of administering punishment to
patients who disobey her totalitarian rule. Amongst those in the hospital is
the initially mute, and paranoid, Native American-Indian, Chief Bromden.
Bromden is of mixed ethnicity, being the child of an alcoholic American-
Indian father and a domineering white mother. Even though he is mute,
Bromden narrates the novel for the reader, the action of which concerns
the arrival of a new patient, Randle P. McMurphy (who is known to the
patients simply as McMurphy), who will gradually set out to challenge the
Big Nurse’s iron grip on the other male psychiatric patients under her ‘care’.
McMurphy’s innately subversive nature leads him to rebel against the
many petty rules which Big Nurse has implemented in order to maintain
control over her patients. He does this by gradually restoring a sense of self
worth and dignity to the other patients, and beginning a series of small
rebellions (over toothbrushing times and TV watching habits) that begin to
erode the Big Nurse’s control. While McMurphy is ultimately lobotomised
for his disruptive actions; his rebellion is still a triumph as his actions and
his attack on her at the end of the text cause the Big Nurse to lose control
180 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

over the other men on the ward. McMurphy’s success is most obvious in
the Chief’s escape from the hospital. Once he has smothered McMurphy,
Bromden manages to escape when he finally succeeds (where McMurphy
had previously failed) in lifting the heavy shower room control panel off
the ground and throwing it through a nearby window. The act is inspired
by McMurphy while also suggesting that Bromden has moved beyond his
previous dependence on the character, indeed, Bromden momentarily tries
on McMurphy’s cap before feeling ‘suddenly ashamed of trying to wear it’
(308). At the end of the novel we are lead to believe that Bromden’s rebel-
lion has progressed to the next, independent stage. The implication of the
novel’s closing sentence – ‘I been away a long time’ (310) – would appear
to be that Bromden is now able to consider, for himself, what direction his
life will take. Indeed, the Chief’s actions at the end of the novel represent
a desire to state the importance of the individual maintaining control over
their own identity and (therefore) their destiny in the face of society’s
attempts to control and mould it.
This declaration is a far cry from the opening of the novel. We are initially
introduced to Bromden as the orderlies on the ward mock him. Many of the
Nurse’s staff regard Bromden as a child and treat him like an object: ‘Chief
Broom’. We soon learn that this abuse is not particular to the Chief and that
the staff at one time or another have mistreated all of the patients on the
ward as a result of Big Nurse’s practice of only employing those who ‘she’s
damn positive . . . hate enough to be capable’ (28) of meting out her unique
levels of punishment and abuse. Rape is institutionally sanctioned and the
orderlies habitually induct new inmates onto the ward by mistreating them.
Such a practice serves as a means of dehumanising the patients, not only in
the eyes of the staff, but more importantly, in the patient’s minds, and there-
fore enables Big Nurses’ control over them to be more total and effective.
The Chief tells us about Ellis and Ruckly, two patients whose minds have
been irreparably damaged by electro-shock ‘therapy’ and about Mr Taber, a
former patient whose refusal to endure the abuse dealt out by the staff led to
him being given a frontal lobotomy. In a mirror of both the counterculture’s
distrust of hegemonic institutions, and wider work being carried out (such
as that of R. D. Laing) that challenged previously established conceptions
of mental illness, the novel foregrounds the control that the institution
wields over its patients as both absolute and unchallenged; and the reader
is encouraged to see how thin the line between punishment and therapy is
in an institution which exists to ‘normalise’ those marginalised by society.
The opening of the novel is indicative of the text’s preoccupation with
identity and the various ways in which hegemonic institutions attempt to
control us by physically and ideologically marginalising any alternatives
to the mainstream or ‘norm’; denigrating certain peoples and lifestyles;
as McMurphy exclaims at one point of his own positioning by those in
power ‘but you know how society persecutes a dedicated man’ (20). The
 David Simmons 181

Chief suggests that those who work on the ward are only a small part of
a much larger organisation which both watches and controls individuals;
curtailing their freedom. Bromden calls this organisation ‘The Combine’
and suggests that it operates as a society-wide mechanism that is trying
to make everyone and everything in American society the same: ‘like, for
example – a train . . . laying a string of full-grown men in mirrored suits and
machined hats, laying them like a hatch of identical insects’ (225).
As the story progresses we learn that the Chief’s conflicted sense of who
he is, is not only due to his being undermined by those in authority but that
his paranoia is also the result of an internal crisis, which is at root concerned
with his mixed race ethnicity. As a half-white, half Native American the
Chief seems torn between two ways of being. Unable to find an identity that
he feels comfortable with, the Chief instead acts as he thinks others expect
him to: ‘I was just being the way I looked, the way people wanted. It don’t
seem like I ever have been me’ (151). The Chief’s identity crisis represents
both the internal conflict that was brought to public attention by Laing in
The Divided Self (1960); that posits the possibility of there being a splintered
rather than singular self at the heart of most individuals; as well as directly
representing a larger issue concerning the destruction of Native American
Indian identity. We are told that the removal of the Chief’s father from his
land was partially instigated by his white mother who became the dominant
force in the relationship. This event lead the Chief to take his mother’s sur-
name instead of his father’s, an act that symbolically emasculates the father
figure and is symptomatic of white assimilation of indigenous cultures,
whilst also highlighting Kesey’s engagement with the concept of the emas-
culating effect of mid-late twentieth century capitalist-led constructs of the
processes of civilisation.
The other patients share the Chief’s confused sense of identity, they are
similarly oppressed by The Big Nurse, who controls the patients with impu-
nity, instilling in them a belief that they are abnormal and need to adjust
in order to fit into ‘normal’ society, as one of the patients sarcastically states
‘Not talk me into it, no. I was born a rabbit. Just look at me. I simply need
the nurse to make me happy with my role’ (61). Harding, in particular, is
important here, with the novel implying that he is a closet homosexual
unable to declare his homosexuality for fear of ridicule by wider society.
While the Big Nurse manipulates any sense of identity the other patients
may have, she is largely unable to control McMurphy in this manner. The
appearance of McMurphy is markedly different from our introduction to the
Chief. While Chief Bromden is presented as a repressed and downtrodden
character, McMurphy’s individuality lends him strength of personality and
a level of belief in himself that the other patients initially lack. The Chief
says that McMurphy ‘sounds like he’s way above them, talking down, like
he’s sailing fifty yards overhead, hollering at those below on the ground.
He Sounds Big’ (10) and suggests that he is this way because ‘He hadn’t let
182 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

what he looked like run his life one way or the other, any more than he’d
let the Combine mill him into fitting where they wanted him to fit’ (151).
In opposition to the detrimental practises of The Big Nurse, McMurphy tries
to restore the other patients’ confidence, turning them from ‘rabbits’ back
into men. He does this by encouraging the men to believe in their own self-
worth and through teaching them that it is Nurse Ratched who is in the
wrong: ‘all you guys. What the hell is the matter with you? You ain’t as crazy
as all this’ (55). McMurphy’s independent actions and the positive effects
that these actions have on the other patients suggest that a strong sense of
‘who we are’ is important to our personal well being.
Reflecting the anti-authoritarian ethos of the 1960s, Kesey’s novel sug-
gests that twentieth-century American society tries to control the actions
of its citizens through oppressive practises. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest we are presented with numerous examples of those who hold power
attempting to tell characters with less power how to behave; even in the
most private and intimate spheres of their lives. Most obviously this occurs
through the characters of the Big Nurse, and her unnamed band of orderlies,
who are effectively employed for the sole purpose of controlling and subdu-
ing the ‘undesirable’ personality traits of the patients. While the structure of
the hospital system means that the staff must tell those under their care what
to do, the novel suggests that Nurse Ratched goes beyond mere supervision
and instead seeks to rule over all elements of the patients’ lives for her own
perverse and questionable ends.
While the majority of the suppression in the novel takes place on the
ward as a direct result of the Big Nurse’s practices we are also presented with
examples outside of the hospital where oppression has taken place; Billy
Bibbit’s emotional development as a young man has been repressed by an
over-protective mother, while Harding has repressed his own homosexuality
for fear of the negative repercussions of ‘coming out’ in a society that still
frowns upon being gay. The novel repeatedly provides us with examples of
minorities being criticised or treated poorly by the majority within society,
as Harding notes: ‘the great voice of millions chanting “shame. Shame.
Shame.” It’s society’s way of dealing with someone different’ (241–2). Chief
Bromden is a pertinent example of this. The Chief recollects his childhood
and the manner in which white society (including his own mother) tried to
oppress his father and the tribe of Native American’s of which he was chief.
Such is the effect of White oppression that the Chief chooses to withdraw
from the world by pretending that he is deaf and dumb.
Indeed, whether or not we choose to read the hospital ward as a repre-
sentative microcosm of wider society, the novel seems to be heavily critical
of what it believes is the repressive nature of post-war America. A sentiment
that is made overt in Chief Bromden’s belief in ‘The Combine’, a secret state
sanctioned organisation that is trying to engineer society so that everyone
looks the same, lives the same lifestyle and behaves in the same way.
 David Simmons 183

McMurphy, the (anti-) hero of the story comes on to the ward to free the
other patients from the Big Nurse’s oppressive regime. McMurphy it seems
has escaped the oppression of society if only due to his refusal to be a part of
it, the Chief notes: ‘logging, gambling, running carnival wheels, travelling
lightfooted and fast, keeping on the move so much that the Combine never
had a chance to get anything installed’ (75). However as the novel pro-
gresses we learn that McMurphy has also suffered from oppression. Growing
up, McMurphy has been in and out of prison and work farms as punishment
for his refusal to conform to society’s rules. Furthermore, the novel implies
that the total reliance that the other patients develop towards McMurphy
and their unquestioning belief that he will save them becomes in itself an
oppressive (rather than a liberating) force, leaving the character trapped into
a course of action that will eventually lead to his death.
McMurphy has only been able to retain his ‘sanity’ through the realisa-
tion that it is those in authority that are in the wrong, rather than he. Secure
in this knowledge he subsequently leads the other patients to freedom by
getting them to realise this too. Indeed, it is an irony that by the end of the
story we view many, if not all of the patients on the ward as being less ‘sick’
than those who have oppressed them for so long.
The idea of heroism is an important element in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s
Nest. The novel contains a subtle but in-depth exploration of how we con-
struct our heroes, what it means to be ‘heroic’, and the results of this process
on those who are singled out for such adulation. The novel’s ending, which
sees Bromden take account of his own destiny is suggestive of the need to
move beyond simple hero worship. McMurphy can only start a rebellion;
but the novel suggests that that resistance must be maintained by the indi-
vidual’s realisation of their ability to take charge of their own destiny; only
then can the power of the combine be challenged in any sustained manner.
Though a more complex engagement with established concepts of hero-
ism became a frequent component of many novels written in the post-war
period; as critic Ihab Hassan notes, ‘the anti-hero seems nowadays to hold
us in his spell’ (Hassan 21), the figure’s significance nevertheless seems to
have been lost amongst the competing literary critical movements of the
time. For, while the work of noted American literary critics; such as Leslie
Fiedler (Love and Death in the American Novel (1961), Waiting For The End
(1967) and The Return of the Vanishing American (1968), Raymond Olderman
(Beyond The Wasteland (1972), Robert Scholes (Fabulation and Metafiction
(1979) and Tony Tanner (City of Words (1971), present us with a comprehen-
sive analysis of many of the more innovative aspects of the contemporary
literary scene, in their focus on more fashionable novelistic techniques
such as Metafiction, Surfiction and Black Humour, such critics appear to
have assimilated the unique properties of the hero or anti-hero figure that
we find in so many post war novels without singling it out for special
attention. Another reason for this paucity may be that the figure’s intrinsic
184 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

relationship to the contemporary age which has so ‘transformed human

life, that the long-inherited, timeless symbols [have] collapsed’ (Campbell
387), indicates an aspect of flux to the heroic, which would have proven
difficult to chart by critics working contemporaneous to such developments.
If the figure is innately malleable, as a result of its changing function, then
a universal definition inevitably becomes problematic. Nevertheless, many
writers’ exploration of what constitutes a suitable heroic model testifies to
the continuing centrality of character in the post war novel and the often
politically and socially informed nature of the form. Given contemporary
critics’ lack of commitment to investigating this propensity, it cannot be
denied that the significance of this engagement with the heroic deserves a
degree of reassessment.
Right from McMurphy’s initial appearance we are told how the other char-
acters conceive of him in a (anti-) heroic mould. Chief Bromden thinks that
McMurphy is a giant sent to rescue them from the Big Nurse and notes that the
rest of the patients ‘get a big kick out of going along with him’ (20–1). As the
story progresses McMurphy takes on the appearance of a religious or spiritual
hero, analogous to the figure of Jesus Christ. Harding suggests that McMurphy
could ‘work subconscious miracles’ (51). McMurphy organises a fishing trip
for twelve of the other men’ ‘his dozen people’ (195), and upon being given
electro-shock therapy on a cross-shaped table he jokingly asks the attendant
whether he gets ‘a crown of thorns’ (222). In addition to these religious allu-
sions the plot of the novel, in which McMurphy sacrifices his own life for the
good of the other men has obvious echoes of the Biblical story of Jesus.
While the traditional hero is often a superhuman individual marked out
by his superior strength or physical prowess Kesey’s novel frequently high-
lights how normal McMurphy is. Perhaps most significantly at one point
in the early part of the novel McMurphy is unable to lift a heavy control
panel off of the ground. While we are never convinced that he will be able
to achieve such a Herculean feat his declaration to the other patients that
he ‘tried though,’ has its own heroic significance given the manner in which
McMurphy encourages the men to stand up for themselves to the Big Nurse.
McMurphy’s subversive actions and anti-establishment attitudes would
appear to mark him out as an anti-hero, a common figure in American
novels of the 1960s. McMurphy seems to fuse a range of uniquely American
rebellious yet heroic motifs; as Gair comments, McMurphy can be seen as
‘a cross between the archetypal cowboy and Marlon Brando’s Johnny from
The Wild One’ (152).
Indeed, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest explores America’s relationship
with the anti-heroic. Once the Big Nurse learns of the patients’ adoration of
McMurphy she attempts to discredit him. She tries to downplay McMurphy’s
heroism by ridiculing the idea that he is saviour-like: ‘And yet,’ she went
on, ‘he seems to do things without thinking of himself at all, as if he were a
martyr or a saint. Would anyone venture that McMurphy is a saint?’ (207).
However, such is the patients’ love of McMurphy that when the Big Nurse
 David Simmons 185

tries to suggest McMurphy is manipulating them for the worse the patients
refuse her suggestions: ‘I feel compelled to defend my friend’s honor as a good
old red, white, and bluehundred-per-cent American con man’ (209). Harding’s
comments imply that the patients both realise and embrace McMurphy’s sup-
posed moral failings. Though the hero conventionally embodies the values
of the establishment that he belongs to, the novel’s depiction of the hospital
ward as a corrupt, abusive, and dehumanising place means that we, like the
patients, have little problem in siding with McMurphy over the Big Nurse and
her staff. As I note in The Anti-Hero in the American Novel:

Though McMurphy may indeed be more of a sinner than a saint, in the

traditional sense of the term, his anti-establishment stance offers the
patients a means of personal and spiritual fulfilment otherwise unattain-
able from the oppressive behavioural codes of a society that has worked
to ostracize and depersonalize them. (Simmons, 132)

Interestingly, the novel also suggests that the patient’s worshipping of

McMurphy has negative results for him. As the story reaches its conclusion
Chief Bromden realises that the role of hero might have more drawbacks
for McMurphy than he and the other patients initially thought: ‘I won-
dered how McMurphy slept, plagued by a hundred faces like that, or two
hundred, or a thousand’ (219). The suggestion that McMurphy is in some
senses trapped by the demands that the patients make of him becomes more
evident as the novel progresses, until it becomes apparent in an incident
in which McMurphy has a chance to escape from the ward but refuses; the
Chief suggests that this can be attributed to McMurphy’s sense of duty to
the other patients on the ward: ‘It was like he’d signed on for the whole
game and there wasn’t any way of him breaking his contract’ (243).
Though, he perhaps ‘loses’ his personal battle against her, being lobot-
omised at her command, McMurphy is successful as a hero, in that he saves
the other patients from the control of Big Nurse. McMurphy thus fulfils a
mythic (Christlike) function within the text. His real purpose was to effect
others, rather than to save himself. By the end of the novel he has managed
to pass on his life-affirming sense of self-belief and self-worth to the other
men. This positive message enables the patients to overcome their fear of
the Big Nurse and face the prospect of leaving the hospital for good. It is
significant that all of the major players in the novel, McMurphy, Bromden,
and the other patients, are no longer fearful of Big Nurse’s rule at the end
of the text; as Bromden tells us: ‘She couldn’t rule with her old power
anymore . . . she was losing her patients one after the other’ (305).
In his move from self-interest to inspiring those around him, McMurphy
seems to embody a particularly countercultural and humanist desire for a
greater sense of self-realisation and actualisation; as Gair notes ‘McMurphy
acquires a sense of responsibility to the community, in which he is willing
to sacrifice himself to the greater good’ (153). Extrapolating from Gair’s
186 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

interpretation of the novel’s central character as socially engaged, we might

say that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, when re-evaluated in a more cultur-
ally informed context than has previously been afforded, might be seen as
offering a potential model for the refashioning of society, one that reposi-
tions the individual’s rebellion as a catalyst for larger change, advocating a
move towards a greater sense of communality in line with the contemporary
countercultural movement. Much as the novel itself espouses a democratic,
humanist philosophy that seeks to recognise and promote the idea of multi-
plicity, so in our own approaches to the text we must be careful of inadvert-
ently closing down the possibility of multiple lines of interpretation too.

Works cited
Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel [1960] (London: Granada, 1970).
——. Waiting for the End: The American Literary Scene from Hemingway to Baldwin [1964]
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967).
——. The Return of the Vanishing American [1968] (London: Paladin, 1972).
——. A New Fiedler Reader (New York: Prometheus, 1999).
Gair, Christopher, The American Counterculture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2007).
Hassan, Ihab. Radical Innocence: The Contemporary American Novel (New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1973).
Kesey, Ken. Sometimes a Great Notion [1963] (London: Methuen, 1976).
——. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (London: Picador, 1973).
——. ed. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest John Clark Pratt (New York: Viking Press, 1977).
——. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (London and New York: Penguin, 2005).
Leeds, Barry R., Ken Kesey (New York: Ungar, 1981).
Lupack, Barbara Tepa. Insanity as Redemption in Contemporary American Fiction
(Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1995).
MacFarlane, Scott. The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture
(North Carolina: McFarland & Co, 2007).
Olderman, Raymond M. Beyond the Waste Land: The American Novel in the Nineteen-
Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972).
Rossinow, Doug. ‘“The Revolution is About Our Lives”: The New Left’s Counterculture’
in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Ed. Peter
Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York and London: Routledge, 2002).
pp. 99–124.
Scholes, Robert. Fabulation and Metafiction (London: University of Illinois Press, 1979).
Searles, George J., ed. A Casebook on Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992).
Simmons, David. The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: from Heller to Vonnegut (London
and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Tanner, Stephen L. Ken Kesey (Boston: Twayne, 1983).
Tanner, Tony. City of Words (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971).
Weinberg, Helen A. The New Novel in America: The Kafkan Mode in Contemporary Fiction
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971).
13
Herzog’s Masculine Dilemmas, and
the Eclipse of the Transcendental “I.”
Gloria L. Cronin

Saul Bellow’s arrival during the Jewish decades

The post-Holocaust decades of the 1940s and 1950s found Saul Bellow
a relatively inexperienced writer passionately committed to humanistic
agendas, and increasingly less convinced that utopian radical politics held
the answer to mankind’s ills. As his left-leaning political idealism faded he
made his withdrawal from the Partisan Review crowd and steadily became an
entrenched neo-conservative. He intended to make his mark on American
letters, score heavily in the international literary arena, write the great
American novel, and mount a passionate defense of the human soul. If
he could simultaneously supplant the monumental Hemingway, all to
the good. He rode into American literary history on the tidal wave of the
“Jewish Decades” of the 1940s and 1950s that breached forever the WASP
hegemony in American letters. By 1976 he had won the Nobel Prize for
Literature, and Ernest was gone.
Herzog (1964), the great masterwork of Bellow’s “middle period,” still
regarded as his magnum opus, is aimed primarily at dispensing once and for
all with European philosophical skepticism and reestablishing the case for
Jewishly nuanced humanism (Boroff, Brodin, Gill, Grady, Hyman, Klein,
Maddocks, Malin, Prescott, Ribalow, Richler and Saporta). Up to this point
in his career Bellow wrestled with the viability of liberal humanism, the lost
transcendent, God, and Modernism. For much of this time he was disaffili-
ated from the Judaism of his childhood, and therefore without the help of tra-
ditional religion. He turned instead to literature, metaphysics, and the social
sciences, only to realize after two decades he had been looking in the wrong
place. By the time he wrote Herzog he was hell bent on holding the feet of the
nay-saying European intellectuals and Western metaphysics to the wicked
and witty fire of his intellect as he thunderously and comically accused
them all of engineering the near moral and spiritual bankruptcy of Western
culture. Bellow’s deadly serious, if comic, de-fanging of such modernist
architects of doom as Nietzsche, Spengler, Freud, Schopenhauer, Heidegger,

187
188 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Sartre, and Camus is now the most written about critical account in 45 years
of literary criticism, with regard to Herzog.

The initial reception

British, European and American critics alike hailed the arrival of Herzog as
a world-class literary achievement, and Bellow himself as the new preemi-
nent American writer. He was immediately placed in the great tradition of
St. Augustine, Milton (Baruch), Sterne, Fielding (Brooks and Hill), Smollett,
Dostoevsky (Chavkin and Wilson), Twain, Flaubert (Weinstein), Tolstoy
(Colbert), Dickens (Wood), Whitman (Van Egmond), Melville (Rose),
Conrad, Lawrence (Rose), Dreiser, Eliot (Pinsker, Poirier and Vogel) and Joyce
(Blufarb, Galloway and Read). Herzog himself was hailed as a modern confes-
sional hero (Axthelm), an essential American Everyman (Walker), a Yiddish
schlemiehl (Shulman), a defeated American Adam (Atkins), a contemporary
picaro (Elgin) and flaneur (Cardon and Dell’Amico). Many recognized the
moral and cultural interrogation of Modernism (Cronin) Bellow was under-
taking, and immediately pegged Herzog as a victim of Western history gone
bad (Aldridge, Bradbury, Cronin, Galloway, Newman, Rovit, Singh) – a
classic Freudian narcissist, a Jewish victim (Bluefarb and Bradbury), failed
romantic (Chavkin and Gerson) and defeated moral philosopher (Cixous).
Additionally, Bellow was hailed for his brilliant wedding of Yiddish linguis-
tic nuances (Wisse), high metaphysical comedy (Read), refusal of Eliotic
Wasteland ideology (Cronin), and apocalyptic nihilism (Bradbury), brilliant
satire on pedantry, and appropriation of the eighteenth-century epistolary
forms (Brooks and Hill) – all served up in spicy Yiddish-inflected American
street language (Bienen). He was even named the penultimate practitioner
of the psychological novel (Cordesse), and the preeminent novelist of the
post-war American city scene (Baumgarten).
Despite the inevitable over-enthusiasm of some early reviews, this picture
of Bellow’s place in the literary canon and Herzog as a world class master-
work has not substantially changed. Critics, long anxious to anoint the
successor to Hemingway, greeted the book as the great summa or odyssey
of Modernism. In it many recognized Bellow’s remarkable achievement in
producing a uniquely urban American voice, compounded of high learning,
everyday wisecracking street speech, and Yiddish intonations that would
hold Anglo-American writers in its thrall for the rest of the century (Amis).
Others saw him producing an updated Leopold Bloom by way of challeng-
ing Joyce’s Ulysses. David Galloway captures the critical consensus best
when he calls the book “a microcosm of the absurd world in which many
modern heroes are compelled to function,” and then adds that in this case
“to the harshness and impersonality of external reality is added an injured
heart,” injured not only by those who have betrayed him, but injured by its
very owner, for “he, Herzog, had committed a sin of some kind against his
 Gloria L. Cronin 189

own heart, whilst in pursuit of a grand synthesis” (Galloway 68). Like the
majority of critics, Galloway resorts to Herzog’s own explanation of how he
had tried to figure out:

What it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a

mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tre-
mendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the
late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and
devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which
made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign
enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery
and barbarism in its own great cities . . . On top of that, an injured heart
and raw gasoline poured on the nerves. (201)

Melvin Maddocks, despite the overwhelming success of the novel and his
own admiration of it, located part of the success of Herzog to its timely
appearance during a hiatus in American literary life in which everyone
eagerly awaited a successor to Hemingway. Looking back he writes:

Since World War II there has been an urgent instinct among US critics
and readers to choose a successor to Hemingway as the champion of
the American novel. The first candidates were the war novelists, and for
a brief period Norman Mailer seemed the logical contender. When he
failed to adapt to what for lack of a better term might be called the civil-
ian novel, there was no major panic. Surely another young novelist was
typing away in obscurity, worthy to emerge and seize the prize. When
no commanding new talent did appear, a certain nervousness became
general. The reputation-makers uneasily marked time by rearranging the
prewar reputations. The orders went out: drop Hemingway to number
two behind Faulkner. Bring Fitzgerald into glamorous contention. Saul
Bellow’s sixth novel is appearing. It is a good novel almost certain to be
overrated. There is every indication that Mr. Bellow is going to be the
next name submitted to the American public as champ, and there is every
possibility that he may last longer than most, before those who overin-
flate take their usual revenge by being the first with the pinpricks. What
“Herzog” may well do in the future is serve as landmark for a change in
posture by the American novelist. No mean achievement. (Maddocks 7)

Regardless of Maddock’s “hiatus” theory and the general circumstances of

American literary history, Bellow’s previous literary achievements substan-
tially helped to position Herzog as a landmark literary event that quickly
impelled the author toward Stockholm and the Nobel Prize in 1976.
Furthermore, the novel remained on the New York Times best-seller list for
the entire year of its publication. To this day it remains not only Bellow’s
190 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

masterwork, but a work which regularly appears in lists of major twentieth-

century American novels.

Three traditional critical narratives

Three major critical narratives have subsequently emerged as the enduring

recurring interpretations of the novel. The first conflated Bellow’s pro-
tagonist and the book with Bellow’s own psychological profile and current
divorce crises. The second and by far the most currently popular critical
narrative detailed Bellow’s penultimate dragon battle with the European
father-philosophers. The third, and by far the most rapidly and recently
developing narrative, has been the biographical/critical story of Bellow’s
hard won recovery of the transcendent, and a semblance of the religion of
his forefathers.

1 Bellow’s marital catastrophe

The earliest set of critics to weigh in on Herzog insisted with Chicago-insider
pride that at the heart of the novel lies Bellow’s profound shock at discov-
ering, a year after his separation from Sondra (Alexandra Tschacbasov), his
second wife, her affair with their mutual friend, Jack Ludwig. Apparently
Bellow had been the last of their circle to know he had been deceived. They
characterized the novel in light of these facts, identified Gersbach as Jack
and Madelaine as Sondra. They insisted further that the novel was the self-
pitying record of Bellow’s deep depression, all tricked out in the form of an
intensely narcissistic and self-justifying hero who was tearful, cuckolded,
and utterly humiliated. Thereafter, as this critical story goes, Moses Herzog is
essentially precipitated into intellectual and spiritual crisis by the failure of
his marriage, failure in the classroom, failure with women, failure to achieve
grand academic synthesis and failure of faith. Then there are his hysterical
letters to God, the long dead, the recent dead, the living, and the modernist
philosophers. Herzog/Bellow they argue has been overcome “by the need to
explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make
amends” (2) and refute the unflattering narcissistic protestant-Freudian
assessment of himself provided by Edvig his analyst. While Bellow certainly
lent a great deal of himself and his current marital miseries to this novel, he
does so in the service of a far greater purpose than to vent and memorialize
his personal humiliation. The journey is an intellectual and spiritual one of
biblical proportions whose biographical details are incidental to their value
as markers of the contemporary masculine condition.

2 Battling with the Modernists

Herzog represented a landmark novel to the majority of critics (Brodin,
Gill, Goran, Klein, Maddocks, Prescott, Pritchett). In it, they have argued
 Gloria L. Cronin 191

for nearly 45 years that Bellow codified for once and for all his passion-
ate defence of embattled twentieth-century humanism, and his powerful
refutation of European modernist nihilism. This dominant and endlessly
elaborated critical narrative shows no sign of being dislodged. While Seize
the Day and Henderson The Rain King (1959) begin to focus Bellow’s intellec-
tual quarrel with Modernism and the social sciences, Herzog (1964) extends
the critique to the entire modern philosophical tradition, and finally to the
book’s major event – Herzog’s escape from such a tradition. As the book
opens Herzog seems to have regained his Jewish identity, purged himself
of violent anger, abandoned his latest mistress, and even repented of his
sexual adventuring, bad fathering, and pathetic dandyism. By now he has
had a profound education in the realities of human nature, rediscovered
nature itself, the heavens, solitude, and the sublime – all on his run-down
Ludeyville estate. After being in constant physical and mental motion for
most of the novel, he is finally seen at rest in a hammock, contemplating
the mystery of the night sky.
However, prior to this he has been precipitated into thoughtfulness
by the failure of his most recent marriage, and appalled at what he calls
the miserable Protestant-Freudian assessment of himself provided by his
analyst, Edvig. Edvig reduced his love for Madelaine to a diagnosis of hys-
terical dependency, and his personality as narcissistic and anachronistic.
He bursts out in a tirade against the “creeping psychoanalysis of ordinary
conduct” (99). From there he goes on to condemn thinkers like Shapiro and
Banowitch who accept psychoanalytical premises and all political power
struggles as paranoid personality theory. Their “curious creepy minds,” he
complains, always work on the premise that “madness always rules the
world: and that mankind resembles a lot of cannibals running around in
packs gibbering, bewailing its own murders, pressing out the living world
as excrement” (77). He complains that Hobbes and Freud have not been
our best benefactors and calls for a moratorium on further academic defini-
tions of humanity which reveal: “A lousy, cringing, grudging conception
of human nature” (58). Thinkers like Dewey and Whitehead he accuses of
concluding that we cannot find happiness within ourselves because we dis-
trust our own natures and take recourse in religion or philosophy. Nietzsche
he indicts for unleashing the Dionysian spirit and calling modern cultural
history a fall from classical greatness. Nietzsche’s ideas, he roars, are no
freer from perversion, nor closer to enlightenment than those with whom
he quarrels. He blames Heidegger for the idea that we have fallen into the
“quotidian” and asks scathingly, “When did this fall occur? Where were we
standing when it happened?” (49) Spengler’s historicism still infuriates him
and he remembers reading in his youth in The Decline of the West (1918)
with its anti-Semitic idea that all Jews are an archaic race of Magians for
whom all heroic and romantic traditions have failed.
192 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Herzog also attacks modern physics with its theories of entropy, as

well as the gloomy forecasts from modern genetics, demography, sociol-
ogy, and statistics. He decries the destructive notion of the biological or
genetic predestination of the Self through logical application of Darwinian
theory of the survival of the fittest. Herzog goes from there to a scathing
examination of Jean Wahl’s theory of de-transcendence, and a condemna-
tion of Rousseau. When he finally comes to the end of his anti-modernist
diatribes he is purged and spent. Only then he is able to turn from failed
metaphysics to the sublime and declare that “the light of the truth is never
far away, and no human being is too negligible or corrupt to come into
it” (314).

3 Reclaiming self and soul

Corollary to this almost standard metaphysical account is the designa-
tion of Herzog as Bellow’s late-life Augustinian spiritual autobiography –
the narrative of Herzog/Bellow’s return from modernist metaphysics to the
religion of his childhood and things of the spirit. Consistent with the
period of the book’s preparation, we know only recently from family
testimony offered after Bellow’s death in 2005 that he had returned by the
late 1950s to the religion of his childhood. He also re-instituted much of
Jewish ritual life at family gatherings. Most look to Bellow’s subsequent
interviews and other personal statements in order to ground this narrative.
It has been significantly added to by his relatives and closest friends, all
of whom are free to comment now he is gone. However, the first public
signal of Bellow’s long spiritual recovery came in 1973 in the classroom
of Professor Sanford Pinsker. Bellow amazed all present by saying, “I think
a person finally emerges from all of this nonsense [modern intellectual
ideas] when he becomes aware his life has a much larger meaning that
he has been ignoring – a transcendent meaning. And that his life is, at its
most serious, some kind of religious enterprise, not one that has to do with
the hurly burly of existence” (Pinsker 96). In 1977 he told interviewer Jo
Brans that he had:

become aware of a conflict between the modern university education

I received and those things that I felt in my soul most deeply. I’ve trusted
those more and more – you see, I’m not even supposed to have a soul.
The soul is out of bounds if you have the sort of education I had. . . .
I read Marx and Bertrand Russell and Morris Cohen. I read the logical
positivists. I read Freud and Adler and the Gestalt psychologists and the
rest. And I know how a modern man is supposed to think. . . . The fact
is there are deeper motives in a human being, which I don’t like to call
Unconscious, because that’s a term preempted by psychoanalysis, but
I say to myself, “I have always behaved in such a way that I cannot
 Gloria L. Cronin 193

escape the conclusion that I believe things I’m not consciously aware of
believing. That I have hopes I can’t justify.” (Brans 142)

He then explained even more compellingly:

There are persistent ideas, the truth of which we recognize when we meet
them in literature. You read Tolstoy – it’s not uncommon that a character
of Tolstoy will hear an inner voice. We all know what it is. We immedi-
ately recognize it. We know the soul of a child speaks to a child. We’ve
experienced it ourselves, only there’s no room for it in the new mental
room we have constructed which is less and less a world and more and
more a prison, it seems to me. (Brans 143)

By 1979, he could tell interviewer Maggie Simmons that “we receive epis-
temological guidance of which we are unaware, and [that] . . . we actually
have infinitely deeper and better ways of knowing than those we’ve been
educated in” (Simmons 167). Like Sisyphus he had first had to roll the rock
of metaphysical despair back up the proverbial ontological mountain, even
if it meant keeping company for a while with three unlikely anthroposo-
phist gurus of the transcendent, Wilhelm Reich, Rudolph Steiner and Owen
Barfield. Though he would eventually plough them under to create his
quixotic, wondrous, comic characters, their romantic theories of a “beyond”
served for a while to carry him through a religious crisis. Tilting at spiritual
windmills with ludic philosophers, meditating on the night sky from his
tatty deck chair, and communing in ancient biblical fashion with owls and
mice, all alone on his Ludeyville estate, was a better game plan to Herzog/
Bellow’s mind than succumbing to “intellectually-engineered European
skepticism”(Brans 142). He then insisted to all family, friends and colleagues
who would listen:

But we know all these [spiritual intuitions] things when people talk to
us about them. Our immortal hopes we know. We understand what they
are. We don’t dismiss them out of hand. And it’s not just ancient super-
stition, it’s because there is some unacknowledged information that we
have. (Brans 143)

In 1984, after having been for a considerable time re-grounded in his own
version of his ancestral religious traditions, he told interviewers Gray,
White, and Nemanic:

My Jewish history gives me an entirely different orientation. The heavens

in all their glory can open up above a ghetto sidewalk, and one doesn’t
need Gothic or Renaissance churches, Harvard University or any of these
places . . . ” (Gray, White and Nemanic 220–1)
194 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

But it was only recently from the vantage point of very advanced age that
Bellow gave his most intimate accounts of his spiritual recovery:

So I suppose you might say that insofar as it is true that there is some
sort of religion working in me . . . I ask myself if it would be dishonorable
to put the thing this way. That is, would it discredit my religious faith,
such as it is, or my artist’s faith? Then there is some connection between
them. (Manea 160)

He then told Manea that he had long ago stopped looking for epistemological
finality:

I stopped arguing with myself about belief in God. It’s not a real ques-
tion. The real question is how I have really felt all these years, and all
these years I have believed in God; so there it is. What are you going to
do about it. (Manea 161)

Speaking specifically of his mid-career anthroposophical and theosophical

novels Bellow explained:

Is there, in fact, any basis for religion other than the persistence of the
supersensible? Science with the aid of modern philosophy – what we
call the positive outlook – has driven the “invisible” into the dark night
where enlightenment says it belongs. Together with it, in our simple-
mindedness, we drive away revelation as well, and with revelation we
drive out art, also we drive out dreaming. (Gray, White and Nemanc 222)

Bellow’s spiritual explorations were not just cranky contrarian intellectual

exercises designed to confound modernist and post-positivist philosophers.
They were positions of belief always spoken openly among friends and fam-
ily. On the occasion of his father’s death in 2005 son Adam Bellow revealed
to the New York Times:

My father believed strongly in the soul – in its powers, its eternity, and
above all its connection with loved ones. He believed that parents and
children were parts of the same soul, and that we are reunited with our
family after death. When he talked about this I used to listen respectfully
and inwardly roll my eyes. Now that he is gone, however, I finally begin
to understand what he was talking about. (Bellow A21)

In 2009, just four years after Bellow’s death, his beloved surrogate son, the
British writer Martin Amis, told the Sunday Telegraph interviewer how he had
once asked Bellow if he believed in an afterlife. Apparently Bellow replied:
“Well, it’s impossible to believe in it because there is no rational ground, . . .
 Gloria L. Cronin 195

But I have a persistent intuition . . . call it love impulses. What I think is

how agreeable it would be to see my mother and my father and my brothers
again, to see my dead’ (qtd in Sanderson 12).
Recalling how early he had made this scarcely popular writerly decision
Bellow told Norman Manea not long before he died: “When I decided
my way in life, I knew that society would be against me. I also knew that
I would win . . . And that it would be a small victory” (Manea 131–211). In
this accounting it would appear that his spiritual quest was always the true
goal of the fiction.
Fellow religious novelist and fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Marilynne
Robinson recognized Bellow’s genius when she wrote on the occasion of
his death: “He was a writer of the highest seriousness. . . . The scale of his
interests, of his meditations, were in the highest traditions” (Robinson 14).
I suspect that in this post postmodern and perhaps post secular moment in
Anglo-American literary history that Herzog will now be revisited by post
secularists who will read it primarily as a watershed mid-twentieth-century
religious text pointing past Modernism, post positivism, and postmodernism
to the post secular moment.

Historic Western masculine dilemmas: a new reading

With these three critical accounts of Herzog in mind, I now wish to turn
attention away from biographical, metaphysical and religious issues back to
the rough ground of social realism and the fraught subject of masculinity
in Bellow’s novels. From the perspective of thirty or more years of feminist
and now masculinist studies of all kinds, I want to argue that masculinity
has been an under reported issue throughout the literary criticism of the
entire Bellow canon. In novel after novel Bellow provides us with amaz-
ingly precise analyses of innumerable American masculine types – gentile,
Jew, immigrant populations, mafioso, underclass, upper class, legal types,
business types, and every occupation imaginable. While his failure to depict
American femininity is a monumental one, the sheer number of masculine
types who speak themselves through Bellow’s texts suggests that masculin-
ity and its American twentieth-century dilemmas interested him greatly as
one of the late twentieth-century’s most important stories. Androcentric
anti-feminist, and even misogynous though they all are, Bellow’s male
protagonists nearly all compel our love, humor and forgiveness – perhaps,
however, with the exception of the significantly less appealing Herzog.
Comic ironic productions all, from Joseph (DM) to Eugene Henderson
(HRK), Charlie Citrine (HG), Kenneth Tractenberg and Uncle Benn Crader
(MDH), we feel for them as they reach for moral seriousness, while endlessly
confronting their failure to parent, husband, sustain male friendships, sus-
tain romantic liaisons, or prevail in erotic encounters. Endlessly bewildered,
damaged, and enraged by turns, they yearn for their families of childhood
196 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

and ultimately fail even to reproduce those. However, Herzog also wrestles
with the equally vexing problem of his conflicted Jewish American sexual
and masculine angst. Working through mental and emotional trauma he
provides us with what Mark Schechner has ironically and colorfully called
“arabesques of lamentation” in which he becomes manic and even “beserk”
(Shechner 121–58). Herzog’s fractured masculinity is of a piece with the well
established late twentieth-century Jewish American preoccupation with the
erotic, with its ubiquitous adulterers, comic schlemiels, eine kliene menschen,
and Jewish obsession with and terror of gentile women. These characters
and themes can be traced in Jewish American literature from I. B. Singer
to Abraham Cahan to Saul Bellow, to Philip Roth, to Woody Allen, Marge
Piercy, Susan Sontag, and more recently Jonathan Safran Foer. In writer after
writer, including Bellow, Jewish male, and gentile female sexual stereotypes
appear, including: the Jewish sexual schlemiel, the Jewish American Princess,
Jewish erotomaniacs, male champions, Portnoy-like mother haters, gentile
haters, female haters, neurotics, sexually perverse Eastern Europeans, shiksa-
obsessed Jewish immigrants. Throughout the entire twentieth- and twenty-
first-century tradition of Jewish American literature the triple issues of
problematic Jewish masculinity, American modernity, and Jewish American
assimilation recur in a near fatal matrix.
From ancient Biblical times to rabbinic culture of the Middle Ages, the era
of the Kabbalah, eighteenth-century Hassidism, nineteeth-century Zionism,
and finally modern American Jewish culture, Eros and its various renuncia-
tions, displacements, sublimations, and liberations have always preoccupied
the architects and caretakers of historic Judaism. In his densely researched
and provocative Eros and the Jews From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America
(1997) David Biale traces what he calls the “dilemmas of desire” that have
resulted from traditional Judaism’s “deep hostility to eroticism and the
body” (Biale 1) and its subsequent encounter with American secular moder-
nity. He talks of modern gentile culture’s fascination with the sexuality of
the Jews, “marked by wildly conflicting beliefs” involving whether or not
Christians have a healthier response to sexuality than do Jews, or vice versa
(Biale 1). Some, he argues, see Judaism as a chaste and therefore ethical reli-
gion, while others see only a counter mythology of sexual prodigiousness.
In their immigrant anxiety to harmonize with American culture America’s
male Jews anguish along the age-old dilemma of pleasure versus procrea-
tion, always beset by the hyper-erotic models of American mass culture
and Hollywood, America’s Jews are inevitably depicted in the national
literature along the axis of the erotic-neurotic. Most of these writers, includ-
ing Bellow, says Biale in chapter 9 “Sexual Stereotypes in American Jewish
Culture (204–30)” reach back for the fin de siècle Hebrew and Yiddish theater
versions of anti-heroic, impotent, luckless sexual schlemiel consumed with
sexual self-doubt, obsessed with gentile women, possessed of an outsized
libido, smitten with guilt, and rarely able to consummate desire. Suffering
 Gloria L. Cronin 197

all of the masochism stemming from the chaste proscriptions of traditional

Judaism, and political impotence instilled during the long Eastern European
experience, they typically appear fumbling, sexually ambivalent, emotion-
ally blocked, easily dominated, cursed with aggressive women, passive, and
erotically inept. Inevitably they are attracted to the exotic, the different in
what amounts to a broken Self–Other dialogue. Or, they are seen transmut-
ing their sexual ineptitude and anxiety into flamboyant consumerism and
dandyish clothing in particular. It is these stereotypes Abraham Cahan,
Woody Allen, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and a host of Jewish comic writers
and novelists are tapping into in all of their works because this comic psy-
chological code is already known to the Jewish readers and consumers of
Jewish literature and comedy.
Herzog becomes, in Bellow’s crafting, the quintessential historical vessel
for all of these troubling Jewish, modern and American masculinities. The
comic or outrageous sexual performance dimensions of Jewish masculinity,
long a staple feature of twentieth-century Jewish American literature, are
not the only ones Bellow is interested in. The compelling and dominant
WASP model of American masculinity, descended from the Classical and
Christian tradition he sees is the equally daunting challenge to the mostly
Eastern European Jew well accustomed to the comic self-ironic identifica-
tion with the Yiddish kliene mensch or the comic stock figure of the luck-
less easily stepped on “little person.” Anglo-American masculinities are, as
Bellow is quite aware, of the descendants of this Classical and Christian
tradition, historically compounded as they are of such types as the pioneer,
explorer, hunter, revolutionary, patriot, warrior, Dionysian, athlete, power-
broker, scientist-engineer, self-made man, and prodigious womanizer – none
of them consistent with Jewish Eastern European masculinity. The philo-
sopher, poet, non-athlete intellectual man of books and ancient worship
does not feature at all in this daunting and distinctively non-Jewish model.
The Classical tradition of heroic masculinity out of which WASP American
masculinities are descended is what postmodern cultural historians call now
the “dominant fiction” of male supremacy – that heroic male who is the
alpha and omega of patriarchal authority, Truth, Reason and Civilization.
This privileged heroic and originally European classical masculinity is an
aesthetic celebration of male beauty that has been the radiating projec-
tion of the male individual transcendent “I” throughout Western and now
American culture. It is the iconic Western masculinity of history painting
and sculpture whose principle purpose is to keep its “feminine” (read also
Jewish) “Other” at bay. It is the linchpin of the system invested with power
and dominance. Such a figure, Greek, Roman, or Christian or American
disqualifies all other masculinities, especially Jewish ones, not to mention
femininity itself, which all represent ontological “lack.” Traditionally it
represented the dominant class, who commissioned, produced, sold, criti-
cized, celebrated and received it. It is a concept of the masculine forged in
198 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

the Western “male imaginary” – that is until about the time of the French
revolution and the simultaneous inception of American history. From that
moment down into American modernity it is a troubled model of masculin-
ity in steady eclipse, and increasingly by its own de-authorization. It is also
in cultural metastasis. From its unified classical model it adapted into mul-
tiple masculinities, including Jewish American, African American, Native
American, Hispanic American, homosexual, metrosexual, transsexual. It
also had to contend with historically altered or historically retrieved femi-
ninities. Herzog is the iconic historical repository of these many troubled
late twentieth-century masculinities and as such Bellow uses him to reflect
masculinity in mid twentieth-century Western and American history. The
epochal change in the late nineteeth-century European Jewish world about
to escape its shtetl, boundaries for America and beyond put Jewish males
into the mainstream WASP American culture where its masculinities were
already in disarray. Post WWII literature provides countless vulnerable anti-
heroes, and a profusion of troubled Jewish males outside of Sam Browne’s
version of WASP America.
Herzog is perhaps the repository of all of these confused models of mas-
culinity, playing behind the luckless “little men” of Bellow’s great novel.
Cuckolded and intellectually defeated, Herzog cannot keep a woman, raise
his child, close the deal with his academic synthesis, cut a heroic figure, use
a gun, or prevail economically. He is by turns whining, outraged, narcissis-
tic, dandyish, orphic, Joblike, infantile, and the emotional “potatoe love”
child of Jews. He might temporarily be seen, at the outset and conclusion of
the novel, as contented and orphically entranced, but only at the expense
of being outcast and alone. He is victim to the classic ancient dichotomy of
religious Judaism and Christianity, sexual or celibate, with its patriarchal sex
for marriage and procreation only, or celibacy model. He is also that quin-
tessential non-synthesis of mobile and inherited contemporary American
masculinities now steadily losing the battle to independent womanhood.
Significantly, all of Herzog’s lovers and relatives, Zinka, Libbie, Daisy, Sono,
Wanda, Ramona and Madelaine, are shrewd and successful ”operators” and
business women. In addition to his historically representative marital intel-
lectual and spiritual condition is his condition as the inheritor of many
masculinities he simply cannot inhabit successfully. Ontologically speaking
Herzog is that moment in twentieth-century literature which now registers
the absence of the no longer the luminescent “I” of earlier Western history a
“lack,” in postmodern terms. He is neither patrician, pioneer, business maven,
sportsman, or man of wealth. Symbolically then, his great synthesis of
Romanticism, at whose center lies that very transcendental “I,” has defeated
him. He is now the absurd, maybe liberated moment of its final absence.
Most indicative of Herzog’s masculine dilemmas are his failed relation-
ships with women. In the tradition of twentieth-century Jewish literature
and comedy he is misogynistic, adolescent, narcissistic, and fascinated with
 Gloria L. Cronin 199

exotic orientals, gentiles, and foreign sexual vampires. As a son Herzog has
misogynistically failed to value his mother and aunts, a failure he is now
trying to correct. Naomi Lutz, his adolescent love, still the subject of his
total adoration, was the only woman who ever made him feel safely within
life. His is still an adolescent, arrested sexuality. All subsequent women have
confused, damaged, and finally overwhelmed him. Herzog writes, “Will
never understand what women want. What do they want? They eat green salad
and drink human blood?” (42). Worked over most recently by an infantilizing
Oriental lover, he next falls prey to an exotic gentile self-styled courtesan,
followed by an aggressive adulterous wife. Finally he is passive and terrified,
having traversed the full distance between the two ancient and enduring
extremes – sexual savant to religious celibate.
Sono, Herzog’s exotic oriental lover, quickly identifies his deep-seated
misogyny and infantile narcissism. She patronizingly tells him he must
come to a woman with the “pride of the peacock, the lust of the goat, the
wrath of the lion and the wisdom of God” (188). It is a confusing array of
elemental non-Jewish sexual stereotypes. While handing him this awful
mythic expectation she is always soaping his feet, massaging his body, sing-
ing to him in the bathtub, and generally playing the oriental courtesan to
his male narcissist and needy infant. Herzog is more than a little disturbed at
having to live up to the dandy, the lustful goat, the primitive lion and God
himself to please Sono’s impossible and ironically biblical sexual fantasies.
He is also disturbed by the cracks in his own fantasy of the oriental lover –
the knowledge that Sono is a savvy war refugee, is possessed of a graveyard
sense of humor, full of gossip and intrigue, who naughtily imitates fat ladies,
and is given to wearing elaborate masking makeup. He never considers her
as a woman and friend, merely as an oriental “lover,” and when she is gone
he never misses her.
Ramona, his recently departed shiksa vampiress, has left him sexually
damaged because of her transparently professional sexual monkeyshines,
pride, anger, excessive rationality, mistrust of emotion, scheming heart,
power plays, competitiveness, tongue-lashings, savagery, and icy rages.
A dominatrix, she renders him passive and emotionally unable to connect
with her romantically. She is first and foremost an American business
woman who fancies herself an exotic Spanish courtesan. To the faltering
Herzog she is the living representation of the deathly erotic gentile woman
who must be both sexually dominated and spiritually evaded. He calls her
a “wily serpent,” and ultimately feels feminized and rendered passive by
this manipulative sexual priestess. Now, many years later, he finally evades
her by writing her a letter of his current healed ecstatic state: “The light of
truth is never far away, and no human being is too negligible or corrupt to
come into it” (314). Herzog represents that historically emblematic waver-
ing figure of the twentieth-century American Jewish male caught between
the impossible and unresolved poles of the erotic gentile temptress and the
200 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

ancient Judeo-Christian religious code of sexual sublimation. Herzog is now

at the far pole of sexual isolation and religious celibacy – for the moment.
Most recently Herzog’s masculinity has taken its final plunge because of
Madelaine, his unfaithful wife, who cuckolds him with his best friend, takes
his child, and complains about his sexual selfishness, his ghetto Jew mental-
ity and his violence. Finally she demands his money. He thinks of her as a
frightening paranoiac, and a destructive, faithless bitch. He recalls that she
hates the ghetto Jew in him so much that she prefers a gimpy gentile man
with a wooden leg to the able-bodied and intellectual but Jewish Herzog.
The final message of these sexual relationships is the ancient historic dichot-
omy – Herzog is a man divided. He can never find sexual and spiritual peace
in the same bed. Wandering across town like the ubiquitous Leopold Bloom,
he finds himself sexually unhinged in the wake of his marital disaster. In the
men’s outfitters he allows a sneering salesman to shamelessly pander to his
damaged midlife pride, and despite his pudgy figure he finds himself buying
clothes that would look absurd on a younger man – further evidence of his
masculine confusion.
Throughout all of Bellow’s novels sexually transgressive Jewish male pro-
tagonists like Herzog attempt to elude, modify, embrace and rarely transcend
their inherited masculinities. As assimilating Jewish male intellectuals, they
still possess a counter-cultural Jewish model of sexual restraint accompanied
by the taboo against gentile women. In contradistinction to the prevailing
WASP Anglo-American male repertoire of masculinities, men like Herzog
are instead simultaneously passive, intuitive, visionary, dreaming, orphic,
and abnormally sexually driven. Having now immersed themselves into
the American masculine narcissism and the romantic tradition of radical
individualism, capitalism, and the whole masculine American experience
from the Puritans to the Cold War, they now also possess self-destructive
and competing WASP codes of masculinity. Their historically Jewish endow-
ment of the tribal, the familial, the poetic, and the spiritual seems to be at
serious odds with modern models. It is this lost Jewish spiritual dimension
of his masculine heritage that Herzog gratefully reclaims in the wilderness
of his Ludeyville estate. Accordingly the book opens with the manic grieving
and unhinged behavior over, and Herzog temporarily at peace, wondering
happily if he has finally lost his mind; his Western rationalism, as the final
arbiter of his masculinity. Lying in a hammock he realizes that when he
“Opened his eyes in the night, the stars were near like spiritual bodies. Fires
of course: gases – minerals, heat, atoms, but eloquent at five in the morning
to a man lying in his hammock, wrapped in his overcoat” (1). The eloquence
of nature is matched equally by his own eloquence in expressing how spir-
itually expressive his natural world has become as he listens to crows and
the barn owls, and walks about observing his garden with new eyes from a
“corner of his mind,” open now to the “external world of transcendental
signification.” He says he “looks keenly at everything but felt half blind”(2).
 Gloria L. Cronin 201

Far from the metaphorical city of gentile destruction, he enters the state of
spiritual dreaming, although one quite removed from Freud’s notions of the
dreaming Unconscious and its roiling unbounded Id. From his life of over-
weaning and preening hypersexuality Herzog now reclaims the realms of
the soul. However, he is still a man divided between head and heart, solitude
and society, sex and celibacy, family and self, the mundane and the mysti-
cal. His temporary peace comes at the cost of aloneness and unresolved,
sexual striving.
Herzog is a massive mea culpa on his acquiescence to traditional American
masculinities, his fathering, selfish marital behaviors, remoteness as a sibling,
and ingratitude as a child. “What he had to suffer, he deserved; he had sinned
long and hard; he had earned it. This was it” (8–9). He has come to the realiza-
tion of his traditional Jewish masculine Other that “There is someone inside
me. I am in his grip. When I speak of him I feel him in my head, pounding for
order. He will ruin me” (11). Furthermore, it is not only these Jewish Fathers
pounding in his head who want to destroy him, it is also the bad Fathers of
European philosophy and the WASP fathers of American masculinity. The
very surfaces of the text reveal his conflicted state – the wild punctuation,
italics, parentheses, switches in point of view, quotations, hysteria, ellipses,
mental asides, prayers, invective, and tearful nostalgic reminiscences.
Thinking of his WASPishly Americanized brother Shura, he notes that he
has “asked for nothing better than to prosper in the belly of the Leviathan
and set a hedonistic example to the community” (78). Herzog prefers instead
“potato love” or Jewish familial sentimentality. Shura is too American,
daunting with his fancy suits, vicűna coat, Italian hats, flashy rings, and lim-
ousines. For him universal concerns or religious intimations are an idiocy.
Shura embodies the worst Dionysian model of excessive Anglo-American
sexuality, sensuality, and material consumption. In contrast Herzog prefers
the old world man of Jewish sensibility and feeling. When his friend Alex
Szathmar gives Herzog an affectionate kiss he feels the old family “potato
love,” followed immediately by a vision of the air around him, and bright
reflections on water which prompt him to say “Praise God – Praise God.”
“His breathing had become freer. His heart was greatly stirred by the open-
ing horizon; the deep colors; the faint iodine pungency of the Atlantic rising
from the weeds and mollusks; the white, fine heavy sand; but principally
by the green transparency as he looked down to the stony bottom webbed
with golden lines” (91). It is a partial rejection of a homophobic masculine
isolation, individualism, and emotional stoicism. Like Natty Bumpo of old
he walks between rotted stumps, moss, fungi, and leaves following a deer
trail. For now he is sustained by silence and calm. He no longer wishes
in hypermasculine fashion to shoot Gersbach, steal June back, or revenge
himself on Madelaine.
Clearly Herzog is an examination of the multiple American masculinities
first-generation assimilating Jewish males have become heir to. But it is also
202 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

a historical reprise of the multiple masculinities the American male of any

ethnic origin is historical heir to at the middle of the twentieth-century.
Adrienne Rich once wrote:

Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we

cannot know ourselves. . . . a radical critique of literature feminist in
impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we
have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our
language has trapped as well as liberated us, and how we can begin to
see – therefore live – afresh. (Rich 18)

The same is true of masculine assumptions, traps, and liberations. Herzog is

that androcentric text which among many other things reveals the impos-
sible construction of Jewish American masculinity, now trying to graft
itself into or evade the remnants of the transcendental “I” of Classical and
Christian culture playing out in contemporary America. Self ironic and
historically aware, the novel enacts and reveals a brilliant taxonomy of
masculine types and styles, each rooted carefully in Bellow’s peculiar brand
of social realism and historical awareness. The historicity of Herzog’s mascu-
line dilemmas, manic self-destructiveness, temporary recovery, and ultimate
non-resolutions are all part of it. Herzog might have temporarily quieted his
soul, but he is yet to find an appropriate sexual relationship and a satisfying
masculinity. His erotics of American twentieth-century Jews and non-Jews
reflects the larger troubled sociological picture of American/Jewish mascu-
line negotiations, and well as the ancient and unresolved Judeo-Christian
one of soul only at the expense of body that haunts modern Judaisms and
Christianities. Herzog, it seems, can only have one at the expense of the
other. Herzog is an American post WWII classic that has by now become per-
manently entrenched in the canon. With his eclectic trademark historicism
Bellow has not only managed to provide a reprise of nay-saying European
metaphysics, but an allegory of the loss of God and the final disappearance
of the transcendental male “I” of Western civilization. As such it is a rich
repository of morphing and troubled American masculinities.

Works cited
Aldridge, John W. “The Complacency of Herzog.” Time to Murder and Create: The
Contemporary Novel in Crisis. New York: McKay, 1966. 133–8. Rpt. in Saul Bellow and
the Critics. Ed. Irving Malin. New York: New York UP, 1967. 207–10.
Aldridge, John W. The Devil and the Fire: Retrospective Essays on American Literature and
Culture 1951–1971. New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1972. 231–4.
Aldridge, John W. Herzog: Text and Criticism. Ed. Irving Howe. Viking Critical Library.
New York: Viking, 1976. 440–4.
 Gloria L. Cronin 203

Amis, Martin. “Author of Yellow Dog talks with Robert Birnbaum.” Identity Theory
(2003), 8 December.
Atkins, Anselm. “The Moderate Optimism of Saul Bellow’s Herzog.” Personalist 50.1
(1969): 117–29.
Axthelm, Peter M. “The Full Perception: Saul Bellow.” The Modern Confessional Novel.
New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1967. 128–79.
Baruch, Franklin R. “Bellow and Milton: Professor Herzog in his Garden.” Critique 9.3
(1967): 74–83.
Baumgarten, Murray. “Herzog and ‘Dignity’: Clown and Columbina in the Modern
City.” Rereading Texts/Rethinking Critical Suppositions: Essays in Honor of H. M. Delshi.
Ed. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Leona Toker, and Sholi Barzilai. Frankfurt: New York:
Lang, 1997. 227–45.
Bellow, Adam. “Missing: My Father.” New York Times June 10. 2005: A 21, Late Edition.
Bellow, Saul. Herzog. New York: Viking Press, 1964.
Biale, David. Eros and the Jews From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1997.
Bienen, Leigh Buchanan. “New American Fiction: Review of Herzog.” Transition:
A Journal of the Arts, Culture and Society 5.20 (1965): 46–51.
Bluefarb, Sam. “The Middle-Aged Man in Contemporary Literature: Bloom to
Herzog.” College Language Association Journal 20.1 (1976): 1–13.
Boroff, David. “Mr. Bellow Achieves His ‘Breakthrough.’” National Observer 5 Oct. 1964: 18.
Bradbury, Malcolm. “Saul Bellow’s Herzog.” Critical Quarterly 7.3 (1965): 269–78.
Brans, Jo. “Common Needs, Common Preoccupations: An Interview with Saul
Bellow.” Conversations with Saul Bellow. Eds. Gloria L. Cronin and Ben Siegel.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. 140–60.
Brodin, Pierre. “La litterature americaine.” Liberte [Montreal] Nov.–Dec. 1964: 480–3
Brooks, Phillips V. “Herzog’s Letters to Sanity.” Bulletin of the West Virginia Association
of College English Teachers 15 (Fall 1993): 31–8.
Cardon, Lauren. “Herzog as ‘Survival Literature’.” Saul Bellow Journal 20.2 (2004):
85–108.
Chavkin, Allan. “Be!low’s Alternative to the Wasteland: Romantic Theme and Form in
Herzog.” Studies in the Novel 11.3 (1979): 326–37.
Cixous, Helene. “Situation de Saul Bellow.” Les Lettres Nouvelles 58 (Mar.–Apr. 1967):
130–45.
Colbert, Robert E. “Satiric Vision in Herzog.” Studies in Contemporary Satire 5 (1978):
22–33.
Cordesse, Gerard. “L’Unite de Herzog.” Caliban 7 (1970): 99–113.
Cronin, Gloria L. “Herzog: The Purgation of Twentieth Century Consciousness.”
Interpretations: A Journal of Ideas, Analysis and Criticism 16.1 (1985): 8–20.
Dell’Amico Carol. “Herzog/Sammler: On the Ethics of Form and Self.” Saul Bellow
Journal. 21.1–2 (2005–06): 19–27.
Elgin, Don D. “Order Out of Chaos: Bellow’s Use of the Picaresque in Herzog.” Saul
Bellow Journal 3.2 (1984): 1322.
Galloway, David. “Moses-Bloom-Herzog: Bellow’s Everyman.” Southern Review 2.1
(1966): 61–76.
Gerson, Steven M. “Paradise Sought: The Modern American Adam in Bellow’s Herzog.”
McNeese Review 24 (1977–78): 50–7.
Gill, Brendan. “Surprised by Joy.” New Yorker 3 Oct. 1964: 218, 221–2.
Goran, Lester. “Saul Bellow Makes It to the Top.” Chicago Sunday Tribune Books Today
20 Sept. 1964: 1.
204 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Grady, R. T., and S. J. Grady. Best Sellers I Nov. 1964: 309.

Gray, Rockwell, Harry White, and Gerald Nemanic. “Interview with Saul Bellow.”
Conversations with Saul Bellow. Eds. Gloria L. Cronin and Ben Siegel. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1994. 199–222.
Hill, John S. “The Letters of Moses Herzog: A Symbolic Mirror.” Studies in the
Humanities 2.2 (1971): 40–5.
Hyman, Stanley Edgar. “Saul Bellow’s Glittering Eye.” New Leader 28 Sept. 1964:
16–17.
Klein, Marcus. “Holy Moses.” Reporter 22 Oct. 1964: 53–4.
Maddocks, Melvin. “Saul Bellow? New Champ?” Christian Science Monitor 24 Sept.
1964: 7.
Malin, Irving. “Herzog, the Jew.” Reconstructionist 16 Oct. 1964: 28–30.
Manea, Norman. “Saul Bellow: ‘Before I Go’,” Salmagundi 115 (2007): 131–211.
Newman, Judie. “Herzog: History as Neurosis.” Delta 19 (1984): 131–53.
Pinsker, Sanford. “Moses Herzog and the Modern Wasteland.” Reconstructionist 20 Dec.
1968: 20–6.
Pinsker, Sandford. “Saul Bellow in the Classroom.” Conversations With Saul Bellow.
Eds. Gloria L. Cronin and Ben Siegel. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994:
93–103.
Poirier, Richard. “Bellows to Herzog.” Partisan Review 32.2 (1965): 264–71. Rpt. as
“Herzog, or Bellow in Trouble.” Saul Bellow: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Earl
Rovit. Twentieth Century Views. Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1975. 81–9.
Prescott, Orville. “A Strange, Brilliant, New Bellow Novel.” San Francisco Sunday
Chronicle This World Magazine 27 Sept. 1964: 39.
Pritchett, V. S. “King Saul.” New York Review of Books 22 Oct. 1964: 4–5.
Read, Forrest. “Notes, Reviews, and Speculations.” Rev. of Herzog.” Epoch 14.1 (1964):
81–96. Rpt. Saul Bellow and the Critics. Ed. Irving Malin. New York: New York UP,
1967. 184–206.
Read, Forrest. Herzog: Text and Criticism. Ed. Irving Howe. Viking Critical Library.
New York: Viking, 1976. 416–39.
Ribalow, Harold U. “The Woes of Herzog.” Congress Bi-Weekly 18 Jan. 1965: 14.
Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision.” College English 34.1
(1972): 18–30.
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Entertainment Weekly, April 15 2005: 14.
Rose, W. K. “The Suffering Joker.” Shenandoah 16.2 (1965): 55–8.
Rovit, Earl. “Bellow in Occupancy.” American Scholar 34.2 (1965): 292, 94, 96, 98. Rpt.
in Saul Bellow and the Critics. Ed. Irving Malin. New York: New York UP, 1967. 177–83.
Sanderson, Mark. “The Literary Life Bestsellers of the Week.” Sunday Telegraph, April
10 2005: 12.
Saporta, Par Marc. “Un roman d’antiamour.” Preuves Nov. 1965: 88–9.
Schechner, Mark. After the Revolution: Studies in the Contemporary Jewish American
Imagination. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 1987: 121–58.
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in Herzog: Text and Criticism. Ed. Irving Howe. Viking Critical Library. New York:
Viking, 1976. 489–509.
Simmons, Maggie. “Free To Feel: Conversation With Saul Bellow.” Conversations
with Saul Bellow. Eds. Gloria L. Cronin and Ben Siegel. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi. 1994. 161–70.
 Gloria L. Cronin 205

Singh, Autor. “Problem of Self in Saul Bellow’s Herzog.” Indian Scholar 2.2 (1980):
49–59.
Van Egmond, Peter G. “Herzog’s Quotation of Walt Whitman.” Walt Whitman Review
13.2 (1967): 54–6.
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44–50.
Walker, Marshall. “Herzog: The Professor as Drop-Out?” English Studies in Africa 15.1
(1972): 39–51.
Weinstein, Norman. “Herzog, Order and Entropy.” English Studies 54.4 (1973): 336–46.
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Biblically English.” Times Literary Supplement (5 Aug 2005): 12–13.
14
Beyond Postmodernism in Alasdair
Gray’s Lanark
Claire Allen

The year 2014 marked the eightieth birthday of Alasdair Gray, “one of
Scotland’s foremost writers and now widely seen as the grand old man
behind the recent Scottish literary and cultural revival”1 (Dietmar Böhnke, 1).
The time span of Gray’s work has seen many changes in both the cultural
and political identity of Scotland, such as the Scottish parliament gaining
independence from London (1999), as well as a great rise in the success
(both literary and commercial) of the country’s younger writers, including
James Kelman, Irvine Welsh and A. L. Kennedy, to name but a few. This
chapter hopes to contribute towards rereading the canon by revisiting one
of Gray’s most famous novels, Lanark (1981) just over thirty years after its
first publication, in order to investigate Gray’s postmodern experimental
techniques from a twenty-first century perspective and to consider Lanark
in light of developments within critical and theoretical approaches to
postmodernism.
Within Gray’s body of work we have a unique, even eccentric, approach
to writing. Gray’s style defies easy categorisation or even summary, as many
critics have pointed out, including Robert Crawford, Thom Nairn, Phil
Moores, and Dietmar Böhnke. Moores’ summary of Gray’s work highlights
the many contradictions within his style, aligning Gray with realism and
modernism, referring to him as “redoubtably modernist” (xi), whilst noting
that he is a writer of fantasy of the postmodern. Böhnke, however, suggests
that Gray has “established a reputation as an experimental, ‘postmodern’
writer” (1). As Moores’ analysis and the inverted commas around Böhnke’s
definition suggest, the postmodernism of Gray’s writing is somewhat a con-
tentious issue. Böhnke notes Gray “freely mixes realism with fantasy, social
and political commentary with parody and playfulness, local concerns with
universal issues, humour and irony with a serious message” (1) highlighting
how there are many aspects to Gray’s writing which need to be carefully
considered. What is clear is the need to avoid any simplified analysis of
Lanark, as Böhnke suggests, and to recognise “the importance of complexity,
pluralism and difference, even contradiction; the necessity to be aware of
206
 Claire Allen 207

‘shades of grey’ as opposed to black and white explanations, and to eschew

monolithic/hegemonic ‘discourses’” (2).
Fellow novelist Jonathan Coe similarly highlights how, despite its use
of experimental narrative devices, and the many features which can be
aligned with postmodernism, we can also read Gray’s text as being akin to
many classic pieces of literature as Gray’s work is not so alien as first appear-
ances may suggest, and in fact draws on a traceable history of texts which
approach a kind of metafctional quality as a means of making comment on
the political and philosophical state of man. Coe positions Gray within a
tradition that predates twentieth-century postmodernism: “Alasdair Gray
found a way of reconciling all the strongest virtues of classic fiction” (65).
Though for Coe there remains also an association with postmodernism
through the manner in which Gray draws on the literary past, “with a thor-
oughly self-questioning and (damn! just when I thought we’d managed to
avoid the word) postmodern sensibility” (65). Coe’s curse here reinforces
how difficult it is to firmly locate Gray’s work, as, although he finally con-
cedes and uses the term postmodern, it is clearly a complex issue for him to
evoke a term that he feels is a half-truth, which (whether intentionally or
not) hides or masks a longer history.
Coe’s difficulties with a reading of Lanark that situates it solely within the
postmodern are clearly not unfounded. The novel expresses concerns about
artistic endeavor and identity which are comparable to those articulated by
Frederick Jameson as being endemic to the postmodern era (15). However,
within Lanark, such techniques can be read beyond a simple assertion of
the consequences of a postmodern fragmented identity; they can also be
aligned specifically to a working class Scottish identity. The character of
Thaw (a working class Glaswegian) is battling to try to achieve an identity as
an artist, but Gray expresses this quest through the dual narratives of Thaw/
Lanark, rather than more realist, conventional means. We can read Thaw/
Lanark’s struggles in relation to geographic and class positioning, as Gray
reflects: “Young artists couldn’t make a living by painting easel or murals
in 1950s Scotland. Nearly all art students became teachers, apart from a
few who got into industry or advertising or became housewives. I supposed
I would have to survive by some kind of compromise like that, but I had no
intention of letting Thaw do so” (Gray, ‘Tailpiece’ 569).
Heeding the warnings issued above, this chapter aims to keep in mind the
specifically and carefully located geographical and class aspects of Gray’s novel,
which, although transcended by the dual quests of the two protagonists – the
eponymous Lanark and Thaw – never fully allow for a non-essentialized read-
ing of the characters’ identities, and thereby compromise the novel’s status as
a truly postmodern text. Thus, in this chapter I do not attempt any kind of re-
classification of Gray’s work. However I do reconsider the various postmodern
aspects of Lanark and to think about Gray’s techniques in light of the discus-
sions surrounding postmodernism which have developed over the last thirty
208 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

years. There are of course an entire plethora of definitions of postmodernism

in terms of theory as well as application to text. I wish to consider Gray’s post-
modern techniques from the perspective which seems to have been gaining
much ground in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, that
is the notion of moving beyond postmodernism’s early, sometimes referred
to as ‘vulgar’2 stage. This theoretical approach is yet to be aptly named, with
terms such as ‘second phase’, ‘beyond’ or ‘post-postmodernism’ being sug-
gested.3 As such I hope to build on Böhnke’s approach to Gray’s work, which
argues that “the distinction of different “postmodernisms” as opposed to one
monolithic system of postmodernism is surely preferable” (26–7).
Postmodernism and post-structuralist trends in critical theory have often
been thought to problematize conceptions of individual and social identity.
Postmodernism has dominated much critical thinking since the middle of
the last century and is a term which by its very nature defies easy defini-
tion. Fredric Jameson makes such a point about the elusive nature of a single
definition of postmodernism in Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (1991): “The problem of postmodernism – how its fundamental
characteristics are to be described, whether it even exists in the first place,
whether the very concept is of any use, or is, on the contrary a mystification –
this problem is at one and the same time an aesthetic and a political one” (55).
Gray’s work has often been classified as postmodern, and it is easy to see why.
Lanark opens with book three, immediately disrupting readers’ notions of
time and place, challenging realist conceptions of temporality. Within Gray’s
work both writing and reading practices are bought into question, narrative
is interrupted by the author, we are presented with a list of plagiarism, and
there are many typographical abnormalities with several story lines running
at once on the same page. However, as Phil Moores suggests, it is far too
simplistic to directly align Gray’s work with postmodern experimentation:

The ease with which Gray plays with the form of the book and the
novel, while never experimenting for the mere sake of it, is impressive;
typographical games, mock erratum slips, an index of plagiarisms and
professorial notation all engage the reader in an interchange, sometimes
playful, sometimes dramatic, but without ever distancing them from the
emotional story they are being told. (Moores, x)

Gray himself is openly skeptical about postmodernism. In a letter to Böhnke

(Shades of Gray) he notes the innate problems of definition: “All postmod-
ernist debates and criticism I have encountered devoted so much energy
to defining what postmodernism was that they had no time to illuminate
anything else” (250). This is perhaps one of the key areas in need of explora-
tion, as opposed to simply defining postmodernism, Grey urges his readers
to consider more than just the definition of a term, instead he asks us to
think about the contexts and pretexts of that which we call postmodernism.
 Claire Allen 209

Nick Bentley, in British Fiction of the 1990s (2005), charts postmodernism’s

development from “the first phase [which] corresponds roughly to the 1960s
and 1970s” to a second phase in the 1980s (4). In particular Bentley suggests
that the later phase questions “the liberatory potential of postmodernism’s
skepticism towards ‘grand narratives’” (4). Postmodernism in its first wave,
in part, represents a democratization of culture because the centre is chal-
lenged along with the idea of “absolute truths”.4 However, Bentley notes a
growing skepticism about postmodernism towards the end of the twentieth
century among literary and cultural theorists such as Fredric Jameson, bell
hooks, Seyla Benhabib, John O’Neil, and Terry Eagleton. bell hooks notes in
‘Postmodern Blackness’ (1994) how a complete rejection of dominant forms
in the new celebration of “difference” (that postmodernism in part embarks
on) can have complicated consequences for those previously marginalized.5
“Post-postmodernism” and “second wave” postmodernism are terms which
have only recently come into usage within literary criticism and are still very
much in the process of being developed and argued over, such as in the work
of Gavin Keulks (‘W(h)ither Postmodernism’ 2006 and ‘Winterson’s Recent
Work: Narrating Realism and Postmodernism’, 2007), Garry Potter and José
López (After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism, 2001) and Klaus
Stierstorfer (ed.) (Beyond Postmodernism: Reassessment in Literature, Theory,
and Culture, 2003). Attempts at defining the post-postmodern are as equally
contentious and difficult as attempts to define its predecessor. One meaning-
ful theme recurrent within these attempts is the notion that trust, dialogue,
performance or sincerity can work to transcend postmodern irony. Raoul
Eshelman offers such a definition in Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism
(2008). It is such a desire to move beyond postmodern irony and reengage
with more “classical” processes of storytelling, yet maintaining the desire to
express the marginal or previously subjugated which is beginning to emerge
as a definition for late twentieth and early twenty-first century literature.
There is a discernible trend among contemporary authors, such as Martin
Amis, Jeanette Winterson, Andrea Levy and Sarah Waters (to name but a
few) to use narrative, storytelling techniques and characterization that can
be interpreted as a significant move away from the narrative and stylistic
experimentalism of what Böhnke refers to as postmodernism’s ‘vulgar’ and
nihilistic phase (46). Can we read Gray’s work as having elements akin to
post-postmodernism as well as the postmodern? Although problematic, due
to the many experimental narrative devices within the text – such as the
non-linear ordering of the novel, as Randall Stevenson elucidates, Gray’s
work has an interesting relationship with postmodernist experimentalism,
as Stevenson begins to align Gray with the post-postmodern due to an
essential attitude and overt polemic which is expressed within his work:

[T]he playful list of references and plagiarisms in the Epilogue is almost

superfluous – though as Gray explains, it does function as a timely, if partial
210 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

deflection of criticism, making a virtue, or a joke, of necessity. It also shows

Gray highly self-conscious about using self-conscious forms of fiction:
postmodernism, once largely directed by the urge to parody and subvert
conventional forms of writing, becomes in its turn a recognized, accepted
form to be parodied and played with itself. Perhaps this makes Gray a post-
postmodernist, though that might really be a term to puzzle him. (55–6)

Even though thinking beyond the postmodern here is presented in a some-

what jovial manner, something to “puzzle” Gray; we can start to think about
Lanark in terms beyond a postmodern pastiche and sense of depthlessness.
Stevenson notes there is a self-conscious and satirical element within Gray’s
text which problematizes any ‘straight forward’ reading. In order to fully
explore the question of the types of postmodernism within Lanark we must
first identify the ostensibly postmodern elements of the novel.
In Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1984), Jameson
raises issues of personal and national identity, suggesting that the cre-
ation of modes of identity is closely linked with society and the world we
experience around us (Postmodernism, 26), thus rejecting the modernist
standpoint that suggests that the ‘self’ can be thought of as essential or
timeless. Instead Jameson suggests a more fluid, fragmented structure. Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Trans v.I 1977,
v.II, 1987) likewise highlight how the individual has become disentangled
from the “modernist notion of the unified, rational and expressive subject”
which is substituted by “a postmodern subjectivity which is decentered,
liberated from fixed identities and free to become dispersed and multiple”
(summarized by Tim Woods, 1999, 32).
The destablizing of the temporal unification that would constitute a nar-
rative of personal identity is textualised within Lanark, in which the past
and the present are often contestable ground, fought over by the figures
within the novel. The novel opens with the character Lanark immediately
being displaced by his unexpected and unexplained existence in Unthank,
as the circumstances of his existence, arrival and purpose elude him. Lanark
attempts placement through his desperate search for sunlight in order to
achieve an idea of time and thus create a past, present and future, and there-
fore a sense of who he is and what he is doing:

“But why do you like daylight? We’re well lit by the usual means.”
“I can measure time with it. I’ve counted thirty days since coming
here, maybe I’ve missed a few by sleeping or drinking coffee, but when
I remember something I can say, ‘It happened two days ago’, or ten, or
twenty. This gives my life a feeling of order.” (Lanark, 5)

But this attempt at understanding and constructing a positive single identity

with a ‘feeling of order’, is quickly flawed as Unthank’s surreal dark skies
 Claire Allen 211

offer only glimpses of sunlight, with conventional realities of sunlight and

dawn exhibiting almost alien status:

“Can’t you see it? Can’t you see that . . . what’s the word? There was
once a special word for it . . . ”
Rima looked in the direction of his forefinger and said coldly,
“Are you talking about the light in the sky?”
“Dawn. That’s what it was called. Dawn.” (11)

The problematized concepts of identity presented by Lanark seem to reflect a

postmodern critical position as established by Jameson, Deleuze and Guattari.
The novel is clearly not depicted within the usual realist time frame, denying
the reader the opportunity to draw upon the characters’ past and present,
making the readers’ understanding of the characters problematic as conven-
tional methods are denied. This reflects the fragmentation which Jameson
identifies as a symptom of postmodern culture in which history and the past
have been rejected and meaning becomes fractured. However, even though
the order which each book appears does not follow a conventional linear
structure and the narrative is often interrupted by other voices,6 the story
of Lanark is not presented as “heaps of fragments”, thus an alternative read-
ing to postmodern alienation can be read into this device. There are clear
hints that the fragments of the novel are not as unrelated as they may at
first appear. The oppositional worlds of fantasy and ‘realism’ clearly contain
the potential to become one and/or the same. There are several instances in
which the same character seems to appear in the book multiple times with dif-
ferent names. The most obvious example of this being Lanark/Thaw, there are
several similarities that suggest parity between these characters: the possibly
interchangable eczema for dragonhide; Thaw imagines that food is human
flesh, and Lanark experiences this as a reality within the institute. In addition
to these tangible points of convergence there is a general feeling of déjà vu
for the reader as the events within the two worlds also take on striking simi-
larities: the questioning of time in Unthank is echoed in Glasgow – whereas
Unthank has no clocks in Glasgow Thaw is told of time’s unreliability: “None
of the clocks in this house can be relied on, least of all the ones that go” (273).
Yet, just because there are fantastical elements, this of course does not
innately mean that the text can not be postmodern. The fantasy elements
may be reflecting the schizophrenic nature of ‘self’ in the postmodern
world. Malcolm Bradbury suggests the use of two worlds has become a
prevalent device for the postmodern writer due to the confused state of past
and present: “The laws of time and space were altering too. Life seemed lived
between two worlds, the dying world of the old and the shapeless world of
the new” (The Modern British Novel, 1994, 456). This appears to be partly
what Gray offers as Glasgow seems to be dying, there is no hope for the
young, such as Coulter who believes he is becoming part of the machinery
212 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

in the work place: “You stop thinking. Life becomes a habit. You get up,
dress, eat, go out tae work, clock in etcetera etcetera automatically, and think
about nothing but the pay packet on Friday and the booze-up last Saturday.
Life’s easy when you’re a robot” (216). The prospects for Thaw appear even
worse, as he eventually commits suicide. A similar sense of doom pervades
Unthank, which remains a forever disjointed and surreal world, in which
systems of order are forever being developed and then proven to be flawed
and abandoned.
Through the creation of two worlds, Gray offers the reader different ways
of understanding the same events. Such a concept clearly raises issues of
identity, highlighting its problematic and unstable nature, as if there are
multiple ways of seeing things, then how can one, true, stable ‘self’ ever
be identified? Thus Gray highlights in his text the problematic nature of
existence and the creation of identity in a seemingly postmodern manner.
However, this is not the sole interpretation of such a strategy on offer. Gray’s
experimental narrative techniques also have the effect of reinforcing the
political aspects of his work. Lanark is clearly a vehicle for Gray’s political
endeavor and socialist, anti-capitalist politics, in which, the fantastical and
postmodern elements further his political statements, giving them greater
impact than previous, less experimental writing. Stevenson notes the com-
parison between Gray’s work and that of D. H. Lawrence, but highlights how
Gray’s concerns about the exploitation of people are expressed more overtly
through the fantastical elements in his texts:

Gray, throughout Lanark, concerns himself with what is only a later,

expanded version of the industrialized capitalism which horrified [D. H.]
Lawrence7 [ . . . ] Lanark expands these possibilities still further, into
nightmare and fantasy. Technology enables ‘the creature’ – ‘a conspiracy
which owns and manipulates everything for profit [Lanark, 410] to make
entirely literal what used to be only metaphors of commodification and
consumption: men and women, in the institute, are actually turned into
food and eaten. (51)

The abuse and use of people to fuel the system is clearly a critique of a
capitalist endeavor in which the many are exploited by the few.8 Thus, we
can see socialist ideologies within Gray’s technique of blurring the bound-
ary between fantasy and reality. Such blurring, along with the repetition
between the two worlds can therefore be read not only as a postmodern
reaction to a fragmented world, but as also having a political impetus (a
point which I will explore in more detail below). However, in order to
explore this fully we must further investigate the fantastical elements of the
novel and situate them in relation to Gray’s particular postmodern politics.
Within the late twentieth century, we can chart a rise in postmodernism
alongside a rise in fantasy and sci-fi writing. If we can understand that in a
 Claire Allen 213

postmodern world, as described by Lyotard, Baudrillard and Jameson, lan-

guage has become detached from a secure representative function, as the
writing of Ferdinand Saussure proposes (1916), showing signifier and signi-
fied, world and word related only arbitrarily; that ‘time has exploded’ as Italo
Calvino (If on a Winter’s Night, 1982) suggests; and that reality is a fiction –
then we can see some parallels between postmodernism and sci-fi and fan-
tasy. Stevenson notes: “If reality cannot be wholly known, nor language any
longer conceived as tightly connected to it, why should not words be used
to create other worlds?” (57). Brian McHale furthers the discussion of the
association between sci-fi and postmodernism suggesting “the two ontologi-
cal sister genres, science fiction and postmodernist fiction, have been pursu-
ing analogous but independent courses of development . . . along parallel
but independent tracks” (65, quoted by Stevenson, 57). The blurring of the
distinction between sci-fi and postmodernism is a common trend within
the work of late twentieth-century writers such as Christopher Priest, Doris
Lessing and Angela Cater, and as Stevenson notes, such a grouping offers an
apt location for Gray’s text: “it is really in this recent context of combined
science fiction and postmodernist forms that Lanark belongs” (57).
We can see how the fantastical elements within Gray’s work, such as the
‘machine’ the oracle describes in Book Three, that processes human flesh
into energy, is acting as a metaphor for Gray’s critique of society’s exploita-
tion of each other, as the repeated phrase “Man is the pie that bakes and eats
himself” (101) exemplifies. Thus the eponymous Lanark enters into a fantas-
tical dystopia which exaggerates all of the horrors faced by Thaw. Stevenson
highlights how the fantasy world Lanark is part of works to ‘make large’ the
socio-political critique of the ‘reality’ of late twentieth-century working class
Scotland experienced by Thaw: “Fantasy is nevertheless very particularly
used by Gray, not as an escape but as satire [ . . . ] Gray’s dystopian vision
uses fantasy to enlarge and make objective some of the problems of this
history, emphasizing how urgently they need to be addressed” (Stevenson,
57). Thus, fantasy is used alongside social realism to foreground the harsh
realities of working class existence. The Oracle’s comments at the end of
Book Three: “it is like all machines, it profits those who own it, and nowa-
days many sections are owned by gentle, powerless people who don’t know
they are cannibals and wouldn’t believe if you told them” (102) reinforce
this so strongly because these words so closely echo Coulter’s experience of
working in a factory, in which his life is metaphorically ‘eaten up’ by the
capitalist ‘machine’ of his workplace, as his social situation has caused him
to “stop thinking” and barely exist (216).
The satirical elements of the text and the use of parody problematize locat-
ing the text within postmodernism’s first phase. Jameson describes a lack of
authorial identity within postmodern style, famously quoting the work of
Andy Warhol, in particular the replication of soup can labels. Jameson sug-
gests the artistic necessity for unique talent to produce something original
214 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

in the postmodern era has faded – and thus too has the ability for parody. He
suggests that it is pastiche which gains prominence as this involves a simpler
copying of styles, rather than parody, which requires a deeper understand-
ing of the past. Yet Lanark offers a socio-political critique, with the repetition
of events across two worlds foregrounding a sense of history and the past. It
is difficult to read the text as pastiche, but rather the fragments of the novel
work together to create a satire of contemporary life.
J. A. Cuddon highlights how European literature’s relationship with satire
has long had a polemic facet: “The satirist is thus a kind of self-appointed
guardian of standards and truths; of moral as well as aesthetic values” (780)
noting that those associated with the “golden age of satire” did not lay
challenges for the mere sake of the challenge, but rather were looking for
change:

We find Pope satirizing materialism, excess and bad writing, Swift fero-
ciously attacking hypocrisy, pride, cruelty and political expedience.
Voltaire ridiculing credulity, religious humbug and native optimism, and
Dr Johnson, with somber magnificence, arraigning the world of folly,
vanity and affectation. With their moral weight and unblinking scru-
pulosity of truth, such men sought to be the cleansers and guardians of
civilization. (Cuddon, 783)

These accounts of satire offer an appropriate reading of Lanark. Gray’s text

is not just to shock or describe postmodern alienation, but rather has a clear
polemic strategy. Lanark was published just after Margaret Thatcher became
Prime Minister in 1979, a time during which the gap between the richest and
poorest in society was ever growing, when capitalism and the free-market
were expanding, but there are limited opportunities for Thaw and his child-
hood friends. They become meaningless cogs in the machine, or “robots”
(216) in a system Thaw does not want to be part of: “I had to read poetry and
hear music and study philosophy and write and draw and paint” (211). He
feels alien because of his love of the arts and isolated from those around him
as society is not set up for him to function within it: “They think you can be
an artist in your spare time, though nobody expects you to be a spare-time
dustman, engineer, lawyer or brain surgeon” (211). Even those trying to help
him do not quite understand, such as the suggestion by his old headmaster
to work towards becoming a librarian, to Thaw “sounds hellishly like Heaven,
or a thousand pounds in the bank, or a cottage with roses round the door, or
the other imaginary carrots that human donkeys are shown to entice them
into all kinds of nasty muck” (211). Seemingly, Thaw is as trapped as his
friends, even though he chooses art school over factory work, he similarly
has nowhere to go, rejecting all the ‘carrots’ he sees in front of him, because
he believes they will only lead to a compromise and not result in the life he
craves, but simply perpetuate the ‘muck’ of existence. Thaw and his friends
are aware of the injustice which surrounds them as they struggle through
 Claire Allen 215

their working class existence, whilst others prosper, as Coulter recalls: “the
sight of Duke set me back a good three weeks. I have nae recovered from it
yet. Why should he be enjoying a dram in a comfortable train while I . . .
ach!” (216). Both Thaw and Lanark are aware of the power of beautiful things,
such as music and poetry as well as the value of such things beyond capitalist
materialism: “not the wealthy in coins and banknotes – that sort of wealth is
only coloured beads to keep the makers servile. The owners and manipulators
have smarter ways of banking energy. They pay themselves with time: time
to think and plan, time to examine necessity from a distance” (Lanark, 410).
Lanark knows what is really important, just as Thaw knows that it is time
that is most precious to him. Both reach a kind of personal epiphany that
encompasses but also surpasses the politics of the movement.
Gray’s “personal philosophy” (Böhnke, 245) is one of the most significant
aspects of his work, on a par with the postmodern, nationalist and science-
fiction elements. However, as Böhnke notes: “while the ‘postmodern’ qual-
ity of his writing (in several respects) has been established, this philosophy
seems to sit more uneasily with the concept” (245). Böhnke highlights that
“there is a strong association of postmodernism with the left, although its
relation to Marxism is ambiguous” (32), further highlighting how many neo
(Marxist) critics, including Jameson are “ambiguous about” postmodernism,
or even hostile towards it (especially Terry Eagleton), noting how: “Laurence
Cahoone specifically links the decline of Marxism to the rise of postmodern-
ism and calls the latter ‘a waywood stepchild of Marxism’” (33). Therefore
when defining Gray’s postmodernism the political aspects and socio-
cultural positioning of his text need to be considered. The Marxist elements
in his work do not have to be antithetical to a postmodern reading, as there
are clearly different political approaches within postmodernism and not all
postmodern thinkers reject metanarratives such as political ideology.9 A full
critique and analysis of the experimental devices within Lanark is required,
reinforcing Moores’ point (quoted above) that the techniques used by Gray
can be read beyond superficial play.
At one point in the novel a young Thaw tries to explain a drawing that he
has just completed to his father, but this is very different to the intepreta-
tion offered by the third person omniscient narrator:

He drew a giant with a captured princess running along the brown line,
and since he couldn’t draw the princess lovely enough he showed the
giant holding a sack. The princess was in the sack. His father looked over
his shoulder and said, “What’s that you’re drawing?”
Thaw said uneasily, “A miller running to the mill with a bag of corn”. (122)

Thaw’s alienation from those around him is highlighted here; from a very
young age he feels the need to lie to his father about his artistic fantasies,
thus furthering Gray’s engagement with expressing the difficulties for
an artist growing up in a working class community. However, the above
216 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

scenario also draws attention to the pragmatic difficulties of representation,

as Thaw acknowledges the impossibility of truly representing the princess,
showing the multifaceted nature of representation, and its inability to con-
struct a single ultimate meaning. Again, it is a postmodern concern to draw
attention to the superficial nature of representation, as discussed above.
Jameson draws attention to the postmodern lack of depth and superficiality
and thus an ultimate rejection of the notion of representation, as we move
away from one single understanding and interpretation to “collage” style in
the postmodern era (29).
Gray provides a kind of multi-screen experience within the world of the
novel, as he splits the page in order to manifest multiple narratives run-
ning simultaneously. This technique provides an effect that is similar to
Jameson’s description of the viewer of a ‘postmodern’ pop video, as both
are required “to see all the screens at once” (31). However, though such
experimental narrative techniques and concerns about representation can
be found within many postmodern texts, much earlier Laurence Sterne
famously addresses the difficulties of representation and draws the readers’
attention to the objectivity of aesthetics overtly in The Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67) through many typographical devices
which deviate from the linear, realist, prose novel form, such as providing
the reader with a blank page in order for them to draw their own represen-
tation of the beauty of widow Wadman (376–7), or the use of ‘squiggles’ in
order accurately convey “a flourish with his stick” (490).
Gray draws attention to his use of intertextuality for the creation, and
understanding of a text to an excessive amount as a list of plagiarisms
actually become part of the novel, appearing alongside the narrative of the
epilogue (which appears four chapters before the end of the novel). Jameson
highlights intertextuality as a symptom of the postmodern era; he sees its
use as: “a deliberate, built-in feature of the aesthetic effect and as the opera-
tor of a new connotation of ‘pastness’ and pseudo-historical depth in which
the history of aesthetic styles displaces ‘real’ history” (20). Many contempo-
rary writers often associated with postmodern stylistic techniques, such as
Angela Carter in Wise Children, Jeanette Winterson in Sexing the Cherry and
Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses use intertextu-
ality to conjure shared images in readers’ minds. This often draws on a mass
culture, pop songs and films, as such references are readily available. This,
for Jameson reflects a demise of individual identity, as the cultural dominant
is one without a historical knowledge. The artist’s identity appears threat-
ened through what Jameson sees as the demise of “High modernist ideology
of style” (17), suggesting that there is no longer the possibility for the artist
to create their own, recognizable identity, but culture can only turn to the
past, as all that is available are an: “imitation of dead styles, speech through
all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a new global
culture” (17–18).
 Claire Allen 217

Through a heighted awareness of the use of intertextuality, the identity

of author, as well as reader, becomes increasingly problematic. The author’s
status as definitive creator, and the reader’s role of passive absorber are chal-
lenged through the acceptance of vast amounts of borrowings during the
creation of the text, thus creating the text as something not completely
original, and the reader is forced to play a larger role in the creative process,
relying on them more for their ability to interpret the internal references.
Janice Galloway highlights the subversion of the readers’ role throughout
Lanark in her introduction to the novel ‘Something to Say’: “From the
beginning, it demands its reader to be an active participant in the imagina-
tive process, not a passive recipient of others’ ideas” (x).
Gray raises issues of authorial identity most clearly in the Epilogue in
which Lanark meets ‘the author’. Bradbury notes this technique developing
within much fiction, such as Martin Amis’ Money, as conventional ideas of
‘identity’ are explored (407). The God like status which can be associated with
the authorial role is clearly debunked within Lanark, as the reader is presented
with a far from grand, almost demonic figure, “His face, framed by wings and
horns of uncombed hair” (480). Thus, the author’s status as outside the text
is brought into question and the novel’s own artifice foregrounded:

“You clearly don’t realize who I am. I have called myself king – that’s
a purely symbolic name, I’m far more important. Read this and you’ll
understand. The critics will accuse me of self-indulgence but I don’t care.”
With a reckless gesture he handed Lanark a paper from the bed. It was
covered with childish handwriting and many words were scored out or
inserted with little arrows. Much of it seemed to be dialogue but Lanark’s
eye was caught by a sentence in italics which said: Much of it seemed to
be dialogue but Lanark’s eye was caught by a sentence in italics which said.
(original emphasis 481)

Here, not only is Gray drawing attention to the novel’s own artifice, but
discussing author and reader roles. He offers a commentary upon the con-
ventional ideas of author which he is flouting, and acknowledging that a
novel is being created, through drawing on examples of other literary texts:

“I am your author.”
Lanark stared at him. The author said, “Please don’t feel embarrassed.
This isn’t an unprecedented situation. Vonnegut has it in Breakfast of
Champions and Jehovah in the books of Job and Jonah.”
“Are you pretending to be God?”
“Not nowadays. I used to be part of him though. Yes I am part of a part
which was once the whole. But I went bad and was excreted. If I can get
well I may be allowed home before I die, so I continually plunge my beak
into my rotten liver and swallow and excrete it. But it grows again.” (481)
218 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

The freedom Jameson suggests that the postmodern era affords its artists
does therefore seem to be represented in some of the characteristics of the
postmodern text, it allows for the challenging of form, and a new freedom
in the relationship of author and reader to text. However, as the quote above
highlights, meeting the author within the texts is far from a new device, and
thus does not necessarily align the text solely with the postmodern.
Gray’s text laments the loss of, and difficulty in attaining, an artistic iden-
tity, thus aligning his work with a left-leaning view of the negative effects
of postmodernism – as articulated by theorists such as Jameson, therefore
aligning his postmodernism with what Bentley terms second wave (4). The
novel highlights the negative impact of the system, as represented by the
art institute and the government, especially in terms of Thaw’s demise and
the institute’s ‘use’ of the lower sections of society by the others for energy
and food. Thus Lanark offers a critique of socio-economic systems and con-
sequences through the use of devices associated with postmodernism. But
to simply read the text as postmodern is problematic, as this risks ignoring
the complexities of the novel in order to suit broader critical hegemonic tax-
onomies. Gray’s text clearly is not nihilistic, depthless pastiche, but is closely
aligned to parody and satire; it demonstrates an acknowledgment of the past
as well as attempting to highlight a need for change. Thus, as Moores (quoted
above) notes, the experimentation within Lanark represents a complex
postmodernism, in which ideology is expressed and reinforced through non-
conventional narrative techniques, perhaps forming an example of what is
now being (no less controversially) termed post-postmodernism.
This, of course, remains a contentious issue, in part because the debate
about any notion of ‘after’ is still in its infancy. Bentley’s definition of ‘sec-
ond phase’ (4) also seems appropriate, as whilst Lanark’s narrative devices
overtly express the marginal position of Scotland’s working class, it remains
overtly experimental in style. Gray has not quite moved towards a reengage-
ment with classical storytelling styles, as the structure of the novel draws
attention to a move away from linearity in order to highlight the artifice of
realism, whereas authors more closely aligned with post-postmodernism are
noted (particularly by Keulks) as moving away from such narrative experi-
mentalism. It is clear that no single taxonomy provides a fully accurate
description of Gray’s text and that Lanark continues to defy categorization.

Notes
1. Böhnke places this revival in focus on Scottish literature and culture, in part, in
a political context, suggesting that it:“preceded and accompanied the political
developments which led to the (re-)establishment of the Scottish Parliament in
1999.” (1). Sadly, I do not have space here to investigate further the particular
political context of Scottish devolution, but rather wish in this chapter to focus on
 Claire Allen 219

other issues. As Böhnke notes, the ‘new’ of this literary renaissance is now more
mature, entering into its 30s.
2. Böhnke refers to ‘vulgar’ postmodernism as the “version of relativist nihilism
which is so often taken for the whole concept by its critics” (46), as does Keulks
during his discussion of Martin Amis’ work (2007, 158).
3. I will outline the different theoretical approaches being suggested in more detail
below, as not only does the term vary, but also the ‘after’ postmodernism’s first
incarnation has various incarnations in many theorists’ works.
4. As Homi K Bhabha in The Location of Culture suggests, such “grand narratives” of
“truth” have been vigorously contested by contemporary writing, which has lead
to the processes which create such accepted ideas of knowledge being revealed,
along with and the narratives of those, who were previously subjugated.
5. hooks suggests that one needs to make a careful consideration of the implications
for the marginalized of any critique or destabilising of the notion of identity. She
is keen to note that a debunking of the notion of “identity” may in fact have
contradictory effects from the supposed liberatory potential: “Any critic exploring
the radical potential of postmodernism as it relates to racial difference and racial
domination would need to consider the implications of a critique of identity for
oppressed groups” (NPg).
6. Such as the writings of Lanark after Sludden tells him to become a writer (Book Three
Chapter Three); the recounting of Thaw’s imagination in his stories and fantasies
(Book Two); and the seeming taking over of the ‘the oracle’ during the Interlude.
7. Stevenson specifies his example in terms of the fears of mechanization that he
is discussing, highlighting how Lawrence’s concerns are summarized in ‘The
Industrial Magnate’ chapter of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1921):

Everything was run on the most accurate and delicate scientific method, educated
and expert men were in control everywhere, the miners were reduced to mere
mechanical instruments . . . [in] a new order, strict, terrible, inhuman . . . a great
and perfect system that subjected life to pure mechanical principles. (259–60)

8. Some famous examples include those from the nineteenth century as writers were
reacting against industrialization, such as Charles Dickens in Hard Times, Elizabeth
Gaskell in Mary Barton and William Morris in News From Nowhere, texts which
highlight the damaging effects on people of a capitalist mentality.
9. Jean-François Lyotard defines postmodernism in relation to modernism:
“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards meta-
narratives” (Postmodernism: A Report on Knowledge, xxiv).

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Bentley, Nick. Ed. British Fiction of the 1990s. London: Routledge, 2005.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture.London: Routledge, 1994.
Böhnke, Dietmar. Shades of Gray: Science Fiction, History and the Problem of Postmodernism
in the Work of Alasdair Gray. Leipzig Explorations in Literature and Culture, v.11.
Glienicke: Galda & Wilch Verlag, 2004.
Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern British Novel. London: Secker & Warburg, 1994.
——. The Modern British Novel 1878–2001. Revd. edn. London: Penguin Books, 2001.
Coe, Jonathan. ‘1994 Janine’, Phil Moores,ed. Alasdair Gray Critical Appreciations and a
Bibliography. Boston Spa & London: The British Library, 2002. 59–66.
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Crawford, Robert and Thom Nairn. Eds. The Arts of Alasdair Gray. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1991.
Cuddon, J. A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 4th edn.
Revd.C. E. Preston. London: Penguin Books, 1999.
Eshelman, Raoul. Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism. Aurora, CO: Davies
Group, 2008.
Gilroy, Paul. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. London: Routledge Classics, 2002
[1991].
Gray, Alasdair. Lanark. Edinburgh: Connogate Classics, 2002 [1981].
Hassan, Ihab. ‘The Anti-Hero in British and American Fiction.’ Rumours of Change:
Essays of Five Decades. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1995. 55–67.
hooks, bell. ‘Postmodern Blackness’.Postmodern Culture.1:1 (Sep. 1990) 10 October
2010.http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Postmodern_Blackness_18270.html
Jameson, Fredric. ‘Afterword: Marxism and Postmodernism.’Postmodernism/Jameson/
Critique. Ed. Douglas Kellner. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1989. 369–87.
——. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991.
Keulks, Gavin. ‘W(h)ither Postmodernism: Late Amis’. Martin Amis: Postmodernism
and Beyond. Ed. Gavin Keulks.Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 158–79.
——. ‘Winterson’s Recent Work: Narrating Realism and Postmodernism.’ Jeanette
Winterson: A Contemporary Critical Guide. Ed. Sonya Andermahr. London:
Continuum, 2007. 146–62.
Lee, Alison. Realism and Power: Postmodern British Fiction. London: Routledge, 1990.
Linklater, Magnus. ‘Selected praise for Lanark’, in Alasdair Gray, Lanark. Edinburgh:
Cannogate Classics, 2002 .
Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. Abingdon: Routledge, 2008.
Lyotard, Jean François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984 [1979].
Massie, Alan. The Novel Today: A Critical Guide to the British Novel 1970–1989. London:
Longman, 1990.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Methuen, 1987.
Moores, Phil.Ed. Alasdair Gray: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography. Boston Spa &
London: The British Library, 2002.
Morris, William. News From Nowhere. Oxford: World’s Classics, 1890.
Potter, Garry and José López. Eds. After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical
Realism. London: Athlone Press, 2001.
Self, Will. ‘Introduction’. Phil Moores, Ed. Alasdair Gray: Critical Appreciations and a
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Snipp-Walmsley, Chris. ‘Postmodernism’. Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford
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Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Oxford: World’s
Classics, [1759–67].
Stevenson, Randall. ‘Alasdair Gray and the Postmodern’. Robert Crawford and Thom
Nairn, Eds. The Arts of Alasdair Gray. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991.
48–63.
Stierstorfer, Klaus. Ed. Beyond Postmodernism: Reassessment in Literature, Theory, and
Culture. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003.
Waugh, Patricia. Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern. London: Taylor and
Francis, 1989.
Woods, Tim. Beginning Postmodernism. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1999.
15
Gender Vertigo: Queer Gothic and
Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus
Sarah Gamble

Introduction

Angela Carter’s penultimate novel, Nights at the Circus, published in 1984, is

commonly regarded as representing a change in both style and approach on
the part of its author, replacing the dark, violent and pornographic narra-
tives with which she had become identified with something more optimistic,
airy, humorous and – ultimately – kinder. It is a view summarised by Merja
Makinen who, in an essay published in 1992, sets up a contrast between the
‘disquietingly savage analysis of patriarchy of the 1960s and 1970s, such as
The Magic Toyshop, Heroes and Villains, Passion of New Eve; and the exuberant
novels of the 1980s and early 1990s, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children
(Makinen 3).
Considered in the context of genre, Carter seems to be leaving her Gothic
antecedents behind; a decision that appears to be symbolically represented
in Nights at the Circus by the encounter between the novel’s heroine, the
winged trapeze artiste Fevvers, and the self-styled magician Mr Rosencreutz.
Kidnapped from a brothel of freaks and grotesques, Fevvers finds herself
in familiar literary territory: ‘a mansion in the Gothic style, all ivied over,
and, above the turrets . . . a fingernail moon with a star in its arms.
Somewhere, a dog howling’ (Carter, Nights 74). Mr Rosencreutz intends
to sacrifice Fevvers in a sex-magic ritual in order to recover his lost viril-
ity, thus placing her in the stereotypical role of abducted Gothic heroine,
but Fevvers’ determination not to be bound within the plotlines of the
Gothic is evinced when she, quite literally, takes flight from the house of
Rosencreutz, sustaining nothing more than ‘a flesh wound on the ball of
my right foot’ (Carter, Nights 83). In an essay discussing the influence
of Edgar Allen Poe on Angela Carter’s fiction, Gina Wisker cites Fevvers
as the exemplification par excellence of Carter’s desire to challenge as
well as to appropriate Poe’s Gothic texts, ‘offer[ing] an alternative to the
constraints and tyrannies which are the subject of conventional horror’
(Wisker 196).

221
222 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

In this argument, I wish to offer a slightly refocused reading of Nights at

the Circus which, while not contradicting the view that it is certainly more
carnivalesque and overtly comic than its predecessors in Carter’s oeuvre,
argues that this does not necessarily constitute a rejection of the Gothic per
se. While it may dismiss the stereotypical paraphernalia of the mode (ivied
castles, fingernail moons and sacrificial altars, for instance) I would maintain
that the Gothic has not been ousted from the narrative at all, but merely
displaced onto less obvious locations. Wisker comes close to recognising
this in her argument that it is in her portrayal of women that Carter takes
most obvious issue with Poe, replacing his victimised, dying heroines with
female figures that have ‘the last liberated laugh’ on those who would seek
to disempower them (Wisker 182). This implies not only that Fevvers is a
radical redefinition of – rather than a departure from – the Gothic heroine,
but also that Nights at the Circus as a whole is a continuation of a project in
which Carter herself was consistently engaged from the beginning of her
writing career; that of imagining ways in which women might challenge
the social script allocated to them within patriarchal culture; and, more
specifically, within the Gothic text.

Queering the Gothic / gothicising the queer

It is primarily through her portrayal of gender that Carter draws upon the
perverse energies of the Gothic in this novel. Fevvers’ profession as an ari-
eliste is central to this, her extraordinary, impossible, act ‘queering’ both
the (primarily male) gaze and her own performance of femininity, which
challenges stable categories of ‘woman’. While the novel’s stress upon per-
formance as its central motif has frequently been taken as an indication that
the carnivalesque has superseded the Gothic as a dominant generic trope in
Carter’s work, in actuality it is in its performativity that the text is also at
its most Gothic.
As Mair Rigby points out, an affinity has always existed between Gothic
studies and queer theory, in that while ‘the Gothic is always already
queer; queer theory is also always already Gothic’ (Rigby 46). She observes
that many significant queer theorists, such as Judith Halberstam and Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick, have also worked within the field of Gothic studies,
indicating the extent to which the two areas of enquiry are closely inter-
twined. For Rigby, the Gothic is ‘a genre that persistently explores the mean-
ing of queerness’ (Rigby 47), its compulsion to uncover repressed secrets and
enduring fascination with the taboo leading it towards the representation
of covert sexual identities and alternative configurations of desire, thus
‘open[ing] a space for recognising the construction of “queer” bodies as
uncanny, that is, as bodies of knowledge that are supposed to be repressed
but which persistently come to light’ (Rigby 50). Additionally, the terminol-
ogy of the Gothic has become intrinsic to queer academic discourse, giving
 Sarah Gamble 223

‘queer theorists a language (metaphors, allusions, tropes, and figures) which

they have drawn upon to speak about queer experience and produce critical
narratives’ (Rigby 54).
Published in 1984, Nights at the Circus pre-dates the rise of queer theory
in the early 1990s, but the novel anticipates some of its central strategies,
and hence its Gothic possibilities. Carter’s focus upon the inescapably queer
body of Fevvers indicates that the uncovering of dissident identities is her
central concern, and her stress upon performance can be aligned with Judith
Butler’s influential theory of gender performativity, a concept that has come
to form the cornerstone of queer studies.
The notion of performativity cuts gender loose from any grounding in the
‘natural’ biological body, with the result that ‘Gender ought not to be con-
strued as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow;
rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an
exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts’ (Butler, Gender Trouble 140).
Unlike some of her peers, Judith Butler has not arrived at queer theory by
way of the Gothic, but she describes both gender systems and their undoing
as if she were telling a ghost story:

Gender is . . . a norm that can never be internalized; ‘the internal’ is a sur-

face signification, and gender norms are finally phantasmic, impossible
to embody. If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of
acts through time and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the spatial
metaphor of a ‘ground’ will be displaced and revealed as a stylized con-
figuration, indeed, a gendered corporealization of time. The abiding gen-
dered self will then be shown to be structured by repeated acts that seek
to approximate the ideal of a substantial ground of identity, but which,
in their occasional discontinuity, reveal the temporal and contingent
groundlessness of this ‘ground’. The possibilities of gender transforma-
tion are to be found precisely in the arbitrary relation between such acts,
in the possibility of failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition
that exposes the phantasmic effect of abiding identity as a politically
tenuous construction. (Butler, Gender Trouble 141)

Thus, Butler presents gender identity – any gender identity – as spectral;

existing only and forever at the moment of (en)action, it is a mere illusion
sustained by nothing more than the force of a culture’s absolute belief.
Nevertheless, to be spectral is not necessarily to be ephemeral, for engage-
ment with ‘the possibilities of gender transformation’ is not an act of
exorcism that allows the subject to arrive at an ‘authentic’ sense of gender –
instead, the acts of ‘doing’ and ‘undoing’ gender ghost each other. As Butler
argues in a more recently published work, Undoing Gender, while gender may
be ‘phantasmic’, it nonetheless ‘figures as a precondition for the production
and maintenance of legible humanity’ (Butler, Undoing Gender 11). To reject
224 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

or rework it is to become unintelligible, culturally unrepresentable – and thus

to be spectralised anew.

To find that you are fundamentally unintelligible (indeed, that the laws
of culture and of language find you to be an impossibility) is to find that
you have not yet achieved access to the human, to find yourself speaking
only and always as if you were human, but with the sense that you are not,
to find that your language is hollow, that no recognition is forthcoming
because the norms by which recognition takes place is not in your favor.
(Butler Undoing Gender 30)

The significance of Fevvers’ ‘notorious and much-debated wings’ (Carter 7)

can be interpreted in many ways, but in this context they can be read as vis-
ible signifiers of gender disruption which render her less than fully human,
baffling any simplistic attempt to signify her as ‘woman’. The result is that
she remains an unclassifiable enigma – in Butler’s terms, ‘an impossibil-
ity’. The fact that they form the crux of her trapeze act is also significant,
for the freakishness that they represent assumes a metonymic relationship
with the freakishness inherent in all female aerialistes who, through their
muscularity and athleticism, transgress the cultural codes governing femi-
ninity. As Peta Tait observes, trapeze artists have always been compared to
birds, ‘present[ing] trained, disciplined physiques working with precision
that promised to fulfil a long-imagined human potential for flight’ (Tait 16),
and discourses of monstrosity were never far away when describing women
performers engaged in ‘immodest muscular action’ (Tait 21). Such women
were caught up in complex negotiations regarding societal assumptions
concerning gender, since ‘Ariel acts theatrically played with, but ultimately
questioned, social beliefs in the natural fragility and inferiority of female
physicality. In presenting a strong muscular athletic physique, aerialists
seemed to defy nature’ (Tait 38).

Ghosting texts, ghosting gender: Nights at the Circus and

‘Le Numeréro Barbette’

Such anomalous, free-falling, bodies do not easily fit into dominant nar-
ratives of gender, and I would argue that Nights at the Circus demonstrates
Carter responding to the challenge that they represent by engaging in
some metaphorical backwards somersaults of her own. Her method is
clearly articulated in an essay published four years after Nights at the
Circus, in 1988, which takes as its subject Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous
short story, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. Entitled ‘Through a Text
Backwards: The Resurrection of the House of Usher’, the piece is a neat
conceit centred upon the retelling of Poe’s tale from its end to its begin-
ning. From the outset, Carter presents Poe as an inherently duplicitous
 Sarah Gamble 225

writer, whose tales ‘are and . . . are not what they claim to be’ (Carter
Shaking a Leg 482–3); such an exercise in inversion, she claims, will reveal
the true extent of that duplicity by uncovering the ‘double’ meaning
interred beneath the surface of the narrative: ‘I decided that I would invert
“The Fall of the House of Usher” – play it backwards, in the same way as
one can play a movie backwards, and see what face is showed to me, then,
and what story that face told about the Ushers and their author’ (Carter,
Shaking a Leg 483).
In the course of following the resurrection and reassembly of the House
of Usher from the tarn into which it has collapsed, Carter also resurrects the
story’s only female protagonist, Madeline Usher, whose death scene – that
forms the climactic episode of the original story – is thrown into reverse.
Her coffin is returned from the dungeon in which her brother has impris-
oned it, to her bedchamber, from which she rises to stalk the corridors of
the domestic space: ‘She lies on her bed in her somnolent, half-sleeping
state, neither fully dead nor fully alive, the life of a sentient plant, waiting,
waiting until the men downstairs call up for her to come and frighten them’
(Carter, Shaking a Leg 488). For Carter, the inversion of the story brings about
a gender inversion, by moving the female figure from the background to
the forefront of the text. In the process, Madeline – the woman for whom
death is never final, whichever way one views her story – is revealed as the
possessor of a vampiric energy, ‘symbolising sex and femininity as compul-
sion and disease’ (Carter, Shaking a Leg 489). Yet, as is so typical of Carter,
this conclusion is revealed in the final paragraph as just another confidence
trick when she confesses that the figure of the female vampire has actually
no ‘authentic’ meaning to convey, but is just another one of the ‘tacky the-
atrical device[s]’ (Carter, Shaking a Leg 490) that form the Gothic narrative’s
stagy mis en scene.
‘Through a Text Backwards’ can be aligned with the Butlerian dynamic
of ‘doing/undoing’, where the act of ‘undoing’ gender only constitutes a
mirror-image of its ‘doing’. Similarly, telling Poe’s story backwards does not
reveal any hidden ‘truth’ about that narrative, but only sheds more light
on the extent of its artifice – as Carter concludes, ‘The story is the story in
a story’ (Carter, Shaking a Leg 490). Viewed from the perspective of gender,
Woman occupies no more privileged position within the Gothic narrative
as Man, since both are equally constructed; ‘[mirror] images of gratified
narcissism’ (Carter, Shaking a Leg 490).
The overturning and retelling of familiar narratives is, however, a favoured
tactic of Carter’s, and ‘Through a Text Backwards’ is merely a tongue-in-cheek
foregrounding of an already familiar trope within her fiction. And while such
a practice may not – as ‘Through a Text Backwards’ indicates – provide the
reader with a definitive interpretation of a narrative, it does offer them a dif-
ferent perspective on it. Moreover, it is a way of reading that is definitively
Gothic because it engages in a ‘ghosting’ of the original text that exposes
226 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

its repressed, or latent, content, and thus frees what it has figured as most
monstrous, and hence most unrepresentable.
I would propose that the first section of Nights at the Circus can be read
as an example of inverted story-telling when aligned with another text to
which it bears an uncanny – yet reversed – resemblance. The novel begins
with Fevvers’ performance being viewed by the sceptical journalist Walser,
who then interviews her in her dressing room. During this encounter he
hears Fevvers’ life story whilst simultaneously viewing her gradual metamor-
phosis from her ‘performing’ to her ‘everyday’ self. This carries echoes of an
essay published in 1926 by the French avant-garde novelist, poet, dramatist
and film-maker Jean Cocteau, ‘Le Numéro Barbette’, which records his inter-
view with the cross-dresing arieliste Vander Clyde. Cocteau describes watch-
ing Vander Clyde transform into his on-stage feminine alter ego, Barbette,
Cocteau then views Barbette/Clyde’s performance, the culmination of
which is Barbette’s reinstatement of his male identity.
Nights at the Circus enacts a looking-glass version of Cocteau’s scenario.
Walser watches Fevvers’ performance first, then her ritual disrobing,
whereas Cocteau witnesses the construction of the Barbette image, then its
public exhibition. Barbette begins as a man, becomes a self-created woman,
then reverts back to masculinity, while Fevvers displays a hyperbolic femi-
ninity which in its dismantling threatens – from Walser’s point of view,
anyway – to reveal a hitherto hidden masculinity (‘It flickered through his
mind: Is she really a man?’ [Carter, Nights 35]).
Where the two encounters particularly intersect is in their use of a male
observer, whose voyeurism is tinged with a certain squeamishness con-
cerning the metamorphoses they are witnessing so intimately. This is very
evident in ‘Le Numéro Barbette’, which opens in an atmosphere of mascu-
line conviviality: Cocteau feels ‘at ease in that dressing-room . . . smoking,
chatting to a fellow sportsman’ (Cocteau). Yet this relaxed and harmonious
mood begins to disintegrate as Barbette proceeds to construct his feminine
stage persona. Cocteau pinpoints the moment of transition precisely:

It is not until he pulls on his blond wig held by a simple elastic band
around his ears that he will take up – while putting a bunch of hairpins
in his mouth – the slightest postures of a woman doing her hair. He then
stands up, goes and puts his rings on. The transformation is complete.
Jeckyll is Hyde. Yes, Hyde! Now, I am scared. I turn away . . . It is my turn
to be intimidated. (Cocteau)

Mark Franko interprets Cocteau’s reaction as ‘the panic of being caught in

a sexually indeterminate middle stage’ (Franko 596), which constitutes a
repulsion of the challenge to dualistic categories of gender that Barbette
threatens to represent at the point at which his transformation from ‘male’
to ‘female’ is almost complete. Fascinated though he might be by the
 Sarah Gamble 227

spectacle of man becoming woman, Cocteau cannot and will not accept the
intersection of these two identities, instead:

deal[ing] with a rigid sexual stereotype as a cultural absolute. Since there

is no perception of a ‘neither/nor’ in an unselfconscious middle ground,
no sensible paradox develops. One does not see the man in the woman
or vice versa. One only sees the man in the man, even though he is got
up in feminine gear. (Franko 597)

The female aspect of Barbette is perfectly acceptable to Cocteau, so long as

he holds onto the knowledge that underneath the elaborate costume, wig
and makeup, the man remains. Moreover, that fact of Barbette’s founda-
tional maleness is something on which the act itself depends, since it ends
with an emphatic assertion of the performer’s masculinity. So convincing
is Barbette’s masquerade of femininity, Cocteau observes, that the mere
removal of his wig (to the audible astonishment, even ‘embarrassment’ of
the audience) may not be adequate: ‘It also requires the truth to be trans-
lated and to retain a certain appeal if it is convince us as forcibly as did the
lie’ (Cocteau). Consequently, Barbette performs a correspondingly exagger-
ated masquerade of masculinity, ‘lets his shoulders play, spreads his hands,
displays his muscles, exaggerates the sporty gait of a golf player’ (Cocteau).
Although the audience may be mortified at having been seduced by the
duplicitous spectacle of the cross-dressed performer, gender norms are ulti-
mately reinstated at the end of Barbette’s performance, which closes down
the potential it offers of proposing an alternative to dualism.
It is notable that throughout his essay Cocteau shies away from any con-
ception of Barbette as a fully embodied ambiguously gendered subject; the
only way in which he can accommodate such a notion is to resort to the
discourse of the phantasmic. The allure of Barbette’s transvestite display is
licensed because it is manifested ‘in the magic light of the stage, in a box of
tricks where reality is no longer usual’ (Cocteau), and the moments of suspen-
sion between masculine and feminine subject positions witnessed by Cocteau
never coalesce into a fully apprehensible ‘third space’. Instead, ‘folded into
the margins of the performance event’ (Rothko 598), the possibility that
Barbette represents is spectralised, flickering in and out of view at the very
edge of Cocteau’s narrative. Barbette’s daring trapeze act itself becomes a
metaphor for this ‘rhetoric of evasion’ (Franko 598). In its movement through
space, Barbette’s body displays both the perils of flight between one polarity
and another, and also its necessary transitoriness. The body of the arieliste
cannot remain suspended in the air or it will fall – it has to land on one side
or the other of the trapeze’s swing. As Rothko argues, in ‘Le Numéro Barbette’:

Gender identity is figured as a binary opposition in which male and

female are mutually exclusive and gender liminality is, by implication, a
228 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

death-defying leap across those boundaries. Androgyny does not actually

‘take place’: the leap is always conceived as a plunge into the nonplace
of oblivion, the ‘chute d’ange fall’ described by Janet Flanner as the high
point of Barbette’s act. (Franko 598–9)

If Barbette is to remain a representable subject, it is vital that the gender-

bending possibilities of his act remain unfixed. The alternative is to become
a dangerous freak – Hyde rather than Jeckyll – or a disembodied being; a
spectre. Barbette’s act, seen through Cocteau’s eyes, continually and com-
pulsively flirts with the possibility of Gothic monstrosity: ‘The danger of
death is the challenge of performance that explores sexual ambiguity before
a society (i.e., an audience) unwilling to recognize, let alone openly endorse,
that ambiguity’ (Rothko 600).

Flying into the gender void

Peta Tait argues that aerialism is intrinsically Gothic, since it constitutes a

circus performance in which ‘death is melodramatically proclaimed as ever-
present’ (Tait 140). The thrill of a performance such as Barbette’s is literally
as well as metaphorically death-defying, since his gender play is underpinned
by genuine daring, and the ever-present risk of falling. For Fevvers, how-
ever, this is not – or should not be – a problem, since her wings allow her
to negotiate a ‘disconcerting pact with gravity’ (Carter, Nights 17). Indeed,
one of the most notable aspects of her act is the fact that it is performed
much more slowly than is normal thus playing up the lack of physical risk
inherent in her act, and potentially depriving it of the association with the
macabre noted by Tait:

What made her remarkable as an aerieliste, however, was the speed – or,
rather the lack of it – with which she performed even the climactic tri-
ple somersault. When the hack aerieliste, the everyday, wingless variety,
performs the triple somersault, he or she travels through the air at a cool
sixty miles an hour. Fevvers, however, contrived a contemplative and lei-
surely twenty-five, so that the packed theatre could enjoy the spectacle,
as in slow motion, of every tense muscle straining in her Rubenesque
form. The music went much faster than she did; she dawdled. Indeed, she
did defy the laws of projectiles, because a projectile cannot mooch along
its trajectory; it if slackens its speed in mid-air, down it falls. (Carter,
Nights 17)

Yet, Fevvers’ act remains an exemplification of risk on the terms outlined by

Rothko in relation to Cocteau’s analysis of Barbette – the risk entailed in the
exhibition of sexual ambiguity in front of an audience unwilling to endorse
it. In fact, Fevvers plays up this risk even more than Barbette by means of
 Sarah Gamble 229

the apparent laziness of her movement through the air. The very slowness
of her passage between her trapezes allows more time for her audience in
general (and Walser in particular) to view her body and contemplate its
anomalousness.
Walser, like Cocteau, is shown to be struggling to accommodate his
subject within dualistic gender assumptions. His self-avowed journalistic
aim is ‘ostensibly, to “puff” her; and, if it is humanly possible, to explode
her, either as well as, or instead of’ (Carter, Nights 11), an endeavour that
depends on being able to explain away Fevvers’ wings. For if we take the
wings to symbolise the gender anomalousness intrinsic to the female ariel-
iste, then what Walser is actually doing is trying to stabilise her as unprob-
lematically female. This is evident in his reaction to her performance, during
which his view of her is largely centred upon his assessment of her feminin-
ity. Viewed through his eyes, the more ‘womanly’ she is, the more easily he
can discount the notion that her wings represent a genuinely inexplicable
phenomenon.
The introductory preamble to Fevvers’ act does nothing to dent his scep-
ticism. Like Barbette, she makes her entrance clothed in plumage, her ‘robe
of red and purple feathers’ (Carter, Nights 14) echoing Barbette’s iconic
ostrich feather costume. But whereas Barbette would ‘daintily discard . . .
the fifty pounds of ostrich feathers covering him one by one in “a sort of
floating strip-tease”’ (Senelick 506–7), Fevvers throws off her cloak with
little ceremony, all the more quickly to reveal the feathers that she cannot
remove:

LOOK AT ME!
She rose up on tiptoe and slowly twirled round, giving the spectators a
comprehensive view of her back: seeing is believing. Then she spread out
her superb, heavy arms in a backwards gesture of benediction and, as she
did so, her wings spread, too, a polychromatic unfolding fully six feet
across, spread of an eagle, a condor, an albatross fed to excess on the same
diet that makes flamingos pink. (Carter, Nights 15)

However, the imperative to ‘look’ is not interpreted by Walser as an invita-

tion to wonder, but an opportunity to engage in a voyeuristic contemplation
of the female form, noting the brevity of her costume and the expansive-
ness of her bosom at the same time as he rationalises her wings out of
existence. It is not until she bursts into action, ‘jump[ing] up some thirty
feet in a single heavy bound’ (Carter, Nights 16), that he becomes flustered,
barely managing ‘to grab tight hold of his scepticism just as it was about to
blow over the edge of the press box’ (Carter, Nights 16). For a moment the
wings genuinely threaten to disrupt Walser’s casual misogyny by revealing
themselves to be more than passive props, their apparent functionality
enabling Fevvers’ display of herself as an active and muscular agent rather
230 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

than an earthbound object of masculine scrutiny. Nevertheless, Walser’s

defensive reaction is to retreat back to a crudely reductive contemplation
of Fevvers’ as a sexual object, thus keeping her in her culturally sanctioned
place: ‘My, how her bodice strains! You’d think her tits were going to pop
right out. What a sensation that would cause; wonder she hasn’t thought of
incorporating it in her act’ (Carter, Nights 17).
But once he meets ‘the marvellous giantess’ (Carter 42) face-to-face in
her dressing room afterwards, Walser finds his strenuously preserved scepti-
cism steadily eroding. The life-story Fevvers relates to him does nothing to
anchor her within the realm of possibility, and neither her behaviour nor
her person conform to any mainstream standard of femininity. Fevvers may
possess a ‘startling head of hair, yellow and inexhaustible as sand, thick
as cream’ (Carter, Nights 19) and ‘the face of an angel in a Sunday school
picture-book’ (Carter, Nights 42), but this classic beauty is intermixed with
physical attributes Walser can only categorise as masculine. He feels over-
powered by her extravagant muscularity, fearing ‘she could easily crush him
to death in her huge arms, although he was a big man with the strength
of Californian sunshine distilled in his limbs’ (Carter, Nights 52), and her
ungloved handshake demonstrates a ‘strong, firm masculine grip’ (Carter,
Nights 89). In addition, she reveals herself – much to his alarm – to be the
possessor of a phallic sword kept hidden in ‘the bosom of her dressing
gown’, which ‘flashed and glittered in the exhausted light so sharply that
Walser jumped’ (Carter, Nights 48).
Walser thus differs from Cocteau in that he is never permitted even a
moment of easy camaraderie with his subject. Instead, Fevvers exists in
state of permanent estrangement from him, neither a woman whom he
can unproblematically desire, nor a fellow man with whom he can feel
a comfortable companionship. And while the wings, the markers of her
freakishness and gender displacement, are ‘stowed away for the night under
the soiled quilting of her baby-blue dressing gown’, they are nevertheless
ever-present: ‘an uncomfortable-looking pair of bulges, shuddering the
surface of the taut fabric from time to time as if desirous of breaking free’
(Carter, Nights 7–8). Here, the wings that threaten to explode into being
at any moment belong as much to Walser as to Fevvers, their intermittent
quivering indicating the presence of a barely-repressed ‘erotic disturbance’
(Carter, Nights 52) that has been aroused in Walser; an attraction that is very
specifically attached to the possibility of new configurations of gender and
desire that Fevvers risks bringing into being:

Walser felt the strangest sensation, as if these eyes of the arieliste were a pair
of sets of Chinese boxes, as if each one opened into a world into a world
into a world, an infinite plurality of worlds, and these unguessable depths
exercised the strongest possible attraction, so that he felt himself trembling
as if he, too, stood on an unknown threshold. (Carter, Nights 30)
 Sarah Gamble 231

I would propose that Walser is on the verge here of fully recognising Fevvers
as a sexually indeterminate subject, but if he does so, he will have to face the
vertiginous possibility of the contingency of all gender configurations; thus,
in Judith Butler’s terms, ‘reveal[ing] the temporal and contingent ground-
lessness’ of identity itself (Butler, Gender Trouble 141). A further dimension
to Walser’s profound discomfiture is added by the presence of his own desire
for this anomalously gendered being, the result of which is to only further
emphasise the shifting sands on which his own sense of gender identity
has been built. The cavernous unfolding of Fevvers’ eyes ‘into a world into
a world into a world’ recalls Carter’s concluding comment in ‘Through
A Text Backwards’, that ‘The story is the story in a story’ (Carter, Shaking
a Leg 490), making the point that the reversal of the Poesque narrative
reveals no ‘truth’ external to the text, but only further levels of fictionality:
Madeline and Roderick Usher as ‘mirror image’ twins ‘entirely sufficient to
themselves’ (Carter, Shaking a Leg 490). The synthesis of Madeline and her
identical twin Roderick into a single gender-b(l)ending figure is itself mir-
rored in the moment in which Walser gazes at Fevvers. In an exemplifica-
tion of Butler’s argument that ‘the sense of possibility pertaining to me must
first be imagined from somewhere else before I can begin to imagine myself’
(Butler, Undoing 32), he glimpses a new way of viewing not only her gender,
but also his own.
His encounter with Fevvers has made an aerieliste of Walser too: in his
contemplation of her all-consuming gaze, the stable ground of gender
falls away beneath his feet, and he is compelled to follow her into the
void of ‘the not yet actualized or the not actualizable’ (Butler, Undoing 28).
For Butler, it is the transformative power of fantasy, which permits ‘us to
imagine ourselves and others otherwise’ (Butler, Undoing 29), that is the
first step towards the embodiment of difference. Gothic monster Fevvers
might be, but as Judith Halberstam says, ‘The monster always represents
the disruption of categories, the destruction of boundaries . . . and so we
need monsters and we need to recognize and celebrate our own monstrosi-
ties’ (Halberstam 27). This is precisely what Walser discovers. Surrendering
his privileged role as spectator and following Fevvers to the circus, where
he finds employment as an apprentice clown, he becomes as monstrous as
she. Putting on his stage makeup for the first time, he is not only ‘cross-
dressing’ in the sense that he is occupying a traditionally feminine position
before the mirror, but also glimpsing the possibility of moving beyond the
confines of dualism:

[H]e looked in the mirror and did not recognise himself. As he contem-
plated the stranger peering interrogatively back at him out of the glass, he
felt the beginnings of a vertiginous sense of freedom . . . the freedom that
lies behind the mask, within dissimulation, the freedom to juggle with
being . . . that lies at the heart of burlesque. (Carter, Nights 103)
232 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

The novel upholds this performative space as its ideal, although it is always
constructed as a precarious position. When the circus train subsequently
crashes in the frozen wastes of Siberia, Walser suffers amnesia and is left
with no identity at all. Taken in by a remote tribe, he adopts their world
view, in which everything is taken at absolute face value, leaving no room
for performative practices: ‘They knew the space they saw. They believed
in a space they apprehended. Between knowledge and belief, there was no
room for surmise or doubt’ (Carter, Nights 253). Although this might super-
ficially appear to represent the ultimate freedom for the gendered subject, in
a place where ‘there existed no difference between fact and fiction’ (Carter,
Nights 260) a being such as Fevvers loses her capacity to instigate wonder,
becoming instead a simple freak: ‘perfectly natural – natural, but abomina-
ble’ (Carter, Nights 289 [italics mine]). It is not until she spreads her wings
in front of Walser that she is restored, seeing ‘the eyes fixed upon her with
astonishment, with awe, the eyes that told her who she was’ (Carter, Nights
290). Fevvers’ wings also function as the means whereby Walser is brought
back to himself; but although he has been ‘reconstructed’, Fevvers perceives
that he is ‘not the man he had been or ever would be again’ (Carter 291).
During the course of the novel he has swung from stringent scepticism to
absolute belief, but ends having found a place between, in which he can
acknowledge his own desire for an anomalous being such as Fevvers, and
accept its implications for his own sense of gender identity. In the erotic
resolution of the novel, both Walser and Fevvers are established as queer
subjects existing betwixt and between gender dualisms.

Conclusion

Fevvers, with her ‘foot-high’ slogan ‘Is she fact or is she fiction?’ resembles
Barbette, ‘[d]escribed in publicity as a “man-woman”, and billed as an
enigma’ (Tait 70), to an uncanny degree. Fevvers can be viewed as an ironic
literalisation of Barbette, the feather costume and chute d’ange that were the
hallmarks of the Barbette act becoming authentic feathers and real flight.
Both construct their performances around an open secret, and both arouse
hesitant fascination in the male witnesses and recorders of their act, since
both Walser and Cocteau see, but are reluctant to endorse, the vertiginous
gender-bending possibilities posed by the soaring queer bodies of their sub-
jects. Yet, in her act of reversed story-telling, Carter picks up the unresolved
tensions of Cocteau’s narrative and pushes it as far as it can possibly go,
until it reaches the conclusion that Cocteau himself evades.
As I have argued, Fevvers’ wings are the key to this, since they seal her in
her anomalous position; unlike Barbette, Fevvers, is unable (it appears) to
remove her wings in the same way that Barbette removes his wig, therefore,
she cannot end her performance with a restoration of normality. Nights
 Sarah Gamble 233

at the Circus does, it is true, concludes with a revelation that a confidence

trick has taken place, and Fevvers’ final exclamation, ‘Gawd, I fooled you!’
(Carter, Nights 294) can be viewed as analogous to the cheeky charade put
on by the be-wigged ‘ex-Barbette’, who ‘winks at us, hops from one foot
onto the other, hints a gesture of apology’ (Cocteau) once he has revealed
the extent of his deception. But where Carter’s resolution differs from
Cocteau’s is that her arieliste’s revelation actually reveals nothing, since the
nature of Fevvers’ deception is never made clear. The consequence of this
is that she never coalesces into a fully knowable and comprehensible sub-
ject capable of being unproblematically classified as ‘woman’ – or, indeed,
properly ‘human’. In ‘Le Numéro Barbette’, the masculine observer stabilises
the queer subject through the act of narration, laying stress upon Barbette’s
foundational masculinity, and spectralising those moments in which he
resists gender categorisation. But in Nights at the Circus, the male reporter
is himself drawn into the scenario he is describing; rather than stabilising
Fevvers, Fevvers destabilises him, drawing him into the performative ‘third
space’ she occupies.
Judith Halberstam defines the Gothic monster of the twentieth century
as incapable of being reduced to a simplistic oppositional relationship with
the human, and thus always imagined as ‘partial, compromised, messy and
queer’ (Halberstam 188). Fevvers, and by extension Walser, can be read in
the context of such debates, resisting clear-cut dualisms in order to situate
themselves within the messiness of evolving intelligibility; in the words of
Judith Butler, ‘contingent, frail, open to fundamental transformation in the
gendered order of things’ (Butler, Undoing 35). This tale told backwards ends
with the transition into a new century, and a leap into the unknown, which
will, optimistically opines Fevvers, hear ‘the dawn chorus of the new, the
transformed –’ (Carter, Nights 285).

Works cited
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London & NY:
Routledge, 1990.
Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. London & NY: Routledge, 2004.
Carter, Angela. Nights at the Circus. London: Chatto & Windus, 1984.
Carter, Angela. Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings. London: Vintage, 1997.
Cocteau, Jean. ‘Le Numéro Barbette’. Jean Cocteau and Man Ray, Barbette. Berlin:
Borderline, 1988: no page nos.
Franko, Mark. ‘Where He Danced: Cocteau’s Barbette and Ohno’s Water Lilies’ PMLA,
107: 3 (May 1992): 594–607.
Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1995.
234 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Makinen, Merja. ‘Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and the Decolonization of
Feminine Sexuality’. Feminist Review 42 (Autumn 1992): 2–15.
Rigby, Mair. ‘Uncanny Recognition: Queer Theory’s Debt to the Gothic’. Gothic Studies
11.1 (May 2009): 46–57.
Senelick, Laurence. The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre. London & NY:
Routledge, 2000.
Tait, Peta. Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance. London & NY:
Routledge, 2005.
Wisker, Gina. ‘Behind Locked Doors: Angela Carter, Horror and the Influence of Edgar
Allan Poe’. Re-Visiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts. Ed. Rebecca Munford.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006: 178–98.
16
Whole Families Paranoid at Night:
Don DeLillo’s White Noise
Martyn Colebrook

In recognition of its significance as a perceptive and prescient assessment

of the postmodern condition, there exists a substantial corpus of critical
writing about Don DeLillo and White Noise (1985). Notably there is Tom
LeClair’s In The Loop: The Systems Novel (1987) and Frank Lentricchia’s
two collections of essays, Introducing Don DeLillo (1991) and New Essays
on White Noise (1991). Steffen Hantke has contributed Conspiracy and
Paranoia in Contemporary American Fiction: The Novels of Don DeLillo and
Joseph McElroy (1994) to the field of Delillo studies, whilst David Cowart,
Mark Osteen, Peter Boxall, Jesse Kavadlo and Joseph Dewey, to name
but five, have written monographs examining the ‘core’ DeLillo novels
and plays. Further to this, Tim Engles and John N. Duvall have edited
Approaches to teaching Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Leonard Orr has con-
tributed a comprehensive study of White Noise as part of the Continuum
Contemporaries series.
In the case of Lentricchia’s and LeClair’s studies, these critics pay tribute to
White Noise mainly because the text appears to emphasise and correlate with
a number of the defining theories of cultural post-modernism, as though the
novel can be considered as a template for the ideas that Frederic Jameson,
François Lyotard, or Jean Baudrillard have been postulating about the
media, mediation and contemporary culture as a whole. As Cornel Bonca
expounds in his essay Don DeLillo’s White Noise: The Natural Language of the
Species, this shanking of text to theory may well be a consequence of timing
and not just the preferred critical approach:

This tendency may have something to do with the fact that White
Noise was published in 1985, seemingly in the wake of a number
of exciting, much-Xeroxed and much-discussed theoretical essays,
among them Baudrillard’s ‘The Ecstasy of Communication,’ Jameson’s
‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’ and Lyotard’s
‘Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?’ (1)

235
236 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

As a figure whose corpus of work attempts to encapsulate the American cul-

tural, paranoid experience but who feels that he must remain ‘independent
of influence’ and ‘outside of society’, Don DeLillo’s biography is as intrigu-
ing as it is responsive to the times he is writing about. DeLillo was born of
Italian immigrant parents in the New York Bronx and lived a block away
from Lee Harvey Oswald. He was raised a Catholic and claims the cinema of
Jean Luc-Godard and the works of James Joyce as influences from his mid-
twenties. The ritualised religious aspects of his upbringing can be identified
in his most paranoid fiction, with the recurrence of rigid, hidden structures,
coincidence and chance. His formative years were spent working as a copy-
writer for an advertising firm and he lived through the testing of atomic
arms, the Kennedy assassination and the uncertainty of the Cold War. The
feelings of unease and apocalypse are contextualised by an interview from
The Daily Princetonian in which DeLillo offers a significant perspective on
the shift in American consciousness:

In the years of the Cold War there was danger, there was the danger that
an enormous cataclysm might take place, affecting virtually everyone on
the planet, [ . . . ] The danger is different now. The danger is much more
specific. The world isn’t going to be destroyed, but you don’t feel safe
anymore in your plane, or train or office or auditorium. (Pell 2002: n.p)

This is the transition from danger on a larger, more comprehensive scale to

a localised, more direct form of terror which heightens individual paranoia
and instils a feeling of personal persecution. The potential to be able to
interfere with and invade a private, personal space has come to pervade our
contemporary daily existence with the imperious mass data-monitoring,
close-circuit television and access to personal internet logs, through to
the banalities and minutiae of recorded consumer activity which directs
individuals to their perfect ‘purchase’. Peter Baker discusses this relation-
ship between terror and spectacle in his essay ‘The Terrorist as Interpreter:
Mao II in Postmodern Context,’ and Margaret Scanlan discusses the relation-
ship between novelists and terrorists in her ranging survey Plotting Terror:
Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction (2001).
Much is made of the different theoretical approaches that DeLillo’s work
lends itself to but I wish to concentrate on a reading of White Noise which
moves away from these techniques and discusses the different representa-
tions of paranoia within the text. Whilst the fear of dying and concerns
about the impact of consumerism and its erosion of the family unit have
dominated studies of DeLillo, the understanding of paranoia as a general
dominant theme has not been extensively analysed. Indeed, the paranoid
sensibility which accompanies and impacts upon DeLillean characters has
been put down to his ironic outlook on the uncertainties and fears which
pervade the individual experience of contemporary life. As he told Gabe Pell
 Martyn Colebrook 237

of The Daily Princetonian, commenting about American culture, ‘I live in it,

and I try to understand it [ . . . ] in the 21st Century [ . . . ] being an American
has a new meaning. It means to be worried, perhaps as never before’ (Pell
2002: 1). The reasons for this feeling of worry have been noted by Tony
Tanner who, in City of Words (1971), reveals that American fiction has been
characterised by a dialogue between those who seek a freedom from the
ubiquitous ‘systems’ of control and those who are content with having their
daily existences regulated and predicted:

There is an abiding dream in American Literature that an unpatterned,

unconditioned life is possible in which your movements and stillnesses,
choices and repudiations are all of your own; and there is also an abiding
American dream that someone else is patterning your life, that there are
all sorts of invisible plots afoot to rob you of your autonomy of thought
and action, that conditioning is ubiquitous. (Tanner 1971: 15)

The obsessive patterning and ‘invisible plots’ are significant themes of

DeLillo’s work, which reflects a fear of the unseen, the unknown and the
uncontrolled. The idea that omniscient agencies are influencing decisions
and conditioning people to operate within regulated, predetermined pat-
terns ultimately suggests that those who regulated in this way are con-
signed to a willing access to consumer-oriented paradise. The significance
of figures such as Jack Gladney in White Noise who seek to escape this
can be read in similar terms to that of the artist who is seeking to remain
autonomous.
DeLillo views the writer as a figure who is struggling for the opportunity
to communicate with clarity and independence, an artist who must preserve
their own individuality to avoid the dangers of being rendered neutral and
ineffective. The writer’s continuous resistance to being consumed by the
system suggests that the relationship between literature and culture is one of
continuous interrogation, with the art reflecting and offering a commentary
on the conditions from which it has emerged.
There remains no consensus for a comprehensive definition of ‘paranoia’
but my own interpretation derives from the etymological values of the
word. The literal understanding of ‘paranoia’ is ‘external mind’ from ‘para’
(external) and ‘nooi’ (of the mind). By comparison, the clinical definition
offered by The Oxford Companion to the Mind identifies one of the paranoiac’s
characteristics as ‘coming into active collision with a world that does not
subscribe to his own exalted view of himself and to others by attacking
those who he conceives as persecuting him’ (Gregory 1987: 576). The writer
who seeks to pose a threat or act as an agent of change will use language
as a weapon and not just an artistic medium and DeLillo has already com-
mented (in an interview with Tom LeClair) that ‘language was a subject as
well as an instrument in my work’ (Le Clair interview 21).
238 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Steffen Hantke suggests that ‘language is no longer exclusively part of the

human nature, instead it is seen as a physically manipulable object with the
ability to manipulate human nature and nature in general. Language ceases
to be neutral, it becomes a piece of technology’ (Hantke 1994: 123). It is
necessary to understand that the language in DeLillo’s work does not just
constitute written and verbal forms; it becomes complicit with the technol-
ogy that is also present. In an interview with Adam Begley, Don DeLillo
summarises the relationship between the writer and the culture surround-
ing them: ‘Words on a page, that’s all it takes to help him separate himself
from the forces around him’ (Interview with Begley 277). Nevertheless,
this detectable distance or difference does not necessary privilege the role
of the author, whose task remains that of assimilation and not exclusion.
DeLillo continues in this same interview to compromise the so-called ideal
segregation of the novelist:

You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the
world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words,
faces, ideas. But there’s a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let
go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger.
The best moments involve a loss of control. It’s a kind of rapture, and
it can happen with words and phrases fairly often-completely surprising
combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of
nowhere. (Interview with Begley 282) (Saltzman)

For the writer and the individual who are attempting to break free from
boundaries and patterns, this means working against the cultural and
consumerist hegemony. The relationship between hegemony and para-
noia is suggested by Stuart Hall in Representation: Cultural Representations
and Signifying Practices (1997): ‘Gramsci’s notion was that particular social
groups struggle in different ways, including ideologically, to win the con-
sent of other groups and achieve a kind of ascendancy in both thought and
practice over them’ (Hall 1997: 48). Paranoia is a sequence of attempts by
different groups to subvert what is perceived as the cultural verisimilitude,
a set of representative conditions, often stereotyped or idealistic, which are
in constant flux and shift, continually responding to different discourses.
In this respect, different languages of cultural representation evolve when
discourses are subjected to endless streams of information: the ‘white noise’
that DeLillo appropriates for his novel, which manifest themselves in ‘such
vulgarized forms are advertisements, tabloid headlines and bureaucratic
euphemisms’ (Saltzman 1994).
White Noise was published in 1985 and has as its backdrop the omnis-
cient threat of biological and nuclear warfare, as well as the burgeoning
markets for cosmetic and life-prolonging medicines. Such a bleak vision is
embellished by precise, perceptive observations and these convey the grim,
 Martyn Colebrook 239

trenchant portrayals of mistrust and suspicion that pervade DeLillo’s work.

Don DeLillo explores the social paranoia that is induced by the acknowl-
edgement of mortality and loneliness, as well as the foreboding threat of
death that Jack Gladney and his wife, Babette, appear to encounter in dif-
ferent forms. DeLillo’s jarring, digressive narrative technique cultivates an
air of the blackly comic, drawing together a series of riffs on the themes of
modern alienation, death and the gradual disintegration of a family as it
collapses under the strain of contemporary cultural forces. White Noise is an
acerbic and darkly comic satire about the processes by which a family are
brought together and torn apart by the forces of consumerism. The central
character Jack Gladney is forced to confront his own death following an
incident known only as the Airborne Toxic Event, his wife Babette attempts
to avert her own death using the designer drug Dylar and his children, most
notably Heinrich, regurgitate the language of advertising as part of their
daily speech.
‘All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political
plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are parts of chil-
dren’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot’ (DeLillo 2002: 26).
By edging towards death, the main reason why the characters appear to be
hurtling towards a fatal conclusion in the novel is identified, the concept of
planning being destabilised by unseen forces that remove control from the
individual and erode the social, cultural and familial bonds that join them
to others. To this effect, the portrayal of Jack Gladney, the main protagonist
of White Noise, is distinct because it conveys the emotions and difficulties
encountered by a man who has begun the slow progression towards death
whilst his wife explores every medical option available to prevent this
happening to her. In an interview with Caryn James of the New York Times,
Don DeLillo explains that:

I never set out to write an apocalyptic novel. It’s about death on the
individual level. Only Hitler is large enough and terrible enough to
absorb and neutralize (sic) Jack Gladney’s obsessive fear of dying – a very
common fear, but one that’s rarely talked about. Jack uses Hitler as a
protective device; he wants to grasp anything he can. (James 1985)

This statement addresses a number of important themes in White Noise and

within the remit of paranoia as a whole. Although the postmodern para-
noid experience is dependent upon the culture of the masses, essentially it
remains oriented around the individual. Just as Mao II posed the question
about the prognosis for when the ‘old God leaves the world, what happens
to all the unexpended faith?’ (DeLillo 2002: 7) White Noise offers a response
that demonstrates how the medium of television and adverts provide the
consumer with a packaged spiritual experience. The idea of a ‘packaged
spiritual experience’ relates to the ‘televisual packaging’ which is served
240 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

up to consumers through their fervent devotion to the mass media and its
cultivation of a personal faith and the, following each show, serial, advertis-
ment and infomercial generates. Murray Jay Siskind, an academic colleague
of the protagonist, Jack Gladney, suggests the following about the effects of
the contemporary media infused landscape:

I’ve come to understand that the medium is a primal force in the

American home. Sealed-off, timeless, self-contained, self-referring. It’s
like a myth being born right there in our living room, like something we
know in a dream-like and preconscious way [ . . . ] TV offers incredible
amounts of psychic data. It opens ancient memories of world birth, it
welcomes us into the grid, the network of little buzzing dots that make
up the picture pattern. There is light, there is sound. I ask my students,
‘What more do you want?’ Look at the wealth of data concealed in the
grid, in the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice-of-life commercials, the
products hurtling out of darkness, the coded messages and endless repeti-
tions, like chants, like mantras [ . . . ] The medium practically overflows
with sacred formulas. (DeLillo 2002: 51)

The desire to be ‘welcomed’ into ‘the grid’ is suggestive of a network or

matrix that offers a hospitable community or refuge, a society that will
accept those on the outside whilst the lights and sound give this an almost
religious aura. By referring to ‘psychic data’, this is the material of fantasy
and desire that is being sold back to the consumer, the inner desires which
have been converted to an attainable sequence of goods. Television’s ‘lit-
tle buzzing dots’ are the same individual signals that the visual language
is composed of. The data that they contain is arranged artificially within
the most effective structure for communication and as the consumer listens
to the ‘coded messages’, ‘chants’, ‘mantras’ it becomes apparent that this is
the information that has been made holy, highly ritualised and calculated;
the ‘unexpended faith’ that is being manipulated to seduce the shopper.
Interestingly Siskind identifies the television as ‘sealed-off, timeless, self-
contained’ and this is highly resonant of the individual cells and rooms
that different DeLillo characters have already occupied. White Noise is lit-
tered with such packages that will offer a structure for those who seek an
ordered, systematic presentation; the condensing of Jack Gladney’s course
to ‘three credits, written reports’ (DeLillo 2002: 25) and Dylar itself, the pill
that responds to the user’s chemical needs. However, there is a paradox here
because those people who remain outside of the mass, those who are resist-
ant to these rituals are considered dangerous because of their independ-
ence but the influence of television and the mass media actually works by
juxtaposing each person’s unique experience with those of individuals who
metamorphose into a group. The title, White Noise, indicates a saturation of
media within the novel.
 Martyn Colebrook 241

As Jack Gladney is looking through a collection of photographs, he

chances upon a series of images that depict the times which have passed.
The non-specific events, arguably, are in keeping with the deliberately
anonymising and jarring stylistic effects of DeLillo’s writing. I would locate
this scene as falling in the early or mid-twentieth-century, but on the cusp
of an influential event such as World War II or the Kennedy assassination:

Children wincing in the sun, women in sun hats, men shading their eyes
from the glare as if the past possessed some quality of light we no longer
experience, a Sunday dazzle that caused people in their church-going
clothes to tighten their faces and stand at an angle to the future, some-
what averted it seemed, wearing fixed and fine-drawn smiles, sceptical of
something in the nature of the box camera.
Who will die first? (DeLillo 2002: 30)

The nature of the box camera is important because it is this object that will
evolve into a tool for capturing the defining moments of contemporary life
(and could just as feasibly represent television), but this is a traditional scene
from an idealised middle America that evokes feelings of nostalgia and con-
veys a sense of simplicity and relaxation. The ‘quality of light’ is natural and
pure, different from the aura that is created when an image is mediated and
the figures’ positioning ‘at an angle to the future’ is suggestive of scepticism
of change, a desire to avoid the head-on confrontation with the next era.
‘Tightened faces’ and ‘fixed smiles’ provoke feelings of indignant sufferance
or resilience in times of difficulty but the children in this image are certainly
of another time, an era of innocence and naivety that is to be shattered by
the impending events of the novel. By placing the question ‘who will die
first?’ at the end of the paragraph, this is an unnerving jolt for the reader
who has just been lulled into Jack’s moment of nostalgia. Initially, there is
an almost elegiac quality to the language and having encountered such a
natural image, one can conclude that Jack’s awareness of how this sense of
contentedness has declined inspires his conscious realisation that he too
will eventually degenerate.
In his analysis of DeLillo and other chroniclers of consumerism, media
and technology, one of Kenneth Millward’s more penetrating questions
concerns the authorial intention behind Delillo’s offering White Noise as a
scathing satire of postmodernism:

Does White Noise lament the passing of an earlier historical moment

when Americans were in touch with something that could credibly be
called ‘authentic’, or does the novel relish the freedoms that the new
technologically determined image culture seems to offer? Is DeLillo’s
novel nostalgic for the historical moment that Ragtime appears to
celebrate? (Millward 2000)
242 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

I would argue that like DeLillo’s other novels, White Noise interrogates
the subject of consumerism and paranoia by offering a critique through
imitation. Each character embraces consumerism and Jack Gladney’s wife,
Babette, embodies the commodification of the individual through her use of
Dylar, a drug that progressively releases medicine into the brain and stimu-
lates chemical reactions to remove the emotions associated with death. In
many respects this is the ultimate consumer anodyne that is tailored to
account for the individual needs.
Jack Gladney is an academic working at the College-on-the-Hill who has
founded his reputation in the discipline of Hitler Studies, taking the sobri-
quet J. A. K. Gladney and developing a physical frame that imitates Hitler’s
own. By adopting this structure for his own personal and academic gain,
Gladney is reinventing himself as a package for the consumers, his students.
His initials have an imposing, secretive yet strangely artificial feeling, mask-
ing the true name that J. A. K. represents but also imitating a corporate
advertising logo. Jack suggests that:

So Hitler gave me something to grow into and develop toward, tentative

as I have sometimes been in the effort. The glasses with thick black heavy
frames and dark lenses were my own idea, an alternative to the bushy
beard that my wife of the period didn’t want me to grow. Babette said she
liked the series J. A. K. and didn’t think it was attention-getting in a cheap
sense. To her it intimated dignity, significance and prestige.
I am the false character that follows the name around. (DeLillo 2002: 17)

Essentially, Hitler offers Jack a secure refuge for his identity. This existence
as Hitler is essentially performative but in his role as an educator and aca-
demic, Jack has become a mediator, adopting the persona of a figure who
features in a course about celebrities and who Murray Jay Siskind places in
the same category as Elvis Presley. Mark Osteen makes the astute observation
that in White Noise ‘Hitler is perhaps the pre-eminent author of spectacles in
our century [ . . . ] Once again Hitler is figured more as a pop star than as a
mass murderer; because the proliferation of images makes all form of fame
equivalent’ (Osteen 2000: 168). Jack’s performance of his lectures in a highly
theatrical fashion is imitative of different theatrical media techniques. This
is not a case of a character who desires gratification. Instead, Jack is an indi-
vidual who is bewildered by the complexity of choice offered in the inten-
sity of Late Capitalism and is conscious of the feelings of estrangement that
he experiences when trying to interact with members of his family.
With this in mind, Osteen also makes the pertinent point that:

Jack is a Professor of Hitler Studies but it is important to note that what

he teaches is not Hitler but representations of Hitler and the creative
constructions of the media that made Hitler into an image. The Hitler
 Martyn Colebrook 243

of Jack Gladney has nothing to do with the morality, ideology, politics,

or the industrialized forms of death associated with the Nazis. (Osteen
2001: 127)

It is apparent that the relationship between those who teach ‘history’ and
those who receive it has reached the point where the different images,
constructions and mythologies are being taught, rather than there being
any engagement with the terrors of actual historical documentation or any
attempt to experience the real. This is the spirit of Baudrillard’s theorising,
amongst the debris and detritus of the contemporary consumer’s waste is
the simulacra of a deceased dictator whose significance in the post-historical
landscape of American culture has been neatly processed and produced for
academic consumers and customers.
Osteen identifies one of the most significant themes of White Noise as
being the ‘mass’, which is also a recurrent characteristic of narratives of
paranoia:

As in Running Dog, in White Noise history is also packaged for ready con-
sumption in Jack’s courses about the ‘continuing mass appeals of fascist
tyranny’ (WN 25). ‘Mass,’ a word that appears in almost every key scene
of White Noise, signifies how Hitler’s stature depended upon large crowds
and the religious nature of his allure; as the word recurs in the novel,
its meaning expands to encompass the complex relationship between
consumption and death. (Osteen 2001: 168)

The importance of identifying the recurrent images of the ‘mass’ through

DeLillo’s novels is that the different media functioning within White Noise
exist for the purpose of neutralising the individual’s fear of death. Each
person is seeking authenticity, they desire to feel validated and have their
anxieties pacified. There is a lack of safety in existing as an individual in the
novel but to be incorporated into the collective offers sanctuary, a security
against loneliness:

Crowds came to form a shield against their own dying. To become a

crowd is to keep out death. To break off from the crowd is to risk death
as an individual, to face dying alone. Crowds came for this reason above
all others. (DeLillo 2002: 73)

Jack’s difficulty with establishing himself as a significant figure in his son and
wife’s lives is compounded by the sense of dislocation he suffers. Even when
copulating with his wife, their desires are inspired by pornography from a
range of different cultures and time periods and there is a distinct detachment
during the act itself. Jack’s narrative is self-conscious, mechanical and forced,
‘I entered her.’ ‘He entered me.’ ‘We’re not lobbies or elevators’ (DeLillo
244 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

2002: 28) and it becomes apparent that their sexual desires have been reduced
to a simple set of instructions. The reduction of humans to this level of sim-
ple programming is significant because it offers a remarkably paranoid view
that actions and desires are simply a set of chemical impulses. As Jack’s son
argues, ‘Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to
do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn’t it all a question of
brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex?’
(DeLillo 2002: 45). Jack’s response to this is intriguing in that when he goes
to the ATM the next morning and withdraws cash his anxiety is, to a point,
calmed because he is engaging with the unseen matrix again: ‘The system
was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquiet-
ing to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now. The networks, the
circuits, the streams, the harmonies’ (DeLillo 2002: 46). On an intertextual
level, Mao II portrays a scene where the poet imagines his image being broad-
cast through these channels, across the airwaves and his body is reduced to
a mass of signals and disparate images. Although the scene is one of a body
being decomposed and reformed again, the feeling is that this offers a tem-
porary freedom from the enclosed cell in which he has been imprisoned.
Comparatively, Jack and his family witness Babette teaching an academic
class on the television and the depiction is strikingly similar to that of Mao II:

The face on the screen was Babette’s. Out of our mouths came a silence
as wary and deep as an animal growl. Confusion, fear, astonishment
spilled from our faces. What did it mean? What was she doing there, in
black and white, framed in formal borders? Was she dead, missing, dis-
embodied? Was her spirit, her secret self, some two-dimensional facsimile
released by the power of technology, set free to glide through wavebands,
through energy levels, pausing to say good-bye to us from the fluorescent
screen. (DeLillo 2002: 104)

The immediate thought is that Babette is dead but because this event is
being witnessed on television, Jack and his family find themselves disen-
gaged from the prospect of a fatality and instead hypnotised by Babette’s
appearance as a ‘secret self’ or a ‘spirit’. It is here that the significance of
mediation becomes apparent because Babette is temporarily freed from her
packaged life and by engaging fully with the camera, she is consumed both
by the watching audience and by the camera itself, which decomposes her
body and distils it into a series of pixels; repossessing her and defining her
within a framework. DeLillo makes the connection between the power of
technology and Babette’s death representing a form of freedom, as though
suggesting that the real can only be experienced through death.
The hidden networks which supply necessary economic support seem to
reaffirm Jack’s confidence but one of the most satirical scenes in White Noise
occurs when the Gladney family go shopping and through the medium
 Martyn Colebrook 245

of consumption, his relatives finally accept him as ‘one of them’ (DeLillo

2002: 83): ‘My family gloried in the event. I was one of them, shopping
at last [ . . . ] I kept seeing myself unexpectedly in some reflecting surface’
(DeLillo 2002: 83). There is an almost narcissistic element to this scene, as
Jack repeatedly acknowledges his image in the surfaces but he regains his
sense of self and validates this by exercising control over clerks who satiate
his desires with the merchandise he demands. This echoes an earlier scene
in a shopping mall, where Jack notices that:

I realised the place was awash in noise. The toneless systems, the jangle
and skid of carts, the loudspeaker and coffee-making machines, the cries
of children. And over it all, or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar,
as of some form of swarming life just outside of the range of human
apprehension. (DeLillo 2002: 36).

This is the collision between the soothing elevator muzak that placates the
consumer and the ‘real’, the authenticity that lies just beyond the bounda-
ries of human awareness. DeLillo’s work is fixated on the presence of indi-
viduals who strive to achieve this temporary freedom from their packaged
life but as White Noise develops, it is apparent that the determination to
achieve the ‘real’ and the progression towards a decisive, fatal narrative are
unavoidably intertwined.
At this point, the ‘mass’ develops to a more sinister entity than simple
consumer happiness. Jack Gladney is subjected to an ATE (airborne toxic
event), an occurrence that I would equate with the threat of biological war-
fare. DeLillo conveys the image of a sprawling nebulous cloud that infuses
the body of those who inhale it or are consumed within its mass: ‘Beneath
the cloud of vaporized chemicals, the scene was one of urgency and oper-
atic chaos [ . . . ] This thick mist arched through the air like some grand
confection at a concert of patriotic music, (DeLillo 2002: 115–16). Babette’s
apparent ‘death’ has already been portrayed by this point in the novel and
I feel it is important to recognise that the movement from mass-produced
waste to a mass of chemicals is linked by the implication that the latter is a
consequence of the former. The effects of his own consumption are slowly
killing Jack and yet again the consumer and the product begin to physically
merge. There is a remarkable similarity between the scene of Babette’s televi-
son ‘death’ and the prospective degeneration of Jack’s body through chemi-
cal breakdown, with his slow movement from a state of physical health to
the unseen invasion of his internal mechanisms. As a state of emergency
is declared, the scene, which initially took on operatic qualities, is now
imbued with a sense of theatrical farce:

The voice grew louder, faded, grew loud again as the vehicle moved in
and out of local streets. Toxic event, chemical cloud. When the words
246 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

became faint, the cadence itself was still discernible, a recurring sequence
in the distance. It seems that danger assigns to public voices the respon-
sibility of a rhythm, as if in metrical units there is a coherence we can use
to balance whatever senseless and furious event is about to come rushing
around our heads. (DeLillo 2002: 120)

The words ‘toxic event’ and ‘chemical cloud’ divorce the event from its
true significance and are the same bureaucratic euphemisms that Arthur
Saltzman identified in the introduction. The rhythms and cadences of the
instructions bring a Foucauldian sensibility to this sequence, but these are
the same pacifying rhythms as found in the consumer paradise of the mall.
Saltzman referred to ‘white noise’ as such ‘vulgarized forms as advertise-
ments, tabloid headlines and bureaucratic euphemisms’ (Saltzman 1994:
p. 807) and it is noticeable that the name of the ATE changes from an
ominous sounding ‘heavy black mass’ (DeLillo 2002: 110) to the light
and ephemeral ‘feathery plume’ (DeLillo 2002: 111). This is the sanitised,
non-threatening language that detaches the victims from the danger and
prevents death becoming ‘real’.
When Jack visits the doctor for a medical examination, he finally realises
the extent to which his life and his body has become complicit with the
technological advancement which has become inherent in contemporary
Western society. Similarly, this is the point at which the information that is
available has been obtained by methods which are invasive:

The whole system says it. It’s what we call a massive data-base tally.
Gladney, J. A. K. I punch in the name, the substance, the exposure time
and then I tap into your computer history. Your genetics, your personals,
your medicals, your psychologicals, your police-and-hospitals. It comes
back pulsing stars. This doesn’t mean anything is going to happen to you
as such, at least not today or tomorrow. It just means you are the sum
total of your data. No man escapes that. (DeLillo 2002: 141)

The idea of an individual representing the ‘sum total of your data’ com-
pares with Heinrich’s ( Jack Gladney’s son’s) analysis of human instinct
and composition being reduced to a series of data but this is also another
example of human history becoming a commodity or a package which is
available for private consumption. To a point, it is possible to suggest that
DeLillo has moved into a genre that traverses the conditions of speculative
science-fiction, with the complicity and convergence between humanity
and technology. Speculative fiction is also characterised by remarkably para-
noid images and the ‘genetics’, ‘personals’, ‘medicals’ effectively render Jack
helpless as the electronic presentation displays his history with a far more
calculated conviction than any human. It is as though his persona has been
 Martyn Colebrook 247

translated into sequences of code and the similarities between ‘pulsing stars’
and ‘chemical impulses’ demonstrate this.
Jack is not the only character in White Noise to surrender his body to the
commodifying forces in operation in the novel. When Babette recounts
the transactions which led to her obtaining her Dylar, it becomes apparent
that she engaged in brief sexual encounters in a motel with Willie Mink,
the extreme scientist who dispenses the drug. Thomas Hine suggests that
‘motels fit perfectly into post-modern capitalism because they are simple
packages for people’ (Hine 1995: 170) and it is appropriate that the motel
room itself is a self-contained unit, perfect for the transaction between
two bodies. Actions of violence in DeLillo’s work are frequently portrayed
through the conventions of cinema and when Jack determines to murder
the man who has persuaded Babette to exchange sexual favours for Dylar,
he attempts to break free of his mediation by finding a ‘reality he can domi-
nate’ (DeLillo 2002: 297), a scene where he is in control and dictating the
events. He becomes a conscious player in his own television film, sensing
that he is ‘part of a network of structures and channels. I knew the precise
nature of events. I was moving closer to things in their natural state as
I approached a violence, a smashing intensity. Water fell in drops, surfaces
gleamed’ (DeLillo 2002: 305). This is the self-realisation that occurs when
an individual verges on the edge of the real, when they commit an act of
violence that imbues them with a sense of power and the feeling of being in
control, rather than at the mercy of impulses and restraint. In the moments
after the murder, this breakthrough is complete:

I continued to advance in consciousness. Things glowed, a secret life

rising out of them. Water struck the roof in elongated orbs, splashing
drams. I knew for the first time what rain really was. I knew what wet
was. I understood the neurochemistry of my brain, the meaning of
dreams (the waste material of premonitions). Great stuff everywhere,
racing through the room, racing slowly. A richness, a density. (DeLillo
2002: 310)

DeLillo’s analysis that dreams are ‘the waste material of premonitions’ con-
curs with his theories of the connection between the mind and conspiracy
in Libra (1988) but the language of the scene where Jack kills Minks is filled
with far more experiential senses, the use of ‘wet’, ‘richness’, ‘density’ are
important because they possess a greater impact than the depthless, lifeless,
condensed language that characterised the earlier shopping mall scenes. The
‘secret life’ of objects is catalysed by Gladney’s breaking free from the self-
sealed spaces in which he has been contained.
However, in keeping with the themes of DeLillo’s work, the state of
realisation is only temporary. Each experience of the ‘real’ usually leads
to death and it is at the end of White Noise that the relationship which
248 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Osteen identifies between paranoia, consumption and death is finally made

apparent:

But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The
terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the
binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and
radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we
wait together, regardless of age, our carts stocked with brightly coloured
goods. (DeLillo 2002: 326)

The implicit trust and, to a certain extent, dependency on technology has

returned and each consumer is sealed within the easily identifiable site of
micro-Capitalism – the mall. This ‘language of waves and radiation’ is the
American ‘dread’ of Libra and White Noise’s hidden anxiety, the unseen
communications which pattern, pacify and channel the consumer’s con-
tentment. ‘Brightly coloured goods’ is a distinctly non-descript phrase
when compared to the enriched language of momentary freedom that Jack
experiences whilst the queues and lists represent a repetitive repackaging
of the same internal desires simply mediated through a different form. The
repackaging of internal wishes and dreams characterises DeLillo’s fiction as a
whole, whilst novels culminate in the cathartic moment when these dreams
are released through actions or words, the consequences for the protagonist
all too often remain unresolved.

Works cited
Baker, Peter. 1994. ‘The Terrorist as Interpreter: Mao II in Postmodern Context.’Postmodern
Culture 4.2 (January). n.p.
Begley, Adam. 1993. ‘Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction’. Paris Review 35.128 (Fall):
274–306.
Bonca, Cornel. 1996. ‘Don DeLillo’s White Noise: The Natural Language of the
Species.’College Literature 23.2 (June): 25–44
Boxall, Peter. 2006. Don DeLillo: The Possiblity of Fiction. Oxford: Routledge.
Cowart, David. 2002. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language.Athens: University of
Georgia Press.
DeLillo, Don. 1983. ‘American Blood: A Journey through the Labyrinth of Dallas and
JFK.’ Rolling Stone 8 Dec. 1983: 21–2, 24, 27–8, 74.
DeLillo, Don. 1985. White Noise. London: Picador. 2002.
Dewey, Joseph. 2006. Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo. Columbia,
SC: University of South Carolina Press.
Engles, Tim, and John N. Duvall, eds.2006. Approaches to Teaching DeLillo’s White
Noise. New York: The Modern Language Association of America.
Gregory, Richard L. (ed.) 1987. The Oxford Companion to the Mind.Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
 Martyn Colebrook 249

Hall, Stuart. 1997. Representations: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices.

London: Sage.
Hantke, Stefan. 1994. Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary American Fiction: The
Works of Don DeLillo and Joseph McElroy. Frankfurt and Munich:GMBH.
Hine, Thomas. 1995. The Total Package: The Evolution and Secret Meaning of Boxes,
Bottles, Cans and Tubes. Boston: Little, Brown.
James, Caryn, 1985. ‘I Never Set Out to Write an Apocalyptic Novel’. New York Times
Book Review 13 Jan.: 31.
Kavadlo, Jesse. 2004. Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief. New York: Peter Lang.
LeClair, Thomas. 1982. ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo’. Contemporary Literature 23.1:
19–31. Rpt. in Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists,
ed. Thomas LeClair and Larry McCaffery. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.
79–90. (Interview conducted in Athens, 1979.)
LeClair, Thomas. 1987. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.
Lentricchia, Frank (ed.) 1991. Introducing Don DeLillo. Durham and London: Duke
University Press.
Lentricchia, Frank (ed.) 1991. New Essays on White Noise. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Millward, Kenneth. 2000. Contemporary American Fiction: An Introduction to American
Fiction since 1970. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Orr, Leonard. 2003. Don DeLillo’s White Noise: A Reader’s Guide. New York and London:
Continuum.
Osteen, Mark. 2000. American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture.
Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Pell, Gabe. 2002. ‘Acclaimed writer DeLillo gives rare reading in McCosh 50’. Daily
Princetonian, 17 Oct.
Saltzman, Arthur M. 1994. ‘The Figure in the Static: “White Noise”.’Modern Fiction
Studies, Winter.
Tanner, Tony. 1971. City of Words: American Fiction 1950–1970. London: Cape.
17
Hooked on Classics: Oranges Are Not
the Only Fruit 25 Years On
Sonya Andermahr

Introduction

Given that Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is one of the more recently pub-
lished texts discussed in this volume and having just published a book on
Winterson’s works myself, it felt slightly odd being asked by the editors to
‘revisit’ it as a ‘classic’ text. Still, it was 29 years ago that Winterson’s debut
novel was published, which is older than the average undergraduate student.
Moreover, the literary scene was a very different place in 1985, so there must
be a good case for reassessment of the text in 2014. The editors’ aim in this
volume is to provide ‘new and original interpretations of texts which have
established themselves as twentieth century classics’. The main problem
this poses the contemporary critic is that the novel has always been seen by
commentators as ineluctably ‘new’: novel, innovative, experimental, post-
modern, as hybridizing forms, challenging boundaries and deconstructing
discourses. Its publication coincided with the consolidation of critical theory
in academic departments of English and so critical readings of it have always
seen it in terms of – and in many ways as an exemplar of – the new (post-
structuralist) theories. As a newly minted ‘classic’ text, one which entered
the canon almost immediately upon publication, Oranges was hailed as a
postmodern text, and Winterson as an exemplary feminist and queer literary
practitioner (Morrison) from the very beginning. The novel has been ana-
lysed variously as a female and lesbian Bildungsroman (Onega, Andermahr),
as a feminist appropriation of the fantastic (Armitt), as an example of the
lesbian postmodern (Doan), as biblical reworking (Cosslett), as quest nar-
rative (Onega, Pykett), and as working class text (O’Rourke). Numerous
critics have drawn attention to the novel’s intertextual relationship with
other canonical texts including D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (Onega),
James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Pykett), and Charlotte
Brontë’s Jane Eyre (Cosslet and Pyrhönen). Winterson, of course, has always
resisted critical appropriation (in any terms) while not necessarily being
unsympathetic to theory’s ideological aims (she is a feminist; she does seek

250
 Sonya Andermahr 251

to dismantle binaries, etc). She has stressed the general and universal reach
of her work, quite antithetically to its construction in the academy. And she
has a point: her readers are many and various; not everyone reads as a post-
structuralist literary critic. Now that the postmodern moment seems to have
waned somewhat in academic thought1 – it may be that the time has come
to reassess the critical reception of Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
Oranges was immediately popular on its publication in 1985, garnering
admiring reviews from the print media and winning the Whitbread prize
for First Novel.2 It has remained in print and has sustained high sales
figures over 29 years. It has been a recommended text by both AQA and
OCR exam boards and has been widely taught since the 1990s as part of
a module on ‘The struggle for identity in modern literature’. The 1989 TV
film version increased its marketability and its lifespan considerably; indeed
it was rescreened on BBC TV in 2010. So, what makes Oranges a ‘classic’?
Firstly, it is a classic quest narrative in the form of a Bildungsroman or novel
of development, charting the growth of a young person to maturity, which
gives it a ‘universal’ appeal. Secondly, it takes the form of a fictional auto-
biography, appealing to the reader’s fascination for the personal details of
an individual’s life. The novel begins with an emphatically autobiographi-
cal opening: ‘Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and
father’ (Oranges 3). This grounds the text in a personal history, which sets up
readerly identification from the start. When discussing the appeal of the text
readers frequently emphasize the authenticity of its description of a working
class childhood, the humour and warmth of the narrative, and their identifi-
cation with the young protagonist.3 Audience members of a recent Bookclub
interview claimed to recognise and identify with Winterson’s depiction
of Accrington in the 1960s and 70s, right down to particular streets and
shops. The novel’s enduring success and popularity therefore owes much to
its autobiographical framing. As Zekiye Antakyalioglu argues, ‘Oranges has
proved to be her longest lasting success not only because it has been seen
to radiate lesbian viewpoints, postmodern issues of intertextuality, metafic-
tion, and new historicist understandings of the past and the present, but
also because it is written in an autobiographical manner’ (Antakyalioglu 5).
It is at once specific – based on Winterson’s own experience of growing up
as a working class lesbian in a fanatically religious community in the North
of England – and general, treating universal concepts such as first love, loss,
grief, rage, and courage (Winterson Oranges xiv). Writing on the occasion of
the twenty-fifth-anniversary of the novel’s publication, Winterson stated:

Oranges would not be in print across the world, much less read and
taught, 25 years later if it were just about me. I never wanted it to be just
about me, and maybe that’s the point. I wanted, through language and
through storytelling, to reach something wider than my own circum-
stances. The opening words, ‘Like most people . . . ’ are the clue. Most
252 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

people have not grown up the way I did, but the struggle to become who
you are is for everyone. (Times 4)

The story that she tells, a classic Bildung narrative, involves the struggle of
a young lesbian to assert her sense of difference against the morally oppres-
sive guardians of her community. In revising the ‘narrative of damnation’
associated with lesbian and gay texts for much of the twentieth century,
incorporating a narrative of flight and ‘enabling escape’ (Stimpson),4 the
novel represents a ground-breaking treatment of lesbian existence, placing
the marginal subject at the narrative centre and inverting the usual privileg-
ing of heterosexuality. According to Hilary Hinds, the text’s success can be
ascribed to its ability to transcend genre categories, which she sees as a func-
tion of its lesbian aesthetic. Winterson herself compares the novel to Virginia
Woolf’s Orlando in terms of its experimentalism, its blurring of genres, and
its radical treatment of sexuality (Winterson Art 53). The novel has been an
important book for several generations of teenage readers, especially those
experiencing similar conflicts around their sexuality. But it speaks more
widely to teenagers’ sense of marginalization and ‘being different’, which is
a striking feature of post-war society. ‘You’ll have a different, difficult time’
(Winterson Oranges 109), Jeanette is told by her orange demon.5 No doubt
its endurance as a text that continues to circulate in culture may, in part, be
ascribed to this factor. According to John Mullan, writing in The Guardian
on the popularity of contemporary fiction on A-Level syllabuses, ‘tales of
oppression, valiantly overcome, are always favourites with A-Level setters’
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2006/oct/23/schools.alevels).
As a text, it therefore operates – and has been read – on many levels.
Commenting on initial reactions to the novel which read it in terms of auto-
biographical realism or as postmodern experiment, Susana Onega argues
that ‘Oranges is both linear and realistic and anti-linear and experimental’
(Onega 19). This is because it interrupts an autobiographical narrative set in
the 1960s and 70s with a series of mythical tales and philosophical inter-
ludes. Nevertheless, despite its ‘complicated’ spiral structure and the diver-
sity of styles and discourses utilized, the novel has a simplicity of address,
which appeals to the majority of readers. In a recent Bookclub interview for
Radio 4, Winterson emphasized the way in which she set out, not to write
an autobiographical account of her life, but to use herself as a fictional char-
acter.6 In this way, she could escape the limitations of her origins and begin
to write her own story and therefore gain power and freedom. In fact the
novel enacts this ‘battle of the stories’; between the version promulgated by
her mother and the Church and her own growing disillusion with religious
fundamentalism and need to individuate herself. The two aspects of classi-
cal quest and autobiography are united in Winterson’s desire to use herself
to write both fact and fiction. The text therefore circulates as a much loved
comic novel of growing up, as teaching material, as an aspect of popular/
 Sonya Andermahr 253

literary culture, and as part of Winterson’s own mythobiography. Its success

may be attributed to the ways in which the narrative ‘hooks’ itself onto clas-
sic texts, which circulate in the culture’s collective unconscious. This chap-
ter will combine these emphases and consider the novel as a literary classic
that both subverts the canon and inscribes the tradition in the process
of reworking autobiography as art. It will draw on recent interviews with
Winterson to suggest that the novel represents a ‘cover story’ that conceals
the sense of loss intrinsic to Winterson’s origin story.

‘I can change the story. I am the story’

Unsurprisingly, Winterson herself ascribes the novel’s staying power to its

art; its transformation of the raw materials of experience into an aesthetic
form. In Art Objects and elsewhere Winterson argues strongly against auto-
biographical readings of her work, claiming that Oranges’s importance lies
not in its ‘wit or warmth’ but in its ‘new way with words’ (Art 53). However,
her argument in Art Objects that ‘the intersection between a writer’s life and
a writer’s work is irrelevant to the reader’ (27) is not always borne out in
readers’ accounts as revealed in the Bookclub interview, where the biggest
laughs came when Winterson mimicked her mother pronouncing, ‘Why
be happy if you could be normal?’ There is clearly an ongoing dialogue
between fact and fiction in reception of the text, and readers’ appetite for
the ‘real facts’ remains undimmed. Another admiring audience member
began her question by praising the humour of her depiction of childhood
experience, before going on to ask Winterson to confirm whether the sam-
pler episode ‘really happened’. Winterson laughed it off but refused to enter
into debate about the veracity of particular episodes, saying she could no
longer remember which was which. In her Times article she takes a stronger
line, despairing of approaches to her work which seek to narrow and fix
versions of her life: ‘I have even had questionnaires asking me to tick which
bits of the story are true and which are the bits I made up’ (Winterson
Times 4). Despite Winterson’s resistance to readerly attempts to identify the
episodes in the text with aspects of her own life, readers undoubtedly do
read Oranges in this way; they are interested in the minutiae and specifici-
ties of Winterson’s life experience as well as the ‘universal’ themes the novel
treats; together these aspects constitute the novel’s appeal.
Oranges is an exemplary escape narrative. At once rooted in Northern
English working class experience, the text also represents an escape from
origins. Repeatedly, Winterson represents life as series of narratives, which
frame and construct the self and the self’s possibilities. Winterson describes
her foster mother, whom she always refers to as Mrs Winterson, as a ‘flam-
boyant depressive; a woman who needed an audience, a plot and some very
good lines’ (Times 4). Winterson ascribes to her an innate theatricality which
she herself then adopts as a mode of representation and self-representation.
254 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Her mother’s stories were so powerful that Winterson risked becoming

enmeshed in them, just as in Oranges the characters Jeanette, the princess
and Winnet risk being caught up in more powerful narratives. As she wrote
recently in The Times: ‘To avoid the narrow mesh of her story about me,
I needed a story of my own, and that is how and why I am a writer’ (Times 4).
Authorship becomes part of a struggle to control her own naming. Winterson
relates how she finally achieved this on publication of the novel when her
mother called her to say that such was her embarrassment, she had to order
the book under a pseudonym. ‘I knew then that I had won’, she states in
the Bookclub interview. When Mrs Winterson finally read the novel she
complained that it wasn’t ‘true’ but, as Winterson points out, truth is a rela-
tive concept: ‘She had invented me – got a baby, given it a name, told it a
story, made it a story, and the baby had invented herself in return’ (Times 4).
All these ideas – of the mother’s creative power, the power of naming, and
self-invention through storytelling – are present in Oranges.
Winterson rightly resists the novel’s categorization as autobiography;
it belongs to the recognised genre of fictional autobiography, in which
a constructed narrative persona relates her own history, frequently from
a position of hindsight. As Winterson remarks, while the ‘facts’ may be
‘threadbare’ or constraining, the ‘story’ permits endless possibilities for con-
structing the self (Times 4). In the preface to her novella Weight, Winterson
insists that authenticity not autobiography is important, by which she
means the achieved vision rather than the original ‘facts’ (xix). Winterson
first expressed this aesthetic credo in the ‘Deuteronomy’ chapter of Oranges,
which has since been much quoted by critics in order to establish Winterson
as a postmodern practitioner of historiographic metafiction. What stands
out now about Winterson’s challenging of binary oppositions, especially
the distinction between history and storytelling, is her insistence on the
aesthetic transformation of life. The word is the thing; naming is power; lan-
guage creates reality. Winterson uses the concept of ‘fiction masquerading as
memoir’ (Art 53) to describe her use of autobiography; she does not ‘clothe
herself in a thin veil of fiction but make[s] herself the fiction’ (Antakyalioglu
15). Life writing is a means of both theorizing and fictionalizing the sub-
ject as Lucie Armitt has demonstrated in her reading of Oranges alongside
Caroline Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman, which is itself a classic of
feminist historiography. Winterson therefore ‘intentionally position[s] her-
self in history, culture, and literature with the permanence of art, which ena-
bles her to transform her diaries into timeless orations’ (Antakyalioglu 15).

Inscribing the tradition

Oranges has the literary tradition written into it in its ongoing engagement with
classical and classic texts. Its allusions encompass Greek myth and Athena’s
birth from Zeus’s head, Homer’s Odyssey, Dante’s Inferno, nineteenth-century
 Sonya Andermahr 255

novels, and the modernists Eliot, Joyce and Woolf. Susana Onega points out
that Oranges adopts a spiral structure, rather than either a linear or a cycli-
cal structure, and that this feature is used by the Western canonical poets
from Dante, Milton, Blake and Goethe to Yeats, Graves, and Eliot in order
to express the ongoing cycle of human life. In his essay ‘Tradition and the
Individual Talent’, T. S. Eliot, who is one of Winterson’s most admired writers,
argues that a sense of the tradition is integral to canonical works of literature,
which involves a historical awareness ‘not only of the pastness of the past; but
of its presence’. The writer should write

with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and
within it the whole of the literature of his [sic] own country has a simul-
taneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical
sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of
the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer tradi-
tional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely con-
scious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity. (Eliot ‘Tradition’, 38)

Winterson’s fusion of autobiographical narrative, allegory, fairy tale and

philosophical reflection represents just such a bringing together of the time-
less and the temporary. She transforms these diverse forms into an artistic
whole, ‘which is both something plural in the sense of fragmentation and
unique in the sense of authenticity and originality’ (Antakyalioglu 11). The
novel contains literary allusions to a range of other texts which all have a
‘simultaneous existence’. The text operates a structural intertextuality in
which the realistic linear narrative is interspersed with biblical, fantastic
and mythical tales. Winterson has commented that as a child her house
contained only six books: two Bibles, a concordance, two books for children,
and Malory’s Morte D’Arthur (Winterson Art 153). She has also revealed that
Jane Eyre was a favourite book of her mother’s. Excepting the concordance,
Winterson draws extensively on these works to provide the novel’s mythi-
cal and narrative framework. In fact Winterson adopts what T. S. Eliot, in
another essay, calls the ‘mythical method’ whereby the writer draws ‘a
continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity (Eliot ‘Ulysses’
483)’ in order to give universal meaning and pattern to contemporary,
contingent experience.
She does this, most obviously, with her use of biblical allusion. Structurally,
the novel is divided into eight chapters which accord to the first eight books
of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua,
Judges and Ruth. Winterson subverts the books of the Old Testament by
inserting them into a lesbian coming-out story. She undertakes a parodic
rescripting of the Bible giving her life story a biblical status and resonance.
Jeanette’s journey represents nothing less than a version of the Creation
and Fall, Christ’s passion, crucifixion, and redemption through love. In
256 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

‘Genesis’, for example, Jeanette’s adoption by Louie is compared to God’s

creation of the universe and to Christ’s birth; Louie chooses Jeanette just
as God chooses his subjects as prophets and ultimately his Son as Saviour:
‘My mother . . . dreamed a dream and sustained it in daylight. She would
get a child, train it, build it, dedicate it to the Lord’ (Oranges 10). Louie
appropriates masculine powers of creation, using baptism, naming and sto-
rytelling. She gives birth not literally but metaphorically to a ‘holy child’.
Importantly, Louie inspires Jeanette with the belief that ‘you can change the
world’ (10); indeed, it is from her mother and the Bible that Jeanette learns
the power of allegorical thinking.7
In the second chapter, Winterson draws a parallel between Jeanette’s
removal from home to the dangerous ‘Breeding Ground’ of school and
the expulsion of the Israelites from Egypt in ‘Exodus’ (21). In these early
sections of the novel, Winterson’s use of the mythical method works to
emphasize the comic aspects. The use of an adult narrator to focalize the
child’s viewpoint provides the distance necessary for the humour to emerge.
In the hyacinth episode, for example, when Jeanette enters a floral exhibit
called ‘The Annunciation’, the narrator comments: ‘I thought it was a
very clever marriage of horticulture and theology’ (45). The juxtaposition
of childish project and high literary culture provides the humour. When
her biblically themed work fails to impress, Jeanette switches to popular
culture as inspiration, drawing on equally inappropriate Hollywood melo-
dramas such as Now Voyager. She proves adept at hybridizing genres just as
Winterson as writer draws on diverse discourses to transform autobiography
into art. While the biblical book of ‘Leviticus’ concerns the rules govern-
ing religious observance, Winterson’s version witnesses Jeanette’s growing
awareness of sexuality (52) and her first theological disagreement with the
Church (58). In ‘Numbers’ Jeanette falls in love with Melanie and worries if
this constitutes ‘unnatural passions’ (86). ‘Deuteronomy’ represents a self-
reflexive philosophical meditation on the nature of history and storytelling,
arguing that the latter represents a ‘way of explaining the universe while
leaving the universe unexplained’ (91). In ‘Joshua’ Jeanette is subjected to
an exorcism in an effort to rid her of her ‘demons’ (105); in ‘Judges’ she is
accused by the Church fathers of ‘aping men’ and her mother orders her to
leave home (125). The final chapter, ‘Ruth’ is the only female book alluded
to. Significantly, it is the chapter in which Jeanette returns home after her
forced exile to broker an uneasy truce with her mother. The biblical Book
of Ruth represents a plea for tolerance of mixed marriages and foregrounds
Ruth’s loyalty to another woman, Naomi. However, Jeanette ‘chooses the
prophetic role of a writer for whom fiction, not the Bible, functions as
scripture’ (Pyrhönen 58), allowing her to challenge cultural myths of origins.
The archetypal narrative form, which has its Western origins in Greek epic,
is the quest. Homer’s Odyssey narrates the story of Odysseus’s ten year quest
to get home after the end of the Trojan wars. The central mythical quest
 Sonya Andermahr 257

narrative explicitly alluded to in the inset tales is the Quest for the Grail, part
of the Arthurian legend, recounted by Sir Thomas Malory in Morte D’Arthur,
one of the few books in Winterson’s childhood home. In Malory’s version,
Sir Perceval, son of King Pellinore, leaves King Arthur’s court where he was a
favourite knight to embark on an ultimately successful quest with Galahad
and Bors. In the course of his adventures he is attacked by a gang of men
and rescued by a red knight; he then saves a lion from being strangled by a
serpent. The lion leads him safely to a ship, which enables him to continue
his quest for the Grail. The themes of mortal danger, personal courage, and
the pursuit of one’s vision are all foregrounded in the narrative. Perceval
represents an alter ego for Jeanette, a legendary counterpart whose knightly
quest is no more or less significant and hazardous than Jeanette’s own. In
her treatment of the tale, Winterson develops the motifs of disintegration of
community (of the Round Table) and Perceval’s resulting sense of disillusion;
the theme of lost love (between Arthur and Perceval); and Perceval’s pursuit
of his personal vision. Winterson uses Perceval repeatedly in her novels (see
The Power Book) in order to symbolize the restless quest for love and hap-
piness, and to evoke a certain homoeroticism. While Perceval experiences
the loneliness of being cast out of the circle of love, the quest pushes him
onwards. Jeanette’s quest is also a quest for love and personal meaning – for
something or someone to replace the figures of Arthur/mother and God.
The text also rewrites the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, especially
Dickens’s Great Expectations and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, adopting aspects
of the plot, characterization and narrative technique of the form. The plot of
the orphan child cast adrift in the world, betrayed by some adults, and nur-
tured by others, is adopted by Winterson; Jeanette is in a long line of found-
ling children, Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Brontë’s Jane, among them. As in
these classic texts, Winterson presents a child’s view of the world, mediated
by an older, mature narrative consciousness. This creates an ironic distance
which both makes possible the humour and renders the adult world strange
and grotesque. The novel is peopled with comic grotesques from Jeanette’s
mother and the squeaky-voiced Pastor Finch to grumpy Betty in Tricketts and
Mrs Arkwright of Arkwright’s for Vermin. Louie in Oranges bears comparison
to the maternal grotesques such as Mrs Joe and Mrs Reed found in Dickens
and Brontë. The ineffectual but kindly men like Louie’s husband also have
their counterpart in Dickens’s portraits of weak masculine figures. The novel
contains a number of male grotesques, notably Pastors Finch and Spratt,
who are akin to Dickens’s perverted authority figures such as Mr Bumble and
Squeers. In Jeanette’s dream about marriage, men appear as beasts. Reading
fairy tales such as ‘Beauty and the Beast’ only confirms Jeanette’s theory. On
one occasion, Jeanette overhears one of the neighbours saying, ‘She married
a pig’ (Oranges 69). Winterson now disavows this portrayal but it remains
a significant feminist aspect of the text, distinguishing it from mainstream
discourse which posits male as norm.8
258 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

If the Bible is the novel’s primary sacred source, Jane Eyre is the foremost
secular intertext. As Pyrhönen comments of the novel’s two central sources:
‘They seduce Winterson, kindling her desire to write. What are they, if
not her literary father and mother?’ (Pyrhönen 66). The novel functions
as a consolatory text for both Jeanette and her mother. Feeling depressed
when abandoned in hospital, Jeanette thinks, ‘so I was alone. I thought of
Jane Eyre, who faced many trials and was always brave’ (Oranges 28). Both
Jeanette and the reader identify with the orphan Jane’s struggle for survival.
For her mother it is a founding text, one which she has completely rewritten
to suit her own worldview. Instead of Jane returning to Thornfield to marry
Rochester, Louie has Jane marry the missionary St John Rivers to embark
upon ‘the Lord’s work’ together in India. In fact, Oranges adopts the plot
structure of Jane Eyre which enacts a struggle between religious and social
duty and self-abnegation and Jane’s passionate desire for selfhood. As in
Jane Eyre, Jeanette is aided in her struggle for selfhood by a series of female
figures; Elsie, Miss Jewsbury and the florist are counterparts of Helen Burns,
Miss Temple and the Rivers sisters. While both texts emphasize ‘the religious
and spiritual dimensions of love’ (Pyrhönen 50), Winterson’s reworking
substitutes a lesbian romance for the heterosexual romance of Jane Eyre.
While her mother gives her a thorough grounding in the Bible and her
revised version of Jane Eyre, it is one of Jeanette’s surrogate mothers, Elsie
Norris, who introduces her to a wide range of English literature including
Swinburne, Blake, Christina Rossetti and W. B. Yeats. Elsie also provides her
with two of the novel’s central insights: ‘She said that stories helped you
to understand the world’ (29) and that ‘What looks like one thing . . . may
well be another’ (30), which relate to Winterson’s twin concerns with sto-
rytelling and epistemological relativism. As this suggests, metaphoric sub-
stitution is the principle of both the novel’s structure and its philosophical
vision. The text transforms everything into something else using repetition
and parallelism: character, motif, and story all morph into another version
of themselves. Visions are another form of allegorical ‘seeing’ and Jeanette
repeatedly invokes the visionary poet-prophet William Blake to describe her
childhood experience. Even the orange demon represents a Blakean vision.
As she admits: ‘This tendency towards the exotic has brought me many
problems, just as it did for William Blake’ (42). By adding the reference to
Blake Winterson transforms Jeanette’s experience of difference from the
particular and ordinary to the literary and visionary.
Oranges adopts a particular form of the Bildung genre; it is a Kunstlerroman,
a novel of artistic development. As Lyn Pykett has shown, the novel has
strong links with James Joyce’s classic modernist Kunstlerroman, A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man. Like Stephen Daedelus, Jeanette battles a series
of oppressive authorities including the mother, school, Church and soci-
ety. The novel’s ending recapitulates that of Portrait; like Stephen, Jeanette
chooses exile and independence on ‘the other side’ of the sea. In the final
 Sonya Andermahr 259

chapter, a fellow Oxford student asks Jeanette, ‘when did you last see your
mother?’(156), which echoes Stephen’s conversation about his mother with
his fellow student Cranly. Jeanette reflects that ‘I could have been a priest
instead of a prophet’ (156), which provides a parallel with Stephen’s rejec-
tion of his vocation for the Catholic Church. Jeanette, like Stephen, rejects
all the authoritative discourses – family, Church, nation in order to forge her
own artistic identity. The narrator of Oranges encapsulates their shared vision-
ary role: ‘The priest has a book with words set out . . . the prophet has no book’
(156). As Antakyalioglu comments, Winterson wishes to maintain that ‘art not
only springs from experience, it also springs from other art’ (Antakyalioglu 7).
As many critics have noted, the use of inset stories and fantasy elements
are distancing devices to detach the narrative from the authorial persona. It
represents a double strategy as Winterson mythicizes the ‘real’ facts of her/
Jeanette’s life, and narrates classic tales which serve to eternalize the narrative
subject. The multiple discourses add up to more than the sum of their parts,
transcending mere autobiography and converting life into art.
Fairy tales are a type of quest narrative in which an innocent hero or
heroine is subjected to the power of a betraying adult and has only their
imagination and resourcefulness to aid them. Louie conforms to the role of
the wicked step-mother and witch, purporting to give life to the heroine but
ultimately betraying her, firstly by sending Jeanette’s birth mother away and
then by siding with the Church fathers against Jeanette. Elsie Norris fulfils
the role of fairy godmother and donor who helps the heroine in her quest
by offering her guidance and a safe space to be herself. In the parable of the
beautiful wise woman, the weight of patriarchal tradition leads the prince
to ignore women’s wisdom. The Princess, who is certainly not a Sleeping
Beauty figure, but a wise and resourceful young woman who saves a vil-
lage by bringing knowledge and healing, is ultimately killed by the Prince
who cannot possess her. Winterson’s retelling represents an anti-patriarchal
morality tale. In this way, Winterson appropriates the form of the traditional
fairy tale and the female archetype of good witch/spinster in order to sub-
vert the canon. The relationship between the main narrative and the inset
tales is that of allegory or parable. Winterson speaks about parables as an
economic way of telling a story (Bookclub interview). The most succinct of
the parables used by Winterson is that of the emperor Tetrahedron whose
grace is contrasted to the foul Isoceles. Through personification, Winterson
converts geometry into story and art. The novel’s central parable and most
important of the inset tales is the story of Winnet Stonejar, which adopts all
the novel’s key motifs: a parental sorcerer figure, a protective chalk circle, a
talismanic pebble, exile from a community, and a connecting thread back
home. In the tale, which is itself a version of Rumpelstiltskin, the sorcerer
sets out to guess Winnet’s name and thereby have power over her. This epi-
sode points to the magical power of naming, just as Louie names Jeanette
and creates her as a special child with a magical destiny as a missionary.
260 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

The sorcerer, disguised as a mouse, subsequently ‘ties a thread around her

button’ (148), which mirrors the thread Louie has tied around Jeanette.
The experience of the characters Jeanette, Winnet, and Perceval is therefore
both personal and archetypal, specific and general. Together the characters
represent the necessity of exile in the service of their vision. Their ‘simulta-
neous existence’ in parallel narratives constitutes the act of writing oneself
a story, into the story, even when there seems to be no alternative to the
present. It enacts the idea that the narrative of one’s life may be changed
even as it draws on numerous established narratives. What unites the het-
erogenous discourses and multiple tales and ‘ties’ them together are the
motifs of thread and the stone/heart. Perceval feels himself ‘being pulled
like a bobbin of cotton, so that he was dizzy and wanted to give in to the
pull and wake up round familiar things’ (168). He dreams he is a spider and
a raven ‘came and flew through his thread’, similar to the raven who flies
through Winnet’s tale and leaves her its stony heart as a souvenir. The raven
is a stand-in for the orange demon who throws Jeanette a pebble (111) and
advises Winnet/Jeanette to ‘find a new place’ (143). When Jeanette returns
home for Christmas after her first term at Oxford, she comments that her
mother ‘had tied a thread around my button, to tug as she pleased’ (171).
As Lucie Armitt has argued, these motifs represent emotional attachments,
which cannot be simply severed by the quest for autonomous identity. They
also, I would argue, represent the incorporation of lost objects in a Freudian
sense.9 And it is the theme of loss in relation to primary attachments that
I lastly want to consider as a significant aspect of the text.

A dark story – and an unhappy one . . .

If Jeanette is the novel’s narrator-protagonist, Louie is its other main char-

acter. She occupies variously the role of God-like Creator, matriarch, villain,
wicked step-mother, Blakean visionary, and failed prophet. It is from her
mother and the Bible that Jeanette learns allegorical thinking. She rep-
resents maternal omnipotence in an archetypal form and the daughter’s
eventual disillusion with that power leads to a profound sense of loss as
theorized by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. The mother’s failure as a
prophet when she sides with the bigoted Church fathers is the second major
loss in Jeanette’s life following the ‘loss’ of her birth mother. As a character
Louie is both reprehensible and immensely enjoyable.10 Her larger than life
persona contributes a huge amount to the novel’s success. Winterson gives
Louie the best lines including the one that gives the novel its title: ‘oranges
are not the only fruit’ (167). It is not the case, either, that Winterson con-
structs the mother in wholly negative terms. As one audience member of
the Bookclub interview commented on re-reading the novel 25 years on,
Winterson accords Louie a large amount of sympathy and understanding.
The novel shows an awareness of Jeanette’s mother’s own ‘losses’ – her lost
 Sonya Andermahr 261

selves, the possibilities that never materialized, as Percy or Pierre’s wife, as

the special ‘friend’ of Eddy’s sister. Winterson’s own mother, a bright, edu-
cated and ambitious woman, was cut off by her family for ‘marrying down’
much like Mrs Morel in Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. Winterson describes her
as a theatrical woman who created a personal bio-mythology in order escape
the mundanity and ordinariness of life, and whose hyperactivity may be
read as a symptom of her depression. Perhaps Winterson’s prolific literary
output over 29 years may also cover over her losses?
If Oranges tells a ‘dark story’ (Winterson Times 4), its comedy serves to
cover over some of the more destructive aspects of the mother – daughter
relationship, most notably maternal neglect. An early example of maternal
neglect comes when Jeanette goes deaf for three months without any of the
adults recognizing that she has a physical illness; rather, they believe she is
in a state of holy rapture. The comedy masks the abuse of the child’s right
to health and well-being. Even when she is finally admitted to hospital she
is left largely alone to build igloos out of orange peel. The novel is also full
of images of violence towards the child. When her birth mother comes back
for her, a scene that is not narrated until page 99, Louie refuses to let her
see her. When Jeanette protests, Louie hits her. The narrator tells us that
this was the first time in her life that she experienced uncertainty. This epi-
sode is followed by the terrifying scene in which Jeanette and Melanie are
accused of demonic possession. Many readers and critics have commented
on the violence that attends the exorcism scene; in a protracted episode that
is tantamount to torture, Jeanette is physically restrained, and subjected to
36 hours of starvation and light deprivation which is meant to drive the
demon out. When Jeanette refuses the Church’s second attempt at exor-
cism, she is disowned by her mother: ‘She’s no daughter of mine’ (153).
The daughter who brings shame to the family and community is a feature
of culture throughout history, not least contemporary British society where
daughters who dare to choose their own relationship risk ‘dishonouring’ the
family. The motif connects Jeanette to millions of young women who are
made to carry the burden of their cultural tradition and are punished with
exile or death. No wonder then that Winterson felt the need to write herself
another story.
Oranges is a first novel about origins but what is striking revisiting the
novel 29 years on is its preoccupation with death and loss. Winterson has
used the phrase ‘cover story’ to describe the construction of narrative lay-
ers and versions in her work. Going back to The Power Book, she talks about
‘changing the story’ and providing alternatives or ‘covers’ to the story. In
this context, it takes on a less postmodern meaning about surface play –
multiple versions irreducible to a single truth – and a more deep-seated psy-
choanalytic resonance: the manifest content of fiction overlaying the latent
content of life and its losses. Given the author’s adopted status, the idea of a
name as ‘disguise’ takes on added resonance and poignancy, suggesting that
262 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

her name is not her own. In fact, Winterson recently revealed that she had
been given another name before being adopted until she was six months
old: ‘I was and was not “Jeanette” (Times 4). In this formulation the assumed
name or pseudonym is both an artistic disguise and an ontological conse-
quence of adoption, which becomes an intrinsic part of Winterson’s origin
story. Writing on the 25th anniversary of Oranges’ publication, Winterson
observed:

But it always comes back to the beginning. I realised recently that Oranges
itself, while a narrative of escape, is also a cover story. It covers the story
I haven’t wanted to hear, and haven’t wanted to tell. Oranges is a funny
novel as well as a painful one, and there are crucial inventions in it that
cover with planks the deep drops I needed to pass off as solid ground.
(Times 5)

We may speculate about the precise nature of the crucial inventions and
deep drops Winterson refers to here. No doubt they concern her insecurity
about her origins, her sense of the loss of her birth mother, and the relative
privation she experienced as a working class child deprived of cultural stim-
ulation other than religious texts. The novel’s humour covers over Jeanette’s
melancholy and represents a mechanism to defend against sadness.
The novel attests to the gradual process of disillusion with the mother’s
version of the world. It depicts a state of original plenitude when she was
one with the mother, and there was no division. But this is interrupted
firstly by the ‘exile’ imposed by school and then by the ‘Fall’ from grace
when she sexually transgresses. It records her unhappiness at school where
she spends hours sitting alone in the cloakroom with liver and gravy down
her gymslip. She becomes a pariah at school, is routinely bullied by the
other children and then victimized by teachers who accuse her of ‘terror-
izing’ other children. She is forced by the school no less than by her mother
to inhabit an ‘outsider’ status, which leaves her feeling isolated: ‘If it had
not been for the conviction that I was right, I might have been very sad’
(43). Elsewhere, Jeanette identifies with Keats’s misery (80). In the course
of the novel, Jeanette suffers the loss of all of her primary love objects: first
her birth mother, then her adopted mother, and the sense of belonging to
a community. The loss of God is perhaps the hardest to bear: ‘I miss God.
I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. [ . . . ] I miss God who was my
friend. I don’t even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your
emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it’
(164–5). Exile brings apostacy, uncertainty and isolation. The text incorpo-
rates these losses through the inset fairy tales. Perceval loses Arthur and the
company of the knights of the Round Table. Winnet loses her place as the
sorcerer’s daughter and her budding love for the young stranger. These tales
encompass three forms of human desire: man for man, woman for man, and
 Sonya Andermahr 263

woman for woman in Jeanette’s own case; loss therefore affects all subjects
regardless of sexuality.
The novel’s epistemological relativism may be seen as a consequence of
Winterson’s sense of a lack of identity and loss of primary attachments.
Lacking the ‘truth’ about her origins, and experiencing a series of traumatic
losses, the author-narrator foregrounds her own act of artistic creation. What
Winterson edits out, by her own admission, are the despairing emotions that
appear to have characterised periods of her life. The text therefore serves
to cover over her loss. While Winterson admits that she is ‘not a Freudian’
(Weight 139), she recognises how manifest content may conceal a latent
meaning. The novel may therefore be seen in terms of Freud’s concept of
mourning as a response to melancholia, marked as it is by a profound sense
of loss and sadness. Concluding his journey, Perceval admits that it ‘seemed
fruitless’ (168). Wryness emerges with her mother’s latest exploits but this
does not dissipate the uncertainty. Returning home after her exile to Oxford,
walking down the hill to the house, Jeanette is overcome with sadness:
‘I thought about the dog and was suddenly very sad; sad for her death, for
my death, for all the inevitable dying that comes with change. There’s no
choice that doesn’t mean a loss’ (169). Oranges tells an unfinished story;
as Winterson comments, there is not a happy ending and Jeanette’s future
remains uncertain. That story continues in Winterson’s subsequent works
as older characters take on the conflict of personal freedom versus worldly
engagement and responsibility.
All Winterson’s novels tell a single story: the story of children who are
abandoned by their real parents and brought up by adopted ones, of how
they are marked by that experience, and how they strive to create their own
identity. The thread that connects them is Winterson’s reinvention of classic
narratives to tell her own story. Oranges inaugurated her writing career and
with it she wrote herself into existence as a writer of fiction. It represents a
classic ‘creation’ story in every sense, a creation of the self through story-
telling, and recognition that this self is inevitably constituted by its losses.

Notes
1. In After Postmodernism (2001), Jose López and Garry Potter argue that ‘[theoretical]
postmodernism has “gone out of fashion”’ (4). Gavin Keulks has analysed the
work of both Jeanette Winterson Martin Amis in terms of a move towards a ‘post-
postmodern voice,’ stating: ‘My suggestion of a second, or late-phase postmod-
ernism seeks to mollify the extremism of its radical “first-phase” configuration’
(Martin Amis 2006: 161).
2. For example, Gore Vidal called Winterson ‘the most interesting young writer
I have read in twenty years’ and Muriel Spark described her as a ‘fresh voice with
a mind behind it’ (Interview with Maya Jaggi, ‘Redemption songs’. The Guardian,
29 May 2004).
264 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

3. See, for example, the responses given by audience members of the Radio 4
Bookclub interview broadcast on 4 April 2010.
4. Catharine Stimpson instances Radcliffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness as the ‘narra-
tive of damnation’ that has dominated twentieth-century lesbian fiction.
5. Winterson rejects the ‘gay’ label while acknowledging the book’s significance in
terms of sexual representation. She wrote recently in The Times: ‘Yes, the book has
been vital for a lot of gay people struggling with social prejudice and self-hatred,
but Oranges is a book about becoming who you are by means of a story’ (13 March
2010: 4).
6. Early reviewers as well as readers (mis)read the novel as autobiography in large
part because the protagonist shares a name with the author. On this point,
Winterson reveals: ‘I felt that “Jeanette” was as good a disguise as any, partly
because I did not relate to my name. I don’t mean that I wish I was called
Esmerelda, but from the first, my close friends have all called me something else,
usually JW, or some variant of their own’ (Times 4).
7. Another major source of Winterson’s canonical rescripting is Greek myth. Louie
takes on the role of a Greek god, creating divine beings and orchestrating human
affairs. Louie dreams a dream of creating a child of destiny; Jeanette is a product
not of Louie’s womb but of her ‘head’ just as Athena springs fully-formed from
Zeus’s head in the Greek creation myth. In the Greek pantheon, Athena, Goddess
of wisdom and purity is a favourite daughter who represents a threat to the
paternal phallus just as Jeanette challenges maternal power.
8. The most awkward moment of the Bookclub interview came when a male audience
member asked about the negative representation of men. Keen to be conciliatory,
Winterson laughingly dismissed the portrayal, saying that she had mellowed since
she had written it. Apart from Jim Naughtie’s introduction which described the
novel as among other things a lesbian coming out story, neither feminism not
lesbian experience were mentioned in the half hour interview. This disavowal is
disappointing because it represents a normalization of available reading positions.
9. ‘In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), Freud theorizes melancholy as a state of
mourning in which the mourner has made a strong unconscious attachment to
an internalized object: ‘The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been
lost as an object of love’ (Freud 245).
10. Winterson’s portrayal of Louie is fascinating to consider in the context of the two
female figures who dominated the 1980s: Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher.
If the novel contains princess archetypes for whom Diana could be the model,
Thatcher appears to spring from the same soil as Louie and shares similar features
of indomitable strength, being hard-working and evangelical about her beliefs
and convictions – and famously not going to bed until the small hours. In the
Bookclub interview, Winterson talked about her mother wallpapering the ceiling
through the night, an account which resonates with a story of Carol Thatcher’s
about her mother doing the wallpapering in between parliamentary work.

Works cited
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Antakyalioglu, Zekiye, ‘Telling the temporary as permanent: Jeanette Winterson’s re-
working of autobiography in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Weight: The Myth of
Atlas and Heracles.’ In Margaret J-M Sömnez and Mine Ozyurt Kilic eds. Winterson
Narrating Time and Space (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009).
 Sonya Andermahr 265

Armitt, Lucie. ‘Storytelling and feminism’, in S. Andermahr ed. Jeanette Winterson:

A Contemporary Critical Guide (London: Continuum, 2007), pp. 14–26.
Cosslett, Tess. ‘Intertextuality in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: The Bible, Malory, and
Jane Eyre.’ ‘I’m Telling You Stories’: Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading. Eds.
Helena Grice and Tim Woods (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 15–28.
Doan, Laura. ‘Sexing the postmodern’, in L. Doan ed. The Lesbian Postmodern
(New York: Columbia UP, 1994), pp. 137–55.
Eliot, T. S. ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent.’ The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and
Criticism (New york: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922).
Eliot, T. S. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth.” The Dial (November 1923), 483.
Freud, Sigmund. ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. The Standard Edition. Volume XIV
(1914–16). (London: Vintage, 2001).
Hinds, Hilary. ‘Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: Reaching audiences other texts cannot
reach’, in S. Munt ed. New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings (Hemel
Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 153–72.
Keulks, Gavin. Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006).
López, José and Potter, Gary (eds). After postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical
realism (London and New York: Athlone, 2001).
Morrison, Jago. ‘Who cares about gender at a time like this? Love, sex and the
problem of Jeanette Winterson’, Journal of Gender Studies 15:2 (2006), 169–80.
Mullan, John. ‘This term, we will be studying Zadie Smith.’ http://www.guardian.
co.uk/education/2006/oct/23/schools.alevels
Onega, Susana. Jeanette Winterson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).
O’Rourke, Rebecca. ‘Fingers in the fruit basket: A feminist reading of Jeanette
Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit’, in S. Sellers ed. Feminist Criticism: Theory
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Pykett, Lyn. ‘A New Way with Words? Jeanette Winterson’s Post-Modernism’, in
H. Grice and Tim Woods, eds. ‘I’m Telling You Stories’: Jeanette Winterson and the
Politics of Reading (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998).
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Stimpson, Catharine. ‘Zero degree deviancy: the lesbian novel in English’, in E. Abel
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Winterson, Jeanette. Art Objects (London: Vintage, 1996).
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Winterson, Jeanette. Weight (London: Canongate, 2005).
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Winterson, Jeanette. Bookclub interview on Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Radio 4,
4 April 2010.
18
Remembering and Disremembering
Beloved: Lacunae and Hauntings
Gina Wisker

On first reading Beloved when it came out in 1987, I felt I was in the presence of
a book that had so many layers of meaning I would not be able to unravel them
there and then to explore it, write about it, and teach it. The sudden shock of
its intertwining of the historically ‘real’ and the Gothic destabilised me. The
story is based on a newspaper cutting of an infanticide, Margaret Garner’s
(Sethe in the novel) murder of her baby in 1855, while the moment and loca-
tion in which is it set, Cincinnati Ohio, was the first step to freedom into the
American North for slaves from the South. These details are historical. Then
the Gothic suddenly intervenes with a baby ghost and a haunting presence;
‘124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom’ (1987, 3) challenging neat categories
of modes of fictional expression and modes of reading. Morrison exposes pain-
ful history, confronts readers with the lived presence of slavery embodied in
the baby ghost, then the fully grown presence of Beloved, and through this
engages with the lived imaginary; ways in which people imagine and internal-
ise versions of their lives, as real as felt experience. Beloved engages readers with
the ways in which literature works to enlighten history and our own lives. This
is where the ghosting appears. The novel now is haunted by its own success,
by those postcolonial Gothic novels which have followed it, and by the effect
it has had on our ability to speak of the terrible legacy of transatlantic slavery.

Story

Beloved uses storytelling forms derived from a Black folk aesthetic and focuses
on the lives of women in the newly emancipated Northern states of America.
Sethe’s tale emphasises the brutality of slavery and we come to empathise with
her on an individual basis, while being made aware of the beatings, lynchings,
rape and ways in which slaves were dehumanised and treated as goods, worth
less than animals. We are told that in 1874 violence still dominated:

Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year

alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown
266
 Gina Wisker 267

men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women
raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken. (180)

Morrison’s novel tells the story of this violence and its effects on successive
generations of African-Americans including Sethe and her daughter Beloved.
Sethe’s mother chose to keep her as she was born from love, though she
discarded her other babies born of rape on the transatlantic ‘middle passage’
and afterwards on the plantation. Sethe and other slaves lived on ‘Sweet
Home’ plantation where the owner, Mr Garner felt confident and humani-
tarian enough not to castrate his male slaves, most of whom were named
after himself. When Sethe fell in love with Halle, another slave, Mrs Garner
gave her a pair of earrings, and she sewed herself a wedding dress but theirs
was not a conventional marriage since slaves were neither allowed to marry
nor to keep the children they bore, who would be sold into slavery. Garner
died, and Schoolteacher arrived. He was aptly named since his brutal behav-
iour towards the slaves (most of the men burned, beaten and murdered)
was matched by his misuse of education to teach his boys that Black slaves
were non human. He taught them to identify and prioritise Sethe’s animal
characteristics over her human ones. She was beaten and her breast milk sto-
len. Although Sethe sent her sons and young daughter ahead of her on the
‘Underground Railway’ an unofficial linkage of radical supportive people,
led by Harriet Tubman who helped slaves escape to the North, she had to
follow later as she was pregnant. Beaten and weary, Sethe gave birth in a
swamp with the aid of a young working class white girl, Amy Denver, after
whom she named her daughter, Denver. When she arrived in Cincinnatti at
Halle’s mother’s house, Baby Suggs, a natural healer and lay preacher with
community standing made her family welcome but the celebrations irri-
tated others who became jealous at Sethe’s good fortune. A month after her
arrival the slavecatcher came with Schoolteacher looking for his goods and
at that point Sethe knew she must kill her children to rescue them from the
brutality they would undergo if recaptured. She killed only the two year old,
Beloved (after ‘Dearly beloved . . . ’ the beginning of a birth, marriages and
deaths sermon and the name cut on the child’s headstone). It is this dead
child who haunts 124 as a poltergeist. Its actions drive out the boys Howard
and Buglar and keep away the community. Paul D, one of the Sweet Home
men visits Sethe, casts out the violent ghost, and they begin a relationship
which gives Sethe back some sense of her own self worth. Suddenly the fully
grown Beloved reappears, weary, intrusive, and both befriends her sister
Denver and takes over her mother’s life. Their relationship of intense love
drains Sethe who experiences overwhelming guilt. When Paul D discov-
ers Sethe’s crime of infanticide, he leaves. The house becomes dominated
by Beloved’s hold on her mother until Denver gets a job, the spell breaks
and the community women return, humming, and exorcise Beloved from
Sethe’s life.
268 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Some readers initially have mixed feelings when they discover Sethe is a
murderess. This confusion is tempered once we hear the slavecatcher and
Schoolteacher teaching that slaves are ‘It’ not people. Sethe acts to pro-
tect her children in the face of a much worse crime: the brutalisation and
dehumanisation of slavery. The other main ‘difficulty’ in the novel is that
the main character other than Sethe is Beloved, a ghost, or succubus, who
functions as an invading, draining presence. It is on the purpose and pres-
ence of the ghost, the hauntology of people and place and the theorising
enabled by the postcolonial Gothic that this piece will focus in the main,
since this is the route my own response to Beloved has taken, and a response
increasingly popular among other critics.

Personal lacunae

It is now well over 23 years since Beloved was published. In 1987 I had
my own sons – one a baby – and was leaving one house and settling into
another, returning to a ‘haunted’ space to make something new. My early
work in 1988 filled me with a sense of guilt which almost silenced my
ability to be critical. An initial workshop on teaching Beloved at the British
Association of American Studies conference in York (1988) led to a con-
tract and my first book Insights into Black Women’s Writing (1993). Several
essays later and Toni Morrison (2002) has been followed by Teaching African
American Women’s Writing (2011). Beloved has ‘ghosted’ my professional
development, and the births, deaths, resettlements, recuperations and voic-
ings of my family and professional life ever since. It has had similar strange
ghosting effects on my undergraduate and postgraduate students including
Dr Marion Treby whose work we explore (2011). The phrase ‘a little old
baby ghost’ spoken by Paul D as he enters Sethe’s haunted house, (5) sums
up its contradictions. Beloved is haunting as a novel. It and the criticism
which has engaged with the postcolonial Gothic have filled and enabled
others to fill a lacuna, offering the right to speak about the poisoned legacy
of colonialism and imperialism. This it does through its ability to connect
us with the historical real, the events of slavery, which many readers resist,
have forgotten, or find incredible. This process serves to re-enact the central
tenet of the novel: ‘it was not a story to pass on’ (275). ‘Beloved’ (275) is,
however, the last word. You cannot actually ‘pass’ on the story, i.e. remain
unaffected and move on. You must in fact ‘pass it on’ while, as Morrison
indicates throughout the novel, you also need to move on and live with
what it exposes: first the years of internalised trauma and disempower-
ment, then expression and the realisation of new self-affirmation, moving
on from our own versions of guilt or rage. Beloved is an essential text for
study because it can provoke empathy, it informs, shocks and nudges the
imagination into engagement.
 Gina Wisker 269

Early criticism

Early critical work reflects the impact of the novel and the confusion critics
and readers felt when deciding how to place Beloved and Morrison in the
canon, and in their own lives.
The novel’s publication in 1987 further established Morrison’s reputation,
moving critics on from their comments about her anomalous position as a
Black woman writer who engaged with exploring more than just the horrify-
ing realities of everyday life. She became a literary model, leading the way
for other African American women writers, a challenge to the assumption
that Black women writers only concentrated on ‘a little black pain undressed’
(Burford, 1988, 10), on life writing and testimony. When Morrison won
the Nobel Prize the Guardian review was unable to cope with her blend of
the real and the fantastic, and criticised her for Pilate in Song of Solomon
(Morrison, 1977), because Pilate had no navel. People have navels. People
in novels who are both realistic but also there to make a statement about
constructing yourself rather than being tied to the past, might be represented
as deliberately lacking a navel. The reviewer could not see Morrison moving
beyond charting history, and missed both the symbolic and the beginnings
of the Gothic in Morrison’s work. Another limited view was that of Sarah
Blackburn. Reviewing Morrison’s earlier works, she equated Black history,
and particularly examples with women as subject matter, with a limitation:

Toni Morrison is far too talented to remain only a marvellous recorder

of the Black side of provincial life, and might easily transcend that early
and intentionally limiting classification ’Black woman writer’ and take
her place among the serious, important and talented American novelists.
(Sara Blackburn 1973, 3)

In interview, Morrison dealt with this kind of convoluted non reasoning

which sets feminist testimony and Black history in opposition to greatness:

I refuse to let them off the hook about whether I’m a Black woman writer
or not. I’m under a lot of pressure to become something else. That is
why there is so much discussion of how my work is influenced by other
‘real’ writers for example white Southern writers whom I’m constantly
compared to. (Morrison, interview with Stuart, 1988, 15)

There seem to be two emerging critical problems for conservative critics:

how Gothic/fabulist/fantastic/sci-fi/speculative fictional forms rather than
testimony engage with serious issues, and the right and skill of Black women
writers to speak at all about their experience and to use these more popular
forms of speculative fiction.
270 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Morrison upset that dichotomy. Her intention: ‘to bear witness to a his-
tory that is unrecorded, untaught in mainstream education and to enlighten
our people’ (Morrison, qtd in Tate, 1984, 185) leads her to re-imagine dif-
ferent periods of African American women’s history mixing the realistic –
details about Cincinnati, slavery, slave catching, the real infanticide – with
the development of a more troublesome Gothic mode that includes the
concept of cultural haunting and the use of the cultural imaginary. In this
way Morrison’s novels after Beloved, Jazz (1992), Paradise (1999), Love (2003),
A Mercy (2008), are ghosted by this prior novel which drew together the
Gothic, the haunting, the imaginary with the historically real, filling the
lacunae of hidden histories and silenced stories.
In this manner the novel echoes Beloved’s own return from the dead as
a full grown spirit woman, coming out of a swamp near her birth place,
remembering her mother’s earrings, entering the house which has been
newly settled, newly exorcised by Paul D’s slightly earlier entrance. Beloved
is simultaneously a baby ghost with demands on her mother, who suffers
intense guilt at the necessary sacrifice, a girl companion for her lonely sister
Denver and a woman who seduces Paul D. She seems contained in the fam-
ily home except that Stamp Paid, who initially rowed Sethe and her new-
born to freedom, also sees her when he looks through the window, as do the
community of women who re-convene at the novel’s close to help exorcise
the now seemingly pregnant succubus from Sethe’s house. Beloved has filled
herself up with her mother’s energies, drained her of her mix of love and
guilt, and prevented her from realising her own self worth.

Critical range

Criticism of the novel since its publication has variously engaged with it
as a work of African American women’s writing exemplifying the depiction
of women’s lives, roles, pains and solidarity and as a work of the Gothic
imagination which suddenly introduces the legitimacy of the supernatural
into a historical politicised text; focusing on gender or ethnicity. We are
used to the Gothic now in the twenty-first century but it is important to
remember that Morrison’s novel is over twenty years old and in the 1980s
Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) had been written but had only
a cult following; Nalo Hopkinson was only work-shopping her early short
stories; Lord of the Rings (1954–5, film 2001) had not yet been revived and
those TV pioneers of intermixing the sci-fi supernatural magical Gothic with
the historical such as the X Files (1993), were still considered as cult works.
The use of the supernatural, fantasy and the Gothic to political effect was a
historical phenomenon largely ignored by contemporary scholars, except by
select individuals such as Martin Barker (1992). A radical philosopher, Barker
exposed the links between the simultaneous clamping down on horror in
the 1950s, and terror at communism and other radical politics.
 Gina Wisker 271

Feminist critics have tended to focus on the treatment of self worth and
on the development of Sethe, some using Beloved to argue against a homog-
enising of feminist critical voices, asserting the different experiences of Black
and Asian women from those of the white middle classes in America and the
UK. The work of Barbara Christian (1980, 1985) and Barbara Smith (1982)
whose initial writing predates this novel, developed Black feminist critical
approaches which tend to focus on Morrison’s portrayal of strong women
whether meanly individualistic (Sula, 1973) or strongly in support of fam-
ily history (Pilate in Song of Solomon 1977). In Beloved we have Sethe as an
example of a strong woman brought to breaking point. Her own internalised
guilt is embodied in the figure of the succubus, her dead baby ghost. Here
Boy the dog leaves as she enters, and later two chapters, one from Sethe’s
perspective, one from Beloved herself, start ‘Beloved she my daughter. She
mine’ (200) and ‘I am Beloved and she is mine’ (212) emphasising the char-
acter’s interchangeability and dependence, a shared, enriching and draining
memory brought into a presence. ‘A fully dressed woman walked out of the
water’ (50) is the first time we see the adult returned Beloved who enters
Sethe’s house, drinks, sleeps, eats, then dominates her.

Sethe was licked, tasted, eaten by Beloved’s eyes. Like a familiar, she hov-
ered, never leaving the room Sethe was in unless required and told to.
She rose early in the dark to be there, waiting in the kitchen, when Sethe
came down to make fast bread before she left for work. In lamplight,
and over the flames of the cooking stove, their two shadows clashes and
crossed on the ceiling like black swords. (57)

Sethe is being eaten up, and Beloved is a ghostly, magical presence, like a
witch’s familiar. The crossing black shadows suggests their intertwining and
the destruction Beloved brings even while she seems to be joyfully reuniting
with her mother whose neck she massages then semi strangles.
Some critics identified the Gothic in Beloved at the outset. Upon the novel’s
publication, the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood (1987, 1) began the trend
to recognise the Gothic in Morrison and saw Beloved as a ghost story which
focuses on a fractured family under slavery. Atwood finds the book critical
of white characters and talks about folklore concerning the dead. Arguing
that the novel urges acceptance in the end, Ann Snotow (1987) places the
text within the field of Holocaust literature and identifies the need to talk
through the events and memories, and then move on. Snotow has no prob-
lem with the use of the supernatural to handle the issues of lived responses
to the haunting past. In 1993 Insights into Black Women’s Writing contained
two essays on Beloved, one by Elaine Jordan and my own. My essay began
the discussion continued here, and looked at the difficulty of reading a text
which mixes realism and the Gothic, and the importance of overcoming the
‘disremembering’ of hidden slave histories, recuperating, understanding the
272 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

past, while the later book Toni Morrison (2002) mentioned this idea among
a more general introduction on the text.
Taking up the issue of hidden histories in her critical work dealing with
differences between writing by Black and white writers, Playing in the Dark:
Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1989), Morrison discusses ways in
which what is defined as history is never the full story and how important
it is to tap into the imagination of people. While Jill Matus (1998) looked
at cultural contextualisation of identity and racism, she also saw Morrison
dealing with slavery as a kind of ‘ghosting’. Linden Peach (1995) defines the
intersection of the historical and the imaginative as magic realism. These
themes have continued, as they do in this essay. A range of more recent
criticism on Beloved has taken several directions but by far the most popular
is that of looking at the novel as a ghost story, a haunting. What do ghosts
do? They refuse to let the past lie down and hide, remain silent, they remind
us through the wandering individuals of the spaces and places of the his-
tory and events which are layered into places. Ghosts are traditionally more
often likely to be traumatic and problematic rather than friendly and every-
day as they might be in Chinese culture where family ghosts live alongside
the contemporary family and have their place in the household dynam-
ics. In the western tradition a ghost’s presence usually suggests something
which has been repressed and now reminds us it needs to be heard and seen,
embodied and preferably engaged with and worked through, not overlooked.
Following this approach, Beloved can be seen as a story of repressed histo-
ries brought into the open, acknowledged in the everyday. On this theme
Deborah Madsen (2010/11) considers the unspeakable when dealing with
Beloved among a selection of works which engage students with the experi-
ences and expressions of trauma. She focuses on transatlantic slavery and
its repercussions in teaching the slave narrative tradition, from Frederick
Douglass and Harriet Jacobs’ autobiographical narratives to twentieth-
century neo-slave narratives including Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979).
Madsen suggests that a historical juxtaposition of the autobiographical with
the fictional leads to a ‘normalising’ of traumatic experience, i.e:

the scripting of trauma and its assimilation to cultural narratives of

normality. The untranslatability of trauma makes survivor discourse
especially reliant upon cultural scripting for the conditions of its own
meaning, even when it may resist these cultural ideologies. (2010/11, 61)

Here Madsen reads the ghosting as an example of loss which is both physical
and emotional – a displacement of historical loss. Literary texts enable and
act as mourning processes, so they are ‘the literary archive of slave narra-
tives, which are seen to be included in this work of memorialisation’ (65).
Using the idea of the ‘recovery moment’ popular in American psychology,
Madsen suggests that the particular poetic qualities of a literary text can
 Gina Wisker 273

recover the trauma of the event in a moment of identity formation, bringing

together absence and loss.
Morrison’s essay (1987) on slave narratives is important here because
cruelty and evil were unnamed and underplayed in the past. Morrison rips
the ‘veil’ that previously lay over traumatic past experiences of slavery:
‘I’m looking to find and expose a truth about the interior life of people
who didn’t write it (which doesn’t mean they didn’t have it)’ (1987, 113).
Madsen uses the work of Dominick La Capra in the introduction to his
book Representing the Holocaust (1994) which helps theorise the engage-
ment with the re-memoried truths of the trauma of the past – in this case
of slavery – because the positions offered allow students to step outside
‘victim’ or ‘perpetrator’ and see more subtleties and so avoid the rejection,
guilt and silencing which are common responses to the revelations of the
repressed. In terms of LaCapra’s reading Sethe is a traumatised silenced vic-
tim who can move beyond the trauma of the murder when she contextual-
ises it in her life and is helped by Paul D to see that the death of the baby
did not remove the best part of herself. Instead as he says, and she realises,
‘you your own best thing’ (273). Sethe relives the arrival of the slave catcher
when Beloved is exorcised from her.
Madsen uses the concept of ‘ghosting’ to explore way in which Morrison
enacts lived memory and history – which through the text causes students
to move beyond disempowerment and silence to engage – and move on.
Linda Holland-Toll and Angela Mullis (2010/11) see Beloved as an example of
American Gothic. Morrison was after all not merely influenced by Faulkner
but wrote a Masters thesis on his work. Ghosting in the tale enables a fac-
ing up to events and escape: Morrison uses common Gothic elements to
explore themes of repression and oppression, and the act of storytelling in
the novel then functions as a means of laying the ghost, and with it the past,
to rest. In addition, Morrison uses storytelling to deal with both the Gothic
elements and the possibilities of escape from the dark vision of the Gothic
and subsequent redemption.
Holland-Toll and Mullis return to the haunting of place and cite Chris
Baldick’s The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, ‘obsessed with old buildings as sites
of human decay’ (1992, xix–xx). Sethe is in an enclosed space in the house
as she was in the shed in which she killed her baby. Paul D notices when
crossing the threshold of her house there is a red aura and he mistakenly
thinks it is the ghost of Baby Suggs.
There is hope ‘Despite the enthrallment in the past, and the sense of
unbreakable entrapment, Beloved also functions as a novel of redemption as
well as Gothic horror’ (2010/11, 108). For Holland-Toll and Mullis, Beloved
is a novel which can take the reader through to imagining a redemptive
future. And the form of oral storytelling has much to offer in this filling of
the silence. Morrison’s own comment in her introductory essay to the novel
is ‘to render enslavement as a personal experience, language must get out
274 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

of the way’ (Morrison 1987, xix). Duly Holland-Toll and Mullis note that:
slavery is so horrific that it is outside of language as a ‘personal experience’.
We can only get at the experience of this ‘peculiar institution’ by way of a
collective telling, recognition of a community’s experience (2010/11, 115).
In exploring the role of the storyteller who gives voice to the silences,
Holland-Toll and Mullis use Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Storyteller’ (1963).
Paul D is the first storyteller to enter Sethe’s life after the brutal events of the
early part of the novel. Denver, who was silenced for two years, also devel-
ops a hunger for storytelling. Storytelling reduces the isolation of individual
narrative and revives the voice of the community which left Sethe and Baby
Suggs alone early in the novel and returns at the end, because her suffer-
ing is seen now as a community experience. Jean Wyatt (1993) also focuses
on storytelling. The presence of the baby ghost returned as a full grown
woman, Beloved, forces Sethe’s story from her and enables her eventually
to confront what she did, and to move out of the entrapped place she is in
physically, mentally, psychologically, emotionally. ‘She was my best thing’
(272) says Sethe but Paul D points out now ‘You your own best thing, Sethe.
His holding fingers are holding hers. “Me?Me?”’ (273).
Morrison asserts the importance of recognising the spectral in the every-
day, but also the dangers of reading and critical practices which might deny
its validity. She seeks:

the tone in which I could blend acceptance of the supernatural and a

profound rootedness in the real time at the same time with neither taking
precedence over the other. It is indicative of the cosmology, the way in
which Black people looked at the world, we are a very practical people,
very down to earth, even shrewd people. But within that practicality we
also accepted what I suppose could be called superstition and magic,
which is another way of knowing things. But to blend these two works
together at the same time was enhancing not limiting. And some of those
things were ‘discredited’ only because Black people were ‘discredited’
therefore what they knew was ‘discredited’. And also because the press
upward towards social mobility would mean to get as far away from that
kind of knowledge as possible. That kind of knowledge has a very strong
place in my world. (Morrison in Evans [ed.], 1985, 342)

Morrison’s work opened up the possibilities for other African American

and postcolonial writers to meld traditional ways of seeing – the mythic,
the fabular, the cultural hauntings, the postcolonial Gothic, with the his-
torical, the realist and the officially named. But Morrison and others have
been aware of the dangers of negative critical reception, of not being taken
seriously if they articulated their tales, their arguments through popular
fictional forms, and the forms of folk culture. Horror, tales of spectres and
hauntings and the Gothic more broadly have tended to be seen as popular
 Gina Wisker 275

fictional expressions and therefore as more trivial, less serious than realist
fiction. Tananarive Due, Miami journalist, daughter of Civil Rights activists,
and author of several politically and culturally engaged African and US set
vampire tales (such as The Living Blood 2002) articulates similar qualms over
a decade later: ‘I needed to address my fear that I would not be respected if
I wrote about the supernatural’ (Tananarive Due, 2002).
Realism and testimony are a necessary response to centuries of silencing
and a social habit of ignoring and denying experience. However, feelings,
hopes, desires and fears are a part of lived experience. As I discussed in an
earlier essay:

the fantastic, imaginative lives of people explored, voiced, are dramatised

in the speculative, the mythic, the Gothic. Misunderstanding, silencing,
downgrading and denying this poetic, metaphoric form of expression is
every bit as much an oppressive critical constraint as is refusing alterna-
tive versions of history. Fantasy and the Gothic are seen in this situation
to be treated as gendered, second class, literary citizens. (Wisker, 2006)

The intersection of versions of the Gothic and the historical, of realistic

detail, the imagination, and hauntology, have become important critical
and creative territory in the work of contemporary writers as diverse as
David Peace and Morrison.
Beloved is filled with the unspeakable, with gaps or lacunae, and with
hauntings. It continues to haunt me, each reading revealing new meanings,
filling in some of the gaps. Daniel Goleman defines a lacuna as: ‘from the
Latin for gap or hole, to refer to the sort of mental apparatus that diversionary
schemas represent. A lacuna is, then, the attentional mechanism that creates
a defensive gap in awareness. Lacunas, in short, create blind spots’ (1997).
There is another term, ‘lacunar amnesia’, referring to blind spots in
memory, which acts as an enlightening entrance into Beloved, in which
individual and cultural amnesia over the misery and horror of the everyday
lived experiences of slavery is troubled and challenged. Gaps are filled in,
lives, homes and histories are inhabited and stories told. This coupled with
the notion of cultural haunting (Kathleen Brogan 1998) and the postcolo-
nial Gothic (David Punter 2000) can help explain how the disruptive pres-
ence of the returned baby ghost eventually leads to breaking silence over
hidden memories, and how in discussion the novel can enable us to engage
with that which might otherwise remain a legacy of victimhood on the one
hand, and guilt on the other: each paralysing. As readers reading Beloved, we
go through versions of shock, absence, filling the void, retelling the story,
and coming to terms with ways of moving on which are similar to those
experienced by Sethe.
History surrounds us, a tangible, visible existent experienced, bumped
into by individuals and communities. In Beloved, the monstrous experience
276 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

of slavery on which the wealth and comfort of others, of many of our ances-
tors, is founded, translates into a lived madness, the haunting of the recent
past in the body of the house, 124, Bluestone, and the lives of its occupants,
Baby Suggs, the grandmother, Sethe, Denver, her daughter, and sons Howard
and Buglar (who leave rapidly when the poltergeist cracks mirrors and leaves
handprints in the flour). They try briefly to live a normal existence in the
constant presence of the ghost of their baby sister Beloved, one of slavery’s
sacrificial victims, and a violent, disruptive, haunting presence. It is over the
issue of this tangible history that readers and students face a problem. This
historically situated, politically focused novel also validates the supernatu-
ral: it uses the forms of politicised, postcolonial Gothic. We must suspend
our disbelief, and engage with the hybrid form as we also must empathise
with Sethe, the protagonist who kills her own baby to rescue her from the
worse, hitherto unspeakable horrors of slavery. The murder silenced the
community, ostracised the family and it is not until Sethe can understand
and tell her own story her own way and move on beyond the imprison-
ing memories of slavery and necessary infanticide that she can recognise
her own self-worth. The novel has time slippages and lacunae of hitherto
untold tales including the transatlantic crossing in race memory; the taking
of Sethe’s milk by the plantation owner, Schoolteacher’s brutal sons and her
whipping near death. These and the necessary infanticide gradually re-enter
the tale and the haunted space, as does Beloved herself, so that the lacunae
of silenced stories are newly refilled and reclaimed.

The process of mutual postcolonial abjection is, I suppose, one that con-
fronts us everyday in the ambiguous form of a series of uncanny returns.
(David Punter, 2000 p. vi)

Punter’s work on the postcolonial Gothic offers ways into interpretations of

Beloved, since it provides a theorised lens through which to recognise and dis-
cuss ways of expressing cultural hauntings, in which ‘rememories’ bump you
into the past, the lived, inherited or felt memories and tangible presences
of events in the lives of individuals, whole communities. The postcolonial
imagination, Punter tells us (2000), unavoidably reads voids, ghosts and
haunting in locations; silencing, dispossession and disempowerment in lives
which suffered colonial and imperial rule. The disremembering, the covering
up of the horrors of rape, murder, dispossession of indigenous peoples and
of slavery are lacunae in the memories, stories and histories of people and
places. The colonisers are also silenced and haunted. Implicated directly or
not, they carry the secrets, ghostly whisperings of ghosts, and are part of that
great oppressive history of transportation, uprooting from home, and abuse.

Colonisers were capitalist vampires, taking the ownership of their own

bodies from the people they enslaved and from those whose lands they
 Gina Wisker 277

stole, emptied or developed. Colonisers were also psychic vampires,

removing history from people, taking away their own sense of ontologi-
cal identity and security, so the tales of the dispossessed were not written
down. However, their tales were passed on in folk tale, oral storytelling
from mother to child and throughout communities. (Wisker, 2004, 25)

Sometimes the rememories are those of others, ‘it’s when you bump into a
rememory that belongs to someone else’ (p. 36), such as that of the transat-
lantic slave crossing. Memories and losses have been repressed and hidden.
They act as lacunae in the stories and lives of the living. The hauntology
of place and time emerges as a way of interpreting the inhabiting of the
bodies and places of the present by those of the past. Derrida, in Spectres of
Marx (1993, 1994) differentiates between spirits and spectres. I first came
across the use of hauntology as a term which helps interpret the versions of
haunting found in Beloved, in Katy Shaw’s work on David Peace’s Red Riding
trilogy as a hauntology of the North (Shaw, 2010). Shaw uses Derrida and
clarifies how ‘Derrida takes pains to distinguish the spirit and the spectres
as two different forms of the haunt. The spirit assumes body, incarnates
itself in the spectre. What defines the spectre is its familiarity and differ-
ence, it is recognisable and felt yet at the same time “altogether other”
(p. 10, Spectres of Marx). Derrida describes this paradox as, ‘the furtive and
ungraspable visibility of the invisible’ (p. 7, Spectres of Marx).), a presence
from the past which causes confusion, doubt and re-thinking since ‘there is
something disappeared, departed in the apparition itself as reapparition of
the departed’ (p. 6, Spectres of Marx) (Shaw, 2010, 110). Beloved’s return as
an adult casts her as other than the baby who was murdered, and yet the
same; one who causes confusion, a mixture of love, guilt, recovery – a kind
of plenitude, the filling of a loss, and form of draining of harmony and
selfhood for Sethe, and for the household.
Morrison’s use of the historically realistic and the postcolonial Gothic, the
cultural haunting, manages to encapsulate both the vitality of the everyday
real and the sense of how it must have felt imaginatively. She evokes the
horrors of slavery which would mean that it was better to sacrifice your chil-
dren then to let them be reclaimed, re enslaved, and how the guilt would
haunt an individual, and both the culture of the victims and the victimiser,
that latter which approved or turned a blind eye to the dehumanising of
people as chattels ‘not worth his own dead weight in coin’ (148).

Haunted by its futures

Beloved now is also haunted by the future which it informed. We read back
from several different novels which it has influenced as the first real ground
breaking cultural haunting text and one which painfully dragged itself out
of some swamp to present itself in front of us in its terrifying presence. The
278 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

re-memory caused us to face a Gothic moment. The ghosting, the haunting,

what the book had to say and who it had to speak to were most unusual in
the 1980s but perhaps less so now. In Beloved as in the later A Mercy (2008) a
novel set in the days before the major period of slavery, the sense of slavery
or servitude is internalised and undermines that of self worth. In Morrisons’
latest novel A Mercy, Florens, a young woman who has internalised her
own servitude and obsessional, selfish hunger for another is seen as a black
demon, and hunted by villagers. ‘They want to see if my tongue is split like
a snake’s or if my teeth are filing to points to chew them up. To know if
I can spring out of the darkness and bite’(2008, 115). Florens then shows she
lacks a sense of responsibility for her actions in refusing to nurture the child
rescued by the free Black man, the blacksmith and object of that obsessional
love. Florens, like Pecola Breedlove in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and
Sethe in Beloved has internalised negative racist stereotypes, and must move
beyond this. Florens does not own herself; she sees only her own obsessional
love, a sign of her enslaved mind.
The sense of disempowerment and the dominance of memory lead back
to our reading of newer texts such as Nalo Hopkinson’s short stories Skin
Folk (1997) and The New Moon’s Arms (2007) with its episode of the slaves’
escape from the horrors of transatlantic slavery by jumping overboard and
swimming free, metamorphosed into fantastic ‘mer-people’ whose presence
through the years is a lacuna for the local people – a silent secret. Their mid-
dle passage in the slave ship led to transformation and new freedoms rather
than slavery, and magical reappearances liberate Calamity the protagonist
into a new sense of her own self worth, in a similar fashion to the way in
which exorcising the guilt attached to the baby ghost liberates Sethe.

Conclusion

Beloved is an intensely social and psychologically political book. It engages

the reader with the everyday lived horrors of slavery and the race memory
of the slave crossing, each equally felt as real, and it also engages the indi-
vidual, black or white, with the complex consuming pain and guilt of the
everyday lived memory of slavery. Beloved introduced me to the notion
of ‘cultural haunting’ as a way of understanding the psychology of places
which are imbrued with the experiences of imperialism and colonialism’s
dark sides: dehumanisation, displacement, destruction of memory and
identity, language and human worth. These are the grim corollary to its
ostensible success as it crosses to and owns the new world, changing cultures
and bringing financial gains not just to the front line settlers and plantation
owners, but to the comfortable landowners and capitalists back home. As
Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729) uses satire to ironically highlight the horrors
of the Irish potato famine and the failure of humanity in a clinical imperial
relationship on Britain’s doorstep, so Morrison several centuries later uses
 Gina Wisker 279

the Gothic, equally ironic, and cultural haunting to fill the hidden silences,
the gaps, the lacunae of this moment in history. Beloved uses ghosting along-
side historical realism, reimagining memory. Sethe and the community re-
engage with the unspeakable and the hidden, as do the novel’s readers, and
then both find ways to move on so that the legacy of horror does not leave
a paralysing guilt for black and white alike. It is first this engagement with
history and the imagination, the lingering cultural memory, and then the
development of ways of managing through fictionalising, through memory,
through expression and working through the narratives of individuals that
Morrison troubles the way we might be used to reading, and enables a
profound new vision.

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stable/462616. Accessed: 23/06/2010 05:25.
19
Embracing Uncertainty:
Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia
and The Black Album
Susan Alice Fischer

As Sukhdev Sandhu writes, ‘If there is one figure who is responsible for
dragging Asians in England into the spotlight it is Hanif Kureishi’ (230). His
novels The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and The Black Album (1995) trace a tra-
jectory for young Asian English men and together give a picture of some of
the ways their experiences – and England – have changed from the 1970s to
the end of the millennium. Kureishi has the knack of capturing the Zeitgeist
in each of these novels. The Buddha of Suburbia focuses on the 1970s during
a heady time of experimentation with drugs, sexuality, Eastern philosophy,
progressive struggles and counter-cultural youth movements, and when
moving from the suburbs into London seemed to give access to all that one
could possibly desire. Overall, The Buddha of Suburbia is an optimistic book
that captures the wide-eyed enthusiasm of the period, while not shying
away from addressing racism and the damage it causes. Kureishi shows the
1970s as a time when the assumption that white people were better than
everyone else was still a firmly established norm in mainstream culture
and when racism was more overt, something he has challenged not only
with this novel, but his screenplays, such as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985).
Equally representative of its time, The Black Album is a bleaker novel that
updates the marginalisation young Asian Britons experience. It takes place
during 1989 when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa against Salman
Rushdie for blasphemy in his novel The Satanic Verses against the Muslim
religion. Although The Black Album never directly names either Rushdie or
his novel, it explores a range of reactions the case stirred up in England.
While the essays in this collection have tended to focus on single iconic
works, doing so in Kureishi’s case would minimise the role he has played
in describing contemporary British culture, particularly from the point of
view of Asian Britons, and in contributing to a changing notion of what
it means to be British or English. Kureishi has said that his writing career
began ‘at the end of something – the psychological loosening of the idea of
Empire – and the start of something else, which involved violence, the con-
tamination of racism and years of crisis’ (Stein 114). Together The Buddha of
281
282 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

Suburbia and The Black Album highlight shifts in national identity, including
the way that discourses about inclusion and exclusion have recently shifted
their emphasis from notions of ‘race’ to religion and culture. In an interview
with Susie Thomas, Kureishi notes the change in the ways that Asians have
been seen in a British context. Comparing the times when he was grow-
ing up in the 1970s to the period of The Black Album and today, he notes,
‘the use of the word Muslim is a completely new thing. We were Pakis, we
were blacks, we were Asians’ (Thomas 2007, 13). On the one hand, limiting
the discussion to The Buddha of Suburbia ignores developments in recent
British history and newer challenges to concepts of national identity, while
focusing only on The Black Album obscures the deep roots of exclusion and
racism that affect the more recent situation of both fundamentalism and
Islamophobia. Kureishi did considerable research for The Black Album by
speaking to young people about their attraction to Muslim fundamentalism.
In his introduction to the script of The Black Album – the play debuted at the
National Theatre’s Cottesloe auditorium on 14 July 2009 – Kureishi writes:

Some of the attitudes among the kids I talked to for The Black Album
reminded me of Nietzsche’s analysis of the origins of religion, in particu-
lar his idea that religion – and Nietzsche was referring to Christianity –
was the aggression of the weak, of the victim or oppressed. These attacks
on the West, and the religion they were supposed to protect, were in fact
a form of highly organised resentment or bitterness, developed out of
colonialism, racism and covetousness. (Kureishi 2009, xii)

Throughout his exploration of Asian Britons, Kureishi has stood firm as

one of the major voices affirming positive aspects of both Asian and British
cultural backgrounds while critiquing both. What remains constant is
Kureishi’s abhorrence of orthodoxies, whether they manifest themselves as
racism, fundamentalist religion, or entrenched political doctrines.
In these novels, Kureishi deals with two key moments in the continuum
that is the struggle against marginalisation of Asian people in Britain, and
specifically in London. The Buddha of Suburbia takes place during the 1970s,
an era that follows on the heels of the heated anti-immigration rhetoric of
the post-war period and is still reverberating from Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘rivers
of blood’ speech, in which he imagined that Black and Asian migrants from
the former Empire would destroy the country. The 1970s also sees the rise of
the National Front, which engages in harassment of and violent attacks on
Asian and Black people. While it is also an intense period of hopeful experi-
mentation, Kureishi blows the lid off this as well, looking at the phoniness of
apparently well-intentioned members of the white liberal middle-classes and
their demeaning interaction with Asian and Black people.
Published in 1990, The Buddha of Suburbia comes into a context which
had just seen intense struggles of Black and Asian Britons, as Thatcherism
 Susan Alice Fischer 283

did much to squelch the emergence of progressive culture in the UK, aimed
at its epicentre in London, partly with the collusion of the tabloid press
which labelled anyone or any project engaged in feminist, gay, anti-racist
or working-class politics the ‘loony left’. Censorship also came from the
Conservative government which passed Section 28 which forbade the so-
called ‘promotion of homosexuality’ in any project receiving public fund-
ing, such as libraries and schools. This followed the Tories’ abolition of
the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1986, which had supported a range
of progressive cultural projects, and their disbanding of the Inner London
Education Authority (ILEA) which had also tried to institute educational
projects which embraced multiculturalism and diversity. At the end of the
1980s, the Rushdie affair presented another sort of censorship and resulted
in increased tensions in both Asian and white communities.
By the time Kureishi writes The Black Album, the draconian tactics of the
Conservative government had decimated progressive movements, and a
backlash was in full swing that dismissed progressive politics as political
correctness – something we are still living through today (see Thomas 2009).
Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, creating a void for some on the
left. In 1988, Penguin published Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, result-
ing in Ayatollah Khomeini’s call to kill the author. While Rushdie managed
to remain alive by hiding for the ten years that the fatwa was in effect,
other violence related to the novel occurred. In addition to book-burnings
and bookshop bombings, other individuals associated with the novel, such
as translators or publishers, were attacked or killed (see Anthony). While
some notable members of the progressive intelligentsia withheld their sup-
port of Rushdie, including John Berger, Germaine Greer and John Le Carré,
most, including Kureishi, condemned the fatwa (Anthony). Stein writes the
publication of The Satanic Verses was significant:

not only for black British literature but also in the context of British poli-
tics. The publication of Rushdie’s novel antagonized British Muslims, and
indeed many Muslims worldwide, who considered the text blasphemous
[ . . . ]. At the same time the heterogeneity among Asians in Britain, and
Asian Muslims in Britain, became all too obvious, with some defending
the right to freedom of expression while others felt personally and spir-
itually antagonized. (124)

Among the long-term effects of the fatwa, according to Anthony, has been
the curbing of literary and other cultural representations of Islam and
Muslims. However, Susie Thomas argues that things are more complex, as
the fatwa also sparked intense anti-Muslim reaction. Twenty years later, she
argues, many seem to have abandoned the ‘left-liberal ideal of respect for
difference, articulated by Tariq Modood: “If people are to occupy the same
political space without conflict, they mutually have to limit the extent to
284 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

which they subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism’” (Thomas

2009, 366). Instead, many have opted for entrenched positions which throw
out multiculturalism wholesale with the dangerously wrong-headed view
that it is incompatible with freedom of expression.
Kureishi has addressed some of these issues head on. While clearly coming
down on the side of freedom of expression in The Black Album – as well as in
his film My Son the Fanatic (1997), also about the attractions of fundamental-
ism for some second-generation Asian youth – Kureishi explores the relation
between marginalisation and extreme positions. In an interview with Colin
MacCabe, Kureishi defines fundamentalism as:

an attempt to create purity. It’s to say we’re not really living in England at all.
We’re going to keep everything that’s English, everything that’s capitalist,
everything that’s white, everything that’s corrupt, it’s going to be outside.
And everything that’s good and pure and Islamic, it’s going to be in here,
with these people. And you can see that mixing, you know, was terrifying,
just as racists find mixing terrifying. But of course it’s inevitable. (50)

Kureishi explores the totalising visions of religious fundamentalism, as well

as of racism and other political orthodoxies, in both The Buddha of Suburbia
and The Black Album. His work speaks out against ideologies which ‘slot
individuals into neat, discrete categories. [Protagonists] Karim and Shahid
[ . . . ] are hungry for contingency, culture-clash, unpredictability’ (253). In
both novels, Kureishi intertwines the comic, the crude and the carnivalesque
to thumb his nose at, and to subvert, the grand narratives of late capitalism
and religious orthodoxies. As Kureishi says, ‘There is nothing like a useful
provocation to start a good conversation’ (2009, xiii). Kureishi’s focus on sex,
drugs and youth culture, especially music, is deliberately provocative, aimed
at overturning established notions of power.
Each novel presents its story through the eyes of a young man who experi-
ences growth through an unorthodox education, particularly once he moves
away from home and into London. Karim Amir in The Buddha of Suburbia tells
his own tale in first person while Shahid Hasan’s story in The Black Album
is narrated through a limited third person point of view. Both Karim and
Shahid come from middle-class suburban families, though there are some dif-
ferences. Karim is the son of a lower middle-class white English mother and
an Indian father from a well-to-do family in Bombay – and in this resembles
the author’s dual ethnicity – while both sides of Shahid’s family are Asian and
well-connected in Pakistan. Tellingly, one of Shahid’s uncles in Pakistan was
‘imprisoned by Zia for writing against his Islamization policies’ (6), though
Shahid will not understand what this means until much later. While Karim’s
father works in London as a civil servant and his mother in a shoe store,
Shahid’s family have developed a family-run travel agency with two shops in
Sevenoaks, Kent, a business which alludes to the distances travelled by the
 Susan Alice Fischer 285

migrant generation, as well as to Shahid’s move from suburbia to London as

he embarks upon higher education. Both families are in disarray: Karim’s is
on the brink of divorce at the opening of the novel, while Shahid’s father has
recently died, and his tragically thuggish brother Chili also comes to London,
leaving his mother and his posh wife, Zulma, to run the family business,
until the latter decides to return to Pakistan without him.
In some respects the two protagonists, Karim and Shahid, are similar. Each
embodies a youthful self-absorption in his search for identity and belong-
ing. Each moves from the suburbs into London – the first in the 1970s, the
second in the late 1980s – and yearns for a creative life outside the confines
of his previous experience in the suburbs and of society’s expectations for
him, particularly with reference to his ethnicity. While Karim becomes an
actor, Shahid wants to write. Kureishi has explained what suburbs and city
represented for him: ‘I was born, actually, in the suburbs, in a place called
Bromley. And for us, the important place, really, was the river. And when
you got on the train and you crossed the river, at that moment there was
an incredible sense that you were entering another kind of world’ (MacCabe
37). His protagonists feel the same way. The need for escape and belonging
resonates with the protagonists’ attempt to make sense of their hybrid iden-
tity. John Clement Ball writes, ‘[The] move from the suburbs to “London
proper” becomes a local, miniaturized version of postcolonial migrancy and
culture shock – the move from ex-colony to metropolis. This London not
only includes “the world” in the sense of peoples, it also replicates within
its borders the world’s spatial patterning’ (quoted in Ilona 100). Stultified
by life in the suburbs, both characters want ‘to lap up the disorderly and
heterotopian possibilities of metropolitan life’ (Sandhu 240).
Bruce King points out that ‘The Buddha of Suburbia [ . . . ] begins a new era
when the children of immigrants write as English’ (187), a point he supports
with the oft-quoted opening to the novel: ‘My name is Karim Amir, and I am
an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny
kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old
histories’ (3). At the beginning of the book Karim is 17, and the novel spans
three years, as well as suburb and city, London and New York. Kureishi is
writing this at a time when Black and Asian people were still struggling to
make themselves seen as English. Thus from the beginning Karim presents
his sense of duality growing up in a society that does not fully accept him.
Pilar Cuder-Domínguez, writes, ‘Karim’s story can be best described in terms
of movement from periphery to centre’ (175). The geographical movement
represents the attempt for this ‘funny kind of Englishman’ to find a place for
himself at the centre of English life, without having to conform to others’
notions of who he should be based on his ethnic background. Karim’s
bisexuality adds another dimension to his experience of duality.
While The Buddha of Suburbia traces the movement from suburb to city,
when we meet Shahid in The Black Album, he has already left the Kent
286 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

countryside to come to his college in north London, though his trajectory is

sketched in as the novel progresses. Upon arrival in the city, Shahid is torn
between opposing cultural discourses as he tries to find himself and a sense
of belonging amongst his peers. Like Karim, he has embarked upon his edu-
cation, only part of which has to do with his academic programme. When
he meets Riaz, the leader of the Muslim group he falls in with, Riaz notes,
‘you are searching for something’ (5). And Shahid recognises that he ‘wanted
a new start with new people in a new place. The city would feel like his; he
wouldn’t be excluded; there had to be ways in which he could belong’ (16).
Although Shahid wonders if he is ‘being slightly coerced by Riaz, as if he
were trying to find out about him for some ulterior purpose’, he is so eagerly
‘waiting for college life to really start’ (5) that he is drawn into the group.
Religion seems one possible answer; and the group is friendly towards him,
providing a ready-made brotherhood that taps into his sense of alienation,
partly because the initial ‘action’ that he is involved in with them is protect-
ing a family from violent racist attack. In addition to offering Shahid ‘a sense
that his identity is coherent and unified’ (Holmes 300), the religious group
acts as an antidote to the racism that Shahid has internalised. He confides to
Chad, one of the group, that he ‘wanted to be a racist [ . . . ] abusing Pakis,
niggers, Chinks, Irish, any foreign scum’ and ‘to join the British National
Party’ (10–11). When Riaz gives Shahid the dubious honour of helping him
with a manuscript, Shahid gets carried away with the revision and sexualises
what is meant to be a devout work, thus recalling the Rushdie affair. But later,
as tensions in the novel rise around the Rushdie affair, Shahid has to choose
between dualistic thinking and a tolerance for ambiguity.
Shahid encounters other possibilities, such as parties with plenty of
opportunities for sex and drugs. Observing his drug-dealer, ‘Shahid wanted
Strapper’s life of no responsibilities, no tomorrow’s [sic], taking pleasure
and money as they came and went moving on’ (197), a life in which his
brother Chili becomes enmeshed. Shahid is also drawn to popular music, in
particular that of Prince, whose Black Album gives the novel its title. What
appeals to Shahid about Prince is his duality or hybridity, which counters
Shahid’s simultaneous longing for certainty. His lecturer Deedee Osgood,
to whom Shahid is attracted both intellectually and physically, and with
whom he has an affair, makes him see that Prince’s attraction is that he can-
not be pinned down: ‘He’s half black and half white, half man, half woman,
half size, feminine but macho too’ (25). Deedee represents the attraction of
literature, intellectual life at the college, as well as love and sex. In class, she
also turns him on to the ‘history of struggle’ through a discussion of racism
and the US Civil Rights Movement (27). At the height of the conflict around
The Satanic Verses, Deedee brings the book to class to discuss, while Shahid’s
fundamentalist friends burn it. At the end of the novel, Shahid will have to
make a choice between the group and Deedee and what they each stand for.
He will opt for the possibility of discussion that Deedee offers.
 Susan Alice Fischer 287

In The Buddha of Suburbia, Karim is similarly torn in different directions.

When his father Haroon decides to leave Karim’s mother, Margaret, for
Eva with whom he has embarked upon another career as the eponymous
‘Buddha’ of the title, guiding other suburbanites in yoga and meditation,
Karim opts for an adventurous and socially mobile life with his father and
Eva. He is angry about the marginalisation and abuse that comes with being
one of the few Asian students in his school, and he gradually drifts away
to embark upon an education of a different sort. He is sexually attracted to
both boys and girls, and while still in the suburbs has sexual relations with
Eva’s son Charlie, with whom he is besotted, with Jamila, the daughter of
his father’s oldest friend, and briefly with a white girl, Helen, whose father
is a racist. These characters represent the different directions in which Karim
feels pulled. He wants to be like Eva’s son Charlie, who is revered by his
peers; he feels comfortable with Jamila, partly because they share a long his-
tory and background, but also because she has great self-possession, which
he lacks; and although he genuinely likes Helen, he also finds it gratifying
to have sex with someone whose father is an Enoch Powell supporter.
Once he gets to the city, Karim is tugged in other directions, and it
becomes apparent that most of the people he encounters see nothing
beyond his ethnicity. Both theatrical groups with which Karim works ‘cast
him for authenticity’ to exploit his ‘exotic’ appearance (147). In the first,
not only is he forced to play Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book (1894),
but his Otherness is exaggerated, as he has to wear make-up to darken his
skin, cavort in a testicle-strangling loin cloth and put on a clichéd Indian
accent. Clearly this production represents some of the worst excesses of
stereotyping. Yet, Karim also ‘subverts the stereotype by switching between
a Peter Sellers Indian accent and deliberating “relapsing into Cockney’”
(Thomas 2005, 70). He also begins ‘to make little demands’ of the director,
Shadwell, whom he refers to as Shagbadly (150). Karim’s ethnicity also deter-
mines his role in the second production, where he initially seems to have
more freedom to develop his own character. But when he attempts to bring
to the stage a character based on Jamila’s father, Anwar, he is told that the
character is too stereotypical, even though it is based on reality. While he
sees the character as ‘One old Indian man’, Tracey, the sole Black member
of the cast, feels that this ‘picture is what white people already think of us’,
and she asks him why he ‘hate[s] [him]self and all black people so much’
(180). Both have a point: the character is individual, but the social context is
hostile and alters meaning. Instead Karim settles on a portrayal of Changez,
Jamila’s Indian husband, even though Changez has asked him not to do
so. (That Changez does not recognise the portrayal suggests a disconnect
between how the English see migrants and how migrants see themselves.)
In neither theatre company is Karim in control of portraying himself or the
people he knows, a metaphor for Karim’s difficulty in finding an identity
in Britain. By juxtaposing these two situations, Kureishi criticises both the
288 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

ugly stereotypes of Asians and also the potentially falsifying notion of ‘posi-
tive images’, promoted by progressives in those years as an antidote to false
or absent images, but which sometimes distorted the truth. Thus Kureishi
pushes Karim and the reader away from accepted orthodoxies, whether of
racists or of well-meaning progressives.
Both Karim and Shahid thus find themselves the prey of others who to
try to press them into pre-established roles as young Asian men and are
pulled in competing directions by family and friends, by Asians and whites.
Kureishi depicts Karim’s and Shahid’s lack of a strong centre, not only
because they are young, but because they have been destabilised by the
marginalisation they have experienced as Asians in contemporary Britain.
In addition, family and society have incompatible expectations of them,
and it is difficult for them to figure out what they actually want and how
to achieve it. While Karim’s father initially wants him to become a doc-
tor, rather than an actor, Shahid’s sister-in-law Zulma mocks his interest in
religion by saying ‘it is for the benefit of the masses, not for the brain-box
types’ (186). She urges Shahid to return home to help his mother ‘and the
family business [ . . . ]. From now you head the business your father and
mother created, if you want it to survive’ (189–90). But Shahid feels that
‘[t]he freedom he had come to London for was being snatched from him.
He was gradually being dragged back into an earlier self and life, one he had
gratefully sloughed off’ (190). These tensions are bigger than the individual
coming of age story, and both novels explore the ways that identity is differ-
ently constructed by Asian and British culture, with neither leaving enough
room for the individual living between cultures to flourish. Stein has said
that The Buddha of Suburbia is ‘a novel about individualism’ and that ‘Karim
Amir insists on forging his own affiliations and reserves the right to reject
those parties who have all too fixed expectations of him’ (122). The same
could be said about Shahid Hasan in The Black Album.
As each protagonist attempts to locate himself, he comes across many peo-
ple that set themselves up as ‘guides’ that show him possible ways of being.
Karim’s father, Haroon, comes to reject some of the constraints of suburban
English conformism and returns to some of the Indian values he had discarded
upon arrival in England. Karim sarcastically refers to his father as ‘God’, but he
can only follow him so far, as he has to find his own way. Many of the other
male characters that Karim encounters attempt to impose a definition upon
him based on their own needs. The nefarious theatre directors mentioned
above have preconceived notions about who Karim can become and control
him. His friend Terry, who sees only through the lens of Marxism, asks Karim
to join the Party. Karim finds that Terry’s view of the working class ‘which
he referred to as if it were a single-willed person’ fails to reflect the reality of
the people from ‘the housing estates near Mum’s house, where the “work-
ing class” would have laughed in Terry’s face [or] smacked him around the
ear for calling them working class in the first place’ (149). Moreover, Karim’s
 Susan Alice Fischer 289

experience of ‘the proletariat of the suburbs’ is that of being on the receiving

end of their ‘hate-filled “virulen[ce]”’ (149). Terry’s insistence on class politics
means that he can see only parts of Karim, but not his bisexuality. While
Karim hates inequality as much as Terry, he realises: ‘that what I liked in Dad
and Charlie was their insistence on standing apart’ (149).
The two women closest to Karim, his lover Jamila, and his father’s lover
(and later fiancée), Eva, both show Karim a kind of strength and determi-
nation. He perceives his mother, Margaret, as frustratingly weak for much
of the novel, and her sense of victimhood at the break-up of her family
parallels Karim’s feelings of being lost in society at large: ‘Why couldn’t
she be stronger? Why wouldn’t she fight back? I would be strong myself,
I determined’ (19). Both mother and son begin to come into their own at
the end of the novel. In the meantime, as her name suggests, Eva becomes
a surrogate mother for Karim and is ‘the only person over thirty [he] could
talk to’ (10). Her strength is underlined by her one-breasted Amazonian
appearance. She not only opens up the world of literature and culture to
him, but also gets him into London. Like him, she wants to be at the centre
of things. Karim’s contemporary, Jamila, also represents a strong female
presence, and she is a smart, politically committed and determined young
woman. Jamila does karate, reads feminist works by Simone de Beauvoir,
Angela Davis and Kate Millet and is determined to be in control of her own
sexuality. Forced by her father’s hunger strike to accept an arranged mar-
riage, she does so on her own terms, and while ultimately developing an
amicable relationship with Changez, the man chosen as her husband, she
refuses to engage in sexual relations with him as she did not select him. The
bewildered Changez thus finds himself in situations beyond his furthest
imaginings, which parallels Karim’s own identity confusion. The two white
women with whom Karim has affairs – Helen in the suburbs and Eleanor
in London – bring him to a similar place with regard to ethnicity. Karim
gets involved with Helen mostly because she is available, and he wants to
get back at her bigoted father whom he dubs Hairy Back. Hairy Back’s dog
humps Karim and ejaculates on his back, thus initiating a number of scenes
in which he will be literally and figuratively fucked by white society. Indeed,
Dominic Head rightly sees a parallel between this scene and the relationship
with Eleanor in London. Karim meets her in Pyke’s troupe, and behind the
scenes, the controlling and sadistic Pyke steers them into a relationship.
When Karim learns that Eleanor’s former lover Gene, a Black actor, has been
driven to suicide by racism, he recognises the power of racism at yet another
level. This is reinforced when Pyke and his wife Marlene fuck Karim: this is
no lovemaking, but exploitative, objectifying sex in which power is exerted
over Karim as an ‘exotic’ Other. After, he realises that ‘the fucker was fucking
[him] in other ways’ (219): Karim’s lover Eleanor becomes Pyke’s masochis-
tic and sycophantic lover, even though Pyke’s ideas are precisely the sort
that caused Gene’s death.
290 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

In The Black Album, Shahid also encounters different ways of being. Riaz’s
group see religion as the only answer, while duty to family threatens to pull
Shahid back to the suburbs. Shahid’s experience is heightened because he
is mourning his father’s death and is thus flailing; unlike Karim, he has no
father to rebel against. The world of drugs and parties also exerts its influ-
ence, but he sees the way that his brother Chili is being sucked into an
underworld, and the drug-dealing Strapper represents a white underclass
with no place to go. Like Karim, Shahid meets a Marxist, Professor Brownlow,
Deedee’s soon to be ex-husband, who has developed a stutter since the col-
lapse of communism and who makes an unlikely alliance with the Muslim
group against the Rushdie book. Brownlow sees the liberals ‘working them-
selves up into a pompous lather’ not as ‘fighting for literary freedom’, but
‘just standing by their miserable class’, without caring for ‘the Asian work-
ing class’ (215). Kureishi has commented on his argument with John Berger
who supported the outrage against The Satanic Verses on the grounds that
it ‘came from the downtrodden proletariat’ and that the novel ‘humiliated
[the] Muslim working class’ (2009, ix). Just as Kureishi thought Berger’s ‘an
eccentric and perverse point of view’ (2009, ix), Brownlow’s worldview fails
to attract Shahid, and it is presented in the novel as a spent secular faith.
While ‘Islam attracts Shahid because it seems to constitute a solid, authorita-
tive foundation for living in a postmodern world lacking in moral substance
and spiritual direction’ (Holmes 299), Shahid has difficulty latching on to
any orthodoxy for any time: ‘The problem was, when he was with his friends
their story compelled him. But when he walked out, like someone leaving a
cinema, he found the world to be more subtle and inexplicable’ (133). Shahid
eventually comes to his own conclusions about Rushdie. As he says to Chad,
‘He hasn’t spat on us or refused us a job. He never called you Paki scum, did
he?’ (218). Deedee represents the pleasure of intellectual ambiguity and pos-
sibility for Shahid, and he is attracted to the fact that she ‘always stimulated
him to think’ (135). Even so, Deedee’s liberalism is also challenged in the
novel: as she calls the police to campus when Rushdie’s book is ‘flambéed’
(226). As Kureishi says, liberals at the time found themselves in a ‘tricky posi-
tion’: ‘Criticism was essential in any society. This could be said, but not that.
But how would this be decided, and by whom?’ (2009, ix). Or as Shahid says
about ‘clever white people’ like Deedee, ‘Why would you want to change
anything when you already have everything your way?’ (110).
Sexuality and love are important parts of each young protagonist’s educa-
tion. King writes that Kureishi ‘was the first black or Asian writer to move
beyond the immigrant self and racial experience to an intense body of work
about the Self and the life it leads in relationship to desire, the body, love,
sex, age, and work’ (186). Indeed, sexual relations constitute an arena in
which many of the larger issues of the novel play out: ‘the desire for change
and renewal is expressed through sexual relationships’ (King 187). It is
not only that ‘eventually themes of race, social justice, and personal social
 Susan Alice Fischer 291

advancement disappear to be replaced by stories on couples uncoupling and

the costs’ (King 187), but rather that these social issues often find expression
through sexual encounters. For instance, in The Buddha of Suburbia, Karim’s
desire to become someone else is expressed through his relation with Eva’s
son Charlie, whom he desires not for himself, but because ‘I preferred him to
me and wanted to be him’ (15). As Thomas points out, this ‘is part of Karim’s
unacknowledged loathing of his Pakistani self’ and he will see Charlie differ-
ently ‘[o]nce [he] stops hating himself’ (79). Towards the end of the novel,
when Karim visits the now famous Charlie in New York, Karim is turned off
by Charlie’s sado-masochism when the latter steps on a reporter’s hand and
later enacts a sado-masochistic sex scene that Karim witnesses. Ultimately,
Karim realises that the tables have turned and that Charlie wants him
around only to witness his greatness: ‘I realized that I didn’t love Charlie any
more. I didn’t care either for or about him. He didn’t interest me at all. I’d
moved beyond him, discovering myself through what I rejected’ (255). By
this point in his education, Karim has seen the ways that others use him for
their own sense of self, and he refuses to be locked in their sado-masochistic
paradigm.
The Buddha of Suburbia ends with a moment in which Karim can gauge
how far he has come and look forward to more growth: ‘I could think about
the past and what I’d been through as I’d struggled to locate myself and
learn what the heart is. Perhaps in the future I would live more deeply. [ . . . ]
I thought of what a mess everything had been, but that it wouldn’t always
be that way’ (283–4). Similarly, in The Black Album, Shahid finds himself by
accepting ambiguity and continuing his relationship with Deedee. At the
end, he wonders, ‘How could anyone confine themselves to one system or
creed? Why should they feel they had to? There was no fixed self; surely
our several selves melted and mutated daily. There had to be innumerable
ways of being in the world. He would spread himself out, in his work and
in love, following his curiosity’ (274). His decision to stay with Deedee
‘[u]ntil it stops being fun’ is more profound than it seems at first sight (276).
It is about ‘embrac[ing] uncertainty’ (227).
In his stance against orthodoxy and for uncertainty, Kureishi draws upon
the carnivalesque, particularly as regards his protagonists’ experimentation
with sex and drugs as they wander through different spaces of the urban
landscape. In his study of Rabelais, Mikhail Bakhtin focuses on the relation
between social power and cultural forms, in particular the meaning of the
medieval feast of Carnival, which he sees as a momentary liberation from
the social order of everyday life as it inverts and subverts normative rela-
tions of power. The oppositional feast of the people, Carnival ‘celebrated
the temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established
order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms,
and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becom-
ing, change, and renewal’, in which the ‘bodily element is deeply positive’
292 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

(686–7). As Karim and Shahid revel in this ‘bodily element’ through sexual
experimentation, they resist the established order and become themselves.
Through the carnivalesque, Kureishi’s work undermines overarching
narratives of politics and religion which ultimately oppress and limit. The
subversive use of the carnivalesque can also be seen in the farcical elements
of Kureishi’s fiction. For instance, in The Buddha of Suburbia, Karim describes
the incongruity of his clashing worlds when he presents his Aunt Jean and
Uncle Ted as ‘characters from an Ealing Comedy walking into an Antonioni
film’ when they arrive at Eva’s house just as his father is starting a medita-
tion session (33). In The Black Album, the religious claim to see a divinely
planted arrow pointing to the truth in an aubergine, while the Labour
council leader Mr Rudder, known as the Rubber Messiah, latches on to the
vegetable for his own political gain. His cynicism – and Kureishi’s humour –
is apparent when he later says, ‘Let’s hope they curry this, blue fruit. Brinjal,
I believe it’s called. I could murder an Indian, couldn’t you, lads?’ (179–80).
Meanwhile, Shahid is left in a quandary about what to tell Deedee he’s been
doing: ‘How could he say he’d been overseeing an aubergine?’ (180).
Through the incongruous, the ridiculous and the irreverent, Kureishi
questions established truths and hierarchies of knowledge. He urges letting
go of those aspects of religion that are incompatible with living in a ‘lib-
eral’ society: ‘a religion isn’t something that you just swallow whole. It is
a pick and choose thing too’ (MacCabe 51). The same could be said about
his approach to politics. Shahid comes to recognise that the problem is
that ‘Like pornography, religion couldn’t admit the comic’ (150). Holmes
argues that ‘Shahid’s insistence on the freedom of the imagination [ . . . ]
finally causes the split between him and Riaz’s group’ (304). Kureishi’s work
encourages us to recapture laughter, reclaim imagination and embrace
uncertainty.

Works cited
Anthony, Andrew. ‘How One Book Ignited a Culture War.’ The Guardian. 11 January
2009. Web. 29 June 2010.
Appiah K. ‘Identity Crisis.’ New York Times Book Review (1995): 42. Academic Search
Complete. EBSCO. Web. 27 June 2010.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. ‘Rabelais and His World.’ Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan.
Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd edn. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. 686–92.
Cuder-Domínguez, Pilar. ‘Ethnic Cartographies of London in Bernardine Evaristo and
Zadie Smith.’ London: Routledge, 2004. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 27
June 2010. 173–88.
Head, Dominic. The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Holmes, Frederick M. ‘The Postcolonial Subject Divided between East and West:
Kureishi’s The Black Album as an Intertext of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.’ Papers
 Susan Alice Fischer 293

on Language & Literature 37.3 (2001): 296. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web.
27 June 2010.
Ilona, Anthony. ‘Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia: ‘A New Way of Being
British’”, in eds. Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham and Philip Tew, Contemporary British
Fiction. London: Polity, 2003. 87–105.
King, Bruce. The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 13: 1948–2000: The Internationali-
zation of English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Kureishi, Hanif. The Buddha of Suburbia. New York: Penguin, 1990.
Kureishi, Hanif. The Black Album. London: Faber and Faber, 1995.
Kureishi, Hanif, The Black Album: Adapted for the Stage by the Author. London: Faber
and Faber, 2009.
MacCabe, Colin. ‘Hanif Kureishi on London.’ Critical Quarterly 41.3 (1999): 37.
Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 27 June 2010.
Sandhu, Sukhdev. London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City.
London: HarperCollins, 2003.
Stein, Mark. Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation. Columbus: The Ohio
State University Press, 2004.
Thomas, Susie. Hanif Kureishi: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Thomas, Susie. ‘Something to Ask You: A Conversation with Hanif Kureishi.’ Changing
English: Studies in Culture & Education 14.1 (April 2007): 3–16.
Thomas, Susie. ‘After the Fatwa.’ Changing English: An International Journal of English
Teaching, 16.4 (December 2009). 365–83.
20
Samad, Hancock, the Suburbs, and
Englishness: Re-reading Zadie Smith’s
White Teeth
Philip Tew

In ‘Speaking in Tongues’ a recent address given by Zadie Smith in New York,

in part concerned with the election of Barack Obama as President, Smith
identifies and locates herself in terms of accent and class, thereby exhibiting,
as she admits in this essay, a characteristically English obsession. Smith notes
that she left university with a changed ‘posher’ accent adopted so that she
might feel confident about being regarded by others as intellectually cred-
ible. Although initially she sustained two voice registers, she admits that her
re-voiced accent has subsumed her earlier more working class one. ‘Recently
my double voice has deserted me for a single one, reflecting the smaller world
into which my work has led me. Willesden was a big, colorful, working-class
sea; Cambridge was a smaller, posher pond, and almost univocal; the literary
world is a puddle.’ Clearly there is suggested here a transitional set of affili-
ations, even a shift of identity perhaps, both of a particularly English kind.
In revisiting Smith’s White Teeth (2000), I want to reconsider and develop a
broad theme I touched on and certain material that I used in preparing the
first full-length study of her fiction, published as Zadie Smith (2010). In so
doing, part of my focus will be Smith’s evocations of Englishness, both cul-
tural and literary aspects, as expressed in her writing generally and in certain
specific ruminations about her life. It may be deceptive to be guided by initial
critical responses to her first novel, for as I explain in Zadie Smith it appeared
at a particular time and place just after the millennium (a short phase pre-
9/11 that a decade on feels very distant and hard to recuperate). Moreover,
as I explore in that earlier study Smith’s first book was much hyped well in
advance of publication in terms of a specifically ‘hybrid’ identity that was
marketed very hard. This process had consequences: as well as the book’s
immense success, it was subjected to a veritable critical avalanche and its
reception was shaped very much by certain essentialisms concerning ethnic
identity and hybridity that permeate so much postcolonial criticism. I will
suggest below that it is through this distorting prism that the book is still
misunderstood, with its actual mood, its nuanced perspective and its range
of contents and characters being either neglected or completely ignored.
294
 Philip Tew 295

In contrast, I hope, as well as suggesting that the overriding register of

the narrative voice of the novel which is variously arch, complex, ironic
and comic in terms of various English traditions explored below, I am also
especially interested in Smith’s other cultural interests and observations that
seem either to be influenced by her father or to represent affinities acquired
when Smith studied for a degree in English at King’s College, Cambridge. Of
course the latter is the environment in which, as described in ‘Speaking in
Tongues’, she underwent her ‘Voice adaptation [which] is still the original
British sin.’ It is worth noting that Smith repeatedly in interviews and jour-
nalism returns to Englishness, class, and paternal affinities, which observa-
tion is not to suggest that these contexts represent the sum total of her parts
either personally or aesthetically. However, I feel these do represent strong
currents in Smith’s sense of identity and creativity, ones either critically
neglected or even rejected by many to date. Setting both these possibilities
and others expressed in the text of her novel against some may prove both
intriguing and instructive.
First consider some specific responses to White Teeth, which as critical
evaluations might superficially appear positive, but are in effect reductive
in terms of narrowing the range of the novel and particularly its potential
influences. Certainly, as we shall see, such responses ignore the author’s own
views of her creative coordinates. For Phyllis Lassner in Colonial Strangers:
Women Writing the End of the British Empire Smith’s novel is rooted in World
War Two and the product of:

Britain’s most celebrated postcolonial prodigy. [ . . . ] White Teeth pro-

claims a declaration of independence not only from haunting and con-
straining memory of the war’s catastrophes and racist oppression, but
from the very idea of belonging. After centuries of colonial oppression
and decades of postcolonial depression and anger, White Teeth imagi-
nes the grand finale of Empire as the construction of a multicultural,
multiclass British bazaar. (193)

The novel, for Lassner, is all about marginalized victimhood and rebellion
against ‘an ongoing history of oppression’ (193) and the text explicitly
acknowledges ‘its colonial history and debt to postcolonial studies [ . . . ]’
(193). Interestingly Smith balks at such sweeping judgments. In an interview
with Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, Smith not only explicitly rejects the inter-
viewer’s comparison of her work with that of Salman Rushdie’s, but Smith
explains of her first novel responding to, it would appear with a certain irri-
tation, the assumptions of hybridity on the part of her interviewer: ‘Its not
really one thing, it’s lots of different things. [ . . . ] But I did want to write
about England post-war . . . and so that’s really what I did’ (267). The inter-
view is throughout subtended by a certain irritation on Smith’s part with the
interviewer’s presumptions. Smith’s sense of a certain hybridity at the nodal
296 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

point for the critic’s understanding of both author and work appear to irritate
Smith. Smith stresses the limited research involved in preparing and writing
White Teeth, insisting more generally ‘Novels are a huge con job, because it’s
not like academic work; you don’t have to prove anything’ (269).
In his essay ‘Colonization in Reverse: White Teeth as Caribbean Novel’
(2008) Raphael Dalleo rejects the literary establishment’s ascription of the
book as ‘British’ using a collocation of writers and theorists listed ‘to show
how the novel engages with the same problematic of British multicultural-
ism and self-definition’ (91). Such criticism fails palpably to address the
true complexity of Smith’s novel and her sense of the equivocations of all
notions of identity, largely defined in White Teeth by families and environ-
ments, rather Dalleo comprehending simply a hybrid or ‘Caribbeanized’
(93) London. This certainly is neither the register of the novel nor its view
of the Caribbean. First, Dalleo ignores the oddly stereotypical (or archetypal)
aspects of all of the characters, including those with Caribbean origins, evi-
denced in the craziness of Mad Mary, the comic sedentary cameo of Darcus
Bowden with his ‘lifelong affection for the dole, the armchair and British
television’ (31), and the reductive verbal double act represented by Clarence
and Denzel. Second, Dalleo misses a significant point, that for Irie Jamaica as
a ‘homeland’ (402) that she has never known offers an imaginary space that
appears unsullied by the coordinates of current relationships. It can be, and
therefore is, idealized by her. The narrator interrupts the flow of Irie’s impres-
sions with an ironic comment in parenthesis concerning Irie’s romanticized
view: ‘(For Jamaica appeared to Irie as if it were newly made. Like Columbus
himself, just by discovering it she had brought it into existence). [ . . . ] And
the particular magic of homeland, its particular spell was that it sounded like a
beginning. The beginningnest of beginnings. Like the first morning of Eden
and the day after apocalypse. A blank page’ (402). Smith is being, in part,
both knowing and ironic about the almost mystical longing of the young,
the sense of being between that seeks to be effaced or validated, and that
rarely satisfies the coordinates of the present. And riven identities suggest
class dynamics as well as colonial migrations. Smith comments in ‘Talking in
Tongues’ while discussing the model of not belonging that is larger than the
legacy of colonialism – either to where one aspires to belong or from where
one has emerged – suggested by George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Smith
senses at least implicitly a general longing concerning abandoned origins
that is part of a bourgeois aspiration that has remodelled modernity,

Whoever changes their voice takes on, in Britain, a queerly tragic

dimension.
[...]
How persistent this horror of the middling spot is, this dread of the
interim place! It extends through the specter of the tragic mulatto,
to the plight of the transsexual, to our present anxiety – disguised as
 Philip Tew 297

genteel concern – for the contemporary immigrant, tragically split, we

are sure, between worlds, ideas, cultures, voices – whatever will become
of them? Something’s got to give – one voice must be sacrificed for
the other. What is double must be made singular. (Smith ‘Speaking in
Tongues’)

It might superficially appear that the critical inflections of Lassner, Dalleo

and others similarly convinced of the innate postcoloniality of Smith’s
text are mirrored here, with Samad emerging as the archetypal figure in
many ways. And yet this appears not finally to represent Smith’s view, for
she manages precisely to see beyond this particular dichotomy or form of
entrapment; and the coordinates of being in-between are evoked as follows
in intensely personal terms:

In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no

choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues. That’s how you get from
your mother to your father, from talking to one set of folks who think
you’re not black enough to another who figure you insufficiently white.
(Smith ‘Speaking in Tongues’)

Samad’s dream is also one of return, hence his kidnap of his son, Magid. The
outcome serves to ridicule Samad’s aspirations, shatter his hopes. For Smith it
is the possibility of transcendence and its defining conditions undertaken in
‘Speaking in Tongues’ that suggest its importance in comprehending Smith’s
positioning of aspects of transcendent identity in her work. Smith locates a
point of overcoming, in terms of both Cary Grant (formerly Americanized
Englishman Archibald Leach from Bristol, a city for Smith with paternal
connections) and Obama as changing that which defines them, in order to
inhabit a further possibility that seems almost to be arrived at magically rather
than by the act of migration alone (rendered mundane in White Teeth beyond
Samad’s histrionics). For Grant it is through a suavity that is almost impossibly
elusive; for Obama it derives from the ability to articulate empathically many
subject positions and constituencies though his subtle voicing of multiplicity
as ‘this invocation of our collective human messiness’ (Smith ‘Speaking in
Tongues.’). This of course is articulated by Smith in Forsterian fashion. Obama
and Cary Grant, for Smith, share something transcendent in that they both
manage ‘To occupy a dream, to exist in a dreamed space (conjured by both
father and mother), [which] is surely a quite different thing from simply
inheriting a dream. It’s more interesting’ (Smith ‘Speaking in Tongues’ Npag.).
And hence given the above, one might suggest that Smith actively resists
the narrowing of her imagination and identity, the exclusion of certain parts
of her by others including academic critics, leading for instance to acts of
interpretation wilfully displacing the kinds of contextual reality explored
in this essay, focusing too insistently instead on other possibilities, creating
298 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

thereby a different ideological emphasis than the ones Smith appears to

foreground. This helps explain Smith’s objection to Gerzina’s assumptions
in her interview, as when Smith comments, ‘My family doesn’t appear
anywhere in the book, and I know – in terms of the Jamaican stuff in the
book – people have assumed that because I have a Jamaican mother, but
I don’t have any contact with the rest of my Jamaican family, so it’s as alien
to me as anything else in the book’ (268).
In fact in an even more assumptive fashion, Dalleo conflates hybridity
as a general concept with Caribbean identity, despite hybridity clearly not
being a process exclusive to that region. Dalleo’s other evidence is slim
at best, hardly sufficient to reach the conclusion that somehow Millat’s
Raggistani gang represent the whole city in that ‘This indiscriminate borrow-
ing suggests the kind of syncretic fusion seen in contact zones like the global
Caribbean’ (95). In fact this group’s coordinates of influence once radical-
ized are in transition, away from the American mainstream entertainment
industry to other more counter-cultural strains, largely constituted by the
civil rights movement, Garveyism and Elijah Mohamed blended to remain
‘within the letter of the Qu-raˉn’ (470). And despite the latter caveat, on the
day of the final denouement and KEVIN’s planned protest against Marcus
Chalfen FutureMouse©, Millat is ‘stoned ‘ (498), hardly a desired condition
for a radicalized Islamicist. Moreover, one wonders whether despite all of
the conflations Dalleo foregrounds, whether he can seriously think that the
Caribbeanizing aspect he posits subsumes the presence of all those other
characters such as Archie, Ryan Topps, Alsana and Samad, the Cocknified
Abdul-Mickey, the bourgeois Chalfens and the intellectualized Magid, all of
whom he fails to factor into his globalizing account. Dalleo’s critical strategy
seems simply a matter of either knowingly or negligently exaggerating the
importance of the hybrid argot of London youth and their sampling or mix-
ing of cultural symbols both of which Smith deploys to comic effect, as in
the first case with the various subtle verbal inflections of Irie, such as in her
argument with Millat about the attraction of Garibaldi biscuits for the elderly
prior to visiting J. P. Hamilton as part of the contentious Harvest Festival:

Millat from under the cocoon of his Tomytronic, sniffed, ‘Nobody likes
raisins. Dead grapes – bleurgh. Who wants to eat them?’
‘Old people do,’ Irie insisted, stuffing the biscuits back into her bag. ‘And
they’re not dead, akchully, they’re dried’. (162)

Another critic who might be regarded as representative of an apparently wil-

ful disregard of the actual dynamics and balance of effects of Smith’s novel
is Pilar Cuder-Dominguez, who states confidently:

Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) is another polyvocal novel about a large
cast of characters who fail to pass the test of traditional, Anglo-Saxon
 Philip Tew 299

England. Two generations of Iqbals (of Bangladeshi origins), Joneses (a

mixed-race couple, white English and black Jamaican), and Chalfens
(Jews) make up a multicultural mosaic where white Englishness is dislo-
cated and even close to complete erasure. Depending on their relative age,
they tend to meet in either the pub or the school, both of them depicted
as temples of hybridity and complexity [my italics]. (183)

Again a certain narrowing of focus and hyperbole are self-evident. Cuder-

Dominguez’s reading also ignores the reality that these family groups all
exist implicitly in a wider culture, and neglects the literary influences to
which Smith alludes explicitly. Her novel is not simply an ideologically-
driven polemic, which is surely how Cuder-Dominguez regards it, conclud-
ing of Smith that ‘she targets white Englishness and exposes its myths and
prejudices’ (185) and in Cuder-Dominguez’s desire to be radically postcolo-
nial she either misses or effaces Smith’s satirical engagement with multicul-
turalism, and confidently erases Smith’s nuanced Forsterian and Dickensian
humanism. In ‘Mediating multi-cultural muddle: E. M. Forster meets Zadie
Smith’ Catherine Lanone points out concerning Smith:

She chose an extract from Where Angels Fear to Tread, Forster’s first novel,
as the epigraph for the opening chapter of her own first novel, White
Teeth, adding echoes such as Forster’s statement that one should betray
one’s country rather than one’s friend, a sentence which is loosely and
anonymously picked up by one of her characters. (186)

As Lanone adds later the novel also ‘used the motif of teeth to question
the notion of roots and debunked myths of historical belonging (like the
dubious family appropriation of the Great Mutiny) [ . . . ]’ (192).
Matthew Paproth in ‘The Flipping Coin: the Modernist and Postmodernist
Zadie Smith’ misses the irony both in Smith’s tone and in her approach to
characterization. Fundamentally Paproth positions Samad with regard to his
obsession with ancestor Mangel Pande as sustaining a virtuous tradition, mov-
ing to putative transcendence, where ‘Although your history may be helplessly
entangled with your present-day existence, it alone does not have to consti-
tute that existence’ (17). In fact in the Holbrook Gerzina interview Smith is
far more dialectical, going as far as to claim, ‘Colonialism is like a love affair
between countries; it’s not just one country going to subdue another; it’s two
countries becoming fixated on each other’ (274–5), a suggestive observation.
Samad hankers after his past experience of Muslim tradition in Bangladesh,
disquieted by the present in London (and his own failings), and thereby seek-
ing an impossible vista (the imagined point of origin as unchanged and static)
he misses the ability to transcend both locations of past and present.
Given all of the above, interestingly Smith herself also volubly rejects
Gerzina’s notion that Smith’s novel is underpinned by ‘an astonishing
300 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

knowledge of histories that are not your own’ (268) having already reacted
when asked about her ‘multi-racial background,’ interceding ‘It’s not so
“multi-”, it’s just one black parent and one white!’ (267). Smith also appears
vexed when Holbrook Gerzina assumes a panorama of London dialects,
‘I’m interested in making characters’ (269) reminding her interlocutor that
Archie’s way of talking was ‘a product of watching a whole load of British
television, because I don’t think many people actually talk like Archie’ (269).
This is a context and influence Smith explores alongside her relationship
with her father in ‘Dead Man Laughing,’ a poignant recollection of certain
significant paternal affinities. Archie Jones in terms of his second marriage,
his capacity for practicalities and his menial profession appears to have been
drawn fundamentally from her father, Harvey, whose obsession with Tony
Hancock Smith outlines and confesses to sharing:

The sadder and more desolate the comedy, the better Harvey liked it.
[...]
Harvey had him on vinyl: a pristine, twenty-year-old set of LPs. The series
was ‘Hancock’s Half Hour,’ a situation comedy in which Hancock plays a
broad version of himself and, to my mind, of my father. A quintessentially
English, poorly educated, working-class war veteran with social and intel-
lectual aspirations, whose fictional address – 23 Railway Cuttings, East
Cheam – perfectly conjures the aspirant bleakness of London’s suburbs (as
if Cheam were significant enough a spot to have an East.) Harvey, mean-
while, could be found in 24 Athelstan Gardens, Willesden Green (a poky
housing estate named after the ancient king of England), also by a railway.
Hancock’s heartbreaking inability to pass as a middle-class beatnik or oth-
erwise pull himself out of the hole he was born in was a source of great
mirth to Harvey, despite the fact that this was precisely his own situation.
[...]
Occasionally, I’d lure friends to my room and make them listen to “The
Blood Donor” or “The Radio Ham.” This never went well. I demanded
complete silence, was in the habit of lifting the stylus and replaying a
section if any incidental noise should muffle a line, and generally leached
all potential pleasure from the exercise with laborious explanations of the
humor. (Smith ‘Dead Man Laughing’ Npag.)

Hancock and his peculiarities feature among the coordinates of post-war

Englishness, particularly its suburban contradictions. Smith’s affinity for
Hancock may, as I suggest below, serve as a key to radically re-reading the
inflection of Samad’s characterization. Later in the same essay Smith reports
her father having listened to her novel:

Listening to my first novel, White Teeth, on tape, and hearing the rough
arc of his life in the character Archie Jones, he took it well, seeing the
 Philip Tew 301

parallels but also the difference: ‘He had better luck than me!’ The novel
was billed as comic fiction. To Harvey, it sat firmly in the laugh-or-you’ll-
cry genre. [my italics] (Smith ‘Dead Man Laughing’ Npag.)

However, it is misleading to conflate Archie and Harvey in simplistic fash-

ion. Archie is never entirely either Hancock or Harvey, the fit as Smith
insists always remains ‘rough.’ And yet Hancock and Smith’s father’s fatal-
istic obsession with the comic’s humour, discussed by Smith in ‘Dead Man
Laughing,’ is still suggestive specifically in terms of White Teeth. Surely
Hancock’s ‘social and intellectual aspirations’ and Harvey’s bad luck, as well
as his melancholy expressed in his affinity for Hancock’s ‘comic bleakness
[ . . . ] wedded to despair, in his life as much as in his work’ are all found
in Samad, exhibiting these very characteristics, expressed in large part in
his own tortured scepticism and pessimism. Peter Goddard in ‘Hancock’s
Half-Hour’: A Watershed in British Television Comedy’ describes the comic
as ‘the seedy misfit with intellectual pretensions, sure he was missing out
while those around him had never had it so good [ . . . ]’ (78). In precisely
terms that might equally be applied to Samad, Eric Midwinter in Make ’Em
Laugh: Famous Comedians and Their Worlds (1979) describes the comic and
‘his pseudo-intellectual ramblings’ (135) thus:

Tony Hancock was both introspective and melancholy. He was perpetu-

ally soul-searching and as frequently soul-seared, yet his self-deception
knew no bounds as he created flimsy, brash veneers of cocksureness. [ . . . ]
That odd compound of self-delusion and insecurity shone frighteningly
through all the time. (128)

A similar paradoxical penchant is exhibited when Samad encounters ‘Mad

Mary’, one of the eccentrics that haunt the streets of the suburban city,
apparently harmless, but impelled and still deranged. Samad responds in
kind, again in a decidedly Hancockian fashion:

He grew confident. There had always been a manqué preacher in Samad.

A know-it-all, a walker and a talker. With a small audience and a lot of
fresh air he had always been able to convince himself that all the knowl-
edge in the universe, all the knowledge on walls, was his. [ . . . ] ‘Believe
me, I understand your concerns,’ said Samad, taking inspiration from
that other great North London street-preacher, Ken Livingstone. ‘I am
having difficulties myself – we are all having difficulties in this country,
this country which is new to us and old to us at the same time. We are
divided people, aren’t we.’ (178–9)

Archie may represent the biographical element (and ethnic identity) of

Smith’s father, Harvey, but surely and somewhat ironically it is Samad who
302 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

incorporates much of Smith’s father’s unfulfilled ambitions, his thwarted

desire to improve himself, wheras Archie is satisfied with his lot. As Andy
Medhurst says in ‘Negotiating the Gnome Zone: Visions of Suburbia
in British Popular Culture’ ‘Hancock lurks on the fringes of suburbia,
close enough to see the lifestyle he aspires to, but always outside, always
excluded, not really “one of us”’ (253). Here lies some of the provenance for
Samad. Also significantly in ‘Dead Man Laughing’ Smith describes: ‘Harvey’s
seemingly infinite pessimism. No good can come of this.’ Of course one might
trace a certain amount of this kind of reticence in Archie, but it is far more
comprehensively evident in Samad, whose pomposity, wry humourlessness
and the ersatz philosophizing that subtend his character and experience of
life all represent a convincingly Hancockian combination, again far more so
than for Archie who exhibits no real goals or ambitions in terms of career,
class or intellect.
Just like Hancock Samad is mocked and parodied by those closest to
him, his wife Alsana deriding his attitudes and his manner of speech, and
Shiva, a colleague at the restaurant where Samad works, mimicking the
older man pitilessly after Samad responds to Shiva’s complaints about shar-
ing tips. Shiva parodies the older man’s words, his movements and the
inappropriateness of his responses:

Round and round the kitchen he went, bending his head and rubbing
his hands over and over like Uriah Heep, bowing and genuflecting to
the head cook, to the old man arranging great hunks of meat in the
walk-in freezer, to the young boy scrubbing the underside of the oven.
‘Samad, Samad . . . ’ he said with what seemed infinite pity, then stopped
abruptly, pulled the apron off and wrapped it round his waist. ‘You are
such a sad little man.’ (57)

Smith similarly orchestrates the details with great skill to achieve the kind
of baffled, wounded pathos Hancock achieves, the humour expressed most
potently in his very ordinariness and inanity. Hancock too is prone to a cer-
tain mockery, his pathos differently inflected to that of Archie whose position
in life is more uncomplaining, hence evoking a more dignified pathos of a
kind Hancock and Samad lack. As for the latter pair they are subject to a com-
edy of utter banality precisely where, quite unlike Archie, the victim imagines
himself tragic. Samad is always such a person, in part swept along partly by
the forces of history, but more dynamically by his own refusal to imagine a
space beyond his sense of contestation, his sense of victimhood, his inner
melancholy. Radically misunderstood by others – at least as far as he regards
matters – Samad rails constantly at the world. All of the above confer upon his
Dickensian roots as a character the passage highlights a decidedly Hancockian
quality, although unlike the apparently frustrated and celibate Hancock,
Samad manages at least to inveigle two women into his intimate life.
 Philip Tew 303

There are other, perhaps unexpected, possibilities in the very suburban

nature of Samad’s life that I will proceed to examine below. John Archer
describes of the earliest origins of the suburbs in ‘Colonial Suburbs in
South Asia, 1700–1850, and the Spaces of Modernity’ (26–54), noting
that ‘Colonies and suburbs (in the sense of a locale outside the settlement
proper) have existed almost since the beginning of organized settlement.
Colonies and suburbs were sites of exile and alienation. Both were politically
and economically dependent on the metropole’ (27). However as Archer
comments on the English dimension in an early development at Kew that
would permeate even the Empire:

The genesis of this and subsequent clusters of comparable dwellings can-

not be explained simply as a matter of changing ‘taste’ or of geographic
dispersion based on factors such as economics and transportation.
Rather, it also is a matter of critical changes in English modes of con-
sciousness at the beginning of the eighteenth century: consciousness that
began to anchor identity primarily in the autonomous self rather than
in social hierarchy or collective. The suburban villa was instrumental
in the construction of this consciousness: it did so, in part, by spatially
differentiating private from public, by establishing the suburban plot as
a site for cultivation of the self (e.g. through leisure pursuits) instead of
commerce and politics. (40–1)

Hence the suburbs might be considered as variously an evolving, but con-

tradictory and ambivalent environment per se, a space of abutment and
transition, a shifting spatial vocabulary. This might be read in a postcolonial
fashion, but although Samad is certainly a migrant, in many ways he is
rendered by Smith as a suburbanite extraordinaire, almost as a postcolonial
Pooter, with his pomposity, with his regular commute to work to an Indian
restaurant at the heart of ‘London’s Theatreland’ (56), the conflicts in the
community and with his wife, his attempts at intellectualism, and added
is that suburban staple of post-war America and late-capitalist Britain, his
extra-marital affair.
Curiously there may even be a further irony in Samad ending up as a
typical suburbanite in many ways, a curious appropriateness that might
explain both the suburb’s attraction for him and a subliminal familiarity,
ignored by critics. As Archer indicates despite the exilic and alienated ori-
gins of the suburbs, in the sub-continent they acquired a fashionability and
Archer points to ‘the early appearance of suburban enclaves in the vicinity
of Madras’ (41) from 1710 onward. Suburbs of ‘garden houses’ (42) were
developed and by 1811 a garden setting was ‘paradigmatic’ of Madras (45).
Archer adds ‘Not only was it unfashionable to live in the town itself, but the
garden house was a necessary instrument for the contrapositional constitu-
tion of self and family as domestic counterparts to the toil and commerce
304 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

of the city’ (45). The system or model spread throughout Imperial India.
Samad inhabits a more déclassé form that epitomized the economic decline
of the interwar years with the Great Depression and the demise of the serv-
ant class. The comparison with Hancock – a figure who inhabits mostly a
world of men – situates the masculine bastion of O’Connells, a tragic-comic
zone of nostalgia. As David Wall clarifies in ‘Tony Hancock and the Cultural
Landscapes of Post-War Britain’ Hancock’s East Cheam may represent
Britain’s post-imperial decline with its painful era of loss, the change and
disruption that undermine the topographically idealized view (235–6), but
specifically the suburban setting becomes a site for contesting meaning, a
tradition essentially continued in Smith:

Suburbia situated as it is on the boundaries between a variety of spaces,

discourses, systems and economies, is inevitably shaped by transgres-
sions of those boundaries. Between public and private, street and garden,
country and city, polite and impolite, domestic and foreign, included
and excluded, or that most powerful of boundaries, between centre
and margin, suburbia exists as both place and no-place, defined always
in liminal relation to the social, geographical and ideological place it
is not. This volatile tension between presence and absence has meant
that, notwithstanding a traditionally scornful attitude towards suburbia
which characterises it as ‘offering nothing but drab conformism and
frigid respectability’ (Medhurst 1997: 241), suburbia has emerged as what
Michael Bracewell (1998: 114) calls ‘the primary incubator of English
outsiders and artists’. (236–7)

Smith is also aware of the genealogy of British comedy, and the immense
influence of television sitcom, something she alludes to in ‘Dead Man
Laughing’ after describing her own delight with Hancock resisted by her
teenage friends more influenced by a new age dominated by American
comedy:

Hancock wasn’t such an anachronism, as it turns out. Genealogically

speaking, Harvey had his finger on the pulse of British comedy, for
Hancock begot Basil Fawlty, and Fawlty begot Alan Partridge, and
Partridge begot the immortal David Brent. And Hancock and his descend-
ants served as a constant source of conversation between my father and
me, a vital link between us when, class-wise, and in every other wise,
each year placed us farther apart. (Smith ‘Dead Man Laughing’ Npag.)

Moreover, like so many televisual representations in sitcom of men in

the suburbs unable to respond to womanly criticism, and like neighbour
Marcus Chalfen, Samad withdraws, using the very medium of television so
often associated with archetypal Anglo-American and Australian suburban
 Philip Tew 305

lives. ‘Samad shrugged, went into the kitchen drawer and fished out the
earphones that could be plugged into the television and thus short-circuit
the outside world. He, like Marcus, had disengaged. Leave them, was his
feeling. Leave them to their battles’ (438). His conflict with Alsana, with her
acerbic asides, draws on the tradition of sitcom and its implicitly suburban
conflicts and values. And despite criticizing Britain and its weather (in a
sense in so doing exuding two very British suburban characteristics) Samad
ends up ‘betraying the English inflections of twenty years in the country
[ . . . ]’ ((407).
Samad describes his impulse for quietude, a suburban desire that he can
continue ‘letting the things that are beyond my control wash over me’
(179), but the impulse to reaffirm his Islamic identity militates against that
desire to remain placid in such a decidedly suburban fashion. Hence his
identity is in flux, but the suburbanite in him persists. At least for a while,
he continues to have an affair with Poppy Burt-Jones. Having decided to so
do he is faced with an image ‘clearly by the bandstand his two sons, their
white teeth biting into two waxy apples, waving, smiling’ (182). The jux-
taposition, the uncanny revelation of one’s guilt is less a matter of tragedy
and morality, more an aspect drawn from television sitcom, a genre ineluc-
tably tied to the mores of suburban life upon which it reflects. Such are the
proximities of the suburbs, its synchronicity, the reminder of human failings
in its practices. As Goddard says, the Hancockian exists in a world ‘where
comedy could be found in personal relations, in the thwarting of aspirations
and in the mundanity of everyday life’ (87). This is exactly how Smith situ-
ates Samad. Smith comments in ‘Dead Man Laughing’:

When meditating on the sitcom, you extrapolate from the details, which
in Britain are almost always signifiers of social class: Hancock’s battered
homburg, Fawlty’s cravat, Partridge’s driving gloves, Brent’s fake Italian
suits. It’s a relief to be able to laugh at these things. In British comedy,
the painful class dividers of real life are neutralized and exposed. In my
family, at least, it was a way of talking about things we didn’t want to talk
about. (Smith ‘Dead Man Laughing’ Npag.).

And yet, perhaps it is among the paradoxes and contradictions of the sub-
urban mind, despite the myths and archetypes of liminal space, that tran-
scendence might still be a possibility even there in the suburbs, within the
quotidian, for as Roy Bhaskar says in Reflections on Meta-Reality: A Philosophy
for the Present (2002) of apparently banal and normative cultural practices,
‘Transcendental identification is common in everyday life. It is not some-
thing to be opposed to ordinary life; it is something which is necessary to
keep ordinary life going. This all really begins to break down the subject–
object duality which is so characteristic of our contemporary world – our
world of duality, alienation, contradiction and crisis.’ (43–4)
306 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

I might ask whether I am as guilty in emphasizing one aspect of Smith just

as some of the critics I excoriate above do in a different manner, in my
view co-opting or dragooning Smith into the ideological constraints that
animate so much postcolonial criticism. Well clearly I think it is a necessary
critical rebalancing, and importantly it is similar to the process undertaken
by Smith herself, as when she considers issues of identity in ‘Speaking
in Tongues.’ Although Smith admits that she signs herself as black on
questionnaires ignoring the option of ‘biracial’ she adds:

I also know in my heart that it’s an equivocation; I know that Obama has
a double consciousness, is black and, at the same time, white, as I am,
unless we are suggesting that one side of a person’s genetics and cultural
heritage cancels out or trumps the other.
[...]
I suppose it’s possible that subconsciously I am also a tragic mulatto,
torn between pride and shame. In my conscious life, though, I cannot
honestly say I feel proud to be white and ashamed to be black or proud
to be black and ashamed to be white. I find it impossible to experience
either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active
part. I understand how those words got into the racial discourse, but
I can’t sign up to them. I’m not proud to be female either. I am not even
proud to be human – I only love to be so. As I love to be female and
I love to be black, and I love that I had a white father. (Smith ‘Speaking
in Tongues’ Npag.)

In ‘Love, actually’ in writing about herself aged around eleven Smith con-
firms the larger possibilities she regards as inherent in effective fiction,
stating. ‘EM Forster’s A Room With A View was my first intimation of the
possibilities of fiction: how wholly one might feel for it and through it, how
much it could do to you.’ Although she also recollects a later response as a
student, with her academically-influenced intellectualization of interpreta-
tion, a rejection of a ‘love’ of a text as insufficient, abjuring the pleasurable,
subsequently in retrospect she finally resolves that:

The conflation of the simple in style with the morally prescriptive in

character, and the complex in style with the amoral or anarchic in char-
acter seems to me one of the most persistently fallacious beliefs held by
English students. The truth is, surely, that every variety of literary style
attempts to enact in us a way of seeing, of reading, and this is never less
than an ethical strategy [ . . . ]. (Smith ‘Love Actually’ Npag.)

Smith’s work is founded on an awareness of the wider ethical function of

fiction, on a certain level always about tentative possibilities, never just a
social critique of human possibilities, but a celebration of human failings.
 Philip Tew 307

This is instructive in terms of White Teeth, since it seems that an ethical view
for Smith is not a complex, socialized one necessarily, but might be found
even in the less explicitly ethical (such as Jane Austen) and rather more in
Forster, concerning whom she finds:

His protagonists are not good readers or successful moral agents, but cha-
otic, irrational human beings. [ . . . ] Forster’s folk are famously always in
a muddle: they don’t know what they want or how to get it. It has been
noted before that this might be a deliberate ethical strategy, an expres-
sion of the belief that the true motivations of human agents are far from
rational in character. [ . . . ] His was a study of the emotional, erratic and
unreasonable in human life. But what interests me is that his narrative
structure is muddled also; impulsive, meandering, irrational, which seem-
ing faults lead him on to two further problematics: mawkishness and
melodrama. (Smith ‘Love Actually’ Npag.)

Influence is important in Smith’s aesthetic shaping of elements, and the

above passage although it relates explicitly to Forster, offers a cartographic
abstraction or pretty much a guide to the very human qualities that perme-
ate White Teeth, which is distinctly comic and anti-heroic, just like Forster.
Admittedly Smith satirizes less gently than Forster, and as I state in my
earlier study ‘Interpretatively, one can exaggerate the positive qualities of
cultural identity and heritage in Smith, over-determining such themes’ (15).
Why might this be important? Well, firstly it is close to the Forsterian vision
of the novel that animates Smith and which perspective she maintains.
Smith makes evident in ‘What Makes A Good Writer?’:

To me, writing is always the attempted revelation of this elusive, multi-

faceted self, and yet its total revelation [ . . . ] is a chimerical impossibility.
It is impossible to convey all of the truth of all our experience. Actually,
it’s impossible to even know what that would mean, although we stub-
bornly continue to have an idea of it, just as Plato had an idea of the
forms. When we write, similarly, we have the idea of a total revelation
of truth, but cannot realise it. And so, instead, each writer asks himself
which serviceable truths he can live with, which alliances are strong
enough to hold. (Smith ‘What Makes A Good Writer?’ NPag.)

And in this same essay, it is in this context of an imperfect form, imperfectly

rendering an attempt at a certain ontological truthfulness, that Smith also
states precisely in Forsterian tones her aesthetic credo:

Writers have only one duty, as I see it: the duty to express accurately their
way of being in the world. If that sounds woolly and imprecise, I apologise.
[...]
308 Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world.

This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the
dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own
but other people’s, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your
nation, the myths of your historical moment – once you have removed
all that warped experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not
believe in – what you are left with is something approximating the truth
of your own conception. That is what I am looking for when I read a
novel: one person’s truth as far as it can be rendered through language.
This single duty, properly pursued, produces complicated, various results.
(Smith ‘What Makes A Good Writer?’ NPag.)

For critics, at least in terms of Smith’s work, a postcolonial tendency mostly

represents a reinterpretation of the core values underpinning White Teeth,
away from the muddle that Smith celebrates, rejecting the paradoxes of
human beliefs and opinions, steering the reader toward the critic’s own cer-
tain and essentialist ideological principles, exemplified for instance in the
ability to situate Samad as some sort of archetypal hero. In fact, in Forsterian
fashion, Smith’s characters and her text precisely represent the kind of ‘mud-
dle’ that Forster in Aspects of the Novel (1927) identified in Laurence Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy (1759 (vol. 1, 2)–1767 (vol. 9)), which is Smith’s sub-textual
allusion in her choice of the term above used to describe Forster himself.
This quality in Sterne Forster calls ‘the universe as a hot chestnut’ (106) and
Forster noted in his Commonplace Book that Sterne is about ‘Supremacy of
indecision in human life’ (156). These are the central qualities of Smith’s
work, and are primary aspects in understanding her characterization of
Samad, defined largely by his various equivocations, and only ever partially
resolved by Archie in the aleatory fashion of spinning a coin. Even in Samad
there is a subtle inflection of various English traditions, ones that the novel
incorporates both in an interrogation and celebration. Smith’s complex fic-
tion has multiple coordinates, its energy deriving from its ironic jouissance.

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Index

9/11 294 Asian 271, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285,

287–8, 290
academia 2, 3–4, 5, 30, 32, 59, 61, 93, Atwood, Margaret 271
146, 147, 148, 153, 154, 155, 156, autobiography 29, 66, 192, 252, 253,
158, 190, 198, 222, 242, 243, 244, 254, 256, 259, 264n
250, 251, 286, 296, 306
Achebe, Chinua 18, 19, 26n Bakhtin, Mikhail (and the application
advertising 39, 46, 93, 101, 107n, 207, of) 7, 110–12, 115, 118, 120–1,
236, 238, 239, 240, 242, 246 291
aesthetics 3, 4, 6, 9, 27, 28, 29, 33, 35, carnivalesque 222, 284, 291–2
44, 52, 54, 59, 61, 71n, 124, 135, dialogism 7, 110, 111, 112, 116, 118,
136, 157, 175, 197, 208, 214, 216, 120, 121
252, 253, 254, 266, 295, 307 heteroglossia 111, 116, 120
impure aesthetics 28, 40 internally persuasive discourse 110,
Africa 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 116–20
25, 46, 275 Barker, Martin 270
African 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 24 Barth, John 1
African American 6, 27, 29, 30, 32, 34–8, Barthes, Roland 1, 176
130, 177, 198, 267, 269, 270, 274 death of the author 176
allegory 86, 115, 202, 255, 256, 258, Bataille, Georges 8, 155, 156
259, 260 Baudrillard, Jean 64, 213, 235, 243
America 1, 6, 8, 27, 29, 30, 31, 57, 59, Baum, L. Frank, The Wizard of Oz 36
60, 64, 109, 110, 113, 116, 119, 122, BBC 251
146, 147, 151, 159n, 162, 175–9, Beats, the 8, 161–2, 166, 300
181–5, 187–90, 195–9, 200, 201, Belgians 15–17, 19, 22–3, 24
202, 236, 237, 240, 241, 243, 248, Belgium 14, 16, 19
266, 268, 269, 271, 273, 298, 303 Bellow, Saul 9, 10, 187–98, 200, 202
American (identity) 9, 30, 34, 172, Henderson the Rain King 191, 195
177, 188, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, Herzog 9, 187–205
200, 201, 202, 241, 272, 297, 304 Herzog, Moses E., 188–93, 195–200,
Amis, Kingsley 8, 146–58 201–2
Jim Dixon 147, 148–50, 151, 152–5, Seize the Day 191
158 Benjamin, Walter 1, 57, 69, 72n, 274
Lucky Jim 8, 146–60 Bentley, Nick 2, 209
the Welchs 148–9, 150, 152, 153–4, Bergonzi, Bernard 92, 93, 99, 107n,
155 134, 135, 136, 157
Amis, Martin 2, 194, 217, 219n, 263n Berman, Ronald 39
Angry Young Men 146 Bhaskar, Roy 305
anti-hero 178, 183, 184, 307 Bible (references to) 184, 193, 196,
anti-Semitism 99, 107n, 191 199, 250, 255–6, 258, 260
apocalypse 236, 296 biography 70, 87, 91, 97, 109, 236
Aronowitz, Alfred G. 165 Bildungsroman 1, 164, 172, 250, 251,
artifice 10, 33, 54n, 63, 151, 217, 218, 257
225, 242 Blake, William 255, 258, 260

312
 Index 313

blitz (the) 8, 134 Conrad, Joseph 6, 14–16, 18–19, 21,

Bloom, Harold 109 22, 24, 26n, 34, 76, 86, 93, 98, 188
Booth, General William 24 Heart of Darkness 6, 13–26, 34, 85, 86
Bradbury, Malcolm 3, 157, 158, 211, Marlow, Charlie 6, 13–25
217 ‘Outpost of Progress, An’ 15
Brighton trunk murder 7, 91 conservativism 5, 53, 54, 97, 159n,
British Empire 14, 20, 24, 25, 46, 87, 170, 177, 187, 283, 296
146, 281, 282, 295, 303 consumerism 172, 197, 236, 237, 238,
Brontë, Charlotte ( Jane Eyre) 250, 255, 239, 240–3, 245–6, 248
257, 258 controversy 5, 6, 24, 30, 56, 57, 60, 64,
bureaucratic 238, 248 105, 129, 151, 218
Butler, Judith 223–5, 231, 233 Cowley, Malcolm 132n, 163, 165, 173n
Butler, Octavia E. 272 Crowley, Sergeant James 30
counterculture 8, 175, 177, 178, 180,
Canada 47 185, 186
Canadian 6, 271
Cambridge (University) 57, 294, 295 Daily Telegraph 58
Campbell, Joseph 184 Dante 254, 255
campus novel 147, 148, 151, 156–7, Darwin, Charles 22, 24, 192
158n, 159n death 14, 21, 27, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 45,
Camus, Albert 188 67, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 84, 86,
canon (canonicity) 2–8, 10, 27, 56, 89, 91, 92, 96, 105, 119, 122, 127,
58, 61, 69, 70, 76, 82, 93, 109, 161, 129, 130, 131, 177, 183, 192, 194,
188, 202, 255, 264n 195, 225, 228, 230, 239, 242–8, 261,
capitalism 9, 28, 97, 98, 110, 143, 151, 263, 267, 268, 273, 276, 289, 290
181, 200, 208, 210, 212, 213–15, of the novel 2
219n, 242, 247, 248, 276, 278, 284, deconstruction 19, 176
303 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari 210,
Caribbean 296, 298 211
Carter, Angela 5, 9, 216, 221–6, 228–34 Capitalism and Schizophrenia 210
Fevvers 9, 221–6, 228–33 Delillo, Don 9, 157, 235–48
The Magic Toyshop 221 Babette 239, 242, 244, 245, 247
Nights at the Circus 9, 221–34 Jack Gladney 237, 239–47
Passion of New Eve 221 Libra 247, 248
Walser 9, 226, 229–33 Mao II 236, 239, 244
Wise Children 216, 221 Running Dog 243
Christian 196, 197, 198, 202, 282 White Noise 9, 157, 235–49
Catholicism 92, 93, 99, 104–6, 107n, Depression, the Great 110, 304
162, 236, 259 Derrida, Jacques 176, 277
Protestantism 190, 191 Dickens, Charles 1–2, 11, 40, 76, 85,
cinema 57, 72n, 76, 99, 100, 236, 247, 86, 87, 88–9, 94, 95, 100, 105, 107n,
290 188, 219n, 257, 299, 302
civil rights 275, 286, 298 David Copperfield 100
Cocteau, Jean 226–33 Dombey and Son 1
Coe, Jonathan 207 Great Expectations 257
Cold War, 200, 236 Little Dorrit 78, 88
colonial 14–15, 18–19, 28, 276, 298, Oliver Twist 257
296, 303 drama (theatre) 93, 99, 107n, 111, 147,
colonialism 268, 278, 282, 296, 299 226, 256, 307
communism 159n, 162, 270, 283, 290 dystopia 8, 134, 135, 159, 213
314 Index

Eagleton, Terry 209, 215 Foucault, Michel 7, 56, 57, 59, 70

Eastern philosophy 281 Fordism 69
efficiency 14, 17 Forster, E.M., 51, 53, 105, 297, 299,
Eliot, T.S., 39–40, 53, 64, 67, 76, 77, 306–8
80, 81, 83, 85–6, 88, 101, 188, 255 Howards End 51
‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ 77, 80 A Room with a View 306
The Waste Land 35, 39, 53, 64, 67, Frankfurt School, the 100
75, 85–6, 101 Freud, Sigmund 103, 187, 188, 190,
Ellison, Ralph 37 191, 192, 201, 260, 263, 264n
England (English) 2, 17, 24, 25, 46, 48, psychoanalysis (psychoanalytic) 57,
50, 51, 54n, 56–60, 63, 66, 67, 82, 87, 94, 129, 191, 192
87, 88, 91, 94, 99, 100, 105, 110, the unconscious 7, 91, 192, 201,
146, 147, 151, 152, 155, 159n, 250, 253, 264n
251, 253, 258, 281, 284, 285, 287, fundamentalism 252, 282, 284, 286
288, 294–5, 299, 300, 303, 304, 305,
306, 308 Gates, Jr., Henry Louis 29–33
enlightenment, the 57, 191, 194 gay fiction 3, 252, 264n
epistemic 56, 57, 59, 61, 65, 70 gender studies 3, 66, 223
epistemology 29, 56 genre 33, 59, 93, 99, 134, 147, 148,
experimentalism (in literature) 3, 9, 156, 158, 159n, 213, 221, 222, 246,
93, 120, 121, 147, 157, 158, 163, 252, 254, 256, 258, 301, 305
166, 167, 170, 178, 206, 207–12, ghost 129, 223, 266, 267, 268, 270,
215, 218, 250, 252 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276
ghosting 224, 225, 266, 268, 270, 272,
fairy tale(s) 255, 257, 259, 262 273, 278, 279
fantasy 9, 87, 158, 206, 211–13, 231, Ginsberg, Allen 162, 164, 167
240, 259, 270, 275 Glasgow 211
Fascism 152 Goldsmith, Meredith 32, 37
Faulkner, William 8, 122–31, 170, 189, Gothic 9, 84, 85, 86, 193, 221–3, 225,
273 228, 231, 233, 266, 268–71, 273–9
Eunice 125, 130, 131 Grady, Hugh 28
Go Down Moses 8, 122–33 Gramsci, Antonio 238
The Hamlet 124 Gray, Alasdair 9, 206–18
Ike McCaslin 122–31, 132n Lanark 9, 206–20
Rider 123, 125, 127–9, 130, 132n Thaw 207, 211–16, 218, 219n
The Sound and the Fury 122, 125, 129 Greene, Graham 7, 91–106
Tomey’s Turl 124–7 Brighton Rock 7, 91–108
feminism 3, 19, 44, 53, 54, 60, 64, Pinkie 92, 94–100, 102–6, 107n
130–1, 195, 202, 250, 254, 257, Rose Moody 92, 96, 97, 98, 100, 102,
264n, 269, 271, 283, 289 103–4, 105, 106
Fielder, Leslie 183 Greer, Germaine 283
First World War 27, 61, 67, 68 Guardian, the 10, 11, 252, 269
Fish, Stanley 31
Fitzgerald, F. Scott 6, 27, 28, 33–6, 40, Halberstam, Judith 222, 231, 233
189 Hall, Stuart 238
The Great Gatsby 6, 7, 27–42 Hancock, Tony 294, 300, 301–2, 304–5
flâneur 44, 188 Hassan, Ihab 183
Flaubert, Gustave 76, 77, 78, 87, 100, haunting 44, 88, 91, 103, 129, 266–8,
188 270–9, 295, 301
Madame Bovary 78, 80, 83, 85, 87, 88 Head, Dominic 2, 151, 159n, 289
 Index 315

hegemony 2, 4, 5, 8, 175, 177, 180, immigration 282

187, 207, 218, 238 imperialism 16, 87, 268, 278
Heidegger, Martin 187, 191 In Darkest Africa (Stanley, H.M.) 24
Heller, Joseph 176 In Darkest England (Booth, General
Hemingway, Ernest 68, 170, 187, 188, William) 24
189 individualism 8, 153, 200, 201, 288
hero (heroine) 8, 33, 65, 68, 84, 97, 98, industrialisation 57, 58, 59, 67, 68–9,
99, 102, 118, 150, 157, 179, 183, 159n, 212, 219n, 243
184, 185, 188, 190, 191, 196–8, 221, Internet 236
222, 259, 308 intertextuality 7, 35, 36, 40, 76,
history 8, 9, 19, 28, 41n, 44, 48, 50, 216–17, 244, 251, 258
54n, 56, 57–8, 59, 60, 61, 66–7, 70, Irish 6, 62, 278, 286
88, 113, 125, 130, 131, 135, 136, irony 7, 15, 37, 47, 75, 76, 82, 84, 85,
137, 139, 140, 142–4, 147, 148, 149, 87, 92, 100, 102, 106, 113, 114,
150, 152, 154–5, 165, 175, 176, 124, 131, 135, 136, 156, 169, 179,
178, 187, 188, 189, 191, 193, 195, 183, 195–7, 199, 202, 206, 209, 232,
196–200, 202, 207, 211, 213, 214, 236, 257, 278, 279, 295, 299, 301,
216, 241, 243, 246, 251, 254–5, 256, 303, 308
261, 266, 268, 269–73, 275, 276, Islam 283, 284, 290, 298, 305
277, 279, 282, 286, 295, 299, 300, Islamophobia 282
302, 308 Muslim 281, 282, 283, 286, 290,
Hitler, Adolf 239, 242, 243 299
Hoggart, Richard 56, 58–9
Holocaust 187, 271, 273 James, Henry 105
Homer 254, 255, 256 Jameson, Frederick 140, 207, 208, 209,
Hopkinson, Nalo 270, 278 210, 211, 213, 215–16, 218, 235
hooks, bell 209, 219n Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic
Hurston, Zora Neale 5, 12 of Late Capitalism 208, 210, 235
Huxley, T.H. 24, 72n Jewish 98, 99, 187, 188, 191, 192, 193,
Social Diseases and Worse Remedies 24 169, 197, 198, 200, 201
hybridisation 113, 119, 125, 250, 256, Jewish-American 32, 196, 198, 202
286, 294, 295, 298, 299 Joyce, James 5, 57, 60, 61, 71, 76, 164,
hysterical realism 10 236, 250, 258
Leopold Bloom 188, 200
identity 8, 28, 43, 44, 45, 46, 69, 87, Portrait of the Artist 250, 258
126, 136, 144, 162, 179, 180, 181, Ulysses 5, 60, 107n, 188
207, 208, 210, 211, 212, 213, 216,
217, 219n, 231, 232, 242, 251, 259, Kafka, Franz 176
260, 263, 273, 285, 294, 295, 296, Keats, John 28, 29, 262
297, 306 ‘On a Grecian Urn’ 28, 29
class 30, 35, 44 Kennedy, John F. 236, 241
ethnic 10, 129, 191, 272, 277, 278, Kerouac, Jack 8, 161–74
282, 286, 287, 288–9, 296, 298, 301, Excerpts from Visions of Cody 167
305, 307 On the Road 8, 161–74
gender 44, 223, 226, 227, 231, 232 On the Road scroll 165
national 10, 206, 210, 282, 287, Visions of Cody 163, 167, 168–70,
288–9, 294, 295, 296, 303, 307 173n
sexual 223 Kesey, Ken 8, 175–9, 181–2, 184
ideology 10, 110, 111, 188, 215, 216, Big Nurse 176, 177, 179–85
218, 243 Chief Bromden 176, 177, 179–85
316 Index

Kesey, Ken – continued 282–6, 288, 289, 296, 298, 299, 300,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 8, 301, 303
175–86 Loy, Mina 64, 66
Randle P. McMurphy 8, 176–85 Lyotard, Jean-François 213, 219n, 235
Kinsey report 176
Künstlerroman 258 Mailer, Norman 189
Kureishi, Hanif 5, 10, 281–5, 287–92 Malory, Sir Thomas (Morte d’Arthur)
The Black Album 10, 281–93 255, 257
The Buddha of Suburbia 10, 281–93 marginalisation (issues relating to) 4,
Charlie Hero 287, 289, 291 5, 61, 180, 209, 218, 252, 281, 282,
Deedee Osgood 286, 290, 291, 292 284, 287, 288, 295
Eva Kay 287, 289, 291, 292 Marxism, 3, 135, 159, 192, 215, 277,
Haroon Amir 287, 288 288, 290
Karim Amir 284–92 masculinity 7, 34, 68, 69, 84, 150,
My Beautiful Launderette 281 195–8, 200–2, 226–7, 233
My Son the Fanatic 284 materialism 99, 135, 214, 215
Shahid Hasan 284–6, 288, 290, McCarthyism 169–70, 176
291–2 media 9, 32, 162, 235, 240, 242–4, 251
Kurtz 13–15, 17–23, 25, 86–7 memory 43, 84, 95, 123–4, 135–44,
149, 162, 271, 273, 275–9, 295
Lacan, Jaques 65, 69 metafiction 176, 183, 254
psychoanalysis (psychoanalytic) 65 Mexico 64, 113
lacuna 266, 268, 270, 275, 276, 277, middlebrow 8
278–9 middle classes 1, 2, 5, 33, 44, 101, 154,
Laing, R.D. 180, 181 172, 271, 282, 284, 300
Lane, Allen (‘paperback revolution’) 4 Milton, John 188, 255
Larson, Nella 32 miscegenation 36, 131, 132n
laughter 8, 10, 34, 82, 154, 155, 156, modernism 4, 6, 7, 29, 39, 44, 59,
292 60–1, 63–8, 71n, 75, 76, 83–9, 93,
Lawrence, D.H. 5, 7, 54n, 56–61, 99, 107n, 122, 146, 187, 188, 190,
63–73, 94, 212, 219, 250, 261 191–2, 194, 195, 216, 255, 258, 299
Connie 58, 60–9, 71n, 72n modernity 57, 58, 62, 64, 66, 67, 68,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover 5, 7, 56–74 70, 77, 196, 198, 296
The Rainbow 58 moonshine 22
Sons and Lovers 67, 250, 261 Morris, William 48, 219n
Women in Love 58, 61, 67, 219n Morrison, Jago 2, 250
Leavis, F.R. 7, 56, 57, 58–9, 69, 93 Morrison, Toni 5, 9–10, 266–75,
Leavy, Andrea 209 277–80
Lefebvre, Henri 135, 136 Beloved 9–10, 266–80
lesbian (fiction) 3, 4, 251, 252, 264n, Beloved 266, 267, 268, 270–1, 273–4,
265n 276, 277
Lessing, Doris 213 The Bluest Eye 278
Lewis, Sinclair (Main Street) 35 Jazz 270
liberalism 10, 57, 98, 290 Love 270
Lodge, David 77, 93, 146, 147, 151, A Mercy 270, 278
156 Paradise 270
London 8, 13, 18, 24, 25, 44, 46, 49, Paul D 267, 268, 270, 273, 274
50–1, 53, 59, 66, 77, 78, 79, 81, Sethe 266, 267, 268, 270–1, 273–9
82, 84, 85, 86, 95, 106, 107n, 134, Song of Solomon 269, 271
136, 138–40, 142–3, 154, 206, 281, Sula 271
 Index 317

Murdoch, Iris 146 poetry 64, 120, 163, 214, 215

mythobiography 253 polemical (fiction) 7, 9, 11, 58, 99,
109, 116, 134, 209, 214, 299
Nabokov, Vladimir 10, 82, 147, 156, pornography 59, 71n, 141, 172, 221,
157, 158 243, 292
Pnin 10, 147, 156, 157, 158n postcolonial 3, 5, 10, 19, 27, 266, 268,
narcissism 103, 188, 190, 191, 274, 275–7, 285, 294, 295, 297, 299,
198–200, 225, 245 303 306, 308
narrator 6, 13, 15, 20–2, 24, 25, 50, postmodernism 8, 9, 65, 175, 176, 177,
68, 77, 102–3, 107n, 111–20, 124, 178, 179, 195, 197, 198, 206–19,
155, 169, 215, 256, 259, 260, 261, 235, 236, 239, 241, 250, 251, 252,
263, 296 254, 261, 290, 299
unreliable 6, 25 post structuralism 8, 175, 176, 178,
Native-American 172, 177, 179, 181, 179, 208, 250, 251
182, 198 Pound, Ezra 39
Naturalism 5 Powell, Enoch 282, 287
New York 29–30, 34, 39, 41n, 77, 164, Priestley, J.B. 99, 107n
236, 285, 291, 294 propaganda 71n, 99, 121, 140
New York Times 31, 189, 194, 239 Proust, Marcel 50, 164, 166–7, 172
Nietzsche, Friedrich 140, 187, 191, 282 Pynchon, Thomas 176
nihilism 155, 176, 179, 188, 191, 209, Pulitzer 109, 195
218, 219n Punk 96, 97, 106
Nobel Prize 123, 187, 189, 269 Punter, David 275, 276
nuclear 238
queer theory 222–3, 232–3, 250
Obama, Barack 30–2, 294, 297, 306
Orwell, George 2, 8, 91, 94, 105, racism 15, 18, 21, 28, 33–4, 129, 132n,
134–5, 139, 143, 152 177, 272, 278, 281–9, 295
Animal Farm 134, 135 realism 3, 7, 9, 10, 75, 85, 87, 146,
England Your England 152 150, 151, 157, 195, 202, 206, 207,
Julia 134, 136, 137, 142, 143, 144 208, 209, 211, 213, 216, 218, 252,
O’Brien 137, 143 255, 271, 272, 274, 275, 277, 279
Nineteen Eighty-Four 8, 134–45 redemption 104, 175, 255, 263n, 273
Winston Smith 134, 136–44 representation (issues related to) 3, 5,
Owen, Wilfred 67 29, 38, 40, 69, 87, 135, 162, 216,
Oxbridge 4, 59, 87 222, 238, 253, 283, 304
Oxford (University) 159n, 259, 260, 263 Rice, Anne 270
Rilke, Rainer Maria
Paine, Thomas 119 Duino Elegies 29
parable 143, 259 Romantic (Romanticism) 95, 198
paranoia 181, 200, 235, 236–7, 238, Roth, Philip 196, 197
239, 242, 243, 248 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 192
Paris 64, 66, 71n Rushdie, Salman 216, 281, 283, 286,
Perkins, Maxwell 33 290, 295
pessimism 3, 301, 302 Russell, Bertrand 192
pigeons 16
Pinsker, Sanford 188, 192 Sandhu, Sukhdev 281, 285
Plato 33, 48, 307 satire (satirical) 35, 53, 66, 77, 87, 100,
Poe, Edgar Allen 221, 222, 224–5, 231 107n, 110, 146, 148, 188, 210, 213,
poet 64, 120, 197, 226, 244, 255, 258 214, 218, 239, 241, 244, 278, 299, 307
318 Index

Sartre, Jean Paul 188 socialism 48, 150, 151, 159n, 160n,
Scanlan, Margaret 236 212
Schlemiels 188, 196 Sontag, Susan 196
Scholes, Robert 176, 183 spatiality 7, 43–5, 50–3, 140, 223, 285,
Schopenhauer, Arthur 187 303
science 189, 194 Spengler, Oswald 187, 191
science fiction 213, 215, 246 spontaneous prose 163
Scotland 206, 207, 213, 218 Steinbeck, John 5, 109, 115, 118, 121
Scottish 206, 207, 218n The Grapes of Wrath 7, 109–21
Second World War 8, 122, 134, 138, Interchapters 111–18
152, 161, 169, 189, 241 Jim Casy 115–20
secularism 195, 196, 258, 290 L’Affaire Lettuceberg 109, 119
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 222 Ma Joad 111, 119
sex, representation of and attitudes Tom Joad 111, 116, 117, 119
towards, 5, 36, 39, 47, 48, 52, 53, Stoddard, Lothrop T., The Rising Tide of
56, 57–62, 64, 66, 68, 70, 78, 80, 85, Color 36
93, 98, 102–4, 114, 115, 126, 132n, stream of consciousness 123
143, 152, 161, 169–70, 177, 191, subjectivity 45, 60, 210
196–7, 198–200, 201, 202, 221, 222, suburbia 84, 114, 169, 170, 281, 284,
225, 226, 227, 228, 230, 231, 244, 285, 287, 288–9, 290–1, 294, 300,
247, 262, 264, 284, 286, 287, 289, 301, 302–5
291, 292 suicide 52, 78, 88, 92, 95, 96, 98, 104,
sexism 28, 34, 151, 177 130, 147, 212, 289
Sex Pistols, the 97 Suffragettes 66
sexuality 4, 57, 93, 103, 104, 169–70, Sunday Telegraph 194
196, 199, 201, 252, 256, 263, 281, Swift, Jonathan, 214, 278
289, 290
bisexuality 169, 285, 289 Tanner, Tony 176, 183
heterosexuality 252 taste (literary) 7, 154, 303
homosexuality 92, 131, 169, 181, Taylor, D.J. 1–2, 3, 11
182, 283 technology 9, 44, 67, 68, 212, 238,
Shakespeare, William 4, 48, 67, 76 241, 244, 246, 248
Henry V 60 television 2, 236, 239, 240, 241, 244,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream 28, 40n 247, 296, 300, 301, 304–5
Sinfield, Alan 2, 151 terrorist 236, 239
slavery 9, 66, 122, 125, 129, 131, Thatcher, Margaret 214, 264, 282
266–8, 270–8 Times, The 24, 47, 252, 253, 254, 261,
slave narratives 272 262, 264n
small presses 4 Sunday Times 154
Smith, Zadie 10–11, 294–308 Tolstoy, Leo 188, 193
Alsana Begum Iqbal 298, 302, 305 Townsend Warner, Sylvia 4
Archie Jones 298, 300, 301, 302, 303 transgression 11, 49, 125, 200, 224,
Irie Jones 296, 298 262, 304
Magid Mahfooz Murshed Mubtasim transvestitism 227
Iqbal 297, 298 trauma 29, 35, 40, 45, 66, 68, 94, 196,
Millat Zulfikar Iqbal 298 263, 268, 272–3
Samad Miah Iqbal 294, 297, 298, Trilling, Lionel 122, 123
299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304–5, 308 Twain, Mark 124, 188
White Teeth 10, 15, 294–309 Tyson, Lois, Critical Theory Today 27,
social activism 8, 121 28
 Index 319

upper class 32, 66, 104, 195 Williams, Raymond 143

Winterson, Jeanette 5, 9, 209, 216,
Van Thompson, Carlyle 32, 33, 36 250–63
Victorian 1, 2, 3, 5, 14, 16, 49, 57, 84, Art 255
88, 101 Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit 9,
Vietnam War 102 250–65
virago 4 The Power Book 257, 261
Vonnegut, Kurt 176, 178, 217 Weight 254, 263, 264
Wolfe, Tom 1, 171
Wales 45 Woolf, Virginia 7, 43–6, 53–5, 65–6,
Walker, Alice 5, 12 93, 100, 105, 252, 255
Washington, Bryan R. 33 Clarissa Dalloway 7, 43–53, 54n
Waters, Sarah 209 Mrs Dalloway 7, 43–55, 65, 93, 107n
Waugh, Evelyn 7, 75–6, 77–90, 106, Septimus Warren Smith 45–6, 48,
154 50–3, 54n
A Handful of Dust 7, 75–90 working classes 3, 4, 5, 52, 88, 147,
Mrs Beaver 76, 78, 80, 83, 88 207, 213, 215, 218, 250, 251, 253,
Welfare State (the) 8, 151 262, 267, 283, 288, 290, 294, 300
Welsh, Irvine 2, 206
Wharton, Edith 77, 87 Yeats W.B 66, 255, 258
The Age of Innocence 77, 87 Yiddish 188, 196, 197