(22) Colonial Experience in the Works of the Twentieth Century British Authors.

(J. Conrad, , R. Kipling, E. M. Forster, D. Lessing, G. Orwell, and G. Greene).

 

T h e  T w e n t i e t h  C e n t u r y

[see "Background for Topics 12-27..."]

 

J o s e p h  C o n r a d

[see C. under ‘13 Neo-Romanticism’]

 

R u d y a r d  K i p l i n g

[see K. under ’13 Neo-Romanticism’]

 

E ( d w a r d )  M ( o r g a n )  F o r s t e r

[see F. under ’18 The Birth of Modernism’]

 

D o r i s  L e s s i n g  ( b . 1 9 1 9 )

E a r l y  P e r i o d :

- conc.: the growth of political awareness amongst native blacks and white settlers in colonial East Af.

Children of Violence (1952 – 69):

= a 5-vol. novel sequence

- conc.: the developing political commitment and the later disillusion of the F protagonist Martha Quest

- M. carefully placed as: ‘adolescent, and therefore bound to be unhappy; Br., and therefore uneasy and defensive; in the fourth decade of the twentieth century, and therefore inescapably beset with problems of race and class; F, and obliged to repudiate the shackled women of the past’

- M. learns her radicalism in colonial Af. x but: also unlearns the Stalinist assumption about world rev.

> The Four-Gated City (1969):

= the last and the most experimental vol. in the sequence

- opening: amid the fragmented political aspirations of Br. anti-nuclear campaigners

- concl.: in the y. 1995 and 2000 after a devastating atomic war

=> M. discovers a hope for the future on a remote Scott. island settled by a group of mutant children with its mental powers enhanced and its social vision reintegrated by the effects of radiation

M a t u r e  P e r i o d :

- conc.: the rejection of conventional realism in favour of what she called ‘inner space fiction’

The Golden Notebook (1962):

- relates the concept of mental fragmentation to the disintegration of fictional form

- attempts to come to terms with an intelligent woman’s sense of private and public diffusion

- shapes the narrative around a series of notebooks, the Black, Red, Yellow, and Blue, kept by a woman writer Anna Wulf to analyse different aspects of her life and order her life accord. to neat categories, both private and public

- A.’s evolving perceptions of herself produce an inevitable and welcome formlessness:

(a) finds herself incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests her = ‘a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life’

(b) finds the private and public diffusion symptomatic not of social, mental, or ideological disease x but: of personal liberation

=> concl.:

(a) gives up the struggle against the ‘banal commonplace’ that ‘women’s emotions are all still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists’

(b) finds her bid for freedom fulfilled in the new, if still insecure, value of a woman’s creativity

 

G e o r g e  O r w e l l  ( 1 9 0 3 – 5 0 )

L i f e :

- b. Eric Blair, in Ind.

- sent to En. for education, won a scholarship to the foremost private boarding school

> 1^st became aware of the difference btw his own background x the wealthy background of his schoolmates

- joined the Imperial Police in Burma

> 1^st gained a sense of guilt about Br. colonialism and a feeling he must make some kind of personal expiation for it:

(a) accepted a pseudonym as a way of escaping from the class position in which his birth and education had placed him

(b) underwent an extremely difficult experience as a teacher in Pairs and a tramp in En. x did not have to suffer the dire poverty, had influential friends to help him x but: did so because ‘part of my guilt would drop from me’

- retained his characteristic independence of mind on political and social questions: scorned ideologies, never joined a political party x but: regarded himself a man of the uncommitted and independent left

- disillusioned with the Soviet Communism: Stalin betrayed the human ideal for him

- saw a social change necessary and desirable for the capitalist countries of the west x but: the ‘socialism’ in Rus. = a perversion of socialism and a wicked tyranny

W o r k :

- due his independence consid. politically misfit x but: a brilliantly orig. writer

F i c t i o n :

- began with fictional analyses of the narrowness and idiocies of the Br. at home and abroad

- saw the Br. as smug imperialists and even smugger domestic tyrants

Down and Out in Paris and London (1933):

< his own experience of a dire life in ill-paid jobs and common lodging-houses

x but: manages to find delight in the comfortable and familiar En. of “bathrooms, armchairs, mint sauce, new potatoes properly cooked, brown bread, marmalade, [and] beer made with hops”

Burmese Days (1934):

< his own experience of Burma

= a fiercely anti-colonialist novel

A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935)

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

The Road to Wigan Pier (1937):

< his own experience of the unemployed in the north of En.

- set in a singularly uncomfortable and unfamiliar En.

- explores the untidy ugliness of industrialism, the urban life scarred by unemployment and poverty, and the contrasts btw the rich x the poor

Homage to Catalonia (1938):

< his own experience of the Sp. Civil War on the Republican side

- strongly criticises the Communist part in the Civil War

> roused a great indignation on the left: leftists believed they should support the Soviet Union and the Communist Party in the struggle against international fascism

Animal Farm (1945):

= an animal fable

- satirises the manifest failure of Communist ideals in Rus. against the background of a fictional speculation of how a perversion of socialism could develop

-sentimentalises the working class strength and good nature (the carthorse Boxer) x but: makes a fine choice of pigs as the undoers of the animals’ rev.

- pigs = at times look suspiciously human, traditionally associated with greed and laziness, and proverbially supposed to be incapable of flight

=> their rev. remains earthbound, their aspirations too much resemble those of their enemies

- incl. the corruptions and distortions of language serving Napoleon to his dictatorial ends [see also his Nineteen Eighty-Four]

> banned in the USSR and its satellites until after the rev. of the late 1980s

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949):

= a savagely powerful dystopia

- set in a totalitarian En. in which the government uses the language of socialism to cover the tyranny systematically destroying the human spirit

- language = one of the principal instruments of oppression, controlled by the Ministry of Truth, and conc. with the transmission of untruth into ‘Newspeak’

- the slogans of the party on the facade of the Ministry = ‘War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.’

- makes purges and vaporisations ‘a necessary part of the mechanics of government’ to create the world with no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement

- blends:

(a) the Stalinist Rus.

(b) the bomb-scarred post-war Br.

(c) Franz Kafka’s (1883 – 1924) dark fantasies of incomprehension and impersonal oppression

(d) Aldous Huxley’s (1894 – 1963) dystopian vision of an ordered scientific future

< C. Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend > an individualist society obsessed by the power of money and typified by the phrase ‘scrunch or be scrunched’ (was among the 1st modern critics to take D.’s fiction seriously)

N o n - f i c t i o n :

- an outstanding investigative social journalist, regularly publ. in left-wing periodicals

- an acute observer, generaliser, and an open-eyed crosser of class boundaries

“Shooting an Elephant” (1936):

= an anti-colonialist essay

“Looking Back on the Spanish War” (1943):

< his own experience of personal discomfort and political disillusionment in Sp.

- criticises both intellectual pacifists x those who dismiss as sentimental his contention that ‘a man holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him’

- provokes those insisting on a division of history into right causes defended by heroes x wrong cause supported by villains

- concl.: his escape not from victorious Fascists x but: from persecution by one of the warring fractions of the split Sp. Left

“Politics and the English Language” (1946):

= one of his most influential essays

- explores the decay of language and the ways to its improvement

- dismisses political language as ‘designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable’

- argues for the plain E as ‘an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought’

“Why I Write” (1947):

- claims every line he had written since 1936 had been ‘directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism, and for democratic socialism’

 

G r a h a m  G r e e n e  ( 1 9 0 4 – 9 1 )

L i f e :

- experienced a singularly unhappy and suicidal adolescence

- entered the Rom. Church (1926)

W o r k :

- wrote 26 novels, 9 vol. of short stories, and many miscellaneous articles

- blamed for seemingly ‘un-English’ prejudices in his time: a semi-devout x but: believing Rom.-Cath., a devout anti-imperialist, and a critic of both Br. and new Am. imperialism

- recurring themes:

(a) a colonially wounded world beyond Eur.

(b) a gloomy sense of sin and moral unworthiness

(c) a commitment to outsiders and rebels

1 9 2 0 s – 3 0 s  P e r i o d :

The Man Within (1929):

- the title: from Sir Thomas Browne’s (1605 – 83): ‘There is another man within me that is angry with me.’

- introd. the recurrent 2-sidedness of his protagonists, complicated by dangerous self-destructiveness

Brighton Rock (1938):

- the protagonist = Pinkie, a Cath. and a gangster

- fascinated by the conc. of ‘Hell, Flames, and damnation’ x but: seems to be intent on courting his own eternal destruction in the face of ‘the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God’

1 9 4 0 s – E a r l y  1 9 5 0 s  P e r i o d :

= his finest work

< the WW II > added sharpness to his fictional perspectives and preocc.

- the angry and self-destructive ‘other man’ moved his fiction in a more distinctively agnostic direction

- the Cath. Christianity:

(a) for him: a single ray of heavenly hope over the dark abysses of human depravity, despair, decay, and pain

(b) for his characters: God and his Church as distant as evidently ‘appallingly strange’

- characteristic settings: troubled and disorienting topographies

- characteristic protagonists: Cath., all of them ruins, or at best ruinous

The Power and the Glory (1940):

- set in the violently restless Mexico

- the protagonist = a whisky-priest in the anti-clerical Mexico

- conc. as much with doubt and failure as with faith

> enriched the E language with the phrase ‘whisky-priest’

The Ministry of Fear (1943):

- set in the phantasmagoria world of the twilit, blitzed London

- incl. the tormented protagonist’s frenetic hallucinations when hiding underground during an air-raid

The Heart of the Matter (1948):

- set in a flyblown, rat-infested, and war-blighted West Af. colony

- the protagonist = Scobie, a suicide

- accuses God of ‘forcing decisions on people’ and blames the Church for having all the answers

The Third Man (1951):

- set in the precarious, ‘smashed, dreary’, and partly subterranean Vienna

- the Cath. Vienna, its citizens, its displaced refugees, and its military occupiers = all wrecked, divided, and guilt-ridden

> coexists with its more brilliant variant of a film-script written by G. himself

The End of the Affair (1951):

- set in the blitzed London

“The Destructors”

L a t e 1 9 5 0 s +  P e r i o d :

= more ostensibly political novels

x but: none of them of quite the same edgy power as his former writing

The Quiet American (1955):

- set in Vietnam

Our Man in Havana (1958):

- set in Cuba

The Comedians (1967):

> provoked an international scandal: the Haitian Government brought a case against it for is having damaged the Rep.’s tourist trade

A Sort of Life (1977):

= an autobiog. memoir

- claims with a characteristic note of pessimism: ‘Success is only a delayed failure.’

x but: achieved both commercial and critical success and became by far the best known and most respected Br. novelist of his generation