King Lear - A Complete Analysis (NIVEL AVANZADO)

Piers Plowman (In Our Time)

Between the Black Death and the Peasants' Revolt.
Bragg, Melvyn, et al. "Piers Plowman." (In Our Time). BBC 4 29 Oct. 2020.*https://t.co/Wsdayw35Xx
2020

— JoséAngelGarcíaLanda (@JoseAngelGLanda) November 27, 2020

Excursos sobre Jane Austen (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 

Abstenerse de estos excursos fílmicos quienes no sean muy fans de Jane Austen. Quienes sean muy fans, también.

 

- Un excurso sobre Persuasion: Long Hammering at Single Thoughts.

Y dos películas más:

- The Jane Austen Book Club

- Jane Austen in Manhattan

Jane Austen: Behind Closed Doors (NIVEL AVANZADO)

Un documental sobre la vida de Jane Austen y la Inglaterra de su entorno:

Northanger Abbey (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 Una película basada en la novela de Jane Austen Northanger Abbey:

Northanger Abbey. Dir. Jon Jones. Screenplay by Andrew Davies, based on the novel by Jane Austen. Cast: Felicity Jones, Sylvestra Le Touzel, Desmond Barrit, John Thorpe, J. J. Feild, Carey Mulligan, Bernadette McKenna,  Shauna Taylor, Sophie Vavasseur, Hugh O'Connor, Catherine Walker, Liam Cunningham, Mark Dymond. Composer Charlie Mole. Prod. Des. David Wilson. Ed. Sue Wyatt. Photog. Ciarán Tanham. Exec. Prod. Charles Elton. Co-pros. James Flynn and Morgan O'Sullivan. Prod. Keith Thompson. Ireland: Granada Television, 2006. YouTube (Harpier Noctem) 6 June 2014.*

         https://youtu.be/MqrfXsDshqg

         2020

Godwin and Wollstonecraft (NIVEL AVANZADO)

(From The Short Oxford History of English Literature, by Andrew Sanders, 1994)

William Godwin (1756-1836), born into a strong Dissenting tradition, abandoned both his Calvinist theology and his Congregationalist ministry in 1783 and assumed the alternative career of journalist and pamphleteer. His interest in both the dissidence of Dissent and contemporary political developments led to his active participation in the debates of the Constitutional Society. In 1789 he formed part of the congregation that heard Richard Price's 'Discourse on the Love of Our Country' and he was sufficiently provoked by Burke's response to it to begin work on what became his own treatise, the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). The Enquiry is Godwin's most systematic theoretical work. He views human happiness and social well-being as the sole purpose of existence, but unlike Rousseau (whose influence pervades the work) he looks forward to a gradual melting away of all government to be replaced by a new system of radical anarchy. A rigid adherence to the leading principle of reason is substituted for Rousseau's cult of sensibility and his innate religiosity. Law, government, property, inequality, and marriage would be abolished as part of a gradual process by which human perfectibility, conditioned by human reason, would transcend existing limitations and impediments to fulfilled happiness.

Godwin's revolutionary hatred of all forms of injustice, privilege, and political or religious despotism also informs his novel, Things as They Are or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), a narrative centred on the problems of class perception and the nature of oppression. Godwin is less concerned with the authority of the state and more with the relatively petty, but no less damaging, exercise of power by a privileged class. 'It is now known to philosophers', he remarks in his Preface to the novel, 'that the spirit and the character of government intrudes itself into every rank of society', a factor exemplified in the story by the pervasive tyranny of a landowner, the once well-meaning Falkland. Falkland's tentacles are observed catching at the novel's hero, Caleb Williams, at every turn. Imprisoned by one of his persecutor's many contrivances, Caleb exclaims against the fale assumption that England has no Bastille: 'Is that a country of liberty where thousands languish in dungeons and fetters? Go, go, ignorant fool! and visit the scenes of our prisons! Witness their unwholesomeness, their filth, the tyranny of their governors, the misery of their inmates!' Such rhetoric forms part of a series of counterblasts to the complacent upholders of the idea of the free-born Englishman. If Caleb fails finally to confront his persecutor in public, a failure which he regrets, he is no passive victim. His escapes from confinement, his disguises,, wanderings, and abortive attempts to flee from England, give the novel something of the quality of an adventure story, but his understanding of his predicament, and his articulation of this understanding is a critique of the existing ills of society, give his narrative a truly radical bite. At the opening of his story the narrator identifies Falkland's attraction to the principles of chivalry. In concluding his memoirs, Caleb returns to the issue. Chivalry has, he claims, served to corrupt a noble mind and perverted 'the poorest and most laudable intentions'. The survival, or worse, the revival of aristocratic codes, it is suggested, works both as a disguise to, and a justification of class oppression.

Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Man (1790) also forms a protest against Burke's nostalgia for the age of chivalry by ridiculing defunct, upper-class codes of behaviour. But her treatise goes beyond a mere attack on system of aristocratic values which keep the greater proportion of humankind in subservience. for Wollstonecraft (1759-97), that greater part of humankind embraced the thraldom of women of all classes. Wollstonecraft was the most articulate of a small group of writers, all of them associated with Godwin's circle, who used fiction to propagate certain aspects of the new revolutionary ideology. This group included two other women writers, Mary Hays (1760-1843), the author of Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), and Elizabeth Inchbald (1753-1821) whose novel A Simple Story appeared in 1791. Hays's Emma Courtney is 'a human being, loving virtue', but one 'enslaved by passion, liable to the mistaken weaknesses of our fragile nature', and hers is a story of unhappy and unrequited love and of a suffereing accentuated by a character insufficiently disciplined by education. Hays's later work includes the six volumes of Female Biography, or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women of All Ages and Countries (1803). Inchbald's A Simple Story scarcely reveals itself now as a work of political or sexual radicalism, concerned as it is with a quiescent English Roman Catholic family, but it does mannage to assert the pressing need for women's education in order to respond to a stifling lack of fulfilment. Inchbald's later literary career included the novel Nature and Art (1796), two unperformed dramas set in revolutionary France, and a string of comedies, one of which, a version of Kotzebue's Lover's Vows of 1798, is the play disastrously rehearsed in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.

The modest fiction of Hays and Inchbald shows a concern with the inconsistencies, limitations, and shortcomings of a contemporary society, but neither writer possessed the fire and the outspoken feminist zeal apparent in Wolltonecraft's flawed, rancorous, polemical, and radically original novels. Both Mary (1788) and the unfinished The Wrongs of Woman (1798) deal with the evidence of a universal oppression of women by men. Mary is told in an unadorned, laconic, matter-of-fact way, a style which, despite its periodic recourse to irony, might almost be described as perfunctory. The narrative touches on a variety of issues which figure prominently in 'Romantic' literature , notably on the significance of the imagination, the nature of religious feeling, and the soul-expanding effects of travel, and it interestingly opposes the emotional security of female friendship to a loveless marriage and an unfulfilled love-affair, but it is ultimately a tragedy without real substance. The Wrongs of Woman is a far more persuasive polemic concerning the need for a public recognition of women's rights. It is also a more impressive, if equally restless, work of fiction. Its heroine, Maria, is in many ways a development from the suffering Mary. She is acutely sensitive to landscape and ambience, but her Rousseauistic musings are balanced by her rejection of intellectual passivity and the kind of decorous feeling in which Rousseau himself ('the Prometheus of sentiment') patronizingly limited women's perceptions. Maria is also alert to 'the present state of society and government' and to what she sees as the 'enslaved state of the labouring majority'. To her alertness she adds the experience of thraldom within a loveless marriage. The novel opens with her literal imprisonment in a rambling madhouse, Gothic both in its architecture and in its frissons. The unhappy state of her suffering sisters is brought home to her through the melancholy catalogue of male oppression that she hears from her fellow inmates. If Maria's spirits are temporarily raised by the contemplation of Italy and 'the heart-enlarging virtues of antiquity', it gradually becomes clear that she is most inspired by the new virtues of revolutionary France. The judge who systematically reject her pleas for independence and for the enjoyment of her own fortune recognizes that her motivation is, to him, a gross parody of all demands for political change. 'We do not want French principles in public or private life', he asserts in the novel's last completed chapter, 'and, if women were allowed to plead their feeling, as an excuse or palliation of infidelity, it was opening a flood-gate for immorality'.

Wollstonecraft's most effective attempt to prize open the  flood-gates remains her highly influential treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), an adaptation and remoulding of French revolutionary theory to the universal needs of women. It is dedicated to a French hero of the moment, the ex-Bishop and singularly devious statesman, Talleyrand. This dedication sets out the nub of the argument of the treatise as a whole: 'If woman be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge and virtue.' 'Who made man the exclusive judge', Wollstonecraft demands, 'if woman partake with him the gift of reason?' Her book is centred on these twin appeals in education and to reason: education to render the further subjection of women indefensible and reason applied to all future questions of gender. The relevance of her argument to contemporary political debate is carefully indicated by comparisons of the particular enslavement of humankind by tyrannical kings to the general enslavement of women by universally tyrannical men. In Louis XIV's France, she asserts in her fourth chapter, a nation and a sex were forced into a subjection which was disguised by a picturesque cloak of chivalric flattery. Similarly, in the ninth chapter, she complains of 'the pernicious effects which arise from the unnatural distinctions established in society', distinctions which divide nations into classes and ranks and which serve to deny both dignity and liberty to the suffering majority. The new order in France, she implies, has a vital relevance to all future attempts to define relationships between class and class, gender and gender. 

Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft

—oOo—

Luri, Gregorio. "Vindicación de Mary Wollstonecraft." The Objective (El Subjetivo) 24 June 2021.*

         https://theobjective.com/elsubjetivo/vindicacion-de-mary-wollstonecraft

         2021

William Blake

 

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble:

BLAKE, William (1757-1827), the third son of a London hosier. He did not go to school but was apprenticed to James Basire, engraver to the Society of *Antiquaries, and then became a student at the *Royal Academy. From 1779 he was employed as an engraver by the bookseller J. *Johnson, and in 1780 met *Fuseli and *Flaxman, the latter a follower of *Swedenborg, whose mysticism deeply influenced Blake. In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher, the daughter of a market-gardener; their childless marriage was a lasting communion. Flaxman at this period introduced him to the progressive intellectual circle of the Revd A. S. Mathew and his wife (which included Mrs *Barbauld, H. *More, and Mrs. E. *Montagu), and Mathew and Flaxman financed the publication of Blake's first volume, Poetical Sketches (1783). In 1784, with help from Mrs Mathew, he set up a print shop at 27 Broad Street, and about the same period (although not for publication) wrote the satirical *An Island in the Moon. He engraved and published his *Songs of Innocence in 1789, and also The Book of Thel, both works which manifest the early phases of his highly distinctive mystic vision, and in which he embarks on the evolution of his personal mythology; years later (in *Jerusalem) he was to state, through the character Los, 'I must create a System, or be enslaved by another Man's', words which have been taken by some to apply to his own need to escape from the fetters of 18th-cent. versification, as well as from the materialist philosophy (as he conceived it) of the *Enlightenment, and a Puritanical or repressive interpretation of Christianity. The Book of Thel presents the maiden Thel lamenting transience and mutability by the banks of the river of Adona; she is answered by the lily, the cloud, the worm, and the clod who assure her that 'He, who loves the lowly' cherishes even the meanest; but this relatively conventional wisdom is challenged by a final vision in which Thel visits the house of Clay, sees the couches of the dead, and hears 'a voice of sorrow' breathe a characteristically Blakean protest against hypocrisy and restraint—'Why a tender curb upon the youthful, burning boy? Why a tender little curtain of flesh upon the bed of our desire?'—a message which sends Thel back 'with a shriek' to the vales of Har. The ambiguity of this much-interpreted poem heralds the increasing complexity of his other works which include Tiriel (written 1789, pub. 1874), introducing the theme of the blind tyrannic father, 'the king of rotten wood, and of the bones of death', which reappears in different forms in many poems; *The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (engraved c. 1790-3), his principal prose work, a book of paradoxical aphorisms; and the revolutionary works The French Revolution (1791); America: A Prophecy (1793); and Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), in which he develops his attitude of revolt against authority, combining political fervour (he had met *Paine at Johnson's) and visionary ecstasy; Urizen, the deviser of moral codes (described as 'the stony law' of the Decalogue) and *Orc, the Promethean arch-rebel, emerge as principal characters in a cosmology that some scholars have related to that of *Gnosticism. By this time Blake had already established his poetic range; the long, flowing lines and violent energy of the verse combine with phrases of terse and aphoristic clarity and moments of great lyric tenderness, and he was once more to demonstrate his command of the lyric in Songs of Experience (1794) which includes 'Tyger! Tyger! burning bright', 'O Rose thou art sick', and other of his more accessible pieces.

Meanwhile the Blakes had moved to Lambeth in 1790; there he continued to engrave his own works and to write, evolving his mythology further in The Book of *Urizen (1794); *Europe: A Prophecy (1794); The Song of *Los (1795); The Book of Ahania (1795); The Book of Los (1795); and The Four Zoas (originally entitled Vala, written and revised 1797-1804), and also working for the booksellers. In 1800 he moved to Felpham, Sussex, where he lived for three years, working for his friend and patron *Hayley, and working on *Milton (1804-8); in 1803 he was charged at Chichester with high treason for having 'uttered seditious and treasonable expressions, such as "D—n the King, d—n all his subjects . . . "', but was acquitted. In the same year he returned to London, to work on Milton and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (written and etched, 1804-20). In 1805 he was commissioned by Cromek to produce a set of drawings for R. *Blair's poem The Grave, but Cromek defaulted on the contract, and Blake earned neither the money nor the public esteem he had hoped for, and found his designs engraved and weakened by another hand. This was symptomatic of the disappointment of his later years, when he appears to have relinquished expectations of being widely understood, and quarreled even with some of the circle of friends who supported him. Both his poetry and his art had failed to find a sympathetic audience, and a lifetime of hard work had not brought him riches or even much comfort. His last years were passed in obscurity, although he continued to attract the interest and admiration of younger artists, and a commission in 1821 from the painter John Linnell produced his well-known illustrations for the Book of Job, published in 1826. (It was Linnell who introduced Blake to Samuel *Palmer in 1824.) A later poem, 'The Everlasting Gospel', written about 1818, shows undiminished power and attack; it presents Blake's own version of Jesus, in a manner that recalls the paradoxes of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, attacking the conventional 'Creeping Jesus', gentle, humble, and chaste, and stressing his rebellious nature, his forgiveness of the woman taken in adultery, his reversing of the stony law of Moses, praising 'the Naked Human Form divine', and sexuality as the means whereby 'the Soul Expands its wing', and elevating forgiveness above the 'Moral Virtues'.

At Blake's death, general opinion held that he had been, if gifted, insane. *Wordsworth's verdict, according to C. *Robinson, was that 'The was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott', a view in some measure echoed by *Ruskin, who found his manner 'diseased and wild' but his mind 'great and wise'. It was not until A. *Gilchrist's biography of 1863 (significantly describing Blake as 'Pictor Ignotus') that interest began to grow. This was followed by an appreciation by *Swinburne (1868) and by W. M. *Rossetti's edition of 1874, which added new poems to the canon and established his reputation, at least as a lyric poet; his rediscovered engravings considerably influenced the development of *art nouveau. In 1893 *Yeats, a devoted admirer, produced with E. J. Ellis a three-volume edition, with a memoir and an interpretation of the mythology, and the 20th cent. saw an enormous increase in interest. The bibliographical studies and editions of G. *Keynes, culminating in The Complete Writings of William Blake (1966, 2nd edn), have added greatly to knowledge both of the man and his works, revealing him not only as an apocalyptic visionary but also as a writer of ribald and witty epigrams, a critic of spirit and originality, and an independent thinker who found his own way of resisting the orthodoxies of his age, and whose hostile response to the narrow vision and the materialism (as he conceived it) of his bêtes noires Joshua *Reynolds, *Locke, and Isaac *Newton was far from demented, but in part a prophetic warning of the dangers of a world perceived as mechanism, with man as a  mere cog in an industrial revolution. There have been many interpretative studies, relating his work to traditional Christianity, to the *Neoplatonic and Swedenborgian traditions, to Jungian *archetypes and to *Freudian and *Marxist theory; the Prophetic Books, once dismissed as incoherent, are now claimed by many as works of integrity as well as profundity. Recently, Blake has had a particularly marked influence on the *Beat Generation and the English poets of the *underground movement, hailed by both as a liberator; *Auden earlier acclaimed him ('New Year Letter', 1941) as 'Self-educated Blake . . .' who 'Spoke to Isaiah in the Strand / And heard inside each mortal thing / Its holy emanation sing'.

See also the Blake Books (1977) by G. E. Bentley Jnr, including annotated catalogues of his writings and scholarly books about him; The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. D. V. Erdman (1965, 1988); Blake's Illuminated Books, 6 vols. (1991-5), gen. ed. D. Bindman; and J. Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993), an authoritative account of Blake's graphic process; The William Blake Archive: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/blake (ed. M. Eaves, R. Essick, J. Viscomi). There is a life by Peter *Ackroyd, (1995).

A World in a Grain of Sand —The Cosmic Dimension

—oOo—

 

Henry Purcell DIDO AND AENEAS (NIVEL AVANZADO)

Salman Rushdie (Oxford Companion)

 

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature:

Rushdie, [Ahmed] Salman, (1947-), novelist and short story writer, born in Bombay to a Muslim family, educated at the Cathedral School, Rugby, and King's College, Cambridge. 

He worked for a time in television in Pakistan, as an actor in London, and as an advertising copywriter. Rushdie's bicultural upbringing informs all his work. He draws on the allegorical fable-making traditions of both East and West and is often classed amongst the exponents of magic realism—the narrative style in which the realistic mingles with the fantastic and the inexplicable. 

His first novel, Grimus (1975), was a fantasy based on a medieval Sufi poem and was followed by Midnight's Children (1981), the book that brought him to literary prominence and which won the Booker Prize. It tells the story of Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke of midnight on the day India was granted independence and whose life becomes emblematic of the political and social destiny of the new nation. 

In Shame (1983) the subject is Pakistan, the struggle between military and civilian rule, and the culture of shame and honour which oppresses women; the historical figures wear satirical and allegorical disguise, but the narrative is interrupted by direct autobiographical interventions from the author.  

The Satanic Verses (1988) is a jet-propelled panoramic novel shich moves with dizzying speed from the streets and film studios of Bombay to multicultural Britain, from Argentina to Mount Everest, as Rushdie questions illusion, reality, and the power of faith and tradition in a world of hijackings, religious pilgrimages and warfare, and celluloid fantasy. Certain passages were interpreted by some Muslims as blasphemous and brought upon Rushdie the notorious sentence of death, or fatwa, invoked by the Ayatollah Khomeini in February 1989, which obliged him to seek police protection. 

Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a novel for children about a boy-hero who has to combat the enemy of storytelling, Prince Kahttam-Shud, was published in 1990 (adapted for the stage at the National Theatre, 1998), and Imaginary Homelands, a collection of critical journalism and interviews, in 1991. 

In 1994 Rushdie published his first collection of short stories, East, West, which, written on the cultural cusp between two traditions, also confronts the  conflicting claims of the real and the imagined. The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) is a dense and exuberant study of cultural and personal inheritance narrated in the first person by Moraes Zogoiby—the 'Moor' of the title—who ages at twice the normal rate.

Critical notes on Salman Rushdie (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 

Some critical notes on Salman Rushdie from various sources:

From Michael Gorra in The Columbia History of the British Novel, ed. John Richetti:

Rushdie's novels are as keenly attuned as Naipaul's to issues of cultural fracture, of worlds and histories and values in collision. Yet his work suggests not a tragic awareness but a ready acceptance of the fact that cultures are never inviolate. "Perhaps we are all," he writes, "black and brown and white, leaking into one another . . . like flavours when you cook." Hence his gloriously ramshackle sentences, in which Bombay street slang flirts with Oxbridge English, a style in which, as in the poems of Baal in The Satanic Verses, "the demotic force[s] its way into lines of classical purity and images of love [are] constantly degraded by the intrusions of elements of farce." That style grows from Rushdie's attempt in Midnight's Children to use the English language as a way of imagining a from for India itself, "that 5000 year old country that has never before existed." But to do that he must first free English from its colonial past, remaking it into a new Indian language called Angrezi, the master's tongue appropriated for his own subversive purposes. Yet Angrezi's essential impurity contests not just the ideology of colonialism but that of India's "folkloristic straitjacket" as well. For Rushdie's refashioning of the language puts English at the heart of modern India's national identity in a way that challenges the nativist assumption that one can be perfectly non-Western. His style is an attempt to acknowledge India's heterogeneous history and complex heritage, to envision a structure in which all its multiple divisions of region and religion and language and caste can be contained. And his work as a whole stands as a model of what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the "dialogic" novel: a linguistic carnival, a polyphony of voices that turns all ideological certainties upside down, a quite literally heteroglot forum for an encounter not just between opposing characters but between different beliefs, languages, levels of discourse, and indeed whole cultures.  

The Satanic Verses takes up such issues through its critique of the idea of cultural purity, the "terrifying singularity" of Islam, in a way that enacts within the novel itself the very storm that has grown up around it. It recasts Midnight's Children in terms of the individual migrant whom Rushdie takes as the emblematic figure of our times. Migration makes the self indeterminate. For the migrant has chosen to translate one identity into another, and in doing so has set out "to make himself up." What Rushdie suggests is that such postcolonial selves should actively choose the hand that history has dealt them. If for Naipaul mimicry is a sign of cultural violation, for Rushdie a self-concious mimicry becomes a way to shuttle between the hybrid selves of the postcolonial condition, to acknowledge that one lives in two worlds at once. And in that acceptance of discontinuity he sees not tragedy but liberation. It does not help the postcolonial man or woman surmount dependency so much as it denies its relevance, for without an ideal of culturl  purity against which to measure the self, there can be no mimicry per se. Instead Rushdie posits a self that is rather like one of his own sentences, Indian and yet English too. And indeed he suggests that we all reject what Lawrence called "the old stable ego of the character" and learn instead to revel in its instability, even as we do in his style. The self becomes a pastiche, like the India Rushdie describes as "borrowing whatever clothes seemed to fit," a collage, a set of masks improvised for different occasions. It is the point at which the postcolonial and the postmodern coalesce.

Where Naipaul sees a cultural violation, Rushdies sees at least the possibility of freedom from an imprisoning authenticity. The pursuit of such an authenticity has led, in India, to the rise of linguistic and religious separatism on the one hand, and Hindu fundamentalism on the other. It has led, most famously, to the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against The Satanic Verses, to demands for its author's death, and to Rushdie's continued life in hiding. And in England it has led to the nativism of the National Front, with its cries of "Wogs out!" Throughout this chapter we have seen the ways in which English writers drew, blurred, and insisted on the lines of racial difference that separated them from the subject peoples of their empire. Rushdie's work challenges those barriers, and in doing so helps construct an identity for a kind of man or woman that Kipling could not have imagined. Along with several other writers of his generation—Timothy Mo, Hanif Kureishi, Caryl Phillips—he shows the ways in which it is possible to be English and yet not white. And that is even one of naipaul's themes in The Enigma of Arrival, an account of how he finally came to see himself at home in the chalk hills of Wiltshire.

"They have the power of description," a tiger-headed character in The Satanic Verses says of the white society in which he lives, "and we succumb to the pictures they construct." For seeing India, or Africa, or the Caribbean is indeed a way of ruling them. One consequence of the end of the British Empire is that they have started to describe themselves.

__________________

From Michael Wood's chapter, "The Contemporary Novel" in The Columbia History of the British Novel:

MIDNIGHT'S FICTIONS

"London is full of short stories walking round hand in hand," the narrator says in Martin Amis's Money (1984). And not just London. The 1980s witnessed an astonishing rebirth of storytelling in British fiction. The stories might be desolate, or even insane, but there were plenty of them, and they were full of emotional or intellectual energy, untapped for generations while novelists attended to more serious matters. "Oh dear, yes," Forster had said, "the novel tells a story"—a regrettable necessity rather than any sort of challenge. What vanishes in recent British writing is the note of polite regret, to be replaced by a slightly febrile  excitement: everyone has a story, always has had, what we are waiting for.

This shift cannot be attributed to a single writer, but if it could that writer would be Salman Rushdie, whose Midnight's Children (1980) effected a massive, garrulous liberation in British fiction—the tall tales of Waterland, for instance, are scarcely imaginable without it. Rushdie himself declared his debt to Günter Grass ("he opened doors in my mind"), and wrote appreciatively of García Márquez, and has predictably been labeled a magic realist. The debts are real enough, but the label is misleading. Fiction for Rushdie, in Midnight's Children as in Shame (1983) and The Satanic Verses (1988) is a means of interrogating the real rather than celebrating its variety.

The central fable of the early novel, a telepathic generation of 1,001 children born in the first hour of India's independence in 1947, which is also the first hour of the partition of India and Pakistan, is a metaphor for missed possibilities rather than found marvels. They are the India that might have been, the promise that difficult midnight was unable to keep. This is what the narrator calls "the fantastic heart" of his story:

Reality can have a metaphorical content; that does not make it less real. A thousand and one children were born; there were a thousand and one possibilities which had never been present in one place at one time before; and there were a thousand and one dead ends. Midnight's children can be made to represent many things . . . 


And again: "Who am I? Who were we? We were are shall be the gods you never had." That, despairing as it may seem, is the optimistic reading, and at other times Rushdie's generally cheery narrator has darker thoughts: "Midnight has many children; the offspring of Independence were not all human. Violence, corruption, poverty, generals, chaos, greed . . . I had to go into exile to learn that the children of midnight were more varied than I—even I—had dreamed." 

India itself is imaginary for Rushdie, "a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will—except in a dream we all agreed to dream." But then the imaginary is not opposed to the real, it is a large part of it. Agreed dreams are just what countries are, India is exemplary but not exceptional, and Rushdie's later work, addressing the dictatorship in an imaginary nation that much resembles Pakistan, and the crazed redrawings of the world in which fundamentalisms of all kinds indulge, continues to mingle fiction and history, or rather to confront those two forms of narative with each other, revealing the (rather tawdry) novels that pass for historical fact, and the deep historicity of what seem to be wild imaginings.

The terrible fate of The Satanic Verses, banned in India and many other countries, burned by Muslims in Bradford, England, announces the even worse fate of its author, sentenced to death by an outraged Iranian government, and at the time of this writing still living in hiding, with round-the-clock police protection. Such a situation confirms Rushdie's own darkest intuitions. In this sprawling and bustling novel, which takes us from Bombay to South London, from Argentina to Everest, a group of monsters, humans half-turned into tigers, demons, snakes, wolves, water buffalo, meet up in a hospital, and offer a simple explanation of their monstrosity. "They describe us," the monsters say. They: the others, the white, the normal, the officers of a homogenized culture. We might add: the tyrants, the bigots, all who care more for their own mythologies than for the discernible reality of others. "That's all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct." We succumb. There is passivity here and Rushdie is implicitly arguing against it, but there is also a precise evocation of how description works when it becomes effective currency, or the only currency; how diffeicult it is to escape even the most fantastic and unlikely identity once it is firmly ascribed to you. And once someone has a stake in the ascription. 

Rushdie's fiction tells a story, but it allso tells the story's story; the narrator narrates his narrating. It could not be otherwise in a world so saturated with stories, and yet Martin Amis manages to go Rushdie one better. His Money is subtitled "A Suicide Note," and the idea, it seems, is that the narrator, the boisterous, violent, drunken, unlovable John Self, will be dead by the time we get to the end of the text. "You can never tell, though, with suicide notes, can you?" Amis writes in a preface, and sure enough John Self seems to survive, a beneficiary of life's kindness to bastards. But then within this rambling, pushy, often very funny tale, a tribute to Amiss's ability to find an English that is not mid-Atlantic but transatlantic, and amazing mixture of American slang and British snot, there is tis writer, a fellow called . . . Martin Amis. Does he survive along with Self? What would Self have made of Flaubert's parrot?

Money is probably the strongest of all Amis's very clever novels, because the sheer nastiness of the central character fuels a seemingly inexhaustible wit. John Self on the tennis court, John Self trying (in vain) to rape his girlfriend, John Self exploring pornography, John Self throwing up in various choice locations—these are all set pieces that argue a kind of dark love for the horrors of the contemporary world, as if its very tackiness made it a candidate for affection. And the prose has fine, fulsome metaphors: "I am still a high-risk zone. I am still inner city." 

My head is a city, and various pains have now taken up residence in various parts of my face. A gum-and-bone ache has launched a cooperative on my upper west side. Across the park, neruralgia has rented a duplex in my fashionable east seventies. Downtown, my chin throbs with lofts of jaw-loss. As for my brain, my hundreds, it's Harlem up there, expanding in the summer fires.   

There are cities and cities, though. Glasgow is described in Alasdair Gray's Lanark (1981) as "the sort of industrial city where most people live nowadays but nobody imagines living." It would be hard to imagine. The gloom and drabness of Gray's Glasgow is paralleled only by that of the same city seen by his grimly amused companion James Kelman. Both Glasgows make Amis's sleazy London and Ne York seem perfectly pastoral places by comparison. Yet, gloomy as the scene is, it provokes some of the most stylish and imaginative writing to have appeared in Britain recently. Gray and Kelman, like Rushdie and Amis, are writers for whom literature exists; they don't hide their reading as a previous generation was wont to do. Indeed they flaunt their allusions with a carelessness that is the reverse of the pretention British writers have always so feared. "To be alone and without gods is death says Hölderlin," we read in Kelman's Dissafection (1989), "but Hölderlin was wrong and is a poor bastard  . . . Fuck Hölderlin he's deid and buried." Lanark has a long mock note of its own "plagiarisms," runing from Anon and Borges to Xenophon and Zoraster. Hamlet is an influence, we learn, because it is a play "in which heavy-handed paternalism forces a weak-minded youth into dread of existence, hallucinations and crime." The story of Lanark, no less.

Apart from their Glasgow and their wit and their literayr resources Gray and Kelman are quite different; Gray an experimentalist, juggling time and tones, starting his book at a late stage of his story, placing his prologue in the middle, Kelman a sort of dour, demotic Kafka, dryly observing the follies of terminally bewildered people. Patrick Doyle, in A Disaffection, is a Latin teacher in a bleak school, worrying a little about his age, and Kelman's language catches Patrick's complicated awareness of his own comic status, the self-mockery amid the gloom: "He did not wish to dwell continually on the passing years. Here he was turning thirty years of age. Thirty years of age is regarded as a landmark, a watershed, a stage of departure. At that age Jesus Christ entered the teaching profession and Joseph K. worked out his guilt."

Fiction in these novels is not an alternative to history, it is a reading of history's failures, a mode of irony. From Rushdie's teeming India through Amis's hustling England and America to Gray and Kelman's northern dampnesses, the imagination asks us to think about what is missing from these worlds, what strange losses have occurred in what ought to be human. In a lighter though not less brilliant vein the early novels of Peter Ackroyd (and indeed Ackroyd's biographies of Eliot and Dickens) explore a similar question through travels to the past, whether in the impeccable Wildean pastiche of The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), the historical crime-world of Hawksmoor (1985), or the intricate literary fakeries of Chatterton (1987). It's not that the past is another country, as L. P. Hartley memorably said in The Go-Between. The past is our country, scarcely disguised, the angled mirror of our diffuse and distressed present.



Some works by Salman Rushdie
 

Rushdie, Salman. Grimus. Novel. London: Gollancz, 1975.

_____. Midnight's Children. Novel. London: Cape, 1981. (Booker Prize for 1981; Booker of Bookers awarded 1993)

_____. Shame. Novel. London: Cape, 1983

_____. The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey. London: Viking, 1987.

_____. The Satanic Verses. Novel. London: Viking, 1988.

_____. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta/Penguin, 1990.

_____. In Good Faith. New York: Viking Penguin, 1990.

_____. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta/Penguin, 1991.

_____. East, West. Stories. London: Jonathan Cape, 1994.

_____. The Moor's Last Sigh. Novel. London: Cape, 1995.

_____. Fury. Novel. London: Random House-Jonathan Cape, 2001.

_____. Shalimar the Clown. Novel. London: Jonathan Cape, 2005.

_____. The Enchantress of Florence. Vintage, 2009.

_____. Luka and the Fire of Life. Children's book. 2010.

_____. Joseph Anton: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2012.

The Satanic Verses

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Satanic Verses
								First edition cover
Author(s)	Salman Rushdie
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre(s)	Magic Realism, Novel
Publisher	Viking Press
Publication date	1988
Media type	Print (Hardback and paperback)
Pages	547 pp
ISBN	0-670-82537-9
OCLC Number	18558869
Dewey Decimal	823/.914
LC Classification	PR6068.U757 S27 1988
Preceded by	Shame
Followed by	Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Salman Rushdie, 2008

 

The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie's fourth novel, first published in 1988 and inspired in part by the life of Muhammad. As with his previous books, Rushdie used magical realism and relied on contemporary events and people to create his characters. The title refers to the satanic verses, a group of alleged Quranic verses that allow intercessory prayers to be made to three Pagan Meccan goddesses: Allāt, Uzza, and Manāt.^[1] The part of the story that deals with the "satanic verses" was based on accounts from the historians al-Waqidi and al-Tabari.^[1]
In the United Kingdom, The Satanic Verses received positive reviews, was a 1988 Booker Prize Finalist (losing to Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda) and won the 1988 Whitbread Award for novel of the year.^[2] However, major controversy ensued as conservative Muslims accused it of blasphemy and mocking their faith. The outrage among some Muslims resulted in a fatwā calling for Rushdie's death issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on 14 February 1989. Although Rushdie himself has never been attacked as a result of the book's creation, extremists have attacked several connected individuals such as translator Hitoshi Igarashi (leading to, in Igarashi's case, death).

Plot

The Satanic Verses consists of a frame narrative, using elements of magical realism, interlaced with a series of sub-plots that are narrated as dream visions experienced by one of the protagonists. The frame narrative, like many other stories by Rushdie, involves Indian expatriates in contemporary England. The two protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, are both actors of Indian Muslim background. Farishta is a Bollywood superstar who specializes in playing Hindu deities. (The character is partly based on Indian film stars Amitabh Bachchan and Rama Rao.^[3]) Chamcha is an emigrant who has broken with his Indian identity and works as a voiceover artist in England.
At the beginning of the novel, both are trapped in a hijacked plane flying from India to Britain. The plane explodes over the English Channel, but the two are magically saved. In a miraculous transformation, Farishta takes on the personality of the archangel Gibreel, and Chamcha that of a devil. Chamcha is arrested and passes through an ordeal of police abuse as a suspected illegal immigrant. Farishta's transformation can partly be read on a realistic level as the symptom of the protagonist's developing schizophrenia.
Both characters struggle to piece their lives back together. Farishta seeks and finds his lost love, the English mountaineer Allie Cone, but their relationship is overshadowed by his mental illness. Chamcha, having miraculously regained his human shape, wants to take revenge on Farishta for having forsaken him after their common fall from the hijacked plane. He does so by fostering Farishta's pathological jealousy and thus destroying his relationship with Allie. In another moment of crisis, Farishta realizes what Chamcha has done, but forgives him and even saves his life.
Both return to India. Farishta kills Allie in another outbreak of jealousy and then commits suicide. Chamcha, who has found not only forgiveness from Farishta but also reconciliation with his estranged father and his own Indian identity, decides to remain in India.

Dream sequences

Embedded in this story is a series of half-magic dream vision narratives, ascribed to the mind of Gibreel Farishta. They are linked together by many thematic details as well as by the common motifs of divine revelation, religious faith and fanaticism, and doubt.
One of these sequences contains most of the elements that have been criticized as offensive to Muslims. It is a transformed re-narration of the life of Muhammad (called "Mahound" or "the Messenger" in the novel) in Mecca ("Jahilia"). At its centre is the episode of the so-called satanic verses, in which the prophet first proclaims a revelation in favour of the old polytheistic deities, but later renounces this as an error induced by Shaitan. There are also two opponents of the "Messenger": a demonic heathen priestess, Hind, and an irreverent skeptic and satirical poet, Baal. When the prophet returns to the city in triumph, Baal goes into hiding in an underground brothel, where the prostitutes assume the identities of the prophet's wives. Also, one of the prophet's companions claims that he, doubting the "Messenger"'s authenticity, has subtly altered portions of the Quran as they were dictated to him.
The second sequence tells the story of Ayesha, an Indian peasant girl who claims to be receiving revelations from the Archangel Gibreel. She entices all her village community to embark on a foot pilgrimage to Mecca, claiming that they will be able to walk across the Arabian Sea. The pilgrimage ends in a catastrophic climax as the believers all walk into the water and disappear, amid disturbingly conflicting testimonies from observers about whether they just drowned or were in fact miraculously able to cross the sea.
A third dream sequence presents the figure of a fanatic expatriate religious leader, the "Imam," in a late-20th-century setting. This figure is a transparent allusion to the life of Ayatollah Khomeini in his Parisian exile, but it is also linked through various recurrent narrative motifs to the figure of the "Messenger".

Literary criticism and analysis

Overall, the book received favourable reviews from literary critics. In a 2003 volume of criticism of Rushdie's career, influential critic Harold Bloom named The Satanic Verses "Rushdie's largest aesthetic achievement".^[4]
Timothy Brennan called the work "the most ambitious novel yet published to deal with the immigrant experience in Britain" that captures the immigrants' dream-like disorientation and their process of "union-by-hybridization". The book is seen as "fundamentally a study in alienation."^[2]
Muhammd Mashuq ibn Ally wrote that "The Satanic Verses is about identity, alienation, rootlessness, brutality, compromise, and conformity. These concepts confront all migrants, disillusioned with both cultures: the one they are in and the one they join. Yet knowing they cannot live a life of anonymity, they mediate between them both. The Satanic Verses is a reflection of the author’s dilemmas." The work is an "albeit surreal, record of its own author's continuing identity crisis."^[2] Ally said that the book reveals the author ultimately as "the victim of nineteenth-century British colonialism."^[2] Rushdie himself spoke confirming this interpretation of his book, saying that it was not about Islam, "but about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay."^[2] He has also said "It’s a novel which happened to contain a castigation of Western materialism. The tone is comic."^[2]
After the Satanic Verses controversy developed, some scholars familiar with the book and the whole of Rushdie's work, like M. D. Fletcher, saw the reaction as ironic. Fletcher wrote "It is perhaps a relevant irony that some of the major expressions of hostility toward Rushdie came from those about whom and (in some sense) for whom he wrote."^[5] He said the manifestations of the controversy in Britain "embodied an anger arising in part from the frustrations of the migrant experience and generally reflected failures of multicultural integration, both significant Rushdie themes. Clearly, Rushdie's interests centrally include explorations of how migration heightens one's awareness that perceptions of reality are relative and fragile, and of the nature of religious faith and revelation, not to mention the political manipulation of religion. Rushdie's own assumptions about the importance of literature parallel in the literal value accorded the written word in Islamic tradition to some degree. But Rushdie seems to have assumed that diverse communities and cultures share some degree of common moral ground on the basis of which dialogue can be pieced together, and it is perhaps for this reason that he underestimated the implacable nature of the hostility evoked by The Satanic Verses, even though a major theme of that novel is the dangerous nature of closed, absolutist belief systems."^[5]
Rushdie's influences have long been a point of interest to scholars examining his work. According to W. J. Weatherby, influences on The Satanic Verses were listed as Joyce, Italo Calvino, Kafka, Frank Herbert, Pynchon, Mervyn Peake, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jean-Luc Godard, J. G. Ballard, and William Burroughs.^[6] Chandrabhanu Pattanayak notes the influence of William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (influences Rushdie admitted to).^[5] M. Keith Booker likens the book to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.^[5] Al-'Azm notes the influence of François Rabelais' works.^[5] Others have noted an influence of Indian classics such as the Mahabharata and the Arabic Arabian Nights.^[5] Angela Carter writes that the novel contains "inventions such as the city of Jahilia, 'built entirely of sand,' that gives a nod to Calvino and a wink to Frank Herbert".^[7]
Srinivas Aravamudan’s analysis of The Satanic Verses was perceived by other scholars as hailing the book as a proof "demonstrating the compatibility of postmodernism and post-colonialism in the one novel."^[5] Aravamudan himself stressed the satiric nature of the work and held that while it and Midnight's Children may appear to be more "comic epic", "clearly those works are highly satirical" in a similar vein of postmodern satire pioneered by Joseph Heller in Catch-22.^[5]
The Satanic Verses continued to exhibit Rushdie's penchant for organizing his work in terms of parallel stories. Within the book "there are major parallel stories, alternating dream and reality sequences, tied together by the recurring names of the characters in each; this provides intertexts within each novel which comment on the other stories."^[5] The Satanic Verses also exhibits Rushdie's common practice of using allusions in order to invoke connotative links. Within the book he referenced everything from mythology to "one-liners invoking recent popular culture" sometimes using several per page.^[5] Chapter VII was especially noted by for such usage.^[5]

Controversy

Main article: The Satanic Verses controversy

The novel caused great controversy in the Muslim community for what some Muslims believed were blasphemous references. Rushdie was accused of misusing freedom of speech.^[8] As the controversy spread, the import of the book was banned^[9] in India and it was burned in demonstrations in the United Kingdom. In mid February 1989, following a violent riot against the book in Pakistan, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran and a Shi'a Muslim scholar, issued a fatwa calling on all good Muslims to kill Rushdie and his publishers, or to point him out to those who can kill him if they cannot themselves.^[10] Although the British Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher gave Rushdie round-the-clock police protection, many politicians on both sides were hostile to the author. British Labour MP Keith Vaz led a march through Leicester shortly after he was elected in 1989 calling for the book to be banned, while Conservative MP Norman Tebbit, the party's former chairman, called Rushdie an "outstanding villain" whose "public life has been a record of despicable acts of betrayal of his upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality".^[11] Meanwhile the Commission for Racial Equality and a liberal think tank, the Policy Studies Institute held seminars on the Rushdie affair. They did not invite the author Fay Weldon who spoke out against burning books, but did invite Shabbir Akhtar, a Cambridge philosophy graduate who called for "a negotiated compromise" which "would protect Muslim sensibilities against gratuitous provocation". The journalist and author Andy McSmith wrote at the time "We are witnessing, I fear, the birth of a new and dangerously illiberal "liberal" orthodoxy designed to accommodate Dr Akhtar and his fundamentalist friends."^[12]
Following the fatwa, Rushdie was put under police protection by the British government. Despite a conciliatory statement by Iran in 1998, and Rushdie's declaration that he would stop living in hiding, the Iranian state news agency reported in 2006 that the fatwa would remain in place permanently since fatwas can only be rescinded by the person who first issued them, and Khomeini had since died.^[13]

 

Violence, assassinations and attempts to harm

Rushdie has never been physically harmed for the book, but others associated with it have suffered violent attacks. Hitoshi Igarashi, its Japanese translator, was stabbed to death on 11 July 1991. Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator, was seriously injured in a stabbing the same month.^[14] William Nygaard, the publisher in Norway, was shot three times in an attempted assassination in Oslo in October 1993, but survived. Aziz Nesin, the Turkish translator, was the intended target in the events that led to the Sivas massacre on 2 July 1993 in Sivas, Turkey, which resulted in the deaths of 37 people.^[15] Individual purchasers of the book have not been harmed. The only nation with a predominantly Muslim population where the novel remains legal is Turkey.

In September 2012, Rushdie expressed doubt that The Satanic Verses would be published today because of a climate of "fear and nervousness".^[16]

Review of The Moor's Last Sigh

 

Salman Rushdie (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 

 Angels and Devils: A BBC documentary on Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses:

Nobel Lecture: Kazuo Ishiguro (NIVEL AVANZADO)

Alumno distinguido 2020 : José Luis Esteban (INTERLUDIO)

George Orwell, Aldous Huxley : "1984" ou "Le meilleur des mondes" ? (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 

Un documentaire en français sur les romans d'anticipation de Huxley (Brave New World) et d'Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four) aujourd'hui devenus trop proches de la réalité—une critique du totalitarisme présent et futur.

(But.... careful!  Don't trust the fake news on Donald Trump etc.  Trust only the trustworthy ones...! You'll have to decide for yourself.)

Laurence Sterne - some notes

 From the Short Oxford Companion to English Literature:

 

STERNE, Laurence (1713-68), educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he embraced the philosophy of *Locke and made a lifelong friend of *Hall-Stevenson, who was probably the model for *Eugenius. He took holy orders and obtained the living of the Yorkshire parish of Sutton-on-the-Forest in 1738. In 1741 he married Elizabeth Lumley. In 1759 he began *Tristram Shandy, Vols I and II being published in that year. This work brought him fame and success, although Dr. *Johnson, *Richardson, *Goldsmith, and others criticized it on both literary and moral grounds. He went to London and he was fêted by society, had his portrait painted by *Reynolds, was invited to Court. He published The Sermons of Mr Yorick (1760), a volume whose title caused some scandal, and in 1761 four more volumes of Tristram Shandy appeared. Meanwhile Sterne's health was deteriorating steadily. In 1762 in the hope of improvement he and his wife and daughter left for France. Sterne returned alone to England in 1764, and in 1765 published Vol VII and VIII of Tristram Shandy; Vol IX  appeared in 1767. In 1765 he returned to France and undertook an eight-month tour of France and Italy, which clearly provided him with much of the material for *A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). In 1766 he published two further volumes of sermons. In 1767 Sterne met and fell in love with Elizabeth *Draper, and began his Journal to *Eliza. He died of tuberculosis in London in March 1768. 

A spate of forgeries appeared after Sterne's death, including another volume of Tristram Shandy, Posthumous Works,  and a continuation by 'Eugenius' (an author whose identity is not known, but who was not Hall-Stevenson) of A Sentimental Journey. 

Sterne is generally acknowledged as an innovator of the highest originality, and has been seen as the chief begetter of a long line of writers interested in the *'stream-of-consciousness'. He acknowledges in Tristram Shandy his  own debt in this respect to *Locke. Throughout his work he parodies the developing conventions of the still-new 'novel', and its problems in presenting reality, space, and time. His sharp but often salacious wit is balanced by the affection he displays towards the delights and absurdities of life.

Tristram Shandy, The Life and Adventures of, by L. Sterne, published 1759-67.

This unique work, although itself the culmination of experiments by lesser authors, is generally regarded as the progenitor of the 20th-cent. *stream-of-consciousness novel. It owes much to *Rabelais, to Robert *Burton, and to Locke's *Essay concerning Human Understanding. The word 'shandy', of obscure origin, means 'crack-brained, half-crazy', and Tristram in Volume VI of his book declares that he is writing a 'civil, nonsensical, good humoured Shandean book'.

In spite of the title, the book gives us very little of the life, and nothing of the opinions, of the nominal hero, who is born only in Vol IV, and breeched in Vol. VI, and then disappears from the story. Instead we have a group of humorous figures: Walter Shandy of Shandy Hall, Tristram's father, 'my Uncle Toby', his brother, wounded in the groin at the siege of Namur, whose hobby is the science of attacking fortified towns, Corporal Trim, his servant, wounded in the knee at Landen, devoted to his master. Behind these three major figures the minor characters, Yorick the parson, Dr Slop, Mrs Shandy, and the Widow Wadman, play more elusive parts.

 

 

 ____________________

 

 

 

(From the  

Concise Cambridge History of English Literature,  

by George Sampson, rev. R.C. Churchill, 1972):

THE AGE OF JOHNSON, III:

STERNE AND THE NOVEL OF HIS TIMES

During the twenty years that followed the death of Richardson new elements were added to the novel, and of these the chief is "sentiment" or "sensibility", the master in that kind being Sterne. Apart from him the writers of the time fall into three groups, (1) the novelists of sentiment and reflection, typified by Henry Mackenzie, (2) the novelists of home life, typified by Fanny Burney, and (3) the novelists of "Gothick" romance, typified by Horace Walpole and Clara Reeve.

Laurence Sterne (1713-68) was born at Clonmel, Tipperary [Ireland], the son of Ensign Roger Sterne and great-grandson of the Richard Sterne who was Archbishop of York 1664-83. He was educated at Cambridge, took holy orders and was made perpetual curate of Coxwold in Yorkshire in 1760. He was not the kind of priest in whom the Anglican Church can feel any pride. Little is known about his life, and even that little is not very reputable. Our concern, however, is with the writer. The publication of Tristram Shandy was begun in 1760 (Vols. I and II), and continued at intervals until the year before the author's death. In 1762 Sterne's health broke down, and he began the travels of which A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr Yorick (1768) is the delightful literary product. Save that Sterne died in London and not abroad, it will be noticed that his life roughly follows the Fielding-Smollett pattern. The author of Tristram Shandy, cool copyst of other men as he was, must be accepted as an original and originating power in literature. He showed that there were untried possibilities in the novel. He opened new fields of of humour. He created a style more subtle and a form more flexible than any found before him. The novel, as left by Fielding and Smollett, might have settled into a chronicle of contemporary life and manners. Richardson had struck memorably into tragedy, but his one great story stood alone. Sterne invented for English literature the fantasia-novel, which could be a channel for the outporing of the author's own personality, idiosyncrasy, humours and opinions. Instead of form, there was apparently formlessness; but only apparently, for Sterne was the master of his own improvisations. Sterne may therefore be called a liberator—even the first of the "expressionists". His success left the novel the most flexible of all literary forms. 

Sterne's odd humour appears in the very title of his book, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman; for it has been truly remarked that the "life" is that of the gentleman's uncle and the "opinions" those of the gentleman's father. Tristram, titular hero and narrator, remains unborn during much of the story and plays no part in the rest. The undying trio, Walter Shandy, My Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim are humorous both in the narrow or Jonsonian sense, and in the larger or Shakespearean sense. My Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim are variations of genius upon Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. They are on a lower plane, but the relation between them is full of beauty, as well as of humour.

Of Sterne's indecency too much can be made. That he has not the broad humour of his other master, Rabelais—that his fun in this kind provokes the snigger rather than the hearty laugh, can be at once admitted. What is unfortunate about Sterne is that much of his own personal life seems to give unpleasant point to the least pleasant parts of his writing. We should like a priest to be more priestly. But actually the most offensive quality in Sterne is the new "sensibility" or "sentimentalism". When the "spot-lights" are manipulated with design so palpable as in the death of Le Fever or in the story of the dead ass, the author goes far to defeat his own purpose; for he at once calls in question his own artistic sincerity. The pathos of Dickens is naturally poured out; the pathos of Sterne is unnaturally put on. But his artistic sins can be forgiven for the sake of an insinuating, irresistible humour in which no English writer has excelled him. His Sermons of Mr Yorick (1760-9) and Letters from Yorick to Eliza (1775) have a biographical rather than a literary importance.