6. SECCIÓN B

 

UNIT 6: LITERATURA INGLESA Y NORTEAMERICANA 1900-1960

SECCIÓN B, 

TEMA 6: LITERATURA INGLESA Y NORTEAMERICANA 1900-1960

 

_______________

 NIVEL AVANZADO: 

Un autor norteamericano muy popular de principios del siglo XX  que nos cae fuera del programa es Jack London.  Se estrenó hace poco una película inspirada en una de sus novelas, Martin Eden.

Martin Eden. Dir. Pietro Marcello. Based on Jack London's novel. Italy/France, 2019.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4516162/

De Jack London es especialmente memorable su relato sobre una pandemia apocalíptica, "The Scarlet Plage". Su interés va más allá de lo meramente literario. Aquí puede leerse algo más sobre Jack London y la epidemiología evolutiva.

 

-  OTROS AUTORES NORTEAMERICANOS 1900-1960

_______________

 

 

Recordad que ya podéis ir leyendo y estudiando los textos de esta sección, que están en la segunda parte de vuestro bloque de fotocopias. Para dudas y consultas sobre ellos y sobre los autores de la sección B, podéis anotarlas y enviármelas por correo a garciala@unizar.es

 

En este tema 6 tratamos (en orden inverso, empezando por abajo) autores ingleses y norteamericanos de principios y mediados del siglo XX. Seguidamente pasamos al tema 7, Literatura inglesa 1960-2000. 

_____________

Richard Gray on Nabokov.

Terminamos el TEMA 6 con unas notas sobre Vladimir Nabokov, clásico moderno de dos idiomas, ruso e inglés, 

—y con una panorámica sobre Samuel Beckett, otro clásico bilingüe en inglés y francés:

 

SAMUEL BECKETT         (1906-1989)

Anglo-Irish and French modernist bilingual writer, conservative bourgeois family, born in Foxrock, Ireland; studied at Portora School, Trinity College Dublin, and the Sorbonne; lived in Ireland, then Paris; loved cousin Peggy Sinclair;  bohemian lifestyle, expatriate skeptic vs. Catholic tradition; admirer and assistant of James Joyce in the 30s; m. Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil; member of the Resistance, lived in hiding in Roussillon during 2nd WW; experimental writer and dramatist in English and French, world success as "absurdist" dramatist with Waiting for Godot; developed an ascetic aesthetics of impotence, decay, minimalism and impoverishment, writing ever shorter and denser works;  Nobel Prize 1969; international success but reclusive character; often directed his own plays; lived and died in Paris)

_____. En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot. Drama, 1951. 1954.
_____. Molloy. Novel. 1951. In English,1955.
_____. Malone meurt / Malone Dies. Novel. 1951. 1956.
_____. L'Innommable / The Unnamable. Novel. 1954. 1958.
_____. Fin de partie /Endgame. Drama. 1954. 1958.
_____. Krapp's Last Tape / La Dernière bande. Drama. 1958. 1959.
_____. Happy Days / Oh les beaux jours. Drama. 1961. 1963.
_____. Play / Comédie. Drama. 1963. 1964.
_____. Not I / Pas moi. Drama. 1973. 1975 

______. Stirrings Still (Soubresauts). Prose. 1988. 1989.

- The New Drama: Beckett and Osborne (Andrew Sanders).

- "Samuel Beckett." In Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.*
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett

- En YouTube se pueden ver varias obras de Beckett. Por ejemplo, Catastrophe.  O la que hemos incluido como lectura obligatoria, Krapp's Last Tape.

____________________

 
NIVEL AVANZADO: 

- Un audio en français sur Beckett: Une vie, une œuvre.

- Samuel Beckett's experimental fiction, in THE NEW NOVELISTS OF THE 1950s.

- Vladimir Nabokov: A documentary and a lecture on Lolita.

________________________

________________________

 

E. E. CUMMINGS     (1894-1962)

Edward Estlin Cummings, US man of letters, modernist poet, dramatist and novelist; b. Cambridge, MA; grad. Harvard, Master of Arts 1916, ambulance volonteer in France, unjustly accused of treasonable correspondence 1st WW, defender of individualism and creative eccentricity vs. social regimentation, 20th-c. Transcendentalist.


Works

Cummings, E. E. The Enormous Room. Narrative. 1922.
_____. Tulips and Chimneys. Poems. 1923.
_____. &. 1925.
_____. is 5.  Poems. 1926.
_____. ViVa. 1931.
_____. (Untitled work). 1930.
_____. Eimi. 1933.
_____. Tom. 1935. (Satirical ballet based on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin).
_____. No Thanks. 1935.
_____. 50 Poems. 1940.
_____. I x I. 1944.
_____ . XAIPE.  1950.
_____. Poems: 1924-1954. 1954.
_____. 95 Poems. 1958.
_____. 73 Poems. 1963. (Posth.).
_____.  Complete Poems, 1904-62.   1993.

- Unas notas sobre el poeta modernista norteamericano e. e. cummings.

Y otro poeta modernista inglés. Notas clicando en su nombre:

W. H.  AUDEN     (1907-1973)

Wystan Hugh Auden, modernist English poet, born in York; anglo-catholic family; studied at Gresham's School, Holt and Christ Church, Oxford;  homosexual, 1928 stay in Berlin with Isherwood, 1930s taught in Scotland and Downs School, Birmingham; professional writer late 30s, leftist sympathies before the war, turned conservative thereafter, cultivated Christian humanism and literary tradition; trips to Spanish War and China; expatriate in US 1939; US citizen c. 1946, lived half-year in Europe and USA with life partner Chester Kallman in New York; summer stays in Ischia and Kirschtetten; honorary Professor of Poetry U of Oxford, 1956-60s; died in Vienna.

Auden, W. H.  Poems. 1930.
_____. Look, Stranger! Poems.  1936.
_____. "Spain 1937." Poem. 1937, 1940.
_____. "In Memory of W. B. Yeats." Poem. 1939.
_____. "In Time of War." Sonnet sequence. 1939.
_____. Another Time. Poems.  1940.
_____. New Year Letter. Poems. 1941.
_____. The Age of Anxiety. Poems. 1947.
_____. The Shield of Achilles. Poems. 1955.
_____. Homage to Clio. Poems. 1960.

_____. About the House. Poems. 1965.
_____. Los señores del límite: Selección de poemas y ensayos (1927-1973). 2007.
 


____________________________________________

Sección B, NIVEL AVANZADO:

- Dos influyentes críticos de la sociedad moderna y sus tendencias distópicas: Huxley y Orwell

—muy relevantes los dos en la era 2020.

Introducción a 1984 de Orwell 

La distopía de Orwell se hace realidad.

 

- Un documentaire, en français, sur Le meilleur des mondes et 1984— ...aujourd'hui.

-  Orwell en España: Rebelión en la pocilga

                                           ___________

 

-  Los poemas de Sylvia Plath, poeta feminista y suicida.


- Dylan Thomas, poeta galés, recita uno de sus poemas en la radio.



__________________________________________ 

 

 

WILLIAM FAULKNER        (1897-1962)

_____.  Soldier's Pay. Novel. 1926.
_____. Mosquitoes. 1927.
_____. Sartoris. Novel. 1929.
_____. The Sound and the Fury. Novel. 1929.
_____. As I Lay Dying. Novel. 1930.
_____. "A Rose for Emily." Story. 1930.
    http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/English_Literature/Rose/el-text-E-Rose.htm
    2012
_____. Sanctuary. Novel. New York: Random House, 1931.
_____. Light in August.  Novel. 1932.
_____. Pylon. Novel. 1935.
_____. Absalom, Absalom! 1936.
_____. The Wild Palms. Novel. 1939.
_____. The Hamlet. Novel. 1940. (Vol. 1 of the Snopes trilogy).
_____. The Big Sleep. Film script based on Raymond Chandler's novel. 1946.
_____. Go Down, Moses. Stories / novel. 1942.
_____. Collected Stories of William Faulkner. 1950.
_____. Requiem for a Nun. Novel. 1951.
_____. A Fable. Novel. 1954.
_____. The Town. Novel. 1957. (Vol. 2 of the Snopes trilogy).
_____. The Mansion. Novel. 1959. (Vol. 3 of the Snopes trilogy).

William Faulkner was a US southern writer, major modernist novelist and story writer; b. William Harrison Falkner in New Albany, Mississippi; l. Oxford, Lafayette county; Nobel Prize for Literature 1949; Pulitzer Prize 1955, 1962; d. Byhalia, Mississipi. He is best known for his complex narrative style involving the memories and mental worlds of characters, and for his portraits of Southern society. Faulkner's South is scarred by the legacies of racism and slavery, with deep-set social divisions as traditional rural communities both decay and endure amid twentieth-century disruptions.

ON FAULKNER'S  NOVEL THE SOUND AND THE FURY.



An introduction to Hemingway and Faulkner  (by Richard Gray)
http://vanityfea.blogspot.com.es/2012/12/hemingway-and-faulkner.html




____________________________________

ERNEST HEMINGWAY      (1899-1961)

_____.  In Our Time. Stories. 1925.
_____. The Sun Also Rises. Novel. 1926. (= Fiesta)
_____. Men Without Women. Stories. 1927.
_____. A Farewell to Arms. Novel. 1929.
_____. Death in the Afternoon. Essay. 1932.
_____. Winner Take Nothing. Stories. 1933.
_____. Green Hills of Africa. Novel. 1935.
_____. To Have and Have Not. Novel. 1937.
_____. The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. 1938.
_____. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Novel. 1940.
_____. Men at War. Stories. 1942.
_____. The Old Man and the Sea. Novel. 1952.
_____. The Dangerous Summer. Report. 1960.
_____. A Moveable Feast. Memoir. 1964.
_____. Islands in the Stream. Novel. 1970.
_____. The Garden of Eden. Novel. 1986.
_____. True at First Light. Novel. 1999.



Hemingway was a major US novelist and short story writer; doctor's son, second of six children, b. Oak Park, Illinois; father committed suicide; reporter at Kansas City Star volunteer ambulance driver in Italy 1st WW, wounded and decorated; USA 1919, married and settled in Paris as foreign correspondent 1921, reporter at Greco-Turkish war 1922, "Lost Generation" expatriate with Ezra Pound, Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein; became Catholic, reporter at the Spanish War and anti-Nazi activist during World War II; left-wing sympathies, lived in Key West and Cuba; travelled widely; wrote modernist fiction with aesthetics of impersonality and spare realistic style, journalist, traveller, sportsman, big-game hunter and sporting fisherman; socialite, divorced, several marriages and divorces; alcoholic, suffered severe accidents, Nobel Prize for Literature 1954, seriously ill, electroshock sessions, committed suicide in Ketchum, Idaho.


 


______________________



SECCIÓN B, nivel AVANZADO:

-  Hemingway and others.

- Un audio en français sur Ernest Hemingway: Une vie, une œuvre.

______________

 

 

 


VIRGINIA WOOLF     (1882-1941)


English woman of letters, modernist writer and forerunner of feminist criticism, b. at High Park Gate as Adeline Virginia Stephen, daughter of scholar Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth; lived in Bloomsbury, London, 1904-, nucleus of the "Bloomsbury Group" of intellectuals and artists; contributor to the Times Literary Supplement; married Leonard Woolf 1912; leading modernist novelist and critic; loving "lesbian" friendship with writer Vita Sackville-West; suffered frequent mental disturbances and heard voices; committed suicide by drowning in the river Ouse, Sussex.

_____. The Voyage Out. Novel. 1915.
_____. Night and Day. Novel. 1919.
_____. "The Mark on the Wall." Experimental prose. http://www.online-literature.com/virginia_woolf/855/
_____. Jacob's Room. Novel. 1922.
_____. Mrs. Dalloway. Novel. London: Hogarth, 1925.
_____. The Common Reader.  1925.
_____. To the Lighthouse. Fiction. 1927.
_____. Orlando: A Biography. Novel. 1928.
_____. A Room of One's Own. 1929.
_____. The Waves. Novel. 1931.
_____. The Years. Novel. 1937.
_____. Between the Acts. Experimental novel. 1941.
_____. The Moment and Other Essays. 1948.
_____. A Writer's Diary.
_____. Moments of Being. Memoirs.
_____. The Diary of Virginia Woolf.





 Why should you read Virginia Woolf ?







El grupo de Bloomsbury, círculo modernista bohemio chic de Londres.


"Virginia Woolf: Huerto, jardín y campo de batalla." Conferencia de Laura Freixas,
http://www.march.es/conferencias/anteriores/voz.aspx?id=2961&l=1
  


_____________________

 

 Sección B, NIVEL AVANZADO: Virginia Woolf

 

______________________

Muchos autores quedan fuera de programa, entre ellos algunos de los más populares actualmente—Stephen King, Agatha Christie.... Como no podemos incluir más autores en el programa, para curiosear sobre estos "fuera de programa" os remito a la Wikipedia, que es excelente sitio para empezar—incluyendo los autores del programa. Aquí Agatha Christie (en la edición inglesa mejor, claro).


En SparkNotes http://www.sparknotes.com  encontráis abundantes materiales didácticos sobre literatura inglesa, introducciones, guías de estudio, etc.

______________________

Un autor norteamericano muy popular de principios del siglo XX  que nos cae fuera del programa es Jack London.  Se estrenó hace poco una película inspirada en una de sus novelas, Martin Eden.

Martin Eden. Dir. Pietro Marcello. Based on Jack London's novel. Italy/France, 2019.*

http://redaragon.elperiodicodearagon.com/ocio/cine/pelicula.asp?id=35560#trailer

         2020

De Jack London es especialmente memorable su relato sobre una pandemia apocalíptica, "The Scarlet Plage". Su interés va más allá de lo meramente literario. Aquí puede leerse algo más sobre Jack London y la epidemiología evolutiva.

 

-  OTROS AUTORES NORTEAMERICANOS 1900-1960

_______________

T. S. Eliot           (1888-1965)  

Thomas Stearns Eliot, US/British poet, critic and dramatist; b. St Louis; Ph.D. Harvard; st. France and Germany, l. London, bank clerk at Lloyd's; married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, expressed disgust with sex in poetry; unhappy marriage, wife with mental problems, separated 1933; married Vivien Eliot 1957; l. London; conservative social critic, influential modernist poet and critic, poetic dramatist; anti-modernist in ideas, "classicist, anglo-Catholic and monarchic"; w. as poetry ed. for Faber and Gwyer, later Faber and Faber; major influence on English-speaking literary world; Order of Merit 1948; Nobel Prize for Literature 1949; d. London.

______.  Prufrock and Other Observations. Poems. 1917.  

_____. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Essay. 1919.

_____. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London, 1920.

_____. "The Metaphysical Poets." Essay. 1921.

http://myhome.naver.com/for_eliot/prose/metaphysical.htm

         2008

_____. The Waste Land. Poem. 1922.

_____. "Ulysses, Order and Myth." Essay. 1923.

_____. Dante. Essay. 1929.

_____. Ash Wednesday. Poem. 1930.

_____. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. 1933.

_____. After Strange Gods. Criticism. New York: Harcourt, 1933.

_____. Murder in the Cathedral. Drama. 1936.

_____. The Family Reunion. Drama. 1939.

_____. Four Quartets. Poems. 1943.

_____. The Cocktail Party. Drama.  1949.

_____. Collected Poems 1909-1935. London: Faber, 1957.

_____. On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber, 1957.

_____. Selected Essays. New ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960.

_____. Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber, 1963. 1974.*

_____. To Criticize the Critic. New York: Farrar, 1965.

_____. Selected Poetry of Thomas Stearns Eliot. In Representative Poetry Online. U of Toronto.

         http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poet111.html

         2005-08-10

 Unas notas sobre T. S. Eliot

 

 
______________________________



Sección B: Drama, T. S. Eliot, Modernism: NIVEL AVANZADO



______________________________________________

 

 

JAMES JOYCE         (1882-1941)

Expatriate Irish writer, leading modernist, experimental novelist; lived a bohemian life in Trieste and then Paris; famous for his representation of the 'stream of consciousness' of his characters in narrative, and for his complex multilayered wordplay and intertextual allusions. Joyce is the ultimate model for 'difficult' and elitist Modernist literature, initially censored in English-speaking countries on grounds of obscenity.



Joyce, James. Dubliners. Short stories. 1914.
_____. Exiles. Drama.
_____. Stephen Hero. Novel.
_____. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Novel. 1916. (Rewriting of Stephen Hero).
_____ . Ulysses. Experimental novel. Paris, 1922.
_____. Collected Poems. 1937.
_____. Finnegans Wake. Experimental novel. 1939.



- An introduction to James Joyce, from the Norton Anthology.

- Jorge Luis Borges, "Conferencia sobre James Joyce." (audio): https://youtu.be/i_ZTt_JQXRU

______________________

SECCIÓN B,  James Joyce - NIVEL AVANZADO.


_______________

 

Empezamos la sección B con un premio Nobel irlandés, W. B. Yeats:

W. B. YEATS     (1865-1939)

Anglo-Irish poet; b. Sandymount, Dublin; son of painter J. B. Yeats; lived in London 1874-83; later in Dublin / London / Sligo; associated to the folk Irish revival in late 19th, then Modernist poet and close friend of Ezra Pound; a superstitious believer in occultism and magic, he held anti-bourgeois aristocratic ideals and sympathized with Fascist movements and traditionalism. He was in love with nationalist Maud Gonne, but was rejected by her; he married a "psychic" wife, 'George' Hyde-Lees in 1917; Irish Free State senator allied to the interests of the Protestant landed classes and a friend of Lady Gregory, he promoted with her the Irish National Theatre at the Abbey Theatre and  lived in a tower in her land; Nobel Prize for Literature 1923.


Yeats, W. B. "The Madness of King Goll." Poem. 1884, pub. 1887.
_____. "The Wanderings of Oisin." Poem. 1889.
_____. "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." Poem. 1890.
_____. "The Sorrow of Love." Poem. 1891.
_____. The Countess Kathleen. Drama. 1892.
_____. Crossways. Poems. 1892.
_____. The Rose. Poems. 1893.
_____. "Who Goes with Fergus?" Poem. 1893.
_____. The Land of Heart's Desire. Drama. 1894.
_____. The Wind among the Reeds. Poems. 1899.
_____. The Shadowy Waters. Dramatic poetry. 1902, 1906.
_____. In the Seven Woods. Poems. 1903.
_____. The Green Helmet and Other Poems. 1910.
_____. Deirdre. Drama. 1906.
_____. Responsibilities. Poems. 1914.
_____. "Easter 1916." Poem. 1916.
_____. "The Second Coming." Poem. 1919
    http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html
_____. The Wild Swans at Coole. Poems. 1919.
_____. "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death." Poem. 1919.
    http://www.thebeckoning.com/poetry/yeats/yeats.html
_____. Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Poems. 1921.
_____. "Leda and the Swan." Poem. 1923.
_____. "Among School Children." Poem. 1926.
_____. "Sailing to Byzantium." Poem. 1926
_____. The Tower. Poems. 1928.
_____. The Winding Stair, and Other Poems. 1933.
_____. A Full Moon in March. Poems. 1935.
_____. "Under Ben Bulben." Poem. 1938.


An introduction to W. B. Yeats, from the Norton Anthology. With links to further criticism. 

Wikipedia is also a good resource for all our writers in section B: W. B. Yeats.




_______________________
 



Sección B, NIVEL AVANZADO: A Yale lecture on Yeats.






_______________________

SECCIÓN B:

 

UNIT 6: Literatura inglesa y norteamericana 1900-1960

Comenzamos la sección B con los autores del siglo XX. Recordad que los autores de la sección B no entran como tema de redacción: sí como preguntas cortas, y como comentario/traducción. Son para preparación individual,  con los materiales que iré añadiendo aquí...

... y con el manual que os habéis comprado, sin duda. Aquí está el manual recomendado, el de Alexander:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9a3FSxKl6ZlV0dkUkJSWHR0dEU/view?usp=drivesdk   (Michael Alexander: A History of English Literature)

Y aquí otro de NIVEL MÁS AVANZADO, el de Oxford:

PDF (The Short Oxford History of English Literature)

—oOo—

 

 

 5. Literatura inglesa y norteamericana 1900-1960

Une Vie, une œuvre : Samuel Beckett (NIVEL AVANZADO)

The New Novelists of the 1950s (NIVEL AVANZADO)

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

Samuel Beckett's trilogy, pulished together in London in 1959 under the English titles Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, was in every sense the most radically innovative fictional statement of the 1950s. The edition bore the announcement that the three novels had been 'translated from the original French by the author'. Beckett's pre-war fiction in English—the episodic novel A Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written in 1932, but published posthumously in 1992), the ten interconnected stories derived from it and given the title More Pricks than Kicks (1934) and the novel Murphy (1938)—had responded with a gauche confidence to the challenge of Joyce's experimental 'work in progress', Finnegans Wake. The titles of the first two of his pre-war works (one being loosely adapted from Chaucer, the other bawdily punning on a phrase of St. Paul's) also suggest the degree to which Beckett was self-consciously attempting to regenerate and re-energize the literary traditions of his native language. Murphy is the most substantial of the three. Its solitary title character, who 'sat it out, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton', is an Irishman in London, precisely placed in time and space (it is Thursday, 12 September 1935) and he has an unbroken view from his window to the northwest). His 'mew' (a bird-coop, originally one designed for moultin falcomry) is condemned (we presume as unfit for human habitation) and Murphy must contemplate the upheaval of removal ('Soon he would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping and putting his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings'). Ostensibly, Murphy is constructed around the drab rituals and the vacuous repetitions of a largely inert life passed in a confined urban space. More profoundly, it seeks to represent a man's energetic inner life which finds its own repetitive rhythms and patterns and its own time-scheme distinct from those of the outside world.

When Beckett returned to fiction after the Second World War, he opted for the discipline of writing in French rather than in English. He also chose the form of a fluid monologue, a positively gushing 'stream of consciousness', rather than that of a third-person narrative. Molloy (written in 1947, published in Paris in 1951, and subsequently translated into English in 1955) shares a deliberate ambiguity of telling with its two successors. Each of the ageing narrators in the trilogy habitually contradicts himself, stumbles over the contortions of his syntax, and is obliged to pause in order to reflect on precisely how he has to express himself or on what he feels pressed to say. Both the flow of narrative and the language employed threaten to break under the strain. Beginnings are vexed or subverted, tenses shift between past and present, and what seem to be digressions or interpolations assume a vital momentum. Molloy (the very title of which may possibly, with the addition of one simple vowel, glance back to Joyce's superlatively fluid consciousness, Molly) is built around two self-explorative consciousnesses, the one seeking the other. Much as the disabled Molloy melts disconcertingly into his contemporary other half, the self-abused, decayed Moran, in the first novel, so both Molloy and Moran are subsumed in the other compulsive story-tellers of the trilogy, Malone and the isolated, unnamed narrator of The Unnamable. The last anguished and lachrymose teller recognizes the extent to which he has assimilated and now disowns the experiences of his narrative forebears: 'All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing . . . I though I was right in enlisting these sufferers in my pains. I was wrong. They never suffered my pains, their pains are nothing, compared to mine, a mere tittle of mine, the tittle I thought I could put from me, in order to witness it . . . these creatures have never been, only I and this black void have ever been.' Whereas Murphy sits it out 'as though he were free', this man of sorrows, the Unnamable, wrenches phrases from himself in his isolation and probes the implications of the perception that he is neither truly alone nor free of a larger humanity ('the little murmur of unconsenting man, to murmur what it is their humanity stifles'). The trilogy ends with an ultimate contradiction in terms: 'in silence you don't know, you must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.' 

Beckett's experiments with narrative form and with the disintegration of narrative form had few immediate echoes in the more popular fiction of the 1950s. The one British writer of the period who keenly responded to the idea of creating an avowedly 'Modernist' fiction, and whose experiments were enthusiastically received by a wide public, was Lawrence Durrell (1912-90). Durrell was born in India of parents whose families had made the sub-continent their home for several generations. Although he became briefly acclimatized to bohemian (as opposed to 'respectable') England in the early 1930s, Durrell found what he regarded as his spiritual home in the Mediterranean, moving first to Corfu and then, after the German invasion of Greece, to Egypt. As a young man he also responded to the liberating influence of two modern writers in particular, D. H. Lawrence (with whom he shared an antipathy to British reserve as much as to British rain) and the Paris-based American novelist Henry Miller (with whom he embarked on a long correspondence). Miller's influence can be felt on Durrell's The Black Book: An Agon, 'a savage charcoa sketch of spiritual and sexual etiolation', which was privately printed in Paris in 1938 (its overt eroticism precluded its publication in Britain until 1973). In 1944, as Press Officer of the British Information Service in Egypt, Durrell was posted to Alexandria, the city of 'five races, five languages, a dozen creeds' which inspired the four novels of his 'Alexandria Quartet'— Justine (1957), Balthazar, Mountolive (both 1958), and Clea (1960). Durrell's dusty, sweaty, multi-layered Aleandria, a city he described in Balthazar as 'half-imagined (yet wholly real), [which] begins and ends in us', is a phantasmagoric, Eliotic place in which men and women dissolve into one another and ancient splendours melt into modern inconveniences. The city's real and imagined disconnections provide the setting for a series of interlocked fictions describing interconnected, unfulfilling love-affairs. The narrator, Darley, is both a self-conscious, self-referential teller and an incorporator of the narrative voices of other tellers, notably that of a fellow-writer, Pursewarden. In one of the 'workpoints'—sentences, ideas, and occasionally poems or translations seemingly discarded from the main narrative of Justine and then appended to it as a kind of afterthought—Pursewarden's 'n-dimensional novel' is described by its author as having a forward narrative momentum which is 'counter-sprung by references backwards in time, giving the impression of a book which is not travelling from a to b but standing above time and turning slowly on its own axis to comprehend the whole pattern'. Readers are doubtless meant to read Darley's actual narrative as somehow shadowing Pursewarden's speculative one. The Alexandria Quartet, in common with Durrell's yet more ambitious 'Avignon Quintet'—Monsieur (1974), Livia (1978), Constance (1982), Sebastian (1983), and Quincx (1985)—attempts to break down preconceptions of time as much as it assaults inherited prejudices in favour of fictional realism. Durrell's literary reputation, so buoyant in the breezy, liberal climate of the early 1960s, tended to sag thereafter. Where his contemporary, Beckett, was economical, he was prodigal; where Beckett saw the force of scrupulous compression, he indulged in a passion for words which is more often libertine than it is liberating.

William Golding's first and most enduringly popular novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), gives a surer indication of his continuing concern with moral allegory than it does of his subsequent experiments with fictional form. Golding (1911-93) set the novel on a desert island on which a marooned party of boys from an English cathedral choir-school gradually falls away from the genteel civilization that has so far shaped it and regresses into dirt, barbarism, and murder. The island is cut off both from the disciplined harmony of the boys' musical background and from a disharmonious world of grown-ups at war. The novel is shaped intellectually by an intermixture of the Christian concept of original sin, a post-Darwinist and post-Wellsian pessimism, and a systematic undoing of R. M. Ballantyne's adventure story of plucky and resourceful boys, The Coral Island (1857). At the end of the story an officer from the warship that rescues the boys dejectedly remarks, 'I should have thought that a pack of British boys . . . would have been able to put up a better show than that'. The sudden shift of viewpoint and the dejection were re-explored, with subtle variations and darker ramifications, in each of Golding's subsequent novels. As the range of his fiction shows, Golding emerged as a major successor to an established line of Modernist mythopoeists. Unlike Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, or Jones, however, he was not content with a reanimation of ancient myth; he was intent on overturning and superseding a variety of modern rationalist formulations and on replacing them with charged, unorthodox moral shapes. It is not just British boys who reveal their innate depravity, but the whole human race. The Inheritors (1955) moves back into an anthropological, rather than Adamic, prehistory in which the talented, if thoroughly nasty and brutish, progenitors of Homo sapiens exterminate their gentler, simpler-minded Neanderthal precursors. The dense, difficult Pincher Martin (1956) has as its greedy egotistical 'hero' a drowned sailor, lost from a torpedoed destroyer, whose body is rolled by the Atlantic. But the 'Pincher' is also a survivor, one whose consciousness tries desperately to hold on to its fragmented identity in a watery purgatory. This identity attaches itslf to an imagined rock, one that Martin names 'Rocall' and one which he also recognized in its rhymed naval transmogrification as 'Buggerall' (a hellish nothing). Golding experimented with a similar metaphorical structue in Free Fall (1959), a tortuous exploration of free will and fallen humanity in relation to the scientific idea of the unrestrained movement of a body under the force of gravity. The subject of  The Spire of 1964 was both more concrete and more elusive. Jocelin, the ambitious Dean of an unnamed English cathedral at an unspecified point in the Middle Ages, is a fallen man obsessed with raising a tall stone spire above his cathedral. His obsession is determined by a serpentine knot of motives—architectural, theological, visionary, psychological, sexual, self-deprecating, and self-aggrandizing. Jocelin both achieves his desire and fails in it; he builds and awe-inspiring structure on shaky foundations, but he is also forced to experience its maiming; he erects an airy reflection of heavenly glory, but he is also obliged to recognize the hot, distracting force of the phallus; he periodically escapes upwards, with a vertiginous thrill, into a Gothic fretwork, but he is held earthbound by the overloaded, creaking pillars that have to support his aspiration. Finally struck down by a mortal paralysis, and attended by a priest known as Father Adam, the dying Jocelin struggles to find the meaning of his life's work, a meaning which gradually forms itself around the metaphoric core of the lost earthly paradise: 'In the tide, flying like a bluebird, struggling, shouting, screaing to leave behind the words of magic and incomprehension—It's like the appletree!'

Golding's The Pyramid (1967) was followed by what appeared to be an abstention from fiction, an abstention broken in 1979 by Darkness Visible. All Goldint's opening scenes, suggestions, and sentences are disconcertingly striking. None is more so than that of Darkness  Visible, a compelling evocation of an intense fire-storm in the London Blitz out of which walks a fearfully burned child: 'He was naked and the miles o light lit him variously . . . The brighness of his left side was not an effect of light. The burn was even more visible on the left side of his head.' From the terrible beauty of this beginning there develops an intense and sometimes confusing exploration of the polarities of redemptive saintliness and destructive malignity, of disinterested love and calculated terrorism. The four novels published since Darkness Visible—Rites of Passage (1980), its sequels Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989), and The Paper Men (1984)—have extended what can be seen as an established rhythm of contrasted sea-stories and land-stories all of which are concerned with extremity and isolation. The most successful is Rites of Passage, the first volume of a sea-trilogy set on a decayed man-of-war bound for Australia in the opening years of the nineteenth-century. Its cocky, journal-writing narrator, Edmund Talbot, is alerted to the problems of 'too much understanding' but can himself comprehend littls of 'all that is monstrous under the sun'. Talbot, like all Golding's central characters, is rawly exposed both to his darker self and to the grinding despair of one of his fellow-passengers. Although Golding's work has sometimes been compared to that of Conrad, it is often closer in spirit, and in its aspirations to the condition of poetry, to that of Eliot. Each of Golding's male protagonists seemes obliged to re-articulate the agonized, incomprehending, unspecific question of Gerontion: 'After such knowledge, what forgiveness?'

Yet more novelists of the 1950s-1980s

Beckett and Osborne

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

With benefit of hindsight, it is arguable that by far the most significant 'foreign' novelty to be performed in London in the years immediately preceding the appearance of Look Back in Anger was Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. The play opened to largely dismayed reviews at the small Arts Theatre in August 1955, but reports of the sensation it had caused in Paris two years earlier, coupled with a real enough and discriminating curiosity, allowed it to transfer for a longer run at the Criterion Theatre a month later. The success of Waiting for Godot in London cannot be simply put down to a yearning for innovation on the part of a theatre-going intelligentsia; the play also contained distinct echoes of a truly 'alternative', but often despised, British theatrical tradition, that of music-hall comedy. In Beckett's hands, however, that tradition had been transformed by a sparse, but none the less definitive, musicality and by a dialogue rich in literary resonance. Beckett (1906-89), born near Dublin, educated (like Wilde before him) at Portora Royal School and at Trinity College, and since 1937 permanently resident in Paris, cannot be slickly or imperially fitted into a narrowly 'English' tradition of English writing and English theatre. He was an English-speaking, Protestant Irishman, and, as the full range of his work demonstrates, his highly literate, cricket-playing, Bible-reading, Irish background had a profound bearing on what and how he wrote. Having worked closely with James Joyce and his international circle in Paris in the late 1920s, Beckett also remained part of a polyglot and polyphonic world of literary innovation. His earliest publications (which, apart from his work as a translator and a novelist, include an essay on Joyce and a study of Proust) also testify to his espousal of a Modernism which transcended frontiers and what were often presumed to be the impassible barriers between languages. Beckett continued to work in both English and French, with French often taking precedence over his native tongue. His work, however, ceased to be tied to a monoglot environment once it had undergone the scrupulous linguistic metamorphosis which marks his own acts of translation (his puns, for example, are often exclusively and inspiredly English).

Although his trilogy of novels, Molloy and Malone meurt (1951) and L'Innommable (1953) had established Beckett as amongst the most discussed and respected of the avant-garde Parisian writers in the early 1950s, it was Godot (also originally written in French) that gave him a wide international reputation. That reputation was cemented by his later work for the theatre, notably the plays known by their English titles as Endgame (1957), Krapp's Last Tape (1960), and Happy Days (1962). He also wrote innovatively for the radio (All that Fall of 1957, Embers of 1959, Words and Music of 1962, and Cascando of 1963) and for BBC television (Eh, Joe of 1965 and Ghost Trio of 1977). His one foray into the cinema, Film (a complex 'script' designed as a tribute to Buster Keaton in 1964), was remarkable not simply for its nods to a cinematic comedy rooted in music-hall and for its visual puns on the philosophical ideas of being and seeing but also for its silence broken only by the sound of a voice saying 'sssh'.

Beckett was consistent in his use of drama as an extension of his wider interest in the gaps, the jumps, and the lurches which characterize the functioning and the malfunctioning of the human mind. In his plays—as much as in his novels—ideas, phrases, images, and minds overlap; voices both interrupt and inherit trains of thought begun elsewhere or nowhere and separate consciousnesses both impede and impress themselves on one another. Beckett's dialogue, for which Waiting for Godot is particularly remarkable, is the most energetic, densely layered, and supple written by any twentieth-century playwright; his comedy, whether visual, verbal, ritual, or even, at times, slapstick is amongst the most subtle and surprising. The set of Waiting for Godot may, for example, require simply the suggestion of 'a country road' and 'a tree'; Endgame  may take place in a 'bare interior' and the designer of Happy Days may be instructed to aim for a 'maximum of simplicity and symmetry' in the representation of an 'expanse of scorched grass rising centre to low mound' but the static baldness of Beckett's visual statements serves both to counterpoise and complement the animation of his verbal ones. When Beckett uses blindness, as he does with Hamm in Endgame, he suggests that one kind of deprivation may alert audiences to the force of alternative ways of perceiving. When, by contrast, he uses silence, as in Film and the mime play Act without Words II (1967), he seems to be directing his audiences to explore the value of new sensory and physical formulations. Beckett never plays with minimalism and reductionism simply for the sake of the aesthetic effects he could achieve. In parallel to the work of certain Modernist architects and composers, if without their Puritan frugality, he was exploring the radical potential of the idea that 'less is more'.







Time-present, as when Beckett represents it in his plays, is broken, inconsistent, and inconsequential. Nevertheless, in each play he allows for the intrusion of a past which is oppressively rich in the larger inconsistencies of private and public history. Krapp's Last Tape and the two far sparser later plays, Footfalls and That Time (both 1976), make much out of the involuntary, untidy, quirky, and even ghost-haunted memories of the old. These memories negate linear concepts of time and of ageing as much as they disturb old assumptions about 'plot'. The structural principles on which he built both his plays and his novels can be related back to the pattern of ideas explored in 1931 in the dense critical essay on Proust. When, for example, he insists on Proust's 'contempt for a literature that "describes"', or when he affirms that 'there is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us', or when he describes 'the attempt to communicate where no communication is possible' as 'merely a simian vulgarity, or horribly comic', it is possible to recognize the extent to which his theatrical innovation was rooted both in a literary precedent and in a coherent Modernist philosophical statement. Beckett continued to be fascinated by what he saw as Proust's concern with the protective significance of habit: 'Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence.'  His own dramatic repetitions and iterations, his persistent echoes and footfalls, emerge not from a negative view of human existence, but from an acceptance of 'dull inviolability' as a positive, if minimally progressive, force. As his inviolable and unsentimental Krapp also seems to have discovered, a path forward lay in exploring the resonances of the circumambient darkness.

Although Beckett gradually came to be recognized as the most important dramatist writing in English in the latter half of the twentieth century, his work initially struck many early critics as emerging from a largely foreign tradition of symbolic and philosophically based drama. If the purely British shock waves radiating from John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956 need to be accounted for, it was because Osborne's work was more obviously a response to, as much as a reaction against, an established native theatrical tradition. His was the rebellion of an insider. Osborne (b. 1929) had served his apprenticeship as an actor in provincial touring companies and his plays show an appreciation both of the craftsmanship that went into the making of the respectable 'well-made play' and of the art that allows a Wilde, a Shaw, a Coward, and a Rattigan to transcend conventions while exploiting them. Osborne's sometimes painful witticisms can be as carefully and devastatingly placed as are those of Wilde and Coward, his confrontations and surprises can be as telling as those of Rattigan, his invectives and monologues can be as provocative as Shaw's. However, the origins of Osborne's style do not lie exclusively in what was once known as 'the legitimate theatre' but are also found in the noisier, often impromptu and far more various world of vaudeville. Where Beckett's debts to an inherited tradition of music-hall lie in his appreciation of dead-pan humour and careful timing, Osborne's are revealed in his love of the outrageous, of the suggestive and, above all, of loud-mouthed repartee. It was a debt acknowledged in his forceful juxtaposition of a shabby and increasingly outdated type of theatre with a faded and redundant British imperialism in The Entertainer (1957).

Look Back in Anger introduced the noisiest of what contemporary journalists dubbed the 'angry young men' to theatre audiences. Osborne's hero, Jimmy Porter, is 25 and 'a disconcerting mixture of sincerity and cheerful malice, of tenderness and freeboting; restless, importunate, full of pride, a combination which alienates the sensitive and insensitive alike'. He was for the 1950s what the restless, idealistic, public-school misfits had been to the 1930s (Porter's father, we learn, had fought in Spain, but Porter himself is neither an idealist nor an ex-public schoolboy). He is, and his wife's friend Alison recognizes, 'born out of his time.' He is a revolutionary without a revolution, or, to put it in terms readily grasped in the 1950s, he is a rebel without a cause. He fulminates against the crumbling authority of what he identifies as Establishment values; his wife's middle-class and ex-Indian army parents; his Sandhurst-educated, Member of Parliament brother-in-law (characterized as 'the platitude from outer space'); bishops and church bells; the intellectually pretentious Sunday newspapers; English music (Vaughan Williams) and English literature (Shakespeare, Eliot, 'Auntie Wordsworth'). Nevertheless, Jimmy Porter is the protagonist in an otherwise affirmative play, one in which love and loyalty are tested and are found, despite the strains, not to be wanting. He may be a new type of character, classless, restless, and aimless, but his dramatic context was largely conventional. When a middle-aged Jimmy Porter returned to the stage in Osborne's play Déjà Vu in 1992, the force of those dramatic and philosophical conventions became self-evident.

In many ways Osborne's most impressive 'angry young man' is the title character in his historical play Luther (1961). When Martin utters his clasic avowal of personal integrity—'Here I stand; God help me; I can do no more. Amen'—we sense that it has been refined by his latent anger: anger with his parents, his Church, and even with the demands of his God. Osborne's Martin may periodically clutch his bowels in agonies of constipation, and he may have flashes of theological insight in the latrine, but he is the quintessential Protestant, the lonely rebel whom God has graced with a cause. In Inadmissible Evidence (1964) Osborne asked for a location 'where a dream takes place . . . a site of helplessness, of oppression and polemic', in essence an office-cum-courtroom in which an angry, sex-obsessed, middle-aged solicitor lurches rhetorically towards a private and professional breakdown. In the first volume of his pungently observant, and equally pungently spiteful, autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981), Osborne observed of himself as a schoolboy that he already had a gift for smoking out 'the prigs, hedgers and dissemblers' and that he had a complementary talent to vex rather than to entertain, a talent 'not to amuse but to dissent, although I possibly thought I could do both'. The anger, the dissent, the vexatiousness, the protest, and the theatricality of Osborne's characters has always been an extension of his perception of himself.

In Our Time: Samuel Beckett (NIVEL AVANZADO)

Sección B, NIVEL AVANZADO - Samuel Beckett

Un libro mío sobre Samuel Beckett y la narración reflexiva: http://www.unizar.es/departamentos/filologia_inglesa/garciala/publicaciones/SBNR.html




sigue NIVEL AVANZADO: Una charla-debate sobre Beckett, para practicar inglés de Nueva York: