Jesús Tronch Pérez    [home]

Narrative webpage

[page under construction !! ]

narrator | focalization | narrative mediation | characters | time | types

 19th century | 20th and 21st centuries |
 utopian / dystopian | coming-of-age | excerpts | bibliography |

novel (literature) in Britannica ; 

Narrator

(Rimmon-Kennan 1983)

narrator is the narrative voice, the speaker of the text

implied author and implied reader are not participants in the narrative communication process (they don’t speak)

Narration is an event, at a different level from the narrated (fictional) event, always superior

Narration —story relationships:  • temporal • subordination (narrative levels)

Temporal:

Ulterior narration: events may be narrated only after they happen (common sense, but ...)

anterior narration: narration which precedes events (generally using future tense, also the present), as in prophecies (biblical), curses, dreams

simultaneous e.g. reporting or diary events (e.g. when the narrator seems to be verbalizing his actions while performing them)

Intercalated when telling and performing follow each other in alternation: classic examples are the epistolary novels (Les liaison dangereuses 1782 by Laclos)

Levels: diegesis= story

 • extradiegetic: immediately superior to the first narrative, concerned with its narration

e.g.: the narrator in Canterbury Tales; adult Pip in Great Expectations

• diegetic level (Genette ‘intradiegetic): the narrated events themselves

e.g. the pilgrims’ journey; Pip falling in love with Estella

• hypodiegetic (Genette ‘metadiegetic): events narrated by fictional characters. Second degree narrative

e.g. the exploits of the pardoner; Arabian Nights,

Function of hypodiegetic narratives: actional; explicative; thematic;

Authors often play with narrative levels to blur the borderline between reality and fiction

Typology of narrators: according to 4 criteria or factors

1- narrative level

2- participation in the story it narrates

3- perceptibility

4- reliability

Narrative level:

• extradiegetic narrator: above or superior to the story

e.g.: Tom Jones (1749), Sons and Lovers (1913), Pip in Great Expectations; [the narrator in Canterbury Tales]

• intradiegetic narrator (second degree narrator): if the narrator is also a diegetic character in the first narrative told by the extradiegetic narrator, then there is a second-degree or intradiegetic narrator

e.g.: the pardoner in Canterbury Tales; Marlowe in Heart of Darkness,

James’s Turn of the Screw the anonymous ‘I’ is the extradiegetic narrator, the intradiegetic one is Douglas, the hypodiegetic narrator is the governess

• hypodiegetic narrator (metadiegetic)

Participation in the story

Both extra and intradiegetic narrator can be present or absent of the story they narrate!

• heterodiegetic: does not participate in the fictional story

e.g.: Tom Jones (1749), Sons and Lovers (1913),

• homodiegetic: does participate

 protagonist (autodiegesis) - witness (observer)

Combination:

• [extra-heterodiegetic] omniscient narrators

e.g.: Tom Jones (1749), Sons and Lovers (1913), (Gen: Homer)

• extra-homodiegetic: e.g. retrospective narrative in 1st person

e.g.:  Pip in Great Expectations, he is a higher narratorial authority with respect to the fictional characters and events (from above) but tells a story of himself when young.

• [intra-heterodiegetic]: fictional or diegetic narrator telling a story (second degree narrative) in which she does not participate

e.g.: Schherezade is a fictional character in a story narrated by an extradiegetic narrator; yet inthe stories sh narrates, she does not participate, she does not appear as a character. She is therefore an intradiegetic - heterodiegetic character

• [intra-homodiegetic: fictional or diegetic narrator telling a story (second degree narrative) in which he is a character (second degree

e.g. pardoner in Canterbury Tales (protagonist); Lockwood in Wuthering Heights (1847) (witness); (Gen: Ulysses in books IX i XII)

Degree of perceptibility of the narrator’s presence

This ranges from more covert to more overt (Booth describes them as dramatized and undramatized narrators) See also Stanzel

maximum of covertness: Hemingway’s ‘The Killers’

Signs of the narrator’s presence (Chatman’s list in mounting order of perceptibility)

1. Description of setting: In a play or film, the description is shown directly, but in narrative fiction, it has to be said in language, the language of the narrator

2. Identification of characters: ‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy flowers herself’, ‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich...’

3. Temporal summary: To compress a lapse of time in a summary (a whole life of the character Albino in Nabokov’s Laughter in the dark ) implies the presence of a narrator

4. Definition of character:

5. Reports of what characters did not think or say: A narrator who can tell things of which the character are unconscious or conceal is clearly felt as an independent source of information

6. Commentary: a) Interpretation: When the narrator explains something either about the story or about the narration.

b) Judgements

c) generalizations

Reliability

Reliable narrator: when the reader takes the narrator’s rendering or commentary of the story as an authoritative account of the fictional truth

Unreliable narrator: when the reader suspects the narrator

Different degrees of unreliability

Signs of unreliability:

- narrator’s limited knowledge,

- his personal involvement,

- his problematic value-scheme: the colouring of the narrator’s account by a questionable value-scheme

A narrator’s moral values are considered questionable if they do not tally with those of the implied author

When the facts contradict the narrator’s views

when the outcome of the action proves the narrator wrong

when the views of other characters clash with the narrator’s

when the narrator’s language contain internal contradictions

Focalization

(Rimmon-Kennan 1983 ; Cohan and  Shires pp. 96-98; Bal )

Term proposed by Genette to refer to point of view, angle of vision, perspective, prism, “vision”, “champ”, ... 

Focalization avoids confusion between ‘perspective’ and ‘narration’ implied in the use of the term “point of view”.

‘Who speaks?’ and “Who sees?”. They are not necessarily the same agent. Someone may tell what another says

Focalization and narration are separated in 1st person retrospective narration; Pip in Great Expectations: Pip, the adult, narrates; Pip, the child, focalizes

‘3rd-person centre of consciousness’ (The Ambassadors, Portrait), the centre of consciousness if the ‘focalizer’ (or ‘reflector’ -term used by H. James and by F. Stanzel), while the user of the 3rd person is the narrator

–> Then, on focalization terms, there is no difference between 1st person retrospective narration and ‘3rd-person centre of consciousness’: focalizers are both characters within the fictional world. The narrator is different

Distinguish between ‘focalizer’ (subject) and ‘focalized’ (object)

Types of focalization: 1) position relative to story; 2) degree of persistence

1) Position relative to story

Focalizer

– external (Genette ‘non-focalized’ récit): Tom Jones, A Passage to India; or in 1st person narratives L’etranger, [Joyce’s “Araby”]

“narrator-focalizer”

– internal (analogous to Genette internal): inside the represented events:

generally a “character-focalizer” = Pip, the child, in many parts of Great Expectations

Test: if narrative segment can be rewritten in 1st person then the segment was internally focalized

Focalized object can be seen from ‘without’ (only outward appearance is presented) or from ‘within’ (feelings, and thoughts are presented)

In combination:

external focalizer — focalized from without (Abraham about to kill his son)

—  focalized form within (Sons and Lovers)

19th c. novel; ‘he thought’ ‘he felt’

internal focalizer — focalized from without (Hemingway, Kafka)

—  focalized from within (Molly Bloom) interior monologue

2) Degree of persistence

– fixed: one focalizer throughout the novel

– alternate: between two predominant focalizers : White The Solid Mandala (1966)

– multiple : shift among several focalizers: Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1931)

Facets of focalization: perceptual, psychological, ideological

Perceptual facet

The focalizer’s sensory range. Perception (sight, hearing, smell, etc,) is determined by  two main coordinates: time, space

Space

– bird’s eye: panoramic or simultaneous focalization (classical position of narrator-focalizer)

– limited observer: internal focalization, attached to a character or an agent within the story (Joyce’s Eveline)

Time

External focalization: – panchronic (if unpersonified focalizer), or – retrospective (if character focalizer)

Internal focalization: – synchronous with the information, limited to the ‘present’ of characters

Psychological facet

Concerns the mind and emotions of the focalizer. Cognitive and emotive orientation of the focalizer towards the focalized

Mind - cognitive component:

External focalizer - unrestricted knowledge [omniscient]

Internal focalizer - restricted knowledge. being a part of the represented world he cannot know everything

Emotion - emotive component:

External -objective, neutral, uninvolved focalization

Internal - sujective, coloured, involved focalization

Ideological facet

Consists of ‘a general system of viewing the world conceptually’ in accordance with which the events and characters of the story are evaluated (Uspensky 1973: 8)

The idelogy of the narrator-focalizer is usually taken as authoritative, and all other ideologies (which may emerge) are evaluated from this ‘higher’ position

In more complex cases, the single authoritative external focalizer gives way to a plurality of ideological positions whose validity is doubtful in principle. Some of these positions may concur in part or in whole, others may be mutually opposed, the interplay among them provoking a non-unitary  ‘polyphonic’ reading of the text (Bakhtin)

Crime and Punishment. The ideology of the text emerges from a juxtapostion of Raskolnikov’s views with his own performance, as well as with the opinions of Razumihin, Sonia, Svidrigailov, and the anonymous officer in the bar

A character may represent an ideological position through his way of seeing the world of his behaviour in it , but also -like Raskolnikoiv- through explicit discussion of  his ideology.

Ideology contributes to focalization but also plays a part in the story (characters) and in narration

Interrelations among the various facets

They may concur, but also belong to different, even clashing focalizers.

In Great Expectations, the perceptual focalizer is usually the young, experiencing Pip,

whereas the ideology tends to be focalized by the older, narrating Pip

Verbal indicators of focalization

Focalization is expressed by language

Naming: use of various names for the same character (for Napoleon in war and Peace ) betray differences and changes of attitude toward him: for the Russians, Bonaparte, Buonaparte; for the French, Napoleon, L’empereur. Most Russians switch to Napoleon after the conquest

Shifts in naming can indicate a change of focalizer within the same sentence or paragraph

Adjective may indicate an evaluation made on the part of the narrator as focalizer

Verb may indicate an action (to forget) which point to an external focalizer by signalling a temporal and cognitive distance from the event

There are cases in which is difficult or even impossible to distinguish between external and internal focalization: e.g. “I imagine that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes” (Joyce, “Araby”, quoted from Rimmon-Kennan p. 86)

back to top |

Narrative mediation

Sources:  Stanzel (S), Rimmon-Kenan (K), Genette (G), Friedman (F), Barthes (BR), Wayne Booth (BW)

Following table of ´kinds of narrative mediation´.

If we take into account focalization, participation of narrator and perceptibility of narrator (Stanzel: perspective, person, mode) we can talk about three ideal kinds of narrative situation depending on the combination of these aspects and which aspect dominates:

Omniscient narrator (non-character narrator)

authorial = *external perspective

*high degree of perceptibility (R) - narrator mode, personalized narrator (S)  ‘telling’ (F), 

* heterodiegetic (R, G), non-character narrator; narrator exists outside his fictional reality, does not belong to the world of the characters (S), non-identity with the realms of existence (person)

Character- narrator

first person = * homodiegetic (R); narrator is a character within the world of the fictional events identity (person)

* internal perspective

*high degree of perceptibility (R) - narrator mode, personalized narrator (S)  ‘telling’ (F), repertorial narration (S),

3rd person centre of consciousness

figural = * minimum or zero degree of perceptibility (R); unpersonalized narrator, scenic presentation (S) = ‘showing’ (F), reflector-character (mode)

reflection of fictional events through consciousness of a character in the novel without narratorial comment.

This character Stanzel calls ‘reflector’ (distinct from the narrator) E.g. Portrait of the Artist

* internal perspective

*heterodiegetic (R, G), non-character narrator; narrator exists outside his fictional reality, does not belong to the world of the characters (S), non-identity with the realms of existence (person)

that is third-person reference (to the reflector-character)

Effects, techniques

we will also take into account two types of narrative:

- report, telling: narration is interpreted, explained

- scene, showing: projects the action directly before the eyes of the reader, it is less abstract

Omniscient narrator (authorial)

-> ‘the novelist commands all the secrets of life’ privilege (Forster),

the story can be seen from any or all the angles

allows the author to reveal the minds of his characters freely and at will and to dominate with his superior and explanatory tone the perception and awareness of his characters

Telling, repertorial narration (S) predominates

Characters’ consciousness: rendered in report form, as complete thoughts in full sentences

Suitable for exciting novels which rush from one phase to the next

for novels with great spans of time  (the repertorial narration can compress the stream of events, increase or decrease the tempo)

Sometimes this mediation is disguised as an ‘editor of a manuscript’, a ‘reporter of an event communicated to him’

Editorial omniscience:  Tom Jones, War and Peace

narrator intrudes. Reports what goes on. Criticizes what goes on in the mind of the characters, and of his own

narrator may speak in 1st person, ‘I’ or ‘We’

Neutral omniscience: [Sons and Lovers, A Passage to India]

absence of direct authorial intrusions, narrator avoids personal commentary

narrator speaks impersonally in 3rd person

Uses report to describe and explain the character’s words and action from his perspective

‘... a figure came from the dark. It was a tall young man. He had a swarthy complexion with a well-groomed black mustache with curled points though his age could not be more than three or four-and-twenty’

Character-narrator (First-person narrator) Great Expectations

Internal focalization -> enhances effect of realism

-> story close to reality,

sense of immediacy, vividness, gains intensity

<- con. it’s all report, it creates a distance, less mobility, smaller range of source of information

Report-like narration is used, and reminds the reader of the existence of a narrating process which is separated from the experiencing process by a time span (a narrating self is different from the experiencing self)

Scenic presentation concentrates the reader’s interest onthe action and thus on the experiencing self

Characters’ consciousness:

If scenic presentation is executed to an extreme degree, all references and traces of the narrating self are eliminated: action consists of dialogue or monologue

Characters’ consciousness: if the narrating self withdraws  -> interior monologue, stream of consciousness)

It can appear in the 3rd person

Continuous spectrum according to the degree of presentation of the narrative act [perceptibility]Ñ toward the authorial novel, towards the figural novel

Witness-narrator :  Moby Dick

The reader perceives only the thoughts, feelings, and perception of the witness-narrator

The witness has no more than ordinary access to the mental states of the other characters (through letters, diaries; inferences)

Usually the witness-narrator informs the reader of his limitations

Scene predominates

Suitable for suspense, mystery, a situation to be gradually built up (Lord Jim)

Protagonist-narrator :  Robinson Crusoe

To tell one-s own story in 1st person -> less mobility and smaller range of sources of information

Limited almost entirely to his own thoughts

Suitable for tracing the growth of a personality (Great Expectations)

The epistolary novel can be viewed as an extension of the First-person novel

Henry Esmond (The History of Henry Esmond written by Himself by W. Thackeray= on the borderline between authorial and First-person.

The narrator plays the authorial role as long as he reports the story of his hero in the third person. That story is his own story.

The narrator again and again reveals his identity with the hero, in a few places he even narrates in the 1st person

3rd person centre of consciousness (Figural narrative situation) (The Ambassadors)

A character-author speaking about the lives of other characters is an obstacle between his illusion of reality and the reader (F)

To reach illusion of reality = story told as if by a character

The reader perceives directly the action filtered through the consciousness of one of the characters, thus avoiding that removal to a distance produced by retrospective 1st person narr. Instead of receiving a report, we receive an act of judgement and reflection (F)

(internal focalization) in 3rd person (non-participant narrator, heterodiegetic narrator) [figural narr. sit.]

The reader has the illusion of being present on the scene in one of the figures, or if the point of observation does not lie in any of the novel’s figures, the reader has the feeling of being present as an imaginary observer, witness of the events (S)

The reader seems to listen to no one, the story comes directly through the mind of the characters (F)

The appearance of the characters, the setting, is perceived by the reader only through the mind of a character(s) (F)

Scene predominates, both focalized from within and from without

Showing (not telling) Difference between omniscient author/narrator peering into the minds and telling, and the withdrawn author showing us internal states

-She saw a figure com from the dark. It was a tall young man. She noticed his swarthy complexion with a well-groomed black moustache with curled points. Though he cannot be more than three or four-and-twenty, she thought’

When all traces of the process of narration are removed -> dramatic mode (Friedman) as in ‘The Killers’, action presented in dialogue

Suitable for novels in which the action progresses slowly (as opposed to ‘authorial narr situation’)

   for novel concentrating in a short span of time (Mrs Dalloway a few hours)

    for novels concerned with the rendering of human consciousness

Since 1900, the figural novel has enjoyed ever-growing popularity (Henry James, John Dos Passos, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Woolf, Huxley)

This is connected to the discovery of the human consciousness as an object of literary presentation

Human consciousness characterized by momentary and fragmentary moods, thoughts, a volatile material which does not cry for a narrative mediation in the form of a report (‘telling’) but scenic presentation without the obtrusive presence of the narrator

The mental process is the action of the novel

Characters’ consciousness: rendered in free indirect discourse as dominant form

-thought report= ‘On turning round Fred saw Jack coming across the street towardshim’

- ‘ ‘Look!’ Fred turned round. Jack was coming across the street towards him’

Multiple selective omniscience / Selective omniscience

multiple: the  reader is allowed a composite of perspectives (To the Lighthouse)

selective: the reader is limited to the mind of only one of the characters (Portrait of the Artist)

multiple: suitable to present experience or personality as emerging from the sensibilities of various individuals

selective: suitable to catch the mid in a moment of discovery (Portrait)

A first person novel (without designation of the narrative act) can be translated into a figural novel is the 1st person is changed to a 3rd person

Dramatic mode (Hemingway ‘Hills like White Elephants’, James’s The Awkward Age)

Information available to the reader is limited to what the characters do and say

Appearance of characters and setting may be supplied by stage directions

Mental states are to be inferred from the dialogue and action

Scene (wholly scenic)

A character may look out of the window but what he sees is not told directly

back to top |

Time

...

back to top |

Characters

Analysis of characters at the abstract level of the fabula

Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. Trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968)
Characters in folktales categorized according to roles or functions

1. The villain
2. The donor
3. The helper
4. The sought-for person (and her father)
5. The dispatcher
6. The hero
7. The false hero
   

     A character may peform more than one role

Souriau, Étienne. Les deux cent mille situations dramatiques (Paris: Flammarion, 1950)
Catalogue of dramatic ‘functions’

• Lion ... the oriented thematic Force
• Sun ... the Representative of the wished-for Good, of the orienting Value
• Earth ... virtual Recipient of that Good (that for which the Lion is working)
• Mars ... the Opponent
• Libra ... the Arbiter, attributer of the Good
• Moon ... the Rescue, the doubling of one of the preceding forces
  

Actantial model

(Greimas, A.J. Sémantique structurale. 1966; see also Cohan and Shires p. 69- : Bal p. 200- )

“The relationships governing this basic actantial model are  centred on the notion of desire, which provides the motivation for action at surface level and the mythical impulse in the deep structure.” (Onega and Landa, pp.76-7)
Greimas distinguishes between ‘actors’ and ‘actants’. Both can include objects and abstract concepts.
“The same ‘actant’ can be manifested by more than one ‘acteur’, and the same ‘acteur’ can be assigned to more than one ‘actant’.” (Rimmon 35)

• Subject  [ Propp's ‘hero’ ; Souriau's ‘thematice Force’]
  
• Object [Propp's ‘sought-for person’ ; Souriau's Good, Value ]
• Sender [ Souriau's ‘arbiter, attributer of the Good’ ; Propp's ‘(the sought-for person and) her father’ ; initiator of the action, agent enabling the action]
• Receiver [Souriau's ‘virtual recipeint of the Good’ ; Propp's ‘dispatcher’]
• Helper [ Souriau's ‘rescue’ ; Propp's ‘donor’ and ‘helper’ ]
  
• Opponent [ Propp's ‘villain’]

Subject vs. Object
Sender vs. Receiver
Helper vs. Opponent (their functions are analogous to the circumstantial fucntion of adverbs)

In a common love story: He = subject + receiver ; She = object + sender
In The Quest for the Holy Grail : Hero = subject ; Holy Grail  = object ; God = sender ; Mankind = Receiver

sender — object —> receiver
                    î
helper — subject <— opponent

Marxist ideology as expressed by a militant : man = subject ; classless society  = object ; history = sender ; mankind = receiver ; bourgeois class = opponent ; working class = helper

back to top |

Types

Types of novels:

novel | novella | short story | tale | nonfiction novel (‘faction’)

romance | adventure novel
picaresque
science fiction | fantasy | prophecy
horror | Gothic |
detective | mystery | thriller | Newgate | spy
realistic | naturalistic |  modernist | postmodernist | nouveau roman (anti-novel) | magic realism
sentimental 
satirical | pastoral | comical | dystopian
historical |  roman à clef | pseudohistorical
retrospective | memoir
epistolary
bildungsroman | apprenticeship | coming of age novel
psychological 
social | proletarian, working-class | social science fiction
novel of manners
silver fork novel | Hampstead novel
campus, academic
feminine | feminist
colonial | postcolonial

‘blockbuster’ | family saga | ‘sex and shopping’ novel | ‘chick-lit’ | ‘new man’ | ‘lad’ | 

cyberfiction | hyperfiction |
fanfiction
graphic |

back to top |

19th century novel

A chronology:

1794    Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho

    W. Godwin: Caleb Williams

1796    Fanny Burney: Camilla

    M. G. Lewis: The Monk

1811      Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility

1813      Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice

1814    Walter Scott: Waverley

    Jane Austen: Mansfield Park

1816      Jane Austen: Emma

1817      Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

1818    Walter Scott: Rob Roy, Heart of Mid-Lothian

    Jane Austen: Persuasion, Northanger Abbey

    T. Peacock: Nightmare Abbey

1820      W. Scott: Ivanhoe

1821      T. De Quincey: Confessions of an Opium Eater

1823      W. Scott: Quentin Duward

1836      Charles Dickens: Pickwick Papers

1837      Dickens: Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby (1838)

1840-6   Dickens: Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge (1841), A Christmas Carol (1843), Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), Dombey and Son (1846)

1847    Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre

    Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights

    Anne Brontë: Anne Grey

    William Thackeray: Vanity Fair

1848      Elizabeth Gaskell: Mary Barton

1848      Dickens: David Copperfield

1852-61 Dickens: Bleak House, Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1855-7), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860-1)

1855    E. Gaskell: North and South

    A. Trollope: The Warden, Barchester Towers (1857)

1859    George Eliot: Adam Bede

    George Meredith: The Ordeal of Richard Feverel

1860    George Eliot: The Mill on the Floss

    Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White

1861      George Eliot: Silas Marner

1865      Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland

1868      Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone

1870      Dickens: The Mystery of Edwin Drood

1871      George Eliot: Middlemarch (1871-2)

1872      Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass

1874      Hardy: Far from the Madding Crowd

1878      Hardy: The Return of the Native

1879    Henry James: Daisy Miller

    George Meredith: The Egoist

1881      Henry James: Portrait of a Lady

1883      R. L. Stevenson: Treasure Island

1886    Henry James: The Bostonians

    George Moore: A Drama in Muslin

    George Gissing: Demos

    R. L. Stevenson: Kidnapped, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

1887-     A. Conan Doyle: adventures of Sherlock Holmes

1891    Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

    Gissing: New Grub Street

    O. Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray

1894      R. Kipling: The Jungle Book

1895    Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure

H. G. Wells: The Time Machine

1897    H. G. Wells: The Invisible Man

    Bram Stoker: Dracula

1898      H. G. Wells: The War of the Worlds

1900      Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim

1901      R. Kipling: Kim

1902    Henry James: Wings of the Dove

    Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness

Oliver Twist :  Gutneberg   online text | trad. José Méndez Herrera (primeras páginas)

Wuthering Heights :  online text |   Cumbres borrascosas excerpts

20th and 21st centuries

periods  | canon | 21st century - awards | production and distribution |

"English Literature" Britannica

Lists : Modern Library 100 Best ; BBC  Big Read  (wkp) ; Time 100 Novels ; Penguin "Great Books of the 20th Century" ; Le Monde 100 ; Times 50 greatest writers 1945- ;

By decades : authors and titles from "English Literature" Britannica [underline indicates an EB entry]

1900 - 1910: Edwardian

H.G. Wells : The Time Machine (1895),  The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The First Men in the Moon (1901)
      A Modern Utopia (1905), Ann Veronica (1909), Tono-Bungay (1909)
John Galsworthy:  The Man of Property (1906) txt
Arnold Bennett : The Old Wives' Tale (1908) html
E. M. Forster : Howards End (1910)

Henry James : The Ambassadors (1903), The Golden Bowl (1904)
Joseph Conrad : Lord Jim (1900), "Heart of Darkness" (1902), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907)

1910-1920 :

D. H. Lawrence : Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920)
James Joyce: Dubliners  (1914) texts, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) texts, 
Wyndham Lewis : Tarr (1918)
Ford Madox Ford : The Good Soldier (1915) texts

Katherine Mansfield, Bliss and Other Stories (1920)
Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage (1915-1967)
Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (1918)

1920-1930 : 

Virginia Woolf:  "Modern Fiction" (1919, rev. 1925) html, Jacob's Room (1922),  Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), A Room of One's Own (1929), The Waves (1931)
James Joyce: Ulysses (1922) htm
D. H. Lawrence : Kangaroo (1923), The Plumed Serpent (1926)

E. M. Forster: A Passage to India (1924)

Ford Madox Ford : Parade's End (1950; Some Do Not 1924, A Man Could Stand Up 1926; Last Post 1928)
Wyndham Lewis : The Human Age (The Childermass, 1928)

Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party (1922)
Jean Rhys

Aldous Huxley : Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), Point Counter Point (1928)

1930-1940 : 

Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932) txt  html  , Eyeless in Gaza (1936),  ... Brave New World Revisited (1958) ...  Island (1962) wkp ;  somaweb

George Orwell : A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), The Road To Wigan Pier (1937), Homage to Catalonia (1938) ...  Animal Farm (1945) , Ninety Eighty-Four (1949)

Christopher Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935), Goodbye to Berlin (1939)

Evelyn Waugh : Vile Bodies (1930) …
Graham Greene : It's a Battlefield (1934), Brighton Rock (1938) …

Lewis Grassic Gibbon, A Scots Quair trilogy
Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole (1933)

Elizabeth Bowen, Death of the Heart (1938)

Virginia Woolf:  The Waves (1931), Three Guineas (1938),  Between the Acts (1941)
James Joyce: Finnegans Wake (1939) text from Words site ; ALP from JADA

John Cowper Powys : A Glastonbury Romance (1932)

1940-1950 :

George Orwell : Animal Farm (1945)  text wiki , Ninety Eighty-Four (1949)  text wiki ( "Politics and the English Language" 1946  text wiki  )

Evelyn Waugh: Put Out More Flags (1942), Brideshead Revisited (1945), Sword of Honour trilogy (1965 ; Men At Arms 1952, Officers and Gentlemen 1955, Unconditional Surrender 1961)
Graham Greene : The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948) txt , The End of the Affair (1951)

Henry Green: Caught (1943), Concluding (1948), Nothing (1950)
Ivy Compton-Burnett :

Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (1949)
Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym
Patrick Hamilton

[Malcolm Lowry : Under the Volcano 1947 ]

1950-1960 :

William Golding : Lord of the Flies (1964), [The Inheritors ]
Iris Murdoch : The Bell (1958),
Kingsley Amis : Lucky Jim (1954)
"Angry Young Men": John Braine, John Wain, Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, David Storey

Doris Lessing : Children of Violence (1952-69)

Anthony Powell: A Dance to the Music (1951-1975)
C. P. Snow : Strangers and Brothers (1940-70)

Malcolm Bradbury : [Eating People is Wrong 1959]

Samuel Beckett: Molloy (1951), Watt (1953) Malone Dies (1958), The Unnamable (1960)

[ Lawrence Durrell: The Alexandria Quartet (1957-60) ]

[ Chinua Achebe : Things Fall Apart 1958 ]

1960-1970 :

Muriel Spark : The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
Iris Murdoch : A Severed Head  (1961),

Doris Lessing : [The Memoirs of a Survivor 1975]

Angus Wilson : No Laughing Matter (1967)
David Lodge: [The British Museum if Falling Down 1965, Out of the Shelter 1970] …

Paul Scott : Raj Quartet (The Jewel in the Crown 1966, The Day of the Scorpion 1968, The Towers of Silence 1971, A Division of the Spoils 1975], [Staying On 1977 Booker]

[ John Fowles, The Collector, The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969)

[ B. S. Johnson, The Unfortunates (1969)

Patrick O'Brien, Master and Commander (1969)

1970-1980 :

J.G. Farrell : Troubles (1970), The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) [Booker], The Singapore Grip (1978)

Angela Carter : The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979)

Doris Lessing: Canopus in Argos — Archives (1979-83)

V. S. Naipaul : [In a Free State 1971 Booke],  A Bend in the River (1979)

[Iris Murdoch : The Sea, the Sea 1978 Booker]
[Nadine Gordimer : The Conservationist 1974 Booker]

Buchi Emecheta
William Trevor
Bernard MacLaverty,

1980-1990 :

Salman Rushdie : Midnight's Children (1981) [Booker], Shame (1983), The Satanic Verses (1988), The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999)

Julian Barnes : [ Flaubert's Parrot 1984], A History of the World in 10  1/2 Chapters (1989)

[Angela Carter : Night at the Circus 1984 ]

Graham Swift : Waterland 1983

David Lodge : Nice Work (1988)

Margaret Drabble : The Radiant Way (1987)

Martin Amis: Money (1984)

Kazuo Ishiguro : An Artist of the Floating World (1986), [The Remains of the Day 1989 Booker ]
Timothy Mo : An Insular Possession (1986)

Barry Unsworth, Pascali's Island 1980, The Rage of the Vulture 1982, Stone Virgin 1985

William Golding: Rites of Passage 1980 [Booker], Close Quarters 1987, Fire Down Below (trilogy as To the Ends of the Earth 1991)

1990-2000 :

Vikram Seth : A Suitable Boy (1993)

Ben Okri [: The Famished Road 1991 Booker]

A. S. Byatt: Possession (1990) [Booker]
Adam Thorpe, Ulverton (1992)

Ian McEwan : The Innocent 1990, Black Dogs 1992, [Enduring Love 1997]

Graham Swift : Last Orders (1996)

[ Angela Carter : Wise Children 1991 ]

[Michael Ondaatje: The English Patient 1992 Booker]

[ Hanif Kureishi : The Buddha of Suburbia 1990 ]

[J. M. Coetzee : Disgrace 1999 Booker]

Barry Unsworth, Morality Play 1995
Patrick O'Brien, Blue at the Mizzen (1999)
Beryl Bainbridge: The Birthday Boys (1991), Everyman for Himself (1996), Master Georgie (1998)

2000-

David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas (2004)

[Hilary Mantel :  Wolf Hall 2009 Booker, Bring Up the Bodies 2012 Booker]

Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White (2002)

[ Zadie Smith : White Teeth 2000 ]
[Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss 2006 Booker ]

Ian McEwan: Atonement (2001), Saturday (2005)

[ Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go (2005)

[Julian Barnes : The Sense of an Ending 2011 Booker]

[Margaret Atwood : The Blind Assassin 2000 Booker]

back to top | back to 20th and 21st c. |

Production and distribution

( Franklin in Leader ; Awards in Shaffer

Awards

Man Booker Prize : full-length novel in English, “only English-language writers from the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, and the Commonwealth countries were eligible. In 2013, however, it was announced that the prize would be open to English-language writers worldwide from 2014” (EBOA)

“the best-known literary prize in Britain” (Childs 2005, 33)

“Publishers choose the novels in the running for the Booker, whose small management committee includes three publishers, an agent, a librarian, a public relations consultant, and one author (the awarding panel itself has an academic, a critics or two, a writer or two, and a 'celebrity' who, a little paradoxically, represents the 'person in the street')” (Childs 2005, 33)

Whitbread / Costa Book Award . “writers resident in the United Kingdom and Ireland for books published there in the previous year. Established in 1971 and initially sponsored by the British corporation Whitbread PLC, the awards are given annually and are administered by the British Booksellers Association.” (“Costa Book Award” EBOA)

“the richest annual literary award” (Childs 2005, 33)

“the Booker [is] sometimes accused of being middle-brow and populist whereas the Whitbread, perhaps because it is less well-known, cast as a more worthy 'alternative' award” (Childs 2005, 33)

Orange / Baileys Women's Prize : novels written in English by a woman in the previous year. Translations were not eligible, but publishers could submit works by women of all nationalities, provided that the works had been released in the United Kingdom during the previous year.” (“Women's Prize for Fiction” EBOA)

Not the Booker Prize: judged by readers of The Guardian books blog

In USA:

National Book Critics Circle Award, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Utopian / Dystopian narrative

utopia = "a nonexistent good place" (Murfin & Ray, Bedford Glossary  529). It combines both Greek outopia in the senses of "no place" and eutopia in the sense of "good place"
   Some utopias are subtle satires of the society described (S. Butler, Erewhon (1872))

utopian genre =  works of fiction 'which claim truly to describe a community posited at some level as ideal' (Bruce xi)

utopia is a critique of dominant ideology, offering its readers an imaginary or fictive solution to the social contradictions of its own time' (Marin, in Bruce xv)

dystopia = "A dystopia is usually set at some point in the author's future and describes a nightmarish society in which few would want to live ... alert readers to the potential pitfalls and dangers of society's present course or of a course society might conceivably take one day ... [depict] unpleasant, disastrous, or otherwise terrifying consequences for the protagonists as well as for humanity as a whole" (Murfin & Ray, Bedford Glossary 125)

"utopian literature" EB

Plato, The Republic (c. 360 B.C.) | Thomas More, Utopia (1516) | F. Bacon, The New Atlantis (1627)

18th c.: Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726) > films | ( Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas (1759) ) |
19th c.: Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872) |  Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000- 1887  (1888) | H. G. Wells  The Time Machine (1895) > films 1960, 2002

20th c.:
H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon (1901) > films 1919, 1964, TV 2010;  A Modern Utopia (1905) | G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1905) | J. London, The Iron Heel (1908) | E. M. Forster, "The Machine Stops" (1909) | [F. Kafka, The Trial (1925) > film (1962, O. Welles), film Kafka (1991, S. Soderbergh) ]

film: Metropolis (1927, Germany) > manga Metropolis (1949, Japan) > anime film Metropolis (2001, Japan)

A. Huxley, Brave New World  (1932) html > films 1980, 1998;  Island (1962) html  |
| J. Hilton, Lost Horizon  (1933 ) > film | Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here (1935) | Ayn Rand, "Anthem" (1937) | C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), That Hideous Strength (1945) | V. Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading (1938, Russian; 1959, English), Bend Sinister (1947)

G. Orwell,  Animal Farm (1945) > film ; 1984 (1949) > film s

K. Vonnegut, Player Piano (1952); "Harrison Bergeron" (1961) > film 2081 |
E. Waugh, Love Among the Ruins (1953) | R. Bradbury, Farenheit 451 (1953) > film | W. Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954) > films  | A. C. Clark, The City and the Stars  (1956) | |
Philip. K. Dick, "The Defenders" (1953); "Minority Report" (1956) film,  The Penultimate Truth (1964); "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (1966) > film Total Recall 1990, 2012 |  Do Androids Sleep of Electric Sheep? (1968) > film Blade Runner (1982); A Scanner Darkly (1977) > film (2006)
| A. Wilson, The Old Men at the Zoo (1961) | A. Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962) >  film | W. F. Nolan and G. C. Johnson, Logan's Run (1967)  > film | J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)  > film ; High Rise (1975) | Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974) html | S. King, The Long Walk (1979); The Running Man (1982) > film 1985
D. Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor (1975)

A. Gray, Lanark (1981) | M. Atwood The Handmaid's Tale (1985) crossref-it  > film 1990 | A. Moore and D. Lloyd, V for Vendetta (1988-1989) > film | P. D: James, The Children of Men (1992) > film (2006, A. Cuarón)

film: Planet of the Apes (1968) based on French novel by P. Boulle | Sleeper (1973, W. Allen) | Rollerball (1975, N. Jewison) | Brazil (1985, T. Gilliam) | RoboCop (1987, P. Verhoeven) | The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989, P. Greenaway) | Demolition Man (1993) | 12 Monkeys (1995, T: Gilliam) | Gattaca  (1997) | L. and A. Wachowski, The Matrix (1999), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), The Matrix Revolutions (2003)
comics: 2000 AD (1977- ) | F. Miller, Sin City (1991 - 2000) > film  2005 |

21st c. : 
M. Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), MaddAdam (2013) |  D. Michetll, Cloud Atlas  (2004) > film (2012, L. and A. Wachowski)| K. Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005) > film | S. Collins, The Hunger Games (2008)  > film |

film: Revenger's Tragedy (2002) | The Island (2005) | Idiocracy (2006, M. Judge) | Electric City (2012- ) web, | Elysium (2013, N. Blomkamp) |  RoboCop (2014, J. Padilha) |

back to top |

coming-of-age story / Bildungsroman

= story of the growth of the protagonist from adolescence (or childhood) to maturity
Bildungsroman = [novel of formation] "a novel that recounts the development (psychological and sometimes spiritual) of an individual from childhood or adolescence to maturity, to the point that the protagonist recognizes
his or her place and role in the world" (Murfin & Ray, Bedford Glossary 39)

(underline indicates American author ; square brackets [ ] enfolds non-Anglophone work)

16th c. : [Lazarillo de Tormes (1554)]
18th c.: Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759) [Candide by Voltaire (1759), Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by  Goethe (1796) ]
19th c. : Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850), Great Expectations (1861); Henry James, What Maisie Knew (1897);
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

20th c. : D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (1913); Somerset Maugham Of Human Bondage (1915) ; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) texts ;
     J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951); Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952); Harper Lee, To Kill a Mocking Bird (1960)
George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)    
Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are not the Only Fruit (1985); Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood (1987); Peter Ackoryd, English Music (1992); Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (1993);

21st c.: Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005); David Mitchell, Black Swan Green (2006)

Film: American Graffiti (1973),

Other genres: Marvel comic Spider-Man (1962-)

Excerpts

Tom Jones | Great Expectations | Sons and Lovers | "Hills like White Elephants" | Heart of the Matter | Midnight's Children |

THE HISTORY OF TOM JONES, A FOUNDLING by Henry Fielding (1749)

Chapter ii.

A short description of squire Allworthy, and a fuller account of Miss
Bridget Allworthy, his sister.


In that part of the western division of this kingdom which is commonly
called Somersetshire, there lately lived, and perhaps lives still, a
gentleman whose name was Allworthy, and who might well be called the
favourite of both nature and fortune; for both of these seem to have
contended which should bless and enrich him most. In this contention,
nature may seem to some to have come off victorious, as she bestowed
on him many gifts, while fortune had only one gift in her power; but
in pouring forth this, she was so very profuse, that others perhaps
may think this single endowment to have been more than equivalent to
all the various blessings which he enjoyed from nature. From the
former of these, he derived an agreeable person, a sound constitution,
a solid understanding, and a benevolent heart; by the latter, he was
decreed to the inheritance of one of the largest estates in the
county.

This gentleman had in his youth married a very worthy and beautiful
woman, of whom he had been extremely fond: by her he had three
children, all of whom died in their infancy. He had likewise had the
misfortune of burying this beloved wife herself, about five years
before the time in which this history chuses to set out. This loss,
however great, he bore like a man of sense and constancy, though it
must be confest he would often talk a little whimsically on this head;
for he sometimes said he looked on himself as still married, and
considered his wife as only gone a little before him, a journey which
he should most certainly, sooner or later, take after her; and that he
had not the least doubt of meeting her again in a place where he
should never part with her more--sentiments for which his sense was
arraigned by one part of his neighbours, his religion by a second, and
his sincerity by a third.

He now lived, for the most part, retired in the country, with one
sister, for whom he had a very tender affection. This lady was now
somewhat past the age of thirty, an aera at which, in the opinion of
the malicious, the title of old maid may with no impropriety be
assumed. She was of that species of women whom you commend rather for
good qualities than beauty, and who are generally called, by their own
sex, very good sort of women--as good a sort of woman, madam, as you
would wish to know. Indeed, she was so far from regretting want of
beauty, that she never mentioned that perfection, if it can be called
one, without contempt; and would often thank God she was not as
handsome as Miss Such-a-one, whom perhaps beauty had led into errors
which she might have otherwise avoided. Miss Bridget Allworthy (for
that was the name of this lady) very rightly conceived the charms of
person in a woman to be no better than snares for herself, as well as
for others; and yet so discreet was she in her conduct, that her
prudence was as much on the guard as if she had all the snares to
apprehend which were ever laid for her whole sex. Indeed, I have
observed, though it may seem unaccountable to the reader, that this
guard of prudence, like the trained bands, is always readiest to go on
duty where there is the least danger. It often basely and cowardly
deserts those paragons for whom the men are all wishing, sighing,
dying, and spreading, every net in their power; and constantly attends
at the heels of that higher order of women for whom the other sex have
a more distant and awful respect, and whom (from despair, I suppose,
of success) they never venture to attack.

Reader, I think proper, before we proceed any farther together, to
acquaint thee that I intend to digress, through this whole history, as
often as I see occasion, of which I am myself a better judge than any
pitiful critic whatever; and here I must desire all those critics to
mind their own business, and not to intermeddle with affairs or works
which no ways concern them; for till they produce the authority by
which they are constituted judges, I shall not plead to their
jurisdiction.

back to top |

GREAT EXPECTATIONS [1867 Edition] by Charles Dickens

[Project Gutenberg]


Chapter I

My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my
infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit
than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

I give Pirrip as my father's family name, on the authority of his
tombstone and my sister,--Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith.
As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness
of either of them (for their days were long before the days of
photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like were
unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on
my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man,
with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription,
"Also Georgiana Wife of the Above," I drew a childish conclusion that
my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each
about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside
their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of
mine,--who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in
that universal struggle,--I am indebted for a belief I religiously
entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands
in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of
existence.

back to top |

=================

SONS AND LOVERS by D. H. LAWRENCE (1913)

[Text from Project Gutenberg]

PART ONE

CHAPTER I

THE EARLY MARRIED LIFE OF THE MORELS

"THE BOTTOMS" succeeded to "Hell Row". Hell Row was a block of thatched,
bulging cottages that stood by the brookside on Greenhill Lane. There
lived the colliers who worked in the little gin-pits two fields away.
The brook ran under the alder trees, scarcely soiled by these small
mines, whose coal was drawn to the surface by donkeys that plodded
wearily in a circle round a gin. And all over the countryside were these
same pits, some of which had been worked in the time of Charles II, the
few colliers and the donkeys burrowing down like ants into the earth,
making queer mounds and little black places among the corn-fields and
the meadows. And the cottages of these coal-miners, in blocks and pairs
here and there, together with odd farms and homes of the stockingers,
straying over the parish, formed the village of Bestwood.

Then, some sixty years ago, a sudden change took place, gin-pits were
elbowed aside by the large mines of the financiers. The coal and iron
field of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire was discovered. Carston, Waite
and Co. appeared. Amid tremendous excitement, Lord Palmerston formally
opened the company's first mine at Spinney Park, on the edge of Sherwood
Forest.

About this time the notorious Hell Row, which through growing old had
acquired an evil reputation, was burned down, and much dirt was cleansed
away.

[...]

To accommodate the regiments of miners, Carston, Waite and Co. built the
Squares, great quadrangles of dwellings on the hillside of Bestwood,
and then, in the brook valley, on the site of Hell Row, they erected the
Bottoms.

The Bottoms consisted of six blocks of miners' dwellings, two rows
of three, like the dots on a blank-six domino, and twelve houses in a
block. This double row of dwellings sat at the foot of the rather sharp
slope from Bestwood, and looked out, from the attic windows at least, on
the slow climb of the valley towards Selby.

The houses themselves were substantial and very decent. One could walk
all round, seeing little front gardens with auriculas and saxifrage in
the shadow of the bottom block, sweet-williams and pinks in the sunny
top block; seeing neat front windows, little porches, little privet
hedges, and dormer windows for the attics. But that was outside; that
was the view on to the uninhabited parlours of all the colliers' wives.
The dwelling-room, the kitchen, was at the back of the house, facing
inward between the blocks, looking at a scrubby back garden, and then at
the ash-pits. And between the rows, between the long lines of ash-pits,
went the alley, where the children played and the women gossiped and the
men smoked. So, the actual conditions of living in the Bottoms, that
was so well built and that looked so nice, were quite unsavoury because
people must live in the kitchen, and the kitchens opened on to that
nasty alley of ash-pits.

Mrs. Morel was not anxious to move into the Bottoms, which was already
twelve years old and on the downward path, when she descended to it from
Bestwood. But it was the best she could do. Moreover, she had an end
house in one of the top blocks, and thus had only one neighbour; on
the other side an extra strip of garden. And, having an end house, she
enjoyed a kind of aristocracy among the other women of the "between"
houses, because her rent was five shillings and sixpence instead of
five shillings a week. But this superiority in station was not much
consolation to Mrs. Morel.

She was thirty-one years old, and had been married eight years. A rather
small woman, of delicate mould but resolute bearing, she shrank a little
from the first contact with the Bottoms women. She came down in the
July, and in the September expected her third baby.

[...]

PART II 

CHAPTER XI

THE TEST ON MIRIAM

[...]
Frequently he hated Miriam. He hated her as she bent forward and pored
over his things. He hated her way of patiently casting him up, as if he
were an endless psychological account. When he was with her, he hated
her for having got him, and yet not got him, and he tortured her. She
took all and gave nothing, he said. At least, she gave no living warmth.
She was never alive, and giving off life. Looking for her was like
looking for something which did not exist. She was only his conscience,
not his mate. He hated her violently, and was more cruel to her. They
dragged on till the next summer. He saw more and more of Clara.

At last he spoke. He had been sitting working at home one evening. There
was between him and his mother a peculiar condition of people frankly
finding fault with each other. Mrs. Morel was strong on her feet again.
He was not going to stick to Miriam. Very well; then she would stand
aloof till he said something. It had been coming a long time, this
bursting of the storm in him, when he would come back to her. This
evening there was between them a peculiar condition of suspense.
He worked feverishly and mechanically, so that he could escape from
himself. It grew late. Through the open door, stealthily, came the scent
of madonna lilies, almost as if it were prowling abroad. Suddenly he got
up and went out of doors.

The beauty of the night made him want to shout. A half-moon, dusky gold,
was sinking behind the black sycamore at the end of the garden, making
the sky dull purple with its glow. Nearer, a dim white fence of lilies
went across the garden, and the air all round seemed to stir with scent,
as if it were alive. He went across the bed of pinks, whose keen perfume
came sharply across the rocking, heavy scent of the lilies, and stood
alongside the white barrier of flowers. They flagged all loose, as if
they were panting. The scent made him drunk. He went down to the field
to watch the moon sink under.

A corncrake in the hay-close called insistently. The moon slid quite
quickly downwards, growing more flushed. Behind him the great flowers
leaned as if they were calling. And then, like a shock, he caught
another perfume, something raw and coarse. Hunting round, he found
the purple iris, touched their fleshy throats and their dark, grasping
hands. At any rate, he had found something. They stood stiff in the
darkness. Their scent was brutal. The moon was melting down upon the
crest of the hill. It was gone; all was dark. The corncrake called
still.

Breaking off a pink, he suddenly went indoors.

"Come, my boy," said his mother. "I'm sure it's time you went to bed."

He stood with the pink against his lips.

"I shall break off with Miriam, mother," he answered calmly.

She looked up at him over her spectacles. He was staring back at her,
unswerving. She met his eyes for a moment, then took off her glasses. He
was white. The male was up in him, dominant. She did not want to see him
too clearly.

"But I thought--" she began.

"Well," he answered, "I don't love her. I don't want to marry her--so I
shall have done."

"But," exclaimed his mother, amazed, "I thought lately you had made up
your mind to have her, and so I said nothing."

"I had--I wanted to--but now I don't want. It's no good. I shall break
off on Sunday. I ought to, oughtn't I?"

"You know best. You know I said so long ago."

"I can't help that now. I shall break off on Sunday."

"Well," said his mother, "I think it will be best. But lately I decided
you had made up your mind to have her, so I said nothing, and should
have said nothing. But I say as I have always said, I DON'T think she is
suited to you."

"On Sunday I break off," he said, smelling the pink. He put the flower
in his mouth. Unthinking, he bared his teeth, closed them on the blossom
slowly, and had a mouthful of petals. These he spat into the fire,
kissed his mother, and went to bed.

On Sunday he went up to the farm in the early afternoon. He had written
Miriam that they would walk over the fields to Hucknall. His mother was
very tender with him. He said nothing. But she saw the effort it was
costing. The peculiar set look on his face stilled her.

"Never mind, my son," she said. "You will be so much better when it is
all over."

Paul glanced swiftly at his mother in surprise and resentment. He did
not want sympathy.


back to top |

=================

"Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway (1927)

 
The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this siode there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went to Madrid.
       'What should we drink?' the girl asked. She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.
       'It's pretty hot,' the man said.
       'Let's drink beer.'
       'Dos cervezas,' the man said into the curtain.
       'Big ones?' a woman asked from the doorway.
       'Yes. Two big ones.'
       The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the felt pads and the beer glass on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.
       'They look like white elephants,' she said.
       'I've never seen one,' the man drank his beer.
       'No, you wouldn't have.'
       'I might have,' the man said. 'Just because you say I wouldn't have doesn't prove anything.'
       The girl looked at the bead curtain. 'They've painted something on it,' she said. 'What does it say?'
       'Anis del Toro. It's a drink.'
       'Could we try it?'
       The man called 'Listen' through the curtain. The woman came out from the bar.
       'Four reales.' 'We want two Anis del Toro.'
       'With water?'
       'Do you want it with water?'
       'I don't know,' the girl said. 'Is it good with water?'
       'It's all right.'
       'You want them with water?' asked the woman.
       'Yes, with water.'
       'It tastes like liquorice,' the girl said and put the glass down.
       'That's the way with everything.'
       'Yes,' said the girl. 'Everything tastes of liquorice. Especially all the things you've waited so long for, like absinthe.'
       'Oh, cut it out.'
       'You started it,' the girl said. 'I was being amused. I was having a fine time.'
       'Well, let's try and have a fine time.'
       'All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn't that bright?'
       'That was bright.'
       'I wanted to try this new drink. That's all we do, isn't it - look at things and try new drinks?'
       'I guess so.'
       The girl looked across at the hills.
      

===============

The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene (1948)

... [32]

"I know these poor devils can't get rice at the controlled 
price/' 

"I've heard, Major Scobie, that they can't get their share 
of the free distribution unless they tip the policemen at the 
gate." 

It was quite true. There was a retort in this colony to 
every accusation. There was always a blacker corruption 
elsewhere to be pointed at. The scandalmongers of the 
Secretariat fulfilled a useful purpose they kept alive the 
idea that no one was to be trusted. That was better than 
complacence. Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid 
a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because 
here human nature hasn't had time to disguise itself? No- 
body here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven 
remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of 
death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cru- 
elties, the meannesses, that elsewhere people so cleverly 
hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as 
God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn't love a 
pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed. He felt 
a sudden affection for Yusef. He said, "Two wrongs don't 
make a right. One day, Yusef, you'll find my foot under 
your fat arse." 

...

[187]

"Going out?" Harris asked with surprise. "Where to?" 

"Just into town/' Wilson said, loosening the knot round 
his mosquito boots. 

"What on earth can you find to do in town at this hour?" 

"Business," Wilson said. 

Well, he thought, it was business of a kind, the kind of 
joyless business one did alone, without friends. He had 
bought a second-hand car a few weeks ago, the first he had 
ever owned, and he was not yet a very reliable driver. No 
gadget survived the climate long and every few hundred 
yards he had to wipe the windscreen with his handkerchief. 
In Kru Town the hut doors were open and families sat 
around the kerosene lamps waiting till it was cool enough 
to sleep. A dead pye-dog lay in the gutter with the rain 
running over its white swollen belly. 

...
[199]
"I'm sorry. I can't wait/' Wilson said. "Here's ten bob," 
and he made the preliminary motions of departure, but 
the old woman paid him no attention at all, blocking the 
way, smiling steadily like a dentist who knows what's good 
for you. Here a man's colour had no value: he couldn't 
bluster as a white man could elsewhere: by entering this 
narrow plaster passage he had shed every racial, social, and 
individual trait, he had reduced himself to human nature. 
If he had wanted to hide, here was the perfect hiding place: 
if he had wanted to be anonymous, here he was simply a 
man. Even his reluctance, disgust, and fear were not per- 
sonal characteristics: they were so common to those who 
came here for the first time that the old woman knew 
exactly what each move would be. First the suggestion of 
a drink, then the offer of money, after that . . . 

...

==========

Midnight's Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie

Book One

The perforated sheet

I was born in the city of Bombay… once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more… On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but Ms accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly  chained  to  those  of  my  country.  For  the  next  three  decades,  there  was  to  be  no  escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate-at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn't even wipe my own nose at the time.

Now, however, time (having no further use for me) is running out. I will soon be thirty-one years old. Perhaps. If my crumbling, over-used body permits. But I have no hope of saving my life, nor can I count on having even a thousand nights and a night. I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning-yes, meaning-something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.

And there are so many stories to tell,-too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles

places rumours, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me; and guided only by the memory of a large white bedsheet with a roughly circular  hole  some  seven  inches  in diameter  cut  into  the  centre,  clutching  at  the  dream  of that  holey, mutilated  square  of  linen,  which  is  my  talisman,  my  open-sesame,  I  must  commence  the  business  of remaking my life from the point at which it really began, some thirty-two years before anything as obvious, as present, as my clock-ridden, crime-stained birth.

(The sheet, incidentally, is stained too, with three drops of old, faded redness. As the Quran tells us: Recite, in the name of the Lord thy Creator, who created Man from clots of blood.)

...

snort… but I take no exception to her attitude. She stirs a bubbling vat all day for a living; something hot and  vinegary  has  steamed  her  up  tonight.  Thick  of  waist,  somewhat  hairy  of  forearm,  she  flounces, gesticulates, exits. Poor Padma. Things are always getting her goat. Perhaps even her name: understandably enough,  since  her mother  told her,  when  she was only small,  that she had been named  after the lotus goddess, whose most common appellation amongst village folk is 'The One Who Possesses Dung'.

In the renewed silence, I return to sheets of paper which smell just a little of turmeric,  ready and willing to put out of its misery a narrative which I left yesterday hanging in mid-air-just as Scheherazade, depending for her very survival on leaving Prince Shahryar eaten up by curiosity, used to do night after night! I'll begin at once: by revealing that my grandfather's premonitions in the corridor were not without foundation. In the succeeding months and years, he fell under what I can only describe as the sorcerer's spell of that enormous-and as yet unstained-perforated cloth.

Dung, that fertilizes and causes the crops to grow! Dung, which is patted into thin chapati-like cakes when still fresh and moist, and is sold to the village builders, who use it to secure and strengthen the walls of kachcha buildings made of mud! Dung, whose arrival from the nether end of cattle goes a long way towards explaining their divine and sacred status! Oh, yes, I was wrong, I admit I was prejudiced, no doubt because its unfortunate odours do have a way of offending my sensitive nose-how wonderful, how ineffably lovely it must be to be named for the Purveyor of Dung!

… A compound can be anything from a wasteland to a park. The largest compound in Amritsar is called Jallianwala Bagh. It is not grassy. Stones cans glass and other things are everywhere. To get into it, you must walk down a very narrow alleyway between two buildings. On April 13th, many thousands of Indians are crowding through this alleyway. 'It is peaceful protest,' someone tells Doctor Aziz. Swept along by the crowds, he arrives at the mouth of the alley. A bag from Heidelberg is in his right hand. (No close-up is necessary.) He is, I know, feeling very scared, because his nose is itching worse than it ever has; but he is a trained doctor, he puts it out of his mind, he enters the compound. Somebody is making a passionate speech. Hawkers move through the crowd selling channa and sweetmeats. The air is filled with dust. There do not seem to be any goondas, any trouble– makers, as far as my grandfather can see. A group of Sikhs has spread a cloth on the ground and is eating, seated around it. There is still a smell of ordure in the air. Aziz penetrates the heart of the crowd, as Brigadier R. Е. Dyer arrives at the entrance to the alleyway, followed by fifty crack troops. He is the Martial Law Commander of Amritsar-an important man, after all; the waxed tips of his moustache are rigid with importance. As the fifty-one men march down the alleyway a tickle replaces the itch in my grandfather's  nose. The fifty-one men enter the compound and take up positions, twenty-five to Dyer's right and twenty-five to his left; and Aadam Aziz ceases to concentrate on the events around him as the tickle mounts to unbearable intensities. As Brigadier Dyer issues a command the sneeze hits my grandfather full in the face. 'Yaaaakh-thоооо!' he sneezes and falls forward, losing his balance, following his nose and thereby saving his life. His 'doctori-attache' flies open; bottles, liniment and syringes scatter in the dust. He is scrabbling  furiously  at people's feet, trying to save his equipment  before it is crushed. There is a noise like teeth chattering in winter and someone falls on him. Red stuffstains his shirt. There are screams now and sobs and the strange chattering continues. More and more people seem to have stumbled and fallen on top of my grandfather.  He becomes  afraid for his back. The clasp of his bag is digging into his chest, inflicting upon it a bruise so severe and mysterious that it will not fade until after his death, years later, on the hill of Sankara Acharya or Takht-e-Sulaiman. His nose is jammed against a bottle of red pills. The chattering stops and is replaced by the noises of people and birds. There seems to be no traffic noise whatsoever. Brigadier Dyer's fifty men put down their machine-guns and go away. They have fired a total of one thousand six hundred and fifty rounds into the unarmed crowd. Of these, one thousand five hundred and sixteen have found their mark, killing or wounding some person. 'Good shooting,' Dyer tells his men, 'We have done a jolly good thing.'