Virginia Woolf-Mrs. Dallaway, George Orwell, 1984, Kazuo Ishiguro-The Remains of the day, S Eliot- The Waste Land, Journey to the Magi, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, Murder in the Cathedral, Ted Hughes- Crow's First Lesson, Tom Stoppard-Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

20 th c.Revolutions

(1) modernism revised realism through cultural, aestheticist experiments with tradition

The high modernist mavericks (maverick – Collins English-English Dictionary – person of independent/unorthodox views) were out to educate a new cultural memory for their dejected century with aestheticist means and they used consciousness as the skeptic’s means of aesthetic salvation from nihilism – they transcended postwar trauma by establishing their aesthetic experiments with tradition

Eliot’s and Woolf’s art: they made experiments with tradition, Eliot, with the London/English version of the Western tradition and with Christianity and Oriental creeds, Woolf with the British national conscience (with Londonness and Britishness) externalizing, making public the Bloomsbury group ethos.1

Arguments for why the (high) modernists were like the late Victorian aesthetic critics/aestheticists:

compare this with the sense of a new age beginning through the most intimate connection of artists with their object of interest, just as the connection between people inaugurated by love. Virginia Woolf and the modernists felt inspired to spiritualize the world through their art, in the same aesthetically sacerdotal sense of erotic investments.

(2) postmodernist literature revised the modernist respect for high culture in literature

the policing of taste by totalitarian experts

proposed the rhizome as a figure of knowledge and a model of human society in the current age when hierarchies have become obsolete and traditional arborescent/organic growth as a model for knowledge and social development have become obsolete. Rather than narrativize history and culture, the rhizome presents history and culture as a map or wide array of attractions and influences with no specific origin or genesis.

POSTMODERNISM BECAME DOMINANT IN EUROPE after the explosive year 1968. In response to the sense of crisis, postmodernism generalized a carnivalesque critique of established discourses. postmodernism also generalized a trenchant criticism of modernity (progress, liberal rationality and order as embodied in democracy.

modern knowledge was virtually defunct, because it was no longer disinterested but corrupt. The bankruptcy of, or the negative verdict about, Western progress and modernity were the premises for a change of paradigm comparable to the one at the end of the Victorian age. Postmodern parody and the ludic spirit changed the sombre or just serious tone of art/literature so as to cover the crisis of the world with an impassible mask (just as

1

had happened at the end of the Victorian age, when the pose of New Hedonism or New Cyrenaicism attempted to compensate for the disorientation and revolt of the world against its own norms.

literature of postmodernism - restored the “worldly” connection of literature (and the arts in general) with the matter of fact world.

roughly the same time as the appearance of postmodernism in America, absurdism advanced, after the French production of Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot (1959), to become the dominant revolutionary form of the literary mid-twentieth century; it had at its back a philosophical ( existentialist) conception, by contrast to the aestheticist conception of high modernism. Absurdism was the sombre, home-bred European version of the protest already launched in America against the salvationist message of the high modernist artists; absurdism brought to the fore the consciousness of doom after the post-war

post-war dejection gave rise to what we also call neo-modernism (or lowered modernism) in fiction and poetry; its forms repeated the message of modernism to an exhausted humanity in dystopias and cynical poetry which dressed the crisis of modernity values in an always cynical and increasingly nihilistic garb – G Orwell

neomodernism made much of its lucidity by giving it most scathing forms, whereas high modernism had found aesthetic/beautiful forms to transcend the negative moods. In so far as both absurdism and neo-modernism were nihilistic, they differed from both high modernism and postmodernism, which prompts us to treat them as a phenomenon apart.

II. + III.

Chronicles of War and Evil I: traditional and experimental approaches to war in literature – a comparison between the poems written in the First World War trenches (Lecture One), T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” [and two poems by William Butler Yeats “The Second Coming” and “Lapis Lazuli”

1) Notice the other name of the stream of consciousness technique, also dominant in high modernist literary texts: multiple selective omniscience. T.S.Eliot;s Waste Land - the poem is a multiple dramatic monologue.

2) Alienation being the theme of this ironic epic,2 “The Waste Land” presents the encounter of humanity with its modern, civilized other. Otherness being postulated as the law of existence in poststructuralism (see Lacanian psychoanalysis, for example), “The Waste Land” configures a multiple heterotopia.

IV.

Cultural memory is a fashionable branch of cultural studies which, believes that history is a construct, just like literature, and uses literature to define the popular versions of history, looking

2 An epic is usually the ritual presentation of human success in spite of numerous adversities, usually taking the form of a perilous journey ending in human triumph (in ancient literature, it was the reverse of tragedy, though both literary/ceremonial forms accepted the overarching power of fate

at the circulation and genealogy of social ideas in everyday parlance. When the public memory span is restricted in scope and means of expression, we talk of communicative memory (which spans over no more than two generations), but when it is more far-reaching and more sophisticated, we speak of cultural memory proper.

mythical, the antagonistic and the reflexive intra-mediation modes (modes of rhetorical expression within literary media

when the encoding of memory is direct, confessive and colloquial, retaining the impassioned dimension of communication in the everyday register, we have to do with experiential intra-mediation; when it draws upon shared myths, it is mythicizing. when it constructs one version of the past by rejecting/refuting others, it is antagonistic; when it establishes its own version self-reflexively (by reflection upon its own discourse).

Consequently, they create cultural ideas anchored in both the present and the past, by complex cultural memory mediation. With T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (further analyzed, in connection with other poems, too, in the seminars) we have witnessed the transformation of cultural grandeur into tormented, self-antagonizing, fragmentary meditation “shored” against the ruins of the past.

Cryptograms put in circulation/constitute/encode or exploit in a cryptical way literary ideas by intertwining expressive, mythical, interrogative or open (rather than directly antagonistic), and reflexive strands of meaning.

IV.

Virginia Woolf’s aim is to focus on people who manage to love life; and to showcase, subsequently, the conditions of possibility for such love of life in the context of post-war dejection that has been seen to dominate the voices and landscapes of “The Waste Land” and “The Second Coming”, only to be circumscribed, and explicitly exorcised, with art’s means in “Lapis Lazuli”.

a demonstration of EMPATHETIC DEIXIS and FEMININE EMPATHY that give sense, IMPRESSIONISTICALLY, to casual encounters [with the objects of the speaking voice’s attention, or of the situated STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS discourse.

. In the stream of consciousness space, the nuclei of attention function just as the sonata form themes introduced/developed/repeated through dense associations IN THE MIND OF A PERSON, WHICH THE TEXTUAL DEVELOPMENT IS SUBJECTED TO. Empathetic deixis is another term for the Free Indirect Discourse which transcribes the word of a character in any narrative from which the narrator has withdrawn, or with whom the narrator identifies

EMPATHETIC – points to identification

DEIXIS points to indefinite pronouns, adverbs of time and place, which are filled with meaning in particular contexts, where “here”, for example, or “now” point to a concrete situation and acquire meaning only in this way.

Impressionistic fiction, just as impressionistic painting, conveys the intimate dependency of the represented objects on the sensibility of the artist and of the picture as a whole on sensibility: that of the artist, first, and that of the onlooker in front of the picture, secondly. This circular movement, from the object, to the artist, to the artistic object, to the art-receiver is based on an empathetic and subjective contract in fiction, just as in lyrical poetry and in painting. The pleasure

of reading comes from the interpersonal movement of consciousness: the reader’s , with the cogito3 of the creator.

The task is to discover the continuities which make the narrative advance. Love of life is one such continuity/theme.

they have the capacity to enjoy life in different degrees. From Lady Bexborough, whose joy of life is susspended in the middle of opening a bazaar by the news of ‘her favourite, John’’sdeath, to Septimus Warren Smith, whose life and joy have become terminally impaired by the war and is inexorably obsessed by death, there are numerous intervening characters whose contributions to the joy of life is chronicled and assessed by Clarissa (her former partner Peter Walsh, Sally Setton, her feminine inspirer, brimful with joy of life educated by books and breathing together with her the charm of feminist emancipation , Rezzia, Septimus Warren Smith’s Italian wife and Richard Dalloway. Rezzia can only access happiness and love of life in the past tense, with the memories of Septimus’s courting her when stationed in her house in Italy, after the war. Richard Dalloway hardly know how to express love, for his wife and for life, being clumsy with words, as shown in the street scene that transcribes his stream of consciousness revolving around Clarissa, his inspirer for love and life alike. The theme that joins love and life in the novel and that structures the whole narrative connects the feminine sensibility priorities with the male ones, ultimately placing love/life and death face to face and finally wrapping them together.

V.

The protracted civil war between nationalist Ireland and colonial Britain is, however, at the background of Ulysses and the ambivalent relationship with English acculturation is one of the themes which anchors Joyce’s aesthetic experiments in lived history.

In Joyce’s 1914 publication, Dubliners, for example, Irish people are shown to live in suspension, as victims of a traumatic national existence studied and typified in fifteen case studies of existential crises.

And Joyce sums up the crisis in the little boy’s conscience symbolically, by pairing the figure of the gnomon, a geometric figure remaining after a parallelogram has been removed from one corner of a larger parallelogram: the older man’s removal from the boy’s world leaves the larger parallelogram of life empty and the boy’s conscience is existentially challenged. A young man’s first incipient love is cut short by the carelessness and cruelty of his uncle who fails to come home in time and give him the money for going to the resplendent imperial bazaar and buy a fancy present to declare his love for his colleague Mangan’s sister (Araby). The boy’s frustration is in the foreground on the closing bazaar site to impair, as it were, the metropolitan splendour of British life on Irish soil, in Dublin and to spoil the seduction of imperial culture here for good.

The same thing happens in Joyce’s next two widely read books, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses. The titles’ meanings slip past one another like the titles of the individual stories of Dubliners, focusing on artistically handled human loneliness which can be made eloquent in ineffable ways. As regards the 1916 book, there is something indefinite in the title with

3 the cogito of the writer is the sum of his creative choices in creating the work, which is all the better understood the more one reads oneself into the text and, as far as possible, the more texts by the same author one reads; the satisfactory identification with a writer’s cogito involves eventually getting a sense of the structure of identity of a particular writer

“A” in front – suggesting that there are other possible portraits of the artist. And, indeed, the portrait in the novel of adolescence (or Bildungsroman) centred upon Stephen Dedalus, who is also the sensitive protagonist of the straight autobiographical sketch preceding A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Hero (published posthumously in 1944) is only a pre-requisite for the fuller portrait-in-the-making of Ulysses. Though the novel Ulysses opens a boisterous window on Stephen’s loneliness, in the Martello Tower where the noisy, windy, mock-heroic Anglo-Irish Buck (satir) Mulligan is patronizing the silent artist in an imperial dorm of sorts, Stephen Dedalus is not the protagonist of Ulysses. By analogy with the Homeric Odyssey, Ulysses begins with the rambling of younger Telemachus, Odysseus’s son.

the crisis which inaugurates Stephen’s wanderings is his mother’s death rather than his father’s departure – or his kingly father’s demise; secondly, because he is haunted, like Hamlet, by his mother’s phantom, which indicates a series of travesties (gender, age, theme travesties) constitutive for the construction of the book’s meaning through the plot threads, intertextualities and subjectivities presented in action in this stream of consciousness novel only partially,

There are as many interpretations as there are threads, rather than merely stream of consciousness moments of refined attention knitting the book together, but if we take the combined intertext with Homer’s Odyssey and Shakespeare’s Hamlet (with the respective travesties and variations) into consideration, then we can understand the artistic theme around the novel revolves as follows. The lonely artist is by nature lost in a surrounding world that only he can chronicle faithfully, though not living in empathy with it in the least (as shown by the distance between the artist and the world presented also in Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”). He will only gravitate towards human empathy and find himself (making a full homecoming to the world of maturity) after the middle of the book. In the fourteenth episode, “Oxen of the Sun”, he is shown to come of age as an artist through brilliant parodies of established literary models, when he both emulates and ridicules canonical peaks of English, Irish and Anglo-Irish prose style; he has found the best way to enter the sanctuary of established art with his own obsessions, since he narrates male drunken prattling at a time and place where female heroism is silently under way as a woman is giving birth to her nth son and is on the brink of death, in a maternity hospital. In a single gesture, the young drunken artist Stephen Boustephanoumenos, brushes past three sanctuaries to both desecrate and enrich the world with his doctrine of artistic postcreation: initially, all the young drunkard boasters who defy and slander femininity by savvy gossiping about tarts, abortions and lechery in general while a real woman is in her birth throes upstairs in the maternity hospital (they are drinking in the lobby);

For all its intricacies, the whole novel Ulysses is centred upon a man who succeeds and who can share joy of life and meaningful conversation with another

The valiant and sly modern Ulysses is a mature hero who counters the trifling emptiness of modern life and its difficult everyday battles not by committing suicide, as Septimus Warren Smith did being in a state of shell shock and in response to what Clarissa Dalloway understood as being the threatening emptiness ol life which can either be thrown, in a meaningful gesture, through the precious embrace with death.

It is interesting to see that what inspired Joyce’s extraordinary originality, which wraps even the special sensitivity of artists in a wider love of life container (since Mr Bloom contains Stephen for a brief, extremely intense existential moment) is the same impulse of refining out of sight any direct emotions. The same dramatic spirit which prompted Eliot’s response to war to reach us in the dramatic shape (and in the dramatic monologue shape) in “The Waste Land” and Virginia Woolf’s

love of life to arrest our attention impressionistically through the modern(ist) dictatorial imagination, prompted the Joycean artist to dress his autobiography in Stephen Hero (written before he left Ireland for good, in 1902) in the more distant, artistic and dramatic form of the third-person, selective omniscience in the Bildungsroman A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; and it prompted the hiding of Stephen Dedalus behind the heroic plenitude of the ordinary yet blooming man Leopold Bloom in Ulysses.

Joyce’s project was to deliberately hide the sensitivity of the artistic mind recording and interpreting the world, as he explains in so many words in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

VI.

Eliot converted to strict Anglicanism in 1927, writing, in 1927, an ironic dramatic monologue “Journey of the Magi”, a ritual poem “Ash Wednesday” (1930) and a ritual play, Murder in the Cathedral (1935).

“Journey of the Magi” is ironical because, in a typical dramatic monologue manner, it entrusts a serious theme to an oblique, inadequate speaker. The speaking Magus is a typically modern dissatisfied man, rather unable to understand and receive the Christian message; but although he remains estranged from it (having the excuse of thinking as a man from the old dispensation, to which he returns disconcerted at the end of the poem’s third part) – he manages to point to the essentials of the Christian doctrine: the uncomfortable, troubling relationship with Calvary as accessible to anyone who approaches Christ at Christmas time in order to witness his birth but is confronted with Christ’s death, as in the last existential question that the Magus asks: were Hard

and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death “Were we led all this way for Birth or Death?[. . . ]I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was/Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death ”. Judged in a myth criticism perspective, the poem’s ingenious performance is of collapsing the narrative poles of the mythical story of Christ’s life, ranging from birth till death into an intense, archetypal emblem of the initiatory message: unless one understands Christ’s birth and death so as to rejoice at the birth and mourn the death as necessary parts of the story, and responds in an adequate way to both, there is no way of reaching or receiving the gift of salvation.

dentification with tired modern humanity,

translating, in historical terms numinous mythical experiences is observed by Eliot also in Murder in the Cathedral. translation/identification in Murder in the Cathedral is with the Elizabethan mentality, in the play’s first part, as expressed in Shakespeare’s chronicle plays, for example Henry II, or The Tempest and with the modern Realpolitik cynicism ready to excuse the dirtiest political deeds nowadays.

Murder in the Cathedral advances into the understanding of the Christian message by a counterpoint movement of three threads which are brought together by two basic objective correlatives. The first thread describes the Saint’s own growth until he is ready for martyrdom (the Archbishop is tempted by three political and one moral voices which he defeats in the play’s First Part); the second thread explains the dynamic of history (it covers the speeches of the Herald and the Tempters in the First Part and of the Knights, in the Second Part); the third thread explains the religious doctrine (and it is presented in Thomas’s speeches and in the Interlude, which comprises the short sermon delivered by the Archbishop on Christmas Morning in 1170).

the classical function of the Chorus, which accompanies the actions of the protagonists, explaining the psychological and contextual circumstances of the individual characters, like a commentator; in ritual drama, such as Tragedy, the Chorus has also a prophetic function, and in Eliot’s play the Chorus of the Women of Canterbury express the point of view of ordinary humanity which is only closer than the nobility to the Saint because of the greater sensitivity educated by sufferance; otherwise, it is as obtuse as ordinary politicians to other than the daily preoccupations of life.

Eliot entrusts not only to the Chorus the prophetic function, but also to the Third Priest. He speaks about The Wheel, which is the first objective correlative of Murder in the Cathedral and speaks his lines right before Thomas, in Act I. The objective correlative of the wheel is the first element that unites all the layers of humanity in one, as the religious understanding of life will have it. The second objective correlative is The Cathedral itself whose power to attract both ordinary people and political interests as opposed to saintliness and martyrdom finally contains the world. The door of the Cathedral could have been closed, and the priests wanted to close it against the threatening violence of the returning knights in the Second Part, but the saint who was ready for martyrdom ordered them to leave it open –

The neo-modernist approach to religion is demonstrated by the savage return along fully low mimetic and secular lines to the Christian lore which the poem by Stevie Smith “Was He Married?”. The way the lay spirit threatens to overcome the Christian message shows how the high-flowing idealism of modernism, even when it is ironical, is getting reversed. Although religiosity is not completely overcome at the end of the poem, statistically it is to be doubted almost, since it is only devoted a few lines, though these being the final lines, they are more credible.

The postmodernist spirit, whose savage irreligiousness progresses towards a grotesque, apocalyptic end without reaching for any limit situation is demonstrated in relationship with the poem by Ted Hughes “Crow’s First Lesson”.

VII.

Modernist/Neo-Modernist/Postmodernist Fiction - The First History Lesson COLONIALISM as seen in A Passage to India (a traditionalist novel) and Heart of Darkness – Modernist

In the modernist texts by T.S. Eliot, even the secular dominants of irony, indifference or violence still pointed to the core of the religious/numinous experience. In the neo-modernist conversation-poem by Stevie Smith the (tragic) seriousness of the religious question was replaced by a low-mimetic interest in the everyday life confrontation (battle, even) with religion. In the postmodernist anecdote of Ted Hughes’s Crow poem, irony becomes savage and human trifles do not merely revolt against, but they also overcome, the very distant presence of God, who is swamped in creation. Yet, as we were invited to see, in the Introductory lecture of this semester, the lack of seriousness in later twentieth century literature expressed the wish of postmodernism to demolish the policing of ordinary minds (intenţia de a o termina o dată, definitiv, cu “ameninţarea” pe care o fac să planeze [arhitecţii] modernişti asupra oamenilor obişnuiţi) (the policing of ordinary minds by European modernist/Bauhaus theorists of architecture in Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House, De la Bauhaus-ul official la căminul personal, an anti-establishment satire of 1981 discussed by Linda Hutcheon in the second chapter of A Poetics of Postmodernism, the First Part).

The colonial theme

A Passage to India

historically accurate, critical and sensational complex plot, profound character analysis, an inspiring Indian setting full of the exoticism, poetry and historical details of good travel books.

The colonial critique in A Passage to India reveals the false courtesy which hides and justifies civilizational gaps. The gap looms greater than the realities of human affinities which the book builds. For there is a genuine affinity between people of a similar bend of mind developed

The colonial critique in A Passage to India exposes hegemony as the main colonial evil, exactly the

same historical evil exposed by Marxian critique as dominating classes and human relations in

capitalist societies. Britain is shown to lose its civilizational advance, with the noble values of

modern democracy and idealism tainted. In fact there is fatal regression to repressive violence,

back and away from modern liberal values and social gains. Western imperialism, the novel shows,

does not transfer progressive values, but the old story of oppression and blind force, to the New

World.

The colonial alienation from the metropolitan home is expressed as a collective discovery in A Passage to India. It is taken up as a more powerful story in Heart of Darkness, because the dramatic discovery, the scandal of colonization, springs from a more intimate – and also tragic – point, as is always the case in modernism.

Heart of Darkness is a symbolic story: it presents the evils of imperialism using for the demonstration the souls of two protagonists; both of them are placed in confrontation with the darkness of the New World, with each other, and with their own selves, in Joseph Conrad’s novella. The greater artistic power of Conrad’s text is not due to the situation and characters, only (as in all realistic novels), but to the symbols and abstract patterning which enriches the allegory of imperial evil.

There is a symbolic/archetypal relay-race, there is a sequence of stories, worlds, characters that

double each other but with significant differences. The reader discovers horrifying stories,

enigmatic characters and truths by a telescope movement, in stages that open towards the

deepest meanings. Historically, Marlow’s story is the story of modern empires, uses history to build

a panorama. Psychologically, Marlow’s trip to the heart of darkness is like the first installment/stage

of a trip for the discovery of Kurtz’s… heart of madness. Archetypally, Marlow is attracted to Congo

as to an initiatory, symbolic journey meant to give meaning to his life. The place is dangerous and

demonic while being also compelling as a place of adventure and poetic beauty. But, because

modernist myth is ironically treated myth, the capital meaning discovered at the end of Marlow’s

journey to Congo is the tragic meaning of Kurtz’s “success” at the heart of darkness, He succeeds

at the cost of his madly twisting all civilized meanings and values. Morally, critically/ politically

approached Kurtz’s story is the demonic story of Western greed (the devil of human greediness,

which animates aggressive colonialists and combines with several other devils to form a legion).

darkness is a symbol for the various realities at the heart of the story: it is a symbol of black hands worked to death; it stands for the innocent blackness of their skin and the Blakean whiteness of their souls (as in the “Chimney Sweeper” poems from Songs of Innocence and Experience); it points

to the fascinating Congo river, resembling a serpent on the white field of an as yet unexplored world on the map that compelled Marlow’s imagination as he explains at the beginning of his story about the journey.

What matters in the story is the way in which irony built upon tragedy is carried by the encounter of the humane Marlow with the nearly inhuman Kurtz, who was supposed to be the colonial hero at the heart of darkness. Symbolically, Kurtz is like the ghost of the effete colonial grandeur. The greatest values of the imperial ethos – and not only the British, but in fact the Belgian, international imperial world – have become specters and will remain buried in the heart of darkness thanks to the symbolic texture of Conrad’s story.

VIII.

The Dystopian Neo-Modernist Paradigm

Allegorical history lessons about public evil and personal sinfulness (more didactic than aesthetically ambitious

THE DYSTOPIAN PLOT (systematic rational demonstrations – the very efficient mechanisms of evil; THE COMPARISON WITH TRAGEDIES – SIMILARITIES: characters subjected to adverse circumstances; characters living isolated; characters- annihilated : torment is a single-minded (single chunk) of the initiatory story/pathos – pathetic literature?: ROMANCE/IRONICAL;NIHILISTIC REDUCTION OF THE INITIATORY SCENARIO – DIFFERENCES: it is NOT FATE, but CORRUPTED IDEAS (turned into dogmas; ideology (false consciousness) that oppress people/

the link with power – the panopticon and pastoral power

Propaganda, the Big Brother Syndrome – according to Michel Foucault’s theorizing, in the wake of Nietzsche’s absolutist teachings about the Will to Power – which dominates modern man’s social and (im)moral existence in the bourgeois West.

The modern Western state has integrated in a new political shape an old power technique which originated in Christian institutions. We can call this power technique the pastoral power.

Christianity is the only religion which has organized itself as a church. And as such, it postulates in principle that certain individuals can, by their religious quality, serve others not as princes, magistrates, prophets, fortune-tellers, benefactors, educationalists, and so on but as pastors

Pastoral power is not merely a form of power which commands; it must also be prepared to sacrifice itself for the life and salvation of the flock. Therefore, it is different from royal power, which demands a sacrifice from its subjects to save the throne. It is a form of power whose ultimate aim is to asure individual salvation in the next world. Finally, this form of power cannot be exercized without knowing the inside of people’s minds, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets. It implies a knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it. This form of power is salvation oriented (as opposed to political power). It is oblative (as opposed to the principle of sovereignity); it is individualizing (as opposed to legal power); it is coextensive and continuous with life; it is linked with a production of truth - the truth of the individual himself.

See the following sentence from Nineteen Eighty-Four mentioning ‘the sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past’. [an unending series of victories over your own memory. ’Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ’doublethink’]

Loving Big Brother, faultlessly obeying the Party by conforming to the principles, and hating the enemy of the Party (Goldstein).

panopticon-formations – or prisons. Orwell adapts Bentham’s panopticon system instilling in the historical totalitarian East the most advanced technology of the rich post-war countries of the West. He generalizes surveillance and places technology in the service of policing citizens, treating them as prison inmates. Here is the link to a University College London site that deals with the panopticon https://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/who/panopticon

Bentham expected that this 'new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example' would ensure that the prisoners would modify their behaviour and work hard, in order to avoid chastisement and avoid punishment. The idea of constant, overbearing surveillance is certainly unsettling, but the panopticon and its central inspection principle would, Bentham argued, have multifarious benefits:

Orwell’s dystopia focuses on the way discourse is instrumental for falsifying consciousness – brainwashing.

Language is the generator of meaning – whoever controls language controls mankind. Structural operations imposed on language: Equating contradictory words, reducing, merging words;

WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The Ministry of Truth monitored and falsified history appropriating the past to suit the present. It ran counter to people’s memory.

A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself — anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.

Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

Double think - blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has 123 two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary

The 1984 society: the Party members, the proles, the Inner Party members.

a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section — Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak — engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at (Chapt. 4)

Postmodernism is metafictional: it likes to surprise its readers with ingenious artifices without the ambition of solving the problems raised within the fictional universe. The result of this is the witty construction of aporias, “pathless paths”.

IX.

The Historical Hoax in Kazuo Ishiguro The Remains of the Day

Hoax – (practical) joke/păcăleală – is the counterpart of the serious history lessons of modernism/neo-modernism and the lecture is a discussion of the kind of seriousness in postmodernist editorial lessons: editorial history lessons here (lessons in postmodern seriousness).

-Editorial omniscience relativized omniscience as a term for explaining the narrative methods of TRADITIONAL/REALISTIC FICTIONAL NARRATIVES

Postmodernist fiction uses history-writing (historiography) ironically – in other words, postmodernist fiction abuses history writing, using fiction to abuse historiography and viceversa. There are a number of features which derive from the intention of entrusting the writing of uncomfortable or paradoxical, or open, or aporetic truths to an ironic point of view.

(i) Being organized by an ironic narrative method/point of view, the histories narrated in postmodernist fiction are hoaxes (intriguing, ironical SECOND-ORDER FICTIONAL NARRATIVES).

(ii) using unreliable narrators and providing no vessels of consciousness / reflectors (fully reliable characters acting as trustworthy/useful interpreters of the implied author’s values included in the texts) they lack safe, fixed points of reference left behind by the implied author to counter the truth-damaging function of the unreliable narrator[s], as was the case in Henry James’s novels, where there were fully knowledgeable characters acting as deflectors of the ironical slippage of meanings in the ironical fictional world).

(iii) they wish to foreground the impossibility of knowing history (the past/external truths) and arriving at any final/simple conclusions; all postmodernist accounts appear as officially or individually biased (flawed, false, deceitful, incomplete, etc.)

(iv) they contest the authority and role of personalities in history/master narratives and undermine subjectivity as the beneficiary or agent of epistemic knowledge (make subjectivity problematic)

ILLUSTRATION ONE OF THE IRONIC NARRATIVE METHOD in The Remains of the Day (1989) by Kazuo Ishiguro

The characters in the novel are equally divided between blind/blinded and lucid persons. The theme of seeing is put across in the first pages of the book in a discussion between the master of Darlington Hall, a big house in the South-East of England, and his butler, Stevens.

Since for him, seeing, while serving, the aristocracy means being familiar with his own country. This introduces the book’s second theme, in confrontation with former: to have or to have not ‘familiarity with what was and what was not commonly done in England’, familiarity with the British ways. The butler, whose first-person narrative seeks identification with the reader, imparts his own thoughts on this in what follows ‘ [. . . ] I did not take Mr. Faraday’s suggestion at all seriously that afternoon, regarding it as just another instance of an American gentleman’s unfamiliarity with what was and wahat was not commonly done in England”.

The ironical point of view that readers are confined to, in late-modern twentieth century fiction, just as in dramatic monologues (in poetry), and the main themes of meditation for a butler in an English grand old house are the following:

- Greatness (detected by the butler even in the landscape itself, not only in the distinguished people that an elite butler may meet)

- Dignity- Impeccable tact and readiness to serve in all imaginable discreet ways under all

circumstances – according to the perfect, gentlemanly code of honour- The obsession with conventions and patterns of behaviour sacredly observed by butlers

As will be seen – each of these notions will be contradicted in this book, situated on the boundary-line (between the old and the new dominant mentalities) historically established by the two World Wars.

These homebred beliefs are toughly countered at the international secret meeting held in Darlington Hall after the Peace of Versailles in 1922. Here is the confrontation between the old dignified British and the American ethos, the latter being aware of where the weight of historical worth and power lies nowadays.Mr. Lewis, the fictional American Realpolitik voice gave its scathing warning to the gathering of European gentlemen:

The performance of the book is to review the historical, ethical, national and international constellation of factors that led to the drastic historical change: the demise of old idealism and the birth of a merciless world of power.

The book’s irony exposes idealism as a batch of old fashioned powerless illusions; but since they are embodied by memorable characters, they come to matter more.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a Victorian realistic fiction hoax whose aim is to set right, with late twentieth-century means, the social, ethical and sexual prudery of the Victorian age. It contests and corrects the point of view of splendid imperial/national history with paratextual documents and intertextual allusions. The fictional hoax is due to the novel’s ecriture being entrusted to an unreliable implied author, who appears as a disoriented character in the book’s Chapter 13 and as a baffled road partner of the main protagonist on a train trip, in Chapter 55

inand who provides three, if not really four possible endings to his story. The literary history hoax is provided by the intertext

X.

British identity

REFLEXIVITY approaches fictional literature (including drama here) to the essay, in so far as it develops ideas, which are, nevertheless dramatized. Because, in the course of twentieth century, ideas became regrettably split from the system of thoroughly theoretical and practical conceptions, as they were seen to be in the Victorian, ideas are generally exposed as ideology, in the Marxian sense, of the generalized belief that societies are controlled by ideologies. REFLEXIVITY in contemporary (British/Western) literature signifies the participation of literature to the erosion (exposure) of ideology; this notion is covered by the reflexivity typical to historiographical metafiction; it has been explained as debunking/exposing historiographical narratives as ideological.

SELF-REFLEXIVITY is responsible with the destructuration of literature, by playing upon the literary conventions to disestablish or empoverish them. To reveal the underpinnings of narrative and of dramatic development conventions, self-reflexive literature plays against each other the parts and coherence,of the plot, it makes the characters revolt against the auctorial plots or, viceversa, it makes the author intervene to discuss his own conception or the particular conception of a given genre with the reader, etc.

SELF-REFLEXIVITY repeats the existentialist lesson about thrownness and suspends, not humane existence only, but the inherited literary conventions in a numbing void. the late modern predominance of the void instead of the numen corresponds to the loss of faith in emancipation and progress, which are replaced with endless questioning and contradicting any truths inherited from the tradition.

In this way, the plot of Fowles’s book consists of two halves: the one of the fictional Victorian story (typically so) and the other which is contributed by the twentieth century meditations about the whole Victorian mentality, characters, conventions etc. Consequently, the form of the book’s plot is that of an hour-glass, which empties the sand of the upper Victorian cup and fills the base-cup with twentieth century expertise at reduces the Victorian tradition to a void.

Similarly, the relationship with tradition in the twentieth century and the tense relationship of the (later) twentieth century with Victorianism open Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus. The elevated self-image about the Victorian age is corrected in the book’s First Part, set in London, in a circus. Victorian ethos is dragged in the mud by the protagonist who appears and develops the cliché of the angel in the house in a derisive, highly ironical way. Just as an angel, Fevvers has wings, but she is a Cockney Venus (an irresistible, slovenly big woman who drinks champagne all the time after her performances at the trapeze, farts and belches and resembles Molly Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses.

n the first part, literature – sensational journalism, sentimental and Gothic species of writing are parodied; in the second part, the Messianic figure of Christ is given to a clown, the oldest clown in the Clowns’ Alley of the Circus on tour to Sankt Petersburg (the clown teaches Nietzschean lucidity lessons and his modern circus testament is delivered because he is about to retire); in the third

part, Western movies and the film shot after The Crime on the Orient Express detective story are merged as a prelude to the end of this Christmas Pantomime novel.

T.S. Eliot’s music hall lyrics in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats

This poem, published by Eliot on the eve of the Second World War, can be regarded as a low-key “ Waste Land”: an encyclopaedia of modern domestic life and national habits. Because the sense of national identity gets established through foundational (or ritual) gestures that institute customs, Eliot begins his “book” with “The Naming of Cats”. Then, the story of Growltiger (“The Terror of the Thames” – a picaresque vagabond, a bellicose stray cat), who “roamed at large/From Gravesend up to Oxford”, is the pretext for making a full tour of some familiar places on the Thames, places in suburban London, Rotherhithe, Hammersmith, Putney, to Molesey and the Bell at Hampton, to Wapping and the Victoria Dock. Since the latter place-name rhymes with Bangkok, it also evokes, with pride, the wider, imperial range of the British world

Witty turns of phrase and funny rhymes give more power to his cat-caricatures of London inmates, while the ingenious personifications of cat- qualities and the words of endearment applied to them contribute to the sentimental charm of the portraits.