Postwar Novels Research Articles

The Subversive Girl and National Discourse in Pre-war Japan: Takeda Taijun's Kizoku no kaidan

This article examines representations of the 26 February 1936 Incident in Japan as seen through the eyes of Himiko, the daughter of the fictional leader of the House of Peers. The text discussed is a 1959 medium length novel, entitled kizoku no Kaidan (The Staircase of the Aristocracy), by post-war novelist, Takeda Taijun (1912-1976). A feature of the text is its subversion of hegomonic interpretations of Japanese military masculinity.

On Writing Techniques of Stream of Consciousness in Post-War Korean Novels

On Writing Techniques of Stream of Consciousness in Post-War Korean Novels

Three Generations of Yankees

This paper addresses the connection between war and masculinity through a case study of three generations of men in one family—the author's own. Gorham's great-grandfather, Charles Edward Gorham, born in 1842, served in the Union army during the Civil War. Her grandfather Henry Wilson Gorham wished he could have served in the First World War. Her father, postwar novelist Charles Orson Gorham, served in the Second World War. Using such primary sources as the Charles O. Gorham papers housed at the Howard Gottlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University; family papers in her possession; local history sources in St. Johnsbury, Vermont; as well as secondary literature on a variety of topics; Gorham presents an account of the experience of these three men. The case study is intended to contribute to a wider analysis of the intersections between dominant American conceptions of masculinity on the one hand, and war and violence on the other.

The Children of 1965: Allegory, Postmodernism, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri was already a celebrated author when her first novel appeared in print. Her short story of Maladies was selected for O. Henry Prize and for inclusion in Best American Short Stories. Her book of collected stories, Interpreter of Maladies, won Pulitzer Prize in literature. And in following year, The New Yorker named her one of 20 most important young American writers of new century. It is not surprising, therefore, that The Namesake attracted widespread press coverage. Reviewers foregrounded novel's mastery of form, focused on specific moments in text when author's skills were clearly in evidence, and compared her favorably to other contemporary authors who seemed, in contrast, overly self-indulgent (Kakutani, Kipen, Metcalf, Caldwell). If reviewers were in agreement about Lahiri's abilities as a writer, however, their enthusiasm about originality of her storytelling was more muted. David Kipen observed: Theme-wise, The Namesake marks no special advance over Interpreter of Maladies. It's a novel about an immigrant family's imperfect assimilation into America.... A certain sameness begins to creep in midway through book--explicable, if not completely excusable, as its picaresque hero's compulsion to trace same neurotic patterns over and over. In many ways, ordinary nature of The Namesake's narrative distances it from other novels, which tend, as Mark McGurl has recently argued, to combine the routine operations of modernist autopoetics with a rhetorical performance of cultural group membership preeminently, though by no means exclusively, marked as ethnic (117). By autopoetics, McGurl refers to reflexivity found in experimentation of highly esteemed contemporary fiction; this reflexivity is not so much a radical break from modernism as it is continuing interest of literary forms as objects of a certain kind of professional research (111). The combination, then, of an intense focus on form with a preoccupation with leads to a cultural (117)--a phrase that describes an impressive array of authors from Jews like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow to Native Americans like N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich; Asian Americans like Maxine Hong Kingston and Chang-rae Lee; Chicanas like Sandra Cisneros; and African Americans like Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed, and Toni Morrison. More impressive still, authors who don't have same claim to as these do nevertheless organize their work as if they were writing novels, minoritizing lower middle class (Raymond Carver), Vietnam War veterans (Tim O'Brien), Southern culture (Flannery O'Conner), and even white techno-nerds (Neal Stephenson). Far from thinking of postmodern fiction and novel as dividing literary field (120), a focus on high cultural pluralism suggests that postmodern is intimately related to what late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. famously denounced as a cult of ethnicity (41). (1) If so, what are we to make of a novel like The Namesake, which clearly combines an intense awareness of its own form (which reviewers quickly picked up in their celebration of author's craft) with a definite marking, but does so without experimentation--nor angst such experimentation routinely gives expression to--that we have come to recognize as indicative of serious postwar American fiction? In response to this question, I wish to suggest that a generational shift in perspective has taken place. The cultural landscape that confronted an earlier cohort of pioneering high cultural postwar novelists required hard work to make imaginable phenomena we have come to group under capacious and aging sign of postmodernism; these are phenomena like accelerated time/space compression of late capitalism, feverish self-fashioning of individuality that is wholly consonant with consumerism such capitalism relies on, hypermobility of populations within and across borders of various kinds, and dominance of biopolitics and its intertwining with geopolitics. …

Atrabile, Vagrancy and Latency in the Post-War Novels of D. H. Lawrence

Is there such a thing as Prophetic melancholy? In its later, technical sense of atrabile, or black bile, the term carries pathological connotations which are at odds with the god-inspired posture of Biblical prophecy. Still, one does wonder, at times, why Jeremiah, who so lamented his coming into the world, or Ezekiel, broken by the loss of the “desire of his heart” (Ezekiel 24:16), or the Suffering Servant in Isaiah, did not simply commit suicide. Theirs was inspired melancholy, the melancho...

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Ellen Cronan Rose This issue of jml introduces two new features: each article is followed by a 100–150 word abstract and a list of key words. Our publisher asked us to include these features to make the journal more searchable online. The print version of jml becomes an electronic version that many university and public libraries make available to users via electronic databases such as Project Muse. Since 90 percent of jml's subscriptions are institutional, it seems safe to reckon that more than three-quarters of our readers read the journal on a computer screen. What next? iPod downloads? Well, maybe something like that. There's a company called E-ink in Cambridge, Massachusetts that has developed a prototype electronic gadget that looks and feels like a newspaper (paper, ink, and all). But because it can be wirelessly attached to a subscription source (e.g., The New York Times or jml), it automatically updates itself on demand (daily for the Times, quarterly for jml).1 Oh brave new world, that has such "books" in't. We begin this issue with a cluster of three essays that interrogate narrative discourse and textual production. If anyone could theorize the implications for literature and literary scholarship of E-ink, it might well be Tony Jackson, whose lead article, "The De-Composition of Writing in A Passage to India," asserts that the scholarship on writing as a material technology has "intriguing implications" for the study of literary texts. The assertion is amply supported by Jackson's provocative reading of E. M. Forster's canonical modernist novel. Jackson concedes that he did not attempt to historicize the theoretical issues and conflicts he saw at play in A Passage to India. Brian Rourke's study of Under the Volcano, "Malcolm Lowry's Memory Machine: An Eclectic Systemë," proceeds from a materialist understanding of textual production similar to Jackson's. Unlike Jackson, however, Rourke is keenly attentive to the way in which the historical contexts which inform Lowry's novel affected his technical problems in producing it. Illustrative of Tony Jackson's dictum that "one of the key qualities of written texts is their materiality" is Doris Lessing's palimpsestic The [End Page iv] Golden Notebook, with its black, red, yellow, and blue notebooks, which we are invited to read by Anna Wulf, protagonist of the frame novel "Free Women." That novel turns out to have been written by (the same?) Anna Wulf, who may or may not be the author of The Golden Notebook. These mysteries are boldly confronted by Tonya Krouse, whose project is precisely to distinguish Anna the fictionalized character from the Anna whose writing occupies, like Doris Lessing's, a multiplicity of twentieth-century literary movements. When pondering whether The Golden Notebook is a "modernist," "postmodernist," or "feminist" text, one might do well to remember Lessing's oft-quoted observation that "it isn't either or at all, it's and, and, and, and, and, and" (Briefing 165). The next cluster of three essays is also concerned—on a spectrum ranging from the cerebral and ratiocinative to the downright gory—with production. The unifying link is maternity. In "Kristevan Themes in Virginia Woolf's The Waves," Chloë Taylor deploys Julia Kristeva's theorization of the relationship to the mother and to language as a way to explicate the complex characterization and symbolism of Woolf's arguably most difficult if also most poetic and affecting novel. For Andrea Jenkins, the theory articulated by Kristeva's "Stabat Mater" is anticipated by the unjustly neglected Southern Renaissance writer Evelyn Scott. Scott's 1921 novel The Narrow House and 1923 memoir Escapade record the physicality and abjection of the maternal body that Kristeva's "herethics" was conceived to remedy. The ultimate maternal abjection is abortion, and jml may be the first literary journal to publish an article on the modernist and post-war novelists who dared to bring it to their readers' attention. Sally Minogue and Andrew Palmer resurrect these pioneering efforts by Aldous Huxley, Jean Rhys, Nell Dunn, and Alan Sillitoe, in a brilliant if discomfiting essay that situates their readings in a context provided by Bakhtin's theory of the...

’Not Septimus Now‘: wives of disabled veterans and cultural memory of the First World War in Britain

Much of the writing on gender and the First World War has looked at the ways in which pre-war gender norms were reasserted in British society after the War. The article looks at the experiences of one group of women, the wives of men psychologically disabled by the experience of war, to show how disability could prevent the reassertion of pre-war gender roles. The experiences of these women, as expressed in the disability files created by the Ministry of Pensions, is then compared with the dramatisations of wives of disabled veterans in two post-war novels. This comparison highlights the ways in which such dramatisations turned the figure of the wife of the disabled veteran into a symbol of suffering that may be compared to the similarly symbolic figures of the neurasthenic veteran.

The Flowering Cross: Suffering, Reality, and the Christ Motif in Francis Stuart's The Pillar of Cloud and Redemption

Mention the name Francis Stuart to anyone interested in literature today and it is likely that words such as fascist, Nazi, and collaborator will spring instantly to their minds. Stuart's decision to stay in Germany during World War II and to do radio broadcasts from there to Ireland was to have profound repercussions, not the least of which has been the widespread view of him as a politically oriented writer tainted with an indelible moral stain. This view would seem to have been copper-fastened with the recent publication of these broadcasts edited by Brendan Barrington. At this distance in time the central question, assuming we accept such a view, is what it means for the reading of Stuart's fiction. The present essay will address this question in a somewhat oblique fashion. It will concentrate on a close reading of two of Stuart's major postwar novels, The Pillar of Cloud (1974) and Redemption (1994), making no direct reference within those readings to the question of their author's political sympathies. I shall read them, in effect, as if that issue were either non-existent or unknown. There are two valid and closely connected justifications for such an approach. The first is based on the admittedly debatable premise that artist and human being are essentially two different creatures. We do not reject Anna Karenina because of Leo Tolstoy's appalling treatment of his wife. A detailed discussion of the second is best left to the end of this paper, where it can be seen in light of the readings here proffered. These readings focus on Stuart's essentially mystical ideas on the nature of reality, which bear directly on the relationship between the human being, in all his or her heterogeneity, and the artist within. More intriguingly, such ideas point to a paradoxical link between mysticism and fascism and, in Stuart's case, afford some clue as to the nature of his fascist sympathies. Because these ideas lay at the root of Stuart's most controversial life decision, his stay in Germany, it is hoped they will at the very least provide a wider context in which that decision can be viewed. A key to such ideas can be found in a particular vision of the nature of the self, one that is closely attuned to the mystic traditions of many world religions and echoed in Western culture chiefly by the Romantics. (1) William Blake expresses it succinctly in this couplet from Jerusalem: As the Pilgrim passes while the Country permanent remains / So Men pass on, but States remain permanent forever (714). This flies in the face of one of Western civilization's self-evident truths (at least between the Enlightenment and structuralism)--namely, that the individual is an indivisible, separate, and fundamental reality and that those indefinable yearnings and passions common to all (finding their expression mostly, as Stuart believes, through love, art, and religion) are to one extent or another merely ethereal emanations from individuals, worthy of respect, certainly, sometimes even reverence, but in the final analysis secondary to the concerns of real life. (Christianity--even organized, official Christianity--is, theoretically speaking, an exception, but in practice this is usually what it comes down to---tamed religion.) For more spiritually sensitive souls, on the other hand, the position is reversed. These indefinable yearnings, these infinite longings (dim psychic intuitions of Blake's States), hint at the true reality, a reality trying desperately to make itself felt through the dense medium of individual, self-centered human beings, while the trappings of identity--name, nationality, sex, class, race, ego--so beloved that people are often prepared to kill and die rather than give them up, are merely subterfuges that must be discarded if what Percy Bysshe Shelley described in Adonais as the coloured dome of existence is to be shattered and the white radiance of eternity glimpsed by the trapped soul within (463). In the shattering lies the pain. …

Strategies under Surveillance: Reading Irmtraud Morgner as a GDR Writer by Geoffrey Westgate (review)

1060 Reviews feld, 2001)). The outcome is to make Koeppen even more of enigmatic. Pending a full evaluation of Koeppen's fragments, and failing a dramatically unifying overall interpretation, he remains inscrutable. In the meantime, Ward offersclose readings and careful and convincing analyses of themes, notably liminality: the author and his figures gravitate towards marginal positions from which to observe the world. Whether such a position is enforced, e.g. by political pressures, or voluntary, or in? deed (seen anthropologically) a necessary ritual function, must make a difference,but it is rarely clear to the reader (or, apparently, to Koeppen) which it is at any particular point. As this ambiguity touches closely on the very identity ofthe author and on his techniques of characterization, it could be tested further,and no doubt will be. Ward stresses social role-playing: the roles, forinstance, of author (though unproductive) or parliamentarian (though disillusioned); and preoccupation with transitional spaces: borders, railway platforms, bridges, and the like. He analyses profoundly the possible concessions in Koeppen's writing around 1933 to ideas of 'Heimat', nation, or public and private duty which he did not necessarily share. But we have no evidence that Koeppen was actually unhappy with Nazism (and Doring has now blown cold on some of the evidence we thought we had). Despite Ward's dissection of passages where national strivings seem chimeric, the young Koeppen seems a rather unreflective conservative, perhaps offended by the aesthetics of Nazism but without a political response (like the young Frisch, not mentioned here). However, Koeppen could learn. As Ward points out, the outsider figures of the post-war novels are much more complex. Coming to grips with Littner's memoirs means critical examination of 'the negotiability of cultural identity' (p. 101) seen in the subjective Germanness of a secularized Polish Jew resident in Munich. The (attempted) rebuilding of a cultural German identity from literal and metaphori? cal ruins can then be fictionally treated from various angles. The writer's space is reached 'by establishing liminal structures in a narrative process of negotiation with the discourses which define the society ofwhich they [Koeppen's protagonists] are ineluctably a part' (p. 73). Even ifWard's own discourse is reached by negotiation with an academe which demands such vocabulary, his method can still bring old-fashioned insights. In sum, this is a helpful contribution to Koeppen exegesis. The book is well produced and remarkably free from misprints and the like (but on p. 141, for Brinkl-Frederici, read Brink-Friederici). Cardiff University Alfred D. White Strategies under Surveillance: Reading IrmtraudMorgner as a GDR Writer. By Ge? offrey Westgate. (Amsterdamer Publikationen zur Sprache und Literatur, 148) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2002. viii+ 276 pp. ?50; $46.50. ISBN 90-42o-i428-x(pbk). Geoffrey Westgate's book on Irmtraud Morgner, based on an Oxford D.Phil thesis, assesses how far the publication of this author's works was hampered, delay ed, and in one instance prevented by institutionalized censorship and control. Beyond this, Westgate sets out to show that the experience of such interference was a fundamental influence in shaping Morgner's choice of subject matter and her approach to it, even to the extent of guiding her aesthetics. Westgate argues moreover that contrasts in Morgner's texts, such as that between the relative optimism of Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz and the disillusionment of Amanda, reflect her sensitivity to the changing political situation around her; Beatriz, published in 1974, owes much to the new climate under Erich Honecker, both in its playfulness and in its 'formal iconoclasm' (p. 142), while Amanda (1983), a formally much more rigorous text with MLRy 98.4, 2003 1061 a strong socio-critical component, bears the mark of the pessimism which set in af? ter Biermann's expulsion in 1976. Referring to feminist readings of Morgner's texts, readings which have played a considerable part in the literary-critical reception and relative popularity of the author especially in West Germany, Westgate contends that these readings may be one-dimensional. They emphasize continuities in Morgner's writings, overlooking how her texts shift in tone and style in reaction to cultural sea-changes within the GDR...

Paul Morand: The Paradoxes of "Revision"

For those who ponder the revisionism that took place among French intellectuals and writers in the 1950s regarding the split between Right and Left, Paul Morand's oeuvre offers a fruitful subject of study. This could seem illogical, for we are talking about a writer who does not consider himself an intellectual, and refused any revision on his own account when he was fired from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in September 1944, based on his choices and actions as a highlyplaced bureaucrat during World War II. The logical challenge (to speak about revisionism from the standpoint of an unrepentant radical) is also a challenge to logic, since Morand's positions -more complex than suggested at first glance, and thus richer-seem linked to paradox. The Dictionnaire Robert defines paradox as Opinion qui va h l'encontre de l'opinion communement admise. In fact, as a recalcitrant Vichyist, Paul Morand places himself against the current of the dominant historical doxa, and sometimes even against the Vichyist minority in which he enclosed himself. The dictionary adds; Etre, chose, fait qui heurt le bon sens. We see Morand in this second meaning, which clarifies itself in a third one on the level of logic: se dit d'une proposition qui est a la fois vraie et fausse. The paradox creates a closed circuit, a link between opposites. The reader is sent back to terms like antinomy, contradiction, sophistry. I will not attempt here to explore the vast domain of political involvement or non-involvement and interpretations thereof. I will also attempt not to follow in the footsteps of readers who have already made great headway in decoding Morand's texts, such as Jeffrey Mehlman. I will take care not to go down the roads of polemic or rehabilitation. My goal is not to take sides, but to detect a coherence in Morand's writing, from post-war novelist to aging diarist. In fact, his Journal inutile (1968-1976) provides a generic and chronologic counterpoint to the earlier writings, allowing one to measure how much Morand substitutes the division Vichy/Other for the Right/Left cleavage. It will gradually become apparent that the writer never stopped rehashing and recomposing directly, via the journal, or implicitly via his fictionthe era 1940-44. He did not revise this past, but looked at it again and revisited it, in order to demonstrate three points: 1) revision characterizes man and the world; 0 Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2003 SubStance # 102, Vol. 32, no. 3, 2003 43

Céline and the Politics of Difference (review)

L'Esprit Créateur self-portrayal as paranoid or hysteric, while Jennifer Forrest analyzes Bardamu's trip to the U.S. in search of the ideal, passive woman who would not threaten his gender fantasies and underlying misogyny. Scullion's "Choreographing Sexual Difference" asserts that the diatribes and ballets of Bagatelles, along with Celine's obsessive focus on the beautiful yet contorted moves of the ballerina, reveal the author's inability to deal with otherness except through rejection, scopophilia, or mastery. Furthermore, Celine's resurrection of ballet imagery after the war accentuates "things beautiful" while diverting attention from "authorial accountability" (142). In another vein, Pascal Ifri concentrates on Mort à crédit and its picture of France's lower middle classes, disadvantaged by industrialization. Other contributors address style and moral responsibility. Andrea Loselle examines Celine's claim that his later novels resemble the medieval and early modern chroniclers Froissart, Monluc, and the Cardinal de Retz. This aesthetic self-justification actually masks ongoing racial stereotyping after the war, when Céline vaunts his "frank speech" as a shift from decadent GaIIoRoman elements in French culture toward Germanic expressive purity (190). Charles Krance spans the prewar and postwar through a critique of Sartre who, though he gave La Nausée an epigraph from Celine's anti-Semitic play L'Eglise, hastily condemned the writer during the Purge. Philip Watts' "Postmodern Céline" aptly concludes the volume. Although Tel Quel praised the innovative, liberating aspects of Célinian style, Watts insists that the accompanying ideology cannot be so easily dismissed, given the affinity between Celine's polemical images of decimated Berlin in Nord and Maurice Bardèche's similar attempt, with reference to the civilian damage inflicted by Allied bombardments, to mitigate French collaboration and facilitate Holocaust denial. The volume, which has an excellent index, ranges impressively through Celine's works, from L'Eglise to Entretiens avec le professeur Y, from Voyage au bout de la nuit through the postwar novels, with special reference to the pamphlets. Celine's career is reevaluated comprehensively through the nexus of his race- or gender-based constructions of identity. Scullion, Solomon, and Spear's admirable and original collection emphasizes the ideology driving Celine's emotional subway and will be of interest to the broader critical community as well as to Celine's scholars. Van Kelly University of Kansas Jean-Michel Rabaté. The Ghosts of Modernity. Gainesville, FL: UP of Florida, 1996. Pp. xxii + 258. $49.95. As a sophisticated theorist who is also a meticulous scholar, editor, and translator, JeanMichel Rabaté holds a unique position among Modernist critics. His work on Joyce and Pound alone would earn him pride of place in the academy, but Rabaté is also an authority on Samuel Beckett and Herman Brach, on Mallarmé and Thomas Bernhard, and, most recently—witness the final chapter of this book, "Uncoupling Modernism"—he has turned his attention to Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding, and H.D. Ghosts of Modernity is a fully revised and expanded English version of Rabaté's La Pénulti ème est morte: Spectrographies de la modernité (1993). If Spectographies and the author's related French studies have not yet won Rabaté the audience he deserves in the U.S., it is probably because his intricate Lacanian and Dcrridean analyses are highly specific; they avoid all cooptation into an "authoritative" metanarrative about the Modern (or Postmodern) condition; then too, they assume at least some knowledge of the authors to be discussed. But for the English edition , Rabaté has provided the reader with an explicit theoretical framework for "rereading modernity "—a framework that has been implicit all along. Rabaté's is basically a theory of reading, deeply informed by the writings of his masters 90 Summer 1999 Book Reviews Lacan, Derrida, and especially Barthes, to whom one of the best essays in the book is devoted. He deplores the "resistance to theory" on the part of many current cultural studies, which subordinates critical analysis to an obsession with contemporary race, class, and gender inequities. Specifically, he wants to show that the much talked about "repudiation of history" on the part of poststructuralist theory is a red herring, that indeed it is possible to be a theorist...

The Face in the Mirror: Hemingway's Writers

The Face in the Mirror is a study of a theme in Hemingway's writing - his depiction of writers and the special problems they face, professionally and personally. From his earliest years as a short-story writer to the end of his career when he attempted to complete two ambitious novels, Hemingway was preoccupied with the artistic and ethical dilemmas of his writer protagonists. Fleming's book explores Hemingway's concern with writers from the 1920s through the early 1960s. Hemingway began his career with an easy confidence that he could profit from the errors of other authors he had encountered during his Paris period. His early story Mr and Mrs Elliot and his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises depict writers who are flawed by a too-shallow commitment to their art that results in truncated literary careers and inferior literary work. By the 1930s, having established his own reputation, Hemingway turned his scrutiny inward, examining some of his own faults in works such as Fathers and Sons and The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio. After World War II, Hemingway attempted to resume his literary career with Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden, neither of which he finished. Both of these massive manuscripts thoroughly treated the problems an artist faces in balancing art and humanity. In A Moveable Feast, nearly completed at the time of his death, Hemingway retreated from the introspection of the previous two unfinished previous novels and instead created the myth of Ernest Hemingway as happy artist, surrounded by inferior talents who exemplify the ways in which authors may fail. In addition, Fleming's book provides a closer examination of such neglected works as To Have and Have Not and the Spanish Civil War short stories. His readings of Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden aim to change the way future readers and critics view those novels. Fleming suggests that both of these postwar novels are major works of fiction, adding new dimensions to the Hemingway canon.

History and the Contemporary Novel.

Cowart presents a study of international historical fiction since World War II, with reflections on the affinities between historical fictional narrative, analysis of the basic modes of historical fiction, readings of a number of historical novels, including John Barth s Sot-Weed Factor, Marguerite Yourcenar s Memoirs of Hadrian, Russell Hoban s Riddley Walker, Margaret Atwood s Handmaid s Tale, Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa s Leopard, D. M. Thomas s White Hotel, William Faulkner s Go Down, Moses, and Umberto Eco s Name of the Rose.He proposes recognizing four modes of the historical novel: the past as a distant mirror of the present, fictions whose authors seek to pinpoint the precise historical moment when the modern age or some prominent feature of it came into existence, fictions whose authors aspire purely or largely to historical verisimilitude, fictions whose authors reverse history to contemplate utopia dystopia in the future. Thus, historical fiction can be organized under the rubrics: The Distant Mirror; The Turning Point; The Way It Was; The Way It Will Be.This fourfold schema his focus on postwar novels set Cowart s work apart from previous studies, which have not devoted adequate space to the contemporary historical novel. Cowart argues that postwar historical fiction merits more extensive treatment because it is the product of an age unique in the annals of historyan age in which history itself may end.

Holograms of Humanity: The Negative Reality of Alberto Moravia's Postwar Novels

Holograms of Humanity: The Negative Reality of Alberto Moravia's Postwar Novels

The Early Years of Angus Wilson

Angus Wilson is unusual among twentieth-century British writers in at least two ways. He seems, in the first place, never to have served a literary apprenticeship or to have experienced any difficulty in getting his first work published. He speaks of having contributed pieces to the school magazine of his preparatory school, and one short story to The Elizabethan, the school magazine of his public school, Westminster,' but, apart from these juvenilia, Angus Wilson wrote nothing until the age of thirty-three, when in a single Sunday in November 1946 he produced his short story, Raspberry Jam. Together with eleven other stories written in rapid succession on subsequent weekends, this was published in 1949 in his first collection, The Wrong Set. Only three of these stories had previously appeared in print, but these came out in excellent magazines: Realpolitik in The Listener, Mother's Sense of Fun and Crazy Crowd in Cyril Connolly's Horizon. Such prestigious first appearances, coupled with the willingness of an important firm, Secker and Warburg, to bring out as part of a collection nine stories not previously published, is impressive testimony to the power of Wilson's late-flowering talent, and to the authority with which he was able to handle material drawn from the experiences, opinions and emotions of his earlier life. Since 1949 and his emergence fully-armed on the literary scene as a writer of short stories, Angus Wilson has become one of Britain's most important post-war novelists. In his entry in Who's Who Angus Wilson lists his recreations as gardening, travel, so revealing in the simplest form the sense of contrast on which his view of the world is based. The cultivation of a garden implies rootedness, or at least usually involves being settled in a particular place, and since the mid-1950s Wilson has lived in a small village in Suffolk, near Bury St. Edmunds. But he has also traveled

Beckett and the Problem of Modern Culture

The most obvious problem of modern culture is that there doesn't seem to be very much more of it. The dearth of great writers today is unjustly dismissed as a problem of perspective. For there are scarcely even any major writers, those known outside the c6teries of specialized amateurs of nouvelle poesie, nouveau (nouveau) roman, nouveau theatre. There remains, to be sure, at least one 75-year-old writer who constitutes exception to this generality. But Beckett's greatness lies in his lucidly paradoxical refusal of greatness. To understand Beckett, and above all to understand the problem of modern culture, we must take seriously his description of Bram Velde as exemplary modern artist: Van Velde . . . is the first to admit that to be artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping.' That this statement is paradoxical, Beckett freely admits. That failure, as a new criterion of authenticity, becomes a new form of success, that failure to express succeeds in becoming an expressive act, even if only of itself, of its impossibility, of its obligation, Beckett the Nobel-Prize winner is perhaps even more acutely aware today than when, as a little-known post-war novelist, he expressed these paradoxes in his Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. But paradox is not nonsense, and Beckett's analysis of modern culture may well be the best point of departure we have. Taken at face value, this analysis very nearly implies the impossibility of art. The successful artist is relegated to arts and crafts, to what we might otherwise call mass or popular culture. His success is the sign of artistic inauthenticity, of his having set himself a problem that is a priori of no esthetic interest precisely because it can be solved. Solving problems was possible, Beckett says or implies elsewhere, for Proust or Joyce; it is no longer possible for artists today. There are no more significant solvable problems left unsolved; success in art is paid for by insignificance, not to say outright plagiarism of earlier solutions. The artist-as-failure, if he is to exist at all, is thus condemned to tread a narrow line between inauthentic success and the truly irremediable failure to produce anything at all. He has nothing to express except his failure

Review of books by Nancy Keesing, James McAuley and Barry Andrews

Australian Postwar Novelists, Selected Critical Essays edited by Nancy Keesing (Jacaranda Press, Milton, Qld., 1975).

Context and Structure of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited, which appeared in 1945, seems to have provided both the impetus and focal point for most of the existing criticism of Evelyn Waugh's fiction. If one wishes to discuss the six earlier novels -Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934), Scoop, (1938), and Put Out More Flags (1942)-it has become more or less customary to mention how Brideshead Revisited, the seventh novel and the first work, differs from them. And if one examines Mr. Waugh's post-war novels, Brideshead Revisited can always be used as a kind -of norm: a later novel belongs either with the serious works, or with the peculiar comic tradition established by the first six novels. However, Brideshead Revisited has itself evoked sufficient critical disagreement to imply that, even at this late date, it still presents problems worth investigating. One of the difficulties confronting the student of Mr. Waugh's fiction is the virtual impossibility of placing this author securely within a single comic tradition. His obviously comic novels seem far too meaningful to be regarded as mere caricature, and yet they lack both the tinge of bitterness one normally associates with irony, and the moral indigation which usually accompanies satire. Erwin Stiirzl identifies him with the tradition of Defoe and Smollett;' and while this is certainly debatable, it emphasizes the importance of plot and craftsmanship in the creation of the earlier novels. The distinctions usually accorded Mr. Waugh are that, until 1945, his fiction reveals a steady progression away from this craftsman's tradition and toward the more conventional novel in which action grows out of motivation fimly grounded upon character, and that Brideshead Revisited represents a complete escape from his earlier tradition. Although critics have disagreed with both of these judgments, none has examined Brideshead Revisited within the specific context provided by the six novels which preceded it, a context of both thought and technique. Such a consideration will reveal a remarkable amount of similarity between this novel and the earlier ones; further, a detailed examination of these similari-

Spain in the Novels of Cela and Baroja

Pio Baroja (1872-1956) and Camilo Jose Cela (b. 1916) are both post-war novelists. The former devoted himself to expressing the abulic state of mind of his nation, particularly of the Spaniards of the nether regions of Madrid, following the SpanishAmerican War; the latter is intent on portraying the seemingly senseless negativism of his people following the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Both writers dwell on the agonizing vacuum which confronts their societies; both present nothingness as a theme of life in their novels. The everflow of life leads nowhere -except unto death. And death and death alone presents the only escape or solution to the otherwise inescapable and turbulent muddle which is life.

A Decade of Political and Economic Change in Italy

A LMOST eleven years ago, in the immediate aftermath of a costly war and the fall of fascism, Italy's electorate dismissed the House of Savoy and voted to try its hand at republican government instead. Looking back, most Italian commentators are inclined to judge positively the events following that decision. They point out that Italy has demonstrated a marked capacity for operating democratic political institutions, and an almost miraculous ability to stay above water economically in the face of the most discouraging obstacles. To be sure, there are those on the political right who still bemoan the break with tradition, and others on the left who claim that the break with the past has not been nearly what many had anticipated during the days of the Resistance. Nevertheless, the evidence is overwhelming that basic changes, many of them with profound long-run implications for Italian society, have been effected in the political, economic, and social spheres. It is common knowledge that the United States has played a major role in the reconstruction of postwar Italy. Economic aid, technical assistance personnel, educational exchange, even the millions of American tourists, have been instruments for shaping the direction which certain changes in Italian society have taken. Yet, in spite of the high degree of interaction between the two countries, the public and the government of the United States probably know less about the politics and economics of Italy than of any other of our major allies in Western Europe. We have come to appreciate Italian fashions, motion pictures, motion picture actresses, and postwar novelists. These interests, however, have not been duplicated by serious inquiries into the political institutions and behavior of the Italian Republic. This limited knowledge of Italian affairs has historical roots. We have always been much more closely identified with Great Britain and France, nations that have loomed large in the evolution of our own political institutions. Italy, on the other hand, did not emerge as a nation until the middle of the nineteenth century. What might have developed into close Italo-American ties was thwarted by American isolationism