English 227 - Modern British Fiction

Michael Gorra

TTh 1:00-2:20 p.m.

 

The history of 20th century British fiction is a complicated tale, or set of tales, a history that can be written in many different ways. Most versions start by trying to offer an account of Modernism, which has the benefit of coinciding with the century's beginning, with something new coming along to replace the old dead world of the Victorians; literally dead with the Queen herself in 1901. Our version of the tale will follow convention by considering, in our first weeks, some of the undisputed masterpieces of the century, novels that any serious reader should know: Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Forster's Passage to India, and Lawrence 's Women in Love. But we'll begin the course in a perhaps unlikely place, with Joseph Conrad's Nostromo , a book set in an imaginary Latin American country. It is Conrad's longest novel, one of his most difficult, and by a long measure his most-well, the only word for it is "majestic." It presents all the usual Conradian themes of honor and fidelity, and all the technical bravura too, the shifts in time, the interpolated narratives. But this novel about a silver mine and a revolution is also one that seems very much about our own today, a novel about the operations of global capitalism, of the role that powerful economic interests play in governmental decisions. And a large part of the story we'll tell in the rest of the semester will develop out of the terms that Nostromo sets for us.

 

After our examination of Modernism we'll pause briefly in the middle of the century. I don't think any fully coherent picture of British fiction in the middle decades has emerged, unless one were to characterize it as a muddle-a period without any one dominant formal or thematic concern, unlike the Modernist moment with its emphasis on consciousness and chronology and the relation between them. We'll read two books here: Elizabeth Bowen's Heat of the Day, about London during the Second World War, the bombing and love and betrayal. And we'll then read either Henry Green's Living, a comic novel set in an Irish country house during the war, or Graham Greene's End of the Affair, which as it happens also concerns bombing and love and betrayal.

 

Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook marks a return, in the early sixties, to the formal experimentation of the modernists, and will offer us some of the Lawrentian attention to consciousness. But this time the experience has been passed not only through the war and the Communist Revolution, but also through what is explicitly a women's understanding of these issues. Lessing's book became, more than any other important work of fiction, a central text in the feminist movement that emerged at the end of the decade. That would be enough for any book; but Lessing also writes about the her heroine's attraction to and disillusionment with Marxism, about madness and psychoanalysis, colonialism, and even about the form of the novel itself, about the possibility of presenting events as they "really" were.

 

We'll conclude with two books that return us to the start of the term. VS Naipaul, born in Trinidad of East Indian parents, can stand more than anyone as Conrad's heir; we will read his novel A Bend in the River, which is set in same town that served as Kurtz's Inner Station in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." And we'll finish with Shirley Hazzard's Transit of Venus , which seems to recapitulate both Conrad and Lawrence, and even a bit of Lessing, a novel about a fully globalized world, set mostly in England and with mostly English characters, but emphatically not an English novel.

 

Three four page papers, and a take-home final.