TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE UP TO 1940 [ENG2C05]

STUDY MATERIAL

II SEMESTER CORE COURSE

MA ENGLISH (2019 Admission onwards)

UNIVERSITY OF CALICUT SCHOOL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION CALICUT UNIVERSITY- P.O MALAPPURAM- 673635, KERALA

190005

ENG2C05-TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE UP TO 1940

SCHOOL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION UNIVERSITY OF CALICUT

STUDY MATERIAL SECOND SEMESTER

MA ENGLISH (2019 ADMISSION ONWARDS)

CORE COURSE:

ENG2C05 : TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE UP TO 1940

Prepared by:

Dr.Muralikrishnan T.R. Associate Professor and Head, Department of English M.E.S Asmabi College, P. Vemballur, Kodungallur, Thrissur District, Kerala

Scrutinized by:

Dr. Aparna Ashok Assistant Professor on Contract Department of English University of Calicut

ENG2C05-TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE UP TO 1940

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SYLLABUS

ENG2C05 : Twentieth Century British Literature up to 1940 (5 credits)

Section A

G.M. Hopkins - : “The Windhover” W.B. Yeats - : The Second Coming, Byzantium TS Eliot - : The Waste Land W.H.Auden - : Funeral Blues Wilfred Owen : A Strange Meeting

Section B : Drama

GB Shaw : Caesar and Cleopatra TS Eliot : Murder in the Cathedral Sean O Casey : Juno and The Paycock

Section C: Prose and Fiction

Virginia Woolf - : “Modern Fiction” Joseph Conrad - : Heart of Darkness D.H. Lawrence - : Sons and Lovers James Joyce - : A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

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SECTION A

G.M. Hopkins - : “The Windhover” W.B. Yeats - : The Second Coming, Byzantium TS Eliot - : The Waste Land W.H.Auden - : Funeral Blues Wilfred Owen : A Strange Meeting

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THE WINDHOVER

GERALD MANLEY HOPKINS

I caught this morning morning's minion, king- dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

A brief critical appreciation Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote "The Windhover" in May, 1877. He had been a student at St Bueno's Theological College for three years, and this was a productive period in his life. He considered this short poem worth reading, and, sending a revised copy to his friend Robert Bridges, declared that this was the best poem he'd ever written. It was published in 1918, almost 30 years after his death. He loved painting and writing poems. As a Jesuit priest he left all artistic activities for years. But his chosen austere life gave him no satisfaction. He used to write music for church programme. Through the choice of words and usages he paints a lively picture of the flight of the falcon in the poem ‘The Windhover’.

The Windhover is a bird that soars high up and encircles and glide to catch its prey like kite or hawk or falcon. It may be taken as the symbol of the soul/spirit or it may be the symbol of

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Jesus Christ whom the poem is dedicated. The poet being a depressed man turned to spirituality and turned to Jesus Christ for solace. In this attempt he links the spiritual world with the material world He writes in this poem, “Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle”. The male figure of Christ allows him to safely express strength, valour and unstinted enthusiasm.

The poet caught sight of the bird falcon hovering high in search of prey. Jesus too search for souls on earth. Poet’s soul is one such that was caught by him. The poet tells us that he is much attracted by the sight of the smooth flight of the bird. The bird ”In his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing, as a skate’s heel sweeps smooth o a bow bend:” This is a photographic expression. In the use of words and phrases , he exposes his sharpness. The phrase “brute beauty” that tells us of the adventurous flight of the bird, and the use of the word “buckle” which implies the link between the spiritual and physical life are very apt and attractive.

His last words “I am happy, I am so happy. I loved my life” tell his psyche. He uses simple imagery, with metaphysical overtones and delicate but intricate prosody. Divinity reflects itself through all of the poems. He used archaic and dialect words or even coined words. One such word is twindles, (twines and dwindles combined), and an adjective use is “dapple- dawn-drawn falcon” (The Windhover).

As Dennis Ward (1965) points out “The mortal beauty of the falcon, the energy and valour and pride will be a billion times told lovelier when apprehended as the outward and visible sign of the creative force, God, which under the world’s splendour and wonder.” (https://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/english-association/schools/resources-for-trainee-teachers- and-nqts/Hopkins%201%2060.2.pdf)

Hopkins extensively uses alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia and both end rhyme and internal rhyme. In the first stanza we find the use of “ing” to end the lines. Eg. king, riding, striding, wing swing, gliding, hiding, and thing. The use of morning’s minion” and “kingdoms of daylight” dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon etc contains different artistic ornaments mentioned above.

In the framework of a sonnet of Octave and Sestet pattern with sprung rhythm Hopkins symbolically connects(buckles) this world and the other world. Jesus Christ gives him consolation in life. With this word painting of the flight of a bird, Hopkins tells us that the

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Nature can give us happiness as the bird which was caught sight of unexpectedly gave him pleasure.

The discussion on this sonnet was first started by the distinguished critic I. A. Richards. Yet in no critique, down to the most recent interpretations does any commentator ever seem to have studied as a watcher of the subject of the poem. Most commentators seem to have studied the wing-beating, hovering, gliding, swooping and recovering of the kestrel or windhover, a study which cannot be conducted inside a dictionary, a Cambridge College, or a religious seminary.

We should notice that a buzzing rhyme runs through the first eight lines, its own report, its own excellence, God's fame, God's excellence. It also tells of the tense ringing vibration of the kestrel's typical movement. It speaks and spells itself, as Hopkins affirmed of each corporeal thing in the sonnet—"As kingfishers catch fire."

Nevertheless, the kestrel was a portion of that dull glory given to God. It was, though dangerous, heaven's sweet gift. As in the sheer plod of ploughing, the steel mould-board or beast of the plough becomes shiny from the turned earth down the long strips of land (sillions) and as embers that have become blue-bleak reveal, when their dull surface drops away the heat and colour inside them. He thinks, addressing Christ, of the sheer plod of his own nine years, as it would soon be, of long preparation; of his own natural avocation since he had chosen to enter the Jesuit Order. The sheer plod puts a shine upon the plough which is himself; his bitter asceticism and exhaustion of mind reduces him to bleak embers which nevertheless gall and gash themselves to gold Vermillion—which are, in fact, the ashes of his other poem.

Of such a kind is the interweaving of subtleties, complexities and force and fire which Hopkins can convey through "inscapes”, of his passionate science. His poetry can, of course, be read at different levels—for its delight in natural phenomena so ecstatically and so exactly caught in the net of language—structures of superb energy which so refreshingly draw forth one's response.

Critical Comments “Aquinas says that of all things only God is totally in act, and this poem about a bird imagined to be totally in act is directed "To Christ our Lord." "The Windhover," thus, may be read as Hopkins' symbolic anticipation of the beatific vision, the state in which man enjoys an

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open view of God's being. If the poem is read in this way, one supposes these steps in Hopkins' identification of the windhover with Christ: first Hopkins sees the bird and admires its energy; this vision of energy so works upon his imagination as to suggest that the windhover is completely in act; he projects onto the windhover all his feelings about the divine nature, especially about Christ, who shares all the divine nature and who of the three persons seems to men the most attainable.”

BRUCE E. MILLER Victorian Poetry, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Spring, 1964), pp. 115-119 West Virginia University Press

“I have already said that I do not think the Windhover is merely a symbol of energy. Certainly it is a bird of prey and was quite possibly circling over a victim when Hopkins saw it. But what Hopkins was watching was not the bird so much as its flight and the perfection of its movements. Its being a bird of prey at this particular moment is quite incidental to Hopkins's point of view. It is the early morning, the sun has risen and the sky is streaked with red, the wind is strong, and the kestrel rides into it and holds his own and sweeps round in a big curve. There is no mention of prey and certainly no difficulty in abstracting from it. If people see in the bird a symbol of Christ, it is in its mastery and control and not in its prey- directed 'energy'. Even if we were to admit the difficulty of forgetting the more cruel elements of the Windhover's activity, it still remains beautiful in flight”.

Francis G. Doyle A Note on Hopkins's Windhover An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 45, No. 177 (Spring, 1956), pp. 88-91, Messenger Publications

“GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS' first poem in what he called "sprung rhythm" was "The Wreck of the Deutschland," composed in the winter of 1875-76. In a letter of October, 1878, Hopkins explained to his friend R. W. Dixon the circumstances that led to the writing of the poem. Concerning its unusual prosody, Hopkins remarked: "I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realised on paper. To speak shortly, it consists in scanning by accents or stresses alone, without any account of the number of syllables, so that a foot may be one strong syllable or it may be many light and one strong."1 This "new rhythm" was to be the metrical principle of nearly half the poems that Hopkins would write thereafter. His various attempts to explain the rhythm, however, do not add up to a clear,

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complete exposition - although his "Author's Preface," written about 1883-84 for Robert Bridges' manuscript B of Hopkins' poems, is the most reliable source of information….”

“Hopkins'"sprung rhythm" is a metrical system having the following characteristics: 1. Falling rhythm - the scansion always beginning with a stressed syllable.2. Feet of varying numbers of syllables - normally from one to four. 3. Feet of approximately equal duration, regardless of the number of syllables in a foot- i.e., isochronous meter. 4. Frequent use of clashing accents- two or more juxtaposed stressed syllables, with no intervening unstressed syllables. 5. Rests, as in music, being allowed to figure in the scansion, taking up part or (theoretically) all of a foot, with a rest-beat substituting for the primary stress of the foot. 6. Dipodic rhythm- two accented syllables frequently occurring within one foot, with the first having primary stress and the second having secondary stress. 7. Occasional use of "rove- over" lines - in which the last foot of a line does not end with that line but continues without pause into the beginning of the following line. 8. Use of "outrides" - extrametrical syllables that need not count in the scansion. 9. Use of alliteration, assonance, and rhyme (both end- rhyme and internal rhyme) as clues to the proper accentuation of the line…” “To end where we began, with an overview of sprung rhythm, let us examine "The Windhover," Hopkins' best-known sonnet. This poem exhibits all nine of the characteristics of sprung rhythm as set forth at the beginning of this paper - even a rest-beat, if my conjectural reading of the fifth line is correct. Hopkins' note on the rhythm of the poem calls it "falling paeonic rhythm, sprung and outriding" (Poems, p. 266). The outriding syllables are those marked with loops below them. Since Bridges' manuscript B has the nine outride marks given in the text below, these have the poet's authority.22 Although in more than one place Hopkins designated outrides as extrametrical, the only example in "The Windhover" of an irregularity thus licensed occurs in the sixth line, in which the foot skate's heel sweeps, with two long syllables in the slack part of the foot, both bearing secondary stress, would be disallowed- except by making heel an out riding syllable, with a fine effect. The other eight outrides, nevertheless, are useful guides to the performer: Hopkins indicated another function of the outride in his note on "Hurrahing in Harvest"- namely, "the strong syllable in an outriding foot has always a great stress and after the outrider follows a short pause" {Poems, p. 269). Almost invariably in Hopkins' poems a primary stress will fall on the nearest syllable preceding the outride that is capable of bearing lexical stress.23 In "The Windhover" this is the immediately preceding syllable in every case except that of "wonder" in the twelfth line.24 Hopkins himself placed acute accent marks in purple, when he edited Bridges'

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manuscript B, in sixteen places in the poem: on all five of the syllables with primary stress in each of lines 3, 12, and 14; and on the morpheme dawn in the compound "dapple-dawn- drawn" in line 2 (thus showing that the third foot of the line is dawn-drawn).25 Another metrical mark the poet used for indicating primary stress was his "great colon," with dots larger and more separated than in the punctuation-colon. Within a line, a great colon means that the syllables on each side of it bear primary stress - a way of calling attention to the clash of accents that gave rise to the name "sprung" for this rhythm.26 In both versions of "The Windhover" in manuscript A (Hopkins' autograph), great colons within the line appear between the words "big wind" (1.7), "sheer plod" (1. 12), and "gash gold-" (1. 14).27 A great colon at the beginning of a line means that the first syllable of the line is stressed. In both A versions this mark appears before "stirred"(1. 8), "Times" (1. 1 1), and "Shine" (1. 13).28 Thus, Hopkins' acute accents and great colons identify with certainty twenty-one of the seventy primary stresses in the sonnet….” “No discussion of sprung rhythm in general and "The Windhover" in particular can be complete without consideration of the often brilliant interaction between meter and meaning in Hopkins' poems and especially in "The Windhover": meaning is the primary force that shapes the rhythm; and rhythm, on the other hand, helps to elucidate the meaning…”

Edward A. Stephenson Hopkins' "Sprung Rhythm" and the Rhythm of "Beowulf" Victorian Poetry, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Summer, 1981), pp. 97-116 West Virginia University Press

“Hopkins lived in a period when many poets were tempted to retreat from social involvement into mere aestheticism, and it is possible to see his conversion to Catholicism as a similar escape-route from the problems of real life. But Hopkins in 1877 was not 'aesthetic' or 'ascetic' in a depreciatory sense. Eduard Goldstücker, exploring these negative tenden- cies in late nineteenth and twentieth century culture, defines the elements of decadence as 'a pronounced depletion of vital energies resulting in the rejection of practical life in favour of contemplation, an aesthetic hyper sensibility, a lack of will to live, pessimism.' {Radical Perspectives in the Arts , ed. Lee Baxen- dall, 1972, p. 234). Hopkins died, in 1889, in the 'decadent' fin de siècle, and his last poems are much concerned with a tendency to despair.”

Patricia Stoneman Hopkins: 'The Windhover: To Christ our Lord' Critical Survey, Vol. 6, No. 1/2 (Summer 1973), pp. 81-85

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"Hopkins was an absolute master of his tools; so that regardless of the value of the clay in which he worked, pieces remain flawless. He not only shaped words and tax to his accuracy of meaning, but also did he ply the rhythm of the language to suit his need. Mr. Richards says that "he gave himself complete rhythmical freedom, but disguised this freedom as a system of what he called Sprung Rhythm." This literal assertion should taken as a figure of speech, an antiphrasis; for, though system did make the poet master over rhythm in contrast a poet's usual position of slave, it did not excuse carelessness. No poem of Tennyson's has the rhythmical perfection "The Windhover." Hopkins' system of rhythm needed excuse. One had just as well say that he chose such words as Jackself, between pie, damask, dauphin because his vocabulary was poor. Vocabulary was poor. This is not to form so replete with possibilities would become the hands of a person not expert; but it must mind that Hopkins not only innovated but also innovations during the fifteen years of his writing In his early years, he wrote a small number of were definitely Romantic; but they are so far removed the Hopkins that they can hardly be considered in his development. When he became a Jesuit, writing and did not resume his art until 1875. Time and his death, he produced less than a hundred and fragments, and they are as far removed from youthful poems as Cummings is removed from Lydgate"

Harris Downey A Poem Not Understood The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 11, No. 4 (OCTOBER 1935), pp. 506-517

‘The Windhover’ is a self-referential poem. The alliterations of ‘m’ and‘d’ (1-2) express the motion of the Falcon rhythmically with a correspondence between content and form. The poet’s passion culminates and he receives the insights of fancy in his ecstasy in the moment when his self plunges into and is assimilated with the Falcon as object: Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! The poet is impressed by the ‘brute beauty’ showing Christ incarnate in a natural object as part of God’s creation. As the subtitle shows, Hopkins dedicates this sonnet to Christ through the figure of the Falcon as representing Christ and the Incarnation. Through the abrupt parallelism between the Falcon and Christ, the poet is assimilated with Christ in his flight of fancy. The fancy of the poet is born when he exclaims ‘Buckle!’ in his ecstasy through his assimilation with the beauty of the object as expressing the Incarnation. Although its beauty is ‘told lovelier’ with the

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language of inspiration, it is ‘more dangerous’, or more powerful, because it is incorporated into the text by fancy through the death of the subject who is assimilated with the object. The abrupt parallelism between the flight of the Falcon as Christ incarnate and the flight of fancy in ‘The Windhover’ shows diatonic beauty.

Tanabe, Kumiko. Gerard Manley Hopkins and His Poetics of Fancy, Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2015.

“Gerard Manley Hopkins' collected verse appeared only in 1918, nearly 30 years after his death, which is why it is easy to regard as a product of the twentieth century. In fact, its `philological and rhetorical passion' 12 and concentration on the inner workings of the soul is pre-eminently a product of the nineteenth. He is essentially a visionary writer, his concept of `inscape' referring to the interior perception into the being of the object. Unlike some of the Romantics, Hopkins is insistently religious in his understanding: God is the inscape of the created world…”

Victorian Poetry, Valentine Cunningham, and Duncan Wu, (Ed) John Wiley & Sons 2002.

“The Windhover is a kestrel, a small bird of prey that hovers stationary before swooping on its prey. Hopkins frequently uses the verb ‘to catch’ when he refers to ‘inscape’: ‘I caught an inscape as flowing and well marked almost as the frosting on glass and slabs’ (J 227); ‘I catch [...] the looped or forked wisp made by every big pebble the backwater runs over’ (J 223). Here he remembers ‘catching’ (notice that the octave is in the past tense) a significant instant as if in a trap – ‘sprung’, like his own rhythm (‘the word I use for this rhythm means something like abrupt ’, LD 23). Hopkins inscaped the hovering bird who rode the ‘rolling level underneath him steady air’. Compare this lengthy compound adjective with the similar one in ‘As kingfishers’). The bird’s prominent exposure high in the air draws our attention, by contrast, to the obscurity of its admirer (‘My heart in hiding’). The word ‘Buckle’, in the sestet, is the most notorious crux in the poem. In a journal entry for 12 July 1868 during his visit to Switzerland Hopkins, describing the dress of some local women, three times uses the word ‘buckle(s)’ to mean a fastening. Here it is likely that for a single moment all the qualities of the bird ‘buckle!’, or fasten together, as the full implication of that morning’s experience is now understood and the inscape is ‘caught’ again. An analogy might be made

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with Wordsworth’s concept of emotion recollected in tranquillity, as in ‘Daffodils’– ‘I gazed -and gazedbut little thought/What wealth the show to me had brought’. For Hopkins the wealth of this particular show is that, through his inscape of the windhover, he can now begin to imagine the ‘billion/Times told lovelier, more dangerous’ nature of God, as the capitalized ‘AND’ indicates….

The language of courtliness in this sonnet, the association of falconry with French chivalry and the bird as an heir apparent (‘dauphin’) who rides the air, all point ‘to Christ our Lord’ of the title, Hopkins’s true ‘chevalier’. ‘The Windhover’, like Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, is a poem about creature and creator. Both creatures combine Burkean beauty and fear, and reflect the ‘lovelier, more dangerous’ nature of God. For Hopkins, God’s glory is as much reflected in the ‘sheer plod’ of the lowly and humble ploughman’s occupation (and by analogy, his own unsung, priestly profession) as in the obvious beauty of the falcon whose ‘pride’ and ‘plume’ possibly emphasise the dangers and vanities of worldly success. And this is no wonder, since the plough makes even a turned clod of clay ‘Shine’ (cf. the ‘cold furls [...] shining’, ‘Harry Ploughman’) and apparently dead, ‘bleak’ embers will fall to reveal the glowing fire within them. At work within this sonnet are less obvious constructions and analogies. The poem encompasses the four elements of earth (‘sillion’), air, water (‘skate’s heel’) and ‘fire’. It implies a diurnal cycle of temporal existence, ‘dawn’, ‘morning’, ‘noon’ (‘High there’) and evening (‘embers’). And Christ’s crucifixion, implicit in the words ‘gall’ and ‘gash’, ensures that the redemptive blood from the gashed body of the ‘chevalier’ ( an appropriately royal colour, ‘gold vermilion’) and offered to all men, destroys invidious distinctions between the high-born and the lowly….”

Gilroy, John. Gerard Manley Hopkins : Selected Poems, Humanities-Ebooks, LLP, 2007.

“He employs almost exclusively the conventional end-rhymed forms of the sonnet and homostrophic ode, both of his patterns having antecedents in Milton. As is standard, his end- rhyme schemes mark the divisions of the stanzaic ‘metres’ into lines, with the completion of the scheme signalling the end of the stanza. End-rhyme is important, then, in delineating the verse structure and also for its participation in the lettering through tying in specific segmental (i.e., letter) sounds with the texture of the phonic continuum. We may instance the major function of end-rhyme in the opening quatrain of Windhover (in identifying the

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stresses I follow the poet’s marking and, in its absence, a consensus of commentators; the vertical lines suggest foot divisions):

I cáught this | mórning | mórning’s | mínion | kíngdom of | dáylight’s | dáuphin dapple-| dáwn- drawn | Fálcon in his | ríding Of the | rólling level | únder | néath him steady | áir, and | stríding Hígh there how he | rúng upon the | réin of a | wímpling | wíng ...

The rhyme word of the first line, ‘king-,’ provides a key sound for the octave. It picks up and stresses the ‘-ing,’ sounded twice previously unstressed in ‘morning’; and it initiates the eightfold rhymes on ‘-ing,’ which alternate stressed with unstressed in the octave: ‘ríding,’ ‘stríding,’ ‘wíng,’ then ‘swíng,’ ‘gliding,’ ‘hiding,’ and ‘thing.’ As is always the case, the more pervasive the chiming, the more it implicates the rest of the sound pattern. Here the sound echoes extend to the - ng s of line-internal ‘rólling,’ ‘wímpling,’ ‘and ‘rúng,’ and further to the numerous n s, in ‘dáwn-drawn falcon,’ etc.

End-rhyme is the rigid aspect of Hopkins’s lettering system. But it is the flexible alliteration that has particular potency in imparting to the stress sounds the special brilliance of pearls, to use his synaesthetic comparison. At the beginning of Windhover , the ‘starriness’ that the poet also attributes to lettering literally suits the word meanings: the brightness of the ‘morning,’ the ‘daylight,’ and the ‘dawn’; Christ’s glory in ‘morning’s minion,’ ‘king-,’ and ‘dauphin.’ The lettering, one might think, generates the verbal sense; its general function in sprung rhythm, of course, is in the phonic context, in giving vital prominence to the stresses, the ‘life’ of sprung rhythm. All sprung-rhythm stresses require clear identity, and some need extra emphasis, as Hopkins specifies in his ‘Preface’ to Deutschland : ‘Only let this be observed in the reading, that, where more than one syllable goes to a beat, then if the beating syllable is of its nature strong, the stress laid on it must be stronger the greater the number of syllables belonging to it’ (P 118).”

Wimsatt, James I.. Hopkins's Poetics of Speech Sound : Sprung Rhythm, Lettering, Inscape, University of Toronto Press, 2006.

Glossary

Inscape: "the 'individually distinctive' inner structure or nature of a thing; hence, the essence of a natural object, which, being perceived through the moment of illumination--an epiphany- -reveals the unity of all creation" (Harmon and Holman, 5th edition). Every object has an

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essence that can be perceived; this essence points to God's design of it and the unified design of the creation.

Instress: "the force, ultimately divine, that creates the inscape of an object or an event and impresses that distinctive inner structure of the object on the mind of the beholder, who can perceive it and embody it in a work of art" (Harmon and Holman, 5th edition). God's instress reveals the inscape of an object not only it may praise him, but also it may be embodied in works of art, which are also acts of praise to God. In Hopkins' thinking, we do not create the inscape of an object; God allows us to discover it via instress.

Sprung rhythm: Glenn Everett (2008) defines sprung rhythm as "a complex and very technically involved system of metrics which [Hopkins] derived partly from his knowledge of Welsh poetry. It is opposed specifically to 'running' or 'common' rhythm, and provides for feet of lengths varying from one syllable to four, with either 'rising' or 'falling' rhythm". Hopkins' interest in poetic rhythm is also important because, in his thinking, poetic stress is aligned with an object's instress--both express a God-given beauty innate in the object. (http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/hopkins/hopkins1.html)

Questions for discussion

1. Describe the setting of the poem "The Windhover" by Gerard Manley Hopkins. 2. What special poetic language is used in Hopkins' poem "The Windhover"? 3. What is the form of this poem? What literary devices are used in this poem and what functions do they serve? 4. How is the falcon depicted in this poem? What emotions does this poem communicate?

Bibliography 1. August, E .R. 'The Growth of the Windhover'. Publications of the Modern Language Association, LXXXII (1967).Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966 2. Baum, Paull F. "Sprung Rhythm". PMLA, IX.XIV (1959),pp.418-25. 3. Bender, Todd K. Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Classical Background and Critical Reception of his Work. 4. Bergonzi, Bernard. Gerard Manley Hopkins. New York:Macmillan, 1977. 5. Bottrall, Margaret ed. Gerard Manley Hopkins - A Case-book. London: Macmillan, 1975.

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6. Brown, Daniel. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Writers and Their Work. Tavistock, UK: Northcote House, 2004. 7. Bump, Jerome. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Twayne’s English Authors Series. Boston: Twayne, 1982. 8. Devasahayam, A.S.J. Understanding Hopkins: The New Spring Poetry. Bangalore: St. Paul's Press, 1981. 9. Downes, David A. Gerard Manley Hopkins: A study of His Ignatian Spirit. London: Vision Press, 1960. 10. Easson, Angus. Gerard Manley Hopkins. New York: Routledge, 2011. 11. Gardner, William H. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889): A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition. 2 vols. London: Oxford University Press, 1944. 12. Gerard Manley Hopkins. The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.ed., W.H. Gardner and N.H. Mackenzie 4th edn. 1970, 13. MacKenzie, Norman H. A Reader’s Guide to Gerard Manley Hopkins. 2d ed. Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2008. 14. Mariani, Paul. A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970.Oxford Univ. Press, 1935. 15. Peters, W. A.M. s. J. GeraFd Manley Hopkins:Critical Essay towards the Understanding of his Poetry, 1948;rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. 16. Storey, Graham. A Preface to Hopkins. Oxford: Routledge, 2013. 17. Warren, Austin. "Instress of Inscape". The Kenyon Critics volume, 1945.Whitehall, Harold. "Sprung Rhythm", The Kenyon 18. David V. Urban, Ignatian Inscape and Instress in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty,” “God’s Grandeur,” “The Starlight Night,” and “The Windhover”:Hopkins’s Movement toward Ignatius by Way of Walter Pater. 6 February 2018, Religions 2018, 9, 49; doi:10.3390/rel9020049 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions 19. Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Sacrament of the World, Or God's Inscape, https://www3.dbu.edu/mitchell/hopkins.htm

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THE SECOND COMING, BYZANTIUM

W.B. YEATS

W.B Yeats

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865. His father John Butler Yeats was a precariously successful painter, an intellectual, a sceptic, an agnostic, as well as a wit. His mother Susan Pollexfen Yeats was a quiet, religious woman of deep, intuitive feelings who shared a deep bond with nature and peasant life in Sligo. Sligo is a town in North-West Ireland, about 135 miles from the capital city of Dublin and beautifully nestled between rugged mountains and the Atlantic Ocean. It is commonly held that Yeats’ poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ talks of Lough Gill, a fresh water lake in Sligo. A look at the poem on the panel beside will tell you what is typical of Yeats’ Modernism that is highly tinged with aspects of Romanticism.

In 1874 the Yeats family moved to London, though Yeats spent his childhood in the Irish countryside with his grandparents in Sligo. He studied at Godolphin School, Hammersmift England and then went to High School at Dublin. During this time, he became acquainted with such leading Pre-Raphaelites as William Morris and Burne-Jones. After completing high school, he enrolled in the Metropolitan Art School. In 1885 his first published poems appeared in The Dublin University Review. Soon after, he began to come under the influence of John O’Leary, the influential Irish nationalist leader. He also met George Russell, along with whom and a few friends, he founded the Dublin Hermetic society. This club was devoted to occult research—magic, theosophy, and spiritualism. In 1888 he joined Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society. In 1889, his first book, The Wanderings of Oisin was published with the help of John O’Leary. He then moved to London and became deeply involved in current literary society. In London he met such literary figures as Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson and others. He founded the Rhymers’ Club. He also met the poet-critic Arthur Symons, who was instrumental in introducing him to new aesthetic ideas as well as to towering personalities like the French poet Mallarme, Verlaine and Villiers de L’Isle-Adam. It was in 1889 that Yeats met the beautiful actress and nationalist Maud Gonne. He fell in love with her and remained so for the rest of his life. Maud Gonne however felt that Yeats

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was too idealistic, too dreamy to become her husband. In 1903 she married Major John MacBride. Yeats was heart-broken. His frustration in love was followed by many catastrophic events on the national as well as international scenario. His poetry lost its old charm and became terser, harder and full of politics and metaphysics. In 1905 Maud Gonne was separated from her husband. Yeats renewed his marriage proposal and was rejected once again. He became involved with another woman named Olivia Shakespeare. The relationship was brief. It made him sourer. In 1899 Yeats along with George Moore, Edward Martyn and Lady Augusta Gregory, founded the Irish theatrical society which later became the Abbey theatre. It was here that the plays of Irish playwrights like Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, Sean O’Casey were staged. Yeats’ plays The Countess Cathleen and Cathleen ni Houlihan were also staged. After being turned down again by Maud Gonne, he proposed to her beautiful adopted daughter, Iseult, who was almost thirty years his junior. He was rejected. Frustrated and defeated in love, he finally married Miss Georgie Hyde-Lees. He was obsessed with the thought of creating some kind of unity in his life. His wife’s power of automatic writing spurred him to write A Vision. In 1925 he published A Vision. The Tower was published in 1928 and The Winding Stair in 1933. He was also appointed as a senator of the Irish Free State and served in that capacity till 1928. In 1924 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. During the last years Yeats suffered from heart and lung conditions and a nervous breakdown. In 1939, just five months before his death he composed ‘Under Ben Bulben’, one of the greatest poems of his career.

Although W. B.Yeats is more famous as a poet, he also delves deeply into all other literary genres:

• Fiction: The Celtic Twilight

• Non-Fiction: Four Years

• Plays: The Countess Cathleen, The Hour Glass, The Land of Heart’s Desire

• Short Stories: Rosa Alchemica, Stories of Red Hanrahan, Synge and The Ireland of His Time, Out of the Rose, The Heart of the Spring, The Curse of the Fires and of the Shadows, The Old Men of the Twilight, Where There is Nothing, There is God, and Of Costello the Proud

• Poetry: A Prayer for My Daughter, Against Unworthy Praise,, Broken Dreams, Easter, 1916, He Wishes for the Cloths Of Heaven,, Her Praise, In the Seven Woods, King and No

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King, Lapis Lazuli, Leda and the Swan, No Second Troy, Politics, Sailing to Byzantium, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, The Second Coming and others

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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The speaker describes a nightmarish scene: the falcon, turning in a widening “gyre” (spiral), cannot hear the falconer; “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”; anarchy is let loose upon the world; “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The best people, the speaker says, lack all conviction, but the worst “are full of passionate intensity.” Surely, the speaker asserts, the world is near a revelation; “Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” But definitely, this is nothing like the benevolence of the First Coming. No sooner does he think of “the Second Coming,” that he is troubled by “a vast image of the Spiritus Mundi, or the collective spirit of mankind: somewhere in the desert, a giant sphinx (“A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun”) is moving, while the shadows of desert birds reel about it. The darkness drops again over the speaker’s sight, but he knows that the sphinx’s twenty centuries of “stony sleep” have been made a nightmare by the motions of “a rocking cradle.” And what “rough beast,” he wonders, “its hour come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Yeats begins the poem with the image of a falcon wheeling about in the sky, far away from the falconer who released it. The bird continues to wheel and gyre further and further away from the falconer. This metaphor stands for the young people of Ireland who have given up the standards of their age old tradition, for the new art, the new literature, the new music, and the other novelties during Yeats’ time. There is yet another interpretation of the falcon- falconer image, and that is the image of the head or intellect as the falcon and the rest of the body and the sensations of the body and feelings and emotions as the falconer. The last two lines of the first stanza are simply a commentary on the present times. Yeats says “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” This also suggests dissociation between the best, which Yeats identifies as the intellectuals, and the worst, which Yeats associates with the common people, the mob who react with passionate intensity not with conscious intellectual study and expression. The first part of the poem also illustrates by reference not only to the contemporary events but also to Yeats’ fundamental belief — the fusion of mythology and history. The central belief or idea around which our civilization (falcon) had revolved (Christianity) has lost its stronghold. It can no more hold society in an orderly structure like a wheel around it (gyres or outward-spiralling circles). Things are falling apart. The present civilization is disintegrating. In the first stanza of the poem Yeats gives us the first bird metaphor. In the second part of the poem Yeats gives us the second bird metaphor in the form of “indignant desert birds.” These creatures appear to have been roosting on the Sphinx, but when the mammoth creature began to move its “slow thighs” the

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birds became agitated and took off. The poet shows us the image a little later. The birds are flying around above the slowly moving Sphinx. At the beginning of the second stanza, Yeats calls for a revelation, saying “Surely a revelation is at hand.”In terms of the Christian myth, the poem prophesies the arrival of a new God. It incorporates Christ’s prediction of His second coming in Matthew XXIV and St. John’s description of the beast of the Apocalypse in Revelations. ‘Falcon’, ‘darkness’ and ‘blood’ accentuate the horror that is closing in upon Mankind. Yeats was influenced by the theosophical notion as well as by the view of comparative mythologists that a new God comes at regular intervals to replace the old God. The contemporary scene will be followed soon by another. The “rough beast” slouching towards Bethlehem is the symbol of this new age; the speaker’s vision of the rising sphinx is his vision of the character of the new world. Thus the second coming here is not really a second coming of Christ himself, but a new figure. A cruel, bestial, pitiless creature who will represent the new era as Christ symbolized the old civilization. The second coming of such a fierce spirit after two thousand years will be a new nightmare. For Yeats believed that history moves in vast two thousand year cycles. Each cycle representing a civilization—such as the Greco-Roman era (200-0 B.C.) which had begun with the annunciation of Leda and birth of Helen. The Christian era (0-200 A.D.) that marked the annunciation of Mary and the birth of Christ. This new dark beginning of a subjective civilization will usher in no hope. No Christ like figure but a rough beast, “a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi” is going to take place the cradle of Bethlehem.” Twenty centuries of stony sleep/ Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle”. There will be no pity, no mercy but the rough beast will “vex” man’s old sleep and turn it not to a dream but a nightmare. Yeats modifies the well-known image of the sphinx to embody the poem’s vision of the climactic coming. By rendering the terrifying prospect of disruption and change into an easily imagined horrifying monster, thus Yeats turns an abstract fear into tangible and real. The “rough beast” slouching toward Bethlehem is the symbol of this new age; the speaker’s vision of the rising spinx is his vision of the character of the new world.

‘The Second Coming’ illustrates by reference to the essential oneness of world’s mythologies and the close correspondence between mythology and national history. The poem prophesies the arrival of a new God, in terms of Christian faith. The poet successfully blends Christ’s prediction of His second coming in Matthew XXIV and St. John’s description of the beast of the Apocalypse in Revelations. In the poem another related imagery which stresses the Christian connection is the mention of Bethlehem with its suggestion of the idea of

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innocence. The Christian myth that a new God comes at regular intervals to replace the old God is an integral part of the symbolic structure of the poem.

The Christian era, to which Yeats himself belongs, is coming to an end. So he is trying to interpret the contemporary scene in terms of the philosophy of national history. He essentially believes that the horror of the subjective era will surely replace the present objective era of which he himself is a part. He, therefore, picks from the Christian myth the image of Christ and that of the beast of Apocalypse to emphasize the contrast between the present objective era and the one that is to follow. The falcon represents man out of touch with Christ. Anarchy and the worst men dominate the present world as it is drowned in a blood-dimmed tide. Out of this chaos must emerge another cone of civilization. The place of birth of this civilization will again be Bethlehem, but this vision of the Second Coming turns into a nightmare as Yeats sees a rough beast with “ A shape with lion body and the head of a man A Gaze blank and pitiless as the sun” slouching towards Bethlehem to replace the Christian era. Blood, darkness, Falcon all accentuate the horror that is coming upon mankind. Thus the Christian myths, theosophical and anthropological notions of rebirth, Yeats’s own theory of national history of Ireland are fused in the poem.

The gyre is of a circular or conical shape. The image of interlocking gyres—visually represented as two intersecting conical spirals—symbolizes Yeats’ essential belief that all things could be described in terms of cycles and patterns. The soul (or the civilization, the era, and so on) would move from the smallest point of the spiral to the largest before moving along to the other gyre. Yeats describes the current historical moment in terms of these gyres. Yeats believed that this image captured the contrary motions inherent within the historical process, and he divided each gyre into particular regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the psychological phases of an individual’s development). The image is therefore applied to the waxing and waning of a particular historical age or the evolution of an individual from youth to adulthood to old age. The symbol of the interlocking gyres reveals Yeats’ belief in fate and historical determinism as well as his spiritual attitudes toward the development of the human soul. Yeats believed that the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic revelation, as history reached the end of the outer gyre (to speak in plain terms) and began moving along the inner gyre. With the image of the gyre, Yeats created a symbol in his poetry that stood for his entire philosophy of history as well as spirituality.

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Falcon: A bird of Prey. Falconing was an activity that was popular in medieval times. The feudal landowners in the middle ages often built aviaries where they kept birds to use for hunting. The most common were falcons and hawks. The bird was tightly controlled by its master. There is also a Biblical reference to a falcon in Job 28:7 which refers to its eye. “That path no bird knows, Nor has the falcon’s eye seen it”. Their eyes are constantly watching for prey. And in the poem the falcon did not return to the falconer. The falcon represents humanity and brings in the image of ferocity. Spiritus Mundi: is literally the “Soul of the Universe”, “Spirit of the World”,“ Collective spirit of the mankind”. Spiritus Mundi brings an image of the sphinx to the poet’s mind. Yeats sees the sphinx rising up to bring forth the end of the world. The sphinx slept in a world of nightmares for two thousand years. A rocking cradle: The birth of the Anti-Christ (literal and figurative), and

Bethlehem was the birth place of Jesus Christ. The “beast” is slouching toward its aim (Bethlehem) to wreak havoc (the spirit of this world hates humans) on this earth. The lion is a beast that is mentioned in the Bible, Revelations 4 but it is not as an ominous sign. Jesus was also called the lion of the tribe of Judah. However, there are several scriptures that mention the lion’s predatory might. Anarchy: The reference is to chapter 13, Book of St. Mark calls to mind the reign of terror on Earth before Christ comes back. It is related to the futility and anarchy of the present times

Questions for discussion

What is gyre in ‘The Second Coming’?

What drowns the “ceremony of innocence” in ‘The Second Coming’?

What vision of future is described in the second half of the poem ‘The Second Coming’?

How does Yeats depict his time in ‘The Second Coming’?

Is ‘The Second Coming’ a conflict between the modern and ancient world?

What is the “vast image” he sees in ‘The Second Coming’?

Is the poem a commentary on the weakening of Christian values?

Critically examine the thematic aspects of Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’.

Discuss Yeats’ use of symbolism in ‘The Second Coming’.

Show how ‘The Second Coming’ becomes a condemnation of degenerate times.

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SAILING TO BYZANTIUM (1926)

I That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees, —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect. II An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium. III O sages standing in God's holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.

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IV Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

The first stanza begins with a dramatic gesture of apparent rejection: ‘That [Ireland] is no country for old men’. But the stanza is held by what it would reject, the world of sexuality, ‘dying generations’ (a phrase that compact death and renewal), the transient but captivating stuff of physical living that composes ‘sensual music’ persisting ‘all summer long’. The last phrase implies that the appeal of the physical objects lessens with the onset of the winter of age and when he describes ‘all’ as being ‘Caught’. Yeats suggests not only willing captivation, but also a state of entrapment. Certainly, though, the neglected ‘Monuments of unageing intellect’ seems ponderous and remote by comparison with the sensual music that Yeats, against the grain of his manifest intention, hymns in this first stanza.

In the second stanza, Yeats turns with scorn on the condition of age, saying it can only be redeemed if ‘Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing/ For every tatter in its mortal dress’. Soul, minus definite article and receiving a strong stress, conveys it’s longing for spiritual life through the physical image of clapping and singing. In this stanza, ‘unageing intellect’ is a vital force, delighting in the study of ‘its own magnificence’, and prompting the poet’s voyage to the holy city of ‘Byzantium’, where the name of the city rhymes triumphantly with the verb ‘come’. After the polarities of ‘sensual music’ and arid ‘Soul’ have been set up, the poem moves, in the third stanza, to its emotional core; here, as Yeats longs for the sages to spiral their way out of their dimension and take him Arnold and Yeats up into theirs, it is his suffering ‘heart’ that takes centre-stage, a heart that is ‘sick with desire/And fastened to a dying animal’ and, in an echo of Christ’s words on the cross, ‘knows what it is’. The lines suggest the poet’s torment ‘fastened’ develops the hint of entrapment in the first stanza’s ‘Caught’; the tragic glamour of the first stanza’s ‘dying generations’ shrinks

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to the drab terror implied by the poet’s description of trig body as a ‘dying animal’. In the act of praying to be gathered ‘Into the artifice of eternity’, Yeats glimpses the limitations of an imagined permanence. It is hard to agree with critics who dispute the presence of irony in ‘artifice’: Yeats implies that ‘eternity’ is both artistically shaped and ‘something’ artificial, a pretence in the final stanza, the poet offers an urbane diminuendo after his emotional climax; he imagines himself choosing his post-mortal shape from something made, not begotten, but the golden bird he strongly suggests he would like to be seems, ornamental, a trivial plaything to amuse the Emperor. Moreover, his song would still be of time what is past or passing, or to come’), for all his would-be escape from the temporal. As ‘Byzantium’ again rhymes with ‘come’, there is less a sense of triumph than of the inability of Yeats’ holy city to free itself from the dimension of time. This impression is reinforced by the syntactical chime across the poem between ‘whatever is begotten, born, and dies’ and the last line.

The poem was composed in 1926 and first published in October Blast (1927). It was also published as the opening poem of The Tower (1928). ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, written in four stanzas of ottava rima (eight iambic lines rhyming abababcc), is among the most distilled and concentrated examples of Yeats’s lyric art. In a radio talk of 8 September 1921, Yeats said: “Now I am trying to write about the state of my soul, for it is right for an old man to make his soul, and some of my thoughts upon that subject I have put into a poem called ‘Sailing to Byzantium”. Byzantium is the emblem of the search for the spiritual life’ (a phrase from the radio talk) because it seemed to Yeats, as he put it in A Vision, as though ‘In early Byzantium, may be never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic practical life were one’. From his earliest work, Yeats dreamed of a world exempt from the usual sadness of life - a domain of greater appetites more greatly gratified. Byzantium became the most lavishly imagined and the most famous of these anti-worlds. In A Vision, Yeats wrote of Justinian’s construction of the cathedral of Hagia Sophia (AD 560) as one of history’s closest approximations to the a historical beauty of the full moon, Phase 15 of the gyre: “Byzantium ... substituted for formal Roman magnificence, with its glorification of physical power, an architecture that suggests the Sacred City in the Apocalypse of St. John. I think if I could be given a month of Antiquity and leave to spend it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium ... I think I could find in some little wine-shop some philosophical worker in mosaic who could answer all my questions, the supernatural descending nearer to him than to Plotinus even, for the pride of his delicate skill would make [religious truths] show as a lovely flexible presence like that of a perfect human body.”

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The characteristics of Byzantium, then, are: (1) an almost complete dematerialization, as if the city were the pleasure dome in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan (1797), manufactured out of air and shadowed on water. In fact, a draft of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ mentioned ‘St Sophia’s ‘sacred dome … Mirrored in water’ (Stallworthy); (2) a deliberate destruction of the boundary between life and art - men are translated into mosaic, while symbols have the presence of ‘a perfect human body’; (3) anonymity - art is the cooperative effect of a community of workers and thinkers; the oblivion and beatitude of dead souls were realized there on earth. Byzantium is an abstraction from life, and Byzantine art is notable for its abstract character, as Owen Aherne says in a passage (later deleted) from the 1908 version of ‘The Tables of the Law’: ‘the Byzantine style ... moves me because these tall, emaciated angels and saints seem to have less relation to the world about us than to an abstract pattern of flowing lines, that suggest an imagination absorbed in the contemplation of Eternity.”

Yet, for all its seductiveness, Byzantium is finally forced to confess its inadequacy. There is a covert allusion in the poem’s first line to Tir na nOg, the paradise for which Oisin searches in The Wanderings of Oisin; and in that early poem, as in so many later ones, paradise at last famishes the appetites that it promises to glut. All representations of the supernatural must contain some grotesquery, a straining for effect, a juxtaposition of incompatible elements, as Yeats himself noted. However, the poet’s metamorphosis into a golden bird, at the end of this poem, may suggest a certain laborious triviality as well as an eerie splendour, as if life in Byzantium were at last shown as a superior sort of folly.

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BYZANTIUM (1930)

The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song After great cathedral gong; A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains All that man is, All mere complexities, The fury and the mire of human veins.

Before me floats an image, man or shade, Shade more than man, more image than a shade; For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth May unwind the winding path; A mouth that has no moisture and no breath Breathless mouths may summon; I hail the superhuman; I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork, More miracle than bird or handiwork, Planted on the starlit golden bough, Can like the cocks of Hades crow, Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud In glory of changeless metal Common bird or petal And all complexities of mire or blood.

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit, Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame, Where blood-begotten spirits come And all complexities of fury leave,

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Dying into a dance, An agony of trance, An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood, Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood, The golden smithies of the Emperor! Marbles of the dancing floor Break bitter furies of complexity, Those images that yet Fresh images beget, That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

“The unpurged images of day recede” at night in the city of Byzantium. The drunken soldiers of the emperor are asleep, and the song of night-walkers fades after the great cathedral gong. The speaker says that the “starlit” or “moonlit dome,” disdains all that is human—”all mere complexities, / the fury and the mire of human veins.” There floats an image before him —a man or a shade, but more a shade than a man, and still more simply “an image.” He hails this “superhuman” image and calls it “death-in-life and life-in-death.” Meanwhile, a golden bird sits on a golden tree, which the speaker says is a “miracle”. The bird sings aloud, and scorns the “common bird or petal / and all complexities of mire or blood.” The speaker says that at midnight, the images of flames flit across the emperor’s pavement, though they are not fed by wood or steel, nor disturbed by storms. Here, “blood-begotten spirits come,” and die “into a dance, / an agony of trance, / an agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve,” leaving behind all the complexities and furies of life. Riding the backs of dolphins, spirit after spirit arrives, the flood broken on “the golden smithies of the emperor.” The marbles of the dancing floor break the “bitter furies of complexity,” the storms of images that beget more images, “that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.”

Each stanza of the poem constitutes eight lines, and each rhymes AABBCDDC. The structure of every stanza is quite complicated. The lines are loosely iambic. The first, second, third, fifth, and eighth lines are in pentameter, the fourth line in tetrameter, whereas the sixth and seventh line in trimester. The theme discussed in ‘Byzantium’ is a follow up of the theme in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. The reader in Byzantium is given exposure to the eternal city to get

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familiar with its reality for the first time. In the first stanza of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, there is remoteness between the speaker and the place from where he came; similarly a distance is disclosed between the speaker and place where he desires to move. On the other hand, in Sailing to Byzantium, there is no such distance between the speaker and the subject, as the poem describes the events as they happen inside the city. Hence, in Byzantium, the speaker becomes aware of the reality since the events happening inside the city are revealed to him in present tense.

The speaker in ‘Byzantium’ is the poet who observes the city’s eternal reality. The speaker has expressed his views in the second stanza. ‘Before me floats an image,’ and ending emphatically, ‘I hail the superhuman; / I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.’ Furthermore, as the speaker is a witness to the events of the city he is never influenced or transformed by the city itself. The speaker is the visionary poet who is able to witness the reality of Byzantium as only human souls enter the city. (‘Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood, / Spirit after spirit!’). Also no one other than the author could speak to the readers from inside, the reality of this eternal city. In ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, the old man visualizes the city’s power as being able to ‘gather’ him into ‘the artifice of eternity.’ In ‘Byzantium’, Yeats makes real what was previously imagined to be perfect. The speaker envisages an actual artifice of eternity and not eternal artifice. The city generates eternal images, motionless and everlasting realities which finally overtake or devour all ‘complexities,’ all individual souls, all art and all forms of temporal life. ‘Byzantium’ explains what eternity actually is rather than some apparently material, everlasting matter which, while being feasible to the human mind, would essentially entail shape and substance and therefore the entrapping of change and finiteness. As in a continuous furnace or procedure beyond all time, substance, and human notion, in Byzantium we observe not a predetermined structure and substance which can excel and eternalize the temporal, but eternally immortal everlasting images, the act or temperament of which devours and invalidates all artifice, all things real or imagined.

Questions for discussion

Discuss the main theme of W.B.Yeats’ Byzantium.

Write a brief note on the images used in Byzantium.

What is the significance of figurative words,’unageing intellect’ in Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium?

Write a comparative overview of themes in Byzantium and Sailing to Byzantium

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Critical Comments

“The original drafts of this poem, preserved by Mrs. Yeats, are comparatively straightforward in their meaning, but 'Sailing to Byzantium' as it appeared in published form' needs much study before the full implica- tions of its message become clarified. The process by which an auto- biographical record of a mood was altered into this complex symbolic poem can be seen from an examination of the draft versions. The title of the original draft was 'Towards Byzantium'...”

“As a result of his rewriting Yeats built up a highly complex poem which does not disclose the subtleties of its construction at a casual reading. Once we discover the poet altering the first stanza so radically, we must ponder on the symbolic value of what he subsequently inserts. The first draft is near his deeply personal emotion. He is old, and, besides being worried over his future career as a poet, is probably envious of the fervour of human lovers. With his revision comes his desire for some degree of secrecy, and his wish to crystallize his thought on a more general plane. Thus there appear in the final version birds and fish instead of the young at 'their gallantries'. The same effect is gained, but by what methods? We might assume that these changes arose naturally out of the process by which Yeats made his verse, and owed their inception to the form of the poem. We could then explain the creation of the natural living birds as due to a desire on Yeats's part to have a thesis for the antithetical artificial and eternal bird. In the same way the salmon and mackerel may have been introduced to balance the subsequent dolphins who carry souls to Paradise. Yet if we consider the likely sources for these images it will seem that Yeats chose them because of their great personal associations as well as their symbolic value. He would remember that in Celtic salmon isused as a symbol of strength; the hero Cuchulain for his 'salmon leap', and his energy is compared to the Some of the richness of the sensual music of the first verse is close to the mood of an Old Irish song of Summer: The blackbird sings a loud strain To him the live word is a heritage The sad angry sea is fallen asleep The speckled salmon leaps. But blended with Yeats's knowledge of the salmon's symbolic meaning in Celtic poetry was a subjective interest. His delight in watching salmon was perhaps increased by his keenness as a fisherman. He particularly wanted to show Mrs. Yeats, when she first visited Ireland after their marriage, the salmon under Galway Bridge. There she was to see the lordly fish in great profusion waiting to leap their way upstream to spawn. This vigour of salmon was suggested

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in an early work, where Hanrahan, one of Yeats's invented characters, a wild romantic lover,sketches an ideal life of love thus: 'We will listen to the cuckoos, we will see the salmon leap in the rivers, we will sleep under the green oak leaves.'”

A. Norman Jeffares The Byzantine Poems of W. B. Yeats The Review of English Studies, Vol. 22, No. 85 (Jan., 1946), pp. 44-52 Oxford University Press

“Yeats's specific attitude toward Byzantium that is most relevant to the poem "Sailing to Byzantium" is expressed in A Vision. Why does he say, "I think if I could be given a month in antiquity and leave to spend it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened St. Sophia and closed the Academy of Plato"? He answers in the next sentence: "I think I could find in some little wine shop some philosophical worker in mosaic who could answer all my questions, the supernatural descending nearer to him than to Plotinus even."' The spirit of this early age-one of nearness to the supernatural (which Yeats would recover in " Sailing to Byzantium") -is not that of the artist creating his religion- making his own "artifice of eternity." On the contrary, says Yeats, the artists of that happy time "were almost impersonal, almost per- haps without the consciousness of individual design, absorbed in their subject matter and that the vision of a whole people . . . and this vision, this proclamation of their invisible master [italics mine], had the Greek nobility." Yeats similarly in the humility of his religious attitude in this poem prays from his weakness as "a dying animal " that the messengers from "God's holy fire" may "gather me/ Into the artifice of eternity." But let us consider in more detail the arguments of the critics. What about the group who find "magic" predominant in the poem? Elder Olson contends that in the last two stanzas the monuments become "insouled" and the art animate: the monuments, he says,"are treated as gods which caii be prayed to for life or death, as beings capable of motion from sphere to sphere"; and Arthur Mizener says that "Yeats for a moment asks us to fancy the figures stepping [from the gold mosaic] as his singing masters." But the poem does not say this: the appeal is no more to the works of art or to the artists than the prayer of the Roman Catholic is to the statues of the saints, or the sculptors of the statues, before which he kneels. The appeal of the Roman Catholic is to the saints, whose lives on earth are commemorated, and whose present spiritual existence in the other world is represented, by the monuments.

Harry Modean Campbell

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Yeat's "Sailing to Byzantium" Modern Language Notes, Vol. 70, No. 8 (Dec., 1955), pp. 585-589

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Donoghue, Denis. Yeats. Fontana/Collins, 1971. Ellmann, Richard and Feidelson, Charles, jr, (eds), The Modern Tradition: Background of Modern literature. New York and London, 1965. Eilmann, Richard. Yeats: The Man and the Mask. Faber and Faber, 1961 Ford, Boris ( ed), The Pelican Guide to English Literature, Volume 7: The Modern Age. Harmondsworth, 1961

Hone, J.M. W. B Yeats. 1865-1939. 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin’s, 1962. Jeffares, A. N. Yeats: Man and Poet. New York: Macmillan, 1949. Leavis, F. R., New Bearings in English Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964.

Southam, B. C., A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot, 4th ed. London: Faber 7 Faber, 1981. Stallworthy, J. Between the Lines: Yeats’ Poetry in the making. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963. Stewart, J.M. Eight Modern Writers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963. Tate, Allen, ed., T. S. Eliot: the Man and His Work. London: Chatto & Windus, 1967. Unterecker, J. A Reader’s guide to Wiliam Butler Yeats. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1959. Wilson, F.A.C. W. B. Yeats and Tradition. New York: Macmillan, 1958.

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THE WASTE LAND T.S. ELIOT

Introducing T.S Eliot T.S. Eliot, the greatest modern English poet, was an American by birth and an Englishman by adoption. Born at St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A., he became a naturalized British subject in had the blending of the best of the American blood and the English intellect. He combined in himself strange and opposing characteristics. He came to possess a many sided personality. He was a classicist, an innovator, a critic, a social reformer, and a mystic all combined into one. He was a professed classicist and an uncompromising upholder of tradition, and at the same time an innovator in intellectual and aesthetic field. Though a great and acute thinker, he had a spiritual approach to life, a quality which is rare in the twentieth century dominated by science and materialism. Of all the modern English poets he had done most to make his age conscious of itself and aware of the dangers inherent in modern civilization. T. S. Eliot’s parents were descended from old New England families. His paternal grandfather had come to St. Louis from Harvard Divinity School to establish the city’s first Unitarian church and then to found and preside over Washington University. His father Henry Ware Eliot became president of a local industry. His mother Charlotte Channcey Stearns is the author of a long poem on the life of Savonarola and a biography of her father-in-law. Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A., as the youngest of seven children.

Eliot had his early education in the Smith Academy in St. Louis and he completed his preparation for College at the Milton Academy in Massachusetts. He entered Harvard in the fall of 1906, where he pursued philosophy as his major field of study. As an under-graduate he edited and contributed poems to the Harvard Advocate. He completed his course in philosophy in three years and then continued to study philosophy in the Graduate School with an interruption for one year’s study at the Sorbonne. In 1914, he returned to Europe, studying first in Germany and then, after the outbreak of the war at Oxford. Although he completed a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of E. H Bradley, he never returned to Harvard for the formal acceptance of the degree. Eliot married Vivienne Haigh Wood in 1915 and for a time was employed briefly as a teacher of various subjects at a boys’ school near London and after that at Lloyd’s Bank. His physical condition prevented him from entering the U.S. Navy in

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1918. From 1917-1919, he was assistant editor of the Egoist and for that period and the years following, besides writing poetry, he supported himself by writing for magazines and periodicals, reviews and essays, some of which have since become famous. Eliot’s personal literary relations led him into the publishing business. Eventually, he became Director of Faber and Faber, a position which he held till his death. He became the editor of the Criterion at its beginning in 1922, a quarterly review which influenced literary developments for the period of its duration. It ceased publication at the approach of World War II. After an absence of eighteen years, he returned to the U.S.A. in order to give the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1932-1933. He made frequent visits to his native country, lecturing, and giving readings at various institutions and accepting official awards of honour. The British Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature were awarded to him in 1948. In 1947, his first wife died, after prolonged illness. In January 1957, Eliot married Miss Valerie Fletcher, who had been his private secretary. He died in London in 1965.

THE WASTELAND T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ is by far the most representative poem of the twentieth century. It exposes the very soul of the modern generation with all its horrors-moral, spiritual and intellectual bankruptcy, disillusionment and waste. It particularly exposes the horror of war and the waste and frigidity that accompany and follow the modern warfare. Here the ‘waste land’ is Europe devastated both physically and spiritually by the two world wars in a single generation. The poem gave a rude shock to the world and forced it to look into the various maladies and channels of emotional and spiritual disintegration into which it had drifted. In ‘The Waste Land’, Eliot’s mood is negative and analytic. He was more aware of the facts of disintegration than of the universal system of order and restoration. The hope of restoration of order and integration is indeed there, but it is a distant vision. ‘The Waste Land’ gave the world a shock, a shock that had a curative effect, to a war crazy world. It was a great positive achievement in the history of English poetry. In it a mind fully alive to the impressions of the age had forced a poetic triumph out of the very difficulties that confronted a poet of that age. War does something to heighten the sympathetic sense of each other in people who might otherwise practice a mutual disregard. Eliot was to be a Londoner in the two wars. London of the First World War and the glimpses it gave of people, suffering and courage led to a heightening of his poetic powers, awakened him to the futility, horror and boredom, beneath human existence and ‘The Waste Land’ was the result. It used to be said

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that ‘The Waste Land’ was a “dead end” to him. It would have been so, had not the Second World War shaken his sympathies and sensibilities, extended and deepened his sympathies and his reflections on history. He was able to write the last two Quartets and then proceed to the successful plays of which he had dream so long. It is true that the immediate sense of the ugliness, the emptiness and aimlessness of man’s spiritual estate during the post-war years, was responsible for the genesis of ‘The Waste Land’ ; Eliot spoke with the voice of the lonely prophet in a corrupt city. But he was not alone in the impulse to lament the desolation or disorder around him and to cry for a reawakened sense of the old laws and values; he was different only in that he was the first to find a voice and a form for that cry. It is a poem which reflects the post-war struggle for reorientation. Eliot wrote the work not merely under the influence of war and London, but also under the stress of illness. Six years of strenuous work, wage earning on the one hand and intellectual conquests pursued at the same time had exhausted him. But a poet’s breakdown is often the moment of creation. It was possible for him, therefore, to gather all that he had experienced and by bold and simple strokes to metamorphose the despairing sounds, the desperate sights of his world, into something rich and strange. ‘The Waste Land’ is a work in which the poet writes simultaneously about his own illness and the world’s illness, of which his own is a reflection. He records and condemns his own despairing state and prescribes or rather attempts to prescribe a cure for the healing of the city civilization of which he is the representative.

Along with these were the influence of writers like La Forgue, Stravisky, Pound and Miss Weston, which settled for Eliot, the method he was to adopt. It is of the essence of Eliot’s method in the poem that the experiences created and enacted in his poems are both timeless and timely. The poem also holds up Eliot’s religious position, viz., that man is in no sense perfect, but a wretched creature that can yet apprehend perfection. The poem was, in fact, a demand for such a realization.

The possibility of spiritual rebirth is a constantly recurring theme in Eliot and Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance provided Eliot with the plan of his poem, with a “way of controlling and ordering and giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of fertility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” The poet is agonizingly aware “in the imprisonment of his personal waste land, that the possibilities of rebirth cannot be dismissed, as a historical anachronism, that the truth of the experience is eternally present, and that the living of it plunges the whole man in to a process of disintegration and conflict.” The presence of sterile

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degeneration and the necessity of regeneration and change is the general truth behind it and its central theme.

The technique and mode of expression in the poem, the very fragmentariness of its nature and the broken images, all these point to the poet’s meaning, more significantly to another preoccupation in the poet’s mind at the time of the conception of the poem. This was his utter despair of even succeeding in fully articulating his meaning. A sense “of isolation, and alienation, and the impossibility of communication” is the chief inspiration of the poem. Much of the poetry of ‘The Waste Land’ is achieved in the effort to find speaking symbols for an experience that cannot be told. The problem of articulation, the difficulty to find a means of communication which would all express his feelings, was what he was striving for. If he has failed, the very failure is effective in portraying his ‘Waste Land’ occupied by mere ‘effigies’ for men. As an attempt towards effective communication, ‘The Waste Land’ helped Eliot to reorganize himself for another eight years of work, it helped younger poets to organize for another thirty, and it set in motion the moralistic poetry of men like Auden. The original introduction to “The Waste Land” was an epigram from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during the supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath – The horror! The horror!” (Davidson 121). The Conrad quotation was later replaced with a passage from the Satyricon, on the advice of Ezra Pound who argued that the original quotation did not carry its intensity. In the course of reading the poem, the allusions often make us perplexed. We come across references to the Bible, to the words of the Buddha, and to the Upanishads, to Sappho, Virgil, Ovid, St Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Malory, Spenser, Kyd, Shakespeare, Webster, Middleton, Milton, Marvell, Dryden, Goldsmith, Tennyson, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Conrad and several others.

Part I, entitled, ‘The Burial of the Dead,’ opens with the scene of cosmopolitan tourists who move from one place to another. For Eliot, April is the cruellest month and people in the wasteland do not want rebirth. They want to hibernate. Their memories are so bad that they do not recollect many of their past life. Winter keeps them happy due to this memory loss in hibernation. They lead a life of uprooted tourists. The German lines are significant here. " I am not Russian at all. I come from Lithuania, I am pure German." There is a reference to a sledding incident as reported by Marie Larisch. She recalls the episode when she has associated with her cousin. Two places are referred to here, viz, Starnbergesee (a lake resort

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near Munich) and Hofgarten (a public park in Munich). As it happens we know the real person on whom Eliot based this episode: she was called Countess Marie von Wallersee- Larisch; Eliot had met her, according to his widow, and he had also read her memoirs, which were entitled My Past (1913).

The land is dry, arid and the soil infertile and waterless. It is stony rubbish. The poet tells the reader that he or she cannot say or guess what the roots of this wasteland are. Your mind is nothing but a collection of incoherent images. The crickets will not cry and even the stones do not give any sound of water. Echoing the words of Donne, the poet says “ I will show you fear in a handful of dust”. The song of the sailor, borrowed from Wagner’s opera, “ Fresh blows the wind, Towards the homeland, My Irish child, Where lingerest thou?” contrasts with the lack of yearning on the part of dwellers of the wasteland. The poet then introduces the Hyacinth girl passage. He introduces the conversation between the “hyacinth girl” and her friend. In Greek mythology, Hyacinth was lover, after death turned into a blood red colour flower. There is a hint of resurrection there. But the girl here admits that when they came back from the garden, there was only silence, a kind of intellectual blankness. The failure to reciprocate the love is referred to in the line, “ I was neither living nor dead”. To complete this sense of desolate mood, the poet once again brings in Wagner, by quoting “Desolate and empty is the sea”.

Madame Sosostris, a fake fortune teller, is originally a character from Aldous Huxley's novel Chrome Yellow. In this poem, she employs a pack of cards, Tarot cards. She tells the future of the people and play with their insecurity and credulousness. The expression "had a bad cold" is inserted primarily to make fun of her and to create a sense of bathos. Originally there are 78 Tarot cards, used by Egyptian priests to read the future and often this is for the sake of getting to know the rise and fall of Nile. This ancient art has been vulgarised by people like Madame Sosostris. The main characters represented are 'the drowned Phoenician Sailor', 'Belladona', 'the man with three staves', 'the wheel', 'the one eyed merchant'' a blank card' and 'the hanged man'. Each of these images would carry symbolic significance and they reoccur in other parts of the narrative later. The reference to The Tempest is important. Prospero, with the help of Ariel, 'destroys' his enemies. Though this fake act of annihilation depresses Prince Ferdinand, Ariel reports the supposed drowning of his father Alonso, the king of Naples: Full fathom five thy father lies/Of his bones are coral made/Those are pearls that were his eyes" However, Eliot subverts the theme in ‘The Wasteland’. Here, there is neither revival, nor transformation. Only cruel death befalls mankind. Madame Sosostris is afraid of the police,

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since she is not allowed legally to practice it. She gives a warning, “fear death by water". This reverberates in many places in section IV.

The poet returns to the Unreal City. ‘The Wasteland’ refers to London directly but from the poem we come to know that it could be any where: Alexandria, Vienna, Paris, Jerusalem or Athens. Eliot refers to the poem by Baudelaire titled Les Septo Vieillards, Seven Old Men. This vision merges even with the Inferno which Dante refers to. The city is not seen through the brown fog of winter dawn. The visibility is affected. Everyone you see walk with diffidence, fixing their eyes on their feet. They walk beside St.Mary Woolnoth, the church strikes nine. In that hazy vision, I caught hold of someone I knew. I addressed him ' Stetson". I enquired whether he recognised me as one who was together with him at Mylae, the ancient battle site between Roman and Carthaginians. The garden refers to the ancient fertility rite site in which the image of the god was buried in the field or thrown to the river. The dog will dig out the plant and it will be destroyed. The dog was a common symbol of aid to rebirth Or the ‘Dog’ with the capital ‘D’ might suggest the Dog Star, Sirius, who was the herald of the rising of the Nile Waters, a true friend to man. Eliot changes the reference of wolf to dog as referred to in the Webster's play, White Devil. The concluding the line is from Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal. It is translated thus: O hypocrite reader, my fellow man, my brother.

In Part II, ‘A Game of Chess,’ two lives are set in juxtaposition. The first life is that of grandeur and luxury. The second shows shallow, insensitive vulgarity. The title of the section is taken from Thomas Middleton’s play, Game of Chess (1624). It is a satire on an uneasy marriage forced by political necessity. In another play written by Middleton, Women Beware Women (1621), there is reference to a game of chess. Livia is a character who is the Duke’s accomplice, and plays chess with the mother of Bianca (Act II, scene ii). Meanwhile, the Duke seduces Bianca and the moves of the chess are linked to the seduction moves reported within. Further, Eliot alludes to Shakepeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (II.ii. 195-205) narrated by Enobarbus. In the initial lines of the section, Eliot creates an image of a wealthy modern woman, who sits in a chair “like a burnished throne”. On the table, there are “satin cases poured in rich profusion”. Inside each case, there are strange perfumes synthetic in nature, which are aphrodisiacs. Her lust is contrasted with Cleopatra who was willing to throw away an empire for love. (Antony says, “let Rome is Tiber melt”, when asked by Cleopatra, “if it be love indeed, tell me how much”). For the modern lady, there is no love but only lust and self-gratification. The entire setting is vividly described by the poet. From the midst of the fruited vines, Cupid peeps out. The well-lit seven branched candelabra flames double the

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figures, images around. There is an obvious hint to Pope’s Belinda (Rape of the Lock) here. Further, Virgil’s description of the banquet given by Dido, Queen of Carthage, in the honour of her lover, Aeneas is also accommodated into the narrative as a suggestion. The room with golden panelled ceiling, the huge chunks of wood seasoned with sea water, decorated with copper strips, coloured green orange, bedecked with jewels, and the painting of Dolphin give an exotic look to the ambience inside. The painting of Philomel, who was savagely raped by King Tereus, is also depicted. John Lyly’s words are added to this scheme: (What bird so sings, yet so does wail?/ O ’tis the ravish’d nightingale/ Jug, jug, jug, tereu! she cries,/ And still her woes at midnight rise. “Spring’s Welcome” John Lyly). Eliot then moves on to a set of disparate passages. First he reports a conversation between a woman and her lover/husband. Her tension is evident is her words. “My nerves are bad tonight”. The word ‘Think’ is oft repeated. Everything frightens her. His monotonous answers arouse her temper. The “rat’s alley” is a meaningful image of spiritual darkness and modern man’s sense of loss. Eliot repeats this pattern in another set of dialogues, in which he emphasises the words ‘noise’, ‘wind’, and ‘nothing’. The wind and the noise evoke an image of activity and life, but the final ‘nothing’ again underscores the lack of meaning that Eliot is trying to convey. A minor reference is also made about the dead Phoenician soldier integrating the song from Tempest. The well-known jazz sung during the First World War is referred to: O O O O that Shakespeherian rag/ It's so elegant/So intelligent. This was sung by American soldiers while returning in groups. Eliot then moves on to a conversation between a husband and a wife whose frustration about frozen time is evident. Ultimately they decide to play a game of chess, with a kind of sexual innuendo in continuation of Middleton’s play. The next passage switches from the rich to the poor. This scene concerns with Lil and her husband Albert. He has been demobbed (released from the army). It is reported to be a real-life experience of Ellen Kelland, the house maid to Eliots. We have two ladies with absolutely no morals talking about family relations. Lil’s husband who is coming back from army might require a good time. He has even given money to buy to new set of teeth to enhance her looks. She has become emaciated and unattractive (“antique”). She complains about the pills she uses. She is warned by her friend that if she failed to satisfy him, he might approach others who are only willing. Lil has already got five children. Then comes the ominous-sounding question, “What you get married for if you don't want children?” This is linked with the idea presented earlier related to fertility myth. In the meantime, the owner of bar keeps urging them to leave because it is already late. “Hurry up please its time”. Then there is a direct reference to Ophelia. “Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.” (Hamlet, Act

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4 Scene 5). Eliot contrasts the symbol of innocence (Ophelia) with the modern woman, who has lost their purity. The vitality and the procreative focus of sex have now debased itself to the meaningless act of immorality.

In Part III, ‘Fire Sermon’, Eliot starts with the sermon rendered by the Buddha. Lord Buddha had cautioned his disciples not to get tempted by the fires of anger, lust and malice. Fire is symbolically associated with two aspects: purification and lust. It can sustain people spiritually or it can degenerate into lust. The scene projected is that of orgy and lust. The setting is the banks of Thames. Tents have now broken down and even the last leaf has sunk. The dry arid land is having a deserted look. Eliot compares the river during the Elizabethan days with the modern days. The refrain, “Sweet Thames” is from Prothalamion by Spenser. Written for the nuptial of the daughters of Earl of Worcester, Elizabeth and Katherine, Spenser glorifies the ceremony and the ensuing raptures of marital life. But for Eliot, the nymphs are gone and the call girls of London replace them. ‘Oil’ and ‘tar’ have replaced the immaculate swans. The reference to Leman is significant. Leman is the French name of Lake Geneva (Lac Léman); the reference is to the convalescent leave from Lloyd's Bank that Eliot spent in Lausanne, on the shores of the lake, in order to receive psychological treatment. It also refers to the lamentation and sorrow of the Israelites recalling their exile in Babylon, when they remembered Zion. In Bible, the Israelites lament their bondage in Babylon, the Babylonian captivity. It was Moses who brought them out of their captivity. The common name ‘leman’ is also associated with a mistress; hence the waters of leman are linked with the fires of lust. Eliot makes a direct reference to Andrew Marvell’s ‘To his Coy Mistress’. “But at my back I always hear / Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near”. The narrator perceives the mood of death which lacks spirituality. He sees skulls everywhere. (“Chuckle spread ear to ear”). Eliot’s rattling bones signify not the reanimation of the dead, but spiritual and bodily death. Two references merge here, one from John Day’s ‘The Parliament of Bees’ and also that of the Actaeon Myth. The next passage also contains a sordid imagery of the polluted environment surrounding Thames River. Slimy rats are creeping; white naked dead bodies are lying on the low damp ground; and the scattered bones in the garret are rattled by the rat’s foot. In the meantime, the narrator hears the sound of horns and motors bringing Sweeney to Mrs. Porter. Mrs. Porter and her daughter are washing their feet in soda water to attract more males suggesting a unified sensibility of the physical and spiritual degeneration of the wasteland. (Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole! “And oh! the chime of children's voices in the dome.”) Eliot purposefully creates an irony here. At the end of his quest, Parsifal,

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the chief Grail knight has his feet washed in holy water to “be free from stain; from devious wandering’s dust.” Next set of lines: “Twit twit twit / Jug jug jug jug jug jug / So rudely forc’d. / Tereu" refers to John Lyly’s Camaspe (1584). Mrs. Porter was a familiar figure, famous for her Brothel at Cairo. In the next passage, Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant invites the narrator “to luncheon at Cannon Street Hotel”, which according to Elizabeth Drew, “is to share promiscuous (homosexual) pleasures. He invites the narrator to have a “weekened at the Metropole”. Smyrna refers to Modern Izmir in the western part of Turkey. The letters “cif” refers to cost, insurance and freight.

At this crucial moment of the poem, the most important character is introduced. Tiresias, the blind seer who combines both the sexes. The experiences of men and women are condensed into one individual. He thus provides an aesthetic continuity for the poem in addition to functioning as unifying the past, present and future. He symbolically represents a unified human consciousness. Eliot quotes from the relevant passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. When Eliot states that Tiresias “sees the substance of the poem”, it would seem that this information supports the idea that Tiresias is hinting at the key to understand the poem. The story of his change of sex is reported first. Tiresias came across two snakes copulating in a forest. He hit them with his staff and in consequence was later changed into a woman. Eight years later he repeated the blow in a similar situation and regained his masculinity. Later a dispute arose between Jove and Juno on the issue of whether in love the woman derives more pleasure than man. Tiresias, (“throbbing with two lives”), was asked to adjudicate. Jupiter Asked Tiresias: “In their act of love/who takes the greater pleasure, man or woman?”/“Woman,” replied Tiresias, “takes nine-tenths.”/Juno was so angry — angrier/Than is easily understandable —She struck Tiresias and blinded him./“You've seen your last pretty snake, forever.”/But Jove consoled him: “That same blow,” he said,/“Has opened your inner eye like a nightscope. See:/“The secrets of the future — they are yours.” To compensate for this Jove gave him the gift of prophecy and long life. Tiresias forgot to ask for the gift of youth. Coming back to the poem, Tiresias witnesses a sexual encounter between “a typist home at tea time” and “a small house against clerk”. The home of the typist is a small place. The narrator could foretell what was going to happen. The woman prepared food until the man arrives, and they eat. After the meal, “she is bored and tired”, but he nevertheless starts “to engage her in caress”. “Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; Exploring hands encounter no defence;” She makes no attempt to stop the man. Once the act is over, he leaves after bestowing “one final patronising kiss”. She is relieved now, and murmurs, “Well now

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that's done: and I'm glad it's over.” Eliot also makes reference to the famous line from Vicar of Wakefield (“When lovely woman stoops to folly”). Eliot quotes the song sung by Olivia, who recollects her first meeting with Squire Thornhill. She recognises her folly because the Squire had already abandoned half a dozen women after abusing them. Eliot, however, contrasts the situation here with the life of the typist. For her, matrimony and procreation are of least importance. In line 257, Eliot is quoting from The Tempest. The quote, “This music crept by me upon the waters,” suggests the theme of death by water.

At this point Eliot includes a long montage of scenes from London interspersed with many literary references to failed relationships through the ages. The indented passage that begins with the line, “The river sweat” invokes a Wagner poem that describes the downfall of ancient gods. The reference is to Richard Wagner’s lengthy opera, The Ring of the Nibelung (1874). The Rhine daughters express their sorrow over the loss of the magic hoard of gold of the Nibelungs, which they had guarded. The loss of the gold is symbolic of the loss of the beauty and charm of the Rhine. Eliot uses Wagner’s melodies for creating this effect. What is significant for us is the matter that happens on the river bank to the daughters of the Thames in the modern world. The first girl who comes from Highbury tells the story of her immoral adventure. In her boat, she passed through Richmond and Kew. At Richmond, she was sexually assaulted by a reveller on the floor of the boat. The second girl gives a similar story of her share of experience. She belongs to Moorgate. She was criminally assaulted by a young man. He felt dejected over his act and he was regretful. He promised that he would behave better. The girl felt ashamed but did not express her displeasure. She opted to remain quiet. Eliot was from the very beginning was in doubt at the validity of love’s capacity to provide a solution in the world where ‘everything exists, nothing has value .So in the first part of the poem, there is among the ‘stony rubbish ’, the Red Rock with the invitation:“(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),” which the critic M.L.Rosenthal believes as ‘ultimately a symbol of church’ (Rosenthal 1960). According to Eliot, line 293 refers to Purgatorio, V. 133: “Ricorditi di me, che son la Pia; / “Siena mi fe’, disfecemi Maremma.” Here the reference is to the chilling story of the murder of La Pia in 1295 by the orders of her husband Paganello de' Pannocchieschi. As some say, she was dropped from a castle window so that after her death her husband would be able to marry his neighbor, a widowed countess. The third girl belongs to Moorgate sands. Tiresias had been to this place/space. After the assault, her mind was blank. She could not recollect anything. Eliot then alludes to the repentance of St. Augustine and to the teaching of the Buddha. Before

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getting initiated to the religious practices, Augustine was a noted lecher. From the fire of lust, Christ released him. The unreal city of London, burning in the fire of lust is compared to Carthage. Carthage was referred to as the cauldron of sensuality by St. Augustine. The section is complete with the collocation of two levels of mysticism i.e. Eastern and Western.

The fourth section, which is brief, starts off with a reference to ‘Phlebas the Phoenician’, the dead sailor, who was mentioned in the second section. Two weeks after his drowning, Phlebas has forgotten his maritime activities. He is now reduced to bones under the sea. The title refers to the ritual of the burying of the Corn God at the end of the summer and reclaiming them at the beginning of the spring season. Death followed by resurrection finds expression in Christianity. But here, there is no hope of revival. Water only drowns the people and does not sustain people. Phlebas could not be given a decent religious burial. He forgot the cry of the sea and the demands of life related to profit and loss. His bones were picked up by the sea in whispers. At that crucial phase of life, he saw everything, from youth to the present, all the stages. These visions crossed his mind. Thus, he entered the ‘undiscovered country’, the whirlpool of death. Through Phlebas, Eliot gives a warning signal to the twentieth century generation. This materialistic generation could meet the same end if they remain attached material conditions. This section is identical to the poem written by Eliot himself titled ‘Dans le Restaurant’. When translated this poem read like this: Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight drowned, forgot the cry of gulls and the swell of the Cornish seas, and the profit and the loss, and the cargo of tin. An undercurrent carried him far, took him back through the ages of his past. Imagine it-a terrible end for a man once so handsome and tall”. Eliot refers to William Morris’s Life and Death of Jason (1867). In Book IV the song of Orpheus to the Argonauts speaks of a Phoenician sailor as a victim of the sea. The passage also echoes St. Paul’s message to the gentile and the Jew that there is no difference that all stand guilty before God and are in need of his life giving grace. The prophecy of Madam Sosostris turns out to be true in this section.

The final section, ‘What the Thunder Said’, explores three themes at the beginning. In the first theme, the episode from Bible is adapted (Luke XXIV: 13-31) of the two disciples walking on the road to Emmaus (a village near Jerusalem) on the day of Christ’s resurrection. He joins them, but they don’t know him until the evening meal, when he blesses them. The disciples, meanwhile, speak about the arrest, trial and Crucifixion. Eliot’s second theme is the first stage of Grail Quest and the journey to Chapel Perilous of the knight. This theme is

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interwoven with the theme of the Emmaus journey. Eliot’s third theme is modern: the decay of Europe in the twentieth century.

The initial lines evoke the course of events from the betrayal and arrest of Jesus Christ. ‘After the torchlight red on sweaty faces/After the frosty silence in the gardens…'But when I look ahead up the white road/There is always another one walking beside you' (322-362). The stanza refers to the agony and the prayer in the garden of Gethsemane to the moment of Crucifixion (John 18:3). Judas then, having received a band of men and officers from the chief priests and Pharises, cometh thither with lanterns, torches and weapons. Christ was taken to the palace of the High Priest where he was publicly interrogated before being taken to Pilate, the Roamn governor, in the Hall of Judgement. In Mark 15:13-14, “And they cried out again, crucify him!” At the death of Christ, the whole world shook. Matthew 27: 51 states, “the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent”. The lines 331-59 give a grand description of the wasteland. Eliot thought very highly of these 29 lines and wrote about them to Ford Madox Ford in letter. The condition of sterility is asserted in the lines, “Here is no water…rock without water”. Our mental faculties fail, we suffer a lot, and illusions control us. There are murmurs and lamentations. Then the question comes, “who is the third who walks always beside you?”The hooded figure can be seen as some sort of guardian, a guide through the chaotic mess of the world that is left behind.

Eliot alludes to the scene of battle, “hooded hordes swarming / Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth”. The poet includes more images of war and destruction, referring to “Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air/Falling towers”. The image is one of a castle being destroyed and the poet deliberately sustains this idea with the list of historical cities that were destroyed or that fell into the ruin and decay: “Jerusalem Athens Alexandria/ Vienna London”. All look unreal now. Only the agony lingers. Two images, phases are combined together; bats and baby faces, ugliness and innocence. Towers are now upside down. The music of death is being played in these towers. What now left are dry and empty wells. There is a reference to the paintings of the fourteenth century Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch. Medieval versions of the Grail Legend portray the harrows of the entry into the Chapel Perilous which were intended to test the knight’s nerves and the nightmarish visions, including bats with baby faces (see: https://arthive.com/publications/2962) In the modern age, we do not see the ‘hanged man’. When the questing knight reaches the Chapel Perilous, he sees that the site has become almost haunted. It is just a “decayed hole among the

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mountains”. Except for the crowing cock, the knight finds nothing meaningful. There is a distant echo of the Biblical story of Peter denying the Lord three times. Then he breaks down in tears at his own cowardice.

The river Ganga had sunken and dried up. All waited for a rain where there was flash of lightening. Himavant is referred to by Eliot to show his cosmic vision, a universal appeal of experiences. Ganga is first called the Bhagirathi, taking the name Ganga after the Alakananda joins with it. The sound DA is the voice of the thunder. The reference is to Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. Eliot alludes to a very significant episode in the Upanishad which describes how Gods (Devas), Asuras (Demons) and Men (mortal human beings) approach Prajapathi, their father-preceptor, for instruction and message after completing their formal education.

Let us look into the well-known translation by Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, in his book The Principal Upanishads (pages 298-290):

The threefold offspring of Prajd-pati, gods, men and demons lived with their father as students of sacred knowledge. Having completed their studentship the gods said, Please instruct us, sir. To them then he uttered the syllable da and asked "Have you understood?" They said "We have understood, you said to us 'damayata", control yourself". He said, "Yes, you have understood". The gods are said to be naturally unruly and so are asked to practise self-control.

Then the men said to him, 'Please tell (instruct) us, sir.' To them he uttered the same syllable da (and asked) 'Have you understood ' They said, 'We have understood You said to us "give".' He said, 'Yes, you have understood ' Men are naturally avaricious and so they should distribute their wealth to the best of their ability.

Then the demons said to him, 'Please tell (instruct) us, sir.' To them he uttered the same syllable da and asked, 'Have you understood?' They said, 'We have understood, you said to us, "dayadhvam,""be compassionate " He said, 'Yes, you have understood ' This very thing the heavenly voice of thunder repeats da, da, da, that is, control yourselves, give, be compassionate One should practise this same triad, self-control, giving and compassion The demons are cruel, given to inflicting injury on others, they should have compassion and be kind to all.

Self-surrender, Sympathy, Self-control—these three are the ways to salvation.

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In between the poet refers to the typist and the carbuncular lover. He receives but gives nothing to her. In this modern age, giving is degenerated into a sexual surrender. Our memories are just like spider webs which are flimsy and unsubstantial. Everyone is a prisoner in our own self. We fail to merge with the world outside. We are inmates of self-made prison. In certain moments of extreme solitude, you do not share your true self with others. We are broken completely by our own pride, just like Coriolanus. Moreover, the concept of self- control is important. If you are a perfect boatman, you can take your boat to any shore/harbour. (Young Eliot was a keen boatman). The word ‘da’ does not mean data, dayadhvam, damyata alone. All these three should be taken together. The Fischer King says he has no hope of bringing rain. Eliot uses the famous rhyme: “London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down”, it is a kind of reminder of a probable disaster expected unless the three principles are followed.

The poem ends with lines/phrases from different languages. Michael H. Levenson (1984) puts the last stanza into perspective from a linguistic point of view: “The poem concludes with a rapid series of allusive literary fragments: seven of the last eight lines are quotations. But in the midst of these quotations is a line to which we must attach great importance: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

“Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.”

Eliot quotes from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Canto 26, lines 145-148, from the Purgatory:

"Now I petition you, by that kind Power Escorting you to the summit of the staircase, At the appropriate time, recall my pain. " Then he hid himself in the refining fire.

(As he climbs the Mount of Purgatory, Dante is addressed by Arnaut Daniel, speaking here in his native Provencal, now suffering the punishment of the lustful in the cleansing fires of purgatory.)

He must pass through the fire of purification. He is haunted by images of desolation and a shower of literary allusions shows him slipping into frenzy.

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Eliot then quotes from Pervigilium Veneris. Cf. Philomela in Parts II and III. The Latin phrase in the text means, "When shall I be as the swallow?" In the last two stanzas of the Pervigilium occurs a recollection of the Tereus-Procne-Philomela myth (except that in this version the swallow is identified with Philomela); the anonymous poet's mood changes to one of sadness, combined with hope for renewal: "The maid of Tereus sings under the poplar shade, so that you would think musical trills of love came from her mouth and not a sister's complaint of a barbarous husband. . . . She sings, we are silent. When will my spring come? When shall I be as the swallow that I may cease to be silent? I have lost the Muse in silence, and Apollo regards me not." Eliot then brings in another allusion. "The Prince of Aquitaine to the ruined tower". “I am the darkness – the widower – the un-consoled,/The prince of Aquitaine in the ruined tower;/My sole star is dead – and my constellated lute/Bears the black sun of Melancholy.” This is a sonnet written by Gerard de Nerval, titled “El Desdichado” and here the poet considers himself a disinherited prince stressing the lost tradition of troubadour poets. As the poem reaches to its logical end, Eliot quotes Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Hieronymo's son Horatio is murdered by a rival. The murder unhinges Hieronymo, driving him mad even as he plots revenge against his son's killers. The line “Ile fit you“ (“I'll oblige you”) is from Act 4, Scene 2, where Hieronymo convinces the murderers to take part in a play to be performed for the king Eliot repeats the message of the thunder and ends with the blessing ‘Shantih, Shantih, Shantih”. The word taken from the Indian context signifies “the peace which passeth understanding”. Only through peace will humanity be able to restore its vitality and quality of sustenance.

QUESTIONS

1. Briefly discuss the origin and growth of idea in The Waste Land.

2. Discuss T.S. Eliot’s symbolism with special reference of The Waste Land.

3. Critically analyse the theme of The Waste Land.

4. Estimate the value of the influence of The Waste Land on modern poetry.

5. “The Waste Land is a music of ideas, the ideas like the musician’s phrases are arranged not that they may combine into a coherent whole of feeling and attitude.” – I.A. Richard. Elucidate

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6. Why does Eliot tell us in a footnote that the blind prophet Tiresias is the most important character in the poem? How is Tiresias best suited to narrate "The Waste Land"? Do you think the speaker of the poem is always Tiresias, who is both a man and a woman and lives many different lives? 7. "The Waste Land" is a complex poem filled with literary allusions and multiple themes. Explain. 8. How do the images Eliot employs (death, flooding, famine, drought) imply that the poem is about death and lack of regeneration? 9. Why does Eliot make use of allusion to sacred writings in his poem?

CRITICAL COMMENTS

“Indian thought has attracted many intellectuals in the West, among whom, in modern times, T. S. Eliot is notable. While at Harvard, Eliot studied Sanskrit and some Indian philosophy. In his own words: Two years spent in the study of Sanskrit under Charles Lanman, and a year in the mazes of Patanjali's metaphysics under the guidance of James Woods, left me in a state of enlightened mystification. A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after-and their subtleties make most of the great European philos- ophers look like schoolboys-lay in trying to erase from my mind all the categories and kinds of distinction common to European philosophy from the time of the Greeks. . . And I came to the conclusion ... that my only hope of really penetrating to the heart of that mystery would lie in forgetting how to think and feel as an American or a European: which, for practical as well as sentimental reasons, I did not wish to do.- This statement explains, partly at least, a kind of disassociation which exists in Eliot's approach to Indian thought-an intellectual identifica- tion combined with an emotional detachment. Eliot sits on the inner wall of the outer structure of a spiritual thermos-flask separated by an almost complete emotional vacuum from the inner philosophic contents his intellect surveys…”

“...Indian philosophic thought, which is inextricably mixed up with Indian religious thought, is to him an intellectual creed rather than an emotional faith. However, with respect to the Bhagavad-Gita, he is no longer, to use an Indian metaphor, going round the outer wall of the inner sanctuary in sacred circumambulation (pradakshina) but appears to catch a glimpse of the inner shrine. In his own words, the Bhagavad-Gita was "the next greatest philosophical poem to the Divine Comedy within my experience." 2 The influence of the Gita on him

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appears to have been profound. The universalism of the main teachings of the Gita has evidently exercised nearly as much fascination on the dean of contemporary English poets as it did on India's epic hero. The Indian philosophical poem deals with a deep spiritual and emotional crisis of man and calls for action to preserve the world from becoming a spiritual wasteland dominated by evil. It is not therefore surprising that the author of The Waste Land turned to this poem and felt attuned to its spirit...”

T. S. Eliot and the Bhagavad-Gita K. S. Narayana Rao American Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Winter, 1963), pp. 572-578 The Johns Hopkins University Press Eliot's early aspirations are synthetized in The Waste Land (1922), the summit of his poetry. The poem consists of 433 lines to which explanatory philological notes of 191 lines arc added. The Waste Land marks an era in the development of English and Ameri- can poetry in the same way as Joyce's Ulysses , published in the same year, does in English and European prose ; in both of them the crisis of bourgeois values, revealed by the bloody welter of the first imperialistic World War, manifests itself in a form mixing expres- sionism, surrealism and constructivism. On a first perusal of the poem it is anarchy that the reader is impressed by. The barren symbol of the title, the Latin epigraph, taken from Petronius' Satyricon, interspersed with Greek words, the dedication for Ezra Pound, begun in English, ended in Italian and referring to Dante, and the main text, in Pound's manner, alluding to thirty-five writers, quoting foreign authors in six original languages, introducing even Sanscrit words, seem to be rather confused. The five structural units also contribute to the impression of incoherence. The great number of characters, introduced and concealed, merging into one another, makes the poem even more difficult to understand. With the blurred characters the indistinct background and the poetic style are continually altering. The method of the cycle in creating images is characterized by a fragmentary and discontinuous application of extraordinarily suggestive mosaic flags. April, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, and stirring dull roots with spring rain; the summer, coming over the Starnbergersee with a shower of rain; the winter sleigh-ride; the full-armed, wet-haired girl; the crowd flowing over London Bridge, under the brown fog of a winter dawn; the chair like a burnished throne glowing on the marble; the red sails, wide to leeward, swinging on the heavy spar; the woman raising her knees supine on the floor of a narrow canoe; the two sweltering wanderers among the mountains of rock without water, seeing a third gliding wrapped in a brown mantle,

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hooded; the image of the stony rubbish : all these awake a powerful atmosphere, but they resist persistently every question by the reader and son of man, concerning the meaning : "What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, / You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images, where the sun beats." The form of The Waste Land also suggests a chaotic world concept. Its vers libre tends to break down the wall between prose and verse, but the lines of demarcation between lyric, epic and drama are also blurred. Behind the characters and situations of the basically lyric poem the outlines of an epic story appear faintly. The excited dialogues of Part II, the dynamically alternating soliloquies of Part III, and the desperate exclamation. closing this part, the questions and answers breaking up Part V, the dramatic represen- tation of the poetic matter, the tension of long verse paragraphs winding through the lines, the terse concision of the language following the tradition of Jacobean poetic drama : all these anticipate the later dramatist. The philological overcharge of the poem often eliminates the boundary between art and science. A detailed analysis, however, can discover the work of a brain constructing with mathematical exactness. Eliot himself points out in the notes attached to the poem that the key to understanding The Waste Land is Jessie Weston's book on the Grail legend, From Ritual to Romance (1920). In the ancient story there is a wasteland whose barrenness is caused by its sovereign, the Fisher King's sterility. The curse of the drought will be removed by the happy union of the Liberator and the mythical Woman. Eliot treats the Grail legend with disillusioned pessimism. The various scenes of the poem: the stony rubbish, the Unreal City, the luxurious boudoir, the dreary pub, the autumn Thames, the typist's dirty flat, and the rocky desert are the spatial versions of the very same spiritual desolation; the alternating characters are the ironically-gloomily unworthy variants of the same figures, the Fisher King, the Liberator and the Woman. The unity of the cycle is promoted, though not carried out with an immediate artistic suggestive- ness, by the constant opposition of the magnificent past and the miserable present61, thrown into relief by citations, too, recurring leitmotifs (philomel, water, barrenness), terse, identical metrical structures and philological parallels. This poetic construction, which is both whirlingly dissonant and at the same time extremely systematic, is akin to the principles of composition in Schonberg's dodecaphonic music, combining expres- sionism with constructivism. The epoch of The Waste Land was concluded by the notable poem The Hollow Men (1925), which, contrasting the symbol of the "cactus land" with the allegory of the "multifoliate rose", is the religious herald of Eliot's new poetic period. T. S. ELIOT'S AESTHETICS

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Péter Egri Angol Filológiai Tanulmányok / Hungarian Studies in English, Vol. 8 (1974), pp. 5-34 Centre for Arts, Humanities and Sciences (CAHS), acting on behalf of theUniversity of Debrecen CAHS

Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West (1918, 1922) closely anticipates theme of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and reveals marked similarities in analogical method and word structure. Decline adopts seasonal ideas of history similar to Eliot's historical juxtapositions in The Waste Land. In fact, Eliot's under- standing of the historical process is more closely comparable to Spengler's than to the well-known anthropological works of J. G. Frazer and Jesse Weston. The advance of history is seen as a permanent taking-down of prior cultural forms and a shift to the inwardly seen. Both Spengler and Eliot view the directional energies of the twentieth century as abstract meliorations of a dying religious consciousness. The final phase in the Spenglerian cycle, winter, is synonomous with Eliot's megalopian London. The provinces are seen to have been dispossessed by world-cities creating a moribund humanity, intensely spiritualized by the cessation of organic growth. Spengler translates these inward necessities into a "mother-longing," Eliot into a "maternal lamentation." Both writers stress the loss of connection between the individual and the race. Both associate time consciousness with the edifices of religion. Modern man, in his dilemma, withdraws from the cosmic drama, the struggles of good and evil. Both Spengler and Eliot dismiss historical evolution and dynamic world-will and seek liberation from causal experience through the Buddhist conception of the ahistoric soul. "The Waste Land": A Possible German Source John Barry Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Dec., 1972), pp. 429-442 Penn State University Press

Bibliography

Aiken, Conrad ‘An Anatomy of Melancholy’, T.S.Eliot:TheWasteLand(CaseBook), Ed. Dyson,Macmillan,London, 1968

Bradbury,Malcolm.The Modern World Ten great Writers, KalyaPublishers,New Delhi,1989

Brooks, Cleanth.Modern Poetry and Tradition, Oxford University Press, New York, 1939

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Drew, Elizabeth.T.S.Eliot:The Designs of His Poetry, Doab Publication, New Delhi,1993

Eliot,T.S. The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism, Faber and Faber,London,1949

Gardener, Helen. The Art of T.S. Eliot, Faber and Faber,London,!949

Pinto, V. de S. Crisis in Poetry: 1880-1940, Hutchinson & Co. , London, 1972

Rosenthal, M.L. The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction, Oxford University Press, USA, 1960

Rudra, Arup.‘The Structure of The waste land’, Journal of Department of English (University of Calcutta),vol.15,no.2,1979-80

Sahane, V. A. Ed.The Waste Land-T.S.Eliot, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1999

Smith, Grover.T.S.Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 1974

Tamplin, Ronald.T.S.Eliot, Pearson Education (Singapur) Pub. Ltd,Delhi, 2003

Matthiessen, F.O.: The Achievement of T.S. Eliot

Maxwell, D.E.S.: The Poetry of T.S. Eliot

Levenson, Michael H. “On The Waste Land.” A Genealogy of Modernism: A study of English literary doctrine 1908-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Web. 27 July 2011.

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FUNERAL BLUES W.H.AUDEN

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, in the United Kingdom. At Oxford, he became associated with a number of radical poets and authors, including Stephen Spender. Many of his poems focus on social ills, as well as concern with the workings of the mind. He lived and worked for many years in the United States of America and returned to the United Kingdom in 1972, where he died a year later.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'. Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood; For nothing now can ever come to any good. This poem is an expression of grief and heartache. The speaker describes his pain and links his overwhelming emotion of despair to the world around him. The references to ‘clocks’, ‘telephone’ (line 1), ‘dog’ (line 2) and ‘pianos’ (line 3) examine the mourner’s reaction to his immediate, domestic surroundings through the lens of loss. The poem then expands the surroundings to the public arena with ‘aeroplanes’ (line 5), ‘doves’ (line 7) and ‘traffic policemen’ (line 8), and finally ends in the universal sphere of ‘stars’ (line 13), ‘moon’, ‘sun’ (line 14), ‘ocean’ and ‘wood’ (line 15). The third stanza describes their special relationship, and gives a personal account of what the dead man meant to the speaker. It is clear from the outset what the subject of the poem will be with the title ‘Funeral Blues’. The choice of the word ‘Blues’ is an effective one as this could refer to a depressed mood, and also describes a slow, sad musical piece. The reader immediately understands the call for everything to cease – time, noise, music – as soon as the reference is made to the ‘coffin’ and ‘mourners’ (line 4). The stark message ‘He Is Dead’, to be written on the sky for all to see, implies the speaker’s need for the world around him to register the passing of his beloved.

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Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, The poem begins with a series of harsh commands: stop the clocks! Cut off the telephones! The speaker sounds forceful, even angry. Whoever the speaker is, he sounds angry, and issues harsh commands. In the first line, he wants to stop the clocks and the telephone. These seem like physical representations of time and communication to us. He wants everything to just stop. In the next line, he asks for silence. He wants dogs to stop barking, too. Lines 3-4 Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. This is not a time for pianos. It's a time for muffled drums. Now that he's asked the dog and the phone to hush, he has no problem extending that request to musical instruments. Except he's not opposed to the drum. That element fits the title. If this is a funeral we're dealing with, drums are much more solemn and fitting for the occasion. In the next line, he wants the coffin to be brought out for mourners to come see it. Maybe the "muffled drum," then, is the sound of mourners walking, or of pallbearers carrying a coffin. Or maybe it is a slow and stately drumming that the speaker wants the kind of drumming that happens at military funerals. The interesting thing about these two lines and the first two as well, is that they are all commands, also known as imperatives. The speaker is making a big pronouncement to the world: someone has died, and we must acknowledge it in dramatic ways. These lines might even seem a little exaggerated. Should we really stop the clocks just because someone has died? Probably not. But the speaker's use of a hyperbole or exaggeration to convey just how important all this mourning business is. Line 3 has eleven syllables, and line 4 has ten. It is safe to call this one iambic pentameter. And by the end of stanza 1, we've also got a clear rhyme scheme at work. "Telephone" rhymes with "bone," and "drum" rhymes with "come." Whenever you see a four-line stanza, or quatrain that has an aabb rhyme scheme in a poem about a funeral, you're reading an elegiac stanza. Lines 5-6 Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead, As if stopping the clocks weren't enough, the speaker would like an airplane to write "He is Dead" in skywriting to commemorate his grief. If a funeral is a public acknowledgment of death, then this is a super public acknowledgement of death.

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While earlier he asked for quiet, and for people to cut off their telephones (which are private communication devices), he wants the whole world to know that "He Is Dead." It's interesting that the speaker doesn't provide a name. He could have written, for example, "John Is Dead." Or "Tommy Is Dead." But he leaves the dead man's name anonymous. Maybe he wants more privacy after all. Or maybe he assumes that everyone already knows "his" name. Either way, there's an interesting mixture between private and public acknowledgments of death. Lines 7-8 Put crépe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. More public demands; the speaker wants even the "public doves" - we have a strong feeling that these are pigeons - to honour the dead man. He wants the traffic police to acknowledge him, too. Does the speaker really want us to put bows on pigeons? It seems our man is getting hyperbolic again. Lines 9-10 He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, This speaker is so broken up about the experience (and wants everyone else to be broke up about it, too) because he really loved the dead man. It doesn't seem like the dead man was important world- wide. The dead man is someone the speaker knew and loved in daily life. These lines are incredibly personal, especially when compared to the earlier lines that are mostly about public mourning. The dead man meant everything to the speaker, so it's no wonder he'd like the entire world around him to reflect the fact that the man is dead. The speaker describes the dead man by saying that he was like a compass for him, and also like every day of the week for him. He provided direction, and filled his time. Lines 11-12 My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong. More metaphors. These lines seem to imply that the dead man filled every hour of the speaker's day. He brought conversation and joy into the speaker's life. While the previous lines were lovely and metaphorical, this one is harsh. Your loved ones will die. No love lasts forever. Lines 13-14 The stars are not wanted now: put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

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The speaker grows even more depressed in these lines. He demands that someone, whomever he's talking to, put out the stars, pack up the moon, and take apart the sun. Now his grief is so extreme, it's affecting the way he sees the cosmos. His extreme, hyperbolic commands are his expressions of his extreme grief. Even though no one could ever "dismantle the sun," the speaker's grief is so intense that he wishes that we could. All of these romantic and natural images—the stars, the moon, the sun- are too painful for him. It's almost as if he wants to blot out everything in the world except his own mourning. Lines 15-16 Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood; For nothing now can ever come to any good. In these final lines, the speaker continues his hyperbolic thinking and asks us to get rid of the ocean and the wood (by "wood," he probably means the forests). He doesn't want to see any sign of the wonders of nature. In the last line of the poem he is totally hopeless, the speaker says that nothing will ever be good again. In a lot of elegies (poems like this one that commemorate a person's death), the speaker will offer some hope for the future, or will talk about how the dead person will live on in memories and poetry. There's usually a small moment of optimism buried somewhere in them but this does not happen in Auden's "Funeral Blues." This is just a really sad poem about death. There is no light at the end of the tunnel for anyone in "Funeral Blues." The speaker spends the first stanza of "Funeral Blues" complaining about how much he wants everyone and everything to be silent. Maybe he wants some peace and quiet to deal with his thoughts. Maybe he wants to make sure that everyone can hear his lament. Maybe he wants silence out of respect for the dead man. Line 1: The speaker wants to cut off personal communication with the world: he wants to stop the telephone lines from running. He's looking for isolation. He's probably being hyperbolic here, which means that he's exaggerating his feelings and desires to show just how sad and hopeless he is. Line 2: He also wants to stop dogs from barking. Poor dogs. It's not their fault. Line 3: Now he'd like people to quit playing the piano, thank you very much. Seems fair enough. This is a funeral after all. Lines 3-4: He wants to hear the "muffled drum" of the funeral march. The speaker wants to hear this and this only. It's like all other noise is a distraction from what really matters, which is his pain. The Public - Symbol Analysis The speaker is not just concerned with his own reaction to the man's death. He wants the acknowledgment of the public, too. Even though we don't really have much of a reason to

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think that the dead beloved is famous or anything, the speaker really desires that this death be noticed. Perhaps his grief is so consuming, that he wants it to be reflected in the entire world around him. Lines 1-4: The speaker wants quiet so that the drum of the funeral march can be heard by the mourners of the dead man. Once again, he's being hyperbolic. No one can really expect every dog in the world to stop barking just because a funeral is happening somewhere in the world. Lines 5-6: The speaker asks airplanes to proclaim the man's death though skywriting. It's like he wants the whole world to know what he's going through. Lines 7-8: He even wants policemen and pigeons to acknowledge the man's death. Once again, hyperbole. Lines 9-12: Compared to the previous lines that deal with the public, these lines seem quiet and intimate, and we realize what the dead man meant to the speaker. He wants a public acknowledgment of the man with whom he's spent his private life. Nature - Symbol Analysis Sun, moon, stars…sounds lovely, right? Well, not to our speaker. He wants all these lovely things - and everything else in nature, it seems - to leave him alone. The grief he feels seems to have interfered with his ability to appreciate nature. Grade 12 Poetry Notes Page 34 Line 11: Here, the speaker says that the dead man was everything to him. Lines 13-16: The speaker calls for us to "put out" the stars, "pack up the moon and dismantle the sun." He wants every beautiful thing that nature provides to go away. No more ocean, no more forests. This guy is so sad that he doesn't even want the stars around to remind him of his dead beloved. He's being hyperbolic, of course; he probably doesn't actually think that someone could "dismantle" the sun. But he yearns for this isolation from the natural world anyway. Analysis: Form and Meter - Elegy Elegies can take lots of different shapes and forms, since there are no rhyming or metrical rules for an elegy. "Funeral Blues" is that is written in elegiac stanzas. An elegiac stanza is a quatrain written in iambic pentameter, usually with the rhyme scheme abab. Here's where the "more or less" comes in. "Funeral Blues" is written in quatrains, and it does make use of iambic pentameter, but it's highly irregular in its meter, with extra syllables here and shaky feet there. And the rhyme scheme is tweaked a bit, too: aabb instead of abab. Auden is using heroic couplets instead of alternating rhymes. Analysis: Speaker Let's list what we know about the speaker. 1. We don't actually know if the speaker is male or female. 2. He/she likes issuing commands and telling people what to do.

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3. He's sad. The speaker is so sad that he can't imagine any good or happiness in the future. He's so overwhelmed by grief that he's driven to speak in crazy hyperboles. It's as if his sadness has completely changed the way he sees the world around him, and he wants that sadness to be reflected back to him by everything he sees. The problem is, he exaggerates so consistently that we may even have trouble taking him seriously sometimes. Analysis: Setting This poem is set at a funeral. This isn't about a small chapel, filled with loved ones in black. The setting, in many ways, is the whole wide world. The speaker wants that sadness to be reflected in everything - from the pigeons in the street to the stars in the sky. The true setting of "Funeral Blues" includes all of those things. Analysis: Title The poem is called "Funeral Blues,” It's a sad song (blues) about a dead man (funeral). Poetic / language devices Auden effectively captures the speaker’s sense of devastation and grief with his images in the first stanza. The speaker’s world has ended, and he feels that life has changed forever. It seems wrong for the world to continue on with the telephone ringing or dogs barking in the face of his loss. The personification of the aeroplanes ‘moaning’ (line 5) shows the speaker’s projection of his grief to his broader surroundings, as is the powerful image of the words scribbled on the sky for all to see (line 6). Describing the loved one as the points of a compass suggests that he, the departed, provided a sense of direction and grounding for the speaker, as well as being his entire world. The impact of the loss is further emphasised with the explanation that ‘he’ was there for the daily grind of work as well as the moments of ‘Sunday rest’ (line 10). We see the depth of the relationship as it gave meaning to the various times of the day – with their implications, and through ‘my talk, my song’ (line 11) was one that thrived through both ordinary conversation and companionship, as well as moments of joy. Line 12 achieves its emotive impact through its simplicity, coupled with the use of the colon to state its devastating realisation. The final stanza plays on images often associated with romantic love: the starlit night sky, the shining moon, romantic walks along a beach or picnics in the wood. These conventions are destroyed as the speaker calls for all these symbols to be stripped of their meaning as ‘nothing now can ever come to any good’ (line 16). Auden achieves a remarkable balance of tone. The speaker’s grief is starkly evident and his sorrow, confusion and even anger or bitterness at his loss is readily apparent. But Auden never allows the tone to become overly sentimental. As a result, the grief seems real and moving as we share and understand the speaker’s bereavement. The rhythm of the poem is regular, and the rhyme scheme contributes to this. This is fitting for a ‘Blues’ musical piece of the title. Notice how the regularity of the rhythm breaks down

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in the last line: This echoes the meaning as the speaker expresses his utter despair at his beloved’s death. Auden allows the aeroplanes to ‘moan’: The onomatopoeia here encourages us to hear the low hum of a light aircraft in the sky overhead. References to sound are effectively used in the opening stanza with the contrast crated between ordinary household noises and the call for silence, only to be broken by the solemn, ‘muffled drum’ (line 3) of the funeral procession

(Adapted from http://www.teachenglishtoday.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Notes-on-Grade- 12-HL-poems-2.pdf pages 29 to 35)

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Strange Meeting

Wilfred Owen

Introduction:

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) was born in Oswestry. He matriculated from London University in 1910 and started writing poems very early. He left for France where he learned French and he developed a keen sense of music for words. In 1915, he joined the Second Battalion of the Manchester Regiment and went to the Somme battlefront. He got his first experience of modern trench warfare during the First World War. He was wounded in the war-front and was hospitalised in Edinburgh. Poet. Siegfried Sassoon was his fellow-patient there. Sassoon encouraged him to write poetry. The pity of it was that Owen was killed a week before the war ended, while he was leading his platoon to the Sombre and Oise Canal. Owen‘s Poetry portrays the grim ground realities of war and its gruesome potentiality for dehumanising life. Owen‘s account of war is authentic because it is born of personal experience is theatres of war. He has declared that his subject is ―The pity of war, the poetry is in the pity. The poem ―’Strange Meeting’, is considered to be Owen‘s master-piece. It is an unfinished poem probably written at the Scarborough where Owen was posted after his discharge from Craiglockhart War Hospital in October 1917. It is about the narrator‘s dream or vision in which he meets a German soldier. Every aspect of the meeting is strange. It is a strange meeting because the place of meeting is hell, and the two soldiers who meet are already dead. The feelings exchanged between the two soldiers are also strange. Owen‘s message is that it is a folly to glorify war. War is tragic and destructive. His own life was cut short by the cruel war. It seemed that out of battle I escaped Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned, Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,

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Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless. And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,— By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained; Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground, And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan. “Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.” “None,” said that other, “save the undone years, The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours, Was my life also; I went hunting wild After the wildest beauty in the world, Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair, But mocks the steady running of the hour, And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here. For by my glee might many men have laughed, And of my weeping something had been left, Which must die now. I mean the truth untold, The pity of war, the pity war distilled. Now men will go content with what we spoiled. Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled. They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress. None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress. Courage was mine, and I had mystery; Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery: To miss the march of this retreating world Into vain citadels that are not walled. Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels, I would go up and wash them from sweet wells, Even with truths that lie too deep for taint. I would have poured my spirit without stint But not through wounds; not on the cess of war. Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

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“I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. Let us sleep now. . . .”

Summary

The title refers to an imaginary meeting in hell between two soldiers belonging to opposite camps. The narrator happens to meet, after his death, one of the enemy soldiers he has killed. He realizes that both of them have been victims of the monstrous war and thus becomes friends with his erstwhile enemy. They both share the feeling of hatred towards war. It was hell. There were a number of soldier lying unconscious and wounded. Once of them sprang up to his feet and recognized the poet. He raised his hands as if to bless. The German soldier looked very sad and unhappy; they were beyond the sound of guns and groans. The poet told his ‘strange friend’ with dead smile that there was no cause for sorrow in hell. The German soldier replied that it was true but he was unhappy because he was thinking of the ruined years and the hopelessness of war. He was full of hopes while alive. He wanted to achieve immortal fame through war. But everything was cut short by death. He could have shared his happiness with others. Or he could have left sonic account of his unhappiness in the form of books or some works. Put his death in the battlefront had prevented all these possibilities. He, in fact, wanted to convey to the world the pity of war, which is the untold truth about war. In the absence of his message, men would continue to shed blood and kill people in battlefields. ―They wiil he swift with swiftness of the tigress. He had the courage, wisdom, and self- control not to join the people in their backward march, 1-Ic would try to wash of the blood caused by wars by preaching universal love, peace, and spiritual truths. Finally the German soldier says, ―I am the enemy you killed, my friend‖. Yes, he was his enemy yesterday. But today, in hell, he is friend. Let enmity be the story of the past. Let there be peace and amity today‖ let us sleep now...

CRITICAL APPRECIATION

“Strange Meeting” is told from the point of view of the narrator who attempts to escape the death and thumping guns by going down into the trenches. Once there, however, he finds that he has descended into Hell, where he is confronted with a man he himself has killed. Unlike

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the hatred and violence exploding above ground, this underground encounter between the two soldiers from opposing armies and nations is infused with an elegiac sense of reconciliation and regret. There, in the silence of the trench / underworld, the soldier and the stranger can reflect on the larger meaning of the war and the toll it is taking on the young men of Europe. “Anthem for Doomed Youth” was written at Craiglockhart in September and October 1917. Sassoon helped with the revision of the poem—there were at least seven drafts—and, according to a letter Owen wrote to his mother, supplied a title as well. “Anthem for Doomed Youth” was most likely inspired by a prefatory note to an anthology of modern poetry that mentions “the passing-bells of Death.” The differences between the first draft and the last show how Owen began to reconcile his lyrical style with his opinions about the war. The poem works through a series of contrasts to suggest that the realities of war negate the values of ordinary, peaceful life; in particular, war negates Christianity. Like Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Edward Salter Owen (1893-1918) is a much anthologized English war poet who fought for his country and died young. But the differences between the two are perhaps more significant than their points of similarity. Unlike Brooke, who was a published poet even before enlisting, Owen had only a few poems published in his lifetime. He wrote little verse of importance till he joined the war in 1915. Whereas Brooke did not actually see much action, Owen was a soldier for more than three years, was decorated for bravery, and eventually died in action a week before World War I ended. He is now almost exclusively remembered for the poems that were largely shaped by his experience of the horrors of war. These affected him as both a person and a poet, turning him from a shy, sensitive introvert into a battle-scarred warrior who could respond as the situation demanded, yet was deeply disturbed by what war did to people in mind and body. His poetic technique also changed, turning his verse from something faintly romantic and sensuous to a vehicle that stylistically and powerfully echoed the discord of a world at war all around him. Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Owen’s war poetry is his preoccupation with what he calls “the pity of war”. This phrase occurs in the poem you are about to study in detail, but is also found in the lines of a preface that he had drafted for a volume of poems he planned to publish: “My subject is war, and the pity of war.” The word “pity” here conveys a sensitivity to the agony and anguish of those who fought in war, but goes beyond, seeing all the suffering and destruction as a tragic waste of humanity. Such an attitude was in sharp contrast to the idealistic glorification of war that characterized

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much of war poetry, at least during the initial stages of World War I. The tradition of poetry as a medium of expression openly glorified war. To die on the battlefield was to win undying honour. The Roman poet Virgil narrates through his epic, The Aeneid, the adventures and heroism of war. However, twentieth century literature subverted this and presented war as one of the worst crimes of mankind. The poem begins with a narrator who is probably a soldier, since he tells us that he escaped “out of battle”. Note however that this is preceded by “It seemed…” so this not a real retreat but a dream vision, or one imagined. Throughout the poem, the atmosphere is dreamlike and inconsistent, now lacking detail and logic, now coming sharply into focus. Note also that the soldier-narrator’s movement involves a descent, suggesting both a psychological journey into the depths of the subconscious and also a journey into some underworld or hell. The narrator travels along a dark tunnel which has been carved out by the ravages of war, yet paradoxically offers protection from the destruction currently raging overhead. He comes across clusters of soldiers who are either unaware or inanimate. He examines them closely, and one of them jumps up and with an expression of pity and distress seems to recognize the narrator. This, as we learn later, is because the narrator has killed him in battle the day before. The speaker so far is surprised to note that the other soldier has a face lined with pain, for he assumes that this place, far removed from the war raging elsewhere, should have no cause for sorrow. The other soldier responds, and with his words the narrator seems to disappear from the poem, never to return, for he neither speaks again nor makes his presence felt. The dead soldier says his sorrow is on account of death taking away his chances to lead a full life, to love and feel, and more importantly, to inspire others with hope and ideals. His laughter might have taught other people to laugh, and similarly his tears could have moved others to sorrow. His own sorrow has been generated by his experience of “the pity of war”: the realization that killing in action connects a slayer and his victim, who do not know one another, yet who might be so similar as to be friends. Though the dead soldier has realized this truth, he cannot communicate this to other men as he is no longer alive. So some soldiers continue to count the supposed gains of victory, while others prepare to retaliate. Either way, people die, and nations who trigger destruction continue to regress. Owen presents here a powerful image of chariot wheels clogged by the blood of the slain, as the dead soldier laments that he might have brought relief and shared the truth about war, had he been alive.

“Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels I would go up and wash them from sweet wells Even with truth that lie too deep for taint

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I would have poured my spirit without stint But not through wounds; not on the cess of war”

It is almost an expression of a pious wish that the dead soldiers would get an opportunity to practise Christian charity and higher humanism and wash the chariot wheels of the nations drenched in blood. He would certainly avoid the cesspool of war. He speaks here as a pacifist The dead soldier now reveals that he has been killed in battle, only the day before, by the poet-narrator. The poem ends on a disquieting note, without a sense of proper closure. What happens to the narrator? Why are the words of the other soldier left unfinished, as indicated by the ellipsis? And when the soldier says “Let us sleep now…” what kind of sleep is indicated: the sleep of death? Or a more literal sleep? Either way, there is no guarantee that this slumber is restful. Remember, this soldier seemed asleep when the narrator first came upon him, yet he suddenly sprang up to address the narrator and to warn him of the tragic waste of war. Perhaps this is the lasting impression the poet intended to leave us with. This would be in consonance with Owen’s declaration in another part of that draft of a preface: that all a poet can do is to warn people. The sudden stop in the middle of the line may indicate either that Owen could not complete the poem or that he deliberately left it like that. Sleep here may suggest that death for both of them is a welcome escape from the misery of war. The title of the poem echoes a line from a poem by Shelley, who (along with Keats) was a major literary influence, at least in the early part of Owen’s poetic career. Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam contains the line: “Gone forth whom no strange meeting did befall.” and Owen’s choice of title for the poem we are studying is an exact replica of the phrase “strange meeting”. The word “strange” here is a hint that the meeting or encounter described in the poem is not perhaps as realistic as it is metaphorical. In fact, some critics feel it might be an experience in a dream (or nightmare); others think that it is about a psychological journey, within a speaker’s mind. Even in terms of theme, Owen may have been influenced by Shelley, who claimed The Revolt of Islam was an expression of what he called the “precariousness” of his life, and that it was animated by feelings similar to those communicated by a dying man. There is a sense of the same in Owen’s poem, which depicts a meeting with an enemy soldier who in a larger sense, as a fellow human being, is a friend, yet has been killed out of compulsions that disregard the bonds of human brotherhood. The poem is thus clearly an exploration of “the pity of war”.

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In structure, the situation recreated in this poem might remind you of a poem by Siegfried Sassoon (who was a war-poet and a major influence on Owen), titled The Rear- Guard. There too a soldier travels along a tunnel, while a battle rages overhead, and mistakes a dead soldier for one asleep. But if Owen takes the germ of the idea from Sassoon, his extension of the situation and his treatment give the work a distinctive and unforgettable quality. Owen impresses with his use of forceful language, and images that challenge rather than colour the reader’s imagination, but are undeniably striking. Witness lines such as these: “I would have poured my spirit without stint But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.” He resorts to alliteration, or the repetition of the same consonants in syllables close together, in constructions such as “might many men” or “boil bloody”; and onomatopoeia, where the sound of the word matches its sense, as in “thumped” and “moan”. All this charges the language with vigour and emphasis. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Owen’s poem is a technical virtuosity that was startling in its time and went on to influence profoundly the work of many who followed him. He discarded conventional patterns of rhythm and rhyme, with their associations of regularity and harmony, as inappropriate devices by which to express the chaos of a world torn apart by war; and in their place he popularized alternative devices. These include para-rhyme, where pairs of words have the same (or similar) consonants but different vowel sounds; either over single syllables, such as in laughed/left, or more, as in mystery-mastery. This creates a sense of discordance to ears used to full rhyme. Owen also used internal rhyme and assonance, which involve the repetition of vowel sounds within sentences but not at the ends of lines, as in “knew you”. All these create unfamiliar auditory patterns that counter the expectation of familiar cadences and rhythms.

Questions for discussion a) With reference to the poem being discussed, show how Owen communicates “the pity of war”. b) Examine how Owen uses language and technique to great effect in his re-creation of the horrors of war. c) How far would you agree with the view that Owen’s response to war is anti-romantic? d) Recreate after the speaker in the poem his nightmarish descent, right up to the time he speaks to his “strange friend”.

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e) Which sections of this poem suggest that the two soldiers, though on opposing sides, might essentially be the same kind of person? f) Consider ‘Strange Meeting’ as a war poem opposing war and advocating peace. g) Discuss ‘Strange Meeting’ as an aesthetic record of authentic personal experience.

Critical Comments

“Examining Owen’s “Strange Meeting,” in the same way, the futility of war is emphasized through the reflection of two dead soldiers in the spiritual world, one of whom is killed by the other, so their encounter is called “strange meeting”. What is ironic in the poem is the two enemies' coming together after death. When they encounter, they begin to utter these remarks: “Strange, friend, ‘I said, ‘Here is no cause to mourn.’/‘None,’ said the other, ‘Save the undone years,/the hopelessness […] [9]” It is apparent that their coming together and beginning to talk to each other after their death show the end of their enmity. Moreover, the dominance of hopelessness, the waste of their youth and undone years cause them not to have the chance of enjoying their youth and the pleasures of life. Since they are forced to kill one another in the war as they are the soldiers of the two enemy countries, they are dehumanized as a part of the necessity of their mission. Furthermore, at the end of the poem, one of them says: “I am the enemy you killed, my friend./I knew you in this dark; so you frowned/ yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed […] [9].” Therefore, it can clearly be assumed that these two soldier are unaware of the fact that they will become friends in the spiritual world after killing each other. In this view, what makes Owen’s war poetry striking is its untraditional way of interpreting the war. On the one hand, “[d]uring 1914-18 in newspapers and magazines, as well as in books, popular poetry was frequently enlisted [...] to present the experience of war as heroic, worthwhile, purposeful” [10], on the other hand the war poets like Owen preferred to reflect the war as a disastrous, futile and meaningless event. He emphasized that because of the meaninglessness and futility of war, many young soldiers died or continued their lives as if they were metaphorically dead. Similarly, in “Strange Meeting,” the two soldiers die as a result of the meaninglessness of the conflict between their nations. In fact, they are not enemies, but the enmity between countries makes them enemies without their own will, therefore he calls his murderer as “my friend, [9]” because both are innocent and become the victim of the wrong politics between two nations. Because of their inability to eliminate the effect of their ‘id,’ they go to war to satisfy their instincts urging

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them to get the satisfaction of being popular heroes in the public. In addition, due to the force of the public, the super ego, they feel that they have to fight and sacrifice themselves for the sake of their nations.” Berna Köseoğlu: ‘An Analysis of Wilfred Owen's War Poetry in the light of Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory’ (2019)

“In writing war poetry he is confined to a historical and bitter reality well-known to himself as soldier and thus he can take no imaginative liberties with contemporary events. His theme is thus the reality of war and his immediate concern is to communicate that brutal reality to the millions at home who cannot visualize, hence appreciate, the magnitude of the experiences and sacrifices of the common soldier. His poetry is also concerned with portraying the prolonged prosecution of a war which has become partkulaI1ly senseless to those who are fighting it. To make us aware of the soldiers' predicament, the poet occasionally gives us accounts of the nauseating experiences they had to endure, expressed in crude details of death and decomposition but the overall picture is one of pity and sympathy rather than hatred. Unlike other war poets, he does not confine himself to accidental, casual or personal experiences. Owen surpasses them by giving us as complete a picture of war as possible by depicting not only the physical background of war, and its devasting effects on the poor soldier but by adding to it a sense of loss, the pathos of human suffering and above all a keen perception of tragic intensity, thus lending to it a touch of universality. In short. Owen's war poetry transcends the traditional role played by the 'poetry of protest' for it is above it as much as it is part of it. Marianne Vella ‘Wilfred Owen: An Introduction’

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Section B : Drama

GB Shaw : Caesar and Cleopatra TS Eliot : Murder in the Cathedral Sean O Casey : Juno and The Paycock

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George Bernard Shaw : Caesar and Cleopatra

George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60 plays. He was also an essayist, novelist and short story writer. Nearly all his writings address prevailing social problems, but have a vein of comedy which makes their stark themes more palatable. Issues which engaged Shaw's attention included education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege.

He was most angered by what he perceived as the exploitation of the working class. An ardent socialist, Shaw wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Society. He became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of its causes, which included gaining equal rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land, and promoting healthy lifestyles. For a short time he was active in local politics, serving on the London County Council. In 1898, Shaw married Charlotte Payne- Townshend, a fellow Fabian, whom he survived. They settled in Ayot St Lawrence in a house now called Shaw's Corner. Shaw died there, aged 94, from chronic problems exacerbated by injuries he incurred by falling from a ladder.

He is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize in Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938), for his contributions to literature and for his work on the film Pygmalion (adaptation of his play of the same name), respectively. Shaw wanted to refuse his Nobel Prize outright because he had no desire for public honours, but accepted it at his wife's behest: she considered it a tribute to Ireland. He did reject the monetary award, requesting it be used to finance translation of fellow playwright August Strindberg's works from Swedish to English. (source: http://agdc.ac.in/pdf/resource/shaw.pdf)

Caesar and Cleopatra, is a four-act play by George Bernard Shaw, written in 1898, published in 1901, and first produced in 1906. It is considered Shaw’s first great play. Caesar and Cleopatra opens as Caesar’s armies arrive in Egypt to conquer the ancient divided land for Rome. Caesar meets the young Cleopatra crouching at night between the paws of a sphinx, where—having been driven from Alexandria—she is hiding. He returns her to the palace, reveals his identity, and compels her to abandon her girlishness and accept her position as

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coruler of Egypt (with Ptolemy Dionysus, her brother). Caesar and Cleopatra was extraordinarily successful, largely because of Shaw’s talent for characterization. (source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Caesar-and-Cleopatra-play-by-Shaw)

PLOT

The invading Roman general Julius Caesar comes upon a statue of the Sphinx, while wandering alone in the Egyptian desert, upon which he discovers, sleeping between its paws, the 16-year-old Queen Cleopatra.

“Hail, Sphinx: salutation from Julius Caesar! I have wandered in many lands, seeking the lost regions from which my birth into this world exiled me, and the company of creatures such as I myself. I have found flocks and pastures, men and cities, but no other Caesar, no air native to me, no man kindred to me, none who can do my day’s deed, and think my night’s thought. In the little world yonder, Sphinx, my place is as high as yours in this great desert; only I wander, and you sit still; I conquer, and you endure; I work and wonder, you watch and wait….Rome is a madman’s dream: this is my Reality. These starry lamps of yours I have seen from afar in Gaul, in Britain, in Spain, in Thessaly, signalling great secrets to some eternal sentinel below, whose post I never could find. And here at last is their sentinel—an image of the constant and immortal part of my life, silent, full of thoughts, alone in the silver desert….”

After meeting Cleopatra, Caesar says, “Nothing would surprise me on this night of nights”.

Cleopatra has strange notions about Romans, “Oh, they would eat us if they caught us. They are barbarians. Their chief is called Julius Caesar. His father was a tiger and his mother a burning mountain; and his nose is like an elephant’s trunk. … They all have long noses, and ivory tusks, and little tails, and seven arms with a hundred arrows in each; and they live on human flesh.”

Upon learning who Caesar is, the girl is initially terrified of him, her fears subsided only when she sees for herself that Romans are not the child-devouring monsters of rumour. Intrigued by Cleopatra’s political potential, as well as by her youth and beauty, Caesar becomes her mentor in her struggle to defend her throne against the rival claim of her 10- year-old brother, Ptolemy.

The scene in which the library of Alexandria turns into ashes is intriguing:

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THEODOTUS (rushing down the hall between them). The fire has spread from your ships. The first of the seven wonders of the world perishes. The library of Alexandria is in flames.

RUFIO. Psha! (Quite relieved, he goes up to the loggia and watches the preparations of the troops on the beach.)

CAESAR. Is that all?

THEODOTUS (unable to believe his senses). All! Caesar: will you go down to posterity as a barbarous soldier too ignorant to know the value of books?

CAESAR. Theodotus: I am an author myself; and I tell you it is better that the Egyptians should live their lives than dream them away with the help of books.

THEODOTUS (kneeling, with genuine literary emotion: the passion of the pedant). Caesar: once in ten generations of men, the world gains an immortal book.

CAESAR (inflexible). If it did not flatter mankind, the common executioner would burn it.

THEODOTUS. Without history, death would lay you beside your meanest soldier.

CAESAR. Death will do that in any case. I ask no better grave.

THEODOTUS. What is burning there is the memory of mankind.

CAESAR. A shameful memory. Let it burn.

THEODOTUS (wildly). Will you destroy the past?

CAESAR. Ay, and build the future with its ruins.

Cleopatra’s playful nature is also revealed in the scene:

CLEOPATRA. I am going to dress you, Caesar. Sit down. (He obeys.) These Roman helmets are so becoming! (She takes off his wreath.) Oh! (She bursts out laughing at him.)

CAESAR. What are you laughing at?

CLEOPATRA. You’re bald (beginning with a big B, and ending with a splutter).

CAESAR (almost annoyed). Cleopatra! (He rises, for the convenience of Britannus, who puts the cuirass on him.)

CLEOPATRA. So that is why you wear the wreath—to hide it.

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BRITANNUS. Peace, Egyptian: they are the bays of the conqueror. (He buckles the cuirass.)

CLEOPATRA. Peace, thou: islander! (To Caesar) You should rub your head with strong spirits of sugar, Caesar. That will make it grow.

CAESAR (with a wry face). Cleopatra: do you like to be reminded that you are very young?

CLEOPATRA (pouting). No.

CAESAR (sitting down again, and setting out his leg for Britannus, who kneels to put on his greaves). Neither do I like to be reminded that I am—middle aged. Let me give you ten of my superfluous years. That will make you 26 and leave me only—no matter. Is it a bargain?

CLEOPATRA. Agreed. 26, mind. (She puts the helmet on him.) Oh! How nice! You look only about 50 in it!

BRITANNUS (Looking up severely at Cleopatra). You must not speak in this manner to Caesar.

CLEOPATRA. Is it true that when Caesar caught you on that island, you were painted all over blue?

BRITANNUS. Blue is the colour worn by all Britons of good standing. In war we stain our bodies blue; so that though our enemies may strip us of our clothes and our lives, they cannot strip us of our respectability. (He rises.)

CLEOPATRA (with Caesar’s sword). Let me hang this on. Now you look splendid. Have they made any statues of you in Rome?

CAESAR. Yes, many statues.

CLEOPATRA. You must send for one and give it to me.

Later in the play, Pothinus asks a pertinent question:

POTHINUS. You harp on Caesar’s departure.

CLEOPATRA. What if I do?

POTHINUS. Does he not love you?

CLEOPATRA. Love me! Pothinus: Caesar loves no one. Who are those we love? Only those whom we do not hate: all people are strangers and enemies to us except those we love. But it

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is not so with Caesar. He has no hatred in him: he makes friends with everyone as he does with dogs and children. His kindness to me is a wonder: neither mother, father, nor nurse have ever taken so much care for me, or thrown open their thoughts to me so freely.

POTHINUS. Well: is not this love?

CLEOPATRA. What! When he will do as much for the first girl he meets on his way back to Rome? Ask his slave, Britannus: he has been just as good to him. Nay, ask his very horse! His kindness is not for anything in me: it is in his own nature.

POTHINUS. But how can you be sure that he does not love you as men love women?

CLEOPATRA. Because I cannot make him jealous. I have tried.

POTHINUS. Hm! Perhaps I should have asked, then, do you love him?

CLEOPATRA. Can one love a god? Besides, I love another Roman: one whom I saw long before Caesar—no god, but a man—one who can love and hate—one whom I can hurt and who would hurt me.

He attempts to broker a compromise between the two siblings, whose political rivalry is exacerbated by their personal dislike of each other, but the situation soon degenerates into armed conflict.

Cleopatra’s violent temper towards the end seems quite frank:

CLEOPATRA (violently—rising). He was slain by order of the Queen of Egypt. I am not Julius Caesar the dreamer, who allows every slave to insult him. Rufio has said I did well: now the others shall judge me too. (She turns to the others.) This Pothinus sought to make me conspire with him to betray Caesar to Achillas and Ptolemy. I refused; and he cursed me and came privily to Caesar to accuse me of his own treachery. I caught him in the act; and he insulted me—me, the Queen! to my face. Caesar would not avenge me: he spoke him fair and set him free. Was I right to avenge myself? Speak, Lucius.

And, as the tide of war turns against him, Caesar discovers to his chagrin that, for all his careful tutoring, his young protégé has a mind and a will of her own.

CAESAR. What! Rome produces no art! Is peace not an art? Is war not an art? Is government not an art? Is civilization not an art? All these we give you in exchange for a few ornaments. You will have the best of the bargain. (Turning to Rufio) And now, what else have

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I to do before I embark? (Trying to recollect) There is something I cannot remember: what can it be? Well, well: it must remain undone: we must not waste this favorable wind.

Caesar promises something to Cleopatra before his journey back:

CAESAR (coaxing). I will send you a beautiful present from Rome.

CLEOPATRA (proudly). Beauty from Rome to Egypt indeed! What can Rome give me that Egypt cannot give me?

APOLLODORUS. That is true, Caesar. If the present is to be really beautiful, I shall have to buy it for you in Alexandria.

CAESAR. You are forgetting the treasures for which Rome is most famous, my friend. You cannot buy them in Alexandria.

APOLLODORUS. What are they, Caesar?

CAESAR. Her sons. Come, Cleopatra: forgive me and bid me farewell; and I will send you a man, Roman from head to heel and Roman of the noblest; not old and ripe for the knife; not lean in the arms and cold in the heart; not hiding a bald head under his conqueror’s laurels; not stooped with the weight of the world on his shoulders; but brisk and fresh, strong and young, hoping in the morning, fighting in the day, and reveling in the evening. Will you take such a one in exchange for Caesar?

Characters

Caesar, Young Cleopatra, Ftatateeta, her nurse, Ptolemy, her younger brother Pothinus, Theodotus, Achillas, Rufio, Britannus, Lucius Septimius, Apollodorus Iras Charmian, Major- Domo Belzanor, Persian, Courtiers, Soldiers, Slaves

Source Shaw’s major source for this play was German historian Theodore Mommsen’s History of Rome,published in the 1850s. His work was known for the contemporary feel it gave to Roman life and the image he gave Julius Caesar as a democrat, republican and social reformer. Shaw maintained that he stuck closely to Mommsen’s description of Caesar as a hero while writing the play. Original history timeline 70 or 69 BC: Cleopatra VII (our heroine) is born, following her sisters Cleopatra VI Tryphaena and Berenice IV.

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60 BC: Pompey, Crassus and Julius Caesar form the First Triumvirate. Pompey and Caesar demand the sum of 6,000 talents from Ptolemy XII in exchange for protection from his rivals. He borrows the money from a Roman financier and plans to pay it back by levying a new tax.

58 BC: The people of Egypt revolt against the new tax. Ptolemy XII flees to Rome. The people of Egypt place his eldest daughter, Cleopatra VI Tryphaena, on the throne. 57 BC: Cleopatra VI dies and the next sister, Berenice IV, succeeds her. 55 BC: Ptolemy XII returns to Egypt, puts Berenice to death, and assumes the throne again. 51 BC: The 18-year-old Cleopatra VII and her father rule jointly for a few months until his death, whereupon Cleopatra’s 10-year-old brother, Ptolemy XIII, becomes her co-ruler. 49 BC: Pompey is appointed the guardian of the young Ptolemy XIII. They depose Cleopatra. 48 BC: Pompey, now engaged in a war with Caesar, decides to set up a base in Egypt. On his arrival, Ptolemy XIII’s government (led by his chief advisor, Pothinus) sends an envoy into the harbour to greet him. Pompey steps onto the welcome party’s boat and is assassinated, his body thrown overboard and his head kept to present to Caesar. Caesar arrives in Alexandria. Rather than leaving immediately, as the Egyptians hoped he would when he found Pompey already dispatched, he decides to enforce Ptolemy XII’s will that his son and daughter should rule together. He summons Ptolemy XIII and Cleopatra to the palace, and, at age 52, is instantly smitten with the 21-year-old Cleopatra. They begin an affair. Pothinus calls 20,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry to lay siege to the palace, shutting in Caesar, Cleopatra, Ptolemy and another sister, Arsinoe. Caesar places Ptolemy under house arrest, whereupon the army attacks the palace. Caesar’s forces capture and torch 72 Egyptian ships in the Alexandrian harbour. Arsinoe escapes the palace and flees to Achillas, the head of the military forces, who declares her queen of Egypt. Later, Caesar releases Ptolemy from house arrest. Ptolemy takes over command of Arsinoe’s armies. 47 BC: Ptolemy’s army loses a battle with Caesar’s army, and in the retreat Ptolemy, aged 15, drowns in the Nile. To prove to the Egyptian people that he is really dead, Caesar has the Nile dredged and his body recovered. His golden armour is put on display. Caesar calls up Cleopatra’s youngest brother, 12-year-old Ptolemy XIV, to be her new co-ruler. Caesar returns to Rome. Shortly thereafter, Cleopatra’s son (whose paternity is inconclusive) is born and she names him Ptolemy Caesar; Alexandrians nickname him Caesarion, “little Caesar.”

46 BC: Cleopatra travels to Rome to sign a new treaty of friendship between Rome and Egypt – and to continue her affair with Caesar. 44 BC: Caesar is assassinated. Cleopatra returns to Egypt. Ptolemy XIV dies later that year and Cleopatra’s toddling son joins her as co-ruler.

(The students are advised to go through the text Ceasar and Cleopatra, pages 152-178 edited A.C. Ward, Published by Orient Longman)

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Critical Comments “Since Caesar and Cleopatra is written around a central theme-the wickedness and futility of revenge- and since it has a historical setting, it allows little free scope for original characterisation. The two principal characters are adequate to the parts they have to play, but it is more as symbols of opposing standards of conduct than as persons that they stay in memory. Three lesser characters are more clearly individualised: the honest rough-tongued Rufio; the horrifyingly sinister Ftatateeta; and Britannus, the first of Shaw’s amusing caricatures of the strait-laced, humourless, self-consciously respectable Englishman. Though Caesar and Cleopatra is unlikely to challenge Shaw’s Saint Joan in popularity, it has nevertheless worn well during the more than half a century since it was written, and it seems most probable that no historical play of its period by any other writer will outlive it.” A.C. Ward, ‘Introduction to Caesar and Cleopatra’ (2011) The ingredients in Shaw's recipe for spoofing Shakespeare are simple enough. The epileptic Caesar of Shakespeare, the controversial Caesar whom Cassius scornfully tells of rescuing from the Tiber, is shown in Shaw's play exultantly diving from the lighthouse of Alex- andria into the harbor. The Caesar over whose corpse Antony assures the people that they will "beg a hair of him in memory" is shown by Shaw futilely trying to hide his baldness with the oak wreath (it is a laurel wreath in Suetonius' chronicle). The victim of hubris who in Shakespeare's tragedy exclaims: "Hence, wilt thou lift up Olympus?" appears in Shaw's comedy using a sacred incense burner as a stool to sit on while settling Egyptian affairs. The Caesar who loftily goes on about cowards who die many times before their deaths is de- scribed by Shaw's Rufio as an incorrigible sermonizer. The entire scene at the lighthouse of Alexandria is Shaw's comic version of the monument scene in Antony and Cleopatra: Shakespeare's heroine buckling on Antony's armor to the accompaniment of grandiose verse finds her comedy counterpart in Shaw's Cleopatra dressing Caesar for battle and in the process gleefully discovering that Caesar is bald. Shaw borrows Shakespeare's Charmian and Iras, but Shaw's Charmian is "a hatchet faced, terra cotta colored little goblin, swift in her move- ments, and neatly finished at the hands and feet," while Iras "is a plump, good-natured' creature, rather fatuous, with a profusion of red hair, and a tendency to giggle on the slightest provocation." Char- mian calls Caesar "Old hooknose" and accuses Caesar (though not to his face) of making Cleopatra "terribly prosy and serious.... The character of Cleopatra herself is straight out of Plutarch's life of Antony, where we are told that Caesar's "acquaintance was with her as a girl, young and ignorant of the world, but she was to meet Antony in the time of her life when women's beauty is most splendid and their intellects are in full maturity." (Dryden-Clough tr.) In the opening Sphinx scene in the desert, a scene that has been often praised, Cleopatra is a child; when, as she supposes, she is about to meet Caesar, it is Caesar himself who, in one of the wise moments of the play, must nerve her for the ordeal:

Caesar [admiring Cleopatra, and placing the crown on her head] Is it sweet or bitter to be a Queen, Cleopatra? Cleopatra. Bitter.

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Caesar. Cast out fear; and you will conquer Caesar. “In Act IV Cleopatra herself testifies to the fact that she is growing up: "Do you speak with Caesar," she tells Pothinus, "every day for six months, and you will be changed." But though Caesar freely admits his susceptibility to women, he is so little stirred by Cleopatra that he almost forgets to say goodbye to her when he leaves Egypt. Both Cleopatra and Caesar's officer, Rufio, serve a purpose which if we did not know better, we might almost think was to debunk Caesar. Cleopatra's giggling at Caesar's baldness already has been mentioned; at the outset of the play, in the scene in the desert, she addresses Caesar pointedly as "old gentleman," and Caesar later demands of her, "Do you like to be reminded that you are very young? . . . Neither do I like to be reminded that I am - middle aged." In the scene at the lighthouse Rufio offers Caesar some dates as a remedy for Caesar's low spirits: "When a man comes to your age, he runs down before his midday meal." When later in the same scene Caesar prepares to dive from the lighthouse after Apollodorus, Rufio demands in consternation: "Can an old fool dive and swim like a young one? He is twenty-five and you are fifty."... And here we come back to Shaw's Preface to Three Phys for Puritans, where Shaw attacks Shakespeare's Caesar and Antony for their failure as heroes. But there is more to it than this. It is impos- sible, says Shaw in effect, to take these characters seriously; they are, in fact, more than a little ridiculous. It is Shaw's Caesar, with all his human frailties upon him, who is the true hero. The Caesar who says in Act IV, "He who has never hoped can never despair," may himself be somewhat romanticized after Shaw's own fashion, but he is at all events in no danger of becoming a victim either of hubris or self-indulgence. In his biography of Shaw, Hesketh Pearson says that Caesar and Cleopatra contains "incomparably the best of Shaw's self-portraits." (G.B.S.: A Full-Length Portrait [N. Y., 1942] p. 189.) If this assertion is true - and there is certainly something in it - it gives us perhaps the final key to Shaw's comedy as a take-off on Shakespeare. Much has been made of the fact that Shaw apparently felt a sneaking ad- miration for the hero, the strong man, the man of action. In fairness to Shaw it must be said that at any rate his hero is subject to the same lively sense of the ridiculous that Shaw brought to bear on Shakespeare. Was Shaw not, in depicting his own Caesar, actually resolving a conflict within himself? "The demand now," says Shaw in one place, "is for heroes in whom we can recognize our own hu- manity." ("Bernard Shaw and the Heroic Actor," Play Pictorial, X [Oct. 1907], 110.) Caesar is Shaw's idea of what a hero should be: a man strong both inwardly and outwardly, at once efficient and mag- nanimous, idealistic yet devoid of illusions. But this Caesar's creator is not free to release his hero until he has first paid his respects to the comic muse; until, that is, he has had a good laugh both at his hero and at the strain of hero-worship in himself. By the same token, Shaw is not free to expose his conception of Caesar on the stage until he has first absolved his audiences of the guilt of indiscriminate hero- worship by giving them the same laugh at Caesar's expense. Thus Shaw accompishes a dual purpose: to parody Shakespeare's heroes and to substitute for them a hero of his own. Thus also he achieves, for his audiences and himself, a kind of catharsis in comedy.” Comic Catharsis in "Caesar and Cleopatra"

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Gordon W. Couchman The Shaw Review, Vol. 3, No. 1 (January, 1960), pp. 11-14 Penn State University Press

“On the most obvious level Shaw's use of historical materials is ironically anti-romantic. In his preface, "Better than Shakespear?" he warns that anyone who "expects to find Cleopatra a Circe and Caesar a hog in these pages, had better lay down my book and be spared a disappointment" (p. xxx). When he depicts Caesar as an ironic, often pedestrian, totally practical and somewhat super- annuated school teacher, rather than as a titanic Antony straddling two worlds, or as a nineteenth-century hero swashbuckling his way to glory; when he depicts Cleopatra as a petulant, rebellious, adolescent school girl, the contrast between the traditional romantic myth and the unconventional dramatic commonsense is more than an amusing paradox, for it is the dialectic in operation, and the synthesis can be a startling and memorable insight that teaches and delights. Echoes of the romantic myth are kept alive for mock-heroic purposes. For ex- ample, Shaw's Cleopatra, like Shakespeare's, helps with the arming of the hero, but in taking off his wreath she exclaims, "So that is why you wear the wreath - to hide [your baldness] . . ." (p. 141). This de- flation humanizes the hero at the very moment when, since he is going into epic battle, you would expect a conventional dramatist to make his hero most god-like. However, the parallels can also be more serious. When Cleopatra has managed to get to the battle area, finding that her life is in danger, she shows the same feminine lack of resolution as did Shakespeare's Cleopatra, but here she is dealing with a bal- anced man who warns her that his duty lies with his men and that "your life matters little here to anyone but yourself" (p. 162). Indeed, Shaw constantly reminds his audience that a great man (when he is fifty years old) is too busy to be bothered with a kitten like Cleopatra....In his "Alternative to the Prologue" of Caesar and Cleopatra, Shaw's first stage direction indicates that there should be the dawn of a moonlit and starry night beneath which "are two notable drawbacks of civilization: a palace and soldiers." The soldiers, engaged in "the main interests in life of which they are conscious", are gambling and telling barracks stories (p. 95). The stars, then, are what George Meredith would call, "the army of unalterable law" - that is, they represent an open order, and they are opposed to the closed rules and stupidities of man. A spirit of disorder, blood and inefficiency prevails as Bel Affris arrives on the scene wounded, the palace servants desert and Cleopatra cannot be found. Bel Affris contrasts the foolishness of the Egyptians who put their trust in their gods and in their bravery to defeat Caesar to "these Romans who fight to win. The pride and honor of war are nothing to them" (p. 98 ). The whole ceremony and tradition in the Egyptian army are ridiculed by Bel Affris, who, having been defeated by Caesar, is in a qualified position to realize the Egyptian limitations. Caesar's soliloquy and his inner tranquility, reflected by the tranquility of the night in Act I, Scene I, contrast sharply with the uproar of the prologue. The depiction of the saint-like Caesar as a being outside mankind's turmoil provides a basis for an amusing but always important interaction as Shaw allows him to reveal Reality to others while simultaneously coming to terms with his own mortality: his age, imminent death, errors, baldness, rheumatism, frugality. For example, Caesar's exultant address to the Sphinx is still ringing in the air - "nothing of man in me at all" - as Cleopatra reveals her pres- ence by crying out "Old gentleman: don't run away" (p. 107). This contrast constitutes the one

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major lesson Caesar wishes to convey to Cleopatra. Caesar places the crown on Cleopatra's head and asks "Is is sweet or bitter to be a Queen?" And she answers, having already been instructed by Caesar in her privileges and responsibilities as a Queen, and now expecting death, "Bitter" (p. 116). The one word sums up all that Caesar has to say about the leader's real duty. Immediately after the soliloquy, Caesar and Cleopatra sit on the lap of the Sphinx and the wise general tells the young ruler that to save herself she must confront Caesar "as a brave woman and a great queen; and . . . must feel no fear" (p. 111). He is telling her that the first quality of the Superman is an ability to see through the closed society of fear, and during the first act as the disorder of the Prologue resolves itself in the presence of Caesar, there is just such a constant action of perceiving or understanding the Reality beyond fear, beyond appearance. Caesar says to the Sphinx, "These starry lamps of yours I have seen ... (p. 107) (Seeing the open order); Cleopatra says, "But this isn't the great Sphinx" (p. 109) (Seeing the open order limited in life ) ; Caesar asks, "Do you notice that I have ... a Roman nose ... ? (p. 110) (Seeing the danger); Caesar says, "You must con- front . . . Caesar asa brave woman, and a great queen" (p. Ill) (See- ing one's responsibilities ) . As the Romans arrive at the end of Act I, the place once again is a scene of disorder, but now the Queen stands firm, because the strength of Caesar is behind her. By facing her fate, her responsibility, she is allowed to see the joyful reality that had been her terror, to find that the old gentleman is the terrible Caesar. Act II opens with Ptolemy attempting to address his court with a speech that obviously has been prepared by his guardian, Pothinus. This official stands next to the young King, prompting him from time to time as the boy loses the thread of the complexly worded message, until Pothinus is forced to read the speech himself. This situation contrasts ironically with the preceding scene in which Caesar had prepared Cleopatra rather than her speech. Indeed the court seems imprisoned in jargon. When Caesar enters he asks what room he is in. Pothinus answers: "The council chamber of the chancellors of the King's treasury. . . ." Caesar's response to this pompous statement is, "I want some money"...sary Caesar can deal in terms of the closed and pompous society. When he repeats, "I am badly in want of money," his secretary, Britan- nus, immediately puts it into the vocabulary of world politicians: "My master ^vould say that there is a lawful debt due to Rome by Egypt, contracted by the King's deceased father to the Triumvirate; and that it is Caesar's duty to his country to require immediate payment" (p. 122). Caesar is presented as so direct that he cannot be understood by devious, jargon -ridden men - that he, "too childish -foolish for this world," needs an interpreter in this marsh of lies. However, Britannus is not a liar, he is part of Caesar's circle and as such one identifies him with Caesar... Caesar continues to be a center of order and kindly sanity in a disorganized palace. All the courtiers crowd in a circle about Caesar who sits sacrilegiously on the tripod of the god, Ra, "as comfortably as if he were at breakfast" (p. 126). His gentle composure rests in the Nietzschean concept of kindness, i.e., power in reserve, for his soldiers stand, sword in hand, at the top of the steps - a telling contrast to the preceding scene in which Cleopatra, attempting "to behave like a Queen . . . comes down to the chair of state; seizes Ptolemy; drags him out of his seat; then takes his place in the chair" ( p. 123 ) . The tension between rule by attraction and rule by pressure is underscored when Lucius Septimius appears and

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reminds Caesar that his so-called clement way to triumph has been spattered with the blood of severed right hands and Vercingetorix's life blood. In reaction, Rufio declares, "I will kill my enemies in the field; and then you [Caesar] can preach as much clemency as you please: I shall never have to fight them again" (p. 131). Ptolemy is profoundly wrong when he attempts to draw a line of demarcation between forceful pressure and clement attraction in his statement, "It is not the lion [Caesar] I fear, but [looking at Rufio] the jackal" (p. 131), for Rufio is a part of Caesar's close circle, he is the personification of one of Caesar's necessary qualities, and as such, he is Caesar. Kenneth Burke feels that Pygmalion is a process of "internalizing the external" but in Caesar and Cleopatra I feel that with such characters as Britannus, Rufio, Apollodorus and Cleopatra there is, rather, a process of "externalizing" the internal dialectic action centered in Caesar... After the resolution of the palace disorder, Caesar continues Cleopatra's training. She attempts to bring sexual attraction into Caesar's seminar on enlightened government but Caesar sternly warns that work, not self-gratification, is the basis of a firm rule. Still Cleo- patra, who slept between the Sphinx's paws, while Caesar conspicuous- ly addressed it, represents the physical and unconscious aspects of the Life-Force, and as such her natural sexual intuition cannot be dis- missed. Cleopatra (like Ann Whitefield) is everywoman; she is a superbly endowed woman and as such she wishes to use her natural weapons; but these can limit her evolution, for, adopting the termin- ology of the play, her development can only be from 'kitten' to 'cat': to conquer she still attempts to use the purring of erotic love or the claws of unreasoning revenge. Shaw does not belittle woman; he merely is trying to put her in her place and that place can be by the side of a great man. He fought against the attitude of his age that women were immersed in the physical world of sensation alone. It was true that in her biological actuality an average woman had a greater share in the carrying out of Life- Force than did an average man, but Shaw wanted her to have an even greater dignity. Woman, ideally, should be allowed to meet man on the intellectual field as well. Still, Caesar is most willing to aid Cleopatra in realizing her vital and specifically feminine dream of a "beautiful young man who slew my sister's husband and gave my father back his throne. ... I would make him my husband" (pp. 133-134). Cleopatra's dream of Antony is Caesar's vital dream too. In Caesar's pledge to send Antony to her the vital intuition and the creative intelligence merge to shape the future. Thus Cleopatra is also a part of the dialectic in Caesar, Caesar who is "part brute, part woman, and part god. . . ." (p. 107). At the close of Act II a further interplay of motives is given ex- ternalization through Theodotus, an emissary from the enemy leader, Achillas, who begs Caesar to save the library of Alexandria. Caesar releases him to gather Egyptian soldiers to put out the fire, and he justifies this move to Rufio at first by saying "Might not the gods destroy the world if their only thought were to be at peace next year?" But this eternal view will not suffice for Rufio or the practical side of Caesar and so he adds, "Besides, my friend: every Egyptian we im- prison means imprisoning two Roman soldiers to guard him" (p. 140). Moreover, the "library will keep them busy whilst we seize the light- house" (p. 142). This practice of rationalization anticipates Joan's ability to give reasons for the actions dictated by her voices. In the second scene of Act III, in the center of the play, Caesar, the embodiment of open morality, appears at the top of a three- hun- dred-foot-high lighthouse, besieged by the forces of closed morality. With an amused glance at Shakespeare, Shaw has Cleopatra hoisted up to Caesar, under the protection of that

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personification of art, Apol- lodorus. Then, Apollodorus shows Caesar how to escape the encircling forces of the closed morality. One must immerse oneself in the destructive element. Apollodorus jumps and Caesar cries, "Bravo, Bravo. . . . By Jupiter, I will do that too." And using medieval animal symbolism, Caesar tells Cleopatra, "I will carry you on my back . . . like a dolphin" ( p. 164 ) . Just as Shaw very con- sciously would use water symbolically with Rankin's bath in Captain Brassbounds Conversation and with the Emigration Officer's involun- tary plunge into the ocean in The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, so he closes Act III with Rufio, Cleopatra, Apollodorus and Caesar in the cleansing and uniting waters, while the respectable Britannus watches from the lighthouse. Act IV opens with the harmony of music ringing through the palace, for Cleopatra seems to have absorbed enough instruction to maintain a degree of order, though her treatment of the old music master gives warning of her still barbarous nature. She tells Charmian and Iras that she allows them to talk freely because Caesar thus dis- covered the real nature of those about him. This statement prepares one for her mature handling of Pothinus when he comes to incite her to rebellion. Pothinus, a representative of the closed and warped morality, had requested an interview in a closed, private area, and as he leaves he discovers that Ftatateeta has been listening. In the wrangle that follows they reveal themselves to be egotistic politicians plotting to take over the rule of Egypt, and their underhandedness is equalled by the openness of Caesar in the second scene. Caesar attains privacy for his discussion with Rufio and Pothinus by choosing a spot where everyone can see them and where, more importantly, they can see everyone. Pothinus' wordy lies contrast with Caesar's gentle at- tempts to make him come to the point, and when he finally accuses Cleopatra of his own sin of ambition, Caesar, with his shock-proof understanding of human nature, says, "To tell me such a story as this is but to tell me that the sun will rise to-morrow" (p. 179). Caesar's calmness, in the face of this accusation, is equalled only by Cleopatra's fury. The banquet which follows has the appearance of a symbolically unifying feast, but the time is not yet ripe, nor was the time ever ripe in Shaw's long life, for a conscious admission that the world of beauty and the world of truth could live in harmony. Apollodorus seems to be another externalization of the Caesarean conflict as he encourages the Roman general in his romantic dream of seeking out the fascinating secrets of the Nile with Cleopatra by his side. Caesar's temporary mistake here - the mistake of the romantic - is that instead of using Cleopatra for inspiration as other great men have used women, he would serve her, and in the process, like Sampson, have his greatness sapped from him while forgetting his greater mission. Throughout Shaw's dramatic works, there seems to run this same tendency to avoid commitment to a deeper love or to art "per se", for fear it will inter- fere with the Reality. The gifted human being must pass through matter, making use of all with which he comes in contact, irradiating, with his own divine spark, his surroundings, but he must not attach himself to an emotionally exhausting situation....”

The Moral Dialectic in "Caesar and Cleopatra" Daniel J. Leary The Shaw Review, Vol. 5, No. 2 (May, 1962), pp. 42-53 Penn State University Press

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“Is Shaw's characterization of Cleopatra as a young girl of sixteen an "intentional effort to hide the truth"? I think not. Shaw stubbornly maintained as late as 1945 that Cleopatra was still a child when Caesar appeared in Alexandria, 48 B.C. Many critics have suggested that Shaw had arrived at that age through a misreading of Mommsen, who in ascribing to Cleopatra the tender age of sixteen at the time of the death of her father Ptolemy Auletes, did not indicate a lapse of time between then and the arrival of Caesar. Such may, of course, be the case, but the confusion is not unique to Shaw; many historians give conflicting information about her age. James Froude, writing against Caesar's reputed liaison with the Egyptian Queen, states: "An amour with Cleopatra may have been an accident of his presence in Alexan-dria. But to suppose that such a person as Caesar, with the concerns of the world upon his hands, would have allowed his public action to be governed by a connection with a loose girl of sixteen is to make too large a demand upon human credulity. . . ."Β. G. Niebuhr's account is equally conflicting. He places Ptolemy Auletes' death after the battle of Pharsalia, Caesar's decisive victory over Pompey, which would when compared to Mommsen make Cleopatra sixteen.Theodore Dodge states that Pompey, who had fled to Egypt after Pharsalia, "found the ten year old Ptolemy, son of Ptolemy Auletes, engaged in war with his sister Cleopatra, who was seventeen, for the possession of the Egyptian throne. "In The Land of the Sphinx (1895), a garrulous and rambling travellogue of Egypt, G. Montbard has one of his disputants hotly disparage Cleopatra as "that dissolute creature who disguised herself at nighttime to frequent places of ill-repute with her Antony, after having married her young rascal of a brother at fifteen, and thrown herself into Caesar's arms a year later." Regardless of the nature of Shaw's confusion, Cleopatra, "available only as a child," was ideal for Shaw, for he had no intention of making sexual infatuation the essence of their relationship. One reason he did not present the erotic Caesar, says Shaw, is that "Caesar was not Antony."Shaw's point is well taken; he has not gone beyond his source. Mommsen writes that "however much ... he enjoyed the society of women, he only amused himself with them, and allowed them no manner of influence over him; even his much-censured relation to queen Cleopatra was only contrived to mask a weak point in his political position. "Mommsen was not alone in this assessment. Froude, as was pointed out earlier, questioned the whole episode. Warde-Fowler agrees substantially with Mommsen, as does Charles Merivale, who, writing in The Roman Triumvirate, states, "we can hardly suppose that the great warrior and statesman allowed himself to be drawn into the perilous adventure by the charm, as has been commonly reported, of Cleopatra's beauty and accomplishments."

"Caesar and Cleopatra": The Making of a History Play Gale K. Larson The Shaw Review, Vol. 14, No. 2, SHAW/SHAKESPEARE ISSUE (MAY, 1971), pp. 73-89 Penn State University Press

Caesar is both dreamer and realist, an advocate both of repose and of action. All of Act I has a dreamlike quality. The darkness, the silence, the moonlight, and the mystery offer a congenial background to the dreamlike soliloquy of the conqueror as he confronts his spiritual symbol in the sphinx. The mood is so pervasive that the elfin Cleopatra causes

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Caesar to doubt his wakefulness. The situation drifts gently into the absurd until Cleopatra pricks him with a pin, but even this drift carries with it a suggestion of somnambulance. In Act IV, Cleopatra calls him a dreamer, inferring that he is out of touch with many obvious realities. And certainly his diversions with the young queen frequently stall ostensibly significant action. His explicit ideal in Act IV would seem to be inimical to a man of action?"Oh, this military life! this tedious, brutal life of action! That is the worst of us Romans: we are mere doers and drudgers: a swarm of bees turned into men. Give me a good talker?one with wit and imagination enough to live without continually doing something I" (p. 443)?yet, as Rufio suggests, this ejaculation is notable as a half truth. Although Caesar refers to "this tedious, brutal life of action," it is clear that he is kinetically vitalized by action, as is revealed in his leap from the lighthouse parapet and later in his vigorous plans to join Mithradates' attack against Achillas. He enjoys his diversion with Cleopatra in Act III, but when she urges her precedence over his soldiers, he bluntly informs her that her head is not worth a hand of one of his men. Caesar's aesthetics and his pragmatism tell him two different things. His statement reveals a mind which respects the value of well spent repose, yet implies the necessity of an opposite in order to make repose meaningful. Ideally, one complements the other?one enriches and the other revitalizes. So Caesar may be a dreamer, but his actions have made his dreams important; and he is a man of action whose dreams have given action meaning. The significance of the action is in proportion to the nobility of the dream. By representing such a wide range of opposites in Caesar, opposites in constant tension and interaction, Shaw instils vital dimension into his character. Caesar's youth in age is exploited in terms of a vibrant dichotomy, fused in a vigorous spiritual fulfilment and leavened by rich comic undertones. In the opposites of greatness and insignificance, Shaw relates the inner strength of Caesar to the outer glory of his achievement, the magnificence of his environment, and his obvious mortality. A perceptive and ironic sense of historical perspective as opposed to spiritual significance is consequently developed. His stature grows as a synthesis of extremes, never as a simple abstraction, and it retains all the vital assertion of those extremes while tempering and balancing them with their opposites. By presenting these opposites in flux, Shaw foils the observer's tendency to stereotype, rounding out the character in terms of humanity on the one hand while elevating it with spiritual power on the other....Caesar's sense of humor is a measure of his sophistication. It reveals his candor, his kindness, and his realistic set of values. George Mere dith once remarked that "Sensitiveness to the comic laugh is a step in civilization. . . .We know the degree of refinement in men by the matter they will laugh at, and the ring of the laugh."9 So it is with Caesar. A sphinxlike laughter is inherent in Act I as Caesar calls his Roman nose to Cleopatra's attention and gently, slyly, instructs her in the ways of queenship. In Act II, it is partially his quiet humor, founded on a base of mastery and daring, which renders him so superior to the Egyptians. Achillas, as Roman and Egyptian general, has it both ways, an ironic and human advantage which tickles Caesar's sense of the absurd, though it places him in a dangerous position. Caesar's proposed settlement of the royal succession question here is in tune with his reported settlement of the Jewish question later?it is a maneuver founded on a quick assessment of the realities, an attempt to resolve in minutes what courts would take years to achieve. Though it does violence to complexities, it offers the shortcut of common sense and evokes a Bergsonian smile at the machinery of society, humor being implicit in the court's confusion

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and indignation. Britannus is dismayed that Caesar will not regard life seriously, and Apollodorus incredulously queries, "Is Caesar serious?" (pp. 426-27). The answer is, of course, that at heart Caesar is highly serious, but that his sense of what is important differs widely from the norm. Thus he responds to Theodotus, "My life! Is that all?" and later observes that "He who has never hoped can never despair" (pp. 396, 459).10 A tacit stoicism underlies his temperament. His humor is based on an accurate appraisal of the facts, and is tickled by the facts bobbing to the surface, upsetting those who live lives of illusion. Thus, he is not upset when Pothinus reveals Cleopatra's treachery, because he is fully cognizant of the facts of her nature...As the portrait of a nearly archetypal civilized man, Caesar is, not surprisingly, strikingly reminiscent of his creator. The broad-minded ness and capacities of a world conqueror are combined with a Puritan proclivity for work and barley water. Caesar's sense of humor, his several masks, his contradictions, vanity, values, asceticism, and kindness are quite Shavian...

Caesar's failure to educate society is accentuated by the vengeance theme. When Cleopatra urges Ftatateeta to "kill, kill, kill" Pothinus, she is a dramatic objectification of the barbarity of the society which later concurs in her action. The moral-political ethic of those who surround Caesar is dog eat dog. And Caesar, as a conqueror, cannot ultimately divorce himself from this barbarity. His initial instinct is to hide his face from Lucius Septimius because he realizes his inevitable worldly debt to the traitor, and he sees in Lucius a debasement of his own opportunistic spirit. Vengeance may be contrary to his in stincts, but the removal of Pompey was essential to Caesar's ambi tions. In Lucius, Caesar's pragmatism is mocked, the difference be tween the two men being largely one of insight. Caesar takes a longer view, being consequently more subtle, and Caesar's opportunism tends to be creative and original, whereas Lucius' is imitative and subservient, but as they both are involved in worldly affairs, they have kinship. This kinship Caesar attempts to transcend through benevolence, but benevolence is contrary to survival in the world to which he has committed himself...

The play thus evolves in pessimistic terms. Society, blind and corrupt, ensnares the potential reformer in its infinite complexities. It cannot be reformed unless it is willing to think differently, and it is too instinctively barbaric, and has too great a vested interest in barbarism, to desire change. True civilization, then, is possible only in terms of the individual who seeks to live in terms of high personal integrity and sensitivity. For Caesar, life is not worth enduring on a level of treachery, intrigue, and vengeance, for such behavior is a negation of meaningful existence. Thus he cannot waste life digging for traitors in enemy correspondence, especially when the enemies of today may be the friends of tomorrow. However, Caesar is saved from death more by his wits than by his beneficence, and ultimately the price of his fully living is death at the hands of the envious, the am bitious, and the treacherous. In mundane terms, the besieged soldier who takes time off to entertain a young girl is subject to surprise attack, and the conqueror who is so noble that he will not pry into enemy mail hazards death...

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The strength of Caesar's characterization thus arises from a com plex of perspectives, the total effect of which is penetrating but ambiguous. Common sense undercuts foolishness, kindness undercuts cruelty, humor undercuts pomposity, and in the sum of these civiliza tion confronts barbarism, but barbarism is tenacious. As a product of Shaw's imagination, the play tends toward romance and fantasy. The romance is carried to some heights by the magnificent settings, the presence of two diverse cultures, and the outward drama of conflict. Fantasy is inherent in the myth of the sphinx, the relation of a kitten queen and a sorcerer-emperor, the contrasting moods of darkness and daylight, and the frequent anachronisms. But all of this is leavened by the offhand, anticlimactic character of Caesar, couched in cunning, kindness, and humor, attracting poignancy through contrast to the spectacle while achieving power through a sense of constant purpose and high personal morality in a world of bloated abstractions and melodramatic motives. In the realm of fantasy, Caesar is victorious, sailing off as the conqueror who, though he may not have illumined the world, has at least set it in order...

The Anatomy of Greatness in "Caesar and Cleopatra" Charles A. Berst The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Jan., 1969), pp. 74-91 University of Illinois Press

"In 1918, Shaw wrote an important account of the genesis of Caesar and Cleopatra in a letter to Hesketh Pearson. In the course of the letter, he declares, "The Sphinx scene was suggested by a French pic- ture of the Flight into Egypt. I never can remember the painter's name; but the engraving, which I saw in a shop window when I was a boy, of the Virgin and child asleep in the lap of a colossal Sphinx staring over a desert, so intensely still that the smoke of Joseph's fire close by went straight up like a stick, remained in the rummage basket of my memory for thirty years before I took it out and exploited it on the stage." The picture Shaw had in mind was undoubtedly Luc Olivier Merson's Repos en Egypte, first exhibited in the Salon of 1879. A sketch of the painting appears in Scribner's Monthly for December 1880 where it is also called "The Flight into Egypt: "Night has fallen; the lustrous stars gleam brightly through illimitable space. At the base of a giant sphinx the party has encamped. The tethered ass crops a few stunted grasses which appear above the sand. The smouldering fire sends a thin column of smoke straight upward into the motionless air. Joseph, wrapped in his cloak, lies asleep, his staff beside him, at the base of the sphinx, which, with upturned eyes and stern, impassive face, looks outward through the deep hush of the Oriental night, as though watching for a new light to gild the eastern portal. The tired mother has climbed between its protecting arms, and the Madonna and Christ-child sleep upon the creature's dark breast"... Cleopatra and "The Flight into Egypt" Author(s): Martin Meisel The Shaw Review, Vol. 7, No. 2 (May, 1964), pp. 62-63 Penn State University Press

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QUESTIONS 1. How does Caesar become a mentor to Cleopatra in her struggle to defend her throne against the rival claim of her 10-year-old brother, Ptolemy? 2. How does Caesar discover that his young protégé Cleopatra has a mind and a will of her own? 3. “Caesar and Cleopatra serves up surprisingly paradoxical and complex portraits of two of the most renowned characters in history”. Discuss.

References Bloom, Harold. George Bernard Shaw. Broomall, Pa.: Chelsea House, 2000. Innes, Christopher. Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century.Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 2002. Jain, Sangeeta. Women in the Plays of George Bernard Shaw. New Delhi: Discovery Pub. House, 2006.

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T.S. Eliot : Murder in the Cathedral

Murder in the Cathedral is Eliot’s first full-length play. He was asked to write a play for the Canterbury Festival and this was the play that he wrote. It was only natural that he should write on a theme suitable for the occasion and he chose the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury as the subject of this play. But, as the critic D. E. Jones aptly notes, “In his first play Eliot turned immediately to what was to be the central theme of almost all his plays – the role of the spiritually elect in society, the fructification of communal life by the example of the saint and the saintly. And he began with the full-scale study of martyrdom”. (50)

Eliot wanted to avoid the Shakespearean model for his play which he regarded as the reason of the failure of the 19th century verse dramatists. So he approached the medieval religious drama and the ancient Greek drama to select features of his play. He decided to adopt the versification of the Morality play, Everyman and the chorus of the Greek drama. The murder of Thomas Becket at the hands of four knights was a historical fact and Eliot has adhered strictly to the historical facts in his play. He focuses on the last days of Becket and the earlier details are filled in during the course of the action through the conversation between the tempters and the Archbishop and later on between him and the knights. So structurally the crisis and the denouement of the play merge with each other. This has left no scope for the dramatist to develop the various stages leading to the final action. This, however, has its advantage also. The swiftness of the action creates a shocking impact on the spectator. Except Thomas Becket no other character in the play has been individualized. This leaves the focus entirely on Becket. The last speech of the knights is addressed to the 20th century audience. In this way Eliot links the past with the present and establishes the contemporary relevance of the play. The play presents before us the events of the last part of the year 1170. It begins with the chorus consisting of the poor women of Canterbury. These women have gathered outside the Cathedral of Canterbury. They have a foreboding of some impending danger. But they cannot guess its nature or source. Even the cathedral does not seem to provide them any safety. They, however, realize that some unknown force has compelled them to come there and they are going to witness some momentous event. The plentiful October has turned into sombre November and the land has become brown with mud. The coming New Year does not

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seem to bring any promise of a bright future. Destiny seems to be waiting round the corner. It is the time when Christ was born and it is also the time of the martyrdom of saints.

The women recollect that seven years have passed since Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury left them. He was always kind to his people. But it would not be well if he returns. His return would mean an upheaval in their placid lives. Whether the king rules or the barons rule they have been largely left to themselves. And they are happy if they are left alone. They have been carrying on with their sufferings and their joys. They have continued with the affairs of their lives, tilling the land, plying their trades and keeping their household in order. They have suffered various oppressions but they have been content with their obscure lives. Now they fear the disturbance of the coming events.

Winter seems to bring death from the sea. Nor shall spring bring any happiness. Disastrous summer would burn up the beds of their streams and the poor would be facing a decaying October. But they can do nothing but wait- We wait, we wait, And the saints and martyrs wait, for those who shall be martyrs and saints. Destiny waits in the hand of God, shaping the still unshapen. (13) Three priests come there and they also talk about the seven years that have passed since the Archbishop left them. They do not know what the Archbishop and the Pope are doing with the English and French kings who are involved in ceaseless intrigues. The third priest says that the temporal powers are involved in endless violence, treachery and corruption. They are governed by one law only – cease power and keep it. The first priest cries in agony that if these things do not cease the poor will forget “their friend, their Father in God.”

While the priests are expressing their grief, a messenger comes to announce that the Archbishop is in England and will be reaching Canterbury shortly. So they have very little time to prepare for his welcome. The first priest asks him if there has been any reconciliation between the king and the archbishop. He is sceptical about the reconciliation of two proud men. The second priest asks whether the arrival of the archbishop means war or peace. The third priest comments that there can be no peace between the hammer and the anvil. The first priest asks if the Archbishop is coming with full assurance from the King or only secure in the power of Rome, the spiritual rule and the love of the people. The messenger is sure about

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the love of the people who have thronged the streets through which the archbishop is passing. He also knows that the Pope and the king of France are fully backing the archbishop, but he cannot say anything about the attitude of the English king. When the Archbishop had parted from the King he is reported to have said that he will not see him again in this life. Opinions about his meaning vary but in any case it does not augur well. When the messenger goes away the priests begin to reflect upon the situation. They are quite uneasy about it. Referring to the time when Thomas Becket was the Chancellor, the first priest says that even then he was alone, hating and being hated by the feudal lords. The king then loved him, but now pride of both these men stands between them ruling out any reconciliation between the two. The chorus again chants its foreboding of some impending evil. They do not wish the Archbishop to come there:

O Thomas, return, Archbishop return, return to France. Return quickly. Quietly. Leave us to perish in quiet. You come with applause, you come with rejoicing, but you come bringing death into Canterbury. (18) They do not wish anything to happen. For seven years they have lived quietly, living and partly living. Now the arrival of the Archbishop would mean that they would not be able to continue with their old life. The second priest scolds them for speaking in that manner.

At this juncture the Archbishop enters there and asks the priest not to scold them. They know and do not know that action is suffering and suffering action. The priests welcome the archbishop and say that he will find his rooms as he had left them. The Archbishop says that he will try to leave them as he will find them. The second priest asks him if his enemies still pursued him. The Archbishop says that at the moment they were waiting and watching. He too can do nothing except wait for the turn of the events.

Then four Tempters come before the archbishop one after the other. Each of them tries to lure him with an offer and an assurance. The first Tempter reminds him of the happy times when he was a friend of the king. It was a life of pleasure and sensuous gratification. He urges the archbishop to give up his ascetic life and return to the good time of mirth and pleasures. The archbishop tells him that he “comes twenty years too late”. Then comes the second Tempter who reminds him of his powers when he was the Chancellor. He says, “Power is present. Holiness hereafter.” Moreover, as a chancellor he has an opportunity to serve the poor and the needy. When the archbishop asks him what he shall have to do, the tempter tells him to

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submit to the authority of the king. The archbishop asks him to go way and let him continue with his duties as a churchman. The third Tempter now appears before the archbishop. He represents the feudal lords and asks the archbishop to join hands with the feudal lords. The archbishop reminds him that it was he who had helped the king in curbing the powers of the barons. So the third tempter also goes away from there. The arrival of the fourth Tempter surprises the archbishop. He had expected the three tempters but not the fourth one. The fourth tempter presents before him the vision of a glorious martyrdom. Kings come and go but the martyrs rule people from their tombs. So he asks the archbishop to go on his way and achieve spiritual glory. The archbishop finds him echoing his own thoughts and the realization dawn upon him that the vision of spiritual glory is no less sinful than the vision of temporal power. He now knows that

The last temptation is the greatest treason:

To do the right deed for the wrong reason. (44)

Thomas Becket thus succeeds in overcoming the temptations that come his way and is now ready to submit to the will of God. Between Part I and Part II of the play there is an Interlude which comprises the sermon that the Archbishop gives in the morning of the Christmas in the "year 1170. He tells them to ponder over the meaning of the masses of Christmas Day:

“For whenever Mass is said, we re-enact the Passion and Death of Our Lord; and on the Christmas Day we do this in celebration of His Birth. So that at the same moment we rejoice in his coming for the salvation of men, and offer again to God His Body and Blood in sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world”. (47)

He then explains the Christian meaning of peace which stands for the spiritual peace. Finally, he reminds the congregation that while they celebrate Christ’s birth and death on Christmas, the next day they celebrate the martyrdom of St. Stephen, the first martyr of Christianity. He concludes that martyrdom is never an accident, nor is it a man’s will to become a martyr. It is always a Divine design.

The Part II of the play presents the murder of the Archbishop in his cathedral on 29 December, 1170. It begins with the chorus which creates the atmosphere of that fateful day. The priests enter with the flags of the martyrs Stephen and John and the flag of the Holy Innocents. And then enter four Knights. The knights demand to be taken straight to the archbishop as they have some urgent business with him. When the archbishop comes before

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them, they charge him with rebellion against the king and the law of the land. It was the king who appointed him the archbishop and so it was his duty to carry out the wishes of the king. The archbishop denies the charges and says that he does not defy the king’s command except in the matters where he has to perform his duties as the archbishop. This enrages the knights and they ask him to appear before the king or face the consequences. When they find the archbishop unmoved they prepare to kill him. The priests hurriedly take the archbishop away from there to the inside of the church and lock the doors. The archbishop asks them to unlock the doors as he would not want the door of the church barred for anyone. The knights enter the hall and kill the archbishop. The play ends with the address of the knights to the audience where they defend their action. They assert that what they did was not motivated by any personal motive but was done in the larger interest of the country. They even go the extent of saying that Thomas Becket deliberately courted his death. So it was a case of suicide and not murder.

T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral deals with the theme of martyrdom. Oxford Dictionary & Thesaurus defines martyr as a “person who undergoes death or suffering for great cause”. In this play Eliot focuses on the martyrdom of Thomas Becket. While going through the historical background of the story you must have noted the personal relationship of Becket with the king when the former was the Chancellor and also his estrangement from the latter when he became the Archbishop. So the story has a very strong personal element. Again, the whole situation evolved because of a political struggle for supremacy between the king and the church. So the story has a political theme as well. But Eliot in his play focuses neither on the friend-turned-foe theme nor on the theme of political conflict. His sole concern here is to present the theme of martyrdom dramatically. Murder in the Cathedral is not the dramatization of the death of Becket. It is a deep searching study of the significance of martyrdom. Thus though the conflict between Church and state is a recurrent theme in the play, it never assumes major significance. Moreover, the clash of character and personal antagonism is deliberately avoided. The king does not appear in the play and the Archbishop also does not refer to him in personal terms. The characters of the knights are also not individualized. They are not presented as individual characters but as a group. They also assert after they have murdered the archbishop that they did not act out of any personal motive. Dramatist has excluded all other angles from the play and focused solely on the martyrdom of Becket.

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When Thomas Becket returns to England, he is already aware what awaits him there. He has come prepared to lay down his life for the Church. But in the deep recesses of his heart lies the desire for glory that such martyrdom would bring for him. He has not yet become free from this grossness of his desire. So when the fourth Tempter echoes his own inner most thoughts, he is startled. The Tempter says to him:

What can compare with glory of Saints Dwelling forever in presence of God? What earthly glory of king or emperor, What earthly pride that is not poverty Compared with richness of heavenly grandeur? Seek the way of martyrdom, make yourself the lowest On earth, to be high in heaven. (39)

Becket asks him who he is, tempting him with his own desires? He realizes the grossness of his apparently selfless and pious desire, and overcomes it:

Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain: Temptation shall not come in this kind again. The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason. (44)

Becket now is ready to merge his will in the Will of God. This is the true spirit of martyrdom. In his sermon to his congregation on the Christmas morning- a few days before he would be martyred – he explains the meaning of martyrdom:

“A Christian martyrdom is never an accident, for Saints are not made by accident. Still less is a Christian martyrdom the effect of a man’s will to become a Saint, as a man by willing and contriving may become a ruler of men. A martyrdom is always the design of God, for His love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to His ways. It is never the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, and who no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of martyrdom.” (49)

Thomas Becket is not merely preaching about martyrdom. He is now ready to act upon it. So when his murderers come he is ready for them in the true spirit of a martyr.

Critical Comments

Initially, however, I wish briefly to compare Murder in the Cathedral not with Eliot's later plays but with an earlier play that offers itself very readily for the purpose: I mean Tennyson's Becket. Almost all the differences between these two poetic dramas could be

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called fundamental and significant: the principal difference is not even merely one of merit, or only consequentially so. It is the difference between, on the one hand, a derivative, circumscribing tradition, a tradition that has been revived without being invested with any new validity, and on the other a tradition which, for all its modesty, is altogether the opposite of this. The tradition from which Tennyson derives is of course the Elizabethan? the point de depart also for the poetic dramas of Blake, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and, frequently, Byron. To anyone who has studied even the best plays by these poets this is at once a cause for some misgivings….Becket (and we can say this quite categorically) tries to be Shakespearian and fails in the attempt even more conspicuously than did its predecessors. At first it is merely the resemblances to an Elizabethan drama that one notices. The convention of five acts is used ; there is a developed "story"; and there is a sub-plot worked up between Henry and Rosamund. Following his model Tennyson introduces approximations to the Romeo and Juliet nurse-type (Margery) and to the type of Macduff's small son (Geoffrey). His imitation extends even to the more wearisome characteristics of the original:

“Fitzurse: Why? why,my lord, I follow'd? follow'd one?

Becket: And then what follows? Let me follow thee.”

These are no doubt peripheral considerations: mala prohibita rather than mala in se: prohibited, we might add, rather because of what they indicate than because of what they are. Coming closer to the substantial differences between Tennyson's and Eliot's plays we come closer, too, to the reason why (despite praise of it in 1910 as "the greatest literary drama of recent years") Becket cannot be held to make any very serious claim to our attention.

In Eliot's play, as we shall presently be observing, the idea of Thomas suffering a "tragic" death (in the sense that, say the death of Othello is tragic) is nowhere entertained. The "murder" in the cathedral is not primarily a murder at all, but an act of redemption. Tennyson, by contrast, has the gross outlines of Shakespearian tragedy so deeply imprinted upon his mind that he tends continually to reproduce them. Now if this were all there might be little to which one could reasonably object; but we can see that Tennyson is never comfortable in his emulation and that indeed the Shakespearian pattern is, for his purposes, unsuitable and irksome? especially in the defective sense in which he understands it.

Applied to his own Becket, however, the conception gives rise to a persistent anomaly which he has nowhere contrived to solve: I mean the anomaly that arises when, having taken as his chief character a saint, he is thereafter obliged to endow the saint with a variety of gratuitous

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imperfections to account for his "fall." The result of this is to invest the whole play with an uncertainty that can hardly be condoned. If on the one hand Becket is proud and wilful then he is no martyr, and his death is merely a personal downfall with no significantly religious implications. If on the other hand he is a saint, it is fatal, or at least absurd, to represent him as impetuous and headstrong, constantly requiring the restraining admonitions of John of Salisbury, plainly his superior in most respects. The poet can't eat his cake and have it too.

Eliot, who read it before setting to work on his own play, admits that he found it bad. One can assume that he also found it something of an object-lesson, helping him to a clearer idea of what he himself wished to do. Tennyson for instance, by beginning with Becket still in his office of Chancellor and friendly to the King, is forced to effect the change to a refractory and estranged Archbishop during the playing; and he does it far too abruptly. Eliot on the other hand-inclining as always towards the dramatic unities-rings up the curtain on a Thomas who is already mature, already on the eve of his martyrdom. Skilful references block in the background of his past (the Tempters of course are very useful here) and the play takes on that taut ness and pregnancy that comes with condensation. But this is not all. There is no John of Salisbury in Eliot's play and no call for Becket to refer to him in Tennyson's terms: "My other self, Who like my conscience never lets me be." For Eliot places Becket's conscience within himself, treating the Tempters merely as objectified facets of his own consciousness; and it is through this modification that he avoids all Tennyson's uncertainty. All thought of a fall-through-arrogance, all idea of a struggle at the character-level, is accordingly by-passed and the dramatic effect is placed beyond all this, in a context of religious redemption. King Henry himself does not appear, being present only indirectly. The whole technique aims at such simplification and intensification as will give appropriate weight to the issues which are discussed: that is, the persistent conflict between the values of the world and those of the spirit, and the idea of the redemption of sin through the death of a martyr.

Murder in the Cathedral John Peter The Sewanee Review, Vol. 61, No. 3 (Summer, 1953), pp. 362-383 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Perhaps the most distinctive thing about Eliot's dramatic form is the degree to which history, or tradition if one prefers, informs its character. George Williamson has pointed out that for Eliot "the historical sense is a sense of the changing and the permanent which sharpens the

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perception of both and makes one aware of their simultaneous existence." Certainly this sense is evident in Murder, both in the choruses and in the insistence on the permanence of the glory of martyrdom as opposed to the fleeting nature of all things temporal. It is, in fact, this very insistence on eternal glory and the permanent rock of the church that distinguishes Murder from so much of Eliot's earlier work...

The plot of the play is simple in the extreme, and based on historical fact. Archbishop Thomas Becket returns to England after seven years of self-imposed exile, where he is urged by Four Tempters to (1) return to the fleshly pleasures of temporal life, (2) to support the King in all matters, (3) to suborn the barons and seize power for himself and a third party, and (4) to strive for martyrdom. He refuses all temptations, and because of his refusal he is murdered, thereby attaining the martyrdom he had refused to seek...

Because it is primarily episodic in structure, with the Chorus not only mediating between the action and the audience, but also mediating between the scenes linking them-the play moves forward in a series of episodes, each episode taking the audience deeper into the emotional/spiritual complex. Eliot knew, or perhaps learned from Tennyson's dramatic excesses, the necessity of weeding out all unnecessary exposition; of providing the audience only with the basic knowledge necessary to advance the action of the play...

Eliot's Chorus is not, as the opening lines seem to indicate, a Greek chorus in the classical (or historical) sense. In the Greek plays the chorus, in fulfilling its function as mediator, was somewhat limited in its viewpoint by the characterization the author gave to it. Thus, the Citizens of Pherae, the Corinthian Women, and the Furies, when they express an opinion, generally do so within the limits of their characterization. This Chorus is much broader than that- it speaks with a universal voice. It has no more than a superficial resemblance to the Chorus of Elders, for example, which represented a very narrow portion of Greek society. This Chorus represents the whole of Common Man...

The entry of the Tempters adds a new ingredient to the play. The pride that has been so carefully pointed out is about to be tried, and the clear logic of Eliot's dramatic form becomes obvious. The Archbishop has several times been described as a proud man, and because of this early characterization the temptation scene becomes dramatically effective a confrontation between Pride and Temptation...

Probably the most interesting aspect of Eliot’s dramatic form is the way it involves the audience in the action. This is done in several ways throughout the play, but most effectively

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by the Chorus, which fulfils several functions. In the beginning it reminds the audience that the audience exists as a group which is witnessing an action...

Form as Agent: Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral" Jerry V. Pickering Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 20, No. 2 (May, 1968), pp. 198-207 The Johns Hopkins University Press

“All the characters in Murder in the Cathedral represent or reflect potential or actual states of Thomas's being and he in turn is the focus of the drama and the whole community. The Chorus is as necessary for Thomas's clear thinking and right choice of action (after listening to the last Chorus in Part I he admits: 'Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain') as he is to their development. Like Thomas, the women of the Chorus have to learn to conform their wills. In a way, they may be said to form a circumference of which he is the centre. In Part I we see them, as it were, acting with him, brought into the action against their will for they have suffered and do not want to suffer any more. As his destiny becomes more evident, their terrors increase for they see him moving towards tribulation and doom. At no time do we see the anguish of Thomas; it is mirrored and expressed by the women. It is they who give voice to the conflict in tumultuous rhythms; in the strange, dark, stifling images of despair. This is one of the paradoxes of the role of the Chorus: they participate in the action and suffering of Thomas in order that action and suffering might be transcended. One of Eliot's aims in Murder in the Cathedral is to propound the difference between the saint and ordinary man, and the Chorus serves to bridge this gap...

Of what kind of people is the Chorus composed? In the list of characters they are designated as 'women of Canterbury'. They themselves enlarge upon this and call themselves variously: 'the poor, the poor women of Canterbury'; 'the small folk who live among small things'; 'the scrubbers and sweepers of Canterbury'; and 'type of common man'. We see, therefore, that the Chorus is not an anonymous group but, as one would expect in a Christian drama, a collection of individuals who represent the common man, a group whose function is suffering just as the Knights' is evil and Thomas's martyrdom. Murder in the Cathedral is a play which penetrates to the heart of the mystery of human suffering and the anguish of surrender. As such, it speaks of the human condition and may be regarded as a drama of salvation, for is it not said in the second epistle of Paul to Timothy 2:12, 'If we suffer, we shall also reign with Him.'? Christian life is often called an Imitation of Christ. The Saviour's sacrifice is renewed in the martyrdom of Thomas which may be seen as a re-enactment of Christ's death in

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miniature. A martyrdom is not efficacious unless it is accepted by the great mass of men as 'the design of God, for His love of men, to warn them and lead them back to His ways…The primary and by far the most complex role of the Chorus is to demonstrate their journey towards salvation…”

The Role of The Chorus In Murder In The Cathedral Carole M. Beckett Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, No. 53 (October 1979), pp. 71-76 Berghahn Books The short Christmas sermon delivered by Thomas Becket in T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral is central to the drama in many senses. By considering the sermon as a focal point for analysis of the play, we might ultimately hope to illustrate some of Eliot's theories concerning the rhythmic possibilities of language, the incorporation of historical materials into drama, the relationship of drama to liturgy, and the proper standards for sermon style.

As the Interlude between Parts I and II of the play, the sermon is not only a hiatus in the central action of Murder in the Cathedral but also a balancing point between many contrasted elements. Eliot's didactic purpose is achieved primarily through the audience's consideration of these contrasts, which point to a definition of the play's major theme...

As familiar a form as a prose sermon may be, we are not accustomed to hearing prose from the mouth of Eliot's Becket, a character who speaks in verse on all other occasions. Thus the prose stands out from the texture of its verse framework and calls attention to the sermon as something like a play within a play, that powerful device of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre which Eliot had studied so carefully. We must watch a play within a play with a double consciousness, to catch the heightened inner drama for ourselves and simultaneously, to see how it will affect characters who perceive it differently because of their places in the action.

Within the context created by the portrayal of these two highly complex "days," the Christmas sermon occurs in a realm where "stage" time is the same, in duration, as the actual time which it represents— that is, the time (somewhat shortened, to be sure) that it would actually take to give a sermon. However, the meaning and impact of the sermon depend on a sense of transcendent, "Christian" time, in i which the historical progression of events is subordinated to the cyclical repetition of the ceremonies of the church year. In this time scheme, Christmas 1170 is the same as the first Christmas, as Christmas 1935, or as any Christmas, in the sense that the birth of Christ is re-enacted in each celebration of it. Only in

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the Christmas Mass are the birth and death of Christ celebrated simultaneously, and Eliot's Becket appropriately seizes upon this central paradox to under gird his foreshadowing of his murder and canonization.

The Centrality of the Sermon in T. S. Eliot's "Murder In The Cathedral" Frances White Fry Christianity and Literature, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Summer 1978), pp. 7-14 Sage Publications, Ltd.

Woolf was not reticent in responding to Elioťs drama in her private journals and correspondence. In 1934, commenting on the dogmatism in The Rock and fearing her reaction comes from her "anti religious bias," she writes that Eliot is "petrifying into a priest" (LVW v 315). After she and Leonard attended Murder in the Cathedral , both were critical. She wrote to Julian Bell, "the tightness, chillness, deadness and general worship of the decay and skeleton make one near sickness" (LVW v 448). To Ethel Smith, she sent this review: "I went to his play last night, and came away as if Yd been rolling in the ash bin; and somehow filled my mouth with the bones of a decaying cat thrown there by a workhouse drab" (LVW v 442). In Christian dogma, Woolf saw skeletons, ashes, and decay, not the hope of renewal that Eliot meant to convey. Woolf s violent physical reaction to Elioťs play was not due solely to its Christian basis, however. Other comments suggest that she found fault with his dramatic method as well. She complains, Eliot cannot "manage the human body; only a soliloquy" (LVW v 443). She feels that human nature, when it is in the flesh, floors Eliot (LVW v 446). When he is dealing with live bodies, Elioťs words thin out and "no rhetoric will save them" (LVW v 448). Eliot, himself, had reservations about dramatizing what was, in essence, an inner conflict, but most critics disagree with Woolťs assessment of his characterization, saying that Eliot succeeds in using figures like the tempters to portray the martyr's emotional and spiritual turmoil (Rosador 521)

Demolishing the Castle: Virginia Woolf's Reaction to T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral Author(s): Carol Osborne Source: CEA Critic, Vol. 70, No. 3 (SPRING AND SUMMER 2008), pp. 46-55 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Questions 1. The major theme of Murder in the Cathedral is that it is a sin to seek Martyrdom. Discuss. 2. The character of Thomas Becket.

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3. Explain the role of the Chorus in Murder in the Cathedral. 4. Discuss the play Murder in the Cathedral as religious drama. 5. Discuss the play Murder in the Cathedral as poetic drama.

References: Coghill, Nevill. Ed. Murder in the Cathedral. Oxford: O.U.P. ,1963 Fergusson, Francis O.,. The Idea of a Theatre: A Study of Ten Plays, The Art of Drama in Changing Perspective. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1949 Grestenberger, Donna., "The Saint and the Circle: The Dramatic Potential of an Image." Criticism 2(4): 336-341. 1960. Jones, David E., The Plays of T. S. Eliot. London: Routledge. 1960. Kenner, Hugh. T.S.Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice Hall, 1962 Lewis, Cecil D. The Poetic Image. London: Jonathan Cape,1965 Martz, Louis l.,. "The Saint as a Tragic Hero: Saint Joan and Murder in the Cathedral." Tragic Theory in Western Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1955 Mathiessen, F.O.,. The Achievement of T. S. Eliot. New York: Oxford University Press. 1959 McGill, William.J., “Voices in the Cathedral: The Chorus in Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral”. Modern Drama . Vol.23(No.3), Fall 1980 294-296

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Sean O Casey : Juno and The Paycock

O'Casey, perhaps, is one of the few dramatists in English who have written so much over a period of half a century of his life. He made his presence felt at the Abbey with the production of his play. The Shadow of a Gunman, which was followed by his two other plays, Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars. These three plays, usually called his Dublin Trilogy, made O'Casey internationally famous. These three are the most frequently performed of all his plays.

The background of the play Juno and the Paycock is the Civil War of 1922 between the Die- hard Republicans and the Free Stators. With the signing of the treaty in 1921, the Republican troops were divided into two groups and there started bitterness and hatred between them which resulted into a Civil war. The whole country was disturbed. Even the innocent people who had no connection with this infighting became the victims of its disastrous consequences. Juno and the Paycock had a favourable theatrical reception in Dublin, London and New York. The play was first performed in Dublin on 3rd March 1924. The Dublin theatre reviews emphasised its comic elements. "It is called a tragedy but it simply bursts its sides with comedy."

The reviewers emphasised the realism of characterization and the events. The second Act of the play drew such attention due to its comic situations. But a group of critics objected to the treatment of the play as a comedy. A.E. Malone, for example, rightly remarked with reference to The Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and the Paycock: "They are tragedies of disillusionment which were played, and accepted as comedies of errors."

The story of the play concerns the suffering of the Boyle family which consists of Captain Boyle , his wife, Juno, their crippled son, Johnny and daughter, Maty. The head of the family Captain Boyle is a lazy man and does not care for the family which is the main cause of the suffering of the family. The only son of the family, Johnny has become invalid due to an injury in the war. The daughter is not earning anything because she is on strike against her employers. Thus the whole burden of running the family falls on the shoulder of Juno and she works hard to keep the family going Inspite of her best efforts the family faces economic hardship. Later a ray of hope comes when Bentham, an outsider, brings the news that Captain Boyle is going to inherit a legacy left by one of his distant relatives. The news of the forthcoming legacy completely changes the life-style of the Boyles. All the members of the

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family become extravagant; they buy luxurious articles on credit even before the money actually comes to them. Mary rejects Jerry, a worker and her true lover, in favour of Bentham who 'loves' Mary only because of the forthcoming legacy. But the news of legacy proves to be false and the Boyle family is reduced to the position of utter wretchedness. All the creditors take away their un-paid- for articles. In the meantime Mary who is expecting a baby, fathered by Bentham, is betrayed by the latter. Then the crippled son, Johnny, is shot dead by his comrades on the charge of deceiving one of his comrades who was shot dead in the fight. Finally, disappointed from every side, Juno gathers courage and leaves her home along with her pregnant daughter to settle somewhere else where she and her daughter can look after the newly born baby.

The opening direction of the play about its setting, establishes O'Casey's continuing interest in naturalism. It is "the living room of a two-room tenancy occupied by the Boyle family in a tenement house in Dublin." The props in the room are: "a dresser", "a picture of the Virgin", "a crimson bowl in which a floating votive light is burning", "a small bed", "a fire place", beside which "is a box containing coal and (there is an) alarm clock lying on its face on the mantelshelf", "a galvanized bath,""a teapot", "frying pan", "few books on the dresser", "a long-handled shovel", etc. The opening stage direction gives us a glimpse of a life in reduced circumstances, belonging to the labour class with' aspirations for intellectual sophistication (a few books on the dresser). The votive light symbolises a clinging to some insubstantial support to an impoverished and catastrophe-threatened life that the family has been living. A fuller implication of this symbol is worked out later in the play when the symbol does not remain a mere superstition but functions as a structural device to make the catastrophe more effective. A characteristic of O’Casey’s dramaturgy is the authorial introduction of a character as a preparation for the audience's response to him or her. For example Mary Boyle has been introduced as a beautiful "girl of twenty two....Two forces are working in her mind- one, through the circumstances of her life, pulling her back; the other, through the influence of books she has read, pushing her forward. The opposing forces are apparent in her speech and her manners, both of which are degraded by her environment, and improved by her acquaintance- slight though it is- with literature." The above characteristics of Mary are worked out through the play and her attitudes and train of thought are brought out initially in her interaction with her mother, Juno. She is discovered as reading out a piece of news from a local daily about the discovery of some one's dead body. This item of news creates suspense and pertains to events of suffering during the course of the action. The elaboration of the

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news item is abandoned because of Juno's inquiry about the return of Captain Boyle. The opening conversation between mother and daughter unfolds a number of points which will be developed as the play proceeds- The first item in this connection is Captain Boyle's "struttin' about the town like a paycock with Joxer", and the second one is "about Mrs. Tancred's son", the news of whose death has appeared in the morning newspaper to which Mary has alluded above. The implication of Johnny in the Tancred's son's affairs, which becomes clear only towards the end of the play, is also hinted at in the opening situation in Johnny's nervousness at the news and his angry disapprobation of Mary's discussing the news items. Mary is puzzled at Johnny's "gettin' very sensitive, all of a sudden" but Juno dispels any apprehension on account of any consequence on the family because of Tancred's son being killed. She says, "Everybody's sayin' that he was a Die-hard- thanks be to God that Johnny had nothin' to do with hin this long time...."The forebodings contained in the news and Johnny's nervous discomfiture, are overshadowed by Juno's elaboration of the irresponsibility, laziness and lack of the sense of decorum and proportion in Captain Boyle. In the middle of Juno's grumbling against Captain Boyle's attitude to work and life, Mary shows her concern with the choice of a ribbon to suit her head. We learn that Mary is on strike against her employers. She talks of trade unionism and is standing firm on the principle of opposing economic victimisation of the workers by the employers. Mary's argument about the 'principle' involved in going on strike to defend the right of one worker is opposed by her mother's practical wisdom, based on the principle of survival: "Wan victim wasn't enough. When the employers sacrifice wan victim, the Trades Unions go wan better be sacrificin' a hundred."Juno's point of view should not be taken to mean that "she is against trade unions but that she is for the workers earning their daily bread" as their first concern. Juno's tacit suggestion is that the talk and fight for principle is a matter of whether one can afford it: The whole conversation between the mother and daughter brings the immaturity of the daughter in contrast with the mother's practical wisdom gained through the experience of survival. The dramatist’s camera swiftly moves to another strain of the Juno family, i.e. Johnny. Johnny has been off his mental tangent ever since he has been rendered invalid by his participation. In the fight between the Die-hard Republicans and the Free Stators: "The bullet he got in the hip in Easter Week was bad enough, but the bomb that shattered his arm in the fight in O'Connell Street put the finishin' touch on him. I knew he was makin' a fool of himself. God knows I went down on me bended knees to him not to go agent the Free State." Mary defends her brother because he, like her, believed in "a principle's a principle.”Here is a family where the husband is a wastrel and not interested in a job. The daughter is on strike without giving a

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moment's thought how the food of the family is going to be arranged. The son is a virtual invalid not needing merely food for survival but also a continuous presence of someone near him to provide him protection against his nervousness, claustrophobia and some vague fear. The exclusive responsibility, thus, of running the family falls upon the mother who has already incurred enough debts to buy food for the family, and is still anxiously struggling to make provision for the family on a daily basis. However, Jerry Devine, a unionist and lover of Hary brings in the news that he has arranged a job for Boyle in Rathmines through the good office of Father Farrell. Father Farrell has been interested in helping the family out of its present poverty because he has been sympathetic to Johnny who has got disabled fighting for Ireland. Captain Boyle is to be contacted immediately to take up the job, and the only place where Juno thinks him to be is one of the cheap pubs nearby- Ryan's or Foley's. The Captain, after he has been properly introduced to us, appears in a spirit of cheerfulness and complete relaxation chattering with his parasitical companion, Joxer. Boyle and Joxer, thinking that Juno is not in, talk freely about jobs and the tyranny of Juno which is, they declare, calculated to restrict their freedom and pleasure. While Boyle and his butty get ready to make a cup of tea to relax themselves and continue chattering, comically "Joxer's rhapsody is cut short by the sight of Juno coming forward and confronting the two cronies. Both are stupefied." Here O'Casey presents a tableau which has a tremendous visual impact. Boyle informs Juno to save his and Joxer's face, that his butty has got influence with a foreman at Killesther who would soon get him a job. First Joxer, being not prepared for this lie, feels puzzled. But soon he gets the clue from Boyle and starts elaborating about the prospect of getting a job for Boyle which will improve the financial condition of the family. Boyle, too, declares that now he feels physically fit to undertake any exacting job because he is sincerely interested in working. Juno can see through her husband's pretence, lies and laziness: "If you think you're able to come it over me with them fairy tales, you're in the wrong shop." Juno knows him only too well. As soon as Juno goes out of the house the pain in Boyle's leg disappears and he regains his mood of romantic cheerfulness. Juno is so "flurried and excited" that she is not interested now in exposing Boyle's lies to him. She has cut short her stay outside on work to be able to come back and tell Boyle that "there's a visitor comin' with Mary in a minute, an' he has great news for you." Boyle is advised to go into Johnny's room to change to look presentable to the visitor. Finally he appears into the room where Bentham is comfortably seated with the entire verbal courtesy of Juno. Comically Boyle feels that the "great news" is perhaps related to some job that his wife has arranged for him. Hence he prefaces his arrival with a complaint about a "terrible pain" in his leg. However, the pains are

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forgotten when the "great news" broken to him is about a substantial legacy left to him by a distant relative of his. The will was prepared by Bentham and hence its veracity is unquestionable. At the prospect of "a fortune", forthcoming to the family, the entire family is excited and jubilant.

As the second Act opens, we see that the legacy announced in the last Act has considerably changed the appearance of Boyle's tenement. "The furniture is more plentiful" and "every available spot is ornamented with huge vases filled with artificial flowers." The room has other props, like a table lamp, symbolical of economic status. The changed style of living is most noticeable in Boyle's attitude to different people and ideologies. He now patronizes his old butty from a superior position.

The rumour of Boyle's legacy has changed the attitude of society towards him. The clergies and the feudal ones now pay him respect in recognition of his social standing. To reciprocate their respects, Boyle also changes his attitude of disdain at the clerics and the nationalists: he says, "I don't like any one to talk disrespectful of Father Farrell." It is the same Father Farrell who was portrayed by Boyle in the last Act as a deceitful and conspiring exploiter. Boyle's high-flown talk of nationalism and respect for religion sounds comically hollow because of his own ignorance about the general state of affairs in Ireland, for which he has always had only one cliche' expression- Ireland is in a state of chassis. The initial situation of Act II is that of a celebration party where Bentham is going to be the chief guest. Eventually Bentham arrives amid applause of welcome from the Boyles. To conform to the traditional social convention of etiquette and gossip, people claiming higher social status, must talk of things of larger interest or abstract philosophical ideas. Boyle, without any awareness of his ignorance, talks of inflation, the role of religion in the betterment of people's lot, etc. Contrasted with Boyle's ill-digested ideas, is Bentham's theosophical elaboration of the values of life and the philosophy of the "Life-Breath" in a language which confirms his intellectual and linguistic sophistry. While these conversations are going on, Johnny feels terribly uneasy at the mention by Bentham of killing a person in the context of a discussion about the existence of ghosts. Johnny's conscience is shockingly jolted and he rushes into his room only to see there, to his breathtaking terror the ghost of Tancred with "wouns bleedin' in his breast Oh, why did he look at me like that?" The company assembled there try to dismiss Johnny's vision as a figment of "an over-wrought imagination" but Johnny alone knows the truth of the questioning stare at him by Tancred's ghost. The only shelter for him is the votive light near the statue.

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Two months have elapsed between- Acts II and III. Bentham is reported to have gone away to England and nothing has been heard from him since we met him in the celebration party in the preceding Act. Mary continues protesting the sincerity of her love for him and suspects that Bentham's unaccountable withdrawal is perhaps because he did not like the Boyles' informality and connections with lower class people, like Joxer and Mrs. Madigan, who did not show any sophisticated behaviour in the carousing party. Juno blames her husband for encouraging such a company. The action now moves at a faster speed until the final catastrophe. Mary feels a little pulled down and the mother decides to get her checked by a doctor. As the shopping spree of the family has been going on without the legacy having actually arrived, they are in great debts. Juno, in her complacent attitude to her situation, did not think it proper to have a check on her husband's free spending on items of luxury and drinks. It is discovered that Mary is expecting a baby which has been immorally fathered by Bentham. Before this news is brought home a lot of troubled water has already flown under the bridge. The rumour that the legacy is not coming at all has been confirmed among the people as a fact. Creditors, therefore, have started coming to the Boyles to realize their dues. Nugent, the tailor, takes away the unpaid-for suit that he had made for Boyle for formal wearing. Joxer, the Captain's butty, derives malicious pleasure out of Boyle's embarrassment and loss of face. Though a devil himself, Joxer preaches Boyle, "Ah, him that goes a borrovrin' goes a sorrowin'*!" Joxer's attitude to the tree (Boyle) on which he acted as a parasite is positively cruel and sadistic, and his laboured comicality only intensifies his despicable character. Similarly Mrs. Madigan, too, appears unsympathetic to Boyle once she finds him in an economic soup. She takes away the unpaid-for gramophone in lieu of the money she had lent Boyle to spend on drinks and the entertainment for himself and his neighbours, like herself, when the news of the legacy had become public. As Mrs. Madigan goes off with the gramophone she expresses malicious satisfaction at the imminent ruin of the Boyles After the humiliation mentioned above, Boyle is going to have a heavier dose of shock when Juno tells that Mary is betrayed by Bentham in the most dishonourable manner. Boyle's initial reaction to Mary's undoing is father-like and human. He declares that he would bring Bentham back from England and make him do justice to Mary by marrying her. Immediately he changes his stand and disowns Mary abandons her to whatever lot befalls her. Johnny, too, forgetting his own immorality takes Mary, task: "She should be driven out o' th' house she's brought disgrace on!" There is only one faint hope which sustains the much wrecked-down Juno: the money of the legacy may enable her to migrate to some other place where Mary's disgrace will not be matter of public scandal. But Juno's troubles are not going

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to be over that easily. Boyle declares that he knew it quite some time ago that the will was "a wash-out" and "The Boyo that's after doin' it to Mary done it to me as well." Boyle's irresponsibility, combined with his inhumanity to Mary, makes his character appear truly repulsive. Even though he had known earlier about the reality of the legacy, he continued borrowing for boozing. And the heaviest stroke so far has been the legacy which was their economic undoing and the undoing of Mary. Before the final catastrophe is brought in, O'Casey brings in a situation which tantalizes the family into some new hope. Jerry Devine, thinking that because of the economic ruin Mary has been abandoned by Bentham, comes forward to accept Mary's hand as a renewal of his earlier love for her. But his "humanity is just as narrow as the humanity of the others." He withdraws his offer when he learns that Mary "has fallen as low as that." Mary exposes Jerry by reciting the lines which the latter had once done while lecturing on "Humanity's Strife with Nature." But the words of the verses fall flat on his ears and he goes away. While the rest of the furniture is being removed for non-payment, "The votive light flickers for a moment and goes out." The ominous symbolism of the votive light's going out is casually explained by the furniture dealer's men, "The oil's all gone, that's all." It appears, as if the visitation of some unknown force of nemesis has taken place where the redeeming divine grace has been withdrawn. Johnny 'agonisingly cries' with "feelin' a pain in his breast like the tearin' by of a bullet." It appears that the paraphernalia of complete ruin has been finalized and only the final doom is to be pronounced. There is complete destitution- economic, human and divine. It appears as if the fate of Johnny, Mary and the utter inhuman irresponsibility of Boyle are the strokes calculated to demolish Juno. But Juno, like a heroic figure, rises to the occasion to face the final debacle in her life with courage and balance of mind. Mrs. Madigan's hesitation in breaking the news of Johnny's death draws Mrs. Boyle's assertion like this: Don't keep me waitin' Mrs. Madigan; I've gone through so much lately that I feel able for anything. Juno now realizes the pang of loss of a son which she tried to explain away when Mrs. Tancred was mournfully following the procession of her son. She repeats the lines of Mrs. Tancred in a truly repentant vein: Maybe I didn't feel sorry enough for Mrs. Tancred when her poor son was found as Johnny's been found now because he was a Die-hard! Ah, why didn't I remember that then he wasn't a Die-hard or a Stater, but only a poor dead son! Its well I remember all that she said an ‘it’s my turn to say it now: What was the pain I suffered, Johnny, bringin' you into the world to carry you to your cradle, to the pains I'll suffer carryin' you out o' the world to bring you to your grave! Mother o' God, Mother o' God, has pity on us all! Blessed Virgin, where were you when me darlin' son was riddled with bullets? Sacred

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Heart o' Jesus, take away our hearts o' stone, and give us hearts o' flesh! Take away this murdherin' hate, an' give us Thine own eternal love! All props of Juno have been removed but she is determined to live for the sake of the new life that is going to come into existence in the form of Mary's baby. The baby will regrettably have no father but Juno declares, "it'll have what's far better- it'll have two mothers." After the final and complete destruction of the family has taken place, Juno goes on a journey for a new life in a better world, treading on the debris of her ruin. The play ends with the return of Joxer and Boyle fully drunk, staggering on an empty stage and muttering incoherently about the "terrible state o' Chassis.""The empty room is a result of the realistic action of the play. But it also serves as a visual symbol of the effect of political and social chaos on the family and the wider community." But as our analysis of the play above has demonstrated Juno and the Paycock is a tale of suffering more on account of "human stupidity," cruelty and even bestiality, than on account of anything else.

Short questions

1. Discuss irony in the play. 2. Show how Boyle is not the only person guilty of “peacockery” in the play. 3. What are some uses O’Casey makes of song in the play? 4. How is Capt. Boyle a miles glorious figure? 5. Discuss Joxer Daly as a type of comic “parasite”

Essay questions

1. “Many characters invest all of their energy into words rather than deeds.” (Christopher Murray, Sean O’Casey.) Do you agree?

2. Discuss naturalism in Juno and Paycock.

3. “The play attacks all kinds of idealism.” Discuss with reference to three or four characters.

4. Discuss Juno and the Paycock as tragicomedy.

5. Discuss illusion and reality in Juno and the Paycock.

6. Do you agree with critic James Agate’s assessment in his review of a 1925 London production, that “Juno and the Paycock is as much a tragedy as Macbeth, but it is a tragedy taking place in the porter’s family”?

7. Discuss Juno and the Paycock as a feminist play

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CRITICAL COMMENTS

Juno has been able, supported by a small conclave of other women, to express solidarity with other mothers and with all those who are against the hatred in her Ireland. Consequently, criticism of Juno as narrow-minded seems badly flawed. Though she is no perfect goddess, O'Casey's Juno shows herself as capable of learning to empathize with others through her role as mother. Such empathy leads her both to construct a network of other mothers and to draw power from it, the better to express her views by which she links herself to an encompassing human society and to provide a way of life for her daughter and grandchild, which distinguishes itself by its opposition to the patriarchal values that her husband and the other males in her life have imposed upon her. The goal of creating a matriarchal community is attained through Juno's education in the use of her maternal power. It seems only fitting to read O'Casey's delineation of her character in light of feminist thought, which acknowledges the mother's role as a source of strength.

The Mother's Tale: Maternal Agency in "Juno and the Paycock" Maria Keaton New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), pp. 85-97 University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)

As a consequence of the plays' political content and the politically charged social milieu in which they were produced, critical response to O'Casey's plays has been, to put it simply, polarized. Elaborating on this point, Shakir Mustafa describes the reception of O'Casey's plays as being "muddied with [the] conflicting interests and ideologies" of the critics themselves (97). In general, critics supporting anti-nationalist positions have defended O'Casey, while other critics have argued that his attacks on anti-nationalist politics have inadvertently re inscribed damaging Irish stereotypes (Mustafa 96). In an alternative reading, Mustafa suggests that the plays primarily attack nationalist rhetoric, without attacking Irish nationalism itself (96-97)…. To critique the more violent aspects of nationalism, O'Casey, as Pilkington points out, portrays militants as being concerned with "self-aggrandizement" and engaged in "self indulgent role-playing" (91). In Juno there is no more a self aggrandizing character than Captain Boyle. As the "head" of a struggling Dublin family living in a tenement building and consistency confronted with the inescapable problems of poverty and politics, Boyle's concerns are inappropriately frivolous. Mostly he worries about finding ways to sneak off to

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the snug with his friend Joxer. And, as for his position in the home, he is always in the periphery of the action, never occupying the traditional male role of central decision-maker. This is quite evident when Boyle's daughter Mary, while fighting with her suitor Jerry, warns that her father may intervene, but the warning is more ritual - more symbolic - than real….

Since the nation is "imagined" in terms of masculine imagery, and, more specifically, masculine agency, the representation of Boyle as ineffectual and superficial is telling. Generally, nationalism has, as George Mosse notes in Nationalism and Sexuality, adopted an "ideal of manliness and built its national stereotypes around it" (10). This ideal insisted on "virility and manly bearing" (Mosse, Nationalism 10). Boyle's virility, however, is an act, and his performance of it is as contrived and as comical as the seaman's cap on his head. Only a ship hand on a collier ship, Boyle, in moments of self aggrandizement, tells tall tales of oceanic adventures. At one point he tells Joxer that he has seen things "no mortal man should speak about that knows his Catechism" (23). With Joxer at his side, Boyle recounts stories of make-believe bravery and adventure, which Joxer then absorbs and repeats without question….

Male national stereotypes involve constructing and idealizing masculinity, at least in part, in terms of "depth and seriousness" (Mosse, Nationalism 16-17). Working against this kind of idealized masculinity, O'Casey presents Boyle as a counter-image, an image that challenges the power that has traditionally saturated masculinity. Obviously Boyle is neither "deep" nor serious, and his ineffectual blabber unsettles notions of male agency, undermining stereotypic and essentialized notions of gender hierarchies. Thus O'Casey's depiction of Boyle destabilizes gender categories and introduces "chassis" into the family and the nation. Phrased another way, O'Casey's depiction of Boyle dismantles, or perhaps even inverts the patriarchal power structure of the Boyle household, and, by extension, undermines the authority of the nation which irrevocability rests on the coherence of the family….

If there is an authority figure in the play, it is Juno; she is industrious and rules the "paycock" who in turn, prefers to tell stories about work and finding work rather than actually doing work. Boyle's efforts to find work are, in Juno's words, only "fairy tales" (13). The characterization of Juno as both serious and shrewd contradicts national stereotypes of femininity, which often accuse women of "shallowness and frivolity" (Mosse, Nationalism 17). Because of these characterizations, the play essentially inverts binary oppositions

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associated with national gender stereotypes: Juno is strong and authoritative, while Boyle is weak and submissive. To make this point quite clear, O'Casey makes Juno a vehicle for unmasking and satirizing Boyle's superficial masculinity. Unaffected and unconvinced by Boyle's stories and posturing, Juno frequently identifies Boyle's stories as the infantile exaggerations they are. Commenting on his seafaring claims, she says, "to listen or look at you, ud take you for a second Christo . . . Columbus!" (14). She treats Boyle, not as the "head" of the house, but as a child in need of supervision, and Boyle reciprocates by acting petty and childish, at one point telling her, "I want no breakfast, I tell you; it ud choke me after all that's been said. I've a little spirit left in me still" (16). In reality the only skit Boyle really shows is when he childishly hides his breakfast away and helps Joxer escape through the window when Juno returns (24). Certainly the scene is farcical, and, as such, it emphasizes that Boyle's masculinity and his position in the home is a masquerade, stressed by his parading, as Juno says, "from mornin' till night like a paycock!" (10)….

In another instance, Boyle, posing as a domineering husband, plans to establish his own "independent Republic," (24) and have Juno make him an "oath of allegiance" (24). Nevertheless, his preposterous boasting only accentuates the ridiculousness of his attempt to, as Joxer puts it, restore his "sacred rights o' man" (24). His "oath of allegiance" is a reference to the pledge of loyalty rebuked by the British Crown in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. By linking the "oath of allegiance" with Boyle, O'Casey merges home and state, and thereby blurs the divisions and differences between public and private domains….

In Juno undercutting male authority can sometimes take a more subdued form. This is the case with the well-educated English gentleman, Bentham, who acts as a foil to Mary's union- devoted boyfriend Jerry. Bentham takes Jerry's place as Mary's suitor, and, probably because of his social positioning, receives the affections and attentions of all the Boyles. Ironically, though, he and Boyle both end up playing central roles in the family's economic problems, which ultimately cause its collapse. Bentham's involvement with the law assigns him a different social position and authority in the play, an authority that is based in the public sphere. This alternate masculine authority based in the public domain proves faulty because Bentham bungles Boyle's cousin's will and this is what brings the family to bankruptcy….

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The audience is introduced to Bentham by Jerry's description in which he calls him a "thin, lanky strip of a Micky Dazzler, with a walkin' -stick an' gloves" (18). Colbert Kearney calls the description of Bentham "inspired" (80). According to Kearney, the term "Micky Dazzler""generally indicates a person . . . who dresses extravagantly to attract female attention. The sexual connotation is strengthened by the fact that 'micky' is slang for penis, but the crucial element is the recognition of Bentham as somebody who is setting out to dazzle ... the entire Boyle family" (80). Declan Kiberd suggests that Bentham is a "melodramatic device" and he represents a stereotypic "rapacious Englishman who leaves a decent Irish girl pregnant" (219). He further suggests the whole episode "could be read as an allegory of the British withdrawal. What he proposes is that Bentham's departure is O'Casey's "indictment of a dishonest and over-hasty British withdrawal, which seemed to create far more problems than it solved" (219). By resisting this allegorical reading, though, one can interpret Bentham as a failed example of the British gentleman. By lacking the "manly virtues" of restraint and self-control, he fails to satisfy stereotypic definitions of the British manly gentleman. The British gentleman, especially in literature of the British Empire, was represented as an extension of British political authority (Mosse, Image 15). He had to use this power wisely, which, according to Mosse, meant "it had to be coupled with self-control and the restraint of reckless impulses. Such self-restraint was a key attribute of the masculine stereotype,... [and] the use of power inherent in modern masculinity, was always restrained by other manly virtues" (Image 15). …

What this means is that "true" manliness "meant freedom from sexual passion and the sublimation of sensuality into leadership of society and the nation" (Mosse, Nationalism \ 3). Contrary to this ideal of "true" manliness, Bentham does not sublimate his sexual desire. He takes advantage of his favoured position in the Boyle household and leaves Maty pregnant with his child. Of course Bentham's actions call Boyle's masculine authority7 into question, because, as Peterson says, "men who cannot defend their woman/nation [/daughters] against rape/invasion have lost their propriety claim to that body,that land" (qtd. in Porter 43)…. defeats Boyle's feeble authority as the family patriarch. We can also read the plot trajectory of Johnny Boyle in terms of illustrating competing types of masculine authority. Johnny, as the representative of militant republicanism, boasts of his part in the Easter Rising in slogan- ridden rhetoric. Echoing Pearse he says, "Ireland only half free'll never be at peace while she has a son left to pull the trigger" (27). His masculine bravado is, however, undermined by his physical appearance and his demeanour. O'Casey describes him as thin and delicate with a

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"tremulous look of indefinite fear in his eyes" (8). Missing his left arm and saddled with a bad hip, Johnny is no longer able to physically or emotionally "pull the trigger." Johnny's body is the site of masculine and national self-destruction - his crippled body is politicized, and thus represents distorted republican ideology. Weakened in this way, Johnny is both infantilized and feminized. His infantilization and feminization point to a breakdown or degeneration in masculine ability, and this subverts national masculine ideals, revealing, as Waterman puts it, a "crisis of masculinity" (36). As Waterman further states, "like his father, Johnny is presented as childish, but more important is his representation as feminized, [and] suffering from hysteria" (66). Far from the idealized hero, he is feminized and secludes himself within feminine space. Ultimately, Johnny, as a conflicted and ambiguous site of masculinity, is physically reclaimed when he is forcefully removed from his home by two "irregulars" (69)…

O'Casey's plays have been categorized as attacks on all militant ideologies and "isms" (Kiberd 223), but there has been much less discussion about O'Casey's methodology - namely, his unmasking of masculine stereotypes as a way of attacking these "isms." In Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars, O'Casey embodies republican rhetoric in masculine subjects who he then deflates to sever the masculine power that underpins such ideological "isms." In both plays male characters are feminized and infantilized, surrendering agency and control to more competent women. As a result of giving women and not men power and agency, O'Casey destabilizes gendered identities and hierarchies, making visible the "normalized" power and domination imbued to men in both private and public domains. In other words, by destabilizing gender hierarchies, O'Casey works against traditional symbolic representations that reinforce militaristic national ideologies.

Making the Least of Masculine Authority: Sean O'Casey's "Paycock" and "Plough and the Stars" Cathy Airth The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Fall, 2006), pp. 42-47 Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

O'Casey's first three plays, The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, and The Plough and the Stars, form a complete and self-contained section of his work. They were all produced at the Abbey Theatre between 1923 and 1926; their background is Dublin in the

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times of unrest between the Irish Rebellion of 1916 and the Civil War of 1922; their characters are realistic portrayals of the Irish people as the playwright knew them. If he had never written anything else, he would go down to posterity as the dramatist of Ireland at the turning- point of her struggle for Home Rule. O'Casey's knowledge of these times was not that of a mere student of history; he had lived the scenes which he described, had gone to school as a Protestant child among Catholics, had travelled on trams where the daily bread of discussion was politics and history, Fenians, Wolfe Tone, Parnell (Parnell ("Who was Wolfe Tone, Ma?" the small boy asked, as the tram conductor sang his chronicle song among the Diamond Jubilee illuminations). Rebellion and civil strife were as natural to the Dublin children of the nineties as bombs and invasion-talk were to the London children of the 1940's. In the main, however, his chief char- actors are less interested in the political scene than busy with their own lives-their love-making, their money-making, their health, and their livelihood -and the political upheavals, culminating often in machine-gun fire, come only as an interruption to lives which are hard enough already without such an added burden. The women are at their best in striving to keep their homes and menfolk safe in the midst of disaster; but the men are at their best when fighting for their ideals. Artistically better still are the men who do not fight but who drink and idle and moralize-Captain Boyle and Joxer and Fluther Good- ne'er-do-wells of the material world but immortals of the theater. These three plays, together with the one-act trivialities A Pound on Demand and The End of the Beginning, form a literature of their own in the Irish Abbey Theatre tradition, an urban and more robust version of the peasant world of Synge. In them the dramatist is in Ireland and Ireland in the dramatist; and, by a paradox not infrequent in art, out of the squalid poverty and sordid chaos of these plays' settings spring a sumptuous characterization, a magnificence of human creation which none of the playwright's subsequent dramas have equaled…

Towering above all contemporary dramatists (save one apparently immortal fellow- countryman) stands Sean O'Casey. Juno, not excluding Saint Joan, is probably the finest play of the century; The Plough and the Stars reaches a climax of unequaled intensity; The Silver Tassie carries experiment further than any competitor; Within the Gates has no rival for originality of spirit and significance.

The Drama of Sean O'Casey Guy Boas College English, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Nov., 1948), pp. 80-86 National Council of Teachers of English

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O'Casey, too, renounced an Irish theatre which celebrated an idealized, lovable rogue; for in that traditional image, which Dion Boucicault, in particular, had found so profitable and successful on the stage, O'Casey saw a man of comic pretensions who backed away from significant political and military engagement while Ireland burned, as did his mock heroes in Kathleen Listens In, The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars. But O'Casey's plays, unlike Yeats', are naturalistic-realistic, not Homeric. They present no idealistic national symbol around which man should rally; in fact, these works look away from the external world of civil conflict into the more conventional and sentimental values of the home and romantic love. They choose private commitments over public ones. These "dark comedies" - which O'Casey called tragedies - reject mythical superstructures. Their patriots are shams who create their own transitory reality and believe their own tales. The playwright prescribes no concise remedy for this pathological world which these mock-heroes create and inhabit; but he does emphasize the mental bondage which this environment imposes upon such persons and the pathetic and ironic degree to which they misunderstand their actual and potential roles. Thus, far from uniting dissident elements and luring young men to give up their possibilities for worthy and pleasurable home membership, O'Casey's " paycocks " strut and fret as shadows whose pretensions bring catastrophe to the home and/or the family struggling to come into being to survive in a hostile surrounding. And their wayward choices are not mere artistic symbols to him... Public Vs. Private Commitment In Two Plays Of W. B. Yeats And Sean O'casey Walter C. Daniel CLA Journal, Vol. 23, No. 2 (December, 1979), pp. 213-219 College Language Association

During his years in Ireland Sean O'Casey's development progressed by a series of rejections. He was born into an ugly, often hostile world, and was precluded from an ordinary education and normal social contacts by weak eyes. He therefore drew into himself, finding in books both a solace and a weapon. Armed with knowledge, he later turned angrily to face the society which had forced the misery and humiliation of poverty upon him, violently rejecting and rebelling against it. At first he identified his grievances with the woes of "poor oul' Ireland"; but his experience as a labourer and unionist convinced him that the Nationalists, to whom he had given himself, wanted only to redeem Ireland for the middle class. Widened sympathies then led him to reject in turn the cause of "Irish Ireland," and to embrace the ideals of socialism. But when compromise and mediocrity threatened these ideals, he scorned

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the Irish labour movement, denouncing its leaders as philistines, and cast his whole hope on the day when the workers, triumphant, would realize a richer life. By the early 1920's his philosophic and political position had almost isolated him in Dublin, but he took heart in the victories of the Russian Bolsheviks, and, rejoicing, felt more confident than ever that the workers' day of glory would come. In the marching of the Red Armies he heard echoes of the workers' army that he had known, as it tramped through the streets of Dublin in 1913. The course of his life in Dublin during his forty-six years there was filled with terrible difficulties, and disillusionment faced each new turning. He was forced to make his own way, and it was one that led him, eventually, out of Ireland. Yet by 1926, when he moved to England, he had achieved a synthesis of his experience that enabled him to go forth, not as a disconsolate exile, but as an older pioneer in search of more promising and congenial surroundings. With a stock-pile of impressions and ideas, the raw material of his later work, he set out to discover better working conditions and more personal happiness than he had found in Dublin. When he sailed that year he had many reasons for bitterness toward Ireland, but he could not blame her for depriving him of happiness, because from his beginning she had never offered him much anyway.

Sean O'Casey: Prelude to Playwriting Herbert Coston The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Sep., 1960), pp. 102-112 The MIT Press

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Section C: Prose and Fiction

Virginia Woolf - : “Modern Fiction” Joseph Conrad - : Heart of Darkness D.H. Lawrence - : Sons and Lovers James Joyce - : A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

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Virginia Woolf - : “Modern Fiction”

Adeline Virginia Stephen was born in 1882, to Leslie Stephen and his second wife Julia. Her father was a distinguished intellectual and an author, literary critic and philosopher. Julia had been a model for photographers and Pre-Raphaelite artists, and had worked as a nurseVirginia Woolf was a writer who lived from 1882 until 1941. She committed suicide on 28 March 1941 by drowning herself in a river. She was a complicated woman, with a love for women, a madness which would never leave her life and strong feminist ideas. She grew up in a family that owned two houses and had some servants. In her later life she received money from an inheritance, which was about the amount of 500 pounds a year she mentions in A Room of One’s Own and she worked as a journalist to earn her own money. She had no formal education but had taught herself how to write articles and books. She wrote many novels, articles, biographies, diaries and essays in her life. Her first book was called The Voyage Out and describes a group of English people travelling to and into South America. It was published in 1915; right after Virginia married Leonard Woolf in 1912 and got ill in 1913. Exactly ten years later, in 1925, her book Mrs Dalloway was published. Virginia’s other novels were: Night and Day (1919), Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931), The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). Woolf was an innovative writer. Throughout her career she experimented with theme and form, producing thoughtful essays about the nature of prose fiction and the challenges it posed. Her critical works include: ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919); her famous plea in A Room of One’s Own (1929) for women to have independence and privacy to write, and Three Guineas (1938) which was broadly on the theme of women’s place in the world and their opportunities for education.

The Essay Certain observations made by Virginia Woolf are remarkable regarding the understanding of modern fiction: They include, 1. It is doubtful if we have learnt anything more than the ancients about the creation of literature. 2. Woolf finds fault with writers like H.G. Wells, A. Bennet and W.Galsworthy and in the process shows admiration for writers like Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad and W.H. Hudson.

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The former writers are branded as “materialists”. They write about insignificant things, and unimportant and temporary appear to be significant and permanent. 3. A major criticism is that these writers fail to capture life. Life is a luminous halo, a spiritual thing which encompasses the human mind from the birth of consciousness to its end. 4. Brilliant writers, as she cites Joyce, reveals a lot about the working of the mind. 5. Joyce can bring the reader closer to the reality of life, a kind of technique, which ensures the true representation of the mind and its constant contact with the reality. This was successfully employed in Tristram Shandy and Pendennis. 6. The novelists should have the courage to speak whatever interests him. She refers to the story “Gusev” by Tchekov. She discusses the Russian influence in the craft / art of fiction. She identifies an element of saintliness in the writing of Russian authors and for Woolf it means sympathy for the suffering humanity. They have a unique charm which can touch us and get us obsessed with. 7. Fiction must explore all possibilities to experiment.

Critical Comments

VIRGINIA WOOLF'S title for the two volumes of essays collected in her lifetime, The Common Reader,' has been taken for a descriptive image of the critic as impressionist or amateur reader. In the preface to her first Common Reader, Mrs. Woolf explains her title and epigraph, taken from Dr. Johnson's "Life of Gray," in place of a statement of purpose. Her description is deliberately casual and informal, but she provides a structure and point of view for her essays by adding that the common reader does wish to create from his reading "some kind of whole-a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing." Though Mrs. Woolf's deceptive remarks on the function of criticism may partly account for the persistent view of her as "reader" rather than "critic" other writers have contributed to the stereotype of Virginia Woolf as an occasional essayist and impressionist, as a literary portrait painter and miniaturist; or as an antiquarian rummaging through the attics of a rather charming but peripheral past. Unsympathetic readers have carried the belletristic image further and coupled it with the conception of her fiction as a total immersion in pure subjectivity or (in Sean O'Faolain's view) as an exercise in the novel as narcissism. Yet, in fairness to reviewers of Virginia Woolf's essays, it should be noted that both favourable and unfavourable comments seem to be based on a similar conception of her as an appreciator or impressionist rather than a serious critic….

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Virginia Woolf's criticism, it will be seen, reveals a similar attempt to reach a via media, a creative balance between reason and emotion, sense and sensibility, the individual critic and the impersonal method. While denying the dichotomy between a so-called objective and subjective literary criticism, Mrs. Woolf's kind of impressionism achieves a critical objectivity, even a structure. As Mrs. Woolf says, at the beginning of her long essay on the novel, "Phases of Fiction": "Yet, if nobody save the professional historian and critic reads to understand a period or to revise a reputation, nobody reads simply by chance or without a definite scale of values. There is, to speak metaphorically, some design that has been traced upon our minds which reading brings to light." Even Allen Tate, one of the leaders of the Southern group of analysts or "New Critics," has emphasized, in the preface to a new collection of his essays, the need to preserve the critic's point of view, which alone can lead to the highest and most genuine kind of literary criticism….

But the art of reading is also a critical matter, as Mrs. Woolf demonstrates in the essay concluding the second Common Reader, "How Should One Read a Book?" Originally presented as a talk, the audience must have realized that as readers they were to be created in Mrs. Woolf's image. At the outset, she again admonishes the reader to follow his own critical conscience, in the Cambridge-Bloomsbury tradition of the individual against authority and conformity. To be open-minded, to get rid of all preconceptions about the author and the work when we read, is the first step not merely toward enjoyment but understanding. "Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this, and soon you will find that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far more definite. The thirty-two chapters of a novel-if we consider how to read a novel first-are an attempt to make something as formed and controlled as a building; but words are more impalpable than bricks; reading is a longer and more complex process than seeing." The reading process is intensified, then, as we turn to the familiar question of form. What is clearly revealed here, and implicit throughout her essays, is a creative tension in her criticism between the emotional response, the impression, the experience of the work, and its rational ex- planation and evaluation-on formal grounds and in terms of traditional standards. As a psychological novelist, Mrs. Woolf was committed to the "unconscious" self, as she describes the creative source, as well as to the equally essential tool…

It is interesting to compare Mrs. Woolf's critic as impressionist-judge with her father's views on the function of criticism. Though a follower of Arnold, Leslie Stephen wanted to go beyond the critical touchstone in order to incorporate a body of critical judgments into a kind

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of literary case- law. Yet even the positivist-minded Stephen re- served a place for the critic's emotional response, as he makes clear in the essay "Thoughts on Criticism by a Critic.""This vivacity and originality of feeling is the first qualification of a critic. Without it no man's judgment is worth having." And again, from the other direction: "A good critic can hardly express his feelings without implicitly laying down a principle."A modern humanist critic, Norman Foerster, has also stressed the twofold response to the work of art, even while stating his case for a revitalized ethical criticism. "He will read it in two ways, first one way and then the other, or else in two ways, simultaneously. One way we may speak of as 'feeling the book,' the other as 'thinking the book'." Leslie Stephen and Norman Foerster may be regarded as humanists making some allowance for impressionism; and Virginia Woolf as an impressionist merely acknowledging the judicial function of the critic. Yet the same conflict between impression and judgment, thought and feeling, has been noted in the early essays of T. S. Eliot. The rejection of Arnold and Pater (and his followers) was behind Eliot's attempt, in The Sacred Wood, to deny the dichotomy of thought and feeling (dissociation of sensibility), which he felt encouraged impressionism (and abstract scientism). Eliot's position is actually close to Mrs. Woolf's notion of a fusion of critical functions, though his intention is more rigorous and programmatic in the light of his poetic aims, as we can see from the early essays.In her essay "On Re-reading Novels," Mrs. Woolf gets at the crucial question of form by way of Percy Lubbock's now classic work, The Craft of Fiction. Reviewing Lubbock's book when it appeared in 1922, Mrs. Woolf declares that it is a step in the direction of a serious aesthetic for the novel. She agrees with his emphasis on form, on the proper reading of the novel as novel, as pattern, as work of art. But she takes exception to his use of the term "form" itself. It is not only a question of words for Mrs. Woolf, but goes deeper, "into the very process of reading itself." …

Virginia Woolf and the Critic as Reader Mark Goldman PMLA, Vol. 80, No. 3 (Jun., 1965), pp. 275-284 Modern Language Association In her two volumes, Common Reader and the posthumous volume Granite, that she was not the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen for The wish that her godfather, James Russell Lowell, then States Ambassador, sent with a posset cup, that her heredity flower and bear fruit - I have not Lowell's exact words by that is the sense of them - was abundantly fulfilled. Not she assume that her object in life was to write good books, was she bookish, but she was a

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scholar. Her critical works the balanced orderly powers of a first-rate intelligence. She could at any moment write a biographical sketch, or an article in the Times Literary Supplement marshalling her facts and delivering her judgment with ease, scholarship and wit. In her novels the originality of her approach, the beauty of her language, the associations, which echo poetry and can be called out like the murmur of the waves evoked for us by a shell clasped to the ear, make Virginia one of the half dozen greatest writers and perhaps the least like a man of them all.

Virginia Woolf David Garnett The American Scholar, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Summer, 1965), pp. 371-386 The Phi Beta Kappa Society

Reference: Essay: http://yunus.hacettepe.edu.tr/~jason.ward/ied388novel3/virginiawoolfmodernfiction.pdf Whitworth, Michael H. Virginia Woolf (Author’s in Context). London: Oxford, 2009.Print. Questions 1. Why does Woolf target the materialists in her essay? 2. Why does Woolf praise Hardy and Conrad as novelists? 3. How does Virginia Woolf in her Modern Fiction defend the stream of consciousness novel against the ‘materialistic’ novel?

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Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad (1857 - 1924), whose original name was Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, was an English novelist and short-story writer of Polish descent, His popular works include Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), and The Secret Agent (1907) and Heart of Darkness (1902). Conrad was admired for the richness of his prose and his renderings of dangerous life at sea and in exotic places. His initial reputation as a masterful teller of colourful adventures of the sea masked his fascination with the individual when faced with nature’s invariable unconcern, man’s frequent malevolence, and his inner battles with good and evil. To Conrad, the sea meant the tragedy of loneliness. A writer of complex skill and striking insight, but above all of an intensely personal vision, he has been increasingly regarded as one of the greatest English novelists. (Adapted from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph- Conrad)

SUMMARY

PART I Nellie, a small ship is moored in the Thames River, London. The narrator and his companions are waiting on the deck of the ship for the tide to turn. The unnamed narrator thinks about the great sailors, Sir. Francis Drake, Sir. John Franklin and mentions some of the well-known ships, Golden Hind, Erebus and Terror. The Sun sets and the lights from the lighthouse and ships appear. He describes the river and the London city to his companions who are waiting on the deck, the Director of the Companies, a lawyer, an accountant and Marlow the protagonist.

They become contemplative as the sun sets. He refers to London as “one of the dark places on earth.” Marlow breaks the silence by narrating his tale about his visit to Congo. The narrator reports what Marlow tells to the people on board of Nellie. Marlow refers to the conquests of the past and how all those conquests turned out to be plundering the riches of those who were different from them. He suggests that something more is needed to redeem mankind. There was long silence. After some time Marlow broke the silence telling about one of his journeys. Even as a boy Marlow desired to become a seaman or explorer. He spent about six years as a sailor in the Indian Ocean, Pacific and China Seas and then decided to join as a pilot in a steam boat that goes to Congo in Africa. He saw the map of the Congo in a shop window and was fascinated by it. The Congo River is compared to a snake with its head

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in the sea, its body curving over the country and its tail in the deep of the land. The Continental Trading Company conducting operations in Congo had its headquarters in Brussels. After signing the documents in Brussels he underwent medical examination. The doctor measures his head with callipers and asks him whether there were any history of madness in his family.

After thanking his aunt he leaves for Congo in a slow French steamer. It reached the mouth of the river in thirty days and Marlow suffered depression due to the long and boring journey. He was taken to the steamboat in a steamer. The Captain of the steamer told him ominous stories about the Europeans in Africa and referred to a man who committed suicide on the road. He spent about ten days at the Company’s outer station from where ivory was shipped to Europe. He came across the real Africa during his stay there, starving natives, broken machinery; lose rails and arrogant white traders. During this period he met the Accountant who told him about Kurtz a company agent who was in charge of ivory business deep in the interior. He described Kurtz as a remarkable person and wanted him to inform Kurtz about his imminent promotion in the Company administration. Marlow moved to the Central station one day after the conversation along with sixty men who carried equipment, food and water. He saw signs of cruelty, suffering and destruction on the way; abandoned villages, bodies of native men who have been shot on the head and innumerable paths to the interior of the forest constructed by the invaders enhanced the horror. When he reached the Central station he was informed that the steam boat that he has to pilot was damaged and that it was at the bottom of the river and so he was forced to wait there. He met a brick maker who enquired him about the company’s activities in Europe. But he confessed ignorance about such official secrets. He saw a sketch in oil in the wall of the Brickmaker’s cabin. It is of a “woman, draped and blindfolded, carrying a lighted torch.” The manager informs him that it was painted by Kurtz. Marlow needed rivets to repair his steam boat but it did not arrive. Instead a group of white explorers who called themselves Eldorado Exploring Expedition arrived riding donkeys followed by natives in search of treasure. He heard rumours about Kurtz who has gone to the interior of the forest.

Part II

Marlow learned from the Manager that Kurtz wanted the company to send him to the jungle to show how much ivory he could procure. Later he sends his assistant back to the Manager alleging inefficiency. The Manager felt that Kurtz would die in the jungle. The Eldorado

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Expedition entered the jungle. It was heard that the donkeys were all dead as well as the natives, “the less valuable animals.” After repairing the steam boat Marlow with his team of “pilgrims” also started their journey to the inner station accompanied by the Manager and the natives. The steam boat came across a hut of reeds about fifty miles below the inner station. There was the remnant of a flag and neatly piled wood and a board in which it is written, “Wood for you. Hurry up. Approach cautiously. “There was a table, heap of rubbish and a book on seamanship inside the hut. Marlow took the book and put it in his pocket and the Natives took the wood. A mile and a half below the inner station the natives attacked the steam boat firing small arrows and the pilgrims reacted by firing guns into the bush. The helmsman was killed by a spear. Marlow thinks about the Helmsman’s look before he died. He throws his dead body overboard. The current takes his body. It rolls twice and disappears. Marlow says that he had been a second rate Helmsman, but he would now be a first class temptation, meaning food for the Cannibals. A decaying building on the slope of a hill was seen. A white man wearing a hat with a boyish face with no beard and blue eyes appeared. He reminded Marlow of a harlequin. He was a Russian who served in an English ship. He pointed towards the hill and told them that Kurtz was there.

Part III

Reaching the Inner Station Marlow saw a long decaying building with long posts around it. Each post was topped with round curved balls which were human heads. He came to know that Kurtz was still alive and that it was his quarters and the Natives attacked the boat because they don’t want anyone to take Kurtz away from them. Marlow came to know more about Kurtz from the Russian who told him that Kurtz used to go for hunting in the forest for ivory along with the natives. He wanted Marlow to take Kurtz away quickly. He had very high opinion about Kurtz. He had listened to him on many occasions and had discussed about love. He had nursed Kurtz out of two illnesses. At present Kurtz is very ill. Looking through the binoculars he discovered that the round knobs that he saw on the posts bordering the house were the heads of native rebels. A group of natives appeared carrying Kurtz on a stretcher. He ordered his army to leave and the Manager and other agents conveyed the messages to Kurtz laying him on bed. Leaving Kurtz’s room he saw a woman who had a proud and magnanimous appearance emerging on the shore. She wears brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow and necklaces of glass beads. She walked with

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measured steps and seemed to wear the value of “several elephant tusks upon her.” She boarded the steam boat raised her arms and disappeared in the bush without speaking a word. The Russian says that she had created problems for Kurtz. Marlow heard Kurtz speaking irreverently to the Manager inside the room. When he came out he informed Marlow that Kurtz’s ivory district will be closed as his method is unsound. The Russian and Marlow shared the suspicion that the white rescuers of Kurtz are really trying to harm him. Kurtz never wanted him to be taken away and that is why he ordered attack on the steam boat. The Harlequin further wanted Marlow to protect Kurtz’s reputation when he goes back to Europe. Marlow woke up at midnight hearing the sound of the drum and the natives reciting incantations. He found Kurtz’s room empty and found him trying to escape crawling through the grass. Seeing Marlow his first reaction was to ask him to run and hide himself, but then he told Marlow about his plans which were ruined by the Manager. He then led Kurtz to his room and the next day they started off to the sea in order to go back to Europe. They saw three natives covered with bright red earth shouting some magic spell. Kurtz’s native mistress began shouting something and the same was repeated by his 1000 followers. The white men pointed their rifles towards the natives. Marlow blew the whistle vigorously to scare the natives. Though many of them ran away the wild woman did not. The whites then opened fire against Kurtz’s followers. Kurtz continued to speak about his experiences and handed over a packet of papers to Marlow to keep it for himself away from the Manager. One evening when he entered Kurtz’s room Marlow heard his last words, “The horror! The horror!” Marlow left the room without uttering a word. Then the Manager’s servant boy announced in a contemptuous voice, “Kurtz dead.” The next day they buried his body in the jungle. Marlow felt that he could never compare himself to Kurtz. He had something to say. His last words, “The horror” are an indication of his conviction about life. It may be a reference to the moral victory that he had finally after many defeats. Back in Brussels Marlow was nursed back to health by his aunt. A company official visited Marlow demanding the papers handed over by Kurtz. Though he hands over the report on the Natives he removes the final comment “Exterminate all the Brutes.” Kurtz’s cousin whom he met told him about Kurtz’s musical abilities and his organizational capabilities. According to him Kurtz could have become an inspiring political leader with his charisma and his electrifying voice. Marlow also met Kurtz’s fiancée who appeared sincere, trustworthy and innocent. When she asked Marlow to tell Kurtz’s last word he lied and said the last word he pronounced was your name. She sighed and cried. The story narrated by Marlow was over. On board the ship Nellie the

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listeners stood still. The narrator looked at the clouds, the overcast sky and the Thames and felt that the river is flowing into the “heart of an immense darkness.”

Critical Comments

Soon after Conrad's death in 1924 writers and critics to interpret Heart of Darkness (I899) along different lines, focusing on particular images and scenes and not the novella as a whole. T.S. Eliot read it as a work about evil, life's bleak hopelessness, and moral emptiness, neglecting the 'affirmation' and victory' and transforming the 'horror' which refers particularly the Belgian Congo to a horror of life in general. Somewhat Bertrand Russell claimed that Conrad's point of view was antithesis of Rousseau's,' and analysed Heart of Darkness as of 'a rather weak idealist... driven mad by horror of the tropical forest and loneliness among savages.' The Conrad of Russell's making 'thought of civilized and morally tolerable human life dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.' Even Andre Gide, who read Heart of Darkness for the fourth while on his Congo trip, and felt that 'This admirable book remains profoundly true ... There is no exaggeration picture; it is cruelly exact', was more interested in Conrad's scriptions of primitive culture and the jungle than in his record Belgian colonialism.3 Eliot, Gide, and Russell, looking at Conrad's novella in the light of their own preoccupations and the concerns of their own time, detected important threads in the narrative brought it new meaning, but they also transformed the tale distracted readers from the 'heart of darkness', which was colonial- ism. As existentialism and Jungian archetypes have become tools, the novella has been disfigured; Conrad would recognize his own hand...

Accounting for the genesis of Heart of Darkness, as for most masterpieces, is a complex affair. A number of influences were at work - some personal, some social and political. What is particularly interesting is that Conrad transformed a personal experience into a fiction of general historical and cultural significance. With little sense of strain, he moved from self to society; it was one of his eccentricities to mythologize an historical self, to place his own life at the heart of historical conflicts. He was the 'Polish Englishman', Easterner and Westerner; he saw himself at the centre of rival European nationalisms, and claimed that his 'was the only case of a boy of my nationality and antecedents taking a ... standing jump out of his racial surroundings and associations'. As a sailor he made of himself' the last seaman of a sailing vessel', and boasted that if he lived long enough he would 'become a bizarre relic of a dead barbarism, a sort of monstrous antiquity, the only seaman ... who had never gone into

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steam...memory. As a child he had read about African explorers and their stories constructed a romantic world of exploration, but he finally went to the Congo it put 'an end to the idealized realities of a boy's daydreams!' However, Conrad's Diary, which from 13 June to i August I890, and his letters from the give us some hints. The Diary has few similarities with finished story, although both depict a journey up the Congo and passages from it which would have depicted the Congo encountered were omitted from the novella. Heart of Darkness has no mention, as the Diary has, of Roger Casement, scription of the Hatton and Cookson English factory, no packing ivory in cases for shipment, no visits to African market plantations, or missions. The Congo Conrad saw in I890 factories, plantations, missionaries, and commercial firms more highly organized and 'civilized' region than the Congo Heart of Darkness, which is presented in the rudimentary stages development. Correspondingly, the Diary betrays no horror jungle or fascination for the primitive on anything like of Heart of Darkness; nor is there the same degree of bitterness and anguish, though occasionally Conrad expressed his hatred the Congo and the colonial...

One of the ironies in Heart of Darkness is that the modern colonialist repeats historical experience of the Roman empire-builder, though exile and death is enacted in the Congo. Spanish conquest of the Americas, too, he saw parallels with Belgian conquest of the Congo, and while Conrad in I903 Casement as the modem Las Casas, and suspected him of lessness camouflaged by piety, in I890 he thought him straight- forward, intelligent, and sympathetic. The earlier Conrad the rhetoric of colonialism, while the later suspected that and thirst for power lay behind claims to progress and civilization...

From his Congo experience Conrad also came to believe that his task as a novelist to unmask society, to look below its surface discern its essential character, and when we turn from to the letters we see a Conrad who had discerned a colonialism. By September 1890 he was sorry he had come Congo. 'Everything is repellent to me here', he wrote, things, but especially men'. He described the manager 'common ivory-dealer with sordid instincts', and thought self as one of the Congo's 'white slaves'. At first he grumbled the stupidity of packing ivory in crates, but gradually he attack the colonial set-up as a whole, and sneered at that fat ?) banker who rules the roost at home'. Some of his letters lost, but those from his uncle Bobrowski reveal Conrad's dilemma. We can deduce what he wrote to his uncle from Bobrowski's sense that his nephew was 'on the frontier between civilization and savagery', and from his remark, 'I see from your last letter that you feel a deep resentment towards the Belgians for exploiting you so mercilessly... reply. For Conrad the railroad was a destroyer of nature, an instrument

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for exploitation and oppression, for the violent destruction of primitive communities. Like the gunboat shelling the African continent, the building of the railroad is depicted as struggle between the white man and nature which slowly the African. Conrad tells us of the black labourers: 'brought all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, sickened, became inefficient, and were allowed to crawl rest'. We see the railroad chain-gang at close range: 'Six advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and balancing small baskets of full earth on their heads ... I every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together a chain'.

Conrad's myth about moribund colonialism rested on the that there was, as in the case of Rome, an inescapable and relationship between imperial decadence and savagery. colonial power confronted and infected by barbarism becomes decivilized and disintegrated; this myth developed from Conrad's sense that he was in I890 on the frontier between civilization savagery, and from his scrutiny of the pervasive and struggle between blacks and whites, on chain-gangs and in outposts. It is a moral myth, too, for it details the evils which the civilized man when he transgresses against barbarism, exploits primitive man and nature. Kurtz has robbed the wilderness of ivory, has 'kicked the very earth to pieces', and in turn wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion'. He has exploited exterminated primitive man (primitive in the sense of natural pre-social as well as specifically Congolese), and they themselves by working his corruption: the torturer becomes a victim.

There were, as well, other elements in Conrad's myth about civilization and barbarism. He believed that 'There are some situations where the barbarian and the, so-called, civilized man meet upon the same ground,' and whether one lived in the tropics or in Western Europe one saw 'the same manifestations of love and hate and sordid greed chasing the uncertain dollar in all its multi- farious and vanishing shapes'. In all cultures, social inequality was maintained by physical force, and Conrad spoke of that 'toleration of strength, that exists, infamous and irremediable, at the bottom of all hearts, in all societies; whenever men congregate...

Kurtz is also a decadent colonialist because he takes part in the rituals of savage society. Conrad attempts to distinguish Kurtz's savagery from that of the Africans, and feels that theirs 'was a positive relief' and 'had a right to exist', while Kurtz's is abominable: savages have a right to be savage but not civilized men. However, he fails to distinguish successfully

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between the two, and the implication of the tale is that the colonialist becomes decadent and corrupt because of contact with savages. Kurtz is decadent literally because he becomes like the Africans, and figuratively because 'powers of darkness' control him and his is the 'heart of darkness'. Conrad held this notion at the same time that he sympathized with and identified with the Africans, and this con- flict links up with a central ambiguity of the novella, for it describes evil both in terms of society and in terms of racial and pre-social force...

Conrad's Heart of Darkness Jonah Raskin Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 2, No. 2, Literature and Society (Apr.,1967), pp. 113-131 Sage Publications, Ltd

Critics have traced the patterns of tragedy, romance, politics, and psychology in Conrad's major fiction, but his comic designs remain for the most part undiscussed. Heart of Darkness, in particular, still grins enigmatically through a critical twilight. On his voyage up the Congo, 15 May 1890, Conrad wrote his aunt in a spirit that pervades the novella, "we have to see this tragi-comedy through." In the novella manuscript he refers to a Congo outpost as "that comedy of light at the door of darkness." We can posit that Conrad's comic vision, a dark one to be sure, allowed him entry into the nightmare of Kurtz's tragedy, while it kept the nightmare from engulfing his sensibilities... Marlow entertains a comic sense of his own nightmare, and his saving humor implies Conrad's own perspective on the darkness in the tale. Marlow narrates countless scenes of comic incongruity:the Company's doctor "in the interest of science" measuring Mar low's cranium with calipers before the jungle trip; the French gunboat shelling an uninhabited coastline and trailing popgun bursts of smoke; the freaks and caricatures of humanity at each Station along the Congo; the "pilgrims" in pink pyjamas firing Winchesters into the undergrowth "with a glorious lot of smoke" and cavorting in the "jolly lark" of slaughtering natives; and finally, Marlow's ironic interview with the Intended. An uncomfortable and challenging sense of comic play operates here—one which unsettles the reader and dares him to keep pace with the author's incisive perceptions. The novelist does not resolve problems or release us from conflict, as in the more traditional forms of comedy. He lays bare with ironic

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humor the problems we prefer not to face; his laconic narrative serves to undercut baseness and hypocrisy throughout... No simple matter of trading flesh for florins, general prostitution covers a series of compromises in which appearance eclipses reality—land and power compromising life (plunder), social bondage compromising individual liberty (slavery), or public conventions compromising private convictions (social hypocrisy, exploitive capitalism, imperialistic Christianity). Conrad attacks these related forms of prostitution in Heart of Darkness. Most severely, he undercuts that person, who in prostituting his own integrity, cannot see or refuses to see his own debasement. Beginning with the character of Kaspar Almayer in his first novel, Conrad dramatizes the folly of self delusion repeatedly in his fiction. He undercuts a fraudulent "civilization," cancerous with imperceptions and egomania that feeds on illusions of benevolent imperialism. At the heart of civilizing plunder lies "the horror," and in his Last Essays Conrad alludes to the rape of Africa as "the vilest scramble for loot that ever dis figured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration." This prostitution spreads from late-century London, "the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth," to Kurtz's Inner Station, an outpost of "progress" where men indulge in "unspeakable rites" of human sacrifice. Imagistic cross reference between Kurtz's mistress and the slaves indicates that Europe possesses the bodies of the slaves at the Outer Station, just as Kurtz possesses the body of his African mistress: "each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain whose bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking". Kurtz's queen is no more free than these chained captives who embody death-in life, hardly more alive than the decaying machinery in their grave yard. Indeed, the animate and the inanimate interchange grotesquely in the grove of death—an abandoned "boiler wallowing in the grass," the carcass of an overturned railway-truck with its wheels helplessly in the air, a stack of rusty nails. Progress, serving the name of civilization, discards the pillaged bodies of men and machin ery in its inhuman, haphazard way...

COMIC LIGHT IN "HEART OF DARKNESS" Kenneth R. Lincoln Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Summer 1972), pp. 183-197 The Johns Hopkins University Press

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In a 1975 lecture at the University of Massachusetts, Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe attacked Heart of Darkness as "racist." Conrad "projects the image of Africa as 'the other world,' the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality." Supposedly the great demystifier, Conrad is instead a "purveyor of comforting myths" and even "a bloody racist." Achebe adds: "That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely undetected." Achebe would therefore like to strike Conrad's novella from the cur riculum, where it has been one of the most frequently taught works of modern fiction in English classes from Chicago to Bombay to Johannesburg...imperialism. Watts is one of the many critics who interpret Heart of Darkness as an expose of imperialist rapacity and violence. Kurtz's career in deviltry obviously undermines imperialist ideology, and the greed of the "faithless pilgrims"—the white sub Kurtzes, so to speak—is perhaps worse. "The conquest of the earth," Marlow declares, "which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than our selves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much." There is nothing equivocal about that remark; Conrad entertained no illusions about imperialist violence. But Marlow distinguishes between British imperialism and that of the other European powers: the red parts of the map are good to see, he says, "because one knows that some real work is done in there". Heart of Darkness is specifically about what Conrad saw in King Leopold's African empire in 1890; the extent to which his critique can be generalized to imperial ism beyond the Congo is unclear... Heart of Darkness expresses not only what Conrad saw and partially recorded in his "Congo Diary," but also the revelations of atrocities which began appearing in the British press as early as 1888 and which reached a climax twenty years later, when in 1908 the mounting scandal forced the Belgian government to take control of Leopold's private domain. During that period the population of the Congo was reduced by perhaps one half; as many as 6,000,000 persons may have been uprooted, tortured, and murdered through the forced labor system used to extract ivory and what reformers called "red rubber" from "the heart of darkness." Conrad was sympathetic to the Congo Reform Association, established in 1903 partly by his friend Roger Casement whom he had met in Africa, and Casement got him to write a propaganda letter in which Conrad says: "It is an extraordinary thing that the conscience of Europe which seventy years ago . . . put down the slave trade on humanitarian grounds tolerates the Congo state today..."

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As Hawkins and others have pointed out, Conrad did not base his critique of imperialist exploitation in Heart of Darkness solely on what he had seen in the Congo. What he witnessed was miserable enough, and he was also made personally miserable and resentful by disease and the conviction that his Belgian employers were exploiting him. But, as he assured Casement, while in the Congo he had not even heard of "the alleged custom of cutting off hands among the natives." The conclusion that Casement drew from this and other evidence was that most of the cruelties practiced in the Congo were not traditional, but were the recent effects of exploitation. The cutting off of hands was a punishment for noncooperation in Leopold's forced labor system, and probably became frequent only after 1890. And just as Conrad had seen little or no evidence of torture, so, Molly Mahood conjectures, he probably saw little or no evidence of cannibalism, despite the stress upon it in his story...

Perhaps Heart of Darkness expresses two irreconcilable intentions. As Parry says, "to proffer an interpretation of Heart of Darkness as a militant denunciation and a reluctant affirmation of imperialist civilisation, as a fiction that [both] exposes and colludes in imperialism's mystifications, is to recognise its immanent contradictions". Moreover, the argument that Conrad was consciously anti-imperialist, but that he unconsciously or carelessly employed the racist terminology current in his day will not stand up, because he was acutely aware of what he was doing. Every white-black and light-dark contrast in the story, whether it corroborates racist assumptions or subverts them, is precisely calculated for its effects both as a unit in a scheme of imagery and as a focal point in a complex web of contradictory political and moral values.

One of the most remarkable perversions of the criticism of Heart of Darkness has been to see Kurtz not as an abomination—a "hollow man" with a lust for blood and domination—but as a "hero of the spirit." That phrase is Lionel Trilling's. In his well-known essay de scribing the establishment of the first course in modern literature at Columbia University, Trilling explains why he put Conrad's novella on the reading list: Whether or not . . . Conrad read either Blake or Nietzsche I do not know, but his Heart of Darkness follows in their line. This very great work has never lacked for the admiration it deserves, and it has been given a . . . canonical place in the legend of modern literature by Eliot's having it so clearly in mind when he wrote The Waste Land and his having taken from it the epigraph to "The Hollow Men"

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Despite the "hollow man" association between Eliot's poem and Conrad's novella, Trilling claims that "no one, to my knowledge, has ever confronted in an explicit way [the latter's] strange and terrible message of ambivalence toward the life of civilization" (p. 17). In Sincerity and Authenticity, Trilling adds that Conrad's story is "the paradigmatic literary expression of the modern concern with authenticity," and continues: "This troubling work has no manifest polemical content but it contains in sum the whole of the radical critique of European civilization that has been made by [modern] literature...

"Heart of Darkness": "Anti-Imperialism, Racism, or Impressionism?" PATRICK BRANTLINGER Criticism, Vol. 27, No. 4 (fall, 1985), pp. 363-385 Wayne State University Press

In Edward Said’s “Two Visions in Heart of Darkness,” the well-known critique from his magisterial Culture and Imperialism, he locates a tension in Conrad’s work between, on the one hand, a position that seeks but fails to imagine an alternative to imperialism, and a textual attitude that is inseparable from the zeitgeist of imperialism on the other. He writes that “Conrad does not give us the sense that he could imagine a fully realized alternative to imperialism: the natives he wrote about in Africa, Asia, or America were incapable of independence, and because he seemed to imagine that European tutelage was a given, he could not foresee what would take place when it came to an end”. It is paradoxical, given the centrality of resistance as a theme in Culture and Imperialism (evident in the epigraph quoted above), that Said chose not to acknowledge the inscriptions of resistance among the natives in his reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. One underappreciated aspect of Conrad’s text is that it represents what Said calls the “violence and waste” of imperialism, while at the same time fretting over the natives’ resistance to the imperial apparatus. As Said points out, the narrative is a “recitation” — as well as a performance — for “a set of like-minded British hearers”. Said argues that Conrad’s text not only embodies imperialist attitudes — which prevents any compelling representation of the experiences of the Other — but also, and owing to Conrad’s depiction, allows “later readers” an opening, an opportunity to “imagine something other than an Africa carved up into dozens of European colonies”. Building on Said’s reading, I suggest that evidence for native “resistance” is already latent in the text. Conrad’s language continually reinforces the measures of control and anxieties of

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enforcement necessary to keep the colonial edifice from crumbling, hinting at the fragility of imperialism’s façade, while at the same time denying such weakness exists….

Peter Nazareth writes that with Heart of Darkness, Conrad “shatter[ed] the benign worldview of colonialism projected at home”. Nazareth and Benita Parry point out the subversive elements of Conrad’s text — namely in its resistance to colonialism — which, for them, takes place principally in Marlow’s critique of imperialism’s dark side (which comes from the West) as well as in the text’s unflinching portrayal of the realities of the colonial project. Contemporary criticism has tended to echo this position. The problem is that while Parry calls Heart of Darkness “a powerful critique of imperialism,” her essay in fact focuses on how European and American interlocutors like Roger Casement and Mark Twain critiqued Leopold’s regime. The African natives are therefore relegated to the background in her analysis, perhaps because she believes that in the novella, “the people are basically silenced”. She argues that Conrad’s work is speaking against imperialism “in its intimations of what may yet come out of an ‘Africa’ that in the fiction cannot speak its name, the book alludes to a reality that lies beyond its own epistemologically constrained field of vision”. It is, for Parry, in the roll of drums that Marlow hears a “hidden knowledge” he “cannot articulate”. It is of course folly to try to guess what meaning these drums convey, but the possibility that they represent not meaningless sounds but distinct formations of human energies (a “hidden knowledge”), communication, and even the residual but ever-present possibility of resistance are but a few of the notions that makes their sound so terrible to the imperial mind….

Conrad’s text opens with Marlow detailing his exploits to a lawyer, an accountant, and a director, figures that Peter Nazareth calls “manipulators of the whole colonial machine”. These figures play a part, at the very least, in regulating colonialist institutions. The “bond of the sea” that unites the men “had the effect of making [them] tolerant of each other’s yarns — and even convictions”. The narrator’s description reveals the sense of community among men who share common experiences. Therefore the text is first and foremost a dialogue directed specifically at an audience that is receptive to the codes and assumptions of the colonial project writ large.8 The “second” narrator’s identity is never fully revealed; he is nameless, yet positioned on the boat. The scene is written in first person point of view (“. . . I was awake. I listened . . .”), thus the narrator is not omniscient because of his/its situatedness among the other men (“our hearts”). Nazareth speculates that perhaps this narrator is the “ ‘I’ of Europe”, but what is unmistakable in this opening scene is that the unnamed narrator, like

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Marlow, feels a kinship among the men, and therefore is also a participant in the imperial narrative, reifying the obligations and anxieties of colonialism’s “supreme monolithic world view”. To extend the notion of the “imperial audience” beyond that of the fictional conceit of the novella itself, it should be noted that when Heart of Darkness was first published in serialized form, the readers of Blackwood’s Magazine were largely supportive of British expansionism, invested in its emotional and ideological project, and direct beneficiaries of its economic exploits. Thus the notion of anxiety would have been much more visceral as a critical assumption orienting this colonialist text…

Heart of Darkness’s depictions of the natives acknowledge that native resistance to imperial aggression is a reality; the natives are not powerless, even though they are depicted throughout the novella as savage, mindless, subhuman, subservient, and at times complicit with imperial power. As the novella progresses, Kurtz becomes the incarnation of white superiority and the purveyor of its most obscene ideas. Endowed with complete control over the native population, Kurtz represents the embodiment of the colonial ideal, an ideal so powerful that it threatens to undermine itself...

In the famous scene at the end of the novella, an ailing Kurtz is brought to the steamboat — the symbol of order and home — to recover. Later he escapes to take part in a ritual involving a “big fire” off in the distance (63). Marlow, realizing Kurtz’s escape from the symbolic home, cuts him off and states, “You will be lost . . . utterly lost” (65). The threat of loss — again repeated — has a strangely compelling effect on Kurtz. Marlow clarifies to his compatriots that he “did say the right thing,” as it has the result, when combined with a physical threat, of returning Kurtz to the steamboat (65). “I was on the threshold of great things,” Kurtz pleads. It is at this threshold limit that Kurtz gives up on his mastery of the Congo and returns with Marlow to the ship…

My analysis suggests that Heart of Darkness in fact acknowledges and continually hints at what it most fears: the possibility of native resistance to colonial rule. This possibility is mitigated near the end of the novella when we find out it is in fact Kurtz’s order that animates the earlier native arrow attack. The anticolonial resistance I have been tracking in this essay is thus foreclosed by the novella’s ending. It is a force that, if realized, might end the exploitative production of wealth and power typically justified though the benevolent imperial narrative of “progress” and “civility” (50). These inscriptions of resistance are an

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important but underdeveloped part of Conrad’s novella. The true catastrophe in Heart of Darkness is not the death, mystery, and existential terror that are common to the rich tradition of interpretation surrounding the novella, but the inability of the natives to overcome Kurtz’s monomania which is to say, the latent energies of resistance that crackle throughout the text culminate in nothing. The potential for resistance to imperialist rule is ever a source of anxiety for Marlow and the pilgrims, but the consequences of this action are never fully articulated within the novella….

Inscriptions of Resistance in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness Charlie Wesley Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Spring 2015), pp. 20-37 Indiana University Press

'Heart of Darkness' is frequently interpreted as an anti-imperialistic tract, a kind of literary counterpart to Kipling's poem 'Gunga Din'. Such an interpretation, as readers of Conrad's letters and other fiction (especially Nostromo) will know, is not obviously wrong. Conrad did intend to expose, to unmask, the hypocrisy and barbarism of European imperialism and colonialism in Central Africa. But it is somewhat misleading and altogether too limiting to see 'Heart of Darkness' as an unveiling of the exploitation and oppression of a commercial and industrial society on a helpless, primitive community. This would make Conrad into an ideologue when, in fact, Conrad persistently denounced ideological thinking...

In this story Conrad has developed an ingenious device. As be accused of inconsistency (or perhaps self-contradiction) communicates his own experience in the Congo directly to the created Marlow to serve as his agent and through whom he can readers some unsalutary aspects of human nature without (Conrad) has penetrated the mysteries of the universe and achieved edge. Since it is Marlow who is 'enveloping' the tale, Conrad is truth of his teaching; he is committing himself only to the view truth is a common quest; a quest which takes place through the between Marlow, the First Narrator and his readers. Thus, Conrad assertions about political life which may be false for, strictly asserting anything at all. He is simply asking the reader to arouse slumber, to join Marlow in his search for truth, even though he it. After all, Marlow is only human, and, as such, his teaching this sense Marlow is to Conrad as Socrates is to Plato. But it won't eat the analogy. Marlow is not Socrates; he does not search the Forms of things, and he does not proceed dialectically. existentially, whereby he narrates his own transformation from a meditating Buddha-like teacher of human care...

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The 'Heart of Darkness' demonstrates the truly complicated and subtle char-acter of Conrad's political thought. Its character is clearly compatible with Hobbes' political teaching. For Conrad, like Hobbes, has a dim view of human nature and, again like Hobbes, emphasizes the thin line separating political society from the 'state of nature'. Conrad, however, in admitting the imperious character of man's instinctual needs, recognizes man's desire to improve his condition, a desire which Hobbes' Leviathan would crush in the interest of peace and harmony. Man requires the possibility of choice, even if the choice is between nightmares. Marlow lies to protect that choice. Does Conrad propose a cure for loneliness and suffering, the tensions and tribulations of modern society? He does not. While he did see some merit in an emphasis on work, skill, loyalty and tradition, he clearly recognized the in- sufficiency of these virtues. He proposed no formula for man's happiness and no blueprints for his political institutions.59 Clearly, then, Conrad's scepticism and pessimism do not lead to authoritarianism; they lead only to a deepening of our awareness of political society as a realm of conflict, instability and disorder, and to a recognition of the danger from those who claim a permanent cure for these ills…

Conrad has used this story to depict man's craving for inner truth, his sus-ceptibility to ideology and his self-regarding instincts. In so doing he has given the reader an opportunity to reconsider and re-evaluate his attitudes and actions. But Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' implies some partial remedies as well. Though he does not propose a 'cure' for the malignancy of ideology, the character of Marlow implies at least a partial remedy. Thus, Marlow is perhaps a model of the individual who has obtained self-mastery and self- command, but who is yet 'worldly wise'. In the face of ideological thinking, he acquires the strength to resist its appeal by making a conscious decision not to drift submissively with the tides of his environment. By acknowledging the limits of reason and rationality, one may, like Marlow, refrain from imposing some abstract meaning on one's life and on others...

Fiction as Political Theory: Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' Roger D. Spegele British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Jul., 1972), pp. 319-337 Cambridge University Press

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Questions

1. How does Conrad project the corrupting influence of power in his novel Heart of Darkness? 2. Discuss the theme of Man’s inhumanity to man in Heart of Darkness. 3. How does Conrad portray Racial inequality in Heart of Darkness? 4. Do you identify Gender inequality in Heart of Darkness? Discuss the issue in the context of the novel. 5. Discuss the theme Nature as adversary in Heart of Darkness?

References: Thamasinte Hrudayam, By Joseph Conrad, A K Abdul Majeed. Publisher: Chintha Publishers, 2010 Stape, J.H., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.Print. Dean, Leonard F., ed. Joseph Conrad's ‘‘Heart of Darkness’’: Backgrounds and Criticisms. Prentice-Hall,1960.Print. Garnett, Edward. Conrad: The Critical Heritage, edited by Norman Sherry. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973. Print.

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D.H. Lawrence - : Sons and Lovers

Lawrence rose from very humble origins to become one of the most influential as well as controversial literary figures of the twentieth century. Lawrence was born on 11 September, 1885, in the small mining town of Eastwood in Nottinghamshire, the fourth child of his parents. His father, Arthur John Lawrence, worked as a coal miner in one of the many small mines that dotted the Nottinghamshire landscape, whereas his mother, Lydia Lawrence née Beardsall belonged originally to the middle class and was a former school teacher. When her fortunes fell after her marriage, she began supplementing her husband’s income by working from home as a lace maker. It is from his intellectual and ambitious mother that Lawrence inherited his love for books as well as his desire to rise above his working class origins. As a child, he was a shy, reserved boy, a misfit among his social peers, but was academically good enough to be first boy in the history of Eastwood to win a County Council scholarship to the Nottingham High School. Thus we may bear in mind, as Raymond Williams points out that the important thing to remember about Lawrence’s social responses to industrialization was that he was not merely a witness to it as a child, but someone who was caught in its processes, and it was no small miracle that he was able to break out of its shackles and fashion a literary career for himself, though it might have seemed obvious enough in retrospect. Lawrence began working as a clerk for a surgical goods manufacturer in 1901, but quit soon after, following his brother Ernest’s sudden death due to a skin disease. This was followed by his stint as a student teacher at the British School in Eastwood. It was here that he met a young woman named Jessie Chambers, a farmer’s daughter who became his close friend and intellectual companion, and who was controversially portrayed as Miriam in Sons and Lovers. Jesse encouraged Lawrence to pursue writing seriously and submitted a collection of his poems to Ford Madox Ford, who subsequently published them in the English Review in 1909. In 1911, Lawrence’s first novel The White Peacock was published, a year after his mother’s death. By this time Lawrence had passed out from Nottingham University College and was writing frequently. In 1912 he met Frieda von Richthofen, the wife of his professor Ernest Weekly, and fell in love with her. Frieda left her husband and three children, and they eloped to Bavaria and then to Austria, Germany and Italy. They were married on July 13, 1914.

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He published his first play, The Daughter-in-Law, in 1912. A year later, he published his first volume of poetry: Love Poems and Others. In 1912, Lawrence’s second novel The Trespassers also appeared, and then in 1913, his first major novel, the heavily autobiographical Sons and Lovers was published. Lawrence was very confident about this third novel of his, about which he asserted in a letter to his publisher Edward Garnett, “It is a great tragedy, and I tell you I’ve written a great book. It’s the tragedy of thousands of young men in England .... Read my novel – it’s a great novel. If you can’t see the development – which is slow like growth – I can.”. Lawrence continued to write furiously, and in 1914 was published his critically acclaimed collection of short stories entitled The Prussian Officer. His fourth novel, The Rainbow was published in 1915, describing the experiences of two sisters growing up in the north of England. The character of Ursula Brangwen was partly based on Lawrence’s teaching colleague in Nottingham, Louis Burrows, with whom he was briefly engaged. The novel explicitly dealt with sex and was banned on the charges of alleged obscenity. These were trying times for Lawrence as about a thousand copies of his novel were burnt on a magisterial order and his paintings were also confiscated from an art gallery. In 1920 was published his next major novel, Women in Love, considered to be a sequel to The Rainbow. This novel additionally grapples with the theme of homosexuality too, and it is around this time that Lawrence is alleged to have had a homosexual liaison with a Cornish farmer named William Henry Hocking. In a letter written during 1913, he writes, “I should like to know why nearly every man that approaches greatness tends to homosexuality, whether he admits it or not ...” He goes on to recollect, “I believe the nearest I’ve come to perfect love was with a young coal-miner when I was about 16.” In the 1920s Lawrence and Frieda travelled extensively around Europe, New Mexico, and Mexico in a period he later described as his “savage pilgrimage”. He continued writing prolifically, but it is only with Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), his last major novel, again heavily censored and censured for its erotic subject matter, that he approached the fame and reputation of his acclaimed earlier novels. Following various bouts of illnesses including malaria, Lawrence died of tuberculosis on March 2, 1930, in Venice, France. Sons and Lovers (1913) is Lawrence’s first major novel. Initially titled Paul Morel, it is a deeply autobiographical novel that traces the unhappy marriage of Paul’s parents, the “warm and hearty, but unstable” Walter Morel, and the “clever, ironical, delicately moulded” Gertrude. (Letters I. p.190), and the effect it has on the children, particularly on Paul. As he grows up, he is inevitably and unconsciously drawn towards his mother and, simultaneously, develops a hatred for his father. This close bond with his mother gradually assumes Oedipal overtones and stunts Paul’s emotional response

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towards other women in his life, thus leaving him unable to have fulfilling relationships with them, though he does attempt to break free from his mother’s emotional prison. Sons and Lovers marks a culmination of Lawrence’s early phase as a novelist and along with The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1921), it remains one of his mostly highly regarded works. In terms of his style, this is a novel where we find a coalescing of the realistic narration of the traditional novel with the nuanced approach of the modern psychological novel.

PLOT OUTLINE

The novel presents the story of Walter Morel and his family who was frustrated by the system and is ultimately destroyed. Mr. and Mrs. Morel at the onset were attracted to each other but gradually, by the time William their first son is born, Mrs. Morel’s bitterness and disillusionment becomes so much that she begins to despise her husband. Consequently she becomes very lonely, devotes her attention to her sons and shuns her husband. This generates serious conflict between husband and wife which is carried through the novel as it later degenerates into violence and the near-anarchy in the family. Mrs. Morel deliberately shuts Mr. Morel out of all family affairs and encourages the children to be hostile to him and they oblige by despising their father. Consequently, as he is alienated, his character deteriorates until he becomes brutalised, hot tempered and violent. All these affect the children negatively especially Paul who is very sensitive. Mr. Morel is presented as a man who could have been loving and caring, given a different circumstance. For he takes a cup of tea to his sick wife in bed and sometimes tells his children stories about the mine, or gets them to help him repair kettles or make fuses. Mrs. Morel chooses her sons as lovers and expects the fulfilment her marriage lacks from them. She is emotionally attached to her sons in a relationship that could be called the Oedipus complex as is seen in the kind of possessiveness with which Mrs. Morel tries to cling to her sons once they grow up, and the hostility she directs towards their girl-friends. This suggests that her feelings for her boys are much stronger than mere motherly love (Palmers 1996,206-7). As he grows older, William turns his attention from home, resists his mother and has affairs with numerous girls, in spite of his mother's passionate love and her concealed jealousy of his girl-friends. He becomes successful but vain, snobbish and desirous of social success. Gradually he becomes lost to the family and in the end the fast pace of the new life kills him. Mrs. Morel now turns fully to her the younger son, Paul, who was conceived at the height of the estrangement between his parents. She is

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passionately attached to Paul and becomes the dominant force and influence in his life. The second section of the novel presents the conflict between Miriam and Mrs. Morel on one hand and the passionate feeling between Paul and his mother on the other hand. Paul loves his mother above every other person but loves Miriam too so is torn between the two women in his life. Unfortunately, Mrs. Morel’s influence is destructive in Paul’s life. At a point Paul becomes estranged from both Miriam and Clara and his life shatters and with his mother’s death he becomes empty and helpless. He therefore needs someone to fill the void left by his mother’s death so turns completely to Miriam but Miriam could not fit into the shoe left by his mother. He becomes unstable. However, the author presents an optimistic future for Paul as the novel ends with the presentation of strong determination to live by Paul as clenches his fist and sets his mouth fast and walks towards the light of the city. He is “determined to take the path of life, not of death. He will not follow his mother. So he walks, not towards the darkness, but towards the lights of the city” (Palmer 1996, 219). Analysis It is believed that Lawrence himself was a victim of Oedipus complex as his mother Lydia had a very strong hold him and in return Lawrence had an extraordinarily close relationship, more like that of a lover, with his mother. Lawrence himself confessed to Jessie Chambers: “I’ve loved her like a lover that’s why I could never love you”. Similarly, in Sons and Lovers, Mrs. Morel happens to be the central force in Paul’s life. Paul cannot break free from his mother in order to establish some sort of normal relationship with any other woman in his life. Graham Hough in his discussions of Sons and Lovers in The Dark Sun says that “the whole situation in the novel presents the Freudian Oedipus imbroglio in classic completeness.” Disillusioned with her husband Walter Morel, Mrs Morel gradually casts him off and takes her two sons William and Paul as husband substitutes one after the other, thus wrecking their emotional life. Mrs. Morel turns to William first because he is older; he is nearer to a manhood; she saw him as a man, young full of vigour, making the world glow again for her” (chapter 3). In him she see the chance of fulfilling all those aspirations—social, intellectual, and emotional— that her marriage with Morel had crushed. William, unlike his father is clever, ambitious, and intelligent and he has the intellectual qualities of his mother: he can enter the outside world from which she has been excluded by her unsuitable marriage. He begins to move in social circles nearer to those of his mother’s youth. More important is the first development of tension between Mrs. Morel and William. Shortly after William’s death the final stage of Mrs. Morel’s final shift of her central love to Paul takes place. Mrs. Morel, since the funeral, has withdrawn from life and begins to lose the will to live. But Paul

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falls ill: his mother lies in bed with him. He wakes, feeling him that he is dying: “I’ll die mother! He cried …oh my son, my son “. Mrs Morel had conceived Paul unwillingly out of a loveless relation and dreaded his birth. She was afraid that he might be unhealthy or malformed. But the child lay there in her arms and pulling at her heart and „she felt as if the naval string that had connected its frail little body with hers had not been broken‟. And she decided that „with all her force, with all soul, she would make up to it for having brought it into the world unloved. She would love it all the more now it was here, carry it in her love.” The situation presented here is quiet analogous to the much dreaded portents in the beginning of some Greek tragedy; surely it proves quiet ominous. As Paul grows up, he sticks to his mother and trots after her like her shadow. She too clings to him and encourages him into an abject contempt of his father. He loves to sleep with his mother. Once when he is ill, he lay against her, and slept, and got better; whilst she, always a bad sleeper, fell later on into a profound sleep that seemed to give her faith.‟ Now, often at the sight of his mother, Paul‟s heart contracts with love". She is his intimate, his confidante. He exists for her, and whatever he does, does for her. When Morel is confined to the hospital through an accident, he joyfully plays the husband: “I’m the man in the house now.” He is happiest when alone with her and “in the end she shared everything with him, without knowing...... she waited for his coming home in the evening, and then she unburdened herself of all she had pondered or of all that had occurred to her during the day. He sat and listened with his earnestness. The two shared lives.” According to Freud, the Oedipus complex remains dormant for a few years after the early infantile psycho-sexual development and is reanimated at the time of puberty. In the case of Paul, the early migration to London of William helps in a „quickening‟ of his fixation for his mother, though it is finally recognised only when Paul is down with severe attack of pneumonia after William‟s death. Mrs Morel lies with him at nights and tightens her grip over his soul in a desperate bid to save him from the clutches of death. It is during this illness that Paul "realises" his mother and he is precisely at the age of puberty. Sons and Lovers has been described as the first Freudian novel in English. It does present the Freudian Oedipus Complex, but the concept of its story was not altered by Freud’s theories. Lawrence had already completed the final draft of his novel before he became acquainted with the ideas of Freud. In 1912, when Lawrence was in Germany, Freud was one of the topics commonly discussed with Frieda but, since Lawrence was trying to understand his own experience, it is most unlikely that he altered the story to conform to the theories of Freud. Graham Hough is right when he says that Freud could and almost certainly did do is to set a theoretical seal on

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a situation that had been very thoroughly explored in actuality. (source https://www.sryahwapublications.com/annals-of-language-and-literature/pdf/v3-i3/2.pdf)

Critical Comments

That Lawrence was one of the greatest and most original of English writers, Mr Littlewood and I believe, I think, equally. We also agree that his antennae-like sensibility was almost uniquely delicate and far-reaching, that his intelligence was brilliantly strong (but 'I don't wear the wheelbarrow on my head', said Lawrence) and that sensibility and intelligence were fostered and disciplined by the central tradition of England, into which he had the good fortune to be born and by which he was educated; we agree that these qualities and circumstances make Lawrence in most ways the most necessary, the most invigorating, the most life-giving influence in twentieth century English literature; we agree also in deploring with sinking hearts the low state of letters in England at present, of which recent criticisms of Lawrence are a most depressing symptom. Nevertheless, Lawrence has faults which, in my opinion, must be recognised and insulated by criticism that is neither ignorant nor envious nor cowardly, so that the living part of his genius may not be damaged by them...

D. H. LAWRENCE CHRISTINA VAN HEYNINGEN Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, No. 8 (1956), pp. 71-78 Berghahn Books

Of D. H. Lawrence's twelve novels, his third, Sons and Lovers, has been subjected to by far the most extensive psychoanalytic scrutiny, and understandably so.1 Carol Sklenicka goes so far as to call it "the novel that brought English literature into the psychoanalytic age". Indeed, Lawrence's future wife Frieda's influence on the final draft of the novel is thought to have infused it with then little known Freudian concepts, the fruit of her recent intimacy with Otto Gross. Furthermore, Lawrence himself unwittingly encouraged a psychoanalytic reading by statements, stretching back to when the novel was first conceived, that alternately seem to justify and to reject such an interpretation, an ambivalence that is, inevitably, additional grist to the psychoanalytic mill where denial is often a form of admission. To Rachel Annand Taylor, for example, he wrote a letter in December 1910, shortly before his mother's death, that describes his parents' marriage and his own relationship to them in distinctly oedipal

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terms: hatred of his father "has been a kind of bond between me and my mother. We have loved each other, almost with a husband and wife love". However, in a letter to Barbara Low in September 1916, Lawrence objects to Alfred Kuttner's newly published Freudian review of his novel: "My poor book: it was as art, a fairly complete truth: so they carve a half lie out of it, and say 'Voilà'. Swine!" Actually, Kuttner's essay was perceptive for its time and retains, even today, some persuasive power, although it and other early Freudian readings of the novel have been somewhat superseded by more nuanced psychoanalytic interpretations in keeping with the general developments in psychoanalysis and in Lawrence criticism.3 The oedipal readings of Sons and Lovers may be said to have culminated with Daniel Weiss's Oedipus in Nottingham: D. H. Lawrence (1962) and have since given way to a gradually formed consensus among psychologically oriented critics that the oedipal configuration, undoubtedly present, is but an interesting veneer that tends at times to obscure a much deeper and more significant pattern of pre-oedipal issues. For Margaret Storch, for example, the surface oedipal pattern "conceals a fundamental antagonism towards the mother". Much as Lawrence claimed, then, the oedipal reading gets us only so far. Although, according to the Freudian paradigm, the oedipal phase is part of normal (male) childhood development, in a sense there is really little reason for oedipal hostility between father and son in Sons and Lovers. As James Cowan writes: "since the mother no longer loves her husband, the infant son [Paul], early in the oral incorporative stage, has already effectively won the oedipal rivalry with his father". In fact, the battle for the affection of the mother was won even before Paul's birth by his older brother, William, whose mantle of lover-son Paul inherits after William's untimely death Critics such as Cowan, Storch, Judith Ruderman, and Barbara Ann Schapiro have delved into the pre-oedipal issues involved in Lawrence's writing in great detail, and I agree with many of their claims. My formulation of the argument is that what we have, not only in Sons and Lovers but also in virtually all of Lawrence's fiction, is a persistent exploration of the complexities of attachment, particularly the tug-of-war between two approach-avoidance options that are mutually exclusive at the extremes. The first option, symbiosis or merger, is attended by the threat of the loss of self integrity; the second, separation or individuation, is accompanied by the fear of isolation or abandonment. Both options have their powerful attractions in different life situations, but as an exclusive relational position each is also frightening; the ideal is to have what Lawrence termed a "trembling balance" between them ("Morality and the Novel" 528, 529).4 In Margaret S. Mahler's coinage, the normal progression in attachment development is a multi-stage process of "separation individuation" that takes the child from a

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necessary initial symbiotic fusion with the mother (3), through a "rapprochement" phase, and finally to a sense of autonomy (77). Although such relations sound and are, indeed, interpersonal, it is important to recognize that the attachment process crucially involves, in Mary Ainsworth's words, "representation in the internal organization of the individual".

"HIS FATHER'S DIRTY DIGGING": RECUPERATING THE MASCULINE IN D. H. LAWRENCE'S"SONS AND LOVERS" Ronald Granofsky Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Summer 2009), pp. 242-264

Questions

1. Character of Miriam 2. Comment on the disappearance of Walter Morel from the novel Sons and Lovers. 3. Analyse Sons and Lovers as a Modernist moment. 4. Discuss the issue of Oedipus Complex as projected in the novel Sons and Lovers at the subtextual level. 5. Character of Mrs. Morel.

References Hough, Graham. The Dream and The Reality. London, Duckworth, 1963. Hough, Graham. Two Exiles: Lord Byron & D.H. Lawrence Nottingham: Nottingham Press, 1956. Hough, Graham. The Dark Sun: A Study of D. H. Lawrence 1961. Puthranmarum Kaaminimarum, By: D H Lawrence, translated by Vaikom Vivekanandan Publisher: National Book Stall, 2013. Worthen, John and Andrew Harrison, eds. D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers: A Casebook. Oxford U P, 2005. Lalal, D. S. A Critique of D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers. New Delhi, IVY Publishing House. 2005. Print.

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James Joyce - : A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

It is an autobiographical novel by James Joyce, published in one volume in 1916. It was originally published in serial form in The Egoist, February 1914-September 1915. Joyce puts a meaningful epigraph at the beginning: Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes, which means “And he sent forth his spirit among the unknown arts”, taken from Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII., 188.

James Joyce was born on 2nd February 1882 in a suburb of Dublin. He was the oldest of ten children. The family was Roman Catholic and middle class and Joyce was sent to a famous private college in County Kildare, for his education. When the family got into financial difficulty, Joyce returned to Dublin and attended a free school for a while, until he was given a free place at Belvedere College, another private school. In 1902, Joyce graduated from University College, Dublin with a degree in Modern Languages. Joyce was always interested in languages and had a working knowledge of Irish, English, French, German, Italian and Latin, at this stage in his life. As a young man, he also studied Norwegian, so that he could read the works of Ibsen. Later he studied many more languages, including Hebrew, Chinese and Japanese. In 1903, he moved to Paris in order to study medicine, but soon moved home when his mother became ill. After his mother died, Joyce published some of his stories in Irish magazines, although they were not very well-received. In 1904, he met Nora Barnacle, from the west of Ireland and they left Ireland together. Joyce taught English in Trieste (now in Italy) and Pola(now in Croatia) and worked in a bank in Rome for a short time. On one of his trips back to Dublin, he started a cinema company there. It failed, and in 1912, he visited Dublin for the last time. Joyce and Nora Barnacle’s two children, Giorgio and Lucia, were born in Trieste. During the First World War, Joyce and his family lived in Zurich and, when the war was over, they moved again, this time to Paris. Throughout these years, Joyce had problems with his sight and had a number of operations. When Paris was occupied by German forces in 1940, the family returned to Zurich, where Joyce died in January 1941 after an operation. Joyce’s best-known works are Dubliners, Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and his final novel, Finnegans Wake. He also wrote a number of essays, poetry and his play, Exiles. Many readers think that Ulysses is Joyce’s greatest work. It is a highly innovative novel, based on the thoughts and actions of its central characters on one day, June

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16th 1904. The date is interesting, as it was the day Joyce and Nora Barnacle first walked around Dublin together. Throughout Ulysses, Joyce experiments with different techniques, such as stream of consciousness, varying literary styles, heavy use of literary and classical references, as well as obsessive detail about Dublin itself. He continued this experimentation with Finnegans Wake, which is considered Joyce’s most difficult novel. (source https://klett.hu/download/DUBLINERS_web.pdf)

Stephen Dedalus (generally considered as representing Joyce), an intelligent but frail child, struggles towards maturity in Ireland at the turn of the century. The novel traces his intellectual, moral, and artistic development from babyhood to the completion of his education at University College, Dublin. Critics consider A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a Bildungsroman (the psychological, moral or social development of a central character) novel that evolves in a Künstlerroman (the growth of an artist from childhood to maturity and the recognition of his/her artistic destiny) one.

Stephen’s individuality is put to constraints by many levels of convention, dictated by the family, Catholicism and Irish nationalism. As a child he witnesses a fiery political dispute between the supporters of Parnell and anti-Parnellites, and suffers unjust punishment at the hands of a stupid and brutal priest, Father Dolan. Adolescent sexuality causes him moral torment, and this is exacerbated at a school ‘retreat’ where he hears Father Arnall’s famous ‘hell fire’ sermon. Rejecting the call to the priesthood, Stephen begins to assert his own identity. At University College he embraces the wider and more rewarding world of literature, philosophy and aesthetics, and by the end of the novel he has freed himself from the claims of family, church and state. He resolves to leave Ireland for Paris to encounter ‘the reality of experience’ and to forge ‘the uncreated conscience’ of his race.

The novel was developed from an earlier work, Stephen Hero, which Joyce had begun in 1904. Part of this earlier work survived and was published in 1944, edited by T.Spencer. Stephen Dedalus re-appears as one of the principal characters in Ulysses (1992).

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, also known as Stephen Hero is actually a fragment of an independent book ‘Stephen Hero’. After writing A Portrait, Joyce had destroyed most of the material of ‘Stephen Hero’. There are several events in the remaining material of Stephen Hero that is not utilised in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for example, the death of Stephen’s sister. The left-out portion of Stephen Hero deals with about two years of Stephen’s life at the university and may perhaps more appropriately be called a portrait of the

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young artist than the work which at present enjoys a title of this significance. In the manuscript of Joyce there are 383 pages that correspond to the last 93 pages of A Portrait. In both, Stephen is the same-poor, arrogant, lonely and young. For example, in one book, Hero is invited to write an essay for the college magazine and wants to know whether he could get something for his contribution, while in the other he is asked to sign a memorandum for world peace and asks: “Will you pay me anything if I sigh.” The major distinguishing feature between the two books is that in A Portrait there is practically nothing of the writer’s comment. : In the Portrait .... from start to end there is not a single comment or generalisation; every thought, every feeling is particularly Stephen’s. Now and then, to be sure, the author reports as author, but he never comments.” ‘It was the very spirit of Ibsen himself,’ Joyce wrote in Stephen Hero, ‘that was discerned moving behind the impersonal manner of the artist’; so again to be certain, it is Joyce’s spirit that is discerned moving behind the objective manner of the artist of A Portrait. The transformation of Stephen Hero into A Portrait presents the progression from the novel of partisan manager to that of the invisible and impersonal director. To sum up, it could be said that Stephen Hero is an absorbing document, exact, explicit and characterized by a fullness of statement that Joyce neglected in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a very strange and exotic title for a novel, and at first glance the articles in this title appear to be put rather irrationally, but a closer observation would reveal that the title is a very significant one and that the articles are indeed accurate. Joyce himself notified conspicuously that the last four words in the title wre significant and should not be neglected. Actually, this was earlier done by some of the earlier critics of the book. Interpreting the appropriateness of the title, William M. Schutte stresses that the novel presents the portrait of the artist, and not just any artist. The next problem, however, emerges out of the words ‘the artist’. Does it imply Joyce himself, and is the book to be estimated as the autobiography of Joyce, or is it that Joyce has built the particular artist the subject of his novel? One of Joyce’s remarks to his friend reveals his intention of making the novel a self- portrait: “I haven’t let this young man off very lightly, have I? Many writers have written about themselves. I wonder if any of them has been as candid as I have.” Most of the previous readers, reviewers and critics of Joyce regarded the novel as a self portraiture. “Many of its incidents closely parallel incidents in Joyce’s life. What is more, Joyce’s schoolfellows at Clongowes Wood school became Stephen’s school fellows at Clongowes Wood under their real names; men still walking Dublin’s streets also walked through the

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Portrait bearing their own names; and numerous well-known Dublin figures, including Joyce’s mother and father and some of his university friends, were immediately recognisable beneath their pseudonyms. Small wonder that the early reviewers saw the book as a thinly disguised autobiography.”

Joyce was very specific about providing a formal structure to his novels; this is the reason why his major novels have a compact and precise form. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is divided into five chapters and all of them end with a note of balance or ‘stasis’. It has been said that each chapter starts with a series of thematic statements; but it does not appear justified to ratify this view, though it is convincing in the context of chapter one, where the themes of paternity, religion, apology, punishment and song are all encompassed in the first two pages. Joyce defined this novel as “the curve of an emotion”. All the five chapters present five versions of the same curve, proceeding from various different experiences, through conflicts to a state of ephemeral peace, when-to use Stephen’s words-”the mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.” As an artist, Joyce feels satisfied in the organisation of his sensible and intelligible matter for an aesthetic end. And once one understands the pattern of the novel, our admiration for it is heightened.

Elizabeth Drew says that the “structure of the novel, as critics have pointed out, is in the form of a series of trial flights. At the end of each chapter, Stephen makes some assertion of his own identity which frees him for a time from the particular outer and inner pressures of confusion and despair which constrict him. The diary form at the end of the book, in spite of much of its “flip” tone of cynicism, hints of doubts and wavering distrust.” Chapter one deals with the childhood of Stephen in Bray and Clongowes. It closes with the proud victory of Stephen over Father Dolan’s wrong cruel punishment. Chapter two interprets the events in Blackrock, Dublin, Belvedere College and Cork. It deals with Stephen’s slow detachment from his family and his surroundings. His romantic imagination reaches its climax ironically when he visits a prostitute. The truth that Stephen really feels the need of being held firmly in her arms’ suggests that he is still a child who needs comfort and care. But the chapter ends with another kind of stasis-the ‘swoon of sin.’ Chapter third opens with references to all the seven deadly sins and concentrates on the sermons depicting the horrible picture of hell. Stephen’s repentance and communion gives another moment, this time of pious calm as the concluding note of equilibrium.

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At the opening of chapter four, Stephen is leading a pure life but he rejects the offer given by the rector to become a priest. His homely life has become wretched, but his father makes arrangements for him to join the university. His quest for beauty finds its objective when he sees the bird-girl on the sea-shore; and his swoon of pleasure provides another end of the chapter in stasis. In the opening scene of the last chapter, emphasis is laid on the wretchedness of Stephen’s home as he looks at the louse-marked lid of the box of pawn- tickets. Then follows the discussion with Davin on patriotism. He discusses art or aesthetic theory with the Dean of Studies. Thereafter, he talks about international politics with Cranly, patriotism with Davin, with Lynch he discusses art and with Cranly, religion. Throughout these discussions and conversations Stephen tries to justify his own point; and ultimately he concludes that in order to do so, he must accept the state of exile. The novel finally closes with another note of stasis as Stephen gets ready to quit his family and country.

CHAPTER -1

First recollections and impressions

The beginning of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man depicts the earliest impressions of an infant. These impressions are represented in a language that carries associations of haphazard experience and the supremacy of outward impressions symbolical of the baby’s mind. The child remembers with peculiar acuteness, sights and sounds, smells, colours and noises. A few incidents of his very young life pass temporarily before us. There is the incident in which the child Stephen listens about a ‘moo-cow’. The opening sentence, “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo” sets an example. There is another instance of the child recalling how he once wetted his bed, and how mother sang to him. It seems that the child has arrived at the stage where it has become easy for him to systematize and evaluate some of these experiences.

The Dedalus Family

Then is introduced the family of Dedalus. There is Simon Dedalus, the father of Stephen. His mother’s name is May Dedalus. Living with them are a few relatives like uncle Charles and Mrs. Riordan (called Aunt Dante). There is also an introduction of the girl, Eileen Vance whom Stephen wants to marry.

Stephen’s School Experiences

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There is a deep impression on the mind of Stephen of his first school experiences. He was sent to a boarding school named Clongowes Wood College. Stephen recollects how he bade farewell to his parents when he first left for the school. He also recalls that playground where he played football. He recollects the ways his friends taunted him: He sat in a corner of the playroom pretending to watch a game of dominos and once or twice he was able to hear for an instant the little song of the gas. The prefect was at the door with some boys and Simon Moonan was knotting his false sleeves. He was telling them something about Tullabeg. Then he went away from the door and Wells came over to Stephen and said: —Tell us, Dedalus, do you kiss your mother before you go to bed? Stephen answered: —I do. Wells turned to the other fellows and said: —O, I say, here’s a fellow says he kisses his mother every night before he goes to bed. The other fellows stopped their game and turned round, laughing. Stephen blushed under their eyes and said: —I do not. Wells said: —O, I say, here’s a fellow says he doesn’t kiss his mother before he goes to bed. They all laughed again. Stephen tried to laugh with them. He felt his whole body hot and confused in a moment. What was the right answer to the question? He had given two and still Wells laughed. But Wells must know the right answer for he was in third of grammar. He remembers the school library and the evening prayer. When he caught cold, he had to take resort in the school infirmary and Brother Michael looked after him. There he met Athy, the son of a race horse owner. Stephen is too frightened and disheartened and fears that he is going to die. He recollects the song that Brigid taught him … “Dingdong! The castle bell! Farewell, my mother!” He somehow comforts himself with the thought that if he died prematurely, even the notorious Wells would be filled with repentance and remorse. Stephen is almost in delirium and recalls the story of a ghost that his old servants had told him.

Christmas Dinner

Stephen recalls very clearly the Christmas that he spent at home with his mother and father. Stephen had grown up and it was for the first time that he was permitted to sit at table with the elderly people. At dinner an argument started on politics. As the argument became more heated, May Dedalus did her best to maintain order and to calm them down but all in vain. Ultimately the dinner was spoilt and it left painful memories in the mind of Stephen. The main subject of the discussion had been the Irish patriot Parnell whose death had recently come to their knowledge. Mr. Casey was a steadfast supporter of Parnell and thought that Parnell had been treated badly by the Irish Catholic Church. The cause for the condemnation

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of Parnell was that he had kept a mistress. Aunt Dante was in support of the Catholic Church and became too furious at the criticism of the church. She left the room out of anger banging the door behind her. Dante stared across the table, her cheeks shaking. Mr Casey struggled up from his chair and bent across the table towards her, scraping the air from before his eyes with one hand as though he were tearing aside a cobweb.

—No God for Ireland! he cried. We have had too much God in Ireland. Away with God!

—Blasphemer! Devil! screamed Dante, starting to her feet and almost spitting in his face.

Uncle Charles and Mr Dedalus pulled Mr Casey back into his chair again, talking to him from both sides reasonably. He stared before him out of his dark flaming eyes, repeating: —Away with God, I say!

Dante shoved her chair violently aside and left the table, upsetting her napkinring which rolled slowly along the carpet and came to rest against the foot of an easychair. Mrs Dedalus rose quickly and followed her towards the door. At the door Dante turned round violently and shouted down the room, her cheeks flushed and quivering with rage:

—Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend!

Stephen’s friend, Eileen

Stephen remembers the girl Eileen. Once he had put her ivory coloured hand into his own pocket, then they started playing together. He had been threatened for playing with her because she was a Protestant, but he somehow associated her with the Virgin Mary, and phrases used by the Catholics to describe Virgin Mary got linked with Eileen in Stephen’s mind.

Eileen had long thin cool white hands too because she was a girl. They were like ivory; only soft. That was the meaning of Tower of Ivory but protestants could not understand it and made fun of it. One day he had stood beside her looking into the hotel grounds. A waiter was running up a trail of bunting on the flagstaff and a fox terrier was scampering to and fro on the sunny lawn. She had put her hand into his pocket where his hand was and he had felt how cool and thin and soft her hand was. She had said that pockets were funny things to have: and then all of a sudden she had broken away and had run laughing down the sloping curve of the path. Her fair hair had streamed out behind her like gold in the sun. Tower of Ivory. House of Gold. By thinking of things you could understand them. Punishment at School

Stephen recalls how he was wrongly punished at school by his Latin teacher. Stephen’s spectacles were broken, thus he had been unable to study. Though Stephen had explained this to the Latin teacher, Father Dolan, yet he made fun of him and used his pandybat for striking

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on his hand. Stephen felt extemely disgraced. Other boys pressed him to meet the Rector and report against Father Dolan; Stephen did that. The Rector had shown sympathy and assured Stephen that this would not happen again.

CHAPTER - 2

The role of Uncle Charles

Uncle Charles was all the time smoking tobacco through the pipe. Simon Dedalus did not like the strong smell of tobacco, it seemed to him like gunpowder and he declared that Uncle Charles should smoke his pipe outside the house. Uncle Charles accepted this disgrace with joy. During the summer vacation Uncle Charles became the regular companion of Stephen when he came home for the vacation. Both went for shopping or to the park where a former athlete Mike Flynn would give Stephen running lessons. At this time Stephen also took delight in the world of books. His dearest book was The Count of Monte Cristo.

His evenings were his own; and he pored over a ragged translation of The Count of Monte Cristo. The figure of that dark avenger stood forth in his mind for whatever he had heard or divined in childhood of the strange and terrible. At night he built up on the parlour table an image of the wonderful island cave out of transfers and paper flowers and coloured tissue paper and strips of the silver and golden paper in which chocolate is wrapped. When he had broken up this scenery, weary of its tinsel, there would come to his mind the bright picture of Marseilles, of sunny trellises and of Mercedes.

Education Discontinued

The economic condition of Mr. Dedalus had so deteriorated that he decided that Stephen should not go back to the expensive school. Several alterations took place in the household to effect economy and it caused great depression to Stephen. He started taking resort in reveries and dreamt about the time when he would become a man, a mature and experienced man.

Sometimes a fever gathered within him and led him to rove alone in the evening along the quiet avenue. The peace of the gardens and the kindly lights in the windows poured a tender influence into his restless heart. The noise of children at play annoyed him and their silly voices made him feel, even more keenly than he had felt at Clongowes, that he was different from others. He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment,

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he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment. Joining New Institution

As a consequence of the influence exercised by Stephen’s father, Stephen and his younger brother were sent to a new preparatory school that was named ‘Belvedere College’. Now Stephen felt himself quite superior, and this sense of superiority is projected in his behaviour towards the other boys of the school. Stephen and Heron became the unrivalled heroes of the school. One of the teachers of Stephen accused him of heresy in one of his weekly essays. Stephen was openly scolded for this. Some boys decided to punish Stephen for his heresy. They gripped him for a few days after the public humiliation of Stephen. Stephen was stopped by three boys when he was walking along the road. These boys were Heron, Boland and Nash. These boys interrogated Stephen as to whom he thought was the best poet or the best prose writer. Stephen told them that he liked Byron a lot as a poet, and that he regarded Cardinal Newman as the greatest prose writer. The boys said that Byron was heretical and immoral. They persisted that he should take back his opinion about the eminence of Byron but Stephen would not do that. He refused, and was thus beaten by them callously with a cane and a cabbage stump.

The Play at School

Stephen remembers the night when a play was staged in his school. His mind was again pervaded by the girl of his fancy. He imagined that she was sitting among the audience. It filled him with shame to perform his part because he felt that his role was a disgraceful one. His role was of a humorous teacher. After the play he ran away, anguished, humiliated and full of “wounded pride.”

He remained standing with his two companions at the end of the shed listening idly to their talk or to the bursts of applause in the theatre. She was sitting there among the others perhaps waiting for him to appear. He tried to recall her appearance but could not. He could remember only that she had worn a shawl about her head like a cowl and that her dark eyes had invited and unnerved him. He wondered had he been in her thoughts as she had been in his. Then in the dark and unseen by the other two he rested the tips of the fingers of one hand upon the palm of the other hand, scarcely touching it lightly. But the pressure of her fingers had been lighter and steadier: and suddenly the memory of their touch traversed his brain and body like an invisible wave. Stephen went to the city of Cork with his father. Mr. Dedalus was going there to dispose of some of his property but he also wanted his son to be familiar with the places where he spent his childhood. In the course of the journey he talked constantly about his friends of old days.

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During his talk he, now and then, took a gulp of brandy from his flask. Stephen was getting terribly bored with his conversation and at the end fell off to sleep. In Cork, Stephen’s father took him to the college where he had studied. The name of his college was the Queen’s College. He was taken round the campus. His father told him several stories about his classmates that he had narrated to him innumerable times before. On the whole, this visit was full of boredom for Stephen.

His mind seemed older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth. No life or youth stirred in him as it had stirred in them. He had known neither the pleasure of companionship with others nor the vigour of rude male health nor filial piety. Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust. His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul capable of simple joys and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon. Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless...? He repeated to himself the lines of Shelley’s fragment. Its alternation of sad human ineffectiveness with vast inhuman cycles of activity chilled him and he forgot his own human and ineffectual grieving. Stephen won the essay contest and got a prize. “When they had passed into the great hall and stood at the counter Stephen drew forth his orders on the governor of the bank of Ireland for thirty and three pounds; and these sums, the moneys of his exhibition and essay prize, were paid over to him rapidly by the teller in notes and in coin respectively”. He spent the money to give pleasure and entertainment to his family that was facing ill-days. He took them to theatre and bought expensive gifts for them. Thus it was a momentary excursion for them and soon after that they were back to their old world of poverty.

A Moral Sin

Stephen’s mind was filled with intense longings and he wanted to go away from the gloomy and monotonous atmosphere of his school as well as his home.

He returned to his wanderings...His blood was in revolt. He wandered up and down the dark slimy streets peering into the gloom of lanes and doorways, listening eagerly for any sound. He moaned to himself like some baffled prowling beast. He wanted to sin with another of his kind, to force another being to sin with him and to exult with her in sin. He felt some dark presence moving irresistibly upon him from the darkness, a presence subtle and murmurous as a flood filling him wholly with itself. Its murmur besieged his ears like the murmur of some multitude in sleep; its subtle streams penetrated his being. His hands clenched convulsively and his teeth set together as he suffered the agony of its penetration. He stretched out his arms in the street to hold fast the frail swooning form that eluded him and incited him: and the cry that he had strangled for so long in his throat issued from his lips.

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One night while wandering in the streets, he reached a brothel. He saw a woman standing at the door of her home. She stopped him and invited him lovingly to her place. Stephen surrendered his body to that woman.

CHAPTER - 3

Stephen’s Self-Estimation

While sitting in the classroom Stephen’s mind was taking delight in the thoughts of that evening when he had taken meal and pleasure in the brothel. As he contemplated over this sinful act he had to admit that he was leading a torn life and putting his soul to the danger of eternal damnation. Yet he knew he was not going to repent, because he felt “a dark peace had been established between his body and soul.” He had stopped going to Mass but still offered prayers to Mother Mary.

Three day retreat

In honour of the patron saint of the school, Saint Francis Xavier, a three day retreat was to be observed. During retreat the master encouraged them to observe meditative silence. He also talked to them about death and damnation. Stephen felt that every word was particularly addressed to him. He recalled all the sins he had committed, big or small. He remembered the obscene pictures that he kept and the indecent letters which he wrote and left out in the anticipation that some girl would read them.

Sin, remember, is a twofold enormity. It is a base consent to the promptings of our corrupt nature to the lower instincts, to that which is gross and beastlike; and it is also a turning away from the counsel of our higher nature, from all that is pure and holy, from the Holy God Himself. For this reason mortal sin is punished in hell by two different forms of punishment, physical and spiritual. The most horrifying lecture was the one on hell. The speaker had vividly described all the torments that the body was put to in hell. Stephen felt great terror. He felt as though he were already dead and going through the very same torments mentioned by the speaker, but the presence of the teacher and his friends convinced him that he was still alive. Stephen knew there was no escape. He had to confess, but dreaded the thought of doing so among his school companions. The final lecture was regarding the spiritual tortures that the damned have to face in hell. The speaker explained that the first such torture they had to face was that of a sense of loss, for they must understand that their sin had deprived them of God’s loving care. The second plight they had to suffer was that of deep regret. The third plight would be the acknowledgement that their suffering was endless, infinite and beyond the limits of time. He

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described this by giving the instance of a bird who carried away a grain of sand from the mountain of sand once in every million years. In God’s eye even a single sin counts. This lecture had terribly shaken Stephen. He tried to examine his conscience but felt incapable of the task. In the evening he went to a nearby old priest and confessed all his sins. Thereafter he felt greatly unburdened and relieved. He received Holy Communion the next morning and decided firmly to lead a new life.

CHAPTER-4 Purgation

Stephen’s understanding of the nature of sin made him adopt a routine of great piety. He went through many purificatory exercises and subjected his body to mortification to conquer himself. He daily attended Mass, offered prayers and recited the rosary that he always carried in his pocket. He found himself successful in bringing all the senses under control through this tough process of discipline. He started to believe in the reality of love, for it appeared to him that God had forgiven him and bestowed grace only because of his love for sinful humanity. Stephen’s control over his emotion, however, was still suspect, akin to interior monologue: “Every word of it was for him. Against his sin, foul and secret. Sometimes doubts entered his mind, sometimes within him was still dragging him towards sin, and that one act of sin would undo all the spiritual progress that he had made through great perseverance and torment. The director of the school was highly impressed by the discipline and pious routine of Stephen. He suggested to Stephen the vocation of a priest and asked him if he would like to join in. For a while priesthood seemed very attractive but later reflection convinced Stephen that he was under an illusion and that he must drop the idea of becoming a priest. He was able to persuade himself to quit his idea about priesthood. He also began to have fresh fears that he might fall from the graceful state for it was with extreme difficulty that one was capable of averting such a downfall even for the shortest time. He also remembered that his family was making a great sacrifice for his education and it made him feel bad for his brothers and sisters. His family was under great debt yet Stephen’s father was determined to educate him at the university.

Epiphany

Stephen was walking by the seashore. As his friends called out his name to invite him for a swim, Stephen, at once, recollected that Dedalus, his namesake, was a ‘famous artificer in Greek mythology’. He imagined himself soaring up in the sky, and the thought made him shiver with thrill. He felt anew the strong urge to live life fully and it seemed that his soul had

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suddenly risen from the grave where it lay imprisoned during his boy hood. His movement into the water is symbolical of his journey of self discovery. He saw a beautiful girl in front of him in the water. Stephen gazed at her face for a considerable length of time. He felt a spiritual change in him. Stephen was suddenly capable of seeing himself and his life with all the possible clarity. He now, realized how he must live his life.

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slateblue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird’s, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some darkplumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face. She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and a faint flame trembled on her cheek. —Heavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy. He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him. Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on! His Friends

Stephen had developed close friendship with a companion named Cranly who shares most of his aesthetic and literary interests. Actually their relation is more like that of a priest and a disciple. Stephen shared all his desires and aspirations without any restraint to Cranly. Another friend of Stephen’s named Davin was an Irish patriot. Stephen has a rather low opinion of his intelligence. Still he feels great attraction for this man, because he speaks a very picturesque language that is a blend of quaint Elizabethan expressions and forceful Irish idioms. Stephen begins to consciously follow Davin’s style. He and Davin have a wonderful encounter when they go out together for a walk one evening. Stephen discussed with the

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Dean of studies the relative claims of the fine arts and useful arts. Their talk took the form of the nature and goal of art. Stephen said that the target of an artist was to create something beautiful, which he explained as those things whose perception gives pleasure to the mind. The aesthetic theory of Stephen is largely derived from Aquinas. He thought that a true artist’s concern is with the beautiful only whereas the productive artist’s job is the production of good and useful things. He believed that art must produce a stasis and it should only end in the satisfaction of the beholder’s aesthetic senses. Art that produces kinesis is only useful art, like rhetoric and not poetry like fine art. The vision of the beautiful needs integritas, consonantia and claritas. All art can be ranked among the three categories-lyrical, epical, and dramatic. That beautiful girl whom Stephen had seen on the sea beach perpetually haunts his imagination. He writes a poem on her. Watching the birds flying high in the sky, Stephen again recalls Dedalus and imagines himself soaring like his mythical hero. It appears to him as an unavoidable requirement to quit his home, religion and nationality in order to achieve perfect freedom. Stephen follows the girl over a little distance.

Chapter-5

University Education

Stephen now joins the University. One morning Stephen is getting late for the class. His father shouts at him for his slackness. His mother also says that University life has changed Stephen. Stephen has now become a grown-up, matured intellectual who completely indulges in the quest for beauty and the essence of art. Cranly, Stephen’s companion, shares his aesthetic interests. Cranly has a serious nature in contrast to Stephen’s other friends at the university. These friends are referred to throughout the chapter and their several encounters are described. For example, Davin, an ardent Irish patriot, is considered by Stephen to be a “dull-witted loyal self.” But Stephen who was obsessed with language found himself trapped by Davin’s speech- “an interesting mixture of Elizabethan English and quaint Irish idioms. Davin’s description of an incident after a hurling match provides Joyce with an opportunity to demonstrate his proficiency in imitating the Irish vernacular speech.” The incident is in reference to a lonely walk home late at night when Davin stops at an isolated cottage to ask for water. A peasant woman who opens the door scares the young student by her mysterious behaviour and her keen request that he should get in and spend the night there. He leaves the house quickly but fails to forget this incident. On reaching the University, Stephen goes to the physics theatre and meets the Dean of studies who is lighting a fire in the hearth. Now

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follows a discussion in which they discuss the useful arts as against liberal arts. This leads to a theoretical conversation on the artist’s goal. Stephen says that the target of the artist must be the creation of the beautiful. The Dean asks what he considers beautiful. Stephen answers with a quote from St. Thomas Aquinas, “Those things are beautiful the perception of which pleases.” Stephen is sincerely trying to evolve a clear conception of the fundamental questions in art and literature. He tries to form his own aesthetic doctrine, and he uses various persons (the Dean, Cranly and Lynch) to examine his ideas. He tells the Dean that he uses Aquinas’ ideas as a lamp to light his own views. There can be no such thing as free thought because all thinking needs to be bound by its own laws. This conversation with the Dean ends as the Professor of physics and other students enter the hall, and the class begins.

His Classmates

When the class is over, Stephen meets Cranly. A group of students are involved in enlisting students to sign a petition for disarmament and world peace. Stephen says that he has no interest in this matter. Temple also walks off with Stephen and Cranly. Davin and Lynch accompany Stephen and Cranly to watch a hurling match. Stephen condemns the blind patriotism of Davin, stating that he does not share the other’s strong devotion to his country. “Ireland is an old sow that eats her farrow”, he says coldly. He is sure that one need not sacrifice anything for such a country. In fact, he has decided to leave it for good. Lynch and Stephen are parted and Stephen begins to hold forth on his aesthetic philosophy. His aesthetic doctrine which he calls “applied Aquinas”, is given below. Stephen’s Aesthetic Theory as Influenced by St. Aquinas

1. We can regard a thing as beautiful if its perception pleases. 2. The good is that towards which the appetite inclines. This suggests: (a) That creation of the beautiful is the only concern of a creative artist. (b) The interest of the productive artist is only in the production of good. Other aspects of Stephen’s doctrine are derived from Greek thought: 3. ‘Stasis’ must be produced through art; it must satisfy the aesthetic sense of the observer. ‘Stasis’ means balance or note of equilibrium. 4. Art must not be kinetic, that means it should not excite an emotion like desire or loathing. It is the function of useful art to produce such emotions. 5. Three things are essential for the perception of beauty; these also show the influence of Greek thought: (a) integritas or wholeness

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(b) consonantia or harmony (c) claritas or radiance To finish what I was saying about beauty, said Stephen, the most satisfying relations of the sensible must therefore correspond to the necessary phases of artistic apprehension. Find these and you find the qualities of universal beauty. Aquinas says: Ad pulcritudinem tria requiruntur integritas, consonantia, claritas. I translate it so: Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance. Stephen explains it through the instance of a basket. First, one sees the basket as one thing, then a thing with parts (harmony) and ultimately as that thing and not anything else. Stephen tells Lynch that beauty and truth produce a stasis in the observer’s mind. He quotes from Plato: “Beauty is the splendour of the truth”.

Stephen divides art into a development of three forms:

(1) Lyrical : The projection of the artist himself, his views or experiences.

(2) Epic : The image is present in close relation to the artist and to others.

(3) Dramatic: The image is presented in close relation to others. The personality of artist is refined out of existence in this type of art. It is totally impersonal or objective.

Lessing, said Stephen, should not have taken a group of statues to write of. The art, being inferior, does not present the forms I spoke of distinguished clearly one from another. Even in literature, the highest and most spiritual art, the forms are often confused. The lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion, a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who pulled at the oar or dragged stones up a slope. He who utters it is more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion. The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea. This progress you will see easily in that old English ballad Turpin Hero, which begins in the first person and ends in the third person. The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. As it starts raining, Lynch and Stephen return to the library of the college. Lynch points out Stephen’s girl as she walks off with her friends. Stephen watches her keenly from afar and pays no attention to Lynch’s talk. He is wrapped in the thoughts of this girl. One morning,

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Stephen wakes up to“tremulous morning knowledge, a morning inspiration.” Ecstatic, and full of passion, verses began to form in his mind. He manages to write a villanelle, complete with six stanzas, in honour of that girl. Stephen is standing on the steps of the library watching the birds flying in a circle over his head. It reminds him of the flight of Dedalus. Stephen decides firmly, that he would not only leave his family but also his religion and nationality. In contrast to Stephen’s seriousness other students are gayful and joyous. Stephen sees the girl again and pursues her for a short distance while Dixon, Cranly, Glynn and Temple discuss where unbaptized infants go when they die.

Stephen tells Cranly that he had argued about religion with his mother. She had told him to perform his Easter duty, that is to go to Mass and communion which Stephen refuses to do. He declares to Cranly the non serviam of Lucifer: “I will not serve”. The analytical Cranly marks the irony of Stephen’s inner involvement with a religion in which he does not believe any more. They discuss the parents of Stephen. He loves his mother but regards his father merely “a praiser of his own past”. Stephen does not want to hurt his mother but he cannot denounce his principles either. Cranly tells Stephen that he should not accept the request of his mother if he does not believe in the religious rituals. Stephen answers that he neither believes nor disbelieves, but admits that he is not adamant enough to disbelieve to risk making a sacrilegious communion. Stephen shows his respect for the rituals of church by refusing to observe them. He says that he does not want to become a protestant, ‘forsaking a logical and coherent absurdity for an illogical and incoherent one’. He decides that he must go far away to attain perfect spiritual freedom. Stephen is determined to sacrifice everything that comes in his way of attaining spiritual freedom. He declares that he cannot serve that in which he no longer believes whether it be home, church or country.

Stephen’s Diary

At the end of Chapter 5 a series of dated entries in Stephen’s diary is depicted which relate to his last moments before leaving Ireland. The date of first entry is March 20th and last one is April 27th. Stephen records his last meetings with Lynch, Cranly, and Davin and in brief, his thoughts and impressions. He tells his mother that he cannot go back to church; that he cannot repent. He describes his last meeting with his girl friend at which both feel disheartened. He turns on “his spiritual heroic refrigerating apparatus invented and patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri” thereby linking his prolonged romance with the unrealized ideal love and devotion of Dante to Beatrice. In the last entry, he invokes the old

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ancient artificer Daedalus, for inspiration : “Aril 26.... so be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. April 27..... old father, old artificer, stand by me now and ever in good stead.” Therefore, like Dedalus, Stephen spreads his wings to escape the labyrinth (jail) of Dublin and fly toward the realm of artistic freedom.

What you said, is it? Cranly asked. Yes, I remember it. To discover the mode of life or of art whereby your spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom. Stephen raised his hat in acknowledgement. The most conspicuous theme of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man lies in its title-the portraiture of the development of a young man as an artist. Besides, there are various secondary themes in the novel that are dealt with through recurrent symbols and motifs. For instance, the theme of the quest for a father substitute, the theme of flight and fall, the theme concerning the severance of cramping ties and the theme of the sacred nature of artistic creativity. The main content of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the development of a young Stephen from ‘creature’ to ‘creator’. The novel begins with the babyhood of Stephen to his decision to quit family, religion and country in pursuit of his true vocation of an artist. It essentially depicts the plight of an artist, his sensibility, his passion, his arrogance, his essential irresponsibility, his fights to raise himself above his mates. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is built on the proposition that art is a main artery in the body of life. All that nourishes art is living: All that stifles art is dead. Joyce works outwards from the conviction that the artist, as artist, must have no loyalties, must make no judgements except in distinguishing between what is relevant or irrelevant to his art. It is with art, not with him or his environment, that Joyce is pre-occupied in this book.”

The theme of the novel is that an artist is necessarily an individual who can develop only after being free of all assimilative predicaments and commitments in the external world. It is not relevant here to discuss whether Stephen can, on the basis of the villanelle be called a promising artist. Joyce is simply depicting the minimum conditions required for the nourishment of the will to create art. Stephen regards family, church and nationality as nets preventing the flight of the artistic soul. Stephen seeks unshaken and perfect freedom that is an essential requirement for the expression of his spirit. He is not ready to serve that in which he no longer believes, even if it is his family, religion or country; he would attempt to discover himself in some mode of life or art as liberally and as perfectly as he could, applying silence, exile and cunning as his weapons to defend himself. Stephen’s consciousness and

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mind are interesting not only in themselves but also because they possess a symbolic significance. “Our knowledge of Stephen is now going to come to us mediated through his own developing consciousness. That consciousness is to be the theatre of whatever drama the book attempts to present, and at the same time a territory sufficiently broad for the exercise of the vigorous naturalism which Joyce has been learning from continental masters.” Yet with a quite transparent naturalism he is no longer content and on the second page we find him putting inconspicuously into operation a different kind of machinery:

“The Vances lived in number seven. They had a different father and mother. They were Eileen’s father and mother. When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen. He hid under the table. His mother said: O, Stephen will apologise. Dante Said: O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes- Pull out his eyes, Apologise, Apologise, Pull out his eyes.”

“The whole Portrait is an apologia: at the same time its cardinal assertion is that Stephen will not apologize; rather he awaits the eagles. Joyce’s eyes, moreover, were in actual fact threatened from the first; presently in the Portrait Stephen as a schoolboy is going to be unjustly punished as a consequence of defective vision; the master who beats him makes an observation suggesting that his guilt is to be seen in his eye; the complex of ideas thus established remains with Stephen and is several times resumed in Ulysses in a manner fully intelligible only to a reader equipped with the relevant memories of the Portrait. This technique of weaving elusive symbolic themes through the strongly realistic fabric of his writing is something that Joyce is to exploit more and more. His prose at length becomes a vast hall of echoes-and one fatally adapted (the toiling inquirer must feel) to the conflicting voices of scholasts. Eventually, Joyce appears to have enjoyed playing up to his commentators.

Critical Comments

But Joyce's amused portrait of the artist as pointer should not be misread to mean that he did not care where in the Portrait the commas were put. He cared very much - more, per- haps,

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than any other prose writer has cared; for as critics have come gradually to understand, he was writing a novel very like a poem.2 In March, 1917, for example, just after the publication of the first edition of the Portrait, he wrote to J. B. Pinker, his agent, that "the novel does not seem to have been read". On April 9 he complained to Ezra Pound, I have been correcting misprints in my four hundred. No revise was sent to me." As we shall see, the misprints in the first edition of which Joyce complained to Pinker and Pound represented only a tiny part of a vast amount of error of which he remained unaware. Of this small part -the "nearly four hundred" misprints which Joyce wrote on seven numbered leaves and sent to Pinker on April 10-88 asked that commas be added or deleted or substituted for other marks, 9 for other punctuation changes, 60 for changes in capitalization, 146 for changes into one word of words hyphened or written as two, 35 for spelling changes, 18 for changes in such mechanics as quotation marks or italics, and only 26 for changes in words. Most of these changes have not been made in American editions of the Portrait. Most, but by no means all of them, were made in the English editions published after 1918 and in the Continental editions published in English after 1924...

But far more corrupt than the other Portrait: there are 264 words omitted, 4 words added in every edition of the book The texts printed during Joyce's lifetime themselves, so that an additional 31 words are omitted, 53 changed, and 5 added in at least two of them; while 302 omissions, 3 additions and 26 changes occur only in the Egoist serialization. The variants in punctuation and other accidentals run into the thousands...

Joyce corrected the proofs while he was recuperating at Saint-Malo from the third operation on his eyes; his left eye was covered with a patch and the sight in the other was not good. More important, he was ten years older than when he finished the Portrait, and he had since written Ulysses and parts of Finnegans Wake the corrections which he made or at when he saw them on the proofs were merely spelling; many were semicolons substituted for colons or commas...

THE TEXT OF JAMES JOYCE'S "A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN" Chester G. Anderson Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, Vol. 65, No. 2 (1964), pp. 160-200 Modern Language Society

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In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce attempted to solve linguistically problems of perception similar to those that the impressionist and postimpressionist painters had already solved visually. The artist of the nineteenth century, rejecting the Enlightenment values of balance and harmony, recognized that man's perception of reality was more complex than traditional illusionary techniques had conveyed. The goal of both painter and writer was to distinguish in perception the role of the retina, or sensory device, from the role of the brain, or creator of meaning. (The impressionists chose to record what the retina perceives; the post-impressionists, what the brain perceives.) Hitherto the roles were assumed to be inextricably interlocked. Joyce used the epiphany technique within the stream-of- consciousness style to separate sensation from meaning, to picture the tiny moments juxtaposed in the flux. His accomplishments become more obvious if one com pares his use of narrative space in the novel to the late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century painters' use of visual space. Both painter and writer were forced to experiment with the traditional relationship between foreground and back ground, or figure and ground...Figure is analogous to the spot lighted details; ground, to the briefly mentioned material context. The novelist, emphasizing selected emphasizing what surrounds it, controls the reader's perception... Using the terms figure and ground in this metaphorical to talk about Joyce's novel helps us to see how he is working on the problem of perception in a way which is analogous to the way impressionists and postimpressionists work on the problem. When Stephen perceives mostly through his senses Joyce employs techniques analogous to post- impressionist symbolism... If we fail to consider, as we read A Portrait, the visual methods that impressionists use to catch a series of flash "vistazo” we may fail to picture in our mind's eye Joyce’s rendering of Stephen's childhood as "isolated reality". The comparison, however, forces us to recognize that Joyce works toward the same end as the impressionist: "never-to-be-repeated constellations" before they become part of the flux. Flash perceptions, or epiphanies, in Stephen’s childhood strike against a panorama of cultural malaise. In other words, Joyce's approach at first is like that of "impressionist painters . . . vivid details . . . momentarily accentuated a moving blur of undelineated background". Later however, his approach becomes postimpressionistic: the cultural milieu is absorbed by the young man Stephen, and symbols of cultural background actually begin to compete with the figure for attention...

THE PROBLEMS OF FIGURE AND GROUND IN A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNGMAN

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Barbara Stevens Heusel The Centennial Review, Vol. 26, No. 2 (SPRING 1982), pp. 180-198 Michigan State University Press

Questions:

1. Compare Portrait of the Artist and Sons and Lovers as autobiographical works. 2. Discuss Portrait of the Artist as a transition from realism to modernism. 3. Discuss the technique of stream of consciousness as employed by Joyce in Portrait of the Artist 4. What is the significance of the myth of Daedalus in the theme of the fiction? 5. Discuss the limitations of Stephen’s theory of aesthetics. 6. Discuss Portrait of the Artist as a story of the development of Stephen Daedalus as an artist?

References Cheruppakkaranenna Nilayil Kalakaarante Chithreekaranam, By: James Joyce, translated by Dr S Sreenivasan Publisher: Chintha Publishers 2012 Burgess, Anthony. Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce. Harcourt Brace, 1975. Benstock, Bernard / Staley, Thomas F. (Eds.). Approaches to Joyce's "Portrait": Ten Essays. Pittsburg (University of Pittsburg Press) 1976. Bloom, Harold. James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". New York (Chelsea) 1988. Burgess, Anthony. Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965); also published as Re Joyce. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Oxford University Press, 1959, revised edition 1983. Ferris, Kathleen. James Joyce and the burden of disease. University of Kentucky Press, 1994. Igoe, Vivien. A Literary Guide to Dublin. Methuen Publishing Ltd., 2000. Gabler, Hans Walter. "Towards a Critical Text of James Joyce's 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'," in: Studies in Bibliography 27 (1974), p.1-53. Levin, Harry, (ed. with introduction and notes). The Essential James Joyce. [1948]. Revised ed. Penguin in association with Jonathan Cape, 1969.

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Read, Forrest. Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound's Essays on Joyce. New York: New Directions, 1967. Thornton, Weldon. The Antimodernism of Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". Syracuse (Syracuse University Press) 1994.

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Acknowledgment of resources used

1. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/apr/01/windhover-gerard- manley-hopkins 2. http://142.93.128.11:8080/jspui/bitstream/123456789/621/6/M-2-U-1.pdf 3. https://etn24.com/2017/10/literary-review-second-coming-understanding-historical- context-yeats-poetry.html 4. http://theenglishindustrialrevolution.blogspot.com/2009/04/william-butler-yeats- poem-second-coming.html 5. http://www.wbnsou.ac.in/online_services/SLM/BDP/EEG-07_M-1-4.pdf 6. http://www.thebeckoning.com/poetry/yeats/yeats5.html 7. https://bild-art.de/poetry-analysis-byzantium-by-william-butler-yeats 8. http://www.sde.kannuruniversity.ac.in/annc_files/364.pdf 9. A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on the Poems of W.B. Yeats ed Michael O'Neil 2004 10. http://mdudde.net/pdf/study_material_DDE/ma/ma- English/Literaturein%20English%201914%20to%20present-final.pdf 11. http://assets.vmou.ac.in/MAEG07 12. Critical Companion to William Butler Yeats: A Literary Reference to His Life 2014 David A. Ross 13. (POETRY NOTES, Grade 12, Noelin Naidoo, HOD: Alexandra High School) 14. https://epgp.inflibnet.ac.in/Home/ViewSubject?catid=13e-PG Pathshala is an initiative of the MHRD under its National Mission on Education through ICT (NME-ICT) being executed by the UGC. 15. All other sources are cited within the text.

ENG2C05-Twentieth Century British Literature up to 1940