REMEMBERING in the BRITISH FICTION of the 1930S Értekezés
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REMEMBERING IN THE BRITISH FICTION OF THE 1930S Értekezés a doktori (Ph.D.) fokozat megszerzése érdekében az Irodalomtudományok tudományágban Írta: Tukacs Tamás okleveles angol nyelv és irodalom szakos középiskolai tanár Készült a Debreceni Egyetem Irodalomtudományok doktori iskolája (Angol-amerikai irodalomtudományi programja) keretében Témavezető: Dr. Bényei Tamás . (olvasható aláírás) A doktori szigorlati bizottság: elnök: Dr. ………………………… tagok: Dr. ………………………… Dr. ………………………… A doktori szigorlat időpontja: 201… . ……………… … . Az értekezés bírálói: Dr. ........................................... Dr. …………………………… Dr. ........................................... A bírálóbizottság: elnök: Dr. ........................................... tagok: Dr. ………………………….. Dr. ………………………….. Dr. ………………………….. Dr. ………………………….. A nyilvános vita időpontja: 201… . ……………… … . 2 Én, Tukacs Tamás, teljes felelősségem tudatában kijelentem, hogy a benyújtott értekezés a szerzői jog nemzetközi normáinak tiszteletben tartásával készült. Jelen értekezést korábban más intézményben nem nyújtottam be, és azt nem utasították el. 3 Doktori (PhD) értekezés Remembering in the British Fiction of the 1930s Tukacs Tamás Debreceni Egyetem BTK 2010. 4 Table of Contents 1. Introduction.................................................................................................................. 5 2. Trauma, Melancholia and Nostalgia in the Fiction of the 1930s ................................ 9 2. 1. “The War Wound Never Received”: the Traumatized Generation ................... 9 2.2. “The Interminable Reel”: Melancholia and Metonymy in the 1930s................ 19 2.3. “We Can Never Go Back Again”: Some Aspects of Nostalgia in the 1930s ...... 29 3. The Theoretical Frameworks of Trauma, Melancholia and Nostalgia .................... 37 3.1. Theories of Trauma............................................................................................. 37 3.2. The Theoretical Framework of Melancholia...................................................... 41 3.3. Two Kinds of Nostalgia ....................................................................................... 46 4. Goodbye to Proust: George Orwell’s Coming Up For Air......................................... 49 5. “Apparently Unhurt”: Trauma In Henry Green’s Party Going (1939) and Caught (1943) .............................................................................................................................. 56 5.1. Henry Green’s Fiction and Trauma ................................................................... 56 5.2. Being Engaged: Memory in Party Going ............................................................ 64 5.3. Through the Stained-Glass: Trauma in Caught................................................. 82 6. Goodbye to Berlin: Melancholia in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories .......... 92 6.1. Isherwood’s Novels in the 1930s ......................................................................... 92 6.2. Remembering the “Old Crook”: Mr Norris Changes Trains ............................. 98 6.3. Herr Issyvoo’s Photo Album: Goodbye to Berlin.............................................. 107 7. Goodbye to the Valley of Blue Moon: Nostalgia in James Hilton’s 1930s Novels.. 122 7.1. Learning Nostalgia: Lost Horizon ..................................................................... 126 7.2. In Search of an England: Good-bye Mr Chips and We Are Not Alone ............. 132 7.3. England Regained: Random Harvest................................................................. 138 8. Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 142 Works Cited ................................................................................................................. 146 Abstract in Hungarian ................................................................................................ 154 Abstract in English....................................................................................................... 156 Publications of the Author........................................................................................... 158 5 1. Introduction The present dissertation addresses the paradoxical nature of remembering in the context of the British fiction of the 1930s. It specifically examines authors belonging to the “Auden generation,” as Samuel Hynes defined them in his basic study (1972), novelists born roughly in the first decade of the twentieth century, and their problematic relationship to the past as it surfaces in their novels. It is remarkable how much the otherwise acute generational consciousness of these writers was formed, among others, by an almost pathological clinging to past experiences, arising from the fact that this generation, and the whole of the 1930s as a decade, in fact, can be defined as an in-between, parenthesised, belated and, in many respects, unplaceable phenomenon, a kind of “no-man’s land” between the two world wars and between the first, classic generation of high modernism and the post-1945 one. The focus of the dissertation will be one of the determining experiences of the late-modern generation: the ambivalent relation between the compulsion to break from the oppression of the past, to deny the achievements and the role of their elders and literary predecessors and, at the same time, their inability to escape from the equally tormenting influence of the past. This awareness of the awkward place of the generation and their ambivalent relationship to the past can be best examined by putting into focus certain modes of misremembering. The theoretical nodes of the dissertation will be three such maladies of remembering: trauma, melancholia and nostalgia. All three of these notions are able to conceptualise the subject’s inability to respond to the past in a “healthy” manner: in trauma, the patient re-experiences and unconsciously repeats or enacts painful past events; in the case of melancholia, the subject clings to a loss, unable to perform an act of mourning; and in the case of a nostalgic occurrence, the person yearns for a place or a period conceived of as the plenitude of meaningful existence and, unable to return to it, suffers in the present. The common points of these approaches – the cessation of an unproblematic relation with the past, the dialectics of the inability to recover significant past experiences, the sense of being invaded by what is supposed to have been passed by, being fixated on the present, the impossibility to break out from a frustrating present situation – are suitable to describe the in-between-ness, the temporal, contingent and provisional nature of the general sentiment pervading much of the fiction of the 1930s. Naturally, the scope of the present dissertation is not sufficient to give an account of 1930s fiction as a whole, not even from the aspect of the maladies of remembering. Nor is it possible here to make generalised statements as regards the role of remembering in the 6 entirety of the chosen literary historical period, not to mention more profound theoretical assumptions as regards remembering, trauma, melancholia or nostalgia as clinical or philosophical problems. This dissertation does not aim, either, at reconsidering the existing canon of the 1930s, it does not want to include forgotten or neglected voices, paying attention to political, artistic, gender, etc. considerations, only at times to shade the existing consensus as to who may be validated as discussable within the “Auden generation.” Therefore, I have selected three authors of the period, Henry Green, Christopher Isherwood and James Hilton, the examination of whose novels in the 1930s (in the case of Green and Hilton, in the early 1940s), carried out within the above-mentioned theoretical framework, may bring one closer to the understanding of the problematic nature of remembering in the period. The selected triad of the malfunctions of remembering, in addition, may prove particularly apt for a reading of certain periods of Green’s, Isherwood’s and Hilton’s oeuvre. In spite of the growing critical interest in 1930s British literature, the years between 1929 and 1939 still seem a blind spot in literary criticism and a sort of “no man’s land” in literary histories. Various attempts have been made to identify and canonise this extremely heterogeneous “in-between” period, from Samuel Hynes’s milestone study of the Auden generation (1972), through Bernard Bergonzi’s (1978), John Lucas’s (ed., 1978) and Richard Johnstone’s (1982) attempts, to more recent (r)evaluations of the 1930s, such as Valentine Cunningham’s monumental British Writers of the Thirties (1988), studies of James Gindin (1992), Janet Montefiore (1995), John Baxendale and Christopher Pawling (1996), Patrick Quinn (1996), Keith Williams and Steven Matthews (1997) and Anthony Shuttleworth (ed, 2003), just to name a few. While studies in the 1970s tended to examine the political context of the 1930s writings (Hynes, The Auden Generation; Bergonzi, Reading the Thirties: Texts and Contexts; Lucas [ed.], The 1930s: A Challenge to Orthodoxy), the late 80s and 1990s brought a renaissance in thirties studies by discovering new perspectives (although Cunningham’s monumental synthesis, published in 1988, is unique in the sense that it identifies the basic motifs of the literature of the period, regardless of class or gender distinctions). Contemporary critical evaluations of the 1930s seem to be preoccupied with rediscovering,