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1 Narrative and Politics Notes 1 Narrative and Politics 1. I shall not attempt to define narrative in any detail but instead take Sterne’s option in Tristram Shandy. Tristram defines a nose as a nose – ‘nothing more or less’ (p. 225). Thomas M. Leitch points out that we all know what stories are – fortunately – ‘for it is excessively difficult to say just what they are’ (What Stories Are: Narrative Theory and Interpretation (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986) p. 3). For present purposes narrative and imaginative literature will generally be used synonymously, though in the Postscript of this study we will also be considering film as a narrative form. 2. Hoggart, Richard, Speaking to Each Other, Vol. 2, About Literature (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970) p. 19. 3. Auden, W.H., ‘The American Scene’, in The Dyers Hand (London: Faber & Faber, 1948) p. 313. 4. Hoggart, Speaking to Each Other, p. 19. 5. Leavis, F.R., The Common Pursuit (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958) p. 198. 6. Sartre, J.-P., What is Literature? (London: Methuen University Paperback, 1967) p. 124. 7. Charques, R.D., Contemporary Literature and Social Revolution (London: Martin Secker, 1933) p. 5. 8. Whitebrook, Maureen, ‘Politics and Literature’, Politics, 15(1) (1955) 55–62. 9. Barker, Rodney, Political Ideas in Modern Britain (London: Methuen, 1978). 10. Arblaster, Anthony, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). 11. Johnson, Peter, Politics, Innocence and the Limits of Goodness (London: Routledge, 1989). 12. Quin, Kenneth, How Literature Works (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992). 13. Quin, How Literature Works, p. 9. 14. Doctor Johnson is quoted as remarking: ‘Great abilities … are not required for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts only to his hand; so there is no exer- cise of invention. Imagination is not required in any high degree … Some penetration, accuracy and colouring will fit a man for the task, if he can give the application which is necessary’ (Boswell’s Johnson (London: Cygnet Classics, 1968) p. 46). 15. Eagleton, Terry, ‘The Rise of English’, in Dennis Walder (ed.), Literature in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) p. 25. 16. Eagleton, Terry, ‘Marxist Criticism’, in John Barrell (ed.), Poetry, Language and Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988) p. 208. 17. Hirsch, E.D., Jnr, ‘The Babel of Interpretation’, in Walder (ed.), Literature in the Modern World, p. 64. 18. Quin, How Literature Works, p. 18. 19. Quin, How Literature Works, p. 20. 170 Notes 171 20. Orwell, George, ‘Why I Write’, Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965 edn). 21. Quin, How Literature Works, p. 93. 22. Crick, Bernard, George Orwell: A Life (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980) p. 85. 23. Forster, E.M., ‘Anonymity: An Enquiry’, in Two Cheers for Democracy (London: Edward Arnold, 1951) p. 89. 24. Mellor, D.H., ‘On Literary Truth’, Ratio, 10 (1968) 150–68. My italics. 25. Auerbach, Eric, Mimesis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968) p. 496. 26. Clark, Margaret, ‘The Politics of Literature’, British Review of New Zealand Studies, 7 (1994) 18–29. 27. Benjamin, Walter, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (New York: Schoken Books, 1969) p. 159. 28. Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) p. 7. 29. Fischer, Michael, in Alan Malachowski, Reading Rorty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) p. 241. 30. From his poem ‘I am’, Selected Poems of John Clare 1793–1864 (Leeds: E.J. Arnold and Son, 1964) p. 70. 31. See for example Ingle, Stephen, George Orwell: A Political Life (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993) ch. 4. 32. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 353. 33. Lukacs, Georg, ‘The Ideology of Modernism’, in John Barrell (ed.), Poetry, Language and Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). 34. Lukacs, ‘Modernism’, p. 81. 35. Quin, ‘How Literature Works’, p. 212. 36. Extract from a radio interview (1990) quoted in Lukacs, ‘Modernism’, p. 210. 37. Lukacs, ‘Modernism’, p. 103. 38. Charques, Contemporary Literature and Social Revolution, p. 51. 39. Woolf, Rosemary, Art and Doctrine: Essays on Medieval Literature (London: Hambleton Press, 1986) p. 196. 40. Golding, William, Rites of Passage (London: Faber & Faber, 1980). 41. Orwell, George, ‘Inside the Whale’, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (CEJL) (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968) Vol. 1, pp. 493–526. 42. Orwell, George, ‘Charles Dickens’, CEJL, Vol. 1, pp. 413–59. 43. Julien Benda, La Trahison des clercs (Paris: Grasset, 1927) passim. 44. We might wish to distinguish, in this debate, between ‘literature’ and propa- ganda. In the latter we may assume that the writer is concerned to promulgate the virtues of one of Orwell’s ‘smelly little orthodoxies’ and is not concerned primarily with communicating an aesthetic experience. The study of propa- ganda is as important as it is interesting but I am not concerned with it here. More problematical for my argument is the writer or producer of ‘faction’ or documentary where essentially a story or an account is portrayed as literally true. As we will see from the example of Jack London’s work, this can be a lit- erary exercise but only on certain conditions. I have said that literal or histori- cal truth is secondary to the enterprise of narrative but in some cases the intention might be to transmit an experience that is intentionally or uninten- tionally based on a historical untruth. This becomes particularly contentious when the subject of the story is recent, for example the two television films 172 Notes that appeared in 2002 to commemorate the events of 1972 in Derry/ Londonderry known as Bloody Sunday. Neither of the two documentaries, Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday or Jimmy McGovern’s Sunday, could be said to have aimed for impartiality but the latter was considered by The Times critic Jo Joseph to ‘repeatedly sacrifice dramatic complexity for argumentative cer- tainty’. Joseph considered that McGovern was ‘so busy assigning blame, and assuring us that all is fact and nothing fiction’, that the drama suffers. For those who believe there is no truth, only ‘truths’, this is not a problem. Yet we might agree that if a writer or film-maker chooses to say something about recent historical events they should at least not knowingly lie, or even pretend to knowledge that they do not have. We may be confident that if their portrayal of events is clearly historically flawed or prejudiced it is not, as Joseph hints, likely to achieve more than a passing influence. 45. Quoted in Belsey, C., Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980) p. 13. 46. Eagleton, ‘The Rise of English’, p. 23. 47. For example, Quin, How Literature Works, pp. 55–63. 48. In an interview published in The Times Higher Educational Supplement, 26 July 1996. 49. See Jauss, Robert, ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory’, in Walder Dennis (ed.), Literature, p. 73. 50. Crosland, C.A.R., The Future of Socialism (London: Cape, 1956). 2 ‘The Terrible Stone Face’ 1. London, Jack, The People of the Abyss (London: The Journeyman Press, 1977). 2. See Hynes, Samuel, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (London: Oxford University Press, 1968) pp. 18–22. 3. London, The People of the Abyss, pp. 24–5. 4. Shaw, Bernard, Mrs Warren’s Profession in Plays Unpleasant (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972 edn) p. 247. 5. Shaw, Widowers’ Houses, in Plays Unpleasant (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972 edn) p. 59. 6. Shaw, Widowers’ Houses, p. 71. 7. Shaw, Bernard, Preface to Widowers’ Houses, pp. 25–6. 8. This attack was in St James’ Gazette and is quoted in the Preface to Mrs Warren’s Profession, Plays Unpleasant, p. 201. 9. Wells, H.G., The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman (London: Odhams, 1914) esp. p. 193. 10. Shaw, Bernard, Major Barbara (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972 edn) p. 88. 11. Shaw, Major Barbara, p. 97. 12. Shaw, Major Barbara, p. 142. 13. Morrison, Arthur, A Child of the Jago (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946). 14. Keating, P.J., The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971). 15. Quoted in Keating, Victorian Fiction, p. 83. 16. Tressell, Robert, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (St Albans: Panther, 1972). 17. See Ball, F.C., One of the Damned (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973). 18. Tressell, The Philanthropists, p. 227. 19. Quoted in London, The People of the Abyss, p. 123. Notes 173 20. Sassoon, Siegfried, ‘Memoirs of an Infantry Officer’, in The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (London: Faber, 1972). 21. Orwell, George, The Road to Wigan Pier (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965 edn) pp. 16–17. 22. Greenwood, Walter, Love on the Dole (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975 edn) p. 50. 23. Booth, Charles, Life and Labour of the People in London (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1892–7) 10 vols. 24. Rowntree, B. Seebohm, Poverty: A Study of Town Life (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1902). 25. Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind, p. 54. 26. Silone, Ignazio, Fontamara (London: Journeyman Press, 1975). 27. Brady, Frank (ed.), Boswell’s Life of Johnson (London: Signet Classics, 1968) p. 297. 28. Gissing, Algernon and Ellen, Letters of George Gissing to Members of His Family (London, 1927) p. 169. 29. Hardy, Thomas, Jude the Obscure (London: Macmillan, 1972 edn) p. 337. 30. Hardy, Jude the Obscure, p. 125. 31. Swingewood, Alan, The Novel and Revolution (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1975) p. 129. 32. Gissing, George, The Nether World (Brighton: Harvester, 1974) p. 109. 33. Gissing, The Nether World, p. 113. 34. Goode, John, Introduction to Gissing, The Nether World, p. vii. 35. Spencer, Herbert, The Man versus the State (London: Watts, 1950) passim. 36. Especially The Hope of Pessimism. See Gardner, P.L., Schopenhauer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971).
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