Social Reality and Narrative Form in the Fiction of Henry Green
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University of Warwick institutional repository: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/34554 This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. Social Reality and Narrative Form in the Fiction of Henry Green by Marius Hentea A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English University of Warwick, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies October 2011 CONTENTS Acknowledgements iii Abstract v Abbreviations vi Chapter 1. Introduction 1 - 22 Chapter 2. ‗Young and Old‘: Generations and Belonging 23 – 86 Chapter 3. Class Representations 87 – 158 Chapter 4. Sites of Authority 159 – 228 Chapter 5. Sensing the Whole 229 – 304 Chapter 6. Conclusion 305 – 307 Works Cited 308 – 342 iii Acknowledgements I have accumulated many debts in the writing of this thesis. I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Jeremy Treglown, for his unflagging assistance in pushing this project along and for giving me not only time but also moral support throughout the writing. His eagle-eye editing was phenomenal, and I have learned so much under his tutelage. Equally vital support came from family and friends, who were eager to see me finish and provided both intellectual help and much-needed personal distractions. The greatest thanks go to my wife, Elise Trogrlic, who put up with me being away from our home in Paris for long stretches. I am grateful for financial support from the Warwick Postgraduate Research Scholarship and the Overseas Research Fund bursary. Declaration I declare that the thesis which follows is my independent work and none of it has been submitted for a degree at another university. Some portions of the thesis are in print or awaiting publication: ‗Fictional Doubles in Henry Green‘s Back‘, Review of English Studies, 61.251 (September 2010), 614-26; ‗Fictions of Class and Community in Henry Green‘s Living‘, Studies in the Novel, 42 (2010), 321-39; ‗The Forms and Functions of Back Story in the Novel‘, Narrative, 18 (2010), 347-66; and ‗Late Modernist Debuts: Publishing and iv Professionalizing Young Authors in 1920s Britain‘, Book History, 14 (2011) [forthcoming]. I would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers at these journals for the valuable suggestions they made to earlier drafts of my work. v Abstract Social Reality and Narrative Form in the Fiction of Henry Green contests the dominant reading of Henry Green‘s fiction as an abstract, autonomous textual production. My thesis situates Green into a number of literary and socio-historical contexts and argues that doing so challenges a number of prevailing critical orthodoxies. I also argue that Green‘s fiction is formally constructed through a variety of dislocations, from displacing the centrality of plot, undermining the integrity of character, silencing the narrative voice and questioning the authenticity of the self. To relate social reality to narrative form, each of the four main chapters is dedicated to one of four substantive aspects of material reality: age, class, geography and the body. In the first chapter, I examine Green‘s relationship to the writing of his generation and to the concepts of age and youth. I argue that Green was deeply ambivalent towards generational belonging or the notion that identity could be supplied through one‘s generation. My second chapter investigates Green‘s treatment of social class and positions his Birmingham factory novel, Living, against 1930s theories of proletarian fiction and its canonical texts. My third chapter considers sites of authority both in the external world (geographic space) as well as within the novelistic space. The eclipsing of the narrator and the subsequent translation of the imaginative faculty to the reader is a part of Green‘s strategy to displace sites of authority. My final chapter looks at Green‘s treatment of the physical body and argues that disability is a central aspect of his novelistic practice. The impossibility of unity and wholeness, therefore, sheds light not only on the physicality of modern man but also on wholeness as a mental and linguistic possibility when the times are ‗breaking up.‘ vi Abbreviations CWGO Complete Works of George Orwell GOCH George Orwell: The Critical Heritage Letters EW Letters of Evelyn Waugh LOD Love on the Dole O.C. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres Complètes PCBR Publishers‟ Circular and Booksellers‟ Record PMB Pack My Bag PW Publishers‟ Weekly RWP The Road to Wigan Pier TLS Times Literary Supplement TRTP The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists Works by Henry Green Blindness, in Nothing Doting Blindness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993 [1926]), pp. 339-504 Back (London: The Hogarth Press, 1946) Caught (London: Harvill Press, 2001 [1943]) Concluding (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964 [1948]) Doting, in Nothing Doting Blindness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993 [1952]), pp. 169-337 Living, in Loving Living Party Going (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993 [1929]), pp. 205-382 Loving, in Loving Living Party Going (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993 [1948]), pp. 17-204 Nothing, in Nothing Doting Blindness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993 [1950]), pp. 7-168 Pack My Bag (New York: New Directions, 2004 [1940]) Party Going, in Loving Living Party Going (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993 [1948]), pp. 383-528 Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green, ed. by Matthew Yorke (New York:Viking, 1993 [1992]) 1 CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION Almost every study of the fiction of Henry Green, the pen name of the British author and industrialist Henry Vincent Yorke (1905-1973), foregrounds its ‗oblique‘ and ‗elusive‘ nature. Edward Stokes calls him ‗one of the most elusive, tantalizing and enigmatic of novelists‘; Oddvar Holmesland calls his fiction ‗oblique‘ while Patrick Swinden chooses ‗unusual‘ and ‗enigmatic‘; for Michael Gorra, Green is ‗the most elusive writer of his generation‘; and, more recently, Patrick MacDermott has spoken of Green‘s ‗oblique approach to novel writing.‘1 These terms are repeated throughout Green criticism, but it is not difficulty that is stressed. Countless undergraduates have been initiated into modernist poetry and fiction through The Waste Land (1922) and Ulysses (1922): the difficulty of these texts is an indispensable sign of their 1 Edward Stokes, The Novels of Henry Green (London: Hogarth Press, 1959), p. 7; Patrick Swinden, The English Novel of History and Society, 1940-80 (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 57; Oddvar Holmesland, A Critical Introduction to Henry Green‟s Novels: The Living Vision (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 4; Michael Gorra, The English Novel at Mid-Century: From the Leaning Tower (New York: St. Martin‘s Press, 1990), p. 25; Patrick MacDermott, A Convergence of the Creative and the Critical: A Reading of the Novels of Henry Green through the Literary Criticism of T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 233. 2 modernity and a claim to their status as high art.2 We have come to understand and accept modernist difficulty, even to revel in it as a means by which a text acquires meaning. With Green‘s novels, though, there is no fallback into a set of literary codes or modes of reading that can navigate through the interpretative thicket. As fine and subtle a reader as Frank Kermode used Party Going (1939) as an emblematic case for the hermeneutic problems of narrative.3 Marina Mackay argues that one of the central problems in coming to grips with Green‘s writing is his lack of direct affiliation with any critical school or tradition.4 In an essay on C.M. Doughty, Green delights in how the Victorian travel writer ‗seems so alone‘.5 Whatever its value as a critical statement, the phrase is prescient in plotting out the ambiguity of Green‘s legacy. He was influenced by the high modernists and shared with them a concern with form and the means by which language creates a world. But putting Green squarely into the high modernist camp, as John Russell does, is problematic.6 His fiction does not impart a transcendent message, inspire a new consciousness, or contain a definitive worldview. Unlike 2 Irving Howe, ‗The Culture of Modernism‘, in Decline of the New (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), pp. 3-33 (p. 3); see also Leonard Diepeveen, The Difficulties of Modernism (London: Routledge, 2003). 3 Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). 4 Marina Mackay, Modernism and World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 97. She has most recently argued that placing Green as an ‗early postmodernist‘ might be ‗a first step, potentially, toward resolving that enduring awkwardness about how mid-century fiction is to be categorized.‘ See her ‗―Is Your Journey Really Necessary?‖: Going Nowhere in Late Modernist London‘, PMLA, 124 (2009), 1600-13 (p. 1605). 5 Henry Green, ‗Apologia‘ (1941), in Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green, ed. by Matthew Yorke (New York: Viking, 1993), p. 96. 6 John Russell, Henry Green: Nine Novels and an Unpacked Bag (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1960), pp. 4, 18. 3 much avant-garde writing, Green never pursues experimentation as an end in itself.7 His work cannot be read through either twenties‘ aestheticism or thirties‘ social