Subject
VN Bibliography: Pellérdi Márta: Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight or, What You Will
From
Date
Body
Kodolányi füzetek: Studies on the 20th Century English NovelEDNOTE. Marta Pellerdi's article on _Sebastian Knight_ is well worth reading. Please ignore the non-Nabokov articles that follow. I was unable to delete them.
----------------------------------------------
Kodolányi Füzetek, 5.
Studies on the 20th Century English Novel
Working Papers
Edited by Kiszely Zoltán
Kodolányi János University College
Székesfehérvár, 1999.
CONTENTS
Preface
Bakos Judit: Fine Arts In Literature
Pellérdi Márta: Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight or, What You Will
Goldmann Márta: "Sirens" The Musical Chapter of Ulysses: Technique and Style
Farkas Ákos: Past in the Present and Future in the Past: T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Sweeney Agonistes
Bakos Judit: Literary Self-Portraits Contrasted - in Virginia Woolf and Wyndham Lewis's Portrait of the Artist
Appendix
Mező Judit: Translations
Vajda János: Twenty Years On (Húsz év mulva)
Juhász Gyula: No More Can I Recall (Milyen volt...)
Juhász Gyula: Forever Anna (Anna örök)
Kosztolányi Dezső: Necrology (Halotti beszéd)
Abstracts
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Editorial Board of Kodolányi Füzetek:
Bakonyi István (series editor)
Cséfalvay Zoltán
Kiszely Zoltán
Lukács Péter (chair)
Majorosi Anna
Szabados Gábor
Tóth László
Proof-reader of this issue: Keith Hardwick
Cover Design: Rózsadombi Ágnes
ISSN 1419-5836
ISBN 963 03 8657 7
Published by Kodolányi János University College,
Székesfehérvár, Hungary
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Preface
The Department of English Studies at Kodolányi János University College provides courses in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Literature and History, besides its obvious aim to improve students' foreign language proficiency. The studies in the first volume of the Kodolányi Füzetek published in April 1999 covered different theoretical and practical issues in Applied Linguistics.
The present volume gives insight into the research of our colleagues whose main area of interest is 20th century English literature. However, the adjective "English" in the title needs to be accounted for. Today several different English languages are spoken as people's native and second language in a number of countries like India, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia etc. As a result, different literary works are written in English in these countries, therefore, the expression "English novel" is considered to be a broader concept than it used to be. It involves all the literary works made in the English language regardless of whether they were created by British or other authors. This phenomenon explains the word "English" in the title of the volume since the present studies are not exclusively about English writers.
In the first paper BAKOS Judit takes an interdisciplinary approach in comparing the paintings of Vanessa Bell with Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. The second paper investigates Vladimir Nabokov's first English-language novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. PELLÉRDI Márta's aim in the study is to show how distinctly Nabokov incorporated Shakespeare's Twelfth Night into the novel. An abundant source of 20th century literary criticism, the theme of the third study is James Joyce's Ulysses. GOLDMANN Márta discusses how musical style and technique creates the text of the chapter called 'Sirens.' In the fourth paper FARKAS Ákos argues for the notion that art has to be light and serious at the same time, in the mirror of two T. S. Eliot works, Four Quartets and Sweeney Agonistes. The fifth paper by BAKOS Judit is concerned with comparing and contrasting Virginia Woolf and Wyndham Lewis's literary self-portraits.
As the Kodolányi Füzetek provides an opportunity for the publication of a wide range of issues, the editors found it important to include MEZŐDI Judit's poem translations in the Appendix of this volume to show the versatility of the colleagues working for our department.
We hope, dear readers, that you will find our work enjoyable.
The Editor
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pellérdi Márta
Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
or, What You Will
Introduction
Vladimir Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is the first attempt on the part of the author to demonstrate his talent at writing in a language other than his native tongue. The novel was written in 1938, one year after Nabokov completed his last and probably greatest Russian novel, The Gift. Although the author continued to write stories, plays and poems in French and Russian until he left Paris for the United States, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is the landmark in his oeuvre. It separates his Russian literary period from the subsequent American one during which he wrote mainly in English. Nabokov's first English novel is a fictitious biography of a distinguished young English author, which the reader is led to believe was written by the author's half-brother, V., a rather obscure person, whose real name, except for the abbreviation is never revealed. The reader is assured by the narrator-biographer that by possessing an "inner knowledge" of Sebastian's character, merely because he is his brother, and the "immense amount of research" he had had to undertake during his quest, he had done all in his power to set down the results in book form. (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight 28) The book is a record of the quest itself and a rival biography to another one written about Sebastian Knight. While obsessively tracking down the past of his half-brother, V. also makes the most of the opportunity to denounce the work of a certain Mr. Goodman, who had published his own hastily compiled version of Sebastian Knight's life only a few months after Sebastian's death. The work teeming with errors, misinterpretations was entitled The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight. The tragedy of Sebastian, according to Goodman, the hack-biographer, lay in his realisation of "having been a 'human failure, and therefore an artistic one too'". (98)
In his version of Sebastian Knight's "real life", V. counters the argument, and his whole book becomes an effort to obliterate the philistine Goodman's distortions of Sebastian's life, thoughts and oeuvre, only to render an equally subjective version of his brother's life to the reader. Thus, the reader is presented with a parody of the biographical genre, and through the fictitious biography, is led to believe that it was written by the fictitious V., about the equally fictitious Sebastian Knight with the intention of offering his imaginary reading public a better and more trustworthy, a more "real" biography than Mr. Goodman's fictitious work on the same person. Needless to say, the work is the "real" work of Vladimir Nabokov and it is also a great deal more, owing to the intricacies of the novel and the heavy use of artifice in the complicated narrative structures the author is best known for. Appreciation of his texts increases as one tries to get closer to understanding his books by unravelling the artifice lying latent, and by regarding with suspicion the slightest details, recurring images, word games, literary and historical allusions that appear. If readers take the time to track them down and play according to the rules of the game Nabokov, the complete master of his prose, devised, they will eventually appreciate his prose to the full extent it deserves.
In this article, I have attempted to throw light on certain points of artifice: literary allusions, characters, and the linking of the fictitious biography theme to Nabokov's own literary career through the enigmatic title, with a closer analysis of the literary antecedent, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, in order to solve the frequent question of textual ownership, a problem which has not yet been convincingly settled. Critics are generally divided when it comes to evaluating the book, more often than not, it is rated favourably, but for some it is a "perplexing failure" as they believe the author to be withholding the rules of the games he plays from the readers, leaving certain questions unanswered. (Maddox 47)
Parallels between the "real" life of Nabokov and the fictitious life of Sebastian Knight
Stepping outside the concentric circles of biographies established by V.'s account of Sebastian's life, V.'s critical analysis of Goodman's work, and in a larger plane seeing the whole work as Sebastian's hoax (or for that matter Nabokov's) we are presented with a book, Nabokov's twelfth work of prose, which in biographical terms meant a turning point in his own career, a personal tragedy for the author. He had been a well-known Russian novelist only in émigré circles, and had not even dared to hope in the late thirties that any of his books would ever get published under the Stalinist- totalitarian regime. The first of Nabokov's eight English novels, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight marks the end of the author's Russian output, leaving behind more than forty short stories and numerous poems written in Russian, not to mention the nine novels terminating with The Gift as his last. A year after the appearance of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight on the literary market, (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941), Nabokov still had misgivings about abandoning his native language. He felt the urge to write in Russian keenly as he described in a letter to his wife: "On the way a lightning bolt of undefined inspiration ran right through me, a terrible desire to write in Russian-but it's impossible. I don't think anyone who hasn't experienced these feelings can properly appreciate them, the torment, the tragedy." (Boyd 52)
Fourteen years later in the author's afterword to Lolita, he expressed the same feeling: "My private tragedy, which cannot and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammelled, rich and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English . . . " (Lolita 334-335)
Although the real author's biography should in no way interfere with our study of his novels, there is an evident similarity between Nabokov's situation at the time and that of his hero, Sebastian, who undertakes writing in English from the start, shedding his Russian skin for an English one. For this betrayal of his "father" tongue, Nabokov seems to punish Sebastian through his relationship to Nina Lecerf, the "femme fatale" in the novel. The reader must admit that for Sebastian, who had grown up worshipping a distant and errant English mother and her remote land of birth, to choose between his two native languages, Russian or English, was not such a difficult task. While V., his half-brother and biographer, stayed to study in Paris which was one of the major centres for Russian émigrés besides Berlin and Prague, Sebastian, resolving to forget his Russian past turned enthusiastically to his mother's country, was trying to:
out-England England...until finally he realised that it was not these outward things that betrayed him, not the mannerisms of fashionable slang, but the very fact of his striving to be and act like other people when he was blissfully condemned to the solitary confinement of his own self (38)
The irony of abandoning his native language will reach Sebastian in the second half of the novel when he arrives at the conclusion that he had been mistaken in trying to give up his past; being Russian is just as much an integral part of his soul as his English heritage, or perhaps even more so. By that time however, it is too late for the English author to become reconciled to his past, too late for him to try desperately to clutch at the hazy and elusive essence of a national identity and what had survived of it in exile after the loss of a fatherland. Language, culture and memories in the novel are all embodied in the female figure of Nina Lecerf.
At the end of the novel, the author who "spoke Russian gingerly, lapsing into English as soon as the conversation drew out to anything longer than a couple of sentences" registers in the hospital where he is to die under his father's Russian name. (27) This is the reason why V. visits the wrong bedside, only to find that his brother had died the night before and the plans he had nursed for re-establishing their relationship on new, sincere grounds were too late.
Even Sebastian's last letter urging V. to visit him was "strangely enough written in Russian". (156) The letter is also a proof of Sebastian's command of Russian "couched in a Russian purer and richer than his English ever was, no matter what beauty of expression he attained in his books". (71) It also throws light on the cool relationship between Sebastian and V. It seems that V. had been too much of a dull fellow for Sebastian to keep in touch with besides being a link with a Russian past. He had always tried to avoid his rather conventional less talented brother, even his last letter at first had been meant for someone else:
I am fed up [oskomina] (sic) with a number of tortuous things and especially with the patterns of my snake-shed skins [vypolziny] (sic) so that now I find a poetic solace in the obvious and the ordinary which for some reason or other I had over-looked in the course of my life. (156)
Although this does not seem to be too much of a praise for V., he does not seem to take the hint. Though his first and last name remain a mystery until the end of the story, the reader is nevertheless granted the opportunity to find out about his family background, his literary tastes and his high esteem of Sebastian and his brother's books. Since both V.'s parents were Russian (he is only a half-brother to Sebastian), he prefers to cling to his Russian identity even in exile. As a narrator he does not possess the objectivity he assures his readers of maintaining throughout his narrative, the attentive reader can best describe him as an unreliable narrator, he divulges the name of the lady who had supplied him with information on the first page of the book, and goes too far in describing scenes he could have had no reliable source for depicting. (Long 119-125) He interviews a few close friends of Sebastian's and at times he completely forgets the warning devised for himself at the beginning of his quest "Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale".(44) The scarcity of his meetings with Sebastian also makes the reader wonder about how factual V.'s account may be. V.'s dislike of Nina Lecerf is too exaggerated, verging almost on jealousy and the parts dedicated to her and Mr. Goodman are anything but objective. V., judging by his style is the "obvious and the ordinary", a typical Russian émigré, loyal to his language and compatriots, intelligent enough to appreciate the merit of Sebastian's books, but not objective enough to write his biography.
Structurally, the first half of the book is dedicated to Sebastian, who deracinates himself from his Russian roots. In the second half however, there is a singular reversal of his feelings in the second half, which happens six years before his death. Upon finding his way back to his native language, the final separation between Sebastian and his ideal mistress, the English Clare Bishop takes place; this is partly due to Sebastian's realisation that he had contracted a fatal heart disease, but mainly owing to his first encounter of the young Russian woman, Madame Lecerf at Blauberg in 1929.
When Sebastian no longer wished to keep up the pretence of being English, he immediately gave up his mistress in order to retrieve his Russian self, that which he had never lost, but simply pushed into the background. (Lowell Scott Long 86) Clare Bishop can never forget him and like other female favourites of Nabokov, dies committing suicide. Although keenly aware that "cheap and vain" Nina belongs to the same category as V., the "obvious and the ordinary" representing everything to Sebastian that is Russian, her figure is actually a metaphor for Russian language and culture. Her character and what she stands for is elusive for Sebastian, as he had once betrayed it, and he cannot bend her according to his will as he could Clare and the English language. Nina, is also a "femme fatale" in the literal sense of the word exuding the poison that will eventually kill Sebastian, affecting his heart by breaking it, which is manifested in the rare heart disease that turns out to be fatal. As soon as Sebastian meets Nina at Blauberg, he will also seek contact with his forgotten Russian brother V. (89)
The "femme fatale" and the colour blue in the story
Readers have not been particular in their reception and investigation of Nina as a character. V. sees her as cruel, totally unaffected by Sebastian's death, the type of woman that makes men miserable. She unashamedly tells V. that she would have liked "to see that kind of refined, distant-brainy fellow [Sebastian] go on all fours and wag his tail".(132). It is quite ironical that V., the character obsessed with preserving his Russian identity, fails to be taken in by the charms of Madame Lecerf, the Russian lady and all that she supposedly stands for, nor can he comprehend how Sebastian could have been attracted by such a woman with whom he could not even discuss his work:
Books mean nothing to a woman of her kind; her own life seems to her to contain the thrills of a hundred novels. Had she been condemned to spend a whole day shut up in the library, she would have been found dead about noon. I am quite sure that Sebastian never alluded to his work in her presence: it would have been like discussing sundials with a bat. (146)
Nina is an incarnation of another Nina from the short story Spring in Fialta written by Nabokov in the same year as The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. The comparison between the two characters starts off a series of associations that lead to Shakespeare in a curious way across a series of literary digressions. "Fialka" is the Russian word for violet, a colour echoed in the title of Spring in Fialta and a flower that "dance through the story from the first page to the last "besides being an obvious rhyme to the Crimean town of Yalta. (Lee 98) Fialta contains "violaceous" syllables and at their last meeting Victor sees Nina holding "a firm bouquet of violets". Virginia Knight, Sebastian's mother and Nina Lecerf are both associated with violets and the colour blue. Madame Lecerf has a bluish sheen to her hair, violet-dark eye-lids, a blue vein on her neck, a sapphire ring, sits on a blue sofa the first time V. sees her, and it is at Blauberg that Sebastian first meets her. Although Virginia Knight and Madame Lecerf both possess rather similar traits; the "mother" association, however, which first occurs to the reader, is correct only in so far as the two characters represent "mother tongues", the native languages of the two females, one of them being English, the other Russian. Sebastian's mother had been a flirt, abandoning husband and child and having various affairs through her life which finally ends in a pension called "Les Violettes". (16) She visits her son only once and "thrusts a small parcel of sugar coated violets into Sebastian's hands". (9) When nosy young V. searches the morose Sebastian's drawers back in St. Petersburg he finds among various items "a small muslin bag of violet sweets". (15) Nina, on the other hand, succeeds in luring Sebastian back to the language and culture of his father, the letters she writes to him are written in Russian on blue stationary which V., out of respect for his brother's request, destroys.
There are other allusions around the mysterious person of Nina scattered in the text that are waiting to be picked up by the reader, deliberately planted by Nabokov, and together with the violets in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, they lead us to another train of associations. The function of the Anglo-Persian dictionary on Sebastian's shelf in his London flat is a detail that gains significance only when Nina tells V. that "there used to be a Persian princess like me. She blighted the Palace Gardens". (138) According to Nina "all flowers except pinks and daffodils withered if I touched them". (138) Her house, which she refers to as a "triste demeure", and gardens are unpleasant and melancholy and V. is surprised to learn that the dismal place had been built only thirty years before (137, 141). Another clue is dropped when V. goes to see a film Sebastian had seen three times, unusual, for it had been a "perfectly insipid" one called the "Enchanted Garden" where V. chances to recognise Nina among some bathers in one of the scenes. (155) V.'s antipathy towards Nina is heightened by the fact that she had smashed Sebastian's life and had never taken him seriously. Although she denies being a "femme fatale" that is exactly what she is, lethal, and Sebastian had withered at her touch just like the live creatures, plants did at Beatrice Rappacini's touch in the enchanted garden created by Nathaniel Hawthorne in Rappaccini's Daughter. Beatrice's attire and the flowers of her sister plant are of a purplish hue, and the whole story being based on an ancient one about "an Indian prince who sent a beautiful woman as a present to Alexander the Great. She was as lovely as the dawn and gorgeous as the sunset; but what especially distinguished her was a certain rich perfume in her breath-richer than a garden of Persian roses...This lovely woman had been nourished with poisons from her birth upward until her whole nature was so imbued with them that she herself had become the deadliest poison in existence".(Hawthorne 202) Nina is the Russian incarnation of that princess, and if the country, culture or language she is associated with is considered, Sebastian's death or exile itself and all things beautiful like the garden that withered at her touch, take on a wealth of metaphorical meaning.
Nabokov had done to Nina what he had done to many of his characters in resurrecting them from literary, mythical, historical or fabulistic sources, there is a metaphysical touch to them, and they seem to be victims of metempsychosis. Nina talking about herself in the third person said that perhaps she did love Sebastian "but held special views about death which excluded hysterics". (130) Pahl Pahlich Rechnoy, her first husband also confirms her belief in Buddhist doctrines: "she used to eat only lemon-ice and cucumbers, and talk of death and the Nirvana or something-she had a weakness for Lhassa-you know what I mean...".(122) All this accentuates not only the fact that she was a philistine following fashionable ideas, but her link with and belief in the transmigration of the soul by supplying an example of curious re-occurring situations in which she becomes a modern Russian "princesse fatale". When V. upon reaching the end of his narrative declares that he had learned one of Sebastian's secrets, "namely: that the soul is but a manner of being-not a constant state-that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations", he proceeds to contemplate life after death: "The hereafter may be the full ability of consciously living in any number of souls, all of them unconscious of their interchangeable burden. Thus I am Sebastian Knight". (172) With this revelation, to make his biography of Sebastian more credible, V. affirms that he had certainly learned the secret of recapturing the "undulations" of his brother's soul from Sebastian himself who in turn witnessed through Nina, the example of literary metempsychosis. For V., the act of "consciously living" in Sebastian's mind and soul, performed the result of his complete identification with his brother in consequence of which he strongly believes his biography can be nothing but entirely factual. On the other hand, he is completely "unconscious" of his soul being similarly burdened and his actions and thoughts ironically mimicked by the alien soul of his creator Sebastian. V. is certainly unaware that he has no will of his own and is not the author of the biography but simply another character in Sebastian's book, to which the above as well as the following lend credence.
The relationship between Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night
The "violet" theme, however can still be continued by tracking down the origin of Sebastian's name. Sebastian's first name may be a reference to the martyr, a painter, a king, or to the identically named character in Twelfth Night (Stegner xxv). The only but completely valid similarity between the martyr and Sebastian is that both were erroneously believed to be dead. In Nabokov's novel Sebastian is thought to be dead by the readers whereas he is only writing his fictitious autobiography in which there is not one item that can be taken for a fact. Thus Sebastian's autobiography on account of its fabulist quality becomes another one of his novels in which the tale is entirely invented. Outside the circle of Sebastian's authorial realm there is the real author's world which ensures the fictitiousness of the characters and situation.
To further prove Sebastian's authorship the reader is best advised to turn to the investigation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. In the play one of the characters is called Sebastian. He has a twin sister who impersonates her brother throughout the play until the last act where before the very eyes of the other characters it is discovered that they are exact replicas of each other. Antonio, the sea-captain is amazed: "How have you made division of yourself? / An apple cleft in two, is no more twin / Than these two creatures. Which is Sebastian?"(Twelfth Night, V, I) Sebastian's sister is named Viola - another violet-coloured association...and another character whose name begins with a V! As she is the duplicate of her brother, she may well have the right to recite the lines V. utters in the novel: "Sebastian's mask clings to my face, the likeness will not be washed off. I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows". (173) As "an apple cleft in two" it is just as difficult to establish the identity of V. and Sebastian, until Shakespeare's Sebastian is taken into account and the ownership of the text is thus determined. In Act V, Scene I, Sebastian beholds the very likeness of his own self when he sees Viola in male attire: "Do I stand there? I never had a brother...". It seems likely that Sebastian Knight whose last name is a pun on the title of the Shakespeare play never had one either, V.'s existence being completely fictitious within the story itself. As the play is about mistaken identities, so this is discovered to be the central theme in the novel. While Sebastian the author is creating his characters, he is also impersonating them, including V. and Madame Lecerf, the Viola of the story who had been associated with the colour blue and violet. V. and Nina are two separate male and female versions of the "obvious and the ordinary" but they are also one with their creator, neither having had any form of existence in Sebastian's "real" life. Goodman, the hack biographer certainly did not seem to know anything about the existence of a brother. V. presses us to believe that the answer for having omitted this important biographical data lay in the careless and sloppy research Goodman had conducted, but the reader must also bear in mind Viola's warning to Olivia in Act I Scene V of Twelfth Night: "I swear I am not that I play". And likewise V. is not the brother he pretends to be or as the readers are led to believe through Sebastian's (Nabokov's) painstaking machinations. After all, a year before his death Sebastian had planned to write a fictitious biography which according to V. he never succeeded in accomplishing. Although The Real Life of Sebastian Knight presents itself as a fictitious biography to the "real reader", it has, upon the basis of the above, thrown hints which proved it to be a fictitious autobiography, as Sebastian cannot present his "real life", he does not even seem to have one, being only a fictitious character of Nabokov's.
The suspicious fiction-within fiction quality of the other characters is accentuated by making their appearance in V.'s life and simultaneously filling Sebastian's books. When V. feels he is impersonating his brother on a stage, he is doing what Shakespeare's Viola had unconsciously done, impersonating her brother also on a stage (Nabokov for that matter has also joined the line of imitators as he is imitating an English author in attempting to write his first English novel). Thus a few characters from the stage of Twelfth Night are borrowed and resurrected to play larger or minor roles in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Helene Grinstein, the woman V. would have liked to see as Sebastian's mistress appears in black, mourning the loss of her brother-in-law but excellently managing a household, even taking the time to help V. in his quest for another source of information. In Twelfth Night Olivia also mourns the loss of her brother which does not hinder her in tending to the affairs of her house, paying attention to the people that surround her. Shakespeare's Sebastian dazed by the hasty marriage that is to take place between them makes a remark that refers to Olivia's housekeeping which could also apply to Helene: "Or else the lady's mad: yet, if t'were so, / She could not sway her house, command her followers" (TN, IV, III).
Pretentious Mr. Goodman's name ironically alludes to the equally contemptuous and philistine figure of Malvolio, the Puritan, both having clerical and administrative duties. Goodman had formerly worked as a secretary to Sebastian, Malvolio as steward to Olivia, both foolishly striving at greatness; the former believing that he could marry the rich Olivia; while Goodman, the inept blundering biographer botches the facts of Sebastian's life, completely misunderstanding and misinterpreting his books and his thoughts, falsely believing that he could thus attain distinguished literary scholarship. The connection between the two characters is further reinforced by the rather archaic word: "goodman" meaning "head of a household", steward, the position Malvolio held in Olivia's house. The Clown in Act IV Scene II of Twelfth Night takes leave of Malvolio with the following song
"...Like a mad lad,
Pare thy nails, dad;
Adieu, goodman drivel".
Needless to say, Mr. Goodman's version of Sebastian's life is nothing but drivel.
The inn in the play where Sebastian seeks Antonio unsuccessfully is called "The Elephant". Translated into Russian, "elephant" is "slon", the name of the bishop in chess, Clare Bishop's name thereby alluding to the inn where Sebastian had not found Antonio-who is incidentally quite in love with Viola's brother as Clare is with Sebastian-Clare's ideal portrait also being a tribute to Vera Evseevna Slonim, Nabokov's dedicated wife.
Perhaps the most relevant connection between Twelfth Night and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is concealed in the title of Shakespeare's play. This connection bears close links with Nabokov's career as a prose writer, therefore it is a biographical one but not a fictitious one this time. Nabokov's first English novel was the twelfth volume of prose that had been published by 1941.
The title of Shakespeare's play can thus be twisted into being interpreted as "the twelfth volume is about Knight" and the play with its comedy of mistaken identities serves as a source for illustrating mistaken textual ownership. It is up to the reader to decide whether they accept holding the real life of Sebastian in their hands or interpret it as they like it. Keeping his readers in mind, Nabokov might as well have entitled his novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight; or, What You Will.
Works Cited
a.. Boyd, B. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.
b.. Hawthorne, N. The Portable Hawthorne. Ed. Malcolm Cowley. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977.
c.. Long, L. S. The Marginal Imagination: Exile and Narrative in Vladimir Nabokov's American Novels. Diss. Harvard, 1989.
d.. Long, M. M. Nabokov: Childhood and Arcadia. Oxford: Clarendon, 1984.
e.. Maddox, L. Nabokov's Novels in English. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1991.
f.. Nabokov V. Afterword. "On a Book Entitled Lolita". Lolita. London: Transworld Publishers, 1961.
g.. -. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982.
h.. Shakespeare, W. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Ed. W. J. Craig. London: Oxford UP, 1959.
i.. Stegner, P. Introduction. Nabokov's Congeries. By Vladimir Nabokov. New York: The Viking Press, 1968.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Goldmann Márta
"Sirens"
The Musical Chapter of Ulysses: Technique and Style
Introduction
As is well-known, the Sirens chapter of Ulysses is devoted to the art of music, where Joyce experiments with creating something new in literature: writing musical prose. Music is not only one of the main subject-matters of this episode, but it is also about music per se. However, blending music and prose is not entirely new in literature, and Joyce seems to have followed a tradition by using literary leitmotifs, having been preceded by the so-called "Wagnerian Novel", and the symbolists, who attempted to fuse music with poetry and thus to aspire to Pater's "Condition of Music". From Romanticism onwards music has had a privileged position among the arts, being the most elemental means of self-expression, which goes beyond the intellect. According to Schopenhauer, music, being a non-representational art, comes closest of all arts to expressing the ultimate essence of existence i. e. The Will. As music does not rely on images and concepts, it represents more directly The Will itself. It is a temporal art, so it shares certain similar characteristics with words, and therefore many writers have experimented in achieving musical effects in their works. Yet Joyce goes beyond his predecessors in creating something new in literature, by exploiting the musical possibilities of language through the stream of consciousness technique, and the fragmentary structure, which breaks the traditional linear line of the narrative. Joyce's attitude to music is rather complex. Mallarmé argued that music had to work with relationships which words had already established. According to Richard Ellmann, Joyce was of the same opinion. "For him music aspires to the condition of language, and being brought to that condition in the Sirens episode, reveals itself as less than supreme. Joyce wanted Bloom to see through music, or hear beyond it. (...) Words, turned to notes, take back their own again and become words once more" (Ellmann 1972, 104-109). On the other hand Joyce was a musician as well, though not a professional, but somebody for whom music was extremely important in his life. In my essay I shall try to look at the different levels at which music appears in the style and technique, and examine whether this experiment with music has been successful.
Technique
As I mentioned above, the Sirens episode is about music per se, which means that music is not only the subject matter of the episode, i.e. the music played and performed in the Ormond bar, but it also appears at all levels of the episode, in the narrative technique, in the structure of the episode, as well as in the style. As form and content can only artificially be separated, it is worth examining why it is the Sirens episode which is concerned with music, and not any other episode in the novel. The Sirens episode can be regarded as the first episode of the second half of the novel, where the language changes significantly. The main theme of this chapter is about love, namely Bloom's love for his wife, Molly, his concern about the forthcoming meeting between her and her lover, Boylan, and his feelings towards other women, with their charms and enthralment (Thus the Homeric correspondences here are literal rather than symbolic. They have little to do with the meaning in Homer's epic i.e. Odysseus's clever behaviour and brightness as opposed to his comrades' weaknesses but rather stress the Sirens' magical power over men, which is represented by their singing). Therefore the main concern is not Bloom's intellect, but rather his emotions. Bloom walks around Dublin until he goes in the Ormond hotel where he meets his friends and listens to them singing famous arias and songs. It is through the melody and words of music that he opens his inner ear and laments his troubles. As "Music is like the shell, which, according to Bloom, gives back the sound, of the listener's ear" (Ellmann, 1972, p. 109). Music has the most elemental power by which human emotions and gestures can be expressed directly, that is without the intellect. Music is beyond words, it can express the inexpressible. But because we are within the domain of literature, we cannot hear the musical sounds, only see their effect on the characters, on Bloom especially. Therefore in literature, we can only indirectly "enjoy" music. Most of the music referred to or heard in this episode is vocal music, which besides its melody has also its semantic components, i.e. the words. However, as Matthew Hodgart and Mabel Worthington put it: "In a song, the words are always incomplete in themselves, they need the music to give them their full aesthetic meaning, and at the same time the music tends to empty them of their normal prose meaning" (Hodgart and Worthington, 1959). Thus it is very difficult to achieve a musical effect in prose in this way, even if we assume that the reader sings the melodies to himself while reading the book. However there are other ways in which a literary work can be made musical, and it is through the poetic devices so well-known to literature. Poetry has its own musical means to achieve a sound effect, but so has prose. As Ulysses can both be regarded as prose and poetry at the same time, being a novel written in a "poetic" language, Joyce applies both. Concerning the technique of the text I will examine the musical structure and devices applied by Joyce, but as far as the style is concerned, I will be mainly looking at the narrative technique.
Joyce's experiments using musical structures can be seen earlier in the novel e.g. in the Scylla and Charybdis episode, where he uses an operatic form and writes part of the text in the libretto style. It is in the Sirens chapter, however, that he applies the most direct musical form to the novel. This chapter was written in the form which he named "fuga per canonem". Whether he was serious about using this term in the strict technical sense is questionable, knowing that Joyce was not a professional musician. Joyce was devoted to music, he used to sing in concerts, but he was not a musicologist. The musical structure of this episode has caused many problems for Joycean scholars. The reason why it has been so difficult to define the musical genre of this episode is twofold. On the one hand Joyce was not proficient enough to use musical terminology, and on the other hand the form of the chapter depends on the relationship between the main body of the chapter and the introductory part. The problem derives from Joyce's inconsistent use of the terms fuga per canonem and fugue. In a letter to Harriet Weaver Shaw Joyce wrote the following: "They are all the eight regular parts of a fuga per canonem: and I did not know in what other way to describe the seductions of music beyond which Ulysses travels..." (Letters, 1959). According to Stuart Gilbert, in the preface to the 1952 edition of his book, James Joyce's Ulysses, Joyce himself said that the Sirens episo- de was written in the form of fugue per canonem. If it is the fugue per canonem then why did Joyce mention "the eight regular parts"- since this genre does not have eight regular parts? Was Joyce confused about the two musical genres or was he being consistent in his own way? Fugue and fugue per canonem are two different musical genres. Fuga per canonem is the historical predecessor of the fugue developed from the 16th century genre, fuga per canonem, which was originally used as a term for an imitative composition developed according to a rule. It had two variants: a "limited" canon, which implies strict imitation, and an "unlimited" canon, which means that it starts canonically and soon breaks off into free passages with occasional points of imitation. Thus it is from the fuga per canonem that the fugue proper, "the most intellectual of musical forms" (Brown 1948, 149) according to Brown, had developed from the 18th century, with its elaborate formal structure. This structure consists, among other things, of an Exposition, a Middle section, and a Closing section. Stuart Gilbert distinguishes the main parts of the fugue, mentioning various themes introduced in a fugal manner where he says "the Subject, being obviously the Sirens' song: the Answer, Mr Bloom's entry and monologue: Boylan is the Counter-Subject. The Episodes or Divertimenti are the songs of Mr Dedalus and Ben Dollard" (Gilbert, 1956). But his identification seems rather arbitrary. Fuga per canonem is closer to the canonic form, which implies repetition, but it cannot be traced on the level of the words in the chapter. David Cole regards the fuga per canonem form as an "unlimited" canon, whose interpretation allows for some kind of freedom at the level of repetition. He believes that the fugue has one main theme, namely sexual relationships (Cole, 1973). Most of the critics who have written about the fugue problem seek to justify the formal complexity of the musical genre in the text rather than examining the potentials of this musical genre in the literary text itself, for example, they were absorbed in trying to find the right musical categories and elaborate their ideas about them. According to David Cole, the most important relationship in a fugue is not between the different sections, but between the different voices. In the fugue, different voices develop the same theme, which is repeated and modified from time to time, whilst the original theme and its modifications are combined and played against one another in a contrapuntal relationship, therefore the most important relationship is not between the different sections but between the different voices, the chords. Hence all the voices are played against each other and they all sound at the same moment. Stuart Gilbert draws our attention to a vertical, not a horizontal listening and reading. Instead of following and listening to the separate melodies we should concentrate on listening to the chords, or the succession of chords, where the different voices are overlapping and their meanings cannot be separately understood. They can only be heard in relation to the other voices e.g. they are usually Bloom's internal monologues, where all the different voices are heard at once. The jingle of Boylan's car, Blooms's singing to himself, the arias performed in the bar, the outside noise, the blind piano tuner's tapping, all of these sounds come together in one chord-sequence. Unfortunately, the consecutive nature of language means that Joyce can only present them in a rapid succession instead of a chord, therefore he can hardly expect the reader or "listener" to grasp it. As Cole says, the fugal form has a more general function for the whole of Ulysses, not just for the Sirens episode, as Stuart Gilbert remarks: "...the effect of this technique is to thicken the texture of the narrative and, especially, the silent monologue" (Gilbert 1956, 221). What we gain by reading a passage in a fugal manner is to be able to grasp a certain simultaneity of events, thoughts, and reality, so characteristic of music. If we disregard all the academic research and just look up the original meaning of the word fugue, we may be surprised to see that it means chase.
Joyce, being a Homo Ludens type of writer, might have used the word chase in a very literal way, the chasing of the characters and the different voices. My explanation for this is that among the people who appear in the Ormond bar we can see that most of them seem to be "chasing" somebody, who is in turn chasing somebody else e.g. Bloom's thoughts are chasing after Molly, whose thoughts in turn are chasing after Boylan. Lenehan flirts with Miss Douce, who is interested in Boylan, who as we have seen above, is interested in Molly.
This episode starts with a seemingly incomprehensible passage. Is it an Overture? But why would a fugue need an overture? Or is it a fugue in itself? Or the tuning up of an orchestra? Both Stuart Gilbert and Walton Litz (1961) regard the opening passages as an overture, and they both agree that it contains a series of words and phrases which form the outline of the following narrative. They emphasise the extensive use of the literary leitmotif, but Litz goes a bit further when he suggests that the overture is not just a simple selection of "extracts", but that the way Joyce uses leitmotifs gives the following text a special character. According to Gilbert and Litz, the function of the overture is to introduce the reader to the style of the entire chapter. The limitations of these theories are shown by their inability to explain the inappropriateness of the two different kinds of musical genres, overture and fugue, being put together. Joycean scholars belonging to the second group, Lawrence L. Levin, David Cole, try to examine the fuga per canonem form with academic scrutiny, supposing that Joyce deliberately chose the archaic form for this episode. They realised that the introduction must be treated as part of the fugal narrative. David Cole gives two definitions for the opening passage, either it is a prelude "based on material drawn from the fugue which it is to follow", or an outline "for the work to follow, much like the cryptic directions for the fuga per canonem of the 16th century" (Cole 1973, 221-226). "The basic message of the canon is conveyed by the last words: "Done!...Begin!" (Joyce 1987, 210-211) which shows that the fugue has become an infinite canon, to be perpetually repeated" (Cole 1973, 221-226). Zack Bowen identifies sixty-seven themes and descriptive motifs that later reappear in the episode. Most of them are repeated metonymical phrases such as "Bronze by Gold" for Miss Douce's and Miss Kennedy's heads and "Jingle jingle jaunted jingling" for Boylan's carriage. The other types of leitmotifs are musical themes such as the "O rose! Castile! for Molly, "Bloom is on the" (Joyce 1987, 210-211) for Bloom, and other song titles that refer to various aspects of the relationship between Molly and Bloom. The problem with the literary leitmotifs is similar to the previous problems we saw when applying musical forms in literature i.e. they are incomplete in themselves, they need the music to carry their whole "meaning". Despite this, we can find some similar features concerning the stream of consciousness technique and the Wagnerian leitmotif.
The other, probably most obvious example of Joyce's musical technique appears on the level of language, that is among the poetry of the prose. Beside the so-called traditional poetic devices such as onomatopoeia, there are numerous musical devices applied in this chapter, some of which Stuart Gilbert identified in his book, such as the trillando in "wavyavyeavyheavyeavyevyevy" (228) or the staccato in "Will? You? I. Want. You. To.". He mentions that there are several glissando effects i.e. when one word slides into the other as in "Rain. Diddle, iddle, addle, oodle, oodle", among others. There is repetition, partial repetition, and variation or play on certain words, as in "Yes, bronze from anear, by gold from afar, heard steel from anear, hoofs ring from afar, and heard steelhoofs ringhoof ringsteel" not to mention the whole range of rhythmic forms in the text. Apart from these musical devices, the episode is rich in musical terminology and musical allusions as well, e.g. "No glance of Kennedy rewarding him yet made overtures." (215), and as Stuart Gilbert remarks, "The climax of the song from Martha is rendered in almost technical terms" (Gilbert, 1956). "...Lionel cried in grief, in cry of passion dominant to love to return with deepening yet with rising chords of harmony."(226)
Style
From the second half of the book Joyce's preoccupation with language is overwhelming. Each chapter is devoted to a certain style or rhetoric, and the "traditional" narration that was more characteristic of the first half of the book, apart from a few chapters, seems to vanish. As I have mentioned earlier, the stream of consciousness technique has a lot in common with the use of the leitmotif. Originally a literary device, later taken over into music by Wagner, the leitmotif is a group of repeated words, which by its shortness and intensity, is able to refer back to something or somebody beyond its original meaning. It is easy enough to see the analogy between the short direct phrases of the interior monologue, and the leitmotifs. The Joycean stream of consciousness novel attains the richness and subtlety of poetry by attempting to capture the actual flow of thoughts of his characters, through the interplay of images and symbols. Most of these symbols are musical e.g. the ear, the shell, the sea, and the blind piano tuner's tuning fork (representing humanity, and art, which links Bloom with Stephen). Joyce learnt a lot from his predecessor, Dujardin, whose novel Les Lauriers sont coupés was the first to use the interior monologue through the consciousness of one character. In the Sirens episode, Bloom catches phrases, words or melodies from running conversations or songs, and uses them as stimuli for his stream of consciousness. Bloom is the central character of the chapter as well as of the novel, therefore, as in other chapters in Ulysses e.g. in Nausicaa, whose style is characterised by Gerty's way of thinking, here the episode is written imitating Bloom's way of thinking. However, there exists a more or less identifiable narrator, and it is through his voice that the episode is related. The characteristics of his speech are short, fragmented sentences. His thoughts seem to follow any random pattern which, according to Zack Bowen, is reflected in his musical stream of consciousness allusions as well. Bloom is preoccupied most of the time by his feelings for his wife Molly, for his daughter Milly, also his bodily functions, his calculations concerning work and other matters, in a down-to-earth manner. The songs have thematic as well as musical significance in Bloom's unconscious, sometimes the words, other times the melodies are important. The kind of arias he associates with are the popular ones which Molly sang, or the ones that bear some resemblance to their relationship e.g. while listening to M'appari sung in the bar by the others Bloom recalls: "Singing. Waiting she sang. I turned her music. Full voice of perfume of what perfume does your lilactrees. Bosom I saw, both full, throat warbling." (226).
The narrative technique of this episode as well as of many others in Ulysses is very complex. Marilyn French distinguishes three voices in the Sirens chapter, each made up of several tones, which are the following, the naturalistic dialogue, Bloom's interior monologue, and the narrational line, all of which are at times merged or submerged with "verbal motifs". For example, noises like the jingle of Boylan's car, the tinkling for dinner, the clock striking four, the barmaids sipping their tea, laughter, giggles, ringing of the bells, striking of the tuning fork, coins, the knock on the door at Molly's home, clapping, tapping of the blind man in the streets of Dublin, the clinking of glasses, cockcrow, the Sonnez la cloche trick, and Bloom's digestive processes, later mixed with the sound of the passing tram. The narrational voice, which is ironical, is composed of several tones among which the most important are, "a lyrical and sentimental, an archaic or artificial, a childlike, and a clumsy stiff one" (French 1978, 1-10). All of these carry some kind of poetic device, such as measurable rhythm, rhyme, sound patterns, repetition, fragmentation, and unusual word order. In order to demonstrate the complexity of the narration, I would like to analyse a short passage from the chapter.
Two sheets cream vellum paper one reserve two envelopes when I was in Wisdom Hely's wise Bloom in Daly's Henry Flower bought. Are you not happy in your home? Flower to console me and a pin cuts lo. Means something, language of flow. Was it a daisy? Innocence that is. Respectable girl meet after mass. Thanks awfully muchly. Wise Bloom eyed on the door a poster, a swaying mermaid smoking mid nice waves. Smoke mermaids, coolest whiff of all. Hair streaming: lovelorn. For some man. For Raul. He eyed and saw afar on Essex bridge a gay hat riding on a jaunting car. It is. Again. Third time. Coincidence." (216-217)
In the first sentence the narrator tells us that Bloom bought notepaper and envelopes at Daly's, and within the same sentence we see Bloom remembering when he once worked for Wisdom Hely's. In the following sentences we trace his interior monologue through phrases from Martha's letter, which are recalled and commented on by him. A few sentences later the narrator reappears, and we are told that Bloom sees a poster, which will again be followed by remarks and associations concerning the book he was carrying, the Sweets of Sin. The same technique is repeated when he sees Boylan's car in the distance. The style of the narration is characteristic of Bloom's i.e. the story is told in very simple, short sentences. As a result, there is no significant shift between the style of Bloom's interior monologue and the narrator's, who seems to merge with his style, making it really difficult to distinguish the two.
A similar phenomenon can be observed if one looks at the numerous musical references in the chapter. Zack Bowen counted 158 references to 47 songs. Most of the musical allusions, as well as other quotations, are so much embedded in the text that it is almost impossible to find most of them. A real understanding of the Joycean text depends on an adequate approach to the quotations, which also requires a new reading different from the positivist one used by Anglo-Saxon criticism. André Topia, in a collection of essays on Joyce edited by French Post-Structuralist critics, pointed at the forms and functions of allusions in Joyce's text. He distinguishes the so-called classical quotation from Joyce's approach to them, saying that "the whole system of classical quotation rests on two prohibitions: the prohibition against modifying the borrowed fragment and the prohibition against reversing the hierarchy which puts the borrowed text in an auxiliary status to the bracket text" (Topia, 1984). In the case of the classical quotation there is no true interaction, it is simply the juxtaposition of two texts where only contexts come into play. The way Joyce uses quotations in his texts tends towards a literature of the intertextual. The disappearance of quotation marks, and the systematic use of indirect free speech, establish an unstable intermediary zone, allowing the narrator to operate at two levels (at least) of discourse at the same time. Joyce used this exclusively in the interior monologue, where the text splits and disintegrates, becoming vulnerable to a multiplicity of other texts.
This is especially interesting in the case of musical quotations, where Joyce evokes a domain which is difficult to realize using words. Most of the music referred to in this episode is vocal music, with a few examples of instrumental music e.g. Liszt's Rhapsodies (232), and Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words, but here it is the actual meaning of the title and not the music referred to which is important. It is not surprising, when we consider how important songs were to Joyce's culture and education, that on the one hand - "It is evident that he constantly slipped fragments of songs into his books because he lived in an atmosphere of songs as others live in air." (Bauerle, 1982) - and on the other hand, that is the musical genre that can be quoted in a literary work. The songs he mentions are nursery rhymes, operas and opera arias, religious chants and hymns, and popular ballads, among others. Most of the characters are involved in singing. The barmaids, however, never sing, although Miss Douce is mentioned once "trilling Idolores" (215). Bloom sings only to himself, he is the "listener" in the hermeneutic sense. Molly is not present but is mentioned several times as being the sensuous woman and the singer. Bloom laments the connection between her voice and her body, in relation to her sexual powers. Those who actually sing are, Simon Dedalus - tenor, Ben Dollard - bass baritone, and Father Cowley accompanying them on the piano. Although Boylan's song the Seaside girls is mentioned, he, himself, does not sing in the bar. The blind piano tuner is contrasted with the deaf waiter Pat, and Milly, who is not present, doesn't have a musical ear. The songs are either sung (two arias, and one ballad, along with some improvisations on the piano), whistled, or recalled. Joyce cites them in a wide variety of ways, from quoting lines from a song italicised, to slipping some words from them in the characters conversations. Sometimes Joyce misquotes the words of a song deliberately, to show how a character, usually Bloom, has remembered it. It is especially interesting when he indicates the musical notes, the pitch, by changing the syllables of the word in " ...my ardent soul I care not foror the morrow" (p 222), and changing the words as well, from "I think not of the morrow" (Bowen, 1975). Once he cites the combination of two songs, Rose of Castille, and Goodbye, Sweetheart (217) at the same time.
Finally, I would like to mention Joyce's influence on certain contemporary composers, especially Luciano Berio, an Italian post-serialist composer. Berio was introduced to the linguistic complexities of Ulysses by Umberto Eco, and they made a radio programme together with the title, Onomatopoeia in Poetic Language, which included an intensive study of the "overture" from the Sirens episode. Later, Berio composed a purely musical structure from the text, Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) in which he extracted from Joyce's mosaic of musical and semantic components, the purely musical elements of the text, "and used them to explore the borderline where sound as the bearer of linguistic sense dissolves into sound as the bearer of musical meaning: a territory that over the next decade he was to make very much his own. He did this by taking Joyce's polyphonic imagery literally, and superimposing texts upon themselves with slightly different rhythmic spacings: in effect, translating text into texture" (Smith, 1991, p. 62).
Works Cited
a.. Bauerle, R. ed. The James Joyce Songbook. New York: Vintage Books, 1982.
b.. Blamires, H. The New Bloomsday Book. London: Routledge, 1988.
c.. Bowen, Z. Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1975.
d.. Brown, C. S. Music and Literature: A Comparison of Arts. Athens, Ga.: Georgia University Press, 1948.
e.. Cole, D. "Fugal Structure in the 'Sirens' Episode of Ulysses." Modern Fiction Studies 191973. pp. 221-226.
f.. Ellmann, R. Ulysses on the Liffey. London: Faber and Faber, 1972.
g.. French, M. "The Voices of the Sirens in Joyce's Ulysses." Journal of Narrative Technique 8 1978. pp. 1-10.
h.. Furness, R. Wagner and Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982.
i.. Gifford, D., and R. J. Seidman. Notes for Joyce: An Annotation for James Joyce's Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
j.. Gilbert, S. James Joyce's Ulysses. New York: Vintage Books, 1956.
k.. Hodgart, M., and M. Worthington. Song in the Works of James Joyce. New York: University of Columbia Press, 1959.
l.. Joyce, J. Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
m.. Letters of James Joyce. London: Faber and Faber, 1957.
n.. Levin, L. "The Sirens Episode as Music: Joyce's Experiment in Prose Polyphony." James Joyce Quarterly 3 1965.
o.. Litz, W. The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake." London: Oxford University Press, 1961.
p.. Schopenhauer, A. A zene esztétikája. Budapest: Hatágú Síp Alapítvány, 1992.
q.. Smith, D. O. Luciano Berio. London: Macmillan, 1991.
r.. Topia, A. "The Matrix and the Echo: Intertextuality in Ulysses." Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French. Ed. D. Attridge and D. Ferrer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Farkas Ákos
Past in the Present and Future in the Past:
T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Sweeney Agonistes
Introduction
The two short articles printed here were originally presented to an audience of fellow-students in a doctoral course at Eötvös University some time ago. Besides trying to make a decent job of introducing the two works they each present, and thus to start some kind of meaningful discussion, the author of both presentations tried to convince his learned audience that heroic past and puny present, "high" seriousness and "low" popularity in art were not quite as unrelated as they might seem to be. Not even in the sometimes formidably demanding works of T. S. Eliot. In fact, the traditional values of his (and partly our) historical heritage and the down-to-earth concerns of our modern lives were just as closely related to each other as elements of light public entertainment and aspects of refined complexity in art interpenetrated each other in the works of this most modern twentieth century classic. Whether I managed to convince my young colleagues then and there is not for me to say, but I am as convinced as ever that real art can be nothing but serious and light, traditional and modern, being rooted in the past and looking forward into the future at one and the same time. To see how such synthesis is achieved we only have to take one (more) look at the poem Four Quartets and the play Sweeney Agonistes. Let's do just that.
Awakening from the Nightmare: Four Quartets
"History," says Stephen in the "Wandering Rocks" episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake". "History is bunk," declares Henry Ford, this latter day prophet of modern efficiency. From these often cited quotations it appears that if there was one thing that the self-portrait of the quintessential Modern Artist and the oracle of the Machine Age could ever agree on, it was that mankind's shared experience of the past had precious little use for the present. History is useless, history-to add another, contemporary, quote-will teach us nothing.
At first sight, there can be little doubt as to what the great conservative poet-thinker T. S. Eliot must have thought of the one who set America (and, indirectly, the world) on wheels and whatever Henry Ford stood for. The motor car, together with the railway car and the underground train, is a recurring motif throughout Eliot's poetry, always suggesting a sense of futile repetition and circularity. Thus in The Waste Land the work-weary employee at day's end is likened to a "human engine", who "waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting" (71); in Sweeney Agonistes the flashy but hollow crowd of Sam Wauchope and his friends arrive on the scene in an automobile whose idling engine sets the primitive rhythms of the ensuing danse macabre and, more importantly here, it is the disconsolate limbo of a London tube station that represents in Burnt Norton, the first of the Four Quartets, a blind world which "moves / In appetency, on its metalled ways", that is on the underground tracks of mean greed and sordid lust. And yet, it cannot be overlooked that Eliot's fascination with the modern world of the machine, if not with the mechanized world of man, was not merely the thrill of repulsion. Not unlike Stephen Dedalus' preoccupation with nightmarish history, and very much like Eliot's own paradoxical interest in certain manifestations of popular culture and the popular press, the poet's attraction to modern inventions, inventions bridging the gap between archaeological past and technologically advanced present, is not entirely without some half-acknowledged admiration.[1] The rhythms suggested by the throbbing taxi-car in The Waste Land or by Sam Wauchope's automobile in Sweeney Agonistes are precisely the same irresistible rhythms which, according to Eliot's essay "The Beating of the Drum", establish a link between the rituals of pre-historic primitivity and the sophisticated theatrical genres of modern times (cited by Smith 48-49).
Returning to Four Quartets, one should note that it is not only in the above-mentioned part entitled Burnt Norton where the machine plays an important part. The train and the ocean liner are the vehicles Eliot uses in the fourth quartet called The Dry Salvages to refute, in the wake of Henri Bergson and Heraclitus, the idea of a stable ego and the related concept of time progressing sequentially from a completed past to an open future:
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus
[...]
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow
You shall not think 'the past is finished'
Or 'the future is before us'. (210)[2]
Even more relevant to our subject is the recurrence in Little Gidding of another, paradoxically far more sinister and at the same time more auspicious, machine-image-that of the dive bomber. The "dark dove with the flickering tongue" (217) or the dove, which "descending breaks the air / With incandescent terror", is both the German stuka with its fire-spitting machine gun mounted on the fighter-bomber's nose, one perhaps spotted by Eliot serving as air raid-warden during the blitz, and the apparition of the Holy Spirit bringing the Pentecostal fire of spiritual cleansing and inspiration.[3]
The apparent contradiction thus underlying Eliot's attitude to the machine, this emblem of modernity, is symptomatic of his equally paradoxical attitude to the reverse of contemporaneity-history. History could, of course, be neither bunk nor a nightmare to the writer of "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (just as a reminder: "the historical sense [is] nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year" /72/), "The Metaphysical Poets" or "Modern Education and the Classics"-to mention but a few of his essays, and those almost at random. And yet, Four Quartets is anything but the lengthy record of an aging conservative's reminiscences of a glorious past or a trite eulogy to history the school-master of life. History in general is neither very glorious nor particularly illuminating.
There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. (199)
When "each venture/Is a new beginning" and yet "what there is to conquer/ [...] has already been discovered" (FQ 203), neither personal experience, nor an entire literary canon-tradition as described in the essay devoted to its relation to individuality in art-can be of much use to the individual poet. And neither has history, seen as a succession of destructive wars and disruptive revolutions, much to offer in the way of examples for the present to emulate. That the behaviour of the protagonists of England's past was not "wholly commendable" is a typical Eliotian understatement. Yorkist or Lancastrian, Royalist or Republican, the path of history's principal actors was always marked by burnt homes, dispersed communities and broken kings; there is no call to "ring the bell backward" or to sing an incantation to "summon the spectre of a Rose" (220)[4]
And yet, while "History may be servitude,/History may be freedom", just as "Only through time time is conquered", to quote two more, at first sight enigmatic, paradoxes from the poem (213 and 192, in that order). To resolve the first of these apparent contradictions, one has to work out the meaning of the second. Risking the charge of simplifying the high complexities of a poem which is rightly regarded as the crowning achievement of an immensely challenging oeuvre, we shall attempt a brief interpretation of the following lines, which provide the immediate context of the "servitude" quotation cited above.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered. (192)
Here is then one possible prose rendering of the lines quoted above: only by recalling significant moments of the past-mankind's common Edenic past as well as the individual's long-lost childhood: the "First Garden" of Burnt Norton-can we hope to transcend the limitations of our time-bound, quotidian existence. As such moments of grace occur in the present, triggered as it were by fresh, concrete impressions (such as the dry "pool momentarily filled with water out of sunlight" in Burnt Norton /190/), Eternity can only be experienced in Temporality: "Only through time time is conquered". History then, rather than a mere nightmare of bloodshed and anarchy, is an ever-changing pattern of significant moments: moments, that is, of living and of generation, of dancing around the bonfire, of commodious sacraments and valid prayer-of instants which, as the critic Joseph Chiari puts it, "link up the temporal with the eternal" (T. S. Eliot 102). Such moments of epiphany do not have to coincide with prominent events of chronicled history and the grace of experiencing them is by no means reserved for the famous and the great. Who best deserve the transcendental light are the humble and the loving and it is the here-and-now of the recipient when the gift of momentary vision is bestowed. For the writer of Little Gidding, this concluding piece of Four Quartets, this here-and-now is located in the poet's self-elected inheritance: his homeland of war-torn Britain. "Here, the intersection of the timeless moment / Is England and nowhere. Never and always (215)".
It is indeed here in England that the poet, heir of a tradition created and preserved by the community of the dead and the living, can be released from wearily repetitive past and future, from the quasi-history of meaningless, circuitous time. History then is a nightmare only to those who are never thus liberated, who are never awakened to its rare moments of significance. Because, as Eliot himself warns us:
A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
Rhythm as Form with Function: Sweeney Agonistes
T. S. Eliot's short drama Sweeney Agonistes was originally published as two fragments in the magazine The Criterion in 1926 and 1927 under the title Wanna Go Home Baby? before it appeared in 1932 bearing its final title Sweeney Agonistes, which event was followed by the play's first, amateur, theatrical performance a year later.
The plot and the characters are reductive to the point of sketchiness and caricature: in the first part or act called "Fragment of a Prologue" Doris Dorrance and her friend Dusty are whiling away the boredom of an afternoon discussing absent friends and cutting a pack of cards by way of casual fortune-telling. The gloom that sets in the wake of a telephone call by the apparently ill-liked "friend" Pereira and the sinister interpretation of a card (the two of spades-the COFFIN) is dispelled by the arrival of a jolly company of visitors. The guests include the girls' chum Sam Wauchope and his former comrades-in-arms now in London on a visit from their native Canada and America: Horsefall, Klipstein and Krumpacker. Another two guests, Snow and Swart, presumably a pair of professional entertainers, are also invited to further enliven the party.
In act, or part, two called "Fragment of an Agon", the company is joined by one more friend, Sweeney, who immediately starts to court Doris, playfully and yet scarily suggesting that he cannibalise the girl after whisking her away to an uninhabited "crocodile island", where life is nothing but "birth, and copulation, and death". This reminds Sweeney of a man he once knew who had committed the horrible crime of "doing in" a girl and dissolving the body in a lysol bath. Sweeney is apparently very much disturbed by his own horror story-was it perhaps himself who murdered the girl?-and so is Doris to whom the terrible tale evokes the spectre of her own death already "foretold" in the cards. There is nothing much to cheer her up when Sweeney gravely insists that "somebody gotta pay the rent" in the end. When Doris admits that she knows who that will be-the mysterious Pereira? herself?-the chorus of the merry visitors break into a song not unlike the tunes one imagines to have accompanied the danse macabre of earlier times, this one ending on the ghostly repetition of the frightful cry "ha ha ha/hoo hoo hoo". The play then concludes with a series of rhythmic knocks at the door.
The bareness of the plot and the flatness of the characters appear to be a function of the fragmentariness of the whole play: for one reason or the other, Eliot seems to have abandoned the idea of the play half way through. This, however, is only one hypothesis. Another, equally convincing, explanation was proffered by Carol H. Smith in her monograph on Eliot's drama, according to which the flatness of the characters and the crudity of the plot follow from the self-proclaimed genre of the play described, in the subtitle, as melodrama. This popular form of entertainment, traceable all the way back to Aristophanes' works (and thus, indirectly, to ancient Greek fertility rites) used stock characters-"humour characters" as Eliot himself called them after Ben Jonson-turned out with little attention to individuation. That even the more important figures in the play are almost interchangeable-telling Doris and Dusty apart is only slightly easier than differentiating between, say, Klipstein and Krumpacker-suggests the lack of dimension, the hollowness, of the demimondes peopling the deserts of furnished flats and cheap hotels of the Jazz-Age metropolis. Moreover, the same flatness serves a structural purpose, too: simple, two-dimensional characters can more easily be manipulated to fit into a plot which moves along and around in the same fashion as jazzy speech rhythms do, providing an insistent, repetitive rhythm to the play. This rhythm is, of course, most conspicuous in the regular syncopation of dialogue and the "background music" of the chanting performed intermittently by the chorus of marginal characters. The first exchange already sets this rhythm.
DUSTY: Who pays the rent?
DORIS: Yes, he pays the rent
DUSTY: Well some men don't and some men do
Some men don't and you know who. (Sweeney 115)[5]
The crude plot of the sensational crime mystery, the sketchy characters of melodrama and the jazzy rhythms of the music-hall variety-show are meant to captivate the attention of an audience which "wanted entertainment of an unrefined sort, but would stand a good deal of poetry," to quote Eliot's remarks on Christopher Marlowe's audiences. The modern, as well as the Elizabethan, poet's task then was "to take a form of entertainment, and subject it to the process which would leave it a form of art" (The Sacred Wood quoted by Smith 37; emphasis mine). The method to be emulated is that used by Shakespeare, whose plays yield, in Eliot's own words, "several layers of significance. For the simplest auditors there is the plot [...] for the more literary the words of phrasing, for the more musically sensitive the rhythm, and for auditors of greater sensitiveness and understanding a meaning which reveals itself gradually" (quoted by Smith 54). Later we shall return to the meaning of the play at hand and how this meaning reveals itself, but let us first look at where the specific rhythms in Sweeney Agonistes, the rhythms of jazz-verse, came from and why Eliot chose this particular musical idiom.
The poet, as his essays so often suggest, was greatly fascinated by the popular art of the music hall, an institution peculiar to the pre-cinematographic days of popular entertainment in Britain, where the tastes of a lower-middlebrow audience were catered to by variety shows featuring a mixture of light musical and prose entertainment. Prose numbers caricatured events familiar to the lower-middle class patrons from the popular press carrying hair-raising stories of domestic tragedies (consider "the bones on Epsom Heath" or Sweeney's girl in the lysol bath). Tap-dance routines, jugglers' and magicians' numbers and, most importantly, jazz music freshly imported from America provided a more soothing-because rhythmical-type of diversion. Eliot, often portrayed as the high-priest of Modernism and the preacher of cultural elitism, was so pleased with the unsophisticated genres of the music hall, that he published a whole series of reviews, including the classic obituary celebrating the memory of Marie Lloyd, the greatest of all English vaudeville entertainers. The apparent contradiction between high art and popular entertainment is largely resolved by another essay of his, "The Beating of a Drum" where, relating drama to ritual and both to man's innate attraction to rhythm, he writes the following:
Two sheets cream vellum paper one reserve two envelopes when I was in Wisdom Hely's wise Bloom in Daly's Henry Flower bought. Are you not happy in your home? Flower to console me and a pin cuts lo. Means something, language of flow. Was it a daisy? Innocence that is. Respectable girl meet after mass. Thanks awfully muchly. Wise Bloom eyed on the door a poster, a swaying mermaid smoking mid nice waves. Smoke mermaids, coolest whiff of all. Hair streaming: lovelorn. For some man. For Raul. He eyed and saw afar on Essex bridge a gay hat riding on a jaunting car. It is. Again. Third time. Coincidence." (216-217)
The drama was originally ritual; and ritual, consisting of a set of repeated movements, is essentially a dance [...] It is [...] possible to assert that primitive man acted in a certain way and then found a reason for it. An unoccupied person, finding a drum, may be seized with a desire to beat it; but unless he is an imbecile he will be unable to continue beating it, and thereby satisfying a need, without a reason [...] The reason may be the long continued drought. The next generation or the next civilization will find a more plausible reason for beating a drum. [...] The reasons may [now] be divided into tragedy and comedy. We still have similar reasons, but we have lost the drum. (quoted by Smith 48-49)
Eliot himself can be said to have found the drum which, for him in Sweeney Agonistes, sounds the rhythms of jazz-verse. As for the reason, or the meaning referred to above, the rationale of the rhythm, is a rather complex matter. Besides evoking the spatio-temporal and cultural setting of the Jazz Age (cf. Snow and Swart the white and black, or possibly Jewish, musicians whose card is the knave of spades), a world peopled by bored youngsters desperate on having a good time, the jazzy rhythms are also rich in thematic suggestions. The emphatic repetitiveness (a feature also characterising the vocabulary and syntax used by every person in the cast) of these rhythms is suggestive of the bored and boring circularity characterising the intellectual and emotional lives of Doris, Dusty, Sam and their crowd. Moreover, the thrusting of the speech rhythm is evocative of the mechanical throbbing of a motor car, as well as the motions of the human engine engaged in no less mechanical copulation. Those familiar with The Waste Land will remember the juxtaposition of biological and mechanical rhythms in "The Fire Sermon", where "the human engine waits/Like a taxi throbbing waiting" (71), while the joyless tryst of the "bored and tired" typist and the "young man carbuncular" is being described in monotonous alternate and couplet rhymes (71-72). Here, in Sweeney Agonistes Sam et al. arrive at the girls' place in a motor car and the primitive rhythms of Sweeney's crocodile-island song are suggestive of the mechanically turning biological circle of "Birth and copulation and death". The third function of the rhythm is to provide musical accompaniment to the danse macabre which can be said to be the prime mover of the whole play. That sex and death are omnipresent and are conjoined by the rhythms of the speech music is only too obvious if one considers the ominous card-reading scene terminated by the sinister phone call of the shady Pereira, this mysterious sugar-daddy in charge of paying the rent (this financial transaction is so often returned to that the stakes involved are surely higher than giving the landlord his due) and, of course, Sweeney's macabre story of the man who could not help doing that young girl in.
The spiritual pilgrimage of man and woman from a hollow, unauthentic life to the acceptance of the fact that you "gotta pay the rent", and through this recognition the achievement of genuine existence is central to the overall meaning of the play referred to above. As William V. Spanos in his insightful "'Wanna Go Home Baby?': Sweeney Agonistes as Drama of the Absurd" demonstrates, the thematic pattern of the play involves the motion of the central characters-mainly Doris and Sweeney-away from the self-deceptive sense of the false heimlichkeit (to borrow this Heideggerian term), the escapism of jazz-music, flirtation, home-parties to the recognition-also: reckoning or the paying of the bill-which all that jazz is followed by. But first these people have to be driven out of their cosy little boredom into anxiety and from anxiety all the way to terror aroused by the hounds of hell or by the Erinys hunting the unpurified soul (cf. the play's double epigraph citing The Choephoroi and St. John of the Cross). Thus the message could be summed up like this: no amount of good time and fun can rid you of boredom and Angst until you face up to "death and annihilation and, ultimately, the absurd and Nothingness" (Spanos), until, that is, you pay the rent when the rent-collector knocks at the door:
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK
KNOCK
KNOCK
KNOCK
Much of this will remind the reader of aspects of the theatre of the absurd. After all, exposure to boredom, circularity, and the Void is then what makes Sweeney Agonistes into an antecedent of the Bald Soprano, Waiting for Godot and The Birthday Party. And if the themes are related, the technique also is close indeed. If it weren't for the proper nouns McCann and Pereira, it would be very hard to tell the following dialogue fragments apart:
GOLDBERG: Don't worry yourself, McCann. Take a seat.
McCANN: What about you?
GOLDBERG: What about me?
McCANN: Are you going to take a seat?
GOLDBERG: We'll both take a seat. (Pinter 27)
DUSTY: How about Pereira?
DORIS: What about Pereira?
DUSTY: I don't care.
DORIS: You don't care! (Sweeney 115)
The juxtaposition of the horrible and the ridiculous, the employment of buffoon-like characters, jesters and clownish philosophers, the incongruent mixture of high and low features of the absurd duly noted by Martin Esslin, the favourite apostle of Beckett et al., are also present in Eliot's play.[6] But then there is something also present in Eliot, but painfully absent from the plays of Ionesco and his contemporaries-the hope of eventual redemption through exposure to the Unheimlichkeit of the Void. For these post-war absurdists the process of divestment fails to turn into a much richer investment-their via negativa leads from nowhere to nowhere. For Eliot there is, at least in The Family Reunion, this completed version of Sweeney Agonistes, a destination where Unheimlichkeit is a price worth paying for Eigentlichkeit or the authenticity of a life worth living.
Works Cited
a.. Chiari, J. T. S. Eliot: Poet and Dramatist. London: Vision, 1972.
b.. Eliot, T. S. Sweeney Agonistes. The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot. London: Faber, 1969. 115-127.
c.. -. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." 20th Century Literary Criticism: A Reader. 1972. Ed. David Lodge. London: Longman, 1992.
d.. -. Four Quartets. Collected Poems: 1909-1962. London: Faber, 1963.
e.. Esslin, M. The Theatre of the Absurd. 1961. London: Penguin, 1991.
f.. Joyce, J. Ulysses. 1936. London: Minerva, 1992.
g.. Pinter, H. The Birthday Party. 1959. London: Faber, 1965.
h.. Smith, C. H. T.S. Eliot's Dramatic Theory and Practice: From "Sweeney Agonistes" to "The Elder Statesman." Princeton: Princeton UP, 1963.
i.. Spanos, W. V. "'Wanna Go Home Baby?': Sweeney Agonistes as Drama of the Absurd." Publications of the Modern Language Association 85 (1970): 8-20.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
1.. As for Joyce's preoccupation with history the Scylla-and- Charybdis episode of Ulysses-not to mention the whole of Finnegans Wake-can serve as an example; Eliot's fascination with low-brow entertainment will be discussed in much detail below.
2.. Besides noting the relevance to the lines quoted here of Heraclitus' famous motto according to which "You cannot step twice into the same river", one should not overlook the pertinence of his system of dialectic to the whole of the philosophy underlying much of Four Quartets. As for Bergson, it is a well-known fact of biography that Eliot attended the French philosopher's lectures in Paris where the scholar expounded his theory concerning durée and the instability of the ego.
3.. Of course, the "flickering tongue" of the dove can also be interpreted as the emblem of the poet whose "concern was speech" (Four Quartets 218) much like that of the apostles who, with tongues of fire flickering above them, "began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance" (Acts 2:3-4).
4.. Whether the Rose is the symbol of York and Lancaster or the Rosicrucian sign cannot, and perhaps should not, be determined.
5.. If one is reminded by Dusty's words of the nursery rhyme "Some like it hot ...", the sinister atmosphere is in no way dispersed: that children's verse can have a menacing ring is only too well known from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four or Eliot's own poem The Hollow Men.
6.. It is all the more surprising that Esslin fails to give any recognition to Sweeney Agonistes among the antecedents of the absurd.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bakos Judit
Literary Self-Portraits Contrasted-in
Virginia Woolf and Wyndham Lewis's
Portrait of the Artist
In the title of this paper, A Portrait of the Artist has a straight reference to Joyce's autobiographical novel, though here it is used in a more general sense. A portrait most commonly refers to a genre of painting, although the term is used in descriptive writing as well. For the contemporary the term artist basically conveys connotations of fine art, yet in a more general sense it can also refer to the art of literature. Each artist-portrait in the modern novel incorporates a strongly individual, mostly autobiographical quality, yet, at the same time, these portraits can be seen as mosaics in the formation of the common idea of the modernist artist.
This paper centres on the multicoloured portraits, among them on the ones highly acclaimed by recent and previous criticism alike, including Virginia Woolf's portrait of the artist in To the Lighthouse. The portraits of James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence are also part of this tradition. As opposed to their portrayals stand those of Wyndham Lewis's more ambiguous, sometimes misunderstood, thus less acclaimed portraits. What I want to point out about these portraits-beyond the obvious similarities, based on the authors working basically upon the same tradition and their being contemporaries-is that though these similarities might seemingly outweigh the differences, still a major difference that is relevant in the writings of Wyndham Lewis compared to those of V. Woolf, J. Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, is his irony, his satirical attitude, that is often considered anti-human or nonhuman, in contrast to the basically humanistic attitude of modernist literature. Perhaps it is this characteristic of Lewis's art, writings and paintings as well, that has prevented him from being judged according to his real merits. (Nicholls)
The portrayals of the artists-the self portraitures at places disguised, at others overt-that is the artist-heroes to be observed further on will be Tarr and Kreisler, Stephen Dedalus, Paul Morel and Lily Briscoe.
All modernists had a high esteem for art and considered the role of the artist accordingly. According to the modernists, -as it is also expressed in the critical writings of Roger Fry and Clive Bell, the 'archaesthetes' of formalism and post-impressionism in England-life is regarded as a means to art. This serious claim made the writers and artists highly critical towards one another's work. Joyce's self-centeredness and linguistic playfulness met Woolf's strict criticism, she writes on Ulysses in her diary: "It is diffuse, brackish pretentious, underbred not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky, startling doing stunts. He is a school-boy-full of wits and powers so self-conscious and egotistical, that he loses his head."
Lawrence's self-worship and his worship of the 'flesh', also triggered wide critical responses. He writes in a letter to Edward Garnett in 1914: "It is the inhuman will (...) that fascinates me. I don't so much care about what the woman tells - in the ordinary usage of the word. (...) I only care about what the woman is - what she is - inhumanly, physiologically, materially..."
There are certain similarities between Lawrence's idea and Lewis's view on a 'soulless' art. However, Lewis's basically pessimistic attitude clearly divides the two. A contemporary critic of Lewis wrote (Spender, 240): "If Wyndham Lewis were living in the Renaissance he would be a Leonardo: since he lives in the 20th century he considers himself a Leonardo forced to be Wyndham Lewis with his modern consciousness and blaming the conditions which frustrate his genius."
Louise Morgan writes on Wyndham Lewis in her interview with Lewis in 1931 (Morgan, 43): "Wyndham Lewis is, as he says himself, a Renaissance man. He has the Renaissance faculty, one that is all but lost today, for taking an active part in things and at the same time observing them from the outside. He has also the Renaissance many-sidedness."
What she says about Lewis can be related to his hero Tarr as well. Tarr as an artist also has a basically romantic attitude to life and art. To conceal and to transcend it, he also strives not to be emotionally involved, that is, to observe life objectively.
As a practising painter and writer, Lewis, in this interview, points out his attitude on the relationship and influence of the sister arts: "The habit of thinking of things in plastic and pictorial terms must have its influence upon the writer's art, when you practise both as I do." (Morgan, 45)
Also in this interview he defines his interest in writing as opposed to the Bloomsbury interest, especially that of Virginia Woolf: "In writing, the only thing that interests me is the shell. It's the actions and the appearance of people that I am concerned with, not the 'stream of consciousness' of any 'mysterious' invisible within I think the normal human attitude is physical, not mental" (Morgan, 46).
Further on, supporting the classical, the orderly form, he argues against the method of Joyce, the so called 'inside method': His method is romantic. The method preferred by me may be described as classical, it is objective, and rather scientific than sentimental. The classical is the form to which all romantic revolutions of style return.The romantic is a decadence, a cons- tantly recurring decadence if you like, but a decadence. (Morgan, 47)
The novel will not develop in the direction of Joyce, "because his inside method is too limited to be a universal method", Lewis says. "The trouble with the 'thought-stream' method, [he continues] is that it robs work of all linear properties whatever, of all contour and definition: it breaks up or dissolves the shell. The romantic abdominal within method results in a jelly-fish structure, without articulation of any sort" (Morgan, 47).
Tarr as the autobiographical hero of Lewis blinks at us from the lines of the same interview, when we read Lewis saying: "Everything I do is done in cold blood.' with the 'temperament of a duellist" (Morgan, 48) He assures the reader that there is no hatred in him whatsoever, which is a far cry from his hero, however.
The 'romantic' notion of creating seems to survive in Modernism, too. Lewis himself is not far from the 'necessary' patterns and frames of the description of the process of creative writing, when he says:
"The book, of course, is born in the head, not on the paper. But I get down upon the paper, in a draught, written at top speed, the action, or the structure of the argument, as the case may be. The detail comes afterwards. But a work of art is a sort of animal-it is not easy for me to tell you just how it is made. It grows all sorts of things on itself-for effect-as it goes along. The brain creates it by a fiat-having pondered upon an entire zoology, for some time. But then the mere craftsman takes it over"' (Morgan, 49).
He clearly opposes, however, the subjectivism of romanticism. In his satiric novel, The Apes of God (1930) he attacks 'the survival of the subject', the appearance of a 'school of unabashed personal Fiction' and 'a universal cult of impersonality'. He points out: "This is a wonderful patent behind which the individual can indulge in a riot of personal egotism, impossible to earlier writers, not provided with such a disguise." (The Apes of God, 254-260)
On impersonality he writes: "It might be a good thing-I do not say it is-for an artist to have a 'personality', and for a scientist not to have a personality: though here of course I am not using a 'personality' in the Ballyhoo sense-I do not mean an individualist abortion, bellowing that it wants at all costs to 'express' itself. (...) I mean only a constancy and consistency in being, as concretely as possible, one thing-at peace with itself, if not with the outer world, though that is likely to follow after an interval of struggle" (Men without Art, 62).
He refuses the cult of impersonality as it is practised in the writings of his contemporaries, like Joyce and Woolf. As Tarr says: "Art is identical with the idea of permanence. It is a continuity and not an individual spasm." (Tarr, 229) But it is the artist who performs the magic, by which the momentary, through the work of art, is made permanent.
Lewis's main ideology might be that of radical antihumanism. There is no affirmation of human dignity in his writings, as in his paintings, even in his self-portrait, the painting entitled Wyndham Lewis as a TYRO'. As Schenker points out this ideology could feed upon T.E.Hulme's (a friend of Lewis at the time) thoughts and theories. In 'A Critique of Satisfaction' Hulme verifies this antihuman attitude (cited in Schenker, 13):
"The philosophers share a view of what would be a satisfying destiny for man, which they take over from the Renaissance. They are all satisfied with certain conceptions of the relation of man to the world. These conclusions are never questioned in this respect. Their truth may be questioned, but never their satisfactoriness. (...) These canons of satisfaction, which are the result of an entirely uncritical humanism, should be subject to a critique."
Like his contemporaries, the advocates of formalism, Lewis also worked upon the principles of defamiliarization, abstraction and the condition of deadness. The achievement of his experimenting in writing was Tarr coming out in book form in 1918. Through the two main characters, Kreisler the fallen German artist and Tarr the English counterpart, he presents a rather inhuman portrait of the artist. 'Kreisler pretends indifference while wanting Bertha, Bertha meanwhile wants Tarr and Tarr, who as the authentic artist figure should have nothing to do with either of them, indulges himself by playing the naif' (Nicolls 183) -if not by 'paring his fingernails'. "He exalts life into a comedy, when otherwise it is, to his mind, a tawdry zone of half-art, or a silly Tragedy. Art is the only thing worth the tragic impulse, for him." (Tarr, 20) For Tarr the conditions of art are its deadness, the absence of soul and that it has no inside.
Tarr's misogyny is quite explicit, as he says: "Surrender to a woman was a sort of suicide for an artist" (Tarr, 214) His problem sometimes is similar to the one of Paul Morel and the young Stephen, though hatred is not so much emphasized in the relationships of the latter ones. Instead of hatred, in their case there is perhaps some kind of self-disgust. Kreisler was different: "Woman was the aesthetic element in Kreisler's life" (Tarr, 102), reminiscent of Stephen's romantic vision of the girl on the shore: "her image had passed into his soul forever and no words had broken the silence of his ecstasy." (Joyce. A Portrait) However, while for Kreisler woman as flesh and blood conveyed the aesthetic idea, for Stephen it was the vision, the image and the moment of ecstasy that gained aesthetic importance.
Yet, the apparent distinction between Lewis and his contemporary modernists lies in his basic rebellion and negation as opposed to the ultimate affirmation of human dignity on the part of Joyce, Lawrence and Woolf. Lewis remained a dissenter, an outsider among his fellow artists. Schenker the critic, contemplating this phenomenon, says that there is a lack of a "sense of unity and purpose in his career, directed toward the fulfilment of some recognizeable human need." (Schenker, 3)
"Joyce described himself as an autobiographical novelist, believing his life and work to be one and the same, 'interwoven in the same fabric'." (Martin, 83) Richard Ellmann, Joyce's biographer, explained the phenomenon of the fusion of the lay and the sacred, that is the life and the art in Joyce's case, as "the mixture of self-recrimination and self-justification which the great writer, like lesser men and women, has made the subject of his lifelong conversation with himself" (Ellmann 1971, 5).
In his biography Ellmann points out this unique fusion of art and artist, the artist as interpreted and portrayed through his art: "Joyce had found he could become an artist by writing about the process of becoming an artist, his life legitimizing his portrait by supplying the sitter, while the portrait vindicated the sitter by its evident admiration for him." (Ellmann 1983, 144-145)
The autobiographical artist figures of Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Joyce's A Portrait, Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, and Lewis's Tarr, all appear in an almost autobiographical setting or 'landscape': Tarr living in Paris, as Lewis did before the Great War; Lily Briscoe staying with the Ramsays at their summer cottage resembling the summer house of the Stephens, the family of Virginia Woolf; Paul Morel in Bestwood, in the Midlands, the place identical to Eastwood where Lawrence himself lived; and Stephen in Dublin, the city of Joyce.
Writing about the self meant a certain justification as well as an exposition of it. All these writers established themselves by justifying their existence as artists throughout these fictional yet autobiographical artist figures in their writings. Lawrence's portrait is perhaps the most extended one, reaching back to the times before the birth of the artist, following upon the growth and development of the child and the adolescent, then the young artist, Paul Morel; it can fairly be called a Kunstlerroman.
Writing Stephen's portrait, another Kunstlerroman, Joyce also insists that: "the features of infancy belong to a portrait as much as the features of adolescence. The past has no 'iron memorial aspect', but implies a 'fluid succession of presents'. What we are to look for is not a fixed character but the development of an entity of which our actual present is a phase only" (Ellmann, 1983, p. 145).
Joyce as well as Lawrence, Woolf and, to a certain extent, Lewis all through their lives strove to try to give form to their inward looking personalities, providing themselves with an ever troubled conscience yet a strengthening belief in the validity of their own art. Eliot's 'impersonality of the artist' became, in a certain aspect, the chosen fate of Joyce, Lawrence and Lewis. Eliot's theory was published in the critical essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' as late as in 1919, while Joyce withdrew into his self-exile much earlier, in 1904. Though for a long time he did not consider his leaving Ireland should become permanent. He did not leave Dublin for good and as the years went by he did not find another place to settle down either. Thus in many terms the artist could live and be indifferent, out of politics and other current social concerns, 'paring his fingernails'. He could also manage to leave his private tragedies out of his work. This way the emotion of the work of art and the artist could remain distinct from that of the person. The emotion of his art got impersonal, as Eliot explained: "The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."
Yet, the epiphany of Stephen bears analogy with the revelation of Joyce; as much as the struggle and final self-affirmation of Paul Morel with Lawrence's self-realization; and Lily Briscoe's muddling through the creative process and finding her solution, with Woolf's own physical and mental victory upon her personal and artistic instabilities. As the critic Deirdre Bair observes on Joyce: "Joyce intended his hero to represent Vico's theory that we project and reveal our deepest selves through our heroes, as in our myths and our dreams" (Martin, 92).
Stephen's adolescent, rebellious 'non serviam' is a recurring feature of all the artist heroes. Non serviam, not only with Stephen, has a rather egotistic meaning for a first reading. Isolation, being the necessary consequence of non serviam, appears in the lives of these fictional personae. They themselves choose the life of the isolated consciousness, though sometimes it proves to be a hard decision. Think, for example, of Lily Briscoe's self-tormenting doubts on the rightfulness of her choice of the life of the artist and not that of a mother to children and the wife to a man.
Exile, cultural displacement, the fragmentariness of life were common experience for many of the modernists. Lawrence, born in England, spent much of his adult life abroad, and felt himself, with his German wife and working class background, a dissident even at home. Eliot with his New England upbringing would also be sensitive to the alien surrounding, as well as Wyndham Lewis with an American father who left the family when they returned to England. Among the discussed writers it was only Virginia Woolf who was both English by birth and well-based socially. Her concerns and motives for writing were thus, from this aspect, fundamentally different.
Form, pattern, motif, composition, symmetry, balance and harmony of structure are key terms of modernist aesthetics. In general, for the modernist artist, intellect gains supremacy over emotion. As Nicholls says (197): 'The literary values of modernism are founded on an attempt to dissociate desire from any form of identification, and on the appeal to the visual and objective which affirms distance and difference.' According to Lewis this can be achieved in the form of satire, with the external method that functions as 'disruption of mimesis'. Satire is a 'dispassionate observation and a withering of its objects into art'. (Nicholls 270) His satire made him the ENEMY, as the desire for the non-human makes Tarr a dead person in the spiritual sense.
Woolf, similarly to Joyce,renders individual consciousnesses by performing a 'stylised report of consciousness'. Both of them are omniscient narrators. As Auerbach observes, in To the Lighthouse "the voice of the author is inseparable from the tone and style of the interior monologues". (Mimesis, 530-32) James Naremore goes even further stating that the whole book is the product of one voice. (Naremore, 123)
In Woolf's writing as opposed to Lewis's 'the everyday is self-consciously elevated to the poetic'. (Nicholls) She interprets her autobiographical novel, To the Lighthouse as an elegy. For Lily, the painter, art is superior to life. The artist herself seems to be subordinated to her own art and craft. It is through the medium of art that she strives to achieve something permanent as opposed to the vanishing impressions and moments of everyday life, to find her answers for the epistemological questions of the meaning of life and death, and love. It is through art that life can be redeemed, but not as the aesthetic movement claimed, that art is the whole and supreme end of human life.
Her feminine sensibility, which Naremore describes as a 'watery world of emotion' matched with the sensibility of the artist, receives 'a myriad impressions' and fights to compose them into a coherent, stable and meaningful unity, into the painting, the work of art. As Jane Fisher observes, painting offers permanence and unity, while the narrative has the symbolic power of language. (Gillespie, 90) Thus Lily says in the novel: "Nothing stays, all changes; but not words, not paint." (Woolf, 267)
It is the painter's point of view, the importance of design, rhythm and texture that Woolf makes use of in her writing. In this she shows something in common with Lewis's statement upon his own method of writing. However, Woolf was convinced that painting is a more proper form of artistic expression than writing. For Lewis however, writing had a higher esteem than painting; fine arts assisted him to express himself in the medium of the written word.
The further quotations from Woolf give example not only of her but also her contemporaries' doubts concerning the primacy of language for the expression of the human experience: "words ... turn tail at the first approach of visual beauty" 'words are impure medium' 'better far to have been born into the silent kingdom of paint" (cited in Gillespie, 67) No writer "ever succeeded in being wholly impersonal because words are freighted with human experience, full of echoes, of memories, of associations" "Literature can never attain the purity, austerity, and aloofness that is possible in painting." (cited in Gillespie, 79)
To sum up this essay, I once again put the emphasis on the individual differen- ces, as opposed to the similarities-among the self-portraits of the modernist writers-that are highlighted and detailed above. As it is demonstrated, Lewis's 'anti-human' attitude in his art shows a sharp contrast with the contemporary modernist concern for 'the human' in the writings of Virginia Woolf as well as James Joyce and, ultimately, D. H. Lawrence. It foreshadows and anticipates the post-modern.
Works Cited
a.. Auerbach, E. Mimesis. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton University Press, 1953.
b.. Gillespie, F. ed. The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf. University of Missouri Press, 1993.
c.. Edwards, P. Wyndham Lewis. Art & War. London: W. L. Memorial Trust, Lund Humphrey P., 1992.
d.. Eliot,T.S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." 20th Century Literary Criticism: A Reader. 1972. Ed. David Lodge. London: Longman, 1992.
e.. Ellmann: 'That's Life.' The N. Y. Review of Books, June 17, 1971. pp. 3-7
f.. Ellmann, R. James Joyce. (revised) New York, London: Oxford University Press, 1983.
g.. Joyce, J. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Wordsworth Classics, 1993.
h.. Lewis, W. Tarr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
i.. -. Blasting and Bombardiering. London:John Calden, 1982
j.. -. Men without Art. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow, 1987.
k.. -. The Apes of God. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1981.
l.. Lawrence, D. H. Sons and Lovers. London: Penguin Classics, 1995.
m.. Bair, D. 'A Portrait of the Artist' In: Martin, A. ed. James Joyce. The Artist and the Labyrinth: London: Ryan, 1990.
n.. Meyers, G. The Enemy. A Biography of Wyndham Lewis. London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1980.
o.. Morgan, L. Writers at Work. London: Chatto & Windus, 1931.
p.. Naremore, J. The World Without a Self. London: Yale University Press, 1973.
q.. Nicholls, P. Modernism, A Literary Guide. London: Macmillan, 1995.
r.. Schenker, W. L. Wyndham Lewis. Religion and Modernism. London and Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992.
s.. Spender, S. The Struggle of the Modern. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963.
t.. Svarny, E. 'The Men of 1914'. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1988.
u.. Woolf, V. To the Lighthouse. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Appendix
Meződi Judit
Translations
János Vajda: Twenty Years On
Like an icecapped mountain
Unharmed by sun and wind,
Left alone by passion's fountain,
My heart is calm and still.
Billions of stars around me
Shine and twinkle in a blur,
They send their rays profoundly,
But melt I do not in the whirl.
Sometimes on a silent night
Dreaming quietly all alone,
On the fairy lake of youth I glide,
Your face before me like a swan.
And then my heart is filled with light
Like Mont Blanc's eternal snow
Brightened on a long winter night
By the first rays of the glow.
Vajda János: Húsz év mulva
Mint a Montblanc csucsán a jég,
Minek nem árt se nap, se szél,
Csöndes szivem, többé nem ég;
Nem bántja újabb szenvedély.
Körültem csillagmiriád
Versenyt kacérkodik, ragyog,
Fejemre szórja sugarát;
Azért még föl nem olvadok.
De néha csöndes éjszakán
Elálmodozva, egyedül -
Mult ifjuság tündér taván
Hattyúi képed fölmerül.
És ekkor még szivem kigyúl,
Mint hosszu téli éjjelen
Montblanc örök hava, ha túl
A fölkelő nap megjelen...
Gyula Juhász: No more can I recall
No more can I recall her blondness,
But the yellow fields of rich ears
Brought by summers so endless
Remind me once more of how she feels.
No more can I recall her eyes so blue,
But the clear lights of autumn skies
Brought by the blue September hue
Remind me once more of her eyes.
Nor can I recall her voice so mellow,
But when fields in the springtime sigh,
I hear Anna's soft words echo
From a spring far as the sky.
Juhász Gyula: Milyen volt...
Milyen volt szőkesége, nem tudom már,
De azt tudom, hogy szőkék a mezők,
Ha dús kalásszal jő a sárguló nyár,
S e szőkeségben újra érzem őt.
Milyen volt szeme kékje, nem tudom már,
De ha kinyílnak ősszel az egek,
A szeptemberi bágyadt búcsuzónál
Szeme szinére visszarévedek.
Milyen volt hangja selyme, sem tudom már,
De tavaszodván, ha sóhajt a rét,
Úgy érzem, Anna meleg szava szól át
Egy tavaszból, mely messze, mint az ég.
Gyula Juhász: Forever Anna
Years coming, years passing and you
Losing hold in my mind. Your face
Fading in my heart. Your shoulders' curve
Just a blur. Your voice
Left me behind. And follow I did not
In the darkest depth of life.
Already I am calm uttering your name,
Already I tremble not at your glance,
Already I know you are one of many,
That youth is foolish, and still,
Believe not, my love that all was useless,
Believe not that all is gone.
For you continue in all my ties askew,
In all my words misplaced,
In all the greetings wrongly uttered,
In all my letters torn to pieces,
In all my life fully mistaken
You live and rule forever. Amen.
Juhász Gyula: Anna örök
Az évek jöttek, mentek, elmaradtál
Emlékeimből lassan, elfakult
Arcképed a szivemben, elmosódott
A vállaidnak íve, elsuhant
A hangod, és én nem mentem utánad
Az élet egyre mélyebb erdejében.
Ma már nyugodtan ejtem a neved ki,
Ma már nem reszketek tekintetedre,
Ma már tudom, hogy egy voltál a sokból,
Hogy ifjúság bolondság, ó, de mégis,
Ne hidd szivem, hogy ez hiába volt,
És hogy egészen elmúlt, ó, ne hidd!
Mert benne élsz te minden félrecsúszott
Nyakkendőmben és elvétett szavamban
És minden eltévesztett köszönésben
És minden összetépett levelemben,
És egész elhibázott életemben
Élsz és uralkodol örökkön, Amen.
Dezső Kosztolányi: Necrology
See, brethren, all of a sudden he died.
He left us alone: he lied.
We knew him. Not grand or outstanding,
but filled our hearts, notwithstanding.
He is no more.
He is like earth.
Gone is a dearth
of treasure.
Learn ye all from this example.
Such is man: a unique sample.
No more like him. Not now or in the past,
no two leaves are in the same form cast.
All through time he will be lacking.
Look at this head, the collapsing
lovely eyes. Look at the hands here,
in remote haze they disappear,
stone-stiff
like a relic,
on which cuneiform wedges will bear
the ancient secret of his life so unique and rare.
Whoever he was: light and heat he was.
All knew and proclaimed: there he was.
The way he loved this or that meal.
His lips, on which now there is a seal
said, and as his voice on our ears did fall
we could hear the bells of sunken churches toll
deep down, and as he said recently,
'Son, I'd love some cheese presently,'
or he drank wine and happily stared
at the smoke of some cheap cigarette,
and he ran and made phone calls,
and wove dreams of all sorts,
on his forehead shone the sign:
of millions he's the only one.
Find him you will not, to no avail,
not in Asia or Cape Colony or here,
and not in the past either. And future's whim
will see many born, but him.
Never again
will his timid smile shine again.
The wheel of fortune so poor in turning
will never have this wonder returning.
See friends: all this so frail
like the man in the tale.
At one point life thought of him,
'Once upon a time there was him,'
then down came the heavens pounding,
no more of him - our sobs resounding.
Like a statue, stiff and numb he rests,
though once he struggled for the best.
No tears, no words: awaken him nothing can.
Once upon a time there lived a man.
Kosztolányi Dezső: Halotti beszéd
Látjátok feleim, egyszerre meghalt
és itthagyott minket magunkra. Megcsalt.
Ismertük őt. Nem volt nagy és kiváló,
csak szív, a mi szívünkhöz közel álló.
De nincs már.
Akár a föld.
Jaj, összedőlt
a kincstár.
Okuljatok mindannyian e példán.
Ilyen az ember. Egyedüli példány.
Nem élt belőle több és most sem él,
s mint fán se nő egyforma két levél,
a nagy időn se lesz hozzá hasonló.
Nézzétek e főt, ez összeomló,
kedves szemet. Nézzétek, itt e kéz,
mely a kimondhatatlan ködbe vész
kővé meredve,
mint egy ereklye,
s rá ékirással van karcolva ritka,
egyetlen életének ősi titka.
Akárki is volt ő, de fény, de hő volt.
Mindenki tudta és hirdette: ő volt.
Ahogy szerette ezt vagy azt az ételt,
s szólt ajka, melyet mostan lepecsételt
a csönd, s ahogy zengett fülünkbe hangja,
mint vízbe süllyedt templomok harangja
a mélybe lenn, s ahogy azt mondta nemrég:
"Édes fiacskám, egy kis sajtot ennék",
vagy bort ivott és boldogan meredt a
kezében égő, olcsó cigaretta
füstjére és futott, telefonált,
és szőtte álmát, mint színes fonált:
a homlokán feltündökölt a jegy,
hogy milliók közt az egyetlenegy.
Keresheted őt, nem leled, hiába,
se itt, se Fokföldön, se Ázsiába,
a múltba sem és a gazdag jövőben
akárki megszülethet már, csak ő nem.
Többé soha
nem gyúl ki halvány-furcsa mosolya.
Szegény a forgandó, tündér szerencse,
hogy e csodát újólag megteremtse.
Édes barátaim, olyan ez épen,
mint az az ember ottan a mesében.
Az élet egyszer csak őrája gondolt,
mi meg mesélni kezdtünk róla: "Hol volt...",
majd rázuhant a mázsás, szörnyű mennybolt
s mi ezt meséljük róla sírva: "Nem volt..."
Úgy fekszik ő, ki küzdve tört a jobbra,
mint önmagának dermedt-néma szobra.
Nem kelti föl se könny, se szó, se vegyszer.
Hol volt, hol nem volt a világon, egyszer.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Abstracts
Fine Arts in Literature (BAKOS Judit)
The paper contrasts Vanessa Bell's paintings with Virginia Woolf's novel entitled To the Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf must have taken her sister's artistic behaviour as a model in creating Lily Briscoe's complex character. With sensitivity, moderation and strong faith in creation Lily represents an artist struggling with a lack of self-confidence. The process of painting Mrs. Ramsay's portrait is not only about painting but also about the techniques of a novelist. The first and most significant step of creation is an intellectual activity, through which the artist organises her ideas and feelings of her impressions about the world so that she could express her message to the audience in a comprehensible way.
Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight or, What You Will (PELLÉRDI Márta)
The paper deals with Vladimir Nabokov's first novel written in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. In this novel Nabokov offers the parody of an autobiography. The article demonstrates how Nabokov integrated Shakespeare's Twelfth Night into the novel through a network of subtle implications. With this discovery the genre of the novel can be determined.
"Sirens". The Musical Chapter of Ulysses: Technique and Style (GOLDMANN Márta)
The article is about an episode in James Joyce's Ulysses called "Sirens", the musical chapter of the novel. Music is not only one of the principal topics of this episode, but it is also about music per se. The author examines the different levels at which music appears in the style and technique and how the text of the chapter is formed by style and technique. At the end of the paper the author discusses Joyce's influence on contemporary composers.
Past in the Present and Future in the Past: T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Sweeney Agonistes (FARKAS Ákos)
By analysing a T. S. Eliot poem and a play the author makes an attempt to prove that seriousness and popularity are strongly interrelated notions in literature and in arts in general. According to the author real art must be serious and light, traditional and modern in a way that it is rooted in the past but looks forward into the future.
Literary Self-Portraits Contrasted - in Virginia Woolf and Wyndham Lewis's Portrait of the Artist (BAKOS Judit)
Applying an interdisciplinary approach the paper sheds light on the connection between fine arts and literature, the basic characteristic of modernism, and analyses the rivalry of painting and literature and the relationship between artists and their works of art. Examining the authors' disguised or overt self-portraits the paper is searching for shared aesthetic notions in Virginia Woolf's and other contemporary authors' (James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis) autobiographical novels. The artist heroes examined are Tarr, Kreisler, Stephen Dedalus, Paul Morel and Lily Briscoe.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------
Kodolányi Füzetek, 5.
Studies on the 20th Century English Novel
Working Papers
Edited by Kiszely Zoltán
Kodolányi János University College
Székesfehérvár, 1999.
CONTENTS
Preface
Bakos Judit: Fine Arts In Literature
Pellérdi Márta: Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight or, What You Will
Goldmann Márta: "Sirens" The Musical Chapter of Ulysses: Technique and Style
Farkas Ákos: Past in the Present and Future in the Past: T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Sweeney Agonistes
Bakos Judit: Literary Self-Portraits Contrasted - in Virginia Woolf and Wyndham Lewis's Portrait of the Artist
Appendix
Mező Judit: Translations
Vajda János: Twenty Years On (Húsz év mulva)
Juhász Gyula: No More Can I Recall (Milyen volt...)
Juhász Gyula: Forever Anna (Anna örök)
Kosztolányi Dezső: Necrology (Halotti beszéd)
Abstracts
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Editorial Board of Kodolányi Füzetek:
Bakonyi István (series editor)
Cséfalvay Zoltán
Kiszely Zoltán
Lukács Péter (chair)
Majorosi Anna
Szabados Gábor
Tóth László
Proof-reader of this issue: Keith Hardwick
Cover Design: Rózsadombi Ágnes
ISSN 1419-5836
ISBN 963 03 8657 7
Published by Kodolányi János University College,
Székesfehérvár, Hungary
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Preface
The Department of English Studies at Kodolányi János University College provides courses in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Literature and History, besides its obvious aim to improve students' foreign language proficiency. The studies in the first volume of the Kodolányi Füzetek published in April 1999 covered different theoretical and practical issues in Applied Linguistics.
The present volume gives insight into the research of our colleagues whose main area of interest is 20th century English literature. However, the adjective "English" in the title needs to be accounted for. Today several different English languages are spoken as people's native and second language in a number of countries like India, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia etc. As a result, different literary works are written in English in these countries, therefore, the expression "English novel" is considered to be a broader concept than it used to be. It involves all the literary works made in the English language regardless of whether they were created by British or other authors. This phenomenon explains the word "English" in the title of the volume since the present studies are not exclusively about English writers.
In the first paper BAKOS Judit takes an interdisciplinary approach in comparing the paintings of Vanessa Bell with Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. The second paper investigates Vladimir Nabokov's first English-language novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. PELLÉRDI Márta's aim in the study is to show how distinctly Nabokov incorporated Shakespeare's Twelfth Night into the novel. An abundant source of 20th century literary criticism, the theme of the third study is James Joyce's Ulysses. GOLDMANN Márta discusses how musical style and technique creates the text of the chapter called 'Sirens.' In the fourth paper FARKAS Ákos argues for the notion that art has to be light and serious at the same time, in the mirror of two T. S. Eliot works, Four Quartets and Sweeney Agonistes. The fifth paper by BAKOS Judit is concerned with comparing and contrasting Virginia Woolf and Wyndham Lewis's literary self-portraits.
As the Kodolányi Füzetek provides an opportunity for the publication of a wide range of issues, the editors found it important to include MEZŐDI Judit's poem translations in the Appendix of this volume to show the versatility of the colleagues working for our department.
We hope, dear readers, that you will find our work enjoyable.
The Editor
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pellérdi Márta
Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
or, What You Will
Introduction
Vladimir Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is the first attempt on the part of the author to demonstrate his talent at writing in a language other than his native tongue. The novel was written in 1938, one year after Nabokov completed his last and probably greatest Russian novel, The Gift. Although the author continued to write stories, plays and poems in French and Russian until he left Paris for the United States, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is the landmark in his oeuvre. It separates his Russian literary period from the subsequent American one during which he wrote mainly in English. Nabokov's first English novel is a fictitious biography of a distinguished young English author, which the reader is led to believe was written by the author's half-brother, V., a rather obscure person, whose real name, except for the abbreviation is never revealed. The reader is assured by the narrator-biographer that by possessing an "inner knowledge" of Sebastian's character, merely because he is his brother, and the "immense amount of research" he had had to undertake during his quest, he had done all in his power to set down the results in book form. (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight 28) The book is a record of the quest itself and a rival biography to another one written about Sebastian Knight. While obsessively tracking down the past of his half-brother, V. also makes the most of the opportunity to denounce the work of a certain Mr. Goodman, who had published his own hastily compiled version of Sebastian Knight's life only a few months after Sebastian's death. The work teeming with errors, misinterpretations was entitled The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight. The tragedy of Sebastian, according to Goodman, the hack-biographer, lay in his realisation of "having been a 'human failure, and therefore an artistic one too'". (98)
In his version of Sebastian Knight's "real life", V. counters the argument, and his whole book becomes an effort to obliterate the philistine Goodman's distortions of Sebastian's life, thoughts and oeuvre, only to render an equally subjective version of his brother's life to the reader. Thus, the reader is presented with a parody of the biographical genre, and through the fictitious biography, is led to believe that it was written by the fictitious V., about the equally fictitious Sebastian Knight with the intention of offering his imaginary reading public a better and more trustworthy, a more "real" biography than Mr. Goodman's fictitious work on the same person. Needless to say, the work is the "real" work of Vladimir Nabokov and it is also a great deal more, owing to the intricacies of the novel and the heavy use of artifice in the complicated narrative structures the author is best known for. Appreciation of his texts increases as one tries to get closer to understanding his books by unravelling the artifice lying latent, and by regarding with suspicion the slightest details, recurring images, word games, literary and historical allusions that appear. If readers take the time to track them down and play according to the rules of the game Nabokov, the complete master of his prose, devised, they will eventually appreciate his prose to the full extent it deserves.
In this article, I have attempted to throw light on certain points of artifice: literary allusions, characters, and the linking of the fictitious biography theme to Nabokov's own literary career through the enigmatic title, with a closer analysis of the literary antecedent, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, in order to solve the frequent question of textual ownership, a problem which has not yet been convincingly settled. Critics are generally divided when it comes to evaluating the book, more often than not, it is rated favourably, but for some it is a "perplexing failure" as they believe the author to be withholding the rules of the games he plays from the readers, leaving certain questions unanswered. (Maddox 47)
Parallels between the "real" life of Nabokov and the fictitious life of Sebastian Knight
Stepping outside the concentric circles of biographies established by V.'s account of Sebastian's life, V.'s critical analysis of Goodman's work, and in a larger plane seeing the whole work as Sebastian's hoax (or for that matter Nabokov's) we are presented with a book, Nabokov's twelfth work of prose, which in biographical terms meant a turning point in his own career, a personal tragedy for the author. He had been a well-known Russian novelist only in émigré circles, and had not even dared to hope in the late thirties that any of his books would ever get published under the Stalinist- totalitarian regime. The first of Nabokov's eight English novels, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight marks the end of the author's Russian output, leaving behind more than forty short stories and numerous poems written in Russian, not to mention the nine novels terminating with The Gift as his last. A year after the appearance of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight on the literary market, (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941), Nabokov still had misgivings about abandoning his native language. He felt the urge to write in Russian keenly as he described in a letter to his wife: "On the way a lightning bolt of undefined inspiration ran right through me, a terrible desire to write in Russian-but it's impossible. I don't think anyone who hasn't experienced these feelings can properly appreciate them, the torment, the tragedy." (Boyd 52)
Fourteen years later in the author's afterword to Lolita, he expressed the same feeling: "My private tragedy, which cannot and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammelled, rich and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English . . . " (Lolita 334-335)
Although the real author's biography should in no way interfere with our study of his novels, there is an evident similarity between Nabokov's situation at the time and that of his hero, Sebastian, who undertakes writing in English from the start, shedding his Russian skin for an English one. For this betrayal of his "father" tongue, Nabokov seems to punish Sebastian through his relationship to Nina Lecerf, the "femme fatale" in the novel. The reader must admit that for Sebastian, who had grown up worshipping a distant and errant English mother and her remote land of birth, to choose between his two native languages, Russian or English, was not such a difficult task. While V., his half-brother and biographer, stayed to study in Paris which was one of the major centres for Russian émigrés besides Berlin and Prague, Sebastian, resolving to forget his Russian past turned enthusiastically to his mother's country, was trying to:
out-England England...until finally he realised that it was not these outward things that betrayed him, not the mannerisms of fashionable slang, but the very fact of his striving to be and act like other people when he was blissfully condemned to the solitary confinement of his own self (38)
The irony of abandoning his native language will reach Sebastian in the second half of the novel when he arrives at the conclusion that he had been mistaken in trying to give up his past; being Russian is just as much an integral part of his soul as his English heritage, or perhaps even more so. By that time however, it is too late for the English author to become reconciled to his past, too late for him to try desperately to clutch at the hazy and elusive essence of a national identity and what had survived of it in exile after the loss of a fatherland. Language, culture and memories in the novel are all embodied in the female figure of Nina Lecerf.
At the end of the novel, the author who "spoke Russian gingerly, lapsing into English as soon as the conversation drew out to anything longer than a couple of sentences" registers in the hospital where he is to die under his father's Russian name. (27) This is the reason why V. visits the wrong bedside, only to find that his brother had died the night before and the plans he had nursed for re-establishing their relationship on new, sincere grounds were too late.
Even Sebastian's last letter urging V. to visit him was "strangely enough written in Russian". (156) The letter is also a proof of Sebastian's command of Russian "couched in a Russian purer and richer than his English ever was, no matter what beauty of expression he attained in his books". (71) It also throws light on the cool relationship between Sebastian and V. It seems that V. had been too much of a dull fellow for Sebastian to keep in touch with besides being a link with a Russian past. He had always tried to avoid his rather conventional less talented brother, even his last letter at first had been meant for someone else:
I am fed up [oskomina] (sic) with a number of tortuous things and especially with the patterns of my snake-shed skins [vypolziny] (sic) so that now I find a poetic solace in the obvious and the ordinary which for some reason or other I had over-looked in the course of my life. (156)
Although this does not seem to be too much of a praise for V., he does not seem to take the hint. Though his first and last name remain a mystery until the end of the story, the reader is nevertheless granted the opportunity to find out about his family background, his literary tastes and his high esteem of Sebastian and his brother's books. Since both V.'s parents were Russian (he is only a half-brother to Sebastian), he prefers to cling to his Russian identity even in exile. As a narrator he does not possess the objectivity he assures his readers of maintaining throughout his narrative, the attentive reader can best describe him as an unreliable narrator, he divulges the name of the lady who had supplied him with information on the first page of the book, and goes too far in describing scenes he could have had no reliable source for depicting. (Long 119-125) He interviews a few close friends of Sebastian's and at times he completely forgets the warning devised for himself at the beginning of his quest "Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale".(44) The scarcity of his meetings with Sebastian also makes the reader wonder about how factual V.'s account may be. V.'s dislike of Nina Lecerf is too exaggerated, verging almost on jealousy and the parts dedicated to her and Mr. Goodman are anything but objective. V., judging by his style is the "obvious and the ordinary", a typical Russian émigré, loyal to his language and compatriots, intelligent enough to appreciate the merit of Sebastian's books, but not objective enough to write his biography.
Structurally, the first half of the book is dedicated to Sebastian, who deracinates himself from his Russian roots. In the second half however, there is a singular reversal of his feelings in the second half, which happens six years before his death. Upon finding his way back to his native language, the final separation between Sebastian and his ideal mistress, the English Clare Bishop takes place; this is partly due to Sebastian's realisation that he had contracted a fatal heart disease, but mainly owing to his first encounter of the young Russian woman, Madame Lecerf at Blauberg in 1929.
When Sebastian no longer wished to keep up the pretence of being English, he immediately gave up his mistress in order to retrieve his Russian self, that which he had never lost, but simply pushed into the background. (Lowell Scott Long 86) Clare Bishop can never forget him and like other female favourites of Nabokov, dies committing suicide. Although keenly aware that "cheap and vain" Nina belongs to the same category as V., the "obvious and the ordinary" representing everything to Sebastian that is Russian, her figure is actually a metaphor for Russian language and culture. Her character and what she stands for is elusive for Sebastian, as he had once betrayed it, and he cannot bend her according to his will as he could Clare and the English language. Nina, is also a "femme fatale" in the literal sense of the word exuding the poison that will eventually kill Sebastian, affecting his heart by breaking it, which is manifested in the rare heart disease that turns out to be fatal. As soon as Sebastian meets Nina at Blauberg, he will also seek contact with his forgotten Russian brother V. (89)
The "femme fatale" and the colour blue in the story
Readers have not been particular in their reception and investigation of Nina as a character. V. sees her as cruel, totally unaffected by Sebastian's death, the type of woman that makes men miserable. She unashamedly tells V. that she would have liked "to see that kind of refined, distant-brainy fellow [Sebastian] go on all fours and wag his tail".(132). It is quite ironical that V., the character obsessed with preserving his Russian identity, fails to be taken in by the charms of Madame Lecerf, the Russian lady and all that she supposedly stands for, nor can he comprehend how Sebastian could have been attracted by such a woman with whom he could not even discuss his work:
Books mean nothing to a woman of her kind; her own life seems to her to contain the thrills of a hundred novels. Had she been condemned to spend a whole day shut up in the library, she would have been found dead about noon. I am quite sure that Sebastian never alluded to his work in her presence: it would have been like discussing sundials with a bat. (146)
Nina is an incarnation of another Nina from the short story Spring in Fialta written by Nabokov in the same year as The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. The comparison between the two characters starts off a series of associations that lead to Shakespeare in a curious way across a series of literary digressions. "Fialka" is the Russian word for violet, a colour echoed in the title of Spring in Fialta and a flower that "dance through the story from the first page to the last "besides being an obvious rhyme to the Crimean town of Yalta. (Lee 98) Fialta contains "violaceous" syllables and at their last meeting Victor sees Nina holding "a firm bouquet of violets". Virginia Knight, Sebastian's mother and Nina Lecerf are both associated with violets and the colour blue. Madame Lecerf has a bluish sheen to her hair, violet-dark eye-lids, a blue vein on her neck, a sapphire ring, sits on a blue sofa the first time V. sees her, and it is at Blauberg that Sebastian first meets her. Although Virginia Knight and Madame Lecerf both possess rather similar traits; the "mother" association, however, which first occurs to the reader, is correct only in so far as the two characters represent "mother tongues", the native languages of the two females, one of them being English, the other Russian. Sebastian's mother had been a flirt, abandoning husband and child and having various affairs through her life which finally ends in a pension called "Les Violettes". (16) She visits her son only once and "thrusts a small parcel of sugar coated violets into Sebastian's hands". (9) When nosy young V. searches the morose Sebastian's drawers back in St. Petersburg he finds among various items "a small muslin bag of violet sweets". (15) Nina, on the other hand, succeeds in luring Sebastian back to the language and culture of his father, the letters she writes to him are written in Russian on blue stationary which V., out of respect for his brother's request, destroys.
There are other allusions around the mysterious person of Nina scattered in the text that are waiting to be picked up by the reader, deliberately planted by Nabokov, and together with the violets in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, they lead us to another train of associations. The function of the Anglo-Persian dictionary on Sebastian's shelf in his London flat is a detail that gains significance only when Nina tells V. that "there used to be a Persian princess like me. She blighted the Palace Gardens". (138) According to Nina "all flowers except pinks and daffodils withered if I touched them". (138) Her house, which she refers to as a "triste demeure", and gardens are unpleasant and melancholy and V. is surprised to learn that the dismal place had been built only thirty years before (137, 141). Another clue is dropped when V. goes to see a film Sebastian had seen three times, unusual, for it had been a "perfectly insipid" one called the "Enchanted Garden" where V. chances to recognise Nina among some bathers in one of the scenes. (155) V.'s antipathy towards Nina is heightened by the fact that she had smashed Sebastian's life and had never taken him seriously. Although she denies being a "femme fatale" that is exactly what she is, lethal, and Sebastian had withered at her touch just like the live creatures, plants did at Beatrice Rappacini's touch in the enchanted garden created by Nathaniel Hawthorne in Rappaccini's Daughter. Beatrice's attire and the flowers of her sister plant are of a purplish hue, and the whole story being based on an ancient one about "an Indian prince who sent a beautiful woman as a present to Alexander the Great. She was as lovely as the dawn and gorgeous as the sunset; but what especially distinguished her was a certain rich perfume in her breath-richer than a garden of Persian roses...This lovely woman had been nourished with poisons from her birth upward until her whole nature was so imbued with them that she herself had become the deadliest poison in existence".(Hawthorne 202) Nina is the Russian incarnation of that princess, and if the country, culture or language she is associated with is considered, Sebastian's death or exile itself and all things beautiful like the garden that withered at her touch, take on a wealth of metaphorical meaning.
Nabokov had done to Nina what he had done to many of his characters in resurrecting them from literary, mythical, historical or fabulistic sources, there is a metaphysical touch to them, and they seem to be victims of metempsychosis. Nina talking about herself in the third person said that perhaps she did love Sebastian "but held special views about death which excluded hysterics". (130) Pahl Pahlich Rechnoy, her first husband also confirms her belief in Buddhist doctrines: "she used to eat only lemon-ice and cucumbers, and talk of death and the Nirvana or something-she had a weakness for Lhassa-you know what I mean...".(122) All this accentuates not only the fact that she was a philistine following fashionable ideas, but her link with and belief in the transmigration of the soul by supplying an example of curious re-occurring situations in which she becomes a modern Russian "princesse fatale". When V. upon reaching the end of his narrative declares that he had learned one of Sebastian's secrets, "namely: that the soul is but a manner of being-not a constant state-that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations", he proceeds to contemplate life after death: "The hereafter may be the full ability of consciously living in any number of souls, all of them unconscious of their interchangeable burden. Thus I am Sebastian Knight". (172) With this revelation, to make his biography of Sebastian more credible, V. affirms that he had certainly learned the secret of recapturing the "undulations" of his brother's soul from Sebastian himself who in turn witnessed through Nina, the example of literary metempsychosis. For V., the act of "consciously living" in Sebastian's mind and soul, performed the result of his complete identification with his brother in consequence of which he strongly believes his biography can be nothing but entirely factual. On the other hand, he is completely "unconscious" of his soul being similarly burdened and his actions and thoughts ironically mimicked by the alien soul of his creator Sebastian. V. is certainly unaware that he has no will of his own and is not the author of the biography but simply another character in Sebastian's book, to which the above as well as the following lend credence.
The relationship between Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night
The "violet" theme, however can still be continued by tracking down the origin of Sebastian's name. Sebastian's first name may be a reference to the martyr, a painter, a king, or to the identically named character in Twelfth Night (Stegner xxv). The only but completely valid similarity between the martyr and Sebastian is that both were erroneously believed to be dead. In Nabokov's novel Sebastian is thought to be dead by the readers whereas he is only writing his fictitious autobiography in which there is not one item that can be taken for a fact. Thus Sebastian's autobiography on account of its fabulist quality becomes another one of his novels in which the tale is entirely invented. Outside the circle of Sebastian's authorial realm there is the real author's world which ensures the fictitiousness of the characters and situation.
To further prove Sebastian's authorship the reader is best advised to turn to the investigation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. In the play one of the characters is called Sebastian. He has a twin sister who impersonates her brother throughout the play until the last act where before the very eyes of the other characters it is discovered that they are exact replicas of each other. Antonio, the sea-captain is amazed: "How have you made division of yourself? / An apple cleft in two, is no more twin / Than these two creatures. Which is Sebastian?"(Twelfth Night, V, I) Sebastian's sister is named Viola - another violet-coloured association...and another character whose name begins with a V! As she is the duplicate of her brother, she may well have the right to recite the lines V. utters in the novel: "Sebastian's mask clings to my face, the likeness will not be washed off. I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows". (173) As "an apple cleft in two" it is just as difficult to establish the identity of V. and Sebastian, until Shakespeare's Sebastian is taken into account and the ownership of the text is thus determined. In Act V, Scene I, Sebastian beholds the very likeness of his own self when he sees Viola in male attire: "Do I stand there? I never had a brother...". It seems likely that Sebastian Knight whose last name is a pun on the title of the Shakespeare play never had one either, V.'s existence being completely fictitious within the story itself. As the play is about mistaken identities, so this is discovered to be the central theme in the novel. While Sebastian the author is creating his characters, he is also impersonating them, including V. and Madame Lecerf, the Viola of the story who had been associated with the colour blue and violet. V. and Nina are two separate male and female versions of the "obvious and the ordinary" but they are also one with their creator, neither having had any form of existence in Sebastian's "real" life. Goodman, the hack biographer certainly did not seem to know anything about the existence of a brother. V. presses us to believe that the answer for having omitted this important biographical data lay in the careless and sloppy research Goodman had conducted, but the reader must also bear in mind Viola's warning to Olivia in Act I Scene V of Twelfth Night: "I swear I am not that I play". And likewise V. is not the brother he pretends to be or as the readers are led to believe through Sebastian's (Nabokov's) painstaking machinations. After all, a year before his death Sebastian had planned to write a fictitious biography which according to V. he never succeeded in accomplishing. Although The Real Life of Sebastian Knight presents itself as a fictitious biography to the "real reader", it has, upon the basis of the above, thrown hints which proved it to be a fictitious autobiography, as Sebastian cannot present his "real life", he does not even seem to have one, being only a fictitious character of Nabokov's.
The suspicious fiction-within fiction quality of the other characters is accentuated by making their appearance in V.'s life and simultaneously filling Sebastian's books. When V. feels he is impersonating his brother on a stage, he is doing what Shakespeare's Viola had unconsciously done, impersonating her brother also on a stage (Nabokov for that matter has also joined the line of imitators as he is imitating an English author in attempting to write his first English novel). Thus a few characters from the stage of Twelfth Night are borrowed and resurrected to play larger or minor roles in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Helene Grinstein, the woman V. would have liked to see as Sebastian's mistress appears in black, mourning the loss of her brother-in-law but excellently managing a household, even taking the time to help V. in his quest for another source of information. In Twelfth Night Olivia also mourns the loss of her brother which does not hinder her in tending to the affairs of her house, paying attention to the people that surround her. Shakespeare's Sebastian dazed by the hasty marriage that is to take place between them makes a remark that refers to Olivia's housekeeping which could also apply to Helene: "Or else the lady's mad: yet, if t'were so, / She could not sway her house, command her followers" (TN, IV, III).
Pretentious Mr. Goodman's name ironically alludes to the equally contemptuous and philistine figure of Malvolio, the Puritan, both having clerical and administrative duties. Goodman had formerly worked as a secretary to Sebastian, Malvolio as steward to Olivia, both foolishly striving at greatness; the former believing that he could marry the rich Olivia; while Goodman, the inept blundering biographer botches the facts of Sebastian's life, completely misunderstanding and misinterpreting his books and his thoughts, falsely believing that he could thus attain distinguished literary scholarship. The connection between the two characters is further reinforced by the rather archaic word: "goodman" meaning "head of a household", steward, the position Malvolio held in Olivia's house. The Clown in Act IV Scene II of Twelfth Night takes leave of Malvolio with the following song
"...Like a mad lad,
Pare thy nails, dad;
Adieu, goodman drivel".
Needless to say, Mr. Goodman's version of Sebastian's life is nothing but drivel.
The inn in the play where Sebastian seeks Antonio unsuccessfully is called "The Elephant". Translated into Russian, "elephant" is "slon", the name of the bishop in chess, Clare Bishop's name thereby alluding to the inn where Sebastian had not found Antonio-who is incidentally quite in love with Viola's brother as Clare is with Sebastian-Clare's ideal portrait also being a tribute to Vera Evseevna Slonim, Nabokov's dedicated wife.
Perhaps the most relevant connection between Twelfth Night and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is concealed in the title of Shakespeare's play. This connection bears close links with Nabokov's career as a prose writer, therefore it is a biographical one but not a fictitious one this time. Nabokov's first English novel was the twelfth volume of prose that had been published by 1941.
The title of Shakespeare's play can thus be twisted into being interpreted as "the twelfth volume is about Knight" and the play with its comedy of mistaken identities serves as a source for illustrating mistaken textual ownership. It is up to the reader to decide whether they accept holding the real life of Sebastian in their hands or interpret it as they like it. Keeping his readers in mind, Nabokov might as well have entitled his novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight; or, What You Will.
Works Cited
a.. Boyd, B. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.
b.. Hawthorne, N. The Portable Hawthorne. Ed. Malcolm Cowley. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977.
c.. Long, L. S. The Marginal Imagination: Exile and Narrative in Vladimir Nabokov's American Novels. Diss. Harvard, 1989.
d.. Long, M. M. Nabokov: Childhood and Arcadia. Oxford: Clarendon, 1984.
e.. Maddox, L. Nabokov's Novels in English. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1991.
f.. Nabokov V. Afterword. "On a Book Entitled Lolita". Lolita. London: Transworld Publishers, 1961.
g.. -. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982.
h.. Shakespeare, W. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Ed. W. J. Craig. London: Oxford UP, 1959.
i.. Stegner, P. Introduction. Nabokov's Congeries. By Vladimir Nabokov. New York: The Viking Press, 1968.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Goldmann Márta
"Sirens"
The Musical Chapter of Ulysses: Technique and Style
Introduction
As is well-known, the Sirens chapter of Ulysses is devoted to the art of music, where Joyce experiments with creating something new in literature: writing musical prose. Music is not only one of the main subject-matters of this episode, but it is also about music per se. However, blending music and prose is not entirely new in literature, and Joyce seems to have followed a tradition by using literary leitmotifs, having been preceded by the so-called "Wagnerian Novel", and the symbolists, who attempted to fuse music with poetry and thus to aspire to Pater's "Condition of Music". From Romanticism onwards music has had a privileged position among the arts, being the most elemental means of self-expression, which goes beyond the intellect. According to Schopenhauer, music, being a non-representational art, comes closest of all arts to expressing the ultimate essence of existence i. e. The Will. As music does not rely on images and concepts, it represents more directly The Will itself. It is a temporal art, so it shares certain similar characteristics with words, and therefore many writers have experimented in achieving musical effects in their works. Yet Joyce goes beyond his predecessors in creating something new in literature, by exploiting the musical possibilities of language through the stream of consciousness technique, and the fragmentary structure, which breaks the traditional linear line of the narrative. Joyce's attitude to music is rather complex. Mallarmé argued that music had to work with relationships which words had already established. According to Richard Ellmann, Joyce was of the same opinion. "For him music aspires to the condition of language, and being brought to that condition in the Sirens episode, reveals itself as less than supreme. Joyce wanted Bloom to see through music, or hear beyond it. (...) Words, turned to notes, take back their own again and become words once more" (Ellmann 1972, 104-109). On the other hand Joyce was a musician as well, though not a professional, but somebody for whom music was extremely important in his life. In my essay I shall try to look at the different levels at which music appears in the style and technique, and examine whether this experiment with music has been successful.
Technique
As I mentioned above, the Sirens episode is about music per se, which means that music is not only the subject matter of the episode, i.e. the music played and performed in the Ormond bar, but it also appears at all levels of the episode, in the narrative technique, in the structure of the episode, as well as in the style. As form and content can only artificially be separated, it is worth examining why it is the Sirens episode which is concerned with music, and not any other episode in the novel. The Sirens episode can be regarded as the first episode of the second half of the novel, where the language changes significantly. The main theme of this chapter is about love, namely Bloom's love for his wife, Molly, his concern about the forthcoming meeting between her and her lover, Boylan, and his feelings towards other women, with their charms and enthralment (Thus the Homeric correspondences here are literal rather than symbolic. They have little to do with the meaning in Homer's epic i.e. Odysseus's clever behaviour and brightness as opposed to his comrades' weaknesses but rather stress the Sirens' magical power over men, which is represented by their singing). Therefore the main concern is not Bloom's intellect, but rather his emotions. Bloom walks around Dublin until he goes in the Ormond hotel where he meets his friends and listens to them singing famous arias and songs. It is through the melody and words of music that he opens his inner ear and laments his troubles. As "Music is like the shell, which, according to Bloom, gives back the sound, of the listener's ear" (Ellmann, 1972, p. 109). Music has the most elemental power by which human emotions and gestures can be expressed directly, that is without the intellect. Music is beyond words, it can express the inexpressible. But because we are within the domain of literature, we cannot hear the musical sounds, only see their effect on the characters, on Bloom especially. Therefore in literature, we can only indirectly "enjoy" music. Most of the music referred to or heard in this episode is vocal music, which besides its melody has also its semantic components, i.e. the words. However, as Matthew Hodgart and Mabel Worthington put it: "In a song, the words are always incomplete in themselves, they need the music to give them their full aesthetic meaning, and at the same time the music tends to empty them of their normal prose meaning" (Hodgart and Worthington, 1959). Thus it is very difficult to achieve a musical effect in prose in this way, even if we assume that the reader sings the melodies to himself while reading the book. However there are other ways in which a literary work can be made musical, and it is through the poetic devices so well-known to literature. Poetry has its own musical means to achieve a sound effect, but so has prose. As Ulysses can both be regarded as prose and poetry at the same time, being a novel written in a "poetic" language, Joyce applies both. Concerning the technique of the text I will examine the musical structure and devices applied by Joyce, but as far as the style is concerned, I will be mainly looking at the narrative technique.
Joyce's experiments using musical structures can be seen earlier in the novel e.g. in the Scylla and Charybdis episode, where he uses an operatic form and writes part of the text in the libretto style. It is in the Sirens chapter, however, that he applies the most direct musical form to the novel. This chapter was written in the form which he named "fuga per canonem". Whether he was serious about using this term in the strict technical sense is questionable, knowing that Joyce was not a professional musician. Joyce was devoted to music, he used to sing in concerts, but he was not a musicologist. The musical structure of this episode has caused many problems for Joycean scholars. The reason why it has been so difficult to define the musical genre of this episode is twofold. On the one hand Joyce was not proficient enough to use musical terminology, and on the other hand the form of the chapter depends on the relationship between the main body of the chapter and the introductory part. The problem derives from Joyce's inconsistent use of the terms fuga per canonem and fugue. In a letter to Harriet Weaver Shaw Joyce wrote the following: "They are all the eight regular parts of a fuga per canonem: and I did not know in what other way to describe the seductions of music beyond which Ulysses travels..." (Letters, 1959). According to Stuart Gilbert, in the preface to the 1952 edition of his book, James Joyce's Ulysses, Joyce himself said that the Sirens episo- de was written in the form of fugue per canonem. If it is the fugue per canonem then why did Joyce mention "the eight regular parts"- since this genre does not have eight regular parts? Was Joyce confused about the two musical genres or was he being consistent in his own way? Fugue and fugue per canonem are two different musical genres. Fuga per canonem is the historical predecessor of the fugue developed from the 16th century genre, fuga per canonem, which was originally used as a term for an imitative composition developed according to a rule. It had two variants: a "limited" canon, which implies strict imitation, and an "unlimited" canon, which means that it starts canonically and soon breaks off into free passages with occasional points of imitation. Thus it is from the fuga per canonem that the fugue proper, "the most intellectual of musical forms" (Brown 1948, 149) according to Brown, had developed from the 18th century, with its elaborate formal structure. This structure consists, among other things, of an Exposition, a Middle section, and a Closing section. Stuart Gilbert distinguishes the main parts of the fugue, mentioning various themes introduced in a fugal manner where he says "the Subject, being obviously the Sirens' song: the Answer, Mr Bloom's entry and monologue: Boylan is the Counter-Subject. The Episodes or Divertimenti are the songs of Mr Dedalus and Ben Dollard" (Gilbert, 1956). But his identification seems rather arbitrary. Fuga per canonem is closer to the canonic form, which implies repetition, but it cannot be traced on the level of the words in the chapter. David Cole regards the fuga per canonem form as an "unlimited" canon, whose interpretation allows for some kind of freedom at the level of repetition. He believes that the fugue has one main theme, namely sexual relationships (Cole, 1973). Most of the critics who have written about the fugue problem seek to justify the formal complexity of the musical genre in the text rather than examining the potentials of this musical genre in the literary text itself, for example, they were absorbed in trying to find the right musical categories and elaborate their ideas about them. According to David Cole, the most important relationship in a fugue is not between the different sections, but between the different voices. In the fugue, different voices develop the same theme, which is repeated and modified from time to time, whilst the original theme and its modifications are combined and played against one another in a contrapuntal relationship, therefore the most important relationship is not between the different sections but between the different voices, the chords. Hence all the voices are played against each other and they all sound at the same moment. Stuart Gilbert draws our attention to a vertical, not a horizontal listening and reading. Instead of following and listening to the separate melodies we should concentrate on listening to the chords, or the succession of chords, where the different voices are overlapping and their meanings cannot be separately understood. They can only be heard in relation to the other voices e.g. they are usually Bloom's internal monologues, where all the different voices are heard at once. The jingle of Boylan's car, Blooms's singing to himself, the arias performed in the bar, the outside noise, the blind piano tuner's tapping, all of these sounds come together in one chord-sequence. Unfortunately, the consecutive nature of language means that Joyce can only present them in a rapid succession instead of a chord, therefore he can hardly expect the reader or "listener" to grasp it. As Cole says, the fugal form has a more general function for the whole of Ulysses, not just for the Sirens episode, as Stuart Gilbert remarks: "...the effect of this technique is to thicken the texture of the narrative and, especially, the silent monologue" (Gilbert 1956, 221). What we gain by reading a passage in a fugal manner is to be able to grasp a certain simultaneity of events, thoughts, and reality, so characteristic of music. If we disregard all the academic research and just look up the original meaning of the word fugue, we may be surprised to see that it means chase.
Joyce, being a Homo Ludens type of writer, might have used the word chase in a very literal way, the chasing of the characters and the different voices. My explanation for this is that among the people who appear in the Ormond bar we can see that most of them seem to be "chasing" somebody, who is in turn chasing somebody else e.g. Bloom's thoughts are chasing after Molly, whose thoughts in turn are chasing after Boylan. Lenehan flirts with Miss Douce, who is interested in Boylan, who as we have seen above, is interested in Molly.
This episode starts with a seemingly incomprehensible passage. Is it an Overture? But why would a fugue need an overture? Or is it a fugue in itself? Or the tuning up of an orchestra? Both Stuart Gilbert and Walton Litz (1961) regard the opening passages as an overture, and they both agree that it contains a series of words and phrases which form the outline of the following narrative. They emphasise the extensive use of the literary leitmotif, but Litz goes a bit further when he suggests that the overture is not just a simple selection of "extracts", but that the way Joyce uses leitmotifs gives the following text a special character. According to Gilbert and Litz, the function of the overture is to introduce the reader to the style of the entire chapter. The limitations of these theories are shown by their inability to explain the inappropriateness of the two different kinds of musical genres, overture and fugue, being put together. Joycean scholars belonging to the second group, Lawrence L. Levin, David Cole, try to examine the fuga per canonem form with academic scrutiny, supposing that Joyce deliberately chose the archaic form for this episode. They realised that the introduction must be treated as part of the fugal narrative. David Cole gives two definitions for the opening passage, either it is a prelude "based on material drawn from the fugue which it is to follow", or an outline "for the work to follow, much like the cryptic directions for the fuga per canonem of the 16th century" (Cole 1973, 221-226). "The basic message of the canon is conveyed by the last words: "Done!...Begin!" (Joyce 1987, 210-211) which shows that the fugue has become an infinite canon, to be perpetually repeated" (Cole 1973, 221-226). Zack Bowen identifies sixty-seven themes and descriptive motifs that later reappear in the episode. Most of them are repeated metonymical phrases such as "Bronze by Gold" for Miss Douce's and Miss Kennedy's heads and "Jingle jingle jaunted jingling" for Boylan's carriage. The other types of leitmotifs are musical themes such as the "O rose! Castile! for Molly, "Bloom is on the" (Joyce 1987, 210-211) for Bloom, and other song titles that refer to various aspects of the relationship between Molly and Bloom. The problem with the literary leitmotifs is similar to the previous problems we saw when applying musical forms in literature i.e. they are incomplete in themselves, they need the music to carry their whole "meaning". Despite this, we can find some similar features concerning the stream of consciousness technique and the Wagnerian leitmotif.
The other, probably most obvious example of Joyce's musical technique appears on the level of language, that is among the poetry of the prose. Beside the so-called traditional poetic devices such as onomatopoeia, there are numerous musical devices applied in this chapter, some of which Stuart Gilbert identified in his book, such as the trillando in "wavyavyeavyheavyeavyevyevy" (228) or the staccato in "Will? You? I. Want. You. To.". He mentions that there are several glissando effects i.e. when one word slides into the other as in "Rain. Diddle, iddle, addle, oodle, oodle", among others. There is repetition, partial repetition, and variation or play on certain words, as in "Yes, bronze from anear, by gold from afar, heard steel from anear, hoofs ring from afar, and heard steelhoofs ringhoof ringsteel" not to mention the whole range of rhythmic forms in the text. Apart from these musical devices, the episode is rich in musical terminology and musical allusions as well, e.g. "No glance of Kennedy rewarding him yet made overtures." (215), and as Stuart Gilbert remarks, "The climax of the song from Martha is rendered in almost technical terms" (Gilbert, 1956). "...Lionel cried in grief, in cry of passion dominant to love to return with deepening yet with rising chords of harmony."(226)
Style
From the second half of the book Joyce's preoccupation with language is overwhelming. Each chapter is devoted to a certain style or rhetoric, and the "traditional" narration that was more characteristic of the first half of the book, apart from a few chapters, seems to vanish. As I have mentioned earlier, the stream of consciousness technique has a lot in common with the use of the leitmotif. Originally a literary device, later taken over into music by Wagner, the leitmotif is a group of repeated words, which by its shortness and intensity, is able to refer back to something or somebody beyond its original meaning. It is easy enough to see the analogy between the short direct phrases of the interior monologue, and the leitmotifs. The Joycean stream of consciousness novel attains the richness and subtlety of poetry by attempting to capture the actual flow of thoughts of his characters, through the interplay of images and symbols. Most of these symbols are musical e.g. the ear, the shell, the sea, and the blind piano tuner's tuning fork (representing humanity, and art, which links Bloom with Stephen). Joyce learnt a lot from his predecessor, Dujardin, whose novel Les Lauriers sont coupés was the first to use the interior monologue through the consciousness of one character. In the Sirens episode, Bloom catches phrases, words or melodies from running conversations or songs, and uses them as stimuli for his stream of consciousness. Bloom is the central character of the chapter as well as of the novel, therefore, as in other chapters in Ulysses e.g. in Nausicaa, whose style is characterised by Gerty's way of thinking, here the episode is written imitating Bloom's way of thinking. However, there exists a more or less identifiable narrator, and it is through his voice that the episode is related. The characteristics of his speech are short, fragmented sentences. His thoughts seem to follow any random pattern which, according to Zack Bowen, is reflected in his musical stream of consciousness allusions as well. Bloom is preoccupied most of the time by his feelings for his wife Molly, for his daughter Milly, also his bodily functions, his calculations concerning work and other matters, in a down-to-earth manner. The songs have thematic as well as musical significance in Bloom's unconscious, sometimes the words, other times the melodies are important. The kind of arias he associates with are the popular ones which Molly sang, or the ones that bear some resemblance to their relationship e.g. while listening to M'appari sung in the bar by the others Bloom recalls: "Singing. Waiting she sang. I turned her music. Full voice of perfume of what perfume does your lilactrees. Bosom I saw, both full, throat warbling." (226).
The narrative technique of this episode as well as of many others in Ulysses is very complex. Marilyn French distinguishes three voices in the Sirens chapter, each made up of several tones, which are the following, the naturalistic dialogue, Bloom's interior monologue, and the narrational line, all of which are at times merged or submerged with "verbal motifs". For example, noises like the jingle of Boylan's car, the tinkling for dinner, the clock striking four, the barmaids sipping their tea, laughter, giggles, ringing of the bells, striking of the tuning fork, coins, the knock on the door at Molly's home, clapping, tapping of the blind man in the streets of Dublin, the clinking of glasses, cockcrow, the Sonnez la cloche trick, and Bloom's digestive processes, later mixed with the sound of the passing tram. The narrational voice, which is ironical, is composed of several tones among which the most important are, "a lyrical and sentimental, an archaic or artificial, a childlike, and a clumsy stiff one" (French 1978, 1-10). All of these carry some kind of poetic device, such as measurable rhythm, rhyme, sound patterns, repetition, fragmentation, and unusual word order. In order to demonstrate the complexity of the narration, I would like to analyse a short passage from the chapter.
Two sheets cream vellum paper one reserve two envelopes when I was in Wisdom Hely's wise Bloom in Daly's Henry Flower bought. Are you not happy in your home? Flower to console me and a pin cuts lo. Means something, language of flow. Was it a daisy? Innocence that is. Respectable girl meet after mass. Thanks awfully muchly. Wise Bloom eyed on the door a poster, a swaying mermaid smoking mid nice waves. Smoke mermaids, coolest whiff of all. Hair streaming: lovelorn. For some man. For Raul. He eyed and saw afar on Essex bridge a gay hat riding on a jaunting car. It is. Again. Third time. Coincidence." (216-217)
In the first sentence the narrator tells us that Bloom bought notepaper and envelopes at Daly's, and within the same sentence we see Bloom remembering when he once worked for Wisdom Hely's. In the following sentences we trace his interior monologue through phrases from Martha's letter, which are recalled and commented on by him. A few sentences later the narrator reappears, and we are told that Bloom sees a poster, which will again be followed by remarks and associations concerning the book he was carrying, the Sweets of Sin. The same technique is repeated when he sees Boylan's car in the distance. The style of the narration is characteristic of Bloom's i.e. the story is told in very simple, short sentences. As a result, there is no significant shift between the style of Bloom's interior monologue and the narrator's, who seems to merge with his style, making it really difficult to distinguish the two.
A similar phenomenon can be observed if one looks at the numerous musical references in the chapter. Zack Bowen counted 158 references to 47 songs. Most of the musical allusions, as well as other quotations, are so much embedded in the text that it is almost impossible to find most of them. A real understanding of the Joycean text depends on an adequate approach to the quotations, which also requires a new reading different from the positivist one used by Anglo-Saxon criticism. André Topia, in a collection of essays on Joyce edited by French Post-Structuralist critics, pointed at the forms and functions of allusions in Joyce's text. He distinguishes the so-called classical quotation from Joyce's approach to them, saying that "the whole system of classical quotation rests on two prohibitions: the prohibition against modifying the borrowed fragment and the prohibition against reversing the hierarchy which puts the borrowed text in an auxiliary status to the bracket text" (Topia, 1984). In the case of the classical quotation there is no true interaction, it is simply the juxtaposition of two texts where only contexts come into play. The way Joyce uses quotations in his texts tends towards a literature of the intertextual. The disappearance of quotation marks, and the systematic use of indirect free speech, establish an unstable intermediary zone, allowing the narrator to operate at two levels (at least) of discourse at the same time. Joyce used this exclusively in the interior monologue, where the text splits and disintegrates, becoming vulnerable to a multiplicity of other texts.
This is especially interesting in the case of musical quotations, where Joyce evokes a domain which is difficult to realize using words. Most of the music referred to in this episode is vocal music, with a few examples of instrumental music e.g. Liszt's Rhapsodies (232), and Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words, but here it is the actual meaning of the title and not the music referred to which is important. It is not surprising, when we consider how important songs were to Joyce's culture and education, that on the one hand - "It is evident that he constantly slipped fragments of songs into his books because he lived in an atmosphere of songs as others live in air." (Bauerle, 1982) - and on the other hand, that is the musical genre that can be quoted in a literary work. The songs he mentions are nursery rhymes, operas and opera arias, religious chants and hymns, and popular ballads, among others. Most of the characters are involved in singing. The barmaids, however, never sing, although Miss Douce is mentioned once "trilling Idolores" (215). Bloom sings only to himself, he is the "listener" in the hermeneutic sense. Molly is not present but is mentioned several times as being the sensuous woman and the singer. Bloom laments the connection between her voice and her body, in relation to her sexual powers. Those who actually sing are, Simon Dedalus - tenor, Ben Dollard - bass baritone, and Father Cowley accompanying them on the piano. Although Boylan's song the Seaside girls is mentioned, he, himself, does not sing in the bar. The blind piano tuner is contrasted with the deaf waiter Pat, and Milly, who is not present, doesn't have a musical ear. The songs are either sung (two arias, and one ballad, along with some improvisations on the piano), whistled, or recalled. Joyce cites them in a wide variety of ways, from quoting lines from a song italicised, to slipping some words from them in the characters conversations. Sometimes Joyce misquotes the words of a song deliberately, to show how a character, usually Bloom, has remembered it. It is especially interesting when he indicates the musical notes, the pitch, by changing the syllables of the word in " ...my ardent soul I care not foror the morrow" (p 222), and changing the words as well, from "I think not of the morrow" (Bowen, 1975). Once he cites the combination of two songs, Rose of Castille, and Goodbye, Sweetheart (217) at the same time.
Finally, I would like to mention Joyce's influence on certain contemporary composers, especially Luciano Berio, an Italian post-serialist composer. Berio was introduced to the linguistic complexities of Ulysses by Umberto Eco, and they made a radio programme together with the title, Onomatopoeia in Poetic Language, which included an intensive study of the "overture" from the Sirens episode. Later, Berio composed a purely musical structure from the text, Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) in which he extracted from Joyce's mosaic of musical and semantic components, the purely musical elements of the text, "and used them to explore the borderline where sound as the bearer of linguistic sense dissolves into sound as the bearer of musical meaning: a territory that over the next decade he was to make very much his own. He did this by taking Joyce's polyphonic imagery literally, and superimposing texts upon themselves with slightly different rhythmic spacings: in effect, translating text into texture" (Smith, 1991, p. 62).
Works Cited
a.. Bauerle, R. ed. The James Joyce Songbook. New York: Vintage Books, 1982.
b.. Blamires, H. The New Bloomsday Book. London: Routledge, 1988.
c.. Bowen, Z. Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1975.
d.. Brown, C. S. Music and Literature: A Comparison of Arts. Athens, Ga.: Georgia University Press, 1948.
e.. Cole, D. "Fugal Structure in the 'Sirens' Episode of Ulysses." Modern Fiction Studies 191973. pp. 221-226.
f.. Ellmann, R. Ulysses on the Liffey. London: Faber and Faber, 1972.
g.. French, M. "The Voices of the Sirens in Joyce's Ulysses." Journal of Narrative Technique 8 1978. pp. 1-10.
h.. Furness, R. Wagner and Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982.
i.. Gifford, D., and R. J. Seidman. Notes for Joyce: An Annotation for James Joyce's Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
j.. Gilbert, S. James Joyce's Ulysses. New York: Vintage Books, 1956.
k.. Hodgart, M., and M. Worthington. Song in the Works of James Joyce. New York: University of Columbia Press, 1959.
l.. Joyce, J. Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
m.. Letters of James Joyce. London: Faber and Faber, 1957.
n.. Levin, L. "The Sirens Episode as Music: Joyce's Experiment in Prose Polyphony." James Joyce Quarterly 3 1965.
o.. Litz, W. The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake." London: Oxford University Press, 1961.
p.. Schopenhauer, A. A zene esztétikája. Budapest: Hatágú Síp Alapítvány, 1992.
q.. Smith, D. O. Luciano Berio. London: Macmillan, 1991.
r.. Topia, A. "The Matrix and the Echo: Intertextuality in Ulysses." Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French. Ed. D. Attridge and D. Ferrer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Farkas Ákos
Past in the Present and Future in the Past:
T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Sweeney Agonistes
Introduction
The two short articles printed here were originally presented to an audience of fellow-students in a doctoral course at Eötvös University some time ago. Besides trying to make a decent job of introducing the two works they each present, and thus to start some kind of meaningful discussion, the author of both presentations tried to convince his learned audience that heroic past and puny present, "high" seriousness and "low" popularity in art were not quite as unrelated as they might seem to be. Not even in the sometimes formidably demanding works of T. S. Eliot. In fact, the traditional values of his (and partly our) historical heritage and the down-to-earth concerns of our modern lives were just as closely related to each other as elements of light public entertainment and aspects of refined complexity in art interpenetrated each other in the works of this most modern twentieth century classic. Whether I managed to convince my young colleagues then and there is not for me to say, but I am as convinced as ever that real art can be nothing but serious and light, traditional and modern, being rooted in the past and looking forward into the future at one and the same time. To see how such synthesis is achieved we only have to take one (more) look at the poem Four Quartets and the play Sweeney Agonistes. Let's do just that.
Awakening from the Nightmare: Four Quartets
"History," says Stephen in the "Wandering Rocks" episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake". "History is bunk," declares Henry Ford, this latter day prophet of modern efficiency. From these often cited quotations it appears that if there was one thing that the self-portrait of the quintessential Modern Artist and the oracle of the Machine Age could ever agree on, it was that mankind's shared experience of the past had precious little use for the present. History is useless, history-to add another, contemporary, quote-will teach us nothing.
At first sight, there can be little doubt as to what the great conservative poet-thinker T. S. Eliot must have thought of the one who set America (and, indirectly, the world) on wheels and whatever Henry Ford stood for. The motor car, together with the railway car and the underground train, is a recurring motif throughout Eliot's poetry, always suggesting a sense of futile repetition and circularity. Thus in The Waste Land the work-weary employee at day's end is likened to a "human engine", who "waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting" (71); in Sweeney Agonistes the flashy but hollow crowd of Sam Wauchope and his friends arrive on the scene in an automobile whose idling engine sets the primitive rhythms of the ensuing danse macabre and, more importantly here, it is the disconsolate limbo of a London tube station that represents in Burnt Norton, the first of the Four Quartets, a blind world which "moves / In appetency, on its metalled ways", that is on the underground tracks of mean greed and sordid lust. And yet, it cannot be overlooked that Eliot's fascination with the modern world of the machine, if not with the mechanized world of man, was not merely the thrill of repulsion. Not unlike Stephen Dedalus' preoccupation with nightmarish history, and very much like Eliot's own paradoxical interest in certain manifestations of popular culture and the popular press, the poet's attraction to modern inventions, inventions bridging the gap between archaeological past and technologically advanced present, is not entirely without some half-acknowledged admiration.[1] The rhythms suggested by the throbbing taxi-car in The Waste Land or by Sam Wauchope's automobile in Sweeney Agonistes are precisely the same irresistible rhythms which, according to Eliot's essay "The Beating of the Drum", establish a link between the rituals of pre-historic primitivity and the sophisticated theatrical genres of modern times (cited by Smith 48-49).
Returning to Four Quartets, one should note that it is not only in the above-mentioned part entitled Burnt Norton where the machine plays an important part. The train and the ocean liner are the vehicles Eliot uses in the fourth quartet called The Dry Salvages to refute, in the wake of Henri Bergson and Heraclitus, the idea of a stable ego and the related concept of time progressing sequentially from a completed past to an open future:
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus
[...]
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow
You shall not think 'the past is finished'
Or 'the future is before us'. (210)[2]
Even more relevant to our subject is the recurrence in Little Gidding of another, paradoxically far more sinister and at the same time more auspicious, machine-image-that of the dive bomber. The "dark dove with the flickering tongue" (217) or the dove, which "descending breaks the air / With incandescent terror", is both the German stuka with its fire-spitting machine gun mounted on the fighter-bomber's nose, one perhaps spotted by Eliot serving as air raid-warden during the blitz, and the apparition of the Holy Spirit bringing the Pentecostal fire of spiritual cleansing and inspiration.[3]
The apparent contradiction thus underlying Eliot's attitude to the machine, this emblem of modernity, is symptomatic of his equally paradoxical attitude to the reverse of contemporaneity-history. History could, of course, be neither bunk nor a nightmare to the writer of "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (just as a reminder: "the historical sense [is] nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year" /72/), "The Metaphysical Poets" or "Modern Education and the Classics"-to mention but a few of his essays, and those almost at random. And yet, Four Quartets is anything but the lengthy record of an aging conservative's reminiscences of a glorious past or a trite eulogy to history the school-master of life. History in general is neither very glorious nor particularly illuminating.
There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. (199)
When "each venture/Is a new beginning" and yet "what there is to conquer/ [...] has already been discovered" (FQ 203), neither personal experience, nor an entire literary canon-tradition as described in the essay devoted to its relation to individuality in art-can be of much use to the individual poet. And neither has history, seen as a succession of destructive wars and disruptive revolutions, much to offer in the way of examples for the present to emulate. That the behaviour of the protagonists of England's past was not "wholly commendable" is a typical Eliotian understatement. Yorkist or Lancastrian, Royalist or Republican, the path of history's principal actors was always marked by burnt homes, dispersed communities and broken kings; there is no call to "ring the bell backward" or to sing an incantation to "summon the spectre of a Rose" (220)[4]
And yet, while "History may be servitude,/History may be freedom", just as "Only through time time is conquered", to quote two more, at first sight enigmatic, paradoxes from the poem (213 and 192, in that order). To resolve the first of these apparent contradictions, one has to work out the meaning of the second. Risking the charge of simplifying the high complexities of a poem which is rightly regarded as the crowning achievement of an immensely challenging oeuvre, we shall attempt a brief interpretation of the following lines, which provide the immediate context of the "servitude" quotation cited above.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered. (192)
Here is then one possible prose rendering of the lines quoted above: only by recalling significant moments of the past-mankind's common Edenic past as well as the individual's long-lost childhood: the "First Garden" of Burnt Norton-can we hope to transcend the limitations of our time-bound, quotidian existence. As such moments of grace occur in the present, triggered as it were by fresh, concrete impressions (such as the dry "pool momentarily filled with water out of sunlight" in Burnt Norton /190/), Eternity can only be experienced in Temporality: "Only through time time is conquered". History then, rather than a mere nightmare of bloodshed and anarchy, is an ever-changing pattern of significant moments: moments, that is, of living and of generation, of dancing around the bonfire, of commodious sacraments and valid prayer-of instants which, as the critic Joseph Chiari puts it, "link up the temporal with the eternal" (T. S. Eliot 102). Such moments of epiphany do not have to coincide with prominent events of chronicled history and the grace of experiencing them is by no means reserved for the famous and the great. Who best deserve the transcendental light are the humble and the loving and it is the here-and-now of the recipient when the gift of momentary vision is bestowed. For the writer of Little Gidding, this concluding piece of Four Quartets, this here-and-now is located in the poet's self-elected inheritance: his homeland of war-torn Britain. "Here, the intersection of the timeless moment / Is England and nowhere. Never and always (215)".
It is indeed here in England that the poet, heir of a tradition created and preserved by the community of the dead and the living, can be released from wearily repetitive past and future, from the quasi-history of meaningless, circuitous time. History then is a nightmare only to those who are never thus liberated, who are never awakened to its rare moments of significance. Because, as Eliot himself warns us:
A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
Rhythm as Form with Function: Sweeney Agonistes
T. S. Eliot's short drama Sweeney Agonistes was originally published as two fragments in the magazine The Criterion in 1926 and 1927 under the title Wanna Go Home Baby? before it appeared in 1932 bearing its final title Sweeney Agonistes, which event was followed by the play's first, amateur, theatrical performance a year later.
The plot and the characters are reductive to the point of sketchiness and caricature: in the first part or act called "Fragment of a Prologue" Doris Dorrance and her friend Dusty are whiling away the boredom of an afternoon discussing absent friends and cutting a pack of cards by way of casual fortune-telling. The gloom that sets in the wake of a telephone call by the apparently ill-liked "friend" Pereira and the sinister interpretation of a card (the two of spades-the COFFIN) is dispelled by the arrival of a jolly company of visitors. The guests include the girls' chum Sam Wauchope and his former comrades-in-arms now in London on a visit from their native Canada and America: Horsefall, Klipstein and Krumpacker. Another two guests, Snow and Swart, presumably a pair of professional entertainers, are also invited to further enliven the party.
In act, or part, two called "Fragment of an Agon", the company is joined by one more friend, Sweeney, who immediately starts to court Doris, playfully and yet scarily suggesting that he cannibalise the girl after whisking her away to an uninhabited "crocodile island", where life is nothing but "birth, and copulation, and death". This reminds Sweeney of a man he once knew who had committed the horrible crime of "doing in" a girl and dissolving the body in a lysol bath. Sweeney is apparently very much disturbed by his own horror story-was it perhaps himself who murdered the girl?-and so is Doris to whom the terrible tale evokes the spectre of her own death already "foretold" in the cards. There is nothing much to cheer her up when Sweeney gravely insists that "somebody gotta pay the rent" in the end. When Doris admits that she knows who that will be-the mysterious Pereira? herself?-the chorus of the merry visitors break into a song not unlike the tunes one imagines to have accompanied the danse macabre of earlier times, this one ending on the ghostly repetition of the frightful cry "ha ha ha/hoo hoo hoo". The play then concludes with a series of rhythmic knocks at the door.
The bareness of the plot and the flatness of the characters appear to be a function of the fragmentariness of the whole play: for one reason or the other, Eliot seems to have abandoned the idea of the play half way through. This, however, is only one hypothesis. Another, equally convincing, explanation was proffered by Carol H. Smith in her monograph on Eliot's drama, according to which the flatness of the characters and the crudity of the plot follow from the self-proclaimed genre of the play described, in the subtitle, as melodrama. This popular form of entertainment, traceable all the way back to Aristophanes' works (and thus, indirectly, to ancient Greek fertility rites) used stock characters-"humour characters" as Eliot himself called them after Ben Jonson-turned out with little attention to individuation. That even the more important figures in the play are almost interchangeable-telling Doris and Dusty apart is only slightly easier than differentiating between, say, Klipstein and Krumpacker-suggests the lack of dimension, the hollowness, of the demimondes peopling the deserts of furnished flats and cheap hotels of the Jazz-Age metropolis. Moreover, the same flatness serves a structural purpose, too: simple, two-dimensional characters can more easily be manipulated to fit into a plot which moves along and around in the same fashion as jazzy speech rhythms do, providing an insistent, repetitive rhythm to the play. This rhythm is, of course, most conspicuous in the regular syncopation of dialogue and the "background music" of the chanting performed intermittently by the chorus of marginal characters. The first exchange already sets this rhythm.
DUSTY: Who pays the rent?
DORIS: Yes, he pays the rent
DUSTY: Well some men don't and some men do
Some men don't and you know who. (Sweeney 115)[5]
The crude plot of the sensational crime mystery, the sketchy characters of melodrama and the jazzy rhythms of the music-hall variety-show are meant to captivate the attention of an audience which "wanted entertainment of an unrefined sort, but would stand a good deal of poetry," to quote Eliot's remarks on Christopher Marlowe's audiences. The modern, as well as the Elizabethan, poet's task then was "to take a form of entertainment, and subject it to the process which would leave it a form of art" (The Sacred Wood quoted by Smith 37; emphasis mine). The method to be emulated is that used by Shakespeare, whose plays yield, in Eliot's own words, "several layers of significance. For the simplest auditors there is the plot [...] for the more literary the words of phrasing, for the more musically sensitive the rhythm, and for auditors of greater sensitiveness and understanding a meaning which reveals itself gradually" (quoted by Smith 54). Later we shall return to the meaning of the play at hand and how this meaning reveals itself, but let us first look at where the specific rhythms in Sweeney Agonistes, the rhythms of jazz-verse, came from and why Eliot chose this particular musical idiom.
The poet, as his essays so often suggest, was greatly fascinated by the popular art of the music hall, an institution peculiar to the pre-cinematographic days of popular entertainment in Britain, where the tastes of a lower-middlebrow audience were catered to by variety shows featuring a mixture of light musical and prose entertainment. Prose numbers caricatured events familiar to the lower-middle class patrons from the popular press carrying hair-raising stories of domestic tragedies (consider "the bones on Epsom Heath" or Sweeney's girl in the lysol bath). Tap-dance routines, jugglers' and magicians' numbers and, most importantly, jazz music freshly imported from America provided a more soothing-because rhythmical-type of diversion. Eliot, often portrayed as the high-priest of Modernism and the preacher of cultural elitism, was so pleased with the unsophisticated genres of the music hall, that he published a whole series of reviews, including the classic obituary celebrating the memory of Marie Lloyd, the greatest of all English vaudeville entertainers. The apparent contradiction between high art and popular entertainment is largely resolved by another essay of his, "The Beating of a Drum" where, relating drama to ritual and both to man's innate attraction to rhythm, he writes the following:
Two sheets cream vellum paper one reserve two envelopes when I was in Wisdom Hely's wise Bloom in Daly's Henry Flower bought. Are you not happy in your home? Flower to console me and a pin cuts lo. Means something, language of flow. Was it a daisy? Innocence that is. Respectable girl meet after mass. Thanks awfully muchly. Wise Bloom eyed on the door a poster, a swaying mermaid smoking mid nice waves. Smoke mermaids, coolest whiff of all. Hair streaming: lovelorn. For some man. For Raul. He eyed and saw afar on Essex bridge a gay hat riding on a jaunting car. It is. Again. Third time. Coincidence." (216-217)
The drama was originally ritual; and ritual, consisting of a set of repeated movements, is essentially a dance [...] It is [...] possible to assert that primitive man acted in a certain way and then found a reason for it. An unoccupied person, finding a drum, may be seized with a desire to beat it; but unless he is an imbecile he will be unable to continue beating it, and thereby satisfying a need, without a reason [...] The reason may be the long continued drought. The next generation or the next civilization will find a more plausible reason for beating a drum. [...] The reasons may [now] be divided into tragedy and comedy. We still have similar reasons, but we have lost the drum. (quoted by Smith 48-49)
Eliot himself can be said to have found the drum which, for him in Sweeney Agonistes, sounds the rhythms of jazz-verse. As for the reason, or the meaning referred to above, the rationale of the rhythm, is a rather complex matter. Besides evoking the spatio-temporal and cultural setting of the Jazz Age (cf. Snow and Swart the white and black, or possibly Jewish, musicians whose card is the knave of spades), a world peopled by bored youngsters desperate on having a good time, the jazzy rhythms are also rich in thematic suggestions. The emphatic repetitiveness (a feature also characterising the vocabulary and syntax used by every person in the cast) of these rhythms is suggestive of the bored and boring circularity characterising the intellectual and emotional lives of Doris, Dusty, Sam and their crowd. Moreover, the thrusting of the speech rhythm is evocative of the mechanical throbbing of a motor car, as well as the motions of the human engine engaged in no less mechanical copulation. Those familiar with The Waste Land will remember the juxtaposition of biological and mechanical rhythms in "The Fire Sermon", where "the human engine waits/Like a taxi throbbing waiting" (71), while the joyless tryst of the "bored and tired" typist and the "young man carbuncular" is being described in monotonous alternate and couplet rhymes (71-72). Here, in Sweeney Agonistes Sam et al. arrive at the girls' place in a motor car and the primitive rhythms of Sweeney's crocodile-island song are suggestive of the mechanically turning biological circle of "Birth and copulation and death". The third function of the rhythm is to provide musical accompaniment to the danse macabre which can be said to be the prime mover of the whole play. That sex and death are omnipresent and are conjoined by the rhythms of the speech music is only too obvious if one considers the ominous card-reading scene terminated by the sinister phone call of the shady Pereira, this mysterious sugar-daddy in charge of paying the rent (this financial transaction is so often returned to that the stakes involved are surely higher than giving the landlord his due) and, of course, Sweeney's macabre story of the man who could not help doing that young girl in.
The spiritual pilgrimage of man and woman from a hollow, unauthentic life to the acceptance of the fact that you "gotta pay the rent", and through this recognition the achievement of genuine existence is central to the overall meaning of the play referred to above. As William V. Spanos in his insightful "'Wanna Go Home Baby?': Sweeney Agonistes as Drama of the Absurd" demonstrates, the thematic pattern of the play involves the motion of the central characters-mainly Doris and Sweeney-away from the self-deceptive sense of the false heimlichkeit (to borrow this Heideggerian term), the escapism of jazz-music, flirtation, home-parties to the recognition-also: reckoning or the paying of the bill-which all that jazz is followed by. But first these people have to be driven out of their cosy little boredom into anxiety and from anxiety all the way to terror aroused by the hounds of hell or by the Erinys hunting the unpurified soul (cf. the play's double epigraph citing The Choephoroi and St. John of the Cross). Thus the message could be summed up like this: no amount of good time and fun can rid you of boredom and Angst until you face up to "death and annihilation and, ultimately, the absurd and Nothingness" (Spanos), until, that is, you pay the rent when the rent-collector knocks at the door:
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK
KNOCK
KNOCK
KNOCK
Much of this will remind the reader of aspects of the theatre of the absurd. After all, exposure to boredom, circularity, and the Void is then what makes Sweeney Agonistes into an antecedent of the Bald Soprano, Waiting for Godot and The Birthday Party. And if the themes are related, the technique also is close indeed. If it weren't for the proper nouns McCann and Pereira, it would be very hard to tell the following dialogue fragments apart:
GOLDBERG: Don't worry yourself, McCann. Take a seat.
McCANN: What about you?
GOLDBERG: What about me?
McCANN: Are you going to take a seat?
GOLDBERG: We'll both take a seat. (Pinter 27)
DUSTY: How about Pereira?
DORIS: What about Pereira?
DUSTY: I don't care.
DORIS: You don't care! (Sweeney 115)
The juxtaposition of the horrible and the ridiculous, the employment of buffoon-like characters, jesters and clownish philosophers, the incongruent mixture of high and low features of the absurd duly noted by Martin Esslin, the favourite apostle of Beckett et al., are also present in Eliot's play.[6] But then there is something also present in Eliot, but painfully absent from the plays of Ionesco and his contemporaries-the hope of eventual redemption through exposure to the Unheimlichkeit of the Void. For these post-war absurdists the process of divestment fails to turn into a much richer investment-their via negativa leads from nowhere to nowhere. For Eliot there is, at least in The Family Reunion, this completed version of Sweeney Agonistes, a destination where Unheimlichkeit is a price worth paying for Eigentlichkeit or the authenticity of a life worth living.
Works Cited
a.. Chiari, J. T. S. Eliot: Poet and Dramatist. London: Vision, 1972.
b.. Eliot, T. S. Sweeney Agonistes. The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot. London: Faber, 1969. 115-127.
c.. -. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." 20th Century Literary Criticism: A Reader. 1972. Ed. David Lodge. London: Longman, 1992.
d.. -. Four Quartets. Collected Poems: 1909-1962. London: Faber, 1963.
e.. Esslin, M. The Theatre of the Absurd. 1961. London: Penguin, 1991.
f.. Joyce, J. Ulysses. 1936. London: Minerva, 1992.
g.. Pinter, H. The Birthday Party. 1959. London: Faber, 1965.
h.. Smith, C. H. T.S. Eliot's Dramatic Theory and Practice: From "Sweeney Agonistes" to "The Elder Statesman." Princeton: Princeton UP, 1963.
i.. Spanos, W. V. "'Wanna Go Home Baby?': Sweeney Agonistes as Drama of the Absurd." Publications of the Modern Language Association 85 (1970): 8-20.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
1.. As for Joyce's preoccupation with history the Scylla-and- Charybdis episode of Ulysses-not to mention the whole of Finnegans Wake-can serve as an example; Eliot's fascination with low-brow entertainment will be discussed in much detail below.
2.. Besides noting the relevance to the lines quoted here of Heraclitus' famous motto according to which "You cannot step twice into the same river", one should not overlook the pertinence of his system of dialectic to the whole of the philosophy underlying much of Four Quartets. As for Bergson, it is a well-known fact of biography that Eliot attended the French philosopher's lectures in Paris where the scholar expounded his theory concerning durée and the instability of the ego.
3.. Of course, the "flickering tongue" of the dove can also be interpreted as the emblem of the poet whose "concern was speech" (Four Quartets 218) much like that of the apostles who, with tongues of fire flickering above them, "began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance" (Acts 2:3-4).
4.. Whether the Rose is the symbol of York and Lancaster or the Rosicrucian sign cannot, and perhaps should not, be determined.
5.. If one is reminded by Dusty's words of the nursery rhyme "Some like it hot ...", the sinister atmosphere is in no way dispersed: that children's verse can have a menacing ring is only too well known from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four or Eliot's own poem The Hollow Men.
6.. It is all the more surprising that Esslin fails to give any recognition to Sweeney Agonistes among the antecedents of the absurd.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bakos Judit
Literary Self-Portraits Contrasted-in
Virginia Woolf and Wyndham Lewis's
Portrait of the Artist
In the title of this paper, A Portrait of the Artist has a straight reference to Joyce's autobiographical novel, though here it is used in a more general sense. A portrait most commonly refers to a genre of painting, although the term is used in descriptive writing as well. For the contemporary the term artist basically conveys connotations of fine art, yet in a more general sense it can also refer to the art of literature. Each artist-portrait in the modern novel incorporates a strongly individual, mostly autobiographical quality, yet, at the same time, these portraits can be seen as mosaics in the formation of the common idea of the modernist artist.
This paper centres on the multicoloured portraits, among them on the ones highly acclaimed by recent and previous criticism alike, including Virginia Woolf's portrait of the artist in To the Lighthouse. The portraits of James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence are also part of this tradition. As opposed to their portrayals stand those of Wyndham Lewis's more ambiguous, sometimes misunderstood, thus less acclaimed portraits. What I want to point out about these portraits-beyond the obvious similarities, based on the authors working basically upon the same tradition and their being contemporaries-is that though these similarities might seemingly outweigh the differences, still a major difference that is relevant in the writings of Wyndham Lewis compared to those of V. Woolf, J. Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, is his irony, his satirical attitude, that is often considered anti-human or nonhuman, in contrast to the basically humanistic attitude of modernist literature. Perhaps it is this characteristic of Lewis's art, writings and paintings as well, that has prevented him from being judged according to his real merits. (Nicholls)
The portrayals of the artists-the self portraitures at places disguised, at others overt-that is the artist-heroes to be observed further on will be Tarr and Kreisler, Stephen Dedalus, Paul Morel and Lily Briscoe.
All modernists had a high esteem for art and considered the role of the artist accordingly. According to the modernists, -as it is also expressed in the critical writings of Roger Fry and Clive Bell, the 'archaesthetes' of formalism and post-impressionism in England-life is regarded as a means to art. This serious claim made the writers and artists highly critical towards one another's work. Joyce's self-centeredness and linguistic playfulness met Woolf's strict criticism, she writes on Ulysses in her diary: "It is diffuse, brackish pretentious, underbred not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky, startling doing stunts. He is a school-boy-full of wits and powers so self-conscious and egotistical, that he loses his head."
Lawrence's self-worship and his worship of the 'flesh', also triggered wide critical responses. He writes in a letter to Edward Garnett in 1914: "It is the inhuman will (...) that fascinates me. I don't so much care about what the woman tells - in the ordinary usage of the word. (...) I only care about what the woman is - what she is - inhumanly, physiologically, materially..."
There are certain similarities between Lawrence's idea and Lewis's view on a 'soulless' art. However, Lewis's basically pessimistic attitude clearly divides the two. A contemporary critic of Lewis wrote (Spender, 240): "If Wyndham Lewis were living in the Renaissance he would be a Leonardo: since he lives in the 20th century he considers himself a Leonardo forced to be Wyndham Lewis with his modern consciousness and blaming the conditions which frustrate his genius."
Louise Morgan writes on Wyndham Lewis in her interview with Lewis in 1931 (Morgan, 43): "Wyndham Lewis is, as he says himself, a Renaissance man. He has the Renaissance faculty, one that is all but lost today, for taking an active part in things and at the same time observing them from the outside. He has also the Renaissance many-sidedness."
What she says about Lewis can be related to his hero Tarr as well. Tarr as an artist also has a basically romantic attitude to life and art. To conceal and to transcend it, he also strives not to be emotionally involved, that is, to observe life objectively.
As a practising painter and writer, Lewis, in this interview, points out his attitude on the relationship and influence of the sister arts: "The habit of thinking of things in plastic and pictorial terms must have its influence upon the writer's art, when you practise both as I do." (Morgan, 45)
Also in this interview he defines his interest in writing as opposed to the Bloomsbury interest, especially that of Virginia Woolf: "In writing, the only thing that interests me is the shell. It's the actions and the appearance of people that I am concerned with, not the 'stream of consciousness' of any 'mysterious' invisible within I think the normal human attitude is physical, not mental" (Morgan, 46).
Further on, supporting the classical, the orderly form, he argues against the method of Joyce, the so called 'inside method': His method is romantic. The method preferred by me may be described as classical, it is objective, and rather scientific than sentimental. The classical is the form to which all romantic revolutions of style return.The romantic is a decadence, a cons- tantly recurring decadence if you like, but a decadence. (Morgan, 47)
The novel will not develop in the direction of Joyce, "because his inside method is too limited to be a universal method", Lewis says. "The trouble with the 'thought-stream' method, [he continues] is that it robs work of all linear properties whatever, of all contour and definition: it breaks up or dissolves the shell. The romantic abdominal within method results in a jelly-fish structure, without articulation of any sort" (Morgan, 47).
Tarr as the autobiographical hero of Lewis blinks at us from the lines of the same interview, when we read Lewis saying: "Everything I do is done in cold blood.' with the 'temperament of a duellist" (Morgan, 48) He assures the reader that there is no hatred in him whatsoever, which is a far cry from his hero, however.
The 'romantic' notion of creating seems to survive in Modernism, too. Lewis himself is not far from the 'necessary' patterns and frames of the description of the process of creative writing, when he says:
"The book, of course, is born in the head, not on the paper. But I get down upon the paper, in a draught, written at top speed, the action, or the structure of the argument, as the case may be. The detail comes afterwards. But a work of art is a sort of animal-it is not easy for me to tell you just how it is made. It grows all sorts of things on itself-for effect-as it goes along. The brain creates it by a fiat-having pondered upon an entire zoology, for some time. But then the mere craftsman takes it over"' (Morgan, 49).
He clearly opposes, however, the subjectivism of romanticism. In his satiric novel, The Apes of God (1930) he attacks 'the survival of the subject', the appearance of a 'school of unabashed personal Fiction' and 'a universal cult of impersonality'. He points out: "This is a wonderful patent behind which the individual can indulge in a riot of personal egotism, impossible to earlier writers, not provided with such a disguise." (The Apes of God, 254-260)
On impersonality he writes: "It might be a good thing-I do not say it is-for an artist to have a 'personality', and for a scientist not to have a personality: though here of course I am not using a 'personality' in the Ballyhoo sense-I do not mean an individualist abortion, bellowing that it wants at all costs to 'express' itself. (...) I mean only a constancy and consistency in being, as concretely as possible, one thing-at peace with itself, if not with the outer world, though that is likely to follow after an interval of struggle" (Men without Art, 62).
He refuses the cult of impersonality as it is practised in the writings of his contemporaries, like Joyce and Woolf. As Tarr says: "Art is identical with the idea of permanence. It is a continuity and not an individual spasm." (Tarr, 229) But it is the artist who performs the magic, by which the momentary, through the work of art, is made permanent.
Lewis's main ideology might be that of radical antihumanism. There is no affirmation of human dignity in his writings, as in his paintings, even in his self-portrait, the painting entitled Wyndham Lewis as a TYRO'. As Schenker points out this ideology could feed upon T.E.Hulme's (a friend of Lewis at the time) thoughts and theories. In 'A Critique of Satisfaction' Hulme verifies this antihuman attitude (cited in Schenker, 13):
"The philosophers share a view of what would be a satisfying destiny for man, which they take over from the Renaissance. They are all satisfied with certain conceptions of the relation of man to the world. These conclusions are never questioned in this respect. Their truth may be questioned, but never their satisfactoriness. (...) These canons of satisfaction, which are the result of an entirely uncritical humanism, should be subject to a critique."
Like his contemporaries, the advocates of formalism, Lewis also worked upon the principles of defamiliarization, abstraction and the condition of deadness. The achievement of his experimenting in writing was Tarr coming out in book form in 1918. Through the two main characters, Kreisler the fallen German artist and Tarr the English counterpart, he presents a rather inhuman portrait of the artist. 'Kreisler pretends indifference while wanting Bertha, Bertha meanwhile wants Tarr and Tarr, who as the authentic artist figure should have nothing to do with either of them, indulges himself by playing the naif' (Nicolls 183) -if not by 'paring his fingernails'. "He exalts life into a comedy, when otherwise it is, to his mind, a tawdry zone of half-art, or a silly Tragedy. Art is the only thing worth the tragic impulse, for him." (Tarr, 20) For Tarr the conditions of art are its deadness, the absence of soul and that it has no inside.
Tarr's misogyny is quite explicit, as he says: "Surrender to a woman was a sort of suicide for an artist" (Tarr, 214) His problem sometimes is similar to the one of Paul Morel and the young Stephen, though hatred is not so much emphasized in the relationships of the latter ones. Instead of hatred, in their case there is perhaps some kind of self-disgust. Kreisler was different: "Woman was the aesthetic element in Kreisler's life" (Tarr, 102), reminiscent of Stephen's romantic vision of the girl on the shore: "her image had passed into his soul forever and no words had broken the silence of his ecstasy." (Joyce. A Portrait) However, while for Kreisler woman as flesh and blood conveyed the aesthetic idea, for Stephen it was the vision, the image and the moment of ecstasy that gained aesthetic importance.
Yet, the apparent distinction between Lewis and his contemporary modernists lies in his basic rebellion and negation as opposed to the ultimate affirmation of human dignity on the part of Joyce, Lawrence and Woolf. Lewis remained a dissenter, an outsider among his fellow artists. Schenker the critic, contemplating this phenomenon, says that there is a lack of a "sense of unity and purpose in his career, directed toward the fulfilment of some recognizeable human need." (Schenker, 3)
"Joyce described himself as an autobiographical novelist, believing his life and work to be one and the same, 'interwoven in the same fabric'." (Martin, 83) Richard Ellmann, Joyce's biographer, explained the phenomenon of the fusion of the lay and the sacred, that is the life and the art in Joyce's case, as "the mixture of self-recrimination and self-justification which the great writer, like lesser men and women, has made the subject of his lifelong conversation with himself" (Ellmann 1971, 5).
In his biography Ellmann points out this unique fusion of art and artist, the artist as interpreted and portrayed through his art: "Joyce had found he could become an artist by writing about the process of becoming an artist, his life legitimizing his portrait by supplying the sitter, while the portrait vindicated the sitter by its evident admiration for him." (Ellmann 1983, 144-145)
The autobiographical artist figures of Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Joyce's A Portrait, Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, and Lewis's Tarr, all appear in an almost autobiographical setting or 'landscape': Tarr living in Paris, as Lewis did before the Great War; Lily Briscoe staying with the Ramsays at their summer cottage resembling the summer house of the Stephens, the family of Virginia Woolf; Paul Morel in Bestwood, in the Midlands, the place identical to Eastwood where Lawrence himself lived; and Stephen in Dublin, the city of Joyce.
Writing about the self meant a certain justification as well as an exposition of it. All these writers established themselves by justifying their existence as artists throughout these fictional yet autobiographical artist figures in their writings. Lawrence's portrait is perhaps the most extended one, reaching back to the times before the birth of the artist, following upon the growth and development of the child and the adolescent, then the young artist, Paul Morel; it can fairly be called a Kunstlerroman.
Writing Stephen's portrait, another Kunstlerroman, Joyce also insists that: "the features of infancy belong to a portrait as much as the features of adolescence. The past has no 'iron memorial aspect', but implies a 'fluid succession of presents'. What we are to look for is not a fixed character but the development of an entity of which our actual present is a phase only" (Ellmann, 1983, p. 145).
Joyce as well as Lawrence, Woolf and, to a certain extent, Lewis all through their lives strove to try to give form to their inward looking personalities, providing themselves with an ever troubled conscience yet a strengthening belief in the validity of their own art. Eliot's 'impersonality of the artist' became, in a certain aspect, the chosen fate of Joyce, Lawrence and Lewis. Eliot's theory was published in the critical essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' as late as in 1919, while Joyce withdrew into his self-exile much earlier, in 1904. Though for a long time he did not consider his leaving Ireland should become permanent. He did not leave Dublin for good and as the years went by he did not find another place to settle down either. Thus in many terms the artist could live and be indifferent, out of politics and other current social concerns, 'paring his fingernails'. He could also manage to leave his private tragedies out of his work. This way the emotion of the work of art and the artist could remain distinct from that of the person. The emotion of his art got impersonal, as Eliot explained: "The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."
Yet, the epiphany of Stephen bears analogy with the revelation of Joyce; as much as the struggle and final self-affirmation of Paul Morel with Lawrence's self-realization; and Lily Briscoe's muddling through the creative process and finding her solution, with Woolf's own physical and mental victory upon her personal and artistic instabilities. As the critic Deirdre Bair observes on Joyce: "Joyce intended his hero to represent Vico's theory that we project and reveal our deepest selves through our heroes, as in our myths and our dreams" (Martin, 92).
Stephen's adolescent, rebellious 'non serviam' is a recurring feature of all the artist heroes. Non serviam, not only with Stephen, has a rather egotistic meaning for a first reading. Isolation, being the necessary consequence of non serviam, appears in the lives of these fictional personae. They themselves choose the life of the isolated consciousness, though sometimes it proves to be a hard decision. Think, for example, of Lily Briscoe's self-tormenting doubts on the rightfulness of her choice of the life of the artist and not that of a mother to children and the wife to a man.
Exile, cultural displacement, the fragmentariness of life were common experience for many of the modernists. Lawrence, born in England, spent much of his adult life abroad, and felt himself, with his German wife and working class background, a dissident even at home. Eliot with his New England upbringing would also be sensitive to the alien surrounding, as well as Wyndham Lewis with an American father who left the family when they returned to England. Among the discussed writers it was only Virginia Woolf who was both English by birth and well-based socially. Her concerns and motives for writing were thus, from this aspect, fundamentally different.
Form, pattern, motif, composition, symmetry, balance and harmony of structure are key terms of modernist aesthetics. In general, for the modernist artist, intellect gains supremacy over emotion. As Nicholls says (197): 'The literary values of modernism are founded on an attempt to dissociate desire from any form of identification, and on the appeal to the visual and objective which affirms distance and difference.' According to Lewis this can be achieved in the form of satire, with the external method that functions as 'disruption of mimesis'. Satire is a 'dispassionate observation and a withering of its objects into art'. (Nicholls 270) His satire made him the ENEMY, as the desire for the non-human makes Tarr a dead person in the spiritual sense.
Woolf, similarly to Joyce,renders individual consciousnesses by performing a 'stylised report of consciousness'. Both of them are omniscient narrators. As Auerbach observes, in To the Lighthouse "the voice of the author is inseparable from the tone and style of the interior monologues". (Mimesis, 530-32) James Naremore goes even further stating that the whole book is the product of one voice. (Naremore, 123)
In Woolf's writing as opposed to Lewis's 'the everyday is self-consciously elevated to the poetic'. (Nicholls) She interprets her autobiographical novel, To the Lighthouse as an elegy. For Lily, the painter, art is superior to life. The artist herself seems to be subordinated to her own art and craft. It is through the medium of art that she strives to achieve something permanent as opposed to the vanishing impressions and moments of everyday life, to find her answers for the epistemological questions of the meaning of life and death, and love. It is through art that life can be redeemed, but not as the aesthetic movement claimed, that art is the whole and supreme end of human life.
Her feminine sensibility, which Naremore describes as a 'watery world of emotion' matched with the sensibility of the artist, receives 'a myriad impressions' and fights to compose them into a coherent, stable and meaningful unity, into the painting, the work of art. As Jane Fisher observes, painting offers permanence and unity, while the narrative has the symbolic power of language. (Gillespie, 90) Thus Lily says in the novel: "Nothing stays, all changes; but not words, not paint." (Woolf, 267)
It is the painter's point of view, the importance of design, rhythm and texture that Woolf makes use of in her writing. In this she shows something in common with Lewis's statement upon his own method of writing. However, Woolf was convinced that painting is a more proper form of artistic expression than writing. For Lewis however, writing had a higher esteem than painting; fine arts assisted him to express himself in the medium of the written word.
The further quotations from Woolf give example not only of her but also her contemporaries' doubts concerning the primacy of language for the expression of the human experience: "words ... turn tail at the first approach of visual beauty" 'words are impure medium' 'better far to have been born into the silent kingdom of paint" (cited in Gillespie, 67) No writer "ever succeeded in being wholly impersonal because words are freighted with human experience, full of echoes, of memories, of associations" "Literature can never attain the purity, austerity, and aloofness that is possible in painting." (cited in Gillespie, 79)
To sum up this essay, I once again put the emphasis on the individual differen- ces, as opposed to the similarities-among the self-portraits of the modernist writers-that are highlighted and detailed above. As it is demonstrated, Lewis's 'anti-human' attitude in his art shows a sharp contrast with the contemporary modernist concern for 'the human' in the writings of Virginia Woolf as well as James Joyce and, ultimately, D. H. Lawrence. It foreshadows and anticipates the post-modern.
Works Cited
a.. Auerbach, E. Mimesis. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton University Press, 1953.
b.. Gillespie, F. ed. The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf. University of Missouri Press, 1993.
c.. Edwards, P. Wyndham Lewis. Art & War. London: W. L. Memorial Trust, Lund Humphrey P., 1992.
d.. Eliot,T.S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." 20th Century Literary Criticism: A Reader. 1972. Ed. David Lodge. London: Longman, 1992.
e.. Ellmann: 'That's Life.' The N. Y. Review of Books, June 17, 1971. pp. 3-7
f.. Ellmann, R. James Joyce. (revised) New York, London: Oxford University Press, 1983.
g.. Joyce, J. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Wordsworth Classics, 1993.
h.. Lewis, W. Tarr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
i.. -. Blasting and Bombardiering. London:John Calden, 1982
j.. -. Men without Art. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow, 1987.
k.. -. The Apes of God. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1981.
l.. Lawrence, D. H. Sons and Lovers. London: Penguin Classics, 1995.
m.. Bair, D. 'A Portrait of the Artist' In: Martin, A. ed. James Joyce. The Artist and the Labyrinth: London: Ryan, 1990.
n.. Meyers, G. The Enemy. A Biography of Wyndham Lewis. London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1980.
o.. Morgan, L. Writers at Work. London: Chatto & Windus, 1931.
p.. Naremore, J. The World Without a Self. London: Yale University Press, 1973.
q.. Nicholls, P. Modernism, A Literary Guide. London: Macmillan, 1995.
r.. Schenker, W. L. Wyndham Lewis. Religion and Modernism. London and Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992.
s.. Spender, S. The Struggle of the Modern. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963.
t.. Svarny, E. 'The Men of 1914'. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1988.
u.. Woolf, V. To the Lighthouse. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Appendix
Meződi Judit
Translations
János Vajda: Twenty Years On
Like an icecapped mountain
Unharmed by sun and wind,
Left alone by passion's fountain,
My heart is calm and still.
Billions of stars around me
Shine and twinkle in a blur,
They send their rays profoundly,
But melt I do not in the whirl.
Sometimes on a silent night
Dreaming quietly all alone,
On the fairy lake of youth I glide,
Your face before me like a swan.
And then my heart is filled with light
Like Mont Blanc's eternal snow
Brightened on a long winter night
By the first rays of the glow.
Vajda János: Húsz év mulva
Mint a Montblanc csucsán a jég,
Minek nem árt se nap, se szél,
Csöndes szivem, többé nem ég;
Nem bántja újabb szenvedély.
Körültem csillagmiriád
Versenyt kacérkodik, ragyog,
Fejemre szórja sugarát;
Azért még föl nem olvadok.
De néha csöndes éjszakán
Elálmodozva, egyedül -
Mult ifjuság tündér taván
Hattyúi képed fölmerül.
És ekkor még szivem kigyúl,
Mint hosszu téli éjjelen
Montblanc örök hava, ha túl
A fölkelő nap megjelen...
Gyula Juhász: No more can I recall
No more can I recall her blondness,
But the yellow fields of rich ears
Brought by summers so endless
Remind me once more of how she feels.
No more can I recall her eyes so blue,
But the clear lights of autumn skies
Brought by the blue September hue
Remind me once more of her eyes.
Nor can I recall her voice so mellow,
But when fields in the springtime sigh,
I hear Anna's soft words echo
From a spring far as the sky.
Juhász Gyula: Milyen volt...
Milyen volt szőkesége, nem tudom már,
De azt tudom, hogy szőkék a mezők,
Ha dús kalásszal jő a sárguló nyár,
S e szőkeségben újra érzem őt.
Milyen volt szeme kékje, nem tudom már,
De ha kinyílnak ősszel az egek,
A szeptemberi bágyadt búcsuzónál
Szeme szinére visszarévedek.
Milyen volt hangja selyme, sem tudom már,
De tavaszodván, ha sóhajt a rét,
Úgy érzem, Anna meleg szava szól át
Egy tavaszból, mely messze, mint az ég.
Gyula Juhász: Forever Anna
Years coming, years passing and you
Losing hold in my mind. Your face
Fading in my heart. Your shoulders' curve
Just a blur. Your voice
Left me behind. And follow I did not
In the darkest depth of life.
Already I am calm uttering your name,
Already I tremble not at your glance,
Already I know you are one of many,
That youth is foolish, and still,
Believe not, my love that all was useless,
Believe not that all is gone.
For you continue in all my ties askew,
In all my words misplaced,
In all the greetings wrongly uttered,
In all my letters torn to pieces,
In all my life fully mistaken
You live and rule forever. Amen.
Juhász Gyula: Anna örök
Az évek jöttek, mentek, elmaradtál
Emlékeimből lassan, elfakult
Arcképed a szivemben, elmosódott
A vállaidnak íve, elsuhant
A hangod, és én nem mentem utánad
Az élet egyre mélyebb erdejében.
Ma már nyugodtan ejtem a neved ki,
Ma már nem reszketek tekintetedre,
Ma már tudom, hogy egy voltál a sokból,
Hogy ifjúság bolondság, ó, de mégis,
Ne hidd szivem, hogy ez hiába volt,
És hogy egészen elmúlt, ó, ne hidd!
Mert benne élsz te minden félrecsúszott
Nyakkendőmben és elvétett szavamban
És minden eltévesztett köszönésben
És minden összetépett levelemben,
És egész elhibázott életemben
Élsz és uralkodol örökkön, Amen.
Dezső Kosztolányi: Necrology
See, brethren, all of a sudden he died.
He left us alone: he lied.
We knew him. Not grand or outstanding,
but filled our hearts, notwithstanding.
He is no more.
He is like earth.
Gone is a dearth
of treasure.
Learn ye all from this example.
Such is man: a unique sample.
No more like him. Not now or in the past,
no two leaves are in the same form cast.
All through time he will be lacking.
Look at this head, the collapsing
lovely eyes. Look at the hands here,
in remote haze they disappear,
stone-stiff
like a relic,
on which cuneiform wedges will bear
the ancient secret of his life so unique and rare.
Whoever he was: light and heat he was.
All knew and proclaimed: there he was.
The way he loved this or that meal.
His lips, on which now there is a seal
said, and as his voice on our ears did fall
we could hear the bells of sunken churches toll
deep down, and as he said recently,
'Son, I'd love some cheese presently,'
or he drank wine and happily stared
at the smoke of some cheap cigarette,
and he ran and made phone calls,
and wove dreams of all sorts,
on his forehead shone the sign:
of millions he's the only one.
Find him you will not, to no avail,
not in Asia or Cape Colony or here,
and not in the past either. And future's whim
will see many born, but him.
Never again
will his timid smile shine again.
The wheel of fortune so poor in turning
will never have this wonder returning.
See friends: all this so frail
like the man in the tale.
At one point life thought of him,
'Once upon a time there was him,'
then down came the heavens pounding,
no more of him - our sobs resounding.
Like a statue, stiff and numb he rests,
though once he struggled for the best.
No tears, no words: awaken him nothing can.
Once upon a time there lived a man.
Kosztolányi Dezső: Halotti beszéd
Látjátok feleim, egyszerre meghalt
és itthagyott minket magunkra. Megcsalt.
Ismertük őt. Nem volt nagy és kiváló,
csak szív, a mi szívünkhöz közel álló.
De nincs már.
Akár a föld.
Jaj, összedőlt
a kincstár.
Okuljatok mindannyian e példán.
Ilyen az ember. Egyedüli példány.
Nem élt belőle több és most sem él,
s mint fán se nő egyforma két levél,
a nagy időn se lesz hozzá hasonló.
Nézzétek e főt, ez összeomló,
kedves szemet. Nézzétek, itt e kéz,
mely a kimondhatatlan ködbe vész
kővé meredve,
mint egy ereklye,
s rá ékirással van karcolva ritka,
egyetlen életének ősi titka.
Akárki is volt ő, de fény, de hő volt.
Mindenki tudta és hirdette: ő volt.
Ahogy szerette ezt vagy azt az ételt,
s szólt ajka, melyet mostan lepecsételt
a csönd, s ahogy zengett fülünkbe hangja,
mint vízbe süllyedt templomok harangja
a mélybe lenn, s ahogy azt mondta nemrég:
"Édes fiacskám, egy kis sajtot ennék",
vagy bort ivott és boldogan meredt a
kezében égő, olcsó cigaretta
füstjére és futott, telefonált,
és szőtte álmát, mint színes fonált:
a homlokán feltündökölt a jegy,
hogy milliók közt az egyetlenegy.
Keresheted őt, nem leled, hiába,
se itt, se Fokföldön, se Ázsiába,
a múltba sem és a gazdag jövőben
akárki megszülethet már, csak ő nem.
Többé soha
nem gyúl ki halvány-furcsa mosolya.
Szegény a forgandó, tündér szerencse,
hogy e csodát újólag megteremtse.
Édes barátaim, olyan ez épen,
mint az az ember ottan a mesében.
Az élet egyszer csak őrája gondolt,
mi meg mesélni kezdtünk róla: "Hol volt...",
majd rázuhant a mázsás, szörnyű mennybolt
s mi ezt meséljük róla sírva: "Nem volt..."
Úgy fekszik ő, ki küzdve tört a jobbra,
mint önmagának dermedt-néma szobra.
Nem kelti föl se könny, se szó, se vegyszer.
Hol volt, hol nem volt a világon, egyszer.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Abstracts
Fine Arts in Literature (BAKOS Judit)
The paper contrasts Vanessa Bell's paintings with Virginia Woolf's novel entitled To the Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf must have taken her sister's artistic behaviour as a model in creating Lily Briscoe's complex character. With sensitivity, moderation and strong faith in creation Lily represents an artist struggling with a lack of self-confidence. The process of painting Mrs. Ramsay's portrait is not only about painting but also about the techniques of a novelist. The first and most significant step of creation is an intellectual activity, through which the artist organises her ideas and feelings of her impressions about the world so that she could express her message to the audience in a comprehensible way.
Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight or, What You Will (PELLÉRDI Márta)
The paper deals with Vladimir Nabokov's first novel written in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. In this novel Nabokov offers the parody of an autobiography. The article demonstrates how Nabokov integrated Shakespeare's Twelfth Night into the novel through a network of subtle implications. With this discovery the genre of the novel can be determined.
"Sirens". The Musical Chapter of Ulysses: Technique and Style (GOLDMANN Márta)
The article is about an episode in James Joyce's Ulysses called "Sirens", the musical chapter of the novel. Music is not only one of the principal topics of this episode, but it is also about music per se. The author examines the different levels at which music appears in the style and technique and how the text of the chapter is formed by style and technique. At the end of the paper the author discusses Joyce's influence on contemporary composers.
Past in the Present and Future in the Past: T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Sweeney Agonistes (FARKAS Ákos)
By analysing a T. S. Eliot poem and a play the author makes an attempt to prove that seriousness and popularity are strongly interrelated notions in literature and in arts in general. According to the author real art must be serious and light, traditional and modern in a way that it is rooted in the past but looks forward into the future.
Literary Self-Portraits Contrasted - in Virginia Woolf and Wyndham Lewis's Portrait of the Artist (BAKOS Judit)
Applying an interdisciplinary approach the paper sheds light on the connection between fine arts and literature, the basic characteristic of modernism, and analyses the rivalry of painting and literature and the relationship between artists and their works of art. Examining the authors' disguised or overt self-portraits the paper is searching for shared aesthetic notions in Virginia Woolf's and other contemporary authors' (James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis) autobiographical novels. The artist heroes examined are Tarr, Kreisler, Stephen Dedalus, Paul Morel and Lily Briscoe.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------