Gods in the House of Pain: Civilization and Savagery in Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

H.G. Wells’ early science fiction novels brim with invention but The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) is the most compelling read of the bunch, a dark masterpiece that takes a scalpel to the idea of the human and slowly tears it to shreds. I discussed in a post on Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” (1872) the operation of Darwin’s idea of evolution in horror fiction, and Wells takes Darwinian ideas relating to the kinship of man and beast even further and maximises their horrific implications in this novel.

The Island of Dr. Moreau is of the then popular genre of “found manuscript” stories (“Green Tea” is another such tale), and the manuscript that is found is the account by one Edward Prendick of his escape from the sinking of the Lady Vain in a dinghy, to be picked up and brought to an island where goings-on are of the strangest.

The real strangeness begins when Prendick comes to face to face with an inhabitant of the island:

He was, I could see, a misshapen man, short, broad, and clumsy, with a crooked back, a hairy neck, and a head sunk between his shoulders.

[…]

In some indefinable way the black face thus flashed upon me shocked me profoundly. It was a singularly deformed one. The facial part projected, forming something dimly suggestive of a muzzle, and the huge half-open mouth showed as big white teeth as I had ever seen in a human mouth.

Moreau, Chapter 3.

The hint of humanity in the apparently bestial is a theme of the book, disorienting the reader and prompting reflection on what makes humans human.

In the spectacularly dark and ahumanist apologia by the titular Dr. Moreau, he sees the gap as being far from insurmountable: “the great difference between man and monkey is in the larynx, he continued,—in the incapacity to frame delicately different sound-symbols by which thought could be sustained.” In his attempts to bridge that gap and become a god, Moreau tortures animals in his “House of Pain” with his unique surgeries, and feels no compunction for doing so: “it is just this question of pain that parts us. So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick; so long as your own pains drive you; so long as pain underlies your propositions about sin,—so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurely what an animal feels.” Moreau’s amorality is almost without precedent in literature, but may echo Wells’ reading of Nietzsche, even as it seems to pre-empt Freud: “Very much indeed of what we call moral education, he said, is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion.” (Moreau, Chapter 14).

The darkness of the novel is defined not so much by Moreau’s attitudes and deeds as by the fact he often appears the sanest and most intelligent presence in the novel, and by the fact Prendick becomes haunted by the sense there is something human, after all, in the beings Moreau has created or recreated:

I cannot explain the fact,—but now, seeing the creature there in a perfectly animal attitude, with the light gleaming in its eyes and its imperfectly human face distorted with terror, I realised again the fact of its humanity. In another moment other of its pursuers would see it, and it would be overpowered and captured, to experience once more the horrible tortures of the enclosure. Abruptly I slipped out my revolver, aimed between its terror-struck eyes, and fired.

A strange persuasion came upon me, that, save for the grossness of the line, the grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest form.

Moreau, Chapter 16

This is the ultimate shock to Prendick’s sense of an ordered human existence in a benevolent universe:

I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it suffering the painful disorder of this island. A blind Fate, a vast pitiless mechanism, seemed to cut and shape the fabric of existence and I, Moreau (by his passion for research), Montgomery (by his passion for drink), the Beast People with their instincts and mental restrictions, were torn and crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, amid the infinite complexity of its incessant wheels.

Moreau, Chapter 16

Though the Beast People appear at times more people than beasts, their lives and deaths are treated by Prendick – not to mention Moreau – with the utmost casualness. Prendick is sometimes disturbed by their humanity, but more often hates them violently. His questioning of the nature of humanity when he sees the Beast People has a perhaps even darker echo in an almost contemporaneous work, Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad. Marlow is never so disturbed in that work as when he acknowledges his kinship with those he calls savages:

They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend.

HoD, II

There are numerous points of similarity between HoD and Moreau. HoD is obviously about colonialism but is also a reflection on what it means to be human or bestial, civilized or savage; Moreau is obviously about the line between humanity and bestiality but is also a sort of reflection on the colonialist mentality. They are like two sides of the same coin. Take the very similar passages near the ends of both, when the protagonists return from their sojourns in hell, and find London itself has taken on a nightmarish complexion, its inhabitants not as unproblematically human as they seemed before:

When I lived in London the horror was well-nigh insupportable. I could not get away from men: their voices came through windows; locked doors were flimsy safeguards. I would go out into the streets to fight with my delusion, and prowling women would mew after me; furtive, craving men glance jealously at me; weary, pale workers go coughing by me with tired eyes and eager paces, like wounded deer dripping blood; old people, bent and dull, pass murmuring to themselves; and, all unheeding, a ragged tail of gibing children. 

Moreau, Chapter 22

I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces so full of stupid importance.

HoD, III

It is no accident. Conrad was an admirer of Wells and dedicated his novel The Secret Agent to him. He also called him “a very original writer with a very individualistic judgment in all things and an astonishing imagination” (Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography, Penguin, 1986, p.282). Wells seems on the whole less impressed by Conrad and described their relation as “a long, fairly friendly but always rather strained acquaintance” (op. cit., p. 284). Later, he took a few rather petty potshots at Conrad in the novel Boon (1915) and they became estranged.

Still, reflecting on the works together is intriguing. There is no doubt Conrad had read Wells’ book before writing HoD and to see Moreau as a forerunner of Kurtz is tempting: the white man in the jungle with ultimate power over the savage indigenous life, power that makes him mad, turns his genius into amorality and brings into question the nature of humanity. Both are megalomaniacal. Moreau insists he is following “the Maker of this world”; Kurtz goes further and explicitly identifies with godlike powers:

He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might of a deity,’ and so on, and so on.

HoD, II – square brackets as in original.

A nice indication that Kurtz and Moreau were, in a sense, the same character is that Marlon Brando famously played Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1979) and, some years later, played Moreau in the much-maligned adaptation The Island of Dr. Moreau (1993). It is unsurprising a figure of Brandon’s stature seemed needed for these Übermenschen, even if his success was mixed in bringing them to life.

Brando as Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.

Conrad read Wells and perhaps the central scenario of Moreau was filtered through Conrad’s own memory of the Congo, allowing him a new manner of seeing the brutality and hubris of the colonising mission and resulting in the classic Heart of Darkness. At the denouement, though, Conrad’s Marlow embraces the lie. Wells never does that, and his work is perhaps the more uncompromising. I cannot deny it is my favourite of the two, a dissection as cold and merciless as anything Moreau got up to in his “House of Pain”.

James Joyce at Christmas, “The Dead” (1914)

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843) aside, James Joyce’s “The Dead” from 1914’s Dubliners may be the most famous work of classic fiction set entirely around Christmas. It is by no means as synonymous with the festive season as Dickens’ work, yet it could take place at no other time of year. Neither is its emotional trajectory as sharply drawn as Dickens’, yet there is a moment of moving and profound Christmas redemption at its denouement. Amid all the human complexity of the relationships surrounding Joyce’s protagonist Gabriel Conroy, there is a moment in which all finally falls away and leaves him with the purest vision of transience, mortality and human interconnectedness ever captured in literature.

The stage of the story is immediately set as a busy social gathering: “the Misses Morkan’s annual dance” is the name presently given to it. Repeated references to snow on the clothes and footwear of those entering establish the weather conditions and, a few pages in, Gabriel notes to the maid Lily that “it’s Christmas time, isn’t it?” as he tries to give her a tip. The narrator has by this stage given the location as Usher’s Island (which, as the name of the collection suggests, is in Dublin – as always with Joyce, it is a real geographical location), so we are given to know exactly when and where we are in an economical fashion.

Though the narration is third person, it is focalised through the thoughts of Gabriel. He is the only partygoer we are given internal access to. Notwithstanding the festive atmosphere, it is a time of anxiety for him. He is first discomposed by Lily’s refusal to take his tip and her “bitter and sudden” response to his light-hearted suggestion that she will be married soon. He worries about the upcoming speech he is expected to make.

More lingeringly, Miss Ivors’ comments that he is a “West Briton” derail his mood. It is a serious allegation. Ireland’s attempts to free itself from British rule mean anyone accused of being in sympathy with that rule is an outsider and a source of suspicion. Gabriel’s true but perhaps pedantic and injudicious comment that “Irish is not my language” annoys Miss Ivors. Further, he writes for a royalist-inclined newspaper and prefers to holiday on “the continent” than to go to the west of Ireland; therefore, he is not a nationalist like most of his compatriots. The idea of going west is to recur. The west of Ireland is the locus of true Irishness, far from Dublin which is the home of the alien government and ruling class. The west, while a harsh landscape productive of poverty, is the last bastion of Irish culture and the Irish language, a haven for patriots mythologised by, for example, Padraig Pearse and by Yeats (sometimes self-consciously, as in his poem “The Fisherman“).

Gabriel’s wife too is from the west, we soon discover. Greta is from Galway. When Gabriel tells her he had words with Miss Ivors about holidaying there, Greta insists she would love to go back but Gabriel remains uninterested. It is a short and seemingly minor exchange but Gabriel’s lack of sympathy with the idea of going west will come back to haunt him.

The story is at its most Christmassy when the describing what is on the table, a feast of Dickensian proportions:

A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table and at the other end, on a bed of creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley, lay a great ham, stripped of its outer skin and peppered over with crust crumbs, a neat paper frill round its shin and beside this was a round of spiced beef. Between these rival ends ran parallel lines of side-dishes: two little minsters of jelly, red and yellow; a shallow dish full of blocks of blancmange and red jam, a large green leaf-shaped dish with a stalk-shaped handle, on which lay bunches of purple raisins and peeled almonds, a companion dish on which lay a solid rectangle of Smyrna figs, a dish of custard topped with grated nutmeg, a small bowl full of chocolates and sweets wrapped in gold and silver papers and a glass vase in which stood some tall celery stalks. In the centre of the table there stood, as sentries to a fruit-stand which upheld a pyramid of oranges and American apples, two squat old-fashioned decanters of cut glass, one containing port and the other dark sherry. On the closed square piano a pudding in a huge yellow dish lay in waiting and behind it were three squads of bottles of stout and ale and minerals, drawn up according to the colours of their uniforms, the first two black, with brown and red labels, the third and smallest squad white, with transverse green sashes.

The sensual delights of the table, however, cannot long still the teeming thoughts of Gabriel’s mind. He sees his wife on the stairway as she listens to a cracked voice upstairs singing “The Lass of Aughrim”. There is much to unpack in the song choice. Aughrim is a village in the west (again), near Galway city, and was also the site of a famous battle in which the Irish forces were defeated by the British in the 17th century. Gabriel is struck by the “grace and mystery” of her attitude as she listens. There is something he is failing to understand, something in his wife’s relation to the west of Ireland that is a mystery to him. He can only listen and register the “old Irish tonality” of the song and the “grief” of the story it tells (about a young woman with a baby caught out in cold, wet weather and pleading with the man who has deserted her). This ushers in the final movement of the story, as Gabriel is awakened from his middle-class cosmopolitan stupor into an epiphany that is both universally humane and cosmically lonely.

As they leave the party for their hotel room, the snow is slushy and the light dull. Gabriel is filled alternately with joy and lust. Something in his wife’s reaction to the song has filled him with a desire for her he has not felt in a long time but when they reach their hotel room she falls to the bed in tears. She tells him the song reminds her of a boy she used to know in Galway who had sung it. His name was Michael Furey. It further transpired he died when, already ill, he snuck out to meet her on a wet night. Greta believes he died for love of her and Gabriel is stunned by this revelation from her past, so long hidden. In a moment of epiphany, Gabriel’s entire being seems to him shallow and insincere:

He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead.

In a stunning denouement, Gabriel’s evening in all its mundanity flashes before him and then he has a quasi-cosmic vision of the snow falling over the living and the dead of Ireland, from the Bog of Allen to the “lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.” Michael Furey is dead, but he once lived and loved more intensely than Gabriel ever has. The snow becomes a vague but powerful symbol of an all-encompassing force uniting the dead with the living (i.e. the not yet dead). There is no synopsis that could reproduce the epic sweep of this final movement wherein a small and inconsequential night in the life of a middle-class Dubliner ends by encapsulating life, death and the condition of all humanity. There are several moments in Joyce when he steps out from his wealth of local detail to an overview of man and woman’s place in the cosmos, but never so powerfully as this. As a Christmas story it is not as comforting as A Christmas Carol, but it is a similarly overwhelming example of an epiphany presented through literature.

“The Dead” can be an equally or even more powerful listening experience. This one by Barry McGovern is particularly good, and is also available wherever you get your podcasts. Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night!

Joe Christmas: Dickensian Orphan, Christlike Saviour and Conradian Racial Symbol in William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932)

The opening pages of William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) include an indictment of industrial ruin that resonates more strongly today than on its publication:

All the men in the village worked in the mill or for it. It was cutting pine. It had been there seven years and in seven years more it would destroy all the timber within its reach. Then some of the machinery and most of the men who ran it and existed because of and for it would be loaded onto freight cars and moved away. But some of the machinery would be left, since new pieces could always be bought on the instalment plan – gaunt, staring, motionless wheels rising from mounds of brick rubble and ragged weeds with a quality profoundly astonishing, and gutted boilers lifting their rusting and unsmoking stacks with an air stubborn, baffled and bemused upon a stumppocked scene of profound and peaceful desolation, unplowed untilled, gutting slowly into red and choked ravines beneath the long quiet rains of autumn and the galloping fury of vernal equinoxes.

William Faulkner, Light in August, Vintage, 1990, p. 4

This graveyard of machinery recalls that found near the infamous “grove of death” by Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:

I came upon a boiler wallowing in the grass, then found a path leading up the hill. It turned aside for the boulders, and also for an undersized railway-truck lying there on its back with its wheels in the air. One was off. The thing looked as dead as the carcass of some animal. I came upon more pieces of decaying machinery, a stack of rusty rails. 

Heart of Darkness

In Conrad’s book, wilderness has already begun to reclaim the jungle despite industrialism’s best efforts. Faulkner, perhaps informed by Conrad, is imagining such a future for his patch of the American south. It is not the only thing these two novels have in common. Faulkner was cagey about being influenced by Conrad when asked during an interview at the University of Virginia, but admitted to reading some of his work repeatedly. Conrad was, of all canonical writers before Faulkner, the one most obsessed with race, constantly ascribing a symbolical importance to it, most notably in the less read The Nigger of the “Narcissus“, which Faulkner significantly names in the Virginia interview as the Conrad novel he repeatedly returns to. I have already written about the symbolical use of blackness in that novel.

In Light in August, Faulkner manages to provide an even more complex rumination on the idea of blackness. The masterstroke in the novel, rendering it endlessly ambiguous and unsettling, is that the central character Joe Christmas is never confirmed as being part black, but, an orphan of unknown parentage, he believes he is and is endlessly obsessed by the notion. Visually, he can pass for white, but as a young child he is moved from the white orphanage to the black one when a nurse who wants to get him out of the way because he has seen her engaging in an illicit affair with a colleague convinces the matron he has “negro” blood. This changes Joe Christmas’ life and is his primal scene, setting up the hatred of sex, hostility to women and racial guilt that will shape his adult life.

Further complicating this character is the parallel to Jesus Christ throughout. The name Joe Christmas recalls Christ both in the surname and in the initials JC. He was born at Christmas and dies at 33. The parallel seems both devout and blasphemous.

The name Joe Christmas is not a birth name. He is given it at the orphanage because of the time of year when he is found. This act of naming evokes a parallel to Oliver Twist, named by the beadle in the orphanage at the beginning Oliver Twist in line with his own nomenclatural formula, and Joe’s life course seems a dark commentary on the peregrinations of a Dickensian orphan. He is perhaps closer to Bleak House‘s Jo than to Oliver and, apart from the racial element, might almost be an answer to the question of what would have happened to Jo if he had outlived that bout of smallpox. Recall Jo’s ignorance of religion and so on before the inquest:

Name, Jo. Nothing else that he knows on. Don’t know that everybody has two names. Never heerd of sich a think. Don’t know that Jo is short for a longer name. Thinks it long enough for HIM. HE don’t find no fault with it. Spell it? No. HE can’t spell it. No father, no mother, no friends. Never been to school. What’s home? Knows a broom’s a broom, and knows it’s wicked to tell a lie. Don’t recollect who told him about the broom or about the lie, but knows both. Can’t exactly say what’ll be done to him arter he’s dead if he tells a lie to the gentlemen here, but believes it’ll be something wery bad to punish him, and serve him right—and so he’ll tell the truth.

Bleak House, Chapter XI

Perhaps it is from Dickens’ Jo that Faulkner found inspiration for his first name. Certainly, in the aforementioned Virginia interview, he mentioned “most of Dickens” as being among the books he read as a youth which he “set [his] store by”. Joe and Jo are linked by their remarkable ignorance of concepts we consider essential parts of our psychological make-up. This ignorance serves to defamiliarise the concepts for the reader. Reading Jo’s reflections on God, the afterlife and sin force to reader – and more pointedly forced the Victorian reader – to reflect on those concepts anew, from the point of view of one living in that society and oppressed by it yet in one sense free from its ruling ideological concepts.

In the memorable flashback section detailing Joe Christmas’s childhood there is a similar sense of a human being too young and too neglected to understand basic human ideals and emotions, which also suggests the constructedness of such emotions: “He didn’t know that she was crying because he did not know that grown people cried[…]” (136) The exception might be guilt. Guilt, it seems, is primal, even when you don’t know what you feel guilty of: “Perhaps he expected to be punished upon his return, for what, what crime exactly, he did not expect to know, since he had already learned that, though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too.” (140) Like a Dickensian orphan, he is a perfect victim. Like Jo, he knows nothing of religion: “He had neither ever worked nor feared God. He knew less about God than about work.”(144) It is all the more discomfiting and ambiguous, then, to discover the Christian echoes in Joe’s later life and death. Though in many ways the opposite of Christlike, there is yet some suggestion that Joe willingly takes the sins of the American South on himself and that his death, somehow, has a redemptive quality.

Light in August is a mysterious book and Joe Christmas cannot be explained neatly. The book is more complex than that, too, because his story is interwoven with the tangentially linked tales of Lena and Hightower. Hightower, like Joe but in a very different way, is tortured by the history of the American South. Lena is a paragon of bovine sanctity, incapable of self-reflection and perhaps an indication that Faulkner, who could do so much, struggled to create sympathetically complex female characters. Her simplicity is almost akin to that of the derided Dickensian heroines. At least she serves, as a young pregnant woman who loves life beyond reason, to illustrate that, if Joe must die, life goes on in its way. She allows one to argue that Light in August is an optimistic novel. Like much of Dickens again, though, it strength is not in its positivity or its light but in its darkness.

Nature Horror in Blackwood’s “The Willows” (1907)

Frequently found in anthologies of classic ghost or horror stories is Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” (1907).  Remarkably, the principal cause of the horror in the story is none other than the titular willows.   That small and widespread tree – Blackwood calls them “bushes” (The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell, Tor, 1987, p. 909) – of wet and neglected ground, considered a weed by some, is an unlikely cause of such cosmic horror as Blackwood is able to evoke, yet its effectiveness is undeniable.

  Blackwood sets the stage for horror by describing in knowledgeable detail the surrounding, which is a unique one: the Danube and the sümpfe or marshes of its flood plain between Vienna and Budapest.  The location is not further specified by Blackwood but has been linked with the Dunajské Luhy protected landscape area in Slovakia.  This setting is the first masterstroke, neither fully water nor land, a liminal space difficult to traverse and ever ready to claim the lives of the uncautious.  The narrator and his friend, known only as “the Swede”, are canoeing down the river and, in rising winds and heavy rain, camp for the night on a river island which is in danger of being submerged or washed away.  The island, as with the other river islands nearby, the banks and the flood plain, is covered with innumerable willows.  

  Characterisation in the story is minimal.  Blackwood never names his narrator, and gives no information on his background except to note that he and the Swede have travelled together many times before.   He has, essentially, no past, no psychological depths , no trauma plot. A character that can hardly be conceived in our culture: not reacting to the complications of his previous relationships, just existing in a set of circumstances that need to be dealt with. All we know of the narrator, like a person we meet for the first time in an emergency, is how he is reacting to those circumstances – with considerable alarm and fear, but in a reasonable and human manner.  Neither is there much in the way of plot: if you know the protagonists are caught in a Danube island on a stormy night, you know pretty much all there is to know.

  Without characterisation and plot, atmosphere is all in this story.  The river, weather conditions and isolated location combine to create an intense and realistic sense of peril.  If that were all, “The Willows” would be an adventure story.  But it isn’t.  From the beginning, the atmosphere is heightened.  There is something different about this place which the narrator struggles to define:

We had made many similar journeys together, but the Danube, more than any other river I knew, impressed us from the very beginning with its aliveness… [I]t had seemed to us like following the growth of some living creature.  Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires as it became conscious of its deep soul, it rolled, like some huge fluid being, through all the countries we had passed, holding our little craft on its mighty shoulders, playing roughly with us sometimes, yet always friendly and well-meaning, till at length we had come inevitably to regard it as a Great Personage. (911)

Though the association of the place with horror has yet to be established, there is a curious insistence on it as a living entity that will resonate throughout the story.  And, despite its “friendly and well-meaning” nature, there is a hint of darkness in its “violent desires”.

  When they escape the rising river to dock on the island, the suggestion of aliveness is renewed:

The ground seemed to shake with the shock and rush, while the furious movement of the willow bushes as the wind poured over them increased the curious illusion that the island itself actually moved. (913)

The movement of willows with wind and its creation of the notion of a living landscape is a keynote of the story.  Almost immediately, Blackwood introduces an extraordinary simile to suggest life in the willows:

the willows… closed about [the river] like a herd of monstrous antediluvian creatures crowding down to drink.  They made me think of gigantic sponge-like growths that sucked the river up into themselves.  They caused it to vanish from sight.  They herded there together in such overpowering numbers.  (913)

these acres and acres of willows, crowding, so thickly growing there, swarming everywhere the eye could reach, pressing upon the river as though to suffocate it, standing in dense array mile after mile beneath the sky, watching, waiting, listening.  And, apart quite from the elements, the willows connected themselves subtly with my malaise, attacking the mind insidiously somehow by reason of their vast numbers, and contriving in some way or other to represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power, moreover, not altogether friendly to us.   (914)

Rarely have willows been presented to the imagination in such a formidable guise, recalling antediluvian monsters while intangibly evoking something yet greater and more terrible.  This is true cosmic horror, most often associated with H.P. Lovecraft, yet present in this work long before Lovecraft put pen to paper.  Lovecraft was fully aware of the influence and said of “The Willows”: 

Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note. (“Supernatural Horror in Literature”, At the Mountains of Madness, Modern Library, 2005, p. 164)

  When horror is as cosmic as this, not only terror is produced but also awe.  The word “awe” appears 9 times in the story and “terror” 14 times.  What produces such terror and awe can only be a deity of sorts, a creature or creatures beyond both nature and the imagination of man; creatures, as such, that can only be hinted at but not described. 

We had “strayed,” as the Swede put it, into some region or some set of conditions where the risks were great, yet unintelligible to us; where the frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a spot held by the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peephole whence they could spy upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil between had worn a little thin. (933)

The awe and terror lie in some unknown and hitherto unsuspected mode of being.  The littleness and contingency of humanity comes crashing in upon the narrator and – of course in lesser degree – upon the reader.  Life is not what we small petty humans experience, or not only that.  As with Le Fanu’s “Green Tea”, “The Willows” is a post-Darwinian and post-Kelvin’s second law of thermodynamics brooding on the nature of life.  In a constantly expanding and dying universe, cold and infinite, one can only think with flashes of wonder but mostly terror of what lies beyond, of a cold, indifferent infinity prefigured in “fifty miles of willows, willows, willows” (938) across an unpeopled and chaotic mosaic of land and water in the middle of Europe.

“Bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth”: George Orwell’s Coming up for Air

George Orwell’s literary career had, in retrospect, a perfect trajectory. He had a long struggle in which he lived meagrely, then wrote some well-received non-fiction volumes (Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia) while also experimenting, less successfully, with novel writing. When war hit, he began working with the Home Guard and his writing took on a patriotic bent. In 1941 he got a job in the BBC, finally putting him at the centre of national political and cultural conversations as well as improving his financial situation. He produced a stream of influential essays during the war years (including “My Country Right or Left”, “Politics and the English Language” and too many to mention) before finally returning to fiction and hitting the jackpot with Animal Farm and 1984. A few months after publication of 1984, he became too ill to write and, a few month after that, he died. In the last years of his life, everything turned to gold in his career: seminal non-fiction essays on culture and politics and two of the most influential novels of the century.

One of the forgotten Orwell novels is Coming up for Air, written during six months he spent in Morocco in 1938-39. It is a first-person narrative, very readable and very thin on plot, about George Bowling, a middle-aged, middle-class insurance salesman who feels the need to escape modern life and his family. It opens:

The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.

I remember the morning well. At about a quarter to eight I’d nipped out of bed and got into the bathroom just in time to shut the kids out. It was a beastly January morning, with a dirty yellowish-grey sky. 

Penguin 2020, p. 3

George’s false teeth are a recurring them in the opening pages. Orwell is precise on the discomfort caused by the absence of teeth:

It gives you a rotten feeling to have your gums meet, a sort of pinched-up, withered feeling like when you’ve bitten into a sour apple. 

p. 4

It is typical of Orwell to choose to articulate this feeling of discomfort and unease, and to be able to do so vividly. Every moment of Bowling’s life seems attended by some minor physical discomfort or displeasure:

It’s a rotten thing to have a soapy neck. It gives you a disgusting sticky feeling, and the queer thing is that, however carefully you sponge it away, when you’ve once discovered that your neck is soapy you feel sticky for the rest of the day. I went downstairs in a bad temper and ready to make myself disagreeable.

p. 6

The prevalence of words like “rotten” and “beastly” in the opening chapter paint a picture of unremitting grimness found in many of Orwell’s books, including 1984, which opens on a “bright cold day”, with a “vile wind” in a hallway that “smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats.” In Coming Up For Air, the discomfort is not just incidental but symptomatic of modern life, as Bowling concludes when he eats a sausage that, as it turns out, is made of fish:

It gave me the feeling that I’d bitten into the modern world and discovered what it was really made of. That’s the way we’re going nowadays. Everything slick and streamlined, everything made out of something else. Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, arc-lamps blazing all night, glass roofs over your head, radios all playing the same tune, no vegetation left, everything cemented over, mock-turtles grazing under the neutral fruit-trees. But when you come down to brass tacks and get your teeth into something solid, a sausage for instance, that’s what you get. Rotten fish in a rubber skin. Bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth.

p. 26

It’s worse than that, though. Not only is the modern world inescapably disgusting, but Bowling (or Orwell) sees World War II coming with unflinching clarity. It reminds me of H.G. Wells’ In Search of Hot Water, another book written in 1938-39 suffused with the certainty that a terrible war was approaching. Which, of course, it was. In idle moments, Bowling’s mind turns to war:

My mind went back to the thoughts of war I’d been having earlier that morning, when the bomber flew over the train. I felt in a kind of prophetic mood, the mood in which you foresee the end of the world and get a certain kick out of it.

And this kind of prophetic feeling that keeps coming over me nowadays, the feeling that war’s just round the corner and that war’s the end of all things, isn’t peculiar to me.

I see it all. I see the posters and the food-queues, and the castor oil and the rubber truncheons and the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows.

pp. 28-29

It is no wonder that Bowling seeks refuge in a return to his childhood. He travels to the small town he grew up in, which he has not returned to in decades. Without giving too much away, he doesn’t find what he seeks. The past is gone and irrecoverable. He does reach a striking and resonant conclusion about why the past, with all its harshness and privations, was a far better place than the present of 1938-39:

[P]eople then had something that we haven’t got now.

What? It was simply that they didn’t think of the future as something to be terrified of. It isn’t that life was softer then than now. Actually it was harsher. People on the whole worked harder, lived less comfortably, and died more painfully. 

p. 119

Orwell’s monumental pessimism feels relevant in the 21st century, not just in 1984 but in Coming up For Air. In the latter, the nightmare hasn’t quite arrived yet, but it is on the way and things are already bad enough. We, too, habitually envision a dark future, whether through environmental apocalypse, resource depletion, Europe at war – cold or hot – with its neighbours, famine and viral pestilence; or maybe through over-reaching corporate power co-opting democracy, aided by a regime of social credit and medical mandates. Perhaps the comfort of reading Orwell is realising that it has all been thought before. Cultural apocalyptism has always been with us. The end is always near. The Doomsday Clock is always inching closer to midnight. (If they keep pushing it forward to signal “unprecedented danger”, they may overshoot midnight and leave themselves no option but to inform us doomsday has already happened.) Reading Coming Up For Air, you might wonder what is to be missed about life anyway. An endless slog of bratty kids, termagant wives, soul-sucking jobs, encroaching wars and poor dental hygiene – that is all Orwell’s protagonist is offered and, by the end, even the possibility of escape has vanished.

Gerty in Ulysses: James Joyce’s Farewell to Narrative

The difficulties presented by James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) are notorious but they are not uniform throughout the book.  With each of the 18 chapters or “episodes” written in a very different style, some are surprisingly straightforward and others are essentially impenetrable on first reading.  Occasionally, dare one say it, there is an episode that is quite enjoyable for the first-time reader.

It is often stated that, in general, the book gets more obscure as it goes on, with some of the most unbearable challenging episodes coming late on (most notably Nos.  14 and 15, “Oxen of the Sun” and “Circe”).  These later episodes anticipate Joyce’s final novel, Finnegans Wake (1939), a novel so difficult that critics can’t agree whether it has a narrative or should even be classed as a novel.

But just before Joyce went over the edge one final time into language games, multilingual punning and torturing the reader, he produced one of his great feats of straightforward storytelling, Ulysses episode 13, “Nausicaa”, centred on Gerty MacDowell, a character almost entirely absent from the rest of the book.  “Nausicaa” is a reminder of the Joyce of Dubliners (1914) and much of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), a storyteller of precision and clarity, one who had brought the art of narrative to such a pitch of perfection that now he had nowhere left to go but into anti-narrative.

“Nausicaa” opens:

The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace.  Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of all too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand, on the proud promontory of dear old Howth guarding as ever the waters of the bay, on the weedgrown rocks along Sandymount shore and, last but not least, on the quiet church whence there streamed forth at times upon the stillness the voice of prayer to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to the stormtossed heart of man, Mary, star of the sea..

It is a nice and very clear piece of scene-setting.  We know where we are, Sandymount strand; when it is, a summer evening; and at least one thing that is happening, a Catholic prayer ceremony in the nearby church.  There is some nice alliteration: “lingered loving on sea and strand, on the proud promontory” and a nod towards Joyce’s neological leanings with “weedgrown”.  Amidst all the unwonted clarity, there is some very curious phrasing.  Why is Howth “dear old Howth”?  Why is the evening said to have a “mysterious embrace”?  Is Mary really “in her pure radiance a beacon ever to the the stormtossed heart of man”?  Such observations are rather trite and clichéd.  There is an element of parody, of Joyce pretending to be a more derivative and conventional writer than he is.  Yet in the context of Ulysses, the very triteness of these lines is in itself intriguing and compelling.

Gerty, we soon discover, is a young lady of about 20, and is passing the evening with two girl friends, one of whom is looking after her younger siblings:

Gerty MacDowell who was seated near her companions, lost in thought, gazing far away into the distance was, in very truth, as fair a specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see.  She was pronounced beautiful by all who knew her though, as folks often said, she was more a Giltrap than a MacDowell.  Her figure was slight and graceful, inclining even to fragility but those iron jelloids she had been taking of late had done her a world of good much better than the Widow Welch’s female pills and she was much better of those discharges she used to get and that tired feeling.

Again the reliance on cliché is apparent.  First, Joyce backs up his own description with “in very truth”, always a meaningless statement for the narrator of a fiction to make.  That Gerty is “as fair a specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see” is the epitome of romantic banality, recalling magazine literature of the time.  Yet in the next line any sense of romance is quickly undercut, first by the reference to her being “more a Giltrap than a MacDowell”, which rings true as a realistic commonplace observation but not as a component of romantic literature.  More jarring is the prosaic reference to “iron jelloids”, an everyday touch like those found in profusion throughout Ulysses.  Even more typical is the reference to Gerty’s “discharges”, a vulgar usage by the time’s standards but in keeping with the obsession with bodily functions throughout the novel.  The episode is already performing a delicate balancing act between being a pastiche or parody of romantic literature and being a realistic window into the consciousness of a young middle-class Dublin woman, including the indelicate bits normally left unspoken by novels in the romantic or any other genre.

In fact, “Nausicaa” was the straw that broke the camel’s back and led to the publishers of Ulysses in instalments being prosecuted and fined in the USA.  It was the first chapter of the book to be seen from a female perspective (the famous Molly Bloom soliloquy not appearing until the final chapter), and detailed descriptions of underclothes and bodily functions, which had been just about acceptable in a male context, caused grave offence when relating to a woman.

Joyce lays it on thick in the parodic tributes to Gerty’s youthful fairness: “God’s fair land of Ireland did not hold her equal”; “a joyous little laugh which had in it all the freshness of a young May morning.” Like her looks, Gerry’s consciousness is constituted of romantic cliché:

No prince charming is her beau ideal to lay a rare and wondrous love at her feet but rather a manly man with a strong quiet face who had not found his ideal, perhaps his hair slightly flecked with grey, and who would understand, take her in his sheltering arms, strain her to him in all the strength of his deep passionate nature and comfort her with a long long kiss.  It would be like heaven.

It is all notably Mills and Boon (founded in 1908 so perhaps Joyce was familiar) but what in the context of a Mills and Boon novel might be risible, in the context of Ulysses is remarkably effective because, having read through to this point, we have a sense of the keen literary intelligence behind the clichés.  There is also an effective contrast between the obsessively romantic workings of Gerty’s mind and the prosaic surroundings which often intrude, from squabbling children to iron jelloids.

Gerty experiences her life as a romantic story and is almost a female Don Quijote, a person so deeply embedded in the imaginative universe created by generic literature that it transfigures her life and makes her potentially sordid encounter with Bloom read as a moment of true ecstasy for both.  The true ironic tension in the episode is between romance and sordidness, Joyce proving himself equally adept at striking either note though, as often in Ulysses, seeming to finally settle on the latter.

Gerry encounters Bloom as the episode wears on, and the two are mutually impressed.  He is “the image of the photo she had of Martin Harvey, the matinee idol, only for the moustache”; she, to him, is ” a fair unsullied soul”.  They do not address each other but their eyes meet across the strand as Bloom is briefly engaged in conversation by one of Gerty’s friends and the effect on both is profound and profoundly satisfying.  Gerty deliberately provides Bloom a glimpse of her underwear; he pleasures himself discreetly as he looks on.  A sort of climax ensues, certainly sexual for him, of an unspecified type for her.  For Bloom this is followed by the somewhat bathetic discovery that Gerty is lame, which is also a surprise to the reader.  Only now, when we see through Bloom’s eyes as she limps away up the strand, do we gain this insight into her situation.  Throughout Gerty’s own reflections and romantic fantasies, she has never clearly alluded to this complicating factor.  Bloom considers it a shame but classes Gerty as a “Hot little devil all the same”.

As the episode winds to a close, we leave Gerty behind and find ourselves once again trapped in the consciousness of Bloom, a place of obscurity and without grammar:

Wait.  Hm.  Hm.  Yes.  That’s her perfume.  Why she waved her hand.  I leave you this to think of me when I’m far away on the pillow.  What is it?  Heliotrope? No.  Hyacinth?  Hm.  Roses, I think.  She’d like scent of that kind.  Sweet and cheap: soon sour.  Why Molly likes opoponax.  Suits her, with a little jessamine mixed.  Her high notes and her low notes.  At the dance night she met him, dance of the hours.  Heat brought it out.  She was wearing her black and it had the perfume of the time before.  Good conductor, is it?  Or bad?  Light too. Suppose there’s some connection.  For instance if you go into a cellar where it’s dark.  Mysterious thing too.  Why did I smell it only now?  Took its time in coming like herself, slow but sure.  Suppose it’s ever so many millions of tiny grains blown across.  Yes, it is.  Because those spice islands, Cinghalese this morning, smell them leagues off.  Tell you what it is.  It’s like a fine fine veil or web they have all over the skin, fine like what do you call it gossamer, and they’re always spinning it out of them, fine as anything, like rainbow colours without knowing it.  Clings to everything she takes off.  Vamp of her stockings.  Warm shoe. Stays.  Drawers: little kick, taking them off.  Byby till next time.  Also the cat likes to sniff in her shift on the bed.  Know her smell in a thousand.  Bathwater too.  Reminds me of strawberries and cream.  Wonder where it is really.  There or the armpits or under the neck.  Because you get it out of all holes and corners.  Hyacinth perfume made of oil of ether or something.  Muskrat.  Bag under their tails.  One grain pour off odour for years.  Dogs at each other behind.  Good evening.  Evening.  How do you sniff?  Hm.  Hm.  Very well, thank you.  Animals go by that.  Yes now, look at it that way.  We’re the same.  Some women, instance, warn you off when they have their period.  Come near.  Then get a hogo you could hang your hat on.  Like what?  Potted herrings gone stale or.  Boof!  Please keep off the grass..

The irony is that Gerty’s consciousness, given over to reproducing the romantic life she has read about and with scarce room for anything else, is far more amenable to the reader than Bloom’s wide-ranging and capacious thoughts on life, the universe and everything.  Her consciousness is cohesive and – though clichéd – literary, while Bloom’s is fragmented.  Reading “Nausicaa” gives us a better idea than any other piece of text of the two Joyces: the brilliant narrative artist, brilliant even when he is trying to be trite, and the pioneering chronicler of modern consciousness.  The originality of the latter approach cannot be denied, but much was lost, too, when Joyce ceased to find interest in the telling of stories.  There is a tension in Joyce’s work between narrative and consciousness; in delineating the latter, he evicted the former.  For many put-upon readers of Ulysses, “Nausicaa” may instil a suspicion that the sacrifice was greater than the gain.

The Fog and the Veil: The Hand of Fu-Manchu

In my recent post of John Buchan’s fourth Richard Hannay novel, The Three Hostages (1924), I noted the wartime milieu of its predecessors had given way to an anxiety around foreign contamination. There was no outright war or threat of one, but the foreign Other was as threatening as ever, if in a more insidious way. I think I missed, however, an obvious influence on Buchan for this mood: the Fu-Manchu novels of Sax Rohmer, which had begun in 1914 with The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu.

Christopher Lee in The Face of Fu Manchu 1965, from The Guardian.

The third instalment of Rohmer’s series is 1917’s The Hand of Fu-Manchu, and the London in which it is set is very reminiscent of that evoked by Buchan. London is perhaps the most memorable character in the novel. It is the London of Sherlock Holmes, a place of fog and veiled light, cut through by a dirty river hiding abominable secrets. From the opening paragraphs:

The window had been widely opened when I entered, and a faint fog haze hung in the apartment, seeming to veil the light of the shaded lamp.
[…]
The long corridor without, lighted only by one inhospitable lamp at a remote end, showed choked and yellowed with this same fog so characteristic of London in November. But nothing moved to right nor left of me.

The Hand of Fu-Manchu, Chapter I.

The fog, in quite a clever bit of foreshadowing, is yellow. Fu-Manchu is the symbol par excellence of the yellow peril – the idea that Chinese infiltration would lead to the downfall of Europe – and Rohmer suggests right at the beginning that the yellow peril is already here and all around, a miasma enveloping and choking London, waiting to be embodied in the fearsome figure of Fu-Manchu. The images of fog and veils recur throughout the book. In the opening chapter, Rohmer’s Holmes and Watson, Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie, travel to see Sir Gregory Hale, a British diplomat who has traveled through deepest China and into Mongolia. He has some explosive secret and could be the savior of the Indian Empire–perhaps of all Western civilization.” He, in the closing words of the chapter, is “the man who has dared to raise the veil.” Sir Gregory possesses dangerous knowledge, though, and is not long for this world. He dies at the end of Chapter II, his room infiltrated by the same yellow fog:

There was no fog in the room, but already from the bleak corridor outside it was entering; murky, yellow clouds steaming in at the open door.

His final words, gasped out, include: “Yellow … rising.”

Chapter II

The other great natural presence in the book weighted with symbolism is the river Thames, “the river of many mysteries” (Chapter V). “the Thames, that gray old stream which has borne upon its bier many a poor victim of underground London.” (Chapter VII) One victim of Fu-Manchu is thrown into the river by that personage “as one might hurl a sack of rubbish” (Chapter XXII). The river is the grave of the poor, luckless and criminal, and its sides places of swarming activity, legal and otherwise. It is the Thames of Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, dark and alluring, bounteous and deadly.

In a relatively unwonted piece of philosophising, the narrator Petrie says:

There is a distinct pleasure to be derived from a solitary walk through London, in the small hours of an April morning, provided one is so situated as to be capable of enjoying it.

Chapter XXXI

He goes on to explain that the policeman and the tramp, for example, are excluded from this pleasure because they have to be there, the policeman for work and the tramp for want of accommodation. They do not see or experience what the leisured gentleman does, “the solitude and mystery of the sleeping city”. This city of night and fog may be the most striking character in the novel, certainly more so than the anodyne English gentlemen who are the ostensible heroes.

Among the antagonists, however, a breath of life enters. As in The Three Hostages, in the feminine oriental a terrible and confusing mixture of the seduction and the repulsive enters, here in the form of Zarmi. Petrie is immediately “transfixed by the vindictive glare of … [the] huge dark eyes […] of this grotesque Oriental figure”. Her eyes, he remarks again, are “splendid, savage” (Chapter 3). The face is one of “devilish beauty” (Chapter XL). This ambivalence is key to this book as to Buchan’s; the Orient is terrible and immoral, yet alive in ways that the English characters cannot help but be drawn towards. Their moral compass insists on a categorisation of evil or wicked yet there is always an undercurrent of attraction towards this Other. That is where these books derive their life from. A century on, it is the dark side of London and the seductiveness of the imagined Orient in The Hand of Fu-Manchu that carry the reader through, not the cardboard heroes representing a flat, insipid England which one can hardly imagine standing up the dark intensity of Fu-Manchu.

Anthony Trollope: The Rich Man’s Dickens

I’ve read several Trollope novels over the years, but never ended one with the urge to go on a binge of his ouevre. A recent reading of Barchester Towers (1867), one of his best-known novels, reminded me of his limitations.

Anthony Trollope, 1815-1882

Trollope has always tended to divide opinion. One of the most oft-cited critical essays on him came from Henry James in 1883, a few months after Trollope’s death. James opens up with a judgment on Trollope’s quality as a litterateur:

The author of The Warden, of Barchester Towers, of Framley Parsonage, does not, to our mind, stand on the very same level as Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot; for his talent was of a quality less fine than theirs. But he belonged to the same family—he had as much to tell us about English life; he was strong, genial and abundant.

Anthony Trollope: The Critical Heritage, ed. Donald Smalley, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969 p. 535.
(also here: https://victorianweb.org/authors/jamesh/trollope.html)

This is a conversation that still follows Trollope around: a good novelist, certainly, but perhaps not quite a great one. On the 200th anniversary of Trollope’s birth, The Guardian ran an article including various eminent persons’ choices for his best novel. The article opened with the rhetorical but revealing question: “Poor man’s Dickens, or master of motives and manners?” Whatever about a master of motives and manners, Trollope was not a poor man’s anything. Poverty was not one of his major concerns as a novelist.

Barchester Towers opens with the chapter title “Who will be the new Bishop?“ This chapter title tells us a lot about Trollope, his priorities and the questions that interest him. The chapter opens with the death of Dr. Grantly, otherwise Bishop Grantly; his son, Archdeacon Grantly, otherwise Dr. Grantly (yes, as well), is the favourite for the position. “The prime minister”, the narrator notes, his given the Archdeacon reason to believe the position is his. He has given no firm assurance but, the narrator says:

those who know anything either of high or low government places will be well aware that a promise may be made without positive words

Barchester Towers, Barnes & Noble, 2005 [1857], p. 10

This is a rather narrow and alienating reference. What of those unfamiliar with high or low government places? Why are they absent from Trollope’s consideration? Yet the reference is indicative of the book’s frame of reference because in the opening few pages we are introduced to a host of titled persons and very few untitled. The narrator also uses various references to prime ministers, ministries and cabinets in these pages to create the impression of inside knowledge of the world of politics and positions. The casual reference to knowledge of “high or low government” places is a typical Trollopian device to situate his narrator in the place of knowledge of and casual access to worldly and elitist things.

As to the death that takes place in these early pages, Trollope is unsentimental about it:

The archdeacon’s mind, however, had already travelled from the death chamber to the closet of the prime minister. He had brought himself to pray for his father’s life, but now that that life was done, minutes were too precious to be lost. It was now useless to dally with the fact of the bishop’s death—useless to lose perhaps everything for the pretence of a foolish sentiment.

Barchester, p. 13

Trollope is unjudgmental about his character’s lack of sentiment. The archdeacon is not intended as an unlikeable figure. Obviously in this treatment of death, he differs markedly from Dickens. Death is always momentous for Dickens, while for Trollope it is an opening of a new position for somebody or other.

Trollope gives great detail about the bishopric in question, particularly financial. Of the archdeacon he notes:

His preferment brought him in nearly three thousand a year. The bishopric, as cut down by the Ecclesiastical Commission, was only five. He would be a richer man as archdeacon than he could be as bishop.

Barchester, p. 17

Archdeacon Grantly is not motivated by money, then, but by power and position. Trollope, however, is conscious of both. He cannot mention a position without also specifying the wages thereof. We know not only the salary that goes with the bishopric, but that of all the positions associated with Barchester Hospital:

it had been ordained that there should be, as heretofore, twelve old men in Barchester Hospital, each with 1s. 4d. a day; that there should also be twelve old women to be located in a house to be built, each with 1s. 2d. a day; that there should be a matron, with a house and £70 a year; a steward with £150 a year; and latterly, a warden with £450 a year, who should have the spiritual guidance of both establishments, and the temporal guidance of that appertaining to the male sex.

Barchester, p. 21

Such detail is eminently Trollopian. One of his USPs among the Victorian literary world was his familiarity, which he accentuated whenever possible, with matters financial and professional. Here, clearly, was a man of the world, and proud of it. But not all men and women in the world are of the world in the Trollopian sense, and this wealth of detail comes at the expense of narrowing the author’s sphere of interest and sympathy. These details can also not fail to lose their interest for posterity’s reader, much as they may have been relevant to Trollope’s contemporaries.

A curious habit of Trollope’s was heavily criticised by James in the 1883 essay:

He took a suicidal satisfaction in reminding the reader that the story he was telling was only, after all, make-believe.

Critical Heritage, p. 535

In Barchester Towers Trollope not only makes reference to his story being a story, but also uses the related but somewhat inconsistent technique of repeatedly stressing his own honesty. He is very fond of formulations like “in truth”. In chapter 4, while introducing the character Obadiah Slope, Trollope includes two instances of “in truth” and one “to tell the truth” within half a page. In chapter 1, he asks a rhetorical question and answers himself: “No, history and truth compel him to deny it.” Yet he is also fond, as in an example used by James, of insisting on the made-up quality of his story:

The end of a novel, like the end of a children’s dinner party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plums.

Barchester, P. 507

Both of these techniques appear throughout Barchester Towers. They are each forms in which Trollope draws attention to himself as author. One demonstrates his honesty and fair-mindedness and the other reminds the reader of who is the guiding intelligence in the situation. Trollope delights in drawing attention to himself as a writer and, done too regularly, this can create a sense of a rather self-satisfied person.

Self-satisfied is a term that seems fitting for Trollope. He is happy with the status quo in society and with his personal status quo as a popular writer. He dislikes those who try to move above their station. Consider the one truly vituperative portrayal in Barchester Towers, that of Obadiah Slope. Trollope’s very first observation of Slope is:

Of the Rev. Mr. Slope’s parentage I am not able to say much.

Barchester, p. 28.

Slope wants to upend church tradition and to rise from humble beginnings, and Trollope uses every rhetorical tool in his arsenal to discredit these goals. The portrait and its lack of balance is revealing of Trollope’s general outlook, one of comfortable indulgence towards all who do not rock the boat, and suspicion of those who threaten to interfere with the established order.

The Guardian asked if he was a poor man’s Dickens, but Dickens was more of a poor man’s Dickens than Trollope. A poor man, unless he had some immediate hopes of advancement, would learn little of relevance to his life from Trollope. Trollope was the wealthy man’s – or at least the comfortably-off man’s – Dickens.

The Pursuit of Happiness in Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You

I mentioned in my last post that Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You (Faber, 2021) is a novel of ideas. One of the ideas its two protagonists are most preoccupied with is happiness. They are both conscious that they are not happy:

I suppose I’m very unhappy [said Alice]. He looked at her. Seriously? he said. Why? Nothing specific. It’s just how I feel. I find my life difficult. [Note Rooney does not use quote marks]

P. 51

Reflections on the generally unsatisfactory state of the world – inequality, exploitation, environmental destruction – also come back to the protagonists’ personal unhappiness. Eileen writes in a letter:

I don’t need all these cheap clothes and imported foods and plastic containers, I don’t even think they improve my life. They just create waste and make me unhappy anyway. (Not that I’m comparing my dissatisfaction to the misery of actually oppressed peoples, I just mean that the lifestyle they sustain for us is not even satisfying, in my opinion.).

P. 38

Eileen, in particular, has a conflicted attitude to happiness. She can’t stop thinking about it, but cannot get a handle on it enough to know if she really wants it or not:

I tell myself that I want to live a happy life, and that the circumstances for happiness just haven’t arisen. But what if that’s not true? What if I’m the one who can’t let myself be happy? Because I’m scared, or I prefer to wallow in self-pity, or I don’t believe I deserve good things, or some other reason.

P. 211

This gets to the nub of the issue of happiness. I have written before in the context of John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle’s writings about how happiness is a concept of such abstraction yet such cultural ubiquity that we can never attain it, but also never ignore it. Mill had a breakdown brought on not by unhappiness per se, but by the conviction that the ideals and life he had inherited could never bring him happiness. It was not just that he was not happy, but that he could not even imagine himself being so. Carlyle, too, wrote much about his youthful unhappiness (in the semi-autobiographical Sartor Resartus, among other places), before entirely rejecting the concept of happiness. I won’t rehash my former post here, but will quote its conclusion:

Therein lies the dialectical bind of happiness: the more conscious one becomes of it, the more conscious one must also become of its absence. The more one must ask oneself if one is happy and, if not, why not. This activity of ceaseless questioning is in itself not a pleasant one, and conducive to anxiety. Happiness is an essentially abstract concept centralized by utilitarian philosophy and economics. We can no longer unthink it, or remember that not all societies have prized it. Happiness does not come naturally, as Mill and Carlyle found. Aristotle’s eudaimonia, remember, was an activity, not a state. As such, it was as close to Carlyle’s ideal of work as to Mill’s happiness.

From A Black Spot in our Sunshine: Happiness in Mill, Carlyle and the Present Day, The Victorian Sage, 17 March 2019

Writers like Carlyle and Sigmund Freud have found in work the closest thing humankind can get to the impossible (except for brief unpredictable periods) state of happiness. On the necessarily transitory nature of happiness, Freud writes:

What we call happiness, in the strictest sense of the word, arises from the fairly sudden satisfaction of pent-up needs. By its very nature, it can be no more than an episodic phenomenon. Any prolongation of a situation desired by the pleasure principle produces a feeling of lukewarm contentment; we are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself. Hence, our prospects of happiness are already restricted by our constitution.

(Civilization and its Discontent, Penguin, 16-17)

For Freud sublimation in work is the answer. It is striking that neither of Rooney’s protagonists, both of them in the field of literature (an author and an editor), the same field signalled by Carlyle as that which would provide the Heroes of the modern age, consider that their work will bring them fulfilment. Eileen wants to be a writer in some vague sense, but seems to have little positive intention that way and does not see it as a route to happiness:

If, as I think is quite possible now, I never have any children and never write any books, I suppose I will leave nothing on this earth to be remembered by. And maybe that’s better. It makes me feel that rather than worrying and theorising about the state of the world, which helps no one, I should put my energy into living and being happy. When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasn’t changed very much since I was a child – a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that’s all. Just to make a home there, and to care for my parents when they grow older. Never to move, never to board a plane again, just to live quietly and then be buried in the earth. What else is life for?

P. 212

Eileen’s vision of happiness does not involve any work, and very little in the way of activity and movement. It is an image of perfect stasis, almost death in itself even before death is directly invoked at the end. Its details are generic. “When I try to picture for myself… a happy life”, she says, and the trying is important. For all her focus on happiness, it has not come any clearer and cannot be imagined in detail. Nevertheless, the concept haunts her communications and is itself the cause of much of her anxiety.

What Beautiful World leaves open is the possibility that happiness can be attained between two people. Simon, Eileen’s love interest (though the term lacks a literary flavour, it is accurate), is motivated precisely by the ambition to make Eileen happy:

Silently with his eyes on the wheel of his bicycle he prayed: Dear God, let her live a happy life. I’ll do anything, anything, please, please.

P. 242

And again:

if you think there’s any chance that I could make you happy, I wish you would let me try. Because it’s the only thing I really want to do with my life.

p. 323

And at this climactic point, Eileen also allows herself a moment of optimism:

maybe I’m not so bad, maybe even a good person, and we’ll have a happy family together. Some people do, don’t they? Have happy families, I mean. I know you didn’t, and I didn’t.

P. 335

Here, still, Eileen is defining her future life in terms of the nebulous concept of happiness. She again seems deeply confused about it, unsure whether happy families exist, knowing only that she does not class her own family life as happy. Her knowledge of happiness is not empirical. She has not experienced it (except in the fleeting glimpses mentioned by Freud), but is intent on believing in and chasing it. In its absence, it shapes her life.

Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881: not happy

The Carlyle-Mill debate about happiness is over. Happiness won. Reading a novel like Beautiful World it is clear that it is a ruling conceptual paradigm in the stories we tell about ourselves in a way that meaningful work as recommended by Carlyle very rarely is. Yet it is equally clear that the pursuit of happiness brings Eileen more unhappiness. That is the great paradox of happiness, as recognised by Freud. At best, it is fleeting. At worst, the concept is an incubus sucking the possibility of peace of mind and spontaneity from those who believe in it, even when their own experience provides little support for such belief. Perhaps Eileen would be better off returning to the long forgotten words of Carlyle. The phraseology of his work (such as using “man” when referring to humankind) is outdated, but the sentiment is worthy of recovery from the dustbin of intellectual history:

[M]an is actually Here; not to ask questions, but to do work: in this time, as in all times, it must be the heaviest evil for him, if his faculty of Action lie dormant, and only that of sceptical Inquiry exert itself. Accordingly whoever looks abroad upon the world, comparing the Past with the Present, may find that the practical condition of man in these days is one of the saddest; burdened with miseries which are in a considerable degree peculiar. In no time was man’s life what he calls a happy one; in no time can it be so.

Characteristics, 1831

Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World: when was it?

Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? (2021) is an uneasy mixture: a romance and a novel of ideas. A novel of ideas, David Lodge wrote in The Art of Fiction, is “a book light on narrative interest, in which abnormally articulate characters bat philosophical questions back and forth between themselves, with brief intervals for eating, drinking and flirtation” (Penguin, 1992, p. 198), and that sounds quite close to this novel, or large parts of it.

Beautiful World‘s chapters helpfully alternate between those utilising third-person narration and those comprising letters between the two female protagonists, a writer named Alice and an editorial assistant named Eileen. The second category of chapter is home to the novel of ideas element. Perhaps the most central idea occupying the minds of the protagonists is that of living in a degenerate world, threatened with extinction:

I know we agree that civilisation is presently in its decadent declining phase, and that lurid ugliness is the predominant visual feature of modern life. (Eileen)

Faber, p. 207

Rooney’s characters are fatalistic about this idea. They don’t like the world they live in anyway. It’s ugly and built on oppression:

For me it feels like looking down and seeing for the first time that I’m standing on a minuscule ledge at a dizzying vertical height, and the only thing supporting my weight is the misery and degradation of almost everyone else on earth. (Eileen)

P. 38

Even if we were to ignore the oppressed millions, we in the world of material comfort have got it wrong in how we live together and apart:

[I]f we all stay alone and practise celibacy and carefully police our personal boundaries, many problems will be avoided, but it seems we will also have almost nothing left that makes life worthwhile. (Alice)

P. 186

With such zealous policing of personal boundaries, we are in a bad place, the titular Beautiful World nowhere to be seen. But if the world as it is is bad, what then is or could be good? Early on, the idea of conservatism is punctured by Alice:

[T]he idea of ‘conservatism’ is in itself false, because nothing can be conserved, as such – time moves in one direction only, I mean. […] We can’t conserve anything, and especially not social relations, without altering their nature, arresting some part of their interaction with time in an unnatural way. (Alice)

P. 16

This is not the novel’s final word on the matter, though, and a surprising facet of the book is the conservative locating of the Beautiful World in the past:

[M]odern living compares poorly with the old ways of life. (Eileen)

Or, more specifically:

[B]efore the 1970s, people wore durable clothes of wool and cotton, stored drinks in glass bottles, wrapped food produce in paper, and filled their houses with sturdy wooden furniture. Now a majority of objects in our visual environment are made of plastic, the ugliest substance on earth, a material which when dyed does not take on colour but actually exudes colour, in an inimitably ugly way. (Eileen)

p. 76

They lament, too, the decline of the nuclear family and of the structure of relationships in the vanished world:

People our age used to get married and have children and conduct love affairs, and now everyone is still single at thirty and lives with housemates they never see. (Alice)

P. 185

Most notably, there is a large amount of reflection on Catholicism, almost all of it positive. The characters don’t exactly believe in the truth of Catholic doctrine, but they constantly will themselves to find the beauty in it. It is, it seems, the best hope for a return to the Beautiful World. As Alice and Eileen flail about for meaning, Catholicism offers something approaching it:

I am not going to join a convent, nor am I even Catholic, as far as I know. I only feel, rightly or wrongly, that there is something underneath everything. When one person kills or harms another person, then there is ‘something’ – isn’t there? Not simply atoms flying around in various configurations through empty space. (Alice)

p. 329

In this epistolary half of the novel, then, there is a yearning for what is lost, and no enjoyment of life in our post-religious age. Without God, Dostoevsky wrote in The Karamazov Brothers (one of many novels from the traditional western canon referenced in Beautiful World), everything is permitted. Rooney’s characters are evidence to the contrary. Beautiful World constitutes a critique of contemporary post-religious western society, not a positive one holding out for a bright new future of ever-increasing freedom, tolerance and diversity, but a negative one finding only a precarious solace in returning to certain apparently outdated and superseded ways of life and of meaning-making. It joins a long literary tradition, identified in the 1970s by Raymond Williams in The Country and the City, railing against an ugly, industrialised modernity and harking back to a vanished golden age of simplicity, truth and deeper human relations. But that age, as Williams could have told Alice and Eileen, is always the one that happened to end just before you were born.