Post-War and Modern English Literature

The remarkable political and social changes in Great Britain within the years following World War II had a great influence on intellectual life and on literature in particular.

During the 1950s a new kind of drama began to reach the theatres in Europe. There were two new trends in drama in the 1950s — absurd drama and social drama.

Absurd drama began in France in the 1940s and reached Britain with Waiting for Godot by Samuel Becket in 1955. The term "absurd" means unreasonable, illogical. It shows a general sense of this new literature. This kind of drama explains how meaningless life is.

The playwrights Eugene Ionesco, Arthur Adamov, Samuel Beckett and others are known today as contributors to the theatre of the absurd. They describe the absurd elements of the human condition. "Cut off from religious roots, man is lost: all his actions have become senseless, absurd, useless".

To underline the spiritual and physical immobility of man pauses and silences are repeated in Absurd Drama. The most memorable literary form which told the stories of the Second World War was the novel.

The novel with a philosophical tendency was born and the traditional satirical novel flourished to the full.

The essence of all these literary phenomena was the earnest search of the writers for their place in life, for a better future.

 

George Orwell

(1903-1950)

George Orwell was born in India in 1903. His family lived in British India where his father worked for the colonial Civil Service. In 1907, the Blair family re­turned to England where Orwell was educated, first at a private Preparatory School, and then at the famous boys' school, Eton.

After leaving school in 1921, Orwell returned to India and be­came a policeman. His first commission, in 1922, was in Burmah. He remained in the Police Force until 1928, when he resigned.

Orwell then began a most unusual literary career. In 1928, while living in Paris and work­ing in a restaurant washing dishes, he started writing articles for the French newspaper Le Monde.

In 1929 he returned to London, where he lived the life of a poor person, collecting in­formation for his book Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). It was for this book that he first adopted the pseudonym George Or­well. He then published a further three novels. The first, Burmese Days (1934), described his experiences in the Police Force in Burmah and demonstrates his developing anti-Imperialist politics. This was followed by A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidis­tra Flying (1936) (aspidistra = common English house-plant).

In 1936 he was commissioned to research into and write about the situation and conditions of the unemployed in England.

The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) was the result of his research, and it was with this book that he established himself as an investi­gative writer. His political point of view, broadly left-wing, anti-Capitalist and indepedent, was by now guite clear.

With the Spanish Civil War, Orwell left England to fight in Spain for the Republican, anti-Fascist forces. He remained there until he was wounded and forced to return to England.

Homage to Catalonia (1938) is about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell's health was suffering from tuberculo­sis. His next novel Coming up for Air was written during a period of convalescence spent in North Africa. When he returned to Eng­land, his reputation as a political free-thinker and social critic was high. He continued to write and publish an enormous variety of works, essays, criticisms, literary criticisms and political reflections. He also worked as a book reviewer for the magazine New England Weekly.

During the Second World War he worked for the В. В. С and enlisted in the Home Guard, a volunteer armed body of men, usually too old or too ill to join the regular army. But his tubercu­losis prevented him, however, from fulfilling this activity.

In 1944 he worked as the literary edi­tor of the important left-wing newspaper Tribune, He wrote his best-known work Animal Farm in 1944. In 1948 his novel Nineteen Eighty-four was published. It describes a future world (in 1984) when the political system has total control over people. The slogan Big Brother is Watching You gives an idea of the power of this system.

The novel Animal Farm has re­mained a consistently popular novel with both adults and younger readers. The novel functions as an allegory. The story of Animal Farm describes the happenings on a farm, when the animals, angry about the way the human, Farmer Jones, runs the farm and treats the animals, stage a successful revolution. They rid themselves of Jones and his tame crow (which represents the Church) and establish an equal system of government, a republic organized along socialist lines.

The revolution is organized by the pigs, the most intelligent animals on the farm, but all the animals take part. But gradually, the day of the glorious revolution is forgotten, as the farm has some economic problems due to its isolation from other farms and markets. To the animals, it seems that they are now working harder and eating less than ever before.

The pigs begin to show signs of corruption and inequality. They become more and more like their masters had been. In Animal Farm, after the rebellion, the animals say that all animals are equal. Later the animals create another saying.

It is: "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others".

Animal Farm is a satire against the political systems which Orwell had seen develop in the 1930s and 1940s.

In this tragic fairy story he shows that a revolution, once it has aban­doned honesty, truth and clarity, results in oppression, cruelty and exploitation. Once the individual has been denied the right to knowl­edge and the right to understand, power can and will be abused.

The new class of abuser will resemble in every shape and form, the old abuser, which is just how the novel ends, with the poor animals looking through the window of the farmhouse, where the corrupt pigs and the neighbouring human farmers are drink­ing and gambling together.

"And they were alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but al­ready it was impossible to say which was which."

Orwell's style is simple, clear and almost journalistic. He fol­lows a great tradition of social critics who turned to the genre of literature to express their ideas and reach a large audience.

There are many similarities between Orwell and George Ber­nard Shaw; for example, in the way that they combined litera­ture and politics and produced works of great political insight.

Injustice, oppression and the effects of Capitalism in general are themes that Orwell presents in his works, together with an analysis of failing Communist regimes.

Orwell died in the age of 46 in 1950.

 

Samuel Beckett

(1906-1989)

Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in Foxrock, near Dublin, in 1906. He belonged to a middle class family. He distinguished himself at school and then went to Trinity College, Dublin where he studied Modern Languages. After graduating in 1928, he moved to Paris and worked as a teacher of English at the University of Paris (1928-1929). In 1930, he returned to Dublin where he taught French at Trinity College, but in 1931, he left this University career and, after travelling in Germany and Italy, settled in Paris where he lived until his death, concentrating on writing.

In Paris, he became friends with many leading intellectual figures of the day. including James Joyce, and dedicated him-self to studying and writing.

During the war, Beckett joined the French Resistence and fought against the Fascist occupation of France. He was arrested in 1942, as a result of his activities, and went into hiding, spending the rest of the war period working on the land in Provence1. After the war, he visited Ireland for a short period, before returning to France as an interpreter with the red Cross. He settled in Paris in 1946.

Beckett's literary production includes prose, novels and short stories, poetry, drama and critical essays. In 1921 he published Dante... Bruno... Vico... Joyce, a collection of critical essays, and the monograph, Proust in 1931. More Pricks than Kicks (1934) was his first experiment with the short story genre, followed in 1938 by his first novel Murphy. In 1944 he wrote the experimental novel Watt that was published in 1953. This was followed by a trilogy of novels Molloy( 1955), Malone Dies (1956) and The Unnameable (1958). In all, Beckett wrote more than nine novels and seven volumes of shorter fiction.

The play Wayting for Godot was published first in French in 1952 and was translated into English in 1954. It was immediately received with critical appraisal and met with mu«:h popular interest. Some other plays are Krapp's Last Tape (1959), Happy Days (1961) Not /(1973) and Breath (1970).

Beckett had found a big English-speaking public that had never read his novels. Controversy and scandal surrounded the dramatic works of Beckett, but he also benefited from the appreciation in literary critics and directors. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.

Samuel Beckett died in Paris in 1989.

 

William Golding

(born in 1911)

William Golding was born in Cornwall, England in 1911. He attended the famous private school, and then went to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he started to study science. After a short period he changed to study English Literature. Golding graduated from Oxford in 1935 and started a career in teaching.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Golding joined the Royal Navy and was involved in active service throughout the war. The effects of the war on Golding were enormous and helped to create his pessimistic view of human nature.

After the war he returned to teaching, a career that he continued even after achieving fame as a writer. His first novel, Lord of the Flies, was published in 1954 and was accepted as an immediate critical success. This was followed by The Inheritors (1955), a novel set in the prehistoric age.

Pincher Martin (1956) was followed by Free Fall, and then by The Spire in 1964. There was a pause in Golding's literary production, and then in 1979 he published Darkness Visible and Rites of Passage in 1980. In 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The novel Lord of the Flies touches some unusual themes. It received huge critical and popular acclaim on its publication and became an important novel, often studied, cited and read through the '50s, '60s and '70s. Now it remains one of the most important contributions to English literature made this century.

The novel is in the form of the fable. A fable is a tale that tells one story through another. The characters exist on two levels: as indi­viduals and as types.

In this novel a group of boys, refugees from an atomic war, are on a deserted island. After an initial sense of liberty and adventure in this tropical paradise, the boys begin to organize themselves into a little democratic society, electing Ralph as their leader. The group hold meetings, go on expeditions to patrol the island, start building shelters to live in, organize the supply of water, and decide to keep a fire burning constantly, with the hope of signalling to passing boats. The group is composed of "littluns" of about six years old and "bi-guns" of about twelve. Apart from Ralph, another of the biguns, Jack, helps lead the group, by organizing a group of choirboys into a band of hunters, whose task it is to hunt pigs. However, things begin to get out of control. The littluns are afraid by the idea of a "beastie" or "snakey–thing" that they believe lives in the forest.

At night the children suffer from nightmares, even when the rational Piggy, an unpopular but intelligent fat boy, tries to tell them that there is no beast on the Island.

The rational projects that they originally established are gradu­ally abandoned, and under the influence of Jack, the boys return to the savage state based around hunting and the fear of the beast, which Jack develops into a kind of God, the Lord of the Flies. Ralph and Piggy try to keep control of the group, but Jack is too strong and all the boys except Ralph, Piggy and Simon, a strange, solitary boy, leave the first camp and follow Jack to live a savage life.

The boys now become hunters, painting their faces, chanting and dancing, throwing stones and spears. Maurice and Roger act as Jack's assistants. The fear of the beast grows, particularly when one night a dead man on a parachute falls onto the island. The boys think that the parachute is the beast. Jack encourages the boys to leave "sacrifices" to the beast every time they kill on a hunt.

One night, Simon discovers the true nature of the parachute/ beast, but when he goes to the camp to tell the boys, he is killed, mistaken for the beast. After Simon's death, the hunters led by Jack, Roger and Maurice, kill Piggy and then decide to kill Ralph and to offer him as a human sacrifice to the Lord of the Flies. Ralph is forced to hide while they hunt him.

During the hunt, the boys set fire to the island and a passing ship sees the flames and lands to rescue them, thus saving Ralph's life.

Golding's development of the novel form during the 1950s and 1960s led him to an interesting experimentation with genre. He used the science fiction genre and the fantasy story to provide an effective narrative style for his analyses of human nature.

 

Iris Murdoch

(1919-1999)

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin. Her mother was Irish and her father was an English civil servant who served as a cavalry officer in the World War I. The family moved to Lon­don in her childhood and she grew up in the western suburbs of it.

Murdoch studied classics, ancient history and philosophy at Somerville College, Oxford. During World War II she was an active member of the Com­munist Party, but soon she became dis­appointed with its ideology and re­signed. Some years later Murdoch took up a postgraduate studentship in philosophy. In 1948 she was elected a fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, working there as a tutor until 1963. Since then Murdoch devoted herself entirely to writing. Between the years 1963 and 1967 she also lectured at the Royal College of Art.

Murdoch published her first novel in 1954. This was Under the Net, a comedy. Most of her novels, however, are more philosophical than comic. They have a wide range of themes, and show that serious novels can still become best-sellers. Among the best-known works are The Bell (1958), which depicts an Agli-can religious community, and a novel about the Irish rebellion in 1916, The Red and the Green (1965). Perhaps her best works from the 1970s are Black Prince (1973), A World of Child (1975) and The Sea, the Sea, which won the Booker Prize in 1978. It is con­sidered her major work.

Murdoch published over twenty novels. She was a prolific and highly professional novelist. Murdoch dealt in her works every­day ethical or moral issues.

The novels combine realistic characters with extraordinary situations, and many of them have a religious or philosophical theme. She is always concerned with moral problems of good and bad, right and wrong, art and life, and the nature of truth. Iris Murdoch died in Oxford on February 8, 1999.