Virginia Woolf-Mrs.

Dallaway, George Orwell, 1984, Kazuo Ishiguro-The Remains of the day, S Eliot- The Waste
Land, Journey to the Magi, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, Murder in the Cathedral, Ted Hughes- Crow's
First Lesson, Tom Stoppard-Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

20thc.Revolutions
(1) modernism revised realism through cultural, aestheticist experiments with
tradition
The high modernist mavericks (maverick Collins English-English Dictionary person of
independent/unorthodox views) were out to educate a new cultural memory for their
dejected century with aestheticist means and they used consciousness as the skeptics
means of aesthetic salvation from nihilism they transcended postwar trauma by
establishing their aesthetic experiments with tradition

Eliots and Woolfs art: they made experiments with tradition, Eliot, with the
London/English version of the Western tradition and with Christianity and Oriental
creeds, Woolf with the British national conscience (with Londonness and
Britishness) externalizing, making public the Bloomsbury group ethos.1

Arguments for why the (high) modernists were like the late Victorian aesthetic
critics/aestheticists:

compare this with the sense of a new age beginning through the most intimate connection of
artists with their object of interest, just as the connection between people inaugurated by
love. Virginia Woolf and the modernists felt inspired to spiritualize the world through their
art, in the same aesthetically sacerdotal sense of erotic investments.
(2) postmodernist literature revised the modernist respect for high culture in literature
the policing of taste by totalitarian experts
proposed the rhizome as a figure of knowledge and a model of human society in the
current age when hierarchies have become obsolete and traditional arborescent/organic
growth as a model for knowledge and social development have become obsolete. Rather
than narrativize history and culture, the rhizome presents history and culture as a map or
wide array of attractions and influences with no specific origin or genesis.
POSTMODERNISM BECAME DOMINANT IN EUROPE after the explosive year 1968.
In response to the sense of crisis, postmodernism generalized a carnivalesque critique of
established discourses. postmodernism also generalized a trenchant criticism of modernity
(progress, liberal rationality and order as embodied in democracy.
modern knowledge was virtually defunct, because it was no longer disinterested but
corrupt. The bankruptcy of, or the negative verdict about, Western progress and modernity
were the premises for a change of paradigm comparable to the one at the end of the
Victorian age. Postmodern parody and the ludic spirit changed the sombre or just serious
1

tone of art/literature so as to cover the crisis of the world with an impassible mask (just as
had happened at the end of the Victorian age, when the pose of New Hedonism or New
Cyrenaicism attempted to compensate for the disorientation and revolt of the world against
its own norms.
literature of postmodernism - restored the worldly connection of literature (and the arts in
general) with the matter of fact world.
roughly the same time as the appearance of postmodernism in America, absurdism
advanced, after the French production of Becketts play Waiting for Godot (1959), to
become the dominant revolutionary form of the literary mid-twentieth century; it had at its
back a philosophical ( existentialist) conception, by contrast to the aestheticist conception of
high modernism. Absurdism was the sombre, home-bred European version of the protest
already launched in America against the salvationist message of the high modernist artists;
absurdism brought to the fore the consciousness of doom after the post-war
post-war dejection gave rise to what we also call neo-modernism (or lowered modernism)
in fiction and poetry; its forms repeated the message of modernism to an exhausted
humanity in dystopias and cynical poetry which dressed the crisis of modernity values in an
always cynical and increasingly nihilistic garb G Orwell
neomodernism made much of its lucidity by giving it most scathing forms, whereas high
modernism had found aesthetic/beautiful forms to transcend the negative moods. In so far
as both absurdism and neo-modernism were nihilistic, they differed from both high
modernism and postmodernism, which prompts us to treat them as a phenomenon apart.

II. + III.
Chronicles of War and Evil I: traditional and experimental approaches to war in literature
a comparison between the poems written in the First World War trenches (Lecture One),
T.S. Eliots The Waste Land [and two poems by William Butler Yeats The Second
Coming and Lapis Lazuli
1) Notice the other name of the stream of consciousness technique, also dominant in

high modernist literary texts: multiple selective omniscience. T.S.Eliot;s Waste

Land - the poem is a multiple dramatic monologue.

2) Alienation being the theme of this ironic epic, 2 The Waste Land
presents the encounter of humanity with its modern, civilized other.
Otherness being postulated as the law of existence in poststructuralism
(see Lacanian psychoanalysis, for example), The Waste Land
configures a multiple heterotopia.

2 An epic is usually the ritual presentation of human success in spite of

numerous adversities, usually taking the form of a perilous journey ending in
human triumph (in ancient literature, it was the reverse of tragedy, though both
literary/ceremonial forms accepted the overarching power of fate

IV.
Cultural memory is a fashionable branch of cultural studies which, believes
that history is a construct, just like literature, and uses literature to define the
popular versions of history, looking at the circulation and genealogy of social
ideas in everyday parlance. When the public memory span is restricted in
scope and means of expression, we talk of communicative memory (which
spans over no more than two generations), but when it is more far-reaching and
more sophisticated, we speak of cultural memory proper.
mythical, the antagonistic and the reflexive intra-mediation modes (modes of
rhetorical expression within literary media
when the encoding of memory is direct, confessive and colloquial, retaining the
impassioned dimension of communication in the everyday register, we have to
do with experiential intra-mediation; when it draws upon shared myths, it is
mythicizing. when it constructs one version of the past by rejecting/refuting
others, it is antagonistic; when it establishes its own version self-reflexively
(by reflection upon its own discourse).
Consequently, they create cultural ideas anchored in both the present and the
past, by complex cultural memory mediation. With T.S. Eliots The Waste Land
(further analyzed, in connection with other poems, too, in the seminars) we
have witnessed the transformation of cultural grandeur into tormented, selfantagonizing, fragmentary meditation shored against the ruins of the past.
Cryptograms put in circulation/constitute/encode or exploit in a cryptical way
literary ideas by intertwining expressive, mythical, interrogative or open (rather
than directly antagonistic), and reflexive strands of meaning.

IV.
Virginia Woolfs aim is to focus on people who manage to love life; and to
showcase, subsequently, the conditions of possibility for such love of life in the
context of post-war dejection that has been seen to dominate the voices and
landscapes of The Waste Land and The Second Coming, only to be
circumscribed, and explicitly exorcised, with arts means in Lapis Lazuli.
a demonstration of EMPATHETIC DEIXIS and FEMININE EMPATHY that give
sense, IMPRESSIONISTICALLY, to casual encounters [with the objects of the
speaking voices attention, or of the situated STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
discourse.
. In the stream of consciousness space, the nuclei of attention function just as
the sonata form themes introduced/developed/repeated through dense
associations IN THE MIND OF A PERSON, WHICH THE TEXTUAL DEVELOPMENT IS
SUBJECTED TO. Empathetic deixis is another term for the Free Indirect
Discourse which transcribes the word of a character in any narrative from which
the narrator has withdrawn, or with whom the narrator identifies
EMPATHETIC points to identification

DEIXIS points to indefinite pronouns, adverbs of time and place, which are filled
with meaning in particular contexts, where here, for example, or now point
to a concrete situation and acquire meaning only in this way.
Impressionistic fiction, just as impressionistic painting, conveys the intimate
dependency of the represented objects on the sensibility of the artist and of the
picture as a whole on sensibility: that of the artist, first, and that of the onlooker
in front of the picture, secondly. This circular movement, from the object, to the
artist, to the artistic object, to the art-receiver is based on an empathetic and
subjective contract in fiction, just as in lyrical poetry and in painting. The
pleasure of reading comes from the interpersonal movement of consciousness:
the readers , with the cogito3 of the creator.
The task is to discover the continuities which make the narrative advance.
Love of life is one such continuity/theme.
they have the capacity to enjoy life in different degrees. From Lady
Bexborough, whose joy of life is susspended in the middle of opening a bazaar
by the news of her favourite, Johnsdeath, to Septimus Warren Smith, whose
life and joy have become terminally impaired by the war and is inexorably
obsessed by death, there are numerous intervening characters whose
contributions to the joy of life is chronicled and assessed by Clarissa (her
former partner Peter Walsh, Sally Setton, her feminine inspirer, brimful with joy
of life educated by books and breathing together with her the charm of feminist
emancipation , Rezzia, Septimus Warren Smiths Italian wife and Richard
Dalloway. Rezzia can only access happiness and love of life in the past tense,
with the memories of Septimuss courting her when stationed in her house in
Italy, after the war. Richard Dalloway hardly know how to express love, for his
wife and for life, being clumsy with words, as shown in the street scene that
transcribes his stream of consciousness revolving around Clarissa, his inspirer
for love and life alike. The theme that joins love and life in the novel and that
structures the whole narrative connects the feminine sensibility priorities with
the male ones, ultimately placing love/life and death face to face and finally
wrapping them together.

V.
The protracted civil war between nationalist Ireland and colonial Britain is,
however, at the background of Ulysses and the ambivalent relationship with
English acculturation is one of the themes which anchors Joyces aesthetic
experiments in lived history.
In Joyces 1914 publication, Dubliners, for example, Irish people are shown to
live in suspension, as victims of a traumatic national existence studied and
typified in fifteen case studies of existential crises.
3 the cogito of the writer is the sum of his creative choices in creating the work,
which is all the better understood the more one reads oneself into the text and,
as far as possible, the more texts by the same author one reads; the
satisfactory identification with a writers cogito involves eventually getting a
sense of the structure of identity of a particular writer

And Joyce sums up the crisis in the little boys conscience symbolically, by
pairing the figure of the gnomon, a geometric figure remaining after a
parallelogram has been removed from one corner of a larger parallelogram: the
older mans removal from the boys world leaves the larger parallelogram of life
empty and the boys conscience is existentially challenged. A young mans
first incipient love is cut short by the carelessness and cruelty of his uncle who
fails to come home in time and give him the money for going to the
resplendent imperial bazaar and buy a fancy present to declare his love for his
colleague Mangans sister (Araby). The boys frustration is in the foreground on
the closing bazaar site to impair, as it were, the metropolitan splendour of
British life on Irish soil, in Dublin and to spoil the seduction of imperial culture
here for good.
The same thing happens in Joyces next two widely read books, A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses. The titles meanings slip past one
another like the titles of the individual stories of Dubliners, focusing on
artistically handled human loneliness which can be made eloquent in ineffable
ways. As regards the 1916 book, there is something indefinite in the title with
A in front suggesting that there are other possible portraits of the artist.
And, indeed, the portrait in the novel of adolescence (or Bildungsroman)
centred upon Stephen Dedalus, who is also the sensitive protagonist of the
straight autobiographical sketch preceding A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, Stephen Hero (published posthumously in 1944) is only a pre-requisite for
the fuller portrait-in-the-making of Ulysses. Though the novel Ulysses opens a
boisterous window on Stephens loneliness, in the Martello Tower where the
noisy, windy, mock-heroic Anglo-Irish Buck (satir) Mulligan is patronizing the
silent artist in an imperial dorm of sorts, Stephen Dedalus is not the protagonist
of Ulysses. By analogy with the Homeric Odyssey, Ulysses begins with the
rambling of younger Telemachus, Odysseuss son.
the crisis which inaugurates Stephens wanderings is his mothers death rather
than his fathers departure or his kingly fathers demise; secondly, because
he is haunted, like Hamlet, by his mothers phantom, which indicates a series of
travesties (gender, age, theme travesties) constitutive for the construction of
the books meaning through the plot threads, intertextualities and subjectivities
presented in action in this stream of consciousness novel only partially,
There are as many interpretations as there are threads, rather than merely
stream of consciousness moments of refined attention knitting the book
together, but if we take the combined intertext with Homers Odyssey and
Shakespeares Hamlet (with the respective travesties and variations) into
consideration, then we can understand the artistic theme around the novel
revolves as follows. The lonely artist is by nature lost in a surrounding world
that only he can chronicle faithfully, though not living in empathy with it in the
least (as shown by the distance between the artist and the world presented
also in Tennysons The Lady of Shalott). He will only gravitate towards human
empathy and find himself (making a full homecoming to the world of maturity)
after the middle of the book. In the fourteenth episode, Oxen of the Sun, he is
shown to come of age as an artist through brilliant parodies of established
literary models, when he both emulates and ridicules canonical peaks of
English, Irish and Anglo-Irish prose style; he has found the best way to enter
the sanctuary of established art with his own obsessions, since he narrates

male drunken prattling at a time and place where female heroism is silently
under way as a woman is giving birth to her nth son and is on the brink of
death, in a maternity hospital. In a single gesture, the young drunken artist
Stephen Boustephanoumenos, brushes past three sanctuaries to both
desecrate and enrich the world with his doctrine of artistic postcreation:
initially, all the young drunkard boasters who defy and slander femininity by
savvy gossiping about tarts, abortions and lechery in general while a real
woman is in her birth throes upstairs in the maternity hospital (they are
drinking in the lobby);
For all its intricacies, the whole novel Ulysses is centred upon a man who
succeeds and who can share joy of life and meaningful conversation with
another
The valiant and sly modern Ulysses is a mature hero who counters the trifling
emptiness of modern life and its difficult everyday battles not by committing
suicide, as Septimus Warren Smith did being in a state of shell shock and in
response to what Clarissa Dalloway understood as being the threatening
emptiness ol life which can either be thrown, in a meaningful gesture, through
the precious embrace with death.
It is interesting to see that what inspired Joyces extraordinary originality, which
wraps even the special sensitivity of artists in a wider love of life container
(since Mr Bloom contains Stephen for a brief, extremely intense existential
moment) is the same impulse of refining out of sight any direct emotions. The
same dramatic spirit which prompted Eliots response to war to reach us in the
dramatic shape (and in the dramatic monologue shape) in The Waste Land
and Virginia Woolfs love of life to arrest our attention impressionistically
through the modern(ist) dictatorial imagination, prompted the Joycean artist to
dress his autobiography in Stephen Hero (written before he left Ireland for
good, in 1902) in the more distant, artistic and dramatic form of the thirdperson, selective omniscience in the Bildungsroman A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man; and it prompted the hiding of Stephen Dedalus behind the heroic
plenitude of the ordinary yet blooming man Leopold Bloom in Ulysses.
Joyces project was to deliberately hide the sensitivity of the artistic mind
recording and interpreting the world, as he explains in so many words in A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

VI.
Eliot converted to strict Anglicanism in 1927, writing, in 1927, an ironic
dramatic monologue Journey of the Magi, a ritual poem Ash Wednesday
(1930) and a ritual play, Murder in the Cathedral (1935).
Journey of the Magi is ironical because, in a typical dramatic monologue
manner, it entrusts a serious theme to an oblique, inadequate speaker. The
speaking Magus is a typically modern dissatisfied man, rather unable to
understand and receive the Christian message; but although he remains
estranged from it (having the excuse of thinking as a man from the old
dispensation, to which he returns disconcerted at the end of the poems third

part) he manages to point to the essentials of the Christian doctrine: the

uncomfortable, troubling relationship with Calvary as accessible to anyone who
approaches Christ at Christmas time in order to witness his birth but is
confronted with Christs death, as in the last existential question that the
Magus asks: were Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death Were we led all this way for
Birth or Death?[. . . ]I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were
different; this Birth was/Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death .
Judged in a myth criticism perspective, the poems ingenious performance is of
collapsing the narrative poles of the mythical story of Christs life, ranging from
birth till death into an intense, archetypal emblem of the initiatory message:
unless one understands Christs birth and death so as to rejoice at the birth and
mourn the death as necessary parts of the story, and responds in an adequate
way to both, there is no way of reaching or receiving the gift of salvation.
dentification with tired modern humanity,
translating, in historical terms numinous mythical experiences is observed by
Eliot also in Murder in the Cathedral. translation/identification in Murder in the
Cathedral is with the Elizabethan mentality, in the plays first part, as
expressed in Shakespeares chronicle plays, for example Henry II, or The
Tempest and with the modern Realpolitik cynicism ready to excuse the dirtiest
political deeds nowadays.
Murder in the Cathedral advances into the understanding of the Christian
message by a counterpoint movement of three threads which are brought
together by two basic objective correlatives. The first thread describes the
Saints own growth until he is ready for martyrdom (the Archbishop is tempted
by three political and one moral voices which he defeats in the plays First
Part); the second thread explains the dynamic of history (it covers the speeches
of the Herald and the Tempters in the First Part and of the Knights, in the
Second Part); the third thread explains the religious doctrine (and it is
presented in Thomass speeches and in the Interlude, which comprises the
short sermon delivered by the Archbishop on Christmas Morning in 1170).
the classical function of the Chorus, which accompanies the actions of the
protagonists, explaining the psychological and contextual circumstances of the
individual characters, like a commentator; in ritual drama, such as Tragedy, the
Chorus has also a prophetic function, and in Eliots play the Chorus of the
Women of Canterbury express the point of view of ordinary humanity which is
only closer than the nobility to the Saint because of the greater sensitivity
educated by sufferance; otherwise, it is as obtuse as ordinary politicians to
other than the daily preoccupations of life.
Eliot entrusts not only to the Chorus the prophetic function, but also to the
Third Priest. He speaks about The Wheel, which is the first objective
correlative of Murder in the Cathedral and speaks his lines right before
Thomas, in Act I. The objective correlative of the wheel is the first element that
unites all the layers of humanity in one, as the religious understanding of life
will have it. The second objective correlative is The Cathedral itself whose
power to attract both ordinary people and political interests as opposed to
saintliness and martyrdom finally contains the world. The door of the Cathedral
could have been closed, and the priests wanted to close it against the

threatening violence of the returning knights in the Second Part, but the saint
who was ready for martyrdom ordered them to leave it open
The neo-modernist approach to religion is demonstrated by the savage return
along fully low mimetic and secular lines to the Christian lore which the poem
by Stevie Smith Was He Married?. The way the lay spirit threatens to
overcome the Christian message shows how the high-flowing idealism of
modernism, even when it is ironical, is getting reversed. Although religiosity is
not completely overcome at the end of the poem, statistically it is to be
doubted almost, since it is only devoted a few lines, though these being the
final lines, they are more credible.
The postmodernist spirit, whose savage irreligiousness progresses towards a
grotesque, apocalyptic end without reaching for any limit situation is
demonstrated in relationship with the poem by Ted Hughes Crows First
Lesson.

VII.
Modernist/Neo-Modernist/Postmodernist Fiction - The First History Lesson
COLONIALISM as seen in A Passage to India (a traditionalist novel) and Heart of
Darkness Modernist
In the modernist texts by T.S. Eliot, even the secular dominants of irony,
indifference or violence still pointed to the core of the religious/numinous
experience. In the neo-modernist conversation-poem by Stevie Smith the
(tragic) seriousness of the religious question was replaced by a low-mimetic
interest in the everyday life confrontation (battle, even) with religion. In the
postmodernist anecdote of Ted Hughess Crow poem, irony becomes savage
and human trifles do not merely revolt against, but they also overcome, the
very distant presence of God, who is swamped in creation. Yet, as we were
invited to see, in the Introductory lecture of this semester, the lack of
seriousness in later twentieth century literature expressed the wish of
postmodernism to demolish the policing of ordinary minds (intenia de a o
termina o dat, definitiv, cu ameninarea pe care o fac s planeze [arhitecii]
moderniti asupra oamenilor obinuii) (the policing of ordinary minds by
European modernist/Bauhaus theorists of architecture in Tom Wolfes From
Bauhaus to Our House, De la Bauhaus-ul official la cminul personal, an antiestablishment satire of 1981 discussed by Linda Hutcheon in the second
chapter of A Poetics of Postmodernism, the First Part).
The colonial theme
A Passage to India
historically accurate, critical and sensational complex plot, profound character
analysis, an inspiring Indian setting full of the exoticism, poetry and historical
details of good travel books.
The colonial critique in A Passage to India reveals the false courtesy which
hides and justifies civilizational gaps. The gap looms greater than the realities

of human affinities which the book builds. For there is a genuine affinity
between people of a similar bend of mind developed
The colonial critique in A Passage to India exposes hegemony as the main
colonial evil, exactly the same historical evil exposed by Marxian critique as
dominating classes and human relations in capitalist societies. Britain is shown
to lose its civilizational advance, with the noble values of modern democracy
and idealism tainted. In fact there is fatal regression to repressive violence,
back and away from modern liberal values and social gains. Western
imperialism, the novel shows, does not transfer progressive values, but the old
story of oppression and blind force, to the New World.
The colonial alienation from the metropolitan home is expressed as a
collective discovery in A Passage to India. It is taken up as a more powerful
story in Heart of Darkness, because the dramatic discovery, the scandal of
colonization, springs from a more intimate and also tragic point, as is always
the case in modernism.
Heart of Darkness is a symbolic story: it presents the evils of imperialism using
for the demonstration the souls of two protagonists; both of them are placed in
confrontation with the darkness of the New World, with each other, and with
their own selves, in Joseph Conrads novella. The greater artistic power of
Conrads text is not due to the situation and characters, only (as in all realistic
novels), but to the symbols and abstract patterning which enriches the allegory
of imperial evil.
There is a symbolic/archetypal relay-race , there is a sequence of stories, worlds,
characters that double each other but with significant differences . The reader
discovers horrifying stories, enigmatic characters and truths by a telescope
movement, in stages that open towards the deepest meanings . Historically,
Marlows story is the story of modern empires, uses history to build a panorama.
Psychologically, Marlows trip to the heart of darkness is like the first
installment/stage of a trip for the discovery of Kurtzs heart of madness .
Archetypally, Marlow is attracted to Congo as to an initiatory, symbolic journey
meant to give meaning to his life. The place is dangerous and demonic while
being also compelling as a place of adventure and poetic beauty. But, because
modernist myth is ironically treated myth, the capital meaning discovered at
the end of Marlows journey to Congo is the tragic meaning of Kurtzs success
at the heart of darkness, He succeeds at the cost of his madly twisting all
civilized meanings and values. Morally, critically/ politically approached Kurtzs
story is the demonic story of Western greed (the devil of human greediness,
which animates aggressive colonialists and combines with several other devils
to form a legion).
darkness is a symbol for the various realities at the heart of the story: it is a
symbol of black hands worked to death; it stands for the innocent blackness of

their skin and the Blakean whiteness of their souls (as in the Chimney
Sweeper poems from Songs of Innocence and Experience); it points to the
fascinating Congo river, resembling a serpent on the white field of an as yet
unexplored world on the map that compelled Marlows imagination as he
explains at the beginning of his story about the journey.
What matters in the story is the way in which irony built upon tragedy is carried
by the encounter of the humane Marlow with the nearly inhuman Kurtz, who
was supposed to be the colonial hero at the heart of darkness. Symbolically,
Kurtz is like the ghost of the effete colonial grandeur. The greatest values of the
imperial ethos and not only the British, but in fact the Belgian, international
imperial world have become specters and will remain buried in the heart of
darkness thanks to the symbolic texture of Conrads story.

VIII.
The Dystopian Neo-Modernist Paradigm
Allegorical history lessons about public evil and personal sinfulness (more
didactic than aesthetically ambitious
THE DYSTOPIAN PLOT (systematic rational demonstrations the very efficient
mechanisms of evil; THE COMPARISON WITH TRAGEDIES SIMILARITIES:
characters subjected to adverse circumstances; characters living isolated;
characters- annihilated : torment is a single-minded (single chunk) of the
initiatory story/pathos pathetic literature?: ROMANCE/IRONICAL;NIHILISTIC
REDUCTION OF THE INITIATORY SCENARIO DIFFERENCES: it is NOT FATE, but
CORRUPTED IDEAS (turned into dogmas; ideology (false consciousness) that
oppress people/
the link with power the panopticon and pastoral power
Propaganda, the Big Brother Syndrome according to Michel Foucaults
theorizing, in the wake of Nietzsches absolutist teachings about the Will to
Power which dominates modern mans social and (im)moral existence in the
bourgeois West.
The modern Western state has integrated in a new political shape an old power
technique which originated in Christian institutions. We can call this power
technique the pastoral power.
Christianity is the only religion which has organized itself as a church. And as
such, it postulates in principle that certain individuals can, by their religious
quality, serve others not as princes, magistrates, prophets, fortune-tellers,
benefactors, educationalists, and so on but as pastors
Pastoral power is not merely a form of power which commands; it must also be
prepared to sacrifice itself for the life and salvation of the flock. Therefore, it is
different from royal power, which demands a sacrifice from its subjects to save
the throne. It is a form of power whose ultimate aim is to asure individual
salvation in the next world. Finally, this form of power cannot be exercized
without knowing the inside of peoples minds, without exploring their souls,

without making them reveal their innermost secrets. It implies a knowledge of

the conscience and an ability to direct it. This form of power is salvation
oriented (as opposed to political power). It is oblative (as opposed to the
principle of sovereignity); it is individualizing (as opposed to legal power); it is
coextensive and continuous with life; it is linked with a production of truth the truth of the individual himself.
See the following sentence from Nineteen Eighty-Four mentioning the sacred
principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past. [an
unending series of victories over your own memory. Reality control, they
called it: in Newspeak, doublethink]
Loving Big Brother, faultlessly obeying the Party by conforming to the
principles, and hating the enemy of the Party (Goldstein).
panopticon-formations or prisons. Orwell adapts Benthams panopticon
system instilling in the historical totalitarian East the most advanced
technology of the rich post-war countries of the West. He generalizes
surveillance and places technology in the service of policing citizens, treating
them as prison inmates. Here is the link to a University College London site that
deals with the panopticon https://www.ucl.ac.uk/BenthamProject/who/panopticon

Bentham expected that this 'new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without
example' would ensure that the prisoners would modify their behaviour and work hard, in order to avoid
chastisement and avoid punishment. The idea of constant, overbearing surveillance is certainly unsettling, but
the panopticon and its central inspection principle would, Bentham argued, have multifarious benefits:

Orwells dystopia focuses on the way discourse is instrumental for falsifying

consciousness brainwashing.
Language is the generator of meaning whoever controls language controls
mankind. Structural operations imposed on language: Equating contradictory
words, reducing, merging words;
WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The Ministry of Truth monitored and falsified history appropriating the past to
suit the present. It ran counter to peoples memory.
A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself
anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having
something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face
(to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a
punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it
was called.
Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the
threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping
analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest
arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any

train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop,

in short, means protective stupidity.
Double think - blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has 123
two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the
habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain
facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black
is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to
believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget
that one has ever believed the contrary

The 1984 society: the Party members, the proles, the Inner Party
members.
a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature,
music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy
newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology,
sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs
which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of
kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section
Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak engaged in producing the lowest kind of
pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party
member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at (Chapt.
4)
Postmodernism is metafictional: it likes to surprise its readers with ingenious
artifices without the ambition of solving the problems raised within the fictional
universe. The result of this is the witty construction of aporias, pathless
paths.

IX.
The Historical Hoax in Kazuo Ishiguro The Remains of the Day
Hoax (practical) joke/pcleal is the counterpart of the serious history
lessons of modernism/neo-modernism and the lecture is a discussion of the
kind of seriousness in postmodernist editorial lessons: editorial history lessons
here (lessons in postmodern seriousness).
-Editorial omniscience relativized omniscience as a term for explaining the
narrative methods of TRADITIONAL/REALISTIC FICTIONAL NARRATIVES
Postmodernist fiction uses history-writing (historiography) ironically in other
words, postmodernist fiction abuses history writing, using fiction to abuse
historiography and viceversa. There are a number of features which derive from
the intention of entrusting the writing of uncomfortable or paradoxical, or open,
or aporetic truths to an ironic point of view.
(i)

Being organized by an ironic narrative method/point of view, the

histories narrated in postmodernist fiction are hoaxes (intriguing,
ironical SECOND-ORDER FICTIONAL NARRATIVES).

(ii)

using unreliable narrators and providing no vessels of consciousness /

reflectors (fully reliable characters acting as trustworthy/useful
interpreters of the implied authors values included in the texts) they
lack safe, fixed points of reference left behind by the implied author to
counter the truth-damaging function of the unreliable narrator[s], as was
the case in Henry Jamess novels, where there were fully knowledgeable
characters acting as deflectors of the ironical slippage of meanings in the
ironical fictional world).
they wish to foreground the impossibility of knowing history (the
past/external truths) and arriving at any final/simple conclusions; all
postmodernist accounts appear as officially or individually biased
(flawed, false, deceitful, incomplete, etc.)
they contest the authority and role of personalities in history/master
narratives and undermine subjectivity as the beneficiary or agent of
epistemic knowledge (make subjectivity problematic)

(iii)

(iv)

ILLUSTRATION ONE OF THE IRONIC NARRATIVE METHOD in The Remains of the

Day (1989) by Kazuo Ishiguro
The characters in the novel are equally divided between blind/blinded and lucid
persons. The theme of seeing is put across in the first pages of the book in a
discussion between the master of Darlington Hall, a big house in the South-East
of England, and his butler, Stevens.
Since for him, seeing, while serving, the aristocracy means being familiar with
his own country. This introduces the books second theme, in confrontation with
former: to have or to have not familiarity with what was and what was not
commonly done in England, familiarity with the British ways. The butler, whose
first-person narrative seeks identification with the reader, imparts his own
thoughts on this in what follows [. . . ] I did not take Mr. Faradays suggestion
at all seriously that afternoon, regarding it as just another instance of an
American gentlemans unfamiliarity with what was and wahat was not
commonly done in England.
The ironical point of view that readers are confined to, in late-modern twentieth
century fiction, just as in dramatic monologues (in poetry), and the main
themes of meditation for a butler in an English grand old house are the
following:

Greatness (detected by the butler even in the landscape itself, not only
in the distinguished people that an elite butler may meet)
Dignity
Impeccable tact and readiness to serve in all imaginable discreet ways
under all circumstances according to the perfect, gentlemanly code of
honour
The obsession with conventions and patterns of behaviour sacredly
observed by butlers

As will be seen each of these notions will be contradicted in this book,

situated on the boundary-line (between the old and the new dominant
mentalities) historically established by the two World Wars.
These homebred beliefs are toughly countered at the international secret
meeting held in Darlington Hall after the Peace of Versailles in 1922. Here is the
confrontation between the old dignified British and the American ethos, the
latter being aware of where the weight of historical worth and power lies
nowadays.Mr. Lewis, the fictional American Realpolitik voice gave its scathing
warning to the gathering of European gentlemen:
The performance of the book is to review the historical, ethical, national and
international constellation of factors that led to the drastic historical change:
the demise of old idealism and the birth of a merciless world of power.
The books irony exposes idealism as a batch of old fashioned powerless
illusions; but since they are embodied by memorable characters, they come to
matter more.
The French Lieutenants Woman is a Victorian realistic fiction hoax whose
aim is to set right, with late twentieth-century means, the social, ethical and
sexual prudery of the Victorian age. It contests and corrects the point of view of
splendid imperial/national history with paratextual documents and intertextual
allusions. The fictional hoax is due to the novels ecriture being entrusted to an
unreliable implied author, who appears as a disoriented character in the books
Chapter 13 and as a baffled road partner of the main protagonist on a train trip,
in Chapter 55 inand who provides three, if not really four possible endings to
his story. The literary history hoax is provided by the intertext

X.
British identity
REFLEXIVITY approaches fictional literature (including drama here) to the essay,
in so far as it develops ideas, which are, nevertheless dramatized. Because, in
the course of twentieth century, ideas became regrettably split from the
system of thoroughly theoretical and practical conceptions, as they were seen
to be in the Victorian, ideas are generally exposed as ideology, in the Marxian
sense, of the generalized belief that societies are controlled by ideologies.
REFLEXIVITY in contemporary (British/Western) literature signifies the
participation of literature to the erosion (exposure) of ideology; this notion is
covered by the reflexivity typical to historiographical metafiction; it has been
explained as debunking/exposing historiographical narratives as ideological.
SELF-REFLEXIVITY is responsible with the destructuration of literature, by
playing upon the literary conventions to disestablish or empoverish them. To
reveal the underpinnings of narrative and of dramatic development
conventions, self-reflexive literature plays against each other the parts and
coherence,of the plot, it makes the characters revolt against the auctorial plots
or, viceversa, it makes the author intervene to discuss his own conception or
the particular conception of a given genre with the reader, etc.

SELF-REFLEXIVITY repeats the existentialist lesson about thrownness and

suspends, not humane existence only, but the inherited literary conventions in
a numbing void. the late modern predominance of the void instead of the
numen corresponds to the loss of faith in emancipation and progress, which are
replaced with endless questioning and contradicting any truths inherited from
the tradition.
In this way, the plot of Fowless book consists of two halves: the one of the
fictional Victorian story (typically so) and the other which is contributed by the
twentieth century meditations about the whole Victorian mentality, characters,
conventions etc. Consequently, the form of the books plot is that of an hourglass, which empties the sand of the upper Victorian cup and fills the base-cup
with twentieth century expertise at reduces the Victorian tradition to a void.
Similarly, the relationship with tradition in the twentieth century and the tense
relationship of the (later) twentieth century with Victorianism open Angela
Carters Nights at the Circus. The elevated self-image about the Victorian age is
corrected in the books First Part, set in London, in a circus. Victorian ethos is
dragged in the mud by the protagonist who appears and develops the clich of
the angel in the house in a derisive, highly ironical way. Just as an angel,
Fevvers has wings, but she is a Cockney Venus (an irresistible, slovenly big
woman who drinks champagne all the time after her performances at the
trapeze, farts and belches and resembles Molly Bloom in Joyces Ulysses.
n the first part, literature sensational journalism, sentimental and Gothic
species of writing are parodied; in the second part, the Messianic figure of
Christ is given to a clown, the oldest clown in the Clowns Alley of the Circus on
tour to Sankt Petersburg (the clown teaches Nietzschean lucidity lessons and
his modern circus testament is delivered because he is about to retire); in the
third part, Western movies and the film shot after The Crime on the Orient
Express detective story are merged as a prelude to the end of this Christmas
Pantomime novel.

T.S. Eliots music hall lyrics in Old Possums Book of Practical Cats
This poem, published by Eliot on the eve of the Second World War, can be
regarded as a low-key Waste Land: an encyclopaedia of modern domestic life
and national habits. Because the sense of national identity gets established
through foundational (or ritual) gestures that institute customs, Eliot begins his
book with The Naming of Cats. Then, the story of Growltiger (The Terror of
the Thames a picaresque vagabond, a bellicose stray cat), who roamed at
large/From Gravesend up to Oxford, is the pretext for making a full tour of
some familiar places on the Thames, places in suburban London, Rotherhithe,
Hammersmith, Putney, to Molesey and the Bell at Hampton, to Wapping and
the Victoria Dock. Since the latter place-name rhymes with Bangkok, it also
evokes, with pride, the wider, imperial range of the British world
Witty turns of phrase and funny rhymes give more power to his cat-caricatures
of London inmates, while the ingenious personifications of cat- qualities and the
words of endearment applied to them contribute to the sentimental charm of
the portraits.