■□ HENRY JAMES, The Portrait of a Lady

“Dear me, who is that strange woman?” Mr. Touchett had asked.
“Perhaps it’s Mrs. Touchett’s niece – the independent young lady,” lord Warburton suggested. “I
think she must be from the way she handles the dog.”
The collie, too, had now allowed his attention to be diverted, and he trotted towards the young lady in
the doorway, slowly setting its tail in motion as he went.
“But where’s my wife then?” murmured the old man.
“I suppose the young lady has left her somewhere; that’s a part of the independence.”
The girl spoke to Ralph, smiling, while she still held up the terrier. “Is this your little dog, sir?”
He was mine a moment ago; but you’ve suddenly acquired a remarkable air of property in him.”
“Couldn’t we share him?” asked the girl. He’s such a perfect little darling.”
Ralph looked at her a moment; she was unexpectedly pretty. “You may have him altogether,” he then
replied.
The young lady seemed to have a great deal of confidence, both in herself and in others; but this
abrupt generosity made her blush. “I ought to tell you that I’m probably your cousin,” she brought out,
putting down the dog. “And here’s another!” she added quickly, as the collie came up.
“Probably?” the young man exclaimed, laughing. “I supposed it was quite settled! Have you arrived
with my mother?”
“Yes, half an hour ago.”
“And has she deposited you and departed again?”
“No, she went straight to her room, and she told me that, if I should see you, I was to say to you that
you must come to her there at a quarter to seven.”
The young man looked at his watch. “Thank you very much; I shall be punctual.” And then he looked
at his cousin. “You’re very welcome here. I’m delighted to see you.”
She was looking at everything with an eye that denoted clear perception – at her companion, at the
two dogs, at the two gentlemen under the trees, at the beautiful scene that surrounded her. […]
“Is one of those gentlemen your father?”
“Yes, the elder one – the one sitting down.” said Ralph.
The girl gave a laugh. “I don’t suppose it’s the other one. Who’s the other one?”
“He’s a friend of ours – Lord Warburton.”
“Oh, I hoped there would be a lord; it’s just like a novel!”
(adapted from Novels 1881-1886, 1985: 204-205)

1. Consider the way in which, on a small scale, the excerpt develops the broader preoccupation of the
novel with the clash between worlds and cultures.
2. Search for ironical stances and remarks that contribute to the portrayal of the two worlds:
America and Europe.
3. Find the embedded criticism addressed to European narrow mindedness, preconceived ideas and
disregard of the ‘other’.
4. Point to the use of the dialogue as an intense, dramatic scene or event.
5. Give examples of textual details which might help in defining James’s style as cautious, therefore
subjective.
6. Analyse the reflections of Isabel offered by the other characters as mirrors; refer to the
metamorphosis of cultural stereotypes.
7. Discuss the impact that this many-filtered presentation of character has upon the reader.
8. Comment on narrative technique, specifying intentions and repercussions.
9. What values may be associated with femininity and which with masculinity? How does the text
illustrate them?
10. How may the fiction/reality borderline alluded to in the excerpt be accounted for?
■□ EDWARD MORGAN FORSTER, A Passage to India

But the crisis was still to come.

Adela had meant to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, and she had rehearsed this as a difficult
task – difficult, because her disaster in the cave was connected, though by a thread, with another part of her
life, her engagement to Ronny. She had thought of love just before she went in, and had innocently asked
Aziz what marriage was like and she supposed that her question had roused evil in him. To recount this
would have been incredibly painful, it was the one point she wanted to keep obscure; she was willing to
give details that would have distressed other girls, but this story of her private failure she dared not allude
to, and she dreaded being examined in public in case something came out. But as soon as she rose to reply,
and heard the sound of her own voice, she feared not even that. A new and unknown sensation protected
her, like a magnificent armour. She didn’t think what had happened, or even remembered in the ordinary
way of memory, but she returned to the Marabar Hills and spoke from them across a sort of darkness to Mr.
McBryde. The fatal day recurred, in every detail, but now she was of it and not of it at the same time, and
this double relation gave it indescribable splendour. Why had she thought the expedition “dull”? Now the
sun rose again, the elephant waited, the pale masses of the rock flowed round her and presented the first
cave; she entered, and a match was reflected in the polished walls – all beautiful and significant, though she
had been blind to it at the time. Questions were asked, and to each she found the exact reply; yes, she had
noticed the “Tank of the Dagger”, but not known its name; yes, Mrs. Moore had been tired after the first
cave and sat in the shadow of a great rock, near the dried-up mud. Smoothly, the voice in the distance
proceeded, leading along the paths of truth, and the airs from the punkah behind her wafted her on… […]
“You went alone into one of those caves?”
“That is quite correct.”
“And the prisoner followed you.”
“Now we’ve got’im” from the Major.
She was silent. The court, the place of question, awaited her reply. But she could not give it until
Aziz entered the place of answer. […]
Her vision was of several caves. She saw herself in one, and she was also outside it, watching its
entrance, for Aziz to pass in. She failed to locate him. […] Speech was more difficult than vision. “I am not
quite sure.”
“I beg your pardon?” said the Superintendent of Police.
“I cannot be sure…”
“I didn’t catch that answer.” He looked scared, his mouth shut with a snap. “You are on that landing,
or whatever we term it, and you have entered a cave. I suggest to you that the prisoner followed you.”
She shook her head.
“What do you mean, please?”
“No,” she said in a flat, unattractive voice. […] “I’m afraid I have made a mistake.”
“What nature of mistake?”
Dr. Aziz never followed me into the cave.”
(adapted from A Passage to India, 1989: 247-248)

1. Consider style, diction and register in connection with setting.

2. Analyse characters as embodying opposing worlds and world outlooks.
3. Develop on the oblique social and political criticism that the excerpt foregrounds.
4. Mention the roles played in unfolding meaning by the spatial and temporal juxtapositions.
5. Discuss narrative technique and give textual evidence in support of your statements.
6. Which is the connector in the text and what are its literary functions?
7. There are numerous figures of speech in the text. Which is which?
8. How obvious are the concepts of spontaneous life and free intelligence in the unfolding of events?
9. Discuss the text as being climactic in the quest for the self.
10. Point to Victorian and modernist features of the text.
■□ JOSEPH CONRAD, Heart of Darkness

‘His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the
bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines. But I had not much time to give him, because I was
helping the engine-driver to take to pieces the leaky cylinders, to straighten a bent connecting-rod, and in
other such matters. I lived in an infernal mess of rust, filings, nuts, bolts, spanners, hammers, ratchet-drills
– things I abominate, because I don’t get on with them. I tended the little forge we fortunately had aboard; I
toiled wearily in a wretched scrap-heap – unless I had the shakes too bad to stand.
‘One evening coming in with a candle I was startled to hear him say a little tremulously, “I am lying
here in the dark waiting for death.” The light was within a foot of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur, “Oh,
nonsense!” and stood over him as if transfixed.
‘Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope
never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on
that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror – of an intense and
hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that
supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision – he cried
out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath –
‘ “The horror! The horror!”
“I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pilgrims were dining in the mess-room, and I took my
place opposite the manager, who lifted his eyes to give me a questioning glance, which I successfully
ignored. He leaned back, serene, with that peculiar smile of his sealing the unexpressed depths of his
meanness. A continuous shower of small flies streamed upon the lamp, upon the cloth, upon our hands and
faces. Suddenly the manager’s boy put his insolent black head in the doorway, and said in a tone of
scathing contempt:
‘ “Mistah Kurtz – he dead.”
‘All the pilgrims rushed out to see. I remained, and went on with my dinner. I believe I was
considered brutally callous. However, I did not eat much. There was a lamp in there – light, don’t you
know – and outside it was so beastly, beastly dark. I went no more near the remarkable man who had
pronounced a judgement upon the adventures of his soul on this earth. The voice was gone. What else had
been there? But I am of course aware that next day the pilgrims buried something in a muddy hole.
‘And then they very nearly buried me.
‘However, […] I remained to dream the nightmare out to the end, and to show my loyalty to Kurtz
once more. Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life is – that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a
futile purpose.
(adapted from Heart of Darkness and Other Stories, 1999: 97-98)

1. Notice the simple and double inverted commas used. Mention their role in connection with the
double-layered narrative pattern.
2. Pick out the autobiographical references in the text.
3. Mention where and how subtle metafictional observations are made.
4. Analyse the unconventional narrative practices and techniques.
5. Focus on Marlow – as narrator and protagonist; how does his story tell of his own character?
6. Discuss the numerous implications of Conrad’s reversed symbolism as obvious in the excerpt.
7. Observe the irony of tone and pinpoint its goals.
8. Develop on as many intertextual references as you can find.
9. How may Kurtz’s last words be interpreted?
10. Is there any proleptic force about the fragment above?
■□ VIRGINIA WOOLF, Mrs. Dalloway

“Good morning to you, Clarissa!” said Hugh, rather extravagantly, for they had known each other as
children. “Where are you off to?”
“I love walking in London,” said Mrs. Dalloway. “Really, it’s better than walking in the country.”
They had just come up – unfortunately – to see doctors. Other people came to see pictures; go to the
opera; take their daughters out; the Whitbreads came “to see doctors”. Times without number Clarissa had
visited Evelyn Whitbread in a nursing home. Was Evelyn ill again? Evelyn was a good deal out of sorts,
said Hugh, intimating by a kind of pout or swell of his very well-covered, manly, extremely handsome,
perfectly upholstered body (he was almost too well dressed always, but presumably had to be, with his little
job at Court) that his wife had some internal ailment, nothing serious, which, as an old friend, Clarissa
Dalloway would quite understand without requiring him to specify. Ah, yes, she did of course; what a
nuisance, and felt very sisterly and oddly conscious of her hat. Not the right hat for the early morning, was
that it? For Hugh always made her feel, as he bustled on, raising his hat rather extravagantly and assuring
her that she might be a girl of eighteen, and of course he was coming to her party to-night, Evelyn
absolutely insisted, only a little late he might be after the party at the Palace to which he had to take one of
Jim’s boys – she always felt a little skimpy beside Hugh, schoolgirlish; but attached to him, partly from
having known him always, but she did think him a good sort in his own way, though Richard was nearly
driven mad by him, and as for Peter Walsh, he had never to this day forgiven her for liking him.
She could remember scene after scene at Bourton – Peter furious; Hugh not, of course, his match in
any way, but still not a positive imbecile as Peter made out; not a mere barber’s block. When his old mother
wanted him to give up shooting or to take her to Bath he did it, without a word; he was really unselfish, and
as for saying, as Peter did, that he had no heart, no brain, nothing but the manners and breeding of an
English gentleman, that was only her dear Peter at his worst; and he could be intolerable; he could be
impossible; but adorable to walk with on a morning like this.
(June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. […] Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the
very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on the waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa
loved. To dance, to ride, she adored all that.)
(adapted from Mrs. Dalloway, 1996: 7-8)

1. Which Woolfian theme might be extracted from the excerpt?

2. Identify the autobiographical references, keeping in mind both the personal and the artistic.
3. Analyse the way in which shifts in time and perspective contribute to forwarding meaning.
4. Pick out the characteristic features of the narrative technique and give illustrative examples.
5. Notice the indirectness of character drawing and describe Hugh and Peter by rearranging the
pieces of the puzzle.
6. Discuss Clarissa’s reflections in/on the male other as mirror.
7. Focus on Clarissa as narrator, narrated and, at times, narratee. Say what you think the plusses
and minuses of her multiple roles might be.
8. Consider the actual and imaginary settings, specifying their implications.
9. Are feminist positions expressed anywhere in the text? Which? How are they obvious?
10. Find the embedded criticism of English stereotypes. Develop on the modernism attached to it.
■□ JAMES JOYCE, Ulysses

In long lassons from the Cock Lake the water flowed full, covering green-goldenly lagoons of sand,
rising, flowing. My ashplant will float away. I shall wait. No, they will pass on, passing chafing against the
low rocks, swirling, passing. Better get this job over quick. Listen: a fourworded wave-speech: seesoo, hrss,
rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops:
flop, slop, slap; bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling, widely flowing, floating
foampool, flower unfurling.
Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, hising
up their petticoats, in whispering water swaying and upturning coy silver fronds. Day by day; night by
night; lifted, flooded and let fall. Lord, they are weary; and, whispered to, they sigh. Saint Ambrose heard
it, sigh of leaves and waves, waiting, awaiting the fullness of their times, diebus ac noctibus iniursia
patiens ingemniscit. To no end gathered; vainly then released, forth flowing, wending back; loom of the
moon. Weary too in sight of lovers, lascivious men, a naked woman shining in her courts, she draws a toil
of waters.
Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At one he said. Found drowned. High water at
Dublin bar. Driving before it a loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse rising
saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing landward, a pace a pace a porpoise. There he is. Hook it quick. Sunk
though he be beneath the watery floor. We have him. Easy now. […]
God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead
breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the
gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring in the sun.
A seachange his brown eyes saltblue. Seadeath, mildest of all deaths known to man. Old Father
Ocean. Prix de Paris: beware of imitations. Just you give it a fair trial. We enjoyed ourselves immensely.
Come. I thirst. Clouding over. No black clouds anywhere, are there? Thunderstorm. Albright he falls,
proud lightning of the intellect, Lucifer, dico, qui nescit occasum. No. My cockle hat and staff and his my
sandal shoon. Where? To evening lands. Evening will find itself.
He took the kilt of his ashplant, lunging with it softly, dallying still. Yes, evening will find itself in
me, without me. All days make their end. By the way next when is it? Tuesday will be the longest day. Of
all the glad new year, mother, the rum tum tiddledy tum. Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet. Già.
(adapted from Ulysses, 1989: 118)

1. Develop on the realism/naturalism/modernism of the text.

2. Discuss the role of the numerous figures of speech present in the fragment.
3. Make special reference to the symbolism of water, under its many guises.
4. Extract the underlying theme.
5. Comment on the unconventional vocabulary and punctuation Joyce chooses to make use of.
6. Detect the ironic and parodic instantiations.
7. Consider the shifts from the ‘he’ to the ‘I’ and relate them to narrative technique.
8. See how the category of time is handled and to what purpose.
9. Trace Joyce-the-man and Joyce-the artist in the web of textual design.
10. Find a plausible explanation for the writer’s experimentally dealing with form, while
traditionally handling content.
■□ DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE, Sons and Lovers

“What nonsense, mother – you know I don’t love her – I – I tell you I don’t love her – she doesn’t
even walk with my arm, because I don’t want her to.”
“Then why do you fly to her so often!”
“I do like to talk to her – I never said I didn’t. But I don’t love her.”
“Is there nobody else to talk to?”
“Not about the things we talk of. There’s lots of things that you’re not interested in, that –”
“What things?”
Mrs. Morel was so intense that Paul began to pant.
“Why – painting – and books. You don’t care about Herbert Spencer.”
“No,” was the sad reply. “And you won’t at my age.”
“Well, but I do now – and Miriam does.” […] He knitted his brows with pain.
“You’re old, mother, and we’re young.”
He only meant that the interests of her age were not the interests of his. But he realized the moment
he had spoken that he had said the wrong thing.
“Yes, I know it well – I am old. And therefore I may stand aside; I have nothing more to do with you.
You only want me to wait on you – the rest is for Miriam.”
He could not bear it. Instinctively he realized that he was life to her. And, after all, she was the chief
thing to him, the only supreme thing.
“You know it isn’t, mother, you know it isn’t.”
She was moved to pity by his cry.
“It looks a great deal like it,” she said, half putting aside her despair.
“No, mother, I really don’t love her. I talk to her, but I want to come home to you.”
He had taken off his collar and tie, and rose, barethroated, to go to bed. As he stooped to kiss his
mother, she threw her arms round his neck, hid her face on his shoulder, and cried, in a whimpering voice,
so unlike her own that he writhed in agony:
“I can’t bear it. I could let another woman – but not her. She’d leave me no room, not a bit of room–“
And immediately he hated Miriam bitterly.
“And I’ve never – you know – Paul – I’ve never had a husband – not really –”
He stroked his mother’s hair, and his mouth was on her throat.
“And she exults so in taking you from me – she’s not like ordinary girls.”
“Well, I don’t love her, mother,” he murmured, bowing his head and hiding his eyes on her shoulder
in misery. His mother kissed him a long, fervent kiss.
“My boy!” she said, in a voice trembling with passionate love.
Without knowing, he gently stroke her face.
“There,” said his mother, “now go to bed. You’ll be so tired in the morning.” As she was speaking,
she heard her husband coming. “There’s your father – now go.” Suddenly she looked at him almost as if in
fear. “Perhaps I’m selfish. If you want her, take her, my boy.”
(adapted from Sons and Lovers, 1993: 228-229)

1. Discuss he text in terms of the normality/abnormality of the situation foregrounded. Underline the
literary connotations.
2. Trace the inner message of the excerpt in connection with Lawrence’s philosophy of life and art.
3. Follow the zigzagging from words and gestures to feelings, and develop on their interrelatedness.
4. Consider the representations of the self as forwarded by the text.
5. What does the realism of the text consist in?
6. Look into narrative practice and technique between tradition and innovation.
7. Analyse characters: men and women, and the power structures associated with each.
8. Use your knowledge of the writer’s life to pinpoint some of his sources of inspiration.
9. How is the battle between the wide range of human feelings and reason/judgement/knowledge
brought forth by the excerpt?
10. What other similarly shocking scenes have made Lawrence’s fame?
■□ ANGUS WILSON, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

Both mother and son regarded the coming soirée with awe; but while Tante Stéphanie, splendid in
black satin and appliqué jet, with one of Mrs. Portway’s lilac chiffons scarves to cover her décolletage,
proposed herself a retiring role in seeing that none of the food was eaten by the servants, Yves, superb in
midnight-blue smoking, a legacy of his Italian widow, saw every opportunity to shine.
He addressed himself aggressively to Robin as they awaited the arrival of the first guests. He was
one business tycoon to another. It was not at all what Robin cared for. […]
“What’s your wastage, Middleton?” Yves asked, and before Robin could inquire the meaning of
this somewhat cryptic question, he followed it up with a machine-gun fire of searching business questions
intended to flatten Robin out, lay him stone dead with their ruthless drive, their dead-hit punch, their
incredible grasp of detail. “What do your absentee figures show?” he asked. “What’s your pension load?
Have you got a record of your pay-out in widows’ benefits? Where’s your loss in toilet time?” These and
many other questions which had once so depressed him from an American colleague in the air force he now
worked off on Robin and, without waiting for a reply, he cried. “Good God! Man, a guy’s got to ask
himself these questions. You need an efficient expert to give your place the works.” And when Robin
looked dejected, he patted him on the elbow. “That’s all right,” he said; “your worries are over. From today
you’re going to be lucky. I’m going to save Middletons thousands.”
Marie Hélène, tightly swathed in crimson velvet, her bosom deadly yellow as a Japanese corpse’s
beneath the fires of her opal necklace, held up her hand in horror. “No businesstalk, Yves, please,” she
cried. “You will ruin my soirée.” And in hard, flat tones, she said: “Do you think that Anouilh is passé? I
find a terrible lack of esprit in his last play. I’m afraid he has quite lost his elegance.” She gave it to him as
a copybook model for the evening.
Yves looked her over. “Mais tu est ravissante, ma chère cousine”, he said, “absolument ravissante”.
He took her hand, and, raising her arm, he planted small kisses all the way up its scrawny, yellow inner
side. Marie Hélène had only just time to snatch her arm away before the first guests were announced.
Thick and vast they came, filling the Hampstead double drawing-room, covering the gold-and-
white couches, sitting bolt upright on the little Empire chairs, staring over each other’s shoulders into the
gilt mirrors, leaning on the two unused harpsichords and the hardly ever used grand piano, threatening the
bad Sèvres with their elbows, swallowing quantities of champagne, gobbling up lobster patties and vol-au-
vents from Fortnums, debouching in elegant pairs into the little garden with its walnut tree and its iris pool.
The more cultured of Robin’s business friends were impressed by the representatives of British Council and
Arts Council and Institut Français and a hundred other councils and institutes; all these bureaucrats of
modern culture were equally impressed by the odd French or English poet or sculptor or violonist. Dotted
among them here and there were B.B.C. officials – programme-planners, features-producers, poetry readers
– and an odd publisher or two; these had a professional appearance of not being very impressed.
(adapted from Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, 1976: 213)

1. Discuss Englishness versus cosmopolitanism as underlying the text.

2. Point to the cultural stereotypes deconstructed.
3. What ‘angry’ attitude may be inferred by considering the excerpt?
4. How much is revealed about the narrator-observer?
5. What is the function of language within the social milieu?
6. Analyse diction and idiolect with a view to disclosing standpoints.
7. Look into the social criticism allusively formulated.
8. Consider activity/passivity as modes of relating to the social context.
9. To what extent may the text be associated with realism?
10. Which twentieth century issues are addressed?
■□ KINGSLEY AMIS, Lucky Jim

“It’ll be a good faint,” Atkinson had said in his arrogant voice. “It’ll create a diversion all right.
Don’t you worry”. Recalling this now, Dixon had to fight down a burst of laughter. At the same moment a
disturbance nearer the platform attracted his attention: Christine and Carol were pushing past Cecil and
Beesley with the clear intention of leaving the hall; Bertand was leaning over and stage-whispering to them;
Gore-Urquhart, half risen, looked concerned. Flustered, Dixon stopped talking again; then, when the two
women had gained the aisle and were making for the door, went on, sooner than he should have done, in a
blurred, halting mumble that suggested the extremity of drunkenness. Shifting nervously on his feet, he half
tripped against the base of the lectern and swayed perilously forward.
A hum of voices began again from the gallery. Dixon had a fleeting impression of the thinner
alderman and his wife exchanging a glance of disapproving comment. He stopped speaking.
When he recovered himself, he found that he’d once more lost his place in midsentence. Biting his
lip, he resolved not to run off the rails again. He cleared his throat, found his place, and went on in a
clipped tone, emphasizing all the consonants and keeping his voice well up at the end of each phrase. At
any rate, he thought, they’ll hear every word now. As he went on, he was for the second time conscious of
something being very wrong. It was some moments before he realized that he was now imitating the
Principal.
He looked up; there seemed to be a lot of movement in the gallery. Something heavy crashed to the
floor up there. Maconochie, who’d been standing near the doors, went out, presumably to ascend and
restore order. Voices were now starting up in the body of the Hall; the fashionable clergyman said
something in a rumbling undertone; Dixon saw Beesley twisting about in his seat. “What’s the matter with
you, Dixon?” Welch hissed.
“Sorry sir … bit nervous … all right in a minute …”
It was a close evening; Dixon felt intolerably hot. With a shaking hand he poured himself a glass of
water from the carafe before him and drank feverishly. A comment, loud but indistinct, was shouted from
the gallery. Dixon felt he was going to burst into tears. Should he throw a faint? It would be easy enough.
No; everybody would assume he’d succumbed to alcohol. He made a last effort to pull himself together
and, the pause now having lasted nearly half a minute, began again, but not in his normal voice. He seemed
to have forgotten how to speak ordinarily. This time he chose an exaggerated northern accent as the least
likely to give offence or to resemble anybody else’s voice. After the first salvo of laughs from the gallery
things quietened down […] and for a few minutes everything went smoothly. He was now getting on for
halfway through.
While he read, things began slowly to go wrong for the third time, but not, as before, with what he
was saying or how he was saying it. These things had to do with the inside of his head. A feeling, not so
much of drunkenness, but of immense depression and fatigue, was taking almost tangible shape there.
While he spoke one sentence, sadness at the thought of Christine seemed to be trying to grip his tongue at
the root and reduce him to an elegiac silence; while he spoke another, cries of irritated horror fumbled for
admission at his larynx so as to make public what he felt about the Margaret situation; while he spoke the
next, anger and fear threatened to twist his mouth, tongue, and lips into the right position for a hysterical
denunciation of Bertrand, Mrs. Welch, the Principal, the Registrar, the College Council, the College. He
began to lose all consciousness of the audience before him; the only member of it he cared abut had left and
was presumably not going to come back. Well, if this was going to be his last public appearance here, he’d
see to it that people didn’t forget it in a hurry. He’d do some good, however small, to some of those present,
however few. (adapted from Lucky Jim, 1990: 116)

1. What kind of world is the academic one in the novel?

2. Analyse the narrative techniques employed and the roles they play.
3. Consider the shift from the outer to the inner dimension in relation with individual well-being.
4. Find the analeptic, proleptic and sylleptic forces at work within the fragment.
5. Discuss the structures of authority envisaged here.
6. Concentrate on language as communication vehicle and barrier.
7. Identify the type of comic obvious in the text.
8. How much rebellion may be gathered from the situation presented?
9. Which are the specific means of character drawing?
10. Develop on the timelessness of the scene.
■□ LAWRENCE DURRELL, The Alexandria Quartet

But what stamps the carnival with its spirit of pure mischief is the velvet domino – conferring upon
its wearers the disguise which each man in his secret heart desires above all. To become anonymous in an
anonymous crowd revealing neither sex nor relationship nor even facial expression – for the mark of this
demented friar’s habit leaves only two eyes, glowing like the eyes of a Moslem woman or a bear. Nothing
else to distinguish one by; the thick folds of the blackness conceal even the contours of the body. Everyone
becomes hipless, breastless, faceless. And concealed beneath the carnival habit (like a criminal desire in the
heart, a temptation impossible to resist, an impulse which seems preordained) lie the terms of something: of
a freedom which man has seldom dared to imagine for himself. One feels free in this disguise to do
whatever one likes without prohibition. All the best murders in the city, all the most tragic cases of
mistaken identity, are the fruit of the early carnival, while most love affairs begin or end during these three
days and nights during which we are delivered from the thrall of personality, from the bondage of
ourselves. Once inside that velvet cape and hood, and wife loses husband, husband wife, lover the beloved.
The air becomes crisp with the saltpetre of feuds and follies. The fury of battles, of agonizing night-long
searches, of despairs. You cannot tell whether you are dancing with a man or a woman. The dark tides of
Eros, which demand full secrecy if they are to overflow the human soul, burst out during carnival like
something long dammed up and raise the forms of strange primeval creatures – the perversions which are, I
suppose, the psyche’s aliment […] Yes, who can help but love carnival when in it all debts are paid, all
crimes expiated or committed, all illicit desires stated – without guilt or premeditation, without the
penalties which conscience or society enact?
But I am wrong about one thing – for there is one distinguishing mark by which your friend or enemy
may still identify you: hands. Your lover’s hands, if you have ever noticed them at all, will lead you to her
in the thickest press of maskers. Or by arrangement she may wear, as Justine does, a familiar ring – the
ivory intaglio taken from the tomb of a dead Byzantine youth – worn upon the forefinger of the right hand.
But this is all, and it is only just enough. (Pray that you are not as unlucky as Amaril who found the perfect
woman during carnival but could not persuade her to raise her hood and stand identified. They talked all
night lying in the grass by the fountain, making love together with their velvet faces touching, their eyes
caressing each other. For a whole year now, he has gone about the city trying to find a pair of human hands,
like a madman. But hands are so alike! She swore, this woman of his, that she would come back next year
to the same place, wearing the same ring with its small yellow stone. And so tonight he will wait trembling
for a pair of hands by the lily-pond – hands which will perhaps never appear again in his life. Perhaps she
was after all an afreet or a vampire – who knows? Yet years later, in another book, in another context, he
will happen upon her again, almost by accident, but not here, not in these pages too tangled already by the
record of ill-starred loves…) (adapted from Justine, 1982: 98)

1. Comment on Alexandria as setting and character.

2. Isolate the principal tropes embedded in the fragment and develop on their usage.
3. How much emphasis is placed on the question of the truthfulness of love and to what purpose?
4. Consider the carnival situation and the carnivalesque discourse.
5. Look into the shifts in narrative practice and technique.
6. Discuss the excerpt in terms of the relativity of truth.
7. Dwell on the mythic suggestiveness of the text above.
8. Find the existentialist ideas rendered by the text and relate them to the reading pattern suggested
by the whole novel sequence.
9. Identify the metafictional stance and point to its functioning as a disclaimer in itself.
10. How much does the text anticipate the further development of the story pattern?