The compulsory Section A question will typically consist of four to six extracts from across the period. You will be asked to discuss one of the extracts of poetry, prose and drama ‘in the light of your knowledge of the period, giving particular attention to what is distinctively ‘modern’. You need not restrict yourself to the work of the author quoted’.
It is vital to remember that the term ‘modern’, as it is used here, refers to twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing generally. It does not refer to that relatively brief period of literary history at the beginning of the century which some construct in terms of ‘modernism’. If the extract you choose to work on in this part of your examination was written in the 1970s by Angela Carter, the kind of ‘modern’ she reproduces will be substantially different from the kind of modern produced by, say, Virginia Woolf in the 1920s. Do not attempt to write about the literature of this period as if there was only one kind of modern.
It should be clear that this part of the paper differs from the kind of ‘practical criticism’ exercise you might already be familiar with. You will be applying close-reading critical skills, but in addition you are expected to place these passages in various related contexts. This means that your critical reading of ‘the words on the page’ should, ideally, be informed by some of the following contexts:
In addition your critical reading may carry a theoretical perspective. This might be very consciously and determinedly deployed, because of your own theoretical stance. Or specific critical approaches might seem to be invited by the nature of the extract your are considering.
A significant and flexible percentage of the marks available can be awarded to your reading of the free-standing text, but a handling of these wider contexts is obviously important. Essentially we will be testing your ability to see how any passage could be seen as representative of the literature of the modern period (i.e. around 1900 to the present day).
In terms of structuring your responses, you might choose to start with ‘the words on the page’ and build out to these wider contexts. There are no hard and fast rules about structuring except that, however your piece is organised, the line of argument must be clear and relevant to the question.
The following is an extract from episode 12 of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). The episode is set in Barney Kiernan’s pub. The ‘citizen’, one of the ‘barflies’, is the first person to speak.
The comments which follow the extract do not constitute an ‘ideal’ answer. They indicate a model of the kind of processes you might deploy to formulate a response.
– Stand and deliver, says he.
– That’s all right, citizen, says Joe. Friends here.
– Pass, friends, says he.
Then he rubs his hand in his eye and says he:
– What’s your opinion of the times?
Doing the rapparee and Rory of the Hill. But, begob, Joe was equal to the occasion.
– I think the markets are on a rise, says he, sliding his hand down his fork.
So begob the citizen claps his paw on his knee and he says:
– Foreign wars is the cause of it.
And says Joe, sticking his thumb in his pocket:
– It’s the Russians’ wish to tyrannise.
– Arrah, give over your bloody codding, Joe, says I. I’ve a thirst on me I wouldn’t sell for half a crown.
– Give it a name, citizen, says Joe.
– Wine of the country, says he.
– What’s yours? says Joe.
– Ditto MacAnaspey, says I.
– Three pints, Terry, says Joe. And how’s the old heart, citizen? says he
– Never better, a chara, says he…
The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deep-chested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freelyfreckled shaggy-bearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero. From shoulder to shoulder he measured several ells and his rocklike mountainous knees were covered, as was likewise the rest of his body wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse (Ulex Europeus). The wide-winged nostrils, from which bristles of the same tawny hue projected, were of such capaciousness that within their cavernous obscurity the fieldlark might easily have lodged her nest. The eyes in which a tear and a smile strove ever for mastery were of the dimensions of a goodsized cauliflower. A powerful current of warm breath issued at regular intervals from the profound cavity of his mouth while in rhythmic resonance the strong hale reverberations of his formidable heart thundered rumblingly causing the ground, the summit of the lofty tower and the still loftier walls of the cave to vibrate and tremble…
So anyhow Terry brought the three pints Joe was standing and begob the sight nearly left my eyes when I saw him land out a quid. O, true as I’m telling you. A goodlooking sovereign.
Taking the passage as it stands, it seems that the opening is in a ‘realist’ mode. There is an ‘I’ narrator telling the story of how he and ‘Joe’ met the citizen in Kiernan’s pub. There is perhaps something of an oral tradition suggested in this first narrative style. There is also a strong sense that the citizen is being mocked and goaded by the two men. The nickname ‘citizen’ (suggesting republicanism and revolutionary France) gives us a clue as to what the two men are laughing at. The comment that the citizen is ‘Doing the rapparee’ also helps (rapparees were Irish soldiers who stayed in Ireland, harassing the English army after the defeat of James II). It looks as if the citizen is a pub nationalist and it is his fervour, and the predictability of his responses, that are being laughed at.
Activity
Does this offer any evidence about Joyce’s relation to nationalist Ireland?
The line beginning ‘The figure seated’ introduces a new narrative voice. It should be clear that this narrator with his grotesque inflation (the citizen becoming a kind of giant of the heroic age, inhabiting a cave rather than a bar) possesses a voice which is quite distinct from the I-narrator. It might be useful to think of this second voice as an interruption of the ‘realist’ I-narrative.
Activity
At this point you should make a list distinguishing between the characteristics of the two narrative voices. On the one hand you will have Dublin working-class Anglo-Irish and on the other hand inflation, elevation, accumulation, Latin and Latinate diction, etc. You should also consider whether there are any similarities between the two narrative voices. It might be helpful to consider the second narrator as a ‘character’, even though this narrator does not actually exist in the real space of Barney Kiernan’s bar. This may help you to plug in to the wild comedy of the interruption.
Describing and analysing these two narrative voices is likely to be central to your overall representation of this passage. It seems probable that you will want to relate Joyce’s disruption of the realist narrative mode to narrative innovation generally in Ulysses. There are 18 episodes in Ulysses and about 12 clearly distinct narrative styles, including an episode that parodies romance magazines and an episode that is written in the language of science. Another episode is built around newspaper headlines, and some episodes are written in interior monologue. The narrative strangeness of the extract we are discussing, then, is part of a much larger scheme of narrative innovation, and this innovation is a marker of the status of Ulysses as a modern (or postmodern) text. It is worth emphasising that one effect of displacing a single narrative voice with a multitude of narrative voices is to render narrative authority relative. This is a distinctive project of quite a lot of modern literature, particularly that associated with figures like Joyce, Woolf and Conrad, and you may wish to draw connections at this point.
Activity
The above paragraph could lead you to a number of theoretical positions. For instance, you might consider how Bakhtin’s work on narratology in The Dialogic Imagination helps us understand Joyce’s competing narrative voices.
You will, in your analysis, want to get as close to the ‘spirit’ of the extract as you can. With this particular passage, some handling of the general hilarity would seem to be essential. The idea that the citizen measures ‘several ells’ and that his ‘eyes were the dimensions of a good-sized cauliflower’ is obviously meant to be funny. But what exactly is being laughed at? Words like ‘parody’ and ‘satire’ are waiting to be used here, but what is the object of the satire and what is being parodied?
Your response to this kind of issue will be partly dependent on your knowledge of the Irish context to Joyce’s fiction. The interrupting narrator inflates some characteristics of Anglo-Irish cultural nationalism. The listings suggest the ‘ranns’ of Gaelic poetry (in their English translations) and the exaggerations and mock emotionalism about all things Irish suggest parody of the so-called Celtic Revival, the romantic movement which Yeats led in the late nineteenth century. It is this form of cultural nationalism, which was largely a Protestant Anglo-Irish invention, which Joyce, a Catholic writer, is satirising here. It is important to realise that it may well be particular forms of Irish nationalism, rather than nationalism itself, which is the object of Joyce’s satire in this passage. From this you may wish to generalise about the treatment of politics in other modern literature you are acquainted with.
Activity
Does this last paragraph affect your understanding of the relations between the two narrators?
One final point: you may be aware that Ulysses is partially structured around Homer’s Odyssey. Each chapter of Joyce’s book corresponds to an episode in the Odyssey. This particular extract is from a chapter referred to as ‘Cyclops’ in Joyce’s scheme for Ulysses. Joyce’s citizen is in parallel to Homer’s giant, but there other ‘giants’ in Joyce’s episode. Language itself, for instance, becomes a gigantic inflation in the ‘interruptions’. This information might be useful for your analysis. It could lead to a discussion of Joyce’s use of myth generally, or to discussion around the area of intertextuality (i.e. the relationship between literary texts) as it affects modern literature more generally.
We would stress again that the above does not constitute an ideal response. It merely suggests strategies that you might follow. Of course, different responses to the extract will develop in different ways and will have different emphases.
The following is an extract from Part I (‘The Burial of the Dead’) of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Once again we would remind you that the comments which follow the extract do not constitute an ‘ideal’ answer.
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in the sunlight, into the Hofgarten, 10
And drank coffee, and talked for a hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south for the winter.
What are these roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, 20
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is a shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. 30
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein irisch Kind
Wo weilest du?
‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’
— Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, 40
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Öd’ und leer das Meer.
One obvious characteristic of this passage is its fragmentation. In many respects it seems to set out not to be ‘whole’ or ‘harmonious’. The referrents of pronouns, for instance, are not clear. It is far from obvious who is the ‘I’ of the passage or the ‘you’ or the ‘we’ or the ‘Marie’. There seems to be not one narrator, but distinct narrative ‘zones’. The ‘zones’ change at lines 7, 19 and 31.
Activity
Consider these narrative voices carefully. Make a list of their distinguishing features. You should think about how (or indeed whether) these voices relate to each other.
The uncertain gender of the narrative voices, the uncertain national identity implied in line 12 (which translates as ‘I am not a Russian, I am Lithuanian, I am a true German’) contribute to the disruptive feel of the extract; intertextuality in this text functions in a similar way. The first line of the extract might remind you of a famous poetic line: the opening of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. If you compare the two texts, however, you will see that it is difference rather than similarity which describes how the two are related.
Activity
Compare the opening of Chaucer’s poem with the opening of The Waste Land.
You should be aware that, just as The Waste Land is made up of apparently fragmentary voices, so it is composed of fragmentary bits of culture. That is, it constantly refers itself to other texts. In this particular passage, apart from the allusion to The Canterbury Tales, there are allusions to Ezekiel and Ecclesiastes (lines 19–30), to Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, to an autobiography by the Countess Marie Larisch entitled My Past, possibly to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (see Eliot’s variant at line 41 ‘the heart of light’) and so on. This characteristic of the poem will need to be discussed. You might want to relate ‘intertextuality’ to ‘modernism’ generally. Certainly there are other modernists whose texts are self-consciously allusive. For a theoretical perspective on intertextuality in this particular poem, it would help to read Eliot’s essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), which is published in both Eliot’s Collected and Selected Essays.
A word of advice. It should be becoming clear that words like ‘harmony’, ‘wholeness’, ‘consistency’, will not do for this poem. It is pointless looking for an ‘order’ which does not exist here. In order to analyse this poem, you will need to deploy a vocabulary which articulates the disruptive, discontinuous and culturally subversive nature of the poem.
Finally, it is quite clear that the poem concerns itself with a sense of cultural and moral breakup. It is possible that you might want to relate this to Western intellectual traditions of the period. The relativism of Freud, Einstein, Spengler and F.H. Bradley (Eliot wrote a dissertation on the last) might be partially responsible for producing the relativism of The Waste Land. This sense of decline and break-up (Eliot himself wrote of ‘the mind of Europe’ which was ‘nearly exhausted by the effort to stay interested in its own contents’) may itself have been partially produced by the First World War. These historical contexts certainly shape the poem in important ways.
The following is an extract from the opening of Angela Carter’s Night at the Circus (1984). In this scene Fevvers, the aerialiste circus star, is introducing herself to Jack Walser, a reporter. We would repeat that the comments that follow the extract are for your guidance. They do not constitute an ‘ideal’ answer.
‘Lor’ love you, sir!’ Fevvers sang out in a voice that clanged like dustbin lids. ‘As to my place of birth, why, I first saw light of day right here in smoky old London, didn’t I! Not billed the “Cockney Venus”, for nothing, sir, though they could just as well ‘ave called me “Helen of the High Wire”, due to the unusual circumstances in which I come ashore – for I never docked via what you might call the normal channels, sir, oh, dear me, no; but just like Helen of Troy was hatched.
‘Hatched out of a bloody great egg while Bow Bells rang, as ever is!’
The blonde guffawed uproariously, slapped the marbly thigh on which her wrap fell open and flashed a pair of vast, blue, indecorous eyes at the young reporter with his open notebook and his poised pencil as if to dare him: ‘Believe it or not!’ Then she spun round on her swivelling dressing-stool…and confronted herself with a grin in the mirror as she ripped six inches of false lash from her left eyelid with an incisive gesture and a small, explosive rasping sound.
Fevvers the most famous aerialiste of the day; her slogan, ‘Is she fact or is she fiction?’ And she didn’t let you forget it for a minute; this query …blazed forth from a wall-size poster, souvenir of her Paris triumphs…The artist had chosen to depict her ascent from behind – bums aloft you might say; up she goes, in a steatopygous perspective, shaking out about her those tremendous red and purple pinions, pinions large enough, powerful enough to bear up such a big girl as she. And she was a big girl.
Evidently this Helen took after her putative father, the swan, around the shoulder parts.
This extract, unlike the last two, is not intrinsically fragmented. The spoken and narrative voices are clearly distinct, easily recognisable and, above all, they are complementary in most senses. Fevvers the character may sound very different from the third person narrative voice, but this difference is not overly exploited. Unlike in the Joyce passage, where the two narrators are entirely at odds, or the Eliot passage where narrative identities are so confused, here the third person narrator is more helpful to the reader. The aim seems to be to elaborate, to picture, and to explain.
In some respects, this may sound like a realist mode of narration, but any such reading of the passage would soon find itself in difficulty. For all the apparent order of this opening, and its obvious earthy quality, it makes great demands on the reader’s credibility. It is in this sense that ‘realism’ is problematic here. In the very first paragraph, we, along with Walser, are asked to believe that Fevvers was not born via ‘the normal channels’, but was hatched, from an egg, and that she has developed wings! The question is – what status do these details have?
Activity
Read the passage again. Make a list of the details that subscribe to an idea of realism. Make another list of characteristics that cast doubt on the realist status of things.
It should be clear that this text is very playful about truth/lies and reality/fantasy. Mirrors play a considerable part here, as does make-up and disguise. This playfulness is emphatically connected to gender issues. It is important to remember the position here. This is a circus star talking to her public, but also an experienced and dynamic woman talking to a young and somewhat naive man. In fictional time the conversation takes place ‘at the fag end’ of the nineteenth century, and precedes ‘the New Age in which no woman will be bound to the ground’. Fevver’s power of ‘flight’, it seems, is resonant of this New Age.
Activity
Analyse the passage in gender terms. What kind of woman is Fevvers? What kind of man is Walser? What is the nature of relations between the sexes here?
At this point you will have identified some of the key textual features of the passage, and considered some of the key ideas raised by it. Your analysis could now proceed in a number of ways. You might want to focus more on the internal characteristics of the passage. For instance, you might want to consider the myth references here. They function very differently from myth references in Eliot. For one thing, Carter’s usage is essentially comic; Eliot’s is not.
Activity
How would you explain this difference?
Alternatively, you might want to begin locating this passage in a wider cultural environment. This could be done with reference to gender issues. Or you might want to locate Carter in terms of the ‘magic realism’ that was so much in vogue in literary culture in the 1970s and 1980s. According to one guide to twentieth-century English literature ‘magic realism’ characteristically ‘combines a realistic manner with strong elements of the bizarre, supernatural and fantastic’. This would seem to be highly relevant for the passage under discussion.
By the end of this chapter, and having completed the relevant reading, you be should able to:
Choose a passage from Section A of a past examination paper available on the VLE. Write a response, and evaluate your essay on the basis of the criteria and guidelines given above. Titles in the general subject reading will help you with historical contexts and with theoretical approaches to prose, poetry and drama.
You should be practising your critical skills throughout your course of study. Indeed, it is a good idea to combine these critical commentaries with your author and topic studies, as suggested in the sample course outline printed at the beginning of this guide. At the end of each part of your programme of study, take an extract from a text you have been studying and write a critical commentary on it, using the standard formulation; discuss your extracts ‘in the light of your knowledge of the period, giving particular attention to what is distinctively “modern”.’
Remember that, as we have stressed throughout this guide, it is very important that you do not oversimplify this issue. Defining such terms as ‘modern’, ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodern’, as we have seen, is a complex business. And there is clearly more than one kind of modern. The modern includes realism, fantasy, science fiction, crime fiction and so on and involves the literature of the whole period. It includes poetry, drama and novels. You must ensure that your practice exercises reflect this range.
We have begun this study with two examples from the ‘classical’ modernists in order to help secure your understanding of this important period of literary history. But it is important that your whole programme of study reflects a much broader literary culture and a stronger sense of balance. Do not limit yourself to a consideration of classical modernism.