The Literature Book

POSTWAR WRITING 249 In Günter Grass’s As the US becomes Martin Luther King, Jr., In Cold Blood, a The Tin Drum, the increasingly involved in delivers his “I Have a true crime novel story unfolds from the conflict in Vietnam, Dream” speech about by Truman Capote, the memoirs of Oskar Joseph Heller finishes racial injustice from the details the murders Matzerath, written in 1959 of the in an institution for his darkly satirical Lincoln Memorial in Clutter family the mentally ill. World War II novel Washington, DC. in Kansas. Catch-22. 1959 1961 1963 1966 1960 1962 1963 1967 In To Kill a Mockingbird, The Cuban missile crisis, Julio Cortázar’s antinovel Gabriel García Harper Lee describes a 13-day US–Soviet Hopscotch has a Table Márquez recounts the through a child’s of Instructions about history of the fictional eyes small-town standoff in October 1962 different sequences in Colombian Buendía life in America’s over ballistic missiles deployed which the 155 chapters family in One Hundred Deep South. in Cuba, takes the world to can be read. Years of Solitude. the brink of nuclear war. These techniques, developed by In the US, too, writers continued against the older generation that European writers such as Jean-Paul to assert their identity. As the civil had taken them into two world Sartre and Günter Grass, were an rights movement gathered wars and had continued on an inspiration to the new generation of momentum in the 1950s and 1960s, aggressive path with military South American authors, who were African-American authors such as involvement in Korea and Vietnam. establishing a distinctive style. Ralph Ellison described how black These young people also reacted to Among them were Julio Cortázar, people were marginalized, while cold war uncertainties and the whose experimental “antinovel” Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird nuclear threat with hedonistic Hopscotch subverted many literary looked at race from the perspective dissent. J. D. Salinger was one of conventions, and Gabriel García of someone from the Deep South. the first to describe teenage angst Márquez, who popularized the style Social issues of all types also and rebellion, followed by the writers known as magic realism, inspired provided the subject matter for of the beat generation, whose work by the surreal short stories of New Journalism, the blend of fact was inspired by the freedom of Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges. and fiction pioneered by Lee’s modern jazz and the brashness of friend Truman Capote. rock ‘n’ roll. Experimental writing by New literary movements were Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and also emerging elsewhere, as many Youth culture William S. Burroughs pushed the countries—especially in Africa— Perhaps the most vociferous boundaries not only of form, but achieved national independence manifestation of postwar culture also of content: their sometimes from European colonial control. came with the younger generation, explicitly sexual material resulted Foremost among these countries and was most noticeable in the US. in legal action and bans on books was Nigeria, where Chinua Achebe An anti-establishment youth in some places, before the more provided an indigenous voice to culture emerged as a reaction relaxed attitudes of the 1960s. ■ a people rebuilding their nation.

YOUBWIGABTRCOTHHEINR GIS NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949), GEORGE ORWELL



252 NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR IN CONTEXT D ystopian literature is a He who controls the genre that portrays the past controls the future. FOCUS nightmarish vision of a Dystopia society that is the polar opposite He who controls the of a utopia (an ideal, perfect world). present controls the past. BEFORE Ever since the appearance of Nineteen Eighty-Four 1516 English humanist Sir Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516, Thomas More’s Utopia first dystopias have been evoked over the threat posed by the destructive imagines an ideal society, the centuries by a wide range of force of the atomic bomb and and its opposite—a dystopia. writers to focus on topics such as the scenario of dramatic climate dictatorships (both communist change have both provided 1924 Russian writer Yevgeny and fascist), poverty, torture, the powerful sources for dystopias. Zamyatin’s We describes the oppression of populations, and One State, where people live the control of people’s minds. George Orwell’s Nineteen for the collective good. Eighty-Four is the best-known Authors use these dystopian modern dystopia. Orwell’s fear 1932 In English writer Aldous worlds to explore central human of rising Stalinism is the starting Huxley’s Brave New World concerns, creating visions of the point for the novel. Although Orwell individuality is suppressed. possible consequences of things believed in a democratic socialism, happening in ways that are he saw the emerging USSR—in AFTER unrestrained. Margaret Atwood’s which one political party had 1953 American novelist Ray The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), for consolidated complete control—as Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is instance, sees a world run by a anything but socialist. He had also banned and burned. military regime, in which women witnessed the splintering of anti- have been stripped of their rights Franco forces in the Spanish Civil 1962 English novelist Anthony and are appreciated purely for Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange their reproductive value. depicts a world full of violence. 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale, by Turning points Canadian Margaret Atwood, is Dystopias focus primarily on set in an America run by a imagined futures, and often on the totalitarian Christian regime. fear of what may arise from new technologies and social change. For example, in the 20th century, George Orwell George Orwell was born as Eric England in 1937 and in 1941 he Arthur Blair in India in 1903 to joined the BBC, only to resign British parents. He was educated in 1943. He returned to writing in England before heading back to with Animal Farm (1945), which the East, to enroll in the Indian proved an immediate success. Imperial Police in Burma. In 1928, His wife died unexpectedly that he moved to Paris, returning to same year, and Orwell isolated London in 1929 to write Down himself on Jura, a Scottish isle, where he wrote Nineteen and Out in Paris and London Eighty-Four (1949). He died of (1933). In 1936, Orwell traveled tuberculosis in 1950 at 46. to Wigan, northern England, to experience the poverty forged by Other key works the Depression. That same year he married Eileen O’Shaughnessy 1934 Burmese Days before going to fight in Spain’s 1937 The Road to Wigan Pier civil war and getting shot through 1938 Homage to Catalonia the throat. Orwell returned to

POSTWAR WRITING 253 See also: Candide 96–97 ■ Gulliver’s Travels 104 ■ Brave New World 243 ■ Fahrenheit 451 287 ■ Lord of the Flies 287 ■ A Clockwork Orange 289 ■ The Death of Artemio Cruz 290 ■ The Handmaid’s Tale 335 War in 1936, when pro-Stalin The world Smith inhabits is ruled dictates the truth of the past as communists turned on those who by an elite. The masses (“the well as the present. History is were supposed to be their allies. proles”), who make up 85 percent revised and rewritten to fit the of the population, are controlled changing diktats of the state. Orwell had already painted a by four paradoxical ministries: And Winston Smith himself works bleak vision of such treachery in the Ministry of Peace, which in the Ministry of Truth: editing his novella Animal Farm (1945). He oversees war; the Ministry of Love, historical records, and burning the also had a template of sorts for his which deals with policing; the original documentation by posting new work: the world outlined by Ministry of Plenty, which controls it into a “memory hole.” History, Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin’s the economy, including rationing as the reader understands it, has We (1924), in which individual for the population; and the Ministry stopped: “Nothing exists except freedom no longer exists. of Truth, or Minitrue, which deals an endless present in which the with news and the education of Party is always right.” Nineteen Eighty-Four depicts the masses, issuing propaganda to a totalitarian society manipulating control the thoughts of the people. The all-seeing government its citizens through propaganda, A network of telescreens, cameras, flipping truths into lies for the sake One of the chief conduits of and covert microphones operate of maintaining political power. This control is Newspeak, the language to spy and eavesdrop on the ❯❯ dystopian society is far darker— of the Ministry of Truth, which one without the hope that the revolution in Animal Farm had The role of the Ministry of Truth first promised, and one in which is to intimidate and terrify the individual lives have become mere population into compliance. cogs in an overarching system. Orwell describes the ministry’s building as “an enormous The end of history pyramidal structure,” upon Nineteen Eighty-Four’s opening which is written the three words—“It was a bright cold day in slogans of the Party. April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”—alert the reader to the WAR fact that even the very nature of IS PEACE the day’s temporal construction FREEDOM has shifted. Winston Smith, the IS SLAVERY novel’s protagonist, is entering his IGNORANCE apartment building. He is a citizen IS STRENGTH of London, capital of Airstrip One (once known as Great Britain), a province of Oceania, one of the three cross-continental states that exist following a global nuclear war. Posters fill the wall space with the image of a face—“a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features,” and whose “eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.” Big Brother is the leader of the Party that governs Oceania.

254 NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR “Newspeak” is a sinister, curtailed Duckspeak: Goodthink: form of everyday English (“Oldspeak”) devised by the all-powerful state. In a form of brainless speaking that enables approved views that give ideological time, “Oldspeak” will be replaced by garbage to be uttered convincingly. conformity to the Party. Newspeak, a stark, simple language, purified to express meanings and to Doubleplusgood: Doublethink: meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. Because thought something that is a system of thought in which control in requires words, the state has inhibited simply the best. the present means amending the past. “thoughtcrimes,” and personal ideas and feelings of dissent will have become unthinkable. Thoughtcrime: Unperson: Blackwhite: Bellyfeel: the criminal act of a belief that someone erased by the state blind, uncritical belief gut instinct acceptance questions the ruling Party. from the historical records. in spite of the facts. of Party ideas. population: these are run by the crime of self expression. He knows the Junior Anti-Sex League, but Thought Police, who supervise it will be an act that he cannot ever passes Smith a note with the the protection of the ruling Party. step back from and, moreover, that simple message “I love you.” Their “he was a lonely ghost uttering a affair is an act of rebellion itself, Everyman’s rebellion truth that nobody would ever hear.” a sex crime. Yet their covert love Orwell immerses his readers in this And yet he continues to write. cannot last for long, hidden beneath hideous totalitarian world before the facade of their obedience to Big revealing that Winston Smith is Winston Smith is the everyman Brother and the rules of Oceania. engaged in a vital act of rebellion. hero of the novel—his surname’s In his tiny apartment, dominated commonality suggesting that there Enemies of the state by the instrument of Party control is nothing special or unusual about The state’s acknowledged enemy (the telescreen), Smith is starting to him. That quality makes his act of is Emmanuel Goldstein, the Party’s write his own history in a diary subversion so incendiary: if every former leader who now heads he has acquired secondhand—a Smith or Jones were to rise up a resistance movement called against society, then revolution In the end the Party would would follow. The use of a name If you want a picture announce that two and two that feels ordinarily English echoes of the future, imagine made five, and you would Eric Blair’s own adoption of the a boot stamping on pseudonym “George Orwell,” which a human face—forever. have to believe it. he did shortly before publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four Nineteen Eighty-Four his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), to avoid any embarrassment to his family. Orwell’s characterization of the ordinary Smith as a rebel, one who makes his own stand for genuine truth against the machinery of the Party, creates an unlikely champion. In Julia, he finds a fellow dissenter and a lover. Younger than Smith, Julia is an apparent firebrand for

POSTWAR WRITING 255 You want it to happen to the superstate has a similar ideological or overtly, and try to crush human other person. You don’t give construct based on keeping their feelings and break a person’s spirit. population compliant. As Julia remarks: “Everybody a damn what they suffer. always confesses. You can’t help it.” All you care about is yourself. The persuasiveness of the The experience of Winston Smith passages from Goldstein’s book reveals how the state apparatus Nineteen Eighty-Four reveal the seductive power of words acts on a single, human individual, and language. One of Nineteen making the reader not only feel his The Brotherhood. Goldstein is a Eighty-Four’s greatest legacies is pain but also his burning desire to despised figure (like Leon Trotsky the plethora of words and phrases fight back against the machine in was in Stalin’s USSR—the two that have seeped from “Newspeak” whatever ways he can. even have the same goatee beards), into English. Big Brother, sex crime, who is used to unite the citizenship thoughtcrime, and Room 101 are A modern message of Oceania via the daily ritual act of just a handful of the most common Initial critical reception of Nineteen “Two Minutes Hate,” during which linguistic creations found in Eighty-Four was extremely positive, abuse is flung at Goldstein’s image Orwell’s work. referencing the originality of the on the telescreens. bleak vision. Since then, the text Mastering manipulation has reached across the globe, been In a secondhand bookstore, The ways in which the state can translated into some 65 languages, Smith opens a text “with no name manipulate and control its citizens and found new audiences in a or title on the cover.” The book are key themes of Nineteen Eighty- major movie version directed by is The Theory and Practice of Four. In a totalitarian system, Michael Radford and released Oligarchical Collectivism by individual choices and lifestyles in 1984, with John Hurt playing Emmanuel Goldstein. Orwell largely become the dictates of an Winston Smith. inserts full pages from this book overarching body of governance. into the text of Nineteen Eighty- The central concern at the Four to draw the reader closer Oceania’s ruling organization heart of the dystopia depicted to the rebel protagonist and to shows that it is determined to in Nineteen Eighty-Four is the reveal the political philosophies maintain its grip on power by danger of allowing those who and social theories that have led weakening personal relationships rule us to gain too much control. to the present. This book within and eradicating trust and mutuality. In a globalized modern era of mass a book thus serves as a device Orwell traces the psychological surveillance, Orwell’s warning to fill in some of the background, and physical methods by which resonates more than ever. ■ explaining the establishment of the state can coerce, either covertly Oceania and the other superstates, Eurasia and Eastasia, in the global reorganization following World War II, and to expose the truth that each A Soviet poster depicts Stalin as the revered leader. Orwell’s dystopia was shaped by his experience in Spain, where the Stalinist faction was ruthless in its pursuit of total control.

256 IIAA’MANBCDOSTUSETLOVITEMKNHEEITTRIE’ITMMEENEESNNOW, THE CATCHER IN THE RYE (1951), J. D. SALINGER IN CONTEXT N umerous authors, from The Catcher in the Rye is narrated Johann Wolfgang von by 17-year-old Holden Caulfield. He FOCUS Goethe and John Keats to is liberal with his parents’ money, Birth of the teenager James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and relentless in his commentary explored the precarious state of on the human condition, sexuality, BEFORE adolescence long before the birth of and morality. He has little regard 1774 The Sorrows of Young the “teenager” in 1950s’ America. for authority and seems careless Werther, by German writer Teenagers, though, with their wild about his self-destructive trajectory. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, new music and their thrill seeking, follows the passions of a represented a challenge to Teenage disaffection sensitive young artist. conservative society and culture, But Holden Caulfield is much and were treated with nervous more than a teenage rebel. His 1821 English poet John Keats dismissal: adults considered this frank admissions of deceptions, dies at 25. His early verse is generation to be morally lax and imperfections, and contradictions criticized as “adolescent.” directionless. Teenagers kicked reveal a bemused individual who back with assertions of hypocrisy, is hankering after childhood 1916 Irish writer James Joyce considering themselves outsiders innocence, suffering grief, and publishes A Portrait of the in an uncaring world; and this is growing painfully aware of the Artist as a Young Man, a the territory of Salinger’s writing. contradictions of adult life. He coming-of-age novel that is a compelling antihero—an depicts rebellion and anti- I’m the most terrific ambivalent, vulnerable figure— Catholic sentiment. liar you ever saw in who can be sensitive and witty your life. It’s awful. as well as immature and vulgar. AFTER The Catcher in the Rye Caulfield’s casual disregard 1963 American writer Sylvia for honesty and disdain for Plath publishes The Bell Jar, a societal norms are mitigated by a coming-of-age story with a genuine confessional impulse and twist—its teenage protagonist surprising tolerance for some of the descends into madness. diverse characters he encounters throughout the course of the novel. 1982 In American author Charles Bukowski’s Ham on Caulfield is also an easy victim. Rye, a first-person male narrator He is bullied in his dormitory at remembers his teen years. school, and ripped off by a pimp working the elevator in the New

POSTWAR WRITING 257 See also: The Sorrows of Young Werther 104 ■ The Magic Mountain 224–27 ■ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 241 ■ The Bell Jar 290 Holden’s journey through New York Central Park: Ice skates 17 Phoebe’s school with Sally and suggests they 5 Central Park could run away together. 18 Metropolitan Museum of Natural Museum of Art J. D. Salinger History: Visits the museum to kill time; nothing changes 6 Museum of Jerome David Salinger was here, he says—it is a world Natural History born in 1919 to wealthy that is frozen in time. 13 Going “Home” parents in New York City. Like his main protagonist Edmont Hotel: Checks in Carousel 20 19 Zoo Holden Caulfield in The here after leaving Pencey 12 The Lake Catcher in the Rye, Salinger Prep and has an awkward attended several schools encounter with Sunny Edmont Hotel 2 10 Wicker before graduating. After (a hooker) and Maurice (a Bar spending a year in Europe, pimp and elevator operator). he studied at Columbia University, taking a writing Broadway: Heads here to Radio City ice rink 9 14 Antolini’s course led by Whit Burnett, buy a record for his sister, Theater 8 editor of Story magazine, Phoebe (and overhears a Broadway 11 7 Biltmore Hotel who became his mentor child singing about the 15 Restaurant early in his writing career. catcher in the rye). Salinger was drafted into Ernie’s: Bumps into 4 Grand Central the US Army in 1942 and Lillian Simmons at Ernie’s Terminal continued to write despite nightclub in Greenwich suffering from a “nervous Village (where apparently Fifth Avenue 16 condition.” The Catcher teenagers can drink at 16). in the Rye thrust Salinger 1 Penn Station onto the world stage as a literary celebrity. However, 1 The numbers in the map 3 Ernie’s he resented the attention and plot Holden’s route through became reclusive and far less New York productive. By the time of his death in 2010, The Catcher in York hotel. In his confusion about Death and grief are prevailing the Rye remained Salinger’s women and sex, he unconsciously themes in The Catcher in the Rye. only full-length novel. seeks out kindness and familiarity. After Holden’s brother dies, he Having paid for a prostitute he asks smashes his hands in rage; his Other key works if they can simply “talk.” He strikes classmate is bullied and comes up a conversation with two nuns, to a tragic end; and the very title 1953 Nine Stories despite his atheism, and they insist of the book refers to stopping 1955 Raise High the Roof he is “a very sweet boy.” (catching) children running through Beam, Carpenters fields before they fall off a cliff. It 1959 Seymour: An Inevitably, Salinger’s dirty is likely that the loss of numerous Introduction realism caused controversy. Some young soldiers in World War II 1961 Franny and Zooey critics dismissed the novel as influenced Salinger to write this puerile and maudlin. But Salinger compelling first-person narrative, gained cult status in the years which remains an enduring portrait following its publication, further of the teenager in crisis. ■ fueled by his reclusive lifestyle.

258 DDGEEAUANTTGHS-BCISOHSLASANADUS POPPY AND MEMORY (1952), PAUL CELAN IN CONTEXT A fter the World War II of the camp commandant, making concentration camp of prisoners dance by their own FOCUS Auschwitz was liberated graves. The collection also includes Literature after Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, and the scale another of his best-known poems, of the atrocities of the Jewish “Corona,” which has been read as a BEFORE Holocaust became known, some reflection on the attempt to achieve 1947 In her poetry collection thought the events so horrific that true love without it becoming an In den Wohnungen des Todes conventional bounds of literature escape from the truth of the world. (“In the Apartments of Death”) would be unfit to describe them. Berliner Nelly Sachs describes To Jewish authors, however, some Elsewhere in Poppy and her own sufferings and those form of expression was essential. Memory, haunting images of of the European Jews. the Holocaust recur: ash, hair, A mournful heritage smoke, mold, bitterness, shadows, 1947 Italian writer Primo The poet Paul Celan (1920–1970) death, memory, and forgetting. Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz was born Paul Antschel into a In exploring these themes, Celan is a first-hand account of his family of German-speaking Jews in expresses the mournful heritage incarceration in Auschwitz. Romania. He survived a ghetto and of organized mass murder. ■ an internment camp to become, 1949 German sociologist under the pen name Celan, a major Black milk of morning Theodor Adorno says that “to postwar German-language poet. we drink you at night. write poetry after Auschwitz is But, haunted by his experiences, barbaric,” a condemnation not he eventually committed suicide. “Todesfuge” of the right to expression but of the society that had allowed Poppy and Memory, which Auschwitz to happen. contains more than 50 poems, was Celan’s second collection AFTER and established his reputation. 1971 The Nazi and the Barber, It includes his most famous poem, a novel by German Holocaust “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”). survivor Edgar Hilsenrath, Written in a musical rhythm, the adopts the perspective of an SS poem features Death, in the guise officer who assumes a Jewish identity to escape prosecution. See also: The Little Prince 238–39 ■ The Tin Drum 270–71 ■ One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich 289 ■ Death of a Naturalist 277

POSTWAR WRITING 259 IUBRAENEMFCDUAEISURNESSVETITSAOPINBESDOLEEPESLIMEMEPLY INVISIBLE MAN (1952), RALPH ELLISON IN CONTEXT T he African-American civil with political and social protest. rights movement of the Ellison found a new form for the FOCUS late 1950s and 1960s protest novel, removed from earlier The civil rights movement sought to end racial segregation realist and naturalist works. His and discrimination in the US style was idiosyncratic, both in BEFORE through protest and civil structure and narrative, describing 1940 Richard Wright’s Native disobedience. Authors such as events based on his experience of Son discusses the criminal James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, being a black man, and what that roles that white society creates Richard Wright, and Ralph meant in a personal and public for African-Americans. Ellison engaged with the perspective in American society. movement, writing about the 1950 African-American writer systematic disenfranchisement, The book’s narrator is invisible, Gwendolyn Brooks wins the overt racial discrimination, and unnamed, and completely alone: Pulitzer Prize for Poetry with state-sanctioned violence that society chooses either not to her collection Annie Allen. It pervaded the US. see him, or to ignore him. He charts a woman’s move from lives underground, mirroring the individual freedom to more An isolated activist segregation of African-Americans engaged ideas of progress. Born in Oklahoma in 1914, Ralph at the time. In his isolation, the Ellison first studied music at narrator reflects passionately on the AFTER Tuskagee Institute in Alabama, path his life has taken—from public 1953 In Go Tell It on the but later moved to New York to speaker in his youth, to disgraced Mountain, James Baldwin pursue courses in the visual arts. college student and mistreated reflects on his own life and Here, he met Richard Wright and worker in a white factory in Harlem, involvement with the church was influenced both by his writing to involvement with the politically as an African-American, and his communist affiliations. ambiguous Brotherhood. The showing both its positive Following service in the merchant narrator muses over the injustices side and its oppressive hold. navy in World War II, Ellison he has suffered in life, but finally became disillusioned with left- he concludes that he must live a 1969 Maya Angelou’s I Know wing ideology and began writing life that is true to his nature and Why the Caged Bird Sings Invisible Man, a book concerned his wider responsibilities: he is expresses the author’s ready to emerge into the world. ■ changing responses to the violence of racism. See also: Les Misérables 166–67 ■ Their Eyes Were Watching God 235 ■ I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings 291

260 OLMMOFYYLMSLITIIYFNAELOLMFIIYGNIRHSSET.OUOLF LOLITA (1955), VLADIMIR NABOKOV IN CONTEXT L iterary history is punctuated obsession with a certain type of with books that were either underage seductress: the “nymphet,” FOCUS banned or censored because a slender, silky-skinned pubescent Banned books they were thought to corrupt public girl, between 9 and 14 years old. morals or cause political or religious The title of the novel has become BEFORE offense. In the first half of the 20th part of the English language as a 1532–64 François Rabelais’ century, literary experimention reference to a young temptress. Gargantua and Pantagruel is pushed the boundaries of taste and condemned for obscenity by shocked a conservative audience. Reading Lolita creates a the College of Sorbonne, Paris. In response to this, censors trawled state of mental confusion since the through works such as Irish writer reader warms to a narrator who 1759 Although banned by James Joyce’s Ulysses to identify subverts all normal reactions to government and church obscenities, and removed sexual his appalling story. In Humbert’s authorities for its satirical references from English author D. H. claustrophobic fantasy, readers content, Voltaire’s Candide Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. lose perspective, seduced by an becomes a best seller. But after the unexpurgated Lady urbane European professor, with Chatterley was tried on grounds a well-prepared defense peppered 1934 Tropic of Cancer, Henry of obscenity in 1960 and acquitted, with apologies, literary allusions, Miller’s account of life as a restrictions on the publication of wordplay, and treacherous wit. writer in Paris, is banned in pornographic literature in the UK the US for sexual content. were effectively abandoned. Across The spell of obsession the world, book censorship eased, As an adolescent on the French AFTER but it never disappeared entirely. Riviera, Humbert fell in love with 1959 Narrated by a junkie, the young Annabel—the template William Burroughs’s Naked Accepting the unacceptable for his obsession. Years later, in Lunch is banned in Boston Few now would be offended by the US, he “broke her spell by in 1962; the decision is books that were censored in the incarnating her in another”: Dolores overturned in 1966. past, and yet Vladimir Nabokov’s Haze, dubbed Lolita, the 12-year- controversial novel Lolita retains its old daughter of his landlady. The 1988 Salman Rushdie’s The power to disturb as well as enchant. devastating consequences are Satanic Verses is banned Banned after its 1955 publication in played out after Humbert marries in more than 10 countries France and republished in London the mother to gain access to the for perceived blasphemy in 1959, the novel is founded on girl, the object of his fantasy. A against Islam. narrator Humbert Humbert’s vague plan to murder his new wife becomes unnecessary after she is

POSTWAR WRITING 261 See also: Gargantua and Pantagruel 72–73 ■ Madame Bovary 158–63 ■ Ulysses 214–21 ■ Nineteen Eighty-Four 250–55 ■ The Tin Drum 270–71 ■ Howl and Other Poems 288 ■ American Pyscho 313 ■ The Satanic Verses 336 Literature is often POLITICAL OBSCENITY RELIGIOUS perceived as a threat CONTENT American Psycho OFFENSE by authorities because July’s People Bret Easton Ellis (1991) Harry Potter series of its ability to convey Nadine Gordimer (1981) J. K. Rowling (1997–2007) ideas that have the Nineteen Eighty-Four Howl The Da Vinci Code potential to change George Orwell (1949) Allen Ginsberg (1956) Dan Brown (2003) minds and challenge Uncle Tom’s Cabin Brave New World The Satanic Verses prevailing ideologies. Harriet Beecher Aldous Huxley (1932) Salman Rushdie (1988) Some surprising titles Stowe (1852) have been banned over the years by nations, states, or libraries for their political content, sexual explicitness, and offensiveness to religion. mown down by a car; the bereaved with Dolores across the continent, Style, structure, and imagery are stepfather then retrieves Dolores “putting the geography of the not found in pornographic books, as from summer camp and begins United States into motion.” The Nabokov reminds us in a defensive his attempt to live out his dream. details of his despotic infatuation afterword to a novel that excels on (the quarrels, close calls, and all three counts. Humbert Humbert In love with language bribes) intermittently surface in is the ultimate unreliable narrator, In an “erotic novel” that offers a surreal, cinematic account that shielded by a fictional foreword almost nothing salacious, part spools across page after page of writer who wraps up the loose two is a continuation of the author’s wry observation on American ends before the story has even real love affair—with language. In culture. Arriving back on the East begun. There are no alternative his highly wrought, ornate, and Coast after a year, Humbert enrolls accounts, only the posthumous lyrical prose, Humbert pieces Dolores at school, and the fabric voice of Humbert, defending the together his year-long road trip of his fantasy begins to fall apart. indefensible to his readers. ■ Vladimir Nabokov Born into an aristocratic family and tutor. He married Véra in St. Petersburg, in April 1899, Slonim in 1925; they had Vladimir Nabokov spent his one son, Dmitri. After fleeing childhood in Russia and grew to the US during World War II, up trilingual in English, French, Nabokov wrote Lolita in English. and Russian. After the Russian He taught at Wellesley College Revolution of 1917, the family and Cornell University and, was exiled to England in 1919, as an authority on butterflies, where Nabokov studied at Trinity held a position at the Museum College, Cambridge. Following of Comparative Zoology at another move to Berlin, Nabokov’s Harvard. He died in Montreux, father, a journalist and politician, Switzerland, in 1977. was assassinated at a political rally. Living in Berlin and in Paris, Other key works Nabokov wrote novels, short stories, and poems in Russian, 1937 The Gift while working as a tennis coach 1962 Pale Fire

262 MHUNEATGLUGERAONVTEELSDO,NNAOENLDSYTNOONE WAITING FOR GODOT (1953), SAMUEL BECKETT IN CONTEXT T he theater of the absurd, in monologue with phrases that have which the acclaimed Irish no meaning. The speech stops only FOCUS writer Samuel Beckett when Vladimir pulls off Lucky’s The absurd (1906–1989) played a major role, hat, causing him to break off mid- subverted the norms of art and sentence—an example of Beckett’s BEFORE life by entertaining the idea that debt to vaudeville comedy and, 1942 The narrator of Albert any meaning in the universe more specifically, to comedians Camus’ novel The Outsider would always elude our attempts Laurel and Hardy. The tramps are expresses a typical absurdist to discover it. “He leaves no stone waiting for Godot, but this character belief: “I laid my heart open unturned,” said English playwright never turns up, and has been seen to the gentle indifference of Harold Pinter admiringly of Beckett, as a stand-in for God, often referred the universe.” “and no maggot lonely.” In both his to but also absent—an analysis plays and his fiction, Beckett gave that irritated Beckett, although AFTER voice to the inarticulate—damaged he conceded its plausibility. ■ 1959 Les Nègres, a play by souls, without hope and with only French writer Jean Genet, pathetic consolations, facing the shocks audiences by using brute truths of existence. black actors in whiteface. Words in orbit Joyce was a synthesizer, trying 1959 In Rhinocéros by The play Waiting for Godot to bring in as much as he Romanian playwright Eugène (originally written in French, like Ionesco, characters turn into much of Beckett’s work) features could. I am an analyzer, trying rhinoceroses and wreak havoc, two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon. to leave out as much as I can. indicating the absurdity of a Their dialogue is a tragicomic world where ordinary people dance of ideas, and the action Samuel Beckett change into fascist monsters. defies common sense. Another character, Lucky, led on a rope by 1960 English writer Harold his master, Pozzo, says nothing Pinter’s play The Caretaker initially but later spews out a owes a great debt to Beckett in surreal 700-word unpunctuated its lack of plot and its oblique dialogue, full of tangents and See also: Metamorphosis 210–11 ■ The Trial 242 ■ Nausea 244 ■ offbeat implications. The Outsider 245

POSTWAR WRITING 263 IEATTNIEDSRLNIMIIFTPEYOWSWSIITITHBHLTEOHNTEEOOHTTAOHNUEDRCH THE TEMPLE OF THE GOLDEN PAVILION (1956), YUKIO MISHIMA IN CONTEXT I n the decades leading up to It is no exaggeration World War II, Japan was an to say that the first real FOCUS aggressive military state, problem I faced in my life Postwar Japanese writers occupying parts of China. Its strict code of literary censorship was that of beauty. BEFORE tightened even further during The Temple of the 1946 Haruo Umezaki’s wartime. The relaxing of these collection of short stories restrictions at the end of the war Golden Pavilion Sakurajima is published. The saw a flowering of literary voices. tales, from which he became 550-year-old Zen temple in Kyoto, known, touch on aspects of Freedom and diversity decorated in gold leaf. Initially, Japanese life in World War II, Many of the “first generation” of it represents to the monk the such as kamikaze pilots. postwar writers (those whose first transitory nature of life and work was published in 1946–47) beauty, but comes to dominate his 1951 Shoˉ hei Oˉ oka’s most focused on the subject of wartime thoughts as a bullying presence, famous novel, Fires on the experiences. However, with the and one that he cannot escape. The Plain, is published. Like appearance of a second generation novel was extremely popular—a Umezaki’s Sakurajima, it (1948–49), and a third (1953–55), compelling study of madness that reflects the author’s wartime the only theme that united the leads to destruction, but also a experiences, including Japan’s authors was the freedom that meditation on beauty itself, of defeat by US forces on Leyte allowed them to flourish. This which one of the most beautiful island in the Philippines. resulted in a period of intense aspects is Mishima’s prose. ■ creativity and productivity. AFTER 1962 Koˉboˉ Abe’s novel Yukio Mishima (1920–1970), was The Woman in the Dunes of the second generation, and The is a bleak and disturbing Temple of the Golden Pavilion is tale about an amateur often said to be his finest work. It entomologist who is held tells the fact-based story of an ugly, captive in an escape-proof stuttering young monk who comes shack at the bottom of a to hate all beauty, especially the pit of sand in a remote village. See also: The Love Suicides at Sonezaki 93

264 HOTHEFEWBREAAOSTOIBTFEITCAHT—E SOUL ON THE ROAD (1957), JACK KEROUAC IN CONTEXT I n the postwar United States, spontaneous form of existence in a generation of middle-class their quest to find true meaning in FOCUS youth became increasingly life. Some of them became known The beat generation reluctant to follow the societal as “beats”: a collective of poets and pathways of their parents based writers who sought kicks, spiritual BEFORE on materialistic goals. Instead, refuge, and excess in alcohol, drugs, 1926 Ernest Hemingway’s they adopted a meandering, and sex; they also delighted in jazz. The Sun Also Rises depicts modern Americans traveling The birth of beat through Europe on a quasi- spiritual journey. An idealistic youth culture turns away from mainstream American society in the 1940s. 1952 John Clellon Holmes’s novel Go includes the first use Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and others take to the of the term “beat” to define the roads of North America seeking the meaning of life. people of the beat movement. The beat generation record their thoughts and 1953 Lawrence Ferlinghetti adventures in “spontaneous prose.” opens City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco; it becomes “Beat” writing forges a path into mainstream literature a haunt for the beat writers. in both poetry and prose. 1956 Allen Ginsberg’s first collection of poetry Howl and Other Poems is published, launching him as the leading beat poet. AFTER 1959 William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch uses a radically disjointed, nonlinear style extending the narrative form of the beat generation.

POSTWAR WRITING 265 See also: The Red Room 185 ■ The Catcher in the Rye 256–57 ■ Howl and Other Poems 288 ■ Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 332 The term “beat” simultaneously launch on a riotous road trip, Kerouac typed On the Road onto held notions of being “beatific”; of hitchhiking and taking buses on rolls of tracing paper that he had glued being “beaten” by the punishing a meandering adventure: partying, together to avoid having to change intensity of a hobo existence; and meeting friends, and looking for paper and interrupt his creative flow. of a life lived to a jazz “beat.” In the girls before finally returning to The final manuscript was 120-foot long. 1950s, tales of the beat movement’s New York. The subsequent parts free lifestyle and reckless ways tell of a series of hedonistic charges and stream-of-consciousness style shocked mainstream society, and through North America. mirrored the intensive pace of Sal’s their writings signaled a radical alcohol-infused, vagrant existence, reinvigoration of American literature. Spontaneous prose while imitating the improvisational The appearance of Jack Kerouac’s The narrative form of On the Road, character of jazz music. Kerouac novel, On the Road, in 1957 framed which Kerouac referred to as wrote On the Road in a frenetic him as the leading beat novelist. “spontaneous prose,” was inspired three-week period in April 1951, by an 18-page typed letter that fueled by caffeine and drugs. On the Road details a series of he received in December 1950 The result was a manuscript in journeys that Kerouac took between from his friend Neal Cassady. wildly creative, original prose— 1947 and 1950. In the book they are According to Kerouac, the key to or “spontaneous bop prosody,” as narrated by Sal Paradise (identified the prose was to write swiftly and Ginsberg called it—that came to with Kerouac himself) who is often “without consciousness,” in a define the beat generation. ■ accompanied on his travels by semitrance, allowing the mind to Dean Moriarty (the writer Neal flow freely, associating sights, Cassady). A number of other beat sounds, and senses in a narrative of generation writers also appear in absolute immediacy. For example, the book, disguised by name only, as Sal and Dean reach Chicago, such as Allen Ginsberg (“Carlo Kerouac writes “Screeching Marx”) and William S. Burroughs trolleys, newsboys, gals cutting by, (“Old Bull Lee”). the smell of fried food and beer in the air, neons winking—‘We’re in The book has five parts. The the big town, Sal! Whooee!’” The first sees Sal Paradise setting off long, fluid, descriptive sentences for San Francisco in July 1947. Sal meets Dean Moriarty and the two Jack Kerouac Jack Kerouac was born to French- other beat writers. Those Canadian parents in Lowell, voyages across the North Massachusetts, in 1922. He American landscape were studied at Columbia University relayed in his various roman à where he met Allen Ginsberg, clef writings, friends’ faces only Neal Cassady, and William S. thinly veiled as protagonists. Burroughs who would become Kerouac’s alcoholism led to fellow leading lights of the beat cirrhosis and his death in 1969. generation. Kerouac dropped out in his second year then joined the Other key works merchant navy, before turning to writing as a profession. From 1950 The Town and the City 1947, he became increasingly 1957 On the Road attracted to the whisky-drinking 1958 The Subterraneans hobo lifestyle and began his 1958 The Dharma Bums wandering across America and 1972 Visions of Cody (published Mexico, often visiting various posthumously)

266 IN CONTEXT IWWASMIHATOANHNTAGOIBSTOOHGNMEOERIONPSDEATOIPOLNE FOCUS Nigerian voices THINGS FALL APART (1958), CHINUA ACHEBE BEFORE 1952 Amos Tutuola tells a Yoruba folklore story in English in The Palm-Wine Drinkard. 1954 Cyprian Ekwensi gains international attention with People of the City. AFTER 1960 Wole Soyinka’s play A Dance of the Forests critiques present-day corruption through the nation’s mythological past. 2002 Helon Habila depicts a new generation living in Lagos under a military regime in Waiting for an Angel. 2006 Half of a Yellow Sun, set during the Biafran War, confirms Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as an exceptional new voice and wins the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction. P ublished in 1958, Chinua Achebe’s slim volume of less than 150 pages, Things Fall Apart, is one of the earliest novels to offer a mode of expression to indigenous writers in Nigeria, and was an instrument in the formation of a dazzling canon of literature. This multilayered story of a fictionalized tribal village and its cataclysmic contact with British colonizers in the late 19th century has since become the world’s most widely read African novel, selling more than 12 million copies in over 50 languages. The story told in Things Fall Apart has a resonance for all of the world’s traditional cultures torn apart by invasion.

POSTWAR WRITING 267 See also: Heart of Darkness 196–97 ■ Disgrace 322–23 ■ Half of a Yellow Sun 339 The Igbo people celebrate different compelling plot, and tragic hero, Set in precolonial southern Nigeria festivals throughout the year. In Things but infused with the myths and in the 1890s, Things Fall Apart Fall Apart, the Feast of the New Yam is oral tradition of Nigerian culture. portrays a civilized society that held just before the yam harvest to give has rich traditions of culture, thanks to the Earth goddess, Ani. When Achebe published his commerce, religion, and justice. pivotal work, Nigeria was in a state The people’s social courtesies and The novel’s title is taken from of political flux in the lead up to greetings—such as the breaking W. B. Yeats’s poem “The Second independence in 1960. He wrote and sharing of kola nuts—the Coming,” which was written in the novel partly as a response bargaining of terms of betrothal, the aftermath of World War I. to the representation of Africa in and the importance of women’s Yeats’s apocalyptic imagery of the books he studied at college. In chastity and obedience in this the world caught up in anarchy, 2000 he described how Anglo-Irish patriarchal society would not seem and the arrival of an ambiguous writer Joyce Cary’s novel Mister out of place in a Jane Austen novel. messiah—some unformed, Johnson (1939), set in Nigeria, was In Umuofia, life revolves around the slouching beast—presages the held up as a fine example of writing seasons as villagers plant, tend, novel’s “first coming” of white about Africa, although native and harvest the crop of yams, Christian colonizers who invade Nigerians saw in it an undercurrent observe the “Week of Peace,” and and break apart tribal cultures. of distaste and mockery. He also enjoy celebrations marked with maintained that Joseph Conrad’s palm-wine feasts, wrestling Nigerian reality lurid description of natives in Heart matches, storytelling, and songs. Early in Things Fall Apart, we of Darkness (1899) typified the learn that “Among the Igbo the art racism endemic in literature about A self-made man of conversation is regarded very Africa shown by European writers. The protagonist, Okonkwo, is a highly, and proverbs are the palm- famous wrestler and warrior, a oil with which words are eaten”; Achebe’s reply was to write a quick-to-anger husband of three perhaps it is unsurprising that textured, immersive story of the wives, and the proud owner of a some of the villagers of Umuofia are downfall of a traditional society— large compound. Having inherited won over by the colonizers’ hymns a rich, close community of Igbo nothing from his idle, cowardly, and and Bible stories. Achebe wins over people (formerly Ibo, as the novel indebted father—whom he strives his audience in much the same refers to them). In place of Conrad’s to resemble as little as possible— way, drawing readers into a classic indistinguishable hordes of black Okonkwo works the fields as a ❯❯ novel with a three-part structure, “savages,” Achebe peoples his village of Umuofia with vibrant The white man is characters that leap from the page. very clever … He has put a knife on things that held us together and we have fallen apart. Things Fall Apart

268 THINGS FALL APART Igbo culture European culture Decentralized government One central government with multiple small ruling over a single large diverse groups and no overall ruler. political entity. Belief in the Earth Belief in one God and in goddess, and numerous Jesus Christ, his son on Earth, as the savior and other deities and redeemer of humankind. ancestor spirits. Community elders manage European colonizers saw Africans as primitive, Formal courts settle grievances and settle making little attempt to understand their customs disputes, according to disputes with the goal and cultures. The imposition of alien values and written laws, with the of making peace. institutions led to profound transformations in goal of upholding rights. traditional African communities at all levels. sharecropper to become wealthy, life that Okonkwo concludes more tribe that they worship “gods of building up the storehouses of than once that she should have deceit who tell you to kill your yams and coffers of cowries that been born a boy. fellows and destroy innocent signify prosperity. His second children. There is only one true wife, Ekwefi, is a tribal beauty who Questions and answers God …” As the missionary’s leaves her first husband because of In Igbo culture, the wishes of the converted interpreter struggles to her passion for Okonkwo; their only gods are passed on by egwugwu— explain to the crowd about Jesu child, Ezinma, is a spirited tomboy masked village elders representing Kristi, the son of God, Okonkwo with such an understanding of her the clan’s ancestral spirits—and asks if God also has a wife. The father and the subtleties of village include brutal acts of sacrifice: missionary ploughs on with an these will become the crack in their incomprehensible account of the Masks were worn by Igbo men culture that allows ingress and Holy Trinity, which seems to be for magical purposes during certain collapse. This may be a “land of the little different from the multiple rituals, especially at funerals and living […] not far removed from the gods of the Igbo tribes, and just festivals, or, as in Things Fall Apart, domain of the ancestors,” but there as reliant on blind faith. by the egwugwu to administer justice. are few who adhere as slavishly to the murderous will of the gods as Two sides of the story Okonkwo. His warrior ideology Achebe exposes the brutality begins to set him apart from others of colonization, including who are starting to ask questions massacres and imprisonments, even before the white men arrive. but also describes the work Ekwefi resolves to defend her of Mr. Brown, a gentle missionary, daughter from the gods; Obierika, who listens as well as preaches, Okonkwo’s friend, questions the winning hearts and minds by practice of abandoning twins at combining religion with education, birth—“but although he thought gifts, and medicine. Okonkwo’s for a long time he found no answer.” eldest son, Nwoye, is among those of the tribe who are drawn to the The first white man to arrive in poetry of the new religion and the neighboring village of Mbanta moved by the “gay and rollicking supplies an answer. He tells the

tunes of evangelism.” For Nwoye, Okonkwo’s grandson Obi, who POSTWAR WRITING 269 Christian hymns not only have returns from university abroad and the “power to pluck at the silent struggles with ideals in a society Chinua Achebe and dusty chords in the heart of built on bribery and corruption. an Ibo man,” but seem to answer Achebe then turns back the clock Born in 1930 in the small town “a vague and persistent question in Arrow of God, to continue the of Ogidi, southeast Nigeria, to that haunted his young soul.” story of the destruction of Igbo Protestant parents, Chinua culture in the colonial years. Achebe spoke Igbo at home The power of language and English at school. He Asked why he chose to write in Described as the “father of graduated from University English rather than his native Igbo, modern African literature,” Achebe College, Ibadan, in 1952, and Achebe replied that it would be opened the door to African writing within 12 years had written foolish not to use a language he had in English. In an article in The New the three novels that were spent a lifetime acquiring and one Gong Magazine, columnist Henry to become the foundation of that could be put to active use as Chukwuemeka Onyema suggests his oeuvre. Achebe married “a counterargument to colonization.” that Things Fall Apart’s “singular Christie Chinwe Okoli in 1961, Achebe maintained that written achievement … was that it told us and they had four children. Igbo, devised by the missionaries about ourselves through our own at the turn of the century, was a eyes.” Onyema describes the 1960s An early career in radio mix of dialects that had lost all the in Nigeria as a “literary ferment,” as ended with the outbreak of rhythm and music of the spoken writers sought to define the newly the Biafran War. Achebe went language. The point is illustrated independent nation and to make on to teach in the US and in his novel when the white man’s sense of its contradictions. Among Nigeria, and wrote stories, Igbo interpreter is mocked by them was playwright and novelist poetry, essays, and children’s the local villagers for his different Wole Soyinka, who was awarded books. In 1990 a car crash left dialect—his way of saying “myself” the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature. him confined to a wheelchair translates as “my buttocks.” for the remainder of his life. In Confronting oppression 1992 he became professor of Achebe followed Things Fall Later generations of Nigerian languages and literature at Apart with two novels that form a writers continued to grapple with Bard College, New York, and trilogy built around the country’s the aftermath of colonialism, civil in 2009 he moved to Brown turbulent half-century under British war, and cultural conflict. In 1991, University, Rhode Island. In rule. No Longer at Ease, set in the Ben Okri was awarded the Booker 2007 Achebe was awarded period just before Nigeria gained Prize for The Famished Road, in the Man Booker International independence, tells the story of which a spirit-child faces down Prize for fiction. He died in death to become part of the lives of March 2013 at 82. An abominable religion has real people. Women writers such as settled among you. A man Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have Other key works can now leave his father and also found a voice engaging with his brothers. … I fear for you; Nigeria’s turbulent political history 1960 No Longer at Ease and exploring the place of women 1964 Arrow of God I fear for the clan. in a male-dominated culture. In 1966 A Man of the People Things Fall Apart Adichie’s debut novel, Purple 1987 Anthills of the Savannah Hibiscus (2003), the narrator is a 15-year-old girl struggling to emerge from the repression of a patriarchal Catholic upbringing. Other writers have explored a wide range of modern-day issues—such as homosexuality, prostitution, and environmental degradation—from a Nigerian perspective. ■

270 EATVHBEAENNTWTHEUARMLLMAPNEAMBPOEERRINYHGASS THE TIN DRUM (1959), GÜNTER GRASS IN CONTEXT T he term “unreliable … I stuck to my drum and narrator” refers to first- didn’t grow a finger’s breadth FOCUS person narrators who The unreliable narrator undermine the authority of their from my third birthday on. own stories. Realist novels tend The Tin Drum BEFORE to offer a rational speaking voice 1884 The naive boy hero in telling a story that meets a reader’s war in The Tin Drum. Anyone Mark Twain’s The Adventures expectations. But what if the seeking an example of an unreliable of Huckleberry Finn fails to narrator gives the reader reason to narrator doesn’t need to look any understand the significance of doubt, because he or she is insane, further than the stunted hero of the events that is clear to readers. or has a distorted perception of the novel, Oskar Matzerath. Oskar world, or is very young, or lying? introduces himself from his bed in a 1955 Humbert Humbert’s “mental hospital” where he has been narrative is assembled from Texts of the 20th century are held following his trial for murder. notes made in an asylum and littered with slippery speakers, He explains that until the age of 20 presented after his death in from Humbert Humbert in Vladimir he was just three feet tall, having Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Nabokov’s novel Lolita to Patrick arrested his own growth on his Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis’s third birthday by sheer force of will. AFTER American Psycho. But unreliable 1962 Delinquent teenager narrators have been around for History is happening all around, Alex confesses all in “Nadsat,” centuries, and include Jonathan but the spotlight focuses on the a futuristic teen-speak, in Swift’s naive Gulliver and Mark fierce, tiny figure of Oskar, with Anthony Burgess’s novel Twain’s ingenuous Huckleberry his constant companion—a tin A Clockwork Orange. Finn. Executed well, novels with drum—and a scream that can unreliable narrators engage the break glass. He has two possible 1991 Bret Easton Ellis’s serial reader differently: that element of fathers: his mother’s lover, or her killer speaks through a yuppie doubt both stretches credulity and archetype in American Psycho. draws the reader in. 2001 Yann Martel’s narrator In the midst of history stretches credulity in Life of Günter Grass has been described Pi, with his tale of life adrift as “the conscience of a nation” with a tiger—and then offers for his darkly satirical portrait of the a different option. rise of Nazi sympathies in ordinary families and the aftermath of the

POSTWAR WRITING 271 See also: Tristram Shandy 104–05 ■ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 188–89 ■ Lolita 260–61 ■ A Clockwork Orange 289 ■ American Psycho 313 husband, who runs a grocery store eels. He diverts us down the blind Günter Grass in the Free City of Danzig (now alleys of his obsessions with art, Gdansk, Poland), which is under circus dwarfs, nurses, and the Born in 1927 in Danzig (now German control. Oskar is a witness scents of women he seduces. He Gdansk, Poland) to a German to real events in history in Danzig offers a rational history of Danzig, father and Kashubian mother, and Düsseldorf but, self-absorbed then conjures up a nightclub called Günter Grass attended the and obsessed with his own needs, the Onion Cellar where people chop Conradinum Gymnasium and he is no hero. Over the years he is raw onions to make themselves cry. was a member of the Hitler implicated in a string of deaths. Youth. In late 1944, at the What does Oskar represent? age of 17, he was drafted into Unlikely truths Perhaps he is the devil, using the Waffen-SS (the Nazi elite Sometimes the narration slips into his scream to cut holes in store military wing), as he revealed the third person, or is passed to windows to tempt passersby controversially in 2006. Oskar’s jailer to allow another to steal, or seducing women by perspective. The tone varies: a ingenious means. Or perhaps he After the war, Grass slaughter of nuns on a Normandy embodies Grass’s perception of worked as a miner and farm beach is scripted like a drawing- Germany—immune to suffering laborer, and studied art, before room farce, while Oskar’s poetic during Nazism and quick to bury working as a sculptor and voice both enchants and revolts as the past. What is certain, however, writer in Paris and Berlin. He he describes a fisherman hauling is that through Oskar’s grim published his first poetry and up a horse’s head writhing with magical fantasy the author found a plays in 1955, but his way to drum history into memory. ■ breakthrough came in 1959 with The Tin Drum, which Unreliable narrators come To Kill a Mockingbird was followed by two more in different guises: some are CHILD novels that made up the liars or conceal facts, others Danzig Trilogy. In 1999 he are unstable, confused, or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was awarded the Nobel Prize manipulative. They may in Literature, one of many be immature or unaware, awards during his career. reporting events that the Grass was heavily involved in reader perceives differently. German politics, supporting the Social Democratic Party One Flew over the The Tin A Clockwork Orange and opposing reunification. Cuckoo’s Nest Drum The Catcher in the Rye He died in 2015 at 87. American Psycho Life of Pi Other key works MENTALLY Midnight’s The Blind 1961 Cat and Mouse UNSTABLE/MAD Children Assassin 1963 Dog Years 1999 My Century LYING/CONFUSED 2002 Crabwalk The Sound Heart of Tristram and the Fury Darkness Shandy Wuthering Heights The Turn of the Screw CONCEALED FACTS The Moonstone

272 IOJTUFHSFITONLOKKNTSEH.KEFRIONELD’KSS. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1960), HARPER LEE IN CONTEXT B uilding on the traditions situations, the texts in this genre of 18th-century gothic examine Southern social issues FOCUS literature, with its elements such as racism, poverty, and crime. Southern gothic of fantasy and the grotesque, mid-20th-century writers of Harper Lee’s classic novel To BEFORE the American Deep South, such Kill a Mockingbird incorporates 1940 Carson McCullers’ as Tennessee Williams, Flannery a coming-of-age theme into the debut novel The Heart Is a O’Connor, and Carson McCullers, southern gothic genre, and Lonely Hunter encapsulates established a literary genre known highlights racial prejudice in the the elements of southern as southern gothic. These writers American South in the years before gothic in a story of social used the characteristics of the the civil rights movement. It also misfits in Georgia in the 1930s. traditional gothic style to inspect explores the behavior of those who the unsettling realities and twisted live in a small Southern community. 1955 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, psyches beneath the surface of by playwright Tennessee Southern respectability. With their Challenging convention Williams, is set on a cotton damaged or eccentric characters, The story is set in the mid-1930s in plantation in the Mississippi macabre settings, and sinister Maycomb, an Alabama town where delta and challenges Southern “a day was twenty-four hours long social conventions with its You never really understand but seemed much longer.” The portrayal of the favorite a person until you consider narrator is a young girl, Scout, nearly son as a repressed gay six years old at the start of events. man and alcoholic. things from his point of She is a tomboy, who questions view—until you climb into his social conventions. Scout lives with AFTER her widowed father, lawyer Atticus 1980 A Confederacy of skin and walk around in it. Finch (a morally upright man who Dunces, by John Kennedy To Kill a Mockingbird strives to teach his children the Toole, is set in New Orleans values of understanding and and follows the antics of compassion), her brother Jem, and slob and misfit Ignatius J. their black cook, Calpurnia. Reilly. Toole is posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize Scout describes daily life in for fiction for the book a Maycomb, their neighbors, her year after its publication. friendship with an unusual boy called Dill, and her school, creating a picture of an apparently timeless society in the Deep South. Heat

POSTWAR WRITING 273 See also: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 188–89 ■ The Sound and the Fury 242–43 ■ Invisible Man 259 ■ In Cold Blood 278–79 Over the course of the novel, Scout’s perception of the world around her matures from a naive ideal to a more realistic understanding of society, but she nevertheless retains her optimism. As the novel This experience Yet through the influence of her father progresses, Scout's leads to the loss of and others around her, Scout never awareness of evil her childhood loses her fundamental belief in in the world innocence, as Scout human goodness. increases as she is learns that the world exposed to darker is not always just elements of life, or fair. including racism and intolerance. bakes the streets, refined ladies When Atticus agrees to take on the ends with Scout older, wiser, and gossip at missionary teas, poor defense of a local black man, Tom reflecting on human behavior white children arrive at school with Robinson, who is falsely accused within her small community. no shoes, and black people live of raping a white woman, Scout segregated lives as land workers describes the tensions and violence Published as the civil rights or domestic servants. In southern created by Atticus’s determination movement was accelerating, To gothic tradition, however, there to defend Robinson, in spite of the Kill a Mockingbird was an almost are oddities in the community—in fact that, as he admits, it is a lost instant best seller. Despite its particular the reclusive Boo Radley, cause. Following the trial there is gentle tone, the novel, like others in who lives in a supposedly haunted a murderous attack on the children, the genre, exposed the darkness house, and about whom the which reveals Boo Radley to be underpinning the gentility of a children weave fantastical tales. guardian, not a monster. The novel Southern community forced to face the reality of racial hatred. ■ Harper Lee Born in the town of Monroeville, childhood, she started To Kill Alabama, on April 28, 1926, a Mockingbird, which she Harper Lee was a loner and a completed in 1959. tomboy. Her father was a lawyer, and her best friend was the author The tremendous success of Truman Capote (she would later To Kill a Mockingbird gained help him to research In Cold Blood). Lee many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in Lee attended the University of 1961. She accepted a post on the Alabama, where she edited the National Council of the Arts but university magazine. Although largely retired from public life she started law school, she from the 1970s. It was believed wanted to write, and in 1949 that Lee had only ever written dropped out and moved to New one book but in 2015 Go Set a York. In 1956 close friends offered Watchman, her second novel, to fund her for a year so that she was published: although a could write. Taking inspiration sequel, it was written before from events and people in her To Kill a Mockingbird.

274 IBNOTSOEONGLETPOIHRHNSIOANATSCGNALTEINASHWDIEMLWOCTSOEHTUAMRITFUAASGLTEL HOPSCOTCH (1963), JULIO CORTÁZAR IN CONTEXT O ne of the distinguishing case of Argentine writer Julio features of the novel is Cortázar’s Hopscotch, the novel is FOCUS generally thought to be subverted even from a physical point The antinovel the sequential, linear organization of view. The reader of an antinovel of its narrative segments: chapters, is forced to suspend all narrative BEFORE more or less in sequence, are expectations and to engage with 1605 Don Quixote, by Miguel presumed or expected to hold the text in ways that a traditional de Cervantes, is regarded as equal status with each other, work of fiction does not require. As the first modern novel, but its from a narrative perspective. the reader of Hopscotch is told in the literary features and episodic book’s Table of Instructions, “In its structure are at odds with later The antinovel—first named as own way, this book consists of many definitions of the genre. such by French writer Jean-Paul books, but two books above all.” Sartre in the mid-20th century— 1939 At Swim-Two-Birds by subverts this assumption, marking An open-ended book Irish author Flann O’Brien has a radical departure from the Hopscotch can be read as a multiple characters and plots conventional novel with respect to straightforward novel—the first that lose linear structure. plot, dialogue, and structure. In the book—one chapter after the other (ending at Chapter 56), or as a AFTER References to jazz appear throughout second story, skipping from the 1973 The Castle of Crossed Hopscotch, not only in its subject so-called Expendable Chapter 73 Destinies, by Italian author matter but also in its jazz-infused to 1, back and forth, all the way to Italo Calvino, has multiple language, nonlinear structure, and 58 and 131, where the reader gets plots; each is determined by improvisational approach. caught in an endless loop of the a randomly chosen sequence latter two. The author also allows of tarot cards. the reader to explore the novel in any other sequence, and to ignore 2001 Bartleby & Co., by the Expendable Chapters entirely. Spanish writer Enrique Villa-Matas, revolves around Even in the more linear option, unwritten texts, fragmented the plot moves in an erratic fashion, notes, footnotes, literary capturing a series of fragments as it allusions, and comments on follows the main character, Horacio authors both real and fictional. Oliveira, initially in 1950s Paris. We discover Oliveira’s intellectual interests and his passion for jazz—a

POSTWAR WRITING 275 See also: Don Quixote 76–81 ■ Tristram Shandy 104–05 ■ The Outsider 245 ■ If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler 298–99 Hopscotch invites the reader to First book experiment with different pathways Expendable Chapters through its pages. There is a “normal” first book of 56 chapters, and a second making use of 99 “Expendable Chapters.” Each book can be read separately, and there also several alternative options. 73 71 81 Julio Cortázar 12345 Julio Cortázar was born to Argentinian parents in 116 84 74 Belgium in 1914. His family moved to Switzerland at form of music that was a clear forced travel across countries is the beginning of World influence on Cortázar’s style, with mirrored in the effects that the War I, but settled in Buenos its staccato, syncopated rhythm. book as an object demands of the Aires, Argentina, in 1919. We hear of Oliveira’s discussions reader. In this way the author with fellow members of the vaguely successfully draws attention to the Cortázar became qualified defined Serpent Club, their text’s fictional constructs, as well as a teacher at an early age, reverence for mysterious author as to the expectations that we have and began his university Morelli, and Oliveira’s love of (but of the novel form. ■ studies in philosophy and troubled relationship with) La Maga. language in Buenos Aires, but Eventually, he heads to Argentina, these were interrupted due to where he finds work in an asylum. financial difficulties. Narrative strategies [A] chess world where you In 1951 he emigrated to The second book takes Argentina moved about like a knight France, where he worked as as its stage. In some Expendable trying to move like a rook a translator while constantly Chapters, Cortázar’s belief that trying to move like a bishop. traveling and writing short the reader should be aware of the stories. He became engaged workings of a novel—as participant Hopscotch in political causes, supporting and even conspirator—can be the left-wing movements in detected, ultimately destroying the Cuba and mainland Latin status of the text itself as a novel. America, which he visited several times from the 1960s Cortázar’s depiction of mental onward. Around the same deterioration, disconnected and time, his novels, including alienating human interaction, and Hopscotch, started being published. Cortázar died in 1984 at 69, and is buried in Paris. Other key works 1960 The Winners 1967 Blow-Up and Other Stories 1968 62: A Model Kit 1973 A Manual for Manuel

276 ILHNIEVTEHHAFEDOARDTEETVCEEIMDRPEOTDRTDOIE CATCH-22 (1961), JOSEPH HELLER IN CONTEXT W ith a fascination for the Anything worth morbid and the taboo, dying for … is certainly FOCUS black humor uses farce American black humor to make light of controversial or worth living for. serious issues. Such humor often Catch-22 BEFORE comes from despair or horror and 1939 The Day of the Locust by frequently highlights the futility Nathanael West satirizes the of life. Many dark, satirical novels grotesque vanity of Hollywood came out of the US in the latter half and its hangers-on during the of the 20th century, when the Great Depression. nation assumed leadership of the West after the shattering of Europe 1959 Philip Roth’s fiction through two world wars, and the collection Goodbye, Columbus onset of the Cold War nuclear age. humorously deals with the dark or taboo side of subjects The madness of sanity situation (which refers to a military such as sex, religion, and Catch-22, the satirical novel by code of practice): they can apply for cultural assimilation. American Joseph Heller (1923–99), discharge on the grounds of insanity, is set in World War II, although the but the very process of claiming AFTER book can be read as a commentary madness using the correct protocol 1966 Thomas Pynchon’s The on the ongoing Vietnam War. proves their sanity and so they Crying of Lot 49 explores the must continue to fly. failure of communication and It follows the exploits of Captain the absurd and disordered Yossarian and his fellow airmen, The madness of war so clearly nature of the world. who serve on bombing missions. seen by Yossarian is underscored Unmoved by patriotism, Yossarian through Heller’s use of paradox, 1969 The search for meaning is furious that his life is at risk; absurdity, and the kind of circular in increasingly fractured times convinced he is surrounded by reasoning exemplifed by Catch-22 is satirized in Kurt Vonnegut’s crazed idiots, he tries to avoid his itself. True to the conventions of Slaughterhouse-Five, inspired missions by faking illness. Yet he black humor, the novel is by turns by the author’s experience of and his comrades are in a “Catch-22” bleak, hilarious, and tragic. ■ the firebombing of Dresden and the absurdity of war. See also: The Crying of Lot 49 290 ■ Slaughterhouse-Five 291 ■ American Psycho 313

POSTWAR WRITING 277 EAVNEDRTYHDEAYLIMVIIRNGACPLAESST DEATH OF A NATURALIST (1966), SEAMUS HEANEY IN CONTEXT T he political, cultural, and “Churning Day.” While there is no personal landscape of the progression of a narrative in the FOCUS generation of poets that collection, the 34 poems all revolve Postwar poetry sprang up after World War II was around similar elements of style one scarred by the war’s atrocities and thematics, with natural BEFORE and filled with guilt. Writers and imagery used to highlight the 1945 Anglo-American poet other artists had a troubled effects of the war upon external W. H. Auden’s Collected Poetry relationship with the past, whether and internal spaces. In the second includes work on public public or personal. In the work poem, “Death of a Naturalist,” a boy politics and the start of his of poets such as W. H. Auden, encounters frogs that Heaney likens religious imagery, reflecting Ted Hughes, and Philip Larkin, to grenades of mud, rupturing the the crisis of modern society. personal relationships often stood childhood connection with nature. in for wider interactions, and the 1957 In The Hawk in the Rain, memory of the war insinuated The past is also incarnated in English poet Ted Hughes itself in imagery, references, Heaney's family members, his explores love and war through poetic forms, and style. father in particular. In “Digging” and alongside the symbolic he shows their now outmoded link lives of animals, showing a Memory and change to manual labor and expertise world of struggle mirroring The first major poetry collection by in older ways of life, recalling his the one of humanity. Irish poet Seamus Heaney (1939– father digging for potatoes and his 2013), the successful and acclaimed grandfather digging turf. Yet their 1964 English poet Philip Death of a Naturalist, explores the labor, after all, is perhaps not too Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings schism between childhood and different from his own, as Heaney is a series of poems conscious adulthood, past and present as a almost apologetically recognizes of the decline of established version of the division between writing as a link to his earthier, familial and social relations. a prewar and a postwar world. more “useful” forebears. Themes and imagery invoke nature, 1965 American poet Sylvia family, human labor, and rural Heaney was awarded the Plath’s Ariel, published Irish landscapes in poems such Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, posthumously, sees a shift to a as “Blackberry Picking” and “for works of lyrical beauty and dark and unsettling flow of ethical depth, which exalt everyday imagery, borrowing from the miracles and the living past”. ■ horrors of war crimes. See also: The Waste Land 213 ■ The Bell Jar 290 ■ Crow 291

278 SWWTHOIHEMTARHETETU’WHSSIE.GNTODGOITWDDTROOOBNEG IN COLD BLOOD (1966), TRUMAN CAPOTE IN CONTEXT T he term “New Journalism” his theory: a wealthy Kansas was introduced by critics farmer, Herbert Clutter, and FOCUS in the 1960s to describe members of his family had been New Journalism the work of American writers such shot dead for no apparent reason. as Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Assisted by his friend, author BEFORE Tom Wolfe, and Gay Talese, who Harper Lee, Capote visited the Early 1900s Investigative used literary techniques to relate scene and began researching journalists such as Lincoln nonfictional stories and present the murder. In Cold Blood was Steffens and Ida M. Tarbell factual reporting dramatically. published seven years later. blend literary techniques and Capote’s theory that journalism journalism in articles that could be forced to yield a new art Murder in Kansas expose corrupt business and form, the “nonfiction novel” (which The book describes the murder, government practices. he expounded in a 1966 interview which occurred on November 15, in The New York Times), lay at the 1959. There were four victims: 1962 Journalist Gay Talese heart of his book In Cold Blood. 48-year-old Clutter, a churchgoing, uses interviews, dialogue, and hardworking man; his wife, Bonnie; observation in a factual but In 1959 Capote had read a his daughter, Nancy; and his son, literary article on boxer Joe newspaper report that offered an Kenyon. The family were well Louis in Esquire magazine. ideal subject on which to exercise respected and popular—their brutal slaying shocked the AFTER I thought that Mr. Clutter community. A local man said they 1970 Tom Wolfe challenges was a very nice gentleman … were “gentle, kindly people, people traditional journalism with I knew—murdered.” Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing I thought so right up to the the Flak Catchers, reporting in moment that I cut his throat. In contrast the two murderers, a lively observational style. Richard “Dick” Hickock and Perry In Cold Blood Smith, were ex-convicts—misfits 1972 Hunter S. Thompson on parole from the Kansas State publishes the drug-fueled Fear Penitentiary. Dick’s promise to and Loathing in Las Vegas, the Perry was that they would “blast genesis of “gonzo journalism,” hair all over them walls.” The two in which the writer plays an were caught and arrested in Las integral part in the story. Vegas on December 30, 1959. Capote immersed himself in his subject, spending time with friends

POSTWAR WRITING 279 See also: To Kill a Mockingbird 272–73 ■ The Armies of the Night 291 ■ Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 332 Blending fact and fiction Journalism New Fiction • Accurate and Journalism • Literature created thoroughly researched. • Creates a connection from the imagination • Focuses on narrative— with the reader. telling the story. • Blends reporting with of the author. • Brevity and concise a distinct literary “voice.” • May be based form are valued. • Examines emotions, on real events. motivations, and characters. • Retains factual accuracy. and relatives of the victims, local New Yorker magazine, and was an Journalism. He stated that Capote’s residents, police, prison warders, instant success. American journalist novel incorporated all the form’s psychiatrists, and the murderers Jack Olsen said it was the first book key techniques: firsthand themselves. He did not record to make true crime a “successful, witnessing of events; real dialogue; interviews, but scribbled down commercial genre.” Even so, Capote third-person narrative; and detailed quotes and impressions afterward. was accused of having falsified or description of minute life details, exaggerated events. He denied this such as how the killers brushed Truth and embellishment falsification, though there is some their teeth. This created a nearly The end result is a remarkable work evidence of embellishment. factual reportage presented in the in which Capote constructs scene style of a novel, enabling readers after scene, building up characters Tom Wolfe wrote that In Cold to gain an understanding of events and allowing participants to tell Blood had given New Journalism and characters that was all the their stories in their own words. “an overwhelming momentum,” and more powerful for being based on The book was first serialized in The he went on to codify the features of real events. ■ the form in his 1973 book, The New Truman Capote Born Truman Streckfus Persons was a controversial figure. A in New Orleans on September 30, socialite, heavy drinker, and 1924, Capote had a troubled sometime drug user, he enjoyed childhood. His parents divorced a flamboyant lifestyle and lived when he was four, and he was openly as a gay man, which was raised by relatives. He then unusual at that time. In later life rejoined his mother and her he became reclusive, and died in second husband, Joseph Capote, Los Angeles on August 25, 1984. attending school in New York City and Greenwich, Connecticut. His Other key works career began with a string of short stories published in magazines 1945 “Miriam” (short story) such as Harper’s Bazaar and 1951 The Grass Harp The New Yorker. His first novel, 1958 Breakfast at Tiffany’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, was 1986 Answered Prayers: published in 1948 and established The Unfinished Novel him as a significant writer. Capote (published posthumously)

ITS ENDINGBENUDTINGNAETVEEVERRYEMNODMIENNGT ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE (1967), GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ



282 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE IN CONTEXT Time was not José Arcadio and Úrsula have two passing … it was sons—a lusty giant, also named FOCUS turning in a circle … José Arcadio, and his anxious, The Latin American boom One Hundred Years prescient brother Aureliano. Their names, physical traits, and BEFORE of Solitude personalities are repeated down 1946–49 Guatemalan Miguel the generations, while characters Angel Asturias blends Their writing was fueled by the such as Pilar Ternera, the village Modernist techniques with counterculture of the 1960s, and prostitute, both enrich the gene surrealism and folklore in Mr. their narratives frequently make pool and complicate it, by coupling President and Men of Maize. use of innovative and experimental with and bearing children for techniques such as nonlinear time, multiple Buendías. 1962 In The Death of Artemio shifting perspectives, and magic Cruz, Carlos Fuentos layers realism—a technique regarded by Through all this complexity, the memory, poetic imagery, many to be an invention of South beating heart of Macondo is always stream of consciousness, American literature. the matriarch Úrsula, whose long life and multiple perspectives to allows her to protect and maintain explore corruption in Mexico. Isolation the Buendía family in every new Often considered the masterwork generation after each invasion of 1963 Argentinian Julio of the boom, Colombian García incomers and the episodes of Cortázar allows readers to Márquez’s One Hundred Years of insanity that follow them. choose their own path through Solitude brings together Bible his radically experimental stories, ancient myths, and South Invasion work Hopscotch. American traditions of magic, Each generation is faced with its resurrection, and regeneration in a own fresh catastrophe, many of AFTER metaphorical commentary on the which parody an episode in Latin 1969 The shattered society continent’s history. American history or reflect the of 1950s’ Peru is revealed at continent’s rich tradition of myth lightning speed in a discussion The story spans one century and and legend. Although he is an artist between two men of different seven generations of a single family, at heart, Aureliano is soon caught classes in Mario Vargas Llosa’s the Buendías. Macondo, the town up in civil wars that ravage the Conversation in the Cathedral. that they found, represents the country for years. He becomes history of Colombia at large. At the a famous colonel, renowned A s its name suggests, the story’s opening, Macondo is a small throughout the land as much for Latin American boom was village of adobe houses, wedged his poetry as his military exploits. an explosion of literary between mountains and swamp. creativity that occurred in South Its isolation from the modern world The house in Aractaca, Colombia, America in the 1960s. Although is complete; no route stretches back where Gabriel García Márquez grew up Jorge Luis Borges had ignited a over the mountains. Established by is now a pilgrimage site for fans of the slow-burning fuse some 20 years José Arcadio Buendía and his wife author, who come to visit the place that before with Ficciones—a puzzle Úrsula Iguarán, it is a utopia where inspired the creation of Macondo. box of short stories that broke all everyone is younger than 30 years literary conventions—the boom old and no one has yet died. years saw the publication of stellar works that gained worldwide attention for authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, and Mario Vargas Llosa. These intellectuals engaged with the political struggles of Latin America.

POSTWAR WRITING 283 See also: Ficciones 245 ■ Hopscotch 274–75 ■ Pedro Páramo 287–88 ■ The Death of Artemio Cruz 290 ■ The Time of the Hero 290 ■ Midnight’s Children 300–05 ■ The House of the Spirits 334 ■ Love in the Time of Cholera 335 ■ 2666 339 All Aureliano’s victories come to squad. The town has been changed Macondo soon becomes an outpost nothing however, as the country forever, and the opening of a new of US economic imperialism. The remains convulsed by conflict, a railroad exposes Macondo to the American Fruit Company turns the parody of the bloody struggles that influence of the outside world for town into a banana plantation, wracked Latin America in the 19th the first time. controlled by a small encampment century. The wars bring death and of Americans. When the workers go violence to the previously peaceful At first the villagers are enthralled on strike for better conditions, they Macondo, and Aureliano’s nephew by the wonders of modernity—they are massacred in an episode that Arcadio becomes a dictatorial cannot understand how an actor forms the violent catalyst of the governor until he is shot by a firing who dies in one movie, can come town’s final decline. ❯❯ back to life to appear in another—but Unknown Úrsula José Arcadio cousins Iguarán Buendía Rebeca José Arcadio Pilar Ternera Colonel Remedios Amaranta Aureliano Moscote Buendía Santa Sofía Arcadio Aureliano 17 sons de la Piedad José Remedios José Arcadio Petra Cotes Aureliano Fernanda del the Beauty Segundo Segundo Carpio Gaston José Meme Mauricio The same names recur across Arcadio II Babilonia the seven generations of the Buendía family with bewildering Amaranta Aureliano II regularity. This family tree depicts Úrsula the various relationships of the Buendías with family members Aureliano III in yellow boxes and incestuous couplings shown by yellow lines.

284 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE The misery inflicted on Macondo between brother and sister, and the The last that remained of a represents the centuries of pain natural progression of family from past whose annihilation had caused by Western economic Adam and Eve in the Bible would not taken place because it was exploitation. Even a rainstorm that have progressed along similar lines. still in a process of annihilation. lasts for four years, 11 months, and Some 17th-century arrivals in South two days, fails to wash the town America believed that the Garden One Hundred Years clean. It does, however, cause an of Eden was sited in eastern Bolivia. of Solitude exodus, leaving Macondo empty The first Conquistadors thought aside from a handful of Buendías they had discovered a people madness, he becomes literally living out their final days in the town. descended from the son of Noah, bonded to the chestnut tree in a survivor of the Great Flood, or his garden, and when he is taken Bible stories and myths possibly from the lost tribes of Israel. indoors the smell of mushrooms Márquez draws on South America’s and wood-flower fungus follows him. mixed heritage of myths and Bible Deluge myths were widespread As Úrsula ages and her sight fades, tales to tell the story of a paradise among indigenous South American “the lucidity of her old age allows destroyed through its loss of people. These bubble to the surface her to see,” and she develops her innocence. In Macondo “the in the great rain toward the end of other senses: using odors to world was so recent that many One Hundred Years of Solitude. remember sights, she tracks a things lacked names.” The novel’s child’s movements by sprinkling exploration of the history of human Science and magic a little rosewater on his head; and progress therefore begins with an Magic is not sprinkled lightly she distinguishes color by texture. idiosyncratic Buendía creation myth. across this novel; it is woven into the fabric of its lilting, poetic text. García Márquez said that he The family’s founding marriage At first, the villagers are mystified discovered the key to handling is a union between the cousins by modern phenomena such as the narrative voice in his novel José Arcadio and Úrsula, and the false teeth and photographs. But story of a previous Buendía incest even when the modernization of that produced a child with a pig’s Macondo is well underway, the tail becomes an ever-present forces of magic carry just as much anxiety. As it turns out, this fear weight as reason and science. was entirely justified; the final Remedios the Beauty, a woman too Aureliano is born with the feared beautiful to be looked upon, rises to affliction. There are several Inca heaven in a cloud of bedsheets. After creation myths founded on incest the first José Arcadio descends into Gabriel García Márquez Born in Columbia in 1928, Gabriel revolution in 1959, he worked in José García Márquez was raised Bogotá and New York for Prensa by his grandparents in Aractaca, Latina, the Cuban news agency. a town resembling the fictional His second full novel, One Macondo of One Hundred Years of Hundred Years of Solitude was Solitude. This upbringing shaped written in Mexico City and his anti-imperialist beliefs. During earned the author worldwide The Violence, a 10-year period of acclaim. Márquez authored 22 political repression in Colombia, books and was awarded the García Márquez became a reporter Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. in Barranquillo. He died in Mexico City in 2014. Although Garcia Márquez’s Other key works journalism flourished, his liberal views meant that he had to leave 1985 Love in the Time of Cholera Colombia and work as a foreign 2004 Memoirs of My Melancholy correspondent in Europe. Whores After reporting on the Cuban

POSTWAR WRITING 285 in his grandmother’s stories and from an aunt who had a knack for offering fantastical explanations with the conviction of the truth. Resurrection remains untouched by the passing A banana plantation is established In One Hundred Years of Solitude of time. Rescued from the firing in Macondo, and the American Fruit the dead continue to exert an squad, Aureliano retreats there to Company’s economic imperialism influence on the living and the fashion tiny gold fishes, which he leads to a massacre and reflects the grave is a door to multiple realities then melts down and makes all over US’s exploitation of Latin America. beyond our own. Early in the story again in an attempt to live forever José Arcadio Buendía throws a in the present moment—a bitter removed “all trace of man’s passage spear through the throat of Prudencio reflection of the futile repetitions of on earth from the room.” As he Aguilar, a neighbor who insults the story and of human history. reads he finds himself “deciphering him. José Arcadio is then haunted the instant that he was living, by the man’s spirit until he is on his When the last Buendía is drawn deciphering it as he lived it, own deathbed. The two men make to the laboratory to finally unravel prophesying himself in the act plans for a bird-breeding farm in the scrolls which document and of deciphering the last page of the afterlife so that they will have prophesy Macondo’s 100-year the parchments, as if he were “something to do on the tedious history, and which were delivered to looking into a speaking mirror.” Sundays of death.” the first José Arcadio by the gypsy In this extraordinary metafictional Melquíades, he finds prehistoric moment the narrator, character, and The fixation on death persists plants and luminous insects have reader arrive at the point at which when distant relative Rebeca arrives past, present, and future combine at the Buendía house dragging a bag Races condemned to one and fall into the void beyond which of her parents’ bones. She eats earth hundred years of solitude the words stop on the page. and lime, the stuff of the grave, while she awaits their proper burial. did not have a second One Hundred Years of Solitude opportunity on earth. has sold more than 30 million copies Circular time One Hundred Years and is regarded as a masterpiece Fractured or nonlinear time is a key of a literary boom that reverberated feature of the Latin American of Solitude across two decades. Márquez’s boom’s postmodernist approach to postmodern vision spoke to both literature. The opening lines set Latin America and the wider world this up in a very memorable way: in its depiction of a planet that is “Many years later, as he faced the doomed to repeat a cycle of endless firing squad, Colonel Aureliano environmental catastrophe, warfare, Buendía was to remember that and infighting over and over for distant afternoon when his father generation after generation. ■ took him to discover ice.” Time is cyclical in the story: present, past, and future events are commingled in the 100-year span of the Buendía family. The setting, too, is circular. All of the action takes place within concentric spheres: first, the modern world that is encroaching on Macondo; then the village itself; the Buendía’s house; and finally the mysterious laboratory that is established in the heart of the house and which

286 FURTHER READING PAROLES priest in Johannesburg who is in The train came out of the search of his son, who has been long border tunnel—and (1946), JACQUES PRÉVERT involved in the murder of a white activist for racial justice. It also there was the snow Paroles (“Words”) is the first poetry tells the story of the activist’s father, country. The night had collection by the French poet and and how his own prejudices and screenwriter Prévert (1900–77). views are changed by his son’s turned white. Comprising 95 poems of varying death and writing, and by meeting Snow Country length, it reveals multiple elements Kumalo. Paton’s narrative reveals of his trademark writing style, such the changing reality of South Africa Yasanuri Kawabata as wordplay, prose poems, puns, on the verge of apartheid. and mini dialogues. The collection and isolation. Kawabata’s focus on covers a variety of subjects and SNOW COUNTRY the personal, with no mention of the themes, entwining everyday life in fighting in World War II, which was postwar Paris with sentiments of (1948), YASUNARI KAWABATA raging at the time of writing, may antiwar protest, critiques of both have been a conscious artistic religion and politics, and a reflection Japanese novelist Yasunari response to the conflict. of the role of art in society. Kawabata (1899–1972) is a Nobel Laureate. One of his most famous THE LAGOON AND CRY, THE BELOVED novels, Snow Country, tells of OTHER STORIES COUNTRY doomed love amid the mountains of western Japan. Shimamura— (1951), JANET FRAME (1948), ALAN PATON a bored, wealthy businessman— meets Komako, a beautiful but A collection of short stories, this The masterpiece of South African forlorn geisha at a hot-spring resort. was the first publication by New author Paton (1903–88) focuses on The landscape becomes a metaphor Zealand author Frame (1934–2004). Stephen Kumalo, a black Anglican for feelings—including hopelessness To varying extents, the texts in the collection question their own status Ernest Hemingway traveled widely to pursue— as fiction, explore the author’s among other interests—his love agency and identity, and experiment Born in Illinois, in 1899, of hunting, a subject that would with narrative voice. The book’s Hemingway discovered his appear in many of his stories. He publication and critical reception— affinity for writing early in life returned to journalism to report including a highly regarded literary as a reporter for The Kansas on the Spanish Civil War (1936– prize—were crucial in saving City Star. He later served as a 39) and the Normandy landings Frame from a lobotomy and a series volunteer ambulance driver in (1944), and won the Nobel Prize of atrocious practices in institutions World War I in Italy, from where in 1954. Hemingway committed for the mentally ill, where she had he returned wounded in 1918. suicide in Idaho in 1961. been committed. His first novel, The Sun Also Rises, was written while working Key works as an overseas correspondent in Paris. Establishing himself in 1929 A Farewell to Arms Europe, Hemingway saw 1940 For Whom the Bell Tolls increasing success from his 1952 The Old Man and short stories and novels and the Sea (see opposite)

POSTWAR WRITING 287 THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA of dystopian fiction. In a world in William Golding which knowledge and books are (1952), ERNEST HEMINGWAY banned, Guy Montag, a fireman Golding was born near the (in Fahrenheit 451, a fireman is a British town of Newquay, Written during Hemingway’s stay person who is in charge of setting Cornwall, in September 1911. in Cuba in 1951, The Old Man and fire to books) slowly rediscovers his He grew up in a political the Sea was the last piece of fiction own humanity and individuality. household in Wiltshire: his to be published during the author’s The story highlights the conflict father, Alec, was a science lifetime. The story is as simple as between mindlessly following teacher, a socialist, and a the writing style, depicting the orders and questioning established rationalist, while his mother, struggle of old fisherman Santiago power structures, and the role that Mildred Curnoe, was a female with a marlin off the coasts of Cuba books and knowledge can play in suffrage activist. Golding and Florida. Nevertheless, the work that ongoing struggle. studied natural sciences, then is deeply emotional and powerful, English literature at Oxford. as both the Pulitzer and Nobel LORD OF THE FLIES He served in the Royal Navy commissions acknowledged in during World War II, and their awards to Hemingway. (1954), WILLIAM GOLDING published his first work of Multiple interpretations of the book fiction, Lord of the Flies, in have been suggested, such as that it Despite its initial lack of success, 1954. He kept writing until is a reflection on the author’s career, Lord of the Flies has since become his death in 1993, and was that it has an allegorical religious a classic and fundamental text of awarded both the Booker significance, or that it is a personal dystopian, allegorical, political, and and Nobel prizes. story based on people Hemingway satirical writing. The story begins encountered during his life. with a group of boys stranded on Key works an otherwise unpopulated island, FAHRENHEIT 451 and follows their unsuccessful, 1954 Lord of the Flies (see left) violent, and ultimately savage 1955 The Inheritors (1953), RAY BRADBURY attempts to impose different types 1980, 1987, 1989 To the Ends of self-government and order on of the Earth: A Sea Trilogy One of the most famous novels by the group. The story takes place the American writer of speculative in the shadow of a rotting pig’s Hobbit (1937). Taking inspiration fiction Ray Bradbury (1920–2012), skull surrounded by insects—the from events in the world wars, his Fahrenheit 451 is a key example eponymous Lord of the Flies of childhood in South Africa, and his the title. Although Golding’s first studies in Icelandic and Germanic A book is a loaded gun novel has often been challenged literatures, he developed the epic in the house next door … for its controversial exploration of tale of The Lord of the Rings. The Who knows who might human nature, utilitarian themes, story follows multiple characters as and violence, it is nevertheless a they journey through The Fellowship be the target of the fascinating insight into political, of the Ring, The Two Towers, and well-read man? psychological, and philosophical The Return of the King, in a life-or- thought of its time. death quest to end the spread of Fahrenheit 451 evil forces across Middle-earth. Ray Bradbury THE LORD OF THE RINGS PEDRO PÁRAMO (1954–1955), J. R. R. TOLKIEN (1955), JUAN RULFO English writer and academic Tolkien (1892–1973) helped to redevelop the Influencing writers such as Gabriel fantasy genre with the three-volume García Márquez and José Saramago, sequel to his children’s book The Pedro Páramo by Mexican author

288 FURTHER READING Yasar Kemal MEMED, MY HAWK openly condemn consumer capitalism, homophobia, racism, and Born in Gökçedam, Turkey, (1955), YASAR KEMAL cultural hegemony in the US. The in 1923, Kemal experienced book’s publisher was charged with childhood hardships that may Kemal’s first full novel, Memed, obscenity, but won the case, which have contributed to his later My Hawk—originally titled Ince only served to increase demand for urge to speak out on behalf Memed (“Memed, the Slim”)—was the book and boost circulation both of the dispossessed. He was the first Turkish-language book to in the US and across the world. blinded in one eye as a child, achieve international fame. The and suffered the tragedy of first volume in a series of four, it DOCTOR ZHIVAGO witnessing his father’s murder follows the troubled story of young at the age of five. He first met Anatolian Memed, who runs from (1957), BORIS PASTERNAK with literary acclaim with his his abusers with his loved one short stories and novels, which Hatche, loses her, and joins a band The internationally acclaimed novel he wrote in the 1950s and 60s of brigands. He returns to his Doctor Zhivago by Russian writer while working as a journalist. mother and hometown to challenge Pasternak (1890–1960) is a thought- He also wrote ballads and the abusive landowner who caused provoking investigation of the children’s books. Kemal was Hatche’s death, and discovers that Russian Communist Party between awarded 38 literary prizes his story has only just begun. the revolution of 1905 and World throughout his career, and War I. It had to be published in Italy was nominated for the Nobel TINHETHDEEVBIALCTKOLAPNAYDS due to censorship by the Russian Prize in 1973. He died in 2015. government, which also removed the (1956), JOÃO GUIMARÃES ROSA Nobel Prize awarded to Pasternak. Key works The story is told through multiple A major work of South American characters—centered around Yuri 1954 The Drumming Out literature, The Devil to Pay in the Zhivago—as they adapt to the new 1955 Memed, My Hawk Backlands, by Brazilian writer political reality of their country. It (see right, above) João Guimarães Rosa (1908–67), is deals with the regime’s misguided 1969 They Burn The Thistles narrated by ex-mercenary Riobaldo attempts to impose conformity and as a long and continuous tale, with its misreadings of socialist ideals, Juan Rulfo (1917–86) is a surreal, no section breaks. It is the story of as well as the characters’ struggles supernatural, and enigmatic the narrator’s life, his encounters in their attempts to deal with and story of grief, haunting memories, with turncoat ranchers and other overcome the alienation, loneliness, and deeply fraught relationships. brigands, and the devil himself, and coldness of communist Russia. Through nonlinear storytelling, as they all cross paths, literally and the blurring of events, dreams, metaphorically, in the outback of LA JALOUSIE and hallucinations, the reader is the Brazilian state Minas Gerais. dragged into the confusion of the (1957), ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET narrator Juan Preciado. He tells of his return to the ghost town HOWL AND OTHER POEMS An experimental French nouveau of Comala after his mother’s roman (new novel), La Jalousie by death to fulfill her last wish—to (1956), ALLEN GINSBERG Robbe-Grillet (1922–2008) features a find his father, Pedro Páramo. Juan narrator who is effectively absent— is shocked to discover the extent The first and most significant although his presence is implied— of Páramo’s influence in the town. collection by American poet from the events he describes. He As the narrative unfolds, Páramo Ginsberg (1926–97), and the most spies, out of jealousy, on his wife is revealed as protagonist and influential for the beat generation through a “jalousie,” a type of antagonist of the story, holding movement. Containing among other window. Scenes are repeated the power of life and death over poems the epic “Howl,” Ginsberg’s multiple times, with some of the Comala and its inhabitants. pieces are raw and emotional, and details changed. Ambiguous and

POSTWAR WRITING 289 She begins serving: the modern governmental procedures, health system. It is often seen as a Cognac … then the soda, basing many of his observations critique of this type of institution, and finally three transparent on his native Turkey. This major as well as of other systems of ice cubes, each of which Turkish-language novel recounts control in American society. imprisons a bundle of silver the protagonist’s personal struggles (as well as those of the secondary A CLOCKWORK ORANGE needles in its heart. characters he interacts with) to La Jalousie adapt to the Eurasian postwar (1962), ANTHONY BURGESS reality, and to be at peace with the Alain Robbe-Grillet changing nature of modern times. In this dystopian novel, Burgess (1917–93) takes his observations of fragmented, the work is an example ONE DAY IN THE LIFE the changing youth cultures present of the author’s experimentation with OF IVAN DENISOVICH in Britain in the 1960s to disturbing the novel form; the reader is left to extremes. The reader follows the interpret the story for themselves. (1962), ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN teenage narrator Alex in his exploits of “ultraviolence,” depravity, and A HOUSE FOR MR. BISWAS An active critic of the totalitarian drug use, told in both English and government ruling over his native the Russian-influenced teen slang (1961), V. S. NAIPAUL Russia, Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) known as “Nadsat.” The authorities wrote this, his first literary work, attempt to reform Alex through an The first novel by Trinidad-born to openly condemn Stalin’s rule. experimental type of aversion British writer Naipaul (1932–) to The book recounts a day in the life therapy, no matter what the cost to achieve international acclaim, A of a wrongly condemned labor- his mental state; the final chapter, House For Mr. Biswas draws on the camp prisoner, Ivan Denisovich, cut from US editions until the 1980s, author’s experiences of growing up and the nature of the punishments, seems to show some redemption for in the Caribbean. Mohun Biswas hardships, and horrors that he Alex. The satirical novel spawned strives toward his goal of owning endures. The underlying message, an extremely successful and equally his own house, to provide a home however, is one of solidarity, loyalty, controversial cinematic adaptation for his family and escape from his and humanity among the prisoners, in 1971 by Stanley Kubrick, which overbearing in-laws. The book lays who only survive from day to day helped to increase the popularity of bare the inequalities of colonialism, by working together. and interest in the book. and exposes the tensions between individual and familial life. ONE FLEW OVER THE If he can only perform good CUCKOO’S NEST or only perform evil, then he THE TIME REGULATION INSTITUTE (1962), KEN KESEY is a clockwork orange … an organism lovely with (1962), AHMET HAMDI TANPINAR One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest colour and juice but … only by American writer Kesey (1935– a clockwork toy to be wound Tanpinar (1901–62) wrote The Time 2001) is a novel set in an institution up by God or the Devil. Regulation Institute as a critique for the mentally ill in Oregon, and is A Clockwork Orange of the excessive bureaucracy in based on the author’s own time as a staff member at a similar facility. Anthony Burgess Although the novel has been well received in most quarters, it has also been subject to bans. Kesey’s best-known book, it highlights the humanity—and in some cases, cruelty—behind the individuals, from patients to staff, in the mental-

290 FURTHER READING THE DEATH OF of her own identity as a woman, The text is littered with cultural ARTEMIO CRUZ descends into a worsening mental and social references to popular state, eventually ending up in a music, literature, and art. (1962), CARLOS FUENTES hospital for the mentally ill and being treated with electroshock therapy. WIDE SARGASSO SEA One of the novels that helped bring Latin American literature to wider THE TIME OF THE HERO (1966), JEAN RHYS international recognition, The Death of Artemio Cruz by Mexican (1963), MARIO VARGAS LLOSA A powerful novel by Dominica-born author Fuentes (1928–2012) is a British writer Jean Rhys (1890–1979), recollection of the life of fictional The heavily censored literary début Wide Sargasso Sea explores feminist main character Artemio Cruz, as he of Peruvian Nobel Prize winner and postcolonial themes through lies on his deathbed. Through the Mario Vargas Llosa (1936–), The relationships of power, especially memories of Cruz, the reader joins Time of the Hero is an experimental between men and women. The story, his greedy family, overbearing work of fiction. Employing multiple a prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane priest, and not-too-loyal assistant in perspectives and a complex, Eyre (1847), follows white Creole revisiting over 60 years of Mexican nonlinear chronology, the story is Antoinette and her troubled life history, politics, and religion, set in a real-life military academy in in Jamaica, as she is controlled, including the country’s foreign Lima. It exposes the techniques oppressed, then dismissed as a mad policies, corruption, and betrayals. used to train cadets, turning them woman by her English husband, into loyal, silent, hypermasculine before being forced to relocate to THE BELL JAR drones, never questioning or England under the name of Bertha. challenging imposed structures of (1963), SYLVIA PLATH authority. In turn, these practices We stared at each other, blood are not solely seen as issues of the on my face, tears on hers. It This semiautobiographical novel by academy, but also of more general was as if I saw myself. Like American poet Sylvia Plath (1932– military structures, and of a state in a looking-glass. 63) retells events in the author’s life, that relies on military power to Wide Sargasso Sea and was initially published under maintain control—such as in Peru a pseudonym. The text is made up from the 1930s to the 1980s. The Jean Rhys of multiple flashbacks to protagonist authorities attempted to prevent the Esther’s earlier life, as she interns novel’s publication, condemning it for a renowned magazine in New as a plot by neighboring Ecuador to York one summer. Esther, in search denigrate the nation of Peru. THE CRYING OF LOT 49 (1966), THOMAS PYNCHON I felt very still and very empty Written by New Yorker and author THE MASTER AND … moving dully along of speculative fiction Pynchon (see MARGARITA in the middle of the p.296), this novella was hailed as surrounding hullabaloo. both a prime example and a harsh (1966–67), MIKHAIL BULGAKOV The Bell Jar parody of postmodern fiction and psychoanalysis. It follows Oedipa Written by Russian author Bulgakov Sylvia Plath Maas and her discovery of a (1891–1940) between 1928 and 1940 worldwide conspiracy rooted in but only published almost 30 years a centuries-old feud between two later, The Master and Margarita is postal services, one real (“Thurn set both in 1930s’ Moscow and—as und Taxis”), one fictional (“Trystero”). told in a novel by lead character the

POSTWAR WRITING 291 “Master”—in Jerusalem at the time THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S responses to the violence of racism. of Christ. Through both story lines, WOMAN A powerful and influential literary the book can be seen as a historical work as well as a candid memoir validation of religious tenets, a (1969), JOHN FOWLES of Angelou’s early life in Arkansas critique of overly bureaucratic rules, from ages three to 16, the book and a satire of the Soviet authorities, This popular and highly acclaimed explores issues of childhood, trauma, catalyzed in the characters of novel by British author John Fowles and motherhood, and proclaims the Professor Woland—an anarchic but (1926–2005) is often labeled as a power of belief in one’s self, and of scholarly manifestation of Satan— postmodern historical fiction. It literature and the written word. and his devilish entourage. tells the story of naturalist Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, a CROW THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT former governess, in a style that comments upon Victorian romances, (1970), TED HUGHES (1968), NORMAN MAILER while dealing with topics such as gender issues, history, science, Often regarded as the most Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The and religion. The narrator, who important collection of British poet Armies of the Night: History as a also becomes a character, allows Ted Hughes (1930–98), Crow: From Novel/The Novel as History, by for multiple possible endings to the Life and Songs of the Crow was journalist, playwright, novelist, and the story, destabilizing the linear inspired by American artist Leonard filmmaker Norman Mailer, was a narrative of the texts it is imitating. Baskin’s illustrations of the bird. key work in the rise and acceptance Some poems are traditional in style, of creative nonfiction in the literary I KNOW WHY THE while others take more experimental landscape. The text is a historicized, CAGED BIRD SINGS forms. They follow the character of political, journalistic recollection of a Crow, weaving elements of world Vietnam War protest in Washington, (1969), MAYA ANGELOU mythologies and religions into an DC, in 1967, interspersed with self- ongoing epic folktale. While reflections, novelizations, and The first book of a seven-volume incomplete—Hughes was unable to personal thoughts on the subject autobiography, I Know Why the continue after the suicide of his matter and the author himself. Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou lover Assia Wevill in 1969—the (1928–2014)—the African-American ambitious collection is a noteworthy SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE Pulitzer Prize winner and activist— philosophical and literary reflection expresses the author’s changing on mythology and the natural world. (1969), KURT VONNEGUT Norman Mailer in the Philippines. In 1955 he Written by American author cofounded the political arts Vonnegut (1922–2007), Born in New Jersey, in 1923, magazine The Village Voice. A Slaughterhouse-Five or The Mailer grew up in New York. He cultural commentator and critic, Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance went to Harvard University at Mailer also wrote biographies of with Death is a key example of the just 16 years old, initially to Picasso, Lee Harvey Oswald, and speculative fiction and surreal study aeronautical engineering, Marilyn Monroe. His creative political satire. It meshes together but soon became interested in nonfiction, political activism, time travel and its paradoxes, alien writing. One of his stories won and two Pulitzer prizes ensured creatures, and semiautobiographical a competition in 1941, which his fame. He died in 2007. notes about the author’s service in led him to pursue writing World War II, including the bombing seriously—an ambition that he Key works of Dresden. The result is a critique of argued (unsuccessfully) should the horrors of war, the publishing exempt him from military 1957 “The White Negro” industry, and the status of literature, service. His first novel The 1968 The Armies of the Night and is a thoughtful, almost comic, Naked and the Dead (1948) is (see left, above) meditation on death and mortality. based on his war experience 1979 The Executioner’s Song

LCIOTNETREAMT 1970–PRESENT

UPORREARY

294 INTRODUCTION The photograph “Earthrise” Chairman Mao Zedong, Salman Rushdie’s The fall of the taken from the Apollo 8 China’s communist Midnight’s Children Berlin Wall manned spacecraft tells the story of the orbiting the moon, a year leader, dies, bringing partition of India symbolizes the end before the first moon to an end the in the style of magic of the Cold War. landing, becomes an iconic Cultural Revolution realism. image of our planet. that began in 1966. 1968 1976 1981 1989 1973 1979 1987 1990 Thomas Pynchon’s In the postmodern novel Toni Morrison St. Lucian poet Derek long and complex If on a Winter’s Night a examines the Walcott publishes novel Gravity’s Rainbow Traveler, by Italo Calvino, psychological combines science and alternate passages are effects of slavery Omeros, reinterpreting philosophy with elements written in the second in her novel Beloved. Homer’s Iliad in a of high and low culture. person—“you,” the reader. postcolonial setting. T oward the end of the This was a period in which the first former outposts of empire, including 20th century, the world generation of writers to have been the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott was becoming a smaller born in nations that had gained and the novelist V. S. Naipaul. In place. The accelerating pace of independence from the European Canada, Australia, and South technological advances, particularly empires came of age. Many writers Africa, where many people had transportation and communications, admired the new techniques of resettled from the UK, British brought about a globalization of postmodernism that some South influence on writing waned and trade and cultures on a scale never American authors had adopted literature began to appear that seen before. Political changes, most as a style, and especially the genre was recognizably of those nations. noticeably the liberalization of of magic realism. The English Eastern European communist bloc language still dominated the New styles of writing were countries and the lifting of the Iron literary world, however, and it was also emerging in Asia, as writers Curtain, also helped foster ever- people from the old British Empire sought to establish a national greater international links. who came to prominence in the identity in a modern China after first wave of postcolonial literature. the upheaval of the Cultural At the same time as nations Revolution, and in a Korea that was around the globe developed their New national voices now divided into an authoritarian own distinct postcolonial cultures, India produced authors such as north and a liberal south by the Europe and North America became Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth 38th parallel. influenced by multiculturalism, who, writing in English, portrayed which led to a realization within the experiences of the new India Multiculturalism the West that its culture could no after independence and partition. While European culture was losing longer be considered a benchmark Local voices also emerged in other its monopoly in its old colonies, for the rest of the world. it was also being influenced by

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 295 Vikram Seth’s J. M. Coetzee’s Love, jealousy, and The Guest, by In his novel Extremely lengthy novel A novel Disgrace betrayal feature in Hwang Sok-yong, Loud and Incredibly Suitable Boy uses details the fall Margaret Atwood’s Close, Jonathan Safran four families to from grace of a The Blind Assassin, deals with the explore the internal college lecturer in which offers a new aftermath of Foer uses several conflicts of India postapartheid twist on gothic fanatical hatred experimental after independence. South Africa. and civil strife in fiction. the Korean War. techniques to shed light on the 9/11 attacks. 1993 1999 2000 2001 2005 1995 2000 2001 2001 In his allegorical novel White Teeth, by Jonathan Franzen’s Terrorists crash three Blindness, Portuguese Zadie Smith, tells the The Corrections passenger planes into author José Saramago story of two families the Pentagon and the describes the social examines the hidden turmoil that follows in multicultural, dysfunctions of a “twin towers” of an imagined epidemic. 20th-century London. traditional family in the World Trade the American Midwest. Center in New York. rising numbers of immigrants from In the US, however, issues of “serious” and “popular” culture, around the world. Many cities in race and cultural assimilation had while sophisticated computing and Europe became cosmopolitan a longer history. American society telecommunications technologies centers, attracting not only people had long been based on the model were the inspiration for novels such in search of a new life and a better of its European settlers’ homelands, as American author Thomas standard of living, but also writers while a quite separate culture Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. and artists who still regarded had developed among the African- Magic realism in particular had Europe as an intellectual center. American descendants of slaves. become a widely accepted genre, Even after many of the political yet new writing continued to draw Ironically, many writers who goals of the civil rights movement upon older forms, such as in the had helped to establish a literary had been achieved, racial tensions allegorical satire of José Saramago style in their homeland, such persisted and this was reflected in and the metafiction of Italo Calvino. as Rushdie, Seth, and Naipaul, a distinctive body of literature by had chosen to settle in England, writers such as Toni Morrison. While English is now a second where their presence inspired language for numerous people younger writers, many of whom International literature across the world, many novels are were the offspring of immigrants Alongside the development of new also availabile in translation. The from the Indian subcontinent, national voices, a global trend of modern readership is international, Africa, the Caribbean, and adopting postmodern stylistic and authors—no longer restricted elsewhere. Such authors described techniques gave much of the era’s by regional boundaries—are quick the complex experiences of living literature an international appeal. to reflect on ideas and issues that in multicultural cities, with Zadie The counterculture of the 1960s have global resonance, such as the Smith exploring the integration broke down the barriers between dysfunctions in modern society and of immigrants into British society. the threat posed by terrorism. ■

296 MOAGUOGRMRHEENIGSTATSTOERYOFISLAANST GRAVITY’S RAINBOW (1973), THOMAS PYNCHON IN CONTEXT T he term “encyclopedic Rainbow, set at the end of novel” refers to a capacious, World War II, Thomas Pynchon FOCUS complex work of fiction that interweaves wartime secret The encyclopedic novel includes swathes of specialized operations with pop culture, information on subjects ranging surrealism, perverse eroticism, BEFORE from science to the arts to history. rocket science, and mathematics. 1851 Herman Melville’s It attempts to create, through a Moby-Dick is the first great virtuoso effort of imagination, a Determinism and disorder encylopedic American novel. fictional world beyond the reach Within a formidably complex plot, of linear storytelling. In his novel with shifts in time and around 400 1963 Thomas Pynchon’s debut Moby-Dick, Herman Melville characters, the novel is a display novel V. anticipates Gravity’s combined, among other things, of prodigious erudition. Its themes Rainbow in its panoramic and biblical and Shakespearean include paranoia, determinism, information-packed scope. references, facts about whales, death, and entropy—a term from and realistic descriptions of life thermodynamics that indicates AFTER on board a ship. In Gravity’s a steady decline into disorder. 1996 Dealing with addiction, family relationships, tennis, Thomas Pynchon his fiction (especially Gravity’s entertainment, advertising, Rainbow). He spent some time Quebecois separatism, and Born in 1937 on Long Island, New in Mexico before moving to film theory, the encyclopedic York, Thomas Pynchon counts California. After Gravity’s novel Infinite Jest, by American among his ancestors the founder Rainbow his fiction became writer David Foster Wallace, of Springfield, Massachusetts. less stylistically challenging has 388 endnotes. Pynchon attended the high and more humanistic and school in Oyster Bay, and went political. Pynchon is known for 1997 Using baseball—and one on to study engineering physics being protective of his privacy, baseball in particular—as its at Cornell University, but left and shy of media coverage. central conceit, American before graduating to serve in the author Don DeLillo’s complex US Navy. He returned to Cornell Other key works novel Underworld stretches to study English. In the early from the 1950s to the 1990s 1960s Pynchon worked as a 1966 The Crying of Lot 49 and involves both fictional and technical writer at Boeing in 1984 Slow Learner (stories) historical characters. Seattle; he would later draw 2006 Against the Day upon his experiences there in 2013 Bleeding Edge

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 297 See also: Moby-Dick 138–45 ■ Les Misérables 166–67 ■ War and Peace 178–81 ■ Ulysses 214–21 ■ Catch-22 276 ■ Infinite Jest 337 The sheer scale and complexity of Calm/restlessness Gravity’s Rainbow make it notoriously The rainwbaorwtimimepalniedspcoHaslmatwrmaafrtoewnroyar/lddeoniwstrpnoeppropyuert.uHaollwy erevsetrl,ePssy.nchon’s resistant to interpretation. It is possible to tease out themes by looking at the in txhpeenndoevdeUlbniiufsntbnacolhoiewsanahlskfc-etshaadnaind/wtcbdlyoaeeymnbb,rcotpethlharekotiuengghdeonwtrno. E symbolic implications of the rainbow, and their opposites, and pinpointing their relevance to the novel. iOsreder nerpgyy. aTnhde ra aniracrlce. The central symbol in the book is inventor of an “erotic” plastic from imaginary friend experience adult the German V-2 rocket, an image which a capsule in rocket 00000 is racism, after which their dreams both of transcendence and of a made. When the rocket is launched, “could never again be entirely frightening, unknown future. The a young boy, Gottfried, is strapped safe.” Gravity’s Rainbow traces book’s opening words describe the inside this capsule: he is the sex a parallel loss of innocence on sound of a V-2 hitting London: “A slave of the book’s Nazi arch villain, a massive scale, and Pynchon screaming comes across the sky.” who by sacrificing Gottfried seeks no doubt relished the idea that Symmetrically, at the end of the to transcend his mortality. reading itself could no longer be novel, a rocket is about to detonate. entirely safe after his virtuoso In between, numerous plots and Such bizarre scenes are shot feat of fictional black magic. ■ subplots propel the characters through with a profusion of ideas, through a succession of wildly including allusions to science The V-2 rocket is a key presence improbable scenarios, in which and philosophy. The reader, like in Gravity’s Rainbow, which features paranoia and fear of death are Slothrop, struggles to find meaning. a project to assemble one, while often rendered with black humor. embracing a profusion of chaos, Paranoid truth seeking perversity, and paranoia. The book’s main plot lines All systems by which we might revolve around the quest by several make sense of our lives, whether characters to uncover the secret of they are scientific, mystical, a V-2 rocket numbered 00000. One religious, or political, are described such character is an American at a certain point in the novel as GI, Tyrone Slothrop, whose sexual paranoid. Against human attempts encounters in London occur at the at rationalization, Pynchon posits precise sites where V-2 rockets will a complex reality in which events fall. Slothrop later rescues a Dutch occur according to inscrutable girl named Katje, who is a double laws—while perhaps entertaining agent, from an octopus conditioned the idea that true paranoia lies in to attack her. The octopus has been precisely such a world view. trained by Laszlo Jamf, who had conducted Pavlovian experiments In his short story “The on Slothrop as a child and is the Secret Integration” (1964), white schoolchildren with a black

298 BCYOEAGULVINAINRROEE’SAABDNOIENUWGTINTTOOALVOEL IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELER (1979), ITALO CALVINO IN CONTEXT T he term metafiction work, an artifact of the author. was coined by American While largely associated with the FOCUS writer William H. Gass in fiction of postmodern writers, many Metafiction 1970 and refers to a fictional form of examples exist from earlier eras, writing in which a series of literary including the 17th-century epic BEFORE tools are employed by writers to of Cervantes’, Don Quixote, and 1615 In the second part of the draw attention to how fiction and the 18th-century hilarity of novel Don Quixote, by Spanish reality interrelate, emphasizing the Laurence Sterne’s The Life and writer Miguel de Cervantes, nature of the text as a constructed Opinions of Tristram Shandy. the eponymous fictional hero is aware that the first part If on a winter’s A novel about novels had been written about him. night a and points of view, Calvino’s traveler book interweaves excerpts of 1759–67 Anglo-Irish novelist imagined books from different Laurence Sterne’s fictional Outside the tOwn contemporary fiction genres; autobiography Tristram Of MalbOrk the titles of these 10 books Shandy contains so many form a complete sentence. digressions that the author is not born until Volume III. Leaning from the steep 1944 Argentine writer Jorge slope Luis Borges’ Ficciones plays with the nature of fiction in WITHOUT FEAR a series of enigmatic and OF WIND OR mesmerizing short stories. VERTIGO AFTER Looks down in 1987 American author Paul the gathering Auster’s The New York Trilogy twists the form of the shadow detective novel and makes the reader question the tropes IN A NETWORK of the genre. OF LINES THAT ENLACE