REALISM IN THE 1930s
Virginia Woolf in her essay “The Leaning Tower” (1940) says:
“In 1930 it was impossible – if you were young, sensitive, imaginative – not to be interested in politics, not to find public causes of much more pressing interest than philosophy. In 1930 young men… were forced to be aware of what was happening in Russia; in Germany; in Italy; in Spain. They could not go on discussing aesthetic emotions and personal relations…they had to read the politicians. They read Marx. They became communists; they became anti-fascists.”
George Orwell in his easy “Inside the Whale” (1940) says:
“During the past ten years literature has involved itself more and more deeply with politics…the younger writers have ‘gone into politics’…the movement is in the direction of some other ill-defined thing called Communism.”
Cyrill Connolly refers to the replacement of avant-garde Modernism by metonymic modes in terms of ‘action and reaction’: “from 1918 to 1928…Joyce, …Woolf…and Huxley… ruled supreme, while from 1928 to 1938 the new realists have predominated…Realism, simplicity, the colloquial style, would appear to have triumphed everywhere at the moment.” (34)
New Realists of the 1930s:
Christopher Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935). Its opening scene takes place in a train compartment (like Woolf’s essay on the task of a novelist “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”), where the narrator called Bradshaw (a projection of the author himself) meets Mr Norris – a half-criminal yet somehow charming character. Bradshaw’s straightforward, uncomplicated and colloquial report concentrates on the visual detail. Among his direct observations of Mr Norris there is one of apparently deep significance: “His smile had a great charm. It disclosed the ugliest teeth I had ever seen.” This comment arguably points at the necessity to penetrate through the appearances, deceit and lies. In Stevenson’s words, “Mr Norris is an analogue of Hitler, whose superficial appeal to Germans, and to many people in Britain in the early thirties, Isherwood is determined to expose.” (36)
The threat of Hitler permeates particularly Isherwood’s most famous novel/collection of stories Goodbye to Berlin (1939). The neutrality and apparent objectivity of the narrator, which forces the readers to make their own judgment, is established immediately in the opening sentence: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”
The novel documents the collapse of a decadent city (which is simultaneously sexually liberated and violent, seductive and unstable) and its fall before the Nazi threat.
George Orwell’s early novels represent an interesting “fusion of autobiography, fiction and documentary” (Crick). His strongly autobiographical debut Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) reveals Orwell’s growing awareness of the “existence of the working classes” that results in such novels as A Clergymen’s Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) - both show the author’s skill for precise journalistic observation and exactness of detail, which helps create a context conducive to examination of social questions. As Stevenson points out “his observations sometimes extend into overtly sociological discussions of the events portrayed.”(39)
A similar feature can be found in many other novels in the period e.g. in a Catholic writer with CP leanings Graham Greene’s It’s a Battlefield (1934), which is a socio-political examination of an inequitable society run by “kings and priests and lawyers and rich men” (p. 97). The setting is a shabby, spiritless and at times hellish London inhabited by miserable characters whose bleak lives make the narrator-author ask direct questions such as: “Do you believe in the way the country is organized? Do you believe that wages should run from thirty shillings a week to fifteen thousand a year?” (p.189)
Orwell’s best 1930s novel Coming up for Air (1939), written in an easy, slangy style, apart from being also grounded in documentary approach, indicates its author’s political views and concerns. Simultaneously, it sometimes departs from the realistic mode of expression and ventures into the territory of the grotesque:
“What was more, I actually had a feeling that they were after me
already. The whole lot of them! All the people who couldn't
understand why a middle-aged man with false teeth should sneak away
for a quiet week in the place where he spent his boyhood. And all
the mean-minded bastards who COULD understand only too well, and
who'd raise heaven and earth to prevent it. They were all on my
track. It was as if a huge army were streaming up the road behind
me. I seemed to see them in my mind's eye. (…) [A]ll the soul-savers and Nosey
Parkers, the people whom you've never seen but who rule your
destiny all the same, the Home Secretary, Scotland Yard, the
Temperance League, the Bank of England, Lord Beaverbrook, Hitler
and Stalin on a tandem bicycle, the bench of Bishops, Mussolini,
the Pope--they were all of them after me. I could almost hear them
shouting:
'There's a chap who thinks he's going to escape! There's a chap
who says he won't be streamlined! He's going back to Lower
Binfield! After him! Stop him!'
It's queer. The impression was so strong that I actually took a
peep through the little window at the back of the car to make sure
I wasn't being followed. Guilty conscience, I suppose. But there
was nobody. Only the dusty white road and the long line of the
elms dwindling out behind me.” (p.182-3)
Such a mixture of the realistic detail and slight grotesque effects is a recognizably characteristic feature of British fiction in the 1930s. If in the above-quoted passage from Coming up for Air the result is a little bit funny, in some other cases this blending results in much more surreal and nightmarish quality of the presented world. Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon may serve as a striking example.
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon:
“The cell door slammed behind Rubashov.
He remained leaning against the door for a few seconds, and li a cigarette. On the bed to his right lay two fairly clean blankets, and the straw mattress looked newly filled. The washbasin to his left had no plug, but the tap functioned. The can next to it had been freshly disinfected, it did not smell. The walls on both sides were of solid brick, which would stifle the sound of tapping, but where the heating and drain pipe penetrated it, it had been plasteres and resounded quite well; besides the heating pipe itself seemed to be noise-conducting. The window started at eye-level; one could see down into the courtyard without having to pull oneself up by the bars. So far everything was in order.
(…) An hour earlier, when the two officials of the People’s Commissariat of the Interior were hammering on Rubashov’s door, in order to arrest him, Rubashov was just dreaming that he was being arrested.
The knocking had grown louder and Rubashov strained to wake up. He was practiced in tearing himself out of nightmares, as the dream of his first arrest had for years returned periodically and ran its course with regularity of clockwork.(…)
He dreamed, as always, that there was a hammering on his door, and that three men stood outside, waiting to arrest him. He could see them through the closed door, standing outside, banging against its framework. (…)
The two men who had come to arrest Rubashov stood outside on the dark landing and consulted each other. (…)” (p. 9-13)
Malcolm Bradbury observes that “generally…the realism of the Thirties talked much of was not a realism of social report but a realism of history; and since history itself was surreal, absurd, nightmarish, and threatening, so too was much of the fiction. In fact New Realism of the Thirties is counterbalanced by fantasy and allegorical modes that proved equally attractive at the time of political tension.”
Some writers (e.g. Rex Warner) acknowledge the influence of Franz Kafka. As Warner himself remarks: no other author has been more successful in expressing the doubt and uncertainty…which marks the modern man all the time at the mercy of abstract forces, economic, political or psychological.”
A connection between realistic representation and accurate observation on one hand, and moving towards political fantasy of a nightmarish world allow Orwell to prophesy in Coming up for Air:
“the world we are going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber trancheons. The secret cels where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke.” (149)
The best examples of expression of this pessimistic vision of the future of humanity are two novels: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
Both are examples of so-called dystopian novel: an anti-utopian novel that shows society of the future as over-organised, ruled by dictatorial methods, and eradicating humanindividuality. It is usually polemical with utopia, with its ideology of progress and belief in the bright future. In dystopian novels progress is usually shown as limiting or threatening people’s individuality and their personal freedom.
In Brave New World society and individuals are controlled by genetic engineering, consciousness programming, and various chemical substances – the novel begins with a visit to CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE where embryos are genetically modified in order to produce various categories of people designed for different social tasks, and where babies are brain-conditioned so they know their place in social hierarchy.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four the strict control of individuals and whole society is done through the means of Newspeak – language of ‘justice’ and ‘progress’ that helps the party to maintain thought-control. According to Michał Głowiński among the fundamental features of Newspeak there are:
1/ a clear value system based on polarization/dichotomy : it is not important what a given word means but how it is qualified in the value system (e.g. good-bad; us-them etc.)
2/ a synthesis of pragmatic and ritual elements: it directly influences social practices; depends on circumstances (esp. political); is fundamentally conservative;
3/ the element of magic: words do not describe reality, but create it; what is stated with authority becomes real (e.g. slogans such as “war is peace” or “ignorance is strength”); simultaneously words not used make the things they refer to non-existent (including proper names).
4/ the language is regulated by arbitrary decisions and is manipulated by censorship: it states not only what is forbidden, but also how certain things should be described.
“The Principles of Newspeak” (appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four): “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.
To give a single example - The word free still existed in Newspeak, but could only be used in such statements as "The dog is free from lice" or "This field is free from weeds." It could not be used in its old sense of "politically free" or "intellectually free," since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispenses with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum. Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even when not containing newly created words, would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day. Newspeak words were divided into three distinct classes, known as the A vocabulary, the B vocabulary, and the C vocabulary. It would be simpler to discuss each class separately, but the grammatical peculiarities of the language can be dealt with in the section devoted to the A vocabulary, since the same rules held good for all three categories.
The A vocabulary. The A vocabulary consisted of words needed for the business of everyday life - for such things as eating, drinking, working, putting on one's clothes, going up and down stairs, riding in vehicles, gardening, cooking, and the like. It was composed almost entirely of words that we already possess -- words like hit, run, dog, tree, sugar, house, field -- but in comparison with the present-day English vocabulary, their number was extremely small, while their meanings were far more rigidly defined. All ambiguities and shades of meaning had been purged out of them. So far as it could be achieved, a Newspeak word of this class was simply a staccato sound expressing one clearly understood concept. It would have been quite impossible to use the A vocabulary for literary purposes or for political or philosophical discussion. It was intended only to express simple, purposive thoughts, usually involving concrete objects or physical actions. (…)
The B vocabulary consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them. Without a full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult to use these words correctly. In some cases they could be translated into Oldspeak, or even into words taken from the A vocabulary, but this usually demanded a long paraphrase and always involved the loss of certain overtones. The B words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables, and at the same time more accurate and forcible than ordinary language.
The B words were in all cases compound words.
They consisted of two or more words, or portions of words, welded together in an easily pronounceable form. The resulting amalgam was always a noun-verb, and inflected according to the ordinary rules. To take a single example: the word goodthink, meaning, very roughly, 'orthodoxy', or, if one chose to regard it as a verb, 'to think in an orthodox manner'. This inflected as follows: noun-verb, goodthink; past tense and past participle, goodthinked; present participle, goodthinking; adjective, goodthinkful; adverb, goodthinkwise; verbal noun, goodthinker. (…)
The C vocabulary was supplementary to the others and consisted entirely of scientific and technical terms. These resembled the scientific terms in use today, and were constructed from the same roots, but the usual care was taken to define them rigidly and strip them of undesirable meanings. They followed the same grammatical rules as the words in the other two vocabularies. Very few of the C words had any currency either in everyday speech or in political speech. Any scientific worker or technician could find all the words he needed in the list devoted to his own speciality, but he seldom had more than a smattering of the words occurring in the other lists. Only a very few words were common to all lists, and there was no vocabulary expressing the function of Science as a habit of mind, or a method of thought, irrespective of its particular branches. There was, indeed, no word for 'Science', any meaning that it could possibly bear being already sufficiently covered by the word Ingsoc.
From the foregoing account it will be seen that in Newspeak the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was well-nigh impossible. It was of course possible to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a species of blasphemy. (…)
(p. 312-322)
In America the same tendency to use the realistic novel for the purpose of “overtly sociological discussions” can be seen in works such as John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939).
Steinbeck is a Californian regionalist – his 1935 novel Tortilla Flat exemplifies well the category of regional novel – with its setting (the Salinas valley and the Monterrey coast) and population (Italian fishermen and Mexican farm workers. According to John Fontenrose it contains a “recurring theme of Steinbeck’s fiction: the values of a simple people are opposed, as more healthy and viable, to the values of a competitive society.” His In Dubious Battle (1936) takes a subject of a strike of migrant apple-pickers, and demonstrates his discussion of the role of the Communist Party in it. Steibeck’s sympathy and empathy for the proletariat and the farm laborers makes him supportive of the communists’ leadership in the class struggle.
Of Mice and Men concentrates on itinerant farm workers too poor to own the land where they work. The central theme is a human longing for home/land, but the novel also explores socio-economic matters. Its realism is founded in his dramatic method (consisting of dialogue).
The Grapes of Wrath came at the peak of Steinbeck’s proletarian period. The novel is based on the author’s first-hand experience with and thorough research into the life and toil of the migrant workers in California. It is sometimes called “the epic of the Great Depression” – its profundity and sweep result from the novel’s structure: sixteen odd chapters tell the ‘story of the people’, while fourteen even chapters concentrate on the experiences of the Joad family, so the panoramic and general overlaps with the particular and individual. As Furmańczyk emphasizes: “the picture of this general process of the growing social consciousness among the migrants becomes sharper when it is shown as a dramatic struggle within a single family. The story of the family supplements that of the people and vice versa.”
But its journalistic and documentary style is accompanied by the books symbolic level and its Biblical references. As Walcutt states:
“The great movement of the Okies across the dustbowl and into the Promised Land of California suggests the biblical analogyof the Chosen People fleeing from Israel. The story is shaped in heroic dimensions, and like the...