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1900s
Blindness
Henry Green
Lifespan | b. 1905 (England), d. 1973
First Published | 1926
First Published by | J. M. Dent & Sons (London)
Given Name | Henry Vincent Yorke
“[A] kind of informal diary would be rather fun.”
Henry Green was to gain considerable renown as a writer’s writer, and all of his novels are in some sense “experimental.” His singular prose style inverts conventional word order, utilizes curious parenthetic constructions, deploys unnecessary demonstratives, and omits a whole range of words normally used to connect clauses. Green’s first novel, Blindness, already reveals his fascination with language as a means of communication and his modernist desire to shape it anew.
The novel tells the story of John Haye, a young man who is accidentally blinded and must learn to live with the loss of vision. Haye gradually comes to realize that there are other ways of processing sensation, experiencing life and construing reality. Haye is preoccupied with the nature of language and with writers who are known as original literary stylists. His interest in the problem of expression marks him out as someone who is not content with the surface aspect of social life; phenomena observed from the outside and accepted as “reality” are shown to be products of a deeper blindness than that which afflicts the novel’s protagonist.
Narrated from a range of viewpoints, Blindness draws on the technique of “stream of consciousness” for its presentation of different perspectives. Here Green explored the inner world of the mind and suggested that the death of sight perhaps presaged the birth of a more profound form of experience and a deeper mode of knowledge. AG
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1900s
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway
Lifespan | b. 1899 (U.S.), d. 1961
First Published | 1926, by C. Scribner’s Sons (N. Y.)
Alternate Title | Fiesta
Nobel Prize | 1954
The cynical irony of the title—an oblique reference to narrator Jake’s mysterious First World War wound, and what no longer rises because of it—sets the apathetic tone for this “Lost Generation” novel. A band of cynical, hard-living expatriates swirls like a hurricane around a comparatively peaceful eye, Jake. In its depiction of the group’s journey from l’entre deux guerres Paris to Pamplona for July’s fiesta, The Sun Also Rises captures a war-shaken culture losing itself in drink and drama, and eschewing all but the occasionally comforting illusion of meaningful experience. Quixotically irascible, Robert Cohn dramatizes the romantic hero’s final crash into absurdity, as he cultivates a disruptive infatuation with Jake’s former lover, Brett, who shares neither Cohn’s intense affection nor his fraught-with-significance outlook (though she does share his bed).
Ernest Hemingway’s first major novel represented a stylistic breakthrough. Though its influence on later writing has slightly obscured its radical character, comparing the style of The Sun Also Rises with those more established contemporaries, such as Ford Madox Ford and Theodore Dreiser, gives a sense of Hemingway’s innovation. The spare prose creates a language seemingly devoid of histrionics, allowing characters and dynamics to come through cleanly and clearly, to a perhaps still unequaled degree. AF
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1900s
Amerika
Franz Kafka
Lifespan | b. 1883 (Czechoslovakia), d. 1924 (Austria)
First Published | 1927, by K. Wolff (Munich)
Composed | 1912–1914
Original Language | German
At the tender age of sixteen, Karl Rossmann finds himself in exile, shipped to the New World after shaming his family by getting a serving girl pregnant. Despite being alone and vulnerable in a strange land, he has youthful optimism and irrepressible good humor on his side. Karl sets out to seek his fortune, and finds work as an elevator boy in a hotel. He gets fired and drifts on again, meeting a succession of bizarre characters, and in the final chapter joins a mysterious traveling theater.
This is an unsettling and disorienting vision of America. On arrival, Karl observes the Statue of Liberty holding a huge sword aloft. This and other puzzling details—a bridge across the Hudson conveniently connects New York with Boston—may simply reveal that Franz Kafka never visited America, but they also create a paradoxical world that is fascinating and sinister, boundlessly open and broodingly claustrophobic. Here is a place where success can bring vast wealth and fine mansions, where failure can lead to misery and rootlessness.
Familiar Kafkaesque themes are already developing—the implied threat of nameless authority, the fear of being singled out, the sense of identity slipping away. Amerika was never finished, but there is enough to tantalize us into speculating about its conclusion. The final scene, in which Karl heads west on a train through spectacular scenery, is a paean to the American Dream. Was this intended as a Kafka novel with a happy ending? TS
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1900s
The Case of Sergeant Grischa
Arnold Zweig
Lifespan | b. 1887 (Poland), d. 1968 (Germany)
First Published | 1927
First Published by | Kiepenheuer (Potsdam)
Original Title | Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa
“In the whole company of prisoners, two hundred and fifty men . . . there were not two who would refuse any request or disobey any order of Sergeant Grischa . . .”
The Case of Sergeant Grischa is a multi-angled study of the social forces that perpetuate war. Its protagonist, Grischa, is a Russian soldier in the twilight of the First World War who is captured by the German military and imprisoned. Wanting to go to his wife and their child—whom he has never seen—Grischa escapes from the prison in hope of getting to Russia. To conceal his identity, he wears the abandoned clothes of a German soldier found in the forest. He is caught once more, and is believed to be the man whose clothes he is wearing. Grischa suddenly learns that the soldier whose identity he has assumed is known as a deserter, and that the penalty for desertion is execution. The fate of the other man now seems to have him by the throat.
Despite the fact that Grischa is ultimately able to prove his identity and his innocence, he realizes that the soldiers who have understood his situation are so afraid of disobeying orders that they are prepared to execute him regardless. The meaninglessness of Grischa’s condemnation comes to represent the wider numbers of innocent men and women killed through war, in battle or otherwise, by soldiers who are merely following orders—men who are not judged, by Grischa, to be good or bad, but to be under the heel of a chain of superiors, each with their own motivations. Zweig’s accomplishment as an author is to examine this complex system, almost scientifically, and to draw from his observations a tragic view of morality and human nature. JA
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1900s
Tarka the Otter
Henry Williamson
Lifespan | b. 1895 (England), d. 1977
First Published | 1927
First Published by | G. P. Putnam’s Sons (London)
Original Language | English
An otter is born, grows up in the waterways of Devon, is hunted by men and dogs as well as facing a number of man-made hazards, and eventually, probably, dies by their hand. This is the essence of Tarka the Otter, but it is not its whole. Tarka is notable for its lack of anthropomorphic identification and its meticulous, sometimes pedantic, depictions of pastoral life through the eyes of a wild animal.
This is not a comfortable tale of humanized creatures, and it avoids the rural idyll while skillfully exploiting it. Henry Williamson’s great strength in this book is the alienation of Tarka, who is, and always remains, feral. This refusal to succumb to personalization, a strong reflection of Williamson’s sense of introversion following the First World War, makes Tarka the Otter stand apart from its suc
cessors. Tarka often shows disdain for both human and mechanized intervention; metal and guns are the enemy, providing rude interruptions in the steady life of the Devon waterways. This is not an easy or simple life—Williamson presents it as a neutral space of great pastoralism, yet this space is interrupted continually by man or his creations; traps, wires, and the great hunting dog “Deadlock,” who pursues Tarka throughout the text. This disdain for metal and man is testimony to Williamson’s post-war disgust with his fellow man, a disillusionment later echoed in his wartime novel The Patriot’s Progress, and the epic series The Chronicles of Ancient Sunlight, which saw him return to the subject of the human world. EMcCS
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1900s
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
Lifespan | b. 1882 (England), d. 1941
First Published | 1927
First Published by | Hogarth Press (London)
Full Name | Virginia Adeline Woolf
To the Lighthouse was Virginia Woolf’s most autobiographical novel, in which she represented her parents, Julia and Leslie Stephen, through the fictional characters of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. The novel’s structure is that of two days separated by a passage of ten years. In the first part, “The Window,” the Ramsay family and assorted guests are depicted during a day on the Hebridean island on which they have their summer home. The novel’s central section, “Time Passes,” is an experiment in modernist narration, as Woolf absorbed into her fiction the representational forms suggested to her by the new art of the cinema; Mrs. Ramsay dies and the world war intervenes to fracture history and experience. In the final section, “The Lighthouse,” the artist figure Lily Briscoe finishes the painting of Mrs. Ramsay whose “vision” had formerly eluded her, and Mr. Ramsay and his two youngest children, James and Cam, reach the lighthouse, having made the journey planned with the first words of the novel.
The novel is a ghost story of a kind, in which Woolf explored the impact of death, representing it indirectly as it resonates throughout the narrative. She reversed the priorities of the novel, bracketing off death and marriage in the novel’s central section, and focusing instead on the changes wrought by time on matter. It is a profound exploration of time and memory, of Victorian conventions of masculinity and femininity, and of the relationship between art and what it seeks to record. LM
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1900s
Remembrance of Things Past
Marcel Proust
Lifespan | b. 1871 (France), d. 1922
First Published | 1913-27 in seven volumes
First Published by | Nouvelle Revue Française (Paris)
Original Title | À la recherche du temps perdu
Proust handwrote his massive masterpiece in school exercise books, endlessly crossing out and rewriting as he went along.
It has often been said that the importance of Marcel Proust’s monumental novel lies in its pervasive influence on twentieth-century literature, whether because writers have sought to emulate it, or attempted to parody and discredit some of its traits. However, it is equally important that readers have enjoyed the extent to which the novel itself unfolds as a dialogue with its literary predecessors.
Remembrance of Things Past (or In Search of Lost Time) is the daunting and fashionable 3,000-page “story of a literary vocation,” on which Proust worked for fourteen years. In it, he explores the themes of time, space, and memory, but the novel is, above all, a condensation of innumerable literary, structural, stylistic, and thematic possibilities. The most striking one is the structural device whereby the fluctuating fortunes of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy from the mid-1870s to the mid-1920s are narrated through the failing memories of an aspiring writer, Marcel, who succumbs to many distractions. This defect of memory entails misperceptions of all sorts, partly corrected, bringing rare moments of joy by the faculty of “involuntary” memory. These moments of connection with the past are brought about by contingent encounters in the present, which reawaken long-lost sensations, perceptions, and recollections. It is these moments that give the novel its unique structure, which, no doubt more than any other novel, calls for careful reading.
Appropriately, the publication of this epic novel in French is still evolving, as scholars continue to work on notes and sketches. The novel has also recently attracted new translators into English, long after the first translation into English between 1922 and 1930. Proust’s “mass of writing,” as it has sometimes been described, continues to expand. CS
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1900s
Steppenwolf
Hermann Hesse
Lifespan | b. 1877 (Germany), d. 1962 (Switzerland)
First Published | 1927, by S. Fischer Verlag (Berlin)
Original Title | Der Steppenwolf
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1946
Harry Haller, the protagonist of Steppenwolf, feels himself painfully divided into two diametrically opposed personas. One is associated with his intellect and the noble ideals to which he aspires, while the other consists of the baser instincts and desires of the flesh. Steppenwolf chronicles this tension that dominates Haller’s inner life from three distinct perspectives: his bourgeois landlady’s nephew, a psychoanalytic tract, and Haller’s own autobiographical account. With the help of some of the novel’s other characters, Haller gradually learns that “every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms . . .” He determines to explore the multiple aspects of his being, experimenting with his sexuality, frequenting jazz clubs, where he learns to dance the fox-trot, and socializing with groups of people whom he formerly regarded with condescension and derision. Thus he realizes that these pursuits are to be valued as much as the thrill of intellectual discovery. The highly experimental, perplexing nature of the conclusion goes some way to explaining why Steppenwolf is the most misunderstood of Hesse’s works.
In addition to a brilliant and thought-provoking meditation on the tumultuous process of self-discovery, Steppenwolf is a scathing and prescient critique of the complacency of Germany’s middle class amid the escalating militarism that preceded and made possible Hitler’s rise to power. CG-G
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1900s
Nadja
André Breton
Lifespan | b. 1896 (France), d. 1966
First Published | 1928
First Published by | Gallimard (Paris)
Original Language | French
André Breton’s Nadja is the most well known and most enduring example of the “Surrealist novel.” This semi-autobiographical work is an account of Breton’s relationship with a strange and unconventional young woman in Paris. Nadja is an enigmatic, haunting presence; she is both material and immaterial, modern and ancient, artificial and carnal, sane and mad. She is a state of mind, a projection that disrupts the structures of everyday reality, a metaphor for “the soul in limbo.” Using the figure of Nadja, perhaps rather questionably, Breton channels the key elements of Surrealist thought: accident, shock, desire, eroticism, magic, and radical freedom. The narrative consists of a series of chance encounters around the city, jumping from point to point with its own unconscious logic. Notionally a “romance,” Nadja is really a meditation on Surrealism as a way of life, overturning the distinctions between art and world, dream and reality.
A literary collage, the prose is supplemented by images, including sketches by Nadja herself, prints of Surrealist paintings, and numerous photographs. Nadja is a rich, textured surface of ideas, a repository of what the critic Walter Benjamin calls “profane illuminations.” From the mainstream to the avant-garde, and from literature to advertising, Nadja’s influence continues to be felt. SamT
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1900s
Quicksand
Nella Larsen
Lifespan | b. 1891 (U.S.), d. 1964
First Published | 1928<
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First Published by | A. Knopf (New York)
Original Language | English
“Authors do not supply imaginations, they expect their readers to have their own, and to use it.”
Nella Larsen, 1926
Helga Crane is the protagonist in Nella Larsen’s compelling and loosely autobiographical novel, Quicksand. Born of a white Danish mother and a West Indian father, Helga Crane is a restless and rootless figure in search of sexual and social acceptance. The novel begins in the claustrophobic atmosphere of “Naxos,” a black college in the South, then moves north, first to Chicago and on to Harlem, where Helga is initially welcomed by the emerging intellectual class. Next she travels to Denmark, where her blackness is celebrated in problematically exotic and erotic ways. In each of these locations, Helga is forced to reject both the proposals of unsuitable lovers, and her own growing desire. In the end, she marries a preacher and returns to the American South, where she sinks into a “quagmire” of harsh reproductive and domestic labors.
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 38