Émigrés émigrés
London; Chatto & Windus, 1970
Introduction
[요약]
9) If it is agreed that the seven most significant wrtiers of twentieth-century English literature have been a Pole, three Americans, two Irishmen and an Englishman, then it might also be agreed that the paradox is odd enough to warrant analysie. With the exception of D. H. Lawrence, the heights of modern English literature have been dominated by foreigners and émigrés: Conrad, James, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Joyce.
- If the creative literature of a society is dominated over a specific period by foreigners and expatriates, then it is reasonable to assume that this fact is revealing of the nature of that society as it is of the writers who approached it from a foreign viewpoint.
- the unchallanged sway of non-English poets and novelists in contemporary English literature points to certain central flaws and impoverishments in conventional English culture itself. That culture was unable, of its own impetus, to produce great literary art: the outstanding art which it achieved has been, on the whole, the product of the exile and the alien.
10) It is part of the genius of poets like Blake and Wordsworth, or novelists like Dickens and George Eliot, that they are able to fuse the profoundest inwardness with the specific life of their own times with a capacity to generalise that life into the form of a complete vision. In the best work of those writers, the shape and structure of an entire culture can be elicited, by an alert sensitivity to the general forces and significant movements of their societies, from the focused detail of local and concrete experience. The Romantic poet or the great realist novelist writes out of a relationship of intricately detailed intimacy with his society; yet he is also able to grasp that society as a totality, in a way which one might have expected to be genuinely available only to an outsider free of its most immediate prussures. It is integral to the imaginative achievements of Blake, Wordsworth, Dickens and Eliot that they can 'totalise' and 'transcend' those prussures without damage to the quickness and specificity of their feel for concrete life. At the high point of their developments, both realism and Romanticism were able to discover a point of operative distance from the partial interests and alleginaces of their own cultures: a point of balance at which inwardness could combine with an essential externality to produce major art.
[19세기의 뛰어난 영국 작가들은 "가장 심오한 내면성을 그들 자신의 시대의 구체적인 삶과 결합할 수 있었다. 그 삶을 완전한 비전의 형태로 일반화할 수 있는 능력을 보유한 상태에서] [쉽게 이야기하자면 구체성과 보편성을 동시에 획득했다는 말. 그의 사회와 복잡하게 세부화된 친밀성의 관계로부터 글을 씀. 그러면서도 그 사회를 전체성으로서 파악할 수 있었음. 현실적인, 구체적인(concrete) 삶에 대한 자신들의 느낌이 주는 신속함과 구체성에 손상을 주지 않고 그 압박들을 '전체화'하고 '초월'할 수 있음.
11) The creation of great literature, as the work of Pope and Jane Austen sufficiently illustrates, has no inevitable connection with the surmounting of such concrete social attachments; [블레이크나 조지 엘리엇, 매슈 아놀드는 각각 자신의 구체적인 사회적 신념에 따라 글을 썼다] but it does seem to demand enough interaction between those convictions, and the typifying problems and developments of the whole culture in whcih they are set, for them to appear as representative rather than as narrowly partisan.
- (위에서 연결) In the nineteenth century, that interaction between paricular commitments and the structure of a whole society was active and vigorous enough, whether as conflict or as congruency, for great literature to be possible;
[19세기와 20세기의 상황이 왜 이렇게 달라졌는가?]
- its virtual disappearance in the twentieth century, along with the point of balance where it belonged, is an impoverishment significantly related to the entry of the émigrés.
12) social class
- I am concerned to see the ways in which the social attitudes adopted by particular twentieth-century writers shape or limit their power to achieve that sense of interrelation between concrete living and the shape of a complete culture which the greatest nineteenth-century authors displayed.
[개인의 구체적 경험과 전체 사회 구조나 문화와의 관계의 문제]
- In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, a species of Zolaesque naturalism, influenced by the philosophy of Comte and Spencer, took shallow root in England in the writing of Gissing, Moore and others.
- 이 당시 활동한 작가들(Gissing, Shaw, Bennett, Wells) : The lower or 'middling' middle-class ethos is obvious: a provincial, clerical, commercial, Nonconformist, grammar-school milieu.
- a drably detailed, grimly unselective reproduction of 'life as it is'--of the seedy realms of routine social existence beneath the 'conventional' upper-class facades.
- science, politics, social organisation.
- Fabianism
: The 'upper-class' novel is very different (Forster, Woolf, Waugh, Myers). The milieu is metropoltan, privileged, public-school.
- an intense but narrow concern for certain highly selective forms of life and value.
- ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics
- Bloomsbury liberalism
[두 그룹의 대조와 비교는 흥미로운 부분]
13) 두 그룹 다 지배적인 문화적 정설에 적대적
Both of these genres are to some extent self-consciously hostile to what they see as the dominant cultural orthodoxy. Lower middle-class naturalism saw its own audacious realism as an assault on bourgeois conventionality, a significant exposure of submerged social realities;
- against the hypocrisy of orthodox culture
the upper-class novel stood counter to that conventionaliy either in its liberalism and aestheticism, or, as with Waugh, in its nostalgic conservatism.
- against its philistinism.
13) Yet the truth is tht both modes of fiction were tied, at crucial points, to the dominant orthodoxy they opposed.
[이글턴의 이 지적이 핵심적이다.]
- Fabianism is the kind of 'radical' ideology, and Bloomsbury the kind of liberal culture, which only a conservative society could have produced. (which를 둘 다를 가리킨다고 봐야할 것.)
- The lower middle-class novel was in general passively related to its society: it [수동적으로 연결될 수 밖에 없는 상황] was a symptom of oppression and frustration, but could not itself transcend the direct pressures of that experience to evaluate it as a whole.
- (14) The upper-class novel, by contrast, was trapped, not within the crippling limits of routine existence, but with a world so partial, rarefied and fragmentary that it could express little more than the relatively untypical living of a rootless, dispossed sector of the dominant social class.
- Both modes . . . were incapable either of embracing, or transcending, the society to which they represented a critical reaction, and yet with which they shared a common basis of assumptions. The novel, in consequence, was either constrained by the insistent detail of 'realist' experience or cut damagingly adrift from it, clinging to 'civilised' values which were themselves unable to comprehend more than a relatively small area of contemporary civilisation.
(두 양식 다 그들이 비판적인 반응을 표시하지만 그들이 가정의 공통 기초를 공유하고 있는 사회를 포용하거나 초월하는 어느 하나도 할 수 없었다.)
- James & Conrad
James and Conrad, as émigrés, chose English society from the outside; both in different ways, were able to survey it from a broader perspective, and so to grasp what it had to offer them as a complete pattern of culture. Both men chose England for reasons closely linked to the whole structure of its social life: its order, its manners, its settled, varied and traditionalist status. Both, as a result, attained a remarkable inwardness with the character of the society; yet they were also able to bring to bear on the culture a range of experience--of America, Europe, Africa, the East--which went beyond its parochial limits, and with which England could be fruitfulyl compared. It was out of this tension that James and Conrad created their major work; and it was a tension notably absent in the work of their contemporaries.
[영국 사회가 문화의 완전한 패턴으로서 그들에게 제공해야만 했던 것을 포착할 수 있었음.
사회의 특징과 함께 놀라울 정도의 내면성(본질 inwardness)을 획득.
- 제임스(1916)와 콘래드(1924)의 죽음 사이에 20세기 영문학의 대표작들이 산출. 1차 세계 대전과 그 이후
- the period when English civilisation itself was called into radical question.
15) first phases of expatriatism and exile (James and Conrad)
- James and Conrad settled in England in flight from a lack of established order and civilised manners elsewhere; through the varied complex of motives for their emigration, this thread of purpose can be traced as an element of continuity.
- After this period, however, exhaustion, futility and disintegration strike at the heart of conventional English society; as war looms and social turbulence spreads throughout Europe, that culture is itself seriously threatened. It is this sense of impending or actual collapse which informs the major work of Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Joyce and Lawrence.
15) 왜 훌륭한 문학 작품이 외국인의 손에 의해 씌어졌는가?
1. the inability of indigenous English wrting, caught within its partial and one-sided attachments, to 'totolise' the significant movements of its own culture. That literatrue responded to the crisis of its society either with an external cynicism, or with a sense of disgusted futility which was itself a symptom, rather than a creative interpretation, of disturbance.
(In the novels of the 1920s--in Waugh and Huxley in particular--both responses can be seen to co-exist. )
- Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Joyce and Lawrence . . . had immediate access to alternative cultures and traditions: broader frameworks against which, in a highly creative tension, the erosion of contemporary order could be situated and partially understood.
16) With enerring instinct for centrality, he[Eliot] came to Europe and experienced, from the centre, the definitive social reality of his time: the undermining of order and tradition.
- When social order was partially re-consolidated in Europe, Eliot stayed in England to re-enact the Jamesian experiment, conforming both his art and theory to the new determinants of established English culture.
17) Lawrence's achievement was to bring to bear, on the disintegrating order of his time, the rich values of a working-class experience: to generalise, from this basis, a critique of Englnad which seemed at times as alien as the judgement of a foreigner, yet as intimately acquainted with its real issues as a native.
- they were able to dramatise the realities of disintegration because of a striking congruency between the structure of feeling of the whole society and their own most immediated responses as literal or social expatriates.
18) In each case, great art is produced, not from the simple availability of an alternative, but from the subtle and involuted tensions between the remembered and the real, the potential and the actual, integration and dispossession, exile and involvement.
[영국 국내 작가들은 문화적 한계에 갇혀 있었음]