Abstract
In 1949, Mark Schorer wrote that as far as Britain is concerned, ‘we must confess that, in the past fifty years, the distinguished novels have been written in the prose that risks’. Naming established writers — Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen — ‘for whom there are no American counterparts’, he concludes that ‘to these we may now probably add the name of Henry Green’.1
The truth is, these times are an absolute gift to the writer. Everything is breaking up. A seed can lodge or sprout in any crack or fissure.
(Henry Green, letter to Rosamond Lehmann, quoted in Lehmann, ‘An Absolute Gift’, The Times Literary Supplement, 6 Aug 1954)
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Notes
James Hall, ‘The Fiction of Henry Green: Paradoxes of Pleasure-and-Pain’, Kenyon Review, 19 (1957) p. 76.
Edward Stokes, The Novels of Henry Green (London, 1959) p. 7.
Henry Green, Pack my Bag (London, 1952) pp. 7–8.
In Terry Southern, ‘Henry Green’, Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 5 (Harmondsworth 1981) p. 104.
Henry Green, ‘The English Novel of the Future’, Contact, 1, no. 2 (1950) p. 22.
Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961) pp. 76, 149.
Frederick R. Karl, A Reader’s Guide to the Contemporary English Novel (London, 1963) p. 186.
Green, The English Novel of the Future’, Contact, 1, no. 2, p. 21. In Alan Ross, ‘Green, with Envy: Critical Reflections and an Interview’, London Magazine, 6, no. 4 (1959) 22, Green also states that his central theme is love.
Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (London, 1933) p. 416.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves (London, 1933) p. 119.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London, 1933) pp. 35–6.
Quoted from Giorgio Melchiori, The Tightrope Walkers: Studies of Mannerism in Modern English Literature (London, 1956) p. 96. My discussion of Lawrence in relation to T. S. Eliot is indebted to Melchiori.
The lines from Lawrence and Eliot are quoted ibid., pp. 97–9. The references are to the American edition of Lawrence’s New Poems (1920) and to the ending of ‘Burnt Norton’.
Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and tr. Jay Leyda (New York, 1968) p. 30.
Green’s images escape classification by general literary or cultural conventions. Culler suggests that ‘What is made intelligible by the conventions of genre is often less interesting than that which resists or escapes generic understanding, and so it should be no surprise that there arises, over and against the vraisemblance of genre, another level of vraisemblance whose fundamental device is to expose the artifice of generic conventions and expectations’. Due to the poetic form of Green’s sunset scene, the reader ‘must allow the dialectical opposition which the text presents to result in a synthesis at a higher level where the grounds of intelligibility are different’ — Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London, 1975) pp. 148, 151. For a definition of ‘vraisemblance’, see n. 35.
Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense, ed. and tr. Jay Leyda (London, 1968) p. 24.
Roland Barthes, ‘Criticism as Language’, in 20th Century Literary Criticism, ed. David Lodge (London, 1972) pp. 249–50.
Robert Richardson, Literature and Film (Bloomington, Ind., 1969) p. 67. Richardson writes that ‘verbs are only one part of speech, to be sure, but they are crucial and one of the reasons why nearly everyone will concede the potential, if not the actual, power of the film may be its rich and varied range of ways to express action as verbs express it in writing’.
Sir Colin Anderson, quoted in Rod Mengham, The Idiom of the Time: The Writings of Henry Green (Cambridge, 1982) p. 15.
Jonathan Culler, ‘Structuralism and Literature’ in Contemporary Approaches to English Studies, ed. Hilda Schiff (London, 1977) p. 63.
I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (London, 1954) p. 207.
Mario Praz, Mnemosyne: The Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts (London, 1970) p. 214.
Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago, 1958) p. xxii.
Eisenstein, Film Form, pp. 150–1. The analogy between Eisenstein’s and I. A. Richards’s statements is suggested by James Allen Pearse, ‘Montage in Modern Fiction: A Cinematographic Approach to the Analysis of Ironic Tone in Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona, 1973). Part of my work centres on basic montage principles also applied by Pearse to expose the irony of man’s (notably Gulley Jimson’s) struggle to impose form on an amorphous existence. However, whereas Pearse comments on the ironic irreconcilability of man and reality, Green is able to unify the two into images of sensual reciprocity. Green’s comparison of ‘tone’ with the effect produced by colour in painting suggests that Green employs montage to give his fictional world ‘a life of its own’. If a montage approach is to uncover expressive nuances in Green’s three-dimensional world, the term must be applied and adapted to the examination of its multiform conflicts and values. It must identify that conceptual operation in which symbols and images, wonder and mysticism, become meaningful.
Sergei Eisenstein, Film Essays with a Lecture, ed. Jay Leyda (London, 1968) p. 83.
Henry Green, Blindness, in ‘Nothing’, ‘Doting’, ‘Blindness’ (London, 1979) p. 442.
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© 1986 Oddvar Holmesland
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Holmesland, O. (1986). Introduction. In: A Critical Introduction to Henry Green’s Novels. Studies in 20th Century Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18221-3_1
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