The Role of Shakespeare in English Culture and Identity During Times of Crisis, Appunti di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica The Role of Shakespeare in English Culture and Identity During Times of Crisis e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! LEZIONE 1 04/03 The name of Shakespeare is recurrent in so many works and performances which were performed or acted in the last centuries, starting from the 18th century when Shakespeare became really a cultural and national icon, he was really at the centre of the British culture. He was also appropriated by other nations such as Germany, which was during the Great War, England’s enemy. Shakespeare quotations in literature, starting from the Great War years until the 21st century, including novel which were written in anglophone countries, such as Australia. This is a new research field; Shakespeare is probably the most quoted author in English and in world literature. Shakespeare, his novels and his plays are quoted not only in novels and poems, but also in everyday life, sometimes we don’t even know we’re using his quotations. He is quoted in advertising as well as in political speeches; he was exploited to make some propaganda about some issues or to promote some ideas. We know that in the late 18th century and in the first years of 19th Shakespeare was part of the English Constitution. On this point, everybody always quote this sentence from Jane Austen: “His celebrated passages are quoted by everybody; […] we all talk Shakespeare, use his similes, and describe with his descriptions...” She is very aware that Shakespeare’s plays and poems provide readers with a certain specific perspective, a vision of the world, and everybody is still influenced by Shakespeare’s vision of the world. It is certain because some scholars have decided really to investigate to the use of his quotations in certain specific situational context and so certainly he’s very much used in political speeches or in trials, especially when someone wants to prove some point; he’s also quoted in private conversations, in advertising, in political propaganda, in novels, poems, crime fiction, drama and tv movies and also in advertisements of Shakespeare or also in internet memes. We should also consider that S. was, first of all, easily quotable; some texts had been quoted and some other text have not been quoted so much during the ages and so the first quality some passages or sentences must have is that they must be very concise and also pithy. We have so many quotations or sentences in S.’s plays and poems which are like maxims, so they provide us with a clear moral message, they won us and gave us some drops of useful wisdom to spend in our lives. Thanks to the restoration of S.’s authorities, and the construction this cultural icon in the 18 th century Shakespeare are really very familiar to large audiences. This is because his plays were really always performed, sometimes they were adapted to new audiences, but still he was performed, even during the restoration when his plays were completely rewritten; before recognizing that this was a text like the Bible and that you have not to change anything in this text, his plays had been rewritten and performed on age – Macbetu by Alessandro Serra. It’s a demonstration that Shakespeare can be translated in all languages, even in Sardinian language. Why Shakespeare was quoted by the 18 th century onwards? This point has been explored by so many scholars; first of all in the 18th century conversation among intellectuals used quotations from classical texts and even from S. In order to give evidence of their good education. So, in the 18th century for sure, Shakespeare became cultural capital. And so, people quoted him just to be accepted by people who they considered superior to them in education and culture. During the Great War was quite evident that people - politician, intellectuals, common people – relied heavy on Shakespeare to copy with the Great War, first of all to make sounds of this tragedy and also, on the government part, there was an effort to convince people that it was worth fighting for England, for Shakespeare who was the best representative of the people mess. Shakespeare, while writing his plays and his poems, was really borrowing from so many other texts. He was not one of the university wigs, he did not attend university courses and he attended the grammar school – similar to our secondary schools – so he knew little Greek and Latin as his contemporaries wrote. However, in his plays and poems there are so many hidden quotations from classical literatures. He quoted from popular culture, some beautiful ballads which were orally transmitted and also proverbs that might have been sometimes from classical ascendents, or typical of the British laws. So, while reading his plays you have this mix of different cultures and that’s why we say that his plays are so polyphonous, because he can detach voices coming from so many different walls: nobles, merchant, elite groups. His audience was heterogeneous so he was trying to make very one feel at ease in theatre. Of course there have been volumes dedicates to this kind of borrowings and we know so much about the use of other author’s sentences and words in his plays. Shakespeare and his success allowed him to disseminate British culture, which was a culture so well rooted In the western countries’ culture and so we have the pervasiveness of his quotations and his culture. Why did he use so many quotations? First of all he wanted his works to sound familiar to his audience, so he was putting together sentences which were really familiar to his audience and also his culture was a culture of quotations. When speaking about the practice, it was common In the Elizabethan age to write down some sentences which the student or the lawyer could use again in some specific situational context. He was trained to memorise some quotation and then to use them again; his audience was also able to memorise large extracts from his plays or poems and so they could really repeat. It was quite easy for him when he was writing a pay to put together fragments of other successful plays and then he shaped everything In his perspective. Another quote from a research about Shakespeare and Quotations, by Maxwell and Rumbold: “Despite the ubiquity of Shakespeare’s quotations – past, present, and emerging into the future – it is relatively absent as an object of study” Why were quotations such an important part of training in Shakespeare’s time? First of all it was very useful to use quotation when educating someone. So, trainers, teachers, mother used some of his sentences in order to inspire young children and give them some advice about how to behave and also how to conform to the rules of society. And also a special function played quotation in general in religion – during holy services the priest will explain the holy scriptures and particularly the gospels and a sermon always starts from a quotation and then the sermonist expanded on the quotation and tried to give it light, just quoting other sentences and reinforcing its point, it’s a sort of dialogue between authors. And the writer or the listener is much involved in this dialogue because it participate for instance when the sermon had been published he can read it and also add in the marginalia his own glossies and quotes from other authors. It was also a way to exercise memory as reads of literacy in some periods. We know that in the Renaissance we can’t know the number of people who can read or write, but some pieces of literature, such as extracts from the Bible were read in aloud in the household and this was done really to disseminate the most important religious issues and rules and people had to really memorise these passages and then to pass them on to their children. We should remember that the quoter is always invoking authority, the authority of Shakespeare for instance, or the authority of God, while quoting the Bible. There are also marked quotations, when we have verba dicendi for instance. The author in marked quotation recognizes that there is this authority and that he’s trying to reinforce his statement by referring to this authority and at the same time he exploited this power of the world, the power of the cultural icon in order to demonstrate his faces. People were enlisting God or S. in order to give evidence of their points. a new meaning lurking in the text. Of course people should know Shakespeare’s works, if they don’t, this allusion got waist. Sometimes you have just the quotation and sometimes you have the rephrasing of the same quotation in the narrator’s words and also metatextual notes can give us some typical traits about the character because generally these quotations want to highlight the name traits of the character or of the situation. We have formal quotation, with inverted commas, italics and also the name of the authors; not only novels, but also letters and diaries. And this is not surprise first of all because they learned to behave in society just reading other authors and especially the Bible and then Shakespeare and so we have a sort of list or description of their value system. We can really identify this values system going through their letters, diaries, autobiographies and so on. We must remember that Shakespeare was used to create the sense of the nation. Glimpse of the use of quotations before the Great War. In the late 18th century, we have, for instance, a good example in Ann Radcliff. She quotes so many times Shakespeare in the Para text, just introducing the chapter. And so, first of all we can grasp the general atmosphere of the chapter or of the situation she wants to describe and also going through the text and the chapter we can discover how this quotation reverberates on our present life, or, on the 18 th century life and on the text. So, writers try to create light, reverberation by juxtaposing passages from Shakespeare and their writings, everything through Shakespeare’s lenses and it is quite easy to identify these quotations. Para text is borrowed from Gerard Genet. He thought and demonstrate that there are some parts of text which don’t belong to the body text but that are around the text and for instance epigraphs belong to the para text and they are not fully incorporated in the text. They’re very important because they try to orient the reader but at the same time, when going through the text the reader can be puzzled because he cannot find what he was waiting for. In the 18th century novels and also in the 19th century novels the characters use quotations in so many times and for a variety of reasons. Of course novel mirrors society and as a quoting with a part of the social theatre of the time; you have to quote to really construct a very polite conversation. This definition of polite conversation with really part of 18th century society, you can ready a lot of sociability. To be sociable in society in the 18th you must be able to exchange words with other people in a pleasant way, amusing your interlocutors and digressing in order to not be too boring and also you should be able to insert quotation to make other people see that you are a one of them, that you have a common ground culture. In the novels, quotations reveal whether the character is well o badly read. Sometimes the reading are narrowminded, all based on the same readings; there are reading list that are very narrow or poor. Take as an example Mr. Colins in Pride and Prejudice. He quotes from a conduct book or a sermons, he cannot quote from other text. so their choice of quotations reveal the qualities of their readings and whether they are openminded or not and so we should take this into consideration when reading these passages. Of course novels were really widely spread over the country, there were the circulation libraries and so even people who belonged to the lower classes could borrow some of these novels and it was a rich literary marked. But, equally important were the periodicals. The 18th century was such a rich century because our all world started then: for instance newspaper, periodicals didn’t exist prior to the 18th. England relied so much initially on the translation of foreign newsbooks, for instance from Spain, from the Dutch countries as well. And then, England moulded this new form: the periodical which were made of essays which discussed existential problems or even today problems, they were also crowded with allusions to gossip, and if you consider the first page of these you will see that in the paratext we have a quotation, sometimes in Latin, which were frustrating fort the people who couldn’t understand Latin, such as the vast majority of the middle-class. But this was kind of an introduction to this language which was still part of the cultural capital. And then, the essay was sort of respond to the quotation and an expansion to this quotation. In the 18 th century, culture was fragmented in order to make it more digestible to people who wasn’t so much learned. This was because they wanted to make culture achievable to larger part of the population and once again we have a great effort. Culture was once again central to a national as it was been in the Renaissance or in the Shakespearean age. This community was trying to build a new cohesion and they needed culture and so they collaborated: novels, newspapers, periodicals, public speeches as well and there was also of course a respond to Shakespeare. By the turn of the 18th century Shakespeare was completely canonized and identified with British culture; so he was the best representative of England. It is not surprise that the novel used so many quotation from the Bible, from Shakespeare, from other novels because novels originated from many genres and these genres made use of quotations. A list of these genres: periodical essays, news ballads, poems which were performed in the squares, spiritual autobiographies which were meditation on quotations, travel reports. It is no surprise that the novels used these quotations like these genres. In the 18 th century, new editions of Shakespeare’s play were published and carefully edited. These editions circulated and were read aloud in the house and so there was a fixed form of the Shakespearean text which were memorised. Some of the editors drew attention to some lines, favouring questions and discussions about the reasons he used those particular terms instead of others and about their meaning. LEZIONE 2  05/03 QUOTATION AS A POLITICAL ACT How quotation were exploited during political meetings and especially in the parliament in order to create social cohesion and also to win power over other people. “ I scarcely ever quote; the reason is, I always think” a quotation by Thomas Paine. So, you can see here a negative perception of the use of quotations in political speeches. This radical politician Thomas Paine said that when you use quotations you are avoiding thinking about something, so you’re quite repetitive and you’re not really discussing the actual issues. So he decides to avoid quoting. Of course he thought that citizens as well as politicians should have an autonomous judgement and one should judge questions by analysing the situational context and trying to perform solutions. Of course many writers and politicians agreed with him and tried to find new ways to say new things and not to rely to stereotypes, maxims and so on. In the 19th century quotations in general, but also from S. plays were considered an insincere approach to political issues, in the sense that you use those in order to be approved by other people but without providing them with real solutions to the problems they were copying with. However politicians used during parliamentary speeches quotations from Shakespeare especially when they wanted to excite sort of emotional reactions on the fellow members of the parliament or of their citizens and also they wanted to persuade them. So it was really a rhetorical strategy they still continued to use and we have at the time so many quotations from S. and he was exploited especially when the nation and its identity was at the risk. So, it was done in order to secure the English nation by staying together. Of course by quoting S., politicians and member of the parliament they were demonstrating they were very educated people, they wield power and they were to admire. Sometimes the level of these exchange and of this speaking through Shakespeare’s quotations were so high that politicians keeping correcting other members of the parliament when they quoting S. and so they corrected the quotations first of all to show off and also to confute other members of the parliament’s opinion. It seemed that S. provided them a code of language and every one of them had to demonstrate that they were competent in the use of the language and in the quoting of Shakespeare. It was remarkable that when quoting S. those politicians were overtly alluding to the actual political situation and asking people to take side with them and also they wanted their listeners to compare the present situation with S. works. It’s quite impressive, they were trying to judge their present through the lenses of their past, so invoking Shakespeare. Some samples of these parliamentary speeches. “Mr. Bright….” The stress is here on linguistic competence and ability and be competent in the English language meant to be one of the guardians of the purity of the English language and protecting the English language you will demonstrate to be really the best representative of the country. Language and nation are really strictly connected in the perception of the Victorians. It was a common place that the language was interconnected with the language of the nation: the language stands for the pure character of the nation and especially that language spoken in the parliament must be the most perfected version of the English language and so enriched from quotations from Shakespeare and Milton: you must be up to your role and measure you’re linguistic ability against Shakespeare’s and other authors who were part of the literary canon. So it’s very important to speak very fluent language in the parliament for instance: to be very polite and so on. In the Elizabethan times the situation is rather different. Even having built a vernacular literary canon, but the general perception was that the English people let a linguistic tool as effective as the Italian one for instance. The Italian language was considered as the best language, first of all because it stands for Latin, they had so many Latin words and variety of words and that’s why people in the Ely times thought that the language e should be improved through the use of it. For instance Richard Mulcaster proclaimed in his books that English children must be encouraged to speak English during their lessons because through the use of language the language would have acquire some other new terms. This language wasn’t flexible and rich so it needed to be improved. They try to disseminate the knowledge of the ancient rhetoric, giving examples both in Latin and in English and inserting some passaging of English authors and moreover the writers coins new words and they tried to adapt words in other languages which they lacked to their sounds in order to enrich the languages. In the 17th century Daniel, a poet who was also historian of English language, wrote a book on rhetoric and the story of English and he prophesized that English language would have become the first language in the world and foreigners would have come to England to learn the language. In Daniel’s times this was a dream, but it became true in the long run. By imitating and quoting Shakespeare and Milton, members of the Parliament celebrated their culture, which was mainly expressed in an economic, musical language, which could fully express the character of the nation. Speaking and quoting was a sort of celebration of the nation and also of their speaking individual and so we should consider that quoting S. was a political act, because every time they quoted S. and others, the nation were reaffirmed. These feeling were especially strong when that culture and that nation felt threatened by an enemy. We should not forget that S. was also used to create divisiveness. Especially in the 19 th century social classes and political factions used S. to promote their own ideas and also to explaining why a conflict was up between different classes and so we can say that they were using S. because his authority in the 19th was unquestionable. So they wanted to testify to S.’s ideas, which were similar, in their opinion, to their own. They were really trying to steal S.’s works and to exploit them. Other examples from Shakespeare and quotations. It’s particular interesting the use of some of S.’s words or plays and the most quoted was at the time Macbeth, but also Hamlet and Coriolanus. involved in the war, but then they decided to join France because of economic interest. They wanted to contrast Germany who was becoming a very aggressive country and it was competing with France and Britain in the conquest of new trade paths. These trade has been always fundamental for Great Britain and so Germany menace to take the lead of Europe. Then, Belgium had decided to be a neutral country but its neutrality was not respected by Germany which invaded it; at this point Great Britain decided to join France and set an alliance. They said that they wanted to defend Belgium because it was moral to defend it against such an unfair behaviour on the part of Germany. And thus the war started. The propaganda by the German emperor and the Austro-Hungarian emperor portrayed themselves as someone who was unreliable, who didn’t know how to act and so wait to make a decision. On the other hand these two great historical figures they had to struggle to save their monarchies. There’s no way out, they couldn’t be neutral and so that’s why they were also prophets in that, because in the aftermath of the great War, the Austro- Hungarian empire was no longer and Germany lost territories and power and was submitted and reduced to its own territory and position in Europe. So, “to be or not to be” was used to exemplified what they felt on that occasion. Germany so was Hamlet, in German words and in their enemies words and we know for sure that this nation was on the edge of a tragedy. Hamlet was quoted even by French people who reminded German people that “there’s something rotten in Germany”, so they used Hamlet and fragments from it to fight a paper war which was the propaganda. There’s repetition of these words in many articles and journals. Initially, especially English young people thought that the war would have been a short war and would have culminated in victory, but actually the end of this war was anticipated and delayed several times and so England was deluded in its hopes. Soldiers discovered that living in the trenches meant to be at risk every single minute. Soldiers had also to use bayonet and grenades and so they could see the people they hold dying in front of themselves. They lived for so many years in complete isolation without seeing their families and friends and they could really experienced how life is fragile and part of everyday routine. So we have in this period poster and postcards which represented how soldiers lived this experience. Of course poster and postcards tried to encourage soldiers: - The bystander: a man who’s looking at his hat and it seems a little bit like Hamlet with a quotation from Shakespeare which is also an adaptation in order to express the feelings of German people. Much of the story of the Great War was told by Shakespeare’s quotations By reading quotations we can really reconstruct the Great War story. It’s a research field. Shakespeare was used to tell the history of the Great War, of course there was a culture of Shakespeare quotations in England, but also in France and Germany. So, Shakespeare was European at the time, starting from the 18th century he became European also. And then in the first decade of the 20 th century, in those countries, journalists quoted or cited Shakespeare, especially when they have to find a very impressing title for their articles in order to attract readers, but also when they comment on contemporary events. When the Great War started and throughout the course of it, they had wide range of quotations ready at their hands. In 1916 recurred the tercentenary of Shakespeare, he died in 1616, then it was time again to remember and celebrate him and England needed to do that because it needed to reaffirm national pride and national values. New anthologies were published to commemorate Shakespeare and his playwright. Colmer’s Shakespeare in times of war was one of them and he claims in its title that he wanted to reassure his citizen giving them example of courage and virtue to imitate. In 1916 England had fully understood started to escape to the countryside; it was really a tragedy and so needed appropriate words to rely onto. In Colmer’s anthology, quotations were grouped under impressive and suggestive headings, in order to orient the readers and of course there were allusions to the emperor of Germany and Austria. So, a sort of presentation of these characters which were considered similar to Shakespeare’s characters. Shakespeare was used like Nostradamus, it seemed that he could speak about present and contemporary events and so we have surprising headings which are on some famous battle fought during the Great War, such as the Gallipoli campaign. So it’s so strange that they were trying to find the meaning of their lives in Shakespeare books, which were so far away from their own experience. Another anthology: Shakespeare Tercentenary Souvenir, issued in 1916, the climax for England because it was the year of the battle of La Somme, and then even the author, Reverend Askew, wanted to reassure and comfort the terrified souls of the English people. In this anthology the common people reaction to the atrocity of the war but in Shakespeare’s words, as if this author was considered immortal, and he could share sense of devastation, uncertainty, lack of control on events and national policy, which was of the nation. There was such a divide between the government and the population. The population was against the war because they were suffering and they couldn’t understand why all these young people should die in the middle of the battles. 1916 – England was constricting soldiers to the war. There was no constriction before, English soldiers embarked themselves as volunteers, sometimes inspired by solemn words and especially from Shakespeare, so S. propaganda was really effective and also they were confident that war would be short, so they want to become heroes. But one they came to see the battlefield and trenches they could really appreciate that this worlds was worse than the other and they couldn’t leave the battlefield. They had to obey, and so their opinion about the war changed dramatically. Shakespeare was enlisted to give them entertainment and so he was performed in London, for instance there were the Shakespeare Acts, were civilians and soldiers on leave could gathered to listen to readings of S. and also to watch Shakespearean performances. British actors went to US to promote both Shakespeare but also the American intervention in the Great War. It was the 1st time UK was asking for help to its former colony. The culture they shared was used to invite them to join forces with Europe against Germany. LEZIONE 3  10/03 WAR, SOLDIERS, AND POETRY When the losses of the war grew increasingly, time for memorialisation of the dead started; soldiers started to believe they were being cheated by the government and that they were killing other people for no reason at all; so the government had to cope with this disenchantment of the soldiers. They had to convince them that it was worth to die for England. In order to celebrate those who died in the battlefields, they started to write obituary in the newspaper in order to inscribe their death in the civilisation problem, which was to defeat the evil Germany. They had to memorialised also the wounded ones; in Shakespeare plays one can find beautiful epigraphs in which the author eulogize untimely death, for instance Anthony and Cleopatra; also Anthony’s speech on the death of Julio Caesar. This plays were republished in order to commemorate soldiers and then they were present as a gift to the survival. So, once again the government used S. in order to convince people and to provide social cohesion. Shakespeare’s works and name had been linked to Englishness and England. In some plays you will find a celebration of the nation and of the values which really established the England as a nation. And also the course of time of so many centuries, S. was identified with the best values that England proclaimed to cherish. He was the poet who best expressed Englishness. In January 1917 the wounded soldiers were given this collection of S.’s plays which were reissued and reedited, to honour diseased soldiers. The value of these collections is that they were a “token of gratitude” for the services rendered to the nation. These collection were preserved and kept because they symbolised the body of the nation. In England, governments and newspaper propaganda were contested by large groups of population, especially by intellectuals and pacifists groups. Many member of the Bloomsbury Group were against the war, such as Bertrand Russell. The soldiers, or part of them, which participated in the IWW were well read, and some of them were poets, thus they were able to write about their war experiences. Some of their poems circulated among the soldiers. So, we can see a fist phase of the war, in which they were very supportive of the war and they really believed in the sort of mission they wanted to accomplish on the battlefield. They also read a lot, first of all because there were large stands of time in which they were doing nothing, just waiting for something to happen. And so they read books, and they were sort of circulating library in the trenches, so books circulated among people, and also people from the lower classes could access to them. This intense reading, allowed them to understand much more about the war and its reasons. So we have in these letters and diaries, traces of soldiers’ meditations on books and on Shakespeare. They needed to read not just because it was boring to be there without doing anything, but also because they wanted to have some symbols and token of their previous life, in that alienating space: the trenches. And so, thanks to reading they could make friends with other people, because they could share and discuss the same readings, so it was a very intensive process and the practice of reading became really important in that period. Shakespeare had a special place in this library; by reading these letter it’s been discovered that Edward Thomas, who was a poet, in his letters to his wife and family, wrote that he was reading S.’s sonnets, and when he died in 1917 his family was given his own copy of S.’s plays. We know he was reading Hamlet and Julius Caesar because he wrote to his wife that he could hear sounds of firing in the distance while reading. They were able to really self-absorb themselves while reading Shakespeare, it was a moment to relief, to relax. Being a poet he was trying to write his own book, and so, by reading Shakespeare, he was kind of exercising himself. They were also members of the official class who decided to read and write imitating some classical English poems. The importance of S. was also that, by reading him they remembered their life and their country, so they really fostered nostalgia within themselves. And they could hope that they were coming back to their previous life, so this tragedy could finish sometimes in the future and they could go back to their family and universities and so on. So by reading books they were trying to keep in contact with their identity. Quotation by James Neville in a letter to his father: “To-day I received my trench boots, and also that Shakespeare which I have charmed with. I looked up Act IV, Scene 3 of Henry V, and the famous passage before Agincourt. I love that passage. It’s a priceless book to have out here.” This famous passage will be quoted many times. The play was really exploited by war propaganda during both world wars. Because this play tells us the story of this king of England who had been a very naughty boy, a prince who wanted to amuse himself with fools and despicable people. He was such a close friend of Falstaff for instance. But in this play the king is able to defend his country and he delivered one of the most patriotic speeches. That is why the war propaganda dug out some pieces from this passage. When Richard III was state firmed by Wales, which was in the IIWW, he decided to use in the 1st scene, some lines from Henry V and it was a message given to both England and America, so there were these worlds which were not lost. who made England and they wanted to reconstruct an idea of Englishness in which everybody coming from difference ethnic regions could identify themselves. They were trying to highlight common values and to put in the background those values that were different. A passage delivered by the professor of the university of Oxford and Cambridge who in those years was really influential and played a political role in those years, in his homage to Shakespeare, Pr. Gollancz. “Shakespeare boundless love of country is no mere poetic fervour; it solidly based upon his belief that English ideal make for righteousness, for freedom, for the recognition of human rights and liberties” So we have in his own words a liberal Shakespeare who shares the liberal government’s set of values. It is a fair England, the one presented by S., an England who sides with freedom and which recognizes human rights and liberties. This was how England wanted to be and then, throughout the war, it discovered it was very different from this. We have also Sidney Lee , another intellectual, historian, one of the co-author of the national biography. He wrote that Shakespeare had disciplined patriotism but also he could see English historical figures faults. He was an Englishman, he represented Englishmen, but he could see also when English people failed, when they are not up to this ideas they want to celebrate. Prof. Dixon said: “no other Englishman, so perfectly represented, not merely the language but the very spirit and genius of the nation as did Shakespeare. His acceptance by the world was in great measure due not so much to his genius as to the English quality of his genius” Here is the recurrence of Englishmen, English and so on. In other words he proclaims that Shakespeare is universal, so he’s really one of the protagonist of the world literature, but he’s such, as much as he is English, so as much as he represents the best of the English qualities. we have here once again the celebration of an idealised Englishness. Of course, as the world progressed, different feelings ran throughout the population, in journal, newspapers and speeches because the war had been really cruel, it would last longer than what told and so, other people and especially German people, were represented in a very derogative way, they were the enemy, they were so different than English people. So there was this sort of polarity between English people and continental people, and this is so typical of English culture. This kind of feelings can resurface after many years, and even nowadays while the urban communities were against Brexit, countryside communities revealed this negative perception of the others. We have the same kind of process in the war years, for instance Marie Corelli in 1916 said: “Above and through all things he was thoroughly English. He loved England with all the loyal passion of a true-born son of this ‘sceptred isle’… There was no taint of the mongrel about him. He had no morbid craving for foreign goods or foreign fashions.” sceptred isle’  this is from Shakespeare’s lines. So, there is a pure English and he represented the pure Englishness, no contamination with other cultures. So, something was changing and this was due to the war and the atrocities of the war. At this point we can see that S. was mainly identified with the English countryside, so the true England was the countryside. And this period, Tudor England, had been retold as a long romance, in which there was this sense of the moral range of Tudor England. And also, according large parts of the intellectual world and the political world, real England was in the countryside where they kept the same values which were typical of the Tudor England. There is this quite peculiar fact: the urban areas not appear in the propaganda or in poems. England was the countryside. Let’s see this poster: “Your country’s call – isn’t this worth fighting for? ENLIST NOW” This is one of the most famous posters which were issued in England so you can see words are quite significant. And, we have the beautiful English yields, a sunny and clear, cloudless sky and the traces of the war in the distance. This is represented as a very peaceful countryside and how it is menaced by the war. Then the cottages and soldier indicating them; something for which is worth fighting. There was a fight between England and Germany over Shakespeare; UK wanted to demonstrated that he was theirs and not German’s. And that’s why they started by giving a very dark description of Germany. They started by denigrating German culture, which was absolutely appreciable, there are so many great scholars and philosophers, but they described German culture as inferior. They also said that Shakespeare and his language were contaminated by the translation into German or by the interpretation of German scholars and so he was deprived of hid Englishness. They thought that German people was trying to distorting Shakespeare’s messages. Some War poems Even the war poets did not innovate rhythm or language; at least until they faced the war and then a very crude language was inserted in these poems. They are characterised by very patriotic lines which are the expression of the liberal government and some other lines that confuted this idea of the superior England and tried to mend differences between countries. Of course Shakespeare is not mention but his shadow is present, because his lines inspired first of all the sense of brotherhood or warn against the conflict between fiction and reality. RUPERT BROOKE (1887 – 1915) He died onboard to his ship. He had a typical Victorian education, he did have very negligent father, of course he loved him but he didn’t spend so much time with him, and a possessive mother. His father was schoolmaster so he had a very good education. Throughout his life he experienced how badly these familiar tides influenced his life. He read classics at King’s College in Cambridge - this was typical for his social class – and he loved so much English literature and so he read many books in English and started writing poems when he was very young. He was also an actor he played some parts in university plays and in 1910 he was just 24, he published his 1st book of poems and the, age 25, he planned to collect poem from the Georgian poetry anthology. So he was well rooted in Victorian and Edwardian society and he really breed this kind of culture. He decided to join the war in 1914, one of the volunteers. He died in 1915 and so his collection of poems was published posthumous. His life was transformed into a myth, after his death the poet, who had not been on the battlefield, who died suffering from a mosquito’s bite was described as the emblem of Englishness, kind of martyr of England and they also capitalised so much on his beautiful looks. He was described as a young Apollo, golden haired. So, this man was used to symbolise a golden age before the war and also the young English people sacrifice during the Great war. He was a tormented soul, he had a lot of relationship both with men and women, so he was really an unhappy man at the time he died, he was just looking for his own way in the world. He was almost transformed into a God, a myth, but in the 60’s, people was really very frightened by the war – the Vietnam war devasted both American and Europe – so his poems and his figure were really revised and he was considered unfashionable, not a poem to quote and to remember because he was not able to deconstruct the war propaganda and his fellow citizens were able to do that. And this is why we will compare Brooke’s poems with Sassoon’s poems. While Brooke wanted to be a true Englishman according to the Victorian and Edwardian age, he couldn’t be and he perceived this because he couldn’t express the Edwardian masculinity. There was such a propaganda work which was in favour of English, vibrant men and he discovered, in his own life, that it was so difficult for him to be a man and his sentimental life was a disaster when he died. So we should consider his poems sincere and at the same time a sort of covering up his own feelings. In the years leading to his death, likes many other soldiers, read and commented on Shakespeare’s plays. So he wrote in his letters some notes about Anthony and Cleopatra for instance, and Othello and he praised the most concise and direct Shakespeare’s lines. And so he uses this kind of style, which was largely appreciated, when he composed “The Soldier” which is an elegy sang to a nation, before dying, before so many elegies so many elegies and obituaries sung to him, he wrote an elegy to his nation. Churchill announced that Brooke was dead in a newspaper – the London times – and soon this poem sounded like a prophecy and everybody agreed that his body stood for patriotic values, which will survive. So we have a grave dedicated to Brooke in a Greek island near to the sea where he died and also some memorials in England, because he was a symbol at the time. Politicians were exploiting his name, his beauty and his poems for nationalistic purposes. The Soldier, by Rupert Brooke If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam; A body of England’s, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. Except the title, this doesn’t seem a war poem. It’s a description of England and the beauties of it. We have the repetition of England so many times and that he refers to England by using the adjective her, so England is a woman and a mother. England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love to this young man, to the soldier who will die. There’s a mother-son relationship and that’s why it so emotional and it’s clear how strong it is the bond between the English soldier and his nation heart. Here we have the beautiful elements of nature giving comfort to people, and then another move forward, another step forward: And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given First of all, see the repetition of “think”, the construction of thoughts, the construction of England. The dominant word becomes here “thoughts” and so immaterial things are so much more important and crucial to the construction of Englishness than natural material things. here “heart” means the inner part of us, the emotional part and also courage. English people were so courageous and they can really cope with the warm with death and the dissolution of their bodies. It's an invite to meditating on this death. And so you have here the climax, because “this heart all evil shed away” so there’s sort of a purification of English mind and body, purged from evil. And this body becomes a pulse in the eternal life, so close to the true life but also so immaterial. There’s no possibility to touch it because it belonged to God, the Almighty and to eternity. “no less // Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given” This is also very significant: Englishness it does not vanish, it will be there, within the eternal mind. In death they can join God, like Jesus Christ, like common men who believe in the 2nd life, so they were really sacrificing themselves. This is another tale of the world: English people were sacrificing themselves in order to save the world. Englishness survives  Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given → death is not the end of communication between the dead and people alive, so this dust, this dissolved body, still speaks to England by communicating English values. They were trying to triumph over death and even over defeat. Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. War is so far removed from these lines, it is a celebration of peace and an English heaven. No words remind us of war throughout the text and so almost immaterial things are the main protagonists in this last part. We have the celebration of male solidarity, companionship and gentleness, one of the traits which was thought typical of England. the poem is an elegy, it’s a sonnets as a form, but in elegiac tone. That is to say Brooke wants to memorialise himself or a soldier who will die for his country and who being just a body, just dust, will really communicate his vision of the world and of the place of England in it. By reading this poem we can understand that there was a prelapsarian world, so a world before the fall, just as a comparison between this poem and the Bible, so the world was the evil but England lived in a sort of earthly paradise before. Or at least, intellectuals want to think of England as a prelapsarian world and there’s this sense of nostalgia throughout the poem. When this prelapsarian world dissolve and only a few elements are left, the most important thing left is English culture and gentleness, English sense of being at peace, a peaceful world. Also, this sort of hidden message which is a message given to England: you are moving yourself towards other lands will make of these lands better than they were before. There’s a sort of England imperialism. So, so many meanings interlaced in this poem. There is also a the sense that your life and your sacrifice for the country will be rewarded if your life will be remembered in a fair way. So there is this soldier who dictate how he wants to be memorialised; the stress of memory, how important it is to construct a biography of the soldier and of England itself. They are really trying to cope with this immense tragedy by constructing their own history of this. SIGFRIED SASSOON (1886 – 1967) Another poet, another view of England His life was much longer than Brooke’s life. He was a poet, well acquainted with Virginia Woolf as well as Brooke and however he had very different vision of the war, his experienced were rather different. He fought in France and he was one of the men who harshly struggle against the English government. He attended courses at Cambridge university, but he didn’t take a degree; however he was very interested in literature and he wrote many poems since he was very young. He enlisted in 1915 and he was immediately sent to France where he became famous for his bravery. He was courageous and because of this he was really well accepted to the generals and to the officer’s ranks. In 1917 he was also wounded an sent back to England and one in England he consulted himself with other writers, and especially with Bertrand Russell, he was a pacifist, Russell was very famous at that moment, he was very close with the Bloomsbury Group, however his ideas were more radical than those of Bloomsbury and so he delivered so many speeches against the government and against the conduct of the war. He was from unexceptionally wealthy and also honoured family in England; he was the nephew of John Russell who had been Prime Minister. He was in a very special position in English society, he was a philosopher, mathematicians, a very gifted mind. Sassoon wrote with Russell a letter which was a violent attack on the politicians and on the general who were leading the war and Sassoon managed to have this letter published and read in the Parliament. Here is the letter: I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them and that had this been done the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation. I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realise. It’s an harsh declaration. Words denouncing the government cover up of the war: - Deliberately ; insincerities; deception; aggression; conquest; now; evil and unjust You can feel that the soldiers had been victims. Now that I have been involved in the war, I have formed a new opinion about it. There’s this sort of tension with the text and we can appreciate what happens in a soldier’s mind when they could understand they were suffering no because of justice, but because of political errors. This is the 1st time that the liberal government were openly contrasted. We have the idea of brotherhood who had been betrayed by the government. There the sense of the dissolution of the nation, because people who were in charge couldn’t really do the best for their country. Also the suffering is repeated, that is to say that you cannot cover up or suffering, we have the right to write on history and it was a tale of suffering. There is the reverse of the story which is coming up. There is also a protest against civilians who did not protest against the war and because of this they are a complicities of the politicians. This is England at war here. It was probably so scandalous because the government, the politicians were probably fully aware that the war was such a mistake and that they were going to be defeated. At the same time they were very blind to the testimonies from the war front. That’s why this declaration was so scandalous. That’s a complete reversal of the propaganda cover up. These fighting men are not sacrificing themselves for good, but because of the political errors and insincerities, so do not use such beautiful words to praise the war, it is really a dirty affair. He never mentioned England but is complaining about the whole system. Not a word remind us of the England, a sort of an ideological party fabricated by someone, but we have forces within the country which have different vision of the war and of course we must stand with the soldiers because they could see what’s happening. It's an important letter because intellectual were taking side and they were not led by political party, but they were speaking of their own interpretation of factual reality and there was no real use of the propaganda words if not to reverse them. So, those passive civilians and audiences that are so submitted to the truth that the government present them and at the same time there are people who have enough imagination to realise what is really happening. There’s also a struggle for new England, a more inclusive one. Thanks to Sassoon, soldiers became the protagonist of this poem. Russell decided to read this passage in Parliament, and would have paid for it, but one of his friends – Robert Graves – protested that Sassoon was shell shot and because of this he cannot be punished by the marshal corps. So he was send to an hospital where he met other poets, for instance Wilfred Owen who was completely devastated by the war, that was a convinced Christian and that’s also why he decided to write this accusation to the war. Another poem from Sassoon: Glory of Women You love us when we’re heroes, home on leave, Or wounded in a mentionable place. You worship decorations; you believe That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace. You make us shells. You listen with delight, By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled. You crown our distant ardours while we fight, And mourn our laurelled memories when we’re killed. You can’t believe that British troops ‘retire’ When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run, Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood. O German mother dreaming by the fire, While you are knitting socks to send your son By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled. You crown our distant ardours while we fight, And mourn our laurelled memories when we’re killed. We see that women are guilty as well as the government, civilians and soldiers who are fighting on the battlefields. Why that? Because they provide the right audience for this tale, for this romances. They listen with delight. You are so excited when you listen to tales of dirt and danger, because you are not there, you’re the audience. You embellish everything while we are fighting, so you distort reality and then mourn.. the target is the government who’s responsible fort these deaths but still decide to celebrate them using laurel, there are these tokens which remind us not of the cruelty of the war, but of heroism: laurelled memories. The women play once again a very active part because they provide once again the audience to this social bribes and by mourning their beloved ones, who were killed on the battlefield, they perpetuated what made the war possible. Step by step the narrator, the Speaking I, we have it if not present the personal pronouns in the text we know that is a sort of dialogue between a soldier and women. You can’t believe that British troops ‘retire’ When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run, Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood Here we have an increasingly cruel language, because there is not longer a distortion of reality, we have the British troops which retired, but unfortunately women cannot believe in it, because they are so absorbed in this induced romance, in this dream, in this fictional rendition of the war that those British heroes couldn’t retire, they must be up to their mission, which has to civilised the war, to be superior. When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run,  now he’s renaming that romance, we have really hell’s last horror and this horror break them, they are really very fragle and they are escaping from the battlefield. Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood We have here corpses. This word which the propaganda avoided to spell, but there are corpses, no more bodies and persons, but corpses. O German mother dreaming by the fire, While you are knitting socks to send your son His face is trodden deeper in the mud. We have here really a change of perspective because from the English setting and the English feelings about the war we are now seeing through the narrator sight, we are seeing a German mother who’s dreaming by the fire, so she’s once again self-absorbed in a sort of oneiric vision, distorted vision of the war and she knits socks to sent her son, but her son is dead. So he’s trying to have simultaneously between the two sights and this simultaneously is so shocking. There0s a German mother who still thinks of her son, but her son is looking down at the mud, it’s a very dramatic and significant moment. There were civilians among them, British troops but also German troops and mothers. The interlocutor here through the poem want to make the audience think about the many perspectives of the war and also how much the feelings, even of the enemies, were affected by this tragedy. The poet is really denouncing the war as it is and also the propaganda and government, but at the same time he wants to make other people understand, the civilians, that they’re very similar to German people who are crying and wheeping for their victims. He wants to show how much these people were affected by the propaganda. Soldiers can understand each other, because they’re experiencing death and when one of them die, they could see that they’re very similar, but at the same time English women can be very guilty because they are supporting the English government. There are some rhyming words which are antonymous: - killed and thrilled. We have amusement rhyming with the vanishing of life. - fight – delight, which expresses how it is really incredible that someone can be delighted when other people are putting at risk their own lives. Also we have alliteration of some sounds or the aspiration ≫ hell – horror ; trampling the terrible corpses He’s trying to make us see the terrible war, this last sentence was one of the most horrible experiences of the soldier. Even horses when they saw corpses they stopped, but soldier had really to trample all that corpses, it was terrible. Soldiers felt completely terribly alone and not part of the English nation because of this. When Woolf wrote Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf was one of the civilians and she belonged to upper-middle class. she seemed to have been detached from the war or at least so the story went at the time. In recent year we discovered that Woolf was terribly affected by the war. She conflicts Brooke’s and Sasson’s biographies in the presentation of Septimus. Septimus was, not in the 1st dropped of Mrs. Dalloway’s. it was then inserted and he was one of the most revealing characters in MRs. Dalloway. Initially VW was almost sheltered and protected from the war, she had signs of mental disease, so her husband Leonard Woolf tried to protect her and they spent so many hours and months in their countryside home, because she was alerted by firing in the distance. She was also a woman unsuitable for the war and this located her in a very peculiar situation. So she was detached from the war, but we know that in her letters and diaries she wrote about it especially when relating or telling us about some of their friend who tried no to enlist or who were in France and especially she wrote about her brother in law, because two of Leonard’s brothers were at the front and one of them died, and the other, Philipp, came back shell-shot. Biographers tell us that Woolf was especially affected when Rupert Brooke died, because he was one of her friends and friend of her brother and then she could see that the war was hitting very close to her place and her friends. So this death had a terrible impact in her life. Also because they were friends since childhood; both of them was affected by mental illnesses, both of them were very fragile and so she started meditating on the life of Brooke and she came t understand that the government was really deceiving those sensitive young people because the government needed many soldiers for this military action and he did succeeded in it because really there were many volunteers from the university students and so on. And so when she started writing her books, she describes a gifted young man who dies and who is mentally wounded by the war and who, initially, joins the war enthusiastically. So we have these characters in MRs. Dalloway which remind us of Rupert Brooke. When eulogising Rupert Brooke, Churchill used these words: “England’s noblest sun” and these words distorted the real history of this man, because Brooke was so young and he was so affected by his doubts and he was really just trying to find his way in love. And then there is this incredible evidence: his photos were heavily touched upon, because they wanted to make us see how he was beautiful and his beauty was a Greek beauty. So we can observe the symmetry between the two sides of his face, they were trying to transform Rupert into a hero. They were really unrespectful, they disregarded the reality of his story, this young man died before even entering the war, when he was near to Gallipoli and he died for a mosquito bite. They were trying to exploit this man and of course, his friends reacted to this mystification of him. When he was writing letters, Brooke, he was not enthusiast about the war. And then we have this final act of memorialisation when a book was issued and memoires were added to the collection of Brooke’s poems and this memoirs, edited by Marsh, really reported the life of this man distorting and omitting some events and some of his sentences and also words. Sentence by a drama – Making history by Brian thrill, which is about history and the way history has been fabricated in order to serve some ideas, the state, the all community, unrespectable of what a man was. Virginia Woolf defined the biography written by Marsh as repulsive. She uses different words when writing to Rupert’s mother, because she can really feel what his mother felt at the time and she didn’t approve of this biography because it was disrespectful of the man and of his reality. According to Woolf this character, who was her friend, was flattered by the large population, by politicians, but in doing so they were really wounded him. Because he was no more able to tell his own story and his story had been completely fabricated, moreover they did it in order to conscript other English men. In Virginia Woolf’s opinion, Sassoon’s poems were really realistic rendition of the war. The war was a dirty affair and people in the war were suffering because some general and politicians were blind to reality and also incompetent. So she shared completely Sassoon’s ideas. So she decided to write Mrs. Dalloway in the aftermath of the Great Wand and to juxtapose the civilian impression about the war and the veteran’s anger, because they were completely forgotten by the English government, and this was another reason for the government to be guilty of. So, she resorted to what she knew about Brooke and Sassoon and also about her brother in law, Philip. Philip came back to the war but he was so dejected, he felt so uneasy in this new situation as if he was living in a sort of dream-like reality, always having visions of the past. And, he was incapable of feeling anymore and this was a disease but people at the time couldn’t understand it. She initially decided to centre all the plot around this character: Mrs. Dalloway, but then she decided to add sort of double of this character which his Septimus Warren-Smith. She disseminates throughout the text so many clues as to make us understand that the two of them were so similar and so different. First of all, both of them suffered from mental disease and initially Mrs. Dalloway was the one to commit suicide, but then her shoulders were relieved from this burden and Septimus committed suicide. As the narrator says in the book, Septimus felt that he should be the escaped got and be punished for this evil of the world. This character is also a Christ-life figure because he decides to die to offer peace and solace to other people. First of all, Septimus was a veteran, that is to say that he was one of them who believed in the propaganda and ready to die on the continental front and the, when coming back he felt so depressed and traumatised by the world, the government let him down, so there was no support from the government. survive. He was right there. The last shells missed him. He watched them explode with indifference. When peace came he was in Milan, billeted in the house of an innkeeper with a courtyard, flowers in tubs, little tables in the open, daughters making hats, and to Lucrezia, the younger daughter, he became engaged one evening when the panic was on him—that he could not feel. For now that it was all over, truce signed, and the dead buried, he had, especially in the evening, these sudden thunder-claps of fear. He could not feel • Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway (p. 75). e-artnow. Kindle Edition. Mrs Dalloway is very fond of literary and biographies because she really eants to make sense of her own life and she can do this only by being perceptive and also she tries to make sense even of other’s life. But her husband doesn’t like Shakespeare and so he’s not so very interested in literature, which was really an emotional outlet for feelings; so people who would deal with feelings had thought to be only women. It was a problem for Brooke who was a poet and also for Septimus who was so keen on reading literature. But here the most important sentence is: “congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably” So he had become, according to the propaganda, an Englishman, because he could really control his passion and he’s very cool even when he was involved in the war, he was able to make friends, to escape from death, to be promoted and he was also a survivor, so he was a winner, he passed his text. However his mind tells him something different, so his mind shows signs of uneasiness and he suffered from panic attacks and anxiety. This is what happens to traumatised people, on the spot they can react to what happens, but when they’re safe they start suffering and they cannot understand why they’re so fragile. This is the impression: he could not feel. This is a disease. For English propaganda you are cool and brave when you’re not feeling, but for a man this is a mental disease, you have no thoughts for life and this is terrible. LEZIONE 6  17/03 It was a social and medical problem when people from the trenches came back to England or their own country, because they showed signs of mental disease and people were not ready to deal with them. Also there was this sort of definition of these mental disease in moral and national terms. First of all English, especially English doctors said that said people who had English nerve – so that were very cool, that show no emotion – were healthy people and very English, but people who didn’t possess these characteristics, which were typical of the English population, suffered from panic attacks and anxiety and in some sense they weren’t English people, because they lacked courage, the most important characteristic of English people and so, they were unworthy of this celebrated tradition of English people. In the long run Doctors discovered that both civilians and soldiers were affected by mental disease and this kind of mental disease was define post traumatic disease and now is seriously taken by government and doctors and it’s been studied, and people are really taken care of during this period of suffering following the disaster of the war. In every moment of their life they felt really in danger, even if the war was over, and they had hallucinations of people trying to wound them and to kill them. And eminent among the enemies of them, was the government. They felt spied and persecuted by the government and this is one of the main characteristics of the first decades of the 20th century. People discovered that they were really affected in their life by some abstract power, faceless power: the government, the army and so on and they couldn’t escape from this kind of control, they understood that they had really lost control of their own life. It was difficult to find a new way of life. People tried to cope with this trauma of the war, in so many ways: some of the civilians tried to celebrate the memories of the war and other people tried to memorialise the many deaths and also to write testimonies of the war. So we have this great phenomenon, in the aftermath of the war, that is that issue of many many books, which were called war books because their main theme was the war. This happened in Europe and also In the States, it wasn’t only an English phenomenon. Initially these books were despised by the critics because they were written in a very different language, even by soldiers from the lower ranks, but however they had an important political function which was also a social function because they tried to ill the mental wounds of this war. And so, the main political result of the publications of such books were that people started to think about the war; was it the only tool given to societies in order to solve their problems or there could be another way out of those very troubled situations? The problem was how to negotiate among countries? This point is really interesting for us, because we have to remember that the Bloomsbury group was at the centre of a very crucial meditation on this topic and so, the political treaty among the countries was really envisaged by the Bloomsbury group and especially by Bertrand Russell and Leonard Woolf and this first draft was really seriously considered by politicians in the aftermath of the war. In these books, except the ones written by Russell, we have poems or also novels and so they had a descriptive or narrative nature, but while telling us or describing us moments of the war, they wanted to put forward the renunciation to the war. They were trying to convince other people that the war was something which will end with the devastation of Europe. There are some elements which are considered crude, and they are the descriptions of bodies and corpses mangled in pieces which really shocked the civilians because they were really slave to this kind of dream of the war as a chivalric romance. It’s a worldwide description of the IWW in war books. We have the war poets in England and then we have for instance Ungaretti in Italy, or also the young Hemingway who came to fight in Europe and wrote his war books being very realistic when describing death. So, this is really the striking image of the war: the fact that so many young men were really dismembered and so lost their country and families. Frederick Manning Why Manning, who was born in Australia, came to fight in Europe? Frederick Manning was well rooted and also supported by the modernist movement, or at least, by some of the main representatives of the modernist movement, however, he’s not so well-known. His novel, HER PRIVATES WE, may be considered a diary, but he had not write it during the European war, when he was in France, but he wrote it in 1929, so some years after the war, when the literary market was quiet interested in this kind of books. He was born in Sidney, Australia, in 1882, in the Victorian Age. He was the son of Sir Patrick, who was very respected in Australia, and he was from roman catholic ancestry and from Ireland. Frederick, however he led a very solitary life because he was an asthmatic and so no fit for the war. However he made friends with Galton, an English man who came back to England to be a vicar and then Frederick decided to go to UK along with him. Galton was a very despotic figure, but he supported Manning an encourage him to write. At the time of the war, Manning was writing historical novels, so gathering material for this kind of word and he was also an eager reader of English literature, so he was kind of a literate person, even if he couldn’t have a formal English education. In London people came to know him and they were very interested in his work, especially Ezra Pound. His first work was Vigil of Brunhild (1907), which is a monologue, it was traditional in the 1st years of the 20th century to write dramatic poems, in line with Browning poems. Browning was a Victorian poet but he was highly esteemed by the modernist, because of the polyphonic monologues that he wrote. And so the 1st work written by Manning is a dramatic monologue in verse. Up to this in 1909 he wrote Scenes and Portraits, which was especially known by the elitist group of modernist poets and intellectuals. Then there is a divide in his life, because he was an asthmatic, so he wasn’t fit for military life, but he really wanted to join the war and the army and while they were so many men trying to avoid recruitment, by protesting they were ill and so on, Manning tried to have support in order to be really accepted in the military ranks. Finally He succeeded in it, and he was enlisted; he became a private and his number was 19022 – nineteen thousands and 22 – in the King’s Shropshire light infantry, and this is one of the lower ranks in British Army. He became one among so many, in a very brief time. He was able to adapt himself to life in the trenches, probably because he had this indifference tense to social classes and differences, which is, on the contrary, typical of the English education; English people were, and even today probably, trained to live withing a group who share same habits, kind of readings and so on, but he was exceptionally open minded and some of the scholars who have studied him, said that this was part of his Australian law, a new country in which differences between people were completely levelled and so there was a new attitude towards other men. That’s why Manning was able to describe people in a very sympathetic way - people from the lower or from the higher class - he was very compassionate and able to be very detached from what he was describing, not so emotionally moved, always in control of himself and his passions, and this was typical of the English training. He was really a good witness and reporter from the war front. He's extremely interesting for us because he participated in this terrible fight, battle, which was LA Somme, which was really -a disaster for the UK army. It is always remembered by scholars and also by soldiers who participated in it. Something changed immediately; so there is the first part of the war joyful and hopeful and then the 2nd part of the war, which was really terrifying and he participated in the 2nd part. No illusion was allowed anymore after La Somme. He was then sent to Ireland in 1917 and there he was punished for heavy drinking; this was one of his weaknesses. It seems that he was able to pass through those terrible consequences of the war, but at the same time he relied too much on heavy drinking and that’s why he was punished, and some references to this are inserted in his book. In 1918, probably to save him from a more severe punishment he was diagnosed suffering from neurasthenia and he decided to resign. In 1917 he published Eidola, a collection of his poems, in which it is clear that he had been influenced so much by his friend Ezra Pound. Then, after the war, he wrote a biography, and also articles for Criterion, a magazine created by T.S. Eliot. He was really at the centre of experimental writings in that time because Criterion was a wonderful magazine and so his articles were published by this magazine. However, of course he was well accepted but he had no mentor, so it was so difficult for him to find its own way in the literary panorama, which was so crowded with interesting literary figures, there was Eliot, Joyce, Conrad, Woolf so very great novelists and writers. Manning did accepted his fate, to be shadowed by these figures this unfaithful lady and fortune means also England, so they belong to England which to a certain extent, betrayed them. This soldiers are completely blind to their own fate, they cannot decide anything, they pawn in the hands of an abstract thing. There was not a man that you can fight or confute, but abstract entities and it’s so difficult to struggle against a government or, for instance, justice and other abstract entities or agencies, which really run the worlds in the first years of the 20th century. The novel does not unravel through a logical plot. We have a series of episodes in which Bourne is the main protagonist and interpreter. But there are a sort of fragments put together by him. This, much more of a modernist modern, can be describe as a pctoresque novel. Episodes which are not link to each other excepts for the fact that the same protagonist is the same. Also we have this senseless movement of characters from one place to another and they seem completely unable or unwilling to act on their own. Another key word is apathy. There is the sense of having possible no reaction let to them; it’s really a sort of nightmare in which you are acted by other entities. The first thing noticeable while going through the novel is that Shakespeare is confined to the paratext. His voice is heard in the title and in this epigraphs which are prefixed to each chapter; the quotations are in italics, so we can immediately understand that they are Shakespeare’s voice. This use of Shakespeare in the paratext of the novel was quite common in the Victorian age and they were used by a novelist in the 18th century: Anne Radcliffe used epigraphs of Shakespeare and other writers in her novels. While analysing these quotations in her novels, we understand that her aim was to Evoque the events to come in the chapter, but also to arouse suspense and create atmosphere. There is this great intention on the part of her, and also it is important for us because it’s what Manning does in his novel. This quotation are not uttered or commented upon other characters in the texts, they are clearly marked as quotations and on the threshold of narration. So, we can define them extradiegetic quotations and so we will see that thanks to these deivces it seems that Shakespeare’s voice speak from the threshold of the novel and it is like a comment on the tail to be told. In Anne Radcliffe we have sort of anticipation of what is going to happen, but also general atmosphere. She’s trying to immerge her readers in this mysterious atmosphere. We have in Her privates we, the voice of the narrator within the text. It’s a 3rd person narration; the narrator knows everything and he also anticipates his opinion sometimes, but the point is, is the narrator speaking by the epigraphs in the sense that he shares Shakespeare’s opinions or can we detect the voice of some characters in these epigraphs, or is Bourne’s voices that we can hear? Also, is there any connection between the quotation and the content of the chapter? The Victorian novels used Shakespeare’s quotations as epigraphs; sometimes they were used in a scientific in the science critical essays. It is not surprise that Manning used this wuotations in a war book, because we know that soldiers read Shakespeare in the trenches and there were some places were he was performed, but what is surprising is that the connection between this quotations and the chapters is sometimes unclear. There is sometimes no direct connection between the two of them, and is up to the readers to solve this enigma and to decide why Shakespeare has been quoted in the margins of the text. So, sometimes the reader is puzzled and sometimes it’s necessary to go back to the first page in order to look for some meaning throughout the chapter. Also, it seems to us at certain point, that all the words written, even Shakespeare’s words, missed the points, and so that we are left without any meaning. Another key word is that people couldn’t decide what to do, so they were reactionless in the sense of apathy as well as uncertain; so uncertainty is the other key word. Why these words have been chosen to open the book? Some of the lines in the play, are uttered by comic characters, or characters who have these lines given to them or a few lines given to them, they are not the leading characters. He was trying to make us see a different perspective, which was not the one of propaganda but the one of the men who really lived the war. LEZIONE 7  18/03/2021 SHAKESPEARE’S VOICES HEARD IN THE TRENCHES We have seen that there are some epigraphs prefixing the chapters with some Shakespeare’s lines that sometimes are uttered by comic characters. And we have to find out why Manning decided to insert these in his book. Chapter after chapter, we will try to discover how Manning exploits Shakespeare’s quotations. In the novel there is a preface written by Manning, who is the one who’s speaking, and this is a good starting point to try to understand his thoughts and opinions regarding the purposes of the book. “While the following pages are a record of experience on the Somme and Ancre fronts, with an interval behind the lines, during the latter half of the year 1916; and the events described in it actually happened; the characters are fictitious. It is true that in recording the conversations of the men I seemed at times to hear the voices of ghosts. Their judgments were necessarily partial and prejudiced; but prejudices and partialities provide most of the driving power of life. It is better to allow them to cancel each other, than attempt to strike an average between them. Averages are too colourless, indeed too abstract in every way, to represent concrete experience. I have drawn no portraits; and my concern has been mainly with the anonymous ranks, whose opinion, often mere surmise and ill- informed, but real and true for them, I have tried to represent faithfully. War is waged by men; not by beasts, or by gods. It is a peculiarly human activity. To call it a crime against mankind is to miss at least half its significance; it is also the punishment of a crime. That raises a moral question, the kind of problem with which the present age is disinclined to deal. Perhaps some future attempt to provide a solution for it may prove to be even more astonishing than the last.” This passage is full with meaning and also almost a literary manifesto and also a warning given to the post war world. In the last part we have really the understanding of war as something which men created and then something which men can solve. There is this kind of hope in the future, providing the solution for the war. Not only the hope, but they are able to envision a new future purged from war. He says: To call it a crime against mankind is to miss at least half its significance – it is also to miss the opportunity to change the future, because we should recognize that mankind is able to create a war and then there is this 2nd sentence: it is also the punishment of a crime – it’s so difficult try to give a definition of war because sometimes you’re reacting to some crime which has been committed against you or your allies and so on, so it is also the punishment of the crime. CRIME and PUNISHMENT of THE CRIME, we have to remember these words while reading Mrs. Dalloway, cause Septimus was waiting for the punishment of the crime, which was war, and he offered himself to pay for all humanity, for all human kind, for this terrible crime which was the war. So, there is this sense of punishment. In Mrs. Dalloway Septimus waits for a whip to punish people, here the sense of punishment. So, it is a moral question, so that people has to consider and to find a solution for. We have this effort to put everything in this novel, let’s see the use of some words: - records of experience, so a diary, close to reality. - and the events described in it actually happened; the characters are fictitious - We have the relationship between text and fiction; Manning is trying to give us the best of fiction and the best of factuality, writing a hybrid novel. This is very interesting because in this he is in line with modernist historian and biographers. - . It is true that in recording the conversations of the men I seemed at times to hear the voices of ghosts - This verbs appears once again; he’s trying to faithfully report on the conversations of these men; it is a coral narration, because he will speak about the conversations of the men involved in this war. - to hear the voices of ghosts - The lexical choice in really important and striking, because there is a sort of phenomenon to which so many veterans were exposed, so they relieved pieces and fragments of their lives in trenches, on the battlefields. The same happened to Septimus: he so many times havens killing, and so he hears, the narrator, the voices of ghosts. Manning decides to have a 3rd person narrator because he wants to be detached, these were ghosts of his past, but he can hear the voices nevertheless. These people, the soldiers, re-enacted their lives and conversations in this novel, waiting for someone to understand the meaning of their actions. And there is another very interesting passage, Manning says: I don’t want to speak of the average people and judgements, because reality is not there. I want to speak about people’s opinion, which are partial, because they provide most of the driving power of life. Our life is not so reasonably, sometimes we are irrational, or driven by our prejudices or partialities and this is why he wants to make us see how people lived the war and also : “Averages are too colourless, indeed too abstract in every way, to represent concrete experience.” He wants to be so far from idealised soldiers, men and women. And he says: “have drawn no portraits” And this is true, indeed we don’t have a real description of characters, they are only shadows who appear here and there. “and my concern has been mainly with the anonymous ranks” There is really here a shift from the idealised men as Brooke, who had been idealised, he wants to see and describe, and to record their voices of the anonymous ranks, so people who are generally voiceless. They can make mistakes and misjudgements of course, but however, their opinion their opinion is real and truthful theirs. He also says that war shouldn’t be described with standard words, through propaganda but you should try to grasp these pieces of conversation which are real. Then we have the conclusion: “War is waged by men; not by beasts, or by gods. It is a peculiarly human activity” This is the reversal of the propaganda speeches on war. So we have men, just men acting on the battlefields, not beast, as the enemies were generally labelled, and no gods, like your own faction was generally portraits. So, in this passage he tells us so many things about what he’s going to do and why. There is the exposure of the soldier to death which is described throughout the book, and also by doing this, and by juxtaposing Shakespeare’s quotations to the this vision of the dying soldiers and of the disease, we can really appreciate and understand the writer’s intention. He wanted to struck us and to urge our own reaction, which must be a political reaction and not an emotional reaction. This is the quotation prefacing the 1st chapter, and it’s from Shakespeare. “By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death ... and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.” We need to focus on the meaning and also on the context, why that? While reading this book you can really decide to focus your attention on these lines without even knowing that these lines are from Shakespeare and from Henry IV. So we have also to consider the situational context in which these words were uttered by the characters in Henry IV in order to better understand the whole meaning of these sentences and also why Manning decided to select them. These lines are from 2nd part of Henry IV in act 3. What about the play? This is another of the history plays written by Shakespeare. He decided to dramatized the history of the English people, especially focusing his attention on the War of the Roses, which is really a huge tragedy in the history of England: there were so many dissections in both factions and a lot of men died, and so brotherhood was completely broken into pieces. Henry IV is a very interesting case in point because Shakespeare will describe not only Henry IV, this powerful king, but also his relationship to his successors, Henry V, a very young man who decided to try to be different from what it is expected from his father and so he mingle himself with people from the lower classes, even with criminals. And so, Because of this Henry IV is made of so many movements: from palaces to taverns and other disparage places and people in England, and there are also some scenes, which are set in the northern part of England, which was considered a wild region opposite to London. So, the quotation is Felicita’s because there is really this sort of contamination of the proud chivalric England with ways of life, opinions and cultures which were typical of middle and lower classes. We need to remember this when trying to understand why Manning singled out this particular quotation. Then we have another peculiar character: Falstaff. He is present throughout the book, he’s a knight, but he’s not up to his role and he teaches Prince Hal how to live among the lower classes. He’s a fascinating character for audiences and for Hal, the young prince, because he’s very eloquent and in such in an amusing way because he can play on words, use ponce and witty sentences and the world presented Hal with, is a world of pleasure: you can do what pleases you. So we have King Henry IV who stands for duty, and especially the duties of the elitist and ruling class and Falstaff who stands for pleasure. Falstaff gives Prince Hal such a kind of comfort, because he doesn’t judge him, he’s not like king Henry IV, who expects so much from his son, he’s so much disappointed with his way of life, he tries to control him and Hal decides to side with Falstaff. Then we have also the fact that Prince Hal is not able to severe ties with Court nor with the tavern and he moves from one place to the other. It seems that he tries to be what other people expect from him, he’s always trying. This history play is an hybrid play so we have a mix of languages, settings, characters, you have not only English language, but also dialect in this play. And also, there is the intertwin of different literary genres. This is an intertextual drama and one of the most popular in Elizabethan’s times because we have the tension so clearly defined and enacted on the stage, and the tension between two visions of the war. Also there’s the coexistence of two different discourses of England should decide to adjust to one or the other vision, and so there is also the coexistence of two different discourses on England and Englishness. Discourses are strings of words, political behaviours, scientific books, treaties and so on, which are pervaded by the same vision of the worlds. As Foucalt says you cannot find this substitution of one discourse by the other. We will have most of the time the coexistence of old and new discourses. Ans that’s what happens in this play. As Greenblatt wrote: “Structurally, Henry IV is not only modelled on chronicle history, which focuses on monarchs, nobles, and affairs of state, but also on chorography: a mode of writing popular in the late sixteenth century that described and surveyed the land of England focusing on the products, the terrain, and the customs of England’s various regions” (The Norton Shakespeare, p. 1167) Greenblatt reminds us of the fact that all that text, which Lotman would have called functional texts, were served to construct the nation state, England. And so, there were this interesting book, written in the Tudor Age, which are descriptions of diverse region of the Kingdom of England and it was an administrative action. T hey were trying know their own positions, properties, in England, but at the same time they were trying to impose over England a depiction of England as it should be, they were trying to construct the state, to this kind of construction was the result of knowledge: they should know other people in England, other territories and so on, and, at the same time, they were really constructing England, not only to describing, but constructing it, using some allegories, symbols and also lexical choices. Shakespeare was a sort of sponge, he was permeated by this kind of culture which was made of conversations among people but also by pretty books. He knew that and in this play he describes English as it is and as it should be. By reading Henry IV we understand that England is made of differences, it’s an heterogeneous body: so many classes, so many cultures, and so many traditions, behaviours made England. The king, in general, has to put together these patches of diverse cultures, traditions, discourses. It seems that Prince Hal is better equipped for reuniting the nation because he will be a Machiavellian King, that is to say, a king who’s well acquainted with his population and knows different languages an places, he can mediate between different cultures. We can find similarities between this play and Manning’s. The 2nd part of Henry IV is more important for us because we see that Hal becomes a king and he will embody the knightly perfection ad also English values and masculinity, he will become a courageous king, able to defeat enemies. This happens at the end of the play. All the play is structured around Falstaff and his humour. We will see that there are really an increase of the number of comic characters, which is really significant and also we will have not only London characters, but also country characters, like for instance the justices of peace. Those justices were judges, who were placed in every region to judge over people and to decide difficult issues among the population; so they were very powerful and, at the same time, they were really connected with the countryside and country culture. We will see that in the end a well ordered England will prevail, so we’ll have the right of the king to dominate on his citizens, recognized in the end. But. At the same time, this much more complex, and also diverse middle and lower class England will take the stage for all the play. So there is clearly the tension between these two Englands. Henry IV - 2nd part is also centred on the human mortality and the sense of frailty which is typical of us as human being, because we are bound to die. We have the same quotation used by another author: Ernest Hemingway, we know he joined the army during the IWW and he fought in Italy, and so, many of his novels or short stories deal the IWW. So we have this quite interesting story: “The short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, so the same quotation, which is the epigraph prefixed in chapter 1 of Manning’s book, has been used in this short story. We can also trace back the story of this quotation in the life of Hemingway. we know that he heard of it when a British officer during the war said it to him, because he wanted to console him, who was very young and he very dejected during the war: he was wounded etc. than he quoted the same quotation in the anthology he edited – Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Times - and he said that it was the best quotation in the anthology because a man could get along all right on that. Everyone can agree with this quotation and it’s also relieved: the sense that we are going to die and there is no sense to try to delay the moment we’ll die. We’ve quoted H. just to demonstrate that this was a casual quotation among the soldier who were involved in the Great War, especially the anglophone soldiers. so, it was disseminated and able to give them a sort of relief in those depressing times. Of course only a few of them knew the real context in which this quotation had been inserted, but what is clear is that they understood that it was an acceptance of the risk and an invitation to be fatalist. Of course we can’t say that Manning was well aware that the sentence was taken from Henry IV and he knew also so well the situational context in which the conversation between the character took place. So it was a very consciously quoting from Shakespeare. But it’s difficult to really understand the real connection between the quotations and the book. It’s a sort of enigma that the readers have to solve. Some informative lines about the situational context: In the secondo part of Henry IV, especially in Act III, Scene 2: We have few characters speaking: first of all we have Justice Shallow and Justice Silence. These two judges are involved in the recruitment of soldiers and they discuss about death. Of course they use some witty sentences and when Falstaff enters, especially, and also he examines some of the recruited men, the language is contaminated with the harsh and also crude language used by soldiers. Of course, men are really not so much positively responding to the recruitment, and so, they tried to escape this situation, and, all of them are from the lower classes, so they are completely immune to the chivalric code and to the language which was used in propaganda and also in this romances; so chivalric romances and their language were really used, even in this play, to try to exploit the soldiers. So we have some of the soldiers, those who asked to became soldiers, who refused to be enlisted and even pay for not being enlisted. This is the opposite of the romances, what happens here. Falstaff is rather cynical and so he decides to select people who do not pay him, who are unhealthy and have thin faces. He mocks Shallow, another authority, and we have really terrible portrayal of England, because we see that England is governed by very mean men and authority and that they are all deceiving the soldiers, but also trying to deceive each other. So, it’s really a very realistic but also bitter description of people. The declaration we quoted before has been uttered by Feeble. There is also a meaning which is conveyed by the names of these characters: so we have, for instance. Justice Silence, or, poor soldier Feeble. It’s really significant because immediately along with Bourne, we immerse ourselves in the darkness of this night. It’s a night after and before a battle; so it’s a sort of pause between action. Bourne and other characters as well, try to reach their trenches in order to be sheltered by other enemies’ attacks. He tries to keep in sight of his fellows. He wants to be a part of the group and he’s also very careful, trying to see in this darkness,; but the more he tries to be careful, the more he falls victim to “faith”. There are some moments in which he literally falls down in shell-holes, so it’s clear from the 1st paragraph that he’s not in control of his walk or actions; so he is in the hands of Fortune. This is the first connection we can find between Feeble and this characters. We will so also see that life and death are contiguous, or even the same thing, in this passage. There is this interesting sentence: “(the ground was) empty of men (and he) is alive with them” There is this sense of solitude, because you cannot see other people who are still there and are alive; there is this sense of anguishing anxiety about the future, because your senses are being diminished in this darkness, which can be considered a physical situation but also a mental state of your mind. Darkness is physical and also symbolic. At the same time you will also understand that this darkness you cannot see men, your fellows, but you can hear their voices and this is very interesting. Throughout the 1st chapter there will be no clear descriptions of soldier, corporal and so on, because it’s not possible to see them in the darkness and thus all these characters are but shadows. Thus, they are memorable not because of their physical appearances but for their lines. So we are really wishing for some word, exactly like Bourne, and this concept recurs throughout the chapter: there is another quotation at page 5: “they were only shadows in the darkness” It reminds us of the special situation of other texts: Dante’s Divina Commedia – Inferno because the are only shadows and also those people are so similar to Shakespeare’s characters. Shakespeare’s quotation reverberates throughout the chapter and orient us as readers. These quotations try to give light in this dark night and so we are almost compelled to look for meaning and understanding step by step in this text. The search for meaning is part of the chapter 1. We will see that Bourne tried to listen to other people and also to understand their words. Sometimes their words are opaque, because is so difficult to hear words which are whispered by others. And sometimes, when he met with three Scottish men, the language is opaque because the three of them do not speak standard English, but their dialect and because of this their debate seems incoherent to voice, who’s an English man. We have the same sense that we have to make an effort in order to understand Shakespeare’s words, because these words come from the past and so they are foreign to our ears. We are so used to identify otherness in post-colonial countries, different languages and so on, but the most counting otherness in our life is our past; the same is for these characters, there is someone who tries to speak to them: this man, this shadow is Shakespeare. This chapter is characterised by the interweave of different voices; they are hardly understandable and then there is an allusion, we have no direct quotations, from Dante. The pattern of the Inferno and of its 1st chapter is quite similar because this night described here is really a travel through hell, it is sort of an allegory but at the same time it is also realistic. We can hear only voices and this is clear by analysing this quotation: • He was moving towards the stairs, when a voice, muffled by the blanket, came from outside. ‘Who are down there?’ There is a sort of filter and so it’s very difficult to understand the man’s words; this man would be so important in this first chapter. There is a difference between Bourne and the other men, because he decided to go, it’s clearly stated, while other people tried to stay where they are, waiting for someone to give them orders. So, IRRESOLUTION, is the key word; and this is connected to the epigraph; of course they would like not to be involved in the battle but at the same time they do not do anything to change their fate and so they are really in the middle of fortune. Very differently from them, Bourne is much more active, he knows that he might loose his way, he might get lost, but however he decides to be part of the events, so he’s less passive than other people. So it is significant the fact that soldiers were looking for someone to make the decisions, so they were completely giving themselves into the hands of the authorities and of fortune: “but, like all tired men in similar conditions, they were glad to have their action determined for them”. So this is a very particular state of mind, when you are very tired and just waiting for someone to dictate what to do. Those soldiers are not self-confident and also they have been deprived of their own worlds. That’s why they are similar to Feeble: they abandoned themselves to someone else; so, this is another connections between men at war, in the Elizabethan ages but also in the Great War. There are so many echoes which can really help contemporary men in 1915, and till the end of the war, to understand what was going on, what they were living in that moment. There are recurrent words and this is by no accident. Some of these words are: VISIONS, SHOW and SHADOW These words belong to the semantic field of theatre recur. In chapter 1 of this novel, the narrator is investing some metaphors. He decides to re-use very familiar metaphors which really were very common in European drama in the 16-17 th centuries. We have many examples in Shakespeare, Calderon de la Barca and so on. Here some examples from Manning’s Her Privates We: 1. “he fell back among the grotesque terrors and nightmare creatures of his own mind.” 2. “You were in the last show, weren’t you?” 1. First of all it’s not a dream, it’s a nightmare, and this is the recurrent word. 2. they do refer to fight, a military action as if it is a play. And so, there is not only one metaphor, but more than one, which have been associated in the history of the western culture and so we have: - A life is like a dream - Drama theatre is like a dream That’s why we can say this is not a casual quotation, but it is really the effort to revive these metaphors, because they perfectly express the real state of mind of these soldiers: they cannot understand whether they are dreaming or living those bad and puzzling experiences. At the same time you have, reasserted, this bond with your past and this is fundamental when all your certainties in life and in your way of life, have been shaken during this moment. So, he reuses all metaphors because they are still vital metaphors but also because he wants to reassure us that it’s something we have already experienced in the past. THE IRONICAL REVERSAL OF “HAPPY FEW, BAND OF BROTHERS” We analysed this passage from S. Crispin’s day in Henry V : “Happy few band of brothers” we noticed that there were so many echoes in literary production of those years and by reading this chapter there is an interesting passage: • “Come on,’ he said, making for the steps, ‘you and I are two of the lucky ones, Bourne; we’ve come through without a scratch; and if our luck holds we’ll keep moving out of one bloody misery into another, until we break, see, until we break.” There is a sort of reverberation of these “happy few bands of brothers” and also of the epigraph in chapter 1. There is the sense of brotherhood: “you and I are two of the lucky ones” not because they were here fighting to defend their countries - as it was the 1st quotation: the happy few bands of brothers - but because their escaped - we’ve come through without a scratch - and also because of their Fortune or faith - and if our luck. Then we have: we’ll keep moving out of one bloody misery into another – this is much in Feeble’s lines  our life is a desperate life, waiting for death. “until we break” means until we die, but also break must be considered as breakdown. So, we have both mental state and also physical death. We have two echoes of Shakespeare remarked by this corpora. There are echoes of words repeated, sometime without knowing that they are repeating some ideas or some lines from Shakespeare; it’s a common human experience. This meeting between Mr. Clinton, who’s the corporal who spoke in the previous lines, is the first moment in which Bourne experiences really strong bonds with other people. The two of them are both alcohol addicted, even in his life Manning was punished for heavy drinking, so they were trying to cope with the disaster of war. They were also so close to each other because they survive, but they know that they survive only to die another time in the future, so it is really senseless to try to defy death. The real fight is against death and you cannot avoid dying. Here again there are of course echoes of Shakespeare’s quotations in the present of the IWW soldiers and then there is also reverberation of this meaning on the Shakespearean plays. Shakespeare’s quotations give us the profound meaning of the chapter but at the same time the chapter enlightens the quotations and this is a very precise perspective on the play. CONFRONTATION BETWEEN FEEBLE AND MR. CLINTON QUOTATIONS Mr. Clinton’s words are so similar to Feeble’s words but they are different as far as their military rank is concerned. Feeble is a private, so a man belonging to the lower ranks, while Mr. Clinton is an officer. There is an overlapping of their thoughts: they do agree in thinking that we must suffer first of all from our common human condition, which is to be abound to die. Instead of excluding people, these words include them and this general label: human kind. Manning by quoting Feeble and giving us so many echoes of his words throughout the chapter, demonstrates that Shakespeare has universal values, and that these values are shared by other people he was an act in a whole chain of acts  once again we have the reverberation of Shakespeare quotation; he has no control, he’s not consider as a person anymore. There is this sense of loosing himself; he becomes a fragment of a play and he becomes an act of a play, he becomes just an action. They must perform their own part together without understanding the real meaning of this play. LEZIONE 9  24/03 THE TIRANNY OF A MECHANISED FATE In the last lessons we analyse the description of war on the part of the soldiers themselves and how they feel in that moment of their life and we noticed the recurrence of the word mechanised. The lexis of the war increased in number during the IWW because there were new guns and new elements which were used during this war: poison gas, machine gun, submarines and so on. These weapons were mainly invisible; you might have wounded by someone which you cannot see. So, war was mechanised and death was administered by an invisible actor. Soldiers in the IWW understood that thew were only part of the mechanism and that they couldn’t really do what they wish to do. They were just part in a machine. They should also do what they were requested to do along with other men. We have another important element which is typical of modern ages: The sense that you are run by a machine, not a god or goddess, not fortune, but just a machine. This is another step forward in the process to depersonalisation. Soldiers understood that this was their fate and they couldn’t escape it. In Manning’s Her Privates We, there is this passage: • he could have no plan because he could foresee nothing, everything happening was inevitable and unexpected, he was an act in a whole chain of acts; and, though his movements had to conform to those of others, spontaneously, as part of some infinitely flexible plan, which he could not comprehend very clearly even in regard to its immediate object, he could rely on no one but himself. You have this very conflicting feeling, the sense that you belong to a whole chain of act, but at the same time the perception that you are so lonely and nobody can help you in this situation, and there is this impending fate, because everything happening is inevitable and unexpected. So you have really lose your ties with other human beings and also your control on the event. The sentence which is really remarkable and significant is: “he was an act in a whole chain of acts” he’s not a man anymore, he’s just an act, so a fragment of a play and what he want it doesn’t matter and he cannot stop this play. It was a metaphor which was used even in classical literature and then relived in 16th and 17th literature. there’s also the lack of freedom and free will: “his movements had to conform to those of others, spontaneously, as part of some infinitely flexible plan” You can perceive this sense of lack of freedom, also while going through Shakespeare history plays: faith, fortune, god’s will seem to govern everything, so some of these heroes tries to contrast god’s will or faith, but in the end, god’s will, will prevail. We have this scene sounds of an unstoppable mechanism. The lexical choice is always so relevant, especially in Her privates we, because there are some words which are really crucial in the understanding of the text: INEVITABLE, UNEXPECTED and MECHANISED MEN. We have here described the pain of these soldiers who had understood so well, they cannot choose what to do, they should conform to orders given to them and they should try to adjust themselves to the situation. They are only part of a machine. This is a very modern feeling, the sense that your life had been planned by someone else, by someone you cannot see and you can’t contrast. There is also one element, another commentary on the part of the narrator: “They were singularly brave men, these Prussian machine-gunners, but the extreme of heroism, alike in foe or friend, is indistinguishable from despair.” We can see how inclusive this description is, because first of all he describes himself and his fellow soldiers as slaved to a machine and here his England enemies, are described as machine gunners. There is the same faith which impounds on all of them. So it’s an inclusive description, there is no binary opposition between countrymen and their enemies. “but the extreme of heroism, alike in foe or friend, is indistinguishable from despair.” We cannot hear through the lines, he kind of critique of the binary a linguistic opposition; first of all there is this comparison between heroism and despair, then when you’re a hero you loose yourself, you do not think of your wish for life, when you decide to make some deeds, to be the protagonist of some heroic enterprise, and also you are in a chain of despair when you think that there is no way out. Also, heroism was celebrated at the time, but in this case another meaning for heroism has been given to us- And this meaning is despair: you are doing something because you’re desperate. Manning makes us see as polarity between words, action or sentences, is not something we can use if we want to describe reality. Because in reality the boundaries between feelings, things, elements, concepts are so blurred. So, it might be a need of someone to define polarities, but this is no in the sake of the rendition of reality itself. It’s not for reality’s description. In other words, we have to consider a new way of expressing our own ideas, a new way to describe reality, which cannot be described in accordance with binary opposites. This is a very important point because it’s at the core of so many research plans in linguistic. Polarity simplifies reality, and that’s why they are used, but here we have rephrasing of reality. First of all, Manning, step by step, is classifying again a reality as it was presented by the propaganda war, so there is no contrast between enemies and fellow citizens. There is a general label we can use and this general label is : human beings. Human beings have the same reaction; this is a change of perception and he does it just by finding new ways of describing reality and first of all really trying to deconstruct the rhetoric of war. And the same happens with heroism and despair: they created those kind of monster heroes, men who do not consider their familiar bonds and decide to sacrifice themselves, to lose their own life. But at the same time this heroism can be read as a real despair of the future and then, step by step, we have the idea of suicide presented to us; those people despaired of the life and of the future and that’s why they decide to sacrifice their life. Manning was not considered a modernist, but there are so many similarities with modernist novelist in the sense that he’s trying to demonstrate that language can distort reality and we need a new language to disseminate a new vision of the world, one that is much more inclusive in which there are human beings and not enemies and so on. In this chapter, the last pages are so peculiar as for as their themes and description are concerned with the war books, because the focus is on death, which is not an abstract entity, but death is that body which is on these plays, a dismembered body, a bloody body, and so you will see throughout Manning so many description of the obscenity of dead. These men that could not play a part anymore and whose death has been exposed to the sight of other men. There is especially a moment in which the concept of death and immortality is discussed. • “And one moves on, leaving the mauled and bloody thing behind: gambling, in fact, on that implicit assurance each one of us has of his own immortality.” • “Out of one bloody misery into another, until we break. One must not break” After the battle , when everything is over, those desperate men walk and tread on the corpses of their friends and fellows, but they “leave the mauled and bloody thing behind”, so not men, but the bloody things. So once again there is “men like objects”, and this is really a realistic description but also so poignant, because those were men and now they are bloody things. • in fact, on that implicit assurance each one of us has of his own immortality.” This of course is irrational, but we can live because we think we’re immortal and death belongs to someone else and it’s nothing to do with us. So we really could gamble on our immortality. But then there is another passage, there is this kind of antithesis between the sense of immortality, which is typical of all of us and especially of men who survived the battle, and their perception, that it was not at that time and it will be next time that they will die. So there is a sentence which is uttered by one of the officers: • “Out of one bloody misery into another, until we break. One must not break” There’s a connection with the epigraph: We should remember Feeble’s discussion on death. He’s about to die and he escapes from it, and will be face it the next time. So our destiny is death and we would crawl from one bloody misery to another. It’s a very desperate vision of life. “BREAKE” has a double meaning: it refers of course to death but also to mental disease, a mental breakdown. Hence, there are two kinds of death which are alluded here: 1. Physical death 2. Mental death CONCLUSIONS ON THE 1ST CHAPTER There is a connection between the epigraph and the chapter. There is an echo of the epigraph throughout the 1st chapter and so, step by step, during the chapter, there is an existential crisis which is described throughout the text. Shakespeare uses of these two opposites, masculine and feminine, because he’s within this kind of culture, which was also the culture typical of the Edwardian age. It is the longest culture which has been passed on to future generation, this kind of polarity between men and women. The first ones, the former, are rational, the other ones, the latter, are emotional. Coolness was considered the best quality an English soldier should have, but in this Shakespeare’s passage we have honourable warriors who feel like women and this emotion is not really despicable in the text. It’s something which moves other people, it’s something superior, so we have the reversal of the hierarchy between men and women. Most of all Exeter, who is a warrior, does not try to repress his emotions, but he shows them. In CHAPTER 2 we have a very abrupt incipit in which we are immediately throw into the day, the day after the battle, and then we see soldiers who get involved in their everyday routine. Because of this we have a very familiar atmosphere, they’re trying to care for themselves: they were washing and dressing up and also there is silence among them. In this passage we have a very good description of what comradeship was: • Among themselves they were unselfish, even gentle; instinctively helping each other, for, having shared the same experience, there was a tacit understanding between them. They knew each other, and their rival egoisms had already established among them a balance and discipline of their own. They kept their feelings very much to themselves. No one troubled them, and they might have lain there for hours, preoccupied with their own formless and intangible reveries, or merely brooding vacantly; but whatever remote and inaccessible world the mind may elect to inhabit, the body has its own inexorable routine. Once again we have some opposition between different elements, so we have a mind and body; the body has its own inexorable routine and the mind wonders random from one feeling to another and from one thought to another, so they are so silent; just a few words are uttered by them. And there is among the soldiers, this kind of very touching carefulness for other people, for each other. They are really trying to be gentle because they have survived the war, but they kept their feelings very much to themselves. So they do not confess their own feelings to their own fellows. This is the sense of alliance between the soldiers. Both Manning and Shakespeare describe what happened in the battlefield after the battle. In Shakespeare there is a keen who’s very compassionate and inquiries about the losses and also the war outcomes, and then we have his man that show their feelings and their sense of grief for the loss of their friends. But here in the novel we have a very silent soldier who brood under the past but at the same time they are very respectful of other people’s fears and grief so they do not touch upon them, they do not ask anything about private feelings. The following passage is a sort of anti-climax, it’s when soldiers wash themselves up and take care of their bodies; they don’t care about the mind but about their bodies. And it is at this point that we have a description of the soldiers as degraded by the battle, by what they have, and it’s clear in the text because these words are used: they have become like savages, and their faces are pitiless”  so emotionless and pitiless You can hear man’s voices or the sounds and the tone of their voices are described in this passage and we know that their tone of voices is very low and anxious and interrupted: • “but control was gradually returning; and all that pity carried with it a sense of relief that the speaker, somehow, but quite incredibly, had himself managed to survive.” They are self-absorbed because they are really experiencing a relief. It is interesting this focus on their voices because it’s really something which is recurrent throughout the text: voices and bodies. In this slide you see a photo taken in trenches, in France, we can see soldiers just living a moment of rest, there are guns and rifles with them, but they’re also amusing themselves and they are writing. They’re waiting for something terrifying to happen but they also try to dedicate themselves to something familiar. They have as it will be said afterwards in the text, happy to have passed to everything without scratchings. Of course they have to digest this incredible experience of death and also they have to go through to different phases, so first in adrenaline response to peril and threat, then apathy, and, in the end, an unbelievable happiness, that of the survivors. The survivor is one of the protagonist of chapter 2 and also it is worth noting how does he react to the peril and the fact that he was not victim to some shots and so on, and also because we can connect this passage to Septimus. Virginia Woolf wanted to describe in Mrs. Dalloway two perspectives on the war: - the women’s perspectives - the veterans perspective, or the survivor’s perspective and Septimus will be the most important representative of this survivor and of the sense of guilty that the survivor experiences. LEZIONE 10  25/03 Last time we were describing the aftermath of the battle when soldiers tried to reproduce the familiar routine, but in this general silence of the soldiers, Prichard, one of the privates, can be heard and he describes the death of one of his fellow: • Then he heard Pritchard talking to little Martlow on the other side of the tent. ‘. .. both ’is legs ’ad bin blown off, pore bugger; an’ ’e were dyin’ so quick you could see it. But ’e tried to stand up on ’is feet. “ ’elp me up,” ’e sez,“ ’elp me up.” — “You lie still, chum,” I sez to ’im, “you’ll be all right presently.” An’ ’e jes gives me one look, like ’e were puzzled, an’ ’e died.’ It's quite and interesting moment because the narrator tries to reproduce the pronunciation on the part of this private man, Prichard, and so this has been done in order to characterise the soldier, who’s not described at all, during his insurgence in the narration, but we immediately understand that this man is from the lower classes and also not from the southern part of England, because of his pronunciation. It’s not the 1st time this happens in English literature, we have this intrusion of dialect in many novels and many realistic novels for instance. Even Dickens tries to reproduce for instance, Cockney, the way in which the dialect of London to sum up. We have here this kind of language; it is really like a novel history: voice recorded as they were really in reality and also there is the use of these words which refer to the man who dies: - Poor bugger  bugger can have a negative meaning: someone very silly, annoying, such a boring people and also a positive on: my friend - Chum  expresses affection, it means my fellow These two words will be used so many times throughout the book especially when referring to people that are very close to each other. Also, we have to concentrate on the way how Prichard describes this death, the death of one of his friends, really chronicling every single moment of this death. And, he’s puzzled from this death, but in this passage he does not hid out on his own feelings, so it’s quite different from other passages. He tells also that Pritchard remember the dying words of his friends and there is a contrast about the dying friend’s request, which is to be helped and Pritchard who cannot help him. Pritchard understands that he is dying but he cannot help him, so he tries to comfort him, reassure him, just telling him a lie: you must take a rest and then you’ll be all right, which is really alienating in this speech is that this piece of conversation, which is quite common in everyday life, that this happens actually on the battlefield and this man is actually dying. The author in the preface promises us to record the real voices of his fellows and he does it, even in this crucial moment, in this so dark moment of their life. Also it has been established a relationship, a strongly bond in men: they are comrades, but however there is this sense of an hopeless help, so you cannot really help someone you care for on the battlefield. Then we have the reactions of other people to this report from Prichard: • Bourne felt all his muscles tighten. Tears were running down Pritchard’s inflexible face, like rain-drops down a window-pane; but there was not a quaver in his voice, only that high unnatural note which a boy’s has when it is breaking; and then for the first time Bourne noticed that Swale, Pritchard’s bed-chum, was not there; he had not missed him before. He could only stare at Pritchard, while his own sight blurred in sympathy. We have Pritchard who shows his emotions, so he puts on display his emotions, and then we have other men’s reactions and especially Bourne’s reaction. While presenting Bourne we said that he’s so detached from other characters, that he’s always ironical when speaking and reporting about the war, but here “felt all his muscles tighten” so here we have a first reaction which can be seen in his own body and then, at the end of this: “ He could only stare at Pritchard, while his own sight blurred in sympathy.” So, this sentence is quite interesting: we have someone who is so courageous and bold to express his own feelings, speaking and also showing a distress in his own face, so it’s kind of show offered to other characters. However this kind of exposure of your own feelings, is at odds with war propaganda and with the idea of Englishness which was disseminated through ages. Bourne reacts sympathetically, so we can see his eyes are veiled by tears: this is own reaction. There is an echo of the scene of Henry V, from this very patriotic eulogy of Englishness, of cool Britannia and here you can see exactly how’s happened in the scene between Exeter, the King, Suffolk and so on, you can see another way to mourn death, which is not only to celebrate the soldier bravery, but also to really weep for them, as human beings. It's also very relevant, the description of the “show” which is Pritchard’s inflexible face. “inflexible” which contrasts with “tears” because we have so the expression of the sense of some strong control on your emotions, which cannot be controlled and then we have tears and then there is also a simile: “ like rain- drops down a window-pane” which is interesting. There is something which is very familiar and part of the experience of everyday life when they were at home, so it’s something reassuring and familiar, and also a natural phenomenon. However this natural phenomenon contrasts with the inflexible face which is repression of your feelings and control of your own nature. The adjective: unnatural appears in the following lines and also we have the control of your own voice: but there was not a quaver in his voice. So we have really existential issues which cannot be really solved out here, because they are really at the core of the life of the soldiers; so there is a sort of rephrasing of the question which was the question of propaganda: “What is worth fighting for?” Becomes a desperate cry  “is it worth to living this life?” It was a feeling which was shared by all of Europe after the IWW. They despaired on the future. A COMPARISON BETWEEN “MRS. DALLOWAY” AND “HER PRIVATES WE” Septimus Warren Smith was the veteran in this novel and he was really forged by Virginia Woolf because in Mrs. Dalloway she wants really to create a tension between civilians’ perspective and traumatised soldiers’ perspective. So we have Mrs. Dalloway, Londoners and Septimus, the veteran and the survivor. He committed suicide in the novel, so we’re going to contrast his path to death with Pritchard’s thoughts.  “And there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a curious pattern like a tree, Septimus thought, and this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames. It is I who am blocking the way, he thought. Was he not being looked at and pointed at; was he not weighted there, rooted to the pavement, for a purpose? But for what purpose?” (Mrs. Dallowat pp. 12-13) Life has become meaningless and especially, there is no drive for life. They cannot see prospect and a new life for them, so they cannot even understand their own actions: “Was he not being looked at and pointed at; was he not weighted there, rooted to the pavement, for a purpose? But for what purpose?” Everything has become meaningless. There is also the vision of something really tragic and terrifying that they have seen. Septimus is really prey to his hallucinations: “this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes” He sees visions undistinguishable for other people and there is this sense of impending tragic: “as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him” It’s very clear the sense not of individual death and dissolution, but of the world’s death and dissolution. It’s really a complete tragedy for human kind and this is the real meaning of these words. There is also the sense of guilt.  “Was he not being looked at and pointed at” He’s persecuted by his hallucinations but also by his sense of guilt and he’s also manoeuvred by other people  was he not weighted there, rooted to the pavement, for a purpose? He’s unable to act. There is also another word which is evoked here and it’s paralysis, so the sense of your incapacity to help other people and yourself, to prevent this tragedy from happening again and again. So we are talking about suffering and dying. It seems that there is this cycle in which human beings cannot escape, there is no way out of these following acts: suffering and dying. Before committing suicide, Septimus claims he will do it and Rezia, his wife, is really peculiarly annoyed and worried about this sentence: • People must notice; people must see. People, she thought, looking at the crowd staring at the motor car; the English people, with their children and their horses and their clothes, which she admired in a way; but they were “people” now, because Septimus had said, “I will kill myself”. This passage can be compared to the previous passage of The Middle fortune. There is here a traumatised soldier who really put on display his despair and he says that he will be aggressive against himself. It’s his way to react to this depersonalisation, to the fact that he has lost control over his own life. Suicide is a taboo in the English society because by doing that you are really contesting the society and its ways, which are terrible; he’s just affirming “I do not want to be on the side of people who wanted the war and who now are trying to forget everything” There is a very interesting passage in the Middle fortune in which, speaking about the soldiers’ feeling, Manning says that soldiers had just one free act and it was to decide where and how to die. They knew, in this kind of war, they were about to die, but they could decide when and how to die. They wanted not to die in a way they couldn’t think of, so it’s just this kind of perception that we have throughout the book. Veterans lived in a sort of bubble, they see people that other couldn’t see and the first time people notice that, people are shocked and so you can feel this sort of alienation and complete separation between veterans and civilian even when we think about Rezia’s words: “people must notice, people must see” The very moment he really reveals his own inner thoughts, and, to a certain extent he defies these people’s convictions, people become so far from him; so there is a sort of alienation. “I will kill myself” Of course we can interpret this sentence in different ways. It might be a plea for help. In this case Septimus is asking for help, but it’s also a shameless show of desperate emotions. Septimus is opposite to other people because he chooses to show his own emotions, like Pritchard, and on the other hand people are indifferent persons and they are also upset by this show of free emotions. But Septimus breaks here also a taboo, the one of suicide and this is so embarrassing for people. He’s severing himself from society, because they he does not share anymore, so there is really a divide between them. Another passage: • “Look, look, Septimus!” she cried. For Dr. Holmes had told her to make her husband (who had nothing whatever seriously the matter with him but was a little out of sorts) take an interest in things outside himself. Dr Holmes, and doctors in general, will become very crucial in the history of Septimus. There will be one with the government, with the English society in trying to conceal Septimus’ words. Both Pritchard and Septimus are compelled to readdress their attention to something else: take an interest in things outside himself – as if Septimus was kind of an introvert person, who should no think of these terrible memories of the past, but should try to dive into life. When people couldn’t help them they’re unable to do that and they tried to divert their attention from what really is making them hurt. “who had nothing whatever seriously the matter with him but was a little out of sorts” Dr Holmes think that this particularly sensitiveness which is typical of Septimus, is madness. They are diminishing this symptoms of Septimus’ mental disease. Septimus is so grounded in his beliefs that he has a message to convey other people, so he tries to alert them, because he thinks that something terrifying is going to happen and he tries to alert people in order to save them. He failed to do that when Evans was shot dead, but he now he wants to help other people and to stop tragedy. On the other hand, society tries to protect itself and other people from madness because madness will present all of them with a terrifying vision of their own society because Septimus is well convinced that he was guilty, but along with him, general politicians and the English society were responsible for the war and its atrocities. Septimus will see Evans a lot of times throughout the novel and he will have recurrent visions of his friend’s death and he will start his mourning for his friend throughout the book. When Evans was shot dead, Septimus couldn’t do anything to save him and so he felt very guilty because he was totally unhelpful at the moment. So, he re-enacts this moment so many times and he hopes he will be able to change things. there is also another reversal: on the occasion of Evan’s death he couldn’t feel anything and he was even happy for that, because he had become a true English soldier: so true, so able to control his feelings. Now he’s completely shaken by the enactment of Evan’s death and so he reacts in such a frantically way and it is a sort of conquer for him, because he can feel again, he is a uman being who feels and who cares for other people. It's so difficult for Septimus to make other people like him; even his wife, she tries hard to be closer to him, but the two of them cannot really communicate and so Septimus’ mourning is very private. He has some conversation with Evans during these visions and also when he writes he tries to communicate with him. Mourning is a social practice which is really necessary for a community to come to terms with its past. But here the process of mourning is individual and no public mourning seems to be permitted in society and so, that’s why people avoid the upsetting sight of Septimus, because he’s a monument mourning and they don’t want to feel sick nor remember. Some example in the text itself there are other characters and they’re praised, because notwithstanding so many deaths and so much bereavement because they have lost their sons for instance, but they try to go on with their life. For instance a mother is remembered in in the novel: while she’s mourning for her son, she’s opening her bazaar, and she is praised for that. Also, there is another moment when a lady who has lost her favourite son does not complain about this death, doesn’t weep for this death but for the loss of the family mansion. There is really a striking difference in the way people react to this loss and there is no communal mourning. There is the complete reprehension of mourning on the part of some of the characters. Septimus doesn’t want to lose memory of the past and that’s why he’s so upsetting. So many times these words are repeated throughout the novel: all is over which means the war is over. It’s meant to be really reassuring and probably was for some of the people but not for Septimus. For him the war is there in London and he’s waiting for a new tragedy, he’s problem is that he cannot share his knowledge of it, not even his mourning for England, so we can really see a general mourning for England: England as it was, as if there was no tragic gap in the ordinary life, but there was and so Septimus wants to invite them to recognise that everything will be not the same after the war. They cannot continue their ordinary lives. And now the doctors, seen through the following passage which speaks about Dr Bradshaw who is a doctor who tries to restore Septimus health. He had been, in the past, Mrs. Dalloway’s doctor, because she has a mental disease, which is not called like that throughout the novel; she went to visit Mr. Bradshaw and not trusting him she decides to stop being visiting by him.  “To his patients he gave three-quarters of an hour; and if in this exacting science which has to do with what, after all, we know nothing about—the nervous system, the human brain—a doctor loses his sense of proportion, as a doctor he fails. Health we must have; and health is proportion; so Sir Williams thought that he’s infallible, he soesn0t perceive that he must be wrong, he’s very rigid in this believe in proportion and the narrator’s commentary is that “this is madness, the believe in your infallible instinct”. Bradshaw’s commentary on Septimus has been attributed to the doctor and this is not the first time the narrator does it. Then we have a longer passage, which is on conversion in which the narrator wants us to meditate on what was happening, on the state violence against his citizens: • But Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a Goddess even now engaged—in the heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of London, wherever in short the climate or the devil tempts men to fall from the true belief which is her own—is even now engaged in dashing down shrines, smashing idols, and setting up in their place her own stern countenance. Conversion is her name and she feasts on the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace. At Hyde Park Corner on a tub she stands preaching; shrouds herself in white and walks penitentially disguised as brotherly love through factories and parliaments; offers help, but desires power; smites out of her way roughly the dissentient, or dissatisfied; bestows her blessing on those who, looking upward, catch submissively from her eyes the light of their own. This lady too (Rezia Warren Smith divined it) had her dwelling in Sir William’s heart, though concealed, as she mostly is, under some plausible disguise; some venerable name; love, duty, self sacrifice. (Mrs. Dalloway, p. 86) This passage is very impressive because the narrator insist on the idea of Englishness but also criticises it and unveils the tools strategies used by people in power, in order to make other people conform to their ideas of the world. Generally speaking people think that VW was not a political mind, that she was such an introvert that she was always describing inner thoughts and also her way to deal with them, but here there is a discussion about Englishness, in her own way, and also on what has been imposed on English people and also their colonists of course. Also, the narrator looks backwards to the history of England which one a history of conquer and aggression against foreign people. We can immediately understand, thanks to irony, that the narrator does not trust Bradshaw’s believes in conversion and proportion. Proportion has been associated to another goddess, so another authority which you cannot confute and this is conversion. The British empire was here and there to stand for some years – India for instance and other colonies asking for independence – and what conversion does? Conversion has to do with people who wants to convert other people, destroy the temples, and idols of these conquered countries in order to build their own buildings and to teach them to worship the Christian God and also proportion and conversion. In a few lines Woolf sums up what really happened in India, Africa and the colonies, and not only the English ones, but the same happened for Spaniels and other colonists who washed up completely a culture – African cultures, Indian culture, Australian cultures and so on. England imposed his culture, they wanted to completely replace, not only building, but also institutions transferring to the colonies their own culture. This was typical of European colonisation of the exotic countries. Bradshaw was trying to convert Septimus the same way colonists did on these countries. There’s this arrogance of being the right model to follow. Another interesting sentence: Conversion is her name and she feasts on the wills of the weakly So, when people feel so weak and also they are really looking for reassurance, conversion can play its task, because it is easier for her to convince people. Septimus for instance felt weak and so they tried to press him. “Conversion is her name and she feasts on the wills of the weakly” This belongs really to English culture: everybody can sit up, stand up on a tab and speak to other people, preaching something and try to convince them. It’s typical of nation who really care for free speech, so this is very appreciable but on the other hand, these people preaching or, some of them, are trying to deceive people. “shrouds herself in white and walks penitentially disguised as brotherly love through factories and parliaments” The narrator’s targets here are people who hide themselves behind the question religion and that’s why they use the Christian vocabulary in order to convince other people and this happens not only in churches but also in factories and parliament. Thanks to rhetoric they could convince people to accept their misery in factories and also in parliament. It is also a very protective conversion of other people and offers help but because they want them conform to the society and to be more and more powerful because of this. They want to maintain their power, this is the most important accusation you can find here. “offers help, but desires power; smites out of her way roughly the dissentient, or dissatisfied” People must be people who dissent from the beliefs of conversion and proportion must be silent; those who criticise the society must be silent and so, we have this poor ladu, Septimus’ wife that really believed that conversion was in Sir William’s heart. And that’s why it is possible for her to be convinced by Dr. Bradshaw because he has a very peculiar way of using language and he does not mention correctly what he means, he does not use the right words but he replaces the right reference of these concepts, things and so on, with other names: the language of Christian religion: love, duty, sacrifice and so on. This passage put together so many of the issues which were discussed within the Bloomsbury Group. They were not only novelist, but also economists for instance and also there was dissention men like Russell and criticised that kind of society and Woolf is putting together the topics discussed by these eminent men and women in the Bloomsbury Group and representing this discussion in her novel. These words remind us of the war propaganda, because there were so many references to love, duty and self-sacrifice when stimulating young mind to join the army. There was this ambiguous association of the Christian thought and the army and the power which is unbelievable because the Christian thought prevent men from fighting. It’s a complete different message, the one of Christianity and that’s why she make us see as religion and also social order have been together in order to gain and maintain power. We have discussed an idea of Englishness found also in some poems and other texts. This idea of Englishness is really well rooted on the pride of England, which demonstrated in the past to be able to conquer and run so many countries and so England displayed her power of the colonies in such a way as to gain obedience and worship. Septimus represents the colonised or the man who they decide to colonised, that is to say to conform to the rules of the society, who should be accept the role the society has given him, if he refuses to do that he will segregated, this is his punishment. He’s invited to stop talking and Rezia has been instructed to divert him from his dreams and his books. Books are considered really a dangerous. Dr Bradshaw and Dr Holmes concentrate their effort to Septimus should be confined because he has a message to convey to other people and he wants to do that and he refuses to be silenced, and so this message he understood when he was in the park and he felt so connected to nature firs tof all, even to trees and animals, he could hear some sparrows singing, so not alienated fro aprt of the world which has been completely forgotten by Mr Bradshaw. Septimus comes to understand that the war was a mistake and England, which had joined the war, is responsible for this mistake and for this tragedy and like England, all of the countries involved in the war. He feels also that someone must pay for this error and he offers himself for sacrifice. He will use Christian vocabulary, but in the right way, he will offer himself not for England, but for human kind and in the effort to wash up England and the world’s sin and so he protests that the war was not made of deeds of heroism, but it was really composed of so many evil acts. He can really act like a Christ figure, because he’s the weakest one, he’s poor, he’s humiliated by powerful people, he’s betrayed by other people and also Rezia betrays him because she tries to convince him to go to visit these two doctors. His message is similar to Christ’s: no much war, love. People should try to find a way to stop future war, but unfortunately they couldn’t because something went wrong in the process and a new war exploded after some decades. Septimus has his own message: to help his fellow citizens and all the world. This is the positive message in the experience of Septimus. Even when he committed suicide we should consider it as a kind of sacrifice which he really makes for human kind because he wants to save human kind. It's a not a message of death, but it is really a message in favour of life, but a new life, which is not a prison which has been envisioned for men by the institutions. We have other people who are so steady in their conviction which cannot really hear this message and Septimus is also fascinated by the beauty of the words but at the same time he goes behind them, discovering their true meanings. There are moments in which he’s completely self-absorbed in the beauty of nature and of poetry. Listening to this beautiful message, Septimus wants to be able to convey this message because he’s so sure that he is a writer, so he has to do what is expected from him: to amuse people and warn them, but especially he wants to write an elegy for the world he’s lost, that England has lost. At the same time he wants to prophesise another world. He was so segregated from other men because of this, because he had sort of revolutionary proposal and so he’s both nostalgic and enthusiastic. He knows that the old world cannot be restored anymore and that there is a new world which is struggling to reborn. There is the reusage of the language used by the war propaganda but this time war refers to her proper reference. The main aim of Woolf who wanted to deconstruct the war propaganda. THE IMPORTANCE AND THE ROLE OF LITERATURE FOR SEPTIMUS There are some sentences here and there in which the narrator comments on literary choices and so, for instance we know that Septimus hears only fragments of the past poems and this is really interesting. He knows of these fragments by heart. The use of quotations and what quotations meant in the past. He was not possible for people the whole bulk of the English literature of the world, so some passages were anthologised and these passages were anthologised in order to orient the reader, so the reader knew, going through these anthologies, what kind of lines were beautiful, what kind of knowledge he must be able to grasp for reading these passages. And, in this case we know that the fragments, the fragments of the Greek poets for instance, are very personal. He didn’t read anthologies, but he really read in the past the whole book and so this fragments are his own and so he is constructing his personal anthologise in which he could put significant passages for him, in order to find this new way and in order also to understand the world, which seems to him to be blurred. He must try to find a new vision to interpret the world and also what happened to his generation, when they went to fight on the continent. . There’s also a critical view on the role of women supporting the war. Virginia Woold was against the war, she thought that it was created and wanted by men, and women should try to stop the war, even not cooperating with men; so this is unbelievable for he, this is a woman and she cannot envisage a way out of war and so she supports this arrogant idea of the English empire. After “without reading Shakespeare”, we have here a casual quotation, an hidden quotations in the sense that we have no reverse commas, italics and so on. LEZIONE 12  31/03/2021 RIVEDERE CON REC Mancano I primi 15 min Poesia Use of this lexis which is typical of utopia: bless plot, which is protected against the envy of ** but also England who nurched his citizens and which is mother to royal king. This kind of words have been used and re used in the war propaganda during the years leading to the IWW and during the war itself. Another concept and words recurring in the propaganda cavarat, so we have England which is famous for its deeds; England who extended her cultural matrice in the war.** so the value which has been translated in other lands are Christianity and those of Christianity and those of true chivalry. ** The poem by Sassoon in which women are described revelling in chivalric values an applying them to describe soldiers in France, there’s this idealised UK*** then there is a sort of reversal. There are statement or restatement of this *** the affective bond is also restated, this dear dear land. We have the adjective DEAR repeated 4 times, but this land is now leased out… After such a beautiful and prosperous England has become a tenement or pelting farm: we can really perceive the decade of England, because steal *** and has ** who protect her from envious enemy. It’s completely upsetting the previous portrayal, England is threatened not by armies but by inky blots and rotten parchment bonds. England has really banned its aggressive effort against itself and it made a shameful conquest of itself. It’s a reference to the civil war or dissention which was really tearing apart England at that time. England is sedged by treatises and also legal text, *** We have just three words, with the repetition of “dear, dear land”; we have a stronger reverberation of the previous passage and we can understand that Lady * is lost in past. **** She has really brought war against itself. This is the more important meaning we can really extract from this quotation and also we need to pay attention to the use of casual quotations. We have different layers of readership. We can really traspect these casual quotations and then understand how much is to consider in order to understand lady Bouton ** and ideology *** in the history of England. The best lines in this passage, which can explain what was happening then in England, are the last ones. There is a retrospective gaze, because “I’m a child of the.. and I know very well what happened after the IWW war” *** This happened in 1925, when Virginia Woolf wrote this novel and England was really weak and unable to decide for herself; she has to negotiate every action with the US and the same for Europe. It was really a divide in the history of EU, the decay of EU started after the Great War and so this passage is really important because it hence precisely what was happening and what Lady Bruton didn’t want to see. ** Some of the people in England, even nowadays, can read this passage and also recall that those lines are familiar to them, but they cannot really locate these lines in a precise ** cannot recognize the act, the situation and so on. So you have a different reading, a partial readin on the part of them. Thanks to these casual quotations instead, the narrator is able to anticipate or to highlight the sense of despair and decay which was typical of those times. that’s why this was a must elegy, because she soes not refer exactly to England’s death, but in the Shakespearian texts we have this passage, because in so many of the war poems we have seen two themes: 1. The elegy for the soldiers 2. The elegy for England, the country We can really see those feelings expressed throughout Mrs. Dalloway and especially thanks to Septimus, who’s the opposite of Mr. Dalloway and Lady Bruton, because he reads Shakespeare, and he reads the Shakespeare which other people had cut off of their memory. The Shakespeare who’s not mainstream. People feel so reassuring speaking about those mainstream readings and books, because other people will recognize them as powerful, as scholars and so on, but there are also some scholars who are not completely satisfied with what was common thinking: repeating the same words without really thinking about the text, and he’s trying to find his *** reading Shakespeare. He will find to find the truth in these books, and he’s a common scholar who’s not looking for the praise of the crown, or to be accepted by other scholars or elitist groups. Septimus’s first meeting with Shakespeare This passage deals with the very first meeting with S. Septimus is very young, he’s from a Christian family, he’s been well educated and he’s looking for knowledge. He wants to improve himself and knowledge and poetry ** She wants to make us see the sense of knowledge coming from so many disagreeable feelings.** he likes to show off his ability and ambition because he likes to improve himself and** and also for loneliness because you have to spend so much of your time and solitude by reading. The result of the time spent on his book made him shy and stammering. He doesn’t really become a strong young boy, but he has become shy a stammering, which means that he cannot pronounce entire words. He was anxious to improve himself also for the lack of self-confident who doesn’t allow him to become a scholar because he’s always in doubt. Mrs. Isabel Pole who really instructs Septimus is very helpful because she lends him books or she exchanges notes with him, she’s really a teacher with him, but, she tries to change him as much as Mr. Brewer, Septimus’s boss who wanted to transform him into someone else. So, both of them did not fully accept Septimus and so they try to change him. And so, she thought of him as Keats, and she tries to give him new anses and she try to present him with new models: Shakespeare of course and Antony and Cleopatra and this is his first meeting. Septimus is really shaked by too different people, one of them is MRs, Pole and the other is Mr Brewer. Miss Pole wants him to be an intellectual, while Mr Brewer to be a good trader. Septimus, like other people tries to***** 9.20 This is an ideal practice, but what happens when we read a book? There is the principle of reciprocity which is active, so we give and take from the text, because as *** and I expect to be ** And so er have to take it in consideration that we are an active part to the** we are reactive to the text because we have *** or about the age, sometimes we are so blind to Shakespeare because we have some preconceptions such as thinking that he’s not of our time or also, being English, is solemn and so far from us, but who reads Shakesepeare can comprehend the variety of language in his works and how much England *** A passage from Woolf: so powerfully reminds us of the fact that whatever our interpretation is it might verry clever, but it is partial: it’s our personal reaction to text. *** it reminds us of the fact that our interpretation and criticism is to be contextualised; of course I, you and other people are speaking because of the ghosts of other readers and it depends also on you, how much you want to listen to these ghosts. She uses a specific word which is a felicitous metaphor: ghosts.** we’re are trying to put together a new cultural text which is made from fragments, the one of criticism and the ones of the other readings of as critics we are quoters, because we use quotes from some critical essays or also from the books we analyse, we’ll do this in order to create a new text, exactly like Virginia Woolf, Manning or other authors did. It’s very difficult even to judge but Woolf who was writing in the 30es of the past centuries are always meditating on great issues such as the readers and reception which was so influential in creating some favourite syllabus, for instance in the university. It was fashionable to study some authors in the past centuries and now they are completely forgotten and this is due to the fact that the readers perception changes through time. Septimus changes his readings from her beloved place but he did it because he was not longer the Septimus who enlisted for the war, and so, Shakespeare changed because he asks different things to Shakespeare. S, is new to him in this moment and while reading him, he fragemtned the text and chooses some quotations, so he dismembered the body of Shakespeare and aims in reconstructing the entirety of this ** text. However he was not able to do this, because the world has been broken into pieces and there was no shared cultural matrix; so it is much more difficult for him to give us a all, he can give us only fragments. This is one of the most important tenets of modernism and also the very reason why modernist writers were so fragmented: Joyce, Eliot and so on.. She says also: “A book….” Really very interesting for better understanding Septimus as well as ourselves as a resader. ** the text react to us, we have a very active exchange and all the readers understand this so well because it’s part of the fascination of reading: you’re so much involved with the dialogue with the author and so on** Once again, we can really enact and live a discussion between two different part of ourselves sometimes just reading, we will try to defend our preconception and sometimes we will *** our ground. There is so a cooperation between reader and author and also past readers, we are really part of the community of readers, we are not alone when reading, but surrounded by this community of readers of the past, of the present time and we should try to find or to react to the text looking for some new messages. Another passage: SEPTIMUS’S SUICIDE IS A MESSAGE, A SHAKESPEARIAN TRAGEDY/MELODRAMA 1611 and it also a very difficult reading because we have the intertwining of so many plots and so sometimes you have to interrupt one line of reading and to follow other character and so on. *** Imogen is Cymbaline’s doctor, Cymbaline is a Britain king. She married ** but in secret, because her father and stepmother wanted her to marry her stepbrother Cloten. When the king discover this, he decides to **** She flies to Italy where there was a villains and ** convinces him that Imogen is unfaithful. ** she tries to meet her and then having noticed some characteristics of Imogen, he can really convince Posthumus that he’s been Imogen’s lover. Imogen decides to escapre fromther golden cage and look for Posthumus and so she dresses her husband’s clothing and she takes a drug and because of the hit she falls into asleep. Then she awakes, she finds the corps of Coten near to her, but since he was wearing her husband’s clothing she thinks that he’s Posthumus and so she abandoned herself weeping and crying. This happens in At. II, sc. VII. Guiderius and Arviragus, Imogen’t brothers, have killed Cloten, and here there and elegy for them. ** here we have elegies for someone whos’ an enemy, but those men want to memorialise and accompany to rest even their enemy and this was pretty usual. An important concept here is that in this elegy they cannot celebrate the dad’s life because they do not know Cloten, but they’re just trying to comfort him. Cloten has been beheaded, so dismembered, and, in this elegy, a union reconciliation of the disperse part of community, of social members, is promised. We have the meditation o what death means. ** but also there is this promise of the reconstruction of community in an afterlife. There is really a social right which has been really performed in this sentences and that’s why it is so significant to lines recur throughout the novel. **** There is the recurrence of these lines in Mrs. Dalloway for at least 8 times. 1. Clarissa reads it in a book in the shop window when she is looking for flowers. S. is not mentioned here, but we know that because of Clarissa. 2. she repeats the words when she comes home and she read a message from Lady Bruton and this is relevant 3. Clarissa mends his gown for the party and she read “the heart says..” it’s ambiguous: os that Clarissa’s heart or is that this entity which ** ? 4. Septimus’s heart says…… *** 5. Clarissa repeats these lines when she decides to come back to the party, after having find relief in her room. So, Clarissa repeats these words 6 times and Septimus twice. There is this musical fascination with words and they are almost tasted by the characters and they are very beautiful lines, which impress the reader. We know that Clarissa has been associated with poetry by her husband, that thinks that poetry is the right thing for Calrissa and wome, but not for him, who’s a politician, a very rational person who does not want to intrude in other people personal thoughts. Even if she says that she’s not a very clever person, that she has read poetry when she was very young and when she met with Sully Sutton and that she only read biographies, we can understand that she’s a good reader of Shakespeare, very insightful and also the most perspective character, because she does not forget these words. ** Clarissa is not probably such a sophisticated reader, she’s not an intellectual, nobody consider her a writer or an intellectural; however she has been endoubt with this emotion and feelings and thanks to this she can be very sympathetic to other people and this is way she’s always thinking of these lines and every time they ***** Another important recurrence: we have Cymbaline’s lines quoted but also waves mentioned and generally speaking, in Mrs. D., but also in VW’s novels, waves are a powerful metaphor for death but also for birth. So, ossimorically we have the union of two opposite concepts: death and birth. **** this is typical of Woolf’s style: she tries to reproduce this going and t*** back, which is tyoical of the time. Whenever waces are evoked, something special happens to Clarissa: she has sort of epiphany, she can’t fully understand a moment in her past or in her life which she couldn’t understand before and so she’s invited to go on with her life, every time. So we have, she coming back to close spaces to find herself or going back to meditation and then deciding to go back to life and to meet other people. So, the same movements that we have in the lines quoted for Shakespeare. *** It is not so easily understandable and readable but is fascinating because of the choral narration, we have a narrator, but also so many narrators starting from Clarissa, then Septimus, Rezia, Peter Walsh, Ms. Kilman and so on. These voices make themselves heard and then they vanish. It’s a free association and a free meeting of different voices which are trying to construct the text and so we have so many narrative text, which are linked by intertextuality. So, there is this play within the text, but also the repetition of these quotations is reassuring for the reader. First of all they were familiar to him, not only because they were from S., but also because this sentence gives a structure in this changing sea of voices. So, it is something that structures the novel into a pattern, and so this is why it is reassuring, we have some order in this chaos. Also, because of its content, it’s reassuring that in death we will not be cursed by so many disappointment and tragedies as in life we had been. But also, another important thing: this fragment is in itself contained as ** because it has afull sense without adding other lines from the original text and also there is something typical of the right, which has the repetition: rights, social rights, funerals, songs are very repetition and because of this they are reassuring, we can predict that they are going to be uttered again and again. So, Shakespeare becomes one of the recurrent voices of the novel and becomes part of Clarissa’s thoughts. They are hardly distinguishable because Clarissa has completely appropriated these words. hey are part of her. However, the lines sound every time similar and different, because every character in the novel appropriate these lines and in doing so they invest these lines with new meanings, so they are different and unique. *** Clarissa is affected by different experiences through her life and her perception of these lines changes throughout her life. So we have two recurrent antonyms: continuity and changes which are part of her life and also of the meaning which are conveyed by the moements *** Let’s consider these alternation of death and rebirth and underline the recurrence of the S. quotation on an episode regarding Septimus. He’s sitting on a sofa in the doctor’s sitting room. He first looks at the wall paper, then the landscape, looking through the window, and he completely absorb himself *** and the a synesthesia - a rhetorical figure in which something is perceived by using an opposite sense: for instance I describe my sight by using taste, smell and so on – we have the watering image of the waves which are described**** “the sound of wate…. Singing” She produces a very powerful rhetorical figure so typical of the modernist, so we have the union of different senses and this union is able to express more powerfully the meaning of the text. “fear no more…. Her meaning” Septimus sees another of his visions, it’s about Nature, and these are Septimus’s thoughts. There is a sort of conflation between Nature and Shakespeare and so Nature speaks Shakespeare’s words, conveying her meanings. In the sense that nature reads Shakespeare. Of course with have Septimus’ very fragmented culture and S. was considered a poet very close to nature. We don’t have really a quotation but it’s trueto say that Septimus alludes to Shakespeare quotations. It's an unmarked quotation*** because he knew so well and Clarissa did not refer to Shakespeare because she pretends not being so expert in Shakespeare. This passage is really interesting because we have Septimus, who’s absent minded and he do no listen to his wife, but then he can hear nature speaking and speaking Shakespeare’s words. So we have a man like Septimus whos’ completely disconnected with people around him, who’s alone even when in a crowd but at the same time he’s this power connection with the universe who other people are not able to reach in their lives. ********* He’s much more alive than other people and willing to participate in life. We’re not considering here that Septimus lives a PTSD; so many of the symptoms named here were also experienced by Virginia Woolf. So we have this connection between Septimus and nature, mediated by Shakespeare. Septimus is shaped into something very different: he’s a man, and also a god, either pagan god or Christian. Another passage: look --- loneliness” Dr Bradshaw says that there are so many crazy men who think to be Christ. Septimus is also the man who’s being selected to save the world, but he’s also a pagan god, a vegetation god. This also classifies myth who’s present in every **** The same is for Septimus: he decides to die, to fertilise his own society and to allow it to give new life and to be a new society. So we have a soldier that for the first time can decide when and how to die for his country; not in the battlefield, but in the city. *** We have the paradoxical triumph of the victim, of Septimus, the veteran who sacrifice, but as ihis own terms. He disappoints his own community, because suicide is a taboo, but through his death he rescue society and his community from violence, neglecting*** Exactly like in the quoted lines by S., we have in his performance, his plunging to death, the same meaning: his vanishing to enter a new life. It’s really the conquest he makes for his community, giving them new life. The language: sacrifice, soldiers, liken to Christ, to sacrifice themselves for human being which were recurrent in war propaganda. Here Septimus uses the same words but to really confute the war propaganda, because he attaches these words to different referents. He himself, Septimus, defies the masculine values which the propaganda disseminated in speeched, articles and images. Hes’ not a cool, unfeeling soldier, but he’s so weak, unable to provide for his family, he disobey and he does not fit in society. *** And so, Septimus’ language is subversive because deconstructs the war propaganda and he says his own words; he does not repeat what people want him to say. He’s completely free, he pretends to have a truth to preach. This is kust putting together quotations from war propaganda, but in a different context without even quoting the sources and VW is able to completely change the message of the authorities and also to wash up this indifference of the civilians to wastes of the world and to the sorrow of the soldiers. LEZIONE 14  08/04/2021 CITAZIONE  Othello There is no mention of the play, act and scene in Manning’s book; there is just the authority of Shakespeare. Some of these quotations, even when taken from plays which were really exploited from war propaganda, Manning selects some passages which are not so well known and that *** We’re speaking about a caring a loving husband who will become a killer and in Her private we, the put out light is quite a very colloquial sentence, we can see that the officer become almost histerical while saying that, but at the same time we understand that he’s also a comic figure in that moment of the play, because he’s too really frightened by the situation. Othello wants to kill his wife, so he’s really doing something which is against god and he’s acting like God, but the regimental, this officer, he’s doing something ** by another officer and he’s been found negligent by other officers and he reacts ** just to assert his power. Power is not something that you can perform, you must have the authority to do something and power does not give you an honourable stance, so when you perform a blind power you will become or a killer, like Othello, or a fool, like this man, the regimental. Citazione : As Bourne says It’s a very bitter statement. The focus is not on men, but on conventions. Here Manning is defining language and rhetoric of war. There a lot of war and sentences which have been used by the war propaganda and some soldier had internalised this kind of rhetoric of war and they used it while speaking about it. He’s distinguishing between conventional words and the test of reality which is really what happened in the camp. There is this kind of very severe, harsh way in which things are been depicted. Even in Mrs. Dalloway there was really a gap between how veterans feel and how the families think and feel. The lady who try to support the war by sellig ** and during this war his son dies. It’s not how soldiers experienced war; in this way we can understand that what Manning wanted to do : he’s creating a sort of friction between the rhetoric of war and real life. So, the rhetoric cannot fully express war life. He’s trying really to find true words to describe what people really felt in some situations. This is a metatextual note, so Manning explain why he uses this S.’s excepts and the relationship between this and his chapter. Soldiers have been tested by war and by their own fellows and so, in the camp, in the trenches and on the battlefield, virtue, as described in the rhetoric of war, has completely vanished, or hide itself and so, this kind of language, the language of the rhetoric of the war, will be usefully used again just after the war. He's juxtaposing the different language of the war propaganda and is the language he has experienced in the camps and on the battlefield because he wants to create a friction between them in order to unveil that the war propaganda lies. WAR, EXPERIENCE, TEST The words disseminated by propaganda can be proved false when tested by experience. *** Speaking od Septimus in the last phase of his life we have a similar perspection: a language, a poetry can intoxicate you when you are tested from strong experience like death, so it’s really a search for a more reliable language which could express how painful and terrified war is. He selects some words and he discusses some words and the meaning of them. Some of them are really recurrent in the war propaganda: sacrifice, honour, virtue. In the war propaganda they were lead to higher values ** However these higher standards are not common people who strikes for their lives in the camps. So there is also this **: we cannot compete with this idealisation of ourselves, we’re just men. He rewrites the war experience as he lived it; so this is *** he wants to vindicate, to give the true report of his experience and, because he wants to write a ** report, he uses colloquial slangs and sometimes reproduces the different dialogue of rewritten and even the different sounds of variety of English spoken and rewritten. He tries to write a truthful right report and he also exposes the real reaction of soldiers and officers in vary phases of their lives: when they were in line, when they were in the camp. There is this kind of effort only in order to bring to life the real English soldier. Chapter V  quotation from Henry V Manning uses as an epigraph just one line. It is difficult to understand whom this refers, to ,u cousin** to my uncle or to their horses. It’s a bit ambiguous in this passage. Henry V was really a mine of quotations for the war propaganda because it was considered a very patriotic play. So, it was really pillaged by politicians and journalists trying to find good reason for fighting against Germany in this play. But, Manning decides to quote some sentences which are not quoted by other people, “and now.. asleep” he really focuses on very not brave, not courageous moment. Another quote from Henry IV: The king here ***** but Vernon rationally tries to convince Hotspur that horses are very tired and so it is not wise to fight; they must wait for a while until the horses will be able to run and fight. Henry, the king, wants first of all to pardon Hotspur for his dissention, but he must recognize that King’s authority, Hotspot is not informed of this royal pardon and so the battle continues. Another passage: After the battle He’s playing on the ambiguity of the epigraph. Soldiers are like the horses, they’re exhausted and their courage is asleep. We’re encouraged to liken them to horses, but also he explains why they are not ready to begin another action. They lived in the terms of heroic tragedy, but this is not any heroic tragedy; after the battle they can’t understand themselves, so we have the contrast about the fictional war, the false language of war, the rhetoric of war and life as it is, as it has been experienced by these men and so, with so angr…. These are men, not automatons, so they react to the situation, they couldn’t be so cool men, their nerves had been broken, so once again the experience of war is the reversal of the war propaganda. In the ch. V there is a word which recur, and this is: stable. Soldiers look for a shelter for themselves and they find protection in stables. They are considered like animals and not like men, and so there is another reversal of the language of the war propaganda, because there is not reciprocity among the soldiers and so it’s clear that the higher rans control everything and soldiers, the privates one, are exploited by the generals, the officers and so on; so the army is a divided group and not a body. LEZIONE 15  09/04/2021 HER PRIVATES WE – CHAPTER V • “I begin to find an idle and fond bondage in the oppression of aged tyranny, who sways not as it hath power but as it is suffered.” These two lines are being taken from King Lear, act I, scene 2. This tragedy is about power, which cannot be divided between so many people. King Lear is a bad king because he divided his power among his daughters and the power he was invested with was not be divided. He was shrinking away from his duties, not only from his rights as divine king and king invested by god; also from his duty, because as a king he should care for his family an for the entire population. These lines are pronounced in the play by Edmond, who is the illegitimate son of Gloucester. Edmond reads a letter, he tries to conceal it, but his father, Gloucester urges him to have a look on it and then he, who has fabricated this letter, says that he had received from Edgar and there is also Edgar’s signature, which is his stepbrother, so the legitimate heir to Gloucester’s title and estate. Gloucester did not understand that Edmond is a malicious person and he’s trying to discredit his good brother and so he believes that this words are being written by Edgar. Throughout the letter Edmund expresses is own feeling about the authority of old people: his father, king Lear and all people in general, in his opinion, should distribute their wealth and power among the young generation and so they should decide to give up everything. The meaning of these 2 lines is that the old generation is still in power because nobody dares to dissent against him. There is really a tension shown here and this tension is about old and young. It’s one of the main issues discussed not only in Shakespearean’s plays but also in Elizabethans’ and Jacobean’s. there was so much concern about the conflict between generations. In order to discuss this issue, Shakespeare decided to focus his attention on two family groups: 1. Lear and his daughters; 2. Gloucester and his sons; Lear is not flawless because he becomes very old and then he decides to divide his kingdom among his daughters and in order to do that he asks his daughters to tell him how much they love him. Reagan and Goneril flatter him and so he’s completely conquered by their words; he believes and trust them. But Cordelia, the younger daughter, tells him the truth and so she speaks very down to earth language; she doesn’t used hyperboles to describe her love for the father. That’s one of the moments in the tragedy in which Shakespeare meditates on language: how language can dupe people into thinking lies, in that sense that they cannot understand what’s going on, and this is one of the case in point in King Lear. Another error which can be attributed to Lear is that he decides to divide his kingdom between Reagan and Goneril and he also persecutes Cordelia. On the other hand there is the other couple of sons, Edmund and Edgar. Edmund, who thinks to be really good and carrying brother, decides to convince Edgar that Edgar will be persecuted and that his life has being put at risk. So Edgar decides to fly away from his own home and he becomes a bagger. Only in the end, after so many crimes committed by the malicious parts of the families, fathers are reunited with their good son and daughter. The message is very clear: it’s an accusation against old man who should be very wise and able to discriminate between good and evil, and they are not. They are not able to appreciate the unselfish love of some of his children and, most of all, they are the most powerful people in the kingdom, and Gloucester in his household. However, both of them, decides to shrink away from their duties and responsibilities, while they should courageous and wise. So they should not be pray to bed mouthing of some of their children and so, they will be ruined for this and also those good children will be really ruined as a result of their first mistakes. CHAPTER V OF MANNING’S BOOK – What’s the link with the epigraph? The situation is typical of war time, so some officers who are in the order room decide to parade 50 men on the street; this is a difficult moment because there are enemies planes flying over their camp, so they must know that they are putting at risk the lives of these soldiers and for this reason, Bourne, who’s one of the demonstrates that this fraction between the actual life in the camp and the chivalric code exists. The chivalric is not more applicable to the issues decided and wished for in the camp. Shakespeare was able to shift from one register to another and he used poetry, he wrote in verse, when he wanted to express solemn and virtues ideas, while he shifted to prose and dialect in order to make us feel the voice of dissenters, for instance, or people coming from the lower classes. It is a decay of a nation in a sense because there is this solemn code, which has expressed for so many years the ideals to be up to for so many people and especially for the army. Here he wants to make us that there is a clash between fiction and reality so you cannot use the language of epic poems to express what real soldiers feel in that moment. There was this very insightful perception of a conflict between ideas and between ways of expressing them. Even in Shakespeare’s age. CLASH OF OPPOSITE CODES AND VERBAL SIGNS In Shakespeare there is this clash of opposite codes and verbal signs; words cannot be attached to same reference, this ancient code has been completely upset. It’s a cultural problem more than a military problem. There are some passages in chapter 6 which are about language in Manning’s nove l – one of the officers complained that Bourne’s handwriting was too small and he tried to write large: “complained that his handwriting was too small; and he tried to write large, with the result that his script became uneven and stiff, like that of a child, who is thinking in letters, instead of in words or in phrases. It seemed to him, somehow, symbolical of the loss of balance which he had detected in himself in the last few days.” It's a remarkable passage. It is something trivial: an officers who complaints about Bourne’s handwriting. Bourne’s reaction: he tried to write large, but while doing that he feels that he looses himself and especially he looses his control of a life and his more mature way of thinking; he becomes like a child who is thinking in letters instead of in words and in phrases. In Mrs. Dalloway there’s the scend of the planes flying in London and the smoke composes some letters and people have to reconstruct words. So the main issue is that men adter and during the war have to cope with; they have to reconstruct a language and also to find their own voice. The war, and also this tyrannical attitude of officers have really deprived mature men of their autonomous judgement, this is the point, and then Bourne says: “It seemed to him, somehow, symbolical of the loss of balance which he had detected in himself in the last few days” So this passage is a interesting because it’s a discussion about language. Then, another passage: • He heard the colour-sergeant speaking in his usual tone of affected diffidence, the sharp, business-like whisper of the corporal, and Johnson’s, an empty echo. The focus is once again on words, but on words spoke, this time. So we have officers who use tone of affective diffidence. So they’re not spontaneous, they’re affective while speaking, so they are like actors performing a part. They speak in lower tones like Fuellen warns other people to speak in Shakespeare’ epigraph. So, you must really be up to your role even when speaking and so you are reciting some words, the ones which you think are really adequate and appropriate to your function and service in the army. And then “Johnson’s, an empty echo”  because privates should echoes another man’s words. • To overhear one-half of a conversation is always a little mystifying, but the adjutant’s part of it seemed idiotic. Throughout the novel there is this very interesting metatextual commentaries in which there are a relevant help when analysing the text and trying to understand the intertextual games. First of all there are some echoes or reversals of the meaning of the Shakesperean’s epigraphs, but here there is something more. Manning warns his readers; you cannot understand the complete meaning of a conversation which you overhear, you must put into the intertextual game. So you must try to reconstruct the intertextual games; so which have been really uttered by characters. This is what we must do when reading this novel: we must consider Shakespeare’s voice and even other character’ voices overheard, so fragmented, and we have to put them together. So even if we can’t really define Manning as a modernist, we can think of the many similarities between him and the modernists, because all of them are so concerned about voices, the interplay of voices and how difficult it is to reconstruct a language which has been broken into pieces, a discourse which has been broken into pieces and also to give new meanings to words. There must been a divorce between verbal signs and its usual references, and so the intellectuals really must try to put together the pieces of language and of the world. They had to use secret language in order not to be understood by the enemies and so there is this passage: • Pepper and salt were code words for two battalions in the Brigade; and when the adjutant went back to his place Bourne scribbled on a scrap of paper the question,…. • If the Hun continued to develop his inventive faculty at this alarming rate, they would soon all be using the deaf and dumb language. Here, “the Hun” refers to the Hungarian, so it’s an abbreviation for it; there is a sort of simplification of language, step by step, so the language will be completely deprived of so many features. There is this sense of loss of your civilisation, step by step. Also, the language should help people communicate, but when we have this continual renaming of things, to a certain point this continual renaming of things indoors communication; it would be no opportunity of exchanging ideas, to communicate and so we have this sense of increasing degradation of human beings, both the enemies and the English will be deprived. It will possible just to dissemble, not to communicate. Another passage: duty and honour • it seemed to them that duty and honour were merely the pretexts on which they were being deprived of their most elementary rights. This passage is related to language, it is connected to the discussion about the degradation of language. Here duty and honour are mentioned and they are key words in the propaganda discussion. Just asking them to be very dutiful, loyal to serve the country and to serve it honourably, they were being deprived of their most elementary rights. Duty and honour are part of the chivalric code, and also they have been used and so these soldiers have been dissembled by language because duty and honour do not represent values for them; they have been used in order to deprive them of the human beings rights. He's so well aware of what was going on during the war and so the exploitation of language in order to enslave men and to use them as tools during the war and then the negotiation of the peace. So, the soldiers, and Bourne is of course their mouthpiece, perceive that language has been abused because it has been banned to express false values and to commit crimes against humanity. The cover up of the war propaganda has been completely deconstructed step by step in this chapter. There is an another echoes, we have a welsh in this chapter, like Captain Fuellen: • ‘I’d be glad of them,’ said Williams simply; he was a man of few words, a rare quality in a Welshman. It’s a nodes to Shakespeare because Fuellen has been depicted as the stereotypical worthy Welshman. Chapter 6 is so interesting because it meditates on language and makes us see as the abuses of language can hamper effective communication. We have the language in the camps, so the verbally exchanges among officers, soldiers and privates which is made of many simples verbal unity, mainly order and rebukes. So, simple words without any sophisticated conversation, but on this metatextual commentaries we have also a meditation on language used to exploit people. There is also some words which people do not want to listen to. There is this character Mr. Clinton who had fought in so many actions and he survived, and for a while he was not on line, but the officers decide that he must go and take part in the next action. He’s very pencive that day and then he goes to speak with the Padre – it’s written in Italian – so, the priest, in order to find some comfort because he feels that he will die in that action. While knowing that Clinton has really died in this action, Bourne feels “as something is going to smack within himself” . So he’s speechless, so we have the void words of soldiers, and especially of officers. And then we have Bourne silence, he’s so detached in his composure, but this note make us feel his real feelings. There is the contrast using Shakespeare’s words between this silence and the trivial conversation in the camps.