{"title":"Things and Nothings: Henry Green and the Late Modernist Banal","authors":"N. Milthorpe","doi":"10.1215/00295132-3854315","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"The tension between precisions and generalities that catches scholars seeking to define the character of literary modernism fruitfully animates the work of novelist Henry Green. Green takes as his subject matter the ordinary stuff of life—commonplace language, routine experiences, unremarkable relationships—transforming dullness into novelistic event. Two novels demonstrate Green's extraordinary effects achieved through and with the banal, the boring, the vague, and the everyday: Party Going (1939) and Nothing (1951). In Party Going, a group of people stranded at a train station wait with their luggage, order drinks, and lose and find various members of their party. In its attention to the bathetic quotidian, Party Going animates a range of late modernist anxieties about time, leisure, and subjective experience that manifest in the novel's fretful leveling of objects and experiences using the repeated, vague signifier things. Later, in Nothing, a group of socialites—a young couple, their parents, who were former lovers, and the parents’ lovers—have conversations in restaurants and pubs. Nothing dramatizes the inane nature of polite conversation, in which \"-thing\" is used as a block, as though to empty a conversation of significant information. The multiple subjects and objects embraced by the vague term things suggests that Green's fiction is preoccupied with the \"utter contingency of everything (and every thing)\" in the modernist period, as Douglas Mao notes. In these novels’ recourse to the any, some, every, or no things of the quotidian, Green explores the potential difference, remarkable sameness, and fuzzy difficulty of late modernist style.","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2017-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-3854315","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The tension between precisions and generalities that catches scholars seeking to define the character of literary modernism fruitfully animates the work of novelist Henry Green. Green takes as his subject matter the ordinary stuff of life—commonplace language, routine experiences, unremarkable relationships—transforming dullness into novelistic event. Two novels demonstrate Green's extraordinary effects achieved through and with the banal, the boring, the vague, and the everyday: Party Going (1939) and Nothing (1951). In Party Going, a group of people stranded at a train station wait with their luggage, order drinks, and lose and find various members of their party. In its attention to the bathetic quotidian, Party Going animates a range of late modernist anxieties about time, leisure, and subjective experience that manifest in the novel's fretful leveling of objects and experiences using the repeated, vague signifier things. Later, in Nothing, a group of socialites—a young couple, their parents, who were former lovers, and the parents’ lovers—have conversations in restaurants and pubs. Nothing dramatizes the inane nature of polite conversation, in which "-thing" is used as a block, as though to empty a conversation of significant information. The multiple subjects and objects embraced by the vague term things suggests that Green's fiction is preoccupied with the "utter contingency of everything (and every thing)" in the modernist period, as Douglas Mao notes. In these novels’ recourse to the any, some, every, or no things of the quotidian, Green explores the potential difference, remarkable sameness, and fuzzy difficulty of late modernist style.
期刊介绍:
Widely acknowledged as the leading journal in its field, Novel publishes essays concerned with the novel"s role in engaging and shaping the world. To promote critical discourse on the novel, the journal publishes significant work on fiction and related areas of research and theory. Recent issues on the early American novel, eighteenth-century fiction, and postcolonial modernisms carry on Novel"s long-standing interest in the Anglo-American tradition.