Things and Nothings: Henry Green and the Late Modernist Banal

IF 0.3 2区 文学 0 LITERATURE NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION Pub Date : 2017-05-01 DOI:10.1215/00295132-3854315
N. Milthorpe
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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.
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《有与无:亨利·格林和晚期现代主义的陈腐
学者们在试图定义文学现代主义的特征时,抓住了精确与笼统之间的紧张关系,这种紧张关系为小说家亨利·格林的作品注入了丰硕的活力。格林以生活中平凡的事物为题材——平凡的语言、例行的经历、平淡无奇的人际关系——将乏味转化为小说事件。格林的两部小说展示了他通过平庸、无聊、模糊和日常生活所取得的非凡效果:《去派对》(1939)和《一无所有》(1951)。在《Party Going》中,一群被困在火车站的人带着他们的行李等着,点饮料,失去和找到他们的各种成员。在对日常生活的关注中,《去派对》激发了一系列晚期现代主义者对时间、休闲和主观体验的焦虑,这些焦虑体现在小说中使用重复的、模糊的能指事物对物体和体验的焦虑中。后来,在《虚无》中,一群社会名流——一对年轻夫妇、他们曾经的恋人父母,以及父母的恋人——在餐馆和酒吧里聊天。没有什么比礼貌谈话的空洞本质更夸张的了,在礼貌谈话中,“-thing”被用作一个障碍,仿佛是为了清空谈话中的重要信息。在这些小说中,格林对日常生活中任何、某些、所有或没有事物的求助,探索了晚期现代主义风格的潜在差异、显著的同一性和模糊的困难。
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来源期刊
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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.
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