1 INTRODUCTION
2 THE COMMONWEALTH OF NATIONS
3 CULTURAL DIVERSITY
4 DEVELOPMENT OF LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY
5 INTERCULTURAL INFLUENCES AND MANIFESTATIONS
6 THE NOVELS OF E.M. FORSTER, D. LESSING AND N. GORDIMER
6.1 Literary reflection of the Commonwealth cultural phenomenon
6.2 E. M. Forster´s life and works
6.3 Doris Lessing´s life and works
6.4 Nadine Gordimer´s life and works
7 STUDY GUIDE
8 BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 INTRODUCTION
TEMA 62
LA COMMONWEALTH. LA DIVERSIDAD CULTURAL. EL DESARROLLO DE VARIEDADES LINGÜÍSTICAS. INFLUENCIAS Y MANITESTACIONES INTERCULTURALES. LAS NOVELAS DE E.M. FORSTER, D. LESSING Y N. GORDIMER.
1 INTRODUCTION
2 THE COMMONWEALTH OF NATIONS
3 CULTURAL DIVERSITY
4 DEVELOPMENT OF LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY
5 INTERCULTURAL INFLUENCES AND MANIFESTATIONS
6 THE NOVELS OF E.M. FORSTER, D. LESSING AND N. GORDIMER
6.1 Literary reflection of the Commonwealth cultural phenomenon
6.2 E. M. Forster´s life and works
6.3 Doris Lessing´s life and works
6.4 Nadine Gordimer´s life and works
7 STUDY GUIDE
8 BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 INTRODUCTION
The Commonwealth of Nations, usually known as the Commonwealth and sometimes as the British Commonwealth, is a voluntary association of 53 independent sovereign states, most of which are former British colonies (the exceptions being the United Kingdom itself and Mozambique).
The Commonwealth is an international organization through which countries with diverse social, political, and economic backgrounds co-operate within a framework of common values and goals, outlined in the Singapore Declaration. These include the promotion of democracy, human rights, good governance, the rule of law, individual liberty, egalitarianism, free trade, multilateralism, and world peace. Queen Elizabeth II is the Head of the Commonwealth, recognized by each state, and as such is the symbol of the free association of the organization’s members.
Elizabeth II is also the Head of State, separately, of sixteen members of the Commonwealth, called Commonwealth realms. As each realm is an independent kingdom, Elizabeth II, as monarch, holds a distinct title for each, though, by a Prime Ministers’ Conference in 1952, all include the words “Head of the Commonwealth” at the end; for example: Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, Queen of Jamaica and of Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth. Beyond the realms, the majority of the members of the Commonwealth have their own, separate Heads of State: thirty-two members are Commonwealth republics and five members have their own monarchs (Sultan of Brunei, King of Lesotho, Supreme Ruler of Malaysia, King of Swaziland, and King of Tonga).
The Commonwealth has long been distinctive as an international forum where highly developed economies (such as the UK, Australia, Canada, Singapore and New Zealand) and many of the world’s poorer countries seek to reach agreement by consensus. This aim has sometimes been difficult to achieve, as when disagreements over Southern Rhodesia in the late 1960s and 1970s and over apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s led to a cooling of relations between Britain and African members.
An important statement of the Commonwealth’s principles is the 1991 Harare Declaration, which dedicated the organization to democracy and good government, and allowed for action to be taken against members who breached these principles.
In its early days, the Commonwealth constituted a significant economic bloc. Commonwealth countries accorded each others’ goods privileged access to their markets (“Commonwealth preference“), and there was a free or preferred right of migration from one Commonwealth country to another. These rights have been steadily eroded, but their consequences remain. Within most Commonwealth countries, there are substantial communities with family ties to other members of the Commonwealth, going beyond the effects of the original colonization of parts of the Commonwealth by settlers from Britain or Ireland.
The Commonwealth is also useful as an international organization that represents significant cultural and historical links between wealthy first-world countries and poorer nations with diverse social and religious backgrounds. The common inheritance of the English language and literature, the common law, and British systems of administration all underpin the club-like atmosphere of the Commonwealth.
Mostly due to their history of British rule, many Commonwealth nations share certain identifiable traditions and customs that are elements of a shared Commonwealth culture. Examples include common sports such as cricket and rugby, driving on the left, parliamentary and legal traditions, and the use of British rather than American spelling conventions (see English in the Commonwealth of Nations). None of these are universal within the Commonwealth countries, nor exclusive to them, but all of them are more common in the Commonwealth than elsewhere.
The presence of the British in their colonies all over the world has given rise to such intercultural influences as the use of the language by very different communities of speakers, but it has also given rise to literatures written in English influenced by the colonial experience. These literatures have followed different paths.
Commonwealth literatures have developed through several stages which can be seen to correspond to stages both of national or regional consciousness and of the process of asserting the differences from the imperial centre.
In the first part of this topic we will study different aspects of the Commonwealth of nations, cultural diversity, development of linguistic varieties and intercultural influences and manifestations. In the second part of the topic we shall analyze the literary contributions of E. M. Forster, Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer.
2 THE COMMONWEALTH OF NATIONS
The Commonwealth of Nations is a confederation born due to the decentralisation and eventual disintegration of the British Empire. It is a free association of sovereign states comprising Great Britain and a number of its former dependencies that have chosen to maintain ties of friendship and practical co-operation and who acknowledge the British monarch as symbolic head of their association.
Although performing a vastly different function, the Commonwealth is the successor of the British Empire. In 1884, whilst visiting Adelaide, South Australia, Lord Rosebery described the changing British Empire, as some of its colonies became more independent, as a “Commonwealth of Nations”.
Conferences of British and colonial Prime Ministers had occurred periodically since 1887, leading to the creation of the Imperial Conferences in the late 1920s. The formal organization of the Commonwealth developed from the Imperial Conferences, where the independence of the self-governing colonies and especially of dominions was recognized. The Irish Oath of Allegiance, agreed in 1921, included the Irish Free State‘s adherence to and membership of the group of nations forming the British Commonwealth of Nations. In the Balfour Declaration at the Imperial Conference in 1926, Britain and its dominions agreed they were equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations. This relationship was eventually formalized by the Statute of Westminster in 1931.
In its early days, the Commonwealth constituted a significant economic bloc. Commonwealth countries accorded each others’ goods privileged access to their markets (“Commonwealth preference“), and there was a free or preferred right of migration from one Commonwealth country to another. These rights have been steadily eroded, but their consequences remain. Within most Commonwealth countries, there are substantial communities with family ties to other members of the Commonwealth, going beyond the effects of the original colonization of parts of the Commonwealth by settlers from Britain or Ireland. Furthermore, consumers in Commonwealth countries retain many preferences for goods from other members of the Commonwealth, so that even in the absence of tariff privileges, there continues to be more trade within the Commonwealth than might be predicted. On Britain’s entry to the European Community, the Lomé Convention preserved some of the preferential access rights of Commonwealth goods to Britain’s market.
The British policy of allowing considerable self-government in its colonies led to the existence by the 19th century of several dependent states populated to a significant degree by Europeans accustomed to the forms of parliamentary rule which possessed large degrees of sovereignty. This was the case in Australia, Canada, the Irish Free State, New Zealand, and the Union of South Africa. By 1931 they were recognised as having special status within the empire by the Statute of Westminster, which referred to a “British Commonwealth of Nations”. The adjective British was dropped in 1946. The growth of nationalism in other parts of the empire from the 1920s produced a long series of grants of independence. In 1947 India and Pakistan became members of the Commonwealth, the first with chiefly non-European populations.
The Queen is the Head of the Commonwealth and she is also recognised as Head of State in 18 countries, including Canada and Australia. Although Britain maintains a strong influence in the Commonwealth and the Queen takes a keen personal interest in Commonwealth matters, they have little real power. The modern Commonwealth includes republics and other monarchies in addition to states headed by the Queen. In 1950 India was the first country to become a republic while remaining within the Commonwealth. There are also a few countries that have left it, such as South Africa in 1961 and Pakistan in 1972.
3 CULTURAL DIVERSITY
The Commonwealth comprises fifty-three of the world’s countries and has a combined population of 1.9 billion people, almost a third of the world population and over twice as many as the whole of the Americas (North and South) put together. Of that figure, 1.4 billion people live in the Indian subcontinent, and 93% live in Asia and Africa combined.
The total GDP is about US$7.8 trillion (about 16% of the total world economy). The land area of the Commonwealth nations is about 31.5 million km² (12.1 million square miles), or about 21% of the total world land area.
The five largest Commonwealth nations by population are India (1.1 billion), Pakistan (165 million), Bangladesh (148 m), Nigeria (137 m), and the United Kingdom (60 m). Tuvalu is the smallest member, with only 11,000 people.
The three largest Commonwealth nations by area are Canada at 3.8 million square miles, Australia at 3.0 million square miles, and India at 1.2 million square miles.
Membership is open to countries that accept the association’s basic aims and have a present or past constitutional link to a Commonwealth member. Not all members have had direct constitutional ties to Britain: some South Pacific countries were formerly under Australian or New Zealand administration, while Namibia was governed by South Africa from 1920 until independence in 1990. Cameroon joined in 1995 although only a fraction of its territory had formerly been under British administration through the League of Nations mandate of 1920–46 and United Nations Trusteeship arrangement of 1946–61. There is only one member of the present Commonwealth that has never had any constitutional link to the British Empire or a Commonwealth member: Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony, was admitted in 1995 on the back of the triumphal re-admission of South Africa and Mozambique’s first democratic elections, held in 1994. The move was supported by Mozambique’s neighbours, all of whom were members of the Commonwealth and who wished to offer assistance in overcoming the losses incurred from the country’s opposition to white minority regimes in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa. In 1997, amid some discontent, Commonwealth Heads of Government agreed that Mozambique’s admission should be seen as a special case and not set a precedent. Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) joined in 1972 in its own right after breaking away from Pakistan (formerly West Pakistan), which was a member until it left later in the same year.
4 DEVELOPMENT OF LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY
In the former British colonies the English language has developed differences that distinguish it from the language of England and from one another. They consist mainly of peculiarities in pronunciation and vocabulary due to the distance, to the time when the colonisation took place and also due to the influence of the new environment. In other countries the characteristics result from the imperfect learning and systematic adaptations by speakers of other languages. English is spoken as a first or second language in most of the Commonwealth; in a few countries, for example Cyprus and Malaysia, it does not have official status, but is widely used as a lingua franca. Many regions, notably Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the Caribbean, have developed their own native varieties of the language.
Southern Hemisphere native varieties of English began to develop during the 19th century, with the colonization of Australasia and South Africa. Australian English, New Zealand English and South African English are non-rhotic dialects closely related to one another and to the English spoken in southeastern England. The vocabularies of these dialects are also similar to that of English, with some differences and several terms that are peculiar to each country; Australian English features also a number of North American words. Differences in grammar and usage are mostly limited to colloquial speech.
In the case in Australia most of the population is of British origin, but their English has some remarkable differences compared with British English.
As far as vocabulary is concerned, they use many words not used in England. Due to the new environment settlers borrowed some words such as “boomerang” and “kangaroo” (which have become general English) but also some others like “corroboree”, which means a tumult. There are also many differences in the landscape which account for the fact that common words in England like “field” or “forest” are out of use while words like “scrub” (vegetation consisting mainly of bushwood) and “creek” (meaning a stream or a brook) have persisted in their language. Another source of differences between Australian vocabulary and general English is that many words come from British dialects, such as “dinkum” (“honest”) from Lincs or “to fossic” (meaning “to search”) from Cornish.
As far as pronunciation is concerned, it resembles Cockney, and the most outstanding characteristic is the substitution of the diphthong /ei/ with /ai/. They have in general the tendency for vowels to become more front and to diphthongise. The reason for these characteristics in pronunciation is that the early settlers were deported prisoners and adventurers who spoke the dialect of the lower classes of south-eastern England.
In New Zealand, in spite of the distance the linguistic divergence is small. Few Maori words have passed into the vocabulary, while the pronunciation is very similar.
Canadian English is regarded as one of two sub-varieties of North American English (the other being U.S. English); however, it also features many elements of British English that are not found in the United States. As far as Canada is concerned, since the great majority of the population lives near the US border American English is very influential, although there are certain social groups where British English is still influential, as well as in private schools and universities.
Caribbean English is influenced by the English-based Creole varieties spoken, but they are not one and the same. There is a great deal of variation in the way English is spoken, with a “Standard English” at the top of the social scale and creoles at the bottom. These dialects have roots in 17th-century English and African languages; unlike most native varieties of English, West Indian dialects often tend to be syllable-timed rather than stress-timed.
Second language varieties of English in Africa and Asia have often undergone “indigenization”; that is, each English-speaking community has developed (or is in the process of developing) its own standards of usage, often under the influence of local languages. These dialects are sometimes referred to as New Englishes; most of them inherited non-rhoticity from Southern British English.
Several dialects of West African English exist, with a lot of regional variation and some influence from indigenous language. West African English tends to be syllable-timed, and its phoneme inventory is much simpler than that of Received Pronunciation; this sometimes affects mutual intelligibility with native varieties of English. A distinctive East African English is spoken in countries such as Kenya or Tanzania.
Small communities of native English speakers can be found in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia; the dialects spoken are similar to South African English.
India has the world’s largest English-speaking population, although most speakers of Indian English are not native speakers. Indian English phonology is highly variable; stress, rhythm and intonation are generally different from those of native varieties. There are also several peculiarities at the levels of morphology, syntax and usage, some of which can also be found among educated speakers.
Southeast Asian English comprises Singapore English and Malaysian English; it features some influence from Chinese. Finally, in Hong Kong, which is no longer a Commonwealth country, English has nonetheless official status.
After the independence, however, India decided to keep English for some time as the language for administrative purposes since the linguistic variety made the automatic introduction of Hindi very difficult. Since most Indians and Pakistanis who speak English use it as a second language, they normally aim at speaking the British variety of English, and it tends to be bookish.
In Africa, with the exception of South Africa, where English is spoken by part of the white population while other whites speak the Dutch dialect known as Afrikaans, in most former colonies English is spoken only by a minority but it is either the official language or a lingua franca, and it has the characteristics of English learnt as a second language.
5 INTERCULTURAL INFUENCES AND MANIFESTATIONS
The ties that bind the Commonwealth are highly diverse. The use of the English language and of English common law, together with some common symbols and remaining cultural affinities, appear to be the major ties binding together this loose association. Trade, investment, currency agreements, population migrations and sports are others.
Meetings of Commonwealth heads of state take place every two years and their governments have High Commissions rather than Embassies as diplomatic representation in other Commonwealth countries. In 1965 a Commonwealth Secretariat was established in London to organise and co-ordinate Commonwealth activities. Two further links between the Commonwealth countries are education and technical co-operation and the Commonwealth games. The Commonwealth Fund for Technical Co-operation, which is financed by all member states, was implemented to provide technical assistance to less-developed states. The Commonwealth Games, is a sports competition held in varying Commonwealth countries at four-year intervals, preferably midway between the Olympic Games.
The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is an intergovernmental agency of the Commonwealth of Nations headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Founded in 1987 at a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) and established in 1988, COL’s mandate is to promote and develop the use of open learning and distance education knowledge, resources and technologies throughout the Commonwealth’s 53 member states, particularly among the Commonwealth’s developing nations.
COL’s goal is to improve universal access to educational and training opportunities in accordance with the Commonwealth priorities of peace, democracy, equality, good governance and the needs of the Commonwealth’s small states. COL’s activities are also guided by the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Education for All (EFA) declarations.
Financial support for COL’s core operations is provided by Commonwealth governments on a voluntary basis, with primary funding renewed every three years. COL also receives extra-budgetary income from other development sources and provides fee-for-service distance education and open learning course delivery and training for international agencies, such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the World Health Organization (WHO).
COL’s partners include national and international development agencies and banks, such as non-governmental organizations; other Commonwealth agencies like the Commonwealth Secretariat; United Nations bodies such as UNESCO, UNICEF, UNIFEM, UNDP and the World Bank; national and regional distance education associations; and industry.
Commonwealth countries share many links outside government, with over a hundred Commonwealth-wide non-governmental organizations, notably for sport, culture, education and charity. The Association of Commonwealth Universities is an important vehicle for academic links, particularly through scholarships, principally the Commonwealth Scholarship, for students to study in universities in other Commonwealth countries. There are also many non-official associations that bring together individuals who work within the spheres of law and government, such as the Commonwealth Lawyers Association and the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association.
The Commonwealth has long been distinctive as an international forum where highly developed economies (such as the UK, Australia, Canada, Singapore and New Zealand) and many of the world’s poorer countries seek to reach agreement by consensus. This aim has sometimes been difficult to achieve, as when disagreements over Southern Rhodesia in the late 1960s and 1970s and over apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s led to a cooling of relations between Britain and African members.
An important statement of the Commonwealth’s principles is the 1991 Harare Declaration, which dedicated the organization to democracy and good government, and allowed for action to be taken against members who breached these principles. Before then the Commonwealth’s collective actions had been limited by the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other members.
The Commonwealth lists its areas of work as: democracy, economics, education, gender, governance, human rights, law, small states, sport, sustainability and youth.
Through a separate voluntary fund Commonwealth governments support the Commonwealth Youth Programme, a division of the Secretariat with offices in Gulu (Uganda), Lusaka (Zambia), Chandigarh (India), Georgetown (Guyana) and Honiara (Solomon Islands). The organization is celebrated each year on Commonwealth Day, the second Monday in March.
6 THE NOVELS OF E.M.FORSTER, DORIS LESSING AND NADINE GORDIMER
6.1 Literary reflection of the Commonwealth cultural phenomenon
The presence of the British in their colonies all over the world has given rise to such intercultural influences as the use of the language by very different communities of speakers, but it has also given rise to literatures written in English influenced by the colonial experience. These literatures have followed different paths.
Commonwealth literatures have developed through several stages which can be seen to correspond to stages both of national or regional consciousness and of the process of asserting the differences from the imperial centre.
The first texts produced in the colonies in the new language are frequently produced by “representatives” of the imperial power. Such texts can never form the basis for an indigenous culture nor can they be integrated in any way in the country invaded. They are the books written by people born in Britain who witnessed the colonial life, such as in the case of Rudyard Kipling or E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, other times they are the descendants of the colonialists who wrote about the life in the countries where they were already born like Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer; finally, we may also consider the literature of people from former colonies who write in English, such as the case of the Indian Salman Rushdie.
6.2 E.M. Forster´s life and works
Edward Morgan Forster was born in London in 1879 as the son of an architect, who died before his only child was two years old. Forster’s childhood and much of his adult life was dominated by his mother and his aunts. The legacy of her paternal great-aunt Marianne Thornton, descendant of the Clapham Sect of evangelists and reformers, gave later Forster the freedom to travel and to write. Forster’s years at Tonbridge School as a teenager were difficult – he suffered from the cruelty of his classmates.
Forster attended King’s College, Cambridge (1897-1901), where he met members of the later formed Bloomsbury group. In the atmosphere of skepticism, he became under the influence of Sir Jamer Frazer, Nathaniel Wedd, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, and G.E. Moore, and shed his not very deep Christian faith. After graduating he travelled in Italy and Greece with his mother, and on his return began to write essays and short stories for the liberal Independent Review.
On leaving Cambridge, Forster decided to devote his life to writing. His first novels and short stories are representative of an age that was shaking off the shackles of Victorianism. While adopting certain themes (the importance of women in their own right, for example) from earlier English novelists such as George Meredith, he broke with the style favoured in the late 19th century and wrote in a freer, more colloquial style. From the first his novels included a strong strain of social comment, based on acute observation of middle-class life. There was also a deeper concern, associated with Forster’s interest in Mediterranean “paganism” that, if men and women wanted to achieve a satisfactory life, they needed to keep contact with the earth and to cultivate their imaginations.
His first novel is Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905). In the following year he lectured on Italian art and history for the Cambridge Local Lectures Board. In 1907 appeared The Longest Journey. In this novel he suggested that cultivation of either in isolation is not enough, reliance on the earth alone leading to brutishness and exaggerated development of imagination undermining the individual’s sense of reality. The same theme runs through Howard’s End, a more ambitious novel that brought Forster his first major success.
Then he writes A Room with a View (1908), based partly on the material from extended holidays in Italy with his mother. The first part of the novel is set in Florence, where the young Lucy Honeychurch is visitng with her older cousin Charlotte Bartless. Lucy witnesses a murder and becomes caught between two men, shallow, conventional Cecil Vyse and George Emerson, who kisses Lucy during a picnic. The second half of the novel takes place at Windy Corner, Lucy’s home on Summer Street. She accepts a marriage proposal from Cecil. The Emerson become friends of the Honeychurches after George, Mr. Beebe, who is a clergyman, and Freddie, Lucy’s brother, are discovered bathing nude in the woods. Finally Lucy overcomes prejudices and marries George. He had found something emotionally incomplete in English life and here he explores the contrast of more passionate Italian life. He contrasts English narrow and fenced middle-class respectabilities, praising the loving freedom exercised by those more radical. Those themes were developed with maturity in Howard’s End, an admirable picture of English middle-class life before the First World War and an exploration of its complexities due to the transformation of a century of industrialisation and imperial expansion.
Forster also wrote during the pre-war years a number of short stories, which were collected in The Celestial Omnibus (1914). Most of them were symbolic fantasies or fables.
Howards End (1910) was a story that centred on an English country house and dealt with the clash between two families, one interested in art and literature, the other only in business. The book brought together the themes of money, business and culture. “To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.” (from Howards End) The novel established Forster’s reputation, and he embarked upon a new novel with a homosexual theme, Maurice. The picture of British attitudes not long after Wilde was revised several times during his life, and finally published posthumously in 1971. His personal life Forster hid from public discussion. In 1930 he had a relationship with a London policeman. This important contact continued after the marriage of his London friend.
Between the years 1912 and 1913 Forster travelled in India. From 1914 to 1915 he worked for the National Gallery in London. Following the outbreak of World War I, Forster joined the Red Cross and served in Alexandria, Egypt. There he met the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy, and published a selection of his poems in Pharaos and Pharillon (1923).
In 1921 Forster returned to India, working as a private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas. The land was the scene of his masterwork A Passage to India (1924), an account of India under British rule. It was Forter’s last novel – and for the remaining 46 years of his life he devoted himself to other activities. Writing novels was not the most important element in his life. He returned to former themes, but they presented themselves in a negative form: against the vaster scale of India, in which the earth itself seems alien, a resolution between it and the imagination could appear as almost impossible to achieve. The novel is set in pre-war British India and portrays the relationship between the Anglo-Indian administration and the natives, with the sometimes comic and sometimes tragic failures to achieve real communication across the division. It shows the incapability of the respectable English middle-class with their public school education and their conventional morality for proper human contact with other peoples.
After Forster’s death his literary executors turned down approaches from Joseph Losey, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, and Waris Hussein, to make a feature film version of the book, but eventually David Lean was approved as director. Forster had shared with T.E. Lawrence a dislike and distrut of the cinema. The two last chapetrs of A Passage to India Forster had also written under the influence of Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
In A Passage to India (1924) Adela Quested visits Chandrapore with Mrs Moore in order to make up her mind whether to marry the latter’s son. Mrs Moore meets his friend Dr Azis, assistant to the British Civil Surgeon. She and Adela accept Azis’s invitation to visit the mysterious Marabar Caves. In this trip Mrs Moore nearly faints in the cave and goes mad for an instant. She believes herself to have been the victim of a sexual assault by Azis, who is arrested. Adela is pushed forward by his friends and family but she admits that she was mistaken. Mrs Moore dies on the voyage home at sea. Azis has changed his liberal views. The novel ends in an uneasy equilibrium. Immediate reconciliation between Indians and British is ruled out, but the further possibilities inherent in Adela’s experience, along with the surrounding uncertainties, are echoed in the ritual birth of the God of Love amid scenes of confusion at a Hindu festival. The novel’s title derives from Walt Whitman, but the American poet’s celebration of the opening of the Suez Canal as bringing together East and West .
Forster contributed reviews and essays to numerous journals, most notably the Listener, he was an active member of PEN, in 1934 he became the first president of the National Council for Civil Liberties, and after his mother’s death in 1945, he was elected an honorary fellow of King’s and lived there for the remainder of his life. In 1949 Forster refused a knighthood and in 1951 he collaborated with Eric Crozier on the libretto of Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd, which was based on Herman Melville‘s novel (film 1962, dir. by Peter Ustinov). Forster was made a Companion of Honour in 1953 and in 1969 he accepted an Order of Merit. Forster died on June 7, 1970.
Forster often criticized in his books Victorian middle class attitudes and British colonialism through strong woman characters. However, Forster’s characters were not one-dimensional heroes and villains, and except his devotion to such values as tolerance and sense of comedy, he was uncommitted.
The epithet ‘Fosterian’ – liberal, unconventional, sceptical, moral – had started to circulate since the publication of Howard’s End. Forster’s famous essay ‘Two Cheers for Democracy’ (also: ‘What I Believe’), which was originally printed in 1938 in the New York Nation reflected his concern for individual liberty. He assumed liberal humanism not dogmatically but ironically, writing in unceremonious sentences and making gentle stabs at pomposity and hypocrisy “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” (from ‘Two cheers for Democracy’).
6.3 Doris Lessing´s life and works
Doris Lessing spent her early childhood in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran). Her English-born father, Alfred Cook Tayler, who had lost his leg and health in World War I, was a bank clerk with the Imperial Bank of Persia. Emily McVeagh, Lessing’s mother, had been trained as a nurse. After the war the Tayler’s moved to Kermanshah and later Tehran. In the mid-1920s the family bought with their life savings a maize farm in the district of Banket, in the Lomagundi area of Southern Rhosesia, where Lessing grew up with her younger brother Harry. Her childhood was lonely, the nearest neighbours were miles away and there was no real roads between the farms.
In 1926 Lessing was sent to a convent school in Salisbury (now Harare), where the Roman Catholic teachers tried to convert her from the family’s Protestant faith. “I was cripplingly homesick,” Lessing later said. She left the Girls’ High School at the age of fourteen and then earned her living as a nursemaid, telephone operator and clerk. At nineteen she married Frank Wisdom, a civil servant; they had two children. The marriage ended in 1943. For some years Lessing was an active member of the Communist Party, which was formally banned in Southern Rhodesia. This period of her life is reflected in A Ripple from the Storm (1958) of the five-volume sequence Children of the Violence, the first four of which were set in a fictional African colony, Zambesia. In 1943 Lessing married the German political activist Gottfried Lessing, a member of the inner circle of the Rhodesian Communist Party. He was the model for Anton Hesse in A Ripple from the Storm and Willi Rodde in The Golden Notebook (1962). Gottfried Lessing became later the German ambassador to Uganda; he and his third wife were murdered in the 1979 revolt against Idi Amin.
Lessing’s second marriage also failed and in 1949 she moved to England with her youngest child and the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass is Singing, which appeared in 1950. The story, set in Rhodesia, focused on a poor white farm woman, Mary Turner, and her weak husband. She has a relationship with her African servant, Moses, who eventually kills her.
From the 1950s onwards Lessing supported herself and her son by writing. Disillusioned with Communist policies in England, Lessing left the party in the mid-1950s. She underwent Jungian analysis and also studied Sufism under the guidance of Idres Shah. In 1979 Lessing set up a Sufi Trust for one hundred thousand dollars.
Her major achievement is five novel sequence about Martha Quest published in the 50s and 60s Children of Violence. It records Martha’s African upbringing, her encounter with post-war London, and finally it takes a prophetic leap into the future. Lessing has been highly praised for her portrayal of modern women. Martha’s experience matches her own in many respects. Martha is a strong young woman obsessively aware of herself physically and emotionally. She is continuously struggling to find her own completeness. Her instinctive rejection of the social and personal role which parental and environmental pressures would impose on her is defined in terms of the progressive ideologies of the 30’s and 40’s. Martha’s problems are never resolved: at the heart of them is the typical character of Lessing cherishing her resentments, preserving her sense of herself at all costs and peculiarly dependent on her problems and their inevitavility in order to reach a definition of herself. Many critics consider Children of Violence, Lessing’s semi-autobiographical series of novels about Martha Quest, her most substantial work.
Other important works by Doris Lessing include The Golden Notebook (1962), which describes the intellectual and moral climate of the time through the study of Anna Wolf, a writer suffering a block, over the question of the relationship between the writer’s real and projected self. The novel also focuses on the relationship between men and women. Anna shares a flat with molly in London and they are free women, living free lives, with freedom of choice, therefore being equal to men.
Four-gated City (1969), the last volume, closes with Martha’s death in destroyed world at the end of the twentieth century. It has been said that Children of Violence and more The Canopus in Argos reflect the influence of Sufist thought on Lessing’s literary work and concern with the union of the soul with a Higher Being.
Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983) and If the Old Could (1984) were published under the name Jane Somers to dramatize the problems of unknown writers. The use of a pseudonym also helped Lessing to experiment with different type of fiction.
Lessing has written poems, plays, and several science fiction novels. One of her most widely read and translated works is The Golden Notebook, an experimental novel, which was greeted upon its publication as a landmark of the Women’s Movement. The story deals with the personal crisis of a writer, Anna Wulf, who keeps four notebooks while working on her fictional novel ‘Free Women’. The ‘yellow notebook’ portrays Anna’s alter ego, the ‘red’ is a political document, the ‘blue’ is a diary, and the ‘black’ is about Anna’s earlier life. In the final section Anna gives the ‘golden notebook’ to her American lover. The ‘Free Woman’ narrative ends with Anna’s acceptance that she cannot capture the absolute truth about herself in her notebooks.
In Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), written in a ‘stream of conscious’ style, and Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) Lessing portrayed the breakdown of society.
The Good Terrorist (1985) examined with irony a militant left-wing life style and the short distance between idealism and terrorism. Alice, the protagonist, sees herself as a committed revolutionary. She knows how to confront officials, spray paint slogans, but she really does not have an understanding of political movements. When explosives are stored under her own roof, she cares more about curtains than issues. As Alice tries to change the house in a genuine commune, she becomes the mother of parasitic companions.
Love, Again (1966) was set in the theatre world. The protagonist is an older woman, manager of a small theatre company, whose self-analysis runs in parallel with a new production.
In The Memoirs of a Survivor (1975) she wrote a prophetic fantasy. Later, Lessing has turned to science fiction in a five-novel sequence titled Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979-83). Space fiction has something in common with the myth-making of Rousseau and offers visions of hope or disaster for mankind, seen particularly in Shikasta (1979). These novels are not an escape from the themes of the realistic novels. Their universe is a battlefield of good and evil. They dramatise all along an opposition between fable and reality, which is particularly seen in The Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five.
The Fifth Child (1988) was a mixture of genres from mythology to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In the story a family is torn apart by the arrival of their fifth offspring, a monster.
African Laughter (1994) was an account of Lessing’s four visits to Zimbabwe between 1982 and 1992.
Mara and Dann (1999), set thousands of years in the future, tells of a brother and sister in a world full of violence and adventures. Its sequel was The Story of General Dann and Mara´s daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2006).
The Sweetest Dream (2002) was a family story, in which Frances Lennox struggles in life with her two sons and her ex-husband, a phoney Communist. The last part of the book focused on Sylvia, the daughter of Johnny’s second wife, who works as a doctor in Zimlia, a thinly veiled Zimbabwe.
The first volume of Lessing’s autobiography, Under My Skin (1994), depicted her childhood in Zimbabwe. Walking in the shade (1997) covered the years from 1959 to 1962. Lessing has also collaborated with the composer Philip Glass on an opera based on the novel The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. Besides the Nobel Prize, Lessing’s several literature awards include the Somerset Maugham Award (1956), the Shakespeare Prize of the West German Hamburger Stiftung (1982), the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1982), the Palermo Prize (1987), the Premio Internaziolane Mondello (1987), and the W.H. Smith Award (1986). However, Lessing refused an offer of becoming a Dame of the British Empire on the grounds that there was no British Empire. She was awarded with the Cervantes Prize in 2001 and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007.
A master of the short story, Lessing has published several collections, including The Story of a Non-Marrying Man (1972); her African stories, collected in This Was the Old Chief’s Country and The Sun Between Their Feet (both 1973); and Stories (1978). The stories collected in A Man and Two Women (1963) deal with the theme of the couple: none of the women seem capable of stable relationships and none of the men worthy of one. She shows contempt at women who depend on men. She is frank about her sexual needs but yet clearly unhappy with them. She decides to be thoroughly female, to turn herself into a love object. She both wants this rule and resents it as well as the male who takes advantage of it. But these women sooner or later collapse. The most explicit study of self-destruction is To Room Nineteen. Susan drifts away from her family into indifference, almost into non-being, and then kills herself. Lessing treats such hopelessness in the most natural way, as a kind of experience. She is only writing about human beings, how they can still operate under near zero conditions and what they achieve is worth mentioning.
6.4 Nadine Gordimer´s life and works
Nadine Gordimer was born into a well-off family in Springs, Transvaal, an East Rand mining town outside Johannesburg. It was the setting for Gordimer’s first novel, The Lying Days (1953). Her father was a Jewish jeweller originally from Latvia and her mother of British descent. From her early childhood Gordimer witnessed how the white minority increasingly weakened the rights of the black majority. Gordimer was educated in a convent school. She spent a year at Witwaterstrand University, Johannesburg without taking a degree.
Often kept at home by a mother who imagined she had a weak heart, Gordimer began writing from the age of nine. Her first story, Come Again Tomorrow, appeared in the children’s section of the Johannesburg magazine Forum when she was only fourteen. By her twenties, Gordimer had had stories published in many of the local magazines. In 1951 the New Yorker accepted a story, publishing her ever since.
Gordimer has revealed the psychological consequences of a racially divided society. Her first volume of short stories Face to Face (1949) appeared the year after the Afrikaner Nationalist government assumed power, and each succeeding book has reflected the hardening grip of racist legislation upon every aspect of South African life. While her novels and short stories report with chilling accuracy upon South African economic, social and political divisions and tensions, they are seldom overtly political. Her interest in politics has arisen from her concern for individual and for personal relationships. Her stories are concerned with the devastating effects of apartheid on the lives of South Africans: the constant tension between personal isolation and the commitment to social justice, the numbness caused by the unwillingness to accept apartheid, the inability to change it, and the refusal of exile.
The novel The Lying Days (1953) was based largely on the author’s own life and depicted a white girl, Helen, and her growing disaffection toward the narrow-mindlessness of a small-town life. The most outstanding feature of this work is the technique; she exhibits already the clear, controlled, and unsentimental technique that became her main characteristic.
Other works in the 1950s and 1960s include A World of Strangers (1958), which is a picaresque novel about a young Englishman’s first experience of South Africa. Here as well as in many short stories of the same period the joys as well as the pains of life are still in evidence; Occasion for Loving (1963) was concerned with the “line in a statute book” – South Africa’s cruel racial law. In the story an illicit love affair between a black man and a white woman ends bitterly. Ann Davis is married to a gentle Jew called Boaz Davis, a dedicated scholar who has travelled all over the country in search of African music. Gideon Shibalo, a talented painter, is black, he has a marriage and several affairs behind. The liberal Mrs Jessie Stilwell is a reluctant hostess to the law-breaking lovers. Boaz, the cuckold, is on the side of the struggling South African black majority, and Ann plays with two men’s emotions; and The Late Bourgeois World (1967), where the contradictions of society have given place to images of exhaustion and defeat. Yet, any human response is in Nadine Gordimer only an aspect of situation, and she sees all human beings as trapped in their situations. She eliminated all the superfluous details and limited the narration to the interior monologue of the protagonist, a woman whose husband has just killed himself. She reviews their life together, their involvement with African political movements, rejection of their family backgrounds and the failure of their marriage. In these novels Gordimer studied the master-servant relations, spiritual and sexual paranoias of colonialism, and the shallow liberalism of her privileged white compatriots.
In The Conservationist (1974) and Burger’s Daughter (1979) there is a breaking away from traditional novel with changes in the chronological order and in the narrative voice and mixture between realism and symbolism. But in these novels still the most important thing is the devastating analysis of white South-Africa.
The Conservationist explores the inner life of an apparently healthy, confident and successful capitalist able only to use other people but incapable of any reciprocal relationship. It is juxtaposed the world of a wealthy white industrialist with the rituals and mythology of Zulus.
Burger’s Daughter is centred on the daughter of a Marxist couple who die in prison. It was written during the aftermath of Soweto uprising. In the story a daughter analyzes her relationship to her father, a martyr of the antiapartheid movement. The novel shows the process she goes through to earn conscience of the unfair reality of her country, so that she begins her own fight and ends up in prison too.
In July’s People (1981) a liberal white couple and their servant July gradually find that their psychological roles are becoming reversed together with the assumptions on which their lives and relationships were based falsified by the apartheid. It is a pessimistic account of the near future. It deals with the absolute failure of community between men. The characters are trapped in different situations and Gordimer studies the anomalies and reversals this situation contains, such as the anomalous circumstance of the dependant passing from servant to master. It is a futuristic novel about a white family feeing from war-torn Johannesburg into the country, where they seek refuge with their African servant in his village.
Gordimer’s early short story collections include Six Feet of the Country(1956), Not for Publication (1965) and Livingstone´s Companions(1971).
The historical context of the racial divided society has also been the fundamental basis of her short stories. In ‘Oral History’ from A Soldier´s Embrace (1980) the village chief has chosen the side of the oppressors. After his village is destroyed he commits suicide. Gordimer examines coolly the actions of her protagonist, linking the tragic events in the long tradition of colonial policy. In the background of the story is the war of independence in Zimbabwe (1966-1980). Gordimer uses the mopane tree as a symbol of life and death – the chief hangs himself in the mopane, the dead are buried in the mopane, and finally the tree becomes a means of consolidation.
Since 1948 Gordimer has lived in Johannesburg. She has also taught in the USA in several universities during the 1960s and ’70s. Gordimer has written books of non-fiction on South African subjects and made television documentaries, notably collaborating with her son Hugo Cassirer on the television film Choosing Justice: Allan Boesak.
In The House Gun (1998) Gordimer explored the complexities of the violence ridden post-apartheid society through a murder trial. Two white privileged liberals, Harald and Claudia Lindgard, face the fact that their architect-son, Duncan, has killed his friend Carl Jesperson.
In The Pick Up (2001) the basic setting reminds in some points the famous film Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1962), starring Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo. Julie is the daughter of a rich investment banker. Her car breaks down, and at a garage she meets Ibrahim, an illegal immigrant from an Arab country. The two young people from different cultures start a love affair. Although their background separates them, sex crosses all the cultural barriers, but does not stop Ibrahim striving for money and success, the good things of life that the West can offer. Another theme in the book is Julie’s maturation. When Ibrahim faces deportation from South Africa, she insists on leaving the country with him. Julie marries Ibrahim and settles in his home country.
Gordimer’s activism has not been limited to the struggle against apartheid. She has resisted censorship and state control of information, and fostered the literary arts. She refused to let her work be aired by the South African Broadcasting Corporation because it was controlled by the apartheid government. Gordimer also served on the steering committee of South Africa’s Anti-Censorship Action Group. A founding member of the Congress of South African Writers, Gordimer has also been active in South African letters and international literary organizations. She has been Vice President of International PEN.
In the post-apartheid 1990s and 21st century, Gordimer has been active in the HIV/AIDS movement, which is a significant public health crisis in South Africa. In 2004, she organized about 20 major writers to contribute short fiction for Telling Tales, a fundraising book for South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign, which lobbies for government funding for HIV/AIDS prevention and care. On this matter, she has been critical of the current South African government, noting in 2004 that she “approves” of everything President Mbeki has done except his stance on AIDS. While on lecture tours, she has spoken on matters of foreign policy and discrimination beyond South Africa. For instance, in 2005, when Fidel Castro fell ill, Gordimer joined six other Nobel prizewinners in a public letter to the United States warning it not to seek to destabilize Cuba’s communist government. In 2001 she urged her friend Susan Sontag not to accept an award from the Israeli government, though she angered some (including her biographer) by refusing to equate Zionism with apartheid.b Gordimer’s resistance to discrimination extended to her even refusing to accept “shortlisting” in 1998 for the Orange Prize, because the award recognizes only women writers. Gordimer self-identifies as an atheist, but has not been active in atheist organizations.
Gordimer’s handling of political and philosophical argument among her characters –European and African– is something unique in the modern English novel. It brings the novel of ideas back into the English literature. It is Nadine Gordimer’s aseptic understanding of the corrosive effects of a system which cripples humanity that gives her writing its strength and originality.
Her fiction has chronicled the damaging effects of oppressive racial laws upon the human potential of white South-Africans while making very clear the brutal burdens that black people bear, so her major theme was exile and alienation. Though she never finished her university degree, she lectured and taught at various schools in the United States during the 1960s and ’70s. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.
7 STUDY GUIDE
The British Empire and its last consequence, the Commonwealth of Nations has been one of the most significant events of the British history. The expansion of Great Britain all over the world has enriched the culture of the Empire by writers of different part of the globe that have taken the English language as the instrument to satisfy their literary interests.
With regards to language, southern hemisphere native varieties of English began to develop during the 19th century, with the colonization of Australasia and South Africa. Australian English, New Zealand English and South African English are non-rhotic dialects closely related to one another and to the English spoken in southeastern England. The vocabularies of these dialects are also similar to that of English, with some differences and several terms that are peculiar to each country; Australian English features also a number of North American words. Differences in grammar and usage are mostly limited to colloquial speech.
In the case in Australia most of the population is of British origin, but their English has some remarkable differences compared with British English.
As far as vocabulary is concerned, they use many words not used in England. Due to the new environment settlers borrowed some words such as “boomerang” and “kangaroo” (which have become general English) but also some others like “corroboree”, which means a tumult. There are also many differences in the landscape which account for the fact that common words in England like “field” or “forest” are out of use while words like “scrub” (vegetation consisting mainly of bushwood) and “creek” (meaning a stream or a brook) have persisted in their language. Another source of differences between Australian vocabulary and general English is that many words come from British dialects, such as “dinkum” (“honest”) from Lincs or “to fossic” (meaning “to search”) from Cornish.
With regards to literature, there were some English authors such as Kipling or Forster that wrote about the new colonized lands although from the point of view of a visitor abroad, that can not be considered pure colonial literature. However, there were authors such as Gordimer or Lessing who produced literary texts after the independence of these lands or in the course of it, whose works have a different flavour. This literature is called proper colonial literature because the themes and perspective of the matters analysed are completely different, as we have already exposed.
Forster was a member of Bloomsbury group and friend of Virginia Woolf. After gaining fame as a novelist, Forster spent his 46 remaining years publishing mainly short stories and non-fiction. Of his five important novels four appeared before World War I. Forster’s major concern was that individuals should ‘connect the prose with the passion’ within themselves, and that one of the most exacting aspect of the novel is prophecy. Forster´s fame rests largely on his novels Howard’s End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924) and on a large body of criticism. He developed a sense of the uniqueness of the individual, of the healthiness of moderate scepticism, and of the importance of Mediterranean civilisation as a counterbalance to the strict attitudes of northern European countries.
He visited India twice, in 1912-13 and 1921. The first visit to India put him in contact with the cultural contrast between the British and the Indians and he began A Passage to India. But he did not finish the novel until after his second visit and the experience of the war influenced it. Mrs. Moore, a woman of unaffected kindness brings the young Adela Quested to India to marry her son. Adela accuses Dr. Aziz, a friend of his boyfriend, of assault at the darkness of the cave, but at his trial she retracts, suddenly aware that she suffered a hallucination. Though Fielding remains throughout convinced of Aziz’s innocence, the complex suspicions and misunderstandings bred by the racial and cultural difference finally separate the two friends.
Doris Lessing is a Persian (Iranian)-born British writer, whose novels and short stories are largely concerned with people caught in the social and political upheavals of the 20th century. Central themes in Lessing’s works are feminism (see also Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedman, Germaine Greer, Marilyn French), the battle of the sexes, individuals in search of wholeness, and the dangers of technological and scientific hubris. Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. Since 1949, she has lived in England but she is also considered an African writer because she grew up and was educated in Zimbabwe (former Rhodesia).
Doris Lessing was born in 1919 in Iran where her father was captain in the British army. The family moved to a farm in Rhodesia, where she lived from 1924 until she settled in England in 1949. In her early adult years she was an active communist. Her novels and short stories are largely concerned with people involved in the social and political upheavals of the 20th century and especially with her experience in colonial Africa. Her first published book, The Grass Is Singing (1950), is about a white couple in Rhodesia who are unequal to the superior role the racial set-up requires of them. In her non-fiction book In Pursuit of the English she gives an account of her departure from Africa and her confrontation with the English.
South African novelist and short-story writer, who received Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. Most of Nadine Gordimer’s works deal with the moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country. She was a founding member of Congress of South African Writers, and even at the height of the apartheid regime, she never considered going into exile.
Gordimer has achieved lasting international recognition for her works, most of which deal with political issues, as well as the moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country. Virtually all of Gordimer’s works deal with themes of love and politics, particularly concerning race in South Africa. Always questioning power relations and truth, Gordimer tells stories of ordinary people, revealing moral ambiguities and choices. Her characterization is nuanced, revealed more through the choices her characters make than through their claimed identities and beliefs. She also weaves in subtle details within the character’s names. Her first published novel, The Lying Days (1953), takes place in Gordimer’s home town of Springs, Transvaal, an East Rand mining town near Johannesburg. In her 1963 work, Occasion for Loving, Gordimer puts apartheid and love squarely together. The Conservationist explores Zulu culture and the world of a wealthy white industrialist through the eyes of Mehring, the antihero. When an unidentified corpse is found on the protagonist´s farm, Mehring does the “right thing” by providing it a proper burial; but the dead person haunts the work, a reminder of the bodies on which Mehring’s vision would be built.
Gordimer’s 1979 novel Burger’s Daughter is the story of a woman analyzing her relationship with her father, a martyr to the anti-apartheid movement. Some of her best novels are July’s People (1981) and The House Gun (1998).
8 BILIOGRAPHY
Aspects of the Novel by E.M.Forster 1927
E.M. Forster: a Life by B.N. Furbank (1977-78, 2 vols.);
The Bloomsbury Group by S.P. Rosenbaum (1975);
A Bibliography of E.M. Forster by Brownlee Jean Kirkpatrick (1986);
A Passage to India, ed. by Tony Davies and Nigel Wood (1994
The Modernist as Pragmatist by Brian May (1997);
Doris Lessing by Carole Klein (1999);
Fine-Tuning the Feminine Psyche by Lorei Cederdstrom (1990); Approaches to Teaching Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, ed. by Carey Kaplan, Ellen Cronan Rose (1989);
The Unexpected Universe of Doris Lessing by Katherine Fishburn (1985); Substance Under Pressure by Betsy Draine (1983
The Novels of Doris Lessing by P. Schlueter (1973); Doris Lessing by D. Brewster (1965)
The Novels of Nadine Gordimer by Stephen Clingman (1986);
Critical Essays on Nadine Gordimer, ed. by Rowland Smith (1990);
; Nadine Gordimer by Dominic Head (1994);
Rereading Nadine Gordimer by Kathrin Wagner (1994)
McArthur, Tom (2002). The Oxford Guide to World English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peters, Pam (2004). The Cambridge Guide to English Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press..
Trudgill, Peter and Jean Hannah. (2002). International English: A Guide to the Varieties of Standard English, 4th ed. London: Arnold..
The Commonwealth of Nations, usually known as the Commonwealth and sometimes as the British Commonwealth, is a voluntary association of 53 independent sovereign states, most of which are former British colonies (the exceptions being the United Kingdom itself and Mozambique).
The Commonwealth is an international organization through which countries with diverse social, political, and economic backgrounds co-operate within a framework of common values and goals, outlined in the Singapore Declaration. These include the promotion of democracy, human rights, good governance, the rule of law, individual liberty, egalitarianism, free trade, multilateralism, and world peace. Queen Elizabeth II is the Head of the Commonwealth, recognized by each state, and as such is the symbol of the free association of the organization’s members.
Elizabeth II is also the Head of State, separately, of sixteen members of the Commonwealth, called Commonwealth realms. As each realm is an independent kingdom, Elizabeth II, as monarch, holds a distinct title for each, though, by a Prime Ministers’ Conference in 1952, all include the words “Head of the Commonwealth” at the end; for example: Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, Queen of Jamaica and of Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth. Beyond the realms, the majority of the members of the Commonwealth have their own, separate Heads of State: thirty-two members are Commonwealth republics and five members have their own monarchs (Sultan of Brunei, King of Lesotho, Supreme Ruler of Malaysia, King of Swaziland, and King of Tonga).
The Commonwealth has long been distinctive as an international forum where highly developed economies (such as the UK, Australia, Canada, Singapore and New Zealand) and many of the world’s poorer countries seek to reach agreement by consensus. This aim has sometimes been difficult to achieve, as when disagreements over Southern Rhodesia in the late 1960s and 1970s and over apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s led to a cooling of relations between Britain and African members.
An important statement of the Commonwealth’s principles is the 1991 Harare Declaration, which dedicated the organization to democracy and good government, and allowed for action to be taken against members who breached these principles.
In its early days, the Commonwealth constituted a significant economic bloc. Commonwealth countries accorded each others’ goods privileged access to their markets (“Commonwealth preference“), and there was a free or preferred right of migration from one Commonwealth country to another. These rights have been steadily eroded, but their consequences remain. Within most Commonwealth countries, there are substantial communities with family ties to other members of the Commonwealth, going beyond the effects of the original colonization of parts of the Commonwealth by settlers from Britain or Ireland.
The Commonwealth is also useful as an international organization that represents significant cultural and historical links between wealthy first-world countries and poorer nations with diverse social and religious backgrounds. The common inheritance of the English language and literature, the common law, and British systems of administration all underpin the club-like atmosphere of the Commonwealth.
Mostly due to their history of British rule, many Commonwealth nations share certain identifiable traditions and customs that are elements of a shared Commonwealth culture. Examples include common sports such as cricket and rugby, driving on the left, parliamentary and legal traditions, and the use of British rather than American spelling conventions (see English in the Commonwealth of Nations). None of these are universal within the Commonwealth countries, nor exclusive to them, but all of them are more common in the Commonwealth than elsewhere.
The presence of the British in their colonies all over the world has given rise to such intercultural influences as the use of the language by very different communities of speakers, but it has also given rise to literatures written in English influenced by the colonial experience. These literatures have followed different paths.
Commonwealth literatures have developed through several stages which can be seen to correspond to stages both of national or regional consciousness and of the process of asserting the differences from the imperial centre.
In the first part of this topic we will study different aspects of the Commonwealth of nations, cultural diversity, development of linguistic varieties and intercultural influences and manifestations. In the second part of the topic we shall analyze the literary contributions of E. M. Forster, Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer.
2 THE COMMONWEALTH OF NATIONS
The Commonwealth of Nations is a confederation born due to the decentralisation and eventual disintegration of the British Empire. It is a free association of sovereign states comprising Great Britain and a number of its former dependencies that have chosen to maintain ties of friendship and practical co-operation and who acknowledge the British monarch as symbolic head of their association.
Although performing a vastly different function, the Commonwealth is the successor of the British Empire. In 1884, whilst visiting Adelaide, South Australia, Lord Rosebery described the changing British Empire, as some of its colonies became more independent, as a “Commonwealth of Nations”.
Conferences of British and colonial Prime Ministers had occurred periodically since 1887, leading to the creation of the Imperial Conferences in the late 1920s. The formal organization of the Commonwealth developed from the Imperial Conferences, where the independence of the self-governing colonies and especially of dominions was recognized. The Irish Oath of Allegiance, agreed in 1921, included the Irish Free State‘s adherence to and membership of the group of nations forming the British Commonwealth of Nations. In the Balfour Declaration at the Imperial Conference in 1926, Britain and its dominions agreed they were equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations. This relationship was eventually formalized by the Statute of Westminster in 1931.
In its early days, the Commonwealth constituted a significant economic bloc. Commonwealth countries accorded each others’ goods privileged access to their markets (“Commonwealth preference“), and there was a free or preferred right of migration from one Commonwealth country to another. These rights have been steadily eroded, but their consequences remain. Within most Commonwealth countries, there are substantial communities with family ties to other members of the Commonwealth, going beyond the effects of the original colonization of parts of the Commonwealth by settlers from Britain or Ireland. Furthermore, consumers in Commonwealth countries retain many preferences for goods from other members of the Commonwealth, so that even in the absence of tariff privileges, there continues to be more trade within the Commonwealth than might be predicted. On Britain’s entry to the European Community, the Lomé Convention preserved some of the preferential access rights of Commonwealth goods to Britain’s market.
The British policy of allowing considerable self-government in its colonies led to the existence by the 19th century of several dependent states populated to a significant degree by Europeans accustomed to the forms of parliamentary rule which possessed large degrees of sovereignty. This was the case in Australia, Canada, the Irish Free State, New Zealand, and the Union of South Africa. By 1931 they were recognised as having special status within the empire by the Statute of Westminster, which referred to a “British Commonwealth of Nations”. The adjective British was dropped in 1946. The growth of nationalism in other parts of the empire from the 1920s produced a long series of grants of independence. In 1947 India and Pakistan became members of the Commonwealth, the first with chiefly non-European populations.
The Queen is the Head of the Commonwealth and she is also recognised as Head of State in 18 countries, including Canada and Australia. Although Britain maintains a strong influence in the Commonwealth and the Queen takes a keen personal interest in Commonwealth matters, they have little real power. The modern Commonwealth includes republics and other monarchies in addition to states headed by the Queen. In 1950 India was the first country to become a republic while remaining within the Commonwealth. There are also a few countries that have left it, such as South Africa in 1961 and Pakistan in 1972.
3 CULTURAL DIVERSITY
The Commonwealth comprises fifty-three of the world’s countries and has a combined population of 1.9 billion people, almost a third of the world population and over twice as many as the whole of the Americas (North and South) put together. Of that figure, 1.4 billion people live in the Indian subcontinent, and 93% live in Asia and Africa combined.
The total GDP is about US$7.8 trillion (about 16% of the total world economy). The land area of the Commonwealth nations is about 31.5 million km² (12.1 million square miles), or about 21% of the total world land area.
The five largest Commonwealth nations by population are India (1.1 billion), Pakistan (165 million), Bangladesh (148 m), Nigeria (137 m), and the United Kingdom (60 m). Tuvalu is the smallest member, with only 11,000 people.
The three largest Commonwealth nations by area are Canada at 3.8 million square miles, Australia at 3.0 million square miles, and India at 1.2 million square miles.
Membership is open to countries that accept the association’s basic aims and have a present or past constitutional link to a Commonwealth member. Not all members have had direct constitutional ties to Britain: some South Pacific countries were formerly under Australian or New Zealand administration, while Namibia was governed by South Africa from 1920 until independence in 1990. Cameroon joined in 1995 although only a fraction of its territory had formerly been under British administration through the League of Nations mandate of 1920–46 and United Nations Trusteeship arrangement of 1946–61. There is only one member of the present Commonwealth that has never had any constitutional link to the British Empire or a Commonwealth member: Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony, was admitted in 1995 on the back of the triumphal re-admission of South Africa and Mozambique’s first democratic elections, held in 1994. The move was supported by Mozambique’s neighbours, all of whom were members of the Commonwealth and who wished to offer assistance in overcoming the losses incurred from the country’s opposition to white minority regimes in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa. In 1997, amid some discontent, Commonwealth Heads of Government agreed that Mozambique’s admission should be seen as a special case and not set a precedent. Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) joined in 1972 in its own right after breaking away from Pakistan (formerly West Pakistan), which was a member until it left later in the same year.
4 DEVELOPMENT OF LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY
In the former British colonies the English language has developed differences that distinguish it from the language of England and from one another. They consist mainly of peculiarities in pronunciation and vocabulary due to the distance, to the time when the colonisation took place and also due to the influence of the new environment. In other countries the characteristics result from the imperfect learning and systematic adaptations by speakers of other languages. English is spoken as a first or second language in most of the Commonwealth; in a few countries, for example Cyprus and Malaysia, it does not have official status, but is widely used as a lingua franca. Many regions, notably Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the Caribbean, have developed their own native varieties of the language.
Southern Hemisphere native varieties of English began to develop during the 19th century, with the colonization of Australasia and South Africa. Australian English, New Zealand English and South African English are non-rhotic dialects closely related to one another and to the English spoken in southeastern England. The vocabularies of these dialects are also similar to that of English, with some differences and several terms that are peculiar to each country; Australian English features also a number of North American words. Differences in grammar and usage are mostly limited to colloquial speech.
In the case in Australia most of the population is of British origin, but their English has some remarkable differences compared with British English.
As far as vocabulary is concerned, they use many words not used in England. Due to the new environment settlers borrowed some words such as “boomerang” and “kangaroo” (which have become general English) but also some others like “corroboree”, which means a tumult. There are also many differences in the landscape which account for the fact that common words in England like “field” or “forest” are out of use while words like “scrub” (vegetation consisting mainly of bushwood) and “creek” (meaning a stream or a brook) have persisted in their language. Another source of differences between Australian vocabulary and general English is that many words come from British dialects, such as “dinkum” (“honest”) from Lincs or “to fossic” (meaning “to search”) from Cornish.
As far as pronunciation is concerned, it resembles Cockney, and the most outstanding characteristic is the substitution of the diphthong /ei/ with /ai/. They have in general the tendency for vowels to become more front and to diphthongise. The reason for these characteristics in pronunciation is that the early settlers were deported prisoners and adventurers who spoke the dialect of the lower classes of south-eastern England.
In New Zealand, in spite of the distance the linguistic divergence is small. Few Maori words have passed into the vocabulary, while the pronunciation is very similar.
Canadian English is regarded as one of two sub-varieties of North American English (the other being U.S. English); however, it also features many elements of British English that are not found in the United States. As far as Canada is concerned, since the great majority of the population lives near the US border American English is very influential, although there are certain social groups where British English is still influential, as well as in private schools and universities.
Caribbean English is influenced by the English-based Creole varieties spoken, but they are not one and the same. There is a great deal of variation in the way English is spoken, with a “Standard English” at the top of the social scale and creoles at the bottom. These dialects have roots in 17th-century English and African languages; unlike most native varieties of English, West Indian dialects often tend to be syllable-timed rather than stress-timed.
Second language varieties of English in Africa and Asia have often undergone “indigenization”; that is, each English-speaking community has developed (or is in the process of developing) its own standards of usage, often under the influence of local languages. These dialects are sometimes referred to as New Englishes; most of them inherited non-rhoticity from Southern British English.
Several dialects of West African English exist, with a lot of regional variation and some influence from indigenous language. West African English tends to be syllable-timed, and its phoneme inventory is much simpler than that of Received Pronunciation; this sometimes affects mutual intelligibility with native varieties of English. A distinctive East African English is spoken in countries such as Kenya or Tanzania.
Small communities of native English speakers can be found in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia; the dialects spoken are similar to South African English.
India has the world’s largest English-speaking population, although most speakers of Indian English are not native speakers. Indian English phonology is highly variable; stress, rhythm and intonation are generally different from those of native varieties. There are also several peculiarities at the levels of morphology, syntax and usage, some of which can also be found among educated speakers.
Southeast Asian English comprises Singapore English and Malaysian English; it features some influence from Chinese. Finally, in Hong Kong, which is no longer a Commonwealth country, English has nonetheless official status.
After the independence, however, India decided to keep English for some time as the language for administrative purposes since the linguistic variety made the automatic introduction of Hindi very difficult. Since most Indians and Pakistanis who speak English use it as a second language, they normally aim at speaking the British variety of English, and it tends to be bookish.
In Africa, with the exception of South Africa, where English is spoken by part of the white population while other whites speak the Dutch dialect known as Afrikaans, in most former colonies English is spoken only by a minority but it is either the official language or a lingua franca, and it has the characteristics of English learnt as a second language.
5 INTERCULTURAL INFUENCES AND MANIFESTATIONS
The ties that bind the Commonwealth are highly diverse. The use of the English language and of English common law, together with some common symbols and remaining cultural affinities, appear to be the major ties binding together this loose association. Trade, investment, currency agreements, population migrations and sports are others.
Meetings of Commonwealth heads of state take place every two years and their governments have High Commissions rather than Embassies as diplomatic representation in other Commonwealth countries. In 1965 a Commonwealth Secretariat was established in London to organise and co-ordinate Commonwealth activities. Two further links between the Commonwealth countries are education and technical co-operation and the Commonwealth games. The Commonwealth Fund for Technical Co-operation, which is financed by all member states, was implemented to provide technical assistance to less-developed states. The Commonwealth Games, is a sports competition held in varying Commonwealth countries at four-year intervals, preferably midway between the Olympic Games.
The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is an intergovernmental agency of the Commonwealth of Nations headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Founded in 1987 at a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) and established in 1988, COL’s mandate is to promote and develop the use of open learning and distance education knowledge, resources and technologies throughout the Commonwealth’s 53 member states, particularly among the Commonwealth’s developing nations.
COL’s goal is to improve universal access to educational and training opportunities in accordance with the Commonwealth priorities of peace, democracy, equality, good governance and the needs of the Commonwealth’s small states. COL’s activities are also guided by the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Education for All (EFA) declarations.
Financial support for COL’s core operations is provided by Commonwealth governments on a voluntary basis, with primary funding renewed every three years. COL also receives extra-budgetary income from other development sources and provides fee-for-service distance education and open learning course delivery and training for international agencies, such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the World Health Organization (WHO).
COL’s partners include national and international development agencies and banks, such as non-governmental organizations; other Commonwealth agencies like the Commonwealth Secretariat; United Nations bodies such as UNESCO, UNICEF, UNIFEM, UNDP and the World Bank; national and regional distance education associations; and industry.
Commonwealth countries share many links outside government, with over a hundred Commonwealth-wide non-governmental organizations, notably for sport, culture, education and charity. The Association of Commonwealth Universities is an important vehicle for academic links, particularly through scholarships, principally the Commonwealth Scholarship, for students to study in universities in other Commonwealth countries. There are also many non-official associations that bring together individuals who work within the spheres of law and government, such as the Commonwealth Lawyers Association and the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association.
The Commonwealth has long been distinctive as an international forum where highly developed economies (such as the UK, Australia, Canada, Singapore and New Zealand) and many of the world’s poorer countries seek to reach agreement by consensus. This aim has sometimes been difficult to achieve, as when disagreements over Southern Rhodesia in the late 1960s and 1970s and over apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s led to a cooling of relations between Britain and African members.
An important statement of the Commonwealth’s principles is the 1991 Harare Declaration, which dedicated the organization to democracy and good government, and allowed for action to be taken against members who breached these principles. Before then the Commonwealth’s collective actions had been limited by the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other members.
The Commonwealth lists its areas of work as: democracy, economics, education, gender, governance, human rights, law, small states, sport, sustainability and youth.
Through a separate voluntary fund Commonwealth governments support the Commonwealth Youth Programme, a division of the Secretariat with offices in Gulu (Uganda), Lusaka (Zambia), Chandigarh (India), Georgetown (Guyana) and Honiara (Solomon Islands). The organization is celebrated each year on Commonwealth Day, the second Monday in March.
6 THE NOVELS OF E.M.FORSTER, DORIS LESSING AND NADINE GORDIMER
6.1 Literary reflection of the Commonwealth cultural phenomenon
The presence of the British in their colonies all over the world has given rise to such intercultural influences as the use of the language by very different communities of speakers, but it has also given rise to literatures written in English influenced by the colonial experience. These literatures have followed different paths.
Commonwealth literatures have developed through several stages which can be seen to correspond to stages both of national or regional consciousness and of the process of asserting the differences from the imperial centre.
The first texts produced in the colonies in the new language are frequently produced by “representatives” of the imperial power. Such texts can never form the basis for an indigenous culture nor can they be integrated in any way in the country invaded. They are the books written by people born in Britain who witnessed the colonial life, such as in the case of Rudyard Kipling or E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, other times they are the descendants of the colonialists who wrote about the life in the countries where they were already born like Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer; finally, we may also consider the literature of people from former colonies who write in English, such as the case of the Indian Salman Rushdie.
6.2 E.M. Forster´s life and works
Edward Morgan Forster was born in London in 1879 as the son of an architect, who died before his only child was two years old. Forster’s childhood and much of his adult life was dominated by his mother and his aunts. The legacy of her paternal great-aunt Marianne Thornton, descendant of the Clapham Sect of evangelists and reformers, gave later Forster the freedom to travel and to write. Forster’s years at Tonbridge School as a teenager were difficult – he suffered from the cruelty of his classmates.
Forster attended King’s College, Cambridge (1897-1901), where he met members of the later formed Bloomsbury group. In the atmosphere of skepticism, he became under the influence of Sir Jamer Frazer, Nathaniel Wedd, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, and G.E. Moore, and shed his not very deep Christian faith. After graduating he travelled in Italy and Greece with his mother, and on his return began to write essays and short stories for the liberal Independent Review.
On leaving Cambridge, Forster decided to devote his life to writing. His first novels and short stories are representative of an age that was shaking off the shackles of Victorianism. While adopting certain themes (the importance of women in their own right, for example) from earlier English novelists such as George Meredith, he broke with the style favoured in the late 19th century and wrote in a freer, more colloquial style. From the first his novels included a strong strain of social comment, based on acute observation of middle-class life. There was also a deeper concern, associated with Forster’s interest in Mediterranean “paganism” that, if men and women wanted to achieve a satisfactory life, they needed to keep contact with the earth and to cultivate their imaginations.
His first novel is Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905). In the following year he lectured on Italian art and history for the Cambridge Local Lectures Board. In 1907 appeared The Longest Journey. In this novel he suggested that cultivation of either in isolation is not enough, reliance on the earth alone leading to brutishness and exaggerated development of imagination undermining the individual’s sense of reality. The same theme runs through Howard’s End, a more ambitious novel that brought Forster his first major success.
Then he writes A Room with a View (1908), based partly on the material from extended holidays in Italy with his mother. The first part of the novel is set in Florence, where the young Lucy Honeychurch is visitng with her older cousin Charlotte Bartless. Lucy witnesses a murder and becomes caught between two men, shallow, conventional Cecil Vyse and George Emerson, who kisses Lucy during a picnic. The second half of the novel takes place at Windy Corner, Lucy’s home on Summer Street. She accepts a marriage proposal from Cecil. The Emerson become friends of the Honeychurches after George, Mr. Beebe, who is a clergyman, and Freddie, Lucy’s brother, are discovered bathing nude in the woods. Finally Lucy overcomes prejudices and marries George. He had found something emotionally incomplete in English life and here he explores the contrast of more passionate Italian life. He contrasts English narrow and fenced middle-class respectabilities, praising the loving freedom exercised by those more radical. Those themes were developed with maturity in Howard’s End, an admirable picture of English middle-class life before the First World War and an exploration of its complexities due to the transformation of a century of industrialisation and imperial expansion.
Forster also wrote during the pre-war years a number of short stories, which were collected in The Celestial Omnibus (1914). Most of them were symbolic fantasies or fables.
Howards End (1910) was a story that centred on an English country house and dealt with the clash between two families, one interested in art and literature, the other only in business. The book brought together the themes of money, business and culture. “To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.” (from Howards End) The novel established Forster’s reputation, and he embarked upon a new novel with a homosexual theme, Maurice. The picture of British attitudes not long after Wilde was revised several times during his life, and finally published posthumously in 1971. His personal life Forster hid from public discussion. In 1930 he had a relationship with a London policeman. This important contact continued after the marriage of his London friend.
Between the years 1912 and 1913 Forster travelled in India. From 1914 to 1915 he worked for the National Gallery in London. Following the outbreak of World War I, Forster joined the Red Cross and served in Alexandria, Egypt. There he met the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy, and published a selection of his poems in Pharaos and Pharillon (1923).
In 1921 Forster returned to India, working as a private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas. The land was the scene of his masterwork A Passage to India (1924), an account of India under British rule. It was Forter’s last novel – and for the remaining 46 years of his life he devoted himself to other activities. Writing novels was not the most important element in his life. He returned to former themes, but they presented themselves in a negative form: against the vaster scale of India, in which the earth itself seems alien, a resolution between it and the imagination could appear as almost impossible to achieve. The novel is set in pre-war British India and portrays the relationship between the Anglo-Indian administration and the natives, with the sometimes comic and sometimes tragic failures to achieve real communication across the division. It shows the incapability of the respectable English middle-class with their public school education and their conventional morality for proper human contact with other peoples.
After Forster’s death his literary executors turned down approaches from Joseph Losey, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, and Waris Hussein, to make a feature film version of the book, but eventually David Lean was approved as director. Forster had shared with T.E. Lawrence a dislike and distrut of the cinema. The two last chapetrs of A Passage to India Forster had also written under the influence of Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
In A Passage to India (1924) Adela Quested visits Chandrapore with Mrs Moore in order to make up her mind whether to marry the latter’s son. Mrs Moore meets his friend Dr Azis, assistant to the British Civil Surgeon. She and Adela accept Azis’s invitation to visit the mysterious Marabar Caves. In this trip Mrs Moore nearly faints in the cave and goes mad for an instant. She believes herself to have been the victim of a sexual assault by Azis, who is arrested. Adela is pushed forward by his friends and family but she admits that she was mistaken. Mrs Moore dies on the voyage home at sea. Azis has changed his liberal views. The novel ends in an uneasy equilibrium. Immediate reconciliation between Indians and British is ruled out, but the further possibilities inherent in Adela’s experience, along with the surrounding uncertainties, are echoed in the ritual birth of the God of Love amid scenes of confusion at a Hindu festival. The novel’s title derives from Walt Whitman, but the American poet’s celebration of the opening of the Suez Canal as bringing together East and West .
Forster contributed reviews and essays to numerous journals, most notably the Listener, he was an active member of PEN, in 1934 he became the first president of the National Council for Civil Liberties, and after his mother’s death in 1945, he was elected an honorary fellow of King’s and lived there for the remainder of his life. In 1949 Forster refused a knighthood and in 1951 he collaborated with Eric Crozier on the libretto of Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd, which was based on Herman Melville‘s novel (film 1962, dir. by Peter Ustinov). Forster was made a Companion of Honour in 1953 and in 1969 he accepted an Order of Merit. Forster died on June 7, 1970.
Forster often criticized in his books Victorian middle class attitudes and British colonialism through strong woman characters. However, Forster’s characters were not one-dimensional heroes and villains, and except his devotion to such values as tolerance and sense of comedy, he was uncommitted.
The epithet ‘Fosterian’ – liberal, unconventional, sceptical, moral – had started to circulate since the publication of Howard’s End. Forster’s famous essay ‘Two Cheers for Democracy’ (also: ‘What I Believe’), which was originally printed in 1938 in the New York Nation reflected his concern for individual liberty. He assumed liberal humanism not dogmatically but ironically, writing in unceremonious sentences and making gentle stabs at pomposity and hypocrisy “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” (from ‘Two cheers for Democracy’).
6.3 Doris Lessing´s life and works
Doris Lessing spent her early childhood in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran). Her English-born father, Alfred Cook Tayler, who had lost his leg and health in World War I, was a bank clerk with the Imperial Bank of Persia. Emily McVeagh, Lessing’s mother, had been trained as a nurse. After the war the Tayler’s moved to Kermanshah and later Tehran. In the mid-1920s the family bought with their life savings a maize farm in the district of Banket, in the Lomagundi area of Southern Rhosesia, where Lessing grew up with her younger brother Harry. Her childhood was lonely, the nearest neighbours were miles away and there was no real roads between the farms.
In 1926 Lessing was sent to a convent school in Salisbury (now Harare), where the Roman Catholic teachers tried to convert her from the family’s Protestant faith. “I was cripplingly homesick,” Lessing later said. She left the Girls’ High School at the age of fourteen and then earned her living as a nursemaid, telephone operator and clerk. At nineteen she married Frank Wisdom, a civil servant; they had two children. The marriage ended in 1943. For some years Lessing was an active member of the Communist Party, which was formally banned in Southern Rhodesia. This period of her life is reflected in A Ripple from the Storm (1958) of the five-volume sequence Children of the Violence, the first four of which were set in a fictional African colony, Zambesia. In 1943 Lessing married the German political activist Gottfried Lessing, a member of the inner circle of the Rhodesian Communist Party. He was the model for Anton Hesse in A Ripple from the Storm and Willi Rodde in The Golden Notebook (1962). Gottfried Lessing became later the German ambassador to Uganda; he and his third wife were murdered in the 1979 revolt against Idi Amin.
Lessing’s second marriage also failed and in 1949 she moved to England with her youngest child and the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass is Singing, which appeared in 1950. The story, set in Rhodesia, focused on a poor white farm woman, Mary Turner, and her weak husband. She has a relationship with her African servant, Moses, who eventually kills her.
From the 1950s onwards Lessing supported herself and her son by writing. Disillusioned with Communist policies in England, Lessing left the party in the mid-1950s. She underwent Jungian analysis and also studied Sufism under the guidance of Idres Shah. In 1979 Lessing set up a Sufi Trust for one hundred thousand dollars.
Her major achievement is five novel sequence about Martha Quest published in the 50s and 60s Children of Violence. It records Martha’s African upbringing, her encounter with post-war London, and finally it takes a prophetic leap into the future. Lessing has been highly praised for her portrayal of modern women. Martha’s experience matches her own in many respects. Martha is a strong young woman obsessively aware of herself physically and emotionally. She is continuously struggling to find her own completeness. Her instinctive rejection of the social and personal role which parental and environmental pressures would impose on her is defined in terms of the progressive ideologies of the 30’s and 40’s. Martha’s problems are never resolved: at the heart of them is the typical character of Lessing cherishing her resentments, preserving her sense of herself at all costs and peculiarly dependent on her problems and their inevitavility in order to reach a definition of herself. Many critics consider Children of Violence, Lessing’s semi-autobiographical series of novels about Martha Quest, her most substantial work.
Other important works by Doris Lessing include The Golden Notebook (1962), which describes the intellectual and moral climate of the time through the study of Anna Wolf, a writer suffering a block, over the question of the relationship between the writer’s real and projected self. The novel also focuses on the relationship between men and women. Anna shares a flat with molly in London and they are free women, living free lives, with freedom of choice, therefore being equal to men.
Four-gated City (1969), the last volume, closes with Martha’s death in destroyed world at the end of the twentieth century. It has been said that Children of Violence and more The Canopus in Argos reflect the influence of Sufist thought on Lessing’s literary work and concern with the union of the soul with a Higher Being.
Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983) and If the Old Could (1984) were published under the name Jane Somers to dramatize the problems of unknown writers. The use of a pseudonym also helped Lessing to experiment with different type of fiction.
Lessing has written poems, plays, and several science fiction novels. One of her most widely read and translated works is The Golden Notebook, an experimental novel, which was greeted upon its publication as a landmark of the Women’s Movement. The story deals with the personal crisis of a writer, Anna Wulf, who keeps four notebooks while working on her fictional novel ‘Free Women’. The ‘yellow notebook’ portrays Anna’s alter ego, the ‘red’ is a political document, the ‘blue’ is a diary, and the ‘black’ is about Anna’s earlier life. In the final section Anna gives the ‘golden notebook’ to her American lover. The ‘Free Woman’ narrative ends with Anna’s acceptance that she cannot capture the absolute truth about herself in her notebooks.
In Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), written in a ‘stream of conscious’ style, and Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) Lessing portrayed the breakdown of society.
The Good Terrorist (1985) examined with irony a militant left-wing life style and the short distance between idealism and terrorism. Alice, the protagonist, sees herself as a committed revolutionary. She knows how to confront officials, spray paint slogans, but she really does not have an understanding of political movements. When explosives are stored under her own roof, she cares more about curtains than issues. As Alice tries to change the house in a genuine commune, she becomes the mother of parasitic companions.
Love, Again (1966) was set in the theatre world. The protagonist is an older woman, manager of a small theatre company, whose self-analysis runs in parallel with a new production.
In The Memoirs of a Survivor (1975) she wrote a prophetic fantasy. Later, Lessing has turned to science fiction in a five-novel sequence titled Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979-83). Space fiction has something in common with the myth-making of Rousseau and offers visions of hope or disaster for mankind, seen particularly in Shikasta (1979). These novels are not an escape from the themes of the realistic novels. Their universe is a battlefield of good and evil. They dramatise all along an opposition between fable and reality, which is particularly seen in The Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five.
The Fifth Child (1988) was a mixture of genres from mythology to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In the story a family is torn apart by the arrival of their fifth offspring, a monster.
African Laughter (1994) was an account of Lessing’s four visits to Zimbabwe between 1982 and 1992.
Mara and Dann (1999), set thousands of years in the future, tells of a brother and sister in a world full of violence and adventures. Its sequel was The Story of General Dann and Mara´s daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2006).
The Sweetest Dream (2002) was a family story, in which Frances Lennox struggles in life with her two sons and her ex-husband, a phoney Communist. The last part of the book focused on Sylvia, the daughter of Johnny’s second wife, who works as a doctor in Zimlia, a thinly veiled Zimbabwe.
The first volume of Lessing’s autobiography, Under My Skin (1994), depicted her childhood in Zimbabwe. Walking in the shade (1997) covered the years from 1959 to 1962. Lessing has also collaborated with the composer Philip Glass on an opera based on the novel The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. Besides the Nobel Prize, Lessing’s several literature awards include the Somerset Maugham Award (1956), the Shakespeare Prize of the West German Hamburger Stiftung (1982), the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1982), the Palermo Prize (1987), the Premio Internaziolane Mondello (1987), and the W.H. Smith Award (1986). However, Lessing refused an offer of becoming a Dame of the British Empire on the grounds that there was no British Empire. She was awarded with the Cervantes Prize in 2001 and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007.
A master of the short story, Lessing has published several collections, including The Story of a Non-Marrying Man (1972); her African stories, collected in This Was the Old Chief’s Country and The Sun Between Their Feet (both 1973); and Stories (1978). The stories collected in A Man and Two Women (1963) deal with the theme of the couple: none of the women seem capable of stable relationships and none of the men worthy of one. She shows contempt at women who depend on men. She is frank about her sexual needs but yet clearly unhappy with them. She decides to be thoroughly female, to turn herself into a love object. She both wants this rule and resents it as well as the male who takes advantage of it. But these women sooner or later collapse. The most explicit study of self-destruction is To Room Nineteen. Susan drifts away from her family into indifference, almost into non-being, and then kills herself. Lessing treats such hopelessness in the most natural way, as a kind of experience. She is only writing about human beings, how they can still operate under near zero conditions and what they achieve is worth mentioning.
6.4 Nadine Gordimer´s life and works
Nadine Gordimer was born into a well-off family in Springs, Transvaal, an East Rand mining town outside Johannesburg. It was the setting for Gordimer’s first novel, The Lying Days (1953). Her father was a Jewish jeweller originally from Latvia and her mother of British descent. From her early childhood Gordimer witnessed how the white minority increasingly weakened the rights of the black majority. Gordimer was educated in a convent school. She spent a year at Witwaterstrand University, Johannesburg without taking a degree.
Often kept at home by a mother who imagined she had a weak heart, Gordimer began writing from the age of nine. Her first story, Come Again Tomorrow, appeared in the children’s section of the Johannesburg magazine Forum when she was only fourteen. By her twenties, Gordimer had had stories published in many of the local magazines. In 1951 the New Yorker accepted a story, publishing her ever since.
Gordimer has revealed the psychological consequences of a racially divided society. Her first volume of short stories Face to Face (1949) appeared the year after the Afrikaner Nationalist government assumed power, and each succeeding book has reflected the hardening grip of racist legislation upon every aspect of South African life. While her novels and short stories report with chilling accuracy upon South African economic, social and political divisions and tensions, they are seldom overtly political. Her interest in politics has arisen from her concern for individual and for personal relationships. Her stories are concerned with the devastating effects of apartheid on the lives of South Africans: the constant tension between personal isolation and the commitment to social justice, the numbness caused by the unwillingness to accept apartheid, the inability to change it, and the refusal of exile.
The novel The Lying Days (1953) was based largely on the author’s own life and depicted a white girl, Helen, and her growing disaffection toward the narrow-mindlessness of a small-town life. The most outstanding feature of this work is the technique; she exhibits already the clear, controlled, and unsentimental technique that became her main characteristic.
Other works in the 1950s and 1960s include A World of Strangers (1958), which is a picaresque novel about a young Englishman’s first experience of South Africa. Here as well as in many short stories of the same period the joys as well as the pains of life are still in evidence; Occasion for Loving (1963) was concerned with the “line in a statute book” – South Africa’s cruel racial law. In the story an illicit love affair between a black man and a white woman ends bitterly. Ann Davis is married to a gentle Jew called Boaz Davis, a dedicated scholar who has travelled all over the country in search of African music. Gideon Shibalo, a talented painter, is black, he has a marriage and several affairs behind. The liberal Mrs Jessie Stilwell is a reluctant hostess to the law-breaking lovers. Boaz, the cuckold, is on the side of the struggling South African black majority, and Ann plays with two men’s emotions; and The Late Bourgeois World (1967), where the contradictions of society have given place to images of exhaustion and defeat. Yet, any human response is in Nadine Gordimer only an aspect of situation, and she sees all human beings as trapped in their situations. She eliminated all the superfluous details and limited the narration to the interior monologue of the protagonist, a woman whose husband has just killed himself. She reviews their life together, their involvement with African political movements, rejection of their family backgrounds and the failure of their marriage. In these novels Gordimer studied the master-servant relations, spiritual and sexual paranoias of colonialism, and the shallow liberalism of her privileged white compatriots.
In The Conservationist (1974) and Burger’s Daughter (1979) there is a breaking away from traditional novel with changes in the chronological order and in the narrative voice and mixture between realism and symbolism. But in these novels still the most important thing is the devastating analysis of white South-Africa.
The Conservationist explores the inner life of an apparently healthy, confident and successful capitalist able only to use other people but incapable of any reciprocal relationship. It is juxtaposed the world of a wealthy white industrialist with the rituals and mythology of Zulus.
Burger’s Daughter is centred on the daughter of a Marxist couple who die in prison. It was written during the aftermath of Soweto uprising. In the story a daughter analyzes her relationship to her father, a martyr of the antiapartheid movement. The novel shows the process she goes through to earn conscience of the unfair reality of her country, so that she begins her own fight and ends up in prison too.
In July’s People (1981) a liberal white couple and their servant July gradually find that their psychological roles are becoming reversed together with the assumptions on which their lives and relationships were based falsified by the apartheid. It is a pessimistic account of the near future. It deals with the absolute failure of community between men. The characters are trapped in different situations and Gordimer studies the anomalies and reversals this situation contains, such as the anomalous circumstance of the dependant passing from servant to master. It is a futuristic novel about a white family feeing from war-torn Johannesburg into the country, where they seek refuge with their African servant in his village.
Gordimer’s early short story collections include Six Feet of the Country(1956), Not for Publication (1965) and Livingstone´s Companions(1971).
The historical context of the racial divided society has also been the fundamental basis of her short stories. In ‘Oral History’ from A Soldier´s Embrace (1980) the village chief has chosen the side of the oppressors. After his village is destroyed he commits suicide. Gordimer examines coolly the actions of her protagonist, linking the tragic events in the long tradition of colonial policy. In the background of the story is the war of independence in Zimbabwe (1966-1980). Gordimer uses the mopane tree as a symbol of life and death – the chief hangs himself in the mopane, the dead are buried in the mopane, and finally the tree becomes a means of consolidation.
Since 1948 Gordimer has lived in Johannesburg. She has also taught in the USA in several universities during the 1960s and ’70s. Gordimer has written books of non-fiction on South African subjects and made television documentaries, notably collaborating with her son Hugo Cassirer on the television film Choosing Justice: Allan Boesak.
In The House Gun (1998) Gordimer explored the complexities of the violence ridden post-apartheid society through a murder trial. Two white privileged liberals, Harald and Claudia Lindgard, face the fact that their architect-son, Duncan, has killed his friend Carl Jesperson.
In The Pick Up (2001) the basic setting reminds in some points the famous film Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1962), starring Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo. Julie is the daughter of a rich investment banker. Her car breaks down, and at a garage she meets Ibrahim, an illegal immigrant from an Arab country. The two young people from different cultures start a love affair. Although their background separates them, sex crosses all the cultural barriers, but does not stop Ibrahim striving for money and success, the good things of life that the West can offer. Another theme in the book is Julie’s maturation. When Ibrahim faces deportation from South Africa, she insists on leaving the country with him. Julie marries Ibrahim and settles in his home country.
Gordimer’s activism has not been limited to the struggle against apartheid. She has resisted censorship and state control of information, and fostered the literary arts. She refused to let her work be aired by the South African Broadcasting Corporation because it was controlled by the apartheid government. Gordimer also served on the steering committee of South Africa’s Anti-Censorship Action Group. A founding member of the Congress of South African Writers, Gordimer has also been active in South African letters and international literary organizations. She has been Vice President of International PEN.
In the post-apartheid 1990s and 21st century, Gordimer has been active in the HIV/AIDS movement, which is a significant public health crisis in South Africa. In 2004, she organized about 20 major writers to contribute short fiction for Telling Tales, a fundraising book for South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign, which lobbies for government funding for HIV/AIDS prevention and care. On this matter, she has been critical of the current South African government, noting in 2004 that she “approves” of everything President Mbeki has done except his stance on AIDS. While on lecture tours, she has spoken on matters of foreign policy and discrimination beyond South Africa. For instance, in 2005, when Fidel Castro fell ill, Gordimer joined six other Nobel prizewinners in a public letter to the United States warning it not to seek to destabilize Cuba’s communist government. In 2001 she urged her friend Susan Sontag not to accept an award from the Israeli government, though she angered some (including her biographer) by refusing to equate Zionism with apartheid.b Gordimer’s resistance to discrimination extended to her even refusing to accept “shortlisting” in 1998 for the Orange Prize, because the award recognizes only women writers. Gordimer self-identifies as an atheist, but has not been active in atheist organizations.
Gordimer’s handling of political and philosophical argument among her characters –European and African– is something unique in the modern English novel. It brings the novel of ideas back into the English literature. It is Nadine Gordimer’s aseptic understanding of the corrosive effects of a system which cripples humanity that gives her writing its strength and originality.
Her fiction has chronicled the damaging effects of oppressive racial laws upon the human potential of white South-Africans while making very clear the brutal burdens that black people bear, so her major theme was exile and alienation. Though she never finished her university degree, she lectured and taught at various schools in the United States during the 1960s and ’70s. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.
7 STUDY GUIDE
The British Empire and its last consequence, the Commonwealth of Nations has been one of the most significant events of the British history. The expansion of Great Britain all over the world has enriched the culture of the Empire by writers of different part of the globe that have taken the English language as the instrument to satisfy their literary interests.
With regards to language, southern hemisphere native varieties of English began to develop during the 19th century, with the colonization of Australasia and South Africa. Australian English, New Zealand English and South African English are non-rhotic dialects closely related to one another and to the English spoken in southeastern England. The vocabularies of these dialects are also similar to that of English, with some differences and several terms that are peculiar to each country; Australian English features also a number of North American words. Differences in grammar and usage are mostly limited to colloquial speech.
In the case in Australia most of the population is of British origin, but their English has some remarkable differences compared with British English.
As far as vocabulary is concerned, they use many words not used in England. Due to the new environment settlers borrowed some words such as “boomerang” and “kangaroo” (which have become general English) but also some others like “corroboree”, which means a tumult. There are also many differences in the landscape which account for the fact that common words in England like “field” or “forest” are out of use while words like “scrub” (vegetation consisting mainly of bushwood) and “creek” (meaning a stream or a brook) have persisted in their language. Another source of differences between Australian vocabulary and general English is that many words come from British dialects, such as “dinkum” (“honest”) from Lincs or “to fossic” (meaning “to search”) from Cornish.
With regards to literature, there were some English authors such as Kipling or Forster that wrote about the new colonized lands although from the point of view of a visitor abroad, that can not be considered pure colonial literature. However, there were authors such as Gordimer or Lessing who produced literary texts after the independence of these lands or in the course of it, whose works have a different flavour. This literature is called proper colonial literature because the themes and perspective of the matters analysed are completely different, as we have already exposed.
Forster was a member of Bloomsbury group and friend of Virginia Woolf. After gaining fame as a novelist, Forster spent his 46 remaining years publishing mainly short stories and non-fiction. Of his five important novels four appeared before World War I. Forster’s major concern was that individuals should ‘connect the prose with the passion’ within themselves, and that one of the most exacting aspect of the novel is prophecy. Forster´s fame rests largely on his novels Howard’s End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924) and on a large body of criticism. He developed a sense of the uniqueness of the individual, of the healthiness of moderate scepticism, and of the importance of Mediterranean civilisation as a counterbalance to the strict attitudes of northern European countries.
He visited India twice, in 1912-13 and 1921. The first visit to India put him in contact with the cultural contrast between the British and the Indians and he began A Passage to India. But he did not finish the novel until after his second visit and the experience of the war influenced it. Mrs. Moore, a woman of unaffected kindness brings the young Adela Quested to India to marry her son. Adela accuses Dr. Aziz, a friend of his boyfriend, of assault at the darkness of the cave, but at his trial she retracts, suddenly aware that she suffered a hallucination. Though Fielding remains throughout convinced of Aziz’s innocence, the complex suspicions and misunderstandings bred by the racial and cultural difference finally separate the two friends.
Doris Lessing is a Persian (Iranian)-born British writer, whose novels and short stories are largely concerned with people caught in the social and political upheavals of the 20th century. Central themes in Lessing’s works are feminism (see also Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedman, Germaine Greer, Marilyn French), the battle of the sexes, individuals in search of wholeness, and the dangers of technological and scientific hubris. Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. Since 1949, she has lived in England but she is also considered an African writer because she grew up and was educated in Zimbabwe (former Rhodesia).
Doris Lessing was born in 1919 in Iran where her father was captain in the British army. The family moved to a farm in Rhodesia, where she lived from 1924 until she settled in England in 1949. In her early adult years she was an active communist. Her novels and short stories are largely concerned with people involved in the social and political upheavals of the 20th century and especially with her experience in colonial Africa. Her first published book, The Grass Is Singing (1950), is about a white couple in Rhodesia who are unequal to the superior role the racial set-up requires of them. In her non-fiction book In Pursuit of the English she gives an account of her departure from Africa and her confrontation with the English.
South African novelist and short-story writer, who received Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. Most of Nadine Gordimer’s works deal with the moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country. She was a founding member of Congress of South African Writers, and even at the height of the apartheid regime, she never considered going into exile.
Gordimer has achieved lasting international recognition for her works, most of which deal with political issues, as well as the moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country. Virtually all of Gordimer’s works deal with themes of love and politics, particularly concerning race in South Africa. Always questioning power relations and truth, Gordimer tells stories of ordinary people, revealing moral ambiguities and choices. Her characterization is nuanced, revealed more through the choices her characters make than through their claimed identities and beliefs. She also weaves in subtle details within the character’s names. Her first published novel, The Lying Days (1953), takes place in Gordimer’s home town of Springs, Transvaal, an East Rand mining town near Johannesburg. In her 1963 work, Occasion for Loving, Gordimer puts apartheid and love squarely together. The Conservationist explores Zulu culture and the world of a wealthy white industrialist through the eyes of Mehring, the antihero. When an unidentified corpse is found on the protagonist´s farm, Mehring does the “right thing” by providing it a proper burial; but the dead person haunts the work, a reminder of the bodies on which Mehring’s vision would be built.
Gordimer’s 1979 novel Burger’s Daughter is the story of a woman analyzing her relationship with her father, a martyr to the anti-apartheid movement. Some of her best novels are July’s People (1981) and The House Gun (1998).
8 BILIOGRAPHY
Aspects of the Novel by E.M.Forster 1927
E.M. Forster: a Life by B.N. Furbank (1977-78, 2 vols.);
The Bloomsbury Group by S.P. Rosenbaum (1975);
A Bibliography of E.M. Forster by Brownlee Jean Kirkpatrick (1986);
A Passage to India, ed. by Tony Davies and Nigel Wood (1994
The Modernist as Pragmatist by Brian May (1997);
Doris Lessing by Carole Klein (1999);
Fine-Tuning the Feminine Psyche by Lorei Cederdstrom (1990); Approaches to Teaching Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, ed. by Carey Kaplan, Ellen Cronan Rose (1989);
The Unexpected Universe of Doris Lessing by Katherine Fishburn (1985); Substance Under Pressure by Betsy Draine (1983
The Novels of Doris Lessing by P. Schlueter (1973); Doris Lessing by D. Brewster (1965)
The Novels of Nadine Gordimer by Stephen Clingman (1986);
Critical Essays on Nadine Gordimer, ed. by Rowland Smith (1990);
; Nadine Gordimer by Dominic Head (1994);
Rereading Nadine Gordimer by Kathrin Wagner (1994)
McArthur, Tom (2002). The Oxford Guide to World English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peters, Pam (2004). The Cambridge Guide to English Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press..
Trudgill, Peter and Jean Hannah. (2002). International English: A Guide to the Varieties of Standard English, 4th ed. London: Arnold..