Prose / novel notes

Smith’s essay (dated 2012 in the original magazine printing; collected as the opening of Feel Free) is not a short story and not a modernist fragment. It distinguishes pleasure from joy. Pleasure is daily and ownable: an egg sandwich from a grimy van, a pineapple popsicle that stills the anxiety of writing for eight minutes, other people’s faces on Broadway, the private language of “being the dog” until a nearly-three-year-old child says stop, it’s very silly. Joy is rarer and harder to manage: a “strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight.” Until recently she had known it five times, perhaps six, and tried to forget it so that the memory would not dement the rest of life.

The six include love (only once viable), drugs, water, a train, a high wall, a high hill, a nightclub, a hospital bed. The nightclub (Fabric, 1999, “Can I Kick It?” into “Smells Like Teen Spirit”) mimicked joy’s conditions: you do not “have” the feeling, you are a piece of it with hundreds of others. Morning proves it was not joy: the sublime talk had no substance; Smiley on the sofa wants twenty quid for a cab. Real joy arrives later: a crush on a museum wall; then love on the train to Auschwitz, “heading toward all that makes life intolerable, feeling the only thing that makes it worthwhile.” Children multiply joy dangerously. Julian Barnes’s line, passed through a friend and a husband: “It hurts just as much as it is worth.” Sane animals would choose pleasure; humans accept the crazy deal of joy.

Unit 1 called this a late essayistic cousin of postmodern mix of registers, not a textbook postmodern novel. Do not drag Harlem into Washington Square. Do not call the popsicle magic realism. Beside Mansfield’s drawing-room, Smith’s “I” is personal essay, twenty-first-century. Hold the pair pleasure/joy, Fabric as false joy, the child as dangerous joy, and Barnes’s sentence.

The set chapter is from Small Is Beautiful (1973), pages 146–160 in the Harper & Row printing the syllabus names. Schumacher is a British economist (German-born). The modern world has been shaped by technology, which tumbles from crisis to crisis. Technology develops by its own laws, unlike living nature, which knows where to stop. Technology recognises no self-limiting principle of size, speed, or violence; it is not self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. In nature it acts like a foreign body. Hence three crises at once: human nature revolts against inhuman organisation; the living environment groans; non-renewable resources, especially fossil fuels, head toward exhaustion. Materialism as limitless expansion in a finite world cannot last. The last quarter-century’s industry has not solved world poverty or unemployment. So: can we have a technology with a human face?

The primary task of technology should be to lighten the burden of work so that a person can stay alive and develop. Watching a computer, this seems true. Watching whole societies, Schumacher is tempted by a first law: the amount of real leisure a society enjoys tends to be in inverse proportion to the amount of labour-saving machinery it employs. Burma has little machinery and much leisure; Germany and the United States more strain. Modern technology is most successful at reducing skilful work of human hands on real materials. Aquinas’s human being has brains and hands; creative work with both has become a luxury of the rich. Actual producers are a tiny share of “total social time” (his rough figure: about three and a half per cent). Prestige goes to those farthest from production. Factory work empties a man. Marx: production of too many useful things results in too many useless people. The face of technology is increasingly inhuman.

Starred prose: an RTC can start from “a technology with a human face,” from the threefold crisis, or from the leisure-law. This is not Golding’s island and not Smith’s popsicle. Keep nature’s measure versus giantism. The next lesson is the opposite goal: production by the masses, intermediate technology, home-comers versus the forward stampede.

Knowledge itself does not commit us to giantism, supersonic speed, violence, and the destruction of work-enjoyment. Imagine the opposite goal: raise productive time toward twenty per cent of social time, with excellent tools, children and old people welcome, quality and beauty possible, work and leisure no longer split. Romantic, yes; present industrial society is not romantic and holds no promise of survival. The rich are the problem children; the poor cannot successfully adopt our technology without mass unemployment and rural decay. Gandhi is quoted: the poor cannot be helped by mass production, only by production by the masses. Mass production is capital-intensive, violent, ecologically damaging. Production by the masses uses brains and hands with first-class tools. Schumacher names this intermediate technology: vastly superior to the primitive, much simpler and cheaper than the super-technology of the rich — self-help, democratic, people’s technology. Man is small, and therefore small is beautiful. To go for giantism is to go for self-destruction.

Two attitudes will decide the future. The people of the forward stampede say you cannot stand still; complete modern technology; “a breakthrough a day keeps the crisis at bay”; more police, more anti-pollution paid by faster growth, synthetics, fast breeders. The home-comers want a new life-style; the term has a religious connotation (prodigal son, Sermon on the Mount). We are poor, not demigods; we have plenty to be sorrowful about; we need a gentle, non-violent spirit; small is beautiful; justice; peacemaking. Growth still matters, but qualitative: some things should grow, some diminish. Politics is too important to leave to experts; today politics is economics, and economics is technology. Hope: ordinary people can back minorities already at work — the Soil Association in farming, the Intermediate Technology Development Group in industry. Do not reduce the chapter to “hate machines.” Hold human face, threefold crisis, 3½ per cent, Gandhi’s masses, intermediate technology, stampede versus home-comers, small is beautiful.

The starred story is Greenwich Village, two young women, and a vine. Sue and Johnsy have a studio. Pneumonia — the “red-fisted, short-breathed old duffer” the narrator personifies — strikes Johnsy. She counts the ivy leaves on the brick wall opposite: when the last leaf falls, she will go too. The doctor tells Sue that Johnsy must want to live. Old Behrman, downstairs, a failed painter who still talks of a masterpiece, poses as the old miner for Sue’s magazine drawing. He scorns the idea that a leaf can kill a girl. In the night a storm. In the morning one leaf is still there, against the brick, stem and all. Johnsy’s will returns: she will take broth, she will paint the Bay of Naples again. The janitor finds Behrman downstairs, soaked, a lantern and a ladder and scattered green and yellow paints. He dies of pneumonia. The last leaf was his masterpiece: he painted it on the wall the night the real last leaf fell.

Unit 1’s symbolism: the leaf is hope and the will to live. Unit 1’s magic-realism trap: the marvel is explained as paint and a death from cold — not a leaf that refused winter as ordinary neighbourhood fact. Allusion is light (masterpiece, Bay of Naples). It is not Mansfield’s drawing-room vanity, not Golding’s pack. Sentiment and a twist ending are O. Henry’s magazine method, early-century, not high modernist experiment. For RTC, quote the counting of leaves or the doctor’s “wants to live,” then land on Behrman’s wall. Do not forget that the painter dies. The gift is the leaf; the cost is the old man’s life.

Mansfield’s 1922 story is the modernist short scene Unit 1 named. Rosemary Fell is young, pretty, rich; she has a “delightful” house in London and shops as a kind of art. In an antique shop she wants a little enamel box; the price startles even her. On the street a poor girl, Miss Smith, asks the price of a cup of tea. Rosemary, thrilled by a Russian-novel moment, takes her home — not to the nearest tea-shop. The girl is given tea, brandy, bread and butter, a bedroom, a fire. She weeps; she has had nothing to eat for three days. Rosemary feels splendid, “like a fairy godmother.”

Philip, the husband, comes in, looks, and says, in the other room, that Miss Smith is “astonishingly pretty.” Rosemary’s charity cools. She finds money, three pounds, sends the girl away, and goes back to Philip. She has let her hair down, put on her finest. She asks, “Am I pretty?” The cup of tea was never about the poor girl. It was about Rosemary’s appetite — the box, the scene, the husband. Unit 1’s inner noticing: we sit inside Rosemary without a Victorian sermon. Symbolism only if you show objects and people used the same way (the enamel box, then Miss Smith). It is not O. Henry’s sacrifice-leaf. It is not Smith’s essayistic joy. Class, vanity, and a marriage glance: that is the handful. Do not add other Mansfield stories.

The named reprint is UBSP Publishers, New Delhi, 2007. A plane evacuating English schoolboys is shot down; the wreck burns; a scar on a tropical island. Ralph meets Piggy, whose real name we never learn, whose glasses matter more than his body. They find a conch. Ralph blows it; boys gather, including a black-capped choir led by Jack Merridew. Ralph is voted chief. Jack will have the hunters. The conch will be the rule of speaking in assembly. They will keep a fire on the mountain for rescue. Unit 1’s dystopia starts as a good place attempted: assembly, fire, shelters. Symbolism already: conch = fragile order; glasses = sight and the power to light fire; the scar = arrival as wound.

The first hunts fail; the choir become hunters with painted faces. The fire is neglected when a ship passes. Piggy is mocked; Simon is the quiet boy who helps the littluns with fruit. Night fears begin: a “beastie,” a snake-thing. Golding is writing what English boys do without grown law, not a holiday adventure. Do not start an answer with the pig’s head. Start with the conch and the vote. The island is a laboratory, not a romance garden. Ralph wants huts and smoke; Jack wants meat and the thrill of the spear. That split is the plot-engine before anyone dies.

Fear thickens. A dead parachutist on the mountain becomes the beast from air. Jack splits from Ralph’s assembly; Castle Rock becomes a fort of meat and dance. Simon, epileptic, visionary, goes inland. He finds the pig’s head Jack has staked as a gift for the beast — buzzing with flies. In his faint the head speaks: the Lord of the Flies, Beelzebub (Unit 1’s allusion). It says the beast is not something you can hunt, because it is them. Simon climbs, sees the rotting airman, knows. He staggers down to tell the others in a storm, in a dance. They kill him as the beast. The body goes out to sea. That is the novel’s moral centre: knowledge murdered by the pack. Existential recognition without Sartre’s vocabulary: no given script, only what they choose.

Do not call this magic realism: the talking head is fever and symbol, then explained as a pig and a corpse. Do not make Simon a full Christ-allegory as the only reading; Golding allows the echo (the body taken by the sea) without turning the novel into a sermon. Hold: parachutist, split, pig’s head, Simon’s knowledge, the dance-killing. The conch still exists, but Jack’s tribe does not need it. Piggy still believes in rules. Ralph is losing the fire and the names of home.

Jack’s tribe steals Piggy’s glasses: fire is now theirs, sight is stolen. Ralph, Piggy, Sam and Eric go to Castle Rock with the conch to ask back the specs. Roger levers a boulder. The conch explodes. Piggy falls forty feet to the rock in the sea. Samneric are taken. Ralph is hunted. The island is fired to smoke him out — the rescue-fire turned to a weapon, Unit 1’s double symbol completed. He runs to the beach and falls at the feet of a naval officer. The officer sees painted little boys, a burning island, and is embarrassed: “I should have thought that a pack of British boys… would have been able to put up a better show.” Ralph weeps for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy. A cruiser waits. The grown world is still at war. Dystopia does not end when the adult arrives; the laboratory is only closed.

Exam handful: conch, glasses, fire, painted face, pig’s head, Simon, Piggy, officer. It is not Shaw’s drawing-room. It is not O. Henry’s one painted leaf. Schumacher’s giantism is a different inhuman face — machines, not a choir with spears — but both distrust a “better show” that hides violence. Stay on this novel.