Idiom of time: the writings of Henry Green

Abstract

This study enlarges on the peculiarities of texture in Green's writing, demonstrating how and where conventional ideas of narrative method are superseded by the irregular condition of other constraints, as often-as not stemming from "conditions of knowledge". This means that all of Green's books are related, in chronological succession, to the intellectual and social history. of the time. Use is made of manuscripts and typescripts to clarify his working methods. Blindness is seen as a compromise, on one level between the disclosure and concealment of desire, and on another level between conflicting ideas of the novel.

Living is shown to be organized around a number of unco-ordinated polarities (of class, gender, and age) which derive sense from D. H. Lawrence's categorizations in a work like Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. Green has confirmed the impact of Lawrence upon his early work, and it is in this context that Living can be seen as the eloquent expression of relatively crude determinants. With Party Going, the writing makes common cause with psychoanalysis; is controlled by the fascination with a threshold of meaning, and is in a critical relation with the image-repertoire of the Thirties (e.g. the 'frontier', the 'border'). With the autobiography, Pack RX Bag, the reproduction of details of a career gives way to an obsessional structure. The chapter on Caught deals with changes in writing, reading, and publishing practices during a period when Green was consciously trying to perfect an "idiom of the time".

Green's ambition that his writing should in some sense be a reading of other writings, bringing in question the motives behind them, is most palpable in Loving, which employs a technique of engrossing fragments of other literary works and forms; among the most striking examples are certain of Shakespeare's plays, the tradition of the Country. House Ideal, and elements of the Fairy Tale. The analysis of Back covers problems of interpretation which connect the issue of demobilization with certain dissociations of language. Concluding is seen as advocating a simultaneity of levels of organization, rather-than a hierarchy of levels of organization, in our knowledge of the world. The final chapter argues that Green's developed method of recycling the material-of_a text rigidifies; in Nothing and Doting; and a number of his prescriptive writings about the form of the novel are compared with the narrowing of scope in the novels themselves..