Letteratura inglese 1

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT, 1929

Goodbye to All That first appeared in 1929, when the author was

34 years old, but he extensively re-wrote it for its second edition

published in 1957 with many significant events and figures added.

The title points to the change of an era, to an old world that is

inevitably transformed after WW1.

By that time, he was living with the American poet Laura Riding.

Apparently the idea of a farewell to the past was hers.

Goodbye to all that is an account of both his own personal

experiences and the end of innocence for an entire generation and

nation and he used it as a kind of therapy; anyway, there are

passages in the novel that are untrue, they are kind of made up. He

often romanticized that part of his life.

What about this text?

It is a Bildungsroman in which he starts with his infancy and

childhood going till adulthood.

War/memory private memoir.

Autobiography/myth of the self. He believed himself to be

someone important, he mythed his life.

Many authors (Blunden and Sassoon) accused him of not being

trustworthy.

STRUCTURE

From chapter I to chapter 10 the novel investigates the story

of his family, his childhood and his education at Charterhouse

boarding school (he justifies his being bisexual by saying that he

was kind of brought to love men, since in his school there were just

boys anyway, he will never understand his own sexuality either).

In this section of the book Graves underlines his disillusionment

in the existence of traditional, stable values in the English society

which led him to become a socialist.

Chapter 11 (a trait-d’union chapter) – in which he narrates his

few months at a training camp in Wrexham – links the first section

of the book with the second which starts with Graves’s arrival on

the front-line at Cambrin.

From chapter 12 to chapter 25 the narration is devoted to his

war service as a lieutenant, then captain in the Royal Welsh

Fusiliers (including his relationship with Siegfried Sassoon and

Wilfred Owen) and to a detailed description of trench warfare,

including the Battle of Loos (chapter 15) and the Battle of the

Somme (chapter 20).

From chapter 26 until the end Graves describes his return home,

his being haunted by ghosts and nightmares (which lasted at least

10 years), and his life after the war, including the story of his first

marriage, his teaching in Oxford and his moving to Egypt to work at

Cairo University.

The key to understanding Goodbye to All That is the essay “P.S. TO

“GOODBYE TO ALL THAT” (1931) which makes it clear that he is

playing with the topics he is writing about and that he wrote the

text in a very easy way in order to have a wide audience that could

be interested in it and caught in the reading. It is very much a

satire, it is very provocative and we have to think it is a money-

making project of his.

He wanted to make the text historically true but also he played with

the absurdity of war, because we think of events that really

happened as untrue, as false.

Graves uses a theatrical technique as he introduces them through

dialogues (instead of their physical appearance or indirect

discourse) (ex: pag. 69). Goodbye to

Compared with Sassoon and Blunden’s memoirs, in

All That Graves didn’t show any interest in nature or in scenery,

human creatures are his interest and his novel is built essentially on

dialogue. Graves is not interested in historical accuracy, but in

giving the audience the scene: he wants the reader to understand

the atmosphere, the tone of the scene.

Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden were very critical with

the contents of the book and felt the need the need to correct him.

In particular Sassoon's complaints were mostly private and related

to Graves's depiction of him (he mentioned his homosexuality and

Owen’s). Sassoon and Blunden disagreed so much with Graves’s

account of events that they felt the need to correct him.

A Dead Boche (1916)

To you who’d read my songs of War

And only hear of blood and fame,

I’ll say (you’ve heard it said before)

”War’s Hell!” and if you doubt the same,

Today I found in Mametz Wood

A certain cure for lust of blood:

Where, propped against a shattered trunk,

In a great mess of things unclean,

Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk

With clothes and face a sodden green,

Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,

Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.

This episode describes the typical moment after a battle when

soldiers were looking for money in the enemies’ pocket. Here, while

walking after the battle of Loos, he finds a german body which he

describes in a very realistic way: stinking and already decomposing,

with his blood running through his nose and beard.

Graves’s language is very clear and there is his typical use of

colour because he wanted his readership to understand exactly

what he wanted to say, and this creates a paradox between the

easiness of the text and o the horrible content.

Goodbye to all That

The beginning is about his origins, his childhood, his period at the

various public schools; then, he will move on to the narration of his

experience of the war. He introduces himself telling us about his

first memory, which tells us that he is a Victorian man and that he is

saying goodbye to that victorian past. Graves firstly introduces

himself by mentioning how affectionate he and his family were to

Shakespeare and then mentioning his connection with a subversive

writer such as Swinburne. This is not a coincidence; it is a specific

idea he wants his readers to think of him.

Pag.61-62 the relationship with his German side was highly

complex  More than once Graves says for example that the

Germans were better soldiers. He also talks about the fact that all

the German atrocities that the newspaper talked about were

something that was highly exaggerated. As a consequence, the fury

in this text is gone.

The crucial passage is chapter 12: we have a provocative

beginning. He says that he had begun to write an account of his

months in France as it was a novel, and now has to re-translate

them into history. He anticipates that what we are going to read is

history, and not any longer something that sounds fictional, a novel.

He talks about the suicide cases, the drinking men, people being

totally unprepared to the war, the dirtiness of the trenches, the

mice, etc. he talks about the feeling of meeting people who are

excited about going in to action without knowing what the war was

about.

Finding of the suicide (pag.88) Suicide was totally unheroic, so

the families were told that they died as soldiers (same with

deserters), to hide it. So here returns the Sassoonian element of

people not really understanding what happened in the trenches.

pag.116-118-119: how they communicated with the Germans. This

is a chapter that was very untrustworthy according to Blunden and

Sassoon. Graves talks about the Germans sending messages.

Communication between the enemies is something that wasn’t very

much true. He also gives an historical evidence the Christmas

Truce, 1914.

Why is he telling something that seems invented? Maybe it is to

highlight the fact that the war was so absurd that people could

really believe that something so unrealistic happened.

Also, pag.142: we see here that this is totally invented. He uses a

satirical tone that is typical element of Graves to eliminate some of

the tension, giving an idea of the trenches which was also –

sometimes and in a dark way – fun. Some thought (Sassoon and

Blunden) of this as disrespect, manipulating history getting

comedy out of something that was too terrible to be fun.

Then he talks about the deth of his friend Dick, and also about

neurasthenia and shell-shock.

(pag.184): satirical tone; he tells us about how he got wounded and

when he was reported dead to his family. We are in-between

autobiographical facts and his desire to play with the reader.

Pag.94: 2 soldiers kill a sergeant major by mistake and when asked

why they did it, they admitted that they wanted to kill a platoon

sergeant and they are court-martialled that cannot be possible; it

almost seems British humour.

What is also very interesting is the story with Sassoon he

introduces the soldier’s declaration very cleverly, wanting to give

his own version but in a very subtle way. He tells us that Sassoon

wasn’t feeling well in those days and that he spent some time with

a group of intellectuals who were pacifists.

Pag.204 very detailed story about the pacifism of the group of

Sassoon’s friends. He believes that it was because of their influence

that Sassoon wrote the declaration which almost ruined his career

and brought him to death.

Pag.188 He mentions a famous letter published in “the morning

post”, called “a mother’s answer to a common soldier”, by a little

mother. This was a patriotic, imperialistic letter a mother that

says that she was happy that her son died serving his country;

anyway, it was a propaganda letter this mother, didn’t exist. This

was the “newspaper language” spoken in England while the soldiers

fought in the trenches.

Pag.152: he talks about the fact that the soldiers didn’t believe in

the propaganda about the German atrocities, and they thought that

what the Germans did was something that also the English did. The

trench soldiers don’t believe in patriotism. It was a civilian

sentiment.

22.11.2022

Graves subverses the ideals that were present in England and gives

a more concrete version of the life in the trenches, an un-idealistic

idea of it.

Role of religion Graves is very subversive about this theme as

well. He tells us how the catholic priests were much more helpful

than the Anglican ones, because they gave the extreme unction to

the dead. We get a very ironic approach to such an important

theme as religion.

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941), MRS DALLOWAY

Adeline Virginia Stephen was the third child of Leslie Stephen, a

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well-known literary figure of the time and Julia Prinsep Duckworth

famous for her beauty and for her notable social and artistic

connections. Virginia was very close to her siblings – Vanessa,

Thoby and Adrian – especially as they got together against their

older half siblings from their mother’s first marriage (George,

Gerald, Stella Duckworth).

Virginia was educated at home together with her sisters and she

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took advantage of her father’s extraordinary library. Extremely

gifted, as a young girl, Virginia started a family newspaper, the

Hyde Park Gate News, to document her family&rsq