Paul Scott

John Lennard

Description

A historically informed and informing study guide to of Scott's four great novels of British India - The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence, A Division of the Spoils - and of the popular coda, Staying On. The book covers Paul Scott's Life and works, the British Raj, imperial decay, civil and military India, the Indian independence movement, the birth of India and Pakistan, Ghandi, Jinnah, Congress and the Muslim League, the characters of the novel, especially Edwina Crane, Daphne Manners, Ronald Merrick and Hari Kumar.John Lennard's The Poetry Handbook (OUP, 1996; 2/e 2005), with Mary Luckhurst The Drama Handbook (OUP, 2002), and Of Modern Dragons and other essays on Genre Fiction (HEB, 2007). He is General Editor of HEB's Genre Fiction Sightlines and Monographs series, for which he has written on Reginald Hill, Walter Mosley, Octavia E. Butler, Ian McDonald, and Tamora Pierce. For Literature Insights he has also written on Shakespeare's Hamlet and Nabokov's Lolita.

Informations

• Publié par: Humanities-Ebooks
• Date de parution: 21 octobre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781847602206
• Langue: English

Extrait

Literature Insights General Editor: Charles Moseley
Paul Scott The Raj Quartet & Staying On
John Lennard
© John Lennard, 2008
The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2008 by Humanities-Ebooks LLP, Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE
ISBN: 978-1-84760-056-1 PDF ISBN: 978-1-84760-142-1 Kindle ISBN: 978-1-84760-220-6 ePub
Page-formatted Pdf versions of all our ebooks are available from: http:///www.humanities-ebooks.co.uk and from MyiLibrary.com . The Pdf format offers easy navigation, fixed page designs and optimized images, and is suitable for reading on desktops, laptops and tablets.
Table of Contents
A Note on the Author
A Note on References
Preface
Part 1. Life and Works: An Overview
1.1 Paul Mark Scott, 1920–78
1.2 Work to 1964
1.3 The Raj Quartet and Staying On, 1964–77
Part 2. Facts, Fictions, and Verisimilitude: Representing the British Raj
2.1 Geography
2.2 History
2.3 Biography
Part 3. ‘Coming to the end of themselves as they were’: Witnessing Imperial Decay
3.1 The Civil
3.2 The Military
Part 4. ‘There’s nothing I can do’: Embodying Personal Nullity
4.1 Edwina Crane
4.2 Daphne Manners
4.3 Barbie Batchelor
4.4 Sarah Layton
Part 5. ‘I’ve put it badly’: Class and Silence
5.1 Neo-Puritanism and the ‘Split Century’, 1850–1950
5.2 Ronald Merrick as Antagonist
5.3 Ronald Merrick as Protagonist
Part 6. Dreams, Nightmares, & Realpolitik: Representing India (and Pakistan)
6.1 Mohammed Ali Kasim, Gandhi-ji, and the Congress
6.2 Sayed Kasim, Jinnah, and the Muslim League
6.3 Ahmed Kasim, Pandit Baba, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
6.4 Hari Kumar as Good and Unknown Indian
6.5 Tusker and Lucy Smalley: Staying On
Appendix 1: Granada TV’s adaptations of Scott
Appendix 2: Critics’ Corner and Further Reading
Bibliography
Works by Paul Scott
Works on Paul Scott
Works on Anglo-/India
Humanities Insights
References
A Note on the Author
Born and raised in Bristol, UK, John Lennard took a B.A. and D.Phil. at New College, Oxford, and an M.A. at Washington University in St Louis. He has taught for the Universities of London, Cambridge, and Notre Dame du Lac, for the Open University, and for Fairleigh Dickinson University; He is also the editor of FDU’s online magazine Exploring Globalization , and was from 2004–09 Professor of British and American Literature at the University of the West Indies Mona. His publications include But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (Clarendon Press, 1991), The Poetry Handbook (OUP, 1996; 2/e 2005), with Mary Luckhurst The Drama Handbook (OUP, 2002), and two collections, Of Modern Dragons and other essays on Genre Fiction (HEB, 2007) and Of Sex and Faerie: Further essays on Genre Fiction . He is General Editor of HEB’s Genre Fiction Sightlines and Monographs series, for which he has written on Reginald Hill, Walter Mosley, Octavia E. Butler, Ian McDonald, and Tamora Pierce. For Literature Insights he has also written on Shakespeare’s Hamlet and King Lear , and on Nabokov’s Lolita .
A Note on References
To help keep footnotes to a minimum references to the texts of The Raj Quartet and Staying On are given parenthetically, by letter and page-number; as ‘J220’ or ‘D87’. The letters indicate the novels as follows:

J The Jewel in the Crown
S The Day of the Scorpion
T The Towers of Silence
D A Division of the Spoils
SO Staying On
Full publication and other details are given in the bibliography.
Preface
For the serious reader, including students required to write about it, getting through the Raj Quartet once is not enough. The sheer scale of Scott’s work/s baffles easy understanding of matters at large, and critics face a problem in assuming familiarity or explaining at length. I have chosen to believe that my readers will have at least some familiarity with the plot/s, and will remember more as they read: Parts 1 and 2 cover basic contexts and offer some plot-summary and first-order analysis; Parts 3 and 4 turn to thematics, and roam more at large; Part 5 attempts a panoptic view through the common misprision of Ronald Merrick; and Part 6 considers some Indian realities and perspectives. References and explanations are, I hope, provided as necessary , but chapters build on one another, and especially in Parts 5 and 6 what goes before is largely taken as read.
For some the necessary detail may in itself be daunting, but Scott is a novelist who richly rewards careful reading. He offers a magnificent portrait of attested accuracy of the heart of the British Empire as it ceased beating; his is also in British literature the outstanding tragedy to encompass World War 2 a conjunction to command attention. To lose oneself for a while in the Quartet ’s dramatic action and supple, highly variegated prose is to be steeped in both sorrow and potent argument; and as one accumulates greater historical, social, and linguistic knowledge of (Anglo-)India, each return sparks with yet more things Scott noticed, knew, and included in his weave. I have read him attentively for more than 20 years and still find new things whenever I revisit, so completion is not to be aimed at and that is partly the point, for such comprehension must diminish its object. Neither India nor empire can be wholly accounted, and Scott reflects at every level the uncertainty of the human mind and will, our failures of perception and adjustments of memory but he also built over a lifetime a case of deep perception and multiple, braced memories, with vivid actions and scenes at once presenting history and set in relief against historical events.
The Granada TV adaptation of the Quartet under the umbrella-title of The Jewel in the Crown (discussed in appendix 1) is a marvellous work and an invaluable guide to (Anglo-)India in the 1940s. Period minds as well as period detail are superbly represented, and older social mores that younger readers often have real difficulty in understanding are made coherent in every moment of dialogue. But the adaptation necessarily straightens out Scott’s chronological loops and overlaps, and besides dispensing with assorted minor characters, most of the novels’ dialogue, and at least half of the important metaphors as well as all the prose styles, it thereby dispenses with the structure Scott imposed the internal ordering of the constituent novels, which are novels, each in its own right, not merely episodes. And yet it is in that structure that a good part of the story lies in every sense so the TV series, while superb, cannot substitute for the experience of reading what Scott wrote, in the order he designed.
The true key, as one’s knowledge expands or becomes uncertain, as memories are jogged or prove evasive, is to keep contingency in mind. All the novels of the Quartet are about people possessed of or coming to premature judgements, assuming a certitude of factual and usually moral understanding that a later chapter reveals as at best questionable, at worst plainly erroneous or the short-circuit of a bigotry. Even at the end much remains uncertain, morally as factually, for the death of an empire and the birth of several nations are inevitably so, confused, bloody and productive. There is also the sobering thought that though he wrote of the 1940s, Scott wrote for readers of the 1960s–70s and beyond, reporting with great dedication and intensity a case-study he thought critical to understanding himself and his own present, as the 1940s had shaped it. He said in 1968 that ‘If I write about Anglo-India in 1942 I do so not only because I find that period lively and dramatic but because it helps me to express the fullness of what I’m thinking and feeling about the world I live in’. 1 And that provides an excellent prescription for reading him, for the more fully a reader is engaged, the more profound the lesson Scott can teach about the world we have inherited.
Part 1. Life and Works: An Overview
Paul Scott’s life and literary work were shaped by his experience of British India. Called-up to the army in 1940, he was posted to the Subcontinent 2 in 1943, and served in northern India and Burma 3 until demobilisation in 1946 three crowded years that saw Allied victory over the Axis powers of Germany and Japan and the terrible nuclear dawn at Hiroshima, but also the catastrophic collapse of British imperial rule in Asia. The events Scott lived through during that time, and the massacres he knew were beginning to happen as he left, haunted him for the rest of his life, and drove him to train himself simultaneously as a novelist and imperial historian, that he might bear full witness to these experiences.
Many others who were there, British and Indian, were also left haunted. Besides the endemic racism and snobbery of much imperial life, and the horrors of the Eastern theatre of World War 2, there were also events in their own ways even more terrible. As many as one million Indians died in the Great Bengal Famine of 1943–4, and most historians now agree that between one and two million Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims were murdered during 1946–7 in sectarian violence triggered by Partition. 4 Those events laid the foundations for problems that continue even today the (nuclear) enmity of India and Pakistan, religious extremism in both nations, the ‘Kashmir’ problem, Maoist terrorism in Bengal, and the endemic poverty of Bangladesh so there were compelling reasons to be haunted, and to believe that the vaunted power and glory of the British Raj had ended in vileness and disaster. But if some understood that all too well, many others, especially those in Britain with little knowledge or understanding of the Raj , ignorantly rejected any notion of imperial disaster, let alone of British responsibility. And it was first of all for these fellow citizens, locked into political