"Sth, I know that woman," the novel begins. "She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an 18-year-old girl with one of those deep-down, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church."

She stands up in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance. She has sensed a shift in the weather. There is another gust of wind, a buckle of noise in the air, and the tall cypresses sway. She turns and moves uphill toward the house, climbing over a low wall, feeling the first drops of rain on her bare arms. She crosses the loggia and quickly enters the house.

In the kitchen she doesn't pause but goes through it and climbs the stairs which are in darkness and then continues along the long hall, at the end of which is a wedge of light from an open door.

She turns into the room which is another garden--this one made up of trees and bowers painted over its walls and ceiling. The man lies on the bed, his body exposed to the breeze, and he turns his head slowly towards her as she enters.

Every four days she washes his black body, beginning at the destroyed feet. She wets a washcloth and holding it above his ankles squeezes the water onto him, looking up as he murmurs, seeing his smile. Above the shins the burns are worst. Beyond purple. Bone.

She has nursed him for months and she knows the body well, the penis sleeping like a sea horse, the thin tight hips. Hipbones of Christ, she thinks. He is her despairing saint. He lies flat on his back, no pillow, looking up at the foliage painted onto the ceiling, its canopy of branches, and above that, blue sky.

She pours calamine in stripes across his chest where he is less burned, where she can touch him. She loves the hollow below the lowest rib, its cliff of skin. Reaching his shoulders she blows cool air onto his neck, and he mutters.

What? she asks, coming out of her concentration.

He turns his dark face with its gray eyes towards her. She puts her hand into her pocket. She unskins the plum with her teeth, withdraws the stone and passes the flesh of the fruit into his mouth.

He whispers again, dragging the listening heart of the young nurse beside him to wherever his mind is, into that well of memory he kept plunging into during those months before he died.

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”—was that it?—“I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace—Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished—how strange it was!—a few sayings like this about cabbages.

She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright.

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this”. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.

It is, at any rate, in some such fashion as this that we seek to define the quality which distinguishes the work of several young writers, among whom Mr. James Joyce is the most notable, from that of their predecessors. They attempt to come closer to life, and to preserve more sincerely and exactly what interests and moves them, even if to do so they must discard most of the conventions which are commonly observed by the novelist. Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small. Any one who has read The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or, what promises to be a far more interesting work, Ulysses,⁹ now appearing in the Little Review, will have hazarded some theory of this nature as to Mr. Joyce’s intention. On our part, with such a fragment before us, it is hazarded rather than affirmed; but whatever the intention of the whole, there can be no question but that it is of the utmost sincerity and that the result, difficult or unpleasant as we may judge it, is undeniably important.

Prose Fiction 2: Essay Questions. fficeffice" />

Choose an essay question from one of the questions below. The essay should focus upon two texts on the course and should be 2500 words.

1)    ‘The past is only ever finished, never finished with.’ Discuss the relevance of this statement to at least two texts on the course. Pay particular attention to the ways in which narratives may reconstitute memory or past ‘realities’?

2)    ‘Certain ways of knowing people diminish their interest for us.’ ( Adam Phillips) Take care to explore how ‘interest’ is maintained for the reader in at least two texts on the course. You must show an awareness of narrative strategy in your response and should not restrict your answer to content based criticism.

3)    ‘I cannot paint what I then was.’ (Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey.) Consider what relevance of this statement to the act of recollection in at least two texts on the course.  

4)    ‘It is, thus, the discontinuities in life that we seek to bridge, or reconcile....’ ( Oliver Sacks) How useful is this statement in exploring the uses of ‘discontinuity’ in tow or more texts on the course. How far are these departures from continuity crucial to our understanding of the texts?

5)    ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am? ‘(King Lear) Consider the problematic representation of identity in any two texts on the course. You must engage with the narrative strategies by which identity is constructed rather than just talking in terms of ‘character’ as personality.

6)    ‘The Horror, the horror.’ ( Conrad) Explore the representation of ‘horror’ in any two texts on the course. Be prepared to problematise the identity of ‘horror’ in terms of secrecy, mortality even sexuality.

7)    ‘I suddenly discovered that one of those boats was exactly what I want my novel to be. Not big, almost ‘grotesque’ in shape-I mean perhaps heavy – with people rather dark and seen strangely as they move into the sharp light and shadow; and I want bright shivering lights in it, and the sound of water.’ ( Katherine Mansfield)  Explore the relevance of this statement to any two texts on the course. You may focus your attention on the ‘impressionistic’ aspects of narrative and the ways in which such narratives create their meanings.

8)    ‘I doubt whether any contemporary writer has made one feel more keenly the many kinds of personal relations in an everyday ‘happy family’ who are merely going on living their daily lives, with no crises or shocks. Yet every

individual in the household (even the children) is clinging passionately to his individual soul, is in terror of losing it in the general family flavour. As in most families, the mere struggle to have anything of one’s own, to be one’s self at all, creates an element of strain which keeps everybody almost at the breaking point. ‘(Willa Cather in Not Under Forty) To what extent is Cather’s statement relevant to any two texts on the course? Are characters living at a crisis situation and if so how are these crises represented in the narratives? You may like to consider Cather’s famous statement in terms of the representation of the domestic life in any two texts on the course.

9)    ‘Things had a habit of coming alive like that.’ ( ffice:smarttags" />Mansfield, Prelude, V)  Consider the use of revelation or a ‘moment of being’ in any two texts on the course. Explore the ways in which narratives may build to such moments and then fall away.

THERE was not an inch of room for Lottie and Kezia in the buggy. When Pat swung them on top of the luggage they wobbled; the grandmother's lap was full and Linda Burnell could not possibly have held a lump of a child on hers for any distance. Isabel, very superior, was perched beside the new handy-man on the driver's seat. Hold-alls, bags and boxes were piled upon the floor. "These are absolute necessities that I will not let out of my sight for one instant," said Linda Burnell, her voice trembling with fatigue and excitement.

Lottie and Kezia stood on the patch of lawn just inside the gate all ready for the fray in their coats with brass anchor buttons and little round caps with battleship ribbons. Hand in hand, they stared with round solemn eyes, first at the absolute necessities and then at their mother.

"We shall simply have to leave them. That is all. We shall simply have to cast them off," said Linda Burnell. A strange little laugh flew from her lips; she leaned back against the buttoned leather cushions and shut her eyes, her lips trembling with laughter. Happily at that moment Mrs. Samuel Josephs, who had been watching the scene from behind her drawing-room blind, waddled down the garden path.

Mansfield reveals the euphoria of change in this opening. The 'crisis' of relocation is witnessed from several contrasting perspectives so that the reader is aware of the conflict between adulthood  and childhood, between in Blakean terms, innocence and experience.

Notice how revelatory is the term lump of a child'. Short story writers choose their language as carefully as poets and the word 'lump' subverts any cosy assumptions about maternity and care. The almost feverish energy of Linda is contrasted against the wide eyed watchfulness of Kezia and Lottie, who uniformed in their very best travelling clothes, find that they are superfluous to their mother's requirements. They are not on the list of her most important things. The lightness and ethereal 'distant' quality of Linda's register is contrasted with the neighbourly stolidity and security of Mrs Joseph's duck like 'waddled.'

Space is a literal and metaphorical device used to explore the ambivalence of intimacy. We are plunged into this moment of metamorphosis where characters are being transported away from themselves and replanted elsewhere. Hence Prelude as the title may suggest with its evocation of Wordworth's famous poem of Recollection, explores the transformative impact of childhood  upon memory. It is an elegy and the elegaic tone underlines the transience and fragility of the past.

He waited outside the drawing-room door until the waltz should finish, listening to the skirts that swept against it and to the shuffling of feet. He was still discomposed by the girl's bitter and sudden retort. It had cast a gloom over him which he tried to dispel by arranging his cuffs and the bows of his tie. He then took from his waistcoat pocket a little paper and glanced at the headings he had made for his speech. He was undecided about the lines from Robert Browning, for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers. Some quotation that they would recognise from Shakespeare or from the Melodies would be better. The indelicate clacking of the men's heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his. He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand. They would think that he was airing his superior education. He would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl in the pantry. He had taken up a wrong tone. His whole speech was a mistake from first to last, an utter failure.

Just then his aunts and his wife came out of the ladies' dressing-room. His aunts were two small, plainly dressed old women. Aunt Julia was an inch or so the taller. Her hair, drawn low over the tops of her ears, was grey; and grey also, with darker shadows, was her large flaccid face.

Significantly Joyce positions his protagonist Gabriel at a threshold. One way of being is at the gateway to another. And we have all stood at the threshold of some social event and hesitated before entering? This allows the filtered impressions to oscillate between the 'insider' and 'outsider'' perspective. It adds to the complexity of the moment as it reveals the contradictory nature of Gabriel's self-perception.

His role as witness is explorede through a strongly expressed auditory and visual series of viewpoints, many of which are also linked to kinaesthetic impressions. This elision between on impression and another highlights the heightened 'sensitivity' of Gabriel in this situation as he awaits the time for the delivery of his speech. It also reveals his overriding concern with HOW he LOOKS to others so that many of the senses lead back to the visual emphasising both his feelings of superiority and inferiority. This tension between one form of perception and another convinces the reader of the authentcity of gabriel's complex being/identity.