The Country House Revisited (Ukázka, strana 99)

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Similarly to the continuous rotation of one round motif around another, the circular orbits of the two novels, The Sea, The Sea and Howards End, meet, echo and at times intersect. They both treat the theme of attempting to attain an ideal, the outcome of which seems to be doomed to failure. A successful quest for authenticity appears to be conditioned by the activity of searching and coveting. Both Forster’s work and Murdoch’s novels also elaborate on certain elements of summer house fiction as explored in the works of authors ranging from John Galsworthy, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Evelyn Waugh and Albert Camus to Elizabeth Jane Howard, Don DeLillo, Sadie Jones, Alan Hollinghurst, Herman Koch, Emma Straub and Sue Miller, particularly temporality, cyclicality, enrapture and bedazzlement. All these elements are triggered by places whose exceptional properties set them apart from real sites as their access is both literally and metaphorically restricted, which emphasises their exclusivity, and they are able to transform the linear passing of time into a circular loop. This circular temporality is projected into the structure of the novels as well as their overall imagery, which accumulates a surprising number of individual motifs endowed with round disposition in both literal and metaphorical sense. Not only does the fleeting character of the season depicted in summer house fiction, whose definition both Howards End and The Sea, The Sea at least partly fulfil, accentuate the urgency of contemporary ecological and ethical issues, but it also mirrors the elusive nature of attaining of any sort of idealised state.

Howards End and The Sea, The Sea revolve around two middle-class country houses, one being an ancient, converted farmhouse and the other an ordinary seaside villa. The relation between the place and its inhabitants, as it is presented on the example of Howards End and Shruff End, challenges the stereotypical depiction of a country house situated in a seemingly idyllic, rural setting. The actual portrayals reveal a wide range of implications of such a type of often idealised living arrangement in connection with class as well as the extreme, people-exclusive interpretation of environmental preoccupation.

Though the houses are still depicted as being essential to the process of establishing, shaping and constructing the authentic existence of their inhabitants, it is, nevertheless, the desire for a view, both literal and metaphorical, which determines the narrative and the nature dwelling presented in both novels. The frequency of the view from or of the house considerably exceeds the presentation of the inside of the houses. The depiction of the house from the outside, quite an unexpected angle for

Ukázka elektronické knihy, UID: KOS236196

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its inhabitant, who you would expect inside, is especially prominent in The Sea, The Sea, where Charles spends the majority of his peaceful nights sleeping on the rocks rather than returning to the stifling atmosphere of Shruff End reminding him of a “doll’s house” (TS, 389). This perspective emphasises the theatrical preoccupation of Charles as he continues in his life-long carer of a famed director and stages his retreat. Yet it echoes, in its own, twisted way, his major undertaking to become a real, authentic, good human being. Ironically, it is the house and the sea, which should have represented his new mind-set, which expel him so that he realises that what he wants to achieve cannot be rehearsed and performed in the secluded environment of Shruff End, but that it requires a life-long commitment and endeavour. What is more, it is not the countryside, but the city that is his natural habitat.

Howards End opens and closes with a view from the house, into the garden and the meadow. Although the red rust of civilization will likely find its way there and invade the Schlegel’s sanctuary in the future, for the time being the Wilcoxes are defeated and the meadow is mown: “Tom’s father was cutting the big meadow. He passed again and again amid whirring blades and sweet odours of grass, encompassing with narrowing circles the sacred centre of the field” (HE, 286). Margaret and Helen, the two heroic connectors, are looking into a future marked solely by seasonal change and domestic demands such as frozen pipes or a gale blowing down the wych-elm, with Helen thinking about “these little events becoming part of her, year after year” (HE, 286). Merging gradually with the house and its surroundings, it is their turn to encompass, with narrowing circles, the sacred centre of existence and thus to dwell.

The view presented in The Sea, The Sea and Howards End is never devoid of interruptions and obstacles: there are wild elements, lost wills, inquisitive visitors and a number of misconceptions, failed efforts and faulty judgements on the side of the main protagonists. The bourgeois, class-exclusive pastoral, which would omit all these inappropriate intrusions, is abandoned and replaced by, if highly ironical and far-reaching at times, meditation upon the nature of genuine dwelling.

Ukázka elektronické knihy, UID: KOS236196

4. Strangers’ Children in the House: Post-millennial Echoes of the Post-war Poetics of the Country House Beside it on his bookshelf in Tooting Graveney stood his small collection of related items, some with a very thin but magical thread of connection; the books that only mentioned Cecil in a footnote gave him the strongest sense of uncovering a mystery.

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He spread a warm glaze over the place and time, as if they were much more distant than was the case.

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The Stranger’s Child, Alan Hollinghurst’s fifth novel, is a densely layered, highly nuanced exploration of the shifting ideals of class, beauty, literary creation, sexuality and the perpetually fluctuating tide of English society. The author anchors the narration by the juxtaposition of two houses, two settings, two symbols of the tightly connected, if profoundly dissimilar, social classes as well as two diametrically different interpretations of domestic space and history: Corley Court, a ghastly Victorian monstrosity, the stately home of the Valances, and Two Acres, a sprightly suburban villa of the Sawle family. These houses, shining emblems of social diversity and financial superiority, become the field of negotiation of new identities. The motivation of the majority of characters’ is not upward social mobility, but rather the emotional and intellectual fulfilment which comprises social acceptance. Unlike in Hollinghurst’s previous novel, Booker-prize awarded and widely critically acclaimed The Line of Beauty (2004), the less socially privileged characters do not automatically strive to appropriate a new identity by means of lodging with the more privileged ones.31 It is quite unexpectedly the less financially secure who 31 In her article “The Role of Dialogic Organisation in Reflexive Construals of Identity in Selected Fiction Texts”, whose main focus is the constituents of personal/social identity as

Ukázka elektronické knihy, UID: KOS236196