1
‘This book is about Allied prisoners of war taken by the Japanese in World War II. With those POWs, the cliché that every human life has a book in it takes on the force of a real truth: the life of any one of them is worth a book.’
Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese (1994)1
‘Because what you have to remember, Charley boy, is that you’re one of the lucky ones. You’re back.’
Henry Green, Back (1946)2
The idea that there is a book in every former prisoner of the Japanese during the Second World War has a special aptness in relation to the life discussed here. No one could have understood better the book-worthiness of a life story than one of Daws’s interviewees, the influential post-war critic Ian Watt. For Watt, the early novel’s use of quasi-autobiographical forms was ‘as defiant an assertion of the primacy of individual experience in the novel as Descartes’s cogito ergo sum was in philosophy’ (RN 15). But, before he was a critic, Watt was a soldier, a prisoner of war, and a slave labourer. This book argues that his wartime world decisively influenced post-war ideas about the novel.
‘Defoe is a welcome and portentous figure,’ Watt announced in The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957), his classic work on the emergence of the novel in eighteenth-century England:
Welcome because he seems long ago to have called the great bluff of the novel—its suggestion that personal relations really are the be-all and end-all of life; portentous because he, and only he, among the great writers of the past, has presented the struggle for survival in the bleak perspectives which recent history has brought back to a commanding position on the human stage. (RN 133–4)
All readers of Defoe recognize that ‘struggle for survival’. As early as The Storm (1704), his non-fictional account of a natural disaster, Defoe signalled what would prove to be a career-long fascination with the relative degrees of selfishness and altruism with which individuals respond to catastrophes that materialize out of blue skies. His interest in reflex responses to emergency informs the memorably volatile careers of all his protagonists: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Bob Singleton, and Colonel Jack are prisoners of unpredictable fortune, while the deracinated courtesan Roxana takes desperate measures to erase her disavowed past when social survival requires the death of her importunate daughter. The unforeseen disaster is a shared one when H. F. traps himself in diseased-ravaged London in Journal of the Plague Year, in yet another Defoe narrative in which those ‘personal relations’ Watt identifies as only seemingly indispensable to the novel are both a luxury and a liability. To find yourself close, in any sense, to other people is to put your own life at risk.
Years before he wrote the books that would become permanently important for Britain’s literary history—thanks, above all, to the canonical story of early English prose fiction invariably summed up in Watt’s phrase ‘the rise of the novel’—the entrepreneur and political journalist Defoe had learned at first hand how difficult the fight for survival could be. John Richetti sums up Defoe’s business affairs as ‘a series of spectacular failures’, and Defoe was repeatedly imprisoned for seditious libel as well as debt, with his incendiary satire The Shortest Way with the Dissenters notoriously earning him three stints in the pillory in the summer of 1703.3 As a lesson about the precariousness of human life, the pillory could hardly be bettered: a life-endangering disgrace that subjected its immobilized victim to whatever missile bystanders felt moved to deliver. The eighteenth-century pillory was ‘a wise old institution, that inflicted a punishment of which no one could foresee the extent’, Charles Dickens satirically recalled in A Tale of Two Cities, his classic novel about people finding themselves on the wrong side of historical events—as Defoe was, and as was Watt.4
For, if bankruptcy, prison, and the pillory taught Defoe about the ‘struggle for survival’ of which Watt wrote, Watt also knew much more than most people about it. He knew more than most, too, about what he called ‘the bleak perspectives which recent history has brought back to a commanding position on the human stage’. Little could have qualified him better to speak from these perspectives than his experience as a prisoner of war in the Far East for the three and a half years between February 1942 and August 1945, one of over 140,000 Allied prisoners of the Japanese. Like most who went through that experience, the young officer Watt knew at close quarters disease, torture, beatings, disability, malnutrition, exhaustion, and terror, in an imprisonment that resembles not only an unforeseen reversal of the kind that punctuates the eventful lives of Defoe’s characters, but also a mid-century throwback to the depths of misery Defoe knew during his own imprisonments. Central to John Bender’s ground-breaking treatment of eighteenth-century carceral culture in relation to the emergent novel is the ‘seeming randomness’ of the ‘chaotic’ older prisons, and Maximillian Novak points out that Defoe spent a total of five months in Newgate at a time when the disease endemic to England’s squalid gaols ‘killed off more inmates than the gallows’.5 There was never anything abstract for Defoe about Moll Flanders’s memories of Newgate: ‘no Colours can represent the Place to the Life; nor any Soul conceive aright of it, but those who have been Sufferers there.’6 Nor was there anything impersonal for Watt about the problems of imprisonment and survival that he would make central to his reading of Defoe when he returned after his own harrowing incarceration to the coolly academic topic of why the English novel emerged when it did.
Although the landmark work that eventually came from this research in 1957 remains the most widely known book on its subject, it is striking that Watt’s standing as a critic was always at least as high among peers who were not themselves eighteenth-century specialists as among those who were. Across the post-war period, commentators as distant from that field and as different from each other as Irving Howe (writing in the 1950s), Tzvetan Todorov (writing in the 1980s), and Edward Said (writing in the 2000s) all characterized Watt as a literally exemplary humanities scholar for the power of his insights into how literature touches on human experience, or what Said called Watt’s worldliness.7 Of course within eighteenth-century studies, The Rise of the Novel retains its unique, perhaps uniquely aggravating, canonical stature even after more than sixty years of challenges attesting to the book’s significance. In a generous appraisal of Watt’s legacy at the end of the twentieth century, Richetti described it as ‘a book that has drawn hosts of envious detractors because of its success’, while Lennard J. Davis parodied critics’ tendency to make Watt their straw man:
Gone is the myth of the novel, a discrete form, a knowable practice, that arose at a specific time for a specific purpose. We run Ian Watt from pillar to postmodern. He made some really big mistakes—he thought there was ‘a’ novel; he thought it had a beginning; he assumed it was a narrative fiction that displaced previous narrative fictions and had a ‘rise’ located in metropole England. In doing so, he was naive, sexist, racist, Anglophilic, logocentric, essentialist, positivist, vulgarly materialistic, and probably homophobic. But nobody is perfect.8
‘To scholars of the eighteenth-century novel, it may seem “a truth universally acknowledged” that “narrative realism” and “the rise of the novel” are outmoded categories,’ writes Rachel Carnell in the opening sentence of a 2006 study that goes on to revive these distinctively Watt concepts.9 Few critical works in any literary-historical field have continued so long after their publication to provoke serious, if exasperated, engagement from other specialists rather than the conscientious citation and thought-inhibited piety appropriate to the period piece. The Rise of the Novel continues to be amplified, supplemented, or attacked—it must somehow be reckoned with—by every critic concerned with the novel’s emergence, that vast field of enquiry for which Watt’s very title, with or without sceptical quotation marks, remains the usual shorthand designation.10 The continued currency of the phrase even after all this time is suggested by Nicholas Seager’s 2012 survey of the field in a series of overviews of ‘essential criticism’: Seager’s book is titled simply The Rise of the Novel.
‘The Rise of the Novel is one of the best-known, most commonly taught, and enduringly satisfying concepts in literary criticism,’ Seager opens, and Watt’s book is its ‘classic formulation’.11 ‘ “The rise of the novel” is one of the most widely circulated narratives of English studies,’ William Beatty Warner writes: it is among ‘the grand narratives of British literary studies’.12 In a retrospective afterword to his own important revisionist work, Davis alludes to the resilience of The Rise of the Novel when he concedes that, although he had ‘tried to drive a stake into the heart of that study’, ‘Watt’s work still lives’—as if its tenacious hold over novel studies makes The Rise of the Novel something akin to either a deathless revenant or one of Richardson’s invulnerable heroines (‘The affair is over. Clarissa lives.’).13 As Ros Ballaster points out in another influential departure from Watt, Davies’s own book, with its closing chapters on Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, reveals indelible traces of Watt’s thought even at the level of organization.14 J. Paul Hunter was probably not exaggerating when he wrote that ‘Everyone…who has written about the beginnings of the English novel has been engaged in rewriting Watt and, in so doing, renewing him’.15 But notwithstanding all that has been written in augmentation or demolition of Watt’s claims about the emergence of the novel, no one has asked why he should have arrived at them in the first place: a story less about the mid-eighteenth century than of the mid-twentieth.
My first aim, then, is to uncover the formative impact of Watt’s devastating war experience on The Rise of the Novel, and to suggest why we might take seriously the origins of classic mid-century intellectual paradigms in the historical contexts that helped to make them possible. Like The Rise of the Novel, the first section of this book is in three main parts: on Watt’s fraught and historically symptomatic versions of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding respectively. It reads Watt’s literary interests in individualist enterprise (Defoe) and interiority (Richardson) and ostensibly more conservative forms of solidarity (Fielding) in relation to the literature of the Second World War prison camps. The final chapters of the book look outward in order to describe what a war-inflected criticism can tell us, first, about the renewed centrality of novelistic realism at mid-century—‘realism’ being absolutely the keyword of the Watt tradition of thinking about the novel, as well as of mid-century fiction and criticism at large—and, second, about the contingent human factor in this period’s institutions of humanities scholarship.
Departures
Homer O. Brown was surely being deliberately provocative about Watt’s transatlantic influence when he emphatically counted him among ‘American academics’ in his anti-Watt thesis, Institutions of the English Novel (1997).16 Even on more distant acquaintance than Brown’s, it would be difficult to think of Watt as anything other than English—English in a virtually paradigmatic way, almost, as a former army officer of canonical literary tastes and the empirical disposition of the kind that Chris Baldick found running through British literary criticism from Matthew Arnold through the first half of the twentieth century.17 As it happens, Watt was a trueborn Englishman only with the satirical inflection that Defoe had given the phrase in his famous Williamite lines on the nation’s mongrel formation, where ‘A True-Born Englishman’s a contradiction, | In speech an irony, in fact a fiction’.18
Watt’s full name, Ian Pierre Watt, points in this direction, with a French middle name that he appears seldom to have used after the 1950s and the unmistakably Scottish first and last names under which he published. He was certainly English in that he was born on 9 March 1917 in the Lake District village of Windermere, and grew up near Dover, one of three children of a Scottish father, Thomas Watt, a Stirling-born teacher of French, and a French mother, Renée Guitton, from Roxana’s hometown of Poitiers. So, on the one hand, he was certainly English—born a little south of the Border and brought up a little west of the Channel—and, on the other hand, not English at all by identification, according to his former Stanford colleague Thomas Moser, who remembered Watt dryly correcting anyone who referred to him as such (‘Not a drop of Anglo-Saxon blood!’).19
In any case, he spent little time after the age of 21 in the country of his birth. By the time the war broke out Watt had left Cambridge for Paris to take up a postgraduate scholarship at the Sorbonne, and within two years of the war’s ending he had married a native of Los Angeles, Ruth Mellinkoff, and spent most of his academic career in California, first rising through the professorial ranks at the University of California, Berkeley (1952–62), before serving at Stanford from 1964 until his retirement. His long expatriation was interrupted only briefly by two years in England, where he returned in 1962 to set up the School of English Studies at the embryonic University of East Anglia in Norwich, which admitted its first student intake a year later, and where Watt served on the university’s first executive committee. Institutional memory at UEA, inclining towards the piquant as institutional memory does, has Watt returning to California after only two years because the pet snake he kept in his office suffered from Norwich’s cool winters; more soberly, he gave ‘family reasons’ as his official motivation and, as he and Ruth Watt explained to Margaret Drabble when she was researching her biography of the novelist Angus Wilson (whom Watt had appointed as a Senior Lecturer), the family appears to have found sleepy Norwich a difficult place to settle in.20 A return to the United Kingdom that was intended to be permanent—and Watt’s American wife had believed it permanent at the very moment they sailed from New York—had lasted only two years. But it is easy to understand why the home country might not have felt like home.
For, spare and self-effacing though they often are, Watt’s autobiographical comments typically speak the same language of homelessness and displacement as we find in his critical writing: in his reading of the rise of the novel as a reflection of modern social flux, and then his study of the émigré Joseph Conrad, and finally in his unfinished book on what he saw as the cultural distortions of modern individualism. For example, in an autobiographical reminiscence he wrote in 1984 for the Stanford Alumni magazine—in which, somewhat ironically, he was asked to represent ‘England’ for a feature on foreign-born members of the faculty—he began by describing his realization on coming home from the war that his mother had a French accent. ‘Naturally, since she was French,’ he conceded: ‘And then I remembered that, while I was a prisoner, several people had surprised me by saying that there was something funny about the way I talked. Did I have a touch of French too? Was I a stranger in my own country?’21 Asked to write about being an alien resident of California in 1984, then, he writes instead about feeling completely foreign on his return to Britain after his imprisonment in the Far East almost forty years earlier. The essay describes meeting old friends upon his repatriation, who ‘hadn’t really changed, but I had; and they didn’t know it, but I did’, and concludes with Watt explaining that he can bear to visit his childhood town now only as a tourist.22 The foreignness of his speech and his feeling of foreignness at returning to England after the war become one; they both produce ‘that sense of speaking falsetto to all these people from the past’.23 Watt recalled elsewhere how he and other former prisoners clustered together immediately after the war, because ‘one could only talk with people who understood one’s language, and that meant people who had shared one’s history’.24
Many former prisoners used these linguistic metaphors to describe their feeling of post-war displacement. In his acclaimed memoir The Railway Man (1995), Scottish veteran Eric Lomax recalled the impossibility of making his experience understood at home: ‘I am sure that tens of thousands of returning soldiers walked bewildered into the same incomprehension. It was as though we were now speaking a different language to our own people.’25 Of course, even an ostensibly less traumatic war experience than Watt’s or Lomax’s could have been transformative in this respect; the anecdote with which Raymond Williams opened Keywords (1976) describes a meeting with another veteran on their return to Cambridge in 1945, when both men agreed that it was as if the people of ‘this new and strange world around them’ were speaking a different language from those who had served.26 Williams had ended the war as a tank commander leading his men into Germany, where they liberated the Sandbostel concentration and prisoner-of-war camp (Stalag X-B) early in May 1945.27 Asked by an interviewer if the war had affected him, Williams’ reply was unequivocal: ‘It was appalling. I don’t think anybody really ever gets over it.’28
‘I’d never thought I was the man of action type myself—and the people I know don’t seem to be either,’ an autobiographical surrogate reflects early in one of the unpublished war stories that Watt drafted shortly after his demobilization: ‘But what happened made me think again, and even now, back home, though I’ve read several books about it, I’m still wondering if I really am or not.’29 For many among this generation of literary critics—students turned soldiers, soldiers turned scholars like Watt and Williams—the Second World War had dramatically overturned distinctions between the ‘man of letters’ and the ‘man of action’.
When the war broke out in September 1939, Watt volunteered immediately and was called up three months later. In April 1940 he joined the 7th Battalion of the Royal West Kent Regiment as a second lieutenant. By this time the so-called Phony War of the winter of 1939–40 was well and truly over, and the coming weeks would bring the fall of France and the Low Countries, as well as the forced evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk. But the conflict that had been underway for years in the Far East had officially become a full-scale war between Japan and China in 1937, and it was in this distant theatre that Watt’s military career would play out, a future assured when he was posted as an officer to the 5th Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment. Within three months of promotion to the rank of lieutenant in November 1941, Watt was a severely wounded prisoner of war.
The 5th Suffolks left England in the winter of 1941 as part of the doomed 18th Division, which travelled 20,000 miles from the Suffolks’ regimental home in East Anglia to the Far East, a journey that took them across the North Atlantic to Canada, down the North American coast to the Caribbean, across the South Atlantic to South Africa, from South Africa to India, and from India to Singapore. Their objective was the defence of Singapore, an island colony of less than 300 square miles, attached by what proved to be a disastrously vulnerable causeway to the southern tip of Malaya. Diminutive Singapore was an outpost of empire distinctive for its propagandistic as well as its strategic importance, and both were critical at this potentially pivotal moment. The authors of one major history of the Second World War describe its significance in a dramatic way when they explain that Singapore was considered ‘one of the two keystones upon which the survival of the Empire depended (the other being neither Suez nor Gibraltar but nothing less than the security of the United Kingdom itself)’.30 This was the impregnable ‘Fortress Singapore’ of the imperial propaganda. As things turned out, it might more accurately have been named ‘illusion isle’, as the Australian Rohan Rivett called it in his memoir of imprisonment as a non-combatant swept up with the Allied personnel at the fall of Singapore, or, alternatively, ‘the naked island’ of his compatriot and fellow prisoner Russell Braddon’s title.31
Singapore fell after mere days of fighting: ‘a few days that, whatever we might do later, would be with us for the rest of our lives,’ Watt called them in another of his unpublished war stories from the late 1940s.32 The decision to surrender Singapore on 15 February 1942—the 5th Suffolks had arrived in Singapore only on 29 January—was perhaps the most humiliating of Britain’s wartime reversals, particularly when it became known that British and Commonwealth forces had outnumbered the victorious Japanese by a ratio of over two to one. In his celebrated history-cum-memoir of the Second World War, Winston Churchill wrote of the fall of Singapore as ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history’.33 Among those who had experienced its appalling consequences, Watt’s fellow 18th Division prisoner Ronald Searle and Malay Volunteer Ian Denys Peek summarized the surrender of Singapore with a different kind of bluntness: ‘a wickedly inept political sacrifice’ (Searle) by ‘our piss-begotten politicians and military muttonheads, who not only did nothing but prevented anyone else from doing anything’ (Peek).34 ‘Seldom in the history of war can there have been such a skein of muddle, confusion and stupidity,’ marvelled Scottish journalist Tom McGowran.35 Searle, Peek, and McGowran were among the staggering 62,000 British, Indian, and Australian personnel who were taken prisoner at Singapore alone.
Capture
‘My military career was on the comic side,’ Watt wrote in a 1967 letter to Brigadier Philip Toosey, the legendary senior officer often misidentified as the original of Alec Guinness’s monomaniacal Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai:
I was chosen to deny Singapore Zoo to the enemy and I think that the first shot fired in anger on the island was by me, with an anti-tank rifle, after I’d decided that certain buffalo, orang-outang and other large caged animals would be dangerous to leave at large once the balloon went up. My beloved Swedes of the 5th Suffolks made it clear that they would regard it as murder if I also disposed of the two zebras; and as a result they were let loose, and eventually followed us from Pongol [Punggol] Point to Bukit Timah crossroads, at a wary distance.36
The picture called up here of the young Lieutenant Watt and his gentle subordinates (the ‘Swede-bashers’ of agricultural Suffolk) withdrawing down Singapore alongside a pair of worried zebras is certainly ‘on the comic side’. Watt and his correspondent obviously never needed to remind each other that what followed the hopeless battle for Singapore was even worse, and that their situation would continue to get worse still over the following three and a half years.
Hospitalized by shrapnel wounds from a mortar shell during the futile resistance in the north-east of the island—he would still be undergoing surgery on those wounds decades later—Watt had another extremely marginal escape when he was helped out of hospital just before invading Japanese troops slaughtered the patients there.37 In the chaos of the British collapse, Watt was believed to have been killed in action on 15 February 1942, the day Singapore was surrendered, and the casualty branch of the War Office sent a letter to that effect to his next of kin, his recently widowed mother. A post-war correspondence between Watt and the War Office indicates that personnel who had managed to reach British lines in India when Malaya and Singapore fell had given unofficial but ostensibly reliable reports of Watt’s death.
It was not until 17 December, ten months after the fall of Singapore, that official information passed through the International Red Cross Committee at Geneva that Watt was alive and imprisoned. A telegram from the War Office was sent to Renée Watt two days later. Watt may have been among the fortunate prisoners who got to send a pre-printed Japanese postcard of the axiomatically fictitious ‘I am in captivity and treated well’ variety (nothing of that description appears to have survived); otherwise the news from the Red Cross would have been the last heard directly of Watt at home until the liberation of the camps in August 1945. In stark contrast to the situation of many Allied prisoners in Germany, where the Red Cross was able to facilitate remarkable feats of communication between prisoners and their homes, incarceration under the Japanese meant almost total isolation from the outside world. ‘We cannot look out and nobody can look in,’ a former prisoner remembered, describing life in the camps where he, too, spent three and a half years as ‘a totally sealed and seamless void’.38
The difficulty of looking into or out of the Japanese camps can be gauged by the extreme paucity of contemporary information about them. Responding to the hunger for knowledge among prisoners’ families, who could not know whether their men were even alive or dead, there emerged in February 1944 the indicatively flimsy first number of Far East, a special monthly edition of The Prisoner of War, the free newsletter published by the Red Cross and the St John War Organisation for the next of kin of captured personnel. The inaugural editorial would have consoled few readers: ‘Unfortunately, owing to the attitude of the Japanese in matters relating to prisoners of war, contact with the prison camps has been only partial, intermittent and uncertain, and we know nothing reliable about the camps holding most of our men.’39 This newsletter is altogether a thin document: some miscellaneous snippets of information from camps in Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan; a feature on the civilian internment camp at Stanley on Hong Kong, and another on the work of the Far East section of the Red Cross and St John Prisoner of War Department in London. Most tellingly, the centrefold is a two-page map of the Far East prison camps on which the location of camps is recorded as ‘unknown’ for Thailand: by now, Watt and many thousands of other prisoners would already have passed as much as eighteen months there, slaving on the Burma–Thailand Railway. As if trying to account for the newsletter’s comfortless insubstantiality, the second issue of Far East included a longish feature subtitled ‘The Story of What Has Been Done’, which recounted the failed efforts made by the Red Cross and the customary ‘Protecting Power’ of neutral Switzerland to secure access to the prison camps.40
In his statement to the House of Commons on 10 March 1942, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden had already—presciently—put the darkest construction on the Japanese refusal to allow the customary neutral oversight of their camps: ‘It is clear that their treatment of prisoners and civilians will not bear independent investigation.’41 Over the following months the government suppressed what was known about conditions on the Burma–Thailand Railway for fear, Sybilla Jane Flower explains, of jeopardizing their covert channels of information and provoking reprisals against prisoners whom they had no way of helping.42 Only as the tide turned in favour of the Allies did Eden give a statement to the Commons (on 28 January 1944) in which he reported on the abysmal conditions under which the prisoners were believed to be held in the railway camps, and on the atrocities (tortures, executions) committed in Shanghai, Manila, and at sea. These were ‘revolting disclosures’, in the words of the following morning’s The Times.43
‘Revolting’ was not an exaggeration. From the point of view of mere survival, it is hard to imagine how Watt’s prospects could have been worse, as a wounded officer taken prisoner by an army taught that it was irredeemably shameful for even the lowliest of troops to outlive their defeat in combat. The directive of ‘death before dishonour’ had recently been written into the Japanese soldier’s own Field Army Service Code: ‘You shall not undergo the shame of being taken alive. You shall not bequeath a sullied name.’44 As a result of this prevailing ethos, if it can be called that, prisoners were disgraced not only by their military defeat but also by their efforts to survive it. Perhaps most consequentially, the asymmetry of interests that resulted from Japan’s public indifference to the fate of its own captured personnel—an ‘ostentatious lack of interest’, The Times editorialized in 1944—deprived Allied governments of the usual leverage for securing the humane treatment of their own servicemen in what is normally (as the War Office reminded relatives of prisoners of the Germans and Italians) a mutual hostage situation.45 Only in what proved to be the war’s final year did the British have leverage of any description, in the form of threats of future punishment underwritten by Japan’s foundering military fortunes. Thus the Secretary of State for War, Sir James Grigg, reported in the House of Commons on the account of the Burma–Thailand Railway delivered by sixty British survivors of their enslavement there; they had been rescued by an American crew after the sinking of a Japanese prison ship in September 1944: ‘it is necessary that the Japanese should know that we know how they have been behaving, and that we intend to hold them responsible.’46
Back in the impenetrable camps, conditions were seldom better than life-threatening, but prisoners became adept at distinguishing between bad camps and those that were even worse, or the spectrum that one military historian crisply describes as ‘an existence that varied from the harsh to the intolerable’.47 When Singapore fell, surrendered personnel had been taken first to a massive holding camp at Changi, a former British military base in the north-east of Singapore, where disease, hunger, and overcrowding soon became dangerous. Nonetheless, so far superior were conditions at this miserable first site, where the prisoners had established their own quasi-autonomous internal administration from the outset, to other camps where the Japanese made their supremacy more intrusively and brutally felt, that internment at Changi was, according to R. P. W. Havers’s history of the camp, ‘in many ways a unique experience’.48 There were many among the thousands of prisoners taken away in forced work parties who came to think back nostalgically about even Changi. ‘You know, I used to dream of Changi and how good it was compared to where we were,’ recalled Fred Ransome-Smith, like Watt a young lieutenant in the 5th Suffolks.49 Changi ‘seemed a paradise in comparison with those we were to know later’, another veteran remembered; it was ‘like a P. O. W. heaven’, ‘a haven of rest’, and ‘like the Mecca of all prisoner of war camps’, others wrote.50
On the Line
This longing for bleak Changi was never more understandable than among the men sent north from the summer of 1942 to be assimilated into the 64,000 or so Allied prisoners of war, and in total more than a third of a million largely coerced labourers, on the new railway that the Japanese were building from Thailand into neighbouring Burma. ‘Being a POW of the Japanese was to become an involuntary subscriber to an extraordinary lottery’, was how one former prisoner remembered their predicament: ‘You could remain hungry and bored in Changi…or you could crack the bad-luck jackpot and end up on the Burma–Siam railway.’51 Along with the other unlucky ones, Watt was packed in the autumn of 1942 into a closed goods wagon shared by forty prisoners—his close friend and fellow prisoner John Durnford remembered their transportation as ‘a Black Hole of Calcutta on wheels’; Scottish veteran Alistair Urquhart likened it to ‘being buried alive’—to commence a punishing five-day, 900-mile journey up to Ban Pong in Thailand.52 From the staging camp there, prisoners were dispersed to sites on the prospective railway to Burma either by trucks or on what were sometimes, in outcome if not intention, death marches.
The building of the Burma–Thailand or Burma–Siam Railway (Thailand had taken its present name only in 1939) proved to be the most grimly significant feature of the war experience of prisoners like Watt; historian Meg Parkes estimates that two-thirds of all British prisoners in the Far East worked on its construction at some point.53 The purpose of the railway was to complete an overland military supply route between Bangkok and Moulmein, or, in effect, between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. Burma was now among the furthest outposts of a new Japanese empire that stretched across five time zones, and there was always a chance that the British and Americans over the border in India, which Japan also planned to invade, would launch a counterattack. The projected railway would cut many hundreds of miles off what was otherwise a laborious and looping sea journey between the land-bordering countries of Burma and Thailand, and allow Japanese troops to bypass the Malacca Strait, a vulnerable shipping channel, shallow and narrow, between the southern tip of Singapore and the north coast of Sumatra.
Probably because an overland route connecting Burma and Thailand would have been so direct a way of linking imperial India with colonies in the Malay Archipelago, British engineers had surveyed a railway route back in the 1880s. But everyone contemplating this project had given it up as a prohibitively bad job, with literally hundreds of miles of rock, mountain, river, swamp, bamboo, and tropical jungle to be blasted or bridged in one of the least humanly hospitable and most endemically disease-ridden (malaria, typhus, cholera) environments in Asia. But Japanese forces were triumphant in the early months of 1942—they had taken Guam, Wake Island, Hong Kong, and Malaya in January, Singapore in February, the Dutch East Indies in March, as well as Burma and the Philippines in April—and, with the attendant windfall of expendable foreign labour, military and civilian, they embarked upon the railway regardless of its manifest difficulties. They compounded the difficulties incalculably by using sick and malnourished people bearing rudimentary native hoes, picks, and bamboo baskets rather than physically fit and properly equipped manpower, and so the enterprise proved predictably deadly. The Allied War Graves Registration established in 1946 that 12,399 Allied prisoners had died there, although, in his authoritative account of the railway project, military historian Clifford Kinvig explains that this official figure clearly underestimates the real death toll, given that the continuing effects of starvation, disease, and hard labour continued to kill men long afterwards.54 This undertaking also killed perhaps 100,000 so-called native labourers, such as Burmese conscripts and Indian Tamils from the Malayan rubber plantations, brought by force and fraud from their homes across south-east Asia.
Probably because their compatriots suffered and died in captivity in numbers disproportionate to the size of the nation’s fighting forces (around 22,000 Australian personnel fell into Japanese hands), Australian memoirists recorded most extensively Allied prisoners’ experiences on the Burma–Thailand Railway. At the other extreme, very little can be learned at source of the atrocious suffering of the illiterate forced labourers from Asia, although they died in even worse circumstances and far higher numbers than Allied prisoners. Theirs were ‘the greatest losses but the hardest to measure’, writes Kinvig, ‘and only the most general indication can be given of the scale of the tragedy’.55 Uncounted and unrecorded, their bodies were buried or incinerated en masse. The memoirs of Allied prisoners give appalled accounts of how the enslaved Asian workforce was destroyed by those who had posed as liberators from European colonialism in the name of the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’, as the imperialist and racist Japanese project of conquest named itself, in one of those terminological hypocrisies so characteristic of the period.56 ‘We must never forget them’, writes one English prisoner, ‘nameless and suffering and dying in squalor, their kinfolk not even knowing what has happened to them’.57
If only from the stricken testimonies of Western prisoners, we know that the Asian workers died in huge numbers from lack of food, clean water, and any medical care. They ‘were shovelled into graves ten at a time’, according to a prisoner friend of Watt who had himself served in a burial party.58 Another prisoner working in brutal conditions near the Burma border reported that the enslaved Tamils in the camp next to his own ‘died like flies and were buried as, or just before, they died in huge communal graves’; another described how ‘every few days a huge hole was dug, and into this were thrown the dead, and sometimes the not-quite dead’.59 When starvation and disease left the Asian labourers too weak to work, the Japanese simply slaughtered them outright. In the highly documentary 1948 memoir that he wrote from his hidden camp diaries, C. F. Blackater, a Scottish officer in the Indian Army, describes deliberate mass poisonings of sick Tamils.60 Half a century later, Lomax still remembered with cold disgust how the Japanese discovered ‘a novel way of containing’ a cholera epidemic in another Tamil camp: ‘they shot its victims.’61 But even aside from the notorious brutality with which they were treated, the Asian workers had another insurmountable difficulty. Brought to the Burma–Thailand Railway individually (or, even worse, with dependent families) from far-flung sites of origin, they lacked even the Allied prisoners’ slim vestigial resources: a shared language and cultural assumptions similar enough to make organization possible, and the understanding of collective discipline instilled by their training as soldiers. ‘At least we had our military discipline,’ one Australian veteran recalled: ‘They had nothing.’62
That Watt had seen collective organization save thousands of lives when those without it died in such sickening circumstances speaks to some of his strongest intellectual commitments. For a start, it helps to explain the intensity of his sympathy with Conrad, the subject of much of his major critical work. We can guess how important Conrad had become to Watt in captivity because within ten days of his repatriation he had visited Conrad’s grave.63 Perhaps the location would always have evoked Conrad to a literary-minded prisoner; we find in the memoir of British Warrant Officer Ronald Hastain that the view of the tropical ocean from the Changi camp on Singapore brought to life the ‘sun and colour saturated prose of Conrad’.64 But Watt’s thoughts on Conrad suggest something darker in all senses. Throughout his work Watt always described admiringly Conrad’s conservative faith in the virtues of duty, renunciation, and solidarity, even while acknowledging that in the face of such atrocities as those Conrad had witnessed in the Belgian Congo the famous Conradian ideals of ‘restraint’ and ‘fidelity’ (Watt glosses these as renunciation and duty) constitute only a ‘meagre moral armament’ (C. 151). Watt describes the experience of Conrad’s surrogate Marlow in Heart of Darkness as ‘a nightmare in a common usage of the term: an experience in which the individual’s thoughts and actions are dominated by a terrifying and inexplicable sense of personal helplessness’ (C. 240). ‘In the last stages of the breakdown of his own health in the Congo, Conrad had faced alone the fact of his own mortality,’ Watt wrote, knowing better than most Conrad critics what that confrontation must have felt like: ‘He later considered the physical and moral assault of his African experience the turning point of his life’ (C. 146). Here, we might also recall that the dehumanized African labourers described in the famous grove of death scene in Heart of Darkness (‘They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation’) are being forced to build a railway through a jungle.65 Watt notices that detail as if entirely neutrally, without any autobiographical comment (C. 220).
Yet, even with their ‘meagre moral armament’, or what military discipline survived a chaotic and unexpected defeat, the death rate among Allied prisoners on the railway was one in three. Thousands died from combinations of the gruesome illnesses caused by performing hard labour on starvation rations and without medical supplies, with primitive and infested bamboo huts as their only shelter from an impossibly hostile environment of tropical monsoon-belt jungle. Among the killers were beriberi, dengue fever, diphtheria, dysentery, malaria, pellagra, scurvy, and typhus. Compounding the prisoners’ misery were the skin diseases scabies and ringworm, and, much worse, the hideous tropical phagedena, whereby even a mere scratch (unavoidable by anyone labouring almost naked like these prisoners, whose clothes the jungle had quickly rotted away) turned septic, and flesh putrefied down to the exposed bone. In the camps, tropical ulcers frequently meant gangrene, and gangrene meant primitive amputations and an agonizing death, because surgical tools and anaesthetics largely had to be improvised or done without. Periodic outbreaks of cholera, as happened at Chungkai and Konkuita, the camps in Thailand where Watt spent the worst periods of his incarceration, exacerbated—as, for that matter, they attest to—the squalor of the conditions prevailing. There were periods at some camps when open pyres were needed to burn the cholera dead. ‘I’ve never seen anything so horrible in my life…the sight of mates melting and disintegrating,’ recalled elderly veteran Reg Twigg, who had been involved in carrying out some of these mass cremations seventy years earlier.66
But not even the worst of these degrading and disfiguring diseases need be fatal, and they would not have been here had their captors thought the prisoners’ lives worth saving. The Japanese refusal even to cooperate with the Red Cross must have cost hundreds if not thousands of lives. What little the Red Cross managed to send to prisoners appears to have been stolen as a matter of course by their captors: Durnford first saw a Red Cross package only in June 1944, while Stephen Alexander (who was also in Watt’s circle of prison-camp acquaintances late in the war) recalls a Japanese handout of Red Cross packages marked April 1942 only on 17 August 1945, when the war was already over.67 The memoir of prisoner Alan Carter, captured in Java and a forced labourer in Japan, describes an entirely staged inspection in the familiar Potemkin style, with guards subsequently boasting to the starved inmates about their enjoyment of the prisoners’ Red Cross packages (‘they must have had about four parcels each’).68 Although there were occasions on which individual prisoners were knowingly worked, starved, or beaten to death, or shot, bayoneted, or beheaded, there is substantial consensus among both veterans and historians that the main cause of death was not so much deliberate cruelty as an absolutely universal indifference among their captors as to whether these expendable bodies lived or died. ‘The labourers on the railway are essentially the victims, not of calculated brutality, but of the blindness to their needs of an alien and more powerful order,’ Watt wrote: ‘they are being mercilessly destroyed by a system which is administered by [those] who make a point of not noticing what they are really doing’ (C. 220). This claim echoes those of many other former prisoners—victims, it has often been said, of ‘the indifference, unpredictability and incompetence of the Japanese’—except that here Watt was ostensibly discussing the enslaved railway workers in Heart of Darkness rather than reflecting on his own wartime experience.69 In the same vein, it is in the surprising context of a talk on Dickens that we find Watt proclaiming ‘that all power relations, whether between nations, or classes, or age groups, are most directly and yet most hypocritically expressed in the distribution of food and drink’.70
It tells its own story that the prisoners who got to stay hungry and ragged at the less remote base camps recorded with such emphasis their horror and disgust at the desperate state in which survivors of the railway trickled back. Braddon called these returned prisoners ‘wreckages of humanity’, and he, himself, had been among them:
These did not look like men; on the other hand, they were not quite animals. They had feet torn by bamboo thorns and working for long months without boots. Their shins had no spare flesh at all on the calf and looked as if bullets had exploded inside them, bursting the meat outwards and blackening it. These were their ulcers of which they had dozens, from threepenny bit size upwards, on each leg. Their thigh bones and pelvis stood out sharply and on the point of each thigh bone was that red raw patch like a saddle sore or monkey’s behind. All their ribs showed clearly, the chest sloping backwards to the hollows of throat and collar bone. Arms hung down, stick-like, with huge hands, and the skin wrinkled where muscle had vanished, like old men. Heads were shrunken on to skulls with large teeth and faintly glowing eyes set in black wells: hair was matted and lifeless. The whole body was draped with a loose-fitting envelope of thin purple-brown parchment which wrinkled horizontally over the stomach and chest and vertically on sagging fleshless buttocks.71
The Australian official war artist Murray Griffin, who had been imprisoned in Changi throughout, made it his task to record in secret sketches the medical conditions of railway survivors in the absence of other ways of documenting the experience. A similar medical-documentary compulsion shapes much of the work of the British cartoonist Searle, captured at Singapore aged 21. A pre-war Cambridge acquaintance of Watt, Searle had experienced some of the most terrible of the camps as part of the notorious ‘H Force’ (two-thirds of his party of 600 were dead within seven months); many of his drawings are almost unbearable documents of the physical deterioration of dying prisoners.72
Synthesizing the eyewitness accounts, Daws writes thus of the railway survivors as they returned to the base camps:
Some were dead on arrival; others collapsed and died before they could get to the sick huts. The rest were walking skeletons, the whites of their eyes gray, pupils just a splotch in the middle, like broken eggs. They stank to high heaven. The men in the receiving camps could smell them hundreds of yards off. They came crawling in like frightened rats; if they were offered food and help they would burst into tears.73
These young men had been—literally—fighting fit as little as eighteen months earlier, and it is instructive to find the view that one military doctor put on record in the British Medical Journal in April 1946. Lieutenant-Colonel R. Kemball Price of the Royal Army Medical Corps had studied 1,000 recently liberated prisoners sent to a hospital in India, and his report on their condition details as clinically as one would expect the physical damage inflicted by years of disease and starvation. But, of the prisoners’ emotional condition, he writes much less dispassionately that ‘anyone who saw them could never forget the experience’:
There was great superficial gaiety, but beneath this was a deep-rooted fear which showed itself when their faces were at rest. The frequent blinking and the shaking hand were a legacy of what they had been through. Their condition was aptly compared to that of the whipped dog returning to his master.74
Recording the ‘Kwai’
In the United Kingdom, the Burma–Thailand Railway is now among the merely half-remembered of the war’s atrocities. This is not true in Australia, where it is ‘accepted as a central part of the modern Australian experience’ and part of ‘the national mythology’.75 We can see something of this in novels like Richard Flanagan’s Man Booker prizewinner The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013): its protagonist is an elderly surgeon with a post-war public career recalling that of the real-life Australian army doctor Colonel Sir Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop, a celebrated national figure for his heroic leadership on the Burma–Thailand Railway. David Malouf’s The Great World (1990), which opens in the late 1980s but reaches back as far as the Diggers of the First World War, also puts the lives and deaths of the prisoners on the railway at its centre, as if it were the core of modern Australian history.
Of course, there was also widely read mid-century fiction explicitly about the prisoners of the Japanese, and Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice (1950) and Laurens van der Post’s The Seed and the Sower (1963) both became well-known films, too, the latter as Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983). Perhaps more tellingly, though, we find that a surprising range of post-war British novels turns to these prisoners’ experience almost as shorthand for wartime fear and horror. This is especially significant because of how far realist fiction tends to rely upon what it takes to be shared cultural knowledge and attitudes, although the more experimental Anthony Burgess must also have thought that imprisonment under the Japanese could serve in readers’ minds as a byword for gratuitous violence when footage from the camps is deployed during the thug Alex’s aversion therapy in A Clockwork Orange (1962). The heroine of middlebrow bestseller Angela Thirkell’s Miss Bunting (1945) has heard nothing for four years of her prisoner-of-war husband. ‘This Japanese business is as black as midnight,’ reflects her father, a retired Royal Navy man.76 A character in Alan Sillitoe’s short story ‘The Disgrace of Jim Scarfedale’, from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959), is so prematurely aged by shock that he looks ‘as if he’d just been let out of a Jap prisoner-of-war camp’.77 Finally, when Anthony Powell’s Charles Stringham, the charming alcoholic socialite of A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–75), is taken prisoner at the fall of Singapore and dies in a Japanese camp, Powell clearly assumes that his reader will know what a terrible end Stringham’s has been. A character who knew Stringham in the camp is asked after the war about their incarceration, and we are told that ‘there shot, like forked lightning, across his serious unornamental features that awful look, common to those who speak of that experience’.78 Noting the ‘instantaneous, petrifying exposure of hidden feeling’, Powell’s narrator elaborates no further—‘I had seen it before,’ he says, to readers who had also, perhaps, seen it before.79
At the same time, many former prisoners of the Japanese felt that their wartime situation was subject to a form of misremembering, and they singled out for special opprobrium the fictionalization of their experience in David Lean’s multiple-Oscar-winning The Bridge on the River Kwai. The film adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s novella of the same title, Lean’s movie appeared in 1957, the same year as The Rise of the Novel. Boulle’s 1952 novella describes how Colonel Nicholson, a senior British officer imprisoned on the Burma–Thailand Railway, comes to rescue a vital Japanese bridge project from (crudely stereotypical) Asiatic incompetence. All the while, the oblivious traitor Nicholson’s progress on the bridge is ironically doubled by a commando unit preparing, with the same technological expertise and single-mindedness of purpose, to blow the bridge up. A rubber planter in Malaya, the Free-French-supporting Boulle had spent the war in French Indochina, a prisoner of its collaborationist regime; he could have learned only at second hand of the historical events at the camp, Tamarkan, where prisoners bridged the Mae Klong River (the railway followed the course of its tributary, the Kwae Noi), and where Lieutenant-Colonel, later Brigadier, Toosey successfully took much of the internal organization of the camp out of Japanese hands. The situation at Tamarkan was close enough to Boulle’s setting as to reveal the origin of his absurdist fable about the moral indifference of the military–industrial enterprise, where it is all the same whether you build bridges or blow them up.
Watt had no fundamental problem with Boulle’s novella, believing that its schematic and quasi-allegorical form made it impossible to read as a work purporting to describe the actual experience of building the Burma–Thailand Railway. The story was ‘intended to be self-evidently absurd’, Watt wrote, and Boulle’s epigraph from Conrad’s Victory on ‘the Great joke’ underscored his ironic intent.80 If Boulle’s novella was historical at all, it was only in so far as the parallel narratives of obsessed bridge-builders and bridge-destroyers gave the novel ‘its own kind of truth’: ‘the conflict between the technical skill of the West and the blindly destructive way it is used’.81 He had much harsher words for Lean’s film adaptation, which, unlike Boulle’s self-conscious fable, used an uncomplicatedly digestible realist style in its substitution of masculine adventure for the brute fact of the prisoners’ total disempowerment.
Importantly for my purposes, the film’s worldwide success seems to have done more than anything else to irritate Watt into publishing on his wartime experiences. He otherwise said little about it in print, although the fact that his personal papers include numerous stories, poems, essays, and fragments of memoir about his imprisonment, written in the 1940s and sometimes surviving in fairly polished drafts, indicate that he must have considered publishing more about this period in his life than he eventually did. (His papers include, for example, the table of contents for a projected autobiographical war book, of which around half the named contents survive.) The only material about the war Watt published prior to the release of The Bridge on the River Kwai is ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, which appeared in the Yale Review in 1956, shortly before the publication of The Rise of the Novel. In that essay, recognizably a product of its existentialist time, Watt addressed the psychological difficulties of becoming a prisoner, and then of ceasing to be one. His former Stanford colleague W. B. Carnochan writes in another context that, although notions of struggle are typically central to the literature of imprisonment, ‘the very absence of struggle, the radical acceptance of confinement—the desire not to escape or even the love of being imprisoned—is sometimes the real story’.82 ‘The Liberty of the Prison’ comes close to this uncomfortable conclusion that psychologically it may have been even harder to come home and have to make choices again than it was to be imprisoned and choice-less. This was the feeling of being ‘conditioned by captivity, and sickly secure in it’, of which former prisoner David Piper wrote, as he recalled the terrible freedom of being helpless in the face of his likely death, when ‘there were no decisions to take’.83
‘The Liberty of the Prison’ is much more explicit than Watt’s other writings about the toll taken by (in his words) ‘one of the least-known tragedies of the Second World War’.84 Unusually, Watt touches on painful matters such as the ‘numb and bewildered fear’ of the initial phase of captivity, the months where he lay sick with malaria (‘a state of dull insensibility and exhaustion’), and his survivor guilt (a ‘case of conscience about his survival’, he dryly calls it).85 In perhaps the most overtly confessional passage he ever published, Watt recalls watching a production of Uncle Vanya not long after demobilization and trying not to cry ‘so violently that I got a cramp in my throat’: ‘I might have shrugged it off: feeling only that the people in Tchehov could express their self-pity, but that one shouldn’t in ordinary life, except for something else that happened a few days later.’86 That ‘something’ was the experience of sitting in an auditorium with other former prisoners watching a film compilation made by a Civilian Resettlement Unit to update them on the major war events that they had missed in captivity:
I didn’t enjoy the battle scenes much, but when they came to the pictures of the relief of Stalingrad, and one saw two endless lines of muffled people slowly advancing to greet each other across the waste of snow, I found that that awful crying had started again; and here was I in uniform, and with men who’d been prisoners with me.87
But rather than allow this anecdote to generate more pathos than it inevitably does—a psychologically defenceless former prisoner overcome by his unforeseen identification with the survivors of Stalingrad—Watt almost immediately explains that he and the other prisoners had been forced in the camps not ‘to realize how sorry for ourselves we were’.88 This is a punishingly dismissive way of talking about his own pain, but it is in keeping with the derisive reference to ‘self-pity’ a few sentences earlier. There is a marked habit in all Watt’s published writings about his war experience of neutralizing moral outrage with ironic self-deprecation. (As he wrote of Conrad, it is ‘the standard modern prescription—when fearful of self-exposure, take cover in irony’ (C. 346).) Still, this essay comes closer than any other to saying how terrible his experience had been. His other purportedly autobiographical essays about his imprisonment, the essays about what he came to call the ‘myth’ of the Kwai, understate almost to the point of misrepresenting the depth of personal suffering that had taught him how falsely David Lean had represented the Burma–Thailand Railway.
Perhaps it is not surprising that Watt’s war experience is largely unspoken in his published work: he was a critic rather than a creative writer, after all. But this special kind of reticence seems to me attributable in part to his membership of a generation of mid-century British literary critics who were never attracted to contemporary dogmas about the irrelevance of the writer’s intentions and the critic’s ability to interpret them, but, on the contrary, expected from serious readers a high level of what we would now call emotional intelligence. Watt’s friend William (in correspondence ‘Billy’) Empson, for instance, argued to the end of his life that the reader ‘ought to be trying all the time to empathize with the author (and of course the assumptions and conventions by which the author felt himself bound); to tell him that he cannot even partially succeed is about the most harmful thing you could do’.89 In another attack on what he considered the inhuman nullity of New Critical orthodoxy, Empson deplored the (‘petulant’) critical position that says ‘that you won’t be bothered with anything but the words on the page…If you cared enough you would.’90 ‘There is always an appeal to a background of human experience which is all the more present when it cannot be named,’ Empson wrote in 1947, in his preface to the post-war edition of Seven Types of Ambiguity.91 It is difficult not to sense an unnamed meaning in the strange apology that opens Watt’s Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, where Watt announces that any critic embarking on a discussion of Conrad’s troubled life ‘must wonder how far the triviality of his own deprivations may have disabled him for the task’ (C. 1). Watt obviously did not specify what constituted this particular critic’s knowledge of ‘deprivation’; it was self-evidently not ‘trivial’, but this was not the place to discuss it. Indeed, even when he appeared to be writing directly about his imprisonment, he tended strongly towards self-effacement, as Frank Kermode noticed when he wrote that in his late lecture ‘The Bridge over the River Kwai as Myth’ Watt ‘nowhere dwells on his own work and suffering’.92
In any case, the received wisdom on dealing with returned prisoners in 1945 was to encourage them to avoid speaking about their experiences. That this was characteristic of the time is suggested by Ruth Leys’s influential Trauma: A Genealogy (2000), which notes the surprising failure of the phenomenon of trauma to command much interest at mid-century, even in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the Second World War.93 It is not remotely surprising to find that prisoners’ memoirs often attest to the clinically traumatic effects of their experience: life-threatening levels of depression and anxiety; unmanageable anger, restlessness, and hyper-vigilance; insomnia, flashbacks, and nightmares. Having worked closely with these men for decades, the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine found that over a third of Far East prisoners suffered from ‘classical PTSD’ long before the syndrome had been named, let alone understood.94 A full sixty-five years after his liberation, Urquhart mentioned nightmares that were still ‘so bad that I fight sleep for fear of the dreams that come with it’.95 Judith Herman explains that chronic post-traumatic symptoms such as these are longest lasting when they emerge from a period of terrorizing and entrapping circumstances, as distinct from Freud’s single instance of ‘fright’.96
Former prisoners of the Japanese had almost certainly needed more help than they received. The War Office established twenty Civilian Resettlement Units (CRUs) across the country to help reintegrate former prisoners of war through a residential stay of five or six weeks. In his history of British demobilization, Alan Allport rightly notes that, ‘considering how blasé the Forces could be about the difficulties of readjustment, it stands out as a humane and imaginative initiative that must have done much good’.97 Writing specifically about former prisoners of the Japanese in his history of modern military psychiatry, Ben Shephard likewise notes the valuable work of these units; the problem was that they were voluntary, and relatively few Far East prisoners attended them.98 Indeed, that only approximately 4,500 out of the 37,583 returned prisoners of the Japanese attended raises the possibility that many of these men were psychologically far too unwell to know how ill they really were. Shephard identifies another problem, though: ‘a general, officially orchestrated repression of the “unpleasantness” in the Far East, born of a very British combination of concern for relatives’ feelings and obtuse official secretiveness’: prisoners were urged not to speak about their experiences, and families were urged not to ask about them.99
Watt alludes to this prescription when he describes returning to the family home after the war, where he encountered his mother’s puzzling (and implicitly hurtful—although this is not the sort of thing he would say outright) incuriosity, an apparent indifference maintained only until ‘awkwardly’ she told him that she had been urged by the repatriation authorities not to mention the prison camps.100 In The End of a Hate (1958), the second volume of his prisoner-of-war memoirs, Braddon also describes his mother dutifully following all the advice conveyed by a psychiatrist on the treatment of former prisoners of war. This was ‘a long list of Dos and Don’ts…wrong, without fail, in every one of them’: ‘We, whose only experience over the past four years was captivity, were never to be questioned about either those years or our captors.’101 Another Australian veteran reports: ‘We were told not to discuss our experiences with relatives and friends; and they in turn were advised not to ask us about our experiences. (This was the current medical thinking—which these days is completely reversed.)’102
Many other former prisoners refer to the same presumably well-meaning but damaging conspiracy of silence when they recount their homecoming in their memoirs, and no doubt with self-conscious irony, given that these memoirs are by their mere existence contravening the injunction of forgetful reticence, and their authors’ felt need to write them so plain a testament to its failure. Durnford opens his memoir with a verse in which ‘friends avoid, with genuine regret, | Mentioning days they like us to forget’.103 He ends with his homecoming, in a conclusion that offers no closure:
There was news of friends, familiar things, of public and private matters all in the cheerful, unemotional manner of English family conversation. But there was no time then over the knives and forks—and somehow there has never been an opportunity since—to explain that things were not the same, and could not be.104
Piper recalled a different kind of reticence, when people ‘politely…asked us what it had been like, and we could not tell them; when we tried to tell them, they changed the subject soon enough, and soon too we learned not to try’.105
In any case, the stiff upper lip was already highly developed among prisoners. In a memoir published, instructively, only half a century after the end of the imprisonment it records, Lomax wrote that ‘we survivors almost competed with each other in laconic understatement’; during their imprisonment they had ‘all tried to be patterns of courage to each other, and the price we paid would not be exacted in full until much later’.106 Durnford gives an imperishable instance of this verbal stoicism in captivity when he writes of two artillery subalterns ‘whose stock-in-trade expression for starvation, murder and sudden death was “Never a dull moment” ’.107
Christopher Hitchens attributed to Watt a similar combination of reticence and gallows humour, when he recounted in his autobiography a 1987 visit to the ‘dry, wry, and donnish’ Watt on the Stanford campus:
He [Watt] admitted later that, detecting other people’s reserve after returning home from these wartime nightmares, he had developed a manner of discussing them apotropaically, as it were, so as to defuse them a bit. And he told me the following tale, which I set down with the hope that it captures his memorably laconic tone of voice:
Well, we were in a cell that was probably built for six but was holding about sixteen of us. There wasn’t much food and we hadn’t been given any water for quite a while. The heat was absolutely ferocious. Dysentery had begun to take its toll, which was distinctly disagreeable at such close quarters…
Added to this unpleasantness, we could hear one of our number being rather badly beaten by the Japanese guards, with rifle-butts it seemed, in their guardroom down the corridor. At this rather trying moment one of my young subalterns, who’d managed to fall asleep, started screaming and flailing and yelling. He was shouting ‘No, no—please don’t…Not any more, not again, Oh God please.’ Hideous noises like that. I had to take a snap decision to prevent panic, so I ordered the sergeant to slap him and wake him up. When he came to, he apologized for being a bore but brokenly confessed that he’d dreamed he was back at Tonbridge.108
Hitchens uses this blackly comic anecdote to introduce his discussion of his own schooldays, but it also speaks to his admiration for the culture of sardonic reticence that this kind of education had instilled in British men of Watt’s generation.
And reticence is itself among Watt’s own critical preoccupations. Late in life, he wrote approvingly of Cervantes as ‘the least confessional of writers, much too proud to give us any notion of his own personal experiences of humiliation and defeat’—Cervantes in fact had also been a war-wounded soldier, a prisoner, and a slave labourer (a captive for five and a half years, according to his prologue to the Exemplary Stories).109 This correspondence was hardly lost on Watt, although, perhaps needless to say, it elicited no autobiographical disclosures; his comment appears in Myths of Modern Individualism, where he comments merely as if in passing that all the book’s subjects had experienced imprisonment at some stage in their lives (MMI 137). Watt used similar terms in Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, where it is even clearer that they were meant as praise: Conrad ‘scorned the confessional genre’, and was ‘the last man either to provide raw biographical data for public consumption, or to disclose anything which might prove in the slightest embarrassing to himself or to others’ (C. 25). Watt speculated that Conrad’s reluctance to ‘explain…to the uninitiated’ the culture from which he had been painfully severed must have been a form of psychic defence against ‘traversing endless tracts of national, family, and personal history, all of them too painful to contemplate and too complicated to share. It was better to keep quiet’ (C. 9). We learn that Conrad had concealed a psychological breakdown to avoid ‘deeply humiliating explanations of the sufferings of a distant past which nobody else would ever really understand anyway’ (C. 13). Conrad himself had Marlow declare that ‘the wisdom of life…consists in putting out of sight all the reminders of our folly, of our weakness, of our mortality; all that makes against our efficiency—the memory of our failures, the hints of our undying fears, the bodies of our dead friends’, in a novel with ventriloquistic qualities that, appropriately enough, interested Watt deeply.110 Watt quotes these lines from Lord Jim—lines about good form and repression—shortly before he turns to Conrad’s representation of the stiff upper lip. The ‘stiff upper-lip’ is ‘the special reticence of the anglo-saxon masculine code’, Watt writes, and its observance is either ‘social decorum’ or ‘a strenuous and unnatural psychological posture’ (C. 317). Among all readers of Conrad, he was placed to see both sides.
The fifty years after the war’s end saw the publication of many memoirs by former prisoners; and indeed more than fifty years, allowing for books such as Peek’s acclaimed One Fourteenth of an Elephant (2003), Urquhart’s The Forgotten Highlander (2010), and Twigg’s posthumously published Survivor on the River Kwai (2013). Reflecting on the fact that he wrote directly of his wartime internment under the Japanese only forty years later, the English novelist J. G. Ballard told an interviewer that ‘those experiences took a long time to forget, and a long time to remember’.111 But some had documented their years of imprisonment as they unfolded, and all these prison-camp diarists and artists had consciously risked their own lives to do so, in the full knowledge that the Japanese had prohibited such record-keeping among their prisoners. (And once defeat looked imminent, the Japanese would also destroy many of their own records of the camps: ‘documents that would be unbearable in the hands of the enemy,’ as their directive put it in August 1945.112) The inordinately brave George Aspinall managed to take secret photographs from his capture at Singapore (at the age of only 18) all the way up to the Burma–Thailand Railway; his commanding officer saved the contraband negatives by hiding them in a latrine borehole. Medical officer Dr Robert Hardie kept a diary on army message forms stashed inside a flask; the Scottish artist John Mennie hid his drawings in the hollow of a bamboo walking stick; with the help of dying prisoners, Searle hid his work in the cholera huts that the guards were too afraid to enter; Blackater wrote notes on flimsy India paper (‘the broad margin from pages of “The Oxford Book of English Verse” ’) and hid them inside the back of a hairbrush; Rivett kept his papers under the coverings on his ulcerated legs.113 Another memoirist, Roy Whitecross, fearfully had a friend bury his diary in two tin cans ‘thirty-seven paces due south of the well we had dug in the camp’; he saw another prisoner beaten to death by Japanese guards for being discovered with a pencil.114 John Coast, a close friend of Watt’s, published one of the earliest of the memoirs in 1946, but Railroad of Death was written on the ship home, because Coast had never been able to find the manuscript that he had hurriedly buried at Chungkai in anticipation of one of the potentially deadly Japanese searches.115 The camp’s commanding officer buried his own diary two feet down in the grave of another English prisoner.116
Decades later, Watt recalled visiting a liberated camp two days after the war’s end, where he watched ‘scores of ex-prisoners circling aimlessly about with their eyes on the ground, like mushroom pickers’, looking for the buried diaries for which they had risked their lives.117 ‘I did not realise how many had taken that risk until long after the end of the war,’ Watt explained in 1981, in a public lecture defending the humanities as a reflection of a universal ‘need to record and testify’ and ‘an assertion of the individual’s sense that his memory of his past, his historical experience, is an essential part of his sense of self’.118 In The Rise of the Novel he praised Defoe’s memoir style of narrative for creating ‘a sense of personal identity subsisting through duration and yet being changed by the flow of experience’ (RN 24); in Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, he praised Lord Jim for showing how ‘the internal sense of the duration of the self and of others is given a context, shaped, and made real, through memory’ (C. 302). The real-world witnesses to the Japanese prison camps must also have been on Watt’s mind when, in an essay on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four written around the same time as he contemplated the relevance of humanistic enquiry even in catastrophic conditions, he emphasized the power of the inner motives driving Orwell’s hero to keep a diary that he knows could get him killed. Winston Smith is not the last man in Europe, nor is he the last human being of his torturer O’Brien’s taunts, but, rather, he is ‘the last humanist’, because his diary ‘is a literary acte gratuit of a heroic kind, since endangering his life merely to give an objective testimony to his view of the truth about himself and his time surely bespeaks Winston’s deep need for self-expression’.119
There is an oblique and rather moving manifestation of the same compulsion ‘to record and testify’ in Watt’s habit of diagnosing fictional characters with diseases whose lethal progress he had witnessed in the prison camps. Robinson Crusoe’s life-endangering but soul-saving fever is ‘presumably malaria’, Watt supposes in a parenthetical afterthought (MMI 159), while Conrad’s skeletal Kurtz, turning into symbolic ivory at the point of death, is based on someone who is probably ‘in the last stages of dysentery—a disease peculiarly repulsive in its physical manifestations, and usually marked by an unimaginable degree of emaciation’ (C. 142). Here, Watt also feels compelled to note that the real-world source for Kurtz was absolutely not buried ‘in a muddy hole’, as Marlow describes Kurtz, ‘but in a proper grave in the cemetery at the Baptist mission’ (C. 141–2). This would seem an almost pedantic correction were it not that Watt had once seen so many friends buried with the same lack of ceremony as the hastily dispatched Kurtz.
Disease, starvation, and exhaustion had left Watt gravely ill by the end of the war. If his mere survival showed that he was ‘one of the lucky ones…back’, as a character tells the returned prisoner-of-war protagonist of Henry Green’s Back, Watt felt that he had been one of the lucky ones all along, if only in a somewhat relative sense, as an officer. He believed that ‘those who were not officers had a much harder time in nearly all respects’.120 That other prisoners had it worse is a common theme of prisoners’ memoirs, and at times the reader senses something like survivor guilt (or, in Watt’s laconic phrase, a ‘case of conscience about his survival’) in their insistence on this point. Of course, the contrasts that they drew have some factual basis: prisoner-memoirists often resort to the all-surpassingly terrible predicament of the Asian labourers by way of contrast; and, as an officer, Watt would usually have had enough money to pay for black-market duck eggs or bananas, where they could be found, to supplement the lethally inadequate prison-camp ration of dirty, weevil-riddled rice.121 Even so, he had suffered in the course of his captivity with malaria, beriberi, diphtheria, and permanently scarring tropical ulcers, not to mention the psychological and other after-effects of having been beaten up and seen others beaten up by the unpredictably violent Korean guards.122 (Japan had annexed Korea in 1910, and even their victims supposed that the racially subordinated Korean conscripts were mostly taking out their own bad treatment on the prisoners in their power.) Watt’s repatriation was delayed by what was now extremely fragile health, which meant hospitalization in Burma, and he was finally demobilized only in March 1946. The year in which he published The Rise of the Novel opened with his receipt on 3 January of the only monetary compensation he seems to have received: a cheque for $85.40 supplied via the Red Cross for his share as a former prisoner in a liquidation of Japanese assets.123
The Rise of the Novel Revisited
‘We were superficially quite normal enough for the idea that nothing had left its mark to survive for quite a time; but the idea, of course, was not altogether true,’ Watt wrote in ‘The Liberty of the Prison’.124 In the decade since demobilization, Watt had commenced and abandoned a book about orality and literacy with the social anthropologist Jack Goody, with whom he had been an English student at Cambridge, and who was, not incidentally, a former prisoner of war in Italy and Germany. (Goody believed that it was their shared wartime experience of having ‘for the first time in our lives been deprived of books and newspapers’ that led them to contemplate ‘the role of writing in human societies’.125) Eventually Watt returned to his pre-war research on the emergence of the novel in relation to eighteenth-century print culture. This project went through many drafts and titles: ‘Public Taste and the Development of the Novel, 1719–1754’, ‘The Novel and its Society, 1719–1754’, ‘The Novel and its Reader, 1719–1754’, and ‘The Reading Public and the Rise of the Novel, 1719–1754’. But, in the more resonantly titled book to which this research ultimately led, the growth of the reading public, once so important, is allotted merely an avowedly ‘brief and tentative’ chapter with only a heavily qualified claim about the extent of eighteenth-century literacy (RN 35). The emphasis of The Rise of the Novel falls elsewhere. The rise of the novel as the rise of the reading public gets replaced by what became Watt’s canonical argument about the rise of the novel as the rise of realism: ‘realism of presentation’, an implicitly individualistic new empiricism, and ‘realism of assessment’, or the effort to judge subjective experience by shared social and moral values. As all students of the eighteenth-century novel learn, Watt uses Defoe and Richardson to represent ‘realism of presentation’, while Fielding exemplifies more briefly ‘realism of assessment’.
Watt’s preface to The Rise of the Novel mentions his dissatisfaction with his earlier focus on literacy: reading eighteenth-century novelists doubtless requires us to take into account the impact of changing audiences for prose fiction, ‘but their works are surely more profoundly conditioned by the new climate of social and moral experience which they and their eighteenth-century readers shared’ (RN 7). I show in the coming chapters how Watt’s book, too, was ‘profoundly conditioned’ by a ‘new climate of social and moral experience’. It is no accident that one of Watt’s own keywords is ‘environment’ (‘fateful’ and ‘lacerating’ are other expressive tics), although it is overshadowed in The Rise of the Novel by Watt’s no less instructive recourse, on well over two hundred occasions, to ‘reality’ and its cognates.
The Rise of the Novel starts from the assumption that the works of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding are axiomatically important, and Watt’s aim is to illuminate the historical, social, and moral conditions that made them possible. This book, in turn, assumes that critics such as Watt matter, and pursues a similarly reconstructive wish to explore the extraordinary conditions that shaped early post-war thinking about literature in ways that only historical distance makes legible. We see there the circuit connecting literature and non-literary life: the lived experiences through which we read literature, and which shape the ways in which we read it, produces readings that in turn make sense of the experiences that drove the readings. So I assume that there is a fundamental sincerity in literary criticism that survives the occasionally anaesthetizing circumstances under which it is produced, and even that sincerity in humanistic enquiry is a good thing; and that academic writing—for once, the urbane Watt uses words more sentimental than mine—‘should above all contain nothing which the writer doesn’t believe in his heart of hearts’.126 ‘Should Criticism be Humanist?’ Watt asked in a talk on the BBC’s Third Programme in 1952. For Watt, the humanist approach was exemplified by the work of Richards, Empson, Leavis, Lionel Trilling, and implicitly himself, against the formalisms of the New Criticism: ‘the humanists giving pride of place to the extrinsic interest and values of the literary work, to its value for the reader, and for society as a whole’.127 Literary criticism was about both the individual and the common good.
As Watt wrote, literary criticism is ‘subject to the processes of history’, and, if the orientations underlying this book are close enough to those that formed Watt’s work to explain why anyone would write a book about another critic in the first place, distance as much as affiliation defines our relationship to mid-century literary critics. Other mid-century humanists have attracted renewed interest in recent years: on the British side, pre-eminently Empson, although intermittently Leavis; and, on the American side, Trilling and perhaps F. O. Matthiessen.128 Like Watt, they wrote too long ago to be actually imitable, but also long enough ago to benefit from the powerful charisma of a time when literary study felt secure about its own purposes. That said, something more than nostalgia should encourage us to read mid-century classics with fresh eyes. In the closing paragraph of his survey of the ‘rise of the novel’ debates, Seager insists that his readers should ‘test against the original all claims about what Ian Watt argues’; his blunt rationale is only momentarily surprising: ‘In the course of my reading for this study I have found a considerable extent of misprision and, what is worse, misrepresentation of The Rise of the Novel. It has unfortunately become a book more often caricatured than consulted.’129
The obvious precedent for my reading of the life in Watt’s work is one of the books to which he explicitly declared his indebtedness, Erich Auerbach’s ‘brilliant panorama’ Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (RN 79). The origins of Mimesis (1946) in its author’s wartime exile in Istanbul as a Jewish German scholar separated from his library and his country by Nazi race laws have been known for so long that Auerbach’s wartime experience is almost inseparable from the story he tells in the book. To name another work to which Watt avows his indebtedness (RN 84), Georg Lukács’ Theory of the Novel (1920) declares its own historical provocations at the outset, when Lukács writes in his preface that this book was his response to the First World War. The pain of being a hostage to geopolitical upheaval finds expression in its famous theory of ‘transcendental homelessness’: although Lukács’s Obdachlosigkeit is the ‘homelessness’ of ordinary English usage, the standard English translation also renders as ‘homelessness’ what Lukács calls Heimatlosigkeit—which is not (just) about losing the roof over your head but about a spiritual, even existential, sense in which you have been uprooted from your own homeland, your habitat. The Rise of the Novel confirms no less the truism about what is hidden in plain sight. Watt’s former colleague Carnochan wrote of Watt’s past as ‘an experience that some of Defoe’s characters could have survived—but…not many others’, when he mentioned Watt’s war in an essay published shortly after his former colleague’s death, in the only discussion of The Rise of the Novel that comes close to implying that Watt’s intellectual life may have been affected by his military experience.130 Carnochan is not concerned with Watt’s imprisonment as such, but he conveys powerfully the sense that there is a ‘protective’ quality to Watt’s urbane style that only partly conceals ‘the existential dread that underlies the rise of the novel’.131 A few years later, Roger Bourke discussed Watt’s Kwai essays in his valuable survey of fiction about the Far East prisoners, although he supposed that ‘it would be wrong to claim that the shadow of his imprisonment hangs over The Rise of the Novel’.132 But Bourke quotes the passage where the ‘shadow of his imprisonment’ is most obvious. Here is Watt closing his discussion of Defoe:
The Second World War, especially, brought us closer to the prophetic nature of Defoe’s picture of individualism. Camus used Defoe’s allegorical claim for Robinson Crusoe as epigraph to his own allegory, La Peste (1948): ‘It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.’ At the same time André Malraux wrote that only three books, Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote and The Idiot, retained their truth for those who had seen prisons and concentration camps. (RN 133)
Or prisoner-of-war camps, Watt could have added, but did not. We will see these incomplete and private references frequently in what follows.
This passage Watt quotes is explicitly about obliquity—Defoe and then Camus using one kind of imprisonment to represent another—but is itself deploying indirection in occluding Watt’s own biographical situation. For many among this generation of critics, an interest in indirection followed their easy acceptance of psychoanalysis, as when Watt wrote of the difference between Conrad’s early and late fiction: ‘it was in the early works that Conrad had drawn most directly upon his own experiences of disillusionment, isolation, and suffering; and after he had once painfully discovered his own ways of coming to imaginative terms with these experiences, there was no longer the need, and there could hardly be the wish, to do it again’ (C. 358). Another British prisoner of the Japanese who became a literary critic, Graham Hough argued that Freud had ‘altered the moral and emotional landscape of the West more fundamentally than anyone since Rousseau’.133
What Freud can do for us…is to show that what might appear to be a rather perverse literary device, a meaningless obliquity, is in fact deeply rooted in our psychological habit. The elaboration of a raw personal situation into a form in which it can be more readily accepted is not a matter of evasiveness or decorum, but a profound psychological necessity.134
This book is centrally concerned with Watt’s ‘elaboration of a raw personal situation into a form in which it can be more readily accepted’. The ‘raw personal situation’ from which we write is unlikely to be as terrifying as those Watt and Hough had known, but perhaps it is true that literature—or literary criticism—allows us to say what we would never say on our own behalf, some of which we never even knew we wanted to say before the encounter with the text that licensed its saying. Watt would have recognized this phenomenon too, for, as he wrote in yet another loaded passage in Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, the need ‘to be articulate about matters which have hitherto been more or less private or unconscious, is perhaps the commonest way in which we clarify our own perceptions and convictions’ (C. 257).
Essentially this book suggests that Watt’s criticism thinks through painfully distinctive modern experiences: problems of subjectivity, individuality, and the demands of communal existence; the lived effects of violence, dispossession, and fear; tensions between the impulse towards testimonial expression and the sense of emotional and verbal decorum. An American colleague greeted the publication of the Conrad book as ‘More Watt on Life’, and Watt professed not to mind ‘the ironic aspersion’ implied in the suggestion that his criticism drifted far beyond the ostensible subject of analysis.135 It is hard to guess how conscious Watt was that he was often writing about more than the literary works in front of him, but his own comments on how far Richardson knew what he was doing as a novelist seem apt: ‘it seems reasonable to say that, in general, although a writer does not always know what he has written, he cannot write what he does not know.’136 What any critic ends up actually writing about is dizzyingly overdetermined, and accidents of many kinds stand behind scholarly interests that appear to be freely chosen. But there is surely some accounting for taste. Perhaps what Watt wanted to say in the autobiographical work he never published he could say most expressively when he was not writing about himself. Here, one recalls the most influential insight of trauma theory, that symptomatic project of historicism meeting poststructuralism as the Second World War generation reached the end of their lives: traumatic experience is not directly available to consciousness but can be reconstructed from its rehearsal.
My debt to that transformative body of work must be obvious even in the basic premise of this book, but Watt’s story is more than a confirmation of what are now psychoanalytic truisms, whereby untimeliness and indirection are of the essence, and the return in criticism to his harming evinces merely what Freud’s foundational model of traumatic recurrence had called ‘the impulse to work over in the mind some overpowering experience so as to make oneself master of it’.137 Naturally, we could elaborate ingeniously the parallel between Cathy Caruth’s emphasis on the image of ‘falling’ in traumatic discourse with the utterly blindsiding fall of Singapore. An experience of traumatizing fright on the grand scale, this previously unthinkable event opens many prisoners’ memoirs. Borrowing Caruth’s terms, it is ‘the traumatic accident’ that ‘takes place too soon, too suddenly, too unexpectedly, to be fully grasped by consciousness’.138 ‘When Singapore capitulated, late in the afternoon of Sunday 15 February, our lives were split into two with the brutal finality of a guillotine blade,’ one veteran recalled with extraordinary psychological acuity: ‘It could not have been more abrupt, more complete, or more destructive to our personalities.’139 But to show how the war finds expression in Watt’s writing is to make a more affirmative argument than to cast criticism as a symptom of unresolved trauma. While this is the story of someone surviving experiences that might have killed him several times over, so to speak, it is also about potentially annihilating experiences being turned into something creative, durable, and analytically powerful.
But—finally—to say so is merely to reprise Watt’s views once more. These transformations of personal loss and fear into sanely measured perspectives on the external world were the basis of his deepest critical affinities, Conrad and Samuel Johnson: ‘Neither Johnson nor Conrad wrote directly about their inner lives, and in each case it is only our subliminal sense of great energies at play to keep turbulent and destructive personal feelings under conscious control which makes us feel that we are in touch with one of the great heroes of the wars of the mind’ (C. 25). The traditional stiff upper lip again, perhaps, except that Watt is suggesting that the codes of stoicism are finally transparent to the ‘subliminal sense’ of a sympathetic reader who is attuned to the ways in which private pain can be turned into shareable insights about the world. This presumption of profound but tacit understanding cannot have been unusual among those who experienced the Second World War, a war in which, as Tony Judt so memorably wrote, ‘everyone lost something and many lost everything’.140
‘Sympathy is a form of knowledge’, R. H. Tawney wrote just after the war, in a line from his classic essay on the relationship between literature and history that Watt was given to quoting: ‘It cannot be taught. It can only be absorbed by association with those the depths of whose natures has enabled them most profoundly to feel and most adequately to express it.’141 For Watt this kind of encounter is a reflection of ‘how people become human’, a move towards ‘the prime condition of civilized life: awareness of the reality of the other’.142 Reading, he continued, ‘involves a deep and unconditional awareness of the real and independent existence of all the multiplicity of things and experiences outside the individual’s subjective world’.143 What Tawney called sympathy Watt said was no more or less than the imagination, ‘the literal imagination’: our means of ‘entering as fully as possible in all the concrete particularities of a literary work or the lives of others or the lessons of history’.144
1 Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific (New York: William Morrow, 1994), 17.
2 Henry Green, Back (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009), 74.
3 John Richetti, The Life of Daniel Defoe (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 4.
4 Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (London: Penguin, 2003), 63.
5 John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1, 11. Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 210, 702.
6 Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 276.
7 In Howe’s laudatory review, The Rise of the Novel is ‘that rare thing: a model of excellence’, a major departure from what Howe considered ‘the sectarian dogmatism’ of recent years (Irving Howe, ‘Criticism at its Best’, Partisan Review, 25 (1958), 150, 145). Todorov singles out Watt for anti-programmatic, humanist ‘masterpieces of literary criticism’ (Todorov, Literature and its Theorists, 106). Said reviewed Watt’s Conrad in the Nineteenth Century as ‘nothing short of a masterpiece’: ‘one could call Mr Watt’s style of criticism Johnsonian: it is generous, and it endows its material with perspective and humanity’; ‘Watt’s study of Conrad is worldly in the best sense of that term, and because of that worldliness it is one of the great critical works produced since the 1950s’ (Edward W. Said, ‘Conrad in the Nineteenth Century’, New York Times, 9 March 1980, 1, 23, 23).
8 John Richetti, ‘The Legacy of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel’, in Leo Damrosch (ed.), The Profession of Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reflections on an Institution (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 96. Lennard J. Davis, ‘Who Put the “The” in “the Novel”? Identity Politics and Disability in Novel Studies’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 31/3 (Summer 1998), 317–18.
9 Rachel Carnell, Partisan Politics, Narrative Realism, and the Rise of the British Novel (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 1.
10 In increasing distance from Watt: Michael McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), is a sophisticated amplification that insists on a dialectical rather than teleological account of forces that produced the novel; J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), addresses the prehistory of the novel, and includes a generous prefatory tribute to Watt’s accomplishment (xx); Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) and How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), follows Watt in identifying novelistic subjectivity with liberal subjectivity, while focusing respectively on the feminization of subjectivity and the function of the realist novel in delimiting personhood; Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), focuses on the relationship between the novel and the ambiguities of ‘news’ in the long eighteenth century; Homer Obed Brown, Institutions of the English Novel: From Defoe to Scott (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), objects to what he takes to be Watt’s treatment of the eighteenth-century novel as if it were merely waiting to be discovered prior to its early nineteenth-century institutionalization; William Beatty Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), approaches the eighteenth-century novel not as privileged individual works but as one among numerous forms of media culture; Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), rejects almost all Watt’s premises, attributing the emergence of the novel instead to the multicultural worlds of the classical Mediterranean. When I say that ‘the rise of the novel’ is established shorthand, I refer to such major contributions to that field as Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Frances Ferguson, ‘Rape and the Rise of the Novel’, Representations, 20 (Autumn 1988), 88–112; Firdous Azim, The Colonial Rise of the Novel (London: Routledge, 1993); Josephine Donovan, Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405–1726 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999); Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Carnell, Partisan Politics, Narrative Realism, and the Rise of the British Novel; and Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). In fact, the ‘rise of the novel’ formula appears as early as Charlotte E. Morgan, The Rise of the Novel of Manners: A Study of English Prose Fiction between 1600 and 1740 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911).
11 Nicholas Seager, The Rise of the Novel (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2012), 1.
12 Warner, Licensing Entertainment, 1.
13 Davis, Factual Fictions, xiv. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (Penguin: London, 2004), 883.
14 Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 13.
15 Hunter, Before Novels, xx.
16 Brown, Institutions of the English Novel, xiii.
17 Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1932 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 203–5.
18 Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings, ed. P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens (London: Penguin, 2011), 36.
19 Thomas C. Moser, ‘Some Reminiscences’, Stanford Humanities Review, 8/1 (2000), 41.
20 The snake story appears in print in Lorna Sage’s obituary for Watt’s successor in the Dean’s office. ‘Obituary: Professor Nicholas Brooke’, Independent, 10 November 1998. (The snake belonged to Watt’s son.) Margaret Drabble interviewed Ian and Ruth Watt in 1992: ‘the Watts did in the event find Norwich uncongenial: their American-reared children found the schools old-fashioned, with too much sport and religion’ (Margaret Drabble, Angus Wilson: A Biography (London: Secker & Warburg, 1995), 315). The reference to Watt’s departure for ‘family reasons’ appears in the Annual Report of the Vice-Chancellor, 1963–4, University of East Anglia Special Collections.
21 Ian Watt, ‘Dover, November 1945’, Stanford University Special Collections, SC401-ACCN 1994–106, Box 23, Folder 1.
22 Watt, ‘Dover, November 1945’.
23 Watt, ‘Dover, November 1945’.
24 Ian Watt, ‘The Liberty of the Prison: Reflections of a Prisoner of War’, Yale Review, 44 (1956), 529.
25 Eric Lomax, The Railway Man (New York: Norton, 1995), 209.
26 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976), 9.
27 Fred Inglis, Raymond Williams (London: Routledge, 1995), 100–1.
28 Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (London: New Left Books, 1979), 57.
29 Ian Watt, ‘A Chap in Dark Glasses’, Stanford University Special Collections, SC401-ACCN 1990-131, Box 56, Folder ‘POW Stuff’.
30 Peter Calvocoressi, Guy Wint, and John Pritchard, The Penguin History of the Second World War (London: Penguin, 1999), 909.
31 Rohan D. Rivett, Behind Bamboo: An Inside Story of the Japanese Prison Camps (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1946), unpaginated section title. Russell Braddon, The Naked Island (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2005).
32 Ian Watt, ‘Too Much Foresight’, Stanford University Special Collections, SC401-ACCN 1994-106, Box 22, Folder ‘POW Stuff’.
33 Winston Churchill, The Second World War, iv. The Hinge of Fate (New York: Mariner, 1986), 81.
34 Ronald Searle, To the Kwai—and Back: War Drawings 1939–1945 (London: Souvenir Press, 2006), 7. Ian Denys Peek, One Fourteenth of an Elephant: A Memoir of Life and Death on the Burma–Thailand Railway (London: Bantam, 2005), 140, 526.
35 Tom McGowran, Beyond the Bamboo Screen: Scottish Prisoners of War under the Japanese (Dunfermline: Cualann Press, 1999), 14.
36 Letter from Ian Watt to Brigadier Philip Toosey dated 9 August 1967, Stanford University Special Collections, SC401-ACCN 1994-106, Box 24, Folder 1.
37 Moser, ‘Some Reminiscences’, 37. The story most likely refers to the massacre at the Alexandra Barracks Hospital, where Japanese troops killed some two hundred patients and staff in supposed retaliation for shots fired from the hospital grounds by the retreating British.
38 Peek, One Fourteenth, 229.
39 ‘The Editor Writes’, Far East, 1/1 (February 1944), 1.
40 ‘Red Cross in the Far East: The Story of what Has Been Done’, Far East, 1/2 (March 1944), 4–5, 8.
41 ‘Hong Kong (Japanese Barbarities)’, Hansard, 10 March 1942.
42 Sybilla Jane Flower, ‘Memory and the Prisoner of War Experience: The United Kingdom’, in Kevin Blackburn and Karl Hack (eds), Forgotten Captives in Japanese-Occupied Asia: National Memories and Forgotten Captivities (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 61.
43 ‘Outrages by Japanese’, The Times, 29 January 1944, 4.
44 Quoted in Clifford Kinvig, ‘Allied POW’s and the Burma–Thailand Railway’, in Philip Towle, Margaret Kosuge, and Yoichi Kibata (eds), Japanese Prisoners of War (London: Hambledon and London, 2000), 48.
45 ‘A Grave Indictment’ (Leader), The Times, 18 November 1944. The mutual hostage scenario was invoked to reassure families: ‘remember that the German and Italian Governments are for their part equally anxious to secure good treatment for their own service men and merchant seamen who are prisoners in our hands and they know that the surest way to obtain it is to treat the British prisoners whom they have captured fairly and decently’ (War Office, A Handbook for the Information of Relatives and Friends of Prisoners of War (London: HMSO, 1943), 2). This foreword ends: ‘The information in this pamphlet relates to the conditions and treatment of prisoners of war in Germany and Italy, and not in Japan’ (2; emphasis in original).
46 ‘British Prisoners of War, Siam (Conditions)’, Hansard, 17 November 1944.
47 S. P. MacKenzie, ‘The Treatment of Prisoners of War in World War II’, Journal of Modern History, 66/3 (September 1994), 515. Flower importantly points out that even on the Burma–Thailand Railway conditions varied ‘between nationalities, between ranks, between camps or even within the same camps over a period of time’ (Sibylla Jane Flower, ‘Captors and Captives on the Burma–Thailand Railway’, in Bob Moore and Kent Fedorowich (eds), Prisoners of War and their Captors in World War II (Oxford: Berg, 1996), 247).
48 R. P. W. Havers, Reassessing the Japanese Prisoner of War Experience: The Changi Camp, Singapore, 1942–5 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), vii.
49 Pattie Wright, Men of the Line: Stories of the Thai–Burma Railway Survivors (Carlton, Victoria: Miegunyah Press/Melbourne University Publishing, 2008), 38.
50 Ernest Gordon, Miracle on the River Kwai (London: Collins, 1963), 52. Rivett, Behind Bamboo, 158. Roy Whitecross, Slaves of the Son of Heaven: A Personal Account of an Australian POW, 1942–1945 (East Roseville, New South Wales: Kangaroo Press, 2000), 11. Ray Parkin, Into the Smother: A Journal of the Burma–Siam Railway (London: Hogarth, 1963), 12.
51 Quoted in Van Waterford, Prisoners of the Japanese in World War II (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994), 32.
52 John Durnford, Branch Line to Burma (London: Macdonald, 1958), 24.Alistair Urquhart, The Forgotten Highlander: My Incredible Story of Survival during the War in the Far East (Abacus: London, 2011), 122.
53 Meg Parkes, ‘Tins, Tubes and Tenacity: Inventive Medicine in Camps in the Far East’, in Gilly Carr and Harold Mytum (eds), Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War: Creativity behind Barbed Wire (New York: Routledge, 2012), 52.
54 Clifford Kinvig, River Kwai Railway: The Story of the Burma–Siam Railroad (London: Brassey’s, 1992), 198.
55 Kinvig, River Kwai Railway, 166.
56 The classic account of the Pacific theatre as a race war is John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (London: Faber, 1986).
57 Peek, One Fourteenth, 244.
58 Stephen Alexander, Sweet Kwai Run Softly (Bristol: Merriots, 1996), 139.
59 Braddon, The Naked Island, 210. Ronald Hastain, White Coolie (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1947), 146.
60 C. F. Blackater, Gods without Reason (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1948), 108, 112.
61 Lomax, The Railway Man, 149.
62 Quoted in Tim Bowden, Changi Photographer: George Aspinall’s Record of Captivity (Sydney: ABC Books, 1993), 119.
63 Ian Watt, ‘Around Conrad’s Grave in the Canterbury Cemetery: A Retrospect’, in Watt, Essays on Conrad, 187.
64 Hastain, White Coolie, 99.
65 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and The Congo Diary (London: Penguin, 2007), 20. Watt writes that Heart of Darkness ‘must have seemed grotesquely pessimistic to its original readers. It surely seems a good deal less so eighty years later, except to those who have had a very blinkered view of the century’s battlefields’ (C. 252–3).
66 Reg Twigg, Survivor on the River Kwai: The Incredible Story of Life on the Burma Railway (London: Penguin, 2013), 224.
67 Durnford, Branch Line to Burma, 153. Alexander, Sweet Kwai, 215.
68 Alan Carter, Survival of the Fittest: A Young Englishman’s Struggle as a Prisoner of War in Java and Japan (Great Britain: Paul T. Carter, 2013), 91–2, 99.
69 Christopher Dowling, ‘Introduction’, in Robert Hardie, The Burma–Siam Railway: The Secret Diary of Dr Robert Hardie 1942–45 (London: Imperial War Museum, 1983), 9.
70 Ian Watt, ‘Oral Dickens’, Stanford Humanities Review, 8/1 (2000), 210. This reprint of Watt’s lecture is prefaced by a sensitive account by John O. Jordan of how, in an overlapping of criticism and personal memory, Watt identifies with the starving prisoner Magwitch. John O. Jordan, ‘The Critic as Host: On Ian Watt’s “Oral Dickens” ’, Stanford Humanities Review, 8/1 (2000), 197–205.
71 Braddon, The Naked Island, 203.
72 Searle, To the Kwai—and Back, 98.
73 Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese, 219.
74 R. Kemball Price, ‘R. A. P. W. I.: An Impression’, British Medical Journal, 1/4451, 27 April 1946, 647.
75 Gavan McCormack and Hank Nelson (eds), The Burma–Thailand Railway (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Press, 1993), 5, 6.
76 Angela Thirkell, Miss Bunting (Wakefield, RI: Moyer Bell, 1996), 52.
77 Alan Sillitoe, ‘The Disgrace of Jim Scarfedale’, in Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (New York: Vintage, 1987), 147–8.
78 Anthony Powell, Temporary Kings, in Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time, Fourth Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 206.
79 Powell, Temporary Kings, 206.
80 Ian Watt, ‘The Humanities on the River Kwai’, in Watt, The Literal Imagination, 241.
81 Ian Watt, ‘Bridges over the Kwai’, Listener, 6 August 1959, 216, 217.
82 W. B. Carnochan, ‘The Literature of Confinement’, in Norval Morris and David J. Rothman (eds), The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 428.
83 David Piper, I Am Well, Who Are You? Writings of a Japanese Prisoner of War (Exeter: Anne Piper, 1998), 15.
84 Watt, ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, 514.
85 Watt, ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, 516, 522, 522.
86 Watt, ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, 530.
87 Watt, ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, 530.
88 Watt, ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, 531.
89 William Empson, Using Biography (London: Chatto & Windus and the Hogarth Press, 1984), viii.
90 William Empson, ‘Still the Strange Necessity’, in William Empson, Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. John Haffenden (London: Hogarth, 1988), 125.
91 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (2nd edn; London: Chatto & Windus, 1947), xv.
92 Frank Kermode, Foreword, in Watt, Essays on Conrad, x.
93 Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 5.
94 D. Robson, E. Welch, N. J. Beeching, and G. V. Gill, ‘Consequences of Captivity: Health Effects of Far East Imprisonment in World War II’, QJM: An International Journal of Medicine, 102/2 (2009), 94.
95 Urquhart, The Forgotten Highlander, 302.
96 Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (London: Pandora, 1992), 74–95.
97 Alan Allport, Demobbed: Coming Home after the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 203.
98 Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), 320.
99 Shephard, A War of Nerves, 320.
100 Watt, ‘Dover, November 1945’.
101 Russell Braddon, End of a Hate (London: Cassell, 1958), 56.
102 Whitecross, Slaves of the Son of Heaven, vi.
103 Durnford, Branch Line to Burma, v.
104 Durnford, Branch Line to Burma, 207.
105 Piper, I Am Well, Who Are You? 16.
106 Lomax, The Railway Man, 200, 196.
107 Durnford, Branch Line to Burma, 71.
108 Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22 (London: Atlantic Books, 2010), 47, 48; ellipses in original.
109 Ian Watt, Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 88. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically as MMI, followed by page number. Miguel de Cervantes, Exemplary Stories, trans. Lesley Lipson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3.
110 Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 125–6.
111 J. G. Ballard, ‘1986: Solveig Nordlund. Future Now’, in Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J. G. Ballard 1967–2008, ed. Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara (London: Fourth Estate, 2012), 226.
112 Quoted in Waterford, Prisoners of the Japanese, 41.
113 Blackater, Gods without Reason, 185.
114 Whitecross, Slaves of the Son of Heaven, vii.
115 John Coast, Railroad of Death (Newcastle: Myrmidon, 2014), xvi.
116 Cary Owtram, 1000 Days on the River Kwai (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2017), 92.
117 Watt, ‘The Humanities on the River Kwai’, 232.
118 Watt, ‘The Humanities on the River Kwai’, 232.
119 Ian Watt, ‘Winston Smith: The Last Humanist’, in Watt, The Literal Imagination, 220.
120 Watt, ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, 532.
121 In theory, though barely in practice since the Japanese held most of it back, prisoners forced to work on the railway were paid. Around half of what little remained to an officer then went to the camp collection for the sick, whom the Japanese considered useless mouths and refused to feed. Blackater, Gods without Reason, 48.
122 ‘I suppose every prisoner of war has seen or heard his companions being murdered by the Korean guards, the Japanese camp officers, or the Kempitai, the hated security police; and he has certainly been beaten himself many times’ (Watt, ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, 523). In an unpublished essay, he describes collapsing (he was sick with diphtheria) after being beaten up in March 1943 by a Korean guard who had once given him some fruit; he attributes the beating to ‘the fact that even after I had received the gifts I had not shown complete and uncritical approval of this particular Korean’s actions with other prisoners’ (Ian Watt, ‘The Japanese’, Stanford University Special Collections, SC401-ACCN 1990-131, Box 56, Folder, ‘The Gahanese Character’).
123 The British—not Japanese—government made payments of £10,000 to surviving prisoners in 2001. Watt died in 1999.
124 Watt, ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, 529.
125 Jack Goody, ‘Watt, War, and Writing’, Stanford Humanities Review, 8/1 (2000), 224. What survived is published as Jack Goody and Ian Watt, ‘The Consequences of Literacy’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 5/3 (April 1963), 304–45.
126 Watt, ‘Realism and Modern Criticism of the Novel’, 84.
127 Ian Watt, ‘Should Criticism be Humanist?’, Listener, 4 September 1952, 378.
128 See, e.g.,John Rodden, Lionel Trilling and the Critics (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), Randall Fuller, Emerson’s Ghosts: Literature, Politics, and the Making of Americanists (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), Matthew Bevis (ed.), Some Versions of Empson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), Adam Kirsch, Why Trilling Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), and Michael Wood, On Empson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).Leavis makes several appearances in Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), and naturally receives extended treatment in Christopher Hilliard, English as a Vocation: The Scrutiny Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
129 Seager, The Rise of the Novel, 189.
130 W. B. Carnochan, ‘The Persistence of The Rise of the Novel’, Stanford Humanities Review, 8/1 (2000), 92.
131 Carnochan, ‘The Persistence of The Rise of the Novel’, 92.
132 Roger Bourke, Prisoners of the Japanese: Literary Imagination and the Prisoner-of-War Experience (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2006), 24.
133 Graham Hough, Image and Experience: Studies in a Literary Revolution (London: Duckworth, 1960), 130.
134 Hough, Image and Experience, 126.
135 Quoted by Watt in Todorov, Literature and its Theorists, 118.
136 Ian Watt, ‘Samuel Richardson’, in Ian Watt et al., The Novelist as Innovator (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1965), 10.
137 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 16.
138 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 101.
139 Peek, One Fourteenth, 663.
140 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 41.
141 R. H. Tawney, Social History and Literature (London: Cambridge University Press for the National Book League, 1950), 14. See Watt, ‘The Humanities on the River Kwai’, 235, and Watt, ‘Realism and Modern Criticism of the Novel’, 77.
142 Ian Watt, ‘Writing about Literature’, Glosses, 1/1 (1970), 3.
143 Watt, ‘Writing about Literature’, 3.
144 Watt, ‘The Humanities on the River Kwai’, 235.