3
‘Vulgar, gross, sentimental, impoverished in style—our popular sub-art presents a dream of human possibilities to starved imaginations everywhere.’
Leslie Fiedler, ‘Looking Backward: America from Europe’ (1952)1
‘Most mass-entertainments are in the end what D. H. Lawrence described as “anti-life”. They are full of a corrupt brightness, of improper appeals and moral evasions. To recall instances: they tend towards a view of the world in which progress is conceived as a seeking of material possessions, equality as a moral levelling, and freedom as the ground for endless irresponsible pleasure. These productions belong to a vicarious spectators’ world; they…pander to the wish to have things both ways, to do as we want and accept no consequences.’
Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (1957)2
‘A prisoner-of-war camp has at least one thing in common with our modern world in general: both offer a very limited range of practical choices,’ Watt proposed in an essay that elaborated a point he had made in passing decades earlier when he described the prisoner of war as ‘not so much a person as an extreme case of a more general modern condition—the powerlessness of the individual caught in the grip of vast collective purposes; in the end what he does makes little difference, and he knows it’.3 Both claims are taken from his essays about the film version of The Bridge on the River Kwai, which he criticized for its pretence that people are freer to act on their own individual desires than they can ever be even in ordinary life, let alone in a prisoner-of-war camp. For Watt, the prison camp is an exemplary site for understanding the limits of human freedom.4
Watt wrote of Don Quixote that ‘the confusion of romantic wishes with historical truth is a universal tendency’, but he believed that nothing had done so much to reinforce and sanction the confusion of what is desired and what is possible as modern entertainment industries from popular fiction to Hollywood cinema (MMI 65). Looking first at his handling of The Bridge on the River Kwai, I suggest in this chapter that Watt found the modern culture industry’s historical and symbolic origin in the commercial successes of Richardson and took Pamela and Clarissa as paradigmatic fictions about inflated fantasies of individualist agency and, in the end, its virtual impossibility.
Constructing the Kwai Myth
Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, the cold-war-blacklisted screenwriters of The Bridge on the River Kwai, recapitulated the dual-narrative structure of their source text, Pierre Boulle’s Le Pont de la Rivière Kwai, in which plans almost simultaneously unfold for building and destroying the railway bridge.5 While the prisoners in the camp construct the bridge under the leadership of the deluded Colonel Nicholson, a crack force is making its way through the jungle to blow it up. Boulle told Watt in a 1976 letter that the story itself was purely fictional, and (even less plausibly) that the Kwai, the minor river along which the Burma–Thailand Railway mostly ran, was merely a name picked from an atlas as a suitable setting for a story that he had already imagined.6 More recently, it has been proposed—maybe Watt even suspected as much when he wrote to Boulle—that the details that Boulle deploys about the Tamarkan camp, from the transformation of Khwae Noi into ‘Kwai’ to the name of the Japanese commanding officer, Saito, were lifted from Railroad of Death (1946), the almost instantaneously written prisoner-of-war memoir of Watt’s close friend John Coast; Watt and Coast had been imprisoned only a couple of miles from Tamarkan.7 But, as I mentioned in Chapter 1, Watt may have had misgivings about the transformation of an extremely painful episode into fiction, but he did not believe that Boulle’s stylized fable would pass with any reader for historical truth. This was not at all his view of the film.
Although the screenwriters largely followed Boulle’s plot, they made a crucial addition to its cast of characters when they invented Shears, a maverick American prisoner who escapes from the camp and joins the British special forces making their way through the jungle to destroy Nicholson’s handiwork, and who unites the two parallel but antithetical groups of disempowered prisoner builders and dashing saboteurs. From Watt’s point of view, this change would misrepresent the building of the Burma–Thailand Railway in a fundamental and historically symptomatic way. For Watt, the addition of the rugged American escapee effectively declares that prisoners who hated their enslavement could simply walk out of the camp to become bona fide war heroes rather than remain among the camp’s nameless multitude of implicitly emasculated victims. As if to underscore the filmmakers’ incomprehension of the specifically demoralizing realities of the Far East camps, Shears was played by William Holden, four years earlier the escapee Sefton in Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17, a casting choice that falsely (although presumably accidentally) implied the interchangeability of two completely different kinds of wartime imprisonment.
‘A golf course is for golf. A tennis court is for tennis. A prison camp is for escaping’—or so says the aristocratic officer De Boeldieu in Jean Renoir’s classic Grand Illusion (1937). Released not long before the Second World War, this retrospective First World War film established the premise and plot arc of all such movies to come: that a prisoner-of-war narrative is the suspenseful story of a bid for freedom. Film historian Kevin Brownlow notes that Grand Illusion was among the films Lean ‘most admired’, and Lean’s effort is a narrative of escape in every sense: most people watching The Bridge on the River Kwai would not have contemplated how far it was dealing in impossibilities when prisoners break out successfully from the jungle camps in accordance with the generic conventions of the war adventure.8 Samuel Hynes attributes the popularity of Second World War escape bestsellers such as The Great Escape and The Colditz Story (‘romances’, he actually calls them) to the fact that ‘they told the public the story it wanted to hear’: ‘They are all adventure stories that inject the old personal military virtues—courage, daring, ingenuity, endurance—into the anonymous mass narrative, with all its suffering and death, that modern war is.’9 There are no equivalents from Thailand, where only the fictional Shears could escape and find willing helpers in a country that had declared war on his own, as Thailand had in January 1942, and encounter whole communities ready to risk their own and others’ lives for a stranger whose very skin usually marked him out as an enemy escapee. Back in the stubbornly unsympathetic real world, the prisoners had prices on their heads: by way of carrot, villagers tempted to facilitate prisoners’ escapes could seek a bounty for surrendering them to the Japanese; by way of stick, the likelihood of mass reprisals discouraged Thai villagers from harbouring or assisting escapees. The infrequent escape attempts typically concluded with men being recaptured and summarily executed in front of their officers.
‘Have you any other matter of any kind which you wish to bring to notice?’ asked the final question on Form M.I. 9/JAP, the War Office questionnaire supplied to the liberated prisoners. Almost absurdly in these circumstances, the form seeks information primarily about escape attempts and recaptures. Watt’s is among those that survive in The National Archives. To this final question he replied tersely: ‘That owing to the distances involved, the colour difficulty, the language difficulty, & low conditions of help, the advice of my own Lt Colonel Baker 5 Suffolks, that escape except in very special circumstances was impossible. This was confirmed by the fate of the few attempts made.’10 One of Watt’s unpublished stories from the 1940s, ‘A Chap in Dark Glasses’, is narrated by an English officer on the Burma–Thailand Railway who fantasizes about escape to the point that he and another prisoner get as far as making contact with a group of local bandits with a view to buying their help. Watt’s liberation questionnaire indicates that the story had some autobiographical basis. He and two other (named) officers had made contact with a group of Thai and Chinese men (Watt could not tell whether they were bandits or guerrilla fighters) late in the summer of 1943 with a view to escaping on the full moon in September, but before the attempt could take place Watt was sent up country to the Konkuita camp, near the Burmese border. According to Stephen Alexander, imprisoned there at the same time, Konkuita was ‘an evil camp’: perpetually filthy with human excrement, and thus disease-ridden even by the standards of its kind; supply problems made the diet even deadlier than usual; and, to add to the threats to their lives, theft among prisoners was endemic.11 Yet Watt’s story ends with the narrator’s ambivalent relief when his being sent there thwarts the escape plan before a single step has been taken, as if he has always known that his dream of escape would have been suicidal in reality. Indeed, in his essay ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, Watt supposed that there may even have been some immunity from feelings of guilt in the knowledge that escape was out of the question, when a thousand miles of hostile mountain and jungle separated the prisoners from the closest Allied lines.12
‘There are no escapes in these pages,’ his friend John Durnford warned in the preface to his memoir, a book completed in the year in which both The Rise of the Novel and The Bridge on the River Kwai appeared.13 That Durnford felt this needed to be said at the start indicates his assumptions about what readers would expect of a prisoner-of-war story. ‘On the Kwai, hundreds tried to escape; most of them were killed; not one succeeded; but for Bill Holden it was a breeze,’ Watt writes in his staccato corrective to Lean’s cinematic fantasy: ‘Obviously, if our circumstances on the Kwai had been as pliable as those of the movie, there would have been no reason whatever for [Camp Commanding Officer] Toosey or anybody else to make all the compromises which their actual circumstances forced on them.’14 The unreal heroics of the American escapee-saboteur made a mockery of the real prisoners’ necessarily passive courage, and Watt was dismayed that the film could render the courageous Toosey a deluded madman. As a former prisoner-officer from Toosey’s regiment put it, ‘a colonel as bone-headed as “Colonel Nicholson” would soon have been pounding peanuts in the cookhouse while someone more pragmatic took over’.15 Watt insisted flatly that the question was not whether or not the prisoners would build the Burma–Thailand Railway—dilemmas like this had been resolved at gunpoint back in 1942 when Singapore was surrendered—‘it was merely how many prisoners would die, be beaten up, or break down, in the process’, and how far it might be possible to minimize those losses, as Toosey tried to do.16
And there was never any question about the Japanese ability to build their own railways, bridges, and all, a point Watt stressed because he believed that the film’s racist depiction of a technologically masterful West triumphing over primitive Asian ineptitude gratified the same white Western supremacy fantasies that the war in Vietnam should now have put to rest forever.17 For ‘nothing is more dangerous than man’s delusions of autonomy and omnipotence’, he wrote in the different racial context of Heart of Darkness, suggesting that the danger of the inflated Western self-image is the cautionary lesson embodied in the career of the megalomaniac Kurtz, whose lofty status as the supposed emissary of European enlightenment makes possible his subsequent career as a brutal Congo warlord (C. 168).
Both the novel and the film of The Bridge on the River Kwai are predicated on Western technological supremacy—Colonel Nicholson may be a prisoner, but he has the expertise to get the bridge built when his Japanese counterpart, the erratic alcoholic Colonel Saito, does not—but the film finally departs from Boulle’s novel in a directly contradictory way by playing up the triumph of technology when its beautiful bridge is blown up spectacularly in the climactic ending. Boulle’s novel, in contrast, ends in pointless death and moral confusion when one commando kills the others as he tries to stop Nicholson protecting the bridge they have been sent to dynamite. That ‘the West is the master of its means’—technology—‘but not of its ends’ is how Watt glossed the meaning of this original ending: ‘Boulle used fantasy to convey a real and salutary truth; while the movie used realistic means to convey a false and—I think dangerous—collective contemporary fantasy.’18 And then, as Watt noted, there was an all-too-historical moral problem that both the novel and the film avoided completely: the problem of forced collaboration with the enemy on a military project, in contravention of international law. Article 31 of the 1929 Geneva Convention mandated that any work to which prisoners were put should have no direct connection with the war; although Japan had not formally ratified the Geneva Convention, it was nonetheless bound, as Tokyo Trials legal advisor Lord Russell of Liverpool pointed out, by the same provision (to which they had agreed) in the Hague Convention of 1907.19 To Watt’s mind, the movie resolved all the problems around collaboration only with the cheapest of evasions. The troublesome bridge is blown to bits, eliminating with perfect finality the chief testament to the Allied prisoners’ collaboration under duress, however far the grand dynamite explosion violates Boulle’s further-reaching point about the West’s unthinking faith in its military might, and irrespective of how much at odds this formally complete style of cinematic closure is with historical actuality: after all, a bridge that is built with forced labour can be rebuilt by forced labour too.
All this, for Watt, compounded with a transparent form of wishful thinking the film’s ignorance, and its ‘stupefying indifference to the facts of geography or politics’: he was darkly amused by the scene in which a strategist meant to be a Cambridge scholar of East Asian languages ‘pointed impressively to Burma on the map, and called it Thailand’.20 It was mere wishful thinking to believe that dynamite could solve all the problems the movie had raised, which the movie implied when it structured its plot according to a countdown to the destruction of the bridge, as if Foreman were reprising his success with High Noon. Indeed, this earlier movie may have been on Watt’s mind when he described The Bridge on the River Kwai ending ‘pure Western style, [as] the train tooted and chugged round the same old corner’.21 Film critic Georges Joyaux quotes Boulle expressing his wish that the screenplay had given more attention to the suffering involved in the historical building of the railway: Joyaux calculates that in screen time the race to blow the bridge up takes much longer than the bridge has taken to build in the first place.22 But passive suffering is evidently not the stuff of commercial fantasy, Watt believed: not when you can have maverick American heroes and a countdown to the big explosion.
Watt’s essays on The Bridge on the River Kwai, then, are primarily concerned with the film as a negatively exemplary production in its promulgation of the commercial untruths associated with what Frankfurt School theorists had famously designated the Culture Industry. The vapidly unhistorical Anglo-American culture that could both generate and swallow a fiction like Lean’s about a war that had ended only twelve years earlier becomes characteristic of modern individualism at large, forever nourishing what Watt mocked as ‘the hypertrophie du moi’ (MMI 177), an excessive sense of individual entitlement, or ‘what Freud called the childish delusion of the omnipotence of thought’.23 It would be bad enough were this merely the preserve of the most overtly commercial cinematic outputs, Watt suggested, but the same individualist fantasy now permeates culture at every level: ‘Hollywood, the advertising industry, Existentialism, even the current counter-culture are alike in their acceptance or their exploitation of the delusion of the omnipotence of thought. From this come many of their other similarities: that they are ego-centered, romantic, anti-historical; that they all show a belief in rapid and absolute solutions of human problems.’24 Kwai veteran Graham Hough, whose tough-mindedness in this regard might have shared its source with Watt’s, held a similar mid-century view of inferior creativity: ‘There is neurotic fantasy, and the idle day-dreaming of normal persons, and, we must admit, a good deal of bad art, which are all, as Freud would say, an evasion of the demands of reality, a refusal, permanent or temporary, harmful or more or less innocent, to come to terms with the world.’25
Formal Realism and Pseudo-Realism
As importantly, however, Watt’s mistrust of conventional Hollywood cinema has a markedly formal as well as thematic aspect. Popular film is dangerous when it gets near historical events precisely because its representational ‘pseudo-realism’, as he calls it, means that heartening frauds are liable to be taken for descriptive truth: ‘the pseudo-realism of Hollywood has the accidental effect of making millions of people think they are seeing what something is really like when actually they are not.’26
The movie’s air of pseudo-reality was also inevitably enforced by its medium…the camera can’t help giving an air of total visual authenticity; and the effect of this technical authenticity tends to spread beyond the visual image to the substance of what is portrayed. Every moviegoer knows in some way that—whenever he can check against his own experience—life isn’t really like that; but he forgets it most of the time, especially when the substance of what he sees conforms to his own psychological or political point of view.27
Given how central the concept of realism was to Watt’s thinking, it is easy to imagine how troubling the idea of ‘pseudo-realism’ must have been for him. After all, his canonical if much-disputed definition of the novel relied on what he termed its ‘formal realism’:
the premise, or primary convention, that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience, and is therefore under an obligation to satisfy its reader with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms. (RN 32)
But it is difficult to see what could distinguish realism from ‘pseudo-realism’, given that both rely on exactly the same ‘primary conventions’, the same illusionistic technologies of a straightforwardly referential medium and a verisimilar accumulation of circumstantial details in order to embed the characters and their actions in their specific and instantly recognizable environment.
Instructively, though, this phrase ‘pseudo-realism’ appears not only in Watt’s denunciations of the ego-and-market-gratifying fictions of The Bridge on the River Kwai and the modern mass culture of which he considered the film depressingly representative. In fact, he first coined the phrase in The Rise of the Novel. But it appears in a slightly unexpected context there: not in the discussion of Defoe, despite that, among all his authors, ‘pseudo-realism’ would be most intuitively relevant to Defoe’s assertions that the wholly fictional is also literally true. We find similar claims in his famous equivocating prefaces to Moll Flanders (‘The World is so taken up of late with Novels and Romances, that it will be hard for a private History to be taken for Genuine where the Names and other Circumstances of the Person are concealed’), Roxana (‘this Story differs from most of the Modern Performances of this Kind…Namely…the Work is not a Story, but a History’), and Robinson Crusoe (‘a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it’).28 Instead, less predictably, the term ‘pseudo-realism’ is invented for Richardson, when Watt turns to the question of ‘private experience and the novel’ in his chapter of that title.
In that chapter, Watt reviews the familiar terrain of Richardson’s prurient eroticism but then adopts a different line of attack. In the end, the ‘major objection’ to ‘Pamela and to the novelette tradition it inaugurates’ can hardly be that it is ‘salacious’—this aspect of Richardson’s fiction, Watt seems to feel, can be taken as given—but rather that, with the air of authentic report that Richardson creates through Pamela’s exhaustively documented psychological and social circumstances, apparently realist novels like Pamela lend ‘a new power to age-old deceptions of romance’ (RN 204). Pamela Andrews is an updated Cinderella, and the fairy-tale resolutions of both girls’ stories ‘are essentially compensations for the monotonous drudgery and limited perspectives of ordinary domestic life’ (RN 204). The Cinderella comparison is amusingly apt: Pamela is no ordinary teenage skivvy, after all, but a natural aristocrat singled out by everyone who encounters her, for her beauty (‘I never saw such a Face and Shape in my Life; why she must be better descended than you have told me!’) and intelligence (‘Said she, thou art as witty as any Lady in the Land. I wonder where thou gottest it’): ‘For Beauty, Virtue, Prudence, and Generosity too, I will tell you, she has more than any Lady I ever saw.’29 There is much of this in Pamela, and if it helps to rationalize what happens—how could Mr B not fall in love with this prodigy?—it also compounds the improbabilities to an almost absurd degree.
Yet what makes Pamela apparently ‘realist’, but in fact merely ‘pseudo-realist’, is not actually its Cinderella content but the formal mode through which it transforms ‘the prince and the pumpkin’ into ‘a substantial squire and a real coach-and-six’:
This is no doubt the reason why Richardson, who so rarely gave his approval to any fiction except his own, was able to forget how close he was to providing exactly the same satisfactions as the romances he derided. His attention was so largely focussed on developing a more elaborate representational technique than fiction had ever seen before that it was easy to overlook the content to which it was being applied—to forget that his narrative skill was actually being used to re-create the pseudo-realism of the daydream, to give an air of authenticity to a triumph against all obstacles and contrary to every expectation, a triumph which was in the last analysis as improbable as any in romance.
(RN 204–5; emphasis added)
This, then, is ‘pseudo-realism’. The modern realist novel proves to be the kind of commodity in which ‘what is fundamentally an unreal flattery of the reader’s dreams appears to be the literal truth’ (RN 205). Defoe, presumably, deploys a similar technology in prototype but not to the same indulgently escapist ends, even though Watt also considered Defoe’s resilient individuals too heroically autonomous to be true (‘a consolatory unreality has been made to appear real’, he wrote of Robinson Crusoe in 195130). So we find that realism is not only the formal or technical category it promised to be in the opening chapters of Watt’s book—‘ethically neutral’, he calls it (RN 117)—but a moral one, because of what pseudo-realism accomplishes. ‘We are the creatures of our light literature much more than is generally suspected,’ Conrad wrote in Chance, and Watt makes the same Conradian point in The Rise of the Novel when he proposes, with reference to Richardson, that ‘the novel’s power over private experience has made it a major formative influence on the expectations and aspirations of the modern consciousness’ (RN 205).31 The great paradox of the novel as a form is that ‘the most apparently realistic of literary genres’ should have proved ‘capable of a more thorough subversion of psychological and social reality than any previous one’ (RN 206).
This unease about a form that uses its realistic resources to animate unrealistic or downright anti-realistic fantasies has an unmistakably eighteenth-century quality. Watt’s fears about entertainment media that mask their fantastical content with unprecedentedly authentic-seeming representational techniques recall many of the concerns expressed about the British novel in its earliest decades. The eighteenth-century novelist Clara Reeve had put a similar objection into the mouth of a disapproving male critic in her pioneering history and defence of the early novel, The Progress of Romance (1785), when she had him argue that novels mislead readers about what the world is like. The novel’s verisimilitude encourages the reader to believe that he or she (probably ‘she’, in keeping with the association of women with the early novel) knows from reading novels what the world is like when she manifestly does not.32 Samuel Johnson’s famous 1750 essay is perhaps the best-known articulation of the fears about realistic fiction accompanying the phenomenon that came to be known as ‘the rise of the novel’: no one would take for truth the fantastical old-fashioned romance, Johnson supposed, so the reader is never really vulnerable to its seductions. In contrast, the real-worldly ‘new novels’ are accordingly more risky when they serve as ‘the entertainment of minds unfurnished with ideas, and therefore easily susceptible of impressions; not fixed by principles, and therefore easily following the current of fancy; not informed by experience, and consequently open to every false suggestion and partial account’.33 The innocent novel reader becomes a Lydia Languish discontented by the refusal of ordinary life to supply the excitements of fictional narratives. Watt’s pessimistic view is that, two centuries later, the world has now come essentially to be rewritten for a culture-consumer whose sense of personal entitlement is shored up on every side by profitable promises that people should expect to get whatever they want. Watt admired Johnson unreservedly (‘one of our great heroes of the mind’, no less), and, like Johnson, he feared the propensity of fiction to ‘undermine our experience of the stubbornness of facts’, in the phrase he used when he wrote of ‘the deep blindness of our culture and its media, both to the obdurate stubbornness of reality and to the stubborn continuities of history’.34
Yet—and also like Johnson—Watt nonetheless admired Richardson too. At times he seems to have admired Richardson’s novels almost against his own will, presupposing as these novels do all kinds of bourgeois luxuries that Watt knew what it meant to live without: the luxury of privacy; the luxury of identification; the luxury of romantic love. He could only have become more attuned to the differences between people’s rawest needs and their mere wants during his harsh life as a prisoner of war: no privacy,35 but identification with others always problematic; and sexual love, by all accounts, out of the picture altogether—or, as Australian Ray Parkin described a conversation he had with friends after a year of captivity: ‘We have all decided that Sex is out and Hunger is King.’36 And then there is the additionally off- putting problem of Richardson’s ‘harrowing moral and stylistic vulgarity’, as Watt puts it in a moment of unusual rhetorical extravagance (RN 219). But the greatest sticking point with Richardson’s fiction is this question of pseudo-realism, or Watt’s apprehension that the apparent realism of a book like Pamela ‘confuses the differences between reality and dream more insidiously than any previous fiction’ (RN 205).
We see here the most negative interpretation on Watt’s part of what J. Paul Hunter, writing of the eighteenth-century booksellers, describes as ‘the fundamentally shrewd analysis of human desire that made the publishing industry, for three centuries, the central vehicle for broad-scale human communication’.37 And when, in Licensing Entertainment, his important book on the ‘rise’ of the novel in the different sense of how this formerly risqué form achieved social respectability, William B. Warner calls the Pamela publishing sensation a ‘media event’, the continuity becomes clearer between the popular novel of private experience that Richardson had helped to inaugurate and what Watt cast as the self-flattering but fantastical Hollywood responsible for The Bridge on the River Kwai, a film in which ‘historical and political and psychological reality became infinitely plastic to the desires of the audience’.38 In the context of Richardson, Watt identified ‘adolescent wish-fulfilment’ as one of the degradations to which the novel as a form has always been prone (RN 202); in the context of The Bridge on the River Kwai, he wrote of the ‘childish’ rejection of the reality principle.39
That popular film continued what the eighteenth-century novel had begun was demonstrably on Watt’s mind in the years leading up to the publication of The Rise of the Novel. In September 1955, Theodor Adorno, now back in West Germany after his wartime exile in California, wrote to Watt soliciting a contribution to a volume of essays he proposed to edit on mass culture for his famous Institute for Social Research. Watt’s handwritten note in the margin of Adorno’s letter indicates that he had either replied or intended to reply with the offer of something along the lines of ‘from Richardson’s P. to 20c. Hollywood’.40 Although the proposed essay seems never to have materialized, perhaps it would have been an amplification of Watt’s passing observation in The Rise of the Novel that ‘in the Hollywood film, as in the type of popular fiction which Richardson initiated, we have an unprecedentedly drastic and detailed Puritan censorship in conjunction with a form of art which is historically unique in its concentration on arousing sexual interests’ (RN 171). We can say more confidently, on the basis of Adorno’s letters to Watt, that Adorno took the significance of The Rise of the Novel to be its implied argument about the origins of modern mass culture in the eighteenth-century novel; in later years Watt came to suppose that the reason why Adorno admired the book when he read a draft back in California (a work of ‘genius’, Adorno apparently thought it) was because, although Watt had not known this at the time, Adorno and Max Horkheimer had been thinking along some similar lines in their recent Dialectic of Enlightenment.41 Watt thanks Adorno in the acknowledgements of The Rise of the Novel, and, although we cannot know if Watt was correct in believing that Adorno liked the book mainly because it supported arguments that he had also advanced, obvious parallels can be found in the depth of their pessimism about what they considered the debasing effects of mass culture, and what Watt elsewhere called its ‘supreme objective’: ‘that total (and sickening) collusion of two “I’s”, the hero’s and the audience’s, as they jointly throw down the gauntlet to reality—and triumph’.42 ‘Much has been written against the mass media,’ Watt wrote in his unfinished final book Myths of Modern Individualism, ‘and their capacity to corrupt human values has no doubt been exaggerated, but…not by a great deal’ (MMI 269).
Aside from these initially unconscious echoes of the Frankfurt School in Watt’s attack on commercial pseudo-realism in The Rise of the Novel, there are more domestic literary-critical influences as well. These are especially pronounced in Watt’s denunciations of mass-market fantasy as ‘childish’ and ‘adolescent’, which suggest the equally-but-differently stern influences of the interwar Cambridge English Faculty: debts to Q. D. Leavis and Ivor Richards are also declared in the book’s acknowledgements. Although Watt shook off the most sententious trappings of Leavisite criticism, F. R. Leavis’s characteristic language of ‘maturity’ survives, mutatis mutandis, in the Richardson sections of The Rise of the Novel, as does some of the moralized sociology of Q. D. Leavis’s ground-breaking Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), in which she had attacked the bestsellers of her day as ‘wish-fulfilment or opportunities for emotional orgies’.43 ‘The forms of emotional debasement that concerned the Scrutiny writers were daydreaming, sentimentality, and the exaltation of material luxuries,’ writes Christopher Hilliard, in a summary that recalls Watt’s treatment of Pamela.44 (The Leavisite influence may once have been strong: a fellow prisoner described Watt’s views back then as ‘the Gospel according to St Leavis’.45) And the Richards of Practical Criticism (1929), with his memorable mockery of students who mistake their own cultural illiteracy for a failure of communication on the poet’s part, seems particularly relevant to Watt’s acerbic handling of egotistical thinking.46 More broadly, his serious if sceptical interest in mass culture in the first place reminds us that this was someone educated at Cambridge during the famously pink 1930s, and, as the slightly younger Raymond Williams recalled, the undergraduate culture at Cambridge was markedly sympathetic to the decade’s left politics, with its ‘very large’ Socialist Club, to which Williams and Watt both belonged.47
Cyril Connolly attributed the anti-romantic ‘new realism’ of mid-century writing to ‘the deflationary activities of the Cambridge critics (Richards, Leavis)’, and Watt was among the obvious heirs to this tradition.48 But what we find in Watt’s reading of Richardson is something more widespread at mid-century than Cambridge influence; as Scottish novelist and wartime intelligence worker Muriel Spark also wrote in the 1950s, ‘emotional immaturity…is a requisite of every best-seller’.49 Published in the same year and by the same publisher as The Rise of the Novel, Richard Hoggart’s classic anatomy of working-class culture, The Uses of Literacy, also advanced a scathing attack on what Hoggart took to be the moral superficiality of mid-century popular culture.
As in the passage that I quote as an epigraph to this chapter, Hoggart’s arguments about the ‘improper appeals and moral evasions’ of mass culture resemble Watt’s in content if not in their somewhat overblown tone. Many of Hoggart’s remarks on popular fiction and film there might have come from Watt’s account of Pamela. ‘Presumably most writers of fantasy for people of any class share the fantasy worlds of their readers,’ Hoggart wrote: ‘They put into words and intensify the daydreams of their readers, often with considerable technical skill.’50 Hoggart lamented the disappearance of moral resilience in a culture he thought was falling under the spell of an undiscriminating populist individualism. According to Hoggart, a middlebrow modernity ‘depreciates the value of a fine application of intellectual gifts, the courage to take unsentimental and unpopular decisions, a disciplining of the self. The word “discipline”, for example, is almost unusable in popular writing, except in a derogatory sense; it suggests “pushing people around”, the Armed Services, “being got at”, and is rejected out-of-hand.’51 There are frequent references to wartime service in The Uses of Literacy; Hoggart himself spent six years in the army, fighting in North Africa and Italy. Their contemporary (and, like Watt and Hoggart, a war veteran) Leslie Fiedler made the point most explicitly when he described how mass culture presents ‘a dream of human possibilities to starved imaginations everywhere’, or, as he wrote elsewhere, supplies ‘prefabricated, masturbatory dreams’.52
And, although this is potentially a somewhat circular claim, perhaps some of Watt’s disgust with the hypertrophied ego that he found in Richardson may have come from or been reinforced by his reading of Conrad—a potentially circular claim, inevitably, because it is impossible to know whether that distaste was an outcome or a cause of his affinity for Conrad. We might think here of the isolating dreams of wealth and celebrity of Conrad’s Almayer, whose shadow casts on the walls of his Malayan hovel a human figure blown up to an ironically ‘heroic size’: Watt calls Almayer ‘a Borneo Bovary’ (C. 51), a vulgarized version of Flaubert’s heroine now that ‘the will and the poetry which inspire Emma Bovary have dwindled into Almayer’s dream of enviable consumer status’ (C. 52).53 Implying the same link between commodity culture and literary fantasy suggested in his discussion of Richardson, Watt’s reading of Almayer’s Folly focuses on the sheer unreality of the love affair between Almayer’s beautiful daughter Nina and her brave Dain, remnants from ‘popular romance, whose heroes and heroines require a world which offers that unconditional freedom which is the essence of individual wish-fulfillment’ (C. 45–6).
All the same, what is no less apparent in Watt’s distaste for what he took to be the corrosive individualist fantasies of modern mass culture—aside from the influence of Adorno, of the Leavises, of Richards, even of Conrad—is the impact of an institutional consciousness predicated on the subordination of the individual to collective ends. When Watt attacks fantasies of the omnipotent self, we find a sobering institutional consciousness that had survived a catastrophic series of lived institutional failures. Such failures had taken Watt as a young officer from poorly defended Singapore into the prisoner-of-war camp in the first place, when the soldiers were ordered to surrender at Singapore because their highest command had put them into a position where there was no alternative left, and, in the words of former prisoner Ronald Searle, ‘years of inept, incoherent and chaotic political and military mismanagement had reached a logical conclusion’.54 As Durnford wrote of being told to put down arms, ‘there are very few occasions in war when you can employ the Nelson touch or do a “Rupert of the Rhine”. The amount of Beau Gestes who capture forts single-handed or escape from blazing cities in fully-victualled yachts is small in number compared with those who go on obeying orders.’55 Ordered to surrender, the soldiers did. But the same acquiescence to collective ends would prove essential in captivity, and vastly more useful than trying to imitate Beau Geste and other heroes of popular adventure stories. Now the institutional discipline that almost got them killed as soldiers in a lost battle would end up saving their lives as prisoners. On the Burma–Thailand Railway, Watt wrote, ‘all our circumstances were hostile to individual fantasies; surviving meant accepting the intractable realities which surrounded us, and making sure that our fellow prisoners accepted them too’.56
Suffering like a Heroine
The literary models appropriate to the prison camp are not, in any case, such manly popular heroes as the dashing legionnaire Beau Geste. A subterranean theme throughout The Rise of the Novel is the identification of male authors with their women characters. ‘Defoe’s identification with Moll Flanders was so complete that…he created a personality that was in essence his own’, Watt contended, and his ‘hypothesis of the unconscious identification’ is advanced again when he turns to Richardson and moves between the identification of authors with characters and the identification of readers with characters (RN 115). Among the reasons why Watt thought Richardson was historically so important to start with was that ‘there had never before been such opportunities for unreserved participation in the inner lives of fictional characters as were offered by Richardson’s presentation of the flow of consciousness of Pamela and Clarissa in their letters’ (RN 201); this ultimately ‘makes possible the novel’s role as a popular purveyor of vicarious sexual experience and adolescent wish-fulfilment’ (RN 202).
But—crucially—Watt presents a completely different aspect of Richardson’s solicitations of identification when he turns to Clarissa, a novel that goes far beyond inviting the reader to identify uncritically with Pamela’s fairy-tale vindication. At the risk of stating the most obvious point about Pamela and Clarissa, these are both narratives of imprisonment. Pamela is perhaps too easy a target of mockery for Watt because of the social benefits that the heroine reaps from her erotic Stockholm syndrome (‘I was loth to leave the House. Can you believe it!—What could be the Matter with me, I wonder!’57), but Watt evidently finds it impossible to dismiss Clarissa’s paralysing state of captivity. In fact, his effort to account for the utterly desolating impact of Clarissa is among the moments in The Rise of the Novel when his own war experience shows through most powerfully. Even his preliminary classification of Clarissa alongside Middlemarch and The Portrait of a Lady as a book about ‘the all but unendurable disparity between expectation and reality that faces sensitive women in modern society, and the difficulties that lie before anyone who is unwilling either to be used, or to use others, as a means’ is, to say the very least, a peculiarly war-haunted reading of the supposedly ‘domestic’ novel (RN 225; emphasis added). Here, Watt may have been half-remembering Graham Greene’s 1947 essay on The Portrait of a Lady—Watt admired Greene, who was among Conrad’s most obvious successors—in which Greene argued that, for James’s heroines, ‘you must betray or, more fortunately perhaps, you must be betrayed’.58 If so, Watt has turned Greene’s moral melodrama into zero-sum choices that are more social than spiritual. His definition of the domestic novel here comes very close to suggesting that women’s traditional experience of subjugation and disenfranchisement emblematizes all the moral and social predicaments of an individualistic modernity. To the extent that people are able actually to make choices, they get to choose only between using others or being used by them.
So, while Watt’s reading of Richardson is, as I have suggested, explicitly ‘about’ identification, and how the presentational realism of the epistolary novel solicited the reader’s identification as no prior narrative form had ever done, his treatment of the ‘much more complicated psychological and literary world’ (RN 214) of Clarissa is itself an identificatory reading. Watt takes with an unguarded seriousness the hopeless conditions under which Clarissa is forced to choose among differently destructive pseudo-options. He insists early and often that Richardson seems to have felt ‘a deep personal identification with the opposite sex’ (RN 153), only then to reveal, when he gets to Clarissa, an identification with the heroine’s disempowerment such as to rival Richardson’s. Explaining the appeal of fictional character in her own influential feminist account of the rise of the novel, Catherine Gallagher writes that the novel ‘stimulates sympathy because, with very few exceptions, it is easier to identify with nobody’s story [the story of a fictional character] and share nobody’s sentiments than to identify with anybody else’s story and share anybody else’s sentiments’.59 Watt’s identification with Clarissa confirms this idea and yet also points to something more intimate.
And the surprising outcome is itself an insistently feminist reading of the novel. Watt emphasizes the ruthless and predatory qualities of an entitled aristocratic masculinity: ‘a sport that had no closed season and where the quarry was human and feminine’ (RN 215). He notes both the impossibly high stakes, or ‘absolute dependence’, of women on ‘their marriage choice’ (RN 222) and the miserable situation of unmarried women under eighteenth-century capitalism, with their ‘tragic dependence’ on the charity of male family members for mere subsistence whereas they once would have been ‘economically useful members of a large family household by right of birth’ (RN 146). He describes how Clarissa’s victimization at the hands of Lovelace and her own tyrannical male relatives is underwritten by all the institutions of eighteenth-century public and private life, and by the ‘abject legal status’ (RN 142) of women like Clarissa against ‘the power of all the forces which deny her sex their just equality with men’ (RN 224), not least the ‘concealed and self-righteous sadism’ of middle-class morality (RN 223) and ‘the barbarity which lies below the genteel veneer of rakery’ (RN 227). Finally, he links male dominance with outright cruelty. ‘Sadism is, no doubt, the ultimate form which the eighteenth-century view of the masculine role involved: and it makes the female role one in which the woman is, and can only be, the prey’ (RN 231). At first glance, a male critic of the 1950s is not an obvious source of such forthright feminist commentary. Where is it coming from?
An answer is suggested by Hynes’s survey of modern combatant writing, The Soldiers’ Tale (1997), where he compares prisoner-of-war narratives to women’s war stories because ‘they tell the story of the other side of war, where human beings suffer but do not fight’.60 (Hynes’s own wartime career as an aviator with over a hundred Pacific missions and the Distinguished Flying Cross represents an outstanding record of courage in the more traditional style.61) Seen in that light, it requires no speculative leap of the imagination to see why the terminal foreclosure of all Clarissa’s options could feel painfully authentic, rather than feverishly melodramatic, to a reader who had undergone the horror, which was unique among the Allied prisoners to those captured in Asia, of an imprisonment psychologically unmitigated by the dream of escape from what Watt described as the Burma–Thailand Railway’s ‘narrow and confused landscapes’.62 This terrifying environment was also a desperately claustrophobic one. ‘Escape for a POW is both a practical and a psychological refuge,’ writes military historian R. P. W. Havers, discussing how the inmates of the Japanese prison camps were denied that emotional resource: ‘Escape, in whatever form, is the single decisive expression of self-determination that a prisoner can make.’63 But for the Far East prisoners ‘there was nowhere to go’, as Hynes writes, and ‘if there is nowhere to go, how can one be an agent in one’s own imprisoned life?’64
To cast this predicament in the language of the eighteenth-century novel, the prisoner in Asia must learn to suffer like a heroine, to paraphrase Ann Radcliffe’s villainous Montoni, one of the century’s many gaolers of women.65 (These men are such conventional villains of eighteenth-century fiction that one of the first things we learn about Catherine Morland’s father in Jane Austen’s parodic Northanger Abbey is that ‘he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters’.66) Obviously there are many unjustly persecuted men in the eighteenth-century novel, from Fielding’s Thomas Heartfree and Oliver Goldsmith’s Dr Primrose to William Godwin’s Caleb Williams. Jonathan Lamb has shown the centrality of the scriptural book of Job to eighteenth-century British culture, and Patrick Parrinder suggests in his history of the English novel that Job was ‘perhaps the most influential of all devotional texts in seventeenth and eighteenth-century English culture’.67 Indeed, the eighteenth-century novel is so concerned with ingenious psychological traps and tortures that Fielding even opens his (it has often been said) most Richardson-inspired novel, Amelia, with the metafictional boast that the ‘Accidents’ and ‘Distresses’ that are to befall Amelia and her feckless husband Billy Booth ‘were some of them so exquisite, and the Incidents which produced these so extraordinary, that they seemed to require not only the utmost Malice, but the utmost Invention which Superstition hath ever attributed to Fortune’.68 Importantly, however, the suffering of the incarcerated Booth is substantially a consequence of his own actions, if not shortcomings, whereas Amelia, like so many other persecuted eighteenth-century heroines, suffers wholly undeservedly in what Hunter beautifully sums up as the ‘cramped spaces of oppression’ in which these fictional women live.69 But nowhere even in the eighteenth-century British novel is there another imprisonment as irretrievably hopeless as Clarissa’s.
Saved among Watt’s papers is an admiring note he received from a woman reader of a late essay he had written about the experience of the Far East prisoners, and I think she got to the heart of the matter when she speculated that Watt’s real subject in the essay was the brave endurance that would once have been thought honourable only in women. Watt’s scribbled note in the margin reads: ‘Perhaps, still?’70 The disjunction between active and passive courage runs throughout former prisoners’ writings. Describing the early days of their captivity after the fall of Singapore, Eric Lomax writes of the struggle to contain ‘our bitter young energy’ and come to terms with ‘the overriding, dominant feature of POW life: constant anxiety, and utter powerlessness and frustration’.71 At the other end of the war, Allied bombers overhead led Ian Denys Peek to reflect ruefully on the ‘short distance between them and us, and they are free and fighting while we are prisoners and passive’.72 ‘Better have died in the excited streets | when death could still be choice. Who chose | the armistice prolonged,’ Watt asked in an unpublished poem dated to 1943 in Chungkai.73 The poem presents a contrast between brave service in ‘the excited streets’ of collapsing Singapore and protracted suffering in a Thai prison camp that is easy to see in the traditional gendered terms of individual agency and passive victimization. As historian Joan Beaumont writes, prisoners of war are ‘problematical’ figures because cultures typically value the same qualities in their servicemen: ‘physical bravery, controlled aggression, machismo’, whereas the prisoner is necessarily ‘powerless, a victim, passive’.74 Instructively, when the former prisoner of war ‘Van Waterford’ (Willem F. Wanrooy) considers the miserable plight of civilian internees of the Japanese in his survey of different forms of Far East incarceration, he finds that women coped better psychologically with their imprisonment than their male counterparts. Drawing a conclusion from this finding that is rather bleaker in its implications than he probably intends it to be, he supposes that ‘the traditional self-sacrifice and resignation expected of women aided them in the internment situation’.75
Still, if Watt’s reading of what it means for Clarissa Harlowe to suffer like a heroine begins as a feminist reading of a liberal–humanist complexion, albeit a little surprising in coming from this mid-century source, it is also the case that the liberal problematic of being ‘an agent in one’s own imprisoned life’, to borrow Hynes’s evocative phrase, becomes somewhat secondary in Watt’s account of the novel. Increasingly, Watt understands Clarissa’s situation to be desperate in excess even of the cruel and insurmountable forces arrayed around her, because Richardson’s attention to her psychological vulnerability produces a theme of self-splitting that Watt finds ‘starker, less reticent, and, perhaps, even more revealing’ than her persecution at the hands of others (RN 225). ‘Clarissa…will never squeeze a tear from posterity,’ Watt’s former mentor Q. D. Leavis had confidently pronounced in the early 1930s, taking for granted the obsolescence of Richardson’s sentimental mode in order to make a wider point about the historical contingency of literary taste; she, too, thought that the worst feature of popular fiction was its solicitations of identification but believed that the emotional rot set in only in the nineteenth century.76 Her husband agreed about Richardson’s contemporary irrelevance: early in The Great Tradition, we are told that Clarissa is ‘a really impressive work’—very high praise from Leavis—but ‘it’s no use pretending that Richardson can ever be made a current classic again’.77 Watt acknowledges the unfashionability of Clarissa, and yet considers this ‘a more modern novel in a sense than any other written in the eighteenth century’ because of its ‘exploration of the private and subjective aspects of human experience’ (RN 220). Perhaps Clarissa felt more rather than less relevant for critics like Watt in the years after the Leavises’ consignment of Richardson to oblivion.78
In fact, Watt finds Clarissa shatteringly powerful not simply because of the heroine’s victimization but also because of how it reveals Richardson’s distinctively modern sense of subjectivity as destructively splintered. By virtue of being what they are, neither Clarissa nor Lovelace can know what she or he wants, perhaps because, Watt speculates, of their ‘ultimate and no doubt pathological expression of the dichotomisation of the sexual roles in the realm of the unconscious’ (RN 231). Of course it is true that Pamela reproaches her ‘perfidious Traitor’ of a ‘treacherous, treacherous Heart’ when she realizes that she has fallen in love with Mr B—and Watt wrote elsewhere that he found Pamela’s mixed and contradictory motives ‘wholly credible and consistent with any adequately complex notion of human behaviour’—but Richardson’s happy ending allows the novel to set aside the inner conflicts it has dramatized.79 In contrast, Clarissa pursues Richardson’s sense of inner contradiction all the way to Clarissa’s death, with what Watt admires as its ‘overpowering sense of waste and defeat…combined with the fortitude she displays in facing it’, and ‘the horror and the grandeur’ of the novel’s devastating conclusion (RN 216).
Triumphantly, Watt wrote that Clarissa Harlowe ‘is the heroic representative of all that is free and positive in the new individualism’ (RN 222); and ‘she proves that no individual and no institution can destroy the inner inviolability of the human personality’ (RN 225). However, there is a very much darker, and also less confidently articulated, side to his reading when he wonders if the psychic horror of Clarissa is really that the seemingly inviolate individual is always on the point of disintegration, and that Clarissa and Lovelace ultimately do not need external forces to destroy them when their own unacknowledged desires can annihilate them both with such suicidal efficacy (RN 228–34). Clarissa senses this self-destructiveness: ‘for don’t you see, my dear’, she asks Anna Howe, ‘that we seem all to be impelled, as it were, by a perverse fate which none of us are able to resist?—and yet all arising (with a strong appearance of self-punishment) from ourselves?’80 It may generally be true that the humanist critic has sought ‘to efface the contingency of events; he also wants a sturdy, reliable image of man’, as Warner wrote in his deconstructive study of Clarissa, but Watt is not as useful an example of this as we might expect.81
Character, Watt wrote elsewhere, is ‘nearly as intractable as circumstance, and equally unlikely to be transformed in accordance with our wishes’: and no one ‘should be judged and found wanting by standards derived from the unsupported modern dogmas that full self-knowledge is possible and that it can deliver us from the ignominious fate of being what we are’ (C. 340). Imprisoned by temperament in a more tragic way than a character like Moll Flanders, whose ‘resilient selfhood’ is ‘confident and indestructible’ (RN 131), Clarissa cannot be other than the divided thing she is, and what she is condemns her to her fate; the same is true of self-destructive Lovelace, compelled by psychic forces he cannot understand to act against his highest impulses and even his own best interests. This is why ‘their experience partakes of the terrifying ambiguity of human life itself’, as Watt abruptly ends his discussion of Richardson—‘concludes’ is scarcely the right word for it (RN 238). ‘This passage is a fine example of the humanist sublime’ was Warner’s rather sardonic verdict back in 1979: ‘for, while it apparently simply talks about a book, it dignifies the very idea of Man’.82 But Watt’s writing is not really given to pompous sublimity, and Richardson is the only subject on which his usual laconic understatement gives way to this loaded and inscrutable emotional register.
Thus, when Watt writes opaquely of ‘the frightening reality of the unconscious life’ in Clarissa (RN 235), for example, or of ‘thoughts and emotions of a kind that cannot issue in speech, and are hardly capable of rational analysis—the flux and reflux of Clarissa’s lacerated sensibility’ (RN 266), we are some distance away from the naively positive and positivist interpreter of individualist autonomy Watt is often taken to be. Most recently, he has made his appearance in the conventionally reduced form, albeit in an extremely sophisticated iteration of it, in Joseph Slaughter’s important discussion of the novelistic shapes taken by the idea of the person in formulations of human-rights law shortly after the Second World War. Of course I believe that Watt might have made a more historically telling appearance here not as the ‘apprentice literary critic’ Slaughter designates him than as someone whom existing human-rights law had failed so signally to protect when the international conventions meant to safeguard captured personnel were violated wholesale in the Far East.83 Clifford Kinvig has found that the Japanese handling of prisoners of war systematically flouted all but one of the seventy-three articles of the Geneva Convention dealing directly with the treatment of prisoners; the exception was Article 76, which was, deplorably enough, on prisoners’ right to honourable burial.84 This must be about as impoverished a human right as the one that allows Clarissa to organize her own funeral once all her other escape routes have been closed off.
In any case, Watt’s uncharacteristically fraught reading of Clarissa implies a more troubled thinker of individualism than we have come to consider him on the basis of his better-known interest in Defoe. This major commentator on novelistic individualism was more sensitive by far to the vulnerability of that so-called individual to unforeseen depredations from within as well as without. The coming chapter describes how he and the other prisoners found a way of living with the knowledge of these destructive forces without being annihilated by them. I propose that Watt found the literary corollary of collective and psychological recovery in the stoical sociability of Fielding.
1 Leslie Fiedler, ‘Looking Backward: America from Europe’, in The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler, i (New York: Stein & Day, 1971), 125.
2 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London: Penguin, 1990), 340.
3 Ian Watt, ‘The Bridge over the River Kwai as Myth’, in Watt, Essays on Conrad, 205–6. Watt, ‘Bridges over the Kwai’, 218.
4 Like Giorgio Agamben, Watt casts the limit situation of the camps as a way to understand the norm, although he approached the question of the administered life as a Weberian whereas Agamben famously follows Carl Schmitt. See ‘The Camp as the “Nomos” of the Modern’, in Georgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 166–80. The comparison only goes so far: it is impossible to imagine Watt making claims like Agamben’s ‘Auschwitz…is, by now, everywhere’ (Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 2002), 20). A useful account of the limits of Agamben’s position—important limits given its intellectual appeal early in the war on terror—is in John Brenkman’s The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy: Political Thought since September 11 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), esp. 55–64. As Brenkman writes, Agamben’s ‘camp’ sometimes covers everything from Auschwitz to the affluent gated communities of the United States, and ‘Agamben thus furnishes his own argument with its reductio ad absurdum’ (58). On Agamben’s tendentious reading of Primo Levi to characterize incommensurate forms of guilt, see Debarati Sanyal, ‘A Soccer Match in Auschwitz: Passing Culpability in Holocaust Criticism’, Representations, 79/1 (Summer 2002), 1–27.
5 On the dispute about how far Foreman’s initial work survived or was supplanted by that of Lean and Wilson, see Kevin Brownlow, ‘The Making of David Lean’s Film of The Bridge on the River Kwai’, Cineaste, 22/2 (1996), 10–16.
6 Letter from Pierre Boulle to Ian Watt dated 11 August 1976, Stanford University Special Collections, SC 401-ACCN 1994-106, Box 24, Folder 1.
7 See Laura Noszlopy, ‘Railroad of Death: An Introduction’, in John Coast, Railroad of Death (Newcastle: Myrmidon, 2014), xxxiv.
8 Brownlow, ‘The Making of David Lean’s Film’, 10.
9 Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, 236.
10 The National Archives: WO 344/407/2.
11 Alexander, Sweet Kwai, 153.
12 Watt, ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, 524.
13 Durnford, Branch Line to Burma, xi.
14 Watt, ‘The Humanities on the River Kwai’, 243.
15 Alexander, Sweet Kwai, 251.
16 Watt, ‘The Humanities on the River Kwai’, 244.
17 Watt, ‘The Bridge over the River Kwai as Myth’, 200.
18 Watt, ‘The Humanities on the River Kwai’, 248.
19 Lord Russell of Liverpool, The Knights of Bushido (Bath: Chivers Press, 1985), 54. Although Japan had not ratified the Geneva Convention, which its delegates had signed, the Japanese Foreign Minister declared on 29 January 1942 that treatment of British and Dominions POWs would be in accordance with the convention ‘mutatis mutandis’ (Kinvig, ‘Allied POW’s’, 42). Some British politicians hopefully recalled Japan’s exemplary modern reputation; for example, the Earl of Onslow reminded his fellow peers of the ‘very good reports’ from the Russo-Japanese War (‘Japanese Atrocities at Hong Kong’, Hansard, 10 March 1942). In contrast, the Foreign Secretary used that same record to point out that ‘the Japanese know well what are the obligations of a civilised Power to safeguard the life and health of prisoners who have fallen into their hands’ (‘Japanese Treatment’, Hansard, 28 January 1944).
20 Watt, ‘Bridges over the Kwai’, 218.
21 Watt, ‘Bridges over the Kwai’, 218.
22 Georges Joyaux, ‘The Bridge over the River Kwai: From the Novel to the Movie’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 2 (1974), 175, 180–1.
23 Watt, ‘The Bridge over the River Kwai as Myth’, 204.
24 Watt, ‘The Bridge over the River Kwai as Myth’, 204–5.
25 Hough, Image and Experience, 110.
26 Watt, ‘The Bridge over the River Kwai as Myth’, 201.
27 Watt, ‘The Bridge over the River Kwai as Myth’, 200.
28 Defoe, Moll Flanders, 1. Daniel Defoe, Roxana (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 3.
29 Samuel Richardson, Pamela (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 53, 46, 423.
30 Ian Watt, ‘Robinson Crusoe as a Myth’, Essays in Criticism, 1/2 (April 1951), 107.
31 Joseph Conrad, Chance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 215.
32 Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, ii (New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1930), 78–9.
33 Samuel Johnson, ‘The New Realistic Novel’, in Samuel Johnson, The Major Works, ed. Donald Greene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 176.
34 Watt, ‘The Humanities on the River Kwai’, 243, 251.
35 Rivett’s profound pleasure in finding a bamboo grove in which he could write without fear of surveillance and interruption—‘a little bamboo clump…where I can write undisturbed’, ‘a private haven’—reads like unconscious parody of Richardson’s heroines in those closets that Watt considered part prototype for Woolf’s ‘room of one’s own’ and part ‘forcing house of the feminine sensibility’ (RN 188). As Rivett explained in this reprinted extract from his, so to speak, written-to-the-moment journal, ‘one of our first needs, if and when we escape, will be to get right away into the country somewhere where we’ll hardly see another man from one day’s end to another’ (Behind Bamboo, 222).
36 Parkin, Into the Smother, 53.
37 Hunter, Before Novels, 61.
38 Warner, Licensing Entertainment, 176–230. Watt, ‘The Bridge over the River Kwai as Myth’, 201.
39 Watt, ‘The Bridge over the River Kwai as Myth’, 204.
40 Letter from T. W. Adorno to Ian Watt, dated 1 September 1955, Stanford University Special Collections, SC401-ACCN 1994-106, Box 1, Folder ‘Adorno’.
41 In fact an earlier letter from Adorno (19 November 1953) to Watt, again soliciting an essay, paraphrases the significance of Watt’s work in exactly this way. Stanford University Special Collections, SC401-ACCN 1994-106, Box 1, Folder ‘Adorno’. On Watt’s description of his dealings with Adorno, see Watt, ‘Flat-Footed’, 55–6.
42 Watt, ‘Samuel Richardson’, 13.
43 Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1939), 89. Unsurprisingly, she casts the growth of literacy as the decline of literary taste; her turning point is Edward Bulwer-Lytton (‘best-sellers before Lytton are at worst dull, but ever since they have almost always been vulgar’ (164)).
44 Hilliard, English as a Vocation, 171.
45 Alexander, Sweet Kwai, 193.
46 Witness Richards’s dry introduction of the student who found John Donne’s ‘At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners’ incomprehensible: ‘A reader unacquainted with the rules for attendance at the Day of Judgment next claims our interest…’ (I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929), 45).
47 Williams, Politics and Letters, 41. On Watt’s attraction to left-wing politics in the 1930s, see Goody, ‘Watt, War, and Writing’, 223–4. Goody writes that, although he and Watt were drawn to Leavis as undergraduates, a ‘value system’ proposing that ‘the world was to be saved by a proper reading of D. H. Lawrence’ was ‘not altogether consistent with our own political stance’ (232).
48 Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 73.
49 Muriel Spark, ‘Daughter of the Soil’, in Muriel Spark, The Golden Fleece: Essays, ed. Penelope Jardine (Manchester: Carcanet, 2014), 152.
50 Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, 209.
51 Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, 187.
52 Leslie Fiedler, ‘Introduction: No! In Thunder’, in Fiedler, Collected Essays, i. 229.
53 Joseph Conrad, Almayer’s Folly (London: Penguin, 1976), 128.
54 Searle, To the Kwai—and Back, 58.
55 Durnford, Branch Line to Burma, 21.
56 Watt, ‘The Bridge over the River Kwai as Myth’, 205.
57 Richardson, Pamela, 244.
58 Graham Greene, ‘The Portrait of a Lady’, in Graham Greene, Collected Essays (London: Vintage, 2014), 49.
59 Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 172.
60 Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, 232; emphasis in original.
61 Samuel Hynes, Flights of Passage: Recollections of a World War II Aviator (New York: Penguin, 2003).
62 Watt, ‘Bridges over the Kwai’, 217.
63 Havers, Reassessing the Japanese Prisoner of War Experience, 33.
64 Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, 250.
65 ‘I can endure with fortitude, when it is in resistance of oppression’, announces Radcliffe’s Emily St Aubert. Her captor Montoni replies: ‘You speak like a heroine…we shall see whether you can suffer like one’ (Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 381).
66 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (London: Penguin, 2003), 15.
67 Jonathan Lamb, The Rhetoric of Suffering: Reading the Book of Job in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Patrick Parrinder, Nation and Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 58.
68 Henry Fielding, Amelia, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 15.
69 Hunter, Before Novels, 272.
70 Card from Mrs Irma Y. Johnson to Ian Watt postmarked 8 May 1973, Stanford University Special Collections, SC401-ACCN 1990-131, Box 30, Folder ‘Kwai: Recent Correspondence’.
71 Lomax, The Railway Man, 72.
72 Peek, One Fourteenth, 579.
73 Ian Watt, ‘Dying in the Summer: Chung’Kai 1943’, Stanford University Special Collections, SC401-ACCN 1994-106, Box 22, Folder ‘Jap. Stuff Misc’.
74 Joan Beaumont, Gull Force: Survival and Leadership in Captivity, 1941–1945 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), 2.
75 Waterford, Prisoners of the Japanese, 59.
76 Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, 156. Bulwer-Lytton serves again as her historical marker: fiction before Lytton ‘keeps the reader at arm’s length, and does not encourage him to project himself into the life he reads of by identifying himself with the hero or heroine’ (235).
77 F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (London: Penguin, 1983), 13.
78 The major Richardson scholar of the day also wondered if Clarissa was more timely at mid-century: ‘Lovelace’s insane persistence’ and his ‘elaborate contrivances’ no longer feel so melodramatic when ‘the age of the atomic bomb is in no position to deny that a life of obsessive drives and intricate techniques may assume this febrile quality, or that a protracted nightmare of this kind could begin in dull and stodgy Harlowe Place’ (Alan Dugald McKillop, The Early Masters of English Fiction (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1956), 72–3).
79 Richardson, Pamela, 249. Watt, ‘Samuel Richardson’, 9.
80 Richardson, Clarissa, 333.
81 William Beatty Warner, Reading ‘Clarissa’: The Struggles of Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 220.
82 Warner, Reading ‘Clarissa’, 245.
83 Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 46.
84 Kinvig, ‘Allied POW’s’, 45.