Abstract
This chapter explores Burgess’s underexamined encounter with the Structuralist philosophy of Claude Levi-Strauss, and illustrates the similarity of their thinking. It explains the creative pause in Burgess’s output as he digested Levi-Strauss’s model and delineates his earliest response in terms of a hybridised mode of creativity, derived from Structuralism, commencing with the overtly Structuralist novel MF, and continuing with close readings of his mid-career fiction, including Napoleon Symphony, Beard’s Roman Women and ABBA ABBA.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Burgess named The Scope of Anthropology as one of his favourite books of the year: “Books They Liked Best and Books They Liked Least”, Anthony Burgess , Book World, 3 December 1967, pp. 16–17, cited in Anthony Burgess: A Bibliography, Jeutonne Brewer, Metuchen NJ, Scarecrow Press, 1980, p. 59.
- 2.
Structuralism in Literature, Robert Scholes, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 1974, p. 2.
- 3.
Burgess’s literary Freud appears as the protagonist of one phylum of The End of the World News , and the incest motif occurs in Tremor of Intent and MF , and is a feature of Burgess’s extensive critical work on Finnegans Wake . In 1972, soon after encountering the work of Lévi-Strauss, Burgess translated Sophocles’s Oedipus the King. Wilcken notes that Lévi-Strauss precociously encountered Freudian psychoanalysis as a teenager, reading the early French translations of A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis and The Interpretation of Dreams under the influence of Dr Marcel Nathan (Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory, Patrick Wilcken, Bloomsbury, London, 2010, p. 26.).
- 4.
Burgess’s sense of musical revelation when he first heard Debussy on the radio as a young teenager is recalled in both his autobiography Little Wilson and Big God and in his musicology text This Man and Music. In Tristes Tropiques , Lévi-Strauss recalls how witnessing one of the first performances of Stravinsky’s Les Noces at the age of fourteen “brought about the collapse of my previous musical assumptions” (494).
- 5.
Denis Bertholet’s biography reveals the extent of Lévi-Strauss’s engagement with literature as editor of the Livres et revues section of L’Etudiant socialiste in the early 1930s (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Denis Bertholet, Plon, Paris, 2003, pp. 56–57).
- 6.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Wilcken, p. 357.
- 7.
I have primarily consulted English translations of Lévi-Strauss’s work, and there is little evidence of Burgess having read Lévi-Strauss in French. (According to the catalogue of Burgess’s book collection maintained at the research centre at Angers, he owned the following books in English: The Scope of Anthropology, Cape, London, 1967; The Raw and the Cooked , Cape, London, 1970; Conversations with Lévi-Strauss, Georges Charbonnier, Cape, London, 1969; and Lévi-Strauss, Edmund Leach, Fontana, London, 1970. Burgess also owned a copy of the 1955 edition of Tristes Tropiques in French, but there is no indication as to when it was purchased or indeed if it was even read.) Hence I refer to Lévi-Strauss’s works by their generally accepted titles in English throughout this chapter.
- 8.
Structural Anthropology , Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anchor Books, Garden City NY, 1967, p. 207.
- 9.
Burgess had edited Finnegans Wake into a ‘shorter’ version for Faber and Faber in 1965–1966, and his introductory essay, and explanatory notes throughout both feature Burgess’s idea that HCE’s suppressed desire for incest with his daughter, occasionally purged or sublimated by riddles, is the central narrative line of the text.
- 10.
11The fact that Burgess had to rewrite parts of the play to make this theme evident goes some way to undermining Lévi-Strauss’s original argument about the universality of this nexus, especially as it applies to the Oedipus myth.
- 11.
12“The Old Shelley Game: Prometheus and Predestination in Burgess’s Works”, Timothy R. Lucas, (Bloom, 135).
- 12.
Lévi-Strauss “consistently behaves as an advocate defending a cause rather than as a scientist searching for the ultimate truth. But the philosopher-advocate is also a poet… Lévi-Strauss has not actually published poetry, but his whole attitude to the sounds and meanings and combinations and permutations of language elements betrays his nature.” Lévi-Strauss, Edmund Leach, 4th ed. intr. and revised James Laidlaw, Fontana, London, 1996 (1st pub. 1970), p. 29.
- 13.
Robert Scholes was one of the earlier Anglophone critics, along with Edmund Leach, to question the scientific rigour of Lévi-Strauss’s work. Such criticisms have never been effectively silenced by Lévi-Strauss’s advocates. For Scholes, rather than considering Lévi-Strauss’s working methods as ‘poetic’, he criticised them (and those of Roland Barthes ) as “too arbitrary, too personal, and too idiosyncratic”. Structuralism in Literature , Robert Scholes, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 1974, p. 155.
- 14.
Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Formative Years, Christopher Johnston, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, p. 155.
- 15.
“Mr. Livedog’s Day: The Novels of Anthony Burgess ”, Shirley Chew, in Encounter vol. 38, no. 6, June 1972, p. 63.
- 16.
“Oedipus Wrecks”, in This Man and Music, Anthony Burgess, Hutchinson, London, 1982; repr. in The Anthony Burgess Newsletter vol. 3, Université d’Angers, December 2000, pp. 27–41.
- 17.
Baffled critics such as Ralph McInerny, in his review in Commonweal, 28 May 1971, pp. 290–291; and Thomas Winter, in “A Protean Work”, in Prairie Schooner, Spring 1972, pp. 82–83.
- 18.
“A Bit of Unoriginal Sin: Allusions to the Fall in Selected Novels of Anthony Burgess ”, Katherine Adamson, doctoral thesis, University of Liverpool, 2010, p. 146.
- 19.
Huxley’s 1945 text was notable for ecumenising notions of a universal transcendent godhead across Western and Eastern religious traditions alike. Insofar as it accepted and popularised ideas of progressive and holistic transcendence, its expansive notion of godhead is often considered a significant influence on the emergence of the ‘New Age’ movement in the latter half of the twentieth century.
- 20.
“Dionysian liquidity is the invisible sea of organic life, flooding our cells and uniting us to plants and animals. Our bodies are Ferenczi’s primeval ocean, surging and rippling .” (SP, 91).
- 21.
“The moon draws up tides in the sea and in women, in la belle mer and la belle-mere. The step-mother is the muse, death, the sea, even the moon or its goddess.” “Poetry and Borborygms”, Frank Kermode, The Listener, 6 June 1968, p. 735.
- 22.
“A Bit of Unoriginal Sin: Allusions to the Fall in Selected Novels of Anthony Burgess ”, Katherine Adamson, doctoral thesis, University of Liverpool, 2010, p. 151.
- 23.
“Durrell and the Homunculi”, Anthony Burgess , in The Saturday Review, 21 March 1970, pp. 29–31, 41.
- 24.
Ibid.
- 25.
Pritchard, William H., “Merely Fiction: Review”, The Hudson Review, Vol. 30, No. 1, (Spring, 1977).
- 26.
“Anthony Burgess ’s 007 obsession”, Andrew Biswell , New Statesman, 9 April, 2013.
- 27.
Hollywood’s bias towards “Great Man” explanations has been widely noted. It extends from film content (such as the prevalence of biopic versions of history, the sub-genre Burgess was most commonly commissioned to write), via the aggrandisement of individual achievement in a fundamentally co-operative industry (as witnessed at awards ceremonies like the Oscars) all the way to academic perceptions of artistic creativity in cinema, such as auteur theory .
- 28.
“Burgess met a film-making friend who talked him … into Napoleon-a-la-Eroica, so Burgess, eager to please and fool around, went ahead and did it. Worked up his Napoleon, got Beethoven in his bones, and ended up with 363 pages of nonsense.” “Fooling around, and Serious Business: Review”, Roger Sale, The Hudson Review, vol. 27, no. 4 (winter, 1974–1975), p. 627.
- 29.
Burgess was very familiar with the work of Thomas Carlyle. See for example: “Carlyle and Friends”, by Anthony Burgess , Books Section, New York Times, 22 March 1981.
- 30.
Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition, Mieke Bal, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991.
- 31.
“Berlin Diary” in Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood , Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1972 (1st pub. 1939), p. 7.
- 32.
“[T]here are two Paolas (one his lover, the other his ‘rapist’), two Pathans (the second of whom Greg Greg knows, in Malaya), two Leonoras (the one on the phone and the one in the past), two Miriams (the lissom young one and the cancerous older one) and two Bellis (the surname of Paola and the dead poet—who himself has two translators, Beard and a restaurant guitarist”. “Beard’s Roman Women”, Martin Phipps, The Anthony Burgess Newsletter 6, Université d’Angers, December 2003. www.masterbibangers.net/ABC/index.php/beards-roman-women--m-phipps.html accessed 10 September 2012.
- 33.
“The Albert Schweitzer syndrome: An excess of virtuousness”, Simon Olshansky, Disabled U.S.A. vol. 2, 1978, p. 3.
- 34.
For example, Thomas Sowell’s collected letters contain a reference to “Albert Schweitzer syndrome” dated 14 March 1964, wherein Sowell implies a definition of excessive indulgence of the faults of others. A Man of Letters, Thomas Sowell , Encounter Books, San Francisco, 2007, p. 47.
- 35.
“Beard’s Roman Women”, Phipps.
- 36.
Ibid.
- 37.
John Keats’s Dream of Truth, John Jones, Chatto and Windus, London, 1969, p. 273.
- 38.
Although Keats did not share the overt atheism of P.B. Shelley , he was vigorously and consistently opposed to religion, as his letters, and poems such as Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition, indicate. According to Robert Gittings, “Keats was strongly anti-clerical. His bitterness with what he called ‘the pious frauds of religion’ was abnormal. He loathed the Church. Every anti-clerical remark in reading or conversation drew from him a mark of approval.” John Keats: The Living Year, Robert Gittings, Heinemann, London, 1978 (1st. pub. 1954), pp. 196–197.
- 39.
Hyperion, John Keats, III.113. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44473/hyperion.
- 40.
Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World, Jeffrey Burton Russell, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1986, p. 136.
- 41.
Pox: Genius, Madness, And The Mysteries Of Syphilis, Deborah Hayden, Basic Books, London, 2003.
- 42.
“The Strange Case of Mr. Keats’s Tuberculosis”, Dr Hillas Smith, in Clinical Infectious Diseases, vol. 38, no. 7, 2004, p. 992.
- 43.
“Nineteen Eighty-Four was a metaphysical game to Orwell , and The Plumed Serpent a politico-religious game to Lawrence . It is probably not in order to speculate how far the killing tubercle was, with both men approaching middle age and death, responsible for their respective fantasies” Flame Into Being: The Life and Work of D.H. Lawrence, Anthony Burgess , London, 1985, p. 158.
- 44.
Clark was the author of a number of books on tubercular illness, including one specifically about the effects of a Mediterranean climate on the disease, The Effects of a Residence in the South of Europe in cases of Pulmonary Consumption.
- 45.
‘Quaint’ and ‘figge’ are Elizabethan euphemisms for the vagina.
- 46.
His distinction between “Class 1” and “Class 2” fiction, as described in Ninety Nine Novels is a good example of the disdain in which Burgess held populist writing, for example. The selection of recommended fiction in the same text also heavily leans towards the experimental, high modernist tradition.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Clarke, J. (2017). Conflict and Confluence: The Trajectory from Dionysian to Apollonian . In: The Aesthetics of Anthony Burgess. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66411-8_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66411-8_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-66410-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-66411-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)