AGE OF CRISIS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26532, 6 August 1947, Page 2

AGE OF CRISIS

EFFECT ON NOVELISTS CONTEMPORARY DARKNESS “ Every age has been called an age of crisis, but we in the. twentieth century are probably living in a completely chaotic age,” said Mr Winston Rhodes, lecturer in English at Canterbury University College, in a talk on the contemporary novel in the Somerset Lounge on Monday night. Mr Rhodes said that some novelists immersed themselves in the destruction in the world, as, for example, James Joyce in “Ulysses,” the. most tragic of all modern books. The individual was lost in the modern world. The novelist examined and dissected human personality until the human being dwindled almost to vanishing point. Modern novelists were interested in sin rather than virtue, being puritans preoccupied with abnormality and disease. Modern writers had deserted ’ the chronological method of describing the life of an individual betwen two crises such as birth and marriage, Mr Rhodes said, and had adopted an allegorical style. This was illustrated by Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse,” which was written on three major themes—the darkness without, the darkness within, and the passing of time. Few writers had anything positive to say, exceptions being Rex Warner and C. S. Lewis. When people complained of modern novels being pessimistic and obscure. Mr Rhodes concluded, the fault really lay in the chaotic condition of society. The task of the individual to-day was to reassemble the world, and the novelist had to build up a new form of novel. At the conclusion of the address it was announced that Mr M. H. Holcroft would give the next talk in the series, his subject being “Some Problems of Creative Writing in New Zealand.”