Madame

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Notes

Tonio Kröger (1903), one of Thomas Mann's most celebrated stories, deals, like many of his works, with the character of the artist.

One example is Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit (1855–57). The novel's young heroine, Amy, tries to save her father from the cruel pursuit of his debtors. The two leave London and hide in small towns. But after their long wanderings and countless troubles, Amy falls ill and dies. Many readers of the novel, which first appeared in instalments, sent letters to Dickens begging him not to let his young, brave heroine die. Readers, when moved deeply by a work of fiction, unconsciously identify literature with life. It is worth noting that F. R. Leavis described Little Dorrit as “one of the great European novels.” See F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: Penguin, 1966), 29.

What comes to mind is Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953) with its unforgettable opening line: “It was a pleasure to burn.” This novel about book-burning and against censorship, supposedly about the distant future, has proved true of the immediate past and present, in so-called civilized countries like Germany and Austria, where book-burning began already in 1933. We should remember that book-burning was neither a new idea nor a new practice, for it took place in ancient times, in the Roman Empire, in Imperial China, in Christendom, and in our own time in Russia and other Communist countries, as well as in America where, last Halloween, thousands of Harry Potter books were burned as “evil” books.

This quotation comes, of course, from Joseph Conrad's famous novel Lord Jim (1900). Feeling that his ship was going down “she was going down, down, head first under me … ” Lord Jim jumped, and thus saved himself.

Leavis, The Great Tradition, 17.

D. H. Lawrence, “Why the Novel Matters,” in D. H. Lawrence: Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal (London: Heinemann, 1967), 107.