ourselves as well. To what precise extent Bradshaw represents some critical view Isherwood came to have of his own moral stance during his time in Berlin it is impossible to say. What we can say with certainty is that Isherwood's use of Bradshaw as a character adds a moral resonance and a complexity to the novel that would be lacking if Bradshaw were only-or simply-the narrator of the tale.
Isherwood divided his novels into two categories: 'constructed novels,' in which he included The Last of Mr. Norris (along with All the Conspirators and The Memorial) and 'dynamic portraits'-books 'whose interest depends on the gradual revealing of a character, rather than on action, crisis, and confrontation'-where he places, among others, Goodbye to Berlin. If the distinction is not altogether useful in explaining the differences between the two Berlin novels, it does at least point to the emphasis on character, or better, characters, to be found in Goodbye to Berlin. The novel consists of four separate portraits or groups of portraits, framed by two lengthy excerpts from the narrator's diary, one from the fall of 1930, the other from the winter of 1932 -33. Although the episodes are sufficiently self-contained to permit them to have been published separately, together they constitute not a set of fragments but an effectively organized whole, connected by tone, chronology, and assorted internal sets of parallels and contrasts. The individual portraits of Sally Bowles, the Nowaks, the Landauers, and others finally blend into a convincing portrait of an entire culture that is rapidly disintegrating. In this way the discontinuous form, far from undermining the novel's coherence, contributes significantly to it.
The presence of the first-person narrator, of course, telling the stories of the people he meets even as he himself experiences the decaying world in which they are all immersed, is the most potent unifying force in the novel. The person who observes it all is another Isherwood surrogate, this time bearing not the evasive name of 'William Bradshaw' but the straightforward 'Christopher Isherwood.'
Goodbye to Berlin is the first novel-Prater Violet and Down There on a Visit were to follow-in which the narrator is called Christopher Ish-761- Christopher Ish-. It is important not to make the mistake of many readers in thinking that Christopher the narrator is synonymous with Christopher the author. In each instance the Christopher-narrator is a freestanding character, treated by Christopher the author as such, rather than a purely autobiographical voice. The complicated relationship between them suggests the extent to which Isherwood remained fascinated by the shifting, elusive selves that exist in a single person's lifetime and the challenges those different selves pose to the writer in trying both to understand and then to represent them in works of fiction and autobiography. In different ways, all of Isherwood's work is an extended journey into the self.
The confusion surrounding the relationship between author and narrator in Goodbye to Berlin is compounded by the narrator's comment at the start of the book, 'I am a camera.' Made famous by John van Druten's stage adaptation of the novel (whose title it became), the statement has been taken as a description of author Isherwood's method of composition, rather than as a self-defining stance the narrator has assumed. Actively transforming the real-life models he met in Berlin into affecting fictional characters, Isherwood chooses to present them through the passive camera-eye of the narrator.
In doing so, he not only achieves the feeling of an unmediated, immediate grasp of the life going on around 'Herr Issyvoo,' as Fraülein Schroeder memorably calls him, but he also establishes the nature of the relationship between the narrator and what he observes. As he captures the different varieties and postures of the lost he encounters in Berlin (and on Ruegen Island), the narrator remains essentially cut off from the subjects of his snapshots, conscious largely of his own isolation and helplessness. Teaching students who are indifferent to what he offers, recording rather than participating in relationships, he lives without passion on the periphery of things, unable to make contact with life. Although cameras are not ordinarily defined by the pictures they take, in this case the lost whom he «photographs» for us speak to his own spiritual condition as well.
Goodbye to Berlin charts both the progressive slide into moral chaos of an entire culture, and the emotional and spiritual aridity of the man who witnesses it. Christopher's failures to connect in some lasting way with what he experiences is demonstrated on the novel's last page. 'I catch sight of my face in the mirror,' he observes, following a thought that at that very moment the Nazis might be torturing someone he -762- knows, 'and am shocked to see that I am smiling. You can't help smiling in such beautiful weather.'
Narrator and author both left Berlin in 1933, when Isherwood started a six-year odyssey through various European countries. During this time, in addition to publishing The Last of Mr. Norris, he collaborated with W. H. Auden on their two poetic plays, The Dog Beneath the Skin and The Ascent of F6. Isherwood's wanderings finally came to an end in 1939, not with a return home but with the discovery of a new home in California. His postwar fiction, less acclaimed than his previous work, continued his explorations into the self, heavily influenced by his new studies in Vedanta and its belief that everyone possesses an unchanging, immortal self that is at one with the universe. These religious convictions significantly change the nature of his later fiction, with his earlier uncertainty now replaced by a confident set of spiritual values. In the words of Alan Wilde, Isherwood's most thoughtful critic, 'If the prewar novels seek above all to discover value, the postwar books attempt rather to demonstrate the consequences of belief.' Novels like Prater Violet, Down There on a Visit, A Single Man, and A Meeting by the River are separated by more than a continent from The Berlin Stories.
Even before Isherwood had published his first novel he was being hailed, as Stephen Spender learned from Auden, as 'the Novelist of the Future.' Cyril Connolly called him 'a hope of English fiction,' and Somerset Maugham announced that he 'holds the future of the English novel in his hands.' Despite all his marvelous gifts, however-his intelligence, the purity and naturalness of his prose, his subtly modulated ironies-it is fair to say that Isherwood never quite achieved the distinction projected for him. At this time, at least, it appears that the only works of his that will really endure are The Berlin Stories, and even these, successful as they are, seem too slight an accomplishment for a major talent. For John Lehmann, Isherwood's good friend, 'Mr. Norris Changes Trains and the stories of Goodbye to Berlin seemed to me far too inadequate an oeuvre for someone who had been tipped, for every kind of good reason, as the most promising novelist of his generation.' But if we relieve him of the burden of unfair expectations, we find a novelist whose clear view of the moral and political chaos of the thirties and its effect on personal life and private values plays a major role in helping define the period for us.
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James Joyce
JAMES JOYCE is associated with modern narrative in the way Einstein is with modern physics or Freud with modern psychology. Though he is indisputably a giant of twentieth-century fiction, Joyce's status has little to do with the actual amount of his published writing. Compared to his nineteenth-century predecessors-Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Henry James-or even his contemporary ones-Arnold Bennett, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad-Joyce's canon seems almost meager. His works consist of one collection of short stories, Dubliners (1914), two small collections of poems, several essays and newspaper articles, one play, Exiles (1918), an unfinished autobiographical novel, Stephen Hero, a finished one, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), a modern comic epic, Ulysses (1922), and a formidable experiment in polyglot fiction, Finnegans Wake (1939).
If volume alone is not the reason for Joyce's premier position among modern novelists, what is? To answer
