Henry Green & Modernism

REGARDLESS of which authors are included in the syllabi of literature survey courses or graduate seminars, there will always be arguments as to why certain authors are included at the expense of others. There will always be claims that the lesser-known author X deserves to be included just as much as the canonized author Y. Marius Hentea makes just such a claim for the status of Henry Green, the nom de plume of Henry Vincent Yorke (1905–1973), in Henry Green at the Limits of Modernism. He makes an excellent argument for this little-studied writer to be included in the larger modernist discussion. Hentea’s careful study is highly accessible and thought provoking, and, as a happy result, it may see Green included in more literature classrooms around the world.

Hentea jumps immediately into the discussion of the canon. He acknowledges that the school of New Modernist Studies has done much in terms of “expansion” of the modernist canon but asserts that “expansion does not come from nowhere but emanates from a centre,” and that this “centre” is taken for granted. “[T]he very prospect of defining modernism,” he continues, “is seen as counter to the expansionist aims of New Modernist Studies.” Hentea claims that he is “not issuing a call for placing Green in the high modernist pantheon, even if his work can be profitably read alongside Joyce, Lawrence and Woolf,” but rather, he is interested in placing Green at “the limits” of modernism as a figure “casting light upon the centre,” or what he calls “a limit-modernist.” In this very structure he seems to be addressing the same center that he criticizes as being taken for granted, but despite this rocky start in his argumentation, Hentea quickly makes up for it with a thorough and engaging “full-scale reassessment” of Henry Green’s obscure and challenging fiction, and in the end makes a persuasive argument for further inclusion of Green into the larger modernist discussion.

In his introduction Hentea outlines three goals for the book that he accomplishes throughout the four chapters. His first is “to overturn the prevalent reading of Green’s novels as abstract, pure art that do not engage with contemporary reality.” His next goal is to chart “the transformation of ‘second-generation’ writers” who had to forge a new path in the wake of predecessors like Joyce and Kafka, and to reevaluate Green’s novels with a “deeper awareness of his style, form and engagement with history and society.” His final stated goal is to establish Green’s entire oeuvre as an embodiment of the “complex continuity in the historical evolution from modernism to postwar realism and then postmodernism.” Hentea accomplishes all of his goals handily while simultaneously bringing Green into the timely discussions of noncanonical modernism, body politics/disability studies, and working-class literature studies.

Hentea’s first goal is addressed in the very structure of his chapters by focusing on the “social reality” surrounding Green’s fiction, meaning that he will be looking into the ideas of the time setting, social class, space, and the physical body, overtly drawing his work out of the abstract and into the real. Chapter one, “‘Young and Old’: Generations and Belonging,” looks at the way in which Green challenges the concept of generational belonging. Hentea focuses this chapter on the novels Blindness, Pack My Bag, and Nothing and demonstrates how Green’s multifaceted look at the idea of generation explores the relationship of fiction to its time. Both in terms of generational bloodlines and epoch, Hentea explores Green’s unique framing of the relationship between fiction and the age in which he was living. In this first chapter Hentea establishes his method of taking difficult material and interpreting it in a very clear manner.

In his second chapter, “Class Representations,” he focuses primarily on the novel Living that Green wrote after returning to work in his family’s factory in Birmingham. The working-class representations in the novel were criticized as...