The Green Child
Encyclopedia
The Green Child is the only completed novel by the English anarchist
poet and critic Herbert Read
. Written in 1934 and first published by Heinemann
in 1935, the story is based on the 12th-century legend of two green children
who mysteriously appeared in the English village of Woolpit
, speaking an apparently unknown language. Read described the story in his English Prose Style, published in 1931, as "the norm to which all types of fantasy should conform".
Each of the novel's three parts ends with the apparent death of the story's protagonist, President Olivero, dictator of the fictional South American Republic of Roncador. In each case Olivero's death is an allegory
for his translation to a "more profound level of existence", reflecting the book's overall theme of a search for the meaning of life. Read's interest in psychoanalytic theory
is evident throughout the novel, which is constructed as a "philosophic myth ... in the tradition of Plato".
The story contains many autobiographical elements, and the character of Olivero owes much to Read's experiences as an officer in the British Army during the First World War. The novel was positively received, although some commentators have considered it to be "inscrutable", and one has suggested that it has been so differently and vaguely interpreted by those who have given it serious study that it may lack the form and content to justify the praise it has received.
, London. Hampstead was then a "nest of gentle artists" who included Henry Moore
, Paul Nash
, Ben Nicholson
, and Barbara Hepworth
. Read was at that time interested in the idea of unconscious composition, and the first 16 pages of the manuscript written on different paper from the rest are considered by some critics to look like the recollection of a dream. Read claimed in a letter written to psychoanalyst Carl Jung
that the novel was a product of automatic writing
. As of , the original manuscript is in the possession of the University of Leeds Library; Read had been a student at the University.
Following the Russian Revolution of 1917 Read became a supporter of communism, believing it to offer "the social liberty of my ideals", but by the 1930s his conviction had begun to waver. Increasingly his political ideology leaned towards anarchism
, but it was not until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War
in 1936 that Read became confirmed in his anarchist beliefs and stated them explicitly. The Green Child was therefore written at a time when Read's political and philosophical ideas were in flux.
There have been six editions of the novel, the first from Heinemann in 1935, priced at 7 shillings and sixpence, the equivalent of about £ in . Ten years later a second edition was published by Grey Walls Press, with the addition of illustrations by Felix Kelly. A third edition, for which the author Graham Greene
an admirer of Read's work wrote an introduction focusing on the novel's autobiographical elements, was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode in 1947. The first American edition was published in New York by New Directions in 1948, with an introduction by Kenneth Rexroth
. Penguin Books
published a fifth edition in 1979, which included the 1947 introduction by Greene. A sixth edition, published by R. Clark, appeared in 1989 and was reprinted in 1995, both containing Greene's introduction.
. The story begins in 1861 with the faked death of President Olivero, dictator of the South American Republic of Roncador, who has staged his own assassination. He returns to his native England, to the village where he was born and raised. On the evening of his arrival Olivero notices that the stream running through the village appears to be flowing backwards, and he decides to follow the water upstream to discover the cause.
The stream's course leads Olivero to a mill, where through a lighted window he sees a woman tied to a chair, forced by the miller to drink the blood of a freshly slaughtered lamb. Instinctively, Olivero hurls himself through the open window, his "leap into the world of fantasy". The miller initially offers no resistance and allows Olivero to release the woman, whom he recognises by the colour of her skin to be Sally, one of the two green children who had mysteriously arrived in the village on the day he left, 30 years earlier; Olivero also recognises the miller as Kneeshaw, an ex-pupil at the village school where he had once taught. During a struggle between the two men Kneeshaw is accidentally drowned in the mill pond. The next morning Olivero and Sally continue on Olivero's quest to find the stream's destination, a pool in the moors high above the village. Paddling in its water, Sally begins to sink into the silvery sand covering its bed. Olivero rushes to her, and hand in hand they sink beneath the water of the pool.
The book's second part recounts the events between Oliver leaving the village as its young schoolmaster and his return as ex-President Olivero. He travels to London initially, hoping to find employment as a writer, but after three years spent working as a bookkeeper in a tailor's shop he takes passage on a ship which lands him in Cádiz
, Spain. Unable to speak the language, and in possession of a book by Voltaire
, he is arrested as a suspected revolutionary. Held captive for two years, he learns Spanish from his fellow prisoners and determines to travel to one of the liberated American colonies he has learned of, where the possibility exists to establish a new world "free from the oppression and injustice of the old world".
Freed in an amnesty following the death of King Ferdinand of Spain, Oliver makes his way to Buenos Aires
. There he is mistaken for a revolutionary agent and taken to meet General Santos of the Roncador Army. Together they hatch a plot to seize the country's capital city and assassinate its dictator. The plot is successful and "Don Olivero" finds himself leader of the Assembly, making him the country's new dictator, a position he holds for 25 years. Eventually he realises that his style of government is leading the country into stagnation and "moral flaccidity"; he begins to feel nostalgia for the English village where he was brought up, and resolves to escape. Wishing to avoid any suspicion that he is deserting Roncador, Olivero fakes his own assassination.
The final part of the book continues the story from when Olivero and Sally disappear under the water. A large bubble forms around them, transporting them to the centre of the pool and ascending into a large grotto, from where they proceed on foot through a series of adjoining caverns. Sally tells Olivero that this is the country she and her brother left 30 years ago. Soon they encounter her people, to whom Sally, or Siloēn as she is properly known, explains that many years ago she wandered off and became lost, but that she has now returned with one who "was lost too, and now wishes to dwell among us". Olivero and Siloēn are welcomed into the community, where life is ordered around a progression from lower to upper ledges: the first ledge teaches the pleasures of youth; on the second ledge the pleasure of manual work is learned; on the third of opinion and argument; and finally, on the upper ledge, the "highest pleasure", of solitary thought.
Olivero soon tires of the first ledge, and leaving Siloēn behind he moves to the second, where he learns to cut and polish crystals, the most sacred of objects in this subterranean world. Eventually he is allowed to move to the highest ledge of all, "the final stage of life". There he is taught the "basic principles of the universe", that there is only Order and Disorder. "Order ... [is] the space-filling Mass about them ... Disorder is empty space". Disorder is caused by the senses, which, "being confined to the body ... create the illusion of self-hood". Olivero selects a grotto in which to spend what remains of his life alone, contemplating the "natural and absolute beauty" of the crystals he accepts from the crystal-cutters. Food and water is brought regularly, and he settles to the task of preparing his body for "the perfection of death", which when it comes he meets with a "peculiar joy". Removing Olivero's body from the grotto the attendants encounter another group carrying Siloēn, who died at the same time as Olivero. The pair are laid together in a petrifying trough, to "become part of the same crystal harmony", as is customary when any of the Green people die.
fairy tale
. The "fluid, seemingly unbroken hand" in which it is written has encouraged the notion that it was produced in a single sitting, followed by a break before the second part was begun. Part two is written as a "conventional political adventure", in which Olivero tells in flashback the story of his rise to power as the dictator of Roncador. The final part of the novel continues the narrative where the first left off, in the "fantastical, subterranean world of the Green people". So different in style is the first part from what follows that some critics regard it as an entirely separate work, or "the 'true' novel".
Olivero's quest in the underground world is written as a reversal of Plato's
allegory of the cave
as described in his Republic. In Plato's allegory, prisoners confined in a cave and condemned to stare at a blank wall, with only the light from a flickering fire behind them, see just the shadows of what is real; the philosopher, on the other hand, is like someone released from the cave, able to see the true form of what is casting the shadows. Read turns the idea on its head; when Siloēn left her subterranean world she left behind the Platonic "eternal forms", and Olivero has to follow her back to her "cave" to discover the "divine essence of things".
In the last few pages of the book, in which Olivero prepares for his death and petrification, Read describes Olivero's final thoughts in a form adapted from Plato's Phaedo
, but in an almost mirror image. Socrates
, whose thoughts on the afterlife Plato was describing, argued that death was the ideal home of the soul, but Olivero longs for his body to be free from the torments of the soul, to become part of the crystalline solidity of the universe. Olivero regards life, not death, as the destroyer, "for it [life] disrupts the harmony of inorganic matter". Socrates' suggestion, towards the end of the Phaedo, that our own world is but one of many, each a hollow in the earth connected by underground rivers, is a strikingly similar image to the subterranean land of the Green people that Read describes. Read however was "almost certainly" influenced in his depiction of the world of the Green people by 1887 utopian novel A Crystal Age
, a story in which people strive to "live above their own mortality".
The Green people's emphasis on achieving "a literal oneness with the material universe" by petrifying the bodies of their dead, although it has "repulsed" some readers, is a vehicle that allows Read to parody the "traditional Western religious notion of the soul aspiring to rise through air to a vaporous paradise".
The manuscript was originally entitled "Inland Far", but at some point, perhaps during the gap between writing the first and subsequent parts, Read changed it to "The Green Child", which suggests that the focus of the novel changed from Olivero’s quest for the source of the stream to the story of the green child herself. The original title was an allusion to William Wordsworth
's ode "Intimations of Immortality
", which describes the bright landscape' of childhood that casts its spell over later life".
Read was interested in psychoanalysis
, and employed psychoanalytic theory in his work, both Freudian
and Jungian
, although "more as machinery than as a key to meaning". Olivero's quest for the source of the stream has been described as "travelling allegorically across a landscape of the mind", moving him "from the boundaries of the preconscious to the center of the id". To Olivero, the miller Kneeshaw represents "the evil destructive instinct which lurks beneath the civilised conventions of society", the Freudian id
, whereas Olivero represents the ego
. Thirty years earlier, Olivero had taught Kneeshaw at the local school, where he had seen the boy deliberately break an engine from a model railway set that Olivero had brought into the school, by overwinding its clockwork mechanism. Unable to comprehend such wilful destruction, and already frustrated by the lack of opportunities offered by village life, Olivero left the next day. "When that spring snapped, something snapped in my mind."
Olivero's confrontation with Kneeshaw displays a Jungian psychoanalytic symbolism, as does the character of Siloēn, "the archetype of the anima, or Jungian 'soul', particularly in its function as intermediary between conscious and unconscious." Kneeshaw represents "the shadow, the dark side of man's nature, the primitive, animal part of the personality found in the personal unconscious". Jung believed that the only way to face the shadow was to acknowledge it, not to repress it as Olivero had done 30 years earlier by leaving the village.
, promoted to the rank of lieutenant, and became "obsessively determined not to betray his own men through cowardice". The novel's development of the "clearly autobiographical hero" of Olivero owes a great deal to Read's wartime experiences and the "resolute self-possession" they instilled in him. The irony of Olivero overthrowing a dictator only to become one himself is perhaps consistent with a view Read expressed in the mid-1930s: "From certain points of view, therefore, I can welcome the notion of the totalitarian state, whether in its Fascist or Communist form. I am not afraid of the totalitarian state as an economic fact, an economic machine to facilitate the complex business of living in a community."
Read was born near the small Yorkshire market town of Kirbymoorside, to which he returned in 1949. One of his favourite walks was along the course of Hodge Beck, the inspiration for the stream followed by Olivero. Hodge Beck too led to a mill, which Read called his "spiritual hermitage".
The crystals carved by the workmen on the second ledge of the Green people's underground world, and contemplated by the sages on the highest ledge of all, symbolise Read's ideas about the relationship of art to nature. He believed physical form to be the "underlying principle of the universe ... the ultimate reality in a completely material cosmos. Therefore it is the quality of recurring forms that makes possible all beauty and value".
, Read's "remarkable career and formidable output have generated a surprisingly limited biographical and critical literature". Richard Wasson has commented that The Green Child "though judged favorably by the few critics and scholars who give it serious study ... is so vaguely and variously interpreted that it would seem to lack both the form and the content which justify such praise". The critic Richard E. Brown, writing in 1990, considered the work to be "an important attempt by one of [the 20th-century's] most influential English critics to integrate his wide-ranging thoughts into a complex interpretation of experience", but added that it divided commentators, appearing to some to be "fascinating but inscrutable". Reviewing the first American edition in 1948, Professor of English Robert Gorham Davis commented that the novel "baffled some English critics when it arrived in 1935", but that it was "beautifully imagined and beautifully written".
A review published in The Times
newspaper shortly after the book's publication described it as a "very charming philosophical tale", and the artist and poet Bob Barker has praised the novel as being "remarkable for its cool yet vivid style". Critic Orville Prescott, writing in The New York Times
newspaper, although admitting that the novel was "beautifully written" and "a triumph of delicate and suggestive mystification", nevertheless concluded that the story was "ridiculous" and "vexatious". He ended his review with the words: "One feels constantly that shining truths are about to be revealed; that there is something important, something significant, hidden in these pages. But it is never made clear, while the ridiculous details remain all too conspicuously in view." Prescott was just as critical of Rexroth's preface to the first American edition, describing it as a "pretentious introduction of uncommon density". Writing in The Independent
newspaper in 1993, shortly after the 100th anniversary of Read's birth, critic Geoffrey Wheatcroft
commented that Read may not have been a great novelist "but The Green Child is the kind of book to write if you are going to leave just the one novel behind: singular, odd, completely original".
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
poet and critic Herbert Read
Herbert Read
Sir Herbert Edward Read, DSO, MC was an English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism, and was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinker Max Stirner....
. Written in 1934 and first published by Heinemann
Heinemann (book publisher)
Heinemann is a UK publishing house founded by William Heinemann in Covent Garden, London in 1890. On William Heinemann's death in 1920 a majority stake was purchased by U.S. publisher Doubleday. It was later acquired by commemorate Thomas Tilling in 1961...
in 1935, the story is based on the 12th-century legend of two green children
Green children of Woolpit
The green children of Woolpit reportedly appeared in the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, England, some time in the 12th century, perhaps during the reign of King Stephen. The children, brother and sister, were of generally normal appearance except for the green colour of their skin. They spoke in an...
who mysteriously appeared in the English village of Woolpit
Woolpit
Woolpit is a village in the English county of Suffolk, midway between the towns of Bury St. Edmunds and Stowmarket As of 2007 it has a population of 2030. It is notable for the 12th-century legend of the green children of Woolpit and for its parish church, which has especially fine medieval woodwork...
, speaking an apparently unknown language. Read described the story in his English Prose Style, published in 1931, as "the norm to which all types of fantasy should conform".
Each of the novel's three parts ends with the apparent death of the story's protagonist, President Olivero, dictator of the fictional South American Republic of Roncador. In each case Olivero's death is an allegory
Allegory
Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...
for his translation to a "more profound level of existence", reflecting the book's overall theme of a search for the meaning of life. Read's interest in psychoanalytic theory
Psychoanalytic theory
Psychoanalytic theory refers to the definition and dynamics of personality development which underlie and guide psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy. First laid out by Sigmund Freud, psychoanalytic theory has undergone many refinements since his work...
is evident throughout the novel, which is constructed as a "philosophic myth ... in the tradition of Plato".
The story contains many autobiographical elements, and the character of Olivero owes much to Read's experiences as an officer in the British Army during the First World War. The novel was positively received, although some commentators have considered it to be "inscrutable", and one has suggested that it has been so differently and vaguely interpreted by those who have given it serious study that it may lack the form and content to justify the praise it has received.
Biographical background and publication
Primarily a literary critic, poet, and an advocate for modern art, Read wrote his only novel, The Green Child, in about eight weeks during 1934, most of it in the summer house behind his home in HampsteadHampstead
Hampstead is an area of London, England, north-west of Charing Cross. Part of the London Borough of Camden in Inner London, it is known for its intellectual, liberal, artistic, musical and literary associations and for Hampstead Heath, a large, hilly expanse of parkland...
, London. Hampstead was then a "nest of gentle artists" who included Henry Moore
Henry Moore
Henry Spencer Moore OM CH FBA was an English sculptor and artist. He was best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art....
, Paul Nash
Paul Nash (artist)
Paul Nash was a British landscape painter, surrealist and war artist, as well as a book-illustrator, writer and designer of applied art. He was the older brother of the artist John Nash.-Early life:...
, Ben Nicholson
Ben Nicholson
Benjamin Lauder "Ben" Nicholson, OM was a British painter of abstract compositions , landscape and still-life.-Background and Training:...
, and Barbara Hepworth
Barbara Hepworth
Dame Barbara Hepworth DBE was an English sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism, and with such contemporaries as Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo she helped to develop modern art in Britain.-Life and work:Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was born on 10 January 1903 in Wakefield,...
. Read was at that time interested in the idea of unconscious composition, and the first 16 pages of the manuscript written on different paper from the rest are considered by some critics to look like the recollection of a dream. Read claimed in a letter written to psychoanalyst Carl Jung
Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Jung is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as "by nature religious" and make it the focus of exploration. Jung is one of the best known researchers in the field of dream analysis and...
that the novel was a product of automatic writing
Automatic writing
Automatic writing or psychography is writing which the writer states to be produced from a subconscious and/or spiritual source without conscious awareness of the content.-History:...
. As of , the original manuscript is in the possession of the University of Leeds Library; Read had been a student at the University.
Following the Russian Revolution of 1917 Read became a supporter of communism, believing it to offer "the social liberty of my ideals", but by the 1930s his conviction had begun to waver. Increasingly his political ideology leaned towards anarchism
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
, but it was not until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
in 1936 that Read became confirmed in his anarchist beliefs and stated them explicitly. The Green Child was therefore written at a time when Read's political and philosophical ideas were in flux.
There have been six editions of the novel, the first from Heinemann in 1935, priced at 7 shillings and sixpence, the equivalent of about £ in . Ten years later a second edition was published by Grey Walls Press, with the addition of illustrations by Felix Kelly. A third edition, for which the author Graham Greene
Graham Greene
Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world...
an admirer of Read's work wrote an introduction focusing on the novel's autobiographical elements, was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode in 1947. The first American edition was published in New York by New Directions in 1948, with an introduction by Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement...
. Penguin Books
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane and V.K. Krishna Menon. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large...
published a fifth edition in 1979, which included the 1947 introduction by Greene. A sixth edition, published by R. Clark, appeared in 1989 and was reprinted in 1995, both containing Greene's introduction.
Plot summary
The first and last parts of the story are told as a third-person narrative, but the middle part is written in the first personFirst-person narrative
First-person point of view is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves. First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the...
. The story begins in 1861 with the faked death of President Olivero, dictator of the South American Republic of Roncador, who has staged his own assassination. He returns to his native England, to the village where he was born and raised. On the evening of his arrival Olivero notices that the stream running through the village appears to be flowing backwards, and he decides to follow the water upstream to discover the cause.
The stream's course leads Olivero to a mill, where through a lighted window he sees a woman tied to a chair, forced by the miller to drink the blood of a freshly slaughtered lamb. Instinctively, Olivero hurls himself through the open window, his "leap into the world of fantasy". The miller initially offers no resistance and allows Olivero to release the woman, whom he recognises by the colour of her skin to be Sally, one of the two green children who had mysteriously arrived in the village on the day he left, 30 years earlier; Olivero also recognises the miller as Kneeshaw, an ex-pupil at the village school where he had once taught. During a struggle between the two men Kneeshaw is accidentally drowned in the mill pond. The next morning Olivero and Sally continue on Olivero's quest to find the stream's destination, a pool in the moors high above the village. Paddling in its water, Sally begins to sink into the silvery sand covering its bed. Olivero rushes to her, and hand in hand they sink beneath the water of the pool.
The book's second part recounts the events between Oliver leaving the village as its young schoolmaster and his return as ex-President Olivero. He travels to London initially, hoping to find employment as a writer, but after three years spent working as a bookkeeper in a tailor's shop he takes passage on a ship which lands him in Cádiz
Cádiz
Cadiz is a city and port in southwestern Spain. It is the capital of the homonymous province, one of eight which make up the autonomous community of Andalusia....
, Spain. Unable to speak the language, and in possession of a book by Voltaire
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...
, he is arrested as a suspected revolutionary. Held captive for two years, he learns Spanish from his fellow prisoners and determines to travel to one of the liberated American colonies he has learned of, where the possibility exists to establish a new world "free from the oppression and injustice of the old world".
Freed in an amnesty following the death of King Ferdinand of Spain, Oliver makes his way to Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...
. There he is mistaken for a revolutionary agent and taken to meet General Santos of the Roncador Army. Together they hatch a plot to seize the country's capital city and assassinate its dictator. The plot is successful and "Don Olivero" finds himself leader of the Assembly, making him the country's new dictator, a position he holds for 25 years. Eventually he realises that his style of government is leading the country into stagnation and "moral flaccidity"; he begins to feel nostalgia for the English village where he was brought up, and resolves to escape. Wishing to avoid any suspicion that he is deserting Roncador, Olivero fakes his own assassination.
The final part of the book continues the story from when Olivero and Sally disappear under the water. A large bubble forms around them, transporting them to the centre of the pool and ascending into a large grotto, from where they proceed on foot through a series of adjoining caverns. Sally tells Olivero that this is the country she and her brother left 30 years ago. Soon they encounter her people, to whom Sally, or Siloēn as she is properly known, explains that many years ago she wandered off and became lost, but that she has now returned with one who "was lost too, and now wishes to dwell among us". Olivero and Siloēn are welcomed into the community, where life is ordered around a progression from lower to upper ledges: the first ledge teaches the pleasures of youth; on the second ledge the pleasure of manual work is learned; on the third of opinion and argument; and finally, on the upper ledge, the "highest pleasure", of solitary thought.
Olivero soon tires of the first ledge, and leaving Siloēn behind he moves to the second, where he learns to cut and polish crystals, the most sacred of objects in this subterranean world. Eventually he is allowed to move to the highest ledge of all, "the final stage of life". There he is taught the "basic principles of the universe", that there is only Order and Disorder. "Order ... [is] the space-filling Mass about them ... Disorder is empty space". Disorder is caused by the senses, which, "being confined to the body ... create the illusion of self-hood". Olivero selects a grotto in which to spend what remains of his life alone, contemplating the "natural and absolute beauty" of the crystals he accepts from the crystal-cutters. Food and water is brought regularly, and he settles to the task of preparing his body for "the perfection of death", which when it comes he meets with a "peculiar joy". Removing Olivero's body from the grotto the attendants encounter another group carrying Siloēn, who died at the same time as Olivero. The pair are laid together in a petrifying trough, to "become part of the same crystal harmony", as is customary when any of the Green people die.
Genre and style
Richard Wasson, professor of English, has said that The Green Child is "defiant of classification", complicated by its division into "three arbitrarily related sections". The first part of the novel adopts the style of a 19th-century GothicGothic fiction
Gothic fiction, sometimes referred to as Gothic horror, is a genre or mode of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. Gothicism's origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled "A Gothic Story"...
fairy tale
Fairy tale
A fairy tale is a type of short story that typically features such folkloric characters, such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, dwarves, giants or gnomes, and usually magic or enchantments. However, only a small number of the stories refer to fairies...
. The "fluid, seemingly unbroken hand" in which it is written has encouraged the notion that it was produced in a single sitting, followed by a break before the second part was begun. Part two is written as a "conventional political adventure", in which Olivero tells in flashback the story of his rise to power as the dictator of Roncador. The final part of the novel continues the narrative where the first left off, in the "fantastical, subterranean world of the Green people". So different in style is the first part from what follows that some critics regard it as an entirely separate work, or "the 'true' novel".
Olivero's quest in the underground world is written as a reversal of Plato's
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
allegory of the cave
Allegory of the cave
The Allegory of the Cave—also known as the Analogy of the Cave, Plato's Cave, or the Parable of the Cave—is an allegory used by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work The Republic to illustrate "our nature in its education and want of education"...
as described in his Republic. In Plato's allegory, prisoners confined in a cave and condemned to stare at a blank wall, with only the light from a flickering fire behind them, see just the shadows of what is real; the philosopher, on the other hand, is like someone released from the cave, able to see the true form of what is casting the shadows. Read turns the idea on its head; when Siloēn left her subterranean world she left behind the Platonic "eternal forms", and Olivero has to follow her back to her "cave" to discover the "divine essence of things".
In the last few pages of the book, in which Olivero prepares for his death and petrification, Read describes Olivero's final thoughts in a form adapted from Plato's Phaedo
Phaedo
Plato's Phaedo is one of the great dialogues of his middle period, along with the Republic and the Symposium. The Phaedo, which depicts the death of Socrates, is also Plato's seventh and last dialogue to detail the philosopher's final days .In the dialogue, Socrates...
, but in an almost mirror image. Socrates
Socrates
Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary ...
, whose thoughts on the afterlife Plato was describing, argued that death was the ideal home of the soul, but Olivero longs for his body to be free from the torments of the soul, to become part of the crystalline solidity of the universe. Olivero regards life, not death, as the destroyer, "for it [life] disrupts the harmony of inorganic matter". Socrates' suggestion, towards the end of the Phaedo, that our own world is but one of many, each a hollow in the earth connected by underground rivers, is a strikingly similar image to the subterranean land of the Green people that Read describes. Read however was "almost certainly" influenced in his depiction of the world of the Green people by 1887 utopian novel A Crystal Age
A Crystal Age
A Crystal Age is a utopian novel written by W. H. Hudson, first published in 1887. The book has been called a "significant S-F milestone" and has been noted for its anticipation of the "modern ecological mysticism" that would evolve a century later....
, a story in which people strive to "live above their own mortality".
Themes
The novel's overarching theme is a "a dialectical search for the meaning of life, a search which involves a return to life's source".The Green people's emphasis on achieving "a literal oneness with the material universe" by petrifying the bodies of their dead, although it has "repulsed" some readers, is a vehicle that allows Read to parody the "traditional Western religious notion of the soul aspiring to rise through air to a vaporous paradise".
The manuscript was originally entitled "Inland Far", but at some point, perhaps during the gap between writing the first and subsequent parts, Read changed it to "The Green Child", which suggests that the focus of the novel changed from Olivero’s quest for the source of the stream to the story of the green child herself. The original title was an allusion to William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
's ode "Intimations of Immortality
Ode: Intimations of Immortality
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood is a poem by William Wordsworth, completed in 1804 and published in Poems, in Two Volumes . The poem was completed in two parts, with the first four stanzas written among a series of poems composed in 1802 about childhood...
", which describes the bright landscape' of childhood that casts its spell over later life".
Read was interested in psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
, and employed psychoanalytic theory in his work, both Freudian
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
and Jungian
Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Jung is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as "by nature religious" and make it the focus of exploration. Jung is one of the best known researchers in the field of dream analysis and...
, although "more as machinery than as a key to meaning". Olivero's quest for the source of the stream has been described as "travelling allegorically across a landscape of the mind", moving him "from the boundaries of the preconscious to the center of the id". To Olivero, the miller Kneeshaw represents "the evil destructive instinct which lurks beneath the civilised conventions of society", the Freudian id
Id, ego, and super-ego
Id, ego and super-ego are the three parts of the psychic apparatus defined in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche; they are the three theoretical constructs in terms of whose activity and interaction mental life is described...
, whereas Olivero represents the ego
Id, ego, and super-ego
Id, ego and super-ego are the three parts of the psychic apparatus defined in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche; they are the three theoretical constructs in terms of whose activity and interaction mental life is described...
. Thirty years earlier, Olivero had taught Kneeshaw at the local school, where he had seen the boy deliberately break an engine from a model railway set that Olivero had brought into the school, by overwinding its clockwork mechanism. Unable to comprehend such wilful destruction, and already frustrated by the lack of opportunities offered by village life, Olivero left the next day. "When that spring snapped, something snapped in my mind."
Olivero's confrontation with Kneeshaw displays a Jungian psychoanalytic symbolism, as does the character of Siloēn, "the archetype of the anima, or Jungian 'soul', particularly in its function as intermediary between conscious and unconscious." Kneeshaw represents "the shadow, the dark side of man's nature, the primitive, animal part of the personality found in the personal unconscious". Jung believed that the only way to face the shadow was to acknowledge it, not to repress it as Olivero had done 30 years earlier by leaving the village.
Autobiographical elements
During the First World War Read served with the Green Howards, fighting in the trenches of France. He was awarded the Military CrossMilitary Cross
The Military Cross is the third-level military decoration awarded to officers and other ranks of the British Armed Forces; and formerly also to officers of other Commonwealth countries....
, promoted to the rank of lieutenant, and became "obsessively determined not to betray his own men through cowardice". The novel's development of the "clearly autobiographical hero" of Olivero owes a great deal to Read's wartime experiences and the "resolute self-possession" they instilled in him. The irony of Olivero overthrowing a dictator only to become one himself is perhaps consistent with a view Read expressed in the mid-1930s: "From certain points of view, therefore, I can welcome the notion of the totalitarian state, whether in its Fascist or Communist form. I am not afraid of the totalitarian state as an economic fact, an economic machine to facilitate the complex business of living in a community."
Read was born near the small Yorkshire market town of Kirbymoorside, to which he returned in 1949. One of his favourite walks was along the course of Hodge Beck, the inspiration for the stream followed by Olivero. Hodge Beck too led to a mill, which Read called his "spiritual hermitage".
The crystals carved by the workmen on the second ledge of the Green people's underground world, and contemplated by the sages on the highest ledge of all, symbolise Read's ideas about the relationship of art to nature. He believed physical form to be the "underlying principle of the universe ... the ultimate reality in a completely material cosmos. Therefore it is the quality of recurring forms that makes possible all beauty and value".
Critical reception
In the words of historian David GoodwayDavid Goodway
David Goodway is a British historian and a respected international authority on anarchism and libertarian socialism. A student of Eric Hobsbawm, Goodway specialised in the history of Chartism in London and his work London Chartism is an acknowledged classic work on the subject...
, Read's "remarkable career and formidable output have generated a surprisingly limited biographical and critical literature". Richard Wasson has commented that The Green Child "though judged favorably by the few critics and scholars who give it serious study ... is so vaguely and variously interpreted that it would seem to lack both the form and the content which justify such praise". The critic Richard E. Brown, writing in 1990, considered the work to be "an important attempt by one of [the 20th-century's] most influential English critics to integrate his wide-ranging thoughts into a complex interpretation of experience", but added that it divided commentators, appearing to some to be "fascinating but inscrutable". Reviewing the first American edition in 1948, Professor of English Robert Gorham Davis commented that the novel "baffled some English critics when it arrived in 1935", but that it was "beautifully imagined and beautifully written".
A review published in The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
newspaper shortly after the book's publication described it as a "very charming philosophical tale", and the artist and poet Bob Barker has praised the novel as being "remarkable for its cool yet vivid style". Critic Orville Prescott, writing in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
newspaper, although admitting that the novel was "beautifully written" and "a triumph of delicate and suggestive mystification", nevertheless concluded that the story was "ridiculous" and "vexatious". He ended his review with the words: "One feels constantly that shining truths are about to be revealed; that there is something important, something significant, hidden in these pages. But it is never made clear, while the ridiculous details remain all too conspicuously in view." Prescott was just as critical of Rexroth's preface to the first American edition, describing it as a "pretentious introduction of uncommon density". Writing in The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
newspaper in 1993, shortly after the 100th anniversary of Read's birth, critic Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Geoffrey Albert Wheatcroft is a British journalist and writer.- Education :He was educated at University College School, London, and at New College Oxford, where he read Modern History.- Publishing and journalism :...
commented that Read may not have been a great novelist "but The Green Child is the kind of book to write if you are going to leave just the one novel behind: singular, odd, completely original".
External links
- The Green Child at Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...