Lucky for Jim

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Glück für Jim (English original title: Lucky Jim ) is the satirical debut novel by the British writer Kingsley Amis , published in 1954. The main character of the novel, set at the beginning of the 1950s, is James (Jim) Dixon, who, contrary to his intentions and inclinations, had become an assistant professor for medieval history at a university in the English province a few months earlier. After starting a career marked by mishaps, he has to fear that his apprenticeship contract will be extended. Any attempt to win over the professor who is decisive in this regard leads to further disasters.

Kingsley's novel won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1954 and is now one of the classics of British post-war literature. Toby Young and Christopher Hitchens have called this novel one of the funniest of the 20th century and the second half of the 20th century, respectively. The US American magazine Time named him in 2005 among the top 100 English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. The Guardian newspaper included the novel in its selection of a thousand must-read novels. In 2015, 82 international literary critics and scholars voted the novel one of the most important British novels .

action

There is no direct reference to the year of the story in the novel, but literary studies assume that the novel is set no later than 1951. David Nicholls points out that Amis managed to draw a particularly apt portrait of this time, in which buses creep by and cigarettes are still hoarded.

Jim Dixon teaches medieval history at one of Britain's Redbrick University , the universities that were founded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The unspecified university is located in the Midlands . The novel's humor results from Dixon's rebellion against the phrases and presumptions that he encounters in everyday academic life and that increasingly dominate his private life.

Dixon is from northern England, has never attended private school and is in the lower middle class. He feels uncomfortable with the pseudo-intellectual values ​​he encounters in his academic environment. He hopes in vain for good-looking female students in his seminar; instead, he is being pursued by a know-it-all student. Even so, Dixon hopes that he will get a permanent position at the end of his probationary year. To ensure that, he finally has to publish an academic article, but his article disappears in the mills of academic publishing. His search for a permanent position is also based on building a good relationship with Professor Welch, the head of his department. What is a distracted, bland pedant, his wife is marked by arrogant tightness and his sons are self-conscious artists.

His private life is also messed up by his difficult relationship with his colleague Margaret Peel. Margaret's relationship with another young man has just broken up and she is recovering from a failed suicide attempt as the Welch's house guest. Through emotional blackmail she appeals to Dixon's sense of duty and pity in order to maintain a largely undefined and, above all, sex-free relationship with him. Like her, he is a guest during Professor Welch's culture weekend, which is characterized by madrigal and recorder music, all sorts of charades and thin tea. Welch expects dedicated participation from Jim and for Jim it seems the chance to finally achieve the appreciation of his subject area on which he so desperately needs. But that too goes catastrophically wrong: while drunk, he burns the bedspread, carpet and bedside table in his host's house. His attempt to cover this up makes things a lot worse. During the weekend, Jim also meets Christine Callaghan, a young Londoner who is also the current friend of Bertrand, Professor Welch's eldest son. He is a painter and his affectation upsets him even more. After a bad start, Dixon finds himself increasingly attracted to Christine. Jim's obvious courtship for Christine turns Bertrand against him, who hopes for the promotion of Christine's wealthy and well-connected uncle.

The plot climaxes with Dixon's public lecture on Merrie England , the (supposedly) idyllic pre-industrial period that Professor Welch believes so strongly. To calm his nerves, Dixon drank copious amounts of alcohol beforehand, and the lecture turns into a cabaret-like event in which Jim can't help but imitate Welch's phrases and pretentious demeanor. The lecture ends in a commotion, in which Dixon ends up falling to the ground unconscious. Welch informs his employee that he no longer has any prospect of a permanent position. Christine's uncle, taken by Jim's disrespect and honesty, offers him a job as an assistant in London, a position that pays far better than Jim's lecturing. A little later he meets Margaret's former boyfriend. Instead of an argument, there is an explanation: Margaret's ex-boyfriend makes it clear to him that there was never a serious relationship between him and Margaret. Her suicide attempt was fake to blackmail both men emotionally. In the meantime, Christine has split up with Bertrand, who cheated on her. Jim and Christine become a couple, relieved to leave the university town in the Midlands behind to go to London.

Individual aspects of the novel

Genre classification

Glück für Jim is one of the so-called university novels , the plot of which is mainly set in and around the campus of a university. The novel is usually classified as an early representative of the genre . In his introduction, Fortunately for Jim , David Nicholls points out that students rarely appear in this novel. Apart from the shadowy students, whose seminar registration Jim hopes in vain, only one student plays a role: Michie is a kind of "anti-student". The ex-soldier commanded an armored squad during the Allied forces' landing on the coast of Anzio and intimidates Dixon with his professionalism and superior knowledge.

Nicholls also points out that the novel has all the hallmarks of a romantic comedy: A is with B but would much rather be with C. C, on the other hand, is with D, but would be better off if A was the partner. And before everyone who belongs together can find each other, various obstacles have to be overcome. In this case it's just a particularly slow moving bus and the final declaration of love is a cautious I like you , but all the patterns of a traditional romance are there.

Merritt Moseley also sees Glück für Jim as a modification of the Cinderella myth: Jim is unjustifiably assigned a low social status. He feels compelled to behave obsequiously towards unworthy and basically even malicious people: in order to keep his job, he has to behave obsequiously towards Professor Welch, take over his literature research without complaint and take part in his bland parties. At the same time, he is trapped in an unsatisfactory relationship with Margaret Peel, a vicious and manipulative colleague who fakes a suicide attempt in order to blackmail two men emotionally.

dedication

Kingsley Amis dedicated his novel to his friend, the poet, author and jazz critic Philip Larkin . Amis himself has claimed that the idea for the novel came to him while visiting Larkin at Leicester University . The character of Margaret Peel is believed to be based on Monica Jones , the muse and occasional companion of Larkin.

Autobiographical traits

Kingsley Amis once stated that all literature is ultimately autobiographical because an author cannot write about something that he has not experienced himself. Amis has given Jim traits that Amis don't share: Jim comes from Lancaster, is a beer drinker, teaches history and not English and hates the "stinky Mozart". Kingsley and Dixon, however, share linguistic care, a disdain for clichés, affectation and sloppiness.

Jim Dixon reacts to a lot of things that are associated with culture with strong rejection - Amis speaks at one point of " filthy Mozart " - " stinky Mozart " and at another point describes a work of modern art as the doodles of a kindergarten idiot. This has led some critics to confuse Jim Dixon's simplicity with Amis' attitude. One literary critic even found himself forced to admit that Americans are actually far too cultured to hate culture so much. Moseley points out that it is not just a mistake to confuse Dixon's attitude with that of the Americans. It is also wrong to accuse Jim Dixon, who identifies Mozart as the composer of a song that was dribbling in the bathroom, with an actual lack of culture. Jim's reactions are rather those of an ordinary man who is disturbed by a pompous and self-important handling of art.

Critical to society and culture

In Lucky Jim , Kingsley Amis takes up a basic theme that also shapes his later novels: the untruthfulness of those representatives of a society in transition who see themselves as bearers of culture but cannot break free from the empty or hollowed out ideas and values ​​of the past. Professor Welch as a teaching or cultural authority is characterized in the novel by his pretentious self-assessment, which is directly related to the frustration of those characters like Jim Dixon, who in the university institutions get caught in the machinery of a "world of illusion marked by self-reflection and boredom", from which they cannot break out due to their own weakness or insecurity. The exposure of this illusory world reaches its climax when the protagonist refuses to be impressed by it or to be involved in it. This unmasking of dishonesty and presumption in Lucky Jim becomes concrete and effective because the (drunk) Jim Dixon does not caricature the institutions as such, but the artificial quirks and manners that emanate from them . Dixon's imitation of the affected tone of voice and the senseless filler words of his professor and the college rector indicate, in addition to the situation comedy, above all that it is not the authority itself, but rather the arrogant claim to authority of the incumbent who should be denounced. Power and position fall to those who stand out less through their abilities, but rather through their "smooth manners, their" educated "tone" and their social origin; Culture thus becomes the privilege of an exclusive group in which only those are accepted who have the appropriate social origin or who come from the “right” school.

However, Dixon ironizes not only others but also himself when he cuts faces in the mirror; he does not think much of his own intelligence, openly admits his reluctance to work and, like others, admits to the fear that one might find out about him. As he just as openly reveals, he has chosen medieval history as his specialty because it is the easiest way for him to find a job as a lecturer at a university. The exposure of opportunism as well as the mendacity and emptiness of the university and cultural industry takes place at the end of Jim Dixon's lecture almost against his own will, when he realizes that there is nothing more he can save and he overcomes his own fear of it, his contempt for it To confess untruthfulness and dishonesty.

Classification in literary history

Glück für Jim is considered to be one of the key novels of the 1950s in Great Britain, which at the same time changed English literature forever. Malcolm Bradbury noted that happiness for Jim changed British literature in the 1950s in much the same way that John Osborne's contemporaneous play Looking Back in Anger changed British theater literature . Bradbury attributes a similar influence on British literature to Amis as Evelyn Waugh had on British literature of the 1920s. It was not only the way in which the novel was written that was influential, but also the theme and type of hero chosen by the Americans. David Lodge said of the novel:

“ Glück für Jim is a book of great eloquence that hides behind an apparent clumsiness, but at the same time is rooted in the English tradition of situation comedy, which has always remained alien to Joyce . Happiness for Jim is a magical book to me - as it is to so many of my English contemporaries who come from backgrounds similar to me: aspiring, scholarship winners, and first generation of college graduates. It gave us exactly the linguistic means of expression that we needed to express our sense of social identity, this difficult intermediate between independence and self-doubt, irony and hope. "

- David Lodge

Other literary critics have emphasized that with Jim Dixon Amis created an archetypal figure with whom an entire generation could identify: disrespectful, powerless and rebelling against the forces of the "establishment", he is not an anti-hero, but a non-hero. Dixon is an ordinary man with ordinary desires and an everyday reaction to his experiences. Despite his work at the university, he is not an intellectual, his work bores him and his relationship with his manager is that of an everyday job holder. Amis' novel led to the fact that it was partially assigned to the so-called Angry Young Men .

Such an attribution, which was initially obvious, did not remain undisputed in the subsequent literary discussion. Among other things, it was pointed out that Amis' way of writing was by no means "angry" and that it was against such a classification. Likewise, the fact that Jim Dixon, despite his self-perception as an outsider, does not bring any charges against the company against such a classification. His displeasure is directed no less against himself, against his own limitations and conditionality, than against concrete forms of his environment. It is precisely because of this that Americans achieve both credibility and identification in his novel. The liberating laughter that his novel evoked was "in the long run more effective and honest than the threateningly raised fist," for example of Jimmy Porter in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger .

In English literary studies and literary criticism, Amis became famous with his first novel Lucky Jim together with Philip Larkin ( Jill , 1946; A girl in winter , 1947), John Wain ( Hurry on down , 1953) and Iris Murdoch ( Under the net , 1954) also included in the group of novelists of the so-called Movement . Since these authors mostly also taught at a university, they were also referred to as the New University Wits , based on the University Wits of the late 16th or early 17th century , whose works have a common background: They reflect the social and cultural changes that resulted from the dissolution of the British Empire and the establishment of the welfare state as well as the blurring of class antagonisms and the associated loss of self-identification. Similarities also exist here in the way in which social, literary and also personal questions are thematized, namely in a realistic and unpathetic as well as satirical or ironic-critical form.

Trivia

The Somerset Maugham Award is given for the best debut novel. Kingsley Amis won this award in 1954 with luck for Jim , his son Martin Amis received the same award 19 years later for his novel The Rachel Diary.

expenditure

literature

  • Merritt Moseley: Understanding Kingsley Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 1993, ISBN 0-87249-861-1 ( English ).
  • Gerd Haffmans (eds.): Kingsley Amis & Philip Larkin. The story of a wonderful literary friendship . Haffmans bei Zweiausendeins, Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 978-3-942048-12-5 (= Jill & Jim or the novels of a wonderful literary friendship ).

Single receipts

  1. ↑ http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2002/05/hitchens.htm
  2. ^ A Good Read, BBC Radio 4, 11:00 PM Fri, March 25, 2011
  3. ↑ 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read: The Definitive List , accessed August 8, 2014.
  4. ^ The Guardian: The best British novel of all times - have international critics found it? , accessed on January 2, 2016
  5. ^ A b John Sutherland: Introduction to the Folio Society's edition of Lucky Jim 2012.
  6. ↑ a b David Nicols: Introduction to Lucky Jim . Penguin Books, London 2010, ISBN 978-0-14-195804-0 , p. VII.
  7. ↑ David Nicols: Introduction to Lucky Jim . Penguin Books, London 2010, ISBN 978-0-14-195804-0 , SV
  8. ↑ David Nicols: Introduction to Lucky Jim . Penguin Books, London 2010, ISBN 978-0-14-195804-0 , SX
  9. ↑ David Nicols: Introduction to Lucky Jim . Penguin Books, London 2010, ISBN 978-0-14-195804-0 , p. VIII.
  10. ↑ Lucky Jim . Penguin Books, London 2010, ISBN 978-0-14-195804-0 , p. 63.
  11. ↑ Lucky Jim . Penguin Books, London 2010, ISBN 978-0-14-195804-0 , p. 180.
  12. ↑ Merritt Moseley: Understanding Kingsley Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 1993, ISBN 0-87249-861-1 . P. 21
  13. ↑ Merritt Moseley: Understanding Kingsley Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 1993, ISBN 0-87249-861-1 . P. 22.
  14. ↑ See Wolfgang P. Rothermel: Kingsley Amis . In: Horst W. Drescher (Hrsg.): English literature of the present in single representations (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 399). Kröner, Stuttgart 1970, DNB 456542965 , pp. 150-172, here pp. 158 f.
  15. ↑ See Wolfgang P. Rothermel: Kingsley Amis . In: Horst W. Drescher (Hrsg.): English literature of the present in single representations (= Kröner's pocket edition. Volume 399). Kröner, Stuttgart 1970, DNB 456542965 , pp. 150-172, here pp. 159 f.
  16. ↑ Merritt Moseley: Understanding Kingsley Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 1993, ISBN 0-87249-861-1 . P. 19
  17. ↑ quoted from Merritt Moseley: Understanding Kingsley Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 1993, ISBN 0-87249-861-1 . P. 20. The original quote is: Lucky Jim (1954), a book of grad verbal dexterity disguising itself as clumsiness, but rooted in an English tradition of comedy of manners quite foreign to Joyce. Lucky Jim was another magic book for me - and for most English readers of my age and background, upwardly mobile, scholarship-winning, first-generation university graduates - for it established precisely the linguistic register we needed to articulate our sense of social identity, a precarious balance of independence and self-doubt, irony and hope.
  18. ↑ Merritt Moseley: Understanding Kingsley Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 1993, ISBN 0-87249-861-1 . P. 20 and p. 21
  19. ^ Wolfgang P. Rothermel: Kingsley Amis . In: Horst W. Drescher (Hrsg.): English literature of the present in single representations (= Kröner's pocket edition. Volume 399). Kröner, Stuttgart 1970, DNB 456542965 , pp. 150-172, here p. 152 f.
  20. ^ Wolfgang P. Rothermel: Kingsley Amis . In: Horst W. Drescher (Hrsg.): English literature of the present in single representations (= Kröner's pocket edition. Volume 399). Kröner, Stuttgart 1970, DNB 456542965 , pp. 150-172, here p. 153.
  21. ↑ Martin Amis: The Rachel Papers , German Das Rachel-Tagebuch , translated by Joachim Kalka, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-596-15504-5 .