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The Genesis of Birdsong
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Faulks: Birdsong
In this course, Dr Allison Adler Kroll (University of Oxford) explores Sebastian Faulks' 1993 novel, Birdsong. We begin by thinking about the genesis of the novel – why did Faulks want to write a story about the First World War in the early nineties? After that, we think about the significance of the title of the novel – 'Birdsong' – and its epigraph, a poem by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, before turning in the third module to the novel's seven-part structure. From the fourth to the ninth modules, we think about the significance of particular characters or groups of characters, including Stephen Wraysford, Jack Firebrace, Isabelle Azaire, and others, before moving on in the tenth module to think about the various settings of the novel – pre-war Amiens, the trenches and tunnels of the war itself, and 1970s England. Finally, in the eleventh module, we think about some of the key themes in the novel, its literary influences, and the importance of faith.
The Genesis of Birdsong
In this section, we think about how Faulks came to write Birdsong: why did he want to write a story set (mostly) in the First World War in the early 90s?
Hi, my name is Dr Allison Adler Crawl,
00:00:02and today I'll be lecturing about Sebastian Fox's Birdsong.
00:00:06Some background about the novel.
00:00:10Fox, when he wrote it in the early nineties,
00:00:12felt that after the armistice 70th anniversary celebrations in 1988.
00:00:17But there was a distinct lack of literature,
00:00:23contemporary literature that is about the first World War,
00:00:27and he felt that he really needed to remedy the situation.
00:00:31Although there had been, he thought,
00:00:35some interesting works written in the twenties
00:00:37and thirties directly after the war,
00:00:39he felt that even those were sort of memoir like,
00:00:42rather than actual sort of literary engagements with War.
00:00:45So this novel is an attempt to address that,
00:00:51and he was coming in a context where writers like s by it had just been sort of thinking
00:00:54about the ways in which we kind of recover the
00:01:01past and what it means to the future generations.
00:01:03And this novel is caught up in the early nineties.
00:01:06Context of this generation is coming to terms
00:01:09with not the generation of their parents,
00:01:13but the generation of their grandparents,
00:01:16which they all seemed to feel at that time, hadn't been adequately dealt with.
00:01:18So again, this novel is an attempt to kind of address that relationship
00:01:23between not the this generation and the immediate past, but the past before that,
00:01:27and to try and recover it for the future.
00:01:33And this is also coming in the midst of
00:01:35that late eighties discussion about heritage and national and
00:01:38the national past,
00:01:43and trying to present that in such a way
00:01:44that it's meaningful for the present and future.
00:01:47In the late seventies,
00:01:50there had been a lot of discussion about how the past had been kind of Disney
00:01:52ified for the future in various theme parks and heritage sites and things like that.
00:01:56And there was a very distinct call for a new kind of way of
00:02:02thinking about national heritage in the late
00:02:07seventies and in the eighties and nineties
00:02:09that really came to fruition.
00:02:12And a lot of writers engaged with that discussion, including by it, including Fox,
00:02:14including Graham Swift and a number of other
00:02:20writers of that generation and a bit later,
00:02:24Julian Barnes.
00:02:26So Fox sits within that tradition.
00:02:27When he came to write the novel, he wrote it, he said, in a kind of trance,
00:02:32which is very interesting if we think about the novel itself,
00:02:37with its many trance states that Stephen experiences, for example,
00:02:40the sort of dreamlike quality of the early Belle Epoque first
00:02:45section of the novel and some of the sort dream wakeful
00:02:50states that are experienced by a number of the characters as
00:02:54they encounter war in the sense that there are worlds that are
00:02:57removed from this one.
00:03:02And so in a way, folks, as he wrote the novel,
00:03:04removed himself from the present world kind of to
00:03:08inhabit that past one other ways he did.
00:03:11That was, in fact,
00:03:15to consult a lot of original documents and also to meet
00:03:16up with as many veterans from the First World War,
00:03:21which, as you can imagine being quite old in the nineties, Um, as he could.
00:03:24And he went to France and was escorted around by some
00:03:29of the tunnel is whom he describes in the novel.
00:03:31They're at the centre of the novel.
00:03:35The tunnel is he wanted,
00:03:37particularly to tell their story as he felt that they had never been,
00:03:39um, uh, fully explored as participants in the First World War.
00:03:44He felt that their story hadn't been told.
00:03:49And so again,
00:03:52this is another kind of way in which Fox is using this story to kind of repay a debt
00:03:53to those people whose stories hadn't been told by recollecting
00:03:59their experiences in in that most horrendous of wars.
00:04:03Um,
00:04:08one of the things that he hopes to do,
00:04:10as his character Elizabeth Benson hopes to do is to kind of repay the debt to those
00:04:12men who sacrificed so much of their humanity
00:04:18and their lives to that cause of winning that
00:04:22first industrialised war.
00:04:25And he also feels as though he's completing a circle just as he has his character.
00:04:29I think Elizabeth Benson, that is, think about her
00:04:35giving birth to two John at the end of the
00:04:39novel that she has repaid a debt that her grandfather
00:04:42and promised to pay. Also, like his character, Elizabeth Benson.
00:04:46In searching through the original documents that he used for the basis of the novel,
00:04:52Fox felt what he called an immediate connection to the past, as he
00:04:59sort of touched the telegrams and documents and
00:05:04artefacts of the soldiers whose lives he was researching
00:05:08and that sort of vital connection, as Elizabeth calls it,
00:05:11and her sections of the novel to the past
00:05:15is something Again which centres folks in this period.
00:05:17It's something that comes up in by its 1990 possession,
00:05:21where touching the letters of the past the of two Victorian poets is
00:05:25what spurs her character on to find out everything he can about them.
00:05:31And this is sort of what drives Fox as well and kind of, I think,
00:05:36creates that kind of drive to complete this story. Complete the circle,
00:05:41and
00:05:48it is again his attempt to kind of redeem the past.
00:05:49And one of the reasons that the first
00:05:54World War stories hadn't been fully appreciated in Fox's
00:05:57time is that it was completely overwhelmed by the
00:06:01Second World War and all of its narratives.
00:06:05And as he remarks himself, it's much easier moral purpose.
00:06:08The first World War, even now,
00:06:13is debated by historians in terms of Was it an efficacious war?
00:06:16Did it achieve nothing? Was it where it's aims actually achieved at any point?
00:06:22And it's a much murkier war than the Second World War, where it was defeat Hitler.
00:06:29End of story, Um,
00:06:35this was a much more difficult, or the Allies,
00:06:38the empires and the nations involved or were bound up with one another,
00:06:41which is something that comes out very powerfully in Fox's novel and
00:06:47creates this kind of miasma of uncertainty that the novel explores.
00:06:52
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Adler Kroll, A. (2018, August 15). Faulks: Birdsong - The Genesis of Birdsong [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/faulks-birdsong
MLA style
Adler Kroll, A. "Faulks: Birdsong – The Genesis of Birdsong." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/faulks-birdsong