Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis - Prof. Susanta Nole PDF

Preview

Summary

IMPORTANT LECTURE SERIES, READ IT TO KEEP GOOD GRADES.GRADES IMPROVED WILL BRIGHTEN YOUR FUTURE....

Description

Module: Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis .

Course ID: ENG 406 ME(F) COURSE TITLE: Post 50s British Literature. Semester : IV Postgraduate study materials ( e-notes )

Prepared by: Prof. SUSANTA NOLE Department of English Ramananda college, Bishnupur, Affiliated to Bankura university.

#Lucky Jim : as a campus novel Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim is a quintessential campus novel of the 20th century, in which Amis utilizes comedy as means for delivering his satiric attacks on the university community. Campus novel, a new novelistic/ fictional genre, emerging during 1950s , “is a novel, usually comic and satirical, in which the action is set with in enclosed world of university and highlights the follies of academic life.” ( Chris Baldick : The concise Dictionary of Literary terms , Oxford UP 1990). Generally the novel is set on academic ground, dealing with professional academics and the tone is in general exuberantly witty but intellectual. Mary MC Carthy's The Groves of Accademy (1952) and C.P.Snow’sThe Masters (1951) are pioneering examples of this genre. Amis in Lucky Jim 1954 and Malcolm Bradbury in Eating people is Wrong set the genre in motion.

Lucky Jim is an example of a witty campus novel; it skewers the hypocrisy and vanities of 1950s academic life -its tattered moral fabric, it’s can’t and sham.

Amis’s personal experience as a junior Lecturer at University West Midland college, Swansea, aided him to probe into the vanity and sham of campus life . Kenneth Womack has observed that in Lucky Jim Amis criticizes “privileged individual s who endeavour to maintain academic status quo in their favour through the explanation of junior colleagues and ultimately through the threat of expulsion from seemingly sacred groves of campus life.” ( published in The literary Encyclopedia in 2006).

The novel presents the journey of the anti- heroic protagonist Jim Dixon through the chaos and trauma of mediating between an upper class value system beyond his understanding and the contradiction of academic life, and ultimately recognizes his own ethos in an effort to locate a new path to selfhood beyond the campus walls. Jim Dixon, a northern grammar school educated, lower middle class young man is ‘lucky' to ensure a post as a lecturer in mediaeval history at a Redbrick University in the English Midlands. The action of the novel begins to wards an end of an Academic year- in which Dixon is concerned about losing his position because of the end of his probationary first year contract. The novel deals with Dixon's violent unease against the cant and pseudo- intellectual values he meets in Academic society. The problem is that though Dixon struggles to keep his job, he hates his assignments; there is nothing of interest in the subject for him; he is keener on drinking bear and enjoying the life to the dregs . The main object of Jim's hatred and ridicule is his head of the department , prof. Welch , a gauche pedant. He is one who decides whether or not Jim will be employed the next year and that is why Jim tries to make a Good impression on him- although he hates the professor. Jim Dixon had been having bad luck from the beginning of his stay at the university and gradually makes rather a bad impression on the whole Welch family. Patrick Swinden in his study The English novel of History and Society 1940-1980 claims that “ the character Jim Dixon expreses the author's own dissatisfaction and annoyance with the world- especially the academic world”. The novel reaches it’s climax during Dixon's public lecture on “Merrie England”, which backfires as Dixon, having attempted to calm his nerves with an excess of alcohol – unctrollably begins to mock Welch and everything else that he hates; he finally passes out. Welch, not unsympathetically, informs Dixon that his employment will not be extended. At this crucial juncture, christine's uncle – Christine is prof. Welch's son's girlfriend- who reveals a tacit respect for Dixon's individuality and attitude towards pretention offers Dixon a new job in London. Dixon Gladly accepts that job ultimately mergers as a self fulfilled

member of the larger community as opposed to the alienated figure of decor and pretention of the cloistered Academic world.

# Merrie England Lecture: The “Merrie England” lecture marks the end of his accadamic career because it turns out to be catastrophic and destructive. It does cost him a job, which he desperately tried to keep while working under a supervisor he despises and makes a complete fool of himself when he accidentally knocks down the chair on which the registrar was about to sit down. Merritt Moseley sympathises with Jim's predicament and states that he is “ unjustly doomed to low status and to enduring his own servility towards unworthy and even evil people”(Moseley,1993,p.22). However ,after the disastrous lecture, Jim,”departs for comedy’s Literary reward of a good job and the nicest girl ,out there in the ordinary common sense working world”(Bradbury ,1993,p.321). Fortunately for Jim, the philanthropist. Gore- Urquhert, Christine’s uncle, who shares Jim's strong dislike for accadamic and artistic pretence or hypocrisy any kind, comes to his rescue and offers him a well paid job in London. The novel ends with the prospect of happiness, economic success, and martial union emerging from the ashes of the main character's insecurity, embarrassment, and bad luck. Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim is both intensely funny and deadly serious. It is also both a satire on academic milieu as well as a comic satiric mode to the Britain of his time where Amis states : We are in for a golden age of satire , in my opinion, and if this is so we will be fortune indeed . Satire offers a social and moral contribution. A culture without satire is a culture with out self criticism and thus, ultimately, without humanity. A society such as ours, in which the forms of powers are changing and multiplying, needs above all the restraining influences of savage laughter(O’Conor, 1963, p. 81). Malcolm Bradbury praises the novel and states that “the real revolution represented by Lucky Jim was primarily a cultural one; it represented a significant alteration of in the register of a fiction, a paradigm shift of clear importance”. John McDermott stresses in his book called Kingsley Amis:An English Moralist “the need of investigating Amis’s work as an ironical and ethical design. He asserts that it is a novel about good people and bad people about right and wrong ways of behaving and thinking and , as in all her major novels, into main

interest and much of it’s delight lies in feeling the tension between these elements”.

Thus, throughout the novel the novelist has critically pointed out the pretention, hypocrisy of the campus life. Through Welch and his son Gore- Urquhert , and Dixon’s ex-beloved Margaret Amis is successful to dig at the pseudointellectual and hypocritical life of the 'learned' people. Amis also satirizes the accademic research and scholarly publication which esteemed essential in the competitive campus arena.

Reference: Malcolm Bradbury, Eating people is Wrong ,1959.print .

Chris Baldick: The concise Dictionary of Literary terms, Oxford university press,1990.

C.P. Snow : The masters, 1951.

Mary MC Carthy’s : The Groves of Accademy, 1952

Patrick Swinden : The English novel of History and Society, 1940-1980.

William van O’Conor : The New University wits and The End of Modernism.1963,(p.81).

John McDermott: Kingsley Amis: An English moralist.1989....