Realism, modernism, and the representation of memory in Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle.(Critical essay)

In January 1939, the British playwright Dodie Smith travelled from London to see the American production of her play Dear Octopus (1938). When war was declared, she and her husband, who was a conscientious objector, decided not to return to Britain. Smith was removed from her usual audience and social circle and felt unable to continue writing the drawing-room dramas set among the English upper-middle-classes on which she had built her reputation. Following a period as a Hollywood "script doctor," she decided to write a novel; and, after a difficult gestation, I Capture the Castle was published in 1949. (1) Written in the form of a diary, I Capture the Castle tells the story of seventeen-year-old Cassandra, a young woman growing up in an eccentric family, who nurses the ambition to be a writer. As Smith's biographer notes, the novel's setting and milieu draws on a vision of "England and Englishness that can only have been emptied from the recesses of [Smith's] memory, six years into her exile" (Grove 163). While the diary form promotes a focus on present and very recent experiences, these are depicted in the novel as incipient memories, a technique that both implies the transitory nature of perception and indicates that this is a novel not only about being but also, given that its narrator is moving from girlhood to womanhood, about becoming.

Smith's choice of narrator and her decision to situate the action in a politically tranquil and for the most part pastoral version of the early 1930s might appear to evade engagement with the political, social, and cultural turmoil of wartime England, which she felt ill-equipped to evoke from the other side of the Atlantic. Her situation in self-imposed exile gives the novel's nostalgia for a chimerical version of English pastoral a particular resonance. However, anxieties about the future articulated through meditations on the apparently unchanging cycles of country life were not uncommon during the 1930s and 1940s and, as I will show, Smith's novel can be placed in the context of other works from this period that equate the countryside with the nation-state, seeing the country as a repository for the values and traditions that were threatened by war. For many authors, including, I will argue, Smith, this was not merely a nostalgic maneuver and she acknowledges that, even prior to the war, the countryside had been encroached upon by the forces of progress. In the postwar period, attempts at forging a sense of national and cultural identity on a pastoral vision of England become increasingly fraught, and in this regard, 1 Capture the Castle can be placed in a lineage alongside such works as L. P. Hartley's The Shrimp and the Anemone (1944) and The Go-Between (1953), Philip Larkin's A Girl in Winter (1947) and Angus Wilson's Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956). If literary modernism is in part a response to the depredations of modernity, these authors strive to negotiate with both modernism and modernity in an aesthetic that is rooted in the familiarity of realism. This is not simply a case of realism looking back in response to modernism's orientation toward the present and future. As I will suggest, Smith shows an awareness of how modernism altered understandings of perception and memory, but she expresses this awareness through a largely realist aesthetic. Modernism and realism may appear at times in the novel to be opposed to each other, but taken as a whole, I Capture the Castle both displays and enacts a more complex interrelationship between these two modes. Smith engages critically with modernism, but this does not imply that the realist aesthetic is presented as an unproblematic or straightforward means of representation.

Beginning with a consideration of the implications and effects of Smith's decision to present I Capture the Castle as a diary, I will suggest that this form is suited to the depiction of a self-conscious narrator and allows for both the presentation and the interrogation of nostalgia. The intricate dialogue between realism and modernism is central to the novel as Cassandra attempts to find her own literary voice through the writing of her journal while her father, the author of a modernist masterpiece, struggles to overcome writer's block. The choice of the journal form, and particularly its engagement with issues of authenticity, are important here; her father's work has artistic authenticity because of the labor that has gone into it, but Cassandra's writing, produced apparently effortlessly by comparison, has authenticity of emotion. Cassandra attempts to preserve events and images that she believes will be significant to her in the future, a kind of proleptic memorialization that contributes to the novel's nostalgic edge. However, she is also aware of the shortcomings of her own representational powers, and it is therefore through both personal and literary self-reflection that her development as an individual is traced.

Writing About Writing

As a novel featuring a number of writers or prospective writers, I Capture the Castle engages with a range of types of literature, both explicitly and implicitly. Cassandra begins to write a journal, having rejected her earlier short stories as "very stiff and self-conscious" (4). Depicting the characters and events around her should, she decides, be a good way to teach herself how to write. Thus it is immediately signalled to the reader that while the journal has some of the characteristics of a "found text"--with Cassandra describing each of the different notebooks she writes in during the course of the narrative, for instance--this will not be an unregulated outpouring of sentiments.

The common perception of the diary as a spontaneous rather than crafted type of writing could explain why, as a narrative form, the diary has received sparse critical attention; its chief formal characteristic would appear to be its formlessness. The diary can begin and end at any point, and the ending may be dictated by many factors quite apart from the writer's sense that the narrative has reached a conclusion (whatever that might entail). As a form of autobiographical writing, it also displays the doubleness that Felicity Nussbaum identifies: "The diarist or journalist may record himself in order to produce an enabling fiction of a coherent and continuous identity; or he may record himself and recognize, to the contrary, that the self is not the same yesterday, today and tomorrow" (134). This tension between sameness and difference is certainly evident in Smith's novel as Cassandra is torn between the preservation of the present moment and the charting of change. As a means of structuring a novel, the diary can create an "impression of immediacy" (Martens 26) and a sense of intimacy between reader and narrator, not least because the diary is traditionally kept secret. Drawing on the work of the narratologist Dorrit Cohn, Lorna Martens suggests that the relationship between narrator and author in the diary novel may be characterized by greater or lesser degrees of ...