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The Herbert Read Conference 2004

The Herbert Read Conference, Tate Britain, London, 25 and 26 June 2004
Jointly organised by the University of Nottingham Institute for Research in Visual Culture and Tate Britain


Speaker: Leena Kore-Schroder, University of Nottingham
Title: 'Rumbling in the depths': The Textual and Cultural Politics of The Green Child

Herbert Read's The Green Child (1935) is a singular novel, primarily of course for being the only work of fiction in a career that covers an astonishingly wide range of genre, subject and period, but also for the way in which it expresses many of the concerns of the transitional, troubled decade in which it appears. Far from presenting a homogeneous topology, the map of the 1930s is riven by anxieties and allegiances, conflicts and overlaps, contradictions and identifications that are both cultural and political: between Marxists and modernists; modernists and postmodernists; realists and surrealists. This paper, therefore, proposes to read The Green Childas a kind of 'threshold' between these various positions, a novel that is as Janus-like in its centripetal inwardness and centrifugal outwardness as is the stream itself on which its plot turns, ever flowing back to its source. By focussing on The Green Child as one of the best examples of Surrealist narrative in the twentieth century, the paper will address the ways in which irrationality and the unconscious can nevertheless be understood in terms that are also historical and political. The title is taken from Jung's reading of the novel, who wrote to Read that its 'rumbling in the depths kept [him] awake all night'. In these inward 'depths' Jung traces the movements of libidinal desire, but the 'rumblings' of his unconscious also reverberate outwards, raising questions about selfhood that are relevant to social and cultural change. The 'real' is always present in the 'surrealism' of The Green Child: the novel is at once spiritual and timeless, and political and time-bound. Yet these are never polarised positions for Read. Thus, the paper explores the relations between ideas of the individual and the mass in order to accommodate both Read the anarchist, and Read the knight of the realm, as well as to better understand him in terms of the cultural matrices of his time.














































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