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In Bloomsbury

Five overly cultured siblings disown their rugged South African relatives by accusing them of murder

Folks

• Narrator, the dry, trouble-making, catalyzing force in the story, who prods people but abstains from most action, quite God-like

• Mr. and Mrs. Curtain, the intelligent and courteous parents of children who are more intelligent, less courteous, and “run into more extravagant molds”

• Clarissa, fascinated by sex

• Julian, the italics-speaking

• Fabian,

• John, the youngest,

• Clinton, the “excessive” one, the slumming one who hangs out with the relatives

• The cousins, from South Africa, constantly referred to as animals, a bundle of stereotypes about out-landers and pioneers, all about body; accused by the family of murdering their half-Bantu half-brother, despite the ambiguity of the comment that supposedly proves it: “We needn’t have done it,” which could have referred to anything, from having done a different crime (maiming the cow) or even to them not actually being the cousins but imposters just trying to ride off their wave of luck, which could explain not knowing anything about the brother….

Themes

• Cultured Bohemia
  • Though they call their parents by their first names, they “moved, without knowing it, in as rigid a convention as any other”
  • They know all the right stuff; they never quarrel but have “situations” instead (47), which is really rather genteel
• Not Really Cultured At All
  • They want their cousins to have murdered him! They make it up; the murder is in their hearts….
    • “they had been sharp enough to see how their supposed crime had enhanced them.”
  • “It seemed as if we were the hunters now.” (49)
• Family Ties
  • The seven members of the family are quite clannish and are accustomed to running out strangers
  • “A tacit league”
  • But the cousins make them all react differently: a touchstone
  • Nonetheless, they run the cousins out all right
• Stuff
  • British museum: “sterilised” but still “mysterious treasures of the world”
  • Jade collection
    • Narrator traces back the collection to Ghengis Khan, Kurdistan, finally to Bloomsbury
    • Calls this historical timeless “the becoming, the duree of a work of art. Jade lasts: jade you cannot destroy or make or unmake. Jade is secure. Jade is loot.” (45)
    • Bergson! Yet the “loot” aspect of the jade isn’t about duree; whereas author must retrace the history by himself to figure out this duree: duree is suppressed by people who loot
• Cafe
  • Chance meeting between brothers and narrator at Paris cafe leads to the brothers finding their cousins
• Country House
  • Country house could count as leisure space when that’s what it’s used for: in contrast to the city, from which you do work
  • Narrator notes, “A bold move to concentrate the situation in a country house.” (460
  • That’s what it does: “concentrate the situation”
• Pleasantries
  • “It turns out there was something in—in the preposterous pleasantry that they killed him.”
  • Shows that pleasantries aren’t pleasantly meant, but actually real accusations… or that that’s what this family thinks, so it makes the murder inevitable for them

Style

• Self-conscious remarks
  • “Not very long it was time for something to happen to them.”
    • Conditions of story-telling
  • Detective story stuff
    • While explaining the plots of crime stories: “Either that, or else the Inspector from Scotland Yard finds out he has done it _him_self.”
• Fragments
  • The reader can supply the rest of the sentence himself, so why should Butts have to give it?
  • Atmospherically, it’s a sense of weariness, of having seen it all and not caring, of this being a tired story that doesn’t deserve full attention.
• Psychological technical terms common now: just drop “repression” and everyone knows what it means
• Truth is as bad as a bad play…
  • “Turned into a comedy that was rather over-strident, a little over-seasoned with false excuses, the true truth of the situation was on us.”
  • The truth itself is theatrical.
  • But the irony is, they’ve made it the bad play with their silly accusation!