Book Chapter

\The Past Is a Foreign Country\

Ulanowicz, Anastasia

2013

Overview

\"The past is a foreign country,\" declares L. P. Hartley's narrator in the opening line of The Go-Between (1958): \"they do things differently there\" (5). Hartley's novel-whose first line is often quoted but whose subsequent content is sadly underappreciated-is narrated by a middle-aged man who reluctantly recalls a childhood trauma that resulted in a nervous breakdown. As the narrator, Leo Colston, describes the events leading up to this catastrophe, he scrupulously draws his twentieth-century audience's attention to the very otherness of the turn-of-the-century historical context in which these incidents occurred, documenting such details as the importance of wearing a proper suit to meals, the regularity of morning prayers in an English great house, and-most crucially-the taboo nature of inter-class romantic affairs. Likewise, he deftly underscores the differences between his childhood self and his present, adult identity, thereby suggesting that one's youth is as impossible to directly access and represent as the national past itself.

• Publisher: Routledge
• ISBN: 9780415628259, 9781138548008, 1138548006, 0415628253