الموضوع: ما سر "الروعة" في افضل مائة رواية عالمية؟ دراسة بحثية
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قديم 10-11-2011, 09:26 AM
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ايوب صابر
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والان مع سر الروعة في :

54 ـ سكوب، للمؤلف إيفلين وورغ.


John Courteney Boot is a rising young British novelist, but after an affair gone sour he wants to get out of England for awhile. He approaches the well-connected Mrs. Algernon Stitch for assistance & she in turn recommends to Lord Copper, publisher of the Beast newspaper, that he send Boot to cover the war in Ishmaelia, Africa. Copper in turn orders Mr. Salter, his Foreign Editor, to get Boot and in short order a series of mix-ups leads to the Beast sending William Boot, their nature columnist and a man who loathes leaving his ancestral home, Boot Magna Hall, to Africa. In Ishmaelia, Boot stumbles into a couple of scoops and returns home a hero, "Boot of the Beast".


Evelyn Waugh is one of the great satirists of the century and he has never been funnier than he is here, skewering the Press.


Scoop is a 1938 novel by English writer Evelyn Waugh, a satire of sensationalist journalism and foreign correspondence.
Plot
William Boot, a young man who lives in genteel poverty far from the iniquities of London, is contributor of nature notes to Lord Copper's Beast, a national newspaper. He is dragooned into becoming a foreign correspondent when the editors of the aptly named Daily Beast mistake him for a novelist who shares his surname. He is sent to the fictional African state of Ishmaelia where a civil war threatens to break out. There, despite his total ineptitude, he accidentally manages to get the "scoop" of the title. When he returns, however, credit is diverted to the other Boot, and he is left to return to his bucolic pursuits, much to his relief.
Background
The novel is partly based on Waugh's own experience working for the Daily Mail, when he was sent to cover Benito Mussolini's expected invasion of Abyssinia - what was later known as the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. When he got his own scoop on the invasion he telegraphed the story back in Latin for secrecy, but they discarded it. Waugh wrote up his travels more factually in Waugh in Abyssinia (1936), which complements Scoop.
Lord Copper, the newspaper magnate, has been said to be based on an amalgam of Lord Northcliffe and Lord Beaverbrook: a character so fearsome that his obsequious foreign editor, Mr Salter, can never openly disagree with any statement he makes, answering "Definitely, Lord Copper" and 'Up to a point, Lord Copper" in place of "yes" or "no". Lord Copper's idea of the lowliest of his employees is a book reviewer. The historian A.J.P. Taylor, however, writes: "I have Evelyn Waugh's authority for stating that Lord Beaverbrook was not the original of Lord Copper."[1] Bill Deedes thought the portrait of Copper exhibited the folie de grandeur of both Rothermere and Beaverbrook and included " the ghost of Rothermere's elder brother, Lord Northcliffe. Before he died tragically, mentally deranged and attended by nurses, Northcliffe was already exhibiting some of Copper's eccentricities - his megalomania, his habit of giving ridiculous orders to underlings." [2]
It is widely believed that Waugh based his hapless protagonist, William Boot, on Bill Deedes, a junior reporter who arrived in Addis Ababa aged 22 with "quarter of a ton of baggage".[3] In his memoir At War with Waugh, Deedes wrote that; "Waugh like most good novelists drew on more than one person for each of his characters. He drew on me for my excessive baggage - and perhaps for my naivety.." He further observed that Waugh was reluctant to acknowledge real life models, so that with Black Mischiefs portrait of a young ruler, "Waugh insisted, as he usually did, that his portrait of Seth, Emperor of Azania, was not drawn from any real person such as Haile Selassie." [4] According to Peter Stothard, a more direct model for Boot may have been William Beach Thomas, "a quietly successful countryside columnist and literary gent who became a calamitous Daily Mail war correspondent".[5]
The novel is full of all but identical opposites: Lord Copper of the Daily Beast, Lord Zinc of the Daily Brute (the Daily Mail and Daily Express);[6] the CumReds and the White Shirts, parodies of Communists (comrades) and Black Shirts (fascists) etc.
Other real life models for characters (again, according to Deedes): "Jakes is drawn from John Gunther of the Chicago Daily News - In [one] excerpt, Jakes is found writing, 'The Archbishop of Canterbury who, it is well known, is behind Imperial Chemicals..' Authentic Gunther." [7] The most recognizable figure from Fleet Street is Sir Jocelyn Hitchcock, Waugh's portrait of Sir Percival Phillips, working then for the Daily Telegraph.[8]
"Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole", a line from one of Boot's countryside columns, has become a famous comic example of overblown prose style. It inspired the name of the environmentalist magazine Vole, which was originally titled The Questing Vole.
One of the points of the novel is that even if there is little news happening, the world's media descending upon a place requires that something happen to please their editors and owners back home, and so they will create news.