The Irrational Knot

The Irrational Knot - Being the
Second Novel of His Nonage

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Bernard Shaw This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost
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Title: The Irrational Knot Being the Second Novel of His Nonage
Author: George Bernard Shaw
Release Date: February 28, 2004 [EBook #11354]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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IRRATIONAL KNOT ***

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THE IRRATIONAL KNOT
BY BERNARD SHAW BEING
THE SECOND NOVEL OF HIS NONAGE
1905

PREFACE
TO THE AMERICAN EDITION OF 1905
This novel was written in the year 1880, only a few years after I had

exported myself from Dublin to London in a condition of extreme
rawness and inexperience concerning the specifically English side of
the life with which the book pretends to deal. Everybody wrote novels
then. It was my second attempt; and it shared the fate of my first. That
is to say, nobody would publish it, though I tried all the London
publishers and some American ones. And I should not greatly blame
them if I could feel sure that it was the book's faults and not its qualities
that repelled them.
I have narrated elsewhere how in the course of time the rejected MS.
became Mrs. Annie Besant's excuse for lending me her ever helping
hand by publishing it as a serial in a little propagandist magazine of
hers. That was how it got loose beyond all possibility of recapture. It is
out of my power now to stand between it and the American public: all I
can do is to rescue it from unauthorized mutilations and make the best
of a jejune job.
At present, of course, I am not the author of The Irrational Knot.
Physiologists inform us that the substance of our bodies (and
consequently of our souls) is shed and renewed at such a rate that no
part of us lasts longer than eight years: I am therefore not now in any
atom of me the person who wrote The Irrational Knot in 1880. The last
of that author perished in 1888; and two of his successors have since
joined the majority. Fourth of his line, I cannot be expected to take any
very lively interest in the novels of my literary great-grandfather. Even
my personal recollections of him are becoming vague and overlaid with
those most misleading of all traditions, the traditions founded on the
lies a man tells, and at last comes to believe, about himself to himself.
Certain things, however, I remember very well. For instance, I am
significantly clear as to the price of the paper on which I wrote The
Irrational Knot. It was cheap--a white demy of unpretentious
quality--so that sixpennorth lasted a long time. My daily allowance of
composition was five pages of this demy in quarto; and I held my
natural laziness sternly to that task day in, day out, to the end. I
remember also that Bizet's Carmen being then new in London, I used it
as a safety-valve for my romantic impulses. When I was tired of the
sordid realism of Whatshisname (I have sent my only copy of The
Irrational Knot to the printers, and cannot remember the name of my
hero) I went to the piano and forgot him in the glamorous society of

Carmen and her crimson toreador and yellow dragoon. Not that Bizet's
music could infatuate me as it infatuated Nietzsche. Nursed on greater
masters, I thought less of him than he deserved; but the Carmen music
was--in places--exquisite of its kind, and could enchant a man like me,
romantic enough to have come to the end of romance before I began to
create in art for myself.
When I say that I did and felt these things, I mean, of course, that the
predecessor whose name I bear did and felt them. The I of to-day is (?
am) cool towards Carmen; and Carmen, I regret to say, does not take
the slightest interest in him (? me). And now enough of this juggling
with past and present Shaws. The grammatical complications of being a
first person and several extinct third persons at the same moment are so
frightful that I must return to the ordinary misusage, and ask the reader
to make the necessary corrections in his or her own mind.
This book is not wholly a compound of intuition and ignorance. Take
for example the profession of my hero, an Irish-American electrical
engineer. That was by