contemporary_british_fiction.pdf

8/14/2019 contemporary_british_fiction.pdf

1/7

1

Some major trends in post-war British Fiction

Post-war literature and realism

The retreat from experimentation in the novel is the landmark of the immediate post-war years: itimplies a consistent re-questioning of Modernism, a distrust of modernistic aestheticism, and adistrust in the power of art to salvage from history. In tune with a wider, European and non-European background of existentialist and new humanist sweep, novelists often tackle the socialand ethical issue of fiction (the possibility/legitimacy of fictionalizing life): what is at stake is therepresentation of a reality that defies comprehension. At the same time, this leads to a basicreflection on realism in the arts that is also nourished by literary criticism and that will underlie thefollowing decades.

For British novelists, writing realistically entails attempts at representing the new post-war life:the utterly changed context of social welfare and the advent of a new, more democratic society, therealignment of social classes, and the emergence of new subjects, notably women and the non-British (migrant or immigrant) population, and the shift to a mass-consumerist economicdimension. Many writers start drawing attention to material aspects of life, to work, to theexpectations brought about by social reformism and political change, and to the shift inrelationships, often seen in generational, class- and gender-conditioned terms. No less than in thetheatre, writers focus on familiar settings; their groundtone adheres to the workaday experience intheir attempt to depict scenes from (an often provincial) British life. Of course many aspects ofsocial life do not emerge yet, due to the rather homogeneous profile of the mainstream writers ofthat period: men, middle-class (or possibly of working-class origin with a middle-class education)British and often English, though mainly belonging to de-centred regions. There are few exceptionsto this profile, variously embodied by Kingsley Amis ( Lucky Jim , 1954), Alan Sillitoe ( Saturday

Night Sunday Morning, 1958; it became a film directed by K. Reisz in 1960), John Braine ( Room atthe Top , 1957 ): such exceptions include Sam Selvon, who comes from a working-class andimmigrant background, which he depicts in The Lonely Londoners (19 ; Keith Waterhouse ( Billy

Liar , 1959) and Nell Dunn, the author of novels ( Up the Junction , 1963, Poor cow , 1967) thatanticipate various issues relating to the womans role and to the life of the new underclass broughtabout by the new political and economic regime.

Compared to the imperatives of Modernism, the endorsement of realism looks like a basicinvolution, a reactionary tendency. Formally it was, but the question is not so simple. What seemscentral to such new trends, despite the relative narrow scope of their social grasp or the exclusion ofbroader sections of society, is a concern with language or the social languages which had beenundergoing changes from the pre-war to the post-war period, and which needed representation. Asmuch as in the theatre and in poetry, the new generation was trying to extend the grammar ofliterature.

Realism, however, is not the only paradigm of the post-war years, as shown by the fantasy/science-

fictional edge in the writing of William Golding ( Lord of the Flies , 1954; the first movie based on


2/7

2

the novel was directed by Peter Brook, 1963). The moral question of realism emerges in itscomplexity in the work of a leading figure of post-war fiction, the novelist Doris Lessing (b. 1919).

Lessings life is wide in its wanderings, both existential and intellectual, and the broad range of herwriting plainly reflects this. She actually experiments both in short stories ( London Observed,

African stories ) and in broader canvasses of social lives, where her concern with realism mergeswith a political (Africa in her Children of Violence sequence, 1953-69) science-fictional or mystic-philosophical interest ( Memoirs of a Survivor ). Lessings considerable output still enjoys highcritical acclaim and a wide readership [2007 Nobel Prize for Literature], not least because of herpolitical views (left-wing and broadly socialist) and of her concern with the woman question. Bothissues are brought into focus through her early, breakthrough novel The Golden Notebook (1962).

In The Golden Notebook the main character, the writer Anna Wulf, is deliberately split intodifferent subjects, as her notebooks are, to explore the different layers of her multi-facetedidentity: four diaries: a black notebook, which is to do with Anna Wulf the writer; a red notebook,concerned with politics; a yellow notebook in which I make stories out of my experience, and theblue notebook which tries to be a diary. The Golden Notebook is a novel within the novel (a novel,Free Women , is also written by Anna, and it frames the notebooks) where the narrator/charactertrusts on the provisional formal composure and structure of fiction to fight the impendingfragmentation of a world which is growing more and more aware of conflicts.

Intertwining narration with self-analysis and political, psychological, philosophical and historicaldigression, Lessing manages to pull the threads together, and her double Anna becomes the(extreme) prototype of the writer and the woman who goes through self-exploration, taking the risk

of dissolution and mental disaggregation in order to find liberation or a state of creative diffusion.From a literary point of view, then, the writers search for identity is a starting point for a reflectionon the creative relation between fiction and facts (as it might variously emerge thorough thesubgenres of the novel-within-the novel, autobiography, the diary or journal).

In the post-war years, such creative relation will be crucial to writers. At the same time, a writersuch as Doris Lessing foregrounds an equally central cluster of questions which revolve around thefluid perception of identity . In the first place, from a psychological and social point of view, thesense of identity (in terms of gender, as well as of ethnic belonging, of class) is neither self-centrednor necessarily confrontational/oppositional, but essentially relational and it implies roles that are

socially constructed but also individually internalised and questioned. In the second place, from asocio-political point of view, the emergence of individual or collective identity revolves on the twinmechanisms of disempowerment/empowerment (the latter requiring a deep awareness of onesposition in a given society, and the notion of ones necessary independence from, but implication in,the relation with the other).

Women and writing

One aspect of identity which Lessing addresses and which has been undergoing change in bothsocio-political and cultural representation since the upheaval of feminism in the late 1960s is the

woman question. In the second half of the century, a basic concern with woman as the object of


3/7

3

fictional worlds and as textual subjectivity is typical of both the more generally traditionalist (FayWeldon, Margaret Drabble, Anita Brookner) and more experimental writing (in different ways, IrisMurdoch, Angela Carter , and A. S. Byatt). The merging of different genres has been one of themost important devices, used by women writers to cope with an open idea of identity: for example,A. S. Byatts work is marked by a constant interplay of fictional genres ( Possession: a Romance ,1990), whereas Angela Carter is regarded as the representative of a new subgenre, the rewriting offables and fairy tales, which she revisits through gender concerns ( The Bloody Chamber andOther Stories , 1979).

The meta-literary aspect of women writers confronting with a possible female tradition leads tointeresting explorations of the link between past and present literature. Many women writers useintertextuality (the formal/semantic relation of their work to other works) to cast a searching lighton the identity of woman within a range of both present and past social contexts. A literary case ofexperimentation where identity is investigated through the vantage point of an ethnically displaced

narrator is Jean Rhys s Wide Sargasso Sea (1965) where the story of Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre (1847) is charged with ethnic meaning: the novel is entirely revisited through the viewpoint ofBertha (Rochesters legitimate wife in Jane Eyre , in her distant home in the West Indies). Rhyssnovel is a paradigm of womens writing and of its possible directions, but it also foreshadows othernovelists general concern with the relation of Great Britain to the former colonies: the perspectivewhich would eventually lead to postcolonial writing.

Concern which gender does not exclusively mean preoccupation with a womans identity, butincludes the issue of homosexual and transexual identity which gradually emerges in fiction. Anew voice in this respect is Jeanette Winterson ( b.1959) who, raised in a strictly religious

climate, regards her religious and working-class environment as crucial to her training as a writer. Anumber of contemporary issues, as well as a deep concern with love, interpersonal relationships,sexual and gender identity, fall within the scope of her writing, which intertwines fiction with otherliterary and non-literary genres. As she observes in a recent collection of essays, realism is hardly asatisfying paradigm, reality being a dimension where a number of realities tend to coexist in onesown life/lives.

Wintersons Written on the Body (1992) revolves on a more than metaphorical relation betweenbodily messages and emotional/psychological state. The narrator/characters concern with thebody and the physical as a way to the emotional and the spiritual turns into a startling apprehensionthe interdependence of all those aspects of life. This is important because Winterson leaves thequestion of identity in the background: she challenges her readers by obscuring thenarrator/characters sexual identity (it might be a man as well as a woman) and such indeterminacyshows very well the provisionality of any category, even the sexual: it shows the body as athreshold where identities are what is realised on an interpersonal, intersubjective level, rather thanfixed essences or roles society might demand of individuals. Winterson comes to convey thisthrough mastering an individual blend of realistic and metaphoric language, drawing inspirationfrom literature as well as from science, especially physics and chemistry. It is a deliberate interplayof languages that charge her poetic prose with the potential intermingling of genres, registers and

micro-languages often regarded as incompatible.


4/7

4

Realism, post-modernism: the question of history.

The departure from realistic modes noticed so far has often led to a kind of experimentation thatinterlocks notions of reality and of fictional representation with the broad question of history and ofhistorical consciousness. The backdrop to this is provided by a twofold attack on the individual andon history, both of which are perceived as the objects of a complex fragmentation (pinpointed byAnna Wulf/Doris Lessings reflection in the reported passage see reading materials): the need towrite or rewrite history is deeply felt. In the U.K. both the post-colonial perspective addressed bywriters such as Jean Rhys and the growing, globalised awareness of/information over the realitiesof distant realities open to new perspective in the novel. The relation between history and realism,far from being extinguished, feeds the whole development of British fiction from the post-war yearsonwards, leading to the disquieting reflections about recent history in John Banville (TheUntouchable , 1996) and Graham Swift (Shuttlecock , 1981; Waterland , 1983; Last Orders , 1996)or in some noteworthy attempts at recasting realism, for example in the experimental fiction of

Julian Barnes (Flauberts Parrot , 1984, where the father of French realism becomes the object ofa experimental research though biography, history and fiction, or A History of the World in 10 Chapters , 1989, where fiction intermingles with philosophical sketches, parables, digressions, etc).

The unfixed status of the individual and of history has consequences for fiction, in that the very ideaof subject and of story are complicated by the changing socio-political panorama and by thequestioning of the so-called narratives- stories underwritten by recorded History: this concern,defined as the indicator of a post-modern consciousness, breeds literary perspectives that moveaway from realism and embrace a post-modernistic stance (the fragmentation of the subject, theinterplay between genres, intertextuality are all signs of this position).

The issue of history and of its subjects has been taken up by a number of Anglophone writers,such as J.M. Coetzee , (Waiting for the Barbarians , Age of Iron , Disgrace Nobel Prize forLiterature) and often in the multi-cultural perspective offered by Salman Rushdie (b.1947).Rushdies multicultural background (he was born in Bombay, but moved to the U.K. and has beentravelling all of his life) is the starting point for his work, which explores the borders between theEast and the West through a culturally complex stance. A major aspect of his work lies in themingling of facts and fiction, which underscores the importance of relativity and mediation in bothour historical memory and our apprehension of present realities. All these issues are tackled througha perspective that pushes beyond the boundary between genres, as much as between high andpopular culture. Rushdies scope is geographically as well as historically really far-reaching, asshown by his early novel Midnights Children (1981).

As emerges from the quoted passage (see reading materials), at the core of Rushdies fiction liesthe notion of individual identity as tightly connected with national and socio-political identity/s: thisis why in the book, the narrators grasp of history and biography starts from an impression offragmentation as much as of dispersion (into the other childerns voices). The author and hisnarrator Saleem intertwine fiction and romance, storytelling and ordered, realistic narration,drawing from as different literary forms as the Indian oral saga and folk-tale, the Bildungroman and

the fake autobiography, magic realism, and non-literary genres, such as the Bollywood movies.


5/7

5

All this enhances the conscious provisionality of any story told in the novel, especiallyconsidering the unreliability of its narrator as he sets out to provide readers with an (his) accountof Indian history since the formation of the modern Indian nation.

Hybridity, interplay, and even a strong stress on orality are some of the devices Rushdie uses tochallenge his audience into a wider understanding of history, even through the ironical appeal tofiction as fabrication. Though focusing on contemporary society rather than history, manywriters share with him the need to find a common ground where possible implications of a multi-ethnic social fabric can be explored. This is quite apparent from the literature written by migrant orimmigrant/second- or third-generation immigrant writers, such as Timothy Mo (Sour Sweet, 1982)or the novelist-playwright Hanif Kureishi (b. 1954;) whose The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) alsoplays on the chord of cultural contamination: the protagonist, a Londoner of Indo-Pakistanidescent in his teens is actually caught between his identity as a Englishman born and bred, almostand the loyalty to and affiliation with his familys culture. Growing up in the feverish and pop

atmosphere of the sixties, the protagonist becomes aware of a number of allegiances which bindhim to both contexts: his friends, his social surroundings, his family past glimpsed through talesbut, also, the life of the burgeoning Anglo-Pakistani community in London. While showing howclass, ethnic belonging and other identities overlap, Kureishi comes to dramatise the allegiances anddivisions of a multi-cultural society in a stimulating way and to dramatic, as well as to comic andironic purpose.

British Nations in contemporary fiction

Irony, interplay between registers, concerns with history and urgent aspects of contemporary society

underlie some major works written by British-born writers whose belonging to the de-centredrealities of Ireland, Scotland, Wales (and to some extent Northern England) also pertain to theperception of a multi-cultural society.

A representative of such de-centred strain, especially after his groundbreaking novel Trainspotting(1993; source for Danny Boyles film) is Irvine Welsh (b.1958) A writer for film, television andtheatre, Welsh was born in Scotland and his Scotland is in some ways his loved/hated dimension asa writer, though like other Scottish novelists ( James Kelman, Iain Banks, Janice Galloway ) hisviews are not qualified by regional interests. In the novel, dislocation is not only geographical butsocial (covering the question of the working-class): it is actually set in Edinburgh and more

specifically in the forgotten neighbourhood of Leith in the 1980s: the characters openly talk about adepressed climate brought about by unemployment, lack of opportunities, boredom, which afflictthe new working-class generation. These themes are not exceptional with the period, as they arealso the primary concern of Northern English literature, and cinema of the nineties (think ofdirectors Ken Loach and Mike Leigh), but Welshs original viewpoint is defined by both hiscontroversially national concern and by his techniques. Focusing on Scotland, and contrasting thepost-devolution Scottish nationalism, Welsh makes explicit an element of contemporary literature inScotland as well as in Ireland and Wales: the keen perception of cultural subjugation to England andthe willingness to disentangle from it. This defines a provocative, and often ambivalent, post-

colonial perspective. The disenfranchisement from England is mostly perceived thought the very


6/7

6

use of language (Edinburghs Scots as opposed to standard English) where dialect is intertwinedwith the characters own idiolect and with a deliberately demotic register. As far as technique isconcerned, the realistic grasp of language is counterpointed by a strain of (black) humour andhallucinatory distortion which is connected with the drug-addiction theme, but is also a landmark ofWelshs writing, as his following novels will reveal ( The Acid House , 1994, Ecstasy: Three Tales ofChemical Romance , 1996, and Glue , 2001).

The relation to England is one of the threads non-English writers have started to pull since the latesixties while foregrounding their regional-national belonging and allegiances. The internal situationof Scotland, Wales and Ireland is now being investigated through a clear focus on the current socio-political situation. This has emerged for example, in a breed of Irish writers who manage to win not

just national but worldwide acclaim by addressing the delicate issue of Irish politics, from the risingof the Troubles in the 1960s to the pacification process of the 1990s. A number of works haveemerged, falling at first into a more realistic strain (such as Frank McCourts autobiographical

Angelas Ashes , 1996; later a movie by A. Parker, 1999) then opening up to not just linguistic butformal experimentation. This often meets the demand for a critical view of history andhistoriographical consciousness: it is the case of writers such as Seamus Deane whose Reading intothe Dark (1997) casts a searching light on the events leading to the Troubles. Deane tackles thepolitical issue by interweaving past and present narratives through a constant interplay of genres,such as the autobiography, the national/official historiographical narrative, the family saga, andcounterpointing the realistic grasp of stories through elements drawing from the supernatural.

England itself, whether in a post-imperial, Cold War, or post- 9/11 context, is the subject of anumber of British writers who have also been in the spotlight, like Ian McEwan (b. 1948) whose

books have gradually managed to relate the private/individual sense of growing instability anddislocation to the depiction of a chaotic public/social scenery, where the need to find newstories of collective identity is urgent. In McEwan, as much as in his contemporaries (the abovementioned Swift or Barnes, for example) history and society loom large, but the realistic mode ispreferably linked to post-modernist narrative techniques which have been mentioned above. Afterdealing with the post-war period and the 1980s, MacEwan has shifted his focus on urgentlycontemporary issues, such as the reflection of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the World TradeCentre in New York on the British scene, haunted by the ghost of fundamentalism since theattacks in 2004 (in Saturday). But the anxiety over contemporary history is often transferred onto a

re-reading of past history which reveals not only its discontinuity and disruption, but also the uttercomplexity of the stories that are spun around it. So Atonement (2001; see the recent movie by JoeWright) tackles the subject of pre-war England and of the subsequent conflict by focusing on afamily history: class conflicts are pitted against a wide historical canvas and individuals areconfronted with the need to find out the truth about their past and the story of those who surroundthem. Like many fellow novelists, McEwan adopts a thoroughly meta-literary perspective (thenarrator, Briony Tallis, is a writer) and opens up to intertextual perspectives to reinforce theimplications of an unstable balance between fact (in history, in personal or collective memory) andfiction, which look inevitably inextricable.


7/7

7

contemporary_british_fiction.pdf

Documents