The English Novel in History, 1950 to the Present

Professor Steven Connor, Steven Connor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN:
  9780415072311
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134908561
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Steven Connor provides in-depth analyses of the novel and its relationship with its own form, with contemporary culture and with history. He incorporates an extensive and varied range of writers in his discussions such as
* George Orwell
* William Golding
* Angela Carter
* Doris Lessing * Timothy Mo
* Hanif Kureishi
* Marina Warner
* Maggie Gee
Written by a foremost scholar of contemporary culture and theory, The English Novel in History, 1950 to the Present offers not only a survey but also a historical and cultural context to British literature produced in the second half of this century.

1

The Novel in Contemporary History

History and Narrative

The novel has always been a useful resource for history and historians. Typically, the novel promises a view of that fine grain of events and experiences which otherwise tend to shrink to invisibility in the long perspectives of historical explanation. Novels seem to have some of the authority of the eye-witness account, in providing the historian with enactment, particularity and individual testimony. There are good reasons why this should be so, of course; it is hard to think of another kind of evidence which so abundantly and yet so economically concentrates together representations of how the world is, or seems to be, with the shaping force of fantasy or imagination; which balances, in other words, reality and desire. Novels also represent a meeting point between the individual and the general, bridging the isolated subjectivity and the peopled world, and giving an individual dimension to the otherwise abstract or disembodied nature of shared norms and values.

Nevertheless, and despite every delicacy and precaution, it is very hard for social and cultural histories not to reduce novels to a kind of second-order phenomenon, to a reflection of a given or already existing set of historical facts and conditions, whether these be political, economic and social. This book proposes that a different account of the postwar novel is possible; one that sees the novel not just as passively marked with the imprint of history, but also as one of the ways in which history is made, and remade. This is not to reduce history to textuality; though it certainly is to suggest that the processes of writing and reading novels are not fully distinct or finally distinguishable from the forms and processes of conflict, deliberation and evaluation that belong to the social, economic or political realms. Once again, this is not to say, as some have incautiously said, that such social forms and processes are nothing but fiction; it is rather to say that the processes we associate with the making and substantiation of fictional worlds are to be seen at work within the making of the real, historical world.

What of that real, historical world? A sketch of the principal historical developments in British life since the Second World War suggests a complex interrelationship of decline and transformation. In domestic political terms, the development of the Welfare State was followed by its dramatic erosion from the mid-1970s onwards. These were also the years of the definitive stripping away of Empire, and, as effect and cause of this from the 1950sonwards, the loss of British power and influence in the world in political, military and economic terms. Externally, this was accompanied by the growth of a globalised world economy and balance of power, in which Britain has come to play a smaller and smaller role (though it remains one of the richest industrialised nations). Internally, it has had as its direct effect the arrival of considerable numbers of immigrants from different regions of the Empire and the challenge to an undisturbed sense of Englishness and Britishness produced by the resulting plurality of impinging and cooperating cultures and histories. In cultural terms, the years since the Second World War have seen in Britain, as elsewhere in Europe and the USA, a prodigious explosion of cultural forms and technologies, which have fundamentally readjusted the relations between art, culture and society. In the age of information and of the society of the spectacle, dispositions of power have fundamentally shifted. In an economy that has shifted from a dependence upon industrial production to the provision of services and consumer products, a politics once organised largely around bilateral antagonisms, most dramatically that between capital and labour, has given way to much more shifting and complex forms of competition and affiliation. Of greatly increased importance in this period are the relations and distributions of power between different through often overlapping interest groups centred on gender, race, sexuality, age, and so on. Most importantly, the assumption that cultural representations primarily reflected or expressed these relations of power has given way to an intimation of the power of culture itself to construct and transform such relations of power.

These changes both produce and are expressed in a redefinition of attitudes towards history as such in postwar Britain and the Western world. Over the course of the twentieth century, but with accelerating force in the years since 1945, the assurance of the special relationship between the history of Britain and global history has steadily been eroded. Where the history of Britain and the English-speaking peoples had at one time seemed to be identical with the history and development of culture in general, the final splintering of Empire and the redefinitions of world power after the Second World War made that association less than credible. The long, continuous narrative of Britain and the West began to seem narrow, arbitrary, even a bit ramshackle, in the light of all the omissions, glosings and distortions necessary to maintain its coherence. After the Second World War, Britain seemed progressively to lose possession of its own history. Michel Foucault has suggested that the history of man over the last two centuries has had as its aim the creation of a ‘subject of history’ (1972: 3–17). Rather than assuming first of all that there is a homogeneousentity known as ‘man’, to whom certain events happen, Foucault’s work suggests that the narration of history is actually designed to establish such a being. Borrowing Foucault’s terms, we may say that, in the postwar period, Britain came progressively to lose its confident belief that it was the subject of its own history. This eviction from historical self-possession came about in two ways. An increasingly hostile ‘outside’ pressed in upon Englishness, in the ever more aggressive relations of military superpowers and the ever more rampant and uncontrollable dynamisms of a capitalism organised in multinational forms not subject to the control of sovereign states. And then, with the multiplication of alternative forms of belonging and self-definition, the very idea of what Englishness meant also began to come apart on the inside.

To say that postwar Britain has undergone a disturbance of its sense of historical belonging and coherence is to imply also that a certain pressure has been put upon the powers of historical narrative to organise the world. Narrative may be defined in an elementary way as an articulation of temporality with transitivity; all narratives involve the passage of time and the ordering of events with relation to sequence, duration and temporal connection, and all narratives, even the most seemingly impersonal, involve the shifting dispositions of subjects and objects, or entities who do things to others. The creation of Foucault’s ‘subject of history’ depends upon narrative because narrative secures the idea of history as a series of actions performed by and upon agents. The novel contributes significantly to this process because it is one of the most important ways in which the world is made accessible and comprehensible by narrative.

Much energy has been expended over the last twenty years or so in trying to define what narrative is, what its elementary forms of organisation and rules of combination are, and so on. But there are many advantages in also asking what narrative (or the particular form of it we recognise as the novel) does. Such a question is less likely to compel a singular or all-inclusive answer than questions about the nature of narrative. It is also likely to open up a range of uses, effects and values of narrative which may be relegated as accessory or irrelevant by the enquiry into the nature of narrative in itself. Most importantly, it may help to restore narrative to history in a way that does not make it merely the mirror or register of historical events. It may suggest that narrative is historical because it is one of the most important forms of symbolic action, or communicative behaviour, in which human beings indulge. The history of human acts cannot afford to ignore the far-reaching and variegated effects of the act of narrating.

To define narrative not as a special kind of object but as a distinctive form of action does not lead straight to simple answers. Depending on the context, it may plausibly be said that a given narrative might act to persuade, explain, reassure, combine, transform, instruct, liberate, enslave, uplift, excite – in fact, to bring about all of the effects that human beings commonly seek to bring about via other linguistic or communicative means.

Despite this, we can distinguish two contrasting forms of action or effect typically associated with narrative. Firstly, narrative can bring about psychological and cultural enlargement. Narrative can lengthen memory or extend forethought, in the elaboration of the past and extrapolation into possible futures. Narrative can effect an imaginative colonisation of unknown or alien spaces, allowing a fuller sense of habitation and belonging. Connected with these broadly enlarging functions of narrative is its function of consolidation. To extend the self, whether individual or collective, into different sorts of unfamiliar or otherwise unavailable experience may also allow the self to become more apprehensible to itself. The effect of much travel writing, for example, may be to give dimension and definition to national identity precisely by pulling it inside out. Jon Stratton (1990), arguing for the close relationship in the West between travel and writing as such, suggests that writing is a form of consolidating travel, just as travel is a form of writing. In spatial as well as temporal terms, to go to the edge of oneself or one’s habitual contexts may be to solidify as well as to stretch the sense of identity. In the case of historical narrative, this effect of binding consolidation works in a collective as well as an individual way. To narrate a history is often both to imagine collectively and to imagine a collectivity.

Any yet, despite its cohering and consolidating functions, the novel is characteristically produced and consumed under conditions of privacy, and, in most cases, of isolation. In the extreme contemporary conditions that Jean Baudrillard has described as ‘obscenity’, in which ‘all becomes transparence and immediate visibility, when everything is exposed to the harsh and inexorable light of information and communication’ (1988: 21–2), the reading of novels stands as an almost impossible ideal of utopian retreat and privacy. At the same time, however, the novel, as form and commodity, is bound in inextricably to mass culture and communications; arguably, it is with the novel that mass communication begins. As D. A. Miller has suggested, the novel mediates structurally between these two dimensions of the domestic and the economic, the molecular and the molar, the private and the public.

What the form secures is a close imbrication of the individual and social, domestic and institutional, private and public, leisure and work… In reading the novel, one is made to rehearse how to live a problematic – always surrendered, but then again always recovered – privacy. )

(Miller 1988: 83

There is a close relationship between this imbrication of the public and private in the material conditions of the circulation and consumption of novels, and the forms of thematic and ideological binding that have often been claimed for the form. I will suggest in chapter 4 that historical narrative contributes significantly to this mediation of individual and collectivity, of private and public experience. Even where it does not actually fill out, reinforce or draw upon actual shared memories, the novel of history always holds the promise of some possible collective memory.

However, set against those functions of narrative I have been describing as broadly enlarging or consolidatory are a range of functions that are better described as transformative. Included here would be the effects of diversifying, exploring, experimenting, undoing, disorientating, and dehabituating to be found in narrative. As well as enlarging and extending, narrative can also transform, criticise, displace, limit, interrupt. Such effects have not gone unobserved in critical writing on the novel; indeed, discussions of realism have tended to split along a contrast between the habilitating and transformative effects of narrative in the claim that, where realism too comfortably confirms the mutual accommodation of self and society, modernist and postmodernist interruptions of realism productively thwart this reciprocity. Such accounts tend to be insufficiently attentive to the complex and differential effects of narrative, which almost always combines the allegedly narcissistic or regressive consolations of habituation with the allegedly enlarging or subversive effects of transformation. Transformation can work in conservative ways, to bind and create communities of interest; just as the consolidation of certain kinds of community or collective belonging can be, or can lead to, a disruption of forms of power.

It has often been claimed that the novel has a distinctive and significant relation to the forms of modern society. According to Ian Watt, the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century is linked to the secularisation and individualisation of the mercantile middle class; as the ‘new’ story, which follows the unprecedented, unpredictable shape of the individual life, the novel embodies the new philosophical preference for the strenuously self-creating individual subject over inherited systems of value and belief (Watt 1957). More recently, it has been claimed that the principal function of the realist novel in the nineteenth century and beyond has been to effect various kinds of mutual accommodation between atomised individuals and the larger groups and communities in which they participate. For Franco Moretti, for example, the representative form of the novel is the Bildungsroman, the novel of education and development. Such a novel offers the promise of a reciprocal mirroring between the individual and society; in the Bildungsroman, society becomes visible as the enabling field of operations for the individual, and the individual as the actualisation of social possibility. The Bildungsroman is for Moretti nothing less than ‘the “symbolic form” of modernity’ (1987: 5), in its focus upon mobility, change and development, combined with its capacity symbolically to frame and channel the boundless dynamism of the modern.

It may be said, therefore, that the novel is central to modern societies, in that it dramatises the process of integrating self-formation that is important to them. The centrality of the novel principally concerns the powerfully cohering function of narrative. Although in theory and in actual historical fact, there can be forms of social imaginary that are predominantly poetic, modern societies have tended to give a certain privilege to the organising powers of narrative. In one sense, it might be said that the new technologies of reproduction and simulation which have grown up since the Second World War have begun to discourage or discredit the claims of narrative to make sense of the social world. Influentially, Jean-François Lyotard (1984) has suggested that the postmodern condition is one in which the organising power of large or inclusive narratives is greatly diminished. On the other hand, there is clear evidence of something like a return of the explanatory privilege of narrative among social and cultural theorists, for whom the processes of cultural and political life seem to come to life most convincingly as struggles in, over and between narratives. Here is Alan Sinfield, for example:

The stories that require most attention – most assiduous and continuous reworking – are the awkward, unresolved ones. They are what people want to write and read about. When a part of our world view threatens disruption by manifestly failing to cohere with the rest, then we must reorganize and retell its story again and again, trying to get it into shape – back into the old shape if we are conservative-minded, or into anew shape that we can develop and apply if we are more adventurous.

(Sinfield 1989: 37)

The centrality of the novel to the period following the Second World War is due to the dramatic swings in the fortune of narrative itself in this period. Certainly the authoritative narratives of this period – narratives of progress towards a universal humanity, of shared peace and prosperity – have compelled less and less assent. In some writers in Britain and in Europe, this has produced an austere impulse to do without the comforting illusion of narrative progression towards discernible goals, even to dispense with the notion of a feasible or available subject of such a narrative. This may be seen in the abandonment of logical or causal sequence in some of B. S. Johnson’s work, and in the radical assault upon the idea of character to be found in the work of Beckett and others. The growing dissatisfaction with the forms of explanation offered in particular historical narratives produced in some quarters a suspicion of narrative explanation as such. Increasingly, as we will see in chapter 6, the prospect of an imminent and actual end to history, as represented firstly by the horrors of the holocaust and secondly by the threat of nuclear extermination, has produced a suspicion of the narrative of history itself. Nevertheless, narrative has not completely lost its authority, even in a culture that allegedly has come to depend much more upon immediacy and transient intensity than on the articulation of meaning in complex sequence. In fact, if the meanings and values of narrative have diversified in this period, the demand for narrative explanation has by no means diminished and appears in fact to have intensified. The novel participates in this process to the degree that it is a form of imaginary laboratory which can produce not only new narratives but also new readers, forms of reading and reading purposes. The novel in this period has not only turned to different kinds of subject but has also turned inwards to reflect on its own nature; this being both an expression and exemplification of a more widespread concern with the powers and possibilities of narrative.

Addressivity

In recent years the structures and forms of organisation of the novel have been the subject of intense and illuminating enquiry. Narratology has advanced some interesting suggestions about the elementary structures of narrative and the grammar of their combinations, and philosophers have begun to turn their attention to the nature of fictional or narrated worlds (Pavel 1986; Rimmon-Kenan 1989; Riffaterre 1990). Psychoanalytic criticism has explored the role of narrative in building and sustaining identity, and the sexual and affective dynamics of narrative (Brooks 1984); and Marxist and postmodernist theories of narrative have, with differing assumptions and results, investigated the relations between narrative, ideology and power (Jameson 1981; Hutcheon 1988; Lee 1990). There is a tendency in all this work, however, to ignore or underestimate one of the features of narrative that is most apparent in our ordinary experience of it, namely that narratives are events of communication. Stories have purposes as well as structures; they have, so to speak, intentional direction. Stories, in short, are always told to listeners and audiences, whether these be actual, intended, assumed, imagined or desired. This is not to reduce narrative to a form of communication, since it is a condition of narration, as it is of all verbal forms, that successful communication, in the sense of a transmission or making common of an intended meaning, can never be guaranteed. I prefer, therefore, to speak of the addressive nature and purposes of narration. I derive this term from the idea of the ‘orientation towards the addressee’ which is an important feature of the work of the Soviet philosopher of language Mikhail Bakhtin. Writing as V. N. Voloshinov in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1928), he proposes that, in all forms of utterance,

the word is oriented toward an address...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• 1. The Novel in Contemporary History
• 2. Conditions of England
• 3. Outside in
• 4. Histories
• 5. Origins and Reversions
• 6. Endings and Living on
• References
• Index