Narrative Desire and Historical Reparations

A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie

Timothy Gauthier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135492151
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book examines and explains the obsession with history in the contemporary British novel. It frames these historical novels as expressions of narrative desire, highlighting the reciprocal relationship between a desire to disclose and to rid ourselves of anxieties elicited by the past. Scrutinizing representative novels from Byatt, McEwan and Rushdie, contemporary fiction is revealed as capable of advocating a viable ethical stance and as a form of authentic commentary. Our anxieties often exist in response to what might be perceived as the oppression or eradication of values, whether this is through the modern repudiation of Victorian principles (Byatt), the Western rethinking of Enlightenment narratives in light of the Holocaust (McEwan), or pluralism threatened by religious fundamentalism (Rushdie). Each of these novelists differentially employs postmodern artifice, sometimes as a way to reject the notion of historical construction, sometimes to advocate for it, but always to bring us closer to what the author believes are significant values and truths, rather than relativism. The representative qualities of these novels serve to highlight themes, concerns, and anxieties present in many of the works of each author and by extension those of their contemporaries.

Chapter One
History, Anxiety, and Narrative Desire

British novelists since Walter Scott have exhibited an interest in history, but this affinity has transformed into a veritable obsession in the fiction of contemporary writers in the last two decades. In fact, a concern with (and distrust of) history and historiographic projects is often hailed as a defining characteristic of postmodernism. And while these writers of “new historical novels,” as Del Ivan Janik labels them, cannot be said to form a movement as such, the propensity of such texts indicates the existence of one or more communal concerns. Nevertheless, there exists a readily identifiable strain of literary production that addresses the circulation of mutual symptoms, beliefs, and anxieties as a response to living in this particular moment in history. Examining three representative novels—A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance, Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs, and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children—this study explores the communal logic and impulse that identifies both reading and constructing narratives as purposeful gestures in coming to terms with our present and future.

This preoccupation with the past can be attributed to a number of different factors, not the least of which is our own ambivalent relationship with the present moment. Pronouncements of “the end of history” or of posthistoire by theorists such as Baudrillard, Jameson, and Fukuyama reflect a sense of desperation. This unknown, shapeless, and fragmented world clearly poses a challenge to a group of writers. The end of the century and, in this case, the millenium, is an obvious and natural time for a re-assessment, a recounting of accomplishments and failures. But fin de siècle and millennial misgivings (what exactly does the future hold, if history no longer exists?) produce, not surprisingly, a good number of works of “apocalyptic fiction.”

Enlightenment concepts of a progressivist history have also shown themselves to be ill-founded, primarily by the violent and traumatic nature of the century through which we have just passed. Whatever dream we may have been fostering—that we were slowly evolving toward some utopian nirvana—was dashed on the rocks of the Nazi concentration camps, the Stalinist gulags, Hiroshima, and many other instances of cultural violence throughout the twentieth century. These events have been traumatic for the Western psyche and concepts of Western civilized self need to be entirely revised. As Zygmunt Bauman observes of these events, nothing “could be more bewildering, shocking and traumatic to the people trained, as we all have been, to see their past as the relentless and exhilarating progression of the ages of reason, enlightenment and emancipatory, liberating revolutions” (Life 193). As such, Bauman contends, we live not only in the “age of camps” but also in the “age of revaluation.”

The stories we have been telling ourselves since the Enlightenment have not only proved sadly inadequate, but events have demonstrated that they could also lead us to totalitarianism, oppression, and possible annihilation. As such, the postmodern age is often characterized, in Lyotard’s well-worn phrase, by its “incredulity towards metanarratives,” those all-encompassing, totalizing, and teleological constructions that imbued our lives with transcendent meaning. The so-called “master narratives” of modernity—the human-ist metanarratives of eventual human emancipation—“have been revealed as the fallible projections of local rather than global interests, of desires rather than ‘knowledge’” (Bennet 262). The process of revaluation thus includes a reassessment of the narratives that give our lives meaning, the abandonment of some and the invention of others that will provide some solid foundation for our lived existence.

The rapidity of change in the twentieth century also created the impression of living entirely unique circumstances that had no precedent in the past. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, for example, we are forced to contend with the acceleration of history. Largely due to the rapidity of technological advancements, modernity is often perceived as “forever accelerating, speeding us faster through rapid mutations, each moment more breathless, more extraordinary than the last” (Luckhurst and Marks 1–2). This aggravates our sense of living in a perpetual present, heightening our ever-present anxiety about the impossibility of grasping, to say nothing of living in, the contemporary. This acceleration of contemporary time leads to a strong sense of discontinuity between the present and the past. The rapidity with which the world appears to be changing makes it increasingly difficult to maintain any sense of connection with history.

In the light of these events, traditional models of history, strongly associated with the rationalist Enlightenment project, prove themselves to be inadequate in describing the post-war world. The challenge has been to find a set of narratives that will allow us to undergo this process of revaluation. Fiction writers perceive their craft as an alternate mode of expression since novels may offer a refracted view of history. Fiction also opens up a number of possibilities unavailable to the monological gaze of the historian. Through such techniques as shifts in narrative voice, play with chronological or linear presentation, the inclusion of different versions of the same event, or the absence of closure, novelists offer a means both to question and to examine the historical past.

This preoccupation with history is particularly prevalent in the British novel of the late twentieth century. Its most recognized writers such as Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt, John Fowles, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift, Barry Unsworth, and Jeanette Winterson have devoted considerable time to investigating Britain’s relationship to its past. A number of determinants, particularly relevant to the British situation, have engendered this renewed focus on and adaptation of the classic historical novel. Perhaps the strongest contributing factor has been a constant and sometimes growing sense of “declinism” in the country. Generally perceived as having relinquished its position as a global and economic power, the country reconsiders regretfully its diminished place in the world. At the same time, the country’s populace must assess the implications of these changes on a private rather than public level. If an individual’s identity is strongly linked to the standing of his or her country in the world community, these changes are likely to cause personal transformation and reassessment. In other words, what exactly does it now mean to be British? As Jim Tomlinson repeatedly points out, the issue of Britain’s purported decline is secondary to the general consensus that such a decline is actually taking place (3, 7). The communal sense of waning significance inevitably has an impact on every strata of British society. Tomlinson argues that since the 1950s Britain has been living with the “culture of decline,” and he sees the 1970s and 1980s as the period of maximum impact of the notions of declinism. This lead to what he terms a “panic” in British society, giving rise to much contemplation and debate about the present and future role of Britain on the world stage. Changes in the demographic makeup of the country and the growth of its multicultural population have also put in question the traditional notion of homogeneous Britishness. The fact that some of the most significant fiction to emerge recently from England is written by “post-colonial” novelists such as Rushdie, Timothy Mo, and Caryl Phillips reveals the extent to which British society is evolving into something fundamentally different from typical notions of Britishness. British identity has also been compromised and altered by its evolving relationship with, and inclusion in, the larger European community. The development of the EEC and, on a smaller scale, the construction of the Channel Tunnel, have eroded the insularity and ethnocentricity that have historically been hallmarks of the British character.

This recent emphasis on the past cannot be attributed to any single factor but rather to an interplay of those previously mentioned. For example, Del Ivan Janik concedes that it “would be difficult to confidently assign historical or literary-historical causes for the striking resurgence and refashioning of historical fiction that these writers’ works represent” (186). But the recent upsurge in “new historical fiction” certainly reflects a communal desire for some sort of historical stability in an unstable age. For while Britain is not the first empire in history to see its powers wane, it is the first to do so in a modern context. That no precedent exists for this situation is only likely to induce further anxiety. After all, what guarantee is there that this is not the beginning of a process that will eventually see Britain disappear entirely? The death of Empire may signal the eventual death of Britain. As such, it is imperative for Britain to formulate narratives that explain her place in the historical continuum. While some of these narratives express nostalgia and a yearning for the stability of the past, a number strive to discover a way to maintain contact with the country’s glorious past and propel it into the future. If this anxiety affects society at large it will be reflected in the art that emerges in this period. Thus, not surprisingly, recent fiction focuses on relationships with the past, both public and private. As representatives of a larger communal group, writers of fiction express, illuminate, and examine the various anxieties we experience in our relationship with the past. Narratives permit a temporary reliving of the past and a reviewing of the paths taken on the road to the present. And while we can investigate the past for its own sake, historical narratives, both fictional and documentary, are often dictated by the concerns and needs of the present.

Apart from relieving some of the anxieties elicited by this troublesome period of history, a number of other elements may compel a writer to reexamine the past. First, disappointment with the present often leads to nostalgia or a yearning for a past that was fuller, more stable, and less uncertain. Fictional narratives allow for the direct juxtaposition of past and present, to the detriment of one or the other, as in Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman or Byatt’s Possession. Second, anxiety is also produced by a feeling that we may have taken a wrong turn somewhere, or that alternate paths might have been chosen. A return to the past allows us to uncover potential alternatives that have suffered the erasure of time and to contemplate whether the right path was indeed taken. Here, voices that have been silenced by the dominant ideology, the victors, are given a chance to speak. Feminist novels such as Winterson’s The Passion or postcolonial works such as Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children often fall into this category. Third, a sense of lack of control over one’s life and the absence of a true sense of freedom can lead individuals to take an active role by constructing narratives that allow them to exercise some mastery over their lives. In novels like Swift’s Water-land or Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs the narrator/protagonist’s anxieties often reflect those of the novelist.

Finally and paradoxically, a growing distrust of historical narratives leads to the re-examination of “history” itself. The recognition of history as a construct, not as a reality simply waiting to be transparently communicated in language, has lead to a greater focus on the role of narrativization. The question is not whether an event occurred, but what it means and how we make it mean. Amy Elias sees postmodernism as

characterized by an obsession with history and a desperate desire for the comforting self-awareness that is supposed to come from historical knowledge. But because of its philosophical and social underpinnings, postmodern art also projects skepticism and irony about the possibilities for true historical knowledge and suspicion of any social or historical narrative that purports to make sense of a chaotic world. (xvii)

This interplay between desire for, and skepticism of, history will be a focal point in this examination of some British contemporary novels. The extent to which various texts exhibit these contradictory impulses suggests that despite what we know about the provisionality and contingent nature of any historiographic reconstruction, there still exists a modicum of faith in the power of narrative to communicate some truth about the past. For example, incredulity towards the grand narratives does not eliminate our desire to construct patterns and systems of signification. In fact, one might stipulate that it is precisely the loss of these metanarratives that creates the greater need for what Lyotard calls petits récits. Since we no longer possess a system whereby meaning might be immediately conferred upon an event, the creation of the “little narratives” becomes our only source for such signification.

Tensions also arise in postmodern texts due to irresolvable paradoxes inherent in the writing process. Contemporary writers exhibit a simultaneous desire for and suspicion of emplotment, the construction of a unified and totalizing narrative. And these novelists often demonstrate at least a working knowledge of postmodern and poststructuralist theory, which then exercises a direct influence on the kind of fiction they produce. Writers like Martin Amis, Peter Ackroyd and Rushdie import criticism and theory directly into their novels, while others, like Byatt and David Lodge, situate their fictions literally in academic settings. Mark Currie labels these works “theoretical fiction,” for while they are self-reflexive, they also demonstrate the novelist’s insight into the various ways their texts may be read and deconstructed. This theoretical knowledge ultimately leads to self-consciousness which, in turn, produces self-referentiality.

These novelists announce, in a number of ways, their awareness of the impossibility of truly capturing the past and of the provisionality of any historical construction. The metafictional aspects of these texts declare their representationality, their blatant constructedness, and their foregrounding of textuality through various literary techniques that highlight the conditional representation of the past. Novels often include a polyphony of voices that engage in competing narratives. Thus, we are presented different versions of the same event. History is replaced by “histories.” The arbitrariness of any historical reconstruction is also revealed in either the absence of closure or a variety of alternative endings. Finally, these texts often contain a “narratee” or surrogate reader who openly comments on the narration. This character may criticize the narrator’s particular reconstruction of events but also serves to alert the reader to the novelist’s awareness of the arbitrariness of the whole enterprise. The metafictional aspects of these texts reveal the contemporary writer’s ambivalent relationship with storytelling. As readers, we are often left to determine for ourselves whether a particular writer is lauding or undermining the power of narrative. In these circumstances, the act of poetic imagination is revealed as an attempt to construct, not discover, the truth of the past. Nevertheless, all of this highlights the degree to which, despite our postmodern knowing vantage point, we can never entirely do away with narrative.

In Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks examines our desire for and of narrative. His concept of “narrative desire” helps to explain our compulsion to instill order by imposing some pattern on the chaos of history. Plot assuages our need to give things meaning and aids in the soothing of these various anxieties. Brooks suggests that the impulses that propel writing and reading forward are the same since they are actions committed in our drive for meaning. Both actions implicitly communicate some progress toward meaning and their very structuration postulates some ordering of experience into a comprehensible and knowable form. The shaping qualities of plot, he notes, give meaning where none may have existed before. Narrative is thus a product of, and a consequent attempt to quench, our desire to know. Brooks also argues that the loss of a “sacred masterplot” in the nineteenth century leads to “narrative anxiety” and the creation of alternative plots that might fill this void. This absence of a communal narrative explains the nineteenth century’s “obsession with questions of origin, evolution, progress, genealogy, its foregrounding of the historical narrative as par excellence the necessary mode of explanation and understanding” (6–7). But have these obsessions really changed? If we follow Lyotard’s line that the postmodern period is characterized by an incredulity to metanarratives, then one might explain the recent fixation on history in literature as a product of this same anxiety. And while the nature of the anxiety may have changed, some recourse emerges to the same palliatives.

The reading of these novels concerned with history furthermore reflects our desire for meaning and ends. While all of these authors might be said to have a “passion for and of meaning,” to paraphrase Barthes, these texts construct this passion through strongly differing impulses, which determine their various approaches to narrative. Hayden White postulates that the historian adopts a mode of emplotment (romance, comedy, tragedy, satire) and that this further dictates both the mode of explanation and the mode of ideological implication employed by the author. In other words, the choice of plot-structure is highly revealing of the historian’s own relationship to history and the impulses for tackling the past in a particular manner. The same can certainly be said of the novelist who manifests an interest in the historical past. Brooks and White demonstrate a concern for the constructedness of narrative and focus on the manner in which meaning is fabricated through the sequencing of events in a narrative line. The emplotment reveals as much about the subject as it does about the object. Brooks points out that fictional narratives almost always tell us the manner in which they are meant to be read, while White stipulates that the form of both the novel and the historical narrative follows a shaping or containing principle that limits the number of possible interpretations of a set of events.

If we accept the writer of fiction as a particular kind of historian, then we can abstract White’s notion of emplotment to the novels under consideration. The choice of plot reflects both the novelist’s attitudes toward history and indicates what he or she wishes to tell about the past. White suggests:

Considered as potential elements of a story, historical events are value-neutral. Whether they find their place finally in a story that is tragic, comic, romantic, or ironic… depends upon the historian’s decision to configure them according to the imperatives of one plot structure or mythos rather than another. (Tropics 84)

Those imperatives remain the province of the author who determines what kind of story he or she intends to tell about the past. These various fictional permutations of the past indicate the extent to which there is a collective self-conscious awareness of “histories” rather than History. Such variability raises the question as to what desire is being satisfied, or at least momentarily satiated, in the construction of the author’s particular choice of narrative? As White suggests, every historical reconstruction is a “metahistory”—a series of commitments on a number of levels (aesthetic, cognitive, ethical)—which illustrates the dynamics of desire in the writer’s own particular relationship to the past (Tropics 71).

While White’s theory of emplotment may encounter resistance when addressing the actual past, it does help us understand the kinds of stories writers of fiction produce...