Contemporary British Fiction

Nick Bentley

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781137009678
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350309029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literatur Allgemein

This essential guide provides a comprehensive survey of the most important debates in the criticism and research of contemporary British fiction. Nick Bentley analyses the criticism surrounding a range of British novelists including Monica Ali, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Alan Hollinghurst, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Sarah Waters and Jeanette Winterson. Exploring experiments with literary form, this authoritative book considers cutting-edge concerns relating to the neo-historical novel, the relationship between literature and science, literary geographies, and trauma narratives.

Engaging with key literary theories, and identifying present trends and future directions in the literary criticism of contemporary British fiction, this is an invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of English literature, teachers, researchers and scholars.

CHAPTER ONE

Studying Form: Realism, Modernism, Postmodernism and After

Standing at the crossroads: realism and modernism

Several critical works concerned with identifying the predominant forms and modes taken in British fiction in the contemporary period offer as a starting point David Lodge’s famous image of the novelist standing at a formal crossroads at the end of the 1960s.¹ According to Lodge, in one direction lay a continued engagement with realism as the true path of English (British) fiction. In the other direction was more and more innovative experimentation. The binary opposition of this image indicates some of the heated debates about the future of the novel in the preceding decades, which tended to centre on the response by postwar novelists to the modernists of the previous generation. Whereas writers such as William Cooper, Kingsley Amis, John Wain and, to a certain extent, the Angry Young Men championed a return to realism in the 1950s and early 1960s, a new generation of experimental writers such as Christine Brooke-Rose, B.S. Johnson, Eva Figes and John Berger continued the experimental exploration of the modernists, often being influenced by literature outside of Britain such as the Beat generation writers in the United States and the nouveau roman in France. This dichotomy of writers was, of course, never as straightforward as it appeared; in which camp, for example, would you place Muriel Spark, William Golding or Iris Murdoch? Doris Lessing, it appeared, crossed the bar in her transition from what she championed as the great realist novels to her experimentation with inner space fiction in the 1960s and 1970s – her key work The Golden Notebook (1962) acting as the turning point in this trajectory. Nevertheless the realist-modernist opposition produced a powerful framework that had influence on the way novelists approached their fiction. As Andrzej Gasiorek notes: ‘Whereas the modernists perceived themselves as an avant-garde, and frequently made a good deal of literary capital out of such self-promotion, post-war writers saw themselves as fighting a rearguard action to preserve a form threatened with extinction’.²

This opposition of realism to modernism (or experimentalism) was challenged on two main counts after Lodge’s intervention in 1970. Firstly, the scope of the novel in English broadened with the increased visibility and success of fiction from parts of the world outside the British Isles. There has, of course, always been an influence on the British novel from sources outside of the UK, but there is a new embracing of this work in the latter third of the twentieth century. Indeed the phrase ‘the novel in English’ as opposed to the ‘English novel’ begins to carry more significance in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s to indicate the importance of writers from Britain’s old colonial nations. Writers from these areas, many of whom had been subject to an educational system that privileged English literature, began to ‘write back’ to the colonial centre. BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) novelists such as George Lamming, V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Salman Rushdie and Sam Selvon – as well as white writers from the old colonies (for example, J.M. Coetzee, Janet Frame and Doris Lessing) – all infused what could be seen as the parochial 1950s and 1960s novel of the British Isles with new subject matter, style and formal techniques. As Richard Bradford notes in a return to David Lodge’s image of the crossroads:

To decode Lodge’s metaphor: the radicalism of modernism had by 1971 become an accoutrement, a decorative feature of the mainstream, realist novel. Twenty years later Lodge reframed the image as a question, ‘The Novelist Today: Still at the Crossroads’ (in New Writing, ed. M. Bradbury and J. Cooke, British Council, 1992), and conceded that the situation of the novelist in 1992 bore less resemblance to a figure standing at a junction than a person in an ‘aesthetic supermarket’ facing an unprecedented abundance of styles, techniques and scenarios; the novelist/customer could now select and combine these in any way they wished. What had once been the stark contrast – often antagonistic conflict – between realism and modernism had been sidelined; hybridity now occupied the centre ground.³

The second area that disrupts Lodge’s initial crossroads metaphor is the popularity of the concept of postmodernism, which in the hands of certain writers seemed to both challenge some of the underlying assumptions in modernism, and to eschew conventional realist approaches. Before discussing the importance of postmodernism further, however, it is important to state that realism as a form does not disappear. Many writers who came to prominence during the period in which there was a so-called ‘return to realism’ continued to produce work and have successful careers, although often under the radar of academic and popular literary criticism which was enthralled by the new ‘posts’ (postcolonialism, postmodernism, poststructuralism) – writers such as Kingsley Amis, Alan Sillitoe and David Storey, and later exponents of literary realism such as Margaret Drabble, Hanif Kureishi and Livi Michael.

Postmodernism (and post-postmodernism)

One of the most important formal movements of the latter half of the twentieth century is postmodernism, whose effects on British fiction are still being felt, even if for most critics the period during which this mode was pre-eminent is now over. As ever periodization is problematic, but the dates of a 2011 retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum offer a workable framework: they titled their exhibition ‘Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990’. It could be argued that the 1990s represents a ‘popular postmodernism’ in which a plethora of popular fiction, TV programmes and films adopted techniques associated with this term, for example, a number of Hollywood films embraced postmodernist techniques and plotlines such as The Truman Show, The Matrix, Pleasantville, Twelve Monkeys, Minority Report, Total Recall, Memento, Donny Darko, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. It must be stressed that postmodernism was never a movement per se and in fact there is little evidence that writers themselves embraced the term (except on occasions when it suited them, for example for Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie). However, it became an exciting and potentially subversive literary form influenced by poststructuralist theory (predominantly from France) and the blurring of the established categories of writing, for example, in the New Journalism coming from America in the 1960s and ‘70s. Writers such as Jean-François Lyotard embraced postmodernism’s power to destabilize reliance on Enlightenment thinking and consequently to interrogate the ‘grand narratives’ on which power and influence had hung for many years.⁴ Jacques Derrida’s form of deconstruction and Michel Foucault’s focus on the ideological assumptions of discourse added to this heady mix. Other theorists, while noting the effects of postmodernism, were more sceptical of its potential. Jean Baudrillard’s critical exploration of the impact of mediatized images on cultural paradigms offered a provocative and yet politically ambivalent set of observations. The American critic Fredric Jameson was more openly critical of postmodernism as the form that late capitalism deserved.⁵ Many British novelists embraced some of the potentially liberating energies of postmodernism, such as Angela Carter, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Jeanette Winterson, while some employed postmodern techniques but were more suspicious of accepting the consequences of a market-driven culture, for example Martin Amis, J.G. Ballard, Will Self and Iain Sinclair.

But how do we know postmodernism in fiction when we see it? Many critics have tried to offer up typologies of the oppositions between modernism and postmodernism and indeed between postmodernism and realism. Ihab Hassan makes an early attempt to provide a working list of narrative techniques in this context that differentiated between modernism and postmodernism. He produces a two-column list of oppositional techniques and moods: under modernism he lists characteristics such as Purpose, Design, Hierarchy, Root/ Depth, Metaphysics, Determinacy; while under postmodernism he has Play, Chance, Anarchy, Rhizome/Surface, Irony and Indeterminacy.⁶

Among the most prominent features of the postmodern novel is its desire to foreground the very nature of fiction, and its relationship with other discursive forms such as biography, history or political tract. Brian McHale sees this shift from modernist to postmodernist fiction as a move from the epistemological to the ontological:

I will formulate […] a general thesis about modernist fiction: the dominant of modernist fiction is epistemological. That is, modernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions such as […]: ‘How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?’ Other typical modernist questions might be added: What is there to be known?; Who knows it?; How do they know it, and with what degree of certainty?; How is knowledge transmitted from one knower to another, and with what degree of reliability?; How does the object of knowledge change as it passes from knower to knower?; What are the limits of the knowable? And so on.

[…This] brings me to a second general thesis, this time about postmodernist fiction: the dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological. That is, postmodernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions like […]: ‘Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?’ Other typical postmodernist questions bear either on the ontology of the literary text itself or on the ontology of the world which it projects, for instance: What is a world?; What kinds of world are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ?; What happens when different kinds of world are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated?; What is the mode of existence of a text, and what is the mode of existence of the world (or worlds) it projects?; How is a projected world structured? And so on.⁷

McHale’s binary model is perhaps overly simplified; nevertheless, it acts as a useful working tool to identify the way in which postmodern texts foreground the ontological status of this thing we call fiction. Many postmodern narratives disrupt the relationship between the reader and the constructed writer of the text by using metafictional devices, which involve an interrogation of the frames upon which the fiction rests. The postmodern tendency to deploy metafiction thus acts as a literary technique to destabilize the worlds presented in novels in order to prompt a questioning of the very nature of the relationship between what is perceived as reality and the representation of reality in aesthetic form. For postmodernism, metafiction is not simply a playful technique but one that encourages us to ask philosophical questions about the nature of the reality in which text, author and reader reside. As Patricia Waugh notes:

Metafictional deconstruction has not only provided novelists and their readers with a better understanding of the fundamental structures of narrative; it has also offered extremely accurate models for understanding the contemporary experience of the world as a construction, an artifice, a web of interdependent semiotic systems.⁸

For Linda Hutcheon, one of the key features of postmodernism is its interrogation of literatures of the past combined with a destabilizing metafiction. Hutcheon adopts the term ‘historiographic metafiction’ to indicate a certain important strain within postmodern literary practice citing British writers such as John Fowles, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie and Jeanette Winterson.

The postmodern, then, effects two simultaneous moves. It reinstalls historical contexts as significant and even determining, but in doing so, it problematizes the entire notion of historical knowledge […] Postmodern works […] contest art’s right to claim to inscribe timeless universal val...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Studying Form: Realism, Moder nism, Postmoder nism and After
• Chapter Two: Politics and Contemporar y Fiction
• Chapter Three: Class
• Chapter Four: Black and Asian British Fiction
• Chapter Five: Gender and Sexuality
• Chapter Six: Contemporar y Historical Fiction
• Chapter Seven: Geographic Space and National Identity
• Chapter Eight: Literature and Science (Fiction)
• Chapter Nine: Contemporar y Trauma Nar ratives
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index