Contemporary Crisis Fictions

Affect and Ethics in the Modern British Novel

E. Horton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137350190
• eBook ISBN: 9781137350206
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire européenne

This book offers a significant statement about the contemporary British novel in relation to three authors: Graham Swift, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. All writing at the forefront of a generation, these authors sought to resuscitate the novel's ethico-political credentials, at a time which did not seem conducive to such a project.

1

Contemporary Crisis Fiction: Constructing a New Genre

What then is contemporary crisis fiction? What are its generic components? In this chapter, I endeavour to answer these questions by taking a closer look at the forms and stylistic features of these writings, instanced in particular in their use of first person unreliable narrators and crisis scenarios, as well as the subversive appropriation of popular genres and intertexts, temporal digressions and fragmentation, memorial retrospection, and confessional disclosure.

Before going on to this, however, it is worth recognising one potential shortfall of this project. Thus, if my concern, as I’ve argued, is to reject a reductive textualist reading of these works and to appreciate each author’s particular craft and vision, then isn’t genre the wrong way to go about this? Doesn’t it merely reflect an idea of ‘tried and tested’ conventions? And isn’t it rather restrictive itself as regards the reading process? Both of these criticisms have indeed often been aimed at genre and if accepted would surely compromise this reading.¹

In fact, in an era of post-structuralism by definition resistant to classification, genre has become the well-referenced demon within the critical closet, directly juxtaposed to deconstruction’s negative textualist practice. Thus, as Jacques Derrida argues, ‘As soon as the word “genre” is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind: “Do,” “Do not” says “genre,” the figure, the voice, or the law of genre’ (Derrida, 1980, p. 56). In other words, Derrida takes offence at genre’s normative approach to reading, which he sees as insufficient to account for the complex inter-generic nature of the reading process. Likewise, Fredric Jameson comments on how ‘the postmodernist aesthetic of the text or of écriture, of “textual productivity” or schizophrenic writing – all seem rigorously to exclude traditional notions of literary kinds, or of systems of the fine arts, as much by their practice as by their theory’ (Jameson, 1983, p. 92). In this way, a focus on genre is seen by deconstruction as misconceived within the contemporary period, inadequate to respond to important shifts in the understanding of reading.

Nevertheless, I want to argue that genre can be of use in appreciating these texts, precisely on account of its specifically social understanding of literature. Thus, if, as Margaret Cohen argues, genre is ‘a social relation, or as Jameson puts it, a social contract’, then looking at genre offers a key insight on these texts’ social importance, one which recognises their larger interaction with a contemporary global context. Cohen writes:

The poetic record of a writer’s and reader’s expectations shaping a text, generic conventions convey crucial information about a text’s position within the literary exchanges of its time and illuminate how it engages its audience. Attention to genre thus counteracts a vulgar sociology of literature that identifies a text’s social dimension on the level of content as well as complicating the Foucauldian equation of a text’s social significance with its participation in non-literary discourses. (Cohen, 1999, p. 17)

In other words, genre offers a crucial tool for overcoming a merely secondary reading of a text’s importance, and for re-imagining its role within a specific social context, offering to mediate ‘between individual works and “the evolution of social life”’ (Cohen, 1999, p. 17).

In arguing thus, Cohen calls not only on Fredric Jameson, but also Pierre Bourdieu, who sees genre not merely as an institution but also ‘a position’: ‘Genre designates the fact that writers share a common set of codes when they respond to the space of possibles, a horizon formed by the literary conventions and constraints binding any writer at a particular state of the field’ (Cohen, 1999, p. 17). In other words, genre, for Bourdieu, works to allocate a text’s specific location within a social field, connecting it to a body of stylistic, thematic, ideological and theoretical concerns, as well as to social norms and expectations. In this way, genre stands in for a text’s multiple and shifting social significance, as it designates overlapping relations within the social field.²

The benefit of this reading for understanding contemporary crisis fiction is that, on the one hand, it becomes possible to distinguish ‘individual examples of the genre’ (Cohen, 1999, p. 18) which, due to their specific location within the field, do not entirely cohere within the established genre codes, and indeed may subvert these in various ways, without dismissing the validity of the genre more largely. In this way, my analysis can recognise individual (or group) instances of rebellion or diversion within the genre, while at the same time paying heed to its broader social and historical significance. Likewise, this also allows me to recognise where each writer himself diverges from a particular style or orientation across time, as he takes up new modes of writing within a later context. This does not suggest the need to qualify the genre’s existence so much as to formulate how it changes or becomes differently relevant within a new era.

On the other hand, equally important for this book is the way Bourdieu’s argument explains how new genres come to be formed, as ‘individual position-takings’ (or subversions of the genre) ‘become recognised by their contemporaries’ as genre-positions; ‘when the very use of them becomes symbolically and/or economically freighted’. In other words, pronouncements (like this one) and debates between academics, readers and writers can be seen to articulate, in a necessary, if temporary, way, the specific terms of a new genre, and to ‘illuminate the relevant distinctions among practices’ (Cohen, 1999, p. 18). As Cohen argues, this understanding offers a new angle on genre within the contemporary, which sees it as provisional but nevertheless useful in framing an approach to the field (Cohen, 1999, p. 18). Again, this allows me to underline these fictions’ specific contemporary importance, recognising how they inform, as well as are informed by, a larger global context.

In what follows, I take a closer look at this historical positioning, outlining various factors which contribute to the formation of the genre, including older styles and influences, changes within the literary field, new modes of writing, and specific strategies of social and ethical engagement. My concern, in principle, is to recognise the construction and revision of the genre within the contemporary context, as well as its place within a larger global literary market. The latter consideration complicates matters somewhat, though without upsetting the final importance of these fictions in challenging New Right and neoliberal modes of thinking.

Influences on the Genre

In relation to earlier literary influences, then, I would begin by arguing that it is important to appreciate both continuity with and divergence from an older generation of British writers, as well as ties to an international literary market. Thus, certainly these writers do reflect certain concerns and narrative devices shared with earlier British authors, including John Fowles, Iris Murdoch, Raymond Williams and Malcolm Bradbury, for example, the last of whom taught both McEwan and Ishiguro at the University of East Anglia, on its MA in Creative Writing programme. For all of these earlier writers a preoccupation with the role of the novel within contemporary society, and an anxiety regarding the representation of subjectivity and memory, is evident throughout their works and carried on by this younger generation in obvious ways. Moreover, this older group shares with the younger a concern to register the disruption of the war on modern society, and to take into account a new experience of uncertainty and contingency which came to define the post-war age, and which also initiated a new view of language and representation. Thus, central to post-war British literature is a refusal of consolation regarding the war which challenged both the stability of life and the terms of representation, and which was carried on in the crisis-bound and self-conscious aspects of contemporary writing.³

Nevertheless, it seems important to stress that these later writers do emerge in a very different social and political context, one determined in many ways not only by Thatcherism, but also by the dissolution of earlier cultural and literary categories tied to nationalism and British imperialism, as well as by the emergence of a global capitalist socio-economic order. As Philip Tew comments, ‘it must be remembered that the world after the mid-1970s is as significantly different from the preceding twenty-five post-war years, as the 1920s of flappers and boom and bust global crisis would have been from the world of Pooter and his proto-Yuppie son, Lupin, essentially a world of the late Victorians’ (Tew, 2007, p. 38). Correspondingly, the orientation of much contemporary British writing, including contemporary crisis fiction, must be seen in light of this new socio-political order, not in opposition to older writers or forms so much as with an awareness of how society and the novel have altered within the global context, presented with a new international agenda.

In fact there are various ways in which these writers diverge from an older generation in order to take up a new global and cosmopolitan social and ethical consciousness. Thus, in opposition to the philosophical idealism and social documentary of this older generation, whose understanding of social responsibility often reflects a specific social and class affiliation, these younger writers instead reflect a shift in social relations following the war wherein the terms of social engagement became less clear-cut, and wherein older class distinctions were complicated by a prominent discourse of social mobility and individualist atomisation. Thus, in contrast to the dissection of speech, dress and manners in the works of Murdoch, Angus Wilson or William Golding, for example, or ‘the working-class world described by David Storey or Alan Sillitoe’ (Louvel et al., 1995, p. 3), these authors explore a very different post-war and post-consensus context, one animated by an awareness of global capitalism and by a concern for the social and political divisions established by neoliberalism. This is true, I would argue, even where the setting of a novel is itself historical, as in Swift’s Ever After, McEwan’s Atonement, or fantastical, as in much of Ishiguro’s work. Repeatedly throughout these novels, the difficulties and the specificities of global life become evident, in this way obliging the reader to understand social concern within a contemporary context. Indeed, Ishiguro further suggests that for the younger generation of British writers in the 1980s, Britain was not ‘an important enough country anymore’ and that their writing, as a consequence, strived to be more ‘international’ (Ishiguro and Kenzaburo, 1991, pp. 119, 121). I would suggest that this is true for all of these writers, even while many of their works are set in Britain.

Moreover, this younger generation differs also in terms of form from its elders. Thus, while the tendency among the older generation is to use a third person narrative voice or focalisation (at least among this latter set of authors – I shall discuss others below), often in connection with free indirect speech/style or stream-of-consciousness, these later writers instead tend to adopt a first person narrative voice, which ties them to a confessional mode of writing (one which became popular across Anglophone male literature in the 1970s and 1980s, also visible in the novels of Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Martin Amis and J. M. Coetzee, for example.) This is both technically and ideologically important. Thus, on the one hand, the shift to a first person confessional has been seen by some critics to intentionally restrict the terms of technical novelty, obliging these writers to limit their technical genius, or at least to direct this in a different way.⁴ This is evident, conceivably, in the conciseness of McEwan’s writing, the everydayness of Swift’s, and understatedness of Ishiguro’s, all of which arguably avoids the more overt virtuosity of modernism, or so it has been argued. I would resist this argument, however, protesting that stylistic concerns remain integral to these fictions: certainly style is expressed in conciseness, everydayness, and understatedness.

One other obvious exception, were I to include him among these writers, would be Amis, whose stylistic exuberance in many ways defines his writing. However, I shall explain why I reject this classification of Amis as a contemporary crisis fiction writer below. Nevertheless, I would concede that this type of writing does suggest a different impetus from earlier fiction, where the emphasis is placed as much on the search for knowledge and ethical understanding, and on the project of reassessment, as it is on exploring consciousness in new and innovative ways. In this sense, disclosure, or in any case, self- and ethical examination, is critical here.

Even so, attention should indeed be given to certain stylistic innovations in these writers, for after all, these writers are renowned for their distinctive narrative voices: Swift in relation to melancholy, maudlin, and often middle-aged male narrators, reduced by unexpected circumstance to crisis and anxiety; McEwan with respect to unease, calamity and paranoia within the narrative voice, and also a deft use of irony and ambiguity to leave the reader uncertain about the authority of the narrator as well as about possibilities for resolution or consolation; and Ishiguro in relation to narrative awkwardness, indirectness and obliquity, as his narrators manipulate established social and cultural discourses to disguise and protect their own self conceptions and to present themselves as respected cultural representatives. In this way these writers carve out distinct stylistic registers, positioning themselves as craftsmen of the contemporary era.

Indeed, it seems possible to argue that attention to this formal component may constitute one significant means of engaging with critical cosmopolitan ethics in this writing, echoing Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s claim in her 2006 study Cosmopolitan Style that cosmopolitan fictions ‘imagine that conditions of national and transnational affiliation depend on narrative patterns of attentiveness, relevance, perception, and recognition’ and that they stylistically ‘assert the often-invisible connections between personal and international experiences’ (Walkowitz, 2006, p. 8). While my analysis here tends to focus instead on new epistemologically and ethically-responsive readings of postmodern truth explored by these writers – such that new attention to discourses of history, science and culture itself is seen to constitute a kind of critical cosmopolitan gesture – nevertheless, it is worth emphasising, in connection with Walkowitz, that central to this project is the way these writers incorporate their distinctive styles to grant narrative unreliability affective purchase.

Thus, if these texts involve the reader in narrative crises they do this not by making unreliability wholly untrustworthy, as in some more satirical or parodic postmodern texts, but instead by endowing it precisely with empathy in relation to the narrator’s crisis experience, in this way again complicating the postmodern vision put forward by the text – making this less cynical and more ethically involved. Thus, despite the deceit, and indeed self-deceit, implicit with these confessional narratives, there remains, at some level, a distinct and cultivated element of pathos. This is what in effect endears the reader to the first person narrator, despite his unreliability, allowing him or her to be understood in terms of an affective struggle with crisis, rather than merely narrative hypocrisy or confusion. Indeed, this element of trustworthiness underpins the search for an alternative social and ethical vision in these narratives, as the narrator seeks out a more critical perspective for initiating a move away from crisis.

Perhaps equally important to this shift in contemporary fiction is the ideological difference between literary generations. Thus, while many (though certainly not all) of the earlier generation would tend to support a liberal humanist ideological outlook, understanding the text in terms of its universal values (often understood via classical philosophy or Christian spiritualism), this latter body of writing, I would argue, is not so easily codified, and though there are undoubtedly liberal humanist inflections in this work, tied to the representation of crisis as a human experience, these novels can also be seen to re-construe liberalism in connection with post-structuralism. Thus, in line with the post-structuralist preoccupation with that which is indeterminate, inconceivable and incomprehensible – that which exists outside the bounds of expression and direct reference – these novels might be said to offer a direct reappraisal of contemporary social and ethical thinking, even while their authors often position themselves as humanists. The novels do this, indeed, not so as to discount morality or ethics, but rather, to the contrary, so as to balance this against an ever-present awareness of the importance of otherness. Thus, these texts reject traditional humanism’s certitude and romance, shared by an earlier generation, instead exploring an idea of ethics outside moral permanency, and with an attention to what is unknown and/or unrepresented. This offers a very different, more linguistically and ideologically attuned, critical standpoint.

Even so, I want to stress, these novelists should not be seen as abandoning, even while questioning, narrative’s importance to ethics, and in this sense they do continue and develop an earlier post-war narrative-ethical vision. This is important as it means reinstating the novel’s traditional significance as a form of social and ethical commentary. Thus, crucial to what these fictions offer is a defence of narrative as inquiry, in such a way as to maintain the central importance of the novel as a mode of ethical thinking. Against the strand of postmodernism that would reject the value of narrative ethics, and which would instead see contemporary writing as a wholly deconstructive project, these writers instead hold on to the integrity of storytelling as an ethical practice, connecting this to the pursuit of recovery from crisis, as well as the exploration of post-crisis community. While narrative inquiry is still, inevitably, unreliable for these narrators, it nevertheless represents a central and indispensable tool for engagement with society, and for coping with the experience of crisis, however provisionally.

In this way, these writers should be distinguished also from another group of earlier British novelists, including, for example, B. S. Johnson, Christine Brook-Rose and J. G. Ballard, who negotiate an extreme radical stance on narrative experiment. Indeed, while these latter writers are in some ways closer to the ideological outlook of contemporary crisis fiction, at least as I read this here, it wo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Contemporary Crisis Fiction: A New Approach to the Writing of Graham Swift, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro
• 1 Contemporary Crisis Fiction: Constructing a New Genre
• 2 Curiosity and Civilisation: Reappraisals of History in the Fiction of Graham Swift
• 3 Reassessing the Two-Culture Debate: Popular Science in the Fiction of Ian McEwan
• 4 Shifting Perspectives and Alternate Landscapes: Culture and Cultural Politics in the Fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro
• Epilogue: A Review of Contemporary Crisis Fiction with an Emphasis on Overlap Between the Works at a Discursive Level
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index