Post-War British Literature and the "End of Empire"

Matthew Whittle

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781137540140
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria inglesa

Post-War British Literature and the End of Empire examines novels by white British writers who emerged during the immediate post-war decades including Anthony Burgess, Graham Greene, William Golding, Alan Sillitoe and Colin MacInnes, among others and contends that they not only depict decolonization within its global context but often propose a solution to Britain's imperial decline through cultural renewal. This book re-conceives twentieth-century British literature from the mid-century period to make central the processes of decolonization and mass immigration.

© The Author(s) 2016

Matthew WhittlePost-War British Literature and the "End of Empire"10.1057/978-1-137-54014-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Matthew Whittle¹

(1)

University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

End Abstract

It was labelled ‘the bonfire of papers at the end of Empire’ (Cobain 2013a, n.p.) when the full extent of Operation Legacy was revealed. As the British Colonial Service and MI5 oversaw the process of decolonization between the late 1940s and early 1960s, Operation Legacy—a codename freighted with anxiety about how Britain’s colonial history would be perceived by future generations—ordered the systematic purging of documents ‘that might embarrass Her Majesty’s government’ (n.p.). Large bonfires were constructed throughout the Empire with instructions that documents be ‘reduced to ash and the ashes broken up’ (n.p.) prior to the transfer of power. ‘While thousands of files were returned to London during the process of decolonization’, the report continued, ‘it is now clear that countless numbers of documents were destroyed’ (n.p.). In Malaysia (formerly Malaya), which gained independence in 1957, this involved the ‘wholesale destruction’ of Colonial Office files, while in Belize officials were assisted in the destruction of ‘sensitive files’ by ‘the Royal Navy and several gallons of petrol’ (n.p.). The involvement of the Navy points to the use of a second practice that was considered less conspicuous than the building of bonfires, namely the mass dumping of documents at sea. Instructions were given that files be ‘packed in weighted crates and dumped in very deep and current-free water at maximum practicable distance from the coast’ (n.p.). For the Colonial Office, it seems, Operation Legacy amounted to the erasure of much of Britain’s colonial history.

The papers that survived the purge were stored behind barbed wire fences in a secret archive in Buckinghamshire, hidden from inquisitive historians or journalists. The Foreign Office was only forced to declare their existence in 2013 during a court case brought against the UK Government by more than five thousand Kenyan survivors of torture during the so-called Mau Mau insurgency of the 1950s. ¹ The revelations surrounding Operation Legacy encapsulate one of the two positions that have come to characterize British responses to colonial history, namely a muted sense of shame and embarrassment—the second position being a kind of triumphalism regarding the railways and the rule of law. Neither of these two extremes serves to progress debates very far. Instead, they have helped entrench the view that those from the erstwhile imperial centre have been conspicuously silent on the history of colonial expansion, or else have looked back with a nostalgic sigh. A sustained reading of texts produced at the moment of extensive post-war decolonization reveals a much more complex, contradictory, and intriguing response. A range of novels by writers with direct experience of the colonies through colonial service or settlement, such as Anthony Burgess, Alan Sillitoe, Graham Greene, Gerald Hanley, David Caute, and Colin MacInnes, do not articulate an inability to comprehend the consequences of decolonization, or a resignation to national decline. Rather, these writers invest in a revised post-colonial national solidarity, committing to a new conception of Britishness that does not rely on static ideas about national or racial superiority. As such, British literature of the 1950s and early 1960s is in many ways a literature of self-conscious transition, where writers sought to address the political and racial tensions that would eventually give rise to British multiculturalism and fully articulated postcolonial perspectives on the Empire. The uneven and dynamic process of decolonization informs an early rejection of Britain’s imperial identity and an awareness of the shift in Britain’s role throughout the globe alongside America and formerly colonized nation-states.

While literature cannot be read in the same way as the documents destroyed during Operation Legacy, novels that respond to decolonization offer an ambivalent engagement with the ideological underpinnings of colonialism. Works by Burgess, Sillitoe, and Hanley for instance provide an ‘unofficial’, subjective, and often critical perspective from those who witnessed the process of decolonization first-hand. Colonial officers and Army personnel began to produce fiction based on their own colonial encounters at a time when innumerable official documents relating to British colonial rule were being transported to a covert archive, sunk to the bottom of the ocean, or providing fuel for bonfires. Some, such as Sillitoe and Hanley, published their reflections on the ‘end of Empire’ in Asia and Africa respectively after leaving the Army, and so were beyond the reach of those responsible for managing Britain’s colonial legacy. In other cases, the practice of writing novels of decolonization was looked on unfavourably within the Colonial Service. John Burgess Wilson, an aspiring writer and composer from Manchester, was ordered by his superiors to use a pseudonym under which to publish novels based on his time as an Education Officer. Of the list of possibilities sent to his editor at Heinemann, ‘Anthony Burgess’ was chosen as the most preferable, and The Malayan Trilogy (1956–1959) would launch the career of one of Britain’s most prolific twentieth-century writers. ²

Due to the fact that direct experience of decolonization was afforded to many Britons through either National Service or employment in the Colonial Service, the demographic of writers who emerged on the post-war literary scene with responses to imperial decline was predominantly male. This is not to infer that female writers of the period did not concern themselves with imperial matters. Phyllis Lassner’s Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire makes the case for authors such as Elspeth Huxley, Muriel Spark, and Olivia Manning, amongst others, ‘unsettl[ing] the imaginative and political power that is still awarded to colonialism today’ (2004, p. 2). More recently, John McLeod has explored the ‘critical vista of empire’ (2016, p. 87) that is opened up in Manning’s Levant Trilogy (1977–1980). McLeod maintains that, while it is ‘marred by the disingenuous representation of colonized peoples that […] marks a wholesale failure to understand or admit native cultural particularities’ (p. 89), The Levant Trilogy nevertheless offers an important example of ‘the limited yet vital ways in which a critical representation of empire was furthered—despite mid-century forgetfulness concerning empire’s centrality to British history—primarily through the unflattering characterization of the British overseas’ (p. 90). The literature of Manning, Huxley, and Spark can thus be read as contributing to a broader understanding of mid-century British culture that is all too often branded as parochial and detached from the realities of imperial decline.

The key concerns of this study however—namely the relationship between the Second World War and decolonization, anxieties regarding Americanization, and the impact of mass immigration—are articulated most urgently by writers whose experience of the Empire was through professional positions in the Army and Colonial Service during the 1950s and early 1960s, or who returned to Britain to settle precisely at this moment of historical transition. The literature of Burgess, whose early work addresses decolonization, Americanization, and mass immigration, is influenced by both these positions. Burgess’s output between his debut novel—the first instalment of The Malayan Trilogy in 1956—and A Clockwork Orange in 1962 thus offers a productive means of orientation around which to situate a diverse range of contemporaneous texts. Burgess’s sensibilities during this short period of time, as well as those of Sillitoe, MacInnes, and Caute, are shaped by movement between Britain and the colonies during the break-up of the Empire. This sense of movement heightens an appreciation of the myths and assumptions lying beneath established notions of British superiority, as well as an investment in rethinking the conditions upon which post-war British society should rest.

Reading the literature of writers who were colonial servants, Army personnel, and settlers broadens our understanding of the impact of colonialism on British culture and society. Typically, the immediate post-war decades have been defined by literary groupings, the most prominent being the Angry Young Men, the Movement and the Windrush generation. This book involves an examination of writers not commonly read together, many of whom are regarded as marginal to literary studies of the 1950s and early 1960s because of their place outside of these established literary groups. This body of literature, however, is not peripheral to the trajectory of twentieth-century culture but instead disconcerts existing narratives, forcing us to think differently about the relationship between post-war British literature and the fields of postcolonial, modernist, and postmodernist literary studies.

Between the Cracks: Postcolonialism, Modernism, Postmodernism

The period of British literary history that I concentrate on in this book has often been oversimplified, in part because of the categorization of cultural creativity in relation to expedient paradigms. As Peter J. Kalliney has recently acknowledged, literature of the mid-century and immediate post-war decades ‘has proved awkward for literary historians’ because it falls ‘between the cracks of modernist studies, postcolonial theory and even postmodernism’ (2013, p. 117). These paradigms offer a highly productive means of understanding the fissures and broad cultural movements of literary and historical eras. At the same time, however, they can prompt the use of generalizations that rely on Manichean definitions. In terms of the period explored here, the prevailing impression is that British literature of the immediate post-war decades was antithetical to the internationalist and radical challenges of anti-colonial thought and was biased towards anti-modernism and parochialism. Positioning my analysis of post-war British literature in relation to the literary-critical discourses of postcolonialism, modernism, and postmodernism, I maintain that a number of white British writers not only saw decolonization within its global context, but proposed a solution to Britain’s imperial decline through cultural renewal.

My evaluation of texts that respond to decolonization intervenes into postcolonial debates that tend to erase the subjectivity of the colonizer. As far back as 1990, in an issue of Critical Quarterly, both David Trotter and Laura Chrisman recognized the problems of this erasure within postcolonial debates. Trotter remarks that colonialism has predominantly been understood as ‘an encounter between a colonizing machine or system, on one hand, and a colonized subject, on the other. The colonizing subject has been elided, his or her subjectivity wished away’ (1990, p. 3). This elision has, as Chrisman maintains, resulted in the imperial power remaining, ‘paradoxically, frozen in power and repressed, an absent “centre”, a hidden referent’ (1990, p. 38). One method of disrupting these binaries, and attending further to what Edward Said termed the ‘overlapping territories’ and ‘intertwined histories’ of the colonizer and the colonized (1993, p. 72), is to examine the impact of colonialism on literature produced by those from within the imperial centre. Where an engagement with the tangled histories of the colonizer and the colonized exists, it has tended to concentrate on the period of high imperialism during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, with Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, and (perhaps above all) Joseph Conrad being the most prominent. ³ Yet, it is necessary to extend this focus to the moment of imperial decline and to examine how British literature responded to the post-war era of extensive decolonization, which saw an irrevocable and dramatic change to Britain’s place within the global order.

This is not to somehow ‘restore the balance’ and undermine postcolonial analyses of non-European writers. Critics working in the field of postcolonial studies have rightly challenged the notion that a canon of writers who are white, European, and male can set the mould of a universal subjectivity, against which all other perspectives must be valued as the ‘Other’. Anti- and postcolonial perspectives, moreover, have done much to foreground the formative role of imperialism in the development of European culture and society and the impact of imperialism upon colonized cultures and societies. As both Trotter and Chrisman suggest, however, focusing solely on textual responses to the history of colonialism produced by writers and critics from formerly colonized regions risks reinforcing the cultural, national, and racial binaries that imperialism inaugurated.

My reappraisal of responses to decolonization also undermines narratives of the twentieth century that see the 1950s as a ‘blank space’ between modernism and postmodernism. Rather than evincing what is regarded as the anti-modernist aesthetics of writers such as Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, the texts under consideration here extend the self-reflexive representation of colonialism found in many modernist works. Acknowledging the ambivalent relationship between Anglophone modernist literature and colonialism, Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby have persuasively maintained that ‘colonialist tropes co-existed with the ideas and narratives that questioned, and in time helped to end, formal British imperialism’ (2000b, p. 2). More recently, the collection Modernism and Race (2011) offers a range of revisionist readings of key modernist writers. The influence of postcolonial discourses on the study of these writers allows for contemporary modernist studies, as Len Platt argues, to ‘engage with the historical conditions that produced, in very specific terms, the complex and often contradictory state of race politics as they were play...