Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries 3110374463, 9783110374469

Table of contents :
Editors’ Preface
Contents
0. Introduction
Part I. Systematic Questions
1. The English Novel as a Distinctly Modern Genre
2. The Novel in the Economy, 1900 to the Present
3. Genres: The Novel between Artistic Ambition and Popularity
4. Gender: Performing Politics in Prose? Performativity – Masculinity – Feminism – Queer
5. The Burden of Representation: Reflections on Class, Ethnicity and the Twentieth-Century British Novel
Part II. Close Readings
6. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899/1902)
7. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
8. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924)
9. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
10. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
11. Henry Green, Party Going (1939)
12. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable (1951–1958)
13. Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956)
14. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (1962)
15. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)
16. B. S. Johnson, The Unfortunates (1969)
17. J. G. Farrell, The Empire Trilogy (1970–1978)
18. William Golding, Darkness Visible (1979)
19. Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (1984)
20. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)
21. Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (1989)
22. A. S. Byatt, Possession (1990)
23. Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials (1995–2000)
24. Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000)
25. David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004)
26. China Miéville, Embassytown (2011)
27. Hilary Mantel, The Thomas Cromwell Trilogy (2009–)
28. Tom McCarthy, Satin Island (2015)
Index of Subjects
Index of Names
List of Contributors

Citation preview

Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries



Handbooks of English and American Studies

Edited by
 Martin Middeke, Gabriele Rippl, Hubert Zapf Advisory Board
 Derek Attridge, Elisabeth Bronfen, Ursula K. Heise, Verena Lobsien, Laura Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, Martin Puchner

Volume 5



Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Edited by Christoph Reinfandt



ISBN 978-3-11-037446-9 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-036948-9 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039336-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Satz: fidus Publikations-Service GmbH, Nördlingen Druck und Bindung: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com



Editors’ Preface This De Gruyter handbook series has been designed to offer students and researchers a compact means of orientation in their study of Anglophone literary texts. Each volume – involving a particular historical or theoretical focus – introduces readers to current concepts and methodologies, as well as academic debates by combining theory with text analysis and contextual anchoring. It is this bridging between abstract survey and concrete analysis which is the central aim and defining feature of this series, bringing together general literary history and concrete interpretation, theory and text. At a time when students of English and American literary studies have to deal with an overwhelming amount of highly specialized research literature, as well as cope with the demands of the new BA and MA programs, such a handbook series is indispensable. Nevertheless, this series is not exclusively targeted to the needs of BA and MA students, but also caters to the requirements of scholars who wish to keep up with the current state of various fields within their discipline. Individual volumes in the De Gruyter Handbook series will typically provide: – knowledge of relevant literary periods, genres, and historical developments; – knowledge of representative authors and works of those periods; – knowledge of cultural and historical contexts; – knowledge about the adaptation of literary texts through other media; – knowledge of relevant literary and cultural theories; – examples of how historical and theoretical information weaves fruitfully into interpretations of literary texts. Internationally renowned colleagues have agreed to collaborate on this series and take on the editorship of individual volumes. Thanks to the expertise of the volume editors responsible for the concept and structure of their volumes, as well as for the selection of suitable authors, HEAS not only summarizes the current state of knowledge in the field of Anglophone literary and cultural studies, but also offers new insights and recent research results on the most current topics, thus launching new academic debates. We would like to thank all colleagues collaborating in this project as well as Dr. Ulrike Krauss at De Gruyter without whose unflagging support this series would not have taken off.

DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-202

VI 

 Editors’ Preface

The first volumes include: Gabriele Rippl (ed.): Handbook of Intermediality Hubert Zapf (ed.): Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology Julia Straub (ed.): Handbook of Transatlantic North American Studies Timo Müller (ed.): Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Christoph Reinfandt (ed.) Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and ­Twenty-First Centuries Ralf Haekel (ed.): Handbook of British Romanticism Ralf Schneider and Jane Potter (eds.): Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War Martin Middeke and Monika Pietrzak-Franger (eds.): Handbook of the English Novel, 1830–1900 Ingo Berensmeyer (ed.): Handbook of English Renaissance Literature Sebastian Domsch, Dan Hassler-Forest and Dirk Vanderbeke (eds.): Handbook of Comics and Graphic Narratives Christine Gerhardt (ed.): Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century Barbara Schaff (ed.): Handbook of British Travel Writing Martin Middeke Gabriele Rippl Hubert Zapf June 2017

Contents Christoph Reinfandt 0 Introduction   1

Part I Systematic Questions 1

Christoph Bode The English Novel as a Distinctly Modern Genre 

2

Alissa G. Karl The Novel in the Economy, 1900 to the Present 

3

Christoph Reinfandt Genres: The Novel between Artistic Ambition and Popularity 

4

5

 23

 42

 64

Ingrid Hotz-Davies Gender: Performing Politics in Prose? Performativity – Masculinity – Feminism – Queer   82 Dirk Wiemann The Burden of Representation: Reflections on Class, Ethnicity and the Twentieth-Century British Novel   107

Part II Close Readings 6

Russell West-Pavlov Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899/1902) 

7

Dirk Vanderbeke James Joyce, Ulysses (1922) 

8

Ralf Schneider E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924) 

9

Timo Müller Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927) 

 152

 175

 195

 133

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 Contents

10

Anya Heise-von der Lippe Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932) 

11

Ingo Berensmeyer Henry Green, Party Going (1939) 

12

 213

 232

Dirk Van Hulle Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable (1951– 1958)   252

13

Lars Eckstein Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956) 

14

Alice Ridout Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (1962) 

15

Brooke Lenz John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) 

16

Jens Martin Gurr B. S. Johnson, The Unfortunates (1969) 

17

Astrid Erll J. G. Farrell, The Empire Trilogy (1970–1978) 

18

Christoph Reinfandt William Golding, Darkness Visible (1979) 

 365

19

Miriam Wallraven Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (1984) 

 384

20

Madelena Gonzalez Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988) 

21

Tatjana Pavlov-West Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (1989) 

22

Lena Steveker A. S. Byatt, Possession (1990) 

23

Gerold Sedlmayr Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials (1995–2000) 

 268

 288

 303

 323

 344

 403

 424

 445

 461

Contents 

24

Michael Meyer Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000) 

25

Dirk Wiemann David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004) 

26

Raphael Zähringer China Miéville, Embassytown (2011) 

27

Andrew James Johnston Hilary Mantel, The Thomas Cromwell Trilogy (2009–) 

28

Christoph Reinfandt Tom McCarthy, Satin Island (2015) 

Index of Subjects  Index of Names 

 575  592

List of Contributors 

 603

 481

 498

 518

 555

 536

 IX

Christoph Reinfandt

0 Introduction 1 Why a Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries? The title of this handbook invites a number of pertinent questions: Why ‘English’ and not ‘British’? Why ‘Novel’ and not ‘Fiction’? And finally: Why ‘the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries’ and not only ‘the Twentieth Century’ or, as is rather common in the field, either the first half of the century under the rubric of ‘modernism’ or the second half of the century under the rubrics of ‘postmodernism’ and ‘contemporary’? The first two questions can be answered together: ‘The English Novel’ is taken to be a distinct discursive formation which transcends its regional grounding in the United Kingdom of Great Britain to a certain extent, though the founding of the latter with the 1707 Acts of Union between the kingdoms of England, Wales and Scotland roughly coincided with the emergence of the new genre in the early eighteenth century. Though it was of course rooted in it, the novel transcended this narrower context from the very beginning because it turned out to be much more than just a new genre of literature in England and/or Britain. Instead, the rise of the novel in England in many respects anticipated the rise of the novel as a modern genre in many national contexts and can thus be seen as paradigmatic (↗ 1 The English Novel as a Distinctly Modern Genre). What is more, the coincidence and complicity of the English language with British imperialism also made sure that there was something which could be called The World Novel in English (Crane et al. 2016) from a very early stage of its development, and this global dimension has become even more prominent at the latter end of the English novel’s trajectory (cf. Goodlad 2015, and Arac 2015). This is prominently reflected by The Oxford History of the Novel in English, in which The World Novel in English to 1950 (Vol. 9, Crane et al. 2016) is supplemented with three more final volumes entitled The Novel in English in South and South-East Asia since 1945 (Vol. 10, edited by Alex Tickell, forthcoming), The Novel in Africa and the Atlantic World since 1950 (Vol. 11, edited by Simon Gikandi, forthcoming), and The Novel in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific since 1950 (Vol. 12, edited by Coral Ann Howells et al., forthcoming).1 While it certainly makes good sense to describe long stretches of the novel’s development on the British Isles in terms of its Britishness

1 Oxford University Press anticipated this move in its earlier The Oxford English Literary History – “the new century’s definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage”, as the Oxford University Press online blurb has it – which takes stock of the end of the twentieth century in two volumes entitled DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-001

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(and of its negotiations of Englishness in this context), as for example Malcolm Bradbury does for the long twentieth century (1878–1990s) in his classic study The Modern British Novel (1993), the chapters of this handbook will address this regional specificity through the lens of the novel’s paradigmatic dimension as a literary genre which thrives on its particular relation to the emerging economic regime of modern culture at large (↗ 2 The Novel in the Economy) with the somewhat paradoxical result that it becomes a genre which transcends traditional notions of genre (↗ 3 Genres). This systematic engagement with the ramifications of the novel’s paradigmatic status in Part I of the handbook is rounded off with two inquiries into the ideological dimensions of this discursive formation, which, as a consequence of its particular character, hovers uneasily but productively between complicity and critique in terms of gender, class and ethnicity (↗ 4 Gender; ↗ 5 The Burden of Representation). In view of this particular angle, it seemed counterproductive to replace the category ‘novel’ (which indicates the full range of values it came to imply at different times in its long history) with the category of ‘fiction’ (which had clearly pejorative implications at the beginning of the novel’s history and only acquired a neutral or even positive standing of late). The answer to the third question then results from this paradigmatic approach: Programmatically taking the long perspective of the novel’s trajectory from its beginnings in the early eighteenth century to the present day into account, the Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries is more interested in the continuities before, between and beyond modernism and postmodernism than many publications in the field. It tries to develop an inclusive understanding of how the novel in all its multifariousness got into the twentieth century and how it worked its way through it and on into the twenty-first century, and it does so with particular attention to the English and British as well as the cosmopolitan, postcolonial, or global embeddedness of the English novel. With this approach the handbook hopes to account for the “novelists’ common experience of the aesthetic form they undertake to practice” in facing “the twentieth century’s long perplexing of all things ‘English’” (Caserio 2009, 2–3), and it will try to bring the observation of this practice forward into the second decade of the twenty-first century.

2 Twentieth-Century Contexts and Coordinates The historian Eric Hobsbawm has memorably characterized what he calls ‘the short twentieth century’ (1914–1991) as The Age of Extremes (1994), which follows the long

The Last of England? (Vol. 12: 1960–2000; Stephenson 2004) and The Internationalization of English Literature (Vol. 13: 1948–2000; King 2004).

0 Introduction 

 3

nineteenth century’s (1789–1914) sequence of ages coined by his influential lifetime’s work of historical monographs (The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848; The Age of Capital, 1848–1875; The Age of Empire, 1875–1914, published in 1962, 1975, and 1987, respectively). And indeed, besides the extremity of the world-shattering key events in twentieth-century history (World War I, the Russian Revolution of 1917, the economic and financial crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the rise of fascism, World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold War, and the rapid dismantling of the post-World-War-II order in the final decades of the century), what is particularly striking is the intensity of these events, both in terms of their comparatively rapid sequence and in terms of their immediate global impact, which was brought about by new technologies of warfare and communication. At the same time, the state of the novel in the early twentieth century could also be described in terms of intensification. “It has arrived, in truth, the novel, late at self-consciousness: but it has done its utmost ever since to make up for lost opportunities”, Henry James wrote presciently in his essay “The Future of the Novel” in 1899 (Veeder and Griffin 1986, 242), providing one of the first symptoms of what has come to be called ‘the turn of the novel’ in later criticism (Friedman 1966; see also the broader, socially embedded views in Keating 1989, Schwarz 1989, and Trotter 1993). Malcolm Bradbury, in his opening chapter of the same title (1994, 1–66), speaks of “the modern change that came to fiction” (2), indicating that the novel as a distinctly modern genre fully came into its own only after two centuries of its history had already passed. In what sense did the novel come into its own at the end of the nineteenth century? Beginning with Ian Watt’s identification of ‘formal realism’ as the central formal principle of the early novel in his classic study The Rise of the Novel (1957), the history of the novel up to this point has frequently been described as the emergence of a genre predicated on its realism, and this focus on the genre’s particular propensity for engaging with reality under evolving modern conditions (see, for example, Hans Blumenberg’s seminal essay “The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel” 1979 [1964]) has remained central to many theories of the novel to this day. However, this worldliness of the novel severely affected the genre’s standing in the emerging Romantic and post-Romantic validation of ‘autonomous’ art and literature: Can a world-saturated genre like the realist novel genuinely aspire to autonomy from the very conditions with which it is filled? As Walter L. Reed quipped in his Exemplary History of the Novel: “An adequate theory of the novel […] would have to be something more than a poetics. It would have to combine a poetics with a prosaics, so to speak” (1981, 13). The answer to this challenge must surely lie in the genre’s modes of world-engagement, and there the continuity of realist modes of representation with the audience’s accustomed ways of making sense of the world poses a problem, even if (or perhaps especially if) it is the fundamental requirement for realism’s seeming transparency of representation, which in turn results in accessibility and ideological efficacy. For being genuinely ‘autonomous’ and thus recognizably ‘literary’, this continuity had to be reconfigured, and this is exactly what the turn of the novel was

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about: “The novel was aspiring to become a far more complex, various, open and self-conscious form, one which, in a new way, sought to be taken seriously as ‘art’.” (Bradbury 1994, 2) The reasons for this change were manifold. Bradbury usefully identifies four layers in which this development was embedded: There were key social reasons: the growth of urban populations, the acceleration of technological change, the coming of improved education and literacy, the shifting relation of the classes, the expansion of leisure, the gradual increase in personal wealth. There were crucial intellectual reasons: the decline of a religious teleology and of the confident, theocentric, progressive Victorian world view, the rise of science and secular philosophies like sociology and psychology, the coming of a more material vision of life. There were important psychological reasons, as changing notions of the nature of the individual, social life, sex and gender relations, and rising awareness of the distinctive, increasingly mobile and fast-changing nature of experience in a modernizing age gave a new, more fluid view of consciousness and identity. There were important changes in the role of literature itself: the dying of the Victorian ‘three-decker’ novel, designed for libraries and associated with moral uplift, the rise of the literary marketplace and the development of the book as an item of purchase, the restratification of the cultural hierarchies in an age of increasing democracy, otherwise called the ‘coming of the masses’. (1994, 3, emphasis mine)

All of these developments are clearly long-term developments, emerging at the dawn of the modern age in the fifteenth century, irreversibly establishing themselves in social and cultural institutions in the eighteenth century, and then evolving towards the twentieth century and beyond (some of them seem to be still under way). What is striking at the turn of the twentieth century is their confluence and rising intensity, which in the case of the novel brings about its full emancipation as an ‘autonomous’ art form (the scare quote seem to be necessary for an autonomy rooted in so many factors outside itself). However, the self-confidence that should come with emancipation manifests itself partly as self-consciousness in the case of the novel, just as realism turns out to be an ism because it never went without saying, so to speak. As Bradbury puts it succinctly: “The modern novel came, but the Victorian novel did not entirely go away; and that is one of the essential secrets of the modern novel.” (1994, 5) At the beginning of the twentieth century, then, the novel seems to paradoxically have achieved cultural centrality and pervasiveness. Taken in its entirety, the spectrum of its realized forms in the twentieth century is both elitist and popular as well as subversive and affirmative: Changing, subdividing, springing from different cultural regions, reaching to very different audiences and new expressive functions, the novel would assume many roles. It would become a relaxing toy of leisure and fantasy, and a complex mechanism for imaginative and artistic discovery. It would serve as naïve popular entertainment, and would transmit radical, often outrageous or surprising, visions and opinions. Above all it would become the central literary prototype, taking an importance it had never had as the literary medium of the age, dislodging poetry, to some degree even sidelining drama – until later in the century, its dominance was in turn chal-

0 Introduction 

 5

lenged by new technological media that promised or threatened to replace book-based culture with something more immediate, visual, and serial. (Bradbury 1994, 4)

Against this background it becomes clear that the novel straddles in a potentially integrative fashion some key coordinates of twentieth-century cultural production: the local vs. the global, popularity and entertainment vs. artistic ambition and experiment, and, finally, book-based culture vs. visual, electronic and finally digital culture. In the following, these coordinates will be addressed in reverse order, beginning with an assessment of the importance of the reconfiguration of media contexts for the trajectory of the novel in the twentieth century and beyond, which in turn determines the novel’s overall shift from cultural centrality and eminence in book-based culture’s last stand in modernism to a more eccentric postmodernist pervasiveness. The introduction will end with an overview of central coordinates of possible histories of the English novel from modernist cosmopolitanism through the “postcolonial and post-imperial melancholia” (Gilroy 2011, 190) and provincialism of Englishness to the English novel’s current standing in “world literary space” (Casanova 2005, 72; cf. English 2006).

3 Media Contexts: Modernism and Postmodernism Why should one approach the history of the novel in the long twentieth century (1880s–2010s) through the lens of media contexts? For one, this approach helps to clarify a number of distinctions crucial for the period, such as realist vs. experimental writing or modernism vs. postmodernism. So let us return to the turn of the novel at the end of the nineteenth century on these grounds: Parallel to Peter Keating’s observation that “[w]hat finally dislodged realism from the most innovative fiction of the day […] was the late Victorian professionalization of empirical sociology” (1989, 303), a similar push towards salvaging an ‘objective’ approach to reality can be observed with the emergence of photography. While the conventions of realism had always been heavily slanted towards visuality within the larger framework of the ‘scopic regimes’ of modernity (cf. Crary 1991), so much so in fact that “‘the image’ – or, more accurately, a differential system thereof – supplanted writing as the grounding of fiction” (Armstrong 1999, 3), the advent of photography promised the possibility of fully eliding the dimension of authorship (in the sense of writing and/or narrating) altogether in order to replace it with ‘autography’ (North 2001), i.e. the prospect of reality writing itself, as it were (and one should not forget that both photography and phonography are still basically print media, after all). In this sense, “realism and photography” seemed to be “partners in the same cultural project” (Armstrong 1999, 26). In “confront[ing] authorship with autography” (North 2001, 1379), however, photography paradoxically highlighted the intransparency of realism’s claims of trans-

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parency. If, in other words, there was a newly institutionalized discourse (empirical sociology) on the one hand and a new medium (photography) on the other, and both promised to observe the world more objectively, then the specific merit of literary world observation had to be recalibrated. And as the one thing that neither empirical sociology nor photography could do but that the novel could do very well was to look inside people’s heads, the inward turn of the novel towards stream-of-consciousness techniques in the early twentieth century can well be read as a reaction to these developments (↗ 7 James Joyce, Ulysses; ↗ 9 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse). At the same time, this shift towards ‘depicting’ something invisible inevitably foregrounded the ‘writtenness’ of the representational mode. Where realist novels had sublimated writtenness into seemingly transparent narration in feigned orality, modernist novels engaged with the problematic process of ‘transcribing’ consciousness, and it was much more obvious that the product was an effect of writing rather than ‘depiction’.2 As for transparent narration, this mainstay of the realist novel also came under pressure from the media innovation that followed in the footsteps of photography: film. While there certainly are affinities between modernist literature and film (see, for example, Trotter 2007, Shail 2012, McParland 2013, and Freedman 2015), the precarious aspects of the relation between film and the novel were perhaps most acutely perceived by the novelist B. S. Johnson in the early 1970s (↗ 16 B. S. Johnson, The Unfortunates): It is a fact of crucial significance in the history of the novel this century that James Joyce opened the first cinema in Dublin in 1909. Joyce saw very early on that film must usurp some of the prerogatives which until then had belonged almost exclusively to the novelist. Film could tell a story more directly, in less time and with more concrete detail than a novel; certain aspects of character could be more easily delineated and kept constantly before the audience (for example, physical characteristics like a limp, a scar, particular ugliness or beauty); no novelist’s description of a battle squadron at sea in a gale could really hope to compete with that in a well-shot film; and why should anyone who simply wanted to be told a story spend all his spare time for a week or weeks reading a book when he could experience the same thing in a version in some ways superior at his local cinema in only one evening? (Johnson 2013 [1973], 11)

“The history of the novel in the twentieth century”, Johnson points out, “has seen large areas of the old territory of the novelist increasingly taken over by other media” (12), first by film and then by television, and this applies first and foremost to the storytelling dimension. So what can or should the novel do instead? According to Johnson, “the novel may not only survive but evolve to greater achievements by concentrating on those things it can still do best: the precise use of language, exploita-

2 With this move, the modernist novel is clearly a central ingredient of the early-twentieth-century epistemological shift that was retrospectively identified as the ‘linguistic turn’ (Rorty 1967) and turned out to be the first and foundational turn of many such turns (Bachmann-Medick 2016).

0 Introduction 

 7

tion of the technological fact of the book, the explication of thought.” (12) This turn towards linguistic and media-aware abstraction resonates with Johnson’s boisterous claim that “Joyce is the Einstein of the English novel” who “by means of form, style and technique in language” turned “the events of one day and one place” into “a novel, not a story about anything” (2013 [1973], 12; ↗ 7 James Joyce, Ulysses). Nevertheless, his own conclusions clearly fall short of these aspirations due to his reluctance to sever the novel’s anchoring in reality in order to fully acknowledge its linguistic, discursive and medial emancipation. While it is fully in line with the inward turn of the novel in the early twentieth century to state that “the only thing the novelist can with any certainty call exclusively his own is the inside of his own skull: and that is what he should be exploring, rather than anachronistically fighting a battle he is bound to lose” (12), this does by no means entail Johnson’s notorious diatribes against fiction (“Telling stories really is telling lies” 14) and his insistence on autobio­ graphical truth as the foremost criterion for distinguishing the novel as an art form from fiction because (a) fiction is not synonymous with telling stories, (b) the inside of a writer’s skull may well contain thoughts that do not have any immediate referent in reality, and (c) this does not necessarily disqualify these thoughts from being worthwhile objects of explication in a novel. B. S. Johnson is an interesting case because the discrepancy between the acuteness of his diagnosis and the limitations of his proposed remedy cuts to the very heart of distinctions crucial for the novel in the twentieth century, i.e. realist vs. experimental writing on the one hand, modernism vs. postmodernism on the other. As an experimental writer, Johnson (who rejected this label for his work, cf. 2013 [1973], 19) suffered from his lack of (commercial) success in the aesthetically predominantly conservative context of British fiction, in which only few writers displayed a formal adventurousness that was up to the standards set in contemporary American or French fiction (on the broader tradition and context of experimental fictions see Blackwell 2015). Johnson himself identifies the following properly Post-Joycean fellow travellers: Samuel Beckett (↗ 12 Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable), John Berger, Christine Brook-Rose, Brigid Brophy, Anthony Burgess, Alan Burns, Angela Carter (↗ 19 Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus), Eva Figes, Giles Gordon, Wilson Harris, Rayner Heppenstall, Robert Nye, Ann Quin, Penelope Shuttle, Alan Sillitoe (for his last book only), Stefan Themerson, and Johns Wheway (cf. 2013 [1973], 29–30). Were he alive, he would certainly lament the lack of recognition given to some of these names even in the present volume, which nevertheless deals with its share of ‘experimentalists’ beyond this list which Johnson could have included, such as Henry Green (↗ 11 Henry Green, Party Going), Sam Selvon (↗ 13 Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners), Doris Lessing (↗ 14 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook) and John Fowles (↗ 15 John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman). Nevertheless, the mainstream of British fiction remained stubbornly realistic until the end of the 1970s, so much so in fact, that the literary magazine Granta announced “The End of the English Novel” due to its being stuck in an “uneasy middleground”, its “irrelevant parochial-

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ism”, and its avoidance of “taking risks”, as contributors to that issue’s “Symposium on the English Novel” put it (Buford 1980, 137, 150, and 155). And as late as 1992 David Lodge still clung to his metaphor of the novelist reaching a crossroads on the main road of realism that he had first introduced in an assessment of the state of contemporary fiction in the late 1960s (cf. Lodge 1978 [1971]), though he had to concede by then that the metaphor of the crossroads now seems to me inadequate chiefly because it doesn’t allow for such mixing of genres of styles within a single text. Such mixing, what one might call ‘crossover’ fiction, seems to me to be a salient feature of writing today. (Lodge 1992, 207–208)

No wonder, then, given this climate on the one hand and the unacknowledged radicalism of his analytical diagnosis on the other, that B. S. Johnson was not quite able to follow through with his poetics of the novel before his tragic suicide in 1973. The very year 1980, however, also marked the beginning of a resurgence of British fiction as reflected in Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists issues for 1983, 1993, 2003 and 2013 (vol. 7, 43, 81, and 123, respectively). The list of authors included in these volumes with excerpts from their work, many of whom managed to retain a very high profile indeed, testifies to the vitality and international standing of British fiction after the demise of the English novel in its more provincial sense: 1983: Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, Ursula Bentley, William Boyd, Buchi Emecheta, Maggie Gee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alan Judd, Adam Mars-Jones, Ian McEwan, Shiva Naipaul, Philip Norman, Christopher Priest, Salman Rushdie, Lisa St Aubin de Terán, Clive Sinclair, Graham Swift, Rose Tremain, A. N. Wilson 1993: Iain Banks, Louis De Bernières, Anne Billson, Tibor Fischer, Esther Freud, Alan Hollinghurst, Kazuo Ishiguro, A. L. Kennedy, Philip Kerr, Hanif Kureishi, Adam Lively, Adam Mars-Jones, Candia McWilliam, Lawrence Norfolk, Ben Okri, Caryl Phillips, Will Self, Nicholas Shakespeare, Helen Simpson, Jeanette Winterson 2003: Monica Ali, Nicola Barker, Rachel Cusk, Peter Ho Davies, Susan Elderkin, Philip Hensher, A. L. Kennedy, Hari Kunzru, Toby Litt, David Mitchell, Andrew O’Hagan, David Peace, Ben Rice, Rachel Seiffert, Zadie Smith, Adam Thirlwell, Alan Warner, Sarah Waters, Robert McLiam Wilson 2013: Naomi Alderman, Tahmima Anam, Ned Beauman, Jenni Fagan, Adam Foulds, Xiaolu Guo, Sarah Hall, Steven Hall, Joanna Kavenna, Benjamin Markovits, Nadifa Mohamed, Helen Oyeyemi, Ross Raisin, Sunjeev Sahota, Taiye Selasi, Kamila Shamsie, Zadie Smith, David Szalay, Adam Thirlwell, Evie Wyld

What is at stake here is in fact also a shift from modernism to postmodernism, which Brian McHale has influentially described as the shift from “a poetics dominated by epistemological issues” characteristic of modernism to “a poetics dominated by ontological issues” characteristic of postmodernism (1987, xii). B. S. Johnson’s obsession with objective, referential truth is a clear sign of his late modernism, taking a last stand in the face of what the parallel Handbook of the American Novel in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries calls “the shift from vertical to relational modes of social organisation”:

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 9

The vertical reference points that had anchored individual and collective identity in the past – God, King, Soul, Reason, History – began to lose their credibility in the later nineteenth century and were radically displaced in the twentieth. Fundamental shifts in various areas of thought suggested that knowledge depended on variable relations rather than on stable hierarchies. (Müller 2017, 8)

In an interesting set of displacements, Johnson sublimates his writing into “the technological fact of the book” as an object, which in turn stands for “the inside of his own skull” which is by way of autobiographical truth in turn linked to the vertical reference point of reality as the last remnant of the vertical reference points listed above (Johnson 2013 [1973], 12, emphasis mine). And all the while Johnson was acutely aware of his horizontal relationships with others – especially more successful novelists and women – and increasingly insecure about his status and the adequacy of his perception – even if he compensated that with particularly strong opinions (the points raised in this sentence follow Müller 2017, 8). In a typical modernist move, then, Johnson transforms his ‘self’ into an object which is represented by an external object (the text, the book) which he charges with transcending his and its limitations through emphatic validation as a modernist work of art/literature. In the ‘ontological’ (McHale) and ‘relational’ (Müller) regime of postmodernism, on the other hand, the modern self would no longer be conceived as a (more or less) stable object visà-vis vertical reference points but rather as a construct in horizontal relations with other constructs (cf. Müller 2017, 8–14), and against this backdrop the work of literature would lose its eminence. In modernism, one could say, the ontological status of reality is epistemologically confirmed in spite of all difficulties, in postmodernism the only thing that is acknowledged as ontologically real is the construct itself, be it self or text. While this is a fairly radical difference, it is also clear that the second position has its origins in the first. As Brian McHale points out: “Postmodernism is not post modern, whatever that might mean, but post modernism; it does not come after the present (a solecism), but after the modernist movement.” (1987, 5) In shorthand, the hallmarks of postmodernism could be identified as (a) a shift from modernist doubt and suffering towards a more relaxed playfulness and acceptance of the constructivist character of texts, selves, knowledge and truth, or, in John Barth’s influential terms, a shift from ‘exhaustion’ to ‘replenishment’ (cf. 1984 [1967 and 1980]), (b) an avowal of (self-reflexive) eclecticism and an acceptance of a pluralism of forms, including popular ones, under the banner of Leslie Fiedler’s rallying cry “Cross the Border – Close that Gap” (1984 [1969]; ↗  3  Genres), and (c) an overall tendency towards increased self-reflexivity in explicit and implicit varieties of metafiction (cf. Hutcheon 1984 [1980]; Waugh 2015 [1984]; Imhoff 1986 and 1987; Curry 2016 [1995]; Neumann and Nünning 2014). The transition from modernism to postmodernism, however, is not clear-cut, and even towards the end of the period under discussion in this volume there are novels for which late modernist remnants can be observed in their more desperate search for ‘higher’ meaning (at the time of writing in 2016, Alan Moore’s

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monumental Northampton-novel Jerusalem would be a case in point despite Moore’s main affiliation with popular culture/graphic novels). With this postmodernist recalibration of modernism, even realism can be readmitted to the fold of literary fiction after modernism, partly because postmodernism itself fosters a climate of implicit self-reflexivity which affects all realist illusions of transparency, and partly because the media environment has also undergone a decisive change. So far we have seen that the novel is certainly one of the key players in a sequence of Revolutions in Communication (Kovarik 2011). It is closely and most obviously connected to the printing revolution, which Bill Kovarik calls “the pivotal development in history, the turning point in the transition between the Medieval and the modern worlds” (13). But we have also seen to what extent it is implicated in the visual revolution in terms of the ‘scopic regimes’ of modernity (cf. Crary 1991) even before the rise of photography, which, together with film, partly necessitated the turn of the novel towards its new twentieth-century status as a self-confident and self-conscious art form. At that point, the ‘vertical modes of social organisation’ as codified in semantics claiming to be somehow manifest in reality if only ‘properly’ made visible, be it in terms of God, King, Soul, Reason, History or whatever, were not completely gone, but they became increasingly abstract vanishing points (pun intended), as is illustrated by the insistence with which modernist writers address an elusive ‘it’ or ‘thing’. This is perhaps most succinctly (and, as it turns out again, prophetically) expressed in Henry James’s short story “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896), taken by many as “the quintessential self-reflexive Modernist story” (Childs 2000, 85). Here, James has his author figure Hugh Vereker say: [T]here’s an idea in my work without which I wouldn’t have given a straw for the whole job. It’s the finest, fullest intention of the lot […] The order, the form, the texture of my books will perhaps one day constitute for the initiated a complete representation of it. So it’s naturally the thing for the critic to look for. It strikes me […] even as the thing for the critic to find. (James 1964 [1896], 281–282, emphasis mine)

Note to what extent the dimensions of print (the “order, the form, the texture of my books”) and visuality (“a complete representation of it […] for the critic to look for”) are evoked, and how the text becomes an embodiment of/as “work” where the critic and by extension the reader can find “it” or “the thing”. In modernism, then, the scopic regime of modernity is still intact, but its meaning manifests itself only in the abstraction of the elusive ‘it’-‘thing’ or, in an anticipation of the postmodernist understanding of ‘ontological’, in the work at hand. The eminence of this work, however, comes under increasing pressure from the ensuing electronic and digital revolutions in media history (Kovaric 2011), which shift the emphasis from representation to communication in ever expanding networks, and from national neighbourhoods (partly transcended by the cosmopolitanism of many modernist writers) to the global village of digital media culture. This development clearly intensifies the shift from vertical to relational modes of social organisation,

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 11

and it goes hand in hand with a shift in functional dominant. The book’s (and also the early novel’s) ‘one to many’-dynamics anticipates the later boosting of this dynamics in print and electronic mass media (newspapers, radio, television) with their ‘push’-function, but it remains more individualized in terms of both production and reception than the later electronic varieties. The modernist novel can be usefully described as the apogee of this development in that it represents both the highest point of achievement (in terms of individuality, seriousness and complexity of expression) and, paradoxically, the remotest position from all those other individuals who may come under the moniker of The Common Reader as envisioned by Virginia Woolf in two influential essay collections in 1925 and 1932. As James Joyce put it famously (or notoriously): “The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.” (Interview with Max Eastman in Harper’s Magazine 1931; Deming 1997, 417) The modernist manifestation of this paradoxically shared singularity in the work (both in the sense of œuvre and in the sense of a single novel) which represents this singularity (though no longer in visual terms) recedes into elitism once the media environment offers seemingly limitless opportunities for individual expression with the advent of digitalization. In the early twenty-first century, it has become increasingly clear that digitalization levels the vertical reference point of the singular individual into variable relations between innumerable individuals, but it is by no means clear what this entails for the renegotiation of power relations in the matrix between elitism and democracy. What is clear, however, is that the novel has found itself in a new game for quite some time.

4 From Eminence to Eccentricity? All in all, then, the eminence of the early-twentieth-century modernist masterpieces in what had only then become the dominant genre in modern literary communication was gradually displaced by the genre’s new positioning as a pervasive presence: More novels than ever before were written and published, but at the same time literature itself lost its status as a central signifying practice of modernity in the course of the twentieth century. As a consequence, claims for the continuing significance and relevance of the novel could no longer rely on the aura of the eminent work of art that was still the raison d’être of the modernist novel. A convincing new case for the novel at the end of the twentieth century has perhaps been best put forward by Salman Rushdie against the backdrop of his own existentially pressing situation (↗ 20 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses). In an essay entitled “Is Nothing Sacred?” (1990) he writes:

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[W]hile the novel answers our need for wonderment and understanding, it brings us harsh and unpalatable news as well. It tells us that there are no rules. It hands down no commandments. We have to make up our own rules as best we can, make them up as we go along. And it tells us that there are no answers; or, rather, it tells us that answers are easier to come by, and less reliable than questions. If religion is an answer, if political ideology is an answer, then literature is an inquiry; great literature, by asking extraordinary questions, opens new doors in our minds. […] [L]iterature is, of all the arts, the one best suited to challenging absolutes of all kinds; and, because it is in its origin the schismatic Other of the sacred (and authorless) text, so it is also the art most likely to fill our god-shaped holes. (Rushdie 1992 [1990], 423–424)

As one can see here, the emphatic self-description of modernism is still present, but it is clearly decentred: The autonomous masterpiece can no longer offer an integrated counter-vision to the fragmented modern world. What a literary text can offer instead is a forum for persistent questioning, and as such it does not draw on capital-L Literature as a guarantor of validity, but it employs lower-case-l literature as one important medium of world negotiation among others. With this programme in mind, Rushdie proposes “the novel as the crucial art form of what [he] can no longer avoid calling the post-modern age” (424) and elaborates the specifics of literature’s performance potential and functionality in its late-twentieth-century context: [L]iterature is the art least subject to external control, because it is made in private. The act of making it requires only one person, one pen, one room, some paper. (Even the room is not absolutely essential.) Literature is the most low-technology of art forms. It requires neither a stage nor a screen. It calls for no interpreters, no actors, producers, camera crews, costumiers, musicians. It does not even require the traditional apparatus of publishing, as the long-running success of samizdat literature demonstrates. […] [T]he truth is that of all the forms, literature can still be the most free. […] (424) And this, finally, is why I elevate the novel above other forms […]: not only is it the art involving least compromises, but it is also the only one that takes the ‘privileged arena’ of conflicting discourses right inside our heads. The interior space of our imagination is a theatre that can never be closed down; the images created there make up a movie that can never be destroyed. (426) Literature is an interim report from the consciousness of the artist, and so it can never be ‘finished’ or ‘perfect’. […] The only privilege literature deserves  – and this privilege it requires in order to exist  – is the privilege of being the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of languages can be acted out. (427) Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way. […] We do not need to call it sacred, but we do need to remember that it is necessary. (429)

At the end of the twentieth century, then, the novel, according to Salman Rushdie, is the one medium in which key coordinates and fault-lines of modern culture are played out: public vs. private, technology vs. expression, individual freedom vs.

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 13

social and political constraints. While this diagnosis would also cover the whole trajectory of the novel as a specifically modern genre (↗ 1 The English Novel as a Distinctly Modern Genre), it is also clear that the novel’s environment has evolved into something beyond book culture, so that a book-based genre finds itself relegated to the margins, however many titles and copies it might bring forth. And yet, Rushdie claims that there might be strength in the insult, particularly with regard to the old medium’s allegiance to individuality in terms of both production and reception. In an age of mushrooming social media and an increasingly pervasive algorithmisation of communication and transaction processes, one would hope that the ex-centricity of the old medium facilitates a privileged and reflexive observer position whose peripheral vision enables better assessments of what goes on in the tumultuous centre,3 and many highly acute recent novels seem to vindicate this hope (↗ 25 David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas; ↗ 26 China Miéville, Embassytown). But at the same time, the status of the resulting texts melts into the multitude of available Interpreting Networks (Krieger and Belliger 2014) which, whatever they themselves might suggest, are necessarily relational rather than vertical in the larger scheme of things, in which “interpretation is part of a general practice of putting into practice” rather than the production of meaning (Connor 2014, 184). Again, this has in a sense been true for the novel since its inception, but of late the conditions have changed, and it remains to be seen how the novel copes with the parallel options of analogue and digital modes of existence and with the reconfiguration or even abandonment of cultural gate-keeping functions on the internet. After years in which the truly postmodern seemed to be mostly academic hyperbole while either an insistence on the narrower notion of postmodernism à la Brian McHale or Hans Robert Jauss’s suggestion to speak of ‘postism’ instead (cf. Jauss 1988–1989 [1983]) seemed to be the more responsible options, it seems now that a genuinely post-modern era might be dawning, an era in which the permanent transformation characteristic of modernity is finally supplanted by a complete metamorphosis of the world as we (and the novel) knew it (cf. Beck 2016).

5 Histories of the English Novel The paradigmatic approach adopted in this Introduction recapitulated established approaches to the history of the English novel in the twentieth century in the light of the genre’s media contexts. With this particular focus it did not stray very far from the

3 This sentence takes its cue from pointed formulations in Hörisch 1999, 112 and 130: “Bemerkenswert ist nämlich, daß [Hans Magnus Enzensbergers kluge Zeilen in seinem Gedicht ‘Altes Medium’ 1995] eben in der Schwäche des alten Mediums seine Überlegenheit erkennen. Ermöglicht doch gerade die Ex-zentrizität des alten Mediums seine privilegierte und überlegen(d)e Beobachterposition. […] Aber läßt sich von der Peripherie her nicht besser beobachten, was im tumultuösen Zentrum vor sich geht?”

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traditional focus on the genre’s characteristic negotiation of the interface between individual subjective experience and the (social) world, and it certainly does not attempt to rewrite established histories of the persistence of realism in the face of twentieth-century developments into modernism and postmodernism and beyond. Within this larger frame, however, various other histories of the novel have been written, some of which will resurface in the following chapters wherever it is necessary. Still broadly speaking, the history of the English novel in the twentieth century can be addressed in two dimensions. On the one hand, there is a strong cosmopolitan strand which mutates from cosmopolitan modernism (Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf; ↗  6  Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; ↗  7  James Joyce, Ulysses; ↗ 9 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse) into modernist cosmopolitanism (Kazuo Ishi­ guro, Salman Rushdie, W. G. Sebald; ↗ 20 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses), as Rebecca Walkowitz has elegantly argued (2006). This novelistic discourse of critical cosmopolitanism beyond the nation finds its more recent continuation in novels written for publication in multiple languages which Walkowitz terms ‘born-translated novels’ (2015; among her chosen authors are David Mitchell and China Miéville; ↗ 25 David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas; ↗ 26 China Miéville, Embassytown), which in itself indicates that there might be some reconfiguration of the status of English as a global language after empire and postcolonialism under way (see also, conversely, Apter 2013 on the politics of untranslatability). On the other hand, a history of the English novel can of course also address its longstanding function for what Bernard Bergonzi has called “The Ideology of Being English” (1979, 56–79) in the face of Britishness with its peculiar “Intranationalisms” (Buzard 2015; see also Craig 2006 on Scottish Fiction, Brannigan 2006 and Fogarty 2009 on Irish Fiction, as well as Hart 2009 on regionalism, and Plotz 2015 on the provincial novel), not to speak of more fashionable thematic angles like urban experience (esp. London), class, ethnicity and elaborations of empire (↗ 5 The Burden of Representation) or feminism, gender and queer theory (↗ 4 Gender). In spite of this double coding, however, the thematic foci of inquiries into contemporary fiction are amazingly consistent at the beginning of the twenty-first century (see for example Lane et al. 2003 with their thematic sections on ‘Myth and History’, ‘Urban Thematics’, ‘Cultural Hybridity’, and ‘Pathological Subjects’; roughly the same territory is covered in Tew 2004 and Boxall 2013), and the problems of how to deal with it are definitely in continuity with the history of the novel at large, albeit under conditions of globalization and digitalization (cf. Eaglestone 2013): When does the contemporary begin (for which context)? How can scholars come to terms with the ever expanding archive of contemporary fiction and relevant related materials? What about authors, agents, publishers (↗ 2 The Novel in the Economy)? How can one deal with genre, “an idea in complete disarray in contemporary fiction”:

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 15

On the one hand, the boundaries of genre are rigidly enforced by agents, publishers, academics, booksellers, and journalists and on the other hand, the effects of hybridity and the postmodern have left many novels creatively challenging traditional genre distinctions. (Eaglestone 2013, 1097; ↗ 3 Genres)

And finally: How exactly are value and judgement related to the issue of form, the latter being, in spite of a strong tradition of formalism(s), still a somewhat elusive matter in literary studies (cf. Leighton 2007; Levine 2015). What can, against this backdrop, be said about the future of the English novel? Is there a future, or will it muddle on as a distinctly modern genre in the new dispensation of an emerging genuinely post-modern world? A first glimpse of an answer can be gleaned in the distinction between ‘contemporary fiction’ (about which numerous books have been published, cf. Lane et al. 2003, Tew 2004, Walkowitz 2015 as well as English 2006 and Eaglestone 2013 in the Further Reading section of the bibliography) and ‘twenty-first-century fiction’, about which Peter Boxall asks: “Can we identify a set of thematic or stylistic characteristics that mark a new phase in the development of the novel, that would allow us to speak meaningfully of the twenty-first-century novel?” (2013, 1) Interestingly, recent (and mostly American) debates about the possibility of a post-postmodernism under the banner of a new sincerity (cf. Wallace 1993) or “postirony” (cf. Hoffmann 2016) seem to mirror B. S. Johnson’s engagement with the realist tradition to a certain extent, only that this time around the charge of falsification is not directed against fiction per se but rather against irony and self-reflexivity, i.e. constitutive features of modernism and postmodernism. So history keeps repeating itself, and David Shields’s 2010 manifesto Reality Hunger, which announces that the “novel is dead. Long live the anti-novel, built from scraps” (2011, 115) in his favoured genre, the lyrical essay, does not seem to be fully convincing in the narrowness of its suggestions, even if, at the end of the day, everything, even a fully-fledged fictional and self-reflexive novel might qualify as a lyrical essay if it is read with strict reference to its author’s relationship with reality. But wasn’t this what novels emancipated themselves from in their long history? A more optimistic reading of Shields’s manifesto would probably insist that Reality Hunger is a symptom of the cultural persistence of exactly that worldliness that the novel has thriven on from the beginning (↗ 28 Tom McCarthy, Satin Island). In itself, then, with its openness and flexibility and freedom, the novel would seem to be well prepared for the future, even in the face of an alleged ‘death of books’ (Domsch 2017, 118–121). The question is rather how well it will adapt to the evolving external conditions of Making Literature Now (Hungersford 2016) – in the present and in the future. ***

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A project like this profits immensely from innumerable conversations with colleagues in the process of putting together the final outline and, ultimately, the table of contents. While the paradigmatic approach outlined in this introduction and the suggestions for the five chapters that make up Part I: Systematic Questions did not spark a lot of controversy in the case of the Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, the choice of texts for Part II: Close Readings certainly did, and, not surprisingly, the more the closer to the present the novels under scrutiny were. I learned a lot from these discussions, but at the end of the day there is a certain randomness to the choices as they stand now, partly due to the availability of colleagues for contributions, partly due to personal inclinations on my part. It is to be hoped that the paradigmatic approach adopted for the volume will enable readers to catch a glimpse of the world of ‘the (English) novel’ through the grain of sand that is embodied by every novel which finally made it into the line up, whether more eccentric or conservative in choice: The whole spectrum of realist and experimental specimens from modernism to postmodernism and beyond has been covered, in cases of obvious alternative candidates, contributors have been asked to include them into their argument (thus, for example, Huxley > Orwell or Pullman > Tolkien), and some of the more glaring omissions have made it into Part I: Systematic Questions (for example, D. H. Lawrence in ↗ 4 Gender). Please consult the Index. At the end of a long process I would like to thank the editors of the Handbooks of English and American Studies: Text and Theory series and particularly Martin Middeke for entrusting me with putting together the Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. My heartfelt thanks go to all contributors who did not only deliver their chapters on time (well, mostly) but were always available for immediate answers to questions which popped up here and there, as they are wont to do in a book of this size. Thank you also to Dr. Ulrike Krauss and Katja Lehming at De Gruyter for friendly advice and efficiency, and to my Tübingen team Eva Maria Rettner, Bianca Klose, Melina Munz and Matthias Yildiz, who diligently and reliably worked their way through seemingly innumerable files for months on end. My final thanks go to my wife Cornelia for her patience – and everything else.

6 Bibliography 6.1 Works Cited Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London/New York: Verso, 2013. Arac, Jonathan. “World English/World Literature.” A Companion to the English Novel. Ed. Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. 456–470.

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Armstrong, Nancy. Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism. Cambridge/ London: Harvard University Press, 1999. Bachmann-Medick, Doris. Cultural Turns: New Orientations in the Study of Culture. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2016. Barth, John. “The Literature of Exhaustion.” The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfictions. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984 [1967]. 62–76. Barth, John. “The Literature of Replenishment.” The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfictions. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984 [1980]. 193–206. Beck, Ulrich. The Metamorphosis of the World. Cambridge: Polity, 2016. Bergonzi, Bernard. The Situation of the Novel. Basingstoke/London: Macmillan, 1979. Blackwell, Mark. “Experimental Fictions.” A Companion to the English Novel. Ed. Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. 144–158. Blumenberg, Hans. “The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel.” New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays. Ed. Richard E. Amacher, and Victor Lange. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979 [1964]. 29–48. Boxall, Peter. Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern British Novel. London: Penguin, 1994 [1993]. Brannigan, John. “Northern Irish Fiction: Provisionals and Pataphysicians.” A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction. Ed. James F. English. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 141–163. Buford, Bill, ed. Granta 3 (1980): “The End of the English Novel.” Buzard, James. “Intranationalisms.” A Companion to the English Novel. Ed. Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. 373–386. Casanova, Pascale. “Literature as a World.” New Left Review 31 (2005): 71–90. Caserio, Robert L. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel. Ed. Robert Caserio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 1–9. Childs, Peter. Modernism. The New Critical Idiom. London/New York: Routledge, 2000. Connor, Steven. “Spelling Things Out.” New Literary History 45.2 (2014): 183–197. Craig, Cairns. “Devolving the Scottish Novel.” A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction. Ed. James F. English. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 121–140. Crane, Ralph, Jane Stafford, and Mark Williams, eds. The World Novel in English to 1950. The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol. 9. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. Curry, Mark, ed. Metafiction. London/New York: Routledge, 2016 [1995]. Deming, Robert H., ed. James Joyce. Vol. II: 1928–41. The Critical Heritage. London/New York: Routledge, 1997 [1970]. Domsch, Sebastian. “Futures of the American Novel.” Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Ed. Timo Müller. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2017. 113–128. Eaglestone, Robert. “Contemporary Fiction in the Academy: A Manifesto.” Textual Practice 27.7 (2013): 1089–1101. English, James F. “Introduction: British Fiction in a Global Frame.” A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction. Ed. James F. English. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 1–15. Fiedler, Leslie. “Cross the Border – Close that Gap: Post–Modernism.” Postmodernism in American Literature: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Peter Freese, and Manfred Pütz. Darmstadt: Thesen Verlag, 1984 [1969]. 151–166. Fogarty, Anne. “Ireland and English Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel. Ed. Robert Caserio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 102–113.

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Freedman, Jonathan. “The Novel into Film.” A Companion to the English Novel. Ed. Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. 159–173. Friedman, Alan. The Turn of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Gikandi, Simon, ed. The Novel in Africa and the Atlantic World since 1950. The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol. 11. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Gilroy, Paul. “The Closed Circle of Britain’s Postcolonial Melancholia.” The Literature of Melancholia: Early Modern to Postmodern. Ed. Martin Middeke and Christina Wald. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 187–204. Goodlad, Laureen M. E. “Internationalisms and the Geopolitical Aesthetics.” A Companion to the English Novel. Ed. Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. 387–405. Hart, Matthew. “Regionalism in English Fiction between the Wars.” The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel. Ed. Robert Caserio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 89–101. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991. London: Michael Joseph, 1994. Hoffmann, Lukas. Postirony: The Nonfictional Literature of David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers. Bielefeld: transcript, 2016. Hörisch, Jochen. Ende der Vorstellung: Die Poesie der Medien. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1999. Howells, Coral Ann, Paul Sharrad, and Gerry Turcotte, eds. The Novel in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific since 1950. The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol. 12. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Hungersford, Amy. Making Literature Now. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. London/New York: Routledge, 1984 [1980]. Imhoff, Rüdiger. Contemporary Metafiction: A Poetological Study of Metafiction in England since 1939. Heidelberg: Winter, 1986. Imhoff, Rüdiger. “Contemporary Metafiction: The Phenomenon and the Efforts to Explain It.” REAL. The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 5 (1987): 271–329. James, Henry. “The Figure in the Carpet.” The Complete Tales of Henry James Vol. 9: 1892–1898. Ed. Leon Edel. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964 [1896]. 273–315. Jauss, Hans Robert. “The Literary Process of Modernism from Rousseau to Adorno.” Cultural Critique 11 (1988–1989) [1983]: 27–61. Johnson, Bryan Stanley. “Introduction” [to Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs?]. Well Done God! Selected Prose and Drama of B. S. Johnson. Ed. Jonathan Coe, Philip Tew, and Julia Jordan. Basingstoke/London: PanMacmillan Picador, 2013 [1973]. 11–31. Keating, Peter. The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel, 1875–1914. London: Faber & Faber, 1989. King, Bruce. The Internationalisation of English Literature. The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 13: 1948–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Kovarik, Bill. Revolutions in Communication: Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital Age. New York/London: Continuum, 2011. Krieger, David J., and Andréa Belliger. Interpreting Networks: Hermeneutics, Actor-Network-Theory & New Media. Bielefeld: transcript, 2014. Lane, Richard J., Rod Menham, and Philip Tew, eds. Contemporary British Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 2003. Leighton, Angela. On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

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Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015. Lodge, David. “The Novelist at the Crossroads.” The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury. London: Fontana, 1977 [1971]. 84–110. Lodge, David. “The Novelist Today: Still at the Crossroads?” New Writing. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury, and Judy Cooke. London: Minerva, 1992. 203–215. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York/London: Methuen, 1987. McParland, Richard, ed. Film and Literary Modernism. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. Müller, Timo. “Introduction.” Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Ed. Timo Müller. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2017. 1–17. Neumann, Birgit, and Ansgar Nünning. “Metanarration and Metafiction”. The Living Handbook of Narratology. Ed. Peter Hühn et al. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/metanarration-andmetafiction. Hamburg: Hamburg University, 2014 (30 September 2016). North, Michael. “Authorship and Autography.” PMLA 116.6 (2001): 1377–1385. Plotz, John. “The Provincial Novel.” A Companion to the English Novel. Ed. Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. 360–372. Reed, Walter L. An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic vs. the Picaresque. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Rorty, Richard, ed. The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Rushdie, Salman. “Is Nothing Sacred?” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta Books, 1992 [1990]. 415–429. Schwarz, Daniel R. The Transformation of the English Novel, 1890–1930. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Shail, Andrew. The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism. New York/Abingdon: Routledge, 2012. Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. London: Penguin, 2011 [2010]. Stephenson, Randall. The Last of England? The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 12: 1960–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Tew, Philip. The Contemporary British Novel. London/New York: Continuum, 2004. Tickell, Alex, ed. The Novel in English in South and South-East Asia since 1945. The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol. 10. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Trotter, David. The English Novel in History 1895–1920. London/New York: Routledge, 1993. Trotter, David. Cinema and Modernism. Malden: Blackwell, 2007. Veeder, William, and Susan M. Griffin, eds. The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and Practice of Fiction. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York/Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2006. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York/Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2015. Wallace, David Foster. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U. S. Fiction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (1993): 151–194. Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London/New York: Routledge, 2015 [1984].

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6.2 Further Reading Bode, Christoph. The Novel: An Introduction. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Boxall, Peter, and Bryan Cheyette, eds. British and Irish Fiction since 1940. The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol. 7. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Caserio, Robert L., ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Eaglestone, Robert. Contemporary Fiction: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. English, James F., ed. A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Parrinder, Patrick, and Andrzej Gaziorek, eds. The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel 1880–1940. The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol. 4. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Part I Systematic Questions

Christoph Bode

1 The English Novel as a Distinctly Modern Genre Abstract: This chapter opens with the question why, with a few exceptions, the English novel of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has so conspicuously fallen short of its possibilities. Acknowledging the facts (a) that the modern novel is the only major literary genre to have emerged in the modern age and (b) that as a genre it is still evolving at a tremendous rate, since it is neither bound by any specific form nor by any specific content, it further asks (taking its cue from various theories) what exactly these possibilities are. Using auto-referentiality and self-reflexiveness as its analytical categories, the chapter then attempts a sketchy mapping of the English novel in the twentieth century as a distinctly modern genre and comes up with a consolingly varied picture. The final part answers the question of the future of this genre with moderate optimism. Keywords: Auto-referentiality, self-reflexiveness, realism, postmodernism, metafiction

1 Setting the Scene: Some Discontents In his 1884 essay “The Art of Fiction” (revised 1888), Henry James criticized English fellow novelists for turning out fiction that simply was not worth discussing: “Only a short time ago it might have been supposed that the English novel was not what the French call discutable. It had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it – of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison.” (James 1986, 165) He continued: During the period I have alluded to there was a comfortable, good-humoured feeling abroad [here meaning ‘widely current’] that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that our only business with it could be to swallow it. […] Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints; and there is a presumption that those times when no one has anything particular to say about it, and has no reason to give for practice or preference, though they may be times of honour, are not times of development – are times, possibly even, a little of dullness. (James 1986, 165–166)

What James particularly objected to – both in the nineteenth-century English novel and its native criticism  – was not only a general disinterestedness in intellectual debate, but also and primarily the novel’s preoccupation with morality (Mr. Besant’s DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-002

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‘conscious moral purpose’, 1986, 180), its fixation upon subject matter, and its anti-formalist stance. Against this, he set – the idea of fiction for adult, mature, grown-up persons: In the English novel […], more than in any other, there is a traditional difference between that which people know and that which they agree to admit that they know, that which they see and that which they speak of, that which they feel to be part of life and that which they allow to enter into literature. […] There are certain things which it is generally agreed not to discuss, not even to mention, before young people. That is very well, but the absence of discussion is not a symptom of the moral passion. The purpose of the English novel– ‘a truly admirable thing, and a great cause for congratulation’ [Walter Besant] – strikes me therefore as rather negative. (James 1986, 181);

– the idea that any novelist should be allowed to choose whatever subject matter they wanted and take it from there: “We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donnée: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.” (James 1986, 175); – and finally, the idea that the sole objective of the novel should be to ‘represent life’ (“The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.” James 1986, 166). And in order to represent life as inclusively as possible (“[T]he province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision.” James 1986, 177), everything would have to be admitted to it: What kind of experience is intended, and where does it begin and end? Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spiderweb of the finest silken threads suspended in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative – much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius – it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses into revelations. (James 1986, 172)

All these points culminate in James’s exhortation to a novice: “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” (1986, 173) But this all-encompassing attentiveness would, of course, have to be channelled and its findings subjected to selection (“Art is essentially selection.” James 1986, 177), that is, you cannot write serious fiction without an idea of how you select and how you construct. For the novel to be taken seriously, there must be a “consciousness of itself” behind it. By these standards, James regarded the nineteenth-century English novel largely as a failure. Although Henry James expressed some faint hope that things were changing for the better, Virginia Woolf, 35 years later, found in an essay on “Modern Fiction” (1919, revised 1925) she still had reason to deplore the sorry state of the English novel  – again castigating novelists for not representing life as experienced in the early twentieth century, what with their worn-out, customary conventions: Is life like this? Must novels be like this? Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this’. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, phantastic, eva-

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nescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style […]. Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged, life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and circumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it. (1972 [1925], 106)

In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1923, revised 1924), Woolf repeats the charge: the old ways will not do any longer, we have to find new narrative techniques, try them out experimentally (“[W]e must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments. We must reflect that where so much strength is spent on finding a way of telling the truth, the truth itself is bound to reach us in rather an exhausted and chaotic condition.” 1971 [1924], 335). But, in spite of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) (↗ 7 James Joyce, Ulysses), Woolf finds, the current situation is bleak: Why when October comes around, do the publishers always fail to supply us with a masterpiece? Surely one reason is that the men and women who began writing novels in 1910 or thereabouts had this great difficulty to face – that there was no English novelist from whom they could learn about their business. (1971 [1924], 326)

And then there follows one of the most condescending, chauvinistic and xenophobic sentences in the whole of her œuvre (if she speaks in propria persona and this is not represented speech): “Mr. Conrad is a Pole; which sets him apart, and makes him, however admirable, not very helpful.” (Woolf 1971 [1924], 326) But this unpleasant remark draws our attention to the fact that even in the 1920s  – the decade of High Modernism– England remained curiously immune to avantgarde writing: a stale and stagnant backwater. As Hugh Kenner’s A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers (1988) was aptly summarized by a critic: “International Modernism happened to England but not in it.” (Conrad 1988, 6) After all, the main proponents of International Modernism – Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, etc. – were not English, which leaves us only with Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson. If somebody tried to seriously suggest that E. M. Forster or D. H. Lawrence were radical innovators of the novel, that would only show how desperate the situation was. Thrice marginalized in England (cf. Bode 1998), the modernist writers writing in England found themselves the victims of a stifling parochialism, a ludicrous and constraining provinciality, a xenophobic Philistinism and an atmosphere that was generally averse to experiment and innovation,

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no matter whether home-grown or imported. Nothing much had changed since the days of Henry James. But if through much of the nineteenth century and right up until at least the 1930s (if not the 1940s), English novelists, with a few notable exceptions, failed to do their homework and, if they did, found little recognition, it is maybe reasonable to ask what exactly their homework was. What is the modern novel good for? And why didn’t the English deliver (if that account is to be trusted)?

2 What Is the Modern Novel Good for? Some Theory First of all, like all other genres, the modern novel should be entertaining and interesting. But it differs from its predecessors – the novels of classical antiquity and the romances, chivalrous or courtly, of the middle ages – through what Ian Watt called its ‘formal realism’. Instead of damsels in distress, knights in shining armour and fire-spitting dragons, it has credible everyday characters. It is set, not ‘elsewhere’ and in some mythological time, but in a space and in a time that seems, if not identical (because it is fictional), then at least continuous with our space and our time. It replaces stock plots with original, ‘once only’ plots, and these plots are driven not by wonders and miracles, but by action that answers to the demands of reason and causality. It is a new genre that is decidedly of this world. We have grown so accustomed to the realist paradigm of the modern novel (about non-realist modern novels in a moment or two) that we tend to forget how scandalous and counter-intuitive its advent must have appeared. For it is easy to see why there should be a demand for literature that is about things that do not exist in the real world (giants and dwarfs, witches and magicians, the never-never-lands of mythical adventure and unrestrained eroticism, talking animals, supernatural metamorphoses, etc.), but why there should be, in the first place, a literature that reflects things that exist already is truly puzzling (and many of the early novels play entertainingly with that thin line that separates this new kind of fiction from extra-literary fact). Why duplicate reality at all? There are two explanations for this and they go hand in hand: the emergence of the modern novel in Western Europe coincides with unprecedented social change. As change accelerates, societies develop a sense of their own historicity and there comes a point in time when the literary forms of comparatively static societies will no longer serve the dynamism of the modern age: reality outgrows forms of fiction that have no systematic place for fundamental change but rather celebrate the general, the ideal, the eternal, and such like. In turn, the modern novel celebrates the particular, the individual, the concrete and the specific – and all that is in a state of becoming. However, accelerating social change is, of course, not only experienced as chance and opportunity, but also as a potential threat. It is more difficult to make sense of things if they are changing all the time. And in steps the second explanation for why

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it is the modern novel, as an epic genre, that, in its realist mode, so radically transforms the literary scene: mankind has one powerful tool for making sense of life, the universe and everything and for creating meaning, and that tool is narrative. Narrative is the meaningful/meaning-creating linking of at least two events. Narrative transforms what might otherwise be a meaningless succession of contingent, isolated events into a string, a sequence of embedded events that have the semblance of (narrative) necessity. Any kind of narrative can be seen as an instance of what we call by that wonderful German word of Kontingenzbewältigung, the reduction of contingency by narrative processing: you feed the experience of radical contingency into that narrative machine – and out comes the illusion of necessity and meaning. It had to be, as A led to B. It is in the modern novel in its realist form that this essential function of narrative is conspicuously highlighted. And that may be one of the reasons for the success of this new literary genre, a success that, on a world-historical scale, is absolutely unparalleled. It should be said that, although the modern novel is full of warnings against confusing literature and life, against confusing the story world with the real world (e.g. Don Quixote [1605/1615], Northanger Abbey [1818], and Madame Bovary [1856], to name but the most obvious cases), the readers of this new genre, for all we know, have seldom fallen into this trap. They learnt very quickly that, in spite of the unmatched proximity of story world(s) and real world, the signs in this new kind of literature operated differently (and asked to be processed differently) from the signs of referential texts (although some confused readers will still be looking for 221b Baker Street, believing Sherlock Holmes lived there), since they referred to worlds of their own construction and therefore could, and should, be read (in the widest sense of the word) allegorically – meaning: as saying one thing, but meaning another, so that, for example, the castaway existence of Robinson Crusoe would be read not only as an exciting maritime yarn, but also as an illustration of, say, his isolation from God. But to this auto-referentiality of the modern novel in face of its realism I will return in the next subsection. First a word about how the modern novel presents the relationship between an individual looking for a meaningful and fulfilled existence on the one hand, and, on the other, a society that, ever-changing and expanding, refuses to be represented as an understandable totality. After that, a brief remark on how the modern novel accommodates non-realist fiction (because, although it has been the predominant, paradigmatic form for a long time, the realist modern novel is, of course, by no means the only one). To address the first point, this is how G. W. F. Hegel conceived of the modern novel, which he famously called the ‘modern middle-class epic’ (‘die moderne bürgerliche Epopöe’ 1975 [1935], 177) in his Lectures on Aesthetics (1818–1829):

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A novel in the modern sense of the word presupposes a world already prosaically ordered; then, on this ground and within its own sphere whether in connection with the liveliness of events or with individuals and their fate, it regains for poetry the right it had lost, so far as this is possible in view of that presupposition. Consequently, one of the commonest, and, for the novel, most appropriate, collisions is the conflict between the poetry of the heart and the opposing prose of circumstances and the accidents of external situation; this is a conflict resolved, whether comically or tragically, or alternatively it is settled either (i) when the characters originally opposed to the usual order of things learn to recognize in it what is substantive and really genuine, when they are reconciled with their circumstances and effective in them, or (ii) when the prosaic shape of what they do and achieve is stripped away, and therefore what they had before them as prose has its place taken by a reality akin and friendly to beauty and art. So far as presentation goes, the novel proper, like the epic, requires the entirety of an outlook on the world and life, the manifold materials and contents of which come into appearance within the individual event that is the centre of the whole (Hegel 1975 [1835], 1092–1093, with amendments by James Vigus, see Bode 2011, 48).

There are two sides to this project of mediating between the individual and society. One (external) is to make available in a broad social panorama the illusion of a totality of social experience that is no longer available to us in reality. The other (internal) is to explain an individual’s behaviour as the outcome of their thoughts and feelings, by linking causality and probability (or plausibility) – in the words of Friedrich von Blanckenburg (1774): If the vaunted principle of imitation has any meaning at all, it must be this: proceed in the connection, in the arrangement of your work just as nature proceeds in producing hers. It is the poet’s work to arrange characters and events in an order and to link them. They must be interconnected, given what we have assumed above, in such a way that they are reciprocally causes and effects, thus forming a whole in which all these parts are interlinked with each other and with the whole, so that the end or result of the work is a necessary effect of all that went before. The poet’s work must constitute a small world, as similar to the big world as it can be. (qtd. in Bode 2011, 49)

But this project founders exactly on the rock of the precept of verisimilitude. As Friedrich Theodor Vischer observed in 1865, acknowledging what the English had achieved in the field of the middle-class novel: The middle-class novel […] is the really normal species. […] The English, who have given the new literature its most meaningful impulses in all its forms, were also in the vanguard of this genre. Its originator, Richardson, is a pedant in description, a painstaking anatomist in psychological analysis, an abstract moralist; and yet in accordance with the requirements of his chosen artform he originated the realistic style with its sharp depictions, and pointed to the true goal of unfolding a portrait of souls in this style, giving that portrait as a focal point the pure ethical content of our educated, middle-class orders. (qtd. in Bode 2011, 51)

At the same time, Vischer questioned the position of the ‘hero’, or protagonist, in this kind of novel: the hero of such a novel, says Vischer,

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really now deserves the name only in an ironic sense, since he doesn’t actually act, but is essentially the more dependent centre that only processes, a centre in which the conditions of mundane life, the leading forces of the sum total of a period’s culture, the maxims of society, the effects of its relationships, converge (qtd. in Bode 2011, 51) –

more acted upon than acting, in other words.1 This idea of the novel as the middle-class epic of a decidedly prosaic world that lacked any transcendence and a totality that could be experienced, culminated in Georg Lukács’s (largely Hegelian) The Theory of the Novel, originally published in 1916. Consider the following key passages (qtd. from Lukács 2006 [1971]): [T]he novel form is, like no other, an expression of […] transcendental homelessness. (41) The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality. (56) Thus, the novel, in contrast to other genres whose existence resides within the finished form, appears as something in process of becoming. That is why, from the artistic view-point, the novel is the most hazardous genre, and why it has been described as only half an art by many who equate having a problematic with being problematic. (72–73) The outward form of the novel is essentially biographical. […] In the biographical form, the unfulfillable, sentimental striving both for the immediate unity of life and for a completely rounded architecture of the system is balanced and brought to rest: it is transformed into being. (77) [T]he life of the problematic individual. The contingent world and the problematic individual are realities which mutually determine one another. (78) The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God. The novel hero’s psychology is demonic; the objectivity of the novel is the mature man’s knowledge that meaning can never quite penetrate reality, but that, without meaning, reality would disintegrate into the nothingness of inessentiality. These are merely different ways of saying the same thing. (88)

All this makes sense with regard to the realist modern novel. What about its other varieties (↗ 0 Introduction; ↗ 3 Genres)? It is not unreasonable to assume that, once the paradigm of realist fiction has been established,2 non-realist fictions, too, can be drawn into the whirlpool of contingency-transformation as well; largely, it can be sup-

1 Or, in Adorno’s words: “The novel has long since, and certainly since the eighteenth century and Fielding’s Tom Jones, had as its true subject matter the conflict between living human beings and rigidified conditions.” (1991, 32) 2 And that realist paradigm, it should be noted, is itself by no means static, but a function: “The requirement of realism or probability is generally fulfilled when a narrative text’s forms of presentation coincide to a large extent with the conventional forms of perception of its readership. But since notions of ‘reality’ have changed quite fundamentally in the course of the last 300 years, as have the possibilities and forms of the novel, the problem of realism is the problem of a correlation between two variables. It is not the approximation of literature to a supposedly changeless reality that stands in question – realism is not a characteristic of some kind of ‘content’ of a text – but the relative proximity or distance, difference from or congruence with prevalent apprehensions of reality.” (Bode 2011, 46)

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posed, in a compensatory function: the wildest, most improbable adventure novels, Westerns, Space fiction etc. compensate the lack of adventure in everyday life, as do, I suppose, thriller, detective and espionage fiction; likewise, romances with a strong love interest as well as erotic and pornographic novels cater for what is not in reality, systematically violating the laws of probability; utopias and Science Fiction produce alternate realities that all too often, especially at a distance, resemble the society out of which they grew; historical novels, which may be realist but may also have varying doses of fantasy, provide an other which readers can either identify with or define themselves against; Gothic and horror novels, fantasy and mystery cover the underworld of what is repressed in a society governed by instrumental reason, etc. If these subgenres all too often have an escapist air about them, as if they tried to flee the core business of making sense of the world as it is, then the fact that they often serve up happy endings, otherwise increasingly eschewed by serious fiction, might be read as symptomatic (cf. Henry James: “The ‘ending’ of a novel is, for many persons, like that of a good dinner, a course of dessert and ices, and the artist in fiction is regarded as a sort of meddlesome doctor who forbids agreeable aftertastes.” 1986, 169). Either way, the modern novel provides models of (story) world making. And it does so in an unprecedented profusion and variety: like a new animal species that aggressively spreads out, the modern novel subdues and dominates every conceivable terrain. With regard to subject matter, there is nothing that does not fall into its domain. It is omnivorous, an omnium gatherum – it contains everything in its generic attempt to contain reality: a containment that is exercised and executed by narrative processing. That is why the modern novel – the most significant literary genre to have emerged since early modern times – is still evolving. Friedrich Schlegel’s ‘progressive Universalpoesie’ (‘progressive universal literature’) is the conceptual blueprint for this: a genre that is forever becoming, as it keeps up with (and often runs ahead of) a reality that will not keep still either. And just as it has no specific content (to repeat: it can contain everything), so it has no specific form either: it is absolutely protean, because the only requirement it heeds is to link (at least) two events in a way that is suggestive of a meaning it does not even have to deliver. Nothing more. That’s it. In the 1940s, M. M. Bakhtin commented on the novel as a quintessentially modern genre as follows: The study of the novel as a genre is distinguished by peculiar difficulties. This is due to the unique nature of the object itself: the novel is the sole genre that continues to develop, that is as yet uncompleted. The forces that define it as a genre are at work before our very eyes: the birth and development of the novel as a genre takes place in the full light of the historical day. The generic skeleton of the novel is still far from having hardened, and we cannot foresee all its plastic possibilities. (1981, 3) The novel is not merely one genre among other genres. Among genres long since completed and in part already dead, the novel is the only developing genre. It is the only genre that was born and nourished in a new era of world history and therefore it is deeply akin to that era, whereas the other major genres entered that era as already fixed forms, as an inheritance, and only now are

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they adapting themselves – some better, some worse – to the new conditions of their existence. (1981, 4) The novel is the only developing genre and therefore it reflects more deeply, more essentially, more sensitively and rapidly, reality itself in the process of its unfolding. Only that which is itself developing can comprehend development as a process. The novel has become the leading hero in the drama of literary development in our time precisely because it best of all reflects the tendencies of a new world still in the making; it is, after all, the only genre born of this new world and in total affinity with it. (1981, 7, emphasis added)

If then the modern novel has no specific content (it can contain everything) and no specific form (it is protean), how can we define its specificity, what makes it ‘tick’, in an abstract way? After that, we can return to the discontents about the English novel in the twentieth century and beyond.

3 Auto-Referentiality and Self-Reflexiveness, Historicized Michael Foucault’s The Order of Things famously opens with a hilariously funny quote from Jorge Luis Borges about a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’: [A]nimals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies. (Foucault 2005 [1989], xvi)

I was reminded of this when I checked the tables of content of some handbooks on British, Irish, Scottish, Canadian and U.S. American fiction like, for example, Brian W. Shaffer’s A Companion to British and Irish Novels 1945–2000 (2005): it has essays on “The Literary Response to the Second World War”, “English Dystopian Satire in Context”, “The Feminist Novel in the Wake of Virginia Woolf”, “Postmodern Fiction and the Rise of Critical Theory”, “The Novel and the End of the Empire”, “Fictions of Belonging: National Identity and the Novel in Ireland and Scotland”, but also about “Black British Interventions”, “The Literary Prize Phenomenon in Context” and “The English Heritage and Other Trends in the Novel at the Millennium”. I particularly like “and Other Trends”. Or take that of David Seed’s A Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction (2010): among its 16 essays in part I, it has “U.S. Modernism”, “The City Novel”, “The Western”, “Modern Gothic”, “Southern Fiction”, “Jewish American Fiction”, but also “Black Humour Fiction”, “Fiction of the Vietnam War” or “Trash Fiction”. It seems to me that these attempts to order material bespeak a profound confusion or Begriffslosigkeit, since, as in Borges’s example, they jumble all kinds of incommensurable categories (textual, extra-textual, generic, stylistic, bio-

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graphical, geographical, historical) – subgenres, subject matter, gender and ethnicity of the author, sometimes their sexual orientation, locale, region, stylistic devices, historical events, etc.: all are treated as equivalent criteria, equivalent groups or sets. And, of course, one could easily continue this, in the spirit of Borges, with ‘novels written on typewriters’, ‘novels recently discovered’ or ‘novels not included in this list’. If the modern novel has no specific subject matter and if it has no specific form either; and if it emerges, in the early eighteenth century, as a narrative genre that is at one and the same time realist but also auto-referential (which may be variously explained by Foucauldian, systems-theoretical, geisteswissenschaftliche, Marxist or whatever theorems), then it makes good sense, I think, to order its immense variety with regard to how this auto-referentiality is historically played out, how conspicuously it is foregrounded, to the degree even that a novel may become so self-reflexive that it seems to be primarily about itself (its conception, its writing process, how it came to be in the first place, etc.). It is true that even in the beginning there were novels that showed a refreshingly high degree of auto-referentiality or self-reflexivity (e.g. Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones [1749]) or that, while firmly rooted in the realist camp, through their open contradictions and obvious faultlines interestingly questioned the whole enterprise of reliable first-person narrative (e.g., Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe [1719] or Moll Flanders [1722]). All this was before Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) – a novel that so entertainingly critiqued all conventions of realist, autobiographical narration that for the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky it was the most typical of all novels, definitely foregrounding ‘art as device’ and placing the ‘How’ above the ‘What’. And while it is true that this tradition of foregrounded auto-referentiality has always been there (think of the different narrative strands in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [1818], the Chinese box-like embedded narratives in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights [1847] or the different levels of credibility and plausibility in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner [1824], to say nothing of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus [1836]), it is also true that in Britain this tradition has always been sidelined or marginalized by a stronger ‘Great Tradition’ of a comparatively ‘tame’ literary realism. No mistake: the closer you look at nineteenth-century novels like William M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847/48) or Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852/53), the more you see of the stitches and of the construction work that went into these fictions and fabrications. But all in all it is safe to say that there was little in the English tradition that prepared the British public for James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) (↗ 7 James Joyce, Ulysses) or, for that matter, in case it was not even allowed to read this novel, for Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925). And many more ‘experimental’ novelists of the second half of the twentieth century have been invariably accused of working under ‘continental’ (mostly meaning French) influences: Christine BrookeRose (Out [1964], Between [1966], Such [1968], Thru [1975]), Anthony Burgess (Napoleon Symphony [1974], Abba Abba [1977], Enderby’s Dark Lady [1984]), John Fowles

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(The French Lieutenant’s Woman [1969] [↗  15  John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman], Mantissa [1982], A Maggot [1985]) and, of course, Samuel Beckett (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable [1951–1958] [↗ 12 Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable]). However, if we look at it not quantitatively, but under the aspect of how the novel evolved technically, narratologically, and take the broader view of fiction in the English language, then it is possible to discern a certain pattern and to historicize auto-referentiality and self-reflexivity. This pattern has been conceptualized in different ways, for example by Wolfgang Iser in The Implied Reader (1974): looking into ‘patterns of communication’ (thus its subtitle) from Bunyan to Beckett, Iser found that the amount of Leerstellen or Unbestimmtheitsstellen (gaps of indeterminacy) in English language fiction increased significantly over the last 300 years, which means that readers today (if they expose themselves to Beckett) have to play a much more active role in the construction of the possible meanings of a fictional text than in days of old. Likewise, in A Theory of Narrative (1988 [1986]) Franz K. Stanzel found, filling his circle of narrative situations with examples from world literature of the last 300 years, that the lower half of his typological circle, registering forms of ‘non-narrative’ representations of thoughts and feelings (figural narrative situation; appearance of a reflector-character, but also interior monologue) is historically only completed, step by step, in the twentieth century.3 Or take this writer’s Ästhetik der Ambiguität (1988): he argued that there was, in the modern age, a marked tendency in the arts, in musical composition and in literature towards ever higher degrees of auto-referentiality, only that, in the field of literature, this trend was hampered by the fact that the building blocks of literature, viz. the elements of human language, in contradistinction to those of music and the arts, were always already meaningful and that, no matter how radically you re-contextualized the elements of language, you could never get rid of the primary, referential meaning of words – which was why absolute auto-referentiality was impossible in literature: what you got instead was ever higher degrees of ambiguity. I argued, too  – and this brings me back to the problem of realism (if it is a problem) – that historically fiction lagged behind in this evolutionary process (compared to, say, modernist poetry or abstract painting or absolute music) because all the parameters of traditional realist novels (character, time, place, plot, causality) worked against this tendency towards higher degrees of auto-referentiality in literary structures, so that these parameters would have to be questioned, modified, or relinquished before the full power of open semiosis could be unleashed. As long as

3 It is one of the unavoidable drawbacks of his typological circle that it cannot systematically represent unreliable narration, poly-perspectival narration, novels that are assemblages of various textual elements, or kinds of embedded narrative or meta-diegetic narratives (G. Genette) – but all these, too, would increasingly be found in the twentieth century.

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these parameters were still fully effective, the novel would still be auto-referential in the sense that you would recognize its form and the fact that it is a literary text calling for a special kind of decoding (you read it differently from a referential text, which means that you are looking for a literary meaning behind its literal one), but it would be harder to disengage yourself from the idea that it was primarily a mimetic text (somehow representing reality), and not a post-mimetic one (language art), let alone disengage yourself from identificatory or compensatory readings. Joyce’s Ulysses (↗ 7 James Joyce, Ulysses) is a good case in point (as would be the late novels of Henry James or Virginia Woolf’s fictional œuvre (↗ 9 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse): it could be regarded as the high point of naturalism – trying to get it exactly right, sparing the readers no detail, giving the acutest attention to everything and to how it is perceived, processed, textualized –, but at the same time this endeavour leads to an unmistakable foregrounding of narrative devices: the ‘How’ often upstages the ‘What’. Ulysses is so unmistakably a textual cosmos that it can only be adequately read as a self-contained textual machine that invites us to make sense of it all, sharing with extra-textual reality this one major aspect: that it can never be exhausted by any finite interpretation. This is, of course, not to say that self-reflexivity in the novel can only be achieved on the basis of a conspicuously high level of auto-referentiality. Not so. There are novels (e.g. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day [1989], Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger [1987] or Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac [1984]) that are pretty traditional realist narratives, but that nevertheless, since they stage a narrative quest for identity and truth (either first-person, or first-person mixed with third-person narration, or with figural passages), are highly self-reflexive. But that surely deserves a subsection of its own: what kind of terrain does the twentieth-century English novel present if it is mapped as a distinctly modern genre (in the sense sketched out so far)? What kind of relief does it show? Where are its highlands and peaks, as opposed to its flatlands and depressions?

4 Not So Bad, After All? Mapping the English Novel as a Distinctly Modern Genre While the radical dismantling or laying bare of narrative techniques performed in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) or in Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy (1951–1958) (↗ 12 Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable) may still be the gold standard of the avantgarde novel in the twentieth century (but then, records are set to be broken), there were also English novels from the 1960s onward that very daringly and intelligently questioned and creatively undermined the conventions of traditional story telling: I am thinking in particular of Christine Brooke-Rose (in addition to the four novels named above and collected in the Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus [1986],

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one could also mention her novels Amalgamemnon [1984], Xorandor [1986], Verbivore [1990] and Textermination [1991]), B. S. Johnson (House Mother Normal [1971] or his ‘book in a box’, The Unfortunates [1969] [↗ 16 B. S. Johnson, The Unfortunates]) and of one Martin Amis novel in particular, Time’s Arrow [1991]. Very often, a concern with reconstructing the past led to fiction that could, in the widest sense of the term, be called historiographic metafiction (↗ 3 Genres) (my prime examples would be Graham Swift’s Waterland [1983], Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor [1985] and Chatterton |1987], Maureen Duffy’s Capital [1975] and Londoners [1983], alongside Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger, both already mentioned, and Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters [1989]; Ishiguro’s gradual erosion of certainty and dawning of a new truth is, of course, excellently repeated in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending [2011]). When this concern with the past engages with traditional forms of the novel, as, for example, with the Victorian realist novel, then we get more or less postmodern neo-Victorian novels that, while mimicking and faking out-dated forms, highlight their own conventionality and foreground their contingency, while they also playfully indulge in their own pastiche (e.g. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman [1969] [↗  15  John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman], A. S. Byatt, Possession [1990] [↗ 22 A. S. Byatt, Possession]). When an interest in the past is coupled with an unreliable first-person narrator– as is already the case in the above mentioned Waterland and The Remains of the Day –, then the whole concept of historical truth may eventually be put into question, as happens in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) or, even more disquietingly, in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans (2000). At the same time, this questioning of the truth value of discourse may also be effected by radical switches in narrative situation or perspective (e.g. William Golding’s Pincher Martin [1956], or, more recently, Ian McEwan’s Atonement [2001] which, at the end, becomes disconcertingly self-reflexive) or through a self-undermining succession of letters by the same person (e.g. William Golding’s Rites of Passage [1980]), or through the addition of ever new takes on the same series of events (the four novels of Laurence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet [1957–1960] would be the best example of that, I think, while Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince [1973], in its combination of unreliable narration with poly-perspectival narrative, would be, to my mind, the most outstanding single novel example). And, of course, the splitting of a (supposed) primal first-person narrator into four different narrative instances that in the end converge into the text we have just read must be another pertinent example of a self-reflexivity that can do without any perceivable deviation from linguistic norm or realist paradigm (evidently, I am thinking of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook [1962] [↗ 14 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook]): in all these novels (with the exception of Pincher Martin), we are still in the realist paradigm (as is arguably the case in Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy [1991–1995]), but this paradigm is, as it were, eroded from within insofar as the truths it produces are fundamentally relativized by high-

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lighting the contingency of the origins of these discourses (in Pat Barker’s case only mildly so). Outside the realist paradigm, the importance of the influence of writing in the magic realist vein cannot possibly be overstated: following Angela Carter (The Magic Toyshop [1967], The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman [1972], The Passion of New Eve [1977], Nights at the Circus [1984] [↗ 19 Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus]) and Maureen Duffy (Love Child [1971]), it was Jeanette Winterson who foremost used non-realist story forms to investigate questions of gender identity and sexual orientation (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit [1985], Sexing the Cherry [1987] [↗ 21 Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry], The Passion [1989], Written on the Body [1992]), a project most convincingly continued in the writings of Ali Smith (e.g. How To Be Both [2014]). But it was probably the runaway success of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) that, more than any other novel, made non-realist fiction not only acceptable, but really palatable to the general British reading public (other Rushdie novels that should be mentioned in this context would be The Satanic Verses [1988] [↗ 20 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses], The Moor’s Last Sigh [1995], The Ground Beneath Her Feet [1999], The Enchantress of Florence [2008], Luka and the Fire of Life [2010]), although one should not forget Scottish and English contributions by Alasdair Gray (e.g. Lanark [1981]) or Lawrence Norfolk (e.g. Lemprière’s Dictionary [1991]). As everybody knows, fantasy writing flourishes, but it seldom reaches the sophistication and intertextual heights or philosophical and moral depths of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995–2000) (↗ 23 Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials), and much of present-day dystopian fiction, in spite of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), Doris Lessing’s five-volume Canopus in Argos: Archives series (1979–1983), Maggie Gee’s fabulous The Ice People (1998), Julian Barnes’s England, England (1998) or Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), somehow seems to lack the intellectual rigour or uncompromising and unflinching scepticism of its two towering predecessors, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) (↗ 10 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). In their own way, all these novels question ‘the official version’, or established ways of narrative world-making (for example, very subtly so in Kazuo Ishiguro’s hauntingly surrealist The Unconsoled [1995]), and thereby, especially when it comes to the pitfalls of first-person narrative – formerly the benchmark of authenticity and reliability – the very possibility to ever get it ‘right’. So, even a cursory glance at the landscape of twentieth-century English fiction offers the consoling news that, while the English novel of the last 120 years or so may not be in toto une recherche, as the French nouveaux romanciers would claim for themselves (but who ever expected that the sum total of the novelistic production of one entire country would march in unison to such avantgarde heights?), it does display not only a surprising variety but, in that variety, an astonishing degree of auto-referentiality and self-reflexivity – there is, and Henry James would have been delighted, evidently ‘a consciousness of itself’ behind it. At least since the late 1950s, the English novel has become discuta-

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ble. My storyline here is that, while English fiction largely ignored the radical modernist experiments of Joyce, Faulkner, Stein and Dos Passos, it simply bypassed that stage of literary history only to embrace more warmly its postmodernist offspring: the moderate, as the case may be, mildly amusing or mildly irritating, but anyway entertainingly interesting narrative production and narrative processing of story worlds that are no longer selbstverständlich, can no longer be taken for granted, and yield a narrative plausibility only at the price of their manifest constructedness – they flag out their scare quotes, they come in inverted commas. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it seems to me, the English novel has come into its own, having inherited modernism in the way that Wolfgang Welsch defines postmodernism in his Unsere postmoderne Moderne (‘Our Postmodern Modernity’), viz. as “the exoteric redeeming of a formerly esoteric twentieth-century modernism” (“die exoterische Einlösungsform der einst esoterischen Moderne des 20. Jahrhunderts” 1987, 6). One might say that by adapting itself to the postmodern condition, it has returned to its core business: Since its inception, the novel has displayed in an entertaining and interesting way ways of making sense of the world by telling stories and by telling them as fiction. The novel, it was said, is a genre that is forever in a state of becoming. That is a good safeguard against becoming obsolete. But it is no guarantee against becoming extinct. What are the chances of survival for a literary genre that is historically so closely linked to print culture, in an age that heavily seems to favour electronic media? This question deserves a new subsection, the final one: what is, with a nod to Sigmund Freud, the future of the illusion that by reading fictive stories you can make sense of it all because you expose yourself systematically not to certain contents, not even to established literary forms, but generally to possibilities of creating the semblance of necessity by narratively processing contingent data in such a way that they appear to be meaningful (even if the meaning they give is that nothing has meaning, which is always an option).

5 The Future of an Illusion As M. M. Bakhtin observed, the modern novel is the only major literary genre that was born in the modern age (a minor one would be the short story). It is a historical genre through and through, not only because its very modernity parades its own historicity, but also in the more general sense that as a genre it has a beginning, a middle and, presumably, an end. It would be naïve to assume otherwise. It has been argued that one of the reasons for the novel’s unparalleled success was that it took over the storytelling function from another, well-established literary genre, the epic. For a while epic poetry and the novel were still competing in the field of narratives, but after 1800 (at the latest) the battle of the books was decided and impressive epic long poems, such as William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1850),

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) or Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868–1869) are exceptions to the rule (in fact, so complete has been the triumph of the novel as the sole literary genre of long narrative that today when we hear ‘poetry’, we think lyric poetry). B. S. Johnson saw this very clearly and felt strongly about what he saw as another major sea change in the literary field, and of no smaller proportions – the loss of the novel’s storytelling function to other media, particularly the movies, in the twentieth century, which, he felt, was a liberation for the novel and the novelist alike, although most of his fellow novelists, he felt, preferred to stay in prison. Here is B. S. Johnson in his own words: It is a fact of crucial significance in the history of the novel this century that James Joyce opened the first cinema in Dublin in 1909. Joyce saw very early on that film must usurp some of the prerogatives which until then had belonged almost exclusively to the novelist. Film could tell a story more directly, in less time and with more concrete detail than a novel; certain aspects of character could be more easily delineated and kept constantly before the audience (for example, physical characteristics like a limp, a scar, particular ugliness or beauty); no novelist’s description of a battle squadron at sea in a gale could really hope to compete with that in a well-shot film; and why should anyone who simply wanted to be told a story spend all his spare time for a week or weeks reading a book when he could experience the same thing in a version in some ways superior at his local cinema in only one evening? It was not the first time that storytelling had passed from one medium to another. Originally it had been the chief concern of poetry, and long narrative poems were bestsellers right up to the works of Walter Scott and Byron. The latter supplanted the former in the favours of the public, and Scott adroitly turned from narrative poems to narrative novels and continued to be a bestseller. You will agree it would be perversely anachronistic to write a long narrative poem today? People still do, of course; but such works are rarely published, and, if they are, the writer is thought of as a literary flat-earther. […] In some ways the history of the novel in the twentieth century has seen large areas of the old territory of the novelist increasingly taken over by other media, until the only thing the novelist can with any certainty call exclusively his own is the inside of his own skull: and that is what he should be exploring, rather than anachronistically fighting a battle he is bound to lose. […] What happens is nothing like as important as how it is written. Nathalie Sarraute once described literature as a relay race, the baton of renovation passing from one generation to another. The vast majority of British novelists has dropped the baton, stood still, turned back, or not even realized that there is a race. (1977, 151, 152, 167).

B. S. Johnson had other strong opinions that one does not necessarily have to share (as, for example, that he wrote novels that were no fiction) and one could easily take exception to his view that Ulysses did not tell stories. But he had a point about the migrating function of storytelling: It would be absurd to claim that in the twentieth century and beyond the novel is the only player in the field – of course, it is not. The different electronic media and genres (movies, video, DVDs, hypertexts, interactive fiction, alternative reality games, game play in general) are very strong contenders and certainly better suited than the printed and bound book to stage multi-linear

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‘future narratives’ (cf. the five-volume book series Narrating Futures, 2013, especially vols. 3 and 4). However, it is not merely defensive to state that a considerable number of these non-print narratives are actually based on novels (e.g. Game of Thrones, House of Cards) or are later converted into text-based spin-offs. The situation is a give-and-take, win-win, mutually re-invigorating, rather than zero-sum game, and there is no reason to be alarmist about the future of the novel. It is true that many of the more interesting text-based narratives that operate with nodes (situations that allow for more than one continuation) rather than with events as their primal units are not of British origin (e.g. Edward Packard, The Cave of Time [1979], Anson Montgomery, The Golden Path Volume One: Into the Hollow Earth [2008], Svend Åge Madsen, Days with Diam or Life at Night [1972], Jacques Roubaud, The Great Fire of London [2005], Stuart Mouthrop, Hegirascope [1995] and Pax [2009], Andrew Plotkin, Spider and Web [1998]). And it is also true that the most important examples of fiction that engages with the physicality of the novel as book (e.g. Chris Ware, Building Stories [2012], Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves [2000], Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes [2010], Ronald Johnson, Radi OS [1977], J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst, S. [2013], Marc Saporta, Composition No. 1 [1961/63; the precursor to B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates]) are not British either.4 But the question is whether B. S. Johnson’s idea of storytelling is not too narrowly defined. It can be shown that, even in the beginning, the modern novel did not provide prepackaged meanings for readers to unwrap (let alone one prepackaged meaning), but that it relied on thematizing possibilities of the production of sense and meaning. And if the storytelling function is now shared with other media and genres, that does not necessarily mean that it is taken away from the novel (just like photography did not steal from painting its capacity to depict something). So far, the exchange has been mutually beneficial – all sides have profited. It has been argued (cf. Bode 2011, 255–261) that each novel individually can be regarded as its own singular allegory of telling, as one particular and specific instance of a unique algorithm of transforming contingency into (the semblance of) narrative necessity. Narratives are meaning-producing machines. The form of stories helps us to make sense of the world. The novel is still one of the prime players in this field of fictional storytelling, not the only one, mind you, but a powerful one. One should, of course, always heed Paul Gascoigne’s unsurpassable dictum, “I never make predictions and I never will” (qtd. in Bode 2013, 87). In the same spirit it is, I think, permissible to say: the modern novel will prevail as long as the conditions that make it possible continue to exist. In other words:

4 The exception being Where You Are/Where Are You: A Book of Maps that Will Leave you Completely Lost (2013), published by Visual Editions, a London-based book publisher that also re-issued Saporta’s Composition No. 1 and is also responsible for the technically challenging production of Foer’s die-cut, ‘erasure’ book Tree of Codes.

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It was to that end (so one version of the story goes) – to make sense of epochal, new experiences, to thematize the experience of innovation and novelty – that the modern novel arose; but it isn’t coming to an end, because this still persists: the condition of its beginning. (Bode 2011, 261)

That guarantees for its continuity. Ezra Pound is said to have said that poetry is news that stays news. Likewise, the novel can prevail as long as it stays novel. That guarantees for its discontinuity. That combination – continuity through discontinuity – has been its success formula right from its inception. But it is, of course, an open-ended story. No dessert.

6 Bibliography 6.1 Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. “The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel.” Notes to Literature. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. 30–36. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bode, Christoph. Ästhetik der Ambiguität: Zu Funktion und Bedeutung von Mehrdeutigkeit in der Literatur der Moderne. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988. Bode, Christoph. “Der Blick von außen: Bemerkungen zum Ort der literarischen Moderne.” Die Zwanziger Jahre in Großbritannien: Literatur und Gesellschaft einer spannungsreichen Dekade. Ed. Christoph Bode and Ulrich Broich. Tübingen: Narr, 1998. 239–266. Bode, Christoph. The Novel: An Introduction. Malden/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Bode, Christoph, and Rainer Dietrich. Future Narratives: Theory, Poetics, and Media-historical Moment. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2013. Conrad, Peter. “A Premature Obituary.” [Review of Hugh Kenner 1988]. Times Literary Supplement September 9–15 (1988): 981. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. London/New York: Routledge, 2005 [1989]. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975 [1818–1829, published posthumously 1835]. Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns in Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to T. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. James, Henry. The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and the Practice of Fiction. Ed. William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Johnson, Brian Stanley. “Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?” The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Fiction. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977. 151–168. Kenner, Hugh. A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers. New York: Knopf, 1988. Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. London: Merlin, 2006 [1971]. Meifert-Menhard, Felicitas. Playing the Text, Performing the Future: Future Narratives in Print and Digiture. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2013. Narrating Futures. A five-volume book series. Ed. Christoph Bode. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2013. (Vol. 1: Christoph Bode, Rainer Dietrich. Future Narratives: Theory, Poetics, and Media-Historical Moment; vol. 2: Felicitas Meifert. Playing the Text, Performing the Future: Future Narratives in Print and Digiture; vol. 3: Sabine Schenk. Running and Clicking: Future

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Narratives in Film; vol. 4: Sebastian Domsch. Storyplaying: Agency and Narrative in Video Games; vol. 5: Kathleen Singles. Alternate History: Playing with Contingency and Necessity). Seed, David, ed. A Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction. Malden/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Shaffer, Brian W., ed. A Companion to the British and Irish Novel. Malden/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005. Shklovsky, Viktor. “A Parodying Novel: Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.” Laurence Sterne: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. John Traugott. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968. 66–89. Stanzel, Franz K. A Theory of Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 [1986]. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974 [1957]. Welsch, Wolfgang. Unsere postmoderne Moderne. Weinheim: VCH, 1987. Woolf, Virgina. “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” Collected Essays. Vol. 1. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth, 1971 [1924]. 319–337. Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction.” Collected Essays. Vol. 2. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth, 1972 [1925]. 103–110.

6.2 Further Reading Berthoud, Ella, and Susan Elderkin. The Novel Cure: An A to Z of Literary Remedies. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2015. Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge/London: Belknap Press, 2009. Caserio, Robert L., and Clement Hawes, eds. The Cambridge History of the English Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. [Especially the essays by Patricia Waugh, Philip Tew, and Peter Childs]. Wellershoff, Dieter. Der Roman und die Erfahrbarkeit der Welt. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2010.

Alissa G. Karl

2 The Novel in the Economy, 1900 to the Present Abstract: This chapter offers an overview of some of the ways in which the British novel since 1900 might be contextualized within, and read alongside, the dramatic economic changes of the past century. The first section examines the status of the novel within twentieth century circuits of production and consumption. The second is a thematic exploration of how novels have represented climates of economic risk and instances of economic crisis, given the prominence of such crises in the early and late century. A third section considers the shared ideological climate inhabited by novels and economic thinkers, and attends to how novels might replicate or critique the larger world views associated with the twentieth century’s successive economic paradigms (those of neoclassical, Keynesian, welfare capitalist, and neoliberal economics). Overall, this chapter aims to shed light upon how the British novel’s history and forms are inseparable from the economic ideas and upheavals of the past century. Keywords: Economics, commodification, economic crisis, economic ideology, British novel and capitalism This chapter situates the production, circulation and reception of the British novel since 1900 within the vast economic changes of the past century, including developments in consumer culture and mass markets; economic risk, shocks and crises; and dominant paradigms of economic analysis on the part of economic elites like policy makers and theorists. This chapter aims to demonstrate the broad possibilities for conceiving of the British novel since 1900 as underpinned and influenced by, but also in many cases reflective upon and at times critical of, major economic ideas and practices. Such a claim is not without precedent: the appearance and evolution of the novel genre as a whole, and of the British novel in particular, has been linked to the inception and development of capitalist markets and class structures. Ian Watt’s well-known study The Rise of the Novel (1957), for instance, distinguishes the genre based upon its individuation of character – a trait imminently connected to the rise of liberal capitalism. In The Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukács links the development of the “problematic individual” in the novel (Lukács 1971, 78) with that of capitalism – both the novel and capitalism, he suggests, share themes of individual striving, class mobility and constant social and economic change. And in The Historical Novel (1983), Lukács makes a case for how the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historical novel’s grounding in socioeconomic conditions consolidates national and class consciousness among its readership. More recently, novel scholars like Franco Moretti and Nancy Armstrong have detailed the ways in which eighteenth- and nineDOI 10.1515/9783110369489-003

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teenth-century British novels engender notions of individuality and personhood that are in line with the dominant social contract, and particularly that of a growing and increasingly influential bourgeois class. To say that the twentieth-century novel is a genre enmeshed in its economic conditions, then, is to follow a well-established scholarly thread. However, the specific conditions of twentieth-century capitalism are not the same as those of liberal, classical, and first-wave industrial capitalism that the above-named scholars have linked to the novel’s historical inception and rise. This chapter offers an overview of some of the ways in which the novel since 1900 might be contextualized within, and read alongside, twentieth-century economic history. While each of the sections that follows examines a prominent economic valence of the twentieth-century British novel, each also presents a different methodological focus for analyzing the relationship between novels and economics  – and indeed, between literature and economics more generally. The first section, on novels and the consumer capitalist marketplace, examines the novel and our presumptions about it within its conditions of production and circulation. The second section is a largely thematic exploration of how twentieth-century British novels have represented climates of economic risk and instances of economic crisis. The third and final section considers the shared ideological climate inhabited by novels and economic thinkers, and attends to the ways in which novels – through thematic treatment, formal construction, or other means  – might replicate or critique the larger world views associated with successive economic paradigms of the twentieth century (those of neoclassical, Keynesian, welfare capitalist, and neoliberal economics). As such, this chapter offers no single argument for how we ought to read or situate the novel in twentieth century economic history; rather, it surveys a field of possibilities to shed light upon how the novel’s history and forms are inseparable from the economic ideas and upheavals of that century.

1 Consumer Capitalism, Commodification and the Marketplace 1.1 Modernism We might reasonably begin with the modernist movement of the early twentieth century, in which the now-legendary turn toward experimentation and difficulty in the novel and other genres and media has been read as a holdout against the forces of market commodification. Crucially, modernism coincides with what has been called the “second industrial revolution” in Britain – so-called due to the increased mass production of ever more affordable consumer products and small luxuries for the middle and working classes, and despite the traumatic interruption of World War I

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and the economic instability and cyclical unemployment that followed in the 1920s and 1930s (Dewey 1997, 86; Hobsbawm 1999, 185–203). British consumers also experienced mass media, particularly in the form of film and advertising, in unprecedented ways. The bustling, burgeoning consumer marketplace is perhaps most famously captured in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), a novel in which every principal character (and many minor ones) goes shopping. While Woolf’s treatment of the consumer landscape in Mrs. Dalloway has been read by some critics as celebratory and as investigating new possibilities for social interaction (Wicke 1996; Tratner 2001), a long-standing scholarly account deemed modernism dismissive of and even hostile to the mass consumer and media cultures in which it was situated. Such perceived resistance to the consumer currents of their day in large part earned modernism its counter-cultural reputation, and indeed, this profile of resistant, formally difficult literary works and artworks was part of the very definition of modernism when the parameters of the literary period were initially staked after World War  II. More specifically for our purposes here, the famed difficulty of the British modernist novel – from the indeterminate impressionism of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899/1902) (↗  6  Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness) to the aggression of Wyndham Lewis’s doorstopper Tarr (1918), from Virginia Woolf’s endless sentences and hairpin shifts in perspective to the baffling combination of narrative intimacy and estrangement in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1916) – was long considered a tactic of resistance to market forces that would commodify the novel. As the story went, modernist writers deliberately avoided the novel’s easy consumption by the reading populace in the manner of fast fashions or cinema; they wanted to protect their works from subsumption by the market – that is, the governance of all production and circulation by capitalist markets and protocols. There are many reasons, however, why the view of modernism as hostile to and fearful of mass markets has been tempered, and two that are of particular interest here. The first is that modernist novels reached readers through a range of publication strategies. It bears remembering that the novel has since its inception been reliant upon all kinds of commercial entities to circulate and reach readers: booksellers, publishing technologies organized by commercial interests, periodicals funded by advertisements. And given their length, novels have always quite simply needed the commercial market to come into print in the first place. However, a survey of how modernist novelists actually published reveals a variety of arrangements, from the do-it-yourself to the mass commercial. Along with her husband, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf owned and ran the Hogarth Press through which she published her own work and that of many other writers, including T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Clive Bell, economist John Maynard Keynes and political theorist J. A. Hobson. Like many of his contemporaries, Ford Madox Ford published regularly in literary magazines and periodicals (including a segment of what was to become The Good Soldier in the short-lived but highly influential  – and polemical  – magazine BLAST in 1914), and was himself editor of the literary and arts journal The English Review. D. H. Lawrence

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appeared in Ford’s English Review, yet his novel publishing career gathered momentum when he was befriended by influential editor Edward Garnett of Duckworth publishing. When James Joyce had difficulty securing a publication agreement for Ulysses (1922) (↗ 7 James Joyce, Ulysses) due to accusations of the novel’s obscenity, the first edition of the novel was privately published by American bookseller Sylvia Beach out of her Paris bookstore, Shakespeare and Company (Beach 1959). And the account of how Jean Rhys altered the ending Voyage in the Dark (1934) at the request of editor Michael Sadlier of the publisher Constable – who suggested that readers might like a more positive conclusion – has become modernist legend (Savory 2009, 53). Even a brief and partial survey reveals the diverse arrangements that modernist novelists undertook to reach their readers, and numerous scholars have demonstrated how these authors marketed a “refined, non-commercial, high-art aesthetic”  – but marketed an aesthetic nonetheless (Outka 2009, 11). Responding to critic Terry Eagleton’s characterization of modernism as “a strategy whereby the work of art resists commodification [and] holds out by the skin of its teeth” to remain autonomous from the market, Lawrence Rainey contends that just the opposite would be a more accurate account: that modernism […] is a strategy whereby the work of art invites and solicits its commodification, but does so in such a way that it becomes a commodity of a special sort, one that is temporarily exempted from the exigencies of immediate consumption prevalent within the larger cultural economy, and instead is integrated into a different economic circuit of patronage, collecting, speculation and investment. (1998, 3)

Rainey’s account of the private publication of Joyce’s Ulysses, for instance, suggests that while Joyce and Beach contended with “philistine publishers, and a hostile and indifferent public”, they marketed the first edition of the novel such that it acquired the status of a rare collectable, and even a financial investment (1998, 42, 44). And Joyce Wexler documents how both James Joyce’s and D. H. Lawrence’s works became attractive to publishers precisely because the controversy that they courted promised higher sales: when publishers made the argument in the courts that works like Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover ought to circulate freely because “artistic necessity justified obscenity”, they asserted that these novels were distinctive works of art; when they sought to publish the books because their reputations as erotica would sell, as Wexler proves, they treated novels like any other commodity on the market (Wexler 1996, 91–92). Similarly, Edward Comentale has argued that modernists were anxious about and thus engrossed in the markets of their time, their texts “preoccupied with their own production and consumption”  – even though some, like Virginia Woolf, as Comentale demonstrates, were at times disdainful of the “dirty public sphere” (2004, 68, 49). John Xiros Cooper goes further, linking modernist writers and market society not by their love-hate relationship, but as two iterations of what he claims is a shared ethos of constant innovation, revolution, and chafing against tradition and restraint. “Capitalism, as it is embodied in market society”, Cooper claims, “emerges from the same gene pool as modernism” (2004, 23). For Cooper, modernism models

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the so-called “creative destruction” of advanced market economies, where old ways of doing things are continually overturned; the very experimental style and method that others read as resistance to the commodification in the market, then, is for Cooper an embodiment of capitalist ethos itself. Such critical perspectives bring us to the second reason why our account of modernism’s engagements with the mass market has broadened – that reason being that the modernist novel is increasingly read as a negotiation or reckoning with the market, and not simply a rejection of it. In a well-known book that documents this version of modernism-as-market resistance, Andreas Huyssen is critical of what he calls a “paranoid view” of modernism as a “reaction formation” against the mass market. Huyssen instead remarks that “the realities of modern life and the expansion of mass culture throughout the social realm are always already inscribed into the articulation of aesthetic modernism. Mass culture has always been the hidden subtext of the modernist project” (1986, 53, 47). And indeed, much scholarship over the past two or so decades has complicated and broadened our sense of how modernist novelists represented mass markets and commercial culture – as themes, or through formal and stylistic tropes. Jennifer Wicke, for example, positions Woolf’s aforementioned Mrs. Dalloway alongside the work of her friend and contemporary – and perhaps the twentieth century’s most famous economist – John Maynard Keynes as an exploration of the very concept of the market, and of what it means for the novelist’s task of representation. Wicke writes: Like consciousness, the market has come to defy description in that it is no longer equitable with realist or entirely rationalist models of representation. This puts the modernist economic theorist like Keynes in the position the modernist writer like Woolf also confronts – a position where the imperative is to represent what is acknowledged beforehand to be resistant to representation, at least by traditional (realist, rationalist) means (1996, 117).

Carey Mickalites (2012) argues that authors like Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford negotiate the risks and potential rewards of the modern financialized economy in their novels, that they are concerned with their own fiscal solvency as authors (Conrad), and with how a culture of financial speculation replaces older, feudal and property-based forms of social hierarchy (Ford). Elizabeth Outka reads E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) as a novel that uses real estate in the form of the actual house, Howards End, to negotiate the transition from a rural, agricultural economy to an urban, commercialized one (2009, 71). Similarly, we might read the novels of D. H. Lawrence as pervasively concerned with the impact of modern market and industrial culture on rural subjects, and on the mindset of the individual subject more generally.

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1.2 The Middlebrow: Novels of the Market? The discussion above in many ways implies a rift between the writer (and their work) and the marketplace in which they are situated – that is, to even ask why and how modernists dealt with the market assumes a definitional distinction between art and commerce. The preceding discussion of recent scholarship has aimed to complicate such a model, and another site in which the interface of modernist writer and the market becomes more intricate is that of middlebrow modernism – that is, literature that is more outwardly amenable to popular trends, reader responses, and marketability. As Melba Cuddy-Keane notes, the terminology of the ‘brows’ becomes prominent at the turn of the twentieth century (2003, 1), and denotes differentiations in readership, class status, and importantly for our purposes here, the relationship of the work and its writer to the marketplace. The middlebrow has predictably been criticized – in the modernist period, and throughout the century – for its susceptibility to publisher, editor, and market influence. In the modernist period especially, women writers were most frequently associated with the middlebrow and accused of sentimentalizing and domesticating their literature. Prolific and commercially successful British novelists like Rose Macaulay, Evelyn Waugh (a male novelist), Rosamond Lehmann, “readable modernist” May Sinclair (see Jones 2013), Winifred Holtby, and Storm Jameson rarely figure in accounts of British modernism (with perhaps the exception of Waugh and, more recently, Sinclair); as two recent commentators note, in the early twentieth century climate of novelistic experimentation, middlebrow writers often focus on literary features that cater to “middlebrow tastes [such as] sentiment and characterization” (Sullivan and Blanch 2011, 4). Sullivan and Blanch thus allude to how certain features of the novel – narrative style, temporal structure, character, and so on – are indexed to the literary marketplace itself, such that a novel with a realist structure and seemingly empathetic characterization is coded as more marketable and in some cases less artful than a less ‘readable’ counterpart. Indeed, in their examination of early twentieth century British novels by women, Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei point out that interior design (a surprisingly common pursuit in so-called ‘middlebrow’ novels of the period) is often an analogue for the middlebrow novel: if interior design’s “association with the new mass marketing of domestic commodities directed at women banished it from the rarefied circle of the higher arts of painting, sculpture and architecture”, then so too might the middlebrow novel’s very marketability “seal[…] its categorization as […] ‘merely’ craft” (Briganti and Mezei 2011, 156). The very classification of the ‘middlebrow’ therefore reminds us that the novel is always an economic entity whose components are correlated to the literary markets in which they circulate – whether they be classed as ‘high-’ or ‘middle-’ brow art. Though this discussion of the early twentieth-century middlebrow novels has been exceedingly brief, it clarifies a few key points about the literary marketplace of the period. First, it demonstrates its diversity and breadth. Second, and perhaps more critically, we realize that the commercial

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coding of the middlebrow novel and its forms ensures the ‘experimental’ or ‘resistant’ coding of less ‘readable’ novelistic works and thus exposes the latter’s status as prestige commodities themselves. In other words, the ‘highbrow’ requires the ‘middlebrow’ in order to distinguish its own features, and the literary marketplace is the site where this occurs.

1.3 Literary Prizes and the Contemporary Novel as Commodity The terminology of the ‘middlebrow’ is especially useful for examining the relationship of more recent and contemporary British novels to the literary marketplace. It may be even harder to distinguish middlebrow from so-called ‘literary fiction’ today precisely because so many of the markers of the literary are enmeshed in the markets of publishing and marketing. Literary prizes – here we will look specifically at the Man Booker Prize – provide a case study that exposes the substantial reciprocity of creative and monetary capital today. Indeed, given prize culture’s combination of “respect for culture with entrepreneurialism”, Beth Driscoll argues that “the literary prize is a standard-bearer for the new literary middlebrow” (2014, 131, 151). In other words, where earlier in the century the term ‘middlebrow’ might have indicated a novel’s use of certain literary forms to appeal to readers, today it might be said to apply to the circulation and appraisal of the novel more generally – which always takes place within a market that makes use of cultural, intellectual and creative values part of an enterprising capitalism. The award now known as the Man Booker Prize (referenced here as simply the Booker) was launched in 1969, and annually recognizes the “very best novel” (Man Booker Prize 2016) published in the UK from a writer who is a British, Commonwealth, South African, Irish, or Pakistani citizen – basically, “any country which was within the British Empire one hundred years ago” (Massie, qtd. in Pitchford 2000, 698). The prize takes part in what James English calls an “economy of spectacle” (2005, 34): the run-up to the award is followed closely in the media, bookmakers take bets on the prize winner, and the gala award dinner is broadcast on television. With an award of £50,000 for the winner and sales of the shortlisted books increasing many times over, the Booker organization is right in claiming that the award “has the power to transform the fortunes of authors and publishers” (Man Booker Prize 2016). Indeed, the massive boon in sales is a key component of the Booker Prize’s own self-presentation; consider their own statement about Marlon James’ winning 2015 novel: A Brief History of Seven Killings went straight to number one on iTunes and number three in the Amazon charts, selling 12,466 physical books in the week following the announcement, a 933 % increase on the previous week. Independent publisher Oneworld issued an immediate reprint of 182,500 copies and last month released a 25,000 print run of a special hardback edition of the book. To date, over 260,000 print copies of the book have been sold internationally, and foreign language rights have been sold to 16 markets. (Man Booker Prize 2016)

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Given the history of the prize, it is not surprising that the Booker publicity machine conflates ‘best’ and ‘bestselling’. The Booker Prize was initially founded  – and funded – by Booker PLC, a British colonial agribusiness with its roots in African sugar plantations in the nineteenth century, but which moved into the publishing business in the 1960s when it bought up copyrights to popular British novelists such as Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie (Huggan 1997; Levin 2014; Pitchford 2000). As Stephen Levin puts it, a “transition moment in the history of the Booker McConnell company, from colonial enterprise to purveyor of literary prestige, served to establish an enduring connection between the Booker Prize and the emergent culture of post-1960s global capital” (2014, 469). Indeed, the UK today has the most literary awards backed by corporate sponsors, while other Anglophone countries see more awards backed by the state or the academy (Driscoll 2014, 131). The case of the Booker demonstrates the deep reciprocity between the contemporary British novelistic and commercial scenes. While the prize is a financial windfall and “spik[e] of adrenaline” (Driscoll 2014, 119) for publishers, finalist authors and winners (for more specific figures see Squires 2007), its consecration of literary value likewise bestows cultural prestige upon its corporate backers. Indeed, while the actual sponsorship of the prize changed hands from Booker McConnell to investment management firm the Man Group in 2002, ‘Booker’ was maintained in the prize’s name, indicating the cultural reputation that the Prize has now attained on its own. The Booker makes it clear that the commercialization of the novel is a two-way street: it is not only the case that novels are groomed and circulated as commodities, but also and just as critically that the cultural standing of the novel has become an essential value in the world of commerce. It has also been argued that the prevalence of commercial novel prize culture in Britain  – not just of the Booker, but of others like the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction (yes, the Bailey’s of liqueur fame; formerly, this award was sponsored by mobile phone operator Orange) and the Costa Book Award (sponsored by the coffee company, formerly known as the Whitbread Book Award after the hospitality company of the same name) – has made its mark on the form and style of the novel. 1994 Booker winner How Late It Was, How Late by Scottish author James Kelman was deeply controversial, primarily for the novel’s extensive use of profanity: the novel is largely a stream-of-consciousness narrative of an ex-convict, written entirely in Glaswegian Scots dialect. As Nicola Pitchford summarizes it, “[d]espite winning the most prestigious literary award in Britain, the novel was denounced as ‘monotonously foul-mouthed,’ ‘unreadably bad,’ ‘indigestible,’ ‘crap,’ and as ‘just a drunken Scotsman railing against bureaucracy’ – and much of this came from one of the Booker judges, Rabbi Julia Neuberger” (2000, 701; original emphasis). Kelman’s detractors attacked not just his liberal use of expletive, but also his non-standard dialect on the basis that the latter made the book inaccessible to the average reader. While the charge that Kelman’s methods are somehow unliterary is deeply ironic given the novel’s fairly explicit formal indebtedness to modernist heavyweights like Joyce and

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Woolf, it also points to the prevalence of realist style in the roster of Booker shortlisters and winners. Writer Stuart Home is even more blunt, declaring: “Literature today functions as a giant Ponzi scheme”, with prizes like the Booker and Nobel awarding the most “conventional” novels that are “the most favored and privileged cultural vehicle[s] of bourgeois ideology” (Home 2012, 72). Though bombastic in tone, Home’s critique finds affinity with theories of the novel in earlier centuries (mentioned earlier in this chapter). Home goes a step further to claim that the contemporary novel’s alignment with commercial culture via the prize system is stunting innovation in the genre: “Today, those who insist that painting should be realistic and representational are treated as a laughing stock. Sadly the same is not true of those who demand realism […] and naturalism in fiction” (2012, 77). But while Home and others claim that prize culture limits the novel’s stylistic and formal evolution, the Kelman controversy makes it clear how such long-standing debates about the genre’s role, style, and form (To what extent should a novel be ‘readable’? What are its proper subjects? In what mode should it represent them?) have become part of the commercial process itself. In the Kelman case, one wonders about the degree to which dissent was emphasized to generate publicity and interest in the prize. For James English, the prevalence of such scandals is not so much evidence of writers resisting the yoke of a narrowly-defined, commercially-sanctioned novelistic style, but rather an ironic “gesture toward that imaginary separate space on which the ideology and institution of modern art have been predicated, the space outside all economies, where artistic genius is a gift rather than a form of capital” – a gesture, however, that ultimately recognizes “that this ‘world apart’ is a matter of collective make-believe” (2005, 215). In other words, it is culturally important to maintain the sense of an artistic/economic divide, even though such a divide really does not exist. Sarah Brouillette (2014) goes further, arguing that cultural and artistic values in fact play a crucial role in British commercial culture today, though in a way that serves the priorities of the latter; for her, since the years of New Labour in the 1990s and 2000s, mainstream commercial culture has monetized creativity in such a way that artistic values are now part of capitalist enterprise and work culture, a creative economy in which the rule-breaking-yet-self-reflective artist becomes a model employee and entrepreneur, and where realizing the economic value of creative and cultural works are prominent state and corporate initiatives. So while Richard Todd’s assertion that the so-called ‘post-Booker’ period from 1969 onwards has witnessed the growing commercialization of literature, where novelists have “worked in an increasingly intensified atmosphere, one in which both the promotion and reception of serious literary fiction have become steadily more consumer oriented” (1996, 128), may be accurate, it might also be augmented. It is not merely the case that authors and their novels are ever-more market-conscious. Rather, the case of the Booker Prize reveals a new status for the novel and other artistic productions: not just as products for sale, but as a source of cultural and intellectual capital of value to the marketplace and its commercial entities.

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2 The Novel and Economic Crisis In his 1932 satirical novel Black Mischief, Evelyn Waugh creates the fictional island of Azania off the coast of Africa, whose Oxford-educated leader is determined to rapidly modernize his country. One of the Emperor’s initiatives is the creation of a new national currency. But the new national bank that issues the notes, the Emperor admits, “actually […] is not quite a bank at all. It is a little thing I did myself” (Waugh 2002 [1932], 203). Unbacked by gold, silver, economic output or public faith, the bank notes are part of Waugh’s general spoof of pretentions to modernity; but they are also a response to the actual British currency crisis of 1931, during which the Pound was removed from the gold standard. Thus one kind of fiction (the novel) addresses the fictionality of another kind of writing (currency) in the midst of a national economic crisis. Indeed, while the modernist period discussed in the previous section and during which Waugh was writing is duly celebrated as a period of novelistic innovation, the decades between the turn of the century and World War II were also a long, tumultuous period economically: From war to austerity, currency crisis and cyclical unemployment to global depression, the modernist period is also distinctly an age of deep economic uncertainty, instability, and crisis. Financial risk, and the threat and actuality of economic and financial crises are not specific to the twentieth century, but the ways in which the novel engages them formally and thematically are notable for any historical account of the genre. It goes without saying that through the entirety of the twentieth century the British economy has been deeply embedded in – and in many cases at the center of – global networks of finance, trade, labor and communications. The British economy has led the way in financialization – that is, economic activity centered upon financial instruments and means of accumulation, including lending and credit, insurance, speculation (through, say, stocks, bonds and futures contracts), foreign exchange transactions, and the prioritization of shareholder value over other kinds of commercial growth – for centuries. Because financial accumulation is often embedded within global economic networks (in part a consequence of financial activity itself, and also of Britain’s imperial activities), it has left the British economy vulnerable to shocks and changes all over the world. At the outset of the century with which we are concerned here, economic globalization was, as two historians put it, “deep and durable”: vast networks of cable, telegraphs, steamships and railways “supported huge flows of capital, technology, people, news, and ideas which, in turn, led to a high degree of convergence among markets, merchants and bankers” (Winseck and Pike 2007, 1–2). And with convergence comes risk. David Harvey has argued that the “spatial integration” that made “the whole continent [of Europe] vulnerable to simultaneous crisis formation” (1990, 261) became a central concern of writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and “seemed to come to a head just before the First World War” (1990, 266). Like Harvey, Fredric Jameson claims that the turn-of the-century’s global web of economic interdependence is the key “dilemma [and] formal

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contradiction that modernism seeks to solve” (1990, 51), and he includes writers like E. M. Forster (↗ 8 E. M. Forster, A Passage to India), Joseph Conrad (↗ 6 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness) and Virginia Woolf (↗ 9 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse) as part of this endeavor. For Jameson (1997), modernist writers thus created forms of representation that were appropriate to an ever-more interconnected, and as such seemingly unstable, economic world. Paul Crosthwaite has demonstrated how this early twentieth-century climate of systemic risk preoccupies modernist novels, due not only to the “growing state of socioeconomic interdependence” (2010, 341) that is registered in their experiments with temporality and perspective: modernist narratives “also orientate themselves towards its future outcomes in the shape of the global accident” (2010, 337). Crosthwaite cites a thematic preoccupation with accidents and systemic risk in novels like Forster’s Howards End, which is concerned with the failure of an insurance company; intuition about the stock market in Ford’s The Good Soldier; and the economic relationships among Britain, Germany, and the US in Lawrence’s Women in Love. And formally, in a novel like Conrad’s The Secret Agent, a “subtle chain of associations […] establishes the distant bodies and constellations of the celestial realm as analogues for the vast and inscrutable networks of the capitalist world system” (Crosthwaite 2010, 338). We might also cite the aforementioned Mrs. Dalloway as an example of a text that both narrates the ability of crises to spread (such as when Septimus Smith’s suicide comes to bear upon Clarissa’s party, or the bang of a car backfire ripples through each person on Bond Street), and formally establishes the compression of time and place that are a function of global economic systematicity (see the novel’s all-in-one-day time frame). Similarly, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) (↗ 9 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse) uses narrative perspective to enact the sometimes-enmeshed, sometimes-conflicting consciousness of its characters, while the catastrophic events of World War I and Mrs. Ramsay’s death, though barely mentioned, underpin the entire narrative. It could be argued that the stock market crash of 1929 and the worldwide depression that ensued in many ways proved modernist novels prescient in their troubling of economic-systemic risk. Furthermore, it would make sense to read later modernist novels of the 1930s like those by Jean Rhys (After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie [1931], Voyage in the Dark [1934] and Good Morning, Midnight [1939]) as texts that materialize both the inevitability and hopelessness of such risk-taking: Rhys’ marginal, alienated and frankly depressed protagonists may make bad choices, but they do so in contexts where they were bound to lose anyway. It could also be argued that following these global economic calamities, World War II, the post-war intensification of the British welfare state, and the ascendancy of Keynesian economic policy which favored state intervention in the interests of employment and domestic economic stability, that the free-flowing forces of the global market were somewhat buffered  – or at least far less apparent – for a number of decades in the middle of the century. The postWorld War II moment of state intervention and welfarism will be addressed again in the next section of this chapter, but here it is cited briefly as an interruption – again,

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if not in actuality then in visibility – of the climate of global economic risk that marks the two ends of the century. The 1980s present an economic ‘crisis’ of a different sort: the shift in British state economic philosophy and policy following the election of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative party in 1979. Many novels register the ascendancy of what has come to be called neoliberal economic policy (again, more on which in the next section) over the welfarism of prior decades. Specifically, the forms and themes of the post-1980 novel frequently negotiate the state’s focus on privatization of formerly national industries, the weakening of organized labor, and the slashing of local council resources in favor of generating a more competitive, market-based state economic model. Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) is a coming-of-age tale in which London is a market where individuals constantly re-invent themselves for consumption in new social markets. Similarly, Monica Ali’s acclaimed novel Brick Lane (2003) portrays the path of a Bangladeshi immigrant, Nazneen, who succeeds when she revises older family structures and becomes an entrepreneur. Jane Elliot (2013) observes that the well-worn novelistic trope of individual development has become, in the neoliberal era, a fascination with individual survival at all costs, and that this trend exposes the fixation on individual choice and agency in neoliberal ideology to the extent that such choices mask systemic social and economic inequality. Elliot cites Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) as an example of fiction in this vein, and the novels of aforementioned Scottish writer James Kelman likewise dramatize the trials and consciousness of down-andout, marginal subjects on the cusp of survival who bear the brunt of cuts to social welfare, witness the rebranding of post-industrial cities like Glasgow as lures for foreign investment, and whose choices are always bounded by economic injustice. Take, for instance, How Late it Was, How Late (1994) protagonist Sammy Samuels’ fantasy of social services in England as opposed to his native Scotland, in which he conflates welfare provisions with social inclusion and counters an imagined English economic abundance with Scottish austerity: “[H]e could get a wee room [in England] and it would be okay. Every cunt was rich there so he would be exceptional circumstances. They would give him his own fucking [Department of Social Services] office. What ye wanting the day Mister Samuels? Eh a plate of eggs and bacon would be nice, maybe a wee round of toast, long on the butter and long on the fucking marmalade” (Kelman 2005 [1994], 256). Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1998) references Britain’s participation in the global neoliberal economy through historical allegory. In the novel, the sell-off of the iconic English country estate to foreigners is attended by a weakening of moral and ethical certitude that may be read in light of the sale of British state-run industries to the private sector and the accompanying class distrust and social upheaval of the Thatcher years. That class conflict was crystallized in the lengthy and divisive National Union of Mineworkers strike of 1984–1985 that pitted trade unions against Thatcher’s government; the strike is depicted in David Peace’s novel GB84 (2004), which, as Matthew Hart claims, captures “the cruel paradoxes of government […]

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in Britain’s transition between welfare-corporatist and neoliberal versions of statehood” (2008, 574). And David Mitchell’s novels (including Ghostwritten [1999], Cloud Atlas [2004] [↗ 25 David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas] and The Bone Clocks [2014]), which make elaborate puzzles of genres including historical and science fiction, spy novels, mystery, and the Gothic, formally enact a sense of global interconnectedness and risk. As his intricate narratives connect across both space and across time, Mitchell’s works exemplify the post-1979 British novel’s attunement to the structures and risk of networked global markets and economies. Indeed, it is perhaps the dark and supernatural turn of Mitchell’s post-2008 novel The Bone Clocks that draws our attention to the ways in which novels have responded to the massive global financial crisis of that year  – a consideration without which any discussion of economic risk would be incomplete. The Bone Clocks suggests that history and time are inescapable (in the form of immortal creatures that embody recurrent corruption and evil, as well as the possibility of humanity’s survival as civilization collapses). It thus offers a kind of allegory for cyclical economic crises. Other post-crisis British novels register losses of community and property, working them into familiar novelistic tropes including Bildung and individual development, the Gothic, and historical fiction. A case in point is Paula Hawkins’ bestselling novel The Girl on the Train (2015), where the protagonist’s loss of her home, job and community standing following a divorce are the stage for a Gothic confrontation of the hidden violence and deviance that lurk within the most mundane suburban neighborhoods. And this author will venture that the recent success of historical novels – like Hilary Mantel’s Booker-winning Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up The Bodies (2012) (↗ 27 Hilary Mantel, The Thomas Cromwell Trilogy), about the intrigues of the court in Henry VIII, or Paul Kingsnorth’s fictional account of the traumatic aftermath of the Norman invasion of 1066, The Wake (2013) – may have something to do with how they situate the crises of the present among the calamities, bloodletting, and politicking of the past.

3 The Economic Imagination: From Neoclassical, State-Based Equilibrium to Global Neoliberalism The previous section outlined some of the ways in which financial and economic risk, the threat of crises, and the dominance of a market ethos made their way into the thematic concerns of the British novel across the century. This last section is similarly interested in positioning the twentieth-century British novel within the context of economic history, but seeks to outline some of the ways in which the novel is conversant with dominant paradigms of economic thought and policy. In other words, while we’ve surveyed some of the economic tumult, events and experiences of the twentieth century, we will now turn to what might be called the ‘economic imagination’ that novelists, economic thinkers, policy makers, and laypersons have inhab-

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ited. And because the novel has historically been invested in modeling the role of the individual within larger social forces, the genre is especially useful for this task; this is because, to some extent or another, we can read the major economic paradigms of the past century as theorizing much the same thing. From neoclassical to Keynesian economics, and from welfare capitalism to the neoliberalism of today, we have seen economic thought and policy seek to situate individuals, and their desires and motivations, within social wholes – whether the market, the state at hypothetically full employment, or something in between. The turn of the twentieth century sees Britain under the sway of so-called neoclassical economic orthodoxy. Conceived in the 1860s in both Britain and on the continent, neoclassical thought as espoused by English writers like William Stanley Jevons and, later, Alfred Marshall, overturned the older, classical idea that the value of a thing was determined by the cost of making it. The new marginal utility theory of value and the so-called ‘marginalist revolution’ in economic thought held that value was a function of the satisfaction that a consumer derived from something. For instance, instead of a pair of boots being worth the materials of which they are made and the time, effort and skill of the bootmaker, neoclassicists would hold that the boots are valuable because the owner finds them comfortable, warm and stylish, and enjoys wearing them, and would choose to have those boots over other goods. While this may seem like a small detail, the marginal utility theory of value is deeply significant for the shift in focus that it entails: neoclassical thinkers turned their attention to the individual, and to calculating what might earlier have been deemed incalculable: human desire and fulfillment. And since there is always some degree of scarcity of those things that will bring satisfaction to people, economics as a discipline can be concerned with calculating the choices and trade-offs that people make to seek fulfillment (More work for a short time in order to take a dream vacation? More beer or more fancy chocolates? Or, in the case of the poor, heat or meat?). And as people strive for satisfaction, the market automatically responds and adjusts to the changing desires of consumers without the need for state intervention or stimulus. We can identify a similar interest developing in novels of the period, as writers turn toward explorations of human psychology and interiority during the modernist period. The works of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson are justly famous for their experiments in narration that replicates the patterns of human thought, but so too are impressionists like Conrad and Ford exploring representation as it is experienced by an individual consciousness. We can, then, identify a shared interest in individual interiority between the novel, economics, and the emergent disciplines of psychology and psychoanalysis. Charles Lewis suggests that the constant individual striving of the novel and the neoclassical economic subject converge in what he calls a shared preoccupation with the notion of scarcity. Lewis starts with theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s observations that the novel’s preoccupation with the striving, developing individual constitutes a fundamental irony of the genre, because in their perpetual changing and seeking, the

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character with which the novel is so preoccupied “cease[s] to coincide with himself” (Bakhtin qtd. in Lewis 2000, 5). For Lewis, the novel’s basic irony (that the development characters are meant to undergo in the novel means that characters themselves are never fully themselves, and always as yet incomplete or unrealized) is conversant with the wanting and striving in which neoclassical economics imagines humans to be perpetually engaged (Lewis 2000, 5). While the novel may dramatize the constant ‘becoming’ of the individual, neoclassical economics analyzes the personal tradeoffs and market fluctuations that attend this condition. In other words, attention to the general investments of neoclassical thought can help attune readers to the broader priorities and interests that link seemingly diverse areas of activity (here, literature, economics, psychology, and medicine, among others). Overlaying the histories of economic thought and literary method can also help us to reconsider the boundaries of literary periods, which often prove intractable. In this case, the neoclassical period draws our literary attention back into the last four decades of the nineteenth century. Similarly, the next major economic paradigm shift – the ascendancy of Keynesian economic thought in the midst of the worldwide depression of the 1930s – cuts across the modernist period, interrupting and informing its later years and revising the common account that modernism ‘ended’ at the outbreak of World War II. While neoclassical thinkers presumed that economic risks and shocks would automatically iron themselves out as markets adjusted to new realities (that is, producers would shift capacity to make more of things people wanted or needed and less of what they didn’t; prices would reflect the relative scarcity or abundance of a good, and consumers would allocate their resources accordingly), in his best-known work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), John Maynard Keynes advocates state intervention and spending in order to stimulate a weak economy. Rather than a natural entity subject to its own internal forces, for Keynes the economy is open to technical intervention and manipulation. And although there is still debate about the degree to which governments should influence their financial and labor markets, consumption patterns, and currencies, the Keynesian view that economies are amenable to intervention persists to the present day. Keynes’ ideas gained traction given the economic hardships that Britain had endured since the end of World War  I: cyclical unemployment throughout the 1920s, the aforementioned currency crisis of 1931, and the depression of the 1930s. For Keynes and his followers, the state could stimulate demand to bring about the economic balance (including, as was Keynes’ aim, full employment) that neoclassicists claimed would occur automatically. Such stimulus could entail state spending on public works or welfare projects, or the adjustment of monetary policy. Michael Tratner has identified Keynes’ concern with ‘pent-up demand’ (that is, the money that is not being spent, and the desires that are not being met, during times of unemployment and economic hardship) as a parallel concern in the discipline of sexology; Tratner writes that “in both [economic and sexual discourses], ‘spending,’ or

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using energy, is a way to keep the system in circulation” (2001, 31), and identifies a broader logic of ‘circulation’ as opposed to ‘saving’ in the literature of the period as well. Tratner points out that Keynes’ economic ideas about the dangers of ‘pent-up demand’ and his diagnosis that it was indeed a cause of the Depression may have been influenced by his Bloomsbury cohort (2001, 6). Jed Esty has argued that Keynes’ interest in state intervention and the strengthening of national economies is part of a larger concern with national retrenchment and cohesion that this is also evident in the literature of the period. Esty points out that literary interest in national consolidation of the 1930s and 1940s coincides with the waning appetite for imperial maintenance and the evacuation of London by many formerly experimental writers and artists. For Esty, “Keynes’s General Theory takes its place among self-conscious attempts by modernist writers in the 1930s to come to terms with the obsolescence of their most successful intellectual habits of the 1920s and to recover a usable core of English national culture from the derelict body of British imperialism” (2003, 167). He cites this ‘anthropological turn’ in novels like Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941), but we might also see responses to it in, for example, the 1930s novels of extreme alienation and national marginalization by British-based, Caribbean-born Jean Rhys (see Karl 2009). With the decline of the empire as a backdrop, then, both economists and novelists turn to the national scene. It could be argued that the build-up of the British welfare state after World War II maintained the occasion for the domestically-oriented novel. Inaugurated by the Government’s Beveridge Report of 1942 that established the architecture of social and economic policies to maximize individual and collective welfare (Beveridge 1942), British welfare economics of the postwar decades included both social elements like expanded educational provisions for free universal secondary education, family support in the form of child benefit payments, and the creation of the National Health Service in 1948, as well as heavy state involvement in the economy: key industries like coal, cable and wireless, rail and road transport, electricity, gas, iron and steel were nationalized (see Whiteside 1999 and Schenk 1994). And guided by Keynesian doctrine that advocated public spending during economic slumps, government policy sought to even out economic volatility and maintain high employment. Of course, the proliferation of the postcolonial novel tends to be the big news in post-World War II literary history – and rightfully so; such a development deserves its own analysis, to which this chapter cannot do justice. But from many writers situated in Britain after the war, we frequently find novels returning to realist style and domestic themes. For instance, in the bestseller Brideshead Revisited (1945) Evelyn Waugh turns the fierce satire of his earlier novels into a somber account of an aristocratic English family. Graham Greene’s novels take the soul-searching of English people as their subjects, whether they are located in Britain (The End of the Affair [1951]) or not (The Heart of the Matter [1948]). And the deep political cynicism of George Orwell’s 1984 makes it, as Jed Esty puts it, a “claustrophobic novel, in which the provincialism of post1945 England translates into a mean Cold War existence” (2003, 221). Trinidad-born

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Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) (↗ 13 Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners) is a portrait of the marginalization of West Indian immigrants in London after the war, and at the same time a deeply domestic novel about the day-to-day struggles and pleasures among immigrants, as well as the idiosyncracies of white, native-born English. The novel has been lauded for Selvon’s use of creole English in the novel’s narrative voice – a voice that may sound like that of an outsider to a white English majority, but which also documents the new domestic reality of immigration from the former colonies. The welfare capitalist state further bolstered domestic culture with its involvement in academic and culture-making institutions; indeed, John Maynard Keynes himself was chair of the Arts Council of England from 1941 until his death in 1946. Scholar Alan Sinfield cites the Labour Party Manifesto of 1945: “By the provision of concert halls, modern libraries, theatres and suitable civic centre, we desire to assure our people full access to the great heritage of culture in this nation” (Sinfield 1989, 50). This theme was not lost on novelists. Angus Wilson’s novels Hemlock and After (1952) and Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956) feature, respectively, academics solving the riddles of early English history and running state-supported schemes for artists; and Kingsley Amis’ renowned comedies Lucky Jim (1954) and Take a Girl Like You (1960) are set in the benign English academy. Writing ten years after the ascendancy of Thatcher’s Conservatives, Sinfield reflected on such state involvement, claiming that “the failure of the postwar settlement [of full employment and the welfare state] has allowed the initiative to pass to the New Right, and we experience a return to the conditions that the settlement was designed originally to avoid: unemployment, poverty, social rupture and authoritarian government” (1989, 3). We have already discussed some of the ways in which novelists thematically treat the ascendancy of neoliberal policies (like privatization, deregulation, and the rollback of the welfare state) on the part of the British government. Many current scholars note that neoliberalism is a broad term as it refers to state policy, economic theory, and even social philosophy. The term ‘neoliberalism’ designates the economic doctrine based upon the works of economists like Friedrich von Hayek (an Austrian contemporary of Keynes) and Milton Friedman; the implementation of such ideas by governments including the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in the 1980s and supported by supra-statal institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank; and its corporate versions, whereby private enterprise becomes truly transnational in its search for the cheapest and most ‘flexible’ labor arrangements, just-in-time production, and avoidance of trade barriers, corporate taxes and other liabilities. What all of these priorities have in common is that they are “rationalized by the presumption that more (and hypothetically, but often not practically, more competitive) market activity will make everyone better off” (Johansen and Karl 2015, 203). The neoliberal logic ultimately locates all kinds of human activities under the domain of the market; in political theorist Wendy Brown’s oft-cited formulation, “[n]eoliberal rationality […] involves extending and disseminat-

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ing market values to all institutions and social action” (2005, 39–40; original emphasis). And if artists, scholars and writers were integrated into the goals of the welfare state establishment, then it could be argued they likewise are implicated in the objectives of the neoliberal economy. Sarah Brouillette’s contention that under neoliberal initiatives in Britain, commerce and creativity have effectively been merged with the latter often deployed in the service of the former, has already been mentioned, as has the thesis that today’s literary prize functions largely as a marketing vehicle. Brouillette further demonstrates how UK state initiatives of the 1990s posit creativity as “interchangeable with [economic] ‘reform’ and with ‘modernization’; each term is used to indicate a willingness to entertain market-based approaches to provision of government services” (2014, 28–29). Creativity  – including the works of artists and novelists – thus falls under the service of a market-oriented renovation of the state’s very mission. Brouillette also examines how recent British novelists probe and critique the figure of the creative entrepreneur (in works like Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen [2009]) as well as the notion of literature’s supposedly transformative potential (in Ian McEwan’s Saturday [2005]). At the same time, we might point to how changes to the funding of UK higher education since the 1980s have subjected the academic study of literature to the market, using a variety of performance measures and national rankings in order to attract students and secure funding. At the time of writing, a proposal is under consideration to allow elite British universities to charge more for tuition than their counterparts based upon projected higher earnings for graduates and demonstrably “better” teaching (Neville 2015). In addition to novelists’ thematic preoccupation with changing social institutions and the increasing dominance of the market, as well as the professional implication of novelists and academics within market structures, scholars are currently debating the ways in which the epistemic conditions of life under neoliberal capital have transformed the novel. These include changes to conditions of labor (such that more and more workers are independent contractors, and work often picks up and moves across the globe); revised notions of time and space in globalization’s aforementioned collapse of distance and erosion of spatial particularity; the indexing of personal identity to an ever-changing consumer and media landscape; and the transformation of the state (whose ascendancy to the dominant global collective form largely coincided with the rise of the novel as a genre) from primary political actor to enabler of global markets and private enterprise. The British novel has registered and responded to such conditions – without, as many commentators would stress, necessarily capitulating to them – in a multitude of ways, renovating key formal and structural aspects of the genre in light of contemporary shifts in our daily economic experience. The traditional path of the Bildung narrative has been revised by novelists like Tessa Hadley and Maggie Gee to question the relevance of older notions of the full and mature subject integrated into a diverse, cosmopolitan world (Johansen 2015); David Mitchell’s reimagining of narrative to create new versions of connection across

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time and space has already been mentioned here, and has received deserved critical attention (Vermeulen 2012; Schoene 2010), as have the temporal and corporeal imaginaries of novelists Ali Smith and Nicola Barker (Karl 2014, 2015); and even the notion of a national or linguistic origin for the novel has fallen under scrutiny, with the so-called ‘British’ novels of writers like Caryl Phillips, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Adam Thirlwell positioned within far more capacious global frames (Walkowitz 2015). *** The discussion above  – about the status of twentieth-century British novels in the consumer marketplace, about their concern with economic phenomena and their attunement to economic ideologies  – will not settle any debate about whether the novel is a tool of the market or autonomous from it. Rather, it has demonstrated the novel’s unique relationship to the economic histories and practices that both threaten and propel the genre: the British novel’s development alongside British capitalism over the past three centuries means that it is uniquely positioned not only as a reflection of economic realities, but also as critical actor that lays economic relations bare, and offers a space for reflection and critique. In the tumultuous twentieth century we have seen the novel maintain its entanglements in the market and the economic realm in historically-specific ways: the modernist novel becomes a specialist commodity as the contemporary novel and its writer afford prestige to the capitalist scene, and model ideal economic subjectivities. At the same time, this very status – of being born with the capitalist economy, not necessarily of it  – means that the novel can re-create economic circumstances according to its own fashion, critiquing the economic status quo, or building a new kind of economic subject. This also means that the economy and the market also need the novel and the stories that it tells.

4 Bibliography 4.1 Works Cited Armstrong, Nancy. How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Armstrong, Nancy. “The Fiction of Bourgeois Morality and the Paradox of Individualism.” The Novel. Volume 2: Forms and Themes. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 349–388. Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1959. Beveridge, William. Social Insurance and Allied Services. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1942. Briganti, Chiara, and Kathy Mezei. “Designs for Living: Female Designers, the Designing Female, Modernism and the Middlebrow.” Modernist Cultures 6.1 (2011): 155–177. Brouillette, Sarah. Literature and the Creative Economy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014.

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Brown, Wendy. “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Edgework: Critical Essays in Knowledge and Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 37–59. Comentale, Edward. Modernism, Cultural Production and the British Avant-Garde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Cooper, John Xiros. Modernism and the Culture of Market Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Crosthwaite, Paul. “Anticipations of the Accident: Modernist Fiction and Systemic Risk.” Textual Practice 24.2 (2010): 331–352. Cuddy-Keane, Melba. Virginia Woolf, The Intellectual, and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Dewey, Peter. War and Progress: Britain 1914–1945. London: Longman, 1997. Driscoll, Beth. The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Elliott, Jane. “Suffering Agency: Imagining Neoliberal Personhood in North America and Britain.” Social Text 115 (2013): 83–101. English, James F. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Esty, Jed. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Hart, Matthew. “The Third English Civil War: David Peace’s ‘Occult History’ of Thatcherism.” Contemporary Literature 49.4 (2008): 573–596. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Malden: Blackwell, 1990. Hobsbawm, Eric. Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution. New York: The New Press, 1999. Home, Stewart. “Humanity Will Not Be Happy until the Last Man Booker Prize Winner Is Hung by the Guts of the Final Recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature!” Review of Contemporary Fiction 32.3 (2012): 72–78. Huggan, Graham. “Prizing ‘Otherness’: A Short History of the Booker.” Studies in the Novel 29.3 (1997): 412–433. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Jameson, Fredric. “Modernism and Imperialism.” Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature. Ed. Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W. Said. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. 43–66. Jameson, Fredric. “Culture and Finance Capital.” Critical Inquiry 24.1 (1997): 246–265. Johansen, Emily. “The Banal Conviviality of Neoliberal Cosmopolitanism.” Textual Practice 29.2 (2015): 295–314. Johansen, Emily, and Alissa G. Karl. “Introduction: Reading and Writing the Economic Present.” Textual Practice 29.2 (2015): 201–214. Jones, Charlotte. “May Sinclair: the readable modernist.” The Guardian. 1 August 2013. http://www. theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/aug/01/may-sinclair-readable-modernist (11 January 2016). Karl, Alissa G. Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Stein, Woolf and Nella Larsen. New York: Routledge, 2009. Karl, Alissa G. “Things Break Apart: James Kelman, Ali Smith and the Neoliberal Novel.” Reading Capitalist Realism. Ed. Alison Shonkweiler and Leigh Claire La Berge. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014. 64–88. Karl, Alissa G. “The Zero Hour of the Neoliberal Novel.” Textual Practice 29.2 (2015): 335–355. Kelman, James. How Late it Was, How Late. New York: Norton, 2005 [1994].

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Levin, Stephen M. “Is there a Booker Aesthetic?” Critique 55 (2014): 477–493. Lewis, Charles. A Coincidence of Wants: The Novel and Neoclassical Economics. New York: Garland, 2000. Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971. Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Man Booker Prize. http://themanbookerprize.com (14 January 2016). Mickalites, Carey James. Modernism and Market Fantasy: British Fictions of Capital, 1910–1939. New York: Palgrave, 2012. Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso, 1987. Neville, Sarah. “UK universities can raise fees if earnings and teaching strong.” The Financial Times Online. 6 November 2015. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/75ad6ab0-83ca-11e5-8095ed1a37d1e096.html#axzz3yHSXLFS9 (20 January 2016). Outka, Elizabeth. Consuming Traditions: Modernism, Modernity, and the Commodified Authentic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pitchford, Nicola. “How Late It Was for England: James Kelman’s Scottish Booker Prize.” Contemporary Literature 41.4 (2000): 693–725. Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Savory, Elaine. The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Schenk, Catherine R. “Austerity and Boom.” 20th Century Britain: Economic, Social and Cultural Change. Ed. Paul Johnson. London: Longman, 1994. 300–319. Schoene, Berthold. “Tour du Monde: David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten and the Cosmopolitan Imagination.” College Literature 37.4 (2010): 42–60. Sinfield, Alan. Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Squires, Claire. “Book Marketing and the Booker Prize.” Judging a Book by its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction. Ed. Nicole Matthews and Nickianne Moody. London: Ashgate, 2007. 71–82. Sullivan, Melissa, and Sophie Blanch. “The Middlebrow: Within or Without Modernism.” Modernist Cultures 6.1 (2011): 1–17. Todd, Richard. Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today. London: Bloomsbury, 1996. Tratner, Michael. Deficits and Desires: Economics and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Vermeulen, Pieter. “David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten and the ‘Novel of Globalization’: Biopower and the Secret History of the Novel.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 53.4 (2012): 381–392. Walkowitz, Rebecca. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. Waugh, Evelyn. Black Mischief. Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002 [1932]. Wexler, Joyce. “Selling Sex as Art.” Marketing Modernisms. Ed. Kevin Dettmar and Stephen Watt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. 91–108. Whiteside, Noel. “Towards a Modern Labour Market? State Policy and the Transformation of Employment.” Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain 1945–1964. Ed. Becky Conekin and Frank Mort. London: Rivers Oran Press, 1999: 76–93.

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Wicke, Jennifer. “Coterie Consumption: Bloomsbury, Keynes, and Modernism as Marketing.” Marketing Modernisms. Ed. Kevin Dettmar and Stephen Watt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. 109–132. Winseck, Dwayne R., and Robert M. Pike. Communication and Empire: Media, Markets and Globalization, 1860–1930. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

4.2 Further Reading Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. David, Deirdre. “Making a Living as an Author.” A Companion to the English Novel. Ed. Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015. 291–305. Osteen, Mark, and Martha Woodmansee, eds. The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Interface of Literature and Economics. New York: Routledge, 1999. Robbins, Bruce. Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Todd, Richard. “Literary Fiction and the Book Trade.” A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction, Ed. James F. English. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 19–38.

Christoph Reinfandt

3 Genres: The Novel between Artistic Ambition and Popularity Abstract: This chapter aims at providing an inclusive mapping of the whole range of fiction written in the twentieth century and beyond. It demonstrates that long-standing dichotomies like literary fiction vs. genre fiction or realism vs. modernism can be more fruitfully discussed in terms of the ideational structures which frame the meaning of fictional worlds so that the seeming polarity between artistic ambition and popular success turns out to be more of a continuum against the background of the novel’s continuous treading of the boundary between the material marketplace for literary commodities catering to a need for entertainment on the one hand, and the ideational market for literature in a more emphatic sense on the other. Without doubting established accounts of realism’s double-edged project of deconstructing and supplanting pre-modern modes of making sense of the world while at the same time constructing bourgeois subjectivity (a project that is marked by an inbuilt tendency towards self-consciousness which comes to the fore with the turn of the novel into modernism), the chapter supplements this familiar story with an attempt at understanding genre fiction’s alternative project of occasionally providing, in spite of (or perhaps partly because of) all commercial constraints, an alternative platform for thought experiments based on a combination of strict visuality, the schema and literality (Fredric Jameson), thus managing to elide the obsession with problems of representation that characterise the mainstream of literary fiction. Early twenty-first-century ‘post-modernist’ developments with their characteristic blurring of formerly clear distinctions, for example in the ‘literary’ ambitions of ‘weird fiction’, seem to confirm this diagnosis. Keywords: Literary fiction, genre fiction, realism, modernism, postmodernism In terms of genre, the novel is marked by an intriguing ambiguity. First and foremost, the genre of the novel in an overarching inclusive sense is ‘distinctly modern’ because it is the only major literary genre to have emerged in the modern age, and it manages, paradoxically but in line with constitutive features of modern culture, to be a genre in spite of the fact that it is neither bound by any specific form nor by any specific content (↗ 1 The English Novel as a Distinctly Modern Genre; Cunningham 2016). Within this limitless, flexible and malleable framework, however, more specific conventions did establish themselves for certain types of novels catering to certain types of readers or segments of the marketplace (↗ 2 The Novel in the Economy) by focussing on certain types of content and/or narrative strategies. As even these brief

DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-004

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opening remarks indicate, the question of genre is a complex one, and not only with regard to the novel. “In fact”, one critic points out, the term ‘genre’ itself has accrued almost too many meanings to be useful: In one sense, it simply refers to market categories; in another, it refers to a set of literary and narrative conventions; in yet another, it refers to a collection of texts with perceived commonalities of affect and world view. (Wolfe 2011, 53)

Nevertheless, genre has long been recognized as being central to the notion of literature (which is, in its even more encompassing way, as limitless, flexible and malleable as the notion of the novel). Accordingly, it has been theorized from various angles since the days of Plato and Aristotle (see, for example, Todorow 1990 [1978]; Fowler 1982; Beebee 1994; Bawarshi 2000; and Frow 2015 [2006]). The present chapter will try to map the territory of fiction from 1900 into the twenty-first century in terms of the uneasy relationship between what has come to be called ‘literary fiction’ on the one hand, and so-called ‘genre fiction’ on the other. At first glance this distinction seems to be straightforward: The first category seems to have a greater affinity with the understanding of the novel as a distinctly modern genre while the second seems to point to the more limited, more commercial and less ‘literary’ category that includes popular genres such as crime fiction, science fiction and fantasy literature. Along these lines, a recent blog in the Huffington Post (Petite 2014) states categorically that “Literary Fiction is anything that does not fit into a genre […] [It] separates itself from Genre because it is not about escaping from reality[.] [I]nstead, it provides a means to better understand the world and delivers real emotional responses.” Conversely, “Genre Fiction includes many subcategories such as Mystery/Thriller, Horror, Romance, Western, Fantasy, Science Fiction, etc.” and “provide[s] the best form of entertainment and escapism that fiction has to offer”. In spite of his best efforts at leaving behind traditional frameworks of evaluation – Petite is at pains to insist that literary novelists are not necessarily “better writers” but merely “[d]ifferent” ones in that they are playing a different game while genre novelists may also be brilliant at what they do – these evaluative frameworks nevertheless persist: “Different” is certainly not as neutral and inclusive as it seems in a text which ends by conceding that “the best Genre Fiction contains great writing, with the goal of telling a captivating story to escape from reality” but insists at the same time that “Literary Fiction is comprised of the heart and soul of a writer’s being, and is experienced as an emotional journey through the symphony of words, leading to a stronger grasp of the universe and ourselves”. I am quoting this blog entry at length here not only to illustrate that old habits/ clichés/prejudices die hard but also because it provides an entry point and some coordinates for a less normative discussion of the difference between literary fiction and genre fiction. In fact, the escapism thesis articulated here has been emphatically rejected by scholars of genre fiction in recent years. Nobody would seriously argue

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that crime or science fiction novels have nothing to do with the world as we know it or how their writers’ or readers’ cultures make sense of it, and even in the case of fantasy fiction it has been pointed out that “the one thing that can rarely be said of [it] is that it has nothing to do with reality” (Hunt 2001, 2). What is more, the recent Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel even suggests that at the beginning of the twenty-first century it is in fantasy fiction, including science fiction, horror, and romance, with their immediate proximity to quotidian daydream and fantasy, that the novel’s literary game, rooted in the conquest of autonomy and its accompanying literary pleasure, might especially save itself. (Caserio 2009, 7)

And the volume ends with a chapter on just this development, asserting that [although] fantasy and its companions certainly have escapist aspects, in a way that seems a departure from ‘the novel’s’ investments in realism and history, they powerfully address contemporary life; by opening the door to unlimited imaginative possibilities, by contemplating the other side of history – the fantastic side – they can lead to action in the real world. (Booker 2009, 251)

As one can see here, the distinction between literary fiction that is generically unbound through a paradoxical principle of formal and thematic continuity in discontinuity while maintaining an orientation to and emotional investment in reality and history on the one hand and, on the other hand, genre fiction that is formally more regulated and potentially open to charges of ‘mere’ escapism and entertainment in its cultural positioning but also thematically less restricted, is an important one for dealing with the potential and cultural validity of fiction in the twentieth century and beyond. While mostly side-lined in more traditional varieties of literary history, genre fiction was there from the beginning of our period of interest when “H. G. Wells’s scientific romances ushered in the twentieth century”, and it was a conspicuous presence at the end of the century when “the so-called British Boom, a blend of science fiction, horror, romance and fantasy, ushered it out” (Booker 2009, 251) with writers like Iain M. Banks, Stephen Baxter, Neil Gaiman, Nicola Griffiths, M. John Harrison, Gwyneth Jones, China Miéville, Richard K. Morgan, Ken MacLeod, Philip Pullman, Justina Robson, and Charles Stross (see Bould, Butler, and Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. 2003 and O’Connell 2013). For all that comes between, the point has been made that J. R. R. Tolkien could be regarded the author of the century (Shippey 2001), and that in the light of the popularity and influence of The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) fantasy could even be considered “the dominant mode of English twentieth-century fiction” (Shippey 2001, vii; Booker 2009, 251). This mode is represented by, among others, writers as prolific and prominent as Terry Pratchett, J. K. Rowling and Michael Moorcock, with the latter also venturing into the territory of science fiction and, together with another early protagonist of the New Wave of science fiction in the 1970s and 80s, J. G. Ballard, frequently crossing over into literary fiction. And

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at the same time there is an equally prolific (though perhaps less literarily ambitious) English tradition of detective and spy fiction with world famous authors like John Buchan, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming, or John le Carré (see Hepburn 2009). The present chapter will try to establish an angle on this complexity by first developing a differentiated and historicized approach to literary fiction in terms of the ambiguity of genre outlined above (1) and then putting forward a more sophisticated approach to genre fiction on this basis (2). All this will ultimately suggest that ‘The Field of Fiction’ (3) in the twentieth century and beyond can profitably be mapped inclusively and not only in terms of the history of the novel understood as literary fiction in an exclusive sense.

1 Literary Fiction Genre, these introductory remarks have made clear, is intimately connected to ideas of literary value (see also Eaglestone 2013, 30–32). What is more, in the case of literary fiction, value is explicitly linked to the elusive notion of ‘literariness’, which is unfortunately not only another word for being well-written but has also been tied to all kinds of ‘serious’ agendas at different times, be it moral improvement, education, nationalism, ‘Life’ in the sense of F. R. and Q. D. Leavis’s ‘Great Tradition’, originality and formal innovation, or whatever. Accordingly, the history of the English novel is from its beginnings onwards full of ‘official’ attempts at legitimizing the new genre in ‘serious’ terms while missing out on the one function that is also indisputably new (and perhaps more so): entertainment. The real game, it turns out, was possibly taking place elsewhere at least to a certain extent: As a distinctly modern genre the novel is also the one literary genre that co-evolved with the emergence of a literary marketplace catering to individual readers who wanted to be, first and foremost, entertained. Materially speaking, a certain degree of popularity has always been necessary for the novel, but too much of it could endanger its aspirations to the status of literature proper. With regard to the English novel in the twentieth century and beyond, this is all the more crucial as it was only in the early twentieth century that the novel finally rose to be the most eminent genre in modern literature with all kinds of formal innovations at its disposal. Before that, ‘formal realism’ held sway in the aftermath of what Ian Watt influentially called The Rise of the Novel. In this classic study, Watt ties the rise of the novel to the rise of the middle class and also acknowledges the importance of the emerging literary marketplace for its development: Bringing the production of literature “under the control of the law of the market-place”, he observes, “assisted the development of one of the characteristic technical innovations of the [novel] form – its copious particularity of description and explanation”; at the same time, “the appli-

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cation of primarily economic criteria” also served “to favour prose as against verse” (Watt 1972 [1957], 62). However, the exploration of the new genre’s capacities for representing extreme or even irrational emotions in the Gothic novels and sentimental fictions of the second half of the eighteenth century can also be seen as an exploration of the capacities and opportunities of the emerging literary marketplace, and when these new forms are quickly relegated to the non-literary realm of generic popular fiction at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it becomes clear that ‘formal realism’ also amounts to a distancing and purifying mechanism that brings the world view of the novel in line with the emerging hegemonic world view of bourgeois society with its middle class proprieties (↗ 5 The Burden of Representation) and male biases (↗ 4 Gender). To achieve this, it continually struggles to keep its distance from the marketplace. As a consequence of this process of differentiation, popular genres such as vampire fiction, sensation fiction, sentimental fiction, detective fiction, (imperial) adventure fiction and early stirrings of science fiction emerged, which seem to be operating in a different realm altogether. In terms of publication mode, however, the two realms of, as it were, Literature and literature (Berberich 2015), were not as separate as it sometimes seems in hindsight. While the popular genres were, as a rule, not published in the respectable format of the three-decker (three-volume) novel (which nevertheless not only maximized profit per novel but also catered to the needs of the circulating libraries in a bid for a wide readership and thus popularity) but rather in serial form in weekly magazines or cheaply printed ‘penny dreadfuls’, serial publication in weekly or monthly magazines was also the preferred first publication platform for the works of many writers later canonized as ‘literary’ such as Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and George Eliot (cf. Pittard 2015). What is more, there are also texts such as, for example, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) that started out as ‘texts for entertainment’ but ended up as ‘classics’ of ‘high literature’ nevertheless, mostly on grounds of their formal innovativeness (multiperspectivity in particular in both cases). Along similar lines, the boom of Gothic novels and sentimental fictions and the subsequent emergence of popular genres can also be seen as a sphere of experimentation in the possibilities the novel form affords (cf. Keating 1989) and thus as an anticipation of the modernist period of formal experimentation at the beginning of the twentieth century, both very much in line with the notion of the English novel as a distinctly modern genre with a potential to reinvent and reconfigure itself at any time. The persistence of the realist paradigm, on the other hand, very much amounts to a genre in the more restrictive sense outlined above. Paradoxically, however, it is here that the constitutive difference between literary fiction and genre fiction establishes itself. The problem is this: At the time of their original publication, the retrospectively canonized literary masterpieces of the realist tradition were in fact much more closely aligned with notions of entertainment rather than literariness in an emphatic sense

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than their later status would care to admit. They gained their literary standing only after the full literary emancipation of the novel in the early twentieth century, which, not coincidentally, is also the moment when the first attempts were being made at re-telling its story as a distinctly literary genre drawing on the aesthetic ideals of the time such as, for example, a preference for showing over telling. As Percy Lubbock influentially and normatively put it in 1921, “the art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself” (Lubbock 1921, 62). What exactly is it then, against this background, that distinguishes the realist novel from genre fiction and makes its retrospective canonization possible and plausible? Or, in other words: What is realism if it is not a genre? Or, more precisely, what is it in realism that goes beyond the understanding of genre that is applicable to the more popular varieties of nineteenth-century fiction? In order to get at this elusive phenomenon, it is necessary to address what Gary K. Wolfe in a discussion of fantastic literature calls “the sources of meaning, the ideational structures of the narrative”, which in turn determine a reader’s “affective attitude” that transforms the novel into an “affective construct” (2011, 73, 75–76). How can this foundational level be identified? Since Plato and Aristotle Western theories of art have mostly focussed on the relationship between art and the world. For some 200 years, i.e. from its rise in the early eighteenth to its full emancipation as a literary genre in the early twentieth century, the novel can surely be seen as a or perhaps even the key player in adapting these ideas to the new regime of cultural modernity. One of the most important characteristics of this new regime manifests itself in a striking reversal of earlier meanings of the adjectives subjective (“as things are in themselves”) and objective (“as things are presented to consciousness”; Williams 1988, 309): From the late eighteenth century onwards this mutates into a “strengthening sense of objective as factual, fair-minded (neutral) and hence reliable, as distinct from the sense of subjective as based on impressions rather than facts, and hence as influenced by personal feelings and relatively unreliable” (Williams 1988, 311). The novel is a key player in negotiating this central fault line of modern culture, as Hegel recognized even in the 1820s: A novel in the modern sense of the word presupposed a world already prosaically ordered; then, on this ground and within its own sphere […] it regains for poetry the right it had lost […]. Consequently one of the commonest, and, for the novel, most appropriate, collisions is the conflict between the poetry of the heart and the opposing prose of circumstances and the accidents of external situations […]. [T]he novel proper, like the epic, requires the entirety of an outlook on the world and life […] (Hegel 1975 [1835], 1092–1093).

So what can a novel do in ideational terms? It can depict the ‘prosaically ordered external world’ as objectively as possible, but if it does not add anything, it misses out on the project of ‘regaining for poetry the right it had lost’, which is, for Hegel, clearly associated with subjectivity (‘poetry of the heart’), an angle on the world which is insurmountably partial and fragmentary. Where, then, can the ‘entirety of an outlook

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on the world and life’ come from which the novel requires in order to emulate the cultural and social function of (pre-modern) epic under modern conditions? Hegel himself at this point brings in the category of the state as the ‘ground’ on which the novel can flourish because the state guarantees order, rationality and purpose in the external world. In retrospect, however, it is clear that this insistence on the meaningfulness of the world did not hold up so that the novel found itself increasingly thrown back to the limitations of ‘its own sphere’. In (even) more abstract terms, the co-ordinates identified by Hegel for the novel can be mapped onto a broader spectrum of modern ways of representing, and making sense of, the world. On the one hand, there is a strong emphasis on seeing and visuality as the one access to the prosaically ordered world that can somehow salvage objectivity in spite of the fact that it is always one person/subject who is performing the act. This goes especially for representations which suggest that they are ‘transparent’ and enable a direct visual access to the (represented) world, and this also applies to linguistic modes of representation and ‘subcreated’ imaginary worlds (Wolf 2012): What you ‘see’ is what you get, the representation is deemed to be ‘literally’ and objectively true, and it is clear that this mode of representation has a strong affinity with ‘showing’. On the other hand, the world has already been made sense of when it is told to you by someone, albeit at the cost of foregrounding the fact that what you get is merely a representation/narrative. ‘Telling’ accordingly marks both the subjective and the representational dimension of a representation, but this can of course be played down by insisting on the transparency of discourse and mediality so that the inbuilt reflexivity is not accentuated by the teller or realized by the listener/reader. And this is just what realism does: While it certainly performs “negative, critical and destructive tasks” in the context of the “bourgeois cultural revolution” of “the first period of modernity in which […] enlightenment and in particular secularization were fundamental”, it does initially not direct this critical potential at itself, because it also has to foster “the construction of bourgeois subjectivity […] supported by taboos and inner restrictions of all kinds” (Jameson 2013, 4). And it is here that a first version of literariness emerges: While depicting the external world can definitely be done in terms of showing, the subjective stakes identified by Hegel for the novel’s agenda insist on the dimension of telling with its inevitable subject positions. Accordingly, the basic “narrative impulse” of realism is about reconciling “destiny” (Hegel’s ‘prose of circumstances and the accidents of external situations’) with the “eternal present” of subjective experience while it lasts (Hegel’s ‘poetry of the heart’), and “to resolve the opposition either way would destroy it” (Jameson 2013, 15–26, 26; on realism’s balance of showing and telling see also Lodge 1996). Literary fiction, then, is marked by an inbuilt awareness of the problematics of representation, which comes with the increasing realisation that reconciliation is only ever possible in the novel’s ‘own sphere’, i.e. literature, and does not have any consequences in the ‘real’ world. With this realisation of the critical potential of realism, the novel begins to turn inward in a fully-fledged reflexive turn which con-

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solidates the differentiation of literary fiction and genre fiction: The generic consolidation of realism (with subgenres like “Bildungsroman, the historical novel, the novel of adultery, and naturalism”, Jameson 2013, 145) is predicated on telling stories as a means of understanding and making sense of the world rather than merely perceiving it, but it still retains a dominantly visual mode of representation; modernism leaves this realm of experiential synthesis behind and moves towards “anti-visuality [and] anti-representational convictions” (Jameson 2015, 17) which push the novel towards formal innovation and finally realise the novel’s Romantic ambition of being a “genre without genre” (Cunningham 2016) in a process which clearly implicates realism in “the dissolution of genre” (Jameson 2013, 138). In this process, visuality is partly retained in the favoured predominance of showing. As it is no longer directed at the world and then mediated by telling, however, but rather at the perceiving consciousness of characters, the mode of representation is distanced from the world and pushed towards analytic abstraction and conceptuality rather than synthetic experientiality. At first glance, this emphatic Literariness seems to stand in clear contrast to realism’s less autonomous and more reconciliatory literariness which was ideologically tasked with the construction of bourgeois subjectivity. However, it can also be seen as a continuation and radicalisation of that agenda in that its preference for ‘seeing’ persists though it is no longer directed at the external world but rather at the interiority of the subject. Somewhat paradoxically, however, the modern partiality for seeing and visuality in its dealings with the external world seems to have migrated to the newly established sphere of popular genre fiction in spite of the fact that these texts often represent imaginary worlds more or less fully detached from the ‘prose of circumstances’ in the real world. At the end of the nineteenth century, the emergent genre of science fiction, for example, displays a clear “bias towards visuality” and is “not crippled by […] representational doubts and scruples” in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that “it emerged as a genre at the very moment in which the representational dilemma began to make inroads into literature” (Jameson 2015, 17). As Jameson elaborates: [Science fiction] was able to do so owing to its possession of a representational instrument rather different from those faltering in the hands of traditional realists. […] [S]cience fiction had the schema; and it is what we have been calling literality, the use of visual materials not to represent the world but to represent our thoughts about the world. […] This is why science fiction, despite appearances, cannot be said simply to carry on traditional narrative methods of ‘old-fashioned realism,’ merely applying it to fantastic or at least non-realistic content. Rather, it enlists the visual literality of Einstein’s thought experiments […] to take their cosmological fantasies literally and to re-enact in a visual […] mode the dynamics of worlds either too large or too small to be conveyed by human language. (2015, 17–18; emphases mine)

While it is questionable whether all genre fiction lives up to the ambitious agenda Jameson claims for it here, it is important to note for my present purposes that the field of genre fiction does indeed establish an alternative mode of dealing with the

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representational dilemma played out in the mainstream of literary fiction, and it seems that this alternative finally gained greater cultural validity at the turn from the twentieth to the twenty-first century.

2 Genre Fiction Taking up Jameson’s suggestions one could argue that the cultural validity of genre fiction can be found in the “potential for creative estrangement” (Booker 2009, 252) or “cognitive estrangement” (Suvin 1972, 372; 1979) that resides in its propensity to elide problems of representation in favour of utilizing the literality of the schema as a medium for thought experiments that posit alternative worlds rather than, as modernism did, alternative attempts at capturing the world in language. In this latter sense, “modernist fiction, however experimental, was relatively realistic” (Booker 2009, 256), and, all in all, it emerges that the tradition of literary fiction was and is basically cued by modes (and problems) of representation enacted (and addressed) in a self-conscious fashion which manages to be self-confident at the same time by emphatically embracing its literariness as an icon of cultural value. Even within this project, however, two distinct understandings of genre prevail: The first, within the realist paradigm, establishes subgenres in terms of themes and content (for example, as already mentioned, the “Bildungsroman, the historical novel, the novel of adultery, and naturalism” according to Jameson (2013, 145)); the second distinguishes, in the course of its evolution, between modes of writing, such as, prominently and influentially, the realist novel and the experimental novel. The latter then clearly relegates thematic concerns to a secondary position for a while until, towards the end of the twentieth century, they resurface even there, for example in the genre of ‘historiographic metafiction’ as identified by Linda Hutcheon (1988; ↗ 15 John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman; ↗  17  J. G. Farrell, The Empire Trilogy; ↗  22  A. S. Byatt, Possession; ↗ 27 Hilary Mantel, The Thomas Cromwell Trilogy). The traditions of genre fiction, on the other hand, seem to be largely cued thematically (Crime Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Adventure Fiction, Romance, Western) with occasional overtones of affect (Horror Fiction). They emphasise the consistency and solidity of their imagined worlds in contradistinction to the (realist) world as we know it. This distinctiveness can concentrate on the seedy side of things (Crime Fiction), it can be set in the past and/or geographically distant regions (Western) or in the future (Science Fiction), and it is particularly the latter option which provides a springboard into fully imagined ‘subcreated’ worlds (Wolf 2012) separate from the world as we know it. Here, the question of mode returns, but it is not the mode of representation that matters but rather

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the contrastive ways in which [these genres] construct fictive worlds. The worlds of science fiction generally operate according to the same physical principles as our own, but they subordinate those principles to changes caused by rationally explicable developments, primarily scientific or technological. Horror fiction is also set in a world similar to our own, but involves monstrous intrusions of supernatural (or at least extraordinary) beings or events. Romance, which usually is a story of a purposeful quest, projects a world in which magical or supernatural powers also intrude – but those powers are more intelligible, and some are more beneficent, than those of horror fiction. Fantasy operates entirely according to principles of its own, differing from our world in ways that are not limited by the laws of physics, and responding to whatever variations (usually magical or supernatural) the author chooses to invent. (Booker 2009, 252)

World construction sometimes even seems to supersede variety in plot design as the governing principle of genre fiction, even to the point that earlier varieties of popular literature such as “crime novels, the classical detective novel, the hardboiled detective story, the Western, and even the ‘best-selling social melodrama’” (Wolfe 2011, 23) were subsumed under the moniker ‘formula stories’ (Cawelti 1976). Nevertheless, it is the potential for creative estrangement provided especially by the twentieth-century evolution of science fiction, horror and fantasy, addressing, respectively, “the geography of reason, […] of anxiety [… and] of desire”, that fosters the dissolution of such torpidity and the emergence of a nascent set of post-modern rhetorical modes that, over a period of several decades, would begin to supplant not only the notion of genre itself, but the very foundations of the modernist barricades that had long been thought to insulate literary culture from the vernacular fiction of the pulps and other forms of noncanonical expression. (Wolfe 2011, 23)

There is, one can see here, an overall dynamics within the field of genre fiction in the course of the twentieth century that is not unlike the one leading up to the turn of the novel from realism to modernism at the end of the nineteenth. In terms of ‘ideational structures’ (cf. Wolfe 2011, 73), however, it is also clear that the idea of genre fiction living up to the ideal of thought experiment may also be a back-projection from the early twenty-first century, i.e. the very end of this development. There is no denying that much of the stuff was actually written for entertainment and continues to be so to this day, and as such it is more likely to promote affirmative agendas rather than open up new perspectives. This becomes clear once one pays attention to the ways in which readers have turned such books into ‘affective constructs’ (cf. Wolfe 2011, 76). A reader-oriented librarian’s perspective, for example, clearly indicates a thematic as well as emotional classification of ‘super-genres’ (cf. Rabkin 1976, 147; Wolfe 2011, 57) which establish clusters of genres in the more conventional sense, as Joyce G. Saricks argues: ‘Adrenaline Genres’ (“intricately detailed stories told at a pace that moves almost more quickly than [readers] can turn pages”) comprise ‘Adventure’, ‘Romantic Suspense’, ‘Suspense’ and ‘Thrillers’; ‘Emotions Genres’ (which create “a particular evocative mood [… and] a strong emotional pull”) comprise ‘Gentle Reads’, ‘Horror’, ‘Romance’ and ‘Women’s Lives and Relationships’;

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‘Intellect Genres’ (which “create puzzles that engage the mind”) comprise ‘Literary Fiction’ (!), ‘Mysteries’, ‘Psychological Suspense’ and ‘Science Fiction’; and ‘Landscape Genres’ (which “focus on an intricately described background, real or imaginary”) comprise ‘Fantasy’, ‘Historical Fiction’ and ‘Westerns’ (2009, 4), the classification being based on “appeal elements” like “[p]acing, characterization, story line, frame (physical setting and atmosphere), tone and mood, and style and language”, all of which play “important roles in what readers enjoyed about one book over another” (Saricks 2009, 2; see also 7). Clearly, the foundational principle of ‘appeal’ is the immersion of the reader, which can be primarily physiological/mechanical (in the sense of adrenaline-induced page-turning), emotional, intellectual or based on aesthetic illusion, “a basically pleasurable mental state that frequently emerges during the reception of many representational texts” (Wolf 2014). And whatever its primary carrier, immersion by necessity elides the foundational self-consciousness about problems of representation that is at the heart of the tradition of literary fiction from realism into modernism and beyond. Against this background it becomes obvious that the seriousness of purpose that comes with viewing genre fiction as a medium for thought experiments in Jameson’s sense would have to be grounded on the level of content (world construction, plot, theme) rather than form (in the sense of adequacy of representation). One well-established way of doing so is to evaluate the alternative world established in a novel as either a model (utopia as a ‘good place’, though also in the sense of an unachievable idealized ‘non-place’) or as a warning (anti-utopia) against which the real world has to be measured. As one of the most prominent strands of genre fiction in the twentieth century, “Dystopias negotiate the social terrain between Utopia and Anti-Utopia in a less stable and more contentious fashion” (Moylan 2000, 147) because, in a striking parallel to the realist novel, the ‘poetry of the heart’ of a character begins to question the ‘prose of circumstances’ in the depicted dystopian world (↗ 10 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World). A similar complicating impulse can also be found in “Tolkien’s revision of the romance formula [… which] constructs an anti-quest”: “The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) is a trilogy of novels about a quest to divest dangerous worldly power, rather than to gain it” (Booker 2009, 257), and this inverted formula with its specific negotiation of a subjective utopian impulse in a dystopian world is still central to Philip Pullman’s successful trilogy of fantasy novels at the end of the twentieth century (↗ 23 Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials). As one can see here, it is not only the boundary between literary fiction and genre fiction that becomes increasingly blurred in the course of the twentieth century, but also the boundaries between formerly distinct traditions of genre fiction, even to the point where a specialist in fantastic literature (especially science fiction, fantasy, and horror) speaks of ‘evaporating genres’ (Wolfe 2011).

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3 The Field of Fiction In the following, I will discuss the coordinates that emerge from the systematic aspects discussed so far without insisting on the stability of genres or the possibility of unambiguous classification of novels in their entirety. Instead, what I call the Field of Fiction is rather meant as a virtual map for tracing the shifting dynamics or orientation and affiliation that characterises the production of long fictional narratives in the twentieth century and beyond. For historical and systematic reasons, the centre of this map is occupied by realism, which precariously balances the tensions generated by its double-edged project of deconstructing and supplanting pre-modern modes of making sense of the world while at the same time constructing bourgeois subjectivity. In terms of the dichotomy between popularity and aesthetic ambition indicated in the title of this chapter, realism also occupies a middle ground: Realism’s balance of showing and telling caters to the experiential predispositions of the bourgeois subject by presenting the world in a fashion similar to the ways in which any reader can ‘see’ it and by making sense of it within the emergent hegemony of an allegedly neutral middle-class perspective grounded in the common sense shared by all individuals (of this class). Once this hegemony is fully established, this perspective can naturalise itself and become the seemingly ‘universal’ yardstick for the cultural value ascribed to the genre of the novel and literature in general in terms of an affirmative educational agenda which aims at including the individual into society by providing orientation. The prime sub-genre with this orientation would be the Bildungsroman. But then, the potential incompatibility between the subjective ‘poetry of the heart’ and the objective ‘prose of circumstances’ could also be articulated on the thematic level with the emergence of the sub-genre of the Künstlerroman, in which the individual cannot find his or her place as a useful member of society but only in the realms of ostensibly ‘autonomous’ art and literature. In both instances, there is a potential for popularity with a certain readership (those willing to adapt or already integrated in the case of the Bildungsroman, those disenchanted with the way things are and privileged enough to envision art as a possibility in the case of the Künstlerroman), and the same can be said for novels which deviate from the realist consensus for political reasons in terms of class or gender, for example, as happens with increasing frequency in the novel’s trajectory from the nineteenth to the twentieth century (↗ 4 Gender; ↗ 5 The Burden of Representation). It is also clear, however, that there is a disjunction between the novel’s claim of universal relevance (which should result in unlimited popularity) and its limited social reach, which is increasingly counterbalanced by an ever-moreemphatic but simultaneously more specialized profession of its literariness. At the same time, the telling component of realism necessarily brings a potentially destabilizing subjective component to the hegemonic project of legitimate and useful representation, and this subjective dimension also potentially foregrounds the fact that a novel is just a novel, i.e. a representation, and a fictional one at that.

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This amounts to an inbuilt tendency towards self-consciousness which comes to the fore with the turn of the novel into modernism in an attempt at turning a perceived weakness (i.e. realism’s increasing self-consciousness) into strength, and interestingly it is with this inward turn towards epistemological questions circling around the perceived gap between language and world that the novel can actually claim a kind of ‘universal’ relevance, albeit of the more deconstructive kind. In the course of the twentieth century this deconstructive trajectory, which is also fuelled by the Romantic grounding of modern literature in ideals of autonomy, originality and innovation, first replaces the synthetic experientiality of realism (which is directed at the world) with the more analytic and experimental experientiality of modernism (directed at the subject’s perception of the world which is increasingly perceived to be not only categorically separate from the world but also from language) and then, when it becomes clear that there is no referentially grounded way of making sense of the world, moves towards the reflexive, relativistic and eclectic acknowledgement of this state of affairs in postmodernism. All in all, this trajectory can be described as a shift from realism’s reliance on telling (albeit in sublimated, invisibilised form) to modernism’s showing of thought and perception (which is, after all, not showing at all but a translation into language simulating showing) to postmodernism’s awareness of the linguistic and discursive constructedness of both modes of representation, which can then either be staged in a way that forces the reader to acknowledge the text as being implicitly metafictional or discursively worked through in varieties of explicit metafiction (cf. Waugh 1984; Imhoff 1986; Wolf 1993; Neumann and Nünning 2014). All the while, and even in deconstructive mode, the novel maintains its investment in reality and history, but it remains perennially caught up in reflection, as it were, both in the sense of mirroring reality and potentially alerting the readers to the fact that they are looking at a mirror. The visual, on the other hand, while certainly a constitutive element of realism, is increasingly elided in the process. But as we have seen in our discussion of genre fiction above, there has always been the possibility of eliding the telling dimension by focussing on mere seeing (in the sense of simulating an unmediated visual access to the world, one that does not even bear traces of showing) in order to get closer to reality (whether fictional or not) and avoid the innuendo of reflection. This change of emphasis clearly favours immersion and illusion as the dominant affective attitudes, but it also opens up Jameson’s alternative realm of thought experiments unencumbered by representational doubts and scruples, which provides a different, less self-reflexive mode of reflection. The continuum of possible affirmative, revisionary and deconstructive functions of fiction, all of which are partly inscribed in individual texts against the background of genre conventions and partly actualized in reading processes which also take place against the background of genre conventions, became a topic of academic debate with the gradual shift from concerns grounded in the linguistic turn towards the so-called cultural turn (cf. Bachmann-Medick 2016), which can also be seen as

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one of the indicators of a shift from modernism to postmodernism. In the process, Literature lost its exalted position and was more neutrally assessed for its cultural function, while conversely genres formerly treated as merely ‘popular’ were treated as literary genres (see, for example, Suvin 1979) and literary fiction began to assimilate popular genres (↗  22  A. S. Byatt, Possession; ↗  25  David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas). In recent years, this development has become more intense. Conceptually, for example, Seo-Young Chu has presented a Science-Fictional Theory of Representation (2010) which, partly in parallel to but also in extension of Darko Suvin’s pioneering work on science fiction as cognitive estrangement (1979) and Frederic Jameson’s focus on visual schema thinking, literality and thought experiments as outlined in the present chapter, establishes the genre of science fiction as a forum for representing “material experiences of modernity which are inherently cognitively estranging and hence resistant to representation in realism” (Vint 2015, 39–40). According to Chu, one of the central tropes of science fiction is the literalization of metaphors, which, in a strikingly original move, pushes the genre into an affinity with lyric poetry and thus one of the bedrocks of literariness in the emphatic Romantic/modernist sense. And, as Sherryl Vint has pointed out, there is a striking parallel here to the work of China Miéville, especially his novel Embassytown, “a book also deeply concerned with literalized figures of speech, the capacities of metaphor, and the limitations of realism” (2015, 40; ↗ 26 China Miéville, Embassytown). Miéville, in turn, is one of the central and most articulate protagonists of the genre-blurring developments of recent years: In addition to popular success and critical acclaim, Miéville attracted academic attention early in his career, becoming considered an exemplary figure within the ‘British Boom’ of science fiction and fantasy (SF/F), which scholars argued saw the genre infused with a powerful new kind of inventiveness and purpose. (Edwards and Venezia 2015, 2)

Miéville’s activities also extend into the academic sector, where he has made the case for a syncretistic tradition of “weird fiction” (‘horror’ plus ‘fantasy’ plus ‘science fiction’, cf. Miéville 2009) going back to H. P. Lovecraft (“Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” 1937) and anticipating the more recent movement of the “New Weird” with which he was temporarily associated (cf. Edwards and Venezia 2015, 2–5). While this debate remains largely within the confines of genre fiction, Miéville has also been deeply invested in the “politics of generic discontinuity” (Edwards and Venezia 2015, 6), both in his fictional and his academic writing. In this register, he has shifted the longstanding academic focus on the ideological character of realism towards the ideological character of capitalist reality itself: “‘[R]eal’ life under capitalism is a fantasy: ‘realism,’ narrowly defined, is therefore a ‘realistic’ depiction of ‘an absurdity which is true’, but no less absurd for that” (Miéville 2002, 42). What is needed, then, is a mode of writing that somehow manages to crack the walls of this ideological totality by pointing out that “this ‘real’ world is no less fantastical than are the worlds

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created by non-realist literary genres”; the resulting “ab-realism specifically targets the fragility and constructedness of this capitalist realism, refusing its pretence that the world-as-narrated is the same as the world-as-lived” (Vint 2015, 41). This re-politicised deconstructive bent clearly builds on the insights of the realism – modernism – postmodernism trajectory outlined above, but it also insists on an alternative mode of writing unfettered by the limitations of realism and its later deconstruction on purely epistemological grounds. And this is where the literalized metaphors come into play: In contrast to Chu, who argues that literalized metaphors are useful for, in Sherryl Vint’s words, “making concrete and hence understandable what exceeds representative realism” and thus “emphasiz[es] the continuity between mimetic realism and SF mimesis” (Vint 2015, 43), Miéville’s argument insists in a fairly modernist fashion on the metaphoricality of the metaphor that is enhanced by the fact that it is integrated in a literal world construction: “To literalize your metaphor does not mean that it stops being a metaphor, but it invigorates the metaphor because it embeds its referent within the totality of the text, with its own integrity and realism.” (qtd. in Shapiro 2008, 65) With this poetics, Miéville is indeed at the forefront of a broader development which supplant[s] not only the notion of genre itself, but the very foundations of the modernist barricades that had long been thought to insulate literary culture from the vernacular fiction of the pulps and other forms of noncanonical expression. (Wolfe 2011, 23)

Perhaps it is only now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, that the novel has realized its ambition of being a ‘genre without genre’ (Cunningham 2016) in a fully inclusive sense which encompasses both genre fiction and literary fiction. This realises the novel’s potential as “the freest of all the arts” (Eaglestone 2013, 2), which in turn has provided and continues to provide a flexible medium for sustained thinking in writing against the backdrop of an assumed public ‘we’ within the larger frameworks of evolving modernity. But then, it may also already be too late: Looked at from the outside, the novel, whether in the guise of ‘literary’ or ‘genre’ fiction, forms one generic unity of ‘extended prose narratives (or at least texts) in writing/print’ which demand sustained attention of a particular kind from their readers, be it in the registers of immersion or reflection. And by now, the novel has to compete with other media outlets which at least in some respects cater to similar needs on the part of the audience while not demanding this particular kind of attention, and these also make demands on that rare commodity: spare time. It is to be hoped that, by moving from the centre of the Gutenberg galaxy to the margins of convergence culture (Jenkins 2006), the novel will obtain a new freedom of eccentricity which will enable it to observe the world even more astutely without being part of any cultural revolution.

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4 Bibliography 4.1 Works Cited Bachmann-Medick, Doris. Cultural Turns: New Orientations in the Study of Culture. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2016. Bawarshi, Anis. “The Genre Function.” College English 62.3 (2000): 335–360. Beebee, Thomas. The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Berberich, Christine. “Introduction: The Popular – Literature vs. literature.” The Bloomsbury Introduction to Popular Fiction. Ed. Christine Berberich. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 1–10. Booker, M. Keith. “The Other Side of History: Fantasy, Romance, Horror, and Science Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel. Ed. Robert L. Caserio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 251–266. Bould, Mark, Andrew M. Butler, and Istwan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., eds. The British SF Boom. Special Issue of Science Fiction Studies 30 (2003): 353–499. Caserio, Robert L. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel. Ed. Robert L. Caserio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 1–9. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Chu, Seo-Young. Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep: A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Cunningham, David. “Genre without Genre: Romanticism, the Novel and the New.” Radical Philosophy 196 (2016): 14–27. Eaglestone, Robert. Contemporary Fiction: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Edwards, Caroline, and Tony Venezia. “UnIntroduction: China Miéville’s Weird Universe.” China Miéville: Critical Essays. Ed. Caroline Edwards and Tony Venezia. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2015. 1–38. Fowler, Alasdair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Frow, John. Genre. The New Critical Idiom. 2nd ed. London/New York: Routledge, 2015 [2006]. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975 [1818–1829, published posthumously 1835]. Hepburn, Allan. “Detectives and Spies.” The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel. Ed. Robert L. Caserio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 210–222. Hunt, Peter. “Introduction: Fantasy and Alternative Worlds.” Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction. Ed. Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz. London/New York: Continuum, 2001. 1–41. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York/London: Routledge, 1988. Imhoff, Rüdiger. Contemporary Metafiction: A Poetological Study of Metafiction in English since 1939. Heidelberg: Winter, 1986. Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. London/New York: Verso, 2013. Jameson, Fredric. “In Hyperspace.” London Review of Books, 10 September (2015): 17–22. Keating, Peter. The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914. London: Secker & Warburg, 1989. Lodge, David. “Mimesis and Diegesis in Modern Fiction.” Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Ed. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. 348–371.

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Lubbock, Percy. The Craft of Fiction. London: Jonathan Cape, 1921. Miéville, China. “Symposium: Marxism and Fantasy. Editorial Introduction.” Historical Materialism 10.4 (2002): 39–49. Miéville, China. “Weird Fiction.” The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. Ed. Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint. London/New York: Routledge, 2009. 510–515. Moylan, Tom. Scraps of Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder: Westview Press, 2000. Neumann, Birgit, and Ansgar Nünning. “Metanarration and Metafiction”. The Living Handbook of Narratology. Ed. Peter Hühn et al. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/metanarration-andmetafiction. Hamburg: Hamburg University, 2014 (30 September 2016). O’Connell, Hugh Charles, ed. The British Boom. Special Issue of CR: The New Centennial Review 13.2 (2013): 1–178. Petite, Steven. “Literary Fiction vs. Genre Fiction.” Huffington Post, 28 April 2014. http://www. huffingtonpost.com/steven-petite/literary-fiction-vs-genre-fiction_b_4859609.html. (12 February 2016). Pittard, Christopher. “The Victorian Context: Serialization, Circulation, Genres.” The Bloomsbury Introduction to Popular Fiction. Ed. Christine Berberich. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 11–29. Saricks, Joyce G. The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction. 2nd ed. Chicago: American Library Association Editions, 2009. Shapiro, Steven. “Gothic Politics: A Discussion with China Miéville.” Gothic Studies 10.1 (2008): 61–70. Suvin, Darko. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” College English 34.3 (1972): 372–382. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Todorov, Tzvetan. Genres in Discourse. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990 [1978]. Vint, Sherryl. “Ab-Realism: Fractal Language and Social Change.” China Miéville: Critical Essays. Ed. Caroline Edwards and Tony Venezia. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2015. 29–59. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972 [1957]. Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Methuen, 1984. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana Press, 1988. Wolf, Mark J. P. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. New York/ London: Routledge, 2012. Wolf, Werner. Ästhetische Illusion und Illusionsdurchbrechung in der Erzählkunst: Theorie und Geschichte mit Schwerpunkt auf englischem illusionsstörenden Erzählen. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993. Wolf, Werner. “Illusion (Aesthetic).” The Living Handbook of Narratology. Ed. Peter Hühn et al. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/illusion-aesthetic. Hamburg: Hamburg University, 2014 (27 September 2016). Wolfe, Gary K. Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2011.

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4.2 Further Reading Armitt, Lucy. Fantasy Fiction: An Introduction. London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2005. Berberich, Christine, ed. The Bloomsbury Introduction to Popular Fiction. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Brooke-Rose, Christine. A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, especially of the Fantastic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. James, Edward, and Farah Mendlesohn, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. James, Edward, and Farah Mendlesohn, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Lanzendörfer, Tim, ed. The Poetics of Genre in the Contemporary Novel. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016. Luckhurst, Roger. Science Fiction. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005. Mathews, Richard. Fantasy: The Liberation of the Imagination. London: Routledge, 2002. Mendlesohn, Farah. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Mendlesohn, Farah, and Edward James. A Short History of Fantasy. London: Middlesex University Press, 2009. Priestman, Martin, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Reyes, Xavier Aldana, ed. Horror: A Literary History. London: The British Library, 2016. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. The New Critical Idiom. London/New York: Routledge, 2005. Wisker, Gina. Horror Fiction: An Introduction. London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2005.

Ingrid Hotz-Davies

4 Gender: Performing Politics in Prose? Performativity – Masculinity – Feminism – Queer Abstract: Gender and sexuality remain among the most rigorously enforced social categories used to classify human beings and make them conform. At the same, they are hotly contested, worked over, debated, questioned, agonized over, and one cannot say that there is any stable general agreement on what they are, what work they do, and if they are even maintainable. The novel reflects this state of affairs, but at the same time it is a privileged site because it is not strictly bound to the rules of ‘what is’. In the realm of the imagination, the boundaries of what constitutes gender or sexual orientation or sexuality are much more open to manipulation than they are in actual social interactions. In pursuing the question of how these categories have been translated into novels, the chapter presents two main strands: novels that take gender and/ or sexuality seriously as a problem (manifesting in anxious masculinities, feminist struggles, gay and lesbian identity affirmations, and the exploration of intersectional anxieties); novels that are motivated by a marked skepticism about the validity of those very categories, and that seek to break their hold and undo the automatisms by which their validity and power is assumed. Keywords: Gender, queer, sexuality, anxiety, subversion When thinking of gender and the twentieth-century English novel, one is tempted to begin with a variation on Austen: that it is a ‘truth universally acknowledged’ that the twentieth century is the century of women, from women’s suffrage in 1918 to the opening of all professions to women, including the military, to the opening of all educational opportunities to women, including the universities, from the successive reduction of legal constraints in divorce and family law to the adoption of anti-sex-discrimination legislation. Following this development in equalizing women’s social status, there is an increasing legal acceptance of homosexual men and women, starting with the partial decriminalization of male homosexuals in Britain in 1967 and ending for now with the ongoing debate about granting the right to marry and adopt children to same-sex couples. In more recent years, the kaleidoscope of sexual and gender identities seeking and in some cases finding protection under the umbrella of equal rights has broadened to include various trans-gender identities. But as we know from Austen, ‘truths universally acknowledged’ are never as clear-cut as one might expect, and these developments need to be seen in a context in which various inequalities continue to exist in terms of the work place, of property and income, the distribution of private tasks and public office, in everyday experiences of denigration DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-005

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and violence, the continuing impact of misogyny and homo- and transphobia, in conflicted attitudes between people and within individual subjects. That is, there is a distinct two-sidedness to the issue of ‘gender in the twentieth century.’ ‘Emancipation’ appears far advanced and at the same time gender continues to be among the most hotly and antagonistically debated issues ranging from everyday advice columns and opinion pieces in the press to recurring ‘backlashes’ and discursively violent gender-fights over what seems to be an unchanging selection of always the same issues: the ‘nature’ of women (and increasingly men) and the acceptability of non-heterosexual forms of sexuality. ‘Gender’ is in no way at rest. In all of this, probably the greatest challenge is conceptual: Do ‘men’ and ‘women’ exist as inherently different and mutually complementary creatures? Is sexuality an identity category, a ‘given’ that precedes any sexual acts, and if so, how many sexualities are there and what should their status be? In other words, what exactly is the status of gender binarism and heteronormativity, the persistence of which has been nothing short of astonishing in the face of the real-life evidence of the many different ways in which human beings inhabit their worlds in the twentieth century? In the academic debate today it is safe to say that most gender theorists adopt some form of constructivist model in which, in Simone de Beauvoir’s resonant phrase, one is not born a woman but becomes one (de Beauvoir 1949). She is not alone with this insight even in her own time (see e.g. Riviere 1929), and today, even if we may not agree on just exactly how gender is ‘done’ in social practice, there are few within the academic field who would endorse any form of marked essentialism, that is the belief that women are after all born ‘that way.’ At the same time, one does not have to move very far from one’s desk to see that essentialist assumptions do persist in all reaches of life so that one must assume a simultaneity of ideas, sometimes even within one consciousness, that might best be thought about with the help of Raymond Williams’ notion of emergent, dominant, and residual cultural forms and relations (Williams 1977). That is, we are looking at a dynamic field of beliefs and their refusal which includes convictions that gender is biologically founded as well as the conviction, following Judith Butler’s influential nomenclature, that it is entirely ‘performative’, that your sexuality is something that you are born with or that it is something malleable that may change over time and may not be categorizable anyway, that there is a vast difference between men and women, be it culturally induced or essential, or that the difference is in reality if not in social practice negligible, that there are two and only two sexes (and genders), or that there are many more (or only one human species), that these entities are strictly separatable or that they are in fact gradational, that our bodies determine who we are and can be, or that they do not, and indeed whether our bodies are to be thought of first and foremost as sexed or not. Just exactly what is the ‘dominant’ belief in which context, what the emergent, and what the residual, is hard to say and is, in fact, itself a part of the structure of the debate. For this reason, it is impossible to establish a clear developmental teleology for gender and the novel in the twentieth century, from, say, late Victorian two-spheres ideologies and the

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egalitarian feminism of the beginning of the century, through gender-quietism in the 1950s, to second wave feminism in the 1970s and 1980s, to the radical deconstruction of gender in the 1990s, or from the sexual liberation of the 1960s and its ‘coming-outs’ of homosexual men and women, through the AIDS crisis in the 1980s to queer ‘gender bending’ in the last few decades. At the moment, the most thorough literary history we have on the issue of gender and literature in the twentieth century is Ina Schabert’s study, available only in German, which traces the topic through some 450 densely packed pages. She posits just such a development (Schabert 2006, 6–7), and then has to modify it in the course of the study because, in terms of what can and cannot be thought about gender, there is a marked continuity of everything and there is no such simple progress from comparative gender stability to deconstructive radicalism. The ‘gender bending’ of, say, Jeanette Winterson (↗ 21 Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry) or Angela Carter (↗ 19 Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus) towards the end of the century is in a continuity with that of Virginia Woolf at the beginning (↗ 9 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse). If we add to this the fact that the topic here is more than ‘women writers’ or even women, the situation becomes even more daunting. Existing literary histories cannot help us as they usually (and very wisely) limit themselves to only one of the parameters in question, for example femininity, masculinity, queer, gay, lesbian, transgender, etc. (see e.g. Breen 1990; Friedman 1989; Knights 1999; Du Plessis 1985; Bluemel 2009; Linett 2010; Woods 1998; Gilbert and Gubar 1988; 1989 and 1994; McCallum 2014; Stevens 2011). For this reason, I suggest a detour through the question of what exactly the ‘politics’ of fiction might be. For a long time, within the paradigm of gender and cultural studies, gender in the novel was discussed under the heading of ‘representation’ (and as with everything in this field, this also persists), that is, the discussion of just how men and women of various sexual orientations, social strata, races, ethnic origins, etc. are being ‘represented’ in a given work of fiction, and this means how they square with real-world expectations of how we want gender to be manifested (for ‘representation’ as a key concern of cultural studies, see Stuart Hall 1997). Are male and female characters ‘represented’ in accordance with the norms of gender-binarism or not? Are women shown to have (some form of) power or agency or not? Just how ‘deviant’ are these subjects being made to look? But fiction is more than representation: it is a highly complex mode that on the one side resides in the entirely invented and inventable, the game of make-believe in which it has the privilege to play out any scenarios it may care to imagine in a mode of the ‘what if’; at the same time, it is bound to a commitment to verisimilitude, if not in relation to a world outside the fiction, then within the fiction itself. That is, the game is not entirely free; on some level, it has to make sense. But this relative freedom to invent is not fiction’s only privilege. If gender is a kind of blueprint as Judith Butler and those sociologists investigating gender as a ‘doing’ suggest (Butler 1990 and 1993; Goffman 1977; West and Zimmerman 1987), a set of compulsive instructions telling us how to ‘perform’ or ‘do’ a particular gender in a particular context, then the reason why these instructions cannot easily be ignored

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is that individuals are heavily subjected to what Louis Althusser calls ‘interpellation’, a continual and coercive ‘call’ by which we are produced and acknowledged as viable subjects (Althusser 1971). The threat, and for Butler this threat is considerable, would be the loss of intelligibility, that is a dropping out of the social altogether: invisibility, stigma, at worst persecution (Butler 1993 and 1997). As with Sartre’s hell, gender, it seems, is other people. It is here that fiction inserts an important delay between performance and interpellation. To be sure, the authors of novels are also interpellated, by having their manuscripts rejected for example, by reviews, by scholarship, by their readers. But at the same time, they can lay claim to a certain degree of deniability as any reading is also in the eye of the beholder, an act of interpretation. Freedom of invention, control over the fictional universe, some deniability of content, and delay of interpellation: these are the strongholds on which literature can rely to do more than represent what is already there, why it can sidestep even the most powerful of regulations, suspend them as it were for the duration of the work, certainly within the limits of the intelligibility of the work, but still under much less constraint than a mere chronicler of any given historically specific reality would be subjected to. So, the question I am going to ask is this: What are the rules of the game (of gender) that can be discerned in a variety of twentieth-century novels? This question cannot be completely or even just exhaustively addressed, very simply because there is no novel that does not in one way or another ‘do’ gender. Even the most experimental of speculative fictions will have some form of gender, and even its absence would be that novel’s way of doing gender. Christine Brooke-Rose’s highly experimental Subscript (1999), for example, begins with a “Zing” and in a feat of narrative ingenuity tells the story of life on the planet from the first amino acids onwards, ending up long before anything like a recognizable human culture that we know from history books has emerged. For the longest stretches, gender is the last thing on evolution’s mind, but in the end this novel, too, must think about how and why these creatures whose evolution we are being made to follow are going to become ‘men’ and ‘women’ (and even if Brooke-Rose had chosen to pursue the evolution of the elephant rather than that of the early hominids, we would in all likelihood not escape the question of how elephants are sexed and socially interactive on the basis of it). Since this is so, I will try to focus on a series of texts that we can think of as prototypical in the hope that other novels not mentioned here will align themselves with the models discussed. And I propose that we be guided by one key question as the thread that is to lead us through the maze of gender in the novel of the twentieth century: What is a text’s attitude to the ubiquity and power of the category of gender? Is gender something that is being taken very seriously, even with a sense of anxiety, anguish, or agonism, or is it something that is being ignored, side-stepped, treated ‘as if’ it didn’t matter (all that much)?

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1 Seriously Gendered: The Literature of Gender Anxiety 1.1 Two Novels Let us begin somewhere where it all starts, with two novels from the period of High Modernism at the beginning of the century, by two writers who can be seen very much as opposites in terms of their gender, class, education, affiliations, and gender beliefs: D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1921) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). These two works are very different from each other in terms of literary technique and subject matter: One develops a long and chronologically worked out trajectory for its Midlands-based characters, the other focuses on one day in London in which the past and present of the characters has to be inserted a-chronologically in the form of flashbacks and projections; one consists of a sprawling narrative subdivided into almost self-contained short-story like chapters, the other is condensed and displays an intricately interwoven and interconnected simultaneity of narrative strands; one takes in a broad range of industrialists, artists, teachers, intellectuals, workers, etc., the other the social environment of one upper-class London wife and one lower middle-class soldier returned from the Great War. And yet, they do have one thing in common: an intense investment in the question of ‘men’ and ‘women’. Lawrence’s novel provides a detailed exploration of the erotic and affective bonds between a set of four characters: the Brangwen sisters Ursula and Gudrun, the industrialist Gerald Critch, and the school inspector Rupert Birkin. All of these are interconnected both along male/female and same-sex lines. Gerald and Gudrun become lovers in a (self-) destructive relationship which is a veritable ‘war of the sexes’ in which neither of them can bear to play the submissive part, while at the same time feeling themselves being curiously attracted precisely by the spectre of being vanquished, undone, overcome. For Gerald, whose battle we get to see in more detail than Gudrun’s, and maybe also with more empathy, what is at stake is nothing less than his manhood, and this is a problem both in his sexual relations with Gudrun, and in his social existence as an industrialist in post-war Britain. Being a ‘man’ is here an impossible task which tears the character apart between contrary pulls. He is intensely committed to a patriarchal notion of male control and dominance but has to operate in a social environment that will not let him assume this role because the woman he desires will not submit herself, and at the same time he himself begins to harbor growing doubts about the very project of masculinity itself. That this is seen as a new problematic, the very symptom of modernity, is made clear from the very beginning as we encounter Gudrun and Ursula unenthusiastically contemplating the prospect of marriage while sporting that “remote, virgin look of modern girls” (Lawrence 1983 [1921], 8). For Gerald, this modern gender doubt ends in death on a snowed-in mountain in Tyrol as he turns away from the unsolvable conundrum of his life. Rupert Birkin fares somewhat better

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in that he at least survives his masculinity. His lover Ursula is a female character who seeks to fill the more conventional role of helpmeet to her man, trying to get him to accept the material and emotional status quo of a conventional life together. But this, too, is seen as a trap as Birkin dreams of an obviously unattainable ideal of a relationship between equals which is at the same time supposed to rest on the notion of binary gender ‘complementarity’. The solution proposed in the end is hardly an idealization of the heterosexual couple but rather a bitter making do with what seems to work, just about. Part of the dissatisfaction with which the novel leaves Birkin at the end stems from an unresolvable second strand which very cannily anticipates much of what Judith Butler would later theorize as the ‘ungrievable’ melancholia of homosexuality, heteronormativity’s price in unlived lives as it were (Butler 1990). It consists of the relationship between Birkin and Gerald, filled on Birkin’s side with an intense longing for the ‘something else’ of a homosexual union, but at the same time relegated to the fantasy realm of an unfulfillable desire, as the heteronormative logic and the homophobic anxieties that result from it will not allow for a homosexual or bisexual resolution of the story. Virgina Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway makes full use of those techniques of indirect thought and speech we have come to call stream of consciousness, and with this of a technique that in the 1920s came to be associated with women’s writing through Dorothy Richardson’s extensive use of it in her Pilgrimage series, especially in the first volume of the 13-volume work, Pointed Roofs (1915). This is not to say that stream of consciousness is either an entirely modernist invention, or that male authors have not been practitioners of it. However, it does mean that Woolf chose a mode that she herself saw as a mode exceptionally suited to the investigation of that hitherto uncharted territory, a woman’s mind, and that she saw it as a distinctly modern concern both in terms of its topic (a woman’s mind) and its technique (the seemingly unmediated rendering of human thought in progress) (cf. Woolf 1919 and 1923). It is in this way that we plunge into Clarissa Dalloway’s mind as we encounter her in the morning stepping out to order flowers for the party she is going to host in the evening (and at the end of the book). Where Lawrence’s chapters have a tendency towards the metaphorical (the one dealing with the closest physical bond between Gerald and Birkin, for example, is entitled “Gladiatorial”), Woolf foregrounds the contingent and fleeting aspects of people’s thoughts and feelings. Of these, there is Clarissa herself, a woman in middle age, married to a successful government official in a marriage that ‘works’ even though there is no very close bond between the partners. She herself for a while thinks back to her old friend Peter Walsh, who also proposed to her in the past and who has had a more precarious career in India, but he will not turn out to have been the better option. Much as in Lawrence, the option of a homoerotic relationship with Sally Seton, a childhood friend whom Clarissa remembers kissing in the garden one day in their youth (the probably single most erotic moment in the novel) had to be sacrificed to married normalcy. In contrast to Clarissa’s more virginal married life, Sally seems to have settled much more happily into the matronly life

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of being a mother of five boys. The novel’s most feared example of both masculinity and authority is probably Sir William Bradshaw, the psychiatrist (a not insignificant choice, not only with regard to Woolf’s own experiences with the profession, but also prophetic in terms of the enormous influence psychoanalysis would have in the twentieth century, specifically also on the conception of gender and sexuality). The great counter-pull to Clarissa’s set of acquaintances is Septimus Smith, a man of a lower social stratum who in a way has to die the death Clarissa escapes at the end of the novel (she has been haunted by it, specifically through a verse from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, which she cannot banish from her mind: “Fear no more the heat of the sun, nor the furious winter’s rages”). In Septimus, we find a masculinity marred and finally destroyed by the experience of World War I and its subsequent ‘shell shock’, a condition much debated at the time as an affliction of the male youth of the country by ‘hysteria’, that most feminine of maladies (Showalter 1985). Septimus is also haunted by an abjected same-sex attachment to Evans, his friend who died in the war and who comes to inhabit his present. All in all, we can see in Mrs Dalloway a parade of gendered ways of being in the world, and in Mrs Dalloway herself a character imbued with a vague sense of melancholy and futility, a profound uncertainty about whether this is indeed the life she should have lived, and what the alternatives would have been (another man, a woman, her daughter’s political ambitions, Sally Seton’s involvement with the world, etc.). As it turns out, there is no viable alternative and Clarissa ends up joining her party and joining the moment, alive (one is tempted to say: for now). Like Rupert Birkin, then, she is a character who does survive her gendered existence, but like him, precariously, with an unresolved substratum of anxiety and regret. In many ways, then, both novels are novels of gender anxiety, even anguish, showing how heteronormativity and gender binarism is something that cannot be avoided but at the same time something that certainly makes these characters unhappy or, in extreme cases, is something they can die from. But there is a very marked difference, and one that can be traced through the whole of the twentieth century. From its very beginning, Lawrence’s text is born out of a nostalgia for a gender stability that no longer works, a conflicted nostalgia to be sure, as Birkin’s anguished musings show, but nevertheless there is a sense that the anxieties of modernity are also a result of a ‘gender trouble’ that is the very mark of the modern. The source of the malaise, then, is a gender system that is not clear enough, that is put under pressure by uncooperative women and a flagging of purpose in men. For Woolf, the problem is the reverse. It is the very traditionalism of the available alternatives that makes Clarissa long for an end to it all: It is the very existence of the sex-gender system, which here appears as largely unaffected by change or modernity, that makes these characters melancholy. These two strands are the main strands that dominate the twentieth-century novel in so far as it pursues the question of gender as a problem. There are very few novels written by women that mourn the passing of patriarchal certainty and privilege, while there is a fine collection of novels written by men that lament a state in which mas-

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culinity is no longer what, supposedly, it used to be. At the same time, the abjected homosexual option, heteronormativity’s sacrifice as it were, is something that will come to haunt many of these texts.

1.2 Anxious Masculinities In her literary history, Ina Schabert describes how men’s literature after World War II translates a perceived loss of the relevance of what used to be male domains – the public sphere, the credibility of political, intellectual, spiritual and military leadership, the establishment of meaning itself – into a literature of the conditio humana, a condition which is, however, really a condition of man (Schabert 2006, 248–276). She begins the role-call of these writers with Ernest Hemingway, and further candidates dealt with by her could also figure here: Malcolm Lowry, Graham Greene, and most fascinatingly but clearly demanding more than could be done here, Samuel Beckett (↗ 12 Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable). But I would suggest that such condition of man-novels are much older. Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900), for example, is a novel that in its entirety revolves around a problem of masculinity as its hero, the Lord Jim of the title, violated naval decorum by abandoning ship ahead of the passengers and, to make matters worse, jumping from a ship that in the end failed to sink. The tonal register of the novel is two-fold. On the one hand, we encounter the narrator Charles Marlow, who tries to piece this story together in an intricately woven collection of accounts that he assembles in order to try and understand the inexplicable: how male honour could have failed and how the man who has lost it could go on living with the shame. On the other side, there is Jim’s very real anguish at actually having to be the one having to accept and do just that. In the fascinating intricacies of the novel’s narrative complexity, it is easy to overlook its basic premise. If we accept human failure and weakness as simply a part of being human, Jim could be forgiven and forgive himself and there would be no story to tell. It is the exacting demands of masculinity (Jim is continually associated with a belief in an older ideal of male chivalric conduct) that generate the whole telos of the story. In the second half of the story Jim tries to redeem himself by taking charge of an unspecified aboriginal community, but all to no avail as he ends up being executed for the death of one of the tribesmen, a heroic and redemptive ending for him maybe, but again a masculinity that is best lived in the moment of death. The quasi-colonial nature of Jim’s quest for redemption should have been obvious to readers as they could already have encountered the narrator Marlow in an earlier novel, Heart of Darkness (1899/1902) (↗  6  Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness). That novel has been read in any number of generalizing ways, most de-genderedly maybe as a story about the human psyche. However, it is part of our anguished masculinity canon as we see Marlow tell the story of how he embarked on a journey to one of the supposedly underexplored regions of the earth in order to pursue a last chance for a

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truly masculine fate in a diminishing field of possibilities. Of course he was wrong all along: the colonial power in both its cruelty and its unheroic mediocrity is already there and the one ideal he desperately and longingly tries to hold on to, the mysterious Mr Kurtz, turns out to be an illustration of just how devastatingly the colonial enterprise and the masculinity that goes along with it have been compromised. All (or most) of this Marlow sees very clearly but at the same time he is sure of one thing even in a world of diminishing certainties: that this revelation must be kept from the women, personified here in the figure of Kurtz’s ‘Intended’ to whom Marlow imparts a final lie about her spouse’s fate. In 1915, Ford Madox Ford, one of Joseph Conrad’s close collaborators, published The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion, a story opening with the statement that this is the “saddest story”. While Lord Jim is a novel which celebrates the unreliability and complexity of evidence and witness, Ford’s novel presents us with what is probably one of the most dazzlingly devious cases of narrative unreliability in the period. The narrator is John Dowell, and when all is said and done, the story he has to tell is of two couples, himself and his wife Florence, and Edward Ashburn and his wife Leonora, who over a course of years spent time together in a German spa, in Dowell’s case ostensibly for his wife’s weak heart condition. As the narrator reveals step by step different facets of his story, in fact different versions of it, we learn that through all those years his wife had an affair with Edward Ashburn, that Ashburn was being terrorized by his wife Leonora, that Ashburn was a notorious philanderer and Leonora the one trying to keep it together, that in the end Ashburn’s last love interest, his ward Nancy, is also his undoing, and that the whole thing ends with two suicides (Florence and Ashburn), one case of dementia (Nancy), and two survivors, Leonora and Dowell, with Dowell having exchanged one ‘ward,’ his fraudulently ailing wife, for another, a real invalid, the mentally disturbed and unresponsive Nancy. In all of this, the point is not so much who did what and to whom (though that is quite a puzzle in its own right), but rather what the narrator knew at which point, and what the purpose of his narration is. Is this really the ‘saddest’ story for him, and what exactly was his relationship with his wife, who obviously managed to keep him out of her bed ever since the wedding? What exactly is his relationship with the man whom he seems to admire and in the end pity so much, Edward, the man who also cuckolded him? Is the purpose of the narration the narrator’s self-exculpation and the salvation of his reputation? Was he in collusion with his wife in her affairs, because she held the purse strings? Or was he a man of such colossal naiveté that he genuinely knew nothing, and what does that say about him? And: does he even care? The one thing that is clear is that we are in the presence of a massive demystification of the ideal of upper class masculinity, of the heteronormative contract as such, and even of the binary arrangement of the sexes that is the foundation of this masculinity. If we now jump more towards the end of the twentieth century, we still encounter male characters longing for the power accorded to them as men, and simultaneously a deep skepticism about such expectations. But the rules of the game have

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also changed. Martin Amis is justly known for his depiction of the ‘low’: despicable, violent, often self-deluded characters who inhabit a world in which they nevertheless seem to be nothing special. In Money: A Suicide Note (1984), for example, we meet John Self, high on his success as a director of high-fat food commercials, loose in America to finally make his international breakthrough. But the tinnitus-plagued, hard drinking, porn-consuming, women-abusing, blow-job craving, blackouts-suffering, decidedly non-low-carb John Self seems already half dead on page one, even as he himself thinks he is on top of his game. As it turns out, all of his assumptions about himself and the world he moves in will have been wrong as we continue to watch him in a downward spiral that he himself is barely aware of. In the process, he is exposed to most excruciating humiliations, stripped of his belongings, dignity, parentage, even his sense of self. In all of this – and one must say: again – it is his very masculinity that seems to be the thing that may very well cost the protagonist his life. However, things have changed in terms of the masculinity that is being showcased. It is no longer the ideal of the chivalric and benevolent upper class patriarch that Self aspires to. On the contrary, it is the defiantly unruly masculinity we have come to associate with lad culture that is this character’s raison d’être: alcohol, casual sex, porn, misogyny, racism, generally a display of unashamed political incorrectness, and the attachment to a (supposed) working-class tradition of masculinity. Amis’s novel, just to be clear, is not an example of ‘lad literature’ but rather of its undoing, as John Self must learn the very hard way. But, and this is also important, the character is not completely handed over to our contempt. Self is also the narrator of the story and as such retains some authority over it, even if it is only the authority of style and of a voice of his own. His is a witty, self-ironic, caustic voice that is attractive not only, I believe, to ‘lads’ as, paradoxically, Self also becomes a kind of everyman (and by implication everywoman) in his stubborn wrongness. If, that is, we assume that being wrong, being weak, being despicable, not measuring up, and above all being fallible is part not only of the condition of man but also of the conditio humana. There is a long tradition of grounding fictions of male anxiety or disentitlement in contemporary developments. Early in the twentieth century it was the advent of modernity and World War I, in the middle of the century World War II and post-industrialism, at the end it is feminism that is to blame (Genz and Brabon 2009). In light of the consistency with which these plots appear, however, we should consider the mourning of a supposedly better past when men were still men and, as in the texts discussed here, the literary undoing of this notion in the moment of its utterance, as itself an inherent part of the performativity of masculinity, which can also be found in American novels not discussed here, foremost of course those of Ernest Hemingway, but also such sophisticated unreliable narrations as Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) or Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991).

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1.3 Feminist Struggles There is no parallel in women’s writing to such anguished masculinities, no novels where the text will longingly look back to a femininity now lost where women could still be women and enjoy the pleasures of being the ‘Angel in the House’. This is not to say that there is no literature written by women that promotes such a set of gender beliefs; in fact, much of the middle-brow romance literature available throughout the century offers just such models. But characteristically this does not involve any self-reflexivity, and certainly not of the degree observable in the literature of anguished masculinity. Let us return to Virginia Woolf again, this time to her novel To the Lighthouse (1927). Here we do find some nostalgia for an older type of femininity as embodied by Mrs Ramsay in the first part of the novel. Mrs Ramsay comes very close to being a portrait of one of those ‘angels in the house’ who Woolf thought should be killed (Woolf 1931). The ideal of self-less femininity that Mrs Ramsay lives by comes at a high price as a psychologically barely supportable existence, and this diagnosis mirrors to a certain degree the anxieties of masculinity we have discussed so far. The key moments in Mrs Ramsay’s life are those when she enters into a practice of meditative emptiness where she feels herself approaching a state of being a ‘wedge of darkness’, ecstatically liberated from her femininity and its duties and, indeed, from personhood itself (on the novel’s ambivalence ↗ 9 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse). The longing for this character enters the novel through the painter Lily Briscoe, but Lily also struggles precisely with those demands on women which Mrs Ramsay has tried to live with (among them the one stipulating that they cannot be artists!). For the novel as a whole it is clear that there is no going back and no desire to do so: the future belongs to Lily Briscoe, and this is a good thing. But the fact that this future has to be fought for by Lily is also what makes this text part of a tradition where the novel’s female characters have to negotiate, very often painfully, between the demands of gender and society and their own needs and aspirations. It is the patriarchal system itself, embodied in the male and female characters of the work in question, which is put to the test and challenged in these novels, and it is in this broad sense that I am calling them feminist. The 1970s and 1980s see the emergence of a programmatically feminist literature in the works, for example, of Sara Maitland, Margaret Drabble, Michèle Roberts, Fay Weldon, and many others. The ‘movement’ is very much determined by the internal debates within feminism and dominated by a model of feminism which sees writing as a woman as a political act and political necessity. However, the plots remain, since they have a ‘message’ to communicate, very much indebted to realist modes of story­ telling, often not without their own perpetuation of stereotypes of femininity and (hegemonic) masculinity (see Greene 1990; Breen 1990; and Schabert 2006, 299–314). But, and this is a realization that emerges simultaneously and goes back at least to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) and its glide into the fantastic, simply turning the tables and writing about the victimization of women

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does not by itself unsettle the gendered arrangements (indeed, suffering and victimization have a long tradition of being gendered female!). In France, feminists like Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva theorized the solution to this problem in an écriture feminine that would seek to find ways of leaving the ‘phallogocentric’ symbolic order behind in order to emerge into a writing of a pre- or extra-symbolic feminine, now a condition that could potentially also be inhabited by men in so far as they pursued the same quest. That is, eventually women would seek to sidestep the realist model for other modes at least seemingly less determined by the patriarchal symbolic order in the form of fantastic, surreal, formally experimental gender bending, a mode we will return to later. For a both sophisticated and amusing insight into the internal debates of the period and the spread of narratives generated by it from fantasy and the re-writing of history ‘from below’ to myth criticism and realist writing, The Book of Mrs Noah (1987) by Michèle Roberts provides both an overview and a critical engagement. The Mrs Noah of the title finds herself at a loose end as her husband attends a (to him!) important conference in Venice. The counternarrative that evolves features an ark imagined by Mrs Noah which is as much a space of the mind as it is a literary and cultural archive of both canonical texts (on the upper deck) and the myriad untold, ecstatic, fantastic, alternative, but excluded stories told by women, the non-canonized. At the same time, it is a kind of women writers’ workshop attended by various “Sibyls” who stand for different directions within the feminist debate, from adherers to the ideal of an écriture feminine to those who refuse to be gendered at all. This assembly is gate-crashed by the Gaffer, a representative of the masculinist notion of the absolute author-creator-God and the male canon, now alas sadly suffering from writer’s block. Various short narratives, accompanied by Gaffer’s comic dismay at being over-exposed to so many women’s voices, show what the concerns of a woman-centered kind of (counter)writing could be, from a story about the spiritual awakening of Noah’s wife to stories of women’s predicaments and pleasures in various historical periods from medieval mysticism to a post-apocalyptic world of the future. The sheer variety of concerns and approaches merges into a complex and ultimately non-essentialist investigation of what it is that ‘woman’ might be, have been, become. While some of the novels produced by a committed political feminism may seem somewhat predictable today, there are writers and works which stick out as exceptionally sophisticated and bearing many re-readings. Of these, Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood have shown a consistently high output, and Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962), the story of an artist and writer who finds herself struggling to write a second novel while seeing herself enmeshed in the demands of relationships, friendship, maternity, dysfunctional family arrangements, (South African) Marxist politics, migration and alienation, and many more, has become a classic (↗ 14 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook). The novels in this section are texts for which, as it were, gender is ‘everything’, and agonizingly so. The same position can also be worked out for texts addressing

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not so much gender as sexual orientation. Radclyffe Hall’s seminal lesbian/transsexual novel The Well of Loneliness (1928), for example, follows the miseries and anguish of its transgender/lesbian heroine Stephen Gordon, who tries to find a place in which she can live not only her desire but what is seen as her ‘nature’ as the ‘male’ part in a relationship with a ‘feminine’ woman. In this, Hall provides one of the first fictional accounts of a life lived under the regime of the assumptions of sexology, specifically the notion of the sexual ‘invert’ (Schaffner 2011). The novel’s belonging in the anguish section of twentieth-century accounts of sexuality is clear, as is its impassioned – and comparatively new – plea for sexuality as a human rights issue deriving from the assumption that it is part of a human being’s nature. Around the same time, E. M. Forster writes and privately circulates his novel Maurice (published posthumously in 1971), which makes much the same claim for its gay hero Maurice, who has to come to terms with his own homosexuality in order to finally follow his nature into the arms of the game-keeper Alec and a utopian but nonetheless politically poignant projected shared life in rural seclusion. The fact that Radclyffe Hall’s courageous novel was published (to immediately attract court action), while Forster’s was not, is a reflection not so much of the daring or timidity of these authors as of the legal situation of homosexual men in Great Britain, who faced criminal prosecution right up to the partial decriminalization of male homosexuality in 1967. Accounts of homosexual/transgender lives which place the horrors of sexual stigma and its effects in the centre can be found throughout the twentieth century, for example in the substantial and complex œuvre of Alan Hollinghurst. Beginning with The Swimming Pool Library (1988) and (for now) ending with The Stranger’s Child (2011), Hollinghurst’s novels have been dedicated to fathoming the complexities of gay life in the twentieth century, both in terms of a history of gay lives in Britain as a history of silence, abuse and persecution but also resilience and persistence, and in terms of the sexual power politics in gay relationships today. Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (1998) is a posthumous dissection of the life of a black jazz trumpeter whose biologically female body is ‘outed’ after his death, a stock-taking that focuses both on the lurid gaze of the public and the nuanced perceptions of the people close to him, most intimately his wife and his son. At first sight, Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972) seems to be a straightforward tale of female victimization as we follow the severely alienated narrator on her search for her father, who may or may not be dead. This quest takes her back to her father’s home on an island in Quebec in the company of her boyfriend Joe and the married couple Anne and David. But the story quickly develops surreal aspects as the narrator finds herself exposed to both David’s and Joe’s sexual advances, witnessing the abusive nature of David’s relationship with his wife, labouring under a real or imagined trauma in which she either abandoned or aborted her child, and furthermore feeling persecuted by mysterious “Americans” trying to take over the island, all in the presence of the haunting memory of the dispossessed and displaced indigenous population who left the mysterious wall paintings her father was in search of at the time of his disappearance. Clearly, all is not well, and in a subtle way this is the

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result of the narrator’s existence as a gendered being, in fact of her imprisonment in social and historical structures and contexts which weigh on and persecute her and seem to be beyond her control. The only way out – this novel’s écriture feminine as it were – is a descent into madness (or is it sanity?) as the narrator waits for the others to leave the island in order to then leave humanity, language, housing, human culture itself behind to become an animal-like creature roaming the island, far removed from what constitutes the human social and symbolic order, language and meaning itself. The much debated ending where she comes to her senses again (or is it madness?) and decides to love Joe after all marks a return from an experience of liminality into order (with something learned along the way), but it also cannot provide satisfactory closure as the problems that caused the narrator’s radical gesture of disengagement have not truly been addressed or solved. The narrator’s flight away from all things human goes to the heart of the problem of a (gendered) human existence in that the only place safe from gender and its impositions and interpellations seems to be a place beyond, before, or above the human altogether. This is the key intuition that powers all of Stevie Smith’s works, her poetry as well as her formally experimental Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), which is an experiment in creating the narrator’s voice as a distinctly oral medium, the “talking voice that runs on, and the thoughts come, the way I said, and the people come too, and come and go” (Smith 1980 [1936], 39). The novel famously came about as Smith failed to find a publisher for her poetry and was advised that she should write fiction instead. What she wrote is a novel of kinds featuring the voice of Pompey, an underappreciated and bored secretary who meets assorted characters and situations in the novel and, not coincidentally, keeps interspersing Stevie Smith’s unpublishable poetry. On one level, then, this is a novel about ‘voice’ and the finding of it as well as the specific discursive quality of ‘talk’. This voice is very strongly context-dependent; that is, Pompey’s opinions, her reactions, the very ideas that will occupy her mind, are in a continual process of being molded and at times almost mauled by the context of their utterance. Take, for example Pompey’s attitude to Jews. They come in for their share of anti-Semitic sentiment when Pompey finds herself the only non-Jew at a party in London, while on a trip to Germany she sees very clearly the origin and social function of anti-Semitism both in herself and in a German madness she sees with lucid and for 1936 even prophetic clarity: “Oh how I felt that feeling of cruelty in Germany, and the sort of vicious cruelty that isn’t battle-cruelty, but doing people to death in lavatories” (Smith 1980 [1936], 103–104). The point here is not so much that Pompey has ‘learned’ something, that is, that she has been taught to think differently of Jews; rather, the point is that Pompey finds herself buffeted to and fro in the minting process of interpellations that assail her on every side. It is these that produce the contexts in which in some instances she feels driven to asserting distance from or closeness to her Jewish interlocutors. This is also reflected in the very structure of the novel which over long stretches consists of snippets of speech from books, from conversations had or overheard, from dipping into the “voice that runs on” of other people.

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It seems that in Novel on Yellow Paper, long before any postmodern or deconstructivist notions of intertextuality, there is an awareness that it may not be we who are speaking our discourses but rather that our discourses might be speaking us; that our opinions, such as they are, are in a way already made before we have them, and the best one can hope for is an exasperated realization that this is so. This also goes for opinions on gender, and as Pompey enters into a number of singularly unsuccessful relationships it is the fact that she continually finds herself confronted with ‘opinions’ – on men, on women, on motherhood, on sex, on everything and anything in a web of expectations and preconceptions that surround the very fact of being human (and female) – that drives her into a sense of despair for which the overarching metaphor is: tiredness. In the end, the most important lesson Pompey has learned is that it is good to know that death exists as the only guarantee that at some point all of this will have an end (almost like a petty, everyday version of Michel Foucault’s grim insight that “death is power’s limit”, 1990 [1976], 138). For in Stevie Smith’s world, it is the social itself in all of its ‘tired-making’ inescapability, nothing less than the continual fact of interpellation, that constitutes subjects, male and female alike, though one suspects more ‘tiringly’ so for the female, and this is the source of a malaise for which there is no remedy. Novel on Yellow Paper, then, is on the one hand one of the most playful novels on offer in any time or artistic regime, but also one of the most caustically unoptimistic, and the existence of gender itself – in its entirety as a social formation that cannot be escaped – is not the least of its anguishes.

1.4 Troubled Intersectionalities In more recent years, British post-colonial writers, that is, writers who may claim an ancestry in one of the former British colonies, have added greatly to the landscape of British literature and have taken on many issues from historical perspectives on empire, migration and the slave trade for example to the investigation of the intricacies of life as a member of a visible ethnic minority in Britain today. Gender, of course, has also come under scrutiny for both male and female subjects as a problem of social expectations and (poly-)cultural interpellation. One of the earlier texts here is Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jean Rhys’s painstaking fictional answer to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which fills in the story of Bertha, the ‘madwoman in the attic’ who appears only as the heroine’s dark foil in Jane Eyre, but who takes centre stage in Rhys’s novel as it follows her victimization and alienation as both a colonial subject and a woman. Hybridity, alienation, victimization, exploitation, (sexual) violence, demonization, these are all aspects in the complex in-between condition of the colonial woman which Rhys brings to light from the attic prison where Brontë’s Rochester (and, arguably, Brontë herself) had sequestered and silenced her. Almost 40 years later, Zadie Smith develops her novel White Teeth (2000) around a cast of various ‘ethnic’ characters who present themselves as mutually intertwined

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in dazzling complexity: characters of Jamaican, English, and Bangladeshi origins and their intermixtures are variously involved with each other in bonds of love, friendship, rivalry, history, contiguity, the sheer simultaneity of their presence in Smith’s London. In this novel, both gender and ethnicity weigh heavily on the characters for whom ‘getting it right’ (and always failing) is of tantamount importance. At the same time, they are accompanied by a devious narrative voice which never fails to make us aware of the rich ironies of existences continually exposed to the interpellations of these identity categories. In the end, ‘hybridity’ may be too narrow a term for what we witness here as the novel seems to embrace human fallibility as the thing it is most celebratory of. A form of ‘dappledness,’ to borrow a notion from Gerard Manley Hopkins, which is set against the certainties of identity categories as much as it is set against the dream of human perfectibility embodied by FutureMouse, the novel’s genetic animal experiment which in the end is allowed to escape its cage to rush towards a suitably mousy, non-utilizable future (↗ 24 Zadie Smith, White Teeth). In her later novel On Beauty (2005), an elaborate re-writing of E. M. Forster’s Howard End (1910), Zadie Smith increases the complexity of social categorizations as we encounter the issues of race, gender, and privilege in different national and hence differently racialized settings in the USA and in Britain. Again, we are looking at a vast cast of main and subsidiary characters as the novel follows the fates of two families, the Belseys and the Kippses, all of whose members are endowed with their own specifically developed racial, ethnic, class, generation, and gender positions. Here, too, we encounter a world in which there is no respite from interpellation, as a gendered human being, as a person of certain convictions, as a specifically ‘raced’ and ‘classed’ individual, as a ‘failure’, as a creature driven by desire (probably most for recognition), as a member of a particular generation, as a parent/child, as someone on a particular rung of a social hierarchy (in the university for example), as a woman of a certain body weight, as a person considered ‘beautiful’ or not, etc. While all of this is handled with a light touch by Zadie Smith, we are in fact not so far away from Stevie Smith’s hyper-interpellative world in which there can be no free unfolding of any individuality as every possible avenue is already scripted, culturally fraught, and apparently pre-fabricated. Zadie’s ultimate solution, too, is not too far away from Stevie’s, as the errant art scholar Howard Belsey in the end learns to appreciate the naked flesh of Rembrandt’s paintings (and his wife’s body) for its fragility as it stands in the middle of life but with the sheen of death already visible. It seems as if here an acceptance and even celebration of the irreducible this-ness and specificity of the imperfect human body in its always already given dedicatedness towards death appears as a more life affirming variety of Stevie Smith’s deathwardness as the place where all categories must fall silent.

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2 Playing in the Face of Power: Gender Skepticisms If we take the novels discussed so far as a measure, it seems that gender and sexuality is both a powerful and a powerfully troubling aspect of English fiction of the twentieth century. But, and it is important that we should return once more to Virginia Woolf, this is not the only story to tell. Alongside this anxiety-ridden occupation with gender, we find playful, deconstructive, downright unconcerned engagements with gender and sexuality also throughout the whole of the twentieth century, novels that do not take the givenness of gender and sexuality for granted but instead recklessly choose to play with these categories, making light of the very pressures of our categorized lives. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) follows the pursuits of its title hero/heroine from the reign of Elizabeth I to the year 1928 through two variously gendered incarnations from a male Orlando serving at the court of Elizabeth to his miraculous transfiguration into a female Orlando beginning in the eighteenth century. In the process, as Orlando has to learn her new gender, we are shown with some precision, and long before Judith Butler’s writings on this question, the full extent of gender as an acquired skill. Woolf’s historical view of gender, which works against any essentialist view of gendered arrangements, as well as her intuition that the sex-gender-system undergoes a process of transformation in the course of the eighteenth century in the direction of a strict binary and heteronormative model that finds its most solid expression in the two-spheres ideology of the nineteenth century, anticipate the historical trajectory worked out much later in the aftermath of Michel Foucault’s historical reading of sexuality (Foucault 1990 [1976]; Halperin 2002; Peakman 2011). The most consistent and programmatic gender skeptic of the period is Woolf’s much less famous near contemporary Sylvia Townsend Warner. Townsend Warner enters the literary scene in 1926 with her debut novel Lolly Willowes, which follows the development of the title heroine (Laura to herself and Lolly to her condescending relatives) from a life of virtually unconscious enslavement as the spinster aunt in the service of her patriarchal family to her liberation as a witch in the village of Great Mop. The point here is not that gendered life is not a source of anguish to her (in fact, almost without her realizing it, it is), but that all it takes is nothing more than a decision for her to escape: first into the safe haven of Great Mop and then into a projected life of such detachment that sleeping in a ditch if she so chooses is a serious option. Like Stevie Smith after her, Warner at this point thinks of an escape from gender as an escape into the non-social realm, though characteristically without invoking death as the ultimate leveler and nullifier. Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927), explicitly framed by her in a letter as the story of a “fatally sodomitic” clergyman (qtd. in Mars-Jones 2001, xi), is in fact no such thing, as Warner very markedly refrains from clarifying what exactly the category is by which Mr. Fortune’s relationship to Lueli, a ‘native’ boy of an unspecified colonial island, may be classified. More categorially obsessed scholarship may be tempted into affixing a tag to the relationship, wanting to know once and for all what it really ‘is’, but the novel does not invite this. The only thing we do

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know about Mr Fortune and his one seeming convert on an island of colonial subjects very much uninterested in what he tries to teach them is that what they experience is love. This love is doomed not because the two players are both male or because one of them is the wrong age but because Mr Fortune brings with him an unhappy English obsession: that he cannot refrain from trying to re-educate anything and anyone his attention happens to fall on, a commentary on the possessiveness of both love and colonialism, not of sexual orientation. In this way, Mr Fortune’s Maggot refuses to specify its unhappy sodomite’s predicament as one befalling ‘homosexuals’, taking instead his love as the basis for a general meditation on love and ownership. The historical novel Summer Will Show (1936), set in the February revolution of 1848 in Paris, gives us Sophia, who after the death of her two children goes in search of her husband, who has been partying it up in Paris, so that he may make her pregnant again. Instead, she falls in love with his mistress, the Russian refugee and revolutionary Minna, and henceforth decides to cast in her lot with her. And then there is nothing more to be said about it; the relationship is clearly disruptive – of the institution of marriage, yes (Sophia’s husband is not amused), but most dramatically of social class as in order to move in with Minna, Sophia has to become socially downwardly mobile in quite a radical way. It seems that learning to live with the masses of the poor and dispossessed and becoming a revolutionary involves a much more challenging learning curve than that of a woman learning to love another woman. In Adam Mars-Jones’s memorable words, rather than agonizing about her gender or her sexuality (or anyone else’s), Sylvia Townsend Warner “had the knack of melting across barriers, rather than defining herself against them” (Mars-Jones 2001, ix), and we are very far away from the anguishes of Hall’s Well of Loneliness (1928). Townsend Warner’s last publication in the year before her death, the short story collection The Kingdoms of Elfin (1977), abandons the concerns of humans altogether as the stories pursue the fates of some very decidedly un-cute fairies, “as if she wanted a change even from warm-bloodedness” (Mars-Jones 2001, xiii). It has become almost a staple feature of any engagement with Townsend Warner’s works to say that she has been neglected, almost forgotten, pushed to the margin, and indeed compared to the much less gender-indifferent Virginia Woolf, Townsend Warner’s substantial œuvre occupies a decidedly less centralized position in the literary canon. But it is also true that her works have been kept alive by and through a dedicated readership who seem to have appreciated her precisely for those qualities that kept her out of the canon (I would suspect that gender indifference is one of those qualities), and in recent years she has attracted considerably more attention from academic critics as well (see, for example, Davies et al. 2006). Rosamond Lehman, another author who is something of a secret from the modernist margins, shares with her precisely such a lack of anguish over gender and sexuality. Her novel Dusty Answer (1927) focuses on Judith Earle, a home-educated only child whose development we follow from the moment when a much-adored family of five children, now adults, comes back to live next-door to her house and garden. One by one, Judith

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will be considering a sexual relationship with each of the four brothers in that family without settling on any one of them; it seems much more that it is the family in its entirety that is the object of Judith’s deepest longings. Once at the university in Cambridge (needless to say that this is a bold career move for a girl), she will be romantically involved with Jennifer, a fellow student, again however without merging into any identity category like ‘lesbian’. The novel is liberally supplied with all manner of sexual orientations (one of the brothers is quite undisguisedly gay, and Jennifer will eventually pursue a life that contemporaries would recognize as ‘lesbian’), but Judith herself is an interesting study in how desire is not necessarily powered by something like object choice, but may be simply an expression of a quite general, gender-independent longing for recognition and belonging. Here, Lehman is somewhat similar to Iris Murdoch. To be sure, Murdoch’s characters usually have to undergo considerable anguish in trying to steer their lives, but this anguish is generalized in the sense that it is the anguish of muddled human beings trying to live morally meaningful lives (and very often just about getting by). Some of these characters are gay, for example Emil in The Green Knight (1993), but the point in all of her works is much more that all her characters are caught in a mesh of the contingency of their lives and desires, a profound general neediness and lack of privileged superiority that, in Ina Schabert’s words, subjects all of them in a special case of gender bending to the incalculable and recalcitrant relationality of human existence, a relationality culturally associated with women and assumed to be transcendable for men, but in Murdoch’s case the fate of all humankind (Schabert 2006, 292). If gender skeptic novels from the period of High Modernism favour a generally understated technique of simply not calling upon the anguishes of gender and sexuality but, like Townsend Warner, choose to ‘melt across’ them, later works may follow the model of Orlando and take on a more explicitly deconstructivist approach. One of the most shattering and at the same time most amusing examples is Brigid Brophy’s In Transit: A Trans-Sexual Adventure (1969). Playfully following the intuition, variously explored later in the phallogocentric hypothesis of French Feminism and in the works of Judith Butler, that language is the foundation not only of human beings as social animals but also of gender, we encounter the first-person narrator Pat bemoaning that it is “my French that disintegrated first” in the multi-lingual environment of the transit lounge of an unnamed airport, a “linguistic leprosy” that will eventually encroach upon more and more linguistic territory of this obsessively language-(un)-conscious novel (Brophy 1971 [1969], 11, 29). Worse is to come as the narrator forgets his or her gender and the novel pursues that entity’s more and more furious (and funny) attempts to fix a sex and hence a gender for him- or herself, using all sorts of doomed ruses to know, from observation, just what her/his sex is. The fact that the single most important pronoun by which we refer to ourselves in English, I, is ungendered (whenever Pat thinks that s/he has hit on the ‘truth’, the narrative switches to third person narration), is not only an inconvenience for the narrator and

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reader, but also the basis on which identity (who I am) is quite nonchalantly, even scandalously, detached from gender (what I am): I can feel no sympathy with supposed loss of identity. I can conceive of losing many things, of which my polyglottism is only the easiest shed. Memory, even, I can imagine blotted out […] Identity, however, is unloseable. That which feels the loss, that which searches and doubts – that is your identity. I have doubted often what I am, but never who. (Brophy 1971 [1969], 44)

Jeanette Winterson playfully tackles the constraints of ‘femininity’ within our patriarchal past (and present), and their possible overcoming in metafictional historiographical novels like The Passion (1987) and Sexing the Cherry (1989) (↗ 21 Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry). Her novel Written On the Body (1992) also turns to the genderlessness of the I in a story where the passionate, even obsessive pursuit of a woman by the narrator on the one hand celebrates love in the mode of romantic agony, but at the same time never allows it to become an agony of gender as the gender of the narrator withstands any disambiguation by the reader. The I, here as well, has no gender, and any sexual orientation to be found is hence unclassifiable in terms of homo-/heterosexual object choice, even while the femininity of the beloved is never in question. With Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977), we encounter on the level of the novel’s characters, especially its narrator Evelyn (m. and f.), a world of profound anguish very far removed from Woolf’s basically unimpressed sex-changed Orlando. It begins with Evelyn remembering his melancholy attachment to the melancholy Tristessa, a film actress condemned and revered for her embodiment of her femininity “in arabesques of kitsch and hyperbole” (Carter 1992 [1977], 5), and at the end we will encounter her again, a cross-dressed man living in a glass palace and subjected to violent abuse by Zeno, the novel’s master enslaver of women. In between, Evelyn has a profoundly abusive sexual relationship with a black dancer, Leilah, and is captured by the radical feminist women of Beulah, only to be violently sex-changed by “Mother” through castration and psychosexual manipulation. That (and more) is on the level of the characters and their crimes and sufferings. On the level of narration, the novel is a bitter satire at the expense, obviously, of a male abuse of women which is here the hallmark of patriarchy’s misogyny, but also of gender-separatist feminisms and their essentialist counter-religion of the Goddess. Ultimately, the object of satire is gender itself as a victimizing and monstrous regime dehumanizing all concerned, men, women, and those in between. Gender, including “Mother’s” femininity, is here very much a social and even, on the level of the body, material construct, and not a benevolent one. So far, all of our authors have been female, and this is no coincidence. Attempts at destroying the workings of gender and heteronormativity as a matter of principle, be it agnostic-playfully or satirical-aggressively, are for the most part interventions by female authors, who as we have seen in the last section may have less reason to feel

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enthusiastic or nostalgic about a patriarchal status quo than their male colleagues. For men, who would have to admit femininity into the very heart of their notion of the masculine in order to achieve similar effects, there may be the additional pressure of the fact that masculinity defines itself in opposition to the feminine in much more coercive and seemingly insurmountable ways than femininity in opposition to masculinity. That is, a collapse of feminine into masculine must threaten masculinity at its very core (see Halperin 2002), a destruction that comparatively few male authors seem to be willing to visit upon their fictional worlds. The great (and courageous) exception here are those specializing in the gender-destructive techniques of camp, among them maybe no one more devastatingly radical than Ronald Firbank in a spate of novels that relentlessly visit a form of culturally devalued femininity (the bitchy, the weak, the swoony, the sentimental, the limp, the masochistic, etc.) on their male and female characters. In The Flower Beneath the Foot (1923), for example, the Swinburne-reading “Hon. ‘Eddy’ Monteith, a son of Lord Intriguer” is brought to a comalike trance by being bathed in a foam bath by his manservant and imagining himself as “St. Sebastian, and […] Teresa … and he would have been most likely, the Blessed Virgin herself but that the bath grew gradually cold.” After this indulgence, he is threatened with a whipping by an object which “looked to be a tortoiseshell lorgnon to which had been attached three threads of ‘cerulean’ floss silk” (Firbank 1961, 40). Firbank’s last novel, Concerning the Eccentricities of the Cardinal Pirelli (1926), gives us the inimitable Cardinal Pirelli, who loves nothing more than “the militant bravoura of a skirt” (Firbank 1961, 294). Other notable camp novels are Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (1911), E. F. Benson’s sequence of novels on “Queen Lucia” and her (queer) entourage, many of the short stories of “Saki” (Hector H. Munro), and among the few women writers to adopt this mode, there is Ivy Compton-Burnett and her caustic portrayals of human cruelty. In the field of ‘postcolonial’ literature, too, the option of gender skepticism is less widely practiced but can be found here and there. Zadie Smith, as we saw earlier, while clearly a great comic writer, wants us to take gender seriously in terms of what it demands of and does to the characters she created. By contrast, Suniti Namjoshi’s novel The Conversations of Cow (1985) does seduce us into a world where gender and sexuality beliefs are being severely tested and in the end have to be handed over to the wisdom of the Goddess who comes to cohabit with Suniti, the lesbian narrator afraid that she may be becoming a misogynist. The Goddess, it seems, comes and goes as she wishes, takes any form she wishes, and it is Suniti’s task (and challenge) to keep up with her, in the process encountering such interesting places as the Self-Sustaining Community of Lesbian Cows. Even once Suniti seems to be out of her troubles by finding the Goddess in a human lover, Bhadravati, things do not really become any easier as her attempts to solemnize the bond through marriage and, possibly, children (becoming, as it were, heteronormative) meets with little enthusiasm on the part of the Goddess: “‘You’re being conventional.’ ‘What’s wrong with that?’ ‘It’s – it’s arbitrary, my dear.’” (Namjoshi 1985, 90). What else, the novel seems to ask, can be

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expected of “The Cow of a thousand faces and a thousand manifestations who walks rough-shod over fields and forests, and falls asleep when her day is done” (Namjoshi 1985, 125)?

3 Walking in Another Man’s Shoes: Imagining Gender(s) So far, my representation of the issue of gender and the novel, and I am wondering if anyone has noticed this, seems to have largely confirmed at least one gender essentialism: that female writers have something to say about women and male writers about men. That is, that there is an essential link between the sex of the writer and the sexualities and genders written about. This is obviously a misrepresentation (Morgan 1994; Miller 1986). After all, men have written some intricate and interesting female characters over the centuries, and women have a very long history, possibly more complex and involved than that of men imagining women, of slipping into the perspectives of male characters, very often not-quite-heteronormative ones. We owe Wilkie Collins’s astonishing ‘sensational’ women and their complex and conflicted inner lives, Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (as well as his creature) to writers who have written in the ‘other’ gender’s perspective. Among those authors who programmatically refuse to be reduced to what their gender seems to allow for is the Scottish writer A. L. Kennedy, who has launched various attacks on precisely that assumption. If within an essentialist paradigm, writing in the ‘other’ gender may appear like a usurpation, Kennedy has pursued just such ‘usurpations’ of male minds and bodies in Day (2007) or Everything You Need (1999), the latter even featuring the ‘usurpation’ of gay male minds and bodies, or most complicatedly maybe in The Blue Book (2011), where we find a female author imagining a female narrator imagining a male character who imagines the minds and bodily experiences of women. In fact, Kennedy has programmatically insisted that fiction is an act of the imagination, even immersion or fusion: The proverb tells us we should walk a mile in a person’s shoes before we judge them. And if we’ve spent a whole novel in their thoughts, if we’ve heard their heart in music, if we’ve seen as they do how light falls, if we’ve breathed with them as they speak, felt the way they dance under our skins? (Kennedy 2013, 256)

In recent years, Ian McEwan has often placed women at the heart of his explorations of other people’s ‘shoes’, for example in Atonement (2001) and Sweet Tooth (2012); William Boyd has given us the invention of a twentieth-century woman photographer of such feistiness that we might well wish she could have been real in Sweet Caress (2015), and earlier of a combative primatologist in Brazzaville Beach (1990); Patricia

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Duncker has ‘invaded’ the mind of a male literary scholar seeking to merge himself into the male writer who is the object of his study and desire (Hallucinating Foucault, 1996), imagined the erotic obsession of a teenage boy with his mother’s new (and curiously vampiric) boy-friend (The Deadly Space Between, 2002), and given us the transgender life of a nineteenth-century army surgeon who lived her life as a man (James Miranda Barry, 1999). This act of a writer (and with them a reader) learning to walk in another’s shoes is at the heart of whole genres of literature where the assumption of a ‘lived reality’ of the writer becomes absurd, most notably the genre of historical fiction and the genre of the purely fictional in the form of science fiction, fantasy, fairy tales, etc. (↗ 3 Genres). These fictions share the fact that their fictional worlds and the characters that move in them cannot be easily measured against any (living) reader’s lived reality: after all, we cannot go back to test whether Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell is a plausible sixteenth-century male (Wolf Hall, 2009; ↗ 27 Hilary Mantel, The Thomas Cromwell Trilogy), or whether Mary Renault’s ancient Greeks ‘represent’ adequately what it meant to be male or eunuch in Greek and Persian antiquity (The Mask of Apollo, 1966; Fire from Heaven, 1969; The Persian Boy, 1972). Renault’s is an interesting if critically underrated case in that she specialized in seeking out specifically those pre-modern worlds in which sex and gender can be assumed to work ‘differently’, and in this she anticipates the scholarly work done today on the sex-gender-systems of premodern societies (see for example Halperin 2002, Rocke 1996). Her fictional universes are almost exclusively inhabited by men (single-sex universes that is, not unlike, for example, those of Herman Melville working in the genre of the sea-faring novel), and as such represent an extreme case of cross-gendered writing. One may wonder if single-sex worlds can at all function as ‘gendered’, since they lack the differential of a binary system. In the process, in any case, she greatly pushes the limits of what may be considered ‘masculine’ through the exploration of a range of same-sex relationships between men unthinkable in the gender regimes of Renault’s own time (or, indeed, ours), and through the imaginative exploration of that culturally most feared of options, the castrated male, in The Persian Boy (1972). For a writer intent on gender bending, the past is not only another country, but also potentially an alternative one in which to explore gender and sexuality in regimes liberated from the pressure of contemporary self-evidence. But maybe this is only a very prominent example of what in general distinguishes the novel in the twentieth century (and in any century) from other discourses engaging with the issue of gender: that here gender may be made as rigid or as fluid a concept as lies within the imagination of the writers and of their readers. In this sense, ‘gender in the twentieth-century novel’ is a thing that can never be written but rather one that continually writes and rewrites itself in innumerable single acts of exploration and imagination. The novel in this sense is not so much a set or system of representations as it is a vast laboratory of what can be thought and felt at all, a laboratory moreover that is continually open and accessible to all those willing to enter into the experiment.

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Morgan, Thaïs E., ed. Men Writing the Feminine: Literature, Theory, and the Question of Genders. Albany: SUNY Press, 1994. Namjoshi, Suniti. The Conversations of Cow. London: The Women’s Press, 1985. Peakman, Julie, ed. The Cultural History of Sexuality. 6 vols. Oxford: Berg, 2011. Riviere, Joan. “Womanliness as a Masquerade.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929): 303–313. Rocke, Michael. Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Schabert, Ina. Englische Literaturgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine neue Darstellung aus der Sicht der Geschlechterforschung. Stuttgart: Kröner, 2006. Schaffner, A. Modernism and Perversion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature, 1850–1939. London: Palgrave, 2011. Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980. London: Penguin, 1985. Sinclair, May. “The Novels of Dorothy Richardson.” The Egoist V (April 1918): 57–59. Smith, Stevie. Novel on Yellow Paper. London: Virago, 1980 [1936]. Stevens, Hugh, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. West, Candance, and Don Zimmerman. “Doing Gender.” Gender & Society 1 (1987): 125–151. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. London: Oxford University Press, 1977. Woods, Gregory. A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Woolf, Virginia. “Dorothy Richardson.” Virginia Woolf on Women and Writing. Ed. Michèle Barrett. London: Women’s Press, 1979 [1919/1923]. 188–192. Woolf, Virgina. “Professions for Women.” Virginia Woolf on Women and Writing. Ed. Michèle Barrett. London: Women’s Press, 1979 [1931/1942]. 57–63.

4.2 Further Reading Benstock, Shari, Suzanne Ferriss, and Susanne Woods. A Handbook of Literary Feminisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Lorber, Judith. Paradoxes of Gender. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Roughgarden, Joan. Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Scott, Bonnie Kime. Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Sellers, Susan, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Dirk Wiemann

5 The Burden of Representation: Reflections on Class, Ethnicity and the Twentieth-Century British Novel Abstract: Twentieth-century novels written by working-class or ethnically minoritarian authors are marked by a specific reflexivity that is owed to the friction between, on the one hand, the ideology of the form of the novel as a naturalization of dominant white middle-class standards and, on the other hand, the divergent structures of feeling of marginalized groups. The trajectory of working-class fiction moves from the assertion of combative class positions in the novels of the first decades of the twentieth century to the reflection of proletarian double-consciousness in the crisis-ridden 1930s to the endorsement of working-class ways of life in a bid for a class-based multiculturalism. From the 1950s onwards, overseas mass immigration results in a demographic recomposition and the emergence of British ‘ethnic’ fiction. From the first generation’s reflections on the experience of foreignness in the new environment and the assertion of political Blackness in the 1970s, the ‘ethnic’ novel gradually transforms into a medium of transculturality. Keywords: Reflexivity, representation, class-consciousness, multiculturalism, transculturality At certain conjunctures the novel as a “representational apparatus” (Jameson 1981, 193) is forced to let go of its apparent naturalness: Foregrounding not so much the what but the how of narrative discourse, the novel in such moments turns towards “the representation of the apparatus” itself (Berger 2000, 77). Such reflexivity is routinely associated with the becoming problematic of the clear-window style of mimetic realism in the course of, first, high modernist epistemological scepticism, to be followed by the playful metafictional pirouettes of the postmodern. Yet there is a third set of instances in which the representational apparatus is forced to represent itself: when the novel is appropriated by those whom it has hitherto only (mis)represented without serving them as a device of self-presentation. These would be instances where the novel is seized by what current diction calls “the part that has no part” (Rancière 1999, 31), that is, marginalised and excluded sections that are integral to society as its constitutive outside. The trajectory that this chapter tries to delineate focuses on the various and no doubt discrepant projects of utilizing the novel as a form for the claim to participation on the side of two specific ‘non-parts’: the working class and the racially or ethnically othered. Theories of the novel, however discrepant, seem to converge on the notion that the novel is exceptionally prone to articulate a particular experience of modernity by conDOI 10.1515/9783110369489-006

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figuring (and often symbolically reconciling) the subject with the social sphere into which it is inserted (↗ 1 The English Novel as a Distinctly Modern Genre). This is not primarily a matter of theme or content but of structure and form thanks to which the novel figures both the modern self with its rich interiority and the modern community of the nation. As a literary device, then, the novel was available to the part that has a part: Representing a particular kind of subjectivity and sociality, it tended to naturalize the individual as member of the enveloping national community. What then about the part that has no part? What about those who had been interpellated into subject positions that did not comply with the criteria of liberal individualism, or those who had not been subsumed into the folds of the nation? To be sure, in its emergent and consolidated forms, the English novel had consistently represented such parts that had no part – from Oroonoko to Man Friday, from the agricultural labourers who form the mute ground from which Jane Austen’s gentry characters can emerge as verbose figures to the poor in Dickens, George Eliot and Gaskell and the colonized or ‘racially impure’ in Collins, Haggard or Conrad (↗ 6 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness). Oscillating between paternalism, demonization and attraction, representations like these are premised on the assumption that the represented cannot represent themselves and hence need to be represented: Against a bulk of ‘industrial novels’ promulgating middle-class ideologies by enforcing reconciliatory closures that “eliminate the memory of class conflict” (Lesjak 2006, 73), the very idea of a proletarian novel would have been anathema to the prevalent nineteenth-century sensibility; likewise, the Victorian genre of the imperial romance thrives on the reassuring circumstance that the empire won’t write back. The advent in Britain of working-class novels in the early years of the twentieth century and of multi-ethnic fiction in the course of decolonization therefore mark much more than ‘only’ the diversification and enlargement of the scope of the novel; much rather, this expansion of the boundaries contributes to a veritable redistribution of the sensible and hence a reorganisation of the space of the political as such. In this process, the appropriation of the novel by the working-class and/or racialised writer came as a kind of literary gate crashing in the course of which the white bourgeois form of the novel retained a degree of alienness that enforced a textual reflexivity and a collateral innovativeness grounded in the self-consciousness with which the marginalized tend to handle the master’s tools. This self-consciousness is itself a side-effect of the burden of representation: As subaltern writers (perceive the obligation to) assume “the role of representatives who are expected to delegate, or speak on behalf of a particular community” (Procter 2006, 102), the intended collective dimension of the text clashes with the tendentially isolated practices of both novel writing and novel reading.

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1 Working Class Fiction as Affirmative Sabotage This in-built reflexivity is strikingly apparent in the English working-class novel of the twentieth century, in which the project of a thorough denaturalization of capitalism and bourgeois ideology rubs against the entrenched conventions of the realist prose novel whose aesthetics so powerfully contribute to precisely that normalization of the status quo which the proletarian text sets out to undo. If the “realist novel, which reached its zenith in the second half of the nineteenth century, [is] the triumphant cultural affirmation of liberal hegemony” (Snee 1979, 168), then the working-class deployment of that form necessarily entails the adoption of an alien given script. Is the working-class text then condemned to the cultural mimicry of “aping a largely alien culture” (Croft 2011, xiv)? Or can “the novel [as] the most important gift of bourgeois, or capitalist, civilization to the world’s imaginative culture” (Fox 1979 [1937], 53) be recalibrated in a “creative deformation” (Haywood 1997, 27)? The following observations proceed from the assumption that working-class writing occurs in a double bind that is best grasped, borrowing Gayatri Spivak’s formula for the limited yet positive speaking potentials of the subaltern, as an “affirmative sabotage” (Spivak 2012, 4). This specific double bind does by no means dilute the distinct “working-class sensibility or structure of feeling” (Klaus 1982, 94) of the proletarian text; to the contrary, the tension of affirmation and sabotage strikingly corresponds to the fundamental relational dynamics of an always internally conflicted (proletarian) class-consciousness, which turns first and foremost around subalternity, that is around the experience of inferiority. This means that the ‘lower classes’ carry about within their heads unconscious convictions as to the superiority of hegemonic or ruling-class expressions and values. (Jameson 1999, 47)

Therefore, even while it is polemically pitted against hegemonic cultural values, working-class ideology is not a pure antithesis of bourgeois ideology per se but an internally riven hybrid: a double consciousness that implies, among other aspects, the vexed acknowledgment “of the shameful dimensions of working-class existence” (Fox 1994, 75) that come into view only by way of the adoption of middle-class (role) models. Nor is this ghostlike presence of the internalized counter-class restricted to the subaltern: also hegemonic consciousness constantly articulates itself in an imaginary polemic and/or anxiety-ridden dialogue with the imaginary underclass that haunts the ruling-class self as a continuously present ideological “alter ego” that embodies “all ineffable premonitions, unspoken fears, secret self-deprecations and guilts too awesome to be thought of” (Bauman 1997, 93). As a result, class identity implies internally divided selves as “each of the opposing classes necessarily carries the other around in its head and is internally torn and conflicted by a foreign body it cannot exorcise” (Jameson 1999, 49). Class-consciousness thus turns out to be itself a representational apparatus whose formal and thematic representation in the novel is

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best understood a second-degree representation, or, a representation at one remove. This perspective brings into view how the naturalizing gestures of nineteenth-century realism, even at their most radical, attempt to make invisible the ineluctable ‘conflictedness’ that marks any class-consciousness, whether hegemonic or subaltern. Against this implication of the realist novel in the silencing of the internal conflict that is class the reflexive working-class novel hits the scene as a denaturalizing impulse.

1.1 Tool-Kit Poetics and the Novel ‘For Use’ Building on the literary output of nineteenth-century Chartism and other socialist movements, the British working-class novel comes into its own only in the first decades of the twentieth century with the publication of such texts as Patrick MacGill’s Children of the Dead End (1914), John Macdougall Hay’s Gillespie (1914), and Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, the latter being arguably the most elaborate and rewarding early working-class novel in England. The book was posthumously published (Tressell had died of tuberculosis in 1911) in a heavily ‘doctored’ version in 1914, which “gave a truncated rendering of the novel’s political polemic” (Kelly 2012 [1914/1955], 10). An unabridged edition of the 600 plus pages text appeared only in 1955, giving a baffled readership a regrettably belated first-time experience with a sprawling and unexpectedly unconventional novel. Set in the fictional small town of Mugsborough, Philanthropists is the portrait of a community of house painters precariously employed in the building trade. Working routine is represented in minute detail and without a central focalising protagonist. Instead, in an appropriation of the decentring principle of the division of labour, the representational focus is diffused across the class community so as to provide a panorama of the milieu in its most important practices, rituals and conflicts. What ensues is a quasi-spatial spread and the evocation of a social comprehensiveness that stands in marked contrast to the relative temporal limitedness, as Tressell himself points out in his ‘Preface’: The action of the story covers a period of only a little over twelve months, but in order that the picture might be complete it was necessary to describe how the workers are circumstanced at all periods of their lives, from the cradle to the grave. Therefore the characters include women and children, a young boy – the apprentice – some improvers, journeymen in the prime of life, and worn-out old men. (Tressell 2012 [1914/1955], 33)

The aspiration, coded in visual rather than narrative terms, ‘that the picture might be complete’ can here only be achieved by the decentering of the narrative focus, in other words, by the suspension of the very category of the individual protagonist: ‘characters’ here are of interest only insofar as they function as concrete embodiments of typical situations. Hence character tends to be replaced by the class collective as a whole, whose members now primarily function as so many emblematic representatives of the various stations of ‘how the workers are circumstanced’. To the extent

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that ‘being circumstanced’ (read, socially contextualized) takes centre stage in the narrative, the constitutive paradigms of both the bourgeois Bildungsroman and the industrial novel of nineteenth-century realism evaporate: Instead of the teleology of a closure-bound narrative, Tressell’s spatialised “plot-in-breadth” (Mitchell 1982, 71) steers towards a tableau-like completeness of the ‘picture’, which can paradoxically be complete only when it emphasises its own incompleteness, when it is not about plenitude but lack. For the social panorama of Mugsborough will gain its ultimate fullness only when configured with the not-yet, i.e. when the “gilded domes and glittering pinnacles of the beautiful cities of the future” (Tressell 2012 [1914/1955], 606) will be superimposed on the lack-ridden present. At one level, Tressell’s text forms one vast assemblage of “jarring discourses/ forms, including advertisements, jingles, lectures, business cards, timesheets, charts and sales receipts” (Fox 1994, 64). As a consequence, the text tends to present itself as a loose affiliation of narrative modules many of which are obviously designed as potential stand-alone units that may be allowed to “escape from the book into collective use” (Yeo 1977, 29). This specific textual mobility holds true in particular for the overtly didactic and instructive lecture chapters: ‘The Great Money Trick’ offers a roleplay demonstration of the capitalist extraction of surplus value; ‘The Oblong’ amounts to a sociology of class divisions in diagrammatic form; while ‘The Great Oration’ contains a full historical materialist disquisition of the stages of the modes of production, along with their concomitant socio-ideological formations. Here, the novelistic positively gives way to the outright didactic, pointing to an distinct class-specific praxis of the novel: one in which the latter “recognizes its own status as propaganda and offers itself for use as much as contemplation” (Miles 1984, 6) and self-consciously but also self-confidently presents itself not so much as a bounded and autonomous work of art but rather a “self-contained kit for the dissemination of ideas” (Miles 1984, 10). Such a ‘tool-kit’ poetics not only stretches “the limits of realism to the extent that [these passages] almost become autonomous discourses” (Haywood 1997, 24); it also corresponds to decidedly non-possessive practices of reading and dissemination that were dominant in working-class cultures all through the first half of the twentieth century: If trade unions and socialist activists used passages and whole chapters from Philanthropists for illustration and explication of complex economic and political dynamics, then this specific kind of reception of Tressell’s novel is a typical outgrowth of a culture in which novel-reading itself retained a conspicuously social dimension: “modes of novel-reading native to the working class – word-of-mouth recommendation, reading groups, shared copies of novels, workplace study circles, trade-union libraries” (Hawthorn 1984, viii) – formed a veritable anti-pole to the dominant ideal of the relation between an individualised and acquisitive reader and the novel as a cherished object to be possessed. Despite this weakening of narrativity in favour of sociological panorama and didactic modularity, Tressell’s text is by no means devoid of teleology. It is, however, a teleology that the text does not have to produce since it is anyway guaranteed ‘in

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the world’ that history will unroll towards an end. In this respect, Philanthropists has a clearly anti-novelistic stake in a kind of narrativity in which, as Hayden White has explained à propos the medieval genre of the annals, significance does not depend on emplotment, but on the prior assumption that each and every event is anyway meaningful because it partakes of an always already given overarching transcendental design. For the medieval annalist, according to White, this design was the divine master plan whose imminent consummation was implied in the non-secular temporality of apocalyptic expectancy. Therefore, what to the modern reader appears as an unstructured “sea of dates” is for the medieval annalist an ordered text premised on the paradigms of a teleology that “figures succession itself as a principle of cosmic order” (White 1987, 14). In Philanthropists, it is of course not the divine master plan that grants all events their significance but the expectation of “the Co-operative Commonwealth of the future” (Tressell 2012 [1914/1955], 490). To be sure, there is no guarantee that this goal will be achieved; but its principal possibility imports into the diegetic present an intention towards the open future that makes all events in the narrative ultimately readable in light of their relation to that goal. For Tressell, this is the only narrative telos worthy of the name.

1.2 Double Consciousness in the Working-Class Text The agent who most articulately expresses this secular eschatology in Philanthropists is the proletarian autodidact Frank Owen, a precursor of a whole lineage of working-class characters whose diegetic function it is to act as mouthpieces of modules of socialist persuasion. Within Tressell’s narrative, Owen, the lecturing voice in the first two major didactic passages (‘The Great Money Trick’ and ‘The Oblong’), virtually produces his own successor, the young middle-class sympathiser Barrington, who in the course of the novel fully converts to the socialist cause and, in Owen’s stead, delivers the ‘Great Oration’. As Raymond Williams remarks, this insertion of a long speech about the new socialist order along with the jeering or cheering reactions results in the novel’s most striking innovation – namely, the configuration of discrepant “levels of discourse which do not cancel each other” (Williams 1991 [1983], 251). What needs to be added is that the transfer of the lecturing function from Owen to Barrington dramatizes, within the narrated world, the authorless mobility of the proletarian discourse of persuasion, which does not remain bound to any one speaker but, in a radically democratic sense, belongs to no one and hence to everyone. Thus the ‘Grand Oration’ is not only a socialist lecture but a demonstration of the non-possessiveness of writing itself, the latter being understood as “orphaned speech lacking a body that might accompany it and attest to it” (Rancière 2011, 40). In this respect it is only germane that modules from Tressell’s kit should have disseminated and resurfaced in other contexts and texts – Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933) being the most obvious example. Indeed, when Greenwood had Larry Meath deliver a version of

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Tressell’s ‘Great Money Trick’ he fulfilled a purpose of Tressell’s. The nutshell lesson has been communicated to a reader (Greenwood), and disseminated further (through Love on the Dole) with encouragement of the new audience to continue dissemination (through a parallel use of the objectified lecture) (Miles 1984, 10). As one working-class text spills over into another an alternative lineage, or ‘literary history’, comes into view: one that would not be premised on the enshrinement of great works or authors but on the sharing of mobilised ‘set pieces’ that disseminate communally. Greenwood’s novel is set and published in the ‘red’ 1930s, when for the first time “working-class fiction achieves a cult status and popular mystique in British culture” and left-leaning members of the establishment actively “encouraged and patronized working-class writers” (Haywood 1997, 36, 48). This, however, holds true in particular for more ‘highbrow’ experimentalist working-class writers (see Fordham 2002; Southworth 2010). Among these are John Summerfield, whose 1936 novel May Day envisages a communist revolution in 1930s Britain in a harsh montage technique reminiscent of Dos Passos; or James Hanley, whose controversial classic Boy (1931) went through a series of rejections before finally getting published by the minor Boriswood Press (Gostick 2010, 188). By contrast, realist miner novelists like Walter Brierley, Lewis Jones or B. L. Coombes remained largely excluded from “a publishing industry which on the whole uncritically accepted the notion that all literary texts of value must emanate from the middle class” (Snee 1979, 167). In this context the instant success of Henry Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933) proves to be exceptional even in the germane climate of the ‘red decade’. Like Tressell’s text, Greenwood’s novel aspires to a group portrait rather than the profiling of individuals. Set in the depression-hit North of England, the narrative zooms in and out of typical workplace, pub, and domestic situations highlighting the dehumanizing effects of extreme austerity and mass-unemployment. While the majority of the cast express themselves in broad Mancunian dialect, Larry Meath, the only class-conscious socialist among the slum-dwellers, speaks elaborate Standard English. More than that, the narrator repeatedly ‘translates’ slang and dialectal phrases for the benefit of an implied standard-speaking reader while no such translation is granted the working-class characters exposed to ‘incomprehensible’ high-cultural terms and references (Ross 2004, 195). Thus the working girl Sally Hardcastle is left puzzled not only with the sophisticated lectures delivered by her socialist lover Larry but also with the experience of inferiority after an outing with middle-class members of the Labour Club: It was as though they belonged to a different species. Somehow she identified them as people who could afford pianos and who could play them; people who lived in houses where there were baths. Their conversation, too, was incomprehensible. When the talk tuned to music they referred to something called the ‘Halley’ where something happened by the names of ‘Baytoven’ and ‘Bark’ and other strange names. […] Suppose they saw her home, her bedroom! She blushed, ashamed. (Greenwood 1993 [1933], 97)

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It is for passages like this that Love on the Dole has repeatedly been taken to task for “catering to middle-class discursive epistemology” (Ross 2004, 206) and for “failing to emphasise […] the creation of alternatives which can be distinctively a product of working-class life” (Johnson 1975, 88). What verdicts like these foreground is the discrepancy that sets the ‘defeatism’ of Love on the Dole worlds apart from the militancy of Philanthropists: While the former is haunted by the normativity of middle-class standards and values, the latter appears to assert a self-sufficient proletariat on the ascendancy by showing how “the exploited workers are no longer on the moral defensive, no longer […] ‘justify’ their class and cause at some abstract court of appeal against the slanders of their enemies. They are now in dialogue with themselves only” (Mitchell 1982, 69). This self-assured notion of the workers being in ‘dialogue with themselves only’ may mark some rare moment in which class-consciousness gets temporarily unburdened of the conflicted internalized presence of the other class, that ‘foreign body it cannot exorcise’; however, given the general relationality of class-consciousness, such a claim to ideological autonomy may bespeak an evasion of the perplexities of actual class-consciousness that will inevitably imply not only resistance but also shame (see Fox 1994). Shame, to be sure, is what Sally’s experience of inferiority boils down to: ‘Suppose they saw her home, her bedroom! She blushed, ashamed.’ The ghost-like presence of the internalized norms of the dominant counter-class, here imagined as preening into the most intimate spheres of the domestic, renders working-class practices not simply as different but deficient: The fact that Sally has to share not only the bedroom but the bed itself with her teenager brother gets suddenly associated with incestuous dimensions. However, Sally’s shame is expressed not in the thick dialect of her direct speech but in Standard English, and more than that, in the mode of free indirect discourse that, ever since its famous inception in Austen’s novel of manners, has been associated with the articulation of proper (bourgeois) interiority. Proletarian class shame, then, expresses itself as ventriloquized and alienated without, however, allowing for a romanticised elevation of the deviant slang parlance to the status of ‘authentic’ proletarian discourse. What ensues is rather a disjuncture, a split between characters’ inner and outer representation. This double consciousness locates their discourse “within a range of contradictory linguistic registers” and marks their self-representation as “not so much a way of making sense of their situation but rather of indicating the nature of their imprisonment within a bourgeois and bourgeois-literary ideology” (Webster 1984, 53). This notion of imprisonment finds its equivalent in the circular narrative structure as the novel seems to close in on itself as it returns, in its final paragraph, to its opening exposition. What a majority of critics have decried as some ostensible opportunism in Greenwood can just as well be read as a consequential innovation, in which the working-class novel acquires a new layer of reflexivity: Pointing to the constitutive split in class-conscious subjectivities as well as to the concomitant contradictions inherent to the very project of a working-class novel, Love on the Dole openly “declares its ideology – is aware of the contradictions

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in fiction – though set in a literary convention whose function is more often to obscure this area” (Webster 1984, 61).

1.3 Working-Class Vernaculars With this reflexive shift of emphasis, Greenwood’s novel opens a trajectory on which the working-class novel will move away from Tressell’s kit poetics towards a reassessment of actual working-class culture in the here and now. In Love on the Dole, as we have seen, this reassessment is haunted with the anxiety of deficit: Its unquestioned norm is an inaccessible bourgeois culture, which alone, as Greenwood’s orator figure Larry Meath has it, can “afford us the opportunity to become Men and Women in the fullest sense of those terms” (Greenwood 1993 [1933], 86). Only after the post-World War II implementation of welfare-state measures does the cultural turn in the working-class novel take on a defiantly self-assertive quality as the spectre of deficit gets exorcised by the assertion of difference: In a bid for a class-based multiculturalism, the working-class contemporaries of the Angry Young Men  – Stan Barstow, David Storey, Sid Chaplin, but also George Lamming and Sam Selvon (↗ 13 Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners) – begin to confront the dominant culture that they no longer covet but simply reject and sabotage with the affirmation of the deviant, newly hedonistic, sexually frank and often aggressively anti-establishment articulations and practices of a working-class culture that now takes on the quality of a veritable counter-culture energized with rock‘n’roll, modest but conspicuous consumerism, alcohol and drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, bouts of rowdyism and petty delinquency. This provocative punkish dissidence stands in stark contrast to the cultural puritanism of the pre-1945 proletarian novel where “no oppositional popular culture challenges the ideological power of the established hegemony” (Miles 1984, 16) and plebeian spare time activities are regularly exposed as dupery. Ironically, the proletarian vanguard share this scepticism about ‘mass culture’ with the contemporaneous elite intellectuals (see Carey 1992, 71–90); nor does left-wing mistrust of popular culture fully dissolve after World War II, as, e.g., the scathing analyses of the “demons” of the “newer mass art” and entertainments in Richard Hoggart’s analyses of working-class everyday life indicate (Hoggart 1982 [1957], esp. 206–290). In this context, therefore, the self-assertion of plebeian practices as counter-culture appears as a revolt not only against a tradition of cultural paternalism reaching from Matthew Arnold to F. R. Leavis but also against an anti-hedonistic rigidity that marks socialist didacticism. Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) gives voice to this defiance not only by way of its offensive indulgence in scenes of binge drinking, adultery and verbal as well as physical violence; it mobilizes all these for an apparently nihilistic and individualistic revolt that is no longer compatible with the older perspective of the collective class-struggle. Accordingly, the proletarian autodidactic orator has to give way to the wisecrack rude-boy dissident:

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Once a rebel, always a rebel. […] And it’s best to be a rebel so as to show ‘em it don’t pay to try to do you down. Factories and labour exchanges and insurance offices keep us alive and kicking – so they say – but they’re booby-traps and will suck you under if you aren’t careful. […] Ah, by God, it’s a hard life if you don’t weaken, if you don’t stop that bastard government from grinding your face in the muck, though there ain’t much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow their four-piece clocks to bits. (Sillitoe 1994 [1958], 202)

Intended neither to explain the complexities of class relations nor to trigger collective action or solidarity, rants like these are first and foremost acts of a stubborn self-assertion. However, inasmuch as the self asserts itself as essentially rebellious, the apparent solipsism conceals an underlying communality: a class-conscious, decidedly agonistic self-positioning vis-à-vis the other class and their structural violence (the factories, the labour exchange, the government) – a foreign body that cannot be exorcised but that no longer haunts the working-class self in the guise of some inaccessible norm. To the extent that the power of ‘them’ cannot be denied, an imagined class community begins to replace the rebel individualism with which the passage sets in. In the process, the monologue gradually transmutes into an imagined lecture, a latter-day version of the ‘Great Oration’ that now imagines collective action no longer as the construction of Tresell’s ‘Co-operative Commonwealth’ but as a Marcuse-style “Great Refusal” (Marcuse 1991 [1964], 63) to cooperate: “But listen, this lathe is my everlasting pal because it gets me thinking, and that’s their big mistake because I’m not the only one. One day they’ll bark and we won’t run into a pen like sheep” (Sillitoe 1994 [1958], 202). From here, the passage proceeds to a fantasy of machine-gun volleys (“Der-der-der-der-der-der-der-der-der-der-der-der”; Sillitoe 1994 [1958], 203) so that rhetoric turns into imagined ballistic barrage and words seem to give way to direct action. But ironically, this whiff of insurrectionary militancy gets abruptly dispelled as the text sharply switches from barricade fantasies to the idyllic family plot of a budding romance. This switch comes with a return to the normalised diegetic mode as narrative report is substituted for the mimesis of free direct discourse: “Arthur became Doreen’s young man. There was something of sweetness in it” (Sillitoe 1994 [1958], 203). Inasmuch as the text thus offers both the articulation and the containment of rebellion, it rehearses the tense textual agonistics that had already marked Tressell’s novel where discrepant ‘levels of discourse do not cancel each other’. In this way, the innovative reflexivity of Sillitoe’s novel redirects attention from the thematic to the formal aspects as “an understanding of the class specificity […] is primarily to be found in its language”, which in “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning rarely attempts to normalize according to an acceptable novelistic discourse” (Hitchcock 1989, 70). Instead, the contrast of mimetic and diegetic narrative modes, the abrupt switches from autodiegetic to heterodiegetic presentation, and from slang to standard all enforce textual heterogeneity. The mimetically presented ‘centrifugal’ articulations of class anger, especially vibrant in the protagonist’s fantasies of refusal and revenge, will neither fully explode nor be completely subsumed under the overarching structure of the diegesis. The family plot will not eliminate the acute aware-

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ness of class antagonism; even as ‘Doreen’s young man’, Arthur will remain a ‘rebel’ whose musings to the very end are predicated on the agonism of class conflict which demands that “you don’t weaken” to the task of dissidence: Life will mean “fighting every day until I die”, and even if “the big wide world hasn’t heard from you yet […] it won’t be long now” (Sillitoe 1994 [1958], 219). Many of Sillitoe’s essentials of class-consciousness spill over into the Thatcher and post-Thatcher working-class novel (James Kelman, Tim Lott, John King) whose perhaps most prominent representative is Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993). In many ways, Welsh’s debut can now be read also as a bristling disclaimer to the neoliberal myth that “we are all middle class now” as members of “a more or less comfortable ‘Middle Britain’” (Jones 2012, 139). Trainspotting is in this light an attempt to intervene into the orthodox assertion that “the rapidly shifting class dynamic of British society since 1950 has largely dissolved the traditional, adversarial model of class, replacing it with a new model of inequality in which there is no longer a collective, working-class experience to which writers might appeal” (Head 2006, 241). As against this doxa, Welsh’s text appears to bring ‘the adversarial model of class’ back to the discussion as “the fundamental factor in determining people’s life chances in terms of education, health, housing and even life expectancy” (Kirk 2002, 360). Much that makes this particular text appear so innovative can now be reframed as a rehearsal of some of the fundamental paradigms of working-class writing from Tressell to Sillitoe. Most obviously, the collation of Standard English diegesis and free indirect discourse pitted against accentual (in this case: Scottish) direct speech and free direct discourse recalls the discursive heterogeneities of the proletarian novel from Tressell to Greenwood and beyond, where speaking positions and subjectivities have a tradition of tending towards “duality, division and fracture” (Horton 2001, 220) in correlation to the internal split that runs through class-consciousness as such. Moreover, its distinctly ‘anti-novelistic’ structure makes the text a group portrait instead of an emplotted narrative, and hence difficult to categorize “as a novel rather than simply a collection of sketches about a group of people from the same economically depressed working-class Edinburgh suburb” (Jeffers 2005, 89). Such a ‘rhizomatic’ structure clearly harks back to the modular form of the ‘tool kit’; and even if Welsh’s book contains no ‘Great Orations’ or explanations of ‘The Great Money Trick’, entire units have been disembedded from Trainspotting and made to resurface elsewhere in popular culture and popular activism. This holds true in particular for the “Choose life” passage with its obvious affinity to Sillitoe’s rebel invocation of the ‘great refusal’: Society invests a spurious convoluted logic tae absorb and change people whae’s behaviour is outside its mainstream. […] They won’t let ye dae it, because it’s seen as a sign ay thir ain failure. The fact that ye jist simply choose tae reject whit they huv tae offer. Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars […]. Choose life. Well, ah choose not to choose life. (Welsh 1999 [1993], 187–188)

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Popularized as the opening voice-over of Danny Boyle’s 1996 film adaptation of Welsh’s novel, this passage has resurfaced in a wide range of new contexts from PF Project’s breakbeat track “Choose Life” (1997) to the placards of Occupy activists in 2012, but also in the “Choose Cameron” speech that Tory chancellor John Osborne delivered at the Conservative Party congress in 2014 (Deacon 2014, n.p.): an unexpected hostile takeover that gives ‘tool kit’ poetics and politics a deeply ironic twist, indicating the ease with which the mobile module of the working-class text can now be ‘absorbed into the mainstream’ and turned against itself. Yet at the same time that very ease may go to show how successfully working-class writing has infiltrated culture at large and how the part that had no part has long since begun to take part: There are moments now, it seems, when the ideology of the conservative middle-class is compelled to express itself in the diction of its working-class other and thus to undergo the ordeal, so acutely experienced by the proletarian novelists of the twentieth century, of ‘aping a largely alien culture’.

2 Voyages in: The ‘Ethnic Novel’ in Britain Not only is there no such thing as a coherent literary history of working-class writing (see, e.g., Hitchcock 1989, 17; Fox 1994, 20; Joannou and Haywood 2004, xx); moreover, apart from D. H. Lawrence whom most practitioners and critics dismiss as the representative of “some sort of literary ‘embourgeoisement’” (Croft 2011, xv), no working-class writer has found admission to the dominant canon, however revised. Yet the various strategies of affirmative sabotage of the ‘middle-class form’ of the novel employed by working-class writers have proven an immensely productive and forceful tool-kit that the proletarian novel shares with the texts of other writers operating in the name of other parts that have no part, such as the manifold ethnic minority communities  – colonial, postcolonial, or other  – that have substantially and irreversibly pluralised Britain demographically and culturally all through the twentieth century. As a consequence, the conflicted “register of ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘colour’ or ‘belief’” (Lee 1995, 1) has complemented the discourses of class, gender (↗ 4 Gender) and region as an indispensable lexicon for the description of contemporary British society. The debate over the relation of novel and class was always partly also a debate over terminology (‘working-class’, ‘proletarian’, ‘popular’) and its implications (see Snee 1979, 166–168); similarly the discussion of the literatures of Britain’s ethnic minorities has to some extent been a struggle over nomenclature, too: The tag of ‘immigrant’ or ‘Commonwealth’ literature that was widely accepted in the period of decolonization and the post-World War II reconstruction of Britain was, from the late 1970s onwards, replaced by the far more assertive label ‘Black British writing’, where the term “‘Black’ was intended to convey a sense of necessary common interest and

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solidarity between communities from the old Empire […] predicated on the politics of anti-racism” (Ali 1991, 195). In this understanding, then, Black British literature included ‘African British’ and ‘Caribbean British’ along with ‘Asian British’ literature. ‘Blackness’, here, is thoroughly de-essentialized and marks a polemic intervention against a marginalizing hegemony in which “blacks were positioned as the unspoken and invisible ‘other’ of predominantly white […] discourses” (Hall 1996 [1989], 441). This understanding posits an integrative Blackness as “the cutting edge of a politics vis-à-vis one kind of enemy” (Hall 1991, 56), namely the normative and racist mainstream of white British society. Pitted against this, ‘Black’ figured as a catch-all term for Britain’s oppressed and oppositional racialized minorities in general (see, e.g., Sivanandan 1990, 12–25; Arana 2004, 28). By the end of the twentieth century, recognition of “the internal frontlines which cut through so-called Black British identity” (Hall 1996 [1989], 127) led to a “demise of ‘political blackness’” (Schulze-Engler 2007, 51) due to an increasing attention to “more fragmented and particular identities such as ‘African British’ and ‘British Asian’” (Upstone 2015, 123) in the course of a more general shift “from post-colonialism to multicultural Britain [where] the contours of identity were now more blurred and less black and white” (Wambu 1998, 28). In this context, the working-class tool-kit poetics of affirmative sabotage finds its specification in the figure of a trajectory that Edward Said has described as a “voyage in [which] constitutes an especially interesting variety of hybrid cultural work” (Said 1991, 295), in which the postcolonial migrant enacts a ‘creative deformation’ of metropolitan culture and thereby inverts the earlier imperialist incursion into the heartlands of the colonial territory.

2.1 The Windrush Generation While individual writers from various parts of the dissolving empire took temporary or permanent residence in Britain even before decolonization, mass immigration from overseas did not set in before 1948, when the implementation of the British Nationality Act granted citizenship to all people living in Commonwealth countries. The “Empire Windrush”, the ship that brought the first large group of Caribbean immigrants to Britain in June 1948, has given a name to a whole ‘generation’ of new Britons who entered the country during the timespan of the British Nationality Act (which was revoked and replaced by the far more restrictive Commonwealth Immigrants Bill as early as 1962). The immigration waves, not only from the Caribbean but also Western Africa and South Asia, of the post-war decades effected a substantial recomposition of Britain’s demographic and cultural make-up. Whether or not this sea change has been adequately recognized and appreciated by the autochthone mainstream remains contested: some commentators assert that, “[i]f British society has changed and become more forward-looking and gently inclusive over the last fifty years, a large part of the reason has to be attributable to the ‘Windrush generation’

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and the discourse of freedom and equality they brought with them to the heart of Empire” (Wambu 1998, 22); others diagnose a pervasive racist negation of the Black presence even on the side of progressive white intellectuals: “As the 50s gave way to the swinging 60s, and then to the 70s and 80s, […] white British writers have continued to write about Britain without seeing any black faces, and the responsibility to represent a multiracial Britain has continued to fall on the shoulders of non-white writers” (Phillips 2004). This, to be sure, definitely holds true for the ‘Windrush generation’ voyage in between the late 1940s and early 1960s, in which Afro-Caribbean writers like George Lamming and Wilson Harris as well as Indo-Caribbean novelists like Sam Selvon and V. S. Naipaul ushered in a new phase of British literature that, from now on, would never again be ethnically homogeneous. Most of the ‘Windrush’ novels are premised on and make productive the “discovery of being alien” (Dawes 2005, 257). Many of these texts have in common their setting in the country of origin, as in Selvon’s A Brighter Sun (1952) and Turn Again Tiger (1958); Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin (1953); Naipaul’s early novels from The Mystic Masseur (1957) to A House for Mr Biswas (1961); and Harris’s Guyana Quartet beginning with Palace of the Peacock (1960). At one level a rewriting of Heart of Darkness (↗ 6 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness), Harris’s novel narrates the excursion of a ‘crew’ upriver into the hinterlands of Guyana, “this kingdom of man turned into a colony and battleground of spirit” (Harris 1998 [1960], 24). The dual inscription of Guyana in historical (‘colony’) as well as undetermined metaphysical terms (‘spirit’) prepares for the idiosyncratic poetics of a complex text that superimposes discrepant temporalities from the conquista to the present, and interweaves diverse diegetic splinters from inserted dream sequences to film fragments. The eeriness of virtual time travel that Conrad’s Marlow diegetically summarises, is here rendered mimetically: “Before the sun was much higher we were in the grip of the straits of memory. The sudden dreaming fury of the stream was naught but the ancient spit of all flying insolence in the voiceless and terrible humility of the folk” (Harris 1998 [1960], 62). In this experimentalism, the novel form virtually evaporates, even while the quest structure of the river voyage remains intact in another enactment of affirmative sabotage. In this, Wilson Harris is surely not alone although his fellow Windrushers deploy most different strategies in their projects of appropriating and transforming the white middle-class form of the novel. Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) (↗ 13 Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners) is, along with Lamming’s The Emigrants (1953) and Naipaul’s The Mimic Men (1967) one of the first novels to focus not on the place of departure but to pioneer the representation of the alien new home, thus marking a shift from the exilic to the diasporic. In this endeavour, Selvon introduces a unique profiling of linguistic difference, for the first time completely abandoning Standard English not only in characters’ direct speech but also in the diegetic sequences of the novel. One consequence is precisely the marking of “the migrant’s otherness” (Sesay 2004, 107), the discrepancy between the perceived and the perceiver: “The sun

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shining but Galahad never see the sun look like how it looking now. No heat from it, just there in the sky like a force-ripe orange. When he look up, the colour of the sky so desolate it make him more frighten” (Selvon 1997 [1956], 42). Clearly, the English sun and the Caribbean newcomer are strangers to each other, and it is this foreignness that endows the manifold estrangement devices of the Windrush novels from Harris to Selvon with a political urgency that is specific to these writers from the margins.

2.2 Political Blackness and Mongrel Selves From the 1970s onwards, writers like Buchi Emecheta complement the ‘masculinism’ of Lamming’s, Selvon’s and Naipaul’s texts by relegating the central but aimless male protagonist to the margins and telling, instead, “the relatively untold story of the female migrant […], accentuating her difficulties in keeping herself and her family together” (Rahbek 1998, 128). In his debut novel, The Final Passage (1985), Caryl Phillips adopts this gender-sensitive approach by focalising his narrative primarily through the lens of Leila who, in the late 1950s, migrates to England from an unspecified Caribbean island. To the extent that Leila’s experience in London is primarily one of being ousted and discriminated, Phillips’s text testifies to the newly vitalised anti-racism in alliance with poststructuralist critiques of essentialist identitarianism. The constructedness of ‘race’ comes to the fore as the rather light-complexioned Leila perceives herself as growing increasingly ‘darker’ despite the fact that she is indeed getting paler due to the same unwelcoming British climate: “In England Leila had suddenly found herself, her light skin starved of the sun, growing paler by the day. But she was more coloured than she had ever been before” (Phillips 1993 [1985], 194). Even though ‘colour’ is here rigorously delinked from any putative substratum in ‘Nature’ and instead revealed to be the effect of hostile ascription, this denaturalization does by no means weaken the facticity of ‘race’ as a powerful social institution. In the tradition of psychological realism, Phillips’s text critiques not only the dissemination of white supremacist racial stereotypes but also the self-stigmatising internalization of these stereotypes: Leila recognizes the image prepared for her by British racism and suffers from “feelings of inadequacy [that] prevented her from looking back into the mirror” (Phillips 1993 [1985], 194). The same phenomenon gets fully satirized in a text like Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) (↗ 20 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses), which grotesquely literalizes the politics of racist representation as demonizing stereotypes translate into monstrous embodiments with the compliance of those who are thus transformed:

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‘There are businessmen from Nigeria who have grown sturdy tails. There is a group of holidaymakers from Senegal who were doing no more than changing planes when they were turned into slippery snakes.’ […] ‘But how do they do it?’ Chamcha wanted to know. ‘They describe us,’ the other whispered solemnly. ‘That’s all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct.’ (Rushdie 1988, 168)

This is certainly an assertion of a ‘political Blackness’ where ‘Black’ stands in for the experience of a wide spectrum of ethnic minority groups who are all subjected to the ‘power of description’ wielded by white majority society. In that sense, Rushdie’s and Phillips’s novels would both qualify as representative of 1980s ‘Black British writing’, understood as the literature of “non-‘white’ English writers” in general, whose works in that period “were most often about social life in England and about what it meant to be a non-‘white’ English citizen living in very specific English towns and neighbourhoods” (Arana 2005, 238). At the same time Rushdie already points towards a further proliferation of differences: For instead of the coexistence of multiple yet internally relatively homogeneous and stable ethno-cultural communities, Rushdie emphasises the constitutive hybridity of identity as such, “rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure” (Rushdie 1991, 394). This insistence on the productivity of syncretism finds its formal-ideological correlate in the hotchpotch composition of The Satanic Verses, where an always already hybrid magic realism is intermingled with satire, political tract, national allegory and the pastiche of cutting-edge poststructuralist/postcolonialist theory (to the extent that Gayatri Spivak sees herself as “part of Rushdie’s text” in the character of Swatilekha; Spivak 1993, 223). Identity is principally posited as impure since “[f]or most of us, multiple cultural connexions are decisive in terms of our cultural formation” (Welsch 1999, 198): culture gives way to transculture, a fluid assemblage of inputs and resources form manifold sources and points of origin. Importantly, this ‘mongrelization’ is not restricted to migrant communities and minorities but gets increasingly acknowledged as the accurate descriptor of British society as a whole. The task of the hybrid text lies in the confirmation that “there is another Britain within Britain. And it has the colour of Black in it” (Sesay 2005, 17). The oft-quoted opening sentences of Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), in which first-person narrator Karim Amir introduces himself as “an Englishman born and bred, almost”, illustrate the increasing but not yet fully achieved naturalness of this notion of a transcultural Britain (Kureishi 1999 [1990], 3; my emphasis). Unlike his Windrush generation precursors, this speaker claims Englishness for himself without denying or playing down his clearly South Asian background that his name gives away; he aspires to no assimilationist ‘passing’ but, instead, attempts “to redefine Englishness to include [him]”, therefore necessarily “contending with the ‘homeness’ of Britain” (Dawkes 2005, 261, 266). The implied or explicated object of critique of such texts, then, is an enveloping mainstream culture that counterfactually denies its own transculturality and insists on being a culture to which the outsider may assim-

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ilate without ever gaining the fullness of proper identity since, in that primordialist understanding, “to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English” (Bhabha 1994, 87). In such a context, ‘mongrel selves’ like Rushdie’s Saladin Chamcha, Kureishi’s Karim Amir, Phillips’s Leila and all the many other hybrid characters that populate Black and Asian British novels since the 1980s will always be held in the position of being “almost the same but not quite” (Bhabha 1994, 89). It is only toward the turn of the century that this focus on a hegemonic racist essentialism begins to give way to representations of a society that gradually begins to acknowledge its constitutive hybridity. In Zadie Smith’s debut novel, White Teeth (2000) (↗ 24 Zadie Smith, White Teeth), hybridity is no longer a project to be pursued but a fact of social life, at least for the new generation who are the ‘product’, as it were, of a century-long ‘great immigrant experiment’: This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O’Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks. (Smith 2000, 281)

However, the very fact that the combination of British and non-British names is perceived as a ‘collision course’ signals that, even ‘this late in the day’, identitarianism has by no means withered away.

2.3 Provincializing British History The project of redefining Britishness as transcultural is, to some extent, contingent on historical revisions. Kureishi’s Karim insists on the historical dimension of his hybridity, “having emerged from two old histories” (Kureishi 1999 [1990], 3), while one character in Rushdie’s Satanic Verses explains the trouble with the English with the circumstance that “their history happened overseas, so they don’t know what it means” (Rushdie 1988, 343). What is at stake, then, is the constitutive importance for the making of Britain of transcontinental exchange, imperial and colonial contact zones, and (often extremely coercive) trade and traffic. If Britain, without the Empire and the slave trade, would never have taken the form it has – if, in other words, the very genealogy of Britain is premised on the greedy absorption of ‘foreign’, overseas resources –, then the notion of a self-enclosed ‘white’ British insularity gives way to the acknowledgment of what Stuart Hall has called “the outside history that is inside the history of England” (Hall 1991, 49). Retrievals and recuperations of that ‘other history’ have been at the heart of a range of post-1980s Black and Asian British novels in numerous attempts to redefine

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Britishness by laying grounds for new, transcultural genealogies in acts of “retrieval of counter memories, of subjugated knowledges, which are thought to lack a history” (Lima 2005, 71). A privileged area in this endeavour is the re-figuration of submerged histories of slavery, as novels from Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge (1991) to Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts (1997) and Bloodlines (2001), from David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress (1999) to Bernardine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots (2008) and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2010) demonstrate. What these texts have in common is the assumption that “the British twentieth-century ‘amnesia’ surrounding the past of slavery has been instrumental in the construction of non-white people as alien to Britain” (Ward 2011, 30). If accordingly the silencing of memories of the slave trade is immediately intertwined with the fiction of a homogeneous white Britain, the re-articulation or productive and poietic “re-membering” (Eckstein 2006, 59) of that which has been so silenced is a bid for redefining Britain here and now. Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress, borrowing its title from William Hogarth’s eponymous 1732 print series, is a telling example of this revisionist interventionism. The novel’s homodiegetic narrator is the young black servant boy from the second plate of Hogarth’s Harlot print series. Giving voice to that muted character, Dabydeen obviously raises a radical critique of that marginal figure’s representation in Hogarth, but more than that problematizes the very conditions of possibility for a narrative about the unspeakable slave experience to arise. The novel’s ‘Prologue’, while ostensibly establishing a clear-cut narrative situation, in fact unsettles the status of the entire subsequent text: In late-eighteenth-century London, the abolitionist campaigner Mr Pringle has traced Mungo, the oldest African living in London, the same person who, as a boy, had incidentally been included by Hogarth in the margins of the second plate of the Harlot’s Progress series. It is Pringle’s objective to elicit “a story” (Dabydeen 1999, 1) from Mungo, a story that would comply with the generic conventions of the slave narrative and thus prove useful in the political campaign for the abolition of slavery. Right at the outset, Dabydeen thus destabilises the narrator’s identity in the guise of a fictional author: The book Mr Pringle intends to write will be Mungo’s portrait in the first-person narrative. A book purporting to be a record of the Negro’s own words (understandably corrected in terms of grammar, the erasure of indelicate or infelicitous expressions, and so forth) would bring great dividends for the Committee for the Abolition of Slavery (Dabydeen 1999, 3).

The whole narrative – is it Mungo’s or Pringle’s? – thus emanates from a highly problematic point of origin to the ironic effect that authorship itself is rendered obscure. In the course of this deeply unreliable narrative, moreover, a whole multiplicity of subject positions is being rehearsed, producing a multitude of possible stories. This forking-out of narrative into many branches corresponds to the circumstance that “the story of Britain’s slave trade, after all, is not simply a story to be told, but a series of messy, overlapping narratives in which competing voices still struggle for dominance” (Wallace 2000, 237). In terms of perspective, especially, Dabydeen’s aesthetics

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is exceptionally alert to the genealogy of the modern narrative voice as a unified locus of enunciation emerging in the colonial rise of the novel, where the “centrality of the subject and the coherence of its narration” has come into being “within the colonising enterprise” (Azim 1993, 31). The dissolution of this unified subjectivity is projected by Dabydeen onto the figure of the slave as a contemporary of the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, marking an alternative, flexible subjectivity that speaks from within the folds of slavery and commercialisation. In this process, the ‘English’ novel itself obtains a transcultural genealogy as the outcome of an intersectional history to which agencies and resources form widely disparate locales have contributed for centuries.

2.4 Going Underground In that sense, every novel is ‘ethnic’ (just as every novel articulates class-consciousness). By the beginning of the twenty-first century, this insight appears to gain ground in British literature as non-white writers increasingly compose novels that appear to have nothing ‘British Black’ or ‘British Asian’ about them. Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music (1999) is one example of a diasporic novel that presents itself “as if it were written by a non-diasporic Briton […] in the mask of an Englishman” (Wiemann 2005, 130). The confessions of the white autodiegetic narrator, Michael Holme, are replete with high cultural references to the arcana of Western classical music along with a wholly non-ironic nostalgia for a white idyllic England evoked in a cascade of pastoral signifiers: The whitebeams look like hedgehogs against the fresh green grass. A huge old leafless chestnut tree, an anomaly beside the youthful avenue of silver limes, offers its down-hanging branches even though they have nothing in this season visibly to yield. But among its uppermost twigs a bird is singing – a robin by the sound, though it is so high that even this bare lattice is enough to obscure the small bird. (Seth 1999, 136)

Increasingly, Seth has his narrator’s discourse implode into a lyrical monologism that renounces the hybridity at the heart of the novel form itself as the text gradually retreats from prose to iambic regularity: “Hawthorn is green in berry, and pyracantha ripe. My feet have lost their hold. The days swelter and they make carnival in the streets. I said I could not sleep without you, yet I do. Is it not to be wondered at?” (Seth 1999, 336). The ‘carnival’ (given the setting of the narrative, most probably the Notting Hill Carnival) as locus of heteroglossia and as one of the very few allusions in the whole novel to non-white presences in Britain, is framed and contained within the blank verse metric of the embedding sentences, which it unsettles, however slightly. In its deliberate negation of the transcultural condition of Britain, then, Seth’s novel appears to subtly perform a critique of a white myopia that, to paraphrase Caryl Phillips, affords to look at ‘Britain without seeing any black faces’.

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Other ‘ethnic’ writers jettison this critique of English insularity and its concomitant aggressiveness altogether and present novels that do not problematize but simply enact the transcultural by the very gesture of not writing about the dilemmas of the diaspora or the ‘Black experience’. Hari Kunzru’s My Revolutions (2007) reintroduces into the Taliban and al-Qaeda era the figure of the white European left-wing terrorist of the 1970s. In an extensive temporal back-and-forth exploration of the first-person narrator’s biographic complexities, the self-portrait of a person emerges who, despite his actual if somewhat accidental involvement in “an international network with nodes in Frankfurt, Milan, Beirut, Bilbao” (Kunzru 2007, 226), retains the strikingly provincial outlook of a non-diasporic Briton. In a reversal of these textual manœuvres, white British writers like Patrick Neate (City of Tiny Lights, 2005), Chris Cleave (The Other Hand, 2008) or Stephen Kelman (Pigeon English, 2011) have published novels featuring Black first-person narrators, thereby contributing ‘from the other end’, as it were, to the destabilisation of identitarian fixities. Whether this bid for a “post-racial society” (Upstone 2015, 128) in which stigmatising difference categories have ceased to matter is mere wishful thinking or endowed with a weak performative power remains an open question. It appears to signal the consummation of a collective voyage in which British society has come another step closer to a transcultural supersession of the separations and exclusions of divide and rule so that, at least in the field of literature, surprising new configurations spring up.

3 Bibliography 3.1 Works Cited Ahmed, Rehana. “South Asian Resistance in Wartime London: Indian Writing 1940–1942.” Wasafiri 27.2 (2012): 17–24. Ali, Yasmin. “Echoes of Empire: Towards a Politics of Representation.” Enterprise and Heritage: Cross-Currents of National Culture. Ed. John Corner and Sylvia Harvey. London: Routledge, 1991. 194–211. Arana, R. Victoria. “Sea Change: Historicizing the Scholarly Study of Black British Writing.” Black British Writing. Ed. R. Victoria Arana and Lauri Ramey. New York: Palgrave, 2004. 19–45. Arana, R. Victoria. “The 1980s: Retheorising and Refashioning British Identity.” Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature. Ed. Kadija Sesay. Hertford: Hansib, 2005. 230–240. Azim, Firdous. The Colonial Rise of the Novel. London/New York: Routledge, 1993. Bauman, Zygmunt. Postmodernity and Its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity, 1997. Berger Jr., Harry. Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Bhabha, Homi K. “Of Mimicry and Man.” The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. 85–92. Carey, John. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1890–1939. London: Faber & Faber, 1992.

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Croft, Andy. “Introduction.” Means-Test Man by Walter Brierley. Nottingham: Spokesman, 2011, vii-xvi. Dabydeen, David. A Harlot’s Progress. London: Vintage, 1999. Dawes, Kwame. “Negotiating the Ship on the Head: Black British Writing.” Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature. Ed. Kadija Sesay. Hertford: Hansib, 2005. 251–281. Deacon, Michael. “Conservative Party Conference 2014 Sketch: George Osborne Goes Trainspotting.” The Telegraph. 29 September 2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ georgeosborne/11128754/Conservative-Party-conference-2014-sketch-George-Osborne-goesTrainspotting.html (21 November 2016). Eckstein, Lars. Re-Membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. Fordham, James. James Hanley: Modernism and the Working Class. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002. Fox, Pamela. Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890–1945. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1994. Fox, Ralph. The Novel and the People. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979 [1937]. Gostick, Chris. “Extra Material on James Hanley’s Boy.” James Hanley. Boy. With an Introduction by Anthony Burgess. London: Oneworld Press, 2010. 181–204. Greenwood, Walter. Love on the Dole. London: Vintage, 1993 [1933]. Hall, Stuart. “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities.” Culture, Globalization and the World-System. Ed. Anthony D. King. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1991. 41–68. Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities.” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Ed. David Morley and Koung-Hsing Chen. London/New York: Routledge, 1996 [1989]. 441–449. Harris, Wilson. Palace of the Peacock. London: Faber & Faber, 1998 [1960]. Hawthorn, Jeremy. “Preface.” The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Jeremy Hawthorn. London: Edward Arnold, 1984. vii–x. Haywood, Ian. Working-Class Fiction from Chartism to “Trainspotting.” Plymouth: Northcote House, 1997. Head, Dominic. “The Demise of Class Fiction.” A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction. Ed. James F. English. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 229–247. Hitchcock, Peter. Working-Class Fiction in Theory and Practice: A Reading of Alan Sillitoe. Ann Arbor/ London: UMI Research Press, 1989. Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982 [1957]. Horton, Patricia. “Trainspotting. A Topography of the Masculine Abject.” English 50 (2001): 219–234. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Methuen, 1981. Jameson, Fredric. “Marx’s Purloined Letter.” Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Ed. Michael Sprinker. London/New York: Verso, 1999. 26–67. Jeffers, Jennifer M. “Rhizome National Identity: ‘Scatlin’s Psychic Defense’. Trainspotting.” Journal of Narrative Theory 35.1 (2005): 88–111. Joannou, Mary, and Ian Haywood. “Introduction.” Clash by Ellen Wilkinson. Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2004. vii–xxv. Johnson, Roy. “The Proletarian Novel.” Literature and History 2.2 (1975): 84–95. Jones, Owen. Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. London: Verso, 2012. Kelly, Lionel. “General Introduction.” The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell. With a Foreword by Tony Benn. Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 2012 [1914/1955]. 9–26.

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Kirk, Jon. “Invisible Ink: Working-Class Writing and the End of Class.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 5.3 (2002): 343–362. Klaus, H. Gustav. “Silhouettes of Revolution: Some Neglected Novels from the Early 1920s.” The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition. Ed. H. Gustav Klaus. Brighton: Harvester, 1982. 89–109. Kunzru, Hari. My Revolutions. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007. Kureishi, Hanif. The Buddha of Suburbia. London: Faber & Faber, 1999 [1990]. Lee, A. Robert. “Introduction.” Other Britain, Other British: Contemporary Multicultural Fiction. Ed. A. Robert Lee. London: Pluto, 1995. 1–3. Lesjak, Carolyn. Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Lewis, Shireen K. Race, Culture and Identity: Francophone West African and Caribbean Literature and Theory from Négritude to Créolité. Lanham: Lexington, 2006. Lima, Maria Helena. “‘Pivoting the Centre’: The Fiction of Andrea Levy.” Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature. Ed. Kadija Sesay. Hertford: Hansib, 2005. 56–85. Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. London: Routledge, 1991 [1964]. Miles, Peter. “The Painter’s Bible and the British Workman: Robert Tressell’s Literary Activism.” The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Jeremy Hawthorn. London: Edward Arnold, 1984. 1–17. Mitchell, Jack. “Early Harvest: Three Anti-Capitalist Novels Published in 1914.” The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition. Ed. H. Gustav Klaus. Brighton: Harvester, 1982. 67–88. Phillips, Caryl. The Final Passage. London: Faber & Faber, 1993 [1985]. Phillips, Caryl. “Kingdom of the Blind.” The Guardian. 17 July 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/ books/2004/jul/17/featuresreviews.guardianreview1 (21 November 2016). Procter, James. “New Ethnicities, the Novel, and the Burdens of Representation.” A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction. Ed. James F. English. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 101–121. Rahbek, Ulla. “Disruption and Displacement: Caryl Phillips’ The Final Passage.” A Woman’s Place: Women, Domesticity and Private Life. Ed. Annabelle Despard. Kristiansand: Agder College Research, 1998. 128–137. Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Tr. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Rancière, Jacques. Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics. Tr. James Swenson. Intr. Gabriel Rockhill. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Ross, Stephen. “Authenticity Betrayed: The ‘Idiotic Folk’ of Love on the Dole.” Cultural Critique 56 (2004): 189–209. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. London: Viking, 1988. Rushdie, Salman. “In Good Faith.” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta, 1991. 393–414. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1991. Schulze-Engler, Frank. “Black, Asian, and Other British.” Global Fragments: (Dis)Orientation in the New World Order. Ed. Anke Bartels and Dirk Wiemann. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 47–57. Selvon, Sam. The Lonely Londoners. London: Longman, 1997 [1956]. Sesay, Kadija George. “Transformations Within the Black British Novel.” Black British Writing. Ed. R. Victoria Arana and Lauri Ramey. New York: Palgrave, 2004. 99–108. Sesay, Kadija George. “Introduction.” Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature. Hertford: Hansib, 2005. 15–19.

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Seth, Vikram. An Equal Music. Delhi: Viking, 1999. Sillitoe, Alan. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. London: Flamingo, 1994 [1958]. Sivanandan, A. “The Liberation of the Black Intellectual.” The Literary Review 34.1 (1990): 12–25. Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000. Snee, Carole. “Working-Class Literature or Proletarian Writing?” Culture and Crisis in Britain in the Thirties. Ed. Jon Clark et al. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1979. 165–192. Southworth, Helen. “‘Going Over’: The Woolfs, the Hogarth Press, and Working Class Voices.” Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press, and the Networks of Modernism. Ed. Helen Southworth. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. 206–232. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Reading The Satanic Verses.” Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York/London: Routledge, 1993. 217–241. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 2012. Tressell, Robert. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Ed. and intr. Lionel Kelly. Foreword by Tony Benn. Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 2012 [1914/1955]. Upstone, Sara. “Postcolonial and Diasporic Voices – Bringing Black to the Union Jack: Ethnic Fictions and the Politics of Possibility.” The 1990s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction. Ed. Nick Hubble et al. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. 123–148. Wallace, Elizabeth Kowalewski. “Telling Untold Stories: Philippa Gregory’s A Respectable Trade and David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress.” Novel 33.2 (2000): 235–252. Wambu, Onyekachi. “Introduction.” Empire Windrush: Fifty Years of Writing About Black Britain. London: Gollancz, 1998. 19–29. Ward, Abigail. Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen and Fred D’Aguiar: Representations of Slavery. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. Webster, Roger. “Love on the Dole and the Aesthetic of Contradiction.” The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Jeremy Hawthorn. London: Edward Arnold, 1984. 49–61. Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Culture Today.” Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World. Ed. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash. London: Sage, 1999. 194–213. Welsh, Irvine. Trainspotting. London: Vintage, 1999 [1993]. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Wiemann, Dirk. “News from Nowhere. Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music.” Transgressions: Cultural Interventions in the Global Manifold. Ed. Renate Brosch and Rüdiger Kunow. Trier: WVT, 2005. 127–141. Williams, Raymond. Writing in Society. London: Verso, 1991 [1983]. Yeo, Stephen. “A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain, 1883–1896.” History Workshop Journal 4 (1977): 5–56.

3.2 Further reading Arana, R. Victoria, and Lauri Ramey, eds. Black British Writing. New York: Palgrave, 2004. Hawthorn, Jeremy, ed. The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century. London: Edward Arnold, 1984. Klaus, H. Gustav. The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years of Working-Class Writing. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1986. Ranasinha, Ruvani. South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

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Sesay, Kadija, ed. Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature. Hertford: Hansib, 2005. Wambu, Onyekachi, ed. Empire Windrush: Fifty Years of Writing About Black Britain. London: Gollancz, 1998.

Part II Close Readings

Russell West-Pavlov

6 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899/1902) Abstract: Heart of Darkness, the best-known work by the Polish-born, British-sailor turned avantgarde novelist Joseph Conrad, has become an iconic representative of High Modernism because it typifies, within the space of less than a hundred pages, the modernist movement’s all-out assault on all the conventions of the nineteenth-century realist novel: linear narrative plot-construction; the conventions of the omniscient extradiegetic or ‘reliable’ first-person autodiegetic narrator; the rationality and self-knowledge of subjectivity that both those narrative conventions and their accompanying characters presuppose; the transparency of literary descriptive semiotics as a reflector of a stable exterior reality, projected into the underpinning notion of ‘setting’; and the framing influence of a set of civilized Enlightenment values that the combination of all these literary devices was supposed to convey and buttress. Conrad’s fundamental concern is the issue of how we narrate (poetics) as the key to the issue of how we know (epistemology), which in turn becomes the condition of how we act (ethics, agency), one of these actions of course being the practice of narrative. Narrative itself, beyond all questions of the moral content, becomes a means of structuring human existence within a universe stripped of ultimate guarantees of meaning. Rather, it is in the reception of narrative, which Conrad integrates into the very structure of his novella, that meanings lacking any ethical underpinning except their own narrative dynamic are produced and performed. Keywords: Modernism, frame-narration, discourse, colonization, European culture, Congo

1 Context: Author, Œuvre, Moment Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness has become the iconic exemplar of literary High Modernism in the English language. It is the spoken tale of a sailor named Marlow who recounts his “inconclusive experiences” of a sojourn in Africa (47)1. Marlow obtains an appointment as a river-boat captain in Brussels and then sails down the African coast to the mouth of one of the continent’s great rivers, where he discovers the barbarous atrocities of European colonization. He is assigned a mission

1 Unless otherwise indicated page references in brackets without further designation refer to Conrad 2010 [1899/1902]. DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-007

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to travel up-river to recall a colonial agent, Kurtz, who has become all too successful in the extraction of ivory and has ‘gone native’, setting up a fiefdom among the tribes of the interior. Appalled by the ghastly brutality and tawdry greed of the colonizers, Marlow becomes fixated upon the figure of Kurtz, hoping to find in the goal of his travel a figure that will save his idealized notions of European civilization and decency. Kurtz, it transpires, is worse than all the other colonizers in his predatory acquisitiveness, but Marlow persists in remaining loyal to Kurtz’s naked embrace of power as opposed to the other agents’ petty greed and squabbling. Marlow returns to Europe disillusioned, but confirms his loyalty to Kurtz: he meets Kurtz’s ‘Intended’ and lies to her about her fiancé’s final words. The novella was serialized in the three parts in the Edinburgh magazine Blackwood’s in 1899 and then reprinted along with several other short texts in book form 1902. Since then it has been republished numerous times, above all in cheap paperback editions from the 1950s onwards. Chantal Zabus has suggested that each epoch of European literary history has central “interpellative dream texts”, naming The Tempest for the seventeenth century, Robinson Crusoe for the eighteenth, Jane Eyre for the nineteenth – and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for the twentieth century (Zabus 2002, 1). Certainly it would be true to say that the title of Conrad’s short novel has passed into common everyday language. The turn of phrase has come to encapsulate a central aspect of the ‘horrors’ of twentieth-century history and is frequently served up to connote situations of extraordinary atrocity – as in the British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd’s 1994 description of the Rwandan genocide as “a true heart of darkness” (qtd. in Melvern and Williams 2004, 17). The all-pervasive influence of Heart of Darkness as an iconic text of the moment of European colonization of Africa is such that a writer like V. S. Naipaul, seeking to explore similar fictional terrain, “found Conrad […] had been everywhere before me” (Naipaul 2003, 170). This omnipresence of Conrad’s text within twentieth-century cultural history is loosely connected to the critical and pedagogical histories of the text’s reception and implementation as what Chinua Achebe described in the mid 1970s as “today the most commonly prescribed novel in twentieth-century literature courses in English Departments of American universities” (Achebe 2001 [1977], 1791). The popularity of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a compact but productive undergraduate teaching text has not abated since in the 1950s. Currie has rather grumpily commented that “Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is the most analysed narrative in history. It has been used to demonstrate everything in the narratological universe” (Currie 1998, 135). Conrad’s novella, which dramatizes from its opening pages onwards the dialectic between the narrating and the reception of narrative, has gained its status as a classic of High Modernism in a process of pedagogical metanarrative consecration (cf. West-Pavlov 2015). This process is not peripheral to its enduring literary value and its capacity to provoke controversial discussion, but resides at the core of its modernist questioning of representation, subjectivity, and the status of reciprocally foreign cultures.

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Conrad second-guesses almost all the questions asked of him by a literary critical identikit, and so we should not be surprised when we discover that Kurtz, Marlow’s interlocutor and Doppelgänger in the novella, resembles Conrad himself in some respects: “The original Kurtz had been educated partly in England, and – as he was good enough to say himself – his sympathies were in the right place. His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” (95). Like Conrad, Kurtz is a litterateur (110), indeed, a “universal genius” mastering all the arts, whether literary, painterly or musical (120), thereby echoing Conrad’s conviction in his programmatic preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, that the ideal work of fiction “must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music” (1960 [1897], 4). Given Kurtz’s subsequent corruption and demise, however, the linkage between literary creation and literary biography becomes highly problematic, as Conrad’s uneasy preoccupation with biography constantly affirms. Nonetheless, a few basic facts are relevant: born in 1857 in a Russian-occupied part of Poland, as a child he was exiled with his parents, who had been engaged in seditious activities, to a remote part of Russia. After the death of his parents, he was raised by his uncle but left Poland in 1874, first for France, and then to Britain, where he served in the merchant navy from 1879 to 1893. In 1889, during a period on shore, he began to write his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, which would be published six years later, launching a literary career that would only gain late recognition. In 1890 Conrad captained a river-boat in the Belgian Congo, an experience which broke his health and contributed to his eventual retirement from the sea to write for a (mostly precarious) living. Out of the Congo experience, where Conrad was confronted with the horrific excesses of King Leopold of Belgium’s brutal exploitation of the subjects of his private colony (see for instance Ascherson 1963), emerged the novella Heart of Darkness. At the moment of its publication, Conrad had published two ‘Malay archipelago’ fictions (Almayer’s Folly, 1895; An Outcast of the Islands, 1896) and a sea fiction, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). Heart of Darkness was followed by Lord Jim (1900), which blended the Malay context, the seafaring story and the Doppelgänger-theme of Heart of Darkness. A book-version of Heart of Darkness (1902) preceded Conrad’s great political novels: the South-American novel of political revolution Nostromo (1904), the London anarchist-terrorist novel The Secret Agent (1907), and the Russian political exile novel Under Western Eyes (1911). In 1914 Chance brought Conrad the commercial success which had long eluded him; it was followed by Victory (1915) and a number of late novels long regarded as belonging to a ‘period of decline’. Conrad was offered a knighthood shortly before his death in 1924, and considered for but not awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Conrad’s second language was French, and English his third, which he spoke with a considerable accent but wrote with a mix of odd lexical inflections and subtle stylistic nuances. Perhaps as a result of his awareness of the slippage between lan-

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guages he was particularly interested in the way language can be manipulated by ideology. By extension, his work questioned conventions of linguistic representation and narrative structure, making him one of the main representatives of High Modernism in English literature, alongside Virginia Woolf (↗ 9 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse), James Joyce (↗ 7 James Joyce, Ulysses), D. H. Lawrence and Henry James in the novel, Katherine Mansfield in the short story, and Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and T. S. Eliot in poetry – many of them like himself expatriates and cultural anomalies within the British literary scene. Heart of Darkness has become an iconic representative of High Modernism particularly within undergraduate courses because it typifies, within the space of less than a hundred pages, the modernist movement’s all-out assault on all the conventions of the nineteenth-century realist novel: linear narrative plot-construction; the conventions of the omniscient extradiegetic or ‘reliable’ first-person autodiegetic narrator; the rationality and self-knowledge of subjectivity that both those narrative conventions and their accompanying characters presuppose; the transparency of literary descriptive semiotics as a reflector of a stable exterior reality, projected into the underpinning notion of ‘setting’; and the framing influence of a set of civilized Enlightenment values that the combination of all these literary devices was supposed to convey and buttress. It is for this reason that Conrad’s almost parodic biographical sketch of Kurtz, noting his pan-European origins, rapidly transits to an ironic consideration of his writerly activity as the composer of a report on “the Suppression of Savage Customs […] It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think. […] [I]t was a beautiful piece of writing” (95). Marlow continues: “But this must have been before his – let us say – nerves, went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which – as far as I reluctantly gathered from what I heard at various times – were offered up to him – do you understand? – to Mr. Kurtz himself” (95). The discrepancy between biographical coherence, civilized eloquence and the descent into ‘savagery’  – cannibalism, that ultimate marker of the spurious difference between modern ‘us’ and primitive ‘them’ – belies the “magnificent” “peroration” of Kurtz’s “magic current of phrases”. Kurtz’s “unbounded power of eloquence” culminates instead in “a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand” that “at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment […] blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’” (95). This famous epithet, in an “unsteady hand”, which, significantly, Kurtz appears to forget he has added, serves to destabilize from within the notions of author and œuvre as standard literary-critical topoi and indeed the very idea of literary biography.

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2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns Conrad’s modernist scepticism, linguistic, epistemological and axiological in scope, poses other problems for literary analysis. The habitual binary division into themes and style, or topics of concerns and narrative strategies, which posits that the ‘what’ of literary creation precedes and thus can be isolated from the ‘how’ of literary composition, is fundamentally questioned by Heart of Darkness. As the analysis of Marlow’s brief ‘biography’ of Kurtz demonstrates, Conrad’s awareness of the perils of language ultimately undermines its own formulation. Conrad’s fundamental concern, then, is the issue of how we narrate (poetics) as the key to the issue of how we know (epistemology), which in turn becomes the condition of how we act (ethics, agency), one of these actions of course being the practice of narrative. Conrad’s corrosive poetics is thus a radically sceptical version avant la lettre of Gadamer’s (2004 [1965]) hermeneutic circle, which claims that we must embark upon all processes of knowledge production from a historically-located, linguistically-conditioned, and thus epistemologically-limited and contingent position. Just as Gadamer accepts the inevitable necessity of historical limitation as the condition sine qua non of knowledge, so too Conrad opts for a contingent loyalty to one narrative, that of Kurtz with his lapidary final utterance “The horror, the horror!” as a “supreme moment of complete knowledge” (117), however bleak this may be. Retreating from the infinite regression of linguistic uncertainty which opens up a bottomless abyss of ontological and existential questioning as Conrad’s primary and ultimate ‘theme’, we can nonetheless identify a number of other central concerns, temporally bracketing off their inextricable relationship to the issue of signification until a later stage of this essay: a strong anti-colonial critique; a symbolism of light and darkness; a literary topography of surface and depth; and finally an axiology of community and isolation. First, Conrad’s anti-colonial critique. Heart of Darkness began life as an almost realist account of the colonial excesses that Conrad had directly witnessed in Leopold’s Congo: The title I am thinking of is ‘The Heart of Darkness’ but the narrative is not gloomy [sic] The criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling the civilising work in Africa is a justifiable idea. The subject is of our time distinc[t]ly – though not topically treated. It is a story as much as my Outpost of Progress was but, so to speak ‘takes in’ more – is a little wider – is less concentrated on individuals. (1983–2007, II, 139–140)

In effect, the issue of anti-colonial protest would be treated in a manner that rapidly became so all-encompassing as to include transcendental issues of good and evil, truth and untruth, reason and unreason. Nonetheless, the early sections of the novella begin on a strong tenor of socio-political critique. This critique peaks in Marlow’s discovery of the indescribable horror of a grove of trees where he finds African slave-­ labourers too weak to work wasting away in the shadows: “Black shapes crouched,

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lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. […] They were dying slowly – it was very clear” (58). Parts of Conrad’s novella may owe something to what Linda Dryden (2000) calls “imperial romance” or White (1993) the “adventure tradition”, discourses which served to legitimize colonization: “I was circumventing Kurtz as if it had been a boyish game” (112). But such discourses are deconstructed. In a later essay entitled “Geography and some explorers”, Conrad would look back upon his own dreams of imperial romance and their destruction by the realities of nineteenth-century colonization: One day [as a schoolboy], putting my finger on a spot in the very middle of the then white heart of Africa, I declared that some day I would go there. […] [I]t is a fact that, about eighteen years afterwards, a wretched little stern-wheel steamboat I commanded lay moored to the bank of an African river. […] A great melancholy descended on me. Yes: this was the very spot. But there was no shadowy friend to stand by my side in the night of the enormous wilderness, no great haunting memory, but only the unholy recollection of a prosaic newspaper stunt and the distasteful knowledge of the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration. What an end to the idealized realities of a boy’s daydreams! (2010 [1926], 14–15)

Already in Heart of Darkness, the imperial adventure genre, which is more prominent in the public-school spirit of Tuan Jim in Lord Jim (1900), is undercut by the sheer ferocity of Conrad’s critique: They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force – nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind […] The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. (47)

Conrad’s critique of colonialism is ethically driven, but it also includes a linguistic dismantling of the ideology of imperial conquest. On the sea-voyage down the West coast of Africa, Marlow sees a French warship pointlessly shelling the jungle: “There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives – he called them enemies! – hidden out of sight somewhere” (55). Conrad takes up these fallacious epithets again when Marlow encounters a group of natives in chains: “[T]hese men could by no stretch of imagination be called enemies. They were called criminals, and the outraged law, like the bursting shells, had come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea” (57). Minutes later, Marlow wanders into the grove of death: “They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now – nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation” (58). It is

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Conrad’s incrementally deployed linguistic critique that erodes the discourse of imperial adventure and ultimately undermines the notion of European civilization itself. Second, the anti-colonial critique quickly took on symbolic dimensions that exceeded the original project. Conrad approaches this problematic by mobilizing what is perhaps the super-trope of binarity in Western civilization since Antiquity, the duality of light and darkness which functions as an isomorphism for the opposed values of knowledge/ignorance, good/evil, openness/hiddenness, speech/ incoherence, modernity/primitivism, civilization/barbarism, and so on. This duality is presented from the very first framing episode of the novella, where Marlow and his listeners find themselves on a yacht in the Thames estuary in a “luminous space” between sea and sky that contrast with “air [that] was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth”  – London (43). Marlow begins his long narrative soliloquy by commenting abruptly: “And this also […] has been one of the dark places of the earth” (45). Marlow’s “And” indicates a continuing train of thought, spanning the apparent border of a discursive opening; his cross-over train of thought spatializes, in discursive terms, what his rumination expresses: that light and dark are in no way opposite terms but, as Nietzsche had suggested only a few decades previously (Said 1977), intimately related to each other. Conrad explores these issues by semanticizing space, overlaying it with certain customary values (for instance the Thames as a locus of heroic imperial travel narratives, 44–45) only then to deterritorialize the same spaces by bringing them up against their respective opposite value (“this also […] has been one of the dark places of the earth”). Thus Conrad demonstrates how these ostensibly opposed values tend to contaminate each other. For instance, Marlow, captaining his ramshackle steamboat up the great Congo river (connoting technological progress and the forward movement of modernity), is often confronted with groups of dancing, howling tribespeople on the bank (connoting the timeless, place-based locus of primitive barbarism). Yet he acknowledges: It was unearthly, and the men were – No, they were not inhuman. […] They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity – like yours – the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. […] [I]f you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise. (79)

The reversal of these values is complete when Marlow wonders why his starving cannibal crew (“Fine fellows […] They were men one could work with”, 78) have not eaten the European colonizers on board the ship. If the cannibals, accustomed to eating their enemies (84), personify that characteristic of barbarism that is used by most societies to distinguish themselves from others, they exercise “Restraint! [which] I would just as soon have expected […] from a hyena prowling amongst the corpses of a battlefield. But there was the fact facing me” (85–86). In effect, the cannibals display precisely that marker of civilized self-control which the Europeans lose when they

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come to Africa and discover a law-free zone where “everything is possible” (Agamben 1998, 170); “Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, […] there was something wanting in him” (104); Marlow sees Kurtz “open his mouth wide”, giving him “a weirdly voracious aspect as if he wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him” (106). It is the cannibals here who embody the values of civilization (the deferral of oral appetite, and by extension, of other rewards) far more than the greedy, petty, cruel colonizers. Third, such moral reversals are effected by the use of a powerfully evocative literary topography. Conrad inaugurates this topography by employing the fulcrum-like function of the turning tide in the Thames estuary, mentioned in the first and last lines of the novella (43, 126). This maritime detail makes the site of narration a median position between metropolitan centre and colonial periphery, between putative civilization and savagery, between light and darkness. Yet because the site of narration is a fulcrum, it is subject to radical reversal: thus the novella transforms the hierarchical relations already evinced in the title, whose ‘heart’ of ‘darkness’ oxymoronically makes the peripheral darkness of tropical Africa a ‘heart’, a centre in its own right. Correspondingly, Conrad retools the colonial travelogue, with its narrative of a journey of discovery (usually associated with the light of knowledge) into the interior: “We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness” (79). Rather than travelling to the colonial peripheries of civilization, Marlow finds himself travelling into a centre that, faithful to an abiding epistemological paradigm within Western civilization, will “reveal the substance of its truth – disclose its inspiring secret” (1960 [1897], 5). This journey of discovery mobilizes a perspective “piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness”, thereby revealing “the appalling face of a glimpsed truth” (118). Kurtz’s “supreme moment of complete knowledge” is crystallized in his lapidary declaration “The horror! The horror” (117), a statement that both promises and witholds meaning (Brooks 1984; Todorov 1978). Yet this revelation of a tantalizingly elusive inner meaning, a jaundiced version of the Joycean “epiphany” (Joyce 1977 [1944], 190), is also the revelation of an inner vacuousness. Marlow says of one of the company agents, “if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe” (68). Regarding Kurtz, the apparent possessor of an ultimate truth about humanity, Marlow claims that the land “had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude – and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core” (104). It is because Kurtz lacks some sort of moral core that he is receptive to “the heavy, mute spell of the wilderness – that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions” (113). Conrad’s ascription of barbarism to the African earth itself is a misnomer: in fact, Africa is simply a foil for the barbaric values of a supposedly civilized Europe, a mirror for what

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­Horkheimer and Adorno (2007 [1944/1947]) called the “dialectic of Enlightenment”. In the parlance of W. B. Yeats, in his iconic poem “The Second Coming” (1919), Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned (Yeats 1974, 99)

In the last analysis, Conrad is claiming that to move outside the sphere of civilization is to remove the feeble supports of moral convention and to expose civilized values for what they really are: a façade for a “flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly”, against which the only protection is a genuine, if rare bedrock of moral values that stand the test of dislocation, what he calls “your own innate strength” or “inborn strength” (44, 86). Fourth and finally, the doubleness of moral values and of the paradigms of civilization and barbarism, even when couched in symbolic terms or within a metaphysical geography, are always concretized via the characterization specific to literary narrative. This means that Conrad’s meditations upon good and evil and moral weakness and strength are ultimately meditations upon the nature of human community and human isolation. Conrad himself, it would seem, was burdened by a deep sense of having betrayed his native Poland, for which his parents were political activists, by leaving his motherland for a maritime career in the British merchant navy (Najder 1983; Hampson 1992). His fiction is populated by characters who betray their human fellows: Jim, in Lord Jim (1900), who jumps from the bridge of the ship he commands, thinking it is about to sink, and later betrays his Malayan lover; Charles Gould in Nostromo (1904), whose passion is dedicated to the silver mine rather than to his wife; Mr Verloc in The Secret Agent (1907), who betrays the trust of his wife Winnie by allowing her son Stevie to carry a bomb to blow up the Greenwich Observatory; Razumov in Under Western Eyes (1911), who betrays his fellow student and revolutionary Haldin; and Heyst in Victory (1915), who abandons his lover Lena by adhering exclusively to his own solipsistic ideals. By contrast, Conrad’s ambivalent admiration is reserved for the stolid Captain MacWhirr in Typhoon (1903), whose lack of imagination enables him to unflinchingly steer his ship through the heart of a fearsome hurricane. Such salutary unimaginativeness Conrad associates in Heart of Darkness with those who are “too much of a fool to go wrong – too dull even to know [they] are being assaulted by the powers of darkness” (94). In similar vein, Marlow claims that the saving value that kept him from the sort of moral erosion experienced by Kurtz is “work for its own sake” (75), “an honest concern for the right way of going to work” (81): “I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by inspiration, the signs of hidden banks […]

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When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality – the reality, I tell you – fades. The inner truth is hidden – luckily, luckily” (77). But another antidote against the inner voices which incite the modern subject to betrayal may be the figure of the Doppelgänger or ‘secret sharer’  – the title of a short story published in ’Twixt Land and Sea (1912). Paradoxically, these communities emerge in the midst of isolation. Conrad wrote from the Congo to his aunt Marguerite Poradowska, “Decidedly I regret having come here. […] Everything is repellent to me. Men and things, but men above all. And I am repellent to them” (1983–2007, I, 62). Moral isolation may result in communities of peculiarly amoral character. In his programmatic preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, Conrad discusses the way in which the work of arts speaks “the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts” (1960 [1897], 4). Ezra Pound’s (1994, 472) artist as outsider, the “lone ant […] ego scriptor”, may transpire in fact to be part of a “minimal pair”. In Heart of Darkness, there are numerous instances of such troubled loyalty in Doppelgänger-pairs that may contravene habitual notions of ethical conduct. Just as what Marlow calls “the bond of the sea” makes sailors “tolerant of each others’s yarns” (43), so too the bonds in and of narrative that rest at the core of Conrad’s fiction create connections that obviate the alienating effects of modernity. Marlow meets a Russian sailor who has attached himself to Kurtz and remained his faithful companion (100–101) – in competition at times with Kurtz’s African mistress, who seeks in vain to exert her powers of magical attraction to prevent the renegade trader from being taken back down the river by the colonists (107–108). Similarly loyal to Kurtz is his ‘Intended’, the naïvely well-meaning fiancée who believes in his essential goodness to the very end – with the help of a white lie uttered by Marlow, namely, that the trader’s last words were her name (125). Marlow’s words in turn seal his loyalty to Kurtz, whom he describes as a “remarkable man” (118). From the very moment when Marlow “seemed to see Kurtz for the first time [in] a distinct glimpse” (75), the trader-gone-native takes form as an object of desire in Marlow’s narrative: “the little begrimed steamboat […] crawled on […] [f]or me […] towards Kurtz – exclusively” (78). Kurtz becomes the sole aim of Marlow’s personal quest, a sympathetic other by which he defines his own existence, the object of a tenacious loyalty: “I did not betray Mr. Kurtz – it was ordered I should never betray him – it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice” (111). This loyalty is, ultimately, a loyalty to language as form over content. Despite Kurtz’s moral turpitude, his brutality and corruption, Kurtz is redeemed, in Marlow’s eyes, by his ability to articulate a truth, however ambivalent it may be: He had something to say. He had said it. […] He had summed up – he had judged. ‘The horror!’ […] After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth – the strange commingling of desire and hate. (118)

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This privileging of the utterance itself (“a vibrating […] whisper”) over the content of the highly ambivalent utterance, essentially the retention of linguistic form over semantic content, is typical of High Modernism. Such a strategy creates the “compensatory affiliative relationships” of modernism that replace the lost “filiative” connections of traditional societies (Said 1984, 20–21). Given the choice between the functionary as the embodiment of the banality of evil, and the crazed luminary who at least opts for evil out of misplaced visionary idealism – a choice expressed in Yeats’ (1974, 100) lines, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity” – Marlow sides with the latter (Levenson 1991, 1–77). Significantly, Kurtz exists in Marlow’s imagination as a voice: I made the strange discovery that I had never imagined him as doing, you know, but as discoursing. I didn’t say to myself, ‘Now I will never see him,’ or ‘Now I will never shake him by the hand,’ but, ‘Now I will never hear him.’ The man presented himself as a voice. […] [O]f all his gifts the one that stood out preeminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words – the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness. (92)

Marlow harbours no illusions about the conventional truth-content or moral value of Kurtz’s discourse. Its ambivalence as a moral instance is acknowledged: “the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness”. What is more important to Marlow is its structuring function, its role in guaranteeing his own existence as a subject in discourse: “Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced” (80). Marlow recognizes what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would capture in his lapidary dictum that “a signifier is what represents a subject for another signifier” (Lacan 2006 [1966], 694). In other words, subjects exist in speech for one another, in their own speech and in the speech of others about them; their existence is reciprocally underwritten by the speech of the other (signifiers representing for another signifier) rather than by some interior depth or essence (the putative signified of the self’s discourse): “The Other is, therefore, the locus in which is constituted the I who speaks along with he who hears” (Lacan 2006 [1966], 358). Those signifiers are connected to each other by desire: “man’s desire finds its meaning in the other’s desire […] because his first object(ive) is to be recognized by the other” (Lacan 2006 [1966], 222). If, as Lacan (2006 [1966], 247) goes on to say, “What I seek in speech is a response from the other […] What constitutes me as a subject is my question”, then this explains the generative nature of discourse itself, which tends to produce more discourse, as Conrad’s frame narrator senses: For a long time already he, sitting apart, had been no more to us than a voice. There was not a word from anybody. The others might have been asleep, but I was awake. I listened, I listened on the watch for the sentence, for the word, that would give me the clue to the faint uneasiness

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inspired by this narrative that seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy night-air of the river. (70)

At this juncture, where the full implications of the discursive affiliation of Marlow and Kurtz become evident on the perlocutionary (performative), rather than the locutionary plane (Kurtz too is “very little more than a voice”, 93) it transpires to what extent Conrad’s concern is with the ethical functioning of language in a context of linguistic decay. In a world where language has ceased to convey a single truth, corrupted as it is by “one immense jabber, silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean, without any kind of sense” (93), what can be rescued from the rubble of Western discourse, the “broken ant-hill […] the wreckage of Europe” (Pound 1994, 472) is the act of speech itself as a mode of aporetic relationship: “Even if it communicates nothing, discourse represents the existence of communication; even if it denies the obvious, it affirms that speech constitutes truth” (Lacan 2006 [1966], 209). Speech and writing as the locus and fabric of Doppelgänger pairs brings us back to the place where Conrad always begins: language as the formal raw material of writing.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies In his manifesto-like preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, Conrad (1960 [1897], 4) stresses his “complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance” and “unremitting never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences.” In consequence, the separation of thematic concerns and aesthetic procedure cannot be sustained, when speaking of Conrad, except as a momentary heuristic strategy. Form cannot be treated as the mode of expression of pre-existing concepts; rather, form emerges together with content out of the situation that drives the impulse to fictional creation and possesses the greater innovative impetus. With Conrad, it may well be the case, as the Russian formalists provocatively suggested, that “the story line [i.e. content] is nothing more than material for plot formation [i.e. form as the primary task of art]” (Shklovsky 1990 [1925/1929], 170). Form cannot do its work unless it has content (plot, character, themes) to work with and within, but the latter must always be analysed through the lens of formal innovation, rather than vice versa. This may help to explain the peculiar disproportion, in Heart of Darkness, of form in relation to events, which often appear nebulous in their rendering. E. M. Forster pinpointed this aspect of Conrad’s aesthetics in 1921 when he claimed that “he is misty in the middle as well as at the edges, that the secret casket of his genius contains a vapour rather than a jewel” (qtd. in Ambrosini 1991, 5). Students reading the novella for the first time are often frustrated by the fact that it seems to involve more talk – it is, after all, a long monologue by Marlow – than action. This primacy of dis-

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cursive performativity over referential substance is precisely Heart of Darkness’s contribution to the modernist moment. This fact is foregrounded from the very outset by the most obvious aspect of the opening pages of the novella: the work done by the frame-narrator’s introduction. Heart of Darkness is a mediated discourse encased within a mediating frame. We receive Marlow’s voice through the voice of an other, though this fact is elided for long stretches of the narrative, except when Marlow breaks off his soliloquy or provokes an irate response from his interlocutors (70, 77, 93). This mediating frame means that Marlow’s discourse is no longer im-mediate; it is no longer the thing itself, the result of a human presence or of human experience. Nor is it truth: it has become part of someone else’s ‘opinion’, a partial, perhaps biased ‘version’ of a story no longer entirely in the ownership of its ‘original’ teller. Yet this alienation of Marlow’s story merely replicates what Marlow himself has already said about Kurtz’s words, or what Kurtz himself already embodies: “Kurtz – Kurtz – that means short in German – don’t it? Well, the name was as true as everything else in his life – and death. He looked at least seven feet long” (106). Marlow, we discover at the end of the novella, is a liar who mangles Kurtz’s last words, albeit so as to protect the sensibilities of the ‘Intended’, and perhaps also, he hints, because he too has designs upon her. How then are we to trust the rest of his account of Kurtz? In order to avoid the petty culpabilization of an individual character as ‘unreliable narrator’ (a senseless tautology if there ever was one) it is worth observing that the notion of narrative as a truth-conveying realist mode of representation is one that dates from the Enlightenment. It is that very Enlightenment and its values that are criticized when Marlow pillories the various epithets mobilized by the ‘civilizing’ mission of colonialism to justify its own exploitation. Upon seeing the skulls displayed on stakes around Kurtz’s compound, Marlow summarizes the gradually accumulated critique of colonial rhetoric: “[T]hese heads were the heads of rebels. I shocked him excessively by laughing. Rebels! What would be the next definition I was to hear? There had been enemies, criminals, workers – and these were rebels” (105). The unreliability of Marlow’s narration is part of a broader ambient erosion of a Realist paradigm of language. That paradigm, which emerges at the same moment as European colonial expansion itself, buttresses the discourse of Modernity to the extent that it constructs the non-European world as retrograde, impervious to meaning and reason, and outside the realm of language. Conrad participates in this discursive configuration, as he does with his usage of racist stereotypes: “Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest” (77). Yet Conrad also departs from such discursive structures by recognizing the moral and intellectual agency of, for instance, Marlow’s cannibal crewman: “‘Eat ’im!’ he said curtly, and, leaning his elbow on the rail, looked out into the fog in a dignified and profoundly pensive attitude” (84; emphasis mine).

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Thus there is a central aporia at the heart of Conrad’s aesthetic undertaking. His aesthetic is lodged firmly within a visual paradigm of knowledge dating from antiquity, yet this paradigm is increasingly undermined, however, by the anti-epistemology of the Modernism of which he is a central proponent. In his 1897 preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, Conrad writes: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see” (1960 [1897], 4). In this formulation, which gives primacy to visuality as a metaphor of knowledge, auditory and affective modes of knowledge jostle for attention. It is hardly surprising, then, that Marlow’s narrative eschews, in a strikingly self-reflexive moment, the visual mode of narrative knowledge. Marlow puzzles over ‘Kurtz whom at the time I did not see – you understand. He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream – making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams. …’ He was silent for a while. ‘… No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence – that which makes its truth, its meaning – its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream – alone. …’ He paused again as if reflecting, then added: ‘Of course in this you fellows see more than I could then. You see me, whom you know. …’ It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could hardly see one another. For a long time already he, sitting apart, had been no more to us than a voice. There was not a word from anybody. (70)

Marlow’s appeal to the visual paradigm of narrative communication is immediately undercut by the frame-narrator’s denial of Marlow’s visibility. These hints of human isolation and solipsism are part of a discourse of late-nineteenth century cultural pessimism (Watt 1980, 161–163), but of more significance for the modernist project is the aesthetic denial of sight as a metaphor of narrative understanding. The force of this refusal is driven home by its replication within the frame narrative as it intrudes into the body of Marlow’s tale in a brief instance of metalepsis. Marlow, burdened by the impossibility of sight in the story-world (“The bush around said nothing, and would not let us look very far”, 81) cannot guarantee it within his narration either. Indeed, Marlow himself has become a mere voice, an embodiment of discourse cut free of its putative moorings in verifiable empirical (i.e. visually verifiable) referentiality. Confronted with the unreliability of Enlightenment notions of clarity of knowledge and of language as an empirical tool of perception, notions undermined by the corrupting effect of colonial savagery and its corrosive erosion of linguistic referentiality, Conrad has recourse to the ‘conative’ or reception-oriented aspect of literary communication (Jakobson 1960, 355). What Ian Watt (1980, 270) defined as ‘delayed

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decoding’ refers to an aesthetic procedure by which the writing tracks the process of perception itself rather than the referent supposedly perceived by the subject. In the feverish activity of the final approach to Kurtz, Marlow only realizes after several seconds that the steamboat is under attack from the natives: “Sticks, little sticks, were flying about – thick: they were whizzing before my nose, dropping below me, striking behind me against my pilot-house. All this time the river, the shore, the woods, were very quiet – perfectly quiet. I could only hear the heavy splashing thump of the stern-wheel and the patter of these things. We cleared the snag clumsily. Arrows, by Jove! We were being shot at!” (89) Perception and understanding are sundered from one another: other thoughts impede the moment of realization of the true nature of the “little sticks”. This procedure is not dissimilar to Virginia Woolf’s (2000 [1927], 53, 35) attempt to convey “life […] being made up of the little separate instants which one lived one by one” via “words […] held meaningless in [the] mind for a long stretch of time” (↗  9  Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse). In effect, this shift of literary discourse from referentiality to reception does not merely characterize Conrad’s central aesthetic procedure, but also determines from the outset the way the novella has been read.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Yet again, Conrad second-guesses critical approaches to his novella by anticipating, in its very form, the processes by which it is read and taken up by critical discourse. The frame-narrator occasionally injects metaleptic records of the listeners’ reactions to Marlow’s tale thereby foregrounding Conrad’s interest in “the situation of narrative” (Said 1984, 90–110). This ostentatious strategy illustrates Bakhtin’s (1981, 257) claim that “every literary work faces outward away from itself, towards the listener-reader, and to a certain extent thus anticipates possible reactions to itself.” Thus the issue of reception is not something that succeeds the composition and the transmission of the Heart of Darkness, but is performatively embedded, from the outset, within its very narratological fabric. Indeed, if we concur with Peirce’s (1931–1958, II, 228) claim that a sign “is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity […] [i]t addresses somebody”, then the literary signifier always includes a ‘conative’ dimension. This ‘conative’ aspect of narration is evident when the frame-narrator, proleptically embodying from the very first line of Heart of Darkness the future reception of the novella, meditates upon the form of Marlow’s tales: The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. (45)

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Conrad’s ‘halo’ conceit is complex. The meaning of a narrative is not within (like a kernel), but envelops it (like a halo). That meaning however is only made visible by the effect of the tale (its glow) as it radiates out (in the telling). Once again Conrad’s ‘mistiness’ comes to the fore, not as an index of opacity of meaning, but as its facilitator: were the halo not opaque, it would not offer itself as a screen for the projection or production of the tale’s meaning. In the act of active, interpretative reception, opacity becomes the ‘ostended’ site of the production of a meaning that is not inherent in the tale itself but can only be made by the listeners or readers. Lest we doubt this, the frame-narrator performatively embodies this notion: he is the first locus of the reception of Marlow’s narrative, a partly opaque ‘ambient’ context whose name and identity, for instance, we never learn. Terry Collits (2005, 3) has observed that Conrad “has been read so radically differently at different times that it is tempting to talk of different Conrads.” He identifies four major moments in the reception of Conrad’s fiction: the ‘original’ moment of Conrad’s first readers; the moment of Conrad’s canonization encapsulated by F. R. Leavis’ inclusion of him in ‘the great tradition’; the moment of a theorized Conrad from the 1960s onwards; and what Collits calls the contemporary “shadowy and reflective moment” of “attempts […] to combine accumulated discoveries of the interpretative tradition and negotiate Conrad anew” (Collits 2005, 3). What Collits terms the ‘original moment’ entailed the gradual recognition of Conrad’s significance through the 1920s and 1930s, overlaid with a man-and-hisworks discourse exemplified in the reminiscences of Jean-Aubry (1927). After several decades of neglect, however, Conrad found himself welcomed into the heart of the canon of English literature by F. R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition (1948), buttressed by Zabel’s packaging of Conrad for a student market with The Portable Conrad (1947), in which Heart of Darkness occupied a central, unabbreviated place. A range of studies by Guérard (1958) through to Berthoud (1978) cemented his status. Conrad was read in this period via a variety of depoliticizing and decontextualizing approaches from the psychological (Kirschner 1968; Meyer 1967) through the psycho-sociological (Fleishman 1967; Hampson 1992) to the philosophical (Bohlmann 1991; Johnson 1971; Roussel 1971). A significant caesura in Conrad studies came in the late 1960s from two directions: on the one hand, from the upsurge in contextually-based Conradian scholarship, and on the other hand, from a theoretically-driven form of textual analysis. The latter supplemented the free-floating textual analysis of the ‘New Criticism’ with a plethora of empirical material, whether literary critical (Erdinast-Vulcan 1991; Graham 1988; Hunter 1982; Thorburn 1974; Watt 1980) or historico-cultural (Sherry 1966, 1971). The former often retained free-floating textual analysis, but sharpened it with a sceptical notion of the semiotics of representation (Brooks 1984; Miller 1965 and 1982; Said 1966). A specifically continental development was the flourishing of narratological studies of Conrad (Hawthorn 1979 and 1990; Lothe 1989 and 2008; Senn 1980).

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A further turn came in the 1980s when these two trends combined in highly politicized postcolonial and, more recently, gender-oriented studies of Conrad (e.g. Achebe 2001 [1977]; Darras 1982; Dryden 2000; Jones 1999; Nadelhaft 1991; Parry 1983; Roberts 2000; White 1993). Recent approaches to Conrad tend to be syncretic, meta-historicist and highly meta-critical (Collits 2005; Mallios, Kaplan, and White 2004).

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Conrad, Joseph. Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether. Ed. Owen Knowles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1899/1902]. --Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001 [1977]. 1783–1793. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Ambrosini, Richard. Conrad’s Fiction as Critical Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Ascherson, Neal. The King Incorporated: Leopold II in the Age of Trusts. London: Allen and Unwin, 1963. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Berthoud, Jacques. Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Bohlmann, Otto. Conrad’s Existentialism. London: Macmillan, 1991. Brooks, Peter. “An Unreadable Report: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Reading for the Plot: Design and Interpretation in Narrative. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. 238–263. Collits, Terry. Postcolonial Conrad: Paradoxes of Empire. London: Routledge, 2005. Conrad, Joseph. Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, Typhoon, The Shadow Line. London: Dent, 1960 [1897], 3–6. Conrad, Joseph. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983–2007, 9 vols. Conrad, Joseph. Last Essays. Ed. Harold Ray Stevens and J. H. Stape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1926]. Currie, Mark. Postmodern Narrative Theory. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. Darras, Jacques. Joseph Conrad and the West: Signs of Empire. London: Macmillan, 1982. Dryden, Lynda. Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna. Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Fleishman, Avrom. Conrad’s Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall. Rev. ed. London: Continuum, 2004 [1965]. Graham, Kenneth. Indirections in the Novel: James, Conrad, and Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Guérard, Albert J. Conrad the Novelist. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958. Hampson, Robert. Joseph Conrad: Identity and Betrayal. London: Macmillan, 1992.

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Hawthorn, Jeremy. Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness. London: Edward Arnold, 1979. Hawthorn, Jeremy. Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment. London: Edward Arnold, 1990. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007 [1944/1947]. Hunter, Jefferson. Edwardian Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Jakobson, Roman. “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” Style in Language. Ed. Thomas Sebeok. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960. 350–377. Jean-Aubry, G. Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters. London: William Heinemann, 1927, 2 vols. Johnson, Bruce. Conrad’s Models of Mind. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971. Jones, Susan. Conrad and Women. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Joyce, James. Stephen Hero: Part of the First Draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. St Albans: Triad/Panther, 1977 [1944]. Karl, Frederick R. Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives. London: Faber, 1979. Kirschner, Paul. Conrad: The Psychologist as Artist. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1968. Krajka, Wieslaw. Isolation and Ethos: A Study of Joseph Conrad. Boulder: Eastern European Monographs, 1992. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink, Héloïse Fink, and Russell Grigg. New York: Norton, 2006 [1966]. Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad. London: Chatto & Windus, 1948. Levenson, Michael. Modernism and the Fate of Individuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Lothe, Jakob. Conrad’s Narrative Method. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Lothe, Jakob. Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. Mallios, Peter, with Carola Kaplan and Andrea White, eds. Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2004. Melvern, Linda, and Paul Williams. “Britannia Waives the Rules: The Major Government and the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.” African Affairs 103 (2004): 1–22. Meyer, Bernard C. Joseph Conrad: A Psychoanalytic Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967. Miller, J. Hillis. Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965. Miller, J. Hillis. Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels. Oxford: Blackwell, 1982. Nadelhaft, Ruth. Joseph Conrad. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. Naipaul, V. S. Literary Occasions: Essays. Ed. Pankaj Mishra. New York: Knopf, 2003. Najder, Zdzislav. Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Parry, Benita. Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers. London: Macmillan, 1983. Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Writings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958, 8 vols. Pound, Ezra. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. London: Faber, 1994. Roberts, Andrew Michael. Conrad and Masculinity. New York: St Martins, 2000. Roussel, Royal. The Metaphysics of Darkness: A Study in the Unity and Development of Conrad’s Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971. Said, Edward W. Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Autobiography. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966.

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Said, Edward W. “Conrad and Nietzsche.” Joseph Conrad: A Commemoration. Ed. Norman Sherry. London: Macmillan, 1977. 65–76. Said, Edward W. The World, the Text, and the Critic. London: Faber, 1984. Senn, Werner. Conrad’s Narrative Voice: Stylistic Aspects of his Fiction. Bern: Francke, 1980. Sherry, Norman. Conrad’s Western World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. Sherry, Norman. Conrad’s Eastern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. Shklovsky, Viktor. Theory of Prose. Trans. Benjamin Sher. Elmswood Park: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990 [1925/1929]. Thorburn, David. Conrad’s Romanticism. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1974. Todorov, Tzvetan. “Coeur des ténèbres.” Les genres du discours. Paris: Seuil, 1978. 172–183. Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. London: Chatto and Windus, 1980. West-Pavlov, Russell. “Heart of Darkness as Chronotope: Conradian Avatars in Fiction, Criticism, Publishing and Pedagogy.” Outposts of Progress: Joseph Conrad, Modernism and Postcolonialism. Ed. Gail Fincham, Jeremy Hawthorn, and Jakob Lothe. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2015. 49–71. White, Andrea. Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition: Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Ed. Stella McNichol. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000 [1927]. Yeats, W. B. Selected Poetry. Ed. A. Norman Jeffares. London: Pan, 1974. Zabel, Morton Dauwen. The Portable Conrad. New York: Viking, 1947. Zabus, Chantal. Tempests After Shakespeare. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

5.2 Further Reading Armstrong, Paul, ed. Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. New York: Norton, 2006. Jordan, Elaine, ed. Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, Secret Agent and Nostromo. Macmillan New Casebooks. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. Mudrick, Marvin, ed. Conrad: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1966. Murfin, Ross, ed. Heart of Darkness: Complete, Authoritative Text with Bibliographical, Historical and Cultural Context. New York: St. Martins, 1996.

Dirk Vanderbeke

7 James Joyce, Ulysses (1922) Abstract: James Joyce’s Ulysses is unquestionably one of the most momentous modernist novels, famed and feared for its intricacies and difficulties, celebrated for its daring literary experiments as well as for its humour, but also occasionally reviled as unreadable, boring or obscene. This chapter is intended as an introduction to the novel which seemingly narrates the events and experiences of a few people over the course of a single day in Dublin, but simultaneously enfolds almost encyclopaedic information about Irish history, European literary history, philosophy since antiquity, art and music high and low, together with contemporary advertising, local politics, fashion, and a huge number of other topics. The main focus is then on the fireworks of revolutionary literary techniques, ranging from the perfection of the interior monologue and innovative approaches to psychological realism to experiments on the musicality of language, literary parody, the evolution of English prose styles or radical methods of literary fragmentation, forcing the reader to become an active participant in the realisation of the text. Keywords: Interior monologue, myth, experimental literature, encyclopaedic literature, Ireland

1 Context: Author, Œuvre, Moment “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” With this sentence begins James Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel equally famed for being intricate, allegedly even unreadable, brilliant, obscene, and funny. After several rounds of proofreading with ever more corrections and amendments, it was published on Joyce’s 40th birthday, 2 February 1922. Until then, his œuvre had consisted of a collection of 36 poems, Chamber Music (1907), a book of short stories, Dubliners (1914), a novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and a play, Exiles (1918). This is not a lot, and only one major work would follow after 17 years, Finnegans Wake (1939), an enigmatic book that has puzzled readers and critics ever since. Nevertheless, when Ulysses appeared, Joyce was already known as one of the most important and also daring modernist authors. In fact, the new novel had also gained some reputation and even notoriety not only from the pre-publication of several chapters in literary journals, but also from the American obscenity trial in 1921 which ended its serialization in The Little Review. In England the pre-publication of chapters in The Egoist had to be cancelled because it became impossible to find printers who were willing to face the risk of prosecution, DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-008

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as they were held legally responsible under British law. When Ulysses was finally published in France by Sylvia Beach, the owner of the bookstore ‘Shakespeare and Company’ in Paris, it was quickly banned in Britain and America. It would take more than ten years until John M. Woolsey, federal judge in New York City, declared on 6 December 1933 that “whilst in many places the effect of ‘Ulysses’ on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be aphrodisiac” (Ellmann 1982 [1959], 667). The novel was then published legally in the United States in 19341 – the first British edition appeared two years later in 1936. 1922 was a momentous year for literature. It saw the publication not only of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit, Hermann Hesse’s Siddharta, Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned, and Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party”, but also of Virginia Woolf’s first truly experimental novel, Jacob’s Room, and T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”. Marcel Proust finished the last volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, and the first translation of this work into English began to appear. Paris was the centre to which the innovative minds in literature, art and music flocked. On one day, 18 May 1922, the novelist and art patron Sydney Schiff and his wife “hosted one of the most infamous dinner parties in the history of modernism” (Benhaïm 2015, 43): Igor Stravinsky, Erik Sati, Pablo Picasso, Sergei Diaghilev, Marcel Proust and James Joyce were all gathered in the Hôtel Majestic in Paris; however, the brief meeting of Joyce (underdressed and slightly drunk) and Proust, did not develop into a sparkling match of brilliant minds, but rather consisted of an exchange of trivialities (Ellmann 1982 [1959], 508–509). Joyce had left Ireland in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, and for the following years lived chiefly in Trieste as a language teacher for Berlitz School. In 1906 he went to Rome for a few months and worked there as a bank clerk. He travelled to Dublin twice in 1909 and on his second visit launched the first cinema in Ireland – in the beginning quite successfully, but it declined when Joyce went back to Trieste. He would return to Dublin only one more time in the summer of 1912. In 1915 he moved to Zurich in neutral Switzerland, where he stayed until the end of World War I. After a short return to Trieste in 1919, Joyce and his family finally settled in Paris in 1920 and would live there for the next 20 years. But while Joyce thus lived in various European countries and finally arrived at the cultural metropolis of his age, in his work he always turned to the city of his childhood and youth, the place that he had once in a letter to his publisher Grant Richards called “the centre of paralysis” (Joyce 1975, 83) and from which he felt to have been exiled by malice and betrayal. The stories of Dubliners and the highly autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are set in the time from Joyce’s childhood to the early 1900s; on the last page of the Portrait Stephen

1 A pirated and altered version had already been published in America by Samuel Roth, and Joyce had been unable to take action against it, as the United States had not signed the Bern copyright convention (Ellmann 1982 [1959], 580).

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Dedalus, Joyce’s alter ego, is about to leave for Paris. Ulysses takes place one year after Stephen’s return to Dublin, but this is no longer only his novel. The focus rather shifts to Leopold Bloom, a man in the midst of his life – he is 38 years old – who is also exiled from his home, if only for the duration of one day, 16 June 1904, which he spends wandering through Dublin. A note on the text: The first edition of Ulysses was published in France in 1922, set by French printers who had little or no English. It contained several thousand mistakes or misprints. In consideration of the specific properties of the text and Joyce’s creative use of language it has, however, been argued that a publication in England would have been even worse, as the printers would have automatically corrected unusual forms of punctuation, spelling or grammar. For the first edition, Joyce and volunteer helpers prepared successive correction lists. The reprints and subsequent new editions removed some, left many and committed errors of their own. Three later editions were in their time successively considered standard: the fourth edition (Hamburg 1932), the eighth edition (London 1960) and the ninth edition set from the eighth (New York 1961). Yet, they perpetuated much faulty text: e.g., while in the third episode (“Proteus”) Stephen muses about two lines of a song and thinks “Acatalectic tetrameter” (3.23)2, the 1922 to 1961 editions throughout have “A catalectic tetrameter” – the opposite in meaning. In 1984, a three volume critical and synoptic edition was published by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior, prepared on the basis of the existing autograph fair copy, the Little Review pre-publication of episodes 1 to 14, and the proofs (sometimes up to 12 successive stages) of the first edition, all with Joyce’s corrections, additions and amendments. This new edition met with enthusiastic responses, but also with scathing critique, chiefly by John Kidd, who argued that innumerable new mistakes had resulted from the editing. The critique, however, necessitated adjustments of only a very few readings in the second (1986) printing of the three-volume edition and the reading-text-only editions of the same year. The scholarly edition introduced as its reference format a through-line numbering by episodes, identical also, together with the edited text itself, in the reading-text-only editions. The 1984/1986 edition has since become the reference standard for scholarly research. Yet previous editions, including the original 1922 text, continue to be published, based on the argument that Gabler’s edition, like any other edition, is by definition debatable; moreover, Ulysses in its states before scholarly editing is now in the public domain and thus free to be published and sold without royalty costs or interference by copyright holders.

2 In line with the following remarks, references to the novel in brackets refer to the Gabler edition (Joyce 1986) unless otherwise indicated. They will adhere to the format ‘section.line’ established in Joyce scholarship. So the reference given here in full is ‘Joyce 1986, section 3.line 23’.

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2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns “Ulysses” is the Latin and English form of the name “Odysseus”, and Joyce’s novel is indeed based on the Greek myth. In the Odyssey, Odysseus returns from the Trojan War to his island Ithaca and to his wife Penelope, but his homecoming is constantly thwarted either by the failures or even blunders of his crew or because he incurs the wrath of Poseidon, father of the cyclops Polyphemus, who is blinded by Odysseus. His return ultimately takes ten years, of which he voluntarily spends one with the sorceress Circe, and for a further seven the nymph Calypso keeps him as a beloved prisoner on her island. Meanwhile, his wife Penelope is besieged by 108 suitors, who try to coerce her into a new marriage and, in the meantime, devour Odysseus’ goods and wealth. Telemachus, the prince of Ithaca, sets out to find his father or to gather information about his fate. He returns to Ithaca, and when Odysseus finally arrives at his native land they together defeat the suitors. In Ulysses, the ten years during which Homer’s hero tries to return to Ithaca are collapsed into a single day; the travels are reflected in the movements and encounters of the protagonists who are not quite the heroes of the classical myth, but rather the inhabitants of a bleak and stagnant city in a colonized country. Still, similarities and analogies are recognizable even in this new and unexpected context, and in consequence the episodes are usually referred to by their equivalents in the Odyssey even though the titles do not appear in the novel. As Joyce used them in his conversations and correspondences they have become common usage. Ulysses consists of three books and eighteen episodes. The first book (The Telemachiad) has three episodes, “Telemachus”, “Nestor”, and “Proteus”, and it describes Stephen Dedalus’s morning from approximately 8:00 to 11:00 a.m. The second book (The Odyssey) returns to 8:00 a.m. and presents the movements and encounters of Leopold Bloom and later again Stephen throughout the day in 12 chapters, “Calypso”, ”Lotus-Eaters”, “Hades”, “Aeolus”, “Lestrygonians”, “Scylla and Charybdis”, “Wandering Rocks”3, “Sirens”, “Cyclops”, “Nausicaa”, “Oxen of the Sun” and “Circe”. The third book (Nostos, or The Homecoming) once more has three chapters, “Eumaeus”, “Ithaca”, and “Penelope”, which describe the end of a very long day for Stephen, Leopold and Marion (Molly) Bloom. The adaptation of classical mythology to modern literature is not peculiar to Ulysses. In Walden, Henry David Thoreau already compared the heroes of antiquity unfavourably to his neighbour farmers when he wrote:

3 This episode has no analogy in Homer, as Odysseus prefers to take the route between Scylla and Charybdis. The Wandering Rocks do appear in the myth of the Argonauts, i.e. another mythical travelogue.

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The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend Iolas to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra’s head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up. (1982, 108)

Robert Musil quite similarly, if more ironically, calculated that the physical forces of the human body required for our daily movements and simple survival far exceed those of the rather brief powerful actions performed by mythical heroes (1981, 12–13). Kafka wrote about “The Silence of the Sirens”, Tiresias makes an appearance in T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, and sometime later Agatha Christie would transform The Labours of Hercules into twelve tasks for Hercule Poirot. T. S. Eliot suggested in 1923 that [i]n using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. […] It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. (1975, 178)

The Odysseus of Dublin is Leopold Bloom, a common man who works as an advertisement canvasser, a husband, and the father of a daughter, Millicent (Milly), aged fifteen; ten years ago, a son, Rudy, died after only eleven days. Leopold Bloom is the son of a Hungarian Jew who converted to Protestantism when he came to Ireland; before his marriage to Marion Tweedy, Bloom himself converted to Catholicism, and so he combines all major Judeo-Christian religions, albeit as an atheist. In the company of his peers he usually sticks out like a sore thumb. He is frequently not taken quite seriously or dismissed even by his acquaintances, and occasionally despised as a Jew. But then he is perhaps not quite as common as he may seem at first sight. In contrast to most inhabitants of Joyce’s Dublin, he is immune to the nationalisms and religious doctrines of his times, and he abhors violence and discrimination – it may well be argued that it is this rejection of ideologies and violence that turns him into a modern day Odysseus, as it was this hero who feigned madness because he did not want to join in the war against Troy. Bloom is predominantly a rational man, and his thoughts regularly turn to science for explanations of phenomena he notices in the course of his walks through Dublin. Moreover, Bloom drinks only moderately, and in consequence of his sober and modest life style he is financially better off than most of the other inhabitants of the city we meet in the course of the novel. This ‘exceptionality’ is also occasionally recognized by his peers, one of whom calls him a “cultured allroundman” and goes on: “He’s not one of your common or garden … you know … There’s a touch of the artist about Bloom” (10.581–583). But then he is not an epitome of morals and good manners. While his sexual life with Molly has never quite recovered from the death of his son, he fantasizes about her – and other women – constantly; moreover he has started an amorous epistolary liaison with a woman, Martha Clifford, whom he has not yet met, he has voyeuristic tendencies, he carries a condom

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in his pocketbook and keeps some pornographic pictures in his drawer – of which Molly is quite aware – , and on the evening of June 16 he masturbates at Sandymount Strand when a young enamoured girl lets him gaze at her knickers. But then he is no hypocrite, and as he is quite aware of his wife’s unfulfilled sexual desires he does not only supply her with the erotic literature she relishes but also seems to accept her love affair with the womanizer Blazes Boylan, the manager of her concert tour. Their amorous meeting in the afternoon, of which he has been informed, haunts him all day, but ultimately he dismisses the idea of leaving Molly, and she, after passionate memories of her sexual encounter with Boylan, realizes that her lover is a brute and that Bloom is, indeed, the better man. Stephen Dedalus is the Telemachus to this Odysseus, but he does not seem to be in search of a father. He very much despises his real father, Simon Dedalus, who ruined the family and spends his money in bars and pubs – yet, it is all too probable that despite all the lofty and moralistic thoughts and ideals Stephen will follow in his footsteps as an alcoholic. He is not very sympathetically presented, and when he meets his little sister, who is on the brink of starvation, he commiserates with her, but does not give her a single penny of the weekly pay he carries in his pocket, most of which he will spend on whiskey and beer in the course of the day. In Ulysses, it is rather Bloom who tries to adopt Stephen as a son (Kenner 1987, 17). In many ways, Bloom and Stephen complement each other. In Stephen’s mind, literature and philosophy dominate while Bloom is more interested in music, science, and empirical knowledge; however, he usually misquotes, makes mistakes, or misinterprets the scientific facts he tries to recollect. Ellmann suggests that “[t]he conception of Leopold Bloom as his hero for the book liberated [Joyce], for Bloom could be an unembittered, comic witness of what Stephen Dedalus, because of his thwarted ambitions and blocked ideals, observed with such resentment and anger” (Introduction to part III of Joyce 1975, 214). As the Odyssey is the book of a voyage, Ulysses is a book of journeys too, here in the plural as it contains the movements of Bloom and Stephen, but also of several other figures. In addition, it presents the journey of the English language from its origins to the present, a passage in “Ithaca” traces the flow of water from Roundwood Reservoir in county Wicklow to Dublin, and a piece of soap which Bloom buys in “Lotus-Eaters” turns out to be a rather uncomfortable travelling companion and thus it is moved from one pocket to the next until it has circled Blooms whole body (Blumenbach 2009, 122–123). And ultimately the reader is taken on a journey, not only through Dublin, but also through Irish history, politics, geography, world literature, music, art and philosophy, and several other possible fields of knowledge. Moreover, he has to fulfil the heroic tasks to master the difficulties and challenges of the text and find a way through the labyrinthine text and the minds of Stephen, Bloom and Molly. It is utterly impossible to offer an adequate summary of the novel, and critics who have tried usually also made mistakes; so I will only give a very condensed outline of the plot.

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The Telemachiad opens with a parody of the Catholic mass, performed by Stephen’s friend Malachi (Buck) Mulligan. Stephen and Mulligan live together in a Martello Tower at Sandycove a few miles South of Dublin, joined at present by the English student Haines. The atmosphere is rather strained; there is an unresolved conflict between Stephen and Mulligan, and Haines’s presence adds to the tension. When Mulligan demands the key to the tower from Stephen, the latter decides that he will not return in the evening, regarding his friend as a “Usurper” (1.744). The text then moves to a school at Dalkey where Stephen works as a teacher with little enthusiasm. We see him in a classroom, supposedly teaching history, but his mind is not on his work and he seems to be rather killing time with his pupils. After class he helps one boy with his homework and then visits the Protestant headmaster Deasy to collect his weekly salary of £3 12s, most of which he will spend on the same day in various bars and pubs. Deasy asks Stephen to transmit a letter about the foot and mouth disease to the editor of the Evening Telegraph, treats him with some unsolicited advice about money and his views on history as a movement towards “the manifestation of God” (2.381), sprinkled with some anti-Semitic remarks. Stephen remains unimpressed and counters Deasy’s paternalistic deliberations with some eminently quotable one-liners, e.g. “History […] is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (2.377), or God is a “shout in the street” (2.386). These chapters are fairly accessible once the reader has become familiar to the use of dashes instead of quotation marks to signify direct speech and has also learned to distinguish between the narrator and Stephen’s stream of consciousness; e.g. on the first page the description of Mulligan’s “white teeth glistening here and there with gold points” (1.25–26) is followed by “Chrysostomos” (1.26), certainly not a comment by the narrator but rather Stephen’s association to the Greek epithet “golden-mouthed” and the rhetorician Dion Chrysostomos and/or the Church Father St John Chrysostomos (Gifford 1988 [1974], 14). The third chapter, “Proteus”, is far less easy to access and may be seen as the first serious stumbling stone for the reader. It consists chiefly of interior monologue, i.e. Stephen’s thoughts and perceptions, a puzzle of bits and pieces which we have to sort out and work through. The chapter brings us up to date about his life since the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when he set out to leave Ireland. The heroic voice that had envisioned artistic triumph has given way to a disillusioned bitterness. In Paris, Stephen lived in poor conditions, spent his time in libraries, met with expatriates, and tried to flirt with some girls, until he was called back to Dublin by a misspelled telegram: “Nother dying come home father” (3.199). Now he once more lives in precarious circumstances, heavily in debt as he obviously spends too much money in pubs and bars, and literary success is not to be expected anytime soon. The chapter is riddled with allusions to Hamlet, the disinherited prince of Denmark; it is, however, not the ghost of his father that haunts Stephen but the death of his mother and his feelings of guilt – in the first chapter we have already learned that he refused to kneel at her deathbed.

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With chapter four, “Calypso”, the clock is turned back to eight o’clock – at one moment, the chapters one and four are synchronized by the repetition of the same sentence and event: “A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly” (1.248 and 4.218). In 7 Eccles Street, Mr. Leopold Bloom prepares breakfast for his wife Molly and then also for himself, and we first learn that he enjoys food, in particular “the inner organs of beasts and fowls” (4.1) which are often considered inferior but also used in burnt offerings (cf. Leviticus 1:9 and 3:4 in the Bible). Fittingly, he will later partly burn the pork kidney he buys for his breakfast but still eat the unspoiled rest of it. Coming home from the butcher’s he finds the mail, including a letter addressed with a “bold hand” (4.244) to Mrs Marion Bloom instead of Mrs. Leopold Bloom, and Molly informs him that it is from Boylan who will come and bring the programme for her concert tour. The fact that Bloom later precisely knows the time when Boylan is supposed to pay his visit indicates that the reader is not given complete information – in chapter eleven, “Sirens”, Bloom thinks “At four she said” (11.188), but we never hear her say it, and so there either must have been another meeting of Bloom and Molly or some parts of their dialogue are missing and need to be restored by the reader (Kenner 1987, 48). Molly appears as an unusual variant of the nymph Calypso, as she sends Odysseus away rather than trying to keep him at home; she will later transform into an equally uncommon Penelope, who does not patiently await her husband’s return but betrays him with one of her suitors. The chapter famously ends with a quite detailed description of Bloom’s visit to the outdoor jakes where, inspired by a prize story which he first reads and then uses as toilet paper, he ponders whether he should also try to make some money with a literary sketch by “Mr. and Mrs. L. M. Bloom” (4.518). In the following chapters, Bloom moves through Dublin. In “Lotus-Eaters” he picks up a letter at a post office across town under a nom de plume, Henry Flower; it is from his lady friend, Martha Clifford. He also buys perfume and soap for his wife, and takes a bath, before in “Hades” he drives to the funeral of his acquaintance Paddy Dignam in a coach together with Stephen’s father Simon Dedalus, Martin Cunningham and Jack Power – during the coach ride they briefly see Blazes Boylan, and Bloom carefully inspects his fingernails to avoid eye contact. As the chapters four to six are comparatively easy to read, it may prove advantageous for some readers to begin with them and afterwards return to Stephen’s morning. Chapter seven, “Aeolus”, is set at the offices of the Freeman’s Journal and Evening Telegraph, a place where the ‘windbags’ meet and hot air is constantly produced. While Stephen passes on Deasy’s letter, Bloom unsuccessfully tries to complete the contract for an advertisement – and like Odysseus at the palace of the god of winds he is first received gracefully by the editor but later dismissed with scorn. After a visit to a rather unsanitary restaurant where Bloom is repulsed by the smells and the disgusting manners of the clients, the novel’s “Lestrygonians”, he has a quiet lunch of a Gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of Burgundy. At the end of the chapter he again catches a glimpse of Boylan and escapes contact by quickly entering the National Museum. In “Scylla and Charybdis” he then goes to the National Library, located next

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to the National Museum, to check the design of the planned advertisement. The bulk of the chapter, however, is focused on Stephen who, in another room, explains his theory of how Shakespeare’s life influenced his writing and why the bard can rather be detected in the dead king Hamlet than in his son – possibly an indication that in this book, too, the author may have more in common with the father figure Bloom than with the errant son Stephen. Then the narration breaks up into fragments, and chapter ten, “Wandering Rocks”, consists of 19 sections (or 18 sections and a coda as many critics have it) in which not only Bloom, looking for a new erotic book for Molly, and Stephen, meeting his hungry sister Dilly, are shown, but also several other characters as they walk or drive through Dublin. It is an intricate puzzle of moving pieces which Joyce calculated carefully to arrange meetings and sightings  – the narratives are occasionally interrupted by inserted elements from other sections which take place at spatially distant locations and serve to synchronize the events. The next chapter, “Sirens”, is the second massive stumbling stone for the reader, and from now on most of the chapters become more intricate and difficult. In this chapter, the language is transformed; the words are broken up and re-joined with special focus on their sound and rhythm to achieve a kind of musicality. The chapter begins with 63 lines that only make sense retrospectively; they are akin to an overture, offering bits and pieces like musical leitmotifs of the following pages (e.g. “Wait while you wait. Hee hee. Wait while you hee.” 11.40). Moreover, the text moves abruptly between different locations inside and outside of the Ormond Hotel where it is set, so that the reader constantly has to reorient and to sort the disjunctive information. It is now four o’clock, the time when Boylan is supposed to arrive at Eccles Street 7 for his tryst with Molly, but he is late. Bloom, who is buying two sheets of vellum for a letter to Martha in a nearby shop, sees him for the third time that day and decides to follow him. Boylan enters the bar of the Ormond Hotel to meet a friend and find out about the results of the Ascot Gold Cup, while Bloom joins Stephen’s uncle, Richie Goulding, for dinner in the dining room from where he can “see, not be seen” (11.357– 358). In the concert room of the hotel, Simon Dedalus and some friends have gathered round the piano, and Simon sings an aria from the opera Martha and “The Croppy Boy”. Boylan flirts with the barmaids, the Sirens of the episode, and then leaves by coach while Bloom stays behind, unable to move or act like Odysseus when he is tied to the mast of his ship. In the following episode, Bloom’s attitude and behaviour change to some extent, and it seems that now, when his wife’s infidelity has become a fait accompli, he is more assertive and no longer shies away from conflict. The location is Barney Kiernan’s pub where a nationalist ‘Citizen’ holds court – strictly one-sided in his opinions, he is the one-eyed “Cyclops” of the novel. The episode is told by a nameless I (eye), the equivalent of the Odyssean Thersites who insults and offends everyone, and thus he is certainly not a reliable source of information. Bloom, who wants to meet Martin Cunningham about a donation for Paddy Dignam’s family, runs afoul of the company,

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because he is unfamiliar with the polite rules of drinking, i.e. in a bar each one in turn buys drinks for the whole group. Not drinking beer, he accepts a cigar, but does not buy a round in return. Moreover, the others suspect him of having been lucky in the horse races, and so it appears as if he does not want to share any of his winnings in the form of a drink, a grave crime in this company. The atmosphere becomes increasingly hostile and once more anti-Semitic, but this time Bloom stands his ground and argues back, pointing out that many great men in history, including Karl Marx and Jesus, were Jews just like himself; he thus claims his Jewish heritage instead of deflecting the attack. He finally drives off with Martin Cunningham in a coach, narrowly escaping a biscuit tin which the enraged ‘Citizen’ hurls after him. The Nausicaa of Ulysses is Gerty MacDowell, a young woman at Sandymount Strand, accompanied by two friends who are looking after two little boys and a toddler. The others are playing on the beach, but Gerty sits on a rock and only observes their games. The first half of the chapter is written as a parody of the sentimental novels that Gerty cherishes, and it focuses on her thoughts, dreams and hopes chiefly of an amorous nature as she seems to have an unrequited crush on a boy from the neighbourhood. The ball the others play with goes astray and lands at the feet of a gentleman in a dark suit. Throwing it back, he misses his aim and the ball comes to rest under Gerty’s skirt. She seems to have some problems kicking it back to her friends, but then she begins to fantasize about the gentleman, falling into a romantic and erotic reverie, leaning back further and further and thus revealing her underwear to his gaze, scandalous behaviour in times when “a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking” (Cole Porter, “Anything Goes”). The scene climaxes in a firework, and so does Bloom, the gentleman who has masturbated to the sight of Gerty’s knickers. The tone then changes to a dry matter-of-factness. Bloom notices that Gerty has a limp and muses that this may be the reason why “she’s left on the shelf” (13.773). He has to recompose his semen-stained shirt which becomes “cold and clammy” (13.852), and the rest of the chapter is mostly devoted to his thoughts about Gerty, Molly, Milly, and women in general. It ends with a call from a nearby cuckoo clock, a rather rude comment on the state of Bloom’s marital life. In “Oxen of the Sun”, Stephen resurfaces, and for the first time he and Bloom are in the same room. Bloom wants to pay a visit to a female acquaintance who has been lying in labour for three days in the National Maternity Hospital, but the child has still not been born. A medical student Bloom knows from a previous treatment of a bee sting invites him to a room where Stephen, Mulligan and some of their friends are having a noisy and drunken party. They are Odysseus’ companions who violate the rules of the place, but also the divine laws when they disrespectfully joke about childbirth, pregnancy, fertility, contraception and abortion. The oxen that are slain are the innumerable bottles of number one Bass ale they drink – the red triangle on the label is akin to “Alpha, a ruby and triangle sign upon the forehead of Taurus” (14.1108–1109) and thus to a bull. Ultimately, the child is born and a thunderstorm indicates the displeasure of God with the blaspheming students.

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The day of Ulysses is over, but the novel also needs the dark of the night, and in the “Circe” chapter, with the beginning of the witching hour, we enter Dublin’s night town. The student group has broken up, and Bloom follows Stephen and two of his friends in order to protect him from harm. They spend some time in Bella Cohen’s brothel; later, on their way out of the red light district, Stephen is knocked down by two drunken soldiers and Bloom experiences a vision of his dead son Rudy. The chapter is by far the longest of the novel, but it is not possible to determine what exactly happens as it is written as a hallucinatory drama, akin to the Walpurgisnacht in Goethe’s Faust or Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony. All the characters from the previous episodes, including some dead figures like Bloom’s father, resurface; some of the quite respectable women now appear as prostitutes; objects and abstract concepts like ‘the sins of the past’ begin to speak out, and even the soap that Bloom bought early in the novel “arises, diffusing light and perfume” (15.336) and declares “We’re a capital couple are Bloom and I. / He brightens the earth. I polish the sky” (15.338–339). In the course of the chapter Bloom is accused, put to trial and sentenced to death for indecency and various kinds of sexual transgressions, but then he is also first elevated to Lord mayor of Dublin and later to “emperor-president and king-chairman” (15.1471), Leopold the First, who will build a “new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future” (15.1545). In Bella Cohen’s establishment, he is transformed first into a woman and then into a pig; he is humiliated, which he seems to enjoy, but ultimately protected by a potato he has been carrying around in his pocket all day, an amulet he was given by his mother – it serves as the equivalent to the plant Moly which saved Odysseus from Circe’s sorcery. Within these kaleidoscopic visions we can, however, be quite sure that Bloom really protects Stephen by temporarily taking hold of his money before he can waste it, and by preventing Stephen from being overcharged for a lamp he broke in a frenzy. From night town, Bloom and Stephen walk to a cabman’s shelter, the hut of “Eumaeus”. On their way they meet an acquaintance of Stephen who asks for a loan and receives not only a half-crown but also the information that there will be a vacancy in Deasy’s school in a day or two. In the cabman’s shelter, Bloom is trying to make conversation, but Stephen is rather unresponsive and disinterested. They talk with a sailor and later read the evening edition of the Daily Telegraph. Bloom shows Stephen a photo of Molly and decides to take him along and offer him a place to stay for the night. In “Ithaca”, the hero finally comes home with Stephen, and they have to enter the house via a door in the basement because Bloom forgot his key in the morning – Joyce actually asked his aunt in a letter from Trieste whether it was possible for a man to climb over the railing of 7 Eccles Street and drop unhurt to the ground (Joyce 1975, 286). They drink cocoa, talk, and once more their conversation remains awkward. Stephen finally leaves, and Bloom goes to bed – first hitting his head at a sideboard, because Molly, possibly with the help of Boylan, moved the furniture in the afternoon. In bed he talks to Molly and tells her about some, but not all of his activities of the

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day. He ponders on some of the events, reflects on Molly’s infidelity, but decides not to divorce her, at least for the time being, and then he slowly slips into sleep. Then the perspective changes to the “Penelope” of Ulysses and Molly’s interior monologue before she also falls asleep. In a seemingly endless stream of thoughts and memories  – 35 pages in the Gabler edition, divided into only eight sentences and without any punctuation except for two periods – we learn about her affair with Boylan, about previous ‘suitors’ and admirers, about her youth in Gibraltar, her life in Dublin including quite a lot of gossip, her married life with Bloom, her career as a singer, and a host of other issues that pass through her mind and have to be sorted out by the reader. In her kaleidoscopic thoughts, different characters and in particular men blend into each other, and it is not always possible to know who ‘he’ is in her reminiscences. And as Bloom was shown on the toilet in his first chapter, she now uses a chamber pot, and we learn that her menstruation has set in and thus her infidelity has not led to a pregnancy. Finally she comes to realize that Boylan may be a vigorous lover, but ultimately he is a brute, and she falls asleep with an affirmation of her acceptance of Bloom’s proposal 16 years ago; “and yes I said yes I will Yes” (18.6008–6009).

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies Famously, Joyce wrote in a letter to Harriet Weaver about Ulysses: “The task I set myself technically in writing a book from eighteen different points of view and in as many styles, all apparently unknown and undiscovered by my fellow tradesmen, that, and the nature of the legend chosen would be enough to upset anyone’s mental balance” (Joyce 1975, 284). These techniques are listed in two schemata which Joyce gave to his friends Stuart Gilbert and Carlo Linati, and, Joyce being Joyce, these schemata differ considerably – they are included in various critical studies, e.g. Stuart Gilbert’s still useful introduction James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study (1955 [1930]) and Richard Ellmann’s Ulysses on the Liffey (1972), and they can easily be found on the internet. The Gilbert scheme also includes symbols, colours, arts and organs for all or some chapters  – one of Joyce’s structuring concepts was that the book should form a complete living organism – while the Linati scheme also offers correspondences to Homeric figures and ‘meanings’, e.g. “Dispossessed son in contest” for “Telemachus” or “The descent into nothingness” for “Hades”. Some of the techniques ascribed to the chapters are more innovative and more recognizable than others, e.g. the difference between “narrative ‘young’” (“Telemachus”) and “narrative ‘mature’” (“Calypso”) is not easily noticeable, while in particular the later chapters are marked by far more radical experimentation – the formal characteristics of “Sirens”, “Circe”, and “Penelope” were already mentioned in the last section. “Aeolus” is broken up into short sections, each of which is headed by a

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pseudo-journalistic headline; moreover, it is a gallop through all possible rhetorical figures – Gifford lists 115 from Abbreviation to Zeugma (1988 [1974], 642–643). The narration of “Cyclops” is interrupted 33 times by insertions which reflect on the narrative and parody various “pompous, sensational and sentimental literary styles” (Gifford 1988 [1974], 316), e.g. Lady Gregory’s re-writings of Irish myths or overblown newspaper accounts of social events. “Oxen of the Sun” is particularly tricky, as it is written in parodies of English prose styles from medieval incantations and imitations of Latin prose to the nineteenth century. According to Sara Davison, over 1000 sources have been identified in Joyce’s notesheets for “Oxen of the Sun” (Davison 2009, n.p.), and the search continues. In addition, the evolution of the English language is correlated to the nine months of pregnancy and the development of the embryo – the final pages in which the students rush out of the hospital and the language deteriorates into fragmented exclamations are then the equivalent of birth and the inarticulate cries of the newborn baby. In “Eumaeus”, not only the protagonists are exhausted, but so is the language, and thus the chapter is full of ramblings, uncertainties, vague perceptions, errors, malapropisms, and awkwardness. Nothing is reliable, and even the sentence structure is frequently shaky. The keeper of the cabman’s shelter may or may not be the famous Skin-the-Goat Fitzharris who took part in the Phoenix Park murders in 1882; a sailor may have returned from a journey all around the world or just from a short trip with a vessel carrying bricks from Bridgwater; and the newspaper contains a note on Paddy Dignam’s funeral which is riddled with errors, some of which are quite significant and require a very close reading. “Ithaca”, finally, is not presented in a usual or even unusual form of narration but in a sequence of questions and answers imitating a catechism. The language is often pseudoscientific and overblown – the question as to what Bloom likes about water is answered by a whole page listing every possible property of water and thus completely missing the point. But embedded, occasionally hidden within the lists and exaggerated explanations, is a lot of useful and necessary information, e.g. the content of Bloom’s bookshelf and two drawers, or the fact that, in consequence of Rudy’s death, between Bloom and Molly “there remained a period of 10 years, 5 months and 18 days during which carnal intercourse had been incomplete” (17.2282–2283). These large structures that serve as a macrocosmic organizing system for the novel are matched by the microcosmic web of intratextual and intertextual references, allusions, parallels and correspondences. The probably most important narrative technique is the interior monologue, first developed by the French author Edouard Dujardin in his novel Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888) but brought to perfection by Joyce. Similar to many other modernist authors and artists, Joyce does not present the world of Ulysses as ‘it is’, but as it is experienced. The reader is chiefly confronted with the perceptions and thoughts of the protagonists, but not with any objective or authoritative view. The focus is thus on the minds and the psychology of the char-

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acters, not on the reconstruction of an external reality.4 James Joyce famously told Frank Budgen that Dublin, should it be destroyed by a catastrophe, could be rebuilt on the basis of Ulysses (Budgen 1972 [1934], 67–68), but this claim is not only exaggerated but fundamentally wrong. There are very few precise descriptions of Dublin landmarks in the novel, and while the information as filtered through Bloom’s mind is certainly accurate, we mostly see whatever draws his attention, i.e. the displays of shop windows, some advertisements, his acquaintances, or some women he might be interested in, but not a lot of the city’s architecture or the streets.5 The narrative voice, where it appears, remains neutral, following Joyce’s dictum from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” (Joyce 2012b, 207). And whenever an authorial narrator (e.g. in “Oxen of the Sun”) or an apparently authoritative voice (e.g. in “Ithaca”) take over, they are modified and stylized to a degree that undermines all assumptions of stability and reliability. In consequence, most of the information contained in Ulysses – about the lives of its main characters, but also almost encyclopaedic information about Irish history, European literary history, philosophy since antiquity, art and music high and low, together with contemporary advertising, local politics, fashion, and a huge number of other topics – comes to us via highly subjective interior monologues, in snippets of thoughts, in sensory experiences, in occasionally surprising associations, and in fragmented memories. These interior monologues are presented not as processed thoughts but supposedly as the raw material (Reichert 2004, 70), and frequently the protagonists are not fully aware of their mental processes, e.g. in “Lestrygonians” Bloom’s thoughts persistently turn to food before he finally realizes that he is hungry. Of course, it is quite impossible to recognize all the allusions and intertextual references, and it is hard to imagine that Joyce ever expected an ideal reader who could follow all the twists and quirks of his protagonist’s minds. In consequence, the reader can approach the highly condensed and information-rich text on two distinct levels. A good example to demonstrate this is the opening of the rather difficult third chapter (“Proteus”), which presents the reader with Stephen’s thoughts and perceptions as he walks on the beach of Sandymount Strand. In fact, we do not know yet where he is; we will have to find out in the course of the chapter.

4 In consequence, some facts remain hidden, e.g. we never find out Leopold Bloom’s exact birthday in May 1866, for the simple reason that it is not mentioned in any of the dialogues and not thought of in any of the interior monologues. John Gordon argues in Joyce and Reality: The Empirical Strikes Back (2004, 138–142), that it was, in fact, May 12, but there is a lot of conjecture involved. 5 It is thus very useful for the reader to have access to a map of Dublin or, even better, to a topographical guide, e.g. Gunn’s and Hart’s James Joyce’s Dublin (2004).

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Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see. Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. (3.1–10)

The different registers, the fragments of abstract concepts, the reference to a “he”, and finally the short passage in Italian indicate that quite a lot of the thoughts that pass through Stephen’s mind are quotes or allusions. This succession of philosophical fragments is mixed with some memories of the earlier morning when Buck Mulligan spoke of the “snotgreen sea” (1.78) and with some impressions of Stephen’s surroundings which we cannot yet fully grasp – at this point it is not quite clear whether “seaspawn and seawrack” is a quote, a visual perception or maybe a visual perception garbed in a quote. This first approach does not focus on what Stephen thinks but on how he thinks. The passage – and basically all the interior monologues in the novel – simulate Joyce’s conceptualization of human mental processes. We find a constant juxtaposition of fragmented memories, snippets of knowledge, sensory impressions and moments of reflection, and from these seemingly disjunctive ingredients the protagonists weave their web of thoughts and ideas. For this approach it is not really necessary to understand and assess all the quotes and allusions, but simply to recognize that they are, indeed, quotes and allusions which interact with the personal memories and sensory experiences. Of course, hardly any reader will understand more than a fraction of the intertextual references, but every reader will probably recognize some, which will then be his or her own discoveries, no matter how many other readers or scholars have noticed them before. The reader can then recognize patterns within the text, depending not only on the literary input but also the reader’s memory and knowledge. The second approach is far more demanding. Of course, it should also be  – at least in principle – possible to recognize and make sense of all the various intertextual references. The short Italian phrase, “maestro di color che sanno”, could send us to the Divina Commedia (Inferno 4.131), where we would discover that Dante is actually referring to Aristotle who might also fit the “he” in Stephen’s thoughts. With some work and patience we might even be able to find out that some of the fragments refer back to Aristotle’s De sensu which indeed discusses perception. Without any guiding signal like the quote from Dante it will be far more difficult to realise that “Signatures of all things” is the translation of De signatura rerum, a book by the German mystic Jakob Böhme, or that “coloured signs” alludes to Bishop George Berkeley and his suggestion that we do not actually see things but only coloured signs which we then take to be things (Gifford 1988 [1974], 44–45). In addition, it will be necessary to find

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out a bit more about those works, as their succession in this text may well follow an inherent logic – Fritz Senn has pointed out and demonstrated that the allusions in Joyce’s works, many of which are unobtrusive or disguised, form a finely spun web of interrelations which, when we realize it, adds to the text’s coherence and poetic density (Senn 1983a, 90–91). Moreover, in Joyce’s allusions the quoted part of a text is quite often less significant than the unquoted rest. Unless the reader intends to follow Fritz Senn’s example and spend the rest of his life researching Joyce, it may be far more practical to turn to secondary literature, and over the last century the Joyce industry has supplied an enormous amount of information which then found its way into Don Gifford’s seminal Ulysses Annotated, into several annotated editions (e.g. by Kiberd, Vanderbeke et al., and Slote, see Joyce 1992, 2004, and 2015, respectively), and also into various very helpful webpages. Of course, reading Ulysses together with the annotations brings some new problems and dangers. It will persistently disturb the reading process, sending the reader again and again to check the sources and allusions. The flow of the language which is very important in Joyce’s texts and in particular in the interior monologues will be constantly interrupted as the paratextual information impinges on the literary language. Moreover, one will be less inclined to search for intertextual references oneself and rather rely on the authoritative voices of the scholars – ultimately, one will readily accept the annotations not only as correct, but also as complete, and thus the excitement of discovery which is an integral part of reading Ulysses will be lost. For many readers, including the author of this chapter, the best approach to the novel has been to read it straight through without letting oneself be distracted or intimidated by the difficulties and then to start it again right away, this time with the help of secondary literature and, where necessary, annotations. In Modernism, we can detect a division, and while many authors seem to have looked at their era with disdain, some modernist movements like Futurism or Vorticism celebrated the social and technological changes, the speed, the machinery, and the promise of progress. Joyce, however, locates his novel not in any metropolis, but in a stagnant city on the brink of the new age, paralysed by the opposed forces of the British colonizer and the Catholic Church. In this environment, the liberating force of art is also anesthetized and confined. In fact, the first sentence already presents the reader with the symbols of the Joycean artist, i.e. the mirror of reflection and the razor of the sharp mind, which are enclosed between state and cross. What may at first appear to be a rather strong reading is then validated on the subsequent pages: Mulligan calls Stephen “Kinch, the knifeblade” (1.55) and Stephen speaks of the “lancet of my art” (1.152), the “cracked lookingglass of a servant” is interpreted as the “symbol of Irish art”, and Stephen also claims that he is the servant of an English and an Italian master: “the imperial British state […] and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church” (1.643–644). Joyce’s text is intricate and complex, but it also guides the reader and occasionally supports bold interpretations.

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This ties in with another important aspect of Ulysses. The difficulties and the recalcitrance of the text are frequently taken as an indication of cultural elitism and membership in the “Culture Religion of Modernism” (Fiedler 1972 [1969], 64). Indeed, modernist texts occasionally seem to despise the ordinary and normal, the daily chores and the common pleasures – T. S. Eliot, for example, envisioned the modern world as a “Waste Land” and his contemporaries as “The Hollow Men”. Ulysses, in contrast, discovers the extraordinary in unexpected places, and one of the central topics of the text is the celebration of the mundane, the common and seemingly trivial. The text juxtaposes the opera with Irish folksongs and popular tunes, poetry with advertising, and a little improvised rhyme triggers Bloom’s association of Hamlet. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen explained his concept of the epiphany, originally the moment just before the revelatory appearance of a deity, but now rather a kind of secular mysticism, in which the aesthetic perception of a common object or event ends in an luminous experience in which the “whatness of a thing” (Joyce 2012b, 205) is revealed. It is Joyce’s concept of a ‘special moment’, which shares some elements with Marcel Proust’s ‘mémoire involontaire’ and Virginia Woolf’s ‘moments of being’ in that all these experiences are focused on the transient and discover, recognize or experience the extraordinary in the marginalized and seemingly insignificant. In Ulysses we find this revaluation on all possible levels, from the conception of the protagonist to the emphasis on bodily functions, from the attention to miniscule details and revelatory mistakes to the – authentically reported – result of the Ascot Gold Cup race of 16 June 1904, in which an outsider won over the favourites, a Throwaway over a Sceptre. Moreover, the ability to speak is granted not only to humans but also to animals and even inanimate objects and phenomena. In “Proteus” the sea speaks in “a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos” (3.456–457), in “Calypso” we hear three distinctly different utterances from Bloom’s cat (4.16, 4.25 and 4.32), and in “Aeolus” the printing press interrupts Bloom’s thoughts with its persistent “sllt” (7.174–177) so that he realizes that “Everything speaks in its own way” (7.177). If Joyce pays close attention to detail, so must the reader, who has to recognize not only the significance of each and every moment on the page, but also the absences and gaps in the text. In the first paragraph of the first story in Dubliners, the young narrator thinks of “the word gnomon in the Euclid” (Joyce 2012a, 3), a term that is probably unfamiliar to most readers, and Joyce expects us to check such words in a dictionary, preferably one which also explains the etymologies (Gerty MacDowell’s knickers are made of nainsook, which literally means ‘pleasing the eye’). Gnomon, in Euclidic geometry, denotes a parallelogram from which a smaller but similar parallelogram has been removed at one corner, i.e. an absence defined by a presence. In reading Ulysses, we have to be aware that a text that is deceptively detailed nevertheless omits significant information that we have to retrieve and reconstruct. Thus, we can figure out how Stephen manages to reach Sandymount Strand from Dalkey in time for the third chapter, even though we may have to consult the timetable for Dublin’s trams from 1904, and while we cannot locate Bloom’s hat when he suddenly

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wonders where he has put it (4.485–486), this gap in his memory may help us better to understand his state of mind when he picks up Boylan’s letter to Molly and momentarily acts unconsciously (Kenner 1987, 14 and 46–47, for further uses of the gnomon in Joyce’s writing see Weir 1991 passim). Quite similarly, it will help our understanding if we recognise mistakes and misquotes. When Molly tells Bloom that on her concert tour she will sing “Là ci darem”, he recalls Zerlina’s first line as Voglio e non vorrei instead of Vorrei e non vorrei. The stronger voglio – “I want”, instead of “I would like to” – indicates that in Bloom’s imagination Zerlina’s still wavering mind has already been won over by Don Giovanni’s seduction, and so has Molly’s (Reichert 2004, 70). Actually, the text itself later points out that Bloom tellingly misquotes, and in “Hades” he suddenly corrects himself: “Voglio e non vorrei. No. Vorrei e non” (6.238). Fritz Senn has suggested that “Ulysses is probably the first consistently autocorrective work of literature” (Senn 1983b, 121), and by drawing the reader’s attention to such mistakes the text not only makes us aware of its own rules and principles of construction but also warns against passive reading and undermines our certainties and confidence in the narrative and its various voices. Such a text, of course, requires an extraordinary memory in the reader, and it regularly sends us back to previous passages to check and to modify or to correct our earlier readings or assumptions. Occasionally, we come upon passages which are absolutely inexplicable at the first reading but will become clear later if we have kept them in mind, e.g. in “Lotus-Eaters” Bantam Lyon’s remark “I’ll risk it” (5.541) is at first incomprehensible, but makes sense when we later learn about the Ascot Gold Cup race.

4 Reception and the Theoretical Perspectives James Joyce is one of the most researched authors of all times, several journals are devoted to him – e.g. James Joyce Quarterly, James Joyce Literary Supplement, James Joyce Broadsheet, Dublin James Joyce Journal, European Joyce Studies, Papers on Joyce, Hypermedia Joyce Studies, Genetic Joyce Studies  – and several monographs have been written on the reception of his works  – e.g. Robert H. Deming’s Bibliography of James Joyce Studies (1977), Geert Lernout’s and Wim van Mierlo’s The Reception of James Joyce in Europe (2004, Volume I: Germany, Northern and East Central Europe; Volume  II: Italy, France and Mediterranean Europe), or Wilhelm Füger’s Kritisches Erbe: Dokumente zur Rezeption von James Joyce im deutschen Sprachbereich zu Lebzeiten des Autors (2000). The “Current JJ Checklist” of new publications in the James Joyce Quarterly vol. 50:3, spring 2013 alone has 21 pages of entries. In consequence, it is utterly impossible adequately to sum up the reception of Ulysses and the most important theoretical perspectives, and a very brief outline will have to do.

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As already mentioned in the first part of this chapter, Ulysses met with very mixed reactions, some of which had already been voiced in response to the pre-publication of the early chapters in The Little Review and The Egoist. On the one hand, it was celebrated as a magnificent artistic achievement, but this enthusiasm was mainly restricted to literary circles which cherished experimental audacity. Authors like T. S. Eliot, Valery Larbaud or Ernest Hemingway were important supporters, Ezra Pound wrote in a ‘Paris Letter’ to The Dial: “All men should ‘Unite to give praise to Ulysses’; those who will not may content themselves with a place in the lower intellectual orders” (Moody 2014, 34), and W. B. Yeats praised Ulysses publicly even though he later confessed that “he had not been able to finish the book” (Ellmann 1982 [1959], 531). But on the other hand, even some of the modernist literary elite rejected the book or remained equivocal. George Bernard Shaw, in a letter to Harriet Weaver, chiefly commented on the novel’s realistic aspects, suggesting that it was “a revolting record of a disgusting phase of history”, and he added: “In Ireland they try to make a cat cleanly by rubbing its nose in its own filth. Mr Joyce has tried the same treatment on the human subject. I hope it may prove successful” (Ellmann 1982 [1959], 506–507). Virginia Woolf in her programmatic essay “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown” (1924) wrote: Mr. Joyce’s indecency in Ulysses seems to me the conscious and calculated indecency of a desperate man who feels that in order to breathe he must break the windows. At moments, when the window is broken, he is magnificent. But what a waste of energy! And, after all, how dull indecency is, when it is not the overflowing of a superabundant energy or savagery, but the determined and public-spirited act of a man who needs fresh air! (1980, 334–335)

And then there were, of course, also the readers and critics who disparaged Ulysses as the obscene work of a worthless author, e.g. Edmund Gosse or George Moore (Ellmann 1982 [1959], 528–529). Moreover, the difficulties of the text repelled some of its potential readers and left others in dire need of some help or guidance. Such aid could have come from a lecture by Valery Larbaud, given already in December 1921 and printed in French (Nouvelle revue française) and English (Criterion) in 1922. Larbaud, who had received a schema from Joyce, opens with the sentence: “The reader who approaches this book without the Odyssey clearly in mind will be thrown into dismay” (1922, 94). The obvious reference in the title and the many allusions and analogies in the text could have led the early readers and critics to a close attention to mythical correspondences in the novel, but to Joyce’s regret the first critics did not take the hints. Two books, however, both from the close circle of Joyce’s friends, became particularly important and helpful for the struggling audience, and they are still so today: Stuart Gilbert’s Ulysses: A Study (1955 [1930]), and Frank Budgen’s James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (1972 [1934]). Both books emphasize the role of the Odyssey in Ulysses, and thus they helped to launch the generally rewarding game of spot-the-Homeric-reference – in many critical studies it was pursued almost to excess until it was abandoned when it became quite clear that other works are similarly or almost similarly important as sources for Ulysses, e.g. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but also Goethe’s

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Faust and Wilhelm Meister, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dante’s Divina Commedia, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and The Temptation of Saint Anthony, or the poetry of William Blake. Academic scholarship proper on Ulysses began in 1941 with Harry Levin’s study James Joyce: A Critical Introduction. Joyce had died earlier that year, and Levin now saw the “proper occasion for a full critical appraisal” with the objective “to overcome the obstacles that sometimes discourage the reader of Joyce” (1960 [1941], vii). The possibly most momentous publication was then Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce (1959, revised 1982), which is still part and parcel of every critical approach to Joyce and Ulysses. An important element of Joyce criticism has been the establishment of the literary and cultural background and, seemingly simple, the events of Bloomsday and the various activities of the novel’s characters. Over the decades, critics have accumulated an enormous mass of information about the historical environment and Dublin’s topography, the biographical correspondences, the multitude of allusions and references, and the ‘biographies’ of the protagonists. The intricate nature of the text of course also has given rise to various controversies and re-adjustments of interpretations, e.g. the early perception of Bloom as a trivial character and “no-man” and of Molly as a slut and serial adulteress gave way to an appreciation of Bloom’s unusual features and his exceptional nature, while Molly’s affair with Boylan now appeared as a new and unique transgression. Moreover, in the course of Joyce studies a division has arisen between two schools of critics: The ‘Ellmannites,’ historical and myth-oriented in their understanding, read Joyce as a humanist genius whose work advocates perennial values; the ‘Kennerites’ tend to see Joyce as an ironist, a genius with words and literary conventions whose playfulness delights and outwits us. Whereas the ‘Ellmannites’ tend to see Joyce as Irish, the ‘Kennerites’ read Joyce as a cosmopolitan who presents the Dublin of 1904 as a modern technological city. (van Boheemen-Saaf 2004, 22; see also Lernout and van Mierlo 2004, 3)

In the early 1980s, new critical approaches entered Joyce studies with the rise of poststructuralist and deconstructionist theory. When in 1975 Jacques Lacan, Hélène Cixous, Phillippe Sollers und Jacques Aubert gave lectures at the James Joyce Symposium in Paris, “it left the divide between Anglophone and Francophone approaches as great as ever, and perhaps even greater” (Attridge 2000, 8); by 1984, when Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva spoke at the symposium in Frankfurt, French theory “had apparently become the dominant approach to Joyce’s writings” (Attridge 2000, 8; see also Lernout 1990). The strongly theoretical perspective has since frequently come under attack as ‘Theory’ occasionally tended to drown Joyce’s already difficult texts under tidal waves of an even more difficult academic discourse, and thus the plea to return to a stronger focus on Joyce’s texts served as an important complement and corrective. In addition, feminist criticism became increasingly important, with studies from critics like Marilyn French, Suzette Henke, Margot Norris, Bonnie Kime

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Scott and many others  – moreover, Brenda Maddox’s biography of Nora Barnacle Joyce was particularly useful for our understanding of Molly. One of the most significant approaches that had always accompanied Joyce studies but gained momentum in the last decades and “moved from a fringe pursuit into the mainstream of Joyce criticism and scholarship” (Groden 2014, 4) is genetic criticism, which was also central to the creation of the critical and synoptic edition (Gabler 1993). Strongly empirical in its theoretical premises, it strives to reconstruct the history of the text from Joyce’s sources in literary works, newspapers, advertisements, songs and musical scores etc. to the notebooks, letters and comments, still existing drafts, the pre-publications and galley proofs to the published versions. In the course of the last century, Ulysses has been a test case for every new literary theory, and in general, the results have proved to be productive, but never exhaustive. Theoretical approaches come and go, but in reading Ulysses we will always have to return to the words on the page, to their history and etymology, to their potential and ambivalences, to their denotations and connotations, to their sound and rhythm, to their immediate and larger contexts, and to the specific ways that Joyce used them to construct the world of his vision. All literary theories contribute to this endeavour, but most of all a clear understanding of what the words are doing on the page and how they got there in the first place.

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Vintage Books, 1986. --Attridge, Derek. “Introduction. On Being a Joycean.” Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 1–21. Benhaïm, André. “Odd Encounters: From Marcel Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe to Albert Cohen’s ‘Projections ou Après-Minuit à Genève’.” 1922: Literature, Culture, Politics. Ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 43–55. Blumenbach, Ulrich. “Ach ja, die Seife, in meiner Gesäßtasche. Der Kolonialismus und die Seife bei James Joyce.“ Historische Anthropologie 17.1 (2009): 121–131. Boheemen-Saaf, Christine van. Joyce, Derrida, Lacan and the Trauma of History. Cambridge: University of Campridge Press, 2004. Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972 [1934]. Davison, Sarah. “Joyce’s incorporation of literary sources in ‘Oxen of the Sun’.” Genetic Joyce Studies 9 (2009). http://www.geneticjoycestudies.org/GJS9/GJS9_SarahDavisonOxen.htm (13 December 2015). Deming, Robert H. Bibliography of James Joyce Studies. Revised edition. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977. Eliot, T. S. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth.” Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt, 1975. 175–178. Ellmann, Richard. Ulysses on the Liffey. London: Faber and Faber, 1972.

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Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Revised edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982 [1959]. Fiedler, Leslie: “Cross the Border – Close the Gap”. Cross the Border – Close the Gap. New York: Stein and Day, 1972 [1969]. 61–85. French, Marilyn. The Book as World: James Joyce’s Ulysses. New York: Paragon House, 1993 [1976]. Füger, Wilhelm, ed. Kritisches Erbe. Dokumente zur Rezeption von James Joyce im deutschen Sprachbereich zu Lebzeiten des Autors. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000. Gabler, Hans Walter. “On Textual Criticism and Editing: The Case of Joyce’s Ulysses.” Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities. Ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. 195–224. Gifford, Don, and Robert J. Seidelman. Ulysses Annotated. Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses. Revised and expanded edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988 [1974]. Gilbert, Stuart. James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study. New York: Vintage, 1955 [1930]. Gordon, John. Joyce and Reality: The Empirical Strikes Back. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004. Groden, Michael. “Writing Ulysses.” The Cambridge Companion to Ulysses. Ed. Sean Latham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 3–18. Gunn, Ian, and Clive Hart. James Joyce’s Dublin. A Topographical Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses. London: Thames and Hudson, 2004. Henke, Suzette. James Joyce and Politics of Desire. New York/London: Routledge, 1990. Joyce, James. Selected Letters. Ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking Press, 1975. Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber and Faber, 1976. Joyce, James. Ulysses. Annotated Student Edition. (Based on the Bodley Head Edition, 1961). Introduction and Notes by Declan Kiberd. London: Penguin, 1992. Joyce, James. Ulysses. (Trans. Hans Wollschläger, 1976, based on the Random House Edition, 1961). Ed. and annotated by Dirk Vanderbeke, Dirk Schultze, Friedrich Reinmuth, and Sigrid Altdorf. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004. Joyce, James. Dubliners. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler and Walter Hettche. New York: Vintage, 2012a. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler and Walter Hettche. New York: Vintage, 2012b. Joyce, James. Ulysses. (Based on the 1939 Odyssey Press Edition). Ed. Sam Slote, with annotations by Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian, and John Turner. Richmond, Surrey: Alma Classics, 2015. Larbaud, Valery. “The Ulysses of James Joyce.” The Criterion 1.1 (December 1922): 94–103. Lernout, Geert. The French Joyce. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. Lernout, Geert, and Wim van Mierlo, eds. The Reception of James Joyce in Europe (Vol. I: Germany, Northern and East Central Europe, Vol. II: Italy, France and Mediterranean Europe). London/New York: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004. Levin, Harry. James Joyce. A Critical Introduction. Revised and augmented edition. New York: New Directions, 1960 [1941]. Kenner, Hugh. Ulysses. Revised edition. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Maddox, Brenda. Nora. A Biography of Nora Joyce. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1988. Moody, David A. Ezra Pound: Poet. Vol. II: The Epic Years. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Musil, Robert. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Rowohlt: Reinbek, 1981. Norris, Margot. Joyce’s Web: The Social Unravelling of Modernism. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. Reichert, Klaus. “Welt-Alltag der Epoche.” Welt-Alltag der Epoche. Essays zum Werk von James Joyce. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004. 53–76. Scott, Bonnie Kime. Joyce and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Senn, Fritz. “Umgang mit Anfängen.” Nichts gegen Joyce / Joyce versus Nothing. Zürich: Haffmans Verlag, 1983a. 85–93.

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Senn, Fritz. “Dynamics of Corrective Unrest.” Nichts gegen Joyce / Joyce versus Nothing. Zürich: Haffmans Verlag, 1983b. 108–124. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Other Writings. Bantam: New York, 1982. Weir, David. ”Gnomon is an Island: Euclid and Bruno in Joyce’s Narrative Practice.” James Joyce Quarterly 28.2 (1991): 343–360. Woolf, Virginia. “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown.” Collected Essays. Vol. I. London: The Hogarth Press, 1980. 319–337.

5.2 Further reading Attridge, Derek, ed. James Joyce’s Ulysses. A Casebook. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Caspel, Paul van. Bloomers on the Liffey: Eisegetical Readings of Joyce’s Ulysses. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Hart, Clive, and David Hayman, eds. James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays. Reprint. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Fischer-Seidel, Therese, ed. James Joyces Ulysses. Neuere deutsche Aufsätze. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981. Lawrence, Karen. The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Litz, Arthur Walton. The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Riquelme, John Paul. Teller and Tale in Joyce’s Fiction: Oscillating Perspectives. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. Steinberg, Erwin R. The Stream of Consciousness and Beyond in Ulysses. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973.

Ralf Schneider

8 E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924) Abstract: A Passage to India is usually regarded as E. M. Forster’s masterpiece and a major novel of the first half of the twentieth century. Written and published in the context of British literary modernism, its narrative strategies seem to remain fairly traditional, although Forster refrains from using the ‘omniscient’ narrator that characterised the Victorian novel. The modernity of the novel becomes very much apparent in the themes Forster explores: questions of epistemological doubt are raised not only through the inability of the English characters to ‘see’ India, but also in the central episode of the plot, an alleged assault against an Englishwoman that remains conspicuously unexplained. The ambivalent personal relationships that pervade the text can also be read as Forster’s representation of an isolated modern self, seeking for connections with the world and other human beings. The events and relationships remain just as ambiguous as the novel’s take on British imperialism. Keywords: Edwardian literature, modernism, colonialism, personal relationships, narrative technique

1 Context: Author, Œuvre, Moment The life and works of Edward Morgan Forster, a central figure of the English literary and cultural landscape in the first half of the twentieth century, are in many ways characterised by transitions and interstices, as well as contrasts and contradictions. First, publishing his prose fiction between 1905 and 1924, Forster’s development as a writer coincides with the transition in the British novel from Edwardian writing to literary modernism, but his style is aesthetically much less innovative than that of other modernists. He was also connected with the intellectual and artistic avant-garde of the Bloomsbury circle, but Virginia Woolf, for instance, was rather critical of Forster’s writing (Woolf 2005 [1942]; ↗ 9 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse). Second, although he lived a very long life of ninety years, he stopped publishing novels at the age of forty-five due to his homosexuality, a theme he wrote a novel and short stories about which were not publishable at the time (↗ 4 Gender). Forster found that if he had to be silent about issues so close to his heart, he could not give the public any more fiction, much to the chagrin of many of his readers. As novelist L. P. Hartley remarked, “one of the saddest gaps in the bookshelves of contemporary literature is the space that should be occupied by the unwritten works of Mr E. M. Forster” (qtd. in Gardner 1973, 416). Forster did, however, remain a public commentator on many topics throughout the second half of his long life, addressing society in lectures, radio talks, essays DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-009

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and other non-fictional writing. Third, most of his prose fiction focuses on English society in the transition from the Victorian era to the modern period, and his characters and plots centre around the tensions between tradition and convention on the one hand, and change, or at least the questioning of conventions, on the other. What is more, all of Forster’s plots are based on the confrontation of characters belonging to different classes and educational backgrounds, or cultures and ethnicities, and the personal, social and political consequences thereof. And finally, A Passage to India, which takes the issue of confrontation to the level of colonial contact, goes beyond staging persistent cultural disagreements on the level of character and plot. At a time when resistance against the Raj itself was entering its late phase – which would leave India suspended between colonial rule and an as yet unplanned future  – the text itself remains ambiguously placed between a refutation of colonial positions and their endorsement (cf. Parry 1985). Forster’s œuvre comprises a broad range of text types and media genres. He wrote six novels and began but never finished a seventh one (Arctic Summer), as well as three volumes of short stories: The Celestial Omnibus (1911) and The Eternal Moment (1928), reprinted together in Collected Short Stories (1947), and the posthumously published The Life to Come (1971). His numerous essays were collected e.g. in Abinger Harvest (1936), which also includes reviews, poetry and a pageant play, and in Two Cheers for Democracy (1951). He wrote two biographies, one of his Cambridge friend, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1934), and one on his great-aunt, Marianne Thornton: A Domestic Biography (1956), which is also a history of private life in the nineteenth century. He produced travel literature in Alexandria: A History and Guide (1922) and in Pharos and Pharillon (1923), where he amalgamates historiography and biography with travel writing, as well as in The Hill of Devi (1953), which includes his experiences with the Maharajah of Dewas Senior. A theoretical study of the novel as a genre, which developed out of a series of lectures (Aspects of the Novel, 1927) became influential in literary studies. Forster was also responsible, with Eric Crozier, for the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s Opera Billy Budd (1949). In addition to that, as Oliver Stallybrass reports, when he died in 1970, “E. M. Forster left behind, at King’s College, Cambridge, a considerable corpus of unpublished literary work, complete and incomplete, and in a wide range of genres: novels (Maurice, published in 1971, and two substantial fragments), stories, plays, poems, essays, talks – to say nothing of letters, diaries and notebooks.” (1972, 72) Forster gave lectures and radio talks and committed himself to the fight against literary censorship and to the cause of civil liberties. Summarising the core impact of Forster’s work as a novelist, one can say that its main thrust is the satirical focus on the British (upper-)middle classes’ inability to understand, accept or empathise with ways of life different from their own, and their reluctance to concern themselves with the ‘inner life’ that Forster regards as the real centre of human existence, rather than the ‘outer life’ of social conventions. What interested Forster most are the personal relationships, as becomes clear in all of his novels, and as he himself pointed out in letters and essays (cf. Childs 2007, 193).

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Forster considered himself – and has been labelled by biographers and critics including F. R. Leavis (1938) and Lionel Trilling (1944) – a liberal humanist (at least until his faith in individual liberties faded after World War II), and his writing usually centres on characters who yearn to develop the full intellectual and emotional potential of their personalities; the protagonists are usually juxtaposed with other characters who prevent them from doing so, or try to, at least, because they feel their convictions, morality and plans questioned or jeopardised by the developing characters. Such antithesis is the principle already in his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), where a young English widow is enchanted by Italy, falls in love with a much younger Italian and, to the horror of her philistine family, gets pregnant again. In the semi-autobiographical The Longest Journey (1907), the protagonist is stifled by routines and conventions, regaining his zest for life briefly after finally connecting with a previously shunned half-brother (only to be killed in a train accident shortly afterwards). It is Italy, again, in A Room with a View (1908), where the female protagonist meets a young Englishman, who, according to her family, is socially unsuitable as a partner; she finally manages to liberate herself from the social constraints she has been subject to, and finds happiness. Howards End (1910) confronts the Schlegels, a predominantly female family of bourgeois culture lovers with the male-dominated Wilcoxes, who are engaged in business and stand for a new, modernised England in which profit and progress are replacing aesthetic values and human warmth. To this constellation, Forster adds a character who stands between the working and the ­lower-middle class and is fatally entangled in the well-meaning attempts of the Schlegels to provide him with cultural capital on the one hand, and the hubris of the Wilcoxes on the other. The novel’s motto, ‘only connect’, points to Forster’s dialectic approach and his dream of antitheses that can be overcome. In Maurice (written in 1913–1914, revised a number of times during Forster’s lifetime and published posthumously in 1971), the full development of the protagonist’s nature is thwarted for a long time by the fact that he is homosexual, but Maurice finally refuses to be chained by the dominant sexual morality and social conventions any longer, and Forster provides him and his working-class partner with a happy ending. One impulse for writing the novel that many regard as his finest achievement, A Passage to India, was Forster’s infatuation with Syed Ross Masood, an Indian who had come to England for education in 1906 and whom Forster tutored. Forster later gained first-hand knowledge about India from two journeys to the subcontinent, one in 1912, after which he began writing the novel, and one in 1921. His experience in India amounted to a total of one and a half years, six months of which he spent as private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas State Senior. After a protracted gestation period of more than ten years the novel A Passage to India, whose title quotes that of a poem by Walt Whitman (from Leaves of Grass, 1900), was published in 1924 and dedicated to Masood. Forster’s last published novel is characterised by transitions, interstices, and contrasts, as all the other ones are. Published in the historical phase in which the Indian independent movement was gaining strength, in which the dis-

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aster of World War I was by no means forgotten, and in which all the arts turned away from traditional modes of expression, A Passage to India does not end on a conciliatory note, in contrast to most of Forster’s previous novels.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns A Passage to India is a novel about a failed romance, about friendship, about cultural understanding and misunderstanding, about cultural stereotypes, and about truth and the difficulties of knowing and understanding – the self, other human beings, the world. The plot is relatively simple to relate: Adela Quested, a young Englishwoman, has travelled to the fictional city of Chandrapore in colonial India, to meet her intended fiancé, Ronny Heaslop, together with Ronny’s mother, Mrs Moore. Both women also plan to ‘see India’, but they ultimately fail to understand both the complexities of the subcontinent and the difficult inter-relations between the English and the Indians. The two women meet Dr Aziz, a Muslim physician who like his Indian friends cherishes a deep dislike against the English colonisers, but at the same time craves for friendship with some of them, such as Cyril Fielding, who is principal of the local college and very much Forster’s mouthpiece for a liberal attitude in the novel. Aziz also befriends Mrs Moore, who is free from racial prejudice. During an excursion to the famous Marabar Caves organized by Aziz for the ladies, after entering one of the caves Adela feels she is molested and afterwards accuses Aziz of the deed, who is brought to trial for the alleged assault. While the antagonism between colonisers and colonised heats up before and during the trial, Adela withdraws her accusation and returns to England, leaving Dr Aziz behind with a ruined reputation and Ronny without a wife. Fielding, after having been to England and getting married to Ronny Heaslop’s sister, Stella, returns to India. He meets Aziz again, but he and Aziz fail to renew their friendship.

2.1 Relationships (I): Groups vs. Individuals, Official vs. Private As in Forster’s other works, among the main concerns of the novel is the failure of honest and sincere personal relationships caused by the lack of human warmth and self-awareness displayed by the English upper-middle and middle classes. This disposition acquires even more acute impact in the context of the cultural difference so prominent in the contact zone of the Raj, giving room to British imperialist and racist attitudes which add yet another facet to the middle classes’ dissociation from everything ‘other’. The attitude manifests itself in Ronny Heaslop’s conviction that

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the English are not in India “for the purpose of behaving pleasantly” (69)1, and in the general conviction of racial superiority that characterises the community in the compound, represented by such figures as Major Callendar, the civil surgeon, or Mr Turton, the collector, and particularly his wife, who with her combination of extreme racial and class prejudices is the most unlikeable character in the novel. Mr McBryde, the police superintendent, although described by the narrator as “the most reflective and best educated of the Chandrapore officials” (175), theorizes about the sexual attractiveness of the lighter-skinned races to the dark, but not vice versa, in the context of the trial. When Fielding reasons about the improbability of Aziz having gone after Adela, McBryde snubs him by saying: “When you think of crime you think of English crime. The psychology here is different.” (177) On the basis of such racist attitudes, the British argue themselves into a position which allows them to dream of retaliation for the alleged violation of one of their women. Here a reference is implied to the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the siege of Lucknow in particular (which is even mentioned, cf. 188; ↗ 17 J. G. Farrell, The Empire Trilogy). However, in the background of Forster’s narrative of Anglo-Indian relationships hovers the much more recent Amritsar massacre of 1919, in which hundreds (or more than one thousand – the figures differ considerably between the official British and Indian sources) of peaceful worshipers and pilgrims celebrating a religious and cultural feast were killed by British troops for disobeying a ban on public meetings. At one point, Aziz tells Fielding that what Indians need is “[k]indness, more kindness, and even after that more kindness” (128), but except for individual characters, such as Fielding and Mrs Moore, the British have little kindness to offer the Indians. It is in this context that the novel repeatedly sets the individual off against the group, a strategy that Forster also uses in his other writings. While Ronny Heaslop places himself among the group of Government officials and is accepted in their ranks, Fielding is clearly situated outside these circles and a sort of loner. The collector declares Ronny “a sahib”, “the type we want”, and “one of us” (47), and Ronny thinks of both himself and others only in terms of their functions. He is of the opinion that “nothing is private in India” (54), which is precisely the opposite position to that held by Cyril Fielding. After the alleged harassment of Adela, Ronny’s function changes, for the British community now holds that “Miss Quested was only a victim, but young Heaslop was a martyr; he was the recipient of all the evil intended against them by the country they had tried to serve; he was bearing the sahib’s cross” (192). Interestingly, this attitude distracts the attention away from the allegedly assaulted woman, suggesting that what is at stake for the colonists is in fact the threat against imperialist manhood. The wives of the British officials despise Fielding because of his friendliness towards the Indians. His attitude and opinions are bound to make him a misfit

1 Unless otherwise indicated page references in brackets without further designation refer to Forster 1985 [1924].

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in that society: “The world, he believed, is a globe of men who are trying to reach one another and can best do so by the help of goodwill plus culture and intelligence – a creed ill suited to Chandrapore […].” (80) When Aziz is charged with the assault in the cave, Fielding tries, in vain, to make the English at least consider the possibility that Aziz might not be guilty. McBryde announces to Fielding that “at a time like this there’s no room for – well – personal views” (180), but Fielding refuses to subscribe to the official British view of the affair and sides with Aziz and the Indians in general, after all. In an emergency meeting at the Club, when the British collectively stand up to honour Ronny and support him against the shame India and Aziz have inflicted on him, Fielding refuses to be drawn in and remains seated. This affront and Fielding’s subsequent declaration that he holds Aziz to be innocent make his expulsion from the Club and the community complete.

2.2 Relationships (II): Personal and Spiritual As the above constellations indicate, to which group a character in A Passage to India belongs partly determines the kinds of personal relationships they have, and the confrontation between the groups is mostly political, since it reflects the entanglement between coloniser and colonised. However, the novel also offers a non-political perspective on human relationships, which Forster on the one hand regards as fraught with anxieties, jealousy and misunderstandings, so that the political issues are loaded up with, and complicated by, personal ones, and vice versa; on the other hand, the personal relationships emerge as the only meaningful mode of existence. Ronny is presented as incapable of even approaching friendliness because of his allegiance to the Raj. He is unable to see individuality and resorts to easy stereotyping, as when he thinks about Aziz that “he knew the type; he knew all the types, and this was the spoilt westernized” (93). Behind Ronny’s official identity not much else seems to be hidden. When he collects Adela from a meeting with Fielding and Aziz, a personal antagonism erupts between Aziz and Ronny, because “the only link [Ronny] could be conscious of with an Indian was the official, and neither happened to be his subordinate. As private individuals he forgot them”; Aziz, however, “was in no mood to be forgotten” (93) and begins to provoke Ronny, until “[e]veryone was cross or wretched. It was as if irritation exuded from the soil.” (94) This early example sets the mood for all further encounters between Ronny and Aziz, the irritation resulting from the colonial framework in which the two men meet as well as from their psychological dispositions. Given the genre tradition of what can be called Anglo-Indian fiction, Forster’s contemporary readers might have expected the love relationship between Adela and Ronny to be at the centre of the narrative, or to see an Adela attracted to Dr Aziz. Since the nineteenth century, writers who lived in India or had lived there at least for some time, had produced novels that were preoccupied with the combined fascination and

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repulsion the British felt towards India, as scholars have analysed long ago (cf. Greenberger 1969; Parry 1972; Gupta 1973). Among the predominant patterns of these novels were romance plots that involved a British woman journeying to India to get married to, or falling in love with, either a resident Anglo-Indian man or an Indian, in which case the fascination and dangers of multicultural love were explored (see Greenberger 1969, 2; and Teo 2004). In A Passage to India, however, the other topics mentioned above and a number of other relationships turn out to be much more important, which signals not only Forster’s contempt for the (heteronormative) ideology of the traditional romance, but also his ambition to give A Passage to India a scope that surpasses that of his previous works. The connection between Adela and Ronny is strange and rather unromantic, going from a first attempt at closeness after Adela’s arrival to Adela’s declaration, after seeing and disagreeing with Ronny’s attitudes and opinions, that “we are not going to be married, my dear boy” (99), via another reconnection and engagement to get married until the final separation subsequent to the trial. Forster is reluctant to allow them any romance, and the question what would have brought them together in the first place is never convincingly answered. Their hands touch twice incidentally on a bumpy car ride (103, 107), which gives them an “animal thrill” (107), but otherwise there seems to be little attraction between them. There is no real understanding between the two except for this one scene, they differ fundamentally on how to approach the Indians, and ultimately it appears that they are much better off without each other. It becomes clear at this point already that Forster is not enthusiastic about heterosexual marriage as the best way of connecting human beings. The connection between Mrs Moore and Dr Aziz, for instance, is much profounder and more spiritual, even if they do not spend much more time together than one meeting in a mosque, Fielding’s tea party and the Marabar Cave exhibition. Forster uses Mrs Moore and the way she responds to India and the Indians to reflect upon some of the larger psychological and philosophical issues. When she and Aziz first meet in the mosque accidentally, Aziz is delighted to find the old woman sympathizing with the Indians, and Forster casts her in the role of the rare British friends of the Indians. When she says “I don’t think I understand people very well. I only know whether I like or dislike them”, Aziz replies: “Then you’re an Oriental.” (45) Later on she tells Ronny, “I like Aziz, Aziz is my real friend.” (111) In the further development of the story, Mrs Moore feels increasingly alienated from her son and his official connections and from her future daughter-in-law, but she feels more connected with nature, as in this ‘moment of being’ or ‘epiphany’, which is reminiscent of comparable moments in the novels of Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, Virginia Woolf (↗ 4 Gender; ↗ 9 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse) and James Joyce (↗ 7 James Joyce, Ulysses): “A sudden sense of unity, of kinship with the heavenly bodies passed into the old woman and out, like water through a tank, leaving a strange freshness behind” (51). However, the attraction of India remains ambivalent for her, as is shown when she first sees the river Ganges and says, “What a terrible river! What a wonderful river!” (53)

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Like Adela after her, Mrs Moore first experiences a kind of epiphany in one of the caves, but it amounts to a feeling of utter emptiness and incomprehensibility. This is prepared by the idea that relationships between human beings do not matter – at least not if they have to be conducted within the framework of marriage: “She felt increasingly (vision or nightmare?) that, though people are important, the relationships between them are not, and that in particular too much fuss has been made over marriage; centuries of carnal embracement, yet man is no nearer to understanding man.” (147–148) When she experiences that “some vile naked thing struck her face and settled on her mouth like a pad” and hears a “terrifying echo” which she only perceives as a “boum” (158–159), she falls into despair at the worthlessness of foundations of life as fundamental as religion: “But suddenly, at the edge of her mind, Religion appeared, poor little talkative Christianity, and she knew that all its divine words from ‘Let there be light’ to ‘It is finished’ only amounted to ‘boum’.” (161) After Adela’s cave incident, Mrs Moore withdraws, refusing to take sides. The narrator explains again that between Mrs Moore’s enthusiasm for India and the terror in the cave, her experience amounted to nothing more than a “spiritual muddledom” (212). She leaves India, but dies before reaching home, while her name is turned into a slogan by which the rioting crowds outside the site of Aziz’ trial invoke their supposed ally against the British imperialists. The relationship between Aziz and Fielding is fraught with continuous, but more often than not failing, attempts at friendship. This relationship starts out with a gesture of generosity and a vaguely homoerotic scene. Aziz, having been invited to the tea party for Adela and Mrs Moore, arrives when Fielding is still getting dressed in his bathroom. Fielding needs a collar pin, and Aziz pretends that he has got a spare one on him but really gives Fielding the one he is wearing. Against all conventions, Aziz is invited to enter the bathroom, and Fielding “was not surprised at the rapidity of their intimacy.” (82) From that moment on, Aziz is frequently offended when he feels misunderstood by Fielding, or when the latter does not reciprocate his emotionality. Fielding himself is out of sorts when he pays Aziz a sick bed visit during which they do not get into a conversation because a lot of Aziz’ Indians friends are there, too; Fielding ends up “rather disappointed with his call. […] He had liked Aziz so much at their first meeting, and he had hoped for developments.” (126) But Forster makes it clear that Fielding’s disposition is not to get passionate about anything, or any person, after all: “‘I shall not really be intimate with this fellow,’ Fielding thought, and then ‘nor with anyone.’” (129) Notwithstanding the difference in disposition, the two men are bound together in their opinion of the British officials, and by the ‘odd’ positions they share in the patriarchal, heteronormative framework of the time, Aziz being a widower and Fielding a bachelor. During Aziz’ imprisonment, Fielding is not allowed to speak to him, but although “[h]e regretted taking sides. To slink through India unlabelled was his aim” (183), he stays loyal to his friend against the British, and is seen wearing native costume afterwards. Still, Aziz and Fielding never reach the kind of closeness both were yearning for at some point. When Fielding announces

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after the trial that he is returning to England on some official business, Aziz “suspected his friend of intending to marry Miss Quested for the sake of her money and of going to England for that purpose” (275). Having spent much time lamenting Fielding’s “treachery” (289), when Fielding returns a married man, Aziz needs some time to realise that the bride is not Adela, but Ronny’s sister, Stella. Towards the end of the novel, Ralph Moore, a half-brother of Ronny’s, has accompanied the couple on their trip. Shortly before Aziz meets the couple and Ralph, he is still full of bitterness: “This pose of ‘seeing India’ which had seduced him to Miss Quested at Chandrapore was only a form of ruling India; no sympathy lay behind it” (301), and when he enters the European Guest house where he will find the party, he “went from one room to another, inquisitive and malicious” (302). When he meets Ralph, he overcomes a moment of hostility to finally shake hands with him, “completely forgetting that they were not friends, and focusing his heart on something more distant than the cave, something more beautiful” (306). He actually repeats the praise “Then you’re an Oriental” when Ralph answers the question whether he can always tell a friendly stranger from a hostile one in the positive. Aziz and Ralph go out on a boat to watch the festivities from a distance, and the boat collides with that of Stella and Fielding, throwing them into the water in great confusion. This communal ‘baptism’ of the Muslim and the Christians in the Hindu river might hint towards a new beginning that overcomes the separation of nations, religions and ethnicities, but no true reconciliation occurs. With Professor Godbole, a highly revered Brahman teaching at the college led by Fielding, Forster has created a character that is placed outside the networks of relationships that all other characters struggle in so much. Godbole keeps aloof from any social interaction, being totally focussed on his spirituality. After the unpleasant meeting of Ronny and Aziz mentioned above, Godbole soothes the situation by singing a religious song, which has the effect that the scene ends with “a moment of absolute silence. No ripple disturbed the water, no leaf stirred.” (96) Godbole’s aloofness, however, also manifests itself in his disregard for arrangements and agreements, which leads to him and Fielding missing the train to Chandrapore on the day of the cave excursion, so that the two are not present as potential witnesses of that crucial event. When Fielding asks his opinion of the Aziz case, Godbole remains entirely unemotional, and when pressed to offer a judgment of Aziz, he refuses to blame individuals, saying that “[w]hen evil occurs, it expresses the whole of the universe. Similarly when good occurs”, and explaining to a frustrated Fielding that “they are both of them aspects of my Lord. He is present in the one, absent in the other, and the difference between presence and absence is great, as great as my feeble mind can grasp.” (186) In the last part of the book Godbole reappears, now minister of education in a neighbouring state and a leading figure in the religious celebrations which is at the centre of the chapter titled “Temple”. He remembers Mrs Moore during his meditations on the love in and of the universe, a moment that suggests a solution to all problems of cultural and religious antagonism. Being the most inactive character of

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the novel, however, he does no more engage with the others now than he did before, and leaves their troubles as insignificant.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies In A Passage to India, Forster is keenly aware of the possibilities and the constraints the novel offers as a medium to engage with human existence. As John Beer once phrased it: “While giving a vivid sense of India and a sharp yet subtle commentary on British rule, A Passage to India is a meditative novel that reflects not only on the world but on fiction itself; even the language is constantly drawing the reader’s attention to its own limitations and its own marvellous powers.” (1985, viii) The novel starts with the famous description of an Indian landscape whose insignificance is then contrasted with the beauty of the city of Chandrapore, which significantly emerges, however, only if viewed from a distance; this distant impression of beauty is obtained especially from the Civil Station, which “shares nothing with the City except the overarching sky” (32). This landscape description contains the germ of the novel’s main motifs, or, as Nicholas Royle puts it, “[t]he whole of the novel is lurking in its opening sentence” (1999, 78): The tensions between the beauty one wishes to see in the grand scenes of life, and the ugliness of detail, and between the attempt to ‘see’, i.e. to understand, and the impossibility of doing so. The platform on which these existential questions are discussed is the meeting between the British, isolated from the surroundings in their Civil Station, and the Indians. The first chapter in which we actually meet characters is then strategically placed among Indians, who immediately discuss whether friendship with the English is possible. Dr Aziz is the dominant focaliser in this scene, so that the reader is made familiar with his way of thinking, before meeting the first British character, Mrs Moore. The next chapter accompanies Mrs Moore to the Club, where we are introduced to the Anglo-Indian community and their prejudices, which Mrs Moore detests. Without a single commentary, then, Forster manages to privilege the view of the anti-British group of characters. As mentioned above, the narrator devotes much time to discussing Mrs Moore’s approach to India (which starts on the ambivalent “wonderful and terrible”, 53); it is significant that it is through her meeting the British in the Club that we are introduced to the ideology of the colonisers, which gives her severe uneasiness and the feeling of estrangement from her son. Forster employs narrative voice and perspective strategically for the purpose of directing the reader’s sympathies towards certain characters and keeping them from others. Rather than inviting any kind of all-embracing empathy for the likeable characters, however, the text creates a distance between the narrator and all characters. Over the entire novel, the presentation of the story alternates between the narrator’s observations on India, Indians and the Anglo-Indians on the one hand, and the view-

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points of the characters on the other, which contributes to the overall impression of a balanced view on the events. The criticism of the attitude of the British in India, however, is much more biting than that of any Indian character, since it is a distilled version of everything that Forster hates about the ideologies he associates with the world of the English public schools, as can be seen by the evocation of that institution on several occasions. Discussing an evening entertainment in the Club – a performance of the comedy Cousin Kate by H. H. Davies of 1903  – the narrator states: “Save for this annual incursion, they left literature alone. The men had no time for it, the women did nothing they could not share with the men. Their ignorance of the arts was notable, and they lost no opportunity of proclaiming it to one another; it was the public-school attitude, flourishing more vigorously than it can yet hope to do in England.” (60) Mrs Moore, much to her distaste, detects this attitude in her son, who “reminded her of his public-school days” (70), and after Mrs Moore’s death, the narrator ironically remarks about the son’s reflections that “Ronny’s religion was of the sterilized public-school brand, which never goes bad, even in the tropics” (256). The Indian characters are less viciously criticised, but still the text is full of ethnic generalisations, as for instance when the narrator comments: “Like most Orientals, Aziz overrated hospitality, mistaking it for intimacy, and not seeing that it is tainted with the sense of possession.” (154; see below for a discussion of Forster’s complicity in Orientalism) In most instances, Forster uses a fairly traditional narrative voice that evokes the setting and comments on the characters, explaining and interpreting their behaviour, as the above readings have already exemplified. Forster even resorts to an old-fashioned address to the “dear reader!” (213). What is ‘modernist’ about this narrative agency, however, is that it cannot be called ‘omniscient’ in any meaningful way, for it remains just as puzzled about India as the English characters, and it does not shed any light upon the central events in the cave. The passage with the reader address just mentioned is quite typical of the mixture of partisanship and non-alignment displayed by the narrator. It comes after a discussion of Mrs Moore’s departure from India and her state of mind, after her experience in one of the caves, where she had suffered from claustrophobia and near suffocation, and heard the echo that turned all sounds into nothing more than “boum” (161). Now, Mrs Moore is eager to escape the trial, the hot weather and Adela’s and Ronny’s marriage, having “come to a state where the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at the same time” (212). Suffering from the unsolved tension between the enormousness and the banality of this insight, Mrs Moore laments that so much fuss is made over Adela, thinking that nothing really happened, and “if it had, there are worse evils than love” (212–213). The narrator then explains: “The unspeakable attempt presented itself to her as love: in a cave, in a church – boum, it amounts to the same” (213), and goes on to say that “[v]isions are supposed to entail profundity, but – wait till you get one, dear reader! The abyss also may be petty, the serpent of eternity made of maggots” (213). As in this case, the narrator is usually closest to the characters when they fail to understand,

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either themselves, or others, or India. When Fielding asks Adela after the trial has been cancelled what really happened in the cave, she is unable to say it. There is a brief moment of collective focalisation (“Were there words beyond which they could never touch, or did all that is possible enter their consciousness? They could not tell. They only realized that their outlook was more or less similar, and found in this a satisfaction.” 261), which is followed by the narrator joining them in their puzzlement: “Perhaps life is a mystery, not a muddle; they could not tell. Perhaps the hundred Indians which fuss and squabble so tiresomely are one, and the universe they mirror is one. They had not the apparatus for judging.” (261) The repeated use of “perhaps” is no rhetorical trick that might imply that the narrator is merely teasing and just keeps his real convictions hidden for a moment; the insecurity is genuine and not solved anywhere else in the novel. Words like “muddle”, “puzzle” or “mystery” recur as leitmotifs throughout the ca. 300 pages of A Passage to India. The sheer degree of narrative uncertainty in this novel has not only invited a prolific output of political and post-colonial readings (see Moffat 1990; and section  4 below), it also suggests that the days of the truly omniscient narrator of the Victorian novel were over when Forster wrote A Passage to India. Other modernist authors buried that kind of narrator by allowing internal focalisation centre stage framed only reticently by covert heterodiegetic narrators, but Forster chose a different strategy, laying bare the lack of explicability and intelligibility of the world by keeping the narrating agency overt but withdrawing any assuredness from it. While Forster employs an insecure narrator, he proves to be in full control of the structure of his narrative. Forster’s plots are always heavily constructed, and A Passage to India is no exception. In his Aspects of the Novel, he devotes a chapter to “Pattern and Rhythm” (Forster 1976 [1927], 134–150), referring to the overall plot design that shapes the narrative on the one hand, and the network of repeated phrases and motifs that gives a text internal coherence, on the other. The pattern of A Passage to India is visible in the tripartite structure of novel, with its sections “Mosque”, “Caves” and “Temple” that trace the various characters’ routes from intended friendships over the breakups to attempted reconciliation. The first part explores the relationships between the characters, their friendships and antipathies, focusing much on the Muslim Dr Aziz. The themes here are Aziz and his Indian friends (and their dislike of the British), Aziz and Mrs Moore getting along in a very friendly manner after their accidental meeting in the mosque, Fielding and Aziz who find it both attractive and difficult to befriend each other; Ronny and Adela are shown as a couple, then splitting up briefly and finally arranging to get married after all. Only the solitary figure of Professor Godbole stays detached from all these connections. The second part contains the fateful visit to the prehistoric caves, which destroys the connections not only between Aziz and Fielding, but also between Ronny and Adela and between the latter two and Mrs Moore. The third and shortest part leads Fielding back to India with his brother in law, Ralph Moore, who almost strikes up a friendship with Aziz at the moment that Aziz and Fielding fail to renew theirs.

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As to rhythm, A Passage to India is rich in repetitions, and they work in particular as foreshadowings, cross-references to, and interpretations of, the events in the caves. At the very beginning, the Marabar hills, where the crucial events will later take place, are described as “a group of fists and fingers […] thrust up through the soil” (32), suggesting uncanny and violent images of groping. When Adela states, “I do so hate mysteries” (86), she has of course no idea yet that what is going to happen to her in the cave; and when Fielding adds “a mystery is a muddle”, explaining that “Aziz and I know well that India’s a muddle” (86), he introduces another leitmotif of the novel: not only the incident in the cave, but India as a whole is a muddle. A few pages later, Aziz invites Mrs Moore, Adela and Fielding to see the caves, which he has not seen himself, and he wonders “why are they so famous?” and suggests that “[p]erhaps that is our empty brag” (92). Groping, mystery, muddles and emptiness are indeed the sum of Adela’s cave experience. The narrator comments that “nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge into something else” (101). Wonderment is replaced again by suspense when the excursion approaches and the narrator says that “April, herald of horrors, is at hand” (127), echoing the opening line of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (“April is the cruellest month […]”, 1999 [1922], 63). Finally, in the second part of the novel, titled “Caves”, the fists and fingers of the hills mentioned at the beginning are described again, and they “thrust above the advancing soil – here at last is their skin, finer than any covering acquired by the animals, smoother than windless water, more voluptuous than love” (138–139; emphasis mine). That the assault Adela experiences is immediately registered as a sexual assault is thus already prepared by a long line of preceding semantic isotopies. This evokes the entire set of themes connected with sexuality and marriage, which play a subdued but central role in the novel (cf. Showalter 1977). It is a theme the narrator never engages with, so that the reader is forced to extract it from the disconnected hints distributed over the text. Aziz fantasises about visiting a brothel and starts making the pertinent arrangements (115), a fact that during the trial is held as indicative of the depravity of his character. The reader, however, knows that Aziz finds Adela sexually unattractive and is unlikely to assume that he would go after her in lust. In a conversation with Aziz, Fielding characterises her as “a prig” (130) and “one of the more pathetic products of Western education. She depresses me.” (131) Forster silences Adela for some thirty pages after the incident in the cave, leaving the reader in the dark as to what precisely it was that Adela experienced. It is only after the reader has witnessed the siege mentality develop in the civil station in response to the putative threat against Western femininity, that Adela’s thoughts are made accessible again. Not only is the timing tragic for Aziz: When she prepares a speech for the moment she is going to confront the public, planning to say that “[h]e never actually touched me once” (199), and when she actually tells Ronny that “perhaps there oughtn’t to be any trial” (208), Ronny only supports the overwhelming impression that it its too late to stop the trial when he says that “the machinery has started” (211). What is more, during the trial Adela becomes aware that “her disaster in the cave

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was connected, though by a thread, with another part of her life, her engagement to Ronny. She had thought of love just before she went in, and had innocently asked Aziz what marriage was like, and she supposed that her question had roused evil in him.” (229) The previous hints make it more likely that the question had roused anxieties in Adela – a fear of the physical contact that marriage implied alongside with the husband’s right to it (Showalter 1977); her panic in the cave was that of having to enter a life of adult, married, sexuality, which to Adela is just as threatening and mysterious as any of the other ‘muddles’ in the book. In the transition from the second part to the third, the muddle motif is used for a reflection on the yearning for beauty and harmony, which can be read as a reflection on literature that betrays Forster’s strong allegiance to Western modes of perception and thought, and at the same time his awareness of their inadequacy for an encounter with India. In the last section of the second part, Fielding’s journey from India (via Egypt, Crete, and Venice) is briefly reported. Arriving in Europe, he perceives the “buildings of Venice, like the mountains of Crete and the fields of Egypt” to be “in the right place, whereas in poor India, everything was placed wrong. He had forgotten the beauty of form among idol temples and lumpy hills; indeed, without form, how can there be beauty?” (277–278) What the encounter with the European Renaissance now offers Fielding is “the harmony between the works of man and the earth that upholds them, the civilization that has escaped muddle, the spirit in a reasonable form, with flesh and blood subsisting.” (278) He feels that his Indian friends “would miss the joys he experienced now” because they do not belong to “Mediterranean Harmony” (278). The narrator even goes on to say that “The Mediterranean is the human norm. When men leave that exquisite lake, whether through the Bosphorus or the Pillars of Hercules, they approach the monstrous and extraordinary; and the southern exit leads to the strangest experience of all.” (278) As Suleri (1991) has criticised, Forster constructs the Indian landscape mainly as the backdrop against which the Westerner must check his wishes and anxieties, his knowledge and uncertainties. It is characterised by lack rather than presence. One of the ‘strange’ experiences just mentioned is presented directly after the passage quoted, when the third part starts (pointing to an ellipsis of two years), with Professor Godbole participating in an invocation of a Hindu saint. The narrator suggests that the Western mind cannot grasp how the celebration works, for Godbole and his fellow singers “did not one thing which the non-Hindu would feel dramatically correct”, adding that “this approaching triumph of India was a muddle (as we call it), a frustration of reason and form” (282). Music and lights and inscriptions meant to honour that God appear inefficient to the eye, and one of the inscriptions “(composed in English to indicate His universality) consisted, by an unfortunate slip of the draughtsman, of the words, ‘God si Love.’ God si Love. Is this the final message of India?” (283) Harmony and form here (in Europe), frustration of reason and form there, as the “triumph of India” – if this is the basis of Forster’s own novel about India, how successful can his own attempts at providing the Indian experience with reason

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and form be? The formal clarity of the plot structures and the rhythms notwithstanding, the intercultural relationships remain, and at the time perhaps had to remain, a ‘muddle’. Towards the ending, Aziz and Ralph establish a kind of connection over the remembrance of Mrs Moore, and Fielding and Aziz clear up some misunderstandings between them. Still, the novel answers the question whether the English and the Indians can be friends with “‘No, not yet,’ and the sky said, ‘Not, not there.’” (316)

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Since its publication, A Passage to India has triggered a continuous flow of critical commentary, analyses and interpretations (see, for instance, the collections by Bradbury 1970; Rutherford 1970; Beer 1985; Davies and Wood 1994, as well as the pieces reprinted in Childs 2002). Contemporary readers and reviewers (cf. Gardner 1973, 196– 288) welcomed another work of fiction by Forster after the prolonged waiting period since the publication of Howards End (1910). That the novel won the James Black Tait Memorial Prize for fiction upon its publication in 1924 hints at its appreciation in the literary system, and the sales figures indicate that readers in England and the USA took to the novel quickly, too (Davies 1994, 1). The popularity of the novel was later boosted by three adaptations for different media (Childs 2002, 107–110). In 1960, it was turned into a stage play by Santha Rama Rau. Although Forster approved of the theatre version, he found his novel inadaptable for film. This did not stop the BBC from producing a TV play on the basis of the stage drama for the “BBC Play of the Month” series in 1965. The film “condenses the novel into six scenes, which have the rhythm of three long sections preceded by three shorter ones: Aziz and Mrs Moore at the Mosque, Fielding’s Party, the train journey to the hills, at the Marabar Caves, at the Club and the trial scene.” (Childs 2002, 107–108) The release of David Lean’s monumental film A Passage to India in 1984, also based on the stage play, but introducing additional scenes, was highly successful, winning many Academy Awards (including that for Best Picture, Best Director for David Lean, Best Actress for Judy Davis as Adela, and Best Supporting Actress for Peggy Ashcroft’s rendering of Mrs Moore). It seems that on the screen sexuality automatically acquires a more central role than in the novel, for the BBC play “accentuates Aziz’s sexual significance for Adela” by having him recite “a sensual speech about a beautiful Moghul princess” and creates a moment of intimacy between Aziz and Adela just before they enter the caves (Childs 2002, 108). Lean focuses on what he understands to be Adela’s desires even more strongly. In the feature film, her desires are shown to be pent up and waiting to be released, but frightening her at the same time: she is shown, in a scene Lean has added, contemplating erotic carvings in a ruined temple, being overwhelmed by the impressions and remembering them in bed at night (Childs 2002, 108). In that “mas-

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culinist reading” of the novel, the unattractive woman basically desires to be raped (Sharpe 1991, 27). As the reactions collected in Gardner (1973) demonstrate, early readers and critics mostly praised Forster’s fairness and impartiality, and they acknowledged the qualities of the characterisation. Some Indian middle-class readers expressed their gratefulness to Forster for his critical representation of the injustices of the colonial rulers, while others took him to task for the imbalance of representation in favour of the Muslims, which emerges from the importance of the Aziz/Fielding plot line (cf. Davies 1994, 2–3). Some early readers were not sure what to make of the novel. Arnold Bennett for instance noted in his journal after reading A Passage to India in 1925 that “I don’t know quite what it is about”, and found that “[a]ll the details are good: but the ensemble is fuzzy, or wuzzy” (qtd. in Gardner 1973, 288). After the above discussion, this reaction comes as no surprise, and the very fuzziness needs to be understood as a manifestation of Forster’s general scepticism as to the kind of explanation of the world the novel as a genre could offer, and the role it could play in the general mood of epistemological doubt of the 1910s and 1920s. A novel so full of equivocations and ambiguities that it already puzzled contemporary readers was, unsurprisingly, interpreted in rather disparate ways in the diverse theoretical schools that developed over the twentieth century. Peter Childs attests the novel “fertile ground for the broadest range of analytical and theoretical perspectives”, and sees the cause for this in “the narrative’s simultaneous breadth of reference and radical indeterminacy” (2007, 188). Analyses of A Passage to India based on formalist and structuralist approaches between the 1930s and 1970s are obviously eased by Forster’s use of ‘rhythm’ and ‘pattern’, and one interpretation of such analyses can be that the formal unity of the novel smoothes and integrates the internal conflicts with a view to an overall harmonizing vision (see above, and cf. Davies 1994, 9–10; Childs 2002, 37–38 for summaries of such readings). Subsequent to structuralist approaches, A Passage to India also lent itself to – one could almost say, forced itself into – poststructuralist, or deconstructivist readings. Surveying the novel’s many hints at the difficulty of naming, its insistence on insecurities, on the difficulty of grasping essences, and the mentioning of echoes that are in themselves meaningless, A Passage to India appears almost as a textual performance of Derridean thought. As Gillian Beer puts it, the novel is “after all, a book about gaps, fissures, absences, and exclusions” (1985, 45). Such qualities certainly invite playful readings (e.g. Ayers 1999), but they enable also more serious ones that engage with the intricacies of the construction and deconstruction of meanings through language and discourses (such as Parry 1985; Moffat 1990). This leads to a heightened awareness of the political dimensions of the novel in various ways: In recent times, postcolonial and queer readings in particular have emphasized that “there is no ‘innocent’ reading of A Passage to India” because of the intricate “issues of imperialist, racial and sexual politics” the novel involves (Royle 1999, 73–74).

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A major weakness of the novel, from the point of view of post-colonial criticism, is its naive complicity in supporting essentialist – and the term ‘racist’ is not entirely inappropriate – views on how ‘Orientals’ and ‘Westerners’ are (for a survey of post-colonial readings see Childs 2002, 39–48). Nirad Chaudhuri (1954) was among the early critics who argue along these lines. He criticises Forster also for his flight into personal relationships, which he feels present an inadequate response to the complex political situation of colonial India. Looking back from a distance of thirty years, Chaudhuri blames Forster for supporting the attitude with which the British ultimately withdrew from India, leaving it at the point of chaos but pretending not to be responsible. Benity Parry (1985) is as critical of the essentialisms in A Passage to India as are other readers, but she sees Forster entangled in a web of discourses that he cannot help but reproduce through the very language he uses, even though, at the same time, he argues against some central convictions of those who profit from these discourses. Forster was thus placed in a position of “inheriting and interrogating the discourses of the Raj” (Parry 1985, 27) at the same time. Peter Childs links the leitmotif of the ‘muddle’, much commented on by many other scholars, too, to Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity, arguing that the “endless muddles and mysteries engendered by cultural difference” in A Passage to India are indicative of the hybridity that “shifts power, questions discursive authority, and suggests that colonial discourse is never wholly in the control of the coloniser.” (2002, 47) Gender Studies, Gay, Lesbian and Queer Studies have looked at themes and concerns in Forster’s works that previous critics tactfully or bashfully overlooked (↗ 4 Gender): “Forster’s death in 1970 and the subsequent publication of Maurice and The Life to Come opened the floodgates for critical studies incorporating his sexual themes.” (Martin and Piggford 1997, 18) Although homoerotic and homosexual themes are addressed explicitly in the posthumously published Maurice and the stories in The Life to Come, once Forster’s homosexuality is noted, it is impossible not to read his novels as containing a variety of comments on love relationships that lie outside the heteronormative bourgeois framework. Indeed, all of the non-conventional love interests in Forster’s novels – the ‘queer’ relationships in which the partners, or potential partners, come from different classes, countries, or educational backgrounds – can be read as instantiations of the love that was impossible to be shown or even mentioned openly in society. The novels feature strong ties between men and evoke an atmosphere of homosocial bonding; some present male-female couples who do not find happiness or male friends who are separated by circumstances that keep preventing closer connections from developing. Readings of A Passage to India in particular have shed light on the connections that exist between colonialist thinking and queerness. Queer Studies scholars have, for instance, noted the frequency with which the words ‘queer’ and ‘extraordinary’ occur in the novel (Bristow 1996; Royle 1999), and as the above reading has shown, the relationship between Fielding and Aziz instantiates both the ‘oddness’ of the two men, casting them as queer, and the homoerotic attraction between them (Bakshi 1994; London 1994). That Fielding is so much opposed

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to the racist ideology of the colonisers does not free him from being uncomfortably involved in their nets of institutional and linguistic oppression: After all, he is head of the college (none of whose students ever appear in the novel, by the way) that educates the colonised in terms of the language, world-views and cultural capital of the colonisers. This rough sketch of some major trends in the reception and critical appreciation of A Passage to India cannot do justice to the broad range and variety of readings the novel has produced; neither is any of the schools evoked above monolithic or coherent, so that within the broad field of gender studies there are many articles that argue from the shared perspective of feminist literary criticism, but they either focus on very different aspects of A Passage to India, or they differ considerably in theoretical and methodological respects. For instance, Elaine Showalter (1977), Brenda Silver (1988), and Jenny Sharpe (1991) all consider the cave scene and reflect upon the moment in which Adela becomes aware that with entering the system of marriage she turns into a sexual object, but starting from sociological, poststructuralist and historicist premises, respectively, they pay different degrees of attention to the subtler complexities and differentiations between male and female colonisers and male and female colonised on the one hand, and within colonial society on the other. The articles can be read as proof, however, that A Passage to India has in store a set of different meanings for different readers looking at the text from different perspectives at different times.

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Forster, E. M. A Passage to India. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 [1924]. --Ayers, David. “The Politics of Friendship in A Passage to India.” English Literature of the 1920s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. 210–226. Bakshi, Parminder. “The Politics of Desire: E. M. Forster’s Encounters with India.” A Passage to India. Ed. Tony Davies and Nigel Wood. Buckingham/Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1994. 23–64. Beer, Gillian. “Negation in A Passage to India.” A Passage to India: Essays in Interpretation. Ed. John Beer. London: Macmillan, 1985. 44–58. Beer, John, ed. A Passage to India: Essays in Interpretation. London: Macmillan, 1985. Bradbury, Malcolm, ed. E. M. Forster: A Passage to India. A Selection of Critical Essays. London: Macmillan, 1970. Bristow, Joseph. “Passage to E. M. Forster: Race, Homosexuality, and the ‘Unmanageable Streams’ of Empire.” Imperialism and Gender. Ed. C. E. Gittings. Hebden Bridge: Dangaroo Books, 1996. 138–157. Chaudhuri, Nirad. “Passage To and From India.” Encounter 2 (1954): 19–24. Childs, Peter. “A Passage to India.” The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster. Ed. David Bradshaw. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 188–208.

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Childs, Peter, ed. E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India: A Source Book. London/New York: Routledge, 2002. Davies, Tony. “Introduction.” A Passage to India. Ed. Tony Davies and Nigel Wood. Buckingham/ Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1994. 1–22. Davies, Tony, and Nigel Wood, eds. A Passage to India. Buckingham/Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1994. Davies, Tony. “Introduction.” A Passage to India. Ed. Tony Davies and Nigel Wood. Buckingham/ Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1994. 1–22. Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems 1909–1962. London: Faber and Faber, 1999. Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976 [1927]. Greenberger, Allen J. The British Image of India: A Study in the Literature of Imperialism, 1880–1960. London: Oxford University Press, 1969. Gupta, Brijen K. India in English Fiction, 1800–1970. An Annotated Bibliography. Metuchen: The Scarecrow Press, 1973. Leavis, F. R. “E. M. Forster.” Scrutiny 7.2 (1938): 185–201. Repr. in: E. M. Forster: A Passage to India. A Selection of Critical Essays. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury. London: Macmillan, 1970. 34–47. London, Bette. “Of Mimicry and English Men: E. M. Forster and the Performance of Masculinity.” A Passage to India. Ed. Tony Davies and Nigel Wood. Buckingham/Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1994. 90–120. Martin, Robert K., and George Piggford, eds. Queer Forster. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Moffat, Wendy. “A Passage to India and the Limits of Certainty.” Journal of Narrative Technique 20 (1990): 331–341. Parry, Benita. Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imagination 1880–1930. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Parry, Benita. “The Politics of Representation in A Passage to India.” A Passage to India: Essays in Interpretation. Ed. John Beer. London: Macmillan, 1985. 27–43. Royle, Nicholas. E. M. Forster. Plymouth: Northcote House in Association with the British Council, 1999. Rutherford, Andrew, ed. Twentieth-Century Interpretations of A Passage to India. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970. Sharpe, Jenny. “The Unspeakable Limits of Rape: Colonial Violence and Counter-Insurgency.” Genders 10 (1991): 25–46. Showalter, Elaine. “A Passage to India as ‘Marriage Fiction’: Forster’s Sexual Politics.” Women and Literature 5 (1977): 3–16. Silver, Brenda R. “Periphrasis, Power, and Rape in A Passage to India.” Novel 22 (1988): 86–105. Stallybrass, Oliver. “Introduction.” The Life to Come and Other Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989 [1972]. 7–25. Suleri, Sara. “The Geography of A Passage to India.” E. M. Forster: Modern Critical Views. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 169–175. Teo, Hsu-Ming. “Romancing the Raj: Interracial Relations in Anglo-Indian Romance Novels.” http:// www.ucalgary.ca/hic/issues/vol4/3. History of Intellectual Culture 4.1 (2004) (14 June 2016). Trilling, Lionel. E. M. Forster. London: Hogarth, 1944. Woolf, Virginia. “The Novels of E. M. Forster.” The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91d/chapter 21. html. Adelaide: The University of Adelaide, 2005 (16 August 2016).

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5.2 Further Reading Beauman, Nicola. A Biography of E. M. Forster. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1993. Bradshaw, David, ed. The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Bristow, Joseph. Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Furbank, P. N. E. M. Forster: A Life. 2 Vols. London: Secker & Warburg, 1978. Gardner, Philip, ed. E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage. London/Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973. Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A. Images of the Raj. London: Macmillan, 1988. Herz, Judith Scherer. A Passage to India: Nation and Narration. New York: Twayne, 1993. Herz, Judith Scherer, and Robert K. Martin, eds. E. M. Forster: Centenary Revaluations. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1982. Horatschek, Annegreth. Alterität und Stereotyp: Die Funktion des Fremden in den ‘International Novels’ von E. M. Forster und D. H. Lawrence. Tübingen: Narr, 1998. Kapila, Shuchi. Educating Seeta: The Anglo-Indian Family Romance and the Poetics of Indirect Rule. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010. Kermode, Frank. Concerning E. M. Forster. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2009. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1993.

Timo Müller

9 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927) Abstract: After a brief biographical survey, the first part of the essay situates Virginia Woolf in the social, political, and artistic context of the Bloomsbury Group. It examines the influence of Roger Fry and Clive Bell’s post-impressionist aesthetics on Woolf’s theoretical and fictional writings. The second part identifies central thematic concerns of To the Lighthouse, all of which are bound up with subjective perception: communication and its failure, modern epistemology, authorship. The third part addresses the innovative narrative technique of the novel, whose blurring of the narrator’s voice and the characters’ consciousness can be read as a consequence of the epistemological questions it raises. The leitmotifs of the novel, such as water and the lighthouse, are shown to reflect these epistemological and narrative preoccupations as well. The final section of the essay offers an overview of the scholarly reception of the novel, from narratological and poststructuralist to political and materialist approaches. Keywords: Modernism, communication, epistemology, narratology, reception

1 Context: Author, Œuvre, Moment Virginia Woolf was a child of the Victorian era. She was born in London in 1882, at the height and in the center of the British Empire. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, whose life spanned the whole of Victoria’s reign, was one of the leading intellectuals of the time. In the family home near Hyde Park and the newly opened Royal Albert Hall, Virginia grew up among the likes of Henry James, George Meredith, and John Addington Symonds. Together with her sister Vanessa and her brothers Thoby and Adrian, she received a thorough education in classical and English literature. Her happiest childhood memories, however, were of the summer vacations the family took in St. Ives, a fishing village in Cornwall. Lodged in a comfortable house with a spectacular look over the bay, the Stephens family and their many guests enjoyed the sunny weather, roamed the large garden and adjacent hills, watched the passing ships, and occasionally visited the lighthouse across the bay (Leaska 1998, 50–52; cf. Ellis 2007, 78–109). These vacations ended with the death of Virginia’s mother in 1895, after which the girls were confined to their London home and the demands of their increasingly irritable father. After Leslie Stephens’ death in 1904, the siblings moved to Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, a few miles west of their old home and yet in a different world. Instead of the narrow structures of Victorian family life, they found themselves among young, DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-010

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educated, socially privileged intellectuals who lived together in varying arrangements, spoke openly about sex, and admitted women into their discussions as equals. Through Thoby’s college friends the siblings gained access to a circle of avant-garde artists and intellectuals that would become known as the Bloomsbury Group (cf. Johnstone 1954). The core members of the Bloomsbury Group were the art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell, the painter Duncan Grant, the writers Desmond and Mary MacCarthy, the biographer Lytton Strachey, the novelist E. M. Forster (↗ 8 E. M. Forster, A Passage to India), the economist John Maynard Keynes, and the political theorist Leonard Woolf. Both of the Stephens girls married into this group: impulsive Vanessa married Clive Bell but soon left him for Duncan Grant, with whom she would spend the rest of her life and become a notable painter herself, while Virginia was courted by Leonard Woolf and accepted his proposal of marriage in 1912. From then on the Woolfs established themselves as a power couple of modernist literature. They founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which became a leading forum for experimental writing such as T. S. Eliot’s epochal poem The Waste Land (1922), and worked together on various publication projects, beginning with Two Stories (1917). Most importantly, Leonard supported Virginia throughout her lifelong struggle with nervous breakdowns, which would lead to her suicide in 1941. He became the first reader and promoter of her work, a service for which she expressed deep gratitude on many occasions (Leaska 1998, 192). The members of the Bloomsbury Group shared progressive political ideas such as liberalism, feminism, pacifism, and internationalism, which made them notorious among the London establishment and bolstered their avant-garde status in the cultural scene. They regarded sociopolitical and aesthetic questions as intertwined. Both were best approached by way of disinterested contemplation, they believed, and great art encouraged this approach (Froula 2005, 1–16; cf. Banfield 2000; Dowling 1985). While Keynes went on to become one of the most influential economists of the century, the Bloomsbury artists made a significant impact as well. Together with the towering figure of James Joyce (↗ 7 James Joyce, Ulysses) and the circle around Ezra Pound, they became the most important representatives of English modernism (cf. Whitworth 2010). While E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf are the best-known members of the group today, its modernist aesthetics was first formulated by the art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell. In what has become a catchphrase of literary history, Virginia Woolf located the beginnings of modernism “on or about December 1910” (1968, 320). This auspicious month saw the opening of Manet and the Post-Impressionists, an art exhibition organized by Fry that introduced the British public to Cézanne, Gaugin, van Gogh, and other French avant-garde painters. Fry and his associates praised these painters for reaching beyond impressionism, which by then was an established technique, and for replacing the illusion of realism with the “direct expression of feeling” (Fry 1957, 237). The post-impressionists, Fry claimed in the catalogue of a follow-up exhibition, “do not seek to imitate form, but to create form; not of imitate life, but to find an

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equivalent for life” (1957, 239). The challenge in painting, in this view, is not to catch the likeness of a thing but to transmit a sense of forms and their relations: “to balance certain harmonies, to reconcile certain dissonances, to achieve certain rhythms” in the composition of the picture (Fry 1957, 66). The goal of these efforts is “unity”, Fry argued: if a picture lacks unity we cannot contemplate it in its entirety, but we shall pass outside it to other things necessary to complete its unity. In a picture this unity is due to a balancing of the attractions of the eye about the central line of the picture. The result of this balance of attractions is that the eye rests willingly within the bounds of the picture (1957, 31).

The term Bloomsbury found for this expressive unity came from literary criticism. In his 1901 inaugural lecture at Oxford, the scholar A. C. Bradley argued that poetry could not be appreciated for its content or its form alone. It took the skillful combination of the two: form expressive of meaning, or “significant form” (Bradley 1950 [1909], 19). Both Fry and Bell, whose aesthetic ideas were very similar, adopted the term “significant form” to describe their core requirement of a successful work of art: its ability to “move us in a particular way”, to convey an “aesthetic emotion” (C. Bell 1913, 11; Fry 1957, 295). Significant form moves us, they argued, not because of its fidelity to outward appearance or its pleasing arrangement, but because it expresses a deeper reality, “the all-pervading rhythm that informs all things” (C. Bell 1913, 57). All members of the Bloomsbury Group agreed that it took taste and training to create such works of art or to appreciate them. Most people did not care for significant form, Fry said, because their “aesthetic sensibility” was too weak, so that they focused on content instead of form and tried to understand even abstract painting by looking for correspondences with real-life objects (1957, 15). While the Bloomsbury Group were ready to concede that their own aesthetic sensibility was deficient as well – Bell admitted that he did not understand music (1913, 29–32) – we will see that they were initially perceived as snobs and elitists, as were many other modernist avant-gardes. The writers among the Bloomsbury Group soon realized that these aesthetic ideas promised a new direction for literature as well. Forster’s well-known definition of story and plot, for example, echoes Fry’s distinction between mere representation and significant form (Antor 1986, 92). Virginia Woolf developed her characteristic style of writing in close communication with Fry, whom she credited with keeping her “on the right path, so far as writing goes, more than anyone” (1977, 385). Her best work shows a closeness to painting, not necessarily because it features characters who paint as in To the Lighthouse, but because it focuses on the spatial and the momentary rather than on temporal progression as narrative typically does. Her first published story, “The Mark on the Wall” (1917), for instance, consists almost entirely of the protagonist’s reflections about a spot on the wall of her apartment, which in the end turns out to be a snail. Another early story, “Kew Gardens” (1919), describes a flower bed in the eponymous botanical gardens and the thoughts of people passing it. The organi-

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zation of the story is spatial: it offers detailed descriptions of a place and of the mind but little outward action or temporal development. Woolf’s best-known novels record comparatively short periods of time as well. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is about a single day in the lives of upper-class housewife Clarissa Dalloway and World War I veteran Septimus Smith, whose walks through London structure the novel and orchestrate their thoughts and relationships. To the Lighthouse is set on two half-days separated by more than ten years, but while the half-days are described in much detail the intervening decade is summarized in a brief chapter that reads as if describing a timelapse recording. Woolf conceived that novel as a spatial arrangement from the very beginning. In her first outline she described its basic structure as “two blocks joined by a corridor” and visualized that structure in an abstract drawing that resembles a bulky ‘H’ (Dick 1982, 48; cf. Banfield 2003; Erzgräber 1982, 77–79). While Woolf was approximating her works to painting by focusing on space rather than time, Fry nudged his aesthetic theory toward literature by considering the temporal dimension of abstract art. When he developed his concept of ‘unity’, he acknowledged that the simultaneous perception of forms in a framed painting was not the only kind of unified impression that art could create. In Chinese art, for example, there is a tradition of painting landscapes on silk rolls, so that the viewer crosses a wide stretch of country by gradually unrolling the painting. Since the unrolling has a temporal dimension, Fry pointed out, the unity created by such paintings is comparable to that of literature. It “depends upon the forms being presented to us in such a sequence that each successive element is felt to have a fundamental and harmonious relation with that which preceded it” (1957, 32–33). Woolf’s mature novels can be read as attempts to create such processual unity. They arrange various actions, thoughts, and descriptions successively on the page, but their main concern is not to establish a clear, logical sequence of events. Rather, they aim for an overall impression that derives from the “harmonious relation” of all of these elements. Woolf may be alluding to this parallel when she describes Lily Briscoe, the painter in To the Lighthouse, who is in many ways an authorial surrogate, as having “Chinese eyes” (113)1. The description is often read as a racial slur today (see section 4), but this would have occurred to very few readers at the time. It more likely suggests that Lily looks at the world around her in a certain way, probably in a series of impressions that she tries to bring into a “harmonious relation” with each other as do the Chinese paintings in Fry’s example. Poetry turned out to be the middle ground on which painting and narrative fiction came together. Of all literary genres poetry is arguably the most spatial: it does not take long to read, typically evokes a momentary impression rather than a sequence of events, and is arranged on the page in a certain manner. Fry noticed the proxim-

1 Unless otherwise indicated page references in brackets without further designation refer to Woolf 2000 [1927].

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ity when he began translating the French experimental poet Stéphane Mallarmé in 1915, whose poems seemed to him like word paintings (Dowling 1985, 17). Woolf, on the other hand, began to incorporate poetic techniques into her novels – above all repetition, which features importantly in To the Lighthouse and becomes the central aesthetic principle in her later novel The Waves (1931). Her works have also been compared to imagist poems in that they evoke visual impressions by means of extremely condensed description (cf. Kronenberger 1931; Stearns 2007). Given this attention to language and description rather than action, Woolf herself doubted whether To the Lighthouse could adequately be categorized as a novel and considered calling it an “elegy” instead (A. Bell 1980, 34). All of these medial and generic considerations show how strongly her approach to writing was influenced by post-impressionist art and by the aesthetic theories Fry and Bell developed on its basis. The shift from realism to modernism that resulted from this influence is perhaps best summarized in her essay “Modern Fiction” (1919). The essay points out that our daily experience follows no logical order but is pieced together in uncontrollable ways from the “myriad impressions” our mind receives. If a writer “could write what he chose, not what he must”, therefore, “if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style”: Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? […] Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. (Woolf 1972, 106–107)

The focus on impressions rather than realistic depiction, on the mind rather than outward action, on the chaotic experience of everyday life rather than conventional plot development, on the deep structure beneath this chaos rather than an imposed logic of causes and consequences: all of these aesthetic ideas came together into a unified whole in To the Lighthouse, which Woolf originally planned to dedicate to Fry (Dowling 1985, 97). At the beginning of this chapter we saw that Virginia Woolf was born into the Victorian age and died in the modern. It now remains for us to examine how her greatest novel helped bring this shift about.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns In accordance with her H-shaped outline, Woolf divided To the Lighthouse into three sections. “The Window” follows the Ramsay family and their guests around a summer

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home on the Hebrides shortly before World War I; “Time Passes” surveys the decay and restoration of the summer home in the years that follow; and “The Lighthouse” records the activities of those family members and friends who have returned to the summer home ten years later. While the first and third sections span only a few hours each – “The Window” begins in the late afternoon and ends around midnight; “The Lighthouse” begins around 8 a.m. and ends at lunchtime – the middle section, though much shorter, covers more than ten years including the whole of World War I. Apart from a few flashbacks and parenthetical insertions, the entire novel is set in the summer home and its immediate surroundings, including the eponymous lighthouse on the other side of the bay. The novel opens with the Ramsays discussing their plan to sail to the lighthouse and ends the moment they finally arrive there over a decade later. The Ramsay family is dominated by the parent figures. Mrs. Ramsay is the emotional center of the entire group, which includes her husband, eight children, and six additional house guests: the scientist William Bankes, the painter Lily Briscoe, the poet Augustus Carmichael, the philosopher Charles Tansley, and a young couple, Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle. Mr. Ramsay is a philosopher of some renown, an impressive but self-centered figure plagued by anxieties over the lasting importance of his work. A deeply loving couple, the Ramsays are portrayed as complements in many respects. Mrs. Ramsay is sensitive, caring, and equitable; her husband is brash, egotistic, and petulant. She thinks in social and emotional categories, he in abstract and logical ones (Hafley 1963, 80–84). She is shortsighted, he is farsighted, and so are their worldviews: while she focuses on her immediate social environment and on the challenges of the moment, he roams across history and scholarship but overlooks the needs of those around him and the simple joys of daily life (Erzgräber 1982, 89). Like the setting, the figures of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay have an obvious autobiographical background. They embody the clearly defined roles of Victorian family life that Woolf witnessed in her childhood. Of the Ramsay children we learn most about the oldest two and the youngest two. The oldest, Prue and Andrew, are widely admired for their beauty and intelligence respectively, but their lives are cut short by death in childbirth (Prue) and on the battlefield (Andrew). The youngest, Cam and James, demand much of their mother’s attention in the first section and take center stage in the third when, now in their teens, they accompany their father to the lighthouse. The most consequential change that occurs between the first and third sections is the death of Mrs. Ramsay, which traumatizes her husband and deprives the family and their circle of its emotional center. The third section explores the consequences of this change by juxtaposing the remnants of the family – Mr. Ramsay, Cam, and James – on their way to the lighthouse with Lily Briscoe, who stays behind to complete a painting she had begun in the first section, ten years ago. Unmarried and self-supporting, Lily represents a new, modern conception of womanhood that emerges in opposition to Mrs. Ramsay’s selfless devotion to her family. While many critics in recent decades have reduced To

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the Lighthouse to a feminist treatise, the novel in fact offers a complex, ambivalent exploration of female identity (cf. Burt 1982; Stevenson and Goldman 1996; Zwerdling 1986, 180–209). By tracing the hopes and frustrations of both women in considerable detail, the novel shows that in the modern world as well as the Victorian, finding one’s place in society is a conflictive process that brings moments of self-fulfillment but also moments of existential doubt. And rather than portraying women as inherently different from men, the novel emphasizes that a very similar ambivalence is at work in Mr. Ramsay and his son James (for the broader context ↗ 4 Gender). This brief summary already indicates that much of the action in To the Lighthouse is internal. It takes place in the characters’ minds, which Woolf renders in an innovative narrative technique (see section 3). The main topics and concerns of the novel, then, revolve around the relationship between the inner and the outer world. One of these concerns is communication, or rather the failure of communication. By shifting continually between the characters’ thoughts and actions, the novel foregrounds the difficulties of communicating one’s feelings, ideas, opinions  – in fact one’s entire personality – to others. The novel opens with an instance of failed communication: his parents’ attempt to warn young James that they might not be able to go to the lighthouse the next day due to bad weather. Mr. Ramsay says so outright, which infuriates James; Mrs. Ramsay tries to placate James and says the weather might change, which infuriates Mr. Ramsay because it offends his sense of logic. These approaches – the coldly rational and the illogically emotional – are the extreme ends of a broad range of communicative strategies that the characters will use throughout the novel. While these strategies may bring momentary success, all the characters whose reflections we follow suffer from a sense of isolation and estrangement (Leaska 1970, 71). In the first section this group of isolated individuals is held together by Mrs. Ramsay’s selfless sensitivity, but such a force is lacking in the third section, after the ravages of the War and the disruption of the Victorian family. When the remaining members of the family take their trip to the lighthouse they do so without speaking to each other; instead they project ideas and feelings onto one another without verifying them in mutual exchange. Yet the ending of the novel holds out a hope for meaningful sociality in the modern age. As they arrive at the lighthouse Mr. Ramsay tells James that he has steered the boat well, an unprecedented sign of appreciation. At the same time Lily, who has remained at the house, overcomes her stifling feelings of inferiority to the older generation and is able to finish her painting. The motif of vision indicates that communication is bound up with epistemology, with questions of how and what we perceive that preoccupied many modernist writers. We will see in the next section that the way the novel is narrated foregrounds such questions, but epistemology is also discussed on the topical level because it is the area of philosophy on which Mr. Ramsay works. Lily remembers asking Andrew what his father’s books are about:

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‘Subject and object and the nature of reality,’ Andrew had said. And when she said Heavens, she had no notion what that meant, ‘Think of a kitchen table then,’ he told her, ‘when you’re not there.’ So now she always saw, when she thought of Mr. Ramsay’s work, a scrubbed kitchen table. It lodged now in the fork of a pear tree, for they had reached the orchard. And with a painful effort of concentration, she focused her mind, not upon the silver-bossed bark of the tree, or upon its fish-shaped leaves, but upon a phantom kitchen table, one of those scrubbed board tables, grained and knotted, whose virtue seems to have been laid bare by years of muscular integrity, which stuck there, its four legs in air. (28)

Andrew is alluding to the classic epistemological problem of whether objects exist independently of the perceiving subject. We cannot prove, after all, that the kitchen table is there when no one is around to perceive it. Mr. Ramsay looks for the answer to this and other existential questions in the realm of abstract thought. While he is widely regarded as one of the great thinkers of his time, he is pushing his mind ever further into philosophical abstraction. In one of his ruminations he compares the range of thought to the letters of the alphabet and admits to himself that he has not made it all the way to the end. “He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q. […] But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R it would be something” (39). It is hardly surprising that Mr. Ramsay, the abstract philosopher, would choose this abstract example. It is equally unsurprising that literary critics have interpreted the letters to stand for a variety of things: Q might stand for his quest, for example; R might stand for his own name and thus self-discovery, or for the reality of the world around him or the existential reality of death (Erzgräber 1982, 89; Froula 2005, 171). Mr. Ramsay and his critical readers seem to agree that Z is the point of highest insight, of truth; but most readers doubt whether Mr. Ramsay can arrive there by means of logical thinking alone. The emotional, intuitive understanding his wife possesses seems necessary as well, quite apart from the problem that Z would look different to different people, as Mr. Ramsay’s own philosophical insights suggest (Beja 1964, 144–145; cf. Friedman 1955, 63). Lily, for example, has no idea what Mr. Ramsay is after. Since Andrew’s answer to her question jumps from the highly abstract to the image of the kitchen table without explaining the connection, she is left to her own devices, and these devices are pictorial. She focuses on the concrete objects before her eyes, which she perceives in their colors and shapes. In the scene just quoted she is walking through the orchard and therefore imagines the kitchen table hanging in a tree. She has to force her mind away from “the silver-bossed bark of the tree” and “its fish-shaped leaves” (28) in order to focus on more abstract things. Her way of understanding the relations between “subject and object and the nature of reality” is to perceive and arrange things in a work of art. The few things we learn about the painting she is working on confirm this observation. She is neither a realist nor an impressionist: her paintings consist

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of brightly colored geometrical shapes that are inspired by things around her but do not resemble them (cf. Dowling 1985, 154–157; Harrington 1980). Her approach is contrasted with that of Mr. Paunceforte, a charismatic figure who visited the holiday resort some years earlier and induced painters “to see everything pale, elegant, semi-transparent” (23). The phrasing already indicates that reality depends on perception as much as the other way round. Mr. Paunceforte is vaguely described as an impressionist, which (although the novel never uses these terms) suggests that Lily, who tries to overcome his approach, is something of a post-impressionist. This observation is confirmed by the similarities between Lily’s picture and Fry’s description of post-impressionist art. The first glimpse we get of the picture is during a conversation with Bankes, who wonders what she wants “to indicate by the triangular purple shape” in one corner. She explains that the shape might be taken to represent Mrs. Ramsay reading to James, but that “she had made no attempt at likeness”: her main reason for including the shape was to balance out other shapes in the picture. Like the audience of Fry’s post-impressionist exhibitions, Bankes begins to realize that he is confronted with a new type of painting that is not about “likeness” but about “the relations of masses, of light and shadows” (59). The artistic challenge Lily grapples with throughout the novel is to relate different masses in a convincing overall arrangement. In Fry’s terms she is searching for ‘unity’, and the solution she finds in the final scene of the novel directly echoes Fry’s observation that such unity requires “a balancing of the attractions of the eye about the central line of the picture” (1957, 31): There it was – her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. (225–226)

The triumphant ending of the novel shows Lily achieving the unity she was searching for by drawing a line in the center of the picture, thus bringing the various shapes into a balanced relationship. Critics have suggested that her breakthrough is also a psychological one. The opposing masses in the picture on one level represent the opposing personalities of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, and on a larger scale the principles embodied by the Ramsays: the male and the female, the public and the private, the professional and the domestic, the present and the past, the rational and the emotional, the egoistic and the altruistic (cf. Moody 1963, 38–42). It is when Lily has made her peace with both sides, when she has found her position toward them, that she succeeds in resolving their relationship in the picture as well. On yet another level, the fact that Lily’s picture is finished in the same moment as the novel itself suggests that the challenges she faces and the solutions she finds are at play in the novel as well. After all, the relationship between the Ramsays and their worldviews is the

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central topic of the novel as a whole, and Virginia Woolf too had to define a personal and an aesthetic approach to this topic while writing the novel (cf. Beja 1964, 146–150; Goring 1994; Hafley 1963, 86–89). Lily is not the only character who becomes an author figure in the course of the novel. Mrs. Ramsay, for example, orchestrates the events of the first section much as a traditional Victorian author would, culminating in the dinner scene that assembles the entire cast of characters. Mr. Ramsay is an author by profession, and he worries about the same questions of achievement and afterlife that occur to Lily in the final scene. These parallels indicate that for all their differences, Lily’s artistic perception is not that far removed from either Mrs. Ramsay’s emotional or Mr. Ramsay’s philosophical perception. As Clive Bell pointed out, art resembles abstract thought in transporting us “from the world of man’s activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation”; like the mathematician, for example, the artist arrives at this exaltation by perceiving patterns and relations others do not see (1913, 25). The fact that all three main characters, as well as a number of minor ones, can be read as author figures also points to a central insight the novel derives from the epistemological questions it raises: “the nature of reality” (28) cannot be determined from a single perspective. Every individual perceives the world around him or her in a different way, and it is the interplay of all of these perspectives that constitutes reality. The novel puts this insight into practice by blending the authorial voice with that of the various characters, so that even the authorial version of reality is not privileged over the others. The techniques Virginia Woolf developed to accomplish that blending may be her most important contribution to literary history. They will be the subject of the following section.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies The lack of a reliable authorial voice is the most immediately striking feature of the novel. Woolf undermines the authorial narrator of the novel by frequently using free indirect discourse, a technique that blurs the distinction between the narrative voice and the characters’ thoughts by reporting impressions in the third person without explanatory speech tags. Free indirect discourse had been in use since the mid-nineteenth century, when it was developed by the French novelist Gustave Flaubert. In To the Lighthouse, however, Woolf goes a step further than most of her precursors in that she uses this technique to blur the distinction between different focalisers as well, shifting continually and often imperceptibly from one character’s reflections to another’s. The epistemological instability created by this narrative strategy is apparent from the very beginning of the novel:

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‘Yes, of course, if it’s fine to-morrow,’ said Mrs. Ramsay. ‘But you’ll have to be up with the lark,’ she added. To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night’s darkness and a day’s sail, within touch. Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator as his mother spoke with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy. The wheelbarrow, the lawn-mower, the sound of poplar trees, leaves whitening before rain, rooks cawing, brooms knocking, dresses rustling – all these were so coloured and distinguished in his mind that he had already his private code, his secret language, though he appeared the image of stark and uncompromising severity, with his high forehead and his fierce blue eyes, impeccably candid and pure, frowning slightly at the sight of human frailty, so that his mother, watching him guide his scissors neatly round the refrigerator, imagined him all red and ermine on the Bench or directing a stern and momentous enterprise in some crisis of public affairs. (7)

The first two sentences of the longer paragraph render the thoughts of James Ramsay, a six-year-old child, in the voice of an authorial narrator who comments on these thoughts while reporting them. The short sentence in the middle of the paragraph, “It was fringed with joy”, is classic free indirect discourse in that it can be read either as the narrator’s description of the cut-out refrigerator or as James’ impression of it. The following sentence seems to take up the narrator’s rendering of James’ thoughts but ends with his mother’s thoughts about James. It remains uncertain when exactly this shift has occurred: only after the reference to “his mother”, or in the transition from “his secret language” to the way “he appeared” from the outside, or even at the very beginning of the sentence? Such ambiguous transitions can be found on almost every page of the novel (with the exception of “Time Passes”), and they often happen within paragraphs, so that readers are left uncertain as to whose perspective they are getting or even unaware that a shift of perspective has occurred at all. This strategy is not interior monologue, as is sometimes claimed, because the authorial narrative voice retains a strong presence; it is more accurately described as the “multipersonal representation of consciousness”, a term coined by Erich Auerbach in one of the first detailed analyses of To the Lighthouse (2003 [1946], 536). Another early study provided a statistical chart of the different focalisers, confirming that the first section centers on Mrs. Ramsay and the third on Lily Briscoe. According to this chart, 42 % of the first section are focalised through Mrs. Ramsay, 17 % through the narrator (zero-focalisation), 13 % through Lily, and 8 % through Mr. Ramsay; on the whole there are about a dozen different focalisers. In the third section Lily takes the lead with 61 %, the narrator has 10 %, and the remaining Ramsays combine for 28 %, with James and Cam sometimes acting as focalisers at the same time (Leaska 1970, 208; cf. Levenson 2015; Volk-Birke

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1993). Since the focalising characters reflect not only on the events but on each other as well, the reader experiences the same epistemological instability as the characters. It is often unclear whether a statement has the authority of the narrator behind it or whether it is one of the characters’ subjective impressions. As a result, we can never be sure to be getting a truthful, objective account of what happens, which in turn raises the question of what we mean by terms like ‘truthful’ and ‘objective’ and why we expect a novel to give such an account when real life never does (cf. Müller 2010). In historical perspective, these questions shatter the false certainties of Victorian omniscient narration and take us into the epistemologically instable world of modernism, in which all perceptions are subjective and difficult to communicate. The multipersonal representation of consciousness also inspired a new narrative language. When Woolf considered calling To the Lighthouse an elegy, she indicated that the new book was to be written in a more poetic style than conventional novels – a goal she shared with fellow modernists like James Joyce (↗ 7 James Joyce, Ulysses), William Faulkner, and Gertrude Stein. Her letters and diaries show that Woolf primarily defined her new style of writing in terms of rhythm, and that she compared the rhythm of writing to the rhythm of music and water. She wanted to compose her sentences with a focus on sound rather than logic, and to replace the linear, progressive sentences of previous novelists with sentences that flow and recede like water on the shore (Winston 2009, 24). The paragraph quoted above, for example, mostly consists of long sentences that rise in intensity, but they do not rise in a linear manner: the many subclauses, separated by commas, create a rhythmic movement not unlike the whirling of water across the rocks on a shore. This connection is sustained by the many references to the sea and the beach in the novel. Mrs. Ramsay in particular thinks continually of the sea, which seems to have a calming influence on her, and one critic has suggested that her consciousness “mimics the motion of the sea with its own steady and soothing ‘waves’ of thought” (Bartlett 2010, 20). Another such merging of rhythm and motif can be found in the middle section of the novel, in which time becomes something of a protagonist and the rhythm of the language quiets down to suggest the slow but inevitable progress of “Time Passing”. Repetition becomes a central aesthetic feature throughout the novel because it evokes notions like the passage of time and the lapping of waves on the beach, but also because it creates leitmotifs in the musical sense of the term. The many intertexts, for example, continually weave a certain topic or association back into the plot the way a certain chord or harmony reappears in a musical composition. Among these leitmotifs are the militarism and tragedy of the poems Mr. Ramsay keeps reciting, the maritime and moral associations of the fairy tale Mrs. Ramsay is reading to James, and the reflections on love and transience in Shakespeare’s sonnets (cf. Barzilai 1995). Many of the settings (window, garden, sea) function as leitmotifs as well, as do less conspicuous elements such as the colors and their symbolic connotations (cf. Daiches 1963, 87–88; Erzgräber 1982, 81–82). The central leitmotif is the lighthouse, which provides the title of the novel and interlinks with many other motifs. It provides

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a point of orientation and stability in the incessant flow of the waves. In this it resembles Mr. Ramsay, who is also described as tall and lean: his wife regards him as a source of mental stability, and he remains a problematic but constant reference point in the thoughts of Lily and his children. The lighthouse among the waves also promises permanence and survival, Mr. Ramsay’s main concerns as he ponders the fate of his work in the first section of the novel. This promise is questioned in the following sections, however. In the middle section the strokes of light are linked to the passage of time as they illuminate the progressive decay of the house. In the final section the journey to the lighthouse becomes a death rite. Undertaken in memory of Mrs. Ramsay, it begins with an ominous farewell to Lily, proceeds silently, and is patterned by the stories about shipwrecks Mr. Ramsay shares with the fishermen or quotes from Romantic poetry (cf. Kaehele and German 1970, 199). Mrs. Ramsay, by contrast, identifies not with the lighthouse itself but with the light emanating from it. Like the rays of light, she brings moments of warmth and happiness to many of the cold, unhappy people around her, including Mr. Ramsay, Lily, and Charles Tansley. In a way her light shines on even after her death, as the journey to the lighthouse resolves many of the tensions and problems the remaining house guests have experienced. Cam and James overcome their hatred of their father, Mr. Ramsay begins to care for those around him, and Lily solves the challenge of finishing her painting (cf. Leaska 1970, 120–122). It is significant that she does so by drawing a “line down the centre” (226) of the picture: this vertical line associates her breakthrough with the form of the lighthouse. From the title to the very end of the novel, the lighthouse is its symbolic center. The lighthouse is thus an example of what Fry and Bell called ‘significant form’, both in the original sense of form invested with meaning, and in the sense of an arrangement of formal elements that expresses a deeper reality. The same can be said of many other motifs and symbols, as well as of the rhythmic, repetitive language in which the novel is written. All of these formal devices function as structuring elements in that they provide points of orientation and establish connections between different scenes and characters. In a move typical of literary modernism, To the Lighthouse is no longer structured by the causal links of a linear plot related by a clearly identifiable narrator. Like Lily’s painting, which makes “no attempt at likeness” (59), the novel shifts its attention from content to form, or in historical terms, from a realist to a modernist aesthetic.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Despite or perhaps because of this shift, To the Lighthouse became the most popular of Virginia Woolf’s novels among readers as well as professional critics. It attained this status within weeks of its original publication, with most book reviewers praising the novel as her best to date, though some disliked the lack of a plot and the narrow

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domestic setting (cf. Winston 2009, 74–78). In the following decades its reputation, like that of Woolf’s entire work, suffered under the attacks of F. R. Leavis, the most influential English critic of the mid-twentieth century. Leavis disliked the Bloomsbury Group as a whole, accusing them of elitism and self-promotion, and he faulted Woolf’s work for failing to represent real life: “The preoccupation with intimating ‘significance’ in fine shades of consciousness, together with the unremitting play of visual imagery, the ‘beautiful’ writing and the lack of moral interest and interest in action, give the effect of something closely akin to a sophisticated aestheticism” (1941 [1970], 99; cf. Annan 1987). While a few appreciative studies of Woolf appeared in the 1930s and 1940s, including one by Forster (1942), it was not until the English publication of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Culture in 1953 that To the Lighthouse began to receive sustained critical attention. Auerbach’s widely influential study, which traced the history of realism since antiquity, concluded with a close reading of Woolf’s novel that emphasized its narrative and temporal complexity. By positioning To the Lighthouse as a culmination and turning point of Western realism, Auerbach accorded Woolf a historical stature she had not possessed before and inspired more benevolent readings of the novel (2003 [1946], 525–553). Many of these readings centered on narrative technique, especially on the uses of focalisation in the novel (cf. Leaska 1970; Hafley 1963, 77–131), while others adopted a structuralist method and traced its underlying formal patterns. Since To the Lighthouse is a tightly structured novel, this approach yielded a number of insightful observations about the relationships among the characters, the significance of the spaces in which the characters move, and the symbolic patterns that support characterization (cf. Daiches 1963, 79–96; Moody 1963, 36–42). The next wave of reception was triggered by two simultaneous developments in the 1970s: the growing availability of Woolf’s personal writings (letters, notebooks, diaries) and the rise of feminism in the academy. Biographical approaches to Woolf’s work multiplied as a result, and To the Lighthouse with its autobiographical background and its juxtaposition of Victorian and modern womanhood was reinterpreted as a feminist parable. While early feminist readings operated with clear oppositions between male and female, often suggesting that Woolf’s writings were “androgynous” in that they combined both principles (cf. Marder 1968, 144–152), the 1980s saw a turn to constructivist approaches that stressed how Woolf’s writing undermined conventional notions of masculinity and femininity alike (cf. Spivak 1980; London 1990, 129–153). These approaches were in turn influenced by poststructuralism, which became the dominant paradigm in English literary studies in the 1980s and 1990s. The fact that most poststructuralist readings of To the Lighthouse centered on gender shows how dominant feminism had become in the critical discussion of the novel, especially in the United States (cf. Caughie 1991). There are a few insightful readings that focus on other aspects, however, including an early essay by the pioneering poststructuralist Geoffrey Hartman on the self-reflexive treatment of the imagination in the novel (1961). Another approach that rose to prominence alongside feminist criti-

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cism is psychoanalysis, which treated Woolf as an exemplary case study because of her sexual anxieties and her long history of mental illness. To the Lighthouse was especially popular with Freudian critics. The relationship between James Ramsay and his parents clearly has Oedipal traits, after all, and many of the symbols can be read as either phallic (the lighthouse, the column, the scimitar) or as suggesting fecundity (the rain, the garden) (cf. Steinberg 1953). The next turning point in Woolf criticism came in the early 1990s, when Jane Marcus’s essay “Britannia Rules The Waves” (1992) turned attention to the Bloomsbury Group’s complicity with British imperialism. Studies of Woolf, empire, and race rarely discuss To the Lighthouse in any detail, however, as these topics play a marginal role in the novel, especially in comparison with her other works. The most thorough postcolonialist interpretation of the novel so far is Urmila Seshagiri’s “Orienting Virginia Woolf” (2004), which takes its cue from Mrs. Ramsay’s and the authorial narrator’s claim that Lily Briscoe is unattractive because of her “Chinese eyes” (113). The essay works out the stereotypes about Asia and the Orient encoded in this phrase and draws attention to other reminders of empire in the Ramsay summer home, including the book about “the Savage Customs of Polynesia”, a necklace Mrs. Ramsay received as a souvenir from India, and the “horrid skull” in the children’s bedroom, which was originally a hunting trophy (Seshagiri 2004, 68). It also shows how the images of cracked teacups and china dishes in the “Time Passes” section complicate the narrator’s lament of the destructions caused by World War I by suggesting that such wars are brought about by imperial greed (Seshagiri 2004, 69). Recent decades have seen a turn to materialist approaches that situate authors and literary works in their concrete socio-historical settings. While several materialist critics of Woolf’s work have written on To the Lighthouse, their readings of the novel have either reiterated old biographical arguments (cf. Zwerdling 1986, 180–209) or strayed away from material issues (cf. Beer 1996, 29–47). These problems might be due to the novel’s focus on the inner as opposed to the material life that Leavis and his followers had already bemoaned. Nevertheless, there are several aspects of the novel that such approaches might elucidate in the future, for example the spatial and social structures in which the Ramsay summer home is located. Another recent approach that promises insightful readings in the future is ecocriticism, which, somewhat surprisingly given the ubiquity of natural settings and motifs in the novel, has not been turned to systematic use yet (cf. Bartlett 2010). Woolf criticism will continue to be dominated by feminist and cultural approaches for some time to come, but formalist questions are beginning to reassert themselves (cf. Banfield 2000). After all, it is the unique, innovative aesthetic form of the novel that has secured Woolf’s historical stature and made To the Lighthouse a masterpiece of literary modernism.

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5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Since Virginia Woolf made different corrections in the proofs of the British and the American editions of To the Lighthouse, there are two slightly different versions of the novel today. The British one is available in the Penguin Modern Classics series, edited by Stella McNichol and ably introduced by Hermione Lee. The American edition is available from Harvest Books, edited with useful annotations by Mark Hussey. This essay refers to the Penguin Modern Classics edition: Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Ed. Stella McNichol. London: Penguin, 2000 [1927]. --Annan, Noel. “Bloomsbury and the Leavises.” Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration. Ed. Jane Marcus. London: Macmillan, 1987. 23–38. Antor, Heinz. The Bloomsbury Group: Its Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Literary Achievement. Heidelberg: Winter, 1986. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003 [1946]. Banfield, Ann. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Banfield, Ann. “Time Passes: Virginia Woolf, Post-Impressionism, and Cambridge Time.” Poetics Today 24.3 (2003): 471–516. Bartlett, Adrienne. “The Forces of Nature in To the Lighthouse: Friend or Foe?” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 78 (2010): 28–30. Barzilai, Shuli. “The Politics of Quotation in To the Lighthouse: Mrs. Woolf Resites Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Cowper.” Literature and Psychology 41.3 (1995): 22–43. Beer, Gillian. Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996. Beja, Morris. “Matches Struck in the Dark: Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Vision.” Critical Quarterly 6 (1964): 137–152. Bell, Anne Olivier, ed. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 3. London: Hogarth Press, 1980. Bell, Clive. Art. New York: Stokes, 1913. Bradley, A. C. Oxford Lectures on Poetry. London: Macmillan, 1950 [1909]. Burt, John. “Irreconcilable Habits of Thought in A Room of One’s Own and To the Lighthouse.” ELH 49.4 (1982): 889–907. Caughie, Pamela. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Daiches, David. Virginia Woolf. 2nd ed. New York: New Directions, 1963. Dick, Susan, ed. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982. Dowling, David. Bloomsbury Aesthetics and the Novels of Forster and Woolf. London: Macmillan, 1985. Ellis, Steve. Virginia Woolf and the Victorians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Erzgräber, Willi. Virginia Woolf. Munich: Artemis, 1982. Forster, E. M. Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942. Friedman, Norman. “The Waters of Annihilation: Double Vision in To the Lighthouse.” ELH 22.1 (1955): 61–79.

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Froula, Christine. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Fry, Roger. Vision and Design. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957. Goring, Paul. “The Shape of To the Lighthouse: Lily Briscoe’s Painting and the Reader’s Vision.” Word & Image 10.3 (1994): 222–229. Hafley, James. The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963. Harrington, Henry R. “The Central Lines Down the Middle of To the Lighthouse.” Contemporary Literature 21.3 (1980): 363–382. Hartman, Geoffrey. “Virginia’s Web.” Chicago Review 14.4 (1961): 20–32. Johnstone, J. K. The Bloomsbury Group: A Study of E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and Their Circle. London: Secker & Warburg, 1954. Kaehele, Sharon, and Howard German. “To the Lighthouse: Symbol and Vision.” Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse: A Casebook. Ed. Morris Beja. London: Macmillan, 1970. 189–209. Kronenberger, Louis. “Poetic Brilliance in the New Novel by Mrs. Woolf: ‘The Waves’ Carries Experimental Technique in Fiction Almost to the Jumping-Off Place.” New York Times. 25 October 1931. https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/08/reviews/woolf-waves.html (8 July 2016). Leaska, Mitchell. Virginia Woolf’s Lighthouse: A Study in Critical Method. London: Hogarth Press, 1970. Leaska, Mitchell. Granite and Rainbow: The Hidden Life of Virginia Woolf. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1998. Leavis, F. R. “After To the Lighthouse.” Twentieth-Century Interpretations of To the Lighthouse. Ed. Thomas A. Vogler. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1970 [1941]. 99–100. Levenson, Michael. “Narrative Perspective in To the Lighthouse.” The Cambridge Companion to To the Lighthouse. Ed. Allison Pease. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 19–29. London, Bette. The Appropriated Voice: Narrative Authority in Conrad, Forster, and Woolf. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. Marcus, Jane. “Britannia Rules The Waves.” Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century “British” Literary Canon. Ed. Karen Lawrence. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. 136–162. Marder, Herbert. Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Moody, A. D. Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1963. Müller, Timo. The Self as Object in Modernist Fiction: James, Joyce, Hemingway. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010. Seshagiri, Urmila. “Orienting Virginia Woolf: Race, Aesthetics, and Politics in To the Lighthouse.” MFS 50.1 (2004): 58–84. Spivak, Gayatri. “Unmaking and Making in To the Lighthouse.” Women and Language in Literature and Society. Ed. Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman. New York: Praeger, 1980. 310–327. Stearns, Thaine. “Pilfering Modernism’s Image: Woolf and Those Other Londoners.” Woolfian Boundaries: Selected Papers from the Sixteenth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anna Burrells et al. Clemson: Clemson University Digital, 2007. 121–126. Steinberg, Erwin R. “Freudian Symbolism and Communication.” Literature and Psychology 3.2 (1953): 2–5. Stevenson, Randall, and Jane Goldman. “‘But what? Elegy?’: Modernist Reading and the Death of Mrs Ramsay.” Yearbook of English Studies 26 (1996): 173–186. Volk-Birke, Sabine. “‘Nothing is simply one thing’: Das Problem der Wahrnehmung in Virginia Woolfs Roman To the Lighthouse.” Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch 64 (1993): 115–130.

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Whitworth, Michael H. “Virginia Woolf, Modernism and Modernity.” The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Sellers. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 107–123. Winston, Janet. Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: A Reader’s Guide. London: Continuum, 2009. Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays. Vol. 1. London: Hogarth Press, 1968. Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays. Vol. 2. London: Hogarth Press, 1972. Woolf, Virginia. The Letters. Vol. 3. Ed. Nigel Nicholson. London: Hogarth Press, 1977. Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

5.2 Further Reading Beja, Morris, ed. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse: A Casebook. London: Macmillan, 1970. Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. London: Hogarth Press, 1990. Caughie, Pamela. “Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse.” The Blackwell Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture. Ed. David Bradshaw and Kevin Dettmar. New York: Blackwell, 2006. 486–498. Caws, Mary Ann, and Nicola Luckhurst, eds. The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe. London: Continuum, 2002. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Chatto & Windus, 1996. Levenback, Karen. Virginia Woolf and the Great War. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Rosenbaum, S. P. The Bloomsbury Group. London: Croom Helm, 1975. Vogler, Thomas, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of To the Lighthouse. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1970.

Anya Heise-von der Lippe

10 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932) Abstract: This chapter reads Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) in the literary context of early twentieth-century dystopias, arguing that the novel’s criticism of its cultural context focused on the predominantly American technocratic consumer culture Huxley perceived to be on the rise at the time and the possible consequences for humanity, which might result in nothing less than a complete de-humanization and the mass-production of (post-)human beings. The chapter attempts a reading of the text in the light of recent critical posthumanist theory alongside an overview of critical approaches to the novel, focusing mainly on the framework of feminist and dystopian readings. Key strategies of utopian and dystopian narrative, the posthuman and intertextual connections to Shakespeare, whose works serve as a literary counterpart to the mass-produced mediality and hedonistic culture of the novel’s World State, are discussed alongside narrative strategies which underline these issues in the text. Keywords: Dystopia, the posthuman, technocratic totalitarianism, ironic criticism, intertextuality

1 Context: Author, Œuvre, Moment Aldous Huxley took a pessimistic view of contemporary society in 1931, the year he was writing the fifth of his eleven novels, Brave New World (see Baker 1990 and Murray 2002). Robert S. Baker, for instance, quotes one of Huxley’s letters, in which he complained: “It’s a bad world; at the moment worse than usual. One has the impression of being in a lunatic asylum  – at the mercy of driveling imbeciles and dangerous madmen in a state of frenzy  – the politicians” (1990, 5). The step from political disillusionment to the writing of dystopian fiction was, however, not a foregone conclusion. Huxley’s previous novels Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925), and Point Counter Point (1928) focused on “social history” and the “generational conflict of the 1920s” (Baker 1990, 2 and 4), which “seemed to indicate that he would never stoop to utopian themes” (Meckier 2003a, 34). Indeed, Huxley was considered “the preeminent figure in the vanguard of English intellectual and literary culture. His name alone conveyed a mood of ironic social and literary criticism, reflecting his talent for propounding shocking new ideas while attacking works and theories he considered hopelessly outdated” (Sisk 1999, 122). His dystopian work must be seen in this context. The “urge to write a literary satire on existing works went hand in hand with the desire to challenge, by means of a correcting, less DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-011

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optimistic vision of his own, the picture of the future that science was enthusiastically offering” (Meckier 2003a, 35). Huxley took the stance of an “amused, skeptical aesthete” (Bloom 2003, 1), offering a dystopian criticism of his own cultural and scientific context in the guise of literary satire, engaging, for example, with the utopian work of H. G. Wells (see Deery 2003, 129). It was only later in life that Huxley was to become a “transcendental visionary” (Bloom 2003, 1). Published within thirty years of each other, Huxley’s two major dystopian/utopian novels Brave New World and Island (1962) enter into a critical dialogue, which “exemplifies the evolution of Huxley’s world view” (Rabinovitch 2009, 183). While Brave New World is undisputedly the better-known text, Island has been read as a “point by point reply” (Meckier 2003a, 52) to the earlier novel. This intertextual connection is supported by Huxley’s own comments in the 1946 Preface to Brave New World, in which he observes that, while he found it “amusing” to let the Savage choose between “two alternatives, an insane life in Utopia, or the life of a primitive in an Indian village, a life more human in some respects but in others hardly less queer and abnormal” (6)1, he would “offer the Savage a third alternative,” were he to “rewrite the book” (7): “Between the utopian and the primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity – a possibility already actualized, to some extent, in a community of exiles and refugees from the Brave New World” (7). In this instance Huxley also details the necessary political, scientific, religious and philosophical framework of such a society, which he later describes in more detail in Island. In this novel “Huxley offers an island of mystics” (Meckier 2003a, 53), a culture combining both “Western knowledge and Eastern religion […] the best of both worlds” (Meckier 2003a, 52). The disruptive influence in this context arrives in the form of Westernized, materialist culture, which is set on exploiting the island’s resources in the name of rapid progress, rather than the controlled technological development practiced by the islanders. Huxley’s solution to the growing “over-organization” of the “bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big Government” described in Brave New World Revisited is also closely related to his vision in Island: [I]f you wish to avoid the spiritual impoverishment of individuals and whole societies, leave the metropolis and revive the small country community, or alternatively humanize the metropolis by creating within its network of mechanical organization the urban equivalents of small country communities, in which individuals can meet and cooperate as complete persons, not as the mere embodiments of specialized functions. (336)

“Viewed from the vantage point of Island, in which many of the questions Huxley raised in 1932 are revived and updated, Brave New World is seen as a society that confronted the right problems but with the wrong answers” (Meckier 2003a, 55). H ­ uxley’s

1 Unless otherwise indicated page references in brackets without further designation refer to Huxley 2005.

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project is to show “the appallingness of Utopia” (qtd. in Zigler 2015, 32) in describing a society which is so obsessed with the constant happiness of its citizens that it has begun to manufacture those citizens to its own standards – not as “complete persons” but as “specialized functions” serving society as a whole (336). In the Brave New World, “[p]ractically everything is not only disposable but synthetic” (Deery 2003, 130). This includes “consumers as well as consumer items” (Deery 2003, 130). The novel describes a rigid caste system of mass-produced posthuman beings manufactured to various standards of intelligence and ability. Only the highest caste, the Alphas, still possess free will, which they are, however, not encouraged to use. The main protagonists mostly stem from this level of society: Bernard Marx, who feels at a disadvantage due to his “physical inadequacy” (69) and his friend, Helmholtz Watson, whose “mental excess” (71) puts him in a similar position in a society based on conformity. Both men are involved with the production of hypnopaedic media and, therefore, to some extent, aware of the fact that everyone in society is being manipulated. This adds to their sense of discontent and nonconformity. The main female character, Lenina Crowne, is a Beta embryo-store worker, whose role in the novel is limited to being an object of male desire. As Bernard Marx observes, she even seems to think of herself “that way. She doesn’t mind being meat” (92). The ‘other’ to the novel’s cultural ‘normality’ is, however, represented by a complete outsider, John, who is rechristened “the Savage” (144) as soon as he enters the seemingly more civilized society of the Brave New World. As the unintentional child of the Director of Hatcheries and a former Beta embryo-store worker who was accidentally left behind on a trip to a Native American reservation in New Mexico, he is a misfit in both cultures. While the novel’s main conflict is enacted between the ‘savage’ outsider and the ‘civilized’ world, the latter also functions as a dystopian society in its own rights.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns 2.1 Utopia/Dystopia Like Island, Brave New World also draws on the model of utopian literature set by Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). The two novels, however, approach the project of envisioning future developments from different sides of the eutopian/dystopian spectrum between envisioned ideal well-being and undesirable states of affairs. As Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini argue: “the ‘typical’ eutopian narrative with a visitor’s guided journey through a utopian society which leads to a comparative response that indicts the visitor’s own society” differs from the dystopian model, which, by contrast, is generally “built around the construction of a narrative of the hegemonic order and a counter-narrative of resistance” (2003, 5). Brave New World, interestingly, combines

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both seemingly eutopian and blatantly dystopian elements, drawing attention to its somewhat ambiguous, ironic position. While the novel begins in the Brave New World, centering on Bernard Marx’s, albeit ludicrously hesitant, resistance to the cultural standard, it later introduces a visitor, the Savage, whose reactions to the Brave New World serve as a more obvious narrative of resistance. It is remarkable, in this context, that the Savage is the child of two citizens of the World State (rather than an actual Native American), revealing the inherent racism and classism of the World State’s view of the ‘uncivilized’ parts of the world, which is also part of the educational programming undergone by Alphas and Betas at Eton: “In the Beta-Minus geography room John learnt that ‘a savage reservation is a place which, owing to unfavourable climatic or geological conditions, or poverty of natural resources, has not been worth the expense of civilizing’” (149). This cynical view frames the powerless position of the savage reservation within the hegemonic order of the World State: “The favela/reservation is hierarchically placed qua power relations, which, by the same token, ‘includes’ it in a broader context, that of the biopolitical capitalist economy” (Diken 2011, 158). John, the Savage, functions as the action’s main catalyst, although the narrative perspective does not encourage reader identification with him or any other of the main characters. One could, at a glance, be tempted to read the main character constellation between Bernard Marx, John and Lenina Crowne as a twisted, tragic love triangle. Thomas Horan even goes so far as to suggest that Huxley, like other major authors of dystopian fiction, “present[s] sexual desire as an aspect of the self that can never be fully appropriated” (2007, 314) by the totalitarian system. Such a reading would, of course, have to take into account the fact that the Brave New World itself has done away with love – and any kind of feeling – in favour of hypnopaedically suggested polygamy. “When the individual feels, the community reels” (92) one slogan suggests, and “everyone belongs to everyone else” (48). Moreover, the text presents John’s admiration of Lenina in a slightly detached, comical manner, as the Shakespearean model in John’s mind necessitates heroic gestures and admiration from afar. This wooing strategy is doomed to fail with Lenina, who has been conditioned to behave in a much more straightforward way. When she takes John’s protestations of love at face value and strips off her clothes, John rejects her advances and resorts to Shakespearean insults: “Whore! Impudent strumpet!” (177) As Baker concludes, “John is driven by his pervasive sense of guilt; rejected by his mother and by his community, humiliated by her sexual promiscuity and by his own desire for Lenina, John can only see women in terms of fanatically extreme oppositions […] as either saints or prostitutes” (1990, 135). This contrast creates a sense of ironic detachment, which is closely connected to the dystopian criticism of the Brave New World’s post-human citizens, who live mostly in the moment, in a seemingly utopian state of universal happiness. As Bülent Diken argues, attempting to draw a connection between “Huxley’s Brave New World – and Ours”, this “‘happiness’ is one reduced to sheer consumerism, just as ‘politics’ in the brave new world is degraded to conformism” (2011, 154).

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It is Huxley’s skeptical distance which sets Brave New World apart from other dystopian classics published in the first half of the twentieth century – most prominently Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1948). While Orwell’s vision of a dystopian future describes a crushingly scarce socialist system modeled on the totalitarian surveillance states in Russia and Germany, Brave New World can be read as a “satire of the ‘American Dream’” (Rohmann 2012/13, 267). The novel envisions a hedonistic, consumerist society based on the constant, drug-induced happiness of its citizens, which makes it seem almost utopian in comparison. Even more so, as the few dissenters who rebel against the dominant system of the World State face no worse fate than being deported to an island of their choice (cf. 206) to, presumably, live with other likeminded individuals. While the inhabitants of Huxley’s World State may not be as miserable and downtrodden as those of Oceania in 1984, one can, nevertheless, argue that Brave New World introduces a totalitarian system, which results in a form of “inertia that stifles both the individual and society” (Myron 2008, 11). Indeed, Brave New World describes a technocratic society, which keeps its citizens docile (in Foucault’s sense) in a number of physically and mentally invasive ways  – most prominently genetic manipulation and intensive physiological and psychological conditioning. Compared to a totalitarian regime ruling with brute force, as Orwell imagined it, “Huxley’s most significant insights on this matter lie in his recognition that a more enduring form of totalitarian rule might be possible by actually securing the consent of the people.” (Zigler 2015, 49) As the Director of Hatcheries points out in Chapter One, “that is the secret of happiness and virtue – liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny” (26). From their (bottled) embryonic state onwards, everyone in the World State is physically and mentally conditioned [t]ill at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too – all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides – made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestion are our suggestions! […] Suggestions from the State. (36)

For (most of) the inhabitants of the World State rebellion or political dissent are, thus, literally unthinkable, as they have been bred to conform to the state doctrines. Conditioning and constant use of the drug soma certainly soften the blow of living in a controlled society, but the fact remains that scientific articles and even propagandistic rhymes (written by Alphas who still possess the potential of creative thought) are censored by the adequately named world controllers. Mustapha Mond, “the Resident Controller for Western Europe” (40), might ostensibly regret the necessity (cf. 162), but he is still in charge of suppressing any article that could give people ideas “outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some

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e­ nlargement of knowledge” (162). The “result in Brave New World of society’s admiration for scientific advances and of its worship of progress – two attitudes Huxley cannot share  – is a condition in which neither is any longer allowable” (Meckier 2003a, 38). In this context, Brad Congdon draws a connection between the technocratic rule of the World State and its religion of ‘Fordism’, reading Brave New World as “a preemptive critique of the type of belief systems which might be mobilized to make the society of the future possible” (2011, 83). The novel describes “an insanely rational society” for which it summarily blames “America’s archetypal technocrat” (Meckier 2002, 427), Henry Ford. This imputation is underlined by “[o]nomastic [s] atire” (Meckier 2003b, 155): “the more the brave new world glorifies Ford’s name, the more ridiculous his grossly inflated importance becomes” (Meckier 2003b, 182). The inflationary use of ‘Ford’ is particularly obvious in part two of Chapter Five, which describes Bernard’s participation in a “Solidarity Service” (80) – a pseudo-religious ritual dedicated to Ford worship. Bernard’s internal skepticism of the proposed concepts of “annihilation” (82) and “the Coming” (83) is ironically contrasted with his constant, silent invocations of “Ford!” (81), for example in the context of the unpleasant seating arrangements, which place him between unibrowed Morgana Rothschild and “too pneumatic” (81) Clara Deterding. The extreme hegemonic control exercised by the World State on its citizens is reflected in its motto “Community, Identity, Stability” (15), which is supposed to guarantee everyone’s constant happiness, but effectively results in a form of technocratic totalitarianism combined with an enforced ideological system. As Hannah Arendt argues in her essay “On the Nature of Totalitarianism”, ideologies are systems of explanation of life and world that claim to explain everything, past and future, without further concurrence with actual experience. […] Insofar as ideological thinking is independent of existing reality, it looks upon all factuality as fabricated, and therefore no longer knows any reliable criterion for distinguishing truth from falsehood. […] Terror is needed in order to make the world consistent and keep it that way; to dominate human beings to the point where they lose, with their spontaneity, the specifically human unpredictability of thought and action. (1994, 350)

In contrast to an “open society” (Popper 1971, 53) based on the regular critical re-assessment of its goals, a totalitarian regime in Arendt’s sense will cause its citizens to live in a constant state of cognitive dissonance as they try to internalize contradictory belief systems and irreconcilable doctrines enforced by the state. 1984 and Brave New World both describe totalitarian systems in this sense, only differing in the ways in which the state’s ideological doctrines are perpetuated in each case: While 1984 describes a system that ultimately breaks its citizens in the attempt to make them believe in the contradictory tenets of “doublethink” (Orwell 1977, 26), Brave New World describes a technocratic regime which has honed its methods of breeding the perfect citizen to the point at which individual thoughts and political resistance are no longer possible for the majority of “standard Gammas, unvarying Deltas, [and]

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uniform Epsilons” (19). The masses can, as Huxley argues in Brave New World Revisited, “be depended upon to behave almost as predictably as machines” (270). This association is no coincidence: In Brave New World “the worker castes are meant to represent the […] attempt of the working class to be ameliorated, within the mass-production factory system of automobile giant Henry Ford” (Peller 2008, 62). According to his own summary in Brave New World Revisited, Huxley’s dystopian vision presents a warning of “a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism”, a result of “accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and […] ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation” by which “the democracies will change their nature” (333). The only remedy against such a development would be a strengthening of the “complete person” (336), which could outbalance the technocratic concept of citizens as cogs in a state’s machinery. In this context, the novel describes the failure of critical thinking in a highly technocratic society. The highest caste of humans in the Brave New World, the Alphas, is permitted a modicum of individuality – after all, even a system based on uniformity needs a ruling class to function and the Alphas are “called upon to take responsibilities and deal with unexpected emergencies” (149). But critical thinking is still frowned upon. While the Alphas “are so conditioned that they do not have to be infantile in their emotional behavior […] that is all the more reason for their making a special effort to conform” (96). Moreover, their constant exposure to hypnopaedic and medial conditioning still works as a form of “brainwashing” (287), as Huxley points out in Brave New World Revisited, which makes them comparable to “domesticated animals” (294) rather than individual human beings who possess a free will. In this sense, another important point from Arendt’s argument quoted above is the suggestion that “human beings” have to be terrorized and manipulated into conformity and obedience by totalitarian regimes. By comparison, the genetically and psychologically manipulated denizens of the World State imagined by Huxley cannot altogether be subsumed under this category. In fact, the novel revolves around the question of whether purposefully bred and conditioned beings could still be considered human. Huxley focuses “not simply on totalitarian politics in his vision of a future world state but specifically on the power impulse within science itself.” (Baker 1990, 8) The fact that the novel predicts the concept of genetic manipulation and the idea that the human body might be manipulable via its biology as well as its psychology turned the novel into a founding myth of modern bioscientific discussion. Indeed, the connection between Brave New World and the concept of rapid and not altogether controllable (scientific) progress is now so commonplace that it has “become the literary context for debates about biotechnology” (McQuillan 2006, 80). No other title – with the possible exception of Frankenstein – is used as often and sometimes as casually to refer to a kind of “warning about the future of scientists and science” – most prominently with regard to “our post-human future” (McQuillan 2006, 80).

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2.2 The Posthuman The discussion of what would later be termed ‘posthuman’ in Brave New World is closely linked to Huxley’s fears of overpopulation and the ensuing political problems he envisioned. Looking back on his dystopian vision in Brave New World Revisited (1958) Huxley argues: In the real contemporary world, the population problem has not been solved. On the contrary it is becoming graver and more formidable with every passing year. It is against this grim biological background that all the political, economic, cultural and psychological dramas of our time are being played out. […] The problem of rapidly increasing numbers in relation to natural resources, to social stability and to the well-being of individuals – this is now the central problem of mankind. (242)

The dystopian solution to this problem envisioned (albeit ironically) in the novel revolves around a rigid eugenics program, which has completely replaced natural births (and deaths). Huxley apparently “found both the positive and the negative aspects of eugenics problematic” (Zigler 2015, 34), but Philip Thody also sees a “resemblance” between Aldous Huxley and his grandfather, biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, which “lies in the interest which both men took in the question of human fertility” (2003, 79). Remarkably, this interest was focused on the dwindling resources of the planet “[l]ong before ecology, conservation and environmental studies had become fashionable concerns” (Thody 2003, 79). In Brave New World Revisited, for example, Huxley discusses the ecological consequences of (rapid) development: “who is to prevent [backward societies], in their desperate efforts to catch up and keep up, from squandering the planet’s irreplaceable resources as stupidly and wantonly as was done, and is still being done, by their forerunners in the race?” (335) Population control is one of the topics discussed in more detail in Brave New World Revisited, which Huxley begins with an essay on “Over-population” (237), but the topic is also a central one in Brave New World. One could argue that the inhabitants of Huxley’s World State function in a similar manner to what Rosi Braidotti calls the “disposable bodies of the global economy” (2013, 111). “Everyone works for everyone else” (77), hypnopaedic wisdom suggests, thus pointing out the inherent usefulness of every layer of society. Even after death “over ninety-eight per cent” of phosphorous gases are recovered – “[m]ore than a kilo and a half per [cremated] adult corpse” (76). The citizens of the World State meet this useful fate rather sooner than one would expect, due to a kind of programmed galloping senility, which kills the person before time has a chance to “age the cheeks” (181). In this sense, the novel describes a far-reaching posthuman necropolitics, which “aims at controlling all that lives” (Braidotti 2013, 111) or possesses a body, in an attempt to commercialize and functionalize life for the profit of society as a whole rather than its individual citizens. While posthuman criticism did not emerge until six decades after the publication of Brave New World, the novel already draws attention to a number of posthumanist

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issues – most prominently the question of who (or what) we consider to be human. As Braidotti argues, “[n]ot all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that. Some of us are not even considered fully human now, let alone at previous moments of Western social, political and scientific history” (2013, 1). In this sense, Cary Wolfe defines posthumanism as a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore, a historical development that points toward the necessity of new theoretical paradigms. (2010, xv–xvi)

To read from a posthuman perspective, albeit not an entirely unproblematic endeavor (see Herbrechter and Callus 2008, 95), draws attention to the constructedness of our own, human(ist) identity and its basis in rationalist, technocratic thought patterns. It is in this sense that Brave New World can be read as a posthumanist dystopia – a text, which confronts its readers not only with the terrifying vision of mass-produced (post) humans as a possible consequence of unchecked scientific ambition, but also with the possibility of a posthumanist perspective. The different focalisers reflect (somewhat ironically) what it might be like to think as a genetically and psychologically conditioned posthuman member of a technocratic collective rather than a fully human individual. In this context, the novel draws attention to the differences between the more individual Alphas and Betas and the mass-produced Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons, whose uniformity and multiplicity seem uncanny and sickening to John, the outsider: “a nightmare” (183). This becomes particularly obvious in the context of the death of John’s mother Linda at the “Hospital for the Dying” (180), which uses the terminal patients for the “wholesome death-conditioning” of whole “Bokanovsky Group[s]” (187) of children. John’s violent reaction to the staring, uniform faces, together with his grief at his mother’s death, triggers his ultimate rebellion against the World State. As in other instances, John’s emotional reaction is depicted as incompatible with the view promoted by the World State, which has replaced human compassion with posthuman conditioning. By comparison, John’s reaction is portrayed as overly dramatic, drawing on Shakespeare: ‘O brave new world, O brave new world…’ In his mind the singing words seemed to change their tone. They had mocked him through his misery and remorse, mocked him with how hideous a note of cynical derision! Fiendishly laughing they had insisted on the low squalor, the nauseous ugliness of the nightmare. Now, suddenly, they trumpeted a call to arms. (190)

Of course, political equality and democratic participation have been replaced by the idea that “all men are physico-chemically equal” (76) and that a society must consist of different castes (to fulfill different roles) in order to function properly. As world controller Mustapha Mond points out a

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society of Alphas couldn’t fail to be unstable and miserable. Imagine a factory staffed by Alphas – that is to say by separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities. […] An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron work – go mad, or start smashing things up. (200)

As a case in point the world controller cites the failed “Cyprus experiment” (201), a society of Alphas which ultimately resulted in “civil war” (201). In contrast, the social ideal of community in the World State is not based on equality, but rather on an “iceberg” model, with “eight-ninth below the water line” (201). As part of its posthumanist presentation of a technocratic society, the novel explores the liminal spaces at the intersections between human and animal as well as human and machine by focusing on issues like the mass production and conditioning of human beings – or rather beings who are no longer considered fully human. One of the most striking examples, in this sense, is the liftman prominently introduced as part of the novel’s essential world-building in Chapter Four. A “small simian creature, dressed in the black tunic of an Epsilon-Minus Semi-Moron” (64), the liftman reverently announces the arrival at the roof “as though suddenly and joyfully awakened from a dark annihilating stupor” (64). It is certainly significant that the creature only speaks one word (“roof”) – albeit in different inflections – but the relevant adjective in this context is “simian”, drawing attention to the animalistic attributes of a being that is clearly not presented as fully human, but rather functions along the lines of a trained animal in a human-shaped body – a creature specifically produced for this purpose, as the first chapter explains: “‘The lower the caste,’ said Mr. Foster, ‘the shorter the oxygen.’ The first organ affected was the brain. After that the skeleton. At seventy per cent of normal oxygen you got dwarfs. At less than seventy eyeless monsters. ‘Who are no use at all’” (24). Here, the ironic tone not only draws attention to the outrageous project of cloning human beings and keeping them intentionally stupid, Foster’s description also reveals that this mass-production occurs according to a specific industrial standard of usefulness. The most important human attribute, the text seems to suggest in the case of the Deltas the Savage tries to liberate from their perceived soma addiction in Chapter Fifteen, is freedom, which the Delta’s oxygen-deprived brains can have no concept of: “‘But do you like being slaves?’ the Savage was saying […] they stared at him with a blank expression of dull and sullen resentment in their eyes” (192). Indeed, the text suggests that their “stupidity” (192) prevents these “less than human monsters” (193) from understanding. “‘Expecting Deltas to know what liberty is! And now expecting them to understand Othello!’” (199), Mustapha Mond scoffs, ridiculing the Savage’s reading of the Deltas as human beings. The lack of individual freedom, not perceived by the mass-produced Deltas themselves, but clearly visible to John, the outsider, is, thus, also negotiated via the inability to understand the literature of the past – most prominently Shakespeare.

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2.3 Intertextual Connections and Meta-Textual Commentary Connections to Shakespeare’s works abound in Brave New World. The novel draws its title from The Tempest (1611), using “brave” in a “satirical to cynical” manner (Rohmann 2012/13, 265). The title already conveys a sense of the novel’s dystopian criticism to the observant reader: “By merely hinting, for example, at the analogy between the Fordian state and Prospero’s island, Huxley manages to convey ironically a disapproval of that state without ever having to voice it himself” (Firchow 2003, 107). Miranda’s original lines from Shakespeare’s play: “Oh, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world that has such people in’t” (Act 5, Scene 1) can certainly be read as implied in Huxley’s title, as they are quoted several times throughout the novel. John’s repeated contemplation of the quotation in view of the World State’s inhabitants is indicative of the novel’s central theme of posthuman irony. The lines echo not only Miranda’s but also John’s bewilderment at encountering for the first time his place of cultural heritage, which turns out to be incomprehensible to him and impossible for him to adapt to. The irony of using a quotation from Shakespeare – an author whose work is no longer known or accessible to the citizens of the World State – is explicitly invoked by the World Controller’s comment that Shakespeare’s work is no longer read because “it’s old” (197). Brave New World, thus, presents more than the fictional exploration of Terry Eagleton’s argument that “anything which is regarded as unalterably and unquestionably literature – Shakespeare, for example – can cease to be literature” (1996, 9) with the shifting of cultural values. “‘Do they read Shakespeare?’” the Savage enquires of the headmistress of Eton whose “blushing” answer is “‘Certainly not’” (150). Shakespeare’s works have not merely gone out of fashion, they have been judged as unfit to be read, as their underlying ideas and values are now considered “[u]ncivilized” (123) or even dangerous: “‘You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art’” (199), Mustapha Mond points out. But without art, the novel suggests, people become largely interchangeable automata. The end of literary greatness also presents itself as a direct lack of imagination and ideas. The new forms of entertainment propagated by the state – “the feelies and the scent organ” (199) – are characterized by a distinct literalness. They do not require any kind of interpretation, as the Savage remarks: “they don’t mean anything” (199). Instead, they are targeted at invoking “agreeable sensations” (199) in the audience. As Mustapha Mond points out to John, “‘[t]hey mean themselves’” (199). This can certainly be read as a critical meta-commentary directed towards the cinema, as Huxley engaged with the impact of the new medium in his essays, which notably influenced Horkheimer and Adorno’s “The Culture Industry” (see Izzo 2008, 1). In this sense, the demise of Shakespeare’s fame also functions as a direct symbol of “mental paralysis in the eternally stagnant present of a civilization without culture” (Rohmann 2012/13, 270). In contrast to the World State’s credo of “Stability” (15), Shakespeare’s works are read as a direct representation of what Mustapha Mond

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describes as “inconveniencies” – for instance “‘the right to be unhappy,[…] the right to grow old and ugly; […] the right to live in constant apprehension of what might happen tomorrow’” (215). These inconveniencies, claimed by John in the penultimate chapter, are an essential part of the human condition, as the novel suggests. Indeed, Chapter Seventeen presents “a debate between two opposing value systems” (Meckier 2002, 449) – the Savage’s and that of the World State. The final chapter, which was presumably added after the fact, when Huxley was revising the typescript in an attempt “to Americanize his dystopia” (Meckier 2002, 427), juxtaposes the Savage’s quest for a solitary existence with the “swarm” of curious onlookers, who invade his refuge “like locusts” (227) to observe the spectacle of the Savage punishing himself with “the whip” (228). To them, loneliness is the gravest sin one can commit in the Brave New World, as everyone is supposed to constantly experience everything “[i]n a crowd” (89) and individual thoughts are condemned as “solecism[s]” (94). The final chapter focuses on this contrast, by showing the merciless medialization and commodification of John as a source of entertainment for the inhabitants of the World State – a situation he can only escape by committing suicide. Shakespeare’s works and the World State’s belief system are pitted against each other in the figure of John, whose only reading materials as a child were his mother’s The Chemical and Bacteriological Conditioning of the Embryo. Practical Instructions for Beta Embryo-Store Workers (121) and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (122). Not only has he internalized Shakespearean wisdom to the point of making it his only value system. The text also suggests that John discovers a kind of “magic” (123) in the words, which, although only half understood, “talked to him” (123) and possessed the power to make things “more real” (124). For John, it is the complexity and ambiguity of Shakespearean language which raises it far above the “extremely simple” plot of “THREE WEEKS IN A HELICOPTER. AN ALL-SUPER-SINGING, SYNTHETIC-TALKING, COLOURED, STEREOSCOPIC FEELY” (154). His criticism of the film, tinged by embarrassment of the sexualized atmosphere, is also indicative of the novel’s critical position. Compared to Shakespeare, the ‘feelies’ are “horrible”, “base” and “ignoble” (156).

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies Huxley’s dystopian criticism clearly extends to the kind of entertainment he imagined would be typical of the Brave New World. The highly controlled, technocratic society can only mechanically re-produce a basic standard of entertainment. ‘Good’ writing, the novel suggests, is the prerogative of cultures which possess enough freedom for human suffering to exist in them. In a society entirely dominated by universal, drug-induced happiness writers would have nothing to write about. Helmholtz

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Watson, a “lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering (Department of Writing)” (71) describes his ‘feeling that I’ve got something important to say and the power to say it  – only I don’t know what it is, and I can’t make use of the power. If there was some different way of writing … Or else something else to write about… […] It’s not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too’. (73)

His lack of both literary style and a “good” (i.e. useful) subject to write about is juxtaposed with his views on Romeo and Juliet, which “taken detail by verbal detail” presents “a superb piece of emotional engineering!” (168). While he finds the play’s subject matter “irresistibly comical” in its “smutty absurdity” (168), he still concedes, ‘I know quite well that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one can’t write really well about anything else. Why was that old fellow such a marvelous propaganda technician? Because he had so many insane, excruciating things to get excited about. You’ve got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can’t think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases’. (169)

Helmholtz Watson’s comments (and his awkward metaphors) suggest that the ability to produce literature is, in fact, closely connected to the human condition and has, thus, become impossible in the posthuman context described by the novel. In contrast, the novel presents instances of posthuman textual production, from the newspapers aimed at the lowest caste – “on khaki paper and in words exclusively of one syllable, The Delta Mirror” (70)  – to Helmholtz Watson’s own (rebellious) attempts at writing some “rhymes on Solitude” (166). Compared with the earlier examples of solidarity hymns and popular songs, Watson’s poem, recited in full to the Savage in Chapter Twelve, seems to be purposefully ‘bad.’ Written in a staggering, irregular metre and using crude images like “Absence, say, of Susan’s / Absence of Egeria’s / Arms and respective bosoms, / Lips and, ah, posteriors” (165), it seems an unlikely attempt for “[o]ne of our most distinguished Emotional Engineers” (199) who “had the happiest knack for slogans and hypnopaedic rhymes” (71). The poem suggests that literary standards have, indeed, gone to the dogs  – together with those of the other arts, as the novel’s various references to “Synthetic Music” (79) and the inane plots of ‘feelies’ suggest. In the posthuman context “language has virtually lost its meaning and few speakers in this model world of scientifically engineered precision realize how unscientific and imprecise their words really are” (Meckier 2003a, 39). One of the most striking examples of this posthuman re-appropriation of language is the change in meaning undergone by most terms referring to reproduction and family. As the citizens of the World State are bred in bottles, the terms ‘father’ and ‘mother’ have not only become obsolete – they are now considered “smut” (32): “The word […] for ‘father’ was not so much obscene as – with its connotation of something at one remove from the loathsomeness and moral obliquity of child-bearing – merely gross, a scatological rather

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than a pornographic impropriety” (140). For the citizens of the World State, all concepts relating to their “viviparous” (32) past have become virtually unthinkable and language has, thus, become an indicator of the State’s true power of manipulation. “It is this awareness of the relation between the perversion of language and the rise of a centralized authority that possibly constitutes Huxley’s main contribution to distopian [sic] literature” (Meckier 2003a, 40). This, of course, suggests a parallel to Orwell’s 1984 and its description of “Newspeak” as a tool of political domination and cultural brainwashing. The awareness of linguistic patterns as an expression of culture is also addressed in the context of narrative perspective – especially in the experimentally multi-voiced Chapter Three. Peter Edgerly Firchow reads the collection of narrative perspectives in this chapter in terms of musical counterpoint: This technique involves a simultaneous juxtaposition of different elements of the narrative, much as musical counterpoint means sounding different notes simultaneously with a cantus firmus. The result in music is, or should be, a complex harmony; in Huxley’s fiction the result is, usually, a complex dissonance, a subtle and often brilliant cacophony of ironies. (2003, 106)

Firchow’s impression of a “cacophony” is produced by a chaotic juxtaposition of narrative perspectives – sometimes thematically interlaced, but continuously interrupting each other – towards the end of the chapter: ‘One of these days,’ said Fanny, with dismal emphasis, ‘you’ll get into trouble.’ ‘Conscientious objection on an enormous scale. Anything not to consume. Back to nature.’ ‘I do love flying. I do love flying’. (55)

The second and third statements are identifiable from the context as Mustapha Mond’s lecture and a part of a hypnopaedic lesson. Read, however, in conjunction with Fanny’s admonishment addressed to Lenina they seem to suggest an underlying meaning of rebellion against the laws of society, rather than their original discussion of (potential) sexual partners. Lenina is also characterized as somewhat adventurous by the reference to flying in the hypnopaedic statement that follows. By ‘remixing’ (to apply another musical term) the different strands of narrative the text, thus, invites the reader to create new and surprising meanings. Individual voices, clearly identifiable at the beginning of the chapter, become increasingly lost in a collective but not homogenous narrative towards its end. The hypnopaedic slogans, ascribed to the loudspeakers at the Conditioning Centre, rather than a particular narrator or focaliser, also create an increased sense of a mechanical narrative community, similar to the social community which has replaced the concept of individuality and personhood as markers of identity in the Brave New World. This is underlined by the novel’s introduction which begins in medias res, namely with a tour of the “CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE” (15). The reader is placed in a position to observe the Brave New World’s central insti-

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tutions alongside a group of visitors in the text, as the Director of Hatcheries provides just as much information to a “troop of newly arrived students” (16) as they need to make sense of the processes at their future work place. The Director’s “I shall begin at the beginning” (16), eagerly recorded by “the more zealous students” (16), thus, clearly refers to the process of creating new (posthuman) members of society, rather than the beginning of the narrative or the beginnings of the society described in it. The ensuing detailed explanations of the process of fertilization, ‘bokanovskification’ and conditioning of the embryos not only serves as the novel’s introduction to the Brave New World, it also underlines the importance of this way of creating its posthuman citizens as the central concept around which much of the novel’s dystopian criticism revolves. One of the chief narrative devices by which Huxley achieves a sense of posthuman strangeness (rather than human identification) is ambiguous characterization. Jerome Meckier, for example, observes that “fully developed characters” are an impossibility in the World State (2003b, 156), drawing on Firchow’s somewhat ambivalent conclusion that the “characters of Brave New World […] are not merely made of cardboard and papier-mache. That they are nonetheless not full and complete human beings is quite true” (2003, 114). Firchow bases his opinion of Huxley’s “extraordinarily powerful” vision on the observation that “in the people he portrays we still recognize ourselves” (2003, 114). It is, of course, possible to read “Lenina’s development in the novel” to indicate that “for all the technology and conditioning and impulses toward uniformity, there is still something profoundly human about” the characters (Firchow 2003, 114). This view, however, distracts from the novel’s dystopian criticism, which targets the inhumanity of the World State, rather than the feeble residues of humanity still present in some of its citizens. Firchow’s conclusion seems equally at odds with his earlier observation that all of the central characters are somewhat problematic and do not serve as identification figures for the reader, pointing out that Huxley clearly abandoned the idea of making either Bernard or the Savage the hero “in favor of having no hero at all” (Firchow 2003, 109). The ironic distance created by the characterizations of Bernard, John and Lenina is certainly not a coincidence, as it matches the novel’s general ironic, distanced style. The heterodiegetic narrative with a tendency towards zero/external rather than internal focalisation creates a distance to the characters, which supports the novel’s dystopian criticism of a Brave New World of ‘goodly’ posthuman creatures.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Any reader looking for secondary sources on Brave New World will soon face a conundrum: while there is an abundance of articles with the words ‘brave new world’ in the title, relatively few of them are actual critical discussions of the novel, while the

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rest merely borrows the title as a catchphrase to discuss such fascinating topics as the “The Brave New World of Party Rental” or the “Peanut Industry” (McQuillan 2006, 81). The novel’s title has become a catchphrase for various kinds of hubristic developments. Moreover, even in serious literary criticism, there seems to be a certain tradition of critical misconceptions about or even misreadings of Brave New World (see Bode 1985, 103 and Baker 1990, 14). It is possible that the novel’s ironic tone can be held responsible for the fact that some interpretations seem to miss its dystopian point, but the detached narrative perspective, with a narrator who often comments by using specific, sarcastic adjectives, also creates a sense of ambiguity and a resistance to simple interpretations. An example of this ironic narrative distance would be the introductory chapters which, although setting a tone and describing the setting, fail to introduce the main characters in their later function as main characters. For instance, Lenina is first described from an outside perspective as “a nurse” (26) and a “[c]harming” (26) object of desire for the men in the text. As June Deery observes, in one of the few feminist readings of the novel, women are generally described as inferior in a society based on “inequality, with women being assigned the lower status” (2003, 131) and Deanna Madden notes: “The men are portrayed as more sensitive than the women, capable of wanting something more meaningful than a mere relationship. The men have a spiritual dimension that the women lack” (1992, 292). While this could be read as something the text criticizes in a dystopian society, Deery notes that “one of the things Huxley does not always portray as objectionable is woman’s relatively inferior role” (2003, 132). She concludes, that some of the described inequalities can be traced to “an automatic importation of the sexist norms of Huxley’s own society into the imagined world” (Deery 2003, 132). The presentation of women as objects of the male gaze and Betas to the exclusively male Alphas in the Brave New World might, of course, be put down to contemporary misogynistic gender politics. The novel, however, also introduces its (male) central characters from an ironic distance as part of its project of describing the “appallingly hubristic” (Deery 2003, 131) scientific developments propagated by the world state, for instance the idea of deliberately disabling a future human being, which is common practice on this production line, is surely repugnant, as is the sadistic postnatal conditioning with electric shocks, all in the Procrustean determination to fit the individual human being to the State’s requirements. (Deery 2003, 131)

In spite of extreme examples like these one could, nevertheless, argue that the dystopian criticism of ambitious scientific developments and technocratic governments, which result in Brave New Worlds, is still very much alive in our contemporary culture. Speculative fiction focusing on the posthuman, for instance Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003–2013) and BBC America’s Orphan Black TV-series (2013–), draw on Huxley’s vision as an important intertextual source for their exploration of bioscientific experiments with posthumans and human cloning. But they also engage

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with the eutopian/dystopian ambiguity of Brave New World. Postmodern hybridizations of genre facilitate the development of “transgressive utopian dystopias”, which “present utopian strategies as integral parts of dystopian narrative” (Mohr 2007, 5). Huxley’s ironic style, thus, certainly contributed to the novels prevailing influence. David Garrett Izzo even goes so far as to describe Brave New World as “perhaps the most influential novel of the twentieth century if one sees its impact as not exclusively literary. Huxley’s intentions were social, political, economic, psychological, scientific, philosophical and then literary” (2008, 1). There is no doubt that Huxley’s technological predictions are generally seen as chillingly accurate. Not only did contemporary reviewers like the biologist Joseph Needham find that “the biology is perfectly right” (1999, 59) but later critics like Nicholas Murray also draw attention to “[t]he extraordinary prescience of Huxley’s satire – he forecast not only human embryo research but […] Virtual Reality, the turning of country walks into a branch of ‘the leisure industry’, the television running perpetually in the corner of the geriatric ward” (2002, 256). At the same time the novel remains relatively vague when it comes to describing the “technological and social steps which would lead to universal cloning”, and “[t]his avoidance of specificity has increased the novel’s topicality” as well as its “currency […] for successive generations” (Dunaway 2003, 165). Later readers’ interpretations would, of course, also be influenced by historical events, for instance cultural paradigm shifts or traumatic political events: [T]he effect of reading any dystopian text post factum, when history has given chilling new meaning to the original context in which the disaster was imagined, reverses the relationship between fiction and reality and raises unsettling postmodern suspicions of the ‘real’ as something that can be known otherwise than as an aesthetic artifact. (Sicher and Skradol 2006, 153)

In this sense, Brave New World is, at least from today’s point of view, accurate in terms of the envisioned technological and bioscientific progress and the ensuing cultural questions still faced by contemporary cultures throughout the world. While the novel’s own dystopian criticism offers an ironic warning of technocratic totalitarianism without providing a utopian counter-model, Huxley returned to the same questions in Brave New World Revisited, concluding that, to counteract these tendencies, societies would have to adopt a model of “Education for Freedom”, strengthening “the value […] of individual freedom, based upon the facts of human diversity and genetic uniqueness; the value of charity and compassion […]; and finally the value of intelligence, without which love is impotent and freedom unattainable” (330).

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5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited. New York: Harper, 2005. --Arendt, Hannah. Essays in Understanding 1930–1954. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1994. Baker, Robert S. Brave New World: History, Science, and Dystopia. New York: Twayne, 1990. Bloom, Harold. “Introduction.” Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. 1–2. Bode, Christoph. Aldous Huxley: Brave New World. München: Fink, 1985. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Congdon, Brad. “‘Community, Identity, Stability’: The Scientific Society and the Future of Religion in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.” English Studies in Canada 37.3–4 (2011): 83–105. Deery, June. “Technology and Gender in Aldous Huxley’s Alternative (?) Worlds.” Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. 129–145. Diken, Bülent. “Huxley’s Brave New World – And Ours.” Journal for Cultural Research 15.2 (2011): 153–172. Dunaway, David King. “Huxley and Human Cloning: Brave New World in the Twentieth Century.” Aldous Huxley Annual 3 (2003): 165–179. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Firchow, Peter Edgerly. “The End of Utopia: A Study of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.” Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. 105–114. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage, 1991. Herbrechter, Stefan, and Ivan Callus. “What is a Posthumanist Reading?” Angelaki 13.1 (2008): 95–111. Horan, Thomas. “Revolutions from the Waist Downwards: Desire as Rebellion in Yevgeni Zamyatin’s We, George Orwell’s 1984, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.” Extrapolation 48.2 (2007): 314–339. Huxley, Aldous. Island. London: Vintage, 2005. Izzo, David Garrett. “Introduction.” Huxley’s Brave New World: Essays. Ed. David Garrett Izzo and Kim Kirkpatrick. Jefferson: McFarland, 2008. 1–9. Madden, Deanna. “Women in Dystopia: Misogyny in Brave New World, 1984, and A Clockwork Orange.” Misogyny in Literature. Ed. Katherine Anne Ackley. New York: Garland, 1992. 289–313. McQuillan, Gene. “The Politics of Allusion: Brave New World and the Debates about Biotechnologies.” Studies in the Humanities 33.1 (2006): 79–100. Meckier, Jerome. “Aldous Huxley’s Americanization of the Brave New World Typescript.” TwentiethCentury Literature 48.4 (2002): 427–460. Meckier, Jerome. “Utopian Counterpoint and the Compensatory Dream.” Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003a. 33–60. Meckier, Jerome. “Onomastic Satire: Names and Naming.” Aldous Huxley Annual 3 (2003b): 155–203. Mohr, Dunja M. “Transgressive Utopian Dystopias: The Postmodern Reappearance of Utopia in the Disguise of Dystopia.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 55.1 (2007): 5–24. Moylan, Tom, and Raffaella Baccolini, eds. Dark Horizons. New York: Routledge, 2003. Murray, Nicholas. Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual. London: Little, Brown, 2002.

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Myron, Coleman Carrol. “The Nonconformers Pause and Say: ‘There’s Gotta be Something More’.” Huxley’s Brave New World: Essays. Ed. David Garrett Izzo and Kim Kirkpatrick. Jefferson: McFarland, 2008. 11–16. Needham, Joseph. “Huxley’s Biology is Perfectly Right.” Readings on Brave New World. Ed. Katie de Koster. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. 56–60. Orwell, George. 1984. New York: Signet, 1977 [1948]. Peller, Scott. “Laboring for a Brave New World: Our Ford and the Epsilons.” Huxley’s Brave New World: Essays. Ed. David Garrett Izzo and Kim Kirkpatrick. Jefferson: McFarland, 2008. 62–72. Popper, Karl. The Open Society and its Enemies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Rabinovitch, Valery. “The Critical Dialogue between Brave New World and Island.” Aldous Huxley Annual 9 (2009): 183–190. Rohmann, Gerd. “The Title of Brave New World: Original Meanings and Current Implications.” Aldous Huxley Annual 12/13 (2012/13): 265–374. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. Sicher, Efraim, and Natalia Skradol. “A World Neither Brave Nor New: Reading Dystopian Fiction After 9/11.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 4.1 (2006): 151–179. Sisk, David W. “Using Language in a World that Debases Language.” Readings on Brave New World. Ed. Katie de Koster. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. 122–129. Thody, Philip. “Brave New World.” Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. 79–91. Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We. New York: EOS, 1999. Zigler, Ronald Lee. The Educational Prophesies of Aldous Huxley. New York: Routledge, 2015.

5.2 Further Reading Bloom, Harold, ed. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. Booker, M. Keith. The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994. Claeys, Gregory, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Izzo, David Garrett, and Kim Kirkpatrick, eds. Huxley’s Brave New World: Essays. Jefferson: McFarland, 2008. Jameson, Fredric. “Progress versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science Fiction Studies 9.2 (1982): 147–158. Koster, Katie de, ed. Readings on Brave New World. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Tower Sargent, Lyman. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5.1 (1994): 1–37. Vieira, Fátima, ed. Dystopia(n) Matters. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013.

Ingo Berensmeyer

11 Henry Green, Party Going (1939) Abstract: This chapter analyses Henry Green’s novel Party Going (1939) as an example of modernist fiction that bridges the divide between realist and experimental narrative modes. Party Going is a farewell to the interwar period observed through the lens of the Bright Young People novel, a subgenre that flourished around 1930. Yet it addresses wider social and aesthetic concerns in its portrayal of personal intimacy, class relations, generational change, and celebrity. It captures the atmosphere of the late 1930s in the confined setting of a railway station by exploring the characters’ wavering between outward appearances and inner insecurities, by contrasting their desire to be somewhere or someone else with their actual immobility, and by shrouding London in a dense fog. The omnipresence of fog underscores Green’s epistemological concern with the unknowable and the inexpressible; a concern that makes Party Going a representative example of English late modernist writing. Keywords: Bright Young People, late modernism, immobility, epistemology

Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, and it is not quick as poetry but rather a gathering web of insinuations […]. Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone […]. (Green 2000 [1940], 55)

1 Context: Author, Œuvre, Moment Henry Green was the pen-name of Henry Vincent Yorke (29 October 1905–13 December 1973). Born into an English upper-class family, he started writing while still at school, and had his first novel, Blindness, published in 1926. Although this might have destined him to join the youthful ‘golden generation’ of the Jazz Age alongside Evelyn Waugh and his fellow Etonian Anthony Powell, his life took a different course. After two years at Oxford, he joined the engineering works of the family firm, H. Pontifex & Sons, in Birmingham, where he worked for two years on the factory floor before becoming a director for the firm in their London offices until his retirement thirty years later. The factory provides the setting for his second novel, Living (1929), which combines a vivid portrayal of working-class life, mainly by means of a naturalistic representation of vernacular speech patterns, with a radical stylistic experimentalism.

DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-012

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Green composed his third novel, Party Going (1939), over a period of almost ten years. The outbreak of war gave a previously unknown urgency to his literary production; in his autobiography Pack my Bag (1940), he assembles memories of his childhood and years at school, noting that he expects to die in the war. He served on the home front as a member of the Auxiliary Fire Service in London. Three wartime novels followed in quick succession: Caught (1943), Loving (1945), and Back (1946) focus on experiences of war, deprivation, and loss. In the post-war period, Green published his last three novels, Concluding (1948), Nothing (1950), and Doting (1952), which are usually regarded as lesser achievements. After his retirement from the family firm in 1958, he spent the rest of his life in London mostly as a recluse, rarely leaving his house in Belgravia after 1960. Green’s œuvre – nine novels and an autobiography – spans the ‘high’ and ‘late’ modernist period. Especially in his writings of the 1920s and 1930s, Green employs experimental narrative techniques that place him at the centre of modernist innovation in England. However, his reclusive tendencies and his working life kept him apart from the predominant literary circles of London, so that he is also, paradoxically, a marginal figure. Even though Party Going was published with the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press, he was never a member of the Bloomsbury group. Similar paradoxes make his work difficult to place in other respects. Generationally, and in terms of his upbringing, he would have been ideally situated to become another aestheticist satirist like Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and Anthony Powell, yet he kept himself apart from the ‘children of the sun’ (see Green 1976) or the ‘Bright Young People’ of the 1920s – those young celebrants of upper-class bohemianism who were the darlings of the society pages in interwar Britain (see Taylor 2008). Furthermore, he wrote what may be the best English ‘proletarian novel’ of the early twentieth century, Living, while not himself a member of the working class (cf. Hitchcock 1994; on working class fiction ↗ 5 The Burden of Representation). Party Going can be considered Green’s most fully achieved novel, a novel in which realist and experimentalist elements have equal weight, pulling in different directions and thus creating both tension and balance. While he never abandoned his interest in literary form and narrative technique, his later writings during and after World War II subdue the earlier experimentalism for the sake of formal restraint, a spare narrative style, and a wry sense of humour that is perhaps the closest English analogue to the prose of Samuel Beckett (↗ 12 Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable). In contrast to Beckett’s post-war prose, however, Green’s final novels do not progress further in the direction of literary minimalism and postmodernism, but remain elegantly (and by then somewhat stiffly) poised between realist and experimentalist modes of narration, repeating an already established pattern. Party Going perhaps best embodies Green’s idea of prose as “a gathering web of insinuations” (2000 [1940], 55). The title raises certain expectations in the context of the literary and cultural landscape of the 1930s. By alluding to the Bright Young People’s cult of youth and

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celebrity, and to their favourite pastime of organizing and attending extravagant parties (see Taylor 2008), it places the novel in the upper-class world of the jeunesse dorée. On a more literal level, it refers to a group of friends who are trying to get from London to the South of France. As the gerund implies, their going is a condition rather than an activity: the novel ends before their train actually departs. Yet the title’s lack of a hyphen also betrays the fact that Green’s novel is a kind of farewell to a vanishing lifestyle, a descant on the ‘golden generation’ that flourished in England after World War I. Its closest literary context, then, is the slew of novels, ranging from the mildly to the wildly satirical, that emerged from this generation: most notably, Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930), Nancy Mitford’s Highland Fling (1931), Anthony Powell’s Afternoon Men (1931), Bryan Guinness’ Singing Out of Tune (1933) and Cyril Connolly’s The Rock Pool (1936). Green was himself a member of that generation, in his early thirties when he wrote it. He was closely acquainted with many Bright Young writers, himself and his wife Dig living the life of Bright Young things in the 1930s. Party Going is possibly based “on a holiday with [the playboy] Aly Khan which went wrong in the fog” (Yorke 1993, 292). It is a swan song to that period, a farewell to what W. H. Auden famously referred to as the “low dishonest decade” in his poem “September 1, 1939”, but the idea for Party Going was probably conceived as early as 1926 (there is an early narrative titled “Excursion” in Green 1993b, 64–74). Its late completion and publication on the eve of World War II places it in the same time frame as Terence Rattigan’s play After the Dance (1939). Both this play and Green’s novel are infused with a sense of belatedness and “futility […] the resigned expectation of unpleasant things to come” (Taylor 2008, 258; cf. Carver 2014, 63–78 on futility as a signature of the interwar period in Oxford and post-Oxford novels).

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns For a short novel of only about 150 pages, Party Going presents a fairly large cast of characters in a very limited spatial and temporal setting. The events of the novel take place on a single evening, from afternoon to nightfall, and in a single setting: Victoria Station and an adjacent hotel. Lacking a traditional hero and focalised from multiple perspectives, it is best described as a group novel. The group at its centre are a number of Bright Young People who have gathered at London’s Victoria Station in order to travel to the South of France for a three-week holiday. The reader learns fairly late in the novel that a similar trip to France has taken place a year earlier, apparently successfully (421)1. The group consists of Max Adey, a rich bachelor who is

1 Unless otherwise indicated page references in brackets without further designation refer to the most widely used and recent edition of Party Going in Green 1993a.

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paying for the trip; Miss Julia Wray, one of his female admirers; Miss Angela Crevy, an even younger acquaintance; Alex Alexander, another rather ineffectual young man; the young couple Robert and Claire Hignam; and the rather less well-off Miss Evelyn Henderson. These are joined later by Amabel, Max’ girlfriend and Julia’s rival for his affections, who had originally not been invited. Amabel is a celebrity, perhaps “the first character in modern fiction who is ‘famous for being famous’” (Dettmar 2006, 464). Towards the end, yet another young acquaintance arrives: Richard Cumberland, known as ‘Embassy Richard’, who is much talked about in the novel as a gatecrasher and practical joker. A dense fog, however, has caused an interruption of all train traffic, so the party are forced to wait and to find a way of killing time. Also stuck at the station are a number of people who have come along to say goodbye: Miss Fellowes, Claire’s aunt, who falls ill and is presented as elderly until it is revealed that she is merely fifty-one (524); Miss Crevy’s ‘young man’, Robin; two pensioned nannies who are members of the Hignams’ entourage; and a number of male and female servants who have to remain in the station while their employers withdraw to a suite of hotel rooms paid for by Max. For the most part the narrative consists of ensemble scenes and conversations among the group, who look down on the masses stranded below as the fog shows no sign of lifting. Waiting in the transitory zone of what Marc Augé calls a “non-place” (2009), they have plenty of time for conversation, to bore each other and be bored in return. There is a clear separation between interior and exterior space in the novel, as well as between vertical and horizontal space. Stranded inside their hotel, the group begin to feel increasingly threatened by the crowd outside and below them. The distance is heightened by the fact that the hotel management “had shut the steel doors down” (437, cf. 415) to prevent the crowd from entering. At one point, the crowd begins to “chant” in unison: “WE WANT TRAINS” (437); later there is fear that the crowd might have broken into the hotel. The group’s anxiety about the crowd is later joined by a fear of urban terrorism – or, indeed, of impending war: “‘What targets,’ one by him remarked, ‘what targets for a bomb’” (483). This anxiety is finally alleviated when, during the night, the fog lifts and the platforms are opened again: Separated there they became people again and were no longer menaces as they had been in one mass when singing or all of their faces turning one way to a laugh or a scream. […] Dear good English people […], who never make trouble no matter how bad it is, come what may no matter. (524–525)

The party are ready to embark when the novel ends. The main characters all belong to the ‘smart set’ of English upper-class youth. Their behaviour is occasionally contrasted to that of their servants, in the manner of a country-house novel – a genre to which Green would return in Loving (1945) – but obviously without a country-house setting. They are at first hardly individualised. They slowly gain contours for the reader mainly by means of dialogue, sometimes

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also through direct characterization. The description of Max, fifty pages into the novel, reads like a cliché of a Bright Young Person: Max was dark and excessively handsome, one of those rich young men who when still younger had been taken up by an older woman, richer than himself. […] It was generally believed that he had lived with this rich lady […]. It follows that, having begun so well, Max had by now become extraordinarily smart in every sense and his reputation was that he went to bed with every girl. Through being so rich he certainly had more chances. (431)

The narrator, however, disrupts this cliché by clarifying that Max and the rich lady “on no occasion had anything to do with each other” (431), pointing to the discrepancy between rumour and reality that characterises many of the relationships in the novel. He also inserts a sociological comment that further serves to place Max in the social and economic world of the novel, which is a world of fine-grained distinctions of class and money: “Money always goes to money, the poor always marry someone poorer than themselves, but it is only the rich who rule worlds such as we describe and no small part of Max’s attraction lay in his having started so well with someone even richer than himself” (431). Distinctions of wealth play a greater role than simply class: while Max and his girlfriend Amabel are extremely rich, Angela Crevy is less so, and Evelyn Henderson is “in fact the least well off of all” (464). As Evelyn reminds herself, money is what “makes [people] different” (464) from one another. It creates distinctions that can be seen, for example, in the style of interior decoration – a style that does not reflect individuality but sameness, as a marker of belonging to a particular ‘set’: Amabel’s flat had been decorated by the same people Max had his flat done by, her furniture was like his, his walls like hers, their chair coverings were alike and even their ash trays were the same. There were in London at this time more than one hundred rooms identical with these. Even what few books there were bore the same titles and these were dummies. (456–457)

This outward uniformity of being “fashionable” relieves the characters from talking about matters of “taste”; being rich, they are not “encumbered by possessions”, which can be easily replaced. So the most highly prized value for them is in “mutual relationships”: “Rich people cling together because the less well off embarrass them and there are not so many available who are rich for one rich man who drops out to be easily replaced.” (437) These relationships need to be constantly maintained and cultivated, and for most of the time that is exactly what the characters are doing: verbally dancing with and around each other in complicated figures that are at times reminiscent of the intricate psychological complexities of a Henry James novel. But the decisions that the characters are being offered never approach the seriousness and the consequences of a novel by James, Hardy or Conrad. They are mostly just killing time. As Beci Carver points out, Party Going is a novel in which “[e]verything seems to be in crisis, and yet nothing is allowed to matter seriously, or definitively.” (2014, 99)

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For the characters, belonging to what Thorstein Veblen famously called the “leisure class” (cf. 1953 [1899]) frees up mental energies for complex social interaction and intimate encounters. But it also exerts new pressures on individuals, who become more insecure in their roles and relationships. Time and again, characters in Party Going reflect on the unknowability of others, and at times of themselves. The fog outside corresponds with this epistemological barrier between people’s minds in the novel: “At the same time no one can be sure they know what others are thinking any more than anyone can say where someone is when they are asleep.” (463) This intransparency is true not only for other people’s minds but even for some of the characters themselves, who are not particularly good at introspection. Thus, for Max, “it was not until he felt sure of anything that he knew what he was thinking of. When he thought, he was only conscious of uneasy feelings and he only knew that he had been what he did not even call thinking when his feelings hurt him.” (441) The contrast between surface and depth, exterior façade and interior insecurity, is perhaps best exemplified by the character of Amabel. Rich and beautiful, she is adored and envied by many, but also secretly despised and hated by some. Julia Wray, who tries to displace Amabel in Max’ affections, seems positively afraid of her, as is Max himself for most of the time. Amabel is a celebrity, possibly modelled to some extent on Elizabeth Ponsonby, the darling of the society pages of the 1920s (cf. Taylor 2008 for details): Amabel had her own position in London, shop girls in Northern England knew her name and what she looked like from photographs in illustrated weekly papers, in Hyderabad the colony knew the colour of her walls. So that to be with her was for Angela as much as it might be for a director of the Zoo to be taking his okapi for walks in leading strings for other zoologists to see or, as she herself would have put it, it was being grand with grand people. (461)

Evelyn, only a few pages later, thinks that […] Amabel had grown to be like some beauty spot in Wales. Whether it was pretty or suited to all tastes people would come distances to see it and be satisfied when it lay before them. Amabel had been sanctified, so she thought, by constant printed references as though it was of general concern what she looked like or how beautiful she might be. But then there was no question of beauty here, Evelyn thought, because there were no features, and it could not be called poise, and then she became offensive in her thoughts of her. But Amabel had that azure glance of fame and was secure. (464)

Such comparisons of Amabel to an exotic zoo animal or a tourist attraction add a Waughesque touch of the grotesque. Because of her celebrity status, Amabel has received an auratic charge; she has become an object of fascination as well as repulsion – rather like a fashion item with a high price tag. But this glossy sheen does not seem to correspond to her inward properties or qualities. To Evelyn, Amabel appears featureless (“there were no features”) and ultimately boring.

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This featurelessness and emptiness is emphasised in the novel’s treatment of Amabel, but it is in varying degrees true of all the characters in the novel. Most of them, like Max, are quite incapable of self-knowledge. They treat themselves and each other as clichés. The narrator at times appears to endorse these, at other times unmasks them with painfully piercing insight. (Because of the shifting focalisation in the novel, it is often difficult to tell whether we are reading reported thought or a straightforward comment by the external narrator; more on this below.) For this reason, the characters’ subjectivity is in constant need of being confirmed and ratified by their peers. Their desire for recognition, and the constitutive lack of an inner core, are exemplified when Amabel towels herself dry after a bath and contemplates her face and body in a mirror; in fact, in this room, “[t]he walls were made of looking-glass.” (479) By writing her name on the steamed-up mirror, Amabel tries, apparently without success, to connect her physical body to her personal and social identity: She leaned over and traced her name Amabel in that steam and that pink mass loomed up to meet her in the flesh and looked through bright at her through the letters of her name. She bent down to look at her eyes in the A her name began with, and as she gazed at them steam or her breath dulled her reflection and the blue her eyes were went out or faded. (479)

She seems, at this moment, entirely disconnected from her body, “that pink mass”. The desired connection contains an auto-erotic dimension that becomes clear in the ironic use of the expression “to meet […] in the flesh.” The attempt at self-observation, perhaps self-knowledge (“to look at her eyes in the A her name began with”) fails because the mirror image disappears when steam or the observer’s own breath touches the mirror. In the next paragraph, she wipes the mirror to look at “all her face”, admire her beauty and to experience a strange split between the self as both subject and object of desire: She always thought [her face] more beautiful than anything she had ever seen, and when she looked at herself it was as though the two of them would never meet again, it was to bid farewell; and at the last she always smiled, and she did so this time as it was clouding over, tenderly smiled as you might say good-bye, my darling darling. (479)

She then proceeds to dry the rest of her body in an elaborate, self-loving series of caresses. Finally: She stood out as though so much health, such abundance and happiness should have never clothes to hide it. Indeed she looked as though she were alone in the world she was so good, and so good that she looked mild, which she was not. (480)

The narrator’s terse comment at the end breaks the narcissistic mould of self-love in the form of self-doubling (visualized in the text by the doubling of the word “darling”).

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Here, self-mirroring has taken the place of introspection – a trade-off between inside and outside, an externalised kind of self-knowledge that remains confined to looks, to the body as a façade that conceals rather than reveals a person’s true nature. In this case, it conceals the fact that Amabel is anything but “mild” in her relationships but rather egotistical and calculating. Her name is part of this game, since its Latin root means ‘lovable.’ While others may fall in love with her, she seems only capable of loving herself. Yet the core self-identity has lost stability because of the manifold simultaneous possibilities of what William James calls “spiritual, material, and social selves” in modernity (2007 [1890], 333). The range of options and freedom of choice brought about by wealth and leisure lead to insecurity and boredom rather than an assertive sense of stable selfhood. Paradoxically, material comfort generates new forms of discomfort and emotional stress. In the case of Julia, this anxiety is alleviated by a superstitious belief in charms: objects from childhood such as a spinning top. Childish, immature behaviour is a typical trait of these semi-adolescent characters; in today’s terminology, they could be said to suffer from ‘affluenza’ (cf. de Graaf et al. 2001). But not only in representing social interaction among the main characters does the novel show a keen awareness of differences (of money, of experience, age and gender). Distinctions of class and of speech play an important role also in their interactions – or lack thereof – with the novel’s other characters. Pretending to be someone or something else is a related concern. Worth mentioning in this respect is the character of Embassy Richard, whose exploits are being discussed long before he actually shows up in person at the hotel (391–392). The character is named after the Embassy Club in Old Bond Street, a celebrated haunt of the Bright Young People. Another case in point is the unnamed “rough-looking customer” (393) who assists Miss Fellowes when she falls ill after having a drink in the station bar. He is later taken to be the hotel detective but arouses suspicion because he changes his speech patterns, switching between “Brummagem” and “educated accents” (477). Robert Hignam sends him down to the station to check on Julia’s luggage, but the hotel management does not allow anyone to enter or exit, so he is stuck in a downstairs lobby; finally he makes his escape through a window. While this unnamed character is ‘passing’ between classes, speech patterns and spaces, Miss Fellowes is immobilised in a transitory, dream-like zone between life and death.2 In the station, the servants also have to wait, missing their tea. Julia’s manservant, Thomson, and Max’s servant Edwards have a conversation that underlines their difference from their employers. When Thomson manages to get a girl to kiss him, he

2 See Kermode 1979, 5–20 for an interpretation of the stranger in Party Going as a Hermes figure – a deliberately esoteric allegorical reading that, Kermode admits (17), lacks probability in the context of Green’s narrative strategies, which resist such hermetic hermeneutics.

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contrasts her willingness to give “a bit of comfort” with the lack of “fellow feeling” in the upper classes (473), using quite drastic words to describe them: ‘No, it’s fellow feeling, that’s what I like about it. Without so much as a by your leave when she sees someone hankering after a bit of comfort, God bless ‘er, she gives it him, not like some little bitches I could name,’ he darkly said, looking up and over to where their hotel room would be. (473–474)

If Party Going is, in part, a (bleak) comedy of manners, it is also a trenchant analysis of the social and personal barriers that make people desire, and withhold, “fellow feeling” from others. As Max ruminates in a later passage, being rich means living and dying comfortably, but without “community singing” and “fellow feeling” (493) – repeating the words used earlier by the manservant Thomson. Without offering any solutions, political or otherwise, Party Going depicts a consumerist society physically and spiritually stuck, lacking compassion and imagination, caught up in its own “dull antagonism” (493), its distinctions and divisions of class, gender, education, and money. Party Going is a novel about mobility and immobility: movement and the lack thereof, about changing places and staying put, about activity and passivity, stasis and change. It is also about social distinctions and divisions, “the half-tones of class” (Green 2000 [1940], 42) and about the effects of wealth and comfort on the selves and social lives of rich people.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies Party Going explores its key topics of mobility and immobility less through telling a story in the conventional manner than through evoking an atmosphere. Although very little happens in terms of external events, there is a close, almost microscopic attention to detail and nuances of social interaction. The narrative traces the characters’ conversations and the minutiae of their behaviour, but this depiction does not aim at a representation of reality modelled on psychological realism (as, for instance, in the novels of Jane Austen or Henry James), or on the modernist innovation of interior monologue (as in ↗ 7 James Joyce, Ulysses or ↗ 9 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse). Rather, it is expressed in a combination of dialogue with flashes of observation by a rather terse, at times cryptic heterodiegetic narrator; Green frequently pointed to William Faulkner as a formative influence on his writing. Focalisation varies between zero, internal, and external. This technique is similar to Samuel Beckett’s experiments with narrative in Murphy (1938) and the 1950s trilogy (↗ 12 Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable). It also anticipates the French nouveau roman in its ‘objectifying’ focus on interpersonal relationships, showing character “from the outside” (Dettmar 2006, 465); but it is important to point out that Green

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had already developed this technique in his two novels of the 1920s, Blindness and Living. As usual in Green’s writing, there is very little exposition or explanation. Stylistically, the novel combines realistic dialogue with passages of narrative, often in free indirect discourse. Sometimes these moments of description or reported thought are extended into vignettes (though consistently less lyrical than in Living) or distanced observations characterised by an acerbic wit. These stand in some contrast to the characters’ often inflated, narcissistic visions of themselves, and also to their trivial conversations. The shallowness which is evoked through precisely observed speech patterns is a superficial veneer; underneath it there is, as in T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” (1925), a sense of emptiness and approaching doom – fear of loss, of isolation, of death, and of a revolution brought about by the anonymous ‘mass’. Probably the best way to explain Green’s narrative technique in Party Going is to point to the impact of cinema, in particular to Eisenstein’s use of montage, which tells a story through juxtaposing often disparate images in quick succession, generating insights that flash upon the viewer’s mind and that can be far more effective than verbal analysis or description. The violence of moving rapidly from one image or scene to the next is an effect shared by many ‘party novels’ of the 1920s and 1930s (a term coined by Julian Maclaren-Ross; cf. Taylor 2008, 252–253), but it is consciously reflected upon by Green in a letter to his friend Nevill Coghill in the late 1920s, while at work on his novel Living (1929): “I think you will like the book I am on now. It’s written in a very condensed kind of way in short paragraphs, hardly ever much longer than 1½ to 2 printed pages and often very much shorter. A kind of very disconnected cinema film” (in Taylor 2008, 253; cf. Holmesland 1985, 15–17 for a discussion of Green’s indebtedness to Eisenstein). In Party Going, this literary “cinema film” is realised as an uninterrupted flow of narrative, only rarely segmented by a space between paragraphs but without chapter breaks. Moreover, there is a close match between story time and discourse time: events are unfolded in the narrative as they occur. Especially at the beginning, the narrator stresses that events happen simultaneously as the narrative shifts from one scene to the next: the word “meantime” (385, 390, 394) is a repeated connective between passages. This simultaneity may be seen as another cinematic effect in the novel. Yet another is the camera-like “perspective and distance” that “has displaced the traditional, situated narrator” (Hentea 2014a, 106) and that can range from a close-up to a wide-angle “seven thousand feet” above ground level (388). Through withholding and delaying information, as well as shifting narrative perspective, Green’s filmic narrative engages and frustrates the reader who seeks to establish coherence. On the semantic level, Green employs a range of images, metaphors and symbols, offering (at times conflicting and disparate) sense-making strategies in a densely woven pattern that invites but ultimately resists interpretation (cf. Taylor 2008, 268). The symbols (such as fog or birds; see below) are polyvalent in meaning, so that the sense-making strategies that are offered fail to add up to a single

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coherent picture. For the characters as well as for the narrator, the modern world is not transparent or self-explanatory. Available schemata, patterns or clichés are interposed between the subjects and objects of knowledge; thus reality is mediated by sometimes conflicting and incoherent images. Moreover, fictions intervene between the mind and the world, so that human “hearts […] make up what they [do] not like into other things” – a constant activity of metaphor that helps to make difficult circumstances “endurable.” (497) Most significantly, the narrator offers no overarching truth by which those incoherent patterns could be evaluated or checked for correctness. Unlike, for example, the ‘mythical method’ that T. S. Eliot (2005 [1923]) detected in Joyce’s Ulysses (↗  7  James Joyce, Ulysses) as a principle to impose order on the chaos of everyday life, Party Going has no underlying ordering principle but traces a shifting cluster of images that make (some) sense of reality in various limited ways.3 The narrative ‘camera’ has no privileged access to this reality, no omniscience in the conventional sense. The narrator’s limited insight fits well with the theme of unknowability; it is also in line with Green’s convictions about the art of the novel: “The conventional approach by a novelist in which he presumes to know all about his characters, what they are feeling and thinking at any moment, seems to me as dead as the Dodo”, he writes in 1952, adding that this was a long-held view of his (Green 1993b, 164, cf. 139 for a similar statement from 1950). There is a distance between events and their verbal reconfiguration: “[T]he moment anything happens which is worth while […] one goes over it verbally after, and […] in going over it one adds favourable interpretations, favourable to oneself, which colour and falsify the account one gives” (1993b, 139). In this mixture of Wordsworthian romanticism and Nietzschean disillusionment,4 Green’s poetics regards representations of reality as invariably affected by processes of selection and filtering that “colour and falsify” any account – including that of the narrator in a novel. The most coherent symbol of this limited knowledge is the London fog. “Fog” is the novel’s first word. The opening sentence offers a striking image of fog as an agent in its own right that transforms mobility into immobility. It causes a bird to crash into a building and fall to its death: “Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet” (384). This first sentence also contains another immediately noticeable stylistic particularity of Green’s, although this is less in evidence in the remainder of Party Going than in his earlier work: the use of nouns without articles. “Fog was so dense”, “bird […] went [.]” This abbreviates and condenses sentences but also leaves nouns or noun phrases in a curious condition of being undefined, neither definite nor indefinite. Arguably, it slows down the reading

3 Kermode (1979, 5–20), however, attempts to distinguish between a latent and a manifest sense in Party Going and proposes a partial mythological reading based on the Greek god Hermes. 4 I owe this observation to Gero Guttzeit.

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process because of the deviation from ordinary language. Marius Hentea refers to this as “the amputation of language” (2014b, 112). It also emphasises the many verbs of movement which pepper the novel’s first page: “went”, “fell”, “hurried”, “penetrated”, “stepped out”, “crossed her path”, “shuttled past”, “to get to where they were going”: in short, “all that movement” (384). One might conclude from this that the emphasis in Party Going is on events, especially events of movement, rather than on the agents who do things or to whom something happens. Particularly, human beings as the traditional subject of history, or at least of stories, are being decentred in this process; they appear less defined than usual. The human agent in this first sentence (“at her feet”) is Miss Fellowes, who picks up the dead bird which the narrator then calls “her dead pigeon” (384), washes it and wraps it in a parcel, for no explicable reason. After her breakdown, she is confined to a bed in the hotel – confined, that is, to inaction, suffering, and bad dreams. In contrast to “all that movement”, then, there is stasis and a sense of death and decay. (But there is also some comedy when she recovers: “She looked as if she had been travelling” [522]). Beginning with the dead pigeon, images of death recur throughout the novel, from the “gravestone luggage” piled up in the station (497) to the image of “airmen, in danger of running fatally into earth” (482) or the description of silence falling “with lifeless wings” (494). Fog as one of the major symbols in the novel connects impossibility of movement with impenetrability of the visual field. The fog is an epistemological as well as physical obstacle. It is, quite literally, deathly – since it causes the pigeon’s death – and a harbinger of impending doom. It also resists a univocal interpretation. A “dark flood” (388), it is even at one point assigned a religious connotation of divine punishment. For Julia, who decides to walk to the station rather than putting herself at the mercy of congested city traffic, the fog also erases social distinctions and identities: As she stepped out into this darkness of fog above and left warm rooms with bells and servants and her uncle who was one of Mr Roberts’ directors – a rich important man – she lost her name and was all at once anonymous: if it had not been for her rich coat she might have been any typist making her way home. (388)

Like death, fog is a great leveller. This early scene in the novel prepares for the later images of the “mass” of people united by the fog into a terrifying Leviathan. The fog also establishes an important element of geographical and historical specificity: it is a defining marker of industrialised London from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and beyond. On one of its many levels, Party Going can thus be read, like Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), as a London novel, in which the city is more than a mere setting but an agent in its own right or even the novel’s actual protagonist. In a highly intertextual moment, the opening harks back to Charles Dickens’s famous scene-setting evocation of the London fog in Bleak House (1852–1853), and also to the frequent use of fog as a symbol of obscurity and the threat of crime or terrorism in late Victorian and Edwardian fiction, from the Sherlock Holmes stories

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(1891–1927) to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907). Fog hints at hidden truths ‘behind the veil’ (cf. Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam, section LVI; cf. Moretti 2013, 101–144 for a trenchant analysis of the “inherent vagueness” of the Victorian middle class and its impact on writing as fog, as “camouflage”). But Green’s opening is truncated in a kind of telegraphic shorthand that highlights the effects of fog rather than engaging in an elaborate verbal description in the style of a weather report (cf. the famous opening of Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities). Green’s fog invites and resists an allegorical interpretation. Is it a symbol of the inability to see the world as it really is – or is it just bad weather? Making invisible, fog is illegible. Birds are another key symbol in the novel, recurring in various guises. Like the dead bird of the beginning, they also invite allegorical reading but do not offer sufficient clues for a coherent interpretation. For example, Julia, while walking to the station, sees “three seagulls” (391) which remind her of “the sea they were to cross that evening”; later, she falsely remembers “two birds”, and “now she forgot they were sea-gulls and thought they had been doves and so was comforted” (473), probably because doves (especially turtle-doves) are conventional symbols of love and faithful attachment, comforting to think about in her unsuccessful attempts to wrench Max away from Amabel. This ‘mistake’ also shows how the novel exposes the characters’ acts of fiction-making in the process of recollection: seeking to alleviate their discomfort, they perceive their reality according to pre-established frames or schemata, while memory plays tricks on them. Similarly, the readers’ memory and interpretative frameworks are constantly challenged by the narrative. Another pervasive aesthetic strategy in Party Going is the description of human beings or man-made artefacts in terms of animals or plants. Such comparisons can stress the closeness as well as distance between the human and the natural world. People, in this vein, can be like “water-beetles” (395) or “ivy leaves” (497) or “like sheep herded to be fold-driven” (524); women can be “like camels” (494), “like cats” (485, cf. 520 “like a cat that has just had its mouse”) or “like delicate plants” (520); bodies like “swollen bamboos” (407, cf. 483) or “tailor’s dummies” (407, cf. 483). In one of Max’s cryptic remarks, Embassy Richard is compared to a bird: “If he was a bird […] he would not last long” (417). When Amabel falls asleep on Max’s shoulder, her breathing is compared to “seagulls settled on the water cock[ing] over gentle waves” (511–512). Max, the group’s centre of attention, is compared to “some sort of a Queen Bee” (526). At times, the narrator expresses self-consciousness about the limited explanatory purchase of his (or the characters’) comparisons and metaphors. Meeting at the station, the characters are “at once engulfed in swarming ponds of humanity” (395). This rather hackneyed metaphor is then extended and elaborated, giving free rein to the associative imagination but also unfolding the absurdity of such comparisons:

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Like two lilies in a pond, romantically part of it but infinitely remote, surrounded, supported, floating in it if you will, but projected by being different on to another plane, though there was so much water you could not see these flowers or were liable to miss them, stood Miss Crevy and her young man […] and Angela coveted for her looks by all those water beetles if you like, by those people standing round. (395)

The contingent, arbitrary character of these analogies between people, water lilies and water beetles is highlighted by the interjections “if you will” and “if you like”, and its lack of fit is stressed by the subclause “though there was so much water you could not see these flowers or were liable to miss them”. Again, the inability to see, or to see anything correctly, is underlined – as is the necessity of finding more or less fitting ‘objective correlatives’ for human experience in order to make sense of it (for an extended discussion of the limitations of visuality in Green’s early novel Blindness, see Tripp 2014). “If”, as the narrator continues, “that swarm of people could be likened to a pond for her lily then you could not see her like, and certainly not her kind, anywhere about her, nor was her likeness mirrored in their faces” (395–396). Here the language, in the etymological closeness between ‘likeness’ as analogy and ‘likeness’ as portrait, reveals an underlying aesthetic principle of limited accuracy in creating (self-) images for the characters by means of ‘likening’ them to other objects or orders of being – or, in the case of Amabel’s mirror scene, of an imperfect fit, a lack of identity between body and body-image, ego and imago, person and name. Perhaps this can also be read as a token of an ontological insecurity – the loss of a firm and stable grounding of humanity in the ‘order of things’ – that has often been viewed as a key feature of Western modernism in various guises, and that Green’s unstable metaphors highlight and explore. The contingency of metaphors and/as clichés is also expressed by means of repetition, as when the same image recurs at a later point in the text. For example, the narrator notes that “it might all have looked to Mr Roberts, ensconced in his office away above, like November sun striking through mist rising off water” (396). Much later, the same comparison appears to occur to Julia: “it did seem like November sun striking through mist rising off water” (430). At this point, the arbitrariness of this image is emphasised by adding alternatives: Or, so she thought, like those illustrations you saw in weekly papers, of corpuscles in blood, for here and there a narrow stream of people shoved and moved in lines three deep and where they did this they were like veins. She wondered if this were what you saw when you stood on your wedding day, a Queen, on your balcony looking at subjects massed below. (430)

Similarly, Robert Hignam’s image of the crowd as “a store of tailors’ dummies, water heated” or “soft, swollen bamboos in groves” (407) recurs when the unnamed pseudo-detective manages to escape from the hotel: “To push through this crowd was like trying to get through bamboo or artichokes grown thick together or thousands of tailors’ dummies stored warm on a warehouse floor” (483) – a highly unlikely coinci-

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dence unless one assumes that Green makes purposeful use of such repetition, possibly to reflect on the narrator’s limited creativity, to expose the artificiality of the novel’s imagery, or to defamiliarize the reading experience. The self-conscious literariness of the narrator’s imagery may be related to some tendencies in modernist poetry, most notably T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who in turn were influenced by French symbolism and surrealism. The surreal nature of some of the narrator’s images may be a parody of imagist poetry and its tendency to combine, in a single image, several conflicting registers (cf. Iser 1966). Indeed, Green’s comparisons of the crowd to organic matter are reminiscent of Pound’s famous poem “In a Station of the Metro”, in which “[t]he apparition of these faces in the crowd” is juxtaposed and associated with “[p]etals on a wet, black bough.” (Pound [1913] 2000, 23)5 In Party Going, this defamiliarization of comparison and perspective, in combination with a depersonalizing and dehumanizing tendency, is present in several extended comparisons, but they are exposed as derivative clichés – taken from the “weekly papers”, from romantic reading (“lilies in a pond”) or even colonial fiction (401), as when Alex compares himself to the Zulu character Umslopogaas from Henry Rider Haggard’s Nada the Lily (1892). Defamiliarization and dehumanization are most apparent when Julia watches the crowd from above: “She thought how strange it was when hundreds of people turned their heads all in one direction, their faces so much lighter than their dark hats, lozenges, lozenges, lozenges” (437). This sight appears “terrifying” to her (437). The same image recurs later on when Max and Julia look down “on thousands of Smiths, thousands of Alberts, hundreds of Marys, woven tight as any office carpet […] lightening the dark mass with their pale lozenged faces” (466). In these passages, Party Going seems to come close to the distanced, scientific attitude towards life that has often been viewed as a key quality of modern(ist) avantgarde literature, from Gustave Flaubert to Alberto Moravia, identified as early as 1925 in Ortega y Gasset’s essay “La deshumanización del arte”. Modernist art, in this view, abandons the human form and the human perspective; art and metaphor, according to Ortega y Gasset, constitute a “triumph against the human” (triunfo sobre lo humano, 1969, 366). But it is important to understand that, for Green, life and living are core values, and the goal of art is “to create life, of a kind, in the reader” (1993b, 137); far from celebrating dehumanization in the manner of the Italian futurists, for instance, Green employs it for the critical aim of showing the limits as well as the possibilities of the human imagination in making sense of the world.6 As crowds are dehumanized

5 For convenience’s sake I have ignored the spaces between groups of words inserted by Pound in the poem’s first printing. 6 Here I disagree with Hentea, who argues that the mass is ‘humanized’ by being divided “into a number of frustrated individuals” (2014a, 98); in the passage he discusses (497), they are consistently likened to “ruins”. Hentea avoids the term ‘humanization’ in his discussion of the same passage in 2014b, 40.

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into patterns, natural events are in their turn anthropomorphized, as when the narrator compares nightfall and the cold to a woman with “long hair”, and her “curls” to “coils” (495) that threaten to strangle those having to wait outside. There is an almost constant blending of concepts in such comparisons between human, natural and technological attributes – showing the extent to which the perception of reality carries imaginary and fictional charges. In the absence of an overarching system of order, the imagination appears to run wild. Such a mobility of images contrasts sharply with the immobility of the situation of waiting (yet another parallel between Party Going and Beckett, especially Waiting for Godot, as well as later experimental novels such as Brigid Brophy’s In Transit). One structural feature of the novel that has not been touched upon so far is its analogy to music and dance. If Party Going has a principle of composition, it is to be found in its analogy to a musical sonata, exploring a limited set of themes with a series of variations in a sequence of movements. The opening section of the novel (384–402) could be viewed as the first movement of a sonata or a symphony. Another musical parallel can be found in dance: the elaborate way in which the connections and separations between characters are choreographed resembles a ballet. Like many modernist writers, Green was fascinated especially by Diaghilev, Massine and the Ballets Russes, whose spectacular performances were extremely inspirational for many artists of the interwar years. Already in an early review of the novel, David Garnett compared the structural design of Party Going to Les Sylphides (Garnett 1939, 489; see also Russell 1960, 105; cf. Jones 2013 for a general assessment of modernist literature and dance).

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Henry Green has never been popular, nor has he received excessive attention from academic critics. Since the 1990s, however, there are indications of a resurgence of interest in his work. Most of his novels are back in print with mass-market paperback publishers (Penguin, Vintage, Harvill); a volume of ‘uncollected writings’ was edited in the early 1990s (Surviving. The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green, 1993), and a biography published in 2000 (Treglown 2000). A critical edition of his works still remains a desideratum. Green’s early critical reception focused on stylistic characteristics, viewing Green as a modernist writer experimenting with narrative form and language, but also as a late inheritor of English aestheticism (Melchiori 1956, 191, 199). In formalist readings, Green is frequently said to place ‘style’ over ‘substance’ and to move from ‘history’ towards ‘abstraction’ (Gorra 1990, 23). The emphasis on technique and stylistic experimentation (cf. Gibson 1984) raises the question of social and political concerns in Green’s work, which have been addressed by critics such as Patrick Swinden (1984)

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and Andrzej Gasiorek (1995). The dichotomy between readings of Green as a detached aesthete or a politically and morally committed writer has led to mutually exclusive interpretations. This impasse has arguably made Green difficult to ‘place’ in the canon of modernist literature. More recent approaches, reflecting more general trends in modernist studies (see Mao and Walkowitz 2008), attempt to combine formal and contextual perspectives and to read Green in the expanded contexts of English, European and American modernism. For example, Peter Hitchcock suggests that Green’s “identification with the English working classes” is “a quintessentially modernist displacement” (1994, 16), discussing the question of Green’s particular style and class identity. Articles and books by Benjamin Kohlmann (2009) and Marius Hentea (2014a, 2014b) help to restore the literary, social and cultural contexts of Green’s early novels “such as 1920s book publishing, Birmingham working-class culture or the history of disability brought on by war” (Hentea 2014b, 3). But Hentea, in the most significant recent study of Green’s work, is certainly right to emphasize that “our existing critical categories [such as realism, experimentalism, or social commitment] do not provide a space to position Green” (2014b, 2). Perhaps this explains why interest in Green has revived since the 1990s, as the study of modernist fiction has expanded beyond the more traditional canon of Joyce, Woolf, and Lawrence. Green poses a challenge also to the conventional periodization of modernism, as a “critical figure between modernism and postwar [and, arguably, earlier forms of] realism” (Hentea 2014b, 3). As a representative of the second generation of modernist writers, Green is now discussed in connection with competing categories of periodization such as ‘intermodernism’, ‘late modernism’ and ‘limit modernism’ (see Bluemel 2009; Miller 1999; Hentea 2014b). Partly realist, partly (high) modernist, and partly anticipating emergent postmodernist forms of narration, what Hentea calls Green’s “experimental realism” (2014b, 6) defies categorization – and invites readers and critics to reassess the foundations for their categories. Party Going in particular invites a range of perspectives for contextualization and interpretation according to these new lights. Jeremy Treglown considers Party Going the first English novel of World War II, as it describes a world of affluence and leisure about to be swept away by uncertainty and chaos (2000, 121). This is not very convincing, since the novel was conceived and written before the outbreak of war. An alternative reading is to see it as an artistic response to the social and economic changes and pressures of the 1920s and 1930s: the decline of the English aristocracy (cf. Cannadine 1999) and the increasing restlessness of the underprivileged during the Great Depression (for readings of Party Going as an anticipation of war, see e.g. Cunningham 1993; Beer 2007). Combining realist, modernist and to some extent postmodernist techniques, Party Going shares with the work of Samuel Beckett the decentring of narrative and authorial authority, as well as the theme of waiting for something to happen. This presentation of “the thinning out of thin moments” in a style approaching “syntactical vertigo” (Carver 2014, 97) can be meaningfully discussed

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in the general context of Western modernism as well as in the more concrete English setting of ‘Oxonian futility’ (cf. Taylor 2008). Beyond the narrower confines of modernist studies, Green still awaits discovery by a wider readership.7 Gillian Beer, amongst others, has praised Party Going for its “marvellously devious description of the moment-by-moment waverings of emotion” and its “bold narrative shape” (2007, 79–80). Another factor that should not be underestimated is Green’s “wholly unexpected” ability to create moments of comedy (Hentea 2014b, 130). Perhaps the most significant English novelist of the 1930s next to Virginia Woolf, Henry Green was and is much admired by fellow writers. He remains to be rediscovered not only as a stylistic innovator and a keen observer of class in Britain but above all as a master of prose as “a gathering web of insinuations” that can “draw tears out of the stone” (Green 2000 [1940], 55).

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Green, Henry. Party Going. In: Loving – Living – Party Going. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993a. 383–528. --Augé, Marc. Non-Places. An Introduction to Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London: Verso, 2009 [1992]. Beer, Gillian. “Modernist Futures.” In(ter)discipline. New Languages for Criticism. Ed. Gillian Beer et al. London: Legenda, 2007. 47–82. Bluemel, Kristin. “Introduction: What is Intermodernism?” Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain. Ed. Kristin Bluemel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. 1–18. Cannadine, David. The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. New York: Vintage, 1999 [1990]. Carver, Beci. Granular Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Dettmar, Kevin J. H. “Henry Green.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. Ed. David Scott Kastan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 462–65. Eliot, T. S. “Ulysses, Order and Myth.” Modernism: An Anthology. Ed. Lawrence Rainey. Malden/ Oxford: Blackwell, 2005 [1923]. 165–167. Garnett, David. Review of Party Going. New Statesman and Nation 18 (7 October 1939): 489. Gasiorek, Andrzej. Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After. London: Edward Arnold, 1995. Gibson, Andrew. “Henry Green as Experimental Novelist.” Studies in the Novel 2 (1984): 197–214. Gorra, Michael. The English Novel at Mid-Century. From the Leaning Tower. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990.

7 Party Going has been translated into several languages, including Swedish (1984), German (1992), Argentinian Spanish (2005), and Italian (2006). Van Steenbergen (2013) offers an interesting analysis from the point of view of translation studies.

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Graaf, John de, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor. Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2001. Green, Henry. Surviving. The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green. Ed. Matthew Yorke. London: Harvill, 1993b [1992]. Green, Henry. Pack my Bag. A Self-Portrait. London: Vintage, 2000 [1940]. Green, Martin. Children of the Sun. A Narrative of “Decadence” in England after 1918. Mount Jackson, VA: Axios Press, 2008 [1976]. Hentea, Marius. “The End of the Party: The Bright Young People in Vile Bodies, Afternoon Men, and Party Going.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 56.1 (2014a): 90–111. Hentea, Marius. Henry Green at the Limits of Modernism. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2014b. Hitchcock, Peter. “Passing: Henry Green and Working-Class Identity.” Modern Fiction Studies 40.1 (1994): 1–31. Holmesland, Oddvar. A Critical Introduction to Henry Green’s Novels: The Living Vision. London: Macmillan, 1985. Iser, Wolfgang. “Image und Montage. Zur Bildkonzeption in der imagistischen Lyrik und in T. S. Eliots Waste Land.” Immanente Ästhetik, ästhetische Reflexion. Lyrik als Paradigma der Moderne. Ed. Wolfgang Iser. Poetik und Hermeneutik 2. München: Fink, 1966. 361–393. James, William. Principles of Psychology. Vol. 1. Rpt. New York: Cosimo, 2007 [1890]. Jones, Susan. Literature, Modernism, and Dance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Kermode, Frank. The Genesis of Secrecy. On the Interpretation of Narrative. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1979. Kohlmann, Benjamin. “‘The Heritage of Symbolism’: Henry Green, Maurice Bowra, and English Modernism in the 1920s.” Modern Language Notes 124.5 (2009): 1188–1210. Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. “The New Modernist Studies.” PMLA 123.2 (2008): 737–748. Melchiori, Giorgio. The Tightrope Walkers. Studies of Mannerism in Modern English Literature. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956. Mengham, Rod. “Yorke, Henry Vincent (1905–1973).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31864 (25 February 2015). Miller, Tyrus. Late Modernism. Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1999. Moretti, Franco. The Bourgeois. Between History and Literature. London: Verso, 2013. Ortega y Gasset, José. “La deshumanización del arte.” Obras completas. Vol. 3. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1969 [1925]. 353–386. Pound, Ezra. Poems Selected by Thom Gunn. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. Russell, John. Henry Green: Nine Novels and an Unpacked Bag. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1960. Swinden, Patrick. The English Novel of History and Society: 1940–80. London: Macmillan, 1984. Taylor, D. J. Bright Young People. The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918–1940. London: Vintage, 2008 [2007]. Treglown, Jeremy. Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. Tripp, Ronja. “Visualisierung und Narrativierung in Erzähltexten der Moderne (H. Green: Blindness)” Handbuch Literatur & Visuelle Kultur. Ed. Claudia Benthien and Brigitte Weingart. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2014. 462–477. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: Macmillan, 1953 [1899].

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Yorke, Sebastian. “A Memoir.” Surviving. The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green. Ed. Matthew Yorke. London: Harvill, 1993b [1992]. 286–302.

5.2 Further Reading Adams, Don. “To Create a Life Which Is Not: Henry Green’s Pastoral-Organic Realism.” Alternative Paradigms of Literary Realism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 95–121. Hart, Clive. “The Structure and Technique of Party Going.” The Yearbook of English Studies 1 (1971): 185–199. Klaß, Sabine von. Die Romane Henry Greens. Textvorgaben und Probleme der Konsistenzbildung. Heidelberg: Winter, 1991. Lucas, John. “From Realism to Radicalism: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Patrick Hamilton and Henry Green in the 1920s.” Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the English Novel, 1900–30. Ed. Lynne Hapgood and Nancy L. Paxton. Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000. 203–223. MacDermott, Patrick. A Convergence of the Creative and the Critical. A Reading of the Novels of Henry Green through the Literary Criticism of T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis. Oxford et al.: Peter Lang, 2009. Mengham, Rod. The Idiom of the Time: The Writings of Henry Green. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Odom, Keith. Henry Green. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Pready, Joanna. “Liminality in a London Hotel: Henry Green’s Party Going and the Impact of Space on Identity.” The Literary London Journal 7.1 (2009): 15 pars. http://www.literarylondon.org/ london-journal/march2009/pready.html (4 September 2015). Steenbergen, Tamar van. “Translating Green. Dissolving the Fog of Party Going.” Master thesis, Utrecht University, 2013. http://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/282023 (4 February 2015). Stokes, Edward. The Novels of Henry Green. London: The Hogarth Press, 1959. Tandon, Bharat. “Henry Green.” The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists. Ed. Adrian Poole. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 393–406. Weatherhead, A. Kingsley. A Reading of Henry Green. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1961. Wood, James. “A Plausible Magic: The Novels of Henry Green.” British Fiction after Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century. Ed. Marina MacKay and Lyndsey Stonebridge. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 50–58.

Dirk Van Hulle

12 Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable (1951–1958) Abstract: This chapter situates Samuel Beckett’s so-called ‘trilogy’ of novels, Molloy, Malone meurt/Malone Dies and L’Innommable/The Unnamable, in the context and chronology of his entire œuvre. Special attention is paid to the periodization of his work into an early, middle and late period, and the ‘watershed’ status of the three novels, in addition to Beckett’s habit to self-translate his bilingual work after he adopted French as a second language of composition. Although he disliked the term ‘trilogy’, Molloy, Malone meurt/Malone Dies and L’Innommable/The Unnamable are closely connected through Beckett’s fascination with linguistic skepticism, as well as their shared focus on denarration and undoing, which increasingly disintegrates the traditional notions of character and fictional universe. Beckett’s characters and story worlds are quite different from what he dismissed as the ‘clockwork cabbages’ and ‘chloroformed world’ of Honoré de Balzac, whose programmatic writing style Beckett did not appreciate. Judging from the manuscript notebooks of his own novels, Beckett experimented with a more processual form of composition that self-reflexively thematizes incompletion, closely resembling what H. Porter Abbott has termed ‘autography’. These characteristics earned Beckett the praise of such early prominent commentators as Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille. Subsequent generations of critics have focused on the novels’ relationship to postwar notions of humanity and the dominant philosophy of existentialism, followed by political and often heavily theorized readings in the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, the range of critical perspectives has only continued to broaden, including an archival field of study. The openness of Beckett’s ‘trilogy’ to such a variety of approaches is precisely what makes it such a vibrant part of his work today. Keywords: Trilogy, autography, self-translation, archival studies, bilingual literature

1 Context: Author, Œuvre, Moment The Irish writer Samuel Beckett is best known as a playwright. En attendant Godot/ Waiting for Godot is one of the most influential plays of the twentieth century. But Note: The research leading to these results has received funding from the Leverhulme Trust (Visiting Professorship at the University of Kent’s School of European Culture and Languages) and from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007– 2013)/ERC grant agreement n° 313609. DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-013

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Beckett’s prose fiction is certainly as innovative as his dramatic works, and the three novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable play an important role in the development of his career as a novelist. Like En attendant Godot, they were originally written in French and subsequently translated into English by the author himself (Molloy in collaboration with Patrick Bowles). Although these three novels are often referred to as a trilogy, Beckett did not like this label. He wrote to his British publisher John Calder “Not ‘Trilogy’, I beseech you, just the three titles and nothing else” (Beckett qtd. in Ackerley and Gontarski 2006, 586). But at the same time Beckett did mention on several occasions that he saw the three novels “as a unity” (Tucker 2014, 23). To situate these three novels in Beckett’s œuvre, various periodizations have been suggested. And although Peter Boxall rightly problematizes these periodizations, he also recognizes their pragmatic use. He therefore summarizes the evolution of Beckett’s prose fiction in a nutshell, “from the Joycean extravagance of his early, mannered work, through the comic agony of frenzied becoming in his middle period, to the bleached impossibility of his later prose” (Boxall 2015, 34). Building on this three-phase periodization, and with the caveat that periodizations entail the danger of doing injustice to the singularity of each separate work (Van Hulle and Kestemont 2016), the early period can be said to consist of the collection of stories More Pricks Than Kicks (which Beckett started writing in 1931, published in 1934) and the novels Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written in 1932, published posthumously in 1992), Murphy (started in 1935, published in 1938) and Watt (started during World War II in 1941, published in 1953). John Bolin distinguishes the early period from the middle period by means of the Beckettian voices of the professor and of the poet, the voice of the professor being characterized by ironic commentary, whereas the poetic voice is more open to the contingent. Bolin argues that the voice of the poet becomes more prominent in the novel Watt, Beckett’s last novel in English before he switched to writing fiction in French. As a result, Watt appears as a pivotal text, marking the border between the early period and Beckett’s mature work. The middle period is often considered to start immediately after World War II with the Nouvelles (La Fin, L’Expulsé, Premier Amour, Le Calmant) and the novel Mercier et Camier. The reason for drawing the line between the ‘early’ and ‘middle’ period is often linked to Beckett’s decision to start writing in French. But this needs to be nuanced. Beckett started writing the first of the Nouvelles in English and he ‘drew the line’ between English and French by literally drawing a line in the manuscript in the middle of his story La Fin, which was originally called Suite in March 1946. After that, he continued writing in French for several years. After La Fin (or The End), he wrote the novel Mercier et Camier (started in 1946, published in 1970 in French and in 1974 in Beckett’s English translation) and the other Nouvelles: L’Expulsé (1946; The Expelled, published in 1962); Premier Amour (1946; published in 1970; First Love, published in 1973); Le Calmant (1946, published in 1955; The Calmative, published in 1967). The immediate post-war years were a period of remarkable creativity, known as “the siege in the room”, in Beckett’s own words (Knowlson 1996; Bair 1978, 346).

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This is the period in which Beckett wrote the three novels Molloy (started in 1947, published in 1951; English version published in 1955), Malone meurt (started in 1947, published in 1951; Malone Dies, published in 1956) and L’Innommable (started in 1949, published in 1953; The Unnamable, published in 1958). Even though Beckett regarded the three novels as a unity and even though in some editions they are published as a “trilogy”,1 some critics have categorized the three novels in separate periods. Brian McHale, for instance, marks a border between Molloy and Malone meurt/Malone Dies. In Constructing Postmodernism, he suggests a demarcation between modernism and postmodernism characterized by “the distinction between the cognitivist and the postcognitivist Beckett” (McHale 1992, 34). According to McHale, the cognitivist Beckett is “still preoccupied with modernist issues of reliability and unreliability of narrators, radical subjectivity, and multiplicity of perspectives, as in Watt and Molloy” (34). The “postcognitivist Beckett”, however, “focuses instead on the status of fictional worlds, the power (and impotence) of language to make and unmake worlds, and the relationship between fictional being and elusive ‘real’ being, as in Malone Dies, The Unnamable, and many of the later short texts” (34). Usually, however, critics shift the border to the end of the so-called “trilogy”. H. Porter Abbott, for instance, situates the border after The Unnamable, because it is only after the “trilogy” that Beckett stops working with the structure of the quest: “Watt, Mercier et Camier, the Nouvelles, and the ‘trilogy’, all conform to the quest structure, despite the manifold incompetence of the questers” (1996, 89). But the next work, Textes pour rien (1955; Texts for Nothing, published in 1967), “marks a pause in the story of the œuvre” (Abbott 1996, 89). This pause corresponds with the end of the “great creative period” (Federman and Fletcher 1970, 63), followed by a feeling of exhaustion, which is reflected in the “willful shredding of narrative linearity within the Texts [for Nothing]” (Abbott 1996, 90), followed by Foirades (started in 1954, published in 1973; Fizzles published in 1976) and From an Abandoned Work (started in 1955, published in 1956; D’un ouvrage abandonné published in 1967). En attendant Godot had been written in the “great creative period” (between Malone meurt and L’Innommable), but it was not until January 1953 that the premiere took place. Whereas the writing process of En attendant Godot had proceeded very smoothly, it took Beckett several attempts and multiple versions to write his next important play, Fin de partie/Endgame (1957). When the BBC took an interest in his work, he started writing radio plays (such as All That Fall) and while fragments of his novels were being broadcast, he continued to write plays, such as Krapp’s Last Tape/ La dernière bande (1958) and Happy Days/Oh les beaux jours (1961). As for his prose fiction, Comment c’est (started in 1958, published in 1961; How It Is, published in 1964) is generally regarded as another pivotal work. The title has been

1 The term “trilogy” was used for the 1959 Olympia Press edition of the three novels (Van Hulle and Weller 2014, 81).

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interpreted as a “pun on beginnings (comment c’est is commencer)” (Abbott 1996, 102), marking the start of the late period. True to his later motto “Fail better” Beckett kept failing again and starting again with “false starts”, Faux départs (1965) and various short plays (such as Breath, Come and Go, Play, Not I, That Time, Footfalls, Catastrophy, What Where) and short texts, such as All Strange Away (1976), Imagination morte imaginez (1965; Imagination Dead Imagine, 1965), Assez (1966; Enough, 1967), Bing (1966), Sans (1969; Lessness, 1970), Le Dépeupleur (1970; The Lost Ones, 1972), Abandonné (1972), Still (1975), Sounds (1978), Still 3 (1978), As the Story Was Told (1973), La falaise (1975), Un soir (1980; One Evening, 1980), The Way (1981). Toward the end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s, when Beckett was in his seventies, he wrote three slightly longer prose texts, which are sometimes referred to as the ‘second trilogy’ (although – again – he did not like this term) and which were published both separately and together under the title Nohow on (1989): Company (1980; Compagnie, 1980); Mal vu mal dit (1981; Ill Seen Ill Said, 1981) and Worstward Ho (1983). Nohow on was followed by the shorter texts Ceiling (1985; Plafond, 1985), Stirrings Still (1989; Soubresauts, 1989), and Comment dire/What is the Word. This last text is so short that it is usually treated as a poem, although it can also be regarded as a prose text. For it is a text about the writing of a text, more specifically about a sentence that fails to get written: It ends in the middle of a sentence with the words “comment dire”, or “what is the word” in Beckett’s translation (Beckett 2012, 227, 229). He thus ended his œuvre by leaving it open, deliberately unfinished.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns This notion of ‘never finished’ is concisely summarized in the word ‘on’, which is arguably the most important word in Beckett’s entire œuvre, summarizing a central concern in his works. It is also the last word of the three novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, which famously ends with the line: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” (Beckett 2010b, 134) When Beckett’s so-called ‘second trilogy’ was published under the name Nohow on, the title still expressed the same concern, always linked to the medium of Beckett’s art: language. In a letter to Axel Kaun (written in German in 1937), Beckett formulated a poetics of the “unword” (Beckett 1984, 172) and he used Gertrude Stein and James Joyce both as examples, but also as a contrastive background. Joyce’s approach had been the “apotheosis of the word” (Beckett 1984, 172); Beckett’s approach would be more “logoclastic”, as he wrote on 11 July 1937 to his friend Mary Manning (Beckett 2009a, 521). Beckett wrote this letter while Joyce’s final work, Finnegans Wake, was still called “Work in Progress”. Whereas this notion of a ‘work in progress’ still implied some form of improvement, Beckett preferred to think in terms of “mere gress” because of what he called its “purity from destination and hence from schedule” (Beckett 2009a, 186).

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Beckett had already expressed his aversion to schedule during his lectures on Racine and the Modern Novel at Trinity College, Dublin, in the early 1930s. Whereas Racine and Gide served as examples of how modern drama and fiction could convey a character’s complexity, Corneille and Balzac were his counterexamples. With reference to the genre of the novel, the “schedule” of Balzac’s “chloroformed world” in which characters functioned like “clockwork cabbages”, as they are called in Beckett’s early (posthumously published) novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Beckett 1992, 120). In the three novels under discussion, Beckett tried to avoid this danger of ‘scheduling’ by writing according to a method which Louis Hay (1987) has called ‘écriture à processus’, rather than ‘à programme’. There are no traces of plans or schemes to structure his novels. The writing simply proceeded apparently without preconceived destination.

2.1 Molloy Molloy consists of two parts. The first part, told by Molloy as a first-person narrator, consists of only two paragraphs, “the first of five hundred words, the second of about forty thousand”, as biographer Deirdre Bair put it (1978, 368). The first paragraph (or preamble) was written after the completion of the rest of the manuscript. It took Beckett only six months to write the novel, from 2 May to 1 November 1947, and he started with what (in the published version) is the opening of the second paragraph: “Cette fois-ci, puis encore une je pense, puis c’en sera fini je pense, de ce monde – là aussi” (Beckett 1951b, 9). In the English translation, which Beckett made in collaboration with Patrick Bowles, this becomes: “This time, then once more I think, then perhaps a last time, then I think it’ll be over, with that world too” (Beckett 2009b [1955], 4; emphasis added). The addition of a third time in the translation may be due to the fact that, by the time Beckett was translating his French version, he had finished not only Malone meurt but also L’Innommable. Evidently there is no one-onone identity between Beckett’s writing project and the reports of his characters, but there is an element of what Abbott calls “autography” that plays an important role in these novels. Abbott differentiates “autography” or “self-writing” from autobiography (1996, 20), because the latter has the storytelling tendency to turn life into a narrative (usually told with hindsight), whereas the former presupposes a form of “continuing incompletion” (1996, 20). With regard to the writing process of Molloy, Beckett told Charles Juliet: “When I wrote the first sentence in Molloy, I had no idea where I was heading. And when I finished the first part, I didn’t know how I was going to go on. […] I hadn’t planned it, or thought it all out at all” (Beckett qtd. in Juliet 1995, 140). After Molloy’s part – including his observation of two men (called A and B in the French version, A and C in the English text) his adventures at the police station, his bicycle accident leading to the death of Lousse’s dog, his stay at Lousse’s house, the scene with the sucking stones at the seaside, his deteriorating body, his crawling

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through the forest ending in a ditch – the second part is narrated by Moran. His report to ‘Youdi’ concerns his assignment to find Molloy, his procrastination before he leaves with his son, and his eventual return home after his unsuccessful quest. After having completed this second part, Beckett returned to the first page of the manuscript and added the opening paragraph or preamble, starting with “I am in my mother’s room” (2009b [1955], 3). In this preamble, Molloy mentions a man who comes every week, gives him money and takes away the pages that he has written. “It was he told me I’d begun all wrong, that I should have begun differently. He must be right. I began at the beginning, like an old ballocks, can you imagine that? Here’s my beginning” (Beckett 2009b [1955], 4). That was indeed where Beckett had begun. By adding the preamble to the original opening, Beckett created a revised (and self-revising) narrator, who is a later version of the narrator of the second paragraph. The complex doubling of character/narrator has been interpreted in terms of “what mathematicians identify as the orderly approach to chaos: the narrator (1) of the preamble (written last), divides into the pseudocouple Molloy-Moran (2), who each split into A and B/C (4), who further divide (8), and so on” (Moorjani 2015, 27). The narrators are not only doubled, the narrative is also “denarrated”, as Brian Richardson calls it, defining denarration as “a kind of narrative negation in which a narrator denies significant aspects of her narrative that had earlier been presented as given” (2001, 168). To illustrate an extreme form of denarration, Richardson chooses Molloy as an example. The second part of the novel opens with the words: “It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows” (Beckett 2009b [1955], 95). In the last paragraph, Moran closes with the lines: “Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining” (Beckett 2009b [1955], 184). As Richardson notes, “very little (if anything) is left over after the assaults of textual negation the narrative performs upon itself” (2001, 171). In Brian McHale’s terminology, these narrative instances of denarration are “Worlds under Erasure” (1991 [1987], 99–111). A world that is literally under erasure in this work is the Molloy country, more specifically Moran’s description of the economy of the Molloy country, called Ballyba. After having described this region, Moran asks the rhetorical question “What then was the source of Ballyba’s prosperity? I’ll tell you. No, I’ll tell you nothing” (Beckett 2009b [1955], 140). In the manuscript and typescript, instead of saying “No, I’ll tell you nothing”, Moran goes on for more than a dozen pages about the fact that the citizens’ stools were the source of Ballyba’s prosperity. Every citizen has to contribute an annual amount of excrement to manure the land and grow vegetables. As a result, the citizens are supposed to stay at home. A travel order is very hard to obtain and can only be issued by the so-called Obidil, always dressed in white (cf. O’Reilly 2006; Van Hulle 2014, 28; Winstanley 2014, 91). Beckett eventually decided to cut this scatological passage, but he deliberately left a textual trace, which can be called a contextual memory (cf. Ferrer 2011, 109). This scar is the sudden appearance in the published text

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of the “Obidil”, who has not been introduced before and never appears again afterwards: “And with regard to the Obidil, of whom I have refrained from speaking, until now, and whom I so longed to see face to face, all I can say with regard to him is this, that I never saw him, either face to face or darkly, perhaps there is no such person, that would not greatly surprise me” (Beckett 2009b [1955], 170). In the storyworld of the published text, indeed, “there is no such person” because the character was cut at the stage of the typescript. But by referring to him anyway, Beckett creates the effect of “disnarration” (in addition to the “denarration” discussed above). The concept of the “disnarrated” according to Richardson (building on Gerald Prince’s work) denotes “possible events that, though referred to, remain unactualized in a text” (2001, 169). The text of Molloy alludes to this unactualized passage, thus allowing part of the process of ‘worldmaking’ (Goodman 1978) to disrupt the finished product. Both the strategies of ‘dis-‘ and ‘denarration’ tend to have a disconcerting effect.

2.2 Malone meurt/Malone Dies As Molloy had announced, “this time” would be followed by “once more” (Beckett 2009b [1955], 4): like Molloy, Malone meurt was also written in only six months’ time. Beckett started writing it on 27 November 1947, less than a month after he finished Molloy, and completed the manuscript on 30 May 1948. In many ways, the book is a continuation and radicalization of some of its predecessor’s metafictional elements. As Ruby Cohn notes, it is “a more relentless parody” of the novel and “a more incisive probing into the narrative process itself” (2001, 169). Moreover, it “eclipses the protagonist into the narrator” (Cohn 2001, 169) in a more explicit manner. It takes almost fifty pages before the first-person narrator refers to himself as “Malone (since that is what I am called now)” (Beckett 2010a [1956], 49). And in the manuscript, he did not even have a name yet. He was simply referred to as “M – ?” (Van Hulle 2014, 31). Malone finds himself lying in a bed. All his possessions have been taken from him, except a few personal items such as a hat, his pencil and exercise book. His plan is to write four separate stories: about a man, a woman, a thing, and an animal. But then he considers dealing with the man and the woman in the same story, and he starts telling the story of Saposcat, whose name combines wisdom (sapere) with scatology, and who is transferred from his urban family to the farm of the Lamberts. The Lamberts are called ‘les Louis’ in the original French version. Through his self-translation, Beckett thus alludes to Balzac’s novel Louis Lambert. Malone’s narrative is interrupted because he drops his pencil. When he can resume his narrative, Malone (or ‘M’) decides to rename his character, “Car Sapo – non, je ne peux plus l’appeler ainsi” (Beckett 1951a, 90), “For Sapo – no, I can’t call him that any more” (Beckett 2010a [1956], 56). But in the manuscript he has no alternative name for him yet, only an initial. Again, the initial is the letter ‘M’ – thus continuing the proliferation of M-characters. This homunculus (Beckett 1951a, 84) is eventually named

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‘Macmann.’ He wears a long coat and a hat that is attached to his upper coat-button, not unlike previous M-characters (such as Molloy). Eventually, Macmann is taken to an institution called St. John’s of God. His attendant nurse is called Moll. They begin a sexual affair, until she does not return because Malone decides to kill her off – “En voilà toujours une de liquidée” [“There’s one out of the way at least”] (Beckett 1951a, 174; Beckett 2009b, 95). She is replaced by the male nurse Lemuel, who takes Macmann and a few other inmates on a trip to an island on Easter Weekend, and kills two men with a hatchet. After this inexplicable act of violence, the narrative peters out in a series of eight elliptic lines of text ending with “never anything / there / anymore” (Beckett 2010a, 119). The sudden moment of gratuitous violence is a recurrent element in Molloy (where both Molloy and Moran kill a man for no reason) and Malone meurt, recalling Beckett’s lectures at Trinity College, Dublin, when – according to one of his students’ notes – he referred to two concepts introduced by André Gide to discuss the role of irrationality in literature: the “geste gratuit” (Rachel Burrows’ notes, Trinity College Dublin TCD MIC 60, 39r) and the “crime immotivée” (Burrows, TCD MIC 60, 14r). Beckett valued acts that “cannot be reduced to motive”, as Burrows noted (TCD MIC 60, 14r). Apart from the excessive explanations à la Balzac, Beckett questioned the “Snowball act”, which releases a “purely mechanical setting of circumstance: ‘enchainement mécanique fatale de circonstances’” with its “arbitrary direction” and “constant acceleration to crisis” (Burrows, TCD MIC 60, 40). After the disintegration of the narrative in Malone meurt/Malone Dies, the question is whether any narrative development is still possible after that.

2.3 L’Innommable/The Unnamable The opening of what Molloy had announced as “then perhaps a last time” (Beckett 2009b [1955], 4) consists of the three crucial questions for any narrative: “Où maintenant? Quand maintenant? Qui maintenant?” (Beckett 1953, 7) In the English version, the order of these basic narratological questions is rearranged: “Where now? Who now? When now?” (Beckett 2010b [1958], 1) The text refers explicitly to the preceding novels: All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing, speak of them when, in order to stop speaking, I should have spoken of me and of me alone (Beckett 2010b [1958], 14; emphasis added).

“Me alone” is of course what Malone was supposed to be. But apparently, it is extremely difficult for the narrator to talk about himself without the tendency to narrativize his “I” (whatever that is) and turn himself into a character with a name. The manuscript of L’Innommable shows the same pattern as the draft of Malone meurt: it features a character that is initially referred to by means of an initial, ‘M’; only later

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does ‘M’ become ‘Mahood’. The name has been read in terms of ‘manhood’ (Cohn 2001, 188), just like ‘Macmann’ (or son of man) can be regarded as a representative of the human species. It is remarkable how often the word ‘humanité’ is deleted in the manuscript of L’Innommable. The unnamed narrator says he has been taught about love and intelligence, in other words “l’humanité quoi” (Beckett 2014, HRC MS SB 3–10, 6v). The first character introduced by the narrator is Basil, who is said to fill him with repugnance because he “sweats” humanity (“il suait l’humanité”; 6v). These references to humanity were eventually omitted, but Beckett questions the notion of humanism throughout the novel and it is not implausible that this is an implicit reply to Sartre’s 1946 lecture, “L’existentialisme est un humanisme.” According to Beckett, the human was a concept that we tend to resort to in times of great massacres (1984, 131). By implicitly criticizing the recourse to this notion, Beckett takes a distance from existentialism. The unnamed narrator wonders how he should proceed – “By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered” (Beckett 2010b [1958], 1). This latter strategy is applied increasingly frequently in the form of epanorthosis (the correction or rephrasing of an immediately preceding word). The frequency of this figure of speech increases in L’Innommable/The Unnamable (Clément 1994, 180–187). In Molloy, Moran announced that he was going to tell the reader about the sources of Ballyba’s prosperity, but then he invalidated the affirmation as uttered: “No, I’ll tell you nothing” (Beckett 2009b [1955], 140); in Malone Dies, the narrator reintroduced Saposcat and immediately corrected himself: “no, I can’t call him that any more” (Beckett 2010a [1956], 56); in The Unnamable, the unnamed narrator says: “I seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not about me” (Beckett 2010b [1958], 1). The narrator says his motto should have been “De nobis ipsis silemus” [About ourselves we do not speak] (Beckett 2010b, 42) – a line which Immanuel Kant took from Francis Bacon’s Novum Organon and used as the motto of the Critique of Pure Reason. The unnamed narrator’s aim is indeed to be silent, but he keeps on talking and in the manuscript the writing only stops when the text reaches the physical boundary of the notebook: the last lines are written on the back flyleaf, the very last page of the notebook (cf. Van Hulle 2012). In the English version, the last line reads: “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” (Beckett 2010b [1958], 134).

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies As indicated above, the first sentence of the three novels under discussion is “I am in my mother’s room” (Beckett 2009b [1955], 3). This simple sentence can be (and has been) read against the background of an aesthetic revelation (Weller 2009, viii), which according to Beckett took place in his mother’s room, in Foxrock, close to Dublin, probably in the summer of 1945 (Knowlson 1996, 352). A literary evocation of this

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moment is referred to as “the vision at last” in his later play Krapp’s Last Tape, when Krapp realizes that what he should be writing about is the “dark” he has “always struggled to keep under” (Beckett 1986, 220). But what exactly is meant by the “dark” is not made explicit. What it meant in Beckett’s case becomes a little clearer in a letter to his friend Con Leventhal. Here, Beckett expressed the core issue of his aesthetics by quoting his favourite line from Petrarch’s Canzoniere: “Chi può dire [sic] com’ egli arde è in piccolo foco” [He who can say he is burning is burning in a small fire] (Beckett 2014a, 136). As he explained to Leventhal, ‘arde’ (the burning) had to be “understood more generally, and less gallantly, than in the Canzoniere”: “As thus solicited it can link up with the 3rd proposition (coup de grâce) of Gorgias in his Nonent: 1. Nothing is. / 2. If anything is, it cannot be known. / 3. If anything is, and can be known, it cannot be expressed in speech” (Beckett 2014a, 136). Beckett’s suggestion implies that he read Petrarch’s line against the background of linguistic skepticism, which he had expressed a decade earlier in his “Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit”: “The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express” (Beckett 1984, 139). This statement was actually part of a comment on the paintings of Tal Coat. Two years earlier, in March 1947, Beckett wrote another text on painting, notably the painters Bram and his brother Geer van Velde, called “Peintres de l’empêchement”, in which he wrote another passage that has also been interpreted as an implicit statement on Beckett’s own poetics: “An endless unveiling, veil behind veil, plane after plane of imperfect transparencies, light and space themselves veils, an unveiling towards the unveilable, the nothing, the thing again” (Beckett 2011 [1948], 880; emphasis added). With reference to the three novels under discussion, this statement is important because it was written only two months before Beckett started writing Molloy on 2 May 1947. Against this background, John Bolin reads the passage as an indication of Beckett’s “interest in a form of internal duplication as a central motif and governing formal characteristic of the artwork” (2013, 122). The word “plane” in the passage from “Peintres de l’empêchement” recalls the terminology Beckett had first used in his discussion of the structure of André Gide’s Paludes and Les Faux-Monnayeurs in his lectures at Trinity College, Dublin in the early 1930s (TCD MIC 60, 33; 37). In these lectures, he advocated what he called the ‘integrity of incoherence’, which is why Racine (unlike Corneille or Balzac) was comparable to Gide. In his 1947 essay Beckett is talking about the paintings of Bram and Geer van Velde, but as Bolin suggests, he may also be talking about his own poetics at that moment, a poetics in which modernity is inseparable from the use of “a self-reflexive form that depicts the process of unveiling that brought it into being” (2013, 122). Each M-character in the series (Molloy, Moran, Malone, Macmann, Mahood) may seem to hold the promise of unveiling the ‘self’, according to Daniel C. Dennett’s notion of “narrative selfhood” (Dennett 1991, 418). But although this human tendency to

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narrate a ‘self’ is clearly recognized by Beckett, he seems to undermine and criticize this urge, which Dennett calls a “fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition” (1991, 418). In the process of writing, Beckett’s characters seem to be counteracting this tactic, undoing their carefully constructed or narrated selves. Moran’s report is particularly telling in this respect. The world he neatly composed for himself gradually decomposes in the course of his report, thus undoing this self to come closer to the integrity of incoherence that was so crucial in Beckett’s lectures at Trinity College, Dublin. Much later, Beckett told Lawrence Shainberg: It’s a paradox, but with old age, the more the possibilities diminish, the better chance you have. With diminished concentration, loss of memory, obscured intelligence – what you, for example, might call ‘brain damage’ – the more chance there is for saying something closest to what one really is. Even though everything seems inexpressible, there remains the need to express. A child needs to make a sand castle even though it makes no sense. (Beckett in Shainberg 1987, 104; emphasis added)

This statement recapitulates not only the “obligation to express” (Beckett 1984, 139), but also the project of “saying something closest to what one really is”, or, in other words, “an unveiling towards the unveilable” (Beckett 2011, 880). But when Beckett wrote “Peintres de l’empêchement”, he was also aware that this is a process without end, an “endless unveiling” (Beckett 2011, 880). Paradoxically, while attempting to unveil, every text simultaneously weaves a new veil, “veil behind veil, plane after plane of imperfect transparencies” (Beckett 2011, 880).

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Beckett’s favourite critic among the early readers was Maurice Blanchot, according to whom the unstoppable utterance in The Unnamable is not the antithesis of silence, for silence is constantly present within it (1953, 678). According to Georges Bataille, one of the earliest critics reviewing Molloy, the novel was characterized by its “absence d’humanité” (Bataille qtd. in Moorjani 2015, 21). As we have seen, Beckett indeed made a conscious effort to, even literally, erase the high-flown notion of ‘humanity’ in these three novels, which are indelibly marked by the experience of World War II. But the War was not the only reason for this post-humanist approach. Even before the War, Beckett had already expressed his wish to find a poetics that was not anthropocentric: “I am not interested in a ‘unification’ of the historical chaos any more than I am in the ‘clarification’ of the individual chaos, & still less in the anthropomorphisation of the inhuman necessities that provoke the chaos” (qtd. in Nixon 2011, 177–178). Angela Moorjani has provided an overview of the different stages in the reception of Beckett’s three novels. As she notes, the first generation of Beckett reviewers interpreted the “decomposing bodies, the informe, and the nullity of language

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and meaning” in his novels as “signs of human-lessness” (2015, 22), not in terms of existential humanism: “If reading Beckett through the lens of existential humanism applies to some second-generation critics’ investigations of authentic being and the quest for self, the label clearly does not fit the trilogy’s earliest readers” (Moorjani 2015, 22). Theodor W. Adorno opposed the tendency to read Beckett in light of existentialism. The problem with existentialist ontology, according to Adorno, is its “hieratic language”: “The hieratic language alone turns the radicalism of existential ontology into a lie. While one confronts nothingness, while everything is being questioned, the bathos of this questioning already warrants the meaning it pretends to know nothing about” (2010, 170). Against this “sacred language” Beckett posits his “regressive language”, according to Adorno (1982, 119), by means of “subtraction” (1982, 123). The last of Adorno’s notes on L’Innommable reads: “Not abstraction but subtraction” (2010, 78). Beckett’s writing is an engaged form of literature, but not in the Sartrean sense, Adorno argues. Beckett’s work is engaged by what it subtracts. Through its negativity, it is a truly engaged form of literature (Adorno 1984, 353–354; Critchley 2004, 183). The 1980s and 1990s were marked by political readings, such as Peter Gidal’s or Alain Badiou’s reading of Beckett’s work in terms of his “ethico-political aesthetic” (cf. Gibson 2002, 93–94, 102). In this period, the role of language was central in Beckett criticism, for instance in Steven Connor’s chapter on self-translation in Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (2007 [1988]). In the twenty-first century, however, this role has been reassessed, notably by Connor himself in the preface to his edition of The Unnamable, where he refers to Badiou’s urge to move beyond “language-centred post-structuralist criticism” (2010, xx). Whereas, in the 1980s and 1990s, Beckett studies may have been dominated by a preoccupation with such thinkers as Kristeva, Derrida, Cixous, Foucault, Deleuze and Lacan, this focus on what Jean-Michel Rabaté refers to as “capital-T Theory” (2011, 700) gradually shifted to other topics. As Moorjani notes: “Renewed critical interest since the 1980s in affect and the material body has led scholars to a focus on the abject and dwindling corporeality in the trilogy that for the first French critics placed the human in question” (2015, 30). At the same time, another shift took place from an ahistorical view on the human condition and the critical construction of a ‘universal’ Beckett towards a renewed awareness of the importance of the particulars. This trend was initiated by such landmark publications as the biography by James Knowlson (1996) and Beckett before Godot (1997) by John Pilling. The publication of such documents as Beckett’s ‘Dream’ Notebook (1999), the Letters of Samuel Beckett (2009–2016), Beckett’s notes on Arnold Geulincx (2006) or Samuel Beckett’s Library (Van Hulle and Nixon 2013), as well as the digitization and transcription of Beckett’s manuscripts in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org) have facilitated intertextual research and investigations that historicize and contextualize Beckett’s works in ways that

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were not possible before. This historicizing approach is part of what Andrew Gibson has called “a new phase” in Beckett studies: “A young generation of scholars have abandoned the theoretical turn that dominated work on Beckett from the late 1980s onwards” (2011, 926). Especially since the Beckett Centenary in 2006, Beckett studies are thriving  – which sounds like a very un-Beckettian concept and raises Moran’s rhetorical question: “What then was the source of [this] prosperity? I’ll tell you. No, I’ll tell you nothing” (Beckett 2009b [1955], 140).

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Beckett, Samuel. Malone meurt. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1951a. Beckett, Samuel. Molloy. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1951b. Beckett, Samuel. L’Innommable. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1953. Beckett, Samuel. Disjecta. New York: Grove Press, 1984. Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber, 1986. Beckett, Samuel. Le monde et le pantalon. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1989. Beckett, Samuel. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Dublin: Black Cat Press, 1992. Beckett, Samuel. Beckett’s ‘Dream’ Notebook. Ed. John Pilling. Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999. Beckett, Samuel. The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Volume I: 1929–1940. Ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009a. Beckett, Samuel. Molloy. Ed. Shane Weller. London: Faber and Faber, 2009b [1955]. Beckett, Samuel. Malone Dies. Ed. Peter Boxall. London: Faber and Faber, 2010a [1956]. Beckett, Samuel. The Unnamable. Ed. Steven Connor. London: Faber and Faber, 2010b [1958]. Beckett, Samuel. “The New Object.” Modernism/modernity 18.4 (2011) [1948]: 873–877. Beckett, Samuel. The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett : A Critical Edition. Ed. John Pilling and Seán Lawlor. London: Faber and Faber, 2012. Beckett, Samuel. The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Volume III: 1957–1965. Ed. George Craig et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014a.

Manuscript material Beckett, Samuel. L’Innommable/The Unnamable: A Digital Genetic Edition. Ed. Dirk Van Hulle et al. Brussel: University Press Antwerp, 2014b. Beckett, Samuel. L’Innommable Notebooks. Harry Random Humanities Research Center at Austin, Texas. Samuel Beckett Collection, box 3, folder 10; box 4, folder 1; abbreviated as HRC MS SB 3.10 and 4.1 (1949–1950). Beckett, Samuel. Molloy Notebooks. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at Austin, Texas. Samuel Beckett Collection, box 4, folders 5–7; box 5, folder 1; abbreviated as HRC MS SB 4.5, 4.6, 4.7, 5.1 (1947a).

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Beckett, Samuel. Malone meurt Notebooks. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at Austin, Texas. Samuel Beckett Collection, box 7, folders 3–4; abbreviated as HRC MS SB 7.3 and 7.4 (1947–1948). Beckett, Samuel. Molloy Typescript (fragment). Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at Austin, Texas. Carlton Lake Collection, box 17, folder 6; abbreviated as HRC MS CL 17.6 (1947b). --Abbott, H. Porter. Beckett Writing Beckett. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Ackerley, Chris, and S. E. Gontarski. The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett. London: Faber and Faber, 2006. Adorno, Theodor W. “Trying to Understand Endgame.” Trans. Michael T. Jones. New German Critique 9.2 (1982): 119–150. Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. C. Lenhardt. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. Adorno, Theodor W. “Notes on Endgame.” Trans. Dirk Van Hulle and Shane Weller. Journal of Beckett Studies 19.2 (2010): 172–178. Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978. Blanchot, Maurice. “Où maintenant? Qui maintenant?” La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française 1.10 (1953): 678–686. Bolin, John. Beckett and the Modern Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Boxall, Peter. “Still Stirrings: Beckett’s Prose from Texts for Nothing to Stirrings Still.” The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett. Ed. Dirk Van Hulle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 33–47. Burrows, Rachel. Samuel Beckett Lecture Notes. Trinity College Library, Dublin; abbreviated as TCD MIC 60. Clément, Bruno. L’œuvre sans qualités: Rhétorique de Samuel Beckett. Paris: Seuil, 1994. Cohn, Ruby. A Beckett Canon. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2001. Connor, Steven. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. Aurora: Davies Group, 2007 [1988]. Connor, Steven. “Preface.” The Unnamable. Ed. Steven Connor. London: Faber and Faber, 2010. vii–xxv. Critchley, Simon. Very Little … Almost Nothing. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2004 [1997]. Dennett, Daniel C. Consciousness Explained. London: Penguin, 1991. Federman, Raymond, and John Fletcher. Samuel Beckett: His Works and His Critics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. Ferrer, Daniel. Logiques du brouillon: modèles pour un critique génétique. Paris: Seuil, 2011. Geulincx, Arnold. Ethics: With Samuel Beckett’s Notes. Ed. Han van Ruler and Anthony Uhlmann. Trans. Martin Wilson. Amsterdam: Rodopi/Brill, 2006. Gibson, Andrew. “Beckett and Badiou.” Beckett and Philosophy. Ed. Richard Lane. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002: 93–107. Gibson, Andrew. Review of Seán Kennedy and Katherine Weiss, eds. Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive. Modernism/modernity 18.4 (2011): 926–928. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Hassocks: Harvester, 1978. Hay, Louis. “La troisième dimension de la littérature.” Texte 5/6 (1987): 313–328. Juliet, Charles. Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde. Trans. Janey Tucker. Leiden: Academic Press, 1995. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame. London: Bloomsbury, 1996. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1991 [1987]. McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1992. Moorjani, Angela. “Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable: The Novel Reshaped.” The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett. Ed. Dirk Van Hulle. Cambridge University Press, 2015: 19–32.

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Nixon, Mark. Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. O’Reilly, Edouard Magessa. “Molloy, Part II, Where the Shit Hits the Fan: Ballyba’s Economy and the Worth of the World.” Genetic Joyce Studies 6 (Spring 2006). http://www.geneticjoycestudies. org/GJS6/GJS6OReilly.htm Antwerp: University of Antwerp, 2006 (1 February 2016). Pilling, John. Beckett before Godot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. “Beckett’s Three Critiques: Kant’s Bathos and the Irish Chandos.” Modernism/ modernity 18.4 (2011): 699–719. Richardson, Brian. “Denarration in Fiction: Erasing the Story in Beckett and Others.” Narrative 9.2 (2001): 168–175. Shainberg, Lawrence. “Excorcising Beckett.” The Paris Review 29.104 (Fall 1987): 100–136. Tucker, David. “‘No One Wanders Unpunished’: Revisiting Molloy, Malone meurt/Malone Dies and L’Innommable/The Unnamable.” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 26 (2014): 11–24. Van Hulle, Dirk. “La genèse de L’Innommable.” Littérature 167 (2012): 65–77. Van Hulle, Dirk. “The Obidil and the Man of Glass: Denarration, Genesis and Cognition in Beckett’s Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable.” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 26 (2014): 25–40. Van Hulle, Dirk, and Mike Kestemont. “Periodizing Samuel Beckett’s Works: A Stylochronometric Approach.” Style 50.2 (2016): 172–202. Van Hulle Dirk, and Mark Nixon. Samuel Beckett’s Library. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Van Hulle, Dirk, and Shane Weller. The Making of Samuel Beckett’s L’Innommable/The Unnamable. Brussels/London: University Press Antwerp/Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. Weller, Shane. “Preface.” Molloy. Ed. Shane Weller. London: Faber and Faber, 2009. vii–xviii. Winstanley, Adam. “‘Grâce aux excréments des citoyens’: Beckett, Swift and the Coprophagic Economy of Ballyba.” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 26 (2014): 91–106.

5.2 Further Reading English Bixby, Patrick. Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Feldman, Matthew, and Mark Nixon, eds. The International Reception of Samuel Beckett. London: Continuum, 2009. Graver, Lawrence, and Raymond Federman, eds. Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. Levy, Eric P. Trapped in Thought: A Study of the Beckettian Mentality. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007. Morin, Emilie. Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. O’Reilly, Edouard Magessa, Dirk Van Hulle, and Pim Verhulst. The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. London/Brussels: Bloomsbury/University Press Antwerp, 2017. Pilling, John. A Samuel Beckett Chronology. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Tucker, David, Mark Nixon, and Dirk Van Hulle, eds. Revisiting Molloy, Malone meurt/Malone Dies, L’Innommable/The Unnamable. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 26. Amsterdam: Rodopi/ Brill, 2014. [Contains a bibliography of secondary literature on the three novels]. Uhlmann, Anthony, ed. Samuel Beckett in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

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Van Hulle, Dirk, and Pim Verhulst. The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Malone meurt/Malone Dies. London/Brussels: Bloomsbury/University Press Antwerp, 2017. Weller, Shane. A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism. London: Legenda, 2005.

French Badiou, Alain. Beckett: l’increvable désir. Paris: Hachette, 1995. Bataille, Georges. “Le silence de Molloy.” Critique 7 (1951): 387–396. Casanova, Pascale. Beckett l’abstracteur. Paris: Seuil, 1997. Collinge, Linda. Beckett traduit Beckett. De Malone meurt à Malone Dies, l’imaginaire en traduction. Genève: Droz, 2000. Grossman, Evelyne. L’esthétique de Beckett. Paris: Editions SEDES, 1998. Nadeau, Maurice. “Samuel Beckett ou le droit au silence.” Les Temps Modernes 7 (1952): 1273–1282. Pingaud, Bernard, ed. “Le dossier de presse de Molloy.” Molloy, ‘L’expulsé’. By Samuel Beckett. Paris: Union Générale d’Editions-10/18, 1963: 255–286. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “L’homme ligoté.” Situations I. Paris: Gallimard, 1947: 271–288.

Lars Eckstein

13 Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956) Abstract: This essay reads Sam Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners (1956) as a milestone in the decolonisation of British fiction. After an introduction to Selvon and the core composition of the novel, it discusses the ways in which the narrative takes on issues of race and racism, how it in the tradition of the Trinidadian carnival confronts audiences with sexual profanation and black masculine swagger, and not least how the novel, especially through its elaborate use of creole Englishes, reimagines London as a West Indian metropolis. The essay then turns more systematically to the ways in which Selvon translates Western literary models and their isolated subject positions into collective modes of narrative performance taken from Caribbean orature and the calypsonian tradition. The Lonely Londoners breathes entirely new life into the ossified conventions of the English novel, and imbues it with unforeseen aesthetic, ethical, political and epistemological possibilities. Keywords: 1948 Nationality Act, racism, kiff-kiff laughter, creolisation, calypso

1 Context: Author, Œuvre, Moment Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners marks a milestone in the decolonisation of the British novelistic tradition. It not only puts Black Britons indelibly on the map of the heart of Empire in what critics have termed a “colonisation in reverse” (Ramchand 2001, 7; cf. Dawson 2007). It also infuses Anglophone fiction with unprecedented aesthetic and epistemic innovations, as one of the first English novels entirely written in a literary creole, and as a novel which effectively translates the ossified European conventions of realism and modernism into distinctly Caribbean worldings. It riffs on the earlier Londoners of Dickens, Woolf or Eliot (Looker 1996, 75); yet its antiphonic and collective narrative form, its tragic-comic spirit, its carnivalesque humour and profanations, and not least its decolonial politics are inspired by Caribbean orature and the calypsonian tradition. The empathetic humanity of its characters, its inspired critique of racist and social injustice, its profound epistemic negotiations and creolisations still outshine the work of later Black and Asian British writers such as Salman Rushdie (↗ 20 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses) or Zadie Smith (↗ 24 Zadie Smith, White Teeth) which were received with much more critical enthusiasm. Samuel Dickson Selvon was born in San Fernando in the South of Trinidad in 1923 as one of seven children. His mother was of Indian and Scottish descent, his father, a dry-goods merchant, a first generation Christian immigrant from Madras. His parents could not afford Selvon’s education beyond high school, and he left Naparima College DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-014

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in San Fernando at the age of 15. His first experiments in writing began during World War II, during the long hours of a job as a wireless operator in a local branch of the Royal Naval Reserve. After the war he moved to Port of Spain, did editorial work for the Trinidad Guardian, and began to publish short stories and poems, several of which were aired on BBC’s Caribbean Voices, a London-based radio programme for Caribbean audiences originally installed to connect West Indian soldiers with their families back home. In its transformations after the war, the programme became formative for a whole generation of young Caribbean writers including George Lamming, Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, Andrew Salkey, V. S. Naipaul and many others, if not without controversy over the invasive editorial policies of its later Anglo-Irish producer, Henry Swanzy (Gramaglia and McIntosh 2013). In April 1950, Sam Selvon emigrated to London, famously on the same boat as Barbadian writer George Lamming, whose second novel The Emigrants (1954) in many ways forms a companion piece to The Lonely Londoners. Like Lamming’s In the Castle of my Skin (1953), Selvon’s first novel A Brighter Sun (1952), most parts of which were still drafted in Trinidad, is a Bildungsroman set in the Caribbean. It chronicles the first five years of marriage of its protagonist, Tiger, to his arranged bride, Urmilla, which metonymically resonate with both local changes in the community and the larger economic and political transformations of the colony. Only with his third novel, The Lonely Londoners, did Selvon fully turn to his new home in England, where he initially found work as a clerk at the Indian embassy. His first residence was the Balmoral Hotel in South Kensington, a place which provided accommodation for students from the colonies as well as recent emigrants, and ‘liming’ with the other West Indians and Africans there provided him with the raw material for the motley cast of characters in The Lonely Londoners: “It was my first experience of living among other West Indian islanders, happening in the heart of London thousands of miles from home territory, and I learned as much about them as I learned about the English, whose ignorance of black people shocked me” (Selvon 1995, 58–59). Like the main focalising character of his novel, Moses Aloetta, Selvon found himself at the gravitational centre of a transient, and overwhelmingly male community of first wave colonial migrants who shared their ‘ballad’ of struggle and conquest in the capital of a nation that was both theirs, by right of the 1948 Nationality Act, and not theirs, by the diverse lived experiences they made. The historical moment of The Lonely Londoners marks a decisive period in Britain’s imperial past and postcolonial future. Published in 1956, the novel looks back on the first years of mass migration from the colonies since the arrival of the first group of 492 immigrants from the West Indies landing on 22 June 1948 at Tilbury on the MV Empire Windrush, the ship which came to provide the name for an entire generation. It is important to note that the waves of post-World War II migration were not the first to establish a substantial black presence in Britain, a presence which goes back as far as to the times of the Romans. In the late eighteenth century, following the American Revolution and the 1772 Somerset Case which effectively declared slavery illegal

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on English territory, the black population of London alone had peaked at an estimated 15,000 before it rapidly declined again in the nineteenth century (cf. Winder 2004; Fryer 1987). The Windrush generation resonates with these earlier generations of migrants, and Selvon’s literature with that of earlier writings, be they Queen Elizabeth’s 1601 proclamation against “the great number of Negroes and blackamoors which (as she is informed) are carried into this realm”, issuing that “the said kind of people shall be with all speed avoided and discharged out of this her majesty’s realms” (Burton and Loomba 2007, 158), or Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789) marking the beginnings of a Black British literary tradition. Selvon’s black Londoners were hardly the first, but they were the first to stay on a mass scale, and to lastingly transform the ethnic fabric of England. Even though The Lonely Londoners focuses on the local struggles of colonial migrants in London and thus on a distinctly limited geographic setting, it is really embedded in the much larger politics of post-War reconstruction and, not least, the demise of the British Empire. The 1948 Nationality Act passed by the Attlee government, which established a new definition of UK citizenship that also included all residents of Empire born in the colonies, needs to be understood in the complex interplay of these contexts. Ashley Dawson (2007) elaborates that the Act’s primary interest was indeed not in the creation of legal equity among all subjects of Empire, and least of all in the encouragement of migration to the motherland, but that it was much rather motivated by the ‘loss’ of India in August 1947. As such, the Act mainly served as “a powerful symbolic reaffirmation of the imperial system” in order to “defuse anticolonial nationalist movements” (Dawson 2007, 10). The Attlee government never lobbied for colonial migrants to rebuild the country, but instead actively recruited continental Europeans – white foreigners rather than black nationals – to settle in the UK; it really wished to forge a system where “imperial subjects were to be formally equal but geographically separate” (Dawson 2007, 10). It is hardly surprising, then, that the Windrush generation neither encountered the equality nor the hospitality they associated with the Nationality Act in their everyday experiences in the metropolitan heart of Empire. What they mostly found was systemic discrimination, most dramatically so on the housing and job markets, and aggravated by the institutional racism of political parties, agencies, trade unions and especially the metropolitan police. The lonely Londoners in Selvon’s fiction are caught up in a system of classed and racial segregation at an historical moment when the inbuilt schizophrenia of Empire – the desire to remake the globe in one’s own image, yet without surrendering the privilege of difference – hit home, quite literally, with a vengeance. Sam Selvon’s work never ceased to engage with the alienations of migration, the trials of everyday survival, and the larger ironies of Empire, in various narrative modes ranging from sober realism to exuberant satire, from standard to creole Englishes, and shifting settings across the Atlantic. He in part built on the success of his first novels: Turn Again Tiger (1958), a sequel to A Brighter Sun (1952), traces Tiger’s return to the world of his childhood. With Moses Ascending (1975) and Moses Migrat-

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ing (1983), he extended The Lonely Londoners into a trilogy, following the life and aspirations of Moses Aloetta across the 1960s and 1970s. Some of Selvon’s most inspiring further novels are I Hear Thunder (1962), The Housing Lark (1965), or The Plains of Caroni (1970). Yet he also continued radio work and collaborated on screen plays, most notably with Horace Ové for the formative classic of Black British cinema, Pressure (1976). Selvon turned his back on England in 1978 and settled in Calgary, Canada. He died of lung disease on a return visit to Trinidad in 1994.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns 2.1 Characters and Episodes The Lonely Londoners does not follow a conventional plot or narrative structure. Instead, it inflects Western episodic narrative models with a distinctly musicalised, calypsonian mode of storytelling in various registers of creolised English. The narrative is told in third-person mode, by a heterodiegetic narrator using a mix of zero and fixed internal focalisation to offer insight into a large cast of black Londoners, some only recently off the boat, some veterans of the earliest Windrush days, all coping differently with the challenges of the city and adopting different strategies of dealing with its opportunities and depravations over a course of roughly three years. It is this narrator, most of all, who holds the loosely related episodes of the novel together, primarily through a specific quality of voice, a voice which steps out from the page by means of a carefully crafted aurality. The narrator’s various registers of creole encompass the voices of all central characters, giving the narration a distinctly collective feel. Still, it is anchored on one primary focalising character whose life and thoughts it is closest to, and who provides the gravitational centre of storytelling: Moses Aloetta, who has been in London longer than any of the other ‘boys’. The novel opens with him travelling to Waterloo station to meet a newly arrived fellow-Trinidadian: One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the blur as if is not at all but some strange place on another planet, Moses Aloetta hop on a number 46 bus at the corner of Chepstow Road and Westbourne Grove to go to Waterloo to meet a fellar who was coming from Trinidad on the boattrain. (23)1

And it closes with Moses’ meditations on the misery and pathos and vastness of black life in the city, all of which he might one day turn into a book:

1 Unless otherwise indicated page references in brackets without further designation refer to Selvon 2001.

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Daniel was telling him how over in France all kinds of fellars writing books what turning out to be best-sellers. Taxi-driver, porter, road-sweeper – it didn’t matter. One day you sweating in the factory and the next day all the newspapers have your name and photo, saying how you are a new literary giant. He watch a tugboat on the Thames, wondering if he could ever write a book like that, what everybody would buy. It was a summer night: laughter fell softly: it was the sort of a night that if you wasn’t making love to a woman you feel you was the only person in the world like that. (141)

There is, then, a rather close association of the narrator/performer, whose voice identifies him as one of the ‘boys’ and a veteran migrant who knows all ‘ballad’, with the figure of Moses. Yet there is no identification in the first person, which would undercut the collective thrust and flow of the narrative, and the plurality of experience it offers to its listeners. Moses’ acquaintances are legion. There is the “fellar name Henry Oliver” (23) he sets out to meet at Waterloo Station, a man he soon nicknames ‘Sir Galahad’, initially ironically for his heroic naiveté and disarming confusion. Yet Galahad lives up to his name when he eventually conquers both the city and its “crafts” in epic style against all setbacks: “So, cool as a lord, the old Galahad walking out to the road, with plastic raincoat hanging on the arm, and the eyes not missing one sharp craft that pass, bowing his head in a polite ‘Good evening’ and not giving a blast if they answer or not” (87). There is the Jamaican Tolroy, a friend he happens to meet at the station who sent only for his mother, but finds the extended family hopping off the “boattrain”, including his sister Agnes and her husband Lewis. Tolroy’s aunt, Tanty, is the only major female West Indian character whose ballad is subsequently shared. She is ridiculed by her family for her ignorance about London ways, but later heroically traverses the city, and in her headstrong manner even convinces the English to adopt Caribbean ways of doing things by pushing a system of buying on credit in the corner shop of her working-class neighbourhood. Cap(tain) is a Nigerian from a rich family who dropped out of Law School and squandered his money on booze and women. His is the ballad of a black male trickster who survives by his boyish charms which he works on his friends but mostly on white women. He dates an Austrian girl whom he promises to get a night job only to chase more women, steals a watch from an English girl to fund his dates with a German only to end up marrying a French woman, borrowing from his soft-hearted friend Daniel. The tragic-comic climax of Cap’s ballad satirising his hyper-masculine powers is an episode where he unwittingly picks up a transvestite. Yet even though Moses complains to Galahad that “is fellars like that who muddy the water for a lot of us” (51), “still Moses have compassion for him” (55). Then there is Bart(holomew), lighter-skinned than the rest of the ‘boys’, terrified of having to share his very meagre fortunes with them, and trying to pass as Latin American. The narrative takes satirical revenge when he is kicked out of his white girlfriend’s house because her daddy “don’t want no curly-hair children in the family”

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(65), and after “a few door slam in Bart face, a few English people give him the old diplomacy, […] Bart boil down and come like one of the boys” (63). Big City, a Trinidadian with big dreams turns out to be illiterate and in need of Moses to help him “full up” (98) forms after he gets into a car accident. There is Harris, the only one of the ‘boys’ who has come to riches and socialises with the London upper class, trying to out-English the English wearing bowler hats and parading a copy of The Times wherever he goes. He is embarrassed to the bone when the West Indian mob crashes a party he throws at St. Pancras, especially fearing Five Past Twelve, a weed-smoking Barbadian “blacker than midnight” and fond of a rub. Harris is eventually put into place by Tanty, who loudly shatters his mimicking charade: “‘Harris!’ […] ‘You don’t know me? You don’t know neighbour who uses to live behind you in George Street? […] [L]ittle Harris what used to run about the barrack-yard in shirttail!’” (114) The biting satire of all episodes is counteracted by the warmth and humour of the narrative voice which is, like Moses, ultimately compassionate with all characters, irrespective of their follies and fancies. It is this collectivising voice, too, which counters the isolation and alienation which all characters feel, even if listeners get different degrees of insight into characters’ emotions. The tension between isolating introspection and an integrating chorus of collective experiences in The Lonely Londoners is maintained especially through passages of free indirect discourse, mostly reserved for Galahad and, more than anyone else, Moses. Thus, the very heart of the novel around which all ballads and episodes are framed consists of an extended stream-of-consciousness passage using free indirect discourse and no punctuation with Moses as focaliser. Nodding both to modernist literary models and to the solo improvisations of Afro-Caribbean musics, the sequence is framed around a summer night in Hyde Park which triggers an almost unstopping flow of observations, associations, fantasies and memories, most of which revolve around all kinds of sexual encounter. Yet the exuberant flight ends in a blue note, juxtaposing Galahad’s youthful rapture with Moses’ disillusion of being stuck in a life devoid of movement and meaning: oh lord Galahad say when the sweetness of summer get in him he say he would never leave the old Brit’n as long as he live and Moses sigh a long sigh like a man who live life and see nothing at all in it and who frighten as the years go by wondering what it is all about. (109–110)

The profundity of aimlessness, alienation and isolation resonates till the end of the narrative of The Lonely Londoners, “under the kiff-kiff laughter, behind the ballad and the episode” (141). Loss and loneliness are held at bay only by the collective experience of storytelling itself; when “[n]early every Sunday morning, like if they are going to church, the boys liming in Moses room, coming together for a oldtalk” (138), even if that talk only riffs on ever new versions of the same: the dregs of finding work or something to eat, the pleasures of ‘coasting lime’, of vouching to soon return ‘home’, but never leaving.

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2.2 Encountering Racism It should have come across by now that one of the challenges of The Lonely Londoners is its generic syncretism of various narrative modes, drawing on both English and Caribbean genealogies of telling tales. The novel is, in this sense, also a social realist text, and yet it is not. The Lonely Londoners astutely observes a city thoroughly segregated by the intersectional lines of class and race. The narrator muses on Tolroy’s run-down working class neighbourhood: “London is a place like that. It divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything about what happening in the other ones except what you read in the papers” (74). It acknowledges that within the ghettoised spaces of the city, there is indeed transgression of the barriers of race – Tanty’s success in establishing a Caribbean credit system is a case in point, or the local grocer who “from the time spades start to settle in the district, he find out what sort of things they like to eat and he stock up with a lot of things like blackeye peas and red beans and pepper sauce, and tinned breadfruit and ochro and smoke herring” (77). In Rushdie’s famous phrase, the West Indian migrants thus locally succeed in “tropicalizing” the city (Rushdie 1988, 354). Selvon locates productive everyday exchanges between Caribbean and English characters that are largely unburdened by the pathologies of race mainly among the working classes: “It have a kind of communal feeling with the Working Class and the spades, because when you poor things does level out, it don’t have much up and down” (75). Yet such solidarities painfully end beyond the boundaries of the “little worlds” of communal exchange. They end most drastically on the housing and job markets, and the discriminations there are translated into institutional policies on all levels from schools to unions to government institutions. In a revealing incident, Moses explains to Galahad how West Indians are filed at the Labour Exchange: ‘Now on all the records of the boys, you will see mark on top in red ink. J-A, Col. That mean you from Jamaica and you black. So that put the clerks in the know right away, you see. Suppose a vacancy come and they want to send a fellar, first they will find out if the firm want coloured fellars before they send you. That save a lot of time and bother, you see.’ (46)

Nick Bentley finds evidence in such passages of how Selvon underscores the perpetuation of everyday racism in the institutions which not only play out precarious black and white Londoners against each other, but more importantly foreclose the possibilities of a joint political movement which could take on matters of systemic racial discrimination. Neither trade unions, nor leftist organisations or the Labour Party really provided a platform and outlet for black politics in the 1950s, and “Black individuals were, therefore, marginalised not only from mainstream white culture, but also from the primary bodies of opposition to dominant power frameworks” (Bentley 2003, 44).

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The Lonely Londoners explores the psychological effects of this double marginalisation in bitter-sweet prose passages which break through the “kiff-kiff laughter” (141) of the surface narrative. In a particularly moving episode, Galahad expands on his own “theory about Black” one night, following an episode where a little child shouts “Mummy, look at that black man” (89) in the street, and starts crying when Galahad talks to them: Galahad would take his hand from under the blanket, as he lay there studying how the night before he was in the lavatory and two white fellars come in and say how these black bastards have the lavatory dirty, and they didn’t know that he was there, and when he come out they say hello mate have a cigarette. And Galahad watch the colour of his hand, and talk to it, saying, ‘Colour, is you that causing all this, you know. Why the hell you can’t be blue, or red or green, if you can’t be white? You know is you that cause a lot of misery in the world. Is not me, you know, is you! I ain’t do anything to infuriate the people and them, is you! Look at you, you so black and innocent, and this time so you causing misery all over the world!’ So Galahad talking to the colour Black, as if is a person, telling it that is not he who causing botheration in the place, but Black, who is a worthless thing for making trouble all about. (88)

The passage resonates powerfully with Frantz Fanon’s furiously poetic analyses of the psychopathologies of race in post-War France and Paris in particular in Peau noire masques blancs, first published in 1952. Black Skin, White Masks only appeared in English translation in 1967, yet still, the parallels specifically between Fanon’s chapter on “The Fact of Blackness” and Galahad’s ruminations are difficult to miss. Fanon develops his notion of a bodily ‘schema’ via describing the habitual act of reaching for and holding a cigarette; he painfully describes how corresponding concepts of self are shattered by the overdetermining scripts of history and race written onto the black skin, and triggered in the moment of white interpellation: “‘Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened’”; how the “corporeal schema crumbles” under the sheer weight of white “legends, stories, history” of “tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave ships, and above all: ‘Sho’ good eatin’.” And Fanon, too, notes: “One day, […] I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object”, relating self to black body “in the third person” (Fanon 2008, 111–112). It is tempting on these grounds to interpret the various compensating strategies of the diverse cast of The Lonely Londoners through the lens of Fanon: to pathologise characters like Galahad and Harris who strive to escape the “infernal circle” (Fanon 2008, 116) of racist overdetermination by becoming more English than the English – unlike Tanty, who tries instead to Caribbeanise the motherland; to pathologise characters like Cap or Five Past Twelve, who embrace the racist stereotypes of blackness they encounter, a strategy which Fanon also identifies in the strategic essentialisms of the Negritude movement. And yet, such interpretive moves alone do not do justice to the complexity of the novel which is grounded in the historical realities of London in the 1940s and 1950s and which is, on one level, a realist text. But again, this realism is

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deliberately challenged by conflicting narrative modes which complicate any straight forward notion of social or psychological verisimilitude. For not only on the level of story, also on the level of discourse The Lonely Londoners is entangled in the psychopathologies of race. Fanon’s (and Galahad’s) insights matter, too, that is, in view of complex questions about the larger politics of representation. One of the most difficult questions Sam Selvon would have had to face when conceptualising his novel was not how to draft a realistic image of West Indian life in London during the early Windrush years, including the social and psychological effects of racism. It would have been the question how those depravations should and could be narrated by an (Indo-)Caribbean British writer in an overwhelmingly white literary marketplace, for a potential audience which, too, would have been by and large privileged and white. In a way, then, the dilemma of racist overdetermination which the characters of The Lonely Londoners face is intricately doubled and refracted on the level of storytelling itself. Not unlike Olaudah Equiano before him in the late 1780s, Selvon was confronted with the task of having to assert a black humanity and identity for West Indian migrants in London largely without black literary models, within and against a world of Anglophone letters which still abounded with white “legends, stories, history” of “tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave ships.” (Fanon 2008, 111–112) Yet while Equiano attempted everything in his outstanding powers to whitewash stereotypes of blackness  – by emplotting his story in a carefully “unvarnished” English (cf. Edwards 1971) and the generic patterns of the spiritual autobiography, and not least by stressing his overachievements in all disciplines of (puritan) civilised life including commerce, austerity and gentlemanly decorum – Selvon in many ways opted for the exact opposite. His is a decolonial assertion of black life in London which flaunts all standards of language, weaves distinctly Caribbean generic patterns into the fabric of storytelling, and which joyfully revels in episodes which confirm the worst nightmares of his potential white bourgeois readers: His ‘boys’ catch pigeons in the park for dinner; they drink and curse and live on the dole; but worst of all, they conquer the city with their penises.

2.3 Sex and the City Few other concerns have troubled the critical reception of The Lonely Londoners as much as its take on white women and the seemingly unreflective “propagation of triumphalising forms of black male heterosexual behaviour” (Houlden 2012, 24). At the centre of debates is usually the extended stream-of-consciousness passage at the heart of the novel and its intoxicating flow of loosely related observations, associations and memories induced by a hot summer night in the park, most of which revolve around sex: sex with other precarious Londoners such as ex-junkies (105), prostitutes “from the country districts whom come to see the big life in London” (107) or European domestic workers who “think like the newspapers say about the Jamai-

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cans that the streets of London paved with gold” (103); yet also sex across the barriers of class, as, in the narrator’s ironic phrase, “it ain’t have no discrimination when it come to that park in the summer” (104). Selvon’s focaliser Moses clearly frames those exchanges as more twisted: old white voyeurs, rich women “who want you to live up to the films and stories they hear about black people living primitive” (108), husbands who take a kick out of hustling their wives to black men. Irrespective of the intersectional take on gender and class, however, none of the prostitutes or lovers or girlfriends is given a voice in The Lonely Londoners. They are picked up and dropped, pretty much like objects, and Moses’ associated ramblings are full of bravado: “to talk of all the episodes that Moses had with woman in London would take bags of ballad Moses move through all the nationalities in the world and then he start the circle again” (102–103). That swagger, moreover, is clearly directed at the conquest of white woman only, while black women are presented as sexually undesirable: “As far as spades hitting spades it ain’t have nothing like that for a spade wouldn’t hit a spade when it have so much other talent on parade” (107). This rejection resonates discomfortingly with one of the novel’s episodic side-lines, in which Lewis begins to regularly beat up his wife Agnes, Tolroy’s sister, suspecting her of infidelity during his long working hours at a job in the city, an episode subsumed within the tragic-comic flow of the overall narrative without much fraction. The ‘slackness’ of The Lonely Londoners flies in the face of English contemporary discourses about West Indian migration, by deliberately fuelling, rather than attempting to appease, a moral panic revolving around images of black criminality, sexual licentiousness and fears of miscegenation. As Paul Gilroy remarks: “Concern about the criminal behaviour of black settlers in the late 1940s and 1950s […] cluster[ed] around a distinct range of anxieties and images in which sexuality and miscegenation were often uppermost” (1992, 79). Selvon’s take on the intersections of gender and race (and class) has accordingly provoked a range of critical responses and attempts at explanation. At its worst, these responses entirely neglect the performative dimension of the text as a whole. A case in point is Lewis MacLeod, who chooses to take the narrative at face value when arguing that “the light-hearted attitude about sex cannot disguise the pathology that underlies it” (2005, 164). He draws on critical masculinity studies to propose that in the absence of two crucial attributions of ‘real’ manhood (according to David Gilmore: man as defender of his “various territories”, and man as material provider; cf. Gilmore 1990, 223), the remaining third attribute, that of sexual potency, expands to clinical proportions. In all this, white masculinity “naturalized as a globalized trope” (MacLeod 2005, 164) and exported to the colonies remains the gold standard. Heavily (mis)using Fanon, MacLeod accordingly proposes that the perpetual desire to conquer white women in The Lonely Londoners really only displaces the desire for white masculinity. Sam Selvon’s boys are all “mimic men” (2005, 160), pathologically trying to screw themselves into the place of the English white male.

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While it is possible to take all sorts of issues with this conclusion  – a conclusion which apparently conflates the diametrically opposed politics of Selvon and V. S. Naipaul, the more (in)famous and infinitely more anglophile of the two major Indo-Trinidadian writers of the Windrush generation  – its major problem is that it ignores the fact that The Lonely Londoners programmatically exceeds ethnographic realism. Sandra Courtman, for instance, remarks how Selvon distinctly satirises the hyper-masculine exploits of his protagonists, such as when Moses mistakes the orgasmic fits of a girl he picks up in the park and takes home to his “yard” for a fatal paroxysm (2012, 103), while Ashley Dawson (2007) foregrounds how the masculine conquests of white women in The Lonely Londoners remain tied to evocations of isolation, and fail to conquer the pervasive sense of loss. He accordingly posits that beyond the surface realism, there is an implicit critique of the intersections of gendered and colonial hegemonies: The Lonely Londoners also stresses the hollow character of the sexual adventurism of ‘the boys,’ suggesting that their triumphs in the bedroom fail to create truly egalitarian and postimperial relations among the novel’s characters. Instead of dismantling colonial power relations, that is, the boys’ conquests simply invert those relations through the creation of gender hierarchy. (2007, 36)

Yet beyond such degrees of authorial reflexivity, it is vital not to take the larger narrative at face value in a more encompassing approach that attends to its creole orality: to take account of the fact that, as John Thieme has elaborated, The Lonely Londoners is a “carnival text in that it subverts the norms of the dominant tradition of Western fiction by instating the oral over the literary” (2003, 62). The inversion of colonial power relations which Dawson talks about and which is intricately played out, among other fields, in the performance of gender relations is thus part of a larger generic strategy, a decolonial strategy deeply rooted in the “carnival mentality in Trinidad” which as long as it is “a genuine expression of the culture of the marketplace […] provides through parody, subversion and irony a source of renewal” (Thieme 2003, 62). One of the most profound interventions into the debates of gender and race in The Lonely Londoners building on this insight is Kate Houlden’s (2012), who argues that the novel’s often noted recourse to calypsonian models matters not only as an aesthetic structuring device, but is also foundational for its racial and sexual politics. Following Simon Gikandi’s seminal insight that popular cultural styles of performance like calypso are “important because they challenge the very foundations of Eurocentric cultural codes and suggest an alternative hermeneutics” (1992, 96), Houlden traces the parallels between the narrative performance of the novel and performances of hyperbolic black masculinity in calypso, a form of expression originating in the creole experience of slavery and the profanating subversion and mimicry of the white masters’ discourse. Drawing on the Mighty Sparrow’s controversial song “Congo Man” as an example, in which Sparrow sings about white women being attacked and eaten by African men (riffing on contemporary reports of the Belgian

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Congo), she traces how the calypsonian deliberately expropriates white fantasies of black savagery, using hyperbolic laughter and inversion as a satirical weapon to confront and to dismantle limiting stereotypes of blackness (cf. Houlden 2008, 34–35). There is, in this sense, a profound potential for decolonial self-assertion and renewal in the carnivalesque irony pervading The Lonely Londoners, modelled on a mode of performance which would not have been alien to contemporary English audiences either, as calypso had long travelled beyond Trinidad, most notably in the person of the Mighty Sparrow’s arch-rival Lord Kitchener on the very MV Windrush in 1948. Yet of course, it also comes at a certain cost: This may less be Western readers on whom the Caribbean generic dimensions of performance are lost and who see their prejudices confirmed in seeming social and psychological realisms. It rather concerns the detrimental side effects of “a real carnival slackness” (99) on the politics of representing black women against Eurocentric stereotypes, within a West Indian ‘alternative hermeneutics’ that is translated into the Western form of the novel.

2.4 City Tactics and New Communities The most profound effect of Sam Selvon’s creolised and carnivalising narrative, however, is its forging of a transnational migrant community across markers of difference, and the inscription of this community into the fabric of London. The Lonely Londoners performatively redraws the map of the city, and claims it as a West Indian metropolis by way of its narrative manœuvres. This concerns particularly the use of language and naming by the narrator and characters, as well as their various movements and everyday practices. Rebecca Dyer (2002) lucidly explores how Selvon’s characters turn from what Michel de Certeau labels as the “consumers” or “dominated element in society” (1988, 475) into creative agents actively shaping the city by their everyday moves. Still in the Caribbean, they were indeed ‘consumers’ of an ideal image of Englishness, taught to them in school curricula, in English literatures and the imperial media, imbuing London’s landmarks – Waterloo Station, Piccadilly Circus, Marbel Arch, Hyde Park – with a mythical fantasy structure marketed as imperial home. Yet when confronted with the everyday racist disavowal of their claim on the markers of Englishness and home alike when they reach London, in a society which strives to delete their visibility from the cityscape precisely for the visibility of their skin in all official walks of life – as Susheila Nasta puts it: “the black man was the backbone of the city, but he was only seen at night” (2002, 79), working in the back of restaurants, behind the railway station – the lonely Londoners draw on different tactics which creatively poach on the available scripts of dominant society. In Dyer’s words, their “‘poaching’ can be seen as their simultaneous borrowing, critique, and transformation of the metropolitan culture – their reworking of the very language, literary genres, and way of life that had been valorized during their colonial schooling”. They thus become involved in the

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“poiesis of their urban surroundings” (Dyer 2002, 109–110), they bring forth, in their wanderings, actions and linguistic practices, a new London which they depropriate as a new home, refracting and defamiliarising older colonial representations of the city. It is important not to read the decolonial tactics of The Lonely Londoners in an exclusively celebratory tone, and thus to elide the social critique of the novel’s poetic assertion of a West Indian London. Lisa Kabesh follows Dyer in confirming that “The Lonely Londoners is an enunciative text; it produces the community it describes in the act of writing, recording and mapping its voices and movements” (2011, 4); yet she also draws attention to the fact that the novel recurrently charts “sites of racist exclusion”, and thus presents “a detailed topography of racial hierarchy in the metropole” (2011, 4). Yet even if the characters’ movements are limited, they powerfully reconfigure the London they find. This already begins in the opening episode, on Moses’ bus ride from Bayswater to Waterloo, reconfigured in Moses’ nostalgic memories and associations of Caribbean arrivals and departures from an inner city railway terminal and tube station named after one of the key events in European history into the central bridge head connecting London with the West Indies. Much of the movement in the novel is then set between the (then) run-down migrant neighbourhood of Notting Hill and the posh city centre, roughly between Notting Hill Gate, Hyde Park and Marble Arch all the way to Mayfair and Soho, as when Galahad walks from Bayswater Road to Piccadilly Circus to meet his date Daisy; as in Cap and Moses’ regular summer nights ‘coasting lime’ on Bayswater Road; or around Speakers’ Corner, which is “a regular for the boys” on Sunday evenings, listening “to them fellars talking about how the government this and that, or making big discussion on the colour problem” (98). The choice of familiar tourist landmarks to chart the ‘boys’’ movements is deliberate, and their West Indian depropriation is geared by a subtle politics of language and naming, the importance of which for “decolonising the mind” (wa Thiong’o 1986) has become a standard trope in postcolonial studies only about three decades after Selvon’s literary interventions. Inverting the colonial appropriation of the Caribbean by the power of naming (the literary master trope still is Crusoe’s naming of ‘Friday’), initiation into the group of migrant Londoners comes with a creole register of place names, from the Circus to the Arch to the Gate, mapping an archipelagic logic onto the city: ‘Which part you living?’ Galahad say. ‘In the Water. Bayswater to you until you living in the city for at least two years.’ ‘Why they call it Bayswater? Is a bay? It have water?’ ‘Take it easy,’ Moses say. ‘You can’t learn everything the first day you land. […]’ (35–36)

By extension, it is primarily the creole continuum represented by the kaleidoscope of voices in the novel, including that of the storyteller, which carves out a space of belonging for the lonely Londoners against the dominant scripts of whiteness and

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Englishness in the city. “What wrong with it? […] Is English we speaking”, Galahad answers Daisy when having Caribbean-style tea in his yard and she confesses that she struggles with “[t]he way you West Indians speak” (93). It is in this self-assured assertion of being and becoming through language that the community of The Lonely Londoners belongs – not in the poststructuralist sense of linguistic constructivism, but in the sense of a creolised language which productively negotiates and sets into motion two distinct ‘hermeneutics’ or epistemologies; a language which firmly stakes its claims on Englishness, yet an Englishness defamiliarised and inflected by diverse oral registers of the Caribbean. Sam Selvon’s community of lonely Londoners, albeit distinctly gendered, holds beyond the need for identification with bounded entities such as nation, class, ethnicity, religion or political conviction, not entirely unlike Esposito’s notion of a Communitas not based on joint ‘property’ but rather the shared lack of it, or Agamben’s Coming Community. The community of The Lonely Londoners is partly framed in the negative, by the collective experience of racist exclusion from the “good life” of social and political participation; yet it is in the collective performance of “a oldtalk” in Moses’ room each Sunday morning, “with London and life on the outside” (140), that it breathes life.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies As the previous sections have shown, the ‘topics and concerns’ of The Lonely Londoners cannot be discussed independently of the novel’s ‘narrative and literary strategies’. The most important elements have already been expanded upon: the episodic structure drawing on modernist models as much as on Caribbean oral and musical forms; a heterodiegetic narrator/performer who nevertheless closely partakes in the story-world by means of an ‘aural’ quality of narrative voice which encompasses the diverse registers of creole spoken by the characters, and which gives the narrative a distinctly collective feel; the frequent recourse to free indirect discourse and, at the heart of the novel, the extended use of stream-of-consciousness technique to allow for introspection within the collective thrust of the overall narrative. The innovation of all this was not lost on Selvon himself, who claimed in an interview: “I think I can say without a trace of modesty that I was the first Caribbean writer to explore and employ dialect in a full-length novel where it was used in both narrative and dialogue. I was boldfaced enough to write a complete chapter in a stream-of-consciousness style” (Selvon qtd. in Fabre 1988, 69). While the credit for the first novel in what was then called Caribbean ‘dialect’ might have to go to V. S. Reid’s New Day (1949), the uniqueness of The Lonely Londoners lies indeed in its “boldface” combination of high modernist as well as realist literary models with Caribbean styles and modes of narrative worldmaking, transported by a carefully crafted literary creole, and the

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performative humour, swagger and satirical edge of Trinidadian popular styles such as calypso. The creolité of Sam Selvon’s approach was only much later, and especially in francophone Caribbean discourses, theorised as a powerful tool of decolonial literary self-assertion, a tool which, in Walter Mignolo’s (2000) terms, allows to negotiate “local histories” and “global designs” of storytelling in productive, interepistemic dialogue. In their In Praise of Creoleness, Patrick Camoiseau, Raphaël Confiant and Jean Bernabé lay out a literary programme which could be modelled on The Lonely Londoners, by asserting the continuing relevance of oral epistemologies in the modern world system: “In short, we shall create a literature”, they write, “which will obey all the demands of modern writing while taking roots in the traditional configurations of our orality” (1993, 98). It is remarkable in this context that Selvon did not originally intend a novel entirely in creole. He comments on the genesis of the novel: I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along. (Selvon qtd. in Fabre 1988, 66)

The reason why the novel would have “shot along” in this new approach is that it no longer allowed for what Catherine Belsey terms a “hierarchy of discourses” that is typical of the “illusionism” of realist fiction, featuring an authorial voice which establishes and vouches for “the truth of the story” (1980, 70). To install a narrator/ performer speaking the same literary creole as his characters was thus much more than merely an aesthetic move: It was also a key ideological move which challenges dominant philosophies of subjectivity, both in the trajectory of the English novel, and in the cultures of modernity at large. In Belsey’s terms again, “the subject finds in the discourse of the classic realist text a confirmation of the position of autonomous subjectivity represented in ideology as ‘obvious’”, and it is this naturalisation of bounded subjectivity which Selvon’s move shatters: “It is possible to refuse that position”, notes Belsey, “but to do so, at least at present, is to make a deliberate and ideological choice” (1980, 70). The narrative subject in The Lonely Londoners undercuts the notion of monadic subjectivity installed by the bourgeois interventions of the European Enlightenment whose universalist projections of a common humanity were from its inception flawed by an endemic racism (cf. James 1989). Instead, the authorial self is inherently relational and collective, extending into and blending with the performed voices of characters, refraining from judgement or a drive toward closure. As Gordon Rohlehr, the doyen of calypso criticism, writes: “In The Lonely Londoners it is the group that has a full self, that faces the wilderness and survives” (1988, 41). It is vital to note in this context that Selvon’s approach to narrative voice does not simply displace the liberalist traditions of European authorial narration by a pur-

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portedly ‘authentic’ Caribbean orality. Selvon is outspoken about the fact that his discourse is, in the best sense, “artificial and fabricated”. He remarks: I did not pick the Jamaican way of talking in London. I only tried to produce what I believed was thought of as a Caribbean dialect. The modified version in which I write my dialect may be a manner of extending the language. It may be called artificial and fabricated. The way I treat the language is not the way it is spoken in Jamaica, or Barbados, or Trinidad either, for that matter. I only resorted to a modified Trinidadian dialect because, much more than Jamaican or Barbadian English, it is close to ‘correct Standard English’, and I thought it would be more recognizable to the European reader. (Selvon qtd. in Fabre 1988, 67)

Selvon’s policy of “extending the language” for his literary purposes shuns simplistic notions of tradition or authenticity played out against trajectories of the modern. Rather, it is inclusive in its approach to creolité, along the lines outlined by Camoiseau, Confiant and Bernabé: It is inclusive in the more profane sense of catering to a plural range of readerships, be they European, West Indian or situated elsewhere. Yet in a more profound sense it is inclusive in not rejecting, but adopting and syncretising Western literary traditions within the alternative epistemologies of West Indian styles. Kathy Birat (2009) puts this most elegantly when she insists that Selvon was not simply dumbing down creole Englishes for Western readers, but that he was instead “increasing the capacity of the language to become a dimension of the narrative, to express more than just a Caribbean reality”. Selvon, she holds, “was ultimately creating what Bakhtin would call an ‘image’ of the language, thus bringing it into dialogic tension with the other languages of the English novel. This was Selvon’s stroke of genius” (2009, 3). The Lonely Londoners does not subvert, or write back in anger to the English novel, the more recent histories of which are unfolded in this handbook. Rather, it generously endows an ossified tradition with new aesthetic and ideological possibilities. Most fundamentally, it explores ways of writing beyond the endemic loneliness not only of its characters, but of the modern (literary) condition. Distinctly geared against what Michael Taussig frames as a “self-enclosed and somewhat paranoid, possessive, individualized sense of self […] within a system wherein that self ideally incorporates […] wealth, property, citizenship” (1993, 97), the novel programmatically draws on what Paul Gilroy called the “ethics of antiphony” inherent in Black Atlantic epistemologies, an ethics that is deeply rooted in “the experience of performance with which to focus the pivotal relationship between performer and crowd, participant and community” (1993, 203). The Lonely Londoners is in this sense a novel that is not only to be read, but also to be carefully listened to, as its ballads call for a communal response. That response is triggered, first and foremost, by the artful musicalisation and seemingly effortless flow of language. Selvon himself emphasised that he spent hours on perfecting the sound of his writing: “I experimented with the language as it is used by Caribbean people. I found a chord, it was like music, and I sat like a passenger in a bus and let the language do the writing” (Selvon 1995, 60). The

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result is a text which translates the Trinidadian carnival tent onto the readerly page; a text which models its collectivising authorial voice on the figure of the calypsonian and his “fierce commitment to the life of the reveller, the man who has not yet been sophisticated into shame and respectability” (Rohlehr qtd. in Houlden 2012, 33), an ‘aural’ text which sustains the tragic-comic spirit of the calypsonian ballad with all its “subversive irony, the melodramatic exaggeration of farcical anecdotes, racial stereo­ typing, repetition for dramatic effect and the inclusion of topical political material” (Nasta 2002, 57) in a carnivalesque performance which ultimately explodes the petty boundaries of race, class and nation.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives The critical reception of The Lonely Londoners initially missed out on the elaborate craft and conceptual complexity behind Selvon’s sonic experiments. It had been strongly affected by a passage in George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile, published in 1960, in which he sides with Selvon as a ‘folk’ writer representative of a “peasant sensibility” against the likes of V. S. Naipaul, who “with the diabolic help of Oxford University, has done a thorough job of wiping this out of his guts” (Lamming 1960, 225). Lamming highlights Selvon’s humour, pathos and decolonial politics in a perspective which foregrounds all the calypsonian qualities just mentioned – yet he does so by diametrically opposing them to ‘English’ writing: Writers like Selvon and Vic Reid – key novelists for understanding the literary and social situation in the West Indies – are essentially peasant. That’s a great difference between the West Indian novelist and his contemporary in England. For peasants simply don’t see like middle-class people. The peasant tongue has its own rhythms which are Selvon’s and Reid’s rhythms; and no artifice of technique, no sophisticated gimmicks leading to the mutilation of form, can achieve the specific taste and sound of Selvon’s prose. (1960, 45)

There are all sorts of issues with this statement, as Susheila Nasta points out: Selvon was himself middle-class, and wrote in a variety of styles; his language and rhythms are hardly the product of an unsophisticated immediacy, but “the result of a conscious and sophisticated craft” (1988, 8). And surely, his most outstanding performance in The Lonely Londoners is the syncretistic incorporation of realist and modernist techniques into the antiphonic ethics of Caribbean orality. Still, the label of ‘peasant writer’ stuck. Barrie Davis reiterated in 1972 that Selvon’s rendition of the West Indian migrant experience is “peripheral to any complexity or subtlety” (1972, 67), while Frank Birbalsingh, otherwise an astute observer of West Indian literature, noted in 1977 that Selvon’s “dominant subject remains a plain, comic representation of West Indian manners” (1977, 15). A more profound revision of Lamming’s “romantic oversimplification” (MacDonald 1979, 203) really only set in in the 1980s, which saw

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the first book-length collection of criticism on Selvon’s work, edited and compiled by Susheila Nasta in 1988. It is here, as well as in more recent criticism much of which has informed this chapter, that The Lonely Londoners begins to trigger productive controversies on the politics of race, class and gender, syncretistic narrative strategies and interepistemic challenges. Given its amazing potential for postcolonial thought, however, the overall critical attention to the novel has remained comparatively sparse. David Dabydeen once claimed that “Selvon was so ahead of his time that […] the critics […] didn’t know what he was doing” (qtd. in Ingrams 2001, 34). That may still be true to some extent, and it may include this essay. Some 60 years after its first publication, in an ever more dramatically unequal world in which more human beings than ever before seek better lives elsewhere, it is vital to eventually catch up with the profound vision of The Lonely Londoners; with its humanity and compassion, with its intimation of community beyond the confines of the (neo)colonial and (neo)liberal alike, and not least with its calypsonian critique of limiting Eurocentric worldings.

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Selvon, Sam. The Lonely Londoners. New York: Longman, 2001 [1956]. --Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London: Routledge, 1980. Bentley, Nick. “Black London: The Politics of Representation in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners.” Wasafiri 39 (2003): 41–45. Bentley, Nick. “Form and Language in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners.” ARIEL 36.3 (2005): 67–84. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant. In Praise of Creoleness. Trans. M. B. Taleb-Khyar. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Birat, Kathie. “Seeking Sam Selvon: Michel Fabre and the Fiction of the Caribbean.” Transatlantica 1.1 (2009): 2–9. Birbalsingh, Frank. “Samuel Selvon and the West Indian Literary Renaissance.” ARIEL 8.3 (1977): 5–22. Burton, Jonathan, and Ania Loomba, eds. Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Courtman, Sandra. “Women Writers and the Windrush Generation: A Contextual Reading of Beryl Gilroy’s In Praise of Love and Children and Andrea Levy’s Small Island.” EnterText 9 (2012): 84–104. Davies, Barrie. “A Sense of Abroad: Aspects of the West Indian Novel in England.” World Literature Written in English 2.2 (1972): 67–80. Dawson, Ashley. Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2007.

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De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988 [1984]. Dyer, Rebecca. “Immigration, Postwar London, and the Politics of Everyday Life in Sam Selvon’s Fiction.” Cultural Critique 52.1 (2002): 108–144. Edwards, Paul. “Equiano’s Round Unvarnished Tale.” African Literature Today 5 (1971): 12–20. Esposito, Roberto. Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Fabre, Michel. “Samuel Selvon: Interviews and Conversations.” Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon. Ed. Susheila Nasta. Washington: Three Continents Press, 1988. 64–76. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008 [1952]. Fryer, Peter. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto, 1987. Gikandi, Simon. Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1992. Gilmore, David. Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Gilroy, Paul. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Routledge, 1992. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Gramaglia, Letizia, and Malachi McIntosh. “Censorship, Selvon and Caribbean Voices: ‘Behind the Humming Bird’ and the Caribbean Literary Field.” Wasafiri 28.2 (2013): 48–54. Houlden, Kate. “Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956), White Sexual Desire and the Calypso Aesthetic.” Journal of West Indian Literature 20.2 (2012): 24–37. Ingrams, Elizabeth. “The Lonely Londoners: Sam Selvon and the Literary Heritage.” Wasafiri 33 (2001): 33–41. James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. London: Vintage, 1989. Kabesh, Lisa. “Mapping Freedom, or Its Limits: The Politics of Movement in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners.” Postcolonial Text 6.3 (2011): 1–17. Lamming, George. The Pleasures of Exile. London: Michael Joseph, 1960. MacDonald, Bruce F. “Language and Consciousness in Samuel Selvon’s A Brighter Sun.” English Studies in Canada 5 (1979): 202–215. MacLeod, Lewis. “‘You Have to Start Thinking All Over Again’: Masculinities, Narratology and New Approaches to Sam Selvon.” ARIEL 36.1–2 (2005): 157–181. Mignolo, Walter D. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Nasta, Susheila. “Introduction.” Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon. Ed. Susheila Nasta. Washington: Three Continents Press, 1988. 1–14. Nasta, Susheila. Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Ramchand, Kenneth. “Introduction.” The Lonely Londoners. New York: Longman, 2001. 3–21. Rohlehr, F. Gordon. “The Folk in Caribbean Literature.” Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon. Ed. Susheila Nasta. Washington: Three Continents Press, 1988. 29–43. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking, 1988. Selvon, Sam. “Finding West Indian Identity in London.” Tiger’s Triumph: Celebrating Sam Selvon. Ed. Susheila Nasta and Anna Rutherford. Arimdale: Dangaroo Press, 1995. 58–61. Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge, 1993.

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Thieme, John. “The World Turn Upside Down: Carnival Patterns in The Lonely Londoners.” Something Rich and Strange: Selected Essays on Sam Selvon. Ed. Martin Zehnder. Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2003. 51–64. wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: Heinemann Educational, 1986. Winder, Robert. Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain. London: Little, Brown, 2004.

5.2 Further Reading Looker, Mark. Atlantic Passages: History, Community and Language in the Fiction of Sam Selvon. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Nasta, Susheila, and Anna Rutherford, eds. Tiger’s Triumph: Celebrating Sam Selvon. Armidale: Dangaroo Press, 1995. Nasta, Susheila, ed. Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon. Washington: Three Continents Press, 1988. Zehnder, Martin, ed. Something Rich and Strange: Selected Essays on Sam Selvon. Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2003.

Alice Ridout

14 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (1962) Abstract: This chapter argues that Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962) is an Icarian novel whose productive failure illuminates debates about the relationship between life and art, politics and writing, gender and genre. Focusing on how Doris Lessing interrogates the function of writing and the limits of realism, this chapter demonstrates that The Golden Notebook makes a significant contribution to mid-twentieth century debates about the novel. Lessing’s critique of nostalgia can be helpfully understood in relation to contemporary post-colonial and cosmopolitan debates. Her use of the diary genre explores the relationship between life and art, particularly for women writers. The Golden Notebook also demonstrates a remarkably contemporary concern with the literary marketplace. Keywords: Metafiction, realism, feminism, nostalgia, cosmopolitanism

1 Context: Author, Œuvre, Moment The placement of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962) between Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956, ↗ 13 Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners) and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969, ↗ 15 John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman) in this Handbook’s list of close readings is highly appropriate. Like Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is a fascinating outsider’s perspective on post-war London. In both these novels, the depiction of London’s famously plentiful pigeons highlights the two protagonists’ immigrant views of this urban, colonial centre. Both Selvon’s character, Galahad, and Lessing’s protagonist, Anna Wulf, nostalgically recall scenes of hunting pigeons in the cultures in which they were brought up – Trinidad and colonial Rhodesia, respectively. These scenes are uncomfortably juxtaposed with scenes of violence against London pigeons in order to enable “a consideration of the different places or, as Moses suggests [in The Lonely Londoners], the lack of place of these expat characters in London” (Ridout 2014b, 29). Doris Lessing had arrived in London from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1949, the year before Sam Selvon, with all the dreams of a returning British expatriate, as she describes in the opening paragraph of the second volume of her autobiography, Walking in the Shade: 1949–1962: “As for me, real London was still ahead, like the beginning of my real life, which would have happened years before if the war hadn’t stopped me coming to London. A clean slate, a new page  – everything was still to come” (Lessing 1997, 3). What she and Selvon found was a dismal “city of Dickensian exaggeration”, DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-015

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unpainted, buildings were stained and cracked and dull and grey; it was war-damaged, some areas all ruins, and under them holes full of dirty water, once cellars, and it was subject to sudden dark fogs – that was before the Clean Air Act. No one who has known only today’s London of self-respecting clean buildings, crowded cafés and restaurants, good food and coffee, streets full until after midnight with mostly young people having a good time, can believe what London was like then (Lessing 1997, 4–5).

Anna Wulf’s navigation of this experience of “returning home” from the margins of the British Empire to its unfamiliar capital is a central concern of The Golden Notebook. Indeed, in her obituary of Doris Lessing, who died in 2013, Margaret Atwood uses for her subtitle the phrase “a model for every writer coming from the back of beyond”, claiming Lessing as an important figure for all writers hailing from the margins (2013). In its metafictional consideration of the contemporary author’s relationship to the great tradition of the realist novel, The Golden Notebook looks ahead to Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (↗ 15 John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman). In his self-conscious, neo-Victorian novel, Fowles is asking how the contemporary author should proceed to write fiction in his post-war, postmodern period of uncertainty and, particularly, how and whether the contemporary writer can still write the realist novel. As Lessing famously argues in her widely cited essay, “The Small Personal Voice”, the contemporary world no longer holds enough certainty for realism, or even for the referential use of language: If there is one thing that distinguishes our literature, it is a confusion of standards and the uncertainty of values. […] Words, it seems, can no longer be used simply and naturally. All the great words like love, hate; life, death; loyalty, treachery; contain their opposite meaning and a half a dozen shades of dubious implication. (1994 [1974], 9)

The limitations of realism and referential language are the focus of Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. Just as Fowles appears as a character at the end of his own novel in a metafictional frame-break that serves to interrogate and subvert the very conventions of realism that Fowles has been utilizing, similarly, the structure of The Golden Notebook perpetually breaks its own frames. The framing novel, “Free Women”, is increasingly undermined by the notebooks and diaries it is juxtaposed with, and the cyclical nature of the novel – with its first line being given to Anna by her lover towards the end of the novel – functions like a disorientating Möbius strip for the reader. If the frame around the art piece is supposed to designate the border between art and notart, in the case of The Golden Notebook it remains disorientatingly unclear which sections are the frame and which are the art itself. Furthermore, Lessing’s protagonist, Anna Wulf, is a writer who has remarkable autobiographical parallels with Lessing herself. As Roberta Rubenstein’s recent work exploring the influence of Clancy Sigal on The Golden Notebook has demonstrated, Lessing’s assertion about the novel that she “made it up” (Lessing 1997, 344) “deserves close scrutiny” (Rubenstein 2014, 5).

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Rubenstein’s archival work has discovered whole passages of Sigal’s own diary that are breathtakingly similar to passages in The Golden Notebook. Thus, the boundaries between art and not-art, and between fiction and life, are blurred both within the novel itself regarding Anna Wulf’s writing and in The Golden Notebook as a whole in terms of Doris Lessing’s writing. These metafictional questions Lessing raises regarding realism, referential language, and the relationship between life and art all look forward to Fowles and to postmodernism. Indeed, particularly in the 1980s, these questions of structure and language became the focus of much critical attention, including work by Betsy Draine, Vivien Leonard, Caryn Fuoroli, Patrocinio Schweickart, Claire Sprague, Molly Hite, and Magali Cornier Michael, that reads the novel in relation to postmodern narrative strategies and emerging new theories of parody (such as Linda Hutcheon’s). Nick Bentley and I have argued that The Golden Notebook’s metafictionality is so central to the novel that it becomes its defining genre. Bentley has identified the novel as ‘an experiment in critical fiction’ (2009). Noting a prevailing view among critics of The Golden Notebook as the “novel in which Lessing works through her changing attitudes towards fiction” and the “turning point” in Lessing’s œuvre from realism to “space fiction”, Bentley instead argues that “the text does not represent Lessing’s working out of a changing attitude to realism but is a critical and philosophical investigation into the nature of fiction itself and the relationship between literary forms and politics” (2009, 44). I have argued that The Golden Notebook should be read as “a threshold or liminal novel, but not because it marks a transitional phase in the development of Lessing’s style from realism to space fiction” but rather that “[its] liminality is derived from its genre – parody – which is inherently liminal” (Ridout 2010a, 68). Certainly, a provocative paradox of this novel is that it is widely regarded simultaneously as Lessing’s masterpiece  – noted in particular by the judges when they awarded Lessing the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007  – and a failure (cf. Ridout 2010a, 47–51). Lessing herself has contributed to this paradoxical view of her novel stating in a collection of her essays, reviews, and interviews: “I like The Golden Notebook even though I believe it to be a failure because it at least hints at complexity” (Lessing 1994, 88). She repeats this idea of the novel’s failure in a later interview collected in Putting the Questions Differently: “The Golden Notebook was a failure in a formal sense, because as usual I take on too much. It was so ambitious, it couldn’t help but fail” (Lessing 1996, 90). This chapter will explore the significant contribution to twentieth-century literature of this Icarian novel. The myth of Icarus is one that Lessing’s artist-protagonist, Anna, herself references in the novel when she talks to her psychoanalyst of wanting to “cry with happiness” when she dreams of “flying like Icarus” (450)1. By flying too close to the sun, Lessing’s “failure” in The Golden

1 Unless otherwise indicated page references in brackets without further designation refer to Lessing 2008 [1962].

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Notebook productively explores the crisis in realism that marks the English novel in the second half of the twentieth century.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns Lessing’s own description of what she called the “shape of this novel” in her 1971 Preface to The Golden Notebook is a concise and clear explanation of its complex structure: There is a skeleton, or frame, called Free Women, which is a conventional short novel, about 60,000 words long, and which could stand by itself. But it is divided into five sections and separated by stages of the four Notebooks, Black, Red, Yellow, and Blue. The Notebooks are kept by Anna Wulf, a central character of Free Women. She keeps four, and not one because, as she recognizes, she has to separate things off from each other, out of fear of chaos, of formlessness – of breakdown. Pressures, inner and outer, end the Notebooks; a heavy black line is drawn across the page of one after another. But now that they are finished, from their fragments can come something new, The Golden Notebook. (xi)

The notebooks are “framed” by “Free Women” because The Golden Notebook opens and closes with sections of “Free Women.” Readers do not realize that Anna wrote “Free Women” until towards the very end of The Golden Notebook. This realization sends the reader back to the beginning of the novel to re-interpret “Free Women” with this retrospective knowledge that Anna is its author. In this sense, “Free Women” is as much within and framed by the notebooks as vice versa. Lessing’s circular structure gives The Golden Notebook a sense of process rather than finished product that seems to have contributed to critics’ and Lessing’s own pronouncements that the novel is formally a failure. Included in the notebooks themselves are a number of writing exercises and plot synopses that demonstrate Anna attempting the process of writing. In her notebooks, Anna writes an unfinished novel, “The Shadow of the Third”, includes crossed-out writing experiments, discusses her previously published novel, Frontiers of War, parodies several different genres and plots (particularly film scripts and diaries), and keeps a diary. Within this complex structure, Lessing tells the story of “an artist, but with a ‘block’” (xvi). As Lessing explains in her 1971 Preface, she wanted to develop that “dominant” (xvi) archetype of the artist “by giving the creature a block and discussing the reasons for the block. These would have to be linked with the disparity between the overwhelming problems of war, famine, poverty, and the tiny individual who was trying to mirror them” (xvii). As Susan Watkins has argued: “What must strike any reader of Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, is the extent to which its protagonist, Anna Wulf, has been affected by the experience of loss” (2010, 53). The Golden Notebook is also drenched in a sense of belatedness and nostalgia. It depicts Anna after the publication of her first novel, living off its royalties in post-war London, exhausted and

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cynical. When Anna rereads her earlier novel, Frontiers of War, she is “ashamed” by its “lying nostalgia” (61). Even when Anna tries to rewrite the experiences that were the “source” (55) of this novel in a more “objective” way she finds herself succumbing to nostalgia: I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It’s full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being ‘objective.’ Nostalgia for what? I don’t know. Because I’d rather die than have to live through any of that again. (145)

Partly, the nostalgia is for her lost belief in the hope of the Communist dream as the group of friends she was writing about in Rhodesia met through the Communist Party. During the course of the novel, one of the central losses that Anna suffers is her loss of faith in the British Communist Party for which she volunteers as an editor. It is productive to think of Lessing as a ‘post-Communist’ writer in texts like Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (1987) and The Golden Notebook (for a fuller consideration of the ‘post-Communist’ dimension of Lessing’s work see Ridout 2010b). Anna leaves the Party on the very same day that she realizes her great love affair with a married man is over. In the inner Golden Notebook at the end of the novel Anna pauses over the “ironical nostalgia” with which she says the word “comrade” (594). The other source of nostalgia is Rhodesia itself which is juxtaposed with the depressing, grey, urban landscape of post-war London. Building on Paul Gilroy’s arguments in Postcolonial Melancholia that “contemporary British culture can be characterised by what he terms its ‘postimperial melancholia’, or an ‘inability even to face, never mind actually mourn, the profound change in circumstances and moods that followed the end of empire and consequent loss of imperial prestige’” (Gilroy qtd. in Watkins 2010, 65), Susan Watkins has argued that The Golden Notebook expresses a profound “melancholy cosmopolitanism” (2010, chapter 3; ↗ 5 The Burden of Representation). Suffering through these multiple losses of belief system, lover, and home, Anna Wulf finally succumbs to a breakdown at the end of the novel which she records in the inner Golden Notebook. Perhaps ‘succumbs’ is too negative a verb here because, in an anti-psychiatry gesture reminiscent of the thought of R. D. Laing, Anna embraces breakdown. In a therapy session with her Jungian analyst, Mother Sugar, Anna expresses her determination to be “open to everything.” (451) She recognizes that fitting her experiences into Jungian archetypes is a way of putting “the pain away where it can’t hurt, turn it into a story or into history. But [she doesn’t] want to put it away” (451). Instead, Anna confronts it through a series of disturbing dreams and a troubled role-playing relationship with her American lover, Saul Green. As Lessing explains in her 1971 Preface, in the inner Golden Notebook, “Anna and Saul Green the American ‘breakdown.’ They are crazy, lunatic, mad – what you will. They ‘break down’ into each other, into other people, break through the false patterns they have made of their pasts, the patterns and formulas they have made to shore up themselves and each other, dissolve” (xii). Lessing explains that their “breakdowns” offer them

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a route to “self-healing” as their “inner [selves dismiss] false dichotomies and divisions” (xii). The Golden Notebook concludes with two irreconcilable endings: in one, Anna goes off to write the novel that Saul gives her the first line for and, in the other, Anna becomes a marriage guidance counsellor. Throughout these harrowing experiences, what defines Anna’s character is this issue of her being a ‘blocked’ artist. Rubenstein has noted: The Golden Notebook pivots on a kind of narrative irony: the same Anna Wulf who struggles relentlessly with the gap between experience and its verbal expression and who protests that she is unable to write a second novel following Frontiers of War nonetheless writes  – indeed writes compulsively and prolifically – in the notebooks that reflect her emotional and intellectual self-divisions while providing the novel’s structural organization: ‘a black notebook, which is to do with Anna Wulf the writer; a red notebook, concerned with politics; a yellow notebook, in which I make stories out of my experience; and a blue notebook which tries to be a diary’ (2015, 100; quoting Lessing).

In many ways, The Golden Notebook can be read as an extended answer to a question Lessing herself posed directly in an interview with Christopher Bigsby in 1980: “[W]hy do we tell stories? What is the function of the storyteller?” (Lessing 1996, 84) The novel asks this question in a range of contexts. As Anna herself puts it in The Golden Notebook, “I am simply asking myself: Why a story at all – not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth?” (61). But, as the twentieth century has demonstrated, this ‘simple’ question has a far from simple answer. One of the first contexts in which Anna Wulf questions her role as storyteller is that of the literary marketplace (↗  2  The Novel in the Economy). Her first novel  – Frontiers of War – has been so successful that for a period of time she does not need to work for pay but, instead, volunteers as an editor at her local Communist Party of Great Britain. On the first page of the black notebook – the notebook dedicated to her writing – Anna draws attention to the clash between what she terms the “Source” of her novel and the “Money” (55) it has made her: Dry and hot, and the silk of dust on my cheek, smelling of sun, the sun. Letters from the agent about the novel. Every time one of them arrives I want to laugh – the laughter of disgust. Bad laughter, the laughter of helplessness, a self-punishment. Unreal letters, when I think of a slope of hot poured granite, my cheeks against hot rock, the red light on my eyelids. Lunch with the agent. Unreal – the novel is more and more a sort of creature with its own life. Frontiers of War now has nothing to do with me, it is a property of other people. Agent said it should be a film. Said no. She was patient – her job to be. (54–55)

This possibility of adapting her novel to film is a source of dark irony throughout the black notebook as Anna repeatedly presents parodic film synopses to her agent for consideration. The lived reality of Central Africa that Anna experienced and which is identified as the “source” for Frontiers of War, is incompatible with the “unreal”

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commodity that is the published novel, Frontiers of War, itself. Indeed, it is noticeable that in her chapter entitled “‘Across the Frontiers’: Reading Africa in The Golden Notebook”, Julie Cairnie focuses on the importance of reviews both externally and internally to The Golden Notebook and to the black notebook in particular: Reviewing the significance of Anna’s African past is a central task in the black notebook. Reviews are in fact central to this notebook, assuming one form or another in each of the four segments. This is hardly surprising given that the black notebook ‘is to do with Anna Wulf the writer’ (The Golden Notebook 418), and her concern that her best-selling novel indulges in colonial nostalgia and naïve political ambition (2015, 18).

Anna’s fears about the “colonial nostalgia” of her successful first novel are an important contributing factor to the ‘block’ that she is struggling with throughout her notebooks. Thus, Anna’s anxieties about her writing’s role in the global marketplace of cultural commodities are closely tied to her worries about how to become a “cosmopolitan child” of her “colonial mother” (cf. Ridout 2011) and the “cosmopolitan melancholy” (Watkins 2010, chapter 3) that marks The Golden Notebook. The black notebook asks how a colonial white woman can write about her experiences in Rhodesia without succumbing to “colonial nostalgia” or turning her experiences into an easily consumed literary commodity. Another key context in which Anna interrogates the telling of stories is in her volunteer position as an editor at her local British Communist Party office. In that role, she struggles with the dominant Communist thinking about art and literature at that time which is helpfully outlined by Nick Bentley in his summary of the arguments for a “committed” or “political” realism made by Georg Lukács and Raymond Williams in the 1950s (2009, 45–47). Bentley argues that in “focusing on the process of turning experience into fiction” in her earlier novel, Frontiers of War, Anna “discovers the contradictions upon which realism is formed” (2009, 48). He reads Anna’s “revelation” as Lessing challenging some of the Leftist thinking about the role of committed literature and its championing of the realist form. This is a crisis point for Anna in terms of realist form, but also, and more importantly, it registers a crisis in the ability of literature to act politically, as a committed aesthetic (Bentley 2009, 48).

This unravelling of the politics of realism is, for Anna, paralleled by her disintegrating faith in the Communist Party and its focus on the collective, especially in relation to artistic production. Half way through a lecture she has given repeatedly in her role with the Communist Party of Great Britain about the benefits of “communal, unindividual” art, Anna finds herself stammering and unable to continue. She realizes that she has taken this role with the Party because she “wanted to have [her] deep private preoccupation about art, about literature (and therefore about life), about [her] refusal to write

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again, put into a sharp focus, where [she] must look at it, day after day” (334). She finds the political fiction she edits for the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) to be “dead stuff” and is “forced to acknowledge that the flashes of genuine art are all out of deep, suddenly stark, undistinguishable private emotion”; what she calls “lightning flashes of genuine personal feeling” (334). This realization is what leads her to stammer in her lecture. “Do you realize”, she asks Comrade Jack, “that all the arguments we ever have are about the same thing – the individual conscience, the individual sensibility?” (335) This central concern is one that Lessing herself highlighted in her 1971 Preface, arguing that “there was no way of not being intensely subjective: it was, if you like, the writer’s task for that time” (xviii). Indeed, Lessing declared in her essay, “The Small Personal Voice” that her Children of Violence novel series consisting of Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), and The Four-Gated City (1969) was “a study of the individual conscience in its relations with the collective” (1994, 18). This substantial series of books in Lessing’s œuvre is significant to The Golden Notebook because the publication of The Golden Notebook in 1962 interrupted the series, appearing between A Ripple from the Storm (1958) and Landlocked (1965). The anxiety Lessing felt due to her Communist commitment regarding this theme  – “Bothering about your stupid personal concerns when Rome is burning”, as she puts it in her 1971 Preface – and Anna’s revelation about the importance of “genuine personal feeling” further complicates the relationship between storytelling and politics (xvii). The final context in which I will consider Lessing’s metafictional interrogation of storytelling is that of gender politics (↗  4  Gender). Lessing’s relationship to her feminist readers has been a difficult one. However, one of the enduring contributions of The Golden Notebook to twentieth century literature is Lessing’s assumption that a female artist’s perspective is as legitimate and authoritative as a male one. She explains in her 1971 Preface: “This book was written as if the attitudes that have been created by the Women’s Liberation movements already existed” (xiv). As I have argued in “Doris Lessing: ‘Political in the Most Basic Sense’” (2014a), borrowing my title from Margaret Atwood’s tribute to Lessing, the understanding that ‘the personal is political’ that developed through and out of Second Wave Feminism and its consciousness raising strategies is central to Anna’s understanding of the world. Indeed, it is through this realization that Lessing resolves “the problem of ‘subjectivity’” as she explains in her 1971 Preface: The way to deal with the problem of ‘subjectivity’, that shocking business of being preoccupied with the tiny individual who is at the same time caught up in such an explosion of terrible and marvellous possibilities, is to see him as a microcosm and in this way to break through the personal, the subjective, making the personal general, as indeed life always does, transforming a personal experience – or so you think of it when still a child […] into something much larger: growing up is after all only the understanding that one’s unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares. (xviii)

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It was in this way, by transforming personal experiences of oppression into a generalized politics of gender through consciousness raising that Second Wave Feminism emerged as a central transformative politics of the twentieth century. Lessing’s exploration of how Anna’s writing block illuminates the “disparity between the overwhelming problems of war, famine, poverty, and the tiny individual who was trying to mirror them” (Lessing 2008, xvii) not only offered a model for Second Wave Feminism but is also pertinent to contemporary debates about individual political action in the face of climate change and global inequality.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies It is impossible to separate Lessing’s narrative and literary strategies from her central topics and concerns in The Golden Notebook. As Lessing famously stated in her 1971 Preface, she wanted to make a “wordless statement” through the very form of the novel: “But my major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped” (xix). In the novel itself, there is a moment when Anna’s psychotherapist, Mother Sugar, challenges her for stating that the reason some books “are for the minority” is a “question of form”. “Form? What is the content of yours? I understand that you people insist on separating form and content?” Mother Sugar asks, implying disagreement (454). Lessing’s complaint in 1971 that her “wordless statement” “was not noticed” (xix) would certainly not hold true today. Following the publication of her 1971 Preface, which has appeared at the beginning of every publication of her novel ever since, critics have explored her narrative and literary strategies extensively and a consensus has emerged that this metafictional novel is largely about writing, form, and representation itself as my outline of its main themes above has made clear. Critics have particularly struggled with the periodization of this novel’s narrative strategies. As Tonya Krouse explains: “From the moment of its publication in 1962, readers, reviewers, and scholars experienced some difficulty with Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: it didn’t neatly fit into the typical criteria for situating modern and contemporary novels” (2015, 115). Certainly, for many readers a defining characteristic of their reading experience of this novel is that of difficulty. Astoundingly, Lessing claims to have written the novel from beginning to end holding each thread in her head as she weaved the complex story lines together. As Rubenstein explains, “Doris Lessing insisted that she composed The Golden Notebook in precisely the chronologically scrambled order in which readers progress through its pages. As she explained in the 1971 introduction to the novel, ‘keeping the plan of it in my head I wrote it from start to end, consecutively, and it was difficult […] [in part] because of what I was learning as I wrote’ (GN xvi)” (Rubenstein 2014, 27). Juxtaposing passages of The Golden Notebook with extracts

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from Sigal’s journals from the time, Rubenstein goes on to question just how likely Lessing’s claim is (2014, 27–42): Was Lessing stealing passages from Sigal’s diary for her novel or vice versa? One aspect of Lessing’s narrative strategies that deserves particular attention is her use of the fictional diary. The diary has a long gendered history and has been particularly important for women writers for whom it was the only type of writing that was socially sanctioned for a significant period of history. The diaries and notebooks in The Golden Notebook allow for Anna’s confessional and metafictional comments about her own writing process: “Words. Words. I play with words”, Anna tells us in the inner Golden Notebook, “hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want. Perhaps better with music? But music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it’s not my world. The fact is, the real experience can’t be described. I think, bitterly, that a row of asterisks, like an old-fashioned novel, might be better. Or a symbol of some kind, a circle, perhaps, or a square. Anything at all, but not words” (604). Just as Rubenstein has identified a central irony in this novel about a blocked writer who writes compulsively, so, too, can we see the irony in Anna expressing her frustration with language in writing. The intimate, confessional tone of the diary genre leaves the reader feeling that they do have a clear sense of what it is that Anna wants to say even as we empathize with her frustration at not being able to say it. The diary is also traditionally a private genre and Rubenstein’s archival work in Literary Half-Lives: Doris Lessing, Clancy Sigal, and Roman á Clef (2014) on Clancy Sigal’s diary from the years of Lessing’s composition of The Golden Notebook has demonstrated how transgressive Lessing is of that convention both within The Golden Notebook itself and in her reading of Sigal’s diary in her ‘real life’ outside her novel. Marie Danziger views the scene in which Tommy reads Anna’s notebooks without her permission as the novel’s “primal scene”, arguing that “[w]hen Molly’s son Tommy presumes to read her notebooks without asking, this act of male aggression is, in my reading, a symbolic rape, arguably the novel’s most resonant event” (1996, 47). Rubenstein has discovered that Sigal’s notes on his own diary indicate that he became aware that Lessing was secretly reading his diary. Lessing utilizes the conventional privacy of the diary in The Golden Notebook in the direct way in which she talks about women’s embodied experiences, such as writing about “the first tampax in world literature” (279–280), as Rachel Blau DuPlessis so famously pointed out. Indeed, in her 1971 Preface Lessing explains: “A lot of women were angry about The Golden Notebook. What women will say to other women, grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism, is often the last thing they will say aloud – a man may overhear” (xiii). Lessing’s choice of the diary genre can be read as transgressive of the socially accepted boundary between private and public. As I have argued in “Rereading The Golden Notebook After Chick Lit” (2015), we can also read Lessing’s use of the fictional diary as an enabling choice

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for the phenomenon of “Chick Lit” in the 1990s which tends to feature confessional fictional diaries written by women.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives The reception of literary texts is a central concern of The Golden Notebook itself, as Cairnie’s focus on reviews makes clear in her chapter “‘Across the Frontiers’: Reading Africa in The Golden Notebook.” Early reviews of The Golden Notebook varied greatly from the positive response of Irving Howe quoted by Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose in their co-edited collection – “‘the most exciting piece of new fiction’ produced in the decade” (1989, 13) – to the anonymous review entitled “Fog of War” published in The Times Literary Supplement on 27 April 1962 quoted by Bentley as an example of an early reader finding the expectations created by the opening section of “Free Women” undermined by the notebooks that follow – “Her material got badly out of hand, and in desperation she has bundled the whole lot together” (qtd. in Bentley 2009, 57). It is clear from Lessing’s own 1971 Preface that the early reactions to her novel frustrated and disappointed her. Of particular fame is her negative response to feminist appropriations of the novel in that Preface: “this novel was not a trumpet for Women’s Liberation” because its “central theme” was “‘breakdown’” not “the sex war” (xiii). She describes those female readers who “claimed” it “as a useful weapon in the sex war” (xii) as having put her in a “false position” (xiii). Watkins explains in her extensive overview of Lessing criticism that “the association between Lessing’s work and feminism has been a close but not always a happy one” (2010, 22). As Barbara Ellen comments in her write up of an interview with Lessing in 2001, “[t]he interesting thing about Doris Lessing is not that she’s not a feminist, but how insistent she is that she’s not a feminist” (2001). Feminist critics have tended to respond to Lessing’s rejection of the feminist label as Gayle Greene does in Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change: “she is not a feminist writer in any simple way, yet I persist in believing that she is deeply feminist” (1994, 28). Certainly, the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique one year after The Golden Notebook seemed to offer a broader cultural context for and understanding of the unhappy female characters in Lessing’s work. The focus of Lessing’s 1971 preface on the “wordless statement” of the novel, how it tried “to talk through the way it was shaped” (xix), prompted an explosion of interest in the structure of the novel that aligned with the academy’s interest in postmodernism, metafiction and deconstruction. Work such as Magali Cornier Michael’s Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse: Post-World War II Fiction (1996) and Patricia Waugh’s Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (1988) are exemplary of this turn. As outlined above, this critical direction has been extended by my own interest in the novel as parody in Contemporary Women Writers Look Back:

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From Irony to Nostalgia (2010a) and in Bentley’s useful term “critical fiction” in “Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: An Experiment in Critical Fiction” (2009). Lorna Sage’s identification of Lessing’s experimentation in The Golden Notebook as “a new stage in ‘un-settlement’ or ‘decolonization’”, choosing these terms in particular because “[t]his formulation at least reminds one how thoroughly the novel as a form is, for her, an aspect of the making of a wider history; and how problematic her Englishness turned out to be” (1983, 48), highlights the relevance of post-colonial and cosmopolitan approaches to Lessing’s life and work. This relation of the cosmopolitan individual to the world is often fraught for Lessing: “Perhaps the image that most hauntingly captures Lessing’s particular cosmopolitan outlook is that which appears in both The Golden Notebook and The Four-Gated City of an individual in a room surrounded by world news. At the end of The Golden Notebook, Anna surrounds herself in her flat with newspaper clippings of the world’s disasters” (Ridout 2009, 121). For Cornelius Collins, Lessing’s work prophesies the post-Cold War globalization of today. Sarah Henstra and Mark Pedretti are both concerned with placing The Golden Notebook in debates about the relationship between nuclear threat and postmodern literary forms. Even this brief overview of the reception of Lessing’s The Golden Notebook makes clear its centrality to the great literary and cultural debates of the second half of the twentieth century. This is a novel that interrogates the very function, form, and limits of the novel itself. Anna Wulf’s notebooks and diaries are productive failures that illuminate the questions and challenges post-war writers faced.

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008 [1962]. --Atwood, Margaret. “Doris Lessing: a Model for Every Writer Coming from the Back of Beyond.” The Guardian. 18 November 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/17/doris-lessingdeath-margaret-atwood-tribute (17 June 2014). Bentley, Nick. “Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: An Experiment in Critical Fiction.” Doris Lessing: Border Crossings. Ed. Alice Ridout and Susan Watkins. London: Continuum, 2009. 44–60. Cairnie, Julie. “‘Across the Frontiers’: Reading Africa in The Golden Notebook.” Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook After Fifty. Ed. Alice Ridout, Roberta Rubenstein, and Sandra Singer. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015. 13–31. Collins, Cornelius. “‘A Horizontal, Almost Nationless Organisation’: Doris Lessing’s Prophecies of Globalization.” Twentieth-Century Literature 56.2 (2010): 221–244. Collins, Cornelius. “‘Through that Gap the Future Might Pour’: Dreaming the Post-Cold War World in The Golden Notebook.” Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook After Fifty. Ed. Alice Ridout, Roberta Rubenstein, and Sandra Singer. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015. 55–72.

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Danziger, Marie A. Text/Countertext: Postmodern Paranoia in Samuel Beckett, Doris Lessing, and Philip Roth. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Draine, Betsy. “Nostalgia and Irony: The Postmodern Order of The Golden Notebook.” Modern Fiction Studies 26 (1980): 31–48. Draine, Betsy. Substance Under Pressure: Artistic Coherence and Evolving Form in the Novels of Doris Lessing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “For the Etruscans.” The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. London: Virago, 1986. 271–291. Ellen, Barbara. “I have nothing in common with feminists. They never seem to think that one might enjoy men.” The Observer. 9 September 2001. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/ sep/09/fiction.dorislessing (18 June 2015). Friedan, Betty. The Feminist Mystique. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2010 [1973]. Fuoroli, Caryn. “Doris Lessing’s ‘Game’: Referential Language and Fictional Form.” Twentieth Century Literature 27 (1981): 146–165. Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Greene, Gayle. Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Henstra, Sarah. The Counter-Memorial Impulse in Twentieth-Century English Fiction. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009. Hite, Molly. The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narratives. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. Howe, Florence. “Timing is All: The Golden Notebook Then and Now.” Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook After Fifty. Ed. Alice Ridout, Roberta Rubenstein, and Sandra Singer. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015. 195–208. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. London: Routledge, 1985. Kaplan, Carey, and Ellen Cronan Rose, eds. Approaches to Teaching Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. New York: MLA, 1989. Krouse, Tonya. “Between Modernism and Postmodernism: Positioning The Golden Notebook in the Twentieth-Century Canon.” Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook After Fifty. Ed. Alice Ridout, Roberta Rubenstein, and Sandra Singer. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015. 115–134. Leonard, Vivien. “‘Free Women’ as Parody: Fun and Games in The Golden Notebook.” Perspectives on Contemporary Literature 6 (1980): 20–27. Lessing, Doris. Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. Lessing, Doris. A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews. Ed. Paul Schlueter. London: Flamingo-Harper, 1994 [1974]. Lessing, Doris. Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949. London: Flamingo-Harper, 1995. Lessing, Doris. Putting the Questions Differently: Interviews with Doris Lessing, 1964–1994. Ed. Earl G. Ingersoll. London: Flamingo-Harper, 1996. Lessing, Doris. Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of my Autobiography, 1949–1962. London: HarperCollins 1997. Michael, Magali Cornier. Feminism and The Postmodern Impulse: Post-World War II Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Pedretti, Mark. “Doris Lessing and the Madness of Nuclear Deterrence.” Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook After Fifty. Ed. Alice Ridout, Roberta Rubenstein, and Sandra Singer. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015. 33–54. Raschke, Debrah, Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis, and Sandra Singer, eds. Lessing: Interrogating the Times. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010.

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Ridout, Alice. “Under My Skin: The Autobiography of a Cosmopolitan ‘Third Culture Kid’.” Doris Lessing: Border Crossings. Ed. Alice Ridout and Susan Watkins. London: Continuum, 2009. 107–128. Ridout, Alice. Contemporary Women Writers Look Back: From Irony to Nostalgia. London: ContinuumBloomsbury, 2010a. Ridout, Alice. “‘What is the Function of the Storyteller?’: The Relationship between Why and How Lessing Writes.” Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Times. Ed. Debrah Raschke, Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis, and Sandra Singer. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010b. 77–91. Ridout, Alice. “Colonial Mothers and Cosmopolitan Third Culture Kids: Doris Lessing’s Under My Skin.” Writing Out of Limbo: International Childhoods, Global Nomads and Third Culture Kids. Ed. Gene H. Bell-Villada and Nina Sichel with Faith Eidse, and Elaine Neil Orr. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. 426–439. Ridout, Alice. “Doris Lessing: ‘Political in the Most Basic Sense’.” Political Fiction: Critical Insights. Ed. Mark Levene. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2014a. 171–186. Ridout, Alice. “Of Pigeons and Expats: Doris Lessing, Sam Selvon, and Zadie Smith.” Doris Lessing Studies. 32 (2014b): 26–29. Ridout, Alice. “Rereading The Golden Notebook After Chick Lit.” Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook After Fifty. Ed. Alice Ridout, Roberta Rubenstein, and Sandra Singer. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015. 153–169. Ridout, Alice, Roberta Rubenstein, and Sandra Singer, eds. Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook After Fifty. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015. Ridout, Alice, and Susan Watkins, eds. Doris Lessing: Border Crossings. London: Continuum, 2009. Rubenstein, Roberta. Literary Half-Lives: Doris Lessing, Clancy Sigal, and Roman à Clef. New York: Palgrave, 2014. Rubenstein, Roberta. “The Golden Notebook, Disguised Autobiography, and Roman à Clef.” Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook After Fifty. Ed. Alice Ridout, Roberta Rubenstein, and Sandra Singer. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015. 99–114. Sage, Lorna. Doris Lessing. (Contemporary Writers). London: Methuen, 1983. Schweickart, Patrocinio P. “Reading a Wordless Statement: The Structure of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.” Modern Fiction Studies 31 (1985): 263–279. Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: From Charlotte Brontë to Doris Lessing. Rev. ed. London: Virago, 1982 [1977]. Sprague, Claire. Rereading Doris Lessing: Narrative Patterns of Doubling and Repetition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Watkins, Susan. Doris Lessing: Contemporary World Writers. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988 [1984].

5.2 Further Reading King, Jeanette. Doris Lessing. London: Edward Arnold, 1989. Krouse, Tonya. “Freedom as Effacement in The Golden Notebook: Theorizing Pleasure, Subjectivity, and Authority.” Journal of Modern Literature 19.3 (2006): 39–56. Lessing, Doris. The Diaries of Jane Somers. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Lessing, Doris. The Grass is Singing. London: Flamingo-Harper, 1994 [1950]. Lessing, Doris. Alfred and Emily. London: Fourth Estate, 2008.

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Rubenstein, Roberta. The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.

Brooke Lenz

15 John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) Abstract: The story of Charles Smithson, a Victorian gentleman who is seduced out of his conventional existence and propelled toward existential authenticity by the alluring Sarah Woodruff, John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) has attracted both critical acclaim and enduring popularity. Its seductive narrative energy; its provocative metafictional gestures, indeterminate ending, and postmodern complexity; its self-conscious twentieth-century examination of the Victorian era; and its profound explorations of the ways in which large-scale social movements impact specifically situated individuals have all worked to secure its status as both Fowles’s most important work and as one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century. Keywords: Existentialism, feminism, metafiction, postmodernism, Victorian

1 Context: Author, Œuvre, Moment Renowned for his exceptional storytelling abilities and experimentation with literary form, John Fowles was unique in his generation of English authors for achieving (and maintaining) both critical acclaim and popular success. As a novelist, Fowles was particularly gifted, with a unique “ability to compel his readers’ attention from the beginning of his novels to the end”, James Acheson notes; “Fowles so beguiles us with uncertainty in his fiction, so tantalizes us with a variety of possible outcomes, that we read his novels and short stories eagerly to find out what happens in the end” (2005, 398). Yet despite such ‘narrative drive’, Fowles’s fiction is also highly allusive, erudite, and philosophically and psychologically complex, seducing readers into profound explorations of human existence and relationships – perhaps not surprisingly, as Fowles’s two most profound influences were the medieval romance and existentialist philosophy, both of which he studied at Oxford. Intrigued by the work of Marie de France, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Carl Jung, in all of his fiction Fowles created situations in which his (anti)heroes’ personal and cultural values would be tested, especially in their interactions with mysterious women. Nowhere is this more apparent (or successful) than in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). Inspired by a “mysterious [and] vaguely romantic” vision of a woman staring out to sea, an “outcast” whose persistent reappearance to Fowles came always “in the same static long shot, with her back turned”, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and especially its eponymous heroine, represented for Fowles “a reproach on the VicDOI 10.1515/9783110369489-016

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torian age” (1998, 13), yet the novel simultaneously critiques “the complacent stereotype that the twentieth century was more sophisticated or thoughtful than its predecessor” (Stephenson 2007, 8). Though unaware of its impact at the time, Fowles later cited Claire de Duras’s 1823 novel Ourika, or at least its heroine, as “very active in [his] unconscious” during the writing of the novel (1994, xxix), which Fowles undertook at Underhill Farm in Lyme Regis (which itself appears in The French Lieutenant’s Woman as the Dairy) between 1967 and 1968, when Fowles presented the manuscript to both his wife, Elizabeth, and his editor at Jonathan Cape, Tom Maschler. These two excellent readers suggested important changes to the text (Relf 1999, 127), and the novel was published in June of 1969, winning the Silver PEN Award that year and the W. H. Smith & Son prize in 1970. The story of Charles Smithson, a Victorian gentleman who is seduced out of his conventional existence and propelled toward existential authenticity by the alluring Sarah Woodruff, The French Lieutenant’s Woman simultaneously titillated readers with its erotic tension and secured Fowles’s reputation as “the paradigm of a new postmodernist generation” of writers, “audacious enough to acknowledge his debt to past literature by playing irreverent formal games with its most cherished conventions” (Stephenson 2007, 1). The novel combines a story set in Victorian England, and structured by many of the conventions of the nineteenth-century novel  – “a dominant narrative voice, a story of love hindered by the class system, and an account of an independent woman’s effort to overcome the trials forced on her by gender” (Stephenson 2007, 13)  – with an intrusive modern narrator who comments on the action, questions the nature of fiction, occasionally inserts himself into the story as a character, and constructs alternative endings. These characteristics clearly identify The French Lieutenant’s Woman as a metafictional text, which Patricia Waugh defines as “fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (1984, 2). With its implicit comparison of historical mores and values and its dramatic flaunting of its metafictional concerns, the novel disconcerted the literary establishment in England, but became popular in the United States, where it remained on the best-seller lists for over a year. Though The French Lieutenant’s Woman “can be summed up [as] … a postmodernist development of the existentialist blueprint of Fowles’s earlier novels” The Collector (1963) and The Magus (1965), especially in its examination of the burdens of social conditioning and the challenges of existential awareness (Stephenson 2007, 7), its enduring popularity with readers and the “postmodern complexity that has appealed to the many academic critics who have written on it” (Acheson 2005, 399) have secured its status as both Fowles’s most important work and as one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century. Though his work peaked in critical reputation by the early 1990s, Fowles remains one of the most popular and influential authors of post-1945 British fiction, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman continues to engage readers with the kinds of productive tensions that inspire endlessly evolving critical interpretations.

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2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns 2.1 Historiographic metafiction One significant reason for both The French Lieutenant’s Woman’s initial popularity and its enduring significance is, as William Stephenson notes, that the novel addressed tensions felt in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century England: the conflict between women and patriarchy; changing sexual morality; the struggle between vested interests and the ambitious working class; the challenges to the prevailing, often unspoken consensus of what constituted Englishness […] Like the society that spawned it, The French Lieutenant’s Woman asserted its progress beyond the past, and yet looked back to it continually. (2007, 12)

Indeed, the most profound tension throughout the novel emerges from its self-conscious twentieth-century examination of the Victorian era, and from its poignant dramatization of how large-scale social movements impact specifically situated individuals. Set in the late 1860s, the novel situates its characters in the midst of significant social disruptions, explicitly considering the impact, both immediate and subsequent, of the work of prominent historical thinkers and public figures such as Gladstone and Disraeli, Hardy, Marx, Lyell, and Darwin. Though the characters themselves are not always fully aware of such disruptions – Charles, for example, “knew nothing of the beavered German Jew quietly working, as it so happened, that very afternoon in the British Museum library […] whose work in those somber walls was to bear such bright red fruit” (12)1 – readers are invited by the narrator to consider the characters’ experiences in light of these cultural and historical developments, and to interpret the characters’ choices as emblematic of widespread social change. This approach is most apparent in the storyline featuring Sam and Mary, two servants who, over the course of the novel, take advantage of their natural abilities, their carefully nurtured ambitions, and their intimacy with the main characters in order to climb the social ladder, eventually establishing themselves in a position “to have recently been able to interview eleven lesser mortals for a post one had, only two years before, occupied oneself!” (424) Throughout the novel, and by their own actions, Sam and Mary, the narrator explains, are “rising in the world; and kn[o]w it” (424), despite their employers’ stubborn inability to recognize or adapt to the social, political, and economic upheaval of their time. Charles, for example, despite his professed admiration for Darwin and his early assumption, deduced from Darwin, that “inexorable laws […] very conveniently arranged themselves for the survival of the fittest and best, exemplia gratia Charles Smithson” (49), cannot even begin to fathom the gradual

1 Unless otherwise indicated page references in brackets without further designation refer to Fowles 1998 [1969].

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extinction of his own social class until his personal circumstances become so agonizing that he is forced to see himself as a “poor living fossil, [stopped] as the brisker and fitter forms of life jostled busily before him” (290). As the narrator explains, Charles […] had not really understood Darwin. But then, nor had Darwin himself. What that genius had upset was the Linnaean Scala Naturae, the ladder of nature, whose great keystone, as essential to it as the divinity of Christ to theology, was nulla species nova: a new species cannot enter the world […] Even Darwin never quite shook off the Swedish fetters, and Charles can hardly be blamed for the thoughts that went through his mind as he gazed up at the lias strata in the cliffs above him. (49)

Such commentary functions simultaneously to invite the reader to understand the characters as representative of various Victorian social castes and occupations; to scrutinize the characters’ awareness of and adaptation to widespread cultural developments that the contemporary reader has the privilege of understanding with the benefit of hindsight and in a broader historical context; and to excuse, and perhaps even sympathize with, the characters’ failings given the comparatively limited scope of their own perspectives. The narrator further interrogates the assumptions readers themselves bring to such judgments, both of the characters and of the Victorian era more broadly; just before Charles reflects in this way on the survival of the fittest, for example, the narrator describes in detail the extensive equipment Charles has brought on the fossil hunt that brings him to the cliffs above, noting the “incomprehensible […] methodicality of the Victorians”, and yet recognizing that [i]f we take this obsession with dressing the part, with being prepared for every eventuality, as mere stupidity, blindness to the empirical, we make, I think a grave  – or rather a frivolous  – mistake about our ancestors; because it was men not unlike Charles, and as overdressed and overequipped as he was that day, who laid the foundations of all our modern science. (47)

Such complex commentaries and comparisons are characteristic of historiographic metafiction, which Linda Hutcheon first defined as “novels that are intensely self-reflexive but that also both re-introduce historical context into metafiction and problematize the entire question of historical knowledge” (1987, 285–286). “Through its play upon ‘known truth’”, Victoria Orlowski explains, “historiographic metafiction questions the absolute ‘knowability’ of the past, specifying the ideological implications of historical representations” (1996). While The French Lieutenant’s Woman is wide-ranging in its exploration of the evolution of various social, political, spiritual, psychological, environmental, and sexual ideologies over a hundred years of English history, most significantly the novel exploits the “fundamental tension between individual freedom and social responsibility” (Stephenson 2007, 54), thereby enact[ing] the dialectic of freedom and power that is the modern existentialist and even Marxist answer to Victorian or Darwinian determinism. But it requires that historical context in order to interrogate the present (as well as the past) through its critical irony. (Hutcheon 1988, 45)

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2.2 Existentialism The vehicle through which The French Lieutenant’s Woman interrogates these systems of thought and their implications for individuals is Charles Smithson, whose journey toward personal authenticity comprises the action of the novel. “Despite its title”, Bruce Woodcock notes – and despite the fact that the narrator refers to Sarah as the “protagonist” (406)  – “The French Lieutenant’s Woman is quite definitely about a man, or more precisely […] about two men” (1984, 85). Indeed, it is Charles whose experiences readers shadow throughout the novel, and the narrator whose perceptions frame the presentation of both him and Sarah. Early in the novel, for example, the narrator informs us that “Laziness was, I am afraid, Charles’s distinguishing trait” (16), and such blunt assessments cannot but help to shape readers’ understanding of the characters, and of Charles in particular, whose consciousness the narrator is willing and able to explore. Charles is first introduced as part of a pair of strangers in Lyme Regis about whom “a person of curiosity could at once have deduced several strong probabilities” (3), especially compared to the mysterious Sarah, about whom that same “local spy […] would have been at sea” (4–5). And indeed Charles is a largely unremarkable English gentleman of his time, casually interested in paleontology and travel, casually disinterested in politics and religion, an “intelligent idler” with “all the Byronic ennui with neither of the Byronic outlets: genius and adultery” (16). Yet Charles is progressively shaken out of his complacent existence through his encounters with Sarah, whose ostracism awakens Charles’s sympathies and whose alluring mysteriousness seduces Charles into an increasingly profound examination of existential authenticity. “Existentialism”, the young Fowles wrote, “is the revolt of the individual against all those systems of thought, theories of psychology, and social and political pressures that attempt to rob him of his individuality” (1981 [1964], 115). Though comfortable enough in his circumstances at the beginning of the novel – engaged to the wealthy Ernestina Freeman, conveniently settled in London while awaiting the inheritance of his family estate at Winsyatt, temporarily diverted by the charms of a spring in Lyme Regis – Charles is nevertheless profoundly affected by his meetings with “‘the French Lieutenant’s … Woman’” (9) in the Edenic Undercliff, as her melancholy story of isolation and unexpected confessions both arouse him and remind him “of his own dissatisfaction” (177) with his conventional existence. Though ostensibly he interests himself in Sarah’s circumstances out of a kind of paternalism, clearly he is sexually attracted to her, which becomes apparent to both of them when he finds her in a barn after her sudden dismissal from her post and subsequent disappearance have prompted both a public search and a moral crisis for Charles. Though he is perhaps helped along in his pursuit of Sarah by an unforeseen disinheritance and doubts about Ernestina’s suitability as a life partner, Charles is ultimately “unable to move away” (249) from Sarah, until, as the narrator explains, “The moment overcame the age”:

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He took her into his arms, saw her eyes close as she swayed into his embrace; then closed his own and found her lips. He felt not only their softness but the whole close substance of her body; her sudden smallness, fragility, weakness, tenderness … He pushed her violently away. (250)

As in many of his encounters with Sarah, here Charles demonstrates a kind of split, characterized on the one hand by his authentic desire for her and on the other by his strongly inculcated sense of Victorian propriety. These conflicting motivations play out as Charles travels to London, where an interview with his future father-in-law plunges Charles into a desperate examination of his identity and purpose. Feeling trapped by Mr. Freeman’s offer to bring him in on his business, Charles wanders aimlessly until he comes to an epiphany in front of Mr. Freeman’s store: To be sure there was something base in his rejection – a mere snobbism, a letting himself be judged and swayed by an audience of ancestors. There was something lazy in it; a fear of work, of routine, of concentration on detail. There was something cowardly in it, as well […]. But there was one noble element in his rejection: a sense that the pursuit of money was an insufficient purpose in life. He would never be a Darwin or a Dickens, a great artist or scientist; he would at worst be a dilettante, a drone, a what-you-will that lets others work and contributes nothing. But he gained a queer sort of momentary self-respect in his nothingness, a sense that choosing to be nothing […] was the last saving grace of a gentleman; his last freedom, almost […] He stood for a moment against the vast pressures of his age; then felt cold, chilled to his innermost marrow by an icy rage against Mr. Freeman and Freemanism. (294, 296)

This moment of self-awareness is followed, much less metaphysically, by a night of carousing with old acquaintances Charles meets at his club, where he has gone to seek certainty and solace in “a bowl of milk punch and a pint of champagne” (296). Yet over the course of the evening, Charles becomes increasingly disillusioned by the lifestyle of his college comrades, so that he abandons them at a brothel and then, quite unexpectedly, pursues a prostitute he sees on the street. That encounter ends similarly badly; a glass of bad wine prompts violent illness when Charles asks the prostitute her name, and she replies, “Sarah, sir” (315). As this encounter suggests, Charles seeks something beyond the conventional pleasures available to him through conventional means, something he perceives in Sarah. Carol Barnum notes that while Sarah’s character and motivations are ambiguous, Charles’s are not: “all that we can know and all that we need to know is that Charles is called by Sarah as his anima to the quest and that he responds to the call because of his deep need for the renewal of mystery in his life” (1988, 57). When he receives a brief note from Sarah revealing her location in Exeter, Charles spends the train journey on his return to Lyme Regis imagining how his life might proceed if he married Ernestina: “Above all he felt himself coming to the end of a story; and to an end he did not like […] The book of his existence, so it seemed to him, was about to come to a distinctly shabby close” (339–340). Instead Charles recklessly stops for the night in Exeter to meet Sarah, whose vulnerability, gratitude, and sadness together

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so arouse Charles that he catches her in his arms and takes her to the bedroom for a much-anticipated sexual encounter (347–350). This is, both literally and figuratively, the climax of Charles’s relationship with Sarah; as he looks at her afterward, he notes that “He had never felt so close, so one with a woman” (353). Yet all of Charles assumptions about Sarah and his hopes for a future with her are shattered when he gets out of bed and notes the blood on his shirt – a telltale sign that she lied to him when she “confessed” to having “given herself” to the French Lieutenant, and that their entire relationship is based on this deception. At Sarah’s command, Charles leaves her, stumbling blindly into the rain-drenched streets of Exeter; “[h]is greatest desire”, the narrator explains, “was darkness, invisibility, oblivion in which to regain calm” (357). Though he has no real religious conviction, Charles “suddenly felt the need for sanctuary” and so enters a small church, where he performs perhaps the most rigorous self-analysis in the novel, which the narrator presents in the form of a dialogue “between his better and his worse self – or perhaps between him and that spreadeagled figure in the shadows at the church’s end” (360): I was deceived. What intent lay behind the deception? I do not know. You must judge […] Do you think water can wash that blood from your loins? I cannot go back. Did you have to meet her again in the Undercliff? Did you have to stop this night in Exeter? Did you have to go to her room? Let her hand rest on yours? Did you – I admit these things! I have sinned. But I was fallen into her snare […] My poor Charles, search your heart – you thought when you came to this city, did you not, to prove to yourself you were not yet in the prison of your future. But escape is not one act, my friend […] You know your choice. You stay in prison, what your time calls duty, honor, self-respect, and you are comfortably safe. Or you are free and crucified. (360–362)

It is shortly after this dialogue that Charles comes to see clearly the extent of the personal inauthenticity that has been the result of his acceptance of the mores and values of his society: “He seemed as he stood there to see all his age, its tumultuous life, its iron certainties and rigid conventions, its repressed emotion and facetious humor, its cautious science and incautious religion, its corrupt politics and immutable castes, as the great hidden enemy of all his deepest yearnings […] He had become, while still alive, as if dead” (363). This realization, Barnum argues, provides Charles with “the strength he needs to continue his quest toward individuation […] [and] a recognition of the terrible burden of freedom and of the individual’s need to choose and be free to choose” (1988, 65). Charles’s reaction to this epiphany is to break off his engagement to Ernestina, which results in his disassociation from Lyme, the Freemans, his servant Sam, and Dr. Grogan, the Irish physician in Lyme whose sympathy and advice Charles has sought throughout the novel. Though Grogan is shocked by Charles’s decision, it is his judgment that shapes Charles’s future decision-making: “‘If you become a better and more

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generous human being, you may be forgiven. But if you become more selfish … you are doubly damned’” (398). Acknowledging this decree, Charles returns to Exeter, now ready and willing to pursue a life with Sarah, but she has vanished. Though Charles searches desperately for her – even employing, the narrator informs us, “four detectives”, members of “a very new profession, a mere eleven years old, and held in general contempt” (408) – he is unable to find her, and after he is effectively forced out of England by legal action undertaken by Mr. Freeman, Charles travels to America, where he regains “a kind of faith in freedom; the determination he saw around him, however unhappy its immediate consequences, to master a national destiny had a liberating rather than depressing effect” (435). Though he still wishes to find Sarah – and indeed sails on the first available ship back to England when she is found in London, living and working in the home of Dante Gabriel Rossetti – Charles demonstrates in his rejection of Ernestina, and most of the inauthentic choices and conventions associated with his marriage to her, that he is beginning to define his existence as an authentic individual. Through some radical interventions – the flip of a coin, a turned-back watch – the narrator provides two versions of Charles’s final meeting with Sarah, both filtered through Charles’s point of view. In the first of these endings, Charles and Sarah reunite to form an unconventional family with their daughter Lalage, conceived, unbeknownst to Charles, in the hotel in Exeter. But it is the second ending that critics have generally understood to be the better resolution to Charles’s existential journey. In it, Charles ultimately decides that Sarah is no more than a manipulator and leaves her. Though he has nowhere to go, recognizing that “[i]t was as if he found himself reborn, though with all his adult faculties and memories” (465), the narrator asserts that he has at last found an atom of faith in himself, a true uniqueness, on which to build; has already begun […] to realize that life […] is not one riddle and one failure to guess it, is not to inhabit one face alone or to be given up after one losing throw of the dice; but is to be, however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly into the city’s iron heart, endured. (467)

This ending, James Acheson argues, “suggests that in fact Charles has become a better person and can look forward to a better life”, especially in comparison to the first ending, where Charles reasons that his reunion with Sarah “had been in God’s hands” (459) and thus, Acheson argues, “denies himself the role of existential hero” (2005, 406). Elizabeth Rankin argues further that the final ending is not only better suited to Charles’s development, but in fact is “absolutely essential […] so that the novel can offer a model of existential freedom which will serve as a ‘moral norm’” (1974, 205).

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2.3 Feminism But what of Sarah? If Charles and his experiences form the basis of the novel’s action, it is Sarah around whom all of that action revolves. This is in keeping with Fowles’s work on the whole; as he noted: “The female characters in my books tend to dominate the male ones. I see man as a kind of artifice, and woman as a kind of reality. The one is cold idea, the other is warm fact” (1998, 23). Yet how best to represent the “warm fact” of this heroine – and his feminist advocacy more generally – gave Fowles some trouble, and his final solution  – to keep Sarah utterly mysterious  – is perhaps the most provocative aspect of the novel. Elizabeth Mansfield, in her examination of the manuscripts of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, notes that [t]he several portrayals of Sarah in the drafts indicate Fowles’s willingness to explore possible definitions, but finally his solution is the least transparent of the lot […] We never know what she is thinking, only what she says and what the narration provides of Charles’s interpretation. Thus, Sarah’s mystery is maintained by narrative point of view. (1980/1981, 282)

Indeed, though the narrator employs his omniscience in exploring the inner views of the other main characters, he refuses to enter Sarah’s consciousness. “Certainly”, he tells us in Chapter 13, I intended at this stage (Chap. Thirteen–unfolding of Sarah’s true state of mind) to tell all  – or all that matters. But […] I know in the context of my book’s reality that Sarah would never have brushed away her tears and leaned down and delivered a chapter of revelation […] I report, then, only the outward facts (96, 98).

This crucial narrative decision has led critics to vigorously debate Sarah’s role in the novel, and indeed to consider to what extent a novel that refuses to offer its heroine’s point of view can be read as a feminist text (↗ 4 Gender). All of Fowles’s heroines are, as Bruce Woodcock recognizes, “the central term in the equation at the heart of [his] work, the mystery woman who is both a male fantasy and the catalyst for male redemption” (1984, 92), and this is certainly true of Sarah, who unquestionably fires Charles’s imagination, prompts him to evaluate the hypocrisies and injustices inherent in his worldview, and initiates his existential journey. Michelle Phillips Buchberger argues that [a]s Fowles was drawn to evolving forms of literary realism, he simultaneously and recurrently depicted a tendency in his female characters to gravitate towards that which is beyond or beneath accepted social conventions, as if using the mythopoeic to shatter conventional realism and the conventions of women’s behaviour (2012, 134).

And indeed Sarah masterfully manipulates those around her by initially conforming to the familiar narrative patterns others use to define her, only to frustrate all

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attempts to control or explain her through actions that her Victorian contemporaries find incomprehensible. Early in the novel, for example, Sarah deliberately encourages the people of Lyme to view her as a tragic, fallen woman jilted by the French Lieutenant through displays of sudden melancholy and an apparent obsession with staring out to sea. Similarly, she secures a position with the difficult Mrs. Poulteney by portraying herself as a repentant sinner, thus securing for herself the additional role of suffering servant. And of course all of these roles are supported by her decision, taken before the events of the novel, to follow the French Lieutenant to a hotel in Weymouth against all sense of propriety. These deliberate actions, Sarah explains to Charles, have served as “a kind of suicide” that has helped her, she says, to “break out of what I was” (175). “I did it”, she declares: […] so that people should point at me, should say, there walks the French Lieutenant’s Whore – oh yes, let the word be said. So that they should know I have suffered, and suffer, as others suffer in every town and village in this land. I could not marry that man. So I married shame […] What has kept me alive is my shame, my knowing that I am truly not like other women […] Sometimes I almost pity them. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame, can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing, I am hardly human any more. I am the French Lieutenant’s Whore. (174–175)

Though Charles sympathizes with “the slow, tantalizing agonies of her life as a governess” (175) and the additional conditions that have prompted Sarah’s extraordinary behavior – her unusual education, her father’s madness, her resulting poverty – he is bewildered by this account of her motivations; as the narrator explains, “this talk of freedom beyond the pale, of marrying shame, he found incomprehensible” (175). Yet neither can Charles accept Grogan’s clinical assessment of Sarah as a melancholic who “wants to be a sacrificial victim” (156), even after Grogan offers a persuasively rational summary of Sarah’s previous interactions with Charles and the probable reasons for her sudden dismissal from Mrs. Poulteney’s and her subsequent request for Charles to find and help her: I am a young woman of superior intelligence and some education. I think the world has done badly by me. I am not in full command of my emotions […] What is worse, I have fallen in love with being a victim of fate. I put out a very professional line in the way of looking melancholy. I have tragic eyes. I weep without explanation. Et cetera. Et cetera. And now […] enter a young god. Intelligent. Good-looking. A perfect specimen of that class my education has taught me to admire. I see he is interested in me. The sadder I seem, the more interested he appears to be […] Now I am very poor. I can use none of the wiles the more fortunate of my sex employ to lure mankind into their power […] I have but one weapon. The pity I inspire in this kindhearted man […] I have fed this Good Samaritan my past and he has devoured it. So what can I do? I must make him pity my present. One day, when I have been walking where I am forbidden to walk, I seize my chance. I show myself to someone I know will report my crime to the one person who will not condone it. I get myself dismissed from my position. I disappear, under the strong presumption

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that it is in order to throw myself off the nearest clifftop. And then […] I cry to my savior for help. (222–223)

While Grogan admits that this summary is “partly hypothesis, of course”, the details of his description conform to Charles’s own knowledge of Sarah, and the accusation that Sarah caused her own dismissal readers likewise know to be correct. Charles is thus forced to choose between luring Sarah into Grogan’s care, eventually to be placed in an asylum, and acting on his desire for her and his intuitive sense that Grogan has misjudged her. His choices, of course, lead to the couple’s sexual encounter in Exeter, where Sarah finally admits her deception. Again, she offers an explanation, and yet Charles is again unable to make sense of her choices or the ideals on which they are based: Yes. I have deceived you. But I shall not trouble you again […] You have given me the consolation of believing that in another world, another age, another life, I might have been your wife. You have given me the strength to go on living … in the here and now […] Do not ask me to explain what I have done. I cannot explain it. It is not to be explained. (355)

It is perhaps not surprising that Charles, in the throes of an existential crisis brought on by his interactions with Sarah, is perplexed by this (lack of) explanation and requires a day or two to come to the decision to pursue her further, despite her insistence that she is “not worthy” of Charles and her admission that “Today I have thought of my own happiness. If we were to meet again I could think only of yours. There can be no happiness for you with me. You cannot marry me, Mr. Smithson” (356). This formal, enigmatic dismissal foreshadows Sarah’s disappearance, though readers also discover that Sam has stolen the letter Charles hoped would secure her attachment, and neither they nor Charles can be sure whether such a letter would ultimately have prevented her from pursuing her own ends. What is clear in the final two chapters is that Sarah has attempted to avoid detection, and that she has found in Rossetti’s home a situation that satisfies her desire for autonomy and personal authenticity. Though Charles at first imagines that he will rescue her from whatever indignities she may have experienced during their separation, Sarah subverts all of Charles’s masculine fantasies, and displays a self-assurance that Charles finds bewildering. Indeed, Sarah’s self-possession is evident in both of the novel’s final endings. Although these two endings convey very different resolutions to Charles’s and Sarah’s relationship, both include Sarah’s articulate summary of her contentment and sense of belonging in Rossetti’s circle. (Lenz 2008, 123)

In describing her new circumstances, Sarah assures Charles, “‘I never expected to be happy in life. Yet I find myself happy where I am situated now […] I am at last arrived, or so it seems to me, where I belong […] You may think what you will of me, but I

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cannot wish my life other than it is at the moment’” (450–451). When Charles attempts to convince her that he wishes only to enhance her happiness, Sarah explains, “‘You do not understand. It is not your fault. You are very kind. But I am not to be understood […] even by myself. And I can’t tell you why, but I believe my happiness depends on my not understanding’” (452). This kind of intuitive self-authorship is perplexing to Charles, yet emblematic of Fowles’s existential ethic; as Buchberger notes, “Sarah exemplifies the elect, change agent who is able to think mythopoeically and see beyond what is evident in surface reality […] She creates her own myth as a means of achieving a degree of freedom” (2012, 146). And it is because Fowles maintains Sarah’s inscrutability that both endings seem plausible; the first “employs Sarah’s alternative ethic as a force of connection for Charles and Sarah”, while the second “constructs this ethic as necessarily committed to self-determination and self-preservation in opposition to convention” (Lenz 2008, 128). In both cases, Sarah appears to set the parameters of the encounter with Charles, to exert a creative authority whereby narrative possibilities are enacted on her terms; in this sense, Pamela Cooper explains, “Sarah Woodruff can be seen as [Fowles’s] first effort to empower his heroine by endowing her with a mature creativity, and by so doing to feminize the artist” (1991, 111). Yet whether this effort is successful has been a matter of some debate. Cooper argues that these efforts ultimately fail; The French Lieutenant’s Woman, “all appearances to the contrary”, she suggests, is “basically consistent in its treatment of art and gender with Fowles’s other fictions” (1991, 118), rather than significantly more successful in offering a genuine narrative of feminist empowerment. Magali Cornier Michael further argues that “[b]ecause Sarah’s point of view remains absent from the text, Sarah remains objectified and never becomes a subject in her own right […] [but] remains a construct of masculine ideology” (1987, 228, 231). Deborah Byrd, on the other hand, claims that “the novel is an almost ideal feminist fictional work” in that Fowles […] sympathetically portrays [Sarah’s] difficult but ultimately successful struggle to liberate herself from the circumstances which restrict her growth as an autonomous human being […] [and] stresses the contemporary relevance of his novel by drawing parallels between his fictional heroine and women of the present (1984, 306).

“Moreover”, Byrd claims, “in the opening and closing chapters, Fowles clearly indicates that Sarah’s emancipation is as central to the novel as is Charles’s” (1984, 307). The ambiguity surrounding Sarah’s motivations offers support for each of these claims; indeed, as Bruce Woodcock recognizes, “while Sarah’s status as a social outcast, emergent feminist and revenging femme fatale displays an awareness in the book of the patriarchal oppression of women, the role is equally an imaginative exploitation of her as a tantalising woman of mystery” (Woodcock 1984, 103).

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3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies While the ambiguity surrounding Sarah is itself provocative, in a broader sense it functions to call attention to the many layers of meaning potentially available to readers of Fowles’s complex fiction. Like all of Fowles’s novels, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is highly allusive and stylistically intricate; the novel performs its indebtedness to great nineteenth-century novels while simultaneously interrogating both the conventions that shaped those texts and the assumptions that readers bring to a contemporary text written “in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes” (95). “The French Lieutenant’s Woman does not simply use modern and Victorian styles”, William Stephenson explains; “instead, it creates imitations of these styles, which to the reader will probably appear convincingly Victorian or twentieth-century […] The novel fakes Victorian discourse in a way that allows a convincingly nineteenth-century surface to be troubled by modern depths” (2007, 26). Fowles recognized, for example, that “[n]ovel dialogue is a form of shorthand, an impression of what people actually say; and besides that it has to perform other functions – keep the narrative moving (which real conversation rarely does), reveal character (real conversation often hides it), and so on” (1998, 16). In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, then, he chose to “pick out the more formal and archaic (even for 1867) elements of spoken speech” to give to his characters, because, he found, “the genuine dialogue of 1867 (insofar as it can be heard in books of the time) is far too close to our own to sound convincingly old” (1998, 15). As these comments suggest, Fowles was a voracious reader and a consummate researcher, and his ability both to highlight telling historical details and to meet the expectations and desires of more contemporary readers is one of his hallmarks as a literary craftsman. Within The French Lieutenant’s Woman, such craftsmanship works to build what feels like an authentically Victorian world within what is otherwise a postmodern, pseudo-Victorian novel. Structurally, the novel similarly works through multiple literary forms. Charles’s existential journey, for example, in many ways conforms to the conventions of the Bildungsroman, while his relationship with Sarah is clearly “derived from the archetypal romance plot of the meeting, separation and reunion of two lovers” (Stephenson 2007, 4). The novel’s metafictional strategies include “subplots; digressions by the narrator; miniature essays on sexuality, evolution and religion; descriptive passages; dialogues; footnotes; formal experiments; extended quotations, and allusions” (Stephenson 2007, 4), all of which work to disrupt the narrative and force the reader to question the making of fiction and to note the similar construction of historical knowledge. The novel’s epigraphs for every chapter pay homage to the most influential thinkers of the Victorian age and provide essential clues to the significance of each chapter’s events, forming “part of an integrated system of commentaries on the plot, and giv[ing] prompts to the reader, just as they might in a Victorian novel” (Stephenson 2007, 59–60) while simultaneously forcing readers

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[…] to look again at Arnold, Darwin, Marx and other significant nineteenth-century figures, and to realize how they can never be accessed directly but are always filtered through editing and interpretation and are mediated by the huge historical gap between the nineteenth century and today (Stephenson 2007, 65).

Yet Fowles mitigates what might be an alienating effect of such narrative complexity by relying “on popular conventions, such as dealing with separate plots in alternating chapters to increase suspense, and the gradual heightening of erotic tension until the obligatory sex scene” (Stephenson 2007, 9). As a reading experience, then, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is at once overwhelming in its complexity and seductive in terms of its pure readability. Of course, the orchestration of these many forms and features is performed by the narrator, an author-figure who comments on his writing of the novel and is yet not synonymous with John Fowles. While working on The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles explained, “the ‘I’ who will make the first-person commentaries here and there in my story, and who will finally even enter it, will not be my real ‘I’ in 1967, but much more just another character, though in a different category from the purely fictional ones” (1998, 18). Though the narrator comments on the action throughout the novel, his most significant impact arrives in Chapter 13, where he brusquely disrupts the reader’s immersion in the text by stating, “This story I am telling is all imagination” (95). The rest of this chapter considers the purpose of fiction and the various reasons authors produce it; “Only one same reason is shared by all of us”, he claims: “we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was” (96). Since, the narrator insists, “a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world” (96), the authenticity of his narrative depends on freedom; consequently, he claims, he cannot control his characters or the actions they take: In other words, to be free myself, I must give [Charles], and Tina, and Sarah, even the abominable Mrs. Poulteney, their freedoms as well. There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist. And I must conform to that definition […] [W]e are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing; but in the new theological image, with freedom our first principle, not authority. (97)

These comments obviously reflect the existential ideology of the text as a whole, yet extend that focus from Charles’s character development to the process of writing, and then beyond, as the narrator takes readers to task for their own faulty assumptions about the supposed barrier between the fictional and the real: I have disgracefully broken the illusion? No. My characters still exist, and in a reality no less, or no more, real than the one I have just broken. Fiction is woven into all, as a Greek observed some two and a half thousand years ago. I find this new reality (or unreality) more valid; and I would have you share my own sense that I do not fully control these creatures of my mind, any more than you control – however hard you try, however much of a latterday Mrs. Poulteney you may be – your children, colleagues, friends, or even yourself […] You do not even think of your own

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past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it … fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf – your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in a flight from the real reality. That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens. (97)

Thus Chapter 13 serves as something of a manifesto, a distillation of the novel’s metafictional imperative to illustrate the extent to which fiction and reality depend upon one another. And yet careful readers must question the narrator’s uses of freedom and authority; as Deborah Bowen notes: He has asked the reader to be distanced and critical – but not so critical as to be immune to his authoritative interjections. He has suggested that his characters have a life of their own – but not to the extent that they can make moves undreamt of in his philosophy. He has encouraged the reader to understand him as fictional – but not so fictional that he cannot make definitive pronouncements about the nineteenth-century world from a twentieth-century perspective. (1995, 86)

In short, this narrator-as-author clearly exerts a certain amount of control over the text, despite his emphasis on its free and organic construction. Perhaps, then, the narrator can be best understood as a device Fowles employs in order to explore “ways in which authorial omniscience might be rejected as formally and ethically presumptuous, and [to consider] how the potentially despotic power of the writer might be responsibly deployed” (Cooper 1991, 104). Indeed, after the narrator intervenes in this way, readers are primed to interrogate the construction of the narrative as a whole and to consider the possibilities for its resolution – a problem the narrator takes up himself in Chapter 55 when he enters the story as a character on a train to London with Charles. “My problem”, he explains, “is simple – what Charles wants is clear? It is indeed. But what the protagonist wants is not so clear; and I am not at all sure where she is at the moment” (406). This provocative statement, which both identifies Sarah as the novel’s protagonist and suggests the narrator’s inability (or unwillingness) not only to penetrate her consciousness but even to track her movements, sets up the novel’s infamous double ending (discounting the “false” ending of Chapter 44, in which Charles imagines a life with Ernestina). Preferring not to “fix the fight” in favor of either Charles’s desires or Sarah’s, the narrator asserts: The only way I can take no part in the fight is to show two versions of it. That leaves me with only one problem: I cannot give both versions at once, yet whichever is the second will seem, so strong is the tyranny of the last chapter, the final, the ‘real’ version. (406)

His solution is to flip a coin – an action Charles witnesses, and which, the narrator surmises, leads Charles to assume that the narrator “is either a gambler or mentally deranged” (407). There is some merit to both judgments; readers continue to be perplexed by the novel’s inconclusive double ending, which the narrator facilitates by again appearing

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as a character in the novel, this time as “the sort of man who cannot bear to be left out of the limelight […] [and who] very evidently regards the world as his to possess and use as he likes” (461–462). By making “a small adjustment to the time” on his watch, the narrator allows the second ending to pick up in the middle of the encounter between Charles and Sarah, thus suggesting that their conversation might result in two different, but equally plausible, resolutions. As Stephenson notes, the first of these endings, in Chapter 60, “mimics the stereotypical conclusion of a Victorian novel”, while the second ending, in Chapter 61, “gives the protagonists existential freedom, but keeps them apart […] [It is] twentieth-century in form as well as content. It imitates the open, existentially free endings of canonical modernist novels” (2007, 22–23). Numerous critics, and particularly those who have focused on Charles’s existential awakening, have argued that “[t]here can be no doubt that the final ending of the novel is meant as the correct one” (Barnum 1988, 73), despite the narrator’s comments about the “tyranny of the last chapter.” Fowles himself admitted that when he first submitted the manuscript to Tom Maschler, he “handed it in with the ‘happy’ ending last”, though he “wasn’t quite sure whether this was right. [Maschler] came down absolutely against having the happy ending last, and so did Elizabeth, and that was that” (Relf 1999, 127). Elizabeth Mansfield, in examining Elizabeth Fowles’s comments on the manuscripts, suggests that what John Fowles considered the “happy” ending, Elizabeth Fowles considered an unfitting ending for Sarah (1980/1981, 280– 281). James Acheson offers further support for this interpretation, arguing that “Sarah emerges from the novel’s second ending not as a tragic heroine but as someone whose existential self-awareness has allowed her to see that she need not be married in order to be fulfilled” (2005, 403). More radically, C. Jason Smith posits that “Fowles constructs in his narrative a split time line – based upon popular quantum mechanics – that results in two outcomes to two very different series of events rather than (as previous critics have supposed) two outcomes to the same series of events” (1999, 92). This reading of the novel hinges on the almost total lack of information about Sarah provided to the reader after her encounter with Charles in Exeter and the ambiguous identity of the child in the novel’s final ending. While most critics assume that child to be Charles’s daughter Lalage, whom he embraces in the first ending but never properly meets in the second, the text itself never explicitly identifies this child as Charles’s, or even Sarah’s, in the second ending. Smith argues that Sarah in fact never bore Charles’s child in the timeline represented by the second ending, and that the narrator is “not simply turning back the clock to show two endings to the same series of events but [is actually] flowing backwards through time to create two very different series of events that result in two different endings” (Smith 1999, 99). What most of these critical readings suggest, then, is that even when a particular critical approach supports a preference for one resolution to the novel’s tensions, what is most significant about the dual ending is its very duality. “By showing how neither conclusion is inevitable”, Stephenson summarizes, “the dual ending allows postmodernist indeterminacy, existentialist choice and evolutionary contingency to become issues for the

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reader” (2007, 25), who is asked to recognize that both endings represent a possible resolution to Charles’s pursuit of Sarah, rather than to choose between these alternatives.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Such indeterminacy, coupled with the novel’s postmodernist ethos and metafictional mischief, was somewhat unsettling to the English literary establishment when the novel was first published, resulting in lukewarm reviews from the English press that Fowles considered mostly “bouquet-and-reservation; damning with faint praise, in fact” (2006, 60). The American reviews, by contrast, he described as “all ‘raves’ […] there’s something faintly hysterical about so much of the tone of American praise” (2006, 66). In September 1969, he wrote: The FLW depresses me, I can’t say why. It has been much better reviewed, on the whole, than the other two [i.e., The Collector and The Magus]. But it feels like a stone in a rough sea. One saw it a moment, now it’s sunk for ever. All I’m left with is the reviews and three or four letters people wrote; and the feeling that it hasn’t sold well at all. It’s really all summed up in the total indifference of Lyme itself to the book. (2006, 63)

While Fowles was disappointed in the local reception that The French Lieutenant’s Woman initially received, his promotional tour in America boosted sales, so that the novel reached number one on The New York Times bestseller list in February 1970, and stayed on the list for more than a year (2006, 77, 99). The novel remains one of the rare works of literary fiction that continues to be popular while also attracting serious scholarly attention, and when Fowles died in 2005, obituaries nearly universally identified The French Lieutenant’s Woman as his most significant contribution to twentieth-century fiction, despite the fact that he published several other important works later in his career, including The Ebony Tower (1974), Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1982), A Maggot (1985), and a number of non-fictional works, most notably his critically acclaimed Journals (2003, 2006). Critics have responded to The French Lieutenant’s Woman from a variety of perspectives, including comparison studies to other works of fiction, especially Victorian novels, other historiographic metafictions, and those Fowles has indicated as influences (Conradi 1982; Huffaker 1980; Hutcheon 1987, 1988; Kadish 1997; Olshen 1978; Onega 1989; Tarbox 1988; Warburton 1996); psychological interpretations, especially Jungian, which focus on the psychological complexity of the characters and their relationships (Barnum 1988; Rose 1972); philosophical studies, which focus on the novel’s existentialist themes, especially the nature of freedom and personal authenticity (Palmer 1974; Rankin 1974); and feminist approaches, which consider Sarah’s ambiguous characterization and debate her status as the “New Woman” (Byrd 1984;

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Cooper 1991; Michael 1987; Lenz 2008; Woodcock 1984). More recent critical threads include an ecocritical approach, focusing on Fowles’s depiction of the natural world and his various characters’ associations with or responses to it (Aubrey 1999; Wilson 2006); and explorations of the novel’s neo-Victorian aesthetic (Buchberger 2012; Wiesenfarth 2008). The proliferation of historical fiction over the last half-century is no doubt in part a response to The French Lieutenant’s Woman as well (↗ 3 Genres); indeed, a wave of neo-Victorian novels followed its publication, most notably the Booker prize-winning Possession by A. S. Byatt (↗ 22 A. S. Byatt, Possession), who, she has said, wrote her novel in part to rescue “the complicated Victorian thinkers from modern diminishing parodies like those of Fowles or Lytton Strachey, and from the disparaging mockery (especially of the poets) of Leavis and T. S. Eliot” (Byatt 2000, 79). And like Possession, The French Lieutenant’s Woman has been adapted for the screen, though with more success. After several rejected screenplays and potential directors, the project finally came to fruition with a screenplay by Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, who solved the problem of translating the novel’s intrusive narrator into film by creating a second storyline “about the production of the period film – a device that serves analogous functions of commentary and distancing” (Knapp 1985, 58). Directed by Karel Reisz and starring Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep, the film was nominated for five Oscars and won several other international awards. A stage version of the novel emerged in 2006, adapted by Mark Healy, and toured the UK that year. These adaptations have both attested to the novel’s lasting relevance and contributed to its enduring popularity, despite the overall decline in Fowles’s reputation. “Perhaps”, Michelle Phillips Buchberger has speculated, […] the complex and contradictory nature of Fowles’s work, its tendency to elude attempts at definition or simplistic categorization, coupled with the writer’s refusal to acquiesce to notions of political correctness or pander to dominant literary tastes, have contributed to his rather contentious relationship with the English literary field in the Academy and to the decline of his public profile (2012, 150).

Whether his work will experience a critical renaissance in the twenty-first century remains to be seen, but The French Lieutenant’s Woman, at least, is likely to retain its reputation among both readers and critics as a complex and provocative classic.

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. New York: Back Bay Books, 1998 [1969]. ---

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Acheson, James. “John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” A Companion to the British and Irish Novel, 1945–2000. Ed. Brian W. Shaffer. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. 398–408. Aubrey, James R., ed. John Fowles and Nature: Fourteen Perspectives on Landscape. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999. Barnum, Carol. The Fiction of John Fowles: A Myth for Our Time. Greenwood: Penkevill Publishing, 1988. Bowen, Deborah. “The Riddler Riddled: Reading the Epigraphs in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” Journal of Narrative Technique 25.1 (1995): 67–90. Buchberger, Michelle Phillips. “John Fowles’s Novels of the 1950s and 1960s.” Yearbook of English Studies 42.1 (2012): 132–150. Byatt, A. S. On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Byrd, Deborah. “The Evolution and Emancipation of Sarah Woodruff: The French Lieutenant’s Woman as a Feminist Novel.” International Journal of Women’s Studies 7.4 (1984): 306–321. Conradi, Peter. John Fowles. New York: Methuen, 1982. Cooper, Pam. The Fictions of John Fowles. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1991. Fowles, John. The Aristos. Revised ed. Reading: Triad/Granada, 1981 [1964]. Fowles, John. “Foreword.” Ourika. By Claire de Duras. [1823]. Trans. John Fowles. New York: MLA, 1994. Xxvii-xxxi. Fowles, John. “Notes on an Unfinished Novel.” Wormholes. Ed. Jan Relf. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998. 13–26. Fowles, John. The Journals: Volume 2. Ed. Charles Drazin. London: Vintage, 2006. Huffaker, Robert. John Fowles. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980. Hutcheon, Linda. “The Pastime of Past Time: Fiction, History, Historiographic Metafiction.” GENRE 20.3–4 (1987): 285–305. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1988. Kadish, Doris Y. “Rewriting Women’s Stories: Ourika and The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” South Atlantic Review 62.2 (1997): 74–87. Knapp, Shoshana. “The Transformation of a Pinter Screenplay: Freedom and Calculators in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” Modern Drama 28.1 (1985): 55–70. Lenz, Brooke. John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Mansfield, Elizabeth. “A Sequence of Endings: The Manuscripts of The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” Journal of Modern Literature 8.2 (1980/1981): 275–286. Michael, Magali Cornier. “‘Who is Sarah?’ A Critique of The French Lieutenant’s Woman’s Feminism.” Critique 28.4 (1987): 225–236. Olshen, Barry N. John Fowles. New York: F. Ungar, 1978. Onega, Susana Jaén. Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989. Orlowski, Victoria. “Metafiction.” Postcolonial Studies@Emory. Spring 1996. https://scholarblogs. emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/21/metafiction/ (20 January 2016). Palmer, William J. The Fiction of John Fowles: Tradition, Art, and the Loneliness of Selfhood. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974. Rankin, Elizabeth. “Cryptic Coloration in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” Journal of Narrative Technique 3 (1974): 193–207. Relf, Jan. “An Interview with John Fowles.” Conversations with John Fowles. Ed. Dianne L. Vipond. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. 119–133. Rose, Gilbert. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman: The Unconscious Significance of a Novel to its Author.” American Imago 29 (1972): 165–176. Smith, C. Jason. “Schrödinger’s Cat and Sarah’s Child: John Fowles’s ‘Quantum Narrative’.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 32.2 (1999): 91–106.

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Stephenson, William. Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman. New York: Continuum, 2007. Tarbox, Katherine. The Art of John Fowles. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. Warburton, Eileen. “Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down: Ourika, Cinderella, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” Twentieth Century Literature 42.1 (1996): 165–186. Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1984. Wiesenfarth, Joseph. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman: Goodbye to All That.” Victorian Turns, NeoVictorian Returns: Essays on Fiction and Culture. Ed. Penny Gay, Judith Johnston, and Catherine Waters. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. 205–214. Wilson, Thomas M. The Recurrent Green Universe of John Fowles. Amsterdam: Brill Academic Publishers, 2006. Woodcock, Bruce. Male Mythologies: John Fowles and Masculinity. Totowa: Barnes and Noble Books, 1984.

5.2 Further Reading Acheson, James. John Fowles. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Foster, Thomas C. Understanding John Fowles. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994. Loveday, Simon. The Romances of John Fowles. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Relf, Jan, ed. Wormholes. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998. Salami, Mahmoud. John Fowles’s Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Associated University Presses, 1992. Vipond, Dianne L., ed. Conversations with John Fowles. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. Warburton, Eileen. John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds. New York: Viking, 2004.

Jens Martin Gurr

16 B. S. Johnson, The Unfortunates (1969) Abstract: The chapter discusses The Unfortunates as arguably the central example of an experimental strain in 1960s British writing, characteristic of Johnson’s role as the most outspoken critic of what he regarded as the pointlessly anachronistic mainstream of predominantly realist fiction. The novel is also characteristic of Johnson’s œuvre in that it follows his highly idiosyncratic insistence that ‘fiction is lying’ and that the only reasonable task for the novel is the truthful, autobiographical representation of thought processes. All the novel’s central concerns – cancer, memory, and urban topographies – are characterized by non-linearity and resistance to representation in conventional fiction. The text thus continues Johnson’s preoccupation with the materiality of the book and comes in 27 separately bound sections which, apart from those marked “First” and “Last”, are unnumbered, inviting readers to read them in any order, thus suggesting the random nature of memory, disease and life in general. Keywords: Autobiography, experimentalism, memory, metafiction, truth

1 Context: Author, Œuvre, Moment The Unfortunates (1969) is in more than one sense the central novel of an author once celebrated for his radical innovations, an author who is now – despite a modest revival of interest since the late 1990s – hardly known outside a coterie of scholars interested in a distinctly experimental tradition of twentieth-century British writing. It is the fourth of B. S. Johnson’s seven novels published between 1963 and 1975, but it can also be regarded as his most innovative and thought-provoking work. Born to a working-class family in London in 1933 and forced to work as a book-keeping clerk in the early 1950s, from 1956 to 1959 Johnson was a mature student of English at King’s College, London, on a scholarship and, with few interruptions, such as a brief residence as the Gregynog Arts Fellow at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth in 1970, he spent almost his entire life in London. For most of his creative life, he worked as a supply teacher, sports commentator and journalist, because, despite his notoriety as a writer, his extensive media presence and a number of grants and scholarships, he was never able to make a living for himself – let alone his family – from his literary writing alone. Despite these bread-and-butter jobs, in a career spanning little more than ten years, he was remarkably productive as a novelist, dramatist, poet, filmmaker, editor and writer for radio and television, even winning several awards at international film festivals for his short films (Tew 2001, 4). Moreover, he frequently DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-017

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appeared on television and was highly visible as an outspoken, often opinionated writer and public intellectual with clearly leftist sympathies, who more than once attacked what he regarded as the “stultifyingly philistine […] general book culture of [his] country” (Johnson 1985b [1973], 13; for informative surveys of his output and career, cf. Tew 2001, 3–70; Coe 2004, 13–31; for a brief discussion of Johnson’s poetry, cf. Garrett 1985). All his seven novels are formally innovative in a vein that might, in shorthand, be designated as that extending from Laurence Sterne to Joyce, Beckett and the nouveau roman. Johnson’s first novel Travelling People (1963) already employed different registers and styles (passages in a pastiche of eighteenth-century English, letters, journal entries, interior monologues, film script) as well as typographical ploys like grey and black pages lifted more or less directly from Tristram Shandy (1759–1767). It is the only novel he did not allow to be reprinted, because he quickly came to dismiss its mixture of “part truth and part fiction” (Johnson 1985 [1973], 9) as no longer suiting his conviction that “truth” – largely understood as autobiographical truth – had to be the ultimate aim of writing. In keeping with this credo, Albert Angelo (1964) uses the unsuccessful architect Albert Angelo and his experience of making a living by supply teaching at a disadvantaged school in London to record Johnson’s own experience as a struggling young writer forced to support himself in the same way. This novel was notorious for the holes cut into selected pages to allow for glimpses forward to a later page as well as for the arrangement of parallel columns for some 30 pages to suggest the simultaneity of the pupils’ talk on the one hand and their teacher’s thoughts on the other (cf. Johnson 2004, Albert Angelo 66–99). Finally, Albert Angelo is known for the metaleptic authorial intrusion near the end, which points to its autobiographical nature and its truth claim: “fuck all this lying look what im really trying to write about is writing not all this stuff about architecture trying to say something about writing about my writing […] im trying to say something about me through him albert an architect when whats the point in covering up” (Johnson 2004, Albert Angelo 167). His third novel, Trawl (1966), is a narrowly autobiographical account, entirely in interior monologue, of time spent on a fishing boat a few years earlier, which uses the metaphor of trawling to suggest how the mind drags up memories from the unconscious; the novel again uses typographical ploys, here especially various lengths of blank spaces, to suggest breaks and pauses in thought processes. The Unfortunates (1969), which is here selected for more detailed discussion, is essentially the interior monologue of a narrator (recognizably, even demonstratively B. S. Johnson himself) who has been sent to an unnamed city (identifiable as Nottingham) to report a football match for the Observer (the report, “Sub Inspires City Triumph: City 1 United 0; From B. S. Johnson”, is reproduced on the inside of the box). It is only when he sees the train station and its surroundings that he realizes that this is a place he knows well. It is here that one of his closest friends during his early career as a writer, Tony Tillinghast, a promising literary scholar and an expert on

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James Boswell, lived before he died of cancer at the age of 29 in 1964, leaving behind his wife and infant son. The novel, covering some eight hours the narrator spends in the city, superficially recounts his itinerary through the city, but mainly uses locations encountered along the way as triggers for memories. Appearing in apparently random, associative order, these are interwoven memories of Tony and the city, recollections of walks taken together or of evenings spent in pubs, of visits to the city with a much-loved former girlfriend who was later to betray him, but also of Tony’s illness and death, all of these memories triggered by topographical details and locations associated with Tony. The book, notorious as Johnson’s “book in a box”, consists of 27 separately bound chapters ranging from a few lines to 12 pages in length and delivered in unnumbered random sequence, with only the first and last chapters designated as such.1 The following novels, House Mother Normal and Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry leave behind the narrowly autobiographical mode while continuing the strand of metafictional experimentation. House Mother Normal (1971) is the attempt to narrate the events of one evening in a home for elderly people from nine different perspectives, eight old people  – mentally and physically challenged in diverse, precisely defined ways – and the ‘House Mother’. Their perceptions are exactly synchronized by allotting the same 21 pages to each perspective, leading to several entirely blank pages (inmate’s name in the headline apart) when a person falls asleep, for instance. Finally, as in Albert Angelo, a metaleptic intrusion on the excess 22nd page of her account, has the house mother reveal herself as the “puppet or concoction of a writer […] So you see this is from his skull” (Johnson 2004, House Mother Normal 204). Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973), Johnson’s most obviously humorous novel, is the account of a frustrated young man who transfers the principle of double-entry book-keeping he has learned as an accountant to his dealings with society at large. Thus, he offsets each perceived offense against him – from “Office Supervisor’s lack of sympathy” (1985a [1973], 47) to “Socialism not given a chance” (151) – by increasingly drastic forms of recompense – from “General removal of small items of stationery” (119) to the “Death of 20,479 innocent West Londoners” by poisoning a water reservoir with cyanide (151). The corresponding balance sheets are graphically presented at the end of each of the five sections of the text. Here, the outrageous, ostentatiously unrealistic nature of Christie’s responses as well as numerous metaleptic intrusions – ultimately disposing both of the protagonist and of the conventions of mainstream fiction – do not allow readers for a moment to forget they are reading a novel.

1 Since simple page references are obviously impossible in the case of The Unfortunates, I follow the common practice of referring to the novel by the opening words of the section in question and the page number within the section; the “First” and “Last” sections will be referred to as such. All quotations from the novel refer to Johnson 1999 [1969].

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Johnson’s final novel, See the Old Lady Decently, completed shortly before his suicide in 1973 and posthumously published in 1975, is a tribute to Johnson’s mother, who died of cancer in 1971. In formal terms, the novel makes use of an arsenal of, broadly speaking, ‘experimental’ devices already explored in his previous works. In contrast to the arguably narrow scope of most earlier novels, however, this text, in addition to the exploration of family history by means of documents, photographs, letters and poems, reaches out into history and myth, by referring to historical and mythical contexts and analogies – not least the decline of the British Empire. It has been called both “his most successful novel [and] most ambitious work” (Levitt 1983, 443) and “the work of a writer reaching the end of his artistic tether […] a statement of the literary problems Johnson felt himself to be facing, rather than a bold step forward on the journey towards solving them” (Coe 2004, 30–31). Of all Johnson’s novels, The Unfortunates has attracted by far the most critical attention and  – as “perhaps the most extreme [one]” (Johnson 1985b [1973], 8) – lends itself to highlighting both his thematic preoccupations and his aesthetic strategies.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns The novel’s opening paragraphs already may be said to show the interweaving of its major concerns: But I know this city!    This green ticket-hall, the long office half-rounded at its ends, that ironic clerestory, brown glazed tiles, green below, the same, the decorative hammerbeams supporting nothing, above, of course! I know this city! How did I not realize when he said, Go and do City this week, that it was this city!     Tony.    His cheeks sallowed and collapsed round the insinuated bones, the gums shrivelled, was it, or shrunken […]. Covered courtyards, taxis, take a taxi, always take a taxi in a strange city, but no, I know this city! The mind circles, at random, does not remember, from one moment to another, other things interpose themselves, the mind’s    The station exits on a bridge, yes of course, and the blackened gantries rise like steel gibbets above the Midland red wall opposite.    I should turn right, right, towards the city centre, yes, ah, and that pub! (“First” 1–2; gaps original).

The random workings of memory and its triggering by familiar architectural and to­pographical details of the city are central to the novel, which associatively ranges back and forth between the task of reporting the match (“Go and do City this week”) and other activities of the day on the one hand and recollections of Tony and his illness, of their earlier friendship, of his death and funeral on the other. These frequently interwoven themes – held together by an overarching concern with ‘truthfulness’ – recur throughout the novel, suggesting simultaneity and a superimposition of past and present in the mind.

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2.1 Disease and Death Tony Tillinghast’s illness, his death from cancer and the time spent with him and his wife June before and during his illness as recollected by the narrator clearly form the thematic backbone of the novel, a centrality emphasized by the cover image of the original 1969 edition, which showed a close-up photograph of cancer cells. The text repeatedly provides unsparingly detailed depictions of Tony’s frailty and bodily disintegration as a result of the progressing cancer. The word ‘cancer’ itself is conspicuously absent from the text, though it is replaced by the equally obvious but less affectively loaded term ‘tumour’. Elaine Scarry has noted that “physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned” (qtd. in Lea 2015, 787). In keeping with this observation, it is hardly accidental that the dominant image of Tony’s illness is that of his shrivelled gums and his dry mouth, suggesting a connection between his illness and the loss or impairment of speech, which corresponds to the frequently tentative, halting prose of the text (see 2.5 below as well as Lea 2015, 792). Though the random order of the 25 middle sections makes it implausible to speak of a progressive disintegration throughout, there is a marked difference in the coherence of the text in the “First” and “Last” sections: While the four paragraphs on just over three pages in the “First” section make for a fairly coherent reading experience, the 17 sections on just over five pages of the “Last” section – with long blanks within and especially long breaks between paragraphs – do suggest incoherence and disintegration. Tying the central concern with disease and death to the disjointed nature of the text, Daniel Lea has argued that the novel’s formal disintegration and the resulting “multiplicity of readings reflects the excessive and proliferative growth” of cancer (2015, 787) as well as its “ability to deconstruct the hermeneutic reliability of narrative” (2015, 785). In a related vein, Julia Jordan suggests that the novel is designed to undercut the “curative trajectory” of narrative, that Johnson “uses his form to cancel the consolations of narrative construction” (2014, 745). This is suggested by the narrator’s comment on his inability to understand and make sense of the disease: That this thing could just come from nowhere, from inside himself, of his very self, to attack him, to put his self in danger, I still do not understand. Perhaps there is nothing to be understood, perhaps understanding is simply not to be found, is not applicable to such a thing. But it is hard, hard, not to try to understand, even for me, who accept that all is nothing, that sense does not exist. (“For recuperation” 2)

Emphasizing death as a central theme of “all of Johnson’s novels” and of The Unfortunates in particular, Ronald Shustermann even suggests that “the act of putting the text back in its box at the end does seem to echo, physically, the closing of a coffin”

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(2010, 179). Persuasive as this may sound, it seems partly misleading, because it suggests precisely the kind of finality and closure which the novel’s formal presentation in unbound sections seems designed to undercut. Rather, the semantic proliferation and the excessive semiosis engendered by the non-linear arrangement of the chapters and the resulting multiplication of potential connections is echoed in the metaphors of disease spreading metastatically throughout the text, “infecting” as it were, other semantic fields: “new bungalows […] spread cankerously over the cliffs” (“For recuperation” 1).

2.2 The Unfortunates as a Prose Elegy In a sympathetic survey of Johnson’s novelistic output in the Spectator in 1991, Jonathan Coe spoke of The Unfortunates as “a sustained lament in the tradition of Lycidas” (for the elegiac nature of The Unfortunates, cf. also Tredell 1985, and Jordan 2014). Thus, a central impetus appears to have been the promise to his friend faithfully to record his life and his dying: [S]o the last thing I said to him, all I had to give him, alone with him, with my coat on, about to go, the car waiting outside to run us to the station, staring down at him, facing those eyes, he staring back all the time now, it must have been a great effort for him, yes, and I said, it was all I had, what else could I do, I said, I’ll get it all down, mate.    It’ll be very little, he said, after a while, slowly, still those eyes.      That’s all anyone has done, very little, I said. (“So he came to his parents” 5; gaps original)

This dovetails with one of the three unattributed quotes on the inside of the box in which the loose sections are delivered, a notion Johnson’s namesake Samuel Johnson formulated in his Rambler essay on “The Dignity and Usefulness of Biography”: “I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful” (1969 [1750], 320). The poignant irony here lies in the fact that Tony Tillinghast was a scholar working on Samuel Johnson’s biographer James Boswell (cf. “Again the house” 6; “The estate” 6; “At least once” 1) and that B. S. Johnson, as it were, came to be Tillinghast’s Boswell. But if The Unfortunates can be read as a prose elegy, it also shares a further characteristic with the traditional English elegy: [Major elegies are frequently] highly self-referential and metapoetic texts. In many elegies, this is even the dominant feature. These texts are often less about the deceased, whose memory they supposedly mean to keep alive, but rather primarily about the mourner in his specific role as a poet. (Kraushaar 2004, 12, my trans.; cf. also several readings in Sacks 1985)

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Strictly in keeping with this notion, the novel is at least as much concerned with Johnson’s attempts at coming to terms with Tony’s death and with his own self-positioning as a writer as it is with Tony himself (cf. also 2.5 and 3 below).

2.3 The Nature of Memory and the Urban Palimpsest A further unattributed motto on the inside of the box is from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: “I will tell you in three words what the book is.  – It is a history.  – A history! Of who? what? where? when? Don’t hurry yourself. – It is a history-book, Sir (which may possibly commend it to the world) of what passes in a man’s own mind.” (Tristram Shandy, vol. II, ch. 2). Since the novel’s 27 sections make up one extended stream of consciousness detailing “what passes in [Johnson’s] own mind” on one day, this highly apposite motto highlights two central observations: Firstly, as noted above, The Unfortunates is arguably more concerned with the elegist than with the deceased; secondly, it emphasises the centrality of thought processes and particularly of the workings of memory. Numerous passages detail, for instance, the way in which memory rearranges events based on spatial and temporal contiguity  – “The mind is confused, was it this visit, or another, the mind has telescoped time here, runs events near to one another in place, into one another in time.” (“Again the house” 4–5) – or retrospectively modifies assessments of situations, people or relationships based on later events: “[M]emories are not now of [Wendy] so much, but only of her in relation to him. So his death changes the past: yet it should not. Yet she too, Wendy, is changed in my mind by what happened later.” (“Up there, yes” 1) Similarly, he comments on the ethical impulse to embellish or sentimentalize remembrance, possibly because of the internalized notion of de mortuis nil nisi bene dicendum or to assuage one’s own conscience: “I sentimentalize again, the past is always to be sentimentalized, inevitably, everything about him I see now in the light of what happened later, his slow disintegration, his death. The waves of the past batter at the sea defences of my sandy sanity, need to be safely pictured, still, romanticized, prettified.” (“I had a lovely flat” 2) Moreover, the narrator remarks on the mind’s similarly self-protecting tendency to forget particularly poignant or painful moments in the compelling analogy of the “fuse” as a protective device against overvoltage or power surges: “Someone said, it must have been June, that there were times when Tony broke down, knew and said he would never live to see the boy grow up.     I fail to remember, the mind has fuses.” (“Then they had moved” 5) Most importantly, however, the subdivision of the novel into unnumbered sections to be read in random order is clearly designed to suggest the non-linear, non-chronological and associative nature of memory. In his most sustained account of his own literary and critical beliefs, the 1973 “Introduction” to his prose collection Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs?, Johnson commented on

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this device as follows: “[A]nd all the afternoon I was there the things we had done together kept coming back to me as I was doing this routine job of reporting a soccer match: the dead past and the living present interacted and transposed themselves in my mind.” (1985b [1973], 10) He goes on to specify the “main technical problem” faced in a novel that “was to be as nearly as possible a re-created transcript of how my mind worked during eight hours on this particular Saturday”, namely the “randomness of the material”, the interweaving of “the past and the present”, which was “directly in conflict with the technological fact of the book: for the bound book imposes an order […] on the material” (1985b [1973], 11). It has been argued that Johnson’s approach here should be regarded as inconsistent or insufficiently radical. Thus, Coe has maintained that “a longish, twelve-page section […] would impose its own narrative sequence [and] any attempt at conveying randomness would be suspended for a good span of reading time” (1999, x). In her study on Chance and the Modern British Novel, however, Jordan plausibly defends Johnson’s method as follows: Memories and recollection of experience do not return to us in a linear, tightly plotted, traditionally novelistic way; but neither do they come to us as entirely disjointed flashes, or individual images. It is common enough to remember whole events and with them their significance, but not to remember these discrete entities in the correct, chronological order. Memories are not necessarily analogous to single words or even single sentences, but they are often episodic, and fragmented: much like the sections of The Unfortunates. (2010, 110)

In one of the most perceptive discussions of The Unfortunates, Nicolas Tredell states that “the novel’s topography of mourning and remembrance is urban and suburban” (1985, 40). Indeed, it is specifically the topography of the city which reminds the narrator of Tony, and it is memories of Tony that trigger memories of having visited Tony together with his former girlfriend Wendy, whose later betrayal was to be traumatic for him: “I even now forget what it was she betrayed me over, some other man, yes, but I have dealt with that, I do not have to think of that any more, it is past, why does Tony’s death and this city throw them up at me again?” (“His dog” 5) Thus, palimpsestic layers of memory and their successive evocation are thematically and aesthetically central to the novel. Despite its distinctly urban setting and the role of urban landmarks, places and spaces as crucial triggers of memory, The Unfortunates is, curiously, the only Johnson novel Philip Tew does not discuss (apart from a passing reference) in his chapter on “Cartography of Self and City” (2001, 167–206). A brief remark is enlightening, however: “For Johnson the personal, the pain, the subjective loss and its implications recur in space. He recalls visiting his now-dead friend and wife” (Tew 2001, 199–200). Benjamin’s notion of urban memory as spatialized, layered, fragmented, disjointed, non-linear and ultimately hypertextual is helpful to conceptualize Johnson’s representation of urban memory and its topographical anchoring (for the following, see my more detailed discussion in Gurr 2016). In the Arcades Project, Walter Benja-

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min develops a notion of the interpenetration of different layers of time and of their simultaneous co-presence in urban space, a phenomenon he refers to as “superposition” (1999, 172, 418, 854 et passim). Given a certain frame of mind – which Benjamin characterizes as that of the flâneur – this simultaneous co-presence can be perceived and understood by an urban observer. He even speaks of this “interpenetration and superposed transparency” of different times in a given space as the “perception of space [unique to] the flâneur” (1999, 546): “Thanks to this phenomenon, anything that ever potentially happened in a space is perceived simultaneously. Space winks at the flâneur: ‘Well, whatever may have happened here?’” (1999, 418, translation modified; cf. also 4, 390, 392, 418, 462, 841, 854, 879 f.). These parallels become even more persuasive if one bears in mind the similarities in the strategy of representation: The Arcades Project, Das Passagenwerk, is a vast collection of about 1000 pages of some 3500 quotations and thoughts on nineteenth-century Paris, organized into 36 folders or sections (“Konvolute”) and a number of essays and outlines, proceeding not discursively, but by means of suggestive juxtaposition and montage. There are, for instance, multiple cross-references and some 30 different symbols marking thematic clusters across the different folders. This system of internal cross-references instead of a linear presentation strongly invites a kind of hypertextual reading following certain threads or thematic strands; Willi Bolle here speaks of a “network-like reading” (2010, 25; my translation). The non-linear representation both in the Arcades Project and in The Unfortunates is vital to the conceptualization of urban space as a space of layered, spatialized memory.

2.4 Autobiography, ‘Truth’ and the Novel It is in the opening pages of his first novel, Travelling People, that Johnson formulated a conviction that was to remain central to his entire novelistic output: Dr Johnson’s remarks about each member of an audience always being aware that he is in a theatre could with complete relevance be applied also to a novel reader, who surely always knows that he is reading a book. […] From this I concluded that it was not only permissible to expose the mechanisms of a novel but by doing so I should come nearer to reality and truth […]. I realized it would be desirable to have interludes between my chapters in which I could stand back, so to speak, from my novel, and talk about it with the reader, or with those parts of myself which might hold different opinions […] without any question of destroying the reader’s suspension of disbelief, since such suspension was not to be attempted. (Johnson 1967 [1963], 11–12; gaps original)

The notion that any claim to ‘truthfulness’ requires anti-illusionist narrative strategies with Johnson sits oddly with – but for him is inseparable from – the notion that novelistic truth is only achievable by abandoning ‘fiction’ altogether and by limiting oneself to versions of autobiographical writing. Ryf even calls “the relationship

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between fiction and fact […] the besetting issue of all Johnson’s work” (1977, 63). In an unpublished interview with Bernard Bergonzi in 1968, Johnson stated: “I’m not interested in the slightest in writing fiction. […] ‘[N]ovel’ and ‘fiction’ are not synonymous. Certainly I write autobiography, and I write it in the form of a novel. What I don’t write is fiction.” (qtd. in Tew 2001, 84) In keeping with this conviction, Johnson is frequently a character in his own novels – thinly disguised or even quite explicitly – in a way radically different from the way an author figure appears in, say, Fowles’ French Lieutenant’s Woman (↗ 15 John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman). Thus, Johnson writes about family matters, financial worries, his supply teaching job, his jealousy, the frequency and (dis-)satisfactions of his lovemaking with Wendy, or the frustrations of having to write match reports to make a living: Thank Christ I don’t have to write that sort of preliminary speculative meaningless crap.     Just my own kind of crap.” (“Time” 2–3) Now I must hack this into some shape, now I must make it into 500 well-chosen words. Yes, 500 they asked for. […] Get on.     By five.     In 40 minutes. (“The pitch worn” 9; gaps original)

These self-representations include touchingly personal reflections: “Steven will be in bed, but I can still look at him sleeping, my son, the warmth of returning, to Ginnie, to our son, the flat will be lit as I come across the square” (“Last” 5). On other occasions, however, personal details can be embarrassingly revealing and make Johnson appear in a rather unfavourable light, as an egoist or undisciplined glutton. Thus, the realization that Tony’s illness is serious comes when Tony and his wife June do not show up for the launch party of Johnson’s first book, which was in fact, dedicated to them: “This shocked me, I was annoyed, angry even, that he, that both of them, should find any excuse whatsoever for missing something so important, that its importance to me should not be shared by them” (“Just as it seemed” 4). Similarly, “my response to insecurity is to eat, this is why I am overweight, no, fat, or so I persuade myself” (“Cast parapet” 1). It is this specific mode of novelistic confessional writing and the concomitant unsparingness, it seems, that is alluded to in the choice of the last of the three mottos inside the box. This is again by Samuel Johnson, and, tellingly, is one attributed to him by his companion Boswell: “There is something noble in publishing truth, though it condemns one’s self.” (Boswell 1970 [1785], 283)

2.5 Writing and the Foregrounding of the Writing Process In keeping with Johnson’s assertion – reiterated in self-reflexively paradoxical form within the novel – that “[i]n general, generalization is to lie, to tell lies” (“Last” 6), the scrupulous, halting and searching prose style does more than merely simulate

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the associative nature of a stream of consciousness. Rather, it also makes explicit the process of writing itself in that the frequent re-formulations within the individual sentence – frequently long, sprawling, associative clauses extending over more than half a page – and the numerous qualifications appear to increase specificity and precision: And yes, there is a castle here […] sandstone, as I remember […] did Tony tell me, he had a great mind for such trivia, is that the right word, no, nor is detail, trivia it is to me, perhaps, to him important […] he had a good mind for such detail, it crowded his mind like documents in the Public Records Office, there, a good image, perhaps easy, but it was even something like as efficient, tidy, his mind, not as mine is, random […] how he embraced conversation, think of an image, no. […] I learnt, I selected and elected to hear what I needed, what was of most use to me, at that time most use, from his discourse, yes, the word is not too pompous, discourse, a fine mind […] how can I place his order, his disintegration? (“First” 3–4)

Jordan even speaks of an “excess of prosaic scrupulousness” and argues that each “sentence contains its own first  – and sometimes second and third  – draft” (2014, 746). It is characteristic of the self-reflexive nature of Johnson’s prose that this tentative, iteratively self-corrective writing process is again made explicit in the novel itself, when the text refers to the process of “[w]orking more specifically, this time, on and around my first novel, discussing, improving, refining, deleting” (“Again the house” 1; cf. also Jordan 2014, 759). This is further supported by the unusual spacing throughout the text: frequent blanks far longer than the common single space after a full stop – often extending to half a line or more – also appear to suggest the halting nature of the prose style and apparently simulate pauses in thought or speech. Thus, the probing, searching, constantly self-correcting prose suits the attempt at ‘truthfulness’ while at the same time suggesting doubts that ‘truth’ is ever attainable. This, it seems, is hardly an accidental self-contradiction but rather seems a fully dialecticized tension that is central to the novel (cf. below 4.1). Moreover, this is a classic case of metalepsis, a blurring of ontological levels in that the same device – an associative, tentative prose style – is used to suggest, autodiegetically, the narrator’s own reconstructed stream of consciousness and heterodiegetically, a writer-narrator’s attempt at plausibly formulating such a stream: “The mind as a     think of an image     ” (“The estate” 5; gaps original), or “no, the image is not right, does not help” (“Just as it seemed” 7). Similarly, several passages foreground the writer’s need to extrapolate: “Why do I suppose all this from so little?” (“This poky lane” 7), highlighting the extent to which even the attempt at writing truthfully will necessarily involve a significant share of guessing, of making plausible assumptions.

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3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies 3.1 Randomness and the “Book in a Box” Arguably more so than with most novels, the central narrative strategy of The Unfortunates, the subdivision into unnumbered sections to be read in random order, is inseparable from the key thematic concerns: cancer, memory or the city are all fundamentally characterized by randomness, unpredictability, non-linearity, proliferation and a resistance to formal representation. In formal terms, the novel thus continues and radicalizes the concern with typography and the materiality of the book. These, of course, were frequent concerns for Johnson throughout – the Shandean grey and black pages in Travelling People, the holes cut into some of the pages and the parallel columns of text in Albert Angelo, or the blank spaces and empty pages in House Mother Normal. A fairly straightforward question arising from the frequent use of this device is that of chronology: Although there are technically a vast number of possible permutations – given 25 freely disposable sections, the result is the factorial of 25 (noted as 25!), yielding just over 1.55 x 1025 – not all of them make sense: The section in which the narrator watches the football match and writes his report must logically come after the section in which he makes his way to the stadium, just as it makes little sense to imagine him eating and contemplating his main course before he has had the starter of his lunch before the match. Nevertheless, the random order creates significant and often touching effects in the contemplation of the narrator’s friendship with Tony and the progression of Tony’s disease, for instance when the narrator recalls how Tony had for some time hoped he had been cured of cancer after we have already read about his death. The passage poignantly even has Tony “know” he has been cured: Yet he knew by that autumn, when they had gone back to Chester, found a flat on the Wirral overlooking the sea and the Welsh mountains, ah, and had undergone more surgery, that he was cured, I think they told him he was cured, they must have, for I remember the letter I got from June, a separate one from him, too, that told me the news, the whole of the lump removed, June’s letter ending in joy that the sun was shining across this view from their flat, on the mountains in the distance, on the sea, and that she could enjoy it, that she had a future again. (“Sometime that summer” 4)

Given this non-linear overlay of different points in time, Jordan rightly emphasises that “Tony’s death is happening, has happened, will happen, palimpsestically” (2014, 755). The representation of chance, randomness and contingency is thus central to Johnson’s endeavour of ‘truthfulness’: “Life does not tell stories. Life is chaotic, fluid, random; it leaves myriads of ends untied, untidily. Writers can extract a story from life only by strict, close selection, and this must mean falsification. Telling stories really is

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telling lies.” (1985b [1973], 5). Randomness is thus arguably the overarching concern of the text and therefore needs to be discussed in some detail as a direct result of the novel’s central device. Thus, a crucial passage, which, strictly speaking, only refers to Tony’s disease, is highly suggestive for the novel as a whole: “the explosive, runaway, zealous, monstrous cells of the tumour: if one single cell escaped to another part of the body, by insinuating itself into the bloodstream, it would grow and multiply there too” (“Just as it seemed” 8). Beyond the proliferation of the tumour cells, it also suggests the non-linear, rhizomatic nature of the text, of memory, or of the city. In her study on Chance in the Modern British Novel, Jordan’s central tenet is her belief in “narrative’s inability to be assimilated to chance, and chance’s resistance to its own representation” (2010, 114). She plausibly argues that in the narrativization of life or of any other unpredictable, contingent process, the random is smoothed out and made to seem necessary (2010, 150). Referring to Leland Monk’s study of the role of chance in Modernist British writing, she states that “chance always becomes fate in narrative” and speaks of “the steamroller power of a teleological narrative” (2010, 149): [E]ventually, chance-as-subject-matter inevitably bursts through the inbuilt limitations of its own representation and engages directly with the form of the work, as a serious engagement with chance must confront the paradoxical nature of its representation in a determined form. The formal engagement of aleatorically experimental fiction is therefore an oblique commentary on chance’s uniquely uncomfortable relationship to the literary forms that seek to contain it. (2010, 92)

She further reads The Unfortunates as “aleatorical in the most fundamental sense [and] as perhaps the most serious attempt, at least in Britain, to engage with the problem of the representation of chance in the novel of the twentieth century” (2010, 109). She regards Johnson’s strategy of representing chance by means of loose sections as “the only way that is genuinely, mimetically possible: by letting [chance] formally participate in the construction of the narrative” (Jordan 2010, 113). This, however, seems clearly misleading in that it does not distinguish between aleatory processes of production and reception. Johnson’s strategy is markedly different from, say, William Burroughs’s cut-up or fold-in techniques: While Burroughs incorporates chance into the process of production, this is precisely not the case with Johnson’s strategy, which relies on randomness on the reception side.

3.2 Literary References, Traditions and Convictions: From the Augustans to the nouveau roman Though he explicitly rejected the category of ‘experimental’ writing as a description of his work, arguing that “experiments” are merely attempts at “solving particular writing problems” (1985 [1973], 8), Johnson inscribes himself into a fairly specific,

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frequently ‘experimental’ tradition, in which Laurence Sterne features prominently, beginning with the typographical devices and the black and grey pages in Travelling People and extending to the motto in the box in The Unfortunates. Moreover, there appears to be an alignment with a Modernist and late-Modernist tradition, Joyce and Beckett being his celebrated models (cf. Johnson 1985 [1973], 4, 7, ↗ 7 James Joyce, Ulysses, ↗ 12 Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable). Furthermore, although his political convictions could not be further from Eliot’s and although Eliot’s elitism would seem to have been entirely alien to Johnson, his assessment of twentieth-century history and contemporary reality, as well as the conclusions for literary practice he draws from it, are remarkably similar: His belief that “what characterises our reality is the probability that chaos is the most likely explanation” (1985b [1973], 7) is strongly reminiscent of Eliot’s view of “contemporary history” as an “immense panorama of futility and anarchy” in his 1923 essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (Eliot 1975, 177). Given this diagnosis, both Eliot and Johnson apparently share the assumption that “to find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now”, as Johnson approvingly quotes Beckett in his programmatic “Introduction” to Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing You Memoirs (1985b [1973], 7). As more direct influences on The Unfortunates, one can identify Beckett’s prose fiction (for the sprawling, associative prose), or, for the concern with the aleatory and the materiality of the book, Alan Burns’ cut-up text Babel (1969), Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1966), Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1 (1962) as a previous “book in a box” (for a comparison, cf. Coe 2004, 231), Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961) and the contemporary French nouveau roman of Alain Robbe-Grillet or Nathalie Sarraute (cf. Jordan 2010, 93–94, or Levitt 1981, 579). Parallels in terms of aesthetic concerns and literary strategies can be identified with the work of Doris Lessing or of John Fowles, whose The French Lieutenant’s Woman was also published in 1969, and with other contemporaries like Rayner Heppenstall and Eva Figes, who were part of Johnson’s circle of “experimental” writers (↗ 14 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, ↗ 15 John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman). However, counter-intuitively, classicist writers of the eighteenth century also play a considerable role. The references to his namesake Samuel Johnson and his biographer Boswell  – which, though Johnson was notably invoked in Travelling People already (cf. above 2.4), are particularly prominent in The Unfortunates – are probably largely due to the biographical constellation and the role Johnson plays as Tillinghast’s Boswell, as it were. Similarly, the reference to another Augustan poet is functional in a very specific way, apart from the fact that “Alexander” as a footballer’s name may simply have suggested the allusion. Bored with the game and with the report he is writing, Johnson entertains himself by contriving to sneak literary allusions into his match report:

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Devoid of real incident, the match dragged its slow length, no, yes, there’s Alexander, earlier, when he hit the bar. Alexander, dragging his slow length along from right back, hit a long one which beat Phipps but struck the intersection, like a wounded snake has to be worked in somewhere, no, it’ll never work, too contrived, scrub it. (“The pitch worn” 6; italics original)

The reference is of course to Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Criticism” (1711) and its self-reflexive performative critique of the tedious writing of inferior poets: A needless Alexandrine ends the Song That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow length along. (1963, ll. 356–357; italics original)

The “Essay on Criticism” – although a work of the very young Pope – is inseparable from Pope’s own poetic practice and is concerned with a type of criticism that seeks to censure bad poetry in order to enable the writing of better poetry rather than with criticism as an art of its own. This is very much in line with Johnson’s own views on the function of criticism as expressed in a debate with Tony: “[W]e argued almost viciously about criticism. To Tony, the criticism of literature was a study, a pursuit, a discipline of the highest kind in itself: to me, I told him, the only use of criticism was if it helped people to write better books” (“The opera singer” 1). Thus, references to individual writers outside an ‘experimental’ tradition can generally be shown to have specific thematic implications, whereas references to the ‘experimental’ tradition frequently serve the self-positioning as a writer. All in all, “Johnson extends modernist experimental techniques, radicalising them by subverting what he regards as High-Modernist elitism” (Tew 2012, 55). The novel’s narrative strategies and the explicit or implicit references to other writers place Johnson firmly in an experimental tradition of a decidedly non-elitist type, making him a figure who can plausibly be claimed both for a late-modernist and for an early postmodernist phase.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives 4.1 Reception The tension of ‘truth vs. experiment’ appears to have overshadowed the novel’s reception from the beginning. In addition to a number of appreciative reviews, several initial responses were belittling: The Observer reviewer Stephen Wall called The Unfortunates “a little experiment” with “a mild logic of its own” and spoke of “a modest, sincere, small-scale novel” (qtd. in Coe 2004, 269), while Richard Holmes in The Times argued that the novel’s “technical self-absorption” deprived the characters of any “reality” and prevented any interest in them (qtd. in Coe 2004, 269).

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In his 1970 study The Situation of the Novel, Bernard Bergonzi commented on Johnson’s convictions and the concomitant self-limitations as follows: The idea that fiction is lying, and in other respects undesirable, has been propagated by another English novelist, B. S. Johnson, whose considerable talents seem to me to be unnecessarily limited by his doctrinaire attitudes. For an English writer Johnson is remarkably conscious and theoretical in his ideas about what he wants to do. (Bergonzi 1970, 204; also qtd. in Tew 2001, 9)

In 1973, a TLS reviewer pithily commented on the dominant impression that a more compelling book for Johnson “seems to be just round a corner which he doctrinally refuses to turn” (qtd. in Ryf 1977, 73), while Patrick Parrinder in 1977 similarly stated that Johnson was frequently “seen as a brilliant writer thrashing around in a trap of his own making” (1977, 45). In a 1985 memoir cum assessment for a special issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Johnson’s friend and fellow experimentalist Eva Figes commented on his achievements and limitations and, despite what now seems a generally more positive view of Johnson’s achievements, in many ways formulates the persisting doubts about his self-limiting insistence on autobiographical truth: [H]e created [literary texts] about real people, real experiences and events, with himself as undisguised narrator and main character. This could be witty and delightful, but at other times a bit ponderous. He had a tendency to take things to extremes, to take truth-telling too literally […]. I think he worked himself into a cul-de-sac. […] By concentrating too much on form, on literal truth, I think Bryan lost touch with an essential, greater truth – that the only way to tell the truth is by lying, and that is the real starting point of meaningful fiction. (1985, 71)

Since the 1990s, the two major champions of Johnson’s work and arguably the driving forces behind the modest but perceptible revival of critical interest have been Philip Tew, the author of the first major monograph on Johnson (2001), and Jonathan Coe, the author of a highly original and sympathetic biography (2004); in addition to their monographs, both have helped rekindle interest in Johnson with perceptive essays, introductions to and reviews of novels reissued after having been out of print since the time of Johnson’s death. Both have championed Johnson as an immensely talented and original writer (despite his self-imposed limitations), who almost singlehandedly opposed the neo-realist mainstream with a sequence of experimental novels, of which The Unfortunates is often regarded as the most compelling and most innovative one. In sum, Johnson is generally regarded as an enormously gifted writer whose stubborn convictions amounted to a self-restriction as essentially a writer of memoirs, forcing him into increasingly remote parts of his family history and, in his last novels, strained rather than persuasive literary experiments.

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4.2 Contradiction, Paradox and Narrative It has long been shown that narrative proceeds from binary oppositions (by, for example, Greimas, Lotman and Todorov) and that it is based on the acting out, on the “mise en branle” (Greimas 1970, 164), of underlying dichotomies. In that sense, narrative is always already as narrative a way of dealing with binary oppositions. This quality of narrative might also be conceptualized in terms of Žižek’s notion that “narrative as such emerges in order to resolve some fundamental antagonism by way of arranging its terms into a temporal succession. It is thus the very form of narrative which bears witness to some repressed antagonism” (1999, 197; italics original). It is equally established that narrative is a way of negotiating, even of harmonizing, oppositions and contradictions that could not be reconciled discursively (for an insightful collection exploring the potential of fiction in the negotiation of extremes, cf. Glomb and Horlacher 2004). It is less clear, however, how contradictions between ideology and form, genre conventions and modes of emplotment or between illusionist and anti-illusionist narrative strategies within a narrative text are to be conceptualized – and it is precisely these tensions and potential contradictions that critics have diagnosed in Johnson’s work and particularly in The Unfortunates (cf. especially Mackrell 1985). Judith Mackrell’s discussion raises the question whether these are productive ambiguities or problematic contradictions when she argues that Johnson’s insistence on form “seems to serve two different functions: on the one hand, Johnson appears to be genuinely examining their different mimetic possibilities; on the other hand, he may frequently overplay a form or style in order to expose it as a literary artifice” (1985, 45). While this may sound like a productive tension, her diagnosis of an “alternating commitment to a painstaking form of mimesis and a radical denial of the mimetic” (58), by contrast, suggests a rather fundamental unresolved contradiction. Similarly, Tew points out the uneasy connection between Johnson’s anti-illusionist experimentalism and his claim to “truth”, quoting Gabriel Josipovici to the effect that “experimental fiction’s overriding impulses reject verisimilitude and counter any illusion of the real” (Tew 2012, 53). Similar tensions might be observed between Johnson’s focus on interiority and his inclination towards class-conscious littérature engagée, the solipsistic insistence that the only relevant subject matter may be “the inside of his own skull” (1985b [1973], 4) being curiously at odds with his frequently political bent (though this is largely absent in The Unfortunates). Finally, the genre of the elegy can be said to jar with the non-linearity of the text: While the elegy teleologically moves from grief and mourning to consolation, precisely this development is subverted and consolation made impossible by the fundamental non-linearity of the text (cf. also Jordan 2014, 748). Admitting that his convictions about order and structure “and other things I have said […] must appear paradoxical”, Johnson polemically asks: “But why should novelists be expected to avoid paradox any more than philosophers?” (1985b [1973], 7)

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It might even be argued that such tensions and contradictions are crucial to Johnson’s novelistic production. Thus, Jonathan Coe has argued that “if Johnson’s work stands up better today than most of the writing of his ‘experimental’ peers, this has everything to do with the fact that he refused – or was unable to – sacrifice intensity of feeling on the altar or formal ingenuity” (2004, 29). The parenthesis, “or was unable to”, of course, tellingly points to just the central tension we are concerned with, suggesting that the continuing narrative interest his novels generate may have been more of an accident and occurs against his stated aims: Denouncing the “primitive, vulgar and idle curiosity of the reader to know ‘what happens next’”, he did maintain that to even attempt to satisfy it “must be a confession of failure on the part of any novelist” (Johnson 1985b [1973], 5). Johnson was not alone, however, in exploring how the use of metafiction and other anti-illusionist devices relate to narrativity and narrative ‘curiosity’. In an essay first published in 1976, J. M. Coetzee remarked that metafictional devices can never obliterate the narrative impetus: “[T]ranscendence of the illusionism of Realism is an illusionary hope [and] to get behind (aufheben) fiction by incorporating into fiction a critical consciousness of the procedures of fiction is only to climb another spiral of illusionistic Realism […]” (1976, 92; parenthesis original; for the inescapability of narrative behind even the most obtrusive metafictional devices, cf. also Lehmann 1986). While one may well find Johnson’s insistence on literal autobiographical truth a misguided self-limitation, it hardly seems plausible to argue that these and other tensions in his work are unresolved contradictions he was unaware of. Rather, such tensions and contradictions seem fully dialecticized in an œuvre which, like that of hardly any other writer, self-consciously explores the functions, potentials and limitations of narrative.

4.3 Media Evolution and the Place of the Novel Johnson formulates his program of writing truthful, introspective, non-narrative novels with a clear view to the role of the novel in a new media environment. Based on the insight that film and TV have become the privileged media for storytelling in the way that had previously been the domain of the novelist, he drastically argues that the “nineteenth-century narrative novel” was dead and that to continue trying to write it was “anachronistic, invalid, irrelevant, and perverse” (1985b [1973], 5). This leads him to a redefinition of what it is that the novel is best capable of doing and what its function and purpose can and should be: No novelist’s description of a battle squadron at sea in a gale could really hope to compete with that in a well-shot film; and why should anyone who simply wanted to be told a story spend all his spare time for a week or weeks reading a book when he could experience the same thing in a version in some ways superior at his local cinema in only one evening? [Just as the days

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of long narrative poems were over when the novel became the privileged medium, but poetry survived by] concentrat[ing] on the things it was still best able to do […], the novel may not only survive but evolve to greater achievements by concentrating on those things it can still do best: the precise use of language, exploitation of the technological fact of the book, the explication of thought. […] In some ways the history of the novel in the twentieth century has seen large areas of the old territory of the novelist increasingly taken over by other media, until the only thing the novelist can with any certainty call exclusively his own is the inside of his own skull: and that is what he should be exploring, rather than anachronistically fighting the battle he is bound to lose. (Johnson 1985b [1973], 4)

The telling of plot-driven stories, Johnson clearly argues, is best left to other media. Therefore, if the materiality of the book and the representation of mental processes are to be central to novelistic production, then the inextricable combination of both – a radical use of the former to do justice to the randomness of the latter – seems the logical way forward for the novel. In that sense, The Unfortunates is certainly Johnson’s definitive novel. Most critics, however, have regarded the self-imposed limitation to autobiography and the insistence that a novel must be ‘true’ in a narrow factual-biographical sense as a dead end. With precisely this biographical focus, however, Johnson’s work appears to have anticipated the more recent vogue of confessional and memoir writing generally, as well as, more specifically, the numerous memoirs of disease, death and loss such as those by Ruth Picardie, John Diamond, Joan Didion and others, to mention only a few of the more widely read texts of this kind in the last 20 years (for this, cf. Tew 1999, xv).

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Johnson, B. S. The Unfortunates. London: Picador, 1999 [1969]. --Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Bergonzi, Bernard. The Situation of the Novel. London: Macmillan, 1970. Bolle, Willi. “Metropole & Megastadt: Zur Ordnung des Wissens in Walter Benjamins Passagen.” Urbane Beobachtungen: Walter Benjamin und die neuen Städte. Ed. Ralph Buchenhorst and Miguel Vedda. Bielefeld: transcript, 2010. 17–51. Boswell, James. “Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D.” Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Ed. R. W. Chapman. London/Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1970 [1785]. 151–447. Coe, Jonathan. “The Novels of B. S. Johnson.” The Spectator, 24 August 1991: 28–29. Coe, Jonathan. “Introduction.” B. S. Johnson. The Unfortunates. London: Picador, 1999. v–xv. Coe, Jonathan. Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson. London: Picador, 2004.

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Coetzee, J. M. “The First Sentence of Yvonne Burgess’ The Strike.” Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Ed. David Attwell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992 [1976]. 91–93. Eliot, T. S. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth.” Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. London: Faber and Faber, 1975 [1923]. 175–178. Figes, Eva. “B. S. Johnson.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 5.2 (1985): 70–71. Garrett, George P. “B. S. Johnson.” Poets of Great Britain and Ireland Since 1960, Part 1: A–L; Part 2: M–Z. Ed. Vincent. B. Sherry. Ann Arbor: Gale, 1985. 277–282. Glomb, Stefan, and Stefan Horlacher, eds. Beyond Extremes: Repräsentation und Reflexion von Modernisierungsprozessen im zeitgenössischen britischen Roman. Tübingen: Narr, 2004. Greimas, Algirdas J. “Eléments d’une grammaire narrative.” Du sens: Essays sémiotiques. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970. 157–183. Gurr, Jens Martin. “The Modernist Poetics of Urban Memory and the Structural Analogies between ‘City’ and ‘Text’: The Waste Land and Benjamin’s Arcades Project.” Recovery and Transgression: Memory in American Poetry. Ed. Kornelia Freitag. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. 21–37. Johnson, B. S. Travelling People. London: Panther, 1967 [1963]. Johnson, B. S. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry. New York: New Directions, 1985a [1973]. Johnson, B. S. “Introduction to Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing You Memoirs.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 5.2 (1985b) [1973] [Special Issue on B. S. Johnson]: 4–13. Johnson, B. S. B. S. Johnson Omnibus (Albert Angelo, Trawl, House Mother Normal). London: Picador, 2004. Johnson, Samuel. “The Rambler, No. 60, Saturday, 13 October 1750” [“The dignity and usefulness of biography”]. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Vol. III. The Rambler. Ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969. 318–323. Jordan, Julia. Chance and the Modern British Novel: From Henry Green to Iris Murdoch. London: Continuum, 2010. Jordan, Julia. “‘For recuperation’: Elegy, Form, and the Aleatory in B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates.” Textual Practice 28.5 (2014): 745–761. Kraushaar, Katja. Englische Elegien: Versuche der poetischen Selbstvergewisserung englischer Dichter in ihrer Auseinandersetzung mit dem Tod. Frankfurt/Berlin: Peter Lang, 2004. Lea, Daniel. “Narrative Wreckage: Cancer and the Unfortunate Body in B. S. Johnson.” English Studies 96.7 (2015): 785–798. Lehmann, Elmar. “‘Ha et cetera.’ Oder: Von der Unmöglichkeit, nicht zu erzählen: Überlegungen zu englischen Ich-Romanen der 80er Jahre.” Gattungsprobleme in der anglo-amerikanischen Literatur: Beiträge für Ulrich Suerbaum zu seinem 60. Geburtstag. Ed. Raimund Borgmeier. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986: 184–194. Levitt, Morton P. “The Novels of B. S. Johnson: Against the War Against Joyce.” Modern Fiction Studies. 27.4 (1981): 571–586. Levitt, Morton P. “B. S. Johnson.” British Novelists Since 1960: Part 2: H–Z [DLB 14]. Detroit: Gale, 1983. 438–444. Mackrell, Judith. “B. S. Johnson and the British Experimental Tradition: An Introduction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 5.2 (1985): 42–64. Monk, Leland. Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modern British Novel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Parrinder, Patrick. “Pilgrim’s Progress: The Novels of B. S. Johnson (1933–1973).” Critical Quarterly 19.2 (1977): 45–59. Pope, Alexander. “An Essay on Criticism.” The Poems of Alexander Pope. Ed. John Butt. London/New York: Routledge, 1963. 143–168. Ryf, Robert S. “B. S. Johnson and the Frontiers of Fiction.” Critique 19.1 (1977): 58–74.

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Sacks, Peter M. The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Shustermann, Ronald. “Leafing Through a Universe: Architectural Bodies and Fictional Worlds.” Architecture and Philosophy: New Perspectives on the Works of Arakawa and Madeline Gins. Ed. Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Françoise Kral. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2010. 169–187. Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Ed. Ian Watt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965 [1759–1767]. Tew, Philip. B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading. Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2001. Tew, Philip. “Moving Beyond Modernism in the Fiction of B. S. Johnson: Charting Influences and Comparisons.” The Legacies of Modernism Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction. Ed. David James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 53–71. Tredell, Nicolas. “Telling Life, Telling Death: The Unfortunates.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 5.2 (1985): 34–42. Žižek, Slavoj. “The Seven Veils of Fantasy.” Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Ed. Danny Nobus. New York: Other Press, 1999. 190–218.

5.2 Further Reading Coe, Jonathan, Philip Tew, and Julia Jordan, eds. Well Done God! Selected Prose and Drama of B. S. Johnson. London: Picador, 2013. Jordan, Julia, and Martin Ryle, eds. B. S. Johnson and Post-War Literature: Possibilities of the Avant Garde. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2014. Tredell, Nicolas. Fighting Fictions: The Novels of B. S. Johnson. Nottingham: Paupers’ Press, 2000. You’re Human Like the Rest of Us: The Films of B. S. Johnson. DVD/Blue Ray. London: British Film Institute, 2013.

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17 J. G. Farrell, The Empire Trilogy (1970–1978) Abstract: Farrell’s Empire Trilogy confronts the decline and eventual loss of the British Empire by zooming in on three of its crises: Troubles (1970) is a Kafkaesque story of the Irish War of Independence. The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) is a metahistoriographic novel about the ‘Indian Mutiny’. The Singapore Grip (1978) is a Marxist-inflected account of the British in Singapore during World War II. All three novels present the perspectives of characters who are deeply implicated in the project of Empire. This chapter emphasizes the trilogy’s significance as a medium of postimperial memory, and it shows that Farrell’s main mode of addressing the difficult legacies of the British Empire is a combination of realism and absurdist comedy reminiscent of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque. Keywords: Postcolonial novel, postimperial memory, historiographic metafiction, British Empire: Ireland, India, Singapore

1 Context: Author, Œuvre, Moment In 2008 Salman Rushdie said about J. G. Farrell that, had he “not sadly died so young, there is no question that he would today be one of the really major novelists of the English language. […] The three novels that he did leave are all in their different ways extraordinary” (qtd. in Greacen 2009, 1). James Gordon Farrell drowned in a fishing accident in the Irish Sea in August 1979, at the age of only 44. He is famous for his Empire Trilogy, an important milestone in the development of both the English historical novel and postimperial memory in post-war Britain. The Trilogy’s novels present key events leading to the decline and eventual loss of the British Empire. They tell imperial history in ironic, often absurd ways. Troubles (1970) deals with the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921), The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) describes the ‘Indian Mutiny’ (1857), and The Singapore Grip (1978) depicts Japanese invasion of Singapore (1942) during World War II. All three novels are characterised by what John Spurling described in 1999 as their “uniquely up-to-date mixture of black humour, surrealism and liberal-left disapproval of and lingering romanticism about the British Empire” (Spurling 1999). The Siege of Krishnapur won the 1973 Booker Prize. Troubles, which had won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1971, received the “Lost Man Booker Prize” in 2010. This prize was awarded retrospectively because due to a change of rules in the Booker committee, novels of 1970 had never been considered. Farrell’s Troubles appeared on the long list together with novels by David Lodge, Ruth Rendell,

DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-018

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Patrick White, and Iris Murdoch. That Troubles won the prize in a public vote shows how much Farrell’s writing had remained popular with the reading public. J. G. Farrell was born on 25 January 1935 in Liverpool. He was of mixed Irish-English parentage. His parents had worked in the British colonies in Singapore and Bengal. After World War II the family moved to Dublin. Farrell attended school in England, visiting Ireland during the holidays. In England, he was continually confronted with British prejudice against the Irish, and he grew up with an acute sense of the legacies of British colonialism – a theme that would become the focus of his major work, the Empire Trilogy. In 1978 Farrell remembered: “It seemed to me that the really interesting thing that’s happened during my lifetime has been the decline of the British Empire” (Brock 1978). In 1956, as a student in Oxford, he contracted polio after an accident at a rugby match. The illness left his right arm paralysed and it marked a deep change in his life, turning a cheerful, athletic young man into a more thoughtful person. Farrell switched from Law to Modern Languages (French and Spanish) and graduated in 1960. In Farrell’s fiction, illness and sudden, profound ruptures in the characters’ lives would become recurrent topics. Rendering the transience and absurdity of existence in black humour turned into the signature quality of Farrell’s writing. After his studies, Farrell moved to France to work as a teacher and write his first novel. A Man From Elsewhere (1963) is set in France and shows the influence of French existentialism. Farrell came to dislike it later in life. His second novel, The Lung (1965), is a black comedy about a recalcitrant polio victim, and his third, A Girl in the Head (1967), is a gloomy novel about lost youth, narrated in unconventional forms. Farrell’s prose, in these early novels as well as his later work, is highly allusive. It explicitly and implicitly echoes Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Henry James, Thomas Mann, Malcolm Lowry, Elizabeth Bowen, Albert Camus and many other novelists (see Spurling 1981; Prusse 1997). His early novels have not received much critical attention, but they already point to the hallmarks of Farrell’s writing, which John McLeod (2007, 32–33) describes as “the unflinching emphasis on decay and decline as major theme, a sense of humour born from incongruity, a bleak view of human life, challenges to ideological and philosophical conventions.” Once Farrell turned to the novels of the Empire Trilogy (and to the unfinished The Hill Station, published posthumously in 1981), the ‘Farrellian’ combination of melancholy and absurdity became a powerful mode of addressing British history after the end of Empire.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns In an interview in 1978, Farrell stated that he preferred to describe his Empire Trilogy as a “triptych rather than a trilogy with each panel presenting a picture of the Empire at a different historical watershed and by their association shedding […] some light

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on each other” (Dean 1978). Rather than narrating one ongoing story, the novels present three panels that show the British Empire in crisis. Farrell tells the history of the British Empire using a strategy of condensation, focusing on rather short spans of time, on restricted (often domestic) locales, and on small casts of characters. In fact, as Ansgar Nünning (1993, 159) maintains with a line taken from Geoffrey Hill’s poem “A Short History of British India (III)” (1978), Farrell “makes miniatures of the once-monstrous theme” of British colonialism  – ‘monstrous’ in both senses of the word, as an incomprehensibly vast and a horrifyingly violent history. Farrell’s miniatures capture complex moments in the history of British colonialism that throw light on the ideologies, mentalities, politics, economics, and the global entanglements of Empire.

2.1 Troubles: The Decline of Anglo-Ireland Troubles is set in Ireland between July 1919 and late summer of 1921, during the Irish War of Independence. This war (‘the Troubles’) would lead to the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1922), which established the Irish Free State. The novel begins with Major Brendan Archer’s travel from London to Ireland. The Major is an Englishman from London, a World War I veteran still suffering from shell shock. He comes to Ireland to claim his fiancée Angela Spencer as his wife. The way their relationship is introduced sets the tone of the novel, which closely follows the consciousness of its passive and uncertain protagonist, a man who has lost orientation, to whom things happen, and often in the most absurd ways: Although the Major is “beyond doubt” that they are engaged (Angela’s frequent and detailed letters to the front implied as much), he cannot remember ever having proposed to her. He met Angela in 1916, during leave, and has only a “dim recollection” of an “afternoon thé dansant in a Brighton hotel”: They had kissed behind a screen of leaves and, reaching out to steady himself, he had put his hand down firmly on a cactus, which had rendered many of his parting words insincere […] Perhaps, however, this suppressed agony had given the wrong impression of his feelings. (T 5)1

Angela’s father, the “leonine” Edward Spencer (his name recalling the sixteenth-century poet and English colonialist in Ireland, Edmund Spenser), owns the magnificent but decrepit Majestic Hotel, situated on the coast of Wexford in the South of Ireland, just a mile from the fictional town of Kilnalough. The Spencers are returnees from India, a British ‘Empire family’. They do not strictly belong to, but clearly display the attitudes of the long-established Protestant Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, a class loyal to

1 Unless otherwise indicated page references in brackets with the abbreviations T, SK and SG refer to, respectively, Farrell 1993 [1970], 2003 [1973], 2010 [1978].

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the British Empire, condescending towards Irish Catholics and vehemently opposed to Irish Republicanism – a class whose decline during the Irish War of Independence mirrors that of the hotel, which, in the end, will be burned to the ground. With the Majestic as an allegory for the fate of the Spencer family and that of Anglo-Ireland, Troubles can be placed in the tradition of the Anglo-Irish Big House novel, a genre shaped by works such as Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1939) (Scalan 1990). Big House novels conventionally tell the story of British colonial rule in Ireland through a domestic lens, by focusing on the decline of a family of Anglo-Irish landowners. But instead of repeating the affirmative or nostalgic stance such novels usually display, Farrell twists the genre in deeply ironical ways, not least by substituting the country house with a once-splendid hotel, whose imposing entrance faces the Irish Sea, and thus Britain rather than Ireland. The Major finds a weakened Angela who keeps eluding him in the vast expanses and labyrinthine corridors of the crumbling hotel, and within a few weeks he learns that she has died of leukaemia. He returns to London, only to come back in spring 1920 because he has fallen in love with Angela’s friend Sarah Devlin, a staunch Catholic and Irish Nationalist, semi-paralysed and in a wheelchair, whose steady recovery contrasts with the rapid decline and death of Angela. The Major becomes increasingly drawn into the Spencer family: the eccentric Edward, who displays the attitudes and conduct of a Victorian Empire builder, his lazy son Ripon who much to his father’s chagrin married a Catholic Irishwoman, and Edward’s unruly and mischievous twin daughters, ironically named Faith and Charity. After a year of the Major’s timid courtship, Sarah coldly rejects him. It turns out that she has had an affair with Edward Spencer. The Majestic falls further into disrepair. A great population of cats multiply in the upper stories. Under its crumbling ceilings and creeping foliage remain as sole guests a group of old people, English ladies mainly, who have long ceased to pay their rent, but ‘stay on’ – just like the Major – for the only reason that they have nowhere else to go. Together with a group of insolent Black and Tans (British armed police force) temporarily stationed at the hotel, some Irish servants and characters from the village (like the old doctor who keeps repeating that “people are insubstantial”), this cast represents a microcosm of Anglo-Ireland. In a humorous, absurd, and often veritably Kafkaesque manner, Farrell has the Major, an unsuspecting outsider, stumble through this small world. The realities of the Irish war reach the Majestic Hotel mainly via rumour and (as is suggested by the occasional insertion of newspaper clippings) via the printed press. A newcomer to the scene, the Major has great difficulty in understanding the power structures as well as the religious and ideological fault lines in Ireland at the time of the Troubles. At heart a liberal humanist, the Major empathizes with the Irish, but his mindset is at the same time deeply – and it seems, irrevocably – shaped by the ideologies of the British Empire. The Major is bewildered and confused by what he experiences at the

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Majestic. As he is the centre of consciousness and most of the action is transmitted via his perception, the novel’s atmosphere is disorienting and dream-like. The novel’s title, Troubles, is a multi-layered term. It is a perfect example of British understatement, having great comic potential, but failing to acknowledge the injustices of and actual resistance to the Empire. In the novel, ‘troubles’ mainly refers to the Irish War of Independence, but the term is also used for the Major’s continued troubles with the opposite sex, his problems with understanding Irish realities of the time, or for the trouble caused by the misbehaved twins. A grand spring ball, for which parts of the ruinous hotel are hastily patched up, is meant to re-establish the past splendour of the Majestic – and the Anglo-Irish ruling class it represents – but it inevitably ends in chaos and violence. A few days later, Edward Spencer, now fervently anti-Irish and increasingly losing his grip on reality, kills a young Sinn Féin militant (a “Shinner”) who tries to dynamite the statue of Queen Victoria standing in front of the hotel. In the end, Irish Republicans enter the premises, seize the Major together with a Black and Tan and try to kill him by burying him up to his neck on the beach, facing the incoming tide. Rescued by the old ladies and seeing the hotel set on fire by the ancient, uncanny butler Murphy, the Major eventually leaves the site of the Troubles.

2.2 The Siege of Krishnapur: The Crisis of the British in India The Siege of Krishnapur is set in India in 1857, during the uprising of native soldiers (sepoys), peasants and princes of Northern India against British rule. While in India these events have come to be seen as the ‘First Indian War of Independence’, the British referred to them as the ‘Indian Mutiny’. As in the case of the Irish Troubles, the term implies a downplaying of resistance and war-like states between colonisers and colonised. The ‘Mutiny’ became one of the key myths of Empire, narrated again and again as a story of British rule in acute danger – and then heroically regained. The events of 1857/58 emerged as a watershed in imperial history. The informal rule of the East India Company on the subcontinent ended, and India became a Crown colony, the British Raj. From the British perspective, the main events of the ‘Mutiny’ were the sieges of Lucknow and Cawnpore, where Anglo-Indian communities held out for months against the attacks of sepoys until relief came from British regiments shipped in from other theatres of Empire. These sieges were retold in countless ‘Mutiny-novels’, whose production and popularity continued until Indian Independence in 1947 and well beyond (see Erll 2007). Farrell relies strongly on the vast archive of Mutiny-literature: diaries, letters, memoirs, novels and histories, especially about the Siege of Lucknow (May – September 1857; the fictional ‘Siege of Krishnapur’ coincides with these dates). This archive is inserted, sometimes verbatim, into the novel, but in a way that consistently inverts the heroic myth of the ‘Mutiny’. Just like in Troubles, Farrell twists an existent liter-

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ary genre that was implicated in the ideology of imperialism: Mutiny-novels combine romance with imperial adventure story. They have a fairly conventionalized plot structure, featuring native treachery, British endurance and heroism, and a last-minute rescue of the besieged community. The Siege of Krishnapur is a parody of such imperialist Mutiny-novels. It turns its story of 1857 into mock-heroic, often ludicrous action in which the Anglo-Indian community appears pathetically impractical, and is gleefully watched by Indian spectators on a nearby hill. The Siege of Krishnapur is a novel about the epistemologies and ideologies underlying the British Empire, ‘a novel of ideas’, as Farrell stated in an interview. Its characters strongly believe in and continuously vent their ideas about Western civilisation, progress, nineteenth-century science and technology (from phrenology to electro-metallurgy to medicine), Christianity, the ‘civilising mission’ of the British in India, and the various ‘blessings’ of Empire for the ‘less developed peoples’. In the words of the novel’s District Collector: “The foundations on which the new men will build their lives are Faith, Science, Respectability, Geology, Mechanical Invention, Ventilation and Rotation of Crops!” (SK 80) Again, a British imperial community (this time Anglo-Indians) and a confined location (the Residency compound) provide the laboratory for the literary investigation into the historical dynamics of Empire. Quirky characters abound, whose Victorian mind-set makes their lives as difficult as the shelling by the sepoys. In the Residency of Krishnapur, the reader first encounters the Collector, Mr Hopkins, whose visit to the Great Exhibition of 1851 has furnished him with a plethora of objects and ideas about Western progress. (‘Collectors’ in British India were district administrators who collected revenues; but the novel turns this title into a telling name, as Mr Hopkins assembles and clutters the Residency with all kinds of things.) Next, there is the freethinking Magistrate, fascinated with phrenology, and his antagonists, the Protestant Padre and the Catholic priest. George Fleury is, like the Major in Troubles, a newcomer, a romantic and naïve young man, who has just arrived from England with his sister Miriam. They are well-received by the Anglo-Indian community, as their father is a Director of the East India Company, i.e. one of the most influential men in the British Empire. Beautiful Louise Dunstable is Fleury’s romantic interest. There is only one fully developed Indian character in the novel: Hari, the son of the local Maharaja, who was educated by English tutors and is fascinated by Western culture and science. Hari mimics the English (on more than one occasion misquoting Shakespeare) and has made daguerreotyping his hobby, taking portraits of the Anglo-Indian community. He is deeply disappointed when the Collector, hitherto his friend and patron, holds him hostage in the besieged Residency. There is also a ‘fallen woman’ in the Residency: Lucy Hughes, courted by Louise’s soldierly brother Harry, much to Louise’s horror. The Anglo-Indians’ disputes about the ‘fallen woman’ show how Victorian gender roles were implicated in the project of Empire. During the Indian Mutiny, ‘pure white women’ and ‘muscular Christian males’ were pitted against insurgent natives who were cast not only as a danger to

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the Empire and its ‘civilising mission’, but perhaps most of all to the virtue of Englishwomen, thus linking gender with race, religion, and politics (Sharpe 1993; Suleri 1992). The Siege of Krishnapur shows the debilitating effects of Victorian gender roles on both sexes (↗ 4 Gender). As in the case of the Siege of Lucknow, the Anglo-Indian community in the fictional Residency holds out despite constant shelling, hunger, thirst, cholera, many dead and decaying corpses all over the premises, and is rescued (or ‘relieved’) at the very last moment by British regiments. But in contrast to the archive of Mutiny-narratives, the characters do not emerge as heroes. In an outright debunking of the imperial myth, Farrell has the General of the relieving force realise: “Even when allowances were made, the ‘heroes of Krishnapur’, as he did not doubt they would soon be called, were a pretty rum lot.” (SK 310) The siege is imagined not only as a crisis of Empire, but most of all as a crisis of its hypocritical ideas. The Siege of Krishnapur places special emphasis on the materiality and materialism of nineteenth century imperialism. Objects are repeatedly, and tellingly, called ‘possessions’, thus linking them with colonisation. Just like the Great Exhibition, the Residency’s objects represent, in a Foucauldian sense, the colonial order of things. They embody British mastery of technology, and they establish hierarchies of objects and the civilisations that created them. In crisis, the objects’ functions are transformed, but they remain within the logic of Empire: during the siege, the possessions amassed in the Residency are used no longer as a sign of ‘culture’, but as its weaponry: they are hurled against and wreck havoc among the sepoys. The Collector is satisfied to see that Shakespeare’s head was, “perhaps not surprisingly, the most effective of all” (SK 289), a hint at the ambiguous role of Western education – specifically the literary canon – in the British colonies (Vishnavatan 1989; Bhabha 1994). ‘Culture’, ‘civilization’, and the objects these concepts represent are exposed in The Siege of Krishnapur as a thin veil obscuring the realities of British violence in India.

2.3 The Singapore Grip: The Loss of the Far-Eastern Empire The Singapore Grip imagines the city of Singapore during World War II. Strategically situated on the Strait of Malacca, which connects the Indian Ocean with the Pacific Ocean, the city was founded by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819 as a trading post for the East India Company. It became an important military base and commercial centre for the British in East Asia. The novel opens with a garden party in September 1940 and ends with the Japanese invasion of Singapore in February 1942. In this last part of the Trilogy, the focus has shifted to the classes that govern the colonies through big business. The patriarch Walter Blackett and his business partner Mr Webb of ‘Blackett & Webb’ are tycoons of the global rubber industry with a sphere of influence reaching across South and East Asia. Old Mr Webb’s death brings his son Matthew to the colony. He is an idealistic and bookish young man who has worked in

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Geneva for the League of Nations, in the Committee for International Understanding. Ironically, he now inherits interests in a firm whose international profits are based on the exploitation of workers and peasants. Old Blackett tries to marry off his beautiful but obnoxious daughter Joan to Matthew, thus hoping to gain power over the entire Blackett & Webb business empire. The young man is initially confused by his new surroundings and almost walks into the marriage trap, but he then declines politely and becomes involved with the Eurasian woman Vera Chiang. Vera, a Communist who claims to be the daughter of a Russian aristocrat and a Chinese merchant, has been in trouble with the Japanese in Hong Kong. Through Vera, Matthew gains access to the poor underbelly of Singapore. Matthew’s best friend from Oxford, the dapper, intelligent American Ehrendorf, is unhappily in love with Joan, but she and her family reject him because of his lack of money and influence. Surprisingly, the Major turns up again as a character in this novel. Twenty years after he left Ireland at the end of Troubles, we see him now as a middle-aged bachelor who has travelled East Asia, settled in Singapore, and become friends with old Webb and the Blackett household, introduced to them by the cynical Frenchman François Dupigny, an old acquaintance from World War I. Yet another British colonial ‘idyll’ (a dark and absurd Farrellian one, to be sure) is destroyed, this time by the Japanese invasion. Historically, this invasion surprised a complacent British military that had not reckoned with the determination of the Japanese to attack the ‘Fortress Singapore’. It is remembered as a devastating humiliation for the British Empire. With Singapore in flames and Japanese soldiers seizing the city, Matthew and Vera manage to escape as refugees, albeit under harrowing circumstances. Matthew ends up in a Japanese internment camp, hoping that Vera may still be alive. The affluent and crafty Blacketts, however, sail off comfortably to more peaceful parts of the Empire. Again, Farrell zooms in on a small community of British people who witness a major crisis of Empire and the crumbling of the colonial setting that had become their lifeworld – a world of great injustices, into which they had complacently and unthinkingly settled. But in this last novel of the Trilogy, Farrell also ventures to other parts of and perspectives on the Empire: next to the rich suburb of Tanglin there is crowded, poverty-stricken Chinatown. On the battlefields of Malaya, the novel offers insight into the consciousness of the simple Japanese soldier Kikuchi as well as into the dreams of General Arthur Percival (the first historical figure whom Farrell furnishes with a complex perspective). The Singapore Grip is a meticulously researched novel, including a great amount of precise data and figures. Farrell went to Singapore for research, and he studied (and acknowledges in a long bibliography) the existent literature on the East Asian rubber industry and World War II in Asia. As preparation for this novel he also intensively read Marx and Engels. The result is a panoramatic historical novel of some 670 pages, which has been compared to Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The detailed descriptions of warfare and its tactics as well as the lengthy discourses on the relation of capital-

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ism to imperialism may seem tedious to some readers. But the tendency towards a historicist roman à thèse is alleviated by the typical Farrellian, highly absurdist drift that characterizes this novel. In many scenes of bitter comedy, The Singapore Grip stages the socio-economic and cultural consequences of capitalism in the age of imperialism. A strong symbol of capitalist self-fashioning is the carnival parade that old Blackett is planning for his firm’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations. The bleak realities behind Blackett’s bright vision of British business in East Asia are explored through a number of leitmotifs, for example that of the relation between love/sex and money. In equally obscene and comic scenes, Blackett tries to pimp his own daughter, Joan, for the good of his business empire. Prostitution, which appears to govern much of life in Singapore, turns into a symbol of capitalism and its dynamics. The novel’s title, The Singapore Grip, is, like Troubles, an extended metaphor whose changing meanings shed light on the significance of British colonialism in East Asia. When Ehrendorf explains that the term refers to a sexual practice of the city’s whores, Matthew counters, “It is the grip of our Western culture and economy on the Far East” (SG 588). In a scene reminiscent of a Homeric descent to the underworld, Matthew is led by Vera to a Chinese ‘dying house’. Here he learns how his firm’s ‘grip’ impacts on simple peasants. Old rubber planters tell him how Blackett & Webb have cheated them of their livelihood. The passage provides insight into how Western business destroys local economies, and it also shows the inadvertent implication of even oppositional thinkers like Matthew, whose Oxford education and charitable work in Geneva were of course funded by these very business practices, in the exploitative system of Empire. If the focus of The Siege of Krishnapur is on the British Empire as a phenomenon of imperialist ideas and ideologies, then The Singapore Grip presents Empire first and foremost as a ruthless money-making machine, which forces all human relations into its inhumane logic. At the end of a trilogy on the British Empire, what hopes are there for a post-imperial future? The Singapore Grip provides the usual bleak Farrellian view, frequently articulated by the cynical Frenchman Dupigny as well as by Ehrendorf’s ‘Second Law’: “The human situation is slightly worse […] at any given moment than at any preceding moment.” (SG 327) But there is a flicker of hope in the transcultural relation between Matthew and Vera, which is described with much less mockery than any other love relationship in the Trilogy.

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3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies 3.1 The British Empire as a Carnivalesque Triptych [A]lthough I may start out with the most serious and measured intentions, everything I touch has a habit of turning to the absurd. (Farrell in a letter to a friend, 5 August 1969; in Greacan 2009, 175)

The Empire Trilogy is characterized by its constant use of various registers of the comic mingled with the serious: satire, parody, dramatic irony, wry sarcasm, the absurd, and the grotesque are its major modes of conveying the violent history of the British Empire. Merrit Moseley finds that “Farrell’s fiction has a distinctive style or atmosphere that combines the comic and elegiac, the dreadful and preposterous”, a certain way of laconically transmitting “outrageous material” (Moseley 2011, 490). Farrell’s style continually evokes a mixture of outrage and laughter in the reader. Among the Trilogy’s recurrent literary strategies are character constellations that bring a naïve outsider (the Major, Fleury, Matthew Webb) in contact with a community of British colonialists (Anglo-Irish, Anglo-Indian, and the British in Singapore). These outsiders provide a central perspective on the events (they are all internal focalisers), a point of view characterized by their equally comic and futile attempts to understand the bewildering logic of Empire and the upheavals they witness. Their insecurity is counterpointed by the self-assurance of the Empire’s representatives, all depicted with animal-like features (Edward Spencer as leonine, the Collector as a big cat, Walter Blackett as a wild boar, with bristles on his spine that stand up whenever he gets excited), but who in the end all lose their grip on reality, go outright mad, or are thoroughly disillusioned. With the Trilogy’s focus on the social interaction of quirky British characters, Farrell appears to write in the tradition of the comedy of manners, but he gives this genre a distinctive twist with his dark and disorienting scenes that frequently cross the border between reality and phantasmagoria – a strategy that Lars Hartveit (1992) has identified (with a view to Troubles) as Bakhtinian carnivalesque. In fact, the strategy of turning the history of Empire into a carnivalesque spectacle is what unites all three, otherwise in many ways different, novels. Social realism mingles with the grotesque, the world turns into a mundus inversus, parody and strong antitheses abound. But instead of the vitality, utopianism and the “joyful relativity” that Bakhtin (1984, 170) assigns to carnival, Farrell’s dark anti-imperial carnivalesque conveys decay, dystopianism, and disorientation. The specific styles the three novels create are quite distinct. In Troubles, the grotesque, Gothic, and the Kafkaesque prevail and contribute to the novel’s predominantly modernist style. The Siege of Krishnapur, which leans more towards postmodernism, emphasizes parody and creates a consistent mundus inversus. The Singapore Grip is less histrionic than the earlier novels; it combines comedy with economic and

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historical analysis, and conveys a stronger sense of social realism. However, the carnivalesque returns in this novel, too, and becomes manifest in the many unintended ironies of Blackett’s carnival parade (a cynical appropriation of demotic counter-culture by a member of the ruling classes). The Empire Trilogy is, as Farrell suggested, best seen as a triptych, and a carnivalesque one at that (the grotesque-carnivalesque triptychs by Hieronymus Bosch or Max Beckmann may come to mind). It is a three-partite work of art that can be read in any order, that features common themes and recurrent literary strategies, but that nevertheless allows for three different aesthetic experiences, and has three distinct ways of addressing historical watersheds aesthetically and epistemologically. The functions of the carnivalesque in the Trilogy vary, sometimes impliying a critique of history, imperialism, capitalism, or gender relations, sometimes creating comic relief, and in some instances effecting comic empowerment. One example of the latter is the pub-scene in Troubles, when the residents of the Majestic enter the local pub and provocatively intone “God Save the King”, only to be surprised by the reaction of the Catholic regulars. They offer “a rolling storm of applause and laughter”, and cheerfully join in the song (T 84). As John McLeod (2007, 39) has pointed out, this Irish response converts the “imperialist gravitas into the stuff of levity via an act of parody and repetition”. In fact “[m]uch of Farrell’s analysis works precisely in this fashion” (McLeod 2007, 39). Yet despite its strong leanings towards the comic, the seriousness of the Trilogy never falls from view. Margaret Drabble (1982 [1981], 178) emphasizes that it deals with “nothing less than the nature of colonialism, the end of an Empire, and the end of an ideology.”

3.2 Authorial Narration, Unreliable Focalisation, Contrapuntal Structure All three novels of the Empire Trilogy feature an authorial narrator who appears at the beginning and the end of each novel, thus framing the stories by acts of authoritative narration. Bergonzi (1979, 58) has compared the novels’ first sentences and found that there “is the same detached and knowledgeable descriptive register, the same calmly assured tone”. The authorial narrators introduce the setting, convey a panoramic perspective, and know even at the very beginning about the disastrous outcomes of their tales. Very few hints are given as to the character of these authorial voices. Troubles places the phrase “says my grandfather with a smile” in parenthesis (T 4) and thus establishes the idea of an inter-generational transmission of the history of Empire. The grandchild-narrator is (just like the author) ‘born after’ the historical events he records and therefore relies on family memory, rumour, and – increasingly in the following novels – on historical documents. In The Singapore Grip, the authorial narrator is staged as a historian-novelist with a Marxist consciousness: in a metafictional moment at the outset of the novel, s/he reminds readers in an explicit address of their

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interdependence with the “[m]ute gigantic labour force” that is also connected “to you thousands of miles away, reading in bed or in a deckchair on the lawn, or to me as I sit writing at a table” (SG 6). After the first two or three pages of each novel, the authorial narrator recedes into the background, leaving the stage to the characters, who act as internal focalisers of the narrated events. Troubles stands out in the Trilogy in that internal focalisation is fixed: it is the Major whose myopic, often disoriented way of perceiving the events becomes the main source of information for the reader. His highly unreliable focalisation is only sometimes rectified by the narrator’s wry ironical comments. The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip are multiperspectivally focalised and reveal the inside views of a variety of characters and their competing versions of reality. However, the various perspectives can never be pieced together to form a reliable picture of historical realities. The fact that the characters’ often-bizarre outlooks on the world are rarely judged – neither by the narrator nor by a character-centre of normative orientation – results in strongly polyphonic structures, for Bakhtin the result of the carnivalesque in the modern novel. The most striking effects of the Trilogy are created by the configuration of the narrated events. All three novels display a contrapuntal structure, another key feature of the carnivalesque. Drabble (1982 [1981], 178) notes that Farrell usually accompanies “more solemn reflections with a pathetic or ludicrous physical activity”. In The Singapore Grip, for example, Matthew’s serious expositions about the aims of the League of Nations at Blackett’s dinner party are counterpointed with the characters’ generously helping themselves to, and thinking mainly about, the delicate food. This counterpointing of actions that happen simultaneously creates cinematic effects and corresponds to ‘parallel editing’ in film. Other examples of such parallel editing are, in The Siege of Krishnapur, a dying soldier incongruously singing a heroic song of the Crimean War while the doctors at the Residency’s makeshift hospital are fighting over correct ways of treating their patients, while in The Singapore Grip, a long list of movies shown at Singapore cinemas in early 1942 is interpolated with information about Japanese air raids and the arrival of refugees and troops from other parts of the Empire. The strategy common in Troubles is to follow the Major’s mental ramblings while outrageous events that he barely notices or understands are unfolding. The absurd effects are obvious. The critical potential of such counterpointing lies in the insights it grants into the simultaneity of great historical events and profane everyday activities, and into the fact that human beings do not usually register such events properly, let alone remember them correctly. Next to parallel editing, the novels also counterpoint non-simultaneous action, thus creating juxtapositions that are distributed across the story. The Siege of Krishnapur starts with a scene of the colonisers’ carefree picnic in the Botanical Gardens of Calcutta. Much later in the story, wealthy Indians assemble on a slope above the Residency to watch the spectacle of the siege, contently picnicking and amusedly watching the “feringhees fighting for their lives” (SK 174). There are, thirdly,

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implicit types of counterpointing which rely on the readers’ contextual knowledge: When Hari takes a daguerreotype of Fleury, and the Englishman’s “head was forced firmly back” with Hari “tightening two thin metal clamps […] above each ear” (SK 81), readers may be reminded of the inverse reality of nineteenth-century ethnographic photographic projects such as The People of India (1868–1875).

3.3 Representing History, Remembering Empire After the publication of Troubles, Farrell characterized his approach to history in the following way: It is a common misconception that when the historians have finished with a historical incident there remains nothing but a patch of feathers and a pair of feet; in fact, the most important things, for the very reason that they are trivial, are unsuitable for digestion by historians, who are only able to nourish themselves on the signing of treaties, battle strategies, the formation of Shadow Cabinets and so forth. These matters are quite alien to the life most people lead, which consists of catching colds, falling in love, or falling off bicycles. It is this real life which is the novelist’s concern (though, needless to say, realism is not the only way to represent it). One of the things I have tried to do in Troubles is to show people ‘undergoing’ history, to use an expression of Sartre’s. (Farrell 1970, 399)

This focus on the small scales of history, on the lived past, and its significance for the people enmeshed in historical events is central to all three novels of the Empire Trilogy. As the perspective of those ‘undergoing history’ remains firmly with the British colonial classes, the Empire Trilogy belongs to a ‘postimperial’ – rather than to a ‘postcolonial’ – body of English historical fiction (↗ 5 The Burden of Representation). When Farrell started writing Troubles, the period he represented lay half a century in the past – almost the ‘sixty years since’ that Walter Scott claimed to be the ideal temporal distance for a historical novel. For Farrell, the theme of the Irish Troubles of 1919–1921 “appeared to be safely lodged in the past” (Farrell 1970, 399), but assumed an “unintended topicality” (Farrell 1970, 399) as Northern Ireland was shaken by a new round of Troubles starting in 1968. Farrell’s fictions of the Raj and World War II in East Asia also resonated in many ways with political events and the social climate of the 1970s: a troubled economy, inflation and strikes, the visible presence of immigrants from former colonies, profound generational change (1968), nostalgia about the lost Empire (especially the Raj), a much-invested myth about British heroism in World War II, and, on an international level, the Vietnam War. Rather than addressing a ‘completed past’, the Trilogy offers a sense of the continuities and legacies of the history of Empire, thus suggesting that people will be ‘undergoing history’ again and again, in essentially the same ways.

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The anachronic arrangement of the Trilogy (1919 – 1857 – 1942) signals that these are historical fictions that do not imply ‘a (or the) history’ of the British Empire, with a beginning, middle, and end, and with a teleological structure of progress or regression. The idea of a ‘triptych’, which allows viewers to look at three images of crisis at the same time, or in an order of his/her own choice, emphasises the Trilogy’s non-linear vision of history. But while the Empire Trilogy does not tell ‘a history’ of Empire, it clearly deals with imperial history. Its main thrust is to challenge and deconstruct imperial discourse and to expose the socio-economic conditions it helped produce and maintain  – a discourse which was transmitted largely unquestioned into the postimperial times of Farrell’s writing, and which impeded a reckoning with the imperial past. Whether it is the euphemism of ‘troubles’ in the Empire, the rhetoric of the ‘civilising mission’, or of ‘benign’ capitalist rule, the three novels show how ways of speaking about the Empire shaped lasting imperial mentalities and legitimised exploitative systems. With the carnivalesque as their main mode of representation, they satirise and deflate imperial discourse, exposing its contradictions. And by installing members of the British colonial classes as internal focalisers, the novels show how powerful clichés of imperial discourse work in the minds of historical actors. Instead of fictionalising the histories of politicians, generals, and other ‘great men’ (i.e. following the conventional ways of writing historical novels), Farrell focuses on characters who are merely tangential to ‘History’, but whose lives are irrevocably shaped by historical transformations. This move is much in line with the ‘history of mentalities’ and the ‘history from below’ that gained popularity in the 1970s. The novels’ turn from authorial narration to unreliable and multiperspectival focalisation highlights the perspectivity of all versions of the past. These features clearly place the Empire Trilogy as part of the postmodern historical novel emerging at the time. While Farrell’s novels do not demonstrate the radical literary experiments that epitomise the genre of ‘historiographic metafiction’ (Hutcheon 1988; Nünning 1995), they do have ‘postmodern’ or ‘metahistorical moments’, most of all The Siege of Krishnapur. The most striking postmodern aspect of how the Trilogy represents history is its frequent use of interdiscursivity and intertextuality, critically referring to the archives of imperial discourse and imperialist historiography. Examples are the use of imperialist clichés and of ‘grand narratives’, such as that of modernisation, which Walter Blackett teaches as a ‘history lesson’ to all Joan’s young suitors, showing them paintings of Rangoon as the “sleepy little village” it was before Western capitalism transformed it into a “great modern city” (SG 12). Other postmodern techniques include the parodic rewriting of genres (the Big House novel, the Mutiny novel) that expressed and shaped imperialist mentalities, and the strategy of montage, such as the insertion of historical newspaper clippings into the fictional narrative of Troubles. A closer look at these newspaper clippings reveals how the Trilogy not only speaks the language of metahistoriographic fiction of its time, but also anticipated insights of more recent studies in Empire and global history. The thirty newspaper extracts,

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all historically genuine, provide the official Anglo-Irish version of the War of Independence, taken, as they are, from the Irish Times, the leading unionist press organ in Ireland. These set a sharp contrast to the private, restricted and cloudy perspective of the Major, and thus highlight (in metahistorical fashion) the different perspectives underlying different versions of ‘historical reality’. But many of the clippings refer to other events and places, for example, India, Italy, Russia, Poland, South Africa, Mesopotamia, and Chicago. Through montage, the novel points to the worldwide system of Empire, which created similar discontents in places like Ireland, India, and South Africa. The clippings also hint at the significance of Communism (the first is about Trotzky in Russia) for anti-colonial resistance movements across the world (Young 2001), a “wider transnational set of resistances to Empire” and other “imperious forms of government” (McLeod 2007, 48; see also Hooper 2002). Another postmodern feature of the Trilogy is its consciousness about the role of media in the construction of history. Looking at Edward Spencer’s wooden memorial for the fallen placed in the Majestic’s dining room, the Major muses: “On what basis had selection been made? […] There were so many ways in which the vast army of the dead could be drilled, classified, inspected, and made to present their ghostly arms” (T 41). The making of history emerges here as a process of selection and arrangement, much in the way that Farrell’s contemporary Hayden White had expounded in Metahistory (1973). The Trilogy is pervaded by metahistoriographic symbols, such as Angela’s letters to the front, which are full of the smallest factual details about life at the Majestic, but fail to provide a coherent narrative about the Spencer family, and inexplicably omit her own sickness and the existence of her brother Ripon. Farrell’s novels are not only a contribution to the field of metahistoriographic fiction i.e. literary reflections about the writing of history. Their most memorable examples of a consciousness about the making of history are derived from the field of visual media (a field that Hayden White would acknowledge only in 1988 with an article called “Historiophoty”). The Siege of Krishnapur highlights the role of nineteenth-century historical painting in the creation of imperialist images of history. The General of the relieving force muses that now, after the siege was ended, he would have to pose for hours, holding a sword and perched on a trestle or wooden horse while some artist-wallah depicted ‘The Relief of Krishnapur’! He must remember to insist on being in the foreground, however; then it would not be so bad. With luck this wretched selection of ‘heroes’ would be given the soft pedal […] an indistinct crowd of corpses and a few grateful faces, cannons and prancing horses would be best. (SK 310)

This passage ironically exposes the conventions of mythologizing Empire heroes in visual media. It refers to imperial history painting and seems to evoke, in an ironic ekphrasis Thomas Jones Barker’s iconic The Relief of Lucknow (1859). In similar fashion, the novel addresses ‘new’ media of the time and their work on the historical imagination: in the midst of fighting against the sepoys, Fleury notices a “historical quality, because everything appeared faintly blurred as in a Crimean daguerreotype”

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(SK 148). The Trilogy explores how the forms and norms of (visual) media representation have shaped cultural conceptions of heroism and Empire. Media emerge here, with a nod to Farrell’s contemporary Marshall McLuhan, as ‘the extensions of imperialist man’. The Empire Trilogy exposes the medial constructedness of imperial history and the tenacity of imperialist discourse. Its aim is to satirize and expose the powerful self-representations of the British Empire as a thin veil covering the actual injustices of imperialism. However, the Trilogy is not concerned with exposing its three novels, and history in general, as ‘fiction’, i.e. with the radical metafictional and metahistoriographic position that characterizes the novels of John Fowles (↗ 15 John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman), and later Julian Barnes. While postmodern in its debunking of the truth-claims made by imperialist history, the Trilogy does search for narrative, social, and restorative truths about the history of the British Empire (to use a distinction by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee), especially in The Singapore Grip, when dying Malayan peasants narrate their histories or when Asian prostitutes appear as internal focalisers. It is also concerned with factual truth when it delves into the British Empire’s socio-economic dynamics and its devastating effects on wide regions of the world. In that sense, the novels are not only postmodern historical fictions, but also a form of critical postimperial memory.

3.4 Problems of Representation Farrell’s writing clearly shows, as Bergonzi (1979, 65) points out, an “interest in extravagant or unbalanced personalities. In this respect there is a Dickensian strain” in his novels. There are only few likeable characters in the Trilogy, and no figures of identification. This is a result of the chosen genres and modes (satire, parody, the carnivalesque, the grotesque). It is also political program: Farrell does not allow his readers to sit back comfortably and follow the action and thoughts of a character, who would be cast as a reliable centre of orientation. The mess and mayhem that the Empire was, and its chaotic legacy, are mirrored in the Trilogy’s form of representation. The novels deal with difficult historical constellations and have them lived through by difficult characters. In this respect, Farrell’s work differs from the more reconciliatory (and also more nostalgic) Empire-novels by E. M. Forster (↗ 8 E. M. Forster, A Passage to India) or Paul Scott, who distribute sympathy and antipathy much more evenly among their casts of characters. However, many critics have found the depiction of non-British characters in Farrell’s Trilogy disconcerting. In Troubles, Irish Catholic characters are represented in a very clichéd way: the unnamed cook is incredibly fat, and her speech utterly incomprehensible to the Major. The old, “hideous, cadaverous” (T 451) butler Murphy is a sinister figure and part of the novel’s Gothic inventory. Sarah Devlin is a more complex character who gets significant portions of dialogue, but her paralysis and

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her love-hate relationship with the Anglo-Irish suggest a reading of her as a problematic allegory of Ireland (on misleading allegories in Farrell’s Troubles, see Bényei 2014). If the Irish Catholics are presented in a rather unflattering way, the Anglo-Irish do not fare much better. Surveying the guests at the Majestic’s grand ball, the Major reflects: “This was the face of Anglo-Ireland, the inbred Protestant aristocracy […]: the wispy fair hair, the eyes too close together, the long nose and protruding teeth” (T 339). This passage shows how Farrell’s ample use of free indirect discourse – by definition an ambiguous, double-voiced discourse – complicates any straightforward reading or critique of such invectives. The passage appears to represent the Major’s thoughts, but is articulated by the narrator’s voice. It is difficult to judge how much is authorial (and authoritative) discourse and how much is the epiphany of an unreliable focaliser. This is another instance of the Trilogy’s counterpointing structure: the racist ideas of British colonisers are now directed towards themselves. The representation of Indians in The Siege of Krishnapur is rather problematic. Drabble (1982 [1981], 190) notices that it “has been objected that the sepoys are never shown as people at all, but merely as cannon-fodder, and comic fodder at that” (see also Singh 1979). The only developed Indian character, Hari, is a ridiculous ‘mimic man’. The depiction of his father, the Maharaja, is replete with racist stereotypes reminiscent of Mutiny-novels: he is shown as a lazily sleeping, farting, and womanizing patriarch. These are the stakes that Farrell takes with his parodic approach, “the risk created by any parodic strategy, since such narratives have to install the very conventions which are to be satirized” (McLeod 2007, 66). The Siege of Krishnapur repeats, but also to a certain extent seems to indulge in, the stereotypes that it sets out to criticise. Most problems of representation, and most misunderstandings in the Trilogy’s reception, arise from the fact that Farrell represents almost exclusively British perspectives on the Empire. Apart from a few passages in The Singapore Grip, the Trilogy does not offer perspectives from the colonised peoples. With a view to Troubles, Margaret Scalan (1990, 61) maintains that “a restricted narrative view shuts out the Catholic Irish and thereby becomes complicit in their dehumanization by the British”. On the other hand, there is not a single British perspective that the Trilogy would endorse as entirely sound. In a sensitive reading of Farrell’s fiction, John McLeod (2007, 8) concludes: Although Farrell could never fully articulate the experience of Empire from the perspective of the colonized – the Catholic Irish peasantry, Indian sepoys, the Chinese and others in Malaya – his commitment to contesting the attitudes which kept such people in servitude and poverty […] affords the Empire Trilogy an important political dimension.

As relentlessly critical postimperial literature, Farrell’s work carries the genre of Empire fiction far beyond the writings of E. M. Forster, Paul Scott or John Masters. But with its

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restricted perspective structure, the Empire Trilogy also seems to call for complementary representations of postcolonial perspectives, as we find them, for example, in the novels of Sam Selvon (↗ 13 Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners), Salman Rushdie (↗ 20 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses) or Zadie Smith (↗ 24 Zadie Smith, White Teeth; see also ↗ 5 The Burden of Representation).

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Farrell’s writing has enjoyed a continued life with reading audiences, and seen intensified interest since the turn of the millennium: The New York Review of Books republished the Empire Trilogy (with new introductions by John Banville, Pankaj Mishra and Derek Mahon) between 2002 and 2005. In 1999, the first biography of J. G. Farrell appeared, Lavinia Greacen’s J. G. Farrell: The Making of a Writer (Bloomsbury). Cork University Press published a collection of his letters in 2009 (Farrell in His Own Words, ed. Lavinia Greacen). More than fifty years after Farrell’s first Booker Prize, the publishers Matthes & Seitz (Berlin) have released translations of the Trilogy’s novels into German (to date, Troubles, 2013; Die Belagerung von Krishnapur, 2015). While the Empire Trilogy was always popular with reading audiences, it posed a conundrum for literary critics, and one can narrate a history of literary studies from the 1970s to the present by studying the changing reactions to Farrell’s work. In the 1980s and early 1990s the Trilogy had fallen out of favour – few of the numerous introductions to the English novel of that time granted Farrell more than a cursory glance – but it was revived and read in new ways from the mid-1990s onwards (Prusse 1997; Crane and Livett 1997; Crane 1999). Two main frames of reception determined this process of de- and re-evaluation. First, there is the frame of experimental postmodernist fiction, especially that of historiographic metafiction (a term coined by Linda Hutcheon, 1988, who does not even mention Farrell). When compared with B. S. Johnson (↗ 16 B. S. Johnson, The Unfortunates) or John Fowles (↗  15  John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman), i.e. with more radical experiments, Farrell’s work appeared to critics of the 1980s as conventional realism, and was often dismissed as such. Even scholars who held Farrell in high esteem tended to discuss his work along the axes of ‘realism vs. experimentalism’ – a problematic dichotomy that has shaped much of postmodernist literary criticism. Bergonzi described Farrell’s work as “conscious realism” (1979, 57), as novels that “rethought its [realism’s] possibilities” (1979, 64). In one of the first book-length studies after the classic interpretation of Farrell’s work by Roland Binns (1986), Crane and Livett (1997, 85) describe the ‘problem’ that “Farrell’s attention to historical sources and his skilful interweaving of documented events with fictional characters has tended to work against his critical reputation rather than for it.” They tease out the experimental, intertextual and metafictional aspects of Farrell’s work.

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However, both, the rejection and the recuperation of Farrell’s Trilogy were based on an understanding of postmodern experimental styles as better suited to address the past (and its constructions) than realist modes of writing – and thus followed the very teleological vision of (literary) history that Farrell and other contemporary authors sought to expose as an ideological construct of Western modernity. Second, there is the frame of ‘Commonwealth literature’, and later that of ‘postcolonial literature’. In the 1970s and 1980s, Farrell’s novels were, for various reasons, not seen as part of the then-emerging Commonwealth literature: first, because the Trilogy featured mainly British perspectives on the Empire (and not those of colonised people), and second, because Ireland was not considered a Commonwealth nation (it had left the Commonwealth in 1948). Scalan (1990, 50–51) has pointed out that Farrell’s inclusion of a novel about Ireland into a trilogy about the British Empire was in fact a “political statement”. Moreover, Farrell’s work was often misread as a continuation of ‘Empire writing’ in the line of the Raj novels by Kipling, Forster, John Masters, M. M. Kaye and Paul Scott. But whereas such novels evoke to varying degrees nostalgia of Empire, and uncritically (and unwittingly) draw on imperial plots and discourses, Farrell’s interdiscursive and intertextual references are clearly conscious dealings with an imperial archive – and this archive is exposed in its absurdity and treachery. Rather than seeing Farrell’s writing as the end of a line of elegiac Empire writing, critics of postcolonial studies now place Farrell at the beginning of a movement: one that addresses imperial discourse in anticipation of Edward Said’s (1978) work, that deals with the culture of Empire, as later theorized by Homi Bhabha (1994), and that places Irish postcolonialism on the agenda. John McLeod, currently the most important critic of Farrell, delivered the first successful re-reading of the Empire Trilogy through a postcolonial lens. Given Spivak’s discussion of the problem of “being constituted by Western liberalism”, McLeod (1994, 117) sees the Siege of Krishnapur “as a strategic intervention in one specific manifestation of colonial discourse, an intervention which depends upon the novel inhabiting those very structures it seeks to disassemble.” Emphasizing the initial position of Farrell’s Trilogy and its generative potential, McLeod maintains that it was an inspiration for many postcolonial writers such as Salman Rushdie (↗ 20 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses), Kazuo Ishiguro, Timothy Mo, Matthew Kneale, and Amitav Ghosh. A third lens, which has implicitly shaped parts of this essay, embeds the Trilogy within the memory culture of its time. When read against the background of British postimperial memory culture of the 1960s and 1970s – or rather, its culture of forgetting  – and of existent research on ‘postimperial melancholia’ (Gilroy 2004), ‘memories of Empire’ (Schwarz 2011), or on Irish history as ‘trauma’ (Garrett 2011), then Farrell’s achievement falls into sharp relief. It consists of the relentless articulation of the imperial past and its cultural and socio-economic dynamics – topics that, at the time, were rarely grasped in their complexity and continuing impact, and that were conveniently silenced and ‘forgotten’. Articulating the ‘once-monstrous’ theme of Empire, the ‘Elephant in the Room’ of postimperial Britain, and thus overcoming

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‘colonial aphasia’ (Stoler 2011) is Farrell’s greatest achievement. That the Empire Trilogy’s specific mode of address is a mixture of realism and absurdist comedy is interesting: laughter has not seldom been a key mode of addressing a deeply troubling past. The carnivalisation of history is a tool that writers tend to draw on in societies which were responsible for (or implicated in) historical crimes and injustices. Thus, grouping Farrell’s writing with Günter Grass’ grotesque or J. M. Coetzee’s dark comedy would open up new ways of reading the Empire Trilogy.

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Farrell, J. G. Troubles. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1993 [1970]. Farrell, J. G. The Siege of Krishnapur. London: Phoenix, 2003 [1973]. Farrell, J. G. The Singapore Grip. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2010 [1978]. --Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Transl. C. Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Bényei, Tamás. “Melancholy Interest: J. G. Farrell’s Troubles and the Politics of Perspective.” The 1970s. A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction. Ed. Nick Hubble, John McLeod, and Philip Tew. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. 215–241. Bergonzi, Bernard. “Fictions of History.” The Contemporary English Novel. Ed. Malcom Bradbury and D. J. Palmer. London: Edward Arnold, 1979. 43–65. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Binns, Ronald. J. G. Farrell. London: Methuen, 1986. Brock, George. “Epitaph for the Empire.” Interview with J. G. Farrell. Observer Magazine, 24 September 1978: 13. Crane, Ralph J., ed. J. G. Farrell: The Critical Grip. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999. Crane, Ralph J., and Jennifer Livett, eds. Troubled Pleasures: The Fiction of J. G. Farrell. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997. Dean, Malcom. “Grip of Empire.” Interview with J. G. Farrell. The Guardian, 13 September 1978: 10. Drabble, Margaret. “Things Fall Apart.” The Hill Station. Ed. John Spurling. London: Fontana 1982 [1981]. 178–191. Erll, Astrid. Prämediation – Remediation. Repräsentationen des indischen Aufstands in imperialen und post-kolonialen Medienkulturen (von 1857 bis zur Gegenwart). Trier: WVT, 2007. Farrell, J. G. “J. G. Farrell Comments.” Contemporary Novelists. Ed. James Vinson. London: St James Press, 1970. 399–400. Farrell, J. G. The Hill Station: An Unfinished Novel and an Indian Diary. Ed. John Spurling. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981. Garratt, Robert F. Trauma and History in the Irish Novel: The Return of the Dead. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Greacen, Lavinia. J. G. Farrell: The Making of a Writer. London: Bloomsbury, 1999. Greacen, Lavinia, ed. J. G. Farrell in His Own Words: Selected Letters and Diaries. Cork: Cork University Press, 2009.

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Hartveit, Lars. “The Carnivalistic Impulse in J. G. Farrell’s Troubles.” English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 73.5 (1992): 444–457. Hooper, Glen. “Troublesome Tales. J. G. Farrell and the Decline of Empire.” Irish and Postcolonial Writing. History, Theory, Practice. Ed. Glen Hooper and Colin Graham. Basingstoke: Palgrave 2002. 222–249. McLeod, John. “Exhibiting Empire in J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 29.2 (1994): 117–132. McLeod, John. J. G. Farrell. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2007. Moseley, Merritt. “Revaluation: J. G. Farrell’s Troubles.” Sewanee Review 119.3 (2011): 489–493. Nünning, Ansgar. “‘Make miniatures of the once-monstrous theme…’ Formen und Funktionen der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Niedergang des Britischen Empire in J. G. Farrells Romanwerk.” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 18.2 (1993): 159–179. Prescott, Lynda. “The Indian Connection in J. G. Farrell’s Troubles.” Irish Studies Review 11.2 (2003): 165–173. Prusse, Michael C. ‘Tomorrow is Another Day’: The Fictions of James Gordon Farrell. Tübingen: Francke, 1997. Said, Edward. Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Scanlan, Margaret. Traces of Another Time: History and Politics in Postwar British Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Sharpe, Jenny. Allegories of Empire. The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Singh, Frances B. “Progress and History in J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur.” Chandrabhaga: A Magazine of World Writing 2 (1979): 23–39. Spurling, John. “As Does the Bishop.” The Hill Station. Ed. John Spurling. London: Fontana, 1982 [1981]. 155–177. Spurling, John. “Unlucky Jim.” Observer Review, 15 August 1999: 11. Stoler, Ann L. “Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France.” Public Culture 23.1 (2011): 121–156. Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. White, Hayden. “Historiography and Historiophoty.” The American Historical Review 93.5 (1988): 1193–1199.

5.2 Further Reading Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? London: Routledge, 2004. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Nünning, Ansgar. Von historischer Fiktion zu historiographischer Metafiktion. 2 Vols. Trier: WVT, 1995. Schwarz, Bill. Memories of Empire. Volume I: The White Man’s World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest. Literary Study and the British Rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Young, Robert. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

Christoph Reinfandt

18 William Golding, Darkness Visible (1979) Abstract: In a somewhat bold move, this chapter analyses William Golding’s novel Darkness Visible (1979) rather than his perennial classic Lord of the Flies (1954) as a cornerstone of his œuvre and the history of twentieth-century fiction at large. While Golding’s novels generally tend to address the world in distinctly metaphysical and religious terms in historically or geographically remote settings, Darkness Visible was singled out for its direct confrontation of Golding’s moral concerns with late-twentieth century British society. The novel pits Golding’s earlier fable-like inclinations against realist necessities and formal adventurousness, thus placing the novel squarely in the history of twentieth-century fiction between realism, modernism and postmodernism and resulting in a spiritual realism that positions itself precariously between metaphysics and metafiction. After analysing the novel’s highly representative cast of characters in their varying affiliations with principles of Good and Evil, the chapter addresses the wide range of narrative and literary strategies on display in the novel and ends with an assessment of Golding’s unique positioning in terms of reception and theoretical perspectives. Keywords: Allegory, realism, religion, metaphysics, metafiction

1 Context: Author, Œuvre, Moment William Golding’s standing as one of the most eminent novelists of the twentieth century rests on three foundations. There is, firstly, the success of his first published novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), which became an instant classic and classroom favourite after the manuscript, originally titled Strangers from Within, had been rejected by twenty publishers before it was taken on by Faber and Faber at the instigation of a young editor, Charles Monteith. Secondly, in 1983, Golding became the last British writer in the twentieth century to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. And, finally and more generally, Golding’s œuvre is exceptional because he is one of the few writers of the second half of the twentieth century who insists on writing “parables of the human condition” (britannica.com: “Golding, William”) without fully discarding an interest in metaphysics and religion (cf. Broich 1984; Gregor 1986). Typically, Golding placed his inquiries into existential problems of morality in spatially and/ or temporally remote settings such as the uninhabited island in Lord of the Flies, the last days of Neanderthal man in The Inheritors (1955), a (symbolic) rock in the Atlantic in Pincher Martin (1954), the middle ages in The Spire (1964), a voyage on ship from England to Australia during the Napoleonic wars in his ‘sea trilogy’ To the Ends of DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-019

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the Earth (comprising the Booker Prize winning Rites of Passage 1980, Close Quarters 1987, and Fire Down Below 1989) or the Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece in The Double Tongue, posthumously published in 1995. As a result, most of his novels seem somewhat distanced from the mainstream of both realist and modernist fiction and clearly foreground their fable-like design, as Golding himself pointed out programmatically with regard to Lord of the Flies in an early essay entitled “Fable” in 1962 (Golding 1984a, 85–101). Accordingly, Golding criticism has been marked by a tendency to read his œuvre in terms of symbolism (cf. Dicken-Fuller 1990) or allegory (cf. Dickson 1990) rather than the history of the novel. When, on the other hand, some of Golding’s novels did turn towards contemporary reality, such as Free Fall (1959), The Pyramid (1967), or the satirical The Paper Men (1984), critics’ reactions were largely hostile, complaining that “in Free Fall Golding did not follow his true bent” (Davies 1987, 160) and at best acknowledging that a book like The Pyramid can retrospectively be seen as a necessary exercise (cf. Johnston 1988): If “it is intrinsic to Golding’s most powerful moral discussions […] that they take for granted an area of experience isolated from contemporary society […] [t]he translation of that behaviour from its remote setting to modern society can never be a simple one” (Waterhouse 1981, 9). Indeed it seems that Golding struggled with just this problem in his twelve years of silence after The Pyramid, parrying all questions with the laconic answer that he was working on a novel “about England” (Johnston 1980, 98). When Darkness Visible finally appeared in 1979 it soon became clear “that some new entity had been born out of the moral simplicities of the early ‘fables’. That initial certainty had given way to a sense of rich and incomprehensible ambiguity.” (Baker 1988, 9) The attempt to transpose his moral discussions into a contemporary framework seems to have posed quite some challenge to Golding, and he refused to comment on this particular novel until his death: “The fact of the matter is that for a number of reasons Darkness Visible is the one of my books I have refused to talk about: and the more I’ve been pressed, the more stubborn my refusal has become.” (qtd. in Crompton 1985, 11) The result, however, “re-establish[ed] him at the pinnacle of his profession”, and the Nobel Prize Committee pointed out that “they were not making the award to Golding solely due to the success of Rites of Passage, but [that] they had first seen his potential in Darkness Visible.” (Doering 2002, 287–288) It is for this reason that Darkness Visible rather than the perennial classic Lord of the Flies has been singled out for a close reading in this handbook: Not only is the novel a cornerstone in Golding’s œuvre, but in its confrontation of Golding’s moral concerns with late-twentieth-century British society, which also pits fable-like inclinations against realist necessities and formal adventurousness in an attempt at what might be called “spiritual realism” (cf. Kojecky 2013), Darkness Visible is a highly interesting specimen of the English novel in the twentieth century.

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2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns 2.1 Representing the Good: Matty Indicating unequivocally that Golding did not relinquish his religious and moral concerns in his turn towards contemporary society, Darkness Visible takes its title from John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667): yet from those flames No light; but rather darkness visible Served only to discover sights of woe (Book I, ll. 62–64)

And indeed the main protagonist of the novel, Matty, emerges from the flames of an apocalyptic air raid on London in World War II only to discover sights of woe during his life. Shunned by other human beings due to his horrible disfigurement he embarks on a search for his place in the world and the meaning of life. This quest begins right in the hospital where he receives his name – foundling child ‘number seven’ from that horrible night becomes ‘Matthew Septimus Windrove’ in a fairly arbitrary administrative act (16–17)1, but while one nurse is open to “the Matty-ness of Matty” (18) and he is constantly referred to as Matty by the narrator, he is never socially integrated in the fictional world, as is indicated by the fact that his ‘family name’ (which is a simulation without referent anyhow) and thus his social identity remain unstable throughout the novel, with other characters referring to him variously as Windup, Windy, Wandgrave, Wheelwright, Windrap, Wildwort, Windwood, Woodrave, Windgrove, Windgraff, Windrave, or Windrow (passim). Only when Matty’s fate is about to fulfil itself does the narrator name him fully and correctly (247), and a brief inquiry into the possible significance of the name’s components clearly indicates Matty’s function in the plot of the novel: 1) Matthew: God’s gift (!); 2) Septimus: number symbolism: the sum of the spiritual 3 and the material 4, a possible lucky number, and a possible allusion to Virginia Woolf’s Septimus Warren Smith (Mrs. Dalloway, 1925) who returns traumatized from active duty in World War I, has religious visions and commits suicide in the end; and 3) Windrove: illustrating Matty’s externally determined fate. Obviously, Matty is intended to be an allegorical character whose fate (Windrove) is not only determined by the author of the novel but also, in the fictional world, by his possible status as God’s gift to the world (Matthew) bringing redemption and representing the Good in spite of his unpromising beginnings and in the face of a possible overbalance of the material in the larger scheme of things (Septimus). It is to Golding’s great credit that in spite of the novel’s clearly marked metaphysical dimen-

1 Unless otherwise indicated page references in brackets without further designation refer to Golding 1980 [1979].

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sion his portrayal of Matty remains realistic and psychologically subtle, and this double coding is at the heart of the “sense of rich and incomprehensible ambiguity” identified by Baker (1988, 9). Following Matty to the Foundlings School at Greenfield (represented with clear Dickensian overtones) and to his first menial employment at Frankley’s the Ironmongers (the description of which also provides “the history of dear old England from the Industrial Revolution to the present day” in a showpiece of “Golding at his very best”, Dennis 1979), the novel draws a nuanced portrait of the psychological damage of rejection, making it also clear that it is not necessarily the heartlessness of other human beings but rather Matty’s own deficits which provoke conflicts. In spite of all attempts at education, Matty remains caught in a childlike literalism. He can only take things at face value and is completely unable to deal with the ambiguities of language and social life. Paired with his longing for love and affection this has catastrophic consequences for his teacher Sebastian Pedigree, whose paedophile advances he misreads, and his fellow pupil Henderson, Pedigree’s next favourite, for whose death Matty seems to be responsible, though the text remains ambiguous in this respect. At this point, Matty’s schooling ends and he finds himself working at Frankley’s, where he becomes aware of the gap between his nascent sexuality and his repulsive appearance. This in turn makes him give up his hopes for a ‘normal’ life in two visionary scenes (47–50). He flees from England to Australia, where he wanders around pondering his identity in a process that ultimately leads to the dissolution of what little self he had developed. This process is clearly marked by a sequence of questions (“Who am I?” 51/53, “What am I?” 56/60, “What am I for?” 68) and supported by a sequence of active and passive initiation rites, which the narrator, in another move towards ambiguity, presents with ironic distance. Matty, evoking the Bible’s “Some have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of God” (61, original emphasis), considers his castration in the course of a “mock crucifixion” (Johnston 1980, 102; Crompton 1985, 107) at the hands of an aboriginal (63/64) as a matter of course in his process of turning away from aspiring to a normal life after he had yet again to flee from the ‘daughters of men’ (cf. 49) as embodied in Mr Hanrahan’s seven daughters. The narrator, however, adopts a mock-biblical tone for the opening of the episode (“And Matty came in the evening unto the city of Gladstone which is a great city. And he sojourned there for many months at peace, finding work as a grave digger” 60), speaks of a “crucifarce or crucifiction” (68) later, and adopts a completely neutral tone for depicting Matty’s elaborate mystical self-baptism in the Australian outback (73–76). As a result, Matty remains ambiguous to the reader: “Matty may be a prophet and evangelist, but he is also a grotesque and a fool, a saint perhaps, but perhaps a religious maniac. Passing judgement on Matty is no easy matter.” (Boyd 1988, 130) Matty’s by then selfless but still outward directed identity as a prophet leads to his expulsion from Australia after his public performances are misread as a political protest against British nuclear tests and he accidentally sets fire to passers-by. He returns to England and spirits (i.e. inner voices) guide him back to Greenfield where

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he takes up a position as a caretaker at a boarding school and leads a completely inward-directed spiritual life, waiting for the fulfilment announced to him by the spirits. One day – we have reached the late 1970s by now – he interrupts his reflections on his final question (“What am I for?”) in order to repair a puncture in his bicycle tyre, and it is this mundane and rather random act (“Then with what for him was an unusual saving of time and energy he had carried his bike over his shoulders to the garages […]” 248) which leads to his apotheosis: Matty returns to the fire from which he came, saving a boy from being abducted by terrorists. Apparently, that is what he was for, but at the same time the text stages an irresolvable juxtaposition of chance (realism) and necessity (allegory). Matty’s allegorical function is obvious, but at the same time his life trajectory and his psychological development are meticulously charted. The novel, one could say, provides a double vision which acknowledges the complexity, contingency and multiperspectivity of late-twentieth-century reality while at the same time insisting on the possibility of an underlying order. This double vision resonates nicely with Golding’s comments in an essay on “Belief and Creativity” (1980): Though universe and cosmos are the same thing in the dictionaries I will distinguish between them […] I will use cosmos to mean […] the totality, God and man and everything else that is in every level and state of being. Universe I will use for the universe we know through our eyes at the telescope or microscope or open for daily use […] With that distinction in mind I would call myself a universal pessimist but a cosmic optimist. (Golding 1984b, 201)

As we will see, Matty and all the other characters in Darkness Visible are caught in ‘the universe they know through their eyes’, and Matty’s literalism and isolation serve to highlight this limitation to the extreme. The novel at large, on the other hand, both in its overall constellation of characters and in its aesthetic strategies, can stand as an expression of a ‘cosmic optimism’ with religious elements that remain clearly outside socially practiced and institutionalized religion: “As for Golding’s religious standpoint, Americans tend to see him as a Calvinist, Continentals regard him as a Catholic or a Humanist and the English look upon him as vaguely Christian.” (Stummer 1986, 81; on the religious dimension of Darkness Visible see Cleve 1982; Clews 1984; Coates 1986). This cosmic optimism focuses on the Good, which in turn is defined through Matty’s final question, “What am I for?”, the answer to which transcends his existence. He was, it seems, born from the fire to embody an innate principle of Good which comes to fruition when he goes back into the fire but saves a boy from the clutches of terrorists, thwarting their plans in a scene which is only described retrospectively and obliquely by one of the terrorists: “‘There is no bleeding boy. I had him and some burning bugger come out at me and –‘“ (252). So what about free will and self-determination? The full constellation of characters in Darkness Visible provides cues for answering this question.

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2.2 Representing Evil: Sophy Matty’s fate is determined by his confrontation with a world that stands in opposition to the principle of Good. The second half of the twentieth century as presented in Darkness Visible is characterised by violence and spiritual and cultural decline. In contrast to the innate principle of Good as embodied in Matty, evil is presented as a cultural effect (and should thus perhaps not be capitalized). The character representing evil, Sophy, is introduced for the first time “within a week of [her] tenth birthday” (105), and the narrator’s summary of her life so far makes it very clear that her situation is the exact opposite of Matty’s: Born into a well-to-do family and more radiantly beautiful than her twin sister Toni, she never had to worry about fitting in. But appearances are misleading: To other people it looks like the “twins were everything to each other”, but “they hated it” (105), as the narrator makes clear with a subtle switch of perspective. In fact, both Toni and Sophy suffer from alienation: Abandoned by their mother and neglected by their father and a never-ending sequence of ‘Aunties’ (i.e. au-pairs who occasionally become their father’s lovers), Sophy and Toni Stanhope are thrown back upon themselves. While Matty’s external ugliness (which, incidentally, already combines a bad/burnt and a good side, cf. 20) and his literal-mindedness stand in contrast to his inner capability for loving which is rejected time and again, Sophy’s external fair-haired beauty and intelligence stand in contrast to her inner hatred and her dark-haired, extroverted twin sister, Toni. Again, Sophy’s name seems deliberately chosen: 1) Sophia: worldly wisdom, 2) Stanhope: a light, single-seated (!) horse-drawn carriage. In spite of these opposites, however, both Matty and Sophy can be read as ciphers for the consequences of World War II: [Matty] survives deformed and anonymous as part of the issue of the Second World War itself […] Like Matty, Sophy is an issue of the Second World War, but she is the product of its social disclocations rather than its physical terrors. (Gindin 1988, 66–67)

Both Matty and Sophy acquire an impressive degree of self-awareness at an early stage, but their trajectories head in different directions: Where Matty strives for seeing wholeness, Sophy develops a consciousness of the world’s fragmentation into ever-smaller pieces. This falls into place for her when she hears a radio talk on the ‘post-modern’ buzzword ‘entropy’ (185). While Matty moves away from society in the course of his spiritual development, Sophy remains embedded in it. While Matty receives his most important impulses from meditation and reading the Bible, Sophy relies on one of the, as it turns out, transitory “emblem[s] of Western civilisation” (Johnston 1980, 104) in the 1960s and 1970s, the transistor radio. And while Matty submits to the divine order as he learns to perceive it, Sophy sets out on a quest for self-gratification at all cost, including, as opposed to Matty’s renunciation, sexual experimentation without consideration of other people’s feelings, finding its ultimate outlet in sadism which climaxes in a sequence where Sophy envisions what she will

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do to the kidnapped boy once he is in her power (251–252; on the role of sexuality in Golding’s œuvre in general cf. Biles 1987). The novel clearly connects the unfolding of evil to the social conditions of the late-twentieth-century world, in which family ties and other emotional bonds have been weakened or dissolved, an obsession with surfaces and appearances has become dominant, violence is latent and endemic, and a scientific world view has destroyed all ‘depth’. Under these conditions, it seems, the Good can only be exceptional. And yet evil appears to be a derivative of the Good, gone wrong in what Golding calls ‘the universe’ as opposed to a larger ‘cosmic’ scheme as represented by the overall construction of the novel. This is made explicit in one of Matty’s journal entries, in which he records the spirits saying about Sophy: “Many years ago we called her but she did not come.” (238) When Sophy did not heed the call of the spirits, the direction of her trajectory changed. It is her plan which leads to Matty’s destruction, but at the same time (and ironically) his death is his destiny, and he thwarts the fulfilment of her sadistic sexual fantasies. Sophy can only return from her fling with extremism into the fold of society by relying on society’s tendency to accept surfaces. In order to achieve this, she has to let society reduce her personality to the clichéd beautiful but slightly stupid female (cf. 253–254). A different variety of evil can be observed in Sophy’s twin sister Toni, whose return from a life as a high-profile terrorist enables Sophy to go through with her plan. Toni’s life as a terrorist is a public and political version of Sophy’s privacy and inwardness. Sophy is aware of the hollowness of Toni’s and her boyfriend Gerry’s seemingly idealistic commitment to a greater cause: “Just ideas. Ghosts. Ideas and emptiness. The perfect terrorist.” (253) Sophy and Toni demonstrate the arbitrariness and particularity of both the private and public blueprints of making sense in modern societies. And in one of the challenges to interpretation that Darkness Visible poses it turns out to be only Sophy’s plan that Matty seems to be predestined to thwart, while the terrorists manage to go through with theirs, as some TV footage towards the end of the novel makes clear: “They were going through it all again on the other channel […] Then, endlessly after that, were Toni and Gerry and Mansfield and Kurtz herding their hostages towards the plane; and again, as a preliminary, before the day’s advance, the new News, there was Toni in Africa, broadcasting, beautiful and remote, the long aria in that silvery voice about freedom and justice –“ (261). According to Golding, only faith in a holistic dimension of meaning can counteract the fragmentation of the ‘universe’ and signpost the meaningfulness of the ‘cosmos’. In both Darkness Visible and an earlier essay, “Crabbed Youth and Age” (1975), Golding clearly identifies World War II as the core event in this respect: The Second World War came near to demolishing all the assumptions of the first one and uncovered entirely different areas of undescribability. The horror of the brewed up tank, the burning plane, the crushed and sinking submarine – all that is difficult to describe but the job can be

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done. The experience of Hamburg, Belsen, Hiroshima and Dachau cannot be imagined […] We stand before a gap in history. We have invented a limit to literature. (Golding 1984b, 102)

With Darkness Visible, Golding seems to try to approach this limit of literature, which also demarcates the limits of his own moral and religious vision. As it stands, the novel seems pessimistic: the problems are clear, but a sustainable change for the better is nowhere in sight. So what does this entail for ‘normal’ human beings?

2.3 For Everyman: Sim Goodchild, Edwin Bell, and Sebastian Pedigree In addition to Matty and Sophy, who are, besides their psychological interest, clearly recognisable as representatives of Good and evil, Darkness Visible also includes a number of characters who are equally clearly meant to represent ‘normal’ human beings. These are the everyman figure Sim Goodchild and, to a lesser extent, his friend Edwin Bell, both with their respective wives,2 on the one hand, and Matty’s former teacher Sebastian Pedigree on the other. Sim Goodchild, who may or may not be the bookseller turned wartime fireman who serves as the main focaliser when Matty walks from the fire at the beginning of the novel (cf. 11–16), tends to brood in a sceptical and rationalistic fashion on the decline of Western culture which also brings about the decline of his trade. Edwin Bell, on the other hand, embraces all kinds of esoteric and mystical traditions. Both Sim’s broodings and his conversations with Edwin characterise Greenfield as a place of disenchantment and alienation emblematic of the condition of England in the late 1970s: [T]he highstreet of the ironically named Greenfield is filled with the incessant noise of jets and juggernauts, broken up into distinctive racial groups, disintegrated by the failure of traditional communal life, a failure epitomized by the conversion of the parish church into a so called community center. (Crompton 1985, 94)

It is against this background that Edwin Bell, after Matty’s return to Greenfield, sees a new saviour figure in him. Pulling a reluctant but partly amused Sim Goodchild along, he organises séances with Matty in the old and, as he thinks, deserted stables which were formerly used by Sophy and Toni as their childhood haven, but which

2 With the exception of Arieka in The Double Tongue and Sophy (as analysed above) in Darkness Visible, Golding seems to avoid an extended engagement with female perspectives in his novels. Accordingly, Mrs Goodchild and Mrs Bell remain rather one-dimensional counterparts to their husbands, but with a twist: Mrs Goodchild is the pragmatic common sense-based counterpart to her dreamer husband Sim, and Edwina Bell is the extremely masculine counterpart to her extremely feminine husband Edwin.

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have now been chosen by Sophy as the centre of operations for the terrorist attack on the boarding school. As the police already have an eye on Toni and Sophy, the stables turn out to be under video surveillance, and Sim and Edwin, though not implicated in the crime, find themselves exposed to ridicule when the tape recording their séance finds its way onto television. Again the novel is quite clear about the fact that the video images do not manage to show what was really the case: While the sceptical Sim had a mystical experience when he was greeting Matty before the session even started (“In a convulsion unlike anything he had ever known, Sim stared into the gigantic world of his palm and saw that it was holy” 231), his trance-like movements on the video result from his attempts to scratch his itchy nose on the table-top during the séance. This ambivalent experience and its aftermath induce an acknowledgement of guilt in Sim (“We’re not innocent. We’re worse than guilty. We’re funny” 258), but it also instils a greater awareness of the wonders of the world, and the novel leaves Sim Goodchild “staring intently into his own palm” (261). Edwin, on the other hand and in spite of his ostentatious esoteric orientation, remains unaware of this spiritual dimension, which seems to be an oblique hint at the power that Golding ascribes to the seemingly obsolete tradition of literature associated with Sim Goodchild. In this sense, the name Sim could allude to ‘simony’, the “buying or selling of something spiritual or closely connected with the spiritual” (britannica.com: “simony”), while ‘Goodchild’ speaks for itself: Sim is about as good as fallen man may aspire to be. The character most closely associated with Matty throughout the novel is Sebastian Pedigree. While Edwin Bell is a fairly ridiculous character and Sim Goodchild a fairly positive one, but both are to a certain extent presented satirically, Sebastian Pedigree is a heavily allegorical character who, more than the other two, carries the burden of original sin, as is indicated by his family name ‘Pedigree’, which invokes the inheritance of mankind at large, while his first name ‘Sebastian’ counteracts this with ascribing to him a possible status of saint and martyr. Throughout the novel, Mr Pedigree is seen (and rejected) through the eyes of other characters, including Sim and Edwin, but the novel makes it very clear that the three men fall into the same bracket and are supposed to represent ‘Everyman’: Sim Goodchild has been quick to condemn Mr Pedigree for coming into his shop to steal books ‘as bait’ for children, refusing to recognize that his placing of the children’s books in the window to attract the Stanhope girls had exactly the same motive, and was the more culpable in that it was cloaked in pious platitudes about the children’s cleanness, sweetness and innocence […] And Edwin might say sanctimoniously about Mr Pedigree ‘There but for the grace of God’ without seeing any connection with his own sexually ambiguous marriage, that of an effeminate man married to a masculine woman. (Crompton 1985, 121–122)

Only in his last conversation with Sim and Edwin (259–261) does Mr Pedigree get the chance to present his own view, and for once he does not hold back, given the exceptional events that have just unfolded. He depicts a life of desperation and fear, less concerned about himself but rather about the consequences of his behaviour for

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his victims, and he sees himself as part of an unhinged world full of hypocrisy: “No, I’m nowhere near the worst, gentlemen, among the bombings and kidnappings and hijackings all for the highest of motives.” (260) When at this point Mr Pedigree refers to one of Toni’s speeches (“What did she say? We know what we are but not what we may be”), he eerily anticipates what will happen to him next. Sitting on a park bench, unable to refrain from trying to lure children into making contact with him with the help of a bright colourful ball, Mr Pedigree dies. The novel clearly emphasizes the gap between appearance and reality again: While the characters in the novel, with no access to the minds of men, will only see the heart attack of an excited old paederast as his just deserts, readers of the novel get a different view. In the moment of Mr Pedigree’s death, Matty appears once again after his return into the fire in order to redeem Mr Pedigree from his miserable existence. And once again the novel emphasises that humankind is imprisoned in what Golding calls the ‘universe’ and unable to transcend this limitation even in Mr Pedigree’s extreme circumstances. Although Mr Pedigree is able to recognize Matty’s love for him in retrospect and would have to greet his death as a deliverance from his earthly plight, he is unable to let go of his life as embodied in the colourful ball, which symbolizes both his disease and his heartbeat. Here, the novel’s testing of the limit of literature comes to a head: Yes, Mr Pedigree is an awful character, but in his agony he is human. It takes Matty’s second return from and into the fire to depict this in a climactic mirror scene to the novel’s impressive opening in the London Blitz after Mr Pedigree has pleaded for his help: It was at this point that Sebastian Pedigree found he was not dreaming. For the golden immediacy of the wind altered at its heart and begun to drift upwards, then swirl upwards then rush upwards around Matty. The gold grew fierce and burned. Sebastian watched in terror as the man before him was consumed, melted, vanished like a guy in a bonfire; and the face was no longer two-tone but gold as the fire and stern and everywhere there was a sense of the peacock eyes of great feathers and the smile around the lips was loving and terrible. This being drew Sebastian towards him so that the terror of the golden lips jerked a cry out of him – ‘Why? Why?’ The face looming over him seemed to speak or sing but not in human speech. Freedom. Then Sebastian, feeling the many-coloured ball that he held against his chest, and knowing what was about to happen, cried out in agony. ‘No! No! No!’ He clutched the ball closer, drew it in to avoid the great hands that were reaching towards him. He drew the ball closer than the gold on the skin, he could feel how it beat between his hands with terror and he clutched it and screamed again and again. But the hands came through his. They took the ball as it beat and drew it away so that the strings that bound it to him tore as he screamed. Then it was gone. (265, original emphasis)

This scene has to be quoted at length because in its not very extensive entirety it serves as the focal point of the novel’s metaphysical dimension. It insists on the reality of Mr Pedigree’s experience (“he was not dreaming”; and note that this is the only place in the novel where he is identified by his first name, Sebastian); it alludes in con-

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ventional Christian terms to the existence of God (“upwards”) in a mirror image of the “burning bush” evoked in the novel’s opening scene (9); difference (“two-tone”) is transcended into identity (“gold”) and the limitations of human existence in language and what Golding calls the ‘universe’ (“not in human speech”, “the strings that bound it to him”) are transcended into the freedom of what Golding calls the ‘cosmos’ in the only hint at the ‘what we may be’ of humanity that the novel provides. Golding is taking a risk here in making a paedophile the symbolic representative of the human condition, but the novel insists on some redeeming qualities: Mr Pedigree differs from the other characters in the book in being more honest, and having paid for his sins […] The freedom Matty offers and that Mr Pedigree, however reluctantly accepts, is starkly contrasted with the illusory freedom for which Toni and her fellow terrorists are fighting. (Crompton 1985, 124–125)

For the reader, however, it takes a leap of faith to accept this, and so Darkness Visible marks a very special case of what a novel is expected to achieve by means of narrative and aesthetic strategies.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies As the preceding analysis has demonstrated, Darkness Visible combines a schematic functionalization of characters (the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, one is tempted to say) with a subtle psychological and social realism. It is clear that this is how Golding sets about combining the allegorical and the realist impulses in his writing, with the first being tied to his notion of ‘cosmos’ and the second to his notion of ‘universe’. With all character perspectives in the novel clearly confined within the fictional ‘universe’ (which is also clearly intended to represent the ‘universe’ late-twentieth-century readers find themselves in), the ‘cosmic’ dimension of the novel will have to be brought into being by the authorial narrator. Given this crucial task it is striking that the narrator in Darkness Visible operates ‘invisibly’ throughout the novel except for the occasional ironic tone which hints at a specific narrator perspective, while the presentation of the fictional world is largely filtered through various character perspectives, even to the point of letting Matty take over whole chapters with excerpts from his diary in 1966/67 (Ch. 7) and in 1978 (Ch. 14). As Johnston sums up: Part of the book does take the form of a first-person journal […] but the major portion is presented through the eyes and the voice of a wryly ironic, omniscient narrator who effaces himself frequently to focus on the viewpoints of four major characters and numerous minor ones. And these several interior voices are themselves augmented by dialogue […] [S]ome fifty characters assume speaking roles in this drama […] (Johnston 1980, 99).

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The novel at large thus establishes, to put it somewhat bluntly, an ethically charged and normative but largely invisible narrator perspective (‘cosmos’) as opposed to relativistic character perspectives (‘universe’), and the central question for any interpretation of Darkness Visible is how the narrator organizes these character perspectives into a hierarchy of affinity with the normative frame. In other words: in this case the authorial narrator seems to occupy a position very close to or even identical with the implied author, and the novel provides an interesting test case for this controversial category. As we have seen in the preceding section, Matty is obviously the central protagonist in Darkness Visible. His ‘birth’ and his death mark the beginning and the end of the plot, and his fate is clearly at the centre of the narrator’s attention and concern. Nevertheless, the perspective structure of the novel is clearly dominated by immanent character perspectives from the very beginning. Starting out in seemingly neutral reporting mode (“There was an area east of the Isle of Dogs in London”) the narrator immediately shifts into what will be his trademark slightly ironic tone (“which was an unusual mixture even for those surroundings”) which presupposes a certain degree of complicity and shared world knowledge in the reader and then shifts the centre of perception clearly into the narrated world while obliquely alluding to the metaphysical dimension at the end of the first paragraph: (“the bombs came down, it seemed, mysteriously out of emptiness. They fell in or round the great fire” 9, emphasis mine). In the second paragraph this immanent focus of perception is assigned to the “men at the edge of the fire” (9) and later narrowed down even further to the figure of a “bookseller, who suffered from a romantic view of the classical world” (11) and who may or may not be responsible for the allegorical and symbolic colouring of the narrator report (on “the edge of the great fire a group of men stood by their wrecked machine” and the fire “was a glare, a burning bush” 9, emphases mine). This scene counts among the most powerful that Golding has written: [T]he most terrible scene in Golding will come from our world and be grounded in the experience of millions […] [H]e has never written more powerfully than the visualizing of the burning city at the beginning of Darkness Visible, which takes the most ordinary eye and object (everybody has looked into a fire) and heightens them to Holocaust […] [in] a final Revelation of beauty and terror in the universe through ordinary ‘reality’ transfigured. (Kinkead-Weekes 1986, 71–72)3

3 There are hints that a similar scene about the nuclear holocaust was cut from the opening of Lord of the Flies (cf. Crompton 1985, 96 and Gindin 1988, 66). Subbarao (1987, 102) sees a different link: “It is rather tempting to view the novel as sequel to Lord of the Flies. It begins with an apocalyptic scene with which Lord or the Flies ends. Ralph has a glimpse into the heart of darkness as he is all but lost in the conflagration; and Matty comes out of it to explore the metaphysics of darkness.”

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After the spectacular opening scene, in the prosaic environments of the hospital, the narrator maintains his slightly ironical distance in continuity with possible immanent character perspectives (“But, though the burnt area reckoned as a percentage of the whole made it improbable, he did in fact survive” 16–17) or delegates perception completely by means of passive constructions (“it was impossible to discover” or “it was observed” 17) or clearly identified character perspectives such as the nurse’s (18). From this point onwards, the narrator increasingly presents events from Matty’s point of view in a process charting his identity formation formally, as it were, until he is able to become a first-person narrator in his own right in his diary in chapter 7 at the end of “Part One: Matty”, after which there is an unexpected break. As mentioned before, “Part Two: Sophy” provides a similar character profile for Sophy, though it does not start from the beginning but rather in medias res, i.e. at her tenth birthday. This less organic and more fragmented mode of presentation finds its equivalent on the level of narrative technique: While “Part One: Matty” employs the full range of realist narratorial possibilities from authorial to first-person and covers a broad range of character perspectives in the process, it refrains from moving into modernist territory of figural stream-of-consciousness narration in spite of its emphasis on character perspectives. “Part Two: Sophy”, on the other hand, does just this for long stretches, but it refrains from elevating Sophy to the status of first-person narrator instead.4 As a result, Sophy’s perspective comes across as less embedded and more solipsistic than Matty’s, which is very much in line with her status as an embodiment of modern alienation. “Part Three: One is One”, finally, adds Sim Goodchild’s perspective, and while its title indicates that the boundaries between the individual subjective viewpoints cannot be overcome, Part Three actually alternates all three main perspectives (Matty, Sophy, Sim) until they come together in terms of plot on the occasion of the terrorist attack on the boarding school. Intriguingly, this coming together has been obliquely prepared throughout the novel. As they all live in Greenfield, Matty, Sophy and Sim have all had cameo appearances in each other’s story. Matty, for example, has his first visions standing in front of Sim Goodchild’s bookshop (47) and this is also where he encounters Sophy and Toni for the first time (101). Sophy, on the other hand, catches a glimpse of Matty at one point without paying any attention to him (132), and Sim Goodchild has secretly adored the twins for years (119–121, 195). On second reading, many connections like these can be traced, and this formal complexity pushes the novel towards an ambiguous variety of modernism, which serves as the main facilita-

4 While the narrative occasionally tips over into interior monologue for both Matty and Sophy, it is striking that in the first instance this is marked by italics in a move which anticipates Matty’s later status as narrator (see, for example, Ch. 4, 51–61 for Matty’s adventures and spiritual progress in Australia) while Sophy’s interior monologue remains unmarked (see, for example, Ch. 10, 155–156).

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tor of presenting alienated character perspectives on the one hand and of integrating these perspectives into a superordinate artistic whole on the other. In addition to narrative strategies of combining various narrative situations in order to create a complex structure of perspectives, the novel thus also displays structural features which foreground its status as a literary work of art. Besides the threepart dialectical overall structure that is clearly marked (“Part One: Matty”: thesis; “Part Two: Sophy”: antithesis; “Part Three: One is One”: synthesis), there are also further aspects which testify to the formal ambition that went into the creation of Darkness Visible. Fairly early on, for example, the narrator alerts the reader to the complementary importance of Matty and Mr Pedigree: “They could be said to have converged on each other, though Matty was going up and Mr Pedigree was going down.” (21) As we have seen, Mr Pedigree’s perspective is only added to the three dominant perspectives of Matty, Sophy and Sim Goodchild on the very last pages of the novel, thus complicating the seemingly clear-cut dialectical three-part design immensely, and to complicate matters even further, the novel does not end here but adds the park keeper’s perspective in its very last paragraph, thus bringing home to readers what they would think had they not had the chance to access the minds of characters and to survey their overall constellation: The park keeper coming from the other gate saw him where he sat with his head on his chest. The park keeper was tired and irritated for he could see the brilliant ball lying a few yards from the old man’s feet where it had rolled when he dropped it. He knew the filthy old thing would never be cured and he was more than twenty yards away when he began talking at him bitterly. (265)

With this ending, the novel stresses the “One is One” of all single perspectives once more, but at the same time it induces readers to rethink their attitudes, perhaps beginning with the intention of trying to talk to people rather than at them. The medium for this inducement to overcome the limitations of subjectivity is the form of the novel itself, which functions as a medium for negotiating multiperspectivity. On the one hand, this negotiation of multiperspectivity imposes order where there might be none in real life. Philip Redpath, for example, suggests that the narration of events in Darkness Visible establishes a mirror structure: ‘Matty’ ends where ‘Sophy’ begins and the relationship between these two parts is that of a mirror-image. This can be represented as MATTY | SOPHY 12345678|87654321 → ONE IS ONE ← (Redpath 1986, 8)

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According to Redpath’s reading, these are the events: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Fire of Blitz | Death of Henderson | Matty’s uncertainty | (Who am I? / What am I?/ | What am I for?) | Matty rejects “daughters of men” | Matty goes to Australia | Matty’s baptism | Spirits tell Matty what he must do | Matty sees twins go into shop |

Fire at Wandicott School Sophy’s imaginative killing of boy Sophy’s certainty in decision to kidnap child and commit ‘outrage’ Sophy finds sexual partner Sophy works at Runways Travel Sophy struck by tidal wave Sophy discovers law of ‘of course’ Twins go into shop

In a similar vein, but with slightly different results in terms of singling out events, Ian Gregor and Mark Kinkead-Weekes point out that as soon as we attempt to recall the significant moments of the two stories [of Matty and Sophy], we detect how remarkably they parallel, contrasting modalities of the same process of discovery. A shoe cast and a stone; a skrying glass and a transistor; a man in black and a dark creature; one stabbing and another; a dark pool and an inkblot; the parallels are as striking as the differences. (Gregor and Kinkead-Weekes 1982, 122–123)

On the other hand, then, even these two examples suggest that the novel rather offers too many possibilities of order, it seems formally over-determined (see also Tiger 1990), something as basic as the chronology of events cannot be ascertained without doubt (cf. Redpath 1986, 5–7). If there is order, it seems, it is not of this world, but either some higher metaphysical (or, in Golding’s parlance, ‘cosmic’) order invisible in the ‘universe’ as we know it – or a mere textual or aesthetic effect.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives When Darkness Visible finally appeared in 1979 a full twelve years after Golding’s previous novel, The Pyramid, which was generally held to be a failure, it was greeted as a welcome return to form. John Bayley, writing in the London Review of Books, hailed it as “Golding’s best book yet” (Bayley 1979) and Nigel Dennis, in the New York Review of Books, identified passages “about as perfect as perfect can be and show[ing] William Golding at his very best” (Dennis 1979). The novel won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the LA Times Book Prize for Fiction in that year and can thus be called a critical success. And yet, a degree of confusion prevailed. On the one hand, for example, critic Allan Massie recalls that when he reviewed Darkness Visible for The Scotsman, “I thought there was something remarkable going on, but I couldn’t say exactly what it was”, while on the other hand, “whatever its difficulty, the book sold well, 15,000 copies in the first month in Britain, with another printing of 10,000; in the US, 45,000

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copies were printed in the first year.” (Massie 2009) One year later, in his celebration in the New York Review of Books of Golding’s next novel, the Booker-Prize-winnerto-be Rites of Passage, Robert Towers reassesses Darkness Visible in a more muted fashion: While this work could not by itself restore Golding to prominence, its qualities merited – and won  – renewed attention. Darkness Visible is a most curious book, often opaque in its intentions, sometimes lurid and sometimes merely smoky in its revelations of human agony, isolation, viciousness, and heroism. But the novel does manage – in a gothic sort of way – to brand the reader’s memory with its image of a seedy, ramshackle England ripe for terrorism and to compel interest in the fire-scarred, religiously maddened ‘prophet’, Matty, who lurches through the collapsing scene, touching lives nearly as grotesque as his own. (Towers 1980)

It is intriguing that this note of misgiving persisted even after the triumph of the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage in 1981, the Nobel Prize in 1983 and the highly successful To the Ends of the Earth trilogy at large (which was turned into a BBC2 television mini-series starring Benedict Cumberbatch in 2005). It even seems to have spread from Darkness Visible to Golding’s whole standing in late-twentieth-century English literature. To this day there is a sense that there is an “angle between Golding and what is easily accepted of recent literature in English”, and that “Golding’s death in 1993 had started a slide in his reputation” (Medcalf 2005), with John Carey’s authorised biography on the one hand and final updates on earlier ‘classic’ monographs on the other marking the exception from this rule (cf. Carey 2009, Gregor and KinkeadWeekes 2002, and Tiger 2003 in the ‘Further Reading’ section of the bibliography). By the standards of ‘literary fiction’, then, Darkness Visible was a fairly successful novel, but it remains emblematic of the darker and more difficult side of Golding’s œuvre, which, like the novel itself with its combination of allegory and realism, seems to be out-of-time and of-its-time at the same time. While on the one hand Darkness Visible engages as intensely with contemporary reality as novels can be expected to do, it does so on unfashionable grounds, not only in terms of its religious bent, but also in terms of the literary traditions evoked: “Darkness Visible, set alongside most recent literature, suggests how much Golding […] now looks like the celebrator of the height, depth and greatness of human character” (Medcalf 2005). As such, many of the academic engagements that the novel provoked move within the confines of liberal humanism and tend to produce formalist and/or structuralist close readings that read the novel as a ‘parable of the human condition’ (cf. britannica.com: “Golding, William”) with only occasional recourse to poststructuralist ideas (for this trajectory see, for example, the monographs by Redpath 1987 and Sugimura 2008). Here, perhaps, more work could be done, as Golding again treads a highly interesting middle ground:

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He shares the disillusion of the theorists with language in its synchronic aspect, and makes the transcending of language in silence a large part of Matty’s prophetic message. But he delights in the historical richness of language, and specifically the English and ancient Greek languages, in their diachronic aspect. He was early in the attack which Theory inculcates on the self-deception involved in a traditional and conservative confidence in the conscious self; but he never doubted the capacity of humanity, however rarely fulfilled, to see and fight through self-deception. (Medcalf 2005)

In this sense, Darkness Visible addresses the reader as an inherently unstable individual full of potentiality. Golding/the implied author/the authorial narrator seem to insist on the belief that Man is by nature a moral creature […] he exploits people and then finds that with this comes guilt and you can’t be free of right or wrong because you know by some sort of instinct when you have exploited somebody […]. (Golding in an interview with James R. Baker 1981, qtd. in Eilersen 1987, 112)

But then again, it is up to the individual reader, who, at the end of the novel, has to choose between belief and disbelief: Golding must still allow for those who cannot believe that the ‘filthy old thing’ that is our pedigree can ever be ‘cured’. For both sets of readers there has to be a gap […] between the telling and the final sense of cause and consequence. It is there on p. 265: an empty space […] But the space must fill with each reader’s vision. Some will see only emptiness after the word ‘gone’. (Gregor and Kinkead-Weekes 1982, 128; the space referred to is the space between the two quotes from p. 265 of the novel presented above, at the end of sections 2 and 3 respectively).

While the novel calls for a leap of faith, it also provides an abundance of alternative explanations for its events (chance, personal agency, social decline, cultural relativism…), none of which, however, seems complete and sufficient. Whatever the reader’s decision, it is either this or that: “Darkness Visible […] can be regarded as the climax of [Golding’s] attempts to create a religious novel for our times” (Broich 1984, 317), but it can also be regarded as a radically metafictional text that leaves the reader with nothing but itself (cf. Tebutt 1993) – and it has to be said that “Writing about Writing” is a prominent motif “in the Later Novels of William Golding” (cf. Whitley 1988) while religion never again figures as prominently as in Darkness Visible.

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5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Golding, William. Darkness Visible. London: Faber and Faber, 1980 [1979]. --Baker, James R. “William Golding: Three Decades of Criticism.” Critical Essays on William Golding. Ed. James R. Baker. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. 1–11. Bayley, John. “‘Darkness Visible’ is William Golding’s first novel for twelve years.” London Review of Books. 25 October 1979. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v01/n01/john-bayley/darkness-visible-iswilliam-goldings-first-novel-for-twelve-years (5 October 2015). Biles, Jack I. “Golding and the Voice of Chapel.” British Novelists Since 1900. Ed. Jack I. Biles. New York: AMS Press, 1987. 173–193. Boyd, S. J. The Novels of William Golding. Brighton/New York: Harvester Press, 1988. britannica com: http://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Golding (21 September 2015). britannica com: http://www.britannica.com/topic/simony (30 September 2015). Broich, Ulrich. “William Golding and the Religious Function of Literature.” Functions of Literature. Ed. Ulrich Broich, Theo Stemmler, and Gert Stratmann. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984. 305–326. Cleve, Gunnel. “Some Elements of Mysticism in William Golding’s Novel Darkness Visible.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 83.4 (1982): 457–471. Clews, Hetty. “Darkness Visible: William Golding’s Parousia.” English Studies in Canada 10.3 (1984): 317–330. Coates, John. “Religious Quest in Darkness Visible.” Renascence: Essays on Value in Literature 39.1 (1986): 272–291. Crompton, Donald. A View from the Spire: William Golding’s Later Novels. Ed. and completed by Julia Briggs. New York/London: Blackwell, 1985. Dennis, Nigel. “Smiles in the Dark” [Review of William Golding, Darkness Visible]. The New York Review of Books. 6 December 1979. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1979/dec/06/ smiles-in-the-dark/ (5 October 2015). Dicken-Fuller, Nicola C. William Golding’s Use of Symbolism. Lewes: Book Guilt Publishing, 1990. Dickson, L. L. The Modern Allegories of William Golding. Tampa: University Press of Florida, 1990. Doering, Jonathan W. “The Fluctuations of William Golding’s Critical Reputation.” Contemporary Review 280.1636 (2002): 285–290. Eilersen, Gilliam Stead. “A Password for the Darkness: Systems, Coincidences and Visions in William Golding’s Darkness Visible.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 28.2 (1987): 107–118. Gindin, James. William Golding. Macmillan Modern Novelists. London/Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988. Golding, William. The Hot Gates and Other Occasional Pieces. London: Faber and Faber, 1984a [1965]. Golding, William. A Moving Target. London: Faber and Faber, 1984b [1982]. Gregor, Ian. “‘He Wondered’: The Religious Imagination of William Golding.” William Golding: The Man and His Books. A Tribute to His 75th Birthday. Ed. John Carey. London: Faber and Faber, 1986. 109–129. Gregor, Ian, and Mark Kinkead-Weekes. “The Later Golding.” Twentieth Century Literature 28.2 (1982): 109–129. Johnston, Arnold. Of Earth and Darkness: The Novels of William Golding. Columbia/London: University of Missouri Press, 1980. Johnston, Arnold. “The Pyramid: Innovation, Rediscovery, Challenge.” Critical Essays on William Golding. Ed. James R. Baker. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. 97–109.

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Kojecky, Roger. “Spiritual Realism: Epiphany in the Novels of William Golding.” Visions and Revisions: The Word and the Text. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013. 147–157. Massie, Allan. “William Golding and the Capacity for Evil.” Times Literary Supplement. 23 September 2009. http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/reviews/other_categories/article758720.ece (5 October 2015). Medcalf, Stephen. “Island Skies: William Golding Reappraised.” Times Literary Supplement. 2 September 2005. http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/reviews/arts_and_commentary/article732413. ece (5 October 2015). Redpath, Philip. “Tricks of the Light: William Golding’s Darkness Visible.” Ariel 17.1 (1986): 3–17. Redpath, Philip. William Golding: A Structural Reading of His Fiction. Lanham/London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1987. Stummer, Peter O. “Man’s Beastliness to Man: The Novels of William Golding.” Essays on the Contemporary British Novel. Ed. Hedwig Bock and Albert Wertheim. Munich: Hueber, 1986. 79–100. Subbarao, V. V. William Golding: A Study. New York: Envoy Press, 1987. Sugimura, Yasunori. The Void and the Metaphors: A New Reading of William Golding’s Fiction. Bern: Peter Lang, 2008. Tebutt, Gloria. “Reading and Righting: Metafiction and Metaphysics in William Golding’s Darkness Visible.” Twentieth Century Literature 39.1 (1993): 47–58. Towers, Robert. “The Good Ship Britannia” [Review of William Golding, Rites of Passage]. The New York Review of Books. 18 December 1980. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1980/ dec/18/the-good-ship-britannia/ (5 October 2015). Waterhouse, Michael. “Golding’s Secret Element of Gusto.” Essays in Criticism 31.1 (1988): 1–14. Whitley, John S. “‘Furor Scribendi’: Writing about Writing in the Later Novels of William Golding.” Critical Essays on William Golding. Ed. James R. Baker. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. 176–193.

5.2 Further Reading Carey, John. William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies; A Life. London: Faber and Faber, 2009. Gregor, Ian, and Mark Kinkead-Weekes. William Golding: A Critical Study of the Novels. 3rd rev. and reset ed. London: Faber and Faber, 2002. McCarron, Kevin. William Golding. Writers and Their Work. 2nd rev. ed. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2004. Tiger, Virginia. William Golding: The Unmoved Target. London: Boyars, 2003.

Miriam Wallraven

19 Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (1984) Abstract: Angela Carter is one of the most influential postmodern authors of the twentieth century who has become famous for her narrative exuberance. In this chapter, her foregrounding of generic hybridity, magical realism, irony, and shifting narrative perspectives combined with a feminist trajectory is analysed in her most successful novel Nights at the Circus (1984). First, the protagonist is presented as a hybrid character who evokes different associations reaching beyond the text in a metafictional manner. Second, the crucial feature of the novel is the narrative situation which not only rests on an unreliable narrator but on a constantly shifting narrative perspective. The third strategy consists of a pronounced intertextuality that alludes to a number of philosophical and literary pretexts. Particularly by the use of magical realism and the picaresque, the multilayered novel questions literary conventions as well as reader expectations. Keywords: Postmodernism, feminism, magical realism, unreliable narration, picaresque, grotesque, carnivalesque

1 Context: Author, Œuvre, Moment Angela Carter1 is not only one of the most influential British authors of the twentieth century, but she is certainly also one of the most prolific ones. In 2008, Carter ranked tenth in the list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945” by The Times. Her œuvre encountered great popularity among general readers and attracted immense academic interest. Between 1966 and her death in 1992, she wrote numerous works in different genres. While her early novels, for example The Magic Toyshop (1967), secured her reputation as a writer of magic realist fiction, who has repeatedly been compared to Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie (Haffenden 1985, 81; Morrison 2003, 157) (↗ 20 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses), her later novels are characterised by an even more eclectic mixture of genres, topics, and literary techniques. Whereas Carter’s reputation as one of the most important twentieth-century British authors mainly rests on her nine novels, she has also written short fiction, pieces of journalism (particularly for The Guardian, The Independent, and New Statesman), poetry collections, dramatic works, children’s books as well as influential non-fiction,

1 While she published her works as Angela Carter, her full name was Angela Olive Carter-Pearce (née Stalker; 7 May 1940 – 16 February 1992). DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-020

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particularly The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (1979), in which, as in her other works, she critically addresses the patriarchal symbolic order. Apart from that, Carter worked as an editor and translator and wrote film adaptations as well as radio plays. What do Carter’s multifaceted works in both fictional and non-fictional genres have in common? First, “Carter distinguished herself as a stylistic and thematic innovator” (Rubinson 2005, 147) and has become famous by her exploration and mixing of many genres in each of her texts (↗  3  Genres). Especially by her use of magical realism, the picaresque and hybrid genres, she playfully questions literary conventions as well as reading expectations: She skips gaily and deviously among science fiction, dystopian fiction, pornography, the gothic, magic realism, fairy tale, burlesque, tragedy, and myth. In doing so, she demonstrates the pliability of literary genres for conveying historically changing ideas about society and culture, especially, in her case, about those related to the roles women play and are expected to play in male-dominated society. (Rubinson 2005, 148)

Second, her experiments with literary form are intimately intertwined with the topics she addresses and negotiates in her works. Since her texts play with and subvert sex and gender as historically and socially determined constructs (see Morrison 2003, 155), she is careful not to establish any new norms, guidelines, or “truths”, not even feminist ones, as many scholars highlight (↗ 4 Gender). While “[s]he mocks, debunks, and revises myths that have contributed to androcentric sexual norms and gender roles” (Rubinson 2005, 149), her texts show that “Carter, however, took nothing, not even feminism, at face value. Instead, both her fiction and non-fiction writing showed her constantly pushing at, testing, the boundaries of any received belief system” (Gamble 1997, 4). It is no wonder, then, that Carter was repeatedly attacked as an anti-feminist because of her seeming support of pornography and her extensive descriptions of violence against women (Gamble 1997, 4). Given these related features, hybridity and liminality are foregrounded in the form and contents of Carter’s œuvre. Indeed she utilises tension to “celebrate borderline states and conditions of being” (Gamble 1997, 6), for instance the blurring of gender boundaries and liminal settings in her novels. Clearly, Carter’s texts exhibit no interest in blending contradictions into a seamless whole. In the following, these main characteristics will be traced in one of Carter’s most successful novels, Nights at the Circus, which was published in 1984. Compared to Carter’s fiction of the 1960s and 70s, many critics agree that in the 1980s and early 90s Carter’s texts became “much more accessible, gentler and more humorous” (Gamble 1997, 9). This also holds true for Nights at the Circus, but I will show that at the same time this novel turns out to be more multidimensional, full of allusions, and packed with a myriad of motifs. Since Angela Carter’s death at the age of 51 in 1992, “there has been an explosion of interest in Carter’s writing” (Morrison 2003, 155). While Gamble argues that “[s]ince

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[then], Angela Carter’s reputation has passed into academic urban legend” (Gamble 1997, 1), her popularity has also grown exceptionally among general readers. It is no wonder that her texts in general and the novel Nights at the Circus in particular hold a special appeal for literary scholars due to Carter’s foregrounding of metafiction, genre hybridity, irony, shifting narrative perspectives, and exceptional symbolic complexity. However, it is also readers in general who are fascinated by her playfulness and narrative exuberance. Nights at the Circus won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature, and in 2012 the novel was selected as the best ever winner of the prize (Flood 2012). Carter took ten years to work on this novel (Gamble 1997, 157) and in an interview she stated that “[t]he idea behind Nights at the Circus was very much to entertain and instruct, and I purposely used a certain eighteenth-century fictional device – the picaresque, where people have adventures in order to find themselves in places where they can discuss philosophical concepts without distractions” (Carter qtd. in Haffenden 1985, 87). This quotation already draws attention to the most important issues and literary strategies in Nights at the Circus and foreshadows its reception.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns 2.1 London: “Is she fact or is she fiction?” Nights at the Circus is divided into three parts the titles of which refer to different geographical locations: London, Petersburg, and Siberia. These titles, however, indicate more than different physical spaces but instead structure the novel into different stations of the life of the protagonist as well as allegorical locations where various theoretical and philosophical topics are foregrounded: “The movement toward increasingly foreign and remote places parallels a movement away from any stable grounds of reality and toward the ever more fantastic”, as Michael argues (1996, 173; see also Peach 1998, 139). These parts and places are held together by the protagonist who is “storyteller, performer, and controlling consciousness” (Toye 2007, 483). Sophie Fevvers (‘feathers’), at the time of the story’s beginning a world-famous ‘aerealiste’, a big woman with wings (“And she was a big girl” 7)2, is interviewed by the American journalist Jack Walser in her dressing room in London. She has just given a performance in the circus which employs her, and she tells her life story to the sceptical journalist who would like to debunk her as a fraud. Instead, Fevvers holds him spellbound with the story of her life. She claims to have been “Hatched out of a bloody great egg” (7) and been

2 Page references in brackets without further designation refer to Carter 1994.

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left as a baby on the doorstep of a brothel where one of the prostitutes, the Marxist feminist Lizzie, found her and now accompanies her on her travels around the world. During puberty, the raised lumps on Fevvers’ shoulders developed into wings, which gave her her name: “Looks like the little thing’s going to sprout Fevvers!” (8) In his interview, Walser initially wants to “talk to Fevvers, for a series of interviews tentatively entitled: ‘Great Humbugs of the World’” (11) and thus attempts to find out the truth about the ‘Cockney Venus’ (7) and her famous slogan “Is she fact or is she fiction?” (7) This question is asked throughout the novel and points to the central topic that is explored on different textual layers. While Walser’s intention is initially to find out if Fevvers is truly half-bird and half-woman and if she really has wings, Martin argues that “[t]he key to the Fevvermania that sweeps the world is, precisely, the curiosity raised by the question of whether Fevvers is a marvellous freak or a fraud” (Martin 1999, 196). However, it is Fevvers who manages this curiosity and enchants Walser and the reader (cf. Martin 1999). First of all, she turns out to be impossible to categorise, since she is described as both seductive and vulgar, as feminine and rude, as seductive and repulsive. These contradictions also hold true for her voice: Her voice. It was as if Walser had become a prisoner of her voice, her cavernous, sombre voice, a voice made for shouting about the tempest, her voice as a celestial fishwife. Musical as it strangely was, yet not a voice for singing with; it comprised discords, her scale contained twelve tones. Her voice, with its warped, homely, Cockney vowels and random aspirates. Her dark, rusty, dipping, swooping voice, imperious as a siren’s. (43)

These contradictions highlight Fevvers’ ambivalence and mystery that is never explained nor solved in the course of the plot. Together with her foster mother Lizzie, Fevvers not only takes control of how to attract and fascinate the formerly critical journalist so that he feels like “a sultan faced with not one but two Scheherezades, both intent on impacting a thousand stories into a single night” (40) but Fevvers also controls time. Walser is repeatedly confused by the time: “But, odder still – Big Ben had once again struck midnight. The time outside still corresponded to that registered by the stopped gilt clock, inside. Inside and outside matched exactly, but both were badly wrong. H’m” (53). One the one hand, Fevvers’ taking control of the time while she narrates her story signals her narrative control over her audience which she can fascinate and manipulate. On the other hand, Punday argues that “[t]hroughout the novel Carter uses images of stopped time to suggest that Fevvers represents a new beginning for women” (Punday 2002, 807). Especially in the London section of the novel, the emphasis lies on 1899 as a historical point in time; thus, historical contexts are used as a backdrop for Fevvers’ fictional story, such as Toulouse-Lautrec painting Fevvers’ advertisement poster (13) or the allusion to the fact that in this year the British parliament discussed votes for women (Finney 2006, 163). The turn of the century marks a new era to come, the era of the New Woman, which is embodied by Fevvers herself: “All across the Union, audi-

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ences clamour for her arrival, which will coincide with that of the new century. […] It is the final, waning, season of the year of Our Lord, eighteen hundred and ninety nine. And Fevvers has all the éclat of a new era about to take off” (11). Fevvers tells Walser how as a child she had posed as a living statue of Cupid in the brothel where she was raised and how as an adolescent she embodied the image of ‘Winged Victory’ holding a sword belonging to the madam of the brothel, Ma Nelson, although Fevvers admits that “Yet it may be that a large woman with a sword is not the best advertisement for a brothel” (38). This stage of Fevver’s life ends abruptly when Ma Nelson dies of an accident. Fevvers and Lizzie, now homeless, move in with Lizzie’s sister and help her to run an ice cream parlour. This short episode is soon finished when the family falls on hard times. Helpless, Fevvers accepts an offer from the intimidating Madame Schreck who runs a mixture of brothel and freak show. Here, the narrative focus widens to narrate the lives of the other women  – ‘prodigies of nature’ (59) – in Madame Schreck’s establishment, who are presented as freaks to the customers, such as the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ (59) who sleeps most of the time because of an illness, a girl named Fanny, whose breasts have eyes instead of nipples (69), or a girl whose face looks as if covered by cobwebs (69). After some time there, the ruthless Madame Schreck sells Fevvers to one of her customers, Christian Rosencreutz, who wants to sacrifice Fevvers in a religious ritual as ‘virgo intacta’ in order to achieve immortality. He is presented as a dangerous figure who combines pseudo-esoteric theories with magical practices (his name refers to the legendary, most certainly fictional, initiator of the esoteric Rosicrucian Order in the seventeenth century) and regards Fevvers as a valuable object because she is a hybrid being and combines opposites: “Lady of the hub of the celestial wheel, creature half of earth and half of air, virgin and whore, reconciler of fundament and firmament, reconciler of opposing states through the mediation of your ambivalent body, reconciler of the grand opposites of death and life” (81). Although he is deluded in his religious fanaticism, his description of Fevvers as combining opposites and appearing as a hybrid being is the recurring motif in the novel and the reason why all characters are attracted to her. At the last moment, Fevvers manages to save herself by actually flying for the first time, as she tells Walser. Soon after, Fevvers joins Colonel Kearney’s circus as an ‘aerealiste’ and instantly becomes famous. The first part of the novel ends with Walser planning to follow Fevvers by joining the circus on its ‘Grand Imperial Tour’, to “spend a few nights at the circus” (91).

2.2 Petersburg: “Welcome to the Ludic Game!” The focus of the Petersburg chapter differs from the first chapter set in London: Here, Fevvers is not in the centre and for most of the time not the “controlling consciousness” (Toye 2007, 483). Instead, Walser’s development as well as the lives of many different characters who are employed in the circus are explored, which creates a

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colourful tableau. Walser approaches Colonel Kearney, the owner of the circus who always takes advice from his fortune-telling pig Sybil, and the Colonel offers him a position as a clown in the circus. The Colonel fashions himself as a self-made man and American capitalist: “A gun-metal buckle, in the shape of a dollar sign, fastened the leather belt just below his pot belly, presumably the dollar-sign to which Fevvers had referred. Even in the relative privacy of his hotel suite, the Colonel sported his ‘trademark’ costume – a pair of tightly tailored trousers striped in red and white and a blue waistcoat ornamented with stars” (99). Hence, his appearance hints at the circus itself which has been read as an ambivalent symbol: “On the one hand, with its hierarchy of male performers, pursuit of profit and oppression of subordinates it is a symbol of patriarchal capitalist society” (Peach 1998, 141), while on the other hand it turns out to be a space where nothing is as it seems, hierarchies can be turned upside down, and new identities are explored. Colonel Kearney describes and advertises the circus as the ‘Ludic Game’ (99, 102, 103, 157), and therefore his motto is ‘Bamboozlem’ (147 ‘bamboozle them’): The circus and all its performers constantly play with appearance and reality, lie and truth, performance and being, as all characters in this chapter, especially the clowns, illustrate. Walser is hired as a clown, wears the ‘dunce’s cap’ (110) and has to perform as the ‘Human Chicken’ (152) who always shouts “‘Cock-a-doodle-dooski’” (152). The ‘human chicken’ is of course the diminutive version of Fevvers’ impressive half-bird, half-woman appearance: Significantly, a chicken is incapable of flying. In this role, Walser begins to undergo a development that leads him from his sceptical and aloof behaviour to a kind of rebirth. Being a clown in the circus is humiliating for him but also liberating: “he experiences the freedom that lies behind the mask, within dissimulation, the freedom to juggle with being, and, indeed, with the language that is vital to our being, that lies at the heart of the burlesque” (103). The most important position in this part of the novel is occupied by the clowns who function as a vehicle for metafiction and reflections on identity and performance, illusion and reality, and signifier and signified: “In the novel, the clowns occupy a particularly interesting ex-centric position, they are outside the privilege of established culture and as masks they are also outside themselves” (Peach 1998, 140). In fact, the clowns in the circus are far from funny, but they insistently question issues of identity and performance. On the one hand, the clown Buffo thematises the freedom to invent the clown’s own identity (“We can invent our own faces! We make ourselves!” 121) but on the other hand he refers to the emptiness behind the mask: “And what am I without my Buffo’s face? Why, nobody at all. Take away my make-up and underneath is merely not-Buffo. An absence. A vacancy” (122). However, it is not only the clowns who illustrate that the circus functions as a liminal space, a space where chaos rules and categories and distinctions are suspended, but other characters embody similar hybrid features: “Since the carnival is a space within which the dominant hierarchical system and its laws and prohibitions are suspended, the carnival allows for ambivalence and relativity as well as for new

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forms of interrelationships – a primary feminist aim” (Michael 1996, 183). New relationships develop, for example when the Princess of Abyssinia, a tiger tamer who is marked all over her body with scars from the tigers’ claws, incorporates the girl Mignon in her act, who has previously been the victim of the Strong Man. Abused and violated, Mignon as an orphan is a tragic figure who is saved by Fevvers. A queer love relationship between the Princess and Mignon develops which shows that the circus is also a space beyond norms. As is the case with all characters, Mignon can be read on a literal and an allegorical level, as Carter herself emphasises in an interview: “Certainly I was using straightforward allegorical ideas in parts of Nights at the Circus” (Carter qtd. in Haffenden 1985, 87). Hence, she explains that Mignon stands for Europe after the war as an unfortunate orphan, “which is why she carries such a weight of literary and musical references on her frail shoulders” (Carter qtd. in Haffenden 1985, 87). The circus is likewise the place where distinctions blur, categorisation becomes impossible, and hybridity comes into existence (as Walser’s role as ‘human chicken’ shows). For example, the distinction between human beings and animals dissolves with the circus act of ‘Lamarck’s Educated Apes’ (107). These apes, who are much more intelligent than human beings and constantly search for education – especially ‘The Professor’ – , mock what is considered human: “he stared directly into Walser’s eyes, producing afresh in Walser the dizzy uncertainty about what was human and what was not” (110). While Fevvers is mostly in the background of many of these scenes, Fevvers and Walser come closer until Walser falls in love with Fevvers (145). Fevvers’ own story continues when after one of her performances, she goes on a date with the Grand Duke, lured by his wealth and his promises. Again, as in the encounter with Christian Rosencreutz, she is regarded as a rare object. The Duke says: “You must know that I am a great collector of all kinds of objets d’art and marvels. Of all things, I love best toys  – marvellous and unnatural artefacts” (187). Again, as in the encounter with Rosencreutz, Fevvers is in danger of being made a victim. The song line “Only a bird in a gilded cage” (190, see also, for example, 107 or 199), the theme with which Fevvers is constantly threatened by becoming the object of the others’ gaze (“And she felt more and more vague, less and less her own mistress” 190), is played again by the Duke. However, Fevvers again manages to regain control over her identity and her story and free herself from the ‘gilded cage’ by narrowly escaping in a Fabergé egg with which she reaches a miniature train which brings her to safety. This non-realist, magical scene leaves the reader puzzled and again casts doubt on Fevvers’ previous narrative of her life by raising the question of her narrative reliability.

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2.3 Siberia: “there’s nothing like confidence” In the final chapter entitled “Siberia”, the novel moves even more towards the fantastic. Created as a literally blank space far away from society, “Siberia is an ideal context for fantastic occurrences” (Michael 1996, 200). This part comprises various perspectives and changes focus repeatedly. Apart from a focus on Fevvers and a separate one on Walser, a seemingly unconnected storyline about the escapees of a women’s prison in Siberia adds another narrative illustration to the prevailing theme of being controlled by other people’s gaze and thus becoming an object. When the circus travels across the continent to Asia, the train is attacked by a group of runaway outlaws who believe that Fevvers can make contact to the Queen of England to convince the Tsar to pardon the criminals so that they can return to their native villages (231–232). In the accident, Fevvers breaks a wing, the train is totally destroyed, and the entire circus, except for Walser who “was buried alive in a profound sleep” (209), is brought to the convicts’ encampment. At this point, the narrative shifts to other characters and a story unconnected to the circus but mirroring the main concepts and topics which have previously governed the plot. It turns to the story of the Countess P. who, after poisoning her husband, sets up a “private asylum for female criminals of the same stripe as herself” (210). She creates a panopticon in which everyone gazes at everyone else, thus exercising total control without any possibility of development: It was a panopticon she forced them to build, a hollow circle of cells like a doughnut, the inward-facing wall of which was composed of grids of steel and, in the middle of the roofed, central courtyard, there was a round room surrounded by windows. In that room she’d sit all day and stare and stare and stare at her murderesses and they, in turn, sat all day and stared at her. (210)

However, after some time, one of the inmates and one of the guards find ways to pass messages to each other. They fall in love and soon spark a revolution: “So it was an army of lovers who finally rose up against the Countess on the morning when the cages opened for the final exercise hour, opened – and never closed” (217–218). The women then plan to “found a female Utopia in the taiga” (240). This subplot takes up the central topic of the novel: The panopticon echoes Fevvers’ position of being constantly looked at and thus being controlled by this gaze which regards her as a rare object to be displayed in a ‘gilded cage’. The prisoners’ escape mirrors Fevvers’ repeated taking control of her body, her narrative, as well as her self-presentation to the audience. Likewise, it functions as a parallel to the control exerted by the owner of the circus and the audience on the performers in the circus as well as their creation of an alternative space where the freedom to explore new identities as well as new relationships exists. The escapees from the prison find Walser who suffers from total amnesia after the accident. He is reduced to a small child again, which signifies the beginning of his

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process of rebirth and development of his mature self. Apart from “Mama” (222), his only words are “‘Cock-a-doodle-dooski!’” (223) Totally stripped off his previous identity, he wanders into the woods where he stumbles into the hut of a Siberian Shaman who makes Walser his apprentice. The Shaman first takes him as an apparition but soon regards him as a Shaman to be. Thus, deprived of his memory and thus of history and logical thinking at the same time, Walser is initiated into the mysteries of Shamanism which are simultaneously ridiculed as well as regarded as a valid counter world in the novel. His amnesia, his strange behaviour as well as his language which nobody understands are interpreted as divine signs. The loss of individuality (“As it was, his self remained in a state of limbo” 254) turns out to be an important stage in his development, as Finney argues: “As the representative of male discourse and of a materialist view of human existence, he is shown to be flawed by his failure to admit into his life the world of fantasy, dreams and invention epitomized by Fevvers, but also embodied in the life of the circus and grotesquely caricatured in the life of the Shaman” (2006, 169). In the meantime, Fevvers thinks of Walser and realizes that she has fallen in love with him. While he slowly discovers a new identity during his Shaman’s apprenticeship, Fevvers also undergoes an identity crisis: When nobody looks at her and she lacks an audience, she loses her identity and when she finally stands again face to face with Walser, she asks in despair: “Am I fact? Or am I fiction? Am I what I know I am? Or what he thinks I am?” (290) Walser then asks her “What is your name? Have you a soul? Can you love?” (291) and she feels recognized for the first time: “‘That’s the way to start the interview!’ she cried. ‘Get out your pencil and we’ll begin!’” (291) With this, the narrative frame closes and in a short chapter entitled “Envoi” Fevvers resumes her story by describing how Lizzie found and nurtured her as a baby. After having regained her self-confidence, she tells Walser: “Believe it or not, all that I told you as real happenings were so, in fact; and as to questions of whether I am fact or fiction, you must answer that for yourself!” (292) In the end, he asks her why she made him believe that she was the “only full-feathered intacta in the history of the world” (294). Fevvers’ reaction is laughter: “Fevvers’s laughter seeped through the gaps in the window-frames and cracks in the door-frames of all the houses in the village; the villagers stirred in their beds, chuckling at the enormous joke that invaded their dreams, of which they would remember nothing in the morning except the mirth it caused. She laughed, she laughed, she laughed” (294–295). The story ends when the new century begins and Fevvers tells Walser: “‘To think I really fooled you!’ she marvelled. ‘It just goes to show there’s nothing like confidence.’” (295) ‘Confidence’ is here used with a double meaning: It refers to the confidence in her that Walser – as well as the reader – develops by believing her, but at the same time it refers to Fevver’s increasing self-confidence as a narrator. In this way, she is not only an unreliable narrator, but Carter comments that “[h]er boast is partly a celebration of the confidence trick, among other things, as well as a description of her way of being: she’s had the confidence to pull it off, after all” (Carter qtd. in Haffenden 1985, 90).

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This confidence trick is created by several narrative and literary strategies that form the basis of Nights at the Circus.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies As the preceding analysis of the three parts of Nights at the Circus has shown, the novel is a multifaceted text which combines various points of view, characters’ stories which appear at times to be unconnected but turn out to be interlinked as well as numerous topics that are also reflected on theoretically in the novel itself. This complex cosmos created in Nights at the Circus relies on several narrative and literary strategies which have one characteristic in common: They all break with the literary illusion and open up the text to postmodern metafiction – fiction with self-consciousness, self-awareness, and therefore an ironic self-distance. As Waugh argues, metafiction is based on a fundamental opposition in the text itself: It constructs a fictional illusion and at the same time it lays bare this illusion (1995, 43). She writes that “metafiction draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, examines the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, explores the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text” (Waugh 1995, 40). Three narrative and literary strategies form the novel’s foundation which will be analysed in the following: First, the character of Fevvers, who is obviously the protagonist, is hybrid, since she is presented a fleshed-out character and at the same time as an allegorical figure who evokes different associations that reach beyond the text in a metafictional manner. Second, the crucial feature of the novel which creates the suspense, the humour, and the fascination that might account for the novel’s success is the narrative situation which not only rests on an unreliable narrator but on a constantly shifting narrative perspective. The third strategy consists of a pronounced intertextuality, which is typical for many of Carter’s works and which again points to the extratextual layers by alluding to various philosophical and literary pretexts. Hence, Nights at the Circus turns out to be a very multilayered novel. The enigmatic Fevvers is from the beginning presented as a very earthy and somewhat vulgar woman, at least as seen through the eyes of Walser, but at the same time she is an allegorical figure and is perceived as such both by the other characters within the texts as well as by literary scholars. In an interview, Carter herself describes Nights at the Circus as an allegorical story (qtd. in Haffenden 1985, 87) and says that Fevvers is “a metaphor come to life” (qtd. in Haffenden 1985, 93), a woman with wings who flies to freedom out of her ‘gilded cage’. Fevvers’ performance of the New Woman is emphasised by her being the herald of a new age in which women are free. Fevvers’ foster mother Lizzie, prostitute and Marxist feminist, voices Fevvers’ allegorical significance: “Oh my little one, I think you must be the pure child of the

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century that is now waiting in the wings, the New Age in which no women will be bound to the ground” (25). Fevvers as a hybrid creature, half-woman, half-bird, significantly undergoes a process from being an object to being able to fly (Desblache 2005, 387). Walser as a ‘human chicken’ is conceived as the counterpoint to Fevvers and by that emphasises her ability to fly all the more. On the one hand, as Blodgett shows, “Carter literalizes the fantastic male construct of the nineteenth-century image of the Angel in the House” (Blodgett 1994, 52) and on the other hand, in the course of the story Fevvers manages to free herself by taking control of her own presentation and her own story. In an interview, Carter explained Fevvers’ origins as coming from her writing of The Sadeian Woman (Gamble 1997, 158), where she includes a quotation by Apollinaire about a woman who will have wings and renew the world (Gamble 1997, 158). Fevvers’ allegorical status is therefore again created by intertextuality. Carter likewise stated that “Fevvers is basically Mae West with wings” (qtd. in Haffenden 1985, 88), because, she argues, Mae West exercises great control of the audience’s response in her movies. As a symbolic representation, Fevvers also comes to pose as the ‘winged victory’ (Morrison 2003, 173) in the brothel, a representation which evokes the famous Nike of Samothrace (see Russo 2000, 141 and Morrison 2003, 173). A repeated reference to Titian’s “Leda and the Swan” (see Finney 2006, 168; and Morrison 2003, 174) shows how Nights at the Circus revises the normative scripts of women as victims of male violence. In her function as an allegorical figure, her character automatically triggers questions of hybridity and ambivalence that make it hard to place and to characterise her. In this context, Michael shows that “Fevvers is altogether an ambivalent figure who threatens traditional binary categories: she possesses masculine strength as well as feminine charms and wiles” (Michael 1996, 176). The most striking strategy of the novel – and typical of much of Carter’s œuvre – thus consists of holding the fleshedout character and the allegorical side of the character in a creative tension. The second strategy is connected to Fevvers as a character, who has to be read on several levels. In fact, her central position is complicated by the narrative situation which presents her as a highly ambivalent character: “Fevvers is certainly imagined as a prototype of the new, liberated woman of the twentieth century, but she is also constructed as a teller of tall tales who is not to be trusted” (Finney 2006, 164–165). Fevvers is thus presented as an unreliable narrator (cf. Carter qtd. in Haffenden 1985, 90; also Finney 2006, 166). In the beginning, however, as well as during most of the novel, Fevvers does not tell the story; the reader does not hear her voice, but it is mediated by Walser. Thus, the London part begins with a covert heterodiegetic narrator with Walser as a focaliser. In this situation, the reader sees through Walser’s eyes and perceives Fevvers as Walser perceives her: “He flicked through his notes. What a performance! Such style! Such vigour! And just how had the two women pulled off that piece of sleight-of-hand, or ear, rather, with the clocks? When he took out his pocket watch, he found, to his unsurprise, it had stopped short precisely at midnight” (90). By this strategy, Fevvers appears to be the object of Walser’s curiosity, an object

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he wants to debunk as a fraud. However, already in this passage, Fevvers controls time and thus the reality Walser experiences. Sections like these change to passages where an overt heterodiegetic narrator comments ironically on Fevvers: “Let me tell you something about Fevvers, if you haven’t noticed it for yourself already; she is a girl of philosophical bent” (185). However, again this narrator cannot take control over the protagonist, since comments like these do not diminish the ambivalent fascination she evokes. Fevvers herself only speaks without mediation as a homodiegetic narrator in very few passages, particularly in the “Siberia” part (but very soon the narrative situation again switches to heterodiegetic narration): “How do they live, here? How do they cope with it? Or aren’t I the right one to pop the question, I’m basically out of sympathy with landscape, I get the shivers on Hampstead bloody Heath” (197). What, then, is the effect of this continual narrative switching? Boehm remarks that “when Fevvers ceases her narration and the point of view is no longer Walser as reader of Fevvers but instead alternates between a third-person account of the sometimes separate wanderings of Walser and Fevvers, Walser’s journalistic writings, and Fevver’s interior monologue, the novel becomes difficult to decode according to comfortable readerly conventions” (Boehm 1995, 40). This narrative strategy does indeed pose difficulties for the reader. And apart from that, it creates an interesting tension: Although Fevvers’ own voice is rarely given directly, she is definitely the ‘controlling consciousness’ (Peach 1998, 132). How is this possible? How can it be that, as Peach describes it, “although Fevver’s story in Nights at the Circus is written up by a male, hers is the controlling voice even to the point where the male voice is emasculated” (Peach 1998, 133)? Cella describes the central strategy of Nights at the Circus as ‘Narrative Confidence Games’: She argues that for Fevvers being a commodity and exercising narrative control are connected, and she describes the mechanism of the novel as follows: Fevvers constructs herself as an object to be admired, but her posture and attitude reinforce the notion that she is the mistress of her own image, aware of herself as a spectacle and controlling the way this image is understood and publicized. Fevvers enacts her own confidence game through her careful omissions, her elaborate performance, and her delight in blurring the line between her physical self and the image she creates for the public. (Cella 2004, 56)

This can be read as a reflection of the hybridity of Fevvers’ presentation as fleshedout as well as allegorical character. I would argue that the shifting narrative situation which rarely gives the reader the protagonist’s voice leads to two crucial effects: First, Fevvers’ mystery is maintained. Neither Walser nor the reader knows anything about her real “nature” in the end, and therefore she remains unfathomable. Second, it is precisely the narrative strategy of seemingly giving other voices and perspectives control over her (the heterodiegetic narrator, Walser as a focaliser) that underscores the impossibility of taming, describing, understanding, and ultimately controlling her. Hence, the narrative situation that starts with a sceptical Walser does not create

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a distance to Fevvers but instead emphasises Fevvers’ almost total control of the story and her performance. The presentation of Fevvers as an allegorical character as well as the narrative situation which presents her as controlling authority but at the same time definitely as wholly unreliable are strategies which are typical for metafiction. So is the third literary strategy, that of intertextuality. In this context, Morrison states that the starting point of most of Carter’s texts is intertextuality because her writings are “constantly engaged in the quotation, appropriation and subversion of other texts” (Morrison 2003, 156–157). Carter herself emphasises the intertextual nature of her fiction in general: “But I realize that I tend to use other people’s books, European literature, as though it were a kind of folklore. Our literary heritage is a kind of folklore” (Carter qtd. in Haffenden 1985, 82). She also reflects on the use of intertextuality in Nights at the Circus in particular: “Nights at the Circus is using the whole of western European culture as though it were an oral tradition, in the same casual way that writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made reference to the classics” (Carter qtd. in Haffenden 1985, 92). Intertextuality in this novel can be found on two levels: first, on a generic level where literary conventions are appropriated and played with. Second, the text is peppered with innumerable allusions to previous literary and philosophical texts. Thus, just like Salman Rushdie, Carter utilises eighteenth-century forms such as the picaresque and the gothic (cf., for example, Morrison 2003, 157). In her appropriation of the eighteenth-century picaresque, gender roles and thus reader expectations are subverted “with Fevvers taking the dual role of heroine and adventuring rogue” (Morrison 2003, 174; see also Boehm 1995, 38). Furthermore, as Christinidis argues, Nights at the Circus can also be read as an adaptation of the Bildungsroman, the novel of development, especially as a rewriting of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, as not only the character of Mignon shows (Christinidis 2012). The grotesque also plays a major role in the novel (cf., for example, Dennis 2008, 119), and the foregrounding of Fevvers’ “monstrous body” (Punday 2002) refers to the contemporary monster story. Given the allusions to and adaptations of previous literary conventions and genre elements, it is no wonder that Nights at the Circus “defies standard generic categories” (Boehm 1995, 38). Apart from that, intertextuality pervades the text by the many concrete allusions to specific literary works. In the following, I will only give some examples in order to show that Carter creates intertextuality by referring to many different works of world literature. In the novel, the whole story of Mignon is a reference to Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (1836). Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is evoked by Walser’s remark “Curioser and curioser” (90). When Walser is described as Ishmael (“Call him Ishmael” 10), this quotation alludes to Moby-Dick (1851) by Herman Melville. W. B. Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” (1919) is evoked when the clown Buffo is described as follows: “Things fall apart at the very shiver of his tread on the ground. He is himself the centre that does not hold” (117). Carter also alludes to the Bible with

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the phrase “as through a glass, darkly” (28) from 1 Corinthians 13:12. These references are only some examples of Carter’s use of intertextual allusions by which she seems to suggest that literature as such, including Nights at the Circus, is constituted by other texts and only comes into existence by intertextuality – a genuinely postmodern position. Carters narrative and literary strategies all lead to metafictionality, which Imhof succinctly describes as “‘ludic’ or playful fiction” (1986, 177). The ‘ludic fiction’ of metafiction that consists of game-playing which makes up Nights at the Circus again finds an intertextual parallel in Colonel Kearney’s description of the circus as a ‘Ludic Game’. Hence, playfulness is highlighted as the central principle of the novel on different textual and metatextual levels.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Since Nights at the Circus creates a multifaceted literary cosmos, theoretical approaches to and readings of Carter’s most successful novel have also been diverse. First of all, the novel has most often been read and interpreted as a feminist fiction. Critics have debated if Carter has to be read as a feminist or an agent of patriarchy, but Nights at the Circus and The Passion of New Eve clearly show Carter as a “writer of genuinely revisionist fiction who aims at enhancing female power and countering the inscription of patriarchy” (Blodgett 1994, 49). Feminism in the novel is complex, since, according to Michael, it consists of both Marxist feminism and “subversive utopian feminism” (Michael 1996, 171), for which Lizzie and Fevvers are the respective mouthpieces. Fevvers as the winged New Woman who heralds freedom is flanked by her foster-mother who utters Marxist feminist statements, for example when she warns Fevvers against longing for motherhood (cf. 283). Hence, Lizzie “functions as the novel’s didactic feminist voice” (Michael 1996, 179). While Fevvers resists “heteronormative and imperial narratives of femininity” (Douglas 2014, 3), it is Lizzie who “verbalizes connections of gender, imperialism, and heteronormativity, with the call to universal suffrage and she also critiques the institution of marriage urging Fevvers not to marry” (Douglas 2014, 11). Caught between agency and commodification (Dennis 2008, 126), Fevvers mirrors the role of women in a society in which the male gaze turns women into objects. In the case of Fevvers, however, Dennis shows how “in a commodity-driven economy, she creates both herself as a product and as the demand for that product” (Dennis 2008, 128). Resisting the commodification time and again, Fevvers retains control, as has already been shown with regard to narration: “Look at me! With a grand, proud, ironic grace, she exhibited herself before the eyes of the audience as if she were a marvellous present too good to be played with. Look, not touch. She was twice as large as life and as succinctly finite as any object that is intended to be seen, not handled.

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Look! Hands off! LOOK AT ME!” (15) Clearly, she controls how much of herself she exhibits as well as the rules for her audience: “As an active subject, she fulfils her own appetites, constructing her own sexual identity, deriving pleasure from the sexual gaze, and remaining in control of the boundaries” (Dennis 2008, 126; see also Michael 1996, 177). As a feminist who creates and explores the power of monstrous women, Angela Carter has been read together with Doris Lessing (↗  14  Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook), Fay Weldon, and Jeanette Winterson (↗ 21 Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry) (Martin 1999). Carter has proven influential for many authors; Rubinson for example states that Jeanette Winterson owes a debt to Carter (Rubinson 2005, 148). However, Nights at the Circus is definitely not a straightforward feminist novel, since “[w]ith extravagant playfulness, [it] weaves together elements of the carnivalesque and fantastic with those of harsh material realism as vehicles for feminist aims” (Michael 1996, 171). The carnivalesque elements complicate her feminism and at the same time reinforce it. Feminist discussions and interpretations of Nights at the Circus have sometimes ignored the predominant tone of “playfulness, irony and exuberant excess” (Finney 2006, 164), maybe because the novel is, in Boehm’s words, “a complex metafictional feminist novel” (Boehm 1995, 37) and it is certainly true that “Carter was an unusual feminist in advance of her time” (Finney 2006, 163). The unease with which some feminist scholars have read Nights at the Circus is caused by Carter’s methods of subversion that she shares with other postmodern authors, such as Salman Rushdie (↗ 20 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses). By placing the monster, the freak, and the grotesque body in the centre of the novel, Carter not only challenges the idea of normalcy but also departs from realist fiction. Various scholars read Nights at the Circus as discussing, illustrating and playing with Bakhtin’s theories of the carnivalesque (cf. Peach 1998, 142), the grotesque and monstrous body (for example Dennis 2008, Douglas 2014, Martin 1999, Punday 2002, Peach 1998, and Desblache 2005). Peach, for example, uses Brecht’s tropes of alienation and masks as well as Mikhail Bakhtin’s study of carnival in Rabelais and his World (1965) for approaching the second part of Nights at the Circus (Peach 1998, 141). Here, Bakhtin makes a distinction between the grotesque and the classical body: The grotesque is related to the earthy, to eating and reproduction, to copulation, pregnancy and birth and is conceived as a contrast to the flawless, idealised classical body in literature and on stage (compare Dennis 2008, 124). According to Bakhtin, the carnivalesque provides a criticism of society – in Carter’s novel especially of patriarchy and normative gender roles as well as any kind of hierarchy, normalcy, and order. Gass especially shows how “The clowns represent contained chaos. They exemplify ‘carnival’ in a thoroughly Bakhtinian sense” (1994, 74). In the novel, the grotesque and the monstrous are connected to the carnivalesque where all hierarchies are turned upside down and norms no longer hold, and they have to be read together with gender. When Martin states that “Lacking the phallus, women’s bodies occupy an ambiguous position in the realm of the grotesque delin-

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eated by Bakhtin” (1999, 194), it again becomes clear that Fevvers occupies a special position, since “Everything about this creature is sublime excess” (Russo 2002, 137). In this way, Fevvers is presented as a mysterious, hybrid being: [I]f she were indeed a lusus naturae, a prodigy, then – she was no longer a wonder. She would no longer be an extraordinary woman, no more the Greatest Aerialiste in the world but – a freak. Marvellous indeed, but a marvellous monster, an exemplary being denied the human privilege of flesh and blood, always the object of the observer, never the subject of sympathy, an alien creature forever estranged. […] As a symbolic woman, she has meaning, as an anomaly, none. As an anomaly, she would become again, as she had once been, an exhibit in a museum of curiosities. (161)

As has been shown, Fevvers controls her commodification and thus creates a new narrative, while the novel as a whole “critiques how normative spectatorship objectifies freaks and simultaneously offers the freak show as a subversive space” (Douglas 2014, 4). With a similar approach, Punday analyses Nights at the Circus in the context of the contemporary monster story where the monstrous body becomes a symbol for female freedom (2002). Many critics agree that some of the main topics in the novel are the ways in which these dominant, frequently male-centered discourses of power marginalize those whom society defines as freaks (madmen, clowns, the physically and mentally deformed, and, in particular, women) so that they may be contained and controlled because they are all possible sources of the chaotic disruption of established power. The whorehouse, the freak show, the circus, and the prison provide the defining arenas within which society may safely contain, define, and exploit these chaotic elements. (Gass 1994, 71)

This central topic of the gaze, of being observed and controlled and an agent who is free to control one’s own story is mirrored in the subplot of the panopticon in Siberia, where female murderers are held under the gaze of the Countess P. In the prison chapter, “the novel’s omniscient narrative voice is totally separated from the voices of Fevvers and Walser, who are not present” (Michael 1996, 190). Nevertheless, the chapter is intimately intertwined with one of the novel’s major topics, the gaze, since “[t]he panopticon serves as an image of the way in which in society at large all are imprisoned” (Peach 1998, 158). Many readings of Nights at the Circus are concerned with this subplot and the philosophy behind it (for example Blodgett 1994, Peach 1998, Toye 2007, or Gass 1994). In an intertextual fashion typical for Carter, critics like Toye and Gass have pointed to Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) in which he discusses the eighteenth-century prison reform initiated by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham. Foucault analyses the panopticon as a social shift from corporeal discipline, which is put into effect in the form of a spectacle, to surveillance, which is supposed to trigger self-discipline. Toye shows how Carter places the panopticon within a female context and that “Carter subverts both the panopticon structure and

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Foucault’s rendition of it” (2007, 485). Therefore, she argues that the all-female panopticon in Carter’s novel reflects the isolation of women in the modern nuclear family which makes them work against each other. However, this structure is overthrown with the plan of a women-only utopia which counters patriarchy. The escape from the panopticon becomes possible because of lesbian love, thus, the escape from the controlling gaze and non-normative forms of relationships are connected. Gass argues that the model of observation that is created by the panopticon in fact controls the novel as a whole, for example Jack who “is in London to objectify, to subject Fevvers to his scrutiny, to define her” (Gass 1994, 72). The same mechanisms are described in the performances of the artists in the circus as well as in Madame Schreck’s display of freaks in her freak show-brothel. In an interview, Carter herself states that “my fiction is often a form of literary criticism” (qtd. in Haffenden 1985, 79) and many critics agree that Carter “is a writer often on the cutting edge of postmodern theory” (Boehm 1995, 47). This theoretically and critically informed fiction thus has to be read on several textual levels at once. Due to this intentional complexity of Carter’s texts, her novels demand analysis. Indeed Dennis puts it in a nutshell when she states that “Carter’s fiction demands interpretation and analysis […]. Her erudition and inventiveness led Carter to produce texts that are a literary critic’s dream. Ludic, richly textured, often ambiguous, but also intensely and purposefully political, her work is informed by a vast range of esoteric and diverse ideas, and her ability to anticipate intellectual currents before they became fashionable” (Dennis 2008, 117–118). Nights at the Circus is a prime example of postmodern storytelling and occupies the most important place in Angela Carter’s whole œuvre.

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Carter, Angela. Nights at the Circus. London: Vintage, 1994 [1984]. --Blodgett, Harriet. “Fresh Inconography: Subversive Fantasy by Angela Carter.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 14.3 (1994): 49–55. Boehm, Beth A. “Feminist Metafiction and Androcentric Reading Strategies: Angela Carter’s Reconstructed Reader in Nights at the Circus.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 37.1 (1995): 35–49. Cella, Laurie J. C. “Narrative ‘Confidence Games’: Framing the Blonde Spectacle in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) and Nights at The Circus (1984).” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 25.3 (2004): 47–62. Christinidis, Georgia. “Radical Transformation: Angela Carter’s Adaptation of the Bildungsroman.” Textual Practice 26.3 (2012): 467–487.

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Dennis, Abigail. “‘The Spectacle of Her Gluttony’: The Performance of Female Appetite and the Bakhtinian Grotesque in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus.” Journal of Modern Literature 31.4 (2008): 116–130. Desblache, Lucile. “Beauties and Beasts: Contrasting Visions of Animal Representation in Women’s Contemporary Fiction.” Contemporary Critical Studies 2.3 (2005): 381–395. Douglas, Erin. “Freak Show Femininities: Intersectional Spectacles in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 43.1 (2014): 1–24. Finney, Brian. “Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus (1984).” English Fiction Since 1984: Narrating a Nation. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2006. 163–176. Flood, Alison. “Angela Carter named best ever winner of James Tait Black award.” The Guardian. 6 December 2012. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/dec/06/angela-carter-uk-oldestliterary-prize (5 January 2016). Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1995. Gamble, Sarah. Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. Gass, Joanne M. “Panopticism in Nights at the Circus.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 14.3 (1994): 71–76. Haffenden, John. Novelists in Interview. London: Methuen, 1985. Imhof, Rüdiger. Contemporary Metafiction: A Poetological Study of Metafiction in English Since 1939. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1986. Martin, Sara. “The Power Of Monstrous Women: Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984) and Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989).” Journal of Gender Studies 8.2 (1999): 193–210. Michael, Magali Cornier. “Fantasy and Carnivalization in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus.” Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse: Post-World War II Fiction. Albany: University of New York Press, 1996. 171–208. Morrison, Jago. “Angela Carter: Genealogies.” Contemporary Fiction. London: Routledge, 2003. 155–178. Peach, Linden. “Illegitimate Power, Carnival and Theatre: Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991).” Macmillan Modern Novelists: Angela Carter. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1998. 131–158. Punday, Daniel. “Narrative Performance in the Contemporary Monster Story.” Modern Language Review 97.4 (2002): 803–820. Rubinson, Gregory J. “Angela Carter.” The Fiction of Rushdie, Barnes, Winterson and Carter: Breaking Cultural and Literary Boundaries in the Work of Four Postmodernists. Jefferson: McFarland, 2005. 147–186. Russo, Mary. “Revamping Spectacle: Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus.” Angela Carter: Contemporary Critical Essays. Ed. Alison Easton. Houndmills: Basingstoke, 2000. 136–160. The Times. “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.” The Times. 5 January 2008. http://www. thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/books/article2452094.ece (17 December 2015). Toye, Margaret E. “Eating Their Way Out of Patriarchy: Consuming the Female Panopticon in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 36.7 (2007): 477–506. Waugh, Patricia. “What is Metafiction and Why are They Saying Such Awful Things About it?” Metafiction. Ed. Mark Currie. London: Longman, 1995. 39–54.

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5.2 Further Reading Bannock, Sarah. “Auto/biographical Souvenirs in Nights at the Circus.” The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism. Ed. Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton. London: Longman, 1997. 198–215. Gruss, Susanne. The Pleasure of the Feminist Text: Reading Michèle Roberts and Angela Carter. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. Müller, Anja. Angela Carter: Identity Constructed/Deconstructed. Heidelberg: Winter, 1997.

Madelena Gonzalez

20 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988) Abstract: This chapter examines the background and context of Rushdie’s now infamous novel from both a literary and a sociological point of view. It provides a detailed study of the main characters and the complex plot of the novel, in addition to an analysis of the author’s innovative style and narrative technique, based on hybridity and intertextuality. As well as discussing the most controversial aspects of the book, linked to the episode of the “Satanic Verses”, it provides some original insights into its continuing relevance nearly thirty years after its publication. Not only is The Satanic Verses a major literary achievement within the impressive Rushdiean canon but it can also be considered as one of the most significant works of fiction of the late twentieth century. Keywords: Comedy, fatwa, hybridity, postmodernism, Romanticism

1 Context: Author, Œuvre, Moment Until the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988, Salman Rushdie (born 1947) was considered a promising new young Anglo-Indian novelist, based and educated in Britain, although born in Bombay. After an attempt at science fiction (Grimus 1975), which was not a commercial or critical success, his second and third novels, Midnight’s Children (1981) and Shame (1983) provided a satirical and inventive postmodern take on South Asian history, focusing on themes of identity and historical truth in post-Independence India and Pakistan. His distinctive literary style, inspired by Gabriel García Márquez and James Joyce, to name only two of the members of his “polyglot family tree” (see “Imaginary Homelands”, 1992a [1991], 21), as well as by Hollywood and the Indian film industry, both Bollywood and the Bombay Talkies, was a blend of magical realism and postmodern playfulness, while frequent narrative interventions in his texts invited comparisons with the eighteenth-century novel and Laurence’s Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767). The popular, commercial success of these two novels and the critical acclaim they received (Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize in 1981 while Shame was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Best Foreign Book Prize in France), allowed the aspiring novelist to leave the London advertising agency where he earned his living and concentrate on writing full time. When The Satanic Verses first appeared on 26 September 1988, it was greeted by the critical establishment in the English-speaking world as a further manifestation of what was fast becoming Rushdie’s signature style of “profuse and multiply-branching DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-021

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fictions” (Parrinder 1988, para. 13), full of complex subplots, a vast cast of characters, original and defamiliarizing use of the English language and, above all, “imaginative boldness” (Mojtabai 1989, 37). Such a description inescapably calls to mind the creative ideal expressed by the artist Vasco Miranda in Rushdie’s next novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) and is encapsulated in the phrase, “Epico-Mythico-Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High-Masala-Art” (148–149). However, if The Bombay Times found The Satanic Verses to be “wondrous and uplifting” (qtd. in Bradford 2014, 282), any literary evaluation of the novel was very rapidly overshadowed by what has become known as “The Rushdie Affair”. In India, after complaints by the Muslim MP Syed Shahabuddin about the book’s disrespectful attitude to Islam, the Prime Minister banned the novel and South Africa quickly followed suit. Despite winning the Whitbread Book Award for “Best Novel” in London, there were bans in Sudan and Bangladesh and then Sri Lanka and Pakistan, while marches were organised in British cities such as Bradford and Bolton where large Muslim populations had settled. Protest escalated and culminated in riots in Islamabad, leaving six dead and more than one hundred injured. It was on the following day, 14 February 1989, that the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa or death sentence, not only on Rushdie but on all those associated with the publication of his novel. One is tempted to remark that ‘the rest is history’, as Rushdie subsequently disappeared into the headlines, according to his contemporary and fellow novelist, Martin Amis (1990). Reality became stranger than fiction, as, with gruesome irony, the writer’s fate came uncannily close to mirroring that of the satirist Baal, who is executed on page 392 of the novel for his poems or “satanic verses”, mocking the religious regime in fictional seventh-century Jahilia, invented by Rushdie as a way of retelling the story of Islam. In 2012 Rushdie published Joseph Anton, a detailed chronicle and memoir of the years he spent in hiding, protected by Special Branch and MI5 in the UK. A vast archive of literature has sprung up about the ‘affair’, approaching it from every possible angle, whether it be literary, cultural, religious, sociological, anthropological, political or philosophical. Although it is not the purpose of this essay to discuss the ins and outs of the affair in any detail (see Appignanesi and Maitland, as well as Ruthven, for an in-depth examination of this aspect), Rushdie’s fate clearly indicates a clash of (liberal) humanist and (religious) fundamentalist world views. The affair is most frequently read through this lens, especially as several essays by the author himself, published in his collection of articles and reviews, Imaginary Homelands (1991), encourage and support this interpretation. So what exactly is the problem with the novel and why was it found to be so offensive? A brief study of characters and themes will shed some light on the controversy.

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2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns To sum up the plot of the novel in a few paragraphs is hard, for like all of Rushdie’s novels for adults, both pre- and post-fatwa, with the exception of Fury (2001), it is one of the “large, loose, baggy monsters”, referred to by Henry James in his preface to The Tragic Muse (1890) where he makes an explicit link with Tolstoy (para. 5). It is worth remembering that both James and Tolstoy are part of the literary tradition which influenced Rushdie. The 547 pages of The Satanic Verses span several centuries and multiple locales, ranging from what, at the time, was contemporary Britain, to seventh-century Arabia, twentieth-century Pakistan and Bombay, as well as a vignette of Argentina in the 1920s or 30s. The novel starts like an epic, in media res, with the “angelicdevilish” (5)1 fall of the two main characters from the exploding jumbo jet Bostan, ironically named after one of the Islamic gardens of paradise. They are Gibreel Farishta, a famous Indian film star of Muslim heritage, and Saladin Chamcha, also of Muslim ancestry but brought up in the decidedly secular household of his businessman father, a wealthy manufacturer of agricultural sprays and “leading light of the nationalist movement” (36). Chamcha, formally Salahuddin Chamchawalla, as we discover later, is an anglicised Bombayite who has settled in London, shortened his name for convenience, married a member of the aristocracy and earns his living as an actor, mostly doing voice-overs for commercials and for the popular TV sit-com, The Aliens Show. In short, he is presented as the archetypal anglophile or, to use Homi Bhabha’s terminology, ‘mimic man’, who is “almost the same, but not quite” (1994, 86) as the colonizer he is mimicking. In addition, it is revealed later in the novel that ‘chamcha’ is the Hindustani word for spoon (83), and as Rushdie underlines in a much quoted article, it also has the derogatory connotation of toady or yes-man: “a chamcha is a person who sucks up to powerful people, a yes-man, sycophant. The British Empire would not have lasted a week without such collaborators among its colonized peoples” (1982, 8). The Air-India flight on which the two men were travelling from Bombay has been blown up by Sikh terrorists, inviting comparison with two major incidents that occurred in June 1985: the hijacking of TWA flight 847 by Hezbollah, and the explosion of Air-India Flight 182 in which 396 passengers perished, the responsibility for which was attributed to Sikh separatists. The continuing, uncanny, even amplified resonance, significance and relevance of many of the themes of the novel in relation to the current terrorist threat in Europe and the US and the situation in the Middle East will be discussed briefly in the final part of this essay. However, it is worth noting for the present that the narrative tone of this surprising and fantastical beginning is deliberately and decidedly comic and it is this tone which can already provide some-

1 Unless otherwise indicated, page references in brackets without further designation refer to Rushdie 1992 [1988].

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thing of a clue as to the offence caused by the book. James Harrison, for example, describes the novel as “vintage Rushdie – comic, inventive, uninhibitedly irreverent” (1992, 103; emphasis mine) and labels it a comic epic, making a comparison with Lord Byron’s notorious masterpiece, Don Juan. We will return to the important question of genre in the next part of this essay and to that of literature and fundamentalism shortly. The two main protagonists, whose backstories we learn as the novel progresses, will be the prism through which the story is told and the focus for the main themes of the novel. Although seemingly very different on the surface, they resemble nothing so much as two sides of the same coin: “Gibreelsaladin, Farishtachamcha” (5). It is thus impossible to categorise them respectively as hero and anti-hero despite the fact that within a few pages, with recourse to his familiar brand of the fantastic couched in the magic realist mode, Rushdie turns Saladin into a devil, complete with hoofs, horns and a tail and Gibreel into an angel with a luminous halo. However, they are not so much opposites as the site for a battle between conflicting and contradictory forces, inextricably locked together. This clear refusal to have recourse to simple binaries like that of good versus evil, for example, is one of the sources of the problem with the reception of the novel from a fundamentalist point of view. But, for the present, let us return to the plot and main themes. Saladin and Gibreel survive their Miltonic fall and second birth (“To be born again, first you have to die” is the first sentence of the novel, adapted from the writings of the Italian philosopher and Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci [1891–1937]), largely unscathed and, with fitting irony, are washed up on a beach at Hastings, where the Norman Conquest took place. The rest of the book will be the story of their very different trajectories as latter-day invaders, or rather migrants, as they negotiate the hostile environment of the English capital with the distinct disadvantage of their brown skins: “Just two brown men, falling hard, nothing so new about that, you may think; climbed too high, got above themselves, flew too close to the sun, is that it?” (5) If the novel had told only this tale, the enthusiastic encomiums printed on its back jacket would have been the end of the story, as it were; instead there developed the furore over its blasphemous intent which soon turned into an affair of international proportions stretching over several decades. It is worth stressing that the scenes set in 1980s London with their satirical portraits of Margaret Thatcher as ‘Mrs Torture’, the street riots and the Metropolitan police, as well as of the immigrant community and its left-wing sympathisers, are some of the most comic, finely observed and well-written to be found anywhere in Rushdie’s fiction. Indeed, in some senses, The Satanic Verses does for multicultural Britain what Midnight’s Children did for India, creating space for “the new empire within Britain” (Rushdie 1992a, [1991] 129) and rendering its vilification by many members of the community it depicts all the more poignant. The Satanic Verses can also be seen as the final novel in a trilogy which began with Midnight’s Children and moves from India to Pakistan in Shame and finally on to England, mirroring the author’s personal trajectory (Suleri 1992, 194).

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However, with typical Rushdiean world-swallowing ambition, the novel does not confine itself to the multicultural metropolis, “the locus classicus of incompatible realities” (314), as one of its many characters, Otto Cone, Holocaust survivor, “melting-pot man” (298) and enthusiastic convert to Englishness, expresses it; it also incorporates other scenarios into its structure, a feature of many of Rushdie’s novels whose intricate and multiple plots are reminiscent of the Victorian novel and particularly of Dickens. Most notable of these parallel plots is the story of the founding of Islam in the seventh-century, where a fictional incarnation of the prophet Mohammed, problematically named Mahound like the medieval spook of the European imagination, plays the main role. The novel also tells the story of a doomed pilgrimage to Mecca from the Indian village of Titlipur (‘Butterfly’), led by the seemingly devout, but possibly unhinged, Ayesha, a beautiful young orphan who suffers from epilepsy. She parades around accompanied by a swarm of butterflies which also serve as her nourishment and has visions in which the Archangel Gibreel gives her holy commands, most notably to lead the inhabitants of her village on a foot pilgrimage to Mecca, a story based on a real incident that took place in Pakistan in 1983 when a substantial number of pilgrims drowned in the Arabian Sea (see Suleri 1992, 202, for a more detailed account). Her religious devotion comes into conflict with the local zamindar or landowner, Mirza Saeed, who is resolutely secular and opposed to the pilgrimage from the start but obliged to accompany his wife who has been convinced by Ayesha that the trip will cure her cancer. In addition to scenes set in a brothel in the city of Jahilia (‘Ignorance’), where the prostitutes have assumed the names of the prophet Mohammed’s wives to excite the appetites of their clientele, and the ‘satanic verses’ episode to which we shall shortly return, the novel also includes a harshly satirical cameo of the Ayatollah Khomeini during an imagined exile in London and a grotesque Bulgakov-inspired dream scene where “the Imam”, as he is called, triumphs over the pagan goddess Al-Lat/Ayesha (212–215). All these different and competing storylines are told separately in different parts of the novel (see Table 1: Main Plot and Subplots in The Satanic Verses) but woven together thanks to a series of recurring leitmotifs and, above all, to the dreaming mind of Gibreel, who first appears in a disturbed state after the suicide of a former lover, a life-threatening illness and a love-at-first-sight encounter with the famous mountaineer, Allelulia Cone. By the end of the novel, partly due to his incessant and troubling dreams, but also to a series of anonymous phone calls exciting his sexual jealousy in regard to his lover, he descends into full blown paranoid schizophrenia which results in him pushing Allie off a skyscraper in Bombay, before he finally confronts Saladin (revealed to be the author of the prank calls which take the form of obscene jingles and nursery rhymes or even “satanic verses” [445]) and turns a gun on himself. Saladin, on the contrary, will start a new life in India after a deathbed reconciliation with his estranged father.

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Table 1: Main Plot and Subplots in The Satanic Verses Part

Title

I

The Angel Gibreel (Main Plot: Gibreel and Saladin) II

Mahound (Subplot I: past)

III

Ellowen Deeowen (Main Plot: Gibreel and Saladin) IV

V

A City Visible but Unseen (Main Plot: Gibreel and Saladin) VI

Return to Jahilia (Subplot I: past)

VII

The Angel Azraeel (Main Plot: Gibreel and Saladin) VIII

IX

Ayesha (Subplot II: present a) exiled Imam in London b) Ayesha’s pilgrimage)

The Parting of the Arabian Sea (Subplot II: present b) Ayesha’s pilgrimage) The Wonderful Lamp (Main Plot: Gibreel and Saladin)

In effect, the scenes in seventh-century Jahilia and modern-day Titlipur are presented as the dreams, or rather nightmares, of the troubled Gibreel, who imagines himself the actual incarnation of the gods in the numerous ‘theologicals’ in which he starred as leading man. Interestingly enough, the mode of narration of what we may call, for the sake of simplicity, the Mahound and Ayesha episodes, is mostly realist, and Goonetilleke, for example, insists on “the greater influx of realism in The Satanic Verses” (1998, 93) in comparison with Rushdie’s earlier novels (see also Harrison 1992, 95). The novel is multifarious in its sources and themes but certain topics and concerns tend to dominate and drive it forward at a relentless pace, giving it an overarching coherence. One of the most obvious and frequently discussed is the question of migrant identity, linked to the concept of metamorphosis and hybridity, the status of the translated being, an idea alluded to by the narrator of Shame and subsequently theorized by Rushdie in some of the essays to be found in Imaginary Homelands (1992a [1991]; see, for example, “The Location of Brazil”, 118–125). An important theme, but one that has been examined in less detail, is that of the role of love as a

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source of individual and communal salvation. But let us first turn to the subject of the “satanic verses” of the title and the source of much speculation and virulent criticism.

2.1 “The Satanic Verses” “What kind of an idea are you?” is a recurring question which appears at key junctures in the Mahound narrative (95, 102, 111, 121, 335) but also in the story of Ayesha (500); we first meet it on page 95 when a mysterious voice whispers it in Mahound’s ear. The problem is what directly follows the question: “We know that voice. We’ve heard it once before” (95). Far from immediately clarifying the source, this odd interpolation is reminiscent of the second page of the novel where we read: Who am I? Who else is there? (4)

and also of the last page of the first chapter where we find: Of what type – angelic, satanic – was Farishta’s song? Who am I? Let’s put it this way: who has the best tunes? (10)

The reader smiles to himself as he recognises the old adage, ‘the devil has the best tunes’, and this allows him to interpret the later interpolation in the same light: Mahound is undergoing temptation by the devil who seems to be narrating the novel, at least temporarily. However, this devilish voice is not found consistently throughout the novel and whether or not we can identify it as the dominant narrative authority is open to discussion (see Aravamudan 1994; Grant 1999; and Harrison 1992). The following interjection by the troubled Gibreel is an illustration of this confusion: Being God’s postman is no fun, yaar Butbutbut: God isn’t in this picture. God knows whose postman I’ve been. (312)

M. Keith Booker, for example, claims that “God and Satan are indistinguishable, irrevocably intertwined, and the narrator does nothing to clear up the confusion” (1990, 988), while in his essay “Home Front”, Rushdie himself avers, “God cannot be defined without the Devil, Jekyll is meaningless without Hyde” (1992a, 144). What we can already notice is the way doubt informs both the reader’s interaction with the novel and the character’s interaction with the higher power. This uncomfortable state of uncertainty reaches its paroxysm with the incident of the “satanic verses”.

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In an article written for the Observer in January 1989 and reprinted in Appignanesi and Maitland (1989), Rushdie claims that the phrase “the Satanic verses” comes from recognised Islamic sources: Even the novel’s title has been termed blasphemous; but the phrase is not mine. It comes from al-Tabari, one of the canonical Islamic sources. Muhammad received verses which accepted the three favourite Meccan goddesses as intercessionary agents. […] Later, the Archangel Gabriel told Muhammad that these had been “Satanic verses”, falsely inspired by the Devil in disguise and they were removed from the Koran. (Appgnanesi and Maitland 1989, 74)

However, Daniel Pipes points out that the expression was in fact invented by western scholarship and used by W. Montgomery Watt in order to refer to what Muslims know as the gharaniq incident or ‘incident of the birds’. He proceeds to quote the two abrogated lines: “These are the exalted birds/And their intercession is desired indeed” (Pipes 1990, 115), which also appear on page 114 of the novel. Thus it would seem that Rushdie’s representation of the incident is rooted in an orientalist tradition, fostered by his study of Islamic history at Cambridge (see Goonetilleke 1998, 101), as well as in a belief in the concepts of historicity and cultural materialism (Teverson 2007, 157). What is particularly unpalatable for devout Muslims is not only the ridicule heaped on the fictional Mahound for his change of heart but the profound uncertainty about the truthfulness of the final revelation and its divine nature that runs through the novel: [H]e has been tricked […] the Devil came to him in the guise of the archangel, so that the verses he memorized […] were not the real thing […] not godly, but satanic. He returns to the city […] to expunge the foul verses […] to strike them from the record […] and orthodox interpreters will try and unwrite their story, but Gibreel, hovering-watching from his highest camera angle, knows one small detail, namely that it was me both times, baba, me first and second also me. (123)

Here, thanks to the dream conceit, Rushdie strikes at the very heart of faith and we reach the crux of the problem, as he substitutes doubt for certainty and establishes a disturbing equivalence between good and evil, god and the devil, in the comic mode, making a mockery of belief. This uncertainty is emphasised in a further apparition by a higher power just before Gibreel’s breakdown when he is staying in Allie’s London flat. The “myopic scrivener” (319) who appears to him as God bears an uncanny resemblance to Rushdie himself (see Spivak 1989, 84) and sums it up thus: “‘Whether We be multiform, plural, representing the union-by-hybridization of such opposites as Oopar and Neechay, or whether We be pure, stark, extreme, will not be resolved here’” (319). These Hindustani terms refer, respectively, to god and the devil, as is explained on the previous page, “‘The Fellow Upstairs’” and “‘The Guy from Underneath’” (318). A creed of doubt, inspired by the Romantic sensibility to be found in William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) (see Rushdie’s essay “In Good Faith”, 1992a [1991], 393–414), was already clearly expressed by the narrative voice at the beginning

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of the first section on Mahound; in the reader’s mind, this clearly links it to the founding of Islam: Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief. Doubt. (92)

This in turn relates to the original question posed in the struggle between absolutism and purity, set against the idea of compromise and adaptation, formulated by Jahilia’s renowned satirist, Baal, whose name conjures up Bertolt Brecht’s poet anti-hero as well as the devil: WHAT KIND OF AN IDEA ARE YOU? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? (335)

It is the same question that Ayesha will reply to uncompromisingly, sealing the tragic fate of her followers. This is more than simply a recurring leitmotif; it is a major theme and all the more important as, thanks to a dense network of connection, it links up with another key concern of the novel, that of migrant identity and hybridity and the two different versions of migrant being, or rather becoming, represented by Saladin and Gibreel, as well as with the concept of metamorphosis, examined in the novel.

2.2 “Pity the Poor (Im)migrant” One of the most obvious and much examined themes of The Satanic Verses is that of migrant identity, which appears in the first few pages of the text in conjunction with the question: “How does newness come into the world?” (8) As is habitual with Rushdie, the theme of migration is based on a strong conceptual foundation; one of his talents consists in the way in which his fiction is able to examine weighty ideas through a tragi-comic prism and make them both entertaining and thought-provoking at the same time. Like many of Rushdie’s novels, The Satanic Verses has more than a passing acquaintance with the novel of ideas and the roman à clef. As we mentioned earlier in this essay, migrancy is a theme close to Rushdie’s heart for obvious personal reasons. The changes required by the experience of leaving one’s homeland for a foreign country, something Rushdie himself experienced at the age of thirteen when he was sent off to school at Rugby, form the basis for an examination of two different and competing conceptions of metamorphosis in the novel. These are expressed by the learned Bangladeshi schoolteacher in exile, Mr Muhammad Sufyan, whose name and character symbolise an enlightened incarnation of Islam.

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Two classical sources, Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, are pitted against each other as alternatives available to the migrant: “Lucretius is taken to show that change or metamorphosis (or migrancy) means the death of one self and the birth of a new self, while Ovid suggests that under the appearance of change, a real essence remains” (Eaglestone 2013, 118). Saladin and Gibreel become the principle vehicles through which this debate is played out. Gibreel proves himself incapable of adapting to the reality of multicultural London and his (im)migrant status; this, in conjunction with his doomed cross-cultural love affair, will lead to a serious breakdown. In the throes of paranoid schizophrenia, he imagines himself to be the avenging angel of death, Azraeel, wandering through the riot-torn capital, blowing on a supposedly fire-breathing trumpet. Saladin’s devilish transformation, on the other hand, forces him back into the arms of the community that he has rejected; not only is he beaten up by the police as a possible ‘illegal’ and taken to a detention centre but he is kicked out of his comfortable home by his wife who has started an affair with his old friend and fellow Indian, the left-wing poet, Jumpy (shortened from Jamshed) Joshi. Thus he is compelled to take up residence in the Sufyan’s Shaandaar (‘Splendid’) Bed & Breakfast for newly-arrived and, mostly illegal, immigrants in Brickhall. From this location, his outcast status as a devil becomes a focus for political unrest within a community habitually victimised and demonised by the police. In the light of Saladin’s fate at the end of the novel and his seeming redemption in contrast to Gibreel’s self-destruction, not to mention the first sentence of the novel, it would seem that Rushdie is coming down firmly on the side of Lucretius. The concept of mélange or hybridity, much touted by the writer himself and by academic assessments of his fiction (see, for example, Cundy 1996 and Kuortti 2007), and also at work stylistically in the novel, would seem to triumph as an ideal. This interpretation is encouraged by certain essays written by the author subsequent to the novel’s publication and which have been used as a convenient framework within which to address the issues it raises. Without falling into the trap of the intentionalist fallacy (see Close 1990 for an alternative take on this point), it is worth quoting at some length the author’s own description of his novel, taken from the essay “In Good Faith”, written as a response to the fatwa: The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love-song to our mongrel selves. (1992a [1991], 394)

It can be seen clearly here how Rushdie conceives of migration as an opportunity for positive change and how he links it to his, for some, ‘satanic’ creed of doubt and creative impurity. It is hardly surprising that on hearing Bob Dylan’s protest song, “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” at a meeting of the local community in Brickhall to discuss

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police harassment, Rushdie has Saladin remark: “Another false and imported note, this” (415). Some critics, such as Timothy Brennan (1989), feel that Rushdie’s constant and committed celebration of migrancy and hybridity is linked to his privileged cosmopolitan status, far removed from the common run of migrant experience. However, it is worth quoting Saladin’s existential epiphany on the subject of hybridity when he has returned to the marital home after regaining human form: On Gardeners’ World he was shown how to achieve something called a ‘chimeran graft’ […], two trees that had been bred into one […] a chimera with roots, firmly planted in and growing vigorously out of a piece of English earth […]. If such a tree was possible, then so was he; he, too, could cohere, send down roots, survive. (406)

This image is set in contrast to the indiscriminate hybridity of the televisual universe through which Saladin has been channel hopping, which might lead the reader to doubt the unimpeded celebration of the notion of intermingling in any form. For Teverson, Saladin has found Bhabha’s ‘third space’ (2007, 148; see Bhabha 1994, 36–39), but Goonetilleke (1998, 82) believes that the novel raises some doubt as to the validity of the concept of hybridity, remarking that the word ‘chimera’ signifies illusion and that Otto Cone’s beautiful English floral garden, composed of grafts and hybrids, is replaced by a vulgar vegetable patch after his death. In many ways, it could be esteemed that Rushdie has a Romantic sensibility, summed up by the last line of his essay, quoted above (1992a [1991], 394). And, of course, it cannot be denied that such an affinity places a high value on the exceptional individual.

2.3 “What Will Survive of Us is Love” Goonetilleke affirms that “the final impression of the novel is caught in the line quoted above, taken from Philip Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb’” (1998, 91). This is an assertion worth taking seriously in relation to a novel which, despite its satirical tone and obsession with doubt, is singularly preoccupied with love as salvation. A case in point is Gibreel’s dramatic rescue of his enemy Saladin from a burning building, qualified in the text as “this small redeeming victory for love” (468). Saladin’s eleventh-hour reconciliation with his estranged father can also be seen in this light: “Death brought out the best in people; […] [T]his, too, was what human beings were like: considerate, loving, even noble. We are still capable of exaltation, he thought in celebratory mood; in spite of everything, we can still transcend” (527). There could be no clearer expression of Rushdie’s belief in love, his Romantic/romantic creed, stemming, no doubt from the “God-shaped hole” or “chamber” he claims to be filling with his writing (1992a [1991], 377). While discussing Rushdie’s affiliation to Romantic thought, Peter Morey evokes his “commitment to the principles of the Romantic imagination” (2007,

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37) and refers to Grant’s comparison between Rushdie’s belief in art and the imagination as central to humanity and that of Shelley in his Defence of Poetry (1840) (see Grant 1999, 1, 11–12), while Dominic Head (2002, 179) notes Rushdie’s view, expressed in Imaginary Homelands, that the imagination “is one of the keys to our humanity” (1992a [1991], 143). Mark Wormald claims that Rushdie has made the novel as a genre “his own secular scripture” (1999, 185), while Rushdie himself wonders whether his own instinctive belief in the “absolute freedom of the imagination” might not represent a “secular fundamentalism” (1992a [1991], 418). It will be clear that such sentiments, which see literature as a form of secular creed free from any constraints save the literary, are anathema to certain readers or simply incomprehensible within a fundamentalist world view, whether Christian, Muslim or otherwise. When analysed in relation to Rushdie’s humanistic faith in love, the somewhat optimistic, happy ending of the novel, or, as Suleri would have it, the “sentimental resolution” (1992, 191) of the narrative, is less surprising. Saladin is finally able to tell Zeeny, his former sweetheart, “I love you” (534). He at last feels able to commit, not only to the relationship, but to the collective action seen as necessary for change (418) by participating in a human chain in support of “national integration” (537), organised by The Communist Party of India in a state run by the far right Shiv Sena. The somewhat mawkish conventions of the Victorian deathbed scene give way to what resembles the climax of a Bildungsroman as Saladin contemplates the view from his ancestral home: He shook his head; could no longer believe in fairy-tales. Childhood was over, and the view from this window was no more than an old and sentimental echo. To the devil with it! Let the bulldozers come. If the old refused to die, the new could not be born. (546)

Catherine Cundy’s assertion of “Rushdie’s belief in love as the prime mover in effecting the rebirth of identity” (1996, 79) would appear to be borne out by this final scene which echoes the incipit of the novel and also the themes Rushdie claims to be addressing in his essay “In Good Faith”, where he states that the novel is a discussion “about how human beings really become whole: through the love of God or through the love of their fellow men and women” (1992a, 395). As Saladin turns away from the view, the reader is presented with what is almost a Hollywood/Bollywood ending as he and Zeeny walk off into the sunset. It is hardly the tricksy, open-ended absence of resolution readers have come to expect of postmodern fiction. Rather than the Borgesian ‘garden of forking paths’, it seems closer in tone to the softly nostalgic but mature closing of the ‘book’ that we find in Great Expectations, for example. The generic hybridity of the novel is one of the characteristics which has made it such a puzzle but also such a joy to read, and it is time now to address precise questions concerning its aesthetics.

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3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies It is generally accepted that while, thematically, Rushdie’s fiction falls into the category of postcolonialism, it partakes at the same time of a postmodernist aesthetic based on a philosophy and practice of ironic eclecticism, a self-conscious mixing of sources, registers and genres, described in detail by the Canadian theorist Linda Hutcheon (1988). It should not be forgotten either that Rushdie was an assiduous reader of the French thinkers Jean-François Lyotard and Michel Foucault at the time he was writing the novel. Richard Bradford explains some of the consequences of this for his literary philosophy, quoting from Rushdie’s lecture/essay, “Is Nothing Sacred”, in passing: Rushdie is an enthusiastic disciple of Lyotard’s central thesis that late twentieth-century existence is composed entirely and exclusively of competing discourses and modes of representation. Reality is no longer something possessed or experienced but rather an endlessly transient spectrum of effects. […] He ponders and accepts Lyotard’s contention that the ‘rejection of totalized explanations is the modern condition […] the elevation of the quest for the Grail over the Grail itself, the acceptance that all that is solid has melted into air, that morality and reality are not givens, but imperfect human constructs […].’ This is what Lyotard called, in 1979, La Condition Postmoderne. (2007, 196)

Dominic Head also insists on this point, linking it to the affair: “[T]o Islam certain sacred things are unimpeachable, whilst to postmodern practitioners everything is both questionable and available for any mode of representation” (2002, 182). Rushdie’s postmodern aesthetic, based on a Lyotardian scepticism towards metanarratives, a Barthesian and Foucauldian belief in the ‘death of the author’ and the primacy of discourse is also indicative of the poststructuralist linguistic turn and Derrida’s affirmation that there is nothing outside the text. This crisis in representation has important consequences in regard to how we apprehend Rushdie’s interweaving of the realist and fantastic modes in his novels. Theory is all very well, but how does the aesthetic we have been discussing manifest itself in practice? Everything about Rushdie’s fiction is excessive; we have already touched on the thematic complexity of the novel, but stylistically it is an even greater challenge to the reader, first and foremost because of its sheer multifariousness. Joel Kuortti, for example, evokes, “different registers and genres”, “postmodern and deconstructivist devices and strategies”, a “heteroglossic, multi-voiced narrative” and “multiple languages”; according to his analysis, the novel, “plays ironically with readers’ expectations”; it is a “polyglot text”, a “multivocal and multifocal narrative that resists mastery” (Kuortti 2007, 128). Kuortti’s assessment is accurate and the incipit of the novel (3–9) establishes a reading pact which can only be described as confusing. It is difficult for the reader to situate with any certainty the narrative voice and to fully grasp the fantastic nature of the events described. His only option is to abandon himself to undecidability and accept with good grace whatever is thrown at him, that

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is to say, a welter of different styles, voices, points of view, allusions, references, even languages, for the novel incorporates Hindustani vocabulary and expressions and a host of idiolects, from Jamaican slang to Eighties ad-speak, via the academic discourse of the postcolonial critic. The text is used as a melting pot into which Rushdie indiscriminately tips a vast number of disparate and seemingly incompatible ingredients, as the sheer number of intertextual echoes imply. Within the first few pages, Brecht and The Doors jostle with popular Indian film, the Bible, the Koran, Jean-Luc Godard, Indian playback singers, the Urdu ghazal, Alice in Wonderland and “Rule Britannia”. Whether one finds these juxtapositions appetising and original or indigestible and incoherent, they allow us to suggest that form mirrors content, for the narrative uncertainty, the ventriloquising of different voices and the switch between various points of view can of course be seen as a manifestation of the migrant condition, the “migrant’s eye view of the world”, evoked by Rushdie in his essay “In Good Faith” (1992a [1991], 394). Such instability is also one of the key characteristics of postmodernist fiction, which frequently destabilises narrative authority, making ‘the truth’ of events a guessing game for the reader: “I’m saying nothing. Don’t ask me to clear things up one way or the other; the time of revelations is long gone. The rules of Creation are pretty clear: you set things up, you make them thus and so, and then you let them roll” (408). This intervention constitutes a self-conscious parody of the disembodied omniscience of traditional realist fiction, such as is to be found in the Victorian novel, based on what Roland Barthes famously termed “the referential illusion” (1986 [1968], 148). This latter could be explained as the idea that a universally recognisable reality, the unvarnished truth, is un-problematically available to all as set down by the words on the page which are the verbal mirror of life as it actually is. Such a contention enters into direct conflict with Derrida’s tissue of textualities and the idea that reality is constructed by language. In familiar postmodern vein, Rushdie’s text self-consciously draws attention to this state of affairs thanks to its recourse to metatextual and metafictional strategies and interventions, although, as Brennan has remarked (1989, 148), these are perhaps less pronounced in The Satanic Verses than in the first two novels of the trilogy. Nevertheless, the irony and word play to be found in the text are very obviously displayed, sometimes to the point of bad taste. One such example is when Saladin describes his father’s dying body as a “living lunch for the advancing cancer cells” (526). This clichéd trivialising of a tragic situation which smacks of the unscrupulous world of advertising with its hackneyed jargon tends to support the view that ‘nothing is sacred’ for Rushdie, apart from the absolute freedom of expression to be found in literature, a fact to which numerous passages in the essays collected in Imaginary Homelands, amply testify (see, for example, 1992a [1991], 395, 418, 439). Once again, the form of the novel mirrors its content. The inconsistency of style and narration make it tempting to assess the book’s aesthetic as a paradoxical or palinodic challenge to authorial hegemony, as Booker suggests (1990, 987), while Grant (1999) evokes the Eastern equivalent of “Once upon

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a Time”, which occurs at several points in the text, in order to back up such an analysis: “‘It was so, it was not’ (SV, 544), the take-it-and-leave-it palinode on which all story floats” (1999, 87). Indeed, the novel’s lack of definition can be interpreted as the manifestation of the fragmented, unreliable, uncertain, disjunctive nature of the postmodern condition to the extent that, for Bradford, “[i]n continually resisting paraphrase or exegesis it exposes as futile the inclination to make sense of anything” (2007, 196). The narrative does indeed swing dizzily back and forth between more or less conventional third-person narration, metafictional interruptions in the first person, dream sequences (oscillating between first and third person modes, between direct and reported interior monologue) where Gibreel, Mahound or Mirza Saeed are the principal focalisers, and the realist and fantastic modes. It has almost become a cliché now to consider Rushdie as an exponent of the South American genre of magic realism, made famous by Gabriel García Márquez, and there are indeed some episodes in the novel which conform to this generic paradigm, already rehearsed in Midnight’s Children and Shame. The incipit is one example and some, but not all, of the Ayesha narrative is recounted in this mode, as is Gibreel’s final deranged progress through the burning capital in the chapter entitled “A City Visible but Unseen”. Goonetilleke develops a parallel with the strategies of science fiction (1998, 93–94), a genre with which Rushdie experimented in his first novel, Grimus, and also in Fury (2001) which contains an interpolated science-fiction web narrative. Many readings insist on this blurring between reality and fantasy and the difficulty in understanding what status to give to the many improbable events of a narrative that juxtaposes angles and viewpoints with more than a conscious wink at the cinema and the technique of montage. As both Booker (1990, 985) and Teverson (2007, 153) remark, ontological confusion is also one of the hallmarks of a postmodernist aesthetic. The literalisation of metaphor, a mainstay of the Rushdiean aesthetic much in evidence in all his fiction, is one of the hinges on which the confusion between fantasy and reality rests. The beating up of Chamcha in the back of a Black Maria, for example, is imbued with a surreal quality as Saladin increasingly takes on the devilish characteristics attributed to him by the police officers, while the brutal authoritarianism of his aggressors conjures up a comic Orwellian dystopia. Wrongfully arrested despite being a “British Citizen first class” (164), he is held at a detention centre for illegals where he encounters a gallery of metaphors made flesh. A male model who has undergone transformation into a manticore explains to Saladin: There’s a woman over that way […] who is now mostly water-buffalo. There are businessmen from Nigeria who have grown sturdy tails. There is a group of holidaymakers from Senegal who were doing no more than changing planes when they were turned into slippery snakes. […] They describe us […]. They have the power of description and we succumb to the pictures they construct. (168)

By consistently refusing to follow any single generic convention or even confine itself to the uniquely literary, for it draws not only on cinema and theatre, but on televi-

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sion, radio and comics as well, the novel is merely conforming to the postmodernist aesthetic of hybridity and sampling, as well as transmediality, playing with all these toys so that it constantly eludes the grasp of the exegete. Suleri finds it to be “a text that begins as Joyce and ends as Dickens” (1992, 191) while Grant sees it as switching between passages of “low realist description and high cultural analysis” (1999, 78). Of course, the danger, as Rushdie himself recognised, is that it may fall apart or alienate the reader: “since it’s so much about transformation I wanted to write it in such a way that the book itself was metamorphosing all the time. Obviously the danger is that the book falls apart” (qtd. in Appignanesi and Maitland 1989, 6–7). So, what, if anything, keeps it all together and makes it a great novel, perhaps the author’s best, as Robert Eaglestone felt able to claim (2006, 93)? Part epic, part tragi-comedy, part Bildungsroman, part picaresque, part “theological”, part “Bombay Talkie”, part sit-com, part soap opera, part comic, The Satanic Verses is also very clearly a satire of the Menippean variety. As has frequently been pointed out, Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesque and his theory of the polyphonic novel, inherited from the Menippea, provide a convenient prism through which to understand the novel’s incongruous multiplicity, its slum naturalism and parodies of the sacred. As Philip Engblom explains, in Bakhtin’s analysis, “the carnival becomes […] a liberation from official, hierarchical seriousness, from absolutized structures of any kind” (1994, 296), and it will be no surprise to learn that one of the novel’s prominent intertexts is an early Menippean satire, The Golden Ass, written in the second century AD by Apuleius, whose hero wanders the world as an ass, observing human folly. This satirical vein and mixture of popular genres are part of the book’s appeal for readers familiar with westernized novelistic conventions, while Rushdie’s Scheherazade-like storytelling skills create a constantly deferred climax, reminiscent of Dickens’s serialised fictions or a contemporary soap opera. The ‘don’t miss next week’s exciting episode’-feeling is coupled with an irreverently self-conscious postmodern delight in flagging up the joins and inconsistencies of the narrative, as well as an ingenious interweaving of different plots and characters, thanks to recurring leitmotifs. The Czech novelist, Milan Kundera, evokes a rondo “in which the main theme returns regularly, in alternation with several secondary themes” (1996, 43). However, the dominant strategies of formal defamiliarization, which, according to Teverson (2007, 149), are typical of Menippean satire, tend to create a carnival space where anything is possible; this freedom is applied to language as well. James Harrison feels that the novel is “not, by Rushdie standards, innovative in its use of language” (1992, 120), while others are sceptical of its display of infinite linguistic and thematic variety: “the result of all this high-wire virtuosity is a dulling of affect, much like the blurring created by rapid hopping between channels on television” (Mojtabai 1989, 37). The author’s stylistic repertoire is as vast as his cast of over a hundred named characters and his prose moves dexterously between the demotic, the arcane and the erudite. Snappy slogans such as “SAY HELLO TO THE GOOD BUYS” (433) rub shoulders with the Bible and Shakespeare in the blend of high

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and low culture characteristic of a postmodern aesthetic. Like Saladin, nicknamed “the Man of a Thousand Voices and a Voice” (60), Rushdie is equally at home with dub poetry and philosophical disquisition. In a few short sentences the text can move from Fraser’s esoteric study of magic and religion, The Golden Bough (1890), to Buster Keaton (398–399), from slapstick to tragedy, from the comic tour de force of a party held at Shepperton Studios on the stage set of a Dickensian TV drama based on Our Mutual Friend, to the Miltonian syntax of the interior monologue of the jealous and vengeful Saladin who has only recently sloughed off his devilish exterior. As he stares transfixed at ice-queen Allie, it is clear that his dual nature is far from reconciled: “Perhaps because he desired her; and desired, even more, what he took to be that inner certainty of hers; lacking which, he envied it, and sought to damage what he envied” (428). In the Angel Azraeel section, for example, different voices and points of view vie for dominance. The obsessive inventory and precise description of the city, at first provided by a Balzacian camera-eye, are subsequently intercut with techniques of montage, reminiscent of those used by Dos Passos in his U.S.A. trilogy: “This is what a television camera sees: […].  – Cut.  – […]  – From the air, the camera watches the entrance to Club Hot wax” (454–456). The cinematic mode will eventually segue into apocalyptic Bulgakovian imaginings as Gibreel’s paranoid schizophrenia becomes the text’s modus operandi and Melvilleian ejaculations, “there he blows!” (463), compete with the defamiliarising strategy of syllepsis and zeugma, reminiscent of Dickensian bathos: The towers stand up on stilts, and in the concrete formlessness beneath and between them there is the howling of a perpetual wind, and the eddying of debris: derelict kitchen units, deflated bicycle tyres […], fast food packets, rolling cans, shattered job prospects, abandoned hopes, lost illusions […] and a rusting bath. (461)

This flexibility of tone and mode, the novel’s linguistic plurality and originality, owe a debt to Joyce (↗ 7 James Joyce, Ulysses), but also to the Kenyan-Indian writer G. V. Desani and his forgotten novel All about H. Hatterr (1948). Much admired by Rushdie, Desani successfully creolizes the English language in innovative and experimental fashion. Saladin’s Bombay girlfriend, Zeeny, refers to “the eclectic, hybridized nature of the Indian artistic tradition” (70), something which features prominently in Midnight’s Children and indeed in later novels. However, Rushdie’s bastardization of the English language seems to go beyond even this and it would seem that The Satanic Verses is truly a manifestation of literature as an “arena of discourse […] where the struggle of languages can be acted out”, as he put it in “Is Nothing Sacred?” (1992a [1991], 427). This, of course, is one of the reasons why numerous critics refer to the ‘difficulty’ of the text. In order to conclude, it is time now briefly to turn our attention to the reception of the novel and to some theoretical perspectives.

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4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives On its publication, the novel received a significant number of plaudits and it was clear that Rushdie was fast establishing himself as a major literary talent. There were comparisons with Joyce, Swift, Voltaire and even the Bible. Rushdie was hailed as a great novelist and his style and powers of storytelling were praised unreservedly. Within a few weeks, however, everything changed, and the “towering work of fiction”, as it was described in The St Louis Post Dispatch (see back cover of the 1992 edition of the novel) became a ticking time bomb threatening to explode at any minute. Subsequently, when dealing with the novel, it has been impossible for critics to ignore the ‘affair’ and what might seem to be extra-literary matters. The fact that it has not been read as a novel, or indeed, in some cases, at all, by many of those who criticise it, is at the heart of the problem and contains a chilling irony, according to Hennard: “Insofar as Rushdie’s intentions have been dismissed or ignored, the affair has demonstrated, fortunately only symbolically, Barthes’ proclamation of the ‘death of the author’ as the ultimate authority over the meaning of his or her text” (1999, 218). However, one of the most significant results of the controversy was the way in which it underlined, or even reinstated, the importance of literature as public discourse. The novel as a genre, considered in its infancy as a somewhat disreputable form of entertainment, much inferior to poetry, rose to prominence in the twentieth century (↗  1  The English Novel as a Distinctly Modern Genre) but its relevance to the real world and its social and political importance often seemed to have become obscured by a sophisticated literariness, detached from the preoccupations of the contemporary wo/man. The Satanic Verses is a novel which not only discusses the function of literature and role of the poet, but also engages with social and political issues in the real world (see Booker 1990, 990). Moreover, the affair made it a significant historical event in itself, as Sameer Rahim remarked in a recent article about the burning of the book in Bradford in 1989: “The political identity of British Islam was forged in those flames” (2012, para. 1), a point also touched on by Stephen Morton who uses Gibreel as a prism through which to examine British Muslim identity (2013, 54–56). As for Dominic Head, he makes an explicit connection with the character of Millat, an Islamic militant, in Zadie Smith’s novel of postcolonial Britain, White Teeth (2000) (↗ 24 Zadie Smith, White Teeth): The internalized ‘knowledge’ of racist interpellation and ethnic suppression generates a groundswell of justified rebelliousness waiting to be unleashed. The emerging Rushdie affair supplies the required cause, and the means of translating that anger into a fleeting episode of ethnic visibility, or self-realization. Millat’s ‘misrecognition’ has a generalized character: Rushdie becomes the convenient scapegoat for the society’s systematic cultural insult. (2002, 185)

Head’s perceptive analysis seems more relevant than ever today and underlines how the affair marked the beginning of a new and much troubled era of East-West relations which was to culminate in 9/11, 7/7, the Charlie Hebdo shootings in January 2015 and

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the Paris attacks in November of the same year, echoing Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood”, alluded to at several points in the novel (97, 281). Today, much of the book’s comedy takes on a new and tragic irony. This is the case with the description of the writer’s Faustian contract, voiced by Jumpy Joshi, the failed poet: “the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he’s lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least” (459). Despite the terrorist threat still hanging over the novel and society in general, it is now possible to re-evaluate its contribution to literature from a distance. Many recent readings have returned to a positive interpretation of the text and see it as dealing with important ethical questions: The figure of Saladin Chamcha reveals the extent to which monsters are created through violence and offers an ethical reclamation of monstrosity that, when read in our contemporary moment, opens us to a new way of apprehending others with hospitality and even love in a post-9/11 world. (Balfour 2012, 15; see also Eaglestone 2006, 96)

This, of course, echoes the implicit question Saladin asks himself at his dying father’s bedside: If you are not religious, how do you live your life and how do you deal with death? It also evokes Rushdie’s own metaphysical expression of this dilemma: “Inside my novel, its characters seek to become fully human by facing up to the great facts of love, death, and (with or without God), the life of the soul” (qtd. in Appignanesi and Maitland 1989, 75). Since The Satanic Verses, Rushdie has written many other capacious and imaginative novels, most notably, The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), Shalimar the Clown (2005), The Enchantress of Florence (2008) and, most recently, Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015). Although all these works are impressive achievements, none have quite the breadth, linguistic vitality and sheer comic verve of The Satanic Verses. Naturally, it is tempting for the critic to wonder how the death sentence might have affected the writer’s powers of expression, a terrifying situation with which the author deals amusingly through the children’s allegory Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990). Rushdie’s memoir, Joseph Anton, on the other hand, explains in uncomfortable detail the bitter personal and professional cost of the fatwa. Midnight’s Children is frequently to be found on literature syllabi in universities worldwide. The winner of the “Booker of Bookers” in 1993, now part of a new postcolonial canon, is seen as a worthy object of study and a safe option, despite its polemical treatment of Indira Gandhi and her political family, which caused trouble at the time of the book’s release. Courses on The Satanic Verses are a rarity, for obvious reasons, and the ‘affair’ has resulted in a certain neglect of the novel from a literary point of view. Successful and entertaining as the earlier novel may be, it is difficult not to recognise the later novel as occupying a very special place in what Mukherjee calls the “Rushdie canon” (2013, 9). It is perhaps not so much ‘a love letter to Islam’, as one much quoted analysis suggests (see Jussawalla 1996), but

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a tribute to the boundless possibilities of the novel as a genre, possibilities which The Satanic Verses expands in momentous and groundbreaking ways between its very covers. For this reason alone, it deserves pride of place in Rushdie’s œuvre and can be considered one of the great novels of the late twentieth century.

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. Dover: The Consortium, Inc., 1992 [1988]. --Amis, Martin. “Rendezvous with Rushdie.” Vanity Fair, December (1990): 160–163. http://www. vanityfair.com/news/1990/12/martin-amis-on-salman-rushdie (29 May 2016). Appignanesi, Lisa, and Sara Maitland, eds. The Rushdie File. London: Fourth Estate, 1989. Aravamudan, Srinivas. “Being God’s Postman is no Fun, Yaar.” Reading Rushdie: Perspectives in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie. Ed. M. D. Fletcher. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994. 187–208. Balfour, Lindsay. “Sympathy for the Devil: (Re)Reading The Satanic Verses after 9/11 and Learning to Love the Monster (Within).” Postcolonial Text 7.4 (2012): 1–19. Barthes, Roland. “The Reality Effect.” The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986 [1968]. 141–148. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Booker, M. Keith. “Beauty and the Beast: Dualism as Despotism in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie.” Journal of English Literary History 58 (1990): 977–997. Bradford, Richard. The Novel Now. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Bradford, Richard. Literary Rivals. London: Biteback, 2014. Brennan, Timothy. Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation. London: Macmillan, 1989. Close, Anthony. “The Empirical Author: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.” Philosophy and Literature 14 (1990): 248–267. Cundy, Catherine. Salman Rushdie. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Eaglestone, Robert. “Salman Rushdie: Paradox and Truth.” British Fiction Today. Ed. Philip Tew and Rod Mengham. London: Continuum, 2006. 91–102. Eaglestone, Robert. “Po-fa: Joseph Anton.” Salman Rushdie. Ed. Robert Eaglestone and Martin McQuillan. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 115–123. Engblom, Philip. “A Multitude of Voices: Carnivalisation and Dialogicality in the Novels of Salman Rushdie.” Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie. Ed. M. D. Fletcher. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994. 293–304. Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A. Salman Rushdie. London: Macmillan, 1998. Grant, Damian. Salman Rushdie. Plymouth: Northcote House, 1999. Harrison, James. Salman Rushdie. New York: Twayne, 1992. Head, Dominic. The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Martine. Origin and Originality in Rushdie’s Fiction. Bern: Peter Lang, 1999. Hutcheon, Linda. The Poetics of Postmodernism. London/New York: Routledge, 1988.

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James, Henry. The Tragic Muse. London: Macmillan, 1890. http://www.online-literature.com/henry_ james/tragic-muse/0/ (23 November 2016). Jussawalla, Feroza. “Rushdie’s Dastan-e-Dilruba: The Satanic Verses as Rushdie’s Love-Letter to Islam.” Diacritics 26 (1996): 50–73. Kundera, Milan. “The Day Panurge no Longer Makes People Laugh.” Critical Quarterly 38.2 (1996): 43. Kuortti, Joel. “The Satanic Verses: ‘To be born again, first you have to die’.” The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie. Ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 125–138. Mojtabai, A. G. “Magical Mystery Pilgrimage. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie.” New York Times Book Review, 29 January (1989): 3, 37. Morey, Peter. “Salman Rushdie and the English Tradition.” The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie. Ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 29–43. Morton, Stephen. “Postcolonial Secularism and Literary Form in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.” Salman Rushdie. Ed. Robert Eaglestone and Martin McQuillan. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 45–58. Mukherjee, Ankhi. “The Rushdie Canon.” Salman Rushdie. Ed. Robert Eaglestone and Martin McQuillan. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 9–21. Parrinder, Patrick. “Let’s get the hell out of here.” London Review of Books, 29 September (1988): 11–13. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v10/n17/patrick-parrinder/lets-get-the-hell-out-of-here (29 May 2016). Pipes, Daniel. The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, The Ayatollah and the West. New York: Birch Lane Press, 1990. Rahim, Sameer. “The Satanic Verses and Me.” The Telegraph. 10 September 2012. http://www. telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9523983/The-Satanic-Verses-and-me.html (29 May 2016). Rushdie, Salman. “The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance.” The Times, 3 July (1982): 8. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991. London: Granta, 1992a [1991]. Rushdie, Salman. The Moor’s Last Sigh. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995. Ruthven, Malise. A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Wrath of Islam. London: The Hogarth Press, 1991. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Reading The Satanic Verses.” Public Culture 2.1 (1989): 79–99. Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Teverson, Andrew. Salman Rushdie. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Wormald, Mark. “The Uses of Impurity: Fiction and Fundamentalism in Salman Rushdie and Jeanette Winterson.” An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction. Ed. Rod Mengham. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999. 182–202.

5.2 Further Reading Gorra, Michael. After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Mendes, Ana Cristina, ed. Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture. London: Routledge, 2012. Morton, Stephen. Salman Rushdie: Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Tatjana Pavlov-West

21 Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (1989) Abstract: This article explores the main topics and literary techniques in Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989), focussing on grafting as the central metaphor of the novel. The topics and the aesthetic techniques cannot in fact be disentangled from one another since they are mutually interconnected according to the overall principle of grafting. Grafting is used as a means to undermine, deconstruct and challenge traditional gender and identity constructions, rigid concepts of fact and fiction as well as of time and space. Instead, the art of grafting produces alternative ways of thinking and being in order to free the subject from prefabricated and restrictive social categories. Sexing the Cherry is a hybrid mixture of different literary genres and aesthetic devices, open to diverse critical discussion and various readings. In other words, the novel does not only discuss grafting as a means of overcoming restrictive dichotomies but it also practices grafting in terms of experimenting with literary techniques. Keywords: Grafting, gender, identity, historiographic metafiction, intertextuality

1 Context: Author, Œuvre, Moment Jeanette Winterson belongs to the best-known British writers of the late twentieth century and her work continues to affect the literary world by constantly questioning and challenging the restrictive hetero-normative rules of Western societies. Her œuvre encompasses a wide range of meta-narratives and self-reflexive texts that lay bare the dichotomies between fact and fiction as well as femininity and masculinity as artificial constructs created by a patriarchal society. Winterson has published numerous novels, of which already her first one, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1985), won the prestigious Whitbread prize for the first best novel of that year. In 1990, she turned her first success into a screenplay for a BBC television production, which then won the BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award for best drama. Several other novels were honoured with prizes, among them Sexing the Cherry which won the E. M. Forster Award in 1989. In 2006, at the New Year Honours “For services to literature”, Winterson was made officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). Winterson’s inspiring voice continues to be heard either through her fiction, non-fiction, her regular contributions in newspapers and journals or through her personal homepage which offers a direct exchange with her readers. DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-022

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While her first novel has often been described as a semi-autobiography, given the similarities between her protagonist, also called Jeanette, and her own fundamentalist upbringing and lesbian outing, her following novels plunge entirely into a world where the fantastic collides with historical facts in a manner that does not allow for any clear categorization. Already in her second novel, The Passion (1987), Winterson invents multiple protagonists and places them in the remote past where historical facts merge with fantastic stories and where she continues to explore themes that circle around her preoccupation with “boundaries, desire, time, identity” (Winterson qtd. in Noakes and Reynolds 2003, 25). As Winterson herself states, all her novels “interact and themes do occur and return, disappear, come back amplified or modified, changed in some way […]” (qtd. in Noakes and Reynolds 2003, 25). In addition to a good dozen novels (her latest so far, The Gap of Time, appeared in 2015), Winterson has published a graphic novel (Boating for Beginners, 1985), a collection of short stories (The World and Other Places, 1998), non-fictional works (Art Objects, 1995 and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, 2011) and several children’s books (Tanglewreck, 2006; The King of Capri, 2004; The Battle of the Sun, 2009; The Lion, the Unicorn and Me, 2009). In all these works Winterson challenges traditional narrative forms by implementing experimental strategies, ostentatiously poetic language, wide-ranging thematic implications and meta-narrative discourses often heavily informed by cultural and literary theory. Her œuvre has been categorized as feminist, postmodern, modern, lesbian, and queer but as the title of her third novel Sexing the Cherry (1989) with its grafting symbolism indicates, clear classifications of any kind are difficult. Rather than labelling her work with a specific term, we should consider her œuvre as a hybrid product full of new possibilities, a mixture of different genres and aesthetic techniques, open to diverse critical discussion and various readings. In other words, the novel does not only talk about grafting as a means of overcoming restrictive dichotomies but it also practices grafting in terms of experimenting with literary techniques, as I will discuss below. Winterson’s work aims at liberating the subject from any prefabricated social categories. Long-standing gender stereotypes and institutions of power that allow the marginalization of minority groups are constantly questioned and so is any form of ‘universal truth’ or ‘secure knowledge’ that people take for granted. Instead, Winterson explores multiple alternative gender identities, concepts of time and space, and her- and (his)stories that, no matter how fantastic and illogical they seem, offer new ways of thinking and being.

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2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns 2.1 Grafting New Possibilities Labelling and naming are essential elements in Western societies. Without naming we cannot identify and categorize things and thus control them. Yet Sexing the Cherry, Winterson’s third novel, cannot be easily labelled with a specific theoretical term, nor can her main protagonists be described according to any familiar categories. As mentioned above, grafting is the central metaphor in Sexing the Cherry and it refers to each major topic of the novel: gender and identity constructions, fact and fiction, and time and space. Bente Gade argues that “[t]hrough the metaphor of grafting, Winterson represents identity as radically fragmented and multiple – and in consequence dependent upon construction” (1999, 36) – and thereby susceptible to de- or re-construction. All the topics just listed operate in Winterson’s novels according to the principle of grafting, interconnecting and fusing with each other, thus resisting any simple categorization under the respective rubrics of topics or form, as the following sections will show.

2.1.1 Gender and Identity Constructions “Gender”, Winterson states, “is a template, a beginning, a set of possibilities, it’s not a rigid structure and should never be a prison” (qtd. in Mihan 2012, 279; ↗ 4 Gender). Despite our awareness that gender is only an artificial construct as Judith Butler explains in detail in her Gender Trouble (1990), we are still caught in rigid categorical ways of thinking. Institutions such as the government or the church prescribe how people should live and behave and any other life style that falls out of the so-called appropriate hetero-normative behavioural pattern is easily condemned. As Jordan, one of the main characters in Sexing the Cherry, notes: “There are many in the Church […] holding that the Lord who made the world made its flora as he wished and in no other way” (87)1. By contrast, grafting, introduces a non-predetermined exogenous element into that which is already given. This general principle, “the means whereby a plant, perhaps tender or uncertain, is fused into a hardier member of its strain, and so the two take advantage of each other and produce a third kind, without seed or parent” (87), may refer in this context to any unspecific gender identification and any sexual practice that is not heterosexual and thus condemned by the establishment as being ‘unnatural’. The ‘third kind’, the hybrids produced, may consequently

1 Unless otherwise indicated page references in brackets without further designation refer to Winterson 2014 [1989].

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allude to other possible gender identities that are neither simply male nor female, nor simply heterosexual or homosexual. Even nowadays, in many contexts, LGBT and queer identities continue to struggle for official acceptance and equal rights since they are still considered as being ‘unnatural’. The prevalent male-female dichotomy is at the heart of this out-dated Western value system and it is precisely here that Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry successfully challenges the status quo. Binary oppositions between femininity and masculinity that constitute the basis of such a value system are revealed as patriarchal instruments for the exercise and preservation of power and as restrictive corsets for individuals of any gender. Winterson goes about the business of gender grafting in ways that can best be exemplified by enumerating the customary bearers of gender (if we can speak of gender in the traditional sense) in fiction: characters. As she did earlier in The Passion (1987), Winterson makes use of a predominantly dual narrative structure to present her story from two autodiegetic perspectives, one male and the other female. However, this technique is used to confute the conventional gender ascriptions. In Sexing the Cherry this duality is marked by specific fruit icons at the beginning of each chapter, which do not only reappear as subject matters within the story itself but which are specifically used to indicate whose viewpoint we are confronted with. Contrary to conventional gender expectations, the male protagonist, a young traveller and explorer called Jordan, is accompanied by an image of a pineapple whereas the female protagonist, his adoptive mother known as Dog Woman, is introduced with a typical phallus symbol, a banana. The banana is the first fruit Jordan brings from his journeys back home to London and at first sight of it his mother exclaims that it “had resembled nothing more than the private parts of an Oriental. It was yellow and livid and long” (5). Not only does this fruit resemble the male sexual organ but the yellow colour, “either painted or infected” (5) classifies it as foreign, non-Christian and consequently evil: “There was no good woman could put that to her mouth, and for a man it was the practice of cannibals. We had not gone to church all these years and been washed in the blood of Jesus only to eat ourselves up the way the Heathen do” (6). Such prejudice against the ‘Other’, either in terms of sexual orientation or cultural and religious background, is however given an ironical turn by being embedded in comments coming from the most grotesque figure in the novel, Dog Woman. Dog Woman exemplifies one distinct set of gender-blurring or grafting strategies. Her physical appearance and frequent violent actions go entirely against conventional norms and yet she is the one who expresses scepticism towards the art of grafting: “Of what sex is that monster you are making?” (87) she asks her son and concludes that “[s]uch things had no gender and were a confusion to themselves” (87). Dog Woman’s comment appears ironic given the fact that she herself does not seem to have a specific gender. Her huge animalistic appearance makes it difficult to identify her gender as well as her species. As her name indicates, she appears to her environment as something between a dog and a woman – an intimidating hybrid figure – which does not and cannot conform to the norms of a patriarchal society: “I

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know people are afraid of me, either for the yapping of my dogs or because I stand taller than any of them” (21). Dog Woman’s intimidating physical appearance makes it impossible for her to act in the expected feminine manner of her society. She is huge and powerful and all her efforts to behave like a ‘woman’ fail due to her enormous size. According to Susana Onega, the figure of Dog Woman “challenges the definition of woman in Lacanian terms as ‘absolute Other’, as the mirror in which man can define himself” (1996, 304). Not only does Dog Woman stand out as the ‘Other’ to men but also to the accepted portrayals of female identity. Elizabeth Langland states, that Dog Woman’s performance of gendered traits of tenderness, charity, and the maternal reveals the extent to which those things seen as inherent to women and to femininity are produced within a cultural context that scripts behavioural norms out of relative size, mass, and strength. (1997, 102)

Dog Woman falls out of the so-called norm and despite the fact that she “is indisputably female by sex”, as Merja Makinen notes, she “is not feminine by gender” (2005, 99). The figure of Dog Woman subverts patriarchal notions of women as being docile and submissive. She is presented as a determinant invincible woman who fiercely fights for justice and her own personal interests. Nonetheless, Dog Woman is strongly influenced by society’s expectations: she occasionally attempts to dress up in a feminine manner and tries her best to behave like other women when she thinks it is appropriate. Following society’s restricted views of what is seen as acceptable, she rejects the ‘unnatural’ art of grafting: “‘Let the world mate of its own accord,’ she said, ‘or not at all’” (87). Jordan, in turn, exemplifies another quite distinct set of gender-blurring or grafting strategies in the novel. He explicitly considers grafting as an option for himself: “[I]t was on the cherry that I first learned the art of grafting and wondered whether it was an art I might apply to myself” (87). Jordan, who was found as a baby on the banks of the river Thames, was called by his adoptive mother Dog Woman after a river “not bound to anything” (3). Consequently, it does not come as a surprise that he is neither bound to one place nor one gender nor even to one specific time continuum. As a traveller, Jordan takes the reader on his physical and imaginative journeys. On his physical journeys he seems to fulfil the expected male role as an adventurous courageous young explorer. He accompanies the Royal Gardener Tradescant on a ship to exotic places from which he then returns with new fruits to England, such as the banana and the pineapple. Jordan’s imaginative journeys, however, take the reader to fantastic magical places that cannot be traced on maps. It is on these trips where Jordan occasionally slips into the role of women that he manages to free himself from any specific gender role. Observing other people cross-dressing too, he realizes that this ‘transgender’ experience becomes a liberating activity: “I have met a number of people who, anxious to be free of the burdens of gender, have dressed themselves as women and women as men” (29). Jordan’s feminine side is also noticed by his mother

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who states on the day of the king’s trial, where she, Jordan and Tradescant all appear in female disguises, that her son “had a fine mincing walk and a leer that got him a good few offers of a bed for the night” (73). Rather than being repudiated by Jordan’s feminine side, Dog Woman appears to be proud of her son. Both protagonists display masculine and feminine characteristics and thereby offer a radical alternative to the hierarchical two-tier gender system. Nonetheless, they are both aware of society’s restrictive gender expectations and are sometimes torn between wanting to fit into the prescribed patterns and longing for a less restraining life style. Despite their occasional efforts to perform what is generally expected by a patriarchal society, they constantly fail to fulfil traditional gender roles. As Jordan announces at some stage: I want to be brave and admired and have a beautiful wife and a fine house. I want to be a hero and wave goodbye to my wife and children at the docks, and be sorry to see them go but more excited about what is to come. I want to be like other men, one of the boys, a back-slapper and a man who knows a joke or two. (116)

Anne Mihan points out that Jordan’s “initial dreams of his ideal self reproduce stereotypical notions of what it means to be a ‘real man’ in a masculinist patriarchal society” (2012, 319). His desire to live another life, however, produces an inner conflict, which Jordan describes as being lost “in the gap between my ideal of myself and my pounding heart” (116). Finding oneself, he claims, seems to be the most difficult task in life: “I’m not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated” (118). When Jordan, early on his imaginative travels, falls in love with a dancer called Fortunata, it first seems that finding her will be the major goal of his journeys. As it turns out, however, all his travels are a means of finding his own true self: When I left England I thought I was running away. Running away from myself. I thought I might become someone else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger. And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way. (89)

At the end of the novel, Jordan will not only find himself but also Fortunata who decides to keep on living her own independent life rather than staying with him. Fortunata may, in fact, represent one of Jordan’s imaginative selves. She is independent and free-floating, neither bound to space nor time and it is exactly this freedom Jordan longs for. His imaginative journeys enable him to realize that “[t]he inward life tells us we are multiple, not single, and that our existence is really countless existences holding hands like those cut-out paper dolls, but unlike the dolls never coming to an end” (102). The idea of the multiplicity of identities is realized in the novel in a variety of subplots that are, nonetheless, connected with one another. After visiting different groups of people in fantastic cities, including a “pen of prostitutes” (27) which is literally interchangeable with the group of nuns who live in a nearby convent, Jordan

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arrives at the house of the Twelve Dancing Princesses. These twelve princesses can be also said to find their counterparts in the depiction of the twelve prostitutes as well as in the twelve nuns. The emphasis here lies clearly on the multiplicity of the self, which is realized in the novel in many different ways, most obviously in the depiction of the two twentieth-century alter egos of Jordan and his mother. With these contemporary personas, Winterson explores a further set of gender-grafting possibilities. Although seemingly different people in different time dimensions there are many similarities between Dog Woman and the unnamed activist, and between Jordan and Nicolas Jordan, which reinforce the impression of being a portrayal of multiple selves. Nicolas Jordan, a young naval cadet will eventually run into the young activist woman whose personality closely resembles that of her seventeenth-century alter ego Dog Woman. Jordan’s and Dog Woman’s future selves’ accounts are even marked by the same fruit icons, with the only difference that this time the pineapple and banana are chopped. The fruits are as fragmented and multiple as the characters themselves. The sudden appearance of the two contemporary alter egos towards the end of the novel reinforces this impression. The first comment of the twentieth-century environmentalist links her immediately to Dog Woman, her alter ego of the past: “I imagine I am huge, raw, a giant. When I am a giant I go out with my sleeves rolled up and my skirts swirling round me like a whirlpool. I have a sack such as kittens are drowned in and I stop off all over the world filling it up” (140). Although there is no physical similarity between Dog Woman and the scientist of the twentieth century, their non-conformity binds them together. Full of rage, the unnamed activist imagines at some stage how she would fight against injustices and environmental pollution if she had the physical power. “I had an alter ego who was huge and powerful, a woman whose only morality was her own and whose loyalties were fierce and few” (144). Whereas Dog Woman is a physical threat to her environment, the scientist becomes an intellectual threat to the established gender categories: unmarried and independent, and not at all willing to be reduced by other people to her physical appearance, she chooses an uncomfortable life style to follow her convictions. All these character traits mark her as a non-conformist just like her alter ego Dog Woman. Similarly to Dog Woman, however, she also longs for a normative life but realizes that it would, in the long term, not work for her: “When I’m dreaming I want a home and a lover and some children, but it won’t work. Who’d want to live with a monster? […] The truth is I’ve lost patience with this hypocritical stinking world” (146). While camping on the banks of the Thames as an act of protest against environmental pollution, the young chemist will meet Nicolas Jordan. Having heard about the activist in the papers, Nicolas goes off in search for her. This reminds one of seventeenth-century Jordan who is determined to find Fortunata, another independent woman who does not follow the expected gender rules. Similarly to his alter ego, but also to Dog Woman, Fortunata and the activist, Nicolas Jordan does not conform to

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society’s expected gender roles. Nicolas, too, finds it difficult to reconcile his sense of self with the demands of a patriarchal society. When Jordan informs his friend Jack about his plans to become a sailor, Jack dismissively tells him that he is “too old for this boat stuff” (136), because a “proper man” should find a secure job with a steady income. Nicolas eventually appropriates his desire by becoming a naval cadet but not for the sake of becoming a masculine hero. Instead he regards this job as a means to explore not only other countries, but also – just like his alter ego of the seventeenth century  – his true self or rather selves. Both Jordan and Dog Woman of the seventeenth century and their contemporary alter egos struggle with the limitations of what it means to be ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ in a patriarchal society. As we have seen, characters in Sexing the Cherry defy expected patterns of identity and gender and call for alternative forms produced by the art of grafting. Grafting is presented as a form of excess that offers not only one third but several alternatives to the already existing, yet rigidified and dichotomous gender roles. It creates a hybrid “fusion of diverse strains” (Doan 1994, 12) that offers the possibility of multiple selves. Winterson’s fiction thus successfully subverts traditional gender concepts and emphasises the multiplicity and fluidity of identities by blurring the boundaries between femininity and masculinity and time and space. This so-called ‘third kind’ is not restricted to any precise categorization, and may even be neither or both or something entirely new. According to this interpretation, grafting becomes a strategy which destabilizes and multiplies any forms of clear dichotomies.

2.1.2 Fact and Fiction – Historiographic Metafiction The above subsection made clear how the metaphor of grafting is used to subvert traditional gender binaries. As already mentioned, boundaries in this novel are, however, not only crossed in terms of gender identities but also in terms of time and space, and fact and fiction, thereby producing a variety of hybrid forms, including that of literary genres. Whereas Jordan’s accounts lead us into the world of fairy tales and other fantastic places, Dog Woman delivers to the reader a report on the Civil War that resembles at first sight the genre of a historical novel. The constant alternation of these two narrative forms and the occasional blending of historical facts with fiction are characteristic of what is known as historiographic metafiction. Linda Hutcheon introduced this term to describe a self-conscious narrative that deals with the uncertainty and the multiplicity of ‘truths’ included in the writing of history (cf. 1991, 75). As Hutcheon explains: Historiographic metafiction is self-conscious about the paradox of the totalizing yet inevitably partial act of narrative representation. […] It traces the processing of events into facts, exploiting and then undermining the conventions of both novelistic realism and historical reference. It implies that, like fiction, history constructs its object that events named before facts and thus

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both do and do not retain their status outside language. This is the paradox of postmodernism. The past really did exist, but we can only know it today through its textual traces, its often complex and indirect representations in the present: documents, archives, but also photographs, paintings, architecture, films, and literature. (1991, 78)

Jordan’s fantastic stories help to deconstruct the apparent reliability of historical discourse. From the very beginning Jordan announces that the journeys he will report are “[n]ot the ones I might have made […]. I could tell you the truth as you find it in diaries and maps and log books. I could faithfully describe all that I saw and heard and give you a travel book” (2). Jordan’s ironic comment does not only make clear that he is not a trustworthy narrator but that the reliability and veracity of ‘official’ documents that we take for ‘universal truths’ should also be called into question. Historiographic metafiction does not deny past events but it problematizes the mode of their accessibility. In Sexing the Cherry this is done when well-known historical facts (the Great Fire of London, the Plague etc.) are mentioned from Dog Woman’s subjective marginalized position which is then juxtaposed with Jordan’s accounts of myths, fairy tales and other fantastic stories that are also altered in such a manner as to point out that both fiction and history writing are merely artificial constructs based on other intertextual sources: The intertextual parody of historiographic metafiction offers a sense of the presence of the past, but a past that can be known only from its texts. […] To parody is not to destroy the past; in fact, to parody is both to enshrine the past and to question it. (Hutcheon 1994, 125–126)

By breaking normative rules and traditional conventions Winterson exposes the illusion-making tendency of male-dominated historiography with its claim on absolute truths. As Winterson notes in an interview with Margaret Reynolds and Jonathan Noakes: “[T]he past is not a place we know. We weren’t there. And no matter what records are given to us, what objects, what stories, what histories, we don’t know” (Winterson qtd. in Noakes and Reynolds 2003, 22). Dog Woman’s linear narration covers “the last years of Charles I’s reign, run[s] parallel to the Civil War and the Puritan Commonwealth, the king’s trial and execution in 1649 and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, and end[s] with the Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666” (Onega 2006, 77). These historical events are, however, “not focussed from the generalist and totalitarian perspective required by World History” (Onega 2006, 77), but from the subjective perspective of the most unusual character in the novel, the monstrous-looking Dog Woman. At first, her accounts on the Civil War resemble those found in historical novels, but her reports are followed by her personal interpretations which then call everything into question. She mentions well-known historical events which she has either eye-witnessed or in which she was even actively involved. In company of her son Jordan and Tradescant, the Royal Gardener, she witnesses the execution of Charles I and describes it in full detail from her marginal position. The Great Fire of London may have even been (un-)

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intentionally caused by her: “I did not start the fire – how could I, having resolved to lead a blameless life? – but I did not stop it. Indeed the act of pouring a vat of oil on the flames may well have been said to encourage it” (167). Another aspect of historiographic metafiction used by Winterson is the way she modifies historical events and turns historical figures such as Charles I’s Royal Gardener Tradescant into a character of the story. Hutcheon explains that, “in all fiction historical characters can coexist with fictional ones within the context of the novel because there they are subject only to the rules of fiction” (1992, 153). Fictional characters such as Dog Woman and Jordan coexist in the same setting with important historical figures such as Cromwell, Charles I, Tradescant and the Puritans but also with familiar fairy tale figures such as the Twelve Dancing Princesses who derive from Grimm’s tale of “The Worn-Out Dancing-Shoes”. According to Olivia Bălănescu, “[t]he heterogeneous mixture of real and fictional characters and events renders history not as an objective record of events but as a baroque labyrinth of historical facts filtered through private, individualised consciousness” (2012, 121). In Winterson’s work, history is endowed with the status of other forms of textuality, becoming an instance of intertextuality that does not make a fundamental distinction, for instance, between historical writing and fairy tales, to the extent that they can both be reworked by a later text. From the very beginning Jordan points out “that [his] own life was written invisibly, was squashed between the facts, was flying without [him] like the Twelve Dancing Princesses who shot from their window every night and returned home every morning with torn dresses and worn-out slippers and remembered nothing” (2). At this stage the reader does not know yet that the fairy tale of the Twelve Dancing Princesses will play a major role in the context of the whole story. Winterson’s use of fairy tale, myth, fantasy and love, everything that defies logical explanations, is a means to fracture the masculine discourse of history and to enable women to claim their own stories (↗ 19 Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus). While looking for Fortunata, Jordan encounters her eleven older sisters who all live together in one house. It turns out that they are the characters of Grimm’s famous fairy tale “The Worn-Out Dancing-Shoes”. In this context, however, each of them is given the opportunity to tell their life stories from their own personal perspective, and these stories are once again full of intertextual references to other fairy tales, myths and literary pieces. The second princess’ story, for instance, starting with the words “That’s my husband painted on the wall […] looking as though he were alive” (49) evokes Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (1842) and the third princess transform Lord Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty” (1813) when she starts telling Jordan that her husband “walked in beauty” (50). However, the famous fairy tale ending, “they lived happily ever after”, that appears to promise happiness and fulfilment to women in the patriarchal institution of heterosexual married life, is undermined. In Winterson’s version of the traditional fairy tale hetero-normative marriage represents confinement. This is why the focus of Winterson’s renaming of the traditional story lies on the princesses’ passion for dancing, an aspect that is forcibly taken away from

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the twelve princesses through the influence of male control in both the original and rewritten fairy tale. In Winterson’s version the princesses are even chained by their ankles on their wedding day to make sure that none of them can escape. The only princess who manages to flee “like a bird from a snare” (63) is the youngest, Fortunata, the one Jordan searches for. In contrast to her sisters, she is the only one who keeps on dancing and even manages to found her own dancing school. As Barbara Curatolo notes: “The fact that Fortunata is the only named princess can be seen to be a portrayal of the fact that she was the only princess who was allowed her own identity by escaping the oppressive ‘happily ever after’” (2012, 28). Fortunata chooses to live her own life, not bound to anyone. Even when Jordan finds her, she continues to live her own unmarried independent life. Despite the fact that Fortunata’s own story is separated from the others, it works in a similar manner. Her tale, a rewriting of the Greek myth of Artemis and Orion, “dramatizes”, according to Jan Rosemergy, “women’s liberation from oppression […]. In creating a variant in which Artemis kills Orion for raping her, Winterson transforms the myth into a paradigm not of women’s victimization but of women’s ability to overcome victimization” (2000, 257). Winterson’s rewritings of history, fairy tales and myths destabilize the belief that fact and fiction are unchangeable. By blurring the line between fact and fiction, the objectivity of history writing is constantly called into question. In Winterson’s re­presentation of fact and fiction, the previously silenced and oppressed are offered the possibility of liberating themselves from a restrictive patriarchal society by ‘rewriting’ (her) stories from their own perspectives. It is not by chance that Winterson chooses to depict the historical period of Puritan rule since it marks an era of oppressive masculine authority with no space for any expression of female experience. The Puritan Revolution is depicted as a move toward ideals of rationality and objectivity, ideals that supported sexual repression and heterosexual marriage as the only acceptable form, which is exactly why Winterson has her protagonists on the side of the royalists. As Winterson explains, “using history”, gives her a chance to “[talk] about everything that was bothering [her]” (ix). It also allows her to draw parallels between the past and the future and to expose the still existing hetero-normative value system as out-dated. This “dialogue with the past in the light of the present” (1992, 19) is according to Hutcheon one of the main features of historiographic metafiction. If Winterson’s usage of the techniques of historiographic metafiction destabilizes the supposed objectivity of the past, it also destabilizes the present’s own convictions of its epistemological supremacy. The novel consequently ends with the same scepticism about any universal truths: “And even the most solid of things and the most real, the best-loved and the well-known, are only hand-shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light” (169). The ending emphasizes once again that there are no certainties about anything, neither about historical facts nor about personal experiences, nor even about our concept of time and space, as the following subsection will illustrate.

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2.1.3 Time and Space It should be clear from the above subsections that grafting is presented by Winterson across the ages and across different spatial realms. Blending the past with the present illustrates the link between cultural, social and environmental issues across the ages. Seventeenth-century London, for instance, is described as “a foul place, full of pestilence and rot” (6), thus resembling twentieth-century London, where the mercury levels in rivers and lakes are growing dangerously high, while men in suits “build dams, clear the rain forests, finance huge Coca-Cola plants and exploit the rubber potential” (122). The similarity of these phenomena tends to blur neat distinctions between the past and the present and creates a sense of continuity and fluidity. It also demonstrates that the past remains an integral part of our contemporary experience, an experience that is based on linguistic constructs. Lewis Buzbee claims that “Winterson has aptly chosen this period in British history [the seventeenth century]. A time of great pollution and plagues, when the governors were narrow-minded, joyless and corrupt, it stands as a mirror for our own world” (1990, 9). In so doing, however, Winterson tends to graft past onto present and future in ways that also present hybrid temporalities of a much more radical type. Jordan does not cease to reflect upon his own experience with time which becomes evident in a passage entitled “THE NATURE OF TIME” which resembles a philosophical abstract: “Thinking about time is like turning the globe round and round, recognizing that all journeys exist simultaneously, that to be in one place is not to deny the existence of another, even though that other place cannot be felt or seen, our usual criteria for belief” (101). This thought is realized within the novel through passages in which the past and the present collide. By means of flashbacks, contemporary Nicolas Jordan and the activist connect to their seventeenth-century alter egos. At the same time, these seventeenth-century protagonists occasionally envision their future versions. In this manner, Winterson disrupts the laws of physics: even time itself is scrutinised and bent. In the last section of the novel, however, past and present collide entirely. On board of a ship, twentieth-century Nicolas Jordan finds himself standing on the railing falling into a black hole: I felt I was falling falling into a black hole with no stars […]. Then a man’s voice said, ‘They are burying the King at Windsor today.’ I snapped upright and looked full in the face of the man, who was staring out over the water. I knew him but from where? And his clothes … nobody wears clothes like that any more. […] Tradescant sighed. My name is Jordan. (139)

There is no obvious indication in form of visual icons that would help to distinguish between Jordan of the past and present-day Jordan, although this is obviously a passage belonging to the modern alter ego. The two Jordans appear to have merged different times and spatial realms and are seemingly the same person at this stage. As Asensio Aróstegui describes it: “The two twentieth-century character-narrators

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stumble into the time, the space, and even the body of the two seventeenth-century character-narrators, thus destroying conceptions of temporality and materiality” (2008, 203). Winterson’s preoccupation with time and space is made evident from the very beginning of the novel by the two epigraphs. The first one talks about the language of the Hopi, a language otherwise as complex as ours, that lacks “tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time?” (v). The reader is immediately invited to question the Western concept of time, which will then be continually discussed and interrogated by Jordan in the course of the novel. At the end, Jordan will come to the conclusion that “[t]he future and the present and the past exist only in our minds, and from a distance the borders of each shrink and fade like the borders of hostile countries seen from a floating city in the sky” (169). According to Asensio Aróstegui (2008) the first epigraph brings to mind the SapirWhorf theory of language, suggesting that any representation of time is relative and culturally constructed. The second epigraph is concerned with the veracity of matter as being “the most solid and well-known” since it “is now known to be mostly empty space […] and points of light” (v). Once again, the reader is asked to think about “the reality of the world” (v). In fact, the second epigraph as well as Jordan’s accounts of his imaginative experiences question all forms of experimental evidence and demystify the solidity of the world, thereby recalling Albert Einstein’s theories about matter. Although not immediately evident at this stage, the two epigraphs are used to frame and ‘relativize’ the web of stories told in Sexing the Cherry which link them to Einstein’s theory of relativity. In Einstein’s theory of relativity matter, space, and time are interdependent. Einstein managed to demonstrate that time and space are relative, and that the mass of bodies is not fixed and that matter is only a form of energy, “only hand-shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light” (169). The novel ends with these words which clearly echo the second epigraph at the beginning. This technique provides the novel with a circular form that not only frames the multiple stories but also helps to break the linearity of time. As Sonia Front explains, “[n]egotiating the space beyond the dichotomies demands a new notion of temporality” (2009, 13). In Sexing the Cherry this “new notion of temporality” is achieved by creating “dissonant chronotopic frameworks” (Front 2009, 13) and a fluid conception of temporality and spatial hybridity. The image of the unbound river, the idea of time travelling and the occasional overlapping of the past and the present support the realization of these fluid concepts. As mentioned above, Jordan was found as a baby on the banks of the river Thames and named after another river, “not bound to anything” (3). He goes off travelling on a ship across the vast seas in search for his multiple selves. Jordan’s journeys with Tradescant first appear to be physical ones through time and space but long before he leaves London for the first time, he experiences a way of travelling “that does not involve maps, globes or even a vehicle and that leads into another world – the

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realities of the imagination” (Mihan 2012, 319). His co-existing imaginative journeys lead him through co-existing fantastic worlds which are not fixed to time and space, such as the world of the Twelve Dancing Princesses and the city of words. As Jordan explains: “Time has no meaning, space and place have no meaning, on this journey. All times can be inhabited, all places visited” (80). After visiting the city of words, Jordan comes across a house without floors, but only with ceilings: It is well known that the ceiling of one room is the floor of another, but the household ignores this ever downward necessity and continues ever upward, celebrating ceilings but denying floors and so their house never ends and they must travel by winch or rope from room to room, calling to one another as they go. (15)

Standing against the law of gravity, this ‘impossible’ house and its inhabitants who never fall down prove that their lives do not follow any familiar laws, norms, traditions, or beliefs. Jordan is thus not only an explorer in the classical sense but also in terms of exploring options of travelling across time and space. He discovers that his imaginative journey [i]s not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body. The self is not contained in any moment or any place, but it is only in the intersection of moment and place that the self might, for a moment, be seen vanishing through a door, which disappears at once. (89–90)

Sexing the Cherry, as Gade argues, “explores different ways of understanding time and materiality and stresses the interrelatedness of these co-ordinates in relation to identity” (1999, 35). At some stage Jordan reflects on the difference he experiences between internal and external time: Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular – an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of the here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain. (101)

In contrast to the restrictive external time that is defined by its technologically mediated nature, the internal time he experiences on his imaginative journeys is characterised by its freedom and movement. This leads Jordan to expose Western concepts of time as damaging artificial constructs that he simply calls lies: Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember. Lies 2: Time is a straight line. Lies 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one has happened while the other has not. Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time.

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Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word ‘finite’ (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves …). Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon. Lies 7: Reality as truth. (92–93)

The whole structure of the novel can be said to constantly challenge and deconstruct these traditional statements about time that are associated with linearity, rationality and objectivity. The traditional notion of time, ‘the external time’, is confronted and replaced with Jordan’s ‘internal time’, one that resembles Einstein’s concept of time as relative. If the traditional concept of time is deconstructed, then the traditional concept of history is destabilized too.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Strategies As mentioned in the introductory section, Sexing the Cherry does not merely talk about grafting as a means of overcoming restrictive dichotomies; it also practices grafting in terms of experimenting with aesthetic techniques. Most of these techniques are typical features of postmodern historiographic metafiction “such as intertextuality, parody, pastiche, self-reflexivity, fragmentation, the rewriting of history, and framebreaks” (Doan 1994, 138). Some of these devices have already been mentioned in connection with the major topics in the previous sections. In the following, however, I will extend the discussion of these strategies by giving more detailed attention to three techniques in particular: the mobilization of what Helena Grice and Tim Woods (1988) call the transgressive “literalisation of language”, the use of intertextuality, and the deployment of multiple embedding. The first technique that Winterson uses involves an engagement with the politics of patriarchal language and its claims to ‘realism’ and is most prominent in part one of the novel. This part has no title and consists of the alternating autodiegetic narrations by Jordan and his ‘mother’ Dog Woman. As mentioned above, their respective accounts are indicated by a specific fruit symbol. This unmotivated iconic symbolism points to the unmotivated nature of patriarchal language, whose conventional, illusory and thus ideological nature Dog Woman lays bare by her over-literal interpretations of its turns of phrase. On her way to Wimbledon, for instance, a man exposes his penis to her and tells her “‘Put it in your mouth […] as you would a delicious thing to eat’” (41). Not able to understand the metaphorical meaning, Dog Woman bites off his member, thinking that she has only done what he wanted her to do. According to Gade these misinterpretations do not only “have a humorous effect, they also direct attention to the ambiguity of language and the perpetual deferral of meaning” (1999, 33). There are plenty of other examples in the novel that display the use of this technique that Grice and Woods describe as “the literalisation of language” (1988, 7), as for instance a scene in which Dog Woman takes the metaphorical expression of the

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Old Testament “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” literally and goes off to dispossess the Puritans of their eyes and teeth (94). All these examples help to destabilize the assumed transparency of language. Isha Malhotra argues that [f]rom Lacan’s perspective, the Dog Woman’s colossal inability to understand the metaphors of patriarchy further augments her position in the unsymbolised realm of the imaginary and confirms the epigraph’s assertion that language is the decisive battle ground for the transformation of the symbolic order. […] [I]t is only by transforming the metaphors of patriarchy that [Dog Woman] can aspire to create a new symbolic order capable of responding to her own, more feminine and authentic picture of the world. (2013, 483)

That the language of women is different from that of men is also emphasized in one of Jordan’s accounts when he observes the fact that “women have a private language. A language not dependent on the constructions of men but structured by signs and expressions” (29). As the novel exemplifies, the language of women, nonetheless, makes use of the masculine discourse and appropriates it in such a manner as to reveal its inherent constructed patriarchal power relations. A feminine counter-discourse is not only offered in this parodic use of language but also in the appropriation of well-known patriarchal fairy tales, as the second part of the novel explicitly demonstrates. The second technique that Winterson employs, a sustained intervention into patriarchal discourse via the techniques of intertextuality and parodic re-writing, is most prominently seen in part two. This part is entitled “The Twelve Dancing Princesses”, whose narrations of their own life stories interrupt the alternating narration of the two main protagonists. In a mise-en-abyme structure, the princesses’ stories present new endings to the traditional fairy tales, not only to that of the encompassing fairy tale of the “Twelve Dancing Princesses” but also to the other intertexts each of the stories refer to. The fifth princess’ story, for instance, recalls the tale of Rapunzel: “You may have heard of Rapunzel. Against the wishes of her family […] she went to live in a tower with an older woman” (52). As it turns out, the fifth princess is the older woman. Contrary to the traditional tale, she is blinded by the prince, who then takes her beloved Rapunzel forcibly from her. Her matter-of-fact comment, “After that they lived happily ever after, of course” (52), reinforces the irony behind the famous fairy tale formula. Neither Rapunzel’s nor her own life seems to end in the pro­mising “happily ever after”. Rapunzel is violently forced into a heterosexual ‘happily ever after’ ending and she herself ends up living with another husband, who unfortunately turns into a frog, the first time they kiss. Whereas marriages with men fail because the partners do not love each other or because husbands abuse their wives, the lesbian relationships are threatened by a homophobic society. The oldest princess, for example, leaves her husband to live with a mermaid with whom she still lives hidden in a well. The seventh princess marries a disguised woman and they live happily together for many years until their homosexual relationship is discovered. The princess then decides to kill her lover in order to

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prevent her pursuers from burning her at the stake. According to Anne Mihan these stories “[address] the issue of violence done to women who do not submit to the mechanisms of gendering in hegemonic hetero-normative patriarchy and women’s refusal to put up with this violence” (2012, 303). All twelve princesses manage, however, to take control of their own lives. They perform resistance to patriarchal power by emancipating themselves from oppressive relationships that allow them no freedom. Of course, fairy tales are fictional but the patriarchal oppression they discuss is nonetheless a ‘reality’. At first sight, this passage seems to be completely disconnected from the rest of the story but at a closer look it becomes evident that “The Story of The Twelve Dancing Princesses” plays a central role in the novel by linking the different parts and topics to each other. The link between this section and the rest of the novel is created by presenting the fairy tale as part of Jordan’s search for Fortunata. In contrast to the other princesses, she does not live with her sisters in the same house and her story will be told at some later point. Whether Fortunata really exists as a character of the novel or whether she is merely one of Jordan’s imaginative selves is unclear at this stage and so are Dog Woman’s accounts of her ‘history’. This evinces the technique of intra-textuality, a variation on intertextuality at work within a text, thus anticipating the technique of multiple embedding. The third technique used by Winterson to destabilize patriarchal ideology is the implementation of multiple embedding. This quintessential postmodernist strategy questions the frames by which fictions and their non-fictional environments are distinguished and thereby stresses the fictional, or ideological character, of much of what passes for reality  – the ‘given’ or ‘status quo’ whose dominance Winterson is so concerned to question. The fourth part of the novel most prominently explores frame-breaking exercises in which an outer frame abruptly transpires to be the ‘inside’ of another narrative layer. It is in the final part of Sexing the Cherry that the two twentieth-century alter egos of Jordan and Dog Woman appear. Their reports, marked by the respective sliced banana and pineapple, do not only alternate with the accounts of their seventeenth-century selves but even merge, at times, with one another, thereby highlighting Winterson’s idea of narrative boundary-blurring, the central task of multiple-embedding. Squashed between two of Dog Woman’s accounts, there is, similarly to the passage about Fortunata’s dancing school reported in italics by an unknown omniscient authorial voice (78–79), a seemingly disconnected passage called “FORTUNATA’S STORY” presented by an unknown heterodiegetic narrator. When examining the previous passage by Dog Woman, however, it becomes evident that it still belongs to her account. The way Fortunata’s story is presented makes it nonetheless difficult to identify the ‘real’ author behind the story. Is it Jordan who is asked by his mother to recount it? The last sentences of Dog Woman’s report before Fortunata’s Story starts emphasize the confusion:

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Jordan was staring out to sea. ‘It was a day like this she described, when she told me the story of Artemis and why she was in her service.’ ‘Tell it to me,’ I said, ‘It is only just light.’ (151)

Obviously, this is now the story Dog Woman will hear from Jordan, but it is a retelling of the one Jordan was given by Fortunata and what is more, it is a retelling of Jordan’s retelling since it is embedded in Dog Woman’s account. “FORTUNATA’S STORY” is, in contrast to her sisters’ tales, which mostly refer to fairy tales, a rewriting of the Greek myth of Orion and Artemis. An interesting aspect in this version of the myth is the mention of alchemy: “The alchemists have a saying, ‘Tertium non data’: the third is not given” (152). Alchemy is described as “a process that cannot be documented. It is fully mysterious” (152). Here we find a link to grafting, the overall metaphor of the novel. According to Jeffrey Roessner alchemy is an even [m]ore telling figure for Winterson’s project to transcend traditional gender roles. […] In grafting, the transformation is scientifically informed; even though it produces a new gender ‘without seed or parent,’ the options arise from known elements. In contrast, the alchemical transformation cannot be rationally controlled or documented: occurring in a realm beyond logic, it signals the ascendancy of the irrational in Sexing the Cherry. (2002, 112)

If the third is not given, then it has to be imagined via the retelling of fairy tales, myths and history or even the invention of characters, such as Fortunata who may only be a product of Jordan’s imagination: “The scene I just described to you may lie in the future or the past. Either I have found Fortunata or I will find her. I cannot be sure. Either I am remembering her or I am still imagining her” (106). Ultimately, it is the novel’s emphasis on undecidability, via the exaggerated decidability of literalized language, the permanent generative transformation of intertextuality and re-writing, and the inside/outside ambivalence of multiple embedding, that manages to overcome traditional binaries in order to graft new ways of thinking and being.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Sexing the Cherry has been labelled a feminist, postmodern, modern, lesbian, and queer novel but it should be clear by now that such neat categorizations are highly problematic. Why should a work that constantly tries to defy binary classifications be put into a single theoretical box? Winterson’s novel grafts multiple possible readings that do not necessarily have to be separated from one another. What is more, Sexing the Cherry is a mixture of different literary genres: it may be called a postmodern feminist novel with traces of a historical novel and certainly a fantasy with queer fairy-tale and sometimes even gothic elements (↗ 3 Genres). Whatever the genre, her work is

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deeply concerned with the opening up of new spaces where the subject in process may develop in various undefined directions free from restrictive dichotomies. Winterson’s patent use of various avant-garde textual techniques has generated a considerable literature on her relationship to modernism and, more controversially, to postmodernism (Andermahr 2009; Asensio Aróstegui 2008; Noakes and Reynolds 2003; Onega 2006; Pykett 1998). In particular, this has involved sustained debates on her relationship to central modernist concerns such as temporality (Clingham 1998; Front 2009; Onega 1999; Walezak 2011). Unsurprisingly, the novel has received a broad reception within the field of feminist literary studies (Onega 1996; Front 2009; Mihan 2012; ↗ 4 Gender). Some of this reception has overlapped with studies of intertextuality and re-writing (Mihan 2012); some of it with issues of feminist temporality, in particular that arising out of Kristeva’s work on ‘Women’s Time’ (1986). Given the evident continuities with Winterson’s first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit (1985), there has been a long debate over Winterson’s stance on lesbian identity and sexual practice, summarized best by Lynne Pearce (1994; see also Doan 1994; Makinen 2005); her work has also provoked more general interest from the perspective of queer studies (Curatolo 2012), where in particular the figure of Dog Woman intersects with work coming out of the psychoanalytic field of cultures of ‘abjection’ (cf. Kristeva 1982) and ‘monstrosity’ (Shildrick 2002).

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works cited Winterson, Jeanette. Sexing the Cherry. London: Vintage, 2014 [1989]. --Andermahr, Sonya. Jeanette Winterson. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009. Asensio Aróstegui, Maria del Mar. “Recurrent Structural and Thematic Traits in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion and Sexing the Cherry: Time, Space and the Construction of Identity.” PhD thesis. Universidad de La Rioja, 2008. Barren, Annabel Margaret van. “Story-Telling and Embodiment in Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry and The PowerBook.” PhD thesis. Utrecht University, 2007. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London/New York: Routledge, 2007. Clingham, Greg. “Winterson’s Fiction and Enlightenment History.” Questioning History: The Postmodern Turn to the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Greg Clingham. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1998. 57–85. Curatolo, Barbara. “Queering ‘Happily Ever After’: Queer Narratives Expose Heteronormalcy in Fairy Tales” (Fall 2012). Senior Honors Projects. Paper 3. Doan, Laura. “Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Postmodern.” The Lesbian Postmodern. Ed. Laura Doan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Eliot, T. S. “Four Quartets.” Collected Poems 1909–1962. London: Faber and Faber, 1963. 187–223.

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Estor, Annemarie. “Jeanette Winterson’s Enchanted Science.” PhD thesis. Universiteit Leiden, 2004. Front, Sonia. Transgressing Boundaries in Jeanette Winterson’s Fiction. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2009. Gade, Bente. “Multiple Selves and Grafted Agents: A Postmodern Reading of Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry.” Sponsored by Demons: The Art of Jeanette Winterson. Ed. Helena Bengston et al. Odense: Scholar’s Press, 1999. 27–39. Grice, Helena, and Tim Woods. “Reading Jeanette Winterson’s Writing.” I’m Telling You Stories: Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading. Ed. Helena Grice and Tim Woods. Amsterdam/ Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998. 1–11. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction. London/New York: Routledge, 1988. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London/New York: Routledge, 1991. Kiliç, Özyurt M. “The Function of the Fantastic in the Works of Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson.” PhD thesis. Middle East Technical University, Institute of Social Sciences Ankara, 2005. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. European Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Kristeva, Julia. “Women’s Time.” The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Tori Moi. Trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. 187–213. Langland, Elizabeth. “Sexing the Text: Narrative Drag as Feminist Poetics and Politics in Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry.” Narrative 5.1 (1997): 99–107. Makinen, Merja. The Novels of Jeanette Winterson. A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Mihan, Anne. Undoing Difference? Race and Gender in Selected Works by Toni Morrison and Jeanette Winterson. Heidelberg: Winter, 2012. Noakes, Jonathan, and Margaret Reynolds. Jeanette Winterson: The Essential Guide to Contemporary Literature. London: Vintage Living Texts, 2002. Onega, Susana. “The British Historiographic Metafiction in the 1980s.” British Postmodern Fiction. Ed. Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993. 47–61. Onega, Susana. Telling Histories: Narrativizing History, Historicizing Literature. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995. Onega, Susana. “Jeanette Winterson’s Politics of Uncertainty.” Gender I-Deology: Essays on Theory, Fiction and Film. Ed. Chantal D’Arcy, Cornut Gentille, and Angel Garcia Landa Jose. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. 297–313. Onega, Susana. Jeanette Winterson. Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2006. Pearce, Lynn. “Written on Tables of Stone? Jeanette Winterson, Roland Barthes and the Discourse of Romantic Love.” Volcanoes and Pearl Divers: Essays in Lesbian Feminist Studies. Ed. Susan Raitt. London: Onlywomen Press, 1994. 147–168. Pykett, Lyn. “A New Way with Words? Jeanette Winterson’s Postmodernism.” I’m Telling You Stories: Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading. Ed. Helena Grice and Tim Woods. Amsterdam/ Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998. 53–60. Reynolds, Margaret, and Jonathan Noakes. Jeanette Winterson. The Essential Guide. London: Vintage, 2003. Roessner, Jeffrey. “Writing a History of Difference: Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry and Angela Carter’s Wise Children.” College Literature 29.1 (2002): 102–122. Rosemergy, Jan. “Navigating the Interior Journey: The Fiction of Jeanette Winterson.” British Women Writing Fiction. Ed. Abby P. Werlock. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000. 248–269. Shildrick, Margrit. Embodying the Monster. Encounters with the Vulnerable Self. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: SAGE, 2002. Walezak, Emile. “Gulliver Revisited: The Horizon of Travel in Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry.” Études britanniques contemporaines 40 (2011): 67–76.

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5.2 Further Reading Smith, Angela Marie. “Fiery Constellations: Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry and Benjamin’s Materialist Historiography.” College Literature 32.3 (2005): 21–50. Sönmez, Margaret. “Voices From Nowhere: Speakers From Other Times and Countries in Boating for Beginners, The Passion and Sexing the Cherry.” Winterson Narrating Time and Space. Ed. Margaret Sönmez and Özyurt Kiliç. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. 98–120. Turner, Kay, and Pauline Greenhill, eds. Transgressive Tales. Queering the Grimms. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012. Winterson, Jeanette. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. London: Vintage, 1996 [1985].

Lena Steveker

22 A. S. Byatt, Possession (1990) Abstract: A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession (1990) revolves around questions of writing the past, more particularly the Victorian past, from the perspective of the late twentieth century. As outlined in the essay, Byatt’s novel stages various forms of possession, both material and immaterial, linking them to issues of identity and female autonomy as well as to epistemological and ethical notions of poetry and imagination. Possession is an ambivalent text in that it problematizes the ontological, epistemological and methodological problems of writing the past; at the same time, the novel asserts the desire to acquire knowledge of the past, exploring literary genres, poetry and imagination as various means of opening the past to the present. As a Neo-Victorian text, Possession re-evaluates perceived clichés about the Victorian age, rewriting it as an era of a benign humanism that counteracts late-twentieth-century doubts and insecurities. Keywords: Biographic metafiction, identity, female autonomy, Neo-Victorianism, knowledge of the past

1 Context: Author, Œuvre, Moment In 1990, the British author A. S. Byatt won the prestigious Booker Prize for her novel Possession, published in the same year. By then, Byatt had already published four novels and a collection of short stories as well as critical studies on English literature, but it was Possession that brought her to the wider attention of both critics and the general reading public. A highly metafictional, self-reflexive novel that moves between various genres, voices and timeframes (↗  3  Genres), Possession clearly differs from Byatt’s previous realist fiction, for which she had won “a reputation as a traditional, academically minded novelist” (Alfer and Edwards de Campos 2010, 93). Her first novel, The Shadow of the Sun (1964), “is essentially a straightforward piece of orthodox realism” (Lewis 1991, 169) which tells the story of a famous novelist’s daughter who struggles to escape her dominant father’s influence upon entering adulthood. The Game (1968) “makes extensive use of mythical and symbolic elements within a realist framework” (Lewis 1991, 169) as it focuses on the strained relationship of two sisters, one an Oxford don, the other an emerging writer. Also located within the tradition of realist writing, Byatt’s subsequent novels The Virgin in the Garden (1978) and Still Life (1985) take up the theme of complex family relationships. In these two texts, which form the first half of a tetralogy eventually completed in 2002, the lives of three siblings from a Yorkshire family serve to create a narrative framework for extended DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-023

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discussions of art, religion, science, language, representation, female emancipation and, more specifically, the intellectual life of women (↗  4  Gender). As a topic that pervades Byatt’s writing, the latter is also of central relevance in her breakthrough novel Possession, but while her early fiction negotiates “the problem of female vision, female art and thought” (Byatt 1991, xiv) in various mid-twentieth-century settings, Possession discusses these issues within the context of the Victorian age and the late 1980s, respectively. Within Byatt’s fictional œuvre, Possession is a pivotal text in that it not only takes up many of the thematic concerns of her previous novels but also explores non-realist literary forms, narrative modes, and structural elements which have become more prominent in her writing since the 1990s. The metafictional self-reflexivity, the intertextual games and the generic hybridity that set Possession apart from her preceding fiction also determine The Biographer’s Tale (2000), a biographic metafiction which, as I have argued elsewhere, lays open the epistemological, ontological, methodological, and ethical problems of life-writing (Steveker 2009, 18–38; see also Boccardi 2001, O’Connor 2002). The novels that complete Byatt’s tetralogy, Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2009), no longer follow in the postmodern vein established in Possession and followed up in The Biographer’s Tale, but neither do they return to Byatt’s former linear writing. Similar to Possession and The Biographer’s Tale, the last two instalments of the tetralogy depend on textual collage as they incorporate fragments of other texts, both fictional and non-fictional, which interrupt and, at the same time, complement their respective narratives. Multi-genericity also serves as the structuring principle of The Children’s Book (2009), a complexly layered, “inexhaustib[ly] encyclopaedic” novel (Bristow 2012, 64) which again uses an intricate family saga to negotiate questions of artistic creation and imagination while it investigates the restraints that patriarchy imposes on women who want to live what, in Possession, is called “the Life of the Mind” (187)1. The Children’s Book opens in 1895 before it goes on to expand its narrative into the Edwardian age and up to the end of World War I. This novel, which “focuses with often pin-point accuracy on the late Victorian period” (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, 157), continues Byatt’s fictional engagement with Victorian literature and culture which also finds expression in Possession and in her two novellas “Morpho Eugenia” and “The Conjugal Angel” (jointly published as Angels and Insects in 1992). Revisiting and reiterating the Victorian age, these four texts belong to the field of neo-Victorianism which, as a literary and cultural phenomenon of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, “illustrate[s] a continued fascination with, if not fixation on, the Victorians and their relationship to us” (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, 8).

1 Unless otherwise indicated page references in brackets without further designation refer to Byatt 1991 [1990].

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2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns 2.1 Possession(s) Possession opens with the literary scholar Roland Michell discovering, in September 1986, two drafts of a letter written in 1858 by the (fictitious) poet Randolph Henry Ash and addressed to, it will turn out, the (equally fictitious) poetess Christabel LaMotte. Together with the feminist critic Maud Bailey, an expert on LaMotte, Roland embarks on a literary investigation, bringing to light a sensational story of love, passion, and poetry. The late-twentieth-century critics discover the Victorian poets’ private correspondence which tells the story of their budding illicit love. Roland and Maud are able to retrace the lovers’ steps to North Yorkshire where Ash and LaMotte spent a few passionate weeks together during the summer of 1859. Maud’s and Roland’s search ends when they learn that LaMotte and Ash had a daughter, Maia, who was born in secret in France and grew up as the child of LaMotte’s sister, in ignorance of her biological parents. In keeping with its title, Possession revolves around various forms of possession, both material and immaterial, as well as around the related notions of possessiveness and obsession. For instance, the unscrupulous Professor Mortimer Cropper, who is the novel’s villain character, attempts to lay his hands, by wealth or stealth, on anything once written or owned by Ash. Sardonically dubbed “the lord and owner of Ash” (29), Cropper possesses not only “the largest and finest collection of Ash’s correspondence anywhere in the world” (96), but also many paraphernalia such as the poet’s signet-ring and his pocket-watch. Cropper presides over “the Stant Collection, where Ash’s relics and those of his wife, family and acquaintances accumulated in the still regulated air [… of a] white temple” (106). Roland assumes that, for Cropper, all things related to Ash “are really his […], because he loves them most” (484). Although Roland mistrusts the quasi-religious fervour of Cropper’s obsessive acquisitiveness, he, too, is possessive about Ash and his writings. Roland deems himself to have “knowledge about the movement of Ash’s mind” (20) and, at one point, even sees Ash as “part of himself” (467). When he finds the drafts of Ash’s letter to LaMotte, Roland “fe[els] they were his” (22), because they mean “something personal” to him (50). Having discovered the poets’ love letters, Roland admits to Maud that he is “so possessive about the damned things” (91).

2.2 Identity Through its characters’ profoundly personal investment in the Victorian past, Byatt’s novel links the topic of possession to questions of identity. Roland’s, as well as Maud’s, sense of identity is fragile and insecure, because their schooling in postmod-

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ern theory has caused them to “see the idea of ‘self’ as an illusion” (424). Knowing that “there isn’t a unitary ego” (167), Maud asks herself: “who am I? A matrix for a susurration of texts and codes?” (251). Having been “trained in the poststructuralist deconstruction of the subject” (9), Roland has “learned to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected” (424). Their exposure to postmodern scholarship has taught Roland and Maud to “question everything except for the centrality of sexuality” (222), but their attitude towards sexuality has also been influenced by poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theories: They were theoretically knowing: they knew about phallocracy and penisneid, punctuation, puncturing and penetration, about polymorphous and polysemous perversity, orality, good and bad breasts, clitoral tumescence, vesicle persecution, the fluids, the solids, the metaphors for these, the systems of desire and damage, infantile greed and oppression and transgression, the iconography of the cervix and the imagery of the expanding and contracting Body, desired, attacked, consumed, feared. (423)

Inhibited by their theoretical knowledge, both Roland and Maud have come to reject sexual desire, each of them instead longing for a “clean empty bed in a clean empty room” (267). The two “exhausted scholars” (267) who “live in the truth of what Freud discovered” (254) turn to the pre-Freudian poets Ash and LaMotte, respectively, in order to provide their shifting, volatile identities with stability and meaning. Roland seems to ‘possess’ Ash in that “he had always seen […  him] as part of himself, of Roland Michell” (472). Maud builds her self-possession on her academic work on LaMotte whom she regards as a “companion” (136) who “redefine[s] and alarm[s] her” (137). For Maud, the female poet is a role model whose defiance of the patriarchal norms of Victorian femininity she emulates in an attempt to cope with her own society’s gender expectations (see Horatschek 1999, 59). Roland’s and Maud’s fascination with the Victorian writers and their poetry is “impelled by a search for identity through identification” (Gauthier 2006, 40). Researching the Victorians’ relationship, the critics’ “descent into the past becomes a descent into the self, bringing to light […] a longing for identity” (Löschnigg 1996, 111). This longing is fulfilled as Roland’s and Maud’s investigation of the poets’ love story comes to an end. Roland not only secures for himself a position as a university lecturer, but he also finds his identity as a poet in an epiphanic scene in which he realizes that “Ash had started him on this quest” which has led him to find for himself “the language of poetry” (473). While Roland establishes for himself a future as both an academic and a poet, Maud discovers her identity as LaMotte’s and Ash’s great-great-great-granddaughter; and as the future editor of the poets’ correspondence, she will enhance her (already respectable) academic reputation. With their identities having become secure, Maud and Roland at last find themselves able to admit to their mutual love and sexual desire.

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2.3 Female Autonomy A key topic of Possession, female autonomy is reflected as yet another form of possession in Maud and LaMotte, each of whom is afraid that men might impinge on “her self-possession, her autonomy” (506). The medieval myth of the Fairy Melusine plays a prominent role in the novel’s discussion of female autonomy. According to this myth, the earliest extant literary version of which is Jean D’Arras’s prose romance Histoire de Lusignan (1387–1394), the beautiful water nymph Melusine is doomed to turn into a snake-woman every Saturday. This curse can only be lifted if she marries a mortal man who vows never to set eyes on her when she locks herself into her bathroom in order to undergo her weekly transformation. If her husband fails to keep his oath, Melusine is doomed forever. The nymph falls in love with the knight Raimondin whom she marries after he has sworn to respect her privacy. Due to her extraordinary creative powers, which manifest themselves during her bathroom sessions, Melusine and Raimondin live a fulfilled, prosperous, and happy life in their castle Lusignan until the knight breaks his oath and spies on his wife during one of her transformations. When he discloses his wife’s secret to other people, Melusine turns into a dragon and, wailing, flies away, forced to leave her husband and her children behind (see Frenzel 1963, 424–425). With Melusine embodying beauty and monstrosity as well as creativity and danger, this myth expresses and contains the cultural anxieties of patriarchy towards the female ‘other’. In Possession, Melusine (also called Melusina in the novel) is repeatedly linked to both LaMotte and Maud. LaMotte (whose epic poem “The Fairy Melusine” is included in the novel, too) is described, for instance, as “some sort of serpent, hissing quietly” (366). Describing her relationship to their daughter Maia in her last letter to Ash, LaMotte compares herself directly to the mythical snake-woman: “I have been Melusina these thirty years. I have so to speak flown about […] the battlements of this stronghold crying to the wind of my need to see and feed and comfort my child, who knew me not” (501). The novel again references Melusine in a scene in which Roland, Raimondin-like, “put[s] his eye to the huge keyhole” (147) of a bathroom from which Maud emerges wrapped in an embroidered kimono that makes her appear like a “long Chinese dragon” (148). As both its female protagonists are cast as Melusinian characters, Possession conceptualizes women’s struggle for autonomy as an ahistorical phenomenon. The Victorian poet as well as the late-twentieth-century feminist critic defend their autonomy against the restrictive norms that their respective societies impose on women. A female artist and independent woman, LaMotte is acutely aware that her decision to live “the Life of the Mind” (187) has only been made possible by her transgressing the gender norms of Victorian society. As she puts it herself in one of her letters to Ash, she has “renounce[d] the outside World – and the usual female Hopes (and with them the usual female Fears) in exchange for – […] Art” (187). LaMotte lives in seclusion from society in a cottage which, like Melusine’s bathroom, signifies

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an autonomous space that allows her, as she puts it, to “live as I do – and manage my own affairs – and work my work” (184). LaMotte sees her love for the married Ash, and indeed Ash himself, as posing a “Threat” (187) to her autonomy for which she has “fought […] against Family and Society” (189). In the end, LaMotte’s fears prove to have been justified. She loses her independence when she is forced to give up her cottage and move in with her sister in order to prevent herself and her child from financial destitution and the social stigma of illegitimacy. For LaMotte, this loss of autonomy is a direct consequence of her relationship with Ash. “Do you remember […]”, she wistfully asks him in her final letter written decades after their affair, “my […] self-possession which you threatened […]? And destroyed […]” (502). Reading this letter, Maud feels sympathy and understanding for LaMotte. Although Maud lives in the late twentieth century, she shares the Victorian woman’s desire for autonomy, because Maud, too, feels repeatedly compelled to defend her independence against intruding former lovers and current admirers alike. “You can become a property or an idol”, Maud says to Roland, “I don’t want that. […] I know what she [LaMotte] felt about […  her] self-possession […]. I don’t want to think of that going” (506). Like LaMotte, Maud is reliant on a Melusinian space of autonomy. She finds this space in the “bright, safe box” (137) of her apartment: “[S]he [can] do nothing with ease and grace except work alone, inside these walls and curtains” (136–137). With Maud losing the ability to work whenever men stay at her apartment, Possession not only foregrounds the importance that this space has for her, but also implies that female autonomy is as endangered by patriarchy in the late twentieth century as it was in the mid-Victorian age. When Maud realizes that she has fallen in love with Roland, she is afraid of repeating LaMotte’s loss of independence. At first glance, the novel seems to refrain from doubling the poet’s experience in the critic, because Roland assures Maud that he “wouldn’t threaten [… her] autonomy” (507). In the ensuing sex scene, however, Roland takes “possession of all her white coolness that grew warm against him” (507). Invoking the patriarchal cliché of dominating male activity and submissive female passivity, the novel closes the critics’ (love) story with Maud yielding her autonomy, her self-possession, to Roland after all.

2.4 Poetry, Reading, Imagination: Epistemologies and Ethics Poetry is a major element of Possession. The novel contains a large number of pastiche poems, written by Byatt and ascribed to either LaMotte or Ash. These poems are reminiscent in style and tone of various nineteenth-century poets. Ash’s texts bear resemblance to poems by Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, whereas LaMotte is modelled on Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Barren Browning. The names of the novel’s twentieth-century protagonists also evoke Victorian poetry, because they allude to Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” and to

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Tennyson’s “Maud”. Most importantly however, poetry presents a form of epistemology in Possession. Poems by Ash and LaMotte provide Maud and Roland with knowledge about the past. The critics’ careful readings of poetry enable them to discover the Victorians’ formerly unknown love affair, an affair that “change[s] the face of scholarship” (19). Maud’s recital of LaMotte’s “Dolly keeps a secret” in the poetess’s former room turns the poem into a “treasure-hunt clue” (83) that enables the two critics to find the Victorians’ love letters, stowed away in one of LaMotte’s old dolls. With the Victorians’ “poems in hand” (236), Maud and Roland embark on a trip to Yorkshire where they successfully read them for “literary clue[s]” (237) which leave them “convinced” (264) that the two poets went there together. Poetry opens the past to the present, the novel suggests, but it does not guarantee knowledge of the past as can be seen when Maud incorrectly deciphers LaMotte’s poem about “Spilt Milk” (381–382) as signifying a stillborn child (422). In Possession, the knowledge contained in poetry can be revealed by the ‘correct’ way of reading. A comment inserted into the epiphanic scene of Roland discovering the poet within himself opines that “[t]here are readings […] that are dutiful, readings that map and dissect […]. There are personal readings, [sic] that snatch for personal meanings […]. There are […] impersonal readings […]” (471). Opposed to these allegedly insufficient and limited forms of interpreting a text, there are readings, the comment implies, that provide existentially meaningful knowledge: “there are readings which make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble […] – readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how” (471). Possession conceptualizes poetry, and the ‘correct’ reading of poetry, as an energizing force that counteracts the intellectually limiting and emotionally inhibiting influence of literary theory which the novel’s twentieth-century protagonists need to overcome in order to find intellectual, emotional and sexual fulfilment. Next to poetry, Possession conceptualizes imagination as another means of gaining knowledge. Roland tells Maud that “[i]t makes an interesting effort of imagination to think how they [Ash and LaMotte] saw the world” (254); and echoing this statement Maud emphasizes that “we have to make a real effort of imagination to know what it felt like to be them” (267). As the author of an Ash biography called The Great Ventriloquist, Mortimer Cropper is proud of his “vivid imagination” which is “his major asset in his craft” (384). But although all characters involved in biographical research stress the importance of imagination, the novel differentiates between ethical and unethical forms of imagination. Mortimer Cropper uses his imagination to “cut his subject down to size” as Maud observes (250). He characterizes Ash as a “typical” man of his age who is “like others of his kind” (247). Read through the prism of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the other (see Levinas 1983, 2000), Cropper thus denies Ash his singularity as an individual, his total otherness. By contrast, Maud and Roland respect Ash and LaMotte as others who lived as “wholly distant and separate” (467) individuals in their own cultural-historical context. With Maud and

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Roland beating Cropper to the discovery of the Victorians’ clandestine love affair, the novel conceptualizes their ‘real’ and ‘interesting’ acts of imagination as an ethically sound epistemology that respects each poet’s unique otherness.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies 3.1 Metafiction Possession is a novel about the past and how to write it. More specifically, it is a novel about individual lives in the past, a novel about how to gain knowledge of those lives and how to represent them. A highly metafictional text, Possession repeatedly draws attention to its own fictionality as well as to the processes of life-writing. Roland, for instance, contemplates Maud’s and his investigation into Ash’s and LaMotte’s lives as “a Romance” (425), thus reinscribing the generic definition provided by the novel’s subtitle. When Roland and Maud term their search for biographical knowledge “our Quest” (328), the text again identifies itself as a romance. The critics’ search is alternatively described as “a Shakespearean comedy” and “a detective story” (483). Such metafictional comments not only reveal the novel’s self-awareness of its own status as a fictional text, but also point towards some of the various genres which, as I will argue below, characterize Possession. Possession also explores questions of writing the past, and more particularly, of life-writing. The Ash biographer Mortimer Cropper, for example, remarks that “[t]he historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject’s life” (385). Due to observations such as this one, Possession draws attention to “the fact that subjectivity, relativity, selectivity, and constructivity are ineliminable features of biographic (re-)constructions” (Nünning 2005, 205). Commenting on the processes involved in life-writing, Byatt’s novel acknowledges and explores the notion of history and biography as narrative constructs, also supported by postmodern theories of historiography (see, for example, White 1973, and 1976). Possession thus belongs to the genre of biographic metafiction, which is a subgenre of historiographic metafiction, influentially defined by Linda Hutcheon as exploring the epistemological, methodological, and ontological questions of writing the past (see Hutcheon 1988, 105–123).

3.2 Parallel Structures On the one hand, Possession lays open the processes of selection, construction and interpretation involved in life-writing, thus problematizing the very possibility of biographical knowledge. On the other hand, the novel “attest[s] to the unflagging

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desire for knowledge about the past, a desire not extinguished by doubts as to how accessible it really is” (Shiller 1997, 557). Possession employs various literary strategies in order to “connect a bygone time with the […] present”, quoting from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s definition of romance (as put forward in the preface to House of the Seven Gables, 1851, iv) which serves as one of the novel’s epigraphs. Its parallel structures, which connect the Victorian past to the late-twentieth-century present, turn Possession into a text about the past as possession, or haunting. There are, for example, several parallels between LaMotte and Maud. Each woman has remarkably fair hair; each is repeatedly associated with the colour green; and, as argued above, each is likened to Melusine. Maud represents LaMotte’s double as she, too, struggles for autonomy within a patriarchal society. The notion of haunting is especially foregrounded in and for Maud, for whom her newly discovered family connection to both Ash and LaMotte is “unnaturally determined. Daemonic” (505). “I feel they have taken me over” (505), she says, characterizing herself as being literally possessed by her ancestors. Past and present are also linked to each other in the corresponding events of the novel’s dual-time narrative. Roland and Maud, who “pace well together” (251) whilst travelling around Yorkshire, mirror the Victorian poets whose “paces suite” each other as they “walk well together” on their trips along the Yorkshire coast (280). Trying to “take a day off from them [Ash and LaMotte]” (268), Roland and Maud visit a place called Boogle Hole. But their outing, which the twentieth-century protagonists see as an escape into unscripted, authentic experience, merely repeats, without their knowledge, the Victorians’ visit to the same place (286). These parallels allow “the reader imaginative access to the past and thus to share something of Roland and Maud’s haunting experience” (Burgass 2002, 49).

3.3 Intertextuality and Pastiche Intertextuality is another literary strategy which Possession employs as a means of accessing the past. Byatt’s novel includes a myriad of references to literary as well as non-literary, historical as well as pseudo-historical texts. There are both direct and indirect references to, for instance, John Fowles (↗ 15 John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman), Robert Graves, John Keats, D. H. Lawrence, Herman Melville, John Milton, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Alfred Tennyson, and Virginia Woolf (↗ 9 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse). The novel features references to texts as diverse as Victorian letters and diaries (both extant and fictitious), nineteenth-century scientific and religious writings, twentieth-century feminist essays, the Bible, fairy tales, and myths. A typical marker of historiographic and biographic metafiction, the densely woven intertextual net of Possession is, in Linda Hutcheon’s words, “a formal manifestation of both a desire to close the gap between past and present of the reader and a desire to rewrite the past in a new context” (1988, 118).

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In addition, Possession includes a large number of pastiche poems which play a central role in the novel’s use of intertextuality as a means of accessing the past. Written by Byatt, but ascribed to Ash and LaMotte, these poems constitute a form of ventriloquism that attempts to resuscitate the literary past by imitating it. According to Byatt, Possession is a novel about “the presence of literary texts as the voices of persistent ghosts or spirits” (2000, 45). It is, above all, with the help of these pastiche poems that the novel “takes possession of a world of voices and poetic scents from an era long gone, asserting the present of the past” (Hoesterey 2001, 93).

3.4 Genres and Narrative Perspectives In her capacity as a literary critic, Byatt states in On Histories and Stories that “Possession plays serious games with the variety of possible forms of narrating the past” (2000, 48). Most prominent among these are various patterns of romance, the detective story and the Gothic novel (↗ 3 Genres). Roland’s and Maud’s search for knowledge about Ash’s and LaMotte’s relationship is alternatively framed in one of these genres which, functioning as “literary modes of detection” (Steveker 2009, 130), allow access to the past. Both its subtitle and Hawthorne’s definition of romance, which serves as one of the novel’s epigraphs, link Possession to romance. Seen through the prism of Hawthorne’s concept, Byatt’s novel about two late-twentieth-century critics who discover a sensational love affair between two Victorian poets, presents the “truth of the human heart […] in the attempt to connect a by-gone time with the very present that is flitting away from us” (Hawthorne 1851, iii-iv). Conflating the medieval verse romance with the modern romantic novel, Possession tells the story of a two-fold “Quest” (328): while Roland and Maud search for evidence of Ash’s and LaMotte’s affair, they also probe their own increasing feelings for each other (cf. Jacobmeyer 2000, 48; Steveker 2009, 130). The generic patterns of romance as a means of writing the past are complemented by elements of detective fiction (Steveker 2009, 131). Maud and Roland are presented as “literary critics [who] make natural detectives” (237). Having found sufficient “clue[s]” (237), they succeed in discovering the secret of Ash’s and LaMotte’s child, a discovery that is described as “the unmasking at the end of a detective story” (483). Possession is also linked to the genre of the Gothic novel, especially in the scene of Mortimer Cropper’s attempted grave robbery (Steveker 2009, 131–132). In true Gothic spirit, this scene is set in a graveyard during a storm-tossed night. Cropper as the novel’s Gothic villain digs up a box from Ash’s grave. The box contains LaMotte’s last letter to Ash (a letter he never read) which informs protagonists and readers alike about the existence of the poets’ daughter who, like a Gothic story’s mysterious secret from the past, makes Maud feel possessed by her newly discovered ancestry. At the end of the novel, Maud is cast as a Gothic heroine who discovers her origins, while

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Roland, reminiscent of the dispossessed Gothic hero, comes into his inheritance by finding his own voice as a poet (Steveker 2009, 132). Maud and Roland gain knowledge about the past within the generic frameworks of romance, detective story and Gothic fiction. Their biographical research culminates in their discovery of LaMotte’s last letter which reveals the existence of Maia. It is at this point that the novel’s various generic markers merge, as this letter enables Roland and Maud to fulfil their quest, to close their case and solve the mystery that began with Roland finding Ash’s draft of his first letter to LaMotte (see Steveker 2009, 132). As Possession presents the successful search for biographical knowledge, and the concomitant biographers’ self-knowledge, as a romantic quest brought to a happy ending, a secret revealed and a mystery disclosed, the novel suggests that “[k]nowledge of the other [person] finds expression in various literary genres” (Schabert 1990, 2). Knowledge of the other person also manifests itself in the novel’s use of what Byatt terms “the nineteenth-century narrator” (2000, 56). Except for its non-narrative elements (the diary entries, letters, pastiche poems, and fairy tales interspersed in the text), Possession mainly features a heterodiegetic narrator with shifting focalisation. However, three parts of the novel are written in the omniscient narrative perspective typically associated with Victorian fiction. Commenting on her choice of narrative perspectives in On Histories and Stories, Byatt states that “I used that kind of [nineteenth-century] narrator deliberately three times in the historical narrative – always to tell what the […] biographers of my fiction never discovered, always to heighten the reader’s imaginative entry into the world of the text” (2000, 56). In an intertextual reference to John Fowles’s historiographic metafiction The French Lieutenant’s Woman (↗ 15 John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman), this narrator is first introduced in chapter 15, the novel’s middle chapter. Narrating the story of Ash’s and LaMotte’s clandestine trip to Yorkshire, this chapter provides the reader with biographical knowledge about the two Victorian poets that remains undisclosed to Roland and LaMotte. The novel’s twentieth-century protagonists likewise remain ignorant of what the ‘nineteenth-century narrator’ reveals to the reader in chapter 25: Ash’s wife Ellen was aware of her husband’s affair with LaMotte whose last letter she read and kept from Ash. In the “Postscript”, the same narrator eventually tells the reader how Ash met Maia by chance, recognizing her as his daughter, but not sharing this knowledge with either her or LaMotte. Stating that “[t]his is how it was” (508), the novel claims that its nineteenth-century narrator allows readers to access the past and “acquire genuine knowledge of the other person” (Schabert 1990, 1).

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4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives 4.1 Postmodernism and Beyond Possession was an immediate success. It won the prestigious Booker Prize and received glowing reviews and critical acclaim. It was praised, for example, as a “wonderfully extravagant novel” (Lehmann-Haupt 1990), “teeming with more ideas than a year’s worth of ordinary novels” (Brookner 1990), and as “a tour de force that opens every narrative device of English fiction to inspection without, for a moment, ceasing to delight” (Parini 1990). Since its publication, Possession has been the subject of numerous scholarly discussions. One recurring issue in many critical readings is the question whether Byatt’s novel is a postmodern text or not. As it negotiates the epistemological, ontological and methodological problems of writing the past, Possession has been identified as belonging to the postmodern genre of historiographic metafiction (Holmes 1994, 318; Burgass 2002, 28) and, more specifically, to its subgenre biographic metafiction (Steveker 2009, 1; Saunders 2010, 329). Arguing that the novel is above all concerned with language as “the primary form” of possession (Brink 1998, 292), André Brink reads Possession as a postmodern text that foregrounds “the fact of narrative, of fiction, of lies, and of language” (1998, 308). Ingeborg Hoesterey sees Byatt’s “meta-poetic ‘romance’ as a prime example of the literary postmodern” (2001, 94). By contrast, other critics read Possession as a decidedly non-postmodern text because it reinforces traditional ideologies often attacked and deconstructed in postmodern fiction. Jackie Buxton, for example, argues that the ideology of Byatt’s novel is a “heterosexual, humanist one” (1996, 216; ↗ 4 Gender). For Annegret Horatschek, Possession “counterpoints the postmodernist levelling of ontological differences by arguing aesthetically for a model of individuality which retrieves the ground for ethical judgments” (1999, 49). Elisabeth Bronfen, however, argues for a more nuanced approach to the question of the postmodern quality of Byatt’s text. Bronfen sees Possession as “a hybrid cross between the postmodern text, whose ethical gesture consists in a self-conscious reference to its own significatory process, and the text of moral realism, aimed at the discovery of an ethical truth” (1996, 131). Ulrich Broich provides an equally nuanced reading of Possession. He identifies various markers of postmodern fiction such as trans-genericity (1996, 620), a high level of intertextuality and the use of pastiche (1996, 623–625), but he argues that the novel, in contrast to its postmodern form, counteracts poststructuralist doubts by suggesting that reality can indeed be grasped. Reading Possession as a successful pastiche of a postmodern novel instead of a postmodern text proper, Broich defines it as a post-postmodern novel (1996, 633). As I have argued elsewhere, the novel’s complex representation of subjectivity is yet another reason for the various, and indeed conflicting, critical reactions it has

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evoked. On the one hand, Possession privileges the tenets of liberal humanism and Romanticism as it has Roland establish himself as a separate autonomous individual (see Steveker 2009, 45). Coming to the end of his literary investigation into Ash’s and LaMotte’s relationship, Roland realizes that Ash, whom he used to see as forming a part of his own identity, has become “wholly distant and separate, not an angle, not a bone, not a speck of illumination […] to do with him” (467). Although he experiences a sense of loss over this separation (441), it enables him to discover his “own primary thought” (441) and, eventually, to “hear, or feel, or almost see, […] a voice […] which was his own” (475). With Roland being fashioned into Ash’s self-sufficient “aesthetic, creative heir” (Buxton 1996, 216), Possession conceptualizes the male self as being unitary, self-sufficient and autonomous (see Steveker 2009, 44–45). On the other hand, Possession moves in what Ina Schabert calls a “positive paradox” (1995, 229) as it is determined by both postmodern doubts and a human point of reference (see Steveker 2009, 27). Maud and Roland are schooled in postmodern theories, but their fascination with poetry allows them to gain knowledge of Ash and LaMotte. With Maud and Roland gaining biographical insight into the lives of two (pseudo-historical) individuals, “the novel speaks out against postmodernist concepts of the decentred subject. […] [I]t accentuates humanity in spite of all (postmodern) doubts. In recentring the subject, Possession crosses the boundaries of postmodernism and moves into post-postmodernism” (Steveker 2009, 27; for other novels sitting uneasily in discussions of postmodernism ↗  17  J. G. Farrell, The Empire Trilogy; ↗  27  Hilary Mantel, The Thomas Cromwell Trilogy).

4.2 Neo-Victorianism In more recent years, much of the critical response to Byatt’s novel has been concerned with its engagement with the Victorian past. While Sally Shuttleworth defines Possession as a “Retro-Victorian novel” (1998, 254), it has by now become critical consensus to term it a Neo-Victorian novel (cf. Shiller 1997; Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, 18). Published in 1990, Possession is often located at “the beginning of the late twentieth-century vogue for the neo-Victorian” (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, 18). According to Louisa Hadley, it “catapulted neo-Victorian fiction into the mainstream” (2010, 2). As an early example of Neo-Victorian fiction, Possession was written before the noughts when “Neo-Victorianism […] moved beyond postmodern concerns such as intertextuality, self-reflexivity or metafiction” (Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss 2014, 2). Typical of early Neo-Victorian fiction, Byatt’s novel is “self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery, and (re)vision concerning the Victorians” (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, 4). One of these acts lies in rewriting the past from the margins of Victorian society, for example by giving voice to women as the others of Victorian patriarchy (see MacDonald and Goggin 2013). Christien Franken argues that, with the character of Christabel LaMotte, “Possession investigates the

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subject of a [Victorian] woman artist’s autonomy” (2001, 101) whilst giving “a feminist analysis of the tragic and historical background of Victorian women’s lives” (2001, 97). According to Jane Campbell, the novel “assert[s] the creative power of women, […] point[s] to a feminist artistic genealogy, [and] transform[s] old [male] notions of literary history” (2004, 146). More generally, Possession is committed to re-evaluating the clichéd, but enduring, notion of the Victorian age as an era of eroding religious faith and concomitant insecurities (see Steveker 2009, 123–124). Maud tells Roland that Ash and LaMotte “valued themselves. Once, they knew God valued them. Then they began to think there was no God, only blind forces. So they valued themselves […]” (254). Possession thus rewrites the Victorian period as “the great age of humanism before the splintering of the unitary self” (Holmes 1994, 324). The “confident and benign individualism” (Holmes 1994, 324–325) that characterizes Byatt’s vision of this epoch serves to counteract late-twentieth-century scepticism. Exemplified in Ash and LaMotte, the Victorians are shown as having been “capable of expressing their thoughts and feelings unrestricted by postmodern doubt” (Gauthier 2006, 37). Their secure self-esteem and self-respect are contrasted with each Maud’s and Roland’s crisis of identity. As Sally Shuttleworth puts it, Byatt’s novel represents the Victorian age as an “antidote to postmodern cultural poverty” (1998, 268).

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Byatt, A. S. Possession. A Romance. London: Vintage, 1991 [1990]. --Alfer, Alexa, and Amy J. Edwards de Campos. A. S. Byatt: Critical Storytelling. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Boccardi, Mariadele. “Biography: The Postmodern Last Frontier: Banville, Barnes, Byatt, and Unsworth.” Q/W/E/R/T/Y 11 (2001): 149–157. Boehm-Schnitker, Nadine, and Susanne Gruss. “Introduction: Fashioning the Neo-Victorian – Neo-Victorian Fashions.” Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture. Immersions and Revisitations. Ed. Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss. London: Routledge, 2014. 1–20. Brink, André. The Novel. Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. Bristow, Joseph. “What Happened? The Children’s Book and the Question of History, 1895–1919.” Journal of Victorian Culture 17.1 (2012): 64–72. Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Romancing Difference, Courting Coherence: A. S. Byatt’s Possession as Postmodern Moral Fiction.” Why Literature Matters: Theories and Functions of Literature. Ed. Rüdiger Ahrens and Laurenz Volkmann. Heidelberg: Winter, 1996. 117–134. Brookner, Anita. “Eminent Victorians and Others.” The Spectator, 3 March 1990. http://archive. spectator.co.uk/article/3rd-march-1990/35/eminent-victorians-and-others (5 August 2016). Burgass, Catherine. Possession. A Reader’s Guide. New York/London: Continuum, 2002.

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Buxton, Jackie. “‘What’s Love Got to Do With It?’: Postmodernism and Possession.” English Studies in Canada 22.2 (1996): 199–219. Byatt, A. S. “Introduction.” The Shadow of the Sun. London: Vintage, 1991. viii–xvi. Byatt, A. S. On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Campbell, Jane. A. S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004. Franken, Christien. A. S. Byatt: Art, Authorship, and Creativity. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Frenzel, Elisabeth. “Melusine.” Stoffe der Weltliteratur. Stuttgart: Kröner, 1963. 424–426. Gauthier, Tim. Narrative Desire and Historical Representation: A. S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie. New York: Routledge, 2006. Hadley, Louisa. Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative. The Victorians and Us. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. House of the Seven Gables. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1851. Heilmann, Ann, and Mark Llewellyn. Neo-Victorianism. The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Hoesterey, Ingeborg. Pastiche. Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Holmes, Frederick M. “The Historical Imagination and the Victorian Past: A. S. Byatt’s Possession.” English Studies in Canada 20 (1994): 319–334. Horatschek, Annegret. “‘A Witness of Difference’: Individualität als Moral im Dialog zwischen Viktorianismus und Postmoderne in dem Roman Possession von A. S. Byatt.” Anglia 177 (1999): 49–70. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York/London: Routledge, 1988. Jacobmeyer, Hannah. Märchen und Romanzen in der zeitgenössischen englischen Literatur. Münster: LIT, 2000. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “Books of The Times: When There Was Such a Thing as Romantic Love”. The New York Times. 25 October 1990. http://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/25/books/ books-of-the-times-when-there-was-such-a-thing-as-romantic-love.html (5 August 2016). Levinas, Emmanuel. Die Spur des Anderen. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und zur Sozialphilosophie. Ed. and trans. Nikolaus Krewani. Freiburg: Alber, 1983. Levinas, Emmanuel. Entre Nous. On Thinking-of-the-other. Trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. London: Athlone Press, 2000. Lewis, Peter. “A. S. Byatt.” Contemporary Novelists. Ed. Lesley Henderson. 5th ed. Chicago: St. James’s Press, 1991. 168–170. Löschnigg, Martin. “History and the Search for Identity: Reconstructing the Past in Recent English Novels.” Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 29.2 (1996): 103–119. MacDonald, Tara, and Joyce Goggin, eds. Neo-Victorianism and Feminism. Special Issue of Neo-Victorian Studies 6.2 (2013). Nünning, Ansgar. “Von der fiktionalen Biographie zu biographischer Metafiktion – Prologomena zu einer Theorie, Typologie und Funktionsgeschichte eines hybriden Genres.” Fakten und Fiktionen. Strategien fiktionalbiographischer Dichterdarstellungen in Roman, Drama und Film seit 1970. Ed. Christian von Zimmermann. Tübingen: Narr, 2000. 15–36. O’Connor, Erin. “Reading the Biographer’s Tale.” Victorian Studies 44.3 (2002): 379–387. Parini, Jay. “Unearthing the Secret Lover.” The New York Times. 21 October 1990. http://www. nytimes.com/1990/10/21/books/unearthing-the-secret-lover.html?pagewanted=all (8 August 2016). Saunders, Max. Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

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Schabert, Ina. In Quest of the Other Person. Tübingen: Francke, 1990. Shiller, Dana. “The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel.” Studies in the Novel 29.4 (1997): 538–560. Shuttleworth, Sally. “Natural History: The Retro-Victorian Novel.” The Third Culture. Literature and Science. Ed. Elinor S. Shaffer. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1998. 253–268. Steveker, Lena. Identity and Cultural Memory in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt: Knitting the Net of Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. White, Hayden. Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. White, Hayden. “The Fictions of Factual Representation.” The Literature of Fact. Ed. Angus Fletcher. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. 21–44.

5.2 Further Reading Boccardi, Mariadele. A. S. Byatt. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Brosch, Renate. “Inszenierung, Visualisierung und Fiktionalität als Strategien der Herstellung von individueller und kultureller Identität: Vom historischen zum historiographischen Text in A. S. Byatt’s Romantetralogie.” Anglistik 1999 (2): 49–65. Chinn, Nancy. “‘I am my own riddle’ – A. S. Byatt’s Christabel LaMotte: Emily Dickinson and Melusina.” Papers on Language and Literature 37.2 (2001): 179–204. Hadley, Louisa. “Spectres of the Past: A. S. Byatt’s Victorian Ghost Stories.” Victorians Institute Journal 31 (2003): 85–99. Hadley, Louisa. The Fiction of A. S. Byatt. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Kelly, Kathleen Coyne. A. S. Byatt. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. Noakes, Jonathan, and Margaret Reynolds. A. S. Byatt. The Essential Guide. London: Vintage, 2004.

Gerold Sedlmayr

23 Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials (1995–2000) Abstract: Revolving around the issue of growing up, Pullman’s fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials offers a complex discussion of crucial questions pertaining to the conditio humana (life/death, free will/destiny, truth, friendship, love, responsibility etc.). As the essay points out, the young protagonist Lyra, fighting against religiously motivated authorities fixated on the sinfulness of sexuality, becomes representative of a liberating Blakean dialectics of innocence and experience. The topic of maturation is complemented and complicated by the novels’ many-worlds setting, including Pullman’s references to and narrative use of quantum theory, which, on the metaliterary level, relates to the opening up of new ‘worlds’ and perspectives by way of the trilogy’s manifold intertextual allusions. Foregrounding the nature of storytelling, Pullman’s narrative insists on the irreducibility of the sensual and performative qualities of literature, as well as the crucial position of the reader. Keywords: Fantasy, maturation, sexuality, free will/destiny, storytelling

1 Context: Author, Œuvre, Moment Philip Pullman, born in Norwich in 1946, was “educated in England, Zimbabwe, and Australia, before [his] family settled in North Wales” (Pullman, “About”). He read English at Exeter College, Oxford, then became a teacher “at various Oxford Middle Schools before moving to Westminster College in 1986, where [he] spent eight years involved in teaching students on the B.Ed. course” (Pullman, “About”). In 1996, Pullman took up work as a full-time writer. He is mostly known for his children’s books and books for young adults, but he claims, certainly rightly so, that “the natural audience for my work seems to be a mixed one – mixed in age, that is, though the more mixed in every other way as well, the better” (Pullman, “About”). In 2005, he received the highly respected Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for his lifetime achievement (cf. Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award). He is currently President of the British Society of Authors and of The Blake Society. After two novels for adults, The Haunted Storm (1972) and Galatea (1976), Pullman published his first novel for children, Count Karlstein, in 1982. A large number of other books for children and young adults followed, most remarkably perhaps the four Sally Lockhart mysteries (The Ruby in the Smoke [1985], The Shadow in the North [1986], The Tiger in the Well [1990] and The Tin Princess [1994]), the first three of which centre on the adolescent eponymous heroine, who, orphaned after the death of her DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-024

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father, becomes a detective in late nineteenth-century London. Employing a realistic tone, the novels adopt a historical perspective to engage head-on with issues like gender equality, class, social injustice, and Britain’s imperial legacy. In 2010, Pullman published his highly controversial retelling of Jesus’ life, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. In this novel, the style of which loosely imitates biblical diction, Jesus is imagined having a twin-brother nicknamed ‘Christ’. Apart from novels and short fiction, Pullman has also written plays and non-fiction. Moreover, in 2012, he published a selection of 50 fairy stories by the Brothers Grimm, all of them retold by himself (Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version). Pullman’s most famous work to date is the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, which consists of three novels: Northern Lights (1995, published as The Golden Compass in the United States), The Subtle Knife (1997) and The Amber Spyglass (2000). Pullman has also added three companion volumes: Lyra’s Oxford (2003), Once upon a Time in the North (2008) and, as an audio book only, The Collectors (2014). A fourth volume, The Book of Dust, is in the making. In 2003, the BBC carried out a largescale survey among the British reading public. “Three quarters of a million votes” were cast to identify the “nation’s best-loved novel” (BBC). His Dark Materials came in third, after J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which was an astounding proof of the trilogy’s huge popularity, but perhaps also came as a bit of a surprise, not least when considering that His Dark Materials has been labelled a series for young readers and as such took pride of place even over J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter saga. Apart from that, His Dark Materials also received a number of high-status honours. Amongst others, Northern Lights was awarded the Carnegie Medal for children’s fiction in 1995 (cf. CILIP) and also selected as the recipient of the “Carnegie of Carnegies” in 2007 (cf. Pauli 2007). Most prestigiously perhaps, The Amber Spyglass was credited with the Whitbread Award in 2001, not only as “Children’s Book of the Year”, but also, and for the first time for a children’s book, as “Book of the Year” (cf. Costa). Although it can hardly be doubted that His Dark Materials is a work of astounding thematic and imaginative intricacy, both for young and mature readers, it is more challenging to locate its success in its respective cultural, social and political contexts. What is clear, though, is that the moment of the novels’ publication was on the cusp of an unprecedented phase of popularity for the fantasy genre. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and the films that followed, Peter Jackson’s cinematic version of Tolkien’s works, as well as the recent phenomenal success of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, including its adaptation as a TV series, A Game of Thrones, all attest to the powerful popular allure of fantasy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is certainly legitimate to argue that the rise of fantasy in the 1990s and 2000s, with its often clearly articulated Manichaean constellations, can be connected, inter alia, to the lack of well-defined politico-ethical structures as a consequence of the breakdown of ‘clear’ ideological blocs after the fall of communism. This, however, does not necessarily validate the often-made charge that it is an essentially escapist genre,

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which, since the stories are often set in purely ‘virtual’ otherworlds, is allegedly free of proper real-world references. After all, as some digging beneath the surface quickly reveals, those works of fantasy that have gained popularity are especially far from being apolitical or non-ideological, despite appearances (cf. e.g. the essays in Sedlmayr and Waller 2014). In fact, Pullman’s characters can be considered as counterdrafts to the more ‘conservative’ heroic models offered, for instance, by Lewis and Tolkien. To quote Phil Cardew: “Pullman gives us heroes fit for the world he presents us, where there is no salvation, and little hope. We might say these are very ordinary heroes fit for a modern, complex and postmodern world in which the very idea of traditional heroism has become so problematic.” (2011, 37) By finely interweaving his story with multifarious intertextual references, Pullman has created a work that offers a ‘narrative’ philosophy of life with a substantial amount of ‘real-world’ relevance, not least because it is tied to a democratic politics and an ethics of tolerance and equality.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns 2.1 Northern Lights: From Innocence to Experience While the last two books of His Dark Materials take the reader to various parallel worlds in Pullman’s multiverse, including our own, the first part, Northern Lights, is set entirely in only one of them. Lyra, the protagonist, lives in an Oxford which is similar to but not quite like its namesake in our world. For one, there seems to be a temporal discrepancy. Lyra’s world is reminiscent of the beginning of the twentieth century rather than its end: there are no cars or planes yet, but horse carts, sleighs, zeppelins and balloons. Some things have been given disparate names (e.g. ‘anbaric’ instead of ‘electric’), and history has generally run a slightly different course. The Reformation, for instance, has never happened. Instead, John Calvin even became Pope. While the papacy had been abolished after his death, the Church, known as ‘the Magisterium’, has grown into a despotic institution with enormous secular power (cf. 31).1 Most conspicuously, all human beings in Lyra’s world have ‘dæmons’, which are externalised embodiments of their inner selves, their souls. The dæmons, who are intelligent and able to speak, always bear an animal shape, which is mutable during childhood but solidifies as a consequence of becoming an adult. Dæmons can “move no more than a few yards from their humans” (163), and if they do, it is very painful. Apart from that, dæmons usually are of the opposite sex: Lyra’s Pantalaimon, for

1 Unless otherwise indicated, page references in brackets without further designation refer to Pullman 2012. In ambiguous cases the abbreviation HDM (for His Dark Materials) will be added.

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instance, is male. However, there are also other conscious beings apart from humans in Lyra’s world, most prominently armoured bears and witches. Not only in name, but even more so in thematic terms, does the trilogy’s main protagonist, Lyra Belacqua, resemble William Blake’s Lyca from Songs of Experience (1794). In Blake’s “The Little Girl Lost” (1988, 20–21), Lyca, all alone, rambles through the unpeopled “southern clime” (l. 9), the haunt of wild animals. While her parents, who do not know where she is, are extremely worried, Lyca faces the wilderness in an unbiased manner and calmly falls asleep underneath a tree. From the parents’ adult position of ‘experience’, the “desart [sic] wild” (l. 20) and the “beasts of prey” (l. 34) pose serious dangers and are therefore considered evil, which Lyca, in her state of childhood ‘innocence’, does not seem to perceive. Blake’s point is that perspective decides upon being: precisely because Lyca does not look upon the untamed animals through a prejudiced lens, they not only appear as, but ultimately are friendly, sympathetic and good. In contrast to Lyca’s real parents, whose “concern for their daughter becomes progressively more self-centred until it is unmistakeably emotional blackmail” (Marsh 2001, 73), the lion and the lioness become caring surrogate parents. In the end, they even strip Lyca of her clothes – i.e. signifiers of what wrongly figures as sexual shamefulness in the ‘fallen’ world – and so return her to that paradisiacal state that best corresponds to her innocence. At the beginning of the trilogy, Lyra, like Lyca, is a lost child in the sense that she has been deprived of her parents, whom she thinks she has never met and falsely believes to be dead. She is a pseudo-orphan, who, when still a toddler, was committed to the care of the Master of Oxford’s Jordan College by her ‘uncle’, but actually father-in-disguise, Lord Asriel. There, she has been raised by the serving staff and male scholars, who in their free time have offered her an eclectic education. Rather than study, though, this “half-wild, half civilized girl” (22) prefers to spend her time exploring the college roofs and the streets of Oxford with her friends, especially the kitchen boy, Roger. Soon, however, the topic of lost children demands more urgency when more and more children, among them Roger, are abducted by the so-called Gobblers. As it turns out, the term Gobblers refers to the General Oblation Board (cf. 80), a renegade and “semiprivate initiative” (31) within the all-powerful Church and as such a rival to the other great Church agency, the Consistorial Board of Justice. In the icy deserts of the North, in stark contrast to Blake’s Lyca’s “southern clime”, the Gobblers have built a research facility, Bolvangar, in which they cruelly sever the children from their demons, leaving them as half-dead shades doomed to die. As the brief comparison has indicated, Pullman, just like Blake, negotiates the concepts of innocence and experience. Significantly, as with Songs of Innocence and Experience, Pullman suggests in His Dark Materials that these two ‘states’, though contrary to each other, can never be opposed in any absolute way. Rather, there is no innocence without experience, just as there is no experience without innocence. Both require and dialectically shape each other. Sadly enough, the children in His Dark Materials have all been touched by ‘experience’ in quite a pronounced way. Pov-

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erty-stricken Tony Makarios, for instance, another child abducted by the Gobblers, has a mother who is an alcoholic unable to properly care for her son (cf. 39–40). She cannot even remember who fathered him. Will, the other important protagonist in the trilogy and a child from ‘our’ world, is also a semi-orphan who does not know his father. His mother is mentally ill, which is why he has to care for her, not vice versa. Things are apparently easier for Lyra, who, at least in the beginning, does not miss anything in Jordan College. Oxford appears to be a safe, perfect and closed-off world: “I want to stay here for ever [sic]” (64). However, in the first chapter, Lyra’s witnessing of the Master of Jordan’s attempt to poison Lord Asriel already reveals quite unequivocally that this is a tainted paradise. Yet still, it is only after she has met the beautiful, ‘magnetic’ Mrs Coulter, a stranger intruding into this perfect world from outside, that she first wishes to have proper parents herself and happily agrees to leave Jordan. Ironically, without yet knowing that Marisa Coulter is her mother, she longs to have her actual parents as parents: “Perhaps [Lord Asriel] and Mrs Coulter would fall in love, and they would get married and adopt Lyra, and go and rescue Roger from the Gobblers.” (76) Most bitterly, Lyra’s parents, just like Lyca’s, are egotists whose care for their child is self-centred. This, however, changes in the course of the novels: eventually, they even decide to save Lyra by sacrificing themselves. Despite the fact that children’s lives are always already prefigured by the actions of others in the world of experience, so that both states blur into each other, children, in the narrative universe of His Dark Materials, are still qualitatively different from adults, and they are so in a very material sense. Firstly, as mentioned, while dæmons can still change during their humans’ childhood, they acquire a permanent outward form at the very moment in which childhood is left behind. Secondly, the mysterious Dust which pervades all worlds – the ‘dark material’ Lord Asriel researches and has managed to make visible in photographs with the help of a specific chemical solution – settles on and condenses around adults, while it is not attracted to children. The reason for this is that children have not yet awakened sexually. What is at issue for Pullman is not so much that the notion of experience is connected to sexual desire. Rather, the novels circle around the question of how this connection is interpreted and, given that the interpretation in question has assumed discursive validity and power, which material and psychological effects it has on humans’ lives. According to the hegemonic view of the Church in Lyra’s world, which is rather obviously reminiscent of traditional real-world Christian positions, sexuality becomes inherently tied to the notions of shame and sinfulness. In the Bible of Lyra’s world, which is in many respects similar to ours, it is only after Adam and Eve have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that “the eyes of them both were opened, and they saw the true form of their dæmons […], and they knew good and evil; and they were ashamed, and they sewed fig leaves together to cover their nakedness” (304–305; cf. Genesis 3:7). Accordingly, their expulsion from Paradise, their fall from innocence into experience, does not simply serve as a metaphor for humans’ physical and sexual maturation, but has been instrumentalised by the Church as an indicator of the potential moral evil-

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ness and degrading nature of sexual desire. Mrs Coulter functions as the major representative of this view. That she herself has internalised such understanding becomes obvious when she bathes Lyra after she has taken her from Oxford to London: since the dæmons of females are usually male, Mrs Coulter wills Lyra’s Pantalaimon to look away from his female counterpart, just as Mrs Coulter’s own dæmon, the golden monkey, already does as a matter of course: “Pantalaimon watched with powerful curiosity until Mrs Coulter looked at him, and he knew what she meant and turned away, averting his eyes modestly from these feminine mysteries as the golden monkey was doing. He had never had to look away from Lyra before.” (70) Obviously, Lyra, being twelve years of age, has reached the threshold of puberty. What for readers complicates Mrs Coulter’s position is that she acts from a firm conviction to serve the cause of the good: for her as the head of the General Oblation Board, severing the children from their dæmons is meant to prevent their falling from innocence. She explains to Lyra: “You see, your dæmon’s a wonderful friend and companion when you’re young, but at the age we call puberty, the age you’re coming to very soon, darling, dæmons bring all sort of troublesome thoughts and feelings, and that’s what lets Dust in. A quick little operation before that, and you’re never troubled again.” (235) Perversely, however, in order to reach this alleged greater good, she is willing to cruelly mistreat and practically kill a large number of poor children, children obviously deemed to be expendable because of their low social position. In a scene obviously referencing the one just discussed, when Lyra and Roger take a bath in Lord Asriel’s luxurious prison in the realm of the bears after having been rescued from Bolvangar, they have already lost some of their innocence: while before, “[t]hey had swum naked together often enough” (299), they now cannot deal with each other in such an open manner anymore. Their experiences at Bolvangar have, if not destroyed, at least altered their innocence. In another of Pullman’s intertexts, Plato’s The Symposium, Diotima of Mantineia, in a discussion Socrates remembers having had with her about the nature of love, avers that love, personified as Eros, “is a great spirit (daimon), and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal” (Plato, n. pag.). Eros, the ‘daimon’, hence functions as a “mediator”, a necessary interpreter “between gods and men […] [f]or God mingles not with man”: “The wisdom which understands this is spiritual; all other wisdom, such as that of arts and handicrafts, is mean and vulgar.” According to Plato, then, love is what connects humans to the spiritual. Moreover, in the metaphysical tradition influentially sparked by his philosophy, it is love that enables them to comprehend moral values in the first place. As is well known, in this view, ‘true’, Platonic, love can never be material and hence never sexual, but ultimately must ‘translate’ and sublimate the physical into the abstraction of the spiritual. While Pullman’s dæmons unmistakeably reference Diotima of Mantineia’s daimon, the thrust of His Dark Materials is decidedly anti-Platonic. In the very last scene of Northern Lights, just after Lord Asriel has sacrificed Roger to open up a gate into other worlds, he and Mrs Coulter face each other, struggling with the question

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of whether they can carry on their missions together. Both of them, as Lyra’s parents and in their very own and apparently opposed ways, represent the Western metaphysical tradition. Ironically, though, through their selfish actions, they themselves constantly undermine this tradition’s essentialist truth claims (the exception being their act of self-sacrifice in the end). After all, as the last scene of Northern Lights especially demonstrates, their relationship is shaped by a powerful physical attraction: “His hands, still clasping her head, tensed suddenly and drew her towards him in a passionate kiss. Lyra thought it seemed more like cruelty than love, and looked at their dæmons, to see a strange sight: the snow leopard tense, crouching with her claws just pressing in the golden monkey’s flesh, and the monkey relaxed, blissful, swooning on the snow.” (323) Certainly, this is not expressive of Platonic love. They are attracted to each other by their lust for power and their boundless self-confidence. In this case, then, sexuality indeed functions as an indicator of a degrading egotism; an egotism which eventually, at the end of the trilogy’s final battle, will also cause the downfall of the ultra-powerful heavenly despot, Metatron, who lets himself be captivated by Mrs Coulter’s sexual allure (cf. 921). Nevertheless, Pullman’s point (and here again he follows in the footsteps of William Blake) is not that sexual desire is debasing per se. Rather, it has been turned into an ‘evil’ and destructive force by the reigning moral regime. It is only by the authorities’ powerful brandishing of sexuality as sinful that it becomes naturalised as such. Pullman writes against an ideology which renders sexuality synonymous with a perverted human nature.

2.2 The Subtle Knife: Science and Materialism When Will, in The Amber Spyglass, argues with the ancient boatman (a figure referencing the ferryman Charon in Greek mythology) whether Lyra should be allowed to bring her dæmon along to the world of the dead, the boatman firmly rejects Will’s imposition. He claims that the necessity of leaving behind one’s dæmon, i.e. one’s soul, when crossing the lake is a law as indisputable as the physical law of gravity, “[t]he law that makes the water fall back into the lake” (824). Tellingly, however, the matter-of-fact nature of the boatman’s comparison loses some of its irrevocability when considering that, throughout the trilogy, apparently self-evident Newtonian laws like this are themselves severely put to the test. Pullman repeatedly evokes a scientific school of thought that, since the beginning of the twentieth century, has challenged the seemingly unquestionable truths of classical physics: quantum theory. The narrative conception of different worlds existing side by side, which is especially at the centre of The Subtle Knife, cannot be grasped without taking this theory into account. To summarise in a highly reduced fashion, quantum theorists, when investigating into the nature of atoms, realised that the negatively charged electrons that hover around the atom’s positively charged core behave according to physical rules which do not match the Newtonian rules to which the larger material world

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is subject. To put it more bluntly, at the quantum level, the rules of time and space, cause and effect, etc. work differently. The thought experiment of Erwin Schrödinger, ‘Schrödinger’s cat’, illustrates this weird state of affairs (Schrödinger 1983, 157): A cat is locked up in a steel box for one hour, together with a small radioactive element, a Geiger counter and a bottle filled with poisonous acid. There is a probability of fifty per cent that the radioactive element will decay within this time. In case that it should, the Geiger counter will register the decay and activate a mechanism which will destroy the flask with the poisonous acid, which in turn will lead to the cat’s death. Obviously, we, the observers, will only know whether the cat is alive or dead when we open the box after an hour. The “quite ridiculous” aspect (Schrödinger 1983, 157), to use Schrödinger’s own words, is that he wants us to assume (remember, this is a thought experiment) that before opening the box, the cat is neither alive nor dead, but alive and dead at the same time: “The ψ-function [psi-function] of the entire system”, i.e. the catalogue of expectations concerning the outcome of the measurement, “would express this by having in it the living and the dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts” (Schrödinger 1983, 157). The cat is in a ‘superposition’ regarding its states, just like an electron in an atom. It is only when we open the box and hence, by consciously observing, interfere with the system that the cat is revealed to be either alive or dead. If one imagines the box itself as representing an atom, this thought experiment can be used in order to demonstrate how the rules of quantum physics differ from those of Newtonian physics. As mentioned, the electrons within the atom do not behave according to the rules of Newtonian physics, especially when it comes to the notions of time and space. Actually, an electron does not have a specific location in time but is everywhere at the same time; it is both here and there. According to Schrödinger’s proposition, it is only when we observe the atom from outside that the electron assumes a fixed position. Simply because we observe the atom, its electrons behave as if they were (at least partly) subject to Newtonian rules of physics. This is because the two physical spheres, i.e. the Newtonian and the quantum systems, interfere; or, to put it more bluntly, we, who are caught in a Newtonian system, impose our own system’s rules (our epistemological view of the world) onto the quantum system. This so-called consciousness theory is not at all undisputed (see Polkinghorne 2002, 50–51) and, apart from that, only one among various theories that try to explain the ‘measurement problem’ in quantum mechanics (Polkinghorne 2002, 46–56). Another, even more controversial issue is the ‘many worlds theory’. To stay with the example of Schrödinger’s cat, the proponents of the theory hold that when the box is opened and the cat is found to be either dead or alive, the respective non-realised option has not been wholly annihilated. On the contrary, although it has ceased to exist as a possibility in our world, it has become reality in another, which is beyond our three-dimensional Newtonian world (but nevertheless operates according to the three-dimensional Newtonian rules). As John Polkinghorne explains:

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Not only is there a world in which Schrödinger’s cat lives, but there is also a parallel but disconnected world in which Schrödinger’s cat dies. In other words, at every act of measurement, physical reality divides into a multiplicity of separate universes, in each of which different (cloned) experimenters observe the different possible outcomes of the measurement. Reality is a multiverse rather than a simple universe. (2002, 52)

How do these complicated theories bear on The Subtle Knife? Will’s cat Moxie, for example, over which an intruder into Will’s house ‘accidentally’ and fatally stumbles in the opening chapter of The Subtle Knife, as well as the appearance of several other cats later in the novel, make a sufficiently obvious nod to Schrödinger’s cat. Yet there are other, much more direct, instances in which the particular conception of the world implied in quantum physics is utilised for narrative and philosophical purposes. There is a most explicit rendering of its basic tenets by Lord Asriel: ‘Now that world, and every other universe, came about as a result of possibility. Take the example of tossing a coin: it can come down heads or tails, and we don’t know before it lands which way it’s going to fall. If it comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed. Until that moment the two possibilities were equal.[’] ‘But on another world, it comes down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart. I’m using the example of tossing a coin to make it clearer. In fact, these possibility-collapses happen at the level of elementary particles, but they happen in just the same way: one moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don’t exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which they did happen.[’] (308)

This passage gives expression to the ethical potential with which Pullman charges quantum theory. After all, his use of this specific scientific discourse is not meant to teach the reader a lesson in physics. Rather, the theory serves as a means to discuss what Asriel refers to as the ‘fundamental laws’ upon which our understanding of the world – and hence of our selves in this world – is founded. Therefore, the word ‘possibility’, which Asriel discusses here, might well qualify as the most central concept fathomed in His Dark Materials, especially when connected to related concepts like ‘choice’ or ‘free will’. In this sense, the novel’s other major protagonist besides Lyra, Will, of course carries a telling name. Both Lyra and Will are caught in the tension between free will and destiny. Regarding destiny, the witches identify Lyra as the long-prophesied child, a saviour, without whom “we shall all die” (149). More specifically, Lyra is foretold to become the new “Eve! Mother of all!” (580), whose fall Mrs Coulter attempts to prevent at all costs. The most important point about the prophecy, however, is that it is Lyra’s destiny to “put an end to destiny” (549), to replace destiny by freely willed choice. The dilemma contained herein, namely that free will paradoxically seems to be a product of destiny, very specifically recalls yet another important intertext, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, from which the trilogy’s title, His Dark Materials, actually stems (cf. 2004, 51; Book 2, l. 916). In fact, as Steven Barfield notes, the trilogy as a whole can be seen as “a modern, hybridized and radical re-conceptualization of Milton’s epic poem” (2011,

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57). At one point in Milton’s epic, Adam, still in his unfallen state, wonders whether it is at all possible to be disobedient to God, “Who formed us from the dust” (2004, 120; Book 5, l. 516). The archangel Raphael answers that God made humans “perfect, not immutable” (l. 525) and hence “ordained [their] will / By nature free” (2004, 121; Book 5, ll. 526–27). It is only if this condition is met that they can truly fulfil their destined purpose, namely to serve God: “For how / Can hearts, not free, be tried whether they serve / Willing or no, who will but what they must / By destiny and can no other choose?” (ll. 531–534) Humans, in other words, are on constant trial; free will brings with it a responsibility to God, which in turn decides upon whether they “stand or fall” (l. 540). Destiny, such a cherished staple ingredient of fantasy narratives, is taken up by Pullman only to be put to the test. As Lee Scoresby, the aeronaut, says to the witch Serafina Pekkala, Lyra “seems to me to have more free will than anyone I ever met. Are you telling me that she’s just some kind of clockwork toy wound up and set going on a course she can’t change?” (255) And yet, at the same time, Lyra does fulfil her destiny and destroys both destiny and death: “Death is going to die” (846). What is more, just like the prophecy has foretold, she is tempted and falls, but her fall is radically different from that of Adam and Eve. As Rachel Falconer has argued: “Pullman re-interprets Genesis as an atheistic story. The dust from which we were made, and which for the religious characters in the story represents original sin, becomes a positive sign of adult consciousness in Pullman’s moral scheme.” (2011, 12) Regarding this, Pullman’s embedding of the logics of quantum theory into the text functions as one of the primary means to radically re-interpret the traditional implications of the fall of humanity into sin. When Asriel asks Lyra to “think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one” (305), Pullman indirectly refers his readers to the fact that, in quantum theory, probabilities “are calculated […] in terms of what are called probability amplitudes” which in turn are “complex numbers, that is to say, they involve not only ordinary numbers but also i, the ‘imaginary’ square root of -1” (Polkinghorne 2002, 34). Asriel explains: “[Y]ou can never see any concrete proof that [this imaginary number] exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn’t be imagined without it” (305). What this implies is not perfectly clear, but if we apply the basic tenets of quantum theory, it allows at least for the following proposition: while certain facts seem to have the status of an undisputable law in our world, there might be another frame of reference (the quantum frame) in which these laws lose their authority. His Dark Materials discusses the implications of switching from one system of thought to another with respect to laws of different ‘natures’: scientific (physical), religious (metaphysical), moral etc. This is not to suggest that His Dark Materials favours scientific over religious thinking, or quantum speculations over morality. It implies instead that the validity of any one truth depends on a particular perspective, so that shifting it might easily entail a corresponding shifting of truths. In Pullman’s own words: “It’s perfectly possible to believe in Darwin’s account of natural selection, and to enjoy the

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story of the Elephant’s Child. It’s perfectly possible to be secretly in love with a family of beings who couldn’t possibly exist, and to nurture a passion for science.” (Pullman 2008, 12) One of the central messages communicated by His Dark Materials is that any truth that is held and propagated in a dogmatic fashion is potentially detrimental because it necessarily excludes other, competing, truths. Even so, the question remains whether Pullman’s attempt to allow for competing perspectives is convincingly implemented. When Will, while fleeing his and his mother’s persecutors, suddenly comes across a window into another world because he happens to see a cat (Schrödinger’s?) step through it (cf. 341–342), this coincidence seems so improbable that it appears hardly believable, at least with respect to the conventions of ‘realistic’ literature. Hidden at the side of a busy road, there is a tiny window into another world that nobody seems to have noticed before. Then a boy comes along who searches for a father that, unknown to his son, has already managed to cross into another world, and this very boy accidentally finds the secret window. So much coincidence seems to be hardly palatable for the mature reader of fiction. Can Pullman only be excused for so ‘unrealistic’ a construction by pinning the labels ‘children’s literature’ and ‘fantasy’ onto his novels? After all, an event like this cannot but be interpreted as an instance of destiny fulfilling itself, can it? This in turn forces us to accept that the narrated world is irrevocably held together by a unified metaphysical framework, simply because a metaphysical framework is the conditio sine qua non for destiny to exist in the first place. Yet if this is the case, is not the death of the Authority, the collapse of the metaphysical system at the end of the trilogy, an illogical event? And if Lyra’s and Will’s existence and destinies are only possible on the grounds of a metaphysical superstructure, how can they destroy the system and survive? Conspicuously, Will and Lyra are themselves puzzled by the many coincidences on their way. But the suggested explanation is actually quite straightforward: “Each of those chances might have gone a different way. Perhaps in another world, another Will had not seen the window in Sunderland Avenue, and had wandered on tired and lost towards the Midlands until he was caught. And in another world another Pantalaimon had persuaded another Lyra not to stay in the retiring room […].” (541) As with the electrons in an atom or Schrödinger’s cat before opening the box, Will’s and Lyra’s fates are improbable only within the parameters of a realistic or Newtonian world view, while their actual potential fates are as manifold as the probability amplitudes of quantum theory allow for. It is in this sense that they become the new Adam and Eve.

2.3 The Amber Spyglass: Storytelling When Lyra, Will and the Gallivespians stand at the gate to the land of the dead and have a discussion with the guardian of the gate, the harpy No-Name, one of the novel’s crucial conceits is revealed. After realising that the story Lyra tells her about her

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parents being a Duke and a Duchess is faked, the harpy screams: “‘Liar! Liar! Liar!’ And it sounded as if her voice was coming from everywhere, and the word echoed back from the great wall in the fog, muffled and changed, so that she seemed to be screaming Lyra’s name, so that Lyra and liar were one and the same thing.” (832–833) Certainly, No-Name is right: Lyra is the most accomplished liar, with the exception maybe of her mother, Mrs Coulter. In this sense, the novels investigate the status of lies, of untruth, and thereby implicitly and simultaneously inquire about the flipside of the coin, the nature of truth: Who can say what truth is? Who has the authority to represent truth? As the chapter “Authority’s End” signifies even in its title, an irrevocable claim to truthfulness can hardly exist in Pullman’s cosmos, at least not if that truth is superimposed, enforced in a top-down and dogmatic fashion. One of the most critical events in The Amber Spyglass comes about by Lyra telling her true story to the ghosts in the Land of the Dead (cf. 849–850). Significantly, it infuses the ghosts with feelings of sense impressions whose reality they had long forgotten about: the story itself hence figures as a medium of ‘true’ life. As such, it becomes a weapon against the harpies, to whom the Authority had given the task to torment the dead eternally. Precisely because it is not a story made up of “[l]ies and fantasies” (851), the leverage point for the harpies’ malice is missing, which calms them and makes them stop their attacks. No-Name explains: “[The story] was nourishing. […] [I]t was feeding us. […] [I]t was true.” (852) And so the harpies ultimately accept Tialys’ proposal that, from now on, if the newly arriving dead agree to tell the harpies their true life stories and so ‘feed’ them, the harpies will lead them through and out of the land of the dead. Accordingly, His Dark Materials imparts the notion that language is inherently performative. Every utterance is an act, and every speech act is a deed that has the power to transform and even create reality. In this sense, the term ‘reality’ has to be understood as basically synonymous with ‘life’. Consequently, there is no division between the alleged ‘falsehood’ of literature and the alleged truthfulness of more ‘objective’ discourses. After all, although Lyra, on the intratextual level, tells her true life story, His Dark Materials, seen from a metaliterary perspective, is a fictive text. Nonetheless, in accordance with Tolkien’s propositions in “On Fairy-Stories”, yet against the older writer’s essentialist leanings, what counts is that it is true in a more abstract sense. In Tolkien’s words: “The peculiar quality of the ‘joy’ in successful Fantasy can […] be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.” (155). For Pullman, what counts is what you intend to accomplish by way of your story. Just like Lord Asriel’s mind can steer the intention craft, the intentions of the storyteller decide upon the ‘truth’ or rather ‘truthfulness’ of the reality he or she creates. However, this is only one component of the ‘truth’-creating process. If everything hinged on the storyteller, his or her truth would be monologic, like the Authority’s truth. Rather, the listener/reader/receiver must be acknowledged as someone who is actively involved in the process. Repeatedly, the novels convey this idea by explicitly and implicitly invoking John Keats’ concept of ‘negative capability’. Keats believed

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that the potential for creativity rested on the ability to open the mind to external influences, not in order to find objective truth, but to get in touch with the world’s unsolvable mysteries: “man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (Keats 1988, 539, HDM 401; cf. also HDM 476, 966). Only by way of this passive receptiveness can one’s imagination, not one’s reason, try to decipher some of the world’s mysterious signs and get intimations, glimpses, of larger truths beyond. Lyra has to use her negative capability in order to decipher the alethiometer, just like Will, by employing the subtle knife, has to use his in order to find the openings between the worlds. As Mary Malone explains to Lyra about the ‘Cave’, her computer: “The universe is full of Shadows […]. But this is the only way we can see them, when you make your mind empty and look at the screen.” (403) If Lyra is to become the new Eve, Mary Malone figures as the equivalent of the snake, the tempter. In the light of His Dark Materials as a meta-novel, a story about the status and significance of storytelling, Mary is an important character precisely because her temptation consists in the telling of a story: this is the apple she offers to Lyra and Will. The story connects two of Mary’s memories. In the first she is twelve when, during a party, a boy “took a bit of marzipan and […] just gently put it in my mouth […] and I fell in love with him just for that”, which leads to her kissing a boy for the first time: “I was aching – all my body was aching for him, and I could tell he felt the same” (953). The second memory is from when she was still a nun and attended a conference in Lisbon. She remembers how she found herself eating in a “garden […] under a lemon tree” with “passion flowers” nearby (951), suddenly flirting with an Italian who again passes her marzipan, the taste of which reconnects her to the first memory, whereupon she decides to cease being a nun and so to stop not only renouncing her bodily desires but also to stop linking them to moral guilt: “I didn’t know whether God had died, or whether there never had been a God at all. […] And all that huge change came about as I had the marzipan in my mouth […] A taste – a memory – a landslide…” (954). What is significant is not the story itself, but what it does to Lyra. Mary’s performative language becomes the apple of the original temptation scene, precisely because, like Lyra’s true story in the land of the dead, it is ‘nourishing’ and ‘life-giving’. Just as Lyra’s story “play[ed] on [the ghosts’] senses” so that they “remember[ed] the time when they had flesh and skin and nerves and senses” (850), Mary’s story has a similar effect on Lyra herself: “Lyra felt something strange happen to her body. She felt a stirring at the roots of her hair: she found herself breathing faster. […] She felt as if she had been handed the key to a great house she hadn’t known was there, a house that was somehow inside her, and as she turned the key, deep in the darkness of the building she felt other doors opening too, and lights coming on.” (953) Mary’s story about marzipan has awakened a yearning for sexuality in Lyra. The later scene, in which Lyra and Will find themselves in the middle of a paradisiacal forest, and Lyra feeds Will “one of those little fruits” (972) and they kiss for the first time, is not

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only a logical consequence of Mary’s temptation, but something which is described as natural and good. Most importantly, Lyra and Will’s ‘fall’ does not signify human sinfulness. Indeed, it is the very act of Lyra and Will making love that stops Dust from draining away into the Abyss: “The Dust pouring down from the stars had found a living home again, and these children-no-longer-children, saturated with love, were the cause of it all.” (976) In a powerful reversal of the original biblical story, Lyra and Will’s fall signifies love, which can never only be an abstract notion (as with Plato), but always also has a physical side to it.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies As discussed in the previous sections, His Dark Materials not only attacks some of the most privileged grand narratives of Western tradition, it is also a metanarrative that tries to reflect on the status of narration itself. Christoph Reinfandt has perceptively pointed out that the novels’ intratextual discussion of metaphysical (free will versus destiny) and scientific themes (classical Newtonian physics versus quantum theory), amongst others, is intricately related to their metatextual trajectory. He writes: What is implied […] is a fundamental change of perspective which rejects all top-down approaches to explaining the world, i.e. approaches in which the largest story pattern – the Destiny of the world – is superimposed upon the innumerable smaller story patterns between an atom’s mutability and life span on the one hand and narratives of personal identity on the other. Instead, it is exactly the other way round: micro-narratives on the atomic level congeal in larger patterns of various quantities and qualities, and these narratives bring forth a world which comprises consciousness and networks of acts of free will. The unimaginable totality of these narratives is the Destiny of the world. (Reinfandt 2005, 50–51)

Since the novels accordingly “do not accept any authority except the authority of the narrative itself” (Reinfandt 2005, 52–53), it is surprising indeed, Reinfandt explains, that Pullman resorts to the “convention of omniscient authorial narration, a narrative mode which has long been described and criticized as being an integral part of the ideological makeup of modernity with its enlightenment master narratives of technological progress and ever increasing domination of the world.” (2005, 53) Is his narrator not an uncanny version of the Authority against which his characters rebel? In other words, there is the possibility that Pullman ignores that aesthetics itself cannot escape being ideological. If this were the case, then the text’s aesthetics would defeat its ideological thrust, ultimately turning it into an authoritative and intolerant meta­ narrative itself. In order to ‘save’ Pullman’s text, Reinfandt suggests with Naomi Wood that Pullman’s omniscient narration is merely a very tame and toned-down version of earlier models (2005, 53; cf. Wood 2001, 244–246). In addition and more importantly, he claims, the narrator is not thoroughly reliable: while the narration insists that only

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true stories will be life-giving, a lesson Lyra has to learn, she could not have achieved her aims without telling her fabricated tall tales in the first place. Another way to explain Pullman’s use of omniscient narration is to stress that his narrator does not speak with ‘one’ voice, but is in fact multi-voiced. After all, the most pronounced aesthetic characteristic of His Dark Materials is its intertextual nature. Pullman himself draws attention to this in the “Acknowledgements”: “I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read. My principle in researching for a novel is ‘Read like a butterfly, write like a bee’, and if this story contains any honey, it is entirely because of the quality of the nectar I found in the work of better writers.” (1017) While Pullman, unsurprisingly, explicitly features Heinrich von Kleist (“Über das Marionettentheater”, 18102), John Milton and William Blake as his major influences, the novels swarm with narrative, lyrical, mythic, religious and other voices ‘not his own’. Carole Scott comments: “Pullman’s trilogy becomes a triumph of intertextuality, with text quoting text and image quoting image in a metaphorical reflective hall of mirrors.” (2005, 96) However, if Scott’s diagnostic image is to have any heuristic value regarding His Dark Materials, then “reflective” must not indicate the presence of certain given and essential signifieds (absolute and self-sufficient meanings) that are then mimetically (‘reflectively’) reproduced in the text and hence only have to be ‘found’ by the reader. If this were the case, the (narrative) cosmos would be static and ‘dead’, lacking the dynamism that, for Pullman, is the defining quality of life. Consequently, just like the souls of the dead are enabled by Lyra and her friends to leave the land of the dead and are given the chance to re-enter a never-ending spectrum of possibilities of becoming, the meaning of texts, including the text that comprises His Dark Materials, is ideally open to multiple ways of actualisation: actualisation, that is, by the individual reader. In this sense, Lyra’s alethiometer, her truth-telling device, functions as the text’s major conceit. In a very illuminating article, Shelley King elaborates on how Lyra’s name may very well be a reference to the medieval scholar Nicholas of Lyra, “whose commentaries on the Bible and principles of literary criticism helped to form the basis for the subsequent reexamination of received scriptural interpretation central to the Reformation movement” (2005, 106), a movement which tellingly did not take place in Lyra’s world. In this connection, King suggests considering the “Text as Alethiometer” whose various levels of meaning have to be seen, connected and interpreted by the readers. Importantly, on the diegetic level, Lyra is not the only one who can read the device. Some older scholars can do so as well, although they lack Lyra’s intuitive access and, in a tedious process, have to consult unwieldy reference tomes. If these scholars – who are representatives not only of the modern literary scholar but also, more generally, of the adult reader – are somewhat ridiculed for their obviously disad-

2 Idris Parry’s 1981 translation into English, “On the Marionette Theatre”, can be found in Tucker 2003, 197–207 and under http://www.southerncrossreview.org/9/kleist.htm (8 March 2016).

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vantaged position when compared to Lyra, it should not be forgotten that at the end of the novel Lyra herself, by way of maturing, unlearns to intuitively read the alethiometer. This, however, is not a cause for despair. As the angel Xaphania ensures her, she can “regain […] by work” what so far has been hers “by grace” (994). In other words, she can become a scholar, which is not worse than being a child prodigy. Experience is not a ‘satanic’ state. On the contrary, “your reading will be even better then, after a lifetime of thought and effort, because it will come from conscious understanding.” However, while biblical exegetes like Nicholas of Lyra insisted that “texts could be interpreted according to four levels of meaning: the literal, the allegorical, the moral or tropological, and the anagogical” (King 2005, 114), Pullman’s negotiation of this position makes the reader especially wary of the significance of the latter, “the anagogical, which refers ‘to that which we must hope for in our future blessed state’” (116). In a reverse movement, His Dark Materials stresses that life can only be fulfilling and true if it is acknowledged as happening not at some stage in the vague, hoped-for future, but in the here and now. “The ending of the novel”, Susanne Schmid comments, “is utterly untheological and promises nothing, no redemption, no judgment, no new Armageddon, no paradise either.” (2013, 198) As Will emphatically states to Lyra, recalling his father’s last words: “He said we have to build the republic of heaven where we are.” (991) This in turn again implies that one’s hopes should not rest on a deferred state in the future which is conceived in abstract and purely spiritual terms, but have to be anchored in a present that is necessarily spiritual and material at the same time. In Shelley King’s words: “Pullman presents the traditional binary of body and soul as a type of doctrinal error.” (2005, 116) Accordingly, it is not overly undue to suggest that the term “aesthetic”, in Pullman’s case, is best understood in the etymologically original Greek sense, namely as “relating to sense perception” (OED). Just as even Pullman’s angels have bodies, desire each other and eat, everything else in the narrative cosmos of His Dark Materials lives only by way of being material. Especially consciousness, and therefore also the potential for creativity, needs materiality in order to have a feedback system on which to thrive, as Mary realises with the mulefa: “Dust came into being when living things became conscious of themselves; but it needed some feedback system to reinforce it and make it safe, as the mulefa had their wheels and the oil from the trees. Without something like that, it would all vanish. […] Matter loved Dust. It didn’t want to see it go.” (959–960) Consciousness needs materiality; a purely spiritual life is an impossibility in Pullman’s narrative universe. Indeed, after leaving the land of the dead, the ghosts will realise, as Lyra assures them, that they are not “nothing” but “part of everything” (854) on the atomic level. As the ghost woman says, welcoming her chance to leave: “[W]e’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves, we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze, we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world which is our true home and always was.” (854) If these Whitmanian lines indicate an affirmation of the concept of resurrection, it is a ‘democratic’ resurrection into a

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cosmos without suppressive hierarchies, without the one authorial voice whose commands have to be heeded. It is a resurrection not into a life beyond, but one within the here and now.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Due to its many thematic levels, the trilogy is open to a wide array of theoretical approaches. Since the novels put forth a clearly articulated counter-ethic, especially regarding the traditional Christian discourse on morality, they have also sparked some heated critical debate. Unsurprisingly, much of the controversial discussion of His Dark Materials has revolved around the question of Pullman’s outspoken hostility towards certain traditional dogmatic theological Christian positions. For instance, David Gooderham, in an intricately argued article, takes exception to the very explicitness of Pullman’s use of “metaphysical, religious or ideological language [that] characteristically does not appear in high fantasy texts” (2003, 156). Gooderham argues that in his fight against the metaphysical didacticism especially of C. S. Lewis in the Narnia cycle, Pullman consciously subverts the fantasy genre and its traditions, which, however, comes at a considerable cost: he takes up various ecclesiastical, mythic and theological discourses only to ultimately simplify and distort them in the service of his very own secular humanism. What is rarely emphasised by Pullman, in Gooderham’s assessment, are the ‘positive’ or liberating aspects of the religion(s) he references; instead, he concentrates on the potentially frightful features: “He makes only oblique reference to the creation myth, but emphatic reference to the fall; there is no attention given to prophetic writing, but an evident appetite for apocalyptic; there is no allusion to the death and resurrection of Christ, central to the Christian tradition, but unmistakably to ‘the harrowing of hell’” (160–161). Accordingly, Pullman becomes what he attacks: a propagandist, whose literature is as ideologically charged and didactic as that of Lewis and others. The outcome is a work which, due to the blatant specificity of its allusions, does not stimulate, but in fact “inhibits a free range of imaginative response” (160). This is particularly problematic, Gooderham avers, when considering that His Dark Materials is aimed at young readers, who are “just beginning to ask large questions about God” (166). It could thus be argued that Pullman’s ‘betrayal’ is threefold: he not only (consciously) betrays the genre conventions upon which he builds his novels (fantasy, children’s literature), but unwittingly also himself (his own project of liberation) and, what is worse, his readership. Bernard Schweizer, who convincingly identifies Pullman’s attitude “as a species of ‘misotheism’” (2005, 167) rather than atheism, takes a stand against Gooderham’s allegations, not least when it comes to the charge of confusing Pullman’s young and meaning-seeking readers. Despite the indubitable “misotheistic undercurrent”, Schweizer insists, Pullman is able to potently bring home “important values

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that define modern liberal societies: gender equality (Lyra becomes the savior), tolerance of sexual orientation (there are homosexual angels), affirmation of sex […], celebration of the life force […], tolerance toward other races and ethnicities […], and anti-imperialism […]” (171). While many other articles engage with questions of the trilogy’s take on religion (cf. e.g. Schmid 2013; the entire collection by Yeffeth 2005), others concentrate on its many intertextual allusions. There are discussions both of those influences that Pullman obviously appreciates, like Milton (cf. e.g. Hatlen 2005; Scott 2005) and Blake (cf. Matthews 2005), and those he consciously turns against, most prominently C. S. Lewis and, with less hostility, J. R. R. Tolkien (cf. e.g. Cardew 2011; Eldridge 2011; Hatlen 2005). In this context, the genre question has assumed some prominence. After all, His Dark Materials does not clearly belong to the fantasy genre, but also bears many elements of science fiction, traditional coming-of-age stories and other types of narration (for more on genres and/of the novel ↗ 3 Genres). In particular, elements like the late-Victorian and Edwardian flair of Lyra’s world, combined with the zeppelins, balloons, and weird gadgets like the Intention Craft or the Loadstone Resonator, as well as Lord Asriel’s gigantic fortress, have contributed to discussing His Dark Materials not only as a hybrid between fantasy and science fiction, but also as one of the major foundational texts of the relatively young steampunk subgenre (cf. e.g. Barfield 2011; Barfield and Colebrook 2011). Moreover, the question whether the trilogy is really children’s literature, literature for young adults, or adult literature, has been variously addressed. Also, dramatic and filmic adaptations have been taken into account (cf. e.g. the essays in section IV of Barfield and Cox 2011, 219–266). Putting stronger emphasis on the political aspects, Laura Peters has pointed out the text’s postcolonial trajectory (2011), while other critical works have discussed gender politics and sexuality (cf. e.g. the essays in section III of Barfield and Cox 2011, 143– 217). Nonetheless, despite the richness of this lucid material already available, there are still enough critical spaces that could be penetrated with intellectual profit – by way of psychoanalytical literary studies or animal studies, for example. This only proves the “complex and rich textual architecture” (Barfield and Colebrook 2011, 77) of His Dark Materials.

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Pullman, Philip. His Dark Materials: Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass. London: Scholastic, 2012. --Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. “Laureates.” http://alma.se/en/award-winners/ (27 January 2016).

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Barfield, Steven. “‘Dark Materials to Create More Worlds’: Considering His Dark Materials as Science Fiction.” Critical Perspectives on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: Essays on the Novels, the Film and the Stage Productions. Ed. Steven Barfield and Katharine Cox. Jefferson: McFarland, 2011. 57–73. Barfield, Steven, and Martyn Colebrook. “Revitalizing the Old Machines of a Neo-Victorian London: Reading the Cultural Transformations of Steampunk and Victoriana.” Critical Perspectives on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: Essays on the Novels, the Film and the Stage Productions. Ed. Steven Barfield and Katharine Cox. Jefferson: McFarland, 2011. 75–92. Barfield, Steven, and Katharine Cox, eds. Critical Perspectives on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: Essays on the Novels, the Film and the Stage Productions. Jefferson: McFarland, 2011. BBC. “The Big Read.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/ (27 January 2016). Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. New York: Anchor Books, 1988. Cardew, Phil. “‘When I Grow Up I Want to Be…’: Conceptualization of the Hero Within the Works of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Philip Pullman.” Critical Perspectives on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: Essays on the Novels, the Film and the Stage Productions. Ed. Steven Barfield and Katharine Cox. Jefferson: McFarland, 2011. 28–39. CILIP. “The Carnegie Medal: Full List of Winners.” http://www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/carnegie/ full_list_of_winners.php (27 January 2016). Costa. “Costa Book Awards.” http://www.costa.co.uk/media/300231/CBA-Past-Winners-2015Version.pdf (27 January 2016). Eldridge, Elisabeth. “Constructions of the Child, Authority and Authorship: The Reception of C. S. Lewis and Philip Pullman.” Critical Perspectives on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: Essays on the Novels, the Film and the Stage Productions. Ed. Steven Barfield and Katharine Cox. Jefferson: McFarland, 2011. 40–56. Falconer, Rachel. “Recasting John Milton’s Paradise Lost: Intertextuality, Storytelling and Music.” Critical Perspectives on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: Essays on the Novels, the Film and the Stage Productions. Ed. Steven Barfield and Katharine Cox. Jefferson: McFarland, 2011. 11–27. Gooderham, David. “Fantasizing It As It Is: Religious Language in Philip Pullman’s Trilogy His Dark Materials.” Children’s Literature 31 (2003): 155–175. Hatlen, Burton. “Pullman’s His Dark Materials, a Challenge to the Fantasies of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, with an Epilogue on Pullman’s Neo-Romantic Reading of Paradise Lost.” His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy. Ed. Millicent Lenz and Carole Scott. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. 75–94. Keats, John. The Complete Poems. Ed. John Barnard. 3rd ed. London: Penguin, 1988. King, Shelley. “‘Without Lyra we would understand neither the New nor the Old Testament’: Exegesis, Allegory, and Reading The Golden Compass.” His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy. Ed. Millicent Lenz and Carole Scott. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. 106–124. Lenz, Millicent, and Carole Scott, eds. His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. Marsh, Nicholas. William Blake: The Poems. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001. Matthews, Susan. “Rouzing the Faculties to Act: Pullman’s Blake for Children.” His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy. Ed. Millicent Lenz and Carole Scott. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. 125–134. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Gordon Teskey. 3rd rev. ed. New York: Norton, 2004.

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Pauli, Michelle. “Pullman wins ‘Carnegie of Carnegies’.” The Guardian. 21 June 2007. http://www. theguardian.com/books/2007/jun/21/carnegiemedal2007.awardsandprizes (27 January 2016). Peters, Laura. “Revisiting the Colonial: Victorian Orphans and Postcolonial Perspectives.” Critical Perspectives on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: Essays on the Novels, the Film and the Stage Productions. Ed. Steven Barfield and Katharine Cox. Jefferson: McFarland, 2011. 93–110. Plato. Symposium. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. The Internet Classics Archive. http://classics.mit.edu/ Plato/symposium.html (14 December 2015). Polkinghorne, John. Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pullman, Philip. “About Philip Pullman.” http://www.philip-pullman.com/about (27 January 2016). Pullman, Philip. “Dawkins, Fairy Tales, and Evidence.” Talk given at the Liverpool Literary Festival 2008. www.philip-pullman.com/other-writing.asp (20 June 2011). (At the time of writing, this link was no longer active so that Pullman’s essay cannot be retrieved anymore from his website – nor, apparently, anywhere else on the internet). Reinfandt, Christoph. “The North and Beyond: Modern Myths of Exploration, Discovery and Transgression in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials-Trilogy.” Narratives of Exploration and Discovery: Essays in Honour of Konrad Gross. Ed. Wolfgang Klooss. Trier: WVT, 2005. 37–56. Schmid, Susanne. “Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and Resistance to the Apocalypse.” Anglistentag 2012 Potsdam: Proceedings. Ed. Katrin Röder and Ilse Wischer. Trier: WVT, 2013. 189–200. Schrödinger, Erwin. “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics” [German original 1935]. Trans. John D. Trimmer. Quantum Theory and Measurement. Ed. John Archibald Wheeler and Wojciech Hubert Zurek. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. 152–167. Schweizer, Bernard. “‘And He’s A-Going to Destroy Him’: Religious Subversion in Pullman’s His Dark Materials.” His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy. Ed. Millicent Lenz and Carole Scott. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. 160–173. Scott, Carole. “Pullman’s Enigmatic Ontology: Revamping Old Traditions in His Dark Materials.” His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy. Ed. Millicent Lenz and Carole Scott. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. 95–105. Sedlmayr, Gerold, and Nicole Waller, eds. Politics in Fantasy Media: Essays on Ideology and Gender in Fiction, Film, Television and Games. Jefferson: McFarland, 2014. Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy-Stories.” The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins, 2006. 109–161. Tucker, Nicholas. Darkness Visible: Inside the World of Philip Pullman. Cambridge: Wizard Books, 2003. Wood, Naomi. “Paradise Lost and Found: Obedience, Disobedience, and Storytelling in C. S. Lewis and Philip Pullman.” Children’s Literature in Education 32.4 (2001): 237–259. Yeffeth, Glenn, ed. Navigating the Golden Compass: Religion, Science & Dæmonology in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Dallas: Benbella, 2005.

5.2 Further Reading Bobby, Susan Redington. Beyond His Dark Materials: Innocence and Experience in the Fiction of Philip Pullman. Jefferson: McFarland, 2012. Freitas, Donna, and Jason King. Killing the Impostor God: Philip Pullman’s Spiritual Imagination in His Dark Materials. San Francisco: Wiley, 2007. Squires, Claire. Philip Pullman, Master Storyteller: A Guide to the Worlds of His Dark Materials. London: Continuum, 2006.

Michael Meyer

24 Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000) Abstract: White Teeth is a realistic and comic family saga about the intertwined lives of three families of different ethnic affiliations. The novel spans the twentieth century, connecting the colonial past in Jamaica and India with the postcolonial present in London. In this metahistorical novel, narrative comments, the characters’ unreliable versions of the past, and the twisted plots develop an ironic comedy of history characterized by repetition as a farce. Both first-generation and second-generation immigrants struggle for recognition. However, they develop different strategies in constructing their positions and identities through assimilation, transcultural hybridization, or the delimitation of their cultures in opposition to the permissive and capitalist Western society. The cosmopolitan and multicultural metropolis becomes the site of intercultural conflicts and transcultural blending. Keywords: Black British novel, metahistorical fiction, comic realism, family saga, postcolonialism

1 Context: Author, Œuvre, Moment Zadie Smith is the daughter of an English photographer and a Jamaican immigrant mother, who became a social worker and psychotherapist at the NHS (cf. Tew 2010, 27). Smith, who grew up in multicultural Willesden in north-west London and earned a degree in English from Cambridge University, is one of the most successful ‘Black British’ authors in the twenty-first century and has been heralded as a shining representative of multicultural Britain (Merrit 2000). Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), won the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Book Award, the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. White Teeth became an instant success both with the public and academia due to its highly humorous treatment of multiculturalism in the intertwined lives of three families of different ethnic affiliations in contemporary London. The book draws on some of her and her parents’ experiences. One of the protagonists, Irie, is the daughter of an ordinary, lower-class Englishman and a young Jamaican mother. Irie grows up in a multicultural community and aspires to become middle-class (cf. Wachtel; Squires 2002, 8–10). However, Smith stresses that her comic novel is neither a means of self-expression nor a political statement on immigrants but a fictional representation of social change (cf. Hattenstone 2000). Smith’s novel reveals echoes of Rushdie and Kureishi but differs from her predecessors in a more humorous vision of history that is both relevant to the present DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-025

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and subject to unforeseen transformations (cf. Ball 2004, 242–243). The well-educated, young, and black author and her novel’s light tone corresponded well to the progressive and inclusive agenda of New Labour’s Cool Britannia (cf. Sell 2008). The Home Secretary launched the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain in 1997, which proposed a reconsideration of British history and identity including ethnic minorities and demanded an anti-racist politics of human rights, recognition, equality, and solidarity. The commission envisioned Britain as a community of communities with a balance of difference and cohesion in multiple affiliations of ethnic identities and Britishness (Parekh 2000, xiii–xxii). In 1998, Britain commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of Jamaican immigrants on the SS Windrush. Although the report of the commission and the celebrations did not meet with unanimous approval, public opinion tended towards accepting Britain as a multicultural nation (↗ 5 The Burden of Representation). The author’s subsequent texts slightly shift in tone and style but display the same interest in the impact of multicultural issues on values, beliefs, identities, and relationships across the boundaries of nations, generations, race, class, and gender. Smith’s second novel, The Autograph Man (2002), won the 2003 Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction. It presents a Chinese-Jewish dealer of autographs, who is fascinated with the glossy surfaces of media and celebrities, but also searches for religion, truth, and relationships in the face of personal loss. Her third novel, On Beauty (2005), is partly based on her own experience as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study of Harvard University (2002–2003). This novel, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Somerset Maugham Award, is mostly set on a campus in New England and explores the conundrums of desire and morals, liberal values and discrimination in the relationship of two families. Smith’s fourth novel, NW (2012), returns to the setting of her first novel and presents how four characters experience the chaotic metropolitan life of Northwest London. NW goes beyond her previous texts in its postmodern montage of styles and media. Smith also wrote and edited short fiction (e.g. Piece of Flesh 2001, The Book of Other People 2007), and she published two volumes of essays, Fail Better: The Morality of the Novel (2006) and Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2009).

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns White Teeth is a family saga of immigrants that intertwines the lives of the Jamaican-born Bowden family, the Bangladeshi Iqbals, and the third-generation Polish Chalfens. The novel spans the twentieth century, connecting the colonial past in the British Empire with the postcolonial present in London. The Christian fundamentalist Hortense Bowden was born in Jamaica in 1907, the child of an English Captain and an Afro-Jamaican maid. Hortense joins her husband in England in 1972, where

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their daughter Clara marries the lower-class Englishman Archie Jones and gives birth to their daughter Irie in 1975. The Bengali Muslim Samad Iqbal makes friends with the Englishman Archie Jones in the imperial forces of World War II, and rekindles their friendship when he moves to London in 1973. Samad marries the upper-class Bengali Alsana, who gives birth to the twins Magid and Millat in 1975. In the 1990s, the second-generation immigrants get involved with the middle-class, intellectual Chalfens, whose Jewish and Catholic traditions have been replaced by psychoanalysis and science. The family saga offers history from below through the experiences of the characters in the shape of the diachronic genealogy of families and a synchronic portrait of generations (cf. Erll 2007, 117–118). The novel is rife with conflicts of generation, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and ideology played out in colonial and postcolonial encounters, in domestic quarrels among husbands and wives, parents and children, in midlife crises and initiation stories. This section will firstly focus on conceptions of history between determination and contingency, and secondly on hybridity and identity in multicultural London.

2.1 History: Between Determination and Contingency The titles of the novel’s four parts indicate how relevant the past is in the lives of most major characters: “Archie 1974, 1945”, “Samad 1984, 1857”, “Irie 1990, 1907”, “Magid, Millat and Marcus 1992, 1999”. The novel begins in the post-World War II era and follows a linear trajectory (1974–1999) with intermittent turns to the past (1945, 1857, 1907), establishing a network of present relationships and their historical roots (cf. Squires 2002, 56–57; Erll 2007, 124). The fact that the more recent year precedes that of the past in three of the four titles suspends the linear concept of cause and effect (cf. Sell 2006, 29). The relevance of genetic inheritance and cultural heritage is also captured in the leitmotif of white teeth and root canals. These dental metaphors suggest the relevance of biology and history, i.e. genetic inheritance, embodied experience, and the cultivation of cultural heritage. Cultural traditions form the roots of present identities, which can become uprooted upon migration or consolidated through finding one’s roots (cf. Erll 2007, 121). Genes define what we are born with, but ageing and trauma can dissolve roots (cf. Braun 2013, 225). Rotten or lost teeth can be repaired or replaced, suggesting the options of (re-)constructing the past or leaving it behind (cf. Thompson 2005, 125; Itakura 2006, 131). As a metahistorical novel, White Teeth offers ironic narrative comments on the past in the shape of the characters’ situated experience and stories. Sell (2007, 158) maintains that “the novel enacts a dialectic between contingency and determinism.” Characters experience and understand history as an unpredictable series of contingencies (Archie Jones), as a fateful cycle of repetitions (Samad Iqbal), as a linear development towards an impending apocalypse (Hortense Bowden) or of scientific progress (Marcus Chalfen; cf. Sell 2006, 29–30). Ball argues that the complex con-

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nections between the stories “simultaneously reinforce and ironically complicate the relations between history and destiny, choice and consequence, accident and design” (2004, 241). However, in total, narrative comments, the characters’ unreliable versions of the past, and the twisted plots question determinist versions of history and develop an ironic comedy of history characterized by repetition as a farce. Contingent events mark the war-experiences of the seventeen-year-old, naïve, nondescript, and pragmatic Archie Jones and the nineteen-year-old, passionate and intelligent Samad Iqbal. World War II ended Samad’s incipient studies of biology. One of Samad’s hands was crippled when a fellow soldier’s gun went off, an accident that terminated Samad’s army career and frustrated his desire to become a war hero. The two anti-heroes get separated from their battalion and stranded in Bulgaria, where they miss both the fighting and the ending of the war. Samad becomes a mentor of the Englishman, inverting the wonted colonial hierarchy. Getting his hands on a fascist doctor of eugenics through luck at playing cards with the doctor’s captors, Samad wants to grasp his last chance to contribute to the war effort through killing the prisoner of war. After a quarrel about whose war it is, Samad urges Archie to kill the POW, which would be illegal. Archie solves his moral dilemma between fighting evil and sparing the life of an unarmed prisoner through tossing a coin instead of making a moral choice. As usual, he shirks responsibility and yields life up to contingency. Chance saves the prisoner’s life, but ironically endangers Archie’s. While he directs his attention to the coin, the prisoner shoots him in the leg, a fact Archie hides from his pal. In sum, the friends’ war experience and wounds result from chance and farcical blunders rather than the heroic feat of killing the Nazi Samad would like to talk about time and again if anybody listened. Samad’s fabulation of defeating the fascists is as tenuous as tracing his lineage to an anti-colonial rebel, Mangal Pande, who triggered the Indian Mutiny in 1857. It is somewhat unlikely that the Indian Hindu Mangal Pande could have been the Bengali Muslim’s ancestor (cf. Nair 2009, 6). British historians as well as the rest of Samad’s family and friends regard the sepoy (Indian soldier) Pande, who was scandalized by bullets greased with pork or beef fat, as a traitor, fool, and coward because he failed to kill both his English officer and then himself. One Indian civil servant and Samad, however, hold him as an emblem of anticolonial resistance. The narrator cautions the reader not to take the version of Pande as a drugged coward and traitor in British historiography as more plausible than Samad’s heroic version since it is neither one man nor one act but “complex forces, movements and deep currents that motivate wars and spark revolutions” (254).1 This debate over the past satirizes both the imperial history and its counter-history, but Smith’s “‘mock’ revisionist historical novel” (Rupp 2010, 122–123) also calls for understanding Samad’s impassioned retrospect as moti-

1 Unless otherwise indicated page references in brackets without further designation refer to Smith 2000.

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vated by frustration, calling for sympathy. Samad’s stories of Pande and World War II should compensate him for his humiliating socio-economic marginality in post-war England and reveal his divided loyalties and hybrid status at the same time. Samad considers history as a cyclical connection of generations under the law of Allah: “[Y]ou cannot read fate. You must experience it” (119). Samad’s misfit son Millat, who rejects his father as a role model and joins militant Muslims, ironically seems to repeat the history of Pande his father failed to live up to. Under the influence of drugs, Millat attends the presentation of a genetically engineered mouse at the end of the novel to shoot Dr. Perret, whose eugenic research he believes to rival Allah’s design. However, Millat’s path is not determined by history, as Suárez (2012, 176) assumes. The narrator ironically confirms Samad’s vision of determinist history, but inverts Samad’s interpretation of his ‘heroic ancestor’ in calling Millat names: “He’s a Pandy deep down. And there’s mutiny in his blood” (526). Numerous inconsistencies undermine the determinist perspective: if Samad’s relationship to Pande is beyond proof, so is Millat’s; if genes were to dictate Millat’s rebellious action at all, his twin brother Magid would not endorse its target, genetic engineering. History is marked by repetition with a difference, and Millat’s plan is foiled because Archie saves Dr. Perret’s life for a second time. In a further uncanny repetition of the past, Archie again is shot in the leg. This time, however, Archie does not act upon the toss of a coin but upon impulse. Ironically, at the very moment the anti-hero unexpectedly turns into a hero, his friend Samad realizes that his friend has been a ‘coward’ because he could not muster the courage to shoot the fascist doctor at the end of the war. Archie’s moral feat is immediately qualified because he accidentally crashes the glass cage in the act, setting free the FutureMouse, and thereby foiling the scientific attempt at controlling life in a linear model of progress. In addition, the potential assassin goes free in the legal confusion over who of the twins shot at Dr. Perret. There is neither poetic justice nor traditional closure: the depraved Nazi is saved, the potential assassin cannot be convicted because the twins cannot be told apart, and the future of the mouse is uncertain. The scientists and the fundamentalists are held in check for a moment, but their basic conflict has not been resolved. Consequently, the plot reveals history to be neither a strictly linear nor cyclical development but repetition as a farce. However, the repetition of history as a tragedy has not been dismissed on principle but has just been barely prevented, which means that the novel’s concept of history, war, and terror is ironic rather than naïve. Samad’s Muslim belief in cyclical fate compares to the fundamentalist Christian belief in linear destiny, a faith paradoxically both fed and undermined by contingency. Irie’s black Jamaican grandmother Ambrosia converted to the Jehova’s Witnesses’ Christian fundamentalism, a framework that makes her interpret the Earthquake of 1907 as Judgement Day, killing a colonial master in the act of molesting her and triggering the birth of her child. She transforms her subjection to Christianity into a form of empowerment against ‘corrupt’ English culture and male repression, a lesson she imparts to her colored daughter Hortense, who emmigrates to England,

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where she gives birth to Clara. Repeated errors about the dates of the impending apocalypse with a bloodbath of the sinners cannot shake Hortense’s faith but certainly undermine its credibility. Christian and Muslim fundamentalists object to Chalfen’s genetic engineering as an arrogant appropriation of God’s prerogative, a critique that appropriately addresses Chalfen’s hyperbolic self-image as master over life and death. These ‘closed’, religious or enlightened models of history as determined by God or science stand against the more modest, ‘open’ model of history in the novel, such as a contingent series of singularities and untoward situations that characters muddle through, farcical repetition with a difference, and a postmodern plurality of small (hi)stories after the end of grand narratives.

2.2 Multiculturalism, Hybridity, and Identity For second-generation immigrants, history is no longer as central a reference point as it is for Samad and Archie but takes second place behind the hybridity of racial mixing and combining ethnic cultures. Smith delineates a “memorial culture in transition” (Rupp 2010, 119) since the colonial memory and the postcolonial counter-memory of the first-generation (Samad Iqbal, Hortense Bowden) differs from second-generation eclecticism. Nevertheless, identity is always positioned in specific historical and cultural contexts and in the process of being generated in representations (cf. Hall 2003, 234). The idea of a nation or ethnicity is often associated with some unity of culture, and multiculturalism with the conflict or co-existence of separate ethnicities. The concept of hybridity presupposes genetic (racial) or ethnic difference, but the definition of difference as radical or relative, binary or multiple, spatial or temporal, is a point of debate in theory and in the novel. The idea of separate cultures has been challenged, for example, by Welsch with an eye on interrelation and Bhabha with a focus on disruption. Welsch’s transcultural model focuses on past and present interrelationships between and within cultures and individuals, which have rendered contemporary mankind all hybrid and transcultural. The multiple options of transcultural combinations do not efface differences but multiply them (cf. Welsch 2009, 8–12), without, however, eliminating conflict (cf. Seeber 2010, 102–103). The nation as a rhetorical and narrative strategy, Bhabha argues, is “more hybrid in the articulation of cultural differences and identifications than can be represented in any hierarchical or binary structuring” (1994, 140). Minorities add to existing cultural differences, challenge dominant forms of knowledge and identification, and require transcultural negotiations (cf. Bhabha 1994, 162). Smith juxtaposes all of these conflicting ideas of cultural identities, differences, and hybridity within and between characters. Time and again, Smith exposes the problems of defining identities in fixed, self-contained boxes of us and them. Archie Jones may count as the representative of

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a pragmatic, non-intellectual, lower-class Englishman, but he is a nobody with next to no particular interests or features, as insignificant as a pebble on a beach (11). In spite of his Welsh family name and his father’s denigration of their family as “chaff”, Archie is proud of his family’s “[g]ood honest English stock” (99), an empty cliché. When he is put to the test by Samad to define Englishness, Archie mumbles helplessly: “[D]emocracy and Sunday dinners, and… and… promenades and piers, and bangers and mash – and the things that are ours. Not yours” (120). Archie’s binary definition of the notion of his own culture and identity is rather fuzzy, but complemented by his liberal attitude towards others, as all of his friends are non-English (cf. Seeber 2010, 114). Archie represents the open-minded Englishman, whose Jamaican wife Clara and daughter Irie meet with resentment from his racist boss and fellow-workers with a more exclusive notion of ‘us’ and ‘them’ (69–73). Archie’s friend, the Bengali Samad, is another spokesman of separate cultures, but he struggles both with his own and his family’s positions between Muslim religion and Western culture. As an imperial soldier with divided loyalties, Samad, who is in despair about being a cripple and his faith being crippled, asks himself whether Indians would have an Englishman like him, the English an Indian like him (112). In defiance of uncertainty and temptation, Samad repeatedly asserts his position as a believer, but his life is marked by backsliding. He is sexually attracted to the English teacher of his sons, Poppy Burt-Jones, who adheres to a superficial ideal of multiculturalism and projects her Orientalist stereotypes of exotic Indian culture on Samad (132–133, 159–160). Suffering from qualms about compromising his faith, his purity, and his role as a father, Samad ends his affair with Poppy and tries to become a good Muslim. Samad’s wife, Alsana, is also concerned about the purity of her family, but more in racial than in cultural terms. She is afraid that if her son was to marry an Englishwoman and they had children, their Bengali genes would be diluted and no longer visible, which “is both the most irrational and natural feeling in the world” (327). Ironically, the fears of the immigrant and the racist are somewhat similar: “But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears  – dissolution, disappearance” (327). However, when Samad provokes Alsana with his stubborn insistence on the need to protect their Bengali culture against Western ‘corruption’, Rushdie’s Satanic Verses by implication (↗ 20 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses), and her beloved Hindi movies, Alsana consults the Readers’ Digest Encyclopedia on what the term ‘Bengali’ means. Finding out that most Bengalis descend from Indo-Aryan migrants, she concludes that she is “Western after all! […] [I]t’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It’s a fairy tale!” (236) The second generation is less concerned with its Bengali heritage, but responds in different ways towards their multicultural environment. The twins’ inverse devel-

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opment questions genetic determinism and endorses cultural influence and individual choice. Magid embodies his father’s interest in intellectual English education (science) and his initial desire to belong, Millat his father’s temptations of sex and drugs and his struggle with Muslim faith. Samad feels alienated from Magid’s denial of his Bengali name as he calls himself Mark Smith (151) and from Millat’s indulgence in dissipation. The narrator comments that the life of immigrants is a tragicomic rerun. We have been here before. This is like watching TV in Bombay or Kingston or Dhaka, watching the same old British sitcoms […]. Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition – it’s something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you’re still going back and forth; your children are going round and round […] there’s no proper term for it – original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better. (161)

Samad would like to send both of his sons back to Bangladesh in order to lead them away from Western corruption and back to their ‘roots’, but the routes they take counteract his plans: “Despite his own religious hypocrisy, he is determined to raise his children according to Islam, hoping that religion can act as an antidote to the disorientation brought about by the plurality of their attachments as second-generation immigrants” (Mirze 2008, 193). However, the impact of the past “on the present and the future is unavoidable but also unpredictable” (Ball 2004, 239). Samad can only raise the money for one son, but ironically, Magid returns as an almost perfect, but brown, Englishman, formed by traditional colonial education in Bangladesh. Immigrants, the narrator maintains, are heading for the future but “cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow” (466). His brother Millat “didn’t need to go back home: he stood schizophrenic, one foot in Bengal and one in Willesden” (219). Millat “is the epitome of cultural hybrid identity” (Beukema 2008, 9). He dresses in the style of hip-hoppers, loves Public Enemy, Hollywood Mafia movies, Kung Fu, and Black Power. Millat leads a gang of Raggastani, who speak “a strange mix of Jamaican patois, Bengali, Gujarati and English. Their ethos, their manifesto, if it could be called that, was equally a hybrid thing: Allah featured, but more as a collective big brother than a supreme being, a hard-as-fuck geezer who would fight in their corner if necessary” (231). Millat’s subsequent radicalization is a prototypical response to pervasive xenophobia or Islamophobia, which reduces him to the negative stereotype of a Paki without a face or a voice of his own (233–234). Millat and his crew protest against a blasphemous book in Bradford, an allusion to Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (↗ 20 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses). Later, Millat joins Muslim fundamentalists and tries hard to give up the ‘Western sins’ of sex and drugs, but the movie GoodFellas still defines the norms of his masculinity, anger, and style in a hybrid way even as he replaces Liotta’s ‘gangster’ by ‘muslim’: “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a Muslim” (446). Here, the hybrid fusion of cultural traditions does not lead to transcultural understanding but exacerbates the conflicts within the individual, the family, and British society.

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Archie’s and Clara’s daughter Irie shares Magid’s desire for belonging to the white, educated middle class but experiences a similar lack of recognition from English culture as Millat. “It is through the character of Irie that the anxieties of youth and immigrant communities are displayed, and her function in the novel is often to articulate opinions that the narrative voice can only do more intrusively” (Squires 2002, 27), such as being sick and tired of the permanent turn towards the past (cf. Rupp 2010, 124–125). In contrast to the handsome Iqbal twins, Irie is worried about her genetic heritage as a black woman. She suffers from her kinky hair and big body, which seem to be less attractive to boys than slim white girls: “There was England, a gigantic mirror, and there was Irie, without reflection. A stranger in a stranger land.” (265–266) Irie feels that she is “all wrong” (268). Her frustration with her ‘African’ body “could be read as a metaphorical denial of part of her cultural origins” (Thompson 2005, 128). Impressed by the long lineage of the Chalfens, her own roots appear to be rather broken (cf. Thompson 2005, 133). Irie’s mapping of her ancestry “parodies the conventional patrilineal family tree sacralized in family Bibles and accurately represents the confused, unknown, illegitimate, multiple legacies and bloodlines of Irie’s, crossing and recrossing the Atlantic” (Nair 2009, 8). Irie, for whom “the Chalfens were more English than the English” (328), “wanted to merge […] to be of one flesh, separated from the chaotic, random flesh of her own family and transgenically fused with another” (342). Ironically, the white English middle-class Chalfens have Polish, Jewish, and Catholic roots, confirming Alsana’s insight that nobody is truly and purely English. Walters argues that “the cultural hybridisation of English society has made concepts of ethnicity and race indeterminate” (Walters 2005, 315). In the words of the Arab immigrant Mickey Abdul: “We’re all English now, mate” (192), a statement equivalent to “we are all hybrid post-colonials” (Head 2003, 114). Since the family metonymically stands for the nation, “the quotidian unit of the family becomes the site where difference literally starts at home” (Trimm 2015, 154). The Chalfens’ genetic and cultural hybridity is mirrored in Joyce’s professional interest in cross-pollination as evolutionary progress and Marcus’s genetic engineering as a path towards the “perfectibility of all life […] for social and scientific progress” (312). However, both of their projects aim at controlling difference and change, and they both fail to some extent, stressing challenge and disruption through otherness and contingency. It is true that Magid and Irie make progress in studying science under Marcus’s tutelage, but they were ready and willing to do so in the first place. Joyce takes on Millat as a project, who had been assigned to her care due to deviant behavior at school. She feels attracted to the handsome stranger, and assumes a motherly responsibility for him. Millat’s misbehavior increases her interest in him, as the Other motivates her intervention as a cultivated and civilized Englishwoman. However, she does not realize that Millat looks through her and exploits her. His challenge only endorses her binary perspective, but the narrator notes how the assumed hierarchy of her position and knowledge is undermined (cf. Bhabha 1994, 162).

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Her husband Marcus created the transgenic FutureMouse, “eliminating the random” (340). The scientist’s claim to be able to predetermine life and death appropriates divine power in a fundamentalist fashion. Marcus’s “compulsive desire to eliminate randomness seems to encourage the genetic essentialism” (Suárez 2012, 180) that reduces human beings to their genes. However, in their ambition to control deviation (Magid, cancer), the Chalfens neglect their own son Josh and inadvertently provoke his turn against his father’s genetic engineering from the militant position of animal rights. The ending asserts transgenic and transcultural hybridity but denies control and domination through fundamentalism of any kind. Fundamentalists oppose each other at the presentation of the FutureMouse. The millenialist Hortense Bowden, the radical animal rights activist Josh and the Muslim fundamentalist Millat oppose the scientific determinism on display. Archie’s intervention saves the eugenic mentor of genetic engineering from Magid’s bullet, asserting humanism and agency in the face of the post-humanist attempt at genetic control (cf. Buchanan 2013, 19–20). However, the novel shows an ironic interplay of choice and chance since Archie accidentally smashes the showcase. The escape of the mouse seems to defy essentialism and fundamentalism (cf. Tew 2010, 134), but nobody wins the argument: Chalfen can no longer prove genetic predetermination, but he could create a new transgenic mouse, and the fundamentalists might interpret the escape as a case of divine intervention. The opposite forms of fundamentalism are suspended through contingency, but not necessarily defeated. In opposition to Samad’s and the Chalfens’ attempt at controlling hybridity, the novel champions the free play of transgenic and transcultural hybridity: Irie sleeps with both twins within a short time, so that it is impossible for her to say – or genetic examination to prove – whether Magid or Millat is the father of her baby (cf. Suárez 2012, 181). The baby with ‘white’, ‘brown’, and ‘black’ genes may grow up with Irie, her grandmother, and Josh, and connect with her ‘uncles’ Millat and Magid, which means an exposure to diverse, already hybridized cultural influences, the outcome of which will be unknown. The human being – as the FutureMouse – is more than its genes and beyond determinism (cf. Braun 2013, 233). Irie, with her complex background, embodies “the emerging model for contemporary Englishness” (Bentley 2007, 496). Irie’s vision of a time “when roots won’t matter anymore” (527) is complemented by the narrator’s vision of Irie with her daughter, Josh, and grandmother on a beach in Jamaica. Her return does not necessarily mean that transcultural London or cosmopolitan identity is a chimera, but that she can “claim multiple spaces of belonging” (Nair 2009, 10). This perspective corresponds to Welsch’s positive vision of a transcultural world, but Christian, Muslim, and post-human forms of fundamentalism, whether genetic engineering or animal rights radicalism, qualify the optimistic image.

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3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies Smith wrote her novel “in the familiar frame of the comic realist mode” (Bentley 2007, 497) in the traditions of the English novel of Dickens and in the wake of the postcolonial novels of Rushdie and Kureishi, “mingling ethnic origins, faiths and families” (Squires 2002, 16) in multicultural London. Within the realist paradigm, White Teeth is a veritable portmanteau of intertextuality: it draws on the sacred texts of the Bible and the Q’ran, colonial and postcolonial history, e.g. the Indian Mutiny, colonial Jamaica and the Congo, World War II, the “Rivers of blood”-speech, the burning of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (↗ 20 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses), on popular culture, such as Hollywood movies, Hip Hop, postmodern chaos theory with fractal repetitions, and the postcolonial theory of hybridity. Following comic realism, Smith presents us with an ironic, third-person, and largely omniscient narrator, very realistic settings and dialogues, somewhat comic protagonists, and comic coincidences and contingencies that tend to undermine the probability of the plot. In addition, the narrator is self-reflexive, “both informs and teases the reader, extending authority, interrogating authority, and hence foregrounding the narrative’s fictionality” (Squires 2002, 62; cf. Groes 2011, 223). The humorous authorial narrator reveals not only an aversion to ideology of any kind but also shows empathy towards the characters who fall prey to fundamentalist ideals. The narrator presents diverse multicultural positions from the perspectives of characters, often giving their idio- and sociolects in free indirect discourse (cf. Childs 2005, 209). The novel is thoroughly dialogic in terms of voices and ethnic varieties, a heteroglot mix of “new ‘breeds’ of hybrid, spoken languages” (Groes 2011, 227), which fulfils both a comic and a referential function of constructing “London’s social, psychological and cultural diversity” (Seeber 2010, 104; cf. Squires 2002, 64–65). “[T]he adoption of linguistic variants by London teenagers”, Logaldo (2010, 117) argues, “appears as the result of a more or less conscious wavering between historical (ethnical, generational, class) issues and cultural issues, between background situations and personal aspirations or group identifications.” The novel’s “multi-voicedness is inseparable from the notion of globalized English in a post-colonial framework”, and its realist representation of direct speech is very close to “the transcription of real life dialogues in scientific surveys” (Logaldo 2010, 118). The characters appear in conspicuously mismatched pairs that draw attention to their shortcomings, such as the intellectual Samad and the naïve Archie, old Archie and young Clara, old Samad and young Alsana, good Magid and bad Millat, angry Millat and gentle Irie. Squires (2002, 60) attributes Smith’s stereotyping of characters and their subordination to the plot to the choice of the comic genre. However, the comic situations do not detract from understanding the serious conundrums of the protagonists Archie, Samad, Millat, and Irie (cf. Seeber 2010, 106). The comic, improbable causality conveys “an erratic, occasionally portentous and yet mundane reality underlying the various lives […] with a sense of trauma and ineptitude” (Tew 2010,

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51). The ending of the novel artfully draws all the threads of the narrative together (cf. Head 2003, 113–114) but “risks its carefully built up balance between empathy and commentary, elevating comedy at the expense of complexity” (Squires 2002, 58). In sum, the novel itself is a hybrid mix of comedy and realism, popular and academic culture, oral heteroglossia and intertextuality.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives White Teeth met with a phenomenal response. Many popular readers, literary critics, and academic scholars received the novel extremely well, praised its good entertainment and new multicultural and hybrid vision of England. It was adapted as a mini-series by Channel 4 Television in 2002 and has even been translated into more than twenty languages. White Teeth had also been the subject of discussion in more than one hundred interviews, reviews, and scholarly essays by 2010 (cf. Tew 2010, 110–135). The initial, overwhelmingly positive reactions to the novel have been qualified by critics who take issue with the novel’s comic perspective on the problems of multicultural society, only to be countered by balanced appreciations of the novel’s irony and complexity. The major issues covered are the novel’s marketing and popularity, its mix of realism and comedy, its take on history, multiculturalism, hybridity, and identity. Some critics are skeptical of the novel’s success and relate that to marketing, commodification, and light entertainment (cf. Squires 2002, 69–82). Jakubiak (2008, 202) says that the novel is easily consumable and that its young, attractive, ethnic, and female author has been an asset in international marketing. She complains that this positive image constructed by the entertainment industry shapes readers’ views of the novel’s optimism to the detriment of its rather mixed picture of multiculturalism (Jakubiak 2008, 211; cf. Nicklas 2013, 125–129). In a more pronounced way, McLeod (2013, 158–161) finds fault with Smith, who, following Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Imaginary Homelands, presents us with a commodified hybridity in the multicultural metropolis, which ultimately subjects dirt, disorder, and uncertainty to narrative order and a reconciliation of opposites that is less provocative than orthodox. Tew (2010, 59) criticizes the naïvely optimistic vision of multicultural harmony with the benefit of hindsight concerning terrorist attacks. Thomas (2006) was more explicit in her scathing remarks: “Smith’s brand of undemanding multiculturalism could serve as an anthem for the complacent self-image of London as the harmonious melting pot. If 9/11 made hysterical realism as a genre irrelevant, 7/7 has exposed the fatuousness of Smith’s cute celebration of cultural hybridity”. Tew and Thomas seem to expect authors to have preternatural prescience since not even the secret services anticipated the extent of radicalization and terrorism. In addition, it would be wrong to reduce the novel to a mere “aesthetic commodity”, Squire (2002, 41–42) argues,

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since “her ironic inscriptions of the reception of postcolonial culture can be understood as a paradoxical strategy of both acceptance and resistance, an argument for both her critical and commercial success”. In response to the skepticism concerning the hype Smith comments on how she grew up with the notion that what 20 million people like cannot be good and she herself was very harsh about her work (cf. Bollen 2012). She concedes that she puts forth a rather optimistic view of multiculturalism, but hedges her criticism by referring to her own experience of the normality of multicultural coexistence in North London (cf. Anon.), a fact that would be supported by the sociologist Gilroy as demotic cosmopolitanism (cf. Sizemore 2005, 65–66). Other critics are more concerned with formal inconsistency. Wood (2005, 168) considers the novel entertaining but flawed: its “hysterical realism” exhausts conventions of realism in exuberant storytelling of multiple narratives with intricate connections and strange conjunctions of events, actually evading reality. He suggests that Smith’s characters retain human traits and that “her details are instantly convincing, both funny and moving” (2005, 176) on the one hand. On the other hand, the narrator’s intrusion and caricature undermine the credibility of the characters. The book as a whole is uneven: “As realism, it is incredible, as satire, it is cartoonish, as cartoon, it is too realistic” (Wood 2005, 172). In opposition to Wood’s critique of excessive form, Paproth (2008, 9–11) maintains that the novel is too controlled because it undermines the characters’ search for fundamental meanings in an uncertain postmodern world but it contains their stories in a modernist narrative structure that offers readers a rather traditional literary experience. Zadie Smith herself concedes Wood’s critique of her sprawling narrative, but she refutes his claim that her book lacks feeling and humanity. She claims that works of high artifice are not opposed to but express humanity, “which derives from their reverence for language, their precision, their intellect and, more than anything, from their humour” (Smith 2001). Smith continued to write her next two novels in the realist and modernist traditions, but she employed a more experimental, postmodern style in her fourth novel, NW. Most critics with a postcolonial approach consider the novel as a rather balanced and fairly appropriate representation of immigrant generations in the multicultural metropolis. White Teeth, Head claims, “part celebration, part cautionary tale, is an apt summation of the triumphs and the limits of British multiculturalism at the end of the century” (2003, 111). Smith’s novel is cited as a realistic portrait of the “fluidity of social formations in the British capital, along with its inhabitants’ intergenerational adaptation” (Knauer 2008, 185). The novel presents London “as a contact zone for cultures around the world” (Dalleo 2008, 92) that transforms both the immigrants’ and the hosts’ cultures, a process that is particularly evident in the hybrid, Carribbeanized ways the younger generation employs in mixing cultures and languages (Dalleo 2008, 94–95). The novel cautions the reader not to idealize Great Britain as a “Happy Multicultural Land” (465) because the immigrants’ multiple affiliations result in uncertainty, a lack or excess of belonging in an uneasy multicultural setting that calls for a constant re-negotiation of identities (cf. Thompson 2005, 123, 135; Trimm

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2015, 155). “Hybridity is no longer an exception to a concept of identity based on some kind of unity, or even unity in diversity”, Moss argues, as “[c]ultural and racial hybridities are becoming increasingly ordinary. The significance of this ordinariness lies in the pivotal notion of a tolerance or acceptance of diversity in opposition to the potential fear or prejudice that comes out of a desire for purity” (Moss 2003, 12; cf. Sizemore 2005, 65–68). Tancke cautions against a rosy view of hybridity because it is qualified by “painful effects of ethnic mixing and the blurring of racial and cultural boundaries” (2013, 28). She adds that the “narrative’s emphasis on the palpably material impact of history, on violence and the body jars with contemporary fantasies of playful hybridity and autonomous self-fashioning” (Tancke 2013, 37). The novel does not present a blinkered vision of multicultural harmony because neither racism nor fundamentalism are absent (cf. Moss 2003, 15; Nair 2009, 9). “London’s utopian conviviality is marred by the survival and reinforcement of these ‘races’ and discrete identities whose boundaries are policed by violence” (Suárez 2012, 182–183), but racism “is continually greeted with comic derision rather than fearful submission” (Squires 2002, 40). The novel considers Muslim fundamentalists as a serious threat but does not necessarily take their representatives serious (cf. Perfect 2014, 94–95) even if it understands their motivation (cf. Childs 2006, 10). Millat’s combination of pop culture and fundamentalism appears to be comic but corresponds to the current version of the postmodern pop-jihad (cf. Falkenhayner 2014, 74). The novel goes beyond the popular projection of fundamentalism on ‘unenlightened’ Muslims as the Other of Western culture. White Teeth also reveals fundamentalism in Christianity as empowerment (cf. Childs 2006, 9), and attributes the same motivation to genetic engineering as a fundamentalism of rationality. Since any position is criticized, Tew asks, what is the overall norm of the book? If there is an ethics, it seems to be that of tolerance, respect, and relativity usually absent in the satirized characters under observation, but also other “cultural shibboleths such as liberalism, political correctness and multiculturalism” (Tew 2010, 50) do not escape censure.

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. London: Penguin, 2001. --Anon. “An Interview with Zadie Smith.” Masterpiece Theatre, PBS. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/ masterpiece/teeth/ei_smith_int.html (15 February 2016). Ball, John C. Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2004. Bentley, Nick. “Re-Writing Englishness: Imagining the Nation in Julian Barnes’s England, England and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” Textual Practice 21.3 (2007): 483–504.

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Beukema, Taryn. “Men Negotiating Identity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” Postcolonial Text 4.3 (2008): 1–15. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Reprint. London: Routledge, 1994. Bollen, Christopher. “Interview with Zadie Smith.” Interview Magazine. 4 September 2012. http:// www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/zadie-smith/ (15 February 2016). Braun, Michele. “The Mouseness of the Mouse: The Competing Discourses of Genetics and History in White Teeth.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 48.2 (2013): 221–236. Buchanan, Brad. “‘The Gift That Keeps on Giving’: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and the Posthuman.” Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond. Ed. Philip Tew. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 13–25. Childs, Elaine. “Insular Utopias and Religious Neuroses: Hybridity Anxiety in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” Proteus 23.1 (2006): 7–12. Dalleo, Raphael. “Colonization in Reverse: White Teeth as Caribbean Novel.” Zadie Smith: Critical Essays. Ed. Tracey L. Walters. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. 91–104. Erll, Astrid. “Familien- und ‘Generationenromane’: Zadie Smith.” Der zeitgenössische englische Roman: Genres – Entwicklungen – Modellinterpretationen. Ed. Vera Nünning and Caroline Lusin. Trier: WVT, 2007. 117–132. Groes, Sebastian. The Making of London: London in Contemporary Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. Ed. Jana E. Braziel and Anita Mannur. Malden: Blackwell, 2003. 233–246. Hattenstone, Simon. “White Knuckle Ride.” The Guardian online. 11 December 2000. http://www. theguardian.com/books/2000/dec/11/fiction.whitbreadbookawards2000 (15 February 2016). Head, Dominic. “Zadie Smith’s White Teeth: Multiculturalism for the Millennium.” Contemporary British Fiction. Ed. Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham, and Philip Tew. Cambridge: Polity, 2003. 106–119. Holmes, Christopher. “The Novel’s Third Way: Zadie Smith’s ‘Hysterical Realism’.” Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond. Ed. Philip Tew. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 141–154. Itakura, Gen’ichiro. “A ‘Happy Multicultural Land’ in Periodontal Terms: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” Studies in English Literature 83 (2006): 125–142. Jakubiak, Katarzyna. “Simulated Optimism: The International Marketing of White Teeth.” Zadie Smith: Critical Essays. Ed. Tracey L. Walters. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. 201–218. Knauer, Chris. “The Root Canals of Zadie Smith: London’s Intergenerational Adaptation.” Zadie Smith: Critical Essays. Ed. Tracey L. Walters. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. 171–186. Logaldo, Mara. “‘Only the Immigrants Can Speak the Queen’s English These Days’ but All Kids Have a Jamaican Accent: Overcompensation vs. Urban Slang in Multiethnic London.” From International to Local English – and Back Again. Ed. Roberta Facchinetti, David Crystal, and Barbara Seidlhofer. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. 115–144. McLeod, Lewis. “Eliminating the Random, Ruling the World: Monologic Hybridity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.” Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond. Ed. Philip Tew. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 155–167. Merrit, Stephanie. “She’s Young, Black, British – and the First Publishing Sensation of the Millennium.” The Guardian online. 16 January 2000. http://www.theguardian.com/ books/2000/jan/16/fiction.zadiesmith (15 February 2016). Mirze, Z. Esra. “Fundamental Differences in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” Zadie Smith: Critical Essays. Ed. Tracey L. Walters. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. 187–200. Moss, Laura. “The Politics of Everyday Hybridity: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” Wasafiri 39 (2003): 11–17.

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Nair, Supriya. “Dented History in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 7.1–2 (2009). 1–17. Nicklas, Pascal. “The Feminine Voice of Zadie Smith.” Anglistik 24.1 (2013): 125–135. O’Grady, Kathleen. “White Teeth: A Conversation with Author Zadie Smith.” Atlantis 27.1 (2002): 105–111. O’Leary, Joanna. “Body Larceny: Somatic Seizure and Control in White Teeth.” Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond. Ed. Philip Tew. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 39–52. Paproth, Matthew. “The Flipping Coin: The Modernist and Postmodernist Zadie Smith.” Zadie Smith: Critical Essays. Ed. Tracey L. Walters. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. 9–29. Parekh, Bhikhu C. The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: Report of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain. London: Profile Books, 2000. Perfect, Michael. Contemporary Fictions of Multiculturalism: Diversity and the Millennial London Novel. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Rupp, Jan. Genre and Cultural Memory in Black British Literature. Trier: WVT, 2010. Seeber, Hans U. “Transculturality and Comedy in Zadie Smith’s Serio-Comic Novel White Teeth (2000).” From Interculturalism to Transculturalism: Mediating Encounters in Cosmopolitan Contexts. Ed. Heinz Antor. Heidelberg: Winter, 2010. 101–120. Sell, Jonathan P. A. “Chance and Gesture in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and The Autograph Man: A Model for Multicultural Identity?” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 41.3 (2006): 27–44. Sell, Jonathan P. A. “Experimental Ethics: Autonomy and Contingency in the Novels of Zadie Smith.” The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction since the 1960’s. Ed. Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2007. 150–170. Sell, Jonathan P. A. “White Teeth.” The Literary Encyclopedia. 23 April 2008. http://www.litencyc. com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8775 (15 February 2016). Sizemore, Christine W. “Willesden as a Site of ‘Demotic’ Cosmopolitanism in Zadie Smith’s Postcolonial City Novel White Teeth.” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 12.2 (2005): 65–83. Smith, Zadie. “This is how it feels to me.” The Guardian online. 13 October 2001. http://www. theguardian.com/books/2001/oct/13/fiction.afghanistan (15 February 2016). Squires, Claire. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum, 2002. Suárez, Carrera I. “White Teeth’s Embodied Metaphors: The Moribund and the Living.” Metaphor and Diaspora in Contemporary Writing. Ed. Jonathan P. A. Sell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 170–185. Tancke, Ulrike. “White Teeth Reconsidered: Narrative Deception and Uncomfortable Truths.” Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond. Ed. Philip Tew. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 27–38. Tew, Philip. Zadie Smith. New British Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Thomas, Matt. “Reading White Teeth to Improve Intercultural Communication.” Journal of Caribbean Literatures 6.1 (2009): 15–30. Thomas, Susie. “Zadie Smith’s False Teeth: The Marketing of Multiculturalism.” Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 4. 1 March 2006. http://www. literarylondon.org/london-journal/march2006/thomas.html (5 February 2016). Thompson, Molly. “‘Happy Multicultural Land?’ The Implications of an ‘Excess of Belonging’ in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature. Ed. Kadija Sesay and Lola Young. Hertford: Hansib, 2005. 122–140. Trimm, Ryan S. “After the Century of Strangers: Hospitality and Crashing in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” Contemporary Literature 56.1 (2015): 145–172. Wachtel, Eleanore. “In Conversation with Zadie Smith.” Brick. Ontario Arts Council, n.y. http:// brickmag.com/conversation-zadie-smith (15 February 2016).

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Walters, Tracey L. “‘We’re All English Now Mate Like It or Lump It’: The Black/Britishness of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature. Ed. Kadija Sesay and Lola Young. Hertford: Hansib, 2005. 314–322. Welsch, Wolfgang. “On the Acquisition and Possession of Commonalities.” Transcultural English Studies. Ed. Frank Schulze-Engler and Sissy Helff. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. 3–36. Wood, James. The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel. London: Pimlico, 2005.

5.2 Further Reading Gunning, Dave. “Ethnicity Politics in Contemporary Black British and British Asian Literature.” Racism, Slavery, and Literature. Ed. Wolfgang Zach and Ulrich Pallua. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2010. 47–59. Hertel, Ralf. “Postkoloniales Gelächter: Zur Erfahrung der Inkongruenz in Zadie Smiths White Teeth.” Wer lacht, zeigt Zähne: Spielarten des Komischen. Ed. Johann Schmidt, N. Sprang, C. H. Felix, and Roland Weidle. Trier: WVT, 2014. 259–266. Korte, Barbara. “From White Teeth to Britz: Multi-Ethnic Britain on British Primetime Television in the 2000s.” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 34.2 (2009): 227–240. McMann, Mindi. “British Black Box: A Return to Race and Science in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” Modern Fiction Studies 58.3 (2012): 616–636. Meinig, Sigrun. “‘Running at a Standstill’: The Paradoxes of Time and Trauma in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” Beyond Extremes: Repräsentation und Reflexion von Modernisierungsprozessen im zeitgenössischen britischen Roman. Ed. Stefan Glomb and Stefan Horlacher. Tübingen: Narr, 2004. 241–257. Ramsey-Kurz, Helga. “Humouring the Terrorists or the Terrorised? Militant Muslims in Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Hanif Kureishi.” Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial. Ed. Susanne Reichl and Mark Stein. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. 73–86. Roupakia, Lydia E. “On Care, Ethics, and Reading Practice: Re-Reading Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 26.2 (2015): 150–171. Weintraub, Jessica. “‘Merely a Trick of Moonlight’: The Accidental Triangulation of Love, Power, and Narrative in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” A Fluid Sense of Self: The Politics of Transnational Identity. Ed. Silvia Schultermandl and Sebnem Toplu. Vienna: Lit, 2010. 175–195. Wille, Anna. “‘Born and Bred, Almost’ – Mimicry as a Humorous Strategy in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia.” Anglia 129.3–4 (2011): 448–468.

Dirk Wiemann

25 David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004) Abstract: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) has been widely discussed as a prominent specimen of the emergent genre of the ‘transnational’, ‘global’, ‘geopolitical’, ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘planetary’ novel. Moreover, Mitchell himself has been dubbed the ideal representative of a ‘new sincerity’ in British writing which, after the waning appeal of an allegedly irresponsibly playful ‘classical’ postmodernism, is perceived to combine reflexive textual manœuvres with a serious concern with, if not commitment to, the pressing problems of an increasingly interdependent but by no means convivial world. The six interlinked and nested narrative segments that constitute the composite text of Cloud Atlas are thematically connected by the confrontation of peaceable solidarity and brutal, dehumanizing predacity, whose most emblematic effect in the novel is the recurrent problem of genocidal enslavement. One of the key questions arising from this design is whether Mitchell’s text articulates an anti-historical essentialism that posits some unchangeable ‘human nature’, or whether Cloud Atlas anticipates a cosmopolitanism yet to come. Keywords: Globalization, ‘new sincerity’, ‘psychosoterica’, utopia/dystopia, composite novel

1 Context: Author, Œuvre, Moment Heralded as the “wunderkind” of twenty-first century British literature (Worley 2014), David Mitchell has by 2016 not only established himself as the author of seven highly acclaimed novels, two of which  – number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004)  – were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; more quirkily, he is also the second invited contributor, after Margaret Atwood, to Scottish artist Katie Paterson’s ‘Future Library’ project, a self-declared “100-year artwork” that aims to articulate the discrepant temporalities of writing and ecology in a gradually accreting collective literary message in a bottle, as it were, addressed to some uncertain future: A thousand trees have been planted in Nordmarka, a forest just outside Oslo, which will supply paper for a special anthology of books to be printed in one hundred years time. Between now and then, one writer every year will contribute a text, with the writings held in trust, unpublished, until 2114. Tending the forest and ensuring its preservation for the 100-year duration of the artwork finds a conceptual counterpoint in the invitation extended to each writer: to conceive and produce a work in the hopes of finding a receptive reader in an unknown future. (Paterson 2015)

DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-026

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Arguably the very fact that Mitchell, after months of consideration, consented to participate in what he calls a “good mad” project (as he states in a video embedded in Patterson 2015) and actually buried the manuscript of his latest book in the Nordmarka forest, is indicative of that author’s general proneness to a seriously playful experimentalism that is the hallmark of his published work so far. This holds obviously true for those of Mitchell’s novels that explore innovative, at times extravagant modes of figuring planetary interdependences and transsubjective porosities (a phenomenon of soul nomadism for which Mitchell has coined the neologism of ‘psychosoterica’), most notably in his début Ghostwritten (1999), in Cloud Atlas (2004), and in The Bone Clocks (2014). These novels appear to marry a highly foregrounded literary virtuosity verging on the gimmicky to a sense of pressing urgency in the treatment of gloomy as well as potentially hopeful prospects for the human species as a whole. On a comparatively smaller canvas, Mitchell’s engagement with the Bildungsroman tradition is manifest in the revisions of the coming-of-age pattern in the convoluted number9dream and the semi-autobiographical Black Swan Green (2006), both quest narratives autodiegetically presented from the perspective of slightly disadvantaged youngsters coming to grips with their own potentials. The ostensible realism of oldschool historical fiction in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010), set in late-eighteenth-century Japan, is counterbalanced by the neo-gothic supernaturalism of Mitchell’s latest published novel so far, Slade House (2015), which picks up the transhistorical, Harry-Potter-style struggle between (good) Horologists and (evil) Atemporals that had already provided the underlying conflict in The Bone Clocks. While this Manichaean confrontation of timeless antagonists threatens to develop into some sort of private mythology that might push Mitchell’s future fiction more and more into the simplistic binarisms of mainstream fantasy literature (↗ 3 Genres), it cannot go unnoticed that some of the features of this scenario are already constitutive elements of even the most ambitious and demanding of Mitchell’s novels where, as in Cloud Atlas, a virtually transhistorical conflict between predacity and convivialty is acted out by a cast of characters that, like the Horologists and Atemporals of his later fiction, appear as so many time-travelling revenants. No doubt the notion of time travel provides a further link between Mitchell’s poetics and the idea of the ‘Future Library’. In fact, both Paterson’s eco-planetary project and the very title of Mitchell’s undisclosed contribution to it, From Me Flows What You Call Time, to be released in 2114, point to one of the defining features of Mitchell’s œuvre: the engagement of literary storytelling with the complexities and ambiguities of time in an intensely (and more often than not mysteriously) interconnected and at the same time threatened and precarious world. Mitchell himself confirms this in his appraisal of Paterson’s project as a statement of hope against all odds that very clearly accords with much of his own fiction:

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Everything is telling us that we’re doomed, but the Future Library is a candidate on the ballot paper for possible futures. It brings hope that we are more resilient than we think: that we will be here, that there will be trees, that there will be books, and readers, and civilisation. (Flood 2016)

What thus ensues is a whole-earth perspective that configures human horizons of expectation with ecological deep time. Mitchell’s literary articulation of this perspective, accordingly, is the reflexive elaboration of a chronotope whose dimensions are no longer locally, regionally or nationally circumscribed but truly planetary, and whose very fragility and precariousness endows Mitchell’s texts with an ethico-political urgency which rules out any suspicion of mere playfulness that the often hyper-sophisticated, intricate and innovative narrative structures of Mitchell’s texts might evoke. For this reason, many critics see David Mitchell as a pioneer author who, as Pico Iyer most pointedly has it, “created the 21st century novel” (Iyer 2007) single-handedly with his spectacular début, Ghostwritten (1999), in which nine apparently self-enclosed stories set in eight countries from Japan to the US-American West Coast are ingeniously braided together, suggesting in effect a subtle and subterranean connectivity that links everything to everything else across the gritty surface of the globe. Novels like these do indeed appear as instrumental contributors to a general tendency in recent fiction toward a new, emergent type of fiction that critics have dubbed “the world novel” (Irr 2014, 190); “the global novel” (Shaw 2015); “the planetary novel” (Childs and Green 2010, 25) or “the cosmopolitan novel” (Schoene 2010, 14). Such texts do not just configure, let alone celebrate a harmoniously globalized world but rather emphasise the persistence if not intensification of deeply unequal power structures in the wake of transnational capitalist subsumption. In this respect, Mitchell’s ‘global novels’ articulate a poignantly pessimistic outlook on a world constantly on the brink of catastrophe, a world “where the omnipresence of the apocalyptic in human history is emphasized“ (Bayer 2015, 350). At the same time, however, when ‘optimistically’ read, Mitchell’s novels seem to prefigure a cosmopolitan world society to come, “whose time and space are beginning to find narrative expression” (Barnard 2009, 214) in texts like Ghostwritten or Cloud Atlas. Whether construed as gloomy dystopia, hopeful utopia, or  – as more nuanced readings tend to do – both at once, Mitchell’s texts have not only been discussed and appreciated for their planetary scope; they have also provoked the apparently more scholastic debate whether or not these are novels that signal the demise of literary postmodernism in favour of what Adam Kelly has, in another context, identified as the fiction of a “new sincerity” (2010, 131). No doubt many of the more conspicuous ‘technical’ features of Mitchell’s texts – such as the propensity to “generic hybridity, a fragmented structure, interrupted narratives and emphasis on illusion and simulacrum” – can be identified in pattern-match fashion as “typical of postmodern writing” (Machinal 2011, 127). More interesting than this focus on textual manœuvres alone, however, is the question of the politics involved in Mitchell’s variety of the postmodern – a take that implicitly points to the respective critic’s (mis)construction of ‘the

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postmodern’ itself. Thus for Richard Bradford, Mitchell represents a type of domesticated, “consumer-friendly” postmodernism in which literary production itself has paradoxically become coterminous with consumption as writers behave “like shoppers in an aesthetic supermarket, faced with an unlimited variety of stylistic opportunities and cultural brand names” (Bradford 2007, 78). Bradford’s hostile construction of the postmodern as playfully irresponsible and consumerist is tacitly shared by a range of critics who, however, try to exempt Mitchell from the verdict on the postmodern by constructing him, instead, as a committed and concerned writer who operates from a post-postmodern position. In these perspectives, Mitchell emerges as the pioneer of a new variety of “network realism” (Selisker 2014, 456); as the first writer to fully articulate “the human life-world in its global transterritoriality” by way of an “elaborate textual compositeness” that is decidedly “opposed to postmodernist fragmentation” (Schoene 2010, 99, 98); and as a novelist whose poetics is grounded in “an overarching quasi-positivism, where ‘truth’ is ultimately upheld as an ideal” so that novels like Cloud Atlas transcend “the abstraction and playfulness of postmodern poetics” (Beville 2015, 14, 1). The following discussion of Mitchell’s arguably most influential novel will give rise to ample opportunities to rehearse and put to the test the main positions that have been raised with regards to Mitchell’s œuvre as a whole.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns 2.1 Progress and Recurrence The novel’s most conspicuous aspect surely is its idiosyncratic macrostructure: Cloud Atlas is composed of six constituent narratives, each written in a different genre and set in a different place and time ranging from the mid-nineteenth century to a distant post-apocalyptic future. While the stories are linked as if in a relay run, they yet appear “each as a discrete novella unto itself” (O’Donnell 2015, 71). The ‘novellas’ are as follows: (1) A travel diary written by good-hearted, naive estate agent Adam Ewing, set in the South Pacific of the 1850s. Ewing saves Autua, a Moriori tribesman, from death at the hands of the Maori (a traditional enemy of the Moriori), and he is in return saved by Autua from being killed for his money by the corrupt doctor Henry Goose. (2) An epistolary narrative written by the unscrupulous, charming and artistically gifted composer Robert Frobisher, set in a Belgian château in the early 1930s. Frobisher takes on the job as amanuensis for the ageing composer Vyvyan Ayrs, hoping thereby to win fame and fortune, but he discovers that Ayrs intends to claim Frobisher’s compositions as his own. In despair and bereft of resources, Frobisher takes his own life.

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(3) A mystery/suspense page-turner featuring intrepid investigative reporter Luisa Rey in 1970s California. Rey discovers a plot by the Seaboard Corporation to put a flawed nuclear reactor online. Beset by Seaboard henchmen intent on killing her, Rey (as well as her expose) is saved by Joe Napier, a former Seaboard lackey who finds redemption but dies in the process. (4) A satire of contemporary Britain put forward as the memoirs of Timothy Cavendish, the venal owner of a vanity press. Through a series of unfortunate events, Cavendish is locked up in a nursing home where the horrific attendants prey on their fragile charges, and he finds new meaning in life by joining several of the more robust residents in a daring escape. (5) The transcription of an interview with the ‘ascended fabricant’ Sonmi-451, set in a near-future Korean ‘corpocracy.’ A member of an enslaved clone race who has achieved consciousness, Sonmi joins a doomed revolt against the system, but, before she is executed, she pens her Declarations, which will serve as the basis for a new religion, as we discover in the following novella. (6) A supposed oral account by Zachry, one of the few surviving humans, set in the Hawaiian Islands several hundred years in the future after a “Fall” has wiped out civilization. Zachry initially distrusts but then befriends Meronym, one of the “Prescients”, a group that has attempted to preserve knowledge. When his family and village are destroyed by the vicious Konas, Zachry and Meronym help one another escape to Maui. (Parker 2010, 202–203) Each narrative except the sixth one is interrupted in mid-air, sometimes in fact quite abruptly in mid-sentence, by the subsequent one, where it figures as an intradiegetic artefact or document (mis-)read by a character/recipient whose story will in turn be consumed by another character in the next novella. Accordingly, Frobisher the composer is shown reading Adam Ewing’s travel diary, while Luisa Rey gets some forty years later absorbed in the composer’s letters, only to be revealed as a fictional character in a manuscript eagerly ‘gobbled up’, in the next narrative unit, by Timothy Cavendish the publisher, a film adaptation of whose ‘ghastly ordeal’ Sonmi vividly recalls in her interview with the archivist. In the post-apocalyptic, far-future fulcrum narrative, the hologram record of this interview surfaces as an undecipherable text “in an Old’un tongue what no’un alive und’stands nor never will” (324)1. From this temporal vantage point the novel boomerangs back through the other narratives in reverse order so that, after the ‘Sonmi-451’, ‘Thomas Cavendish’, ‘Luisa Rey’ and ‘Robert Frobisher’ narratives have been concluded, the second part of Adam Ewing’s ‘Pacific Journal’, with which the novel opened, forms the last narrative block of the novel.

1 Unless otherwise indicated page references in brackets without further designation refer to Mitchell 2004.

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Paradoxically therefore the reading progress results in a temporal regress as the narrative arc leads back to the historically earliest of the six diegetic settings and gives the last word to the idealistic Adam Ewing who naturally remains happily unaware of the apocalyptic and murderous futures lying ahead (or rather, for the reader, behind). Even while writing in full view of European imperialism and persistent slavery in his native United States, Ewing closes his journal on the optimistic notion that despite all manifest systemic atrocities reform is possible by way of a gradual education of humanity, and that only a life spent in devotion to that course “is worth the living” (528). Even if, as Ewing anticipates, the individual’s contribution to the cause of human betterment “can amount to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean”, the journal writer avers this incipient threatening defeatism with the rhetorical question that concludes his diary and simultaneously the novel as a whole: “Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?” (529). The optimism of this conclusion is grounded in the notion of progress, however slow and painful this may be envisaged, and the open question in the stead of an assertive closure seems to interpellate the reader (of the journal? of the novel?) into some kind of active collaboration in the fostering of that progress and to immerse him-/herself as one more drop in the ocean of the well-meaning. In light of the ‘preceding’ narrative units, Ewing’s concluding meditations furthermore must appear as only one more variation on the recurrent theme of the novel, namely “the clash between those who pursue immediate gratification at the expense of all else and those who are future-thinking and life-affirming” (Parker 2010, 203). To the extent that this conflict between ‘predators’ and ‘civilizers’ seems to underpin the socio-political setting of each of the six narratives, it appears as a wellnigh perennial leitmotif of human history. And in fact, Mitchell makes it a point to have the most obvious and catastrophic incidents of such clashes appear as genocidal massacres in the two narratives that bookend the sequence in temporal terms: While Ewing’s journal reports the brutal decimation and enslavement of the radically pacifist Moriori tribe at the hands of the belligerent Maori invaders (13–14), the strangely idyllic post-apocalypse world of “Sloosha’s Crossin’ and Everythin’ After” gets, in a virtual repetition of the Maori assault on the Moriori, violently disrupted as the narrator’s peaceable agrarian “Valleysmen” communities are being conquered, massacred and enslaved by the warlike Kona tribe (303–324). Likewise, Ewing’s laudable resolution to join the Abolitionist cause against slavery may, when read against the ‘real’ historical background of mid-nineteenth-century America, appear as historically sanctioned; in the context of the novel, however, that is in light of further dystopian developments as figured in later/earlier sections, the tiny Abolitionist drop in a vast ocean seems pathetically insignificant as slavery surfaces in various manifestations in each of the six narratives. Most obviously, the near-future capitalism of the ‘Sonmi-451’ episode turns out to be built on “the creation of a ‘substrata of slaves’” (349) by way of genetic engineering. Though much less tangible, slavery turns out to be fundamental to the production and maintenance of ‘civilization’ as such: Frobisher, writing in the 1930s, both despises in and at the

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same time shares with his employer a hieratic cultural politics according to which the ‘temple of civilization’ is based on the material and ‘menial’ labour of the “masses, slaves, peasants and foot-soldiers […] ignorant even of their ignorance” while “the great statesmen, scientists, artists and, most of all the composers of the age, any age, […] are civilization’s architects, masons and priests” (82). And even the roughly contemporary “Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” is resonant with hints of slavery, albeit in a far more satirical manner than in the bleak replicant dystopia of ‘Sonmi451’ or the post-apocalyptic tribe-versus-tribe primordialism of Zachry’s orature. Bent on making as much trouble as possible in the old people’s home into which he has been confined, Cavendish reflects on the tacit complicity that pertains between policing and insurrectionary agents: “Slavers welcome the odd rebel to dress down before the others. […] Prisoner resistance merely justifies an ever-fiercer imprisonment in the minds of the imprisoners” (183). No doubt, the topos of slavery thus resurfaces in different variations but its semantic omnipresence all through the six discrepant narrative settings seems to support a sense of history repeating itself. The suspicion that things simply repeat themselves in ever-recurrent loops and cycles is itself thematic in Cloud Atlas as, for instance, Robert Frobisher’s employer, composer Vyvyan Ayrs, labours on a last major symphonic work based on and titled after Nietzsche’s idea of “eternal recurrence” (84). This philosophical notion resurfaces in Frobisher’s own suicide note as the expectation of reincarnation and perpetual re-enactment of the same events ad infinitum: “We do not stay dead long. Once my Luger lets me go, my birth, next time around, will be upon me in a heartbeat. Thirteen years from now we’ll meet again at Gresham, ten years later I’ll be back in this same room, holding this same gun, composing this same letter […]” (490). Hundreds of years later and thousands of miles to the east, ‘ascended’ and briefly liberated servant replicant Sonmi-451 in her ‘corpocracy’-ruled futuristic Korea will meditate on the desire for “salvation from a perpetuity of birth and rebirth” (345), and even further into the future, Zachry of the neo-primitive civilization of nuclear holocaust survivors repeatedly rambles away on the question “where’d our souls be rebirthed” (306) after the Kona assault. All this topical and structural emphasis on recurrences seems to undermine the appeal to progress invoked by Ewing, as human history appears as an endless rerun of the same disasters all over again and again. In that perspective, Cloud Atlas’s final pages attempt to undermine the entire fatalistically pessimistic worldview it had so meticulously established with [Ewing’s] constructivist conviction that our beliefs determine our reality – that a better set of beliefs will help create a better world. Here the possibility for a better formulated existence leads us to a neohumanist ethos of progressivism […]. (Dimovitz 2015, 81)

True, there is not only the recurrent motif of predacity but also “the fact that in every section characters struggle against some form of tyranny [all of which] can make the novel seem heartily committed to the meta-narrative of emancipation” (Robbins

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2015, 12). In that respect, Cloud Atlas configures an idealistic “faith in progress with groundhog cynicism”, and betrays precisely through this ultimately abstract polarization its own “latent conservativism” (Shoop and Ryan 2015, 97). For, as Bruce Robbins scathingly remarks, since the privileging of endless recurrence has as a result that “the moral dilemmas are always pretty much the same in every period”, “Mitchell’s deep history is actually shallow”, and by extension “the novel is ethically shallow” too (2015, 11). This, still according to Robbins, is due to a profound lack of historical sensibility so that Cloud Atlas stages a virtually timeless scenario in which “primal pacifism” (2015, 14), as represented by the Moriori or the Valleysmen, recurrently falls prey to the aggressiveness of conquering predatory tribes who are constructed as “pure, inscrutable Others, the antithesis of what their victims would call civilization. In short, they are what used to be called barbarians” (2015, 11). Robbins’s ultimate verdict on Cloud Atlas hinges on the persuasively argued assumption that the novel, by indiscriminately upholding the Othering of its “barbarians without explanations, qualifications, or quotation marks” (2015, 11), itself “regresses from our contemporary common sense” into an aggressively dichotomous ideology that denies […] our achieved disbelief that the world can be divided between civilization, on the one hand, and barbarism, on the other. The achievement of this disbelief, if you agree that it exists, would have to count, little as we may want to acknowledge it, as moral progress. If we believe that it is better not to believe in barbarians and that these days we basically don’t believe in barbarians, whoever ‘we’ are, then we do believe in moral progress. And it seems that Mitchell does not. (Robbins 2015, 11–12)

As if to add insult to injury, Robbins here harks back to Adam Ewing’s ‘constructivism’ (“If we believe that it is better not to believe in barbarians”), thereby adopting the ethical discourse of responsibility but hurling it back at the author himself who, in an act of wilful suspension of achieved disbelief, has retrograded back into a barbarism that believes in barbarism. Robbins’s critique is as convincing as it is ungenerous. For despite the apparent inconsistency of Ewing’s ‘constructivist’ humanism with the main bulk of the novel, it cannot go unnoticed that his concluding (and therefore, in narrative terms, privileged) plea for the production of progress is itself a recurrent theme in Cloud Atlas, and so is the rhetorical upgrading of smallness. In the fulcrum narrative, the ‘prescient’ Meronym expresses her hope against all probability that “one day” even the aggressive Kona (according to Robbins immutably othered as barbarians) might have turned (‘civilized’) themselves into peaceable neighbours: Some savages what I knowed got a beautsome Civ’lized heart beatin in their ribs. Maybe some Kona. Not nuff to say-so their hole tribe, but who knows one day? One day. ‘One day’ was only a flea o’ hope for us. Yay, I mem’ry Meronym sayin’, but fleas ain’t easy to rid. (319)

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Drops in the ocean, fleas that are not “easy to rid”: like the large-scale atrocities that run all through history as its apparent dominant leitmotif, these tiny but persistent attempts at “shaping a world […] that divers races & creeds can share” (528) are, in Mitchell’s scenario, irrepressible, too. In this configuration, the cyclic structure of eternal recurrence, rebirth and repetition is tensely fused with the linearity of a progress-oriented outlook that is, however, always already contained within the patterns of eternal repetition.

2.2 Characters, Clouds and Cannibals If time in Cloud Atlas is being figured as a combination of linear and cyclic perspectives, then this doubleness stands arguably in intimate relation to the specific construction of characters in the novel. For the dual temporal consciousness in Mitchell’s novel is deeply tied in with what Jay Clayton discusses as “genome time” that “fuses the personal timescale of everyday life with the immense impersonal timescale of the species” (2013, 58). In this perspective, the singularity of the individual’s genetic code appears as an equivalent to the parole, that is an unrepeatable speech act in linear time, whereas the genome is “a four-letter langue that runs through and beyond the individual, reaching back to the first primordial cell and forward to whatever future humanity may encounter” (Clayton 2013, 59). Individuality is hence a performative act (parole) as well as the transitory articulation of some quasi-perennial collective code (langue). Thus, every individual is unique yet every individual’s uniqueness is not an essence but rather the singularity as/of a site, or a node, at which the code of the multiple materializes in the guise of the one. In a fascinating discussion of Joyce’s Ulysses (↗ 7 James Joyce, Ulysses), Julian Murphet observes how in Stephen Dedalus’s private metaphysics the “mole is a figural guarantor of a persistence of character through a limitless multiplicity of becoming” (2011, 258). As Stephen points out, “the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time” (Joyce 1988, 159–160); hence the mole figures as “a patterned integrity rendered visible by the incessantly replaced, rewoven molecules of Stephen’s skin” (Murphet 2011, 258). If in Joyce the mole – itself not a ‘body’ but a quilting point or knot in a constantly unwoven and rewoven body made of “molecules shuttled to and fro” (Joyce 1988, 160)  – physically signals the continuity of ‘character’ in the midst of ongoing molecular flux, then it appears as a visible token of the individual’s “entelechy” (Joyce 1988, 156). Interestingly, Mitchell plants a mole, or birthmark, into his novel too but to the effect not of heralding individual continuity and integrity in the midst of continuous unmaking and remaking, but, more germane to the notion of genome time, to introduce a ‘patterned integrity’ that serves as an anchoring point in the boundless connectivity of trans-subjective spill-overs across time and space. For many of the characters that populate that sprawling novel appear as revenants or variants of other

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characters from other component narratives. The conspicuous comet-shaped birthmark is shared by Frobisher (85), Luisa Rey (124), Timothy Cavendish (373), Sonmi-451 (204–205) and Meronym, Zachry’s ‘prescient’ helper in the fulcrum story (319). As a result, all these characters, however removed from each other in spatial and temporal terms, seem to be interconnected in some underdetermined yet indubitable fashion as “the umbilical birthmark” figures as visible token of a transindividual “panhuman relation” (McCulloch 2012, 148) that links subjects to each other in a mode structurally akin to intertextual imbrications. By this token, Cloud Atlas’s metastructure of intricately interwoven and mutually permeable narratives finds its correlate in the characters’ porosity as apparently non-bounded fictional selves tend to merge into each other across vast spatial and temporal gulfs. Within (but not necessarily without) the diegesis, reincarnation – “recurrence” in Frobisher’s (84), “rebirth” in Zachry’s diction (345) – may serve as one possible model for rendering the unsettling experience of such a mysterious and nomadic interconnectivity if not plausible then at least conceivable: Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ’morrow? […] only the atlas o’ clouds. (324)

It is cloud-like shape-shifters that “cross ages”, and while doing so merge into one another only to separate again. The apparently oxymoronic cloud atlas would, then, square the circle of charting the positions of those malleable, polymorphous ‘souls’ that will neither stay in place nor even remain identical with themselves: “Who can say […] who the soul’ll be tomorrow?” This propensity to merge is explicitly tied in with the basic physicality of bodies. At the conclusion of the “Half-Lives” story, the investigative journalist Luisa Rey receives a package containing the last eight letters written by Martin Frobisher in 1931. Before actually reading the letters, Rey literally incorporates the content of the package, to the effect that a physical fusion with the long-dead composer appears to take place at that very same level where, for Stephen Dedalus, the integrity of the bounded self is called into question, namely at the level of the molecular: Luisa uses a plastic knife to slit the package open. She removes one of the yellowed envelopes, postmarked October 10, 1931, holds it against her nose, and inhales. Are molecules of Zedelghem Château, of Robert Frobisher’s hand, dormant in this paper for forty-four years, now swirling in my lungs, in my blood? Who is to say? (453)

Most critics have tended to note a hopeful dimension in such instances of ‘psychosoterica’ across the boundaries of time, space and selves. Thus, for instance, Berthold Schoene suggests that Mitchell’s device of the birthmark “has to be seen as a general rather than specific symbol of humanity’s potential for communal affiliation” (2009,

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116). As a token of “humanity’s global being-in-common”, therefore, the mark as well as the text in which it resurfaces time and again so conspicuously indicates how “humanity’s heritage throbs in all of us, however vaguely and intangibly” (Schoene 2009, 116). The comet-shaped mole as ‘patterned integrity’ is thus written on a body that is now understood as the recent accommodation of a time-travelling ‘soul’ and as the nodal point through which a shared polygenetic legacy circulates (‘throbs’), so that the “all-embracing cosmopolitan network” (Schoene 2009, 116) of humanity appears as grounded in a corporeal substratum and hence implied in human nature. For other critics, most systematically in Fiona McCulloch’s posthumanist reading of Cloud Atlas, Mitchell’s figuration of fluid overlaps between characters enacts a thorough decentring of the subject “in a non-linear […] resistance to unified self, time or place” (2012, 147), so that all who find themselves woven into this inscrutable cosmopolitan network do no longer participate in their specific historical formation alone. Instead, then, they inhabit several chronotopes at the same time. Hence the uncanny feeling Luisa Rey has when Frobisher’s epistles trigger an intense experience of déjà-vu by way of “the dizzying vividness of the images of places and people that the letters have unlocked. Images so vivid she can only call them memories” (121). No longer at home in the contingencies of the historical here and now into which they have been born, characters who have undergone such experiences may begin to “feel at odds with dominant hegemony” (McCulloch 2012, 149) and may instead see themselves as members of “a panhuman community spanning time, space and central characters [in] a counter-narrative of hope for tomorrow” (McCulloch 2012, 151). This thorough denaturalization of the given finds its continuation in the insight that any historical situation is – analogous to the time-straddling characters themselves – not only marked but actually constituted by heterotemporal synchronicities of the non-synchronic, that is, the coexistence of “historically varied and variable elements” (Williams 2012, 121). Time-travel, therefore, is not only a matter of esoteric spirituality (‘souls crossing ages’) but also a constitutive hallmark of the various social formations in Cloud Atlas, however discrepant these may seem. What Ewing’s high colonialism has in common with Cavendish’s postmodern present, Sonmi’s ‘corpocracy’ and definitely Zachry’s fragile post-‘Fall’ pastoral is “the coexistence of realities from radically different moments of history” (Jameson 1991, 307). Here, any step can catapult you into a different time zone: Ewing’s plunge into the “prehistoric” Moriori mausoleum (20) is surely a descent – “as in a dream (but it wasn’t)” – down the ladder of deep time, and so is Sonmi’s brief respite with the outlaw community squatting a derelict Buddhist abbey as well as Zachry’s ascent of mount Mauna Kea with the relics of a pre-apocalypse “observ’tree” (292). Similarly, when Luisa Rey, chased by the gunmen of a corrupt bigwig financier, escapes for shelter into a Dickensian “underworld sweatshop clattering with five hundred sewing machines” (443), this descent into the ‘hidden abode of production’ (Marx) reveals the mixed constitution of the present: “It’s 1875 down here, thinks Luisa, not 1975” (443). The nomadism of polymorphous

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cloud-like souls across the ages is thus in accordance with a historical permeability that renders apparently distinct social formations porous to each other, and that opens up the possibility to sociologically chart these heterogeneities in an equivalent to the novel’s eponymous cloud atlas. However, as the concepts of progress and civilization are, as we have seen, ambiguously linked to both the hope for a potentially better future and the imperialist ideology of racial supremacy, so is the notion of trans-subjective overlap. Even while indubitably suggestive of a cosmopolitan ‘panhuman’ multitude, the merger of ‘souls’ is also subtly linked with one of the most abject leitmotifs of the novel: cannibalism. For sure Luisa Rey’s reception of Frobisher’s letters is a literal incorporation of ‘molecules of Robert Frobisher’s hand’, just as Frobisher himself, on discovering the missing second half of Adam Ewing’s journal, is determined to “finish gobbling it down v. soon” (479), while Cavendish, confined in the prison-like Aurora House, compares the Luisa Rey manuscript, despite all its perceived shortcomings, to welcome nourishment: “To the starving man, potato peels are haute cuisine” (374). In short: these fluidly fusing characters do actually eat each other. Thereby they partake of the topos of cannibalism that, like predacity and conviviality, slavery and cosmopolitanism, resurfaces all through the novel from Ewing’s report of the genocide of the Moriori to the recycling of dysfunctional replicants for protein ‘soap’ and junk food in the Sonmi451 episode. “The Weak are Meat the Strong do Eat” (508), runs the vulgar-Darwinist “Law of Survival” pronounced by the villainous Henry Goose, whose first appearance is that of a collector of human teeth spread across a South Pacific beach that had once been “a cannibals’ banqueting hall, yes, where the strong engorged themselves on the weak” (3). This connotation complicates the otherwise all too celebratory notion of ‘souls crossing ages’ as characters now not only link and fuse over time and space but also consume each other in virtually cannibalistic acts of reading.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies 3.1 Pastiches and Gaps Of course the trope of cannibalism activates a reflexive metatextual register as well. After all, cannibalism has frequently been deployed for the description of postmodern literature as a mode of writing that “devours selected texts and ideas of the past to both assimilate their strength and knowledge and to digest them critically” (Filimon 2013, 179). If “the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past” (Jameson 1991, 18) is, in that line of thought, a hallmark of postmodern literature, it should not come as a surprise that prominent writers like Salman Rushdie (↗ 20 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses) or Thomas Pynchon have been profiled as virtuosos in “cannibalizing the various languages, dialects and traditions” (Al-‘Azm 1994, 263), just as post-fem-

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inist performance artists “cannibalize the canon” in order to appropriate and ‘critically digest’ the masculinist legacy (Kauffmann 2003, 54). No doubt Cloud Atlas is in that respect a highly cannibalistic text that feasts on a multitude of readily available, more or less reified styles and more or less obsolete genres including the travel diary (Ewing), the confessional epistolary novel (Frobisher), the conspiracy thriller (Rey), the memoir (Cavendish), the dystopian novel (Sonmi) and the post-apocalypse ‘yarn’ (Zachry). All of these distinct narrative units are replete with intertextual resonances, allusions and quotations ‘cannibalizing the canon’ of established highbrow culture as well as various subcultural registers in so many elaborate pastiches. This holds true not only for the pieces set in established literary territory, such as the ‘Pacific Journal’ that, expectably, recalls Herman Melville and even James Cook himself, but also for the apparently unprecedented futurist sections that overtly cannibalize the shady canons of dystopian fiction: While the ‘Sonmi’ narrative clearly harks back to the tradition of fictions that, from George Orwell to Philip K. Dick and Cyberpunk, articulate anxieties with state or corporate overdetermination, Zachry’s world is that of the entropic neo-primitivism of the post-apocalypse tradition of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Mad Max or Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006). Nor does this generic and stylistic reification remain unreflected in the novel itself as characters tend to expertly comment on the texts they are consuming. Frobisher, for one, establishes the intertextual dimensions of Ewing’s journal, which, as the young composer remarks, […] puts me in mind of Melville’s bumbler Cpt. Delano in Benito Cereno, blind to all conspirators – he hasn’t spotted his trusty Doctor Henry Goose [sic] is a vampire […]. Something shifty about the journal’s authenticity  – seems too structured for a genuine diary, and its language doesn’t ring quite true – but who would bother forging such a journal, and why? (64)

No doubt the character-cum-hypercritical-reader here steps in as a surrogate for the actual reader who may or may not recognize his/her own observations, inferences and allusion-spottings from his/her reading of Ewing’s journal. As Frobisher casts the shadow of doubt on the generic ‘authenticity’ of the strange text he has discovered, the issue of the re-enacted genre gets foregrounded even more; the same holds true for the Luisa Rey potboiler that Cavendish begins to edit and gradually appreciate as “a publishable thriller after all” (373) during his imprisonment in Aurora House: “One or two things will have to go: the insinuation that Luisa Rey is this Robert Frobisher chap reincarnated, for example. Far too hippie-druggy-new age. […] But, overall, I concluded the young-hack-versus-corporate-corruption thriller had potential” (373). It could be argued that such in-your-face self-referentiality invites a reading of Cloud Atlas as one vast gimmicky finger exercise in which postmodern preoccupations with writing about writing get rehearsed ad nauseam; however, the display and self-commenting of all these dead idioms (including the future styles of the sci-fi sections) does not really exhaust itself in metafictional reflexivity but appears

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instead to articulate an acute sense of history and historicity as such that grasps “historical periods […] as styles” (Jameson 2013, 307) and not as plot elements in some grand récit. The highlighting and disputing of the period-piece character of each of the narratives (again, very much including the sci-fi sections) produces an effect of immersion (or, more claustrophobically put, incarceration) in the respective historical and cultural situation, whose limited vocabulary and ideology cannot be transcended. Or so it seems. Due to the temporal straddle that the novel’s time-travelling, ‘ages-crossing’ characters perform, they constantly rub against this impoverishing imprisonment in the here-now. Nonetheless they remain bound to the stylistic confines of ‘their’ allotted period, a confinement that is very obviously shared by them all in highly dramatized thematic situations: Ewing caged in his ‘coffin’ cabin en route from Sydney to San Francisco, Frobisher in the throes of financial debt, Rey encapsulated in her Volkswagen Beetle pushed off a bridge into the Pacific, Cavendish lured and then coerced into an old peoples’ home, Sonmi held as a slave in a subterranean junk food joint, and Zachry and his tribe trapped on a Hawaiian island with the belligerent and (needless to state) cannibalistic Kona as next-door neighbours. Read in isolation, therefore, each of these narratives will evoke claustrophobia by way of both its topicality and its style: a sense of being fettered to a constricting present from which there appears to be no escape. This, of course, is another way of naming the apparent post-historical (or more generally, anti-historical) moment of a status quo that appears to be eternal. The dramatic interruption of each but one of these narratives in mid-air, however, ensures that no continuity, no coherence and therefore no smooth transition from one narrative to the next will occur. Instead, the lacunae between them are foregrounded and thereby the absence or inaccessibility of the historical process as such whose ‘hidden abode’ is exactly the gulf between the stories. The reader’s task, then, lies in the negotiation of those gaps. Especially the transition from the present to the ‘corpocratic’ near future and from there to the far-distant post-apocalyptic world compels the reader to construct an absent history that could fill the void between ‘Cavendish’ and ‘Sonmi’, ‘Sonmi’ and ‘Zachry’. Inasmuch as the novel thus “impels us to invent as many connections and cross-references as we can think of in an ongoing process” (Jameson 2013, 303), Cloud Atlas virtually forces its readers to ‘make history’ by closing the gaps between the segments that make up this composite novel. What needs to be added is that ‘gappiness’ (a term introduced by Brian McHale in a different context; see McHale 1992, 36) is not only a conspicuous characteristic of Cloud Atlas’s macrostructure but also an internal feature of the majority of its constituent narratives, many of which are generically ‘gappy’. The journal (Ewing), the epistolary novel (Frobisher), and the interrogation minutes (Sonmi) are by definition composed of semiautonomous, more or less loosely affiliated units: the diary entry, the individual letter, the Q&A segment. Also the ‘Luisa Rey’ manuscript is conspicuously segmented, as Thomas Cavendish somewhat derisively observes: “Half-Lives” is “written […] in neat little chapteroids, doubtless with one eye on the Hollywood

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screenplay” (164). In all these instances, segmentivity is foregrounded to the effect that the text appears intensely spaced without, of course, abandoning narrative sequentiality completely. Rather, a tension between these two tendencies – segmentivity/spacing and sequentiality/timing – ensues and will be played out at all levels of the text: all the way down to the microscopic scale of the lexemes that, in the neo-primitive diction of the narrator of the central “Sloosha Crossin’” story will be perforated analogous to the segmentation of the entire novel and most of its component units: “some dusks my kin’n’bros’ll wake up the ghost girl jus’ to watch her hov’rin’n’shimm’rin’” (324–325). At this minute lexical scale the normalized smooth flow of continuous articulation and reception is interrupted but not fully disenabled by the gaps that the apostrophe marks, resulting in a “resistance of segments to get entirely dissolved into some overarching sequence of transaction” (Wiemann 2014, 59). All this, it could be argued, pushes Cloud Atlas into the ambit of poetry, whose “meanings are constructed by segmented units of a variety of sizes. The specific force of any individual poem occurs in the intricate interplay among the ‘scales’ (of size or kind of unit)” (DuPlessis 1996, 51). Poetry can then be defined as the kind of writing that is “articulated in sequenced, gapped lines and whose meanings are created by occurring in bounded units, units operating in relation to chosen pause or silence” (DuPlessis 2006, 199). This is an exact description of what in terms of story time serves as the conclusion of Cloud Atlas: At the furthermost temporal apex of the novel, the text fully reverts to poetry as Zachry’s son invites his intradiegetic listeners (as well as the reader) to: Sit down a beat or two. * Hold out your hands. * Look. (325)

3.2 Only Connect: Russian Dolls, Concertinas, Elevators None of this, however, leads to the full suspension of sequentiality: While the ‘gappy’ structure of the text foregrounds the singularity of the individual units at all levels from the apparently disjoint tributary narratives through their ‘chapteroids’ to their very graphemes, the fact remains that Mitchell’s novel all the more ‘impels us’ to only connect by way of gap negotiation. This may involve the reparation of ‘damaged’ language (the decoding of, say, “hov’rin’n’shimm’rin’” as ‘hovering and shimmering’) or the construction of non-delivered transitions from one story element to the next within the segmented narratives. However, to ‘invent’ connections between the six tributary units appears to pose serious challenges but at the same time, the text itself

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offers some explanatory options that are, significantly, non-narrative but conceptual. One of them is the concept metaphor of the Russian doll that is introduced as [o]ne model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each ‘shell’ (the present) encased inside a nest of ‘shells’ (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of ‘now’ likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future. (409)

The symmetry with which every unit is nested within a larger one that is in turn nested in the next one is certainly an apt image of the architecture of Mitchell’s novel but it is not quite clear how, as Courtney Hopf suggests, the analogy could also capture “how discourse over time is palimpsestic – new layers may be ‘painted’ on but that does not erase the layers below” (2011, 110). For it appears more accurate that the matryoshka model offers “a metaphor of encapsulation and centrality” (O’Donnell 2015, 97) that does not capture the mutual permeability that pertains between the segments and that makes Cloud Atlas a palimpsest in the first place. In this respect, a further metatextual passage that highlights the temporal and motif-specific interplay of the individual ‘voices’ of a “sextet of overlapping soloists” appears as a “fairly inescapable hint” (Jameson 2013, 303) to the structure and dynamics of Mitchell’s text as a whole: “piano, clarinet, ‘cello, flute, oboe and violin, each in its own language of key, scale and colour. In the 1st set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the 2nd, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky?” (463) The tonguein-cheek self-interrogation at the end of the quoted passage is of course not limited to Frobisher, the composer, but expands self-referentially to the text in which he appears as a character. As if it were still necessary to drive this point home, Frobisher’s sextet bears the same title as Mitchell’s novel: Cloud Atlas. Like the birthmark or the topoi of slavery and cannibalism, the apparently oxymoronic idea of “a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable […], an atlas of clouds” (389) resurfaces at the most discrepant moments in the novel, constituting one further link that impels the reader to create connections and to negotiate the gaps between units. Especially with its explicit musical associations – Fredric Jameson characterises the text as an “immense glissando through all the styles and affects of history” (2013, 312) – the cloud atlas theme ties in with one more possible meta-structural device: the notion that time is “no arrow, no boomerang, but a concertina” (370) that, rather than passing along a linear or curved vector, expands and contracts elastically. In this to-and-fro movement, past and future become interchangeable as “the ends of […] elastic moment[s] disappear into the past and the future” (448). This inverse elasticity obviously corresponds to the palindrome architecture of the novel at large, which regresses, paradoxically through the progress of the reading process, back to the beginning, so that at the moment of reading

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[…] the second part of Adam Ewing’s story, the chronological future that Zachry’s tale illustrates is in the novel’s past – that is, it is a prior reading experience, preceding the chronological past of Adam’s resumed story. From the perspective of the reader, when we are reading Zachry’s tale, Adam’s resumed story is the novel’s future. (Parker 2010, 216)

Fredric Jameson identifies this forth-and-back movement that confounds past and future as a necessary feature of the entire genre that he, with typical counter-intuitive plausibility, designates to Cloud Atlas: that of the historical novel, which “today must be seen as an immense elevator that moves us up and down in time, its sickening lifts and dips corresponding to the euphoric or dystopian mood in which we wait for the doors to open” (2013, 301). In that metaphor, Cloud Atlas “is an elevator of a novel that stops briefly at a number of disparate floors on its way to the far future” (Jameson 2013, 303); and after having arrived at that “farthest point that thought can reach” (Jameson 2013, 308) reverts back to the starting point. Jameson assigns Mitchell’s novel an acute insight into the ideological limitations under neoliberal hegemony: By taking the reader for an elevator ride into a future that can only comprise the dystopias of either world dictatorship (in the ‘Sonmi’ story) or regression to barbarism (in “Sloosha’s Crossin’”), the text points to the damaging and disempowering impoverishment of the political imagination: These two alternatives are today and for the moment the only ways in which we can imagine our future, the future of late capitalism; and it is only by shattering their twin dominion that we might conceivably be able again to think politically and productively […] to begin to think once again Utopia. (2013, 308–309)

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives With more than 500,000 print copies sold by 2014 (Habash 2014), Cloud Atlas is Mitchell’s most popular and most intensely discussed novel so far. While the book received generally positive and partly enthusiastic reviews on publication – not least from established colleagues including A. S. Byatt, Lawrence Norfolk, Dermot Bolger or Phil Henscher – its commercial success story proper sets in only after the release of the film adaptation by Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer in 2012 (see Harkvey 2012). As we have seen, Mitchell’s novel has been widely discussed as a possible epitome of the twenty-first-century novel that configures the transnational “borderless world” (Dix 2010, 105) and simultaneously transcends the perceived shortcomings of classical postmodernism. However, the novel remains controversial with regards to its political implications. For different reasons critics like Schoene, McCulloch, or O’Donnell appreciate Cloud Atlas for its commitment to cosmopolitanism and its advocacy of a ‘new sincerity’ in favour of what Theo D’Haen has dubbed the “cosmodern”: a mode of writing that affirms “the humanity of all humankind on

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a non-hierarchical, non-denominational, non-discriminatory basis [and] underwrites a truly ‘cosmic’ humanity appropriate to our new age of ‘planetarity’” (D’Haen 2013, 280). It is precisely this celebration of an increasingly dehistoricised ‘humanity’, however, that has rendered Cloud Atlas anathema for more critically inclined readers who, like Bruce Robbins or Cacey Shoop and Dermot Ryan, make out a retrogressive and conservative outlook at work here, one that under the guise of postmodernist experimentalism ushers back in an essentialist and dichotomous worldview including the return of the fantasy of natural born barbarians. It is to be hoped the ‘Future Library’, into which Mitchell has inserted himself, will in 2114 open to a less dystopian world than the one that Mitchell envisages in the futurist passages of Cloud Atlas so that Mitchell’s as yet undisclosed manuscript will find readers who may with slightly bemused incomprehension look back at the impoverished imagination of a then fortunately past age in which the full deterioration of the planet must have appeared more easily conceivable than the demise of capitalism/corpocracy. In that sense, Mitchell’s message in a bottle would combine the utopian and the dystopian: the Brechtian ‘dark-times’ plea to an unborn future generation ‘to think of us with forebearance’ with the anticipation of productive misreadings on the side of potential post-apocalyptic recipients who “sit down a beat or two” to “look” (325) at an object that emits a message “in an Old’un tongue what no’un alive und’stands nor never will” (324).

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas. London: Sceptre, 2004. --Al-‘Azm, Sadik Jalal. “The Importance of Being Earnest About Salman Rushdie.” Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie. Ed. M. D. Fletcher. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. 255–292. Barnard, Rita. “Fictions of the Global.” Novel 42.2 (2009): 207–214. Bayer, Gerd. “Perpetual Apocalypses: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and the Absence of Time.” Critique 56.4 (2015): 345–354. Beville, Maria. “Getting Past the ‘Post’: History and Time in the Fiction of David Mitchell.” (dis) placements 6.1 (2015): 1–16. Bradford, Richard. The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Childs, Peter, and James Green. “The Novels in Nine Parts.” David Mitchell: Critical Essays. Ed. Sarah Dillon. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2011. 25–47. Clayton, Jay. “Genome Time: Post-Darwinism Then and Now.” Critical Quarterly 55.1 (2013): 57–74. D’Haen, Theo. “European Postmodernism: The Cosmodern Turn.” Narrative 21.3 (2013): 271–283. Dimovitz, Scott. “The Sound of Silence: Eschatology and the Limits of the Word in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.” SubStance 44.1 (2015): 71–91.

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Dix, Hywel. Postmodern Fiction and the Break-Up of Britain. London: Continuum, 2010. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “Manifests.” Diacritics 26.3–4 (1996): 31–53. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Works. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. Filimon, Eliza Claudia. Heterotopia in Angela Carter’s Fiction: Worlds in Collision. Hamburg: Anchor Academic Press, 2013. Flood, Alison. “David Mitchell buries latest manuscript for a hundred years.” The Guardian. 30 May 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/30/david-mitchell-buries-latestmanuscript-for-a-hundred-years. (16 June 2016). Habash, Gabe. “Clocking in an #4.” Publisher’s Weekly. 15 September 2014. http://www. publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/63997-this-week-sbestsellers-september-15-2014.html. (26 May 2016). Harkvey, Mike. “Atlas Within Atlas Within.” Publisher’s Weekly. 22 October 2012. http://www. publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/54461-this-week-sbestsellers-october-22-2012.html. (26 May 2016). Hopf, Courtney. “The Stories We Tell: Discursive Identity Through Narrative Form in Cloud Atlas.” David Mitchell: Critical Essays. Ed. Sarah Dillon. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2011. 105–126. Irr, Caren. Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U. S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Iyer, Pico. “David Mitchell.” Time. 3 May 2007. http://content.time.com/time/specials/2007/ time100/article/0,28804,1595326_1595332_1616691,00.html. (29 May 2016). Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991. Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso, 2013. Joyce, James. Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988 [1922]. Kauffmann, Linda. “Cutouts in Beauty School.” Thinking the Limits of the Body. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Gail Weiss. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 39–62. Kelly, Adam. “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction.” Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays. Ed. David Hering. Los Angeles: Sideshow Press, 2010. 131–146. McCulloch, Fiona. Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction: Imagined Identities. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave, 2012. McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1992. Murphet, Julian. “The Mole and the Multiple: A Chiasmus of Character.” New Literary History 42.2 (2011): 255–276. O’Donnell, Patrick. A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Parker, Jo Allison. “David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: Of Narrative Constraints and Environmental Limits.” Time: Limits and Constraints. Ed. Jo Allison Parker et al. Leiden: Brill, 2010. 201–217. Paterson, Katie. “Future Library.” Weblog. 2015. http://www.futurelibrary.no. (25 May 2016). Robbins, Bruce. “Cosmopolitanism in Time.” English Language and Literature 61.1 (2015): 3–18. Schoene, Berthold. The Cosmopolitan Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Selisker, Scott. “The Cult and the World System: The Topoi of David Mitchell’s Global Novels.” Novel 47.3 (2014): 442–459. Shaw, Kristian. “A Unified Scene? Global Fiction in the C21.” Alluvium. June 2015. https://www. alluvium-journal.org/2015/06/26/a-unified-scene-global-fictions-in-the-c21/. (29 May 2016). Shoop, Cacey, and Dermot Ryan. “Gravid With the Ancient Future: Cloud Atlas and the Politics of Big History.” SubStance 44.1 (2015): 92–106. Wiemann, Dirk. “World-Literary Spacing: Contemporary Verse Novels Across the Anglosphere.” Across Literary and Linguistic Diversities: Essays on Comparative Literature. Ed. Madhu Sahni and Shaswati Mazumdar. Oxford: Lang, 2014. 45–62. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012 [1977].

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Worley, Sam. “Review: The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell.” Chicago Tribune. 12 September 2014. http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-prj-bone-clocks-david-mitchell-review20140912-story.html. (16 May 2016).

5.2 Further Reading Dillon, Sarah, ed. David Mitchell: Critical Essays. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2011. Harris, Paul A., ed. David Mitchell in the Labyrinth of Time. Special Issue SubStance 44.1 (2015).

Raphael Zähringer

26 China Miéville, Embassytown (2011) Abstract: The contribution discusses China Miéville’s Science Fiction novel Embassytown (2011). In the first section (Context: Author, Œuvre, Movement), after a brief overview of Miéville’s writing, it sketches the literary history of Weird Fiction and attempts to place both writer and novel in this context. Section two (Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns) focusses on Embassytown’s obsession with language and on its blend of space opera and (post)colonial notions. The third section (Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies) sheds light on the novel’s narrative strategies, most importantly its intricate design of sequential pieces and its refusal to describe the indescribable – both of which are, as will be demonstrated, again conducive to the text’s linguistic concerns. The final section (Reception and Theoretical Perspectives) provides a survey of contemporary research on Miéville’s œuvre by emphasising his exchanges with the academic world as well as the impact of fan culture attempts to discuss and visualise his work. Keywords: Weird Fiction, Science Fiction, postcolonialism, cognitive estrangement, language

1 Context: Author, Œuvre, Movement The first striking aspect about Miéville as a writer is his double-tracked career. On the one hand, he is a significant figure in the academic and political left-wing domain: besides being a member of the International Socialist Organisation and one of the editors of the Marxist journal Historical Materialism, this side of Miéville is probably best known through his PhD thesis entitled Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law (2005). On the other hand, Miéville stands as the contemporary spearhead of the so-called New Weird (see below). His consistently expanding œuvre comprises mostly novels, covering a vast range of genres (↗ 3 Genres) and literary modes, and all of them aptly demonstrate the outstanding capacities of twenty-first century fiction. His debut novel, King Rat (1998), already paved the way for Miéville’s remarkable blends of fantasy and horror set in an urban environment, thus moving away from the classical (and reactionary) modes of Tolkienian fantasy as observed in academia since Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979). His next major project was the Bas-lag trilogy (Perdido Street Station [2000]; The Scar [2002]; Iron Council [2004]) which further elaborated on notions of urban fantasy horror with a good dash of steampunk thrown into the mix. He also explored new ways of writing children’s literature in Un Lun Dun (2007) and Railsea (2012). In 2009, Miéville DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-027

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turned to the detective novel by writing and publishing The City & The City, which was awarded no less than five literary prizes and tied for a sixth while also receiving more critical acclaim from academics than any other of his works up to this point. The most obvious display of his roots in the literary Weird is Kraken (2010), a dark comedy heavily indebted to H. P. Lovecraft’s myth of Cthulhu. Embassytown (2011), deeply concerned with the impact of language on sentient species and postcolonialism alike, is Miéville’s most striking venture into the realm of SF. Additionally, he published three short story/novella collections (Looking for Jake [2005]; The Apology Chapbook [2013]; Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories [2015]). Occasionally, Miéville also moved into comics (Hellblazer #250 [1988]; Justice League #23.3 [2011]; Dial H [2012– 2013]). When reading Miéville, it very soon becomes obvious how his dedication to Marxist dialectics infuses his entire œuvre since virtually all texts, it has been argued, “offer a striking example of twenty-first century literature’s ability to imagine political alternatives at a time of crisis for leftist ideas within the political realm” (Edwards and Venezia 2015, 8). In a way, this statement also hints at the reasons why Miéville should be a part of any Handbook of the English Novel: because his works demonstrate such a vast variety of different genres seamlessly woven together while simultaneously “invit[ing] us to reflect upon the role of fiction within the broader public sphere and to consider what it is that the contemporary literary imagine might achieve, which such non-fictional discourses as philosophy and political debate are unable to articulate” (Edwards and Venezia 2015, 8). Weird Fiction as a thriving genre has been aptly described by Miéville himself in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. Its origins are usually traced back to the publication of the Weird Tales pulp magazine in 1923, but Miéville also hints at an even earlier start in the late nineteenth century. H. P. Lovecraft is usually considered to be the genre’s most influential representative, but it includes dozens of writers associated with the Weird Tales cycle or its ideas, for instance Clark Ashton Smith, Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, Arthur Machen, or M. R. James, to name but a few. “Weird Fiction is usually, roughly, conceived of as a rather breathless and generically slippery macabre fiction, a dark fantastic (‘horror’ plus ‘fantasy’) often featuring non-traditional alien monsters (thus plus ‘science fiction’)” (Miéville 2009, 510). The result, according to Miéville, is the genre’s “oscillation between serious, abstract ideas and a vivid postpulp narrative” (Naimon 2011, 59). Thus, Weird Fiction’s vibrant productivity on the level of genre is already made transparent and problematized at the same time: it is frequently stated by reviewers and researchers alike that Weird Fiction in general, and Miéville’s Weird Fiction in particular, transcends genre (see Manglis 2011, n. pag.). Certainly, the Weird is fed by horror, fantasy, Science Fiction, steampunk etc. – but according to Miéville, that is not really the point. Genres, according to him, as helpful and traditional as they are, have always been feeding on each other and, more importantly, this is primarily the case because genres always impose fairly blurry categories on texts; thus, writers of Weird Fiction embrace the very basic idea of their mode of writing “as a tradition that glories in that blurriness” (Naimon 2011,

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64) instead of tearing down barriers which only need to be taken down because they have been established somewhat arbitrarily in the first place. Thus, Weird Fiction, even in its beginnings (and potentially peaking in Miéville’s works), already anticipated the post-Suvinian liberating moment which most prominently effaced the hierarchical imbalance between fantasy and Science Fiction (see Edwards and Venezia 2015, 16 and Freedman 2015, 143–154). Miéville rather takes issue with his work being described as transcending genre in the sense that his work is not, say, Science Fiction proper, but Science Fiction evolving into literary (as in high-brow realist/modernist/ postmodernist) fiction, his point being that the fantastic is, in various ways, much more capable to “pick at the skin of the real world” (Naimon 2011, 63) due to its specific strategies of estrangement used as a productive testing ground for discussing actual-world issues, be they political, philosophical, theological, economic, or epistemological. In this context, the fantastic in general and Miéville’s œuvre in particular can be closely associated with Michael Löwy’s concept of critical irrealism  – a mode of writing attempting to come to terms with actual-world problems, but on the grounds of an irrealist setting which is nevertheless represented in a realist fashion (see Löwy 2010). In terms of poetics, Weird Fiction primarily functions as “a placeholder for the unrepresentable” (Miéville 2008, 111) and, simultaneously, as an escape from the known. Be it the inconceivable idea of an entity such as Cthulhu or the impossibility to fully describe and grasp the appearance of the Hosts in Embassytown: virtually all monsters and entities of Weird Fiction “are a radical break with anything from a folkloric tradition”, a break most obvious in “Weird Fiction’s obsession with the tentacle, a limb-type absent from European folklore and the traditional Gothic” (Miéville 2009, 512). Not only are the monsters different from their European predecessors – the inability to fully describe them also emphasises humankind’s incapability to conceptualise the greater cosmic (un)design of the sublime which cannot be understood: “The focus is on awe, and its undermining of the quotidian. This obsession with numinosity under the everyday is at the heart of Weird Fiction” (Miéville 2009, 510), and it is often present as part of the texts’ narrative strategies which struggle with or celebrate the Weird’s underlying epistemological insecurity by asking a very fundamental question: How does one describe the indescribable in words? In this basic framework, scholars tend to assert a shift in focus from the Haute Weird spanning from 1880 to 1940 (see Miéville 2009, 510) and the New Weird, which builds on its predecessors while also becoming indebted to 1960s and 1970s Science Fiction, horror fiction of the 1980s, and the cultural movement of Surrealism (see Gordon 2003, 357). The New Weird, it is argued, maintains the “sublime terror of early pulp monsters” while “mixing it up with an updated sensibility that had become fascinated with the monsters themselves, in addition to the supernatural terror they inspired” (Edwards and Venezia 2015, 2–3). It is exactly due to this fascination with the monster itself, in conjunction with Miéville’s stunning “taxonomic playfulness” (Edwards and Venezia 2015, 1) aiming at representing life forms so alien that language itself seems to capit-

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ulate in its descriptive function, that Embassytown (rather than the highly decorated The City & The City) has been chosen for inclusion in this handbook.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns Embassytown is set in a far future in which the human race is still eager to colonise new planets. The novel’s main protagonist and sole narrator is Avice Benner Cho, a female human who lives on the rather recently colonised planet Arieka located at the rim of human expansion. There, a small colony named Embassytown has been established within a larger alien city hub inhabited by the native Ariekei (often referred to as ‘Hosts’ by the Embassytowners). Despite Arieka being quite far away from the rest of human civilisation it is, due to is strategic position (granting access to further unexplored systems) and the Hosts’s biorigging technology (including living implants, data chips, and breathing architecture), of vital importance to the elusive multi-planetary faction called Bremen located on Dagostin of which Arieka is a colony. Human existence on Arieka is completely dependent on a series of biorigging products (including so-called aeoli which enable humans to breathe the planet’s otherwise poisonous air) and, of course, on the Hosts’s consent. Interracial contact, despite this vital exchange, is only possible via Ambassadors, genetically created pairs of human twins, because the Language of the Ariekei (capitalised throughout the novel text) is so utterly different from any other language that communication is virtually impossible. The power relations between Ariekei and humans are turned around as the Ariekei become addicted to Bremen’s most recent Ambassador’s EzRa’s way of speaking Language. The spreading addiction brings about the slow collapse of interracial relations as the Hosts neglect their work which is necessary to maintain human existence on the planet; the mounting resistance on the Hosts’s part ultimately turns into a revolution by a splinter of group of Hosts who try to free themselves and their fellows from their addiction by tearing off their so-called fanwings (the limb/organ roughly equivalent to the human ear) – and by eliminating the humans, who brought it to their planet after all.

2.1 Language and language Primarily, Embassytown is a novel about various aspects of language: referentiality, figural speech, instrumentalisation of language and the resulting means of control and repression, but it also negotiates language as a tool of power, resistance and progress. These major notions hinge on the basic communication problem between the Embassytowners and the Hosts. While the humans in the novel seem to speak a – by the readers’ standards – rather straightforward language called Anglo-Ubiq,

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“evidently a far-future descendant of the modern English that we know” (Freedman 2015, 116), the Hosts’s Language is unique – in fact, it is so unique that it defies the very basic principle of any human language which is provided by Miéville in the form of a quote by Walter Benjamin (taken from “Language as Such and on the Language of Man” from 1916) preceding the story: “The word must communicate something (other than itself)”. This is exactly what words in Language do not do. Language is a language that does not signify; thus, only things which actually exist can be conceived of. Here, Miéville delves deeply into linguistic theory: beyond the basic question to what extent language determines thought (most prominent in the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; see Nediger 2014, 21–22), Language is primarily influenced by notions of reference and signification, the cornerstones of modern linguistics as established by Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the most influential linguists of the twentieth century. According to de Saussure, there is a fragile stance “both between language and extra-linguistic reality, and within language itself” (Freedman 2015, 106). De Saussure, in Course in General Linguistics (1966 [1916]), describes the relationship between the word itself as a linguistic sign (say, the word “tea”) and the referent the word refers to. As emphasised ever since in linguistics, the relation between these two items is arbitrary: the word “tea” might as well refer to something completely different, and tea might be described by the word “car”. There is no inherent, fixed relation between sign and referent – just the one English native speakers, by convention, have agreed on. However, the sign itself is a bit more complex. It consists of the signifier (the written, spoken, or drawn representation) and the signified (the mental concept associated with the signifier in the human mind). And again, the relation is arbitrary: the three letters and the two sounds making up the word “tea” do not in any way inherently refer to the mental concept of tea: “Like referentiality, signification is held together by a structure of differentials” (Freedman 2015, 107). Additionally, as hinted at by Carl Freedman, language in itself is not too stable. Most prominently in the deconstruction of de Saussure’s theory by Jacques Derrida, the (allegedly) fixed relationship between a sign and a referent is only possible because the sign is distinguished from all others signs (“tea” refers to something different from what “car” refers to). Even worse, the meaning of any word can only be explained by turning to other words, which then again use other words for definition and description. In short, “signification flickers equivocally” since “[i]n Derrida’s terminology, there is no transcendental signified that controls or holds in place the process of signification” (Freedman 2015, 108). Thus, Language in Embassytown even goes beyond Derrida because what is at stake in Language is “not the deconstruction of the distinction between signifier and signified but the absence of that distinction altogether and tout court” (Freedman 2015, 117). “Language – with the capital L – is thus without polysemy: each word can mean one thing and one thing alone, since meaning derives not from a system of differences à la Saussure, but from the one-to-one correspondence of original thought/thing and word” (Vint 2015, 53).

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All these realisations display both the drawbacks as well as the assets of human language: On the one hand, the equivocal flickering of language inevitably leads to misunderstandings, miscommunication, lies, and arguments about what any given word should mean, in which context it should or should not be used, and who is in charge of controlling the meaning of words. On the other hand, though, a flickering language also means (!) that it bears a lot of potential for creativity (artistic combinations, puns, expressing something in different ways) as well as for evolution or at least productive change, since speakers of a ‘living’ language will always abandon certain words which have become unnecessary and coin new ones in order to describe newly emerging phenomena in the world that demand signification. The Hosts’ Language, in its purest and most static form, does not offer these possibilities. One character in particular, a linguist named Scile, is fascinated by Language’s purity and is eager to preserve it. He “praises Language as the only mode of discourse of which Hegel’s (or, as he puts it, ‘some philosopher’s’) romantic-idealist assertion is true: ‘The human voice can apprehend itself as the sounding of the soul itself’” (Freedman 2015, 117). While his wife Avice, the novel’s main protagonist and narrator, mocks Language as “the language of God. The Ariekei are angels. Scile’s their messenger, maybe. And now it’s the fall” (265),1 this is exactly Scile’s opinion. The religious vocabulary used also alludes to biblical notions of humankind’s divine language before the Fall of Man (see Freedman 2015, 121) – and Scile, it seems, against the backdrop of humankind’s fall, is trying to prevent the Hosts’ fall from linguistic divinity. However, the novel demonstrates that, at the time of the events described in Embassytown, Language has already begun to change, and that Scile is fighting a battle already lost. Even his murder of Surl Tesh-echer, one of the most progressive Hosts who indulge in Anglo-Ubiq’s introduction of lies and figural speech to the Ariekei, is ultimately insufficient to prevent Language’s progression from reference to signification. This progression hinges on two developments, one of them being imported through the Hosts’ contact to humans (and, possibly, other species speaking signifying languages), the other being a feature apparently deeply embedded into Language before the first humans landed on Arieka. First, the Hosts are fascinated by the idea of lying available in language – so fascinated, in fact, that they celebrate the principle of lying. The Hosts hold so-called Festivals of Lies – or, as Avice calls them with a brief digression into Welsh, “eisteddfods of mendacity” (96) – where the most daring Hosts prod Language’s boundaries by trying to lie (i.e. to state something that is untrue) in a Language that does conceptually deny this very idea (because it only allows to conceive of things that actually exist). Thus, “the lie is so exciting because the listeners simultaneously believe it (because what is spoken in Language is, almost by definition, true) and disbelieve it (because they independently know it to be false),

1 Unless otherwise indicated, page references in brackets without further designation refer to Miéville 2011.

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which produces an extreme form of cognitive dissonance” (Nediger 2014, 31). Several techniques are used, most of which can rather be treated as approximations of genuine lies without ever getting there. For example, a common technique is to either speak so slowly that the words are barely understood as belonging together; the opposite strategy is “quick-lying” (149): To speak so quickly that the lie comes out too fast for the speaker to realise it before it is out. While these only come close to being proper lies, they at least hint at the possibility of lying in Language because of “the fact that these noises can be heard as untruths by the listening Hosts” (Freedman 2015, 121). The truly pioneering lie, though, is performed by the aforementioned Surl Tesh-echer in a three-step sequence. He starts with the utterance “Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much of certain things”, which he then repeats while dropping the end of the sentence: “Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much” (148); ultimately, the Host reduces the utterance to an outright lie: “Before the humans came we didn’t speak” (149), which is enough to cause a riot at the Festival. The second transition of Language into signification, though, started much earlier, and it is bound to how the Hosts themselves develop Language. “In Language, with the capital L, words are the things to which they point and the only way to make something speakable is to make it exist” (Vint 2015, 52). Therefore, the Hosts indulge in the creation of similes by means of performance, usually with the help of Embassytowners, and it is a great honour to be part of or embody a simile. Similes, of course, are possible in Language because “the simile is the one figure of rhetoric that does not assert a literal truth. The simile simply asserts that one thing is like another” (Freedman 2015, 119). Avice, the main protagonist, was made a simile in her childhood by being subject to the following performance: “There was a human girl who in pain ate what was given her in an old room built for eating in which eating had not happened for a time” (28), which is later shortened to “the girl who ate what was given her”. Thus, the Hosts are then able to use this simile in another context: X is like the girl who ate what was given her. Similarly, other humans also become similes; in at least one case, the simile is in simple present, the result being that the act of “making do” (134) has to be repeated on a regular basis so the simile can continue to exist: “the man who swims with fishes every week” (124). As the story progresses, Avice becomes dissatisfied with being a simile and, in order to become a metaphor (see 345), she pushes Language further toward signification. It is an extremely exhausting process for the first Host (called “Spanish Dancer” by Avice) to understand and speak figural utterances in Language  – but in the end, the way is paved for an entirely new conceptual grasp on (and understanding of) the world, the trigger being that metaphors in particular and figural language in general depend on the aforementioned flickering relationship between signifier and signified.

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2.2 Two Mouths, One Mind Besides the fact that human languages and Language are so different with regard to referentiality and signification, there is another serious problem for any cross-species communication: The Hosts have two mouths, and both mouths are necessary for speaking Language. More to the point, these two mouths need to speak two different utterances simultaneously with one mind behind both utterances. This ‘divergent stereo’ is the reason why Ambassadors need to be created and trained in order to make contact: a singular human is, after sufficient training, able to understand Language without too much effort (see 58–59); two ordinary humans may be able to speak with two mouths, but they are unable to convey the underlying, unifying idea since they are thinking (and speaking) with two independent minds. In fact, Hosts themselves are unable to understand recordings of their own utterances because any utterance “needs a mind behind it” (63). In contrast, the genetically created Ambassador twins come as close to two minds thinking as one as possible. How does one represent a language spoken by two mouths simultaneously in narrative fiction? Embassytown cleverly employs mathematical fractions as a very stunning strategy of graphic representation. The name Surl Tesh-echer, when spoken in Language, is expressed as

surl , the numerator being referred to as “Cut” while tesh echer

the denominator is called the “Turn” (64). In itself, this attempt to represent an utterly alien language in which lying is impossible ties in with SF’s more general, Suvinian strategy of cognitive estrangement of language as we know and describe it. Thus, “the aesthetic project of Embassytown is to make this impossibility into what Aristotle would call a ‘probable impossibility’ […], one that is delineated with such plausibility as to induce a quasi-Coleridgean suspension of disbelief in the reader” (Freedman 2015, 110). In terms of genre, this attempt solidifies Embassytown as space opera at its best because it “tackle[s] cognitive issues that could not be handled, or handled so well, in any other kind of fiction” (Freedman 2015, 112). Furthermore, once the Hosts cannot only use figural language but also learn other languages since they understood the basics of signification, the representation in fractions also elucidates the Hosts’ new options to creatively play with words. Especially Spanish Dancer (better:

spanish ), the Host closest to Avice, displays the Hosts’ dancer

never-ending craving for developing Language, of which the similes were only the most humble beginning. Being asked whether it regrets having learned to lie, it ambig-

I regret  nothing ” (403). Avice is even more pleased by Spanish DancI regret   metaphor ”, er’s playful variations of the Anglo-Ubiq word “metaphor” not simply as “ metaphor lie that   truths truthing ” or “ ” (395), which adroitly sums up the basic concept of but as “ lie that   truths lie

uously answers: “

the metaphor stating a lie which nevertheless points at a truth. In more grandiose terms: “Spanish Dancer has thus arrived at what, on earth, has always been – at least since Aristotle’s refutation of Plato’s attack on mimesis – the classic justification for

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fiction: That it departs from truth in the literal sense only to tell the truth in some more indirect, more complex, and more profound way” (Freedman 2015, 125). The most striking use of mathematical fractions, however, occurs at the very end of the novel as the meaning of “Embassytown” itself has changed for both humans and hosts. While before, Embassytown referred to the human enclave within the Ariekei city, it now comprises the entire urban area, and this new sense of unity and commu-

town embassy ”, “ ” (here, the former, established fissures are town embassy embassytown ” (405). still visible graphically) – or, most aptly, as “ embassytown

nity is expressed as “

2.3 Postcolonialism at the End of the Galaxy Embassytown’s profound exploration of the fundamentals of language (and Language) is, on the story level, embedded in a more typical action-adventure of a small, outnumbered colony on a distant planet fighting against wave after wave of alien attackers who try to wipe the colony off the map. This situation, as mentioned earlier, is brought about by the larger frame narrative of Embassytown’s existence as a colony of Bremen. While usually Embassytown breeds its own Ambassadors (a fact which ensures the colony’s exceptional position and autonomy), EzRa is sent to Arieka from Bremen to break the town’s monopoly. Direct access to the Hosts would enable Bremen to exploit Arieka’s massive supply of biorigging technology without Embassytown as an intermediary. Thus, in a colonial context the Hosts can be read as an allusion to earlier imaginations of noble natives uncontaminated by the effects of civilisation (or alternatively, as the ultimate ‘other’, existing in an essentialised opposition to the humanly known; see Sarkowsky and Schulze-Engler 2012, 302), Bremen can be read as the colonial master nation, and Embassytown functions as a peculiar in-between colony having contact to both sides, its major asset being its unique Ambassadors. Against the hope of Bremen’s executives, EzRa turns out be an imperfect attempt to copy local Ambassadors, and their slight imperfection in mind and voice proves to be so irritating and fascinating for the Hosts that they get addicted to EzRa’s voice. Very soon, the addiction spreads and turns the Ariekei into desperate junkies constantly hungry for new words which are fed to them in public speeches and, after Ez’s murder of Ra, are also passed around in the form of recordings because there is no new/genuine material anymore. A growing number of Hosts, though, is trying to fight the addiction by tearing off their and other Hosts’ fanwings so that they become unable to hear the painful pleasures brought about by EzRa’s speeches. Soon, this group of rebels is called the Absurd  – a fairly ambiguous name: the prefix ‘Ab’ itself primarily refers to the utter alterity of these muted and mutilated Hosts out for a kill as a group while being unable to communicate with each other (obviously, they cannot speak to each other anymore, and Language does not feature a writing system either). Thus, ‘Ab’ is also

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strongly linked with Miéville’s aesthetics of the Weird as something that ‘has never been known’ (in contrast to the rather suppressed and re-emerging notion of the uncanny; see Tranter 2012, 424). On the other hand, the syllable ‘surd’ is a pun on the Latin word surdus for ‘deaf’ (see Tranter 2012, 425). As their numbers grow, the Absurd as the ‘deaf who have never been known because they are so utterly alien’ start to close in on Embassytown and its human inhabitants, who can only expect belated and half-hearted support from their colonial Bremen masters. Luckily, the revolution is brought to an end by Avice and her ragtag group of likeminded individuals: shortly before the ultimate assault of the Absurd, Avice, in the aforementioned linguistic revolution, manages to teach metaphorical speech to the Host Spanish Dancer, who is then able to communicate with the Absurd and start ‘The Parley’ (as indicated by the title of Part Eight, 347). However, in order to understand Spanish Dancer, a second linguistic or mental revolution is necessary: the Absurd, in absence of their fanwings, start to use their giftwings for communication; obviously, a rebel army needs some means of communication in order to be a functioning army in the first place – and the Absurd army’s attacks are performed with ‘freakish precision’ (344) enabled by their invention of body language: They were communicating: there was no other explanation for such efficient murder. Languageless, they still needed and made community, though they might not have known that’s what they were doing […]. I’d seen them gesticulate. Their commandos or commanders indicating with their giftwings. The Absurd had invented pointing. With the point they’d conceived a that. They’d given the jag of the body, the out-thrust limb, power to refer. That that was the key. From it had followed other soundless words. That. That? No, not that: that. (344)

By pointing, signification enters Language beyond Spanish Dancer’s transition from similes to metaphors. Language is thus freed from its rigid conceptual constraints as soon as the deictic element “that” starts to soften the formerly rock-solid relation between word and referent, between signifier and signified: Each word of Language meant just what it meant. Polysemy or ambiguity were impossible and with them most tropes that made other languages languages at all. But thatness faces every way: it’s flexible because it’s empty, a universal equivalent. That always means and not that other, too. […] It was base and present tense. But its initial single word was actually two: that and not-that. And from that tiny and primal vocabulary, the motor of that antithesis spun out other concepts: me, you, others. (344)

Now that the Absurd have found a signifying way of communication, another barrier falls, too. Before, they were unable to identify sounds produced by humans as language at all  – but the concept of thatness lets them see that humans can also use thatness. The Absurd begin to recognise human speech as communication and, as a consequence, humans as a sentient species worth a diplomatic parley in the first place.

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As pointed out by Nediger, Embassytown’s overall obsession with language is also striking in the context of colonialism and postcolonial studies because “[d]etailed descriptions of language are often conspicuously absent from the various non-fictional accounts of colonial encounters we have available to us” (Nediger 2014, 19) – which is quite surprising with regard to postcolonialism’s “writing back paradigm [which generally] sees literature in terms of poststructuralist accounts of language and literature, for example by stressing the necessary indeterminacy of language produced by the ambiguous relationship between signifier and signified [!]” (Sarkowsky and Schulze-Engler 2012, 307). And even then, issues of language are hardly ever presented in such depth as in Miéville’s novel. The reason for Embassytown’s highly productive engagement with language in a (post)colonial context stems from its unifying but nevertheless ambiguous ending: the colonised Hosts do not remain the pure, ‘noble savages’ they had been, and the colonising Embassytowners do not stay the heroic or greedy occupiers they may have started out as. On the one hand, the story can be read as a positive process of cultural formation in the sense of postcolonialist transculturality (see Sarkowsky and Schulze-Engler 2012, 309; ↗ 5 The Burden of Representation): Communication enables the aforementioned new sense of community, expressed in the creation of the new double word

embassytown , and this new sense of embassytown

community can be read as a new “openness of a cultural in-between [which] produces unexpected effects that fundamentally question the possibility of fixed boundaries between cultures” (Sarkowsky and Schulze-Engler 2012, 309). On the other hand, the price to be paid, especially by the Hosts, is high. Signification has torn down language barriers and enabled contact, communication, and community, but it also irrevocably changed Language – from Scile’s point of view, Language’s essence itself has been destroyed. The question then is whether the advent of signification in Language also leads to a succumbing of the Hosts’ culture and identity to the colonisers’ because arguably, changing Language strips away their singularity and replaced it with human ways of thinking as Arieka is absorbed by the epistemology of the spreading human empire. In the novel, the Fall of Language and the new sense of unity uneasily hover next to each other. In this “morally opaque tentacular” (Miéville 2008, 111), the connection to the overall conception of Weird Fiction is highlighted again: In this sense, the Weird may be understood as the literary equivalent of breach: the moment when disparate and wholly incompatible entities are yoked together into a bastardized assemblage which cannot be reconciled into any form of union, but jostle uneasily. Such a breach transgresses taxonomies, linguistic parameters, species boundaries, and philosophical precepts. It seeks to name new conjunctions through a process of lexical articulation […]. (Edwards and Venezia 2015, 14)

Such an understanding of Weird Fiction in general and Embassytown in particular reveals the full potential of the genre and of Miéville as a writer – beyond providing

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stunning stories and characters, the playful prodding of genre boundaries, and the implementation of political and philosophical discourse into narrative fiction.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies Embassytown is exclusively told by Avice Benner Cho in homodiegetic mode. On Arieka, she occupies an intricate in-between position: as a simile, she is recognised and appreciated by the Hosts; on the other hand, while she is technically a commoner, her former occupation as a far-travelled immerser (an interstellar navigator) also grants her a privileged position among human administrators and Ambassadors alike (see Freedman 2015, 124). Being very familiar with various customs from other planets as well as being a child of Embassytown is also reflected in the way she mediates her story, and it is a thin line between providing information to unknowing earthling readers and not elaborating on certain things because they are obvious to Avice and do not need specification. Miéville himself aptly describes the narrative technique as “a kind of memoir of somebody who inhabits a world that she takes for granted […]. You have to – I hope – glean your own sense of what these things look like, sort of behind the back of the words themselves” (Naimon 2011, 61). Terms such as terretech, biorigging, shiftparents, or aeoli need to be decoded without further explanation by the narrator and start to make more and more sense as one progresses through the story; thus, Avice’s narration is in tune with Embassytown’s overarching contemplation of how language works. The novel opens – as most of Miéville’s texts do – with a puzzling sequence in medias res: Here, it is most obvious to what extent Avice takes things for granted as she throws the reader right into the arrival of EzRa, the “impossible new Ambassador” (4) without explaining the significance of their arrival, herself as a character, or the fact that the story is going to take place at the corner of no and where in the galaxy. Embassytown thus denies the reader guided access to the story world and its characters in order “to avoid the cumbersome and boring task of first explaining that world (in some sort of encyclopedic preview or purview)” that can occasionally be found in the fantastic according to Moylan (2000, 6). This strategy is an intended disconnect or “culture shock” which again ties in with SF’s notion of estrangement: At first, the fictional world of Embassytown is presented as bewildering and fragmentary, but this way of introduction functions as a “productive hermeneutic” nevertheless (Naimon 2011, 60) because the irruption of particularities proves to be much more engaging than the aforementioned formalising and totalising strategy of immediately providing the full picture (“In the year XXXX, the interstellar Bremen Empire was threatened by…”). The text takes the reader by the hand while simultaneously forcing him/her to leave the comfort zone of common narrative practice. As in any ambitious SF text,

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[t]he generically informed reader of such a text therefore learns the strange new world not by way of a condensed reality briefing but rather by absorbing and reflecting upon pieces of information that titrate into a comprehensible pattern, by which the reader subsequently “makes sense” of the plot and character development unfolding within that alternative spacetime. (Moylan 2000, 6)

This narrative strategy of sequential pieces also functions as the novel’s crucial structural element. Right after the short opening, a section called “Proem: The Immerser” spends three chapters to inform the reader about Avice’s childhood (the chapter is titled ‘0.1’), her becoming a simile (0.2), and finally becoming an immerser (0.3). The decimals are only used in the Proem, and one might wonder at first about their function; a quick answer would be that readers need to take these three preparatory steps to tackle the first part of the story (Part One: ‘Income’). However, the arrangement is a bit more complex, and it depends on another aspect that might appear to be irritating at first: That is, one might wonder about the necessity of elaborating on Avice’s career as an immerser when interplanetary travel itself does not play a significant role in the novel since virtually the entire story is set on one single planet. And yet, the insistence on immersion is part and parcel of the overall idea of active reader involvement. In the fictional universe of Embassytown, one distinguishes between the so-called ‘immer’ (the German word for ‘always’) and the ‘manchmal’ (German for ‘sometimes’). The former is either read as “what an earlier science-fiction tradition […] often called hyperspace: a space that exists differently and more capaciously than the mundane Newtonian space we know (which in Embassytown is called the manchmal”) (Freedman 2015, 114) or as a “poetic and metaphorical […] subspace” (Wolfe 2011, n. pag.). The exact configuration of ‘immer’ and ‘manchmal’ is hard to pin down, as Avice explains: “The immer’s reaches don’t correspond at all to the dimensions of the manchmal, this space where I live. The best we can do is say that the immer underlies or overlies, infuses, is a foundation, is langue of which our actuality is a parole, and so on” (34). Being immersed into the immer by certain mental techniques, immersers are able to navigate spaceships through this space, thus reducing the vast ‘sublux’ (slower than light – 33) distances between planets in the manchmal. Besides the obvious linguistic reference which again demonstrates Embassytown’s obsession with language – “the universe as a kind of deep-structured grammar, and a kind of foreshadowing of the novel’s central themes” (Wolfe 2011, n. pag.) – the relationship between manchmal/actuality and immer/hyperreality also points to the greater significance of literature in general and SF in particular. The manchmal is just as inevitably intertwined with the immer as our reading of texts “underlies or overlies, infuses, is a foundation, is langue of which our actuality is parole”. The exact relations may be undecipherable, but our world is deeply influenced by (and a crucial part of) the greater and boundless second-order hyperreality of fiction  – and every sometimes (‘manchmal’), whenever we pick up a book, we are made aware of the immer of literature. In this context, SF and the fantastic at large prove to be most valuable since

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they stage their fictionality outright while insisting on Löwy’s critical irrealism. Thus, the figure of Avice as an immerser and the three introductory sections of the novel’s Proem come full circle: Avice as the main narrator needs to immerse herself while travelling through the immer so the readers can in turn leave their actual-world manchmal and become immersers themselves – immersed in the immer of which Embassytown is a most remarkable part. After the Proem and the resulting immersion, all following chapters are titled without decimals; however, the narrative now distinguishes between ‘Formerly’ and ‘Latterday’ chapters. The latter, starting with ‘Latterday 1’, pick up from the opening, thus providing recent events since EzRa’s arrival. Conversely, Formerly chapters shed light on the more distant past (thus assuming a supportive feedback-loop function) and take their cue from the Proem sections. The end of Part Three (subtitled ‘Like As Not’), then, coincides with the tenth and last Formerly chapter. In concordance with Moylan’s assertion of SF’s textual ‘bit-by-bit’ strategy, the reader is now ready to fully engage with the actual story told in the six following parts, all set in the Latterday and presented in chronological order. Another important feature of Embassytown’s narrative design deserves a few words: its occasional refusal to fully describe the ineffable. Beyond the struggle of representing and writing about Language as something incomprehensible to the human mind, two further features stand out in this regard: the utterly nebulous description of Avice’s becoming a simile, and the novel’s overall inability to convey what the Hosts look like. As stated in the introduction, questions of how to (not) describe the indescribable against the backdrop of SF’s cognitive estrangement are probably the most pressing concern of Weird Fiction in general. On the one hand, of course, the task seems quite impossible: How, for instance, can a human being writing in a signifying human language adequately represent a language that is not only non-human and non-signifiying, but also non-existent? Miéville himself is quite aware of the problem and admits that “it’s literally impossible. If you are a writer who happens to be a human, I think it’s definitionally beyond your ken to describe something truly inhuman” (Staggs 2011, n. pag.). Yet, the mere attempt – in tune “with the Aristotelian idea of a probable impossibility” (Freedman 2015, 120) – is worth the effort because it can produce remarkable results. In Miéville’s words: “the very asymptotic aspiration is very exciting. You can play games  – you can imply consciousness beyond ours, you can hint at things obliquely, you can not [sic] say too much […]. I don’t think you can succeed, but I think you might just fail pretty wonderfully” (Staggs 2011, n. pag.). Beyond this very pragmatic basic idea, the somewhat underrated charm of describing the indescribable seems to hinge on the ambiguity of the phrase “you cannot say too much”: of course, one cannot say too much about, for example, the Hosts’ appearance because they are non-existent, so one is literally unable to describe them adequately – but at the same time, one has the liberty of not having to say too much either, and this insistence on obliqueness is Weird Fiction’s most compelling line of thought.

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To elaborate on the non-description of the Hosts, the most detailed or coherent description provided in the novel is the following: “We thought of Ariekei in terms of stuff from an antique world – we looked at our Hosts and saw insect-horse-coral-fan things. Those were chimeras of our own baggage” (141). The problem is a fairly substantial one, and it is again tied to linguistics: it may be possible to say (in a striking inversion of the Hosts’ obsession with simile making) that parts of the Hosts look like parts of an insect, others like parts of a horse, and so on – but it does not help too much. Not because the overall composition looks like a hard-to-describe chimera, a wild accumulation of different body parts, but because the body of a Host is not that of a chimera, and because the body of a Host does not have insectoid parts. The Hosts are aliens with unique alien bodies which only appear chimerical or insectoid to us, and all attempts to describe them by means of comparison to what we humans know from our “antique” world are only desperate attempts at approximation weighted down by the baggage of our own languages’ borders. Even if we had or invented a word for what the Hosts look like, it would only join the arbitrary, open-ended play of signifiers and signifieds which do not hold any fixed meaning. And yet, any oblique or playful attempt to (not) pin down what cannot be expressed in words is part and parcel of Weird Fiction’s epistemological insecurity. In Scile’s words: “Now, granted, […] words can’t actually be referents, that I grant you, there’s the tragedy of language, but our asymptotic efforts at deploying them aren’t nothing either” (32). At the same time, Embassytown’s elusive descriptions of the Hosts in particular invite its readers to participate in the imaginative game of probable impossibility – and, as described in the section on reception and theoretical perspectives, they also trigger very concrete results as readers start to visualise what the Hosts look like in their heads. The performance that turns Avice into “the girl who ate what was given her” is an equally compelling example of Embassytown’s agenda of the indescribable. Avice herself starts to describe the act of becoming a simile as follows: “What occurred in that crumbling once-dining room wasn’t by any means the worst thing I’ve ever suffered, or the most painful, or the most disgusting. It was quite bearable. It was, however, the least comprehensible event that had or has ever happened to me. I was surprised how much that upset me” (26). No details are provided – the reader is not informed how Avice was hurt, what she had to eat et cetera. The incomprehensibility of the simile performance is tied to Avice being a little girl at this time, and since she as the main protagonist might simply not fully have understood what was going on, it makes sense to leave the readers in the dark, too. Furthermore, Avice herself tried to distance herself from the performance: “I know now to call what I did then dissociating. I watched it all, myself included” (27). Her insistence on watching indicates that there is an event worth narrating which nevertheless, due to her status as an uninvolved bystander, defies the act of narration. Beyond these vague statements, she only mentions how the Hosts spoke during the preparation of the performance and how she was waiting for it to be over. According to Tranter, the events at the restaurant amount to “a disturbing lacuna at the center of the story, a trauma that refuses

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narration” (Tranter 2012, 423) – and therefore to a trauma that unfolds its terrifying, oblique awe mostly in the reader’s mind triggered by the non-description’s obscurity. However, in contrast to the comparatively playful openness of the Hosts’s appearance, Miéville’s non-narration of Avice’s becoming a simile also points towards a more bitter conclusion. Of course, readers want to know ‘what happened’  – but it may not always be productive to be greedy for narrative. In Miéville’s own words: “the notion that it’s obviously good [to be ‘hardwired for story’] is just odd and question-begging. What if it’s one of the great tragedies of humankind that we’re hooked on stories” – just as the Hosts are hooked on EzRa’s voice? “It’s certainly the case that narrative involves a winnowing down of the complexity of reality, a subjective and thus inevitably political/ideological narrowing” (Tranter 2012, 432). Thus, a certain wariness or scepticism about the possibilities, limits, and basic functions of narrative and fiction in an extremely complex reality, as a counterpoint to its celebratory pulp origins, finds its way into Weird Fiction’s poetics as well.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Miéville’s Marxist background has primarily and unsurprisingly spawned research taking the same angle. The most influential journal in this regard is Extrapolation, which also published a special edition solely dedicated to Miéville’s works in 2009. While monographs on contemporary authors generally have a hard time providing a full picture, Carl Freedman’s Art and Idea in the Novels of China Miéville (2015) discusses the majority of Miéville’s œuvre (covering all novels from King Rat to Embassytown and his PhD while leaving out the comics as well as the short stories) against the backdrop of  – as suggested by the title  – art and idea as crucial categories of Marxist dialectics. In the same year, a second volume containing a series of essays was published (China Miéville: Critical Essays, edited by Caroline Edwards and Tony Venezia); most of these essays originated from the first conference solely dedicated to Miéville’s work (Weird Council: An International Conference on the Writing of China Miéville, 2012) at which the author himself was also present. Thus, Miéville stands out as a writer who is quite at ease about sharing his thoughts with the academic world, as the considerable number of interviews with scholars, published in academic journals, demonstrate. Early Marxist readings have mostly celebrated and examined the Bas-Lag trilogy, identifying Iron Council (2012) as the œuvre’s most powerful discussion “of unionist and revolutionary political protest” (Edwards and Venezia 2015, 9). Similarly, Anthony F. Lang’s readings of The City & The City and Embassytown mostly concentrate on the novels’ conjunctions with Miéville’s Between Equal Rights (see Lang 2015). However, scholarship has also elaborated on questions of genre (SF, fantasy, horror) and the (New) Weird as a literary tradition, spatial concepts, the

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various figurations of urbanity in general and London in particular, and – most prominently in Embassytown – Miéville’s use of language. As mentioned in the introduction, unlike The City and the City, Embassytown was not showered with awards with the exception of the 2012 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Gary K. Wolfe, in his review for Locus Magazine, praised Embassytown as “a novel that demands reflection” and “one that offers, in Conrad’s terms, ‘that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask’” (Wolfe 2011, n. pag.). Contrastingly, discourse on Miéville’s works is also heavily indebted to bottom-up fan culture, again demonstrated by the vast number of interviews in corresponding magazines or on websites as well as by Matthew Sangster in his study on reader expectations on the web platform goodreads.com (see Sangster 2015). As is often the case in fan discourse, readers of Miéville are quite eager to not only discuss the primary material they endorse in online forums and blogs, but to elaborate on it, and the primary impulse seems to hinge on visualisation. For example, there are various reader-made maps of the Bas-Lag world as well as of other cities in which Miéville’s stories take place. In general, the most striking fan productions are those which try to visualise the indescribable. Some people, for instance, have attempted to draw or paint various ragtag characters of the Bas-Lag trilogy; in the context of Embassytown, one can find various representations of the Hosts’ appearance (see outtherebooks, n. pag.). At first, these attempts seem to repudiate the fundamental impulse in Miéville’s writing associated with the sublime of the indescribable, an impulse ultimately aiming at precluding reification and visualisation  – but on second thought, the apparently pressing need to visualise what words necessarily fail to express in the novel is only conducive to Weird Fiction’s thrust of cognitive estrangement on the level of language.

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Miéville, China. Embassytown. London: Pan Macmillan, 2011. --Edwards, Caroline, and Tony Venezia. “UnIntroduction: China Miéville’s Weird Universe.” China Miéville: Critical Essays. Ed. Caroline Edwards and Tony Venezia. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2015. 1–38. Freedman, Carl. Art and Idea in the Novels of China Miéville. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2015. Gordon, Joan. “Reveling in Genre: An Interview with China Miéville.” Science Fiction Studies 30.3 (2003): 355–357. Lang, Anthony F. “Between: International Law in The City & The City and Embassytown.” China Miéville: Critical Essays. Ed. Caroline Edwards and Tony Venezia. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2015. 213–238. Löwy, Michael. “Critical Irrealism: ‘A moonlit enchanted night’.” A Concise Companion to Realism. Ed. Matthew Beaumont. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 211–224.

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Manglis, Alexandra. “An Interview with China Miéville.” Wave Composition 1 (2011). Ed. Rachel Abramowitz. http://www.wavecomposition.com/article/issue-1/chinamieville/ (29 February 2016). Miéville, China. “M. R. James and the Quantum Vampire: Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and an/or or?” Collapse IV. Ed. R. Mackay. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2008. 105–128. Miéville, China. “Weird Fiction.” The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. Ed. Mark Bould. London: Routledge, 2009. 510–515. Molyan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky. Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder: Westview Press, 2000. Naimon, David. “A Conversation with China Miéville.” The Missouri Review 34.4 (2011): 52–66. Nediger, Will. “Whorfianism in Colonial Encounters from Melville to Miéville.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 47.3 (2014): 19–34. Outtherebooks. What do the Hosts (Ariekei) from Embassytown Look Like? https://outtherebooks. wordpress.com/2014/02/27/what-do-the-hosts-ariekei-from-embassytown-look-like/. Weblog, 2014. (22 February 2016). Sangster, Matthew. “Iron Council, Bas-Lag and Generic Expectations.” China Miéville: Critical Essays. Ed. Caroline Edwards and Tony Venezia. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2015. 185–212. Sarkowsky, Katja, and Frank Schulze-Engler. “Postcolonial Studies.” English and American Studies: Theory and Practice. Ed. Martin Middeke, Timo Müller, Christina Wald, and Hubert Zapf. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2012. 301–313. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966 [1916]. Staggs, Matt. “A Brief Interview with China Mieville [sic], Author, Embassytown.” http://sf-fantasy. suvudu.com/2011/05/a-brief-interview-with-china-mieville-author-embassytown.html. Del Rey and Spectra Science Fiction and Fantasy. New York: Penguin Random House, 2011. (24 February 2016). Tranter, Kirsten. “An Interview with China Miéville.” Contemporary Literature 53.3 (2012): 417–436. Vint, Sherryl. “Ab-Realism: Fractal Language and Social Change.” China Miéville: Critical Essays. Ed. Caroline Edwards and Tony Venezia. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2015. 39–60. Wolfe, Gary K. “Gary K. Wolfe Reviews China Miéville.” Locus Online. http://www.locusmag.com/ Reviews/2011/05/gary-k-wolfe-reviews-china-miville-2/ (29 February 2016).

5.2 Further Reading Edwards, Caroline, and Tony Venezia, eds. China Miéville: Critical Essays. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2015. Extrapolation 50.2 (2009). Ed. Sherryl Vint. Special Issue on China Miéville. Glaz, Adam. “Reversals and Paradoxes: China Miéville’s Anti-Language.” Extrapolation 56.3 (2015): 335–352. Luckhurst, Roger. Science Fiction. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer. The New Weird. San Francisco: Tachyon, 2008.

Andrew James Johnston

27 Hilary Mantel, The Thomas Cromwell Trilogy (2009–) Abstract: This article interprets Hilary Mantelʼs historical novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies with a special emphasis on two contexts: first, the development and the theoretical discussions of the genre of historical fiction and, second, the historio­ graphical discourses the two novels themselves engage with. The novels are shown to use modernist narrative strategies in order to trick readers into seeing their protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, as a perfect specimen of the historiographical stereotype of ʻRenaissance Manʼ. At the same time, by making readers understand how easy it is thus to collude in perpetuating the grands récits that have traditionally buttressed notions of Western superiority, the novels succeed in opening up a perspective on the otherness of historical constructions of subjectivity – in this case, courtly subjectivity. Keywords: Historical novel, teleological historiography, Renaissance Man, courtly subjectivity

1 Context: Author, Œuvre, Moment Hilary Mantelʼs historical novel, Wolf Hall (2009), and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies (2012), have both been tremendously successful.1 Not only were they showered with well-nigh unanimous praise, but they became instant bestsellers and were each awarded the Man Booker Prize. Never before had the Booker Prize been granted to the direct sequel of a work that had previously won it, and only two other authors have ever won the prize twice, Peter Carey and J. M. Coetzee – three, if one counts James Gordon Farrell, who received the prize retrospectively and posthumously in 2010 for a book published in 1970 (↗ 17 J. G. Farrell, The Empire Trilogy). Hilary Mantel, an English author (born 6 July 1952) with Irish ancestry, studied Law at the London School of Economics and the University of Sheffield where she graduated in 1973 after having married the geologist Gerald McEwen the year before. Her first job after graduation was that of a social worker in a geriatric hospital. From

1 In principle, the analytical observations made in this chapter refer to both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, but cases where the two books differ will be duly noted. Note: At the time this article was completed (February 2016), the third novel in the trilogy, entitled The Mirror and the Light, had not yet been published, despite having been announced for 2015. DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-028

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1977 to 1986 she and her husband lived abroad, spending five years in Botswana and then four in Saudi Arabia. Mantel began writing in 1974. Her first novel, Every Day Is Motherʼs Day, was published in 1985. From 1987 to 1991 she reviewed films for the Spectator. By the time Wolf Hall came out in 2009, Hilary Mantel had written a number of highly acclaimed novels, two of them belonging to the genre of historical fiction. The first of these, A Place of Greater Safety (1992), is about the lives of some of the French Revolutionʼs leading personalities – Desmoulins, Danton and Robespierre – from their early childhoods down to 1794, the year that saw the highpoint of the terreur. Her second historical novel, The Giant, OʼBrien (1998), tells the story of an exceptionally tall young Irishman who travels to London in 1780 where he becomes the celebrated star of a prominent freak show. Incapable of dealing with his sudden rise to wealth and fame, the eponymous hero dies of drink at the age of twenty-three. OʼBrien, a character deeply grounded in Irish folk poetry and mythology, is locked in an unequal struggle with Enlightenment scientific culture, living in constant horror of its seedier underside, the world of the body-snatchers. When Mantel published her first historical novel in 1992, literary critics were celebrating the triumph of postmodern ʻhistoriographic metafictionʼ, a term coined by the Canadian critic Linda Hutcheon in 1988. Historiographic metafiction denotes a radically self-reflexive type of literature employing metafictional strategies in the service of foregrounding the problematic nature of both fictional and non-fictional historical writing. The novels in question self-consciously draw on devices such as anachronism, parody and pastiche while also experimenting with all forms of intertextuality. Typical English-language examples are John Fowlesʼs The French Lieutenantʼs Woman (1969) (↗ 15 John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman), William Kennedyʼs Legs (1975), E. L. Doctorowʼs Ragtime (1975), Salman Rushdieʼs Midnightʼs Children (1981), Graham Swiftʼs Waterland (1983), Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989) (↗ 21 Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry), A. S. Byattʼs Possession (1990) (↗ 22 A. S. Byatt, Possession), Michael Ondaatjeʼs The English Patient (1992) and Thomas Pynchonʼs Mason and Dixon (1997). But even as the freshly coined term was rapidly gaining traction in scholarly discourse, a number of novelists were beginning to show a renewed interest in historical fiction as a means of interrogating historical experience and were returning to a style of writing markedly closer to the traditional forms of the historical novel. Increasingly, they focused their attention on historical fictionʼs capacity for probing the alterity of the past. Although these issues are by no means absent from historiographic metafiction itself – and were included in Hutcheon’s discussion of the genre – the critical discourse on historiographic metafiction tended to betray an overwhelming postmodernist fascination with problems of representation and displays of literary self-reflexivity, with literary strategies highlighting the inaccessibility of historical experience rather than with that experience itself. Ironically, it was about a year after the term ʻhistoriographic metafictionʼ had entered the critical debate, that the move towards historical novels with an increasing interest in historical experience first became manifest. 1989 saw the publication of two important

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historical novels signalling a noticeable departure from the more radical principles of historiographic metafiction: Rose Tremainʼs Restoration, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Sunday Express Book of the Year award, and Kazuo Ishiguroʼs The Remains of the Day which won the Booker Prize. This advent of a new type of historical novel did not, however, result in a complete break with the postmodern approach to writing historical fiction. Many of these later novels, too, registered the influence of historiographic metafiction, despite redirecting their focus to questions such as the otherness of life in the past. As Rosario Arias puts it: “many contemporary historical novels seek to show the relevance of the knowledge of the past, however problematic this may beˮ (2014, 21). And Kate Mitchell has suggested […] that these novels, while demonstrating a vivid awareness of the problematics involved in seeking and achieving historical knowledge, remain nonetheless committed to the possibility and the value of striving for that knowledge. They are more concerned with the ways in which fiction can lay claim to the past, provisionally and partially, rather than the ways that it can not. (2010, 3)

That said, distinguishing between these two types of historical fiction is not always easy, and as critical focus, too, has been re-adjusting and critics have identified new historical sub-genres, such as ʻNeo-Victorianʼ fiction, we find that some novels are actually recruited into both cohorts, or else we witness critical discourse moving them from one camp to the other, as seems to be the case with A. S. Byattʼs Possession (↗ 22 A. S. Byatt, Possession). Byatt (2001) herself has been careful not to align her work with historiographical metafiction, arguing, instead, for a more inclusive revival of historical fiction in English since the 1960s, a view that implicitly bridges the shifting gap between historiographic metafiction and other types of historical fiction. Recent criticism, too, has shown a growing interest in self-consciously transcending the borders between the two styles of historical fiction without, however, simply collapsing them. Thus, drawing on the newly-established concept of ʻNeo-Victorianʼ fiction, Elodie Rousselot has made an interesting attempt to theorize the new(er) type of historical novel as ʻneo-historical fictionʼ (2014, 2). One thing about the specific moment of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies in literary history seems to be clear: despite their lacking neither in self-reflexivity, nor in an awareness of the complexities involved in representing the past, the two novels’ overall affiliation is with the kind of historical novel that has moved beyond historiographic metafiction in the strictest sense.

2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies tell the story of the early modern statesman Thomas Cromwell (1485–1540) who, from 1532–1540, served as Henry VIIIʼs most influential

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adviser and state official, i.e. during the years that saw Anne Boleyn’s rise and fall as well as the first stages of the English Reformation. Amongst other things because Anne Boleyn herself is one of English historical fiction’s favourite characters, Cromwell, too, has featured in a great many novels, though rarely as the central protagonist and hardly ever as a character winning the readers’ sympathies. But in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, Cromwell succeeds in gaining the readers’ admiration while also providing the perspective through which they perceive the novel’s fictional world. For all its urbanity and humanity, his character does not, however, remain unproblematic. Though they tend to like him, readers repeatedly witness Cromwell committing acts of brutal ruthlessness, of intimidation and cynical entrapment. Readers find themselves impressed by his ability to coolly calculate the strategic opportunities a given situation might offer and they learn to respect his uncanny talent for gauging, with sinister precision, an opponentʼs pivotal – and not least psychological – weaknesses. Cromwell enters the stage in a scene rife with violence when, as a mere boy of fifteen, he is nearly beaten to death by his father, a brewer and blacksmith from London’s suburb of Putney. Later, in retrospect, we learn that Cromwell runs away soon after, off to the Continent where he first serves as a mercenary with the French and then, in Italy, picks up the secrets of the cloth and the banking trades. A grown man, he returns to London to settle as a lawyer and, finally, to enter the service of Cardinal Wolsey, the king’s chief minister, whence he will move on to becoming a servant of the king himself. Later still, we will be told that as a boy Cromwell had killed a youth in a street fight and that his father had paid off the victim’s family after Cromwell had run away. Hence, though only in retrospect, do we begin to understand that Cromwell’s running away may not have been motivated primarily by his father’s brutality. Significantly, the information revealing his father’s unexpected display of paternal responsibility is provided by one of Cromwell’s most irreconcilable opponents: Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester, a famed ecclesiastical lawyer and master diplomatist who, similar to Cromwell himself, has risen from humble origins. Thus readers are made to witness yet another of Cromwell’s many sources of insecurity: far from exerting power over his own biographical narrative, the protagonist must, from the lips of the very man who most openly desires his downfall, learn things about himself he had never even imagined possible. After its initial scene from Cromwell’s adolescence, Wolf Hall takes a great leap in time and it is some thirty years later that we encounter him again. He is now serving Cardinal Wolsey during that final period preceding the Cardinal’s fall. Cromwell is portrayed not merely as a loyal servant but as something close to the Cardinal’s friend. Even as the Cardinal topples – hounded by the great lords longing to take their revenge on a butcher’s son – Cromwell does not desert his master. It is not through an act of betrayal that Cromwell’s rise takes place, but because King Henry VIII has already noted his impressive range of talents. Cromwell proves to be a fixer, a man

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who can do almost anything, most importantly ridding the monarch of two wives and a Church, considerably enriching him in the process. Thus it is said of Cromwell: “[He] is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a juryˮ (WH 31)2. Cromwell inspires devoted loyalty in his followers and fierce enmity amongst the many who resent his unprecedented rise. More so even than Wolsey himself, he is denigrated as a social climber and never permitted to forget his lowly origins. By the end of Bring Up the Bodies, when he has successfully disposed of Anne Boleyn, we can already foresee his enemies closing in like a pack of wolves. Whereas in Wolf Hall the protagonist seems to be very much in control of the situation, displaying his talents to his best advantage – amongst them a strategically useful, but also quite genuine modesty – Bring Up the Bodies increasingly lets us share his sense of fear, making us more and more conscious not simply of the precarious nature of his tight-rope act, but also of Cromwell’s own sense of his vulnerability. When, in Bring Up the Bodies, a tournament accident renders the king unconscious, it is Cromwell who administers basic first aid, thus saving the monarch’s life – but not before making sure that Katherine of Aragon, the king’s discarded first wife, is provided with protection. Within a fraction of a second Cromwell has realized that the king’s death would result in the instant and complete take-over by the Boleyn faction and that, in order to secure their hold on power, they would have to eliminate not only Cromwell himself, but, more importantly, the deceased monarch’s previous wife and his daughter from that marriage. The highly dramatic scene offers a vivid glimpse of how, in the world of the Tudor court, even the most consummately skilled politician remains totally dependent not merely on his utterly selfish master’s capricious whims but on that sovereign’s very life. Hence, in providing for the former queen’s safety – even as he still hopes to resuscitate Henry – Cromwell is beginning to weave a safety net for himself, always a step ahead of his aristocratic competitors. Yet such a net cannot be woven in secret: while Cromwell succeeds in bringing the king back to life, his attempt to protect the former queen in the moment of crisis is duly noted by Anne Boleyn and her faction. For all its brevity, the crisis has made abundantly clear where Cromwell’s loyalties lie, or more precisely: where they do not. Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies stage politics as court politics where nothing is private, where silly jokes and inadvertent glances can prove fatal, where personal vanities and petty jealousies become murderous weapons in the hands of the powerful, Cromwell in particular. Both novels, and Bring Up the Bodies especially, go to great lengths in depicting the complexity of the main protagonist’s dealings with the ambitious and domineering Anne Boleyn, the heroine of so many historical romances. Precisely because he and Anne have much in common – e.g. sympathies for budding Protestantism and a spectacular rise to great, but precarious power – do

2 Page references in brackets preceded by WH and BB refer to Mantel 2009 and 2012, respectively.

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they eye each other warily even as they have to depend upon one another. In the end, it is he who ensnares her in a net of treason, rather than the other way round. Cromwell succeeds in manipulating Anne Boleyn’s lutenist Mark Smeaton into revealing all manner of malicious gossip about the queen and thereby gains – or rather: fabricates – the unsavoury evidence required for framing Anne and her closest associates. Yet it is only after a futile attempt to negotiate Anne’s voluntary withdrawal from the scene – a scheme that would likely have saved both her own and her brother’s life and much of her family’s newly won wealth and consequence – that Cromwell embarks on his campaign of destruction. Cromwell’s take on power is pragmatic, not vengeful. In this, too, he is remarkably alone in the two novels’ fictional universe. One of Wolf Hall’s and Bring Up the Bodies’ most important historical contexts is the Reformation, and Cromwell supports the movement in many, primarily hidden ways: after all, in theological terms, Henrician England remained very close to the teachings of the Roman Church. Cromwell does not, however, come across as a religious character. Critics have noted the essential secularity of his approach to matters religious, as his sympathy for Protestantism seems to be guided by humane rationality rather than burning faith. This distinguishes him from Sir Thomas More, one of his principal opponents, whom the novels depict in a thoroughly sinister and even disgusting light: a religious fanatic torturing suspected heretics in his own house, a man of considerable intellectual gifts but even greater arrogance barely hidden beneath a transparent coating of false humility. Just as Mantel presents us with the remarkably original image of a likable Cromwell, she casts More in the highly unusual role of an arch-villain who betrays not a hint of the kindly and proto-enlightened protagonist of Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons (1960). While Henrician court politics and the early stages of the Reformation provide the novels with their principal political and intellectual contexts, we are simultaneously subjected to a vibrantly colourful, almost textbook-like panorama of Renaissance culture, with something close to a neo-Burckhardtian cliché of the Renaissance that assigns to Cromwell the familiar star role of the archetypal, universally talented Renaissance Man: a courtier, a fighter, a soldier (not the same thing!), a (former/ potential) lover, a lawyer, an administrator, a merchant, a voracious reader and a patron of the arts all rolled into one; a man who has acquired on the Continent not only the secrets of high finance, but also an Italian memory-technique enabling him to store away sheer oceans of facts, whether they pertain to the sexual proclivities of his fellow-courtiers or the flora of the newly discovered lands beyond the oceans. And, indeed, memory constitutes another of the novel’s central themes. As is stressed by repeated references to his mnemonic art, Cromwell’s recollections are crucial, not least for our understanding of his character: they provide by far the most important source of insight into his mind and his capacity for emotional experience. There are, for instance, memories of his wife and daughters who all died of the sweating sickness; memories such as that of the peacock-feather wings belonging to a

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costume his little daughter had been so proud of. Right before she succumbed to the epidemic, she had been cast as an angel in a religious play. Incidentally, that, too, is one of the novels’ recurring themes, the inherent theatricality of the Tudor world. This ineluctable theatricality haunts even Cromwell’s most intimate environment: whenever an important event takes place, the young people in Cromwell’s household at Austin Friars recreate the scene through an impromptu play. But the theatrical is shown to be also of considerable political importance: in one of the very last major scenes before the machinery prepared for Anne’s fall is set in motion, Chapuys, Emperor Charles Vʼs ambassador, is deftly tricked into publicly greeting the queen. Previously, the diplomat, who adamantly refused to recognize Anne as the monarch’s legitimate consort, had adroitly managed to avoid her. The Boleyns succeed, however, in bringing him into her presence unawares, denying him the opportunity for an elegant retreat. Once more the murderously double-edged nature of success at Henry’s court becomes apparent. Grotesquely, the very scene Anne and her family perceive as a brilliantly staged diplomatic victory over their greatest foreign enemy turns out to trigger the most sinister of consequences. Ironically, it is the unwilling public acknowledgement of Anne, so cunningly extracted from Chapuys, that paves the way for her downfall. Now that Henry has received, from the imperial ambassador himself, something like the remote semblance of an official recognition of his queen, and consequently – albeit implicitly – of his dynastic and ecclesiastical policies, he can, without fear of losing face, go about the business of divesting himself of her. The king is free to stage Anne’s destruction as a sovereign act, a deed entirely uninfluenced by foreign opinion. Within the context of the Tudor court’s essential theatricality, its public ritual and symbolic display, Chapuysʼ sour salutation translates into the kiss of death for Anne. As is illustrated by the almost too charming detail of the peacock-feather wings, the novels betray a considerable interest in the material and, especially, the visual culture of the Renaissance and, consequently, also in the sources that aid modern readers in re-imagining the past. Mantel unobtrusively weaves poignant references to Holbein’s paintings into the narrative, paying homage to the artist who single-handedly shaped the image(s) of the Henrician court that modern readers draw on as they seek to picture the early Tudor world in their minds. Almost inevitably, she alludes to Holbein’s famous double portrait The Ambassadors, a painting celebrated amongst other things for its uncanny anamorphic representation of a human skull, an image that, within the representational economy of the picture as a whole, self-reflexively highlights the two-dimensional illusion of painting. It is through their references to visual art that the novels come closest to employing the self-reflexive narrative strategies typical of historiographic metafiction (cf. Lehtimäki 2011, 47). Yet for all her skilful, though sparing deployment of self-reflexive and metafictional devices, Mantelʼs allusions to visual art seem to culminate less in a triumph of literary self-reflexivity than in one of Cromwell’s own psychological self-reflexivity – or possibly its absence:

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At home in his City house at Austin Friars, his portrait broods on the wall; he is wrapped in wool and fur, his hand clenched around a document as if he were throttling it. Hans had pushed a table back to trap him and said, Thomas, you mustn’t laugh; and they had proceeded on that basis, Hans humming as he worked and he staring ferociously into the middle distance. When he saw the portrait finished he had said, ʻChrist, I look like a murdererʼ; and his son Gregory said, didn’t you know? (BB 7)

Mantel actually provides two versions of this scene, one in Bring Up the Bodies and one in Wolf Hall (WH 527). It is as though Mantel were suggesting that, in order for Cromwell to access his interior self, he has to rely on prompters such as his own image, though in this case one that is not, like the trope of the mirror image, staring back at him.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies 3.1 Narrative Strategies The ekphrastic scene just described alerts us to some of the two novels’ most distinctive literary strategies. Through Cromwell’s encountering his own image in his portrait and thus realizing how others perceive him, we begin to understand one of the two novels’ central representational paradoxes. As we read the book, we experience the world entirely from the principal protagonist’s perspective; but, as Renate Brosch (2017, 175) observes in her shrewd analysis of Wolf Hall’s narrative strategies, hardly ever are we permitted a direct glimpse inside him. Despite his being the prime  – indeed, the all but exclusive – focaliser, Cromwell’s subjectivity remains oddly veiled and it is largely through dialogue, not least through others’ comments on him – Cromwell is frequently insulted to his face – that we understand what he is like, or rather, what he is like to his fellow-characters. Apart from that, his inner emotional life must largely be gauged from the memories already mentioned. This paradox is only one of many when it comes to discussing the two novels’ narrative structures and literary devices. From start to finish, the novels are told in the present tense and exude thereby a pervasive sense of literary modernism very much at odds with their seemingly conventional historical plots and with the Renaissance world they are set in. The narrative style closely resembles interior monologue, but the novels are, nevertheless, rendered in the third person not the first, which one would normally expect from an interior monologue. Hence, Renate Brosch shrewdly characterises Wolf Hall as something akin to “a book-length interior monologue in the third personˮ (Brosch 2017, 175). The results make for a startling immediacy of the reading experience but are capable of generating confusion, too. Sometimes the effect actually borders on the comic, since Wolf Hall’s deixis excessively relies on the third-person singular pronoun. This narrative mode produces a proliferation of ʻheʼsʼ,

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and it is often quite unclear which particular referent a given pronoun might actually refer to. And as so many of the novels’ characters are called ʻThomasʼ, this state of confusion is sometimes maintained even in cases where Christian names, rather than pronouns, are used – an issue that is, in fact, commented on in the narrative itself. Indeed, the issue of the pronouns is one of the relatively few features in which the two novels do differ, since criticism of her unidentifiable pronouns led Mantel to introduce, in Bring Up the Bodies, a higher frequency of personal names into narrative situations where the pronoun ʻheʼ might otherwise not have provided sufficient clarity: ‘he, Cromwell,…’. These are by no means the two novels’ only narrative idiosyncrasies: their third-person narration is consistently marked by character-specific word-choices reminiscent of free indirect discourse, but then again free indirect discourse is rendered in the past tense rather than the present. Moreover, one would normally expect the kind of homodiegetic narration and focalisation the two novels display to be linked to I-narration and not to third-person narrative. And finally, as Renate Brosch (2017, 176) perceptively points out, the two novels’ intensely modernist style of narrating consciousness, paradoxically, takes shape in a manner that appears to be designed for preventing any access whatever to Cromwell’s interior. What is largely absent in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies is the self-reflection and the laying bare of an individual’s interior in the fashion that readers would expect from the novel’s deployment of acutely modernist strategies of narrating consciousness. Brosch (2017, 175) sees this as Mantelʼs way of staging a specifically pre-modern lack of subjectivity. What is certainly true is that in Cromwell we encounter a subjectivity heavily veiled. Yet whether this apparent absence – or possibly inscrutability – is in fact expressive of a premodern lack of individual subjectivity, or whether it actually points to a difference in expressing such an interiority, remains to be seen.

3.2 Genre As a genre, the historical novel is fraught with problems. One issue frequently raised is its status in literary history. Broadly speaking, the historical novel has been subject to at least two very different yet equally influential historical-cum-theoretical accounts that, to this very day, continue to haunt our appreciation of the genre. The first is Georg Lukácsʼs Marxist approach which sees the historical novel in very distinct ideological terms and assigns, therefore, a very specific, and astonishingly brief, place to it within its scheme of literary history. According to Lukácsʼs unashamedly teleological narrative, expounded most prominently in his study The Historical Novel (1937), the genre proper was invented by Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), only to be, within a mere two decades, assimilated and hence rendered close to obsolete by the socially analytical realism of Honoré de Balzacʼs works. After Balzac (1799–1850), Lukács argues, fictional narratives set in the past became deprived of

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their aesthetic and intellectual purpose since their basic principles were completely absorbed into the realism of the bourgeois novel. For Lukács, the historical novel is characterized by – and derives its particular historical legitimacy from – its capacity for giving expression to the way human experience is shaped by the social conditions of its time: especially its capacity for analytically depicting social experience in periods of dramatic transition and momentous rupture “the portrayal of a total context of social life, be it present or past, in narrative formˮ (Lukács 1983, 242). Thus, the realism of the historical novel is encapsulated, amongst other things, in the main characters whom Lukács refers to as ‘mediocre heroes’. Rather than casting the great figures of history themselves in the most prominent roles of its dramatis personae, the historical novel à la Scott chooses entirely fictional characters for its protagonists. Although these protagonists’ lives are strongly affected by the historical events in a manner supposedly typical of their times, their actions do not have any particular impact on the larger course of events. Moreover, these protagonists tend to be rather ordinary: quite intelligent and often morally upstanding, but in no way exceptionally so: “as central figures they provide a perfect instrument for Scott’s way of presenting the totality of certain transitional stages of historyˮ (Lukács 1983, 35). Ironically, Lukácsʼs teleological logic resulted in the historical novel’s effectively being emptied of what one might conventionally call the ʻhistoricalʼ, i.e. its link to the past. In Balzacʼs works, the historical novel’s capacity for portraying and dissecting the social conditioning of life was already being absorbed into and perfected by novels dealing with contemporary or near-contemporary events: “The classical historical novel arose out of the social novel and, having enriched and raised it to a higher level, passed back into itˮ (Lukács 1983, 242). Consequently, as a novel clearly set in the past, a past beyond the horizon of living memory, the historical novel in its most literal sense became superfluous. Indeed, as Lukács argued, after the year 1848, with its failure of the democratic bourgeois revolutions in Europe, the historical novel rapidly declined  – as did the bourgeois realism he was so enamoured with. From Lukácsʼs point of view, the very emergence of the historical novel set in the (distant) past as a specialised sub-genre of fiction constituted an important symptom of that decline. In these later historical novels, the “turbulence of the timesˮ was, at best, “used as a pretext for revealing human-moral qualitiesˮ (Lukács 1983, 243). Even though today most critics will probably not fully share Lukácsʼs position, a number of the labels he attached to the post-1848 development of the historical novel continued to stick and resulted in the genre’s losing much of the prestige it had possessed in the nineteenth century. Moreover, some of Lukácsʼs more general perspectives on the historical novel, especially his fundamental tenet that the genre derives its intellectual and aesthetic legitimacy from its capacity for representing and critically engaging with the total complexity of human experience in the past as an experience evolving in conditions of social change, have vociferously been revitalised by both Perry Anderson (2011) and Fredric Jameson (2013). Interestingly enough, Jameson actually praises Mantelʼs A Place of Greater Safety for its ability to capture

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the experience of the French Revolution and bring to life its principal revolutionaries and their individual outlooks, but he never mentions Wolf Hall (cf. Jameson 2013, 276– 277). Where Jameson literally goes beyond Lukács is in his contention that, in present-day economic and political conditions, the social purposes lending legitimacy to the historical novel can only be fulfilled through a deliberate turn to the future, i.e. to the “Science-Fictional inasmuch as it will have to include questions about the fate of our social system, which has become a second natureˮ (Jameson 2013, 298). Lukácsʼs highly influential history of the genre significantly contributed not only to critically devaluing historical fiction set in the distant past but also to driving a powerful analytical wedge between historical fiction, on the one hand, and modernism with its formal experimentation and avantgarde aesthetics, on the other. If one chose, therefore, to judge Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies by narrowly Lukácsian standards, they would have to be considered abject failures. Through casting as their principal characters the very stars of the Tudor age: Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII and Thomas More, while elevating their central – and also historically central – protagonist to the status of a near-genius, the two novels obviously reject the concept of the ʻmediocre heroʼ. Moreover, the two novels’ complex narrative structures with their firm roots in literary modernism at least appear to be paying tribute to the type of avantgarde writing that, by the end of the nineteenth century at the very latest, finally came to supplant the bourgeois realism Lukács favoured. The second important account of historical fiction is the postmodern one encapsulated in Linda Hutcheon’s influential concept of ʻhistoriographical metafictionʼ. As sketched above, Hutcheon saw historiographical metafiction not merely as the supreme expression of a specifically postmodern notion of history, but rather as fundamentally expressing the principles of postmodernism themselves. Postmodernism, she argues, claims to radically question the teleological narratives supposedly associated with the modernist perspective and has emphatically maintained that all (historical) knowledge or understanding is determined by discourse. Hence, the notion of the postmodern seems to be perfectly encapsulated in a literary mode more or less playfully fragmenting historical experience while simultaneously asserting the essential inaccessibility of historical truth by suffusing narrative with intertextual effects and undermining any sense of authenticity through parody and pastiche. But the idea of historiographical metafiction as the only self-reflexive or even as the central form of historical fiction in the latter stages of the twentieth century did not go unchallenged. Ansgar Nünningʼs careful analysis has, for instance, shown that, as a concept, historiographic metafiction is far too narrow to aptly describe the development of historical fiction in the period succeeding classical modernism. Nünning demonstrates persuasively that even in conditions of postmodernism there have been plenty examples of the historical novel which, despite possessing a considerable degree of self-reflexivity and aesthetic complexity, do not adhere to the formula of historiographic metafiction (cf. Nünning 1995 and 1997).

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Another trenchant, if somewhat implicit challenge to historiographic metafictionʼs conceptual dominance came in the shape of a more general critique of some of the sweeping assumptions either promulgated by poststructuralist criticism itself or associated with postmodernism in art and literature in general. In Doing Time (2000), the feminist critic Rita Felski, for example, points out how critics supporting the idea of postmodernism either as an aesthetic style and body of theory or else as a fullblown period in cultural history – to Felski these two approaches are essentially the same, since the former tend to “almost always smuggle in a historical theoryˮ (2000, 6) – remain rooted in the kind of teleological history that orders historical time according to chronologically arranged stages. These stages, she contends, imply a necessary logic of succession and simultaneously enforce the notion of a unified whole of historical experience: “Within such a framework, homogeneity and sameness become all-important, and dissident or contradictory historical currents are banished to the sidelines of analysis.ˮ (Felski 2000, 11) If we accept Felskiʼs critique, then the notion of historiographic metafiction, too, inevitably becomes complicit in this kind of teleological historicism, even as it claims to be dissolving the epistemological foundations of traditional historiography and historical fiction. Moreover, what is particularly interesting about Felskiʼs critique is that its basic thrust, i.e. its anti-teleological critique of homogenising approaches to temporality, applies both to the Marxist and the postmodern theorisations of the historical novel. A more recent blow to historiographic metafictionʼs conceptual dominance has come from critics who have argued that precisely because the historical novel cannot help but establish a precarious relation to the past, it is eo ipso self-reflexive with respect to the manner in which it negotiates temporal otherness. And this is held equally to be true of Scott’s earliest examples of the genre and of the most naïve of contemporary bodice-rippers. Self-reflexivity is thus elevated to an ineluctable characteristic of the historical novel as such, a position that considerably reduces the uniqueness of historiographic metafiction which thus merely performs with a greater degree of emphasis and visible self-consciousness what the genre has, in fact, been doing all along (Boccardi 2009, 1–27; cf. de Groot 2010, 1–10). Finally, there is the rise of what Rousselot has recently dubbed ʻneo-historicalʼ fiction (2014, 2), a style of historical novel marked by a curiosity about the temporal otherness of the past and about the different ways in which the past was experienced when it was still the present. This literary approach perceives the past not primarily as part of an extended teleological narrative, according to which every element of that past already has its pre-ordained place within a larger scheme of historical development. Nor does this perspective resign itself to conceiving of the past as an endless series of simulacra testifying either to the mere constructedness of that past or else to its fundamental inaccessibility. Rather, it is a view of the past that takes seriously temporal difference as a fundamental category of cultural experience, while simultaneously acknowledging that any attentiveness to the otherness of the past will always be guided by the concerns and the discursive constraints of the present.

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The concept of the ʻneo-historicalʼ novel could help us to understand one aspect of the seemingly modernist use of present-tense narrative in Wolf Hall. In its experiential immediacy the present tense creates a distancing effect that reminds readers of the historicity of the past. This effect is possible because the present tense, so uncommon in historical fiction, prevents the past from becoming submerged in the timeless narrative past tense that is familiar and ubiquitous in story-telling. Instead, the events of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies gain in historical specificity precisely because we realise that the past we are being told about is not some general story-past, but an actual former present, a past once very much alive and inescapable to those who experienced it first-hand. Paradoxically, the present tense thus restores to the narrated moment in history its quality of being particular, of possessing its own experiential existence in time.

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives Despite their winning almost universal acclaim, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies did eventually spark some controversy, though this controversy was provoked more by the BBCʼs excellent television adaptation (2015) than by the novels themselves. Eamon Duffy, the Cambridge-based Irish ecclesiastical historian famous for his revisionist work on Reformation England  – most importantly his seminal study The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400–c.1580 first published in 1992 – severely criticised the TV-series for being anti-Catholic. What he found especially irksome was Sir Thomas More’s portrayal, pointing out that the historical More did not torture heretics in his private residence, whereas the historical Cromwell, amongst many other things, ruthlessly persecuted Carthusian monks refusing to accept the Henrician Reformation (Duffy 2015). At first glance, one might dismiss this critique as belonging to the kind of positivist protest often provoked by historical fiction, i.e. objections centring on questions of historical accuracy and verisimilitude. After all, many readers of historical novels really do demand that the fictional representation of the past remains loyal to what are considered the known facts of history, and many critics do believe that, as a genre, the historical novel is defined by its apparently closer ties to established facts than is the case with other types of fiction. Yet Duffy’s protest was not motivated simply by a positivist concern about the known facts of history. Rather, his criticism must be seen in the context of a long-standing debate on the status of the Renaissance, the status of the Reformation and the question of the grands récits that have helped to establish the self-image of Western modernity. What lies at the heart of the problem is the role that those historiographical twin-brothers, the Renaissance and the Reformation, have played in the typical master narratives serving to legitimate and analytically buttress the concept of Western modernity and the progress narratives linked to that concept.

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Paired as antagonists, the hypocritical  – and rather unwashed  – More of the TV-series, brilliantly played by Anton Lesser, and the sceptical, thoughtful and gentle Cromwell, no less impressively portrayed by Mark Rylance, seem to encapsulate every major historical cliché about the Renaissance and the Reformation available. And in this they appear to offer what even most professional readers seem to have seen as an extremely plausible interpretation of the novels themselves – though one, I contend, that is not free of disturbing qualities. As we have seen, the two novels cast Cromwell in the almost stereotypical role of Renaissance Man. He is made to look such a perfect embodiment of his period and has even acquired most of his superior skills in Italy, the country conventionally, and with some obvious justification, seen as the origin of the Renaissance in art and humanism: his knowledge of finance, his memory system and his clear-eyed understanding of Macchiavellian politics. Moreover, his approach to religion comes close to being a modern, almost secular stance – one that prefers ethics to dogma while being profoundly suspicious of mystery and miracle, relics and ritual. Sir Thomas More, by contrast, can easily be taken for a stereotypically ʻmedievalʼ religious fanatic who, in the service of a tradition-bound authority, delights in wielding the ecclesiastical machinery of oppression. In the struggle between More and Cromwell, then, we seem to be witnessing yet another instance of that rather tired battle of a budding Renaissance modernity against the rear-guard actions of a superstitious and backward-looking Middle Ages, a Middle Ages marked by moral hypocrisy and religious terror, and also by a conspicuous lack of personal hygiene; an oft-quoted nineteenth-century definition of the Middle Ages supposedly runs ‘a thousand years without a bath’. This, at least, is how many reviewers and academic critics responded to Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. These professional readers had no qualms about enlisting the novels in the service of a more or less sophisticated version of Western modernity’s conventional progress narratives, celebrating Cromwell for being such an ideal and supremely likable specimen of Renaissance Man, with his ethical contradictions contributing all the more to his resembling the early modern precursor of the modern bourgeois individual. In the sympathetic eyes of the critics, Cromwell thus stood for a historiographic scheme going back to nineteenth-century bourgeois liberalism, a scheme that saw in the Renaissance – and also in the Reformation, its supposed religious executor – a momentous rupture marking a break from what was perceived to be the static, collective, hierarchical and superstitiously religious Middle Ages and an ushering in of all those values and qualities bourgeois society prided itself on, e.g. historical dynamism, individualism and subjectivity, social mobility, intellectual curiosity-cum-scepticism and, last but not least, secularism. This was a view perhaps most famously expounded by the nineteenth-century Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt: In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness – that which was turned within as that which was turned without – lay dreaming or half-awake beneath a common veil. The veil was

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woven of faith, illusion and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation – only through some general category. (1990, 98)

The mere fact that critics have overwhelmingly read the novels in terms of an implicit endorsement of a traditional Western grand récit, does not, per se, detract from the numerous qualities that render the two novels so spectacular and entertaining works of fiction. Nevertheless, the prevailing trend of these interpretations does raise some political questions. After all, it is difficult to ignore that by the second decade of the twenty-first century those traditional narratives of Western progress and superiority – be they of a Whiggish, Marxist, Weberian or a modernization theory hue – have considerably fallen out of favour. They have been criticized from a variety of perspectives such as that of postcolonial studies (Chakrabarty 2008, 7), global history (↗  5  The Burden of Representation) or queer studies (↗  4  Gender), but also by medievalists seeking to combat the increasing marginalisation of their field in an academic climate still very much committed, at least where the period divide between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is concerned, to Western narratives of progress. The problem lies not simply in the grand récit itself, but also in that master narrative’s specific structure or emplotment. Modernity has tended to derive its legitimacy from rupture, from revolutionary breaks with a past conceptualised as all that modernity is not, or not supposed to be – and this past is ideally found in descriptions of the Middle Ages. As Bruno Latour explains: The moderns have a peculiar propensity for understanding time that passes as if it really were abolishing the past behind it. They all take themselves for Attila, in whose footsteps no grass grows back. They do not feel that they are removed from the Middle Ages by a certain number of centuries, but that they are separated by Copernican revolutions, epistemological breaks, epistemic ruptures so radical that nothing of the past ought to survive in them. (1993, 68)

And one highly influential embodiment of this sense of rupture is the proto-bourgeois concept of Renaissance Man already mentioned (cf. Johnston 2008, 225–312), that very concept so many readers have happily been projecting onto Mantelʼs Cromwell. In other words, one reason for Cromwell’s immense popularity with his audience is because, at first glance, he appears to inhabit such a familiar realm of teleology. But does he really? At this point it is helpful to recall Renate Brosch’s striking observation that, while the literary strategies employed in Cromwell’s depiction all suggest a complex display of individual subjectivity, the end-product of all this narrative machinery nevertheless appears to be denying readers any access to that very subjectivity (2017, 176). The whole narrative apparatus designed for the most complex representation of individual consciousness simply refuses to deliver on its promises. If we place Brosch’s observation in the context of the massively teleological way Cromwell has been received, then it looks as though Mantel had torn the very heart of modernity, i.e. the individual’s subjectivity, out of her supposedly perfect literary

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re-creation of proto-modern Renaissance Man. As we have seen, to Renate Brosch (2017, 175) this opaqueness encapsulates Cromwell’s pre-modern lack of subjectivity. Hence, Mantel would be highlighting the paradox of a seemingly modern or proto-modern character locked, nevertheless, in his pre-modern perspective. Cromwell would thus at best appear to be a figure of transition, an embodiment of the Renaissance not least through inhabiting a status somewhere in between the modern and the pre-modern: neither quite yet the one, nor really any more the other. There is, however, another way of reading the odd paradox of Cromwell’s fictional consciousness. Instead of assigning him a straightforward place in bourgeois teleology by letting him uneasily straddle the gap between the Middle Ages and (early) modernity, the strategies that inform Cromwell’s portrayal may in fact be gesturing precisely towards the kind of epistemological problem we encounter when seeking to grasp the fundamental otherness of historical experience. Such a view shifts the interpretive problem away from Cromwell, the character and his subjectivity, and locates it, instead, with his readers and the way their responses are easily guided by long-standing historical stereotypes. What seems to be at issue here, is a certain (post)modern audience’s incurable desire for the master narratives through which they have learned to celebrate their own place in history. According to this reading, Mantelʼs strategies would, in part, resemble those of historiographic metafiction  – but, I would argue, with a crucial difference. Whereas historiographic metafiction assumes that the inaccessibility of the past through narrative means is an epistemological given, an ineluctable consequence of the discourse-bound conditions of representation, Mantelʼs approach permits us to opt for a slightly different emphasis, one more in keeping with the concept of the ʻneo-historical novelʼ: Cromwell remains enigmatic to us because we apply to him interpretive conventions deeply rooted in the teleological traditions of Western historiography itself. In letting ourselves be seduced by Cromwell – the man who looks ‘like a murderer’ – we are seduced by our willingness to identify in his lineaments the apparently inexhaustible attraction of Renaissance Man. Cromwell’s depiction in the novel invites this kind of reading – and makes us painfully aware of it. In Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies narrative technique may, in many respects, closely follow the models of classical modernism, but its overall effects are more akin to those of Pride and Prejudice. Just as Elizabeth Bennet is presented in so seductive a manner that, as they follow her through the narrative, readers are tricked into committing all her errors of judgement, Cromwell’s portrayal encourages us to employ an interpretive framework that agrees perfectly with the stereotypical image of the Renaissance. The price we pay is the unease generated by what we perceive as his ultimate opacity. The novel does not merely depict or represent the experience of the historical as Other, it performs that experience on a readership only too willing to reduce otherness to sameness, to see in the early modern an all too flattering mirror image of the (post)modern, or vice versa. In other words, Cromwell may appear unnecessarily opaque if readers let themselves be lured into approaching him from a cliché-rid-

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den perspective of historical familiarity. It is not Cromwell’s lack of subjectivity that matters, but the modern reader’s tendency automatically to assume that all subjectivity, and especially Renaissance Man’s subjectivity, must equal that of its supposed lineal descendant, (post)modern subjectivity. Hence, what ought to be perceived in terms of difference is reduced to mere lack, the famous medieval lack of individual subjectivity, stated, for instance, in Burckhardt’s famous lines quoted above. Where we ought to detect otherness, we are capable of merely registering absence. Here, it is worthwhile to ponder the contextual nature of the fictional Cromwell’s subjectivity. This subjectivity does not become manifest through a series of self-reflexive commentaries the protagonist generates for the reader, not through an excess of dramatic introspection as in Hamlet, but, amongst other things, in the complex interactions between the characters, in the strikingly apt similes and, most importantly, in the supreme sensitivity of Cromwell’s observations, observations that constitute, after all, the novel’s fundamental narrative perspective. It is a question of showing, rather than telling: what counts in the glaring absence of the protagonist’s explicit self-reflection, is how Cromwell’s perception of the world is marked by such a considerable degree of acuteness and individuality as to be impossible to conceive without assuming a highly developed subjectivity at work. In Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies we always see the world through Cromwell’s eyes, hence the novels’ complex construction of subjectivities is always generated by Cromwell’s own perspective. And there is a good reason why this should be so. In the eternal struggle that shapes life at the Henrician court, to remain unreadable, to maintain a firm control of the expressions of one’s own subjectivity, is a strategy for survival. This is one reason why Stephen Gardiner burrows deep into Cromwell’s past and confronts him with his findings. Gardiner is trying to prove to Cromwell that he can read him. At the Tudor court, interiority and emotional weaknesses must be kept out of sight, because, as Anne Boleyn learns, it is the petty jealousies, the half-acknowledged desires and the secret fears that provide the raw material from which judicial murder is fashioned. It is not Cromwell’s pre-modern lack of subjectivity we witness, but a consummate courtier’s talent for denying his subjectivity even to himself, so that he may also be capable of always denying it to others. In the portrayal of its principal protagonist’s talent for dissimulation, the novel betrays clear affinities to espionage fiction – admittedly, a very modern genre. Cromwell’s courtly subjectivity is, therefore, best expressed through a lacuna, but one that stares us in the face. And this may be why Mantel is so intent on alerting us to the peculiar nature of Holbein’s portrait of Cromwell: the subject of the painting, the sitter “staring ferociously into the middle distanceˮ (BB 7), does not look back at us. Yet the particular nature of Cromwell’s socially conditioned subjectivity is revealed to us only if we refrain from reducing him to a carbon copy of Renaissance Man, if we resist the temptations of Mantelʼs colourful spectacle to an extent that permits us to understand how Cromwell’s fictional subjectivity is constructed ex negativo and how that mode of construction perfectly reflects the emotional and commu-

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nicative conditions of life at court. Ultimately, it is by seeing through his eyes that we look most deeply into Cromwell’s mind. This is a lesson about history. The historical Other can be approached only if it is not conceived of in terms of lack or absence, but of difference. In making us imagine the world as Cromwell would have perceived it, Hilary Mantel has succeeded in engendering a notion of a subjectivity that is acutely Other, but no less subjective for that. And in embedding that different subjectivity within a fictional context of early modern court society, Mantel succeeds not only in deconstructing the teleological myth of proto-bourgeois Renaissance Man but also in writing a historical novel encapsulating “the portrayal of a total context of social life, be it present or past, in narrative formˮ (Lukács 1983, 242) – and with a very heavy emphasis on form, that is.

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited Mantel, Hilary. Wolf Hall. London: Fourth Estate, 2009. Mantel, Hilary. Bring Up the Bodies. London: Fourth Estate, 2012. --Anderson, Perry. “From Progress to Catastrophe.ˮ London Review of Books 33.15 (2011): 24–28. Arias, Rosario. “Exoticizing the Tudors: Hilary Mantelʼs Re-Appropriation of the Past in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.ˮ Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction. Ed. Elodie Rousselot. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 19–36. Boccardi, Mariadele. The Contemporary British Historical Novel: Representation, Nation, Empire. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Brosch, Renate. “Thomas Cromwell, Our Contemporary: The Poetics of Subjective Experience as Intersubjective Ethics in Wolf Hall.ˮ The Return of the Historical Novel? Thinking About Fiction and History After Historiographical Metafiction. Ed. Andrew James Johnston and Kai Wiegandt. Heidelberg: Winter, 2017. 163–183. Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Trans. S. G. C. Middlemore. London: Penguin, 1990 [1860]. Byatt, A. S. On Histories and Stories. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008 [2000]. Duffy, Eamon. “More or Less.ˮ The Tablet. 29 January 2015. http://www.thetablet.co.uk/ features/2/4525/more-or-less. (26 April 2016). Felski, Rita. Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Groot, Jerome de. The Historical Novel. London: Routledge, 2010. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London/New York: Routledge, 1988. Jameson, Fredric. “The Historical Novel Today, or, is It Still Possible.ˮ The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso, 2013, 259–313. Johnston, Andrew James. Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008.

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Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Lehtimäki, Markku. “Anamorphic Narrativity: Hilary Mantelʼs Wolf Hall in the Renaissance Perspective.ˮ The Grotesque and the Unnatural. Ed. Markku Salmela and Jarkko Toikkanen. Amherst: Cambria Press, 2011. 43–66. Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983 [1937]. Mitchell, Kate. History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Nünning, Ansgar. Von historischer Fiktion zu historiographischer Metafiktion. 2 vols. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1995. Nünning, Ansgar. “Crossing Borders and Blurring Genres: Towards a Typology and Poetics of Postmodernist Historical Fiction in England since the 1960s.ˮ European Journal of English Studies 1.2 (1997): 217–238. Rousselot, Elodie. “Introduction: Exoticising the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction.” Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction. Ed. Elodie Rousselot. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 1–16. Wolf Hall. Dir. Peter Kosminsky. BBC, 2015.

5.2 Further Reading Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400–c.1580. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005 [1992]. Hartung, Heike. Die dezentrale Geschichte: Historisches Erzählen und literarische Geschichte(n) bei Peter Ackroyd, Graham Swift und Salman Rushdie. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002. Johnston, Andrew James, and Kai Wiegandt, eds. The Return of the Historical Novel? Thinking about Fiction and History after Historiographic Metafiction. Heidelberg: Winter, 2017. Scanlan, Margaret. Traces of Another Time: History and Politics in Postwar British Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Christoph Reinfandt

28 Tom McCarthy, Satin Island (2015) Abstract: Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015) marks a powerful intervention in recent debates on the validity of fiction. Employing a triangular operational grid that pits anthropology and literature against corporate culture, the novel provides an acute diagnosis of the state of knowledge in a fully digitized contemporary world. Provocatively placed against ‘lyrical Realism’ (Zadie Smith) as the still dominant mode of novel writing, Satin Island draws on the combined resources of modernism, postmodernism and more recent theoretical positions (New Materialisms, Speculative Realism, Actor-Network-Theory) in order to demonstrate what potential the genre of the novel – and literature in general – might hold for the future. Keywords: Materialism, mediality, digitization, anthropology, the contemporary

1 Context: Author, Œuvre, Moment The Introduction to this Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries ended with some remarks on the early-twenty-first-century debate about the validity of fiction as captured in buzzwords like ‘new sincerity’, ‘post-irony’ and ‘reality hunger’ (↗ 0 Introduction). Provocatively put, this trend culminates in the question “Is Non-Fiction the New Fiction?” (Barekat 2017), and Tom McCarthy’s 2015 novel Satin Island offers an interesting take on some of its central concerns. Born in London in 1969 and educated at Dulwich College, McCarthy studied English Literature in Oxford before spending the early 1990s on ‘the continent’ after the wall came down, living in Prague and Berlin and becoming involved with all kinds of jobs and artistic projects while also pursuing writing activities. A first novel, based on his experience in Prague, Men in Space, was written in the 1990s but only came out in 2007 in the wake of the success of his second novel, Remainder. This success, however, was a long time coming. McCarthy had finished the novel by 2001, but it was rejected by all major publishers in the UK. In 2005, it was finally published by a small art publisher based in Paris and became a cult success that garnered a lot of critical attention, which then led to republication by independent publisher Alma Books in the UK in 2006 and by Vintage US in 2007. The most prominent critical reaction to Remainder came from fellow novelist Zadie Smith (↗  24  Zadie Smith, White Teeth), who, in an essay programmatically entitled “Two Paths of the Novel”, hailed Remainder as a necessary alternative to “what we have been taught to value in fiction”, i.e. the conventional mode of “lyrical Realism” with its emphasis on fully rounded characters and plot as epitomized by DOI 10.1515/9783110369489-029

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her second example, Joseph O’Neill’s novel Netherland (Smith 2008, 89). Ever since, Remainder has held a central place in an emerging “story […] about the future of the Anglophone novel” (Smith 2008, 89), and Smith’s essay has become a major point of departure for academic engagements with McCarthy’s œuvre, which is seen as marked by a “knowing, theoretical resistance” to lyrical Realism (Duncan 2016, 6). McCarthy himself puts it like this: I’m wary of this distinction between literature or fiction and theory, because all fiction is theory, it’s just usually bad theory. Unexamined naïve realism  – that is a construct just as much as everything else. It is just a construct that has erased its own constructedness. […] I think good literature […] has always been aware of its own textuality […] This is […] perhaps what the more conservative mainstream will always try to push away from, preferring instead just to carry on reproducing the dominant narrative of its culture. (McCarthy et al. 2015, 142)

This indicates that, with regard to the time-honoured opposition between realist and experimental fiction as established in the wake of modernism, McCarthy clearly comes down on the side of modernism/experimentalism. McCarthy’s modernist inheritance is indeed clearly discernible in his activities as General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), which has since its inception in 1999 continually grafted “key terms from the world of artistic avant-gardes and modernist poetry” onto the more recent “language of entrepreneurship, mass communication, and conspiracy theories” (Bourriaud 2012, 11) in a series of manifestos and projects (cf. Downing 2016). It is also discernible in McCarthy’s novels (cf. Nieland 2012, Eve 2016, Weaver 2016). But then again, McCarthy’s fiction can also be aligned with postmodernism in that his narrators and/or protagonists frequently “want […] the real to triumph over fiction” (Groes 2016, 149). And yet in some respects McCarthy can even be seen as “trying to break free from […] postmodernism” in that he “strips down postmodernism’s celebratory powers, and returns us to an experimental, late Modernist critical mode which argues that knowledge about oneself and the world is increasingly hard to interpret” (Groes 2016, 148/157). What is characteristic of all of McCarthy’s novels is a keen and theoretically informed interest in a shift from textuality to performance anchored in the interplay of mediality and materiality while acknowledging that “the secret (the authentic, the real) would be material – it would be the secret of matter” (Boever 2016, 219). In his later novels C (2010) and Satin Island (2015), McCarthy combines this interest with a focus on matters of mediation, addressing the media environments around 1900 in the first and after 2000 in the second. Accordingly, Satin Island is an example of a literature that programmatically engages the contemporary. This, however, has been the main brief of the novel from its very inception (↗ 1 The English Novel as a Distinctly Modern Genre), and the challenge has been met in both the realist mainstream of novel writing and by the ‘experimental’ alternatives introduced in modernist fiction. So what is new about Satin Island?

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2 Basic Coordinates: Central Topics and Concerns Satin Island opens with a meditation on the Turin Shroud, “the one showing Christ’s body supine after crucifixion: hands folded over genitals, eyes closed, head crowned with thorns.” From the very beginning, the passage distinguishes carefully between the material object on the one hand and the image that it came to stand for on the other: “The image isn’t really visible on the bare linen. It only emerged in the late nineteenth century, when some amateur photographer looked at the negative of a shot he’d taken of the thing, and saw the figure  – pale and faded, but there nonetheless.” As it turns out, the object cannot possibly carry the image: “A few decades later, when the shroud was radiocarbon dated, it turned out to come from no earlier than the mid-thirteenth century”. So how can a piece of cloth from the mid-thirteenth century become the Turin Shroud, carrying the image of Christ’s body? This is, on the one hand, a matter of mediation, and, on the other, a matter of belief. The image issued from the object by means of a newly available technology, photography, and the emerging negative then “became a positive” in an act of faith; “the shroud itself was,” the text insists, not present, “but there nonetheless”. On this basis, a reality asserted itself, and scientific proof to the contrary “didn’t trouble the believers. Things like that never do.” (3)1 From this opening move, Satin Island insists on a foundational opposition of materiality and mediality. Its central premise of Satin Island is explicitly stated towards the end of the opening meditation on the Turin Shroud: “We see things shroudedly, as through a veil, an over-pixellated screen.” (3) McCarthy himself has identified this as his “model for subjectivity” in the early twenty-first century: the whole novel revolves around a subject “in front of the screen” but in search of the (material) world (McCarthy et al. 2015, 148). The first-person narrator of Satin Island, U., is an anthropologist who works for an influential corporation/consultancy called the Company (14). “What does an anthropologist working for a business actually do?” U. imagines the reader asking and answers: “We purvey cultural insight […] and let a client in on how they can best get traction […] [to] sell their product” (23). The reader meets U. when the Company has just won a huge contract for what is enigmatically called the Koob-Sassen Project, which U. is not allowed to talk about for contractual reasons, though he keeps pointing out how important it is: “It will have direct effects on you […] although you probably don’t know this. Not that it was a secret. Things like that don’t need to be. They creep under the radar by being boring. And complex.” (13) Besides his contributions to this enigmatic project, however, U. receives an unofficial brief from the Company’s charismatic head, a man called ‘Peyman’, whose very name

1 Unless otherwise indicated page references in brackets without further designation refer to Mc­ Carthy 2016a.

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makes him the embodiment of corporate capitalism.2 U.’s unofficial brief is much closer to his academic home turf: When [Peyman] first hired me, as he shook my hand to welcome me onboard, he fixed me with his gaze and said: U., write the Great Report. […] The Document, he said; the Book. The First and Last Word on our age. Over and above all the other things you’ll do here at the Company, that’s what I’m really hiring you to come up with. It’s what you anthropologists are for, right? (61)

In spite of its affinity with the scientific ambition of yore, however, the Great Report is transferred here to an all-encompassing world of business, as Peyman explains when U. points out that the time for totalising ambitions such as these seems to be over: [I]t’s exactly the situation you describe […] that makes our era’s Great Report all the more necessary […] we need a brand-new navigation manual. But […] I tried to tell him […] there are universities … Forget universities! he snorted […]. These are irrelevant, they’ve become businesses – and not even good ones. Real businesses, though, he said […] these are the forge, the foundry where true knowledge is being smelted, cast and hammered out. […] [T]he Great Report […] will come out of the jungle […] a brand new genus, flashing, sparkling – fulgurating – high above the tree line, there for all to see. I want it to come out of the Company. […] [Y]ou, U., are the one to write it. (62)

Taking his cue from this line of thought, which shifts agency from human beings to the forge and foundry that is the jungle of contemporary life, U. waits for the form of the Great Report to manifest itself from the networks that he keeps tracing, feeding the information into dossiers. His “claim that the Great Report is ‘finding its form’ is repeated, refrain-like, throughout the novel” to whoever asks about it (Weaver 2016, 105). So what kind of knowledge would the Great Report produce and provide if it ever came to be written? Again, it is the visionary Peyman who can best put this into words, as U. grudgingly acknowledges by presenting Peyman’s view at length: His most famous riff, perhaps, was about knowledge. […] Who was the last person, he would ask, to enjoy a full command of the intellectual activity of their day? The last individual, I mean? It was, he’d answer, Leibniz. […] Our own era, perhaps more than any other, seems to call out for a single intellect […] Yet there will be no Leibniz 2.0. What there will be is an endless set of migrations: knowledge-parcels travelling from one field to another, and mutating in the process […] Migration, mutation, and what I (Peyman affirmed) call ‘supercession’: the ability of each and every practice to surpass itself […] That, he’d say, is the future of knowledge. (49–50)

2 The name may also evoke the performance and charade sides of consultancies with its allusion to the influential German theatre director Claus Peymann, who, in another intriguing twist, has been head of the Berliner Ensemble, the formerly East German theatre company founded in 1949 by Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel, since 1999.

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Knowledge, we learn here, has become so complex that it can no longer be brought forth, processed and synthesized by the individual, that key player of modernity. Instead, it resides in networks and systems in which human beings are just bit players in front of their screens, or, as the philosopher Simon Critchley puts it, ‘dividuals’ rather than ‘individuals’ (McCarthy et al. 2015, 148). From the consultancy’s point of view that Peyman embodies, the networked processes in which ‘knowledge-parcels travel’ are re-appropriated under the banner of ‘practice’, and this ties in with recent academic attempts at describing the state of the contemporary world. In their monograph Interpreting Networks: Hermeneutics, Actor-Network-Theory and New Media, for example, David Krieger and Andréa Belliger plead for a description of “the construction of meaning through networking” (2014, 7), and Steven Connor spells out the consequences of this shift when he puts forward a new conceptualisation of ‘interpretation’ which is very much in line with Peyman’s diagnosis: Now interpretation is part of a general practice of putting-into-practice […] This new, expanded form of interpretation does not say what things say, but shows how they work, which is to say, how they might be worked out […] The purpose of playing the game is not to show what the game means […], but to explore what it makes possible […] Interpretation has been drawn into a general performativity, in which informing interacts with performing […] Interpretation is no longer to be thought of as the solving of a riddle, or the cracking of a code […], but rather the playing out of a game, the running of a programme, the perfecting of a routine, the exploiting of a potential. (Connor 2014, 184–185)

In short, the practice of interpretation no longer asks “what does an object mean”, but it ‘surpasses itself’ (Peyman) to include “the implications of what it might mean” – the central question of this practice of second-order interpretation is then “what does what it means mean?” (Connor 2014, 186) Against this backdrop, Tom McCarthy’s œuvre can be profitably read as part of a turn from a ‘literature of deconstruction’ inspired by postmodernist theory to a ‘literature of reconstruction’ which “suggests an alternative path to authentic representation” by focusing on “re-enactment and performance” instead, as Wolfgang Funk has pointed out with regard to Remainder (2015, 191). What really begins to worry U. in the course of Satin Island is that it might not be for human beings to know ‘what what it means means’. Just like the classical anthropological distinction between ‘field’ and ‘home’, which became problematic for U. when his participatory observation of the London club and rave scene for his PhD thesis began to interfere with his typing up of his notes and sparked reflections on “contemporary ethnographic method and its quandaries” (24) for which the published book became more famous than for its ethnographic findings, the difference between observation/description/representation on the one hand and operation/process/ practice on the other seems to vanish, leaving knowledge processually embedded in the material world with no opening for anthropologists or even human beings in

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general. As U. observes with regard to Malinowski’s famous maxim of anthropology, ‘Write Everything Down’: But the thing is, now, it is all written down. There’s hardly an instant of our lives that isn’t documented. […] Nothing ever goes away. And as for the structures […] whose mapping is the task, the very raison d’être, of someone like me. Well, those networks are being mapped […] by the software that tabulates and cross-indexes what we buy with who we know, and what they buy, or like, and with the other objects that are bought or liked by others who we don’t know but with whom we cohabit a shared buying- or liking-pattern. (133)

This observation, which hints at an imminent “Rule by Algorithm” or “Algocracy” (Danaher 2014), is at the heart of the central plot twist of a novel without much plot: After initial euphoria about his insight (“What if the Report might somehow, in some way, be lived, be be-d, rather than written? […] Fulgurate, Peyman had said.” 77) which leads to delusive visions of his own greatness and importance as the founder of a new breed of “U-thographers” practicing “Present-Tense-AnthropologyTM” (78), U. finally comes to a different conclusion: [T]he truly terrifying thought wasn’t that the Great Report might be un-writable, but – quite the opposite  – that it had already been written. Not by a person […] but simply by a neutral and indifferent binary system that had given rise to itself, moved by itself and would perpetuate itself […] And that we […] were no more than actions and commands within its key-chains. (133–134)

And what is worse, and in spite of all his efforts, U. will not only remain de-coupled from where the real action is in the digital network of connections behind visible reality, he and everybody else will also lose their status as readers of the world: “But who could read [the Great Report that is continually writing itself]? From what angle, vantage-point or platform […] could it be viewed, surveyed, interpreted? None, of course: none and no one. Only another piece of software could do that.” (134) What human beings can see and make sense of is only ever the surface of a ‘deeper’ digital reality. As Henderson Downing has pointed out, an awareness of this key problematic of the early twenty-first century is also at the core of many of McCarthy’s activities with the International Necronautical Society: McCarthy touches upon another form of burial in which online authors produce electronic texts via proprietary software and operating systems that screen the user from the coded performance of their digital tools. But in such a digital context it is important to try to differentiate between the discrete specificities of code and text […] Spun into a series of abstracted patterns through a simplifying web of medial technology, cultural representations of digital code are often diverted through an overly textual critical framework that fails to capture fundamental aspects of the complex relationship between medium and materiality (that as a ‘language’ computer code exists only in finite bursts of site specific activity that we cannot read or even decode). (Downing 2016, 27–28)

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What little plot there is in Satin Island  – the narrator warns the reader about this shortly after he has introduced himself by exclaiming “[E]vents! If you want those, you’d best stop reading now.” (14) – ultimately revolves around the question of what conclusions U. should draw from his insights and what exactly the role of human beings can or should be under these conditions. These Central Topics and Concerns of Satin Island are addressed by means of an “operative structure” that is, as McCarthy observes, “a triangle, with anthropology, corporate culture, and literature as its three points” (McCarthy et al. 2015, 137). In terms of anthropology, the novel is keenly interested in what the anthropologist Paul Rabinow has called an ‘Anthropology of the Contemporary’ (2007; see also McCarthy et al. 2015, 152); in terms of corporate culture, the novel is keenly interested in how it works, especially with regard to recent developments of digitalisation and algorithmization, on which McCarthy takes the long perspective by viewing them as just the latest stage in an “overall scriptural project” (McCarthy et al. 2015, 147) through which “that digital moment” (149) was established a long time ago by means of print – a stage, however, which is finally putting paid to the “humanist fantasy” of modernity which “becomes less and less possible in a digital age – which in itself is, I’d say, a good thing” (McCarthy et al. 2015, 149); and in terms of literature, finally, the novel is keenly interested in what human beings can know in spite of all that, in the role of human beings after the end of the ‘humanist fantasy’, and in the affordances of the (literary) text in the digital age.

3 Aesthetics: Narrative and Literary Strategies The thoroughly mediated world of Satin Island is brought to the attention of the reader in yet another act of mediation by a narrator who introduces himself both as a literary construct and as a stand-in for the reader. After the reader has, in chapter 1, read about the Turin Shroud as part of the observations and reflections of a man stranded in the airport of Torino-Caselle, getting fractured information about the world’s and the man’s situation at that point, variously mediated through information screens, laptops, television screens and mobile phones as perceived by the man, the narrator finally introduces himself at the beginning of chapter  2 with the ingenuous words “Me? Call me U.” (13). With these words he opens up, on the one hand, an intertextual field ranging from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) with its famous first words “Call me Ishmael” to Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930–1943) with its hapless protagonist Ulrich who is facing a modern world without sense or purpose. On the other hand, he establishes an observer position that calls out for adoption by the reader. As McCarthy points out in an interview, there is in fact a link between these two dimensions: “U. as in ‘you, the reader’, like Baudelaire’s hypocritical reader, the double, the brother” a famously cited at the end of part I of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste

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Land (1922), perhaps the iconic text of literary modernism (McCarthy et al. 2015, 148). But then, the reader does not have to know this to identify U. as an everyman figure in a genuinely post-modern world. In addition to all this, it also turns out that U. is a stand-in for the author Tom McCarthy himself, as critics have been fast to spot: “The figure of the novelist has morphed into that of the anthropologist”, observes Milly Weaver, and given the extensively shared wording between U.’s reflections in Satin Island and McCarthy’s 2015 essay on “The Death of Writing”, it is not only the ‘figure of the novelist’ but the real novelist/author as well who has morphed into U. (cf. Weaver 2016, 96–97). What is more, Gill Partington indicates that a similar conflation of author- and narrator-positions was already at stake in McCarthy’s first ideas for Remainder, though at that point it came to nothing (2016, 47), while now McCarthy admits that with the anthropologist U. he has found “a perfect stand-in for the writer” (McCarthy et al. 2015, 139). All in all, then, Satin Island establishes a fictional observer position which is, by way of designation (U.) and profession (anthropology), conflated with the observer positions of reader and author, indicating that there is no clear-cut separation between fictional and non-fictional representations of the world. In this experimental set-up, the anthropologist represents the traditional scientific ideal and everyman’s (and woman’s?) basic idea of how to make sense of the world: “He looks at the world and reports on it.” (McCarthy et al. 2015, 139) Satin Island positions this basic operation in a thoroughly mediated and digitized world where material reality will have to be recuperated from the individual’s experience of the surface textures of all media, from page to screen. It is in this sense that “digital culture is totally material for U.” (McCarthy et al. 2015, 142). As Milly Weaver observes in a thorough analysis of Satin Island, the “characteristic mode of U’s [sic] phraseology is to figure the abstract in material terms” (2016, 104), and, through the ‘finding its form’-refrain mentioned above, U.’s strategy ultimately aims at “de-mediation” (106), a “sense of direct correlation between perceived object and its mental reception or recall” which “collapse[s] all distinction between himself, the age itself, and the Great Report” (111) that has to be “as de-mediated as possible so that the sources are themselves the final product” (118). In this dimension, the novel implicitly evokes Jorge Luis Borges’ famous story “On Exactitude in Science” (1946), written in the form of a forged one-paragraph quotation from a 1658 source in which the possibility of mapping a territory on a scale of one to one is presented as the ideal vanishing point of cartography. Along similar lines, U.’s discourse in Satin Island “apes non-textual forms of media  – the visual, the material  – as a response to the threat posed to writing by digital culture’s ever-tightening web of data” (Duncan 2016, 15), and McCarthy places “his narrator’s mind as a kind of photographic plate or film” (Weaver 2016, 109). With this emphasis on visuality, however, the novel remains anchored in modern culture’s foundational obsession with visuality at the tipping point between subjectivity and objectivity as elaborated by Jonathan Crary (1991), and this “focus on the visual agency of the subject […] provide[s] an interesting counterpoint to the

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emphatically impersonal, ‘neutral and indifferent binary system’ that Satin Island suggests as possible future scribe” (Weaver 2016, 110). Behind this double veil of the already available texts of ‘past scribes’ with their specific representations of the world on the one hand and the currently produced text of the ‘future scribe’ of pervasive algorithmization with its performative processes on the other, matter as such seems to vanish completely. And yet, the mattering of matter and the humanity of humankind seem to be very much at the centre of Satin Island. On the one hand, the novel seems to suggest in continuation from McCarthy’s earlier novel Remainder that “one can never get the upper hand of matter […] Matter wins out over form: it is in matter that form collapses, releasing an experience of the real” (Boever 2016, 220). On the other hand, Satin Island foregrounds the question of how form can prevail over matter more prominently than Remainder, and it does so by replacing plot with “source images and the writing process […] as the basic content of the novel” (Weaver 2016, 118). Instead, Satin Island displays a keen “interest in representation of information that expresses itself by recourse to materiality”, and while “the use of visual media as an emulative model” is clearly anchored in the sphere of mediation, the focus on “writing figured as a record of its author’s thought process” (Weaver 2016, 96) ties in with the novel’s attempt at transcending the boundaries of fiction: Somewhat mockingly, McCarthy describes in the Acknowledgements how he spent “a 2010 residency at the International Artists Studio Programme in Stockholm […] projecting images of oil spills onto huge white walls and gazing at them for days on end” only to follow this up with another stint at the “Center for Fiction in New York, who lent me a spacious office in which to sit and think about the general impossibility of writing a novel about the general impossibility of etc.” (191) U.’s endeavours clearly mimic these authorial (non-)activities so that “reading through U’s [sic] working practice […] equates to a reading through of the conditions of Satin Island’s own production” including “an extended meditation on writing’s physical basis” (Weaver 2016, 113/115) when U. tries to really get started on the Great Report (93–97). U. clears his desk in order to use the “tabula rasa” as “a launch pad for the task at hand” (93), but when he places “his laptop in the middle” (97), an inadvertent mouse-click floods the primal scene with “all the extraneous clutter, all the world-debris, that I’d so painstakingly eliminated” (97). This key moment comes roughly halfway through the novel, indicating how the mediated world pollutes and compromises the material world while conversely the mediated world is potentially compromised by its material foundations if these are not kept out of sight: Everything is streamlined and abstracted, but when we shop online there is still some sevenyear-old Indian boy working in some sweatshop somewhere, whose body is making the stuff. We’re not in a post-material phase at all. So, the idea of materiality to literature is something that is really important to me. (McCarthy et al. 2015, 142)

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Again, this was first addressed in Remainder: “The whole apparatus of recreation which Naz [the Indian ‘facilitator’ in that novel] is hired to organize involves the elimination of all traces of effort which go into the recreation” – but “there is always a remainder” (Slote 2016, 123/124). Or, more generally: “Each perspective, no matter how valuable and insightful, is always partial and delimited and cannot quite account for everything. The remainder is the remainder of the vanity of human wishes” (Slote 2016, 125). In Satin Island, the tension between the vanity of human wishes and the remainder of matter is staged in a number of prominent motifs and metaphors on the story level. The first of these is a long digression in which U. speaks of a visit to Frankfurt for a conference in the context of the Koob-Sassen Project. After his presentation on modernity as “a moving ratio” which establishes “the perspective of shifting perspectives” (100) is met with indifference and bafflement, U. spends the rest of his stay visiting a friend who is in charge of the anthropology museum. In the course of this visit (101–109), his friend Claudia holds forth on the older anthropological method of “acquir[ing] material culture” (103), which was replaced, she points out, from the mid-sixties onwards, by “a turn away from objects: suddenly the prevailing wisdom held that you don’t need to look at pots and arrows anymore – you need to study patterns of behaviour and belief and so forth: your school of anthropology, U.”, as she reproachfully adds (104). After this turn, the world of material objects vanishes into storage, carefully archived of course, but pointless to access. And indeed, the one item from the many instances of “material culture” (108) Claudia produces for him that catches U.’s attention and stays with him afterwards is “a lump of some black substance, all unformed […] It’s caoutchouc, Claudia had said, seeing me staring at it: rubber, in its raw form.” (109) In U.’s understanding, only this is true matter, i.e. organic matter untouched by human refinement into form and utility. On his flight back he links this to two further recurrent themes of the novel (cf. 109). One is his friend Petr’s battle with cancer, seen by U. in terms of “smudgy, dark lumps pushing up beneath his skin” (131) and sparking the insight that the “stuff of the world is black” (147), presented in stark contrast to Petr’s mediated ‘immortality’ after his death (149/151–153). The other recurrent theme is the motif of spilled oil. While U. is waiting for his flight at Torino-Caselle, all the newsfeeds that reach him in various formats report “an oil spill that happened somewhere in the world that morning, or the night before” (6). Following the story U. begins to put a dossier together, which, in good old anthropological fashion, is not interested in the single event but the “generics” of oil spills (37). Images of oil begin to haunt U. (53) until he has a vision of “ink polluting paper, words marring the whiteness of a page” (98). After the failure of his presentation at the conference and his visit to the anthropology museum in Frankfurt, U. daydreams an alternative presentation on oil spills (110–119) that ties in with his megalomania about “Present-Tense-AnthropologyTM” (78), and it is certainly striking how he locates the principle of digitization

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even here, in this not-so-natural confrontation between oil (refined by human beings) and water (provided by nature): Oil, gentlemen [sic!], I’d say, is hydrophobic: It recoils from water. This is not a tendency or a quirk of oil: it is an elementary property that defines it at its very core […] So what are we observing […]? You might say that we’re observing ecological catastrophe, or an indictment of industrial society, or a parable of mankind’s hybris. Or you might say, more dispassionately, that we’re observing a demonstration of chemical propensities. But the truth is that, behind […] beneath […] these dramas, […] and before them, we’re observing […] differentiation. Differentiation in its purest form: the very principle of differentiation. Ones and zeros, p and not-p: oil, water. Behind all behaviour, issuing instructions […] – just as behind life itself, its endless sequencing of polymers – there lies a source-code. (112)

Here, the not-so-natural is re-materialized as a natural process (as U. eulogizes: “When oil spills, Earth opens its archives” 118), and in a sense an oil spill indeed mirrors writing as in U.’s preceding vision: It adds something to the material world which is alien to it and ‘mars’ it. While the oil spill-motif comes to U. and, indirectly, the reader mostly through footage which U. sees on various screens, it is striking that another motif is introduced in parallel but seems to have a greater affinity with print media like “free newspapers” (18, 29, 40) and an “old-style broadsheet” (84): the death of a skydiver whose parachute did not open. As with the oil spills, U. becomes obsessed with the case and wants to get at the generics, gathering information on parachuting accidents (or even murders) all over the world and, partly in parallel to the mass media coverage of the case, developing hypotheses as to what actually happened and how to deal with the ‘event’, even evoking Schrödinger’s cat in (or for) the process: Once the strings had been severed, had the dead parachutist “been murdered without realizing it […] walking around […] already effectively dead” (60)? These reflections culminate in two central passages of the novel, one a striking image that begins to haunt U., the other recapitulating “a longer, more reflective article about the case” in the broadsheet mentioned above (84). First, U. describes the image of a severed parachute that floated, like some jellyfish or octopus, through the polluted waters of my mind: the doomed canopy above, the floppy strings casually twining their way downwards from this like blithe tentacles, free ends waving in the breeze. This last picture, for me, produces, even now, a sense of calm […] [which] grows all the more pronounced when set against the panic of the man hurtling away from it below. (82)

This image, which also evokes the oil spill-motif for the state of U.’s mind, directly segues into the following reflections on the faith of skydivers: The article kept mentioning ‘faith’. Skydivers are induced into and graduate up through a world in which faith plays a fundamental role. They must believe in their instructors; in the equipment; in the staff packing their rigs; in tiny ring-pulls, clips and clip-releases, strips of canvas, satin, string. It could be argued […] that this belief had nothing of the devotional or metaphysical about

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it, since each of the things to be believed in had a solid evidential underpinning: the mechanics of ripcord, say, or a spring-loaded riser – or, of course, on a larger scale, the overall infallibility of physics […] Yet […] these things could only carry one so far towards a gaping hole in a plane’s side, and the fundamentally counterintuitive act of throwing oneself through it […]. That final spur, the one that carried skydivers across the threshold, out into the abyss, was faith: faith that it all – the system, in its boundless and unquantifiable entirety – worked, that they’d be gathered up and saved. (85)

Taken together, the two motifs of oil spills and the floating parachute, crystallize the central themes of Satin Island: Oil stands for materiality as it is absorbed into what is these days discussed as the proposed epoch of the Anthropocene, i.e. a period marked by crucial and irreversible human impact on the earth’s geology and ecosystems (cf. Davies 2016). The floating parachute stands for the knowledge that human beings put their faith in to be kept afloat and in charge, and the novel makes it very clear that the academic or scientific rituals that Western modernity has implemented to acquire this knowledge are not so very different in terms of function from the rituals of the tribe of Vanuatans that U. speaks about in yet another thematic strand (cf. 59, 64, 84, 89–91, 128–130, 184–187). In a striking parallel to the oil spill- and parachute-motifs, U. also employs visual images and metaphors to come to terms with the unspeakability of the Koob-Sassen Project, and it is clear that this strategy with its ‘literary’ overtones emanates from what many people are doing anyway, trying to figure the invisible: The Koob-Sassen Project. I won’t, as I’ve already stated, talk of this – and yet, during this period, everyone did, all the time. They discussed it not as people discuss things they know about […] but rather as they try to ascertain those of a foreign object, one that is at once both present – omnipresent – and elusive: groping after its dimensions; trying, through mutual inquiry, to discern its composition, charge and limit. When I asked people to provide a visual image […] I got answers varying from hovering spaceship to rabbit warren to pond lilies. I had my own, of course: I saw towers rising in the desert – […] part modern skyscraper, part sultan’s palace lifted from Arabian Nights. […] Below them, hordes of people […] moving around like ants, their circuits forming patterns on the sand, patterns that […] coalesced into one larger, more coherent pattern. (68–69)

As U. clearly recognizes, the process is self-organizing and transcends its material starting points and trappings: What were they doing, all these ant-like labourers? Why, they were bringing in materials, or carrying out excavated soil, or delivering instructions they themselves, perhaps, did not quite understand, nor even, fully, did the person to whom they were relaying them, so complex was the logic governing the Project as a whole – instructions […] whose serial execution, even if full comprehension was beyond the scope of any point in the command-command chain, had the effect of moving the whole intricate scheme towards its glorious realisation, at which point all would become clear, to everyone, and ants would see as gods. (69)

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U. also realizes that “the Company’s own logo [the Tower of Babel] [has] wormed its way into the picture” (69; cf. 47), and as he becomes increasingly disillusioned, his “mental picture of the Project […] changed […] into […] a black box […] lying on the shelf of some administrative building […] black and inscrutable, opaque.” (81–82) Satin Island tries to get beyond this opaque surface by pitting, within its triangular operative structure, the points of anthropology and literature against the point of corporate culture. In a semblance of anthropology, the text is on the one hand explicitly written by an anthropologist who employs a phenomenologically enhanced reporting style that occasionally veers into methodological self-reflection and doubt. The multitude of observed phenomena are organized into a systematic structure of fourteen chapters which are in turn divided into a minimum of eight and a maximum of twenty not very long subchapters ordered, Wittgenstein-style, by numerals (1.1, 1.2 etc.). However, this discursive form should perhaps not be read in terms of systematic representation (anthropology, philosophy) but rather in terms of practice and process, “as an operation manual – it’s about how to use this machine, and in a way it’s trying to notate its logic somehow, which, to a large extent, means re-enacting it” (McCarthy et al. 2015, 150). With this move, McCarthy tries to establish “a logic not of the book, but around the book” (McCarthy et al. 2015, 137; cf. Sussman 2011). With this shift of emphasis, the text that we are reading is actually thrown back upon its own materiality, as U. elaborates with reference to Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of his all-time heroes: In Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss recounts how […] bored out of his skull […], he started to compose an epic drama. For six days my hero wrote […] on the back of sheets of paper containing his research notes […] On one side, scientific, evidence-based research; on the other, epic art. If my report had come to be completed, which side of the paper would it have been written on? More to the point: to which side does this not-Report you’re reading now, this offslew of the real, unwritten manuscript, belong? Perhaps to neither side, but to the middle: the damp, pulpy mass that forms the opaque body at whose outer limits, like two mirages, the others hover. (124–125)

By positioning itself in the material middle, Satin Island seems to call for a new mode of writing and reading that is neither academic nor literary, but somehow both and, at the same time, very alert to the material dimension of reality. As opposed to Milly Weaver who argues that the “final product must belong either to one [scientific, evidence-based research] or the other [epic art]; the alternative is an unsatisfactory, indefinable ‘middle’” (Weaver 2016, 98) and then infers “that Satin Island’s preference lies with the former, scientific category” (99), it seems that it is exactly this material middle ground that McCarthy wants to recover for or uncover with his writing, and that he sees literature rather than science as the medium for doing so. More than academic texts with their strict discursive rules, for example, literature can embody underlying geometric forms, and this seems to be a strategy that is characteristic of McCarthy’s œuvre at large, as Mark Blacklock has demonstrated by identifying “[i]nfinity in Remainder and zero in Men in Space,” while “[t]he third element

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we encounter is […] C […] a symbol in any number of equations” (Blacklock 2016, 75; on C’s C-shaped structure see also Eve 2016, 185–188, 198). In Satin Island there is, of course, U, yet another geometric form, which is not horizontally but vertically open at its top, away from the ground, as it were. Given that C presented a flat protagonist who is horizontally decentred into the emerging networks of mediality at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, the fact that U.’s decentring might take place vertically instead of horizontally seems significant, especially in view of the fact that U. does not show any symptoms of the death drive of some of McCarthy’s former protagonists who envision perfection in re-joining matter: The narrator in Remainder, for example, envies a man who has been gunned down in gang warfare for having “merged with the space around him” (McCarthy 2007, 197), and the protagonist in C longs for merging with the materiality of the earth when he observes how the body of an aviator who has fallen out of his plane in no man’s land in World War I slowly dissolves into the ground, leaving only its contours in the grass (McCarthy 2010a, 129). In contrast to these precursors, McCarthy’s U. displaces this longing into what becomes the title of the book we are reading, Satin Island. An allusion to the title of the novel first obliquely emerges in the context of U.’s reflections on his new working environment in the consultancy: “[W]e unpick the fibre of a culture (ours) […] and let a client in on how they can best get traction on this fibre so that they can introduce into the weave their own fine, silken thread.” (23) Satin is a particularly glossy weave, originally exclusively produced from silk, which in turn is a natural fibre obtained mostly from the cocoons of the larvae of the mulberry silkworm.3 The quote thus prepares the ground for the title motif of the novel by suggesting that culture/reality is a fibre on which human beings (and corporations) need to get traction while at the same time producing it just like silkworms, and the more sophisticated the weave (silk > satin) the harder it becomes to get traction. In a sense, the productivity displaces the significance from the producer into the product (the weave, the fabric, the network, the culture), and this also applies to the formerly exalted position of the author: “An author,” McCarthy observes, “is more like a by- or waste-product of the work, and of literature in general.” (2016b, 2) The basic metaphorical motif of silk/satin/weave/fabric/culture is picked up again only much later in the novel: After U. has finally acknowledged that the “order and harmony of the West, the laboratory in which the structures of untold complexity are being cooked up, demand the emission of masses of noxious by-products” (140–141), he has a dream in which he is flying over the world’s greatest cities from all periods rolled into one. From way up high he spots “[o]ut in the harbour – some way out, separated from the city […] an excrescence, a protuberance, a lump: an island” (141), which he thinks is identified by a voice as “Satin Island” (143). In the real world,

3 Silk, incidentally, is a prominent motif in McCarthy’s novel C, where it also turns up as the material for early parachutes.

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he soon realises, this set-up clearly refers to Staten Island in New York Harbour with the “Fresh Kills landfill site […] the great dump” (144), and this doubling illustrates both the linkage and the difference between the world and the web of significance that we spin around it. And in spite of its emphasis on the material dimension of existence the novel is also quite clear about the fact that the latter dimension, i.e. the web of significance spun in the register of mediality, is somehow all we have. Though U. spends the final chapter gravitating towards Staten Island during a conference trip to New York, he finally decides not to go there because he realises that “[t]o go to Staten Island – actually go there – would have been profoundly meaningless […] And so I found myself […] suspended between two types of meaninglessness. Did I choose the right one? I don’t know.” (185–186) These could have been the last words of the novel, but they are not. The final sentence is: “[T]hen I […] started walking […] back into the city” (189). In an emphatically literary double “reverse shot”, McCarthy contrasts the first image in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) of “Ishmael looking at the island of Manhattoes” with “the final image in Satin Island […] of U. looking out from the same island”, and he also sets the darkness at the end of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899; ↗ 6 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness) against the dazzling light over Staten Island (McCarthy et al. 2015, 140–141). So in spite of its overall diagnosis that the “humanist fantasy becomes less and less possible in a digital age” (McCarthy et al. 2015, 149), Satin Island seems to be a plea for not neglecting the human factor in all these processes, if on a much more pragmatic basis. Throughout, the novel presents the human factor as one of the buffering phenomena in the processes of the world (cf. 9, 60, 70–75, 121–122, 150), and this is also the opening for the resistance that U.’s return to the city seems to anticipate: U. is taking a form of resistance back to the heart of the machine. […] The book is so much about gaps and buffering – the delays, the hiatuses that open up within the rhythm of the machine. I think that is a political and aesthetic gesture at the end – taking this restlessness back into the heart of things. (McCarthy et al. 2015, 140)

In contrast to this, U.’s girlfriend Madison’s uncanny experience of state oppression while protesting against the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001, which she tells him about in direct, unmediated communication in a restaurant while darkness falls outside in a deliberate echo of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (cf. McCarthy et al. 2015, 141), may be the most humanly moving and unsettling episode of the novel (154–174), but ultimately this is a mode of “old-school resistance […] that has become shipwrecked on the stealth and invisibility of contemporary networked power” (McCarthy et al. 2015, 145). In fact, Madison herself recognizes this when she comments fatalistically on U.’s fantasies of resistance: “It isn’t revolutionaries and terrorists who make power plants melt and blow their tops, or electricity grids crash, or automatic trading systems go all higgledy-piggledy and write their billions down to pennies in ten minutes – they do that on their own.” (140) Contemporary networked power can only be tackled (if

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at all) by the fundamental “‘out-of-jointness’” of human beings as bugs, in the double sense of glitches and insects (McCarthy et al. 2015, 145). McCarthy’s kind of resistance would accordingly be the “capricious, wandering grapheme of writing” that can accommodate the complexities and ambiguities of the world (including human beings) without the necessary simplifications of political agendas; in this sense, literature is “a kind of mapping-from-within” (2015, 147), a performative re-enactment of the kind that Wolfgang Funk calls ‘reconstruction’ (2015).

4 Reception and Theoretical Perspectives In the wake of Zadie Smith’s ‘the future of the Anglophone novel’-intervention (2008), all McCarthy novels after Remainder were widely and on the whole positively reviewed, though particularly in the British context a slight uneasiness with his ‘continental’ affectations of intellectual challenge can be perceived on occasion. Nevertheless, as the inclusion of both C (2010) and Satin Island into the Booker Prize shortlists indicates, the mainstream certainly recognizes his ambitious take on literariness in the twenty-first century, and his novels are widely discussed among readers on the Internet, a fate that is generally less visible with ‘literary fiction’ than with ‘genre fiction’ (↗ 3 Genres). On the evidence of a site like goodreads.com at the time of writing (February 2017), ‘normal readers’ (whoever they are exactly), while on the whole positively impressed, do not always appreciate what McCarthy is doing and also file a substantial number of one- or two-star reviews (out of five possible stars). This would seem to indicate that Smith’s ‘what we have been taught to value in fiction’ has, in a replay of the realism vs. experimentalism debate, certainly not been superseded by the new ways of novel writing McCarthy hints at. Academic reception, on the other hand, has only just begun, but McCarthy already saw a symposium dedicated to his work (‘Calling All Agents’, London, Birkbeck College, 2011; cf. Duncan 2016), and academic articles on his fiction tend to be enthusiastic and sophisticated. This, of course, has to do with McCarthy’s ambitious agenda, which, on the one hand, draws on the resources of modernism and, on the other, tries to move beyond postmodernism by teasing out the limits of the discourse of literary theory as it unfolded from the heyday of Theory in the 1980s and 1990s to more recent developments. While his work has been read in the light of Speculative Realism (Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman and others; cf. Gratton 2014; Boever 2016) and some of U.’s reflections on the “ant-like labourers” in the Koob-Sassen Project (69) and anthropology in general bear similarities to basic assumptions of Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory (ANT; cf. Latour 2005) and his Anthropology of the Moderns (Latour 2013), McCarthy does not let himself be easily assimilated into these contexts. His focus on practice and performance, for example, distances his work from the proponents of Speculative Realism whom he deems ‘empirical Buddhists’ (McCarthy et

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al. 2015, 150). The crux here is that “the speculative realists refuse to take the linguistic turn. They abandon it and leave it behind them. For they take their bearings from an objectality […] quite beyond the human-world or subject-object relation” (Gibson 2016, 232). McCarthy, on the other hand, rather acknowledges and extends the linguistic turn. “In light of Satin Island”, one of his interviewers points out to him, “one can appreciate how close those poststructuralist pieties […] are to the mechanics of the capitalist model” (McCarthy et al. 2015, 149), and this provokes McCarthy’s observation that “[c]apitalism is networked and so is literature […] there is no outside to it all, to the machine or to language.” (150) In fact, as U. demonstrates in Satin Island, even the concepts of left-wing ‘postmodern’ thinkers like Deleuze or Badiou can be appropriated in his work for the Company after ‘taking out all the revolutionary shit’ (33), and in an interview McCarthy points to similar uses of Habermas, Deleuze, and Lyotard while insisting that in contrast to this “the very uselessness of Derrida’s thinking is to his enormous credit” (McCarthy et al. 2015, 151). Given his additional focus on digitization, McCarthy’s outlook also touches on the more recent debate about post-humanism (cf. Lavery 2016), but neither U. nor McCarthy share the enthusiasm of some of the protagonists of that debate. While the optimists would point out that these developments minimize or compensate for what N. Katherine Hayles calls “the costs of consciousness” (confabulation, slowness and the inability of the analogous modern self to fully come to terms with the complexity of the systems which it is made of and in which it is embedded, cf. Hayles 2014, 204– 205), Satin Island registers the supplanting of semantic dimensions of meaning in the realm of representation that have framed human knowledge for a very long time with a stronger emphasis on functional or procedural dimensions of meaning: Whatever helps to keep up the process is meaningful – but what exactly is the process that is maintained? At the end of the day machines are less interested in representation as the basis for understanding than in keeping up the process by putting things into practice for its own sake. What gets lost here is the human dimension of synthesis in representation. U., and with him the outlook of Satin Island at large as expounded by the author, foregrounds the importance of this dimension both in terms of individuality – There is a whole Romantic, even Gnostic, thing going on. U. is looking at a veil, which is the screen, the pixellated screen […], and all the time U. is looking for some kind of absolute – a codex or a moment that would make sense of everything. (McCarthy et al. 2015, 140) –

and in terms of collectivity: U. is the reader. I imagine him sitting in front of twenty screens, all this information coming at him, and that’s his interface, that’s his veil, his grid. There are lots of possibilities there. There is enormous pathos in this possibility of communion with almost everyone – from dead parachutists, to Vanuatuans [sic], to Muslims moving around the Kaaba, to weekend zombies on a fun march […]. And on the other hand there is this kind of disconnect between U. and the infor-

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mation that comes to him through those screens, and that remains unresolved. So, my model for subjectivity – the way I stage it in this book, at least – is just U. in front of the screen. (McCarthy et al. 2015, 148)

In this specific context McCarthy insists on the productivity of what his interviewer calls “the affordances of words on a page”, wondering “whether there is something about textuality that the move towards performance is forgetting, perhaps even to its detriment?” (McCarthy et al. 2015, 143) This chimes with the agenda of the academic journal CounterText, which was founded in 2015 with the aim of identifying and discussing “countertextual works […] which currently call the literary to account and push the boundaries of what might be thought proper to the literary” and then found Satin Island “a work of literature that seems, in many ways, to fit this bill most uncannily” (McCarthy et al. 2015, 135–136). The sense that the Great Report can, with all reservations and qualifications, only be written as literature is strongly supported by the cover design of the American edition of Satin Island, as McCarthy himself points out: Look at the American cover of the book, it’s got ‘A Treatise’, ‘An Essay’, ‘A Manifesto’, ‘A Confession’, all crossed out. The only thing that is not crossed out is ‘A Novel’ – which doesn’t mean that that’s what it is, it means that that’s the thing that it least isn’t. So literature would be the space between these other fixed things. (McCarthy et al. 2015, 141)

By way of its epigraph from Mallarmé’s 1886 essay “Restricted Action”, Satin Island aligns the Great Report with Mallarmé’s idea of the ‘Book’ (cf. Weaver 2016, 96). For the globalized world of today, the Book would have to be “an examination of systems” that replaces “the Novel’s classical concerns of plot, character, psychology, event” (Duncan 2016, 13). As McCarthy puts it succinctly in an earlier interview well before Satin Island, “what we encounter in a novel is not selves, but networks” (McCarthy 2010b), and this networked environment straddles both the inside and the outside of the text: [L]iterature would be about encountering a series of symptoms that don’t live in the author’s mind or even in the text; they live in […] networks of interpretation, of which the author is just one reader, one point of interpretation, and not necessarily a very good one, actually, and certainly not a reliable one. (McCarthy et al. 2015, 137)

In this context, Andrew Gibson (2016, 235) points to McCarthy’s obsession with formalisms of all kinds, which resonates with a recent resurgence in literary studies of interest in matters of form beyond the traditional focus on the form of the literary text (see Levine 2015). Form in this sense becomes performative, and the space where this can happen is, as Gill Partington points out with reference to Remainder, “the flat surface of the page” (2016, 65). Read against the backdrop of the history of the English novel since 1900, Satin Island is only the latest attempt at ‘rerouting the novel’ from its traditional default position of ‘lyrical Realism’ (Smith 2008). It clearly implies that

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“reading fictional worlds – reading depth from flatness – is not natural” (Partington 2016, 65). But even after this deconstruction, Satin Island suggests, the novel should be utilized for reconstructive purposes of making sense of the world.

5 Bibliography 5.1 Works Cited McCarthy, Tom. Satin Island: A Novel. New York: Vintage, 2016a [2015]. --Barekat, Houman. “Is Non-Fiction the New Fiction?” Times Literary Supplement (27 January 2017). http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/non-fiction-new-fiction/ (15 February 2017). Boever, Arne De. “Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and the ‘Great Outdoors’.” Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays. Ed. Dennis Duncan. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2016. 201–226. Connor, Steven. “Spelling Things Out.” New Literary History 45.2 (2014): 183–197. Danaher, John. “Rule by Algorithm? Big Data and the Threat of Algocracy.” Philosophical Disquisitions (6 January 2014). http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.de/2014/01/rule-byalgorithm-big-data-and-threat.html (6 February 2017). Davies, Jeremy. The Birth of the Anthropocene. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. Downing, Henderson. “Crypt, Craft, Crackle: The INS at the ICA. Two Times.” Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays. Ed. Dennis Duncan. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2016. 19–46. Duncan, Dennis. “Introduction: Calling All Agents.” Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays. Ed. Dennis Duncan. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2016. 3–17. Eve, Martin Paul. “Structures, Signposts and Plays: Modernist Anxieties and Postmodern Influences in Tom McCarthy’s C.” Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays. Ed. Dennis Duncan. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2016. 181–200. Funk, Wolfgang. “Remainder.” The Literature of Reconstruction: Authentic Fiction in the New Millennium. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. 189–191. Gibson, Andrew. “New Inhumanisms: Tom McCarthy and Speculative Realism.” Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays. Ed. Dennis Duncan. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2016. 227–246. Gratton, Peter. Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Groes, Sebastian. “‘An Eternal Detour’: Reality Hunger, Post-Proustian Memory and the Late Modern Self in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder.” Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays. Ed. Dennis Duncan. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2016. 137–160. Hayles, N. Katherine. “Cognition Everywhere: The Rise of the Cognitive Nonconscious and the Costs of Consciousness.” New Literary History 45.2 (2014): 199–220. Krieger, David J. and Andréa Belliger. Interpreting Networks: Hermeneutics, Actor-Network-Theory & New Media. Bielefeld: transcript, 2014. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge/ London: Harvard University Press, 2013. Lavery, Nick. “Post-Humanism and the Distributed Consciousness in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder.” Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays. Ed. Dennis Duncan. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2016. 161-180. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015.

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 Christoph Reinfandt

McCarthy, Tom. Remainder. New York: Vintage, 2007. McCarthy, Tom. C. London: Jonathan Cape, 2010a. McCarthy, Tom. “Technology and the Novel, from Blake to Ballard.” The Guardian (24 July 2010b). https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jul/24/tom-mccarthy-futurists-novels-technology (31 January 2017). McCarthy, Tom. “The Death of Writing.” The Guardian (7 March 2015). https://www.theguardian. com/books/2015/mar/07/tom-mccarthy-death-writing- james-joyce-working-google (31 January 2017). McCarthy, Tom. “Foreword: On Being the Subject of a Conference or, What Do I Know?” Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays. Ed. Dennis Duncan. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2016b. 1–2. McCarthy, Tom, James Corby, and Ivan Callus. “The CounterText Interview: Tom McCarthy.” CounterText 1.2 (2015): 135–153. Nieland, Justus. “Dirty Media: Tom McCarthy and the Afterlife of Modernism.” Modern Fiction Studies 58.3 (2012): 569–599. Partington, Gill. “Dummy Chambers and Ur-Houses: How to Find Your Way Around in Remainder.” Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays. Ed. Dennis Duncan. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2016. 47–67. Rabinow, Paul. Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Slote, Sam. “The Recidual Remainder.” Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays. Ed. Dennis Duncan. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2016. 121­–135. Smith, Zadie. “Two Paths of the Novel.” New York Review of Books 55.18 (20 November 2008): 89–95. Sussman, Henry. Around the Book: Systems and Literacy. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011. Weaver, Milly. “Restricted Action: McCarthy’s Modernist Legacy?” Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays. Ed. Dennis Duncan. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2016: 95–119.

5.2 Further Reading Duncan, Dennis, ed. Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2016. Funk, Wolfgang. The Literature of Reconstruction: Authentic Fiction in the New Millennium. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. McCarthy, Tom, and Simon Critchley et al. The Mattering of Matter: Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012.

Index of Subjects abjection 442 Abolition, Abolitionist 124, 503 abstraction 7, 10, 71, 202, 247, 263, 466, 501 abstract thought 202, 204 absurdity, absurd(ist) 344, 345, 346, 347, 351, 353, 355, 362 Actor-Network-Theory 555, 559, 570 aestheticism, aestheticist 208, 233, 247 aesthetics, aesthetic 2, 45, 46, 69, 74, 75, 109, 124, 144, 146, 147, 163, 168, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 204, 206, 207, 209, 224, 229, 232, 244, 245, 260, 261, 263, 278, 282, 283, 294, 320, 336, 354, 369, 375, 414, 416, 474, 475, 476, 527 ––aesthetic complexity 546 ––aesthetic devices 424 ––aesthetic effect 379 ––aesthetic strategies 326 ––aesthetic techniques 424, 425, 438 ––aesthetic values 177 ––avantgarde aesthetics 546 affect 65, 72, 263, 418 agency 53, 84, 133, 137, 145, 185, 186, 381, 397, 403, 464, 490, 558, 562 alienation 57, 93, 96, 145, 270, 273, 370, 372, 377, 398 allegory, allegorical 27, 39, 53, 54, 122, 239, 244, 347, 360, 366, 367, 369, 373, 375, 376, 380, 386, 390, 393, 394, 421, 476 allusion 125, 158, 164, 165, 166, 167, 170, 171, 336, 367, 385, 387, 396, 397, 416, 461, 477, 478, 488, 510, 526, 542, 558, 568 alterity 526, 537 ambiguity 33, 64, 67, 190, 224, 228, 229, 314, 315, 339, 366, 368, 438, 499, 527, 531, 570 ambivalence 92, 143, 172, 201, 387, 389, 394, 441 anachronism 537 anagogical 476 androcentric 385 animal studies 478 Anthropocene 566 anthropocentric 262 anthropological 57, 404, 559, 564 anthropologist 557, 558, 559, 561, 562, 567 anthropology 555, 560, 561, 562, 564, 567, 570 anthropomorphisation 262

antiphonic 268, 284 antiquity 26, 104, 139, 146, 152, 155, 156, 165, 208 anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic 95, 158, 161 antithesis 109, 177, 262, 378, 505, 527 anxiety 82, 85, 88, 91, 98, 109, 115, 235, 239, 295 aporia, aporetic 144, 146 apotheosis 255, 369 artistic whole 378 atheist 156, 470 atmosphere 24, 25, 50, 74, 158, 161, 191, 224, 232, 240, 348, 353 author ––author figure 10, 204, 316, 332 ––authorship 5, 124, 195, 314 ––death of the author 415, 420 ––implied author 376, 381 autobiography, autobiographical 7, 9, 32, 153, 177, 200, 208, 233, 288, 289, 317, 323, 324, 325, 331, 332, 338, 340, 341, 425, 499 ––spiritual autobiography 276 autography 5, 252, 256 autonomy, autonomous 3, 4, 12, 45, 60, 71, 75, 76, 111, 114, 282, 313, 314, 445, 449, 450, 453, 457, 458, 494, 526 auto-referentiality, auto-referential 23, 27, 32, 33, 34, 36 avantgarde 25, 34, 36, 133, 175, 196, 197, 246, 442, 546, 556 ballad 269, 272, 273, 277, 284 barbarism, barbaric 139, 140, 141, 505, 514 bathos 419 belief system 218, 224, 292, 385 Bible, biblical 159, 368, 370, 396, 416, 418, 420, 453, 462, 465, 474, 475, 476, 489, 491, 523 binaries 406, 431, 441 binarity, binary 87, 90, 98, 104, 139, 339, 427, 441, 486, 487, 489, 499, 560, 563 ––binary categories 394 ––binary division 137 biography, biographical 29, 32, 126, 135, 136, 137, 153, 171, 176, 195, 208, 209, 247, 263, 328, 336, 338, 341, 361, 451, 452, 455, 457, 499, 539

576 

 Index of Subjects

biopolitical 216 bioscientific 219, 228, 229 biotechnology 219 Blackness 107, 119, 121, 122, 275, 276, 279 bourgeoisie, bourgeois 43, 50, 64, 68, 70, 71, 75, 108, 109, 111, 114, 177, 191, 276, 282, 545, 546, 549, 550, 551, 555 ––bourgeois culture 115 ––bourgeois ideology 109 Britishness 1, 14, 123, 124, 482 burlesque 385, 389 calypso, calypsonian 268, 271, 278, 279, 282, 284, 285 canon, canonical 89, 93, 99, 118, 148, 248, 318, 350, 403, 410, 421, 510 capitalism, capitalist 42, 43, 44, 46, 48, 50, 52, 55, 58, 60, 77, 78, 109, 111, 216, 352, 354, 357, 389, 481, 500, 503, 514, 515, 571 ––corporate capitalism 558 carnival, carnivalesque 125, 268, 278, 279, 284, 344, 353, 354, 355, 357, 359, 389, 398, 418 caste system 215 catalyst 216, 311 Catholicism, Catholic 156, 158, 167, 347, 349, 354, 359, 360, 369, 483, 489, 548 causality 26, 28, 33, 491 censorship 176 character ––alienated character perspectives 378 ––allegorical character 367, 373, 395, 396 ––ambivalent character 394 ––characterisation 45, 47, 141, 190, 208, 236 ––character perspectives 375, 376, 377 ––fleshed-out character 393 ––functionalization of characters 375 ––hybrid character 123, 384 ––immanent character perspectives 376, 377 ––individuation of character 42 ––trivial character 171 characterisation 74, 227, 319 chivalry, chivalric 89, 91 Christianity, Christian 156, 182, 183, 268, 349, 369, 375, 414, 427, 465, 477, 482, 485, 486, 490, 494, 544 chronotope 500, 508 cinema, cinematic 6, 38, 44, 153, 223, 241, 271, 340, 417, 419, 462 –– cinematic effect 241, 355

cipher 370 civilisation 54, 109, 134, 139, 140, 141, 223, 349, 350, 370, 500, 502, 503, 504, 505, 509, 521, 526 ––civilising mission 349, 350, 357 Civil War 431, 432 class 2, 4, 14, 42, 47, 53, 75, 86, 90, 91, 97, 99, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 176, 191, 219, 232, 235, 236, 237, 239, 240, 248, 249, 274, 277, 281, 284, 304, 305, 306, 312, 323, 339, 462, 481, 482, 483, 491 ––class antagonism 117 ––class conflict 108, 117 ––class-consciousness, class-conscious 109, 110, 113, 114, 116, 117, 125 ––class identity 109 ––classism 216 ––class prejudice 179 ––class-struggle 115 ––lower class, lower-class 483, 487 ––middle class, middle-class 27, 28, 29, 43, 67, 68, 75, 107, 108, 109, 112, 113, 114, 118, 120, 176, 177, 178, 190, 244, 481, 483, 489 ––ruling class, ruling-class 109, 219, 348, 354 ––upper class, upper-class 86, 90, 91, 109, 198, 232, 233, 234, 235, 240, 273, 483 ––working class, working-class 43, 91, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 219, 232, 233, 248, 272, 274 classicism, classicist 336 closure 95, 108, 111, 282, 328, 485, 503 cognitive estrangement 72, 77, 525, 531, 534 Cold War 3, 57, 299 colonialism, colonial 49, 57, 89, 90, 96, 98, 99, 118, 119, 123, 125, 134, 137, 138, 139, 140, 145, 146, 176, 178, 180, 186, 190, 191, 192, 246, 269, 270, 278, 279, 280, 288, 292, 294, 345, 346, 347, 350, 351, 352, 353, 354, 356, 357, 358, 362, 363, 481, 482, 483, 484, 485, 486, 488, 491, 508, 526, 527, 528 ––anticolonial resistance 484 ––colonial nostalgia 294 ––colonial rhetoric 145 ––(neo)colonial 285 colonisation, coloniser 133, 134, 138, 139, 140, 167, 178, 180, 184, 191, 192, 268, 348, 350, 355, 360, 405, 528

Index of Subjects 

colonised 178, 180, 192, 348, 360, 362, 521, 528 colony 120, 135, 269, 270, 277, 345, 348, 350, 356, 521, 526 comedy, comic 25, 185, 199, 240, 243, 253, 348, 352, 353, 354, 360, 403, 405, 406, 410, 411, 417, 418, 421, 452, 481, 484, 491, 492, 494, 519 ––absurdist comedy 344, 363 ––black comedy 345 ––comedy of manners 353 ––dark comedy 363 coming of age 53, 478, 499 commodification 43, 45, 46, 224, 397, 399, 492 communication 3, 10, 11, 13, 33, 51, 144, 146, 195, 197, 201, 521, 525, 527, 528, 556, 569 communicative strategies 201 communism, communist 113, 292, 293, 294, 295, 351, 358, 414, 462 conditio humana 89, 91, 461 consciousness 4, 6, 12, 23, 24, 36, 52, 53, 55, 69, 71, 83, 109, 114, 186, 195, 205, 206, 208, 217, 295, 296, 307, 311, 317, 340, 346, 348, 351, 354, 358, 370, 386, 388, 395, 433, 544, 547, 549, 550, 551 constructedness 37, 76, 78, 121, 221, 359, 547, 556 constructivism, constructivist 9, 83, 208, 504, 505 consumer culture 42, 213 contextual memory 257 contingency 27, 29, 35, 36, 39, 100, 245, 318, 334, 369, 483, 484, 485, 489, 490, 491, 508 corpocracy 502, 504, 508, 515 cosmic optimism 369 cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitan 2, 10, 14, 59, 171, 288, 292, 294, 299, 413, 481, 490, 493, 498, 500, 508, 509, 514 counterpointing, counterpoint 226, 355, 356, 360, 394, 498, 533, 562 creative impurity 412 creole 268, 270, 271, 278, 280, 281, 282, 283 creolisation 268 critical irrealism 520, 531 cross-reference 187, 331, 511 culture, cultural ––book-based culture 5 ––corporate culture 555, 561, 567

 577

––cultural anxiety 449 ––cultural capital 177, 192 ––cultural code 278 ––cultural context 213, 248, 298, 428 ––cultural heritage 483 ––cultural institutions 4 ––cultural production 5 ––cultural studies 84 ––cultural turn 76 ––digital culture 5 ––memory culture 362 ––popular culture 491 ––transcultural 481, 486, 488, 490 ––unity of culture 486 cyclic structure 506 daguerreotype 356, 358 decolonisation 108, 118, 119, 268, 299 ––decolonial politics 268, 284 deconstruction, deconstructivist 78, 84, 96, 100, 171, 190, 298, 415, 426, 448, 522, 559, 573 decontextualizing approach 148 defamiliarisation 246, 418 deferral of meaning 438 dehumanisation, dehumanising effects 113, 213, 246 deixis, deictic 527, 543 demonization 96, 108 destiny 70, 217, 310, 371, 461, 469, 470, 471, 474, 484, 485 determinism 306, 483, 488, 490 deviation from ordinary language 243 diachronic 483 dialect 49, 113, 114, 281, 282, 283, 509 dialectics, dialectic 134, 141, 177, 306, 333, 340, 461, 464, 483, 519, 533 ––dialectical structure 378 dialogue 109, 114, 159, 165, 214, 235, 240, 241, 261, 281, 282, 309, 315, 359, 375, 434, 491, 543 diary 289, 290, 291, 293, 297, 298, 299, 375, 377, 455, 501, 502, 503, 510, 511 ––diary genre 288, 297 dichotomy, dichotomous 64, 75, 248, 293, 339, 361, 424, 425, 427, 431, 436, 438, 442, 505, 515 diegesis 116, 117, 507 digitalisation 11, 14, 561

578 

 Index of Subjects

digitization 263, 555, 564, 571 digression, digressive 315, 523, 564 disambiguation 101 discourse 6, 12, 14, 35, 36, 56, 70, 96, 104, 107, 111, 112, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 125, 138, 139, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 171, 190, 191, 204, 205, 241, 273, 276, 277, 278, 281, 282, 283, 315, 333, 351, 357, 359, 360, 362, 392, 399, 415, 416, 419, 420, 425, 432, 433, 439, 469, 472, 477, 491, 505, 513, 519, 523, 529, 534, 536, 537, 538, 544, 546, 551, 562, 570 ––counter-discourse 439 disillusionment 213, 242 disintegration 259, 327, 329, 333 Doppelgänger 135, 142, 144 drama 4, 31, 162, 189, 256, 375, 419, 424 dream sequence 120, 417 duality 117, 139, 318, 427 dystopia, dystopian 31, 36, 74, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 219, 220, 221, 223, 224, 227, 228, 229, 353, 385, 417, 498, 500, 503, 504, 510, 514, 515 ecocriticism, ecocritical 209, 320 economics, economic 2, 3, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 68, 111, 117, 220, 221, 229, 236, 248, 269, 305, 346, 353, 485, 520, 536, 546 ––artistic/economic divide 50 ––economic change 42 ––economic crisis 42, 43, 51, 54 ––economic elites 42 ––economic history 43, 54 ––economic ideology 60 ––economic inequality 53 ––economic paradigm 42, 43, 55, 56 ––economic status quo 60 ––economic value 50 ––Keynesian economics 42, 43, 52, 55, 56, 57 ––neoclassical economics 56 ––neoliberal economics 42, 43 ––socio-economic 352, 357, 359, 362 ––socioeconomic conditions 42 ––welfare capitalist economics 42, 43 economy 45, 46, 48, 50, 51, 53, 56, 57, 59, 60, 216, 220, 257, 352, 356, 397, 542 écriture feminine 93, 95

editor 44, 45, 47, 158, 159, 292, 293, 294, 304, 323, 365, 385, 448, 518 education 4, 57, 59, 67, 86, 117, 177, 183, 187, 195, 229, 240, 268, 312, 350, 352, 368, 390, 464, 488, 503 Edwardian 175, 243, 478 ––Edwardian age 446 ekphrasis, ekphrastic 358, 543 electro-metallurgy 349 elegy, elegiac 199, 206, 328, 339, 353, 362 elitism 11, 168, 208, 336, 337 ellipsis 188 emancipation 4, 7, 69, 83, 314, 446, 504 embedding 125, 438, 440, 441, 470, 553 emigration, emigrant 269 empire 14, 31, 57, 96, 108, 119, 120, 123, 209, 268, 269, 270, 292, 344, 345, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 351, 352, 353, 354, 355, 356, 357, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, 363, 406, 424, 482, 528, 529 ––British Empire 48, 195, 270, 289, 326, 344, 345, 346, 347, 349, 351, 352, 353, 357, 359, 362, 405 ––imperial legacy 462 empiricism, empirical 5, 6, 146, 148, 157, 165, 172, 306, 570 emplotment 112, 339, 550 Englishness 2, 5, 122, 279, 281, 299, 305, 407, 487, 490 English Reformation 539 Enlightenment 70, 133, 136, 141, 145, 146, 282, 474, 537 entertainment 4, 5, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 73, 115, 185, 223, 224, 420, 492 environment, environmental 220, 306, 430, 435 epanorthosis 260 epic 27, 28, 29, 37, 69, 70, 272, 405, 406, 418, 449, 469, 470, 567 epigraph 315, 436, 439, 453, 454, 572 epistemology, epistemological 6, 8, 9, 76, 78, 107, 114, 133, 137, 140, 146, 175, 190, 195, 201, 202, 204, 206, 232, 237, 243, 268, 281, 282, 283, 349, 354, 434, 445, 446, 450, 451, 452, 456, 468, 520, 528, 532, 547, 550, 551 escapism, escapist 30, 65, 66, 462 essentialism, essentialist 83, 93, 98, 101, 103, 121, 123, 191, 275, 467, 472, 490, 498, 515 estrangement 44, 121, 184, 201, 520, 529

Index of Subjects 

ethics, ethical 28, 53, 133, 137, 138, 142, 144, 268, 283, 284, 314, 317, 329, 376, 421, 445, 446, 451, 452, 456, 462, 463, 469, 477, 494, 505, 549 ethnicity, ethnic 2, 14, 32, 96, 97, 107, 108, 118, 120, 122, 125, 126, 176, 183, 185, 270, 281, 420, 478, 481, 482, 483, 486, 489, 491, 492, 494 ––ethnic minority 84, 96, 97, 118, 122, 482 eugenics 220, 484, 485, 490 Eurocentrism, Eurocentric 278, 279, 285 existentialism, existential(ist) 252, 260, 263, 303, 304, 306, 307, 310, 311, 313, 314, 315, 316, 318, 319, 345 ––existential authenticity 303, 304, 307 ––existential awareness 304 ––existential freedom 310, 318 exogenous 426 experientiality, experiential 71, 75, 76, 548 experimentalism, experimental(ist) 5, 7, 16, 25, 32, 46, 48, 57, 72, 76, 85, 93, 95, 113, 120, 153, 170, 196, 199, 226, 232, 233, 247, 248, 323, 326, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 361, 362, 419, 425, 436, 493, 499, 515, 556, 562, 570 fable 365, 366 fairy tale 104, 206, 385, 414, 431, 432, 433, 434, 439, 440, 441, 453, 455, 487 Fall of Man 523 family saga 446, 481, 482, 483 fantasy, fantastic 4, 30, 36, 53, 65, 66, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 87, 92, 93, 104, 116, 279, 311, 386, 391, 392, 394, 398, 406, 415, 417, 425, 428, 429, 431, 432, 433, 437, 441, 461, 462, 463, 470, 471, 472, 477, 478, 499, 515, 518, 519, 520, 529, 530, 533, 561, 569 ––urban fantasy horror 518 farce 481, 484, 485 fascism, fascist 3, 484, 485 femininity, feminine 84, 88, 92, 94, 101, 102, 187, 208, 372, 387, 394, 397, 424, 427, 428, 429, 431, 439, 448, 466 feminism, feminist 14, 31, 82, 84, 91, 92, 93, 101, 192, 196, 201, 208, 209, 213, 228, 295, 296, 298, 311, 314, 319, 384, 385, 387, 390, 393, 397, 398, 425, 441, 442, 447, 449, 453, 458, 510, 547

 579

––anti-feminist 385 ––feminist criticism 171 fiction ––adventure fiction 68, 72 ––Anglo-Indian fiction 180 ––biographic metafiction 446, 452, 453, 456 ––children’s fiction 462 ––colonial fiction 246 ––crime fiction 65, 72 ––critical fiction 290, 299 ––detective fiction 67, 68, 454 ––dystopian fiction 36, 213, 216, 385, 510 ––Empire fiction 360 ––espionage fiction 30, 552 ––ethnic fiction 107 ––fantasy fiction 66 ––genre fiction 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 570 ––historical fiction 54, 74, 104, 320, 356, 499, 536, 537, 538, 539, 546, 547, 548, 357, 359 ––historiographic metafiction 35, 72, 306, 319, 357, 361, 431, 432, 433, 434, 438, 452, 455, 456, 537, 538, 542, 546, 547, 551 ––horror fiction 65, 72, 73, 520 ––literary fiction 10, 48, 50, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 74, 77, 78, 319, 380, 393, 570 ––ludic fiction 397 ––metahistoriographic fiction 357, 358 ––modernist fiction 72, 232, 248, 366, 520, 556 ––multi-ethnic fiction 108 ––neo-historical fiction 538 ––Neo-Victorian fiction 457 ––political fiction 295 ––postmodern(ist) fiction 31, 361, 414, 416, 456, 520 ––realist fiction 29, 282, 323, 384, 398, 416, 445 ––revisionist fiction 397 ––science fiction 30, 54, 65, 66, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 104, 385, 403, 417, 478, 518, 519, 520, 525, 529, 530, 531, 533, 534 ––sea fiction 135 ––sensation fiction 68 ––sentimental fiction 68 ––short fiction 482, 384, 462 ––space fiction 30, 290 ––spy fiction 67 ––vampire fiction 68

580 

 Index of Subjects

––Weird Fiction 64, 77, 518, 519, 520, 528, 531, 532, 533, 534 fictionality, fictional 51, 393, 452, 491, 531 ––fictional being 254 ––fictional illusion 393 ––fictional universe 85, 104, 252, 375, 530, 541 ––fictional world 64, 102, 104, 254, 367, 375, 529, 539, 573 figural speech 521, 523 film 6, 10, 38, 44, 101, 118, 120, 189, 224, 241, 277, 291, 293, 320, 323, 324, 340, 355, 385, 403, 405, 416, 432, 462, 502, 514, 537, 562 First Indian War of Independence 348 focalisation 205, 208, 240, 544 ––collective focalisation 186 ––internal focalisation 186, 227, 271, 355 ––multiperspectival focalisation 357 ––shifting focalisation 238, 455 ––zero/external focalisation 205, 227 focaliser 184, 204, 205, 221, 226, 273, 277, 372, 394, 395, 417, 543 ––internal focaliser 353, 355, 357, 359 ––unreliable focaliser 360 folklore 396, 520 foreshadowing 187, 530 formalism, formalist 15, 32, 144, 190, 209, 247, 380, 572 ––anti-formalist 24 form, formal ––formal experimentation 68, 546 ––formal innovation 67, 71, 144 ––formal innovativeness 68 ––formally over-determined 379 ––significant form 197, 207 fragmentation 152, 370, 371, 426, 430, 438, 501 frame-break 289, 440 free indirect discourse 114, 117, 204, 205, 241, 273, 281, 360, 491, 544 free will 215, 219, 369, 461, 469, 470, 474 French Revolution 534, 546 fundamentalism, fundamentalist 404, 406, 414, 425, 482, 485, 486, 488, 490, 491, 494 futurism, futurist 167, 246, 504, 510, 515 gay 82, 84, 94, 100, 103, 191 gaze 94, 161, 228, 238, 390, 391, 397, 398, 399, 400, 558

gender 2, 4, 14, 32, 36, 75, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 118, 121, 149, 192, 208, 239, 240, 277, 278, 281, 285, 288, 295, 296, 304, 314, 349, 350, 354, 385, 396, 397, 398, 424, 425, 426, 427, 428, 429, 430, 431, 441, 462, 478, 482, 483 ––gender binarism 83, 84, 88 ––gender complementarity 87 ––gender expectations 448 ––gender identity 82, 425, 427, 431 ––gender norm 449 ––gender politics 228 ––gender role 428, 429, 431, 441 ––gender studies 191 ––gender system 88 ––transgender 428 genetic criticism 172 genetic engineering 485, 486, 489, 490, 494, 503 genocide 134, 509 genre 1, 2, 3, 8, 11, 13, 14, 15, 23, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 38, 39, 42, 43, 50, 51, 54, 55, 59, 60, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 104, 108, 112, 138, 176, 180, 190, 198, 229, 232, 235, 256, 279, 288, 290, 291, 297, 339, 347, 349, 353, 357, 359, 360, 384, 386, 396, 406, 414, 415, 417, 418, 420, 422, 424, 425, 431, 441, 445, 452, 454, 455, 456, 462, 477, 478, 491, 492, 498, 501, 510, 514, 518, 519, 520, 525, 528, 529, 533, 536, 537, 538, 544, 545, 546, 547, 548, 552, 555 ––hybrid genre 385 ––popular genre 65, 68, 71, 77, 418 globalisation 14, 51, 59, 299 God 9, 10, 12, 27, 29, 93, 116, 158, 161, 165, 188, 310, 316, 367, 369, 373, 375, 409, 410, 413, 414, 421, 429, 458, 466, 470, 473, 477, 486, 523 gothic 30, 31, 54, 68, 353, 359, 380, 385, 396, 441, 454, 455, 499, 520 ––neo-gothic 499 grafting 424, 425, 426, 427, 428, 430, 431, 435, 438, 441 Great Depression 248 grotesque 237, 353, 354, 359, 363, 396, 398, 407

Index of Subjects 

hermeneutics, hermeneutic 239, 278, 279, 281, 529, 559 ––hermeneutic circle 137 ––hermeneutic reliability 327 hero 28, 29, 31, 89, 94, 98, 155, 156, 157, 162, 227, 234, 310, 350, 358, 406, 429, 431, 455, 537, 546, 567, 418, 463, 484, 485 ––anti-hero 303, 406, 411, 485 heroine 94, 96, 98, 303, 304, 311, 314, 318, 396, 461, 540 heteroglossia 125, 492 heteronormativity, heteronormative 83, 87, 88, 89, 90, 98, 101, 102, 103, 181, 182, 191, 397, 424, 426, 433, 434, 440 heterosexuality, heterosexual 83, 87, 101, 181, 276, 426, 427, 433, 434, 439, 456 highbrow 48, 113, 510, 520 historicity ––meta-historicist approach 149 historiography, historiographic 101, 176, 357, 432, 452, 453, 455, 484, 536, 538, 546, 547, 548, 549, 551 history, historical ––historical analysis 354 ––historical context 306, 387, 451, 541 ––historical imagination 358 ––historical representation 306 ––historical sensibility 505 ––history of mentalities 357 ––teleological history 547 Holocaust 3, 376, 407, 504 homophobia, homophobic 87, 439 homosexuality, homosexual 82, 84, 87, 89, 94, 99, 175, 177, 191, 427, 439, 478 horror 30, 65, 66, 72, 73, 74, 77, 518, 519, 520, 533 human condition 224, 225, 263, 365, 375, 380, 461 humanism, humanist 171, 260, 263, 347, 369, 404, 414, 445, 456, 457, 458, 490, 505, 549, 561, 569 ––liberal humanism 177, 380 ––secular humanism 477 human rights 94, 482 hybridity, hybrid 14, 15, 96, 97, 109, 119, 122, 123, 125, 191, 385, 386, 388, 389, 390, 393, 394, 395, 399, 403, 408, 410, 411, 412, 413, 414, 418, 424, 425, 426, 427, 431,

 581

435, 456, 469, 478, 483, 485, 486, 488, 489, 490, 491, 492, 493, 494 ––generic hybridity 384, 446, 500 ––hybridisation 489 ––transcultural hybridization 481 hyperbole, hyperbolic 13, 101, 278, 279, 486 hyperreality 530 hypertext, hypertextual 38, 330, 331 hypocrisy, hypocritical 157, 311, 350, 374, 430, 488, 549, 561 hysteria 88 identity 4, 9, 31, 34, 36, 59, 82, 101, 109, 119, 122, 123, 124, 148, 180, 218, 221, 226, 238, 239, 245, 248, 256, 276, 308, 318, 368, 375, 389, 390, 392, 398, 403, 414, 420, 425, 431, 434, 437, 442, 445, 447, 448, 457, 458, 474, 482, 483, 486, 487, 488, 490, 492, 494, 528 ––female identity 201, 428 ––identity category 83, 97, 100 ––identity constructions 424, 426 ––identity formation 377 ––migrant identity 408, 411 ––multiplicity of identities 429 ––political identity 420 ––social identity 367 ideology, ideological 2, 3, 12, 14, 42, 43, 50, 53, 60, 71, 77, 83, 98, 107, 108, 109, 111, 114, 115, 118, 122, 136, 138, 156, 181, 184, 185, 192, 218, 282, 283, 306, 314, 316, 339, 345, 346, 347, 349, 352, 354, 362, 385, 438, 440, 456, 462, 463, 467, 474, 477, 483, 491, 505, 509, 511, 514, 533, 544 imagination 12, 54, 82, 103, 104, 138, 141, 143, 169, 208, 223, 240, 244, 246, 247, 255, 311, 316, 358, 407, 413, 414, 437, 441, 445, 446, 451, 452, 473, 514, 515, 526 imagist 199, 246 immigration, immigrant 53, 58, 107, 118, 119, 123, 268, 269, 288, 356, 406, 412, 481, 482, 483, 486, 487, 488, 489, 493 immobility 232, 240, 242, 247 imperialism, imperial(ist) 1, 51, 57, 68, 108, 119, 123, 138, 139, 167, 175, 178, 179, 182, 190, 209, 269, 270, 279, 292, 344, 348, 349, 350, 352, 353, 354, 357, 358, 359, 362, 388, 397, 462, 483, 484, 487, 503, 509, 542

582 

 Index of Subjects

––postimperialism, postimperial 278, 292, 344, 356, 357, 359, 360, 362 ––postimperial melancholia 5, 292, 362 impressionism, impressionist 44, 55, 196, 202, 203 ––post-impressionist 195, 196, 199, 203 incompletion 252, 256 indescribable 518, 520, 531, 532, 534 Indian Mutiny 179, 344, 348, 349, 484, 491 individuality, individual 11, 13, 43, 97, 180, 219, 226, 236, 307, 310, 392, 456, 506, 552, 571 ––individual freedom 12, 222, 229, 306 inexpressible 232, 262 in medias res 226, 377, 405, 529 intentionalist fallacy 412 interior monologue 33, 152, 158, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 205, 240, 324, 377, 395, 417, 419, 543 internationalism 196 interpellation 85, 95, 96, 97, 275, 420 intertext 206, 418, 439, 466, 469 intertextuality, intertextual 36, 96, 213, 214, 223, 228, 243, 263, 357, 361, 362, 384, 393, 394, 396, 397, 399, 403, 416, 432, 433, 438, 439, 440, 441, 442, 446, 453, 454, 455, 456, 457, 475, 491, 492, 507, 510, 537, 546, 561 ––intertextual allusions 397, 461, 478 ––intertextual references 164, 165, 166, 167, 463 intradiegetic artefact 502 intratextuality, intratextual 164, 440, 472, 474 Irish War of Independence 344, 346, 347, 348 irony, ironic 15, 55, 56, 223, 278, 279, 284, 292, 293, 297, 299, 306, 328, 353, 384, 386, 398, 404, 406, 416, 420, 421, 427, 439, 492 ––dramatic irony 353 ––ironic commentary 253 ––ironic distance 368, 377 ––ironic distance 227, 228, 393 ––ironic eclecticism 415 ––ironic tone 375, 376 Islam, Islamic 404, 405, 407, 410, 411, 415, 420, 421, 488 ––Islamophobia 488 isomorphism 139 Jew, Jewish 31, 95, 156, 161, 305, 482, 483, 489

Kafkaesque 344, 347, 353 knowability, knowable 306 language ––body language 527 ––English language 1, 33, 133, 157, 164, 344, 404, 419, 537 ––figural language 524, 525 ––instrumentalisation of language 521 ––literalisation of language 438 ––multiple languages 415 ––performative language 473 ––poetic language 425 ––power of language 254 langue 506, 530 Leerstellen 33 leisure 4, 229, 237, 239, 248 leitmotif 16, 160, 186, 187, 191, 195, 206, 352, 407, 411, 418, 483, 503, 506, 509 lesbian 82, 84, 94, 100, 102, 191, 400, 425, 439, 441, 442 levels of meaning 475, 476 liberal individualism 108 liberalism, liberal 42, 43, 49, 108, 109, 177, 178, 196, 344, 347, 362, 380, 404, 457, 478, 482, 487, 494, 549 ––neoliberalism, neoliberal 42, 43, 53, 54, 55, 58, 59, 117, 285, 514 life-writing 446, 452 liminality, liminal 95, 222, 290, 385, 389 linearity, linear 38, 133, 136, 206, 207, 254, 323, 328, 329, 330, 331, 334, 335, 339, 357, 432, 436, 437, 438, 446, 483, 485, 506, 508, 513 linguistics, linguistic 7, 60, 70, 100, 136, 137, 138, 146, 192, 226, 280, 418, 421, 435, 522, 523, 527, 528, 532, 530 ––extra-linguistic reality 522 ––linguistic concerns 518 ––linguistic constructivism 281 ––linguistic critique 139 ––linguistic difference 120 ––linguistic form 143 ––linguistic norm 35 ––linguistic plurality 419 ––linguistic register 114 ––linguistic sign 522 ––linguistic skepticism 252, 261 ––linguistic theory 522

Index of Subjects 

––linguistic turn 6, 76, 415, 571 ––linguistic uncertainty 137 ––linguistic variants 491 literariness 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 75, 77, 246, 420, 570 literary ––English literary studies 208 ––literary convention 115, 384, 385, 396 ––literary cosmos 397 ––literary criticism 197, 213, 228, 361, 400, 475 ––literary critics 202, 361, 492, 454, 537 ––literary device 108, 133, 136, 543 ––literary genre 23, 27, 30, 37, 38, 64, 67, 69, 77, 78, 198, 279, 385, 424, 431, 441, 445, 455 ––literary history 37, 57, 66, 84, 89, 113, 118, 134, 152, 165, 196, 204, 362, 458, 518, 538, 544 ––literary illusion 393 ––literary journals 152 ––literary magazine 7, 44 ––literary minimalism 233 ––literary period 44, 56 ––literary philosophy 415 ––literary prize 31, 48, 59, 482, 519 ––literary prototype 4 ––literary satire 213, 214 ––literary scene 27, 98, 136 ––literary strategies 163, 184, 224, 281, 296, 336, 353, 354, 365, 386, 393, 397, 453, 518, 537, 543, 550 ––literary style 164, 225, 403 ––literary techniques 86, 152, 384, 424, 425 ––literary theory 172, 425, 451, 570 ––literary traditions 283, 380 ––metaliterary level 461 ––metaliterary perspective 472 literature ––African British literature 119 ––Asian British literature 119 ––Black British literature 119 ––Caribbean British literature 119 ––children’s literature 471, 477, 478, 518 ––Commonwealth literature 118, 362 ––engaged literature 263 ––fantasy literature 65, 499 ––lad literature 91 ––limit of literature 372, 374 ––travel literature 176

 583

––utopian literature 215 ––world literature 33, 157, 297, 396 locutionary 144 macrostructure 501, 511 magic realism, magic realist 36, 122, 384, 385, 403, 406, 417 Manichaean 462, 499 manuscript 252, 253, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 263, 304, 311, 318, 365, 499, 502, 509, 511, 515, 567 marginalisation 275, 550 marketplace 43, 44, 47, 50, 60, 64, 278, 294 ––literary marketplace 4, 47, 48, 67, 68, 276, 288, 293 Marxism, Marxist 32, 93, 306, 344, 354, 387, 393, 397, 406, 518, 519, 533, 544, 547, 550 masculinity, masculine 82, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 102, 104, 190, 208, 268, 272, 277, 278, 313, 314, 372, 373, 394, 424, 427, 429, 431, 433, 434, 439, 488, 510 materialism, materialist 111, 195, 209, 214, 350, 392, 555 ––cultural materialism 410 materiality, material 323, 334, 336, 341, 350, 436, 437, 445, 447, 476, 542, 556, 557, 559, 560, 562, 563, 564, 565, 566, 567, 568, 569 ––material body 263 meaningfulness 70, 371 media 5, 6, 10, 11, 13, 37, 38, 39, 43, 44, 48, 59, 78, 176, 189, 215, 279, 323, 340, 341, 358, 359, 482, 556, 562, 563, 565 ––transmediality 418 mediality, medial 7, 70, 199, 213, 219, 359, 555, 556, 557, 560, 568, 569 medicine 56, 349 medium 4, 6, 12, 13, 38, 72, 74, 78, 95, 107, 184, 223, 255, 341, 344, 378, 472, 560, 567 melancholia, melancholy 5, 87, 88, 101, 138, 292, 294, 307, 312, 345, 362 mémoire involontaire 168 memory 94, 101, 108, 120, 138, 140, 166, 169, 207, 244, 257, 262, 323, 326, 328, 329, 330, 331, 334, 335, 344, 354, 359, 362, 380, 392, 472, 486, 541, 545, 549 ––urban memory 330 metafiction 9, 23, 35, 72, 76, 107, 298, 303, 305, 306, 319, 340, 357, 365, 386, 389, 393, 396, 397, 431, 432, 433, 434, 446,

584 

 Index of Subjects

452, 453, 455, 456, 457, 537, 538, 542, 546, 547, 551 metafictionality, metafictional 76, 101, 258, 289, 290, 295, 296, 297, 303, 304, 315, 317, 319, 325, 340, 354, 359, 361, 381, 384, 393, 397, 398, 416, 417, 445, 446, 452, 510, 537, 542 metahistory, metahistorical 344, 357, 358, 359, 481, 483 metalepsis, metaleptic 146, 147, 324, 325, 333 metamorphosis 13, 408, 411, 412 metanarrativity, metanarrative 134, 415, 474, 504 metaphor, metaphorical 8, 77, 78, 87, 96, 146, 225, 241, 242, 244, 245, 246, 324, 328, 352, 393, 424, 426, 431, 438, 439, 441, 448, 465, 475, 483, 489, 513, 514, 524, 525, 527, 530, 564, 566, 568 ––literalisation of metaphor 417 metaphysics, metaphysical 120, 141, 308, 365, 367, 374, 376, 379, 421, 466, 467, 470, 471, 474, 477, 506, 565 metastructure 507 metatextuality, metatextual 397, 416, 474, 509, 513 methodology, methodological 43, 192, 445, 446, 452, 456, 567 methodology, methodological metonymy, metonymical 269, 489 metropolis 153, 167, 214, 268, 279, 407, 481, 492, 493 metropolis Middle Ages 26, 365, 549, 550, 551 middlebrow 47, 48, 92 migration, migrant 93, 96, 119, 120, 121, 122, 269, 270, 272, 274, 276, 277, 279, 280, 284, 406, 408, 411, 412, 413, 416, 483, 487, 558 mimesis, mimetic 34, 78, 107, 116, 120, 208, 335, 336, 339, 475, 525 mimicry 109, 278 miscegenation 277, 487 mise-en-abyme 439 misogyny, misogynist 83, 91, 101, 102, 228 mobility 42, 111, 112, 232, 240, 242, 247, 549 modern condition 3, 70, 283, 415 modernism, modernist 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 25, 31, 33, 37, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 51, 52, 55, 56, 57, 60, 64, 68, 71,

72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 87, 99, 107, 133, 134, 136, 137, 143, 145, 146, 152, 153, 164, 167, 168, 170, 175, 185, 186, 196, 197, 199, 201, 206, 207, 209, 232, 233, 240, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 254, 268, 273, 281, 284, 318, 335, 336, 337, 353, 365, 377, 442, 493, 520, 536, 543, 544, 546, 548, 551, 555, 556, 562, 570 ––High Modernism 25, 86, 100 ––modernist cosmopolitanism 5, 14 ––modernist movement 43 ––modernist period 47, 51, 55, 56 mongrelization 122, 412 monstrosity, monstrous 73, 101, 121, 140, 188, 335, 346, 362, 396, 398, 399, 401, 432, 442, 449 montage 113, 241, 331, 357, 358, 417, 419, 482 morality, moral 4, 23, 24, 28, 36, 53, 67, 100, 114, 133, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 156, 157, 177, 206, 208, 225, 248, 269, 277, 305, 307, 310, 365, 372, 381, 415, 430, 456, 465, 467, 470, 473, 476, 477, 482, 484, 485, 545, 549 ––moral concerns 365, 366, 367 ––moral progress 505 ––moral value 141, 143 –– moral values 466 motif 184, 186, 188, 201, 206, 207, 209, 261, 381, 385, 388, 504, 513, 564, 565, 566, 568 multiculturalism, multicultural 107, 115, 119, 181, 406, 407, 412, 481, 482, 483, 486, 487, 491, 492, 493, 494 ––multicultural Britain 119, 406, 481 multidimensional 385 multiperspectivity 68, 234, 254, 355, 369, 378 music, musical 33, 113, 125, 135, 152, 153, 157, 165, 172, 188, 197, 206, 225, 226, 247, 273, 281, 283, 297, 387, 390, 513 ––musicality 152, 160 Muslim 178, 183, 186, 190, 404, 405, 410, 414, 420, 483, 484, 485, 486, 487, 488, 490, 494, 571 mysticism, mystical 93, 166, 168, 368 ––mystical experience 373 ––mystical traditions 372 myth, mythical 26, 93, 117, 155, 156, 170, 171, 219, 242, 290, 314, 326, 348, 350, 356, 385, 432, 433, 434, 441, 445, 449, 453, 475, 477, 553

Index of Subjects 

––mythical travelogue 155 mythology, mythological 26, 155, 242, 467, 499, 537 ––classical mythology 155 ––Greek mythology 467 mythopoeia, mythopoeic 311, 314 narration ––authorial narration 282, 357 ––autodiegetic narration 438 ––denarration 252, 257, 258 ––disnarration 258 ––first-person narration 32, 34 ––heterodiegetic narration 395 ––homodiegetic narration 544 ––omniscient authorial narration 474 ––omniscient narration 206, 474, 475 ––poly-perspectival narration 33 ––third-person narration 34, 100, 271, 417, 544 ––unreliable narration 33, 35 narrative ––counternarrative 93, 215, 508 ––embedded narrative 32, 33 ––emplotted narrative 117 ––enlightenment master narrative 474 ––episodic narrative 271 ––experimental narrative 232, 233 ––first-person narrative 32, 36, 124 ––frame narrative 146, 526 ––heterodiegetic narrative 227 ––imperial travel narrative 139 ––master narrative 474, 548, 550, 551 ––meta-diegetic narrative 33 ––metanarrative 134, 415, 424, 425, 474 ––multi-voiced narrative 415 ––narrative authority 409, 416 ––narrative control 387, 395 ––narrative conventions 65, 133, 136 ––narrative cosmos 476 ––narrative device 34, 227, 456 ––narrative exuberance 384, 386 ––narrative focus 110, 388 ––narrative form 247, 268, 425, 431, 545, 553 ––narrative frame 392 ––narrative framework 445 ––narrative interventions 403 ––narrative knowledge 146 ––narrative linearity 254

 585

––narrative mode 116, 232, 270, 274, 276, 446, 543 ––narrative performance 268, 278 ––narrative perspective 52, 216, 226, 228, 241, 375, 376, 384, 386, 393, 455, 552 ––narrative reliability 390 ––narrative selfhood 261 ––narrative situation 33, 35, 124, 378, 384, 393, 394, 395, 396, 544 ––narratives of progress 550 ––narrative strategies 64, 137, 175, 213, 239, 285, 290, 296, 297, 331, 334, 337, 339, 378, 395, 518, 520, 536, 542, 543 ––narrative structure 114, 136, 271, 427, 493, 500, 543, 546 ––narrative style 47, 233, 543 ––narrative technique 25, 34, 164, 195, 201, 208, 233, 241, 377, 403, 529, 551 ––narrative uncertainty 186, 416 ––narrative unit 502, 503, 510 ––narrative universe 465, 476 ––narrative unreliability 90 ––narrative voice 58, 97, 125, 165, 184, 185, 204, 205, 273, 281, 282, 304, 399, 410, 415, 489 ––teleological narrative 335, 544, 546, 547 ––unreliable narrative 91, 124, 384 narratological 33, 134, 147, 148, 195, 259 narrator ––authorial narrator 165, 204, 205, 209, 354, 355, 375, 376, 381, 491 ––autodiegetic narrator 125, 133, 136, 427 ––external narrator 238 ––first-person autodiegetic narrator 133, 136 ––first-person narrator 35, 100, 122, 126, 256, 258, 377, 557 ––frame narrator 143, 145, 146, 147, 148 ––heterodiegetic narrator 186, 240, 271, 281, 394, 395, 440, 455 ––homodiegetic narrator 124, 395, 529 ––narrator report 376 ––omniscient authorial narrator 440 ––omniscient extradiegetic narrator 133, 136 ––omniscient narrator 175, 186, 375, 491 ––third-person, omniscient narrator 491 ––unnamed narrator 260 ––unreliable narrator 145, 384, 392, 393, 394 Nationality Act 119, 268, 269, 270 nation, national 1, 10, 14, 16, 31, 42, 44, 51, 53, 57, 58, 59, 60, 97, 108, 122, 183, 269, 270,

586 

 Index of Subjects

281, 284, 310, 362, 414, 462, 482, 486, 489, 526 naturalism, naturalist(ic) 34, 50, 71, 72, 232, 418 naturalization 107, 109, 121 ––denaturalization 109, 121, 508 necessity 27, 37, 39, 45, 74, 92, 137, 217, 221, 245, 369, 437, 467, 530 negative capability 472, 473 Negritude 275 New Criticism 148 new materialism, new materialist 555 new sincerity 15, 498, 500, 514, 555 Newtonian physics 468, 474 nonconformity 215, 430 nostalgia, nostalgic 88, 92, 102, 125, 280, 288, 291, 292, 294, 347, 356, 359, 362, 414 novel ––adventure novel 30 ––Anglo-Irish Big House novel 347 ––Bildungsroman 54, 59, 71, 72, 75, 111, 269, 315, 396, 414, 418, 499 ––Bright Young People novel 232 ––camp novel 102 ––composite novel 511 ––contemporary novel 50, 60 ––cosmopolitan novel 500 ––country-house novel 235 ––crime novel 73 ––detective novel 73, 519 ––diasporic novel 125 ––eighteenth-century novel 403 ––epistolary novel 510, 511 ––experimental novel 72, 95, 153, 247, 338 ––feminist novel 31, 398, 441 ––framing novel 289 ––global novel 500 ––Gothic novel 68, 454 ––historical novel 30, 42, 54, 71, 72, 99, 344, 351, 356, 357, 431, 432, 441, 484, 536, 537, 538, 544, 545, 546, 547, 548, 551, 553 ––horror novel 30 ––Icarian novel 288, 290 ––Künstlerroman 75 ––liminal novel 290 ––London novel 243 ––metahistoriographic novel 344 ––meta-novel 473

––modernist novel 6, 11, 44, 45, 46, 52, 60, 152, 318 ––Mutiny novel 348, 349, 357, 360 ––neo-historical novel 551 ––neo-Victorian novel 35, 289, 320, 457 ––nouveau roman 240, 324, 335, 336 ––novel of adultery 71, 72 ––novel of ideas 349, 411 ––planetary novel 498, 500 ––polyphonic novel 418 ––postcolonial novel 57, 491 ––proletarian novel 108, 115, 117, 118, 233 ––religious novel 381 ––rise of the novel 1, 3, 59, 67, 125 ––roman à clef 411 ––roman à thèse 352 ––romantic novel 454 ––science fiction novel 66, 518, 534 ––social novel 545 ––spy novel 54 ––Victorian novel 4, 175, 186, 407, 416 ––wartime novel 233 ––world novel 1, 500 novella 133, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 144, 145, 147, 446, 501, 502, 519 numinosity, numinous 520 ontological 8, 9, 10, 333, 445, 446, 452, 456 ––ontological confusion 417 ––ontological insecurity 245 ––ontological questioning 137 orality, oral 6, 278, 282, 283, 284 Orientalism 185 otherness, other 12, 120, 425, 427, 428, 451, 452, 482, 489, 493, 494, 505, 526, 536, 538, 547, 551, 552, 553 overdetermination 275, 276, 510 pacifism 196, 505 palimpsest 330, 334, 513 palinode 417 panopticon 391, 399, 400 paratextual information 167 parody 152, 158, 161, 164, 246, 258, 278, 290, 298, 349, 353, 354, 359, 416, 432, 438, 537, 546 parole 506, 530 pastiche 35, 122, 324, 438, 450, 454, 455, 456, 510, 537, 546

Index of Subjects 

––pastiche poem 450, 454, 455 pastoral 125, 508 paternalism 108, 115, 307 patriarchy, patriarchal 86, 88, 91, 92, 93, 98, 101, 102, 305, 314, 385, 389, 397, 398, 400, 424, 427, 428, 429, 431, 433, 434, 438, 439, 440, 446, 448, 449, 450, 453, 457 performance 12, 59, 85, 185, 190, 247, 268, 278, 279, 281, 283, 284, 368, 386, 389, 390, 393, 394, 395, 396, 400, 428, 510, 524, 532, 556, 558, 559, 560, 570, 572 performativity, performative 83, 91, 126, 144, 145, 147, 148, 277, 279, 282, 337, 461, 472, 473, 506, 559, 563, 570, 572 periodization 248, 252, 253, 296 perlocutionary 144 phallogocentrism, phallogocentric 93, 100 philosophy, philosophical 4, 36, 53, 58, 148, 152, 157, 165, 166, 181, 201, 204, 214, 229, 282, 290, 303, 317, 319, 345, 384, 386, 393, 395, 396, 399, 404, 415, 419, 463, 466, 469, 504, 519, 520, 528, 529, 567 ––philosophy of existentialism 252, 260, 263 photography 5, 6, 10, 39, 557 phrenology 349 picaresque 384, 385, 386, 396, 418 playfulness 9, 171, 386, 397, 398, 403, 500, 501, 520 poem 37, 38, 141, 152, 176, 177, 196, 199, 206, 225, 234, 244, 246, 255, 269, 326, 336, 341, 346, 396, 404, 449, 450, 451, 452, 454, 455, 469, 512 poetics, poetic 3, 8, 78, 111, 115, 118, 119, 120, 133, 137, 167, 206, 242, 253, 255, 261, 262, 275, 280, 298, 337, 425, 454, 456, 499, 501, 520, 530, 533 ––metapoetic 328 ––poetic justice 485 ––poetic techniques 199 poetry 4, 18, 28, 33, 37, 38, 40, 69, 70, 74, 75, 77, 95, 136, 168, 171, 176, 197, 198, 207, 232, 246, 324, 337, 341, 384, 414, 419, 420, 445, 447, 448, 450, 451, 457, 512, 537, 556 poiesis 280 politics, political 12, 13, 14, 44, 54, 57, 58, 59, 75, 77, 78, 84, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 107, 108, 110, 111, 118, 119, 121, 122, 124, 135,

 587

137, 141, 148, 149, 152, 157, 165, 176, 180, 186, 190, 191, 195, 196, 213, 214, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 226, 228, 229, 240, 247, 248, 252, 263, 268, 269, 270, 274, 276, 278, 279, 280, 281, 284, 285, 288, 290, 293, 294, 295, 296, 305, 306, 307, 309, 320, 336, 339, 346, 350, 356, 357, 359, 360, 362, 368, 371, 400, 404, 412, 420, 421, 438, 462, 463, 478, 481, 482, 494, 498, 500, 503, 504, 514, 518, 519, 520, 529, 533, 540, 541, 542, 546, 550, 569, 570 ––Macchiavellian politics 549 polysemy 522, 527 positivism, positivist 501, 548 post-apocalyptic 93, 501, 502, 504, 511, 515 postcolonialism, postcolonial 2, 5, 14, 57, 96, 102, 118, 119, 122, 149, 190, 191, 209, 269, 280, 285, 288, 292, 299, 356, 361, 362, 415, 416, 420, 421, 478, 481, 482, 483, 486, 489, 491, 493, 518, 519, 528, 550 ––postcolonialist transculturality 528 posthumanism, posthuman(ist) 213, 215, 220, 221, 222, 223, 225, 227, 228, 262, 508 postmodernism, postmodern(ist) 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 31, 35, 37, 64, 76, 77, 78, 96, 107, 229, 233, 248, 254, 289, 290, 298, 299, 303, 304, 315, 318, 319, 337, 353, 357, 358, 359, 361, 362, 365, 384, 393, 397, 398, 400, 403, 414, 415, 416, 417, 418, 425, 432, 438, 440, 441, 442, 446, 448, 452, 456, 457, 458, 463, 482, 486, 491, 493, 494, 498, 500, 501, 508, 509, 510, 514, 515, 520, 537, 538, 546, 547, 555, 556, 559, 570, 571 ––postmodern condition 37 ––postmodern(ist) aesthetic 415, 417, 418, 419 ––postmodern playfulness 403 poststructuralism, poststructuralist 121, 122, 171, 190, 192, 195, 208, 281, 380, 415, 448, 456, 528, 547, 571 power relations 11, 216, 278, 439, 521 pretext 384, 393, 545 probable impossibility 525, 531, 532 production 5, 11, 13, 36, 37, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, 50, 58, 67, 75, 111, 137, 148, 213, 215, 219, 222, 225, 228, 233, 294, 320, 335, 340, 341, 348, 398, 424, 501, 503, 505, 508, 534, 563

588 

 Index of Subjects

progressive Universalpoesie 30 progressivism, progressive 4, 30, 120, 196, 206, 207, 307, 327, 464, 482, 504, 523 prolepsis, proleptic 147 prose 28, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 78, 125, 152, 164, 175, 176, 232, 233, 249, 253, 254, 255, 275, 284, 327, 328, 329, 332, 333, 336, 345, 418, 449 Protestantism, Protestant 156, 158, 346, 349, 360, 540, 541 psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic(al) 55, 88, 209, 442, 448, 478, 483 psychology, psychological 4, 28, 29, 55, 56, 74, 92, 121, 143, 148, 152, 164, 179, 180, 181, 203, 217, 219, 220, 221, 229, 236, 240, 275, 276, 279, 290, 303, 306, 307, 319, 368, 369, 375, 465, 491, 539, 542, 572 psychosoterica 499, 507 publication 2, 14, 44, 45, 68, 99, 110, 135, 152, 153, 154, 169, 170, 171, 172, 189, 191, 196, 207, 208, 220, 234, 263, 285, 291, 295, 296, 298, 320, 356, 456, 403, 404, 412, 420, 462, 514, 519, 537, 555 publisher 14, 15, 25, 39, 45, 47, 48, 49, 95, 153, 247, 253, 361, 365, 502, 555 ––publishing business 49 ––publishing industry 113 pulp 73, 78, 519, 520, 533 ––postpulp 519 Puritan Revolution 434 Q’ran 491 queer 84, 102, 190, 214, 308, 390, 425, 427, 441, 442 ––queer studies 191, 550 ––queer theory 14 race, racial 97, 107, 108, 118, 121, 178, 179, 190, 198, 209, 268, 270, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 280, 284, 285, 350, 372, 478, 482, 483, 486, 487, 489, 494, 502, 506, 521, 550 ––racial supremacy 509 racism, racist 91, 119, 120, 121, 123, 145, 178, 179, 191, 192, 216, 268, 270, 274, 275, 276, 279, 280, 281, 282, 307, 360, 420, 482, 487, 494 Raj 176, 178, 180, 191, 348, 356, 362 randomness 16, 330, 334, 335, 341, 390

reader expectations 384, 396, 415, 534 realism, realist 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 14, 15, 16, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 46, 47, 50, 57, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 92, 93, 107, 109, 110, 111, 113, 121, 122, 133, 136, 137, 145, 152, 196, 199, 202, 207, 208, 232, 233, 240, 246, 248, 268, 270, 274, 275, 278, 279, 281, 282, 284, 288, 289, 290, 291, 294, 311, 323, 338, 340, 344, 353, 354, 356, 361, 362, 363, 365, 366, 368, 369, 375, 377, 380, 384, 385, 386, 388, 390, 403, 406, 408, 415, 416, 417, 418, 431, 438, 445, 456, 462, 491, 492, 493, 499, 501, 520, 544, 545, 546, 555, 556, 570, 571, 572 ––comic realism 491 ––material realism 398 ––non-realist 446 ––realist paradigm 26, 29, 35, 36, 68, 72, 145 ––spiritual realism 365 reception 11, 13, 42, 50, 74, 111, 133, 134, 146, 147, 148, 169, 192, 195, 208, 247, 262, 276, 284, 298, 299, 319, 335, 337, 360, 361, 365, 386, 406, 419, 442, 493, 509, 512, 518, 532, 562, 570 referent 2, 78, 147, 367, 522, 527, 532, 544 referentiality, referential 23, 27, 32, 33, 34, 36, 146, 147, 510, 521, 522, 525 ––referential language 289, 290 reflexivity, reflexive 13, 70, 76, 107, 108, 109, 110, 114, 115, 116, 278, 498, 500, 509, 510 Reformation 463, 475, 539, 541, 548, 549 relationality 100, 114 religion 12, 101, 156, 168, 182, 183, 185, 214, 218, 281, 307, 309, 315, 350, 365, 369, 381, 419, 446, 477, 478, 482, 487, 488, 502, 548, 549 Renaissance 188, 320, 536, 541, 542, 543, 548, 549, 550, 551, 552, 553 repetition 159, 187, 199, 206, 245, 246, 263, 284, 354, 481, 483, 484, 485, 486, 488, 491, 503, 506 reported thought 238, 241 representation 3, 6, 10, 33, 46, 50, 52, 55, 64, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 84, 103, 104, 107, 108, 109, 114, 120, 121, 123, 124, 134, 136, 145, 148, 175, 190, 197, 205, 206, 208, 223, 232, 233, 240, 242, 276, 280, 284, 296, 306, 323, 330, 331, 332, 334, 335, 341,

Index of Subjects 

356, 357, 359, 360, 361, 394, 410, 415, 431, 432, 434, 436, 446, 456, 481, 486, 491, 493, 522, 525, 528, 537, 542, 543, 548, 550, 551, 559, 560, 562, 563, 567, 571 ––graphic representation 525 ––second-degree representation 110 ––self-representation 114, 332, 359 rhetorical figures 164 rhythm 160, 172, 186, 187, 189, 190, 197, 206, 207, 284, 569 romance 26, 30, 65, 66, 72, 73, 74, 92, 108, 116, 138, 178, 181, 303, 315, 317, 349, 449, 452, 453, 454, 455, 456, 540 Romanticism, Romantic 3, 71, 73, 76, 77, 207, 242, 246, 344, 403, 410, 413, 457, 571 Russian Revolution 3 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis 522 satire 31, 57, 101, 122, 213, 214, 217, 229, 270, 273, 353, 359, 418, 493, 502 ––Menippean satire 418 savagery 136, 140, 146, 170, 279 science 4, 156, 157, 214, 219, 306, 309, 349, 446, 467, 471, 483, 486, 488, 489, 562, 567 secularism, secular 4, 70, 112, 168, 405, 407, 414, 463, 477, 541, 549 self-consciousness, self-conscious 3, 4, 10, 57, 64, 72, 74, 76, 108, 111, 244, 246, 289, 298, 303, 304, 305, 340, 393, 415, 416, 418, 431, 456, 457, 537, 538, 547 self-determination 314, 369 self-discovery 202 self-presentation 48, 107, 391 self-referentiality, self-referential 510 self-reflexivity, self-reflexive 9, 10, 15, 23, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 76, 92, 146, 208, 252, 261, 306, 332, 333, 337, 424, 438, 445, 446, 457, 491, 537, 538, 542, 546, 547, 552 semiotics, semiotic 133, 136, 148 setting 97, 74, 120, 125, 133, 136, 185, 200, 206, 208, 209, 228, 223, 232, 234, 235, 243, 249, 270, 330, 351, 354, 365, 366, 433, 446, 461, 482, 491, 493, 503, 504, 520 ––liminal setting 385 ––limited geographic setting 270 ––remote setting 365, 366 ––socio-historical setting 209 ––spatial setting 234

 589

––temporal setting 234 sexuality 4, 32, 36, 56, 82–104, 115, 156, 157, 162, 175, 177, 179, 181, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 196, 209, 216, 224, 259, 268, 173, 276–278, 298, 305–309, 312, 313, 315, 316, 350, 352, 368, 370, 371, 385, 398, 426–442, 448, 450, 451, 456, 461–467, 473, 478, 487, 541 shell shock 88, 346 short story 10, 37, 99, 136, 142, 175, 176, 269, 303, 445, 519 signification 137, 522, 523, 524, 525, 527, 528 signified 143, 389, 475, 522, 524, 527, 528, 532 signifier 125, 143, 147, 389, 522, 524, 527, 528, 532 simile 524, 525, 527, 529, 530, 531, 532 simultaneity 83, 86, 97, 241, 324, 326, 355 slavery 124, 125, 269, 278, 503, 504, 509, 513 slave trade 96, 123, 124 socialism, socialist 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 217, 325, 518 society, social ––social change 26, 305, 481, 545 ––social conventions 176, 177, 311 ––social disclocation 370 ––social injustice 268, 462 ––social panorama 28, 111 socio-economic 352, 357, 359, 362, 485 socio-ideological 111 sociology, sociological 4, 5, 6, 84, 111, 148, 192, 236, 403, 404 sociopolitical 196, 404, 503 soliloquy 139, 145 space, spatial 5, 12, 26, 50, 51, 54, 59, 60, 93, 108, 110, 139, 160, 197, 198, 208, 209, 222, 234, 235, 239, 241, 261, 274, 280, 329, 330, 331, 334, 335, 381, 386, 390, 391, 406, 418, 424–426, 429, 431, 434, 435, 436, 442, 450, 468, 478, 486, 490, 500, 506, 507–509, 518, 530, 568, 572 ––alternative space 391, 530 ––blank space 324, 334, 391 ––exterior space 235 ––horizontal space 235 ––hyperspace 530 ––interior space 12, 235 ––liminal space 222, 389 ––space opera 518, 525 ––subversive space 399

590 

 Index of Subjects

––third space 413 ––vertical space 235 spirituality, spiritual 306, 466, 476 steampunk 478, 518, 519 stereotype, stereotypical 92, 121, 145, 178, 209, 275, 276, 279, 284, 304, 318, 360, 425, 429, 487, 488, 536, 549, 551 stream of consciousness 6, 49, 87, 158, 273, 276, 281, 329, 333, 377 structuralism, structuralist 190, 208 ––structuralist close readings 380 stylistic devices 32 subalternity, subaltern 108, 109, 110 subjectivity, subjective 14, 60, 69, 70, 74, 75, 108, 114, 117, 125, 133, 134, 136, 165, 206, 238, 254, 282, 295, 330, 377, 432, 452, 456, 499, 506, 509, 533, 536, 543, 544, 549, 550, 551, 552, 553, 557, 562, 572 ––bourgeois subjectivity 64, 70, 71, 75 ––limitations of subjectivity 378 ––subjective experience 70 ––subjective perception 195 sublime 399, 520, 534 subtraction 263 subversion, subversive 4, 278, 284, 396, 397, 398, 399 supernaturalism, supernatural 26, 54, 73, 499, 520 surrealism, surrealist 36, 246, 344, 520 survival of the fittest 305, 306 suspension of disbelief 331, 525 syllepsis 419 symbolism 137, 246, 366, 367, 425, 438 symbol, symbolic 108, 139, 141, 163, 167, 206, 207, 208, 209, 223, 241, 242, 243, 244, 270, 297, 331, 352, 358, 365, 375, 376, 385, 386, 389, 399, 420, 425, 427, 438, 439, 445, 507, 542, 568 ––symbolic order 93, 95, 385 ––symbolic representation 394 synchronic 381, 483, 508 systemic risk 52 technocratic 213, 217, 218, 219, 221, 222, 224, 228, 229 teleology, teleological 4, 83, 111, 112, 335, 339, 357, 362, 536, 544, 545, 546, 547, 550, 551, 553 telos 89, 112

temporality, temporal 47, 52, 60, 110, 112, 120, 126, 137, 197, 198, 208, 234, 329, 339, 356, 365, 435, 436, 442, 463, 486, 498, 499, 502, 503, 506, 507, 508, 511, 512, 513, 547 textuality, textual 148, 257, 432, 433, 556, 572 theatre 12, 58, 189, 331, 348, 417, 558 theatricality, theatrical 542 theology, theological 306, 316, 418, 477, 520, 541 theoretical turn 264 theory 415 ––chaos theory 491 ––consciousness theory 468 ––many worlds theory 468 ––quantum theory 461, 467, 469, 470, 471, 474 ––theory of relativity 436 time ––discourse time 241 ––external time 437, 438 ––internal time 437, 438 ––story time 241, 512 ––time and space 424, 425, 426, 431, 434, 436, 437, 468 ––timeframe 445 ––time-travel 499, 508, 511 topography, topographical 137, 140, 165, 171, 280, 323, 325, 326, 330 topography, topographical totalitarianism, totalitarian 218, 219, 229, 432 ––totalitarian regime 217, 218, 219 ––totalitarian system 216, 217, 218 tragicomedy, tragic-comic 268, 272, 277, 284 transcendence, transcendental 29, 112, 137, 214, 522 transculturality, transcultural 107, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 352, 481, 486, 488, 490, 528 transgender 82, 84, 94, 104, 428 transgenic 490 translation 76, 113, 153, 166, 252, 253, 255, 256, 275, 331, 361, 366, 475 ––self-translation 258, 263 ––translated being 408 ––translation studies 249 trauma 94, 362, 483, 488, 491, 532 travelogue 140 Trojan War 155 trope 46, 53, 54, 77, 139, 277, 280, 398, 509, 527, 543

Index of Subjects 

truth 3, 7, 8, 9, 12, 25, 34, 35, 82, 100, 137, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 178, 202, 218, 242, 244, 282, 293, 306, 323, 324, 326, 331, 332, 333, 334, 337, 338, 339, 340, 359, 385, 387, 389, 403, 410, 416, 425, 430, 431, 432, 434, 438, 448, 454, 456, 461, 467, 470, 471, 472, 473, 475, 482, 501, 524, 525, 526, 534, 546, 565 ––restorative truth 359 two-spheres ideology 98 typescript 224, 257, 258 uncanny 187, 221, 348, 405, 410, 474, 485, 539, 508, 527, 542, 569 unconscious 98, 109, 169, 304, 324, 540 unity 29, 78, 181, 190, 197, 198, 203, 253, 254, 486, 494, 526, 528 unknowable 232 unrepresentable 520 urbanity, urban 4, 46, 54, 214, 235, 258, 280, 288, 292, 323, 330, 331, 386, 526, 534, 539 ––urban environment 518 ––urban experience 14 utopia, utopian 30, 74, 94, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 229, 363, 391, 397, 400, 494, 500, 514, 515 ––eutopian 215, 216, 229 value system 224, 427, 434 verisimilitude 28, 84, 276, 339, 548 victimization 92, 94, 96 Victorian 4, 5, 83, 108, 175, 186, 195, 200, 201, 204, 206, 208, 243, 244, 303, 304, 306, 308, 312, 315, 316, 318, 319, 347, 349, 350, 407, 414, 416, 445, 446, 447, 448, 449, 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, 455, 457, 458, 478, 538 ––late Victorian 446

 591

––neo-Victorian 35, 289, 320, 445, 446, 457 ––Victorian age 199, 304, 315, 445, 446, 450, 458 ––Victorian era 176, 195, 303, 305, 306 ––Victorian femininity 448 ––Victorian ‘three-decker’ novel 4 ––Victorian world view 4 villain 447, 454, 509, 541 visuality, visual 5, 10, 11, 39, 64, 70, 71, 76, 77, 110, 146, 166, 198, 199, 208, 238, 243, 245, 358, 359, 376, 413, 435, 542, 562, 563, 566 voice ––authorial voice 4, 282, 284, 354, 440, 477 Vorticism 167 Weird 518, 519, 520, 527, 528, 533 ––Haute Weird 520 ––New Weird 77, 520 Western 26, 65, 69, 72, 73, 125, 139, 140, 144, 187, 188, 208, 214, 217, 221, 245, 249, 268, 271, 278, 279, 283, 349, 350, 352, 357, 362, 370, 372, 396, 410, 424, 426, 427, 436, 437, 467, 474, 481, 487, 488, 494, 536, 550, 551, 566 Western modernity 362, 548, 549, 566 whiteness 280, 564 wholeness 370 women’s suffrage 82 World War I 3, 43, 51, 52, 56, 88, 91, 153, 178, 198, 200, 209, 234, 346, 351, 367, 446, 568 World War II 3, 44, 51, 52, 56, 57, 89, 91, 115, 118, 177, 233, 234, 248, 253, 262, 269, 298, 344, 345, 350, 351, 356, 367, 370, 371, 483, 484, 485, 491 xenophobia, xenophobic 25, 488 zeugma 419

Index of Names Abrams, J. J. and Doug Dorst ––S. 39 Abbott, H. Porter 252, 254, 256 Achebe, Chinua 134 Ackroyd, Peter ––Hawksmoor 35 ––Chatterton 35 Adorno, Theodor W. 29, 141, 223, 263 Alderman, Naomi 8 Alighieri, Dante ––Divina Commedia 166, 171 Ambler, Eric 67 Amis, Martin 8, 404 ––Time’s Arrow 35 ––Money: A Suicide Note 91 Amis, Kingsley ––Lucky Jim 58 ––Take a Girl Like You 58 Anam, Tahmima 8 Ali, Monica 8 ––Brick Lane 53 ––In the Kitchen 59 Althusser, Louis 85 Amis, Martin 8, 91, 404 ––Time’s Arrow 35 Arendt, Hannah 218–219 Aristotle 65, 69, 166, 525 Armstrong, Nancy 42 Arnold, Matthew 115 D’Arras, Jean ––Histoire de Lusignan 449 Atwood, Margaret 93, 498 ––Surfacing 94 ––MaddAddam 228, 289, 295, 498 Auerbach, Erich 205 ––Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western ––Culture 208 Austen, Jane 82, 108, 114, 240, 345 ––Pride and Prejudice 462, 551 ––Northanger Abbey 27 Badiou, Alain 263, 571 Bakhtin, Mikhail M.  30, 37, 55, 147, 283, 344, 353, 355, 398–399, 418 Ballard, James Graham 66

Balzac, Honoré de 252, 256, 259, 261, 419, 544–545 ––Louis Lambert 258 Banks, Iain M. 8, 66 Banville, John 361 Barker, Nicola 8, 60 Barker, Pat 8, 36, 359 ––Regeneration 35 Barnes, Julian 8, 359 ––Flaubert’s Parrot 35 ––A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters 35 ––England, England 36 ––The Sense of an Ending 35 Barstow, Stan 115 Barthes, Roland 315, 416 Barth, John 9 Bataille, Georges 252, 262 Baudelaire, Charles 561 Baxter, Stephen 66 Beauman, Ned 8 Beauvoir, Simone de 83 Beckett, Samuel 7, 89, 233, 248, 336 ––More Pricks Than Kicks 253 ––Dream of Fair to Middling Women 253, 256 ––Murphy 240, 253, 259 ––En attendant Godot 247, 252–254 ––Watt 252–254 ––The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable 33–34, 240, 252–267 ––Textes Pour Rien 254 ––Fin de Partie 254 ––Krapp’s Last Tape / La dernière bande 254, 261 ––Comment c’est 254–255 ––Faux Départs 255 ––Mercier et Camier 253–254 ––Company 255 ––Mal vu mal dit 255 ––Worstward Ho 255 ––Ceiling 255 ––Stirrings Still 255 ––Comment dire / What is the Word 255 Beer, Gillian 249 Beerbohm, Max ––Zuleika Dobson 102 Bell, Clive 44, 195–196, 204 Belliger, Andréa 559

Index of Names 

Benjamin, Walter 522 ––Arcades Project 330–331 Benson, Edward Frederic  102 Bentham, Jeremy 399 Bentley, Ursula 8 Berger, John 7 Bergonzi, Bernard 14, 332, 338, 354, 359, 361 Berkeley, Bishop George 166 De Bernières, Luis 8 Besant, Walter 23, 24 Bhabha, Homi 191, 362, 405, 413, 486 Billson, Anne 8 Blackwood, Algernon 519 Blake, William 171, 467, 475 ––Marriage of Heaven and Hell 410 ––Songs of Experience 464 Blanchot, Maurice 252, 262 Blumenberg, Hans 3 Boleyn, Anne 539–541, 546, 552 Bolger, Dermot 514 Bolt, Robert ––A Man for All Seasons 541 Borges, Jorge Luis 31 ––“On Exactitude in Science” 562 Bowen, Elizabeth 345 ––The Last September 347 Boyd, William 8 ––Brazzaville Beach 103 ––Sweet Caress 103 Böhme, Jakob 166 Boxall, Peter 15, 253 Bradbury, Malcolm 2–4 Bradford, Richard 415, 417, 420, 501 Braidotti, Rosi 220–221 Brathwaite, Kamau 269 Brecht, Bertold 398, 411, 416, 515, 558 Brierley, Walter 113 Brontë, Charlotte ––Jane Eyre 96, 134 Brontë, Emily 103 ––Wuthering Heights 32 Brookner, Anita ––Hotel du Lac 34 Brook-Rose, Christine 7, 34 ––Out 32 ––Between 32 ––Such 32 ––Thru 32 ––Amalgamemnon 35

 593

––Xorandor 35 ––Verbivore 35 ––Textermination 35 ––Subscript 85 Brophy, Brigid 7 ––In Transit: A Trans-Sexual Adventure 100, 247 Brouillette, Sarah 50, 59 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 450 ––Aurora Leigh 38 Browning, Robert 433, 450 ––The Ring and the Book 38 Buchan, John 67 Burgess, Anthony 7, 32 ––Napoleon Symphony 32 ––Abba Abba 32 ––Enderby’s Dark Lady 32 ––A Clockwork Orange 36 Burckhardt, Jakob 541, 549, 552 Burns, Alan 7 ––Babel 336 Burroughs, William 335 Butler, Judith 83–84, 87, 98, 100, 426 Byatt, Antonia Susan 514 ––The Shadow of the Sun 445 ––The Game 445 ––The Virgin in the Garden 445 ––Still Life 445 ––Possession 35, 72, 77, 320, 445–460, 537–538 ––Babel Tower 446 ––The Biographer’s Tale 446 ––A Whistling Woman 446 ––Angels and Insects 446 ––The Children’s Book 446 Byron, George Gordon 38, 307, 433 ––Don Juan 406 Camus, Albert 303, 345 Carey, Peter 536 Carlyle, Thomas ––Sartor Resartus 32 le Carré, John 67 Carroll, Lewis ––Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 396, 416 Carter, Angela 7, 84 ––The Magic Toyshop 36, 384 ––The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography 385, 394

594 

 Index of Names

––The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffmann 36 ––The Passion of New Eve 36, 101, 397 ––Nights at the Circus 36, 384–402 De Cervantes, Miguel ––Don Quixote 27 Chekhov, Anton 345 Chaplin, Sid 115 Christie, Agatha 49, 67, 156 Chu, Seo-Young 77 Cixous, Helene 93, 171, 263 Cleave, Chris ––The Other Hand 126 Coetzee, John Maxwell 340, 363, 536 Collins, Wilkie 103, 108 Comentale, Edward 45 Compton-Burnett, Ivy 102 Connolly, Cyril ––The Rock Pool 234 Conrad, Joseph 14, 25, 46, 52, 90, 108. 236 ––Almayer’s Folly 135 ––An Outcast of the Islands 135 ––The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ 135, 142, 144, 146 ––Lord Jim 89–90, 135, 138, 141 ––Heart of Darkness 44, 89, 120, 133–151, 569 ––Nostromo 135, 141 ––The Typhoon 141 ––The Secret Agent 52, 135, 141, 244 ––Under Western Eyes 135, 141 ––Chance 135 ––Victory 135, 141 Coombes, Bertie Lewis 113 Cooper, John Xiros 45–46 Cortázar, Julio ––Hopscotch 336 Critchley, Simon 559 Cromwell, Thomas 104, 433, 538–544, 548–553 Cusk, Rachel 8 Dabydeen, David 285 ––A Harlot’s Progress 124–125 D’Aguiar, Fred ––Feeding the Ghosts 124 ––Bloodlines 124 Danielewski, Mark Z. ––House of Leaves 39 Darwin, Charles 305–306, 308, 316, 470, 509 Davies, Hubert Henry

––Cousin Kate 185 Davies, Peter Ho 8 Defoe, Daniel ––Robinson Crusoe 27, 32, 134 ––Moll Flanders 32 Deleuze, Gilles 263, 571 Derrida, Jacques 171, 263, 415–416, 522, 571 Desani, Govindas Vishnoodas ––All About H. Hatterr 419 Diaghilev, Sergei 153, 247 Dickens, Charles 68, 108, 243, 268, 288, 308, 345, 359, 368, 407, 418–419, 491, 508 ––Bleak House 32, 243 ––Great Expectations 414 ––Our Mutual Friend 419 Dickinson, Emily 450 Dick, Philip K.  510 Disraeli, Benjamin 305 Doctorow, Edgar Lawrence ––Ragtime 537 Dos Passos, John 37, 113, 419 Doyle, Arthur Conan ––Sherlock Holmes 27, 243 Drabble, Margaret 92, 354 Duffy, Eamon 548 Duffy, Maureen ––Love Child 36 ––Capital 35 ––Londoners 35 Dujardin, Edouard ––Les Lauriers sont coupés 164 Duncker, Patricia ––Hallucinating Foucault 104 ––James Miranda Barry 104 ––The Deadly Space Between 104 de Duras, Claire ––Ourika 304 Durrell, Laurence ––The Alexandria Quartet 35 Dylan, Bob 412 Eagleton, Terry 45, 223 Edgeworth, Maria ––Castle Rackrent 347 Einstein, Albert 7, 71, 436, 438 Elderkin, Susan 8 Eliot, George 68, 108 Eliot, T. S.  25, 44, 136, 170, 242, 246, 320

Index of Names 

––The Waste Land 153, 156, 168, 187, 196, 561–562 ––“The Hollow Men” 168, 241 Ellis, Bret Easton ––American Psycho 91 Emecheta, Buchi 8, 121 English, James F.  48, 50 Equiano, Olaudah 276 ––Interesting Narrative 270 Esty, Jed 57 Evaristo, Bernadine ––Blonde Roots 124 Fagan, Jenni 8 Fanon, Frantz 275–277 Farrell, James Gordon 536 ––A Man From Elsewhere 345 ––The Lung 345 ––A Girl in the Head 345 ––Empire Trilogy 344–364 ––The Hill Station  345 Faulkner, William 37, 206, 240 Felski, Rita ––Doing Time 547 Fiedler, Leslie 9 Figes, Eva 7, 336, 338 Firbank, Ronald ––The Flower Beneath the Foot 102 ––Concerning the Eccentricities of the Cardinal Pirelli 102 Fischer, Tibor 8 Fitzgerald, F. Scott ––The Beautiful and Damned 153 Flaubert, Gustave 204, 246 ––Madame Bovary 27, 171 ––The Temptation of Saint Anthony 162, 171 Fleming, Ian 49, 67 Foer, Jonathan Safran ––Tree of Codes 39 Ford, Ford Madox 46 ––The Good Soldier 44, 90 Forster, Edward Morgan 25, 44, 94, 144, 196–197, 208, 359–360, 362, 424 ––Where Angels Fear to Tread 177 ––The Longest Journey 177 ––A Room with a View 177 ––Howard’s End 46, 52, 97, 177, 189 ––The Celestial Omnibus 176 ––Maurice 94, 176–177, 191

 595

––A Passage to India 175–194 ––The Eternal Moment 176 ––Abinger Harvest 176 ––Two Cheers for Democracy 176 ––Aspects of the Novel 186 ––Arctic Summer 177 ––The Life to Come 176, 191 Foucault, Michel 96, 98, 217, 263, 415 ––Discipline and Punish 399–400 ––The Order of Things 31–32 Foulds, Adam 8 Fowles, John 7, 32, 359, 361, 453 ––The Collector 304, 319 ––The Magus 304, 319 ––The French Lieutenant’s Woman 33, 35, 72, 288–289, 303–322, 332, 336, 455, 537 ––The Ebony Tower 319 ––Daniel Martin 319 ––Mantissa 33, 319 ––A Maggot 33, 319 Fraser, James George ––The Golden Bough 418 de France, Marie 303 Freud, Esther 8 Freud, Sigmund 37, 209, 448 Friedman, Milton 58 Fry, Roger 195–199, 203, 207 Gaiman, Neil 6 Gaskell, Elizabeth 108 Y Gasset, Ortega ––“La deshumanización del arte” 246 Gee, Maggie 8, 59 ––The Ice People 36 Genette, Gérard 33 Gide, André 256, 259 ––Paludes 261 ––Les Faux-Monnayeurs 261 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 92 Gilroy, Paul 277, 283, 292, 493 Gladstone, William Ewart 305 Godard, Jean-Luc 416 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von ––Faust 162, 171, 421 ––Wilhelm Meister 171, 396 Golding, William ––Lord of the Flies 365–366, 376 ––The Inheritors 365 ––Pincher Martin 35, 365

596 

 Index of Names

––Free Fall 366 ––The Spire 365 ––The Pyramid 366, 379 ––Darkness Visible 365–383 ––To the Ends of the Earth 365–366, 380 ––The Paper Men 366 ––The Double Tongue 366, 372 Gordon, Giles 7 Gosh, Amitav 362 Gramsci, Antonio 406 Grant, Duncan 196 Grass, Günter 363 Graves, Robert 453 Gray, Alasdair ––Lanark 36 Greene, Graham 67, 89 ––The Heart of the Matter 57 ––The End of the Affair 57 Green, Henry 7 ––Blindness 232, 241, 245 ––Living 232, 241 ––Party Going 232–251 ––Pack My Bag 233 ––Caught 233 ––Loving 233, 235 ––Back 233 ––Concluding 233 ––Nothing 233 ––Doting 233 Greenwood, Walter 117 ––Love on the Dole 112–115 Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm 462 ––“The Worn-Out Dancing-Shoes” 433 Griffiths, Nicola 66 Guinness, Bryan ––Singing Out of Tune 234 Guo, Xiaolu 8 Habermas, Jürgen 571 Hadley, Tessa 59 Haggard, Henry Rider 108 ––Nada the Lily 246 Hall, Radclyffe ––The Well of Loneliness 94, 99 Hall, Sarah 8 Hall, Steven 8 Hall, Stuart 84, 123 Hanley, James ––Boy 113

Hardy, Thomas 236, 305 Harrison, M. John 66 Harris, Wilson 7, 121 ––Palace of the Peacock 120 Hartman, Geoffrey 208 Hay, John Macdougall ––Gillespie 110 Hawkins, Paula ––The Girl on the Train 54 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 453–454 van Hayek, Friedrich 58 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 27–29, 69–70, 523 Hemingway, Ernest 89, 91, 170 Henry VIII 54, 538–539, 540 Hensher, Philip 8, 514 Heppenstall, Rayner 7, 336 Hesse, Hermann ––Siddharta 153 Hill, Geoffrey ––“A Short History of British India (III)” 346 Hoban, Russell ––Riddley Walker 510 Hobson, John Atkinson 44 Hobsbawm, Eric 2 Hodgson, William Hope 519 Hogarth, William 124 Hogg, James ––The Private Memoirs and Confessions of A Justified Sinner 32 Holbein, Hans 542, 552 Hollinghurst, Alan 8 ––The Swimmingpool Library 94 ––The Stranger’s Child 94 Holtby, Winifred 47 Home, Stewart 50 Homer 155, 163, 170, 352 Horkheimer, Max 141, 223 Hutcheon, Linda 72, 290, 306, 361, 415, 431, 452–453, 537, 546 Huyssen, Andreas 46 Huxley, Aldous 16, 233 ––Crome Yellow 213 ––Antic Hay 213 ––Those Barren Leaves 213 ––Point Counter Point 213 ––Brave New World 36, 213–231 ––Island 214–215 ––Brave New World Revisited 214, 219–220, 229

Index of Names 

Irigaray, Luce 93 Iser, Wolfgang ––The Implied Reader 33 Ishiguro, Kazuo 8, 14, 60, 362 ––The Remains of the Day 34–35, 53, 538 ––The Unconsoled 36 ––When We Were Orphans 35 ––Never Let Me Go 36, 53 James, Henry 3, 23–24, 26, 30, 34, 36, 136, 195, 236, 240, 250, 345 ––“The Art of Fiction” 23 ––“The Figure in the Carpet” 10 ––The Tragic Muse 405 James, Marlon ––A Brief History of Seven Killings 48 James, Montague Rhodes 519 Jameson, Fredric 51–52, 64, 71–72, 74, 76–77, 513–514, 545–546 Jameson, Storm 47 James, Phyllis Dorothy 67 Jevons, William Stanley 55 Johnson, B. S. 6–8, 15, 38, 361 ––Travelling People 324, 331, 334, 336 ––Albert Angelo 324–325, 334 ––Trawl 324 ––The Unfortunates 35, 39, 323–343 ––House Mother Normal 35, 325, 334 ––Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry 325 ––See the Old Lady Decently 324 ––Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? 329, 336 Johnson, Ronald ––Radi OS 39 Johnson, Samuel 328, 332, 336 Jones, Lewis 113 Jordan, Julia 327, 330, 333–334, 335 Joyce, James 6–7, 11, 14, 25, 37–38, 49, 55, 136, 140, 181, 196, 206, 248, 253, 324, 336, 403, 418–420, 489 ––Chamber Music 152 ––Dubliners 152–153, 168 ––A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 152–153, 158, 165, 168 ––Exiles 152 ––Ulysses 25, 32, 34, 38, 45, 152–174, 242, 336, 506 ––Finnegans Wake 34, 152, 255 Judd, Alan 8

 597

Jung, Carl 303 Kafka, Franz 156 Kavenna, Joanna 8 Kaye, Mary Margaret 362 Kay, Jackie ––Trumpet 94 Keaton, Buster 418 Keats, John 453, 472 Kelman, James 50, 53, 117 ––How Late It Was, How Late 49 Kelman, Stephen ––Pigeon English 126 Kennedy, Alison Louise 8 ––Everything You Need 103 ––Day 103 ––The Blue Book  103 Kennedy, William ––Legs 537 Kenner, Hugh 25 Kerr, Philip 8 Keynes, John Maynard 44, 46, 56, 58, 196 Kingsnorth, Paul ––The Wake 54 Kipling, Rudyard 362 Kleist, Heinrich von ––“Über das Marionettentheater” 475 Kneale, Matthew 362 Krieger, David 559 Kristeva, Julia 93, 171 Kunzru, Hari 8 ––My Revolutions 126 Kundera, Milan 418 Kureishi, Hanif 8, 123, 481, 491, ––The Buddha of Suburbia 53, 122 Lacan, Jacques 143, 171, 263, 428, 439 Lamming, George 115, 121 ––In the Castle of My Skin 120, 269 ––The Emigrants 120 ––The Pleasures of Exile 284 Larbaud, Valery 170 Latour, Bruno 550, 570 Lawrence, David Herbert 16, 25, 44–46, 118, 136, 453 ––Women in Love 52, 86 ––Lady Chatterley’s Lover 45 Leavis, Frank Raymond 115, 148, 177, 208 Lehman, Rosamond 47

598 

 Index of Names

––Dusty Answer 99 Lessing, Doris 7, 93, 336, 398 ––Martha Quest 295 ––A Proper Marriage 295 ––A Ripple from the Storm 295 ––Landlocked 295 ––The Four-Gated City 295, 299 ––The Golden Notebook 35, 288–302 ––Canopus in Argos: Archive Series 36 ––Prisons We Choose to Live Inside 292 ––Walking in the Shade: 1949–1962 288 Levinas, Emmanuel 451 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 567 Levy, Andrea ––The Long Song 124 Lewis, Sinclair ––Babbit 153 Lewis, Wyndham 25 ––Tarr 44 Litt, Toby 8 Lively, Adam 8 Lively, Penelope ––Moon Tiger 34–35 Lodge, David 8, 70, 344 Löwy, Michael 520, 531 Lotman, Juri M.  339 Lovecraft, Howard Phillips 77, 519 Lowry, Malcolm 89, 345 Lubbock, Percy 69 Lucretius 412 Lukács, Georg 294, 544–546 ––The Theory of the Novel 29, 42 Lyell, Charles 305 Lyotard, Jean-François 415, 571 Lyra, Nicholas of  475–476 MacCarthy, Desmond 196 MacCarthy, Mary 196 Macaulay, Rose 47 MacGill, Patrick ––Children of the Dead End 110 Machen, Arthur 519 Madsen, Sven Åge ––Days with Diam or Life at Night 39 Mahon, Derek 361 Maitland, Sara 92 Mallarmé, Stéphane 199, 572, Mann, Thomas 345 Mansfield, Katherine 135, 153

Mantel, Hilary 104 ––Every Day Is Mother’s Day 537 ––A Place of Greater Safety 537, 545 ––The Giant, O’Brien 537 ––Wolf Hall 54, 536–554 ––Bring Up the Bodies 54, 536–554 ––The Mirror and the Light 536 Marcuse, Herbert 115 Markovits, Benjamin 8 Márquez, Gabriel García 384, 403, 417 Marshall, Alfred 55 Mars-Jones, Adam 8, 99 Martin, George R. R. ––A Song of Ice and Fire 462 Marx, Karl 161, 305, 316, 351, 508 Masters, John 360, 362 McCarthy, Cormac ––The Road 510 ––Mad Max 510 McCarthy, Tom ––Men in Space 555, 567 ––Remainder 555, 556, 559, 562–564, 567–568, 570, 572 ––C 556, 568 ––Satin Island 555–574 McEwan, Ian 8 ––Atonement 35, 103 ––Saturday 59 ––Sweet Tooth  103 McHale, Brian 8–9, 13, 254, 257, 511 McLuhan, Marshall 359 McWilliam, Candia 8 Melville, Herman 104, 419, 453, 510 ––Moby Dick 396, 561, 569 Meredith, George 195 Michael, Magali Cornier 290, 298, 314 Miéville, China 14, 66, 78 ––King Rat 518, 533 ––Perdido Street Station 518 ––The Scar 518 ––Iron Council 518, 533 ––Looking for Jake 519 ––Un Lun Dun 518 ––The City & The City 519, 521, 533–534 ––Kraken 519 ––Embassytown 77, 518–535 ––Railsea 518 ––The Apology Chapbook 519 ––Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories 519

Index of Names 

Mignolo, Walter D.  282 Milton, John 453 ––Paradise Lost 171, 367, 406, 419, 469–470, 475, 478 Mishra, Pankaj 361 Mitford, Nancy ––Highland Fling 234 Mitchell, David 8, 14, 59 ––Ghostwritten 54, 499–500 ––Cloud Atlas 54, 498–517 ––Black Swan Green 499 ––The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet 499 ––The Bone Clocks 54, 499 ––Slade House 499 Mohamed, Nadifa 8 Montgomery, Anson ––The Golden Path Volume One: Into the Hollow Earth 39 Moorcock, Michael 66 Moore, Alan 9 ––Jerusalem 10 Moravia, Alberto 246 More, Thomas 541, 546, 548–549 ––Utopia 215 Moretti, Franco 42, 244 Mo, Timothy 362 Mouthrop, Stuart ––Hegirascope 39 ––Pax 39 Murdoch, Iris 100, 345 ––The Black Prince 35 ––The Green Knight 100 Musil, Robert 156 ––Man without Qualities 244, 561 Naipaul, Shiva 8 Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad 121, 134, 269, 278, 284 ––The Mystic Masseur 120 ––A House for Mr Biswas 120 ––The Mimic Men 120 Namjoshi, Suniti ––The Conversations of Cow 102–103 Neate, Patrick ––City of Tiny Lights 126 Nietzsche, Friedrich 139, 242, 504 Norfolk, Lawrence 8, 514 ––Lemprière’s Dictionary 36 Norman, Philip 8

 599

Nünning, Ansgar 346, 546 Nye, Robert 7 O’Hagan, Andrew 8 Okri, Ben 8 O’Neill, Eugene ––The Hairy Ape 153 O’Neill, Joseph ––Netherland 556 Ondaatje, Michael ––The English Patient 537 Orwell, George 16, 417, 510 ––Nineteen Eighty-Four 36, 57, 217–218, 226 Ovid 412 Oyeyemi, Helen 8 Packard, Edward ––The Cave of Time 39 Palahniuk, Chuck ––Fight Club 91 Paterson, Katie 498–499 Peace, David 8 ––GB84 53 Petrarch, Francesco ––Canzoniere 261 Phillips, Caryl 8, 60, 123, 125 ––The Final Passage 121 ––Cambridge 124 Picasso, Pablo 153 Pinter, Harold 320 Plato 65, 69, 467, 474, 525 ––The Symposium 466 Plotkin, Andrew ––Spider and Web 39 Pope, Alexander 337 Pound, Ezra 25, 40, 136, 142, 170, 196 ––“In a Station of the Metro” 246 Powell, Anthony 232–233 ––Afternoon Men 234 Pratchett, Terry 66 Priest, Christopher 8 Proust, Marcel ––A la recherche du temps perdu 153, 168 Pullman, Philip 16, 66 ––His Dark Materials 36, 74, 461–480 ––The Haunted Storm  461 ––Galatea 461 ––Count Karlstein 461 ––The Ruby in the Smoke 461

600 

 Index of Names

––The Shadow in the North 461 ––The Tiger in the Well 461 ––The Tin Princess 461 ––The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ 462 Pynchon, Thomas 509 ––Mason and Dixon 537 Queneau, Raymond ––Cent mille milliards de poèmes 336 Quin, Ann 7 Racine 256, 261 Rainey, Lawrence 45 Raisin, Ross 8 Rattigan, Terence ––After the Dance 234 Reagan, Ronald 58 Reed, Walter L. 3 Reid, Vic 284 Renault, Mary ––The Mask of Apollo 104 ––Fire from Heaven 104 ––The Persian Boy 104 Rendell, Ruth 67, 344 Rhys, Jean 57 ––Sargasso Sea 96 ––After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie 52 ––Voyage in the Dark 45, 52 ––Good Morning, Midnight 52 Rice, Ben 8 Richardson, Dorothy 25, 55, 181 ––Pilgrimage 87 Richardson, Samuel 28 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 315, 336 Roberts, Michèle 92 ––The Book of Mrs Noah 93 Robson, Justina 66 Rohlehr, Gordon 282 Rossetti, Christina 450 Roubaud, Jacques ––The Great Fire of London 39 Rousselot, Elodie 538, 547 Rowling, J. K. 66 ––Harry Potter 462, 499 Rushdie, Salman 8, 11–13, 122–123, 268, 274, 344, 361–362, 384, 396, 398, 481, 509 ––Grimus 403, 417

––Midnight’s Children 36, 403, 406, 417, 419, 421, 492 ––Shame 403, 406, 408, 417 ––The Satanic Verses 36, 121–122, 403–423, 487–488, 491 ––Haroun and the Sea of Stories 421 ––Imaginary Homelands 403–404, 408, 414, 416, 492 ––The Moor’s Last Sigh 36, 404, 421 ––The Ground Beneath Her Feet 36, 421 ––Fury 405, 417 ––Shalimar the Clown 421 ––The Enchantress of Florence 36, 421 ––Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights 421 ––Luka and the Fire of Life 36 Sahota, Sunjeev 8 Said, Edward 119, 362 Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) 102 Salkey, Andrew 269 Saporta, Marc ––Composition No. 1 39, 336 Sarraute, Nathalie 38, 336 Sartre, Jean-Paul 85, 260, 263, 303, 356 Sati, Erik 153 de Saussure, Ferdinand 522 Sayers, Dorothy 67 Schabert, Ina 84, 89, 100, 457 Schlegel, Friedrich  30 Schrödinger, Erwin 468–469, 471, 565 Scott, Paul 359, 360, 362 Scott, Walter 38, 356, 544–545 Seiffert, Rachel 8 Selasi, Taiye 8 Self, Will 8 ––The Book of Dave 510 Selvon, Sam 7, 115, 121, 361 ––A Brighter Sun 120, 269–270 ––The Lonely Londoners 58, 120, 268–288 ––Turn Again Tiger 120, 270 ––Moses Ascending 270 ––Moses Migrating  270–271 ––I Hear Thunder 271 ––The Housing Lark 271 ––The Plains of Caroni 271 Seth, Vikram ––An Equal Music 125 Shakespeare, Nicholas 8

Index of Names 

Shakespeare, William 160, 206, 213, 216, 221–224, 349–350, 418, 452–453 ––The Tempest 134, 223 ––Romeo and Juliet 225 ––Hamlet 158, 160, 168, 170, 552 ––Othello 222 ––Cymbeline 88 Shamsie, Kamila 8 Shaw, George Bernard 170 Shelley, Mary ––Frankenstein 32, 103, 219 Shelley, Percy Bysshe The Defence of Poetry 414 Shields, David ––Reality Hunger 15 Shklovsky, Viktor 32 Shuttle, Penelope 7 Sigal, Clancy 289, 297 Sillitoe, Alan 7 ––Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 115–117 Simpson, Helen 8 Sinclair, Clive 8 Sinclair, May 47, 181 Smith, Ali 60 ––How to Be Both 36 Smith, Clark Ashton 519 Smith, Stevie 97–98 ––Novel on Yellow Paper 95–96 Smith, Zadie 8, 97, 102, 268, 361, 555, 570 ––White Teeth 96, 123, 420, 481–497 ––Piece of Flesh 482 ––The Autograph Man 482 ––On Beauty 97, 482 ––The Book of Other People 482 ––Fail Better: The Morality of the Novel 482 ––Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays 482 ––NW 482, 493 Spenser, Edmund 346, 453 Spivak, Gayatri 109, 122, 362 Stanzel, Franz K. ––A Theory of Narrative 33 St Aubin de Téran, Lisa 8 Stein, Gertrude 37, 206, 255 Sterne, Laurence 324, 336 ––Tristram Shandy 32, 324, 329, 403 Stevenson, Robert Louis ––Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 68 Stevens, Wallace 136 Stoker, Bram

 601

––Dracula 68, 244 Storey, David 115 Strachey, Lytton 196, 320 Stravinsky, Igor 153 Stross, Charles 66 Summerfield, John ––May Day 113 Suvin, Darko 77, 518, 520 Swift, Graham 8 ––Waterland 35, 420, 537 Swinden, Patrick 247 Symonds, John Addington 195 Szalay, David 8 Tennyson, Alfred 450–451, 453 ––In Memoriam 244 Thackeray, William M.  68 ––Vanity Fair 32 Thatcher, Margaret 53, 58, 117, 406 Themerson, Stephan 7 Thoreau, Henry David ––Walden 155 Thirlwell, Adam 8, 60 Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel 16, 472, 478, 518 ––The Hobbit 66 ––The Lord of the Rings 66, 74, 462–463 Tolstoy, Leo 345 ––War and Peace 351, 405 Tremain, Rose 8 ––Restoration 538 Tressell, Robert 113, 117 ––The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists 110–112 Vint, Sherryl 77–78 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor 28 Voltaire 420 Walcott, Derek 269 Walkowitz, Rebecca 14 Ware, Chris ––Building Stories 39 Warner, Alan 8 Warner, Sylvia Townsend 100 ––Lolly Willowes 98 ––Mr Fortune’s Maggot 98–99 ––Summer Will Show 99 ––The Kingdoms of Elfin 99 Waters, Sarah 8

602 

 Index of Names

Watt, Ian  26, 146 ––The Rise of the Novel 3, 42, 67 Waugh, Evelyn 47, 232–233, 237 ––Black Mischief 51 ––Decline and Fall 234 ––Vile Bodies 234 ––Brideshead Revisited 57 Waugh, Patricia 9, 298, 304, 393, Weaver, Harriet 163, 170 Weldon, Fay 92, 398 Wells, Herbert George  66, 214 Welsh, Irvine ––Trainspotting 117–118 Wexler, Joyce 45 Wheway, Johns 7 White, Hayden 112, 137, 358 White, Patrick 345 Whitman, Walt 476 ––Leaves of Grass 177 Williams, Raymond 83, 112, 294 Williams, William Carlos 136 Wilson, Andrew Norman 8 Wilson, Angus ––Hemlock and After 58 ––Anglo-Saxon Attitudes 58 Wilson, Robert McLiam 8

Winterson, Jeannette 8, 84, 398 ––Oranges Are not the Only Fruit 36, 424, 442 ––Boating for Beginners 425 ––The Passion 36, 101, 425, 427 ––Written on the Body 36, 101 ––Sexing the Cherry 36, 101, 424–444, 537 ––The World and Other Places 425 ––The Gap of Time 425 Wolsey, Thomas 539–540 Woolf, Virginia 24–25, 31, 34, 45, 55, 84, 92, 99, 136, 147, 168, 170, 175, 181, 233, 249, 453 ––Jacob’s Room 153 ––“Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown” 25, 170, ––Mrs. Dalloway 32, 44, 46, 52, 86–88, 198, 243, 367 ––To the Lighthouse 52, 92, 195–212 ––Orlando 98, 100 ––The Waves 199 Wordsworth, William 242 ––The Prelude 37 Wyld, Evie 8 Yeats, William Butler 25, 141, 143, 170, 396 Žižek, Slavoj 339

List of Contributors Ingo Berensmeyer is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Giessen, Germany, and Visiting Research Professor of English at the University of Ghent, Belgium. Christoph Bode is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Munich (LMU), Germany. Lars Eckstein is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures outside of GB and the US at the University of Potsdam, Germany. Astrid Erll is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. Madelena Gonzalez is Professor of Anglophone Literature at the University of Avignon, France. Jens Martin Gurr is Professor of British and Anglophone Literature and Culture at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Anya Heise-von der Lippe is Assistant Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Ingrid Hotz-Davies is Professor of English Literature and Gender Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Dirk van Hulle is Professor of English Literature at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Andrew James Johnston is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at the Free University of Berlin, Germany. Alissa G. Karl is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, Brockport, NY, USA. Brooke Lenz is Associate Professor of English at Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota, USA. Michael Meyer is Professor of English Literature at the University Koblenz-Landau, Germany. Timo Müller, PD, is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Augsburg, Germany. Tatjana Pavlov-West is Assistant Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Christoph Reinfandt is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Alice Ridout is Assistant Professor of English and Film at Algoma University in Ontario, Canada. Ralf Schneider is Professor of British Literature and Culture at Bielefeld University, Germany.

604 

 List of Contributors

Gerold Sedlmayr is Professor of British Cultural Studies at the University of Dortmund, Germany. Lena Steveker is Assistant Professor of British Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Saarland, Germany. Dirk Vanderbeke is Professor of English Literature at the University of Jena, Germany, and Visiting Professor at the University of Zielona Góra, Poland. Miriam Wallraven, PD, is Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Würzburg, Germany. Russell West-Pavlov is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and Research Associate at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Dirk Wiemann is Professor of English Literature at the University of Potsdam, Germany. Raphael Zähringer is Assistant Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany.