Home > Notes from the Underground
I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Philip Hensher writes on the history of the state of the nation novel:"Several things define this genre: a range of social settings; the coverage of an extended period of time; a sense that the lives described reflect major social shifts or matters of public importance; and, often, open debate on political concerns and the nature of the nation itself. Commentators on the English novel have often claimed to find works of this type in 19th-century fiction. In fact, few of Dickens's or Eliot's works really analyse the whole of a society. However, some 19th-century authors certainly did set out to write state-of-the-nation fiction. The title of Trollope's The Way We Live Now is a clear indication of intent, and the book conscientiously covers a range of social settings and roles, from the agricultural to the new capital markets of the City. Disraeli's splendid "Young England" trilogy of the 1840s, Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred, with its broad social spectrum and tendency to political solutions, is virtually the founding example of the state-of-the-nation novel. The celebrated passage from Sybil about the two nations, rich and poor, is one of the very few examples of a piece of state-of-the-nation rhetoric making its way permanently into the political debate. Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, Middlemarch and, probably, Little Dorrit all have a state-of-the-nation flavour: they have an acute sense of the larger implications of the individual situation; their ambitions are both literary and, in a general sense, policy-directed in ways which go beyond the aspirations of, say, Great Expectations or Daniel Deronda.
The novelist's concern with the state of the nation has never gone away, but it only occasionally emerges in the form of a state-of-the-nation novel. Nothing could be more telling about Britain's unhoused exhaustion at the end of the second world war than the rush of enthusiasm for novels about country houses and fantastical, often demonic palaces—Brideshead Revisited, Love in a Cold Climate, Gormenghast and The Lord of the Rings. None of them, however, was exactly state-of-the-nation, and the taste for the national diagnosis was satisfied by the factual discussions of the Beveridge report, which sold an astonishing 600,000 copies, at two shillings each.
Since then, the state-of-the-nation tendency in fiction has surfaced from time to time. The mid to late 1970s saw a small run of such books concerned with what seemed the collapse of the Attlee consensus. AS Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden (1978), set in the early 1950s, was the first volume of a tetralogy that traced the developing state of the nation in the following decades. William Golding's Darkness Visible (1979) seems to give in to despair in a tale of motiveless violence. In Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age (1977), commerce and property become evil, empty values in ways that foreshadow the "Thatcher's Britain" novelists... Why are we seeing such a range of state-of-the-nation novels at this moment? Perhaps the last occasion when such novels seemed urgent and vital was not the "Thatcher's Britain" years but the years which produced Drabble, Byatt and Golding, the fag-end of the Callaghan Labour government. The public consensus then was clearly breaking down under a prime minister who had no mandate from an election. The trust between people and elected representatives was evaporating, and acts of individual violence were common."
This is something I've been thinking about recently and something I have my doubts about. London Fields by Martin Amis is characterised by a sense of English life as an irrelevance, a place from where history has fled ("Bellow says that America is the only place to be, because it contains the 'real modern action'"). I recall him later comparing England to Switzerland, making me think of Greene's comment about centuries of peace and prosperity creating nothing more than the cuckoo clock. By contrast, the London of Trollope and Dickens was an economic experiment, a place wholly unlike anywhere else on Earth and which represented the shape of things to come. There's also the sense of Victorian society as having been considerably more cohesive; even with two nations there is the sense of inequality as a source of collective shame that needs to be addressed collectively. This isn't something that is obviously a part of modern England, where the return of Victorian social conditions does not seem to have led to any similar set of social concerns. Modern England seems to be comparatively atomised, it's individualism and multiculturalism making state of the nation fiction difficult at best and often confined to minority groups, as with Smith or Hollinghurst.
Perhaps this is why much modern social fiction seems a rather poor substitute for its Victorian counterpart; Arnott's He Kills Coppers spans a social history of decades but its characters remains as they are, unaffected by social upheaval, whereas the Victorian assumption was that the individual and society were inextricably intertwined. Similarly, McEwan's On Chesil Beach certainly contains several passages that suggest a degree of scepticism as to political radicalism; Florence's mother describes the Soviet Union as little different to Nazi Germany. As Florence believes it to be essentially benevolent it is a little inconsistent for her to describe Edward's membership of CND as being akin to a medieval millenarian cult (particularly when she too belongs to it). However, whether any of this really translates to support for conservative ideas is an extrapolation the novel fails to justify, particularly when McEwan comments that he has not disavowed any of the views he once held as a member of CND. My own reservations about McEwan are rather different. As the above descriptions attest, the novel is concerned with events in the years that Larkin described sexual intercourse as having invented in ("This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine ...This was still the era when to be young was a social encumbrance.") At one point McEwan's omniscient narrator declares that "Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself." This seems true of one of the characters, Edward, who travels in the course of the novel from English middle class awkwardness to becoming a sixties dropout. However, Florence's "visceral dread" of sex is deliberately left unexplained and can certainly not be laid at the hand of history. Similarly, her suggestion that their relationship be platonic, with her tolerating him having sex with other women hardly seems to be ahead of its time in the way McEwan seems to believe it to be; quite the contrary. The idea that Edward's life would have been much better if he had accepted also seems somewhat unwarranted, given that the novel itself holds out little more than a post in her father's firm for choosing that road. McEwan generally seems to prefer the aberrant and unexplained too much to be able to work fully within the constraints of the realist novel, where the struggles of Julien Sorrel or Dorothea Brooke is entirely in keeping with the spirit of their age.
Update: an interesting, and to my mind quite persuasive, article from Alan Massie takes an approach that rather recalls Lukacs. In this context we might compare the 'closed' Madame Bovary to the 'open' Lost Illusions:"One may make a distinction between two types of novel: the self-enclosed and the open. The distinction is not absolute. Such things never are. Genre fiction may merge with what is called the literary novel, for instance. Still the categories I have in mind are useful, or at least interesting. By the self-enclosed novel, I mean one which makes no reference — or almost no reference — to anything beyond itself. It belongs to its age of course, but it does not appear to be set in time. Time naturally passes, as it must in a narrative, but there is no suggestion that events in the world of fact beyond the novel might impinge on its characters, influence their behaviour, or affect the course of their lives. The doors of the novel are closed against the winds of the world. In the open novel, these winds, which are the winds of history, beat upon the characters. Indeed history is itself a character in this kind of novel, even if the author chooses not to introduce real-life historical figures. In, for instance, that fine novel by Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day, the second world war is a character as the Napoleonic Wars are not in Jane Austen’s beautifully self-enclosed novels. The treason of which the heroine’s lover is guilty would seem less significant if we didn’t bring to our reading of the novel our knowledge of the enemy he has chosen to serve — the enemy whom his lover, Stella, rightly calls ‘horrible — specious, unthinkable, grotesque’.
The open novel was invented more or less by Walter Scott, though it had ancestors in Defoe and Fielding. Especially in the series of great novels set in the Scotland of the 17th and 18th centuries, Scott demonstrates that, for a man of a certain stamp at a certain time, there is no escaping history. It is history, the world of harsh political fact which, working in conjunction with personal qualities, forms or deforms men’s lives. Henry Morton’s dilemma in Old Mortality is certainly occasioned by his character, but it is specifically provoked by the temper of the times in which he lives and the bitter animosities with which he is confronted are historical facts...
Some frown on this. A work of art, they say, should be self-sufficient, needing to make no reference to anything beyond itself. This argument is advanced more often in discussion of painting than in literary criticism — Roger Fry’s doctrine of ‘significant form’, for instance — and would have puzzled the Old Masters who expected people to bring their knowledge of the Bible or Classical mythology to the contemplation of their work. It would likewise have puzzled the poets who expected their readers to catch their classical allusions.... The self-enclosed novel will always be written, but Scott’s example was soon followed by Stendhal, Hugo and Tolstoy. Most novels are perhaps hybrids. Sometimes you get an open novel, like Thomas Mann’s masterpiece Doctor Faustus, which, for much of the time, pretends to be self-enclosed. Nowadays the problem for the writer of the contemporary open novel is that news and the sense of immediacy press so hard and insistently upon him. This is perhaps why so many of the best open novels are set in the past, even if that past is quite recent, as in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy."Labels: Literature
posted by Richard 11:08 am
