Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space: Style, Landscape, Perception

206 Pages·2009·20.9 MB·English

by  David James

David James
Contemporary British Fiction
and the Artistry of Space
,
Style, Landscape Perception
A
continuum
C O N T I N U U M L I T E R A R Y S T U D I E S
Contemporary British Fiction and
the Artistry of Space
Continuum Literary Studies Series
Also available in the series:
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Canonizing Hypertext by Astrid Ensslin
Character and Satire in Postwar Fiction by Ian Gregson
Coleridge and German Philosophy by Paul Hamilton
Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space by David James
Contemporary Fiction and Christianity by Andrew Tate
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English Fiction in the 1930$ by Chris I lopkins
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Milton, Evil and Litera iy History by Claire Colebrook
Modernism and the Post-colonial by Peter Childs
Novels of the Contemporary Extreme edited by Alain-Phillipe Durand and
Naomi Mandel
The Palimpsest by Sarah Dillon
Recalling London by Alex Murray
Romanticism, Literatim? and Philosophy by Simon Swift
Seeking Meaning for Goethe's Faust by J. M. van der Laan
Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad by Jeremy Hawthorn
Such Deliberate Disguises: The Art of Phillip Larkin by Richard Palmer
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Contem porary British Fiction
and the Artistry of Space
Style, Landscape, Perception
David James
A
con Linn um
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© David James 2008
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this lw>ok is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-8470-6494-3 (hardback)
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Contents
Acknowledgement vi
Introduction: The Spatial Imaginary of Contemporary
British Fiction 1
1 Landscape and Narrative Aesthetics 20
2 New Horizons for the Regional Novel 41
3 Urban Visionaries 69
4 Cartographers of Memory 96
5 Island Encounters 132
Epilogue: ‘Because Time Is Not Like Space’ 164
Notes 169
Bibliography 181
Index 191
Acknowledgements
In the course of completing this book over the past 3 years, many people have
lent help, guidance and support. First and foremost, though, I want to thank
Laura Marcus, whose rigorous judgement was fundamental to refining the
initial scope and critical sensibility of this study from its inception. Her compan­
ionship, wisdom and intellectual generosity remain personally and professionally
inspirational.
I am indebted to Philip Tew for many candid discussions about the diversify­
ing priorities of contemporary fiction studies, and he has alleviated my anxieties
at important stages of this project - not least over that always-tricky task of
selecting who and what to include. Roger Luckhurst and Julian Wolfreys
likewise reassured me of the need to propose an alternative vocabulary for
addressing literary cityscapes. At the University of Nottingham, Peter Howarth
comforted me as a colleague who, fresh through the door, was tackling new and
challenging responsibilities while trying not to forget the small pleasures that
motivate us to write about literature in the first place. Also at Nottingham,
Dominic Head, Julie Sanders, Mark Robson and Sean Matthews remain
superb mentors. On various occasions, they have all reminded me never to
feel cautious about starting with the texture of what we read over and above
subsidiary concerns, and to have the conviction to write about contemporary
fiction rather than about contemporary theory. Always putting these principles
to work, Andrzej Gasiorek remains for me a most powerful and exemplary
scholar of postwar British writing, one who demonstrates that we can’t divorce
contemporary novelists from their modernist predecessors. This book bears the
mark of his invaluable friendship and advice, and I share his determination to
show how history and aesthetics can intimately inform one another in the course
of doing justice to literary form.
To my dear mum I give a last (and eternally inadequate) word of thanks for
supporting my academic pursuits through times when intellectual ambitions
seemed irrelevant. If it weren’t for my dad I would never have appreciated
firsthand the fascinatingly complex rhythms of the countryside. I thank my two
brothers for not being academics, and I honour the way they never allow me to
take myself too seriously. Finally, this book is for Maria del Pilar Blanco, whose
patience I have shamelessly and repeatedly plundered while re-reading, worry-
A cknoivledgements vii
ing and rewriting - instead of saying what I intuitively wanted to say first time
around. I will forever thank her for giving a purpose to it all. Into the emerging
life of a book about fictional space she arrived to make the world seem such a
very small place.
A previous version of Chapter 2 appeared in JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory
36, no. 3 (2006): 424-45, and material from Chapter 4 informs a forthcoming
essay in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fidion, 1 thank Eastern Michigan
University and Heldref publications, respectively, for granting me permission
here to incorporate material partly disseminated in article form. Sections from
Chapter 3 build upon a more focused essay which originally appeared in City
Vùions: The Work of Iain Sinclair (2007), and sections from this are republished
with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 1 especially want to
thank that volume’s editors, Jenny Bavidge and Robert Bond, for the stimulat­
ing conference and conversations which confirmed my commitment to working
on landscape and the novel.
I would like to thank the Continuum editorial board as well as all staff involved
in the book’s production for all their diligence and enthusiasm in seeing this
book through to press.
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Introduction
The Spatial Imaginary of Contemporary
British Fiction
Every novel has to be set somewhere. All fictional worlds surely depend upon
some indication of locality, named or anonymous. Moreover, characters'
decisions and their pivotal consequences are often intensified by the demands
and opportunities of where they take place. Beginning a novel, we might indeed
expect the writer initially to assume the role of a tour guide, acquainting us with
the quintessence of his or her chosen locale. For how can novelists hope to
secure our sympathy without first setting the scene? Such are the assumptions
that this study seeks to explore, assumptions that seem at once self-evident and
yet all too unrefined for understanding how writers transport us to geographies
other than our own. Conspicuous or unnamed, fictional settings are never rudi­
mentary and rarely inconsequential. Instead, they raise a series of pressing
questions that are less obvious than they sound: Do landscapes themselves have
a determining effect on our emotional engagement with the novel as a form?
If so, to what extent do places in fiction mediate our response to the very
texture of narrative prose by functioning not simply as background sceneries
but as vibrant figures in their own right? If literary landscapes draw attention to
the interplay of description and embellishment, documentary images and
rhetorical flair, might the formal and figurative aspects of fictional space give us
an insight into the way novelists today are experimenting with style? That we
readily entertain, if not lake for granted, the plausibility of novelistic settings,
and that the language of topographical description plays such a pivotal role in
securing our absorption in the page, implies that the poetics of place calls atten­
tion the reading process itself. And as Graham Swift makes clear, our immersion
in the verbal craft of landscape description puts us imaginatively in touch not
only with environmental sounds, colour and scale, but also with a place’s
intimate rhythms and modes of inhabitation. Novelists succeed in connecting
us emotionally with the domains they describe precisely because literary
settings convey something more than ‘just physical place, it's the sense of people
having their territory’.1
Swift sets a standard here that unites the aspirations of the very different
novelists considered in this book. Though formally diverse, they compel us