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postwar englishness in the fiction of pat barker, graham swift and adam thorpe ingrid jennifer gunby PDF

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POSTWAR ENGLISHNESS IN THE FICTION OF PAT BARKER, GRAHAM SWIFT AND ADAM THORPE INGRID JENNIFER GUNBY Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University ofL eeds, School ofE nglish, October 2002 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work ofo thers. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. For my father, and the father he never knew. 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis could not have been written without the intellectual, emotional and financial help of many people and institutions. Of these, financial assistance is perhaps the easiest to specify, and I would like to thank the New Zealand Vice Chancellors' Committee, the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals, the University of Leeds, and the School of English for providing the funding that enabled me to undertake this research, and the Leeds University Union for assistance with nursery fees. Dr John McLeod's deft guidance played no small part in keeping a potentially unruly project under control, and his enthusiasm reinvigorated me at many moments when my own was flagging. Alistair Stead read Chapter One and was, as he always is, both rigorous and generous in his comments. My thinking on Pat Barker benefited early on from long discussions and the sharing of research resources with Roberta Jackson, whose own study on Barker I am eagerly awaiting. My fellow research students in the School of English have encouraged, commiserated and celebrated with me, and helped me out on occasions too numerous to count: special mention should go to Caroline Sumpter, Colin Winborn, Rob Ward and Richard Haw. Michael McDonald, meanwhile, provided a view of life outside the academy, and Sue Baker and Pamela Rhodes smoothed my encounters with the School's administrative machinery. My parents, David Gunby and Jenny Rockel, have been present in this project from the beginning in ways that may only now be dawning on them, and have helped me, in every way, to see it to completion. But my biggest debts are to Oscar and Harry, who have seen much less of me over the last year than they would have liked, and to Mel Kersey, who has held everything together during a difficult final year and who, simply, makes it all worthwhile. 11 ABSTRACT The widely-recognised crisis of Englishness in the 1980s and 1990s has generally been explained as a response to the end of empire. If the place of memories of the First and Second World Wars in this crisis has been considered at all, these have generally been assumed to support a nostalgic version of English or British national identity. Taking three contemporary British novelists-Graham Swift, Pat Barker and Adam Thorpe-as examples, however, this thesis argues that the late-twentieth century memory of these conflicts is strikingly ambivalent, and that the contemporary crisis of Englishness must be understood not only as postcolonial, but also, in a strong sense, as postwar. The Introduction sets out the parameters of critical discussion of late twentieth-century Englishness to date and explains my use of the term 'postwar', as marking the continuing cultural legacy of the world wars, and the process of interrogative re-reading of that legacy undertaken in the contemporary fiction I discuss. It also challenges the assumption that 'nostalgia' and a 'healthy' attitude to the past can necessarily be easily distinguished, through a discussion of post Freudian psychoanalytic approaches to mourning and melancholia. Chapter One considers three writers of the early to mid-twentieth century, Siegfried Sassoon, J. B. Priestley, and Elizabeth Bowen, in order to suggest the nature of the questions about Englishness, war and violence which re-emerge with the breakdown of Britain's postwar social and political consensus from the mid-1970s onward. Chapter Two then discusses Graham Swift's early novels, The Sweet Shop Owner, Shuttlecock and Waterland, arguing that critical attention to his metafictional concerns in Waterland has meant that his interest in suburban English life as encrypting memories of war has been overlooked. Chapter Three proceeds to Pat Barker's The Regeneration Trilogy, charting a two-way process of haunting through which contemporary concerns with violence are read back into the historical and literary record of the First World War, and simultaneously seem to re-emerge in the present as the return of the violence underpinning a melancholic cultural attachment to the very English narrative of 'doomed youth'. My discussion in Chapter Four of Adam Thorpe's novels Ulverton, Still and Pieces of Light emphasises their exploration of the violence at the heart of the 'deep England' evoked in heritage representations of Englishness. I suggest, however, that Thorpe's attempts to find appropriate fictional forms for ambivalence and melancholia are at times closer to paralysed repetitions than to interrogations of Englishness. My argument concludes with a reading of Swift's Last Orders, which I contend enacts the beginnings of a movement beyond the wartime end of a certain England and Englishness. Its misreading by critics as parochial and nostalgic, I suggest, indicates the extent of critical misunderstanding of the troubled memory of the world wars in contemporary Britain. It also testifies to the difficulty and the necessity of the creative and critical work on postwar Englishness undertaken by the writers considered in this study. 111 CONTENTS Acknow ledgements 1 Abstract 11 Contents 111 Introduction 1 Paths Around Absence Chapter One 26 Unfinished Business: The Loss and Renewal of 'England' in Narratives of War Chapter Two 77 'Something Left Over from the War': The Early Novels of Graham Swift Chapter Three 130 'We Are Your Ghosts': The Regeneration Trilogy and the Uses of Gothic Chapter Four 178 'Dying of England': The Novels of Adam Thorpe Chapter Five 230 Last Orders? Conclusion 247 Bibliography 251 1 INTRODUCTION PATHS AROUND ABSENCE 'To be English', writes Ian Baucom in his recent study of Englishness during and after empire, 'is, often, to be a member of a cult of the dead, or, at the very least, a member of a cult of ruin'. 1 Baucom's was only one among many voices, in the popular media as well as the academic presses, charting the travails of Englishness as the twentieth century closed and the twenty-first opened. For many of these observers, noting laments for 'England gone' from Philip Larkin's 'Going, Going' through V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival to Roger Scruton's recent, and unapologetically-named, England: An Elegy, the key characteristic of contemporary Englishness is nostalgia.2 For the English, Baucom writes, nostalgia is no mere 'sentimental attitude', but 'an injunctive politics ofretum' to the true nation. Indeed, David Gervais has asked whether, without nostalgia, there would be any versions of England at all.3 Diagnoses of the cause of this national malaise have tended to lOut of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 175. Larkin, 'Going, Going', in Collected Poems, ed. by Anthony Thwaite (London: Marvell 2 and Faber, 1988), p. 190, Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (London: Penguin, 1987), Scruton, England: An Elegy (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000). Baucom, p. 176, Gervais, Literary Englands: Versions of 'Englishness' in Modern Writing 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 4. For further representative examples of this view of Englishness, see Antony Easthope, Englishness and National Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen, 1987), Roy Porter, 'Introduction', in Myths of the English, ed. by Roy Porter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 1-11 (p. 2), Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985). Although Wright and Hewison's 2 concentrate on the impact on Britain of the end of empire, devolution, and European integration: as the meaning of Britishness shifts, albeit unevenly and with extreme reluctance, to accommodate the loss of Britain's empire, postwar immigration and increased Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish autonomy, so-the argument goes- Englishness's complicated embrace of and differentiation from Britishness has been exposed. The casual equation of England with Britain that was common fifty, or even thirty, years ago can no longer be made so easily. But the relationship between the two terms is still not a clear one. 'English' can specifically denote an identity separate from, even opposed to, Britishness.4 'British' can mean a composite identity shared by the English, Scots, Welsh and (more complexly and problematically) the Irish. But 'British' can also refer to 'the dominant particularism within Britain, that of "Britain" itself, often referred to as "England"'. 5 In a classic analysis of the English problem, first published in 1977, Tom Nairn argues that the lack of a viable English national identity is a consequence of the end of empire--of which the 'break-up of Britain' is the final phase.6 Having titles refer to Britain, it is really the English 'national past' with which they are concerned: Neal Ascherson's assertion that heritage is a manifestation of 'vulgar English nationalism' only makes this more than usually explicit (in Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994), p. 262). John Fowles makes such a distinction in his essay 'On Being English But Not British' 4 (1964), in Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings, ed. by Jan Relf (London: Cape, 1998), pp. 79-88, as does Jeremy Paxman in The English: A Portrait of a People (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 265-66. Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Pimlico, 1992), p. 1. See also Robert ColIs, 5 Identity ofE ngland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 377-78 and Bernard Crick, 'The English and the British', in National Identities: The Constitution of the United Kingdom, ed. by Bernard Crick (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 90-104. The Break-up ofB ritain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, (London: NLB, 1977). In his recent 6 After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland (London: Granta, 2001), Nairn writes that with regard to 'the question of England [ ... J all too little has altered since 1977' (p. 15; see also pp. 39-42 and 177-78). 3 thrown in their lot with a 'Great-British chauvinism' based on territorial and economic expansion, he writes, the English have found that 'the retreating tide of imperialism' has left them only 'the battered cliche-ridden hulk' of an identity (78, 259). Contemporary attempts to define and assert an English identity are only 'so many paths around an absence' (294). An awareness of this absence has, moreover, haunted Englishness throughout the imperial period, '[sounding] through the English imperialist mind in a thousand forms: in Rider Haggard's necrophilia, in Kipling's moments of gloomy doubt, in the self-pitying pessimism of Housman, in the sadness of Elgar, or in the gloomy cosmic truth of Forster's Marabar caves' (265). What is troubling Englishness in the late twentieth century could therefore be construed, Nairn's argument suggests, as the uncanny return of the 'something persistently missing, something absent from English national identity itself that has hitherto been masked by the confusion of Englishness and Britishness (262). Nairn points to this lack within Englishness through literary examples, although ostensibly his primary concern is political culture and, by extension, people's SUbjective sense of national identity. It may be worth stating at the outset that my own study is concerned with literary constructions of Englishness, rather than with the sociological or psychological study of national identity. This is not by any means to discount the connections between the subjective meaning and experience of Englishness and literary Englishness, or, to frame the issue differently, between the variety of ways in which Englishness, and English subjects, are discursively produced: it is simply to recognise the necessary limits of a thesis concerned with literary texts. More recent studies echo Nairn in explaining the contemporary trials of Englishness by reference to imperialism and the end of empire. ill the spirit of 4 Whisky Sisodia's observation in The Satanic Verses that 'the trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don't know what it means', Baucom, for example, argues that English nostalgia and melancholy are a response to the dissemination and dispersal of Englishness across the globe.7 But whereas Nairn's designation of 'something absent from English national identity' suggests that it should be possible to find a true, coherent identity at the heart of the nation-for him, this is 'an idea of the people' and their 'forceful entry [ ... ] into history' (295)--other critics argue that the very search for a missing or lost presence that would guarantee identity signals a refusal to recognise England's- though of course not just England's-postmodem, postcolonial condition, a nostalgic longing for the 'transcendental ground' of meaning and identity which 'doubtless never existed,.8 Immigrants' experiences of the 'border and frontier conditions' of migrancy and colonisation have been made to stand for a pervasive, postmodern and postcolonial, sense of displacement, and for an awareness that all attempts to formulate a stable identity are 'paths around an absence', or around the other that is constitutive of the self.9 In the context of discussions of Englishness, Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses is perhaps the paradigmatic example to which critics Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988; New York: Henry Holt, 1997), p. 353, 7 Baucom, Out of Place. On Englishness as formed in colonial encounters, see Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), and Baucom; for an analysis that partly endorses, partly criticises such a reading, see ColIs, Identity ofE ngland. Ned Lukacher, Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell 8 University Press, 1986), p. 11. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 12. As Bhabha 9 himself observes, this manoeuvre ' [gives] poststructuralism a specifically postcolonial provenance' in order to suggest what a poststructuralist politics might look like: postcolonial hybridity, he writes, 'initiates the project of political thinking by continually facing it with the strategic and the contingent, with the countervailing thought of its own "unthought''' (p. 64). 5 tum in trying to sketch the possible, desired, postcolonial and postmodem transformation of Englishness. As Michael Gorra puts it in his 'notes towards a redefinition of Englishness' (highlighting, in the process, the aforementioned confusion of 'English' and 'British'): Britain's illusory belief in its own historical homogeneity means that it will probably never become a fully multiracial society. Even if nonwhites can insert themselves into the continuity of English life, the terms of that life will change only in degree. Nevertheless their presence will have important consequences. After his transformation into a human goat, Rushdie's Saladin Chamcha finds himself in a hospital full of other foreign beasts: a manticore from Bombay, 'businessmen from Nigeria who have grown sturdy tails ... holiday makers from Senegal who ... were turned into slippery snakes.' And when Saladin asks what has happened, the manticore tells him that white British society has 'the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct'. But the map isn't pink anymore, and in describing themselves, in changing the face in England's mirror, such figures as Saladin may one day help loosen the coils of that island nation's seemingly endless past.lO Englishness may not, in fact, be as nostalgic, or as uniquely nostalgic, as its critics often suggest.II fudeed, one of the arguments of this thesis is that it is not always as easy as those critics seem to assume to distinguish nostalgia from a productive working-through of the traces of the past, in literature and in culture more generally. The point I wish to make here, however, is that analysts of the contemporary crisis of Englishness who, with greater or lesser degrees of hope, anticipate a regeneration of Britain (or England), tend to see both crisis and hope for renewal in postcolonial terms. The examination of Englishness that has taken place over the past two decades is far less frequently connected to the legacy of the two Michael Gorra, After Empire: Scott, Naipau[, Rushdie (Chicago: University of Chicago 10 Press, 1997), pp. 174-75. Compare Baucom, pp. 200-18, and Gikandi, pp. 205-24.

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Pat Barker benefited early on from long discussions and the sharing of research resources Chapter Three proceeds to Pat Barker's The Regeneration. Trilogy
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