Trauma, Postmodernism, and the Aftermath of World War II

229 Pages·2009·3.08 MB·English

by  Paul Crosthwaite (auth.)

Trauma, Postmodernism, and the
Aftermath of World War II

Trauma, Postmodernism,
and the Aftermath of
World War II
Paul Crosthwaite
© Paul Crosthwaite 2009
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-20295-5
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First published 2009 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-30091-4 ISBN 978-0-230-59472-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230594722
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crosthwaite, Paul, 1980–
Trauma, postmodernism and the aftermath of World War II /
Paul Crosthwaite.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. World War, 1939–1945 – Literature and the war. 2. English fiction – 20th
century – History and criticism. 3. American fiction – 20th century – History
and criticism. 4. War in literature. 5. Psychic trauma in literature. 6. World
War, 1939–1945 – Psychological aspects. 7. War and literature – Great
Britain – History – 20th century. 8. War and literature – United States –
History – 20th century. 9. Postmodernism (Literature) – Great Britain.
10. Postmodernism (Literature) – United States. I. Title.
PR888.W66C76 2009
823(cid:1).91209358—dc22 2008045134
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 War, Trauma, Postmodernism 15
2 Gravity’s Rainbow and Traumatic Models of History 45
3 ‘ A Secret Code of Pain and Memory’: Traumatic
Repetition in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard 76
4 T otal War and the English Stream-of-Consciousness
Novel: From Mrs Dallowayyto Mother London 115
5 Their Fathers’ War: Negotiating the Legacy
of World War II in Prisoner’s Dilemma and Atonement 145
Conclusion: Writing/Reading World War II After 9/11 175
Notes 182
Select Bibliography 213
Index 219
v
Acknowledgements
This book began as a doctoral thesis written at the University of
Newcastle upon Tyne. My study at Newcastle would not have been pos-
sible without the generous support of the British Arts and Humanities
Research Council. I am also grateful to the Council for additional fund-
ing that allowed me to present ideas arising from the project at a confer-
ence in the United States. Further financial support came from the
School of English Literature, Language, and Linguistics at Newcastle,
which funded several conference trips and provided opportunities for
teaching. The Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas at Austin
permitted me to view a number of letters by Thomas Pynchon; my
thanks to the staff at the Centre for their assistance. Michael Moorcock
kindly responded to my queries regarding his use of the ‘stream-of-
consciousness’ technique in his novel Mother London.
The book has benefited greatly from the guidance of my doctoral
supervisor, John Beck. John’s reading of my work was consistently care-
ful and rigorous, and his constructive criticisms contributed enormously
to the development of my ideas. Our wide-ranging discussions remain
amongst my most valued memories of my time at Newcastle.
Since joining Cardiff University in 2007, my thinking has been
enriched by conversations with colleagues and discussions with stu-
dents taking my ‘Contemporary American Fiction’, ‘War and Memory’,
and ‘Literature and Film After 9/11’ modules. These have often sug-
gested new and intriguing angles on the material.
I have benefited from the advice, guidance, and support of many peo-
ple, both inside and outside the academy. I particularly wish to thank
Tom Theobald, Leen Maes, Stacy Gillis, Andrew Shail, Anne Whitehead,
Mark Gillingwater, Bob Stoate, Becky Munford, Vike Plock, Ann Clifford,
Al Smith, Daniel Johnson, Andrew Montgomery, Trevor Rapley, Alex
Wilkinson, Peter Nicholls, John Armitage, Ryan Bishop, Douglas Kellner,
William Rasch, Wilfried Wilms, Diederik Oostdijk, and Markha
Valenta.
I am deeply grateful to my family – David, Bernie, Mark, and Mary
Crosthwaite – for their immense love and support and the faith that
they have always had in me. Finally, I wish to thank Melanie Waters,
whose warmth, wit, intelligence, and love have sustained me during the
years spent working on this project.
vi
Acknowledgements vii
Parts of chapters 4 and 5 have previously appeared in the publications
below. I am grateful to the editors and publishers for permission to
reprint this material.
‘“Children of the Blitz”: Air War and the Time of Postmodernism in
Michael Moorcock’sMother London’, inBombs Away!: Representing the Air
War over Europe and Japan, ed. by William Rasch and Wilfried Wilms
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 233–247.
‘Speed, War, and Traumatic Affect: Reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement’,
‘Velocities of Power’, ed. by John Beck and Paul Crosthwaite, special sec-
tion offCultural Politics 3.1 (2007), 51–70.
The cover image, Head of a Man (1956) by Nigel Henderson, is © Tate,
London and the Estate of Nigel Henderson, 2008.
The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to quote
from the following copyright material:
Mother London by Michael Moorcock, copyright © Michael Moorcock
and Linda Moorcock, 1988, reprinted by permission of Michael
Moorcock.
Prisoner’s Dilemma by Richard Powers, copyright © Richard Powers,
1988, reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Gravity’s Rainbow (Vintage UK) by Thomas Pynchon, copyright ©
Thomas Pynchon, 1973, 2001, reprinted by permission of the Melanie
Jackson Agency, L.L.C.
Introduction
This book constitutes the first sustained attempt to locate Anglo-American
postmodernist fiction in relation to World War II. As such, it aims to
redress a marked disparity between the pervasiveness of the war’s legacy
within those realms of literary production typically identified as ‘post-
modernist’, and the relative lack of critical attention this relationship
has received. More significantly, though, it argues that full acknowl-
edgement of the integrality of the Second World War to the postmod-
ern ‘force field’ substantially strengthens the case for a thoroughgoing
reassessment of the very structure and character of this cultural and aes-
thetic movement itself. This wider imperative to interrogate prevailing
readings of the postmodern has been pursued by a number of scholars
in a range of areas over the last decade, and I aim to make a contribu-
tion to this emerging interdisciplinary project in this study. Here, as
in several of the most significant works in this field, productive tools
for rethinking postmodernism are found in the models of temporality
and history that arise from psychoanalytic theories of trauma. Trauma,
as a paradigm of the historical event, possesses an absolute material-
ity, and yet, as inevitably missed or incompletely experienced, remains
absent and inaccessible. This formulation offers a way of conceptualiz-
ing postmodernist culture’s effacement of the referent or the originary
moment, whilst at the same time affirming its sensitivity to the reality
of historical experience.
I elaborate this theoretical position in detail in Chapter 1, before
pursuing close readings of texts by six authors – Virginia Woolf,
Thomas Pynchon, J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Richard Powers,
and Ian McEwan – for whom World War II, in its vast scope and fer-
ocity, exerts a profound influence. Beyond their shared preoccupation
with the war, these figures have been selected on the basis of two sets
1
2 Trauma, Postmodernism, and World War II
of criteria. Firstly, as I will explain in a moment, their writings serve,
individually, not merely to demonstrate but to positively exemplify
the various waves of fictional response to the Second World War that
have succeeded one another over the last sixty years. At the same time,
these writers evince a range of discernible associations – whether the-
matic, formal, professional, or personal – that recommend them for
discussion as an, albeit loose, group or cluster. While Woolf may ini-
tially appear as an anomalous figure, for reasons including age, gender,
class, and the conventions of cultural periodization (her writing being
typically held up as a paradigmatic expression of ‘high’, rather than
‘post-’, modernism), what I try to show in my analysis of her work in
Chapter 4 is how strikingly her concerns with technology and militar-
ization, and the forms of anxiety and disorientation they engender,
anticipate the preoccupations of the later novelists under discussion.
Indeed, in their own renderings of these issues, Moorcock, Ballard,
and Pynchon are demonstrably informed by the tradition of radical
literary experimentation they inherited from their modernist prede-
cessors. Particularly in their work of the 1960s and 1970s (though also
in later texts such as Moorcock’sMother London [1988], Ballard’s Empire
of the Sun [1984], and Pynchon’s Vinelandd [1990]) their speculative or
fantastical approaches to questions of technology, war, paranoia, and
aberrant subjectivity also border on, or indeed fall within, the generic
boundaries of science fiction. Here, the connections between these
three writers become all the more concrete: as editor of the British
SF magazine New Worlds from 1964 to 1971, Moorcock presided over
the emergence of the so-called New Wave of artistically sophisticated
SF, of which Ballard has often been identified as the definitive expo-
nent, and with which Pynchon (whose first British publication was
in New Worlds) has also been associated. Richard Powers, in turn, is
one of a number of contemporary American novelists (one thinks
also of the likes of William T. Vollman, David Foster Wallace, and
Neal Stephenson) whose dense, encyclopaedic, technoscientifically
suffused novels would be unthinkable without the work of Pynchon.
McEwan, for his part, is similarly self-conscious in his responsive-
ness to the history of twentieth-century literary innovation, while his
notorious penchant for the grotesque, violent, and bizarre bears the
imprint of Pynchon and Ballard.
With the exception of Woolf, another point of commonality amongst
these writers is the fact that they were either children during World
War II or else were born only after its conclusion; of their fictional
responses to the conflict, the earliest texts I discuss date from the 1960s,