English literature at the end of the twentieth century

Opinions about the state of the late twentieth century English literature ranged from critical "feeble - thinly imagined, dotty about the past, unable to picture ourselves in the present" (J.Cowley) (Qtd. in Cunningham 1998: 1) to enthusiastic "confident, brilliant, inventive and full of variety (A.S.Byatt) (Byatt 1996: 6). To understand the real situation in English prose fiction at the end of the millenium we need to cast a glance at some of the processes and tendencies which were underway then.

While in the 1960s Christine Brooke-Rose complained that the experimentalists and anti-novelists made a "sparse alignment compared with the vast body of straight novelists" (Qtd. in Bradbury 1994: 363), later reviewers seemed to be unanimous about the absence of straight novels, i.e. works with a traditionally solid, consistent narrative, among the contemporary literary creations. There were relatively few long prose works about the condition of England or the class system and other themes so characteristic of the nineteenth century or pre-Second Word War social novels where the plot used to be organised round the life of an individual or a family. Much of the late twentieth century writing had a fable character and its authors were, according to A.S.Byatt, "tale-tellers, or fabulists". Many of them were "interested in history and its relation to fable, ... in tricks of consciousness, dreams, illusions" (Byatt 1996: 6). Instead of writing about here and now more and more writers preferred to set their novels either in the past or in the future; they made the three time levels overlap and sent their characters outside Britain.

Obsession ("dottiness about") with history was one of the dominant tendencies of British fiction at the end of the millennium. Yet historicism in the late twentieth century British prose was considerably different from the traditional, conventional treatment of the past canonized by Sir Walter Scott. Writers no longer attempted to plunge their readers into the past so that they should forget about the present. On the contrary, the reader was constantly reminded that the past was not abandoned, that it was still alive, it affected the present and predetermined the future. The past was not idealized, it was subjected to analysis and criticism.

The devices employed by novelists for dealing with history were diverse. In The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) which is set in the nineteenth century John Fowles constantly drew parallels between the past, the present and the future, thus involving the readers into archetypical viewing of the world. Peter Ackroyd made up his novel The House of Dr. Dee (1993) of the monologues of two protagonists - a twentieth century man and his distant predecessor who lived in the sixteenth century - which seem to echo each other. In his novel Ulverton (1992) Adam Thorpe traces the 300-year history of the village and the time levels overlap one another. Julian Barnes managed to "squeeze" the history of the world, which starts in his above mentioned novel with the story of Noah's Ark told by a woodworm, into 10 1/2 chapters. In A. S. Byatt's novel The Virgin in the Garden, set in our times, there is a haunting shadow of Elisabeth I while in the novel Possession she interlaces the love story of the Victorian time with that of our contemporaries - two scholars trying to unveil the mystery of their nineteenth century predecessors’ relationships.

«Archaelogy» is an appropriate metaphor for many British novels which attempt at uncovering layer after layer of history and appraising the facts and phenomena found in them. Their protagonists are either literally or metaphorically involved in archaelogical (palaeontological) excavations. Such are the characters of Graham Swift's novels Out of This World,

Waterland and Last Orders, Peter Ackroyd's The House of Dr.Dee, Margaret Drabble's The Realms of Gold, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Sometimes the novels look like a piece of patchwork where the present mingles with the past, true narrative with myth, fictional pieces alternate with fragments from historical or philosophical essays, etc.

The theme of the Second World War and of the Holocaust had not yet been exhausted in English literature. On the contrary, the last decades of the past century saw a number of novels on the topic. Some of them were written from personal experience. Thus, James Ballard's Empire of the Sun (1984) was based on the writer's internment by the Japanese during the Second World War. Among the younger writers, who have not passed through the horrors of the war, yet have written on iL Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift and Kazuo Ishiguro are worth mentioning. Martin Amis' novel Time's Arrow ( 1991) is a very non-traditional work as far as its mode of writing is concerned. It takes time for the reader to realize who is the protagonist for the name of the person changes several times in the course of the novel. Neither is it easy to comprehend the events - dead bodies rise from pits, come alive, jump into trucks and are carried away; dogs seem to heal Jews with their teeth and jaws, etc. The book reverses the life story of a character, modeled on German surgeon Joseph Mengele, whose whole career, thanks to the writer's trick, looks as life-giving and beneficial to his patients, as it is supposed to be, while in reality he was a cynical murderer, evidently enjoying his manexterminating job.

The characters of G. Swift's novel The Last Orders (1996), the composition of which brings to mind W. Faulkner's /Is I Lay Dying and S. Beckett's Waiting for Godo, as well as his Out of This И/ozVt/ (1988) are obsessed with memories of the war. The war has also affected the lives of the characters in Ian McEwan's The Black Dogs (1992) and of Kazuo Ishiguro's protagonists in his novels A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist in the Floating World (1986), both written in a very reserved, non-committal manner, which is, undoubtedly, due to the Japanese origin of their author. Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces (1996) "runs a story of geology and paleontology alongside the raising of Jewish Holocaust memories from the dead" (Cunningham 1998: 4).

One of the most recent developments in the literature of the last few decades was the widening of its ethnic paradigm. While previously English novel used to be dominated by writers from metropolitan England, in the 1980-90s new voices, those of people born in the former colonies and immigrants from other countries, were heard more and more persistently. Prestigious literary awards often went to authors of Indian, Nigerian or Japanese descent. There were even suggestions to replace the phrase "English literature" by "literature in English" for this reason. Multiethnicity, naturally, enhanced the problem of literary canon, i.e., in academic terms, the question what authors should be included in the university set reading list.

All these writers brought in a fresh stream into fiction, especially into the rather traditional post-colonial thematics. Salman Rushdie, the well-known English writer of Pakistani origin, considered that "moribund British form has been invigorated by the striking back of the Empire" [Qtd. in Byatt 1996: 6]. Unlike their predecessors - white writers who dealt with this theme from the, so to say, outside point of view, as did E. Forster in Passage to India (1924), J. Parrel in Empire Trilogy (1978) or P. Scott in The Raj Quartet (1974) and Staying On (1977), ethnic minorities authors trace the complex and painful processes accompanying the acquisition of national sovereignty from the inside, writing from experience.

Salman Rushdie is, undoubtedly, the most notable of the postcolonial literature writers. His most significant novel, Midnight's Children (1981), treats of the life of 1001 children born within the first hour of India's independence in 1947, each of them endowed with some supernatural powers which decrease in effectiveness the further away from the stroke of midnight the child's birth came. The story is narrated by Salem Sinai, born on the stroke of midnight and, thus, the most gifted of the children. The book is a detailed and fantastic account of the history of India in the twentieth century. It is extremely rich in themes, ideas, facts and characters. As M. Bradbury points out, the book draws not only on the oriental tradition of storytelling, but on the European and Latin American fiction too (Bradbury 1994: 419). Really, there are traces of influence of Don Quixote, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, of Joyce and Beckett, Borges and Marquez, which turn the novel into a specific blend of modernism and postmodernism. Midnight's Children is also an outstanding specimen of magic realism in British fiction. The book duly won the Booker Prize for 1981. Rushdie's significance was heightened by the influence he exerted on other writers, especially noticeable in the works of those authors who came from the former Commonwealth countries - The Famished Road (1989) by Ben Okri (Nigeria), Cyrus Cyrus (1990) by Adam Zamenzaad (Pakistan), Л Suitable Boy (1993) by Vikram Seth (India) or The God of Small Things - the first novel by a young Indian writer who got the 1997 Booker Prize for it.

A great number of works written at the end of the twentieth century deal with problems of literature. Such are Peter Acroyd's novels The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), Chatterton (1987) and Milton in America (1996), Anthony Burgess' Abba Abba (1976) - about John Keats and A Dead Man at Deptford (1993) - about Christopher Marlowe. The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald deals with the life story of the German writer Novalis, Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot is based on the life story of the great nineteenth century realist. These metafictional novels have men letters for their protagonists and in one way or another touch on the art of literary creation.

In our survey we have highlighted but a few of the themes and tendencies characteristic of the English fiction in the last decades of the twentieth century. Moreover the writers mentioned in the article were not the only ones to deal with the problems covered in the article and the lists of books related to them might have been much longer. Yet even this brief overview testifies to the wealth of English literary production as well as to the variety of its artistic means at the close of the previous century.