English literature on the theme of the Second World War

В статье изложены представления о трех периодах в английской литературе после Второй мировой войны, периодов, отличающихся между собой тематикой, проблематикой, манерой повествования и т.п.

In the decades between the two world wars modernists used to prophesy that in the future mankind would keep easily disposing of its past as, according to Nietzsche, history must be “seriously hated as a costly and superfluous luxury of the understanding” [1] because memory might induce false morality in human beings. In his Brave New World Aldous Huxley pictured a society in which knowledge of the past was looked on as a crime against the state. Fortunately these pessimistic predictions did not completely come true and contemporary society has not shaken and is not going to shake the dust of its 20th century tragic past off its feet. Surprisingly enough no scholar has even suggested relegating novels covering either the First World War or the Second World War to the realm of historical prose, which proves that the tragic war experience is still topical, still too vitally connected with our present to consider it just the matter of bygone days. The further the Second World War recedes into the past, the fewer grow its participants and witnesses, the stronger seems the urge to record the war events in English literature. The number of works dedicated to the theme of the Second World War is not diminishing. On the contrary, it seems that almost all present-day writers have in some way given it its due. The most recent novels covering those bleak times were written by young writers born in the 1970-80s. In 1965 Walter Allen stated that England had not produced war literature similar to that of the 1920s [2]. However, the number of books on the war experience published since 1939 as well as the diversity of their genres, tone and scale clearly show that the theme of the Second World War occupies a significant place in English literature and constitutes its considerable part.

There are three marked stages in the development of the theme which differ by their basic issues, scope and manner of their representation, the degree of the authors’ involvement in the events depicted as well as the writers’ motives for turning to the problem. The first stage coincides with the war years which saw a number of stories and novels dealing with the situation in the country and at the front, describing the privations of the civilian population, the heroism and losses of the British army. Among the works of that period were the novels We Shall Return (1941) by Jack Lindsay covering the tragic events at Dunkirk in May-June 1940, James Aldridge’s Signed with Their Honour (1942) and The Sea Eagle (1944) which depicted the struggle against the Germans in Greece.

In his novel Blackout in Gretley (1942) J.B.Priestley criticised the treacherous policy of the English conservatives which played into the hands of nazi Germany while in Daylight on Saturday (1943) he described the hardships and privations experienced by English workers during the war time. Both novels, like Priestley’s popular broadcasts, encouraged his countrymen for endurance and struggle. Mention should also be made of the collections of stories The Last Inspection (1943) by Alun Lewis and Fireman Flower (1944) by William Sansom, both written from the authors’ own war experience and W.S.Maugham’s story The Unconquered (1944) which conveyed the spirit of the French Resistance. Highly picturesque, at times impressionistic pictures of wartime London were created by Henry Green (Caught, 1943) and Elizabeth Bowen (The Heat of the Day, begun in 1944 though not published until later).

All these writers were evidently led by a desire to record the immediate experience of people overwhelmed by a desire to withstand danger.

The second period came in the first three post-war decades.

Many of the works written then were lengthy with a large number of characters and covering a wide range of events. Such was the 6-volume sequence Fortunes of War (1960-80) by Olivia Manning. It consisted of The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy and was set in several countries - Rumania, Greece and Egypt. It traced the life of a newly married English couple, affected by the war events. The dramatic pathos of Manning’s work differs from Evelyn Waugh’s trilogy The Sav ord of Honour (1952-61) in which the author satirizes the British military bureaucracy which was to a great degree responsible for the country’s losses in the first years of the war. The life career of the protagonist Guy Crouchback, losing his romantic idea of the war and his own role in it, is in a way similar to that of the main character of Anthony Powell’s war trilogy - The Valley of Bones, The Soldier’s Art and The Military Philosophers - which is part of his 12-volume sequence Dance to the Music of Time (19511975). What united the above mentioned works as well as the two plays by David Hare - Plenty and Licking Hitler (both 1978) was their heroes’ loss of ideals due to the disintegration of the old world brought about by the war cataclysm. The old set of values -nobleness, patriotism, honesty, devotion - seemed to be no longer as valid as they used to be.

It would be no exaggeration to say that the last decades of the 20th century saw a revival of interest in WWII which is a manifestation of the phenomenon that the English critic Valentine Cunningham defined as “dottiness about history” [3]. It is the various combinations of what may be called ‘external’ and ‘internal’ themes that to a great extent predetermine the peculiarity of individual writer’s treatment of the war subject. The basic difference between the war novels of this period and their predecessors is that they have become noticeably narrower in scope but have acquired psychological depth. They are centred round individual destinies. The novel Empire of the Sun by James Ballard (1984) treats of the sufferings of an English boy who loses his parents during the Japanese invasion in Shanghai and goes through a kind of tragic initiation while in a prisoner-of-war camp. The reserved, somewhat detached, first-person narration based on the writer’s own experience adds to the dramatism of Empire of the Sun and, together with its apocalyptic images, makes it one of the best English war novels.

The Second World War is a key theme of the three early novels by Kazuo Ishiguro, an English writer of Japanese origin. A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986) are set in post-war Japan, the third novel - Remains of the Day (1989)- in post-war England, and though the war events proper do not figure in the novels, they affect the lives of the protagonists. Masui Ono, the main character of An Artist of the Floating World and Stevens, a butler from Remains of the Day, both reminisce of their past life and have to acknowledge that their dutiful loyalty was nothing but collaboration with militarism and nazism.

Painful memories, haunting images, spiritual shocks experienced by the characters when they unravel the dark pages of family history, the sense of shame or guilt - these and other similar psychological states call for untraditional means which sometimes acquire a structural function. Besides a complex chronotope the novels are as a rule characterized by understatement, indeterminacy, various games with the reader - in a word, all that Martin Amis defined as ‘postmodernist trickiness’.

It is Martin Amis who wrote what is, perhaps, the most unusual and challenging novel about the Second World War. The peculiarity of his Time’s Arrow (1992) lies in the mode of narration and the identity of the narrator which take the reader time and effort to comprehend. The story is told by the soul of the protagonist, a Nazi criminal, who used to make brutal experiments on prisoners in Auschwitz. The episodes describing the fascist atrocities are few but they have a spine-chilling effect, which is in no small degree due to the reverse order of narration, which stresses the Nazi’s brutality. According to Martin Amis, he was motivated by his concern about the new generations’ growing ignorance of the horrors of the war and by his desire to disclose the nature of the offence. The crowd syndrome, collective irresponsibility, encouragement of lowest instincts and brutal power - these are the factors which made fascism as an extreme form of violence possible.

The traumatic consequences of the war are the key motives of such novels written in the last decades of the century as Latecomers (1988) by Anita Brookner, Shuttlecock (1981) and Out of This World (1988) by Graham Swift, The Black Dogs (1992) by Ian McEwan, The Soldier’s Return (1999) and its sequel A Son of War (2000) by Melvyn Bragg, Spies (2002) by Michael Frayn, The Dark Room (2000) by Rachel Seiffert, Mr. Schnitzel (2000) by Stephen Knight and others. The protagonist’s internal conflicts are as a rule enhanced by family ones, and both are somehow provoked by war circumstances. Thus, the protagonist of G. Swift’s novel Shuttlecock experiences a real shock when he learns the truth about his father’s alleged heroism during the war; a dramatic episode connected with the aftermath of the war events brings about a radical change in the world outlook of the heroine and causes a rift between the husband and wife in Ian McEwan’s novel The Black Dogs. The protagonist of M.Frayn’s novel Spies recalls his wartime childhood in London when he played up to his imaginative friend’s fantasies, and what started as an innocent game led to grave consequences. The eponymous character of W.G.Sebald’s novel Austerlitz (2001) has to unravel the mystery of his own life, to penetrate the depths of his memory set against the horrors of nazism.

There is hardly any single all-embracing and exhaustive explanation for the popularity of the Second World War theme with modern writers most of whom have not experienced the drama of the war effort, and the past war was their fathers’ or grandfathers’ war. We may suggest but a few. Firstly, though the tragic events have long become a fact of history the processes they initiated have not been completed on the global scale as yet. The present political situation and the problems that arise now and then are to a great extent predetermined by their consequences. Moreover, the recent developments, especially the warfare in Afghanistan and the Middle East make the problem of man at war an extremely topical literary theme because, after all, the antihuman nature of war has remained the same throughout centuries, it is only the means and ways of waging it that are changing. As A.S.Byatt put it “we cannot understand the present if we do not understand the past that preceded and produced it”. [4]

Secondly, there is a personal dimension to the incompleteness factor. In almost every family there still lives some sort of memory of the war years and their impact on the destinies of its members. It is not by chance that many of the recent novels are based on real facts of family histories and are dedicated to the memory of the authors’ ancestors thus becoming a manifestation of the contemporary overall tendency in the European world to know and have some sort of record of one’s roots. As a metaphorical expression of this desire to save war memories from oblivion is the dialogue between the protagonist of Michael Frayn’s novel Spies, an old man setting out on a travel into the place of his childhood, and his children: “I tell my children I’m going to London for a few days. “Do we have a contact for you there?” asks my well-organised daughter-in-law. “Memory Lane, perhaps’” suggests my son drily. ... “Exactly”, I reply. “The last house before you go round the bend and it turns into Amnesia Avenue”.

Thirdly, we should not overlook the fact that the post-Second World War literature was marked by a strong influence of existentialist philosophy the main premises of which was investigation of the essence of man, of man’s conduct in extreme situations, of the limits of human endurance, of factors underlying man’s freedom of choice. Namely the war atmosphere presents a favourable ground for projecting these issues into real life situations and allows writers to portray a human being as a multifaceted combination of biological, psychological, moral and social elements.

The amount of English literature dealing with the Second World War is by no means confined to the novels, stories and plays mentioned in the present essay. Extension of the list as well as a more in-depth analysis of concrete works might add a new dimension to the study of this topical literary phenomenon.

• 1.    Cit. by Higdon, David Leon. Shadow's of the Past in Contemporary Fiction. -L., the Macmillan Press Ltd, 1984. -P. 219

• 2.    Аллен, Уолтер. Традиция и мечта. - М., Прогресс, 1970. -С. 185

• 3.    Каннингем, Валентайн. Английская литература в конце тысячелетия. - ИЛ, №10, 1995. - С. 228

• 4.    Byatt A.S. On Histories and Stories.Selected Essays. L., Chatto and Windus, 2000. -P.ll.