Realism? Modernism? Postmodernism? On contemporary British fiction by Nick Bentley

В рецензии на монографию Н.Бентли «Современная британская проза» (2008) анализируется структура книги, ее главные проблемные и исследовательские посылки. В ходе анализа рассматриваются некоторые существенные стороны современного британского литературного процесса, в частности своеобразный синтез трех литературноэстетических парадигм - реалистической, экспериментальномодернистской и постмодернистской при явном доминировании первой.

Russian specialists in foreign literature are well aware of the dislike their British colleagues have for textbooks or handbooks in the Russian understanding of the genre, i.e. when the main periods of literary history are presented on a large scale and a particular writer is considered as contributing to the overall dynamics of the literary process with his or her works illustrating the dynamics of the world, regional and national literary processes. As the British specialists themselves put it, they teach not the history of literature, but “purely literature”. It explains their rejection of their Russian colleagues’ love for all kinds of classifications and their own inclination towards academic monographs; and it explains their deeply rooted belief that there is nothing better than the text of literary work which is read and thought through by the students themselves before they start to talk about it. Any kind of generalisation is especially unacceptable for the British colleagues when speaking about the contemporary state of literature. Here all kinds of labels are simply out of place. Being a “free artist” and an individual, a writer at any moment can (and as a rule does!) violate the frames of a given movement, school or style, in which he or she has been hastily put by an improvident scholar of literary history.

However with the beginning of globalisation of Higher Education in the second half of the twentieth century, such editions as “Cliffs Notes” started to appear in Britain among other countries. They mechanically presented a work of fiction in so many details (but with little dialectics) that a student didn’t even need (and what is more - did not want!) to read the text. Rather quickly British scholars felt the urge to publish their own commentaries on texts included in the university reading lists. “Penguin Critical Studies”, “York Notes” “Continuum Contemporaries” are the successful examples of such commentaries which differ from “Cliffs Notes” by a more thorough analysis of a work of fiction as an aesthetic whole and not as an simple “arithmetic sum” of themes, characters, parts and chapters.

Also in the second half of the twentieth century there were widely published books that may be called “handbooks in literary history”. A bright example of these is “Longman Literature in English Series” - a series of books on the literary history of Britain, the USA, Australia, India, South Africa and other English-speaking countries, edited by two probably the most well-known historians of British literature, David Carroll and Michael Wheeler.

This series is so profound that it has become obligatory for the university courses of literature. Among the no less reputable critical series of Cambridge and Oxford Universities are “The Cambridge Companion”, “Oxford Reader’s Companion”, “The Oxford Handbook”. While “Oxford Reader’s Companion” is, as a rule, a kind of “mini-encyclopaedia” representing all aspects of a writer’s creative work [see: George Eliot 2000; Trollope 1999]; “The Cambridge Companion” and “The Oxford Handbook” are the collections of essays written by prominent English speaking specialists in given period of the development of the world or national literatures (more often - English, American or some other Western literatures) [see: The Victorian novel 2001; The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms 2010].

Edited by Martin Halliwell and Andy Mosley “Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature” is another influential series on the history of literature. It is widely used at British universities. These are individual research: each book is written by an outstanding scholar not necessarily working at Edinburgh University. There have been published books on Gothic prose, women poetry, contemporary American drama, Renaissance and Mediaeval literature, Canadian literature, etc. Thus the most important periods, stages and phenomena of the literature written in English have been “covered” (for more detailed information see .

Nick Bentley’s Contemporary British Fiction (2008) is extremely interesting and useful for the specialists in contemporary British literature. Nick Bentley is a professor at Kiel University, the author of a number of works on the problems of contemporary British literature including two monographs: Radical Fictions: the British Novel of the 1950s (2007) and British Fiction of the 1990s (2005), where he acted as the main editor.

The book under review is a productive and suggestive mixture of genres. On the one hand, it is a successive presentation of the history of British (mainly English) prose between 1975 and 2005 with its major names and characteristics. On the other hand, it is obviously a monograph in its treatment of the material and phenomena: the writers6 personalities as well as the literary and aesthetic paradigms of the analysed period. The editors’ preface stresses this feature claiming that “Edinburgh Critical Guides” “reflects the challenges and pluralities of English today, but at the same time it offers readers clear and accessible routes through the texts, contexts, genres, historical periods and debates within the subject” [Bentley 2008: VI].

The fact that this is a handbook is apparent just because the literary material is preceded by a “Chronology”, which is obligatory for the books in this edition. In this section a reader (a student) gets familiar with a table correlating the major (by the author’s understanding) historical and cultural events (Margaret Thatcher being elected as a leader of the Conservatives in 1975, her coming to power in 1979, a new wave of rock and pop culture that, according to the author, fell upon Britain in 1978, the education reform of 1988 and the spread of rave culture in the same year, etc.) with the appearance of significant works by British prose writers. For instance^ the table shows that in 1975 David Lodge published Changing Places, which since then has become a classic of a campus novel genre, in 1979 John Le Саггй wrote Smiley’s People, one of the best political thrillers in British literature, and during the period of the new wave of rock culture there were published Young Adolf by Beryl Bainbridge, The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt and The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan (even though this new stage of rock culture was not directly represented in the novels mentioned). The choice of authors included in the table (which is given crucial importance since placed at the beginning of the book) is remarkable and suggestive: Emma Tennant, Angela Carter, Graham Swift, Alasdair Gray, Salman Rushdie, Fay Weldon, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Peter Ackroyd, Jeannette Winterson, V.S.Naipaul, Kadzuo Ishiguro, Hanif Kureishi, Pat Barker, Doris Lessing, Jonathan Coe, Bernard MacLaverty, Will Self and some others. The chosen writers are those whose creative work is well known not only in the UK but all over the world. They demonstrate the major ways of development of British prose and at the same time inscribe it into the global literary process demonstrating common ideological and artistic paradigms (mostly in form and poetics).

It is therefore not by chance that the five chapters of the book investigate the key phenomena of world literature in their English variant. (The author tends to consider the literary process in England as more representative and revealing the phenomena analysed in its purity.) The chapters are entitled “Narrative Forms: Postmodernism and Realism”, “Writing Contemporary Ethnicities”, “Gender and Sexuality”, “History, Memory and Writing” and “Narratives of Cultural Space”.

We would like to pay attention to the fact that the chapters are constructed in a very “British” way: minimum of theoretical considerations (not more than a page) and then maximum of particulars from literary works to illustrate the problematic aspect given in the title. Each chapter analyses three novels that, as the author writes, “explore some aspect of the theme” and which by the moment of the talk are “already read” by the readers of the book [Bentley 2008: 2]. This is how Professor Bentley explains his choice of novels for analysis in the chapter on multiculturalism and postcolonialism in contemporary British prose: “As with all the chapter topics in the book, it was difficult to decide which texts to include and many of the novels covered in other chapters could easily have been included in this chapter, especially Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth" [Bentley 2008: 65 - 66]. Then the chapter successively and in a detailed way analyses the problematic and poetic aspect of Shame (1983) by Rushdie, Society Within (1999) by Courttia Newland and Brick Lane (2003) by Monica Ali. They, despite our doubts of Bentley’s choice of samples, significantly broaden the readers’ ideas on artistic presentation of postcolonial issues, on stylistic interrelations between social and psychological reconstruction of character in British realist tradition on the one hand and ethnopoetics on the other hand, the latter being a tradition brought about into British literature by the migration caused by the collapse of the British Empire, the appearance of generations of non-Anglo-Saxon British citizens in search of identity, the new social and ethnic structure of the contemporary British society - all this leading to a shift of the notions of ethnic nucleus and socio-ethnic marginality.

The fact that each chapter ends with a short paragraph entitled “Summary of Key Points” is another proof that the book is a synthesis of a monograph and a handbook. These paragraphs consist of four or five points. They are actually not conclusions on the investigated problem but the key notions which the author would like the reader to keep in mind in order to comprehend the contemporary British literary process. They are definitely “food for thought” as no British author of a book resembling a handbook in the Russian understanding of the genre is peremptory about his or her conclusions. Yet viewed together these “Key Points” present a kind of an abstract (scheme) for the student to map the general “force fields” of the British literary process of the last thirty years. Let us consider the concluding paragraph of “Narrative Forms: Postmodernism and Realism” which, in our opinion, is one of the most suggestive and innovative chapters in the book. It looks into Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi, Downriver (1991) by Ian Sinclair and the famous England, England (1998) by Julian Barnes. The paragraph consists of four points which again remind us that “contemporary British fiction is keen to explore the cultural representation of geographical spaces, especially in relation to the urban environment and national identity, that “the relationship between narrative fiction and the representation of space has proved a fruitful area in terms of formal experimentation in the novel”, that “postmodernism and postcolonialism in fiction have both served to loosen traditional discourses of Englishness” and finally that “the changes made to social and cultural landscapes have provided a good source for fiction that is critical of social and political changes over the last thirty years” [Bentley 2008:189].

The author’s concern with social and political changes in Britain of the given period and cultural and historical contexts is especially noteworthy. It also deserves mentioning that in an extensive introduction (which is longer than any of the chapters) two sections out of seven are devoted to politics and class relations of 1975-2005. Other sections - “Gender and Sexuality”, “Postcolonialism, Multiculturalism and National Identity”, “Youth and Subcultures” -are also a picture of social and cultural situation in the country rather than of a literary one. Simply the fact that for the author the beginning of contemporary fiction is closely related to the ascension of Margaret Thatcher to political Olympus, is very significant. Truly, the election of Mrs Thatcher as the leader of the Conservative Party “marks a key moment of transition in the politics of Britain, and by extension the social, economic and cultural climate” [Bentley 2008:2].

The Russian historians of literature (see any “History of Foreign Literature of the Twentieth Century” written at the turn of the centuries) have agreed that 1979, when Mrs Thatcher came to power as Prime Minister (and the beginning of the 1980s on the whole), was a milestone in the dynamics of the English society and, thus, of literary process of the second half of the twentieth century. (That was an additional pleasure to see in the book of Bentley that this idea is close to the British academic writing on the matter; though both he and Russian literary historians, (and the authors of this review are among them), understand very well that there is no direct correspondence between the life of the society and literature or art.) Anyway, Thatcherism is known for its notable shift of the British society to the right not in politics only. Its birth was caused by the crisis of the “Keynesian socialism”, which in fact was determining the life of the British society since the victory of the Labour Party at the first post-war General Election of 1945. The values that were preached and put into life by Thatcher were aimed to decrease the role of state and community in social sphere and stressed personal success and enrichment and social and psychological egocentricity as the basis for social positive dynamics. The glorification of values of personal material prosperity as opposed to socially oriented ones could not but cause rejection among many intellectuals, especially young - at that time - writers, which, by our understanding, transformed into a rebirth of “anger” and its tradition of aesthetic and ethic shock from the 1950s (Kingsley Amis, John Braine, John Osborne and others). The writers that appeared in British literature in the 1980s - Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Hanif Kureishi, Graham Swift and others - either analytically reproduced the main sore spots of Thatcherism or, which became a dominant in the aesthetics of the “new angry young men”, artistically rejected it (from various and different political, social and aesthetic positions though), creating works that revealed what was behind the fa3ade of a decent world of proprietors so carefully constructed by Thatcher and her followers. Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Hanif Kureishi, Fay Weldon, J.G.Ballard, Angela Carter and some others were the “products” of new “red-brick” universities which were opening during the 1960s’ “boom in Higher Education” and favoured freer organisation of studying process aimed at argument, discussion, analytical reading and comprehension. Like the “angry young men” of the 1950s the “new angry young men” of the 1970-1990s (it seems that the second haff of the 1990s with their anticonservatism and Blairian “New Labourism” changed the general tone of social life and therefore - that of literature) through “black humour”, accentuated brutality, open eroticism (and sometimes aesthetic games with pornography), postmodernist experiments (but without losing touch with national traditions of social and psychological realism) raised a sort of aesthetic revolt of various and different intensity and clearness against the limiting and degrading society based on Thatcherist values. In a way these “new angry young men” did not allow British literature to turn away from the traditions of social warning and analytical critics powerfully represented in the previous periods of English Literature.

All this determined the complicated relations between contemporary British literature and postmodernism. These relations are profoundly analysed in the first chapter of the book reviewed on the basis of two novels which, according to Mr Bentley, best represent postmodernist experiments - London Fields (1989) by Martin Amis, Poor Things (1992) by Alasdair Gray. The chapter strangely enough also explores White Teeth by Zadie Smith which although it “includes some postmodern techniques, tends, on the whole, to use a realistic mode” [Bentley 2008: 35]. This chapter has the longest introduction as the issue of relations between the Realist tradition (which, we believe, has been going uninterrupted since Geoffrey Chaucer) and Postmodernist aesthetics and poetics is the central issue of the national literary process of the last thirty years. It is hard to disagree with the author’s assertion that “in practice the contemporary novel has been a mixture of both these styles, along with the increasing popularity in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s in Britain of a third category: postmodernism, which, stylistically differentiates itself from both realism and modernism” [Bentley 2008: 31]. Professor Bentley is absolutely right when saying that “the postmodern, then, operates at (at least) two distinct and interconnected levels in historical terms. It signals a style in writing that supersedes, or at least marks itself as different from the modernist literature of the early twentieth century whilst at the same time employing a philosophical outlook that rejects many of the tenets of modernity as established during the Enlightenment” [Bentley 2008: 32].The conclusion in the final paragraph of the chapter appears quite logical: “Postmodernism has been an important feature of much contemporary British fiction, both in terms of formal techniques and as a form of social and cultural critique” [Bentley 2008: 61]. In this respect the choice of both novels is very appropriate. The analysis proper is based on the author’s clear understanding that a novel is an artistic system dialectically uniting form and content and it is impossible to talk about the former without talking about the latter and vice versa. This integral analytic approach is especially productive in the chapter “History, Memory and Writing”

on A.S.Byatt’s Possession (1990) and Graham Swift’s Waterland, (1983). (It also deals with Atonement (2001) by Ian McEwan as one of the best English novels of the beginning of the twentieth century in terms of history reconstruction through the character’s perception.) No less interesting (and for a Russian student also unexpected) is the chapter “Gender and Sexuality” analysing The Passion of New Eve (1977) by Angela Carter, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) by Jeannette Winterson and Fever Pitch (1992) by Nick Hornby, which are not well-known in Russia. Indeed, Russian scholars of British literature often ignore this very important problematic and thematic aspect of contemporary British novel, which is increasing both in quantity and in quality. It is not by chance that the 2004 Booker Prize was awarded to Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty which interprets the beginning and peak of Thatcherism through a very rich in nuances inner world of a gay’s character.

It needs to be stressed that, on the one hand, Nick Bentley’s work reminds us of the already considered phenomena and gives new evidence for the already constructed paradigm of the contemporary British literary process. At the same time it allows to look at the known literary works in a new way as well as opening new historic and literary horizons by putting under consideration phenomena and books that for some reasons were not given due attention which is not fair for the understanding of dynamics of one of the richest literatures in the world. Therefore, it is especially valuable that within the framework of a handbook the author introduces a section “Student Resources” which broadens the knowledge and the understanding of British literature in general and some writers in particular. It provides the Internet resources, an additional list of literary works for each chapter (which is especially valuable as it expands the picture of contemporary British prose through its names and phenomena), a glossary of terms and categories, a 24-page list of critical works including the works on the period of 1975-2005 in general as well as on each (!) writer analysed in the book.

In “Conclusion” the author writes: “One of the points that this book has tried to suggest is the healthy state of contemporary British fiction” [Bentley 2008: 192]. No doubt he has succeeded in this attempt: not only has he convinced the reader of the “healthy” state of national literature but also showed that British prose is diverse and specific in themes, problems, narrative and genre forms, characters and means of his or her presentation, what it has said, is saying and will say in the global literary process and, most important, how impressive and productive has been the “fight” between Realist, Modernist and Postmodernist tendencies with Realist being the dominant one.

“Contemporary British Fiction” by Nick Bentley is not only a worthy continuation of a series in which it was published but also is a trustworthy research for a teacher as well for a student devoted to the problems of the dynamics of British literature at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries.