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

280 Pages·2012·11.52 MB·English

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.