Traces of Another Time: History and Politics in Postwar British Fiction

by Margaret Scanlan

Overview

Is the historical novel the outmoded genre that some people imagine—form inseparable from romanticism, nationalism, and the nineteenth century? In this stimulating volume, Margaret Scanlan answers a convincing "no," as she demonstrates the relevance of historical novels by well-known figures such as Anthony Burgess, John le Carr, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, and Paul Scott, as well as by less well established writers such as Joseph Hone and Thomas Kilroy. Scanlan shows what a skeptical, experimental approach to the relationship between history and fiction these writers adopt and how radically they depart from the mimetic conventions usually associated with historical novels. Drawing on contemporary historiography and literary theory, Scanlan defines the problem of writing historical fiction at a time when people see the subject of history as fragmentary and uncertain. The writers she discusses avoid the great events of history to concentrate on its margins: what interests them is history as it is experienced, usually reluctantly, by human beings who would rather be doing something else. The first section of the book looks at fictional representations of England's difficult history in Ireland; the second examines spies, aliens, and the loss of public confidence; and the third probes the theme of Apocalypse, nuclear or otherwise, and depicts the collapse of the British Empire as an instance of the greatly diminished importance of Western culture in the world.

Originally published in 1990.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691605258
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1069
Pages:	226
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.50(d)

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Traces of Another Time

History and Politics in Postwar British Fiction

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By Margaret Scanlan

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06824-4

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CHAPTER 1

Iris Murdoch's The Red and the Green

To select, to simplify, to arrange elements in the patterns most congenial to itself: these are temptations the novel always faces when it attempts to draw an unfinished public history within the boundaries of finished form. The deep suspicion of narrative that attaches itself to this perception, and the resultant struggle to write historical fiction that avoids fictionalizing history, can be felt in many contemporary English novels. No one argues more persistently against the consolations of form than Iris Murdoch, whose plots are always characterized by what A. S. Byatt has called a "respect for the contingent," by accidents, coincidences, and surprises intended to suggest the limits of authorial knowledge and the density of real experience. In the only one of her novels that fits conventional definitions of historical fiction, The Red and the Green, Murdoch confronts these problems explicitly. Her novel takes place during Easter Week 1916; in other words, it describes a rebellion immortalized by W. B. Yeats in a time and place immortalized by James Joyce. To find "other words," to deconstruct the attractive mythology of Easter Week in the service of a larger criticism of literature s complicity in the violence of public history, is the novel's goal.

In his perceptive essay on "Le roman historique et l'histoire," André Daspré argues that the interest of the historical novel lies in the oxymoronic nature of its fictional world, "composé à la fois d'éléments fictifs et d'éléments réels," where real history must be assimilated to a fictional story. According to Daspré, the historical novelist seeks out "la confrontation directe entre le monde réel et le monde fictif, a l'intérieur même du roman." Thus, the critical reader must consider not only the relation between the fictional world and reality, but the relation between reality and fiction within the novel's imaginary world. If we apply his suggestion to The Red and the Green, then the critical problem is not so much to see how faithful or vivid the portrait of the Easter Rebellion is, but to see how it is integrated with the lives of Murdoch's characters, and to what effect. But that problem hinges on another, for Murdoch's fictional world is full of literary fragments that add a third term: at the center of her novel, the real and the imagined confront the imagined worlds of other works of literature. Millie fights at Boland's Mill, but afterward goes to live on Eccles Street. And while Murdoch's fictional world is not always a successful assimilation of its literary and historical sources — Donna Gerstenberger is justified in deploring the "educational symposia" on Irish politics in the early chapters — a confrontation of literature and history is the novel's central theme. For, in The Red and the Green, Murdoch uses historical fiction as a device for examining the relationship between fiction and history. She analyzes the relationship between artistic and revolutionary impulses, the role of literature in creating public events, and the fictional nature of much public history. In the end, she suggests that literature cannot be free from the historical world, any more than the revolutionary can be free from the fictions that shape his or her perception of history.

The choice of the Easter Rebellion was anything but accidental for a writer concerned with the involvement of literature in history. Outside Ireland, of course, the rebellion is chiefly remembered as the occasion for a few Yeats poems and for O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars. Indeed, in the early twentieth century the Irish independence movement was extraordinarily literary. Three of the fifteen "Easter martyrs" — Pearse, MacDonagh, and Plunkett — were poets, part of a literary renaissance that Conor Cruise O'Brien sees as a displacement of the Parnellite movement, which "deviated from politics into literature" (PHP, 356). Perhaps, as Sean O'Casey puts it, the "Plunkets" (sic) and "MacDonaghs" merely "paddled in the summer-time in the dull waters of poor verse," failing to appreciate and therefore rioting at the first performance of The Playboy of the Western World and in Yeats's work caring only for "the dream which fashioned the little play about Cathleen ni Houlihan." Yet, Yeats himself was to wonder in "The Man and the Echo" if "that play of mine set out / Certain men the English shot," an act to which the poor verse contributed as well (CP, 337). William Irwin Thompson argues that the Irish rebels were failed artists who attempted "to make of the state a work of art," who "lived as if they were in a work of art." What the artist imagined of Irish independence was translated into action, which is a reversal of the process by which the artist is usually seen "portraying" history. As Thompson says, "Easter 1916 is a public event which became a private imagination in the art of A.E., Yeats, and O'Casey. But to regard the historic event as the known with which we solve for the unknown of the work of art is to misunderstand history and art by distorting the relationship between them. The event of Easter 1916 is itself a work of imagination, and to understand the event we must take into account the manner in which private imagination ... became part of the process of public event."

Throughout The Red and the Green, "the event of Easter 1916" is treated as a paradigm of all past events — including literary works — that give rise to the imagination and, at the same time, it is presented as the outcome of such imagining, and the standard against which to measure those literary characters who are portrayed as bringing it into being. Historical figures are overheard, or have reported conversations with the characters, but they are never on stage. Each character is assigned a political role and a set of political opinions, which are often reflected in his or her name: Barney the Celtic revivalist, Pat the Irish Volunteer, Andrew the unwilling officer of the anachronistic cavalry, Millie the Constance Markievicz soldier-woman, Kathleen the apolitical victim who echoes MacNeill's warning that "there is no such person as Caitlin Ni Uallachain" when she cries, "She! Who is Ireland indeed. ... There is no such thing as dying for Ireland" (RG, 193). Motives for political action are inseparable from personal, psychological intentions. Pat's aversion to women, for example, is closely linked to his adoration of Pearse: "Pat approved of the absence from [Pearse's] life of women and all that they represented" (RG, 76). Similarly the impact of a political crisis, for many characters, is largely personal: Kathleen and Frances grieve for Pat, whom they love, and not for the Rising, to which they are indifferent. Finally, as Peter Kemp indicates, historical relationships between England and Ireland are written into the relationships among members of the "incestuous" Anglo-Irish family to which the major characters belong: "family tensions and quarrels illustrate the forces which, on a larger scale, keep the countries apart: jealousies, temperamental antagonisms, religious intolerance. The language of international affairs ... is used ... of lesser events — 'Millie's difficulty would be Christopher's opportunity'" (RG, 64).

This skewed version of a political aphorism is but one of the many literary allusions that are woven into the lives of the novel's characters, its setting, and its language. The novel's sense of a literary past is an extension of its historical consciousness and reminds the reader of how other writers have viewed public events. In reimagining Easter 1916, Murdoch may very well, as R. B. Kershner, Jr., points out, have borne in mind We Always Treat Women Too Well, a 1947 novel by Raymond Queneau, to whom she dedicated Under the Net. Queneau's novel, also set in Easter Week 1916, describes the fictitious occupation of a branch post office by a band of rebels whose password is "Finnegans wake." In a Dublin constructed entirely of literary allusions (mostly to Joyce), Gertie Girdle, held hostage and subjected to what might be termed consensual rape, awaits rescue by her sterling fiancé, Sidney Cartwright, who, at the end of the novel, commands the firing squad that executes her remaining captors. Queneau's is a world full of evident misinformation ("the codpiece" is glossed as "a part of the masculine costume, extremely common in Ireland") and anachronism (when a character remarks, "Anyone can see we're in the land of James Joyce," the author adds a footnote: "Caffrey, being illiterate, could not have known in 1916 that Ulysses had not yet appeared" [WWW, 83; 66]). But, as Valerie Caton argues in her introduction to the English translation, although Queneau's playful novel may well be deadly serious about combating the "glorification of the power instinct" in popular fictions about rape and murder, it is not at all serious about Irish history. Murdoch seems to have taken from Queneau the notion of liberating oneself from the grip of a literary work by displacing, rearranging, and reinventing it, but, for her, the purpose of doing so is to enable the reader to see the historical world that literature formalizes.

Murdoch's most extensive allusions are to Irish writers, especially Joyce and Yeats. Alluding to these two figures, from whom most of Murdoch's readers have taken their ideas about Ireland in the early twentieth century, helps to create a recognizable setting. But Murdoch's allusions do more. By creating a world in which it is possible to encounter a character of obviously Joycean extraction described in language that echoes Yeats, the allusions violate the formal unity of Joyce's or Yeats's world. Such violations compel us to note that Joyce's Dublin or Yeats's Holy Ireland is but one version of Ireland, a unified vision of a more complicated reality. Yet, as the novel succeeds in making us aware of how Yeats, Joyce, or the artist generally impose a perspective on history, it also insists that the revolutionary imposes, in very similar ways, an equally limited perspective.

The Joycean allusions in The Red and the Green are easily recognized. That the novel provides an alternative perspective on his more familiar Dublin becomes clear when we note the number of echoes of Joyce's settings, images, and characters. To be sure, Dublin is so much Joyce's city that any novel set there would seem to echo him; clearly, Joyce is not the sole proprietor of Howth, Clontarf, or even Findlater's Church. But that the revolutionary Pat Dumay lives on Blessington Street, one street north of Eccles Street, while Sandycove, with the Martello Tower always visible (RG, 5, 9, 187), is his English cousin's home, is more than coincidental. The sense of being once more in Joyce's world is also owed in part to the novel's colors, which are those of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The "red" and "green" of the title, frequently iterated, are more than national emblems. These colors recall Dante's press box, with its green brush for Parnell and maroon for Davitt and the chain of images they generate — the "green rose," the picture of the green world with maroon clouds, the holly and ivy of the Christmas dinner. Frances's sash, as she walks across the green lawn, is mauve (RG, 25), and Millie is twice described wearing mauve (RG, 157, 161), although she is usually associated with red — red shawl, reddish-brown hair, a house painted with powdery red wash (211, 56, 53). Christopher picks her a "lovely green rosebud" (119). As in Dubliners, brown is the color of dull materialism devoid of imagination: Kathleen wears it (RG, 43, 128); her drawing room is brown with brownish-white curtains (RG, 42); to Barney the Liffey looks a "dark, dirty brown" and the clouds above it are "whitish brown" (RG, 128). Quite naturally, after MacNeill cancels the Rising, the moon seems to Pat to shine "through a brown haze" (RG, 202). Similarly, as in Joyce, yellow is associated with what is both sensual and repellent: while Barney is reflecting on the lies he told Frances about frequenting Dublin's brothels, the sky over Kingston seems "yellowish" (RG, 97); the rocks "remained senselessly jagged and yellow" (RG, 102). In a scene at Millie's when Pat's visit is interrupted by Barney, her light is yellow (RG, 84); after Millie's proposition, Andrew looks up at a "thin papery yellow" sky (RG, 163). Similarly, words that acquire a special significance in Joyce are repeated: Pat, Andrew, and Cathal are "paralyzed" (RG, 152, 159, 233); Andrew in bed with Millie is "like a paralytic" (RG, 239).12 Cathal, like Heron, resembles a bird (RG, 106, 134); his face "like a piece of ivory" (RG, 106) recalls Eileen's hands and the "Tower of Ivory" images of A Portrait of the Artist.

But these attempts to reimagine Joyce's world would be less significant were it not for the fact that two of the novel's characters, Barney Drumm and Pat Dumay, are based on Joyce's characters. Barney certainly resembles Leopold Bloom; Howard German notes that he wears a skullcap that makes him "look like a Jew" (RG, 130); he has a platonic infatuation with a woman named Millie that recalls Bloom's marriage to Molly (Molly's daughter, of course, is named Milly), and is stepfather, if not exactly Odysseus, to Pat's Telemakhos. Any attempt to seize the significance of his relationship to Bloom must take into account, however, that he buys his skullcap at Finnegan's store and resembles Stephen in a number of ways, most notably in his desire to write and his renunciation of a priestly vocation. Qualities that in Ulysses are seen as opposites are merged in The Red and the Green and yet form the basis of a credible character. Perhaps a view of Barney as a pastiche of Stephen and Bloom is, in fact, more important than his separate relation to each. Like the Dumay's house, one street north of Eccles Street, Barney's character is not a reproduction but a reimagining of its original that generates new possibilities: what if Bloom had been Catholic, what if Stephen were middle-aged?

These questions are precisely those that Joyce, with his conception of the novel as a unified object detached from the historical world, does not want the reader to ask. By prompting them, Murdoch suggests a fallacy in the aesthetic of the early modernist novel, more specifically, in that aesthetic as articulated in extreme form by Stephen at the end of A Portrait of the Artist. We see the point most clearly when we compare the famous scene in A Portrait of the Artist where Stephen, having just renounced his ambition to join the Jesuits, takes the walk along the sea that culminates in the epiphany of the bird-woman, with a similar scene in The Red and the Green. In Murdoch's novel, Barney, the spoiled priest, retraces Stephen's path and, like him, looks back at Dublin but, unlike Stephen, sees there "the two tall rival spires at Kingstown, Catholic and Protestant, shifting constantly in their relation to each other except when from the Martello tower at Sandycove they could be seen superimposed" (RG, 98). For a lyrical affirmation of the artist's vocation and his flight over the nets of church and country, Murdoch substitutes an acknowledgment of the complexities of real experience. The view from the Martello tower, although attractively unified, is an optical illusion. That criticism of Stephen's aesthetic — that too many people and issues are subsumed to the single vision of formal perfection — is implicit in the novel's fragmented point of view as well. By focusing on Frances, Millie, Christopher, and Andrew, as well as on Pat and Barney, Murdoch reinforces the suggestion that the real world is made up of conflicting egos and interests that cannot, except by illusion, be subordinated to the claims of one vision.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Traces of Another Time by Margaret Scanlan. Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Acknowledgments, pg. ix
• Abbreviations, pg. xi
• Introduction, pg. 3
• CHAPTER ONE. Iris Murdoch's The Red and the Green, pg. 23
• CHAPTER TWO. Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September and J. G. Farrell's Troubles, pg. 40
• CHAPTER THREE. Northern Ireland in Four Contemporary Novels, pg. 63
• CHAPTER FOUR. Philby and His Fictions, pg. 87
• CHAPTER FIVE. Iris Murdoch's Nuns and Soldiers, pg. 116
• CHAPTER SIX. Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet, pg. 135
• CHAPTER SEVEN. Doris Lessing's Children of Violence, pg. 157
• CHAPTER EIGHT. Anthony Burgess's The End of the World News, pg. 175
• Afterword, pg. 195
• Bibliography, pg. 197
• Index, pg. 207