by Peter Watson
Francis Crick’s aim has been fulfilled. Consciousness is being investigated as never before. But it would be rash to predict that the new century will bring advances quickly. No less a figure than Noam Chomsky has said, ‘It is quite possible – overwhelmingly probably, one might guess – that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.’
40
THE EMPIRE WRITES BACK
In an essay published in 1975, Marcus Cunliffe, a professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., concluded that, so far as literature was concerned, ‘by the 1960s, the old Anglo-American cultural relationship was decisively reversed: the major contribution, in quantity and quality, was American.’1 He also observed that the business of America was still business, that if publishers were to stay alive, they had to make profits, and that in such an environment ‘the most reliable mainstay was… non-fiction: self-help, popular religion, sexology, health, cookery, history and biography, advice on investments, documented scandal, accounts of adventures, reminiscences.2 Nor did he ignore the fact that by 1960, ‘the annual American consumption of comic books had passed the billion mark; expenditure on them, estimated at $100 million a year, was four times as large as the combined budgets of all the public libraries.’3 As this ‘mid-cult’ flourished, mass culture, passive and increasingly commercial, was seen as the enemy by those American authors who wrote increasingly of ‘alienation. In avant-garde fiction one can trace the gradual disappearance of the qualities of worthiness formerly attributed to the main characters. Even in the strongest (as in Hemingway) they go down to defeat. The majority are either victims or slobs.’4
This change occurred, he said, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, provoked by political and economic events, such as the many assassinations and the oil crisis. Cunliffe quoted Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970, who had followed Social Darwinism in American Thought, discussed in chapter 3, with Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), and who in 1967, writing in Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol’s The Public Interest, had this to say: ‘Is it not quite possible that the responsible society will get little or no nourishment from modern literature, but will have to draw mainly on history, journalism, economics, sociological commentary? Art, as it more ruthlessly affirms the self, as it more candidly probes the human abyss, may in fact have less and less to tell us about the conditions of a responsible society.’ He referred specifically to such figures as Walter Lippmann, James Reston, J. K. Galbraith, Paul Samuelson, Nathan Glazer, and Daniel P. Moynihan.5
Cunliffe and Hofstadter had a point. The centre of gravity had shifted; nonfiction was buoyant. But America’s genius is to constantly reinvent herself, and it is no surprise to find yet another turn of the wheel in that country’s fiction. Maya Angelou was an early hint of things to come. Though her works are in fact autobiography, they read like fiction. In the last twenty-five years of the century, the role of the black author in America, the part once played by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Eldridge Cleaver, has been better filled by women than by men, by such figures as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. In books like Sula (1973), Tar Baby (1981), and Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison creates her own form, an African-American amalgam that makes use of folk tales, fables, oral history, myths both public and private, to produce highly original narratives whose central concern is to explore the awful darkness of the black (and female) experience in America, not to dwell on it but to ‘banish it with joy,’ much as Angelou does in her autobiographies.6 Morrison’s characters journey into their past, from where, in a sense, they can start again. Sula is about a promiscuous girl, but she is not the usual ‘village bicycle’ (to use a British phrase): she is successfully promiscuous, with her affections and her attentions just as much as with her body, and she shines: the drab community that surrounds her is transformed. Morrison is telling us as much about womanhood as being black. Beloved is her most ambitious book.7 Set in Reconstruction times, it is the story of a black mother who kills her own young daughter when the former slave owner comes to return her to her old life of slavery. But this is fiction, and the daughter, Beloved of the title, reappears as a ghost to make a new inner life for her mother – the daughter lives again, through the power of love. Here too, amid the squalor and humiliation of slavery, Morrison uses the African devices of myth, ritual and oral legend to produce joy – not sentimental joy, but a joy that is earned.
Alice Walker also writes about the poverty she knew when she was growing up in the South, in a sharecropping family, but her novels, most notably The Color Purple (1982), look forward rather than back, forward to the way that the urban, more open America offers promise for blacks and for women. Narrated as a series of letters, the book, which won a Pulitzer Prize, follows a group of black women as they fight their way out of poverty, out from under their abusive menfolk, with racism ready to subvert any progress they make. Like Morrison and Angelou, Walker has the strength of optimism, viewing the women’s progress as not only political but personal. Inside their persons, these women cannot be touched; their integrity is complete.8
Morrison and Walker both are and are not postmodern and postcolonial writers. Their exploration of blackness, the ‘other,’ the female condition, the use of African literary forms, all typify the arena of fiction in the last quarter of the century. In his book English as a Global Language (1997), David Crystal concludes his argument, ‘There has never been a language so widely spread or spoken by so many people as English.’9 It is, he says, a unique event historically. He also concurs with a sentiment of the Indian author Salman Rushdie, who wrote that ‘the English language ceased to be the sole possession of the English some time ago.’10 ‘Indeed,’ says Crystal, ‘when even the largest English-speaking nation, the USA, turns out to have only about 20 per cent of the world’s English speakers [as Crystal had himself demonstrated in his survey, earlier in his book], it is plain that no one can now claim sole ownership.’11 He goes on to quote the Indian author Raja Rao, Chinua Achebe, and Rushdie again: all accept English as a world language but warn that it will from now on be used in increasingly new ways.
Whereas until 1970, say, it is possible to write about the ‘great books’ of the century, at least so far as Western countries are concerned, this becomes much more difficult for the period afterward. The reasons all have to do with the collapse of a consensus on what are, and are not, the dominant themes in literature. This collapse has been engendered by three things: the theories of postmodernism; the great flourishing of talent in the formerly colonial countries; and the success and impact of free-market economics since 1979–80, which has both caused the proliferation of new media outlets and, by attacking such institutions (in the U.K. for example) as the BBC and the Arts Council, sabotaged the idea of national cultures, the very notion of a shared tradition, which men like F. R. Leavis, T. S. Eliot, and Lionel Trilling so valued. It follows that any synopsis of late-twentieth-century literature offered by one individual is bound to be contentious, at the very least. Some generalisations are possible, however, and here attention will be limited to the Latin American school of ‘magic realism,’ magic realism being an important influence on other schools of writing; the rise of postcolonial literature, especially that written in the English language; the rise of ‘cultural studies’ as a replacement for traditional literature courses; and the enduring strength of American imaginative writing, reflecting a country – now the only superpower – where more people than anywhere live life’s possibilities to the full.
The writers of Latin America – of whom the most well known are Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala), Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), Carlos Fuentes (Mexico), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Pablo Neruda (Chile), Octavio Paz (Mexico), and Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru) – come from countries that are scarcely postcolonial these days, having achieved their independence, for the most part, in the nineteenth century. At that time Latin American writers were traditionally very politica
lly minded, often seeking refuge, when they went too far, in Europe. The European wars put a stop to that form of exile, while the numerous revolutions and political coups in South America forced upon writers a new way of adjusting, politically. The presence of indigenous groups also gave them a keener appreciation of marginal members of society, even as they regarded themselves as part of European civilisation.
Against this background, the school of magic realism grew and flourished as a primarily aesthetic response to political and social problems. At one stage, in the earlier part of the century, Latin American writers saw their role as trying to improve society. The aims of magic realism were more modest – to describe the universal human condition in its Latin American context in a way that could be understood all over the world. The appeal of Latin American literature, apart from the sheer writing power with which it is composed, is that it is ambitious, more ambitious than much European literature, never losing sight of social ideals and going beyond the purely personal.
Jorge Luis Borges, for example, developed a new form for what he wanted to say, a cross between an essay, containing real people, and a short story in which episodes are invented. Borges mixes philosophy and aesthetic ideas and plays games, the aim being ‘to upset the reader’s confidence in fact and reality.’12 In one story, for example, he invented an entire planet, Tlön, down to its playing cards and dialects, its religion and architecture. Is this planet as strange as Latin America? By emphasising the differences, he also brings home the common humanity.
In Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel The City and the Dogs (1963), the main characters are cadets in a military academy, who band together to fight off the bullying older pupils.13 This tussle becomes sordid, resulting in perversion and death, and is contrasted with the much more civilised worlds these cadets will have to inhabit once they leave the academy. As with Tlön and Macondo (see below), the academy is cut off from the mainstream, like Latin America itself, and the same is true yet again of The Green House, set in a brothel in Piura, a town surrounded by rain forest (another green house).14 In this book, arguably Vargas Llosa’s best, the chronology changes even in mid-sentence to suggest the shifting nature of time and relationships, and the magical and unpredictable nature of existence.15
In 1967 Miguel Angel Asturias became the first Latin American novelist to win the Nobel Prize. But of greater significance that year was publication of ‘the most seamless achievement in Latin American fiction,’ Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s incomparable One Hundred Years of Solitude.16 This book proved so popular that at one stage it was being reprinted every week. It is not hard to see why. Márquez has been compared to Cervantes, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, and has himself admitted the influence of Faulkner, but that does no justice to his own originality. No other book has so successfully fulfilled Lionel Trilling’s plea for novels to get outside the familiar ways of thinking, to imagine other possibilities, other worlds. Márquez not only does this but on top of it all, he is extremely funny.
One Hundred Years of Solitude exists on almost any level you care to name.17 Márquez invents an imaginary town, Macondo, which is separated from everywhere else by marshes and impenetrable rain forest. The town is so cut off that the main character, Aureliano Buendía, makes discoveries for himself (like the fact that the earth is round) without realising that the rest of the world discovered this centuries ago. Morality is at a primitive stage in this world – people are allowed to marry their aunts, and the inhabitants haven’t even got round to naming all of the objects in their little ‘universe.’ The story traces the rise and fall of Macondo, its civil strife, political corruption, exotic violence. This narrative is held together by the fortunes of the Buendía family, though because different generations share so many names, the chronology is not always clear. Ideas and things from the outside world sometimes reach Macondo (like railways), but always the town returns to isolation, the Buendías sequestered in their solitude.
The exuberant and deadpan attention to detail combine to create a unique sense of humour. ‘Colonel Aureliano Buendía organized thirty-two armed uprisings and he lost them all. He had seventeen male children by seventeen different women and they were exterminated one after the other on a single night before the oldest one had reached the age of thirty-five. He survived fourteen attempts on his life, seventy-three ambushes and a firing squad. He lived through a dose of strychnine in his coffee that was enough to kill a horse.’18 The Buendías are also surrounded by a cast of dotty eccentrics. For example, on one occasion a young Buendía, Meme, brings sixty-eight friends home from school for the holidays. ‘The night of their arrival the students carried on in such a way, trying to go to the bathroom before they went to bed, that at one o’clock in the morning the last ones were still going in. Fernada then bought seventy-two chamber-pots, but she only managed to change the nocturnal problem into a morning one, because from dawn on there was a long line of girls, each with her pot in her hand, waiting for her turn to wash it.’19 Macondo is a world where the itinerant gypsy sage Melquíades returns to life after dying because he couldn’t bear the loneliness of death, where yellow flowers rain down from the skies and real rainstorms last for months.
The story of Macondo has a mythic quality, with countless allusions to twentieth-century ideas. Márquez deliberately gives his story a dated feel, so the reader is distanced from the action, as Bertolt Brecht recommended. It is likewise an attempt to re-enchant the world: things happen in Macondo that could happen nowhere else. This is not exactly biblical but close; we may not believe what happens, but we accept it. The illusions evoke Kafka, but a very sunny Kafka. In some senses José Buendía and his wife Ursula are the primordial couple, who undertake an exodus from the jungle in search of the sea; the ages of some characters are vastly inflated, as in the early books of the Bible; Melquíades presents the family with a manuscript written in Sanskrit code: this recalls both the decipherment of languages of earlier civilisations and the observations of Sir William Jones, the British judge in India, about the ‘mother tongue.’ The parchment on which the code is written turns out also to be a mirror, throwing us back on the relation between the text and reader and the ideas of Jacques Derrida. The playing with time recalls not only relativity but Fernand Braudel’s ideas of la longue durée and what governs it. Underneath all, as Carlos Fuentes has pointed out, One Hundred Years of Solitude questions: ‘What does Macondo know about its creation?’ In other words, the very question that has so obsessed twentieth-century science.20 In the way that Macondo ends, Márquez even raises the idea of entropy. In the very last sentence, he reminds us that we have no second opportunity in life, and this is the ‘big reason’ why the ‘official version’ of things should never be ‘put up with.’ The book may well be the greatest achievement of its kind in the last half of the twentieth century.
The wider significance of these alternative worlds is twofold. They are metaphors for Latin America itself, as a site for ‘the other,’ a key concept, as it turned out, in postmodernism. Second, and arguably more important, is their ‘playful maturity’; these are artists who have distanced themselves from the quotidian and the political. In so doing, they have given an undoubted stature to Latin American fiction with which the mother country, Spain, cannot compete. As Márquez makes explicit, Latin American fiction at base is about solitude, the continent itself used as a metaphor for that predicament.
After the magic realism of Latin America, the fabulous intricacies of Indian fiction probably come next in any fledgling ‘canon.’ Twentieth-century Indian novels written in English date from the 1930s at least, with the works of Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand, but the novels published since, say, R. K. Narayan’s ‘Malgudi’ stories fall into two kinds: minute observations and commentaries on Indian life, and attempts to find some sort of escape from it. The familiar idioms of English being used in such fabulous settings certainly highlight that the language no longer belongs to anyone.
R. K. Narayan’s many novels generally take plac
e in his beloved Malgudi, otherwise known as Mysore. The Sweet Vendor, published in 1967, is a study of spirituality, though not as, say, a Christian would understand it.21 For sixty years, Jagan has sold sweets from his store, when suddenly he decides to change his life: he is going to help a stonemason carve a ‘pure image’ of a goddess so that others can find spirituality in her contemplation. But of course he takes his foibles (and his checkbook) with him, with some hilarious consequences. The fact is, Jagan’s change in life is ambitious – too ambitious for his flawed personality: like someone in a Larkin poem, he is not really up to the challenge he has set himself. It is not that easy to retreat from life; for one thing, there is his moody son, more Westernised than he, with an American-Korean wife (actually a mistress), and with whom Jagan is constantly at odds. Narayan is of course poking serious fun at India herself, her spirituality (or spiritual pretensions), her ambition to be a world power when she cannot even feed herself (Jagan produces ‘frivolous’ food), and is both contemptuous and envious of the West.
Anita Desai’s novels are in general domestic stories, small-scale on the face of it, but in each one the characters are unprepared for the life of an independent India, which as often as not involves some measure of Westernisation. In The Village by the Sea, the locals of Thul are worried by the government’s proposal to install a chemical fertiliser plant nearby.22 Hari, the main character, unlike many other villagers who don’t want change, seeks to adjust to the new state of affairs by escaping to Bombay and becoming a watch repairer, in anticipation of all the watch wearers who will come and live in the village. Others ensure that the village remains a bird sanctuary, but once Hari’s life – his ambitions – had been disturbed, and despite his dismal experiences in Bombay, there is no going back. The new silence isn’t the same as the old one. Desai is saying that change is a question less of events than of attitude, psychology. Deven, the main character of In Custody, has great ambition, and when he is invited to become the secretary of the great Urdu poet Nur, he conceives a grand plan to tape-record the poet’s wisdom.23 In fact, this plan runs into endless difficulties; the poet himself is much less than perfect – he loves pigeons, wrestling, and whores just as much as wisdom – but Deven’s technological incompetence is also a factor, so that the whole project descends into chaos. Desai’s stories are small tragedies, though large enough for the characters who live through them. Is this India as she always was, or as she has been made by colonial occupation? In Desai’s stories no one seems to know.
