From the very start, our bookstore carried as many British works as American ones, but we had fewer readings with authors from Great Britain, who were used to launching their books at the British Council in Paris.1 After the Council’s program closed in the early 2000s, these writers started to appear more frequently at the Village Voice. Among them, two British novelists, David Lodge and A. S. Byatt, captured the influence of literary currents coming their way from American universities at the time.
A visiting professor at the University of Berkeley where he taught creative writing, David Lodge agreed to speak at our bookshop on January 4, 1990. He described how he had become the witness of the “professionalization” of the study of literature through a flagrant misuse of new literary theories in vogue on American campuses, i.e., structuralism, deconstruction, and the like.
As a critic, he could recognize their intrinsic value, but “like any other intellectual system, if abused, these tools mystify people, dominating rather than educating them. This trend is becoming so ‘institutionalized,’” he admitted with some regret, “that compared to academic works, my novels are not considered serious literature.”2
And yet his semi-fictional The Campus Trilogy3 deals with a most serious subject—what is to become of literature—in a successfully bold, satirical manner. The three novels of his trilogy, Changing Places, Small World, and Nice Work are comedies of manners set in the small, closed academic world of theories that seem to exist solely to curb literary inventiveness.
The Californian Paris-based novelist Diane Johnson humorously introduced Lodge as “the scourge of American academia, blithely making fun of its current mechanisms.” Lodge concluded his own talk on a sober, if not pessimistic note by stating that “we are getting into a tragic situation for literature.”
Three years later, Antonia (A. S.) Byatt was at the bookstore on September 14, 1993, to discuss Possession: A Romance,4 her well-
received work in defense of “the novel as invention.” She compared her fictional work in which she had imagined a Victorian poet, Randolph Henry Ash, his life, his loves, and, even more importantly, his entire body of poetry, in happy contrast with the research findings of the two modern protagonists of this same novel.
Roland and Maud are ambitious scholars embarked on a frantic and competitive hunt for spectacular discoveries among the intimate, secret loves of the poet Ash, the subject of their research. Both scholars are even ready to go as far as resorting to the most unethical and reprehensible acts, such as violating his grave to “promote their careers and bring fame to themselves.”5
In sharp opposition, Byatt shared with us the noble gesture of the nineteenth-century English novelist George Eliot, one of her beloved authors, who “took with her to her grave the letters of her lover George Henry Lewes, clutched to her dead bosom.”6
On April 24, 2001, Lodge was back at the Village Voice to launch his latest novel Thinks.7 Describing the current state of literature, he acknowledged that “something had changed in British writing” since his last talk at the bookshop: “We are now witnessing a fertile time in literature,” he proudly announced.
Living proof of this welcomed renaissance are several British authors who read with us over the years, including Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Jim Crace, Gabriel Josipovici, A. L. Kennedy, Ian McEwan, Tim Parks, and Graham Swift, to name just a few.
Lodge ascribed such an encouraging literary momentum partly to the Booker Prize jury, whose members had continued to bring to the fore outstanding British authors, “but more crucially,” he added, “this jury, viewed as conservative at one time, has opened up to the Commonwealth, now getting a large spectrum of works, including all English-language fiction from everywhere, except the United States. This broadly based literature,” he stressed, “embraces the world, raising media interest.”
In fact, the grand opening up of British literature had started in 1981 when the Booker Prize was awarded to Salman Rushdie, a young author born in India on the eve of its independence in August 1947, the historical subject of his internationally acclaimed Midnight’s Children.8
This recognition paved the way for the emergence of flourishing Indian and Pakistani literatures, and soon a new literary dynamic ignited a good number of the countries of the former British Empire. First referred to in academic circles as “postcolonial literatures,” a term that linked them to a past empire, they now were evolving into “world literatures written in English,” reflecting their contemporary importance and broad appeal.
At the start of the twenty-first century, our bookstore became a platform for some of these essential literary voices that continue to resonate today.