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 politically 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 place 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.
Not so in the stories of Salman Rushdie. There is nothing small about either his characters or his plots. His two best-known books, Midnight’s Children, 1981, and The Satanic Verses, 1988, are written in an exuberant, overflowing style, the images and metaphors and jokes billowing forth like the mushroom clouds of an atomic bomb.24 Rushdie’s relationship to his native India, and to the English language, is complex. His stories tell us that there are many Indias, enough of them grim, failing, divided. English at least offers the chance of overcoming the chronic divisions, without which failure cannot be conquered, and only by embarking on a fabulous journey of improbable fantasies can he hope to have what are in fact very direct messages swallowed. Midnight’s Children tells the story of Saleem Sinai, born at midnight on the day India achieved independence in 1947, one of 1,001 other children to be born at the same time. By virtue of this, all of them are given some magical property, and the closer their birth to midnight, when ‘the clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting,’ the stronger their magical power. Saleem has a very large nose, which grants him the ability to see ‘into the hearts and minds of men.’ His chief rival, Shiva, has bloated knees, meaning he has the power of war. The book is written mainly in the form of Saleem’s memoirs, but there is little in the way of traditional characterisation. Instead Rushdie gives us a teeming, tumbling narrative, juxtaposing day-to-day politics and private obsessions (one figure works on a documentary about life in a pickle factory), all intertwined with ever more fabulous metaphors and jokes and language constructions. The best and most terrible joke comes in the central scene where the two main characters discover that they have been swapped as babies. Rushdie is challenging the meaning of the most basic ideas – innocence, enchantment, nation, self, community. And, in so doing, independence. All this is done with an ‘elephantiasis’ of style that emulates the Indian oral storytellers of old, yet is as modern as it is reminiscent of Günther Grass and Gabriel García Márquez. Midnight’s Children is neither eastern nor western. That is the point, and the measure of its success.25
The theme of The Satanic Verses is migration, emigration, and the loss of faith it often brings about in the emigrant/immigrant.26 Faith, its loss, and the relation of faith to the secular life, the hole – the ‘God-shaped hole’ – at the centre of the once-faithful person, is the issue that, Rushdie has admitted, underpins the book.27 He deals with the issue also in a fabulous way. The book begins when two Indian actors, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, formerly Salahuddin Chamchawal, fall to earth after an Air India jumbo jet explodes 30,000 feet above the English Channel. This naturally evokes the memory of an actual explosion, of an Air India Boeing 747 off Ireland in 1985, blown up, it is believed, by Sikh terrorists in Canada.28 Farishta is the star of several Bombay ‘theological’ films and is so popular that for many an Indian he is divine. Saladin, on the other hand, is an Anglophile who has rejected India and lives in Britain doing voiceovers for television commercials, ‘impersonating packets of crisps, frozen peas, Ketchup bottles.’29 These two fall to earth in the company of airplane seats, drink carts, headsets, but land safely enough on a British beach. From then on, the book follows a series of interwoven plots, each more fantastic than the last. These episodes are never out of control, however, and Rushdie’s references make the book very rich for those who can decipher them. For example, Gibreel Farishta, in Urdu, means Gabriel Angel, making him in effect the archangel whom Islamic tradition regards as ‘“bringing down” the Qur’an from God to Muhammad.’ Saladin was also the great defender of mediaeval Islam against the Crusaders, who restored Sunni Islam to Egypt. Gibreel, learning Islam from his mother, encounters the notion of the Satanic Verses, in which the devil is understood to have inserted a sentence in the Qur’an, later withdrawn, but which nonetheless insinuates a sliver of religious doubt. Religious doubt, then, is at the very heart of Rushdie’s book. One may even say that it plays with the very idea of the devil, of the secular being the devil, certainly so far as the faithful are concerned. Essentially, throughout the interlocking narratives, Saladin is a sort of Iago to Gibreel’s Othello, ‘using the thousand and one voices of his advertising days.’ Under this onslaught, Gibreel is led astray, notably to a brothel, the ‘anti-Mosque’ in Malise Ruthven’s apt phrase, falling among people who blaspheme, not just in swear-words but in their criticisms of the Prophet’s actual behaviour (for example, Muhammad had more wives than strict Islamic law allowed). At every opportunity, therefore, The Satanic Verses skirts danger. It is certainly a challenging book. But can a book that explores blasphemy actually pursue that theme without being blasphemous? In exploring faith, Rushdie knew he had to deliberately provoke the faithful. At one point in the book, the Prophet issues a fatwa against an impious poet.30
Perhaps it was this above all which provoked the Islamic authorities. On 14 February 1989, Ruhollah Al-Musavi Al-Khomeini – better known as Ayatollah Khomeini, of Iran – issued a fatwa against the ‘apostasian’ book Satanic Verses: ‘In the name of God Almighty; there is only one God, to whom we shall all return; I would like to inform all the intrepid Muslims in the world that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses which has been compiled, printed and published against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, as well as those publishers who were aware of its contents, have been sentenced to death. I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, wherever they find them, so that no one will dare to insult the Islamic sanctions. Whoever is killed on this path will be regarded as a martyr, God willing. In addition, anyone who has access to the author of the book, but does not possess the power to execute him, should refer him to the people so that he may be punished for his actions. May God’s blessing be on you all.’31
Inside forty-eight hours, Rushdie and his wife had gone into hiding, where he would remain except for brief forays into the limelight, for nearly ten years. In subsequent months, the ‘Rushdie affair’ claimed many headlines. Muslims in Britain and elsewhere staged public burnings of the tide; ten thousand demonstrated against the book in Iran, and in Rushdie’s native Bombay ten people were killed when police opened fire on demonstrators.32 In all, twenty-one people died over The Satanic Verses, nineteen on the Indian subcontinent, two in Belgium.33
Like Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul’s novels – his later novels especially – generally concern people living outside their native context. He himself was born in Trinidad, a second-generation Indian, moved to England to attend Oxford, and has remained there ever since, except to research a remarkable series of travel books.
Naipaul is less concerned with faith than Rushdie, and has more in common with Anita Desai’s fascination with modernisation and technological change, though he uses this to reflect his preoccupation with the nature of freedom. A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) ostensibly follows the building of a house. At the same time Naipaul deconstructs Mr. Biswas himself.34 His facility for sign writing leads him out of the prison of poverty and into a marriage where he is trapped, but in a different way. Sign writing leads to other forms of writing, letters to his son mainly. As he discovers language, like a writer discovers language, so Biswas discovers another layer of freedom. But total freedom, Naipaul infers, is not only impossible but undesirable. Fulfilment comes from loving and being loved, a status Biswas achieves, but it is not freedom. In The Mimic Men (1968), the scene has shifted to England, not the dream England that a poor Trinidadian might conceive of but the drab, suburban England of the immigrant, with the endless fresh attempts to get going on a career, the chronic tiredness, and the poor sense of self that comprise modern city life.35 Again, freedom boils down to one struggle replacing another. The later books – In a Free State (1971), which won the Booker Prize, Guerrillas (1975), and A Bend in the River (1979) – are more nakedly political, juxtaposing political and private freedom in deliberately jarring ways.36 In the 1971 book, two white people, Linda and Bobby, drive back to their expats’ compound through a black African state laid low by civil war. Their politics differ – Bobby is a liberal homosexual, Linda a bombastic right-winger. Naipaul is asking how they can enjoy so many freedoms at home when they can’t agree on anything. In the car, there is civil war between them.
In his films, Satyajit Ray (1921–1992) embodied a bit of Desai, a part of Narayan, and aspects of Rushdie and Naipul, and this is because he was more than a filmmaker. He was a commercial artist, a book designer, an author of children’s books and science fiction, and a celebrated musician. He began as a filmmaker when, in 1945, he was asked to illustrate a children’s version of a popular novel, Pather Panchali.37 Ray had the idea instead of turning the novel into a film; he set about it with no experience of filmmaking, trying his hand at weekends (it never had a proper script).38 The project took ten years and was only finished after Ray several times ran out of money, when the Bengali government stepped in with funds.39 Despite its unpropitious beginnings, the film was a triumph and became the first in a trilogy of trilogies, for which Ray became famous: the Apu Trilogy (Aparajito, 1956, with music by Ravi Shankar, and The World of Apu, 1960), the Awakening Woman trilogy (including, most notably, Charulata, ‘The Lonely Wife,’ 1964, still very popular), and a trilogy of ‘city’ films, which included The Middleman (1975).40 Ray’s films have also been described as a mixture of Henry James and Anton Chekhov, though they are marked by an emotional generosity that James, certainly, rarely showed. But the strength of Ray lies in his telling of ordinary stories (of a family trying to survive, in Pather; of an affair between a woman and her husband’s young cousin, in Charulata; of a businessman expected to provide a client with a woman in The Middleman) in extraordinary detail, lovingly observed. His biographer has pointed out that there are few, if any, villains in Ray’s world because he sees everyone’s point of view. Ray was just as aware of India’s failings as the other writers, but he seems to have been more comfortable with the contradictions.41
The award of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature to the Nigerian writer and dramatist Wole Soyinka, and then to the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, in 1991, the same year that Ben Okri, another Nigerian, won the Booker Prize, shows that African writing has at last been recognised by what we may call the Western literary ‘establishment.’ At the same time, contemporary African literature has nothing like the same following, worldwide, as does Indian or South American literature. In his Myth, Literature and the African World (1976), Soyinka, who had studied in Britain and read plays for the Royal Court Theatre, did his best to make many fellow writers more visible in a Western context.42
Soyinka was trying to do for literature what Basil Davidson had done for African archaeology, not just in the book referred to but in his own poetry and plays. In fact, it was Soyinka’s choice of literature – in particular theatre – that finally won the Nobel Prize for him, rather than for Chinua Achebe. (Achebe’s novel Anthills of the Savannah was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987.) Soyinka was part of the generation of brilliant writers who studied at Ibadan University College in the period before independence, together with Cyprian Ekwensi, Christopher Okigbo, and John Pepper Clark, some of whose works he covered in Myth, Literature and the African World. In that book, his secondary aim, after rendering these writers visible to an international audience, was to do two things: first, to show black African literature as its own thing, having themes in common with other great literatures, and just as rich, complex and intelligent. At the same time, Soyinka, in discussing such entities as Duro Ladipo’s Yoruba plays, or Obotunde Ijimere’s Imprisonment of Obatala, or Ousmane Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood, stressed the particular strengths of African literature, the ways in which it differs from its Western counterparts.43 Here, he stresses the collective experience of ritual, the way the individualism of the West is alien to African experience. In the African social contract, community life comes first, and Soyinka explains the impact of ritual by analogy at one point, in order to bring home how vivid it is: ‘Let us say he [the protagonist in a story] is a tragic character: at the first sign of a check in the momentum of a tragic declamation, his audience becomes nervous for him, wondering – has he forgotten his line? Has he blacked out? Characters undertake acts on behalf of the community, and the welfare of the protagonist is inseparable from that of the total community.’44 Soyinka’s point is that whatever story is set out in African literature, the experience is different.
Soyinka is both a creative writer and a critic. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, literary and cultural criticism has been both exceptionally fertile and exceptionally controversial. This is particularly true of three areas, all related: postcolonial criticism, postmodern criticism, and the development of the discipline known as cultural studies.
In postcolonial criticism two figures stand out: Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak. Across several works, but especially in Orientalism (1978), Covering Islam (1981), and ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, (1986), Said, writing as a Palestinian academic on the faculty of Columbia University in New York, explored the way the Orient’ has been conceived in the West, especially since the beginning of ‘Oriental studies’ early in the nineteenth century.45 He examined the writings of scholars, politicians, novelists, and even painters, from Silvestre de Sacy, whose Chrestomathie arabe was published in 1806, through Gustave Flaubert, Arthur James Balfour, and T. E. Lawrence, right up to academic books published in the 1960s and 1970s. The jacket of his title shows a young boy, naked except for a large snake wrapped around him, standing on a carpet and entertaining a group of men, dark-skinned Arabs festooned in rifles and swords, lounging against a wall of tiles decorated with arabesques and Arabic script. A detail from Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Snake Charmer (1870), it illustrates Said’s argument exactly. For this is an imaginary Orient, a stereotypical Orient full of caricature and oversimplification. Said’s argument is that the intellectual history of Oriental studies, as practised in the West, has been corrupted by political power, that the very notion of ‘the Orient’ as a single entity is absurd and belittling of a huge region that contains many cultures, many religions, many ethnic groupings. In this way the world comes to be made up of two unequal halves, shaped by the unequal exchange rooted in political (imperial) power. There is, he says, an imaginative demonology of ‘the mysterious Orient’ in which the ‘Orientals’ are invariably lazy, deceitful, and irrational. Said shows that de Sacy was trying to put ‘Oriental studies’ on a par with Latin and Hellenistic studies, which helped produce the idea that the Orient was as homogeneous as classical Greece or Rome. In Madame Bovary, Emma pines for what, in her drab and harried bourgeois life, she does not have – ‘Oriental clichés: harems, princesses, princes, slaves, veils, dancing girls and boys, sherbets, ointments, and so on.’46 In Joseph Conrad’s Victory, he makes the heroine, Alma, irresistibly attractive to men – by the mid-nineteenth century, the name evoked dancers who were also prostitutes. But, Said reminds us, Alemah in Arabic means ‘learned woman’; it was the name used in Egyptian society for women who were accomplished reciters of poetry. Even in recent times, says Said, especially since the Arab-Israeli wars, the situation has hardly improved. He quotes a 1972 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry in which an essay entitled ‘The Arab World’ was published by a retired member of the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Intelligence. In four pages, the author provides a psychological portrait of more than 100 million people, across 1,300 years, using exactly four sources: two books, and two newspaper articles.47 Said stresses the sheer preposterousness of such an exercise, calls for a greater understanding of ‘Oriental’ literatures (which he shows to be sadly lacking in Oriental departments in Western universities) and allies himself with Clifford Geertz’s approach to anthropology and international study, in particular his notion of ‘thick description.’48 As with the views of Martin Bernal on the African origins of classical civilisation discussed in the next chapter, Said’s arguments have been fiercely contested by distinguished orientalists such as Albert Hourani.
As a critic, an Indian, and a woman, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has become one of the more prominent postcolonial writers, perhaps most influential as one of the editors of the celebrated journal Subaltern Studies. This word, subaltern, neatly ironical, refers to that low rank of the army, especially the Imperial Army of Britain, which was subordinate to the officer class – so low, in fact, that if a subaltern wanted to speak, he (always a he) had to ask permission. Subaltern studies is a variety of historiography that is frankly revisionist, seeking to provide an alternative history of India, a new voice somewhat analogous to the British Marxist historians, retelling the story ‘from the bottom up.’ Gayatri Spivak, who like Rushdie, Desai, and so many other Indian intellectuals, divides her time between India and the West, combines an essentially feminist view of the world with neo-Marxist flavouring derived from Derrida and Foucault.49 The chief achievement of this group has been, first, gaining access to the raw material of the Raj, without which no revision would have been possible, and second, confronting what many have regarded as the failure of Indian culture to hitherto produce a rival system to the British one.50 In historiography, for example, subaltern scholars have revisited a number of so-called mutinies against the British when, according to the imperial accounts, ‘bands’ of ‘fanatics’ rose up and were defeated.51 These are now explained in terms of contemporaneous religious beliefs, marriage/sexual practices, and the economic needs of empire. Five volumes of Subaltern Studies were published in the 1980s, to great acclaim among scholars, providing an alternative historiography to what is now called colonialist knowledge.52
Underlying much of the postcolonial movement, not to mention the postmodern sensibility, was a phrase that the American critic Fredric Jameson gave to one of his books in 1981, The Political Unconscious.53 Postcolonial and postmodern criticism derived much of its strength from Raymond Williams’s earlier arguments that ‘serious’ literature should not be read in any way different from popular literature, and that the same is true of all art. This position was set out most fully in two celebrated articles published in New Left Review, one in 1984 by Jameson, entitled ‘Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’ and the other, in 1985, by Terry Eagleton, professor of English at Oxford, entitled ‘Against the Grain.’ Jameson’s argument was that all ideologies are ‘strategies of containment,’ which enable a society ‘to provide an explanation of itself which suppresses its underlying contradictions.’54 The certainties of the nineteenth-century novel, for example, were designed to reassure the middle classes that their orderly class system would endure. Hemingway’s novels, on the other hand, with their spare, short sentences, obsessed with machismo, had to be set in exotic foreign countries because he couldn’t fit into America’s self-image as a complex, technologically sophisticated society. Jameson’s second major argument was that the postmodern sensibility was by the mid-1990s not merely one way of looking at the world but the dominant one, and that this was because it was the logical outcome of late capitalism.55 In this late stage, he said, society has finally abolished the distinction between high culture and mass culture – we have instead a culture that many decry as ‘degraded’ but younger people espouse enthusiastically: kitsch, schlock, pulp fiction and TV, Reader’s Digest. The first to appreciate this was Andy Warhol. The point, Jameson says, is that late capitalism recognises that art is, above all, a commodity, something to be bought and sold.
Eagleton was more aggressively Marxist. The distinction between high art and popular/mass art was one of the oldest certainties, he said, and the fact that it has been undermined is an aid to the socialist, because it helps ‘expose the rhetorical structures by which non-socialist works produce politically undesirable effects.’56 In late capitalism, Eagleton writes, commodities have become fetishes, and he includes artistic commodities with the others. This is a new aesthetic category with no precursors.
Critics like Jameson and Stanley Fish, his colleague, then at Duke University in North Carolina and now at the University of Illinois in Chicago, paid as much attention in their work to other media besides books – that went without saying. Films, television, comic books, advertising … all these were systems of signs.57 The early work of Raymond Williams, postcolonialism, and postmodern literary theory, together with the theories of such French authors as Barthes, Lyotard, Lacan, Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard, plus the anthropology of Clifford Geertz, therefore came together to create a new discipline, cultural studies. This is not the same as media studies, but they both stem from the same impulse. The fundamental idea behind both is, as was mentioned above, and to return to Jameson’s phrase, the political unconscious – that works of the imagination are not ‘privileged’ in any way, to use the favoured term, that they are just as much a product of their context and environment as anything else, are subject to market forces, and therefore cannot avoid having an ideological or political angle. It is the aim of cultural studies to render this hidden agenda visible, peeling away one of the final layers of self-consciousness.
Cultural studies is controversial, especially among an older generation brought up to believe that ‘aesthetic’ values are sui generis, independent of everything else, helping us to find the ‘eternal truths’ of the human condition. But cultural studies courses at universities are very popular, which must mean that they meet some needs of the young (they have been around too long now to be merely fashionable). The heart of the issue, the most controversial aspect of the new discipline, is the battle for Shakespeare. Keats called Shakespeare the ‘chief poet,’ the ‘begetter of our deep eternal theme.’ The new Shakespeareans, if we may call them that, argue on the other hand that although the bard wrote a remarkable number of remarkable plays, he did not, as Coleridge maintained, speak for all men, in all places, and at all times.
The new scholars say that Shakespeare was a man of his age, and that most, if not all, of his plays had a specific political context. They add too that in the nearly 400 hundred years since his death, successive establishments have appropriated him for their own essentially right-wing agendas. In other words, far from being an objective fount of fundamental wisdom about our essential nature, Shakespeare has been used by lesser souls as propaganda to promote and sustain a particular point of view. In arguing that Shakespeare was a man of his time, they are also saying that his insights into human nature are no more ‘fundamental’ or ‘profound’ or ‘timeless’ than anyone else’s, and therefore he should forfeit his place as the rock on which English literature is built. For the cultural materialists, as they are called, Shakespeare’s significance is as a battleground for competing views of literature, and its relevance in our lives.
The first concerted attack on the conventional wisdom came in 1985, in a book edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, from the University of Sussex, which was provocatively entitled Political Shakespeare,58 It comprised a series of eight essays by British and North American scholars; by comparing the chronology of the plays with contemporary political events, the essays were designed to show that, far from transcending history and politics and human nature, Shakespeare was a child of his times. As a result the conventional meaning of many of the plays was changed radically. The Tempest, for example, far from being a play about colonialism and America, becomes a play about England’s problems with Ireland. Published in the middle of the Thatcher/Reagan years, Political Shakespeare created an academic storm. Two of the academic referees who read the manuscript argued that the book should ‘on no account be published.’59 After publication, one reviewer wrote, ‘A conservative critic … may conclude in horror that Shakespeare has succumbed to an academic AIDs, his immunology systems tragically disrupted by Marxist, feminist, semiotic, post-structuralist and psychoanalytic criticism.’ Others found the book important, and in the classroom it proved popular and was reprinted three times. In Annabel Patterson’s Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, published in 1989, she argued that until the early nineteenth century Shakespeare was regarded as a political playwright and a rebel, and that it was Coleridge, worried by the ripple effects in England of the French Revolution, who sought to overturn the earlier view, for political reasons of his own.60 These books provoked such interest that the London Review of Books produced a special supplement on the controversy in late 1991.
The strength of American literature, so evident to Marcus Cunliffe in the 1960s, became even more marked as the postwar decades passed. Its most impressive quality, as new talents continued to emerge, was the staying power of familiar names, and the resilience of their approach to their art.
The playwright David Mamet, for example, continued in the fine American tradition of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller, in that his themes were intimate, psychological dramas, where the ‘action,’ such as it was, took place inside the characters as revealed in language. Mamet’s two greatest plays, American Buffalo (1975) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), were once described as indictments of a society ‘in which the business ethic is used as a cover for any kind of criminal activity.’61 In Buffalo a group of lowlifes plot a robbery that they are totally ‘incapable of carrying out.’ Mamet’s characters are almost defined by their inarticulateness, which is both a source and a symptom of their desperation. His chosen territory is the modern city and the life-diminishing occupations it throws up – in particular, and here he echoes O’Neill and Miller, the salesman. In Glengarry Glen Ross, the pathetic optimism of the real-estate salesmen, which overlays their quiet desperation, is painfully moving, as each tries to do the other down in even the smallest of struggles. This distracts them from recognising their own true nature.
Mamet’s significance, as a figure who emerged in the 1970s, was his response to the arrival of the postmodern world, the collapse of the old certainties. Whereas Peter Brook was part of the new temper, a man who enjoyed multiculturalism, and Tom Stoppard, the British playwright, set his face against it, asserting that there was objective truth, objective good and evil, that relativism was itself in its way evil, Mamet exercised an old-fashioned, Eliot-type scepticism to the world around him.62 He embraced and updated the tradition articulated by O’Neill, that America was ‘a colossal failure.’63 His plays were plays because he was suspicious of the mass media. ‘The mass media,’ he wrote in a memoir, ‘… corrupt the human need for culture (an admixture of art, religion, pageant, drama – a celebration of the lives we lead together) and churn it into entertainment, marginalizing that which lacks immediate appeal to the mass as “stinking of culture” or “of limited appeal”…. The information superhighway seems to promise diversity, but its effect will be to eliminate, marginalize, or trivialize anything not instantly appealing to the mass. The visions of Modigliani, Samuel Beckett, Charles Ives, Wallace Stevens, survive for the moment as culture in a society that never would have accepted them as art…. The mass media – and I include the computer industry – conspire to pervert our need of community…. We are learning to believe that we do not require wisdom, community, provocation, suggestion, chastening, enlightenment – that we require only information, for all the world as if life were a packaged kit and we consumers lacking only the assembly instructions.’64
John Updike has published more than thirty books since Poorhouse Fair in 1959, during which time he has attempted to follow both the small and the grand themes in American, white, middle-class life. In Couples (1968), Marry Me (1976), and Roger’s Version (1986) he examined sex, adultery, ‘the twilight of the old morality.’ In Bech: A Book (1970) he looked at Communist East Europe through the eyes of a Jewish-American traveller, which enabled him to compare the rival empires of the Cold War. And in The Witches of Eastwick (1984) he took a swipe at feminism and American puritanism all at the same time. But it is for his ‘Rabbit’ series that he most deserves consideration. There are four books in the sequence: Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990).65 Harold ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom used to play basketball as a professional, used to be young and romantic, and is now caught up in the domestic dreariness of married life. Rabbit is a deliberate echo of ‘Babbitt’ because Updike sees his hero as the natural epigone of Sinclair’s man from Zenith. But the world has moved on, and Rabbit lives on the East Coast, rather than in the Midwest, more at home in New York and Connecticut. His world is that of gadget-packed apartments, of commodities, including art, of material abundance but also of a spiritual malaise. Rabbit and his circle, with all their everyday needs well provided for, seek to recover the excitement of their youth in affairs, art courses, ever more pompous wines, travel. Despite this, they never escape the feeling that they are living in an age of decline, that theirs is an unheroic, shabby era; and as the books progress, the characters, showing what Updike himself called ‘instinctive realism,’ grow still more desperate in a search for epiphanies that will provide meaning. It is the fate of Updike’s characters, in the Rabbit books, to be entering the postmodern bleakness without knowing it. Updike invites us to think that this is how social evolution takes place.66
Saul Bellow has achieved the enviable distinction, better even than the award of the Nobel Prize in 1976, of writing at least one masterpiece in each of five decades: Dangling Man (1944); Henderson the Rain King (1959); Herzog (1964); Humboldt’s Gift (1975); The Dean’s December (1982), and More Die of Heartbreak (1987).67 Born in Canada in 1915, the child of immigrant Jews, Bellow was raised in Chicago, and most of his books are set there or in New York – at any rate, in cities. This is not Updike’s world, however. Most of Bellow’s characters are Jewish, writers or academics rather than business types, more reflective, more apt to be overwhelmed by mass culture, the mass society of vast cities, which they confront with ‘a metaphysical hunger.’68 In Dangling Man, much influenced by Kafka, Sartre and Camus, Bellow wrote this about the main character: ‘He asked himself a question I still would like answered, namely, “How should a good man live; what ought he to do?” ’ In The Adventures of Augie March (1953), the hero says, ‘It takes some of us a long time to find out what the price is of our being in nature, and what the facts are about your tenure. How long it takes depends on how swiftly the social sugars dissolve.’ All Bellow’s books are about the ‘social sugars’ in one form or another, the nature of the link between the self and others, community, society. For Bellow, the nature of the social contract is the most fundamental of all questions, the fundamental problem of politics, the deepest contradiction of capitalism, the most important phenomenon that science has not even begun to address, and where religion can no longer speak with authority.69 In Herzog we have a character determined not to surrender to the then prevalent nihilism; in Humboldt’s Gift we have ‘the Mozart of gab,’ a brilliantly loquacious poet who nonetheless dies penniless while his postmodern protégé, obsessed with commodities, becomes rich. In The Dean’s December, the dean, Albert Corde, from a free city – the Chicago of violence, cancer, and postmodern chaos – visits Bucharest, then behind the Iron Curtain, where families, and family life, still exist. He is for ever comparing his own despairing knowledge about city life with the certainties of the astrophysical universe that are the everyday concerns of his Romanian wife. The aphorism behind More Die of Heartbreak is ‘more die of heartbreak than of radiation,’ showing, in idiosyncratic yet tragic form, some limits to science. (The book is a comedy.) The progression from the dangling man, to Augie March, to Henderson, to Herzog, to Humboldt, to Dean Albert Corde is a profoundly humane, ebullient set of tragedies and epiphanies, an intellectual and artistic achievement unrivalled in the last half of the twentieth century.
In the early 1990s literature by native American Indians began to appear. Keeping Slug Woman Alive: Approaches to American Indian Texts (1993) and Grand Avenue (1994), both by Greg Sarris, were two commercially and critically successful titles.70 Sarris is part American Indian, part Filipino, and part Jewish, an elected chief of the Miwok tribe but also professor of English at UCLA. This conceivably makes him the ultimate postmodern, multicultural figure, the natural next step in America’s evolving history. He, or someone like him, could be the first major literary voice in the twenty-first century. But Bellow has set the standard against which all others will be judged.