Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel

Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel

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Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel Colin Hutchinson

© Colin Hutchinson 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–21045–5 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–21045–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hutchinson, Colin, 1958– Reaganism, Thatcherism, and the social novel / Colin Hutchinson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–21045–5 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0–230–21045–7 (alk. paper) 1. English fiction–20th century–History and criticism. 2. Political fiction, English–History and criticism. 3. American fiction–20th century–History and criticism. 4. Political fiction, American–History and criticism. 5. Social problems in literature. 6. Right and left (Political science) in literature. 7. Thatcher, Margaret–Influence. 8. Reagan, Ronald–Influence. 9. Politics and literature–Great Britain–History–20th century. 10. Politics and literature– United States–History–20th century. I. Title. PR888.P6H87 2008 823⬘.9109358—dc22 2008016429 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To Anne

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Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction

1

1 Reagan, Thatcher and the 1980s

15

2

Complicity and British Fiction

38

3

Liberal Guilt and American Fiction

65

4

The Communitarian Turn

90

5

Futures and Pasts

112

6

The Battlefield of the Self

136

Conclusion

168

Notes

179

Bibliography

195

Index

203

vii

Acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: Taylor & Francis Ltd. for Stan Lindsay, ‘Waco and Andover: An Application of Kenneth Burke’s Concept of Psychotic Entelechy’ Quarterly Journal of Speech (1999), 85 (3). Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture for Alex E. Blazer, ‘Chasms of Reality, Aberrations of Identity: Defining the Postmodern Through Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho’ (2002), 1 (2). Pynchon Notes for Johan Callen, ‘Tubed Out and Movie Shot in Pynchon’s Vineland’ (1991), volumes 28–29; M. Keith Booker, ‘Vineland and Dystopian Fiction’ (1992), volumes 30–31; Barbara L. Pittman, ‘Genealogy, History and the Political Left in Vineland’ (1992), volumes 30–31; Philip Gochenour, ‘The History Written on the Body: Photography, History and Memory in Pynchon’s Vineland’ (1993), volumes 32–33; Eva C. Karpinski, ‘From V to Vineland: Pynchon’s Utopian Moments’ (1993), volumes 32–33; and John Johnston, ‘An American Book of the Dead: Media and the Unconscious in Vineland’ (1994), volumes 34–35. Sage Publications for Herbert Kitschelt, ‘Austrian and Swedish SocialDemocrats in Crisis: Party Strategy and Organization in Corporatist Regimes’ in Comparative Political Studies (1994), 27 (1); Thomas Robbins, ‘Cults, Converts, and Charisma: the Sociology of New Religious Movements’ Current Sociology (1988), 36 (1); and Lori Kendall, ‘Nerd Nation: Images of Nerds in US Popular Culture’ International Journal of Cultural Studies (1999), 2 (2). ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature for Berthold SchoeneHarwood, ‘Dams Burst: Devolving Gender’ in Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory (1999), 30 (1). Oxford University Press for N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Postmodern Parataxis: Embodied Texts, Weightless Information’ in American Literary History (1990), 2 (3); and Xuejun Sun, ‘Thatcher’s Man’ Cambridge Quarterly (1994), 23 (4).

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Acknowledgements

ix

Kudlow & Co. for Lawrence Kudlow, ‘Reaganomics, What Worked? What Didn’t?’ (1997), available at www.ronaldreagan.com/experiment.html; accessed on 16 June 2008. The Dalkey Archive Press for Jonathan Franzen, ‘I’ll Be Doing More of Same’ The Review of Contemporary Fiction (1996), 16 (1). The English Association for Paul Edwards, ‘Time, Romanticism, Modernism, and Moderation in Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time’, and Jeremy Green, ‘Millennial Hysteria in Don DeLillo’s Mao II’ in English: The Journal of the English Association (1995), volume 44; and Patricia Horton, ‘Trainspotting: A Topography of the Masculine Abject’ English (2001), volume 50. Heldref Publications for David Porush, ‘ “Purring into Transcendence”: Pynchon’s Puncutron Machine’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (1995), 36 (4); and Jago Morrison, ‘Narration and Unease in Ian Mcewan’s Later Fiction’ Critique (2001), 42 (3). Bomb magazine for an excerpt from an interview between Jonathan Franzen and Donald Antrim (2001), issue 77.

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Introduction

An era of renewed moral and spiritual values, an era of global peace and prosperity, is upon us. I think that we are about a third of the way into this long cycle, and I believe that it was Mr. Reagan who began it.1 There is nothing political about American literature. Everyone can like American literature, no matter what your party.2 Ronald Reagan is dead, and it is now almost two decades since Margaret Thatcher left office. In many ways, however, it is as if both leaders are still in power. Their political legacy is such that subsequent administrations in the United States and the United Kingdom have been unable or unwilling to roll back policy towards the political centre or left, and have continued to steer by the star of private sector interests, while all but removing issues such as wealth redistribution and social justice from the mainstream political agenda. The left – defeated, disunited, and disillusioned – has been unable to mount an effective, broad-based opposition to the pervasive influence of neoconservatism, not least because of the assault by the latter on the public realm, and the consequent erosion of civic sensibilities and collective allegiances. The insistence of the New Right upon the primacy of the market has influenced general assumptions and values to the extent that a significant proportion of the British and American electorate – that proportion which increasingly decides the outcome of elections – relies for its economic well-being not only on income from employment, but also on such factors as interest rates, the housing market and the performance of pension funds and share portfolios, leading one commentator to arrive at the conclusion that ‘we are all becoming American conservatives now’. 3 1

2

Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel

It is in this context that this book will assess the influence of ‘Thatcherism’ and ‘Reaganism’4 upon what has been termed the ‘social novel’ in the United States and the United Kingdom – that is, the novel that addresses contemporary social and political concerns more or less explicitly. 5 It will concentrate on novels published after 1979 by authors who, for the most part, came to prominence during or just after the Reagan-Thatcher period. More specifically, the study will use as its focus the work of white male novelists with a broad left-liberal political perspective who, in the context of the New Right ascendancy, began to share the relatively unfamiliar experience of feeling marginalized by virtue of their political orientation. From the United Kingdom, texts by Martin Amis, Iain Banks, Jonathan Coe, Iain Sinclair, Ian McEwan, Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, and Julian Barnes will be contrasted with works of American fiction by Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Bret Easton Ellis, Douglas Coupland, and Tom Wolfe in order to provide a comparative insight into the state of both nations. In addition, novels by Anita Mason and Katherine Dunn will be included on the grounds that they offer revealing perspectives on the situation of the white male subject in the contemporary world. Most of these texts can be termed ‘popular literary’ because they combine a degree of commercial success with a level of critical approval that prompts academic discussion. Because of their relatively wide and heterogeneous readership, I contend that these novels indicate concerns that will almost certainly differ in their range from those shared by a comparatively determined, confident and less diffuse oppositional group or avant garde movement. This is particularly relevant to a study of the Reagan-Thatcher period because of the way in which, as I aim to demonstrate, widespread anxieties and aspirations were exploited by the populism of the New Right. If the obverse image of the 1980s and 1990s is that of the aggressive celebration of markets and money, then the concerns of the ‘popular literary’ texts examined here represent the reverse: an amorphous sense of left-liberal discontentment that may have lacked direction, unity and purpose, but which offered to the left at least the potential for an alternative both to its own despair and to the strident triumphalism of its adversaries. Furthermore, by deliberately selecting a diverse group of authors and texts (albeit within the white/male focus outlined above) that appear to have little in common, I intend to demonstrate that the correspondences between them reinforce the argument that the social novel of the 1980s and 1990s is informed by

Introduction 3

a diffuse yet popular left-liberal sensibility that is usually suppressed by most representations of the contemporary period. The successive election victories of Reagan and Thatcher placed white male left-liberals in a curious position, in that the latter were obliged to assess their position as members of the dominant group by virtue of gender, race and (for the most part) class, but as members of the subordinate group in terms of their political sympathies. Whereas members of other dissident, marginalized, or victimized sections of society could stand in relatively straightforward opposition to the New Right project, the white male left-liberal found himself in a situation of complex and compromised opposition rather than in a position of comparatively uncomplicated antagonism: a situation that throws into sharp relief the complex and contradictory nature not only of Reaganism and Thatcherism, but also that of the political and literary left in contemporary Britain and the United States of America. Themes of political defeat, disillusionment and impotence have always been familiar to the left, but were to become further complicated by notions of complicity and betrayal. For example, the emergence of ‘whiteness studies’ in the 1990s, while helpful and constructive in terms of encouraging straight white men on the left to extend their political critique horizontally beyond the economic realm in order to encompass the politics of gender and race, only reinforced the sense of culpability and self-doubt that springs from a sense of guilty privilege, and which is evident throughout the novels discussed in this book.6 Nevertheless, although the outcome of such self-examination is often either crippling ambivalence or destructive (frequently self-destructive) despair, I maintain that the diverse crises of the white male left-liberal in the social novel of the 1980s and 1990s expose what have been described as the ‘faultlines’ through which the ‘criteria of plausibility’ of a social order ‘fall into contest and disarray’,7 and that it is through the very complexity and ambiguity of these crises that dissident readings of the fiction of that period are made possible. Ambivalence is the distinguishing feature of the contemporary white male left-liberal. In political terms, this manifests itself in a reassessment of the individualistic-libertarian sensibilities that dominated the postwar decades, and in a consequent revival of interest in collectivist discourses. Yet this, in turn, is countered by a persistent individualism that insists upon independence from what is fearfully perceived as the unbending dogma of collectivist programmes: what Alex Callinicos has described as ‘the traditional liberal [doubt] that any attempt at

4

Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel

social change will lead straight to the Gulag’.8 At the same time, there is a great deal of wariness with regard to pragmatism, and to the flexibility of principle that is held to accompany traditional political activity, with its potential for opportunism, complicity, and corruption. Similarly, an awareness that the foundations of liberal humanism have been shaken both by the horrors of twentieth century history and by theoretical assault (feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism) exists alongside a residual sympathy for those aspects of the Enlightenment ethos that promote tolerance, liberty, and pragmatism above economic or philosophical rigidity. Indeed, what can be salvaged from the Enlightenment project represents for many on the left a bulwark against the fear that postmodern theory, in its assault upon all foundations, assumptions, and assertions, ultimately leaves the left in a weakened position when it comes to forming a confident opposition to its New Right opponents. What emerge are strategies of ambivalence and conciliation, rather than assertion, that affect the perennial debates over the need for radical or moderate political action, realist or experimental literary techniques, and over the subversive or conservative potential of the postmodern condition. Practitioners of the social novel generally assume that economic and social factors are inseparable from both the form and content of fiction, and reject the idealist notion that literature can float blissfully free of what happens at the stock exchange, on the factory floor, the battlefield, the television, or the high street. They are aware of the ubiquity of the news media; that now, more than ever, ‘the world is too much with us’, and that even the wealthiest and best-insulated of novelists are scarcely able to maintain an other-worldly detachment from the effects of government policies or the strategies of multinational corporations. It was therefore inevitable that the events and developments that distinguished the 1980s in both the United Kingdom and the United States of America – the miners’ strike, Irangate, the Falklands War, ‘yuppies’, mass unemployment, and the IT revolution, for example – would inevitably become represented in fiction, although not always immediately and not always in predictable ways. What is also inevitable for social novelists and their critics, however, is consideration of the issue of ‘economism’: that is, the extent to which cultural phenomena can be determined by economic and political factors; and whether the traditional Marxist basesuperstructure model is at all useful or valid in terms of explaining those phenomena. Ever since Georg Lukàcs, leftist writing and criticism has aspired to reconcile its insistence upon the significance

Introduction 5

of the social and economic domain in relation to culture with the proposal that the relationship between them is far from onedimensional.9 In particular, Marxist theory has demanded an account of ideology: the means by which ‘superstructural’ ideas, forms, and practices influence, protect or disguise the nature of the economic base. For Lukàcs, the techniques of realism are suitable both for limited (and literal) political ends – the exposure of child labour in order to campaign for its abolition, for example – and for revealing the deeper realities of social conflict and exploitation. Yet, for other writers and critics (most notably with regard to Lukàcs, Bertolt Brecht10) the stable, universalizing model employed by realism that assumes a relatively unproblematic transcription of reality into linguistic and literary forms, is unsuitable for delving beyond surface appearance in order to expose the extent of ideological orthodoxies. Instead, it is experimental art, with its emphasis on internal consciousness, fantasy, and transgression, and its insistence on exposing the problematic nature of representation that is deemed to be more appropriate to a subversive purpose. The difficulty for engaged fiction – pursued by subsequent Marxist theorists11 – has always been that of explicating ‘critical reality’: in other words, representing that which is suppressed or distorted by a dominant ideology, and appropriating it within a progressive critical context, without attracting accusations of a reactionary withdrawal into aestheticism and formalism at the expense of social and historical relevance. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the left encountered the contention of theorists such as Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard that there is effectively nothing beyond ideology at all: no ‘deeper’ Marxist-friendly reality or teleology, and no stable codes of meaning or agreed set of values that are revealed once the dark curtain of ideology has been drawn back.12 In the politically charged context of the Reagan-Thatcher period, the left has responded by attempting to graft what it sees as the most pertinent aspects of contemporary critical thought onto an account of history, society, and culture that continues to emphasize the need for change and struggle as a means to avoid that sense of political despair and ‘playful’ nihilism deemed by many on the left to be inherent within contemporary theory. What is notable in this is the tendency for contemporary left-liberals to attempt to reconcile, synthesize or transcend opposing views rather than to assert one view over another in the manner most frequently associated with political radicalism. For example, the work of the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson may be understood as an attempt to

6

Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel

‘work through’ the accusation (as made by Lyotard) that Marxism is a discredited and anachronistic ‘grand narrative’. Jameson acknowledges the extent to which culture – by which is meant all manner of mediated expressive, informative, or recreational activity – has extended its influence throughout every aspect of life in a way that renders untenable the use of the Marxist base-superstructure model as a useful critical tool. If the clarity of a ‘base’ analysis is unavailable, then that critical analysis must be fought on the cultural domain. This is in curious contrast to the ‘economistic’ insistence of the New Right that all human activity thought and action ultimately stems from the workings of the marketplace, and to the implicitly conservative postmodernist notion (expressed most vividly in Baudrillard) that a media-saturated, consumerist culture has actually superseded politics and economics. How might this triangle of opposing viewpoints be ‘worked through’ according to a progressive political analysis? On the basis that the New Right have already made this move, one strategy might be to adopt economism in cultural form. It is arguable that works such as Martin Amis’s Money (1984) and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) represent a critical response to New Right economism in that both novels can be understood as more or less direct representations of the deleterious effects of Reaganite and Thatcherite economic policies upon both individuals and the social fabric. The 1980s and 1990s saw concerted efforts to remove all forms of liberal dissent and leftist aspiration from the map (often literally) but, as Terry Eagleton has argued recently with particular reference to Marxism, it is only because of the relevance of such dissent and aspiration to the contemporary period that both have been pushed to the periphery of mainstream political and cultural debate.13 Without real economic and political power, however, the left is obliged to ‘work through’ its insistence on the economic alongside an emphasis on the importance of cultural activity as a redoubt for resistance and dissent. For instance, it is easy to conceive how Reaganism and Thatcherism may have influenced the social novel, but less easy to imagine how this influence could ever work in the opposite direction. Yet the phenomena of Reaganism and Thatcherism are a part of culture, and it is culture that has shaped – and is still shaping – our perception of the Reagan-Thatcher years. It has been argued that ‘texts or cultural objects are [ ... ] dynamic agents engaged in mutually constitutive relations with the societies in which they are situated’.14 This allows for the possibility of contention and resistance, even if the latter is held ultimately to be subservient to the dominant structures of power in

Introduction 7

any society, so that ‘power produces resistance not only as its legitimation, as the basis for an extension of control, but as its defining difference, the other which endows it with meaning, visibility, effectivity’.15 Alan Sinfield has presented a slightly but significantly different perspective, pointing out that, in order to exercise power, dominant groups are obliged to name the things they dominate, thereby giving those things a life and an agency that are effectively fuelled by the power of suppression.16 Cultural artifacts are capable of revealing ‘faultlines’: those ideological lacunae that mark historical forces at work, simultaneously enforcing and resisting relationships of social and economic power. It is while working in these lacunae that the contemporary social novel is most effective, drawing its strength not from outright defiance or adherence to a definite social or political programme, but – paradoxically – from its own ambivalence and need for assimilation and reconciliation. In keeping with its image as the decade of style and presentation over content, the Reagan-Thatcher period is indeed ‘packaged’ beautifully. Few decades coincide so neatly in chronological terms with the events with which they are closely associated and, in terms of the historical relationship between Britain and the United States of America, fewer still can be said to have dovetailed so appropriately. Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister just before the beginning of the decade in May 1979, while Ronald Reagan was elected shortly afterwards, in November 1980. Reagan left office just before the close of the decade, in January 1989, whilst Thatcher was deposed several months later, in December 1990. For a suitable fanfare, the Soviet bloc and South African apartheid collapsed at roughly the same time, leaving Reagan and Thatcher, whatever the true extent of their influence over either event, looking resplendent in the reflected glory of the seemingly omnipotent global free market. Chapter 1 of this book is an assessment of the origins, definitions, features and fate of both Reaganism and Thatcherism that will provide the social and political context for the novelists whose work is discussed in subsequent chapters. Both Reagan and Thatcher are, of course, associated with economic liberalism and with social conservatism, but it is necessary to stress that neither Reaganism nor Thatcherism is quite the same thing as monetarism or neoconservatism. More bewilderingly, although Thatcher had her gender and uncompromising manner to set her apart from her predecessors, Reagan had little to distinguish him from dozens of other late-middle-aged, white male presidents with winning smiles and a firm belief in the free market and the pursuit of

8

Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel

American interests. Yet the terms ‘Reaganism’ and ‘Reaganomics’ were nonetheless coined, perhaps as no more than indicators of over a decade of continuous Republican government in which policies remained consistent and identifiable – at least by comparison with the politics of compromise and consensus that had marked previous administrations. Despite being vague and often contradictory, then, Thatcherism and Reaganism have persisted as widely used terms precisely because they include the qualifications and contradictions that prevent them from being associated too readily with any single political or economic phenomenon. They are rather catch-all signifiers of a set of precepts that, whatever the truth of the matter, seemed to indicate a break with what had gone before in their willingness to favour conflict and assertion over consensus and compromise. They also denote a legacy that, while it may not have destroyed consensus utterly for later decades, has moved the grounds of that consensus considerably towards the right and has therefore reduced the possibilities open for leftist political and cultural participation in the foreseeable future. Chapter 1 will also note the way in which a number of writers and commentators have drawn correspondences between the 1980s and the 1960s that suggest an uneasy relationship between the political reversals suffered by the left during those two decades, and the role played by the countercultural left in effecting such reversals. This leads to an overview of the way in which writers and critics have addressed what has been described as the ‘ideological ambivalence of the postmodern’,17 acknowledging on the one hand that the climate of postmodernity offers the political left a site (or sites) of potential resistance to the dominant orders, while on the other arguing that postmodernity, by negating all claims to depth or finality, is vulnerable to appropriation by those orders, and to the accusation that it leads only to an impasse of political fragmentation and quietism. Chapter 2 will examine works by four white male British novelists, all of whom, in seeking to represent what they see as the impact of Thatcherism upon contemporary British society, invoke themes of complicity, guilt and political defeat. The first of these is Iain Banks, whose novels Complicity (1993) and Dead Air (2002) are treated as twin works that examine the conflict in the mind of the white male left-liberal between the need for violent revolution or pragmatic compromise as the most suitable response to the triumph of the New Right. This debate is revisited in Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve-Up! (1994), which suggests that British reserve, with its distaste for extremes, is inextricably linked to its own ‘other’ by a covert

Introduction 9

fascination with the extremes of gothic horror and transgressive sexuality that is both distanced and neutralized by elements such as camp and slapstick humour that function as cultural safety valves. The implication in these novels is that British popular and literary culture, by consistently suppressing, parodying and distancing itself from extremes, has refused a negotiation of those extremes in political and cultural life, and has thus allowed the right to ‘carve up’ the spoils of a neglected collectivist potential. Despite undertaking a more experimental and poetic approach to the representation of Thatcher’s Britain, many of the concerns addressed by Iain Sinclair’s Downriver (1991) are strikingly similar to those of the other novelists featured in this chapter in that Sinclair’s cast of bohemians and would-be revolutionaries are either marginalized by, or else become complicit with, the values that they profess to oppose. The notion of resistance is thrown back into the cultural realm to the extent that Downriver’s interrogation of its own modes of representation has a significant effect on both the form and the content of the novel itself. The last of the four writers is Martin Amis, who has been chosen for two main reasons. The first of these is his association (through his father, Kingsley) with the generation of ‘Angry Young Men’ whose intention it was to break with what was seen as the stagnant cultural life in Britain just after World War Two. The individualistic, assertive and belligerent attitude of the ‘Angries’ was antecedent to the libertarian and iconoclastic ‘permissiveness’ of the 1960s counterculture and the rise of the New Left, and it is possible to read the three novels discussed here – Money, London Fields (1989), and The Information (1995) – as an interrogation of the ways in which the individualisticlibertarian legacy of the generation of Kingsley Amis, as well as its successors in the 1960s, has manifested itself in a later economic and political context. Secondly, Amis has been selected because of mixed nationality and (more arguably) mixed class origins (he was educated at private schools on both sides of the Atlantic, but his father had a working-class background). The simultaneous confirmation and subversion of class and national stereotypes that are a feature of his novels make Amis a suitable choice for an examination of the ways in which, during the 1980s and 1990s, British institutions and traditions were often perceived to be the victims of a malevolent form of ‘Americanization’. Similarly, Amis’s work indicates the way in which the British novel of the 1980s, in trying to escape its reputation for restrained good taste and parochialism, was in many ways repeating

10 Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel

the attempt of his father’s generation to break with a similar tradition. The transatlantic identity of Martin Amis provides the link to the following chapter, in which the themes of left-liberal guilt and impotence are discussed within the context of the contemporary American social novel. It will begin by discussing contrasting attitudes towards social class and political consciousness on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and will look at two novels by Don DeLillo, White Noise (1984) and Mao II (1992), in order to illustrate the ways in which white male leftliberal novelists in the United States feel at once helpless in the face of implacable political and cultural opposition to their own sympathies, yet guilty and complicit with a system in which they prosper – materially, at least. A reading of Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections (2001) will reinforce this theme and bring to light the recurrent subject in many contemporary American novels of intergenerational tension. In The Corrections, this takes the form of selfblame, as the younger offspring of the Lambert family contemplate the notion that material and libidinal gain has contributed to the loss of potency and satisfaction in other social and political domains. It becomes apparent in this chapter that perceptions of the 1960s represent an important touchstone for many white male left-liberal novelists in their interrogation of Reagan’s America. Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990) explicitly contrasts the two decades, suggesting that the principal reasons for the final collapse of the 1960s counterculture in the Reagan years lay within the nature of the counterculture itself. Two other novels mentioned in this chapter that share a very distinctive 1980s setting – Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho – also make fleeting but significant references to the 1960s which imply that it was the self-indulgence of an earlier white male cohort who, in the name of personal freedom, paved the way for the ‘greed is good’ philosophy of the young male protagonists of both novels. Along with Ellis’s first novel, Less Than Zero (1985), these novels are employed to illustrate the way in which immersion within the consumer-driven lifestyle of Reaganite America is deemed not to bring the satisfaction promised by its apologists, but instead a deterioration of self that leads to acts and visions of horror and despair. James Annesley has labelled such novels ‘blank fictions’ because of their lack of any detectable political or ethical grounding, but it is proposed that this lack is made so dramatically and exaggeratedly apparent that there can be inferred from these writings a submerged need (albeit unfulfilled) for some such grounding as an alternative to a

Introduction 11

postmodern capitalism that offers no values or satisfactions other than those provided by the market.18 The need for alternative satisfactions provide the basis for the last two novels discussed in this chapter: Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (1991) and Microserfs (1996). Coupland’s characters share with those of Banks and Coe a typically left-liberal mixture of ambivalence and anxiety about the society in which they live, and about their own potential to effect change. Whereas characters in Complicity and What a Carve-Up! are torn between advocating violence and moderation as the most advisable means of social transformation, the assumption that their problems are political in nature is in contrast to Coupland’s characters, whose failure to make such an assumption means that their search for more profound and ‘authentic’ satisfactions presents a narrowed political perspective. Although the ‘questing’ of Coupland’s characters makes these novels less apocalyptic and horrific than those of (say) Ellis, what remains ‘blank’ about them is their failure to posit alternatives, and their uncertainty about the extent of their own involvement in this failure. The following chapter coins the term ‘individuation paradox’ in order to denote the way in which capitalism, while claiming that individualistic economic and social activity is the basis of a healthy and prosperous society, seems to many to represent only the erosion of individual sovereignty and selfhood. For those suspicious of, if not hostile towards, contemporary capitalism, one means by which the individuation paradox might be resolved is to reject the Thatcherite dictum that ‘there is no such thing as society’19 in favour of the notion that the individual self can only be defined satisfactorily in relation to others. What follows is a reassessment of collectivity in general, along with the suspicion that the individualist-libertarian discourses pursued by the postwar left have been appropriated by the New Right with devastating consequences for those collective values, traditions and institutions that had, in a more distant past, served as the tap root of progressive and dissenting movements. The writers whose work is studied in this and the subsequent chapters of this study are indicative of what I term a ‘change partners’ scenario, whereby the left, obliged by the social, economic and political legacy of the Reagan-Thatcher years to acknowledge the dangers of untrammelled individualism, began to reconsider tropes lately associated with conservatism – community, tradition, history, the family – while the right has loosened its association with those tropes in the interests of the advantages to be gleaned from embracing the libertarian ethos

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Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel

inherent within the advocacy of deregulated global markets. Because this ‘communitarian turn’ appears to offer to the contemporary white male left-liberal a potential source of escape from feelings of isolation, defeat and complicity, a number of works already discussed in earlier chapters will be revisited and examined alongside other texts in order to assess the ways in which writers view such a potential. It ought to be stressed, however, that it is hardly feasible to read (for example) either Amis’s ‘London trilogy’ or Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) as representations of the rediscovery of heart-warming communal values. It is more accurate to understand them as valedictions for the loss of such values, with Welsh’s novel delving further into left-liberal ambivalence by casting doubt upon the worth of communal identity even as its decline is regretted. Only in occasional passages does Trainspotting, along with the last two novels considered – Ian McEwan’s The Child In Time (1987) and Enduring Love (1997) – indicate that some form of collective (and progressive) salvation may be available. Significantly, both novelists suggest that such a resolution lies not with patriarchy but rather with the surrender of ‘macho’ individualistic assertiveness to a ‘feminized’ form of pragmatic left-liberalism based upon inclusion and co-operation rather than adversarialism and the imposition of teleological belief-systems. Chapter 5 will describe the way in which the motif of the abandoned or neglected church is employed in several examples of the contemporary British social novel in order to represent the left’s regret at the loss of sustainable collective identity as a consequence of its own decline. It will be proposed that the use of this motif in novels as diverse as Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (1995), Julian Barnes’s England, England (1998), Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981), Sinclair’s Downriver, and Anita Mason’s The War Against Chaos (1988) invokes not only the idea of an abandoned collective life, but may also be a covert statement by these novelists about the state of the social novel itself. The left-liberal acceptance of this ‘communitarian turn’ is far from complete, however, and Mason’s novel is shown to demonstrate the ways in which appeals to ‘tradition’ and ‘community’ can be exploited as a means to reinforce reactionary social control. Mason’s protagonist is the very type of abject and dissenting white male character whose dilemma forms the basis of this study, yet his struggles also serve as a reminder that those social groups and individuals who are marginalized or pressed into subordinate roles by mainstream society may be more apprehensive about a revival of Gemeinschaft than those white male left-liberals who might advocate such a revival, and that for such groups the notion of personal liberation

Introduction 13

and self-determination may not seem discredited or exhausted. Mason’s novel sheds a positive light on certain forms of (anarchic) communal participation, but even this is hedged with qualifications and pessimism, indicating that the default position of the British left-liberal novelist is one of doubt and ambivalence that impedes the adoption of a committed and explicit political viewpoint. Chapter 6 transfers this discussion to the American context and demonstrates that, whereas British novelists tend to focus their examination of the individual in crisis upon the network of institutions and customs that envelop and connect individuals, their American counterparts, although clearly aware of the importance of social connection, lean towards an emphasis on the assertion and dissolution of personal identity. The chapter begins with a discussion of communal decline and of the proposal that this decline can be linked both to the rise of the New Right and to the origins of the American state and Constitution. This is followed by a re-reading of those texts examined in Chapter 3 in order to pursue the theme of the ‘individuation paradox’ in the context of eroded public space and supportive collective frameworks. With this in mind, the chapter will then look at a number of texts that feature the peculiarly American phenomenon of the cult. Just as, in Britain, conservative tropes such as tradition and community seem to offer a solution to the anomie and instability of the contemporary world, so in America cult membership seems to offer to the besieged and fearful individual a source of collective redemption. Nevertheless, cult membership in novels such as Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love (1989), and DeLillo’s Mao II (also revisited in this chapter) and The Names (1992) is shown to lead to similar levels of violent destruction as those experienced by protagonists who continue to participate in mainstream society. From this, it can be inferred that the dynamics of cult behaviour mean that the cult is not an alternative to contemporary American life but instead represents that life in extremis. This could mean that contemporary America has become a form of ‘super cult’: an idea that in turn begs the question as to what constitutes a ‘true’ (in the sense of healthy and constructive) rather than a ‘false’ (or violent and destructive) community. What many of the writers featured here appear to advocate is an open, inclusive and non-prescriptive society that is deemed to be associated with a lost or abandoned past not dissimilar to that invoked by some of the British novels discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. As with the latter, however, the occasional wistful longing for a renascent communitarianism evident in the works of Pynchon,

14

Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel

DeLillo, and Coupland is qualified with a wariness about the viability of coupling a progressive project to dreams of a deceptive ‘pioneer’ nostalgia that drains such aspirations of conviction, leaving the contemporary American social novel in a state of enervation not dissimilar to its British equivalent. The study will end with a chapter that contrasts the implementation and legacy of Reaganism with that of Thatcherism in a way that suggests that the latter offered the British political and cultural left the greater potential for dissident strategies. It will then draw some conclusions about what remains of that potential, and about the double aspect of the contemporary social novel as written by the white male left-liberal: at once offering a portal to progressive thought and action, yet also weighed down by its own self-reflexive inertia.

1 Reagan, Thatcher and the 1980s

On 3 May 1979, Margaret Thatcher led the Conservative Party to a convincing victory in the UK General Election. Almost exactly 18 months later – on 4 November 1980 – Ronald Reagan won the US Presidential election for the Republican Party in a similarly emphatic manner. The close proximity of these victories suggested that the electorate within both countries had become disillusioned with the socalled ‘consensus’ politics of the postwar period, in which the conflicting demands of labour and capital had attempted an uneasy compromise, and had instead accepted a more adversarial politics that proposed the removal of state intervention from a free market, and the gradual dismantling of the public sector. The consensual project was only ever a qualified success: in the United States, President Johnson’s Great Society programmes coincided with mass protest movements in favour of black civil rights and against the Vietnam War; while in the United Kingdom, attempts to impose wage limits on industrial and public sector workers resulted in disputes that brought down both the Heath and Callaghan administrations.1 Nevertheless, the concept of the mixed economy seemed to suit almost everyone: the working and lower-middle classes could look forward to increased prosperity and social mobility, while the capitalist class saw those same factors fuelling the development of an expanding consumption-based economy that simultaneously voided the collectivist spirit fostered by the war of any radical political content. 2 During the course of the 1970s, however, confidence in the consensual, corporatist model was shattered by a series of crises. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)inspired 1973 oil price rises, competition from newly industrialized nations, slow growth that resulted in a build-up of surplus capital, 15

16

Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel

and increasing levels of inflation, unemployment and industrial disputes all contributed to a sense of economic and social malaise. 3 Yet, as some commentators have argued, the situation offered to private capital opportunities for regeneration and even expansion.4 It became evident, for example, that the competition from emerging nations that seemed to threaten Western prosperity could have the effect of undermining the influence of the Western labour force to the benefit of ‘globalized’ capitalism. Similarly, ‘the internationalization of capital flows’, abetted by technological developments in the fields of communications and construction, enabled the new generation of multi-national corporations to re-locate easily according to economic advantage, thereby gaining political leverage against local and national governments, who were obliged to compete for muchneeded sources of employment and revenue.5 An important aspect of this economic and social reconfiguration was the changing nature of the workforce, especially in the West. From being predominantly male, white, full-time, skilled, unionized and based in the manufacturing sector, the workforce was becoming increasingly mixed-sex, multi-racial, de-skilled, part-time or short-term and non-unionized, with reduced entitlement to fringe benefits and reduced legislative protection, working in the white collar service, leisure and financial sectors.6 In both the United States and the United Kingdom, the switch from a blue to a white collar by a significant proportion of the industrial working class had the effect of disrupting old loyalties and antagonisms, to the disadvantage of leftist parties and movements. For those on the right, it then became necessary to discredit the active participants in the postwar consensus. Once in power, this involved the Reagan and Thatcher governments in a curiously self-reflexive attack on the government itself (and on public institutions in general) as the principal cause of ‘stagflation’ (i.e., the combination of slow growth and increasing rates of inflation).7 In the United States, ‘Big Government’, which had been perceived as enabling and positive by an earlier generation accustomed to the New Deal and the Great Society projects, became associated – not least because of the Watergate scandal and military failure in Vietnam – with waste, corruption and decline.8 There is agreement among commentators that President Carter took much of the blame for this sense of decline because Carter’s ‘unwelcome realism’ with regard to economic and political circumstance went against the grain of simplistic, flag-waving optimism represented by Ronald Reagan. By ‘preach[ing] the seemingly un-American virtues of limits, of

Reagan, Thatcher and the 1980s

17

self-limitations’, Carter had offended the notion of America as a nation whose boundaries – in terms of economic and geopolitical influence – were to be expanded endlessly outwards.9 If Carter was America’s scapegoat, the Labour Party under Jim Callaghan’s leadership was held to account for a comparable similar sense of decline in Britain. The country was increasingly forced to see itself as a faded imperial power being overtaken in terms of production and growth by its own trading rivals. Between 1974 and 1979, the Wilson and Callaghan governments had attempted, through the use of the renowned ‘social contract’ with the major employers and unions, to control both inflation and the extent of industrial dispute by limiting both price increases and wage claims, but with limited success. Although the Callaghan administration had begun to make progress in tackling some of these problems before the 1979 General Election, it could not avoid being associated with the overwhelming sense of crisis and decline that had grown throughout the decade. The extent to which the decisive electoral victories of Thatcher and Reagan were an explicit endorsement of New Right policies rather than an appropriation of a more general popular discontent is of great significance to the left. If the former, then the pessimism of the contemporary social novel is thoroughly understandable; if the latter, then there exists for the left-liberal writer the possibility of unmasking the ideological nature of that appropriation, implying thereby a degree of hope for a progressive politics and for an engaged literature – a conclusion that, arguably, puts the ‘blankness’ of many of the texts discussed here in an unsympathetic light. Even moderate commentators have cast doubt on the extent of the Reagan and Thatcher victories as popular endorsements of New Right thinking. Although Reagan captured an impressive 44 states out of 50 in 1980, this ‘landslide’ victory was achieved with only 41 per cent of the popular vote, while Thatcher’s victory in 1979 rested on an overall majority of 43 seats (by contrast, the Labour overall majority in 1997 was 167) and was achieved with a 43.9 per cent share of the popular vote.10 Geoffrey Smith is one advocate of the view that what brought both leaders to power was not so much popular enthusiasm for deregulation and the operation of free markets as a vague (and by no means universal) desire for change.11 Smith also denies that either Reagan or Thatcher initiated a complete reversal of the policies of their predecessors, indicating that both Carter and Callaghan had already begun to implement policies that were to some extent monetarist in nature. Nevertheless, neither Carter nor Callaghan was able

18 Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel

to convince voters that, even by adopting monetarist policies, they would be capable of restoring national prosperity and stability. The impetus for change, however vague or specific, was to become entrusted to Reagan and Thatcher by what they represented in the popular mind rather than to monetarism per se. But what exactly did they represent? There is general agreement among these commentators that neither the term ‘Thatcherism’ nor the term ‘Reaganism’ signifies any particularly original, coherent or consistent body of thought or practice. Although both leaders broadly subscribed to the principles of monetarism, their approval of economic libertarianism did not extend to its social equivalent and, despite insisting on the need to roll back the powers of the state, neither was sympathetic towards liberal legislation regarding drug use, pornography, abortion, and homosexuality. Reagan fostered close relationships with ultraconservative pressure groups, most of which, like Christian Voice and the Moral Majority, had an evangelical Christian basis, while Thatcher made suitably understated references to prayer and church-going intended to please (or, at least, not to offend) middle England. Both leaders also invoked myths of a national past that had supposedly been traduced by a network of malign forces (socialism, Keynesian economics, the welfare state, a free-thinking ‘permissive’ liberal elite) that had sapped American and British society of the virtues of self-reliance and behavioural restraint. This contrast between economic libertarianism and social conservatism is used to support the claim that the ideological nature of the Reagan-Thatcher axis has been exaggerated by the left, and that their terms in office were governed more by ‘an instinct, a series of moral values [ ... ] rather than an ideology’.12 This argument indicates that the appeal of Reagan and Thatcher was not based purely on economics, but rested on an appeal that transcended economics, or at least masked the latter beneath spectacle and rhetoric. Indeed, both leaders, through the efforts of advisers and image-makers, fostered a cult of personality that went far outside the traditional parameters of political debate in order to boost their mass appeal. As Gary Wills’s biography attests, Reagan was sold to America as a slick but trustworthy avuncular figure in the same way that movie stars are presented to the public: that is, in terms of fantasy and desire rather than policy and accountability. Reagan’s reputation as the ‘Teflon’ president – in the sense that no stain or blemish would ever stick to him – remained intact because, after the comparative realism of the Carter years, the

Reagan, Thatcher and the 1980s

19

lure of the kind of American Dream peddled by Reagan for those who continued to participate in the voting process (mainly the affluent middle classes) seemed to take precedence over economic and social reality.13 According to Wills, Reagan’s ‘Marlboro man’ image is intended to suggest that modern capitalism is based upon the self-reliant individual: a notion that is undermined by the incessant demands within the capitalist economy for ever greater specialization in the interest of economic growth. Such demands reinforce, whether by self-interest or economic coercion, the need for collective effort and responsibility that tend to be inimical to individual self-reliance (in the form of small-scale farming or craftsmanship, for example) as well as to the sense of identity experienced by the modern urban individual (a perennial theme of literature ever since the nineteenth century). Reagan’s image can thus be understood as an attempt to conceal the collective basis of capitalism (as well as Reagan’s own personal debt to the collectivist orientation of the New Deal) beneath a veneer of individualistic self-assertion that served the interests of the New Right project.14 By contrast with Reagan’s movie-star slickness, Thatcher seemed like something dredged deep from within the British psyche. Resembling a formidable auntie, matron or nanny, this avatar of a besieged middle England seemed a perverse choice for a nation supposedly throwing aside its drab, repressed image in the name of liberating energies. What may explain this discrepancy is the way in which both leaders renegotiated their own pasts in terms of their shared vision of the future. Like that of Reagan, Thatcher’s early life owed a great deal to the corporatist ethos of an earlier generation: her biographer Hugo Young testifies that, for her father, Alderman Alfred Roberts, ‘public spending, properly directed, seems to have been [ ... ] the acme of public morality’.15 Both leaders, in adopting the belief that public spending now no longer promoted worthy industriousness but instead the self-indulgent habits of both a liberal elite and an ‘undeserving’ poor, were required to reconstruct the 1940s and 1950s not as decades marked by centrist consensus and state intervention, but as a mythical period in which ‘decent’ families built their own prosperity unencumbered by state regulation or enervating welfare. While such a revision of reality was consistent not only with Reagan’s background in film, but also with resistance to the fearful world invoked by Jimmy Carter, it seemed that Britain too, having at one time glimpsed a future consisting of Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’, the contraceptive pill and ‘Swinging London’, was now,

20

Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel

like Walter Benjamin’s angel, reversing fearfully into that future, with its collective mind, inspired by the backward-facing revisionism of Thatcherism, defined by what has been summarized as ‘the xenophobia of the private housing estate [and] the pragmatic conservatism engendered by the inevitability of mortgage payments’.16 Wills claims that this distortion of the past and ambivalent view of the future rests on the contradiction between the nature of modern capitalism and the rhetorical basis on which it is sold to the electorate by leaders such as Reagan and Thatcher. Consumer goods, he argues, are sold on the basis that they will improve our lives but somehow will not alter the moral, ethical or communal foundations upon which those lives are based. Yet, it seems that these goods do just that; eroding cherished certainties, values and even the physical environment, in a whirl of change necessitated by the demands of expansion and growth. The marketing of consumer goods (and of politicians), which not so long ago relied on images of a deracinated, space-age future, is now increasingly oriented towards the nostalgic in order to assuage the fear of an insecure future and to mask the contradiction between what the commodity promises and what it delivers. It is logical, then, that politicians like Reagan and Thatcher, even as they proposed a future of deregulated ‘big bangs’ and new information and communication technologies, should also offer reassurance in the form of an implied promise of a return to the values and certainties of a comforting, mythical past that is consistent with the age and social conservatism of both leaders. This image of Reagan and Thatcher as a highly compatible, mature, transatlantic couple (each with their own ‘ghost’ spouse) is one of the most enduring of the 1980s and fostered the idea that the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and America had never been healthier. Reagan’s affable, relaxed manner dovetailed neatly with the more intense and assertive character of Thatcher: she supplied the gravitas and he the polish and charm. Yet this affinity between the pair did not appear to signify a great deal when it came to the decision of the United States to invade Grenada and bomb Libya in the mid-1980s, and when America’s diplomatic support for the Falklands campaign turned out to be less fervent than Thatcher would have liked. For the right, this hardly mattered: the ‘back-to-the-future’ fantasy sold by both leaders won elections and consolidated power. This returns us to the question as to whether the Reagan-Thatcher project was an openly populist declaration of good faith in the idea that a healthy market economy benefits everyone, or an ideological dupe

Reagan, Thatcher and the 1980s

21

behind which lay a programme intended only to benefit an affluent and powerful elite. Was it, in short, ‘pragmatic’ or ‘ideological’? If pragmatism is to be defined as the concept whereby results are deemed to be the test of the truth of one’s beliefs, then the success of the Reagan-Thatcher fantasy can be deemed as ‘true’ as that of the Disney Corporation (in the sense that, although Disney deals in fictions, its profits are real enough). On this basis, the comparative lack of theory produced by the New Right is understandable: why theorize, or attempt to delve beneath appearance in order to unearth hidden values or meanings, if one’s actions bring success?17 Under this kind of pragmatic paradigm (where it seems that might is right) the suggestion that the Reagan-Thatcher project is ideological seems misplaced in that the need for ideology – or for its unmasking – is superfluous. The weakness of this (admittedly circular) argument lies with the pragmatic notion of measuring belief against achievement: against what set of beliefs are the results of the Reagan-Thatcher project being measured? If it can be determined that Reagan and Thatcher concealed the elitist intent of their project beneath a veneer of deceitful populism, then both the moderate ‘good faith’ model and the pragmatist argument are confounded. To invoke the ‘might is right’ principle at this point (on the grounds that concealed elitism is justified because of its success at the ballot box) is not only to surrender the populist argument, but it is also to admit to the cynical substitution of demagoguery for democracy. On this basis, it is legitimate to question the nature of the professed personal convictions of both Reagan and Thatcher. Despite his courtship of far-right Christian movements, Reagan failed to implement much of the social legislation with regard to abortion, homosexuality, sex education and religious practice in schools demanded by those groups: as one study has noted, ‘most of the Christian Right agenda went nowhere during the Reagan years’.18 Furthermore, Wills reports that Reagan (unlike Carter) struggled to give convincing examples of his religious convictions in interviews, which led the Christian right to speculate that Reagan – baptized a Catholic, but twice-married – was exploiting their support. Similarly, although Thatcher paid lip-service to Christian worship and the monarchy, the criticism of her policies voiced by various bishops (as well as Prince Charles) did not receive a sympathetic hearing, which suggests that Thatcher’s professed allegiances were, like Reagan’s evangelism, useful political appendages rather than a set of sincerely-held beliefs.

22

Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel

The argument that Thatcher was seeking to implement a pragmatic rather than an ideological project is buoyed up by claims that the 1979 Conservative Party election manifesto was not a particularly strident New Right document, and that privatization did not play a significant part in Conservative policy until their second term in office. It might equally be argued, however, that if the New Right intended to exploit general discontent for its own purposes it would hardly declare the elitist nature of its agenda. Such an argument proposes that the populist strategies of both Reagan and Thatcher in their early campaigns represent an ideological Trojan horse that, once accepted by the electorate as an acknowledgement of widespread disillusionment with the incumbents of the 1979–1980 elections, would reveal a different agenda. Indeed, the second terms in office of both Reagan and Thatcher demonstrated that the methods employed by both leaders to arrest economic decline would benefit some more than others. Nonetheless, it is undeniable that both Reagan and Thatcher struck a chord with many voters, whether or not those voters consciously subscribed to the tenets of free-market capitalism. What both leaders seemed to offer those voters was the means to leave behind the restrictions and the stagnation that the postwar corporatist model had been deemed to represent. Herbert Kitschelt has argued that this model was a victim of its own success in that the prosperity it brought about created heightened expectations and ‘libertarian, decentralizing demands’ to which the 1960s counterculture had contributed in no small measure, and from which political parties who explicitly distanced themselves from the image of the monolithic, inflexible state, could derive benefit.19 Such an upheaval meant that the traditional left-right political axis had lost its value as a meaningful tool of political analysis, so Kitschelt posited the addition of a libertarian-authoritarian axis running perpendicular to the original left-right axis. Using these axes, it is possible to explain the appeal of Thatcher and Reagan without the conclusion that their mandate was necessarily a vindication of the New Right. Instead, it can be argued that the older institutions of the left – particularly trades unions and nationalized industries – came to be perceived as authoritarian and outmoded at a time when the diffuse, libertarian impulses of the British and American electorates coincided with the ‘new broom’ rhetoric of Thatcher and Reagan and their frequent appeals to individual freedom. Thatcherism and Reaganism, then, had many subscribers, but it is doubtful that all of them knew what their subscription entailed.

Reagan, Thatcher and the 1980s

23

What it did entail were some peculiar practices for politicians who were supposedly attempting to restore general prosperity and stability. In the United States, even the elder George Bush had warned, when running against Reagan for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination, of the latter’s ‘voodoo economics’20 that rested on a curious combination of monetarist and supply-side measures that were never intended to be used simultaneously but which, in effecting cuts in welfare payments, jobs and rates of pay, worked to the advantage of the wealthy. 21 The immediate effects of ‘Reaganomics’ were not signs of restored prosperity and optimism, but rather the recession of 1981–1982, and the growth of a huge balance of payments deficit. In time, however, the increased profitability of those enterprises that were able to survive the earlier recession (largely through job cuts), along with increased investment in the United States from abroad (itself stimulated by the use of high domestic interest rates as a means of attacking inflation), triggered the return of ‘petrodollars’ to America for investment purposes and a five-year economic boom. Unemployment figures fell but many of the jobs created by the boom were low-quality ‘McJobs’, based predominantly in the service sector. 22 If the nature of such employment was precarious, it reflected the nature of the boom, balanced awkwardly upon the combination of an expanding stock market, extended credit, and an insistence upon increased defence expenditure that seemed to contradict the monetarist squeeze on spending in most other areas. In October 1987, the stock market suffered its worst postwar crash, an event that was followed by the Savings and Loans crisis, which saw the collapse of many local financial institutions throughout the United States. Pointing out the extent to which the US Federal Reserve was responsible for shoring up Wall Street during the 1987 crises, one commentator pointedly concluded that, ‘rumours of the death of the interventionist state have been exaggerated’. 23 The free market, it seemed, still required the support of public institutions and public money for its own survival. Far from reviving a sense of general sense of prosperity and optimism, Reaganism came to represent for many an indictment of ‘trickle-down’ economics in the form of an increasingly insecure, cynical and pessimistic society in which ‘an immense reservoir of social capital and civic trust’ had been drained by the withdrawal of the wealthy and powerful from social participation both in physical (into gated communities and isolated estates) and economic terms (through their insistence on tax cuts and private provision). The freedom from ‘Big Government’ demanded by the

24 Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel

electorate in 1980 had become, under Reagan (and subsequently), the freedom of the super-rich ‘from obligation to or for unnamed strangers, and freedom from a sense of inclusion in the social’. 24 By 1987, it seemed that ‘Reaganomics I’ – the populist version that proposed the free market as the route to general prosperity – had been superseded by ‘Reaganomics II’: a more covert doctrine that, while maintaining its opposition to the socially progressive aspects of postwar consensualism, was evidently prepared to use the tools of the latter – namely, state intervention in legislative and fiscal terms – in order to ensure that the interests of America’s social and economic elite were met. In the United Kingdom, a similar pattern may be discerned. Commentators as diverse in political outlook as Peter Riddell and Alex Callinicos claim that, like Reagan, Thatcher also began to retreat from monetarism towards the end of the 1980s. New Right doctrine had insisted that the postwar combination of Keynesian economic policies, workplace legislation and the influence of trades unions had impeded the effectiveness of the labour market, and was therefore the cause of unemployment and economic stagnation, yet by 1986, the number of those unemployed had risen to 3.13 million (Riddell’s figure), demonstrating that after seven years of attacks on trades unions, wage levels and workplace legislation, Thatcherism had still not solved the problems of the labour market. Furthermore, despite an overall improvement, the performance of the UK economy did not bear comparison with Britain’s competitors among the G7 nations. 25 Even moderate commentators damned the Thatcherite experiment in both economic and social terms, and, like many of the social novelists whose work is discussed in subsequent chapters, invoked the image of a country in which the Thatcherite emphasis on individual assertiveness ‘with little regard for wider social responsibilities and interests’ had fuelled a growth in crime, drug use and other forms of anti-social behaviour, not just in low-income urban areas but also in relatively well-heeled country towns. 26 Thatcherites tended to blame the perceived decline in behavioural standards and social cohesion upon the lack of personal restraint associated with the ‘permissiveness’ of the 1960s and 1970s yet, as Riddell has observed, Thatcher’s governments – like Reagan’s administrations – made no serious attempt to repeal the laws relating to homosexuality, abortion, divorce and capital punishment. It may be inferred from this failure to reverse the social libertarian legislation of the earlier decades that the pursuit of economic individualism in the 1980s may not be so implacably

Reagan, Thatcher and the 1980s

25

opposed to the former, and that the two impulses came to exist in a relationship of mutual confirmation from which the right drew considerable advantage. The success of the Reagan-Thatcher project can be measured by the extent to which subsequent administrations have been unable or unwilling to roll back policy towards the political centre or left. Neither the Democratic Party in the United States, nor the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, have made serious attempts to reverse the policies of privatization, deregulation and trades union reforms that had been pursued by their predecessors, and both succeeded in achieving electoral victory by persuading voters that they had no intention of allowing inflation to rise, or of imposing increased levels of income tax. The price of their victories has been capitulation to the New Right project, while ignoring the fact that, in the United Kingdom at least, approximately 60 per cent of the electorate steadfastly refused to vote for the Conservatives throughout the 1980s. 27 This leads us back once more to the debate between the ‘pragmatic’ and ‘ideological’ accounts of the Reagan-Thatcher period. Although the former construes the flexibility of the Reagan and Thatcher administrations with regard to New Right doctrine as proof of its case, the latter perceives such flexibility as evidence of a more nuanced ideological strategy that is still being unravelled. Such an unravelling might reveal that the Reagan-Thatcher project was both pragmatic and ideological. By taking on a populist guise – at least initially – it could claim to be attempting to restore economic well-being while responding to libertarian drives for the removal of restraint upon self-gratification. At the same time, however, it could exploit the technological developments and social changes that had led to the emergence of those drives in order to strengthen the influence of the capitalist class, and also to make an assault upon the gains made during the postwar period by organized labour, marginalized social groups, and public sector professionals. In order to maintain electoral appeal, both Reagan and Thatcher exploited a strategic flexibility that attempted to avoid making the damaging effects of their policies too evident – at least to their less fervent supporters – and to maintain cults of personality that existed to assure those supporters that the unleashed powers of the free market would enhance rather than erode their quality of life. As even supporters of the pragmatist line have acknowledged, neither Reaganism nor Thatcherism succeeded in restoring the general economic prosperity attained during the postwar period. Where its success lay was in restoring and enhancing the

26 Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel

wealth and power of the social and economic elite, and in shifting the course of the political mainstream some distance to the right. During the speculation boom of the 1980s, it seemed that capital had begun to break free of any connection to solid currency and traditional means of exchange. The analysis of cyber-capital increasingly presented itself as ‘a problem of abstraction’ rather than an engagement with any form of ‘base’, whether economic or epistemological. 28 The sense of a severance from – or even an assault upon – received notions of ‘reality’ and ‘grounding’ corresponds to an American presidency that, for some, ‘was only tenuously rooted in reality’, and which was deemed to have ‘a surreal quality in the way that presidential statements and objectives were allowed to prevail over self- evident proof of their implausibility or invalidity [ ... as if] sincerely held beliefs had a creative property to them – that “makebelieve” could literally be true’. 29 The connection is taken up by Jane Feuer, who comments that ‘1980s culture was financed by imaginary money (junk bonds) in the same way that Reagan was an imaginary president’, and who extends this connection to popular culture, pointing out that Reagan’s inauguration year (1981) saw not only tax cuts for the wealthy and the deregulation of the media, but also the launch of both Dallas and MTV. The harsh economic imperatives of Reaganomics, it seemed, were being masked by a tableau of rock surrealism and fantasies about the super-rich. 30 Mention of rock music in this context invokes the uncomfortable correspondences a number of writers have made between the 1960s counterculture and the Reaganite 1980s. Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland (1990) is an extended meditation on the notion that the latter decade was a ‘mirror-image’ of the former, not least in the sense that the liberal perspective of charismatic 1960s figures such as President Kennedy, Martin Luther King came to be inverted by outspoken 1980s conservatives such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Steven Paul Miller argues that what the 1960s counterculture shared with the neoconservatism of the 1980s was a desire to break free from strictures (and structures) that were perceived as oppressive limitations on personal freedom, as well as the conviction that ‘reality needs to be justified and is only truly authenticated and accommodated by intimations of a visceral super-reality’. 31 In the 1960s, the latter consisted of a utopian vision of peace, joy, and personal liberation from the behavioural norms of the 1950s: in the 1980s, a dreamworld of expanding affluence and self-gratification was promulgated as the only desirable alternative to fearsome visions

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27

of wasteful public expenditure, taxation and other ‘Carteresque’ limitations on the American Dream. As Miller’s account makes clear, however, neither the counterculture nor the New Right believed that they were escaping reality: on the contrary, both sought to re-make it. The counterculture pursued utopian aims while simultaneously seeking to expose the truth about (e.g.) Vietnam, racism and police brutality, while the New Right made Panglossian pronouncements about the potential of free markets alongside social-Darwinist rhetoric and appeals to economic realism. What both claimed, in short, was cognizance of a superior reality that vindicated their right to expose and to mould inferior reality according to that privileged vision. Where they differed was in their respective attitudes towards conflict with the state apparatus. For the counterculture, the capitalist state was the agent most responsible for blocking its route to Utopia, and so was the principal target for dissent and rebellion. The New Right also adopted an anti-statist outlook, yet succeeded in reinforcing the power of ‘Big Government’ even as that power was admonished. By means of a strange self-reflexiveness, the Reaganite state did not attempt to foment dissent but instead sought to neutralize it by claiming that the state (under neoconservative direction) wished to erase itself, and that Utopia was already available within the fulfilment of those desires stimulated by an unfettered, consumerist-led capitalism. The establishment of collective bonds deemed by the left to have been blocked by an oppressive state were no longer necessary in the dreamworld of the libidinal marketplace: on the contrary, such bonds could now be considered part of that oppressive and outdated apparatus which was to be abolished, along with all collective interference with individuals and the market. This aspect of the Reaganite presidency gave pause to those on the left for whom the distinguishing features of twentieth century thought were considered to be subversive and progressive rather than politically conservative. Ideas such as those proposing that truth is shaped rather than found, 32 that the relationship between language, perception and reality is deeply problematic, and that historical and scientific events have discredited both religious belief and confidence in the ideas of the Enlightenment, have had the effect of calling into question traditional meaning, value and truth, and of disrupting received distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, and between the authentic (or natural) and the inauthentic (or artificial). For those groups and individuals previously subordinated and marginalized by the forces of patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism, the

28

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arrival of such ideas meant that it was now possible to take advantage of the displacement of the foundations upon which those latter institutions were built, and to open up any system or discourse to perpetual interrogation and contestation. The confidence of the left in this, however, has never been total. The notion that there are ‘no effective hierarchies in cultures, no depths beneath surfaces, no totalities through which to organize fragments; and no political theories adequate to the dispersal of significance in the postmodern world’33 suggests to some that, because no model or discourse can be privileged over another, the decision as to what kind of reality is ‘made’ may be open not to consensus or democratic process, but rather to the straightforward assertion of power. 34 In the same way that an allegedly pragmatic approach to the economy in the name of liberty and democracy conceals the demagoguery and manipulation of Reaganism and Thatcherism, so it may be that what lurks behind postmodern antifoundationalism in the wake of the events of the 1980s may be an affirmation rather than a denial of the workings of the globalized free market,35 while activists frequently condemn postmodernist theory as an abdication of effective political engagement.36 Michael Hardt and Anthony Negri contend that the subversive potential of such theory is now limited by the possibility that contemporary capitalism no longer has a pressing need to insist on the importance of those institutions being subverted, and so feels unthreatened by their deconstruction within academia. 37 Those who defend contemporary theory against such accusations insist that the perspectives it provides represent the very opposite of uncritical acceptance, and that attacks on deconstructionist techniques can usually be traced back to closed interpretative models that seek to assert an implicitly patriarchal ‘mastery’ of truth and history.38 When called upon to explain what deconstructionism might represent in any positive sense, its proponents frequently claim that it questions representation itself, and thus the dichotomy of standing for or against anything. Thus, it is very difficult if not strictly impossible to describe deconstruction itself as if it were simply this or that identity or essence – a body of beliefs or values, a method, a system, what have you, that we could then understand outside the specific activity of such testing. The problem is, how to give a description that could adequately comprehend what names only the necessary work of testing and

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renewing the limits of all understanding – how describe such work, that is, without at the same time irremediably betraying such work?39 What frustrates those wishing to interrogate rather than dismiss deconstructionism is the way in which its adherents ascribe to its critics perspectives that do not necessarily follow from having doubts about some of the consequences of the deconstructionist approach. The quotation given above illustrates the tendency by which the approach tends to presented for inspection and then immediately withdrawn, with a denial that any inspection is possible other than those that accept the terms – or the ‘anti-terms’ – of deconstruction itself. It is surely possible to insist on the evershifting, dialectical nature of social and historical truth, but at the same time cast doubt on the political relevance and effectiveness of attempting incessantly to split every atom of signification as if this process of linguistic fission had, in effect, become its own teleology or grand narrative. Furthermore, it still does not answer the question of how a stance that is supposedly informed by an emancipatory and egalitarian politics can possibly oppose anything if it is so radically opposed to that which the rhetorical – and presumably the actual – act of opposition entails. Hardt and Negri contend that, in any event, contemporary capitalism has made the debate redundant by regrouping and effectively outflanking what remains of a largely rhetorical opposition: When we begin to consider the ideologies and corporate capital and the world market, it certainly appears that the postmodernist and postcolonial theorists who advocate a politics of difference, fluidity and hybridity in order to challenge the binaries and essentialism of modern sovereignty have been outflanked by the strategies of power. Power has evacuated the bastion they are attacking and has circled around to their rear to join them in the assault in the name of difference. (138) The deconstructionist insistence that the concept of (for instance) truth is no more than the product of a reactionary discourse of power might have the effect of closing off certain avenues of resistance by ascribing to the concept too narrow and fixed a meaning that fails to take account of the ways in which it might be employed in concrete

30 Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel

historical situations. As Hardt and Negri put it, in the context of state terror and mystification, clinging to the primacy of the concept of truth can be a powerful and necessary form of resistance [ ... ] The master narratives of the Enlightenment do not seem particularly repressive here, and the concept of truth is not fluid or unstable – on the contrary! The truth is that this general ordered the torture and assassination of that union leader, and this colonel led the massacre of that village. (155) In other words, an appeal to truth need not be an appeal to an immutable, universalizing truth but to a truth generated by a particular context (after all, it is either true or untrue that the colonel led the massacre; it cannot be both, or neither). From a contrasting political perspective, Richard Rorty shares this apprehension with regard to the ostensible negation of all asserted value, proposing that the criterion by which moral and political assertions and practices ought to be measured is the alleviation of suffering.40 Thus, the ultra-relativism that lurks behind the refusal of any model of reality, truth or value seems to many across a broad range of those on the left implicitly elitist on the basis that it is only those who are not forced to confront pressing social, economic or political circumstances who have the luxury of constantly being able to take a demolition ball to such models. Rorty’s influence is evident in the work of Anna Yeatman, who argues that the commitment of the New Right to the mechanism of the free market is an instance of the Nietzschean principle of ‘ultimate ends’ that ‘operates when political actors proclaim an absolute adherence to a particular value, and leave the consequences to take care of themselves’.41 In the place of both ‘grand narratives’ and ‘ultimate ends’, Yeatman proposes a ‘postmodern revisioning’ based upon a socially inclusive pragmatism that she claims represents the very kind of interventionist ethic so detested by Reagan and Thatcher. Such a proposal claims to be consistent with the anti-foundationalist tenets of postmodernist theory, while denying that the postmodern condition necessarily demands an acceptance of depthlessness and relativism. This type of approach, however, reflects the uncertainty in contemporary left-liberal circles as to how political resistance might be directed: revolutionary violence can hardly be placed on the agenda along with consensus; yet the alternative seems less than robust, and not a little conservative. If the strength of ‘postmodernist revisioning’ lies with its resistance to

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dogma and its ability to seek ‘local and provisional, rather than universal or absolute, powers of legitimation’, then its weakness lies with its lack of conviction over the need for struggle that is provided by ‘metanarratives of emancipation’.42 Consider the following quotation from Tony Blair: We should leave behind both the narrow and selfish individualism of the present and old notions of state control. Instead, we should fashion a new relationship between society and the individual for the future, where the purpose of social action is to liberate individual potential, and where rights and duties go hand in hand.43 The ingredients of the ‘postmodern revisioning’ are all here: the rejection of authoritarianism and individualism in favour of consensual agency; and a rhetoric of ‘newness’ coupled with an implicit assertion of traditional values. The fact that Blair’s ‘Third Way’ has been woefully inadequate in combating the increasing divisions between rich and poor, the assault on public spaces and institutions by private capital, and the increasing global hegemony of American neoconservatism, may simply be ascribed to cynical opportunism by a populist politician in the Thatcherite mould, but it may also indicate the ineffectiveness of left-liberal pragmatism with regard to providing a serious challenge to the forces of the free market and to political and religious fundamentalism. Yet, to paraphrase Thatcher herself, there is no alternative for those on the liberal left who, while being acutely aware of the inadequacy of principled liberal pragmatism in a world dominated by a combination of savagery and realpolitik, remain fearful of the cruelty, intolerance and hypocrisy so often associated with the outcomes of revolutionary ardour. The left-liberal reassessment of postmodernism was not restricted to speculation about political practice and cultural theory. In the 1980s, the critical mood turned against American experimental fiction of the 1960s and 1970s that eschewed both realism and the ‘high art’ pretensions of modernism in favour of subverting cultural distinctions and exploring the problematic nature of representation and meaning.44 The language games, formal innovation and stylistic experimentation that was a feature of such fiction was dismissed by many commentators as a kind of ludic nihilism that privileged its own artifice over any attempt at social or political relevance. Writing towards the end of the 1980s, Allan Lloyd Smith denies that the postmodern condition necessarily involves the purposeful abandonment

32 Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel

of mimesis as practised by such writers as John Barth but instead offers the opportunity for a much-needed reassessment of the latter in a process that can involve engagement with an avowedly problematic reality as well as the investigation of the means of its capture. Smith argues that the formalism of much experimental fiction made it seem inadequate in the face of Reaganism, and that what had seemed subversive in an earlier decade, now seemed much less so: ‘the openness came look like closedness, as reality balefully (and joyfully) persisted in the face of fiction’s dismissal of it’.45 Instead, Smith challenges American writers to concern themselves with ‘the re-attachment of words to things: in the certain knowledge of arbitrariness of signification, a new kind of adequation is called for’ (41). Also writing in the 1980s, Patricia Waugh makes a distinction, in keeping with that made by Hal Foster between ‘a postmodernism of resistance and a postmodernism of reaction’,46 between two forms of metafiction: ‘one that finally accepts a substantial real world whose significance is not entirely composed of relationships within language; and one that suggests there can never be an escape from the prisonhouse of language and either delights or despairs in this.’47 Like Smith, Waugh recommends that contemporary fiction, reinvigorated rather than driven into insularity by metafictional techniques, blend metafiction with mimesis so as to reproduce within the text a troublesomely ‘storied’ world in such a way that all fabulation is interrogated, obliging the reader to question rather than accede to the postmodern dreamworld. Another critic writing in the 1980s, Peter Currie, focuses upon the crisis of the individual in postmodernist fiction, and detects a curious polarization between ‘on the one side [ ... ] a fetishization of the inmost me, a deification of an original essential self; on the other, an effective negation and diffraction of the self, a transgression of the identity principle’.48 These tendencies are mutually reinforcing: corporate dehumanization prompts a greater ‘Me-ism’49 which in turn sucks the individual-as-consumer further into the whirlpool of the corporate world. Intensive self-analysis and the search for personal redemption are the outcomes of ‘untrammelled American individualism ... [yet are] inversely proportional to the individual’s demise’ (68). Contemporary life indicates the erosion of a stable, autonomous identity despite the fact that an abstracted individualism is frequently invoked in order to vindicate postmodern capitalism, not only in terms of the Reaganite myth of the self-reliant cowboy-entrepreneur, but also with regard to the healthy-happy object of the therapy industries (from pharmaceuticals and

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fitness to psychotherapy and New Age lifestyle manuals). Currie finds within postmodernist fiction ‘a correlation between the phenomenon of self-reflexive narrative and introspective self-absorption in American culture’ (56). This suggests that the attempt in such fiction to refute the primacy of the individual in American popular mythology is vulnerable to the accusation that the latter is actually a confirmation of the ‘individuation paradox’ within consumerist society wherein the individual exists only as a cipher that, while asserting its own cultural primacy, fosters economic and social practices that contribute to its erosion as an agent of democratic participation.50 Currie is not entirely hostile to postmodernist fiction, and acknowledges that it at least attempted to interrogate the notion of the sovereign individual so that ‘far from endorsing the dehumanization of the subject, [postmodernist fiction] actively reinstates the claims of the concrete individual by opposing the ideology of abstract individualism (attacking as it does the essentialist foundations of the myth of the autonomous individual)’ (68). What is missing, Currie claims, is the role of the collective in the determination of individual identity, and recommends that fiction in the wake of the ludic school identify the self not as an autonomous entity but as ‘a mutual mediation or reciprocal determination of subject and social structure, a subject both product and agent’ (67). The recommendation that novelists rediscover agency may not accord with the despair, violence and nihilism frequently encountered in the postwar American novel, but Currie takes an optimistic view, suggesting that ‘negation [...] implies a correlative positive belief in the necessity for disbelief’ (69). As subsequent chapters will demonstrate, critics have frequently interpreted the grim content of many contemporary British and American novels (from London Fields [1989], say, to American Psycho [1991]) as having an implicitly progressive dimension in the sense that their depiction of horror signifies outrage rather than relish or despair, and that there lies behind the apparent amorality of such fiction a desire for recuperation and for the assertion of value in the context of mutuality and social being.51 It may be that this advocacy of the social represents not only a reaction to the ludic school of postmodernist fiction, but also a prescription against the post-Carter American cultural climate, in which serious political debate is perceived to have fallen into decline52 and in which Frank Bascombe, the determinedly apolitical narrator of Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter (1986) is said by one critic to be emblematic of Ronald Reagan’s attempt to minimize internal conflict in favour of an anodyne optimism.53

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The British situation presents a striking contrast. The existence of strong unions and recalcitrant left-wing councils provided the early years of Thatcherism with a ready supply of antagonists and prompted what was certainly the nation’s most politically turbulent decade since the 1940s. With the occasional exception (B.S. Johnson, Angela Carter, and J.G. Ballard, for example), literary experimentation was rare before the early 1980s, so a backlash against it was not to be expected. If anything, British fiction experienced a (typically mild) reversal of the process by which American ‘dirty realism’ supplanted postmodernist fiction. Writers such as Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro (among many others) began to blend postmodernist techniques with the British realist tradition, while initiating an assault on the much-deprecated reserve and parochialism associated with the British novel. 54 Yet, despite these differences, the state of the British social novel during the 1980s was surprisingly similar to that of the United States. Most of the ‘popular literary’ novels to have addressed Thatcherism directly appeared well after the event: Iain Banks’s Complicity was published in 1993 and Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve-Up! in 1994, whilst Tim Lott’s Rumours of a Hurricane (2002), Tim Binding’s Anthem (2003), David Peace’s GB84 (2004), and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004) did not appear until after the millennium. Even in 2002, a review of Lott’s novel noted the reluctance of British writers to engage with political themes in the most general way,55 while D.J. Taylor, writing a decade earlier, asks why the fury of the Thatcher years left the novel almost untouched. Taylor suggests that there exists a general awareness in British society that the real sources of power in that society extend beyond a hate-figure such as Thatcher, and lie ‘with wider industrial and economic authority wielded by an increasingly elusive oligarchy, a trail of shareholders and overseas connections that grows ever more faint’.56 This combination of deferred responsibility and lack of transparency, he claims, is ‘disastrous for fictional analyses of the higher administrative process’ (268). Another factor to have affected the social novel is the extent to which British television drama until recently offered left-liberal writers a forum for political dissent and debate that, in being able to reach instantly a much wider audience than that offered by the literary novel, made the latter a less attractive medium. The subsequent deregulation of television and its increasingly market-led bias have had the effect of all but destroying politicized television drama, yet what may otherwise have been a fillip to the social novel (which may explain the recent

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glut of novels about the Thatcher years) is likely to be offset by the commercialization of the British publishing industry and the decline of the public library. Furthermore, the overwhelmingly middle-class composition of the publishing industry and the British literary milieu has meant that those groups most injured by Thatcherism have had the least access to literary expression, whilst those who remained relatively immune to the New Right retrenchment project have cornered the market in dissent: as Taylor observes, ‘the class struggle in this country has nearly always been superintended by forces other than those it was immediately intended to benefit’ (128). In addition, the alleged ‘dumbing down’ of many aspects of British cultural life in the wake of an increasing orientation towards market forces has done nothing to alleviate the sense of social estrangement experienced by many writers and readers from working-class backgrounds. If literature is widely perceived as being a wasteful, unfashionable or – worse still – a middleclass pursuit, it may be the case that certain subaltern voices will continue to remain at the margins.57 Another contributing factor to the apparent lack of social and political engagement by contemporary novelists may be the form of the novel itself. The tendency of the genre towards an individualistic perspective (either that of the self-limiting first-person narrator, or that of the omniscient narrator typified by the classic realist novel) may be problematic for authors who wish to represent collective histories, values and narratives. 58 Although there is little evidence that practitioners of the social novel have adopted his proposal, David Lodge suggests that Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘dialogic’ (or multi-voiced) text presents novelists with a suitable method of subverting the conservative tendencies of the form. 59 Nevertheless, it seems that, for British novelists at least, the project of renegotiating a collective history along politically and culturally subversive lines remains a task that is attempted but rarely achieved, and that, far from having had a revolutionary effect upon British fiction, experiments with form seem to have been absorbed into the ‘popular literary’ novel in ways that set off few cultural or political ripples. In effect, social novelists appear to be following a Blairite trajectory in the sense that their attempts to reconcile their conflicting impulses propel them in the direction of a conservatism that neutralizes the sting of their engagement.60 The lack of Yeats’s ‘passionate intensity’ has instead bred in left-liberal writers the insecure feeling that it is treating with the enemy. As Patricia Waugh observes, ‘many [such writers] are self-professed liberal humanists, yet their work is often a

36 Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel

savage indictment of late liberalism for its moral dishonesty and exclusions and its spiritual failings’.61 Similarly, Xuejun Sun has written that the novel of political dissent has been subsumed into the Thatcherite project because of its complicity with a publishing industry that, since the 1980s, has been transformed by a series of market-driven factors such as the spread of chain bookshops, the use of the internet, the growth in the number of literary prizes (usually funded by commercial sponsors) and the increasing number of lifestyle magazines offering book reviews. Sun argues that contemporary ‘popular literary’ novelists have colluded with marketing strategies that demand ‘the unique mixture of high culture and streetwise pop style’ to which is added ‘the obligatory ploy with metafictionality and the narrative order, the usual post-modern trickery of parody and pastiche’.62 Within this strategy, he adds ‘it makes financial sense that no experiment with technique and ideas should impede the readability of the novels [ ... that] all conform to a tradition of nonconformist radicalism’ (372). D.J. Taylor makes a similar claim that the tendency in the contemporary novel towards ‘the metropolitan, the slick and the contrived’ is a manifestation of the demand for constant novelty and sensation that conforms agreeably with the spirit of consumerism and entrepreneurial flair encouraged by Thatcherite (and Reaganite) rhetoric.63 These remarks are perceptive, but they carry mixed messages: on the one hand, there is the implication that novelists ought to abandon innovation and contrivance in the interest of a formal conservatism said to avoid commodification and complicity; on the other, there is a seemingly contradictory demand for a degree of experimentation that both disconcerts the expectations and demands of the reader and defies the logic of the market. Again, ambivalence appears to have confounded commitment, and it remains unclear as to whether that ambivalence could ever be re-cast in such a way as to act as a substitute for an unattainable revolution and a commitment that cannot escape compromise. Whatever the prognosis might be, there are signs that some of the American novelists featured in this study share some of the concerns of Taylor and Sun. As far back as 1984, Thomas Pynchon, in his introduction to Slow Learner (1995), commenting on ‘the failure of college kids and blue-collar workers to get together politically’ during the height of the 1960s counterculture, regretted the ‘fancy footwork’ of his early fiction, suggesting that he considered a reliance on spectacular stylization to be inadequate as a means of effecting social engagement within the novel.64 More recently, Jonathan Franzen,

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reviewing his decision to narrow the scope of his third novel The Corrections during its composition, made the revealing comment in interview that ‘I feel like I’m essentially participating in one of those swings, a swing away from the boys-will-be-boys Huck Finn thing, which is how you can view Pynchon, as adventures for boys out in the world. At a certain point, you get tired of all that. You come home.’65 As with British writers, however, the danger is that, in eschewing the excesses of the avant garde, an ineffectual conservatism awaits in which the white male left-liberal novelist is haunted by fears of his own complicity with the forces of reaction.

2 Complicity and British Fiction

In Britain, themes of political guilt and complicity are never far from the subject of social class, and can be traced back at least as far as the period following the World War Two, when the progressive educational reforms introduced by the 1945–1951 Labour government permitted children from working-class backgrounds increased access to higher education and therefore to increased social mobility. A significant character is the ‘scholarship boy’ – often associated with such figures as the critics Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, and with the playwright Dennis Potter – whose self-conscious unease at being removed from his social origins was the result of a tension between a nostalgia for the social intimacy and stability provided by those origins, and by an individualistic impulse to escape from their alleged restrictions and prejudices.1 This tension bore fruit in the work of those writers whose work consisted of a broad assault upon the perceived conformity and stagnation of cultural life within postwar Britain. Famously, the ‘anger’ of those writers was to become dissipated by age and success, just as the phenomenon of the scholarship boy was to become, for the most part, specific to a single generation, due largely to the introduction of the comprehensive system of education by the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s. Nonetheless, it is arguable that the trajectory of belligerent individualism displayed by the protagonists of such novels as Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and plays such as John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), in which the idea of social mobility took precedence over that of class solidarity, can be followed directly from the 1950s, through the rebelliousness and dissent of the 1960s, to the mood of dissatisfaction and frustration that led to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Patricia Waugh has said 38

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of this individualistic discourse that the sixties provided less the opportunity to cement social unity through participation in a national culture than the chance to pursue individual or subcultural paths to liberation from it: consumer liberation from post-war austerity; cultural liberation from leisure-class values; sexual liberation from Victorian mores; and a celebration of the making of the new, of youth, technology, design and fashion. 2 The reassessment of the 1960s as something other than a thoroughly progressive decade in political and cultural terms is a process in which the left and right have both participated enthusiastically over the past two decades. Although Thatcher’s electoral campaigns appealed to notions of freedom from state intervention that had much in common with 1960s libertarianism, supporters of Thatcherism also contended that it was a raft of ‘permissive’ legislation from that decade concerning homosexuality, abortion and pornography that was to blame for the damage done to social cohesion and to ‘family values’. The left, meanwhile, was to argue during the 1980s that it was not so much ‘permissive’ legislation but the promotion of the unrestricted pursuit of personal wealth and gratification that had led to the erosion of social and family life. It seemed, however, that the right had derived most benefit from the libertarian drives of the 1960s, as Waugh indicates: ‘once the libertarian vocabulary had been safely regrafted onto monetarist economic theory [ ... ] here was another ready-made vocabulary to be recycled as packaging for an authoritarian populism now deemed essential to hold together a society destabilized by the arrantly unpredictable energies of the ubiquitous Market’. (17) If the left is to contend that the conservative assault on permissiveness is compromised by the fact that the right has profited most from appeals to personal freedom, then it is also obliged to admit that it too had adopted in the postwar period a type of libertarian individualism that it has now come to regret for having undermined social cohesion. Where the left continues to promote personal emancipation, it appears complicit with the libertarian ethic of postmodern capitalism, but if it prioritizes the interests of the collective over those of the individual by emphasizing tropes such as history and community, it risks undermining its own emancipatory traditions. Just as the scholarship boy

40 Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel

was torn between the restrictions of working-class life and the comparative freedom of life as a member of the ‘creative’ middle class, the contemporary left fears the consequences of full commitment to either a libertarian or a communitarian discourse. In his study of postwar British political satire, Stephen Wagg detects another way in which the liberal belligerence of the 1950s and 1960s can be said to have had unforeseen political consequences. Wagg contends that the ‘anti-political iconoclasm’ of Beyond the Fringe and Private Eye is far from being a subversive left-wing threat to the status quo, but in fact represents a nihilistic and inherently quietist distrust of all public affairs that is consistent with the Thatcherite distrust of interventionist politics.3 Noting the upper middle-class origins and the largely apolitical sensibilities of most of the proponents of British postwar satire, from That Was the Week That Was to the alternative comedy of the 1980s, Wagg claims that such satire has always been predicated upon the detachment of an ironic, intelligent (usually white male) individual from an irredeemably absurd world plagued by corruption, violence and injustice. From this perspective, those involved in the public realm are considered to be ‘all the same’; but this eradication of political difference also negates real conflict, and therefore the need for, or possibility of, change. Dissent and criticism are thus transferred from those public spaces in which change can be effected, to the private domain of the viewer, the listener, the spectator and the reader, where isolation further militates against activity. The lack of any significant impact on the electoral appeal of the Conservative Party throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, despite constant attacks by satirical comedians, is testament to the complicity of postwar British satire – and much of its left-liberal audience – with the erosion of the public domain in favour of a withdrawal into the private, anodyne performance of political issues. In keeping with the arguments of both Waugh and Wagg, the tone of much contemporary fiction by white male left-liberal writers is marked by an awareness of the decay of the public realm and of collective sensibilities that might have fostered a degree of defiance or optimism in the face of an apparently ubiquitous and omnipotent postmodern capitalism. It is a setting described by Kiernan Ryan in which the scope for resistance or refusal, let alone transformation, seems to shrink geometrically as capitalist technology invades our very cells to programme our appetites and fantasies, to install the structures of addiction – to food, to sex, to drugs, to money, to violence, to voyeurism – which the market needs to survive.4

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In the US, one reaction to the triumph of Reaganite postmodernity within dissenting literary circles has been the emergence of James Annesley’s ‘blank fictions’, in which any sense of personal agency and identity has been so eroded by the commercial forces governing contemporary life that the characters who inhabit these novels sink apathetically into a desperate nihilism that is marked by excesses of violence, drug use and transgressive sex. It is arguable that the lack of explicit political opposition evident in such fiction reflects the weakened position of the institutionalized left (in the form of strong trades unions and left-of-centre mainstream political parties) in the US by comparison with Europe. This is not to deny that either class conflict or leftist traditions and institutions exist within the US, but rather to suggest that the earlier arrival of postmodernity in the form of consumerist affluence and new communications technologies has, together with a firmly established conservative political consensus and a comparatively weak institutionalized opposition, eroded the social and political antagonism that persists within the British novel of the 1980s and 1990s. The characters in both Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) and Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero (1985) are immersed in drug addiction, despair and violence, but there remains among the class-conscious and impoverished characters in Welsh’s novel an aggressive and partisan energy that is distinct from Ellis’s portrait of idle rich Californian youth. In the contemporary British novel, the retreat of intelligent, dissenting protagonists into hedonistic despair tends not to be portrayed ‘blankly’ but instead is the subject of tortuous debate in which themes of complicity, loss, regret and guilt are explicitly related to social and political concerns. Iain Banks’s Complicity (1993) is a case in point. Most of the novel is narrated in the first person by Cameron Colley, a self-styled ‘gonzo’ journalist typical of many of Banks’s principal characters: an intelligent, wisecracking, outspokenly left-wing Scot in early middle-age who is fond of gadgets, cars, drugs and sex. Although the novel is set just after the 1991 Gulf War, an early scene depicts Colley covering the return of a nuclear submarine to its Scottish base, allowing him to comment upon Reagan’s escalation of the arms race in the 1980s. The scene indicates the so-called ‘special relationship’ between Reaganite America and Thatcherite Britain, but may also be read as a representation of the state of contemporary leftist dissent, with Colley’s verbose pontification from the shore being representative of the impotence of unreconstructed ‘old Labour’ rhetoric, and the vain attempt by a group of protestors in inflatable boats to block the path of the submarine

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demonstrating the failure of strategies of ‘direct action’ to link gestural politics to a mass movement. What follows is a meditation upon where power lies in post-Thatcherite Britain, and upon the ways in which that power might be challenged. Colley is investigating a series of murders and serious assaults perpetrated against corrupt entrepreneurs and right-wing extremists by an attacker dubbed the ‘Red Panther’. It transpires that the ‘Panther’ is Colley’s lifelong friend Andy Gould, a Falklands veteran and retired entrepreneur who has become angered and disillusioned by the moral decay he regards as the Thatcherite legacy to the United Kingdom. Gould is by no means a traditional radical, but is meant to embody the libertarian drive that in the late 1970s grew impatient with postwar corporatism and was seduced by Thatcher’s professed zeal for reform: I remember thinking in ‘79 that it was time to really go for something, to finally try something different; to be radical. It seemed like ever since the ‘sixties there had just been one brand of government in two slightly different packages, and nothing much ever changed; there was this feeling that after the burst of energy in the early-mid-‘sixties everything had been going downhill.5 Gould then explains that he subsequently became disillusioned with the Thatcherite project, concluding that its populist rhetoric was no more than a dupe intended to disguise the narrow interests of the capitalist class. His disaffection is consistent with Herbert Kitschelt’s argument that the electorate in most Western democracies will abandon political parties of any hue when those parties become associated with authoritarianism rather than liberalizing energy;6 and this was indeed to be the fate suffered by the Conservatives, as the British electorate eventually passed the libertarian mantle to New Labour. In this respect, it is worth noting that Colley’s circle of friends represents not the Scottish working class dispossessed and marginalized by Thatcherism, but rather those sections of the middle classes whose interests coincided with Thatcherite acquisitiveness and selfindulgence. Colley’s leftist diatribes are belied by his irresponsible combination of fast cars and drug use, and by his relentless pursuit of another scoop, making him as much one of Thatcher’s children as Gould, Colley’s mistress Yvonne Sorrell (who works in bankruptcy), and her husband William (an unapologetically right-wing IT executive).7 Complicity, then, is a study not of working-class resistance

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or surrender to Thatcherism, but rather an examination of the response to the New Right project of disaffected white middle-class liberals. Although the novel was published before the advent of Blair’s Third Way rhetoric, it seems unlikely that Gould’s anger would have been channelled in the direction of New Labour reformism. His choice of a personalized form of terrorism recalls the strategies of the BaaderMeinhof group and the Angry Brigade in the 1960s and 1970s, and is completely at odds with the left-liberal views of Colley, yet Colley refers to Gould at one point as ‘my soul-mate, my surrogate brother, my other me’ (Complicity, 29). According to Cairns Craig, the close relationship between Colley and Gould is an example of a tradition within Scottish literature of ‘a divided consciousness which expresses itself in schizophrenia, doubles and repressed Others’,8 the best known instance of which is Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Craig argues that the fearless and aggressive Hyde-like antagonist represents a reaction against Calvinist repression and the internalization of fear and submission. From this perspective, it can be inferred that Colley’s inane addictions are indicative not of a true break with the repression of his most deeply-felt urges, but rather a distraction that masks this repression. As the repressed Other, Gould is the avenging equalizer who has escaped the bounds of Colley’s left-liberal conscience, but who permits Colley the luxury of deflecting his own political responsibility into the distant fantasy figure represented by Gould. The justification of violent means to achieve political ends is a central theme of the novel, the plot of which demonstrates that the intentions of a political actor can become inverted by the means chosen to achieve them. In Complicity, both Gould’s pragmatic, radical action and Colley’s principled, moderate analysis are compromised by complicity and guilt. Colley is haunted by memories of incidents in childhood when he abandoned Gould in dangerous situations because of his own need to conform to ‘decent’ standards of behaviour. He reflects that, in order to redress wrongdoing, it may be necessary to abandon such standards and to accept that transgressive action may be necessary. Without the promptings of Gould, however, Colley allows himself to sink into a pessimistic hedonism that (like the similar behaviour of the protagonists in novels such as Trainspotting and Less Than Zero) signifies profound dissatisfaction with society, as well as the feeling that rebellion is even more futile than the pursuit of short-term pleasures. Sucked further into a spiral of despair, Colley is

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aware that his convictions mean little when they are compromised by his own lifestyle: you find that Thatcher is taking half a million from Philip Morris for a three-year consultancy and you swear never to buy any of their products ever again but at the end of the day you still light another cigarette and suck in the smoke like you enjoyed it and make more profits for those evil fucks. (54 – emphasis in original) As in childhood, Colley finds that his indecision and his inability to break with the ties that bind him to mainstream society effectively signals assent to the forces he would oppose. Yet Gould’s radicalism is shown to fall into a similar trap: if Colley represents a traditional political left still shackled to the idea of peaceful reform, Gould’s represents the revolutionary who, in attempting to fight suffering and violence by being the agent of further suffering and violence, is effectively colluding with the values he abhors. The tension between Colley and Gould is also reflected in the formal aspects of the novel. The first-person narrative of Colley that dominates the text is verbose and tangential, reflecting the narrator’s bewilderment, indecision and introspection. By contrast, an unusual second-person narrative relates Gould’s attacks in the minimalist style of the thriller: You go downstairs and walk through the kitchen, where the two women sit tied to their chairs; you leave via the same window you entered by, walking calmly through the small back garden into the mews where the motorbike is parked [ ... ] You’re glad you didn’t have to hurt the women. (9) The short, factual sentences packed with references to solid objects contrasts with Colley’s verbosity and sarcastic asides, indicating Gould’s disavowal of abstract (and therefore distracting) thought in favour of effective action. It is an action informed by principle (he does not want to hurt the women) but his pragmatism allows him not to be bound by it (he will hurt them if obliged to do so). In chapter 6 of the novel, Banks plays an interesting trick with this narrative duality. The passage at first appears to be the description of another of Gould’s attacks, but is recounted in the first person: When I stand up I see the wooden block full of knives on the work surface, just visible by moonlight next to the gently gleaming

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stainless steel of the sinks. I pull out the largest of the knives, then turn and leave the kitchen, heading down the corridor past the dining room and study to the stairs. (127) Although narrated in the ‘concrete’ style of the Gould narrative, this is Colley’s description of he and Yvonne playing at a sex game that involves a simulated break-in and rape. The style links Colley’s actions to those of the ‘Panther’ in a way that further invokes themes of power, domination and submission, both sexual and social. The episode also draws parallels between the role-playing involved in sado-masochistic sex and the apparent surrender of power and control by the liberal left in the interests of maintaining a principled opposition that demands no responsibility.9 This is an implicit criticism of Colley, but Yvonne’s claim that what sets their role-playing apart from a real assault is the extent to which both participants lend their trust and consent also functions as a criticism of Gould. Gould’s actions are based upon an assumed authority that he believes vindicates his assertion of physical power over his victims. The implication of the debate between Yvonne and Colley is that the authority Gould assumes is refuted by the lack of trust and consent, not from Gould’s victims, but from wider society. Gould never defines the terms of his authority because to do so would involve either an adherence to a philosophical foundation that would threaten the effectiveness of his pragmatic relativism, or an appeal to collective forms of trust and consent that could invest him with that authority (in other words, a form of court). By acting alone, any form of trust or consent – and therefore any form of a collective dimension – remains absent from Gould’s actions, the implication being that the use of power without responsibility to other agents is ultimately infertile ground for the left. The theme of the irresponsible use of power is also addressed by Colley’s addiction to the computer game Despot in which the player adopts the role of the tyrannical ruler of a fictional kingdom. It appears that only within the virtual world of computer graphics and the fantasy world of sexual play does Colley abandon the role of the passive liberal, only to go to the kind of extremes pursued by Gould in the real world. The implication here is that Colley’s abdication of political responsibility in the interest of maintaining a high-minded but ineffective oppositional stance masks a desire to wield power irresponsibly in a manner not dissimilar to that of his ‘double’, Gould. Events cause Colley to neglect the game, bringing

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about the collapse of his virtual fiefdom: there’s no head man, no Despot, no me. I can look at all this but I can’t do anything about it, not on this scale. To start playing again I’d have to trade this omniscient but omni-potent view for that of ... God knows, some tribal warrior, village elder, a mayor or a bandit chief [ ... ] I guess a radical Green or Deep Ecologist would think it’s a pretty cool result. (262) The game demands of Colley the responsibility of a participant rather than the irresponsibility of a spectator (or a fantasist or despot). It thus becomes evident that the political aspirations of both Colley and Gould are limited by their lack of collective participation and responsibility. Gould seems aware of this when he appeals to a moral order that he implies transcends a discredited political realm:10 We all have moral responsibility, whether we like it or not, but people in power – in the military, in politics, in professions, whatever – have an imperative to care, or at least to exhibit an officially acceptable analogue of care; duty, I suppose. It was people I knew had abused that responsibility that I attacked; that’s what I was taking as my ... authority. (297) In this respect, Gould represents the contemporary dissident who feels able to employ terms such as duty and morality because of a feeling that, although such terms are traditionally associated with political conservatism, the right has abandoned their use in favour of the rapacity of the free market, leaving the concepts they signify available for use by the left. Colley, who seems to have detected the contradiction between Gould’s references to duty and morality, and the lack of a collective referent within Gould’s outlook, makes a plea for consensus, but attracts only an angry reaction from his friend – ‘where has this consensus of yours brought us?’ (300) – who indicates the failure of the liberal consensus model to alleviate the global effects of capitalist greed. As the dispute between the two men develops, Colley begins to feel that Gould’s self-righteous contempt for humanity and liberal democracy – ‘Why are people so fucking useless?’ (213) – can only lead in the direction of fascism. At the same time, Colley’s own inability to find an adequate political direction suggests that his objections to Gould are little more than excuses for inaction.

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At the end of the novel, Colley develops a cancerous tumour the cause of which is never explained. The tumour may simply be the result of his smoking habit, or of exposure to the burning oil wells of Kuwait during his stint as a war correspondent during the 1991 Gulf War. Colley, however, has already linked his love of cigarettes to his sense of political complicity, and recalls that, after witnessing the burning of the wells and the destruction of the Iraqi army, he was unable to write anything for his newspaper. This episode suggests that his (temporary) estrangement from language is analogous to his estrangement from political commitment, as well as to his guilt over the possibility that inactivity amounts to collusion, and to (self-) destruction. Colley struggles with the tools of representation, but his struggles have failed to break through the ideological barriers that Gould appears to have removed in order to reveal the destructive truth. From this perspective, Gould’s use of violence is redemptive, yet the way in which Colley’s cancer (which only appears after Gould’s disappearance) is linked to Gould suggests that both men carry inside them the potential for corruption. The novel ends by reinforcing this relationship in formal terms, the narrative switching to the secondperson used to recount Gould’s attacks, but in this instance employed to relate an inconclusive ending in which Colley sits looking out over Edinburgh, smoking yet another self-incriminating cigarette. A postscript to Complicity is provided by Banks’s later novel, Dead Air (2002), whose narrator is given the name of Ken Nott: a name that suggests negation, impotence (‘cannot’), and lack of insight (‘knows not’). Like Colley, Nott is a confident, sceptical, heavy drinking drug user who works in the media as an outspokenly left-wing ‘shock-jock’. Just as Colley beds the wife of a right-wing businessman, Nott enjoys the favours of Celia, the wife of the gangster John Merrial, who fulfils the role of the fearsome Other. Furthermore, Nott’s sado-masochistic games with Celia re-invoke the themes of power, domination and responsibility addressed by the earlier novel, and suggest that Nott, like Colley, is indulging in fantasies in which he abdicates responsibility and surrenders to that which he opposes in order to achieve selfdefinition. As his friend Amy points out, Nott’s political jeremiads over the airwaves are not subversive at all, but act as a means of support to his employer, the media baron Sir Jamie Werthamley: By employing you and allowing you to do your little rants [ ... ] Sir Jamie can give the impression of being even-handed and fair and able to tolerate criticism. What’s actually going on is that the

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bad corporate stuff, which Mouth Corp does as much as anybody, gets a lot less publicity than it deserves, thanks to you.11 Where Dead Air differs significantly from Complicity is in the treatment of Nott’s fearsome Other. Unlike Gould, Merrial plays a minor role and represents not an alternative route for political dissent but a criminal underworld that has more in common with Sir Jamie’s cynical entrepreneurial spirit than with Gould’s ‘moralistic’ anarchism. Nevertheless, both Gould and Merrial are associated with violence, both work outside the law, and both force the protagonists Colley and Nott into considering what they stand for, rather than merely against. Furthermore, in both novels the protagonist comes to some form of accommodation with his Other: in Complicity, Colley allows Gould to escape the police, while in Dead Air, Celia leaves Merrial for Nott without there being serious consequences. The significant difference lies with the disappearance from the later novel of the option of any form of dissent other than Nott’s left-liberalism, whether that is represented by the direct action of the protestors boats, or by Gould’s more extreme methods. Whereas Gould deliberately places himself outside of society, Merrial prospers within that society, suggesting that, by adopting the latter as his foil, Nott’s strategy of accommodation is no less sinister than Colley’s ambivalent relationship with Gould. Complicity ends with its liberal hero contracting cancer and the psychopathic Gould still on the loose, but at the end of Dead Air, Nott ‘gets the girl’. This moderately up-beat ending might be read alternatively as a condemnation, or as a defence, of Nott’s decision to seek some form of accommodation with both capitalism and criminality in preference to attempting to bring about the defeat of both. Unlike Complicity, in which an alternative to the liberal perspective is shown to exist, in Dead Air what might lie beyond either a straightforward acceptance or rejection of Nott’s viewpoint is never evident. It is at least arguable that what is available to the reader at the end of the later novel is a guarded defence of the left-liberal position as voiced by Nott in the (admittedly tongue-in-cheek) passage when he is asked by an exasperated friend if he approves of anything. Along with a curious list of answers (students, cricket, journalists), Nott replies that he approves of liberals: They’re my kind of people. Liberals want niceness. What the hell is wrong with that? And, bless ‘em, they do it in the face of such adversity! The world, people, are disappointing them all the time

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[ ... ] but liberals just take it all, they hunker down, they grit their sandals and they keep on going [ ... ] just generally getting all hot under the collar when they see people being treated badly. That’s the great thing about liberals; they care for people not institutions, not nations, not religions, not classes, just people. (189) This passage advocates what amounts to a ‘Rortyan’ retreat from ‘foundational’ concepts such as class, nation and religion, in favour of a humble form of left-liberalism that seeks to accommodate principles with pragmatism. It is matched in terms of Banks’s own development as a stylist by a move towards a ‘consensus aesthetics’12 that is manifest in a move away from the fantastic and grotesque elements that marked his early novels, such as Walking on Glass (1985) and The Bridge (1986), towards a more straightforward realist style. If Banks’s move towards realism means that his characters can be understood – at least in part – as reference points in a debate about political engagement, then what emerges from a reading of Complicity and Dead Air is the sense of a withdrawal from radicalism and confrontation in favour of a formal conservatism and a pragmatic left-liberal politics based upon consensus and humanitarianism. Complicity is a novel in which radical alternatives are both externalized and demonized in the form of a fearful Other so that the white male left-liberal is no longer obliged to incorporate those alternatives into his beliefs and actions. After ‘releasing’ Gould, Colley has exorcised the need for radical action, but the corrupting cancer of liberal guilt and inaction continues to consume him from within. At the end of Dead Air, by contrast, the protagonist recovers from a beating, and thus seems vindicated by his choice of evasion and accommodation over confrontation and revolt. The consensualism that lurks beneath the themes of political conflict in Banks’s novels may stem from the fact that his protagonists are nearly always the beneficiaries of Thatcherite affluence, having either been born into middle-class families, or having attained that affluence by way of good fortune or exceptional talent. Lacking the basis for the resentment or the poverty of aspiration that marks the working-class characters of (say) James Kelman or Irvine Welsh, it is perhaps unsurprising that Banks’s characters ultimately seek balance and resolution over conflict in ways that seek to reconcile a libertarian impulse with a collectivist conscience. Although the extent of their political complicity is always acknowledged, the fate of Banks’s characters seems to insist upon the need for a revisionist democratic socialism

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that avoids the pitfalls of both anti-humanist revolutionary ardour and the defeatist cynicism of the post-Thatcherite centre-left. The intelligent, resourceful and belligerent protagonists of Banks’s fiction are the upwardly mobile descendants of the anti-hero found in the works of Sillitoe, Osborne et al. whose sense of social injustice is driven by highly individualistic energies. At the end of Complicity and Dead Air, all that remains of these energies is a sense of defeat and diffidence that, despite sharing a certain amount of truculence with the ‘Angry Young Men’, seems more in keeping with typical British reserve than with the notion of an iconoclastic movement sweeping through the British literary scene during the 1980s and 1990s. This theme of left-liberal diffidence, and its social and political consequences, is also at the heart of Jonathan Coe’s novel What a Carve-Up! (1994). The narrator of the novel, Michael Owen, is a troubled author who has been commissioned to write a history of the fabulously wealthy Winshaw family, only to discover that the riches of the Winshaws have been ill-gotten for centuries, and that in Thatcher’s Britain, the family’s unscrupulous methods are flourishing. He then realizes that all of the misfortune that surrounds him – his father’s impoverished retirement, the death of his friend Fiona from undiagnosed cancer, and his own loneliness and depression – is ultimately attributable to he ways in which the Winshaws and their kind have been allowed by successive right-wing governments to plunder the country for profit. Owen is infuriated not only by Thatcherism, but also by his own failure to channel his anger into effective political action. What Owen values as an alternative to Thatcherism, it transpires, is not violent revolution, but a return to the communitarian values he associates with his happy childhood, and in this he differs significantly from characters like Colley or Nott, whose abrasive individualism points them away from full social participation. Owen’s lack of assertiveness, however, means that he is particularly vulnerable to the social divisiveness of aggressive Thatcherite values which, having invaded the social realm, marginalize and isolate those who, like Owen, can thrive only upon mutual dependency. For much of the novel, Owen ascribes his timidity and sense of failure to a childhood incident in which his mother, embarrassed at a sexually suggestive scene, removed him from a screening of the British spoof horror film that provides the novel with its title. In later years, Owen becomes obsessed by the scene, in which a timid man (played by the actor Kenneth Connor) flees the room of an attractive

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woman after seeing her undressed image in a mirror. Owen identifies with the male character’s repressed sexuality, but also relates the scene to the myth of Orpheus (in particular, to Jean Cocteau’s cinematic adaptation of the myth), and its associations with taboos, reflections, passive observation and with the barriers between the real world and the world of the imagination. Later in the novel, he realizes that, in relating the restraint of Connor’s character to his own adolescent experience and his subsequent inability to form relationships with others, he has become trapped within an individual pathology that has led him into an Orphean labyrinth of selfobsession rather than to consideration of the wider causes of his malaise. He concludes that he has willingly accepted and reproduced within himself a system of taboos, restrictions and distinctions that have served only to bind him and to allow the corruption of the Winshaws to spread. As personal crises such as Fiona’s worsening illness and public crises such as the increasing likelihood of war with Iraq converge upon Owen, he is forced to re-evaluate the distinctions that have marked what amounts to no less than his own (Owen’s) false consciousness.13 This is defined in terms of screening: like Connor’s character, he allows himself to glimpse that which he desires, but separates himself from it, gaining access to the desired object only in fantasy and reflection (and in the literal projection of the videotaped image on the screen that Owen watches in the privacy of his home). This act means that he neither fully rejects the desired object nor pursues it, but instead withdraws behind (or before) the screens that divide the personal from the public, the private from the political and the real from the imaginary. These distinctions begin to dissolve for Owen, as if cracks had started to appear in the screen and this awful reality was leaking out: or as if the glass barrier had magically turned to liquid and without knowing it I had slipped across the divide, like a dreaming Orpheus. All my life I’d been trying to find my way to the other side of the screen [ ... ] Did this mean that I’d made it at last?14 This passage encapsulates the experience of the white male left-liberal who, in the context of Thatcherism, feels the need to break away from seemingly fruitless concerns about representation in order to redeem his own complicit position. This need is expressed in part by the realist style in which much (but by no means all) of the novel is written,

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and by the way in which Coe employs characters that explicitly address the state of the social novel in Britain. Perhaps significantly, it is not the left-liberal Owen who addresses this issue, but two very contrasting minor characters. The angry young film student Graham Packard tells Owen that ‘the problem with the English novel is that there’s no tradition of political engagement. I mean, it’s just a lot of pissing about within the limits set down by bourgeois morality, as far as I can see. There’s no radicalism’ (276), while the vengeful Tabitha Winshaw appears to be making a comment about the inefficacy of writing when she admits, with some disappointment, that she had hoped Owen’s account of the history of her family would be ‘a tremendous book, an unprecedented book – part personal memoir, part social documentary, all stirred together into one lethal and devastating brew’ (476). As in Complicity, however, neither the life nor the novel of uncompromised radicalism seems possible: Packard eventually becomes a manager for a company involved with the illicit supply of weapons to Iraq (he hatches a subversive plot, but is nearly murdered), and Tabitha is revealed as a psychopath. Similarly, Owen, although angry, is destined to play a passive, spectatorial role as both Tabitha and Mortimer Winshaw decide to redress the wrongs committed by their own family by despatching them in ways that, as in Complicity, match their nefarious deeds.15 In this way, the elderly Winshaws represent the repressed Other of Owen’s liberal conscience in the same way that Gould represents the fantastic distancing of political responsibility for Colley in Banks’s novel. Passive yet complicit to the end, Owen obeys Mortimer’s command to push on the plunger of the syringe containing the fatal drug dose that will end Mortimer’s life but, before dying, Mortimer pricks Owen’s conscience one last time: there comes a point where greed and madness become practically indistinguishable [ ... ] And there comes another point, where the willingness to tolerate greed, and to live alongside it, and even to assist it, becomes a sort of madness too. Which means that we’re stuck with it, in other words. The madness is never going to end. (485) As a disease that corrupts from inside and strikes indiscriminately at hopelessly vulnerable victims, cancer features in both novels as a destructive residue of the failure to reconcile the conflict in the left-liberal conscience between the need to take effective action against the malevolent nature of the seemingly ubiquitous forces that govern contemporary society, and distaste for the violence that frequently

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seems the only suitable response to those forces. Cancerous decline can also be understood as the consequence of a blocked future: in Complicity and Dead Air, the future holds little or no hope beyond that of incremental change, while in What a Carve-Up! a communitarian alternative is invoked, as during Owen’s childhood reminiscences, or his visit in 1982 to a friend in ‘the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire’ where he experiences ‘envy at the thought of a community which could so closely unite around a common cause’ (273), but is always associated with an irredeemable past. Whereas the political tensions created by Banks’s novel are generated by the counterpoint between characters and, in Complicity, between different narrative styles, the structure of What a Carve-Up! prevents too ready an identification between the reader and Owen. The novel employs a variety of narrative strands, including Owen’s first-person account, an annotated edition of the letters of Henry Winshaw, and a third person narrative that, it transpires, consists of a preface and introduction to Owen’s unfinished history of the Winshaws. In addition, fictional clippings from newspapers and magazines, interview transcripts, notes, and even a cinema poster are inserted into the text. This fragmentation of the narrative has the effect of establishing a distance from which the reader can view Owen’s apparent culpability. In this way, Coe follows the critical recommendation (described in the previous chapter) that the social novel ought to engage with issues in the ‘real’ world, yet also indicate the problematic nature of the representation of such issues. Inside the metafictional space opened up by the fractured narrative of the novel, readers are obliged to interrogate the structuring of their own reality, and to break through the screens of awareness and responsibility that Owen himself, for the greater part of the novel, feels unwilling or unable to shatter.16 The possibility that the redemption of the social novel may lie in the metafictional treatment of its subject is taken further by Iain Sinclair’s Downriver (1991). Although the novel is another portrayal of the deleterious effects of Thatcherism upon British society, the use of multiple narrators, parody, fantasy and stream-of-consciousness sequences have a similar effect to that achieved by Coe in subverting the flat ‘literalness’ of realism. In fact, the documentary mode is satirized by the involvement of the principal narrator (named Sinclair) in the making of a television film about the changing face of London’s East End in the 1980s. The film-makers are shown to be more interested in their own career prospects and in expense-account

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lunches than in the issues raised by the subject matter of their film, perhaps indicating that the two-dimensionality of documentary realism is inadequate in terms of a sufficiently critical representation of Thatcherism, and that this very inadequacy amounts to complicity with Thatcherite self-interest. As with Banks and Coe, the involvement of the white left-liberal middle class in shoring up its political nemesis is the principal subject of Downriver. The novel’s narrator observes bitterly that ‘the great shame, and dishonour, of the present regime is its failure to procure a decent opposition’,17 and reserves some of his strongest vitriol for a leftist intelligentsia that prospers while asserting no more than gestural protests: Exquisitely made-up young ladies tottered out on Saturday mornings to hawk the Socialist Worker, for an hour, outside Sainsbury’s. Duty done, they nipped inside to stock up on pâté, gruyère, olives, French bread and Frascati for an alfresco committee meeting. The worse things got, the more we rubbed our hands. We were safely removed from any possibility of power: blind rhetoric without responsibility. (72–73) Similarly, Sinclair portrays a radical London MP, Meic Triscombe, as a lecherous, self-serving hypocrite who, whilst railing against the injustices of capitalism, has made a number of profitable investments in the same kind of property speculation that has devastated the lives of the less fortunate of his constituents. Like Banks’s Ken Nott, Triscombe is defined only in terms of opposition: his stance is that of the political masochist who prospers only through the domination of an ideological opposite; and it is interesting that Triscombe also indulges in sex-games that are linked to violence, the implication being that the furtive transgressions enjoyed by these leftist male protagonists contribute to the destruction of that which they pretend to value. In Downriver, this is represented by the dress in the form of a map of London worn by the performance artist Edith Cadiz, and by the suggestion that her demise is the responsibility of Triscombe. This sense of complicity is reinforced by the narrator’s self-damning description of ‘the Widow’ – a grotesque portrait of Thatcher – as ‘the focus of our own lack of imagination: the robot of our greed and ignorance.’ (267) Whereas the other novelists whose work is discussed in this chapter focus upon the effect of Thatcherism upon people, Downriver

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concentrates on the intrusion of new capital upon urban, public space, and the way in which that intrusion has a corresponding effect on time and history as shared, public phenomena. Throughout the novel, the narrator mourns the way in which property speculators have demolished old buildings and eradicated long-established communities all over the East End in the interest of lucrative ‘gentrification’. In his eyes, the construction of retail parks, office complexes and intruder-proof apartment blocks are intended for those who prosper under the new economic order, driving out all that does not fit comfortably with the monetarist ethos. This involves not only an assault upon public space, but also an attempt to erase history: the gentrification of the East End docks is represented as a denial both of Britain’s industrial and imperialist past, and of the working-class communities that presented an alternative set of histories and traditions. Despite the novel’s near-mystical obsession with lost or disappearing working-class communities, and its generalized sympathy for such communities, Downriver is haunted by the absence of workingclass characters (although such an absence may be a reinforcement of Sinclair’s argument). Apart from the occasional thuggish stereotype, the novel is populated not by an urban proletariat, but by the members of a demi-monde of bohemian writers, artists, book-dealers and other assorted eccentrics who have emerged from the routine nonconformity of the 1960s counterculture. If it is the case that the discourse of personal liberation promulgated by the counterculture has been appropriated by the 1980s discourse of economic liberation, it is interesting that Sinclair’s cohort are divided between those who have been shunted into madness or dereliction by such a transformation, and those who are thriving, but whose politics have been compromised by their prosperity. As with so many of the novels discussed in this study, there is a feeling in Downriver that the politics of the 1980s is related to the libertarian drives of the 1960s in ways that are disquieting for the liberal left. The novel appears to suggest that, following the (geographically literal) erasure of a politicized inner-urban working class, the onus to provide some form of progressive opposition has fallen to the left-liberal middle classes, who have evidently failed this responsibility. This suggestion even informs the metafictional aspect of the novel. As with What a Carve-Up! the various means by which Downriver reminds the reader of its own fictionality open up a space which attempts to signify some form of redemptive potential for the social novel. Although documentary realism remains thoroughly discredited

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throughout, there is evidently some doubt about the adequacy of self-referentiality as a means to construct a politically charged form of fiction. Towards the end of the novel, the narrator named ‘Sinclair’ confesses that he is searching for an ending to his narrative, ‘a final tableau vivant, a magical getout. The one that lets the narrator melt from the narration. Can we make our escape while the witnesses (the readers) weigh the plausibility of some tricksy conclusion?’ (375–376). This declaration is simultaneously an attempt to invoke that ‘magical getout’ and a subversion of the same by openly confessing to its own artificiality. It is also an indication that the narrator/author feels trapped in a loop of consciousness in the sense that he is composing a text the technical demands of which compromise its purpose, which is to attempt to describe the ideological situation of the writer and the reader: he exclaims to the latter, ‘I want you to keep the record’ (376 – emphasis in original). Yet by constantly indicating himself, and the artificiality of his treatment, he is lured into that evasion of the external political referent that always seems to prick the conscience of the white male left-liberal writer. Because the objectivity and authority to which novelists have traditionally aspired has been jettisoned by engaged writers who are aware of their own complicity in the maintenance of the ideology being criticized, it is understandable that a novelist such as Sinclair should express some frustration with the act of writing itself. Shortly afterwards, ‘Sinclair’ takes his frustration on his typewriter by burying it on a beach, but this symbolic attempt to abdicate his role as a writer is bound to fail, and he sums up the contradictions inherent in such a gesture: ‘I have to get out from under the burden of a narrative which includes my request to be released from the burden of a narrative’ (378). This statement about the impossibility of escaping from the act of representation – escaping from the novel, in other words – can be equated with the impossibility of escaping from collusion with, or utter defeat by, the forces of contemporary capitalism. Indeed, the increasingly despondent narrative – ‘I feel utterly submerged and powerless’ (379) – suggests imminent collapse, yet the metafictional distancing of ‘Sinclair’ (as opposed to Sinclair) has the effect of clearing some potentially redemptive space, and it is in this space that Downriver alludes to the responsibility of the reader as agent: ‘You will do it. I know you will.’ (378). Those responsible for rebuilding the Labour Party during the late 1980s and 1990s deliberately distanced themselves from discourses that assumed a class model of society, a Fordist industrial base, or appeals to the scientific basis of socialism. Instead, they relied upon avowedly

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instinctive and pragmatic appeals to morality and fairness that seemed to have more in common with religious nonconformism than with dialectical materialism.18 This effacement of the political by the centreleft at a time when it faced a blatantly ideological opponent is matched by the tendency among contemporary white male left-liberal novelists to eschew a programmatic critique of Thatcherism in favour of a comparable insistence on intuitive morality and pragmatism. In many ways, the protagonists of both Complicity and What a Carve-Up! are fuelled more by instinctive moral outrage than by rational analysis, and it appears that, in Money (1984), London Fields (1987) and The Information (1995), Martin Amis is another writer who, while testifying to the corrosive influence of Thatcherism upon British social and cultural life, bases that testimony upon some form of ethical objection. Because of the apparent relish with which Amis describes the descent of his characters into greed, corruption and violence, it is not immediately obvious that these novels are studies in contemporary morality. Amis frequently attracts hostile criticism over of the failure of the authorial voice in his novels to condemn the behaviour of their protagonists, but supporters of Amis counter that his work is driven by a mimetic intent that refuses to prescribe a moral framework, not only because such a prescription would compromise that intent but also because contemporary life seems to militate against the formation of any such framework.19 Nevertheless, what D.J. Taylor describes as the ‘intense and fascinated disgust’ provoked by Amis’s treatment of his characters, most of whom are punished for their sins, indicates regret for the loss of some form of sustainable ethical code. 20 The ferocity of Amis’s portrayal of moral (and physical) decay certainly suggests disapproval but, crucially, Amis has said in an interview that he does not ‘offer alternatives to what I deplore’. 21 This dilemma is summed up by Taylor, who claims that contemporary novelists ‘struggle to write about “value”, for they inhabit a world in which there is no clear agreement on what “value” means’ (293). If the dominant social order is deemed morally bankrupt, what are the ethical truths upon which those who dissent from that order can agree? If there are to be no such truths, then the fear is that any form of coherent and stable public life or social contract – whether the product of a religious or political grand narrative or of pragmatic, instinctive ‘common decency’ – will be rendered impossible by the endless competitive self-assertion inherent in the social and political climate fostered by Reaganism and Thatcherism. Amis draws both writer and reader into this crisis: if no moral prescription is forthcoming, then does

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the disgust passed on to the reader remain disgust in the act of consumption, or does it become a voyeuristic delight in the excesses it describes even as it purports to condemn them? If Amis is presenting disgust and relish simultaneously, then such ambivalence compromises both himself and the reader. Both become complicit with the dominant order, within which an intuitive sense of disgust is no substitute for the loss of an alternative ethical code, or a confident programme of political commitment. In these three novels, Amis explores the old idea that money is the root of all evil by employing a geographical and historical context – London and New York during the 1980s – in which national governments have adopted the opposite viewpoint: that the pursuit of money is a desirable end that supersedes the idea of money as mere means, and that effectively abolishes all other priorities. Nevertheless, characters express an instinctive moral repugnance towards money: Go back far enough and all money stinks, is dirty, roils the juices of the jaw. Was there any clean money on earth? Had there ever been any? No. Categorically. Even the money paid to the most passionate nurses, the dreamiest artists, freshly printed, very dry, and shallowly embossed to the fingertips, had its origins in some bastardy on the sweatshop floor.22 The lack of any other form of foundation, however, means that such repugnance is an insufficient means of resistance that makes the imperatives of fetishized monetarism irresistible: ‘The streets are full of movement but hardly anybody goes where they go through thought or through choice, without the money motive [...] We are all stomped and roughed up and peed on and slammed against the wall by money.’23 John Self, the narrator of Money, seems aware that the reification of money represents some form of ethical abdication, but also senses that such an awareness does not necessarily bring about a set of ethical values that might challenge monetarism. What follows is a defeatist mythology in which all are deemed to be complicit with promoting belief in the fiction that money represents: If we all downed tools and joined hands for ten minutes and stopped believing in money, then money would no longer exist. We never will, of course. Maybe money is the great conspiracy, the great fiction.

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The great addiction, too: we’re all addicted and we can’t break the habit now. (384) Addiction is a symbol of this complicity, and surrender to the negative mythology of money is paralleled by surrender to libidinal urges that in turn are fostered by the libertarian entrepreneurial spirit. Self – who claims that he is ‘addicted to the twentieth century’ (91) – is advised by the confidence trickster, Fielding Goodney, to ‘keep a fix on the addiction industries: you can’t lose. The addicts can’t win [ ... ] Nowadays, the responsible businessman keeps a finger on the pulse of dependence’ (93). Furthermore, Goodney emphasizes the social isolation that underpins addiction and dependence: All projections are targeting the low-energy, domestic stuff, the schlep factor. People just can’t hack going out any more. They’re all addicted to staying at home. Hence the shit-food bonanza. Swallow your chemicals, swallow them fast, and get back inside. Or take the junk back with you. Stay off the streets. Stay inside. (93) As in What a Carve-Up! the implication is that the isolated, fearful individual is more prone to the fictions and addictions of the marketplace than groups, who are able to generate alternative fictions in the form of collective priorities and values that stress agency and responsibility, and so offer formidable resistance to the exigencies of unfettered capitalism. Although Self professes to relish his addictions, he also frequently regrets them and makes several attempts to read more, drink less, and give up hitting women. This indicates that his surrender to addiction is not final, yet this potential for redemption continues to be exhausted by his feeling that awareness of his own condition is insufficient: that the route to another life and better future is blocked. This is echoed in the plot of the novel. Thoroughly disillusioned with the ‘moneyworld’ (363) of the United States, Self returns to a Britain that has adopted similar values but, as the director of several sensationalist advertising campaigns, he is aware that he has helped bring those values to the United Kingdom. He realizes that television, the medium that has made him rich, is ‘cretinizing’ (27) him and that the incessant promptings of a commercialized media will eventually dictate reality: ‘Television is working on us. Film is. We’re not sure how yet. We wait and count the symptoms. There’s a realism problem, we

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know that. TV is real! Some people think. And where does that leave reality?’ (361). In London Fields, Amis provides an answer to this question in the form of Keith Talent, the ‘pub champ’ (36) who, according to the narrator of the novel, Samson Young, is no more than a collection of ‘berk protocols [ ... and] fierce and tearful brand loyalties’ (43). As Young makes clear, Talent is a man of no talent who represents the complete surrender of John Self to his worst appetites, while lacking any of Self’s besieged desire for redemption. Talent is the amoral endproduct of the advertising campaign and the tabloid newspaper who represents the paradoxical annulment of personal identity – the downfall of ‘Self’ – in the pursuit of self-gratification and selfassertion. Money and London Fields thus trace the way in which contemporary capitalism has extended its power and influence by assaulting the collective realm and installing the individual within a thoroughly mediated and commodified environment in which that individual becomes complicit in the surrender of responsibility, agency and – ultimately – identity. Everyone – including novelists and their readers – is included in this process. Money features a character called Martin Amis who asserts, ‘I really don’t want to join it, the whole money conspiracy’ (262), but who – for a fee – finally participates in the film project that brings about Self’s downfall. The removal of all restraint upon money does not liberate the individual but instead brings about the downfall of the self/Self; and it is a downfall in which the writer who documents the process, but proposes no alternative, is complicit. In fact, the involvement of writers in the events they narrate is a recurring feature of the trilogy: in London Fields, Samson Young engineers his own death as well as that of the diarist Nicola Six, while The Information is a novel built around the scheming of two rival novelists. One critic claims that Amis shares with many of his contemporaries a concern for ‘the moral and emotional function of narrative fiction’, 24 and this is evident during the scene in Money when ‘Amis’ asks Self, ‘Is there a moral philosophy of fiction? When I create a character and put him or her through certain ordeals, what am I up to – morally? Am I accountable.’ (260) This indicates an anxiety about the moral criteria implied by a writer’s manipulation of plot and character, and about the persistence of such criteria even when writers eschew the formulation of a moral framework. Again readers are also involved in this quandary: in Money, the character Martina Twain (no doubt the ‘twin’ of ‘Martin Amis’) remarks that ‘Actors are paid to pretend that they are unaware of

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being watched, but they of course rely on the collusion of the watcher, and nearly always get it’ (132) while Self, when first suspecting that he is the victim of a conspiracy, addresses the reader directly; ‘And you’re in on it too, aren’t you. You are, aren’t you’ (285). In a sense, Self is quite correct: readers are indeed in on it, and are obliged by writers such as Amis to consider their own role in the creation, dissemination and acceptance of fictions that question the fetishization of money, but that fail to propose any economic or ethical alternatives. The use of such metafictional themes and techniques are as crucial to Amis’s analysis of white male left-liberal complicity as they are to Sinclair and Coe. In the background of the novel is the figure of Mark Asprey, the absent writer, whose initials match those of Amis and who is suspected by Young of setting up the whole story. The fact that Asprey’s bedroom is lined with mirrors and that his impressive collection of awards and framed photographs turns out to be fake suggests that Asprey, like all writers, is a manipulator of surfaces and appearances. Yet the power of the writer can be deceptive: Young falls victim to the belief that, as a writer, he is able to manipulate the world around him, only to discover that he is a part of someone else’s scheme. (The fact that the scheme may be that of another writer – Asprey – gives Young’s anxiety a further metafictional twist.) Furthermore, if Young’s ‘writerly’ attempts at manipulation are deemed sufficient to make him guilty of collusion with that same commodification of humanity that makes him despair, there may be substance to the argument that London Fields ‘lament[s] the very cultural sickness in which it participates’. 25 Although the apparent obsession of these authors with themes of entrapment and complicity signifies a pessimistic outlook, Dominic Head argues that it also demonstrates ‘a determination to use fiction to exorcise our collective complicity in the worst excesses of the contemporary’. 26 By employing metafictional devices, writers acknowledge that, as creators of fiction, they are involved with ideological processes comparable to those they criticize, but at the same time are attempting to defer the production of a closed, passive ideological artefact by presenting these issues to the reader in an open, dialectical manner. By addressing contemporary social and political issues explicitly, while simultaneously posing questions about their own means of representation, they are distancing themselves from what might be termed the ludic retreat of an earlier generation of experimental novelists (perhaps represented by Asprey’s Nabokovian hall of mirrors). Beneath the surface desperation of such

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writing there is at its core an impulse that seeks to escape from its own sense of entrapment. In Downriver, Sinclair’s protagonists occasionally extricate themselves from literal entrapment by means of a symbolically collective, poetic willpower; and beyond the annihilation of the morally culpable authorial figures of Samson Young and Nicola Six in London Fields, the novel is said by one critic to perform ‘the paradoxical feat of nihilistically denying the possibility of meaningful creation while simultaneously creating a memorably corrosive, if somewhat compromised, satire of contemporary culture.’27 Trapped by one form of desire – that of a commodified (and commodifying) libido – the characters of Amis and Sinclair turn to another form of desire whose elusive nature is, ultimately, aesthetic (even magical, in the case of Sinclair). The collective nature of this desire is important. As we have observed, characters in these novels often make ethical judgements on an intuitive and highly individualistic basis that lacks a collective dimension. One telling instance of this is the stalking of John Self by an anonymous telephone caller he names Frank who is eventually exposed as the con-artist Fielding Goodney. In his calls to Self, Frank makes it clear that he is seeking some sort of revenge, and even gives Self clues as to his real identity, but Self fails to understand both the clues and the reasons Frank provides for his stalking of Self. Even when Self discovers the truth about Goodney, he is at a loss to understand the motivation of his tormentor: ‘Where’s the motivation? On the phone he was always saying I’d fucked him up. How could I have? I’d remember’ (359). In reply, ‘Amis’ assures Self that the telephone calls are ‘all a blind’ and suggests that ‘as a controlling force in human affairs, motivation is pretty well shagged out by now’ (359). It is easy to take this at face value, and to infer that this is an explicit statement by the real Amis about the lack of a moral centre in a postmodern world in which the notion of moral causation has given way to the perception of a set of random, amoral acts that yield no explanation or meaning in a shared, public sense. It may well be, however, that by placing this sentiment in the mouth of the faux-author ‘Martin Amis’, the real Amis is distancing himself from this idea. In the same way that the writer Mark Asprey plays tricks with mirrors and fake images, so it is possible that ‘Martin Amis’ is guilty of deceiving John Self with surface appearances. There may, after all, be an explanation for Goodney’s actions that goes beyond individual pathology. Self may be correct in claiming that he never hurt Frank/Goodney personally, but the nature of the anonymous calls is collective, not personal. On

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one occasion, Frank taunts Self, ‘You want motivation. Okay. Here. Have some motivation’. What follows is a litany of social injustice against the powerless by the powerful: Remember, in Trenton, the school on Budd Street, the pale boy with glasses in the yard? You made him cry. It was me. Last December, in Los Angeles, the hired car you were driving when you jumped that light in Coldwater Canyon? A cab crashed and you didn’t stop. The cab had a passenger. It was me. 1978, New York, you were auditioning at the Walden Center, remember? The redhead, you had her strip and then passed her over, and you laughed. It was me. Yesterday, you stepped over a bum in Fifth Avenue and you looked down and swore and made to kick. It was me. It was me. (217–218) Self’s failure to recall any of the events listed by Frank signifies that he has not understood the accusation. As befits his surname, he is unable to see beyond the particular circumstance to the plane of general responsibility. Goodney’s revenge against Self invokes the possibility of an uprising of the powerless against the powerful, but this is undermined by the fact that the uprising is not collective, but is instead depicted as an isolated instance of individual psychosis that recalls similar episodes in Complicity and What a Carve-Up! Together, these novels represent the confusion between the particular and the collective, and between the moral and the political, that is at the heart of the difficulties faced by contemporary white male left-liberal writers. In these novels, contemporary society is presented not in terms of the Thatcherite (or even Blairite) rhetoric of renewal, revival and recovery, but in terms of a decline marked by an increasing sense of social injustice manifest in the personal misfortune of most of the leading characters. Morality and politics are confounded in ways that occasionally suggest that morality transcends the enmities associated with political conflict. It may be that the situation of the novel form within contemporary society contributes to this tendency. The traditional novel consists of a cast of individual characters placed in a social context that allows each individual to communicate with others and, whatever their subsequent fate, affirm a sense of identity bred from both mutual dependency and conflict. Within the contemporary social novel, however, the individual is depicted as beleaguered by a social context that, rather than fostering communication, mutual dependency, and the kind of conflict that generates debate and

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consensus, acts as a malevolent force that isolates individuals and coerces them into active competition and passive consumption. The deterioration of the social realm that is a common theme of the contemporary social novel is shown to have the effect of exaggerating the individualistic orientation of the novel and fostering a moralistic tone that is not conducive to political analysis. Sympathy for the powerless may signify the fact of opposition, but not its form. Dominic Head remarks that the novel presents ‘an experience of simultaneity’ (122) that stems from its early development alongside that of the newspaper and the rise of the concept of the nation state during the eighteenth century. The formation of a national identity, claims Head, is bolstered by the assumption of an omniscient vantage point and the emphasis on simultaneity and connection that occurs within both the newspaper and the pre-modernist novel. These features are interpreted by Head as a positive sign for contemporary writers with an interest in fomenting a collective form of awareness of, or opposition to, the isolating tendencies of contemporary cultural life. It may be, however, that the potential offered by the novel to invoke an ‘imagined community’ (122) is so severely limited by the absence of available communities either within the imagination or within contemporary life that the novel carries with it the danger of simply reinforcing that sense of the triumphant omnipotence and ubiquity of contemporary capitalism which infects so many social novels of the 1980s and 1990s. If in these ways the form of the novel appears complicit with those forces, it is unsurprising that dissenting writers will attempt to subvert that form with devices and conceits that acknowledge such complicity while attempting to distance themselves and their work from it. Such attempts might point to the world beyond the novel, while using the novel as a means to indicate that world.

3 Liberal Guilt and American Fiction

Although factors such as increased social mobility and the dissolution of the assumed solidarity between the left and the working classes have made the subject of class much more problematic over recent decades, the previous chapter has demonstrated that class is unlikely to disappear as a feature of the British social novel within the near future. In American literature, however, class has rarely been a topic so readily discussed as in the United Kingdom, due to a prevalent conviction that the United States of America is an example of ‘a class society without class consciousness’.1 John Patrick Diggins proposes a number of reasons why, in spite of astonishing discrepancies in levels of personal wealth, so many Americans regard their society as classless, and why, notwithstanding the many hard-fought causes in its history, the American left has failed to mobilize mass support on a consistent basis. Firstly, he suggests that the expanding physical frontier over the course of the nineteenth century had the effect of keeping unemployment relatively low and preventing the formation of a stable urban proletariat capable of forming a collective identity. Secondly, he points out that the rapid economic development of the United States of America has had the effect of dispelling the economic pessimism that normally stimulates political dissent on a massive scale. Thirdly, he argues that the desire for distinct national and ethnic groups to advance their own interests, while simultaneously seeking to conform to an ‘acceptable’ American lifestyle, also militated against the formation of a class identity that transcended national or ethnic boundaries and set itself in opposition to that lifestyle. Fourthly, while asserting that the ‘universal “rags to riches” ladder to success’ (68) is mythical, he suggests that the relatively fluid American social structure at least offered some degree of mobility to a largely 65

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immigrant population more accustomed to high levels of social and economic rigidity. In a more speculative mode, Diggins adds that socialism has always given mixed messages to the working classes, fighting for improvements in material conditions on the one hand, while on the other appealing for a ‘humanization of life’ (71) that lies beyond the pursuit of material goods. In the American context, this has proven problematic because the success of the American economy in providing abundance to all but the poorest has brought about a situation in which ‘workers could mistake the abolition of scarcity for the abolition of capitalism. Since the boosters of capitalism could claim to have brought about the miracles of abundance, there was [the] danger that America’s “proletariat” would accept the ruling class’s power and values’ (71). For the American left to oppose those values on ‘spiritual’ grounds was, by implication, to associate oneself with opposition to abundance – an approach hardly likely to attract mass support. Furthermore, the widespread acceptance of the possibility of social mobility and economic prosperity meant that the failure to realize either was considered a personal, rather than a systemic, failure. This, in turn, makes collective resistance much more difficult to realize. Finally, Diggins argues that, because full citizenship had been extended to all white males from an early point in American history, the American left has tended to be drawn towards the rights of minorities in ways that have affected its broad-based electoral appeal and contributed to a factional and fragmented political arena. The outcome of this has been, concludes Diggins, ‘a social-psychological deference on the part of the “subaltern” strata towards the attitudes of the upper classes’ (345) that renders class identification in the British sense all but unthinkable because of the glossing of blatant economic and racial inequalities by a rhetoric that ceaselessly invokes concepts of personal liberty and self-reliance. Any suggestion that the American Dream is in any way inadequate tends to lead not in the direction of confident rejection and defiance, but rather towards the expression of desperation, self-blame and self-destruction. The defeatist outlook evident in much contemporary fiction has been ascribed to the internecine conflict between the American New Left and an older generation of anticommunist New Deal-age leftists over the Vietnam War, and to the subsequent withdrawal of the New Left from conventional political activity into academia, where its concerns are alleged to have become more obtuse and its influence upon mainstream politics severely limited. 2 During the Reagan years, the way in which ‘radicals fell like dominoes into the arms of the

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institutions they had excoriated’ only served to intensify feelings of left-liberal guilt, and disillusionment with the political process. 3 Because many contemporary American left-liberal writers feel estranged from any continuous tradition of class-based social antagonism, they have been unable even to call upon the energy of resentment that has fuelled the work of their British counterparts as a reaction against the sudden and traumatic imposition of New Right economic doctrine. The outcome has been a state of enervation and disengagement that, according to John Kucich, has affected white male writers of a left-liberal disposition to the extent that ‘the decline of politically-engaged fiction written by white American male writers’ appears ‘quite natural’.4 Kucich argues that the emphasis of contemporary critical theory on the primacy of language has undermined the legitimacy of the traditional sources of cultural authority upon which the (predominantly masculine) left has traditionally depended, and that the consequence of this for white male left-liberal novelists has been a retreat into either ‘a basic refusal of seriousness’ or ‘complex political despair’ (329). Although the collapse of transcendent cultural authority has made possible the articulation of previously unheard voices, the consequence of this collapse has been, according to Kucich, an ‘urgent search for culturally marginal discourses’ (332) that derive their legitimacy from the fact of marginalization alone and that contribute to a ‘fetishizing of social identity that is both anti-intellectual and fatal to any attempts to collectivize opposition on the left’ (333). What follows – the desire simply to assert one’s own voice without sanction or grounding – is said to be complicit with a process of commodification that ‘thrives on the fluidity and insubstantiality of contemporary political stances’ and, in any event, is of little use to those white American males who ‘constitute the one social group unable to use their social identity to ground fluid postures of opposition’ (333). If the assertion of one’s own contingent voice leads to ideological embarrassment in the case of the white male left-liberal, then it is understandable to seek grounding outside that voice, and all the more devastating when no such grounding seems available. For Kucich, the work of Don DeLillo exemplifies ‘the ideological aimlessness of most white male American writing’ in the sense that, although DeLillo’s work addresses political issues, his characters are ‘unwilling or unable to take the next step toward any kind of political assertion’ (334) because they evince no faith in either their own cultural authority or in their experimentation with the appropriation of other cultural identities. By way of example, Kucich refers to the

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failed attempts made in White Noise by the narrator Jack Gladney and his professorial colleagues to ‘transform white male cultural figures into acceptable models of protest’ (338). Gladney realizes that his attempt to deconstruct Hitler is as ludicrous as any of the other attempts of his white male cohort to invest all manner of cultural ephemera with dubious significance: The teaching staff is composed almost solely of New York émigrés, smart, thuggish, movie-mad, trivia-crazed. They are here to decipher the natural language of the culture [ ... ] All [the] teachers are male, wear rumpled clothes, need haircuts, cough into their armpits. Together they look like teamster officials assembled to identify the body of a mutilated colleague. The impression is one of pervasive bitterness, suspicion and intrigue.5 The teamsters reference suggests that cultural deconstruction is being portrayed as a neutered form of political activity by comparison with riskier forms of engagement pursued by white men on the left in the past. In effect, Gladney and his colleagues are the beneficiaries of an ideological truce that has transformed tough teamsters into comfortable academics who have ploughed the remains of their white masculine identity into the aggressive custodianship of abandoned popular cultural artefacts in an attempt to align themselves alongside the other voices of postmodern contingency.6 It appears to Gladney that every quarter of society has conspired in surrendering to the forces of mediated commodification against which he and his colleagues struggle in vain. A passenger on an aeroplane that narrowly averts disaster reports how quickly corporate normality came to be restored: ‘The first officer walked down the aisle, smiling and chatting in an empty pleasant corporate way [ ... ] They looked at him and wondered why they’d been afraid’ (92). Subsequently, Gladney’s daughter Bee suggests that the passengers’ experience is inadequate because it lacks the validation of approved representation: ‘Where’s the media?’ she said. ‘There is no media in Iron City.’ ‘They went through all that for nothing?’ (92) While characters such as Bee crave the fix of mediation, others are propelled in the opposite direction towards a search for ‘authenticity’

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that is sited upon the human body.7 Gladney and his wife Babette take up running, and their son’s friend Orest Mercator plans to live in a tank of venomous snakes, but these projects end in failure: Babette’s fitness regime does not prevent her from resorting to the illicit use of the drug Dylar in order to conquer her fear of death; and Mercator’s own attempt at attaining a more visceral reality is abandoned after he is bitten. Like many a besieged white male character, Gladney turns to his own children for some form of redemption,8 but although he admires the unselfconscious awareness of the very young, his attempt to invest the sleeping Steffie’s incantation of the name of an automobile with ‘splendid transcendence’ (155) is unconvincing because, even in the sleep of childhood, it is evident that there is no escape from commodification: ‘the unselfconscious life, without fear or memory, is [ ... ] also what unmistakably qualifies one to be the ideal late-capitalist consumer’.9 This futile search for transcendence is parodied once more at the end of the novel when Gladney visits a hospital run by distinctly postmodern nuns whose religious faith is built only on the need of others for belief. The nuns are ‘signifiers of a divine signified. But in fact the nuns believe only that we must believe they believe: a circularity, which is the circularity, the infinite deferral of language itself’.10 Like language, transcendence too is endlessly deferred but, as Gladney discovers, the desire for transcendence has been appropriated by consumerism’s irresistible promotion of a passive, essentialized state of being. It is this state that enchants not only the sleeping Steffie but the fully conscious Gladney out on a shopping spree with his family at the local mall: It seemed to me that Babette and I, in the mass and variety of our purchases, in the sheer plenitude those crowded bags suggested, the weight and size and number, the familiar package designs and vivid lettering, the giant sizes, the family garden packs with Day-Glo sale stickers, in the sense of replenishment we felt, the sense of wellbeing, the security and contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls – it seemed we had achieved a fullness that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the evening. (20) So atrophied is Gladney’s sense of dissent that, in this scene, he contemplates surrendering completely to the consumerist culture that engulfs him.11 It even occurs to Gladney that it is not the happy participant in what passes for contemporary collective experience who is

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guilty of contributing to the erosion of collective values, but rather the dissident, whose sense of dissatisfaction has become a bar to communal participation. The paradox at the heart of Gladney’s reasoning is that it is the individualistic dependence on the satisfaction promised by consumer goods that brings Gladney’s family together as a group, while the refusal of such self-indulgence in the name of other collective imperatives is what isolates the dissident. As a typically guilt-ridden left-liberal, however, Gladney cannot accept fully the seductions of the mall because of a persistent awareness that membership of the consumerist community is almost exclusive to the white middle classes.12 There is little evidence, however, that Gladney’s sympathy for subordinate social groups runs very deep. In fact, he feels contentedly estranged from their difficulties. When a cloud of toxic chemicals appears over the town, Gladney is dismissive of the effect it may have on his own neighbourhood: Society is set up in such a way that it’s the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters [ ... ] I’m a college professor. Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods? We live in a neat and pleasant town near a college with a quaint name. These things don’t happen in places like Blacksmith. (114) The joke is that they do: Gladney is exposed to the cloud, suggesting that the political quietism of the subservient liberal does not necessarily confer protection from the outcomes of consumerist capitalism, whether environmental or otherwise. White Noise makes it evident that the American middle classes have been betrayed: that a deal has been broken. Throughout the novel, Gladney and his family return to the symbolic location of the supermarket: a private site where the public meets in order to satisfy its own private appetites. The supermarket is the place where a form of ideological covenant is established by which the public is presented with abundance in exchange for the surrender of public space and collective interests. That this agreement is a dupe becomes evident not only in Gladney’s encounter with the toxic cloud, but in the scene at the end of the novel when the narrative explains that ‘the supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers [ ... ] They see no reason for it, find no sense in it’ (325–326). The rearrangement of consumer goods takes on the air of a more sinister disruption: a breaking

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of the covenant, presumably for the sole benefit of those who own the supermarket. The community of consumers wakes up to the delusion, but it is too late: There is a sense of [ ... ] sweet-tempered people taken to the edge. They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal [ ... ] In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless roar of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. (326) The community has been betrayed by a process whose power is manifest in a dehumanizing technology that renders the speculation of its subjects irrelevant but in which those same subjects have been trapped by their own aspirations and by their helpless complicity with the agents of their own undoing. Commodification is also one of the principal concerns of Bill Gray, the principal character in DeLillo’s later novel Mao II (1992). Gray is a politically-aware novelist whose own attempt at resisting commodification takes the form of refusing to give interviews or have his photograph taken, only to realise that his reclusive lifestyle only stimulates the very kind of celebrity that he scorns.13 In an attempt to outflank the forces he sees as hostile to an independent, critical culture, Gray agrees to a photo-session before deciding to engage with the outside world by travelling to the Middle East in an attempt to help free a poet taken hostage by terrorists: a project that ends in failure and death. It is a dilemma typical of a DeLillo white male left-liberal protagonist: the critic of contemporary culture finds himself either passive and complicit, or active and doomed. Gray contrasts the declining influence of the contemporary dissident intellectual with the ascendancy of the terrorist: There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists [ ... ] Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.14 Later, the photographer Brita finds that Gray’s initial reluctance before the camera corresponds with the violent reaction she encounters when she attempts to photograph one of the young men who serve the

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terrorist leader Abu Rashid. The suggestion of a correspondence of interests between the left-liberal intellectual and the terrorist who claims to represent the world’s most oppressed people is reinforced by George Haddad, a representative of the terrorist group, who tries to persuade Gray into expressing public sympathy for the terrorists. Of the latter, Haddad emphasizes, The way they hate many of the things you hate [ ... ] In societies reduced to blur and glut, terror is the only meaningful act [ ... ] Everything else is absorbed. The artist is absorbed, the madman on the street is absorbed and incorporated. Give him a dollar, put him in a TV commercial. Only the terrorist stands outside. The culture hasn’t figured out how to assimilate him. It’s confusing when they kill the innocent. But this is precisely the language of being noticed, the only language the West understands. (157) The claim that the terrorist has escaped commodification is especially alluring to a writer seeking to do the same, but Gray finally refutes Haddad’s suggestions with an appeal to what Gray sees as the glorious uncertainty and ambivalence of liberal democracy and his own besieged left-liberal position. Gray argues that the experience of my own work tells me how autocracy fails, how total control wrecks the spirit [ ... ] how I need internal dissent, selfargument, how the world squashes me the minute I think it’s mine [ ... ] Ambiguities, contradictions, whispers, hints. And this is what you want to destroy [ ... ] And when the novelist loses his talent he dies democratically, there it is for everyone to see, wide open to the world, the shitpile of hopeless prose. (159) This is prophetic: Gray dies on the way to meet Rashid in Beirut, his words suggesting that, even if the open, contingent, anti-essentialist, liberal democracy is doomed, then at least his honest adherence to those values is preferable to dissolution in either the world of commodities and capital, or the world of violent political clarity. Gray may be a more admirable apologist for liberal democracy than Jack Gladney, but the ending of Mao II offers little cause for celebration: with Gray dead, his place as society’s conscience and source of reflection has been usurped by the terrorist in a way that suggests that the fate of the independent human agent is to be either absorbed by the endless commodification of the capitalist West, or else dissolved within a mass

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ruled by terror. As Steven Paul Miller says of the novel, ‘Mao II posits a reality of crowd and work organization that lacks a mechanism for questioning reality, a reality in which Mao II and Coke II are equally viable’.15 DeLillo may have pleaded a sympathetic case for the white male left-liberal writer but seems to acknowledge that, because the latter lacks the means (or the confidence) by which to privilege himself over any alternative, his pessimism is no more progressive than Warhol’s deliberately ‘empty’ representation of Coke cans. A similar sense of left-liberal pessimism and self-doubt pervades Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections. One of the novel’s principal characters, Chip Lambert, is a college lecturer who becomes increasingly disillusioned with his attempts to teach his students to deconstruct consumerist culture. Chip suspects not only that his counter-ideological strategies are failing but that any possibility of cultural resistance is receding: Each year, it seemed, the incoming freshmen were a little more resistant to hardcore theory than they’d been the year before. Each year the moment of enlightenment, of critical mass, came a little later. Now the end of a semester was at hand, and Chip still wasn’t sure that anyone [ ... ] really got how to criticize mass culture.16 Chip’s story pokes fun at the academic left in a manner similar to DeLillo in White Noise. Early in The Corrections there is a comic episode in which a frenzied Chip, having botched the arrangements for a family get-together, employs the tools of cultural criticism in order to excuse his own responsibility: I’m saying the structure of the entire culture is flawed [ ... ] A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication [ ... ] The very definition of mental ‘health’ is the ability to participate in the consumer economy. When you buy into therapy, you’re buying into buying. And I’m saying that I personally am losing the battle with a commercialized, medicalized, totalitarian modernity right this instant. (31) Having committed himself to a critique of consumerism, however, Chip confesses to having ‘a poached salmon in the fridge. A crème fraîche with sorrel. A salad with green beans and hazelnuts. You’ll see the wine and the baguette and the butter. It’s good fresh butter from Vermont’ (31–32). Like both DeLillo and Amis, Franzen seems determined

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to bring low his white male left-liberal protagonists in ways that underline the complicity of the latter with all that they oppose, along with their failure to sustain their own confidence in any alternative. Chip criticizes an advertising campaign by the W_ Corporation for exploiting women’s fear of breast cancer, but Melissa Paquette, the student with whom Chip is having an affair, produces a counterargument that proves to be popular with her classmates: ‘It’s celebrating women in the workplace [ ... ] It’s raising money for cancer research. It’s encouraging us to do our self-examinations and get the help we need. It’s helping women feel like we own this technology, like it’s not just a guy thing’ (43). Chip is sceptical but, as a left-liberal white man confronted by a woman claiming empowerment, he is troubled not only by Melissa’s implication that his critique is part of the same ‘guy thing’ that covertly seeks to reassert patriarchal domination, but also by the possibility that the cultural theory and left-liberal political outlook he represents has failed to engage the young, and that it has left a political and cultural vacuum which, either by default or sinister intention, has come to be filled by the libidinal-consumerist Utopia evoked by Melissa in her subsequent attack on Chip’s critical perspective: it’s one critic after another wringing their hands about the state of criticism. Nobody can ever quite say what’s wrong exactly. But they all know it’s evil [ ... ] And people who think they’re free aren’t ‘really’ free. And people who think they’re happy aren’t ‘really’ happy. And it’s impossible to radically critique society any more, although what’s so wrong with society that we need such a radical critique, nobody can say exactly [ ... ] Here things are getting better and better for women and people of colour, and gay men and lesbians, more and more integrated and open, and all you can think about is some stupid, lame problem with signifiers and signifieds. (44) Disillusioned by the possibility that ‘it was only straight white males like Chip who had a problem with this order’ (45), Chip decides to capitulate to the forces of capital and participates in an Internet scam run by the similarly desperate Lithuanian politician-turnedentrepreneur Gitanas Misevičius. By asking himself ‘What positive thing do I stand for?’ (447), Misevičius, like many a character in the contemporary social novel, indicates that he is seeking a seemingly unobtainable correlative for his own diverse set of libertarian, collectivist, ethical and political impulses. The decision that he and Chip make to join the entrepreneurial scramble for the plunder of Eastern Europe is rewarded

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by initial financial success, but the subsequent demise of the pair at the hands of more ruthless ‘businessmen’ is a further indication of the betrayal of the aspirations of those members of the professional and managerial classes who have bought into the New Right project only to find that its promises were illusory. Although Chip’s predicament is presented in comic terms, other representations in the novel of the plight of the contemporary leftliberal are more serious in tone, and indicate that the latter is not restricted to white males. The character of Sylvia Roth, for instance, admits to her obsessive wish for revenge against her daughter’s murderer Khellye Winters, but is aware that ‘her desire would please conservatives for whom the phrase “personal responsibility” constituted permission to ignore social justice’ (307). Roth subscribes to the idea that a more equitable society would make the existence of such men as Winters less likely, and so cannot accept the conservative argument, but is still unable to reconcile her left-liberal principles with her desire for violent revenge. Whereas Roth is drawn away from her principles towards violence, Nick Passafaro is drawn by his own traumatic experience in the opposite direction, away from his earlier conviction that violence may be justifiable on political grounds. Passafaro’s adoptive son, Billy, carries out a serious physical assault on an executive of the W_ Corporation after the company donates outdated computing equipment to schools and community centres in exchange for publicity rights. Although Passafaro defends the political motives behind Billy’s attack, he is appalled by the extent of the injuries that Billy has inflicted on the executive and, his spirit broken, withdraws into mental illness. Both Roth and Passafaro are stranded in a desperate ambivalence, torn between their deepest ethical and political principles and their desire for effective action – a dilemma that recalls Banks’s Complicity. Passafaro’s daughter Robin is also appalled by Billy’s assault and tries to make a gesture of redemption by attempting to help the victim and embarking on a number of other charitable projects. She is aware, however, that her efforts are compromised by the fact that she can only pare the leisure time in which to pursue these projects because of the purchase of her husband’s software by none other than the W_ Corporation She becomes a regular churchgoer, but it seems that, along with her voluntary work, this is due more to a need for some form of communal contact and contribution than to any deep religious conviction. Robin thereby becomes a typical contemporary left-liberal protagonist in that she has abandoned what Diggins terms

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‘negation’ (23) – an implicitly future-facing refusal to accept given social and economic arrangements from a belief that other arrangements are possible – in favour of traditional modes and institutions that, despite their conservative associations, indicate a past in which collective values have not been so thoroughly subject to the vagaries of the market, and which therefore seem to offer some form of sanctuary from contemporary isolation and guilt. It is unsurprising that the theme of complicity should be so prevalent at a time when political defeat came not beneath a truncheon, or after gruelling conflict and sacrifice, but as a result of the straightforward failure of leftist parties to capture the popular vote. Traditionally, the democratic left has assumed that the revision or the overthrow of capitalism would be achieved by popular consent rather than through revolution, and there were signs in the decades following the Depression and World War Two that this might be a realistic goal. With hindsight, and in the American context, the election victories of Nixon in 1968 and 1972 effectively signified the end of such hopes, and the beginning of a process in which the American left became little more than helpless spectators of the events that led to the subsequent success of Reagan. In linking the Nixon years to those of the Reagan presidency, Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990) examines the way in which the right succeeded in isolating the American left from the popular appeal to which it aspired by means of the appropriation of the very forms of popular culture that at one point seemed to offer to the left a route towards collective liberation. The novel demonstrates how the subversive potential of sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and electronic media – particularly television – was so quickly absorbed into American mainstream culture that the latter was able, like an alien creature in a sci-fi B-movie that feeds on the weapons used against it, to transform itself into a still more efficient machine of oppressive commodification. From Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) to Mason and Dixon (1997) there recurs in Pynchon’s work the notion that America has taken a ‘wrong turning’; that its democratic and egalitarian potential has been betrayed in the interests of private capital. Vineland is a description of the way in which this betrayal was effected at the end of the 1960s by reactionary forces acting with the complicity of the liberal left. A useful starting point for following the political trajectory of Pynchon’s novel is the somewhat inaccurate prediction by Marx that, with increased leisure time, workers would follow ‘higher’ pursuits that would enhance their participation in civic society.17 Vineland is a

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declaration that, with the arrival of increased leisure time, there came instead the ‘wrong turning’ of a decline in civic participation in favour of the indulgence of individual appetites. In Vineland (as in Amis’s Money), the implication is that capitalist interests have reacted to the libertarian drives of the 1960s by exploiting those drives in ways that fuel declining sociability and drive increasingly isolated individuals further towards addiction and compliance. The left conspires in its own downfall by succumbing to the process by which libertarian desire becomes appetite, and then addiction. The downfall is both sexual and technological (although in Pynchon’s work, the two are never far apart): the surrender to her sexual desires brings about the complicity of the activist Frenesi Gates with the sinister federal agent Brock Vond, but it is the addiction of many of the novel’s characters to television that is Vineland’s grand signifier of surrender, passivity and control. With reference to the fate of 24fps, the anarchist film collective whose downfall Vineland traces, Joseph Slade recalls how, during the 1960s, radical independent film-makers enjoyed remarkable success in having films with progressive political content screened on network television, only for Congress eventually to block their distribution in favour of programmes with a less challenging content.18 Thus, a medium that offered revolutionary potential was to become a narcotic intended to dull the interests of the audiences that had begun to take an interest in subversive content. As Governor of California during the novel’s 1960s setting, and as President in the later setting of 1984, Reagan is an absent presence in the novel whose influence stretches back as far as the wartime memories of older characters such as Hub Gates, Jess Traverse and Eula Becker. As a former unionist and Democrat, Reagan is a potent symbol of the way in which America turned away from the idealistic legacy of the New Deal in favour of cynical authoritarian populism,19 especially in light of the notion that ‘the vehicle for illustrating the co-option of the left is the media of Reagan’s expertise: radio, film and television’. 20 The presence of Brock Vond in the novel acts as a reminder that the defeat of the left was not entirely a matter of surrender and collusion, but it is significant that Vond’s reliance on truncheons and attack helicopters comes to an end as a result of Reaganite cuts. It becomes evident that, in the climate of conformity fostered by Reagan’s America, authoritarian measures are largely redundant: the drugs enforcement officer Hector Zuñiga, for instance, points out that Vond’s ‘re-education’ camps were closed because ‘since

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about ‘81 kids were comín in all on their own, askiń about careers’ (punctuation in original). 21 Vineland begins with an episode that indicates the extent to which the counterculture has become complicit with the contemporary capitalist state and its media. Zoyd Wheeler – bohemian rock musician turned compliant welfare claimant – is about to stage the defenestration stunt that ensures his supply of mental disability payments, but discovers that fake glass has been placed in the window he leaps through so that the stunt looks better on television. The scene indicates ‘an ominous but familiar (and familial) dynamic of complicities among an unwilling but compliant subject, the state apparatus, and television’ in which even representatives of the counterculture have willingly participated because of the way in which their appetites have been programmed by a popular media that has been appropriated by the dominant culture. 22 A generation later, it is the young musician Isaiah Two Four who understands the extent to which the collapse of the counterculture was due to its failure to understand the importance of the means of representation: Whole problem ‘th you folks’s generation [ ... ] is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out there for it – but you sure didn’t understand much about the Tube. Minute the Tube got hold of you folks, that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just like th’ Indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970 dollars – it was way too cheap. (373) Isaiah’s comments seem to be borne out by other commentators. Daniel Snowman and Malcolm Bradbury claim that ‘the counter-culture in all its manifestations was imaginative rather than intellectual, expressive rather than analytical, interested in trying new types of experience rather than improving old ones’ and that it placed too much emphasis on ‘radical style over radical content’ in ways that fostered not social revolution but a politics of the self that in subsequent decades accorded with the cults of personality and celebrity exploited at the political level by Reagan and his successors.23 Interestingly, it is not Zoyd Wheeler but his ex-wife Frenesi Gates who is the principal representative in the novel of that politics of the self thought to have undermined the traditionally collectivist goals of the left. Frenesi signifies the individualistic and libertarian impulses of the postwar years that altered the political direction of the country between

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the 1960s and 1980s. In the same way that Reagan was a product of the New Deal who turned against the state interventionism that kept his family afloat during the Depression,24 so Frenesi’s ‘easy privileging of her own desires over her ideology’25 embodies the way in which the countercultural left betrayed its own collectivist origins in order to pursue and promote private indulgence. The pursuit of single appetites provides Brock Vond with a politically useful ‘snitch potential’ (268) that stands in marked contrast to the kinship system of opposition proffered by the older members of the extended Becker-Traverse clan. Vond and Zuñiga neutralize the political (and familial) resistance of both Frenesi and Wheeler by exploiting their respective appetites for sex and drugs, and in a similar way recruit college students as informers on the basis of the students’ wish for one more year of collegiate pleasures. Vond’s claim to the students that ‘the FBI could put you on the time machine if that’s what you wanted’ (239) suggests a link with the past that, with regard to the way in which the radical traditions of the Becker-Traverse community are portrayed positively, might contradict Vond’s association with a terrifying conformity that is hostile to any such association, but in this instance the past being evoked is no more than the repetition of an individualistic present in which self-indulgence is bought at the price of co-operation with the authorities. Such a bargain represents the abrogation of responsibility by Frenesi and Wheeler’s generation, its political outcome in terms of the decline of the integrity of the left since the time of Jess Traverse a reminder that, ‘justice is not innate but won only through hard work and human struggle’.26 The ending of the novel, in which the members of that generation are brought together by the Becker-Traverse gathering, offsets the implication that the countercultural generation was irredeemably individualistic and therefore inherently reactionary. Frenesi and Prairie are reunited, and Wheeler, Frenesi and her lover Flash reconciled. What is more remarkable in the light of Hector Zuñiga’s description of a generation that willingly surrenders to the demands of Reaganism is that Vineland’s younger characters are, after all, not ‘yuppies’ but instead adopt a tentative bohemianism that allows them to be sceptical about the kind of society they inhabit yet, aware of the failings of the parental generation, remain shy of overt political engagement. This ambivalence is in keeping with the tone of the end of the novel, which signifies neither an Emersonian optimism (in which the contemporary world is redeemed by the natural setting of the Vineland woods), nor a form of nihilism born out of political despair.27 Instead, it seems that Vineland,

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through its ambivalence and scepticism, and in its refusal of despair, points outside the text to the political culpability and responsibility of both writer and reader. The contrast between 1960s radicalism and 1980s conservatism, and the ways in which the former may have contributed to the latter, is not only the principal theme of Vineland, but is addressed in the work of other contemporary white male American novelists. Tom Wolfe’s, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1998) is clearly a satire upon the machinations of a corrupt New York public realm and the greed of financial institutions during the mid-1980s boom, but there are occasional references to the radicalism of the 1960s that are in keeping with Wolfe’s own association with the New Journalism of the period. During one episode, the former radical lawyer Albert Vogel bemoans the fact that the young audiences at his lectures on student politics fail to comprehend the subject. In a manner that recalls Pynchon’s portrayal of the sexual fantasies of the Gates women in Vineland, Vogel claims that young female students ‘just fall over’ in the presence of ‘Authority ... Power ... Fa me ... Prestige’, and is bewildered by the way in which sexuality has become emblematic not of liberation but of submission to power: You know, when the Movement was going strong, one of the things we tried to do on the campuses was to break down that wall of formality between the faculty and the students, because it was nothing but an instrument of control. But now, Jesus Christ, I wonder. I guess they all want to get laid by their fathers, if you believe Freud, which I don’t.28 Vogel despairs at a seemingly Foucauldian dynamic in which ‘sexuality is not an expression of natural passion so much as a product of socially conditioned discourses’.29 In Vineland, Frenesi Gates surrenders to Brock Vond, but in The Bonfire of the Vanities a purposive right-wing presence is no longer even necessary because the female students have absorbed the ‘Vondian’ power discourse to the extent that, in Vogel’s eyes, they seem actively to seek their own submission.30 Unlike Pynchon, Wolfe does not attempt a serious analysis of why the radicalism of the 1960s failed to prevent the rise of political conservatism during the 1980s, but does hint occasionally at some form of collusion between the two. Towards the end of the novel, McCoy reminds his wife Judy that, in their youth, he would give a Black Power salute before leaving for work in order to indicate that he would never submit to the values of Wall Street but instead would ‘use

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it and rebel and break with it’ (685). Of course, the effect of this exchange is comical because McCoy has become a self-proclaimed ‘Master of the Universe’ who owns a luxury apartment on Fifth Avenue and who berates a colleague for reading a newspaper at work, while Judy, the daughter of a Midwestern history professor, has abandoned her interest in the humanities in favour of designing interiors for Manhattan socialites. Beyond the comedy, however, there is the suggestion that, as with Vineland’s cast of former radicals, entrapment within the values of the right is the political legacy of a romantic self-indulgence that passed under the guise of an emancipatory politics. Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho (1991) is similar to The Bonfire of the Vanities in that its central character and narrator, Patrick Bateman, is also a wealthy Wall Street bonds dealer whose story is another satirical account of ‘yuppie’ life in 1980s New York. 31 Like Wolfe’s novel, American Psycho is set firmly in the present but, just as The Bonfire of the Vanities makes the occasional reference to the 1960s, Thomas Irmer has found in the novel a number of references to the earlier decade that emphasize the correspondences between the 1960s and the 1980s. 32 Along with Bateman’s lengthy praise of middle-ofthe-road acts such as Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis, these references seem to confirm that rock music in the 1980s is no more subversive or transgressive than Bateman’s designer clothes and toiletries. The same is true of the drug use and sexual promiscuity that seems entirely compatible with the social conservatism of Bateman and his peers. It is tempting to conclude from this that Bateman’s descent into sadism and murder is the outcome of an amoral self-indulgence that has its roots in countercultural libertarian rhetoric, but Irmer warns against such a conclusion, arguing that it is in fact Bateman’s estrangement from that counterculture, and his claustrophobic immersion in the values of Reaganite America, that brings about his moral dissolution. Irmer chooses to portray the 1960s positively, as a time of cultural richness and potential by comparison with the depthless consumerism of the later decade in which a form of counter-liberation is said to restore aggressive forms of repression that had been challenged by countercultural movements. Irmer’s argument, however, is weakened by his own observation that the parental generation which features in all of Ellis’s novels consists almost solely of a cohort of self-indulgent, upper-middle-class baby boomers whose sense of care for their offspring extends only to underwriting college fees and credit-card bills. This generation was

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young in the 1960s, and it is arguable that Bateman’s descent into psychosis is not so much the result of complete estrangement from the movements of that decade, but rather a consequence of the sanctioning of self-indulgence borrowed more or less directly from the libertarian rhetoric of those movements by an ideology that privileges individualistic self-assertion and consumerist immediacy over social co-operation and commitment, history and cultural depth. Of course, much depends on what is meant exactly by ‘the 1960s’. Fredric Jameson has warned against relying on received ideas about the 1960s that suppress the contradictions and difficulties inherent in the attempt to define a period of significant change and conflict in order to plunder and commodify that decade as a readily identifiable set of ideas and images. 33 Irmer’s argument suggests that, during the 1960s, the political impulses of the young all ran implacably in the direction of countercultural libertarianism; but it is also arguable that the readiness with which the artefacts of that period could be commodified and parodied during the 1980s implied a contrary impulse that, although still part of that which is termed ‘the 1960s’, drew the parental generation in a very different direction. Irmer points out that most of Bateman’s victims are those marginalized by the values prevalent in Reaganite America (women and the homeless, for example), and this may indicate that the social liberalism that was but one aspect of the 1960s has indeed become its opposite in the sense that the material self-gratification into which that liberalism has collapsed has had the effect of driving out not only those values that might challenge the economic and political basis of such self-gratification, but also those social groups that might have claimed some protection from such values. In the background of Ellis’s fiction is the presence of what Alan Bilton has described as a ‘shadowy father’ who is ‘no longer a symbol of parental authority but [is] somehow much more sinister [ ... ] and provides a sense of dread which cannot be dismissed as artificial’.34 This presence, he claims, is not the Freudian figure of paternalistic prohibition, but rather the satanic representative of total license whose ‘wealth makes all things possible, whilst his absence makes all things meaningless’ (213). It is reasonable to conclude that this figure represents contemporary capitalism, which has severed the notion of licence from the emancipatory context of 1960s rebellion and put it into the service of a thoroughly different, and utterly unlicensed, social context that ultimately fuels the isolation and despair Bateman

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shares with Clay, the narrator of Ellis’s first novel, Less Than Zero (1985). In the absence of any redemptive social or ethical structure, both Bateman and Clay become fascinated by the possibility of moving beyond social limitations that are now perceived as meaningless in an attempt to derive some desperate form of satisfaction from the transgressive value of horror and violence. Terry Eagleton’s comment that ‘American culture is deeply hostile to the idea of limit, and therefore to human biology’ is of particular relevance to Clay and Bateman, and to the way in which they focus their own hostility and frustration upon the limits of the physical body.35 Eagleton claims that the American attitude towards sensual pleasure veers between fervent desire and puritanical loathing: what seems a celebration of the body, then, may also cloak a virulent anti-materialism – a desire to gather this raw, perishable stuff into the less corruptible forms of art or discourse [ ... ] To reduce this obstreperous stuff to so much clay in our hands is a fantasy of mastering the unmasterable. (164–165) This is indeed how Clay and Bateman behave: indulging in the pleasures of the body, yet despising those same pleasures; and attempting to contain and control the body through fitness regimes, designer clothing and drugs, yet also punishing the rebellious body by humiliating and dismembering it. It is Clay who has the most pronounced tendency to alternate between revulsion from the horrors of the flesh and submersion in those same horrors. He walks out of the screening of a snuff movie, and berates a friend for taking part in the gang-rape, yet agrees to watch his friend Julian prostitute himself with an out-of-town businessman, and confesses to possessing a collection of gruesome news stories clipped from newspapers and magazines. At the end of the novel, he decides to leave Los Angeles and return to his eastern college, implying that he has renounced his sordid Californian lifestyle, but as he leaves town he hears a song on the radio that conjures up ‘images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children [ ... ] Images so violent and malicious that they seemed to be my only point of reference’. 36 Again, the suggestion is that an older generation has bequeathed to the children of the 1980s a legacy of ineradicable self-indulgence and moral and political

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abdication that leads nowhere but to a desperate and self-destructive nihilism. The influence of the parental generation is also at work in the novels of Douglas Coupland, whose characters, although as young, white and American as those of Ellis, are neither as affluent nor as debased. A sense of profound disappointment haunts both sets of characters, but whereas Ellis’s protagonists remain dissatisfied despite having access to all that money can buy, those of Coupland associate their discontent with financial insecurity. The contrast between the two sets of characters indicates discrepancies in wealth even among the white American middle classes that implies the existence of a class system, yet the existence of identifiable social strata in terms of both wealth and expectation do not involve (as in Britain) significant levels of class-consciousness and class conflict. In the context of a post-Reaganite economy based on short-term contracts and quick profits in which the betrayal of the professional and managerial middle classes described by DeLillo in White Noise is all too evident, Bilton claims that, ‘Coupland’s protagonists have to deal with the idea of having less; of “downsizing”, curtailing desire, leading smaller lives [ ... ] The baby-boom years of prosperity are now long gone’ (224). In 1980, it was a sense of resentment by the American electorate against the lowered expectations of Jimmy Carter’s economic and political realism that provoked the swing to the right that brought Ronald Reagan to power, yet in the 1990s the reaction not only of Generation X but of all the other social groups to have suffered the emiseration of the Reagan-Bush years, can hardly be said to have provoked an equivalent left-wing backlash. This lack of rebellious anger is evident throughout Coupland’s novel Generation X (1991). Tellingly, the three principal characters, Andy, Claire and Dag, reveal that, far from being forced into austerity, they have chosen to move to the margins of consumer society and to work in ‘McJobs’ in the leisure and service industries. The rebellion of these ‘slackers’ lies in the fact that they have deliberately rejected the aspirational drives fostered by mainstream American society in favour of a quest for a form of personal satisfaction founded upon (curiously ‘un-postmodern’) notions of spirituality and depth. Dag, who claims to have walked away from a high-pressure ‘yuppie’ lifestyle to work in a bar, is relieved to find that his new job means that ‘there [is] no possibility of being the ideal target market any more’, 37 while Andy also suggests that their ‘downshifting’ project

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has been a success: We live small lives on the periphery: we are marginalized and there’s a great deal in which we choose not to participate [ ... ] We had compulsions that made us confuse shopping with creativity, to take downers and assume that merely renting a video on a Saturday night was enough. But now that we live here in the desert, things are much, much better. (14 – emphasis in original) The relaxed lifestyle of the three friends is contrasted with that of Clare’s ‘yuppie’ suitor Tobias, a character seemingly imported from an Ellis novel who confesses to suffering from violent, nihilistic visions in which he sees himself as ‘radiator steam on the cement of the Santa Monica freeway after a thousand-car pile up – with acidrock from the smashed cars roaring in the background’ (185). Andy’s contempt for Tobias, along with his scorn for those who buy property, implies a degree of hostility towards the American Dream, but when compared to (e.g.) the diatribe against consumerism voiced by Renton in Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), the criticisms of Coupland’s trio seem closer to evasion than to confrontation and sound less antagonistic than petulant: I wonder that all things seem to be from hell these days: dates, jobs, parties, weather [ ... ] Could the situation be that we no longer believe in that particular place? Or maybe we were all promised heaven in our lifetimes, and what we ended up with can’t help but suffer by comparison. (8) Bilton suggests that it is the ambivalence of Coupland’s characters towards their situation that neutralizes any possibility of political engagement. They attempt to distance themselves from trash culture and aspirational acquisitiveness, yet at the same time delight in cartoons, junk food and television, and search relentlessly for any artefact or possession that might be considered ‘cool’ by an implicitly elitist peer group. In thereby imbuing abandoned objects with their own ephemeral significance, they are complicit in the very process of commodification they disdain. This immersion in trash culture – ironic or otherwise – is marked by an infantilism that Nick Heffernan claims is evident in the tendency for Coupland’s characters to respond to their social predicament ‘with play rather than critique’. 38

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Heffernan and Bilton both indicate that this infantilism is associated with nostalgia for the more prosperous America of the characters’ childhood, the irony being that this is the same America that has precipitated the cultural collapse they mourn, and that the parental generation at the centre of this nostalgia is blamed for the disappointment of their offspring. A further twist is that a group who profess such discontent with the values of post-Reaganite America should appear to blame the older generation not for failing to undermine the American Dream, but for failing to hand down that Dream in a suitable state of repair. Andy, Dag and Clare seek some form of salvation from the ills of their society, but fail either to identify those ills precisely or to condemn the agents that bring about those ills. Instead, they seek some form of accommodation with society, although Andy seems aware that it is this very desire to compromise, to seal the bargain that seeks for the protection of the middle classes while generating liberal guilt, that is the source of his disappointment and his ideological entrapment: You see, when you’re middle-class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied. (171) A later Coupland novel, Microserfs (1996) shares this ambivalence. Unlike the characters in Generation X, those in Microserfs do not fit the ‘slacker’ category by virtue of their jobs as programmers for the Microsoft corporation. Nonetheless, their discontent is similar, and is similarly compromised. Young, white and middle-class, they are – more than any other social group – best placed to benefit from the relative prosperity of the 1990s boom in the IT industry, yet still feel that their lives are incomplete. As in the earlier novel, much of their discontent stems not from an unambiguous hostility to the values of the society in which they live, but rather from the feeling that that society has not presented them with the prosperity and security offered to a previous generation. Dan, the narrator of the novel, is aware of the precarious nature of the economic and social status of all the members of his peer group, remarking that ‘you’re always just a breath away from a job in telemarketing.’39 The ruthless economic efficiency of a company such as Microsoft means that employees

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regarded as unproductive will quickly be discarded without regard to factors such as employee loyalty or the social implications of redundancy drives. This is brought home to Dan when his father, a longserving company man with IBM, is fired in the ‘downsizing’ frenzy of the late Reagan period. Like the characters in Generation X, Dan and his peers profess a hostility towards the sanitized world of mass consumption: Dan complains that even Las Vegas – not frequently considered a symbol of authenticity – ‘has now evolved into a Disney version of itself’ (358), while a character named Dusty rails against Lego as a symbol of the denial of impurity and the attempt of big corporations to ‘enculturate a citizenry intolerant of smell’ (257). As with Ellis’s characters, however, this attempt to recruit the visceral into a discourse of dissent fails because of the lack of any explicit social or political dimension, meaning that what Bilton describes as ‘the combination of Luddite suspicion and geeky enthusiasm’ (231) that informs the indecisive nature of the dissent expressed by Coupland’s characters traps them between ‘accommodation or flight’ (223) in ways that makes them unable to commit themselves to either because of a feeling that neither is adequate. In other words, the anxiety expressed by Coupland’s characters is the outcome of being unable to decide whether to run from the system or work within the system: it does not even consider the overthrow of that system. Of course, a political agenda is not a requirement of any novel. Yet the nature of the discontent expressed in Coupland’s novels – the recurring discussions of working conditions, financial security, and general dissatisfaction – points relentlessly towards a missing political dimension. Perhaps the reason for this absence lies with a feeling that, politically, there is nowhere for them to go at the ‘end of history’, in the post-perestroika world in which American-led capitalism seems triumphant.40 Coupland’s characters have the appearance of politely dissenting left-liberals who, despite a minor fillip in the form of Clinton’s presidency, can see no alternative to the ubiquity of Republican free-market thinking. Dan is only mildly ironic when he says that, ‘I have no stock, and this means I am a loser’ (6) and sadly acknowledges that ‘vesting’ (the practice of cashing in matured share options by his Microsoft colleagues) ‘turns most people into fiscal Republicans’ (28). The ambivalence of Coupland’s characters extends even to their attitude to their own youth. Although quite prepared to bask in the glory of their hipness, they also acknowledge that youth does not

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automatically confer a satisfying sense of rebellion, but rather involves a sense of entrapment within the superficial infantilism of the corporate-consumerist world they inhabit. In some ways, the ‘Microserfs’ feel that ubiquitous youth and beauty is no cause for celebration, but rather a cause for regret. Despite a degree of antipathy towards the older generation in general, there is in Coupland’s novels an apparent need for reconciliation with their own senior relatives that is fulfilled during the episodes in which Dan and his friends help his father to recover from redundancy, and in which the character of Michael employs his technological expertise to help Dan’s seriously ill mother to communicate. (What is significant about these episodes is that Dan’s parents are ‘straight’; they have no trace of the 1960s counterculture that damns the parental generation elsewhere.) The apparent distaste of the Gen X-ers for what they see as the irresponsible personal libertarianism of the parental generation (if not their own parents) is, of course, compromised by the tacit acceptance of the younger cohort of the freedom to indulge that is another part of the legacy of their elders. There can be little doubt that Coupland’s characters would suffer much distress if that freedom were to be rescinded and the group condemned to live in a Pleasantville-style 1950s time-warp in which gender roles were more rigidly enforced, sexuality, drug and alcohol use more closely monitored, and casual dress regarded with intense suspicion.41 Coupland’s characters sense that they are trapped by the twin dangers of 1950s conformism and 1960s libertarianism, the combination of which has spawned a 1980s hybrid to which accommodation is unsatisfactory and from which escape seems impossible. Instead, they seek tentative refuge in marginal activities and locations: in the desert, in ‘downshifted’ employment, in telling stories, cultivating intimate friendships, and in carving out their own self-consciously ironic niche within popular culture. Even the political references in Microserfs are couched in playful escapist terms: one chapter tellingly entitled ‘TrekPolitiks’ tells of a frivolous bodybuilder named Todd who suddenly declares his adherence to communism, which is dismissed by another character as ‘some sort of outdated, cartoon-like ideology’ (250). It seems that, on the basis of its fragmented narrative and tricks with typology that resemble an advertising campaign, rock video or comic book, that it is Microserfs that is the truer representation of ideology as cartoon. This may well be the point – that no ideology now has any more depth or relevance than that of a cartoon – but it indicates something of a dead end for the social novel.

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This chapter has provided ample evidence for the assertion that contemporary fiction written by white American men whose political sympathies lie to the left of the Republican party is marked by an abdication of explicit political engagement, either by the characters within the fiction or by the author himself. Even where discontent with the state of the nation is voiced, it is frequently accompanied either by violent nihilism, or by an enervating uncertainty as to the causes of dissatisfaction, and to the possibility of any remedy. These novelists and their white left-liberal protagonists – usually but not exclusively male – demonstrate a reluctance to assert convictions not only because those convictions remain half-formed, or sunk in ambivalence, but also because of an implicit feeling that they might drown out other voices (although the voices of ethnic, gay and working-class characters are almost entirely absent from these novels). They appear to believe that their own deepest impulses, and their associations with past misfortunes (particularly those associated with the failings of the 1960s counterculture and the inability of the political left to achieve mass support) have undermined their right to cultural authority: a feeling that fosters themes of defeatism and despair in their work. Their ostensible isolation from other social groups and (in some cases) their retreat to the redoubts of academia and ‘niche’ publishing have led them to examine the ways in which the individualistic discourse that was an important component of both the radicalism of the 1960s and the conservatism of the 1980s has contributed to their own predicament and to that of contemporary Western society. It seems that it is only through a re-assessment of that discourse that the white male left-liberal might be able to propose his own recovery and revive the possibility of resistance. It is this re-assessment that will form the basis of the following chapters.

4 The Communitarian Turn

In his classic study, Ian Watt argues that, although the early novel is a celebration of individualism, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) takes this celebration to such an extreme that the productive tension normally generated within the novel form by the social context is absent. Crusoe represents a mercantile ‘end of history’ in the sense that the protagonist, unworried by competition, has his entire world – even his sole human companion – reckoned up and consigned to the status of possession. Watt contends that the novel ‘requires a world view which is centred on the social relationships between individual persons’ (84) rather than a retreat into solipsism: a balance that is alleged by Watt to have been best achieved during the nineteenth century, when the confidence of the novelist, like that of the capitalist class, had reached its zenith.1 As confidence in the Crusoe-like sovereignty of the rational Enlightenment subject came to be undermined over the course of the twentieth century, a rearguard defence of individualism was indicated within the modernist novel by the emphasis of the latter on the reproduction of inner consciousness and on a ‘propensity towards drawing attention towards the irredeemably fictional nature of fiction’ that, for the most part, was hostile to the delineation of the social in anything but negative terms.2 If modernism can be understood as the last stand of the sovereign individual, then its successor – postmodernism – may well represent the final collapse of the latter in terms of the ‘denial of humanist, Enlightenment meaning through the decentring and de-essentializing of the subject’.3 Bereft of autonomy, the postmodern subject is held to be no more than a product of conflicting discourses that themselves are primarily the artefacts of linguistic rather than social and political activity. In this way, postmodernist American novels of the 1960s and 1970s experimented with the abandonment of 90

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characterization and social context in favour of the pursuit of a type of fiction that, in the words of an authorial voice in John Barth’s Chimera (1972), ‘will represent nothing beyond itself, have no content except its own form, no subject but its own processes’.4 However, with the demographic spring that had nourished the postwar avant garde now dry, the left in disarray, the right triumphant and the formalist experimentation of a previous generation fallen from favour, there was a crisis of literary succession that demanded the reassessment of the social context of the novel, along with a restoration of the novel’s mimetic purpose.5 Although the implicitly conservative nature of such a demand may have been prompted by a publishing industry that had adopted the imperatives of a more aggressive marketplace, there was also the feeling – outlined in Chapter 1 – that much experimental fiction was inadequate in the context of the 1980s, and was the outcome of individualist-libertarian discourses that were in need of reassessment. This reassessment manifested itself in different ways on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Very broadly, the concerns of American writers became weighted towards a consideration of the paradoxical situation in which a popular culture devoted to individualistic self-gratification is considered responsible for the widespread feeling that individual identity is being eroded. As with Watt’s view of Crusoe, there follows the realization that this sovereign sense requires a social context in which to operate, and that the contemporary assault upon this vital social realm by global capital is politically motivated, and therefore requires a political assessment. By contrast, the contemporary British social novel tends to concentrate less upon the matter of individual sovereignty than on the nature of the assault on the network of institutions, traditions and connections that define and support the social context in which the individual operates. There are several explanations for such a divergence. Firstly, an affluent consumerist economy is more deeply established in the United States than in the United Kingdom, where austerity reigned until well into the 1950s. Consequently, the notion of a sovereign self decentred by the consumerist whirl has failed to take hold in British fiction until quite recently. Secondly, it may be that British social and cultural life in general makes fewer appeals to the virtues of unrestrained individualism than is the case within the United States. The British subject is well-named, having been restrained over the centuries by feudal-aristocratic institutions, class divisions and the informal obligations of innumerable traditions and customs. More recent attempts to define ‘Britishness’ have frequently appealed to (comparatively new) institutions founded along broadly collectivist lines (the NHS and

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the BBC, for example) in preference to the rhetoric of individual liberty that, although a familiar part of American political campaigns, seemed something of an exotic import when employed by Thatcher and her followers during the 1980s. It is unsurprising, then, that the British novelists featured in this study should concentrate so much of their resentment upon the decline of such public institutions and draw a degree of encouragement from traditions and histories that, while often being far from progressive in themselves, at least offer some form of potential for the disruption of the confident assertions of late capitalist ideology. This is not to imply that the United States of America lacks models of tradition and community. On the contrary, the strength of such traditions has given the country ‘an immense reservoir of social capital and civic trust’ that contemporary Britain would find difficult to match.6 Nonetheless, America’s Main Street is a comparatively recent and seemingly fragile invention whose decline has been rapid.7 As the work of (e.g.) Amis, Coe and McEwan make clear, the collective realm in Britain is also in danger, but there is at least some degree of conviction that it can and ought to be defended. By comparison with the US of America, this makes Britain potentially fertile soil for the social novel, although it is easier to advocate socially engaged fiction than to write it, especially when such fiction tends to be less than explicit about the means by which a reversal of the decline in the collective realm might be effected, and what part a literature of engagement might play in such a process. To those on the left, the Thatcherite insistence on opening up hitherto neglected or protected areas of activity to the free market not only promoted economic inequality and social division, but also constituted an ideological assault on any concept that could conceivably become a barrier to market forces. The reduction of the public sector represented more than economic restructuring, and seemed motivated by antipathy towards the underlying concepts of social obligation, civic trust, public interest and democratic participation. As a consequence, themes and discourses that had for some time been associated with social and political conservatism came to be perceived by the left in a different light. In the context of the New Right ascendancy, communities could be seen as sources of identity and support rather than as repositories of exclusion and restriction; public life and its associated institutions no longer seemed so discredited by corruption, waste and incompetence when they could offer some degree of protection against the market and

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provide a forum for debate and opposition; tradition and history could provide the means by which to view contemporary market-driven values of consumerism from alternative perspectives; while the family needed not be seen as a source of enslavement to banal domesticity, but instead as a potential source of resistance to the increasing demands of a working life dominated by the need to generate profit. This ‘communitarian turn’ was somewhat embarrassing to a left that had previously accepted the individualistic social liberalism whose economic equivalent had sent into decline those same values and institutions that the left had now begun to defend. Although it may be understood as an attempt by the left to return to its collectivist origins, the communitarian turn is tentative and hedged with qualification because the socially progressive benefits derived from the individualistic-libertarian discourse of the postwar period made the left uneasy about surrendering this discourse completely. In addition, the danger of adopting tropes that assert the importance of unity and tradition is that one also risks their less palatable associations: inflexible social hierarchies, sexism, homophobia, nationalism, racism and xenophobia. If this is uncertain ground for the left, the right finds itself in a comparable position. Although like most Tory leaders, Thatcher frequently appealed to the Middle English virtues of patriotism, tradition and stability, the economic policies she pursued contributed to the decline over the course of the 1980s and 1990s of much that both middle England and ‘One Nation’ Conservatives held dear. Just as the left became aware that rallying beneath the flag of freedom ultimately led to the decline of trades unions and of secure employment, the sale of public housing and the privatization of public utilities, so the right came to realize that rallying beneath that same flag contributed to the collapse of British-owned companies, to rapid change and instability, abandoned traditions, increasing levels of crime and homelessness, and to a deterioration of public behaviour. Furthermore, in the same way that the left is uncomfortable with some of the implications of communitarianism, any attempt by the right to invoke traditional values as a means of solving social problems is compromised by the fact that such values may conflict with those of the primacy of the profit motive and the free market: as Alan Sinfield has observed, ‘community feeling cannot be invoked or acknowledged [by the right] because it is liable to sound like socialism’.8 Coe’s What a Carve-Up! (1995) provides a distinctive fictional example of this communitarian turn. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator

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Michael Owen confesses to a neighbour that, This is the longest conversation I’ve had – the most I’ve talked to someone – for something like two years [ ... ] I suppose in the old days you’d have talked to someone: going into shops and things. But now you can do all your shopping in the supermarket, and you can do all your banking by machine, and that’s about it. (54) Looking back to a happier childhood and to the ‘easy sociability’ (32) of his parents, Owen concludes that the depression and loneliness he suffers as an adult is related less to individual temperament than to economic and political causes. He reflects upon the discovery of a small farm by his parents during one of his family’s Sunday walks and how his mother’s trips to the farm for provisions ‘began to take on a social as well as a practical aspect’ (160). The farm becomes the site of Owen’s most treasured memories but, revisiting the spot some years later, he finds that it has become part of an agribusiness empire, the owners gone and their buildings replaced by windowless sheds and barbed wire fences. The positive social interaction promoted by an earlier phase of capitalism in which neighbourhoods were able to share other values than those connected with the pursuit of profit has been superseded by a climate of divisive rapacity in which Owen and his friends and family are dismissed as ‘losers’ and in which ‘social interconnections [ ... ] have become channels for exploitation and suffering’.9 For Owen, communities have a redemptive power that is absent from a London given over to the aggressive pursuit of self-interest. Owen contrasts his own life in London with that he encounters in Sheffield, where Joan and her lodgers are perceived to be enjoying a more intimate and socially cohesive life. Together with his nostalgia for a bucolic childhood, Owen’s communitarian vision is vulnerable to the accusation that it is selective and that, quite apart from being disturbingly close to the image of a homely and harmonious 1950s promoted by Thatcherite (and Reaganite) rhetoric, it glosses over the conflict between a stable but unequal and oppressive old order, and a libertarian, but desperately individualistic new order. The problem with adopting discourses that have (or have had) strong conservative undercurrents is that some of those undercurrents persist. If the left is to adopt such discourses, then it seems it must first re-cast them in a significantly different form. Perhaps the death of Owen at the end of the novel, coupled with the fact that Coe, writing in the mid-1990s, leaves unmentioned the subsequent fate of Sheffield and its Council at the hands of

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Thatcherite legislation and economic policy, indicates the profound difficulty inherent in the attempt to promote a left-liberal vision of conciliation and communitarianism in the face of implacable political opposition, while suggesting that to shirk such a challenge is to be complicit with one’s own doom or defeat. Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time (1997) is another novel that attempts to adopt conservative tropes for the purposes of a left-liberal agenda and, in so doing, is required to address the issue of social class in terms not of conflict, but of conciliation. The principal concerns of the novel are encapsulated during the episode in which the narrator, Stephen Lewis, leaves London late one evening in an attempt to visit his estranged partner, Julie. Lewis bribes Edward, the driver of a freight train, to drop him close to Julie’s house. Edward is not a man fuelled by aggressive class-conscious belligerence, but rather an amiable and gentle character who regretfully informs Lewis that the railway line upon which they are travelling is marked for closure, and refuses payment for Lewis’s journey. Pointing out the craftsmanship that has been applied to the design and construction of the soon-to-be-abandoned tunnels, Edward tells Lewis, ‘there’s no heart in motorways. You won’t see kids on bridges taking car numbers, will you’.10 Like the farm in What a Carve-Up! Edward represents an older world in which civic-mindedness was as important as profit, but it can be argued that he also represents a sentimentalized version of working-class life that has been prompted by the dissent of the left-liberal middle classes from the values prevalent in Thatcherite Britain, and by the desire for social and political solidarity with a class deemed to support a set of more positive values. This emphasis on the importance of social engagement and co-operation stems from a left-liberal wish-fulfilment that suppresses the more difficult aspects of class antagonism, as well as the awkward negotiation of tropes that maintain a politically conservative content, in the interest of articulating some kind of coherent gesture of political resistance. The novel is set in a near future in which a right-wing government with an authoritarian leader is in its fifth term of pursuing ruthless privatization policies. One of the Prime Minister’s closest aides is Charles Darke, an ambitious minister who had been a friend of Lewis at university. As his name implies, Darke is evidently Lewis’s fearsome ‘Other’: ‘the carrier of a false or unsatisfactory version of the novel’s value system’.11 Darke and Lewis share traumatic experiences with time and childhood, but their different reactions to those experiences indicate the different ways in which the British middle classes of the 1980s have reacted to the engineered decline in the public realm that are outlined by Lewis in

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the novel’s opening pages. Darke supports the pursuit of self-interest and withdrawal from the public realm into private provision, whereas Lewis insists on the need for the middle classes to commit themselves to a progressive and socially inclusive form of liberalism. Lewis believes that it is his duty as a member of the wider community to participate in, rather than isolate himself from, the rest of society, just as it is the duty of a responsible, democratic government to ensure the well-being of all its citizens rather than just those who adopt the pursuit of self-interest most successfully. He believes, like Michael Owen in What a Carve-Up! that individual responsibilities and pathologies are related to much wider social and political events, and that the exclusive pursuit of self-interest eventually corrodes the single personality as well as the common weal. Lewis’s own pathology is that of a man estranged from his partner because of his inability to cope with the abduction (and presumed murder) of their young daughter some years earlier. After experiencing a vision of his parents as young people having an argument in a country pub, he becomes convinced that he has been exposed to some sort of slippage in time. When he is subsequently involved in an accident with a lorry and drags the driver Joe from his overturned cab, the two men conduct an intimate conversation that reflects upon the elastic nature of time.12 The theme of time is revisited when Darke, who regularly pays a prostitute to treat him as an infant, suffers a breakdown after which he begins to behave like a ten-year-old boy. Lewis is angered by the admission of Darke’s wife Thelma that she prefers her husband’s infantile state to that of the workaholic politician, and infers that Thelma is guilty of the same destructive pursuit of self-interest that marked Darke’s own career, and the policies of the political party he represented. The outcome of the couple’s self-absorption, Lewis concludes, is the dissolution of self that is manifest in Darke’s regression and eventual death. Subsequently, Lewis reinterprets his own unusual experiences with time and childhood in ways that point him back towards social engagement, sympathy and co-operation. Discussing his vision through the pub window with his mother, he discovers that the scene he witnessed took place when his mother had argued with his father about her pregnancy (with Lewis), and refused to have the abortion upon which his father had insisted. Lewis interprets this decision as another sign that he, like the lorry driver Joe, must step beyond his own self-absorption and re-engage with human life. The ending of the novel, in which Lewis and a pregnant Julie are reconciled, is a further meditation upon the nature of time and the

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redemptive power of childbirth that pitches over into sentimentality. The political tone of the first part of the novel evaporates, as Lewis, who had earlier rejected the self-absorption of the Darkes, himself seems to retreat into a mystical reverence for the nuclear family. McEwan’s critics deny that this amounts to an abdication of the political: Jack Slay argues that, by contrast with the childless Darkes, the birth of Lewis’s and Julie’s child represents engagement with that society rather than retreat from it,13 while Kiernan Ryan claims that The Child in Time marks a departure from the shocking content and cold, impersonal style of McEwan’s earlier fiction in a way that signifies a revision of McEwan’s political thought in the light of his exposure to feminist thought. For Ryan, the consequence of this exposure has been a retreat from the ‘macho’ politics of polarization and opposition in favour of a pragmatic scepticism that resists the sway of ossified opinion, forcing readers to reappraise what has congealed into doctrine. It is by eschewing political engagement in the obtrusive, narrow sense that the novel may succeed in defining what counts as political, may clear a space in which a genuinely transformative politics, purged of self-deception, takes place.14 This reading may be used to counter the argument that Lewis’s conciliatory encounters with working-class men expose a concealed political conservativism that manifests itself in the passivity of such men, and in the unchallenged ascendancy of the middle classes. The introduction of a feminist perspective – or, at least, his own version of that perspective – is the (convenient) means by which McEwan attempts to defuse the tensions that destroy the white male protagonists of other contemporary social novels. A later McEwan work, Enduring Love (1997) is a reinforcement of McEwan’s critique of male adversarialism. The novel begins with an incident (again involving a child) in which a group of men that includes the principal character, Joe Rose, fail in their attempt to bring a hot-air balloon under control. Rose later reflects that there was a political aspect to this failure: had the whole group been determined to co-operate, they would certainly have been able to control the balloon, but because each man feared for his own safety, one of the rescuers died. For Rose, the incident is a comment on the nature of his own society: ‘a good society is one that makes sense of being good [ ... ] Suddenly the sensible choice was to look out for yourself’.15 As in The Child in Time, the explicitly political concerns of the main character at the beginning of the

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novel fade as his own private concerns begin to dominate events. In the same way that Stephen Lewis’s indignation at government policy ends with his abandonment of the politics of confrontation, so the later novel traces the collapse of Rose’s self-righteous confidence in his own convictions. Rose is stalked by the psychopathic religious fanatic Jed Parry and, after a series of confrontations with Parry, buys a gun for protection. His decision to purchase the gun seems vindicated when he uses it to rescue his partner Clarissa Mellon from an attack by Parry, but Mellon is angered not only by Rose’s decision to arm himself with a gun but also by his suspicious, adversarial attitude towards Parry which, she maintains, exacerbated Parry’s aggression. Jago Morrison argues that the ‘gendered framework’16 in which the novel traces the decline of the male characters calls into question what one commentator describes as ‘the world map which guarantees the imaginary knowing, mastering autonomy of those who speak from the centre of a culture’.17 As a popular science writer, Rose’s ‘world map’ is a masculine scientific logic that is shown to break down rapidly into the same violent selfassertion that condemns Parry’s (illogical) religious fundamentalism. Furthermore, the scientific report upon the case of Parry that is appended to the end of the novel is held by Morrison to be ‘a strongly overdetermined gesture of legitimation’ (255) that destabilizes rather than confirms its own conclusions, and brings Joe’s mental health into question as much as that of Parry. As Morrison points out, this recalls the radical revision of scientific enquiry recommended by Thelma Darke in The Child in Time that Stephen Lewis at first rejects, but seems eventually to accept after the birth of Julie’s child. At the end of Enduring Love, Rose is reconciled with Mellon, and the couple adopt a child, the implication being that, like Lewis, Rose has surrendered his masculine self-absorption and adopted the tolerant pragmatism of his partner. In these two novels, McEwan introduces a feminist discourse in order to argue that patriarchy and the market economy are related by their common reliance upon rationalistic and utilitarian models that seek to justify the individualistic self-assertion of the bourgeois male. In the face of the bewildering inconsistencies of time, biology and human behaviour, however, these models are shown as inadequate in that they lead their adherents into increasing social isolation and eventually to self-justifying violence. The mental health of the individual and the collective well-being of society, it seems, are better promoted by the ‘feminine’ virtues of inclusiveness, tolerance and communication in which the redemptive powers of family and social connection play a significant part. As has been suggested above, this is a useful argument

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for the contemporary white male left-liberal. At one stroke, the problem of economic inequality has been eradicated by the claim that the class-based antagonisms that arise as a result of inequality are invalid, because they are inherently ‘masculine’ in their propensity for confrontation and destruction. The weakness of the argument lies not only in its assumption that feminism is necessarily non-confrontational (an assumption that ascribes to feminism an uncomfortable degree of passivity and quietism), but also in the implication that the subaltern groups represented in The Child in Time by the characters of Edward and Joe have nothing to gain from confrontation. It seems, then, that the only dissenting bodies who gain from the ‘feminized’ values advocated by these novels are the white male left-liberal members of the professional and managerial classes with whom McEwan seems most concerned and that, despite the critique of society offered, the structure of that society – and the respective class and gender roles played by its members – remains more or less intact.18 Towards the end of Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), there is a scene set on the eve of the 1979 General Election in which the narrator takes a walk around central London and senses ‘that the town was being ripped apart; the rotten was being replaced by the new and the new was ugly [ ... ] the ugliness was in the people too. Londoners seemed to hate each other’.19 It is this ugly and debased version of London that is the also setting of the three novels by Martin Amis that have already been discussed in relation to themes of complicity and guilt. Much British fiction set in the 1980s suggests that there is a causal connection between the arrival of Thatcherism and growing levels of social hostility, the inference from this being that the values fostered by Thatcherism are essentially alien imports that have distorted an earlier consensual Britain.20 Where exactly this alternative Britain can be located is a moot point: the British Empire was not known for its consensual nature, and the notion of the character of British towns and cities being altered to fit new notions of progress and prosperity might apply as much to the 1950s and 1960s as to the 1980s. In fact, Money (1986) shares with the American novels discussed in the previous chapter the suspicion that the origins of contemporary decline are to be found within the libertarian iconoclasm of the postwar period during which, with the ostensible connivance of both left and right, the priorities and interests of the past were ceded to those of the present and the future. At one point, John Self proclaims that, A product of the Sixties, I was led to believe that being young was quite an achievement. Everyone seemed to encourage me in this

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apprehension, especially the old. An iconoclast, I had no time for mortality. I used to stand around denouncing you all – you old fucks – and you just nodded and smiled. You seemed to think I was wonderful. (392) Self’s name is an indication of the solipsistic nature of both the indulgence and iconoclasm that distinguished him as a product of the 1960s, but this solipsism proves unsatisfactory and no less a dupe than the confidence trick played on Self by Fielding Goodney. Indeed, Self’s progress can be read as an allegory of postwar Britain: seduced first by the promise of liberation and indulgence, only to succumb to the notion of economic revival at the hands of an American confidence trick. Throughout the novel, there are moments when, behind the Thatcherite bluster, Self appears to sense the nature of the deception. Interestingly, these moments of doubt occur when he experiences varying degrees of empathy with those excluded from the affluence that fails to satisfy him. Reading a tabloid report about the riots in Brixton and Toxteth (the novel is set in 1981), he finds that, the whole of England has been scalded by tumult and mutiny, by social crack-up in the torched slums. Unemployment, I learned, was what had got everyone so mad. I know how you feel, I said to myself. I feel how you feel [ ... ] Inner cities crackle with the money chaos – but I’ve got money, plenty of it, I’m due to make lots more. What’s missing? What the hell else is there? (66 – emphases in original) It would be excessive to claim that Self’s occasional doubts ever constitute a damning indictment of consumerism, or that his attempts to read more and refine his manners amount to a ‘McEwanesque’ adoption of feminist values, but they certainly indicate a degree of dissatisfaction with a prevailing order that deliberately neglects the powerless. Self is particularly vulnerable (in a way not dissimilar to the characters of McEwan) to children, being moved at one point by the ‘gently suffering look’ (271) of a young child and, after discovering the identity of his own real father, recommending to the reader that, ‘should you ever find yourself in a paternity or maternity mix-up, should you ever have a child who isn’t really his or isn’t really hers, tell the kid soon. Do it [ ... ] how can you live seriously if you don’t know who you are?’ (392). Another Thatcherite myth that Self begins to suspect is that of social mobility. Occasionally, Self’s sympathy for the less fortunate blends with a degree of class-consciousness that seems at odds with his

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aspirational temperament. In the darkness of a game arcade, for instance, he says of the clientèle that ‘their grandparents must have worked underground. I know mine did’ (25). The suggestion that his grandparents were miners, the fact that his (supposed) father runs a pub, and that he is a film director attests to the reality of social mobility, but another outburst suggests that this mobility conceals a pervasive class structure based on culture rather than money: And you hate me, don’t you. Yes, you do. Because I’m the new kind, the kind who has money but can never use it for anything but ugliness. To which I say: You never let us in, not really. You might have thought you let us in, but you never did. You just gave us some money. (58) Like Andy Gould in Banks’s Complicity (1996), Self accepts the Thatcherite ethos because he believes that its professed iconoclasm will obliterate the class-based strictures of the ‘old’ Britain, but becomes disillusioned by the failure of Thatcherism to bring about the state of true ‘classlessness’ that would eradicate his innate feelings of cultural inferiority. What has emerged, it seems, is a naked hierarchy of power that has abandoned notions of consensus or social responsibility and made available to those able to hold their heads above the waters of monetarism not satisfaction but merely addiction. At the end of the novel, finally impoverished by Goodney’s elaborate fraud, Self rejoins the ranks of those with whom he has sympathized. Although he is far from having developed his embryonic sense of collective solidarity into a political critique, his vestigial sense of identification with others appears to save him from the kind of despair often encountered in contemporary American fiction. Despite its transatlantic aspects, Money has what might be termed a typically British ending in the sense that it evangelizes neither despair nor revolutionary anger, but settles Self into a stoic sense of resignation. Living with a secretary called Georgina – a woman he is unable to beat up – Self finds consolation in quotidian pleasures: visiting the public library, trying to fix his car, defrauding his dentist, and sharing the joke when he is mistaken for a tramp. Like a number of other contemporary novels in both Britain and America (those of Coupland come to mind, along with Anita Mason’s The War Against Chaos (1988), which is discussed in the following chapter), the ending of Money suggests that it is only at the margins of the ‘moneyworld’, and under the weight of economic and political resentment, that some degree of communal life and social identification can be attained, but that the price paid for such a situation is marginalization and irrelevance.

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The fate not only of Self but of Samson Young, the American narrator of London Fields (1990), gives weight to the argument that, whereas the British protagonists of contemporary social novels tend towards stoic resignation, their American counterparts tend towards despair and violence. Suffering from a terminal, unnamed illness as well as writer’s block, Young has exchanged apartments with the successful British novelist Mark Asprey and lends an outsider’s perspective to Thatcherite London. Unsurprisingly, his conclusions are similar to those of Self (and to those of Stephen Lewis and Michael Owen). Since his last visit to the city, Young sees nothing but ‘ten years of Relative Decline’ (14) during which all institutions and models of behaviour based upon notions of reciprocal benefit have collapsed: The post office, whose floor stayed wet in any weather, was a skating rink of drunks and supplicants and long-lost temper [ ... ] He queued for a callbox, or milled for a callbox, the queuing idea, like the zebra-crossing idea, like the women-and-children-first idea, like the leave-the-bathroom-as-you-would-expect-to-find-it idea, having relinquished its hold in good time for the millennium. (364) Like The Child in Time, London Fields is set in a near future in which there is a constant threat of nuclear war. Heightened international political tension has coincided with an imminent total eclipse of the sun and a series of other environmental disasters, and civic amenities are close to collapse. Young relates this entropic setting to his own illness and concludes that, ‘everything is winding down, me, this, mother earth. More: the universe, although apparently roomy enough, is heading for heat death’. (239) Young’s despair is coupled to that of Nicola Six, who avenges her own sexual commodification by seeking the humiliation of her male suitors, and who explicitly links the cancellation of her own humanity (in the form of a bikini swimsuit) to the nuclear annihilation of humanity (the naming of the swimsuit after an early nuclear test site).21 For Young and Six, their own doomed circumstances become general in their own eyes because they are unable to make the positive social connections that might instil them with either the pragmatism that could provide the means for endurance, or the sense of the particular and historical that might initiate a sense of collective resistance. At the end of the novel, both characters are dead, but nuclear war has been averted and the eclipse passes without incident. The fact that the apocalypse fails to arrive and that life goes on is perhaps Amis’s cruellest joke on the hyperbolic (and solipsistic) obsessions of his protagonists.

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Like Money, and The Information (1995), much of London Fields is set in a pub, but the modern British pub in Amis’s novels is far from being the idealized focal point of communal life in which differences of age, class and gender are temporarily suspended. Instead, the pub is a corrupted public space in which individuals scheme and compete against one another. Young implies that the name of his local bar – the Black Cross – invokes the debasement and ‘moral horror’ (209) of the black mass rather than the virtues of social communion. The decline and decay of contemporary life, then, is so extensive that even those spaces that might offer some potential for the assertion of alternative values have their virtues perverted into vices. As in Money, the novel’s only sign of redemption occurs when the narrator becomes involved with the care of children. Young, addressing Keith Talent’s young daughter Kim in one of the ‘Endpapers’ that act as a coda to the novel, writes ‘I cling to certain hopes: hopes of you’ (469). Again, readers are made to feel that, in the wake of the decline of all great social, economic and ideological projects the only valid imperative remaining is that of attempting to alleviate the suffering of the powerless. The Information also concludes with an emphasis on the need to protect children from cruelty and suffering when a plot to abduct the young son of the novel’s principal character, Richard Tull, ends in failure. Amis again uses the pub as a signifier of the collapse of social cohesion, but indicates that collapse has been accompanied by a curious fluidity between social classes that had hitherto been separated not only economically but also geographically. The narrator remarks that, as easily identifiable members of the middle classes, he and his friend and rival Gwyn Barry ‘could never have gone to a snooker hall [ ... ] Gwyn and Richard might have got in. But they wouldn’t have got out’.22 Now, the pair finds that they can mix as freely at the snooker hall as they do at the local pub, where they are respected for their expertise with the quiz machine. Initially, this suggests a healthy dissolution of class barriers, and a widening rather than a narrowing of social inclusiveness, yet on further examination, it seems that (as in Money) this blurring of class-based social distinctions points to something more insidious. Tull is bewildered by the disappearance of the old certainties that were confirmed by the existence of an easily identifiable (and belligerent) working-class community, and by the subsequent emergence of an ‘underclass’ whose amorphousness corresponds with the contemporary lack of social definition: ‘In those days the Englishmen all had names like Cooper and Baker and Weaver, and they beat you up. Now they all had names like Shop and Shirt and Car, and you could go anywhere you

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liked’ (59). For Tull, the older names are associated with socially valuable productive skills, whereas the newer names are those of ephemeral commodities: a shift that signifies the rise of a consumer-driven culture that, in all but eliminating a production-based economy, has also eradicated the communities that formed in its shadows. The consequence for Tull and Barry is that the direct (but easily avoided) hostility of the older working class towards the middle classes has been superseded by the more pervasive, ruthless and calculated scheming of characters such as Scozz, 13 and Crash that lacks the class-based antagonism of their elders, but mimics the selfish individualism of the middle classes upon whom they prey. Teaching Tull’s wife how to drive, Crash tells her that the most important aspect of driving is not consideration for other road users but ‘to impress you personality on the road’ (115 – emphasis in original), while Tull learns that local gangs compete with one another for supremacy not on the basis of adherence to arcane rules and codes, but on their respective abilities at rejecting taboos and going beyond all forms of restriction. Only a parodic version of communal redemption appears in the form of Barry’s best-selling novel Amelior, the story of ‘a group of fair-minded young people who, in an unnamed country, strove to establish a rural community’ (43). Tull is contemptuous of Amelior, believing that it represents an apolitical wish-fulfilment that does not arrest but only serves to accelerate social decline. Tull reasons that Barry’s novel represents the same kind of abstraction that he sees in the escalation of criminal violence from that of the street gangs, through Scozz’s drug-dealing, to the termination of the international arms race in the scenario of Mutually Assured Destruction. Scozz tells Tull that his own current criminal activities are ‘all paperwork now’ (191) compared to the ‘dinosaur stuff’ (191) of the gangs, and this prompts Tull to speculate that the response of modern literature has been to follow this trail of inhuman abstraction until the ethical consequences – in terms of the abdication of ethical responsibility – have become comparable to those of drug-dealing or to the threat of nuclear destruction: ‘the same with literature, getting heavier and hairier, until it was all over and you arrived at paperwork. You arrived at Amelior’ (192 – emphasis in original). From an uncompromising literary experimentalist such as Tull, this is a telling admission that literature effectively confesses to its own exhaustion when it pursues abstraction to the extent that all engagement with reality – however problematic the rendering of that reality in language may be – is surrendered, for it is within such an engagement that communication, and therefore social and political engagement, lies.

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Such a conclusion may justifiably be understood as a warning against despair rather than a surrender to it. In The Uses of Literacy (1957), Richard Hoggart claims that the British working classes maintain a suspicious, even hostile, attitude towards public institutions: ‘they tend to regard the policeman as someone who is watching them, who represents the authority that has its eyes on them, rather than as a member of the public services whose job it is to help and protect them’.23 It is interesting that his claim runs counter to the tendency of most of the novelists whose work has been discussed so far to mourn the decline of public institutions in the face of the Reaganite-Thatcherite assault on the basis that such institutions may afford some degree of protection to subordinate social groups from the excesses of a market economy. In Hoggart’s world of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’, both public and capitalist institutions belonged to the latter. More recently (and it is surely significant that the period between Hoggart’s recollections and the Thatcher years saw the establishment of the welfare state), it appears that the left’s communitarian turn has to some extent adopted the public institutions of the capitalist state as its own at the same time that the capitalist class has either abandoned those institutions or opened them up to the marketplace. Although this discrepancy between the attitudes towards public institutions described by Hoggart, and those of contemporary left-liberal novelists, may be partly explained by the demonstrable improvements in the quality of life for most British people brought about by the establishment of the welfare state, another factor may be the class orientation of contemporary novelists and their protagonists. The characters in Ian McEwan’s novels, for example, tend to be recruited from the professional and managerial classes, while in Amis, Coe and Banks, the working-class credentials of many of the characters are open to question because of their (frequently lucrative) occupations in the media. In this respect, it is interesting to note that the indisputably working-class characters in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1999) maintain that general hostility towards all institutions – public and commercial alike – that Hoggart claims is a distinguishing feature of the British working class. Although the novel describes the utter collapse of those communal values and customs held dear by Hoggart, the antagonism shown by its predominantly young characters towards the police, potential employers, and counsellors alike suggests that some of Hoggart’s definitions of workingclass life are not entirely outdated. Welsh’s depiction of Edinburgh youth bears little relation to the society described by Hoggart, but this

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is not to say that it has no antecedents. Alan Sinfield has drawn several correspondences between Renton, the main protagonist of Trainspotting, and Arthur Seaton, the typical British postwar anti-hero of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1993). 24 Both are defiant and aggressive young men who refuse to subscribe either to the aspirational values thrust at them by mainstream society, or to the passivity and contentment they see in their own localities. At least a generation apart, both represent the same working-class mistrust of institutions and authority that, in the context of increased social mobility and the decline of traditional working-class self-identification, fuelled the individualistlibertarian impulse from which the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher was to benefit. If Renton and Seaton share a sense of isolation from the collective, it is because their traditional working-class suspicion of authority and institutions has coincided with the postwar decline of the older working-class communities described by Hoggart. One crucial difference between Renton and Seaton lies with their respective prospects at the end of the two novels. Throughout Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Seaton directs his individualistic belligerence outwards and, although his fate is uncertain, he seems confident of a relatively prosperous future within society, without necessarily being obliged to surrender the core of his self-belief to the values of that society. By contrast, Renton has little hope of such prosperity (or even survival), and his own defiant individualism is turned in upon itself in a fury of self-hatred and self-destruction. Whereas Seaton seems likely to find some form of accommodation with society and with himself, the collapse of any collective sensibility evident in Renton’s last escapade (in which he steals the proceeds of a drugs deal from his friends and escapes to Amsterdam) suggests that no such accommodation is feasible, and that the only feasible course is to succumb thoroughly to the very kind of selfish individualism he has criticized throughout the novel. Ironically, the political consciousness of the desperate Renton is far more developed than that of the confident individualist Seaton. Renton’s dissenting stance is not merely instinctive but demonstrates a sophisticated awareness of the relationship between economics and cultural hegemony. The presence of the Festival in his home town provokes his ire, but Renton is not content simply to mug straying tourists. Indicating the contrast between the conditions on his own housing estate and those elsewhere in Edinburgh, he makes a trenchant political statement about the complicity between capital and (avowedly left-wing) middleclass culture that many festival-goers would find uncomfortable. Handed an advertisement for the performance of a Brecht play, Renton

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assumes that the performers will be ‘doubtless a collection of zit-encrusted, squeaky-voiced wankers playing oot a miserable pretension to the arts before graduating to work in the power station which gives the local children leukaemia or the investment consultancies which shut doon factories, throwing people into poverty and despair’.25 He claims that the only significant difference between many of the art exhibits on show, and the trail of a squashed fly that he traces on a toilet wall, is the difference in social class between himself and the exhibitors. Renton is a more consciously political creature than Seaton, but feels that his awareness is futile because of its isolation from a wider context of solidarity and resistance. In any event, such a context is no longer viable: in contemporary Britain, working-class communities have been dispersed and divided, some ascending the ladder of social mobility to the ranks of the professional and managerial classes, while others descend into an ‘underclass’ plagued by unemployment, poverty, violence, crime and drug addiction. What Renton lacks is the viability of the explicitly collectivist ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ model indicated by Hoggart, and his downfall is due to the notion that, while ‘They’ may still exist as the object of a persistent working-class antagonism, it is by no means clear who ‘We’ are, or whether ‘We’ exist at all. The idea of 1980s Britain as a divided nation may apply in terms of individual prosperity or poverty, but not in terms of antagonism between easily identifiable social groups. Indeed, because Welsh’s characters have been ‘raised in an era of mass unemployment and brought up on housing schemes, they have been deprived of the communal networks which existed within traditional working-class families and communities’.26 Consequently, intelligent and politically aware individuals such as Renton are estranged from the sense of collectivity and optimism that has always been the lifeblood of the left and, seeing little hope for either the present or the future, sink into a despair that ends in heroin addiction. As if acknowledging that social co-operation and cohesion have been thoroughly undermined both by both addiction and by the selfishness and ruthlessness of the prevailing economic climate that encourages addiction, Renton’s dealer declares that friendship is no longer tenable, and that ‘We are all acquaintances now’ (11). This cohort does not represent a leftist redoubt against Thatcherism, but confirmation that the unrestrained individualism of the latter that Hoggart claims was alien to the old working class has been fully absorbed and re-appropriated. This is evident in the character of Sick Boy, a nightmarish caricature of the Thatcherite entrepreneur who pimps his drug-addicted girlfriends and proudly claims that, ‘I am a dynamic young man, upwardly mobile and

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thrusting [ ... ] the socialists go on about your comrades, your class, your union and society. Fuck all that shite. The Tories go on about your employer, your country, your family. Fuck that even mair. It’s me, me, fucking ME (30)’. Other characters in the novel display a telling ambivalence towards the vanishing order. For instance, in the episode entitled ‘Her Man’, the narrator reflects on his father’s advice to ‘nivir, ivir hit a lassie [ ... ] It’s the lowest scum that does that, son’ (58), while witnessing a man beating up a woman in a pub. Although it is implied that the existence of any form of behavioural restraint or ethical code is deemed preferable to their complete absence, the emphasis on the patriarchal nature of the remark indicates the hesitant nature with which the novel’s more contemplative characters regard the traditional values of working-class life. Renton refuses to sentimentalize his background, fully aware that members of his extended family are prone to outbursts of violence, bigotry and religious sectarianism. Similarly, in the chapter ‘Na Na and Other Nazis’, Spud recognizes that his own grandmother is no dignified matriarch, but an unpleasant ex-prostitute who ‘picks oan people’s weaknesses, particularly other women, and uses that against them’ (123). When Spud goes for a drink with Uncle Doad, his grandmother’s child by a black sailor, he encounters the violent racism that Doad has to endure regularly, and he likens the intolerance and spite of the Nazis and Orangemen who attack Doad to that shown by his grandmother, concluding that traditional communities often foster an insularity upon which hatred feeds. Another example of this suspicion of the sentimental and nostalgic reverence for past loyalties is provided by Stevie who, during a New Year’s Eve party, worries about the singing of sectarian songs: It had a desperate edge to it. It was as if by singing loudly enough, they would weld themselves into a powerful brotherhood. It was, as the song said, ‘call to arms’ music, and seemed to have little to do with Scotland and New Year. It was fighting music. Stevie didn’t want to fight anyone. But it was also beautiful music. (46) As a consequence of this ambivalence, Renton adopts a view of London that is in marked contrast to the negative view of the capital observed in other contemporary British novels. Sitting in a London pub, Renton claims to prefer the tolerant cosmopolitanism of the capital to the bigotry and parochialism of home: ‘the board tells us there is a gay skinheads night oan in the back bar. Cults and subcultures segment and

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cross-matrix in a place like this. Ye can be freer here, no because it’s London, but because it isnae Leith’ (228). Renton, Spud and Stevie all acknowledge the positive aspects of traditional working-class life – the communal solidarity evident in unwritten codes of behaviour, in music, sport and humour (all of which are also acknowledged by Hoggart) – but are aware that little now remains of that life apart from its skeleton of patriarchy and bigotry. They are also aware, however, that their critique of that culture only accelerates their own social isolation and despair. The crisis of white Scottish masculinity, stripped of both the bluecollar industries that provided its economic foundation, and of the communal superstructure of cohesion and collective identity that provided its ideological justification, is at the centre of Trainspotting. The working-class man, ‘already feminized as a disempowered native (br)other’ by the decline of ‘his’ industry and community, resists any further association with what are perceived as feminine values.27 The outcome is a thuggish hyper-masculinity, typified in Trainspotting by the character of the psychopathically violent Begby. Renton’s parents approve of Begby rather than the mild-mannered (and therefore ‘feminine’) Spud, believing that Begby represents the proud and dignified Scotsman of popular myth. As Renton observes, however, Begby’s outlook has not been formed by the restraining influence of traditional working-class customs but, like Keith Talent in London Fields, by an illiberal populist media: railing against anyone who reads books, Begby claims that ‘Ye git aw ye fuckin need tae ken ootay the paper n fae the telly’ (116). Reflecting upon the significant role of Calvinism in the development of modern Scottish nationalism, Cairns Craig argues that ‘the Scottish community, and the Scottish imagination, was ruled in large measure by fear, and, equally, by a fearlessness which refused to submit to the fears of those who did not dare challenge the powers that ruled their universe’.28 In this way, the fear inspired by English colonial rule could only be matched by a fearlessness that initiated a tradition of transgressive/ aggressive Scotsmen whose resistance to all forms of restraint is, in its own way, as Calvinistic as that which would restrain them. Buoyed up by economic and communal support, it may be possible for this type of authoritarian patriarch to survive – perhaps as a church leader, municipal politician or football manager – but without such support, an abject character such as Begby can only respond to any emotional challenge to his masculinity (such as the encounter with his own down-and-out father) by exploding into senseless violence. The more astute Renton attempts to steer a course somewhere between the ‘fearful’ passivity of his parents and the unthinking ‘fearlessness’ of

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Begby, but he is incapacitated by a lack of faith in any positive sense of the collective that might rescue him from the apathy and nihilism that fuels his drug abuse. His drug addiction counsellor suggests that Renton’s rejection of consumerism and materialist aspiration does not actually represent rejection or rebellion, but instead low self-esteem: He feels that ma means ay emasculating the rewards and praise (and conversely condemnation) available tae me by society is not a rejection ay these values per se, but an indication that ah dinnae feel good enough (or bad enough) aboot masel tae accept them. Rather than come oot and say, Ah don’t think ah have these qualities (or ah think ah’m better than that), Ah say: It’s a loaday fuckin shite anywey. (186) If Renton accepts this argument, it means that he is subconsciously seeking collective (or ‘societal’) values with which he can identify. As long as Renton fails (or refuses) to do this, it means that, in the absence of a collective cause that might conceivably connect him with some part of society, his general hostility towards society will be turned in on himself. While acknowledging that there is something in this argument, Renton argues that his counsellor is guilty of refusing ‘tae see this picture in its total bleakness’ (186) because, for Renton, both the selfish individualism and the conformity of expectation promoted by mainstream society militate against the establishment of a hopeful collective referent. ‘Us-and-Them’ are no more; ‘We’ is not an option; while ‘I’ leads to the choice between one form or another of addiction, passivity and despair. As in Amis’s trilogy, however, there is among all of Trainspotting’s episodes of despair and degradation what Dominic Head describes as ‘a series of quasi-epiphanic moments that signal a submerged moral code [ ... ] a suggestion of a human collective struggling to re-emerge, suppressed by deprivation and social dysfunction’ (44). By way of example, Head cites the emotional episode in which Renton visits Tommy, who is dying of AIDS in a council flat (not in hospital, as Head claims); and to this can be added the scene in which Renton becomes reconciled with his parents when he breaks the news to them that he has been infected with HIV. Of still greater significance in the light of the novel’s critique of patriarchy is the chapter ‘Feeling Free’, in which two female characters, Kelly and Allison, are encouraged to retaliate against the sexist taunts of some ‘workies’ by a pair of lesbian tourists from New Zealand and two ‘auld wifies’. Having bested the workmen,

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the group adjourns to a café to celebrate, and Kelly then invites all of the women back to her flat for drinks and conversation, but the ‘wifies’ turn down the invitation, explaining they have to prepare their husband’s evening meals. Apart from emphasizing the susceptibility of older members of the working class to patriarchal codes, ‘Feeling Free’ is, like many of the other episodes that focus upon female characters, distinguished by the ease with which those characters form positive relationships with one another and by the way in which their confident defiance does not tip over into self-defeating violence. These episodes are also relevant to the sympathetic portrayal of Spud who, although hapless, is a likeable character because of ‘feminine’ traits such as an easy-going sociability, and a revulsion towards violence, cruelty and intolerance. Although he is a source of bewilderment to the parental generation still tied, like the ‘auld wifies’, to patriarchy, Spud has avoided the crisis of masculinity that has drawn most of his male contemporaries into either the violent defence of ultra-macho codes of behaviour, or into self-destructive isolation and despair. The implication is that it is only through the increased adoption of behaviours generally considered ‘feminine’ that the working-class psyche may be able to rediscover and re-cast the communal bonds that might reinvigorate a progressive politics of the left, even while it rejects those more oppressive traditions that are ultimately founded upon patriarchy. It seems, then, that in their respective emphases on the rejection of phallocratic isolationism, and on the acceptance of a pragmatic and tolerant form of progressive communitarianism, Welsh’s Trainspotting and McEwan’s The Child in Time are not such strange bedfellows as at first it might seem.

5 Futures and Pasts

This chapter will continue to examine the ways in which contemporary left-liberal novelists have, in re-assessing the individualist-libertarian orientation of both 1980s conservatism and 1960s radicalism, begun to mourn the decline of collective and communal models of behaviour and organisation associated with the past. Because the left, in keeping with John Patrick Diggins’s concept of negation, has traditionally drawn much of its inspiration from visions of a better future rather than from a past (or a present) deemed to be steeped in injustice and oppression, the project of re-evaluating the past and appropriating themes more frequently associated with political reaction than with progress has been a significant departure. The confidence of the left in amelioristutopian discourses was shattered not only by the electoral defeats of the 1980s and 1990s and by the loss of faith in (and eventual collapse of) Soviet-style communism, but also by the assault of postmodernist theory on teleological grand narratives, of which the Marxist view of history was considered a prime example. In any event, neither communism nor socialism seemed futuristic any longer: the Soviet bloc had followed Fordist production models too slavishly and inefficiently to present a serious challenge to a capitalism that had, in any event, developed beyond such models. With the future seemingly in the hands of the hi-tech children of Reagan and Thatcher, it is perhaps understandable that a defeated (and defeatist) left should surrender its futuristic orientation in favour of sieving through history for signs of hope and succour. Although history is to some a conservative redoubt that has been thoroughly appropriated and stabilized by the wealthy and powerful, it is to others a site upon which the ‘faultlines’ of ideological definition and enforcement can be traced in ways that offer the potential for destabilization and opposition. Writers such as Iain Sinclair and Peter 112

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Ackroyd, for example, regard the past as a living repository of images, narratives, values, and other cultural phenomena that may not in themselves present an explicit challenge to the ideology of contemporary capitalism, but which may at least confound the confidence and ubiquity of that ideology. Such writers invest historical artefacts and features of both the rural and urban landscape with a significance that, although often vague and mysterious, indicates some degree of cultural resistance. This chapter will describe the use by several contemporary writers of the image of the church building – usually abandoned or neglected – as a means of representing their concerns about the limits of individualism and the decline of a collective sense. Of course, history is at least as open to capitalist commodification as it is to appropriation by progressive movements. Heritage, as a character in Julian Barnes’s novel England, England (1998) explains, is ‘eminently marketable’.1 Lauren Langman suggests that the contemporary fad for converting deconsecrated churches and other disused buildings into apartments, shopping centres, art galleries, restaurants and bars stems from the way that such conversions are intended to ‘create nostalgic memories of neighbourhood and lost community’.2 Such projects, however, belong to a private sector that has less interest in promoting the collective priorities associated with such memories than it has in promoting market-driven exclusivity.3 Left-liberal writers who use the image of the abandoned church in order to invoke the notion of lost community are obliged to stress the subversive and contingent aspect of their project if they are not to become complicit with the privatization of history. It must also be stressed that the use of the church motif does not signify a revival of religious interest. On the contrary, its use is determinedly secular. Cairns Craig points out that the use of ecclesiastical buildings in Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark (1981) marks an attempt ‘to recreate the sense of the significance of the church building itself as the centre of a culture’ rather than as a signifier of spiritual authority.4 Furthermore, it seems that this secular use of the church as motif is peculiar to British novelists. One very simple reason for this may be the lack of suitable buildings across the breadth of the United States of America. Not only is there a lack of sufficient vintage, but the typical American townscape or cityscape is not dominated by a church or cathedral building to the same extent as is the case in Britain and Europe. (Witness the example of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, dwarfed by tower blocks on either side.) Another is the utilitarian, ‘low church’ attitude towards church buildings taken by most American religious

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denominations. Many American places of worship are makeshift and temporary, and tend to become abandoned as either the congregation moves to another pastor, or the pastor moves to another town.5 It is understandable, then, that the seductive image of an ancient, dominating but anachronistic building still exerting a mysterious and quietly subversive presence should have relatively little currency in the United States of America, especially when harnessed to a secular and political agenda. The secular orientation of British society by comparison with the United States may be another significant factor. It is a commonplace observation that although America is, more than any other nation, associated with the pursuit of material wealth and physical comforts, religious attendance is practised with greater regularity and enthusiasm than in Europe. This apparent contradiction may be resolved by the explanation that ‘religion in America is like the proverbial prairie river, a mile wide and an inch deep’ and that ‘most people want religion to give them just enough communal sharing and spiritual sustenance to enable them to persist in the competitive, individualistic broader culture [ ... it] sustains the liberal social order by providing what that very order lacks’.6 With religion and capitalistic individualism so complicit, the left-liberal project I have proposed – of appropriating the communal associations of religion while discarding religious content – seems unlikely in the American context. The strength and influence of religious conviction in the United States almost certainly muddies the waters for secular American novelists who can be much less confident than their British counterparts that the appropriation of religious themes and imagery will not be misinterpreted. It ought again to be made clear that there remains a significant degree of doubt among left-liberal writers about the communitarian turn. Even if history, community, tradition and family can all be said to offer the potential for ideological resistance, they also linger in the left-liberal mind as sources of exclusivity, bigotry and repression. Not all adverse responses to the global legacy of the Reagan-Thatcher period are necessarily positive: David Harvey points out that, across the world, ‘many elements in the middle classes took to the defence of territory, nation and tradition as a way to arm themselves against a predatory non-liberal capitalism’, and Slavoj Žižek has described the way in which the Communist Party in Serbia under Milosevic exploited an aggressive form of nationalism that arose as a consequence of a fear of the free market and which collapsed into a sinister fetishization of the national community and calls for a return to traditional values.7 If it is the case

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that the communitarian turn – both of the left and of the right – has been embraced mainly by white men, it is unsurprising that doubts are expressed most readily by members of groups who have in the past borne the brunt of the repression associated with close-knit social and racial groups. For such groups, the emancipatory aspect of libertarian individualism may be such a worthwhile prize that any consideration given to the notion of restraint in the name of the common weal seems dangerous for groups deemed to be subordinate or marginal.8 The latter part of this chapter, then, will deliberately break with the professed intention of this study to discuss the work of male novelists in order to examine a text that reverses the tendency uncovered in this chapter for white male left-liberal novelists to employ female characters in an apparent attempt to negotiate problems of political complicity when invoking the ‘communitarian turn’. Anita Mason’s The War Against Chaos (1988) is a novel that employs a male principal character (one who, perhaps significantly, is in search of his estranged wife) in order to address the theme of the communitarian turn and its relationship to the dissenting white male. I argue that the novel justifies its inclusion here because of the way in which it offers a compelling account of the white male left-liberal crisis by placing its leading character in a series of situations that humble and humiliate him, pushing him to the margins of society, thus enabling him to view both the necessity for, and the dangers of, the communitarian turn from a markedly different perspective to that experienced by the most of the male protagonists featured in this study. Iain Sinclair’s Downriver (2002) is a text whose principal theme is that of marginalization: not only the cultural marginalization of the political left, but also the physical marginalization of the working class. In this context, the interest shown by Sinclair’s characters in neglected buildings (including churches), obscure locations, bizarre histories, and forgotten artefacts is thoroughly logical, and constitutes a project intended ‘to amplify the voices of the disenfranchised’ by seizing upon the discarded by-products of the past and adopting them for purposes of subversion and cultural resistance in the present.9 Where the future and the present offer little inspiration to the left, writers such as Sinclair turn to the past with the hope that what is perceived as its irrepressible Protean power can disrupt the confident triumphalism of 1980s political conservatism. What the latter has discarded, neglected or defeated, Sinclair attempts to invest with a transformed, mystical power: ‘The heart of Whitechapel remained in purdah, sheathed in a prophylactic neglect: from the streets there was no hint that this unexploited

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kingdom even existed. Had I stumbled, after all these years, on a method of painlessly visiting the past?’ (97) It is by means of the idea that the past is an unruly force with the ability to subvert the assumptions of the present that Sinclair seeks to avoid the accusation that he is as guilty of making a commodity of the past as the heritage or tourist industries.10 The past can only be commodified, it would seem, if it is presented as something inert and concluded rather than something inconclusive, fragmentary and contradictory that cannot be colonized by any single discourse. Such resistance demands not only surrendering the notion of a knowable, controllable history, but also an acknowledgement that the history must be experienced and processed along collective and co-operative lines, because to do otherwise is to be complicit with a singular, privatized model of history that is indeed prone to the commercial pressures of the heritage industries. This idea is evident during the surreal episode in which the narrator and a group of acquaintances infiltrate a ceremony to mark the corporate takeover of the Isle of Dogs by the Vatican. When the group’s presence is discovered, they escape by conducting some form of counter-ritual in which they ‘had to believe more strongly in some other reality, a place beyond this place’ (295). In a concentrated collective effort, the group asserts its resistance by invoking images of the past: ‘Afternoons of children and animals [ ... ] the original windmills of Millwall. An engraving in the National Museum [ ... ] The view towards Greenwich, the classical vision of form: hospitals, avenues, churches [ ... ] As time was made to hesitate, stutter’ (295). As in McEwan’s The Child in Time (1997), the reference to disrupted time is made to suggest a re-casting of older certainties and traditions in the light of a revised view of reality that emphasizes the collective and the contingent rather than the assertive and the absolute. It is a suggestion reinforced during the episode towards the end of the novel in which the narrator and his friend Joblard visit an old church on the Isle of Sheppey. The church building is disassociated from the institution by the description of the vicar as ‘a Harvard Business School jock’ (391) who had been appointed by the Church Commissioners in order ‘to neutralize a site that could, however remotely, be connected to folk memories of ritual and mystery’ (391). For the narrator, the church institution is ‘a multinational octopus in the process of rationalizing UK branches that refuse to pay their own way’ (391), but the building itself, with its disquieting tombs and statuary represents ‘a repository of meaning, a place of consultation. A blood relative’ (392). According to the rigid interpretations of history (and thereby of time) that Sinclair is attempting to disrupt, the tombs and the church signify the power

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wielded by the monarchy, the aristocracy and religion in mediaeval England, but the reference to ‘folk memories’ invokes the uneasy relationship between early Christianity and paganism, and initiates the process of undermining the confident solidity of the power that the stones are meant to assert. As Alan Sinfield has argued, the assertion of power signifies the existence of that over which power is asserted, investing the latter with a degree of that power.11 Further divested of power by the passage of history, the church and its tombs are appropriated by Sinclair’s narrator, so that they no longer represent a repressive authority but instead signify the ideological opposite; ‘a place of consultation’ that nourishes the possibility of a communal life in which authority is not generated by military or economic force. The frequent references to church buildings and ceremonies made throughout Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (2002) at first seem like a curious and unnecessary adornment to a novel that, like Welsh’s Trainspotting (1999), describes the decline of collective identity and solidarity within working-class communities. Both novels are set in a Scotland that has been ravaged by Thatcherite public spending cuts and post-industrial decline, but whereas in Welsh’s novel even a desperate nihilist such as Renton remains angry and politically aware, the eponymous heroine of Morvern Callar has surrendered to the apathetic blankness that is more often found in contemporary American fiction. Despite many similarities between the two novels, the defiant energy of Trainspotting is very different to the atmosphere of defeated aftermath that pervades Warner’s novel. As with Trainspotting and Martin Amis’s London trilogy, however, there remain fading signs of another kind of life; a life in which individual satisfactions are both absorbed into and restrained by a collective identity, and which is represented by frequent references to religious buildings and rituals. The first of these references is to a local landmark known as the Tree Church; a tiny chapel once sculpted from hedges by a group of gardeners. A tiny replica of the Tree Church is included on a detailed model of the local area built by Morvern’s nameless boyfriend, a writer whose suicide begins the novel. A note left by the boyfriend for Morvern reads ‘KEEP YOUR CONSCIENCE IMMACULATE AND LIVE THE LIFE PEOPLE LIKE ME HAVE DENIED YOU. YOU ARE BETTER THAN US’.12 This declaration of middle-class guilt prompts Morvern to dismember and conceal his body, and to put her name to the manuscript of a novel he has written in a way that suggests that she has indeed liberated herself from the confinements of middle-class patriarchy, yet this suggestion is qualified by the awareness that Morvern continues to pursue

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a course recommended by her boyfriend. His writing and obsessive modelling is a self-conscious indication by Warner of the way in which the portrayal of working-class characters and communities is nearly always a fabrication assembled by those whose class origins either lie elsewhere, or are compromised in the act of writing and publishing. In true metafictional style, the relationship between the text, the authorial figure and the representation of a working-class (and female) character is complex and demonstrates that the attempt by the middle-class authorial figure to ‘liberate’ the working-class protagonist is compromised by its tone of control and command. Similarly, the narrative makes it clear that the collective ingenuity and skill of the makers of the Tree Church was not independent but remained subject to the direction of their employers (it is noted that local couples who wished to marry or baptize children in the Tree Church were obliged to seek permission of the landowners). The boyfriend may be seeking to free Morvern in the same way that the individualist-libertarian discourses of both the 1960s left and the 1980s right sought to liberate the British working classes of collective restraint (as manifest in tradition, discrimination, and state control), but the novel suggests that the price of that liberation – in the form of the rupture between the individualistic young working class and the collective sensibilities of their elders – is not worth paying. This rupture is highlighted during another episode in which the Tree Church is mentioned. After a night of debauched partying, Morvern and her friend Lanna are recovering at the home of Lanna’s grandmother Couris Jean, whose recollections and mysterious stories invoke the very kind of unknowable and subversive past invoked in Sinclair’s Downriver. The conversation between the older and younger women about the Tree Church conjures a fleeting moment of intimacy and community, but this is quickly dispersed as soon as Morvern leaves the house and returns to her own more immediate and self-absorbed priorities. This break with past customs and tradition is common to both Trainspotting and Morvern Callar but, whereas the former novel portrays a relatively passive and (curiously) apolitical older working class in contrast to some of the more aggressive and politicized (if impotent and desperate) younger characters, the latter shows this situation in reverse: it is the older generation that attempts (but fails) to bequeath to an apathetic younger generation a sense of social engagement and political awareness. A group of unemployed locals who call themselves ‘The Weekday Club’ demonstrate this sense by each contributing a few pence per week to a fund so that they can enjoy an occasional modest meal of cheese and bread at a local pub, but when one of their number says to

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Morvern ‘up the revolution then, we’ll support yous but it’s up to you young ones to bring it about’ (177), Morvern fails to react. Her apathy is especially significant in that she is the adoptive daughter of Red Hanna, a train driver well known for his communist affiliations and trades union activism. Yet Hanna is more of a burnt-out case than a firebrand. Crushed by his own failure, and that of the political left in general, to transform either his own future or that of his foster daughter, Hanna realises that Morvern’s poverty of ambition is an understandable means of coping with the prospect of having nothing to look forward to but ‘a forty-hour week on slave wages for the rest of your life’ (177). Hanna has fallen victim to what might be termed the monetarism of the defeated Marxist: although he is fully aware of the work ethic as ideology and false consciousness, all sense of the imperative for struggle and resistance has collapsed before what he evidently sees as the primacy of the economic base. Hanna tells Morvern that, the hidden fact of our world is that there’s no point in having desire unless you’ve money. Every desire is transformed into sour dreams. You get told if you work hard you get money but most work hard and end up with nothing. I wouldn’t mind if it was shown as the lottery it is but oh no. The law as brute force has to be worshipped as virtue. (45) Morvern’s subsequent actions underline the extent to which she accepts both Hanna’s words and the recommendation of her boyfriend that she live the life denied her. She empties her boyfriend’s bank account and embarks with Lanna on a holiday in a Spanish coastal resort with ‘Youth Med’, a company specializing in holidays for young British singles. The fact that Couris Jean dies on the day when Morvern and Lanna leave for Spain suggests that the older way of life Jean represents has been eclipsed by the orchestrated debauchery of Youth Med and that, although the behaviour of some of the men back in Morvern’s home town is no less drunken and self-destructive than that of the young male holidaymakers, the latter lack the wit and warmth of the former. Again, the implication is that the ‘liberation’ advocated by both middle-class liberals and by the forces of consumer-driven capitalism, seized upon by a working class which has severed its own links with the past, has amounted to no more than the freedom to throw toilet rolls from hotel balconies and to take part in drunken sex games. Morvern appears to embody the ‘affectless’ postmodern personality that has become so immersed, like an Amis character such as John Self or Keith Talent, in the various addictions of popular culture that she

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can no longer relate to anything that might lie outside that thoroughly commodified culture.13 At one point, unmoved by horrific footage of civil war in Yugoslavia, she switches off the television news in order to watch a film on video and is moved to tears ‘on account of the sadness of it’ (50). Nevertheless, it appears that Morvern’s conversation with Couris Jean has triggered something that makes her dissatisfied with her lifestyle. She tires of Youth Med, and begins to make solitary visits to traditional Spanish village communities. On one such visit she witnesses a spectacular religious ceremony in which an effigy of the Virgin Mary is floated out to sea and set alight: an episode that presages her own pregnancy by an unnamed father. Although this episode hints at some form of redemption in the communal and collective, it is made apparent that Morvern’s appreciation of village life remains haunted by a sense of detachment, and that she represents the deracinated cultural tourist rather than the engaged participant. John Frow contends that much tourism ‘represents a quest for an authentic domain of being’ at a time when the very notion of authenticity is under threat.14 Moreover, such a quest is doomed because authenticity is generally held to exist ‘outside the circuit of commodity relations and exchange values (although it is only accessible through this circuit: one form of the basic contradiction of the tourist experience)’ (72). This is Morvern’s situation: with money in hand, she is pursuing the dreams described by her father, and the freedom prescribed by her boyfriend, only for the circuit of commodification and exchange value to efface the authenticity she seeks, and for her libertarian impulses to isolate her from her own community. In addition, Morvern’s frustrated self-absorption seems to isolate her from culture, history and knowledge. Although this allows Warner to have several jokes at the expense of his principal character, there is the suggestion that the outcome of Morvern’s attempt to articulate her own experience (itself ironic, as the text is a representation of Morvern’s articulation by Warner that can bear no more relation to the original than the replica Tree Church) is only a form of inarticulation that stems from her own cultural isolation. Morvern is told that her surname is a Spanish word meaning ‘silence, to say nothing’ (125) and, in fact, the narrative does leave frustrating gaps in Morvern’s account of her life in Spain. This can be read as a sign of Warner’s own (possibly class-conscious) refusal to appropriate Morvern’s voice, or as further evidence that the very culture that has fostered Morvern’s apparent desire for greater articulation and more profound satisfactions than those provided by her life in Scotland have rendered that articulation and satisfaction impossible.

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The desire for a sense of profundity and seriousness (a theme that will be pursued further in the discussion of Barnes’s England, England below) is evident during the episode in which Morvern is taken for a night of drinking and clubbing by the publishers Tom and Susan. After leaving a nightclub in the early morning, the trio wander into a church service where Morvern silences her drunken acquaintances and leads Susan up to take communion (although the perverse solemnity of this scene is undercut by the following scene in which all three fool around in a photographic booth before Susan begins vomiting). Despite the generally flippant mood, however, there remains the sense that Morvern (like Martha Cochrane in England, England) is searching for something that she is reluctant either to embrace or even name, partly from an attendant feeling that she remains a cultural tourist forever estranged from the authentic. Isolated from (social) communion, culture and seriousness, Morvern’s source of recompense is her surrender to the atmosphere and music of the Spanish rave scene. Antonio Melechi claims that rave began as a response to ‘the loss of cultural and self identity’15 experienced within mainstream popular culture but reports that, instead of actively attempting to resist this loss, ravers instead attempted to recuperate the loss by celebrating it, in the same way (Melechi argues) that Jean Baudrillard celebrates the ‘hyperreality’ of American popular culture.16 Rave music is said to signify the ecstatic disappearance of the self and, although some critics see this as infantile escapism rather than a search for ‘alternative moral values’,17 Morvern appears to accept rave as a refuge from ‘the phallic domain of visibility’18 in which she is subject to the patriarchal assertions of her boyfriend and adoptive father. Morvern’s trance-like submission in dance thus represents her surrender to an anaesthetized form of community in which the complexities of both individual assertion and collective unity are temporarily resolved: A dreamy repeating pulse began. Immersed in the darkness, feet kept on the floor by the water bottle, bottom half followed the pulse and drone. Sometimes torso and arms were everything else: the bleepers or synth patterns [ ... ] You didn’t really have your body as your own, it was part of the dance, the music, the rave. (202–203) As if to confirm the economic determinism of Hanna, as well as critics of the rave scene who counter that rave is a thoroughly Thatcherite phenomenon dependent on money, prestige and the entrepreneurial rather than the co-operative spirit, Morvern’s money runs out and she

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is forced to return to Scotland to look for work.19 The novel ends with a scene in which, walking back towards her home town during a snowstorm, she is forced to spend the night in the Tree Church, which seems to be invested with recuperative powers: After a bit my head started to nod-nod forward. Then I felt the icy drop on my scalp. Then another. One dripped down my cheek and brought me round. I felt less poorly. I put out my tongue and a lovely freezing drop landed there [ ... ] The snow was melting and drops of melty water were falling through the thatched roof making me better. (228) In the same way that Morvern’s body nurtures her own child, the Tree Church has formed a womb around her, protecting her from the storm and reviving her. Once again, tropes of childbirth and childhood, locality, community and history are employed to sound notes of redemption at the end of an otherwise bleak novel. Like Morvern, the principal character of Barnes’s England, England, is a woman who is looking for a ‘seriousness’ that defies the ‘world map’ provided for them by the men who have dominated their lives. Martha Cochrane is a senior executive with the vast Pitco corporation whose chairman, Sir Jack Pitman, is a flamboyant, authoritarian tycoon in the manner of Sir Robert Maxwell. Pitman is an unabashed celebrant of the ersatz whose latest scheme is to build a vast Disneyesque theme park on the Isle of Wight devoted to relocating or replicating all of England’s most popular institutions in one place for the convenience of foreign tourists. The embodiment of Hal Foster’s ‘postmodernism of reaction’, he represents contemporary capitalism’s contempt for the notion of the natural or authentic: he asks his staff, ‘Are you real [ ... ] My answer would be No [ ... ] I could have you replaced with substitutes, with [ ... ] simulacra’ (31) and, on one of his staged walks in the countryside, notices how, ‘a jay flew past, advertising the new season’s car colours. A beech hedge flamed like anti-corrosion paint’ (43). For Pitman, everything is a function of the marketplace: even his professed patriotism is of a type which, like that of Reagan and Thatcher, has broken with notions of collective responsibility and provision and serves merely as a selling point in a globalized market place. The idea that nothing is natural or authentic, he argues, should not impede enjoyment or appreciation, because eventually the simulacrum of a thing ‘becomes the thing itself’ (61 – emphasis in original, except where otherwise stated). Pitman employs a gaggle of postmodernist theoreticians to prove his

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case: the historian Dr Max argues that the search for definitive origins, or for absolute terms and values is futile; and an unnamed French intellectual is hired to give a lecture in which he claims that ‘we prefer the replica to the original’ (53), citing the example of the nineteenthcentury reconstruction of the mediaeval cité of Carcassonne during which the architect was alleged to have altered many original features according to his own interpretation of how mediaeval buildings ought to look. Pitco’s theme park is exalted as a triumph of capitalism which is alleged by Dr Max to prove that ‘in the modern world, stability and longterm economic prosperity are provided more effectively by the transnational corporation than by the old-style nation state’ (128). The narrative makes it clear, however, that this is an elaborate confidence trick: prosperity is assured simply because the corporation have ‘shipped the old, longterm sick and the socially dependent off to the mainland’ (183). Furthermore, it becomes evident that not even capitalism in its most fluid and opportunistic form can assert itself over a troublesomely persistent reality. After its initial success, a ‘Sinclairesque’ chaos begins to intrude upon the theme park from the depths of history when the supposedly decorative smugglers begin to deal in contraband goods, the fake Robin Hood starts to behave like a ‘bloody outlaw’ (225), and the actor playing Dr Johnson succumbs to the bad manners and depression of the original. Even the Frenchman who makes an eloquent apology for Pitco’s fakery proves to be inconsistent, and indicates a preference for authenticity over the ersatz when it is revealed that he spends his fee on ‘waders from Farlow, flies from House of Hardy and aged Caerphilly from Paxton and Whitfield’ (56).20 Pitman expresses disappointment with the Frenchman’s lecture, and seems to sense that the ‘fit’ between contemporary capitalism and the postmodern condition is not quite as thoroughly convenient and comfortable as he (Pitman) would prefer. The Frenchman claims that the inaccurate restoration of Carcassonne was an attempt to ‘abolish the reality’ of the mediaeval buildings, adding that, ‘We have nowhere to hide when we are presented with an alternative reality to our own’ (54). The suggestion that some form of reality will always emerge in order to challenge or to defer the authority of any attempt to articulate and control would certainly unsettle Pitman, and indicates the difficulty contemporary capitalism faces in reconciling an ‘economistic’ emphasis on the market as the foundation of all value with postmodernism’s insistence on liquidity and contingency. The speech also unsettles Cochrane because she recalls Carcassonne as the location of an idyllic sexual experience that a friend once related

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to her. Whether or not the setting was relevant to the experience, the recollection suggests to Cochrane that, despite Dr Max’s denial of the ‘prime moment’ (132), there is within human beings a need to invest their experience of life with values and meanings as if those values and meanings were absolute.21 She is further troubled by her meeting with the actor whose personality seems to have been taken over by that of Dr Johnson and, finding the man’s distress to be genuine, confesses to what is for her the unfamiliar feeling of being ‘alone with another human creature’ (211). Confused by the conflict between the amoral frivolity of Pitco and her new-found affinity with others, Cochrane turns to her own memories of childhood and the contemplation of her own identity as something other than a Pitco functionary. She recalls how, during her childhood, she was unable to complete a jigsaw depicting the counties of England because her father had left one of the pieces in his jacket pocket when he walked out on his family; and this recollection suggests to her that any attempt to impose a rigid definition of either individual or collective identity upon the Protean reality evoked by the French intellectual will always involve incompleteness and contradiction. This could be read as a vindication of Pitman’s ideas about inauthenticity, but for the fact that such ideas have left Cochrane with ‘a discontent with the thinness of life, or at least life as she had known it’ (220). Provoked by the scepticism of Pitman and his cabal, Cochrane begins to feel the need for a ‘seriousness’ in which ‘the seriousness lay in celebrating the original image: getting back there, seeing it, feeling it [ ... ] but you must celebrate the image and the moment even if it had never happened’ (238). Cochrane deposes Pitman as head of the company after discovering (in an episode that recalls the story of Charles Darke in McEwan’s The Child in Time) that Pitman pays prostitutes to treat him as a baby. As in McEwan’s novel, Morvern Callar22 and the novels of Douglas Coupland, these episodes suggest that the dissolution of the self in acts of irresponsible, infantile satisfaction can bring relief from a social environment that demands a constantly assertive but anxious solipsism. This kind of dissolution is not presented in England, England or The Child in Time as subversive, but rather as a form of ‘refuelling’ on the part of white patriarchy. Indeed, Pitman regroups his forces and fires Cochrane, who by now has begun to doubt her own role in the corporate world, and begins to pay frequent contemplative visits to a nearby church: The church of St Aldwyn lay half forgotten in one of the few parts of the Island still unclaimed by the Project [ ... ] She had the key; but the

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building, now sunk in scrubby woodland, was unlocked and always empty [ ... ] The church didn’t strike her as beautiful: it had neither proportion, lustre, nor even oddity. This was an advantage, since it left her alone with what the building stood for. (218) What the building stands for is not Cochrane’s religious conversion but her desire for the ‘seriousness’ and for the collective ties that Pitco’s world of simulation and simulacra cannot provide.23 In this setting, the only community available to her seems to be that of the names of the dead on the tombstones in the church graveyard. From ‘a quiet curiosity bordering on envy’, she asks of the deceased, ‘what did they know, these future companions [ ... ] More than she knew, or less?’ (220). As a rare instance of something that is beyond the control of the corporate, death takes on a renewed significance when the (albeit bleak) collective sense experienced by Cochrane in the graveyard is contrasted with the description given towards the end of the novel of Pitman’s grandiose but isolated and unvisited tomb. In her further pursuit of that which lies beyond the frivolity of Pitco’s machinations, Cochrane eventually returns to the ‘old’ England, now called Anglia. The narrator reveals that Anglia is now a ruined and depopulated stump of a nation that eventually re-establishes itself as a fragmentary collection of communities living in ‘voluntary austerity’ (253). As modern technology is rejected in favour of fountain pens, steam locomotives and operator-based telephone exchanges, it at first seems as if Anglia has become something akin to the ‘retrotopia’24 envisaged by Pitco.25 The difference is that Anglia has developed ‘organically’, without the need of a grand narrative such as national identity, socialism or free enterprise. In this way, although the ‘willed antiquarianism’ (257) of Anglia bears more than a passing resemblance to one of Prince Charles’s experiments with organic communities, it may be read as an endorsement of a kind of liberal pragmatism that, while it seeks to restore communal ties, remains aware of the exclusivist dangers that such a restoration can bring. The nature of one of these communities is tested when Cochrane settles in a village where she discovers that the local blacksmith, Jed Harris, is in fact Jack Oshinsky, a former lawyer from America, that the schoolmaster, Mullin, was once an antiques dealer, and that the publican, Ray Stout, was once a motorway toll-collector. These deceptions are all readily accepted by the other inhabitants of the village, which the narrator is at pains to describe as being ‘neither idyllic nor dystopic’ (256). Sensing that this awkward balance between artificiality and

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authenticity is linked to her own need for seriousness and community, Cochrane gravitates towards the village church, presided over by the Reverend Coleman, who recalls the Isle of Sheppey vicar in Sinclair’s Downriver in the sense that both men are suspicious of those who want to use their church, believing (not without reason) that the interests of the latter are secular rather than religious in nature. Just as Sinclair’s protagonists are less interested in worship than in unearthing historical energies, so Coleman’s parishioners are said to be hostile to any ‘coercive theological system’ (262). Instead, ‘when they came to Church on Sunday it was more from a need for regular society and a taste for tuneful hymns than in order to receive spiritual advice and the promise of eternal life from the pulpit’ (262). The villagers maintain a pragmatic anti-authoritarianism alongside a need for some form of (half-) structured social and ethical existence. Like Pitco’s apologists, they would almost certainly reject the idea of a ‘prime moment’ just as they would abstract concepts that – as with the organized religion represented by Coleman – corrupt their original purpose. Unlike Pitco, however, the villagers would also reject the consequences of postmodern scepticism, since their need to live as an inclusive community involves the refusal of both individualistic despotism and ethical chaos. For Cochrane, this uncertain balance between scepticism and humanism is summed up by an incident she witnesses at the (newly-initiated) village fête when local children gleefully crowd around Ray Stout dressed as Queen Victoria: What held her attention now were the children’s faces, which expressed such willing yet complex trust in reality. As she saw it, they had not yet reached the age of incredulity, only of wonder; so that even when they disbelieved, they also believed [ ... ] They saw all too easily that Queen Victoria was no more than Ray Stout with a red face and a scarf around his head, yet they believed in both Queen Victoria and Ray Stout at the same time. (264) Cochrane speculates that the perceptions of the village children and their elders succeed in juggling a pragmatic scepticism with regard to truth and authenticity alongside a readiness to take advantage of the benefits conferred by a simultaneous collective and consensual acceptance of contingent versions of truth and authenticity. The combination of the ‘seriousness’ offered by the church and its communion of the dead, and of the life-affirming contingency of the parishioners, persuades Cochrane to make the village her home.

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Although England, England is a novel that, unlike the others mentioned in this chapter, studiously avoids the topic of social class, it is nonetheless another example of the way in which contemporary white male leftliberal novelists are employing themes normally associated with political conservatism in order to present a damning critique of contemporary capitalism. This appropriation is not straightforward. Barnes’s use of parody throughout England, England distances the novel from any unambiguous assertion that the revival of national identity is a suitable antidote to the ills of contemporary capitalism. The ‘nation’ he describes, after all, is so fragmented and lacking in any form of central authority that it barely deserves the name. Barnes’s fiction in general serves to remind the reader that concepts such as that of national identity are cultural constructs that ought always to be open to interrogation and that Barnes’s constant disruption of representational certainties consistently disrupts the conclusions drawn by his characters.26 This makes Barnes’s engagement with traditionalism and communitarianism tentative, as if to acknowledge the ideological dangers inherent in such an engagement. This, however, has the effect of diluting the effectiveness of Barnes’s novel political critique, leaving him open to the accusation that what lies beneath his satirical assault on capitalism consists of little more than ‘old-fashioned liberal humanism’.27 Whether or not such a politically ambivalent form of left-liberal humanism – old-fashioned or otherwise – can ever resist the forces aligned against it is a question that the social novel continues to debate, but it appears that writers such as Barnes believe that it is only through the negotiation of ambivalence, in a manner that somehow fuses the communal with the contingent, that the cynicism and brutality that underlies the amoral ‘playfulness’ of contemporary life might be averted. In all of the novels discussed above, the neglected church acts as a potent symbol for dissenting individuals who, dissatisfied with the forces that control their lives, remain isolated from the sense of social connection for which they strive. Pessimistic about their chances of ever attaining such a sense, they mourn the passing of values, beliefs and customs that denoted a more satisfying collective life. (In the same way, the neglected church may represent for left-liberal writers the passing of a committed fiction capable of contributing in some way to socio-political debate.) The possibility that a satisfactory collective life may never have been feasible for certain groups and individuals means that this discourse is the subject of some awkward negotiation on the part of the writers who represent, or who express sympathy or solidarity with, such groups and individuals.

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One significant aspect of such negotiation is the perceived nature of the threat to individual and collective well-being, and to the conflicting claims of both. Collectivity may signify oppressive hierarchy, or unified resistance to such oppression: similarly, individuality may signify liberated expression, or competitive anomie. Throughout the twentieth century, the social novel has reflected the changing nature of the threat both to personal emancipation, and to healthy social coherence. During the first part of the century, novels such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) indicated that the sovereign individual was besieged by tyrannies that justified their rule on the basis that the collective interest was endangered by some form of threat such as racial impurity or political subversion from within, or military invasion from without. In later decades, writers of dystopian fiction increasingly explored the idea that the capitalist state was as capable of developing brutally authoritarian bureaucracies as any dictatorship of the right or left. Whereas the earlier dystopia depicted cynical oligarchies wielding power in the name of some collective goal, the later dystopia of capitalism described vast, sinister, multi-national corporations holding sway in the name of free enterprise and the rights of private capital. The novel in which a sympathetic protagonist became associated with the perceived threat to the Party, racial purity or nationhood became superseded by that in which the protagonists become a threat to profits and investment, as writers diverted their hostility away from the idea of coercive, collectivist social programmes towards the notion that the pursuit of acquisitive self-interest necessarily provides the most favourable conditions for the majority. For the latter, living in a time of corporate takeovers and globalized capital flows, appeals to individual freedom ring as hollow as those to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Alasdair Gray’s Lanark is a typical example of a contemporary dystopia in which the forces that control society represent, in the words of one character, ‘[a] conspiracy which owns and manipulates everything for profit’28 and which promotes a culture of conspicuous consumption as a means to tame and dupe the masses. As with the ‘statist’ dystopia, any claims made on the basis of social unity are no more than a cynical pretence; yet there remains the feeling in Lanark that the remedy for this kind of dystopian society is a revival of genuine communal ties, intimate personal contact and social responsibility. As the next chapter will attempt to show in relation to American fiction and society, the motif of apocalyptic destruction frequently occurs whenever a social group or worldview experiences an initial loss

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of faith in the future. As Fredric Jameson says of the contemporary fictional obsession with personal or collective disaster, for political groups which seek actively to intervene in history and to modify its otherwise passive momentum (whether with a view toward channelling it into a socialist transformation of society or diverting it into the regressive re-establishment of some simpler fantasy past), there cannot but be much that is deplorable and reprehensible in a cultural form of image addiction which, by transforming the past into visual mirages, stereotypes, or texts, effectively abolishes any practical sense of the future and of the collective project, thereby abandoning the thinking of future change to fantasies of sheer catastrophe and inexplicable cataclysm, from visions of ‘terrorism’ on the social level to those of cancer at the personal.29 It seems that what remains for any utopian project is, on the one hand, a collective obsession with terrorism that corresponds on the individual level with a similarly masochistic fear of terminal disease and, on the other, a regretful yearning for social contact and communality.30 It is arguable that both are the projections of white male left-liberals in crisis, and that the implicit nihilism of the former tendency is answered by a communitarian vision that, while inclusive, egalitarian and progressive in intent, is open to interrogation on the grounds that it carries with it inherently conservative social and political tendencies. Whereas a novel such as Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) signals an extreme manifestation of such tendencies, Mason’s The War Against Chaos implies that the kind of ultra-conservative backlash described in the former novel is unlikely given that such a backlash would undermine the economic and ideological foundations of contemporary capitalism. In other words, although such administrations as those led by Reagan and Thatcher may employ a rhetoric of social conservatism in an attempt to shore up the collapsing social cohesion brought about by its own economic order, it is highly unlikely that such rhetoric would ever be converted so determinedly into social policies that would engender social connection (albeit in reactionary form) in ways that would restrict corporate profitability. It seems much more likely that – as in The War Against Chaos – such rhetoric would be restricted to a convenient project of retrenchment that, in the true style of the Reagan-Thatcher decade, left its economic presumptions undisturbed while marginalizing that which questioned those presumptions. The principal character of The War Against Chaos is a man named Hare, who works as a clerk for Universal Goods, a vast commercial

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enterprise that wields considerable influence over a government that has initiated a campaign for a ‘return to ancient, forsaken standards [ ... ] the sacredness of virginity, of paternal authority, of filial duty’.31 In keeping with the populist, anti-intellectual nature of the campaign (itself a satirical projection of Thatcherism), academic books and institutions have been suppressed, and Hare’s wife Maria, a former art student, has disappeared. Hare tries in vain to conform with this new order by attending ‘faith parties’; social events that attempt to bolster communal feeling, but he is regarded with suspicion because of his liking for reading and taking solitary walks at a time when activities that denote ‘curiosity, or introspectiveness, or a desire for solitude’ (19) are frowned upon. Hare is dismissed from his job by his boss Jacobs, who claims that he is trying to protect ‘those institutions on which the human community and human happiness are founded: country, workplace, family’ (62) by purging society of ‘disaffection, rootlessness and the assertion of individual judgement over collective wisdom’ (63). In act, Jacobs is using Hare’s dismissal as a cloak for his own corrupt activities in the same way that the government’s communitarian programme is evidently no more than a cynical attempt to maintain just enough social cohesion (or coercion) to keep the wheels of private industry turning. The narrative makes it clear that behind the official advocacy of communal regeneration lies a shabby, run-down social infrastructure, and that behind the rhetoric of social unity lies the reality of inequality and of the apathy of the elite towards the social fabric. Even Jacobs struggles with the contradiction between the egalitarianism implicit in the regeneration programme and the economic realities of the system to which he is devoted: If one had to treat everyone equally, without regard for who they were or what they had [ ... ] The day-to-day business of the Company would be made impossible, since the Company functioned on the principle of taking as much as possible from those who could least afford to give it, and rewarding those who were doing nicely already. The imbalance was the dynamo that kept everything running. (82–83) Capitalism as represented by Universal Goods depends on the maintenance of social and economic divisions that are at odds with the need for social cohesion through mutual obligation and responsibility. Hare encounters the lack of the latter when, only days after losing his job, he is evicted from his home and begins sleeping rough and foraging for scraps of food. Eventually, he is taken in by one of the ad hoc communities of the

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disenfranchized and disaffected known as the ‘marginals’ who live at the fringes of society and are barely tolerated by the authorities. The group that adopts Hare lives in a semi-derelict house in a state of sociable anarchy that even the habitual loner Hare comes to appreciate. The group adheres to no structure or set of principles and attempts to balance individual freedom (the character Brag simply does as he pleases) with the need for mutual assistance (the demented Filthy is cared for by other members of the group). Hare struggles to grasp how this arrangement can possibly work, but comes to understand that the very attempt to ‘grasp’ – in the sense of imposing order and structure on something that cannot be ordered or structured in any definitive way – militates against the anarchic pragmatism that enables the marginals to thrive. Hare finds that, outside the circuit of exchange value and economic coercion, work takes on a new, positive meaning, and discovers in the genuine sociability of the group a more profound satisfaction than in the forced collective conformity imposed by Jacobs and his ilk. The marginal community depends upon reciprocation, consensus and collective interest but, unlike mainstream society, does not appeal to abstract principle and the coercion that is frequently the consequence of such an appeal. In this way, the novel suggests that it is when the communitarian turn is accompanied by the alliance of abstraction and coercion that it takes on the reactionary political characteristics of the appeals to social regeneration made by the government, rather than the more positive view of collective life expressed in the depiction of the marginals. Nonetheless, there is a suspicion – voiced by the marginals themselves – that theirs is a lifestyle of evasion rather than of resistance, and that their parasitic dependency upon the leftovers of mainstream society means that they can never overthrow or become independent of that society. Their refusal of power allows them a peripheral existence, but compromises the revolutionary zeal of its members. Hare decides to leave the marginals in search of his wife, but the communitarian theme is revisited when he encounters the Diggers, another anarchic community that inhabits a network of underground chambers originally built as a refuge in the event of nuclear conflict.32 As with the marginals, social capital is the basis of the Digger community: those who abuse its informal codes are simply not permitted to eat with the group, and Hare realizes that, whereas in mainstream society such social isolation has become the norm, here it is reserved as a useful and constructive form of discipline. Once more, use is made of a church building in order to reinforce a sense of communal intimacy and identity. Hare attends the funeral of

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a Digger that is held in a neglected chapel, and the informal ceremony triggers in Hare emotional memories of his own childhood when his mother would take him to church. Again, the ecclesiastical references do not signify a religious intent but rather indicate a means by which dissenting groups invest what Raymond Williams terms ‘residual’ forms with a symbolic resistance that provides some consolation for their defeat and marginalization.33 As Williams puts it: We can understand, from an ordinary historical approach, at least some of the sources of residual meanings and practices. These are the result of earlier social formations, in which certain real meanings and values were generated. In the subsequent default of a particular phase of a dominant culture, there is then a reaching back to these meanings and values which were created in real societies in the past, and which still seem to have some significance because they represent areas of human experience, aspiration and achievement which the dominant culture undervalues or opposes, or cannot even recognize.34 The idea that the dominant culture undervalues or cannot recognize the collective sensibilities of the Diggers is reinforced by the episode in which Hare is shown an old official report that reveals how the fear of nuclear war had been exploited by the government as a means of social control. The report states that the removal of the nuclear threat would undermine not only the fear of war in general, but also all forms of authority, and that society would collapse in chaos: effects are likely to be Protean in their manifestations and in the long term incalculable: symptoms which have already appeared include a rejection of ‘work’, an insistence on the right of unrestricted sexual gratification and a general and broad-ranging intolerance of authority and discipline [ ... ] Linked with this rejection of moral and legal order, we expect to see an increasing amorphousness and classlessness in society, tending towards chaos, as the hierarchies, including gradations of social class, are eroded, and as the concepts of superiority and leadership come under attack. (174) The kind of ‘Protean’ society the authorities fear is that represented by the Diggers and marginals, except that the authorities cannot conceive of any society that shuns surveillance, hierarchy and coercion being able to avoid complete collapse. As in The Handmaid’s Tale, an authoritarian hierarchy is justified from a fear of personal emancipation that

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takes no account of the possibility that such an emancipation might involve a sense of the collective that eschews coercion and exclusivity. Nevertheless, in the same way that Brag criticizes the passivity of his marginal community, a group of young Diggers (who call themselves The Bag) point out that the reliance of their elders on the surplus produce of the society that they despise weakens the integrity of their position. The Bag tell Hare of their plan to leave the tunnels and found a rural community that they intend to call Skylight by using a set of antiquated rifles they have discovered in order to seize the necessary land.35 Hare realizes that their plan, apart from being hopelessly naïve, shows a paradoxical readiness to use violence in the interests of peace that can only lead to ‘the old mistakes’ (177) being made. By rejecting the practice of appealing to distant goals and abstract principles in order to justify questionable actions, Hare suspects that the Bag’s plans are compromised from the start. These fears are well-founded: due largely to the influence of the captured policeman Koberg (who represents the corrupting individualism of mainstream society), the land seizure is a spectacular failure in which both the marginals and Diggers are routed. In the aftermath of the defeat, Hare and a few others flee the tunnels and emerge in the ‘Zone’, a mysterious sealed area in the centre of a city that the authorities have used as another means of instilling fear and bolstering their own power. Realizing that the Zone is empty, Hare suggests that the group settle there. This hopeful ending, however, is offset by the novel’s final passage in which the sinister head of Universal Goods, Mr Lucy, observes the scene and pronounces that the poisoned land of the Zone will kill the settlers.36 The War Against Chaos is an interesting articulation by a female writer of the abjection of a white male left-liberal protagonist at a time when even such a comparatively privileged social group could muster little in the way of effective opposition to the New Right project. In Mason’s dystopia, oppression is much less brutal and effective than in (for instance) The Handmaid’s Tale, if one considers that dissenting groups are tolerated as long as they present no threat to the established order by remaining at the fringes of society. Similarly, the talk of regeneration and rebirth on the part of the authorities that might signify a determined socio-political programme is hardly matched by action. It seems from this that the status quo is maintained by a shabby pragmatism rather than by strict adherence to an ideological project but – as with the favoured strategies of both Reagan and Thatcher discussed in Chapter 1 – this pragmatic approach does not necessarily make that status quo any less of an ideological construct with very distinct economic and social outcomes.

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This contrast between The War Against Chaos and more extreme dystopian fictions might be read as being indicative of the contrasting polities of the United Kingdom and the United States. Being founded upon abstract principles and absolute goals (liberty, the pursuit of happiness) rather than the reality of slavery and genocide, there may be a propensity within American culture for abstraction – in the form of constitutional enshrinement, for example – that would in turn stimulate ideological assertion more readily than in other cultures so that victory and defeat are assumed to be total, leading in some circumstances to an uncompromising triumphalism, and in others to the most terrible fear of defeat (which may in part explain the despair of the contemporary American left, and of much contemporary American fiction). By comparison, the British polity, at least since the decline of the British Empire, appears more of an amalgam of Raymond Williams’s residual and emergent forms without a determining teleology (or even a fixed Constitution) in which the ruling order has, for the most part, maintained its power through a conservative momentum that for several centuries has had no need for revolution on its own behalf, and relatively little need for determined resistance to internal revolt. What this may have bred is a more muted response to challenge that has to date succeeded in smothering and nullifying that challenge, yet also permits marginalized, dissident social gatherings to form the kind of social connections that offer the best source of hope to those groups. This chapter has demonstrated that the use of a female protagonist is one means by which the white male left-liberal novelist is able in some measure to deflect the accusation that his proposal of a communitarian solution to his own crisis carries with it implications of patriarchal reassertion. In Morvern Callar, for instance, the latter is evident in the tortured attempt by the (male) author to present Morvern as a young woman who, in claiming her dead boyfriend’s novel as her own, has appropriated her own means of representation and escaped the paralysing sense of complicity that has driven the boyfriend to despair. As the reading of the novel presented here makes clear, however, this attempt is compromised by the patronising ‘blessing’ the boyfriend gives to Morvern in his suicide note (as well as by the fact that the text remains the articulation of Morvern’s experiences by a white male). Julian Barnes’s representation of Martha Cochrane can be read as another attempt by a white male left-liberal writer to renegotiate his awkward ideological position. It is arguable that, had Cochrane been male, his success as a senior executive within a patriarchal business empire might have made his disillusionment with Pitco more difficult for the author

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to depict convincingly. Instead, the fact that Cochrane’s position of alterity (in gender terms) has been suppressed in order to rise through the ranks of Pitco – where, in any event, her role is said to be that of compliant cynic – makes it acceptable that this alterity should re-emerge in the form of disillusionment and refusal. Cochrane’s contended absorption into the life of the village is made to represent the triumph of a communitarian turn divested of patriarchy (an idea that the image of the publican Ray Stout dressed as Queen Victoria is perhaps intended to portray). With this in mind, what makes The War Against Chaos a revealing text for the purposes of this study is the way in which a female novelist has effectively inverted the dynamic described above by driving a male protagonist into a position of alterity. Hare is no corporate executive who suddenly awakes to his own wrongdoing, but a man progressively humbled and marginalized beyond the point where he can reasonably be accused of complicity with the forces of patriarchy and reaction. The conclusion that he reaches – that his own redemption lies within a collective context based upon inclusion and co-operation rather than exclusion and coercion – throws into relatively uncluttered relief the position of the contemporary white male left-liberal without the paralysing complexities that accompany the privileged social position (by virtue of gender, race and, in most cases, class) of most such protagonists and their creators.

6 The Battlefield of the Self

The previous chapter demonstrated that, even in the most secular society, the legacy of religion can provide a source of powerful social memories that are frequently associated with notions of collectivity. Will Hutton argues that, by fostering a sense of social obligation (upon which they relied for their existence), European religious institutions were able to restrain – at least to some degree – the most powerful secular forces. This established not only the concept of noblesse oblige, but also, claims Hutton, the basis for socialism. In early America, the lack of an established Church and the need to stimulate the settler virtues of self-reliance and individual initiative made the institutionalization of charity more difficult to establish, with the result that those factors that signified the close relationship between the development of a capitalist economy and Protestantism (especially Calvinism) were allowed free rein: the belief that the pursuit of wealth through labour and enterprise is a duty rather than a sign of shameful involvement with a fallen world; the denial of sensuality and emotion; and suspicion of any social contact (even friendship) deemed superfluous to religious contemplation and to business.1 As a capitalist economy developed, so too did the notion that wealth creation and the rights of private property take precedence over ‘emotive’ concerns about social provision and collective well-being. Some degree of restraint was provided by the Protestant awareness of sin, and by a consequent fear of despotism that manifested itself not in restrictions upon private capital, but in proscriptive measures intended to limit political (or public) power. Acutely aware of humanity’s capacity for corruption, the Founding Fathers installed into the American Constitution the checks and balances that have ever since ‘contributed to the American fear of concentrated governmental power’. 2 If the legacy of 136

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the European Church has been the principles upon which socialism was founded, then the legacy of the American Protestant fear of the despot has been hostility towards centralized intervention in issues considered local or personal. As Sut Jhally remarks, ‘in the United States, we call government interference domination, and market governance freedom’. 3 Although the fear of political tyranny is understandable, and the system of checks and balances laudable, Hutton contends that the emphasis of the American Constitution on the rights of property and ownership has been exploited by the vast commercial and financial concerns that control the American economy. The protection once extended to farmers and entrepreneurs (including slaveowners) with regard to private property rights has been appropriated by powerful corporations in the interests of shareholders and to the detriment of collective interests. Protected by the sympathetic administrations of Reagan, Wall Street and the multi-nationals were free in the 1980s to embark upon the programmes of corporate raiding, merging and asset stripping that are now held to distinguish that decade by appealing to the principles of liberty and ownership enshrined in the Constitution. Unchecked by collectivist notions of restraint, the salaries and bonuses paid to an elite band of senior executives became increasingly vast, while the workforce became ever more subject to ‘rationalisation’, low pay, short-term contracts, and anti-union legislation. Furthermore, the physical withdrawal of some three million affluent Americans into gated communities that are able to claim political independence and exemption from state taxes is evidence of a more general withdrawal of the rich from social responsibility indicated further by the declining interest of the super-rich in what might be termed the noblesse oblige projects of Central Park and Rockefeller Plaza.4 The tendency of the wealthy and powerful to withdraw from communal life is only one instance of what Robert Putnam sees as a general decline in the willingness of all social groups within America to participate in social (or sociable) activity. According to Putnam’s figures, two-thirds of Americans in the mid-1970s claimed to have attended a recent meeting of some form of club or association: by the late 1990s, only one third claimed to have done so. Although the social capital generated by such participation is said by Putnam to be invaluable not just for society as a whole, but for the health and happiness of individuals, he claims that American popular culture has undervalued it by placing too much emphasis on the merits of the

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distinctive individual: ‘our national myths often exaggerate the role of individual heroes and underestimate the importance of collective effort’. 5 Putnam’s research indicates four principal factors deemed to have brought about this decline. The first of these is television – the bogey-man of Vineland (1990), Money (1984) and London Fields (1990) – which is considered inimical to communal life because of its passive mode of reception and because the viewer is removed from sites of entertainment (dancehalls, theatres, amusement parks) that promote some degree of social interaction. The fact that most American TV networks are owned by private corporations, arguably with little interest in the maintenance of a critical public forum, is deemed to have exacerbated the tendency for television to neglect the public realm in favour of the interests and concerns of private individuals.6 The second reason proposed for the decline in communal feeling is the disappearance of traditional town centres with small shops and public spaces – America’s Main Street – in favour of vast suburban (or even ‘exurban’) estates and malls that accentuate a privatized realm of consumption and domesticity. Thirdly, it is suggested that an increasingly insecure and competitive job market has meant that the workplace is no longer a location in which people feel inclined to invest social capital: if workers feel that they or their colleagues are not likely to hold on to their jobs, then there is less likelihood of work-based relationships becoming firmly established. Finally, there is the issue of generational change. Putnam argues that whereas the generation that grew up during the New Deal and World War Two found a source of social capital in the collective triumph against both the Depression and fascism, the later generation of baby-boomers, despite an apparent commitment to social liberty and racial equality were ‘less trusting, less participatory, more cynical about authorities, more self-centred, and more materialistic’ (258), possibly as a result of their experiences in the black civil rights and anti-Vietnam war campaigns. Their cynicism with regard to the public realm has been handed down to ‘Generation X’, whose members, shaped by uncertainty (especially given the slow-growth, inflationprone 1970s and 1980s), insecurity (for these are the children of the divorce explosion) and an absence of collective success stories – no glorious D-Day and triumph over Hitler, no exhilarating, liberating marches on Washington and triumph over racism and war [ ... ] have never made the connection to politics, so they emphasize the personal and private over the public and collective. (259)

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As if anticipating the objection from the left that the above represent a list of ancillary rather than primary causes, Putnam denies that the reasons for the decline of America’s communitarian traditions lie within the nature of capitalism. Levels of social capital have varied, he reasons, but America has never had anything other than a capitalist economy. Capitalism is not to blame, he claims, because ‘a constant can’t explain a variable’ (282). It is doubtful, however, that what Putnam is describing is in fact constant. The period over which he makes his analysis begins with the New Deal, when there was an attempt to temper the less fortunate outcomes of a capitalist economy by means of massive public spending and social welfare projects. There followed the collective effort demanded of American society by its involvement in World War Two. It is therefore arguable that the high point of social engagement from which Putnam charts the process of decline also represented the point at which American capitalism had been restrained by collective imperatives more than at any point in its history. If the ensuing relaxation of these imperatives can be held to have contributed to the fact of communal decline to an equal or greater degree than the phenomena described by Putnam, then this suggests that there is indeed something about late twentieth-century capitalism that is hostile to communal life. In other words, it is the type of capitalism that has been unleashed upon American society since the late 1970s that, in providing a contrast with the New Deal that Putnam appears to use as a default, furnishes the variable that he requires. Zygmunt Bauman has described contemporary capitalism as ‘liquid’: the solidity and durability of Rockefeller’s hard industrial plant, he claims, has been superseded by the amorphous disposability of Bill Gates’s cyber-assets, with the consequence that capitalism, abetted by new technologies, is able to flow past restraints of time and space in ways that have ‘led to the progressive untying of economy from its traditional political, ethical and cultural entanglements’, thereby avoiding accountability to those demanding a degree of social responsibility.7 During the period of ‘solid’ capitalism, the formal system of checks and balances built into the American Constitution were reproduced on a quotidian level by that relationship between economic libertarianism and behavioural conservatism upon which the complicated network of American communitarian traditions depended. During the 1970s and 1980s, and the onset of ‘liquid’ capitalism, that relationship was subverted by the blending of economic and behavioural libertarianism, especially in those growth

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areas, such as IT and the popular communications media, whose young practitioners had been influenced by the 1960s counterculture. What ensued was a ‘Pynchonian’ shift, from an attempt by countercultural behavioural libertarianism to undermine its economic equivalent, to a state of affairs in which these antagonists combined in order to uncouple themselves from all but minimal commitment to any form of social contract. The individualist-libertarian discourse that was at the centre of the counterculture, when combined with the lucrative markets opened up by IT and the electronic media, provided ‘straight’ enterprise with at least part of the means by which to revive the stagnating economies of the 1970s and to evade those obligations that could now be written off as being restrictive and anachronistic. Haight-Ashbury had moved to Silicon Valley.8 The withdrawal of the wealthy and powerful from the public realm is indicated by a passage in Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1998) in which the novel’s protagonist, Sherman McCoy, is told that ‘If you want to live in New York [ ... ] you’ve got to insulate, insulate, insulate’ (65–66). Wolfe’s account of McCoy’s trial for the killing of a black youth is a testimony of Bauman’s description of the contemporary public realm as a ‘now largely vacant agora’ (41) in which the process of judging a citizen’s transgression against agreed civic values has been degraded to the point where it becomes no more than a site upon which a politics of identity and interest is fought out incessantly. In this context, not even agents who claim to be fighting for social progress appear to have faith in any form of social contract: Wolfe’s black community leader Reverend Bacon, for instance, seems not so much a champion of the underprivileged than an opportunist who pays only lip service to social justice while misappropriating funds for a day-care centre in order to speculate on the same Wall Street markets he castigates. The former radical lawyer Vogel suggests that the very notion of social justice cannot now be grasped by a younger generation that, fed on a diet of instant satisfaction, seems unable to relate either to the past or to collective traditions: I told them what it was like on the campuses fifteen years ago [ ... ] But I don’t know ... fifteen years ago, fifty years ago, a hundred years ago ... they have no frame of reference. It’s all so remote to them. Ten years ago ... five years ago ... Five years ago was before Walkman earphones. They can’t imagine that. (235 – emphasis in original) Vogel’s association of Walkman earphones with contemporary society’s estrangement from history recalls the way in which the McCoys

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abandoned the liberal pretensions of their youth in favour of immersion into a world of luxurious consumption. Both episodes signal that the absorption of the individual into a culture of self-indulgence and selfabsorption leads not only to a break with history and the degeneration of social territories, but also to a crisis of identity for that individual. This is precisely what happens to McCoy, who eventually finds that he can no longer sustain a belief in the private and autonomous self, and concludes that the self is ‘an open cavity, like a cave or a tunnel or an arcade, if you will, in which the entire village dwells and the jungle grows’ (546). At first, this reads like an endorsement of the idea that the individual depends on the communal context for self-definition, but the subsequent portrayal of McCoy presents a number of problems to a pro-communitarian interpretation. Given that McCoy’s crisis has been precipitated by the absence of a supportive social network against which self-definition can be achieved, McCoy’s new self seems to consist more of the jungle of contemporary New York than of the (implicitly harmonious) village he invokes. Despite the claim that he has surrendered his sovereign self to some form of collective identity, he remains an isolated figure whose defiance and aggression resembles that of the survivalist or white supremacist, especially in the light of the episode in which he derives much satisfaction from punching a black man after one of his court appearances. In the same way that the plastic doll from which McCoy once derived the conceit that he was a ‘Master of the Universe’ represents beneath its sci-fi trappings no more than old-fashioned muscular patriarchy, so McCoy, once stripped of his ‘yuppie’ veneer, surrenders to the frontier myth of white manhood and mastery.9 McCoy’s reinvention of himself is in fact a reversion: in refusing to admit that the forces that have conspired to bring about his downfall (the pursuit of individual gratification, the decline of the public realm, and the absence of the collective aspect of self- definition) were forces unleashed by his own class, he falls back into an atavistic idealization of the American pioneer age.10 The ‘liberation’ that individualistic consumerism has offered him has in fact eroded his own sense of sovereign individuality and, lacking a collective referent, he has fallen back on an older form of individualistic, aggressive patriarchy that in his eyes is vindicated by his rejection of that consumerist culture he finally comes to regard as being implicitly effete and ‘feminine’. McCoy’s descent into violent transgression is more than matched by the principal characters in Ellis’s Less Than Zero (1986) and American Psycho (1991), who effectively represent the destructive testing of white male individualism within the consumerist popular culture of the

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1980s. They have youth, beauty, hipness, health and wealth, but their pursuit of gratification does not result in satisfaction. Both Clay, in Less Than Zero, and Bateman, in American Psycho, find that the general pursuit of one’s own desires results in a terrifying tendency towards convergence and similarity in a way that threatens distinctive individual identity. Clay repeats the phrases ‘People are afraid to merge’ (1) and ‘Disappear Here’ (33) like a paranoid mantra,11 and anxiously observes a group of boys who ‘all look the same [ ... ] then I start to wonder if I look like them’ (140), while Bateman finds that he is constantly mistaken for someone else, but admits that ‘everyone is interchangeable anyway’ (379). Harvie Ferguson claims that ‘social meanings can only be manufactured and transmitted through the perception of difference’, yet the characters in Ellis’s novels attempt to assert a sense of identity not by attempting to escape from the terms of consumerism, but further immersing themselves within it.12 As James Annesley says of Ellis’s characters, ‘people are measured by the amount they earn, the clothes they wear and the places they eat’, yet it is not enough for Ellis’s characters to buy (or have bought for them) a sports car or a pair of sunglasses; it must be a Porsche and the latest Raybans.13 In this world, ‘branding has emerged as a means to achieve the status and sense of belonging that social and economic structures no longer provide’,14 but this is ‘belonging’ in a competitive rather than co-operative form, as is evident during the comic episode in American Psycho when a group of white male bonds dealers attempt to assert their own superiority through the quality of their business cards. It is a vicious circle. Consumerism has eroded those social structures that confer identity, but promises that further indulgence can confer that identity; yet this indulgence fuels the economic order that creates the original problem, creating not the meaningful differences described by Ferguson, but the situation where even those who profit most from the economic order go to the same bars and restaurants, wear the same designer clothes, and even exchange the same sexual partners. When Ellis’s characters realize that consumerism offers no sense of salvation or profound satisfaction, they turn to transgression. Clay’s exclamation, ‘I want to see the worst’ (160), is a declaration of his hunger for the visceral reality excluded by his sanitized urban lifestyle, but this declaration demands that he abandon all social connection or commitment. At one point, Clay is asked, ‘What do you care about? What makes you happy?’, to which he replies, ‘Nothing. Nothing makes me happy. I like nothing ... I don’t want to care ... It’s less painful if I don’t care’

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(192). Clay abandons caring – with its implicit admission of the need for social responsibility – as a consequence of the painful realization that no one else seems to care. By delving beneath the social networks that are now deemed inadequate to the provision of a satisfactory sense of self, Clay is confronted by an existential void from which he cannot derive any redeeming value or meaning.15 Bateman’s own crisis is similar: his lovestruck secretary Jean, he notices, is ‘searching for a rational analysis of who I am, which is, of course, an impossibility: there ... is ... no ... key’ (264), and he explains that, ‘There wasn’t a clear identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being – flesh, blood, skin, hair – but my depersonalisation was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to show compassion had been eradicated (282)’. Bateman expresses a need for some form of socialization when he tells a girlfriend, ‘I ... want ... to ... fit ... in’ (237) but, like Clay, he finds the social networks available to him inadequate. He discovers the true shock of the postmodern: that the search for depth is futile, that ‘sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue [ ... ] Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in’ (375). Unable to adapt to the collapse of a narrative that might affirm his place in a social and ethical order, he begins to ‘unleash his nothingness upon the world’ in the form of a series of sadistic assaults and murders.16 Ostensibly driven by libidinal appetites, there is evidence of a vestigial Puritanism within Bateman in his failure to surrender himself fully to the sensual fulfilment he pursues. Sex in the novel is effectively de-sexed by narcissism and lack of spontaneity: Bateman assesses his own muscle tone in the mirror during copulation, and one of Bateman’s girlfriends refuses to sleep with him without her supply of lithium and a precisely-adjusted condom. This mechanistic approach to sex stems from an inability to identify with others, and represents a contemporary twist on Puritanism: whereas the traditional Puritan would refrain from sensual indulgence out of a concern for the common good, Bateman and his peers reject the common good, but are thereby unable to enjoy their indulgence. Clay’s search for depth and value leads him to contemplate his own family and childhood. This is a not uncommon tendency in the contemporary novel: Clay’s search resembles Martha Cochrane’s quest for seriousness in Barnes’s England, England, and the investigation of childhood and family as sources of redemptive social connection can be observed in novels as varied as The Child in Time, Money, The

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Corrections, Microserfs and Vineland. Unlike those novels, in which familial connection provides some form of consolation, however qualified, Clay quickly becomes disillusioned by attempts to invest his past with some form of nostalgic yearning. He finds that Christmas at home is devoid of intimacy, as his father discharges his paternal duties simply by dispensing cheques; he visits his old elementary school only to find the school closed and the gates locked, with another boy pathetically doing the same; and his memories of other family gatherings are ruined by his subsequent recollection that his grandmother died of cancer and that his grandfather became an alcoholic. As was made clear in Chapter 3, it is the parental generation that is held to account in Ellis’s novels for the failure of social connection. In Less Than Zero, Clay is unsettled by his mother’s lack of concern about the cocaine habit of his younger sisters and their interest in porn movies, and later notices a piece of graffiti that sums up the resentment of his cohort towards their elders: ‘Fuck you Mom and Dad [ ... ] You both can die because that’s what you did to me’ (180– 181). The parental neglect of obligation and responsibility has evidently brought about a climate in which there are no longer any acceptable restraints for anyone: when Clay berates his friend Rip for participation in a gang rape, saying ‘I don’t think it’s right’, Rip retorts, ‘What’s right? If you want something, you have the right to take it. If you want to do something, you have the right to do it’ (177). Rip’s attitude, inherited from the behavioural nexus between social libertarianism and economic liberalism that he has observed in the parental generation, represents the apotheosis of individualism: the ability to abandon all social and moral restrictions, and to assert one’s will (and body) over another.17 Clay’s despair lies with the fact that he cannot propose a set of values that would challenge Rip’s behaviour (and his justification for that behaviour); and it is the absence of such values that has created a cultural vacuum into which has leaped a rhetoric of individualism that has fostered consumerist self-gratification and so shored up the corporate world of mergers and acquisitions, shareholder dividends and ruthless downsizing that continues the assault on collective values, thus closing the circle around the besieged individual. The outcome is a culture in which ‘the historical sense has grown increasingly blunted, as it suited those in power that we should be able to imagine no alternative to the present’,18 and against which Bateman, Clay and McCoy are staging their own desperate, lonely and reactionary protest.

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Despite its emphasis on surface and illusion (evident in the hallucinatory ‘Chase, Manhattan’ chapter and the implication that Bateman’s killings may be the product of his own imagination), American Psycho ends with an episode that suggests that some form of political reality lies behind the reflective glass that forms the boundary of Bateman’s world (albeit with the qualification that it is not possible to break through that glass).19 Bateman and a group of acquaintances are watching a television appearance by Ronald Reagan that sparks a debate about whether or not Reagan was guilty of lying while in office. One of the group, Price, asks of Reagan, ‘How can he lie like that? How can he pull that shit?’ (396 – all emphases in original except where stated). The other members of the group ridicule Price’s attempts at seriousness, indicating that this is a world of surfaces into which the intrusion of any suspicion of ‘depth’ is futile. The threat represented by the latter is neutralized by the undifferentiated element over which Reagan continues to preside: McDermott objects to Price’s complaints about Reagan with the non sequitur, ‘He is totally harmless, you geek. Was totally harmless. Just like you are totally harmless. But he did do all that shit and you have failed to get us into 150 so, you know, what can I say?’ (397). Whether or not McDermott is aware that he is contradicting himself (Reagan is ‘harmless’, yet ‘did do all that shit’), he is obviously unconcerned, equating the issue of Reagan’s culpability with Price’s inability to make a restaurant booking. It is as if the Irangate-Contras issue and the national debt are no more relevant than getting a table – an impression that is reinforced when Price attempts to continue his assault on Reagan: ‘He presents himself as a harmless old codger. But inside ...’ (397). Price implies that Reagan’s harmless exterior (like that of Bateman) conceals something much more sinister, but he is unable to complete the sentence. (Bateman claims that the words Price is searching for are ‘doesn’t matter’, but remains silent.) With Price no more able to articulate his objection to Reagan than Clay is able to object to Rip’s participation in gang rape, the conversation drifts back towards triviality, and the novel ends when Bateman’s eye spots a sign that reads ‘THIS IS NOT AN EXIT’ (399). Reagan’s televised image persists, looking down on the ‘depthless’ culture that offers even its beneficiaries no means of escape. If the individuation paradox is at the heart of Ellis’s fiction, it is the starting point for Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (1991) and Microserfs. The narrator of the latter novel, Dan, says of his fellow programmers at Microsoft that ‘nerds get what they want when they want

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it, and they go psycho if it’s not immediately available’ (2). The instant gratification promised by consumerism, bolstered by the ‘apolitical individualism’ of Coupland’s young IT professionals, finally amounts to an ironic failure of differentiation that, as in Ellis, threatens the sovereign self. 20 Dan’s girlfriend Karla complains that ‘Everybody looks the same nowadays’, and concludes that ‘Identity is so tenuous – based on so little’ (32), while even the ‘slacker’ characters of Generation X bemoan the fact that ‘where you’re from feels sort of irrelevant these days [ ... because] everyone has the same stores in their mini-malls’ (5). Andy, Dag and Claire – the three principal characters in Generation X – are also aware that the crisis of individuation is not restricted to material self-assertion and self-indulgence. The novel spends some time satirising what it terms ‘Me-ism’, defined in one of the novel’s many self-consciously snappy footnotes as, ‘a search by an individual, in the absence of any training in traditional religious tenets, to formulate a personally tailored religion by himself. Most frequently a mishmash of reincarnation, personal dialogue with a nebulously defined god figure, naturalism, and karmic eye-for-eye attitudes.’ (145) The search for individual rather than collective remedies in Coupland’s novels follows a path that runs parallel to the self-destructive route followed by Ellis’s characters, as is evident in the tale told by Clare of a wealthy heiress who decides to undergo an oriental regime of strict diet and meditation for seven years in an attempt to obtain spiritual enlightenment. It transpires that the goal of the heiress is not to dissolve her consciousness in some higher state of being, but rather to derive some form of metaphysical profit from her cost-accounted striving: ‘it was said that the truth to be found at the end of [her] ordeal was so invariably wonderful that the suffering and denial was small change compared to the Higher contact achieved at the end’ (143 – emphasis in original). At the end of Clare’s story, the heiress dies as a result of an over-literal interpretation of a religious text: a conclusion that serves as an indictment of the destructive nature of unrestrained and isolated individualism. Coupland’s characters have moved beyond the desire of those of Ellis to immerse themselves in horror and degradation as a (doomed) means by which to cope with the void in their lives. Because the former imply that it is companies such as Microsoft who are responsible for the dissatisfaction of their sanitized lives – from which age, disease and death have been submitted to a process of cultural editing that removes all over which such companies have no control, and which thus poses an implicit threat to their compliant and contented

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markets – they seem to be moving towards some form of political critique that is enhanced by an awareness of the collective and of the limits of individualism. Coupland’s characters, however, finally back away from explicit political analysis. Instead, as in so many contemporary novels by white male left-liberal writers, the remedy for despair is sought in the collective ties offered by friendship and family. The characters of Generation X claim to have turned down ‘yuppie’ careers in order to embrace quieter, peripheral lives that, in terms of quiescence and dependence on the dominant order, are comparable to the lives of the ‘marginals’ in The War Against Chaos, but whereas the emphasis in Mason’s novel is on communities that are inclusive in nature, the communal networks described by Coupland are exclusive, based mainly on the comradeship of hip, middle-class youth. Whereas novelists such as McEwan, Amis and Franzen all explore the possibility that family ties may be a source of personal and political redemption, Coupland instead focuses on the potential offered by friendship. For his characters, it seems that friendship is community, with little or no consideration given to the possibility that community might be a function of locality or common interest. Instead, Coupland’s communitarianism seems generated by an implicitly exclusive network of acquaintance rather than by a system based upon the notion of ‘the kindness of strangers’ that implies mutual obligation by dint of common humanity. (Mason’s ‘marginals’ and Diggers are not necessarily friends, but this does not prevent them from forming coherent and supportive communities.) The substitution of friendship for community is one of the most politically revealing aspects of Coupland’s fiction. Indicating the white, middle-class composition of the Microserfs cohort, Nick Heffernan asks, ‘under contemporary conditions, in what respects can such a bunch of people be said to constitute a community?’ (75) and observes that, although the work ethic evident among the novel’s characters would be familiar to an American Puritan such as Cotton Mather, the latter would be bewildered by the absence of any commitment to the life of the community. In both Generation X and Microserfs, all references to streets, small shops, neighbourhoods and public institutions have been eradicated in favour of references to freeways, malls, and corporate offices. This, clearly, is not the America of Mather, in which the wealth that was the outcome of submission to the work ethic necessarily involved a subsequent submission to a corresponding (if subordinate) ethic of social obligation, but an America in which any notion of noblesse oblige has been abandoned in

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favour of the ruthless advocacy of private gain. The seemingly perverse melding of Weber’s Protestant work ethic with countercultural libidinal indulgence has produced a postmodern hybrid that traduces both the social connectivity of the former and the promised liberation of the latter. With this in mind, Eagleton suggests that contemporary capitalism ‘needs a human being who has never yet existed – one who is prudently restrained in the office and wildly anarchic in the shopping mall’, 21 yet it seems that, if Coupland’s ‘Microserfs’, DeLillo’s Jack Gladney and Franzen’s Lambert offspring are accurate pointers, then the brave new world of post-Reaganite America already has such people in it. Alan Bilton berates Coupland for advocating a ‘fortune-cookie philosophy’ (221) of friendship and playful irony as a substitution for a more forceful critique of post-Reaganite America. This is perhaps too harsh: Coupland’s protagonists are, after all, merely small groups of young wage-slaves who find themselves set against the full force of contemporary American capitalism (although this, of course, does not quite apply to Coupland himself). As helpless as any other group of dissenting or dissatisfied characters in contemporary fiction, their adoption of friendship as a redoubt against the excesses of their own culture is, at the very least, less destructive than some of the strategies pursued by the characters of, say, Ellis, Amis, or Irvine Welsh. Friendship provides a source of satisfaction and personal identity rarely to be found in the contemporary social novel: at one point in Microserfs, Dan says that, ‘All I care about is that we’re all still together as friends, that we’re not enemies, and that we can continue to do cool stuff together. I thought the money would mean something, but it doesn’t. It’s there but it’s not emotional’ (358). Although friendship (at least when shorn of any unsettling commitment to the wider community) is readily absorbed into such moments of epiphany, the family is a less digestible entity. In Generation X, Andy’s friend Dag maintains an hostility towards his own parents that is reminiscent of characters in Less Than Zero: Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they’ll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective. Sometimes I’d just like to mace them. I want to tell them that I envy their upbringings that were so clean, so free of futurelessness. And I want to throttle them for handing over the world to us like so much skid-marked underwear. (98)

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The resentment towards the parental generation for what is perceived by the younger generation as a legacy of decline and failure, persists. Andy complains that his parents’ home is ‘like a museum of fifteen years ago’ (96) and reveals that he has ‘no memory of having once been hugged by a parental unit’ (155). Despite this lack of intimacy and empathy (and the fact that he mocks his parents’ belongings while condemning consumerism), Andy strives to establish within his family a similar degree of intimacy to that he experiences with his friends. On Christmas Day, he sets up hundreds of candles in the front room of his parents’ house in an attempt to transform an otherwise humdrum public holiday into a poetic, ‘meaningful’ event and, although his effort is appreciated, there remains at the end of this episode a feeling that his yearning lacks an appropriate corollary: indeed, Andy confesses that, ‘our emotions, while wonderful, are transpiring in a vacuum, and I think it boils down to the fact that we’re middle class’ (171). Coupland’s characters can neither reject nor fully embrace the parental generation: to reject one’s parents utterly is to accept individual isolation and to deny oneself a potential source of redemption and epiphany akin to that offered by friendship, but to accept their values is to trade political dissent for the comforts and privileges offered to the professional and managerial classes by the capitalist class. Andy is fated to remain dissatisfied because to reject consistently the values and aspirations of the class to which he and his parents belong would be to sever himself from the very kind of social and familial connection he craves. At the end of Generation X, Andy and his friends effectively sidestep this dilemma by moving to Mexico, but Microserfs ends with a concerted attempt at reconciliation between friendship, family and the technology of Gates-era capitalism in a way that hints (albeit vaguely) at spirituality and depth. Unsurprisingly, Heffernan is unconvinced by the ending to the latter novel, pointing out that the way in which Michael amends his software in order to help Dan’s mother represents not a challenge to the free market but, in terms of the dependence of the group on Michael’s talents as an inventor and entrepreneur, a conformation of that market. The failure of the characters to break with the values of the economic system they criticize when they are unambiguously aware of its faults – Dan knows that the reason why Microsoft products are so popular in the business world is that they enable companies ‘to downsize millions of employees’ (9) – indicates that what is really on offer in Coupland’s novels is what

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Heffernan terms a ‘therapeutic individualism’ (80) that offers only enough succour to stricken individuals to enable them to return to the world of productive labour. The perfect example of this would be the way in which Dan’s father reacts to his unemployment ‘as an index of personal failure rather than as a consequence of the impersonal and systemic reformulation of productive forces and class relations’ (100). Ryan Moore points out that, whereas other social groups have found within the postmodern condition a means of unearthing previously suppressed sources of identity and an impetus towards protest and self-expression, the opposite has been the case for white middle-class men who, like Dan and his father, prefer models of personal recovery and redemption to protest and resistance simply because the latter would undermine a position that retains some degree of assumed (but tacit) agency and superiority. If the ending of Microserfs represents a rearguard defence of the social and economic order, Moore argues that the ending of Generation X represents a deferral of commitment and responsibility and an unwillingness to invest in anything beyond a ‘ “seen-it-all” cynicism’ that leaves the dominant order no less intact. 22 Although both novels articulate a sympathetic yearning for social ties that indicates an admirable alternative to self-destruction and despair, their willingness to abandon resistance and to accommodate the very type of economic system they criticize only reinforces the ‘end of history’ feeling that is arguably the most profound legacy of the Reagan years and which is summed up by Dan towards the end of Microserfs: ‘Karla, like myself is of the new apolitical pick-and-choose style of citizen. I think politics is soon going to resemble a J. Crew catalogue more than some 1776 ideal’ (260). In novels such as those by Ellis, Coupland and Pynchon, the theme of inter-generational conflict is addressed in terms of the influence of the 1960s counterculture – and the conservative backlash against it – upon the yuppies, slackers and nerds of the 1980s and 1990s. In Jonathan’s Franzen’s The Corrections, a straightforward 60s–80s contrast does not apply: the parental generation is represented by the elderly Alfred and Enid Lambert, while the younger generation is represented by their three offspring Gary, Chip and Denise, all of whom are in early middle-age. In strictly chronological terms, Alfred and Enid may belong to the Kennedy-Johnson period, but their conventional white, middle-class, Midwestern lifestyle and values clearly belong to the prosperous conformity of the Eisenhower years. Similarly, their offspring are on a revealing cusp between the

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1960s counterculture and post-Reaganite ‘yuppiedom’. As a strict disciplinarian who resented those work colleagues who took coffee breaks, Alfred represents not only the Cotton Mather American ideal by which hard work, individual enterprise and self-reliance is restrained by personal self-discipline and a sense of social obligation, but also, as head of the Engineering Department at the Midland Pacific railway company, the age of industrial production-based capitalism, tempered by Roosevelt’s New Deal and the subsequent prosperity and comparative social consensus of the postwar period. Now retired and suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, Alfred’s life is shown to have followed the same trajectory of decline as the railway which, as in other contemporary novels (The Child in Time, Morvern Callar and Jayne Anne Phillips’s Machine Dreams [1984], for example) is associated with notions of public service rather than private profit and self-interest. The novel reveals that Midland Pacific was taken over and then ruthlessly asset-stripped during the 1980s by the Wroth brothers, a pair of venture capitalists who embody the unfettered Reaganite capitalism that offends Alfred’s civic-minded values. Just as those novels that contrast the 1960s with the 1980s (Pynchons’s Vineland in particular) draw politically uncomfortable parallels between the radical counterculture and the New Right backlash, so Franzen suggests that the values of the Wroths and those of Alfred are not so very far apart and that Alfred (and therefore ‘old’ capitalism) held within himself the seeds of his own destruction. It transpires that, during his frequent trips working away from home for Midland Pacific, the puritanically-minded Alfred was tormented by lascivious visions that he could only suppress by working still harder. His libidinal impulses, in other words, were sacrificed to the demands of the Protestant-capitalist work ethic. In old age, suffering from the hallucinations that accompany his dementia, he is similarly tormented by a gigantic talking turd that, like the voluptuous torturers of his younger days, represents not only his own suppressed libidinal impulses but also the spirit of contemporary society in which economic and personal freedom are yoked together without restraint. In keeping with the philosophy of the Wroth brothers (as well as that of the aptly-named Rip in Ellis’s Less Than Zero), the turd proclaims, ‘I am opposed to all strictures. If you feel it, let it rip. If you want it, go for it. Dude’s gotta put his own interests first’ (285). The turd indicates the (literal) corruption of the Protestant work ethic, as do the Wroths, who are described by one of Alfred’s colleagues as embodying ‘a Baptist morality gone sour’ (70). This does not signify the

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outright rejection of Alfred’s work ethic, but rather its defiled obverse. As the episodes that recount his strict domestic regime reveal, there seems to be as much Baptist sourness in Alfred as there is the Wroths, and it is this apparent imbalance in favour of external obligation – towards received patterns of behaviour, towards institutions and traditions, but most of all towards his employer – at the expense of personal and familial intimacy and joy that drives the Lambert children each to adopt in different ways notions of personal liberation and self-gratification as antidotes to the self-imposed misery they see in their parents, and in Alfred in particular. (The Wroths may also present the young Lamberts with a warning of what can happen when the reaction against their parents’ values is pursued unthinkingly, and all sense of personal restraint and obligation is abandoned: one becomes no more than the equivalent of Alfred’s own id.) The title of the novel, then, not only signifies the ‘corrections’ of the penal system, medicine and economics, to which regular references are made, but also the ways in which the young Lamberts attempt to adjust their own lives in order to avoid the mistakes of Alfred and Enid. Although, as the vice-president of a Midwestern bank who lives in an affluent suburb of Philadelphia with his wife and three sons, Gary Lambert seems to have inherited the values of his parents, the narrator of the novel reveals that Gary’s ‘entire life was set up as a correction of his father’s life’ (181). In an attempt to distance himself from Alfred’s work ethic, Gary has turned down the prospect of more demanding jobs and is reluctant to discipline his children. It becomes evident, however, that his efforts to foster the intimate familial lifestyle denied him by Alfred’s coldness are met by his wife and sons with casual indifference, as they lounge on the couch eating junkfood and watching TV. Disappointed and frustrated, Gary muses that ‘the nature of family life was changing – that togetherness and filiality and fraternity weren’t valued the way they were when he was young’ (166). Increasingly, Gary feels that his ‘corrections’ have taken him too far from his parents’ values and that, for all the drawbacks of their life in the Midwestern town of St. Jude, the latter demonstrated a sense of community that is absent from his own neighbourhood in which ‘every front yard was backed by the full faith and credit of floodlights and retinal scanners, emergency batteries, buried hot lines and remotely securable doors’ (226–227). Along with Gary’s job at the bank, which epitomizes the very kind of non-productive, ‘liquid’ capitalism so detested by Alfred, the depleted nature of the

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public realm is implicated in the outcome of the ‘libertarian turn’ that, as in Gary’s case, promises intimacy and fulfilment, but delivers only isolation and disillusionment. The attempts of two generations of white middle-class men to ‘correct’ the demands of respective phases of capitalist development have failed: Alfred subconsciously yearns to release himself from his demanding work ethic and submission to social obligation, but is unable to do so; while Gary, immersed in an environment in which individualistic self-indulgence must be balanced with the demands of a conformist-consumerist economy, longs for a degree of interpersonal intimacy that both his world and that of Alfred lack. Chip Lambert also lives ‘in a spirit of correction’ (33) after years of ‘listening to his father pontificate on the topics of Men’s Work and Women’s Work and the importance of maintaining the distinction’ (33). If Alfred is the avatar of Midwestern responsibility and restraint, Chip represents something close to the opposite: a neo-Marxist college lecturer who is fired from his job because of an affair with a female student, who drinks and smokes heavily, and who is also deeply in debt. At one point, he is handed a recreational drug in the form of a tablet bearing a logo that resembles that of the Midland Pacific railroad; an incident that indicates the transition in the space of one generation from the heavy production-based industry of Fordist America to the ephemeral consumer-driven America of Nike, Gap and Microsoft. Like Gary, however, Chip is haunted by the feeling that something has gone wrong, and that both his lifestyle and the leftist cultural-critical faculties he tries in vain to impart to his students are no longer relevant. Curiously, Chip remains his father’s favourite, perhaps because he represents the release of the libidinal urges locked up in Alfred. This may not be the only connection between the two men. There is arguably a hint of Cotton Mather in Chip’s academic critique of consumerist culture, as well as in Alfred’s hostility to the Wroth brothers and to Gary’s bank. In contrasting ways, both men assert the primacy of collective interests over those of the free market, but just as it has already been proposed that the ‘Baptism gone sour’ of the Wroth brothers is not so far from the suppressed aspects of Alfred’s character, so it emerges that Chip’s collectivist credentials are compromised by the individualist tendencies of his own ‘corrections’. The way in which Alfred is taunted by the giant turd that reminds him of the Wroth brothers is comparable to Chip’s downfall after his participation in the Internet scam that involves cheating American investors who are hoping to profit from the privatization of all of Lithuania’s civic assets and

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institutions. The scheme ends in disaster, and Chip returns home to St. Jude where, after Alfred’s removal to a care home, he takes his father’s place, carrying out repairs, helping his mother and conducting a durable relationship with Alfred’s neurologist. Although his fate at the end of the novel is uncertain, Chip appears to have survived his own ‘corrections’ by tempering the conflict between his father’s selfimprisonment and his own selfish libidinal drives, and living a life in which the latter are restrained by some degree of responsibility and restraint. More than either of her siblings it is Denise Lambert who has most inherited Alfred’s unremitting work ethic. This has brought her considerable success in her profession as a chef but, like her brothers, she has sought to ‘correct’ the influence of her parents by fleeing to the big city and accepting her bisexuality. (Her gender-neutral choice of profession is almost certainly another ‘correction’ in the light of her father’s pronouncements about men’s work and women’s work.) As is the case with her siblings, Denise’s lifestyle seems to mock that of her parents: in the same way that the Midland Pacific Railway logo has become a decorative motif on a recreational drug, so the transformation of the old, production-age America into an America defined by the service and leisure industries is represented by Denise’s conversion of an obsolete electricity-generating plant into a fashionable restaurant. Again, the individualist-libertarian ‘corrections’ of the younger Lamberts fail to bring satisfaction, and Denise too begins to reconsider the communitarian values of her familial past. Just as Alfred once threw himself into his work with Midland Pacific in order to avoid his sexual demons, so Denise finds that she uses her own exhausting work schedule as a means to offset anxieties about her own ‘liberated’ lifestyle. Denise has no illusions about her parents, or about the banality of their lives and concerns in St. Jude, but begins to hanker after aspects of the upbringing she has attempted to ‘correct’. At a presentation for a new drug that may help Alfred’s symptoms, a sales executive proclaims, ‘Corecktall: It’s the Future!’ to which Denise wistfully retorts, ‘I liked the past’ (206). As an indication of the extent to which she becomes drawn to the values of the parental generation, it is Denise who persuades the reluctant Chip and Gary to grant Enid’s wish for one last family Christmas, and who is obliged to hold a grudging respect for Alfred when she discovers that he knew and kept silent about an affair she once had with one of his work colleagues. Like Chip, Denise realizes that, although she wants to hold on to the personal freedoms that have enabled her to break free from the oppressive excesses of self-denial and self-sacrifice that seem to have

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made their parents’ lives so desperate, she does not want to immerse herself completely in the ultimately unsatisfying and destructive world of self-gratification. In short, none of the younger characters in The Corrections want to throw out either the communitarian baby or the libertarian bathwater: a summary of the novel that is reinforced by the episode involving Denise’s affair with Robin Passafaro, the wife of the wealthy entrepreneur Brian Callahan. Denise is obliged to choose between Callahan, who typifies Reaganite self-interest and enterprise, and Passafaro who, as the representative of a less selfish America, is linked in Denise’s mind to the values of her parents. Although a Philadelphian, Passafaro is in Denise’s eyes a Midwesterner, ‘By which she meant hopeful or enthusiastic or community-spirited’ (404, emphases in original) who admits that her own leftist politics and her communitarian projects in the poorer districts of Philadelphia may be a lost cause but nevertheless remain the only alternative to despair.23 The principle of ‘correction’ embraced by the Lambert children is flawed because their search for a redemptive balance seems to offer no more than the same kind of simplistic ‘therapeutic individualism’ criticized in Coupland’s novels. What Passafaro represents is the unrequited contemporary left-liberal desire for a discourse that is more substantial, but which is marked by a baffled hopelessness that stems from a blocked future (the abandonment of Utopia), a lost past and a present that is compromised by dependence on capitalist prosperity. The Corrections is arguably the ultimate novel of white male leftliberal ambivalence. Throughout, it suggests that a reinvigoration of the social realm is necessary as a counterforce to the ills of contemporary capitalism, yet maintains a wariness with regard to the consequences of social obligation and responsibility for the liberated, (post)modern individual. Similarly, Chip’s fate implies that Franzen is recommending a life of stoic balance – or ‘tragic realism’, as he has described his own mode of writing24 – that seeks an interim position between personal liberation and maintenance of a healthy public realm; yet there is also in the novel a submerged implication that a better life requires more than the series of therapeutic ‘tweaks’ that his characters apply to contemporary individualism. It seems that neither the ‘old’ nor the ‘new’ forms of American capitalism provide the cure for a sick constitution, but what follows from this remains unsaid. The Corrections has been criticized on the grounds that it presents a rigid, deterministic world order in which characters are allowed little or no agency.25 This is attributed in some degree to Franzen’s determination,

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articulated in his notorious Harper’s essay, to eschew the devices of the postmodernist novel in favour of a more traditional, realist approach. Although this has had the effect of invigorating his own muse (and his career), Franzen’s adherence to the character-based conventional novel has limited the means by which ideology might be interrogated. Franzen’s protagonists – in particular, white male left-liberals such as Chip Lambert and Louis Holland in Strong Motion (1992) – feel unable to assert an identity that is not complicit in some ways with all that they criticize, and are thereby left with a sense of suffering and penance which implies that redemption is only available outside the (white male) self and in relation to others. This conclusion represents the passivity that has attracted criticism; yet activity, as Chip notes in his own ill-fated screenplay, seem to boil down to a ‘clash of Therapeutic and Transgressive worldviews’ (27), neither of which bring satisfaction. What is significant, however, is that where both transgression and therapy fail in The Corrections, they fail singly: both entrain ‘corrections’ that do no more than sustain the status quo, and represent a failure to realize the renewed sense of public space and manners that Franzen advocates elsewhere.26 What can be inferred is the unuttered possibility of transgression and therapy on a collective basis that might transform nostalgia, penance and pessimism into negation (in Diggins’s sense of the term), resistance and solidarity. Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland is a novel in three acts: the first and third being set in the ‘scabland garrison state’27 of the Reaganite 1980s, and the second – what David Porush calls the ‘magic middle’ of the novel28 – in the late 1960s, at a time when the influence of the counterculture was at its height. The way in which the narrative of the novel leads backwards from the 1980s to the 1960s and then forwards again seems to fit the way in which, in political terms at least, time seemed to have defied the linear, ameliorist course along which the left has traditionally projected its own progress, and presented the left not with a brighter, more hopeful future, but the pessimism and disillusionment of the Reagan years. Left-liberal writers such as Ian McEwan have suggested that the protean nature of time has useful potential for the left, especially when allied to a feminist philosophical agenda, but it appears that, for the most part, it has been the political right that has derived most benefit from the newer, more fluid conceptions of time, as well as from the abandonment of the Enlightenment view of steadily increasing social progress based upon stable and predictable models of time and history. In this respect, Vineland is an accurate portrayal of an ideologically treacherous inside-out world in which the individualism

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of the New Left feeds into that of the New Right, and in which the communitarian turn adopted by the left as an acknowledgement of the limits of individualistic libertarianism is obliged to confront its own inherent conservatism and acquiescence. The novel suggests that, from its own left-liberal perspective, there is both a ‘good’ (progressive) and ‘bad’ (reactionary) individualism as well as a comparable ‘good’ and ‘bad’ communitarianism, and that, in Pynchon’s own terminology, it is unsettlingly easy to ‘yo-yo’ between them, or to flick between one and the other like the values in the binary switch that is one of Pynchon’s favourite conceits. At the heart of Pynchon’s representation of the 1960s counterculture is The People’s Republic of Rock and Roll (or PR³), an alternative academic collective set up on the Californian coast on the campus of the strait-laced College of the Surf. Although the narrator notes that ‘research – somebody’s, into something – was going on 24 hours a day’ (209), PR³ is said to be principally ‘a lively beachhead of drugs, sex and rock and roll’ (204). The removal of all libidinal restrictions is a cause for celebration on the campus, but the emphasis of PR³ on hedonistic self-indulgence is also an implicit vindication of the right of the individual to sever any ties with state, religion, family or community. Furthermore, its predominantly youthful demographic composition implies that the counterculture is fundamentally an exclusive movement, isolated from historical and social connection. The ultra-rightwing federal agent Brock Vond foresees in this severance of the individual from all such ties a crisis of identity that will lead the members of the counterculture to identify a need for a reassuring collective context (in this respect, Pynchon’s 1960s youth resembles Coupland’s young characters in the 1990s). It is at this crucial point of weakness – what Pynchon would almost certainly see as one of many forks in the road presented to American society throughout its history29 – that Vond sees the opportunity to reverse the political direction of 1960s radicalism by steering its adherents into the ‘bad communitarianism’ that the novel suggests was manifest in the passivity and conformity of subsequent generations: Brock Vond’s genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep [ ... ] need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national family. The hunch he was betting on was that these kid rebels, being

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halfway there already, would be easy to turn and cheap to develop [ ... ] They needed some reconditioning. (269) In order to appropriate and control this nascent communitarian turn within the counterculture, the right provide a suitable ‘pseudocommunity’, the basis of which is deemed within Vineland to be the popular media in general, and television in particular.30 TV acts as a placebo for collectivist impulses, allowing the artefacts of social interaction to be substituted by those of the junk culture that floods the pages of Pynchon’s novel. In Vineland, the notion of a community whose foundation is no more than the passive reception of a commercialized media is signified by the Thanatoids – groups of living dead whose addiction to their own manipulated appetites has left them hopelessly apathetic and acquiescent, and who are said by one critic to represent the contemporary American public.31 The story of the downfall of the radical film-making group 24fps is further evidence of the way in which the right (with significant assistance from the counterculture itself) appropriated the means of representation for its own ends; but there are episodes in Vineland that suggest it is possible to resist that appropriation. When Prairie Gates is being protected from Vond by DL Chastain, a former member of 24fps, she is encouraged by DL not to accept the received history of her mother Frenesi’s fall from grace, but rather to reconstruct Frenesi from her own fading memories, from stories related to her by DL, and from fragments of old film. In place of the passive acceptance of pre-determined images, DL’s scheme represents an active, historical and collective process of resistance: a project of ‘counter-mediatization’32 that involves the re-casting of simulacra and received images in ways that subvert their ideological content in order ‘to demonstrate the world’s textuality [ ... ] to demonstrate that it can be rewritten, remediated, remediatized’.33 Such a project is emblematic of Pynchon’s attempt to reconcile the anti-realist, experimental aspect of his fiction with the ‘non-ludic’ desire to maintain a politically sensitive engagement with the human community and the natural world: a reconciliation that is manifest in the conclusion of the novel, in which Vond is defeated and the extended Becker-Traverse family is reunited in the (as yet) unspoilt northern Californian forests. Such an ending is said to represent ‘a certain paradigm shift within the postmodern discourse, with emphasis shifting from negatively valorized dreams of essentialized identity to more positive dreams of social transformation through communitarian and ecological effort’.34 Pynchon certainly avoids both the self-destructive nihilism of ‘blank fiction’,

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and the New Age ‘Me-ism’ that haunts Coupland’s novels, yet there still persists the awkward fact that Vond’s doom at the end of Vineland is brought about not because of a communitarian love-in, but because of Reaganite cutbacks. Perhaps this is a realistic admission on the part of Pynchon concerning the location of real power – and the power of real economics – yet the fact that such a pessimistic conclusion remains offset by the positive atmosphere engendered by the Becker-Traverse reunion is at least an encouraging indication of the persistence of a tradition of resistance built upon lives and histories that exist (or have existed) in explicit opposition to the media-saturated self-absorption of contemporary society, and the powers that dominate such a society.35 The American sovereign self, exposed to the adversities of New Right self-reliance, robbed of a supportive social context, and alienated by consumerism, is liable to plunge itself into desperate transgression and self-destruction. Alternatively, it may seek to subsume its threatened or damaged sense of identity within structures of reassurance other than the ‘pseudo-communities’ of the mainstream media. Reflecting on the American obsession with ‘how to’ manuals, counsellors and gurus, the narrator of Amis’s The Information (1995) asks, ‘Who could explain the fact that “My Way” was the anthem of modern America? Americans didn’t want to do it their way. They wanted to do it your way’ (313 – emphasis in original). What seems to be a search for dependence is at odds with the Reaganite emphasis on self-reliance, and perhaps explains the persistence in American society of the phenomenon of the cult movement. When so many seek therapy from the ills of the dominant culture, it is perhaps unsurprising that secession from that culture should prove an attractive alternative. The acceptance of a comforting, ready-made network of codes and rituals – whether those of a cult or some other form of system, method, regime or programme – may restore a sense of purpose and an enabling social framework to an individual threatened by the possibility of guilt and failure within a culture centred around competition and success. Katherine Dunn and Don DeLillo are only two of the many contemporary American novelists who have used the phenomenon of cult membership in order to explore the tension between the importance accorded to individualism within American society and the concomitant fears about where untrammelled individualism might lead.36 Dunn’s Geek Love is the story of the travelling freakshow run by Al Binewski and his partner, Lil. By experimenting with drugs and radiation treatments, the pair breed a family of mutants who make the show a phenomenal success. One of the children, Olympia, a bald,

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hump-backed female dwarf, is the narrator of the novel, but its central character is Arturo (or Arty), a limbless but charismatic manipulator of crowds who founds a cult whose followers are so devoted to the worship of Arty that they practise progressive amputation in an attempt to resemble him.37 The novel is a study of how an assertive individual can attain power over groups of people who subsume their identities not within a communal body but within the projected image of a leader, and demonstrates how democracy as well as personal identity can be surrendered in a way that is disturbingly easy given the importance placed upon the enfranchised individual within American culture generally, and by the US Constitution in particular. Arty is the satirical representation of what is no less than an American tradition of charismatic leaders, from Brigham Young through Billy Graham to cult leaders such as Jim Jones of the People’s Temple, Marshall Herff Applewhite of the Heaven’s Gate sect and David Koresh of the Branch Davidians. Fear of freedom, it seems, is accompanied by the temptation to surrender it. Geek Love can also be read as a parable of the limits of individualism, and the way in which the latter is both the basis of the American Dream and the source of its corruption. At the beginning of the novel, the patriarch Al is shown to embody ‘a standard issue Yankee, set on selfdetermination and independence’.38 Full of pioneering spirit, Al is resourceful, adept in a number of fields, and scornful of established interests and institutions. Although these characteristics are portrayed positively, they are contrasted with Al’s willingness to dabble in extortion, dose his wife with potentially lethal substances and make ‘freaks’ of his own children, all for financial gain. Without social censure or obligation – and the Binewski ‘Fabulon’ remains fiercely independent from mainstream society – the unrestricted freedom to act according to one’s own values and priorities (which more often than not are financial in nature) appears to default to an authoritarian white patriarchy, the values of which are unquestioningly imposed upon others. The attainment of freedom is matched by the assertion of power, and it is this assertion of power over others that Dunn deems corrupting and which is symbolized in the novel by the gradual transformation of Al’s informal and benevolent infirmary into the amputation surgery presided over by the sinister Dr Phyllis Gleaner. In keeping with his father’s Yankee spirit, Arty begins his rise to prominence by refusing dependency and the fate that seems to await him: ‘You know what they do with people like me? Brick walls, six-bed wards, two diapers a day and a visit from a mothball Santa at Christmas!’

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(116). Instead, Arty asserts his own identity by making his own unique physical form the main attraction of the Fabulon and combining his stunts with the dispensation of advice to members of his audience. By shrewdly targeting those who feel alienated by the demands imposed by mainstream society, Arty bases his appeal upon the ‘rejection of consumerism [and] the possibility of shedding the quest for normality’.39 Arty asks his audience, ‘Can you be happy with the clothes and the ads and the clothes in the stores and the doctors and the eyes as you walk down the street all telling you there is something wrong with you? No. You can’t. You cannot be happy. Because, you poor darling baby, you believe them.’ (200 – emphases in original.) Arty’s admirers do not seek liberty, but submission. Arty cultivates the persona of a cult leader such as Koresh or Applewhite, inviting his followers (the ‘Admitted’) to participate in the cult’s trademark amputation rituals, and to hand over their wealth to him. Rachel Adams argues that, far from endorsing a rejection of the values of mainstream society, Arty offers his followers ‘fetishized models’ of a ‘bodily ideal’ that is merely an inversion of the way in which the cosmetic, diet and fitness industries build their own power-base around their own ‘cult’ of the perfect body.40 By asserting the supremacy of ‘freaks’ over ‘norms’, Arty implicitly accepts the dichotomy between the two and is therefore reproducing the codes of the mainstream society that he criticizes, not least in the way in which the assertion of his own individuality involves the loss of the personal identity and freedom of others. Dunn’s satirical portrayal of ‘Arturism’ embodies the way in which cults tend not to attempt to engage with the society from which they emerge, but instead face away from that society in an attempt to give to its members ‘a source of meaning, morality and community that the culture and government cannot provide’.41 Similarly, Thomas Robbins’s study of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church claims that membership of a cult movement can provide an affirmative social or familial network in a society where such networks appear to have dissolved into anomie.42 The idea that cult membership brings sanctuary from the world’s ills is, however, a dupe. Robbins reports that movements headed by charismatic leaders are liable to become locked into ‘a very erratic trajectory culminating [ ... ] in sensational violence’ (117) and this claim seems borne out not only by the fate of the People’s Temple in Guyana in 1978, the Branch Davidians at Waco in 1993 and Heaven’s Gate at San Diego in 1997, but also by the destruction of the Fabulon in a conflagration created by the telekinetic powers of Arty’s younger brother Chick.43 The displays of violence that Robbins finds to

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be an integral part of groups led by charismatic leaders are comparable to the violence displayed in contemporary ‘blank fictions’ (Ellis being the prime example), and from this correspondence it may be inferred that, if cults mirror the society from which they have broken away, then the violent dissolution of the endangered self will be an inevitable feature of a society founded upon individualistic assertion.44 Geek Love draws other parallels between the workings of a cult and those of mainstream society. Arty derides politicians, yet the basis for his critique – ‘Only a lunatic would want to be president. Those lunatics are created deliberately by those who wish to be presided over’ (255) – is also the principle upon which he has built the cult of Arturism. Indeed, the descriptions of Arty recorded by the journalist Sanderson recall similar descriptions made of presidents (Kennedy, Carter, Clinton and Reagan, for example) deemed to be especially charismatic in their time: ‘He seems to have no sympathy for anyone but empathy for everyone [ ... ] when he turns his interest on an individual (on me) the object (me) suddenly feels elevated to his level.’ (213–214) The implication here is that, like a cult, American society has become a ‘pseudo-community’ (or even some form of ‘super-cult’) in which liberty, responsibility and identity – even the ability to distinguish truth from fiction – are surrendered to a figurehead such as the President or an entity such as the Constitution, only to be returned as reassuringly false myths. As Arty remarks to Sanderson, ‘The truth is always an insult or a joke. Lies are generally tastier. We love them. The nature of lies is to please. Truth has no concern for anyone’s comfort’ (251). Arty replicates the evolution of American society by exploiting the rhetoric of freedom and individual happiness in order to create essentialized beings who, being reduced to the status of objects, are defined by their use-value: a process that is symbolized in the novel by invasive surgery. Rhetoric and abstraction are absent from Al Binewski’s pharmacy but, when coupled with the power to assert oneself over others, are at the heart of the partnership between Arty and Dr. Phyllis, for whom ‘lobotomy is the shortcut’ (305) to the acquiescent Arturan goal of ‘Peace, Isolation and Purity’. If one is to view America as a representation of the bourgeois aspirations of the West in their purest ideological form, then the point made by Eagleton is compelling: ‘the West has long believed in moulding nature to its own desires; it is just that it used to be known as the pioneer spirit and is nowadays known as postmodernism’.45 In this light, Geek Love’s description of the transition from Al to Arty represents the passage of American ideology from settler isolationism (tempered by the material necessity of some degree of

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social co-operation) to the postmodern Reaganite dreamworld, and what Jameson describes as its ‘underside [ ... ] of blood, torture, death and terror’.46 The idea that American individualism has collapsed into a cult-like desire to be absorbed into a non-identity predicated upon violence has been alluded to by Jean Baudrillard, who comments that, it is as though America as a whole had espoused this sect-like destiny: the immediate concretization of all perspectives of salvation [ ... ] the whole of America is preoccupied with the sect as a moral institution, with its moral demand for beatification, its material efficacity, its compulsion for justification, and doubtless also with its madness and frenzy.47 After the climax of the ‘madness and frenzy’ in which the Fabulon is destroyed, the second half of the novel reprises the use of surgery as a means to signify the manipulative power of the unrestrained individual, except that it is now a female character who is the destructive, authoritarian figure. Just as the character of Dr Phyllis in the first part of Geek Love demonstrates that gender is not the sole determinant of relationships of power (although it plays a very significant part), the second part of the novel is an investigation of what can be said to constitute such relationships, and how the destructive nature of such relationships might be overcome. Years after the deaths of most of her family in the fire that destroyed the Fabulon, Olympia is shown to be living an austere, reclusive life in which she covertly supervises her daughter Miranda. Miranda falls under the influence of Mary Lick, an eccentric heiress who persuades young, attractive women to undergo mutilating surgery, her avowed purpose being ‘to liberate women who are liable to be exploited by male hungers’ (182). Aware that Lick’s manipulation of others in the name of liberty resembles the behaviour of Arty, Olympia murders the heiress. As she hears Lick’s dying breaths, however, Olympia realises that, through the act of murder, she is guilty of exercising the ultimate form of manipulative power, and so kills herself as well as Lick, liberating Miranda from the influence of both women. Geek Love is a novel that, in keeping with America’s Protestant traditions, affirms the importance of individual autonomy while acknowledging the dangers of allowing the liberty of one individual to overpower that of others. It recognizes that the individualistic impulse to master nature is not in itself valuable without a reciprocity that limits both the desire to master nature, and the tendency to master the autonomy of

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others: a tendency that the novel implies is not restricted to gender, but which may arise in any unequal social or economic relationship. The novel proposes that the search for a balance between the rights of the sovereign self and the circumscription of those rights in the interests of the collective is necessarily contingent, self-questioning and incessant, and that this is what distinguishes the ‘true’ community from the ‘pseudo-communities’ of the Fabulon, the cult or, indeed, contemporary American society. Don DeLillo is another American novelist to have addressed the way in which cult membership fulfils a need for communal participation that the increasingly aggressive imperatives of global capitalism have denied to all manner of social groups and individuals. Like Geek Love (1989), DeLillo’s novels The Names (1992) and Mao II (1992) propose that, by virtue of their pursuit of purity and fixed (usually abstracted) goals, cults and sects not only replicate the faults of mainstream society but exacerbate those destructive tendencies that in mainstream society are usually tempered by the plurality and diversity of the latter. Set in ‘the world of corporate transients’,48 The Names is narrated by James Axton, a risk analyst who travels throughout the Middle East at the behest of various American agencies and corporations seeking increased influence and market expansion. Axton’s wanderings are contrasted with the life of his estranged wife Kathryn, an architect who has undertaken a long-term project in a Greek village. According to Nick Heffernan, Kathryn is satisfying her professed need to connect with place, history and tradition, but the intimacy of the village unsettles Axton in a way that suggests he is unable to relate to the manifestation of any values that might constitute a challenge or an alternative to those of the private individual or corporation (this might also explain his eccentric refusal to visit the Acropolis, even though he lives in Athens). Axton, along with fellow globetrotters such as the filmmaker Volterra and the archaeologist Owen Brademas, becomes fascinated by reports of a small, secretive cult that is dedicated to committing ritualistic acts of murder with rudimentary weapons in obscure places. All three men see in the cult a quest for an atavistic authenticity that offers the potential to redeem their own perplexing, deracinated lives. Although Kathryn’s project might also offer such a remedy, it becomes evident that Axton and his accomplices are seeking a form of salvation that will vindicate rather than disrupt their rootless, self-absorbed existence. Whereas Kathryn aspires to a communal life that that is inclusive, outward-facing and life-affirming, Axton is attracted to a cult that faces (exclusively) away from society and is determinedly set upon Robbins’s

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trajectory of ‘sensational violence’. When Brademas finally encounters the cult in a remote Indian village, he finds one member fasting herself to death, and another expounding a form of nihilistic mysticism that Brademas attempts to summarize: ‘They may have felt they were moving towards a static perfection of some kind. Cults tend to be closed-in, of course. Inwardness is very much the point. One mind, one madness. To be part of some unified vision. Clustered, dense. Safe from chaos and life’ (116). As in Geek Love, cult membership is deemed to offer a transcendence of postmodern instability and dissatisfaction, but its hermeticism results in the formation of a ‘pseudo-community’ that not only tends towards destruction and death, but also appears to replicate the very conditions that the cult members are attempting to transcend. Heffernan points out that the incessant wanderings of the cult around the Middle East in search of a dubious authenticity simply ‘leads in the direction of capital itself’ (191) as it replicates the wanderings of Axton and his peers. The cult, then, does not offer to the peripheries of the non-capitalist world a means of resistance to, or redemption from, deterritorialized capitalism, but rather a literal and symbolic representation of the way in which capital continues to penetrate those peripheries, destroying communities and erasing identities. Mao II is a more extensive investigation of the cult as a ‘pseudocommunity’ that pretends to resolve the contemporary crisis of identity and the need for collective affirmation, while in fact replicating the dynamics of mainstream society. An interrogation of the distinctions between crowds and communities is established by the novel’s opening scene, in which the Reverend Moon is conducting a mass wedding of members of his own Unification Church in the Yankee Stadium. One of the brides is Karen, who later becomes a personal assistant to the novel’s protagonist, the writer Bill Gray. Karen claims that ‘the point of mass marriage is to show that we have to survive as a community instead of individuals trying to master every complex force [ ... ] We can’t survive by needing more, wanting more, standing out, grabbing all we can’ (89). The narrative questions the nature of the communal life being offered to Moon’s followers, indicating that Moon ‘answers their yearning, unburdens them of free will and independent thought’ (7) until his followers ‘all feel the same [ ... ] immunized against the language of self’ (8). The orientation of the cult towards the singularity of the mass rather than the plurality (and dialogue) of the collective means that the cult members constitute a (malleable) crowd rather than a (dynamic) community. For Jeremy Green, the emphasis of the Moonies on the

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dissolution of identity and the abdication of personal agency offers no true collective alternative to the mainstream American polity because ‘the genuinely collective does not imply a refusal of identity, but a way of mediating between differences, sharing what is common while respecting the distinctiveness of what is not’.49 Throughout the novel, DeLillo draws parallels between the Moonies and mainstream American society.50 When Karen is removed from the Unification Church and ‘deprogrammed’ by specialist squads hired by her parents, she finds that controlling socialization is a feature of both worlds, and comments that ‘they bring us up to believe but when we show them true belief they call out psychiatrists and police’ (8). Karen’s susceptibility to the techniques of persuasion used by both the Moonies and by the deprogramming squads is seen to be the outcome of the assault upon the individual within consumer society of the gamut of comparable techniques employed by the commercial media. Behind the latter, of course, lies the profit motive; but this is no less true of the Moonies, for whom the communal motive is apparently no more than a disguise. When Karen is put in charge of a small Moonie fundraising group, her insistence that her charges ‘sell, make the goal, grab the cash’ (14) gives the lie to her earlier claim that the Church offers something other than financial priorities. The second part of the novel explores the work of a different (but comparable) kind of cult-sect: that of the terrorist cell. Gray becomes involved in negotiations with a terrorist group over the release of a hostage and, in conversation with one of the group’s representatives, refutes the idea that the terrorist and the engaged novelist are linked by mutual dissent and by a desire to articulate the plight of the marginalized. For Gray, his role as novelist is essentially communal in that his articulation of marginalized voices is an inherently open, self- doubting and anti-foundationalist project with a humanist imperative, whereas the terrorist project is closed, confident and absolutist to the degree that human life can be sacrificed to attain ‘higher’ ends. Gary Wills has asserted that, ‘the terrorist is the true individualist of our time, the lone defier (and defeater) of the common will’,51 and this statement seems to concur with the argument that terrorist cells, like cults, offer only ‘pseudo-communities’ in which, as Gray argues, the will of an assertive individual (or a cabal of same) can initiate escalating levels of destruction and death that lead beyond the secretive cult and the terrorist cell to the atrocities committed deep inside closed societies. Gray’s views echo those of Stan Lindsay, who has used Kenneth Burke’s term ‘psychotic entelechy’ to describe the ways in which the tendency

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of a cult towards escalating levels of authoritarianism and violence is pre-determined by the closed system of belief of its leader, as well as by the need of its members to submit to that system. Lindsay contends that certain psychotic individuals obsessively predicate their beliefs upon concepts of perfection and pre-destination, employing ‘selective perception, selective organization and selective interpretation’ in order to justify those beliefs.52 Distractions from the one-dimensional visions of the leader, such as debate, dissent, or even the sex drive, are ruthlessly suppressed: noting that members of the Heaven’s Gate cult consented to castration before succumbing to Hepplewhite’s demand for mass suicide,53 Lindsay comments that, ‘in an effort to bring to perfection the implications of religious purity, the Heaven’s Gate cult engaged in very hazardous or damaging actions’ (272), and claims that a similar destructive tendency was at work in Waco, where the behaviour of Koresh was not irrational but rather ‘super-rational. He (carried) his meaning to the extreme’ (279). In Mao II, Gray suggests that all closed systems share this tendency to carry ‘meaning to the extreme’. Just as cults tend towards a violent conclusion, then terrorist groups, usually founded upon adherence to a closed religious or political doctrine, justify violence from the outset in the pursuit of the perfection of their cause. Mao II, however, is a novel that shows that it is the left-liberal outlook of Gray, rather than those of the cult or the terrorist group, that is most under threat.54 Gray dies from injuries sustained in a road accident, his death representing the marginalization of the intellectual conscience not only by the contemporary capitalist state, but also by the embryonic tyrannies of terrorist organisations. All that can be salvaged from the more optimistic (or the least pessimistic) strands within the novels examined in this study is that a politics based upon Gray’s ‘ambiguities, contradictions, whispers, hints’ (159) – that is, upon openness, negotiation and mutuality rather than on dogma, silence and the assertion of dominant interest – is still both feasible and necessary and whose articulation it is the task of the social novel to provide.

Conclusion

The day comes when the truly subversive literature is in some measure conservative.1 This study began by arguing that both Reaganism and Thatcherism represented a determinedly ideological assault upon public and progressive institutions under the guise of an avowedly pragmatic attempt to restore general economic prosperity, stability and confidence. By eschewing a rigid adherence to New Right social and economic doctrine in favour of strategies that ensured political survival, the Republicans and the Conservatives achieved the crucial long-term goals of shifting that which is perceived as economic and political ‘common sense’ by a decisive proportion of the electorate distinctly to the right, thereby extending the wealth, power and privileges of capitalist elites. Although this engendered understandable pessimism in leftist circles, it also offered some degree of hope: if it is the case that the populism and professed anti-elitism of the Reagan-Thatcher campaigns was a deception, and that voters were at best only dimly aware of the nature and consequences of the project to which they gave their assent, then it is arguable that there may still have existed throughout the 1980s and 1990s aspirations, loyalties and concerns within both the British and American electorate around which a leftist project could have regrouped. The degree to which such optimism remained (and remains) viable is one of the pivotal concerns of the contemporary social novel on both sides of the Atlantic. Although both Reagan and Thatcher participated in the promotion of a cult of personality at the expense of more traditional means of political debate, the distinction between Thatcher’s relish for confrontation and appetite for work, and Reagan’s apparent distaste for either, coincided 168

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with differences in the ways in which their respective programmes were implemented. Lawrence Grossberg contends that the political took precedence over the cultural in Thatcherite Britain, but that the reverse was true of Reaganite America.2 This schema seems borne out by the explicitly political nature of both the rhetoric of Thatcherism, and by its principal targets: by comparison with the damage inflicted on the trades unions and left-wing local authorities, the sorties made against cultural institutions such as the BBC and the universities, although far from insignificant, were limited. Moreover, the popular cultural domain, in the form of television drama, alternative comedy and rock music, was able to strike back at Thatcherism with some degree of impunity; although, with the political bases covered so effectively, manifestations of cultural dissent by an easily-contained liberal left did little harm.3 By contrast, claims Grossberg, it was ‘through cultural rather than political strategies’ (15) that the Reaganite ideological project was implemented in the United States, where the public arena had effectively been depoliticized by a legacy of popular disillusionment over Vietnam and Watergate, and by the imperatives of a sensationalist commercial media. In this context, the right was able to bypass traditional political channels by promoting Reagan’s tendency to address social and political affairs ‘in affective rather than economic or ideological terms’ (256).4 This transatlantic divergence corresponds with the ways in which the British and American novelists featured in this study have addressed what I term the ‘individuation paradox’. In the United Kingdom, the crisis of the white male left-liberal has occurred on a site where, for the most part, the existence of some form of sovereign self is relatively assured. What is mostly at issue in the British novels examined above is the state of collectivities and institutions, and the way in which they affect the well-being – rather than the very existence – of the individual. Within the novels from the United States, however, it is the self that is the site of conflict, the social realm being all but absent. In the American context, the besieged self is threatened either with annihilation or with surrender to a seductive but ultimately equally destructive collective form: that of the cult, the sect or, by implication, the ‘supercult’ of American postmodern life, presided over by the charismatic leadership of a figure such as Reagan. From this, it may be inferred that, within the British novel, the possibility of confident dissent is not so remote as in American fiction. Yet the tone expressed in most of the British novels examined here is largely conciliatory or defeatist. Because Thatcherism disrupted the means by which the left could exploit old

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class-based antagonisms, the liberal left has largely abandoned assertiveness and confrontation in favour of constructing allegiances and fostering discourses of inclusiveness and consensus. What antagonism remains towards the forces of reaction is aimed curiously (but entirely in keeping with the ‘change partners’ scenario proposed here) at the ‘new times’ that are alleged to have eroded those traditions of public-spiritedness and social co-operation that the left appear to have re-discovered. 5 This suggests that the states of the two nations may be converging. Both Money and Morvern Callar are instances of contemporary British novels that indicate both the erosion of the self and the decline of class-based political antagonism, as both are dissolved in a culture of media-driven consumption. The decline of antagonism is signified by the disappearance of the right-wing antagonists that feature in such texts as What a Carve-Up! (1995) and Complicity. Instead, in novels such as Trainspotting and Tim Lott’s Rumours of a Hurricane (2002), the forces of economic imbalance are evidently at work, but their agents are largely absent, and the working-class protagonists are shown to be either complicit with those forces, or are unable to turn their resentment anywhere but inwards. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that one of the legacies of Thatcherism to the British white male left-liberal novelist has been for the latter to surrender his own legacy of class-consciousness and conflict in favour of a project of reconciliation that brings with it the danger of an increasingly depoliticized sense of cultural isolation, fragmentation and despair with which American fiction is all too familiar. In assessing the postmodern condition, many left-liberal writers and critics have attempted either to debunk postmodernist critical theory, or to reinvigorate the latter with an explicitly progressive agenda that refutes any accusation of political quietism or of complicity with the imperatives of the Reagan-Thatcher project.6 Conflating ‘late capitalism’ with the postmodern condition, Fredric Jameson argues that it is necessary for the left not to reject either outright, but rather to acknowledge that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race and the worst […] the urgency of the subject demands that we make at least some effort to think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together.7

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Jameson is typical of many commentators on the left who, acutely aware both of a loss of confidence in leftist circles about the possibility of progress, and of the alleged responsibility of the assertions of much contemporary critical theory for this loss, seeks a reconciliation of past and future, of old and new, of the conservative and the radical, and of the traditional and the libertarian, that is anxious to avoid either a return to conservative forms of cultural representation and social life, or a desperate surrender to the libidinal consolations of the marketplace. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, the left divided itself, very broadly, into three groups: the left-liberal pragmatism typified by the philosophy of Richard Rorty; the neo-Marxism of Jameson, and Hardt and Negri (among others); and the anarchistic perspective of the antiglobalization movements. This study has indicated that most of the novelists whose work is discussed in this study are closest to ‘Rortyan’ thinking in the sense that they tend to eschew commitment to political programmes (such as Marxism) based on what are perceived as fixed socio-philosophical foundations in favour of an instinctive leftliberalism that has as its basis sympathy for human suffering, and which invokes notions of morality and justice that such novelists are frequently reluctant to associate with conventional politics. Although these writers emphasize within their work the contingent fictionality of all cultural expression, their work also indicates a desire to move (albeit with difficulty) beyond such contingency to a domain in which such concepts as truth, nature, morality and justice are in some way more than rhetorical constructions of an unattainable reality. It is this tentative desire for a more robust and assertive discourse that perhaps places these novelists further towards a more radical outlook than they appear to realize. In keeping with the ‘change partners’ scenario described in this study, Terry Eagleton remarks that, traditionally, it had been the political left which thought in universal terms, and the conservative right which preferred to be modestly piecemeal. Now, these roles have been reversed with a vengeance. At the very time when a triumphalist right has been boldly reimagining the shape of the earth, the cultural left has retreated by and large into a dispirited pragmatism.8 As an advocate of Marxism, Eagleton denies that the latter is a narrative that is ‘grand’ in any fixed, teleological sense, asserting that

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its dialectical flexibility is the most adequate means of explaining the nature of capitalist activity and class consciousness in the contemporary period. By constantly relating the local to the global, claims Eagleton, Marxism – like the anarchism espoused by the antiglobalization movements – avoids the dangers of exclusivity and chauvinism to which ‘localist’ pragmatism is alleged to be prone. Eagleton’s attack on both Rortyan pragmatism and radical postmodernist theory continues with a denial of the primacy of language and culture in favour of the primacy of nature, on the basis that the latter is a more potent counter to the exigencies of capitalism: ‘in its ruthlessly instrumental logic [… capitalism] has no time for the idea of nature – for that whose existence consists simply in fulfilling and unfolding itself, purely for its own sake and without thought of a goal’ (119). Because of its need for relentless growth and expansion, capitalism can never be reconciled with the limits – such as death – that nature inevitably sets. A crucial part of Eagleton’s case is his contention that what sets human species-being (that is, humanity’s situation within nature) apart from other natural phenomena is that it is perpetually able to question and reinterpret itself. This selfreflexive aspect of human species-being is prone to succumbing to a sinister Nietzschean aspect through which ‘it is easy to mistake the peculiar kind of nature we have for no nature at all, and come like the champions of transgression to cultivate a Faustian image of ourselves’ (119). What redeems humanity from such a fate, Eagleton claims, is the mutual nature of human species-being whereby ‘others […] are the custodians of my selfhood’ (212). On this basis, ‘if the other’s selffulfilment is the medium through which you flourish yourself, you are not at liberty to be violent, dominative or self-seeking’ (170). Thus, by insisting on the collective aspect of human species-being, Eagleton’s brand of Marxism is said to circumvent the kind of cultural relativism that might seek to justify ‘local traditions’ such as torture or female circumcision. The terms of reciprocity and collectivity that would apply in this kind of society would not be absolute or selfdetermining, but would perpetually be debated in a political and ethical forum. This formulation – which is remarkably close to the socio-political vision invoked at the end of Barnes’s England, England (1998) – is for Eagleton the basis of socialism, but it is not so very far from Rorty’s anti-foundationalist humanism, and may indeed be the location of that site of ‘instinctive’ morality and justice that is held by many of the novelists featured here to lie beyond conventional politics.

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The prescriptions of contemporary pragmatists, neo-Marxists and anarchists all represent the ways in which critics and activists have ‘worked through’ the postmodern condition and the way it has affected the left during and after the Reagan-Thatcher period. The three broad factions described have emerged from a period of defeat, pessimism and enervation with a renewed awareness of the need for defiance, engagement and an (as yet unformulated) popular political programme. If this is the situation with regard to theoreticians and activists, what of the practitioners of the social novel? At a time of conservative ascendancy, the white male left-liberal felt the loss of political influence keenly because, belonging to the dominant group by virtue of race, gender and (for the most part) class, the experience of marginality and alterity was new and traumatic. The fact that this experience coincided with the rise of identity politics and the so-called ‘culture wars’ meant that white male left-liberals were confronted with particularly acute issues of complicity because the grounds of their own identity were under attack in those very circles that had previously provided the basis for political and cultural resistance. It is therefore unsurprising that the fiction examined in this study should be shot through with themes of paralysis and pessimism that question the very possibility of effective resistance, or which at least indicate that such resistance lies beyond the capabilities of both literary practice and academic debate. Consequently, white male left-liberal writers have raked over the embers of seemingly burnt-out revolutionary fires, and have proposed that it is only by moving beyond the individualistic discourses embraced by postwar Western culture that an effective leftist politics can be reinvigorated. Because of an awareness that their compromised ideological position stems in part from their own participation – or that of their antecedents – in the diverse manifestations of postwar individualism, the novelists discussed in this study have indicated that some form of redemption lies in consensus, inclusiveness and collective intervention rather than in assertion, acquisitiveness and self-gratification. Nevertheless, there remain the qualifications – indicated by the work of the two female novelists discussed in this study – that individual liberation is not necessarily a politically exhausted discourse that leads only to the advocacy of unfettered capitalism, and that the communitarian turn is perpetually troubled by the possibility of collapsing back into white patriarchy, either in the form of a general reassertion of conservative values that seeks to rein in the less convenient excesses of libertarian consumerism, or in the form of cults and sects that, by

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withdrawing from the confusing demands placed on personal identity by contemporary mainstream society, seem inevitably to default to a position antecedent to that of an inclusive participatory democracy. Additionally, there is a persistent feeling that the apparent preference for reconciliation over confrontation and assertion may bequeath to the left a legacy of passivity and a lack of direction that is insufficient to the needs of social groups with more pressing social and political needs. Is it the part of the novel to offer any way out of this impasse? As this study has demonstrated, some critics have suggested that a critique of individualism is limited by the demands of a form with an individualistic bias. In order to clarify the ways in which the novel form works against those writers who seek to emphasize the importance of the collective, Lennard Davis contrasts novelistic ‘character’ with nonfictional ‘personality’, suggesting that whereas the former is purposive and limited by authorial capacity, the latter is non-purposive, less limited and more complex. The political implication of this is that the restricted subjectivity of ‘character’ involves a reduced potential for social interaction. Consequently, ‘character’ tends towards social isolation, so that any impetus for change is projected internally rather than externally, towards the individual rather than the collective. Furthermore, claims Davis, novels are detrimental to a progressive politics because they offer a politically quietist form of consolation for the ills of capitalist society, as well as a false sense of the collective engendered by supposed ‘membership’ of a reading community: novelistic characters offer the hope of being the units of complete personality that seem to be missing from life since the early modern period. Consistently, they have to appear in commodified form as products of technological processes since those processes cannot produce complete human beings. And the novel is a form which offers, through the process of displaced object desires, a complete and unalienated relationship to individuals and to a community […] In the simplest terms, the novel promises on a personal level the overcoming of alienation and loneliness.9 Reader participation can thus be understood as a form of surrender that is comparable to the way in which cult or sect membership has a debilitating effect upon the ability of adherents to effect independent thought and action. (Perhaps this explains why certain authors or genres inspire fanatically devoted readerships.) The same can be said of

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the temptation (voiced by Franzen and DeLillo) to ‘surrender’ to the marketplace; and Grossberg argues that most novels do indeed represent ‘the commodification of experience’ (204) by reducing that experience to the stuff of (marketable) plot and character. Yet Davis believes that the novel is redeemable from a leftist perspective because it offers the possibility of a counter-ideological deconstruction of its own processes. The novel, then, is at once a (potentially progressive) repository of deviance, marginality and utopianism that highlights the limits of the current social order, and a safety valve that dissipates harmlessly the pressures placed upon that order. It is thus a suitable embodiment of the ambivalence of the contemporary white male liberal which suggests that neither vessel is quite able to bear the demands of full political engagement. Nevertheless, however strong the temptation to write off either on the basis of their compromised and limited political potential, both continue to address and engage with social and political concerns in ways that continue to expose the ‘faultlines’ of ideological tension and conflict. Despite the premature announcement of the ‘end of history’ at a time when the influence of postmodernist critical theory was at its height, the subsequent refusal of history to comply with that assertion – totemized by the events of 11 September 2001 – suggests that the messy ambivalence of the social novel may be one of those ‘residual’ forms posited by Raymond Williams that (like the image of the abandoned church) continue to act as a beacon and rallying point for those who now find themselves at the margins of contemporary political and popular cultural life. The attraction of this cohort towards strategies of ambivalence and reconciliation denotes not just that fear of radical change noted by Alex Callinicos, but also a more general fear of selection, excision and rejection: of one course of action over another; of one set of social, political and economic arrangements over others; of choices with regard to values and priorities, alliances and enmities. The paralysis of the contemporary white male left-liberal might be summarized as the consequence of a rejection of rejection. This summary may, in turn, be understood as the outcome of a reassessment of the postwar iconoclasm evident in the British ‘Movement’, the Beat Generation and, subsequently, the New Left and the counterculture. It was when the New Right also began to participate in the destruction of the same (or similar) icons that white male left-liberals began to question that destruction as part of a general interrogation of ‘masculine’ truculence, defiance, assertiveness and violence. Such an interrogation, as we have seen, has promoted the need to remodel and restore some of those broken icons,

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particularly those associated with the importance of public space and a sense of reciprocal obligation and responsibility. The countercultural notion that any kind of division between the personal and public was a sign of repressed bourgeois individualism has been eclipsed by a feeling – voiced in a gamut of fictional and non-fictional texts from The Child in Time, London Fields, The Corrections and The Bonfire of the Vanities to Bowling Alone (2000), City of Quartz (1998) and The World We’re In (2002) – that, instead of everything being opened up to political scrutiny in the interest of progressive conflict and transformation, the consequence of ‘letting it all hang out’ has been to privatize the public realm, reducing that scrutiny to a babble of competing, fragmented voices. In this context, it now seems a progressive notion for Zygmunt Bauman to argue that ‘“wearing a public mask” is an act of political engagement and participation rather than one of noncommitment’.10 Similarly, Jonathan Franzen contends that a far more insidious threat to social well-being than the alleged threats to personal privacy from surveillance by government agencies is the encroachment of the private sphere upon the public. Finding evidence for this tendency in everything from the pseudo-intimacy of the service industries and the popularity of confessional TV shows, to the use of mobile telephones in public, Franzen concurs with Bauman that, ‘privacy loses its value unless there’s something it can be defined against’.11 What is positive about this critique is its orientation towards the collective, the communal and a public life that defies the New Right emphasis on the indulgence of the private, whether that of the property rights of global conglomerates, or the rights of individual consumers to drown themselves in unlimited goods, services and resources. What is less positive about this ‘rejection of rejection’ is its persistent individualistic twitch that signifies a suspicion of all collectivist programmes directed by public bodies, and of political declarations deemed to be redolent of (potentially intolerant) foundationalism. This points towards pragmatism (and, more arguably, anarchism), yet even this indication is countered by the suspicion that any value system based upon nothing more solid than contingency and rhetoric will always be subject to dilution, compromise and corrupting opportunism. The dilemma remains: on one side, the return of a potentially fearsome foundationalism; on the other, a state of intense self-analysis, self-doubt and self-blame that, while it may mark the redemption of the white male left-liberal in some form of purgatory sense, also signifies his further marginalization and irrelevance.

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One way out of this dilemma might be to cut the Gordian knot and go beyond both the limits of the social novel and the complications of political debate. The protagonists of novels such as Complicity and What a Carve-Up! advance the possibility that political resistance is best effected not through conventional representative means (both in the textual and in the parliamentary sense), but by direct action propelled by an instinctive sense of justice and morality. For those critical of the perceived legacy of the 1960s counterculture, this seems uncomfortably close to invoking the anti-rationalist spirit of the latter, and appears similarly doomed to repeat the mistake of attempting to ‘transcend’ politics in order to address concerns that are, in fact, inextricably political: as Frederic Jameson has warned, ‘the displacement of political and historical analysis by ethical judgments and considerations is generally the sign of an ideological maneuver and of the intent to mystify’.12 The idea that a political problem might be tackled more effectively in the moral or active domain is suspiciously akin to the Thatcherite process by which an issue is first outlined in moralistic terms (e.g., the allegedly corrupting effects of liberal ‘permissiveness’) before being addressed politically (via assaults on the welfare state) according to a model that actually suppresses debate or consensus. Direct action outside some form of cohesive political and ethical framework is never advocated fully, yet frustrated and paralysed protagonists such as Cameron Colley and Michael Owen project onto the vengeful actions of Andy Gould and Mortimer Winshaw a form of wish-fulfilment that indicates a leftliberal desire for a (figurative) explosion within the realms of politics and culture that opens up those realms for wider participation and debate. It is a narrowing of such participation and debate that has been the most enduring legacy of the Reagan-Thatcher period and, ultimately, it is not through fantasies of instinctive, violent action, but through a reversal of these narrowing processes, led by the deliberate and necessarily self-reflexive interrogation of their own patriarchal legacy, from which follows an emphasis upon the inclusive, the reciprocal and the consensual, that white male left-liberal writers feel most able to combat this legacy. Such an approach, however, brings with it a seemingly irresistible attraction towards ambivalence. Consequently, the contemporary white male left-liberal has attempted to reconcile or transcend a number of parallel, long-standing tensions that have plagued the left: between realism and experimentalism in fiction; between individualist and collectivist social models; and between radical and moderate political strategies. Prompted by feelings of guilt and of complicity into discourses

178 Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel

of reconciliation and co-operation rather than assertion and adversarialism, the outcome of such ambivalence for most of the novelists featured here has not been a sense of transcendence or reconciliation but rather the feeling that all that can be achieved is a negative synthesis in the form of either an ineffective conservatism or a nihilistic despair, either of which – once manifest in suitable form – can be absorbed profitably into the contemporary marketplace. What persists, however, is an implicit faith in a more positive synthesis that rests on the attempts of contemporary novelists to rein in the excesses of the ludic experimentalism of the 1960s and 1970s while moving beyond the limitations of the traditional realist novel. The outcome has been a kind of metafictional realism that is evident in most of the texts examined here. This kind of fiction, while continuing to face objections of formal conservatism and of suspiciously eager participation in the market economy it criticizes, does not so much point at the novel form (in the way of much self-reflexive experimentation) but rather through it to a position where writers and readers are not only made conscious of the fictive nature of the texts that surround them, but are also obliged to face their own social and political responsibilities for the transformation of all texts, discourses and practices. This means that the social novel need not be written off as dead or discredited but that, in the form of metafictional realism, it might offer a means by which the committed novel is able to point at a ‘real’ world that it plays a part in shaping, and which is the stuff of the novel form. Simultaneously, such fiction is also required to indicate a ‘beyond’: a utopian political vision with which the novel has little or no business in itself but which, as an invisible point of orientation, acts as a riposte to the dystopian imprisonment of the novel form inside a pessimistic sensibility of its own limitations and of its nature as a commodity in a capitalistic culture shored up by the events of the Reagan-Thatcher decade.

Notes Introduction 1. Lawrence Kudlow, 15 July 1997. Kudlow is an economist who served in the Reagan administration. The quotation is taken from a speech entitled ‘Reaganomics: What Worked? What Didn’t?’ available at www.ronald reagan.com/experiment.html; accessed on 16 June 2008. 2. Laura Bush, cited in The New York Times, 10 October 2002. 3. Will Hutton, The World We’re In (London: Little Brown, 2002), p.6. 4. ‘Thatcherism’ is a term that has, with little qualification, come to denote the policies and values associated with the administrations of Margaret Thatcher. The American equivalent, however, is more problematic because of the existence of the term ‘Reaganomics’, which is generally employed to refer to Reagan’s economic policies. I have chosen to employ the term ‘Reaganomics’ throughout this book because it is my contention that Reagan’s influence manifested itself at least as potently in the cultural domain as in the economic. 5. Dominic Head, Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), p.2 et seq. 6. See for example Mike Hill, ed., Whiteness: A Critical Reader (New York: New York UP, 1997), Thomas K. Nakayama and Judith N. Martin, eds, Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity (London: Sage, 1999) and Fred Pfeil, White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference (London: Verso, 1995). 7. Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p.45. 8. Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), p.22. 9. See for example Georg Lukàcs, Studies in European Realism (London: Hillway, 1950) and The Historical Novel (London: Merlin, 1962). 10. See Georg Lukàcs, ‘Realism in the Balance’ and Bertolt Brecht, ‘Against Georg Lukàcs’ in Frederic Jameson, ed., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1998), pp.28–59, 68–85. 11. See for example the chapter ‘The Culture Industry’ in Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1997), the chapter ‘The “Piccolo Teatro”: Bertolazzi and Brecht’ in Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Verso, 1990), and Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1978). 12. See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1984) and Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication (New York: Semiotext, 1988) and Selected Writings ed., Mark Poster (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001). 13. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London: Penguin, 2004), chapter 3. 14. Michel Hardt and Kathi Weeks, eds, The Jameson Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p.9. 179

180

Notes

15. Catherine Belsey, ‘Towards Cultural History – in Theory and Practice’ in Kiernan Ryan, ed., New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: A Reader (London: Arnold, 1996), p.87. 16. Alan Sinfield, ‘Cultural Materialism, Othello and the Politics of Plausibility’ in Kiernan Ryan, ed., New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: A Reader (London: Arnold, 1996), p.78. 17. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998), p.116. 18. James Annesley, Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel (London: Pluto Press, 1998). 19. Margaret Thatcher, interview with Woman’s Own magazine, 31 October 1987.

1

Reagan, Thatcher and the 1980s

1. Peter Kerr and David Marsh contend that the breakdown of the consensual project was due to a failure on the part of governments to implement ‘true’ Keynesianism on a broad basis. Instead, they claim, responsible interventionism was imposed in a piecemeal fashion that gave excessive priority to the interests of the private sector (Kerr and Marsh, ‘The Transformation of the State in Postwar Britain, False Dichotomies and Failed Assumptions’, Revisiting and Revising the Consensus Debate, a collection of papers given at the Political Studies Association, Contemporary Political Studies, 1996. Available at http:/ www.psa.ac.uk/journals/pdf/5/1996/kerr.pdf; accessed on 20 June 2008. 2. See Ian Haywood, Working-Class Fiction from Chartism to Trainspotting (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1997). 3. See Philip Cooke, ‘Locality, Economic Restructuring and World Development’ in Cooke, ed., Localities: The Changing Face of Urban Britain (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp.1–44. 4. Ibid., David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003). 5. Herbert Kitschelt, ‘Austrian and Swedish Social-Democrats in Crisis: Part Strategy and Organization in Corporatist Regimes’, Comparative Political Studies, 27 (1), 1994, p.4. 6. See Kitschelt, The Transformation of European Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), chapter 2. 7. Steven Paul Miller, The Seventies Now: Culture As Surveillance (London: Duke UP, 1999), p.43. 8. See Joseph Hogan, ‘Back to the 1970s, the Context of the Reagan Presidency’ in Hogan, ed., The Reagan Years: The Record in Presidential Leadership (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990), pp.3–20, and Theodore H. White, America in Search of Itself: The Making of a President 1956–1980 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983). 9. Michael Foley, ‘Presidential Leadership and the Presidency’ in Hogan, p.29, and Hogan, ‘The Reagan Presidency: an Assessment’ in Hogan, p.303. 10. See Foley ‘Presidential Leadership and the Presidency’ in Hogan and Eric J. Evans, Thatcher and Thatcherism (London: Routledge, 1997). 11. Geoffrey Smith, Reagan and Thatcher (London: The Bodley Head, 1990). 12. Peter Riddell, The Thatcher Decade: How Britain Has Changed during the 1980s. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp.2–3.

Notes 181 13. Gary Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home (London: William Heinemann, 1988) pp.375–377, 386–387. 14. For an account of the Reagan family’s indebtedness to New Deal social programmes, see Wills, Reagan’s America, pp.11, 60–63. 15. Hugo Young, One of Us (London: MacMillan, 1989), p.10. 16. Joel Krieger, Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Decline (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), p.63 17. In Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998), Richard Rorty argues that the left should adopt an equivalent approach, eschewing the kind of theorizing and analysis that matches all thought and action against systems of ultimate value (such as Marxism) in favour of piecemeal, campaign-based reforms the success of which will be their own judgement. 18. Robert Booth Fowler, Allen D. Hertzke and Laura R. Olson, Religion and Politics in America: Faith, Culture and Strategic Choices (Oxford and Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), p.119. 19. Kitschelt, The Transformation of European Social Democracy, p.280. 20. Cited in White, America in Search of Itself, p.304. 21. See Isabel V. Sawhill, ‘Economic Policy’ in John L. Palmer and Sawhill, eds, The Reagan Experiment: An Examination of Economic and Social Policies under the Reagan Administration (Washington DC: The Urban Institute Press, 1982), pp.31–58 and Palmer and Sawhill, ‘Perspectives on the Reagan Experiment’ in the same volume, pp.1–28. 22. See Nigel Ashford, ‘The Conservative Agenda and the Reagan Presidency’ in Hogan, pp.189–213, and Stephen Grubaugh and Scott Sumner, ‘Monetary Policy and the US Trade Deficit’ in the same volume pp.237–258. 23. Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, p.139. 24. Hutton, The World We’re In, p.31, and John Frow, Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p.105. 25. See C.F. Pratten, ‘Mrs Thatcher’s Economic Legacy’ in Kenneth Minogue and Michael Biddiss, eds, Thatcherism: Personality and Politics (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1987), pp.72–94. 26. Riddell, The Thatcher Decade, p.123. See also Pratten, ‘Mrs Thatcher’s Economic Legacy’, p.22 and Evans, Thatcher and Thatcherism, pp.115–121. 27. David Marquand, ‘The Oppositions Under Thatcher, or, The Irresistible Force Meets the Movable Object’ in Minogue and Biddiss, pp.111–126. 28. Fredric Jameson, ‘Culture and Finance Capital’ in Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks, eds, The Jameson Reader (London: Harvard UP, 2000), p.260. 29. Richard H. King, ‘The Eighties’ in Malcolm Bradbury and Howard Temperley, eds, Introduction to American Studies (Third Edition) (Harlow: Longman, 1998), p.304, and Foley, ‘Presidential Leadership and the Presidency’ in Hogan, p.45. 30. Jane Feuer, Seeing Through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism (Durham, SC: Duke UP, 1995), p.2. 31. Miller, The Seventies Now, p.14. 32. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays 1972–1980) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p.166.

182

Notes

33. Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (London: The Athlone Press, 1997), p.291. 34. Terry Eagleton suggests that ‘we could now be witnessing the dawn of a new, post-ethical epoch, in which world powers no longer bother to dress their naked self-interest in speciously altruistic language, but are insolently candid about it instead’. See Eagleton, After Theory, p.148. 35. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999), p.xii. 36. See for example Naomi Klein, No Logo (London: Flamingo, 2001). 37. See Hardt and Negri, Empire (London: Harvard UP, 2000). 38. See for example Cathy Caruth, Introduction to Caruth and Deborah Esch, eds, Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1995). 39. Kevin Newmark, ‘Nietzsche, Deconstruction and the Truth of History’ in Caruth and Esch, p.159. 40. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), p.65. See also the claim by Paul Virilio that, ‘even if I accept the demise of the grand historical and ideological narratives in favour of the small narratives, the narrative of justice is beyond deconstruction’ (John Armitage, ‘From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond: An Interview with Paul Virilio’, Theory Culture and Society 16 (5–6), 1999, p.39). 41. Anna Yeatman, Postmodern Revisionings of the Political (London: Routledge, 1994), p.98. 42. Tim Woods, Beginning Postmodernism (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999), pp.11, 33. 43. Tony Blair, New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country (London: Fourth Estate, 1996), p.244. 44. Examples of this would be the fiction of John Barth, Donald Barthelme and John Hawkes. I have deliberately omitted the name of Thomas Pynchon from this list because I hope to demonstrate in subsequent chapters that Pynchon succeeds in ‘working through’ postmodern instability in order to make an engaged critique of contemporary American society. 45. Allan Lloyd Smith. ‘Brain Damage: the Word and the World in Postmodernist Writing’ in Malcolm Bradbury and Sigmund Ro, eds, Contemporary American Fiction (London: Edward Arnold, 1987), p.41. 46. Foster, ed., Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1985), p.x. 47. Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Routledge, 1990) p.53. 48. Peter Currie, ‘The Eccentric Self: Anti-Characterization and the Problem of the Subject in American Postmodernist Fiction’ in Bradbury and Ro, p.59. 49. The phrase is borrowed from Douglas Coupland’s Generation X. 50. See John Matthews, ‘The Ideology of Parody in John Barth’ in Patrick O’Donnell and Robert Con Davis, Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction (London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989). Matthews indicates Barth’s membership of an elite in which, contrary to notions of postmodern ‘flux’, certain qualities (whiteness, masculinity and social class as evinced by erudition, for instance) are privileged over others. In a British context,

Notes 183

51.

52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

60.

61. 62.

Patricia Waugh detects in the work of B.S. Johnson a degree of solipsism that sits curiously alongside Johnson’s apparent attempt to destabilize the notion of the self (Waugh, Metafiction, p.99). A decade later, Peter Brooker, posits a ‘new modern’ sensibility that retains the sense of a world of lived social, cultural and economic relations [ ... ] along with a recognition of the material effects of advanced media and information technology [ ... ] with all due sense of how problematised representation, identity, forms of critique and politically motivated action have become in this ever ‘new’, ever more complex environment. (Brooker: New York Fictions: Modernity, Postmodernism and the New Modern. Harlow: Longman, 1996, p.15) Brooker claims that the solution to left-liberal ambivalence towards the postmodern lies with anarchism, which, while remaining ‘sceptical of fixed aims and of grand narratives’, provides ‘a newly viable answer to the contemporary search for an anti-foundationalist ethics, critical but continuous with Enlightenment principles’ (218). See for example Hutton, The World We’re In, and Jonathan Franzen’s How to Be Alone (London: Fourth Estate, 2002). Nick Hornby, Contemporary American Fiction (London: Vision Press, 1992), p.105. See the introduction to Ann Massa and Alistair Stead, eds, Forked Tongues? Comparing Twentieth-Century British and American Literature (London: Longman, 1994). Andy Beckett, ‘Thatcherism for beginners’, The Guardian, 2 February 2002. D.J. Taylor, After the War: the Novel and English Society since 1945 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993), p.267. In this respect, ‘dumbing down’ may be an indication that the increasing ‘classlessness’ of British society alluded to by both John Major and Tony Blair is nothing of the sort but rather a masking of social and economic differences beneath the veneer of passive consumerism. See Lennard J. Davis, Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987). See David Lodge, ‘The Novel Now’ in Mark Currie, ed., Metafiction (London: Longman, 1995), pp.145–160. A recent example of an attempt to produce a ‘dialogic’ novel is David Peace’s GB84, a novel about the British miners’ strike of 1984–1985. Peace employs multiple narrators, genres (thriller, documentary), and styles (social realism, stream-of-consciousness), and experiments with pagination in order to invoke alternating impressions of collective effort, chaos and paranoia. The result is a ‘polyphonic’ effect that disrupts the tendency towards a closed relationship between reader and writer generated both by genre fiction (e.g., collusion in the thriller) and by political tendentiousness. For an examination of this tendency in the 1980s fiction of Margaret Drabble, see Ruth Wittlinger, Thatcherism and Literature: Representations of the ‘State of the Nation’ in Margaret Drabble’s Novels (Munich: Herbert Utz Verlag, 2002). Waugh, Harvest of the Sixties: English Literature and its Background 1960 to 1990 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995), p.70. Xuejun Sun, ‘Thatcher’s Man’, Cambridge Quarterly 23 (4), 1994, p.372.

184

Notes

63. Taylor, After the War, p.299. 64. Pynchon, Slow Learner (London: Vintage, 1995), pp.7, 21. 65. Interview between Franzen and Donald Antrim in Bomb magazine, issue 77, 2001. See also Franzen’s essay ‘Perchance to Dream: in an Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels’ (Harper’s Magazine, April 1996, 35–54), a re-edited version of which appears as ‘Why Bother?’ in How to Be Alone, 55–97.

2 Complicity and British Fiction 1. See Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London: Penguin, 1986), and Glen Creeber, ‘ “The Anxious and the Uprooted”: Dennis Potter and Richard Hoggart, Scholarship Boys’ in Vernon W. Gras and John R. Cook, eds, The Passion of Dennis Potter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), pp.31–39. 2. Waugh, Harvest of the Sixties, p.9. 3. Stephen Wagg, ‘You’ve Never Had It So Silly’ in Dominic Strinati and Stephen Wagg, eds, Come On Down? Popular Culture in Post-war Britain (London: Routledge, 1992), p.275. 4. Kiernan Ryan, ‘Sex, Violence and Complicity: Martin Amis and Ian McEwan’ in Rod Mengham, An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction: International Writing in English Since 1970 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), p.210. 5. Iain Banks, Complicity (London: Abacus, 1996), pp.139–140. 6. Kitschelt, The Transformation of European Social Democracy, p.280. 7. See Cairns Craig, Iain Banks’s Complicity: A Reader’s Guide (London: Continuum, 2002), p.47. 8. Ibid., p.31. 9. Cairns Craig points out that the Scottish word colley can mean either to dominate or to surrender (70). 10. Colley tells the police officer McDunn ‘I don’t think it’s political [ ... ] I think it’s moral’ (264). 11. Banks, Dead Air (London: Little, Brown, 2002), p.252. 12. Waugh, Harvest of the Sixties, p.20. 13. As previously noted, the first Gulf War of 1991 also features in Complicity. 14. Coe, What a Carve-Up? (London: Penguin, 1995), p.411. 15. Published a year apart, the two novels employ the same black humour. For example, Complicity (1993) features an attack on an arms dealer who loses the use of his arms because of necrosis, while in What a Carve-Up! (1994) the arms dealer Mark Winshaw has his arms amputated. 16. The ‘Preface’, by Hortensia Tonks, notes that ‘keen public interest in the Winshaw family and all its doings’ has ‘been aroused’ (497) and allows the reader to infer that Owen’s history may be instrumental in providing some form of redress. 17. Iain Sinclair, Downriver (London: Granta, 2002), p.72. 18. For instance, Tony Blair claims that, ‘the ethical basis of socialism is the only one that has stood the test of time’ (Blair, New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country, p.16.). 19. See Kiernan Ryan, ‘Sex, Violence and Complicity’ in Mengham, pp.203–218. 20. Taylor, After the War, p.189.

Notes 185 21. John Haffenden, Interview with Martin Amis in Nicolas Tredell, ed., The Fiction of Martin Amis (Cambridge: Icon, 2000), p.63. 22. Martin Amis, London Fields (London: Penguin, 1986), p.255. 23. Amis, Money (London: Penguin, 1984), p.270. 24. Head, Modern British Fiction, p.229. 25. Frederick Holmes, ‘The Death of the Author as Cultural Critique in London Fields’ in Tredell, p.116–117. 26. Head, Modern British Fiction, p.258. 27. Holmes, ‘The Death of the Author’, p.112.

3

Liberal Guilt and American Fiction

1. John Patrick Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left (London & New York: Norton, 1992), p.329. 2. See Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country, pp.39–72. 3. Brooker, New York Fictions, p.81. Brooker gives the example of former ‘Yippie’ leader Jerry Rubin investing in Wall Street, and Tom Hayden, the former leader of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), becoming a state representative for affluent Santa Monica. 4. Jon Kucich, ‘Postmodern Politics: Don DeLillo and the Plight of the White Male Writer’ in Michigan Quarterly Review, 27 (2), 1988, p.328. 5. Don DeLillo, White Noise (London: Picador, 1999), p.9. 6. Gladney makes an attempt to reassert his white masculine identity when he shoots his wife’s (black) lover but, significantly, this attempt is inspired by cinematic representations of machismo rather than by any essential masculinity. In any event, Gladney botches the shooting and takes his wounded victim to hospital. 7. N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge, ‘Toxic Events, Postmodernism and DeLillo’s White Noise,’ Cambridge Quarterly 23 (4), 1994, pp.303–323. 8. A tendency that will be examined in the next chapter: Ian McEwan’s The Child In Time and Martin Amis’s Money and London Fields all feature narrators who contemplate the redemptive force of childhood innocence. 9. Reeve and Kerridge, ‘Toxic Events’, p.319. 10. David Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2002), p.86. 11. See Jerry Varsava, ‘The Quest for Community in American Postmodern Fiction’, International Fiction Review, 30, 2003, p.5. 12. In his essay ‘First City’, Jonathan Franzen has a similar experience in a shopping mall: ‘I have cash in my wallet, my skin is white, and I feel utterly, utterly welcome. Is this a community?’ (Franzen, How to Be Alone, p.190). 13. Michel Branch, ‘Oswald Our Contemporary: Don DeLillo’s Libra’ in Mengham, pp.135–149. 14. DeLillo, Mao II (London: Vintage, 1992), p.41. 15. Miller, The Seventies Now, p.254. 16. Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (London: Fourth Estate, 2001), p.40 – emphases in original, except where stated otherwise. 17. See David Thoreen, ‘The Economy of Consumption: The Entropy of Leisure in Pynchon’s Vineland’, Pynchon Notes 30–31, 1992, pp.53–62.

186

Notes

18. Joseph W. Slade, ‘Communication, Group Theory & Perception in Vineland’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 32 (2), 1990, p.128. 19. Eric Solomon, ‘Argument by Anachronism: The Presence of the 1930s in Vineland’ in Geoffrey Green, Donald J. Greiner and Larry McCaffrey, eds, The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon’s Novel (Normal, ILL: The Dalkey Archive Press, 1994), p.163. 20. Barbara L Pittman, ‘Genealogy, History & the Political Left in Vineland’, Pynchon Notes 30–31, 1992, p.45. 21. Thomas Pynchon, Vineland (London: Secker and Warburg, 1990), p.347. 22. John Johnston, ‘An American Book of the Dead: Media & the Unconscious in Vineland’ in Pynchon Notes 34–35, 1994, p.22. See also Johan Callen, ‘Tubed Out and Movie Shot in Pynchon’s Vineland’ in Pynchon Notes 28–29, 1991, pp.115–141. 23. Daniel Snowman and Malcolm Bradbury, ‘The Sixties and Seventies’ in Bradbury and Temperley, pp.289, 291. 24. See Wills, Reagan’s America, chapters 1–4. 25. Judith Chambers, Thomas Pynchon (New York, Twayne, 1992), p.193. 26. Susan Strehle, ‘Pynchon’s ‘Elaborate Game of Doubles’ in Vineland’ in Green et al, p.114 – emphasis in original. 27. Ibid. p.117–118. 28. Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities (London: Picador, 1998), p.235. 29. M. Keith Booker, ‘Vineland and Dystopian Fiction’, Pynchon Notes 30–31, 1992, p.22. 30. In neither Wolfe nor Pynchon is the reader exposed to the women’s own analysis of their desires: perhaps this is an instance of the white male leftliberal projecting his own fantasies of submission and abdication onto the female body. 31. Ellis has Bateman work for ‘Pierce & Pierce’, the same company that employs Sherman McCoy in Wolfe’s novel. 32. Thomas Irmer, ‘Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and Its Submerged References to the 1960s’ in A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture 41 (4), 1993, pp.349–356. Irmer indicates a New Age version of Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit being played in a restaurant, and a band playing old Motown hits in one of Bateman’s haunts. 33. See Jameson, ‘Periodising the Sixties’ in Patricia Waugh, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), pp.125–152. 34. Alan Bilton, An Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2002), p.206. 35. Eagleton, After Theory, p.185. 36. Ellis, Less Than Zero (London: Picador, 1986), p.195. 37. Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (London: Abacus, 2001), p.35. 38. Heffernan, Capital, Class and Technology in Contemporary American Culture: Projecting Post-Fordism (London Pluto Press, 2000), p.96. 39. Coupland, Microserfs (London: Flamingo, 1996), p.17. 40. The reference is to Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992). 41. Pleasantville (USA 1998, dir. Gary Ross): a feature film in which two contemporary teenagers are absorbed by a television set into the world of a 1950s sitcom.

Notes 187

4

The Communitarian Turn

1. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: The Hogarth Press, 1987), p.84. 2. John Fletcher and Malcolm Bradbury, ‘The Introverted Novel’ in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds, Modernism (London: Penguin, 1978), p.395. 3. Kathleen M. Wheeler, ‘Constructions of Identity in Post-1970s Experimental Fiction’ in Mengham, p.16. 4. Barth, Chimera (New York: Random House, 1972), p.256. 5. Theodore White notes that the G.I. Bill of Rights enabled nearly 8 million World War Two service personnel to attend college on government grants (White, America in Search of Itself, p.4). It is arguable that the relatively welleducated offspring of this generation produced an unprecedented interest in non-mainstream cultural (and behavioural) pursuits that prompted the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. 6. Hutton, The World We’re In, p.21. 7. See Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). 8. Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, p.297. 9. Head, Modern British Fiction, p.36. 10. Ian McEwan, The Child in Time (London: Vintage, 1997), p.209. 11. Paul Edwards, ‘Time, Romanticism, Modernism and Moderation in Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time,’ English: The Journal of the English Association 44, 1995, p.43. 12. This is another encounter between Lewis and a working-class man that results not in antagonism but reconciliation: just as Lewis is eventually reconciled with Julie as a consequence of his experiences, so Joe departs from the scene of the accident determine to repair his own broken marriage. 13. See the conclusion to Jack Slay, Ian McEwan (New York: Twayne, 1996). 14. Kiernan Ryan, Ian McEwan (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994), p.41. 15. Ian McEwan, Enduring Love (London: Vintage, 1998), p.15. 16. Jago Morrison, ‘Narration and Unease in Ian McEwan’s Later Fiction,’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 42 (3), p.254. 17. Catherine Belsey, ‘Towards Cultural History – in Theory and Practice’ in Ryan, p.83. 18. For an analysis of the way in which the apparent crisis of marginalization perceived by the contemporary white male writer may be little more than a paradoxical attempt to reassert domination over previously subservient groups, see Kathleen Fitzpatrick, The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, 2006). 19. Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), p.258. 20. Hutton, for instance, claims that New Right ideology has had a ‘malevolent impact’ on the British ‘national conversation [ ... ] preventing us from understanding who we are and how we work’ (Hutton, The World We’re In, 211). 21. See Penny Smith, ‘Hell Innit’ in Tredell, p.102. 22. Amis, The Information (London: Flamingo, 1995), pp.58–59. 23. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London: Penguin, 1986), p.73. 24. See Sinfield’s introduction to Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain.

188

Notes

25. Welsh, Trainspotting (London: Vintage, 1999), p.29. 26. Patricia Horton, ‘Trainspotting: A Topography of the Masculine Abject’ in English, 50, p.224. 27. Berthold Schoene-Harwood, ‘Dams Burst: Devolving Gender in Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory,’ ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 30 (1), 1999, p.134. 28. Cairns Craig, The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999), p.38–39.

5 Futures and Pasts 1. Julian Barnes, England, England (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998), p.39. 2. Lauren Langman, ‘Neon Cages: Shopping for Subjectivity’ in Rob Shields, ed., Lifestyle Shopping: The Subject of Consumption (London: Routledge, 1992), p.49. 3. In the same way, the work of the arts and crafts movement is no longer the domain of William Morris’s common man, but is rather the preserve of the affluent and ‘discriminating’ middle classes. 4. Craig, The Modern Scottish Novel, p.182. 5. Fowler et al., Religion and Politics in America, chapter 1. 6. Ibid. pp.31, 261. 7. Harvey, The New Imperialism, p.188, and Žižek, Welcome To The Desert Of The Real! (London: Verso, 2002), pp.118–125. In an Anglo-American context, the various Back to Basics and Moral Majority campaigns are examples of a similar conservative tendency. 8. This is the warning of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), in which an ultra-right wing regime attempts to justify its savagely patriarchal rule by means of spurious appeals to the greater good. Published in the middle of the Reagan decade, the novel is an understandable left-liberal reaction to Reagan’s association with fundamentalist Christian groups which suggests that the libertarianism of the ‘parental generation’ is by no means an exhausted option (especially for women). There is also in the novel the implication – shared with several of the novels discussed in this study – that the surrender of the counterculture to individualistic gratification at the expense of intellectual rigour and consideration of the collective aspect has led not only to the collapse of that culture but to a terrible political reversal in which collectivist rhetoric has been appropriated by the agents of that reversal. 9. Kiernan Ryan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, p.xv. See also Simon Perrill, ‘A Cartography of Absence, the World of Iain Sinclair’, Comparative Criticism: An Annual Journal 19, 1997, pp.309–339. 10. The idea that an obscure corner of the East End could become a portal to a more alluring past was exploited by ‘Goodnight Sweetheart’, a BBC television comedy series (1993–1999) about a young white male professional who travels back in time to 1940s London. In the series, the unhappiness of the principal character in the private contemporary settings of home and the workplace is contrasted with a more exciting life in the past, where most of the action takes place in public spaces such as the local pub and the air raid shelter. 11. Sinfield, ‘Cultural Materialism’ in Ryan, p.78. 12. Warner, Morvern Callar (London: Vintage, 2002), p.82 – emphasis in original.

Notes 189 13. Fredric Jameson has famously noted that postmodern culture is distinguished by a ‘waning of affect’ (Postmodernism, p.14). 14. Frow, Time and Commodity Culture, p.71. 15. Antonio Melechi, ‘The Ecstasy of Disappearance’ in Steve Redhead, ed., Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture (Aldershot: Avebury, 1993), pp.29–40, 33. 16. See Baudrillard, America (London: Verso, 2000), p.28. 17. Hillegonda Rietveld, ‘Living The Dream’ in Redhead, p.66. 18. Melechi, ‘The Ecstasy of Disappearance’ p.35. 19. See Kristian Russell ‘Lysergia Suburbia’ in Redhead, pp.91–174. 20. It is notable that What a Carve-Up! the fast-food entrepreneur Dorothy Winshaw keeps her own stock of free-range pork for her own consumption, while in Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992) the American plastics tycoon Sam Allison tells the narrator, ‘You gotta have substitoots’ (7) while indulging his own appetite for Tudor mansions and bespoke tailoring. 21. This is not to say that Cochrane’s feelings necessarily contradict the outlook represented by the Frenchman, but that they challenge the cynical, marketfriendly interpretation proposed by Pitman. 22. Rietveld (in Redhead ed. p.54) notes the ‘overgrown toddler’ look prevalent in the early rave scene. 23. The persistence of the association between church buildings and the need for a sense of ‘seriousness’, even among non-believers, was noted by Philip Larkin in his poem ‘Church Going’. See Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Marvell Press/Faber & Faber, 1988), p.98 24. Patrick Parrinder, ‘The Ruined Futures of British Science Fiction’ in Zachary Leader, ed., On Modern British Fiction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), p.230. 25. It is arguable that Anglia represents an endorsement of Thatcherism in the sense that it is a decidedly backward-looking society in which people live quietly and work hard. On the other hand, enterprise and energy are lacking, people do not work very hard and there is a sense of co-operation and tolerance. Perhaps the problematic connection between Thatcherism and Anglia says more about the contradictory nature of the former than the shortcomings of Barnes’s imaginary communities. 26. See the conclusion to Bruce Sesto, Language, History and Metanarrative in the Fiction of Julian Barnes (New York: Peter Lang, 2001). 27. Merritt Moseley, Understanding Julian Barnes (Colombia, AC: University of South Carolina, 1997), p.123. 28. Alastair Gray, Lanark (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002), p.410. 29. Jameson, Postmodernism, p.46. 30. In Welcome To the Desert of the Real!, Slavoj Žižek suggests that this selfdestructive rage is indeed the outcome of contemplating the fate of that which can no longer be attained. By way of illustration, he indicates the East German phenomenon of Ostalgie as nostalgia not for what actually occurred under Soviet domination but ‘for what might have happened there, for the missed opportunity of another Germany [...] a negative proof of the presence of the emancipatory chances, a symptomatic outburst of rage displaying an awareness of missed opportunities’ (24 – emphasis in original). 31. Anita Mason, The War against Chaos (London: Abacus, 1988), p.27. 32. Mason’s Diggers are presumably named after the English radical group who, in the mid-seventeenth century, opposed the enclosure of the commons by

190

33.

34. 35.

36.

6

Notes establishing small farming communities based on shared labour and common ownership. The name was later adopted by an anarchist collective established in San Francisco during the late 1960s. The link between the neglected church building and the defeated left is also made during the episode in which Angel, the main advocate of revolution among the marginals, is killed during a demonstration, and Hare carries his body into a churchyard. Raymond Williams. ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’ in Ryan, p.25. The idea of a group of disaffected young idealists founding an idyllic rural community recalls the basis of Gwyn Barry’s utopian novel Amelior in Amis’s The Information. The description of sycamore trees in the Zone throws even this conclusion into doubt: there is no way of knowing whether Lucy’s statement is correct, or whether the settlers will succeed.

The Battlefield of the Self

1. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Unwin, 1970), p.122. 2. Fowler et al. Religion and Politics in America, p.4. 3. Sut Jhally, ‘The Political Economy of Culture’ in Angus and Jhally, eds, Cultural Politics in Contemporary America (London: Routledge, 1989), p.81. 4. See Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Evacuating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Pimlico, 1998), p.227. 5. Putnam, Bowling Alone, p.24. 6. Stanley Aronowitz argues that TV and other electronic media deflect authority away from local sources (the family and the local community, for example) towards an increasingly influential and partisan mass media (Aronowitz, ‘Working Class Culture in the Electronic Age’ in Angus and Jhally, pp.135–150). 7. Bauman, Liquid Modernity (London: Polity Press, 2000), p.4. 8. Nonetheless, there remained (and remain) tensions and contradictions between the ‘pleasure principle’ of libidinal indulgence and the ‘reality principle’ of generating profit. The Reagan and Thatcher personality cults were a means of holding together the alliance between behavioural conservatism and economic liberalism as popular culture promoted indulgence alongside conformity in the shape of the ‘yuppie’ (see the reading of American Psycho below). 9. See Liam Kennedy, ‘ “It’s the Third World Down There!” Urban Decline and (Post) National Mythologies in The Bonfire of the Vanities,’ Modern Fiction Studies 43 (1), 1997, pp.93–111. 10. See M. Kimmel and A.L. Ferber, ‘ “White Men Are This Nation”: Right-Wing Militias and the Restoration of Rural American Masculinity’, Rural Sociology 65 (4), 2000, pp.582–604. 11. See Peter Freese, ‘Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero, Entropy in the “MTV Novel”?’ in Reingard M. Nischik and Barbara Korte, eds, Modes of Narrative:

Notes 191

12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

Approaches to American, Canadian and British Fiction (Würzberg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1990), pp.68–87. Harvie Ferguson, ‘Watching the World Go Around: Atrium Culture and the Psychology of Shopping’ in Shields, p.37. Annesley, Blank Fictions, p.14. Hutton, The World We’re In, p.173. See Nicki Sahlin, ‘ “But this Road Doesn’t Go Anywhere”: The Existential Dilemma in Less Than Zero,’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 33 (1), 1991, pp.23–43. Alex E. Blazer, ‘Chasms of Reality, Aberrations of Identity: Defining the Postmodern Through Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho,’ Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, 1 (2), 2002, available at http:// www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2002/blazer.htm; accessed on 20 June 2008. As in The Bonfire of the Vanities, the ‘default’ values of individualism are shown to coincide with those of white patriarchy. Eagleton, After Theory, p.7. This recalls the moment in What a Carve-Up! when the narrator experiences an epiphany articulated in terms of shattering glass and broken screens. Perhaps this denotes different degrees of white male despair on opposite sides of the Atlantic: in the United States, utter entrapment within Reaganite ideology; in the United Kingdom, an ability to interrogate that ideology that is tempered by political impotence. Lori Kendall, ‘Nerd Nation: Images of Nerds in US Popular Culture,’ International Journal of Cultural Studies 2 (2), 1999, p.279. Eagleton, After Theory, p.28. Ryan Moore, “ ‘And Tomorrow Is Just Another Crazy Scam’: Postmodernity, Youth and the Downward Mobility of the Middle Class’ in Joe Austin and Michael Nevin Willard, eds, Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America (New York: New York UP, 1998), p.254. This is another instance of the tendency (see chapter 4) within novels such as Trainspotting, England, England and Morvern Callar of the way in which the contemporary white male left-liberal novelist is prone to casting women as ‘redemptive’ characters by contrast with male counterparts who sink into self-destructive despair at the thought of their own ideological complicity. See Franzen, ‘Why Bother?’ in How to Be Alone (London: Fourth Estate, 2002), pp.91–92. See James Annesley, ‘Market Corrections: Jonathan Franzen and the “Novel of Globalization” ’, Journal of Modern Literature 29 (2), 2006, pp.111–128, and Jeremy Green, Late Postmodernism: American Fiction at the Millennium (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), chapter 3. Franzen, ‘Imperial Bedroom’ in How to Be Alone, pp.39–54. Pynchon, Vineland, p.314. David Porush, ‘ “Purring Into Transcendence”: Pynchon’s Puncutron Machine,’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 36 (4), 1995, p.97. In Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), the seventeenth-century egalitarianism of the character William Slothrop is described as ‘the fork in the road America never took’ (Gravity’s Rainbow, London: Picador, 1978, p.556).

192

Notes

30. Joseph Slade argues that TV ‘mimics community’ in ‘Communication, Group Theory & Perception in Vineland’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 32 (2), 1990, p.131. 31. Kathryn Hume, ‘Books of the Dead, Postmortem Politics in Novels by Mailer, Burroughs, Acker and Pynchon’, Modern Philology, 97 (3), 2000, pp.417–444. 32. Philip Gochenour, ‘The History Written on the Body: Photography, History and Memory in Pynchon’s Vineland,’ Pynchon Notes 32–33, 1993, p.177. See also José Liste Noya, ‘Ghostbusters: Fantasy and Postmodern Death in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland,’ Journal of Narrative Technique 27 (2), 1997, p.151. 33. Johan Callen, ‘Tubed Out and Movie Shot in Pynchon’s Vineland,’ Pynchon Notes 28–29, 1991, p.139–140. 34. Eva C. Karpinski, ‘From V to Vineland: Pynchon’s Utopian Moments,’ Pynchon Notes 32–33, 1993, p.41. 35. See David Cowart, ‘Attenuated Postmodernism: Pynchon’s Vineland’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 36 (4), 1995, pp.67–76. 36. This is meant to apply to social secession in general: not only the religious cult, but also the survivalist group, New Age commune and even terrorist cell. See also Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor (1999) and T.C. Boyle’s, Drop City (2003). 37. This is a recurring motif in ‘cult’ fiction: in Palahniuk’s Survivor, one of the customs of the Creedish cult is the amputation of the little finger; in DeLillo’s Mao II, the ‘Moonie’ follower Karen (in ‘pidgin’ English) exhorts her juniors to ‘Lose hair, lose nail off finger, lose whole hand, whole arm; it go on scale to stand against sins’ (14); and in Paul Auster’s Mr Vertigo (1994), the young protagonist Walt is told to amputate a finger joint. (Strictly speaking, Auster’s novel is not about a cult but, like Geek Love, it deals with a travelling show, and with the total submission of Walt to the dominating, charismatic figure of Master Yehudi). 38. Dunn, Geek Love (London: Abacus, 1999), p.8. 39. N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Postmodern Parataxis: Embodied Texts, Weightless Information,’ American Literary History, 2 (3), 1990, p.416. 40. Rachel Adams, ‘An American Tail: Freaks, Gender and the Incorporation of History in Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love’ in Rosemarie Garland Thompson, ed., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York UP, 1996), pp.279, 283. 41. Fowler et al., Religion and Politics in America, p.260. 42. Robbins, ‘Cults, Converts and Charisma: the Sociology of New Religious Movements,’ Current Sociology, 36 (3), 1988, pp.1–248. 43. Although the situation at Waco was arguably exacerbated by the aggression of Federal agents, this perhaps reinforces the suggestion made later in this chapter that American society and the cults its spawns are intimately related. 44. One of the few contemporary British novels to address the topic of cults is Iain Banks’s Whit (1995). The idea that the cult reproduces the values of mainstream society is evident in the patriarchal leadership of Salvador Whit and in the commercial exploitation of the cult’s activities. As in Geek Love, resistance comes from a female source. Isis, Salvador’s grand-daughter, leaves the cult and engages with the outside world before returning and ousting its leaders. Where Whit differs from the American novels discussed

Notes 193

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

in this chapter is in the way in which a destructive ending is avoided: instead, Isis’s involvement with the outside world imparts to her a (typically ‘Banksian’) liberal pragmatism that enables her to articulate an assertion of the cult’s communal values that eschews a framework of domination and submission. Eagleton, After Theory, p.165. Jameson, Postmodernism, p.5. Baudrillard, America, p.91. Don DeLillo, The Names (London: Picador, 1999), p.54. Jeremy Green, ‘Last Days: Millennial Hysteria in Don DeLillo’s Mao II’ in Essays and Studies, 1995, p.135. See Millard’s reading of Mao II in Contemporary American Fiction: An Introduction to American Fiction Since 1970 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000). Wills, Reagan’s America, p.386. Stan A. Lindsay, ‘Waco and Andover: An Application of Kenneth Burke’s Concept of Psychotic Entelechy,’ Quarterly Journal of Speech, 85 (3), 1999, p.271. In Geek Love, Norval Sanderson claims to have castrated himself to win Arty’s favour. See Silvia Caporale Bizzini, ‘Can the Intellectual Still Speak? The Example of Don DeLillo’s Mao II’, Critical Quarterly 37 (2), 1995, pp.104–117.

Conclusion 1. Jonathan Franzen, ‘I’ll Be Doing More of Same,’ The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 16 (1), 1996, p.38. 2. Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), p.15. 3. For example, the much cited instance of The Specials’ Ghost Town being the best-selling single at the time of the 1981 riots; also the Thatcher-baiting Live Aid and Nelson Mandela tribute concerts in 1985 and 1988 respectively. 4. Grossberg’s argument appears to contradict Jameson’s celebrated notion that postmodern culture is marked by a general ‘waning of affect’ (Postmodernism, p.14), yet there is common ground between the two proposals. Because the Reagan ‘affect’ was susceptible to the accusation that it lacked depth and conviction, it seems consistent with, rather than implacably opposed to, postmodern relativism. Jameson and Grossberg thus identify the same ‘depthlessness’, but from different perspectives. 5. The phrase is borrowed from Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques, eds, New Times: the Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s (Lawrence and Wishart, 1989). 6. For example, David Locher has claimed that the writings of Baudrillard and Lyotard are strongly derivative of Dadaism, and are subject to similar accusations of pessimism and inherent conservatism. Locher argues that both Dada and the postmodernism of Baudrillard and Lyotard effectively sought to demolish the foundations of Western philosophy, but that this ‘millenarian’ denial of hope for the future implicitly regretted the collapse of all that the past signified. If one accepts Locher’s argument, then it

194

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Notes seems that two of postmodernism’s most distinguished proponents share with many of the novelists and commentators featured in this study an ambivalence about what both the past and the future (or, the conservative and the radical) offer to the left (Locher, ‘Unacknowledged Roots and Blatant Imitation: Postmodernism and the Dada Movement’, Electronic Journal of Sociology, 1999, available at www.sociology.org/content/ vol004.001/locher.html; accessed on 20 June 2008). Jameson, Postmodernism, p.27. Eagleton, After Theory, p.52. Lennard, Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction, pp.131–132. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, p.96. Franzen, ‘Imperial Bedroom’ in How to Be Alone, p.52. Jameson, ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture’ in Hardt and Weeks, p.145.

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Index addiction, 40, 59, 77, 101, 107, 110, 158 ambivalence, 3–4, 7–8, 11, 13, 36, 72, 75, 79–80, 85–9, 108, 127, 155, 175, 177–8, 183, 194 American Dream, 19, 27, 66, 85, 86, 160 American Psycho, 6, 10, 33, 81–4, 141–5 Amis, Martin, 6, 9–10, 57–64, 77, 92, 99–105, 147, 159 Angry Young Men, 9, 50 Annesley, James 10, 41, 142 Atwood, Margaret, 129, 188 Banks, Iain, 8, 11, 34, 41–50, 52, 53, 54, 75, 101, 105, 192–3 Barnes, Julian, 12, 34, 113, 121–7, 134, 143, 172, 189 Barth, John, 32, 91, 182 Baudrillard, Jean, 5, 6, 121, 163, 193 Bauman, Zygmunt, 139, 140, 176 Bilton, Alan, 82, 84, 85–7, 148 Blair, Tony, 31, 43, 183 ‘Blairite’, 35, 63 ‘blank fiction’, 10, 41, 158, 162 Bonfire of the Vanities, The, 10, 80–1, 140–1, 176, 190 Buddha of Suburbia, The, 99 Bush, George W.H., 23, 84 Callaghan, James, 15, 17 Callinicos, Alex, 3, 24, 175 capitalism, 11, 16, 19–20, 22, 27, 28–9, 32, 39, 40, 48, 56, 59, 60, 64, 66, 70, 76, 82, 87, 94, 112, 113, 119, 122, 123, 127–9, 130, 139, 147–9, 151–2, 155, 164–5, 170, 172–3 Carter, Jimmy, 16–17, 18, 19, 21, 27, 84, 162 Child in Time, The, 12, 95–9, 111, 116, 124, 143, 151, 176, 185

Chimera, 91 church, 12, 18, 75, 113–27, 131–2, 136, 161, 165–6, 189, 190 class, 3, 9, 10, 16, 35, 38–40, 41, 42–3, 49, 54–5, 56, 65–7, 70, 84, 86, 95–7, 99, 100–1, 103–4, 105–11, 114, 115, 117–19, 149–50, 153, 170, 173, 182, 187 Clinton, Bill, 87, 162 Coe, Jonathan, 8, 11, 34, 50–3, 54, 93–5 collectivism, 3, 9, 11, 12–13, 15, 19, 27, 33, 35, 39, 45–6, 49, 59–70, 76, 78–9, 91, 92–3, 102, 106–7, 109–10, 112–13, 116, 117–18, 121, 125–33, 135, 136–41, 144, 147, 153, 156–8, 164–6, 169, 172–7, 183, 188 commodification, 36, 60–2, 68–9, 71–2, 76, 82, 85, 102, 113, 116, 120, 175 communitarian, 13, 40, 50, 53, 127, 129, 130, 131, 134, 139, 141, 147, 145–5, 157, 158–9 ‘communitarian turn’, 12, 90–111, 114, 115, 131, 135, 157, 158, 173 community, 11, 12, 13, 39, 53, 64, 71, 92, 93, 96, 103–4, 109, 113, 114, 118, 120–2, 125–6, 130–1, 133, 147–8, 152, 155, 157, 158, 161–5, 174, 185, 190, 192 complicity, 3, 4, 8, 12, 36–7, 38, 40, 41, 54, 56, 59, 61, 64, 71, 74, 76, 77, 106, 115, 134, 135, 170, 173, 177 Complicity (Iain Banks), 8, 11, 34, 41–50, 52, 53, 57, 63, 75, 101, 170, 177 consensus, 8, 15, 16, 19, 28, 30, 46, 49, 101, 131, 151, 170, 173, 180 Conservative (Party), 15, 22, 25, 42, 93, 106, 168

203

204

Index

Constitution (US), 13, 134, 136, 137, 139, 160, 162 consumerism, 6, 27, 33, 36, 41, 69–70, 73–4, 81–2, 85, 88, 91, 93, 110, 141–2, 144, 146, 149, 153, 159, 161, 173, 183 Corrections, The, 10, 37, 73–6, 144, 150–6, 176 counterculture, 9, 10, 22, 26–7, 36, 55, 78, 81, 88–9, 140, 150–1, 156, 157–8, 175, 177, 187, 188 Coupland, Douglas, 11, 14, 84–8, 101, 124, 145–50, 155, 159 Craig, Cairns, 43, 109, 113 cult, 13, 160–8, 169, 173, 174, 192–3 see also personality, cult of Currie, Peter, 32–3 Davis, Lennard, 174–5 Dead Air, 8, 47–50, 53 deconstructionism, 28–9, 68 Defoe, Daniel, 90 DeLillo, Don, 10, 13, 14, 67–73, 148, 159, 164–7, 175, 185, 192 despair, 2, 5, 10, 33, 41, 43, 67, 80, 82, 89, 101–2, 107, 109, 110–11, 134, 144, 147, 150, 155, 170, 178, 191 Diggins, John Patrick, 65–6, 112 Downriver, 9, 12, 53–6, 62, 115–17, 126 Dunn, Katherine, 2, 13, 159–64 dystopia, 128, 133, 134, 178 Eagleton, Terry, 6, 83, 148, 162, 171–2, 182 Ellis, Bret Easton, 6, 10, 41, 81–4, 141–5, 150 ‘end of history’, 87, 90, 150, 175 Enduring Love, 12, 97–9 engagement (social/political), 5, 17, 28, 34, 35, 36, 49, 52, 53, 56, 67–8, 71, 79, 85, 89, 92, 95, 96–7, 104, 118, 120, 139, 158, 166, 173, 175, 176, 182 England, England, 12, 121, 122–7, 143, 172, 191 Enlightenment, 4, 27, 30, 90, 156, 183 experimental fiction, 4, 5, 9, 31–2, 61, 91, 158, 177, 178

‘faultlines’, 3, 7, 112, 175 feminism, 4, 97, 98, 99–100 Ford, Richard, 33 Foster, Hal, 32, 122 Franzen, Jonathan, 10, 36, 73–6, 142, 148, 150–6, 175, 176, 185 free market, 7, 15, 17, 22–5, 27, 28, 30, 31, 46, 87, 92, 93, 119, 153 Geek Love, 13, 159–64, 165 Generation X, 11, 84–6, 87, 145–50 grand narrative, 6, 29, 30, 57, 112, 125, 183 Gravity’s Rainbow, 76, 191 Gray, Alasdair, 12, 113, 128 Green, Jeremy, 165–6 Grossberg, Lawrence, 169, 175 Handmaid’s Tale, The, 129, 132, 133, 188 Hardt, Michael, 28–30, 171 Head, Dominic, 61, 64, 110 Heath, Ted, 15 Heffernan, Nick, 85–6, 147, 149–50, 164, 165 Hoggart, Richard, 38, 105–9 Hutton, Will, 136–7, 187 identity, 12, 13, 19, 32–3, 41, 60, 63–4, 67, 91, 109, 117, 121, 124, 127, 131–2, 140–2, 146, 148, 150, 156, 157–8, 159–62, 165–6, 173–4 ideology, 5–7, 17, 18, 20–2, 25, 56, 61, 67–8, 70, 73, 82, 86, 88, 92, 112–13, 114, 117, 119, 129, 133–4, 156, 158, 162, 168–9, 173, 175, 177, 182, 191 individualism, 3, 9, 11, 12, 19, 24, 31–3, 35, 38–9, 50, 62, 64, 70, 78–9, 82, 89, 90–1, 93, 94, 98, 104, 106–7, 110, 112–13, 114–15, 118, 126, 140, 141, 144, 146–7, 150, 153–63, 166, 173–4, 176, 188, 191 ‘individuation paradox’, 11, 13, 33, 145, 169 Information, The, 9, 57, 60, 103–5, 159 Irmer, Thomas, 81–2

Index 205 Jameson, Fredric, 5–6, 82, 129, 163, 170–1, 177, 193 Johnson, Lyndon B., 15, 150 Kennedy, John F., 150, 162 Keynesianism, 18, 24, 180 Kitschelt, Herbert, 22, 42 Kucich, John, 67–8 Kureishi, Hanif, 99 Labour (Party), 17, 25, 38, 41, 42, 43, 56 Lanark, 12, 113, 128 Langman, Lauren, 113 left-liberal, 2–3, 5, 10–13, 14, 17, 30–1, 34, 35, 37, 40, 43, 48–57, 61, 63, 67, 70–5, 87, 89, 95, 99, 105, 112–15, 127, 129, 133–5, 147, 155–7, 167, 169–77, 183, 188, 191 Less Than Zero, 10, 41, 83–4, 141–4 libertarianism, 9, 11, 18, 22, 25, 39–40, 42, 49, 55, 59, 74, 77, 78, 81, 82, 88, 94, 99, 112, 115, 120, 139–40, 144, 153–5, 157, 171, 173, 188 Lindsay, Stan, 166–7 London Fields, 9, 57, 60–2, 102–3, 176 Lott, Tim, 34, 170 Lukàcs, Georg, 4–5 Lyotard, Jean-François, 5–6, 193 Mao II (DeLillo), 10, 13, 71–3, 164, 165–7, 192 marginalisation, 2, 3, 9, 12, 25, 27, 42, 50, 67, 82, 85, 88, 101, 115, 131–5, 166, 167, 173, 175, 176, 187 Marxism, 4–6, 112, 119, 171–3, 181 Mason, Anita, 2, 12–13, 115, 129–34, 147 Mason & Dixon, 76 Mather, Cotton, 147, 151, 153 McEwan, Ian, 12, 92, 95–9, 105, 116, 124, 147, 156, 185 ‘Me-ism’, 32, 146, 159 Melechi, Antonio, 121 metafiction, 32, 36, 53, 55, 56, 61, 118, 178 Microserfs, 11, 86–8, 143–4, 145–50 Miller, Steven Paul, 26–7, 73

modernism, 31, 90 monetarism, 7, 17–18, 23–4, 39, 55, 58, 119 Money (Martin Amis), 6, 9, 57–63, 77, 99–103, 138, 143, 170 morality, 46, 52, 57, 63, 161, 171, 172, 177 Morrison, Jago, 98 Morvern Callar, 12, 117–22, 124, 134, 151, 170, 191 Names, The, 13, 164–5 Negri, Antonio, 28–30, 171 neoconservatism, 1, 7, 26 New Deal, 16, 19, 66, 77, 79, 138, 139, 151, 181 New Labour, 42, 43 New Left, 9, 66, 156, 175 New Right, 1, 4, 6, 11, 13, 17, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27, 30, 67, 75, 92, 133, 151, 156, 159, 168, 175, 176, 187 nihilism, 5, 31, 33, 40, 41, 79, 84, 85, 89, 110, 117, 129, 158, 165, 178 Nixon, Richard, 76 Orpheus myth, 51 ‘Other’, 8, 43, 47–9, 52, 95, 109 parental generation, 79, 81, 82, 84, 86, 88, 111, 144, 149, 150, 154, 188 patriarchy, 12, 27, 28, 74, 98, 108–11, 117, 121, 124, 134, 135, 141, 160, 173, 177, 188, 191, 192 Peace, David, 34, 183 personality, cult of, 18, 25, 78, 168, 190 postmodernism, 4, 6, 8, 10–11, 28, 29–34, 39, 40–1, 62, 68, 69, 90, 112, 119, 122–3, 126, 143, 148, 150, 156, 158, 162, 163, 169, 170, 172, 173, 175, 183, 189, 193–4 power, 6–7, 28, 29, 34, 45, 47, 54, 63, 80, 101, 115, 116–17, 128, 131, 134, 136, 159, 160, 162, 163, 182 pragmatism, 4, 8, 12, 21–2, 25, 28, 30–1, 43, 44, 45, 49, 57, 97, 98, 102, 111, 125, 126, 131, 133, 168, 171–3, 176, 193

206 Index public realm, 1, 40, 80, 95–6, 138, 140–1, 152–3, 155, 176 public space, 13, 31, 40, 55, 70, 103, 138, 156, 176, 188 Putnam, Robert, 137–9 Pynchon, Thomas, 10, 13–14, 26, 36, 37, 76–80, 140, 150, 151, 156–9, 182, 191–2 Reagan, Ronald, 1, 3, 7, 10, 15–26, 30, 33, 41, 66, 76–9, 84, 112, 122, 129, 133, 137, 145, 150, 156, 162, 168, 169, 188, 190, 193 Reaganism, 2, 3, 6, 8, 14, 18, 22, 23, 25, 28, 32, 57, 79, 151, 159, 163, 168, 169, 191 Reaganomics, 8, 23, 24, 26, 179 Reagan-Thatcher period, 2, 5, 6, 7, 11, 25, 114, 129, 173, 177, 178 project, 20–1, 25, 168, 170 religion, 114, 116–17, 126, 136, 146 Republican (Party), 8, 15, 87, 89, 168 Riddell, Peter, 24 Robbins, Thomas, 161, 164 Robinson Crusoe, 90–1 Rorty, Richard, 30, 49, 171, 172, 181 Rumours of a Hurricane, 34, 170 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 38, 106 scholarship boy, 38, 39 ‘seriousness’, 67, 121, 122, 124, 126, 143, 145, 189 Sillitoe, Alan, 38, 50, 106 Sinclair, Iain, 9, 12, 53–6, 62, 112–13, 115–17 Sinfield, Alan, 7, 93, 106, 117 Slow Learner, 36 Smith, Allan Lloyd, 31–2 Smith, Geoffrey, 17 social connection, 13, 98, 102, 127, 129, 134, 142, 143, 144, 157 social mobility, 15, 38, 65, 66, 100–1, 106, 107 social novel, 2–7, 10, 12, 14, 17, 34–5, 52, 53, 55, 63–4, 74, 88, 91–2, 97, 102, 127, 128, 167, 168, 175, 177, 178

social realm, 50, 64, 91, 155, 169 socialism, 18, 49, 56, 66, 93, 112, 136–7, 172 Sportswriter, The, 33 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 43 Sun, Xuejun, 36 Taylor, D.J., 34–5, 36, 57 television, 34, 53, 59–60, 76, 77, 78, 85, 120, 138, 145, 158, 169 terrorism, 43, 71–2, 129, 166, 167, 192 Thatcher, Margaret, 1, 3, 7, 15–22, 24, 25, 30, 31, 34, 35, 38, 39, 42, 44, 50, 54, 92, 93, 106, 112, 129, 133, 168, 190, 193, see also Reagan-Thatcher Thatcherism, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 11, 14, 18, 20, 24, 25, 28, 34, 35, 39, 42–3, 49–50, 51, 53, 54, 57, 92, 94–5, 99, 100, 101, 102, 107, 117, 121, 122, 130, 168–9, 170, 177, 179, 189 tradition, 9, 11–12, 13, 31, 55, 91–3, 107–9, 111, 114, 116, 118, 120, 127, 138, 139, 152, 159, 164, 170, 171, 172 Trainspotting, 12, 41, 43, 85, 105–11, 117, 118, 170, 191 Uses of Literacy, The, 105 Vietnam (War), 15, 16, 66, 138, 169 Vineland, 10, 26, 76–80, 81, 138, 143–4, 151, 156–9 violence, 11, 30, 33, 41, 44, 47, 48, 52, 54, 57, 75, 83, 98, 102, 104, 107, 108, 109, 111, 133, 161–2, 163, 165, 167, 175 Wagg, Stephen, 40 War Against Chaos, The, 12, 101, 115, 129–35, 147 Warner, Alan, 12, 117–22 Watt, Ian, 90–1 Waugh, Patricia, 32, 35, 38–40, 183 Welsh, Irvine, 12, 41, 49, 85, 105–11, 117

Index 207 What A Carve-Up!, 8, 11, 34, 50–3, 55, 57, 59, 63, 93–5, 96, 170, 177, 184, 189, 191 white male, 2–3, 8, 10, 12, 14, 37, 40, 49, 51, 56, 57, 61, 63, 67–9, 71, 73, 74–5, 80, 89, 97, 99, 115, 127, 129, 133, 134, 135, 141, 147, 155, 156, 169, 170, 173, 175, 176, 177, 186, 187, 189, 191 White Noise, 10, 68–71 Williams, Raymond, 38, 132, 134, 175

Wills, Gary, 18–19, 20, 21, 166 Wilson, Harold, 17, 19 Wolfe, Tom, 10, 80–1, 140–1, 186 work ethic, 119, 147–8, 151–2, 153 Yeatman, Anna, 30 Young, Hugo, 19 ‘yuppies’, 4, 79, 81, 84, 85, 141, 147, 151, 190 Žižek, Slavoj, 114, 189