Abstract
The growth of the intelligence state was only one of a number of socio-political factors that made scepticism a defining feature of 1945–89 society. While the Cold War witnessed a burgeoning of anti-government protest in nations across the world, much of the dissent lacked a clear political agenda for reform and did little to alter the course of national life. In the West, the state’s reliance on an expanding network of bureaucracies, regulatory mechanisms and propagandistic media systems was as likely to produce despair about the possibilities of reform as a conviction that reform was necessary. By the 1950s, consumer capitalism was further eroding belief in political alternatives, ushering in a stage of history that social scientists would variously term the ‘post-industrial society’, the ‘media society’ or the ‘society of the spectacle’. The ability of postmodernity to ensnare the individual was captured in Irvine Howe’s definition of the ‘mass society’ as ‘a relatively comfortable, half welfare and half garrison society in which the population grows passive, indifferent and atomized … and in which man [sic] becomes a consumer, himself mass-produced like the products, diversions and values that he absorbs’.1 If Bradbury’s supposition is right, that ‘[t]he history of the novel can perhaps be described, grandly, as a history of cultural epochs expressing themselves as forms’, then the paranoid, labyrinthine plots of espionage and postmodernist fiction expressed something of Cold War conditions.2 This chapter seeks to illustrate the new pessimism by charting the cultural shift from the left-wing radicalism of the 1930s to the postmodernism of the 1970s and 1980s, a shift prompted by a number of Cold War factors. These include the intractable nature of corporate capitalism, the association of left-wing ideologies with ‘fellow-travelling’ and the eradication of socialism from mainstream political life.
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Notes
Howe, ‘Mass Society and Postmodern Fiction’, in Patricia Waugh, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), p. 24.
Bradbury, The Modern American Novel, new edn (1983; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. viii.
One left-wing commentator of the time enthused that the clashes of the 1930s were, ‘with a change here and there in local colour, like a twenty- or thirty-year old account of the smashing up of a demonstration of Russian workers by Cossacks’ (quoted in David Smith, Socialist Propaganda in the Twentieth-Century British Novel (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978), p. 49).
Quoted in Steven Fielding, ‘The Good War: 1939–1945’, in Nick Tiratsoo, ed., From Blitz to Blair: A New History of Britain since 1939, new edn (1997; London: Phoenix, 1998), p. 45.
Quoted in ibid., p. 48.
The mood created by Labour’s success in the 1945 election, and by the unity between the Party, unions and grassroots, was described by Hugh Dalton as ‘exalted, dedicated, walking on air, walking with destiny’ (quoted in Eric Shaw, The Labour Party since 1945: Old Labour: New Labour (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 19).
Jim Tomlinson, The Unequal Struggle? British Socialism and the Capitalist Enterprise (London and New York: Methuen, 1982), p. 63.
See Christopher M. Law, ‘Employment and Industrial Structure’, in James Obelkevich and Peter Catterall, eds, Understanding Post-War British Society (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 89.
Quoted in Morgan, Britain, pp. 466, 473; quoted in Sked and Cook, Post-War Britain, p. 33. See also Ray Hudson and Allan M. Williams, Divided Britain (London and New York: Belhaven Press, 1989), pp. 1–3.
Andy Croft, Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), pp. 28–9, 11.
Taylor, ‘Introduction’ to Taylor, ed., John Osborne: Look Back in Anger (London: Macmillan, 1968), p. 12. As a character in Murdoch’s Under the Net (1954) comments, ‘English socialism is perfectly worthy, but it’s not socialism. It’s welfare capitalism’ (Murdoch, Under the Net, p. 99).
Quoted in Maroula Joannou, ‘Sylvia Townsend Warner in the 1930s’, in Andy Croft, ed., A Weapon in the Struggle: The Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain (London and Sterling VA: Pluto Press, 1998), p. 103.
Stuart Laing, Representations of Working-Class Life 1957–1964 (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 59.
Eagleton and Pierce, Attitudes to Class in the English Novel from Walter Scott to David Storey (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), p. 130; Booker, The Modern British Novel of the Left: A Research Guide (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 3.
Von Rosenberg, ‘Militancy, Anger and Resignation: Alternative Moods in the Working-Class Novel of the 1950s and Early 1960s’, in H. Gustav Klaus, ed., The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), p. 148.
Quoted in John Heilpern, John Osborne: A Patriot for Us, new edn (2006; London: Vintage, 2007), p. 185.
Osborne, Look Back in Anger, new edn (1957; London: Faber and Faber, 1960), pp. 84–5. This sense of political vacuity was repeated in D.J. Enright’s comment that there is ‘little political excitement in Britain today’, in Thom Gunn’s notion that ‘[t]he agony of the time is that there is no agony’, in Amis’s claim that ‘when we shop around for an outlet we find there is nothing in stock: no Spain, no Fascism, no mass unemployment’ (quoted in Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 96).
Lessing, ‘The Small Personal Voice’, in Tom Maschler, ed., Declaration (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1957), pp. 21–2.
Ian Haywood, Working-Class Fiction: From Chartism to Trainspotting (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1997), p. 96.
Braine, Room at the Top, new edn (1957; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), pp. 24, 11, 14.
Ibid., p. 36. In a discussion of the novel, Hewison’s comment that ‘[o]nly Ian Fleming’s James Bond series are as brand conscious’ could have referred to Braine’s oeuvre as a whole (Hewison, In Anger, p. 135). See Braine, The Jealous God (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964), pp. 9–10; Braine, Stay with Me, p. 90; Braine, Vodi, p. 23; Braine, Two of Us, pp. 47, 60, 65; and Braine, Life at the Top, p. 95.
Fox, Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890–1945 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 17.
Quoted in John Kirk, Twentieth-Century Writing and the British Working Class (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), p. 53.
Quoted in Kirk, Twentieth-Century Writing, p. 54. ‘No real effort was made to eliminate, or even partially modify, the maldistribution of wealth and property which remained very pronounced in Britain after six years of supposedly socialist government’ (Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945–1951 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 493).
Quoted in Kenneth Allsop, The Angry Decade: A Survey of the Cultural Revolt of the Nineteen-Fifties, new edn (1958; Wendover: John Goodchild Publishers, 1985), p. 55; Amis, Memoirs, pp. 315, 315–16.
Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth Century British Working-Class Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1974), p. 2.
Eagleton and Pierce, Attitudes to Class, p. 15. For examples, see Stan Barstow, ‘The End of an Old Song’, in Barstow, The Desperadoes, new edn (1961; Bath: Cedric Chivers, 1973), pp. 32–9; Barstow, ‘The Desperadoes’, in Barstow, Desperadoes, pp. 204–8; Barry Hines A Kestrel for a Knave, new edn (1968; London: Penguin, 1969), pp. 122–4; Waterhouse, Happy Land, pp. 85–93, Bill Naughton, ‘Spiv in Love’, in Naughton, Late Night on Watling Street and Other Stories, new edn (1959; London: Panther Books, 1965), pp. 162–73; James Kelman, A Chancer, new edn (1985; London: Picador, 1987), p. 12; Sillitoe, ‘The Match’, in Sillitoe, Loneliness, pp. 111–15; Chaplin, Day of the Sardine, p. 59; and William McIlvanney, Docherty, new edn (1975; London: Sceptre, 1987), pp. 53–4.
Storey, This Sporting Life, new edn (1960; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 68. For Storey, an erstwhile rugby league player and the son of a mineworker, the sport was ‘almost a natural extension of the experience that a man undergoes in digging coal underground’ (quoted in Laing, Representations, p. 71). In this way, Storey’s accounts of the physical hardships of the game merge with his wider portraits of working-class poverty to create a harsh attack on the discourse of ‘affluence’ (see ibid., pp. 9, 47–8, 61–2, 163, 190).
Ortega, ‘Language’, p. 142. For accounts of upward mobility in working-class writing, see Barstow, A Kind of Loving, new edn (1960; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), pp. 125–6, 154; Barstow, Watchers, pp. 123, 135; Barstow, Right True End, pp. 81, 98; Barstow, Ask Me Tomorrow, pp. 17, 161; Hines, Blinder, pp. 7, 63; Naughton, Alfie, pp. 20–1; and Waterhouse, Billy Liar on the Moon, p. 7.
Knight, ‘How Red Was My Story’, Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, Vol. 98 (1993), p. 84.
Emecheta, Head above Water, new edn (1986; London: Flamingo, 1986), pp. 64, 76.
Emecheta, Adah’s Story, new edn (1972, 1974; London: Allison & Busby, 1983), pp. 9, 35.
Raven, September Castle, new edn (1983; London: Panther Books, 1985), pp. 260–1; West, Cousin Rosamund, new edn (1985; London: Virago, 1988), p. 5; Brookner, Family and Friends, p. 33. See also Wilson, Setting the World, p. 290; Brookner, Friend, p. 12; Tennant, Colour, p. 90; Lehmann, Echoing Grove, p. 204; Fitzgerald, Innocence, p. 27; Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head, new edn (1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 8; Fay Weldon, Little Sisters, new edn (1978; London: Sceptre, 1979), p. 200; and McEwan, Child in Time, p. 31.
Waterhouse, Billy Liar, new edn (1959; London: Penguin, 1962), pp. 91, 41, 23.
Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’, in Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: Volume I: An Age Like This 1920–1940, ed. by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, new edn (1968; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 562.
Quoted in Régine Robin, Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 11.
Smith, A Field of Folk (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1957), p. 228.
Doherty, The Man Beneath (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1957), p. 187.
Smith, Field of Folk, p. 230; Doherty, A Miner’s Sons (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1955), pp. 94, 136.
For criticism of the Labour Party and right-wing unions, see Smith, Field of Folk, pp. 142–3; Doherty, Man Beneath, p. 66; Doherty, Miner’s Sons, pp. 31, 108–9, 119; Jack Lindsay, Betrayed Spring (London: Bodley Head, 1953), pp. 82–3, 309; Jack Lindsay, Rising Tide (London: Bodley Head, 1953), pp. 84, 224; and Jack Lindsay, The Moment of Choice (London: Bodley Head, 1955), p. 32.
Selvon, The Lonely Londoners, new edn (1956; London: Longman, 1979), p. 24.
Ibid., p. 45. The further novels in Selvon’s loose ‘Moses Trilogy’, Moses Ascending (1975) and Moses Migrating (1983), see Moses become more conservative, achieving ownership of private property, condemning the Black Power movement and even becoming a propagandist for Britain. Other writers from the Caribbean were not unsympathetic in their portrayals of socialism and socialists: see Beryl Gilroy, Black Teacher (London: Cassell, 1976), pp. 61, 103; Beryl Gilroy, Boy-Sandwich, new edn (Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1989), p. 22; Sam Selvon, The Plains of Caroni (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1970), pp. 110, 129, 162–3; Selvon, Turn Again Tiger, new edn (1958; London: Heinemann, 1979), p. 7; Andrew Salkey, The Adventures of Catullus Kelly (London: Hutchinson, 1969), p. 76; Salkey, Late Emancipation, p. 24; George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin, new edn (1953; Harlow: Longman, 1986), pp. 92–3, 188–201; George Lamming, The Emigrants, new edn (1954; London and New York: Allison and Busby, 1980), p. 40; and Jean Rhys, ‘Fishy Waters’, in Rhys, Sleep It Off Lady (London: André Deutsch, 1976), pp. 45–7.
McMahon, ‘Marxist Fictions: The Novels of John Berger’, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 23, No. 2 (1982), p. 216.
Caute, The Occupation (London: André Deutsch, 1971), p. 10; Arden, Silence among the Weapons: Some Events at the Time of the Failure of a Republic (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 47.
Graham Holderness, ‘Miners and the Novel: From Bourgeois to Proletarian Fiction’, in Jeremy Hawthorn, ed., The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century (London: Edward Arnold, 1984), p. 32.
Wald, ‘Marxist Literary Resistance to the Cold War’, Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, Vol. 20 (1995), p. 487.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi (1979; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. xxiv; Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Oxford and Cambridge MA: Blackwell, 1992), p. 9.
Waugh, Practising Postmodernism/Reading Modernism (London and New York: Edward Arnold, 1993), p. 8.
See Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 93.
Federman, ‘Surfiction — Four Propositions in the Form of an Introduction’, in Federman, ed., Surfiction: Fiction Now … and Tomorrow (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975), p. 8.
Johnson, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, new edn (1973; London: Picador, 2001), pp. 11, 16.
Ibid., pp. 178, 82.
Durrell, Dark Labyrinth, p. 80; Carter, Several Perceptions, p. 34; Ian McEwan, ‘Preface’ to McEwan, Black Dogs, new edn (1992; London and Basingstoke: Picador, 1993), p. 18. As Weldon writes, ‘I daresay it is absurd to seek so patiently and earnestly after truth …. Truth in any case is no constant thing; it changes from day to day’ (Weldon, Leader of the Band, pp. 93–4).
Holmes, The Historical Imagination: Postmodernism and the Treatment of the Past in Contemporary British Fiction (Victoria: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 1997), p. 49.
Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in Hal Foster, ed., Postmodern Culture (London and Sydney: Pluto Press, 1989), p. 125; Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), p. 4; Jameson, ‘Postmodernism’, p. 125.
Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction 1950–1970 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), p. 16.
Ibid., p. 15.
Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 1987), p. 172.
Quoted in Sonya Andermahr, Jeanette Winterson (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 38.
Fowles, Magus, p. 539; Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, new edn (1969; London: Panther Books, 1971), p. 348.
Wilde, Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 116; McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, p. 220.
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© 2013 Andrew Hammond
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Hammond, A. (2013). From Socialism to Postmodernism. In: British Fiction and the Cold War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137274854_5
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