Brexit and the Decline of the English Novel

DAVID MARTIN JONES Brexit and the Decline of the English Novel fter the June 2016 referendum, novels about tan literature or to attentive and responsive liter- what had happened began to appear on ary scholarship” things take a distinctly Orwellian best-seller lists and the shelves of British turn. It has “stirred up a terrifying political dis- bookshops.A Brexlit addressed “the mind-bending course” where “opponents of Brexit are described as horror of Brexit”. It explored not only the politi- saboteurs or enemies of the people”, Eaglestone tells cal cleavage between Remain and Leave voters, but us. His fellow professors of contemporary litera- “deep cultural and attitudinal divisions” that will, ture and European thought at the universities inter the Guardian argued, “animate British politics for alia of East Anglia, Kent, Dublin, Warwick and the decades to come”. LSE agree. Tomas Docherty considers Brexit “an Te horror of the long-drawn-out crisis comes assault upon the intellect”. Michael Gardiner asserts with a political health warning. Fintan O’Toole that Brexiteers use “anachronism as a weapon” to thinks the Brexit vote was informed by “a strange disrupt our “neo-liberal present”. More specifcally, sense of imaginary oppression”. Voting Leave on a Lyndsey Stonebridge considers Brexit stupid: “Men ballot paper, he says, was the white racist equiva- too stupid to think about the consequences of their lent “of scratching the name of England on their action tricked the British into making a fatally arms to prove their love”. James Graham, discuss- stupid decision.” In Stonebridge’s judicious assess- ing his Brexit docudrama Te Uncivil War, thought ment, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage “took evident that David Cameron called the 2016 referendum pleasure in performing their twitfuckery” upon the believing he inhabited one reality only to fnd the unsuspecting British people. electorate lived in a diferent one, “dominated by Summing up the views of the professoriate, anger, populism and anti-establishment sentiment Baroness Young of Hornsey fnds Brexit an “exis- that had been bubbling away under the surface. It tential mire” that the “creative mind” must work just erupted and the volcano has not stopped spew- through via “the insightful and valiant eforts” ing.” Given the British preference for social analysis of novelists like Ali Smith, Andrew Cartwright, in novel form, how might Brexlit help us negoti- Jonathan Coe, Rachel Cusk, Olivia Laing, Sam ate what Graham considers the current “national Byers and Douglas Board, all of whom discuss the trauma”? consequences of Brexit in a variety of genres, rang- English fction, from Charles Dickens to George ing from auto fction to social novels and political Orwell, has frequently provided a more compel- satire. ling insight into the “condition of England” ques- tion than the polysyllabic howl of sociologists. li Smith’s Autumn (2016) was “the frst sig- In a recent edited volume, Brexit and Literature: nifcant post Brexit novel”. Long-listed for the Critical and Cultural Responses (2018), Robert ABooker Prize, it opens in sub-Dickensian mode: “It Eaglestone, Professor of Contemporary Literature was the worst of times. It was the worst of times.” at the University of London, observes that litera- Through the not very compelling relationship ture broadens our ability “to think, feel and argue”. between Elisabeth, a young lecturer in art history Consequently, fction might aford “an especially and her dementia-ridden ageing mentor, Daniel, useful and appropriate way to address political argu- Smith refects upon the recent past and the disturb- ments about national identity which lie at the heart ing present condition of England. A week after the of Brexit”. 2016 referendum, Elisabeth fnds her mother’s vil- So far so good. When, however, the professor lage in “a sullen state”—“Go Home” in black capitals says that Brexit “is no friend to creative cosmopoli- adorns the local bus shelter. Her mother is tired of Quadrant September 2019 93 Brexit and the Decline of the English Novel “the vitriol, the anger, the meanness”, as well as the sive writer, she commutes between London, Rome “violence”, which somewhat inconveniently, “hasn’t and New York, attending literary conferences. happened yet”. Although living the literary high life, Kathy Since Brexit, the UK has disintegrated: hates “living at the end of the world”. Anticipating the coming apocalypse: “she was fairly certain that All across the country people felt it was the by the time she was an old lady they’d be eating out wrong thing. All across the country, people felt of rubbish dumps, sheltering from a broiling impos- it was the right thing … All across the country sible sun. It was all done, it was over, there wasn’t people looked up Google: what is EU? All any hope.” Like liberals everywhere, “she missed across the country people looked up Google: Obama. Everyone missed Obama. She missed the move to Scotland. All across the country people sense of time as something serious and diminishing. looked up Google: Irish passport applications. She didn’t like living in the permanent present of All across the country people felt unsafe … All the id”, despite the fact that Kathy serves up noth- across the country people drew swastika grafti ing but the angry id of liberal narcissism. … All across the country racist bile was general Analysing the referendum, she finds that: … All across the country, everything changed “People were told Brexit would be good, so they overnight. voted for Brexit and now all the EU citizens would be sent home, according to a leaked document.” She A few months later, “a bunch of thugs” in the assumes that “Jacob Rees-Mogg would be the next street outside Elisabeth’s London fat chant: Prime Minister, he went on Good Morning Britain and explained pleasantly that he thought abortion Britannia rules the waves. First, we’ll get the should be illegal even for rape and that he would Poles. And then we’ll get the Muslims. Ten like to ban gay marriage.” we’ll get the gyppos, then the gays. You lot are on Consequently, Kathy: the run and we’re coming after you, a right-wing spokesman had shouted at a female MP on a hated everything … it was all so tawdry, the panel on Radio 4 earlier that same Saturday. Te endless malice of the polite right … At the chair of the panel didn’t … even acknowledge weekend she was going to a party with people the threat. who had openly praised Enoch Powell, at the weekend she was going to a party with people Such an unlikely response from the national who had said of refugees crossing to Greece, it’s broadcaster suggests the author herself might ridiculous, they should just bomb the boats. inhabit a parallel reality. It is one all the Brexit novelists share. Anger at the “No” vote and the threat In alt-paranoid style, Kathy contemplates a bleak it presents to their borderless worldview pervades future: Brexlit. Indignation comes naturally to the self-indul- run by strongmen, she saw the poorer nations of gent contemporary genre of auto fction practised the world obliterated by climate change, she saw by Olivia Laing and Rachel Cusk. Tus, Times the liberal democracy in which she had grown best-selling author and Guardian columnist Olivia up revealed as fragile beyond measure, a brief Laing’s Crudo introduces the reader to her alter ego, experiment in the bloody history of man … she Kathy, engaging in an apocalyptic rant about the knew she shouldn’t read the paper, but she snuck state of the post-Brexit world. Laing’s Kathy is a looks from the minute she woke up … How’s fctionalised, Anglicised version of the 1980s New the car-crash of Brexit proceeding, how are they York punk author Kathy Acker, who lived fast and getting along with changing all the country’s died youngish. Acker wrote largely forgotten paeans laws in secret, how much do we hate foreigners to Blood and Guts in High School (1984), masturba- today, who’s winning? Kathy … was riven by tion, body piercing and sado-masochism. Even the despair. New York Times considered that she “raised literary masturbation to an anti-art form”. Laing’s expur- Whilst Olivia Laing’s Kathy surfs a wave of gated version of a reborn Kathy ofers her millennial liberal dread, Rachel Cusk’s Kudos explores her readership sanitised, snowfake-sensitive, literary fictional alter ego, Faye, a successful feminist masturbation. writer’s encounters with fellow writers at an Laing’s Kathy is “avant-garde, middle-class-in- expenses-paid conference in an unnamed European fight”, but she “did not like the bourgeoisie”. Now a country. Cusk thinks that “character” doesn’t “exist forty-something successful but impeccably progres- anymore”. Instead Faye passively records random 94 Quadrant September 2019 Brexit and the Decline of the English Novel conversations. One is with a “Welsh writer”, who intones, “cos we are. You want to know why? Need observes patronisingly: “the people who lived in to be told. Ten fuck of.” “Britain’s Great. End of.” the most helpless poverty and ugliness were those BG’s preferred rallying ground is the Den, home to who had voted most overwhelmingly for Brexit, and Millwall, an unfashionable football club known for nowhere was that truer than his own small country”. its London dockland fans’ past links to the National It was, he states, “an act of collective self-harm”, “a Front. BG adopts the club supporters’ chant: “No case of turkeys voting for Christmas”. one likes us. We don’t care.” Te heady cocktail of Te Welsh proles are stupid. Te writer knows British identity politics combined with an assault of: on fnancial capital proves irresistible.

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