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Postwar Englishness in the Fiction of Pat Barker, Graham Swift and Adam

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Postwar Englishness in the Fiction of Pat Barker, Graham Swift and Adam POSTWAR ENGLISHNESS IN THE FICTION OF PAT BARKER, GRAHAM SWIFT AND ADAM THORPE INGRID JENNIFER GUNBY Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University ofLeeds, School ofEnglish, October 2002 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work ofothers. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. For my father, and the father he never knew. 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis could not have been written without the intellectual, emotional and financial help of many people and institutions. Of these, financial assistance is perhaps the easiest to specify, and I would like to thank the New Zealand Vice­ Chancellors' Committee, the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals, the University of Leeds, and the School of English for providing the funding that enabled me to undertake this research, and the Leeds University Union for assistance with nursery fees. Dr John McLeod's deft guidance played no small part in keeping a potentially unruly project under control, and his enthusiasm reinvigorated me at many moments when my own was flagging. Alistair Stead read Chapter One and was, as he always is, both rigorous and generous in his comments. My thinking on Pat Barker benefited early on from long discussions and the sharing of research resources with Roberta Jackson, whose own study on Barker I am eagerly awaiting. My fellow research students in the School of English have encouraged, commiserated and celebrated with me, and helped me out on occasions too numerous to count: special mention should go to Caroline Sumpter, Colin Winborn, Rob Ward and Richard Haw. Michael McDonald, meanwhile, provided a view of life outside the academy, and Sue Baker and Pamela Rhodes smoothed my encounters with the School's administrative machinery. My parents, David Gunby and Jenny Rockel, have been present in this project from the beginning in ways that may only now be dawning on them, and have helped me, in every way, to see it to completion. But my biggest debts are to Oscar and Harry, who have seen much less of me over the last year than they would have liked, and to Mel Kersey, who has held everything together during a difficult final year and who, simply, makes it all worthwhile. 11 ABSTRACT The widely-recognised crisis of Englishness in the 1980s and 1990s has generally been explained as a response to the end of empire. If the place of memories of the First and Second World Wars in this crisis has been considered at all, these have generally been assumed to support a nostalgic version of English or British national identity. Taking three contemporary British novelists-Graham Swift, Pat Barker and Adam Thorpe-as examples, however, this thesis argues that the late-twentieth­ century memory of these conflicts is strikingly ambivalent, and that the contemporary crisis of Englishness must be understood not only as postcolonial, but also, in a strong sense, as postwar. The Introduction sets out the parameters of critical discussion of late­ twentieth-century Englishness to date and explains my use of the term 'postwar', as marking the continuing cultural legacy of the world wars, and the process of interrogative re-reading of that legacy undertaken in the contemporary fiction I discuss. It also challenges the assumption that 'nostalgia' and a 'healthy' attitude to the past can necessarily be easily distinguished, through a discussion of post­ Freudian psychoanalytic approaches to mourning and melancholia. Chapter One considers three writers of the early to mid-twentieth century, Siegfried Sassoon, J. B. Priestley, and Elizabeth Bowen, in order to suggest the nature of the questions about Englishness, war and violence which re-emerge with the breakdown of Britain's postwar social and political consensus from the mid-1970s onward. Chapter Two then discusses Graham Swift's early novels, The Sweet Shop Owner, Shuttlecock and Waterland, arguing that critical attention to his metafictional concerns in Waterland has meant that his interest in suburban English life as encrypting memories of war has been overlooked. Chapter Three proceeds to Pat Barker's The Regeneration Trilogy, charting a two-way process of haunting through which contemporary concerns with violence are read back into the historical and literary record of the First World War, and simultaneously seem to re-emerge in the present as the return of the violence underpinning a melancholic cultural attachment to the very English narrative of 'doomed youth'. My discussion in Chapter Four of Adam Thorpe's novels Ulverton, Still and Pieces of Light emphasises their exploration of the violence at the heart of the 'deep England' evoked in heritage representations of Englishness. I suggest, however, that Thorpe's attempts to find appropriate fictional forms for ambivalence and melancholia are at times closer to paralysed repetitions than to interrogations of Englishness. My argument concludes with a reading of Swift's Last Orders, which I contend enacts the beginnings of a movement beyond the wartime end of a certain England and Englishness. Its misreading by critics as parochial and nostalgic, I suggest, indicates the extent of critical misunderstanding of the troubled memory of the world wars in contemporary Britain. It also testifies to the difficulty and the necessity of the creative and critical work on postwar Englishness undertaken by the writers considered in this study. 111 CONTENTS Acknow ledgements 1 Abstract 11 Contents 111 Introduction 1 Paths Around Absence Chapter One 26 Unfinished Business: The Loss and Renewal of 'England' in Narratives of War Chapter Two 77 'Something Left Over from the War': The Early Novels of Graham Swift Chapter Three 130 'We Are Your Ghosts': The Regeneration Trilogy and the Uses of Gothic Chapter Four 178 'Dying of England': The Novels of Adam Thorpe Chapter Five 230 Last Orders? Conclusion 247 Bibliography 251 1 INTRODUCTION PATHS AROUND ABSENCE 'To be English', writes Ian Baucom in his recent study of Englishness during and after empire, 'is, often, to be a member of a cult of the dead, or, at the very least, a member of a cult of ruin'. 1 Baucom's was only one among many voices, in the popular media as well as the academic presses, charting the travails of Englishness as the twentieth century closed and the twenty-first opened. For many of these observers, noting laments for 'England gone' from Philip Larkin's 'Going, Going' through V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival to Roger Scruton's recent, and unapologetically-named, England: An Elegy, the key characteristic of contemporary Englishness is nostalgia. 2 For the English, Baucom writes, nostalgia is no mere 'sentimental attitude', but 'an injunctive politics ofretum' to the true nation. Indeed, David Gervais has asked whether, without nostalgia, there would be any versions of England at all. 3 Diagnoses of the cause of this national malaise have tended to lOut of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 175. 2 Larkin, 'Going, Going', in Collected Poems, ed. by Anthony Thwaite (London: Marvell and Faber, 1988), p. 190, Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (London: Penguin, 1987), Scruton, England: An Elegy (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000). 3 Baucom, p. 176, Gervais, Literary Englands: Versions of 'Englishness' in Modern Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 4. For further representative examples of this view of Englishness, see Antony Easthope, Englishness and National Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen, 1987), Roy Porter, 'Introduction', in Myths of the English, ed. by Roy Porter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 1-11 (p. 2), Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985). Although Wright and Hewison's 2 concentrate on the impact on Britain of the end of empire, devolution, and European integration: as the meaning of Britishness shifts, albeit unevenly and with extreme reluctance, to accommodate the loss of Britain's empire, postwar immigration and increased Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish autonomy, so-the argument goes- Englishness's complicated embrace of and differentiation from Britishness has been exposed. The casual equation of England with Britain that was common fifty, or even thirty, years ago can no longer be made so easily. But the relationship between the two terms is still not a clear one. 'English' can specifically denote an identity separate from, even opposed to, Britishness.4 'British' can mean a composite identity shared by the English, Scots, Welsh and (more complexly and problematically) the Irish. But 'British' can also refer to 'the dominant particularism within Britain, that of "Britain" itself, often referred to as "England"'. 5 In a classic analysis of the English problem, first published in 1977, Tom Nairn argues that the lack of a viable English national identity is a consequence of the end of empire--of which the 'break-up of Britain' is the final phase.6 Having titles refer to Britain, it is really the English 'national past' with which they are concerned: Neal Ascherson's assertion that heritage is a manifestation of 'vulgar English nationalism' only makes this more than usually explicit (in Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994), p. 262). 4 John Fowles makes such a distinction in his essay 'On Being English But Not British' (1964), in Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings, ed. by Jan Relf (London: Cape, 1998), pp.
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