Narrating the Past: Historiography, Memory and the Contemporary Novel

Narrating the Past Historiography, Memory and the Contemporary Novel

Alan Robinson

Narrating the Past

Also by Alan Robinson: IMAGINING LONDON, 1770–1900 INSTABILITIES IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH POETRY POETRY, PAINTING AND IDEAS, 1885–1914 SYMBOL TO VORTEX: Poetry, Painting and Ideas, 1885–1914 (US edition)

Narrating the Past Historiography, Memory and the Contemporary Novel Alan Robinson

© Alan David Robinson 2011 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 2011 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 978–0–230–23593–9 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 Robinson, Alan, 1957– Narrating the past : historiography, memory and the contemporary novel / Alan Robinson. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978–0–230–23593–9 (alk. paper) 1. Fiction—History and criticism. 2. Historiography. 3. Narration (Rhetoric) 4. Memory in literature. 5. History in literature. I. Title. PN3343.R6 2011 809.3'81—dc22 2011012463 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Esther

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Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Preface Part One

x Historiography and Fiction

1 The Narrative Turn in History

3

2 The Historical Turn in Fiction

25

Part Two Issues in Practice 3 History, Life-Writing and Epistemology

57

4 National Stories

84

5 Present Pasts in Neo-Victorian Fiction

120

6 Gothic Afterlives

150

7 After the Event

170

Notes

193

Index

216

vii

Acknowledgements Among the pleasures in concluding a lengthy project is the opportunity to thank colleagues, friends and family, who all helped substantially to bring this book to publication. I’m very grateful to the organisers of the Literary London 2008 conference at Brunel University, in particular Lawrence Phillips, Phil Tew and Nick Hubble, for inviting me to give a plenary lecture in which material in Chapters 5 and 6 was first presented. I would also like to express my gratitude for the support which I have received at the University of St Gallen: a reduced teaching load in autumn 2009 and sabbatical semester in spring 2010; an efficient library whose staff are unfailingly friendly, responsive to research needs and instantaneous in book-ordering (here Malgorzata Ratajski deserves a special mention); and the very congenial team spirit which characterises the English Department. Doris Zängerle, my secretary for over twenty years, could, as ever, be relied on beyond the call of duty whenever help was needed. Over the years much of the thinking which developed into the book has been occasioned by preparing seminars and lecture series at the university. In particular, my loyal public-lecture audience, who trek to campus each Tuesday evening come snow or shine, have played a greater role in enabling this book than they realise. They have become a much-appreciated part of my life in St Gallen. At Palgrave Macmillan I am grateful to Paula Kennedy for commissioning the book and for her enthusiasm for the project from the outset and to Ben Doyle, Nick Brock and Linda Auld for efficiently steering the manuscript through production. Rachel Potter and Anna Green kindly sent me their valuable essays, on Iain Sinclair and on memory respectively. Several friends and colleagues read part or all of the draft manuscript and provided helpful feedback which considerably improved the final version; any remaining errors are, of course, my own. Robert Bartlett and John Davis gave Chapter 1 their expert appraisal as historians; Michael Wheeler offered specialist advice with Chapter 5; Roy Sellars has grappled with the whole thing as it evolved. His intellectual acuity and scholarly camaraderie have been crucial factors in the successful completion of this book. Friends and family in Switzerland, the UK and India have done much to sustain authorial spirits. My father, Norman Robinson, did not live viii

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to see the manuscript completed but remained a presence in the background while I was writing. My greatest debts, as always, are to my three wonderful daughters, Perdita, Chloe and Käte, and, above all, to my wife, Esther. She was the invaluable, incisive first critic of every draft and, with my daughters, gave the affection and encouragement which kept this project going. It is thus her book as well as mine and I dedicate it to her with love.

Part of Chapter 3 was first published as ‘Alias Laura: Representations of the Past in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin’, Modern Language Review, 101.2 (April 2006). I am grateful to the Modern Humanities Research Association for permission to reprint this copyright material.

Preface Interest in the narrative representation of the past, in both historiography and historical fiction, has mushroomed since the 1960s. But discussions often reveal the mutual incomprehension of historians and literary scholars.1 This study therefore aims to bridge the disciplinary divide by examining theoretical and methodological issues in making sense of the past which are shared by all forms of historical narrative. It differs from other criticism of historical fiction, which usually divides the genre into thematic or formal categories, in focusing on the explicit or implicit historiographical assumptions of historical novelists. In other words, I approach historical fiction as a form of history in its own right, which confronts similar cognitive and imaginative challenges to those faced by historians. My guiding assumption is that both history and historical fiction project an anachronistic narrative world, whose model of reality depends on the ‘cognitive asymmetry’ between present inquiry and past experience.2 This involves several narrative levels and interpretive aspects. First, with the aid but also the limitations of hindsight, the author connects selected states, events and actions from the past into an emplotment, which offers an explanation of how a significant transformation came about.3 In its presuppositions, the emplotment is shaped by the author’s norms and values and his or her assumptions about the causal factors which influence occurrences. This authorial interpretation constructs the present past, that is, a mental representation of what, from our present perspective, is now taken to have been the nature of the past; its subjective propositions about the past are, however, only provisionally valid and open to constant revision.4 Second, within this overarching emplotment are embedded the subworlds of historical agents, who, under uncertainty, with bounded rationality, and subject to various constraints, seek to make sense of and act in the narrative world which represents past actuality. Their immanent perspective, ignorant of the eventual outcome, is that of the past present; their anticipatory planning is directed towards the past future. Third, through immersion in this narrative world, readers are led to experience vicariously the competing possibilities of how things might turn out, as they enter empathetically into the characters’ projections of the virtual future they conceive and seek to realise, and themselves speculate x

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on how things will end, before the gradual elimination of alternatives culminates in a resolution which retrospectively reveals or clarifies the import of events.5 Part One of the book expounds cognate aspects of historiography, historical fiction and life-writing, first from the disciplinary perspective of history, then from that of literary studies. This analytical framework provides a compact digest of the major features of historical narrative. Chapter 1 reviews for non-specialists salient developments in historiography and the philosophy of history since the 1960s. It explores how the past has a virtual afterlife in the present, analyses postmodernist controversies about our knowledge of the past, clarifies the importance of the structure/agency debate for explaining historical actions, and finally considers the narrative challenges involved in reconciling past and present perspectives. Chapter 2 establishes the generic features of historical fiction, noting its affinities with and distinctions from history. It then extends the previous chapter’s action-oriented approach to historical narrative by investigating emplotment and plotting at different narrative levels. These are linked to narrative temporality through my examination of the time-boundedness of meaning, and of counterfactuality and virtuality in alternative, nonactualised past futures. I then discuss how historical fiction tries to combine micro and macro levels of analysis and representation in models both of causation and of the reciprocal interaction of individual agency and social structure, in the context of historical change. Finally, I explore the ontological convergence of past and present in the anachronistic narrative worlds of historical fiction and in their reception by readers. Part Two applies this framework in five chapter-length case studies of key recent novels, selected to exemplify important thematic and methodological concerns. Given the voluminous output of historical fiction, exhaustive coverage would be impossible; I have, however, addressed its major varieties, in discussing representative realist, magic realist, metafictional and fantastic texts. Most attention is given to novels which, however experimentally, engage with the realist tradition, as I argue that what is most distinctive in historical fiction is the attempt to interpret and represent the complexity and significance of human actions as they unfold in time, are enabled and constrained by social structure and environmental conditions, and affected by unforeseen circumstances, unexpected events, unintended consequences and the interventions of other agents. Although each case study emphasises a different aspect of narrating the past, there is inevitably some overlap, as some thematic preoccupations

xii Preface

have dominated recent historical fiction and certain issues are so central to historical narrative as to recur in virtually all texts. Thus, trauma is a major topic in Chapters 3, 4, 6 and 7, as are re-imaginings of world wars in Chapters 3, 4 and 7; individual memory plays a crucial role in the fictional or semi-autobiographical self-narratives discussed in Chapters 3, 4 and 7, as does collective memory in Chapter 6. Conceptually, the tension between self-determination and forms of external necessity appears an integral element of historical representation; equally, all novels discussed construct an anachronistic present past influenced by present-day interests, with varying success in recreating or recuperating a plausible past present. Chapter 3 investigates knowledge in and of the past in two fictional autobiographies cum family histories: Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin and Graham Swift’s Waterland. It emphasises less epistemological issues per se than unreliable narration and ethical dilemmas in these self-justifying, memorial (re)constructions of traumatic events. Chapter 4 analyses, in the context of their authors’ other writings, three representations of nations as imagined communities: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance and Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! Foregrounding the reciprocal interaction between society and the individual, and hence the structure/agency debate, I compare how they emplot the breakdown of the post-Independence or postwar socialist consensus. At the same time, I relate their ideological positioning and implications for social practice to the authors’ adoption of magic realist, metafictional and/or realist conventions. Chapter 5 examines how the Victorian present past constructed by neo-Victorian novels is shaped by their historical moment of production. John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, A.S. Byatt’s Possession and Sarah Waters’s Affinity exemplify evolving responses to sociohistorical developments and historiographic and literary critical fashions from 1969 to 1999. As anachronistically hybrid texts, they illustrate the difficulty of representing the alterity of the past and, conversely, how Victorian issues are appropriated for their perceived current relevance, or present-day concerns are projected onto a purportedly Victorian screen. The pragmatic functions served by neo-Victorian fiction are the topic of Chapter 6. It shows how Peter Ackroyd’s and Iain Sinclair’s historiographical assumptions minimise the scope for agency and hence change, emphasising instead cyclical recurrence and traumatic repetition, and how, by perpetuating the pathologisation of London’s East End, their Gothic fantasies influence current constructions of the area.

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Chapter 7 explores the issue of belatedness in Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and related works, connecting it not only to their representations of trauma but also to their authors’ historical situation in engaging, after the event, with the established mythography of the Great War and the Holocaust. While Barker’s novels are read primarily as fictionalising the gender concerns that emerged in historical accounts from the mid 1980s onwards, Sebald’s work is interpreted as a complex, ethically troubling interweaving of memorial (re)construction and projected afterthoughts. Criticism of historical novels is still dominated by the model of historiographic metafiction. But, after the heyday of postmodernist selfreflexivity in the 1980s, this is now outdated; it is also inadequately narrow in reducing historiography to epistemological issues and in neglecting the crucial importance of temporality in the interplay between past present and past future and present past. While not minimising the cognitive difficulties in (re)constructing past activities, or the frequent distortions of memory, I propose that modish allegations of the unknowability or sublime unrepresentability of the past are belied by ordinary experience. Indeed, a bizarre feature of academic criticism is that influential claims about the ineluctable absence of the past, which are unquestioningly accepted in the context of historiographic metafiction, coexist incompatibly with discourses of spectrality, the uncanny, trauma, photographic postmemory and cultural memory, which all stress the persistent afterlife of the past. Like constructionist historiography, historical fiction faces hermeneutic challenges in attempting to re-enact or resurrect the past present memorialised in textual relics. But it can supplement cognitive inquiry with empathetic engagement, in evoking into virtual existence a former possible world which takes place in present consciousness as the present past of our mental representations. Atwood, for example, balances historiographic self-consciousness with a conception of narrative as motivated by the desire ‘to bring something or someone back from the dead’ through the posthumous ‘life of a sort [which] can be bestowed by writing’.6 Byatt’s Possession counters poststructuralist anti-foundationalism with Romantic historiography, celebrating the power of linguistic mimesis to reanimate the imagined past in factually informed but fictive narratives which evoke for readers the illusion of a real presence. Sebald remarks that ‘You establish a presence in another life through emotional identification. And it doesn’t matter how far back that is in time. [...] And if you only have a few scraps of information

xiv Preface

about a certain sixteenth-century painter, if you are sufficiently interested, it nevertheless allows you to be present in that life or to retrieve it into the present present, as it were’.7 After more than two decades of historiographic metafiction, the time has come not naively to dismiss epistemological challenges but to recognise that within literary studies their significance for our negotiations with the past has been massively overstated and the imaginary presence of the past in history and memory correspondingly underplayed.

Part One Historiography and Fiction

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1 The Narrative Turn in History

The question of whether ‘the discipline of history is essentially a narrative mode of knowing, understanding, explaining and reconstructing the past’ has been described as ‘the most important and central debate in the philosophy of history since the 1960s’.1 As this debate has developed, historiography has undergone a linguistic turn inspired by structuralist and poststructuralist thought, leading to the emergence of so-called postmodernist history.2 Since the 1980s this has had a considerable impact on how literary scholars and novelists have thought about the past, provoking a historical turn evident in new historicism and the emergence of historiographic metafiction. Literary scholars have, however, devoted disproportionate attention to limited aspects of historiography. Popularising Hayden White, they have celebrated the supposed assimilation of history to fiction, and emphasised the situatedness of historical discourse and its connections with hegemonic power. But they have neglected several fundamental issues common to historiography and historical fiction. Some involve the imaginative and cognitive experience and narrative handling of time, particularly the anachronism which characterises historical consciousness: in what form can the past be said to exist in the present; how, through focalisation and voice, does the author reconcile her retrospective knowledge of the outcome and her ostensibly synoptic view with the partial, immanent perspective of historical agents or characters; how are anticipation and retrospection also integral to the dynamics of the reading process? Related to these are the challenges of understanding and explaining the meaningful action of other human beings: to what extent, through intentionality and conscious and unconscious motivation, do historical agents and literary characters express self-determining agency and to what extent are their lives conditioned by structural 3

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Narrating the Past

constraints or shaped by contingency; how is this modelled by plotting and emplotment in fiction and history? In exploring these key issues, this chapter on historiography and its counterpart, Chapter 2, on historical fiction, provide a critical terminology and a theoretical and methodological framework for the case studies of historical fiction in Chapters 3–7. First, I consider the various forms in which vestiges of the past survive. I then set out what is entailed in constructing an interpretation of these into a narrative, that is, ‘a representation of a sequence of [temporally unfolding] non-randomly connected actions and/or events’, thereby making history.3 The third section addresses the conceptual options open to historians and historical novelists, in explaining the interaction between historical agents and their social environment. Finally, I examine the narrative negotiation between past and present perspectives.

Anachronism: the present past As creatures living in time, humans are constantly in transition from the elusive present into a future which itself soon becomes the everreceding past. Understandably, we deal with this temporal dislocation by seeking to preserve, retrieve, reinterpret or appropriate past experience. In its original actuality, as it once was, the past is inaccessible. Nevertheless, we are daily surrounded by the manifold traces of earlier activities, to whose former existence they thus bear witness. In semiotic terms, we can think of these as signifiers which stand for the signified, ‘the past’; this mental representation is pragmatically assumed to correspond to a non-linguistic reality or referent. Signifiers of the past can be physical or immaterial. As individuals, we carry the legacy of our past with us in the scars, wrinkles, synaptic links, physiological habitus and so on through which our experiential duration is inscribed on our ageing bodies. Likewise, the longue durée of the natural environment and the longevity of human artefacts, in both of which an earlier age took form, means that this former time still occupies a place in the present. Time spans of different extent, and varying temporal rhythms of historical change, thus constantly overlap in our perceptual experience. This is also manifest in the perpetual coexistence of successive human generations, rendering society ‘a community of time as well as of space’.4 Immaterial signifiers of the past include individual memory and a shared cultural memory (explored in Chapters 6 and 7); these permit the transgenerational transmission and inheritance of values, norms and social practices. Amnesia resulting from illness or ageing indicates

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5

how indispensable an awareness of one’s past is to the individual’s sense of identity and ability to orient herself in daily life; similar importance attaches to the actual or invented traditions and collective memory of social groups and nations, as imagined communities with a consensual ‘national story’.5 Autobiographical memories – represented in the fictional autobiographies discussed in Chapters 3, 5 and 7 – highlight two important common features of life-writing and historiography. The first is the epistemological issue of the accuracy of our truth-claims and narrative accounts of the past, given that the historical self, like the actual past, now exists only in subjective representations. A self-narrative, like a historical narrative, purports to be a truthful reconstruction of how the present came to exist in its actual form but is perhaps merely a plausible construction or fabrication. It derives from memories of varying reliability and authenticity in which a remembering self now recalls (and narrates) a remembered self which is taken to correspond to the historical self that was alive at the time.6 On the one hand, the benefit of hindsight offers the opportunity for an honest confrontation with one’s past, aided by the possible clarity of chronological distance from the emotional and perceptual confusion with which the events were originally experienced. On the other hand, it offers the opportunity for inconsistencies, embarrassments, hesitations, failures or mistakes to be edited out of the record, as in retouched photographs. The extent to which such (un)conscious manipulation takes place will depend on the audience to whom the narrative is addressed and the personality of the narrator. In any case, as Jerome Bruner has emphasised, life-writing has less to do with verifiability than with ‘verisimilitude’ (lifelikeness) and subjective plausibility, in which one’s past may be (un)consciously adjusted to create an illusion of continuity or consistency by minimising or rationalising cognitive dissonance. To what extent these qualifications also apply to historiography will be discussed later. The second common feature is ontological: if, through memory, we believe we can, at this moment, summon up the past, what is this ‘present past’, and where does it come into existence? It is a commonplace that we view the past through the filtering lens of our present interests; the range of what we see is accordingly restricted by this viewfinder, which focuses selectively on only part of the much larger potential field of vision. An alternative metaphor would picture the memory or historical inquiry as shining a torch beam into a dark, disused lumber room; certain objects are highlighted, others remain half-illuminated on the shadowy margins or completely invisible. As the questions we ask of the past change, dictated

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by institutional fashion, paradigm shifts, or the need to investigate the antecedents or precedents of pressing social problems, so what we perceive and recognise as the usable past undergoes constant revision and reinterpretation. Thus, in the 1960s attempts to rescue marginalised groups from what E.P. Thompson termed ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ favoured the expansion of social history.7 Under the influence of poststructuralist and postcolonialist critiques of institutional power, which interrogated by whom, for whom, in whose interests, and with what exclusions the dominant versions of history were written, ‘history from below’ came to include women’s history, gender history, ethnic history and subaltern history. As the content of history was extended, so its conceptual foundations were transformed by poststructuralist theories which in the 1980s led to the gradual displacement of social history by cultural history. Identity politics also encouraged many groups to seek to legitimise their standpoint by reconstructing its history. In addition, accelerating social and technological transformation, the late-capitalist culture of obsolescence, the end of the Cold War and repeated commemoration of the Second World War have generated enormous public interest in the recuperation of the personal and local past through memorialisation. This cultural nostalgia, evident also in the vogue for heritage preservation, has been commercialised in retro fashions and advertising, and in innumerable films, television documentaries and costume dramas; it underpins the neo-Victorian fiction discussed in Chapters 5 and 6. Following Reinhart Koselleck, one can term the latest or dominant version of these historiographical makeovers the present past, denoting the imagined pre-existence in a previous era of what we now take to have been the nature of that past. Koselleck’s point goes beyond the evolution of trends in historical interpretation, however, to encompass our experience of time. Koselleck notes that the present could be regarded as a vanishing point on the axis of time, the point of intersection at which the future becomes the past. Alternatively, one could argue that at any given moment several dimensions of time coexist in present consciousness: ‘All time is present […] For the future is not yet and the past no more. The future exists only as the present future, the past only as the present past. The three dimensions of time come together in the presence of human existence’. This perspective could be extended backwards to include ‘a past present with its past pasts and its past futures’ and forwards to include ‘a future present with future past and future future’.8 This implies that, although the experiential actuality of the past is irrecoverable, irredeemably absent, nevertheless in present

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consciousness a projected past exists in the virtual reality of our mental representations. This imaginary space, in which the hypothesised past now takes place, may be evoked by all historical narratives, whether fictional, counterfactual or aspiring to be factual. The afterlife of the past may be desired or feared.9 Awareness of its inhibiting potential to constrain innovation can be exemplified by the Ancient–Modern controversy; by Emerson’s critiques of Americans’ filial veneration and imitation of the European cultural heritage, anticipating Harold Bloom’s thesis of belatedness and the ‘anxiety of influence’: ‘Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers’; and by Nietzsche’s emphasis on the importance of individual and cultural forgetting, to prevent a morbid excess of historical consciousness.10 The involuntary intrusion of a spectral past that defies exorcism ranges from the return of the repressed in traumatic flashbacks or the Gothic imaginary of unappeasable ghosts and vampirish undead (compare Chapters 6 and 7), to psychological forms of repetition, such as unconscious transference or the defence mechanisms of neurotic compulsions. Conversely, the virtual existence of the past may be deliberately reinvoked by monuments, memorabilia and architectural revivalism, enacted in rituals of commemoration, or stimulated nostalgically by the endurance of buildings and other artefacts which harbour accrued memories to which one has grown accustomed. The concreteness of such anachronistic survivals can arouse the illusion that through their tangible presence one might somehow be able to touch the past or, through their musty odour, inspire the atmosphere or aura of a bygone era. As in spiritualism and the necromantic rites of many cultures, the desire, whether pious, conscience-stricken or melancholy, is to commune with the dead and gain wisdom, make atonement, or restore what had been believed lost. A major emotional impetus for the historical imagination is thus the imaginative and cognitive aspiration to resurrect a former age: the new historicist Stephen Greenblatt remarks, ‘I began with the desire to speak with the dead’; this is a major theme of A.S. Byatt’s Possession, discussed in Chapter 5.11 But relics remain inert matter until we breathe our reanimating life into them, mute until we give them a voice by projecting an interpretation or assigning a meaning to them. For although we might wish to bring the past back to life, we have no unmediated access to what once was and cannot transcend the bounds of our own subjectivity. This awareness inevitably directs attention from ontological issues to epistemological questions: what can we know of the past and how can this knowledge be organised into narrative form?

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Narrating the Past

Making history or making up history? As an academic discipline, history has affinities with both literature and the social sciences. Its scientific pretensions were reasserted in attempts from the 1940s to the mid-1960s to extend to history the covering-law model of scientific explanation (even though history deals with single, unrepeatable events which arguably exhibit probabilistic regularities but cannot be generalised into empirically testable laws with predictive force). Since the early 1970s, its literary orientation has been reaffirmed by the structuralist and poststructuralist ‘metahistory’ proposed by Hayden White. White was reacting against the then fashionable models of ‘scientific history’, evident in neo-Marxism, the Annales school and American ‘cliometrics’ or quantitative history, which adopted a structural-functionalist approach from the social sciences or sought to emulate the physical sciences.12 In also marginalising the epistemological concerns that had characterised the analytical philosophy of history, White’s narrativist conception of history foregrounded instead the aesthetic aspects of historical discourse.13 His assertion is that the form of historical writing itself constitutes a kind of suprafactual, metaphorical explanation which cannot be refuted logically and in which, in effect, the medium is the message. In response to the ‘linguistic turn’ which White heralded in AngloAmerican historiography, three main camps have emerged. Despite the straw men attacked by postmodernist theorists of history, few modern historians have been naive empiricists or ‘reconstructionists’. Instead, most historians, although attempting to reconstruct aspects of the past, could probably now be characterised as ‘constructionists’ who are selfcritically aware of how their own situatedness and imposition of an explanatory framework alter their object of observation. More radical is the stance of ‘deconstructionist’ or anti-foundationalist historiography, advocated inconsistently by White (who sometimes adopts a constructionist position) and by Frank Ankersmit in his earlier work, and popularised by Keith Jenkins.14 Constructionists acknowledge that the past is only accessible in mediated form, through mainly textual representations, but presume that these representations correspond to and thus enable some knowledge of a once-existent reality. By contrast, although deconstructionist theorists of history accept that ‘the world exists independent of, and is irreducible to, human mental states’, they emphasise the impossibility of moving outside our mental and textual representations to compare them with an objective reality which would verify or disconfirm these descriptions and

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interpretive assertions.15 Historians’ truth-claims are thus, they argue, not founded on the authority of an extratextual referent. Instead, they derive, in an endless process of deferral of meaning through intertextual chains of signification, from cross-reference to sources and to what are accepted as the justified beliefs of other historical interpretations. The illusion of verisimilitude which is created by the scholarly apparatus of footnotes and the stylistic conventions of academic historiography is accordingly no more than a Barthesian ‘reality effect’; the supposition that in this process truth is being established is sustainable only within the institutional and discursive context of a scholarly interpretive community.16 Historians’ protocols and procedures devised to promote objectivity and ensure validity in inferential interpretation are thus worthless; mainstream historical relativism gives way to radical indeterminacy. If accepted, this position would mark the end of history, and indeed Jenkins has called for just this. It is, however, possible to contest this textualist idealism.17 This chapter therefore considers the implications of the constructionist approach. The starting point of historical inquiry is with those fragmentary, often fortuitous, sometimes preselected remnants of the past which can come to serve as sources. To this cultural archive the historian brings research questions, formulated in the light of previous scholarly interpretations and consensually established facts; these are indivisible from her chosen theoretical and methodological paradigm, whose conceptual categories guide and necessarily limit what evidence will selectively be deemed a significant ‘event’. This point requires clarification. On the one hand, occurrences in the past had an ontological reality independent of any observer: ‘The tree in the woods of the past fell in only one way, no matter how fragmentary or contradictory the reports of its fall, no matter whether there are no historians, one historian, or several contentious historians in its future to record and debate it’.18 On the other hand, in historical narrative occurrences are singled out from the plenitude of what actually happened because retrospective interpretation regards them as meaningful within a network of causal relations, and as significant as what turned out to be the necessary precondition for subsequent developments. For Louis Mink, who influenced White, this selective transformation of specific ‘past facts’ into ‘events’ is what distinguishes history from chronicle, which is merely an undiscriminating chronological list of what happened. But this entails that the recognition of a historical ‘event’ is inseparable from the historian’s conceptual model: ‘we cannot refer to events as such, but only to events under a description’.19 Ideally, this hypothetico-deductive method should lead

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to constant revision and refinement of the hypothesis in the light of new findings. But the circularity of the process raises the question to what degree the historian, although aiming to reconstruct the past, is instead constructing the putative connections which s/he claims to have unearthed.20 White has reiterated that although historical research recovers factual information, the past has no inherent meaningful patterns (and hence, presumably, no causal connections) which would dictate that historical interpretations adopt a corresponding narrative structure. On the one hand, ‘Unlike literary fictions, [...] historical works are made up of events that exist outside the consciousness of the writer’ and cannot be ‘invented’.21 On the other hand, historical discourse ‘constructs its subject matter in the very process of speaking about it’, as, rather than uncovering pre-existing relationships among the events they investigate, historians themselves ‘endow’ events with ‘meaning’ by projecting a narrative ‘emplotment’ on the past, choosing its generic form and tropological figuration according to aesthetic criteria.22 Similarly, having abandoned his earlier radical deconstructionism, Ankersmit now accepts that, through critical authentication and evaluation of sources, historians can establish historical facts which refer to something real, and about which they can make descriptive predications that are verifiable. By contrast, what he finds problematic is the organisation of these individually falsifiable descriptive statements into a largescale narrative interpretation or extended propositional statement, the truth of which, as a whole, cannot be tested. Whatever coherence this may possess as an aesthetic representation is, Ankersmit insists, not warranted by or reducible to the empirical facts on which it is imposed and is thus the invention of the historian.23 If this is accepted, the only grounds for preferring one underdetermined interpretation to another would be aesthetic, moral or political value judgements. To grasp what is at stake here, it’s necessary to look more closely at White’s arguments.24 Although his model of historical interpretation does not exclude epistemological elements, what White terms ‘formal argument’, that is, ‘nomological-deductive’ explanation, carries less weight than the ‘deep structure of the historical imagination’ manifest in the linguistic ‘master tropes’ (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony) which, at a preconscious level, prefigure the kind of plot structure or narrative explanation that the historian will adopt. In choosing an ‘emplotment’, the historian draws on the repertoire of conventional stories which s/he shares with readers of the same culture. Historical interpretation thus seeks to recognise what kind of story most appropriately fits the

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historical situation, and thereby renders an unfamiliar sequence of events comprehensible by figuring them in an analogous plot structure such as romance, tragedy, comedy or satire, which (presumably within what Hans-Robert Jauss would term a horizon of expectations) symbolically evokes their meaning for readers. This highlighting of how presuppositions and generic conventions unconsciously shape the interpretive configuration or ‘emplotment’ of historical argument has considerable heuristic value. Cultural myths and metaphors – such as decline/degeneration from a putative golden age, the heliotropic theory of the westward movement of civilisation, cyclical rise and fall, revolution in the senses of abrupt transformation but also coming full circle either to one’s starting point or on a higher level of an upward spiral, progress and/or modernisation – indubitably influence how historians imagine and evaluate past developments and how they conceive the opening and closure of their stories.25 Uncovering and hence potentially demythologising this preconceptual level of argument has an important social function, even though disputes across the paradigms rooted in such cultural preconceptions remain difficult to resolve. It is, however, misguided of White to maintain that the plausibility or adequacy of such emplotments cannot be ‘disconfirmed’.26 In so doing, he understates the constraints which historical facts (and previous interpretative controversies about these) place upon ‘the kinds of story that can be properly (in the sense both of veraciously and appropriately) told about them’.27 In one essay he characterises historical narratives as ‘verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found’, then appears to reject the ‘found’ in asserting that the ‘sets of relationships’ which ‘events can be demonstrated to figure’ are not ‘immanent in the events themselves; they exist only in the mind of the historian reflecting on them’.28 Elsewhere, he avers that ‘the same set of events’ may ‘with equal plausibility and without doing any violence to the factual record’ be represented ‘as having the form and meaning’ of an epic, a tragedy or a farce and contends that ‘the best grounds for choosing one perspective on history rather than another are ultimately aesthetic or moral rather than epistemological’.29 Representing the Holocaust in comic form would, on this view, only be false if one expected the account to be literally rather than merely figurally true.30 The distinction between history and fiction is thus elided: To emplot real events as a story of a specific kind (or as a mixture of stories of specific kinds) is to trope those events. This is because

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stories are not lived; there is no such thing as a real story. Stories are told or written, not found. And as for the notion of a true story, this is virtually a contradiction in terms. All stories are fictions. Which means, of course, that they can be true only in a metaphorical sense and in the sense in which a figure of speech can be true.31 White attributes to traditional historiography the naive aim of providing a mimetic copy of past reality and oddly believes that, as history cannot succeed in achieving unmediated iconic replication of the past, the only possible alternative to this unattainable absolute of direct correspondential truth is arbitrary invention.32 He thus overlooks the parameters set by pre-existing collective traditions of inquiry and frameworks of assumptions, and trivialises the intersubjective consensus which obtains about cognitive standards of acceptability and plausibility (such as scope, explanatory power, consistency, adequacy) in evaluating the provisional truth-claims of historical inference to the best explanation.33 As many critics have remarked, White’s relativism leaves history unable to justify any stand against dangerous myths and ideologies.34 White’s argument that emplotment generates a narrative coherence which life itself does not possess also requires qualification.35 Forty years before White’s Metahistory, H.A.L. Fisher prefaced his History of Europe by dismissing imputations of a teleological significance to history as a whole: ‘Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave, […] only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen’.36 Recent cataclysms had for Fisher and many contemporaries discredited the dominant nineteenth-century ideology of emancipatory progress, embodied in secular versions of the Christian Heilsgeschichte such as Manifest Destiny, the Whig interpretation of history, Hegel’s idealist history and its transformation into Marxist dialectical materialism. As such, his scepticism anticipates not just White’s but also that of another influential text of the 1970s, which reflected widespread post-1968 disillusionment: Lyotard’s critique of ‘metanarratives’ or ‘grand narratives’.37 White’s insistence that history has no immanent meaning is, like Lyotard’s, persuasive if restricted to the macro level – to speculative philosophy of history with a capital H, as a hypothesised metaphysical force directing events – and to the authorial pretension of any historian

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who, like the omniscient narrator that was the dominant convention of nineteenth-century fiction, claimed to provide a magisterial overview or master narrative of this. But if one moves from this external viewpoint and the pursuit of a single overarching story as the supposed meaning of history, then White’s absolutist view that lived events are unconnected and meaningless prior to the historian’s retrospective interpretation is an untenable simplification. The coherence of historical interpretations depends on what W.H. Walsh termed ‘colligation’: the conceptual organisation of events into general trends and processes, for example, ‘the Russian Revolution’ or ‘global warming’.38 Such concepts are not necessarily, as White and Ankersmit maintain, retrospective impositions on the chaotic past; often they were current at the time and both reflected and shaped how contemporaries perceived, experienced and acted in their society. Furthermore, cognitive science indicates, contra Mink and White, that the interpretation and generation of human action relies on experiential repertoires stored in the memory as dynamic ‘scripts’ and is hence narrative in organisation, for a script ‘represents a set of expectations’ ‘of how a sequence of events is expected to unfold’.39 The temporal component of causal explanation – the past establishes the preconditions of the present antecedents of future states, actions and events – also seems to entail narrative representation. That White denies this is curious, given his insistence that historical emplotment depends on ‘culturally provided’ ‘processes of sense-making’ in which events are ‘encoded’ in conventional ‘story types’ which ‘endow’ them ‘with culturally sanctioned meanings’.40 His and Mink’s thesis that ‘We do not live stories, even if we give our lives meaning by retrospectively casting them in the form of stories’ fails to consider that these ‘story types’ function prospectively as well as retrospectively.41 This is indicated by the phenomenologist David Carr, who, following Husserl and Ricoeur, begins by arguing that we do not experience the passage of time as a sequence of isolated, unconnected events.42 Instead, we inhabit a continuum in which our ‘attention’ in the present involves our ‘retention’ of the recent past and our ‘protention’ or tacit anticipation of the future. To elucidate this, Husserl gives the example of listening to a melody, whereby the individual notes are grasped as extending into the future within the formal configuration of the musical structure as a whole; Ricoeur cites Augustine’s similar account of how reciting a psalm from memory presupposed his prefiguring awareness of the overall structure constituted by the individual verses. Carr then applies this argument to

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larger time spans and more complex human actions. He suggests that the experiential continuum of retention, attention-intention and protention is also evident in the deliberative activity of formulating projects and plans, in which ‘we quite explicitly consult past experience, envisage the future, and view the present as a passage between the two’. This temporal configuration leads him to propose a ‘kinship’ between ‘the means–end structure of action and the beginning–middle–end structure of narrative’. Narrative attempts to negotiate the future would accordingly be ‘a constitutive part of action’. As Chapter 2 shows, this activity is undertaken not only by historical agents and characters but also by readers of narrative plots. It thus seems plausible that historical agents conceived of their lives as having an ongoing story that was prospective as well as retrospective; drawing on the available repertoire of cultural scripts and the social roles and identities that these constructed, they devised possible scenarios in which they tried to project their future, made plans and sought to realise these intentions. That historians now must rely on inference in trying to reconstruct these and must operate with probabilities and uncertainties, does not mean that, on this micro level, history lacks inherent significance. And indeed, in the later 1970s historiographical fashion underwent an incipient shift away from large-scale structural explanations of history, such as those earlier favoured by the Annales school, towards the cultural interpretation of experience and a renewed focus on events, on the causative influence of historical agents, and on contingency, miscalculation and unintended consequences, factors which particularly lent themselves to and hence favoured the return of sequential narrative history. The following sections therefore consider how historiography can grasp the activities of historical agents.

Conceptual approaches: structure and agency People make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past.43 As history and historical fiction attempt not just to reconstruct but also to explain the past, they often rely either explicitly or in their implicit presuppositions on conceptual models from the social sciences. A crucial issue, indicated in Marx’s aphorism above, is the relationship between the relative autonomy of the individual (free will, purposive action), which

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alone permits moral choice and responsibility, and external necessity (determinism, Providence or fate). This debate on the respective weighting to be accorded to social constraints or self-determination is now usually conceptualised in terms of structure versus agency. A related issue is whether historians should emphasise enduring structure (as in the longue durée and cyclical conjunctures favoured by second-generation Annales and quantitative historians) or the singular event. The matter has been complicated in historical practice since about 1980 by the impact of the ‘linguistic turn’, which ‘denotes the historical analysis of representation as opposed to the pursuit of a discernible, retrievable historical “reality”’.44 In such studies language plays a vital role, in that, usually in the guise of social discourses, it is regarded ‘as constituting historical events and human consciousness’.45 The earlier focus of social historians on material conditions and relations of domination and resistance or coercion, conformity and consent has thus been increasingly displaced by investigation of how these social structures are represented symbolically and internalised in ideologies and belief systems. Two influences have been crucial: French structuralist and poststructuralist social theories, notably those of Althusser and Foucault, and the semiotic analysis of culture as a system of symbols and meanings in Clifford Geertz’s symbolic anthropology. Controversy has centred on whether, following Barthes and Geertz, the widespread treatment of social phenomena as literal or metaphorical ‘texts’ has effaced the material and experiential reality of institutions, practices and the human body; and on the decentring of the ‘bourgeois humanist’ subject in structuralist anthropology and in structuralist Marxism and poststructuralist theories which emphasise the discursive and nondiscursive production of subjectivity. Althusser’s structuralist Marxism entails the effective denial of agency, as individual identity is reduced to a passive ‘subject position’ or point of intersection of the ideological state apparatuses by which it is interpellated and thereby constructed as a distinctive kind of subject. Starting from a similarly rigorous structuralism, Foucault examined how the discursive delimitation and regulation of what in any period can be recognised as legitimate ‘knowledge’ itself produces the object which it investigates.46 As a field of knowledge or discursive formation is indivisible from the practical exercise of power relations, Foucault employs the term ‘power-knowledge’ to indicate their systematic connection, as, for example, in the construction of normative and pathological behaviours and identities which facilitate the disciplinary surveillance required to forge ‘docile bodies’. Power is envisaged as omnipresent but continually

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in flux, as local, unstable ‘states of power’ are engendered; these constitute ‘a multiplicity of points of resistance’ at which power relations can be supported or contested.47 Unlike Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, however, this dynamic struggle is not directed towards the ‘domination’ of one group over another, although this may transpire as one of its effects or ‘terminal forms’. Instead, just as Barthes proclaimed the death of the author’s originary authority over writing – ‘it is language which speaks, not the author’ – so Foucault denies that humans author their actions: ‘Power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective’.48 He glosses this by acknowledging that although ‘there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives’, ‘this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject’; instead, the decentred human subject is subordinate to the anonymous ‘strategies’ which coordinate the ‘tactics’ which characterise ‘the rationality of power’. ‘Power’ is accordingly hypostasised as a self-authoring, causative force which humans do not possess but merely implement or instantiate. Foucault’s synchronic studies of the inhumane operation of social institutions constitute less an empirical history than an implicit grand narrative in which impersonal power-knowledge, transhistorical but also immanent, is the prime mover. His speculative philosophy of history is, however, not teleological: there is simply a contingent ‘series of subjugations’ or permutations of power relations, without origin, progress, purpose or hidden meaning.49 Likewise, the discontinuities which mark the abrupt transition from one episteme to another evidence no rationale, save that the emergence of new techniques of power-knowledge makes discursive transformation possible. Thus, unlike conventional social history, where systemic change is analysed either materially (as determined by or as an adaptational response to new political or socioeconomic circumstances), or ideally (as driven by intellectual innovation), Foucault’s regimes of truth unpredictably and inexplicably mutate, thereby producing a fortuitous reorganisation of elements which the prior discursive structure had disregarded. The closest equivalent in a historical novel to Foucault’s Nietzsche-inspired vision of history as ‘the endlessly repeated play of dominations’, is, I believe, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.50 Despite the emphasis on ethical practices in his final works, it is Foucault’s earlier vision of a self-perpetuating system of power that has most influenced literary studies and historical fiction. Some of the implications of a structural or systemic approach can be illustrated by the hybrid forms of cultural history and anthropology,

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including new historicism, that were prominent in the 1980s and 1990s and thus shaped the assumptions of contemporary historical novelists. A forerunner was the history of mentalities practised by the Annales historians. Mentalité has been defined by Roger Chartier as ‘the “unthought” and internalized conditionings that cause a group or society to share, without need to make them explicit, a system of representations and a system of values’.51 In studying ‘the attitudes of ordinary people toward everyday life’, the history of mentalities shifts the focus from world-views, the common currency of the idealist tradition, to the structures through which such conceptions are conveyed. By structures, the historian of mentalities refers to all of the forms which regularize mental activity, whether these be aesthetic images, linguistic codes, expressive gestures, religious rituals, or social customs. By describing these forms which shape the expression of ideas, the historian of mentalities maps the mental universe which furnishes a culture with its essential characteristics.52 The shortcomings of such an approach lay in the tendency of Annalistes to suggest an undue homogeneity and hence stasis or inertia in collective mentalité, and to regard mentalités as largely determining human action.53 With the more recent influences of discourse theory and ethnographic ‘thick description’, a tendency in cultural history from the 1970s and in new historicism has been to represent the past synchronically (as in structuralist linguistics) by investigating a temporal cross-section or momentary snapshot of a society. A decisive influence on the cultural historian Robert Darnton and new historicist Greenblatt was Geertz’s programme for interpretive anthropology: ‘The aim is to draw large conclusions from small, but very densely textured facts; to support broad assertions about the role of culture in the construction of collective life by engaging them exactly with complex specifics’.54 Characteristically, this involves a shift in emphasis from material reality itself to its interpretation. Action is accordingly of subordinate importance, although in Geertzian ethnography and the work of his historian followers an intriguing episode or anecdote, such as Darnton’s ‘cat massacre’ or a cross-cultural encounter in the New World, usually serves as the starting point for descriptive analysis.55 The incident – read as a cultural ‘text’ – is presumed to have a representative significance, in that it expresses symptomatically or encapsulates metonymically what inference then extrapolates as the social imaginary of an alien culture or epoch.

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Methodologically, this was combined by the new historicists with the early Foucauldian notion of a cultural episteme: ‘the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems’.56 In Louis Montrose’s description, new historicists focus upon a refiguring of the socio-cultural field within which canonical Renaissance literary and dramatic works were originally produced; upon resituating them not only in relationship to other genres and modes of discourse but also in relationship to contemporaneous social institutions and non-discursive practices. [...] In effect, this project reorients the axis of inter-textuality, substituting for the diachronic text of an autonomous literary history the synchronic text of a cultural system.57 What is examined is the circular process of the social construction of reality: cultural representations are understood as immaterial events with material consequences, in that they not only articulate but also shape how contemporaries seek to make sense of their environment and thus influence social practices, which are in their turn mediated in further cultural representations. In new historicist criticism this tends to involve the colligation of disparate contemporaneous fragments into a cultural narrative or anecdotal collage: typically, a canonical text is juxtaposed with a medical or legal case, a sermon or treatise, or a technological invention.58 The texts, artefacts or practices selected for their surprising intertextual coincidences of meaning mutually constitute their own context; no causal, nor usually any demonstrable connections are proposed in their supposed discursive negotiations or exchanges, so that the putative analogies on which their alleged relationship depends may be dismissed as arbitrary. The methodology is intuitive and lacks theoretical underpinnings, although one might detect a similarity with Lucien Goldmann’s attempt to uncover cultural ‘homologies’ displaying the same structural logic; retrospectively, Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher have suggested that ‘out of the vast array of textual traces in a culture’ they seek to isolate what Pound called the ‘luminous detail’.59 Alternatively, Gallagher now asserts that their characteristic deployment of anecdote was a strategy to deconstruct historical grands récits by disruptively foregrounding the marginalised, accidental and abjected; Greenblatt, by contrast, highlights Erich Auerbach’s inspirational ability ‘to concentrate on an anecdote and pressure it to reveal a whole system’.60 Ideologically, Greenblatt and several other new historicists have tended to derive from Foucault’s middle period a totalising interpretation of

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power, and argue, often in functionalist terms, that Renaissance texts produced subversion in order that its containment would confirm state power (thereby attributing to the human exercise of power an ideological motivation or interest utterly foreign to Foucault).61 Greenblatt adapts from Foucault the epistemic thesis that ‘Elizabethan power’, unlike later disciplinary society, depended on the public staging of authority, but repeatedly indicates that the discursive (re)production of monarch and state through theatrical performance (including Renaissance drama) remained ambivalent.62 Attention to performative practice leads him to aver that although ‘Renaissance society was totalizing in intention’, ‘Even those literary texts that sought most ardently to speak for a monolithic power could be shown to be the sites of institutional and ideological contestation’.63 This apparent acknowledgement of a dynamic, Foucauldian ‘micro-physics of power’, is, however, undermined by Greenblatt’s conflicting claim that an Althusserian ‘well-developed repressive apparatus’ was in operation.64 By contrast, Montrose displays a more assured grasp of the instability and constant renegotiation of power relations, influenced by Raymond Williams and by Anthony Giddens’s notion of ‘structuration’ (discussed below).65 The capacity for agency has also been insisted upon by British cultural materialists, influenced by E.P. Thompson’s histories of the experiential shaping of class consciousness and protest, and by Williams’s interpretation of Gramsci’s dynamic conception of hegemony as the incorporation by, negotiation with, or resistance to the dominant of residual and emergent structures of feeling and social formations. Their emphasis on explicit and implicit literary dissidence in earlier periods (sometimes exposed by a reading of texts against the grain) alternates with a politicised appropriation of historical texts for present-day interventions to unmask the ideological work that the literary canon continues to perform in sustaining existing power relations. What new historicism and cultural materialism have in common is the aim of locating historical texts ideologically in the contexts of their production and reception. Where they differ is that, to use Koselleck’s terminology, new historicists focus on the supposed past present (although one coloured by anachronism, in that Renaissance texts uncannily anticipate presentday conceptions of power), whereas cultural materialists foreground the present past, highlighting how the literary heritage is enlisted to legitimise current interests.66 The emphasis on social structure in ‘the semiotic model of culture that informed “linguistic turn” historical writing’ is now, it has been argued, being succeeded by a renewed concern with practice and performance

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and a ‘recuperation of the historical actor as an intentional (if not wholly self-conscious) agent’, inspired by social theory.67 In seeking to explain how structure is interpreted, internalised and embodied, produced, reproduced or contested and thus to link the individual with his or her social environment, there have recently been attempts to transcend the structure/agency dualism. Thus, Giddens’s ‘structuration’ theory, Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘habitus’ and Christopher Lloyd’s ‘structurist’ model have sought to reconcile the strengths and shortcomings of opposing traditions in sociological thought – the subjectivist approach of interpretive sociology, ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism; the systemic approach of structural-functionalism; and the structuralist approach.68 Reflecting these developments, the historian William Sewell notes ‘how historical agents’ thoughts, motives, and intentions are constituted by the cultures and social institutions into which they are born, how these cultures and institutions are reproduced by the structurally shaped and constrained actions of those agents, but also how, in certain circumstances, the agents can (or are forced to) improvise or innovate in structurally shaped ways that significantly reconfigure the very structures that constituted them’.69 Both Giddens and Bourdieu understand structure as a series of embodied competences or classificatory cultural schemas which enable but also delimit routinised social knowledge and hence purposive action. For Bourdieu, social structures are internalised and, as enduring but flexibly transposable ‘dispositions’, generate practices which, recursively, in turn reproduce structures. Similarly, Giddens conceives of the ‘structure’ stored in ‘memory traces’ as a virtual paradigm analogous to Saussure’s langue: drawing on acquired ‘rules and resources’, it generates utterance-like actions or interactions, that is, the performative parole of social practice. These ‘instantiate’ and thereby unintentionally reproduce or potentially redefine the underlying structure but also the pre-existing social system, through what become the structural conditions for future actions.70 Giddens argues that social systems of whatever scale are constituted by the social practices through which structure is reproduced; over time these evolve into predominantly cultural, political, economic or legal institutions. This proposed link between structure and system is important, as the virtualisation of structure in Giddens’s linguistic analogy otherwise understates the objective constraints exercised by social institutions and the differential distribution of ‘authoritative’ and ‘allocative’ resources, in terms of material goods, legitimised hierarchical power, and opportunity, or Bourdieu’s economic, social, cultural and symbolic capital. Chapter 4 examines structure and agency in recent national stories.

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The emergent attempt to reintegrate agency brings historiography once again closer to the concerns of historical narrative as opposed to historical analysis. A disadvantage of the synchronic approaches of much recent cultural history and new historicism, which are descriptive rather than explanatory, was that they did not address the central historical problem of change. More usually, history is concerned to interpret why actions and events happened and must thus plot connections between past, present and future. The individualist focus on (in Weberian terms) instrumental, principled, affective and traditional agency and (un)conscious motivation, and the favouring or thwarting of this by contingency and conjunctions of circumstances, lends itself to narrative more easily than structural explanation, which offers too little scope for the psychological complexity, voluntary character and situational improvisation of individual agency. It thus tends to be favoured by historical novelists, so that Peter Ackroyd’s and Iain Sinclair’s emphasis on transgenerational structure (discussed in Chapter 6) is unusual. For this reason I focus in the final section on what is entailed in interpretive understanding of the meaningful actions of historical agents and characters.

Whose story is it? Point of view and plot in historical narrative A fundamental challenge in all historical narratives is negotiating the temporal gulf between the historian and historical agents. Two issues are involved: how to understand an alien period in its possibly incommensurable otherness; how to apprehend the historical significance of events. Leopold von Ranke influentially advocated attempting to recreate the past on its own terms by entering non-judgementally into the worldviews or mindsets of the time, instead of the moralistic and/or didactic interpretations favoured by Enlightenment historians. An immanent approach to the past has also been variously adopted in R.G. Collingwood’s thesis that historical knowledge presupposes ‘re-enactment’ of the thought processes of historical agents; in the study of mentalités; and in social and postcolonial histories in which the marginalised are given a voice and the subaltern speak.71 The importance of trying to reconstruct the logic of the agent’s point of view and belief system has also been insisted upon in Geertz’s symbolic anthropology (echoed by Greenblatt): ‘The whole point of a semiotic approach to culture is [...] to aid us in gaining access to the conceptual world in which our subjects live so that we can, in some extended sense of the term, converse with them’.72 Attempts to

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narrow the divergence in perspectives between participant and observer cannot, however, alter the fact that, to use Koselleck’s terms, the present past which we now imagine to have existed can never be the same as the past present experienced by those who lived through it; nor can we readily recapture the past future which they once envisaged and sought to realise. For their indeterminate, as yet open future, with all the contingent possibilities of how things might turn out, has become the unalterable past on which we now look back. In trying to grasp the foreign country of the past, the historian, like the anthropologist, must rely on empathy and imagination to transcend his or her own cultural framework; s/he lacks the direct experience of earlier forms of life and the interior perspective of participants. Furthermore, in historiography (with the exception of oral history), unlike the faceto-face interaction of anthropological fieldwork, the accuracy of the historian’s ‘translation’ of past culture cannot be verified. Inferential understanding thus risks imputing to historical agents a rationale which they would not have shared but which appears plausible to present-day readers because it corresponds to our customary sense of how things are. To some extent it is inevitable that the colligatory concepts into which the foreign culture of the past is translated in order to make it intelligible today would not have been grasped by contemporaries; Mink gives as an example: ‘The unpropertied citizens of Rome constituted the first urban proletariat’.73 But it is also legitimate to ask whether the present-day recovery of their putative forebears by ideologically motivated historians, often in terms which these forefathers or foremothers themselves would not have recognised, involves wish-fulfilling anachronism. The modern historian’s knowledge is in some ways greater than that of agents at the time, in that s/he has more information, a wider contextual and chronological overview and can compare several accounts of the same event. However, the most far-reaching difference is that the historian knows the outcome, whereas ‘Not knowing how it is all going to end is the mark of living through events’.74 This difference in perspective – inherent in the retrospective character of almost all narrative – entails several crucial consequences.75 On the one hand, as I indicated, the historian seeks to understand historical agents’ conscious and unconscious motivation and what they regarded as the meaning of their actions. On the other hand, with the benefit of hindsight, the historian is aware that these actions frequently had a significance which the agent could not have anticipated, either because the projected action had unintended consequences, or because subsequent events have enabled the earlier

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action to be recognised in retrospect as an influence on or precursor of a later development within the historian’s emplotment of the past.76 Arthur Danto terms this the collision of two ‘cognitive perspectives’ – ‘the perspective of the agent and the perspective of the narrator who knows how to describe the former’s action in the light of later events’; this means that ‘The reason an event is mentioned in a [historical] narrative is typically distinct from the reason the event happened: different, in brief, from its historical explanation’.77 To clarify this point, one can compare Hegel’s interpretation of the purpose of world history as humans’ developing consciousness of their identity with the world spirit (Geist) and consequent emancipation. Within this metaphysical context human actions can be viewed as carrying out both the subjective intentionality of the agents themselves, and, unintentionally from their point of view, as fulfilling the higher purpose intended by ‘the cunning of reason’: This relationship between the subjective consciousness and the universal substance is such that the actions of human beings in the history of the world produce an effect altogether different from what they themselves intend and accomplish, from what they immediately recognise and desire. Their own interest is gratified; but at the same time, they accomplish a further purpose, a purpose which was indeed implicit in their own actions but was not part of their conscious intentions.78 This distinction between the (un)conscious motivation and immediate purpose of human activities and their unforeseen and indirect consequences is a feature of speculative philosophies of history, such as those of Vico, Marx or Foucault, but also of more worldly models of society, such as Mandeville’s suggestion that private vices result in public virtues, or Adam Smith’s belief in the invisible hand coordinating market transactions. Aside from such macro models, it is clear that human actions are generally carried out in involuntary, unconscious and sometimes unnecessary ignorance of crucial information, and always without the ability to foresee their ultimate significance. As Danto points out, both tragedy and comedy turn on the ‘cognitive asymmetry’ between what the characters are aware of and the privileged overview communicated to reader or audience by narrator or playwright, arousing the belief that, enlightened by what was then knowable but unknown to them, the characters would have acted differently.79

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Likewise, the poignancy or the irony of historical narrative, like the regret or remorse of the remembering self, depends on the discrepancy between the historical agents’ unconsciousness of the future that awaited them, to which they had perhaps inadvertently contributed, and what the historian or remembering self now knows. Thus, although the events themselves are irrevocable and unalterable, the significance which is attributed to them changes over time. The challenge is accordingly to reconcile a retrospective overview, informed necessarily by the interests of the historian’s present day, with an immanent approach intended to reconstruct the provisionality and disorientation entailed in the point of view of historical agents who were trying to make sense from a restricted, ground-level perspective of the situation which was partly beyond their control.80 A historical or ethnographic narrative thus contains at least two different kinds of story: the first-order narratives told by participants to themselves and others, in which they recorded and interpreted their experience and perceptions, and, framing these critically, the secondorder narrative told by the historian observer, which is an interpretation of the participants’ own interpretations.81 As Geertz remarked of anthropology, ‘what we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to’.82 The historical agents’ intentional plotting of their lives, the alternative paths they chose not to take, and the social construction of their reality are thus embedded within the historian’s own emplotment and analytical model, which frequently reformulates these actions in terms of modern concepts, such as class or ideology, which the historical agents could not have recognised. On the one hand, the unalterable outcomes of these actions largely dictate the kind of explanatory emplotment which the historian imposes on events. On the other hand, the historical agents become hostages to posterity, in that their lives are now perceived and represented through the prism of their future significance, however much this may differ from their self-concept and from what they once envisaged becoming. The important implications for plotting, focalisation and voice of an action-oriented approach to narrative are further examined in Chapter 2, which extends to the historical novel the analytical model developed in this concluding section.

2 The Historical Turn in Fiction

As the counterpart to Chapter 1, this chapter alters the focus from historiography to related developments in historical fiction.1 The celebrated resurgence of this subgenre since the 1970s followed years of critical neglect rather than actual decline, particularly if traditional historical fiction and historical romances are also considered.2 Throughout the twentieth century the woman’s historical novel commanded a popular, predominantly female audience.3 History was integral to AngloAmerican modernist prose, in major works such as Conrad’s Nostromo, Lawrence’s The Rainbow and recurrent writings on the philosophy of history, Woolf’s Orlando and Between the Acts, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels and Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy. Indeed, some aspects of modernist fiction anticipate recent historical novels: the foregrounding of epistemological difficulties in reconstructing the past, even of aporias (notably in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!); concern with the varying rhythms and subjective experience of time (represented as Bergsonian duration, cyclical recurrence or mythic pattern). The transition to what is proclaimed and marketed as new begins with the late-modernist or postmodernist reshaping of the historical novel through metafictional or magic realist experimentation. In the British context, the former can be traced back to John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). Both influences are apparent in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), intertextually indebted to a metafictional tradition extending back to Sterne and to Latin American and Günter Grass’s versions of magical realism. This mode reached its zenith in the 1980s in, for example, D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981), Rushdie’s Shame (1983), Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983), Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984), Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), Fowles’s A Maggot (1985), Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985) and 25

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Chatterton (1987), Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion (1987) and Sexing the Cherry (1989), and Barnes’s A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989). The heterogeneity of this list indicates, however, that formalist taxonomy is of limited utility in grasping the historical novel, particularly as, from the 1990s, metafictional elements have increasingly been integrated into mainstream fiction. Instead, my analyses will consider the implicit or explicit historiographical aims and preconceptions of representative texts. I contend that recent innovations in the historical novel are related to transformations within historiography. As Chapter 1 demonstrated, these affected both the content and the conceptualisation of history. In his ground-breaking The Making of the English Working Class (1963), E.P. Thompson sought to ‘rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver [...] from the enormous condescension of posterity’ (although not their female counterparts, as feminist historians would later point out).4 Three years later, in Wide Sargasso Sea, her prequel to Jane Eyre written from a Creole perspective, Jean Rhys likewise recuperated the experience of the formerly silenced, by giving a narrative voice to Charlotte Brontë’s monstrous ‘woman in the attic’. Thompson’s magnum opus inaugurated an upsurge in social history, while Rhys’s late masterpiece would inspire a generation of feminist re-readings of the Victorian canon and of postcolonial revisionism, in keeping with Antoinette/Bertha’s comment that ‘“There is always the other side, always”’.5 Corresponding extensions in subject matter and narrative perspective are evident in Maxine Hong Kingston’s recuperation of Chinese-American history in China Men (1980), Toni Morrison’s refiguration of slave narrative in Beloved (1987), and postcolonial forms of writing back, in historical novels by, for example, Rushdie, Peter Carey, David Malouf, Amitav Ghosh, Caryl Phillips, Andrea Levy, Timothy Mo and Hari Kunzru. Feminist alternate histories such as those by Carter, Winterson and Sarah Waters attempt to reclaim a female past either through transformative fantasy or by rewriting it, with conscious or unconscious anachronism, in the light of present concerns. In Barnes’s History of the World history from below wittily becomes the below-decks account of a downtrodden but resilient woodworm of how the animals experienced Noah’s Ark. Conceptual changes in historiography also influenced both historical fiction and its academic conceptualisation. In the late 1980s, asserting the importance for literary criticism and practice of Hayden White’s ‘metahistory’, Linda Hutcheon sweepingly characterised ‘postmodernism in fiction’ as ‘historiographic metafiction’.6 Hutcheon was seeking

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to map a development beyond late-modernist formalism which combined self-reflexivity with ‘a relation of reference (however problematic) to the historical world, both through its assertion of the social and institutional nature of all enunciative positions and through its grounding in the representational’.7 To substantiate this, she aligned historical novels with what I have termed constructionist historiography, reiterating the provisionality of our textualised access to the past and the situatedness of historiographic discourse (cf. Ch. 1, 8–10). Her approach has subsequently reached an apparent dead-end in Amy Elias’s thesis – indebted to White, Ankersmit and Lyotard – that historical narrative evinces the desire of the ‘postmodern, post-traumatic, metahistorical imagination’ for the necessarily unattainable and hence unrepresentable ‘historical sublime’.8 With dramatic exaggeration, Elias asserts: ‘History is untouchable, ultimately unknowable, and excruciatingly tantalizing as well as terrifying, for there resides [idealist] Truth’.9 I argued in Chapter 1 against antifoundationalism in historiographic practice.10 Although the avowedly provisional truth-claims of constructionist historians cannot be proven, acting pragmatically on the assumption that consensual views bear some plausible relation to truth is a strategy which works. The fact that cognitive certainty is unattainable does not entail the absolutist alternative of complete ignorance. As one of Barnes’s narrators remarks: We all know objective truth is not obtainable, that when some event occurs we shall have a multiplicity of subjective truths which we assess and then fabulate into history, into some God-eyed version of what ‘really’ happened. This God-eyed version is a fake [...] But while we know this, we must still believe that objective truth is obtainable; or we must believe that it is 99 per cent obtainable; or if we can’t believe this we must believe that 43 per cent objective truth is better than 41 per cent. We must do so, because if we don’t we’re lost, we fall into beguiling relativity, we value one liar’s version as much as another liar’s, we throw up our hands at the puzzle of it all, we admit that the victor has the right not just to the spoils but also to the truth[.]11 As has often been remarked, the denial of historical ‘truth’ undermines efforts to document and contest racist, class, and gender oppression. Elias’s extreme scepticism endorses a drearily familiar poststructuralist emphasis on lack or absence: ‘The postmodern historical sublime is [...] the place where history cannot be fathomed at all, or is perceived

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as a sublime and decentered Absence, in all of its terrifying, chaotic, and humbling incomprehensibility’.12 As a speculative philosophy of history, the assertion of incomprehensibility is scarcely news outside literary circles (cf. Ch. 1, 12–13). Equally, to narrow down the scope of constructionist historiography to epistemological issues is unjustifiably reductive. This chapter therefore departs in two ways from this modish fascination that has dominated recent literary discussion of history. First, I refocus attention on how historical narrative plots the temporal and hermeneutic complexity of human action. Second, moving from epistemology to ontology, I emphasise not absence but rather the evocation of an imaginary presence, the virtual reality of the present past, as a property which historical fiction shares with all fictional narrative worlds. Before doing so, however, in order to examine what is distinctive about historical fiction, I will begin by revisiting the postmodernist concern with referentiality and the boundaries of history and fiction.

The ‘truth’ of historical fiction As Chapter 1 indicated, in discussing constructionist and deconstructionist historiography, history’s truth-claims depend on its referentiality to the actual world. This was, for Aristotle, a criterion which distinguished history’s narrative of ‘particular facts’ and ‘what has actually happened’, from the ‘universal truths’ of poetry: ‘the kinds of thing a certain type of person will probably or necessarily say or do in a given situation’.13 His categorial distinction between history and poetry is accordingly between actual and metaphorical truth; by constructing a cognitively and imaginatively compelling analogy to reality, poetic mimesis asserts propositions about human existence which, based on their prior experience, its audience can recognise as lifelike and hence credible.14 What constitutes verisimilitude lies in the eye of the beholder; intersubjectively, this forms the basis of the historically variable conventions of realism. The congruence or equivalence to the actual world which readers of realist texts expect is thus not the specific, determinate accuracy of history or documentary, but rather a plausible match with a general type of possibly real objects, ‘based on the particulars of a given historical time but not coincidental with them’.15 In possible-worlds literary theories the contrast between history and fiction is generally regarded as absolute, a matter not of degree but of kind.16 Historiography, Lubomír Doležel proposes, can be categorised among ‘world-imaging texts’, that is, ‘representations of the actual world’

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that ‘exists prior to, and independently of, textual activity’. By contrast, ‘world-constructing texts’, including fiction, themselves create the alternative, nonactualised, possible worlds to which they refer. This referential distinction corresponds to a pragmatic difference in truth-conditions. The statements of imaging texts can be ‘challenged, modified, or canceled by validation and refutation procedures’; whereas, in relation to the actual world, ‘Fictional texts are outside truth-valuation; their sentences are neither true nor false’.17 But although some possible-worlds theorists insist that fictional worlds are ontologically autonomous and hence completely detached from the actual world, realist and historical fiction arguably form special cases in terms of the author’s presumed intentionality and the audience’s generic expectations.18 Realism’s declared commitment to verisimilitude or Aristotelian probability arouses expectations of empirical validity. Equally, the predominant conventions of historical fiction (that is, its unmarked form) include authorial assertions and audience expectations of greater referential veracity than in most other genres.19 MarieLaure Ryan has argued that, unless otherwise prompted by textual cues, readers fill in the gaps in necessarily incomplete fictional worlds by supplementing the given information through inferences based on their everyday knowledge, assuming a ‘principle of minimal departure’ from the actual world.20 In unmarked forms of historical fiction, this assumption presumably involves an anticipated degree of correspondence to known historical facts. I therefore claim that historical fiction resembles historiography in that its interpretive emplotment constructs a subjective present past; this differs from a wholly invented spatiotemporal world, as it is modelled on and anchored in a former actuality. What is disorientating for readers is that historical fiction blurs indistinguishably what is imported from known historical data and what is invented: ‘the ontological pedigree of the story elements is smoothed over in the narrative. The “factual” and the “fictitious” are not located in discrete formal units that can be identified as such’.21 The ambiguous referentiality of historical fiction can be illustrated by the frequent coexistence of real-world ‘prototypes’, such as Napoleon, and invented characters. Possible-worlds theory often argues that such ‘transworld’ figures are integrated into an ontologically homogeneous fictional world; Napoleon’s possible ‘counterpart’ is thus indistinguishable from other characters, including perhaps intertextual ‘versions’ of their counterparts in other literary works.22 Similarly, Paul Ricoeur maintains: ‘From the mere fact that the narrator and the leading characters are fictional, all references to real historical events are divested of their

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function of standing for the historical past and are set on a par with the unreal status of the other events’.23 This seems counterintuitive, in that it precludes referential interest on the part of readers, many of whom are surely drawn to historical fiction exactly because of its relationship with the historical past. I find more persuasive Dannenberg’s contention, which I would extend to all realistic historical fiction, that reading counterfactual historical fiction involves the blending rather than the separation of worlds: on the one hand, there is ‘transworld identification’ (the recognition that certain characters have real-world counterparts); on the other hand, there is ‘transworld differentiation’, as readers are expected to appreciate the divergence between the actual historical past, with which they are to some degree familiar, and its fictional rewriting.24 The conventions of this genre thus rely on the reader’s importing extratextual information, just as all realistic fiction presupposes the transposability from the real world to the narrative world of cognitive scripts and schemata. There would accordingly be a spectrum of perceived referentiality to the actual world, ranging from history, through counterfactual history, then hybrid genres such as the historical novel and documentary fiction, to alternate history, metafiction or fantasy.25 However, during the reading process a clear-cut distinction between history and fiction perhaps disappears, in that immersion in the virtual afterlife of the once-actual past which is evoked by (re)constructionist historical representations resembles immersion in an actually non-existent fictional world. As a hybrid genre, historical fiction is partially counterfactual, in that it rewrites the historical record by inserting into past actuality figures or events whose existence is fictitious or at least undocumented. But it has generally remained within the parameters of known historical facts and outcomes. McHale formulates this constraint: in ‘classic’ historical fiction ‘freedom to improvise actions and properties of historical figures is limited to the “dark areas” of history, that is, to those aspects about which the “official” record has nothing to report’.26 These limits have, however, been progressively tested. Modernist historical fiction represented access to the past as epistemologically problematic, but did not draw referentiality itself into question. This norm is challenged only in the more recent genre of alternate history (discussed below) and in some postmodernist experiments, for example by Winterson and Ackroyd, which undermine or blur the distinction between the primary, real world, which usually enjoys ontological priority, and the secondary world of fiction.27 In Todorov’s definition of the ‘fantastic’, the prolonged hesitation between a supernatural or a naturalistic explanation

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of events is ultimately resolved through confirmation or reinstatement of a single-world ontology.28 By contrast, in Winterson’s and Ackroyd’s multiple-world fantasies, fabulation or Gothic repetition, involving paranormal happenings, uncanny historical echoes or rhymes of earlier events, and apparent transhistorical identities of characters separated by centuries, destabilise historical reality. In formal respects, there are also intriguing similarities and differences in focalisation and voice between history and historical fiction. The historian is, in Genette’s terminology, necessarily a heterodiegetic narrator who stands outside the ‘diegesis’, that is, ‘the universe in which the story takes place’.29 Unlike fictional narratives, in historiography there can be no distinction between author and narrator; indeed, as Genette points out, ‘their rigorous identification’ ‘defines factual narrative, in which [...] the author assumes full responsibility for the assertions of his narrative and, consequently, does not grant autonomy to any narrator. Conversely, their dissociation (A ≠ N) defines fiction, that is, a type of narrative for the veracity of which the author does not seriously vouch’.30 Cohn likewise notes that ‘history is committed to verifiable documentation’, whereas ‘this commitment is suspended in fiction’.31 History thus has no equivalent to one variant of narrative unreliability which is familiar in fiction: the potential divergence between the implied author and a homodiegetic narrator. A major further difference between history and fiction is that, unlike the heterodiegetic narrator in the dominant convention of realist fiction, the historian is not omniscient and has no privileged access to the thoughts and emotions of historical agents.32 As Cohn remarks, ‘the minds of imaginary figures can be known in ways that those of real persons cannot’. Thus, historians tend to explicitly admit the limits of what they know and to invite debate about their surmises: it is indeed only when such privately revealing sources as memoirs, diaries, and letters are available to him that a scrupulous historian will feel free to cast those of his statements touching on psychological motives and reactions into the past-indicative tense. In the absence of reference, he will have to make do with inference (and its grammar) – or else opt for a history devoid of any allusions to individual psychology[.]33 As Cohn notes, the heterodiegetic historian’s knowledge of the inner life of the historical agents whom s/he depicts is accordingly as restricted as homodiegetic characters’ mutual understanding of one another.34

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To the extent that the perspective of historical agents is represented through focalisation in historical narrative, their attitudes can be as unreliable as those of homodiegetic narrators or characters in fiction. Aside from their cognitive misperceptions or misreading of their present situation and of other characters, or the possible fabrications or self-deceptions revealed by their writings, the retrospective viewpoint of historical narrative, which is privy to the outcome of their actions, often reveals the fallibility of their judgements. Narrative alternation between analepsis, from the perspective of the authorial narrator and present-day readers, and prolepsis, from the perspective of the historical agents, opens up the possibility of irony, which one might regard as historical narrative’s default mode. In both history and historical fiction unreliability can also arise at the level of authorial narration as a result of the author’s choice of interpretive paradigm, of blind spots, distortions or misjudgements, involving selectivity, the omission of evidence or invalid interpretations, or of the author’s situated bias. Retrospection also harbours dangers in this regard: first, that the author imposes a teleological logic on the emplotment, implying an illusory inevitability in the course of events; secondly, that the author projects from the present a series of antecedents which serve to justify or legitimate a current phenomenon, in a variant of the invention of tradition. If one turns from the heterodiegetic narrator to the homodiegetic historical agents, their actions can be viewed ‘as the result of individual and collective reasoning in particular circumstances under the impact of a variety of social, political, economic, ideological and cultural influences (themselves contexts of action composed of and created by other human agents)’.35 Rational analysis must, however, be complemented by acknowledgement of the habitual routines and conventional roles and rituals, the impulsiveness or unconscious emotional and biological drives which frequently direct human behaviour.36 In seeking to reconstruct the actual reasons for past actions, historians have as evidence only the results of those actions, both in terms of their practical consequences and in the form of retrospective commentaries or reports (perhaps involving rationalisation after the fact) to which they may have given rise. These will range, at varying temporal and spatial removes from the event itself, from a possible first-person narrative by the agent (which might include premeditation, if the action was planned) in, for example, a diary, letter, autobiography, memorandum or court testimony, to accounts by eye-witnesses or based on hearsay. Whereas I noted in Chapter 1 the selectivity with which historians must approach

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a potential plethora of sources, it is typically the converse problem of insufficient evidence and of gaps in the historical record which hampers the interpretation of historical actions. Historians must accordingly try to supplement what is missing; this process has several aspects. First, the historian has to assess the reliability of the textual source and infer and attribute motivation and intentionality to its narrator; revealing this subtext or pretext entails reading against the grain to decode what was expressed unconsciously as well as consciously, while adhering to the documented usage of words at that time, to avoid anachronistic misreading. Second, the historian must draw on her other knowledge of the period and of the author to recreate the social and discursive contexts in which the sources were embedded, the conditions of their production and intended reception, and to postulate causal relationships. A significant difference between history and historical fiction is that historical argument seeks to fill in the epistemological gaps in sources by treating the evidence as metonymic fragments from which a connected narrative whole may be conjectured, whereas the narrative discourse (sjužet) of historical fiction (save in intrusive heterodiegetic commentary) frequently leaves gaps and silences, although its metaphorical organisation and conceptual presuppositions may interpret implicitly. Unlike the historian, who (with the exception of counterfactual hypotheses) must work within the parameters of what actually happened, the historical novelist has considerable scope to supplement known historical facts and agents by invention. This means that s/he decides which events will take place in the narrative world (including any historical facts s/he chooses to incorporate) and significantly, unlike the historian, has the power to make things happen. To this extent, any fictional narrative, although usually cultivating the illusion, which contributes to its verisimilitude, that the characters exercise some self-determination, is controlled deterministically by the novelist who not only, like the historian, knows what happened but herself brings this about.37 The fictional world projected by the author’s emplotment constitutes an interpretive model of reality. Cohn claims that historiographic emplotments differ from fictional plots: ‘A novel can be said to be plotted but not emplotted: its serial moments do not refer to, and cannot therefore be selected from, an ontologically independent and temporally prior data base of disordered, meaningless happenings that it restructures into order and meaning’.38 As I argued earlier, I believe that this objection does not hold for historical fiction. Instead, I shall use emplotment in the sense of the worldview which informs the authorially constructed narrative

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world. Embedded within this narrative frame are the ‘subworlds’ of individual characters.39 Like historical agents, they seek to make cognitive sense of their environment and attempt, through protention, to project alternative future outcomes, one of which they aspire to realise through their goal-directed activity (cf. Ch. 1, 13–14). Their intentions are subordinated to the plans which the author has for them and controlled by the author’s puppet-master-like manipulation of their lives, which, in addition to any structural constraints inherent in the society depicted in the novel and to the interventions of other agents and the irruption of contingency, sets limits to their agency. The actions which result from the characters’ and the author’s plotting serve to illustrate and confirm the implied author’s emplotment, that is, the perhaps preconscious worldview which can be inferred as underlying and configuring the world that the text projects. These different narrative levels are negotiated by readers who, through empathetic immersion, also engage in dynamic world-making. The following section examines these issues more closely.

Emplotment, plotting and narrative temporality Despite its centrality to narrative theory, plot remains an elusive concept with several different connotations.40 In the context of historiography, as Chapter 1 explained, what White terms ‘emplotment’ and Mink ‘configuration’ refers to the interpretive structuring of diverse facts and events into an intelligible whole, within which they come to assume significance.41 As Ricoeur indicates, this combines a chronological and a non-chronological dimension: The former constitutes the episodic dimension of narrative. It characterizes the story insofar as it is made up of events. The second is the configurational dimension properly speaking, thanks to which the plot transforms the events into a story. This configurational act consists of ‘grasping together’ the detailed actions or what I have called the story’s incidents.42 Provisionally, therefore, emplotment can be defined as encompassing several interdependent aspects: first, the gradual revelation through narrative discourse (sjužet) of the (typically causal) connections (plot) among a linked sequence of events ( fabula); second, in retrospective review of the story by historical agents, characters and/or readers, what can finally be recognised and comprehended as the import of the events.

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The time-boundedness of meaning is thus crucial to historical understanding. How this is perceived and experienced varies according to narrative level and from the perspectives of author and reader. I will first consider the author. As Mink notes, the historian starts with what s/he determines as the conclusion of a selected course of events. From this effect, seeking causal explanation, s/he traces lines backwards; in this temporal direction, contingencies no longer exist. I infer that, for Mink, this establishes the fabula and also the plot. Then, ‘when we tell the story, we retrace forward what we have already traced backward’, ‘writing and rewriting our stories of it to reduce rather than to exploit the contingencies of the events narrated’.43 Mink is not implying that the actual course of events was teleological or necessary but rather that the retrospective narrative of what led to the unpredictable outcome imposes a coherent pattern on events. In this procedure, Nancy F. Partner provocatively asserts, modern history differs from novels, as its selectivity in order to maximise intelligibility makes history ‘an overplotted genre, even outrageously so for one claiming a higher degree of verisimilitude than fiction. History’s reality has no room for contingency [...] the central fictionality of history [...] is its unrelenting meaningfulness’.44 The alternative to this historiographic foreclosing of contingency is – as in counterfactual history and in historical fiction – to adopt the experiential perspective of historical agents or characters as they lived through events, which readers, through immersion and sympathetic identification, can potentially share. To do so is to move from the determinacy and intelligibility of the author’s present past back to the openness of the characters’ or agents’ past present and past future with their alternate possible outcomes. The end of Chapter 1 sketched the implications of this for narrative focalisation and voice. Such issues lead to consideration of the perspectives of readers and characters/agents. Mink alleges that the reader of history always knows in advance what happens; as there is no suspense, reflective reading focuses on the explanatory how of historical analysis.45 By contrast, the reader of historical novels is usually ignorant of the ending which from the outset already awaits her, because, although the invented characters’ lives are generally mapped out within the constraints of familiar, documented events, their particular fates are unknown. This can add poignancy and dramatic irony, as, for example, in the final chapters of Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995), when, as Prior’s unit prepares to cross the Sambre–Oise canal on 4 November 1918, readers, unlike Prior, know that there are only seven days until the Armistice and may know the outcome of this attack, but, like Prior, do not know whether he will survive it.

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The characteristic past tense of narrative, indicating the author’s foreknowledge of what the reader has yet to discover, is, Peter Brooks notes, perhaps decoded by the reader as an experiential present: ‘that of an action and a significance being forged before his eyes’. Thus, if ‘the past is to be read as present, it is a curious present that we know to be past in relation to a future we know to be already in place, already in wait for us to reach it. Perhaps we would do best to speak of the anticipation of retrospection as our chief tool in making sense of narrative’, confident that ‘what remains to be read will restructure the provisional meanings of the already read’.46 (Brooks is referring here to the reader’s immersion in what, from the author’s perspective, is the characters’ past present and past future.) Similarly, in Ricoeur’s words: To follow a story is to move forward in the midst of contingencies and peripeteia under the guidance of an expectation that finds its fulfilment in the ‘conclusion’ of the story. This conclusion is not logically implied by some previous premises. It gives the story an ‘end point,’ which, in turn, furnishes the point of view from which the story can be perceived as forming a whole. To understand the story is to understand how and why the successive episodes led to this conclusion, which, far from being foreseeable, must finally be acceptable, as congruent with the episodes brought together by the story.47 I remarked earlier on the time-boundedness of meaning. The historian’s or historical novelist’s retrospective vantage point grants her insights unavailable in the past, when the working out of actions had not been finalised and their full significance could not be appreciated (cf. Ch. 1, 22–4). This corresponds to the distinction in narrative temporality between what Dannenberg terms ‘the postclosure position of knowledge about the nature of the story’ and the dynamic ‘intranarrative state’: Viewed in its nonfinalized state as experienced during reading, plot is an ontologically unstable, primordial mass of events and relationships out of which the story is gradually formed; plot is thus not so much a preexistent given (although the reader will ultimately view the actual narrative world as such) as (at least in the realist tradition) the gradual formation of one version from a variety of alternatives.48 Apposite metaphors to convey this would be the provisional unfolding of a fan-like range of possibilities, and a funnel-like narrowing down of alternatives towards an inexorable, ever-more-definitive outcome.49

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Narrative theory is increasingly recognising that envisaging alternate, unactualised outcomes plays a significant role in the reading process in generating suspense and surprise, through readers’ anticipatory projections of plot development, and in the characters’ or agents’ plotting in the past present of the past future they intend to realise. If, simplistically, historical developments are imagined as resulting from a branching succession of directional decisions taken at innumerable forking paths, then in retrospect it is possible to wonder what might have eventuated had the road(s) not taken been pursued. As it is realistically impossible to alter the previously fixed course of events, such speculations are necessarily counterfactual. Their functions in historiography differ somewhat from their role in historical fiction. Historians appear to use counterfactuals in three kinds of thought-experiment. The first is heuristic, in order to improve causal explanations. By altering one of the variables in a historical situation, that is, changing an event or circumstance in order to examine whether this would substantially affect the outcome, historians can test whether what has been hypothetically identified as a necessary cause was indeed of decisive importance.50 The aim is to isolate an ‘antecedent’ or antecedents, but for whose existence the ‘consequent’ would probably not have happened.51 Contrasting what the state of the world would have been, had a particular action not taken place, enables greater appreciation of the action’s significance.52 The second kind – resembling Collingwood’s notion of historiographic re-enactment – involves attempting to reconstruct empathetically the decision-making processes of historical agents, by projecting the potential alternatives, with their presumed consequences, which they can be conjectured or documented to have weighed up. This imaginative shift in focalisation and voice returns the historian to what preceded the event under investigation: the experiential perspective of agents in the past present, confronting several plausible or viable options, before the realisation of one possibility rendered its alternatives counterfactual.53 The third, academically questionable use of counterfactuals is to extensively rewrite the past. In this variant, changing a historical fact does not simply aid causal reasoning; instead, this new antecedent provides the basis to emplot a virtual past future that was once potential but remained unrealised.54 Both this and the first approach are hampered by their exclusively rational explanation of what they assume would have transpired under altered circumstances, in that they cannot take account of random or improbable eventualities; even complex mathematical modelling of stochastic processes cannot predict particular rather than generalised

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outcomes. As Hassig comments, projected counterfactual consequences are necessarily limited to those ‘one can reasonably foresee’: Unfortunately, the world frequently produces results that, while logical when seen after the fact, all too often are not logically anticipated in advance. While historical analysis emphasizes ex post facto causal reasoning in which both the probable and the improbable can be seen, counterfactual analysis demands predictive causal reasoning, which is notoriously more difficult and generally does not capture the improbable.55 Historians who engage in counterfactual forecasting from a new hypothetical antecedent to what they intuitively project as its likely consequences are in effect reproducing the earlier bounded rationality or intelligent guesswork of historical agents. Although they can draw on subsequent knowledge that was unavailable to contemporaries, they too are attempting to foresee the past future from a position of imperfect information. But life is characterised by the generative interplay of innumerable chains of factors, whose causal significance may be obvious only in retrospect, and of random occurrences, whose possible distribution and potential impact even powerful computer algorithms struggle to predict adequately.56 Even if we consider only human interaction in artificial isolation from its context, game-playing indicates that altering one move has repercussions for the subsequent tactics and strategy of all players, who will inevitably react differently to this change in initial conditions. Over a very short timescale this might not matter: for example, the counterfactual awarding of a penalty in the last seconds of a football match will probably alter the result, without materially affecting the remaining course of play.57 But, if extrapolated over a long period, counterfactual projection of an alternative past future becomes increasingly fanciful and thus approximates fiction. In historical fiction the second and third kinds of counterfactual predominate, as novelists’ alternate histories are usually more interested in developing the narrative potential which results from a counterfactual antecedent than in analytical inquiry into the causes of known events. Just as historians attempt to reconstruct the complex decision-making processes and experiential reality of historical agents, so realistic and semi-realistic historical novels convey the past present and past future by embedding within their narrative world the virtual realities constructed in characters’ subworlds. These include the counterfactual remodelling of the past in characters’ wistful musings about their own or others’

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missed opportunities, and their envisaging of possible future outcomes, which are progressively eliminated by design or default. Characters’ plotting of intended outcomes also involves their often fallible attempts to infer their fellow characters’ emotions, beliefs and motivations in order to anticipate their intended actions.58 Clearly, counterfactual alternative pasts and prospective possible futures can be projected not just by the characters themselves but also by authorial narration. As I emphasised earlier, however, the author already knows the outcome of the story, which is accordingly narrated in the past tense. Narratorial projection of possible futures is thus a sleight of hand, designed to arouse the illusion that, as characters and readers are caught up in the dynamic unfolding of the plot, the ending of the story is not yet determined. By contrast, use by the heterodiegetic narrator of prolepsis, which is the counterpart on a higher narrative level to characters’ premonitions or predictions, emphasises authorial control and implies that the emplotment is shaped by a deterministic and/or ironic or tragic worldview. Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) illustrates some of these temporal intricacies: Briony is remorsefully aware of Robbie’s and Cecilia’s deaths but, in attempted restitution, gives them a virtual existence together in the imaginary present of her commemorative narrative, by projecting the counterfactual past future which they had hoped to realise. Counterfactual speculations may not just be embedded intermittently in a narrative but also developed authorially to constitute an entire historical essay or historical novel. Such extensive counterfactuals include a subset of historical novels which, resembling science fiction, imagine alternate histories on a national or global scale, as a result, for example, of time-travellers’ interference, or of the Axis powers winning the Second World War, or of the Reformation not having taken place in what thus remained a Catholic England.59 They differ from counterfactual historiography in that, although historians may sometimes extrapolate the prolonged consequences of a counterfactual antecedent, there is never any suggestion in such narratives that this hypothetical past future could displace or replace the actual past; in other words, historians adhere realistically to a single-world ontology. By contrast, as Dannenberg has shown, the multiple worlds of some alternate histories and postrealist novels suspend this ontological hierarchy.60 Alternate histories do not figure in my case studies other than incidentally in Chapter 3 in connection with Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, but Lawrence Norfolk’s Lemprière’s Dictionary exemplifies what they involve. Set in 1787–8, with flashbacks to the seventeenth century, Norfolk’s conspiracy theory represents the East India Company as masterminded

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by ‘The Cabbala’ of French Huguenots, who not only abetted the massacre in 1628 of their co-religionists and their own families at La Rochelle but are employing their immense wealth from colonial trade to finance a French Revolution intended to grant them control of that severely indebted nation. Norfolk’s overdetermined narrative of plots and counterplots traces detective inquiries into these infamies, culminating in the destruction of their perpetrators and healing of the collective trauma of La Rochelle. In its British version, however, his novel moves beyond realism to the supernatural: the sinister caballers are cyborgs, Septimus an avenging angel. This counterfactualism manifestly differs from that of historians, in that the alternative past future which Norfolk projects does not derive from antecedents that once actually existed. Lemprière’s Dictionary also treats with cavalier freedom the lives of the historical figures whose counterparts it includes: John Lemprière, John Fielding. Exasperated by such departures from documented truth, by the perceived irresponsibility of Norfolk’s recourse to conspiracy theory, his shifting of responsibility for the East India Company’s exploitation from the British to the French, and his inattention to the victims of colonialism, Keen has described Lemprière’s Dictionary as ‘an extraordinarily silly novel’.61 This does less than justice to its powerful re-imagining of the late eighteenth century via one of its own emergent genres, the Gothic novel, from which it diverges, however, in withholding a naturalistic explanation for its fantastic events. Norfolk depicts his historical setting with greater verisimilitude than Winterson: the streetlife, social venues and recurrent rioting of late Georgian London are evoked credibly, although Fielding’s role as investigating magistrate involves poetic licence, as he died in 1780. More generally, Norfolk blends features of the late eighteenth-century imaginary with anachronistic intertextual references. As a conspiracy theory, his narrative parallels the chauvinistic anti-Catholicism of some early Gothic novels but also draws on Pynchon. The elaborate mythological murders which are orchestrated for John, ostensibly to deter or derange him but, in Septimus’s direction of his quest, to engineer his enlightenment, recall both the masquerades staged by Conchis in Fowles’s The Magus (1965, 1977) and the conspiratorial murder in Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) (itself a counterfactual narrative of Protestant–Catholic and gender conflict in the guise of a reworked Restoration drama). The Gothic labyrinthine passages of East India House and the subterranean tunnels under central London which constitute the Beast’s skeleton recall the Burkean sublimity of Piranesi’s Carceri, and also Blake’s Giant Albion.

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The automaton designed a few years ahead of its time by the actual Henri Maillardet epitomises the Enlightenment fascination with materialist conceptions of humanity (such as de La Mettrie’s); by contrast, Norfolk’s invented cyborgian Cabbala and army of automata, which the historical Jacques de Vaucanson (1709–82), is supposed to have designed, owe more to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982).62 Despite its fantastic character, Norfolk’s novel confronts several of the historiographic issues I have analysed, resulting in several paradoxes. Intertextual anachronism is apparently the only way in which Norfolk connects the past with the present; in other words, he does not try to uncover or construct precedents or antecedents relevant to today’s problems (unless his present past is interpreted as implicitly criticising today’s capitalism). Conversely, within his Gothic narrative world, the past present is haunted by the past past, in the guise of the unappeased spirits of La Rochelle, in keeping with Norfolk’s persistent fascination with the transhistorical continuity of what is symbolised by myth. His declared aim ‘to reproduce the lived experience of another period’ implies adopting the viewpoint of participants in their past present.63 Norfolk accordingly emphasises the chaotic inscrutability of events at ground level, the characters’ ‘different kinds of unknowing’, as, in their decipherment of clues or portents, and mistaken conjectures about what they observe, they, like his readers, are repeatedly, often wilfully misled.64 On a higher narrative level, however, their partial perspectives alternate with Septimus’s angel’s-eye panoramas of ancien régime Europe (the novel’s most ambitious but least successful sections), an approach which is extended to the continent’s longue durée in Norfolk’s The Pope’s Rhinoceros (1996). This cognitive asymmetry between historical agents and the panoptic overview of the historian-narrator, ‘the most-knowing player, the nearest we have to a perfect observer’ (567), corresponds to Septimus’s manipulative direction of their actions, as an authorial demiurge. Like the other characters, John cannot grasp the present; strikingly, however, epistemological limitation does not extend to the past, which, under Septimus’s tutelage, he is able to reconstruct and (re)solve. In this respect Norfolk doesn’t espouse postmodernist historiographical scepticism.65 His attitudes to interpreting the meaning of events are inconsistent, however. On the one hand, Septimus’s surveys treat European history as a farcical concatenation of blunders or accidents and ridicule the ineffectual rulers of the ancien régime. Likewise, the London mob (depicted with a Burkean counterrevolutionary hauteur) is improbably defeated more by accidental malfunctioning of the conspirators’

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cybernetic ‘Europe-machine’ (555, 566–8) than by the blind Fielding’s design. Conversely, Norfolk’s agnosticism about the meaning of events and his foregrounding of contingency are at odds in this scheming novel with the determinism implicit in his conspiratorial interpretation of history and in Septimus’s revenge plot. Accordingly, within Norfolk’s emplotment, what appears disordered to the characters is connected in an intricately patterned web of significance, in which, in Hegelian fashion, the characters unconsciously realise a hidden purpose, manipulated by the author or his surrogates at several narrative levels. The fictional modelling of causation and of individual agency and social structure is my next topic.

Micro/macro In locating particular events or individual actions and beliefs within the larger contexts of colligatory concepts and social structures, we assume that they are instances of something more general. Thus, an event is perceived as evidencing a causal regularity; through structuration, individuals contribute to the (re)production of social structure; their internalised norms and values manifest ideological attitudes which are representative of collective mentalités or residual, dominant and emergent structures of feeling and social formations (cf. Ch. 1, 14–21). Without such extrapolations it would be impossible to develop an interpretation of social phenomena with sufficient scope. This section begins by considering the presuppositions about causation which shape emplotments, as, in seeking to explain significant transformations, historical narratives cannot avoid addressing the conditions and events which cumulatively made the outcome more probable. It then examines how, in representing social change, historical fiction connects the micro and macro levels of individual actions and social structure. (i) Causation In McCullagh’s probabilistic understanding of causation, ‘quite often an effect is the outcome of a number of interacting causes, and the regular consequence of none of them. [...] [C]auses tend to produce effects of a certain kind, but [...] that tendency can be offset by other tendencies at work in the situation’. Effects accordingly result from the ‘conjunction’ of possibly contingent ‘triggering circumstances’ with someone or something with a ‘disposition’ (for example, personality attributes, collective strategy, intrinsic physical property) to react in specific ways.66 At an earlier stage, these human dispositions were shaped by underlying cultural,

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psychological and sociohistorical causes. Within narrative universes, causation operates on several narrative levels: agents’ goal-directed actions (under the social and physical conditions which constrain their choices), their intended and unintended consequences, and their conjunction with other agents’ interventions and with anticipated and unexpected events and circumstances; the plot connections effected between these conjunctions, which reflect the author’s presuppositions about the nature of causation and hence the worldview implied by the emplotment. Causal explanations can be metaphysical and postulate a supernatural power or agency (attributing a teleological purposiveness to Providence or Hegelian spirit, or predetermination to fate/destiny or a Calvinist God); empiricist (conforming to natural laws, and alleging genetic predispositions, psychological dispositions, or predictable regularities, as in positivism and behaviourism); or emphasise indeterminacy (chance, coincidence, luck, accident, the speciously random concatenations of occurrences highlighted by chaos theory).67 Historical narratives often dramatise the ironic, tragic, comic or absurd clash of incompatible causal interpretations, and hence expectations, between and within narrative levels, as agents’ or readers’ assumptions are qualified or refuted by what actually transpired, or by what the author will make happen, in the past future.68 In historical fiction, apart from documented events that are incorporated in the text, everything that takes place is invented. Richardson observes accordingly that, although common in everyday experience, chance events can only be found in literature ‘if first planted there by the author. [...] Even when plausible enough within the fictional world, excessively fortuitous encounters clearly show the author’s hand. Where a character sees coincidence, a reader will discern contrivance’.69 Metafiction foregrounds this intervention, while realistic fiction tries to camouflage ‘the ultimate causal-manipulative level of the author’.70 Coincidence can be distinguished from mere randomness, in that although the unexpected or uncanny intersection of characters or events involves no causal intent, the conjunction is perceived as meaningful, either as reinstating a prior connection, or as initiating a significant relationship that will retrospectively appear not to have begun fortuitously.71 (ii) Change Narratives record the transition from one state of affairs to another through an eventful process of conflict or complication, culminating in a resolution whose achieved stasis provides a consonant sense of

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an ending.72 The historian Christopher Lloyd suggests that ‘we should look for the basic source of social change in the conflict between social necessity and individual attitudes and choices’.73 The same assumption underpins Ryan’s concept of narrative as generated by conflict: either internally, between irreconcilable aspects of a character’s ‘private world’ or subjective construction of reality (encompassing knowledge, misbelief, ignorance and uncertainty; values; internalised norms; desires), or because of its incompatibility with the private worlds of other characters or with the factual domain s/he inhabits.74 These mental constructs are responsible for characters’ conflict-solving ‘moves’: projected, planned and realised goals, which are expressed in diversifying narratives, both virtual and actual.75 This narratological model considers individual actions or interpersonal conflicts. But, as Lukács has argued, realist historical fiction extends this to the macro level, by depicting individuals as representative of the evolving ‘totality’ of society.76 In other words, the focus lies on how they engage in the reciprocal processes of structuration. Lukács’s Marxist grand narrative correlates the rise and fall of the historical novel with that of bourgeois humanism: its efflorescence was possible because its leading exponents participated in the bourgeoisie’s spearheading of the struggle against feudalism, until, after 1848, their class-interested economic laissez-faire alienated them from their former connection with popular life. Scott’s fiction provides the template for Lukács’s prescriptive interpretation of the historical novel as a variant of realism which depicts critical, transitional phases in the dialectical process of history, through the ‘collision’ between reactionary and progressive groups and ideologies. The ostensibly neutral ground of Scott’s narrative worlds is praised for acknowledging the contradictoriness of progress, whereby what was tragically doomed to decline is recognised as in some respects nobler than what succeeds it.77 Thus, the inexorable defeat of Jacobite clan feudalism by Williamite or Hanoverian bourgeois capitalism is dramatised in the moral conflicts between incompatible values and allegiances experienced by Scott’s middle-ranking protagonists, who retain contact with the preoccupations of ordinary people, out of which the main historical motives develop organically. This focus on invented marginal figures rather than ‘world-historical’ leaders facilitates Scott’s occasional strategic departures from documented facts in order to convey a deeper mimetic truth; avoiding pedantic antiquarianism despite his aspiration to accurate reconstruction, his ‘historical faithfulness’ lies in the historically plausible psychological motivation of his protagonists (59–61, 166–8).

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Despite its tendentiousness, Lukács’s account illuminates features of historical emplotments which are of methodological importance. Historical novels must, he argues, combine an immanent perspective which acknowledges the alterity of the past – the ‘derivation of the individuality of characters from the [distinctive character] of their age’ (19) – with an awareness of the past’s relationship with the present, for which it forms the ‘concrete precondition’ (21) and ‘necessary prehistory’ (61). Lukács’s concept of historical necessity – ‘the characters act according to their individual inclinations and passions, but the result of their actions is something quite different from what they intended’ (148) – echoes Hegel (cf. Ch. 1, 23). But he attributes this not to the workings of transcendental Spirit but rather to materialist causes: ‘the force of social circumstances’ (148). Equally, although the outcome of history is allegedly inevitable, Lukács limits necessity to the aggregate or ‘totality’ (147, 150) of individual actions. At the micro level, although both Scott and Balzac recognised ‘the necessity for the present to be [just] as it was’ (83), in their novels this is represented not as an otherworldly fate divorced from men; it is the complex interaction of concrete historical circumstances in their process of transformation, in their interaction with the concrete human beings, who have grown up in these circumstances, have been very variously influenced by them, and who act in an individual way according to their personal passions. Thus, in Scott’s portrayal, historical necessity is always a resultant, never a presupposition. (58) Lukács’s model of causation is thus centred on human agency, which is constrained by social structure and other agents’ interventions and subject to contingency; it is stochastic rather than deterministic. A far-reaching but controversial component of Lukács’s analysis is his concept of typicality, which disguises subjective, ideological judgement (what is ‘typical’, and ‘typical’ of what?) as putative fidelity to the allegedly objective truths of the historical dialectic. These presuppositions clearly evidence the situated bias of the author’s emplotment. Typicality differs from stereotypicality or allegory, in that the typical character, although socially representative, is individualised through distinctive traits of personality and behaviour.78 Lukács argues that the experiential connections of typical characters with ‘the objective general problems of the age’ vary with their position in the social and narrative hierarchy.79 For ordinary people ‘the great transformations of history’ (48–9) have an existential impact as shocking disturbances in their daily life, to which,

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ignorant of their cause, they react with ‘immediate [heartfelt] responses’ (44). By contrast, the narrative function of a ‘world-historical’ leader is to reflect consciously on these events and thus raise ‘what is individual and incidental in his existence to a specific level of universality’.80 Through these alternating perspectives the historical novel makes manifest the broad consequences of social change, so that readers can ‘re-experience’ them (42, 128). Lukács’s conception that ‘the typical quality of a character in a novel is very often only a tendency which asserts itself gradually’ and conveys the emergence or demise of a trend (140) anticipates Raymond Williams’s argument that literature is receptive to tentatively evolving structures of feeling: ‘The most important thing is to show how the direction of a social tendency becomes visible in the small, imperceptible capillary movements of individual life’ (144). Even though the totalising narratives that Lukács favoured are rare nowadays, the concept of typicality remains relevant even for microhistories, which claim that their miniature canvas metonymically represents general mentalités. Combined with his action-oriented, structurationist approach, it offers a dynamic model which, unlike the synchronic, descriptive accounts which characterise new historicism and much recent cultural history, proposes narrative techniques to represent social change.

Anachronism and ontology: present pasts Lukács indicated the duality of historical novels: they combine fidelity to the immanent ‘historical peculiarity’ or alterity of the past with an anachronistic, present-based perspective that comprehends the past as today’s ‘concrete precondition’ or ‘necessary prehistory’. Thus, however much they seek to reconstruct ‘as it actually was’ the past present in which historical agents envisaged and planned the past future, historiographic emplotments inevitably select matters of perceived relevance to the present, which, in retrospect, can recognise that particular events had or would come to have a significance of which historical agents at the time were usually unaware. Historically fluctuating assessments of this significance are reflected in what at a particular time and place is constructed as a usable present past. To illustrate forms which such present pasts have assumed in recent fiction, I’ve largely taken examples from neo-Victorian novels. What I want to explore, unlike the obsessive foregrounding of epistemological issues in ‘historiographic metafiction’, are their ontological characteristics. At the outset, it is useful to recall the semiotic terminology of signifiers, which evoke a mental representation (signified ) of, in this case, particular

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aspects of ‘the Victorian age’; in turn, this signified is pragmatically assumed to correspond to an extratextual referent, the social practices and experiential reality of Victorians. In retrospect this referent is only accessible indirectly, through its physical traces and via textual, visual and oral representations to which it gave rise. What are now provisionally regarded as plausible (re)constructions of ‘the Victorian age’, that is, the present pasts projected by historical narratives, are thus a complex amalgam derived from diverse signifiers: (a) extant verbal and visual representations of social mentalités and of the subjective interior worlds of individual Victorians (that is, the Victorian cultural imaginary); (b) subsequent historiographical and literary critical interpretations of this material; (c) collective memory, as expressed in oral history over generations and in references to and reworkings of Victoriana in literature, film, television, advertising and other forms of mass culture. A heuristic distinction among kinds of present past can be made according to whether their primary aim is to engage in a revisionist intertextual dialogue with earlier signifiers, or whether, ostensibly bypassing these mediating representations, they direct themselves towards the referent itself, that is, attempt to (re)construct, resurrect or (re)invent what they claim was Victorian actuality. One subset of neo-Victorian fiction re-imagines Victorian representations and their authors. This can take the form of what the Augustans termed ‘imitation’, as in Pope’s ‘imitations’ of Horace, which transposed classical prototypes to a present-day context in which their satire was still held to be pertinent. An example is David Lodge’s Nice Work (1988), which imitates the Victorian industrial novel, specifically Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), by recontextualising its debates in the Birmingham of the 1980s, while emulating some of its ideological evenhandedness. By updating a genre rooted in an earlier period of industrial strife, regional and class polarisation, and suspicion or hostility between cultural and capitalist interests, Lodge playfully questions the viability of anachronism. How appropriate is the political invocation of ‘Victorian values’, which asserts the present relevance of historical precedent? How would Gaskell’s conventional resolution of ideological and economic conflict through a marriage and inheritance plot play out nowadays? Although remote from their political radicalism, Lodge’s stance thus resembles cultural materialists’ concern with the use and abuse of the past to subserve present-day interests, even as it itself enlists the canon ideologically.81 It was not Lodge’s intention to interrogate the presuppositions of Gaskell’s novel in its original context; his work thus differs from writing back to the canon that is past-focused.

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That includes biocritical novels, as in the sympathetic counterparts of Henry James imagined in Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004) and Lodge’s Author, Author: A Novel (2004), and Carey’s antipathetic Dickens counterpart, Tobias Oates, in Jack Maggs (1997). While grounded in the Victorian authors’ own letters, autobiographies and fictional self-projections, their imaginary counterparts in these historical novels are constructed in response to modern critical preoccupations – for example, James’s sexuality and negotiation of the marketplace, Dickens’s dealings with mesmerism, money, Mary Hogarth and Britain’s colonies – with which they engage in a dialogue. A.S. Byatt also practises a hybrid form of criticism in Possession (1990), where her Browning counterpart, Randolph Ash, ventriloquises her interpretations of Browning, which almost simultaneously were published in a critical essay, and in ‘The Conjugial Angel’ (1992). Possession’s Victorian narrative is partly a roman à clef which, in significant respects, echoes attitudes or situations experienced by Christabel and Randolph’s real-world prototypes (see Chapter 5), although Byatt’s counterfactual alterations determine that her fictional counterparts lead alternative possible lives to those of Dickinson and the Brownings. ‘The Conjugial Angel’ adheres more closely and explicitly to Emily Jesse’s life, supplemented by Byatt’s own inventions: ‘It was a kind of splicing of my imaginary woman onto a real woman’.82 Jesse articulates Byatt’s critique of her near-effacement from In Memoriam; a disembodied Tennyson and the revenant corpse of Arthur Hallam also serve as mouthpieces for views Byatt had taught in a university lecture and recycled in her lecture/essay on the making of ‘The Conjugial Angel’.83 Byatt’s metaphor of ‘splicing’ could be applied to all counterparts of real-life prototypes in historical fiction; these join invented with existing material, creating a hybrid character which resembles the original but, in keeping with the novelist’s revisionist interpretation, is either conceived counterfactually as leading an alternative possible life or is depicted anachronistically in a way that contemporaries could not have recognised, in the light of posthumously uncovered secrets or of modern critical methodologies or of presentist ideological judgement. When ‘splicing’ is applied to intertextual versions of characters in other literary works, they too may lead an alternative possible life but more usually are depicted as displaying characteristics which were already latent in and hence an integral part of the source-text. This procedure differs from Jauss’s understanding of literary history as the attempt to reconstruct the original audience’s horizon of expectations and thus the meanings which a work would have had when first published, for what is highlighted by fictional writing back would have been disregarded or overlooked by

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contemporary readers. It is, however, not unhistorical, in that the aspects which it foregrounds were already present in the original work. But it involves anachronism in that this newly perceived significance could only be recognised with hindsight, as it results from later critical theories or from sociohistorical developments which make relevant now what was then ignored. Such adaptation – as in Rhys’s rewriting of Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea, Byatt’s critique of In Memoriam, and Carey’s rewriting of Great Expectations in Jack Maggs – involves what Adrienne Rich termed ‘Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction’.84 The source-text is deconstructed by altering the focalisation or narrative voice and thereby moving into the centre of attention what in the original had been marginalised or omitted, that is, the Victorian ‘Other’. For Rhys and Carey, the aim, as in Macherey’s symptomatic reading practices, is to highlight unattended details in the text and thus expose what the author unconsciously betrayed: the gaps, inconsistencies or faultlines in the dominant ideology which the work sought to repress. As a subversive strategy, this variant of neo-Victorianism aims to supplement the historical record by uncovering its blind spots and indicating the powerful interests which its version of events was intended to legitimise. It can often be described as a form of parody, caricature, or postcolonial mimicry, in which the unenlightened past is retrospectively readjusted, with varying degrees of empathy and historical sensitivity, by anachronistically being made to conform to our morally superior sense of justice or political correctness. The more judgemental or self-righteous this strategy becomes, however, the less convincing is the author’s grasp of the alterity of the past and of social practices or mentalités which we may now find unacceptable or abhorrent but which appeared plausible or defensible within the context and constraints of an earlier society. Changing an aspect of the source-text creates in effect a counterfactual antecedent, from which an alternative past future may be developed, in a belated act of redress. This cannot alter the actual past but, in influencing current perceptions and evaluations of canonical works, aspires to shape future practices. Projection of an alternate nineteenth century is also a feature of a second subset of neo-Victorian fiction, including steampunk, which rewrites the Victorian period in fantastic or science fictional mode, by realising a once potential but nonactualised past future. A notable example is William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s reconfiguration of both Disraeli’s Sybil and of Victorian technoculture in The Difference Engine (1990).85

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Apart from mystical or paranormal claims (such as those of Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair, discussed in Chapter 6) that, through morphic resonance, unmediated access to past reality is still possible, those neo-Victorian novelists who wish to represent as faithfully as possible the imagined past present of Victorians face similar challenges to constructionist historians (cf. Ch. 1, 8–14). They may indicate the distance but also the connections between past and present by temporal shifts, either at narratorial level (Fowles) or in alternating plots. The temporal alternation at plot level may emphasise the epistemological difficulties inherent in reconstructing facts or events (for example, Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, Swift’s Waterland and Ever After (1992)) or, conversely, as in the subgenre of ‘romances of the archive’, suggest that detective inquiry can succeed in uncovering the full truth about the past.86 Or it may assert uncanny repetitions or Gothic connections between then and now (as in Ackroyd’s and Sinclair’s work, Lindsay Clarke’s The Chymical Wedding and Michèle Roberts’s In the Red Kitchen). Alternatively, novelists may choose to adopt an immanent perspective, that is, create a self-contained narrative world located temporally and spatially in a nineteenth-century setting, which attempts to replicate or supplement the Victorian imaginary on its own terms. By imitating the conventions and ‘voice’ of Victorian narrators, pastiche tries to create the illusion that it could have been written in that period (as in, for example, the pseudo-Victorian texts in Byatt’s Possession and ‘Morphio Eugenia’ and Swift’s Ever After) or to ‘forge’ a contemporary authenticity, even while calling into question the notion of authorial authority and authenticity (the Victorian sections of Ackroyd’s Chatterton). Other novelists who do not attempt to counterfeit a Victorian style either merely pretend that the narrator is a Victorian, although his or her voice may sound more modern in register or sensibility (for instance, the first-person narratives of Matthew Kneale’s Sweet Thames and Waters’s faux-Victorian novels), or may, through deliberate anachronistic references or metafictional commentary, indicate a self-conscious distance from the conventions which, as it were, s/he places in scare quotes (for example, Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman). Whereas Ackroyd’s and Fowles’s metafictional alienation effect disrupts readers’ immersion in the narrative world, Byatt’s framing of the Victorian sections does not undermine their power to possess the reader’s imagination. By contrast, Kneale and Waters preserve the aesthetic illusion that narrator and reader inhabit the nineteenth century. While Kneale fictionalises familiar historical events in his narrative of London’s mid-century sanitation problems, Waters departs from the known historical record to (re)construct a largely undocumented lesbian past (see Chapter 5).

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What results from this ontologically is, I think, of considerable importance for understanding revisionist historical fiction in general. Although Waters’s work relies on modern scholarship, Victorian literature and Victorian cultural discourses, Tipping the Velvet (1998) and Affinity (1999) cannot avoid a degree of fantasy in that, even by comparison with the clandestine gay culture of that period, late Victorian lesbian experience has remained largely invisible and has had to be speculatively inferred. Like the mid-Victorian Lyme Regis and London of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, what Waters’s faux-Victorian fiction fabricates is accordingly a simulacrum of late Victorian London for which arguably no referent exists, a temporally hybrid space in which the present haunts the past. I propose therefore that the virtual realities which these narratives create can be regarded as temporal ‘contact zones’ inhabited by chronologically in-between creatures. Unlike Fowles’s Victorian existentialists, Waters’s characters do not teleologically anticipate modern developments; but they nevertheless behave in accordance with modern interpretations of the late Victorian society they inhabit in ways that might have been unavailable to contemporaries without the hindsight knowledge that is enjoyed by their creator. To this extent, although purporting to resurrect the past, her representations of late Victorian London in fact create an ontologically distinct, parallel entity, an unprecedented neo-Victorian London. Accordingly, Waters’s Victorian present past – the past as it now exists in our conscious imagination, which may or may not correspond to the past as it actually was – arguably has less to do with the past present of that society than the identity politics of the present. The intentional difference between this and alternate history is that, in projecting onto a previous era what she believes were occluded features of that society, Waters implies not that this was a possible but unrealised past, but rather that it did actually exist surreptitiously then and has subsequently been forgotten or suppressed. Whereas Waters strives for fidelity to an authentic past present, despite what she perhaps anachronistically projects onto it, the presentism of some novelists loses sight altogether of the alterity of the past. This is the case with Winterson’s The Passion and Sexing the Cherry.87 Although they take place in specific, but apparently arbitrarily chosen historical settings – the Napoleonic era, mid-seventeenth-century England – they display scant awareness of the transformational forces in these societies, or their radical otherness. For example, the English Revolution is simplistically reduced, in Dog-Woman’s Royalist perspective, to the hypocritical meddling of caricatured, kill-joy Puritans, who recall the

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life-denying Pentecostalists of Winterson’s childhood.88 This naivety about a key phase in English gender and social history hampers Winterson’s cultural materialist aim to appropriate the usable past for political ends in the present.89 Both her historical fantasies, in which all ages appear interchangeable, target the consequences of patriarchy or, arguably, hegemonic masculinity: the destructive pursuit of charismatic heroism, in both militarism and imperialism; the human oppression and the environmental disasters that result from the capitalist reduction of everyone and everything to a commodity. Redemption is proposed through a move away from fixed binary identities towards androgyny or gender performativity, or by an apocalyptic conflagration which, repeating the Great Fire of London, will cleanse the moral plague of today’s City or of industrialisation. Winterson’s Romantic emphasis on liberatory self-fashioning and on the imaginative transformation of society suggests that both are infinitely malleable and subject to no constraints; this appears possible because her individualist conception of agency does not consider social structure and because her visionary assertions in Sexing the Cherry of the transhistorical influence exercised on the present-day Nicolas Jordan and unnamed female ecologist by their seventeenth-century counterparts regard this paranormal recurrence as empowering rather than menacing. In this respect, Winterson’s fantasised ancestral role-model, the woman warrior Dog-Woman, bears more resemblance to Carter’s New Woman foremother Fevvers in Nights at the Circus than to Ackroyd’s Gothic revenants in his 1980s fiction prior to First Light (1989), although she shares a religiously informed vision of a fallen London comparable to his.90 So far I have considered how past and present are interwoven in the anachronistic narrative worlds of historical novels. I want to conclude by proposing that this is true also of their transmission and reception. Beforehand, I will take a step back to the textual sources from which they were constructed, which formed an earlier stage in the perpetuation of the past. Historiography is inherently belated and confronts the aftermath of events. Adherents of postmodernist history and historiographic metafiction have emphasised the epistemological problems which this poses: the past is accessible only through its textual remains and thus irredeemably absent. However, this viewpoint drastically underestimates what is stored in the cultural memory of texts as a potential energy that is always capable of actualisation in present consciousness. As the traces from which human activity may be imaginatively and cognitively inferred, textual sources preserve and may continue to communicate versions of preceding actions, states of mind and states of affairs.

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Their subsequent interpretation reactivates performatively what is immanent in the text’s past present, in a fusion of the reader’s imaginative projections with what the author’s words evoke both subjectively and interpersonally within an interpretive community, thereby enabling but also constraining what can be acknowledged as valid interpretation. Thus, although the actuality that preceded the text is irrecoverable, some of the subjective meanings which were invested in it and later memorialised in the objective correlative of the text can once again achieve a virtual existence as mental representations which constitute the reader’s experiential present past. Using metaphors which have gained currency in neo-Victorian fiction (see Chapter 5), I think this can be more appropriately be described as resurrection (given the reader’s performative reanimation of what is embodied by the text), or as spiritualism rather than spectral haunting, in order to indicate the intervention of present human agency in recalling the past. I suggest that the ideal persistence of the past in primary sources carries over to the second-order emplotments of historians and historical novelists, which also conjure up in readers’ imaginations a vivid mental image of past events. For historians, the question of whether this signified accurately represents the referent is crucial. It is secondary for historical novelists, who sidestep the issue of verifiability, emphasising verisimilitude more than documented accuracy. The historiographic features of these projected present pasts are explored in the case studies in the following five chapters.

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Part Two Issues in Practice

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3 History, Life-Writing and Epistemology

‘[T]hough ignorance may be bliss, happiness is not to be purchased by a refusal of knowledge’.1 Thus Matthew Pearce writes to his ex-wife in Graham Swift’s Ever After, although his curiosity has undermined his religious faith, and his decision to communicate what he knows has destroyed his marriage. His statement could be applied to both the selfnarratives which I analyse in this chapter: Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin and Swift’s Waterland. In revisiting with hindsight their and others’ choices in the past present to refuse, seek or pass on knowledge, both narrators confront the ethical issue of how to deal with the results of their actions. My concern in this chapter is thus not with the epistemological issues per se which have been accorded such prominence in constructionist historiography and foregrounded so repetitively in historiographic metafiction (cf. Ch. 1, 8–14; Ch. 2, 26–8), but rather with why they loom so large to the narrators whose versions of the past I discuss. In these family histories cum fictional autobiographies the protagonists’ memorial reconstructions are motivated by guilt at their accessory responsibility, whether deliberately or through unforeseen consequences, for the deaths or breakdown of others. Atwood’s Iris Chase Griffen comments: ‘In Paradise there are no stories [...] It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward’.2 Swift’s Tom Crick likewise remarks: ‘History begins only at the point where things go wrong; history is born only with trouble, with perplexity, with regret’.3 In their narrative returns to family traumas, knowledge is a central theme, both in the recollected experience of the remembered self and in the self-questioning or evasiveness of the present, remembering self (cf. Ch. 1, 5; Ch. 3, 60–1). In Iris’s second self-narrative, completed just before her death, the remorseful remembering self reflects on the 57

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culpable passivity and alleged blindness of her remembered self and explores what, with hindsight, she ought to have known or perhaps did observe but refused to acknowledge. Tom tells how in the early 1940s his and others’ curiosity provoked a fateful concatenation of events, the consequences of which, in collusion with Mary, he has sought to repress for almost forty years, before a renewed crisis, exacerbated by his complacent incuriosity or feigned ignorance, threatens this defence mechanism. Sibling rivalry is crucial to both novels. It decisively influenced their protagonists’ historical actions, resulting from sexual jealousy of their sibling’s known or suspected rivalry in an eternal triangle, and related uncertainty over the paternity of an aborted baby. It also biases their retrospective self-narratives, which conceal as well as reveal, and construct self-justifying, subjectively plausible family histories, whose partiality is accentuated by their restricted focalisation of other historical agents.

Alias Laura The Blind Assassin is characteristic of Atwood’s fiction from Surfacing (1972) onwards in depicting the protagonist’s haunting by ghosts which defy repression and must be confronted and appeased. Her negotiating with the dead is effected in two self-narratives – a pseudonymous roman à clef and an overt memoir – which reflect on the nature of the past in memorial and literary ‘reality’. Thus, Iris remarks of her self of over sixty years earlier that ‘she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember’ (292). Here, the emphasis falls on transience and impairment. Conversely, the fact that the past is not entirely irrecoverable but may be evoked into virtual existence in the present enables Iris’s literary acts of commemoration and expiation, in which she bestows an imaginary afterlife on the dead. I begin and conclude with these epistemological and ontological issues, pondering in the interim Iris’s psychological entanglement with her sister, which motivated both her memoir and her fictional disguise alias Laura. Atwood’s preceding historical novel, Alias Grace (1996), an imaginative reconstruction of the enigmatic Grace Marks, who was sentenced as an accessory to a double murder, combined contradictory source material from the 1840s to 1860s with fictitious texts, including Grace’s own inconsistent self-narratives. This self-conscious venture into historiography emphasises our problematic access to events via their traces in fortuitously preserved and necessarily partial accounts, although Atwood elsewhere indicates that she rejects the anti-foundationalism of those

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postmodernist historians who argue that there is no referent anterior to the discursive representations through which alone we encounter the ‘past’.4 Instead, her scepticism in Alias Grace is epistemological rather than ontological; she concludes not that there is no truth to be known but that, as far as the murder is concerned, ‘truth is sometimes unknowable, at least by us’.5 Inconsistently, this appears to be contradicted by her use of an authorial narrative voice with privileged access to Simon Jordan’s consciousness. This selective omniscience does not, however, alter the fact that, as far as the eponymous main character is concerned, Atwood offers no interpretive synthesis or closure but instead presents readers with narratives which are alias Grace: multiple versions of her personality which are ascribed to her by herself and others, one or some of which may be a true likeness, although this remains uncertain. Atwood’s succeeding novel, The Blind Assassin, which delves into the circumstances surrounding a fictitious rather than factual series of violent deaths between 1945 and 1975, addresses similar historiographical difficulties. It too has a first-person narrator who is accused of being an accessory to the deaths of others and is, like Grace, a storyteller ‘with strong motives to narrate but also strong motives to withhold’.6 Her reasons for withholding information are partly pragmatic and tactical, like Grace’s, but also result from her conflicted relationship with her enigmatic sister, Laura, about whose life the novel’s main narratives contain significant gaps and silences. Readers thus confront a biased, possibly unreliable narrator and a character about whose acts and motivation they, like the narrator herself, can only make conjectures, which may perhaps be alias Laura. Atwood accentuates these hermeneutic problems by adopting a modernist structure, although not a modernist narrative technique, in The Blind Assassin: several kinds of textual material are cut up and interleaved by an implied authorial arranger in what Atwood herself has described as a collage, suggesting an analogy between these different forms of narrative and the juxtaposition in a Cubist collage of different conventions of representing ‘reality’. The main narrator is the 82-yearold Iris Chase Griffen. Writing in 1998–9, she recalls the history of the Chase and Griffen families, in particular the events leading up to her sister Laura’s suicide in 1945, interweaving this narrative with diarylike observations on her present life in Port Ticonderoga. Interspersed with this memoir are what purport to be authentic extracts from local newspapers and magazines between 1934 and 1999, and chapters from a roman à clef, The Blind Assassin (New York, 1947) [hereafter abbreviated as BA], which Iris ostensibly published under the pseudonym of

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her sister – alias Laura, as it were.7 This novel-within-the-novel itself contains a lengthy science fiction narrative about the planet Zycron (a Bolshevist allegory of Canadian society in the 1930s) and other fragmentary stories through which this novel’s main characters negotiate their love affair. If one believes Iris’s unverifiable assertion that she is the author of BA, then Atwood’s novel intriguingly contains two separate autobiographies by Iris Chase: one written with coded obliquity during the 1940s, when Iris was preoccupied with the triangular relationship which she and Laura shared with Alex Thomas, and one written over fifty years later with the benefit of hindsight but the added unreliability of memorial reconstruction at an even greater chronological distance. The two autobiographies differ in intended audience. The addressee of the 1947 text was Iris’s husband, Richard Griffen. Its publication avenged his physical abuse of Iris and sexual abuse of Laura by destroying his political career through the scandalous revelations it provoked (which Iris herself anonymously fuelled). It also destroyed any illusions which Richard might have had that Laura had any affection for him, or (if he suspected that the ‘she’ might be Iris) taunted him with his wife’s adultery. The 1998–9 text, Iris’s final act of revenge against the Griffens and in effect her last testament, is addressed to her estranged granddaughter Sabrina. Claiming to be the last one who can offer ‘the truth’ (536), Iris retaliates against Winifred Griffen’s checkmating of her in the ‘game of nasty chess’ (618), in which she first claimed custody of Iris’s daughter, then of her granddaughter and turned both against her, by asserting that Sabrina is no blood relative of the Griffens. Three interrelated and practically inextricable issues stand out in this memoir. The first is that of knowledge. To adapt the terminology which the cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser has developed in his research into memory, Iris as the ‘remembering self’ constructs in 1998–9 a ‘remembered self’ or series of ‘remembered selves’ which purportedly correspond to the ‘historical self’ that was alive at the time of the situations she recalls.8 As Iris remarks of her wedding photograph: ‘I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember’ (292). At times her narrative indicates the limits of this memorial (re)construction. Related to this question of how much she now can ‘know’ about her past is the question of how much she ‘knew’ while living through what she now believes she remembers. Sometimes she emphasises how much she was able to grasp intuitively, although elsewhere she stresses the discrepancy between what

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she has subsequently learned and her earlier naivety, impercipience or ignorance. This inconsistency is crucial to the presentation in her memoir of her protracted inner debate between self-reproach and the desire to justify or vindicate herself. This leads to the second issue: that of agency. Iris’s self-questioning centres on what she guiltily feels she ought to have known (or perhaps must have known but repressed) about Laura, which would perhaps have led her to act otherwise. Whether accurately or astutely, her narrative presents her – in contrast to Laura’s active initiatives of escape or rebellion – as a largely passive figure who, as with her arranged marriage, acquiesces in the path of least resistance. The implication is that, whether as a result of Iris’s personality or the responsibility which her mother’s early death prematurely thrust upon her as the elder sister, her belief in her capacity for self-determination has been buried beneath the compliant ‘false self’ she has constructed to secure the love and approval of the men on whom she is emotionally dependent.9 Knowledge and agency are subsumed in the third, overarching issue: how to emplot events in a narrative which, like all historiography, records the build-up to an outcome which, at the time of writing, is already known. Iris’s self-narrative entails both an interpretation and an evaluation of her life. This requires that a meaningful pattern be imposed on events, involving such rhetorical devices as ‘turning points’ and organising metaphors, themes or leitmotifs. The implicit theories according to which such interpretations are made are drawn from the shared beliefs and expectations of her society, just as her life itself was lived largely with reference to the role-models, scenarios and discursive paradigms available to an upper-class woman in English Canada for the social construction of the self. In Iris’s case, the generic conventions within which she imagines and negotiates her life include the Tennysonian and Pre-Raphaelite late Romanticism which she derives from Grandmother Adelia and her tutor, Miss Violence, discourses of female and male self-sacrifice, plots involving resolution in marriage, and narratives of trauma and victimhood in the cautionary tales told by Reenie and Mrs Hillcoate. In fitting the relatively unpredictable course of events into such interpretive moulds, the risk is of falling into the trap of teleological thinking: as Iris comments on Reenie’s account of Iris’s parents’ lives, ‘after the wedding, there was the war. Love, then marriage, then catastrophe. In Reenie’s version, it seemed inevitable’ (87). Similarly, Iris’s retrospective remark that Laura ‘had no thought of playing the doomed romantic heroine. She became that only later, in the frame of her own outcome

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and thus in the minds of her admirers’ (509) implies fatalistically that, albeit without her foreknowledge, Laura’s life-history followed a predetermined script. Related to this are the thorny issues of causation and responsibility: to what extent were the outcomes in Iris’s and Laura’s lives the foreseen and intentional consequence of conscious actions (necessarily founded, however, on imperfect knowledge and partial impressions), the unintentional consequence of conscious actions, or the practical consequence of unconscious impulses which led involuntarily to unforeseen and perhaps undesirable results, as other agents, in turn, reacted to their actions? Within Iris’s family history one can distinguish the period before her childhood from that of which she has conscious, first-hand recollections. Her account of the former seems plausible because its descriptions of artefacts, fashions and furnishings lend an aura of authenticity and because the themes which it traces in the social history of the later nineteenth century echo those highlighted by recent historians of that period: the amassing of industrial wealth by the Chases, the conversion of this new money into cultural capital through a dynastic marriage with a branch of the financially declining Montreal aristocracy, Adelia’s pursuit of Arnoldian and Ruskinian Culture through the construction of the late-Pre-Raphaelite Avilion, the humanistic rather than commercial education of the sons, and so on. The historiographical assumption is that such cultural narratives were ones which the members of the Chase family themselves would have recognised and chosen to identify with, shaping their self-concepts and their lives according to the scenarios available to them in English Canada at that time. At the individual rather than the social level, Iris’s self-narrative is structured by the caesuras caused by life events which marked what can be identified as successive phases or stages in the lives of family members. These ‘turning points’ were sometimes so obvious that they could be recognised as such at the time: for example, the devastating impact of the First World War on her parents, Liliana and Norval, or Iris’s mother’s death: ‘It would be trite to say that this event changed everything, but it would also be true’ (107). In other cases, such as her musings as to whether the dinner party at Avilion after the button factory picnic marked ‘the beginning’ (232), it is impossible to distinguish what was evident at the time from what, in the retrospective constructions of the memory, appears to have been so. A further structuring device is Iris’s suggestion that life situations or behavioural patterns within the Chase family have repeated themselves over generations. A straightforward example is her quotation of Reenie’s

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comment that, in her social work in the soup kitchen, Laura was the ‘spitting image’ of her mother Liliana (240). A more intriguing instance is her reporting of Reenie’s remark that Grandmother Adelia ‘wasn’t married, she was married off’ (74), which in Iris’s memoir proleptically anticipates her own arranged marriage to a parvenu industrialist. It isn’t clear whether this implicit foreshadowing suggests an ineluctability which would serve Iris’s self-justifying disavowals of her own agency. There is a similar proleptic irony in her account of the clandestine love affair which as a teenager she imagined for her first role-model, Grandmother Adelia (74–5). This, Iris acknowledges, corresponds more to her own fantasies of escape or rescue from the Burne-Jones-like ‘thorn-encircled island’ of Avilion and to her own later adulterous grand passion than to Adelia’s own circumstances. Iris’s romanticisation of her grandmother is inspired by a photograph of Adelia. It epitomises the recurrent utilisation in the memoir of photographs as historical ‘sources’, raising the issue of Iris’s ‘knowledge’ of the past. At times Iris self-consciously indicates the projection involved in her interpretations. Thus, imagining her parents’ brief stay in Halifax in 1915 before Norval’s departure for France, during which Iris was conceived, she wonders where they met, what passed between them: ‘The usual sorts of things, I suppose, but what were they? It is no longer possible to know’ (89). Similarly, as she scrutinises the newspaper photograph which records Norval’s return from the War, she veers between confident statements, rhetorical and tentative questions, while her slippery adverbial phrases, modal verbs and use of free indirect speech concede the presumptuousness of her suppositions about her parents’ emotional life (94–6). Nevertheless, throughout Iris’s memoir it is striking how frequently she feels warranted in slipping into free indirect speech to convey what, on frequently tenuous evidence, she presumes to have been the emotions and beliefs of others. The tricky question of what Iris knew becomes more complex when her narrative reaches the period in which she can draw not only on what she can remember of Reenie’s anecdotal accounts of events – the oral history of a witness which antedates or supplements her own perceptions – but also on her own intuitive inferences about what was going on in the family. At one point, to justify the validity of these inferences, she adopts a defensive tone: ‘How do I know all these things? I don’t know them, not in the usual sense of knowing. But in households like ours there’s often more in silences than in what is actually said’ (98). This contention is supported by three kinds of memories. First, of observations which impressed themselves on her imagination

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as significant, even though at the time she was naively unable to interpret them: for example, of the fact that the waitress at Betty’s Luncheonette briefly touches Norval’s hand. Second, of insights into characters, as in her powerful depiction of Norval just before Laura’s birth, as he stares into the flames of the morning-room fire. But this passage raises hermeneutic difficulties which recur throughout Iris’s self-narrative and blur the boundary between ‘reality’ and unconscious fiction. It is possible that this ‘memory’ is a genuine recollection of her childhood imago of her wounded father as the ‘werewolf’ of their besieged castle, an inscrutable, remote figure who periodically withdrew into his turret room to stupefy himself with alcohol and, in his evident vulnerability, formed the implicit antithesis to the man in flames in her colouring book, whom she loved because the fire ‘can’t hurt him, nothing can hurt him’ (102). It may, however, be that this ‘memory’ is a retrospective construction, influenced by Laura’s later confession of how she had been disturbed by her sense that Norval ‘was burning up. All the time’ (470–2) and by Laura’s painting of Richard as a man with his head in flames (551). Such symbolic patterns lend rhetorical form to Iris’s memoir but their blatancy reminds readers of how much, as a narrator, Iris has her ‘thumb in the scale’.10 The third kind of memory is of premonitions which are subsequently confirmed. A striking instance is when she learns of the onset of her mother’s fatal illness: ‘When she said that, I felt an electric chill run through me, because I knew it. I’d known it all along’ (109). Significantly, her later premonitions involve Alex. When he is being hidden in the attic at Avilion and makes a pass at Iris, she reflects: ‘Had I expected this? Was it so sudden, or were there preliminaries: a touch, a gaze? Did I do anything to provoke him? Nothing I can recall, but is what I remember the same thing as what actually happened?’ (266). In fact, her memoir has recorded her preceding sexual fantasies about him and the dream of escape which she associates with him. But what she emphasises instead is a sense of helpless passivity, which appears to confirm Reenie’s warnings that women are the powerless victims both of predatory males and of a ‘love’ which sweeps them away, perhaps even to their death. The implication is that Iris has only limited agency and hence responsibility; it is a pattern which characterises her relationships with her father and Richard and also the abject emotional dependency of the ‘she’ in BA. The interpretive issue throughout her self-narratives is whether Iris’s personality structure did indeed make her vulnerable to the pressure exerted by overbearing men, with whom she repeated her formative

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relationship with her father, or whether her self-representation in her memoir self-justifyingly understates her scope for agency. In this respect it is interesting to compare her account of how she fortuitously meets Alex again in August 1935 in Toronto and stretches out her hand, ‘like a drowning person beseeching rescue’: ‘such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance’ (393–4). This is, one feels, a more honest admission than the self-deceptive ambivalence of the earlier account, where what is presented as a passive encounter with Alex had also been unconsciously desired. Iris’s downplaying of her own agency conflicts, of course, with her selfaccusation of having acted as Laura’s blind assassin. Iris’s representation of this relationship is, I shall now argue, crucial to BA. Given Iris’s ostensible ability to detect emotional undercurrents in the people around her, it is disconcerting that, on her own account, she was unprepared for the revelation of Laura’s abuse by Richard, even though there had been several verbal and non-verbal intimations of this, which Iris had apparently registered, otherwise she would now be unable to chronicle them. This inconsistency in Iris’s self-representations is explicable only if one posits a wilful ‘blindness’, involving defence mechanisms of repression and denial which enabled her to collude in Richard’s abuse. What underlay this is suggested by the paradox that her memoir foregrounds speciously clear patterns of interpretation, which imply considerable knowledge of motivation and events, while, on the other hand, significant gaps in this overdetermined narrative betray Iris’s ignorance about extended periods of Laura’s life. I’ll turn first to what is highlighted, then to what largely remains invisible. The concatenation of events which resulted in Laura driving off the bridge is emplotted in two patterns which imply a tragic inevitability. One concerns Laura’s own personality and emphasises first her obsession with ‘sacrifice’, in her attempted self-immolation to persuade God to restore her mother, and sexual self-sacrifice to Richard, to prevent his betraying Alex’s whereabouts; secondly, the presumptive influence of Reenie’s and Mrs Hillcoate’s fatalistic tales – which also impressed Iris – of lovelorn or abandoned women who drown themselves either by jumping off bridges into the Louveteau River or by letting the water take them. The other pattern deals with Iris’s accessory role in Laura’s suicide. It begins with the early sibling rivalry of the sisters, exacerbated by Iris’s

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resentful belief that Laura’s birth caused their mother’s decline, and the injunctions of both parents that Iris take care of Laura, placing on the young elder sister an unwelcome burden of responsibility which she is unable to refuse or negotiate. The ambivalent feelings of anger and protectiveness towards Laura which Iris discovers in or projects onto an early photograph of the two of them find expression in a series of episodes in which she is impelled either to harm or reluctantly to save Laura: her aggressive pushing of Laura off the ledge of the lily pond; her retrieval of her from drowning in the Louveteau, when she came close to letting go; and her final vindictive words to Laura. Lest obtuse readers miss these causal connections, Iris overemphasises them: foreshadowing her role as Laura’s blind assassin, with melodramatic excess she describes Laura after her tumble as ‘wailing as if she’d been knifed’ (121); in the account of their final meeting, the earlier episode of the lily pond is explicitly recalled, before once again Iris ‘pushed her off’, and Laura’s near-drowning in the Louveteau is mentioned. Iris’s ambivalence towards Laura increases when their competition for the affection of their first love-object, their mother – which Iris believes Laura won – is succeeded by their rivalry for another love-object: Alex. When they first meet at the button factory picnic Iris, unlike Laura, takes little interest in Alex. At the subsequent dinner party her sceptical distance is reduced as she begins to compete for him: ‘I wanted his attention. He was talking mostly to Laura’ (230). What then happens heralds Iris’s ultimately lethal jealousy of what Alex and Laura might be doing behind her back. They both disappear from Iris’s view and, while Iris works at the factory and has no boyfriend, Laura and Alex are repeatedly seen together in Port Ticonderoga, so much so that local gossip refers to him as ‘Miss Laura’s young man’ (254). The nature of their relationship remains obscure: the religious Laura claims that she is trying to convert the Bolshevist Alex but Iris, who notes Laura’s unsuspected capacity for duplicity, believes that she is ‘pulling the wool over’ Reenie’s eyes and feels that Laura is ‘making a fool’ of her (243–4). Intriguingly, however, Alex’s slightly later comments to Iris appear to support Laura’s version: ‘“Laura and I aren’t up to anything […] She’s a great kid, but she’s a saint in training, and I’m not a baby snatcher”’ (258). It is against this background of Laura’s infatuation with Alex that he takes refuge at Avilion in December 1934. Iris again assumes the protective role of the older sister, taking charge of Alex, which enables Laura to relax ‘like a tired child’. In effect, Iris tries to sideline her, as her guilty self-questioning indicates: ‘Was it my belief that I was doing this only to spare her – to help her, to take care of her, as I had always

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done? Yes. That is what I did believe’ (257). During his concealment the sisters play what Iris presents as a double act as Mary and Martha, Iris providing creature comforts and Laura ‘devotion’. Their shared responsibility brings them temporarily closer but this changes after Alex’s sexual advance to Iris. Iris decides not to confide this to Laura because this ‘would be too hurtful to her’ but also because ‘he might have been doing a similar kind of thing with Laura. But no, I couldn’t believe that. She never would have allowed it. Would she?’ (266). Iris’s nagging suspicions continue henceforth to the end of Laura’s life, as Alex remains a taboo topic of conversation. Each is tacitly aware of the other’s feelings for Alex, as is confirmed by Laura’s partitioning of the photograph of the three of them at the picnic into two photographs, each of which almost entirely excises the rival sister. But, as in the photograph, Alex separates them. Iris’s jealous insecurity is exacerbated by her ignorance of her sister’s life. The period in autumn 1934 when Iris has no knowledge of Laura’s movements when she is meeting Alex is succeeded by several periods in which Iris loses track of Laura: winter 1934–5 and spring 1935 in Port Ticonderoga; the week in August 1935 when Laura works at Sunnyside amusement park; autumn 1935 to April 1936, when Laura plays truant from school in Toronto; autumn 1936–February 1937, when Laura briefly attends school again, then does charitable work; her months of incarceration at Bella Vista; the years between her escape from Bella Vista and reappearance in May 1945. During this time Iris is first occupied in the financial negotiations between Norval and Richard that lead up to her arranged marriage, then allies herself to some extent with her husband in the face of what she takes to be Laura’s adolescent rebelliousness and later mental instability, and from August 1935 is herself apparently absorbed in an affair with Alex. Iris’s fear that, if pressed, Laura will confront her with her own liaison with Alex partly motivates her reluctance to quiz Laura about her whereabouts. When she does try to inquire about Laura’s unhappiness, in what can retrospectively be seen as ‘turning points’ Laura refuses to confide in her, having learned from the experience of her earlier sexual abuse by Mr Erskine that the only person who will believe her is Reenie, not Iris. The extent of what Iris was unaware of is exemplified by her blindness to the relationship between Reenie and Ron Hincks (‘How long had that been going on, and how had I missed it?’ (383)), her belated realisation that Reenie’s pregnancy has left her no option but to get married, and her even later realisation that the father of Reenie’s child might have been not Ron Hincks but Norval. This last hypothesis arouses the

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reflection: ‘I wonder if Laura knew about Reenie and Father, if indeed there was anything to know. I wonder if that is among the many things she knew, but never told. Such a thing is entirely possible’ (476). The place where Iris confronts the many things which she suspects Laura knew but never told is BA, in which Iris projected an imaginary life for her sister, masquerading alias Laura. The fact that Iris’s 1998–9 memoir is a first-person narrative, whose statements usually cannot be corroborated by external sources, raises the question of her reliability as a narrator. It is theoretically possible that Iris is lying when she claims to be the author of BA and that this act of usurpation is the last stage of her sibling rivalry, motivated by jealousy of the affair with Alex which Laura’s novel records. Were one to accept this hypothesis, then her memoir would be unmasked as an elaborate (self-) deception, rendering Atwood’s text a Nabokovian game with the reader (with perhaps the additional possibility that Iris herself merely fantasised her own supposed affair with Alex). This extreme self-referentiality seems, however, less probable than an interpretation which acknowledges in the sisters’ intertwined lives the kind of doubling of female roles characteristic of Atwood’s earlier novels. I’ve therefore assumed that Iris was indeed the author of BA. BA refers with deliberate pronominal obliquity to a ‘she’ whose identity could be resolved only through recourse to the other textual material in Atwood’s collage. It seems likely that the placing of the newspaper extracts is not accidental and that they thus enable the conjectural dating of the successive stages in the affair between ‘he’ and ‘she’, which are often followed by another version of the same events in Iris’s memoir. But, confusingly, this circumstantial evidence, including what one can learn or infer from Iris’s memoir about the movements of the two sisters in the 1930s, could apply to both sisters. It thus seems that, in a tangled mixture of reality and fantasy, Iris, supposedly adopting Laura’s voice in an act of literary ventriloquism, intended to convey not just a disguised record of her own affair with Alex but also what she imagined to have been her sister’s affair with Alex during the extended periods in which Laura disappeared from Iris’s view. This psychological situation is conveyed by Laura’s modifications to Elwood Murray’s photograph of the love-triangle, in which the sisters had appeared as mirror images of each other on either side of Alex. In each of Laura’s duplicated but mutilated photographs of the picnic the ghostly hand of the other, excised sister is present on the margins, as if to indicate that, although the focus is alternately on one sister and Alex, ‘the hand of the other one’ ‘is always in the picture whether seen

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or not’ (631). This shifting perspective is emphasised in Iris’s rather heavy-handed insistence that they wrote the 1947 novel together: ‘It’s a left-handed book. That’s why one of us is always out of sight, whichever way you look at it’ (627). Fittingly, therefore, the Prologue to BA begins by describing what seems to be Iris’s version of this photograph, hidden in her book Perennials for the Rock Garden, while in the alternate version of this passage in the Epilogue it could also be Laura’s photograph that is described. Within the narrative itself there is a frequent slippage between Iris and Laura as the possible referent of ‘she’. The initial chapters of BA, which record the beginning of the affair, contain so little deictic information – unspecific park benches, the rubbish-strewn waste ground beneath a bridge – that although (as Iris indicates on p. 624) their context is presumably the period after August 1935 in Toronto, which marked the onset of Iris’s affair with Alex and the possible resurgence of his relationship with Laura, they could also evoke the autumn of 1934 in Port Ticonderoga, when Laura met Alex ‘down by the soup kitchen’ and ‘on more than one park bench’ (242). Later, following on from Laura’s statement in January 1936 that she saw Alex Thomas the other day (412), in the chapter ‘Carnivore stories’, set in April 1936 when Laura is playing truant, ‘she’ asks ‘him’: ‘Are you ever unfaithful to me?’ (424). His evasively disingenuous reply corresponds to the tale which, on the Queen Mary in May 1936, she remembers his having told her of the two peach women of Aa’a – one a sexpot, the other more serious-minded and open to theological discussion – who bear an uncanny resemblance to the Mary and Martha who looked after Alex in the attic at Avilion. The situation in ‘The Top Hat Grill’ in autumn 1936 – when Laura is dressing up in Iris’s clothes and is later suspected by Iris to have been meeting Alex – where a pregnant ‘she’ bids farewell to ‘him’ before he leaves to fight in Spain, could also apply to both sisters at that time. There is a similar ambiguity in ‘The tower’, which takes place presumably in late spring 1937, where the woman’s environment and state of mind suggest Iris’s post-natal depression after Aimee’s birth but could also apply to Laura’s drugged confinement in the Bella Vista clinic in the aftermath of her forced abortion. Likewise, with the exception of ‘The telegram’, the emotional states evoked in all the subsequent chapters could have been experienced by both sisters. Similar ambiguities surround the parentage of Iris’s and Laura’s babies. Winifred maintains to Iris that the ‘hysterical’ Laura had to be incarcerated in Bella Vista because ‘She appeared to believe that the baby you’re going to have is actually hers, in some way she was unable to explain’

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(525). Laura presumably feels that the baby is ‘actually hers’ because she accurately intuits that the father is Alex, with whom she feels that she rather than Iris might appropriately have a child, whereas, in an ironic mirroring of the sisters’ situations, Laura herself is presumably carrying Richard’s baby, which would more properly be Iris’s. We never learn, however, whether it was indeed Richard rather than Alex who was the father of Laura’s baby. Confusion over the authorship of the 1947 novel leads Iris’s daughter Aimee to believe that she is a changeling and that her true parents are Laura and Alex, a claim which frightens Iris; in this memoir in which history repeats itself, it is perhaps significant that from 1940 onwards Laura waits for Alex’s return in Halifax, where in 1915 Liliana and Norval had conceived a child just before his departure for the world war in which his generation fought. To elucidate what motivated Iris’s deliberate interweaving of herself, Laura and Alex in BA, it is helpful to examine thematic links between The Blind Assassin and Atwood’s contemporaneous Negotiating with the Dead.11 In this Atwood discusses ‘the most famous poem ever written by a Canadian’, John McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’, which insists that the ‘dead make demands […] and you can’t just dismiss either the dead or the demands’ (Negotiating, 147–9). Iris’s recollection of McCrae’s war poem, which is alluded to or quoted on three occasions in her memoir, leads her to a similar conclusion: ‘Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I’ve found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them’ (621). This has several implications for her. One is the need for expiation: as in Cat’s Eye, where Atwood’s protagonist must also confront her unresolved feelings of guilt for having blindly revenged on her sisterly counterpart her own earlier experience of victimisation, Iris must seek to appease the ‘Cries of the thirsty ghosts’ (621) which haunt her: Reenie and Laura.12 Her second reaction to the dead is one of indignant protest on their behalf. In the Zycron narrative and in her memoir Iris deplores the vain self-sacrifices made by her mother, herself and Laura, who had naively believed the dominant ideology of Canada’s patriarchal elite ‘that the welfare of the entire kingdom depended on their selflessness’ (36). Singling out this element of Atwood’s novel, J. Brooks Bouson interprets the book as ‘an unsettling cautionary tale’, ‘a trauma narrative focusing on the sexual self-sacrifice of women under a patriarchal system’.13 But by reducing The Blind Assassin to a ‘feminist’ indictment of a monolithic, undifferentiated ‘masculinist culture’, Bouson leaves out half the story. The first act of commemoration in the novel was not Iris’s self-narratives but Norval’s Weary Soldier war memorial,

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intended to refute the deceitful pieties of those who had demanded that the statue be inscribed ‘For Those Who Willingly Made the Supreme Sacrifice’ (180). Not only the main female characters but also the four principal male characters who were killed or maimed in two world wars were ‘sacrificed’ because of their uncritical complicity with the ideology of ‘hegemonic masculinity’.14 Iris’s self-narratives show the persistence of such ‘generic’ wars, in which ‘Nobody won’, from ‘his’ retelling of the destruction of Jericho and Ai in the Book of Joshua to the televised conflagrations of the 1990s; they have a counterpart in the internecine family conflicts in which Iris, blindly pursuing ‘justice’, gains a Pyrrhic victory.15 But her narratives are more tragic than ‘feminist’ in ascribing this self-lacerating suffering to something primeval: ‘the great leaden suffocating order of things, the great spike-wheeled chariot, the blind tyrants, the blind gods’ (528). This leads to Iris’s third response to the dead: to memorialise them not just out of the acrimonious desire to perpetuate wrongs but also from a yearning to restore and preserve the loved ones she has lost. In keeping with Atwood’s thesis in Negotiating, it seems that for Iris writing originates in mutability and mortality. This is conveyed in BA in a sequence of parables set against the background of wars in Abyssinia and Spain. In April 1936 ‘she’ and ‘he’ debate how the Sakiel-Norn story should end. She favours a happy ending, whereas in his version the ‘entire culture’ of Sakiel-Norn ‘is wiped from the universe’. Then, in an ironic echo of the close of Paradise Lost, the two lovers ‘hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, through the western mountains take their solitary way’. But their faith in providence is misplaced and they are devoured by wolves. The moral, he insists, is that to be ‘true to life’ stories must contain literal or metaphorical wolves (420–4). The following month she recalls how earlier that year when she had pleaded for a happy story, he had teased her with another rewriting of Genesis: a macho fantasy of the Paradise Garden, in which Will and Boyd are seduced by the servile Peach Women of the planet Aa’a (432–6). The chauvinist earthlings become dissatisfied when they realise that the crystal pleasure-dome which encloses Aa’a is actually ‘a big transparent tit’ in which they are trapped, having effectively regressed to the oral phase. They conclude that ‘It’s Paradise, but we can’t get out of it. And anything you can’t get out of is Hell’. As in his earlier tale, ‘Alien on Ice’, ‘he’ is parodying Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, which supplied the theme of the fashionable Xanadu ball which Iris attended in January 1936. His implicit target, indicated in Iris’s recollection in her memoir of how in 1936 she joyfully inhabited her ‘pleasure-dome’ with him (411), is

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what he takes to be the naive complacency which she shares with the Peach Women. His satire seems to have the desired effect, for ‘she’ too becomes indignant at the men’s situation: You’re going to keep those two men cooped up in there forever? I did what you wanted. You wanted happiness. But I can keep them in or let them out, depending how you want it. Let them out, then. Outside is death. Remember? Within weeks, ‘he’ also has left the pleasure-dome, to fight in the Spanish Civil War. After his death in Holland in 1944, the ‘Epilogue’ to BA returns to his stories and to the photograph with which both the ‘Prologue’ and their love affair began. It concludes: ‘The picture is of happiness, the story not. Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road’ (632). What motivated Iris in writing this story of ‘loss and regret and misery and yearning’ as a ‘memorial’ to Alex, Laura and herself, is suggested in Chapter 6 of Negotiating. It argues that ‘not just some, but all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality – by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead’ (Negotiating, 140). In these terms, Iris can be seen as a representative writer, driven by ‘the quest for a lost beloved’ and the desire to bring that person ‘back to the land of the living’ through the ‘life of a sort [which] can be bestowed by writing’. Atwood cites Borges’s suggestion that the Divine Comedy ‘was composed by Dante mainly so he could get a glimpse of the dead Beatrice, and bring her back to life in his poem. It is because he is writing about her, and only because he is writing about her, that Beatrice is able to exist again, in the mind of writer and reader’ (Negotiating, 152, 154). In both her self-narratives Iris, adopting one of ‘his’ catchphrases, evokes what is referred to as ‘another dimension of space’, a ‘parallel universe’ in which ‘what didn’t happen’ may be projected as a counterfactual reality.16 There, fleetingly, the loved and the lost (above all, Alex, and Laura as Proserpine (509–10) and as Dido (608–10)) are ‘able to exist again, in the mind of writer and reader’. There is, I believe, a similarity with Ian McEwan’s Atonement, whose conscience-stricken female narrator, unable to make amends to her sister for her own act of injustice

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which blighted the lives of her sister and her lover, tries to atone by drafting (likewise in 1947) a novel in which they are given a fictive afterlife together, in which, despite their premature deaths, they will ‘exist as my inventions’.17 So, in the ambiguous ‘she’ of BA, Iris accords not just herself but Laura too the relationship with Alex which she desired but was unable to realise. It is therefore appropriate that the interplay in Iris’s memorial and fictional constructions between the past and the different narrative forms in which it is imagined and represented ends with her own self-effacing retreat into a merely virtual reality, ‘another dimension of space’. For, as she acknowledges in her envoi to her intended reader, her granddaughter Sabrina, ‘I leave myself in your hands. What choice do I have? By the time you read this last page, that – if anywhere – is the only place I will be’ (637).

Revolutionary acts In Waterland the central issue is also how the remembering self comes to terms with the recollected actions of the remembered self and significant others. But whereas Iris’s self-narratives are concerned with Laura’s traumatic experiences, Tom Crick confronts not merely Mary’s trauma but also his own. Swift’s narrative voice is thus that of a traumatised character. In foregrounding this, my reading departs from the predominant interpretations of Waterland as historiographic metafiction and follows instead those critics who have emphasised Swift’s preoccupations with mourning and/or melancholia and/or treated the novel as a trauma narrative.18 It shows how (like Iris’s) the fatalistic family history which Tom constructs serves to justify his behaviour towards Dick and Mary, to whom he is obtusely or complacently blind, and how, even when recalling the past, Tom’s stylistic evasiveness betrays his continuing emotional dissociation and denial. From Russell’s Christian perspective ‘the seeds of [Crick’s] possible redemption’ lie in his confession; Craps claims that ‘rather than promoting despair or resignation’, Waterland offers the promise ‘that a truly historical transmission of trauma [...] may save us from apocalypse and offer a measure of redemption’.19 The opposite is true: Waterland insists oppressively on the impossibility of redeeming past mistakes.20 The traumatised Tom emplots life as either empty stasis, punctuated by the recurrent irruption of overwhelming events, or futile attempts at progress which merely go round in circles. His narrative begins with a renewed but now definitive sense of finality: in 1979–80 he once again confronts the

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possible ‘End of History’ (4), ‘the old, old feeling, that everything might amount to nothing’ (233). Several near-repetitions in his life apparently substantiate his cyclical interpretation of history. In 1946, amid devastated German cities Tom had envisaged teaching schoolchildren about the precarious endurance of ‘civilisation’, to counterbalance his ‘vision of the world in ruins’ (207); now history is to be axed as irrelevant. Armageddon again looms, with the proposed stationing of American cruise missiles in Britain; the fear this inspires in the 16-year-old Price reminds Tom of himself at that age in 1943, when American bombers flew daylight sorties from nearby RAF Mildenhall, and of his father in the mud at Ypres. The trauma of Mary’s abortion in that year, when her and Tom’s future effectively came to an end, has been reopened by her desperate abduction of a baby, in the wish-fulfilling delusion that she could thereby transform their lives. She does, but not as she intended. Instead, they remain inescapably bogged down in the Fenlands of their past. Despite his professional advocacy of ‘curiosity’ (168–9), Tom’s adult life has been a deliberate detour away from disturbing matters close to home; he has displaced into the safe territory of historical inquiry the tormenting ‘Whywhywhy’ (93, 244) of his grief. In 1979–80, however, by departing from their collusive denial of their trauma, Mary forces him to address this overwhelming question. Their present crisis results from its predecessor in 1943, which was, Tom alleges, itself predetermined. To explain how, he constructs a grand narrative which traces the longue durée of the Fens, the cyclical conjunctures that marked the rise and fall of the Atkinsons, and a supposedly deterministic pattern of recurrent calamities (cf. Ch. 6, 153). His morbid convictions, the product of his temperament and his traumatic experiences, are projected into the tropes and cultural myths with which he emplots the history of his forebears. The schematic neatness of its Atkinson-Crick, sanguine-phlegmatic antitheses and emphatic repetitions indicate how much Tom imposes his own interpretive framework on events. The Atkinsons, inspired by their supposed far-sightedness, typify the ‘Idea of Progress’ (80); their rise to entrepreneurial pre-eminence, with hegemonic dominance of the entire production process and distribution of beer in the Fenlands, parallels that of post-Waterloo England and is increasingly associated with that of the British Empire. But their sanguine pursuit of ‘Improvement’ (80) evolves into ‘hubris’ (62), provoking the nemesis which overtakes them. Tom pinpoints their ‘zenith’ in 1874, the year of Ernest Atkinson’s birth; their ‘decline’ coincides with the late nineteenth-century depression, ‘a period of economic deterioration from which we have never recovered’ (80–1, 137). In tracing the

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Atkinsons’ reduced commercial momentum and would-be gentrification, by converting economic capital into the cultural capital of Kessling Hall, Tom’s historiography follows Martin J. Wiener’s influential English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (1981). Wiener’s since-discredited thesis maintained that English entrepreneurship, unlike its foreign rivals, was vitiated by the humanities-focused education at public schools and Oxbridge of the sons of industrialists, whose fathers sought to make them gentlemen.21 Ernest Atkinson’s sojourn at Cambridge enables his political radicalisation and Cassandra-like warnings about the overreaching expansionism of the Atkinson brewery and of British imperial interests in the ‘great power’ rivalry that preceded the First World War. After his Coronation Ale has exposed the ‘inflammatory folly’ (152) of his jingoistic fellow-townspeople, accompanied by the fire which destroys the brewery, Ernest abandons industry for Kessling Hall, which becomes a home for shell-shocked survivors of the greater ‘conflagration’ (152) which he had despondently foreseen. The Atkinsons’ megalomania is succeeded by Ernest’s melancholia; his eschatological expectation of a Second Coming offers the only hope of redemption from what he and Tom view as terminal decline. In contrast to the Atkinsons’ grandiosity, the Cricks accept the reality principle symbolised by the Fens, which are ‘never reclaimed, only being reclaimed’ (8). Their empirically based wariness informs Tom’s cyclical interpretation of history and his intuition of an underlying organic drive towards inertia, which resembles Freud’s Thanatos: the Cricks ‘did not forget’ ‘that, however much you resist them, the waters will return; that the land sinks; silt collects; that something in nature wants to go back’ (14–15). Progress is accordingly consolidation rather than expansion, the attempt through ceaseless land-reclamation to prevent reversion or loss: ‘It’s progress if you can stop the world slipping away’ (291) – like Tom’s mother who, when he awoke, had ‘gone’ (243). The metaphor reappears in Tom’s fatalistic tenet that children will become like their parents; what matters is whether they’ve struggled to avoid this outcome, ‘and so prevented things slipping’ (208). Heroism is trying to hold on in a world that offers no prospect of amelioration. Significantly, in view of the deaths that marked his youth, Tom associates the incremental threat of silt, which clogs up passages and requires constant dredging, with that of phlegm, which ambivalently ‘Eases yet obstructs; assists yet overwhelms’ (298) and ultimately choked his father. Because it is ‘gathered with experience’ (298), ‘this remorseless stuff that time leaves behind’ requires constant ‘scooping up from the depths’ (299). The grim implication is that only by minimising experience can

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one hope to reduce its cumulative, life-threatening residues. This irresolvable aporia suggests why Tom’s life has reached an impasse, just as Mary’s ‘came to a kind of stop’ when she was sixteen (106). Tom’s phlegmatism is a family trait, but an acquired numbness stems from the traumatic impact of his mother’s early death and the deaths of 1943. His mother’s death, he remarks, has ‘gone on happening, the way unique and momentous things do, for ever and ever, as long as there’s a memory for them to happen in’ (237–8). Tom thus views ‘the past’ as ‘What stops but remains’ (273). To cope with such overwhelming events, his overall strategy is cerebral: to order them in cyclical patterns, which, although implying their inevitable recurrence, relativise the fear they arouse, by demonstrating that others survived comparable adversity. Within this rationale, his memorial narrative ironises traumatic experiences, as a way of dissociating himself from what he cannot accept, or takes refuge in fabulation, in the accustomed manner of the Cricks, for whom spinning yarns is a strategy to ‘outwit’ the ‘wide, empty space of reality’ (15). However, what this rhetorical distancing from uncontrollable emotions repeatedly betrays is that ‘explaining’s a way of avoiding the facts while you pretend to get near to them’ (145). This evasiveness is evident in Tom’s treatment of the family traumas of 1921–2 and 1942–3, which glibly emplots this harrowing, emotionally complex material as fairy tales: the ‘ogre’s castle’ (186), the ‘gingerbread house’ (195), ‘Beauty and the Beast’ (209), the ‘Witch’ (258). The disconcerting incongruity of tone between subject matter and style belongs, I suggest, in a pattern of psychological reflex actions, whereby Tom resorts to flippancy or crass wordplay (‘An Empty Vessel’ (34–6), ‘the Change of Life’ (101)) to deal with emotionally threatening situations. I’ll return later to his insensitivity towards Mary. For now my concern is how his narrative of 1921–2 struggles with the historically more remote traumas of Henry’s severe neurasthenia and Helen’s negotiation of her father’s incestuous desires. Its dominant focus, characteristically, is not on imagining empathetically what those involved might have felt, but on indicating echoes, repetitions and foreshadowings of other family experiences. This serves to keep the characters at arm’s length, so that readers must infer their psychological inwardness. Consider how Tom surmises Helen’s ordeal: Coming and going, through the trees, between the lodge and the hospital, she would ask herself, which is the madder place? [...] And sometimes on these journeys to and fro she would stop, while an acorn dropped, a woodpecker drilled, a breeze swung through the

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beech trees, and say to herself: these are the only sane interludes of my life – if this is what sanity is. She would think: the truth of it is, I’m trapped. My life’s stopped too. Because when fathers love daughters and daughters love fathers it’s like tying up into a knot the thread that runs into the future, it’s like a stream wanting to flow backwards. [...] So she would linger amongst the trees, like a distressed damsel in the forest. (197) The first three sentences persuasively begin to evoke Helen’s emotions. But the fourth echoes one of the novel’s leitmotifs, applied twice here to the ‘broken-minded soldiers’ (196) and to Henry, elsewhere to Sarah Atkinson and to Mary: the life that has stopped. We thus move from the character’s reported thoughts to what masquerades as free indirect style but in fact ventriloquises the narrator’s own interpretive patterns. This is succeeded by his pontifications on incest, which, before his audience has been allowed to explore the depth of Helen’s feelings, extrapolate from her predicament to make a schematic generalisation. The following paragraph (omitted above) extends his commentary on her dilemma, in the awkward, faux-naif tone in which Tom talks down to his listening ‘children’. By the time we reach the stereotype of the final sentence, Helen’s experiential actuality has been elided. A comparable example of inauthenticity is on pp. 192–3, where Tom patronises Henry’s doctors, through the nursery idiom with which he imagines they addressed their patient, and Henry himself (‘our limping veteran’), and travesties Henry’s parents’ reaction to his breakdown, with a far-fetched simile that inhumanely parades its cleverness: ‘One after the other – like two of those dazed, doomed Tommies advancing blindly into the same machine-gun skittle-alley – they topple into their graves’ (193). The salient example of Tom’s traumatised narrative voice is his recounting of how his and Mary’s aborted foetus slipped away: Larks were trilling somewhere above the mist, but I was stumbling through a mist of tears. I climbed the river wall, descended to the water’s edge. I turned my head away. But then I looked. I howled. A farewell glance. A red spittle, floating, frothing, slowly sinking. Borne on the slow Ouse currents. Borne downstream. Borne all the way (but for the Ouse eels...) to the Wash. Where it all comes out. (274) By conveniently overlooking the final four sentences, Russell can shoehorn this into his Christian interpretation: ‘Crick has begun the first step

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in forgiveness: a steady gaze at the sins committed and an admission of responsibility’.22 In a more remarkable misreading, Poole comments: ‘It is at once shocking and soothing at such a moment to be recalled to such a brave banality, that “it all comes out in the wash”. [...] The abortion has seemed such a monstrous, exceptional happening, yet, as Tom retells it, we hear at just this moment the first stirrings of relief. The event begins to recede, smiled gingerly into a long perspective’.23 Craps is more accurate: ‘Tom unexpectedly ends his reminiscence with a tiresome cliché which ill befits the high seriousness of his subject matter’.24 However, as I have argued, this bathos comes far from ‘unexpectedly’ but is entirely representative of Tom’s defence mechanisms. In its forced jocularity, selflaceration and self-pity it indicates how, despite the apparent facing of facts in Tom’s grim aside about the carnivorous eels, he cannot yet allow himself to accept the full emotional impact of what happened. Despite his throwaway remark, he has not disposed of the baby’s mortal remains; they still form part of the ‘remorseless stuff that time leaves behind’ (299). Tom’s traffic with the past is most intense in his linking of his grandfather, mother, Mary and Dick through fateful events in 1922, 1937 and 1942–3. He emplots their entanglements as a catastrophic Fall from innocence, resulting from the pursuit of forbidden knowledge and the communication of home truths best left unsaid. In conjecturally reconstructing his parents and his grandfather, Tom projects onto the eternal triangle of Henry–Helen–Ernest the moral dubieties that preoccupy him in the later triangle of Dick–Mary–Tom. There is a questionable circularity to this: Tom uses the later situation to cast light on the earlier, which thus proleptically anticipates events a generation later, the alleged structural parallel confirming his fatalistic interpretation that history repeats itself. Subsequently he uses Ernest’s religious mania as a template to interpret Mary’s behaviour in 1979–80. Tom’s unresolved insecurities about ‘Mary’s version’ (225–7) of the paternity of her child are transposed onto Helen: what the daughter really hoped (though it grieved her to deceive the father) was that first she would get a child by Henry and that the father would take it for his own. And if, failing this, she got a child by the father then she would never tell Henry whose it was and perhaps never need to. A third possibility – that she might not know herself whose child it was – she scarcely considered[.] (198) The common theme is how, under the duress of Ernest’s emotional blackmail or Dick’s potential violence, a beleaguered female manipulates

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two male rivals. The key issue is whether she withholds or communicates the truth; by considering alternative strategies, Tom explores the moral responsibility and unintended consequences involved. Dick serves as a model for Tom’s imagining both of how, under Helen’s experienced tutelage, the naive, mentally disordered Henry ‘discovered love’ (194), and of the importunate Ernest, whom Helen tries to placate. But there is also a disquieting resemblance between Tom’s situation and that of the duped Henry and Ernest. Like Dick, Henry is ostensibly not the biological father of the child he believes is his. But whereas Dick is apprised by Mary and Tom of this, with fatal consequences, Tom’s narrative leaves indeterminate the thorny question of when and how much Henry knew. Conversely, while Dick’s congenital slowness apparently betrays his incestuous origins, the paternity of Mary’s aborted foetus is never established unequivocally. Tom’s fatal interference in events (which resembles Iris’s decisive pushing of Laura to suicide) is caused by sibling rivalry. Again, the desire for and handling of knowledge are crucial. Tom’s ambivalence towards Dick is evident throughout his narrative. On the one hand, he tries to educate him (before Henry, always in favour of avoiding unsettling knowledge, intervenes), and encourages Mary to enlighten him sexually, before ‘charity’ turns to ‘jealousy’ (221). On the other hand, Tom’s envy of Helen’s favouring of Dick, culminating in Tom’s ‘exclusion’ (241) in 1937, when Helen summons Dick to her deathbed and passes on the key to secret knowledge, is heightened by his suspicions about Mary and Dick. Tom’s resentment is expressed in the verbal aggression of his representations of Dick – as ‘freak’, ‘potato-head’ (27), ‘dumb-dumb’, ‘sieve-brain’ (280), and so on – and innuendo suggesting Dick’s sexual congress with his motor-bike (32–3, 219). Tom once manages to empathise with Dick, in imagining his reaction to Mary’s request that he bring her an eel (216). Otherwise, he disparages him. His aggression finds an ultimate outlet when the illiterate Dick asks him to read Ernest’s legacy: ‘D-Dick want know’ (276). Tom’s exculpatory narrative implies that he is doing him a favour, for Dick ‘wants releasing’, ‘He’s stuck in the past’ (275). Thus, after his unsuccessful spying, Tom finally attains what Helen had withheld from his curiosity. As arbiter of this knowledge, he has power over his brother, which he exploits vengefully. The scene is painful in the contrast between Dick’s distress and Tom’s detachment (277–80). Having gratuitously told Dick that Mary’s baby wasn’t his, provoking him to tears, which Tom clinically describes as a kind of non-human ‘secretion’, Tom then explains that ‘My father isn’t your father’. While Dick, by implication an eel out of

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water, gasps for air, Tom attributes thoughts to him which voice his own fraternal hostility towards this ‘bungle’ ‘that shouldn’t be’. From this point, Tom’s narrative dislodges him from the family: Tom is now ‘only son’, ‘true-son’, Dick is the ‘son-who’s-not-a-son’, ‘non-son’ (281–2), although Henry makes no such distinction. Should Tom have been able to foresee, or did he unconsciously will, the fatal consequences of his verbal spite, which his unresponsive coldness did nothing to forestall? Although the revelations in the trunk take him too by surprise, his reaction vents a long-standing animus, manoeuvring Dick into a position where he apparently takes Tom’s denigration of him to heart. His self-justifying narrative attempts to mitigate his guilt by suggesting an inevitability to Dick’s self-annihilation. The ground for this naturalisation was prepared earlier by an insidious prolepsis: ‘Can it be that knowledge has indeed dawned and that Dick [...] realises that he’s not like other people? He’s defective; he’s a botched job. [...] Perhaps it’s time [...] something better were found to replace this abortive experiment called Dick Crick...’ (221). Tom’s canny foreshadowing here is reinforced by a rhetorical strategy that also aids his accounting for Mary: adducing self-fulfilling deterministic repetitions and symbolic patterns from Tom’s version of family history. Thus, Dick’s final hours echo Tom’s reconstruction of his father Ernest’s suicide; as a ‘fish of a man’ (309), Dick’s return to the sea is merely ‘Obeying instinct’ (310), as Tom’s chapter ‘About the Eel’ handily explained. Just as Tom’s emplotment naturalises Dick’s demise, so his interpretive pattern naturalises Mary’s final crisis, by representing her as the successor of the crazed Sarah Atkinson and of Ernest Atkinson, who believed that his son would be a ‘Saviour of the World’ (190), and repeatedly associating her with a Madonna. In narrating her desired immaculate conception of a child who, as a token of God’s forgiving grace, would redeem her original sin and restore her prelapsarian innocence, Tom lends her actions as a Catholic a logical coherence. But, by adducing historical precedent, he crushingly dismisses her initiative in attempting to work through their trauma as doomed to futility, explaining away what, in his inability to empathise with Mary, he fails to comprehend. Thus, in autumn 1979 he is as ‘Stupid’ (252–3) as he was in 1943, when he obtusely refused to recognise what Mary was trying to tell him. Tom describes Mary’s baby-snatching as a ‘revolutionary’ act (228), having earlier noted that, despite the popular notion of revolution as ‘transformation – a progressive leap into the future’, almost every revolution contains an opposite tendency: ‘the idea of a return. A redemption; a restoration’ (119). Similar would-be ‘New Beginning[s]’ (6) that

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culminate in cyclical returns dominate the stories which Tom tells of his family, region and nation; they never, however, bring ‘redemption’ or ‘restoration’ but only inaugurate the resumption of a downward trend. Hence, in his philosophy of history and in his dealings with Mary in 1979–80 there are ‘no short-cuts to Salvation, no recipe for a New World’ (94); instead, disillusionment counsels fatalistic resignation. Thus, it is he who dictates that her provocative disruption of their retrenched lives leads nowhere. Why should he change his Crick-like devotion not to transforming the status quo but rather preserving it in ‘the tenuous, reclaimed land of [their] marriage’ (111)? Mary’s story, ‘pieced together and construed by me’ (215), is occluded by Tom’s tiresome witticisms (‘Her menstrual cycle [...] stopped cycling’ (224)) and his external focalisation of her. Its postwar phase begins with a lacuna: the three and a half years during which, in presumed penance, Mary withdrew from the world. Tom never learns what took place, because, he self-justifyingly alleges, Mary was ‘destined never to disclose it’ (103). What remains unspoken are not merely these years but also – save for Mary’s remark, ‘“You know, don’t you, that short of a miracle we can’t have a child?”’ (106) – the unresolved, repressed aftermath of 1943. As Tom now goes over events in his memory, his narrative is influenced by hindsight knowledge of Mary’s breakdown and thus highlights what in retrospect might be seen to have foreshadowed or ‘explained’ it. From the rationalistic perspective of Tom’s remembering self, the salient theme is the ability to accept reality versus forms of escapism or make-believe. In narrating their reunion in 1947, Tom contrasts ironically the naive romantic or melodramatic preconceptions of his remembered self with Mary’s resilient realism and presumed ‘decision to live henceforth without any kind of prop or refuge’ (104). He thus constructs her as the stronger partner, a ‘prop to him’ (105), who conveniently is able to ‘withstand, behind all the stage props of their marriage, the empty space of reality’ (110). Hence Tom can happily regress to boyish dependency; before Mary finds work, she sees him off to school each morning, with ‘the inevitable ironies, the mother–son charades this prompted’ (106). Although Tom’s affected breeziness makes a joke of their situation, ‘charades’ acknowledges retrospectively the inauthenticity of their modus vivendi. To deal with this troubling material, his summary memoir of their uneventful marriage adopts an emotionally detached thirdperson perspective (106–13). Although early on ‘the husband warily – hopefully’ inquired about adoption, Mary repeatedly dismissed this option, ‘so the husband supposed’, as the kind of ‘make-believe’ (110) she does without. (Alternatively, she perhaps rejects his characteristically

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logical solution as failing to address the underlying emotional issues.) Tom’s interjection, like his qualified statement ‘she made do (so he thought) with nothing’ (110), serves to justify what in self-questioning retrospect might appear culpable incuriosity or self-serving complacency. Thus, while Mary’s putative self-sufficiency absolves him from needing to worry about her, Tom escapes from their personal past into history, reassuringly surrounded at school by surrogate children. Tom is aware that Mary’s menopause reminds her of the finality of her childless infertility, commenting wrily on its coinciding with her purchase of a dog. But although this act ‘suggests a different explanation’ than Mary’s ‘official justification’ (107–8) (as earlier, when she took up work with the elderly ‘for reasons never fully explained’ (106)), Tom avoids inconvenient inquiry, even when, ‘he strongly suspects’ (111), she attends church. His phlegmatism arguably provokes Mary’s resort to a desperate remedy to break their intolerable deadlock, when she catastrophically leads both of them to re-enact the trauma they have repressed for almost forty years. In attempting to reverse the abortion which she had induced earlier, Mary abducts a baby to replace her lost child. Tom’s emotionally dissociated, third-person narrative of this ‘bizarre Nativity’ casts him as ‘awe-struck shepherd’ in ‘mock Adoration’ of Mary’s ‘Madonna – and child’, and, later, ‘ruthless Herod’ (229–31). The shock of what defied his comprehension is still unassimilated and can be dealt with, even in retrospect, only by recourse to awkward humour which treats the overwhelming event as absurd. In an uncontrollable surge of empathy, as he pulls the baby from Mary, echoing the abortion, Tom ‘cannot suppress the sensation that he is [...] tearing the life out of her’ (231). But this involuntary emotional connection soon gives way to condescending rationalism, marking a renewed distance: ‘God doesn’t talk any more. Didn’t you know that, Mary? [...] God’s for simple, backward people in godforsaken places’ (232). Tom’s deflating scepticism is fully reinstated when, in a ‘parody’ of a young couple driving to Maternity (268), he directs them back to Safeways. As he and Mary ‘retrace [their] steps’, it is, he insists, ‘impossible’ for them to ‘get back to where you can begin again. Revolution’ (270). For, while their revolutionary act restores her baby to the teenage mother (who recalls Mary’s earlier self ), Mary is once again bereft of a child (271). This renewed acting-out of the original trauma doesn’t enable her to work through it; instead, unable to cope with this second irruption of a devastating reality, she suffers a psychotic breakdown. Tom’s inveterate rationalism apparently preserves him from this fate; his forms of dissociation permit a functioning, outwardly normal life.

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Instead, Mary’s retreat into an inner world (implicitly repeating her withdrawal in 1943–7) licenses Tom to resume their long-standing repression: ‘Avoiding in these memory-jogging journeys so many no-go areas, emergency zones [...] afraid to tread, when it comes to it, the mine-fields of the past’ (285). By treating Tom primarily as an autobiographical narrator rather than ‘an allegorical representation of the postmodern historian’, I have redirected discussion of Waterland from an overemphasis on epistemology towards the ethical issues which it shares with The Blind Assassin.25 The uncontroversial point that historiography is a subjective, provisional (re)construction of the past is of little interest per se and results in critical readings which reduce all historiographic metafiction to tedious similarity. Instead, I have argued, what matters is the situatedness of Tom’s and Iris’s self-narratives, and the psychological impulses which motivate them to make sense of the unresolved past in far-fromdisinterested histories and render their versions of it unreliable or inadequate. Knowledge in and of the past thus remains a key issue in both novels but is subsidiary to the uses to which this knowledge is put by both remembered and remembering selves.

4 National Stories

Much attention has recently been devoted to how nations as imagined communities forge their identity through a consensual ‘national story’.1 Focusing on the relationship between the individual and society – in Rushdie’s words, ‘How […] may the career of a single individual be said to impinge on the fate of a nation?’ – this chapter examines national stories by Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry and Jonathan Coe, in which families serve as a microcosm of the nation.2 Despite their geographical diversity, they display considerable similarities. From a middle-class, left-leaning perspective, all emplot the breakdown of the post-Independence or postwar socialist consensus, enshrined in Nehruvian secularism or the British Welfare State, into communal (that is, sectarian) or class polarisation, significant responsibility for which is attributed to Indira Gandhi or Margaret Thatcher. In varieties of conspiracy theory, their regimes are represented as enmeshed with other power groups – the Shiv Sena and underworld of Bombay, the British establishment – to form all-encompassing networks which inspire depressive resignation among the disempowered or newly marginalised. Significantly, none of the novels envisages organised resistance to these developments; their political protest assumes satirical form. But although their location of agency within the individual rather than in larger social structures has attracted Marxist criticism, this focus enables them to investigate moral responsibility, in the form of complicity with the developments they abhor, and, in Rushdie’s and Mistry’s case, to suggest that societal change is only possible through a transformation of the self, affecting the interactions on a micro scale through which society is (re)produced.

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I: Babu histories Outsider! Trespasser! You have no right to this subject! […] We reject your authority. We know you, with your foreign language wrapped around you like a flag: speaking about us in your forked tongue, what can you tell but lies?3 Depicting a nation challenged by the centrifugal forces of class, caste, religion, ethnicity and regional languages, Rushdie’s and Mistry’s Bombaycentred novels show how social divisions are (re)produced in families or small groups, evidencing Lukács’s concept of typicality and the process of what Giddens terms structuration (cf. Ch. 2, 45–6; Ch. 1, 19–20). They are written from what Tabish Khair has termed the socioeconomic and discursive perspective of a ‘Babu’: ‘middle or upper class, mostly urban (at times cosmopolitan), Brahminized and/or “westernized”, and fluent in English’.4 Their situatedness is also affected by Rushdie’s and Mistry’s doubly marginal perspective: from the Indian diaspora, and also, as Muslim or Parsi, representing minorities within an increasingly Hindu majoritarian state. The authors’ positioning obviously affects the handling of voice in their narratives – for whom they claim to speak – and their emplotments. As Indian English novelists they face a dilemma: omitting subalterns is politically incorrect; attempted narratorial ventriloquism of their worldview is hegemonic appropriation. Saleem Sinai’s Nehruvian historiography in Midnight’s Children exemplifies what a leading subaltern historian terms ‘bourgeois-nationalist elitism’: the prejudice that ‘the making of the Indian nation’ and the development of nationalist consciousness ‘were exclusively or predominantly elite achievements’.5 His focus on political events, the upper classes and Muslims differs little from most western historians of India.6 Rushdie has come to explore this self-critically, by addressing in The Moor’s Last Sigh the shortcomings of the Nehruvian elite. In A Fine Balance Mistry extends the middle-class focus of his earlier fiction to include subalterns and explicitly thematises the transcendence of class and communal boundaries. Their emplotments of Indian history are narratives of decline, in which Indira and Sanjay Gandhi’s Emergency policies, the ascent of the chauvinist, then Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena, the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 and Hindu–Muslim clashes of 1992–3 mark significant turning points in the demise of Nehruvian secularism.7 In Rushdie’s case, this disillusionment stems from the gradual passing of

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power to religious and populist forces which have marginalised his own elite group and transformed his imaginary homeland beyond recognition, thereby challenging also the self-image of cultural hybridity which he had projected onto the nation. But whereas Rushdie narrates a declension from the promise of 1947, while maintaining that Nehru’s ‘idea of India’ remains valid, Mistry’s pessimism appears timeless, suggesting the inexorable frustration of human aspirations.8

Midnight’s Children Midnight’s Children combines fictional autobiography with a historical survey from the ideological viewpoint of Nehru’s nationalist elite. Its mythopoeic narrative, later completed by The Moor’s Last Sigh, dramatises how Saleem/Salman’s paradise, Bombay, was lost: India’s most modern city, whose upper-class cosmopolitan culture reached its zenith during Rushdie’s youth, is represented as symbol and transitory realisation of Nehru’s vision of a tolerant, non-sectarian nation.9 The novel grew from Rushdie’s nostalgia for the Bombay of his childhood, from which he had twice been exiled: first, by being sent at 13 to board at Rugby; secondly, when his father moved the family to Karachi.10 The ‘imaginary homeland’ he recalled is a privileged area, bounded to the north by the Mahalaxmi Racecourse, to the south by Malabar Hill and Marine Drive, and centring on the upper-middle-class ‘Methwold’s Estate’ at Breach Candy (corresponding to Westfield Estate, where the Rushdies lived in Windsor Villa). Beyond the pale lie the northern slums where Shiva grows up, and Colaba, the source of the secretaries with whom Ahmed flirts. But Rushdie’s Proustian desire to ‘reclaim’ ‘a city and a history’, ‘to restore the past to myself’ was, he came to recognise, doomed to failure: he could not resurrect the past ‘as it actually had been, unaffected by the distortions of memory’. Instead, Saleem’s unreliable narration foregrounds the fallibility and provisionality of memorial and historiographical (re)construction: ‘the way in which we remake the past to suit our present purposes, using memory as a tool’ (IH, 9–12, 22–5). Ostensibly addressed to Padma, who tokenistically represents India’s proletariat, and his adopted son, Aadam, who embodies India’s future, but de facto to a western audience, Saleem’s narrative is his testament to a nation that he believes to be, like himself, gradually disintegrating.11 It thus thematises the tension between Nehru’s efforts to impose a federal unity and the centrifugal forces of communalist fragmentation. The assembly of fragments into an imaginary nation is likewise a historiographical challenge for Saleem. Just as Aadam Aziz inferred Naseem as a whole from

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his piecemeal viewings through a perforated sheet, so Saleem’s episodic narrative envisages India in apparently disconnected vignettes, like Lifafa Das’s peepshow. On the clocktower at Breach Candy, ‘peeping through the miraculous peepholes of a private “Dilli-dekho” machine’, the telepathic Saleem has the feeling of ‘somehow creating a world’, with ‘the illusion of the artist’ that the ‘multitudinous realities of the land’ are ‘the raw unshaped material of my gift’ (173, 174). Elsewhere, Saleem compares history to a cinema, in which too close proximity to the screen, that is, insufficient temporal distance from events, causes the big picture to dissolve in myriad details or subjective judgements. As if to illustrate this, his compulsive alleging of causal ‘correspondences’ (300) among coincidental but unrelated events seems to parody historiographic colligation (cf. Ch. 1, 13, 18). Early critics overemphasised this fragmentation, in treating Midnight’s Children as postmodernist ‘historiographic metafictionality’. Thus, Linda Hutcheon asserted that Saleem’s narration is a Foucauldian ‘rethinking of the past in non-developmental, noncontinuous terms’, offering ‘contingency’ with ‘no final point of reference’; it was accordingly not an ‘ideological’ novel seeking to persuade readers ‘of the “correctness” of a particular way of interpreting the world’.12 This fails to distinguish the meandering sjužet of Saleem’s Shandean digressions from the chronologically sequential, ideologically coherent fabula which represents his own and India’s history. Saleem’s methodological reflection is evident in his analysis of the ‘chutnification of history’ through which the past is preserved (459–61). This has encouraged David Lipscomb to propose that Saleem intended to deconstruct western authority and monolithic historiography, by inserting textbook ‘facts’ from Wolpert’s A New History of India as rhetorical foreign bodies in his story.13 There is no evidence to support this conjecture.14 Instead, what Saleem does – but only in the context of the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965 – is to problematise their truth-claims by showing that the conflicting nationalistic propaganda of All-India Radio and the Voice of Pakistan makes it impossible to establish what happened (338–41). In consistently satirising the distortions and exclusions of official or dominant versions of history, Saleem’s target is not neo-colonialist historiography but rather the domestic suppression of inconvenient truths and dissent. Thus, he pillories two regimes characterised by hypocrisy, nepotism and corruption and sustained by electoral fraud: (West) Pakistan’s military dictatorship and Indira Gandhi’s Emergency rule. Saleem’s exposure of the malleability of the ‘truth’ does not, however, imply a postmodern relativism, which would condone the manipulations of authoritarian regimes, including, he claims, the burning of incriminating evidence by

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Indira and Sanjay Gandhi. Rather, his scepticism seeks to undermine the ‘dietary laws’ of history which delimit the ‘halal portions of the past’ (59), but not to discredit the civic responsibility of reconstructing the probable truth for an ‘amnesiac nation’ (460). Rushdie’s Shame depicts a country which is ‘not Pakistan, or not quite. There are two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space, or almost the same space […] at a slight angle to reality’.15 Midnight’s Children likewise depicts in ‘Anglepoised’ light a ‘real and fictional’ India, alternating between verisimilitude and allegory. Saleem’s emplotment omits the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century stirrings of Indian independence and begins instead in 1915, when Gandhi returned to India. The location, however, signals Saleem’s elective affinity with Nehru, the Kashmiri Brahmin and westernised moderniser: Aadam Aziz, Nehru’s exact contemporary in birth and death, returns to Kashmir a ‘translated’ man (IH, 17), importing newfangled science and socialism, while rejecting his German friends’ Eurocentric prejudices. Saleem’s conceptual colligation contrasts emergent modernisation with residual but still dominant tradition. Aadam is driven out by Tai, who embodies Kashmir’s longue durée; he tries to force Naseem to abandon purdah like his mother (who suffers psychosomatically as a result), and drives out her maulvi, who advocates atavistic hatred of non-Muslims. Concomitantly, Saleem traces the history of home-rule agitation. Predictably, Amritsar figures as a turning point. Subsequently, however, his account is strikingly idiosyncratic: the major significance of Gandhi and – unlike Subaltern Studies revisionism – of mass protest is elided; in contrast to Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace, Chandra Bose merits only a subordinate clause, although Rushdie would later disingenuously lambast Richard Attenborough’s omission of Bose.16 Instead, Saleem proposes a counterfactual history of 1942, the year of the ‘Quit India’ resolution. There are similarities between Mian Abdullah and Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, who founded the anticommunalist Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference; other Muslim factions were also active.17 But Saleem’s ‘legend’ invents the Free Islam Convocation of the ‘doomed’ Hummingbird, ‘a creature which would be impossible if it did not exist’ (38–40) as a counterfactual alternative to Jinnah’s paternalist Muslim League, whose pressure for a separate Muslim state culminated in the riots engineered by their Direct Action Day in Calcutta in 1946 (81–2). Abdullah’s ‘conjuring trick’ (46) creates a broad-based but illusionary alliance against Partition, sustained by the princely state of Cooch Naheen (that is, ‘nothing at all’). The magic realist narrative of his

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assassination is playful but the fabulation makes some serious points: the complicity in Partition of British divide-and-rule policy, the sweeping ‘under the carpet’ of alternative histories (48), with the pie-dogs’ attack on Abdullah’s killers commemorated in the betel-chewers’ subaltern oral history.18 Verisimilitude and allegory also alternate when Saleem recounts the communalism preceding and succeeding Partition. Amina rescues Lifafa Das from a Muslim mob; S.P. Butt is murdered by Hindus; Ahmed’s Muslim firm is extorted by the Hindu Ravana gang, which, as in the Ramayana, is thwarted by Hanuman; later, in Bombay, the State Secretariat freezes his assets. At the moment of Independence realism is subordinated to fantasy. Preceding political manoeuvrings are summarised perfunctorily. Instead, in an allegorical tour de force, Methwold hands over power to a class of mimic men who had gained prosperity under colonialism. Before his supposed Samson-like strength disappears into thin (h)air, the coloniser Methwold illegitimately sires Saleem/ the new nation. Against this Anglo-Indian heritage, however, stands another claim to Saleem’s paternity: the simultaneous births of Saleem and the nation are accompanied by quotations from Nehru’s speech ‘A Tryst with Destiny’, which performatively called India into being. (The importance which Rushdie accords this speech is indicated by its pole position in his joint-edited Vintage Book of Indian Writing, 1947–1997.) Saleem’s association with Nehru is confirmed by Nehru’s letter which terms Saleem’s life ‘the mirror of our own’ (122). Correspondingly, Saleem’s emplotment of Indian history reflects Nehruvian thinking. Anticipating Benedict Anderson’s constructivist understanding of a nation as an imagined political community, in The Discovery of India (1946) Nehru had defined nationalism as ‘a group memory of past achievements, traditions, and experiences’.19 Accordingly, countering the interpretation in earlier nationalist historiography of India as a Hindu nation, Nehru’s tendentious history – which underpinned the state ideology after Independence – constructed a secular past for India.20 This tradition constituted a transhistorical ‘myth and an idea, a dream and a vision’ binding together Indians in a ‘geographical and economic entity, a cultural unity amidst diversity’. The ‘extraordinary freedom of the mind’ manifest in India’s syncretic absorption of foreign influences and ‘tolerance of belief and custom’ was, however, ‘allied to certain rigid social forms’. To revitalise the nation, Nehru’s teleological narrative of progress thus advocated technological modernisation, democratic collectivism, and ‘equal opportunities for all’, instead of the ‘narrowing religious outlook’ of caste and socially exclusive ‘ceremonial purity’, and

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the ‘relics of a feudal régime’. The major threat to this vision was ‘communalism, a narrow group mentality basing itself on a religious community but in reality concerned with political power and patronage for the interested group’.21 Hence, speaking at Independence ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour’, Nehru emphasised that ‘All of us, to whatever religion we may belong, are equally the children of India with equal rights, privileges and obligations. We cannot encourage communalism or narrow-mindedness’. Only so could India’s Constituent Assembly ‘give reality to our dreams’.22 Nehru’s visionary idea of India resembles Saleem’s description of India as a ‘new myth’ or ‘collective fiction’: ‘a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will – except in a dream we all agreed to dream’ (112). The failure to realise this dream is attributed by Saleem both to actual events and their allegorical counterpart in the Midnight Children’s Conference (MCC), ‘the lok sabha or parliament of my brain’ (227). The founding of the MCC coincides inauspiciously with language marches, provoked by the States Reorganisation Committee’s recommendation – to Nehru’s dismay – that some state boundaries be redrawn along linguistic lines. Consonant with Saleem’s civic aspirations, the Bombay Congress MP S.K. Patil advocated that the multilingual Bombay become a city-state, ‘a miniature India run on international standards … [A] melting pot which will evolve a glorious new civilisation’.23 Instead, in 1960 Bombay was incorporated in the newly created state of Maharashtra, in which Saleem’s cosmopolitans were increasingly marginalised by a Marathi-speaking regional elite.24 Alienated by anti-Muslim prejudice, Rushdie’s family abandoned Bombay in 1964; two years later, the ethno-linguistic Shiv Sena was founded, to defend job opportunities for Maharashtrians from SouthIndian migrants.25 Likewise, on an allegorical level, the MCC is threatened by communalism. As a nebulous Habermasian public sphere, ‘a [...] sort of loose federation of equals, all points of view given free expression’ (220), it symbolises the gathered potential of the nation. But it generates no innovative ideas, realises no practical projects, voices irreconcilable ideological positions and succumbs to the communalist prejudices which the children imbibe from their parents. Saleem emplots the 1975 declaration of Emergency, extending the authoritarian tendencies that had developed in the Indira-led Congress since 1969, as the final betrayal of Nehru’s dreams. Delhi witnessed the worst excesses of Sanjay Gandhi’s civic beautification and sterilisation programmes in the massacre at Turkman Gate, which corresponds to the clearing of the Magicians’ Ghetto. Saleem’s allegory of this subaltern

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group – to which Hummingbird also belonged – reflects his opportunistic fellow-travelling and consistent anti-Communist bias.26 Proletarian resilience is implied by the indomitability of their ‘moving slum’ (431), but the Communist movement’s ‘prestidigitators’ and ‘contortionists’ (399) are ridiculed as being as ineffectual as Hummingbird’s illusionism. In actuality, the Janata Morcha (‘people’s front’) also crumbled. The postEmergency government is thus moribund, Saleem remarks scathingly, with Jayaprakash Narayan on dialysis and the octogenarian ‘dotard’ Morarji Desai Prime Minister (441). Hence Saleem, who, with all of the Midnight’s Children generation, has suffered allegorical ‘Sperectomy’ (437) and physical castration, has limited hope for India. An era has ended and ‘New myths are needed’ (458); this task is inherited by young Aadam, resolute ‘synthesis’ (425) of Saleem and Shiva, who has fathered a ‘tougher’ generation (447). In the meantime, only Saleem’s own narrative opposes the memory-less ‘negation of history’ (454) in Bombay’s Midnite-Confidential Club and among Delhi’s now ex-Communist magicians. Saleem’s narrative is illuminated by its dystopian pendant, The Moor’s Last Sigh, which completes Rushdie’s history of civic decline. There too multi-ethnic, culturally hybrid Bombay is idealised as a place symbolising the possibility of tolerant coexistence: ‘the city of mixed-up, mongrel joy’.27 Both protagonists embody this: Saleem is the offspring of an Englishman and a Hindu, raised in a Muslim family by a Catholic ayah; Moraes has Catholic, Jewish and Muslim ancestry. In each novel, however, optimism is curtailed by traumatic events: the Emergency and Indira’s and Sanjay’s transformation of the Congress into ‘an overtly Hindu party’ (IH, 386), the Hindu–Muslim clashes after the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in 1992. Two explanations are suggested for these developments: first, the Nehruvian elite’s misjudgement, in excluding from their conception of progressive ‘civil society’ the ‘backward’ masses, who, in a return of the repressed, would later turn to populist demagogues to represent their interests; secondly, in the family melodramas which mirror national dissension, the triumph of baser instincts over the better self.28 In the 1930s the paternalistic Camoens da Gama supports Nehru’s vision of a ‘secular’, ‘socialist’, ‘many-tongued’, ‘multi-coloured’, ‘literate’ India which is ‘above caste’ (MLS, 51). But he witnesses the popular appeal of Gandhi’s ‘God stuff’ – ‘In the city we are for secular India but the village is for Ram’ – and fears that grassroots fundamentalism could become a Hindu supremacist ‘Battering Ram’ (MLS, 55–6). On Independence night Vasco Miranda likewise warns that the Nehruvian chattering classes

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misperceive Indian reality. Alluding ironically to Macaulay’s famous ‘Minute on Indian Education’ which recommended the formation of a ‘class who may be interpreters between us and the millions we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’, he mocks this westernised elite as ‘Bleddy Macaulay’s minutemen!’, a ‘Bunch of English-medium misfits’ who ‘don’t belong here’ (MLS, 165–6).29 Deluded by Nehru, they think that ‘all those bloodthirsty bloodsoaked gods’ll just roll over and die’ (MLS, 166). Instead, atavistic fundamentalism can, he suggests, only be opposed by bribery and corruption. His prophecy is borne out in the struggle for power in the new ‘god-and-mammon’ Bombay between Raman Fielding’s Hindu nationalist Mumbai’s Axis (based on Bal Thackeray’s Shiv Sena) and the mafia-style capitalism of Abraham Zogoiby, the Cochin Jew who unites the Muslim gangs.30 Aadam Sinai, who represented India’s future, has become Adam Braganza, a yuppie whizz-kid in computing and finance, whose overreaching destroys the Zogoiby family empire. Rushdie’s revisionist scepticism towards Nehruvianism is conveyed symbolically by Camoens’s daughter, the grande dame Aurora, whose rumoured affair with Nehru would make Moraes, not merely metaphorically like Saleem, Nehru’s son. Although she criticises Nehru’s Congress for ending the anti-British Bombay strikes of 1946, her aloofness from the masses is epitomised by her annual anti-religious dancing on her Malabar Hill parapet while the throngs below celebrate the Ganesha Chaturthi festival, increasingly exploited by Mumbai’s Axis. While slumming in Colaba she inadvertently maims a sailor whom, in restitution, she complacently employs and patronisingly renames. Later Moraes realises his ignorance of the Bombay outside his family’s privileged enclave when he learns that this disaffected amputee acted as a sleeper for Mumbai’s Axis. The plot of repressed upper-class guilt and proletarian revenge recalls Saleem’s marginalisation of Shiva. When the ‘Bombay Central’ section ends with the city ripped apart by the 1993 bombings, Moraes concludes that ‘the barbarians were not only at our gates but within our skins’, the ‘explosions were our own evil’ (MLS, 372). As a descendant of Boabdil, who surrendered Moorish Spain’s supposed cultural pluralism without a fight, he attributes the demise of its alleged modern equivalent in Bombay to ‘what we were too enfeebled, too corrupt, […] too contemptible to defend’ (MLS, 373). In Rushdie’s national story the betrayal of a civic ideal is thus rooted in the intra- and interpersonal conflicts in which individuals (re)produce social divisions and hence, in Saleem’s words, ‘impinge on the fate of a nation’ (238).

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This is evident in Saleem’s narrative, which both records his activities as historical agent and is itself an intervention in India’s history, through its egocentric manipulation of the past. His self-justifying story conflates his own quest for purpose with that of the nation to whose history he is ‘handcuffed’ (39). The verb implies involuntary subjection to a higher power, and indeed Saleem’s autobiography maintains that his life was frequently determined by forces beyond his control. Ramram Seth’s and Resham Bibi’s prophecies of his future come true (although Ramram’s should presumably have applied to Shiva); Saleem’s life is also shaped by Ahmed’s family curse and Jamila’s revenge. His lie that he is impotent becomes a self-fulfilling curse. Although Saleem’s recurrent snakes and ladders metaphor implies that life is directed by accident and contingency, he regularly finds himself trapped in ‘dynastic webs of recurrence’ (422): his marriages to Parvati and Padma will, like Mumtaz’s to Nadir Khan, remain unconsummated; like his adoptive father, Ahmed, Saleem is also not the biological father of his son. These suggestions that he is a ‘perennial victim’ who ‘persists in seeing himself as protagonist’ (237) are, however, contradicted by equally extreme assertions of his supernatural power. Saleem could thus be described as a narcissistic personality, whose self-esteem oscillates between abjection and megalomaniac grandiosity. Worshipped by Puroshottam as the ‘Mubarak’ or Blessed One, celebrated by Nehru, repeatedly told that ‘you can be anything you want’ (156), Saleem grows up burdened and confused by intimations of his destined greatness. He is further demoralised by the belief that, like his double Shiva, he is the unforgivable cause of his father’s ‘slow decline’ (128). This conviction is of fundamental importance. Following Saleem’s birth, Amina and Mary devote themselves to the baby, who senses his father’s resentment. The remembering self grasps that Ahmed’s ‘position in the household was undermined by my coming’ (131). The naive remembered self regards this as his ‘fault’ (116), as he attributes Ahmed’s alienation to the broken toe which he supposedly caused. This childish misunderstanding influences Saleem’s autobiographical national story, in which he repeatedly gives himself central importance by neurotically assuming causal responsibility, and hence guilt, for events for which he cannot be blamed. Conversely, he contrives to minimise his responsibility for what he actually caused. The insecure Saleem, who cannot articulate his troubling emotions, is depicted sensitively in his isolation from uncomprehending parents absorbed with their own problems, and tragicomically in his symbolic rebirth with telepathic powers, when the umbilical ‘Pajama-cord’ is released

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from his nose and he tumbles from the lower door of his washing-chest refuge with a ‘caul’ of the family’s dirty linen (162). Deluded that, like Muhammad, he receives divine messages, he hopes to repay his parents’ ‘investment’ in him (156) and thus secure their and Mary’s love and approval. Their devastating rejection provokes his withdrawal into the imaginative refuge of the MCC and redoubles his clumsy attempts to conform to the role-expectations of the adults around him, as in his precocious relationship with Aunt Pia. For much of his life, in his constant aspiration to please a series of father-figures, Saleem allows external but self-imposed constraints to dictate his actions. This acquiescence in others’ plans for him reaches its nadir in Pakistan in his bit part in Ayub Khan’s military coup and deposition of Iskander Mirza and in his complicity in the massacres at Dacca entailed by the ‘just-following-orders requirements of war’ (364). As Saleem’s purgatory in the Sundarbans reveals, his subservience to others involved a disavowal of his own agency and moral responsibility. By contrast, his principal form of agency, both as remembered self and remembering self, lies in what his narratives make happen by ‘rearranging history’ (260). As a historical agent, his collage of newspaper headlines into a poison-pen missive accords him the power of a ‘puppet-master’ (262), as the ‘puppet’ Sabarmati acts out Saleem’s scenario of revenge against Amina and Catrack, with unintended as well as intended consequences. In thus emulating Alia’s acrimony towards his mother, Saleem is also influenced by the venomous Schaapsteker. Later, his memory of this melodramatic scenario colours his narrative lie that Shiva was murdered, a wish-fulfilling rewriting of history generated by his present fear of Shiva’s vengeance. And indeed Saleem’s historiography constantly remakes the past to suit his present purposes. As a historian, his ideologically biased, sometimes counterfactual emplotment interprets India’s history as the failure to realise Nehru’s idea of India and its ultimate betrayal by his daughter, Indira. As an allegorist, he narrates the corresponding failure of the MCC, which he and Shiva betrayed. As an autobiographer, he narrates his family’s internecine downfall. All three declines are attributed to a dualistic conflict within the self and at every social scale between ‘what-wehad-in-common’ and ‘what-drove-us-apart’, the baser instincts of dogmatism, separatism and egoistic venom (298; cf. 304). Rushdie has described the rise of Hindu nationalism as ‘the negation of the India I grew up in’, ‘the triumph of sectarianism over secularism, of hatred over fellowship, of ugliness over love’.31 His emplotments of Indian and Pakistani history likewise link the poisonous stratagems

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of insecure individuals with those of larger groups, whose normative demarcations of stigmatised people and behaviours find expression in authoritarian government and communalist segregation, culminating in the attempted reduction of India to a Hindu nation. The recurrent pattern is ‘multiplicity destroyed by singularity, the defeat of Many by One’ (MLS, 408). By contrast with Bombay’s ‘highly-spiced nonconformity’, Karachi is depicted as a ‘city of mirages’ (308), for, as in the manipulated elections in Kif, ‘in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist’ (326). Official doublethink is at its height in the civil war launched against East Pakistan: ‘our worthten-babus jawans held Pakistan together by turning flamethrowers machine-guns hand-grenades on the city slums’ (357). But although this propaganda is refuted by the evidence of their own eyes, the traumatised invaders repress their unacceptable glimpses of ‘things that weren’t-couldn’t-have-been true’ (356). Pakistanis’ unreflecting obedience to authority – caricatured by Saleem’s reduction to a mandog who impassively tracks down ‘undesirables’ – is attributed to the influences of Islam/’submission’ and puritanical censorship in ‘that God-ridden country’ (292), and the regimentation epitomised by the garrison town, Rawalpindi. It is rooted in ‘the somehow barren certitudes of the land of the pure’ (316), where the pretension to possess absolute truth entails clear-cut binary divisions between the pure and the impure, or halal and haram (318). In Jamila, this provokes a fanatical ‘blind and blinding devoutness’ and ‘right-or-wrong nationalism’ (314) before her final tirade against Bhutto. General Zulfikar, who identifies with hegemonic masculinity, reviles his bedwetting son, Zafar: ‘Coward! Homosexual! Hindu!’, ‘I want to see you prove you’re not a woman’ (290, 292). Similar arbitrary but categorical discriminations by the ‘clean, mean apartheiding Ones’ (MLS, 289) fuel India’s communal conflicts. Saleem’s own animosity is apparent in his dealings with Shiva both as historical agent and as historian. In a possible projection of his own recurrent misogyny and resentment of Anima’s adulterous desires, Saleem attributes to Shiva serial murders of prostitutes. In a crucial passage, he also makes Shiva a scapegoat for the disintegration of the MCC. Saleem concedes that his own deceit provoked the children’s descent into petty ‘bickerings, prejudices, boredom, selfishness’. But he disclaims ‘ultimate responsibility’, attributing the MCC’s demise to his parents’ inadvertent termination of his telepathy, and, in a stunning act of dissociation, to Shiva, who ‘has made us who we are’ (298, 299).

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Saleem’s statement that Shiva ‘came to represent, in my mind, all the vengefulness and violence and simultaneous-love-and-hate-of-Things in the world’ (299) can be understood allegorically: Shiva is the Hindu deity of procreation and destruction. Psychologically, however, Saleem’s projection of his own aggression onto his alter ego exemplifies both a major mechanism of human conflict and the attempted denial of responsibility for this. Saleem equivocates on this issue: once he admits that he ‘coldbloodedly denied’ Shiva ‘his birthright’ (299); elsewhere he terms him a ‘birthright-denying war hero!’, ‘mess-of-pottage-corrupted rival’ (430); his final version is that Mary (whose ‘crime’ ‘doomed’ Shiva to poverty [129]) ‘denied him his birth-right’ (442). Saleem alludes to the fraternal enmity in Genesis 25 and 27, where – like Mary’s baby-switching – Rebekah instigates and abets the deception of Isaac, who is tricked into giving Jacob his paternal blessing. But it is the sly Jacob who takes advantage of Esau in getting him to exchange his birthright for the lentil pottage, just as Saleem unjustly appropriates Shiva’s birthright. Comparable animosity destroys Saleem’s family: his own vindictiveness towards Amina (in his voiced suspicion that she slept with Ramram, and in the venomous Sabarmati plot) is outdone by the embittered Alia’s more insidious envy. In Rushdie’s other retellings of the Fall, serpent-like promptings recur: the ‘poison’ of Epifania’s malediction against her murderess, Aurora, saps the ‘house divided’ of Zogoiby; Moraes’s obscenities, ‘dripping poison’, break Aurora’s heart; Saladin Chamcha’s ‘demonic’ phone calls sever Gibreel and Allie.32 There are glimpses of a better alternative. Ahmed returns from illness ‘not to the self which had practised curses and wrestled djinns, but to the self he might always have been, filled with contrition and forgiveness and laughter and generosity and the finest miracle of all, which was love’ (297). The bitterness of Saleem’s remembered self towards Lila Sabarmati, Alia and his parents is tempered by the remembering self’s mature, less judgemental understanding, and awareness of how his own supposed deficiencies had led to a defensive aggression: ‘maybe, I say, [...] my parents loved me. I withdrew from them into my secret world; fearing their hatred, I did not admit the possibility that their love was stronger than ugliness, stronger even then blood’ (301). In this emphasis on ‘our need for flowing together, for putting an end to frontiers, for the dropping of the boundaries of the self’ (MLS, 433), Rushdie’s emplotments of Indian history resemble Mistry’s, despite their stylistic divergences.

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A Fine Balance Whereas Rushdie’s national story allegorises the ‘idea of India’, Mistry’s concretises it, by examining what its realisation would entail in everyday social practice. Although confined geographically to north-west India and Bombay, A Fine Balance strives for inclusiveness through typicality: the nation is epitomised by three generic locales and by Parsi, Hindu and Muslim families and, briefly, a Sikh taxi-driver.33 Flashbacks extend its historical range to the 1920s but the main focus lies on the Emergency years. It thus forms a sequel to Such a Long Journey, set in 1971, which depicts the rise of the Gandhi dynasty following the IndoChinese war of 1962. Indira Gandhi’s government is associated with the tactical fostering of Hindu nationalism and with corruption: in her nepotistic award to Sanjay of the state-funded contract to build Maruti cars, control of the judiciary, and misuse of the secret service to spy on rivals and opponents and to embezzle public funds.34 This emplotment continues in Balance, where the circular movement from a dispiriting Prologue (the declaration of Emergency) to a depressing Epilogue (the communal violence of 1984, Rajiv Gandhi’s succession) implies that Indira’s rule has made India’s social problems more intractable. The novel’s epigraph from Balzac aligns Mistry with a realist aesthetic, courting objections to the representativeness of his selection of material and the interpretive bias of his emplotment by those who equate realism with the mirroring of actuality. To Germaine Greer’s allegation that his ‘dismal, dreary’ Bombay is inauthentic, Mistry rejoined: ‘People are afraid to accept the truth’.35 Some Indian critics have remarked on implausibilities: Mistry’s tailors (Marathi-speaking) and Parsis (Gujarati- or English-speaking) could not have communicated; Mistry’s understanding of rural society and lower castes has been dismissed as unconvincingly second-hand, his expatriate grasp of India as outdated, in a ‘time warp’ (although this is a historical novel, written from firsthand experience of pre-1975 Bombay).36 His novel’s truthfulness to the human condition cannot, however, be gauged by slavish literalism, and Indian critics have also praised the stark, unsparing realism of Mistry’s account of the Emergency.37 The verisimilitude of Balance should therefore, as Peter Morey has suggested, be understood, in Aristotelian terms, not as a history of what actually happened but rather as poetry: ‘“the kinds of thing that might happen because they are, in the circumstances, either probable or necessary”’.38 In combining typical, verifiable facts and events from historical actuality with invented lives, it emplots the Emergency years

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as an alternative history of the subaltern and the marginalised and offers a parable of possible fellowship across communal boundaries. The reverse suffered by these aspirations can plausibly be attributed to the actual workings of the Gandhis’ policies but also conveys an apparent preconceptual assumption that human projects are usually frustrated. The inexorability with which Mistry’s characters are disabused of their hopes is striking. Their life expectancy is correspondingly low: Dr Shroff, Mrs Shroff, Rustom, Shirin Aunty, Darab Uncle, virtually all of Ishvar’s family, Avinash and his sisters, Mumtaz, Worm/Shankar, Beggarmaster, Farokh and Maneck Kohlah all die. A taxi-driver swerves to avoid a dog but the reader senses what’s coming: ‘Maneck glanced through the rear window to see if the animal made it to safety. A lorry behind them squashed it’ (581). At one point this morbidity is self-consciously acknowledged: Ibrahim’s ‘older daughter died of tuberculosis, followed by his wife. Then his sons disappeared into the underworld, returning periodically to abuse him. The remaining daughter, just when he was beginning to think she would redeem everything, left to become a prostitute. His life, he thought, had become the plot of a bad Hindi movie minus the happy ending’ (89–90). But if this suggests black humour, Mistry’s perspective is closer to that of literary naturalism, such as the pessimistic fatalism of Hardy and Gissing or the genetic determinism of some of Ibsen’s and Hauptmann’s dramas, or to Chekhovian melancholia: for example, the collective suicide of Avinah’s sisters, to relieve their parents of the shame of three dowryless and hence unmarriageable daughters, recalls that of Hardy’s Father Time, after hanging his two siblings, ‘Done because we are too menny’.39 Some of the premature deaths are attributed to structural injustices; I discuss these below. More frequently, however, they arise from a narratorial conviction that life is a process of disillusionment. This informs Mistry’s handling of temporal perspective and focalisation. Prolepsis, occasionally heavy-handed, alerts the reader to ironic eventualities which the characters may intuit but cannot prevent. For example, Dina’s nervousness about Rustom’s cycling in traffic is, from her homodiegetic perspective, a premonition; for the heterodiegetic narrator it has the plot function of foreshadowing not only Rustom’s but also Om’s and Shankar’s traffic accidents. Or consider the halting of the train because yet another body has been found by the tracks. Maneck’s reflection on this, ‘A nice, quick way to go’, anticipates his own method of suicide; another’s comment, ‘Maybe it has to do with the Emergency’ foreshadows the discovery of Avinash’s tortured body by the tracks (5). These two plot connections become clear to the reader only in retrospect. The pattern

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of events has, however, been carefully planned by a narrator whose control of the characters corresponds to his presupposition that life is largely governed by forms of necessity (cf. Ch. 2, 42–3). In retrospect, Dina also inclines to this interpretation, as Shirin Aunty’s counsel not to strain her eyes with needlework (an instance of authorial prolepsis) becomes in her hindsight a ‘prophecy’ that has been fulfilled (57, 64). She could have chosen to follow the advice but this option was effectively ruled out by economic dictates, themselves a consequence of her resolution to live independently of Nusswan’s patronage. Thus, Dina’s individual responsibility, expressed in self-determining decisions, is exercised within external constraints which are partly given and partly result from her earlier agency. One of the strengths of Mistry’s novel is its realist alertness to how the potential directions of human lives are cumulatively narrowed down and determined by this process of structuration. The characters’ own plotting of their lives takes place within and is subject to the narrator’s emplotment (cf. Ch. 2, 34–7). Narrative focalisation in the characters’ past present or past future arouses pathos in the discrepancy between their optimistic aspirations and the narrator’s knowledge and reader’s suspicions that these will be crushed. This cognitive asymmetry is exemplified in Dina’s vision of ‘decades of wedded bliss with Rustom’ (42); later she wrily recalls her and Rustom’s naive unconsciousness in their ‘planning and plotting in full ignorance of destiny’s plans for them’ (336). But, significantly for the worldview offered by Mistry’s novel, this disillusionment does not discourage her from similarly planning her future with Om’s family, which also will not materialise. In his past future, Ishvar likewise conceives of himself as ‘building the foundation for Om’s happiness’ (467–8). As he does so, destiny is again evoked in what the superstitious Dina regards as Maneck’s ‘inauspicious’ comment: ‘Everything ends badly. It’s the law of the universe’ (466). In the event, Ishvar’s attempt to arrange his nephew’s marriage results in Ashraf’s manslaughter, Om’s reckless insulting of Thakur Dharamsi and punitive castration, and the amputation of Ishvar’s legs. Maneck’s gloomy prognosis is thus borne out. What transpires is, however, not the result of a deterministic ‘law’ but rather of the unpredictable interaction between Om and Dharamsi, which could have turned out differently. Such unforeseeable, unintended consequences of actions figure prominently in Mistry’s ironic historiography, as, for example, in Dina’s innocent information to Monkey-man of Beggarmaster’s whereabouts (enabling him to murder Beggarmaster to avenge his mutilation of Monkey-man’s nephew and niece), or Beggarmaster’s more ambivalent benevolence towards Shankar. The narrator

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details the chain of circumstances, each apparently inconsequential, which, as necessary causes, cumulatively make Shankar’s death ever more probable, although their conjunction is a matter of contingency or fate: Shankar’s begging for the sack of hair (which will lead to his downfall when the crowd turn on him as a suspected murderer), Beggarmaster’s commissioning of Rajaram as Shankar’s barber, his trolley’s lack of a brake. This interplay between fate or chance and selfdetermination is related to Mistry’s analysis of social structure. At a conceptual level, the two major colligations which unify Mistry’s historical survey are the struggle between modernisation and tradition in both social structures and economic practices, and the scope for individual agency within a pervasive network of exploitation and corruption. The narrative repeatedly criticises the negative impact, especially on women, of Zoroastrian dogma and of the superstition and feudalism that characterise the longue durée of rural society. Dina’s life is a prolonged effort to emancipate herself from her brother’s paternalistic control, which his patriarchal religion and his status within the Parsi community lead him to regard as his duty. In the village lowercaste women are routinely abused; a supposed witch is beaten to death; Dukhi changes his sons’ caste but the attempts of his son Narayan and grandson Om to stand up to Thakur Dharamsi meet with savage retribution. The tailors’ migration to the city exposes them to more enlightened ideas, but the transport connections which shrink the physical and developmental gap between village and town also bring detrimental processes of modernisation. While Rushdie espouses Nehru’s progressivism, Mistry is more sceptical. Thus, the widened road to the Kohlahs’ hill-station, replacing ‘scenic mountain paths too narrow for the broad vision of nation-builders and World Bank officials’ (215), brings factory-produced goods which herald the end of home-manufactured Kohlah’s Cola and threaten the viability of the family’s general store. Partition had left Farokh Kohlah expropriated; now, once again, he feels ‘trapped by history’ (205). His entrepreneurial resignation, rejection of Maneck’s proposed marketing innovations, and despair at the environmental rape of his valley significantly influence his son’s depressed apathy and ultimate suicide. Capitalist transformation also affects the Muzaffar Tailoring Company, whose skilled workmanship is increasingly displaced by cheap factory garments, driving Ishvar and Om to sweated piecework in Bombay, in the company of Dina, whose widowhood has declassed her. Mistry’s conceptual model of society as a system of human interdependencies is in the tradition of nineteenth-century realism. It recalls

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the ‘Great Web’ of possible entrapment and potential fellowship which ties townspeople together in Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Dickens’s uncoverings from Dombey and Son onwards of the hidden networks of interrelationships which connect all levels of society. Dickensian plot devices include the education of an uninformed middle-class observer (Dina) about the urban underclass, and, in the revelation that Beggarmaster is Shankar’s half-brother, the discovery of an unsuspected cross-class connection involving illicit sexuality and illegitimacy. In her journeys into the ‘hellishness’ of northern slums, Dina recalls a Victorian social explorer, confronted by the ‘black slime’ and ‘sewer sludge’ in which Bombay’s residuum of slum-dwellers live like Mayhew’s mudlarks and scavengers (67–8).40 Mistry’s juxtaposition of this ‘underworld vision’ (67) with Mrs Gupta’s callous disregard for the outworkers she exploits points the kind of moral contrast characteristic of Victorian urban narratives of how the other half lives. Dickens is also recalled by Mistry’s anthropomorphic descriptions of Bombay: ‘Splotches of pale moonlight revealed an endless stretch of patchwork shacks, the sordid quiltings of plastic and cardboard and paper and sackcloth, like scabs and blisters creeping in a dermatological nightmare across the rotting body of the metropolis’ (379). The most important similarity is, however, Mistry’s depiction of the main connections among his characters as a Carlylean Cash-nexus.41 In the village this is complemented and sustained by the Hindu caste system, which Ishvar flouts by having his untouchable Chamaar sons trained as tailors, thus elevating them into the Darji caste. The symbiosis of the Maratha landed elite and more recent political hierarchies is emphasised by Thakur Dharamsi’s becoming a leading Congress politician.42 In the city most money and power circulate in the shadow economy. Bribery and corruption are rife. The tailors are expected to pay a railway policeman for an overnight place on the platform; to be permitted to sleep in a chemist’s doorway, they pay the night watchman a bribe, from which the chemist extracts his cut. In Avinash’s student hostel, contractors line their own pockets with fees paid for services. The university is plagued by ‘nepotism in staff hiring, bribery for admissions, sale of examination papers, special privileges for politicians’ families, government interference in the syllabus’ (243). These were not new developments, but the political patronage, nepotism, and disregard for state autonomy that characterised Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian governments had severely compromised public life. In reaction, a series of strikes took place, culminating in a national rail strike in 1974. In the same year a student protest movement – to which Avinash

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belongs before his politically motivated arrest and probable murder – arose against the corrupt Congress regime in Gujarat; this later gained national momentum under Jayaprakash Narayan.43 The illegally constructed jhopadpatti where Ishvar and Om live belongs to the slumlord Thokray (whose name combines Thakur with Bal Thackeray), who, like a Sena dada, appropriates land and uses backhanders to procure the indifference of the police and municipal authorities.44 When, under Sanjay Gandhi’s civic beautification scheme, the slum is bulldozed, Thokray emerges in a contradictory role, characteristic of the Sena, as Controller of Slums.45 The Sena is also evoked in the remark that ‘when there are riots, [Thokray] decides who gets burned and who survives’ (163), alluding to Thackeray’s instigation of antiMuslim reprisals in 1993.46 The venality of the police, echoing real incidents, is illustrated when Sergeant Kesar conscripts slum-dwellers to be bussed to a Gandhi rally to masquerade as popular support for her government, and when they seize bystanders, including Ishvar and Om, to undergo a compulsory vasectomy, so that the district officials can meet the targets of Sanjay’s family-planning programme.47 The widespread corruption and the suspension of the rule of law under the Emergency mean that the only safeguard of individual rights lies in paying for protection from Beggarmaster. Together with Dina’s landlord’s goondas, he represents Bombay’s extensive underworld. Its enmeshment with the police is shown when, under the legitimising cloak of civic beautification, Kesar rounds up pavement dwellers for a fee paid by a ‘Facilitator’, who sells their labour to an irrigation project. Later Beggarmaster buys the injured labourers from the Facilitator for Rs 2,000; he purchases Om and Ishvar’s freedom for Rs 400, for which, however, he charges them almost Rs 5,000, thereby placing them in permanent indebtedness to him. They become, in effect, his indentured labourers, receiving in return his protection, as their debt-repaying labour is a valuable asset. Thus, they move from the village’s caste system to the capitalist feudalism of Bombay. Mistry’s Gissing-like enumeration of the precise amount of financial transactions is a powerful reminder of, in the fullest sense, the cost of living in India. The forms of dependency or exploitation in which Dina is involved both actively and passively illustrate the complex interplay between agency and structural constraints and the moral ambiguities of individual situations. Her landlord’s understandable eagerness (given the low rent fixed at 1940 levels by the Rent Act) to find a pretext to force her to vacate her apartment severely restricts her tailoring business.48 Dina is also constrained by her subordinate situation as a woman. After

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her father’s death, her brother Nusswan becomes her guardian; after his marriage and their mother’s death, he terminates her education at the age of 15, motivated by self-interest and financial calculation. Nusswan is, however, not a mere tyrant. In deferring too readily to the conservative values of the middle-class Parsi community, he is careful to uphold his own reputation and that of the family but also believes sincerely that, in seeking a husband for Dina, he is discharging his duty in loco parentis. (Ishvar likewise sees it as his duty to arrange a marriage for his orphaned nephew, Om.) When Dina rebels against Nusswan’s paternalism, which she associates with the patriarchal Zoroastrianism of Dustoor Framji, her pursuit of economic self-reliance leads ironically to a different structure of dependency. For, within the network of globalised capitalism, western boutiques buy garments supplied by Mrs Gupta’s outsourced production; Gupta’s profit margin is generated at the expense of Dina, who in her turn extracts surplus value from Ishvar’s and Om’s piecework. Increasingly, her role as middleman involves Dina in moral dubieties similar to those of the rent-collector, Ibrahim. Just as in Dickens’s Little Dorrit Pancks is forced by the unscrupulous landlord, Casby, to extort the tenants of Bleeding Heart Yard and encounters corresponding opprobrium, so Ibrahim, as ‘spy, blackmailer, deliverer of threats’ (86), provides the façade behind which Dina’s landlord conceals himself. If the tenant threatens legal resistance, ‘The rentcollector’s tears would convince the tenant to back down, to have mercy on the poor beleaguered landlord, a martyr to modern-day housing’ (86). Ibrahim therefore has a repertoire of ‘multiple roles’ (86). Dina likewise has to learn her capitalist roles, as subordinate link in a supply chain but also novice employer under the tutelage of Mrs Gupta, who, untroubled by qualms of conscience, advises her to ‘be firm with your tailors or they will sit on your head’ (74). As Brecht’s Good Person of Szechwan discovers, it seems impossible in the capitalist system to be good and survive: because her kind-heartedness is constantly taken advantage of, in desperation Shen Te invents a harsh cousin, Shui Ta; in this persona, she stands up to her former abusers but, increasingly taken over by the role of her alter ego, herself becomes a capitalist exploiter. Dina’s inability to sustain this dissociation between her function as an impersonal embodiment of capital and her essential humanity leads her, in a major theme of the novel, to overcome the distance which separates her from her employees. Rushdie’s national story depicted an intra- and interpersonal struggle between the opposing forces of ‘what-we-had-in-common’ and ‘whatdrove-us-apart’. Mistry also addresses this issue, through the stubborn

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challenges posed to pluralism by traditional beliefs and social practices. The barriers that separate people partly derive from religion: the importance for Parsis, Hindus and Muslims of preserving ritual purity involves strict demarcations from the polluted or prohibited; transgressing ‘the line of caste’ (147) has momentous consequences.49 In overcrowded Bombay boundaries also involve territorial claims, for example among pavement-dwellers: ‘One fellow was sleeping in someone else’s spot. So they took a brick and bashed his head’ (155). What preoccupies Mistry is, however, less physical and metaphorical contests for turf, than the social and emotional distance between people. Like Rushdie, he depicts the middle-class family as a unit which, through structuration, (re)produces in miniature the problems of the nation as a whole. His parable in Balance traces Dina’s gravitation away from the self-enclosed Shroff family towards the unorthodox family group that gathers in her apartment and represents an ideal of social harmony. The Shroffs are characterised by their isolation from one another and from their surroundings. Following Dr Shroff’s death, his widow, like Bapsy Aunty earlier, withdraws physically and emotionally; Nusswan’s son–father conflict is transformed into a father–daughter conflict when he assumes guardianship of Dina. Shirin Aunty’s and Darab Uncle’s demonstrative affection contrasts happily with Dina’s inhibited immediate family, but Nusswan’s insistence on keeping themselves to themselves continues in Rustom’s ‘policy regarding neighbours’: ‘to avoid them as much as possible’ (56). After his death and her broken relationship with Fredoon, Dina’s lonely desire for human contact attracts her to having a respectable Parsi lodger, who provides welcome supplementary income. But her socialised aloofness from the proletarian, low-caste tailors seems unbridgeable. Keeping the Other at arm’s length is, Mistry emphasises, a universal human trait: Mumtaz is initially reserved towards the apprenticed Ishvar and Narayan; Roopa acquiesces in Narayan’s serving lowest-caste untouchables but refuses to admit them indoors; Nawaz’s brusque inhospitability towards the tailors outside his kitchen expresses his territorial instinct. Likewise, Dina segregates the tailors by allotting them a separate drinking glass and teacups. She is uncomfortably aware of her ingrained prejudices: ‘The smell in the wc bothered her. Living alone for so long, I’ve grown too fastidious, she thought’ (76). But her bourgeois Parsi upbringing and new role as employer override this self-questioning. In Mistry’s similar parable in Family Matters, a middle-class rewriting of King Lear, Yezad not only grudgingly accepts the presence on the front-room settee of his cramped flat of his bedridden, Parkinsonian

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father-in-law, but overcomes his revulsion and shaves him, trims his nails, scrubs his dentures and helps with his bedpan.50 By spelling out such deceptively trivial practicalities, Mistry’s realism refuses to gloss over the difficulties of tolerant coexistence.51 Dina’s comparable recognition of the humanity she shares with Om and Ishvar also results from a protracted inner debate, which accompanies an involved process of concessions and negotiation. Her reluctance, recalling Nawaz’s, to allow the homeless tailors to store their trunk at her apartment comes from Rent-Act-inspired anxiety that this might stake a residential claim. This is relaxed only when she realises that carting around the heavy trunk injures Om’s arm and is thus not in her self-interest as his employer. When, after their liberation from the work camp, she permits them to sleep on her verandah, she justifies this step to herself through specious rationalisations: by accommodating them, she will prevent once again losing their labour, on which her livelihood, like theirs, depends; by not accepting payment, she will avoid subtenancy rights; by allowing them to use her bathroom, she will minimise the risk of the landlord detecting their illegal presence. Her reduction of her motives to selfpreservation screens, however, other compassionate impulses that she cannot acknowledge, but which gradually undermine her wary standoffishness. Mundane but significant gestures of generosity transform their cohabitation into a community: Ishvar’s and Om’s spontaneous cleaning of the apartment, Dina’s serving their tea in non-stigmatised cups and their food indoors, and joining them in eating it using fingers not cutlery. Academics’ tendency to cringe at such moments contrasts with the sentimentalism of (pre-)Romantic and Victorian taste and of global mass culture. In Mistry’s emplotment this unlikely family group represents the possibility of realising the idea of India. American feminism has recuperated quilt-making as both literal female cooperation and a symbol for sisterly resilience and resistance. Similarly, Dina’s quilt, sewn from leftover fragments of their shared labour and hence shared story, represents the unity pieced together from their heterogeneous lives and memorialises their endurance despite adversity. As a work of subaltern historiography, it provides a mnemonic for their unofficial, oral history of the Emergency years. Intended optimistically as Om’s wedding gift, abandoned incomplete when, having returned to Nusswan’s, the demoralised Dina decides ‘there was nothing further to add’ (573), it ends up as the tattered padding on the maimed Ishvar’s platform. Its deterioration symbolises the attrition of Dina’s family grouping by the Gandhis’ policies and stooges.

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The Epilogue surveys the winners and losers from Indira Gandhi’s governments. The former include the commercial middle class, typified by Nusswan, who, like Mrs Gupta, supported the strong-arm tactics of the Emergency and even recommended the eugenic elimination of the poor. Their prosperity is evident in the luxury flats which have replaced Dina’s low-rent tenement and in the gentrification of the Vishram Vegetarian Hotel. For the masses, nothing has changed; the old newspapers through which Maneck browses are an eight-year litany of abuses. To survive under these adverse constraints requires balancing acts that range from the uncomfortable to the tragic: in the slums ‘dilapidated buildings and shops’ stand ‘precariously like a house of battered cards’ (66); the tailors experience ‘the unsteadiness of their existence’ sewing cross-legged on a makeshift shelf (157); Ishvar has to learn to balance under heavy baskets of gravel; Monkey-man’s nephew and niece are forced to balance at the top of a 15-foot pole, a preferable alternative to their later mutilation for beggarhood. The associations of this leitmotif convey Mistry’s worldview. At their most ambitious, they engage with the inscrutable issue raised by the novel’s many catastrophes: ‘“What is the meaning of such misfortune! […] Why does He allow such things?”’ (46). For Brahmins and Thakurs divine justice is ordained in the ‘timeless balance’ of the caste system (147). Lower castes ask themselves, as does the Muslim Ibrahim, how they had deserved their fate: ‘Did the Master of the Universe take no interest in levelling the scales – was there no such thing as a fair measure?’ (87). Ultimately, Ibrahim ‘no longer believed that the scales would ever balance fairly’ (352). This view is, however, qualified and complicated in the novel’s final part. First, in Dickensian fashion, although systemic change appears impossible, nevertheless individual moral conversions take place. Ibrahim abjures further involvement with the exploitative landlord; incredibly, Kesar redeems himself by rescuing Dina from the landlord’s goondas, in emulation of Dirty Harry who ‘delivers justice even when the law makes it impossible’, ‘The final balance is what’s important to him’ (570–1). But Beggarmaster’s revenge killing by Monkey-man, while gratifying Ibrahim that ‘for once, the scales look level’ (556), has ambivalent repercussions for the beggars whom he both exploited and protected. Removing an evident abuse in an interlocking system of dependencies may, Mistry indicates, have unintended consequences and undesirable externalities. That an overall equilibrium exists in the ‘fine balance between hope and despair’ is Valmik’s article of faith (231; cf. 563). The vital importance of sustaining this belief is shown by Maneck, who, shortly before

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his despairing suicide, concludes that God cannot read the ‘balance sheet’ between fair and unfair (595). The antithesis between the two characters is further evident in Maneck’s inability to accept that, in an ‘unrefrigerated world’ (441) where, in his reiterated conviction, everything ends badly, nothing can be preserved. By contrast, Valmik believes that ‘Thanks to some inexplicable universal guiding force, it is always the worthless things we lose’ (566). His equanimity towards change derives from Yeats’s cyclical philosophy of history, reflected in his remark that ‘The circle is completed’ (565), adopted as the final chapter-title in Mistry’s emplotment.52 But Valmik’s vaunted adaptability is frequently unprincipled opportunism or adaptation to the system, his attitude to loss apparently glib if related to the physical disabilities which overtake Dina and the tailors. Nevertheless, I think that persistence, however apparently futile, is what Mistry wishes to endorse, accompanied by a George Eliot-like emphasis on the transformational power of simple acts of fellowship, as in the final kitchen scene or in Ibrahim’s instinctive consolation of Dina: He patted her hand, and she saw his nails were dirty. A few months ago she would have been repulsed by the touch. Now she was grateful for it. His skin, wrinkled and scaly, like a harmless reptile’s, filled her with wonder and sorrow. Why did I dislike him so much, she asked herself? Where humans were concerned, the only emotion that made sense was wonder, at their ability to endure; and sorrow, for the hopelessness of it all. (556) Dina’s reflection echoes Kent’s tribute to Lear: ‘The wonder is he hath endured so long’.53 Mistry’s humanism has been dismissed by Khair as ‘Babu-socialist valorization of “the poetry of poverty and suffering”’, in a ‘semi-eternal saga of “human” misery’.54 Within Khair’s incommensurable Marxist paradigm, individual resistance merely leads to the perpetuation of oppression; hence his frustration that Mistry depicts no organised subaltern protest. In fact, Mistry’s account is accurate: Bombay’s last organised working-class protest was the disastrous textile strike (1982–4); specialists term its slum-dwellers ‘politically powerless and marginalized’.55 I have argued that Mistry’s realist model of society as a network of interdependencies enforces recognition of the complexity of any systemic reform and of the intractability of social problems. In suggesting that social change first presupposes a transformation of the self, Mistry does not deny agency but relocates it from politics to individual moral responsibility.

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II: Metafictionalising Thatcherism The scope of individual agency and moral responsibility is also a major concern of Coe’s left-liberal critique of Thatcherism and its mutation into New Labour. In explaining historical change from 1973 to 2003, What a Carve Up! (1994), The Rotters’ Club (2001) and The Closed Circle (2004) downplay structural forces, emphasising instead the decisive influence of events and individual actions.56 They thus foreground turning points in the characters’ lives, where they either take a defining decision or are the direct or indirect objects of another’s decision, are in the wrong place at the wrong time (like Lois and Malcolm in the IRA Birmingham pub bombing, or Miriam, whose witnessing of the killing of an Irish car-worker provokes her own murder), or in the right place at the right time (as, apparently, in Benjamin’s visit to Plas Cadlan and later epiphanies). To enable these portentous conjunctions, Coe’s narratives are plotted with an overdetermined patterning. The underlying historiographical assumptions are set out by Claire (CC, 368–70). The impact of a significant event has, she suggests, ripple effects that spread through the lives of ever more individuals, which are thus transformed indirectly by this remote cause. The event’s own causal antecedents can be traced regressively through concatenations of human responsibility. Thus, considering how Lois’s and Miriam’s lives were ruined as a consequence of colonialism in Ireland, she ponders whether ultimately Oliver Cromwell could be blamed for what happened. Her speculation arises from her anguish that ‘perfectly innocent people continually have their lives fucked up by forces outside their control’. Rather than accept that this happens through ‘chaos and randomness and coincidence’, she pursues instead explanatory ‘patterns’, persuaded that ‘Everything that one human being does to another is the result of a human decision that’s been taken some time in the past, either by that person or by somebody else’. As Michael Owen comes to do for similar reasons, she thus reduces history to ‘whodunnits’ (WACU, 413). Coe’s own adoption of this kind of causal explanation can be exemplified by the interventions of other characters in Steve Richards’s life. In a racially motivated incident, Steve’s chances of getting into Cambridge are wrecked when Harding drugs him before a crucial exam; later, he loses out on a pay-rise and is made redundant as a result of decisions taken unwittingly by Benjamin and indifferently by Michael Usborne. Coe thus personalises structural problems in British society, such as racial hatred and industrial relations, assigning individual responsibility and apportioning blame. In this case Benjamin admits uneasily to his

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former prejudices about Handsworth as an African ‘no-go area’, his shame at the socioeconomic privileges which ease his path through life, and concludes, sadly but resignedly, that Steve’s life chances have been destroyed by ‘what can you call it?, history, politics, circumstance’ (RC, 384, 387). This evasiveness masks, he later confesses, his guilty sense of indirect responsibility or unthinking complicity: as an unqualified bank worker, he turned down Steve’s employer’s application for a business loan. But although Benjamin’s complacency is challenged, he remains socially and politically disengaged. The fatalism of Coe’s protagonists, Benjamin and Michael, thus conflicts with his historiographical emphasis on individual agency. Benjamin remarks: ‘Sometimes I feel that I am destined always to be offstage whenever the main action occurs. That God has made me the victim of some cosmic practical joke’ (RC, 107; cf. 389). His defeatism, like Michael’s, is rooted in disabling nostalgia for a lost childhood paradise in Birmingham’s semi-pastoral outskirts. Strikingly, the desire to restore what has been lost or to conserve its memory informs the preponderance of Coe’s characters, who are ‘frozen […] in time’, ‘locked in the past […] that kept reaching out to them with subtle tendrils whenever they tried to break away and move forwards’ (CC, 223, 284–5). Benjamin cannot form successful relationships because of his twenty-year-long fixation on his first love, Cicely, to whom he dedicates the sprawling magnum opus which he also cannot end; Lois is traumatised by Malcolm’s death, Inger by Emil’s death, Claire by Miriam’s disappearance; Michael returns obsessively to a childhood trauma which blocks his adult relationships and also suffers from writer’s block. By contrast, those characters who are not ‘mired in the past’ but live by ‘discontinuities’ (CC, 139, 148), such as Paul and his Closed Circle intimates, are associated with innovation that is socially damaging. Coe thus returns obsessively to a structure of feeling characterised by mourning or melancholia and the fatalistic unwillingness or inability to relinquish a past that supposedly determines the present.57 Overcoming this passivity is linked in What a Carve Up! to its middleclass protagonist’s tentative political engagement. Through a combination of realism, fantasy, Gothic satire and metafictionality Coe plays variations on the structure/agency debate. First, Michael comes to abandon his apolitical fatalism for a conspiracy theory which treats himself, his father, Fiona and Phoebe as involuntary victims of the Winshaws, although his narrative exposes this belief as simplistic and self-serving. Second, the delusion of powerlessness (resulting from Michael’s belief that he is destined to repeat the film scenarios of What a Carve Up! and

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Orphée) with which Michael excuses his abdication of social responsibility is linked to narratological issues of plotting and authorial control. Michael’s growing conviction that his life has been scripted for him is not entirely false: he has been manipulated by Tabitha and Mortimer Winshaw, just as his biological father earlier played a role in plots engineered by Lawrence and Tabitha. The fact that the plot of Part Two is a pastiche of What a Carve Up! also emphasises determinism. This mise en abyme undoes the novel’s political critique by denying the characters the self-determining agency required to initiate social change.

The Winshaw conspiracy Coe’s historiographical concern with self-determination addresses a paradox of the Thatcher era. The dominant ideology of self-reliance stressed the empowerment of the autonomous individual. Yet many Britons felt increasingly helpless, as their lives were drastically reshaped by socioeconomic forces beyond their control. Through the typical figure of Michael, Coe conveys their oscillation between demoralised resignation and the enraged desire to identify and, at least in wish-fulfilling fantasy, punish those whom they could make responsible. In his detective investigation into Godfrey’s death Michael accumulates evidence that undermines his naive belief that the Winshaws have nothing to do with him as an ordinary citizen. The more connections he uncovers, the more paranoid he becomes, expressing his anxieties in an increasingly speculative narrative, which may be the Winshaw chapters of Part One.58 As these uncover the nepotistic stranglehold on politics, the media and the markets of the Thatcherite elite, the Gothically menacing Winshaws are fantasised as exercising deterministic control over British society. But it emerges that their power depends on the complicity of those who allow themselves to be exploited, and who thus enjoy more agency than their sense of victimhood would imply. Each Winshaw typifies one of the areas most transformed by Thatcherite free-market ideology, through privatisation, under-regulation or deregulation. The Hilary and Henry chapters show the repercussions in public service institutions. In the tradition of the BBC’s first director-general, Baron Reith, Alan Beamish believes broadcasting has the paternalistic responsibility to inform, educate and entertain. By contrast, Hilary insists that consumer choice should determine content and that no watchdog is required to uphold standards and ensure debate about political accountability. She is implicitly associated with Rupert Murdoch, whose Sun newspaper supported Thatcher, who reciprocated by backing

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his struggle against striking print-workers when News International relocated to Wapping. Thus, in her tabloid column Hilary advocates the 1988 White Paper which led to the Broadcasting Act 1990; this replaced prescriptive supervision by the Independent Broadcasting Authority with the less weighty Independent Television Commission, facilitating the rise of Murdoch’s Sky satellite network. Employing Thatcherite buzzwords, she takes an anti-union stance both against the miners and by replacing a front-page report on the restriction of civil liberties at GCHQ with a sensationalist trifle. Her tendentious journalism, dumbed down for the ‘brain-dead morons’ who buy her paper, ensures, in Michael’s conspiracy theory, ‘that we all stay dead from the neck up’ (78, 413). Just as Hilary advocates market-led media, so Henry argues for the primacy of market forces in public health provision. He cites approvingly the government-commissioned Griffiths Report, which criticised the NHS’s failure to monitor its performance against predetermined standards and objectives. The Report’s insensitive advocacy of ‘measurement of health output’ is easy to lampoon.59 Should efficiency be increased by Taylorising the throughput of patients, or by cost–benefit analysis of treatment, as in Henry’s obsession with ‘Quality Adjusted Life Years’ and plan to run hospitals, renamed ‘provider units’, as a profit-oriented business (139–40)? This approach is unethical, as Gillam points out, for ‘the commodity involved – human life – could not be quantified’ (123). Nevertheless, although Gillam’s daughter justifiably criticises the ‘deliberate underfunding’ of the NHS ‘as a prelude to privatization’ (138), she doesn’t suggest how to fund the desired additional resources. Coe’s satire ignores the structural constraints on the NHS. Greater efficiency was required because, although spending on the NHS outstripped inflation, it failed to match the rising costs incurred by demographic change, the higher expectations of the technically advanced service now possible, and the moral hazard of no charge at point of delivery.60 For the understandably distraught Michael, Henry’s NHS policy is the deterministic sufficient cause of Fiona’s death, although only some of the necessary causes, contingent factors and human errors which heightened its probability can be attributed to the NHS’s inadequate resources. Authorial plotting accentuates the Winshaws’ personal responsibility: Mark fatally disrupts Fiona’s treatment through his attempted murder of Graham and abetting of the impending Gulf War, which has caused the closure of a ward. But scapegoating Henry for the ideologically motivated reduction of public service screens the inconvenient truth that in 1987 only 30.8 per cent of the British electorate chose to place public welfare before personal interest by supporting

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the Labour Party’s proposed tax increases to improve health and education provision. That the Winshaws’ self-interested greed is facilitated by public indifference or egoism is illustrated also by Dorothy’s agribusiness. Funded by her merchant banker brother Thomas, Dorothy buys small farms or drives them out of business, profiting from government subsidies to undercut small competitors until her Brunwin empire has almost monopolistic control of the entire supply chain. Her maximisation of profits is enabled by the deregulation which resulted in the BSE epidemic of the 1980s. But her animals are also subjected to her ruthless cost-effectiveness because consumers demand the cheapest possible meat or ready meals. In suggesting that Dorothy killed his father because his heart attack resulted from eating Brunwin’s saturated-fat-filled products, Michael conveniently disregards his middle-class parents’ choice of priorities: they economised on food in order to live in a residential area beyond their budget and send him to a private school. Belatedly, he concedes the contributory responsibility of consumers, in allowing themselves to suffer ‘insult’ from the Brunwin meals which he subsequently boycotts (257–8). His case is stronger in arraigning Thomas as an accessory to his father’s death, hastened by the loss of his pension after an asset-stripper funded by Thomas engineered a hostile takeover of Phocas Motor Services. As usual, it is Conservative under-regulation of the capitalist marketplace (exemplified by the Guinness takeover scandal) which enables Thomas’s exploitation of legal loopholes, with callous indifference to the collateral damage caused by his greed-driven mergers and acquisitions. Coe shows that what had become the dominant ideology of entrepreneurial individualism readily degenerated into opportunism. That this applies not only to the Winshaws, however, but also to ordinary citizens is illustrated by Michael’s and Phoebe’s negotiation of the capitalist marketplace. Hilary’s facility for producing a sellable commodity is evident also in her formulaic novel. Although Michael’s editor, Patrick, regards it as trash, he is nevertheless frustrated to have been outbid for it. Both he and Michael have ditched their earlier faith in art and sold out to a publishing industry increasingly dominated by conglomerates such as HarperCollins (itself owned by Murdoch’s News Corporation), where editorial discernment counts less than marketing potential. Michael’s disillusionment is projected into his portrayal of Phoebe, whose devotion to art contrasts with Roddy’s philistine reduction of painting to its exchange-value as an investment. Nevertheless, when Roddy inflates her reputation in the Times she decides reluctantly to sleep with him if this ‘deal’ is his ‘absolute precondition’ for exhibiting her paintings

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(199–200, 203). Like the other Winshaws, Roddy profits from a system which his wealth and influential connections tilt in his favour. He exploits his power as gatekeeper to the metropolitan network of gallery owners and critics to sexually blackmail women seeking his patronage; but he only succeeds if they compromise their own values. The complacent belief that those who suffer at the hands of the Winshaws are involuntary victims whose innocence accords them an unquestioned moral superiority is further discredited by Michael’s sharing of many of the traits which he condemns in them. This is perhaps not surprising, given that, as presumptive narrator of Part One, they are largely his imaginative projections. He has become, like Thomas, a voyeur who lives in a virtual reality; his spiteful review of a literary rival parallels Hilary’s cheap journalism, Henry’s backstabbing and Roddy’s narcissism. By late 1990, in the June 1982 chapter, the remembering self seems to have achieved this self-insight. He comments on his present shame about the review and remarks tongue-in-cheek on the remembered self’s incomprehension at being unmasked in the Cluedo game as unconsciously guilty and thus ‘suddenly confronted with the falseness of your own, complacent self-image as disinterested observer’ (303). With this belated consciousness of contributory responsibility comes the possibility of agency. But, significantly, Coe’s narrative refuses Michael a socially active role. In portraying his fictional double, George, Michael asks why George did not hate Dorothy, thereby interrogating his own passivity. To the horror of both, the Nuttalls’ farm of Michael’s childhood idyll and George’s own farm have been absorbed and denatured by Dorothy’s agribusiness. Nevertheless, George acquiesces in their marriage and her business activities, retreating, like Michael, into a compensatory ‘fantasy version of happier times’ (243). Finally, in June 1982 in a suicidal act of resignation, he directs his unexpressed aggression against himself. In that same month Graham had seen Michael as ensconced in a metropolitan ivory tower, in contrast to his own agitprop film-making. Subsequently, the interweaving of the Winshaw chapters with the autobiographical narrative of 1990–1 suggests that Michael has become more politically engaged. But this impulse towards activism is exhausted after Fiona’s death and dwindles into Michael’s suicidal fantasy or acquiescence in his own death.

Life-writing: fantasy and repetition The second narrative strand, also concerned with agency and determinism, is the impotent Michael’s autobiographical quest to understand and

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break free from the self-destructive behavioural patterns which he has allowed to dominate his life. He traces the origins of his insecure masculine identity and fatalistic passivity to a traumatic experience on his ninth birthday. By contrast with the preceding summer on the Nuttalls’ farm, when Michael discovered his literary vocation – a period which in the idealising nostalgia of his ‘memory’s version of events’ was ‘heaven’ (159) – the cinema show in 1961 is highlighted as the first turning point in a historiographical pattern of loss and seemingly inevitable decline. Michael’s mother’s interruption of his viewing of What a Carve Up!, frustrating his sexual curiosity, reinforces his fateful identification with Kenneth Connor’s screen role. This emotionally immature, impotent figure replaces Michael’s earlier ineffectual role-model, his hen-pecked father. Michael’s fantasised identification with this supposed mirrorimage effects an intrapsychical split into inquisitive but emotionally detached onlooker (out of which his voyeurism will develop) and wouldbe participant, who, however, feels inhibited from realising his desire. Although Michael remains conscious of the distinction between the ‘I’ sitting in the cinema and the ‘I’ on the screen, the episode nevertheless leads him in adulthood to resort increasingly to forms of virtual reality for the pseudo-satisfaction of his sexual and emotional needs. When he compulsively reviews Kenneth’s and Shirley’s anticlimactic encounter in freeze frame, it seems that Michael is seeking not just voyeuristic gratification but also the re-enactment over and over again of a drama of arrested sexual development which, in a self-fulfilling prophecy, he fatalistically believes he must repeat indefinitely. After his brief failed marriage and recourse to novel-writing with no ‘sexual dimension’ (267), Michael reaches what he represents as the second major turning point in his life: his visit to Sheffield in June 1982. His acceptance of Joan’s invitation is motivated by characteristic nostalgia; through her he hopes to ‘rediscover the youthful and optimistic self’ to which she is the only surviving witness (262). En route he meets ‘Alice Hastings’. His infatuation with the fantasies which he projects onto her blinds him to the actual relationship which Joan offers him. Hence in Sheffield Michael apparently repeats – in a form of transference – scenarios from two of his favourite films: Orphée’s obsession with the mysterious Princess and, on the second occasion when Michael surreptitiously observes the undressed Joan but rejects her sexual overture, Kenneth’s retreat from Shirley. (Michael’s first voyeuristic scrutiny of Joan is also symbolic: on his nocturnal visit to her bedroom what he is looking for is a book from his childhood, conveying both his emotional regression and his narcissism.) This involuntary repetition has healing

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potential, in that, if Michael could manage to progress beyond the point of interrupted development, a different outcome could enable him to work through the original traumatic experience. But instead his relapse into voyeuristic fantasy with Joan and in his sexualised exposure of Phoebe’s painting reinforces the destructive pattern, strengthening his morbid self-concept, in imitation of his film alter ego, ‘that it was my destiny to act the part of a shy, awkward, vulnerable little man caught up in a sequence of nightmarish events over which he had absolutely no control’ (302). Michael’s inability to handle these resurfacing insecurities marks a watershed. Lured by Alice and by material security, he abandons novelwriting for the Winshaw family history. His rejection of the real-life Joan for the fantasy figure of Alice is accompanied by his purchase of a video recorder and regression into the virtual reality of film. After eight years of suspended animation Fiona arouses him from his depressive lethargy. His awkward attempts to initiate a sexual relationship with her are, however, often bathetically revealed as comic misunderstandings; later, their nascent relationship is thwarted by her increasingly severe illness. In such passages Michael’s quasi-adolescent tendency to laugh off sexual or emotional intimacy appears to serve as a defence mechanism, much as, under psychological stress, he turns to children’s sweets as comfort food. His defences against loss break down, however, when Fiona’s illness recalls his father’s death and second ‘death’, when Michael’s mother revealed that his supposed father was not his biological parent. The inability to sustain his customary protection against disturbing emotions becomes even more acute after Fiona’s emergency admission to hospital. Michael’s narrative of this crisis conflates several of his favourite leitmotifs. Having discussed with Dr Gillam the hospital’s preparations for the Gulf War, he remarks: ‘It was as if cracks had started to appear in the screen and this awful reality was leaking out: or as if the glass barrier itself had magically turned to liquid and without knowing it I had slipped across the divide, like a dreaming Orpheus’ (411). With Fiona’s imminent death, he can also no longer distance himself from his fears of bereavement: like Cocteau’s Orphée, he seems to have passed into a parallel universe of death. His lifelong aim ‘to find my way to the other side of the screen’ (411) thus seems on the point of fulfilment but not in the liberating manner he had envisaged. The convergence of fantasy and ‘awful reality’ culminates in the intensive care ward, which in Michael’s narrative becomes the hospital ‘cinema’. As in his childhood trauma, Michael once again experiences an intrapsychical splitting, initially in

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a dream and then in reality. This instinctive dissociation is, one conjectures, a defensive attempt to shield the self from a disturbing reality with which it cannot cope and thus must reject. As in 1961, Michael alternates between the roles of dispassionate observer and distraught participant. But now the nurse, unlike his mother, permits Michael to view the whole ‘film’ before she persuades him to leave the cinema. However, witnessing the hitherto repressed end of the screenplay, which turns out to be the end of Fiona’s life, brings Michael no cathartic release. Instead, this more severe repetition of his earlier trauma leaves him unable to connect with his emotions; that part of the self which has been affected is shepherded away for good, while the observing self remains in a state of almost psychotic withdrawal.

Mad, incredulous laughter Expectations of a resolution to the sociopolitical and psychological problems of Part One are frustrated by Part Two’s increasing self-referentiality and remoteness from social practice. The ‘boundary between fiction and reality’ (331) had earlier been blurred in the caricatural depiction of the Winshaws, where enormities that read so improbably as to arouse incredulity often had really happened. Part Two continues this uncovering of truths which appear increasingly surreal or absurd, in an Orphée-inspired journey through the looking-glass into an underworld of death which merges with the actual Gulf War. If Michael is the third-person narrator, Part Two constitutes his internal ‘film’ or dream, as, like Tabitha earlier, he too is driven to madness by the Winshaws. Michael’s dream self is also doubled in the roles of Mortimer and Tabitha, who, acting on his behalf in a bleak rewriting of the film’s happy ending, not only carry out the avenging murders but also fulfil his death-wish, responsibility for which he can only half-acknowledge. If instead we are dealing with an authorial narrator, then the structure/agency debate is shifted to a metafictional level. Graham had earlier argued that novel-writing had become largely irrelevant in an age of cinema and debated how he could best ‘expose the mechanics’ of his film-making and ‘foreground issues of authorship’ (282; cf. 276). Although his comments are amusingly deflated, they echo B.S. Johnson, whose biography Coe has written, and whose ludic metafiction inspires Coe’s play with two narratological issues: first, the aesthetic illusion that literary characters have an ontological existence separate from their authorial creator; second, whether literary characters can be said to exercise free will, or are entirely subject to the author’s

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deterministic plotting.61 In Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry a character remarks: ‘My son: I have for the purposes of this novel been your mother for the past eighteen years and five months’; later, Christie negotiates with the author how much longer he will be allowed to ‘go on’.62 Similarly, in House Mother Normal a character addresses the reader: ‘Thus you see I too am the puppet or concoction of a writer (you always knew there was a writer behind it all? Ah, there’s no fooling you readers!) […] So you see this is from his skull. It is a diagram of certain aspects of the inside of his skull! What a laugh!’.63 The imaginary existence of literary characters is emphasised in What a Carve Up! through allusion to Lewis Carroll’s philosophical idealism. Michael’s suggestion that the people assembled at Winshaw Towers are just ‘characters in my film’ is compared by Tabitha to Tweedledee’s and Tweedledum’s assertions that Alice is ‘only a sort of thing in [the Red King’s] dream’.64 This ontological mise en abyme is linked to Michael’s obsessions with virtual reality. Michael’s identification with Kenneth had convinced him that he was destined to follow this film script. Part Two seems to realise this belief, as, from the arrival of the sinister solicitor (named Everett Sloane, as in the film) onwards, its plot pastiches What a Carve Up!, with intertextual allusions also to The Cat and the Canary, Theatre of Blood and Ten Little Niggers, as several characters remark.65 Their awareness of acting out these apparently prescriptive scenarios reaches its climax when Michael, playing Kenneth’s role, finds himself with Phoebe (imitating her lookalike, Shirley Eaton) in the traumatic situation that has haunted him. But now, departing from the script (although echoing Michael’s earlier narrative, in which Phoebe likewise helps Roddy to ‘live out’ his ‘childhood fantasies’ [192]), Michael/Kenneth sleeps with Phoebe/Shirley. His exultation at this supposed psychological breakthrough is, however, succeeded by the awareness that, despite apparently regaining the ability to act, he is still constrained by another plot: Tabitha and Mortimer’s scheme of revenge against the Winshaws. When playing Cluedo in Sheffield, Michael reacted with incredulity when he was revealed as the murderer. Now he repeats the situation this foreshadowed: Tabitha tells him that Mortimer’s serial murders were inspired by Michael’s book about the Winshaws, so that he is ultimately ‘responsible’ for the slaughter (478). Thus, Mortimer’s summary execution of his relatives, imitating Gabriel Broughton’s in the film What a Carve Up! but also early modern revenge tragedy, vicariously realises Michael’s desire that the conspiratorial Winshaws be brought to justice (413). Arguably, Mortimer’s intertextual bloodbath expresses his despair at the resignation of his fellow citizens. Part One showed that the

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Winshaws could only succeed because of the irresponsibility, whether naive, apathetic or motivated by supposed self-interest, of those whom they exploited. Mortimer now advances a related view: ‘there comes a 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 […] The madness is never going to end [...] for the living’ (485; cf. 493). To confirm this, the absurdist ending interweaves Mortimer’s words with President Bush’s broadcast, announcing the implied madness of the Gulf War, and Tabitha’s suicidal hysteria. Her nursery-rhyme refrain, ‘Life is but a dream’, chimes with the Princess’s injunction in Orphée that the dreamer’s role is to accept his dreams; the acquiescent Michael does just this, in relinquishing control of his life to Tabitha. For him the fatal plane crash fulfils a premonitory dream which is now shown to have anticipated not just Gagarin’s death, but also his own. That the dream perhaps conveyed an unconscious death-wish is implied by Michael’s identification with Cocteau’s Orphée, who is lured by his infatuation with the beautiful but vampirish Princess into an underworld of death, which is, however, also a source of poetic inspiration. His absorption with this fantasy world leads him to ignore Heurtebise’s warning that his wife Eurydice is in mortal danger. After rescuing her from the underworld, Orphée is torn apart by the bacchantes. Like Orphée, Michael allows himself to be drawn away from life, lured first by Shirley into the virtual reality of film (where the cinema screen and later television screen parallel the mirror through which Orphée enters the underworld), and then by Alice into devoting several years to the Winshaws, ‘That bunch of vampires’ (291). Like Orphée with Eurydice, Michael becomes blind to the real-life attractions of Joan and wakes up too late to Fiona’s mortal danger. The final Eurydice avatar in the novel is Phoebe, whose paintings of the Orpheus legend Michael had devastatingly failed to recognise. After their one-night stand, which she regards with understandable scepticism, she admonishes him ‘Don’t look back’ (488), alluding to the injunction placed on Orpheus. Her concern is that ‘his preoccupation with the past was somehow obsessive’ (489). His psychotic withdrawal after Fiona’s death, culminating in an abject regression to a foetal position, suggests that Michael is again succumbing to the depressive preoccupation with loss which underlies his nostalgia. His Freudian self-diagnosis is that after his adoptive father’s ‘two deaths’ he had entered a period of sustained mourning (427). Given Michael’s morbidity and recurrent struggle to embrace life, it is tempting to apply another Freudian interpretation to his final unconscious gravitation towards the Winshaws and everything

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they represent: the organic drive to revert to the static equilibrium of death, to Thanatos rather than Eros. Like Rushdie’s and Mistry’s national stories of major transformations which unsettle their middle-class protagonists, Coe highlights individual agency rather than social structures, thus emphasising ethical responsibility. In locating What a Carve Up! among British novels which, in representing the social impact of Thatcherism, ‘invoke themes of complicity, guilt and political defeat’, Colin Hutchinson has argued that Coe’s fragmentation of the narrative obliges readers to ‘interrogate the structuring of their own reality’ and reflect critically on Michael’s apparent culpability.66 I share this interpretation of Part One but regard Part Two differently: in my view, Coe’s narratorial move from realism into metafiction and from social practice into fantasy and ‘mad, incredulous laughter’ (277) is an ingenious cop-out which reiterates Michael’s fatalism, in its ludic but desperate implication that the only response to an immutable status quo is fantasised violence or self-immolation. By contrast, in The Closed Circle the Gothic Winshaws are rewritten more realistically as the conspiratorial éminences grises of a right-wing club, whose influential decisions can feasibly be opposed. By abandoning the metafictional foregrounding of plot determinism, Coe accords his characters greater agency, so that, significantly, Claire is able to build up a viable future for herself. Thus, although, like Rushdie and Mistry, Coe regards systemic reform as impossible or improbable, he too ultimately implies that, through structuration, change in individual practices can cumulatively impact on larger-scale social groupings.

5 Present Pasts in Neo-Victorian Fiction

Retrospective engagement with the Victorian era began even before the death of Queen Victoria.1 But its extraordinary prevalence now, in the mushrooming niche market for publications promoting neo-Victorianism as a brand, invites investigation. As a broad cultural and sociopolitical phenomenon, neo-Victorianism has manifested itself in the rediscovery of Victoriana in the 1960s; the commodification of a retro Victorian look in advertising, fashions and furnishings; television and film adaptations of Victorian novels, which themselves featured ever more prominently in university curricula; the heritage debate of the 1980s and discussion of the history curriculum in schools; and the revival or invention of tradition in the ‘Victorian values’ evoked in political controversy during the Thatcher years, in contradictory versions of the present past enlisted to legitimise competing visions of Britain’s future. What arouse fascination are either the contrasts between us and the exotic Victorians (provoking nostalgia, curiosity, or Whiggish self-congratulation), or, increasingly, the perceived continuities between us and our recent ancestors.2 The relative proximity of the Victorians and the apparent recognisability of forms of modernity which evolved during the nineteenth century encourage the appropriation and recuperation of Victorian issues for their perceived current relevance, or enable present-day concerns to be projected onto a purportedly Victorian screen. This is facilitated by the fact that the Victorian period either is the origin of major social theories or serves as their reference point. Hence, the Victorian era projected by neo-Victorian fiction and its academic commentators seems largely constructed in our own image, in its uncanny anticipation of contemporary obsessions with sexuality and gender, self-fashioning and identity politics, anti-foundationalism, imperialism, and, increasingly, trauma and ecology.3 120

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Whereas the final section of Chapter 2 took a generic approach to neo-Victorian present pasts, this chapter highlights chronological stages in their evolution since the 1960s. Its thesis is that neo-Victorian revisionist novels are shaped by their historical moment of production, in responding to the sociohistorical context in which they are written and to fashions in historiography and/or literary studies, which, in turn, they themselves may influence. In considering authors’ envisaged audience and pragmatic aims, I argued in Chapter 2 that, as a hybrid genre, historical fiction presupposes some prior knowledge in readers, who are thus able to appreciate departures from the historical record or intertextual allusions and re-visions. These expectations are of particular importance in novels which rewrite the literary canon or adapt or challenge dominant historical accounts. My sampling of the cross-fertilisation or symbiosis between neo-Victorian emplotments and changing historiographical approaches to the Victorian period begins with Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which initiated neo-Victorian interest in feminism, sexuality and anti-foundationalist scepticism.

1969: Fowles and the feminine mystique In historical or social terms I’ve always had great sympathy for, I won’t quite say feminism in the modern sense, but for a female principle in life. [...] My wife would deny point blank that I’m a proper feminist. But I do, more for obscure personal reasons, hate the macho viewpoint.4 [F]or me the 20th Century was born let’s say roughly between 1850 and 1870. This is when various neurosis [sic] begin to creep into the Victorian age. And so the heroine [of The French Lieutenant’s Woman] of course represents at one level women’s liberation[,] the beginning of the movement.5 As a prime exhibit of ‘historiographic metafiction’, The French Lieutenant’s Woman has generated extensive commentary; this has focused more, however, on the metafiction than the historiography. My analysis redresses this imbalance, by indicating how, in selectively representing the past as the anticipatory prehistory of the present, Fowles invents mid-Victorians who reflect the preoccupations of the 1960s. Through protagonists who are psychologically ahead of their time, he tries ‘to show an existentialist awareness before it was chronologically possible’ and likewise projects second-wave feminism back a century.6 Sarah’s

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and Charles’s historically feasible actions ‘in pursuit of their ends’ thus subserve Fowles’s teleological narrative of emancipation, emplotted as a quest romance.7 Although modelled on Victorian fictional prototypes, Sarah departs from these in her atypical resolution of her socioeconomic disadvantages. Her self-willed flouting of Victorian norms has a catalytic effect on Charles, who, perceiving her as a ‘symbol’ of his own latent ‘possibilities’ (288; cf. 114), is led to repeat her earlier process of self-ostracisation from respectable society. Within the narrative world Charles undergoes a Ruskin-like religious unconversion in the church in Exeter, thereby assuming responsibility for his own, self-defining freedom. (On the authorial, heterodiegetic level, however, Fowles’s corresponding attempt to liberate his characters from his God-like ‘omniscient and decreeing’ control (86) necessarily founders, as his inconsistent intervention as ‘impresario’ (394) concedes.) Fowles does not, however, ‘confuse progress with happiness’ (132). The novel’s concluding allusions to Arnold’s ‘To Marguerite’ and Mallarmé’s ‘Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’ (399) indicate that the consciousness which Charles has gained of living in a godless, contingent universe that is constantly in flux is painful as well as liberating. Despite its avant-garde pretensions, The French Lieutenant’s Woman actually has much in common with the traditional historical novel in Lukács’s analysis (cf. Ch. 2, 44–6), which Fowles had read.8 Thus, focusing on the lives of mediocre but representative individuals, it emplots a critical phase in the transition from the aristocracy typified by Charles to the consumer capitalism and bourgeois plutocracy typified by Freeman, and the democracy heralded by the Second Reform Act of 1867. Like Lukács, Fowles treats this historical process as stochastic rather than deterministic; but he represents its causational force not as Marxist dialectic but in terms of Darwinian evolution: ‘Evolution is simply the process by which chance [...] co-operates with natural law to create living forms better and better adapted to survive’ (394, epigraph). Fowles depicts two alternative forms of modernity: capitalism and self-emancipation, as defined by French existentialism and the early, humanist Marx. Those who successfully adapt to capitalism include Freeman and Sam, who cannily shifts employer, as Charles adheres to his obsolescent, gentlemanly distaste for trade. The emancipated elite include Sarah, who finds a socially marginal but equally lucrative niche among Chelsea’s aesthetes and, a generation early, becomes a ‘New Woman’.9 Belatedly, the palaeontologist Charles is awoken to the danger of his ammonite-like extinction through natural selection.

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Fowles’s grand narrative claims a Lukácsian totality, in which the ‘tension’ between ‘lust and renunciation’ ‘structures the whole age’ (236). This interpretation is underwritten by the intrusive narrator’s sociological or anthropological commentary on the alien culture of mid-Victorian England, emphasising the restrictive sexual mores against which the protagonists rebel. Historical change is typified, in Lukácsian fashion, in Charles’s inner conflict between incompatible values and allegiances; hence, in his gravitation from Ernestina to Sarah ‘the whole Victorian Age was lost’ (66) or ‘[t]he moment overcame the age’ (217). Fowles’s overgeneralisation was encouraged by the Freudian repressive hypothesis, which, prior to volume one of Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976; trans. 1978), also underpinned current historiography. The stigmatisation of ‘Victorian’ as connoting prudishness and hypocrisy was well established by the end of the First World War.10 But this debunking reached a self-congratulatory peak in the mid-century resurgence of interest in Victorian sexuality. Popular accounts such as Cyril Pearl’s The Girl with the Swansdown Seat (1955) and Ronald Pearsall’s The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality (1969), complete with ‘Sin Map of London’, and Steven Marcus’s more academically respectable The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England (1966) displayed a gleeful prurience in unmasking the furtive ‘reality’ behind the strait-laced façade of middle-class propriety. Charles’s vacillation between his duty to Ernestina and the conventional, shallow respectability she represents and his infatuation with Sarah is characteristic of the then-dominant historiographic polarisation between the middle-class Madonna or Angel in the House (who, according to Marcus’s foremost authority, William Acton, was not troubled by any sexual feelings) and the Magdalen who, in providing an outlet for the male sexual drive, sustained the sexual double standard.11 Where it differs is that Sarah represents not primarily sexual fulfilment but rather the potential for self-determining agency despite structural constraints. In the context of gender history, Fowles’s present past constitutes an ambivalent attempt to engage with the second-wave feminism of the 1960s. Heralding later feminist strategies, he revises the Victorian canon by rewriting fictional conventions and the social norms these reflected. Sarah combines several stereotypes and fictional prototypes: the lower-class woman educated, like Tess Durbeyfield, beyond her class, with a father obsessed by the family’s genteel ancestry; the governess experiencing ‘status incongruence’; the naive innocent suffering, like Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, the unwarranted loss of her

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reputation. But whereas conventionally, although not in Victorian actuality, for a ‘fallen woman’ only death (as, for example, in Gaskell’s Ruth) or emigration (for example, Little Emily in David Copperfield) lay ahead, Sarah avoids victimhood through a self-fashioning acte gratuit in which she defines her own identity as ‘the French Lieutenant’s Whore’ (152). By voluntarily embracing obloquy, she gains an outcast’s freedom outside the oppressive social structures which she refuses to allow to determine her existence. The stories she tells about herself, in which she performatively adopts a series of social roles, can be read as countering the sociohistorical, psycho-medical and misogynistic discursive constructions placed upon her by Grogan and an ultimately embittered Charles: class ressentiment, melancholia, the cunning of a femme fatale. Conversely, some feminist critics have deplored Fowles’s giving final prominence to Charles’s reductive condemnation of Sarah.12 The text’s unresolved contradictions are rooted in Fowles’s oscillation among emergent, dominant and residual attitudes to women and his emplotment of mid-Victorian history as a quest romance, in which the enigmatic Sarah functions as a Jungian anima archetype.13 For Fowles as well as for Charles, his ‘surrogate’ within the text, this originated with the vision of a woman who ‘represented a reproach on the Victorian Age. An outcast. I didn’t know her crime, but I wished to protect her. That is, I began to fall in love with her. Or with her stance. I didn’t know which’.14 These unreflected patriarchal assumptions echo the Victorian ideology and legal practice of coverture, which placed the dependent middle-class wife under her husband’s ‘wing, protection and cover’.15 Charles’s desire – with which Fowles identifies – to solve this woman’s mystery provides the novel’s narrative drive. It begins with a mise en abyme in which the narrator observes a telescopic observer (Grogan, we later infer) observing the female stranger, whose history is narrated in Chapters 2 and 4 in the first of a series of unreliable accounts. An epistemological aporia is thus created, in which the psychological inwardness of the inscrutable central character is conveyed through narratorial inference (as the narrator disclaims omniscience), the conjectures of the male characters by whom she is focalised, and her own incompatible versions of her actions, some of which she allegedly cannot explain. In attributing this metafictional indeterminacy to the disorientation of a would-be liberal male by the 1960s feminism which Sarah embodies, I endorse Woodcock’s view that Fowles’s novel charts ‘the male anxiety of the late 1960s at a newly-emergent female autonomy’.16 Charles is depicted as undergoing a process of consciousness-raising in

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which ‘Slowly he began to understand one aspect of Sarah better: her feeling of resentment, of an unfair because remediable bias in society’ (351). The narrator tries to remedy this bias not just in fictional conventions but also in historiography by incorporating references to early signs of female emancipation: for example, the founding of Girton College, Mill’s The Subjection of Women, or ‘the booming new female clerical agencies’ (350) (a prescient recognition of the establishment in 1859 by the ‘ladies of Langham Place’ of the Society for the Promotion of the Employment of Women). Charles’s masculine prejudices are chaffed: his self-image as the chivalric knight come to save the ‘damsel’ Sarah (381); his incredulous spouting of the conventional male wisdom of the 1860s – ‘But you cannot reject the purpose for which woman was brought into creation’ (386) – recalling sentiments such as W.R. Greg’s characterisation of marriage as women’s ‘most honourable function and especial calling’.17 Elsewhere, however, bias reinstates itself.18 Sarah’s emancipation doesn’t extend to the wage-earning independence which was becoming feasible for similar lower-middle-class women in the London of the 1860s. Instead, she remains dependent on the quasi-coverture of the male-dominated Rossetti household, in the subordinate function of Dante Gabriel’s amanuensis and occasional model. Indeed, Fowles had originally conceived her as merely modelling at the Royal Academy for a living, before Elizabeth Fowles intervened: ‘You should bang her somewhere into the centre of the art world you hint at. Not place her on the rather tentative fringe of it, it is timid, and this sort of timidity is not part of Sarah’.19 Elizabeth’s rejoinder belongs in the context of her involuntary isolation in the Fowleses’ Dorset farmhouse.20 While preparing to move there, they had quarrelled about Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), a polemic against the unhappiness and wasted potential of American middle-class housewives confined to suburban domesticity. Friedan attributed this to women’s attempts to conform to the ‘feminine mystique’ promulgated in American media from 1949 onwards: The feminine mystique says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfilment of their own femininity. [...] It says this femininity is so mysterious and intuitive and close to the creation and origin of life that man-made science may never be able to understand it. But however special and different, it is in no way inferior to the nature of man; it may even in certain respects be superior. The mistake, says the mystique, the root of women’s troubles in the past is that women envied men, women tried to be

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like men, instead of accepting their own nature, which can find fulfilment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love.21 Fowles commented: ‘I don’t believe all the feminist argument (Betty Friedan’s) about unfulfilled women. There are just as many unfulfilled men, because fulfilment is a comparative thing’.22 Two months before beginning The French Lieutenant’s Woman he had responded to the ‘loneliness’ and sense of ‘unnecessity’ experienced by many of his and Elizabeth’s middle-aged women friends, by writing a play about emancipated women unequipped for their freedom. The solution, he opined, was that ‘Woman has to retrace her steps [...] to loving the man more than the man loves her, to more domestic responsibility (the home as her province, not her millstone). [...] A woman is the port from which the ship sails, and to which it will return. She cannot fulfil this role, and try to be the joint captain of the ship’.23 This attitude apparently informed the single ending of Draft I of the novel: a conventional reunion of Charles, Sarah and their son, which, Elizabeth realised, was ‘too pat’.24 Following her promptings it was replaced by two alternative endings to John’s godgame, in which, according to the critical consensus, Sarah as authorial demiurge masterminds the final stage of the male protagonist’s education, succeeding the Prospero-like Conchis of The Magus. Charles’s inconsistency is exposed. On the one hand, he earlier rejected a conventional marriage to Ernestina, who approximates Friedan’s ‘Happy Housewife’ in her unquestioning adherence to the feminine mystique. On the other hand, he is unable to understand or accept what an alternative kind of relationship would entail, in Sarah’s ‘wish to be what I am, not what a husband, however kind, however indulgent, must expect me to become in marriage’ and her self-possession resulting from the ‘varied and congenial work’ she has found (385). His incomprehension is articulated in the bitter suspicion that ‘Some terrible perversion of human sexual destiny had begun; he was no more than a footsoldier, a pawn in a far vaster battle [...] about possession and territory’ (387). Phrased less melodramatically, he is caught up in an evolutionary process which enforces his involuntary enlightenment and adaptation, in which Sarah’s ‘manoeuvres’ are ‘instruments to a greater end’ that he cannot grasp (387). In the wish-fulfilling Chapter 60, following Charles’s renewed testing by Sarah’s inscrutable ‘parables’ (393) in her role as mystificatory embodiment of what Fowles idealises as ‘the female principle’, she dispels his anxiety by reverting to a sentimentalised domesticity, although the narrator

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suggests this is obsolescent or incredible. By contrast, in Chapter 61 Charles rejects the unorthodox cohabitation which Sarah offers, that of ‘a spirit prepared to sacrifice everything but itself’ (397); in reluctant independence, he must now develop his own selfhood. What emerges therefore from the unresolved contradictions in Fowles’s historical novel is a chronologically displaced engagement with the sexual politics of the 1960s, which would serve as a point of reference for subsequent neoVictorian present pasts.

1990: Byatt and the persistence of the past Irritation with The French Lieutenant’s Woman gave impetus to A.S. Byatt’s Possession. Byatt maintains that ‘Fowles’s understanding of Victorian life and literature is crude and derived from the Bloomsbury rejection of it’; Possession accordingly was intended to rescue ‘the complicated Victorian thinkers from modern diminishing parodies like those of Fowles and Lytton Strachey’.25 But Byatt’s alleged authenticity merely substitutes her tendentious construction of the Victorians for Fowles’s, replacing his present past of the 1960s with one which engages with critical and historiographical discourses of the 1980s, notably poststructuralist anti-foundationalism. Both writers select feminism, sexuality and religious doubt as salient themes in mid-Victorian history, which they emplot as a quest romance. In both novels the elusive, recalcitrantly autonomous women are Jungian anima figures; but whereas Fowles relegates Sarah to the role of a muse, Byatt’s Christabel and Maud enter as equal partners into the creative dialogue of male and female, which, however (like Fowles’s Charles Smithson), Randolph angrily suspends in exasperation at Christabel’s secretiveness. In contrast to Fowles’s male-focalised narrative, Possession seems a polyphonic text: in their own writings as well as through narratorial focalisation Byatt allows Blanche, Christabel, Ellen, Randolph and Sabine to speak for themselves, but their invented voices of course articulate the implied author’s attitudes. This expansion of point of view profits from intervening historiographical trends, which generated new female stereotypes (although in Ellen’s frigid inability to consummate her marriage Byatt perpetuates an earlier and by 1990 untenable cliché). Thus, Byatt’s present past is influenced by recent interest in ‘romantic friendship’ and ‘Boston marriages’, following Lillian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men (1981); in the women in the shadows of the male artists, exemplified by Jan Marsh’s PreRaphaelite Sisterhood (1985) and Pamela Gerrish Nunn’s Victorian Women

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Artists (1987); and in independent women, as in for example Sheila R. Herstein’s A Mid-Victorian Feminist: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1985) and Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (1985). The critical recovery of Victorian women poets gathered momentum in the 1980s. Whereas Charles Smithson expressed incomprehension of Christina Rossetti, Byatt creates in Christabel a powerful composite of Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson. Christabel’s writings reflect not only the re-visioning of Victorian poetry but, as pastiches, also belong in the context of Angela Carter’s feminist rewritings of fairy tales, of écriture féminine, and critical interest in misogynistic or empowering female archetypes. But, while incorporating feminist insights, Byatt distances herself from separatist approaches to women’s writing, satirising Leonora’s Irigaray-speak and ideological appropriation of Christabel as a lesbian foremother.26 Furthermore, Byatt’s portrayal of Christabel, Blanche and Randolph implicitly counters critical speculation about Dickinson’s lesbian relationship with Susan Gilbert/ Dickinson rather than heterosexual attachment to Charles Wadsworth; similarly, Maud is made to gravitate away from Leonora’s advances. Indeed, authorial manipulation runs throughout Byatt’s overdetermined emplotment, which utilises the generic ‘latitude’ of Romance to effect improbable genealogical connections and echoing resemblances among characters: Ellen/Beatrice, Blanche/Roland’s mother/ Val, Blanche/Leonora, Christabel/Maud, Randolph/Roland.27 What Christabel perceives as the ineluctable ‘necessity’ drawing her and Randolph together repeats itself with Maud and Roland; Roland is thus superstitiously conscious of ‘being driven by a plot or fate that seemed, at least possibly, to be [...] that of those others’, in a ‘self-referring, self-reflexive, inturned postmodernist mirror-game or plot-coil’.28 He rationalises this as Althusserian interpellation: ‘a Romance was one of the systems that controlled him, as the expectations of Romance control almost everyone in the Western world’ (425). This controlling Romance ‘plot’ (425) is, however, not a social script but rather is engineered by the designing author, who also orchestrates all the rival academics’ schemes, which she resolves in what to the characters ‘feels like the ending of a Shakespearean comedy’ or ‘the unmasking at the end of a detective story’ (482–3). Such metafictional gestures, characteristic of a novel crammed with inter- and intratextual echoes and allusions, underline the constructedness of Byatt’s narrative world. This authorial control underpins Byatt’s main thesis: the power of the historical poet or novelist, despite critical or theoretical scepticism,

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to project imaginatively a former possible world. On three occasions – Chapters 15, 25 and the Postscript – the narrator omnisciently moves beyond the contingent, nineteenth-century textual evidence available to her twentieth-century characters, to depict, and simultaneously create, events which otherwise remain unrecorded. Dana Shiller fails to recognise this distinction in narrative level, claiming that the poets’ Yorkshire trip is ‘Byatt’s imagined version of what might have happened, based on the scanty documentary evidence available’.29 These metaleptic shifts from the narrative world to external, synoptic vision recall Danto’s concept of ‘cognitive asymmetry’: the discrepancy between the privileged knowledge communicated to readers by the fictional narrator or retrospective historian and the immanent, limited viewpoint of literary characters or historical agents (cf. Ch. 1, 22–4). With the ironic perspective of hindsight knowledge, Byatt reveals Christabel’s final letter, of which Randolph remained ignorant, and her ignorance of his message in 1868. Byatt’s modern researchers likewise gain access to Christabel’s letter and hence to a retrospective overview denied to Randolph. Conversely, they remain ignorant of Randolph’s meeting with his daughter in 1868 and his earlier letter to Christabel, which Ellen burned (455–7). Instead, the authoritative narrator alone commands the whole unmediated truth. Byatt favours narrative coherence and closure; with few exceptions, cognitive gaps are filled.30 Such omniscience is the prerogative of the historical novelist, who, unlike the historian, had the power to invent the characters, events and textual ‘sources’ in her mimesis of former actuality and its discovery in the present. For example, Ellen and the modern researchers misattribute the lock of hair that Randolph preserved in his watch; the heterodiegetic narrator shows readers it was Maia’s (452, 504, 509–10). There is a triumphalism in this would-be demonstration that historical fiction is superior to history or criticism: ‘it was partly a theoretical matter of principle to tell people things that couldn’t be found out by scholars’.31 But, although in Byatt’s narrative world certitude is confined to the authorial level, she is not underwriting postmodernist assertions that the past is unknowable. On the contrary, she respects historians’ painstaking pursuit of provisional truths: although her scholars’ inevitable misinterpretations of fortuitously surviving textual traces are never entirely eliminated, they are cumulatively reduced.32 In polemically opposing poststructuralist anti-foundationalism, Byatt invokes a Victorian usable past, enlisting Browning as historical precedent and ally. Accordingly, in a thematic echoing that has largely escaped

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critical attention, her emplotment attempts to ‘connect a bygone time with the very present’, by interpreting both eras as afflicted by epistemological scepticism: ‘Doubt, doubt is endemic to our life in this world at this time’.33 In the mid-Victorian plot, the anti-foundationalist discourses of the ‘Higher Criticism’ of the Bible, geology and evolutionary biology drive Byatt’s Browning-counterpart, Ash, to question the truth of biblical and historical narrative, even as he champions poetry’s capacity to give historical figures an imaginary afterlife in the present. In the parallel plot set in 1986–7 Byatt pointedly intervenes in debates about constructionist historiography, as the title of Roland’s dissertation indicates: ‘History, Historians and Poetry? A Study of the Presentation of Historical ‘Evidence’ in the Poems of Randolph Henry Ash’ (9). This creates a Chinesebox effect: Ash/Browning’s critically self-conscious poetry resurrects historical personae; the authorial narrator revivifies Ash/Browning in critically self-conscious fiction; Roland, as critic, seeks empathetically to reanimate Ash by what he infers from his textual remains. Throughout, Byatt defends the viability of restoring the past to imaginative vitality in the present. But, she concludes, poststructuralism has made this more difficult for the academic than the novelist or poet. In literary circles, constructionist and deconstructionist historiography have often been conflated in assertions that, as the past as extratextual referent is not merely inaccessible but unknowable, history’s unverifiable truth-claims are indistinguishable from fiction (cf. Ch. 1, 8–14; Ch. 2, 26–8). Byatt’s opposition to this viewpoint was formulated in critical essays contemporaneous with Possession. In 1986 she wrote: ‘I am afraid of, and fascinated by, theories of language as a self-referring system of signs, which doesn’t touch the world. I am afraid of, and resistant to, artistic stances which say we explore only our own subjectivity’ (Passions, 11). In 1989, implicitly countering deconstructionist readings which were coming to dominate studies of The Ring and the Book, Byatt maintained that Browning ‘believed it was possible, indeed imperative, to tell the truth, that there was such a thing as “truth” that could be sorted out from all the intricate meshes of thought and opinion and partiality that make up our account of things. This makes him profoundly unfashionable now’ (Passions, 23; cf. 44).34 Browning’s approach to historiography is thus of central importance to Possession, although no critic has yet examined how Browning’s scepticism and faith in imaginative ‘resuscitation’ of the past are ventriloquised by Ash. By returning to Browning’s poetry itself, I show that Ash offers a more compelling version of his real-life prototype than Byatt’s disappointing academic criticism of Browning (Passions, 29–71).

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Browning’s later poetry dwells on the precariousness of historical evidence. Reports of the nature and significance of an event are conjectural reconstruction of the invisible cause from its perceptible effects, ‘feel after the vanished truth’: the world’s outcry Around the rush and ripple of any fact Fallen stonewise, plumb on the smooth face of things; The world’s guess, as it crowds the bank o’ the pool, At what were figure and substance, by their splash: Then, by vibrations in the general mind, At depth of deed already out of reach. Groping efforts to retrieve this metaphorical stone, the ‘deceptive speck’ of ‘Truth’, from the bottom of the pool fail because the ‘prepossession’ which directs the reacher after Truth distorts his aim with a ‘swerving’ which prevents his grasping the thing itself. Should ‘success’ result, this is ‘luck’ rather than ‘skill’.35 Eye-witness accounts, already at a subjective remove from actuality, are ephemeral; their afterimages of the event fade like a falling rocket: What once was seen, grows what is now described, Then talked of, told about, a tinge the less In every fresh transmission; till it melts, Trickles in silent orange or wan grey Across our memory, dies and leaves all dark[.]36 With a similar metaphor, Browning ventriloquises the biblical critic Renan’s lament that the revelation of Christ’s incarnation has departed irrecoverably: Gone now! All gone across the dark so far, [...] Dwindling into the distance, dies that star Which came, stood, opened once!37 The ‘star’ of Bethlehem is now indistinguishable from all others in the firmament, which humans belatedly comb for confirmation of God’s presence: We, lone and left Silent through centuries, ever and anon

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Venture to probe again the vault bereft Of all now save the lesser lights, a mist Of multitudinous points [...] But where may hide what came and loved our clay?38 In this latter-day deus absconditus, Victorians expressed the unattainability of a transcendental signified, anticipating deconstructionist accounts of deferral and absence. Browning’s Renan and John (see below) are echoed by Ash (165). When the Higher Criticism demonstrated that the Gospels were not authored by Christ’s apostles, direct evidence of God’s incarnation disappeared. As Byatt notes (Passions, 30–1), this affected John’s Gospel, which records Christ’s miraculous resurrection of Lazarus and contains the only eyewitness testimony of the Crucifixion: ‘And he that saw it bare record, and his record is true; and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye might believe’ ( John 19:35). But although in Browning’s ‘A Death in the Desert’ the dying John wonders ‘How will it be when none more saith “I saw”?’, he dismisses the significance of his first-hand testimony, admitting that he didn’t see the Crucifixion.39 Such ocular proof, like a miracle he perhaps performed, was, John suggests, simply necessary at an earlier stage of mankind’s spiritual evolution, ‘When, save for it, no faith was possible’.40 With greater maturity, however, minds will no longer require to be ‘spoon-fed’ with infantile ‘truth’ and the rational discrediting of revelatory ‘proofs’ will enable a leap of faith, founded deductively on intuitive experience of God’s love.41 The acknowledgement, then disregard of scepticism also characterises Browning’s approach to history, which supplements and transforms the inherent insufficiencies of evidential ‘fact’ through faith and poetic ‘fancy’.42 In The Ring and the Book Browning juxtaposes biased rumours, relativist judgments, witness testimonies, defence and prosecution statements, and the verdicts of court and Pope, ‘the ultimate / Judgment save yours [the reader’s]’ (I, 1220–1). He does not, however, resolve the murders of 1698, as mortals’ vision can discern no unequivocal truth, given the moral ambivalence and protean changeability of human action, which, constantly revealing new facets, ‘baffles so / Your sentence absolute’ (I, 1372–3). What saves this from deconstructionist aporia is faith. As the supreme earthly authority, Browning’s Pope cannot relinquish the practical responsibility and moral burden of judgement; his agonised deliberations before passing the death sentences are depicted at length. But he believes that the ‘Candle’ of his fallible understanding receives supplementary illumination from God’s ‘sun’.43 Browning doesn’t suggest that the Pope’s conscientious judgment is

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correct, merely that phenomenal rather than noumenal truth, ‘truth reverberate’, ‘reduced to suit man’s mind’ (X, 1389–90), is all that humans are capable of grasping. The Pope’s inspired quest for truth corresponds to the narrator’s imaginative projections, which resemble Collingwood’s idealist theory of history as the empathetic ‘re-enactment’ of historical agents’ thoughts. An extraordinary, melodramatic vision transports him, ‘Feeling my way’, back in time to the locales of the ‘tragic piece’ which, as ‘The life in me abolished the death of things’, ‘Acted itself over again once more’ (I, 506–23). In this vivid illusion, past events in Arezzo and Rome are experienced as ontologically present: I saw with my own eyes In Florence as I trod the terrace, breathed The beauty and the fearfulness of night, How it had run[.] (I, 523–6) Similarly, Browning’s John remarks: To me, that story – ay, that Life and Death Of which I wrote ‘it was’ – to me, it is; – Is, here and now: I apprehend naught else.44 To balance his melodramatic oversimplification, The Ring and the Book’s narrator supplies further versions of events. But he stands by his defence of the imagination’s ‘Mimic creation’ (I, 740), which projects man’s ‘surplusage of soul’ (I, 723), so That, although nothing which had never life Shall get life from him, be, not having been, Yet, something dead may get to live again[.] (I, 727–9) This fusion of ‘live soul’ and ‘inert stuff’ (I, 469) is, in a passage which Byatt quotes (Passions, 46–7), figured as the galvanic raising of ghosts, or Elisha’s reanimation of a corpse (I, 740–72). Byatt transposed Browning’s idealist historiography to Ash, who is ‘at ease with other imagined minds – bringing to life, restoring in some sense to vitality, the whole vanished men of other times’, or Iñez (sic) de Castro, ‘gruesomely resurrecta’ (158, 6). Byatt’s Browning essay corresponds closely, sometimes verbatim, to Ash’s poems and early letters to LaMotte about the Higher Criticism. Presumably following Strauss’s treatment of the New Testament as mythic truth, Ash’s Ragnarök equated Christianity

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with other mythologies, as expressions of a ‘Universal Truth’ (163); but, as LaMotte remarks and Ash concedes, this risks reducing ‘Holy Scripture’ to ‘no more than another Wonder Tale’ (160; cf. 163, 165 and Passions, 30–40). Ash thus interrogates the epistemological validity and ontological status of poetic and scriptural truth in his version of the increasingly controversial Lazarus story (cf. Passions, 36–8). In her essay Byatt notes that Michelet defined history as ‘Resurrection’ and identified ‘his own work, the bringing to life of the dead in the history of Humanity, with that of the sage or thaumaturge or prophet who raised Lazarus’ (Passions, 41). Similarly, by poetically summoning up Lazarus as a ‘livingdead-man’ (168), Ash, like Browning, enters into the controversy surrounding John’s Gospel. His musings suggest that this fictive resurrection through the visionary imagination (in Browning’s terms, ‘Mimic creation’) offers the kind of figurative rather than literal truth which the Higher Criticism now saw in evangelists’ accounts of miracles and may, in turn, evoke in receptive readers the illusion of a real presence: We live in an age of scientific history – we sift our evidence – we know somewhat about eyewitness accounts and how far it is prudent to entrust ourselves to them [...] So if I construct a fictive eye-witness account [...] am I lending life to truth with my fiction – or verisimilitude to a colossal Lie with my feverish imagination? Do I do as they did, the evangelists, reconstructing the events of the Story in after-time? Or do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra?[...] I do not claim to bestow Life as He did – on Lazarus – but maybe as Elisha did[.] (168) Ash implicitly recalls Aristotle’s distinction between history’s particular facts and the universal, metaphorical truths of poetic mimesis (cf. Ch. 2, 28). As a late Romantic, he alludes to Keats, then to Coleridge’s association of religious and poetic ‘faith’, each of which in a sceptical age required a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’: ‘the only life I am sure of is the life of the Imagination. Whatever the absolute Truth – or Untruth – of that old life-in-death – Poetry can make that man live for the length of the faith you or any other choose to give to him’ (168).45 Ash’s and LaMotte’s debates about fictive afterlife have a counterpart in their disagreements about spiritualism, which rewrite those of Browning and Barrett Browning. In 1855 the Brownings attended a séance which Daniel Home conducted in Ealing. Robert’s sceptical and Elizabeth’s affirmative versions of events were succeeded by Robert’s

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enraged onslaught on Home, his ‘Mr Sludge, “The Medium”’, and by Home’s rejoinders.46 Byatt invents a séance conducted by Hella Lees in Twickenham, recounted in Ash’s and LaMotte’s partly undelivered epistolary testimonies at increasing remoteness from the event, his ‘Mummy Possest’, and Lees’s The Shadowy Portal (103–5, 390–1, 393–8, 405–12, 456–7, 500). The séance thus epitomises in modern form the problems addressed by the Higher Criticism: the unreliability and textual transmission of eyewitness evidence of an alleged miracle, the raising of Blanche’s spirit from the dead. Its importance for Possession as a whole is indicated by Byatt’s extensive epigraph quotation from Browning’s ‘Mr Sludge’. Ash’s disruption of the séance expresses male rivalry towards the female power of Victorian spiritualism, and jealousy of LaMotte’s power to dispose of their child.47 By terming it his ‘Gaza exploit’, he alludes to Samson’s self-immolating destruction of the Philistines but also betrays his sense that, like Samson, he has been emasculated and blinded by the woman who ‘practised upon’ him (390–1, 397). Ash mockingly compares Lees to Shakespeare’s pretentious mage, Owen Glendower, reminding her that spirits ‘speak to me too, through the medium of language’ (395). In ‘Mummy Possest’ he denigrates her perceived travesty of his vocation and prerogative in a wounding attack which blends Lees with LaMotte in the persona of Sibylla Silt, the artful visionary. In what is authorially intended (like Sludge’s monologue) to be self-condemning casuistry, Silt contrasts women’s lack of agency under patriarchy with the ‘Power’ which they exercise in their spiritualist ‘secret room’, ‘our negative world’, where ‘women sit enthroned’ (410). What the crystal ball reveals to the female ‘Medium’ – a ‘reversed world’, ‘all widdershins’, ‘Like a drowned world with downward-pointing flames’ (410, 406) – parodies LaMotte’s The Drowned City, in a rejection of everything which the City of Is had once symbolised for them both. In dismissing LaMotte’s vision of Is as the perversion, rather than the complementary antithesis of masculine rationality, Ash recapitulates her father’s hostile interpretation of this legend, which contrasts with LaMotte’s and Leonora’s feminist re-visioning (133–4). Hurt by LaMotte’s exclusion of him, Ash thus retracts his earlier sympathetic response to her poetry – ‘I shall feel my way into your thought’ (132) – in a wilful misreading rooted in his misconstruction of her secretive actions and sibylline pronouncement, ‘You have made a murderess of me’ (457, 500). Randolph’s false deduction from Christabel’s verbal evidence is repeated when Maud and Roland misconstrue her cryptic postpartum poems (381–2, 422–3). Their errors result from cognitive

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asymmetry: decoding LaMotte’s utterances requires biographical information which she withholds from Ash, and the authorial narrator from readers. But Randolph’s interpretive failure is more disconcerting, given his intimate relationship with Christabel. His misinterpretation of her, which fits the evidence to his preconception, is, for Byatt, a model of how not to read: it lacks both empathetic openness to and respect for the Other, and the willing suspension of disbelief that constitutes faith. By contrast, in the same year as his ‘Gaza exploit’ Ash published The Garden of Proserpina (463–5); if, fortuitously, one can decode its private subtext, what emerges is an affirmation that, in their mutual passion, the poets entered, however fleetingly, an Earthly Paradise. Ash’s dialogue here with LaMotte incorporates reminiscences of the Yorkshire landscape they explored together, alluding to the myth-making in which both indulged, and referring playfully to the quest romance they self-consciously shared. On another level, Ash traces the evolution of human language from Adamic denotation to the metaphorical truths projected by the imagination: ‘We see it and we make it, [...] People the place with creatures of our mind’. His comparative mythology of archetypal gardens of paradise concludes on an italicised verb with an ostensive force: All these are true and none. The place is there Is what we name it, and is not. It is. It is a defiant reiteration (cf. 168–9) of the imagination’s power to create, and inspire in readers, the illusion of a real presence. The lines concede poignantly the inevitable transience of the lovers’ time together in a place that was a utopia, a no-place. But the place that is and is not also recalls LaMotte’s ‘City of Is’, which, like all fictive creations, continues to exist ‘for the length of the faith you [...] choose to give’ (168). In this private allusion Ash pays commemorative tribute to the passion they shared, not merely for each other but for the evocative power of language: ‘We two remake our world by naming it / Together’ (114). Embodied and hence immanent in a text, what Ash and Byatt regard as language’s performative energy is transmitted to later generations, where, in suspended animation, it awaits revival in the act of reading.

‘The death of the poet was kept from his poems’48 The trickiest aspect of Possession is Byatt’s alternation between two different ways of recuperating the past: literature and literary criticism.

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Her critical reading of Browning’s historiography informs her fictional (re)creation of Ash/Browning’s critico-poetical revivals of historical figures, which are interpreted in Roland’s biocritical readings of Ash. For most of the novel what links these is a Romantic theory of historiography as the imaginative re-enactment of the past. Despite his epistemological scepticism, Ash believes that, like the naturalist Cuvier, Michelet, Renan and Carlyle ‘have heard the bloodless cries of the vanished and given them voices’ (104). Just as Cuvier ‘spliced together the Megatherium from a few indicative bones and hypothetic ligatures – and his own Wit and powers of Inference’ (173), so historians colligate textual fragments into a narrative (re)construction of the past. This presupposes scientific knowledge of what is possible, but also imaginative projection of the once-existent entity, in a provisional hypothesis which undergoes continual revision. Similarly, Ash’s poet-historian’s ‘resuscitation’ (104) combines an intellectual grasp resulting from immersion in sources – ‘long and patient contemplation of the intricate workings of dead minds’ (105) – with ‘the aid of the imagination’ (104).49 Ash’s Browningesque fusion of fact and fancy, which entails empathetically feeling one’s way into the past, accordingly combines intuitive understanding with the poet’s projections, as he ‘mixt my life’ with ‘those past voices and lives’ (104). In evoking through language ‘the life of the past persisting in us’, Ash conceives of himself as contributing to the perpetuation of cultural memory, which ‘we must thoroughly possess and hand on’ (104). This transmission is illustrated in Roland’s reception of The Garden of Proserpina. He is first depicted looking for its sources in Ash’s copy of Vico’s Principj di Scienza Nuova. When the book is ‘exhumed’ from its locked safe (1), Roland’s reverential disinterment proleptically contrasts with Cropper’s resurrectionist violation of Ash’s coffin: It was immediately clear that the book had been undisturbed for a very long time, perhaps even since it had been laid to rest. The librarian fetched a checked duster, and wiped away the dust, a black, thick, tenacious Victorian dust [...] Roland undid the bindings. The book sprang apart, like a box, disgorging leaf after leaf of faded paper, blue, cream, grey, covered with rusty writing, the brown scratches of a steel nib. (2) All symbolises the reactivated inspiration of the past present: Roland breathes in the Victorian atmosphere, as it survives in these random particles on another contingent survival, Ash’s book, and traces the authentic strokes of the author’s handwriting. As he does so, intuitively

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‘recuperating a dead man’s reading’ (4), he attempts to reconstruct from their memorials the movements of Ash’s thought. The inferential understanding of scholarship – unlike the authorial narrator’s unmediated access to the invented past – is, however, fallible and provisional; Roland’s plausible hypothesis is refuted by evidence discovered later. Roland’s critical reanimation of Ash follows Ash’s critical ‘resuscitation’ of his predecessors, in the face of mid-Victorian scepticism. The mimetic truth of poetry was for Ash the appropriate vehicle for this. Similarly, through the medium of fiction, Byatt’s authorial narrator can resurrect the Victorian past in apparent critico-biographical plenitude. By contrast, as an academic critic Roland faces a more forbidding challenge: he must try to reconcile the poststructuralist reduction of the self to a speaking position or locus of intersecting discourses, and of language to différance, with a humanist belief in the agency of individual ‘voice’ and linguistic presence. In a crucial but ultimately incoherent section Byatt indicates how for Roland this tightrope-walking entails a move away from biocritical pursuit of Ash (which the novel as a whole otherwise endorses) to a viewpoint compatible with Barthes’s ‘The Death of the Author’: ‘it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality [...] to reach that point where only language acts, “performs”, and not “me”’.50 Thus, on rereading The Garden of Proserpina (470–3), Roland reflects that Ash’s intertextual consciousness of Spenser, Botticelli’s Primavera, and Milton meant that ‘all these voices sang’ with his. Accordingly, Roland ‘heard Ash’s voice, certainly his voice, his own unmistakable voice, and he heard the language moving around, weaving its own patterns, beyond the reach of any single human, writer or reader’. Although Ash’s voice is unique, it serves at the same time as a medium to transmit an intertextual and linguistic tradition which exceeds the self. Byatt apparently recalls Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, which argues that the ‘most individual parts of [a poet’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously’.51 Ash would have concurred, as his aperçu indicates: ‘The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence’ (4). Roland connects the poem with Ash’s death-bed photograph, deathmask and two portraits of Ash by Manet and Watts: He had always seen these aspects as part of himself, of Roland Michell, he had lived with them. He remembered talking to Maud about modern theories of the incoherent self, which was made up of conflicting

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systems of beliefs, desires, languages and molecules. All and none of these were Ash and yet he knew, if he did not encompass, Ash. He touched the letters, which Ash had touched, over which Ash’s hand had moved, urgent and tentative, reforming and rejecting his own words. He looked at the still fiery traces of the poem. (472–3) This passage can be read as representing cultural heritage as a communal humanist endeavour which revivifies traces of human sensibility: Shelleyan, Byronic or Browningesque sparks or embers that poetic inspiration and inspired reading can rekindle. Roland is right to regard these as having become ‘part of himself’ (472), in that through immersion in Ash’s writings he achieved an empathetic communion with their implied author. At the same time, however, he realises that: ‘What Ash said, not to him specifically [...] though it was he who happened to be there, at that time, to understand it – was that the lists were the important thing, the words that named things’ (473). At this point Roland also becomes a medium for this transhistorical, ultimately impersonal linguistic energy. Byatt’s essays repeatedly privilege literary creativity over the academic criticism which is parasitic on it, not surprisingly in view of her own abandonment of academia for hybrid critical fiction. An autobiographical investment is accordingly evident when Roland, despite theoretical insistence that language ‘could never speak what was there, that it only spoke itself’ (473), mysteriously regains faith in linguistic referentiality and, becoming a poet, compulsively assembles lists that assert an Adamic, correspondential fit between word and thing. Similarly, Byatt herself, on leaving Frank Kermode’s seminars on Derrida and Barthes, anxiously compiled lists of words ‘that you can’t possibly turn into literary theoretical words’.52 In order to continue as writers, both Byatt and Roland must reject sceptical arguments which, as critics, they cannot rationally refute. Byatt’s doctoral thesis, concerned with ‘temptations in gardens between The Faerie Queene and Paradise Regained’, left her as a novelist with an obsessive interest in ‘the incarnation, in fallen and unfallen (adequate and inadequate) language to describe reality’.53 There is thus an autobiographical resonance when, with wish-fulfilling symbolism, the narrator gives Roland access to the garden from which their landlady had banned him and Val. Its red-brick wall had once bounded the Putney estate of General Fairfax, for whom Marvell wrote about gardens. He cannot stay in that garden; he is, like Marvell, an exile in a fallen world. But, with the latitude of Romance, he temporarily regains a paradise believed lost, in which, as earlier for Ash, ‘The things were what they named and made

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them’ (464). This willing suspension of disbelief recalls Ash/Browning’s cognisance but ultimate disregard of anti-foundationalism and recourse instead to Romantic historiography, reanimating the imagined past in factually informed but fictive narratives which evoke for readers the illusion of a real presence. Thus, while modern academics must grapple with the epistemological difficulties of constructionist historiography, the authorial narrative in Possession sidesteps these limitations and instead celebrates the power of linguistic mimesis to bring a virtual reality into being.

1999: Waters’s surmised lesbian history Waters’s Affinity revises the marginal topic of ‘romantic friendship’ in Byatt’s Possession, in keeping with intervening developments in gender history. Like Tipping the Velvet (1998), it is shaped by and alludes to critical, theoretical and historiographical models which Waters knew from her doctoral research on ‘lesbian and gay historical fictions, 1870 to the present’. These have been duly replicated in their academic interpretation. Thus, in a self-reinforcing process of self-fulfilling expectations, what Waters represents as late Victorian ‘London’ derives from late twentieth-century constructions and has its verisimilitude validated by readers conversant with these stereotypes and revisionist interpretations. To an extent, it is inevitable that we make present pasts in our own image; the hermeneutic circularity evident in the production and reception of Waters’s faux-Victorian novels is, however, accentuated by the methodological challenges of lesbian history. In attempting to recuperate a lesbian past, salient issues include: (i) Should lesbianism be defined as specific (primary, exclusive, or transitory) sexual and/or affective practices and orientations, as a discursively constructed identity, or as subversive, destabilising ‘queer’ positionalities? To what degree are sexual subjectivities shaped by available sexual scripts, or the result of self-fashioning, self-identification and (performative) self-representation?;54 (ii) Is transhistorical identification possible, as the presentist genealogies of recent identity politics propose; or is the alterity of the past incommensurable with present-day colligatory concepts and social formations, so that it is presumptuous to apply the term ‘lesbian’ to historical agents who could not have recognised it and who attached different meanings to their same-sex relationships (cf. Ch. 1, 13, 22)? Within a traditionally homophobic or heteronormative discipline, the first set of questions has entailed proving the existence of sexual activity or homoeroticism despite its occlusion from the historical record.

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Assembling evidence is more difficult than for male homosexuality, as ‘Women wrote less; their writings survived less often [...]; and they were less likely than men to come to the attention of civic or religious authorities’.55 Even when source material (predominantly by white elite or middle-class women) is unearthed, its frequent indirections and coded implication rather than explicit statement pose severe problems of interpretation; scholars’ speculative desire to uncover an ‘unspeakable’ subtext encourages projection into apparent euphemisms, ellipses or silences. The history of sexuality highlights the epistemological opacity of the past present and the difficulty of reconstructing the immanent perspective of historical agents, in order to avoid presentism. Emphasising the need to acknowledge alterity, Jeffrey Masten notes ‘the impossibility, even as it figures as an intractable curiosity or desire, of searching the annals of the past for erotic subjects motivated by our desires and living our practices, with the cultural and political meanings we associate with these desires and practices’.56 Liz Stanley similarly maintains, with some overstatement, that understanding romantic friendships ‘in the terms they were understood by their protagonists is an impossibility: we now can never understand the past as it was understood by those who lived it – “recovery” and “reclamation” are quite untenable projects’.57 Stanley was criticising the then-dominant paradigm of female same-sex affectivity in the long nineteenth century, which Waters later revised: Faderman’s emplotment of a prelapsarian era of asexual, romantic friendship before fin-de-siècle sexology pathologised and stigmatised the ‘lesbian’. Using the example of the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’, whom Faderman represented as Platonic friends but their contemporary Hester Thrale Piozzi had termed ‘damned sapphists’, Stanley comments: ‘I am not arguing that these women were “really lesbian” and constituted a lesbian sub-culture [...] but equally neither am I arguing that “lesbianism” did not exist then. My view is that drawing either conclusion from the historical record is problematic [...] “lesbian” meant something very different then and to which we now have no access’.58 Whereas such ‘irresolvable’ interpretive issues frustrate historians, the need for surmise opens up an imaginative space for historical novelists.59 Waters is self-conscious about what is at stake historiographically. In an essay written with the historian Laura Doan, she asks whether the popular lesbian historical novel should ‘recuperate the names and lives of “suitable” or famous lesbians of the past’, or ‘invent a “history” haunted by the present and understood to take its authority from the imperatives of contemporary lesbian identities?’.60 On the one hand,

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‘the lesbian hunger for genealogy’ favours ‘intuit[ing] a meaningful history from the most insignificant of evidence’ and ‘offers fantasy and wishful thinking as legitimate historiographical resources’, echoing Monique Wittig’s plea ‘that we should “[m]ake an effort to remember, and failing that, invent”’. On the other hand, the past ‘emerges from the lesbian historical genre as an erotic and political continuum through which alterity can be mystically overridden’, with historical difference reduced to former impediments to a liberationist teleology. Hence, much lesbian historical fiction is driven not by ‘historicism’ but ‘nostalgia’ for a speciously familiar past, evident in the frequent adoption of ‘that Fadermanesque model of “romantic friends” which [...] appears reassuringly to anticipate a modern lesbian feminist paradigm, but actually simply replicates it’. Waters accordingly attempts to avoid naive presentism, but also profits from the inescapability of projection to supplement the paucity of source material, which permits her to conjure up ‘apparitional lesbians’ in the imaginative spaces of her newly-created present past.61 Waters differs from Winterson in her respect for historical alterity, having devoted three to four months’ preparatory research to each neo-Victorian novel in order ‘to write from a perspective that felt like it belonged to my characters, rather than something of my own. I know it’s an illusion, obviously, but I think the whole point of writing a historical novel is to make the leap into a slightly different mentality and a different cultural landscape’.62 Unlike historiographic metafiction, her first-person faux-Victorian novels display no epistemological anxieties about access to historical truth: ‘I think it’s amazing too, how much we do want our historical fiction to be authentic, even though it’s fiction. I know that myself. And you feel cheated if you then discover that they didn’t get it right, or they were manipulating things, even though it’s all a manipulation’.63 Her novels accordingly aspire towards historical plausibility in the realistic recreation of specific milieux at a particular juncture, while at the same time departing from the documented past, in order to project unrecorded lesbian lives into these settings. The verisimilitude of Tipping the Velvet is underwritten by influential interpretive trends in metropolitan historiography, exemplified by Judith Walkowitz’s City of Dreadful Delight (1992), which discussed women’s mobility in urban spaces, and their involvement in housing philanthropy and social reform; work on music hall and urban leisure (such as Peter Bailey’s); the plethora of studies of the East End that followed Gareth Stedman Jones’s Outcast London (1971); research into late Victorian homosexuality, such as Jeffrey Weeks’s Sex, Politics and Society (1981) and Ed Cohen’s Talk on

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the Wilde Side (1993), and explorations of gay culture, for example Neil Bartlett’s Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde (1988) and Alan Sinfield’s The Wilde Century (1994). On this basis, extrapolating from the ‘recognizably modern gay subculture’ of late Victorian London, Tipping the Velvet rewrites Victorian Bildungsromane and male picaresque narrative such as ‘Walter’s’ My Secret Life, creating a complementary ‘imagined sexual underworld for Victorian lesbians’; Waters used ‘the chance, intentionally anachronistic, “to pinch for women” the material she had gleaned about the male upper-middle-class homosexual circles of the 1890s and their encounters with “rough trade”’.64 Likewise, her cross-dressing protagonist, unlike those whom Waters melodramatically and anachronistically terms ‘ladies in peril’, has the freedom to wander the streets.65 Eclectically, she also appropriates for her projected lesbian subculture the eighteenth-century slang ‘tom’ which, as Randolph Trumbach had shown, was probably the popular libertine term for London’s sapphists. But whereas this first novel ‘deliberately had a wide range of models for lesbian communities, I wrote Affinity with characters who for the most part didn’t have any lesbian models at all’.66 There she was ‘trying to engage far more with real historical difference; to explore how lesbian desire might actually have been experienced and expressed in 19th-century culture, where it had no public place or acknowledgement’.67 In doing so, Waters reflected the ‘shift towards an increasingly sexualised reading of lesbian culture during the 1980s and 1990s’, which challenged the asexuality and the class limitations of Faderman’s model of romantic friendship.68 The depiction of Ruth Vigers/Peter Quick in Affinity draws on the nineteenth-century stereotype of the ‘mannish lesbian’ but arguably also, anachronistically, on research into mid-twentieth-century, working-class butch/femme culture (and also, intertextually, on the fantasised sexual transgressions of Peter Quint in James’s The Turn of the Screw). As Selina’s ‘Spirit-Control’, the socially and sexually ‘rough’ Peter Quick takes a sadistically dominant role. Her manly vigour, resulting from her manual labour, is evident in the macabre cast of her hand, displayed at the newly founded British National Association of Spiritualists.69 The Gothic frisson this arouses in Margaret perhaps recalls Jaggers’s exhibition of Molly’s murderous ‘power of wrist’.70 But, in focusing fetishistically on the maid’s hand, Waters surely draws also on modern scholarship about a cross-class, gender-bending, sadomasochistic relationship hidden from Victorian contemporaries: that of Arthur Munby and his servant/wife, Hannah Cullwick, who were secretly married in 1873. Munby appears to have been sexually aroused by what he saw as the combination in

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working-class women of an outward ‘masculine’ force and an inner feminine nobility: he measured Cullwick’s biceps and wrist and recorded her in photographs taken in the 1860s not just as a toiling maid of all work but also in queer roleplay as a half-naked, abjected slave; in drag as a young man; and passing as a middle-class lady, despite the incongruous, brawny hands which marked her servitude.71 Modern fascination with Munby and Cullwick dates back to Derek Hudson’s Munby: Man of Two Worlds (1972) in the context of post-Marcus interest in the ‘Other Victorians’ and has subsequently (re)constructed their ‘deviant’ relationship within the paradigms of class and labour history, gender performativity and metropolitan imperialism. They have served to illuminate tensions within normative constructions of masculinity and femininity and to suggest the diversity of Victorian sexual self-identifications. Although their representative significance may be disputed, they enable a glimpse of an alternative, dissident lifestyle amid the shadowy inscrutability of mid-Victorian sexuality. Another glimpse, this time of an apparitional lesbian, is provided by a divorce case of 1864, with which Waters was presumably familiar, where public discussion centred on ‘the role of the feminist, Emily Faithfull, in alienating Helen Codrington’s affections from her husband’.72 Admiral Codrington was alleged to have attempted to rape Faithfull, the companion of his estranged wife, while the women were sharing a bed. Martha Vicinus surmises that, as a notorious disciplinarian cognisant of homosexuality in the Royal Navy, Codrington was inspecting the shared bed, furious at his wife’s insubordinate intimacy with ‘the “mannish” usurper’.73 Faithfull later withdrew her signed affidavit, apparently intimidated by the admiral’s filched possession of his wife’s diary and incriminating correspondence. Codrington had lodged with his brother a sealed packet detailing the reasons for Faithfull’s expulsion from the Codrington household; Robert Browning, writing to a female friend, claimed that ‘the “sealed letter” contained a charge I shall be excused from even hinting to you’.74 Vicinus concludes: ‘The silence at the heart of the Codrington trial – the unnameable thing – is lesbian sex, which everyone acknowledges, but no one names. [...] Homosocial, and homosexual, relations were most accepted among bourgeois women if they remained unmarried and within their own all-female communities; they were most threatening if they disrupted heterosexual norms of courtship and marriage’.75 It is tempting to think that Waters adapted this widely reported scandal, with its suppressed lesbian subtext, to Selina’s situation as Mrs Brink’s companion. Selina’s required role as the look-alike and spirit-medium

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of Brink’s deceased mother licenses Brink’s nightly homoerotic contact with her. In addition, the performative conventions of spiritualist manifestations in the 1870s permitted erotic, sometimes cross-gendered intimacies, which subverted gender norms.76 After Brink’s speechless death, following her shocked discovery of the lesbian séance involving Madeleine Silvester, Selina and the exposed Peter Quick, Selina is convicted of ‘Fraud & Assault’ (27); the sentence elides all homosexual irregularities, even though the doctor’s examination of marks on Madeleine’s body had led him to regard events as ‘a queerer business than he thought’ (3). The discrepancy between what is tacitly known but unmentionable is also evident in Waters’s depiction of Margaret as a closeted lesbian, who is isolated from a sympathetic female community. Her reaction to hearing about the same-sex, convict ‘pals’ in Millbank is that ‘it disturbed me to find that the term had that particular meaning and I hadn’t known it’ (67). But although Margaret tries to dissociate her own behaviour from that ‘meaning’, the significance of her increasingly unguarded attachment to Selina does not escape the knowing, mocking matrons. Like other apparitional lesbians, however, Margaret disappears without trace. Her self-monitoring according to internalised norms, self-repression and self-loathing leads to the destruction of the diary to which she confided her love for Helen (which was perhaps wise, as the Codrington trial underlined) and subsequent burning of the vestiges of her similar frustrated passion for Selina, erasing them from the historical record before she silences herself for good.77 The apparent inexorability of Waters’s pessimistic emplotment results from several stylistic devices. One is the handling of time in the narrative discourse. Affinity begins analeptically on 3 August 1873 with the final entry in Selina’s diary; then, in a further analepsis, subsequent entries date from 2 September 1872 and proceed in chronological order, as Selina records what for retrospective readers is her past future. As her narrative leads teleologically to its known catastrophic ending, readers, who, unlike the historical agents, can anticipate the outcome although only gradually understand its causes, experience the illusion of a deterministic necessity. The effect is of forward movement towards a dead-end. Through the intercutting of Selina’s prospectively unfolding narrative with Margaret’s prospective diary of 1874–5, readers discover ominous parallels between the women’s life histories, suspecting that Margaret’s projected present future will also end in her demise. This is reinforced by the novel’s symbolic and ideological patterning. Thus, in keeping with the 1990s vogue for late Victorian Urban Gothic, Affinity combines a Foucauldian interpretation of Victorian disciplinary

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society and panopticism with the characteristically Gothic tropes of female social and domestic imprisonment, in a ‘London’ as claustrophobically oppressive as in Dickens’s Little Dorrit.78 (With narratorial irony, Margaret ends up reading this novel to her mother.) As Armitt and Gamble have remarked, Waters plays ironically with the Foucauldian tropes of visibility and invisibility.79 Margaret’s class position as a ‘Lady Visitor’ to Millbank aligns her with institutional surveillance; at the same time, she is the object of familial scrutiny, under observation by the prison staff, who intuit her passion for Selina and suspect her complicity in Selina’s escape, and spied upon by Ruth. Conversely, Margaret’s gaze and hence the restricted focalisation of her journal overlook Ruth’s omnipresent activities, as unworthy of notice. Subversively, therefore, it is Ruth, all-seeing but effectively invisible in her segregated attic bedroom, who commands the greatest power in the Priors’ panoptic household; with omniscient access to Margaret’s interiority through her journal, she authors events in her subordinate mistress’s life. Her scheming subserves the many repetitions in Waters’s emplotment, which suggest that, for late Victorian women, there is no escape from imprisonment. Selina’s self-narratives reveal a history of exploitation, in which, as a passive medium, she has laid herself open to control or possession by others. Although she dodges Mr Vincy’s advances, she succumbs to a series of inveigling women, for whom, despite their abuse of her, she retains a submissive affection: Auntie, who ‘made a turn of her’ (228) at 13; Mrs Brink, whose fierce importunity leads to Selina’s confinement in the cabinet, which foreshadows the ‘darks’ of Millbank and appears in her nightmare as her coffin (173, 281); Ruth/Peter, who is the ‘fate’ to which Mrs Brink brought her (165). Selina describes her relationship with Peter as both ‘terrible’ and ‘marvellous’: ‘It was like losing her self, like having her own self pulled from her, as if a self could be a gown, or gloves, or stockings’ (166). The metaphor suggests a compulsive erotic bond, a transforming love which ‘she will do anything to keep [...] about her’ (211), and/or self-negating abjection. At 17, the impressionable Selina was little older than the 15-year-old Madeleine Silvester or the other young women whom Peter molests, as they repeat the mantra ‘May I be used’ (261–2). ‘Development’ of the woman’s power is the euphemism for this (260–1, 301, 352); Selina likewise remarks on ‘the power I found in myself, through Peter Quick’ (168). Although Miss Isherwood’s ingenuous comment that ‘I think I have a nature that is very like [Miss Dawes’s], or could be made like it’ (261) suggests her being encouraged to acknowledge her repressed homoerotic feelings, Peter’s sadistic interventions show little respect for the sexual objects

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of his manipulation. Instead, Stephen’s conjecture that Selina probably ‘“fell foul of some sort of influence”’ (99) appears corroborated by Ruth’s statement, applicable to Selina as well as to Madeleine: ‘Only let [Peter] put his mark upon her once, she would come to us for ever. And do you know how rich she is?’ (352). Selina’s money-spinning subjection to Peter will continue abroad; having escaped from Millbank, she resumes her former duress. Margaret’s affinity with Selina enables Peter to put his mark on her too, in an ironic series of repetitions which conclude her entrapment. Blind to the similarity with her own deluded situation, Margaret voices her belief that Selina ‘had been used – impressed – by some queer power. [...] When a fancy came to her, she could not shake it off’, particularly at night, when ‘morbid influences’ ‘baffle her’ (216). The parallel is underlined when, in an authorially contrived echo, Stephen assures Margaret that she will receive her income, ‘unless you fall foul of curious influences’ (292). Ruth directs Margaret through the symbolic objects she plants in her room; her mastery is confirmed when Margaret dons the velvet collar that earlier betokened Selina’s bondage by Peter, from which she can only free herself with a self-laceration that foreshadows her suicide. Peter’s plotted seduction of Margaret is effected through Selina’s mediumship. Although Margaret rejects her testing remark that she is a ‘sharp little actress’ (85), associating her instead with Crivelli’s Veritas, the spiritual ‘TRUTH’ apparently inscribed on Selina’s body is mere trickery which nevertheless dupes the gullible Margaret (167–8). Selina’s shrewd protestation – ‘Do you think [...] that I will be like her – like her, that chose your brother over you?’ (276) – clinches Margaret’s trust by touching her deepest insecurity, before, in a repetition that is the more callous for being calculated, Selina re-enacts Margaret’s earlier abandonment by Helen. Thus, like Isabel Archer in James’s The Portrait of a Lady, the ingénue Margaret belatedly realises that, because of the money that promised her agency, she has been the pawn of two illicit lovers with a prior attachment. But although Ruth seals Margaret’s fate, her life has already been shaped by the constraints of social structure; these far outweigh her agency, as she unsuccessfully negotiates a succession of discursively constructed, increasingly confining roles. She begins as helpmeet to her scholarly father (whom she venerates with an Oedipally coloured attachment); this enables her to compensate for her deficient education and offers not just an intellectual outlet but also the prospect of joint travel to Italy, accompanied by her beloved Helen. After Helen’s marriage and her father’s death, Margaret’s role as the dutiful daughter dwindles to that

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of spinster companion to her egotistic mother. Given the available social scripts, Margaret’s only alternative, as her mother reiterates, would be a conventional marriage. Her refusal to countenance this has led to a failed suicide attempt and the control through medication of her hysteria, a condition associated after 1853 with female sexual repression, for which marriage and pregnancy were recommended cures.80 Margaret had, however, envisaged an alternative life for herself, drawing, like the early nineteenth-century lesbian Anne Lister, on available cultural representations.81 Whereas Lister constructed her sexual identity by reading the classics, Rousseau and Byron, Margaret models her vision of self-determination and sisterly solidarity on Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh. ‘Aurora’ was Helen’s sobriquet for Margaret; Selina revives it, encouraging Margaret to believe that she might finally reach Italy, following in the footsteps of her role-model Aurora and her workingclass companion, Marian Erle (the assumed name in the passport that Margaret acquires for Selina). Her escape plan is motivated by her elective affinity with Selina: ‘handsome as Dawes was, no prisoner ever sought to make a pal of her. [...] And so I looked at her, and felt a rush of pity. And what I thought was: You are like me’ (82). Their resemblance is rooted, however, not only in homoeroticism but also, ever more evidently, in their imprisonment. Like the protagonist in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, Margaret is driven towards derangement by her enforced inactivity and the infantilising solicitude of her family, intended to maintain the patriarchal status quo, as ‘ladies like me’ ‘throw the system out’ (209). Their relentless supervision provokes her devious attempts to elude their control; their suspicion is mirrored in her paranoia.82 Margaret’s intensifying empathetic identification with Selina appears pathologically unbalanced to onlookers when, in an aggressive response to her mother’s harrying, she recklessly flouts decorum at a family dinner-party and confesses that, had class privilege not protected her from the legal consequences of her suicidal felony, she, not Selina, should have been put in Millbank (like Jane Samson, incarcerated as a ‘nuisance to the public good’) (255, 23). Afterwards, at the height of her chloral-induced hallucinations, she vicariously experiences Selina’s solitary confinement in ‘the darks’. Margaret imagines their escaping together, like Keats’s lovers, on St Agnes’ Eve; instead, when Selina ‘has not come’ (318), Margaret is left, like Tennyson’s Mariana, ‘“aweary, aweary, / Oh God, that I were dead!”’.83 The passionate convergence which Margaret had anticipated culminates ironically in a role-reversal and identity-theft: Selina leaves Millbank, Margaret and the country under Margaret’s name; conversely, Margaret, in despair

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at a second betrayal which leaves her trapped at home, smashes Ruth’s room in an orgy of destruction that is as futile as the Millbank prisoners’ similar breaking-outs. Confronted with this evidence of her derangement, she realises the imprudence of approaching a policeman for aid; she risks becoming as notorious as her chloral-addicted neighbour in Cheyne Walk, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose dissident lifestyle had contributed to his pillorying in 1871 in Buchanan’s broadside against ‘The fleshly school of poetry’, and who, suffering from persecution mania, had, like Margaret, attempted suicide in 1872 by taking an overdose.84 Intertextually, the ending of Waters’s emplotment recalls the recurrent suicides or deaths of protagonists in New Woman fiction. Llewellyn remarks that ‘it is striking how “neat” all the elements of [Affinity] are. Waters manages to create a plot which threads through every aspect of the female “Victorian” underworld’, highlighting ‘for astute readers the very contemporary (and un-Victorian) nature of the text’.85 Armitt and Gamble likewise note the ‘combination of historical literary material and contemporary ideologies’.86 This anachronistic hybridity has been the guiding theme of this chapter, which has shown how we reconstruct the Victorians according to current preoccupations and illustrated how such interpretations have varied between 1969 and 1999. What emerges clearly is the provisionality of present pasts and the extent to which the plausibility or verisimilitude of their Barthesian ‘reality effect’ is the product of historiographical and critical fashion. The pragmatic functions which they serve are considered in Chapter 6, which examines how, by perpetuating the pathologisation of London’s East End in their neo-Victorian fiction, Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair influence current constructions of the area.

6 Gothic Afterlives

How cultures and individuals deal with their history is a perennial issue, which has recently commanded attention in the guise of two apparently contradictory phenomena: the desire to hold on to or restore a lost past, and the disturbing inability to relinquish its involuntary legacy. On the one hand, in the face of unsettling sociopolitical change and a consumer culture of rapid obsolescence, a widespread need to reaffirm personal, familial, communal or national identity and continuity has manifested itself in an obsession with memorialisation and with nostalgia, which ‘inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals’.1 As the ‘conceptual opposite’ of progress, nostalgia addresses the experience of loss ‘endemic to living in modernity’, with its emphasis on ‘relentless supersession’.2 On the other hand, indicating the degree to which modernity is haunted by what it tries to displace, critical theory has undergone a spectral turn, the uncanny has become a ‘master trope’ and the Gothic, which dramatises a feared regression to the socially and psychologically archaic, has undergone a major revival.3 The recent upsurge of interest in trauma brings together both approaches in the ethical responsibility to bear commemorative witness, but also the compulsive re-enactment and possible working through of past suffering. In general, what appears to be at stake here is the anachronistic survival or haunting re-emergence in the present of irrational energies which properly belong to an earlier period, or the simultaneous coexistence in the self and/or in society of different layers of time. This chapter investigates the treatment of these issues in Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography and in several interrelated works which have reanimated the late Victorian Gothic mythography of London’s East End: Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, and Iain Sinclair’s Lud 150

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Heat and White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. Their work represents one of the two dominant constructions of the East End which now circulate in commodified form. One version is evident in the recent upsurge of writing and film about Brick Lane, ‘Brickhall’ or Banglatown (reflecting the fact that in the 2001 Census 33.43 per cent of the population of Tower Hamlets classified themselves as ‘Asian or Asian British: Bangladeshi’). The alternative, conservative vision – which Ackroyd and Sinclair have shaped decisively – overlooks the British Asian community and has instead revived the area’s Gothicised past.4 The forms that their cultural pathology has assumed and the purposes which it has served in the brand marketing of the local heritage industry and property developers are the topic of this chapter.

Gothic fantasies: the late Victorian East End Dominant cultural stereotypes of the East End are largely a creation of the late nineteenth century, when middle-class fears of the perceived threat posed by the underclass or ‘residuum’ to the political stability and social and moral hygiene of the metropolis were increasingly projected onto this area.5 From the late 1860s and 1870s the Settlement Movement sought to civilise the East End poor; the People’s Palace, opened in Mile End in 1887, sought to co-opt the respectable working class through paternalistic acculturation or ‘refinement’. But the trade depression of the mid-1880s provoked gloomier assessments of the poverty attending casual and sweated labour, domestic overcrowding and poor sanitation, such as Andrew Mearns’s The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor (1883).6 Despite the demythologising efforts from the late 1880s of social investigators such as Charles Booth, the influence of social Darwinism led to a fear in some intellectual circles at the fin de siècle that an atavistic race of ‘city savages’ was emerging in the urban slums. This was reinforced by the lurid accounts of the East End in George Gissing’s early fiction, in Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets (1894) and A Child of the Jago (1896), and in Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903). Xenophobic anxieties were aroused by the influx into Whitechapel in the 1880s of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, leading to an anti-Semitic backlash when one line of popular speculation suggested that the extreme brutality of the Ripper murders could only have been perpetrated by an ‘alien’. Moral panics of this kind fed into the late Victorian urban Gothic imaginary, in reverse colonisation fantasies such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), in which the alien count has coffins delivered to Piccadilly,

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Bermondsey and Mile End New Town, which adjoins the area of the Jack the Ripper murders.7 The Victorian middle-class belief that moral degeneracy was as contagious as physical disease gained support from the Lamarckian thesis that acquired characteristics can be inherited. This environmental determinism emphasised the transmission of vicious behavioural patterns resulting from the cultural and economic deprivation of the metropolitan underclass. Take, for example, Sidney Godolphin Osborne’s letter to The Times about the Ripper murders, which inspired John Tenniel’s famous Punch cartoon of 29 September 1888, ‘The Nemesis of Neglect’: Sir, – The tilled garden is fast producing the crop sown; it is ripening, it affords ample evidence of the nature of the seed, its fruit is just that which such seed, under such tillage, was certain to produce. […] We have far too long been content to know that within a walk of palaces and mansions, where all that money can obtain secures whatever can contribute to make human life one of luxury and ease within homes, from infancy to old age, surrounded with all that can promote civilized life, there have existed tens of thousands of our fellow creatures begotten and reared in an atmosphere of godless brutality, a species of human sewage, the very drainage of the vilest production of ordinary vice, such sewage ever on the increase, and in its increase for ever developing fresh depths of degradation. […] Just so long as the dwellings of this race continue in their present condition, their whole surroundings a sort of warren of foul alleys garnished with the flaring lamps of the gin shops, and offering to all sorts of lodgers, for all conceivable wicked purposes, every possible accommodation to further brutalize, we shall have still to go on – affecting astonishment that in such a state of things we have outbreaks from time to time of the horrors of the present day.8 Understandably, therefore, in the aftermath of the Ripper murders, there were public health and housing reforms to reduce the negative environmental factors which were held to have caused the killings.9 This practical effort at amelioration had, however, little influence on the notoriety of Whitechapel, which until the later 1970s continued to be perceived, as indeed it had been since its inception, as a site of poverty and urban decline.10 But in recent decades Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Wapping and Limehouse have been regenerated, or gentrified, depending on one’s perspective. The pathologisation of the East End which is perpetuated by Ackroyd and Sinclair is thus consciously anachronistic.

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Eternal recurrence: Ackroyd’s East End Ackroyd’s visionary historiography, like Sinclair’s, asserts the continuing presence and occult influence of the past. It apparently derives from the ‘geohistorical structuralism’ of the influential French historian, Fernand Braudel, whose historiographical concepts have been further developed in Reinhart Koselleck’s philosophy of time.11 In analysing the Mediterranean region, which he depicted anthropomorphically as a living creature, Braudel distinguished three different time spans: ‘longue durée’, or longterm structure, manifest in secular continuities or almost imperceptible variations in the physical environment; medium-term fluctuations over decades (‘conjunctures’), such as economic cycles; short-term ‘events’.12 Ackroyd leaves out the middle term, emphasising, like Braudel, longue durée and downplaying the significance of events and of individual agency. It is a methodological paradigm which advances no theory of change, nor persuasive explanations of marked historical discontinuities, and pays little attention to causation.13 Braudel’s theory of different rhythms of historical time influenced one of Koselleck’s key concepts: ‘the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous’.14 This implies that the history of any society or region encompasses phenomena which have developed at different tempos of change (15–16, 238–9, 296–7). Their relative ‘delay’ or ‘acceleration’ results in the accretion of what Koselleck terms ‘layers of time’ of varying durations, like geological strata, with the difference that the historical processes which caused this sedimentation are still effective (9–10). The differentiation of discrete layers of time leads, in Koselleck as well as Braudel, to the analytical distinction between long-term ‘structure’ and unique ‘event’. Koselleck’s ‘structure’ – which encompasses unconscious natural processes (biological, geological, climatic, and so on) and consciously reiterated rituals, laws, social and artistic conventions – denotes the very gradual evolution and enduring influence of some historical agents (12–14, 207–9, 327–31). (On the conceptual significance of structure, cf. Ch. 1, 14–21.) It is the longevity of ‘structure’ which alone enables us to make tentative predictions about the future by extrapolating from the past regularities which inform what Koselleck terms our ‘space of experience’ and thus shape our ‘horizon of expectations’. ‘Structure’ thus implies the possibility, and indeed in some contexts the necessity, of repetition, of the historical recurrences which so preoccupy Ackroyd and Sinclair. Ackroyd’s indebtedness to Braudel’s historiography is evident in London: The Biography (2000).15 The perspective which he adopts in this Blakean mythography is that of longue durée, beginning with London’s prehistory. The emphasis on long-term ‘structure’ minimises the significance and

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the causational complexity of individual ‘events’, which are regarded as merely transient activities of the unchanging, animistic ‘London’ whose ‘Biography’ Ackroyd has written. Ackroyd’s London is a being like Blake’s giant Albion. It can be viewed macroscopically as a single body, a genius loci, with an ‘essential organic will’ (115), or microscopically in the myriad Londoners who collectively form this timeless whole. This prosopopoeia attributes agency not to individual Londoners but rather to London itself, whose ‘purpose’ or ‘destiny is to represent the contradictions of the human condition, both as an example and as a warning’ (600, 766). ‘Purpose’ and ‘destiny’ refer beyond human agency to an inscrutable providential intention, whose dramatic unfolding on the metropolitan stage serves in the book’s visionary conclusion as the basis of a theodicy. London: The Biography combines Romantic anti-capitalist mythography with jeremiad. Its grand narrative alleges that London was founded upon the masculine pursuit of power through ‘commercial profit’ and ‘financial speculation’, which casts a ‘palpable’ ‘shadow’ over the city’s ‘impoverished inhabitants’, and spreads like a ‘cancer’ through England until its ‘mad pursuit of getting and spending’ finally covers ‘the great globe itself’ instigating ‘one of the great disasters for the human spirit’.16 These materialistic forces have also, Ackroyd maintains, structured London’s geographical development since Saxon times, through what he terms their topographical ‘imperatives’ (127, 401, 669). On a more vatic level, Ackroyd’s London is depicted as an apparently amoral creature with an ‘instinctive and almost primordial reaching towards money and trade’ (765). Its ‘paganism’ is repeatedly asserted, while the Square Mile is described as ‘possessed by the spirit of commerce’, and as ‘a city of Mammon, with precincts and labyrinths and temples devoted to that deity’.17 What is here imagined as London’s diabolical possession or devotion to a false god leads, in Ackroyd’s vision, to the city’s periodic visitation by ‘judgements’ in the form of fire, death and plague (24, 201), from which, however, as in the Blitz, the ‘gods and griffins of the City’ emerge unscathed (766, 744). Instead, the cost of London’s material success is borne by the poor – something which leads Ackroyd to frequent sentimental wringings of hands over London’s destitute before he offers an unctuous mini-sermon which could have been penned by Dickens’s Chadband: ‘If the city had a voice it might be saying: There will always be those who fail or who are unfortunate, just as there will always be those who cannot cope with the world as presently constituted, but I can encompass them all’ (767). Thus, although Ackroyd deplores the injustices which arise from London’s fallen state, he does not press for social reform. Instead,

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London: The Biography, like Ackroyd’s earlier Blake biography, takes inspiration from Blake’s visionary spirituality while suppressing his political radicalism, as in the following misappropriation of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘The most abject poverty or dereliction can appear beside glowing wealth and prosperity. Yet the city needs its poor. What if the poor must die, or be deprived, in order that the city might live? That would be the strangest contrast of all. […] “Without Contraries”, Blake once wrote, “is no progression”’ (772). Whereas Blake remarked caustically that ‘Pity would be no more, / If we did not make somebody poor’, Ackroyd’s quiescent acceptance that the providential ‘meaning’ (766) of London is inscrutable leads to an acquiescence in the supposed immutability and hence inevitability of recurrent social injustices.18 In keeping with Ackroyd’s Catholic faith, his grand narrative can accordingly be read an as yet uncompleted Heilsgeschichte, in which the only hope of ‘deliverance’ (143), and thus of transformative change in this metropolis of eternal recurrence, would be through apocalyptic intervention.19 Ackroyd’s conservative preoccupation with enduring ‘structure’ in London can also be related to Koselleck’s notion of the ontological ‘simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous’, of synchronically coexistent but developmentally asynchronous layers of time. Thus, Ackroyd’s London is not merely an archaeological and architectural ‘palimpsest’ but is also temporally multilayered (93, 685, 771, 665, 777–8). Ackroyd remarks that the ‘nature of time in London’ resembles a lava flow: ‘Sometimes it moves steadily forward, before springing or leaping out; sometimes it slows down and, on occasions, it drifts and begins to stop altogether’.20 He distinguishes accordingly among the varying durations of ‘sacred time’, ‘communal memory’ and ‘human memory’ (661). Of these, the most interesting are ‘sacred time’ and ‘communal memory’. Ackroyd suggests that the topographical imperatives which shape London can be attributed not merely to commerce but also to the continuing influence of prehistoric religions in sacred mounds and the ‘ley-lines’ inscribed by Celtic earth magic which allegedly continue to align and invoke the powers of significant sites (216, 308, 555, 697). These layers of ‘sacred time’ provide one explanation for a mystery to which Ackroyd’s narrative obsessively returns: Why do certain areas of the metropolis attract and preserve particular occupations, activities and energies?21 Another explanation, apparently drawn from the biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance (to which both Ackroyd and Sinclair refer), suggests a ‘persistent echoic effect’, evidenced not just in topographical features but also in the uniform size over centuries of the

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sites of London dwellings: ‘These houses emerge as a matter of instinct, therefore, deriving from some ancient imperative; it is as if they were similar to the cells that cluster in a human body’.22 Reinforcing this idea, Ackroyd speculates elsewhere that ‘the city itself creates the conditions of its own growth, that it somehow plays an active part in its own development like some complex organism slowly discovering its form’.23 His assumption appears to be that what he terms ‘territorial clusters’ or ‘a congregation of aligned forces’ evolve, which realise ‘a certain destiny or pattern of purpose among the streets of the capital’ (468–9). The transgenerational transmission of these ‘kinds of activity, or patterns of inheritance, arising from the streets and alleys themselves’ (465) presupposes what Ackroyd understands by a communal memory. Unlike Jan Assmann’s concept of ‘cultural memory’,24 which denotes conscious forms of commemoration, Ackroyd’s communal memory is unconscious and involuntary; he gives no indication of whether he believes that it is stored (as Sheldrake would suspect) in the collective memory of a species, which influences behavioural patterns within the morphic fields of social groups, or whether it is stored as temporal layers in the physical fabric of London’s architectural palimpsest. In Ackroyd’s impressionistic psychogeography, areas where a distinctive ‘atmosphere’ lingers over many generations are frequently portrayed as ‘packed to blackness with accumulations of suffered experience’.25 The suggestion is that these stored psychic energies exercise a paranormal or occult influence which leads to their being repeatedly acted out but never worked through. Ackroyd can thus remark of the Ripper murders that: ‘The fact that the killer was never captured seemed only to confirm the impression that the bloodshed was created by the foul streets themselves; that the East End was the true Ripper’ (678). The implications of this cryptic statement are developed in Ackroyd’s novel, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. Like all of Ackroyd’s fiction, Dan Leno is concerned with the afterlife of the past. On four occasions the air of London is imagined as a ‘vast library’ which preserves eternally all the sounds of the city.26 The metaphor implies that material reality is etherealised and textualised, but also that the archived ‘pages’ remain accessible and can thus be reactualised. This two-way traffic is central to Ackroyd’s novel both technically and thematically. On the technical level, it is the textualisation of material reality that predominates. Dan Leno plays variations on one of Ackroyd’s favourite themes: the Wildean paradox that life imitates art. Thus, De Quincey’s ironic interpretation of the ‘fine art’ of the Ratcliff Highway murders of 1811 leads Ackroyd’s murderer narrator in 1880 to repeat the

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earlier crimes, using De Quincey’s narrative as a script for the homicidal performance.27 At the same time, the unprecedented sexual mutilations which Ackroyd’s psychopath introduces as virtuoso improvisations can be viewed by the modern reader as a fictitious anticipation of the Ripper murders that would take place eight years later. Conversely, Ackroyd’s invention of John and Elizabeth Cree appears to have been inspired by the ‘discovery’ in 1992 of a forged diary purportedly written by James Maybrick, in which Maybrick, who (like Cree) was poisoned by his wife, claimed to be Jack the Ripper.28 The ingenuity of this analepsis and prolepsis reduces the phenomenon of copy-cat crimes to a metafictional game. Equally, Ackroyd’s characteristic blurring of the boundaries between historical fact and invention, and the sheer neatness with which the omniscient narrator engineers plot connections among the characters, puts intratextual verbal echoes into their unwitting mouths, and points out synchronicities of which they are unaware, foregrounds the artificiality of this narrative construct and tends to reduce history to discursive textuality.29 Ackroyd’s historiographical emphasis on structure and recurrent patterns thus finds a formalistic equivalent in the overdetermined plotting and intertextual echoing of his novels. The self-referentiality of this cerebral system contradicts Ackroyd’s visionary assertions elsewhere of the unmediated presence of the past. At the thematic level, Dan Leno is more concerned with what London: The Biography presents as ‘communal memory’, with how what is stored in the ‘atmosphere’ of particular places can assume physical form or exercise a causative influence on behaviour. At the symbolic heart of this London of cyclical repetitions stands the Limehouse Golem, which the narrator describes as ‘an emblem for the city’, representing ‘the horror of an artificial life and a form without spirit’ (88). We are dealing, therefore, as in London: The Biography, with an ambitious investigation into the ‘mysteries of London’ (121), which are treated as representative of the human condition. Two dominant interpretations of the golem circulate, corresponding to two different material forms which are conjured up by Londoners’ ‘desire for purgation or escape’ (121) from their oppressive but unchangeable suffering. Both versions, unhistorically, emanate from St Anne’s, Limehouse, familiar from Ackroyd’s earlier novel, Hawksmoor, as a point at which the power of several intersecting ley-lines accumulates. Golem A is Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a proto-computer which, following the ‘felicific calculus’ of Benthamite utilitarianism, was designed to furnish statistical evidence to help eliminate metropolitan poverty. Ackroyd gives his fictional counterpart of the real-world

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George Gissing the task of writing an article on this invention.30 Gissing was presumably selected for his concurrence with Ackroyd’s own ideological standpoint, as Gissing’s attempted redemption of the alcoholic prostitute, Nell Harrison, had disabused him of his naive faith in social amelioration. Echoing Romantic scepticism towards ‘Our meddling intellect’, the fictional Gissing’s verdict on Babbage’s venture is that ‘To be informed by statistical evidence was neither to know nor to understand’; ‘He no more believed in progress than he believed in science, and […] knew enough of London to realise that its condition was irredeemable’.31 He accordingly speculates that the Analytical Engine is perhaps ‘the true Limehouse Golem, draining away the life and spirit of those who approached it. Perhaps the digits and the numbers were little chattering souls trapped in the mechanism, and its webs of iron no less than the web of mortality itself. What monstrous creation might it bring forth in years to come? What had begun in Limehouse might then spread over the entire world’ (147). (This nightmare anticipates the vision in London: The Biography of the global proliferation of the cancer of materialism.) That this Romantic anti-rationalism is underwritten by the implied author is indicated by the narrator’s facile denigration in similar terms of Charles Booth’s path-breaking Life and Labour of the People of London: ‘This was the statistical grid about to be stretched across London’ (137–8), an image which recalls the Net in which Blake’s Urizen traps not only himself but all mankind. All is not lost, however, for although number crunching won’t solve London’s social problems, relief is at hand in the music-hall performances and songs of Ackroyd’s Cockney visionary, Dan Leno.32 A schematic antithesis between Babbage and Leno recalls Dickens’s equally schematic opposition in Hard Times between Gradgrind’s utilitarianism and the consolatory amusements of Sleary’s circus. The music hall, with its stage poised symbolically between ‘the gods’ and ‘the pit’, is depicted as a ‘cathedral of light’ with the capacity to ‘assuage’ the ‘misery’ of life; ventriloquising the views of his Catholic creator, Leno himself intuits ‘a connection between Rome and the pantomime’.33 Gissing is vouchsafed a transcendent vision of the women in a manufactory singing a Dan Leno melody as they shoulder pots of an acrid liquid; thus transfigured, their soulless factory comes to resemble Burne-Jones’s contemporaneous The Golden Stairs (1866–80). The narrator comments that: ‘They might have been proceeding up and down the staircase for eternity’ (245). Ideologically, therefore, like London: The Biography, Dan Leno eschews social critique in favour of a conservative vision of eternal recurrence; in contrast to the Frankfurt School, Ackroyd envisages a positive role for

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mass culture in enabling the oppressed to endure what, in his view, cannot be changed. Golem B is connected to sacred time and communal memory. In London: The Biography Ackroyd suggests that ‘the bloodshed was created by the foul streets themselves; that the East End was the true Ripper’ (678). I remarked earlier on the environmental determinism which informed Victorian interpretations of the Ripper murders. This was given a radical cast in Justice, the organ of the Social Democratic Foundation, which commented that: ‘Whoever may be the wretch who committed these sanguinary outrages, the real criminal is the vicious bourgeois system which, based on class injustice, condemns thousands to poverty, vice and crime, manufactures criminals, and then punishes them!’34 Similar notions are voiced in Dan Leno by some religious leaders, who suggest that London itself is somehow responsible for the evil (162), and by Ackroyd’s fictionalised Karl Marx, who sees the Limehouse murders as a symptom of conditions in the East End. But this socioeconomic aspect is played down in the authorial narrator’s treatment of the xenophobic hysteria, moral panic and subsequent reforms which attend the Limehouse killings, like the Ripper murders (6–7, 128, 216–18, 267–8). Instead, Ackroyd highlights the occult aspects of the crimes. Anticipating the social psychology of othering and abjection, Ackroyd’s Marx comments that ‘The Jew and the whore are the scapegoats in the desert of London, and they must be ritually butchered to appease some terrible god’ (92–3; cf. 59–60). His interpretation is uncannily apposite, although in a manner he could not have foreseen, for the murderer is inspired by a religious mania in which s/he variously becomes the ‘messenger’ of an apocalyptic transformation and deluded ‘redeemer’ of the victims whose ‘spirit’ s/he releases (85, 126, 86). If Elizabeth Cree, the self-proclaimed ‘scourge of God’, is the murderer, then several killings appear plausibly motivated by the abhorrence of sexuality and the vengeful aggression arising from her conflicted relationship with her mother, a fallen woman turned tormented Methodist (266, 272–3).35 But the killings of the Gerrard family, emulating the Ratcliff Highway murders of the Marrs, require a different explanation. The first-person murderer/narrator comments: ‘They were about to become patterns of eternity, and in their own wounds reflect the inflictions of recurrent time. To die on the same spot as the famous Marrs – and to die in the same fashion – why, it is a great testimony to the power of the city over men’ (160). The assertion recalls the fictional Gissing’s comment that in De Quincey’s narrative: ‘London becomes a brooding presence behind, or perhaps even within, the murders themselves; it is as if John Williams had in fact become an

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avenging angel of the city’ (38); in both instances the narratorial distance between character and implied author disappears. By locating the epicentre of the killings at St Anne’s, Limehouse, the site of archaic ritual sacrifices in his earlier novel, Hawksmoor, Ackroyd implies that communal memory may have transmitted some atavistic impulse from the past. His emphasis on morphic resonance and the recurrent acting out of unconsciously inherited violence is one that Sinclair shares. Where they differ is that Ackroyd believes that ‘redemption’ from these otherwise immutable structural patterns of cyclical repetition may only be achieved through divine intervention. By contrast, in his early work Sinclair suggested that through shamanistic ritual it might be possible to ‘appease’ the ‘pains of the past’ and thus heal the communal trauma. More recently, however, it appears that this hope of positive transformation has given way to a more pessimistic resignation about the fate of the East End.

Autoptic rites and shamanism: Sinclair’s East End The starting point for Ackroyd’s and Sinclair’s mythography of the East End was, as is well known, Sinclair’s Lud Heat (1975).36 Sinclair’s occult speculations depict Hawksmoor’s East London churches, Christ Church, Spitalfields, St George-in-the-East and St Anne’s, Limehouse as forming a triangle of ‘centres of power for those territories’, ‘with an unacknowledged influence over events created within the shadow-lines of their towers’. Hawksmoor is held to have ‘coded’ into the buildings ‘knowingly or unknowingly, templates of meaning’, involving sacrificial practices reaching back to Egyptian antiquity. Their ‘unacknowledged magnetism and control power’ are supposed to have generated the Ratcliff Highway murders of 1811 and the ‘ritual slaying’ of Marie Jeanette Kelly and other Ripper victims in ‘The whole karmic programme of Whitechapel in 1888’. This macabre fantasy recalls the speculative mythography of some modernist writers: Yeats’s A Vision, Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent and the Mediterranean mystery religions and ‘factive personalities’ of Pound’s Cantos. As they did, Sinclair risks aestheticising and legitimising violence by treating it as part of a supposedly archetypal pattern. This danger is apparent in his bizarre description of the Ratcliff Highway murderer’s brutal infanticide as ‘pre-sculptural image-making’ and his inclusion within this pattern of the Krays’ gangland murders.37 Sinclair’s early obsessions with disturbing material distinguish him from Ackroyd’s postmodernist game-playing. His thesis is that St Anne’s, Limehouse should be interpreted as an Egyptian ‘Mortuary Temple’ at

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which ‘autoptic’ rites of ‘purification’ take place (28–34). Providing selfconfirming evidence of the continuing afterlife of this phenomenon, he links sculptures by his then protégé, Brian Catling, with the ‘autoptic’ in a film by Stan Brakhage (54–9). The autopsies recorded in Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971) convey, Sinclair asserts, the survival in corrupted form of ‘those Egyptian autoptic rites that set free the Soul Bird’. By bearing witness to such ‘secret rites’ Brakhage is held to risk ‘soul theft’; viewing his film is also an ordeal for ‘the uninitiated eye’, at which wimpish RCA students baulk. The text accordingly positions Sinclair as deliberately courting psychological extremity. He finds a kindred spirit in Catling, whose ‘autoptic’, archaic sculptures are first represented – in a pastiche of early Wyndham Lewis and of Pound’s essays on Gaudier-Brzeska – as Vorticist ‘power objects’ in which ‘muted sadism’ is ‘unrepressed’ (78, 82, 81). Sinclair’s essay, portentously titled ‘From Camberwell to Golgotha’, culminates by splicing Catling’s account of what is aggrandisingly termed his ‘expedition’ (82) to St Anne’s, Limehouse with commentary on Catling’s large installations. Aware of being guided by self-fulfilling Gothic expectations, and in a mixture of self-parody and self-dramatisation, Catling describes himself, as if in a scene from Polanski’s Dance of the Vampires, as ‘stumbling among ultimate hazard’, in a place ‘like the pyramids’ (83, 86). Sinclair’s commentary, by contrast, betrays no trace of irony in its unself-conscious reversion to the modernist discourse of primitivism: ‘The sculptor, at this level, is shaman’; Catling’s objects, ‘in hieratic priest language’, ‘made for voyages beyond the rim of reason’, have a ‘tribal vitality’ (83–4). Catling’s sculptures were presumably influenced by Joseph Beuys’s contemporaneous ventures into sculptural shamanism, which had lent the concept an avant-garde cachet. But what Sinclair understood by shamanism was altogether darker: ‘The sculptor opens himself, through the shrine that he has made, to divine or demonic possession … it is as risky as that … in the way that the church body (Winchester or Limehouse) is opened … the need is sexual … consummation leading to madness’ (86–7).38 This disturbing version of East London shamanism leads to the restaging of the late Victorian Romantic Agony and the Gothic pathologisation of Spitalfields in Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), which, like Lud Heat, depicts Sinclair’s and Catling’s activities in the early 1970s. I will highlight three strands in this roman à clef: historical detective work, a theory of textual ‘coding’, and the issue of how to live with the past. In the first, the narrator (alias ‘Sinclair’/‘the Late Watson’) and Catling/Joblard speculate on the Ripper murders. This results in a historical

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fantasy about Sir William Gull (whom Stephen Knight had identified as the Ripper) and James Hinton.39 In Sinclair’s version Hinton’s abhorrence of sexual repression and of the sexual double standard leads him to advocate the ‘sacrifice’ of willing prostitute victims, as a means of extirpating prostitution and dualistic constructions of women. Departing from Knight’s conspiracy theories, Sinclair depicts Gull not as carrying out a Masonic-Royalist cover-up of Prince Eddy, but instead as the implementer of Hinton’s sadomasochistic fantasies and religious mania. What is involved in Sinclair’s supposed reconstruction but perhaps merely construction of late Victorian Whitechapel can be elucidated by Koselleck’s philosophy of time (cf. Ch. 1, 6–7). I shall argue that the late Victorian London of Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings corresponds to Koselleck’s notion of a present past, that is, the imagined pre-existence in a previous era of what we now take to have been the nature of that past. This present past is projected back in time, in order to masquerade as the past present of the late Victorian era, that is, how Victorians at the time experienced their society. Given its prurient emphasis on sexuality, the present past of Sinclair’s Victorian London seems influenced by the historiography of the later 1960s and early 1970s, notably Stephen Marcus and Ronald Pearsall, on the double lives of the ‘Other Victorians’. The second strand of White Chappell resembles the assertion in Lud Heat that Hawksmoor ‘coded’ occult meanings into his churches. In both works Sinclair depicts the late Victorian period – ‘the ninth gyre’, ‘the time of the Ghost Dance. Mahdi. Messianic spasms’ – as charged with a psychical energy which through ‘morphic resonance’ found unconscious literary expression.40 This has two implications: first, ‘The writers were mediums; they articulated, they gave a shape to some pattern of energy that was already present’; second, that Doyle, Stevenson and Rimbaud not only prophetically ‘encoded’ the events of ‘the Whitechapel millennial sacrifice’ but ‘by describing, caused them. They were said. They had to be’.41 Thus, ‘the presences that they created’, ‘like Rabbi Loew’s Golem’, ‘got out into the stream of time, the ether’ (117). ‘Sinclair’ persuades himself of the validity of this theory by eliciting ‘a sort of planchette message’ from Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet and Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations.42 A further late Victorian Golem is conjured up in the London Hospital Medical College Museum by viewing the skeleton and cast of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, who is fantasised to be the occult creation of Sir Frederick Treves (97–8). It is suggested that the Jekyll-like Treves hopes to absorb an animal vitality from this Golemdouble; ironically, however, it appears that Treves, who draws voyeuristic pleasure from subjecting Merrick to an undesired sexual initiation,

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himself brutalises the innocent creature to whom, like Frankenstein, he had given life (140–2). In the narrator’s historical fantasy the energies that are released through Treves’s desire to reclaim his ‘aboriginal’ nature correspond to Rimbaud’s and Verlaine’s ‘occult’ and ‘inhuman sex heat coupling, “total derangement”’, in which ‘the will of Rimbaud and the compliant sacrifice of Verlaine’ result in Verlaine’s elimination (141, 119–20). The narrative thus derives from but also projects onto the late Victorian era a constellation of sadomasochistic acts of physical and/or ethical violation, climaxing in the literal or figurative sacrifice of the weaker, supposedly compliant partner. The issues posed by their projection onto present-day Spitalfields form the third strand in my discussion. The imaginative power of White Chappell derives from the claustrophobic pressure generated by its narrowly restricted topography, which is heightened by the compressed density of Sinclair’s prose poetry and the self-reflexive mirroring of its metaphorical patterns. Labyrinthine streets, described as ‘the heated intestine of the city’ (52; cf. 13), butchered animals past and present, whose inner organs are devoured by several characters, the entrails of the Ripper’s eviscerated victims: the repetition of these associative correspondences conveys what Sinclair, like Ackroyd, would regard as the ‘morphic resonance’ of the fleshmarkets of Spitalfields, including the modern sex trade of pub strippers and prostitution. It is a highly selective vision. Whereas, a year later, the fate of the alleged ‘Granny Ripper’ in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses would highlight the continuity of racist scapegoating in Spitalfields, the continuities which Sinclair’s novel projects onto Spitalfields are those between late Victorian Gothic and his own literary preoccupation with sexuality and psychological doubling. The notion of morphic resonance, with its corollary of a collective memory, enables Sinclair to postulate a kind of collective post-traumatic stress disorder; White Chappell arose, he has stated, from the desire to ‘appease’ the ‘pains of the past’ which dominate ‘the Whitechapel ghetto’.43 The auditory hallucinations which he experienced in the period depicted by the novel could be taken as intrusive psychic flashbacks in the traumatic memory of the area.44 ‘Sinclair’ claims accordingly that Whitechapel ‘holds the memory of what it was’, ‘it’s all there in the breath of the stones’, so that you can ‘walk back into the previous, as an event’ (53, 102; cf. 23). But there is something presumptuous in the notion, taken over from the ‘autoptic rites’ of Lud Heat, that by opening oneself ‘to divine or demonic possession’ (87) shamanistic healing of this communal trauma and of a postulated repetition compulsion might be possible.

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‘Sinclair’ speculates that through their investigations of the Ripper murders the two protagonists become mediums through whom, a century after the crimes, another ‘cycle’ or ‘pattern of sacrifice’ might be re-enacted, so that they ‘become performers in the same blind ritual’, in an ‘exchange of wills’ between Gull and Joblard (48, 45). In a statement foreshadowing Joblard’s occult identification with his predecessor, ‘Sinclair’ opines that Gull was a ‘victim’ who ‘could not escape the acts he had to perform’ (103). This convenient rationalisation disavows responsibility for one’s actions by postulating the deterministic influence on the self of an irresistible outside force or spiritualist control. What can emerge when the self is allowed to become a channel for such archaic impulses is exemplified when, in a thoughtless verbal assault, Joblard terrifies Hymie Beaker, a former concentration-camp inmate, by posing as a Nazi (43). After he and Sinclair have tried unavailingly to ‘repair the psychic wound’, they discover that Beaker has been savagely beaten by an assailant whose identikit portrait is a composite of ‘Sinclair’ and Joblard (87). The physical attackers were, Sinclair later commented, probably National Front racists, but his conjecture is that this destructive energy had been released in the earlier incident in the form of a Golem or tulpa-like ‘third being of some terrible malignancy’ which perpetrated the violence (WCST, 87; Verbals, 71–2, 76). The episode invites comparison with a story which the narrator hears of a British army officer traumatised by entering Belsen, whose quest to comprehend what he has witnessed ends in his psychotic identification with the Nazis. In a powerful image, he is described as ‘At the mercy of his voices. An unborn head forcing his teeth apart’ (96). His auditory hallucinations, which involuntarily articulate what had gestated in his unconscious or in a Jungian collective unconscious, result in a schizophrenic splitting which far exceeds what was acted out by Joblard’s alter ego in his Nazi charade. Uncanny doublings link ‘Sinclair’ and Joblard with the figures in their seductive imaginings or occult memories of the nineteenth century. In the novel’s present past, the narratorial focalisation of Hinton’s nightmarish experience of ‘Hell’s hinges; Whitechapel’s henges’ is echoed in ‘Sinclair’s’ vision of an old woman brutalised by Treves’s coachman in a sadistic knee-trembler (73, 142). The narratorial distance between ‘Sinclair’ and Hinton is elided by their linguistic assimilation: Hinton’s ‘henges’ (the heart, liver and lungs of an animal) blend into the narrator’s visceral image patterns, just as Hinton’s sense of ‘so many pains to be borne’ in Whitechapel is echoed in the narrator’s ‘pain memories’ (73, 93). This conscious or unconscious identification implies an

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unsettling affinity between Hinton’s religious-mania-induced selfimage as the self-sacrificial ‘Saviour of women’, Gull’s supposedly redemptive acts, and the ostensible self-sacrificial shamanism of their modern successors. Comparable identifications take place in the Nazrul restaurant where ‘Sinclair’, Joblard and a hired stripper set out to re-enact what, in their imagination, was a traumatic episode in Merrick’s life. The declared aim is shamanistic: ‘Unless we can exactly repeat the past, we will never make it repent; it will escape us. Nothing is exorcised’ (139). But whereas an autoptic rite would be intended, in Sinclair’s words, to ‘set free the Soul Bird’, the restaurant ritual does not appear to bring peace to the traumatised Merrick. Instead, the Merrick of their present past serves as the occasion for a psychodrama in which Joblard ‘sacrifices himself, leaves himself: the man who emerges from that room is a different man, with larval energies to unleash’ (142). Instead of an exorcism or what is later termed an ‘erasure’ (183), it seems that what is uncannily re-enacted in the ganja-fuelled physical and psychical mergings of the three participants and of present and present past is Treves’s pursuit of his ‘aboriginal’ nature and Rimbaud’s and Verlaine’s ‘total derangement’. What is reality and what fantasy? What from the occult perspective are Gothic hauntings in which London’s past is ontologically present could also be viewed as an attempt to emulate the late Victorian Romantic Agony, or as psychotic hallucinations in which an intrapsychical splitting has led to the apparently external manifestation of dissociated aspects of the self. As earlier, in the self-confirming occult theories of Lud Heat, we are dealing in White Chappell with a hermeneutic circle: Sinclair has selected nineteenth-century figures who correspond to his preconceived interpretation of the late Victorian era; the attitudes which he projects onto those figures, or the occult voices which he hears, uncannily confirm what he expected to find.45 Thus, unless one accepts Sinclair’s occult premises, White Chappell is not about the afterlife of the past but rather about the projection back in time of a present past.

Gothic branding Sinclair’s Gothic reanimation of Spitalfields soon took on a life of its own: in an uncanny repetition of Sinclair’s claim that the writings of Stevenson, Doyle and Rimbaud had released a late Victorian Whitechapel Golem, his own early writings released a late twentiethcentury Golem. The outgrowth of Lud Heat and White Chappell into Ackroyd’s bestselling London historical pastiches created a market for

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Sinclair’s work; Lights Out for the Territory (1997) marked his commercial breakthrough, leading in turn to the media hyping of psychogeography and its unlikely promotion by Will Self and others. While Sinclair has cast up his hands in horror at the antics of this Golem – ‘There’s this awful sense that you’ve created a monster’ – he has also played up to his ‘brand image as the London psychogeographer’, to the point of becoming what he wrily terms ‘a hack on my own mythology’.46 The capitalist exploitation of his and Ackroyd’s Gothicised East End is also apparent in the aestheticisation of history by the Spitalfields heritage industry. In the early 1970s, the period depicted in White Chappell, Spitalfields was in decline; the novel depicts ‘Unredeemed’ streets ‘doomed’ to be razed (42). By contrast, when White Chappell was published in 1987, it was moving up market, as the Spitalfields Trust’s conservation of condemned Huguenot dwellings generated a property boom which priced the conservationists themselves out of the area. The New Georgian Handbook of 1985 celebrated the contrast between refurbished and reEnglished Georgian interiors and the local colour added by the ‘socially crunchy’ streets outside; Holden Matthews’s lifestyle magazine, Inside Islington, launched in 1986, used the retro aura of black-and-white photography to advertise a property marketed as having a picturesque history ‘as a brothel and clothes factory’.47 Sinclair’s works accordingly became caught up in what he has described as ‘the reimagining of the area that the developers […] of the Eighties would enforce – the need to ground their presumptuous brochures in a neverworld of Huguenots, dancing Hasids, and blandly sinister Masonic serial killers’.48 The final phrase indicates Sinclair’s wish to distance from a trend he has decisively influenced, including Alan Moore’s and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell (which relies in its depiction of Gull on ‘a kind of speculative seance-divination’) and its Hollywood adaptation, and daily Jack the Ripper walks for tourists.49 His moral ambivalence towards his ripping yarns has been voiced from the outset: White Chappell not only reprints Douglas Oliver’s letter questioning Suicide Bridge’s ‘sucking-in towards evil’ but also includes Joblard’s critique of ‘seedy and salacious’ Ripperologists ‘trekking over the tainted ground in quest of some longdelayed occult frisson’ (149, 47). Similarly, the Ripper speculations in Downriver (1991) are accompanied by the narrator’s voyeuristic confrontation with John Millom (that is, John Morrison), a chilling double whose obsession with the Ripper’s final victim degenerates into actual necrophilia. Millom’s séance transcription, ‘The Prima Donna’s Tale’, ‘must never be published’, the narrator decides, only to publish

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it anyway, ‘pressganging [Millom] (as a prime freak) into my book of tales’.50 Sinclair’s co-optation as a purveyor of cultural capital by the market forces he opposes has also involved the mythography of David Rodinsky. Rodinsky’s disappearance belatedly attained media prominence in 1987 in a lead article in the LRB by Patrick Wright, which led to a proposed BBC collaboration between Wright and Sinclair on Spitalfields as a ‘zone of “disappearances”’ (Downriver, 117). In Downriver Sinclair comments on Rodinsky’s resurrection as a ‘selling point’ ‘in the occult fabulation of the zone that the estate agents demanded to justify a vertiginous increase in property values’ but himself provides just such ‘occult fabulation’ in two Gothic narratives set in the Princelet Street Synagogue, where Rodinsky had lived.51 In retrospective self-commentary Sinclair is scathing about this act of literary appropriation: ‘as much the vampire, I was hot to audition the Vanishing Jew for the cast of my novel Downriver’, ‘Picking through the unsorted detritus of a lost life, it was too easy to summon the phantoms of the English Gothic’ (Rodinsky’s Room, 67, 258). The Sinclair paradigm would soon be applied by a host of New Georgians and film crews, eager to realise their own projections of this Spitalfields Golem.

Nostalgia and melancholia Recent developments in Tower Hamlets invite some concluding distinctions between Ackroyd’s increasingly complacent celebrations of England’s and London’s heritage and Sinclair’s increasingly melancholy cultural interventions. The nostalgic longing of tourists and incoming residents for historical continuity and a restored collective memory or invented tradition is catered for in Dennis Severs’s House, where tableaux vivants create a simulacrum of a middle-class Spitalfields household between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries (with an incongruous cross-class element in its aestheticised weavers’ garret). Appropriately, Ackroyd wrote the introduction to Severs’s book about the house, for Severs’s guiding illusion that the past can be made physically accessible today in unmediated form is in keeping with Ackroyd’s historical pastiches and the essentialism of his visionary historiography.52 By contrast, Sinclair expresses his disorientation as a resident at the unsettling transformation of the environment in which, although always an outsider, he feels ever less at home. From the late 1960s to the 1980s Sinclair belonged to a marginal middle-class avant-garde in

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a working-class borough, observing as a detached flâneur the white indigenous population (whom he frequently sensationalises as semicriminal proles) and overlooking non-white migrants. His increasingly favoured cultural identification is with the disappearing Jewish community of Tower Hamlets and Hackney, onto whom he projects his own alienation, in belated concern with Jewish history, after the minor presence in White Chappell of Hymie Beaker. In contrasting Severs’s historical fabrication with the impassive, incommunicative exterior of the Princelet Street Synagogue (Rodinsky’s Room, 5–11), Sinclair implies that despite the attempts of various interest groups to co-opt Rodinsky, the appropriate response to his disappearance would be a silent act of witness to the death of the Whitechapel ghetto which his deserted room can be regarded as symbolising. Apart from his memorialisation of Rodinsky, the revenants in Sinclair’s Gothic East London of the 1990s included casualties of colonialism and victims of the Ripper and the Princess Alice disaster. But the main loss commemorated in Downriver and Lights Out for the Territory was the traumatic erasure of the working-class past of Tower Hamlets and its replacement by a sanitised, postmodern simulacrum of that heritage in the retro chic of Bow Quarter (which revamped the Bryant and May match factory, scene of the landmark strike of 1888) and by the ‘riverside opportunities’ of Wapping and the Isle of Dogs. What survive elsewhere are sites of entropic dilapidation, counterbalanced only by Downriver’s fantasy of shamanistic redemption from the power of Margaret Thatcher, the undead ‘Widow’, and from pervasive surveillance by the CCTV of government and the City. Roger Luckhurst has interpreted contemporary London Gothic as articulating the sense of political disempowerment caused by the collapse of metropolitan governance in the 1980s, in a reprise of the fear in early Gothic of a reversion to arbitrary and oppressive rule.53 Disempowerment in the face of the market forces that have remodelled large swathes of the East End since the foundation of the London Docklands Development Corporation in 1981 certainly did not lessen under New Labour. In this respect, although Sinclair’s political stance differs from Ackroyd’s conservative vision of a timeless London of eternal recurrence and equanimity towards the new Docklands (London, 764–7), Sinclair’s pathologisation of East London and the reduction of agency in his paranoiac dystopia to occult guerrilla forays holds out little hope for the future of the inner city. Not surprisingly, perhaps, his recent geomantic trails have led him ever further away from Hackney (although Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire (2009) unexpectedly returns

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to the borough, it constitutes a self-regarding elegy for the alternative culture of Sinclair and his clique, who have since moved elsewhere). His disaffected resignation in the face of what is emerging in his psychogeographic stamping ground, like his Gothic memorialisation of its past, can thus be interpreted as a residual structure of feeling comparable with that of some other long-standing local inhabitants, whom decades of traumatic change have left with a melancholy sense of dispossession.

7 After the Event

How individuals and societies cope with the aftermath of events which they experienced as traumatic has attracted ever-increasing academic and media attention in ‘Western society’s ongoing obsession with catastrophe, victimization, and memorialization’.1 Within trauma theory it has become commonplace to emphasise the temporal structure of post-traumatic psychopathology: ‘the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly’.2 The sudden irruption of an unanticipatable, threatening situation necessarily finds the individual unprepared, inducing fear, helplessness and bewilderment. Immediate defence mechanisms may include dissociative symptoms such as numbing, detachment, derealisation or depersonalisation. Subsequently, dissociation or repression may lead to amnesia and/or conversion disorders (such as psychogenic paralyses and anaesthesia), or, conversely, to intrusive memories.3 In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) Freud attributed traumatic neurosis to an extensive breach in the mind’s protective shield against stimuli; hence, dreams in which the traumatic situation is compulsively repeated attempt ‘to master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis’, thus permitting it to be grasped affectively and cognitively.4 More recently, neurobiology maintains that the inability to integrate frightening, extraordinary experience into existing mental frameworks or to organise it linguistically means that it is dissociated from conscious awareness and later re-emerges intrusively as fragmented somatic sensations, behavioural re-enactments, nightmares and flashbacks, in which the traumatised person returns to the memory in order to complete it, spontaneously attempting to assimilate these enigmatic scraps. There is thus a time-lag between the overwhelming event and its belated transformation into a narrative which can be located within the person’s life history.5 170

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The belatedness (Nachträglichkeit) with which the subjective import of repressed traumatic events is finally realised shapes the lives of the main characters in Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. Understanding after the event is, however, also a problem which their authors and narrators must confront. Born in 1943 and 1944 respectively, Barker and Sebald were too young to participate in either world war; but they experienced the impact of their traumatic aftermath on their families and, in Sebald’s case, in the silence of rural Bavaria about the war, culminating in his alienation and self-imposed distancing from Germany. Their belatedness is also literary and cultural, forcing them to position their own present pasts in the context of the established mythography of the Great War and the Holocaust. Thus, in their anachronistic texts the temporal structure of trauma is combined with the cognitive structure of historical understanding, which with hindsight can attribute to events a significance of which agents at the time were necessarily unconscious (cf. Ch. 1, 22–4).

Regen(d)eration She tried to get Geordie to frame his war experience in terms of late-twentieth-century preoccupations. Gender. Definitions of masculinity. Homoeroticism. Homo-what? asked Geordie.6 Barker grew up with two veterans of the Great War: her taciturn grandfather, scarred outwardly and inwardly by a prominent bayonet wound, and her stepfather, afflicted by a ‘paralytic stammer’, whose violence may have partly resulted from trauma and was exacerbated by his inability to articulate his emotions: ‘So the idea of war, wounds, impeded communication, and silence [...] became entwined in my mind with masculinity’.7 Her early association of ‘the domestic scene and the war in the background’ was further reinforced by witnessing uncharacteristic outbursts of rage by her uncle, who had returned with damaged nerves from fighting the Japanese.8 Thus the symptoms of what is now labelled post-traumatic stress disorder perpetuated the war for veterans and brought it home to their families. Breaking the men’s own powerful silence, Barker’s trilogy links the Home Front with the Western Front and explores the connections ‘between public violence and private violence’.9 Its thematic foci had, however, not only autobiographical origins but were also shaped by emergent historiographical concerns of the later 1980s. Current interest in the psychiatric disorders of the Great War dates back to the 1970s but underwent a decisive turn from the mid-1980s

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with the foregrounding of gender analysis in Elaine Showalter’s ‘Male Hysteria: W.H.R. Rivers and the Lessons of Shell Shock’, itself influenced by Eric Leed’s No Man’s Land (1979).10 Leed interpreted war neurosis as a psychic effect of industrialised warfare: ‘The dominance of long-ranged artillery, the machinegun, and barbed wire had immobilized combat, and immobility necessitated a passive stance of the soldier before the forces of mechanized slaughter. [...] the neuroses of war were the direct product of the increasingly alienated relationship of the combatant to the modes of destruction’.11 Showalter’s crucial step was to interpret neurotic responses to this enforced passivity in gender terms: shell shock ‘was the body language of masculine complaint, a disguised male protest not only against the war but against the concept of “manliness” itself’.12 Barker projects this modern interpretation into the present past of her trilogy, so that Rivers anticipates, or rather anachronistically echoes, Showalter almost verbatim: ‘The war that had promised so much in the way of “manly” activity had actually delivered “feminine” passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had scarcely known. No wonder they broke down’.13 The Eye in the Door’s plot and thematic emphasis on dissociation appear inspired by Showalter’s comments that ‘the longterm repression of signs of fear that led to shell shock in war was only an exaggeration of the male sex-role expectations, the self-control and emotional disguise of civilian life’ and that ‘all signs of physical fear were judged as weakness and [...] alternatives to combat – pacifism, conscientious objection, desertion, even suicide – were viewed as unmanly’.14 Barker’s anachronistic procedures can be exemplified by Anderson’s account to Rivers of his dream and their competing interpretations of it (R, 28–32). The episode derives from Rivers’s own narrative of an RAMC Captain’s dream, in which, giving a jingoistic address at the Golders Green Empire (‘“We must continue the struggle to the last man. Better let us die than lose our manhood and independence”’), he confronts in the audience his ‘dream-surrogate’, who alternately applauds and groans in agony.15 The Captain’s father-in-law brandishes at this alter ego a stick with a snake and threatens him with a ‘straight-waistcoat’, which is a lady’s corset. Rivers interpreted the snake as ‘a symbol of Medicine’, with which the wife’s people were threatening the Captain; the equation of the corset with a straitjacket reflected the patient’s ambivalent feelings of love and antagonism towards his wife. Barker’s rewriting sexualises this source material by inventing Anderson’s nakedness and his Freudian associations of the corset which replaces his discarded uniform with emasculation, and the snake with phallic symbols. In 1916 the fantasies of traumatised soldiers had been similarly interpreted by David

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Eder.16 Barker has Rivers dismiss Anderson’s self-interpretation, just as the historical Rivers rejected what he took to be Freud’s sexualisation of the unconscious (although in The Ghost Road Rivers links war hysteria with effeminacy: to treat Moffet’s psychogenic paralysis, he shames him by drawing stocking tops on his legs).17 But, through Anderson, she retrospectively reinterprets what the historical Captain associated with ‘lose our manhood’, thus inviting modern readers to locate war neurosis within Showalter’s gendered analytical framework. This fictionalisation of current paradigms is popular with literary academics: ‘Barker defamiliarizes some of the effects of war in order to illuminate a neglected facet of war neuroses: sexual anxiety’.18 By contrast, Barker’s tetchiest critic is the military historian Ben Shephard, who champions an immanent approach to the past present (cf. Ch. 1, 21–4): the fiction-writer, he rightly argues, ‘must re-create the past in its own terms as well as her own’, whereas ‘whenever Barker steps off firm historical ground’ she succumbs to naive presentism.19 How could Prior have read Freud in 1917, ‘when only Bloomsbury intellectuals were aware of psychoanalysis’? The odds of a working-class officer reading Freud or Rivers in 1917 are indeed low. But to categorically dismiss the possibility betrays exactly the class-based prejudices that Barker seeks to destabilise. (Although by reworking the over-familiar story of Sassoon and Owen at their officers’ hospital, Barker passed over the working-class majority of casualties, whose public invisibility and relative inarticulacy have left the discriminatory treatment of other ranks largely unrecorded.) Shephard’s overbearingly positivistic attitude (evident also in his A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century (2000)) and hostility to feminism, poststructuralist theory and cultural history underplay the scope for revisionist reinterpretation, for each generation inevitably projects a present past informed by its own concerns. From this perspective, Barker’s trilogy can be regarded as a temporal ‘contact zone’ in which Prior exists as a chronologically in-between creature (cf. Ch. 2, 51). His disruptive force lies in his knowing, subaltern antagonism to dominant ideologies of gender and class; by inserting him anachronistically as a foreign body into military and metropolitan milieux in 1917–18, Barker imagines a precedent for today’s identity politics. Barker’s historical belatedness forced her to engage intertextually with what Samuel Hynes has termed the ‘Myth of the War’: ‘a generation of innocent young men, their heads full of high abstractions like Honour, Glory, and England [...] were slaughtered in stupid battles planned by stupid generals. Those who survived were shocked, disillusioned and embittered by their war experiences, and saw that their real enemies were not

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the Germans, but the old men at home who had lied to them’.20 She does so in part by introducing a complementary female viewpoint familiar to historians.21 Thus, although the Regeneration trilogy is predominantly concerned with how men negotiate the expectation that they fight for their country, Barker emphasises throughout the reciprocal interaction between constructions of masculinity and femininity. Her representations of the Home Front highlight the contradictions in women’s roles in relation to men and in men’s images of them. Almost all the female characters are working-class; in several ways the war improves their subordinate situation. In the absence of their husbands, domestic violence ceases. Women’s employment opportunities expand, stereotypically in munitions work, a high-wage, high-risk alternative to domestic service; this leads Mr Prior, a chauvinistic socialist, to complain that male pay differentials are being diluted. In her dogged pursuit of genteel respectability, Ada Lumb resorts to several makeshift, often ethically dubious strategies. Disillusioned about romance, she cynically peddles worthless abortifacients and cures for the clap, counsels Sarah to trade sex only for a marriage certificate and prospective widow’s pension, and dabbles in war profiteering by charging soldiers exorbitant prices for refreshments. Sarah’s work in the munitions factory means that she supplies the explosives which prolong the killing on both sides; the soldiers fight on her behalf, as a non-combatant; because of them, she is well-paid; but, like them, she also ruins her health in the war effort and is reduced with her colleagues to ‘machines, whose sole function was to make other machines’ (R, 201). Prior’s adherence to the obsolescent separate spheres ideology leads him to idealise Sarah as an innocent moral ‘haven’ (R, 216); however, as a civilian, she initially arouses his envy, contempt and aggression: ‘They owed him something, all of them, and she should pay’ (R, 128). Intertextually, Barker’s female characters respond to the war poets’ sometimes misogynistic resentment towards women as co-instigators and beneficiaries of militarism, who ‘love us when we’re heroes’, ‘make us shells’ and ‘mourn our laurelled memories when we’re killed’.22 In Goodbye to All That, after narrating how severe injuries led in 1916 to erroneous reports of his death, Graves reprints (or fabricates?) a ‘typical document of this time’ to ‘show what we were facing’: ‘A Little Mother’ appeals to the ‘sacred trust of motherhood’ through which ‘We women pass on the human ammunition of “only sons” to fill up the gaps’ (caused by the heavy casualties at the Somme), as ‘Women are created for the purpose of giving life, and men to take it’.23 Conversely, Barker recalls the counter-example of Alice Wheeldon in her depiction of Beattie

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Roper, a former suffragette, who is imprisoned on trumped-up charges for her pacifist beliefs, sheltering of deserters and conscientious objectors and involvement with organisers of a strike in munitions factories. Her ostracism and bullying by her working-class community, as they close ranks against dissenters from the patriotic norm, forms a female equivalent to the scapegoating of male ‘degenerates’ which The Eye in the Door also records. Class discrimination also influences her fate: while Beattie’s alleged plot to assassinate Lloyd George leads to her exemplary punishment, the gentlemanly Sassoon’s connections ensure that his comparable threat against the Prime Minister is disregarded.24 A recurrent topos in writing from the war’s later years is the unbridgeable gulf between the war-scarred and non-combatants: for example, ‘the man who had really endured the War at its worst was everlastingly differentiated from everyone except his fellow soldiers’, or, more aggressively, ‘These men are worth / Your tears. You are not worth their merriment’.25 Barker reverses the situation, by also adopting the perspective of equally alienated female non-combatants. In ‘Disabled’ Owen tried to evoke the emotions of an ex-soldier whom amputations have reduced to abject dependency on ‘whatever pity they may dole’ and to an asexual freakishness, as girls now ‘touch him like some queer disease’.26 Invoking savage irony rather than Owen’s pathos, Sassoon undermined conventional expressions of sympathy: Does it matter? – losing your sight?... There’s such splendid work for the blind; And people will always be kind [...]27 Instead, Barker imagines the awkward helplessness of the well-meaning female onlooker (and, through her, society’s unease with disability), uncomfortably aware of involuntarily exacerbating the men’s fear and shame, as ‘a pretty girl’ ‘forced to play the role of Medusa’ (R, 160). Trauma, Barker insists, has repercussions not just for the victims themselves but also those around them. Barker’s foregrounding of gender also builds on the war poets’ writings, by indicating that the gap between combatants and non-combatants corresponded to fissures in patriarchal society and in the dominant construction of masculinity. Although in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer Sassoon criticises ‘civilian callousness and complacency’, which he associates with ‘bloated profiteers’, he also displays understanding for the irresolvable predicament of older generations: ‘For middle-aged persons who faced the War bleakly, life had become unbearable unless they

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persuaded themselves that the slaughter was worth while. [...] What could elderly people do except try and make the best of their inability to sit in a trench and be bombarded?’28 This awareness of a potential inner conflict or soul-searching is, however, absent from Sassoon’s satires on military insouciance or incompetence, such as ‘Base Details’ and ‘The General’, and from ‘The Fathers’, with its ‘impotent’ armchair warriors.29 Barker echoes the latter in the scene at the Conservative Club, where Sassoon is imagined as thinking ‘When did you two last get it up?’ (R, 114). Thus, Barker develops Sassoon’s sexualised anger into an Oedipal rivalry, which provides the basis for a wider exploration of the functions of sacrifice within a patriarchal society. Barker’s trilogy is structured around several literal or figurative father– son relationships. At their centre is Rivers, a paternalistic non-combatant, whose military duty, conflicting with his Hippocratic oath to preserve life, is to regenerate the traumatised, so that they can return to probable death at the Front. Barker conveys his moral dilemma through intertextual allusions to Owen’s ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’ (R, 149–50).30 Patriarchal society is, Rivers reflects, founded on a sacrificial bargain whereby the young and strong obey the old and weak in return for the assurance that they will duly inherit the patriarchal role. But Europe’s older generation, including the complicit Rivers, are breaking the covenant. This causes a crisis of patriarchal legitimacy, which Barker explores by depicting how individual males negotiate the internalised values, norms and role expectations through which their society constructs masculinity. Serving at the Front – which became more mandatory after conscription was introduced in 1916 – was, Barker suggests, partly a matter of perceived moral obligation, reinforced by peer group and public pressure. She depicts Graves urging Sassoon to honour his military contract; the apparition of Orme, recorded in Sassoon’s ‘Sick Leave’, which he gives Rivers to read, conveys how Sassoon’s self-reproaches for having abandoned his brothers in the Battalion have strengthened his resolve to go back.31 Rivers intuits Prior’s internal conflict between his inadmissible hope of being honourably exempted from further frontline duty and his dread of ‘“the shame” of home service’ (R, 206). Later, Prior approvingly quotes Sassoon in reflecting that, had Hallet been born two years later, ‘He might even have missed the war altogether, perhaps spent the rest of his life goaded by the irrational shame of having escaped. “Cowed subjection to the ghosts of friends who died.” That was it exactly, couldn’t be better put. Ghosts everywhere. Even the living were only ghosts in the making’ (GR, 46).32

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This passage, whose full proleptic irony becomes apparent only in retrospect, illustrates the hermeneutic and narrative complexity of Barker’s anachronistic trilogy. Its free indirect discourse voices Prior’s experiential past present in 1918. At this stage in events, Prior, despite his combat experience, cannot foresee that Hallet will die, nor his own role in prolonging the agony. A cognitive asymmetry accordingly separates him – and readers restricted to his limited perspective – from the plotting narrator, who determines Prior’s and Hallet’s deaths and, to heighten the poignancy of Hallet’s grotesque mutilation, will emphasise Hallet’s physical vulnerability by imitating a topos of First World War writing in the pastoral scene of his bathing.33 The narrative thus alternates between the immanent focalisation and contemporaneous idiom of historical agents and the hindsight interpretation placed upon these by the author’s emplotment. Barker has authorial foreknowledge of what will happen; the characters have fatalistic premonitions which historically informed readers also share. The pathos of The Ghost Road lies in its atmospheric recreation of the uneasy expectation and superstitious resignation of men who, as a result of structural but also self-imposed constraints, ‘have no control over their own fate’, for ‘Somewhere, outside the range of human hearing, and yet heard by all of them, a clock had begun to tick’ (GR, 147). Prior’s sense that ‘Even the living were only ghosts in the making’ is reinforced authorially by recurrent metaphors of ghosts and cross-cultural references to the Melanesian concept of mate: ‘a state of which death was the appropriate outcome’ (GR, 134). Readers are thus placed vicariously in the helpless position of the soldiers; they intuit the likely outcome but are powerless to alter it and must simply follow its necessary course. The intolerability of waiting for the anticipated bitter end, for soldiers then as for readers now, generates an instinctive protest. Sassoon suggested that the middle-aged must try to convince themselves that the slaughter is worthwhile. The rhetorical straws at which they clutch in their efforts at self-persuasion are echoed by impressionable youths such as Hallet, who has imbibed his father’s military ethos and believes naively in the purposeful legitimacy of the war. By contrast, the disillusioned Prior has grasped that there is no ‘rational justification left. It’s become a self-perpetuating system’ (GR, 144). The plot of The Ghost Road, with a grim inevitability predetermined by events in late 1918, endorses Prior’s viewpoint: in the senseless crossing of the Sambre–Oise canal days before the Armistice, troops were ‘being sacrificed to the subclauses and the small print’ (GR, 249). On the point of death, Hallet too eventually concedes ‘Shotvarfet’, although his agonised

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officer father, striving for words of consolation and for self-reassurance, continues to assert ‘“Oh, it is worth it, it is”’ (GR, 274). By concluding emotively with a swelling chorus of mate voices insisting on the tragic futility of their deaths, Barker’s emplotment echoes what has become the dominant post-1960s view of the Great War. But her trilogy also shows that this retrospective judgement would not necessarily have been endorsed by historical agents, who, despite their foreboding, returned to action. On the eve of the final, doomed assault, aware of his negligible chance of survival, Prior thinks ‘What an utter bloody fool I would have been not to come back’ (GR, 258). What sustains him is not merely the fear of shame, or Owen’s sense that, even in a sordid cause, altruistic sacrifice remains admirable (R, 157), but also a desire to belong to ‘the Club to end all Clubs’ (R, 135), a sentiment shared by Manning (E, 275–6), with which Rivers can also identify (R, 108; GR, 203). Arguably, Barker is anachronistically projecting onto the men of 1918 the ambivalence of the succeeding generation, who felt ‘a mixture of revulsion at the brutality and waste of it, guilt at not having fought in it, and envy of those who had’.34 Isherwood, ‘Like most of my generation’, was obsessed with ‘“War”’, which ’in this purely neurotic sense, meant The Test. The Test of your courage, of your maturity, of your sexual prowess: “Are you really a Man?”’.35 But later Isherwood suggests that the ‘truly strong man’ would not need to ‘try and prove to himself that he is not afraid’; ‘the Test exists only for the [neurotic] Truly Weak Man’.36 Barker dramatises this issue in the argument between Prior and the pacifist Mac who, having downplayed his beatings in prison compared to trench warfare, comments: ‘of course there’s always the unanswered question. Could you face it? Could you pass the test? But where I think we differ, Billy, is that you think that’s a Very Important Question, and I think it’s fucking trivial’. It transpires, however, that the two men actually agree about demonstrating masculine prowess: Mac’s ‘moral and political truths’ also ‘have to be proved on the body’ (E, 112). Their interchange is surely shaped by Barker’s lifelong experience of the the macho culture of North-East England: ‘my son-in-law, who is infertile, was in a Working Men’s Club. He looked round the room and said to his wife, “At the moment there are three men in this room who would try to take me out; if they knew my tiddlers couldn’t swim, that would be tripled”’.37 Barker suggests that the desire to conform to an internalised hegemonic masculinity leads to attempts to prove one’s courage, to distinguish oneself from the ‘effeminacy’ of pacifism, cowardice and homosexuality, and to violence against perceived deviants from this norm.

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Manliness was linked with war neurosis in evidence presented to the War Office Commission of Enquiry into ‘Shellshock’: Shell shock is born of fear. Its grandparents are self-preservation and the fear of being found afraid. [...] Under its stimulus, a man squanders nervous energy recklessly in order to suppress his hideous and pent-up emotion, and mask and camouflage that which if revealed will call down ignominy upon him and disgrace him in the eyes of his fellows. He must save his self-respect and self-esteem at all costs’.38 In Barker’s trilogy this inner conflict is frequently expressed through conversion disorders, such as the mutism resulting from Prior’s ‘gobstopper’, or Moffet’s hysterical paralysis. Rivers’s therapy is directed towards the patient’s recovering the repressed memory of the traumatic incident which is somatised in symbolic form and experiencing the affect which should have accompanied it. However, this therapeutic outcome should culminate, wherever possible, in a return to combat, which will entail renewed repression: Craiglockhart’s ‘success stories’ are Owen’s ability to machine-gun Germans ‘Like killing fish in a bucket’, and Prior’s to touch ‘a gob of Hallet’s brain’ and not ‘feel anything very much’ (GR, 199–200). Dissociation or splitting thus comes to assume central explanatory importance in Barker’s interpretation of masculinity and war. Her prime examples are Sassoon and Prior. She follows Graves’s characterisation of Sassoon as oscillating incongruously between ‘happy warrior’ and ‘bitter pacifist’ capable of ‘wholesale slaughter’.39 But she interprets Sassoon’s aggressive hypermasculinity as a reaction formation intended to dissociate him from the malingerers and ‘degenerates’ whom he encountered at Craiglockhart (E, 201) and from his own homosexuality. When Sassoon finally admits the unsustainability of his internal division into ‘two people’, he recalls with self-contempt, in a ‘mincing, effeminate tone’, his attempted self-deception that returning to the trenches would merely involve looking after his men and not killing (E, 233, 229). Being able to kill requires a functional and situational detachment to which professional soldiers were inured by training and experience, whereas civilian recruits were comparatively unprepared. Manning survived by splitting off normal feelings, but Scudder couldn’t ‘turn off the part of himself that minded’ (E, 159, 170–1). What is unclear is whether Barker believes that this adaptive dissociation is caused by warfare, or is merely a normal mental process. The issue is muddled by her overextension of dissociation to ordinary social role-play or to Manning’s homosexual double life. Is Rivers’s witting separation of his

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private feelings for Sassoon from his professional role, or his Melanesian ‘self’ from his British, really a ‘duality’ or ‘splitting of personality’ (E, 235) that can meaningfully be compared with soldiers’ battlefield detachment or traumatic dissociation as an instinctive defence mechanism to protect the self? Barker’s portrayal of Prior combines several kinds of dissociation. It seems implied that his abuse by the paedophile Father Mackenzie, followed by teenage prostitution, resulted in Prior’s frequent reduction of sexuality to sadistic assertions of domination or hatred, in which the former victim becomes a perpetrator, and his performance for Manning as rough rent boy. He associates sexual pleasure with war, both in battle itself and in related wet dreams. Prior’s self-protective withdrawal from his father’s violence and his conflicted loyalties to opposing parents has culminated in his present fugue states during which Prior’s alter engages in independently conscious activities. His working-class allegiance and childhood attachments to Beattie and Mac conflict with his instinct of self-preservation and loyalty to his comrades-in-arms, rather than those depriving them of ammunition and moral sustenance. Although Prior aids Beattie and attacks the agent provocateur Spragge (thus attempting to dissociate himself from his psychological double), his alter’s betrayal of Mac during a fugue resolves Prior’s dilemma of conscience for him. In the context of a nation riven from 1916 onwards by dissent and corresponding repressive control by the government, Barker’s Foucauldian depiction of surveillance and disciplinary power presents Prior’s internal conflict as representative of a backlash against the enemy within.40 The scapegoating of deviants from hegemonic masculinity, including pacifists, conchies and the homosexuals witch-hunted in Pemberton Billing’s moral panic, enforces normative demarcations. Barker’s portrayal of Rivers suggests that this situation is ineluctable. Rivers extends Showalter’s thesis that war feminised soldiers by asserting that it also fostered a ‘domestic. Caring’ relationship between officers and men, resembling his therapeutic nurturing as ‘male mother’ (R, 107). But for him this is instrumental to restoring functional selfdiscipline. Rivers also remarks that the wartime emphasis ‘on love between men – comradeship’ (R, 204) arouses homophobic anxiety; as a closeted homosexual, he thus counsels Sassoon to be seen to conform to normative manliness. By retrospectively psychoanalysing Rivers, Barker attributes his attitude to his Oedipal rite of passage. She invents a traumatic experience at Rivers’s breeching, when his howling caused his father to slap him, contrasting Rivers’s weakness with his eponymous ancestor, who, when his leg was amputated, ‘didn’t make a sound’

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(GR, 95). Barker’s Freudian fantasy suggests that this Oedipal castration scene underlay the historically documented conversion disorders of Rivers’s speech impediment and impaired visual imagery (to suppress all recollection of the painting of his ancestor’s exemplary heroism).41 The historical Rivers would have dismissed this interpretation, as he rejected Freud’s aetiological emphasis on childhood sexuality.42 By contrast, Barker depicts how, in Freudian fashion, Rivers’s resistance to Prior’s psychoanalytical interpretation (E, 136–42) is finally broken down. The outcome doesn’t differ, however, from Rivers’s position in Regeneration: men may ‘grieve’ and break down, but must then ‘stop crying’ (GR, 96; cf. R, 48). He has taken over his father’s ambiguous role as therapist to the traumatically inarticulate but also instigator of manly self-repression and thus self-silencing. Hence Barker heavy-handedly depicts Rivers’s association of patriarchal sacrifice on Vao and in Maidstone, where he received communion from his father under the Abraham-Isaac window, with his surrogate son, Prior (GR, 103–4). Barker thus emphasises Rivers’s role in the intergenerational transmission of patriarchal expectations. But in foregrounding masculinity she tendentiously misconstrues his statements about head-hunting. Rivers largely attributed the depopulation of Melanesia to demoralisation caused by Europeans’ prohibition of head-hunting ‘without at all appreciating the vast place it took in the religious and ceremonial lives of the people, without realising the gap it would leave in their daily interests, a blank far more extensive than that due to the mere cessation of a mode of warfare’.43 This colonialist suppression of the centre of their culture led to depressive resignation, because of its religious significance for propitiating ancestral ghosts and its vital importance to their economy, through stimulating canoe-building, horticulture and pig-breeding.44 Rivers suggests that this decline could have been averted by substituting animal for human sacrifice, if this had been supplemented by new economic motives.45 His argument thus stresses the systemic importance of head-hunting to Melanesian culture and, in proposing alternative solutions, implies that head-hunting rites were socially constructed rather than rooted in biological essentialism. At times, Barker seems to adopt similar arguments. She suggests that sacrifice has analogous religious significance for Melanesians and Christians. Potts’s insistence that the war ‘was being fought to safeguard access to the oil-wells of Mesopotamia’ (GR, 143) (a conspiracy theory encouraged retrospectively by the Gulf War), revises Rivers’s connection of head-hunting with domestic economic activity. But when Barker directly summarises Rivers’s thesis, her free indirect discourse omits his

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sociopolitical and culturalist arguments, instead imputing to him the view that ‘head-hunting had been the most tremendous fun’ (GR, 207). This aligns Rivers with Prior’s eroticisation of battle and Sassoon’s gungho blood-lust. By making Rivers reflect ‘This was a people perishing from the absence of war’ (GR, 207), Barker suggests bleakly that the killing instinct is biologically hard-wired rather than culturally constructed, and hence ineradicable. This simplifies Rivers’s analysis, which concerned not ‘war’ per se but rather the cultural embeddedness of religious sacrifice and Europeans’ destruction of customs they failed to comprehend. Barker’s regen(d)eration of the Great War thus ultimately departs from Showalter’s emphasis on feminisation, her grand narrative implying instead the intractability of hegemonic masculinity and the cross-cultural constancy of male violence.

Memories and afterthoughts [I]n most of my texts [...] the dark centre behind it all is the German past between 1925 and 1950 which I came out of. I was born in 1944 in an idyllic place, untouched by the War, but, in looking back upon this year, I cannot abstract from the fact that I know what happened during this last year of the war particularly – the bombing of my native country, the deporting of people from Rhodes or Sicily, or God knows where, to the most ghastly places anybody could possibly imagine.46 If one could speak of a home in time (Zeitheimat), then for me this is the years between 1944 and 1950[.]47 Although he devoted his life to disavowing them, Sebald compulsively mythologised his origins in an elaborate process of self-fashioning in which memories were reshaped by afterthoughts. His formative years inspired his antipathy towards his parents’ postwar Germany; his compensatory, empathetic identification with German-Jewish exiles; and his conviction that understanding the past entails becoming conscious that in whatever locality (Heimat) one investigates, one stumbles upon the uncanny (unheimlich) traces of the ‘organised madness of our species’.48 Air War and Literature is his most extended account of the cover-ups that marked his childhood. Ostensibly Sebald deals with German literature’s inadequate representation of the devastation of bombed German cities, symptomatic of a tacit general agreement not to describe the nation’s ‘true state of material and moral ruin’, which remained accordingly ‘under a kind of taboo like a shameful family secret [...] that perhaps could not

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even be privately acknowledged’.49 Later autobiographical passages make clear, however, that what really concerns him is the attempted public and private suppression of all traces of the war, for which he elsewhere arraigns his parents and the ‘lower-middle-class’ stratum, in which his ‘father occupied a “proper” place’ and ‘the so-called conspiracy of silence was at its most present’.50 Although Sebald acknowledges that, following devastating bombardments, attempts to restore a semblance of normality could result from traumatic shock and be instinctive ways to avoid panic or depression, he pillories German petty-bourgeois orderliness. The self-imposed imperatives of reconstruction prohibited looking back, he suggests, and successively brought about a ‘second liquidation’ of the nation’s history.51 Hence, the catalyst for Germany’s postwar economic miracle was a psychic energy flowing from ‘the well-kept secret of the corpses built into the foundations of our state’; this, more than the goal of realising democracy, is still what binds Germans together.52 (Sebald grimly conflates the actual bodies in bombed ruins with the German idiom for skeletons in the cupboard.) As Anne Fuchs notes, this characteristic hyperbole disregards the manifold post-1968 critiques of the 1950s culture of repression.53 Sebald’s sweeping assertion, befitting only a Germany stuck in a time warp, corresponds to his memory of a villa in his hometown, Sonthofen, which remained in ruins until the early 1960s. In a Gothic fantasy he recalls descending into its cellars, where he always dreaded finding the corpse of an animal or a human. Several years later, an ugly self-service shop replaced the villa, whose grounds disappeared under an asphalted car park; this, according to Sebald’s parable of repression abetted by consumerism, is ‘the main theme of the history of post-war Germany’.54 The historical authenticity of such memories is, however, drawn into question by Sebald’s self-contradictory statements about his childhood. He told interviewers that ‘It was an idyllic environment, and only at 17 or 18 did you get inklings [about the war]’; ‘I could easily say now that even as a boy I felt uncomfortable in that country. But whilst I was at school I didn’t think about it. [...] it took the first separation from home to change anything’.55 Conversely, he recalled having grown up ‘with the feeling that something was being kept from me: at home, at school, and by the German writers whose books I read hoping to glean more information about the monstrous events in the background of my own life’.56 He was only one year old when the war ended, ‘Yet to this day, when I see photographs or documentary films dating from the war I feel as if I were its child, so to speak, as if those horrors I did not experience cast

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a shadow over me [...] from which I shall never entirely emerge.’ Hence, he claims, he associates home (Heimat) more with images of destruction than with ‘the now entirely unreal idylls of my early childhood’, ‘perhaps because they represent the more powerful and dominant reality of my first years’.57 It is difficult to accept that such statements correspond faithfully to the experiential past present of Sebald’s early childhood. Instead, it seems that, in the present past of Sebald’s reconstruction, what he later learned about ‘the monstrous events in the background’ is being projected back to convey what his retrospective knowledge and moral sensibility feel he should somehow have been able to have been aware of then. This temporal overlayering is evident in his remark: ‘I know now that at the time, when I was lying in my bassinet on the balcony of the Seefeld house and looking up at the pale blue sky, there was a pall of smoke in the air [from battle or genocide] all over Europe’.58 Clearly, this cannot be a memory of his first months of life. Instead, Sebald’s afterthought is concerned with an infantile innocence which in retrospect is made to appear blinkered, because of the historical context into which the unwitting child was born. Although his existence coincides with atrocities, the baby in his bassinet cannot be held responsible for them, or for his insouciance towards what he could not have preternaturally sensed. But the older, remembering self attributes to this remembered self a complicity by association. It is a tricky area. Sebald wishes retrospectively to bear witness to suffering of which he was necessarily ignorant in the 1940s. However, there is arguably self-dramatisation in his belated, melancholy identification with a victimhood from which he was spared. In the final section of Nach der Natur [After Nature] Sebald portentously associates his conception and birth with a series of catastrophes. On the day that his mother realises she is pregnant, she watches Nuremberg in flames; later, the first-person narrator views Altdorfer’s painting of Lot and his Daughters, with Sodom and Gomorrah burning in the background, which provokes in him a disturbing sense of déjà vu (a recurrent Sebaldian topos). At his birth, Saturn is in the ascendant; hours later, one of the Ascension Day procession is killed by lightning. Although he has no ‘concept of destruction’, his child’s imagination comes to picture ‘a silent catastrophe, that / unfolds before the viewer without a fuss’.59 To examine this fantasy, it seems legitimate to collate Sebald’s semidocumentary fictions with his autobiographical statements, as the details and anecdotes about ‘W.’ and ‘S.’ in Sebald’s novels correspond exactly to information given in interviews about Sebald’s own upbringing in Wertach and Sonthofen. Several texts refer to frightening eschatological

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images in his intensely Catholic environment; to the conflagration of a nearby sawmill; or to primary school lessons about the chronicle of disasters which over centuries had afflicted their village.60 The implication is that these must somehow be screen memories, behind which lurks something more horrible; Sebald thus evokes a free-floating anxiety or melancholy expectation that attaches itself to various objects. In one interview his ‘“hunch that this is where it all began – a great disaster that occurred, which I knew nothing about”’ traces his morbid preoccupations to viewing, aged five, his father’s photograph of a fellow soldier killed in a motor accident; this sounds, however, like rationalisation after the fact.61 Instead, Sebald’s oeuvre reads as a quest to explain this haunting obsession that appears inexplicable or ungrounded and causes the familiar to appear threateningly uncanny. There is, however, something almost solipsistic in Sebald’s relentless linking of catastrophic events with himself or his first-person narrators. These connections form the basis of his impressionistic historiography. For example, in an article published in a Stuttgart newspaper shortly after Austerlitz Sebald asserted that the point of literature is perhaps that we remember and learn to comprehend ‘that some strange connections cannot be explained by causal logic’.62 He illustrates this by a colligation of places and events which are yoked by violence together: Stuttgart, to which Hölderlin returned from Bordeaux; Tulle, through which Hölderlin walked en route to Bordeaux, and where on 9 June 1944, ‘exactly three weeks’ after Sebald’s birth and ‘almost exactly’ 101 years after Hölderlin’s death, 99 of the male population were massacred by the SS and the rest deported to forced labour or extermination camps.63 Sebald ponders ‘what the invisible connections that determine our lives are’: what connects his visit in May 1976 to an old schoolfriend in Stuttgart’s Reinsburgstraße with a police raid in March 1946 on a camp for displaced persons then located in that street, one of whom was shot dead?64 What, indeed? I return later to Sebald’s melancholy historiography. Although Sebald characterises Germans as ‘blind to history’, as if nothing had changed in this respect since he emigrated in 1965, he remarks that ‘when we [...] take a retrospective view, particularly of the years 1930 to 1950, we are always looking and looking away at the same time’.65 Here, rather than blindness, he refers to a mixture of curiosity, averting of one’s gaze and hence denial of what one would prefer not to see. It thus seems that what Sebald terms the ‘shameful family secret’ was actually an open secret, constantly visible but constantly overlooked. Sebald’s mostly inaccessible father had been in the army since 1929, was a prisoner of war until Sebald was almost three, and again served as an officer

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from the mid-1950s until his retirement. The family albums contained photographs of his father’s participation in the Polish campaign of 1939, first with a ‘boy-scout atmosphere’, then with gipsies behind barbed wire, then razed villages. But the photos ‘seemed quite normal to me as a child. It was only later...’.66 Similarly, following a visit to Munich at the age of either three or five, for a long time Sebald believed that ‘mountains of rubble’ (which he also saw in the fortnightly newsreels shown in the house where his family lived) were ‘a natural condition of cities’.67 Just outside W. a final skirmish had taken place in April 1945, in which four German soldiers had died and were subsequently buried in W.; as a child, the narrator heard various reports of the fighting.68 The traces of the war were thus right in front of Sebald’s eyes in these disparate clues, if he could have interpreted what he sensed was being kept from him. Arguably, therefore, what Sebald is exploring is not primarily the silence of the older generation but rather the belated curiosity of those born later. There is a fascinating example of this process in Sebald’s decision as a student to transfer from the University of Freiburg in Germany to the University of Freiburg/Fribourg in Switzerland. In several accounts Sebald represents this as an ideologically motivated turning point, in which he consciously distanced himself from Freiburg’s professorial former Nazi adherents.69 (Arguably, given Heidegger’s controversial involvement with National Socialism, Sebald’s choice to study in Freiburg was itself remarkably ‘blind to history’.) Elsewhere, however, he attributes his transfer to poor study conditions; in Switzerland libraries were more accessible, and staff–student ratios better, so that ‘I really left Germany for practical reasons in the first instance. It’s in retrospect that I seem to think – and I’m not entirely sure whether it’s true – that I did have a sense of discomfort about the whole thing’.70 This is refreshingly honest about the temptations of retrospective self-fashioning. It seems possible that what Sebald would like to believe about his disaffection from German academia in 1965 is projected back as a self-deluding afterthought, in keeping with his attack in 1998 on Heidegger.71 A similar time-lag characterised Sebald’s relationship with his Jewish landlord in Manchester, who had emigrated from Munich in 1933 and served as one of the models for Max Aurach/Ferber in The Emigrants. In 1966–8 both he and Sebald ‘avoided the subject’; twenty years later Sebald returned to talk to him about it, prompted by what he had learned about his primary school teacher, ‘Paul Bereyter’, following his recent suicide.72 As only ‘three-quarter Aryan’, Bereyter had been banned from teaching by the Nazis; having fought in the German Army, he returned in 1945

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to S. but neither he nor the townspeople talked about the Nazi years.73 This structure of avoidance or professed ignorance, followed by belated acknowledgement and recognition resembles Austerlitz’s dealings with the German past, in which an inner censor ‘always preserved me from my own secret, systematically preventing me from drawing the obvious conclusions and embarking on the inquiries they would have suggested’, and his regrets that he never discussed Theresienstadt with its historian survivor, H.G. Adler, although they both lived for decades in London.74 Sebald has stated that only in 1965, when the Frankfurt trial of Auschwitz personnel began, did he begin to understand ‘the real dimensions for the first time: the defendants were the kinds of people I’d known as neighbours – postmasters or railway workers’.75 This uncanny revelation came, however, when Sebald had already removed himself geographically from Germany and was reading, and identifying emotionally with, works by the German-Jewish émigré Peter Weiss and the Austro-Jewish resistance fighter and Auschwitz survivor, Jean Améry, who in Sebald’s emigration and Oedipal conflict with his father’s Germany constituted morally attractive role models.76 These elective affinities are apparent in a symptomatically revealing passage in Austerlitz, when the narrator visits Breendonk, the fort where Améry was tortured in 1943. It describes the subjective experience of several layers of time: in the late 1990s the narrator’s remembering self recalls how his remembered self in 1967 sought to understand what took place there in the 1940s and underwent a hallucinatory flashback which fused sensations from his own childhood with war crimes. While still outside the fort, he finds it impossible to conceive the prisoners’ hard labour. Inside, however, in the SS guards’ mess, he ‘could well imagine’ the South German ‘good fathers’ and ‘dutiful sons’: ‘After all, I had lived among them until my twentieth year’ (29). The contrast is between the epistemological and experiential remoteness of the prisoners’ suffering, and his intimate, first-hand knowledge of the kind of men whom the trials of the mid1960s had revealed to have been their torturers. His moral sympathy lies with the victims; his involuntary, now disavowed cultural affiliation with the perpetrators. His memory of what followed was, he claims, ‘clouding over’ even on that day, either because of the fort’s obscurity, ‘cut off for ever from the light of nature’, or because ‘I did not really want to see what it had to show’ (30). In now forcing himself to remember – and thus, by bearing witness, oppose entropic ‘oblivion’ – he re-enacts how he earlier overcame his resistance to entering the fort’s ‘backbone’-like tunnel (31). The plan reproduced in the text indicates his actual route

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past the mortuary (Lijkenkamer) to the torture chamber (Folterkamer) but his journey into the interior leads into the underworld of his ‘childhood terrors’ (33). Although the narrator often emphasises his oblique, mediated access to the past, here by contrast it appears to come back to him with a sensuous immediacy, as he imagines the brutality that took place where he now stands, ‘around the time I was born’ (33). In his hallucination the ‘pit’ of the torture chamber mutates into an inner ‘abyss’, from which rise associative images of the laundry room at home and the local butcher hosing down his tiled floor. A nauseating smell of soft soap connects itself with his father’s favourite word for scrubbing-brush, which he had always found revolting (‘zuwider’), causing him to nearly faint and lean his head against the wall, which he imagines as bruised (‘von bläulichen Flecken unterlaufen’) and covered with beads of sweat.77 Apparently a psychic energy harboured in the room provokes an intrusive flashback, in which a repressed trauma of his own fuses with the fantasised trauma of the interrogated. Acts of torture are not described (although the following page incorporates Améry’s graphic account) but evoked indirectly through a series of symbolic displacements: the aftermath of another form of butchery, in which hygienic order is restored; the German petty-bourgeois obsession with cleanliness. (In an interview a year before Austerlitz, Sebald refers to the ‘mad delusion’ ‘of making Europe a cleanly swept house with no “dubious elements” any longer, a sort of sanitisation (Hygienisierung) of Europe’.)78 The narrator’s near passing-out against a wall – thereby making psychological and tactile contact with what his metaphors (like the earlier ‘backbone’) equate with the body in pain of the Other – testifies to the power of his empathetic fantasy, which has sickened him. But his identification with the Other’s subject position, and interweaving of personal and collective memories could also be read as presumptuous, in implying an analogy between experiences which are incommensurable. It is suggested that these repressed childhood (screen?) memories stood in some relation of equivalence to traumatic events that took place in Breendonk during his gestation and infancy, which in 1967 he vicariously re-enacts. The synchronicity of his birth and the SS crimes is taken not as coincidence but rather signifies a profound affinity. Sebald’s preoccupation is thus less with the Holocaust, than with how a German of his generation deals with being implicated in its immediate aftermath, the Zeitheimat to which he compulsively returns. The critical consensus applauds his self-reflexivity about the ethical danger of usurping the traumatic experience of others, and thus downplays what I maintain to be his empathetic identification with the Jewish subject-position.79

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In Austerlitz complex doublings and shifting self-identifications attempt to negotiate the dubieties arising from a second-generation German bearing witness to the survivor testimony of a Czechoslovakian Jew, who finally entrusts him with his photographs and the keys to his house adjoining the Jewish cemetery. (Similarly, in The Emigrants Max Aurach/ Ferber hands the narrator the memoirs he inherited from his murdered mother.) Elaborate stylistic indirections place the narrator and readers at several removes from the Holocaust. In a series of embedded narratives the narrator’s remembering self recalls his remembered self ’s meetings with Austerlitz, which after 1996 centred on Austerlitz’s narrations of his own remembered self, including what he belatedly learned at second hand of what befell his father in occupied France and of his mother’s deportation to Theresienstadt. But although he painstakingly reads Adler’s massive account of Theresienstadt, Austerlitz’s ‘wishful fantasies’ (343) that he might glimpse his mother there in the Nazis’ propaganda film are disappointed; there is no surviving trace of her final days. The Holocaust is thus located at the farthest point of this chain of oral and textual transmission and constitutes for Austerlitz the vanishing point of memory and historical representation. But Sebald’s emphasis, as in constructionist historiography, on the mediatedness of our access to past reality also has the effect of stressing the relationship between Austerlitz and the narrator. The novel comprises their overlapping life histories. Austerlitz’s is marked by a series of abrupt hiatuses, bereavements, broken or failed relationships, and by cognitive gaps, some of which, following initial incuriosity, he belatedly manages to fill. Retrospectively he learns that while he grew up shielded from the war in a Welsh backwater, unbeknown to him his father was interned and his mother murdered. It is a version of the Sebald mythography: the protected childhood, while simultaneously atrocities take place elsewhere, but with parental victims rather than perpetrators or acquiescers. Austerlitz’s enlightenment is gradual: in adolescence he learns his real name and thus glimpses a family history which his foster father had sought to repress or eradicate. His biography thus literalises Sebald’s Freudian ‘family romance’: the narcissistic fantasy of being the true child of a superior Jewish father-figure, rather than of the stepfather or adoptive father who arouses hostility.80 At this stage, however, Austerlitz does not pursue what his headmaster has revealed of his suppressed past; similarly, Sebald’s teenage viewing at school of a documentary about Belsen had no immediate impact.81 Instead, Austerlitz avoids having anything to do with Germany, which he senses is somehow related to a traumatic past that he strives to ignore.

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But the legacy of these buried years nevertheless determines his life in ways that he cannot comprehend: thus, in 1972 his relationship with Marie de Verneuil founders when Austerlitz is overcome by a déjà-vu melancholia in Marienbad, where he spent his last family holiday in 1938. Involuntary, unconscious repetition occurs more forcefully after a further latency of twenty years when, in the disused waiting room at Liverpool Street station, Austerlitz experiences what Sebald’s plan for the novel labels the ‘return of the repressed’.82 This provokes a nervous breakdown, the grounds for which remain inexplicable to Austerlitz until a year later when, hearing a radio broadcast about children evacuated to England, he grasps that his déjà-vu experience at Liverpool Street was a memory of his arrival there. His subsequent return to Prague culminates in another traumatic repetition when the train journey home revives his journey of 1939, precipitating a more severe breakdown. As with Bereyter therefore, Sebald depicts the ‘survivor syndrome’, in which, in advanced age, the survivor is repossessed by a repressed suffering which re-emerges decades after the event.83 Whereas Bereyter (like Améry) commits suicide, Austerlitz’s ultimate fate, after gradually becoming conscious of what befell him and his family, remains open. Austerlitz learns only belatedly of the formative influences on his life, of which he tells the narrator only after a further interval. For example, although the narrator is in regular contact with Austerlitz when Austerlitz’s relationship with Marie breaks down, he learns of this turning point only in the late 1990s. This is partly because of Austerlitz’s reticence about his private life but also because, prior to what he learns in Prague in 1993, he himself cannot make sense of his behaviour in 1972 and requires time to bring himself to talk about painful events. It is tempting to relate this temporal structure of delayed revelation to Sebald’s own encounters with Jewish émigrés in England. Having left Germany in 1966 for undisclosed reasons, the narrator’s biography reproduces the chronological and geographical pattern of Sebald’s own. His relationship with Austerlitz is an elective affinity but also a psychological doubling. For example, the narrator’s traumatic hallucination in Breendonk is mirrored in Austerlitz’s déjà-vu experiences in Liverpool Street station, a ‘kind of entrance to the underworld’ (180) built on the site of Bedlam: ‘I often wondered whether the pain and suffering accumulated on this site [...] had ever really ebbed away, or whether they might not still, as I sometimes thought when I felt a cold breath of air on my forehead, be sensed’ (183). The improbable conjunctures through which their lives intersect confront both of them with the unresolved German-Jewish past which both have consciously (the narrator) or intuitively (Austerlitz) sought

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to avoid. Both are deracinated, both afflicted by periodic depression, both drawn to sites which are associated with the failures of the modern project, which, they sense, hold the key to understanding the historical predicament into which they were born. Their peregrinations are elucidated by Sebald’s comment that the course of history involves ‘something like drifting, sand- or snowdrifts, natural historical patterns, chaotic things that at some point coincide and then diverge again. And I believe that it would be important for literature and also historiography to bring out these complicated, chaotic patterns. This isn’t possible systematically. Suddenly something flashes up: One sees how absurd our organised social life is’.84 It is possible to argue that Sebald’s compositional favouring of bricolage is the aesthetic expression of a worldview that foregrounds contingency and, like the unpredictable shifts which Foucault mapped from one episteme to another, acknowledges no overriding rationale. Nevertheless, as his metaphor of a flash suggests, I believe that Sebald drew inspiration from Benjamin’s thesis that ‘To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’.85 In The Rings of Saturn Sebald had written about Conrad’s experiences of Belgian colonialist atrocities in the Congo. Similarly, like Heart of Darkness, Austerlitz begins and ends in Belgium in episodes which initiate the narrator into the connections between metropolitan darkness (the Nocturama, the gloomy Salle des pas perdus at Antwerp station, Breendonk) and the megalomaniac pursuit of territorial gain at the expense of the material and racial oppression of others. His mentor is Austerlitz, whose personal fate and professional interests uncannily combine two interrelated phenomena, the Holocaust and technological, instrumental modernity, for the nineteenth-century stations which fascinate him are linked unconsciously to his repressed trauma and, historically and symbolically, to railway-timetabled genocide. His disquisitions on the self-defeating character of fortifications are not merely a projection of the futility of his own defence mechanisms but also, like his remark that ‘the whole history of the architecture and civilization of the bourgeois age [...] pointed in the direction of the catastrophic events already casting their shadows before them’ (197), implicitly echo Adorno, Horkheimer and Zygmunt Bauman on the dialectic of modernity. The closest affinities with his fragmentary, abandoned investigation into capitalist architecture are, however, with Benjamin’s Arcades project. Benjamin’s Marxist materialism aimed to demystify the collective, dream-like phantasmagoria of consumer capitalism, in order to make

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conscious the unfulfilled utopian desires perverted and suppressed by commodity fetishism. His assumption was that it is possible ‘to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event’.86 Through historiographic montage of so-called dialectical images, ‘wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation […] in the now of its recognizability’, he sought to provoke a startling, transformative ‘Awakening’ which contained the immanent possibility of Messianic redemption.87 This revolutionary potential alleviated what was otherwise a melancholy view of history as the exile from Paradise and eternal recurrence of catastrophes, as in the famous passage on the ‘angel of history’ which Sebald quotes as the conclusion to Air War and Literature.88 Sebald also sought to defamiliarise the quotidian environment, to uncover what is suppressed from consciousness. I argued earlier that his recollected or (re)constructed childhood experience of something being kept from him generated a sense of the uncanniness of his Heimat. The Rings of Saturn transposed this to his adoptive English home in a ‘pilgrimage’ through rural Suffolk which repeatedly uncovers the ‘traces of destruction’, encompassing warfare and the devastation of natural resources, in apparently innocent local backwaters.89 His dominant emplotment of history is a grand narrative either of cultural decline or of repeated man-made catastrophes, caused by imperialist capitalism or by the inherent contradictions of the modern project.90 But Sebald differs from Benjamin in that his alternately entropic or apocalyptic worldview envisages no prospect of redemption. Instead, fatalistically, all one can do is attempt to rescue the past from oblivion and bear witness to what Austerlitz terms ‘the marks of pain which [...] trace countless fine lines through history’ (16), in a literary act of attempted ‘restitution’.91 In articulating current preoccupations with memorialisation and trauma, his present past thus captures a structure of feeling widespread in western societies at the end of the second millennium, as the extraordinary acclaim for his work confirms.

Notes Note: Place of publication for books is London unless otherwise stated.

Preface 1. As Ann Rigney also remarks in Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca, 2001), 4–6. 2. On Arthur Danto’s concept of cognitive asymmetry, see Ch. 1. 3. Compare David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln, NE, 2002). 4. Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptualisation of present past, past present and past future is discussed passim. 5. This account draws on Marie-Laure Ryan, Peter Brooks, Paul Ricoeur and Hilary Dannenberg (see Ch. 2). 6. Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing [2002] (2003), 140, 154. 7. Eleanor Wachtel, ‘Ghost Hunter’, in The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald, ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (New York, 2007), 42.

1 The Narrative Turn in History 1. Geoffrey Roberts, ‘Introduction’, in The History and Narrative Reader, ed. Geoffrey Roberts (2001), 1. 2. On the recent history of historiography, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988); Georg Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century (Hanover, NH, 1997); Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, MA, 2004); Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, 2005); The Postmodern History Reader, ed. Keith Jenkins (1997). 3. I have modified Ann Rigney’s definition in ‘Narrativity and Historical Representation’, Poetics Today, 12 (1991) 591–605; 591. 4. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols (Chicago, 1984–8), III, 113; cf. 109–12. 5. On the significance of a ‘national story’, see the Parekh Report, The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (2000), Ch. 2. 6. See Ulric Neisser, ‘Self-Narratives: True and False’, in The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-narrative, ed. Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivush (Cambridge, 1994), 1–18. 7. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1968), 13. 8. Reinhart Koselleck, Zeitschichten: Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt a.M., 2000), 247–8, 249; my translation. 193

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9. David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985) surveys responses to survivals from the past. 10. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nature’, in Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (Harmondsworth, 1982), 35; cf. Emerson, ‘The American Scholar’; Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben’, in Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta (München, 1969), I, 209–85; Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York, 1973). 11. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford, 1988), 1. 12. In a much-cited article, Lawrence Stone noted in 1979 the waning of ‘scientific history’; see ‘The Revival of Narrative’, in Roberts, The History and Narrative Reader, 281–98. 13. On the distinctions between epistemological and narrativist philosophy of history, see F.R. Ankersmit, ‘The Dilemma of Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Philosophy of History’, History and Theory, 25.4 Beiheft 25 (Dec. 1986) 1–27. 14. This tripartite classification derives from Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History, 2nd edn (2006), although my application of the categories differs from his. 15. Keith Jenkins, ‘A Postmodern Reply to Perez Zagorin’, History and Theory, 39 (2000) 181–200; 184; F.R. Ankersmit, ‘Reply to Professor Zagorin’, History and Theory, 29 (1990) 275–96. 16. On historiographical realism, see Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr, Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 58–60. 17. Compare, for example, C. Behan McCullagh, The Truth of History (1998), 5, 33. 18. Peter Gay, Style in History (New York, 1974), 210; quoted in Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 48. 19. Mink, ‘Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument’ (1978), in Roberts, The History and Narrative Reader, 219. White’s usage is exactly opposite: ‘Events happen, whereas facts are constituted by linguistic description’; see Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore, MD, 1999), 18. 20. For incisive comment, see Noel Carroll, ‘Interpretation, History and Narrative’, in Roberts, The History and Narrative Reader, 246–65 (on White); Chris Lorenz, ‘Can Histories be True? Narrativism, Positivism, and the “Metaphorical Turn”’, History and Theory, 37 (1998) 309–29 (on White and Ankersmit). 21. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD, 1973), 6. 22. White, Figural Realism, 4; White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD, 1987), 44. 23. See F.R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation (Stanford, 2001), passim; John Zammito, ‘Ankersmit and Historical Representation’, History and Theory, 44 (2005) 155–81. 24. His thesis is first advanced in Metahistory, ix–xii, 1–38; see also his Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD, 1978), 51–100. 25. Emplotments are discussed well in Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 125–37. 26. White, Metahistory, 4; White, Tropics, 89. 27. White, Figural Realism, 29. 28. White, Tropics, 82, 94; my emphasis in final quotation.

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29. White, Figural Realism, 28; White, Metahistory, xii. Cf. White, Figural Realism, 9; White, Content, 44. This is more equivocally asserted in White, Tropics, 84–6. 30. White, Figural Realism, 28–30. This claim is contradicted in Figural Realism, 12. 31. White, Figural Realism, 9; compare White, Content, ix–x. White echoes Louis Mink, ‘History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension’, New Literary History, 1 (1970) 541–58; 557–8. 32. On the supposition that historical narrative is an ‘icon’, ‘simulacrum’ or ‘accurate imitation’, see White, Metahistory, ix, 2; White, Content, 27. White’s and Ankersmit’s simplistic conception of realism is discussed in Lorenz, ‘Can Histories be True?’, 313–15. 33. Compare McCullagh, The Truth of History, 23, 114. On collective assumptions, see Mary Fulbrook, Historical Theory (2002), 66–72; on intersubjective acceptability, see Fulbrook, Historical Theory, 107–21; Zammito, ‘Ankersmit and Historical Representation’, 177–81. White dismisses such arguments in Tropics, 97. 34. On criticisms of White, see Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Hayden White’s Critique of the Writing of History’, History and Theory, 32 (1993) 273–95; 286–9. 35. Cf. White, Content, 24–5. 36. Quoted in Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History, 2nd edn (2000), 29–30. 37. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge [1979] (Manchester, 1984). Earlier critiques of metanarratives, from Ranke’s in 1824 to Karl Popper and Karl Löwith, are noted in Perez Zagorin, ‘History, the Referent, and Narrative: Reflections on Postmodernism Now’, History and Theory, 38 (1999) 1–24; 6–7. 38. W.H. Walsh, Philosophy of History: An Introduction, rev. edn (New York, 1967), 59–63; W.H. Walsh, ‘Colligatory Concepts in History’, in The Philosophy of History, ed. Patrick Gardiner (Oxford, 1974), 127–44. 39. David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln, NE, 2002), 89 and Ch. 3 passim. 40. White, Tropics, 86, 88. 41. White, Tropics, 90; cf. 87. 42. David Carr, ‘Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity’, History and Theory, 25 (1986) 117–31; quotations below from 122, 125. Cf. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, I, 16–22. 43. ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ [1852], in Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford, 1977), 300; I have altered the translation of ‘Menschen’ from ‘Men’ to ‘People’. 44. Kathleen Canning, ‘Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience’, Signs, 19 (1994) 368–404; 369. 45. Canning, ‘Feminist History’, 370. 46. The secondary literature on Foucault is voluminous. Early studies of continuing importance are Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn (Chicago, 1983); Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (Oxford, 1986). For a recent overview, see The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2003). 47. Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 [1976] (1998); quotations in this paragraph from 93, 95, 92, 94, 95.

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48. ‘The Death of the Author’, in Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, ed. Stephen Heath (1977), 143. 49. ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Michel Foucault, Language, CounterMemory, Practice, ed. D.F. Bouchard (Ithaca, 1977), 148; cf. 151–2, 154–5. 50. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, 150. 51. Quoted in Michael A. Gismondi, ‘“The Gift of Theory”: A Critique of the histoire des mentalités’, Social History, 10 (1985) 213. 52. Patrick H. Hutton, ‘The History of Mentalities: The New Map of Cultural History’, History and Theory, 20 (1981) 237, 238. 53. Gismondi, ‘“The Gift of Theory”’, 212, 222, 229–30; Anna Green, Cultural History (Houndmills, 2008), 34. 54. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 28. Greenblatt discusses Geertz’s influence in Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago, 2000), 20–31. 55. See, for example, Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984); Greenblatt, ‘Invisible Bullets’, in Shakespearean Negotiations, 21–65. 56. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York, 1972), 191. 57. Louis Montrose, ‘Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture’, in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York, 1989), 17. 58. On new historicism, see Veeser, The New Historicism; Jeremy Hawthorn, Cunning Passages: New Historicism, Cultural Materialism and Marxism in the Contemporary Literary Debate (1996); Claire Colebrook, New Literary Histories: New Historicism and Contemporary Criticism (Manchester, 1997); John Brannigan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (Houndmills, 1998). 59. Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, 15; cf. Ezra Pound, Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (1978), 21, 23. 60. Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, Ch. 2 (reiterating Joel Fineman’s argument in ‘The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction’, in Veeser, The New Historicism, 49–76) and 46. 61. On the latter point, see Colebrook, New Literary Histories, 62–4. On the subversion/containment debate, see Alan Liu, ‘The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism’, ELH, 56 (1989) 733–5, 766n.47; Theodore B. Leinwand, ‘Negotiation and New Historicism’, PMLA, 105 (1990) 477–90. Greenblatt’s use of Foucault is criticised by Frank Lentricchia in Veeser, The New Historicism, 231–42. 62. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 64–5. 63. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 2, 3. 64. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 34. 65. Montrose, ‘Professing’, 20–4. 66. The new historicists’ presentism is pilloried in Liu, ‘The Power of Formalism’, 748–52. 67. See Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘Introduction’ in Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn, ed. Gabrielle M. Spiegel (New York, 2005), 1, 4 and passim. 68. These traditions are analysed in Christopher Lloyd, The Structures of History (Oxford and Cambridge, MA, 1993); Malcolm Waters, Modern Sociological Theory (1994); Nicos P. Mouzelis, Modern and Postmodern Social Theorizing: Bridging the Divide (Cambridge, 2008); The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, ed. Bryan S. Turner (Chichester, 2009).

Notes

197

69. ‘A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation’, American Journal of Sociology, 98.1 (July 1992) 1–29; 5. 70. See John B. Thompson, ‘The Theory of Structuration’, in Social Theory of Modern Societies: Anthony Giddens and his Critics, ed. David Held and John B. Thompson (Cambridge, 1989), 56–76. 71. On re-enactment, see R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, ed. Jan van der Dussen (Oxford, 1994), 213–19. 72. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 24. 73. Louis O. Mink, ‘Philosophical Analysis and Historical Understanding’, Review of Metaphysics, 21 (1968) 667–98; 691. 74. Arthur C. Danto, Narration and Knowledge (New York, 2007), 294. 75. Exceptions include some epistolary novels and experiments in present-tense narration. 76. Danto, Narration and Knowledge, 11, 182–3, 284. 77. Danto, Narration and Knowledge, 356. 78. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge, 1975), 75. 79. Danto, Narration and Knowledge, 351–2. 80. That this is easier said than done is demonstrated in Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, Ch. 7. 81. An intermediate level may intervene, if one or more participants have themselves already synthesised the first-order narratives into an interpretive account. 82. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 9; cf. 14–16.

2 The Historical Turn in Fiction 1. For general approaches to contemporary historical fiction, see Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988); Margaret Scanlan, Traces of Another Time: History and Politics in Postwar British Fiction (Princeton, 1990); Elisabeth Wesseling, Writing History as a Prophet: Postmodernist Innovations of the Historical Novel (Amsterdam, 1991); Steven Connor, The English Novel in History, 1950–1995 (1996); Frederick M. Holmes, The Historical Imagination: Postmodernism and the Treatment of the Past in Contemporary British Fiction (Victoria, BC, 1997); David W. Price, History Made, History Imagined: Contemporary Literature, Poiesis, and the Past (Urbana, 1999); Paul Smethurst, The Postmodern Chronotype: Reading Space and Time in Contemporary Fiction (Amsterdam, 2000); Peter Middleton and Tim Woods, Literatures of Memory: History, Time and Space in Postwar Writing (Manchester, 2000); Suzanne Keen, Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction (Toronto, 2001); A.S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays [2001] (2002); Amy J. Elias, Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Baltimore, 2001); Martha Tuck Rozett, Constructing a World: Shakespeare’s England and the New Historical Fiction (Albany, 2003); Mariadele Boccardi, The Contemporary British Historical Novel (Houndmills, 2009). Older studies evince an understanding of history that is either unsophisticated or now superseded: compare Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel (Baltimore, 1971); Harry E. Shaw, The Forms of Historical Fiction (Ithaca, 1983); Neil McEwan, Perspective in British Historical Fiction Today (Houndmills, 1987); David Cowart, History and the Contemporary Novel (Carbondale, 1989).

198

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2. Suzanne Keen addresses the variety of historical fiction in Romances, and ‘The Historical Turn in British Fiction’, in A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction, ed. James F. English (Oxford, 2006), 167–87. 3. Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (Houndmills, 2005). 4. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, rev. edn (Harmondsworth, 1979), 13. 5. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Harmondsworth, 1983), 106. 6. Hutcheon, Poetics, ix. Compare Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (1989), Ch. 3 and passim. 7. Hutcheon, Poetics, 141. 8. Elias, Sublime Desire, xviii. 9. Elias, Sublime Desire, 53. 10. Compare pp. 8–14. 11. Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters [1989] (1990), 245–6. 12. Barnes, A History of the World, 56. 13. Aristotle, ‘On the Art of Poetry’, in Classical Literary Criticism, trans. T.S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth, 1975), 43–4. 14. On fiction as ‘analogous configuration’, see Barbara Foley, Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction (Ithaca, 1986), 67–84. 15. Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (1990), 104. 16. This is also asserted by Dorrit Cohn, in ‘Signposts of Fictionality: A Narratological Perspective’, Poetics Today, 11 (1990) 775–804; 788. 17. Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore, 1998), 24–6. Cf. Ruth Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (Cambridge, 1994), 89. 18. Ann Rigney also denies the autonomy of historical fiction; see Imperfect Histories (Ithaca, 2001), 18–19. Foley, Telling the Truth, discusses mimesis as an intentionally defined social contract. 19. On these conventions, compare Joseph W. Turner, ‘The Kinds of Historical Fiction: An Essay in Definition and Methodology’, Genre, 12 (1979) 333–55. 20. Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Bloomington, 1991), 51–60. 21. Rigney, Imperfect Histories, 23. 22. Ryan, Possible Worlds, 15; Doležel, Heterocosmica, 16–18; Ronen, Possible Worlds, 87–8. Thomas G. Pavel comments in Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, MA, 1986), however, on the varying referential ‘porosity’ or ‘permeability’ of fiction (101–2); in Postmodernist Fiction (1987), 28–9, Brian McHale remarks on overlap or interpenetration between the real world and the internal field of reference of fictional worlds, creating ‘enclaves of ontological difference within the otherwise ontologically homogeneous fictional heterocosm’. On counterparts and versions, see Hilary P. Dannenberg, Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction (Lincoln, NE, 2008), 56. 23. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols (Chicago, 1984–8), III, 129. 24. Dannenberg, Coincidence and Counterfactuality, 60. 25. Ronen notes ‘possible affinities’ and varying distance between fictional worlds and the actual world (Possible Worlds, 94–6). 26. McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 87. 27. On ontological priority, see Pavel, Fictional Worlds, 57–61.

Notes

199

28. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca, 1975). 29. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited (Ithaca, 1988), 17. 30. Gérard Genette, ‘Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative’, Poetics Today, 11 (1990) 755–74; 764. 31. Cohn, ‘Signposts of Fictionality’, 779. 32. Genette, ‘Fictional Narrative’, 761–3. 33. Cohn, ‘Signposts of Fictionality’, 785. 34. Cohn, ‘Signposts of Fictionality’, 789–91. 35. Geoffrey Roberts, ‘Narrative History as a Way of Life’, Journal of Contemporary History, 31 (1996) 221–8; 221. 36. Compare C. Behan McCullagh, The Truth of History (Abingdon, 1998), Ch. 8. 37. Naturalist fiction is of course an exception, in that, for ideological reasons, it emphasises the characters’ social and genetic determination. 38. Cohn, ‘Signposts of Fictionality’, 781. 39. Ryan, Possible Worlds, 4. 40. Dannenberg, Coincidence and Counterfactuality, 6–10, offers a digest. 41. Compare above, 9–10. 42. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, I, 66. 43. Louis O. Mink, ‘Philosophical Analysis and Historical Understanding’, Review of Metaphysics, 21 (1968) 667–98; 687. 44. Nancy F. Partner, ‘Making Up Lost Time: Writing on the Writing of History’, Speculum, 61 (1986) 90–117; 102. 45. Mink, ‘Philosophical Analysis’, 687–8. 46. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA., [1984] 1992), 22–3. 47. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, I, 66–7. 48. Dannenberg, Coincidence and Counterfactuality, 64, 46, 64. 49. On the funnel structure of historical processes, see Lubomír Doležel, ‘Possible Worlds of Fiction and History’, New Literary History, 29 (1998) 785–809; 801. 50. Ross Hassig, ‘Counterfactuals and Revisionism in Historical Explanation’, Anthropological Theory, 1 (2001) 57–72; 59–62. 51. Compare Niall Ferguson, ‘Virtual History: Towards a “Chaotic” Theory of the Past’, in Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, ed. Niall Ferguson (1998), 80–2; Johannes Bulhof, ‘What If? Modality and History’, History and Theory, 38 (1999) 145–68; 146–7. 52. David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln, NE, 2002), 55–6. 53. Compare Hassig, ‘Counterfactuals and Revisionism’, 58–9. 54. For examples, see Ferguson and the What If? collections of essays edited by Robert Cowley. 55. Hassig, ‘Counterfactuals and Revisionism’, 65. 56. Richard Ned Lebow appraises this more positively; see ‘Counterfactual Thought Experiments: A Necessary Teaching Tool’, The History Teacher, 40 (2007) 153–76; 171–3. 57. Compare Bulhof, ‘What If?’, 161. 58. Ryan, Possible Worlds, 124–74, and Claude Bremond, ‘The Logic of Narrative Possibilities’, New Literary History, 11 (1980) 387–411, propose formal taxonomies of plot structures.

200

Notes

59. See Ferguson, ‘Virtual History’, 7–19; Dannenberg, Coincidence and Counterfactuality, 199–207; Wesseling, Writing History, 93–115, 155–91; and the exhaustive bibliography at www.uchronia.net. 60. For a taxonomy, see Dannenberg, Coincidence and Counterfactuality, 120–1, 126–30. 61. Keen, Romances, 140–1; on 144–53 she analyses Norfolk’s rewriting of history. 62. Norfolk is exploiting a historical lacuna: Vaucanson’s elaborate automata, including a mechanical duck capable not only of movement but also ingestion, have disappeared without trace. 63. Jonathan Walker, ‘An Interview with A.S. Byatt and Lawrence Norfolk’, Contemporary Literature, 47 (2006) 319–42; 339. 64. Lawrence Norfolk, Lemprière’s Dictionary [1991] (1997), 485. Hereafter cited in the text. 65. Historical certitude based on ‘solid facts, incontrovertible evidence, and well-preserved memories’ is a generic feature of ‘romances of the archive’ (Keen, Romances, 3). 66. McCullagh, The Truth of History, 178, 179–81. 67. Adapted from Christopher Lloyd, The Structures of History (Oxford and Cambridge, MA, 1993), 159–61; Brian Richardson, Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative (Newark, 1997), 61–88. 68. Richardson also emphasises the collision of incompatible causal systems and the interplay between characters’ and readers’ interpretations of events (38–45). 69. Richardson, Unlikely Stories, 85. 70. Dannenberg, Coincidence and Counterfactuality, 27 and passim. 71. Dannenberg notes the prior but not the prospective aspect; see Coincidence and Counterfactuality, 93–4. 72. Compare Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York, 1967). 73. Lloyd, The Structures of History, 161. 74. Ryan, Possible Worlds, 110–23. 75. Ryan, Possible Worlds, 124–74. 76. See Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel [1937], trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln, NE, 1983); subsequent references are to this edition (including three minor emendations, indicated in square brackets). 77. Ideological contradiction between the author’s conscious standpoint and the repressed meanings which the text betrays has subsequently been conceptualised in Macherey’s theory of symptomatic reading. See Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production [1966] (1978). 78. Lukács, The Historical Novel, 47, and ‘The Intellectual Physiognomy in Characterization’ (1936), in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, trans. Arthur Kahn (Lincoln, NE, 2005), 149–88; 149–55. 79. Lukács, ‘Intellectual Physiognomy’, 154. 80. Lukács, ‘Intellectual Physiognomy’, 155–6. 81. On Nice Work’s conservatism, see Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (Edinburgh, 2007), 100–6. 82. Walker, ‘An Interview with A.S. Byatt and Lawrence Norfolk’, 332. 83. Byatt, On Histories and Stories, 92, 102–14. 84. ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’, in Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Charles Gelpi (New York, 1993), 167.

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201

85. See Herbert Sussman, ‘Cyberpunk Meets Charles Babbage: The Difference Engine as Alternative Victorian History’, VS, 38.1 (Autumn 1994) 1–23. 86. Compare Keen, Romances. 87. Jeanette Winterson, The Passion (1987) and Sexing the Cherry (1989). 88. The historian Katharine Hodgkin makes a similar assessment in ‘The Witch, the Puritan and the Prophet: Historical Novels and Seventeenth-Century History’, in Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women’s Writing, ed. Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn (Houndmills, 2007), 18–19. 89. Compare my discussion of cultural materialism: Ch. 1, 19. 90. On Ackroyd’s ‘increasing equanimity’ towards the influence of the past, see Del Ivan Janik, ‘No End of History: Evidence from the Contemporary English Novel’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 41.2 (1995) 160–89; 173–7.

3 History, Life-Writing and Epistemology 1. Graham Swift, Ever After (1992), 52. 2. Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin [2000] (2001), 632. Hereafter cited in the text. 3. Graham Swift, Waterland [1983] (1984), 92. Hereafter cited in the text. 4. Compare Ch. 1, 8–9 and The Postmodern History Reader, ed. Keith Jenkins (1997), a convenient, if partisan, overview of positions in this debate. 5. Margaret Atwood, ‘In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction’, The American Historical Review, 103 (December 1998) 1503–16; 1515. Atwood emulates Robert Browning’s treatment of a Florentine murder, The Ring and the Book, which furnishes an epigraph for Chapter V of Alias Grace. Her position resembles that of A.S. Byatt, also influenced by Browning, in Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings (1991), 23–4; compare Ch. 5. 6. Atwood, ‘In Search’, 1515. 7. To avoid confusion in references to The Blind Assassin, I refer to Atwood’s novel itself using this full title and to the novel-within-the-novel, The Blind Assassin (New York, 1947), in the abbreviated form BA. 8. Ulric Neisser, ‘Self-narratives: True and False’, in The Remembering Self, ed. Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivush (Cambridge, 1994), 1–18; 2. 9. The term ‘false self’ derives from D.W. Winnicott, ‘Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self’ (1960), in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (1965), 140–52. 10. I allude to D.H. Lawrence, ‘Morality and the Novel’ (1925), in A Selection from Phoenix, ed. A.A.H. Inglis (Harmondsworth, 1979), 177. 11. Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing [2002] (2003). 12. McCrae’s poem is also quoted in Cat’s Eye [1988] (1990), 106–7. 13. J. Brooks Bouson, ‘“A Commemoration of Wounds Endured and Resented”: Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin as Feminist Memoir’, Critique, 44 (Spring 2003) 251–69; 251, 255, 257. In ‘Margaret Atwood’s Discourse of Nation and National Identity in the 1990s’, in The Rhetoric of Canadian Writing, ed. Conny Steenman-Marcusse (Amsterdam, 2002), 199–216, Coral Ann Howells locates The Blind Assassin within Atwood’s other recent demystifications of English–Canadian history.

202

Notes

14. On ‘hegemonic masculinity’, see Tim Carrigan, Bob Connell and John Lee, ‘Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity’, in The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies, ed. Harry Brod (Boston, 1987), 63–100; 91–5; and Raewyn Connell’s Masculinities, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2005). 15. See Atwood, Blind Assassin, pp. 13–14, 93, 573, 582, 607–8. 16. Atwood, Blind Assassin, pp. 11, 12, 19, 429, 436, 522, 569, 574, 611. 17. Ian McEwan, Atonement [2001] (2002), 371. 18. See Adrian Poole, ‘Graham Swift and the Mourning After’, in An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction, ed. Rod Mengham (Cambridge, 1999), 150–67; Wendy Wheeler, ‘Melancholic Modernity and Contemporary Grief: The Novels of Graham Swift’, in Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present, ed. Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks (Harlow, 1999), 63–79; Tamás Bényei, ‘The Novels of Graham Swift: Family Photos’, in Contemporary British Fiction, ed. Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham and Philip Tew (Cambridge, 2003), 40–55; Daniel Lea, Graham Swift (Manchester, 2005); Stef Craps, Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift (Brighton, 2005); Richard Rankin Russell, ‘Embod[y]ments of History and Delayed Confessions: Graham Swift’s Waterland as Trauma Fiction’, Papers on Language and Literature, 45.2 (Spring 2009) 115–49. 19. Russell, ‘Embod[y]ments’, 147; Craps, Trauma and Ethics, 86. 20. This is also Bényei’s conclusion. 21. Contra Wiener, see W.D. Rubinstein, Capitalism, Culture, and Decline in Britain, 1750–1990 (1993). 22. Russell, ‘Embod[y]ments’, 140. 23. Poole, ‘Graham Swift and the Mourning After’, 151. 24. Craps, Trauma and Ethics, 197. 25. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (1989), 56.

4 National Stories 1. See Ch. 1, note 5. 2. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children [1981] (1982), 238. Hereafter cited in the text. 3. Salman Rushdie, Shame [1983] (1984), 28. 4. Tabish Khair, Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Novels (New Delhi, 2001), ix. Timothy Brennan’s placing of Rushdie as a ‘Third-World cosmopolitan author’ in Salman Rushdie and the Third World (Houndmills, 1989), Ch. 4, was less alert to the specifically Indian context. 5. Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York, 1988), 37. On Saleem and Nehru, compare Nicole Weickgenannt Thiara, Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography (Houndmills, 2009), 26–38, 53–4. 6. M. Keith Booker, ‘Midnight’s Children, History, and Complexity: Reading Rushdie after the Cold War’, in Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie, ed. M. Keith Booker (New York, 1999), 294. 7. On ‘the breakdown of the Nehruvian secular consensus’, see Neelam Srivastava, Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel (2008), 2–12. For

Notes

8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

203

Rushdie’s analysis, see Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 [1991] (1992) (hereafter cited as IH ), 27–33, 41–4, 52, 385–7. Compare Salman Rushdie, Step Across this Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992–2002 [2002] (2003), 175–9. See Sujata Patel, ‘Bombay and Mumbai: Identities, Politics, and Populism’, in Bombay and Mumbai: The City in Transition, ed. Sujata Patel and Jim Masselos (New Delhi, 2003), 3–30. Rushdie, Step Across, 195; IH, 9–10. On addressivity, see Harish Trivedi, ‘Salman the Funtoosh: Magic Bilingualism in Midnight’s Children’, in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: A Book of Readings, ed. Meenakshi Mukherjee (Delhi, 1999), 69–94. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), 118, 162, 180. David Lipscomb, ‘Caught in a Strange Middle Ground: Contesting History in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children’, Diaspora, 1 (1991) 163–89. Booker, ‘Midnight’s Children, History, and Complexity’, 293, is also sceptical. Rushdie, Shame, 29. IH, 105. On Gandhi’s omission, see Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World, 84. Patrick Colm Hogan, ‘Midnight’s Children: Kashmir and the Politics of Identity’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 47 (2001) 510–44; 538. On Hummingbird as subaltern, see Weickgenannt Thiara, Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography, 21–2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983); Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Bombay, 1961), 515. Srivastava, Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel, 23. Nehru, Discovery, 563, 562, 517, 62, 517, 521, 519, 520, 394, 382. Nehru, ‘Tryst with Destiny’, in The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, 1947–1997, ed. Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West (1997) 3–4. ‘Boss Patil’ (222) is quoted in Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi (2007), 194–5. Patel, ‘Bombay and Mumbai’, 5. On the Shiv Sena’s initial phase, see Jayant Lele, ‘Saffronization of the Shiv Sena’, in Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India, ed. Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner (Bombay, 1996), 186–95. On anti-Communism, see Booker, ‘Midnight’s Children, History, and Complexity’, 301–3. Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (hereafter MLS) [1995] (1996), 376. Compare Weickgenannt Thiara, Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography, Ch. 5. On the first, compare Weickgenannt Thiara, Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography, Ch. 3; Srivastava, Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel, 32–6. Macaulay’s text is reprinted in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (1995), 428–30. On the reality, see Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004), 43–123, 144–273. Rushdie, Step Across, 220. Rushdie, MLS, 99, 319; The Satanic Verses (1988), 443–6. Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance [1995] (2006); hereafter cited in the text.

204

Notes

34. Rohinton Mistry, Such a Long Journey [1991] (1992), 9–11, 39, 68–9, 270–2, 277–81; Bilimoria is based on the Nagarwala case. 35. ‘Mistry Miffed at Greer’s View of Novel’, Toronto Star, 18 November 1996; Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters (2002), 202–3. 36. Shashi Tharoor, ‘Mixing Pain with Hope’, India Today, 15 March 1996; Mohan Ramanan, ‘Emigré’s View of India’, New Straits Times, 6 November 1996; Nilufer E. Bharucha, Rohinton Mistry ( Jaipur, 2003), 16, 44, 152, 167. 37. Compare Tharoor, and assessments by Jaydipsinh K. Dodiya and Nila Shah in The Novels of Rohinton Mistry: Critical Studies, ed. Jaydipsinh K. Dodiya (New Delhi, 2004), 3, 22, 36, 78, 89. 38. Peter Morey, Rohinton Mistry (Manchester, 2004), 166. 39. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure [1896], ed. Terry Eagleton and P.N. Furbank (1974), 356. 40. On this aspect of the Victorian urban imaginary, see Alan Robinson, Imagining London, 1770–1900 (Houndmills, 2004), 52–61. 41. In Chartism (1839) Thomas Carlyle deplored how capitalism had instrumentalised human relationships, by rendering ‘Cash Payment’ ‘the universal sole nexus of man to man’. See Thomas Carlyle’s Works, The Standard Edition, 18 vols (1904), VII, 292; cf. 293, 297. Carlyle’s criticism of laissez-faire, the ‘Leave-alone principle’, is discussed in Robinson, Imagining London, 61–4. 42. Compare Lele, ‘Saffronization of the Shiv Sena’, 191–4. 43. Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi, 477–92. 44. On the dada, see Patel, ‘Bombay and Mumbai’, 23–4. 45. Compare Gérard Heuzé, ‘Cultural Populism’, in Patel and Thorner, Bombay, 236–8. 46. Mehta, Maximum City, 44. 47. See Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi, 515–16. 48. The consequences of the Rent Act are discussed in Mehta, Maximum City, 126–30. 49. Mistry’s focus on the body and on social dividing lines is emphasised in Morey, Rohinton Mistry, 101–4. 50. Mistry, Family Matters, 407–10, 418–22. 51. Subsequently Yezad retreats into sectarian fanaticism. 52. Valmik’s most significant Yeatsian quotations are from ‘Lapis Lazuli’ (230), ‘Easter 1916’ (229) and ‘The Second Coming’ (230, 566). 53. William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. G.K. Hunter (Harmondsworth, 1977), V.iii.314. 54. Khair, Babu Fictions, 144–5; cf. 324–5. 55. Patel, ‘Bombay and Mumbai’, 28; Rajendra Vora and Suhas Palshikar, ‘Politics of Locality, Community, and Marginalization’, in Patel and Masselos, Bombay and Mumbai, 161; Sandeep Pendse, ‘Satya’s Mumbai; Mumbai’s Satya’, in Patel and Masselos, Bombay and Mumbai, 307–11. 56. The Penguin editions, published in 1995, 2002 and 2005 respectively, abbreviated as WACU, RC and CC, are cited in the text. 57. Compare Pamela Thurschwell, ‘Genre, Repetition and History in Jonathan Coe’, in British Fiction Today, ed. Philip Tew and Rod Mengham (2006), 28–39. 58. This inference is undermined by footnotes in the ‘Henry’ chapter which refer to The Winshaw Legacy as a separate work and comment disparagingly

Notes

59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

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on Michael himself; furthermore, this chapter’s initial ‘editorial’ footnote is dated 1995, that is, a year after Coe’s novel itself was first published. It thus appears that although Michael may have written the other Winshaw chapters, an authorial arranger must have assembled Part One. ‘General Observations’ in the Griffiths Report, http://www.sochealth.co.uk/ history/griffiths.htm. Geoffrey Rivett, National Health Service History, Ch. 4: http://www.nhshistory. net/chapter_4.htm. Compare B.S. Johnson, Introduction to Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? (1973), in The Novel Today, ed. Malcolm Bradbury (Glasgow, 1977), 151–3; Jonathan Coe, Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson (2004). B.S. Johnson, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry [1973] (Harmondsworth, 1984), 27, 165. B.S. Johnson, House Mother Normal [1971] (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1984), 204. WACU, 462; Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, And What Alice Found There (1871), Ch. 4. The mode of Roddy’s murder alludes to Shirley Eaton’s identical screen death in Goldfinger. Colin Hutchinson, Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel (Houndmills, 2008), 8, 53.

5 Present Pasts in Neo-Victorian Fiction 1. Simon Joyce, The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (Athens, OH, 2007), 8–10. 2. This summary draws on assessments of Victorian revivalism in Joyce, The Victorians; Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff (Minneapolis, 2000); Suzanne Keen, Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction (Toronto, 2001), 102–9, 211–16; Kate Mitchell, History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction (Houndmills, 2010), 39–62; Louisa Hadley, Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative (Houndmills, 2010), 6–15. 3. On trauma and ecology, see Marie-Luise Kohlke, ‘Introduction: Speculations in and on the Neo-Victorian Encounter’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1.1 (Autumn 2008) 1–18; 7–9. 4. ‘Interview with John Fowles’, in Katherine Tarbox, The Art of John Fowles (Athens, GA, 1988), 188. 5. John Fowles, on The South Bank Show (1982), quoted in Bruce Woodcock, Male Mythologies: John Fowles and Masculinity (Brighton, 1984), 82. 6. John Fowles, ‘Notes on an Unfinished Novel’, in The Novel Today, ed. Malcolm Bradbury (1977), 140. 7. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman [1969] (Frogmore, 1977), 280, quoting Marx; hereafter cited in the text. 8. Lukács serves as Dan’s mentor in Fowles’s Daniel Martin (1977), where his analysis of Scott’s heroes is quoted approvingly on p. 617 (cf. 559). 9. See Alan Robinson, Imagining London, 1770–1900 (Houndmills, 2004), Ch. 6. In ending the novel in the Rossetti household, Fowles reflected the Pre-Raphaelites’ recent revival from unfashionable oblivion, which was

206

10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

Notes pioneered in the 1960s by Jeremy Maas; Timothy Hilton’s art-historical survey, The Pre-Raphaelites (1970), was the first since 1899. Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford, 1994), 8–20. See Eric Trudgill, ‘Prostitution and Paterfamilias’, in The Victorian City, ed. H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (1973), II, 693–705; and Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalens (1976). On feminist readings, see Bonnie Zare, ‘Reclaiming Masculinist Texts for Feminist Readers: Sarah Woodruff’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman’, Modern Language Studies, 27.3–4 (1997) 175–95. Carol M. Barnum, The Fiction of John Fowles: A Myth for Our Time (Greenwood, FL, 1988) is the most single-minded Jungian interpretation. ‘Notes’, 136. Fowles terms Charles his ‘surrogate’ in ‘Hardy and the Hag’, in Thomas Hardy After Fifty Years, ed. Lance St John Butler (1977), 35. Robinson, Imagining London, 207–8. Woodcock, Male Mythologies, 82. W.R. Greg, ‘Why Are Women Redundant?’, National Review, 14 (1862) 434–60, discussed in Robinson, Imagining London, 206–7. On the narrator’s male contradictions, compare Woodcock, Male Mythologies, 90–1. Elizabeth Mansfield, ‘A Sequence of Endings: The Manuscripts of The French Lieutenant’s Woman’, Journal of Modern Literature, 8.2 (1980–1) 275–86; 280. Compare John Fowles, The Journals, ed. Charles Drazin, 2 vols (2003–6), II, 4–5, 10–11, 22–4. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique [1963] (1992), 38. Eileen Warburton, John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds (New York, 2004), 267; Fowles, Journals, I, 641–2. Warburton, John Fowles, 291–2; Fowles, Journals, II, 23–4. Mansfield, ‘A Sequence of Endings’, 280–1. A.S. Byatt, Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings (1991), 174; Byatt, On Histories and Stories [2000] (2001), 79. On Byatt’s ambivalent feminism, see Jane Campbell, A.S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination (Waterloo, ON, 2004), 15–25. Hawthorne refers to the ‘latitude’ of Romance in Possession’s first epigraph. A.S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance [1990] (1991), 276, 421; hereafter cited in the text. Dana Shiller, ‘The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel’, Studies in the Novel, 29.4 (1997) 538–60; 551. On coherence and closure, see Tim S. Gauthier, Narrative Desire and Historical Reparations (2006), 56, 60–7; on remaining indeterminacy, see Campbell, A.S. Byatt, 139–41, and Gauthier, Narrative Desire, 56–60. Later Byatt even satisfied readers’ curiosity about Maud’s and Roland’s marriage and daughter: see Maud Michell-Bailey, ‘Letter to the Editor’, Victorian Poetry, 33.1 (1995) 1–3. ‘Interview with A.S. Byatt’, in Jonathan Noakes and Margaret Reynolds, A.S. Byatt (2004), 20. As Keen also remarks, in Romances, 53–5, 57–8. Byatt, Possession, Hawthorne epigraph; 165. See, for example, E. Warwick Slinn’s Derridean ‘Language and Truth in The Ring and the Book’, Victorian Poetry, 27.3–4 (1989) 115–33.

Notes

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35. Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book (1868–9), ed. Richard D. Altick (Harmondsworth, 1971), I, 839–85. 36. Browning, The Ring and the Book, XII, 14–18; cf. I, 658–78. 37. ‘Epilogue’ to Dramatis Personae, ll. 22–5, in Robert Browning, The Poems, ed. John Pettigrew and Thomas J. Collins, 2 vols (Harmondsworth, 1981), I, 863. 38. Browning, ‘Epilogue’, ll. 43–9. 39. Browning, Poems, I, 787–804; l. 133. 40. Browning, Poems, l. 465. 41. Browning, Poems, ll. 455, 295. E.S. Shaffer makes the latter point in ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Fall of Jerusalem (Cambridge, 1975), 208–11, which Byatt commends in Passions, 334. 42. Browning, The Ring and the Book, I, 451–68, 679–706. 43. Browning, The Ring and the Book, X, 1263, 1284–9; cf. X, 211–81, and full argument in 1238–418. 44. Browning, ‘A Death in the Desert’, ll. 208–10, Poems, I, 793. 45. Keats, Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (1975), 36–7; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria [1817], ed. George Watson (1971), 169. 46. Ronald A. Bosco, ‘The Brownings and Mrs. Kinney: A Record of Their Friendship’, Browning Institute Studies, 4 (1976) 57–124; 85–90, 98–100, 109–11; Dorothy Mermin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Chicago, 1989), 179–80; Browning, Poems, I, 821–60. 47. On this power, see Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Nineteenth-Century England (1989), 1–17. 48. ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’, in W.H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (1976), 197. 49. This is Byatt’s own procedure, which resembles intellectual historian Quentin Skinner’s; cf. Byatt, On Histories and Stories, 94. 50. Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (1977), 143. 51. T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 3rd edn (1951), 14. 52. Christien Franken, A.S. Byatt: Art, Authorship, Creativity (Houndmills, 2001), 92. 53. Byatt, Passions, 3. 54. Compare Martha Vicinus, ‘“They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong”: The Historical Roots of the Modern Lesbian Identity’, Feminist Studies, 18.3 (1992) 467–97; Anna Clark, ‘Anne Lister’s Construction of Lesbian Identity’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 7.1 (1996) 23–50; Judith M. Bennett, ‘“Lesbian-Like” and the Social History of Lesbianisms’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 9.1–2 (2000) 1–24. 55. Bennett, ‘“Lesbian-Like”’, 2; cf. Clark, ‘Anne Lister’s Construction’, 26–7. 56. Quoted in Valerie Traub, ‘The Rewards of Lesbian History’, Feminist Studies, 25.2 (1999) 363–94; 380. 57. Liz Stanley, ‘Romantic Friendship? Some Issues in Researching Lesbian History and Biography’, Women’s History Review, 1.2 (1992) 193–216; 210. 58. Stanley, ‘Romantic Friendship’, 196–7. 59. Stanley, ‘Romantic Friendship’, 202. 60. Laura Doan and Sarah Waters, ‘Making up Lost Time: Contemporary Lesbian Writing and the Invention of History’, in Territories of Desire in Queer Culture: Refiguring Contemporary Boundaries, ed. David Alderson and Linda Anderson (Manchester, 2000), 12–28; 13. Subsequent quotations are from pp. 15–16, 18, 19.

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61. Compare Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York, 1993). 62. Waters interview (2006) with Seraphina Granelli for Libertas; Abigail Dennis, ‘“Ladies in Peril”: Sarah Waters on Neo-Victorian Narrative Celebrations and Why She Stopped Writing about the Victorian Era’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1.1 (Autumn 2008) 41–52; 48. 63. Dennis, ‘“Ladies in Peril”’, 49; first emphasis mine. 64. Waters, Interview with Ron Hogan: http://www.indiebound.org/authorinterviews/waterssarah; Waters, Interview with Debbie Taylor, Mslexia, 20 (January/February/March 2004): http://www.mslexia.co.uk/magazine/ interviews/interview_20.php; Waters, ‘Her Thieving Hands’, an interview in The Bookseller [2003?] reproduced on Waters’s Virago author features page: http://www.virago.co.uk/author_results.asp?SF1=data&ST1=feature&REF=e2 006111617063697&SORT=author_id&TAG=&CID=&PGE=&LANG=EN. 65. Dennis, ‘“Ladies in Peril”’, 49. On women’s mobility in late nineteenthcentury London, see Robinson, Imagining London, 222. 66. Waters, Interview with Hogan. 67. Waters, Interview with Hogan. 68. Sue Morgan, ‘Theorising Feminist History: A Thirty-year Retrospective’, Women’s History Review, 18.3 (2009) 381–407; 389. 69. Sarah Waters, Affinity [1999] (2000), 130; hereafter cited in the text. 70. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations [1860-1], ed. Margaret Cardwell (Oxford, 1994), 212. 71. See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (1995); Barry Reay, Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror and Bodily De-formation in Victorian England (2002); Diane Atkinson, Love and Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick (2003). 72. Martha Vicinus, ‘Lesbian Perversity and Victorian Marriage: The 1864 Codrington Divorce Trial’, Journal of British Studies, 36.1 (1997) 70–98; 71. 73. Vicinus, ‘Lesbian Perversity’, 87. 74. Vicinus, ‘Lesbian Perversity’, 92; cf. 81. 75. Vicinus, ‘Lesbian Perversity’, 94. 76. For actual precedents adapted by Waters, see Owen, The Darkened Room, 216–21, 227–31. 77. Marie-Luise Kohlke discusses Margaret’s self-narrative in ‘Into History through the Back Door: The “Past Historic” in Nights at the Circus and Affinity’, Women: A Cultural Review, 15.2 (2004) 153–66; 159–61. 78. On panopticism in Affinity, see Paulina Palmer, ‘Lesbian Gothic: Genre, Transformation, Transgression’, Gothic Studies, 6.1 (2004) 118–30; 126; Mark Llewellyn, ‘“Queer? I should say it is criminal!”: Sarah Waters’s Affinity (1999)’, Journal of Gender Studies, 13.3 (2004) 203–14; 204–10; Lucie Armitt and Sarah Gamble, ‘The Haunted Geometries of Sarah Waters’s Affinity’, Textual Practice, 20.1 (2006) 141–59; 142–9. 79. Armitt and Gamble discuss Ruth’s controlling invisibility and Margaret’s visibility in ‘The Haunted Geometries’, 152–4. 80. Mid-century opinion is discussed in Jeannette King, The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction (Houndmills, 2005), 22; Llewellyn, ‘“Queer? I should say it is criminal!”’, 207–8, notes Margaret’s hysteria. 81. Compare Clark, ‘Anne Lister’s Construction’. 82. Parallels with Gilman’s protagonist are evident on 242, 289, 292–3.

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83. The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (1969), 190. 84. Armitt and Gamble also comment on Margaret’s identity crisis (‘The Haunted Geometries’, 157–8). 85. Llewellyn, ‘“Queer? I should say it is criminal!”’, 213. 86. Armitt and Gamble, ‘The Haunted Geometries’, 142.

6 Gothic Afterlives 1. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, 2001), xiv. For perceptive comment on memorialisation, see Andreas Huyssen, ‘Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia’, Public Culture, 12.1 (2000) 21–38. 2. Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley, ‘The Modalities of Nostalgia’, Current Sociology, 54 (2006) 919–41; 920. 3. Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the “Spectral Turn”’, Textual Practice, 16.3 (2002) 527–46; 527, 531–3, 535. 4. On the marginality of Bangladeshis and Bengalis in Sinclair’s East End, see Peter Brooker, Modernity and Metropolis: Writing, Film and Urban Formations (Houndmills, 2002), 97–105; Brian Baker, Iain Sinclair (Manchester, 2007), 94–5. 5. See Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Harmondsworth, 1984); William J. Fishman, East End 1888 (1988); Alan Robinson, Imagining London, 1770–1900 (Houndmills, 2004), 52–61; Robert F. Haggard, ‘Jack the Ripper as the Threat of Outcast London’, in Jack the Ripper: Media, Culture, History, ed. Alexandra Warwick and Martin Willis (Manchester, 2007), 197–214; Jack the Ripper and the East End, ed. Alex Werner with an Introduction by Peter Ackroyd (2008); Paul Newland, The Cultural Construction of London’s East End: Urban Iconography, Modernity and the Spatialisation of Englishness (Amsterdam, 2008), Ch. 2. 6. Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London is reprinted in The Metropolitan Poor: Semi-Factual Accounts, 1795–1910, ed. John Marriott and Masaie Matsumura, 6 vols (1999), VI, 80–100. For related publications in 1884–6, see III, 56–124; VI, 101–253. 7. On late Victorian Gothic, see Glennis Byron, ‘Gothic in the 1890s’, in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Oxford, 2000), 132–41; Kelly Hurley, ‘British Gothic Fiction, 1885–1930’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge, 2002), 189–207. 8. ‘S.G.O.’, ‘At Last’, Times, 18 September 1888. Compare ‘The Nemesis of Neglect’, Punch, 95 (29 September 1888) 150–[1]. 9. Fishman, East End 1888, 223–8. 10. The latter point is made in John Marriott’s survey of Whitechapel history, ‘The Imaginative Geography of the Whitechapel Murders’, in Werner, Jack the Ripper and the East End, 34. 11. For excellent analysis of Braudel’s methodology, see Samuel Kinser, ‘Annaliste Paradigm? The Geohistorical Structuralism of Fernand Braudel’, The American Historical Review, 86.1 (February 1981) 63–105. 12. See Fernand Braudel, ‘History and the Social Sciences’ [1958], in On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (1980), 27–34. On Braudel’s personification of geographical space as the ‘actor’ ‘behind all of human history’, see Kinser, ‘Annaliste Paradigm?’, 67–8, 72.

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13. On this point, see Kinser, ‘Annaliste Paradigm?’ and Lynn Hunt, ‘French History in the Last Twenty Years: The Rise and Fall of the Annales Paradigm’, Journal of Contemporary History, 21.2 (April 1986) 209–24; 214. 14. Reinhart Koselleck, Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt a.M., 2000), 9; my translation. Subsequent references are to this edition. 15. Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (2001); hereafter cited in the text. 16. Ackroyd, London, 115, 139, 24, 627, 632–3, 141, 602–3, 718. Ackroyd’s ‘getting and spending’ (602) echoes ‘The world is too much with us’, in William Wordsworth, The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden, 2 vols (Harmondsworth, 1977), I, 568–9. 17. Ackroyd, London, 15, 273, 280, 301, 635, 766, 519. 18. See ‘The Human Abstract’, in The Poems of William Blake, ed. W.H. Stevenson (1971), 216. 19. For Ackroyd’s championship of England’s Catholic culture, see Ackroyd, The Collection, ed. Thomas Wright (2001), 336–40, 353, 366. 20. Ackroyd, London, 661; cf. Ackroyd, The Collection, 343. 21. In the case of the violence at the Broadwater Farm Estate in 1985, Ackroyd unusually includes some sociological factors in his reflections on this area’s ‘prevalent instinct towards riot’ (London, 492). 22. Ackroyd, London, 669; cf. the remarks on ‘echoic effects’ in Clerkenwell (474). Ackroyd refers to Sheldrake in The Collection, 339, while Sinclair notes Sheldrake’s influence in The Verbals: Kevin Jackson in Conversation with Iain Sinclair (Tonbridge, 2003), 100. For Sheldrake’s theory, see Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life [1981], 2nd edn (1987) and The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988). 23. Ackroyd, The Collection, 342. 24. Jan Assmann expounded his concept of ‘cultural memory’ in Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich, 1992). 25. Ackroyd, London, 341, 465, where the latter statement is quoted from Henry James’s description of Craven Street; cf. similar comments on 131, 502–6. 26. Peter Ackroyd, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem [1994] (1995), 46–7, 116–17, 243, 246; hereafter cited in the text. 27. See the ‘Postscript’ to ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, in Thomas De Quincey, The English Mail-Coach and Other Essays, ed. John E. Jordan (1961), 87–133. 28. For information on the Maybrick hoax, see the leading Ripperologist website: www.casebook.org. 29. The metafictional aspect of Dan Leno is emphasised in Susana Onega, Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd (Columbia, SC, 1999), 133–47, and Jeremy Gibson and Julian Wolfreys, Peter Ackroyd: The Ludic and Labyrinthine Text (Houndmills, 2000), 200–11. 30. On counterparts, cf. Ch. 2, 29–30. 31. Ackroyd, Dan Leno, 114, 120; cf. ‘The Tables Turned’, in Wordsworth, Poems, I, 357. 32. Compare Ackroyd’s contemporaneous comments on Dan Leno, ‘a Cockney visionary’, in The Collection, 341–2, 349–51. 33. Ackroyd, Dan Leno, 53, 68, 73–4, 20, 265.

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34. Justice, 15 September 1888, quoted in Fishman, East End 1888, 226. 35. De Quincey applied the epithet ‘scourge of God’ to John Williams, the Ratcliff Highway murderer; see ‘On Murder’, 91. 36. Iain Sinclair, Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge (1998); the quotations in this paragraph are from 15, 20, 17, 21, 23. 37. Compare the mythography of the Krays as Hand and Hyle in Suicide Bridge (1979) and the account of their funeral in Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory [1997] (1998), 68–87. 38. On the artist as shaman, cf. Sinclair, Lights Out, 240. 39. On Hinton and Gull, see Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, 2004), 14–18, and the respective entries by Neil Weir and Nick Hervey in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 40. Sinclair, Lud Heat, 29; Sinclair, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings [1987] (2004), 139; Iain Sinclair, ‘Introduction’ to Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, ed. Ed Glinert (2001), xviii. 41. Sinclair, WCST, 118 (cf. 140–1); WCST, 118, 120. 42. Sinclair, ‘Introduction’, xvii; WCST, 49–51, 121–2. 43. Stuart Jeffries, ‘On the Road’, Guardian, 24 April 2004; Sinclair, The Verbals, 115–16, 120. 44. Sinclair, The Verbals, 71–2, 74–5. 45. In Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair, Rodinsky’s Room [1999] (2000), 63, Sinclair concedes this. 46. Jeffries, ‘On the Road’. 47. See Patrick Wright, A Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London (1991), 99–111, and ‘The Fall from Grace and Favour’, Guardian, 6 May 1992. 48. Lichtenstein and Sinclair, Rodinsky’s Room, 63–4. On Sinclair’s place within the rebranding of the East End, see David Cunningham, ‘Living in the Slashing Grounds: Jack the Ripper, Monopoly Rent and the New Heritage’, in Warwick and Willis, Jack the Ripper, 169–73. 49. Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, From Hell (2000), Appendix I, 33; Moore acknowledges his indebtedness to Lud Heat in From Hell, 3, 11; Sinclair comments on From Hell in Lights Out, 125–7, 145, and on its film adaptation in ‘Jack the Rip-off’, Observer, 27 January 2002. 50. See Sinclair, Downriver [1991] (2004), 247–78 (quotations from 274, 250) and Lights Out, 51–2. 51. Sinclair, Downriver, 173, cf. Lichtenstein and Sinclair, Rodinsky’s Room, 6–7; Sinclair, Downriver, 145–50, 179–85. 52. On affinities between Ackroyd and Severs’s house, see Alex Murray, Recalling London: Literature and History in the Work of Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair (2007), 175–7. 53. Luckhurst, ‘The Contemporary London Gothic’, 536–42.

7 After the Event 1. Paul Lerner and Mark S. Micale, ‘Trauma, Psychiatry, and History: A Conceptual and Historiographical Introduction’, in Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930, ed. Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner (Cambridge, 2001), 3.

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2. Cathy Caruth, ‘Introduction’, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, 1995), 4. 3. International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 10th Revision, Version for 2007, sections F43–4: http://apps.who.int/ classifications/apps/icd/icd10online. Compare Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edn (DSM-IV): http://allpsych.com/disorders/ dsm.html. 4. Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols, XVIII (1955), 1–64; 32. 5. Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart, ‘The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma’, in Caruth, Trauma, 169–78. 6. Pat Barker, Another World [1998] (1999), 83. 7. Sheryl Stevenson, ‘With the Listener in Mind’, in Critical Perspectives on Pat Barker, ed. Sharon Monteith, Margaretta Jolly, Nahem Yousaf and Ronald Paul (Columbia, SC, 2005), 175, 178; Caroline Garland, ‘Conversation between Pat Barker and Caroline Garland’, Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 77 (2004) 185–99; 186–8. 8. Stevenson, ‘With the Listener in Mind’, 179. 9. Stevenson, ‘With the Listener in Mind’, 179. References to Regeneration [1991] (1992), The Eye in the Door [1993] (1994), and The Ghost Road [1995] (1996), abbreviated as R, E, and GR, are given in my text. 10. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 [1985] (1987), 167–94. On the evolution of this historiography, see Peter Leese, ‘“Why Are They Not Cured?” British Shellshock Treatment During the Great War’, in Micale and Lerner, Traumatic Pasts, 205; Tracey Loughran, ‘Masculinity, Shell Shock, and Emotional Survival in the First World War’, Reviews in History: http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/ review/944. 11. Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I [1979] (Cambridge, 1981), 164. 12. Showalter, The Female Malady, 172. Showalter’s interpretation is assessed critically in Laurinda Stryker, ‘Mental Cases: British Shellshock and the Politics of Interpretation’, in Evidence, History and the Great War, ed. Gail Braybon (New York, 2003), 154–71. 13. R, 107–8; cf. Showalter, The Female Malady, 173–4 and R, 222. 14. Showalter, The Female Malady, 171. 15. W.H.R. Rivers, Conflict and Dream (1923), 22–32. 16. See Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves [2000] (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 86–7. 17. Rivers, Conflict, 110–11, 150, 176–7; Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious (Cambridge, 1920), 162–6. 18. Nahem Yousaf and Sharon Monteith, ‘Introduction’, in Monteith et al., Critical Perspectives on Pat Barker, xii. 19. Shephard, ‘Digging Up the Past’, TLS, 22 March 1996. 20. Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (1990), x. On Barker’s negotiation of belatedness, see John Brannigan, Pat Barker (Manchester, 2005), 96–100; Mark Rawlinson, Pat Barker (Houndmills, 2010), 65–8; Karen Patrick Knutsen, Reciprocal Haunting: Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy (Münster, 2010), passim.

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21. Gail Braybon surveys historiography on women and the war in ‘Winners or Losers: Women’s Symbolic Role in the War Story’, in Braybon, Evidence, History and the Great War, 86–112. 22. Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Glory of Women’, in Collected Poems (1947), 79. 23. Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, rev. edn [1957] (Harmondsworth, 1965), 187–91. 24. Compare R, 34 with Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer [1930] (1978), 196 and Graves, Goodbye to All That, 211. 25. Sassoon, Memoirs, 205; Wilfred Owen, ‘Apologia pro Poemate Meo’, in The Complete Poems and Fragments, ed. Jon Stallworthy, 2 vols (1983), I, 125. 26. Owen, Complete Poems, I, 175–7. 27. Sassoon, ‘Does it Matter?’, Collected Poems, 76. 28. Sassoon, Memoirs, 205–6, 221. 29. Sassoon, Collected Poems, 74–5. 30. Owen, Complete Poems, I, 174. 31. R, 188–90; cf. Sassoon, Memoirs, 203. 32. Compare Sassoon, ‘Survivors’, Collected Poems, 90. 33. Compare GR, 146–7 with Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory [1975] (1979), 299–306. 34. Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation [1976] (1979), 21. 35. Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows [1938] (1985), 46. 36. Isherwood, Lions and Shadows, 128. W.H. Auden advances similar views in The English Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (1977), 126–9, 150, 320–1. 37. Garland, ‘Conversation’, 186; compare the aggression in Newcastle’s Bigg Market depicted in Barker, Another World, 1–3. 38. Quoted in Shephard, War, 139–40. 39. Compare Graves, Goodbye to All That, 226 with R, 74; E, 158–9. 40. See Hynes, War, 145ff., and, on Foucauldian aspects of E, Sharon Monteith, Pat Barker (Tavistock, 2002), 61–2; Brannigan, Pat Barker, 109–10. 41. On the unconscious origins of the latter, see Rivers, Instinct, 11–13, 19. 42. Rivers, Instinct, 170–8. 43. W.H.R. Rivers, ‘The Psychological Factor’, in Essays on the Depopulation of Melanesia, ed. Rivers (Cambridge, 1922), 93. 44. Rivers, ‘The Psychological Factor’, 101–2. 45. Rivers, ‘The Psychological Factor’, 108–9. 46. W.G. Sebald, interview with Michaël Zeeman, in W.G. Sebald: History – Memory – Trauma, ed. Scott Denham and Mark McCulloh (Berlin, 2006), 27–8. 47. Volker Hage, ‘Volker Hage im Gespräch mit W.G. Sebald’, Akzente, 50.1 (2003) 35–50; 36. This and subsequent unattributed translations from German are mine. 48. Hage, ‘Volker Hage im Gespräch’, 48. 49. W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York, 2004), 10. 50. Maya Jaggi, ‘The Last Word’, Guardian, 21 December 2001; compare Eleanor Wachtel, ‘Ghost Hunter’, Michael Silverblatt, ‘A Poem of an Invisible Subject’, and Joseph Cuomo, ‘A Conversation with W.G. Sebald’, in The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald, ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (New York, 2007), 44, 84–5, 105.

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Notes

51. Sebald, Natural History, 7. 52. Sebald, Natural History, 13. 53. Anne Fuchs, ‘Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte’. Zur Poetik der Erinnerung in W.G. Sebalds Prosa (Cologne, 2004), 155. Graham Jackman summarises successive German postwar attitudes to the Third Reich in ‘Introduction’, German Life and Letters, 57.4 (2004) 343–7. 54. Sebald, Natural History, 76–7. 55. Maya Jaggi, ‘Recovered Memories’, Guardian, 22 September 2001; Carole Angier, ‘Who Is W.G. Sebald?’, in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 65. 56. Sebald, Natural History, 70. 57. Sebald, Natural History, 71. 58. Sebald, Natural History. 59. W.G. Sebald, Nach der Natur. Ein Elementargedicht (Nördlingen, 1988), 73–7. 60. W.G. Sebald, Vertigo, trans. Michael Hulse [1999] (2002), 179–80; Sebald, Nach der Natur, 76; Sebald, Vertigo, 182–3; Sebald, Campo Santo, trans. Anthea Bell [2005] (2006), 216; Sebald, Vertigo, 240–1. 61. Arthur Lubow, ‘Crossing Boundaries’, in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 171. 62. Sebald, Campo Santo, 213–14. 63. Sebald, Campo Santo, 214. 64. Sebald, Campo Santo, 210. 65. Sebald, Natural History, viii–ix. 66. Angier, ‘Who Is W.G. Sebald?’, 66–7; cf. Sebald, Vertigo, 184–5. 67. Hage, ‘Volker Hage im Gespräch mit W.G. Sebald’, 35–6; Lubow, ‘Crossing Boundaries’, 161; Sebald, Vertigo, 186–7; Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (1996), 30. 68. Sebald, Vertigo, 181–2. 69. Wachtel, ‘Ghost Hunter’, 48; Angier, ‘Who Is W.G. Sebald?’, 65; Sebald, Campo Santo, 216–17. 70. Cuomo, ‘A Conversation with W.G. Sebald’, 106–7. 71. Compare W.G. Sebald, Logis in einem Landhaus (Munich, 1998), 12. 72. Cuomo, ‘A Conversation with W.G. Sebald’, 106. 73. Wachtel, ‘Ghost Hunter’, 43–7. 74. W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell [2001] (2002), 60–1; hereafter cited in the text. 75. Jaggi, ‘Recovered’. 76. Mary Cosgrove remarks Sebald’s affiliation with German- and Austro-Jewish writers in ‘The Anxiety of German Influence: Affiliation, Rejection, and Jewish Identity in W.G. Sebald’s Work’, in German Memory Contests, ed. Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove and Georg Grote (Rochester, NY, 2006), 232, 235–7. 77. Compare W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Munich, 2001), 37. 78. Hage, ‘Volker Hage im Gespräch mit W.G. Sebald’, 44. 79. Fuchs, “Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte”, 28–39, exemplifies the consensus. Brad Prager, ‘The Good German as Narrator: On W.G. Sebald and the Risks of Holocaust Writing’, New German Critique, 96 (Fall 2005) 75–102, voices scepticism. Peter Morgan, ‘“Your Story is now My Story”: The Ethics of Narration in Grass and Sebald’, Monatshefte, 101.2 (2009) 186–206, and Cosgrove, ‘The Anxiety of German Influence’, 234, 238–9, criticise Sebald’s identification with Jewish victims.

Notes

215

80. Freud, ‘Family Romances’, in Standard Edition, IX (1959), 235–42. 81. Angier, ‘Who Is W.G. Sebald?’, 64; Jaggi,‘Recovered’. 82. Ruth Vogel-Klein, ‘Französische Intertexte in W.G. Sebalds Austerlitz’, in W.G. Sebald. Intertextualität und Topographie, ed. Irene Heidelberger-Leonard and Mireille Tabah (Münster, 2008), 78. 83. Wachtel, ‘Ghost Hunter’, 38; Angier, ‘Who Is W.G. Sebald?’, 69–70. 84. Hage, ‘Volker Hage im Gespräch mit W.G. Sebald’, 43. 85. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt [1970] (1977), 257. Stuart Taberner discusses Benjaminian metaphors in Austerlitz in ‘German Nostalgia? Remembering German-Jewish Life in W.G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten and Austerlitz‘, Germanic Review, 3 (2004) 181–202; 192–4. 86. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 461. 87. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 462–3. 88. Benjamin, Illuminations, 259–60; Sebald, Natural History, 67–8. 89. W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York, [1998] 1999), 3. 90. On Sebald and modernity, see Amir Eshel, ‘Against the Power of Time: The Poetics of Suspension in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz’, New German Critique, 88 (Winter 2003) 71–96; 83–91. 91. Sebald, Campo Santo, 215.

Index Note: ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates a note on that page. Abdullah, Sheikh Muhammad, 88 Ackroyd, Peter, xii, 21, 25, 30–1, 50, 52, 149, 150–1, 152–60, 163, 165–6, 167, 168, 201, 209, 210, 211; Blake, 155; Chatterton, 26, 50; The Collection, 210; Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, 150, 156–60; First Light, 52; Hawksmoor, 25, 157, 160; London: The Biography, 150, 153–6, 157, 158, 159, 168 Acton, William, 123 Adler, H.G., 187, 189 Adorno, Theodor W., 191 agency, 3–4, 14–24, 32–3, 33–4, 37, 38–9, 43, 44–5, 46, 52, 61–2, 63, 64–5, 65–6, 84, 93–4, 95–6, 99–100, 108–19, 122–4, 145–9 compare structuration, structure Alderson, David, 207 Altdorfer, Albrecht, 184; Lot and his Daughters, 184 Althusser, Louis, 15, 19, 128 Améry, Jean, 187–8, 190 anachronism, see cognitive asymmetry, ontological presence of past, presentism, present past, remembering self Anderson, Benedict, 89, 203 Anderson, Linda, 207 Angier, Carole, 214, 215 Ankersmit, Frank, 8, 10, 13, 27, 194, 195 Annales school, the, see historiography, history Aristotle, 28, 29, 97, 134, 198 Armitt, Lucie, 146, 149, 208, 209 Arnold, Matthew, 62, 122; ‘To Marguerite’, 122 Assmann, Jan, 156, 210 Atkinson, Diane, 208 Attenborough, Richard, 88; Gandhi, 88

Atwood, Margaret, xii, xiii, 39, 57–73, 193, 201, 202; Alias Grace, 58–9, 201 n. 5; The Blind Assassin, xii, 39, 57–73, 79, 83; Cat’s Eye, 70, 201 n. 12; Negotiating with the Dead, 70, 71, 72; Surfacing, 58 Auden, W.H., 136, 207, 213 Auerbach, Erich, 18 Augustine, Saint, 13 Babbage, Charles, 157–8 Bailey, Peter, 142 Baker, Brian, 209 Balzac, Honoré de, 45, 97 Barker, Pat, xiii, 35, 171–82, 212, 213; Another World, 171, 212, 213; The Eye in the Door, 172, 175, 178, 179–80, 181, 212, 213; The Ghost Road, 35, 173, 176–8, 180–2, 212, 213; Regeneration, xiii, 171–2, 174, 175–6, 178, 180–1, 212, 213 Barnes, Julian, 25, 26, 27, 50, 198; Flaubert’s Parrot, 25, 50; A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, 26, 27 Barnum, Carol M., 206 Barthes, Roland, 9, 15, 16, 138, 139, 149, 196, 207; ‘The Death of the Author’, 138 Bartlett, Neil, 143; Who Was That Man?, 143 Bauman, Zygmunt, 191 Benjamin, Walter, 191–2, 215 Bennett, Judith M., 141, 207 Bentham, Jeremy, 157 Bényei, Tamás, 202 Bergson, Henri, 25 Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr, 194, 197 Beuys, Joseph, 161 Bharucha, Nilufer E., 204 Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 95

216

Index Billing, Noel Pemberton, 180 Blake, William, 40, 153, 154, 155, 158, 210; The Book of Urizen, 158; ‘The Human Abstract’, 155; Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion, 40, 154; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 155 Bloom, Harold, 7, 194 Boabdil, see Muhammad XII of Granada Boccardi, Mariadele, 197 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 29 Booker, M. Keith, 202, 203 Booth, Charles, 151, 158; Life and Labour of the People of London, 158 Borges, Jorge Luis, 72 Bosco, Ronald A., 207 Bose, Subhas Chandra, 88 Botticelli, Sandro, 138; La Primavera, 138 Bouchard, D. F., 196 Bourdieu, Pierre, 20 Bouson, J. Brooks, 70, 201 Boym, Svetlana, 209 Bradbury, Malcolm, 205 Brakhage, Stan, 161; The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, 161 Brannigan, John, 196, 212, 213 Braudel, Fernand, 153, 209 Braybon, Gail, 212, 213 Brecht, Bertolt, 103; The Good Person of Szechwan, 103 Bremond, Claude, 199 Brennan, Timothy, 202, 203 Brod, Harry, 202 Brontë, Charlotte, 26; Jane Eyre, 26, 49 Brooker, Peter, 209 Brooks, Peter, 36, 193, 199 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 48, 128, 134–5, 148, 207; Aurora Leigh, 148 Browning, Robert, 48, 129–35, 137, 139, 144, 201 n. 5, 207; ‘A Death in the Desert’, 132; ‘Epilogue’ to Dramatis Personae, 131–2; ‘Mr Sludge, “The Medium”’, 135; The Ring and the Book, 130, 131, 132–3, 201 n. 5 Bruner, Jerome, 5 Buchanan, Robert Williams, 149; ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’, 149

217

Bulhof, Johannes, 199 Burke, Edmund, 40, 41 Burne-Jones, Edward, 63, 158; The Golden Stairs, 158 Bush, George Herbert Walker, 118 Butler, Lance St John, 206 Byatt, A.S., xii, xiii, 7, 48, 49, 50, 127–40, 197, 200, 201 n. 5, 206, 207; ‘The Conjugial Angel’, 48; On Histories and Stories, 127, 200, 206, 207; ‘Morphio Eugenia’, 50; Passions of the Mind, 127, 130, 132, 133, 134, 201 n. 5, 206, 207; Possession, xii, xiii, 7, 48, 50, 127–40, 206 Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron, 139, 148 Byron, Glennis, 209 Calvin, Jean, 43 Campbell, Eddie, 166, 211; From Hell, 166, 211 Campbell, Jane, 206 Canning, Kathleen, 195 Carey, Peter, 26, 48, 49; Jack Maggs, 48, 49 Carlyle, Thomas, 101, 137, 204; Chartism, 204 n. 41 Carr, David, 13–14, 195 Carrigan, Tim, 202 Carroll, Lewis, 117, 205 Carroll, Noel, 194 Carter, Angela, 25, 26, 52, 128; Nights at the Circus, 25, 52 Caruth, Cathy, 212 Castle, Terry, 142, 208 Castro, Inés de, 133 The Cat and the Canary (dir. Elliott Nugent), 117 Catling, Brian, 161 causal explanation, 9, 10, 13, 14, 16, 18–19, 21, 34–5, 37–8, 42–5, 61–2, 65–6, 74–5, 80–1, 87, 93, 99–100, 108–13, 119, 152, 154–60, 162–5, 185, 191–2 Chartier, Roger, 17 Chekhov, Anton, 98 Clark, Anna, 207, 208 Clark, Elizabeth A., 193

218

Index

Clarke, Lindsay, 50; The Chymical Wedding, 50 Cocteau, Jean, 115, 118; Orphée, 109–10, 114, 115, 116, 118 Codrington, Helen, 144 Codrington, Henry, Admiral, 144–5, 208 Coe, Jonathan, xii, 84, 108–19, 205; The Closed Circle, 108, 109, 119, 204; The Rotters’ Club, 108–9, 204; What a Carve Up!, xii, 108–19, 204 cognitive asymmetry (Danto), x, 22–4, 32, 36, 41, 48–9, 57–8, 60–2, 81, 99–100, 129, 135–6, 177 compare immanent perspective, past present, present past, remembered self, remembering self Cohen, Ed, 142–3; Talk on the Wilde Side, 142–3 Cohn, Dorrit, 31, 33, 198, 199 Colebrook, Claire, 196 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 71, 134, 207; ‘Kubla Khan’, 71 colligation, 13, 18, 22, 42, 87, 88, 100, 185, 188, 191–2 Collingwood, R.G., 21, 37, 133, 197 Connell, Bob (now Connell, Raewyn), 202 Connor, Kenneth, 114, 117 Connor, Steven, 197 Conrad, Joseph, 25, 191; Heart of Darkness, 191; Nostromo, 25 ‘contact zone’, temporal, 51, 173 Cosgrove, Mary, 214 counterpart (narratology), 29–30, 40, 48–9, 84–95 passim, 97, 102, 125, 130, 133–5, 137, 157–9, 162–5, 172–82 passim Cowart, David, 197 Cowley, Robert, 199 Craps, Stef, 73, 78, 202 Crivelli, Carlo, 147 Cromwell, Oliver, 108 Cullwick, Hannah, 143–4, 208 cultural materialism, 19, 47, 52 Cunningham, David, 211 Cuomo, Joseph, 213, 214 Cuvier, Georges, 137

Dannenberg, Hilary P., 30, 36, 39, 193, 198, 199, 200 Dante Alighieri, 72; The Divine Comedy, 72 Danto, Arthur, 23, 129, 193, 197 Darnton, Robert, 17, 196 Darwin, Charles, 122, 151 Denham, Scott, 213 Dennis, Abigail, 208 De Quincey, Thomas, 156–7, 159, 210, 211 n. 35 Derrida, Jacques, 138, 139, 206 Desai, Morarji, 91 Dickens, Charles, 48, 101, 103, 106, 146, 154, 158, 208; Bleak House, 154; David Copperfield, 124; Dombey and Son, 101; Great Expectations, 49, 143, 208; Hard Times, 158; Little Dorrit, 103, 146 Dickinson, Emily, 48, 128 Dirty Harry (dir. Don Siegel), 106 Disraeli, Benjamin, 49; Sybil, 49 Doan, Laura, 141–2, 207 Dodiya, Jaydipsinh K., 204 Doležel, Lubomír, 28–9, 198, 199 Dos Passos, John, 25; U.S.A., 25 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 162, 165, 211; A Study in Scarlet, 162, 211 Dreyfus, Hubert L., 195 Dyos, H.J., 206 Eaton, Shirley, 114, 117, 118, 205 Eddy, Prince (Albert Victor), 162 Eder, David, 172–3 Eley, Geoff, 193 Elias, Amy J., 27–8, 197, 198 Eliot, George, 101, 107; Middlemarch, 101; The Mill on the Floss, 123–4 Eliot, T. S., 138, 207; ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 138 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 7, 194 emplotment, x, 9–14, 21, 22–3, 24, 29, 32, 33–4, 34 (defined), 35, 42–3, 45–6, 53, 61–3, 73–5, 76–7, 78–9, 80–1, 84, 85–6, 88–92, 93, 94–6, 97–107, 108–13, 121–8, 129–30, 145–9, 153–6, 171–82, 191–2 see also plot(ting)

Index English, James F., 198 epistemology, see historiography, history, constructionist, deconstructionist, postmodernist Eshel, Amir, 215 Evans, Richard J., 195 Faderman, Lillian, 127, 141, 142, 143; Surpassing the Love of Men, 127, 141, 142, 143 Fairfax, Thomas, General, 139 Faithfull, Emily, 144 Faulkner, William, 25; Absalom, Absalom!, 25 Ferguson, Niall, 199, 200 Fielding, John, 40, 42 Fineman, Joel, 196 Fisher, H.A.L., 12; History of Europe, 12 Fishman, William J., 209, 211 Fivush, Robyn, 193, 201 Fleishman, Avrom, 197 focalisation (in historical narrative), 3, 21–4, 31–2, 35–7, 38–9, 41, 49, 58, 63, 77, 78–80, 81–2, 85, 98–9, 124, 127, 164–5, 176–8, 187–9 see also cognitive asymmetry, immanent perspective Foley, Barbara, 198 Foucault, Michel, 15–16, 18–19, 23, 87, 123, 145–6, 180, 191, 195, 196, 213; History of Sexuality, 123 Fowles, Elizabeth, 125, 126 Fowles, John, xii, 25, 40, 50, 51, 121–7, 205, 206; Daniel Martin, 205; The French Lieutenant’s Woman, xii, 25, 50, 51, 121–7; The Journals, 206; A Maggot, 25; The Magus, 40, 126 Franken, Christien, 207 Frankfurt School, the, 158 see also Adorno, Habermas, Horkheimer Freud, Sigmund, 75, 118–19, 123, 170, 172–3, 173, 181–2, 189, 212, 215; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 170 Friedan, Betty, 125–6, 206; The Feminine Mystique, 125–6 Fuchs, Anne, 183, 214 Fulbrook, Mary, 195 Fussell, Paul, 213

219

Gagarin, Yuri, 118 Gallagher, Catherine, 18, 196 Gamble, Sarah, 146, 149, 208, 209 Gandhi, Indira, 84, 85, 87–8, 90, 91, 94, 97, 98, 101, 102, 105–6 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, 88, 91, 203 Gandhi, Rajiv, 97 Gandhi, Sanjay, 85, 88, 90, 91, 97, 98, 102, 105 Gardiner, Patrick, 195 Garland, Caroline, 212, 213 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 47, 124; North and South, 47; Ruth, 124 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 161 Gauthier, Tim S., 206 Gay, Peter, 194 Geertz, Clifford, 15, 17, 21, 24, 196, 197 gender, see hegemonic masculinity, historical novel, gender history in Genesis, Book of, 71, 96 Genette, Gérard, 31, 199 Ghosh, Amitav, 26, 88; The Glass Palace, 88 Gibson, Jeremy, 210 Gibson, William, 49; The Difference Engine, 49 Giddens, Anthony, 19, 20, 85, 197 Gilbert, Susan, 128 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 148, 208; ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, 148 Gismondi, Michael A., 196 Gissing, George, 98, 102, 151, 158, 159 Goldfinger (dir. Guy Hamilton), 205 Goldmann, Lucien, 18 Gothic mode, Gothic novel, xii, 7, 31, 40–1, 50, 52, 109, 110, 119, 143, 145–9, 150–2, 156–67, 168–9, 183, 208, 209 Gramsci, Antonio, 16, 19 grand narrative, 12, 16, 18, 44, 74, 89–90, 123, 153–6, 160, 182, 191–2 grand récit, see grand narrative Granelli, Seraphina, 208 Grass, Günter, 25 Graves, Robert, 174, 176, 179, 213; Goodbye to All That, 174, 213

220

Index

Green, Anna, 196 Greenaway, Peter, 40; The Draughtsman’s Contract, 40 Greenblatt, Stephen, 7, 17, 18–19, 21, 194, 196 Greer, Germaine, 97, 204 Greg, W.R., 125, 206 Griffiths Report, the, 111, 205 Grote, Georg, 214 Guha, Ramachandra, 203, 204 Guha, Ranajit, 202 Gull, Sir William Withey, 162, 164, 165, 166, 211 Gutting, Gary, 195 Habermas, Jürgen, 90 Hadley, Louisa, 205 Hage, Volker, 213, 214, 215 Haggard, Robert F., 209 Hallam, Arthur, 48 Hardy, Thomas, 98, 123, 204, 206; Jude the Obscure, 98, 204; Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 123 Harrison, Nell, 158 Hassig, Ross, 38, 199 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 98 Hawksmoor, Nicholas, 160, 162 Hawthorn, Jeremy, 196 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 206 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 12, 23, 42, 43, 45, 197 hegemonic masculinity (Connell), 52, 71, 95, 178, 180–2 Heidegger, Martin, 186 Heidelberger-Leonard, Irene, 215 Heilmann, Ann, 201 Held, David, 197 Herman, David, 193, 195, 199 Herstein, Sheila R., 128; A Mid-Victorian Feminist, 128 Hervey, Nick, 211 Heuzé, Gérard, 204 Hilton, Timothy, 206 Hinton, James, 162, 164–5, 211 historical novel, contemporary: analysed, x–xi, xiii–xiv, 25–53; counterfactual, 30, 35, 36–42, 48–9, 51, 72–3, 88–9; fictional autobiography in, 25, 26, 35, 39,

48, 49, 50, 51–2, 57–83, 86–96, 109–19, 140–9, 182–92; First World War in, 70–1, 74, 76–7, 171–82; gender history in, 26, 51–2, 58–73 passim, 81–3, 102–3, 104, 122–8, 140–9, 171–82; historiographic metafiction, xiii, 3, 26–8, 46, 52, 73, 83, 87, 121; Indian history in, 84–107; London’s history in, xii, 40, 41, 50–1, 52, 125, 134–5, 139, 140, 142–9, 150–69; neo-Victorian, 6, 46–53, 58–9, 62, 74–5, 120–49, 156–60, 161–5; Second World War in, 74, 88–9, 171, 182–92; social history in, 62, 74–5, 122, 123–4; Thatcherism in, 108–19; trauma represented in, 7, 40, 57–8, 61, 65–83, 114–16, 117, 118–19, 150, 156, 163–5, 168–9, 170–92 historiography, history, x–xi, 3–24, 31–3, 35, 52–3; Annales school, the, 8, 14, 15, 17, 153; constructionist, 8–14, 26–8, 58–9, 129–30, 140, 189; counterfactual, 37–8, 39; cultural, 6, 15, 16–19, 21, 46, 191–2; deconstructionist, 8–9, 130–3; postmodernist, 3, 8, 27–8, 41, 52, 58–9, 87–8, 129–30; social, 6, 15, 16, 21, 26 see also present past Hodgkin, Katharine, 201 Hogan, Patrick Colm, 203 Hogan, Ron, 208 Hogarth, Mary, 48 Hogle, Jerrold E., 209 Holden Matthews, 166 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 185 Holmes, Frederick M., 197 Holocaust, see historical novel, Second World War in Home, Daniel, 134–5 Horkheimer, Max, 191 Howells, Coral Ann, 201 Hoy, David Couzens, 195 Hudson, Derek, 144; Munby, 144 Hunt, Lynn, 210 Hurley, Kelly, 209

Index Husserl, Edmund, 13 Hutcheon, Linda, 26–7, 87, 197, 198, 202, 203 Hutchinson, Colin, 119, 205 Hutton, Patrick H., 196 Huyssen, Andreas, 209 Hynes, Samuel, 173–4, 178, 212, 213 Ibsen, Henrik, 98 Iggers, Georg, 193 imagined community, nation as, 5, 84, 86–7, 89–92, 94–5 immanent perspective, x, 3, 21, 45, 46, 50, 129, 141, 177 compare cognitive asymmetry, focalisation, past future, past present, presentism Irigaray, Luce, 128 Isherwood, Christopher, 178, 213 Jackman, Graham, 214 Jaggi, Maya, 213, 214, 215 James, Henry, 48, 143, 147, 210 n. 25; The Portrait of a Lady, 147; The Turn of the Screw, 143 Janik, Del Ivan, 201 Jauss, Hans-Robert, 11, 48 Jeffries, Stuart, 211 Jenkins, Keith, 8, 9, 193, 194, 201 Jesse, Emily, 48 Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, 88 John, Gospel of, 132, 133, 134 Johnson, B.S., 116–17, 205; Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?, 205; Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, 117; House Mother Normal, 117 Jolly, Margaretta, 212 Joshua, Book of, 71 Joyce, Simon, 205 Jung, Carl Gustav, 124, 127, 164, 206 Kansteiner, Wulf, 195 Kaplan, Cora, 200 Keats, John, 134, 148, 207; ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, 148 Keen, Suzanne, 40, 197, 198, 200, 201, 205, 206 Keightley, Emily, 209

221

Kelly, Marie Jeanette, 160 Kermode, Frank, 139, 200 Khair, Tabish, 85, 107, 202, 204 Khan, Ayub, 94 King, Jeannette, 208 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 26; China Men, 26 Kinser, Samuel, 209, 210 Kneale, Matthew, 50; Sweet Thames, 50 Knight, Stephen, 162 Knutsen, Karen Patrick, 212 Kohlke, Marie-Luise, 205, 208 Koselleck, Reinhart, 6, 19, 22, 153, 155, 162, 193, 210 Koven, Seth, 211 Kray, Reginald and Ronald, 160, 211 n. 37 Kucich, John, 205 Kunzru, Hari, 26 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 152 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 41 Lane, Richard J., 202 Lawrence, D.H., 25, 160, 201; The Plumed Serpent, 160; The Rainbow, 25 Lea, Daniel, 202 Lebow, Richard Ned, 199 Lee, John, 202 Leed, Eric J., 172, 212; No Man’s Land, 172 Leese, Peter, 212 Leinwand, Theodore B., 196 Lele, Jayant, 203, 204 Lemprière, John, 40 Leno, Dan, 158, 210 Lentricchia, Frank, 196 Lerner, Paul, 211, 212 Levy, Andrea, 26 Lewis, Percy Wyndham, 161 Lichtenstein, Rachel, 211 life-writing, see historical novel, fictional autobiography in linguistic turn in history, 3, 8, 15 (defined), 19 Lipscomb, David, 87, 203 Lister, Anne, 148, 207 Liu, Alan, 196 Llewellyn, Mark, 149, 201, 208, 209

222

Index

Lloyd, Christopher, 20, 44, 196, 200 Lloyd George, David, 175 Lodge, David, 47, 48; Author, Author: A Novel, 48; Nice Work, 47, 200 Loew, Rabbi, i.e. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, 162 London, Jack, 151; The People of the Abyss, 151 longue durée, 4, 15, 41, 74, 88, 100, 153–6 Lorenz, Chris, 194, 195 Loughran, Tracey, 212 Lowenthal, David, 194 Löwith, Karl, 195 Lubow, Arthur, 214 Luckhurst, Roger, 168, 202, 209, 211 Lukács, Georg, 44–6, 85, 122, 123, 200, 205 Lyotard, Jean-François, 12, 27, 195 Maas, Jeremy, 206 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 92, 203; ‘Minute on Indian Education’, 92 Macherey, Pierre, 49, 200 Mahdi, the (Muhammad Ahmad), 162 Maillardet, Henri, 41 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 122; ‘Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’, 122 Malouf, David, 26 Mandeville, Bernard, 23 Manet, Edouard, 138 Mansfield, Elizabeth, 206 Marcus, Steven, 123, 144, 162; The Other Victorians, 123, 162 Marks, Grace, 58, 59 Marks, Peter, 202 Marr, Timothy and Celia, 159 Marriott, John, 209 Marsh, Jan, 127; Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, 127 Marvell, Andrew, 139 Marx, Karl, 8, 12, 14, 15, 23, 44, 84, 107, 122, 159, 191, 195, 205 Mason, Michael, 206 Masselos, Jim, 203, 204 Masten, Jeffrey, 141 Matsumura, Masaie, 209

Maybrick, James, 157, 210 Mayhew, Henry, 101 McCarthy, Cormac, 16; Blood Meridian, 16 McClintock, Anne, 208 McCrae, John, 70, 201; ‘In Flanders Fields’, 70 McCullagh, C. Behan, 42, 194, 195, 199, 200 McCulloh, Mark, 213 McEwan, Ian, 39, 72–3, 202; Atonement, 39, 72–3 McEwan, Neil, 197 McHale, Brian, 30, 198 McLellan, David, 195 Mearns, Andrew, 151, 209; The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, 151, 209 Mehta, Suketu, 203, 204 memory, memorialisation, xiii–xiv, 4–6, 7, 47, 52–3, 57–8, 60–1, 62, 63–83 passim, 86–8, 93–6, 113–16, 137–9, 150, 155–60, 163–5, 166–9, 170, 171, 173–4, 182–92 see also ontological presence of past Mengham, Rod, 202, 204 mentalité, 17 (defined), 21, 42, 46, 47, 49 Mermin, Dorothy, 207 Merrick, Joseph, 162, 165 Micale, Mark S., 211, 212 Michelet, Jules, 134, 137 Middleton, Peter, 197 Mill, John Stuart, 125; The Subjection of Women, 125 Milton, John, 71, 138; Paradise Lost, 71; Paradise Regained, 139 Mink, Louis O., 9, 13, 22, 34, 35, 194, 195, 197, 199 Mirza, Iskander, 94 Mistry, Rohinton, xii, 84, 85, 86, 96–107, 119, 203, 204; Family Matters, 104–5; A Fine Balance, xii, 85, 97–107; Such a Long Journey, 97 Mitchell, Kate, 205 Mo, Timothy, 26 Monteith, Sharon, 212, 213 Montrose, Louis, 18, 19, 196 Moore, Alan, 166, 211; From Hell, 166, 211 Morey, Peter, 97, 204

Index Morgan, Peter, 214 Morgan, Sue, 208 Morrison, Arthur, 151; A Child of the Jago, 151; Tales of Mean Streets, 151 Morrison, John, 166 Morrison, Toni, 26; Beloved, 26 Mouzelis, Nicos P., 196 Muhammad XII of Granada, 92 Mukherjee, Meenakshi, 203 Munby, Arthur, 143–4, 208 Munslow, Alun, 194 Murdoch, Rupert, 110–11, 112 Murray, Alex, 211 Nabokov, Vladimir, 68 Nachträglichkeit (belatedness), 170–92 compare anachronism Napoleon, see Bonaparte Narayan, Jayaprakash, 91, 102 nation, see imagined community Nehru, Jawaharlal, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89–90, 91–2, 93, 94, 100, 202, 203; The Discovery of India, 89–90; ‘A Tryst with Destiny’, 89, 203 Neisser, Ulric, 60, 193, 201 new historicism, 3, 17–19, 21, 46 Newland, Paul, 209 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7, 16, 194, 196 Noakes, Jonathan, 206 Norfolk, Lawrence, 39–42, 200; Lemprière’s Dictionary, 39–42; The Pope’s Rhinoceros, 41 Novick, Peter, 193 Nunn, Pamela Gerrish, 127–8; Victorian Women Artists, 127–8 Oliver, Douglas, 166 Onega, Susana, 210 ontological presence of past, xiii–xiv, 5–7, 27–8, 30, 52–3, 58, 72–3, 76, 128–9, 130, 133–4, 136–40, 155–6, 157–65, 167, 187–8, 190 Orphée, see Cocteau, Jean Osborne, Sidney Godolphin, 152 Owen, Alex, 207, 208 Owen, Wilfred, 173, 175, 176, 178, 179, 213; ‘Disabled’, 175; ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’, 176

223

Palmer, Paulina, 208 Palshikar, Suhas, 204 Parekh Report, the, 193 Partner, Nancy F., 35, 199 past future, x, 6, 22, 35, 36, 37–9, 40, 43, 46, 49, 99, 145 past present, x, xiii, 6, 19, 22, 35, 36, 37, 41, 46, 50, 51, 53, 57, 99, 137–8, 141, 142, 143, 162, 177, 184 compare cognitive asymmetry, remembered self Patel, Sujata, 203, 204 Patil, S.K., 90, 203 Paul, Ronald, 212 Pavel, Thomas G., 198 Pearl, Cyril, 123; The Girl with the Swansdown Seat, 123 Pearsall, Ronald, 123, 162; The Worm in the Bud, 123 Pendse, Sandeep, 204 Phillips, Caryl, 26 Pickering, Michael, 209 Piozzi, Hester Thrale, 141 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 40; Carceri d’invenzione, 40 Plato, 141 plot(ting), 21, 24, 34–7, 39, 40–2, 43, 43–6, 98–100, 128, 157, 177 see also emplotment Polanski, Roman, 161; Dance of the Vampires, 161 Poole, Adrian, 78, 202 Pope, Alexander, 47 Popper, Karl, 195 possible-worlds theories, 28–31 Pound, Ezra, 18, 160, 161, 196; The Cantos, 160 Prager, Brad, 214 Pre-Raphaelites, 61, 62, 122, 125, 127, 205 n. 9 see also Burne-Jones, Rossetti presentism, 19, 22, 26, 32, 48, 49, 51–2, 121–2, 140–2, 173 present past, x, xii, xiii–xiv, 5–7, 19, 22, 28, 29, 35, 41, 46–53, 86, 120–1, 123–8, 140–6, 149, 162–5, 171–82, 184 compare past future, past present, presentism, remembering self

224

Index

Price, David W., 197 Proust, Marcel, 86 Punter, David, 209 Pynchon, Thomas, 40 Rabinow, Paul, 195 Ramanan, Mohan, 204 Ramayana, the, 89 Ranke, Leopold von, 21, 191, 195 Rawlinson, Mark, 212 Reay, Barry, 208 referent, referentiality, 4, 8–9, 27–31, 46–7, 51, 53, 130, 131–3, 139–40 Reith, John Charles Walsham, Baron Reith, 110 remembered self, 5, 57–8, 58, 60–1, 63–4, 65, 66–7, 73, 81, 83, 93, 94, 96, 113, 184, 187–8, 189 see also remembering self remembering self, 5, 24, 57–8, 59–83 passim, 93–6, 113, 184, 187–8, 189 see also cognitive asymmetry, remembered self Renan, Ernest, 131, 137 resurrection, historiography, history as, see ontological presence of past Reynolds, Margaret, 206 Rhys, Jean, 26, 49, 198; Wide Sargasso Sea, 26, 49 Rich, Adrienne, 49, 200 Richardson, Brian, 43, 200 Ricoeur, Paul, 13, 29–30, 34, 36, 193, 195, 198, 199 Rigney, Ann, 193, 198 Rimbaud, Arthur, 162, 163, 165; Les Illuminations, 162 Ripper, Jack the, 151, 152, 156, 157, 159, 160, 161–2, 163, 164, 166, 168, 209, 210, 211 Rivers, W.H.R., 172–3, 176, 178–82, 212, 213 Rivett, Geoffrey, 205 Roberts, Geoffrey, 193, 194, 199 Roberts, Michèle, 50; In the Red Kitchen, 50 Robinson, Alan, 204, 205, 206, 208, 209 Rodinsky, David, 167, 168

Ronen, Ruth, 198 Rossetti, Christina, 128 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 125, 149, 205 n. 9 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 148 Rozett, Martha Tuck, 197 Rubinstein, W.D., 202 Rushdie, Salman, xii, 25, 26, 84–97, 100, 103, 104, 119, 163, 202, 203; Imaginary Homelands, 85, 86, 88, 91, 203; Midnight’s Children, xii, 25, 84, 85–96, 103, 202, 203; The Moor’s Last Sigh, 85, 86, 91–2, 95, 96, 203; The Satanic Verses, 96, 163, 203; Shame, 25, 85, 88, 202; Step Across this Line, 86, 203; The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, 1947–1997, 89, 203 Ruskin, John, 62, 122 Russell, Richard Rankin, 73, 77–8, 202 Ryan, Marie-Laure, 29, 44, 193, 198, 199, 200 Sadoff, Dianne F., 205 Sassoon, Siegfried, 173, 174, 175–6, 176, 177, 179, 180, 182, 213; ‘Base Details’, 176; ‘The Fathers’, 176; ‘The General’, 176; Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, 175–6, 213; ‘Sick Leave’, 176 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 20 Scanlan, Margaret, 197 Schwartz, Lynne Sharon, 193, 213, 214 Scott, Ridley, 41; Blade Runner, 41 Scott, Walter, Sir, 44–5, 205 Sebald, W.G., xiii, xiii–xiv, 171, 182–92, 213, 214, 215; After Nature, 184, 214; Air War and Literature, see On the Natural History of Destruction; Austerlitz, xiii, 171, 185, 187–92, 214, 215; Campo Santo, 214, 215; The Emigrants, 186–7, 189, 190, 214; Logis in einem Landhaus, 214; On the Natural History of Destruction, 182–4, 192, 213, 214, 215; The Rings of Saturn, 191, 192, 215; Vertigo, 214 Self, Will, 166 Severs, Dennis, 167, 168, 211

Index Sewell, William, 20, 197 Shaffer, E.S., 207 Shah, Nila, 204 Shakespeare, William, 104, 107, 128, 135, 204; King Lear, 104, 107, 204; The Tempest, 126 shamanism, 160–5; see also ontological presence of past Shaw, Harry E., 197 Sheldrake, Rupert, 155–6, 210 n. 22 Shelley, Mary, 163; Frankenstein, 163 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 139 Shephard, Ben, 173, 212, 213 Shiller, Dana, 129, 206 Shiv Sena, the, 84, 85, 90, 92, 102 Showalter, Elaine, 172–3, 180, 182, 212; ‘Male Hysteria’, 172 Silverblatt, Michael, 213 Sinclair, Iain, xii, 21, 50, 149, 150–1, 152–3, 155, 160–9, 209, 210, 211; Downriver, 166–7, 168; Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, 168–9; Lights Out for the Territory, 166, 168, 211; Lud Heat, 150–1, 160–1, 162, 163, 165, 211 n. 49; Rodinsky’s Room, 167, 168, 211; Suicide Bridge, 166, 211; The Verbals, 164, 210, 211; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, 151, 161–6, 168 Sinfield, Alan, 143; The Wilde Century, 143 Skinner, Quentin, 207 Slinn, E. Warwick, 206 Smethurst, Paul, 197 Smith, Adam, 23 Spenser, Edmund, 138; The Faerie Queene, 139 Spiegel, Gabrielle M., 196 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 202 Srivastava, Neelam, 202, 203 Stanley, Liz, 141, 207 Stedman Jones, Gareth, 142, 209; Outcast London, 142, 209 Steenman-Marcusse, Conny, 201 Sterling, Bruce, 49; The Difference Engine, 49 Sterne, Lawrence, 25; Tristram Shandy, 87

225

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 162, 165 Stevenson, Sheryl, 212 Stoker, Bram, 151; Dracula, 151 Stone, Lawrence, 194 n. 12 Strachey, Lytton, 127 Strauss, David, 133 structuration (Giddens), 20, 85, 92–6, 99, 100–7, 119 compare agency, structure structure, 3–4, 14–21, 42, 44–6, 52, 61, 62–3, 84, 100–3, 145–6, 147–9, 153–60, 162–5, 168–9, 177 compare agency, structuration Stryker, Laurinda, 212 Sussman, Herbert, 201 Swift, Graham, xii, 25, 50, 57, 73–83, 201, 202; Ever After, 50, 57; Waterland, xii, 25, 50, 57, 58, 73–83 Tabah, Mireille, 215 Taberner, Stuart, 215 Tarbox, Katherine, 205 Taylor, Debbie, 208 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 110 Ten Little Niggers, i.e. Ten Little Indians (dir. George Pollock), 117 Tenniel, John, 152; ‘The Nemesis of Neglect’, 152 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 48, 61, 148, 209; In Memoriam, 48, 49; ‘Mariana’, 148 Tew, Philip, 202, 204 Thackeray, Balasaheb, 92, 102 Tharoor, Shashi, 204 Thatcher, Margaret, 84, 108, 110–11, 119, 120, 168 Theatre of Blood (dir. Douglas Hickox), 117 Thomas, D.M., 25; The White Hotel, 25 Thompson, E.P., 6, 19, 26, 193, 198; The Making of the English Working Class, 6, 26 Thompson, John B., 197 Thorner, Alice, 203, 204 Thurschwell, Pamela, 204 Todorov, Tzvetan, 30–1, 199 Tóibín, Colm, 48; The Master, 48

226

Index

Traub, Valerie, 207 trauma, see historical novel, trauma represented in Treves, Sir Frederick, 162–3, 164, 165 Trivedi, Harish, 203 Trudgill, Eric, 206 Trumbach, Randolph, 143 Turner, Bryan S., 196 Turner, Joseph W., 198 typicality (Lukács), 44, 45–6, 97, 106, 110, 122–4 Van der Hart, Onno, 212 Van der Kolk, Bessel A., 212 Vaucanson, Jacques de, 41, 200 n. 62 Veeser, H. Aram, 196 Verlaine, Paul, 163, 165 Vicinus, Martha, 128, 144, 207, 208; Independent Women, 128 Vico, Giambattista, 23, 137; Principj di Scienza Nuova, 137 Victoria, Queen, 120 Vogel-Klein, Ruth, 215 Vora, Rajendra, 204 Wachtel, Eleanor, 193, 213, 214, 215 Wadsworth, Charles, 128 Walker, Jonathan, 200 Walkowitz, Judith, 142; City of Dreadful Delight, 142 Wallace, Diana, 198 Walsh, W.H., 13, 195 ‘Walter’, 143; My Secret Life, 143 war, see historical novel, First World War in, Second World War in Warburton, Eileen, 206 Warwick, Alexandra, 209 Waters, Malcolm, 196 Waters, Sarah, xii, 26, 50–1, 140–9, 207, 208; Affinity, xii, 51, 140–9; Tipping the Velvet, 51, 140, 142, 143 Watts, George Frederic, 138 Waugh, Patricia, 198 Weber, Max, 21 Weeks, Jeffrey, 142; Sex, Politics and Society, 142

Weickgenannt Thiara, Nicole, 202, 203 Weir, Neil, 211 Weiss, Peter, 187 Werner, Alex, 209 Wesseling, Elisabeth, 197, 200 West, Elizabeth, 203 What a Carve Up! (film, dir. Pat Jackson), 109–10, 114, 117; novel, see Coe, Jonathan Wheeldon, Alice, 174 Wheeler, Wendy, 202 White, Hayden, 3, 8, 9, 10–13, 26, 27, 34, 194, 195 Wiener, Martin J., 75; English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980, 75, 202 n. 21 Wilde, Oscar, 156 Williams, John, 211 Williams, Raymond, 19, 46 Willis, Martin, 209 Winnicott, D.W., 201 Winterson, Jeanette, 26, 30–1, 40, 51–2, 142, 201; The Passion, 26, 51; Sexing the Cherry, 26, 51, 52 Wittig, Monique, 141 Wolff, Michael, 206 Wolfreys, Julian, 210 Wolpert, Stanley, 87; A New History of India, 87 Woodcock, Bruce, 124, 205, 206 Woods, Tim, 197 Woolf, Virginia, 25; Between the Acts, 25; Orlando, 25 Wordsworth, William, 210 nn. 16, 31 Wright, Patrick, 167, 211 Yeats, W.B., 107, 160, 204, 207; A Vision, 160 Yousaf, Nahem, 212 Zagorin, Perez, 194, 195 Zammito, John, 194, 195 Zare, Bonnie, 206 Zeeman, Michaël, 213