Brexlit

British Literature and the European Project

Kristian Shaw

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350090859
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Englische Literaturkritik

Britain's vote to leave the European Union in the summer of 2016 came as a shock to many observers. But writers had long been exploring anxieties and fractures in British society – from Euroscepticism, to immigration, to devolution, to post-truth narratives – that came to the fore in the Brexit campaign and its aftermath.
Reading these tensions back into contemporary British writing, Kristian Shaw coins the term Brexlit to deliver the first in-depth study of how writers engaged with these issues before and after the referendum result. Examining the work of over a hundred British authors, including Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ali Smith, as well as popular fiction by Andrew Marr and Stanley Johnson, Brexlit explores how a new and urgent genre of post-Brexit fiction is beginning to emerge.

1

An imperfect union

British Eurosceptic fictions

May I say how pleased we are to have some Europeans here, now that we are on the Continent? I didn’t vote for it myself, quite honestly, but now that we’re in, I’m determined to make it work.

(Cleese and Booth 1975)

A symposium in the literary journal Encounter, ‘Going into Europe’, communicates the views and concerns of a range of prominent writers and intellectuals on the merits of European integration. Within its pages we can discern early anti-Common Market leanings that would go on to characterize an underlying Euroscepticism in British literature for decades. As the editors of the journal identify, however, it has always been difficult to forecast the assumed stances of writers and literary scholars on European integration:

What has been a constant source of surprise to us has been the unpredictability of almost everyone’s attitude – not merely to the ‘pro’ and ‘con’ of the relatively technical questions of Common Market entry but more interestingly to the deeper emotions involved. ‘Regional poets’ have turned out to be internationalists; cosmopolitan travellers to be ‘provincials’; the idea of ‘little England’ appears suddenly to be both virtue and vice. (1962: 56)

For C. S. Lewis, the fear of European integration was not that it made a federal superstate inevitable, but rather that any supranational arrangement would be ‘built out of units far smaller than the existing nations: units like Wessex and Picardy, not like “Britain” (a horrid word) and France’, neglecting the local and regional idiosyncrasies of culture, language and local customs (1962: 57). Iris Murdoch adopted a related stance, emphasizing that attention should be focused on the political protection and maintenance of the Commonwealth which was surely going to be marginalized in favour of a greater concentration on European economic attachments. E. M. Forster shared this fear that the Common Market was a foil for the ‘Europe of Big Business’, wavering on the merits of entry (1962: 64). Playwright John Osborne concurred, declaring ‘[I] am proud to settle for a modest, shabby, poor-but-proud Little England any day. I’d gladly say goodbye to those hordes of grasping businessmen and technocrats, and see the lot off to the Rhine’ (1962: 59). Playwright and screenwriter Robert Bolt reasoned that while the Tories desired an entry into Europe due to their opportunistic ‘greed’ for such economic growth, Labour’s reluctance was due to ‘inertia’, concluding ‘the Tories have the best of it. Greed is at least an active principle’ (1962: 58). ‘Going into Europe’ is particularly significant in revealing the vast number of writers and intellectuals for whom European integration was simply a non-issue. J. B. Priestley (2015), who later called for a protection of the English national character and dismissed the merits of Common Market membership, was an early detractor on EEC membership and cast doubts on public enthusiasm for such an endeavour. In his 1962 novel The Shapes of Sleep, a reporter charged with ascertaining the public stance towards integration merely concludes: ‘Britons are not thinking about the Common Market’ (182).

Priestley’s remarks are shared by historian A. J. P. Taylor, who opined ‘we have never belonged political to Europe and I see no reason why we should begin now’ (Encounter 1962: 62). He concludes: ‘There is no British opinion about “going into Europe” [. . .] [It] is the greatest non-question of all time’ (Encounter 1962: 62). Harold Pinter echoed his remarks, briefly stating ‘I have no interest in the matter and do not care what happens’ (Encounter 1962: 59). Moreover, some contributors were acutely prescient in doubting the validity or suitability of a referendum to determine the European Question. T. S. Eliot, for example, conceded a slight personal bias for greater cultural integration, yet deemed the matter should not ‘be decided by a plebiscite’ (Encounter 1962: 65). Anthony Powell, despite his personal antipathy towards the EEC, went further, asserting that writers or artists should not even be consulted on matters for which they were not informed, pre-empting the thoughts of several Leave-supporting politicians in the 2016 referendum.

As the introduction discussed, there has been a notable absence of engagement with Europe in post-war British literature, as authors concentrated instead on the legacy of Empire or internal developments affecting Britain’s economic stability and structural integrity. However, this chapter will identify a range of disparate novels which depict a diminished and fearful Britain, belatedly and belligerently limping into the European arena. A particular strain of wartime resistance often seeps into these various narratives, as characters are forced into new European spaces in which their national identity (and enforced Europeanized identity) must be negotiated.

In his 1976 essay ‘Englands of the Mind’, Seamus Heaney characterized the post-war period as a time of national self-reflection (1980: 150–69). Nick Bentley rightly identifies that such concerns take on literary expression, with fictions of the 1950s revealing ‘a deep concern with the nation’s changing identity, its international status and role, and the reconstruction of Englishness’ (2007: 36). Ongoing decolonization and mass immigration threatened existing constructions of national identity and resulted in ‘a sense of existential crisis in national terms’ as Britain sought to safeguard its splintering identity and imperial authority (2007: 37). While society struggled to adapt to post-war life, with the subsequent political, social and cultural upheavals, British authors also struggled to engage with changing European relations. In comparison to the deep literary engagement with the Commonwealth and Britain’s postcolonial condition, the question of European influence and integration has attracted far less critical attention.

The awkward partner

A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself.

(Okri 1995)

Kingsley Amis was an early opponent of British membership yet his opposition is arguably more nuanced. In his contribution to ‘Going into Europe’, Amis reflects on the condition of post-war England and determines that a ‘closer economic union relation with the Continent seems desirable, even necessary’, conceding he ‘can contemplate closer cultural ties without shuddering’ (1962: 56). It is the ‘inevitable progression to political unity’ that Amis finds ‘disturbing’, as well as the suggestion that a ‘Continentalised Britain’ would have to surrender its close ‘special’ relationship with the United States and the Commonwealth (1962: 56).¹ Instead, Amis considers the privileged ‘English-speaking’ realm of the Anglosphere to be Britain’s ‘future’ destination while Europe remains ‘a place we have spent much of our history trying to extricate ourselves from’ (1962: 57). His Anglocentric comments seem to align with the views of poet W. H. Auden, who succinctly captures the psychological separation preventing a close cultural alignment with the Continent: ‘If I shut my eyes and say the word Europe to myself, the various images which it conjures up have one thing in common; they could not be conjured up by the word England’ (Encounter 1963: 53).

Amis’ engagement with the question of Europe as a literary theme is crystallized in his 1958 novel, I Like It Here. The novel follows Garnet Bowen, a freelance journalist and lecturer, as he travels to Portugal on an assignment. Tired of relying on tenuous contracts, Bowen begrudgingly accepts a commission for an article on European culture despite his abject disdain of ‘going abroad’, in return for the promise of a key position in publishing. I Like It Here conforms to the narrative style of the travel novel but employs a seriocomic stance in order to deconstruct British perceptions of post-war European engagement. Bowen shares similarities with Amis’ earlier protagonists such as John Lewis and Jim Dixon in his self-deprecating acknowledgement of his pretentious social attitude but retains a staunch resistance against those who attempt to alter his isolationist posture: ‘he suffered from acute prejudice about abroad. Some of this he thought he recognised as unreasonable, based as it was on disinclination for change, dislike of fixing up complication arrangements’ (1968: 23). After all, Bowen does not decide to travel to Europe of his own volition but rather is sent there for business, interpreting the telegraph offering him the trip as ‘a deportation order’ (1968: 5). The proffered trip is a fictionalized account of Amis’ own visit to Portugal, after receiving a £500 financial reward for winning the Somerset Maugham Award for Lucky Jim (1954), and Bowen is arguably employed to voice Amis’ own Europhobic sentiments (he even has two sons and a daughter like his author). As Philip Gardner has observed, Garnet Bowen’s initials appropriately allow him to become the mouthpiece for Great Britain; initials which he proudly displays on his number-plate when driving abroad (1981: 50). Upon arriving in Portugal, ‘hoping not to be addressed in a foreign tongue’, Bowen remains thankful that the Portuguese ‘had not tried to knife him or rob him’, and discovers that ‘trying to pronounce even a few syllables of French set off [. . .] a most complex and deep-seated network of defensive responses’ (1968: 11; 20; 157). Like Roger Micheldene – the protagonist of Amis’ 1963 novel One Fat Englishman – Bowen revels in the distinctive privileges and national eccentricities that mark him apart from his European interlocutors.

By concealing semi-autobiographical elements under the guise of social satire, critics interpreted I Like It Here as evidence of Amis’ own Europhobic anxieties and sneering condescension towards the Continent, and heavily criticized the novel in early reviews. Fellow author Margaret Drabble deemed the novel ‘xenophobic and slight’ and declared the novel among his weakest works (2006: 25). Yet many critics also fail to note how Amis consciously satirizes both his own bitter vitriol and the Angry Young Man movement. The title of the novel itself is not so much a reflection of the protagonist’s own defiant Euroscepticism but an exaggeration of Amis’ own parochial and insular aesthetic evident in his early fiction. Amis privately called the novel ‘a very slipshod, lopsided piece of work that has very little to say about anything’, but defended himself against accusations of Euroscepticism: ‘In I Like It Here people thought I was attacking Europe, but I was attacking the people who like it’ (Barber 1975: 48; qtd. in McDermott 1989: 89). Bowen’s defiant parochialism in the novel is often directed towards the ‘upper-middle-class traveller’ who insolently believe they have ‘the right to knock the English’, promoting the value of foreign culture and bemoaning ‘the spirit being chilled and restricted in the foggy atmosphere of Anglo-Saxon provincialism’ (1968: 32).

As Cecile Leconte identifies, such ‘cultural anti-Europeanism is a key dimension of Euroscepticism’ within Britain (2010: 69). Yet Andrew James qualifies Amis’ personal fear of ‘abroad’, suggesting it is ‘best viewed as a further manifestation of his poetic provincialism and not xenophobia’, noting that Amis so enjoyed his time in Portugal that he began to travel widely after the publication of the novel; his experiences shaping his subsequent novel One Fat Englishman (James 2013: 59). That being said, given One Fat Englishman’s concentration on American society this merely serves as further evidence for Amis’ continued attachment to both the Anglosphere and the ‘special relationship’ in place of any burgeoning Continental attachments: ‘let [European relations] be ties, not bonds’ (Encounter 1971: 20). Further, the denouement of I Like It Here does not bring a shift in Bowen’s cultural outlook and we are still left with a protagonist who resents lecturing on the work of French nationalists for Modern European literature course, mocks the English mispronunciations of his foreign students and only takes pleasure in Harry Bannion’s recital of Charge of the Light Brigade, before retreating to the relative safety of British soil convinced of the futility of European relations. The satirical commentaries on Europeans and their cultural idiosyncrasies, rather than the EEC directly, hints at ‘a disconnect that goes much deeper than mere frictions between a member state and an institution [. . .] we are dealing with two opposing concepts. The one is called Britain, the other Europe’ (Spiering 2015: 2).

The novel is certainly anti-cosmopolitan in tone, regardless of Amis’ satirical stance. Bowen is not what Anthony Appiah would term a ‘cosmopolitan patriot’, incapable of entertaining ‘the possibility of a world in which everyone is a rooted cosmopolitan, attached to a home of his or her own, with its own particularities, but taking pleasure from the presence of other, different, places that are home to other, different, people’ (1998: 91). But in Bowen’s mind Europe is a homogenized space of cultural otherness and he is unable to discount ‘the essential abroadness of the place, the things it must share with millions of square miles between here and Istanbul’, inhabited by elitist Europeans who subscribe to a stereotyped pattern, deployed to aggrandize the superiority of the British national character (1968: 157). His distaste for faux-cosmopolitan attachments (captured by the character of Celia Welch in Lucky Jim who perceived herself as ‘Western European first and an Englishwoman second’) offers a veiled commentary on Britain’s brief forays into European political arrangements: ‘Going and standing on the touchlines of other chaps’ ways of life and telling yourself you’re joining in isn’t very self-aware. Just like going through foreign poetry with the dictionary and telling yourself you’re reading it (1968: 16).

In ‘Going into Europe – Again?’, published a decade on from his initial article on British membership of the EEC, Amis has become more staunchly opposed to the question of membership, citing his distaste of the extortionate entry fee – which merely benefits ‘French and German farmers who are even less efficient than our own’ – and the concerning aim of monetary union (1971: 19). More importantly, he offers an early critique of the implied loss of national sovereignty which was to characterize British Eurosceptic fiction for the following decades: ‘Let us not submit ourselves to “harmonisation” – that new and dreadful euphemism for the projected ironing-out of national differences in every department of life’ (1971: 20).² I Like It Here ultimately remains sceptical of the merits of European integration, privileging national attachments and espousing a form of British exceptionalism which places it in line with other provincial Little Englander texts of the decade:

the place is located abroad and the people are foreigners, which [. . .] means that they and I belong to different nations, so we can’t understand each other or get to know each other as well as chaps from the same nation can. I’m all for international co-operation and friendship and the rest of it, but let’s be clear what we mean by it. (1968: 185)

Imagined threats to Britain’s post-war European security find fertile ground in Nancy Mitford’s h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The European question
• 1 An imperfect union: British Eurosceptic fictions
• 2 This blessed plot: The English revolt
• 3 The disunited kingdom: Politics of devolution
• 4 Fortress Britain: The great immigration debate
• 5 L’espirit de L’escalier: Post-Brexit fictions
• Conclusion: Life after Europe
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright