London Fiction at the Millennium

Beyond Postmodernism

Claire Allen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030488864
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria europea

This book analyses London fiction at the millennium, reading it in relation to anexploration of a theoretical positioning beyond the postmodern. It explores howa selection of novels can be considered as "second-wave" or "post-postmodern"in light of their borrowing more from mainstream and classical genres asopposed to formally experimental avant-garde techniques. It considers howwriters utilise the cultural capital of London in a process of relocating marginalized, subjugated or under-represented voices. The millennium provides an apt symbolicopportunity to reflect on British fiction and to consider the direction in whichcontemporary authors are moving. As such, key novels by Martin Amis, BellaBathurst, Bernardine Evaristo, Mark Haddon, Nick Hornby, Hanif Kureishi, AndreaLevy, Gautam Malkani, Timothy Mo, Will Self, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, RupertThomson, and Sarah Waters are used to explore writing beyond the postmodern.

'In this significant and welcome contribution to the field, Allen provides us with asophisticated, detailed, and rigorous study of the move in contemporary fictionbeyond postmodernism as exemplified by London fiction.'

—Nick Hubble, Brunel University London, UK

© The Author(s) 2020

C. AllenLondon Fiction at the Millenniumhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48886-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Mapping Millennial London Fiction

Claire Allen¹

(1)

Humanities, University of Northampton, Northampton, UK

Claire Allen

Email: [email protected]

The rise of the city, in Britain, coincides with the rise of the novel itself, and the two have been inextricably linked ever since. As cities develop and mutate in the late twentieth century, subject to national and international population movements and political fissures, multiplying varieties of religion, race, history and politics increasingly contest each other for space and public visibility and legitimacy. New individual and collective identities struggle to emerge; new voices seek to find a hearing above the noisy crowd.

—Ken Worpole . “Mother to Legend (or going underground): The London Novel” 1995 181

End Abstract

This book is concerned with an analysis of London fiction at the millennium (leading up to and immediately after the year 2000). As the title suggests, this involves an exploration of texts that can in some way be regarded as occupying a space beyond postmodernism. I explore millennial London texts and argue that they should be considered as “second-wave” or “post-postmodern”¹ in relation to their style of storytelling and characterisation which borrows more from mainstream and classical genres than it does from formally experimental avant-garde techniques. The texts considered in this study are read as challenging the “centre” in terms of repopulating it with new or previously underrepresented voices via the adaptation and appropriation of mainstream forms. By using popular styles such as heroic characterisation and historic narratives, “marginalised” writers refrain from wholly subverting the form, but instead revise the novel in the light of previous subjugations. The reasons that writers might choose to represent characters from politically marginalised backgrounds but to employ traditional and conventional, rather than avant-garde or innovative forms are complex, and any investigation into this aspect of contemporary London writing must acknowledge a need to understand the text as a cultural and social artefact, not purely a literary one. As this study will explore, it is evidently still desirable for writers engaging with the periphery, in the form of the characters they write, to gain a foothold on traditional forms, rather than simply to reject them, and this may be due to the relative cultural capital that is still afforded conventional styles and forms in popular discourse, which has implications for the legacy of the postmodern endeavour. This is not to suggest that the writers considered here reject postmodernism entirely, rather that they are selective in their appropriation of some of the formal innovations that postmodernism ushered in, and instead of wholly embracing the postmodern, attempt to produce texts which form a synergy between a postmodern opening out of the form and a conventional, accessible style. I discuss and define the terms “second wave” and “post-postmodern” at length below, but initially I will address the specific temporal and spatial subject matter, that of London fiction at the millennium.

To an extent, millennial London fiction acts as a useful representative sample of wider trends within British fiction. In some texts the capital city acts as a highly charged symbol of the state of Britain at the dawn of an era in which the UK emerged a changed nation, having lost most of its empire, and still owing a debt to the USA from the Second World War. However, textual representations of London are often more complex than this model suggests, and in many texts the city functions as more than simply a metonym for the whole of Britain. Writers are often drawn to the uniqueness of the capital and in particular its ability to mutate: “It has rarely been just one thing at a time. Despite everyone from Inigo Jones to the GLC, it has never remained what its planners desired” (Roy Porter London: A Social History 9). As Porter suggests London developed through the amalgamation of many different cultures without much reverence for the art of urban planning. The nature of the mélange of London also derived from the city’s complex history of governance: “not since the Romans has London possessed a unified government, a government relevant to all its needs” (Porter 3). These factors have combined to make London unique, and from the nineteenth century (and continuing in millennial fiction) authors have consistently been drawn to the resulting mêlée of peoples, cultures and ideas. From Dickens’s portrayal of the many versions of Covent Garden that one may experience (Little Dorrit 1855–1857), through Peter Ackroyd’s layering of historical periods in a single space within London in Hawksmoor (1985) to Zadie Smith’s depiction of the multicultural, hegemonic playground in Willesden in White Teeth (2000) and Sarah Waters’s recreation of the “Blitz spirit” in The Night Watch (2006), writers have responded to and represented London’s unique and complex character.

Ken Worpole, during his discussion of the definition of the “London novel”, as opposed to a novel simply set in London, suggests that we must ask: “Why, of the many dozens of novels published each year set in London, do so very few of them qualify even to be considered as a ‘London novel’?” (183) He answers this question by suggesting that: “The main qualification, surely, is that the city is not simply a backdrop of the action, but an essential feature and dominating metaphor throughout” (183). In the novels considered here London is an “essential feature and dominating metaphor”. Even though it does not always feature as “part of the very texture of the lives and thoughts of the characters, and constitutes the very air in which they live and breathe” (Worpole 184) in the same manner as it does in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Iain Sinclair’s Downriver or Michael Moorcock’s Mother London; London is a significant metaphor in key novels by Martin Amis, Bella Bathurst, Bernardine Evaristo, Mark Haddon, Nick Hornby, Hanif Kureishi, Andrea Levy, Gautam Malkani, Timothy Mo, Will Self, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Rupert Thomson and Sarah Waters. For these authors a London setting provides a symbolic representation of the relationship between the centre (in the form of the capital city) and the marginalised characters that the texts portray. As such, for many authors in this study London forms an opportunity for a striking metaphorical repositioning of once marginalised voices (in the forms of their characters) within the centre.

The category of “London literature” is both long established and highly contested. For Lawrence Phillips in The Swarming Streets the category “literary London” has a particular relevance to the nineteenth century: “Nineteenth-century ‘literary London’ was an imaginative, physical and psychological space in which there was much to surprise, horrify, titillate and appal the polite reader, but it could be eminently known” (3). Bradbury makes a similar point, that it is during an earlier period that London literature has a distinct aesthetic identity,² describing London at the beginning of the twentieth century as “a fruitful symbiosis of the cosmopolitan and the nativist [that became] a profoundly important aspect of the aesthetics of the entire period from the 1880s through to the First World War” (Modernism 175).

However, representations of urban life and the city also hold a prominent position within contemporary British fiction. Philip Tew argues that the changing relationship between the novel and the city has been a significant feature of the current era of literature: “If the contemporary novel has done anything consistently since the mid-1970s it has been to radicalize traditional understandings of the late capitalist cityscape and urban environment. … [N]ew voices have emerged and cartographized the complexity and heterogeneity of urban existence” (The Contemporary British Novel xi). The urban and the city therefore continue to be prominent areas for consideration and discussion within the contemporary novel. With such a focus on “the city” within contemporary British fiction, London, as the British capital, and as a city with a long history as a publishing centre (a place historically where writers both come to write and to have their works published) is an obvious point for discussion and must take its place within the debate about contemporary British fiction.

London had a renewed energy at the beginning of the new millennium as its status as a place of cultural significance was reasserted in the decision to focus much of England’s millennial celebrations in the capital. London had recently enjoyed a revival, being at the forefront of popular culture through the success of “Brit Pop” of the 1990s, and was also the stage chosen for New Labour’s election campaign, which simultaneously evoked images of “New Labour” and a “newly” rejuvenated English Capital.³ At this time for many there was a cultural investment in the idea, by writers and critics, that there was something noteworthy occurring at this specific time and place.

Nick Bentley (British Fiction of the 1990s) suggests that “trying to identify the defining characteristics of any period of literary history is a difficult task” (1), a task which is further complicated, as Fredric Jameson comments, when that fiction is so contemporary: “[T]he grasping of the present from within is the most problematical task the mind can face” (“Afterword—Marxism and Postmodernism” 383–384). Though problematic, I consider that it is possible to begin to map some significant trends within millennial fiction. The contemporary should not be ignored or reserved for analysis in a future period, but instead forms an integral part of a vibrant, contemporary literary criticism as a topic which is currently occupying the minds of an array of established critics.⁴ Dominic Head, Tew, Bentley and Jago Morrison all draw attention to the contemporary novel as a ripe area for literary analysis, Tew asserts: “One important historical fact (set of observable and arguable circumstances) about contemporary British fiction is that it is being increasingly studied very widely in a range of institutions” (180). The field of contemporary fiction studies is expansive and within the scope of the term there can be found more discrete areas of study that are worthy of critical attention. Millennial London fiction is one such area; it represents an opportunity to analyse the myriad ways in which writers have interacted with the shifting narrative strategies that have come to the fore as the capital city was defined and redefined.

The years leading up to the millennium were a significant period for British fiction; “the last decade of the old millennium was seeing some striking changes” (Bradbury The Modern British Novel 1878–2001 515). As Bradbury goes on to note, in some ways this involved a natural ending of an era as a “significant number of the leading writers who had shaped the course of post-war British fiction died in the decade” (515).⁵ Although, as Bradbury also comments, “[a] ‘Millennium’ is an artificial invention […] millennial sentiments are, and always have been real enough” (502). The inevitable feelings of change associated with fin de siècle reflection, and the careers of many of the key figures of post-war British literature coming to an end in the final two decades of the twentieth century combined to contribute towards a sense of an end of a literary era. As such, the beginning of the new century, and a new millennium, offers an appropriate moment to focus our attention in order to reflect upon the trends and characteristics of British fiction at the time. Garry Potter and José López (After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism 2001) concur, highlighting the opportunity the new millennium provided for reflection: “It is a year similar to many, but yet unlike any that has come before. It is the year two thousand, the gateway to a new millennium and as such an opportune time to pause and attempt to reassess” (3). Similarly, John Brannigan in Orwell to the Present, whilst acknowledging the artificial nature of the construct, states the turn of the millennium “afforded some opportunities” for “reflection” (65).

This book therefore seeks to consider and explore millennial literature, but with a focused consideration on London literature. The specific concentration on London literature needs to be contextualised in relation to the existing body of critical work on the specific topic, such as that by Phillips, John McLeod and Alex Murray. Phillips has written extensively on the topic of London fiction⁶ and I extend his trajectory to a consideration of the post-1990 novel. Murray’s approach in Recalling London (2007) is to examine the specific developments of London fiction through the authors Sinclair and Ackroyd, this book seeks to build upon Murray’s work to consider a range of contemporary authors. Similarly, I broaden some of the work of McLeod’s Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (2004) which focuses on post-1950s immigrant writing, to consider the wider contexts of style, structure and characterisation of a range of authors in the millennial period. If there is one aspect within the critical literature that constantly recurs, it is the idea that the city is a continuously changing entity—what Phillips calls “the city in performance” (London Narratives 159). Through a focus on a selection of key millennial texts, this study extends a critical focus on the literary re-imagining of the capital, one that is forever “in process” (London Narratives 159).

Context: The Postmodern Debate

This book approaches millennial London texts through a theoretical positioning of the post-postmodern. It is necessary for any discussion and definition of post-postmodernism to first engage with postmodernism. Postmodernism has dominated much critical thinking since the middle of the last century and is a term which by its very nature defies easy definition. Fredric Jameson makes such a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Mapping Millennial London Fiction
• 2. Restabilising Storytelling in the Female Historical London Novel at the Millennium
• 3. The Hero Returns: Character Motivation in London Millennial Fiction
• 4. The Heroine in the Millennial London Novel
• 5. Masculinities: Beyond the Postcolonial and the Postmodern in the London Novel
• 6. Outside of the Outside: Cultural Negativities and the Centre
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter