Thirlwell's failure to distinguish reality and the ‘reality-effect’ is symptomatic of his — and his English colleagues' — failure to grasp what was obvious to every artist I have been looking at in the course of this book, that what is at issue is reality itself, what it is and how an art which of necessity renounces all claim to contact with the transcendent can relate to it, and, if it cannot, what possible reason it can have for existing. This is not an issue for Thirlwell. ‘The problem of living in Brazil, or Cuba, or Russia, and wanting to write a novel’, he says grandly, ‘is the same problem as living in France, or Britain, and wanting to write a novel. The problem is universaclass="underline" it is about finding a way of describing real life.’
Thirlwell and his mentor Craig Raine, for all their waving of Modernist credentials, seem as confident as Jane Austen that the ground they stand on is solid. What I have tried to suggest in the course of this book is that, for some artists at least since the time of Dürer, and for any serious artist since 1789, the ground has been anything but solid. And that if this is the case then it is not enough to examine the surface of a work, to admire the artist's skill in doing this or that. What we need to do is to see it from the point of view of the artist — not of course Picasso or Stravinsky or Eliot the man but the maker. The reason for this is that the work itself asks for such a reading. Don Quixote, like Prufrock or Kafka's ‘The New Advocate’, is not just ‘about’ the juxtaposition of romantic beliefs and the world's reality; it recognises itself as implicated in an impossible struggle to reconcile these two, and it implicates the reader.
But our English pseudo-Modernists cannot or will not see this. They pride themselves on their realism, which means their beady-eyed refusal to be taken in by highfalutin language and all the temptations of Romanticism. Love is not about stars in your eyes, it is about the itch of sex; death is not a consummation devoutly to be wished but a dingy and degrading experience; art is there not to make you rejoice but to rub your nose in the dirt. As well as thanking, in the course of his book, his old tutor Craig Raine, Adam Thirlwell thanks Julian Barnes, and Barnes's latest book, Nothing to be Frightened of, perfectly exemplifies this mindset. Shocked by the death of his parents and his realisation that, at sixty, he has not all that much time to go himself, Barnes spends 250 pages telling himself and us how frightened he is at the prospect. What is terrifying about old age is the loss of control, and this is particularly difficult for Barnes because he seems to have inherited his mother's need to be in control at all times and never to be taken in by sentiment, though he recognises the ambiguous roots of such feelings. ‘I was an idealistic adolescent’, he writes, ‘who swerved easily into suspicion when confronted with life's realities. My kicks were those of a disheartened Romantic.’ This is insightful, but he doesn't follow it up. Rather, he seems happy to accept himself as a clear-eyed realist. ‘I hope, Barnes’, one of his teachers says to him, ‘that you're not one of those bloody back-row cynics.’ ‘Me, sir? Cynic, sir? Oh no — I believe in baa-lambs and hedgerow blossoms and human goodness, sir’, the grown-up Barnes responds across the years. But this kind of smartness soon palls. It's bright but it tries too hard to shock, like the joke which he likes so much he repeats it: ‘Alzheimer's? Forget it.’ Barnes, like Thirlwell and Raine, prides himself on his realism, which he likes to think brings him closer to his beloved Flaubert. But the trouble with this English brand of Realism is that it yields an impoverished view of life and leaves Barnes prey to all the fears he has striven to repress.
Reading Barnes, like reading so many of the other English writers of his generation, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Blake Morrison, or a critic from an older generation who belongs with them, John Carey, leaves me feeling that I and the world have been made smaller and meaner. Ah, they will say, but that is just what we wanted, to free you of your illusions. But I don't believe them. I don't buy into their view of life. The irony which at first made one smile, the precision of language, which was at first so satisfying, the cynicism, which at first was used only to puncture pretension, in the end come to seem like a terrible constriction, a fear of opening oneself up to the world. It is sad to see this has infected a writer from the next generation like Adam Thirlwell. All of them ultimately come out of Philip Larkin's overcoat, and clearly their brand of writing and the nature of their vision speaks to the English, for they are among the most successful writers of their generation. I wonder, though, where it came from, this petty-bourgeois uptightness, this terror of not being in control, this schoolboy desire to boast and to shock. We don't find it in Irish or American culture, or in French or German or Italian culture. The English have always been both sentimental and ironical, but there was never that sense of prep-school boys showing off, which is the taste these writers leave on my tongue.
How has it come about? I would venture three points. ‘Like most Victorian novelists’, writes John Bayley, ‘[Dickens'] sense of other places and people was founded on fear and distrust. The Boz of the Sketches seems to hate and fear almost everything even though it fascinates him.’ But this is something that antedates the Victorians. As Linda Colley has shown in her fine book, Britons, from the early eighteenth century on Britons defined themselves in opposition to others, in particular to the large, aggressive Popish nations of Spain and France: Britons are different; Britons never will be slaves, to other nations or to the ideas of other nations. To this must be added the fact that England was just about the only European country not to be overrun by enemy forces during the Second World War, which was a blessing for it, but which has left it strangely innocent and thrown it into the arms, culturally as well as politically, of the even more innocent United States. This has turned a robust pragmatic tradition, always suspicious of the things of the mind, into a philistine one. Though there is something appealing in the resolute determination not to be taken in evinced by Larkin and Amis in the face of European Modernism, something that reminds me of the Just William books I so enjoyed as a child, it soon begins to pall. Taken as a cultural rallying-cry it is little short of disastrous.
Second, and paradoxically, ours is an age which, while being deeply suspicious of the ‘pretentious’, worships the serious and the ‘profound’, so that large novels about massacres in Rwanda or Bosnia, or historical novels with a ‘majestic sweep’, are automatically considered more worthy of attention than the novels of, say, P.G. Wodehouse or Robert Pinget.
Finally, ours is the first generation in which High Art and Fashion have married in a spirit joyously welcomed by both parties. When the speakers at major literary festivals are for the most part politicians, television personalities or foreign correspondents; when we are enjoined to buy three books for the price of two in our major bookshops and a serious newspaper like the Independent offers its readers the chance, as a Christmas bonanza, to gatecrash a book launch of their choice with one of the paper's literary critics, we have truly arrived at an age where art and showbiz are one and the same.
In his delightful novel, Rates of Exchange, Malcolm Bradbury touches on the first of my points when he has his East European magical realist femme fatale, Katya Princip, explain his own history to the bemused British Council lecturer, Dr Petworth:
Oh, Mr. Petwit, I have told you. You are really not a character in the world historical sense. You come from a little island with water all round. When we were oppressed and occupied and when we fought and died, and there were mad mullahs and pogroms against the Jews, what did you have? Queen Victoria and industrial revolution and Alfred Lord Tennyson. We sent Karl Marx to explain everything, but you didn't notice. What did you do with him? Put him in Highgate cemetery, some would say the best place, I know. You never had history, just some customs.