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ANDREW SANDERS

POST-WAR AND POST-MODERN LITERATURE

When the Second War ended in the summer of 194 much of Britain was in ruins. The
landscape was marked by absences where familiar landmarks had once stood. The broken
London of bricks, facades, and dangerously exposed basements can now only be
recognized from paintings and photographs. This landscape of ruins must also be
recognized as forming an integral part of much of the literature of the late 40s and the
early 50s. It was a landscape which provided a metaphor for broken lives and spirits and,
in some remoter and less-defined sense, for the ruin of Great Birtain itself.

The view commonly held by artists and writers of the period was that the strange
juxtapositions of flowers and dust, of unexpected, wild gardens and shattered, empty
houses, and of the familiar seen in an unfamiliarly surreal way though a broken wall had
somehow been prepared for by Modernist experiments with fragmentation. The post-war
period was often seen as one which required the reassembling of fragments of meaning.

BRITAIN IN THE 1950s

In the immediately post-war years, the Empire melted into the larger concept of the
“Commonwealth”, a loosely associated fellowship of independent former colonies
dominated by Britain’s closest wartime allies (Canada, Australia, New Zeland and South
Africa.) The acceptance by the post-war Labour Government that India should be granted
its independence and that the sub-continent should be divided into two separate self-
governing countries inevitably brought about the broadening of this concept of a
“Commonwealth of Nations.” In June 1947 King George VI formally abandoned his
inherited title of “Emperor of India” as a necessary prelude to India’s assumption of self-
determination in August.

Official propaganda greeted the subsequent granting of independence to former colonies

in Africa, Asia, the West Indies, and the Pacific as successful examples of Britain’s
enlightened policy towards those it had once sought to educate in the principles of good
government and fair play. Rather than leaving Britain without a role, the loss of the Empire
was probably deeply resented ony by those members of the upper and middle classes who
had once felt called to serve it. Its gradual disappearance, together with that of its
somewhat exclusive employment opportunities, was steadily compensated for by Britain’s

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gain of a new cultural diversity following the immigration of a large body of workers, both
professional and unskilled from the Indian sub-continent and the West Indies.

The 1950s were marked by immigration and by the deaths of conscripted British soldiers
fighting against Communist insurgents. Perhaps the most notable example of the failure of
the imperial will was the Anglo-French military debacle at Suez in 1956 following the
nationalization of the Canal by the Egyptian Government. The Conservative Government’s
inept intervention, in the face of a radically changing pattern of international relations,
was readily interpreted by many jaded observers as careless.

It was a post-war Labour Government (elected in 1945) which have brought in the
legislation which gave India its independence. Labour’s mandate for the domestic reforms
it attempted to introduce was based on the widespread popular acceptance that the ar, the
war economy, and wartime propaganda had prepared the way for social change. An air of
optimism fostered the idea that Britain was rebuilding itself in a new, socially responsive
economic dawn. A pavilion called “The Lion and the Unicorn had also attempted to define
the “British Character” by endeavouring to represent “two of the main qualities of the
national character: on the one hand, realism and strength, on the other, fantasy,
independence and imagination.”

The optimism implicit in the Festival of Britain was not exactly forced, but it was clearly
designed to cheer up a dreary and deprived nation, one drained by the sacrifices which
had been required of it by the effort of fighting the war. It had, however, been a “People’s
War”, one which had forcibly suppressed distinctions between classes, genders, and races
thorugh military conscription, a planned economy, the recruitment of women’s labor, and
the rationing of food and luxury goods. The victory as much as the misery had been shared
by everyone. This was the drab, egalitarian Britain which found an exaggerated echo in the
world of George Orwell’s 1984. This was the Welfare Britain, with its citizens cared for
from the cradle to the grave, that the post-war Labour government nobly attempted to
forge into a united nation by the exercise of beningn state planning. It was an orderly and
conformist Britain that was also ripe for further change, not all of it disciplined or planned.

THE “NEW MORALITY”: THE 60s AND 70s

The Lady Chatterly’s Lover veredict represented a breaking of the shackles of official
censorship and public prudery; the Beatles’ record expressed the energy of a new popular
music, one that had appropriated the vitality of American styles and added a new lyricism
and a home-grown romanticism. At the trial, Lady Chatterly’s Lover had been defended

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against charges of obscenity by a succession of witnesses drawn from the literary, critical,
and clerical establishment, but, despite the fact that it sold over two million copies in the
year following its publication, the novel struck many of its readers as representative of an
essentially high-brow “literary” tradition. The Beatles’ music was, by contrast, patently not
high-brow. It erupted from below, both socially and harmonically, and it offended against
canons approved by right- and left- wing arbiters of taste alike. The music of the Beatles
and other groups of the time was not simply an added stimulus to some amorphous “cult
of youth”, but was itself a part of the vanguard of a new youth culture which was
dissenting, anarchic and constantly shifting.

It was the era of the female contraceptive known popularly since 1960 simply as “the pill”,
the sexual behavior of post-war youth was described as “casual promiscuity”. But the
“New Morality” was not simply to do with promiscuity, the pill, and “macho” male values.
It was in part a reflection of a post-Freudian openness about sexual relationships and in
part a post-Lawrentian attempt to sanctify sexuality. If the 1960s did not exactly mark the
discovery of the pleasures of sexual intercourse, the decade proved memorable not simply
for its legislative liberalization (birth-control and divorce were facilitated; abortion and
adult male homosexual acts were legalized) but also for the gradual establishment of new
moral, political, and cultural discourses.

The debates of the 1960s were, to a considerable degree, refocused by the consequent
theoretical formulations of the 1970s and 1980s. They were also conditioned by the
national and international political issues of the decade itself: the Cold War, the crisis over
the siting of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Britain proved to be impotent and attempted to avoid
all direct involvement in international conflicts during the Cold War.

In 1968, the evidence of world-wide disaffection seemed to suggest that radical political
change might be imminent. A new generation felt they might be as much the forgers of a
new social order as they were already the beneficiaries of a new moral one.

The 1960s were also notable for the attempts of British governments to negotiate a
belated entry into the European Economic Community. After several attempts, and
together with the Republic of Ireland and Denmark, Britain became a full member of the
European Community on 1973. Debates about the ramifications of these decisions for
national sovereignty have continued divisively into the 1990s.

The relative prosperity of Britain in the late 50s and 60s may have been insecurely based
on illusions of an economic renewal and a more equable distribution of wealth, but such

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economic optimism both propped up successive Conservative administrations and helped

the dream of a technological revolution sponsored by the Labour Government that
supplanted them in 1966. The 60s and 70s saw the reconstruction of industrial Britain and
offered new opportunities for travel and home entertainment. What had once seemed
unaffordable luxuries, such as continental holidays and televisions and stereos, were
gradually transformed into virtual necessities.

Social deprivation and homelessness were less noticeable, and therefore less addressed
and pressing problems. The material prosperity and consumerism led directly to the
relative complacency of the Thatcherite 1980s.

FEMALE AND MALE REFORMULATIONS

The New Morality begun to challenge received perceptions of gender, sexualiy and
marriage and new patterns in women’s employment and particularly professional
employment had steadily emerged since the end of the 2ndWW.

The campaigns of genteel suffragettes had represented the “first feminist wave”. Now, in
the second wave, the “ungenteel middle-class women were calling for revolution.”
(Germaine Greer). For her, the revolution began with a heightened alertness to the narrow
representations of women’s roles, and women’s consciousness, in society and its
literature.

SOME NOTES OF LATE-CENTURY FICTION

In common with the 1790s and the 1890s, the 1990s looks set to be a decade of
uncertainties and redefinitions, of false starts, blind alleys, reiterations, and tired
reaffirmations. There are certain periods when the Zeitgeist declares itself; there are many
others when contemporaries signally miss the point about what really matters to later
generations in how they thought, acted, and wrote. If it was clear enough to the men and
women of the 1790s that the period would have to come to terms with the political
implications of the French Revolution, relatively few contemporary British critics and
readers clearly identified what seem to us to be the leading literary spirits of the time. The
British 1890s were dominated by already established writers, but, with the exception of
W. B. Yeats, very few of the younger writers of the decade did in fact determine how the
Modernist revolution of the early twentieth century would be realized. What seem to be
leading cultural lines lead nowhere. What is certain is that the literature of the 1990s lacks
the tutelary presence of a major writer or major writers.

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British writing now seems to be still living off the twentieth-century past. It has little of the
originality and intellectual bite of the recent work that has emerged from South America
and the former Communist states of Eastern Europe. It also seems to be taking its time in
assimilating the import of the substantial changes that have taken place in the world since
the end of the Cold War, since the fragmentation of the Soviet Empire and its former
satellites, and since the resurgence of Islam and the redefinitions of Orthodox and Catholic
Europe. It may have taken post-colonialism in its politically correct stride and it may have
awkwardly flirted with the notion of ‘multiculturalism’, but it will have to learn the true
significance of other histories and other ways of telling stories. Despite the United
Kingdom’s prominent place in the European Community and despite the significance of
the English language both to Europe and to the world as a whole, English literature still
shows a marked tendency to be insular and to dwell on a narrow view of the past.
Although it likes playing games with narrative, and with the idea of narrative, it has
relatively few grand ideas and rather fewer epic pretensions.

In the early 1990s the novel remains the most accessible, the most discussed, and the most
sponsored literary form. Judging from the work of new novelists over the past fifteen
years, the forms and subjects of the late twentieth-century novel remain plural but
conservative despite the plethora of contemporary narrative theory. What some critics see
as ‘post-Modernism’ has entailed both a return to the basic challenges posed by the
pioneer experimentalists of the early century, and a degree of subversion of the very
assumptions upon which both traditional and early- Modernist fictional forms were based.

Broadly speaking, other recent British fiction can be seen as having explored four
particular areas of interest: it has, sometimes outrageously, continued the development of
the well-established Gothic tradition; it has sought a newly distinct feminist expression; it
has tried out new varieties of historical writing; and it has begun to widen its horizons to
include writers and subjects stemming from the old colonial Empire and from a wider
world. For example: Mc Ewan.

The history of the fragmented and still fragmenting, former British Empire has held a
notable fascination for other recent novelists. Victorian India has in particular attracted
the restorer of the boys’ adventure story for adult readers. Quite the most striking and
inventive single novel to discuss India’s transition from Raj to Republic is Salman
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). ‘Reality is a question of perspective’, he writes, ‘the
further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems-but as you
approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.’ Rushdie’s own

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‘handcuffing’ to history rendered him an especially effective, sensitive, and observant

commentator on India for non-Indian readers. Rushdie is, however, far from alone in his
awareness of how a non-European cultural awareness can shift the sometimes narrow
temporal and intellectual perspectives of European, and specifically British, literature.

Quite distinct, and far less easily characterized as ‘post-colonial’, is the work of the
Japanese-born Kazuo Ishiguro (b.1954) whose novel An Artist of the Floating World
(1986) is a delicate fictional study of an ageing painter's awareness of, and detachment
from, the political and cultural development of twentieth-century Japan. When Ishiguro
writes directly about Britain, as he does in The Remains of the Day (1989), he manages to
ask equally delicate, carefully framed, but none the less demanding cultural questions.

In speaking of the British and Irish literature of the past forty-five years it is clear that it
remains dominated by the historical and social changes wrought by the Second World War
and by the period of external decolonization and internal reconsideration that followed. If
one single decade seemed at the time to matter more than any other, it was, of course, the
1960s. Whether or not that decade will in future seem remarkable for the literature it
produced, rather than simply for the changes in popular culture and popular awareness
that it witnessed, will be for the future to judge.