THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: 1945 TO PRESENT find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist’.
thing, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist’. Waiting for Godot (in
The years since the end of the Second World War have seen a decline in British
influence and continuing failure to compete successfully with the newly
developing economies of the world. In national terms, the country has also seen
decentralisation. The regions have competed with London for economic, social,
and cultural influence. Nowadays, regional accents are heard as regularly on BBC
television and radio programmes as standard English accents. These changes have
corresponded to changing inflections in writing in the English language
worldwide, with the result that the term ‘literatures in English’ is now often
preferred to English literature.
For the novelist A.S. Byatt, there is, throughout this time, a new richness and
diversity in English writing, a continuing of the search for a post-Darwinian
security in creativity: ‘A wonderful mix of realism, romance, fable, satire, parody,
play with form and philosophical intelligence.’ Byatt notes an ‘almost obsessive
recurrence of Darwin in modern fiction’. Where nineteenth-century writers –
novelists in particular – wrote about the ending of certainty, especially religious
certainty, late twentiethcentury writers largely concerned themselves with (again
according to Byatt) ‘what it means to be a naked animal, evolved over
unimaginable centuries, with a history constructed by beliefs which have lost their
power’. This is a useful perception of the common themes underlying much of
modern writing, and indeed much of the Modern or post-Modern perception of the
world we live in.
BECKETT
A different kind of realism is found in the plays of Samuel Beckett and Harold
Pinter. Their works were for several years rather misleadingly labelled ‘theatre of
the absurd’. The critic who first applied the term ‘absurd’, Martin Esslin, has since
revised his terms of reference for the word ‘absurd’, but it can still be applied, if in
a slightly different sense. The existential philosophy of writers such as Jean-Paul
Sartre – which posited the individual as ‘the source of all value’ – met the mood of
a time which was to become more and more concerned with material comforts,
acquisitiveness, and wealth. A vision of the world as essentially meaningless,
peopled with helpless but selfish characters with no particular sense of identity,
was not new. It can be traced back in poetry, through T.S. Eliot and Wilfred Owen,
as far as Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, and in the use of ‘wasteland’ or ‘no
man’s land’ as an image.
Beckett’s characters inhabit these empty wastelands, and one of Pinter’s plays has
the title No Man’s Land. Although accepting the ‘absurdity’ of existence and
human behaviour, neither playwright can be described as entirely pessimistic.
Where, in Dover Beach, the line ‘Ah, love, let us be true to one another’ offered
some reassurance against the bleakness of the world, Beckett’s characters ‘always
English, 1955), probably Beckett’s best-known play, is based on waiting, in the
eternal hope that ‘tomorrow everything will be better’.
The two tramps Vladimir and Estragon spend their time in the same place, day
after day, filling in time, waiting for things to happen. The audience might feel,
with Estragon, that ‘Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!’
But the spirit of Beckett is highly comic even in the face of bleakness and
sameness. It is the same spirit informing the absurd situations presented in the
silent films of the early twentieth century. Beckett’s characters have much in
common with those played by the stars of silent films like Charlie Chaplin and
Buster Keaton, in that their ‘routines’ (both verbal and physical), their very
appearance, all deliberately recall these ‘Everyman’ figures of the century.
VLADIMIR You must be happy, too, deep down, if you only knew it.
ESTRAGON Happy about what?
VLADIMIR To be back with me again.
ESTRAGON Would you say so?
VLADIMIR Say you are, even if it’s not true.
ESTRAGON What am I to say?
VLADIMIR Say, I am happy.
ESTRAGON I am happy.
VLADIMIR So am I.
ESTRAGON So am I. vladimir We are happy.
ESTRAGON We are happy. [Silence.] What do we do now, now that we are
happy?
VLADIMIR Wait for Godot.
[estragon groans. Silence.]
Things have changed since yesterday.
ESTRAGON And if he doesn’t come?
VLADIMIR [after a moment of bewilderment] We’ll see when the time comes.
HUGHES
Hughes’s poetry emphasised the pitiless and violent forces of nature. Many of his
poems focus on animals who pursue their lives with a single-minded strength and
power. Some of the animals he depicts are not so much violent as vigorous, with a
sharp sense of survival. Hughes makes his readers aware of the prehistory of the
natural world, stressing its indifference to man. Poems such as Pike, Jaguar,
Thrushes, or Wind are totally without sentimentality, the natural forces viewed
with a harsher eye than Lawrence’s.
In one of his best-known poems, Hawk Roosting, which is cast as a monologue,
Hughes presents the hawk as a powerful bird which catches and eats smaller birds
and animals. The hawk states that everything in nature has been arranged for its
own convenience. It assumes that the existence of other birds and animals as its
prey is part of the purpose of creation. Its eye and a strong personality (‘I’ in a pun
on ‘eye’) will ensure that this situation does not change.
I kill where I please because it is all mine
My manners are tearing off heads, the allotment of death.
The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began;
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.
Many critics have equated this state of mind with the psychology of a totalitarian
dictator. The hawk’s words and actions relate to forces underlying both human and
animal experience. The word ‘hawk’ is applied to politicians who believe in the
use of force to resolve political problems.
In his later work, Hughes became more preoccupied with myths and legends. In
Crow (1977) he retells the creation story from the point of view of a violent,
anarchic consciousness – the crow himself – who emerges as a kind of anti-Christ.
The poems in this volume, and in Gaudete (1977), are sparse dramas in which
traditional metrical patterning and realistic presentation are abandoned.
RUSHDIE
Salman Rushdie’s novels move from realism to what has become known as magic
realism. Rushdie was born in India, and the subcontinent is the setting of what
many regard as his best works – Midnight’s Children (1981), about the children
born as India passed to self-rule in 1947, and Shame (1983) – which are deeply
concerned with the culture, politics, and religion of that vast land and its
neighbours. Rushdie recalls an oral tradition of storytelling applied in a modern
context, evoking sights, sounds, and smells of the world in realistic terms, side by
side with the spinning of wild fantasies and improbable tales.
Rushdie is at the same time the most controversial novelist of his time and the
most critically acclaimed. The Satanic Verses (1988) gave rise to charges of
blasphemy, and the Iranian government issued a fatwa (death sentence for religious
reasons) against the author. The controversy over this – possibly his least exciting
novel – has often overshadowed the very real achievements of his major novels. In
Midnight’s Children Rushdie uses the image of chutney, one jar per year, to
indicate the glorious rich mixture that is India. Towards the end of the novel, the
narrator reflects:
The process of revision should be constant and endless; don’t think I’m satisfied
with what I’ve done! Among my unhappinesses: an overlyharsh taste from those
jars containing memories of my father; a certain ambiguity in the love-flavour of
‘Jamila Singer’ (Special Formula No. 22), which might lead the unperceptive to
conclude that I’ve invented the whole story of the baby-swap to justify an
incestuous love; vague implausibilities in the jar labelled ‘Accident in a Washing-
chest’ – the pickle raises questions which are not fully answered, such as: Why did
Saleem need an accident to acquire his powers? Most of the other children didn’t. .
. . Or again, in ‘All-India Radio’ and others, a discordant note in the orchestrated
flavours: would Mary’s confession have come as a shock to a true telepath?
Sometimes, in the pickles’ version of history, Saleem appears to have known too
little; at other times, too much . . . yes, I should revise and revise, improve and
improve; but there is neither the time nor the energy. I am obliged to offer no more
than this stubborn sentence: It happened that way because that’s how it happened.
There is also the matter of the spice bases. The intricacies of turmeric and cumin,
the subtlety of fenugreek, when to use large (and when small) cardamoms; the
myriad possible effects of garlic, garam masala, stick cinnamon, coriander, ginger .
. . not to mention the flavourful contributions of the occasional speck of dirt.
(Saleem is no longer obsessed with purity.) In the spice bases, I reconcile myself to
the inevitable distortions of the pickling process. To pickle is to give immortality,
after all: fish, vegetables, fruit hang embalmed in spice-and-vinegar; a certain
alteration, a slight intensification of taste, is a small matter, surely? The art is to
change the flavour in degree, but not in kind; and above all (in my thirty jars and a
jar) to give it shape and form – that is to say, meaning. (I have mentioned my fear
of absurdity.) One day, perhaps, the world may taste the pickles of history. They
may be too strong for some palates, their smell may be overpowering, tears may
rise to eyes; I hope nevertheless that it will be possible to say of them that they
possess the authentic taste of truth . . . that they are, despite everything, acts of
love.
Rushdie’s reputation was fully restored with the publication of East West (1994)
and The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995). Where Midnight’s Children took the historical
moment of Indian independence, The Moor’s Last Sigh takes the departure of the
Moors from Spain in the fifteenth century as its starting point: what is lost and
what is gained are explored in a panoply of fantasies, tales, realism, and magic,
which reaffirm Rushdie’s place in modern fiction, and show him returning to the
height of his creative powers.
Source: The Routledge history of literature in English : Britain and Ireland by
Ronald Carter and John McRae