The
Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950-2000
Dominic Head
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
£40.00, 307 pages, ISBN 0-521-66014-9 (hardback).
£14.95, 307 pages, ISBN 0-521-66966-9 (paperback).
Marylin Mell
Madison, Wisconsin
Dominic
Head’s ambitious study of post-war British fiction lodges its
center within the flexible and forgiving shape of antinomy. Society/
Individual. Anti-Theory/History. Time/Timelessness. Ethics/Self-Interest.
In The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950-2000,
Head’s daunting task is to offer comprehensive commentary upon
several factories’ worth of literary production. How might one
individual—who must occasionally need respite and further fortification
to carry on—find a way to oversee such a prodigious amount of
material? (By his own accounting, repeated several times, Head scrutinizes
more than 100 authors and 200 literary works.) Head soldiers his way
through this project by creating a limited number of categories for
analysis, fine tuning his focus, and eliminating what he considers
riffraff. (Gleefully, for instance, he jettisons Angela Carter asserting
that her current stock value far exceeds its actual worth.) Head’s
investigation of postwar British fiction concentrates almost exclusively
on social fiction. The criterion for inclusion here is that a novel,
novella, or short story must brush up against reality and reshape
it. Head’s assertion is that the best fiction is that which interrogates
life, repackaging its vibrancy and dreariness within itself. His fascination
is for how fiction’s porous quality, its absorption of life’s
most elusive or radical dimensions, provides a specialized knowledge
unavailable elsewhere.
Responsibility often becomes burdensome. In seeking to survey fifty
years of recent and near-recent fiction, Head desires to go the distance,
and be as all-inclusive as possible. Yet his insights are most compelling
when he revels in extended critiques of individual works. Ironically,
in a critical analysis dedicated to outlining the evolution of the
social novel over the last 50 years, his own prose is most effective
when he indulges in lyrical outbursts. Perhaps, there is a book on
John Fowles in Head’s future since he is particularly engaging
when he writes about Fowles’s Daniel Martin (1977). In
the Introduction, he focuses on how Fowles cleverly places Daniel
Martin within Tsankawi ruins, an abandoned Amerindian site in New
Mexico. Fowles manipulates Martin’s experiences here to investigate
time, especially the phenomenon of time’s horizontality. Fowles
recalls how the Tsankawi culture held no sense of the past or future,
but only of time-not-present. To conceive of time only within the
present permitted the Tsankawi to create equivalence between memories
and feelings and to construct a totality of consciousness so distinct
from contemporary fragmentation and alienation. Clearly, Head structures
his critique within the materialist tradition and appears most heavily
influenced by Raymond Williams. Perhaps, this is why his chapter on
“Country and Suburbia” is one of this text’s most inspired.
Evoking Williams’s meditations on how pivotal the city was in
modernist formations, Head reflects powerfully on how alienation and
fragmentation of suburbia are symbolically lodged in mid-to-late twentieth-century
British fiction.
Ironically, it is Head’s circumspect tour guide manners that
occasionally chafe. In seeking to offer an in-depth analysis of such
a wide scale of material, some of his best insights are denied their
maximum development. Head clearly took considerable care in designing
the text’s layout. The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British
Fiction, 1950-2000 is divided into 7 chapters: (1) "The State
and the Novel"; (2) "Class and Social Change"; (3)
"Gender and Sexual Identity"; (4) "National Identity";
(5) "Multicultural Personae"; (6) "Country and Suburbia";
(7) "Beyond 2000". "National Identity" and "Country
and Suburbia" emerge as the strongest and most appealing chapters.
In "National Identity" Head with economy and discernment
offers an overview of Britain’s radical altering of its sense
of self. Perhaps, it is because Head can comprehend how the individual
is knotted into the society-at-large that his critical skills seem
so keen and fast paced here. Clearly, Head’s gift is for analyzing
how social and historical culture shapes and even limits those who
live within specific places and mindsets. Head’s interest in
Ireland and what is termed the Northern Troubles leads him to construct
a compelling analysis of Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal (1983).
Yet, in attempting to include many other multicultural perspectives,
sometimes his commentary thins out, even if understandably so. Although
his chapter on "Multicultural Personae" is not as gripping,
his reading of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988)
is one of the book’s highlights. Here Head demonstrates a compelling
even-handedness, indicating how Rushdie’s portrait of Mohammed
as Mahound or “false god or even devil” would be offensive
to devout believers but also suggests how the novel cleverly satirizes
cultural problems resulting from a conformity too tightly wound. Head
is also most entertaining when he liberally dismisses popular authors.
Yet his need to dismiss critical perspectives seems somewhat disingenuous
since his work could not be structured as it is (with its emphasis
on nation, gender and multiculturalism) without the trench work critical
theory has performed.
What is genre? Embedded within Dominic Head’s treatise on post-1950
fiction, this question is implicitly handled in several intriguing
ways. First, Head in determining what to include in his encyclopedic
account of fifty years of British fiction decides that he must include
short stories, novellas, and novels in his analysis. Second, and more
curiously, Head’s most passionate interest is in narrowing the
type of fiction that he will analyze in The Cambridge Introduction
to Modern British Fiction, 1950-2000. Although generously discussing
more than 100 authors and 200 works, Head asserts directly that he
will be focusing on post-war British fiction that contributes to a
greater understanding of social and cultural history. Here Head’s
interest might be typed as concern for the genre of the social novel
as it unfolds in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet, third,
it could be claimed that Head is participating within a materialist
critique of literature, one that intentionally follows in the principles
used most memorably by Raymond Williams. Here Head can be seen as
crafting a type of social criticism whose purpose is to reveal how
literature’s mimetic undertones offer its greatest good. What
is the reality that fiction offers to its readers—and more precisely
how gracefully does it enact epiphanies that transform perception
and even induce the possibility for an altered consciousness? Since
it is this question that dominates Head’s critical apparatus,
it is here that the work stakes its claim for the future.
In attempting to analyze what the Victorians termed “The Woman
Question”, Head adopts a chronological approach that rather heavily
relies upon the pre-set critical categories of second wave feminism
and post-feminism in a manner that sometimes seems more methodical
than illuminating. Yet the chapter does begin with the engaging and
useful commentary that the “impression that the 1950s epitomized
a traditional British way of life is belied by the way in which some
of the planks of second wave feminism were being put in place”
(83.) Yet since The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction,
1950-2000 operates within this not always fully acknowledged mimetic
undertones, his concern for women’s experience is more socially
bound than might be most effective here. In another of his desires
to be inclusive, he ends the chapter with a sketchy and rather disappointing
section on gay literature. Again, Head’s sense of responsibility
pushes him to get cornered in a section that he either cannot really
handle or due to time constraints cannot forcefully execute. Yet,
it should be considered that he seeks to include commentary on society’s
repression of gays precisely because he feels that it should be done—perhaps
aware that others might investigate both women’s writing and
gay literature in a manner more compelling and charismatic than he
can muster here in his Napoleonic march across British/Commonwealth
fiction of the latter half of the twentieth century.
In assessing this monumental work, Head should be offered his due—respect
and gratitude. This book is likely to age well and will undoubtedly
allow students and scholars alike a place to begin to see patterns
emerging within British social fiction. Although the book is not so
easily read straight through, casual readers can indulge in reading
those sections which interest them most. This marathon labor offers
the reader quick entry into the best of the period. Head's critical
analyses allow the reader to consider which of the works that are
covered he might like to revisit or read for the first time. In re-reading
the Introduction and noting those lyrical outbursts this reader becomes
impatient for further works by Head where he will not be constrained
to offer such radical breadth and where he will be able to work further
within those intense passages where his gloss is most brilliant. Head’s
close reading of Fowles’s temporality and his Ricoeur citations
indicate that his future insights into time will be worth reading.
Additionally, Head’s generosity toward other critics, especially
his gracious citing of Andrzej Gasiorek’s study of realism suggest
that this is a critic knotted within the larger social visions of
the time and place of his own inhabitation.
