5
‘The eighteenth-century novel is formally most like our own, under comparable pressures and uncertainties, and it was in the deepening understanding of the relations between individuals and societies that the form actually matured.’
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (1961)1
‘And so strong was the general air of collapse that, when the task of the novel resumed in post-war conditions, it resembled the task of beginning all over again.’
Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel (1993)2
Writing in an issue of the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction from 2000 devoted to The Rise of the Novel, W. B. Carnochan attributed Watt’s staying power to the fact that this is ‘a book people can actually read’.3 Carnochan returns to Watt’s much-annotated typescript pages in order to describe the labour that produced his unusual clarity, as if to say that this work on the writer’s part is as essential for the production of readable criticism in the twenty-first century as it was in the 1950s. Three years later Gerald Graff named Watt among the critics from whom academic novices should take courage: ‘scholars who wrote with lucidity and wit’ and reached ‘the top of the profession’ without ever sacrificing the approachability of their writing.4 Needless to say, Carnochan’s and Graff’s emphasis on this aspect of Watt’s criticism implies a judgement on the unreadability of much academic prose.
But if there is a transhistorical drive behind their use of Watt as exemplar, where good scholarly writing from the 1950s remains recognizably good writing still, there is also an importantly historical dimension to Watt’s style. In The Rise of the Novel an interest in realism gets advanced at the level of critical style by a kind of writing analogous to Watt’s own definitions of realism in fiction, ‘formal realism’ and ‘realism of assessment’. Watt’s critical writing is precise and concrete, but it also appeals in a worldly way to the values (in Daniel Schwartz’s words, ‘rational, humanistic, and egalitarian’) that Watt assumes his readers share. Looking back at the mid-century, we find among critical and creative writers alike a pronounced discomfort with what they saw as verbal abstraction in the service of mystification. Philosopher Colin McGinn writes that a ‘new mood’ unites mid-century writers with the British logical positivists, with their ‘clarity, tough-mindedness, descriptive accuracy, attention to linguistic fact, down-to-earthness, anti-obscurantism, celebration of the ordinary, respect for common sense, hatred of pretentious nonsense’.5 Meanwhile, some critics felt that something had gone wrong even in the language of humanistic enquiry. Graham Hough worried that literary complexity had ‘often been met by making the language of criticism itself as impenetrable to ordinary modes of apprehension as the language of poetry is alleged to be. To much of what has been said about poetical discourse in the present century it is impossible to attach any meaning at all.’6 Watt made a similar point about ‘ordinary modes of apprehension’ when he emphasized the importance of accessibility in criticism to his undergraduates at Stanford: ‘Literature, unlike the mysteries of faith and physics, is not invisible to the unassisted naked eye. On the contrary, it is visibly there; it would still be there if there were no professors to teach it.’7
William Empson had also studied with I. A. Richards at Cambridge, but, although Richards influenced them both as critics, a different aspect of Richards’s work resonated in their writing for decades, Richards’s advocacy of Basic English. Neither Watt nor Empson was ever an actual believer, but it had a kind of ironized utility for them both as a touchstone. While Basic was meant to become a standard point of entry for English as a Second Language, many of Empson’s more biting pronouncements are concerned with native speakers of an advanced kind: writers and critics. ‘Practice in turning their own stuff into Basic really would be the kindest education in style you could give them, even if it made them realise how often they are talking nonsense,’ he wrote in an essay for a 1973 Festschrift for Richards: ‘To pretend that it could possibly make them use the language worse than they do already sounds to me farce.’8 Recalling the link between clear thinking and clear writing on which his wartime BBC colleague George Orwell had based ‘Politics and the English Language’, Empson argued that ‘to get a thing said fully in Basic may be a training in thought’, and that for English speakers to know Basic ‘might make them a bit less easily deceived by nonsense written in bloated English’.9 In 1954, he declared his intent to Janet Adam Smith, literary editor of the New Statesman: ‘I have to read so much Mandarin English Prose now, especially in literary criticism, and am so accustomed to being shocked by its emptiness, that I feel I must do otherwise at all costs.’10
Watt’s essays give an even stronger sense of his commitment to the plain style. Critical writing should convey ‘the notion that it is the product neither of a card index nor of a divine oracle, but of a putative human being communicating with other human beings’; and there ought to be more ‘exceptions to the rule that “scholarly” usually means “unreadable” and “readable” usually means “wrong” ’.11 In another essay he joked that, although ‘all more or less specialised pursuits have their own vocabularies; plumbers make a nice distinction between a coupling and a union’, ‘the vocabulary of criticism should be as common sense as possible in its attempt to achieve clarity and accessibility of statement’:
The effect of long words is a little like that which Fowler attributes to the exact pronunciation of French words in English conversation: ‘the greater its success as a tour de force, the greater its failure as a step in the conversational progress; for your collocutor, aware that he could not have done it himself, has his attention distracted whether he admires or is humiliated.’
Any literary criticism whose effect is to humiliate the reader (and I’ve seen some cases where that seemed its only intention), seems to me to defeat its primary purpose, which is, I take it, to be part of a conversation among lovers of literature. In that sense, the critic’s concern for a common orientation with his reader towards literature should produce a style of discourse which is fraternal; that is, discourse whose rhetoric implies the common and equal possession of shared interests and feelings.12
To write accessibly is sociable good manners, and a vote of confidence in literary criticism as a place where the possibility of democratic consensus can, if only rhetorically, be assumed.
One defining quality, then, of a body of mid-century criticism is its commitment to transparency in fields otherwise inclined towards ‘pretentious jargon or bogus sentiment’, in the contemporary words of the great émigré art critic Ernst Gombrich: ‘I have striven sincerely to avoid these pitfalls and to use plain language even at the risk of sounding casual or unprofessional.’13 As in The Rise of the Novel, the critical style follows the theme in Gombrich’s classic The Story of Art (1950). This is, among other things, a book about (‘formal’) realism and empiricism, and Gombrich unmistakably approves of those artists who ‘tried to explore the visible world’, arguing that the major artistic watersheds came when the artist ‘decided to have a look for himself instead of following the old prescription’ and ‘began to rely on what he saw’ rather than on pre-existing traditions.14 (Watt may not have known this argument when he was writing The Rise of the Novel, but he cites it in Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (C. 171).)
For these writers, critical language goes wrong when it is merely ventriloquizing pre-existing formulae and feelings, Gombrich’s ‘pretentious jargon or bogus sentiment’. These second-hand descriptions were what Orwell denounced as ‘readymade’ language in his classic denunciation of writing produced not by ‘picking out words for the sake of their meaning’, but by ‘gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else’.15 Most famously, Orwell cast political writing as the truly dangerous violator of everyday referential norms, but in the same essay he also identified ‘art criticism and literary criticism’ as academic disciplines culpable for whole bodies of writing in which ‘it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.’16
So this chapter describes how the ‘plain style’ became so important at mid-century, and asks why a hyper-referential realism should have entered criticism in so self-conscious and sustained a way in exactly the same years as it dominated Britain’s literary fiction. Thinking about Watt’s writing in a specifically literary context—in a period when criticism could imagine, even assume, a non-academic readership—helps us to see what was unique to the literary conditions of the mid-century. It offers a different way into a critical topic that has been familiar to scholars of twentieth-century fiction since the 1960s: the so-called return to realism in the novels of the 1940s and 1950s. Up to this point, I have been treating Watt’s criticism the way we ordinarily treat creative rather than critical writing, unpacking the biographical and historical contexts that helped to make it possible; this chapter reads Watt’s concern with realism—qua transparency, concreteness, empirical observation, and the appeal to normative values—explicitly in the context of his British contemporaries’ work in the novel.
The Return of the ‘Real’
That British fiction after the war was characterized by a ‘return to realism’ was first argued in Rubin Rabinovitz’s influential 1967 study The Reaction against Experiment in the English Novel, 1950–60, and the claim was shored up by numerous surveys of what up until the early twenty-first century was easily the least critically fashionable phase of modern British writing. Bernard Bergonzi, for example, substantially echoed Rabinovitz’s view in The Situation of the Novel (1970). Here, the post-war novel’s characteristic realism is less a positive choice than a symptom of depletion: the novelist ‘has inherited a form whose principal characteristic is novelty, or stylistic dynamism, and yet nearly everything possible to be achieved has already been done’.17 (Perhaps tellingly, only a few pages earlier Bergonzi takes exception to what he considers Watt’s overemphasis in The Rise of the Novel on ‘a relation between the novel and philosophical empiricism’.18) Bergonzi offered a more enthusiastic account of early post-war fiction when he looked back in Wartime and Aftermath (1993), however, and in his survey of the modern British novel published in the same year, Malcolm Bradbury argued that the mid-century novel had certainly indicated ‘a return to an older concept of fiction, to realism, materialism, empiricism’, although he thought earlier critics had underestimated the extent to which realism had been a feature of modern British fiction all along.19
As the literally negative characterization of realism in Rabinowitz’s title suggests—‘the reaction against experiment’ makes realism merely a refusal of something else—critics have often understood the assertively realist strand of mid-century writing as fundamentally reactionary, a movement (or, indeed, The Movement) reflecting a widespread sense among writers of the 1950s that modernist fiction had inflated the importance of the inner life at the expense of the social and material world. In the wider European context, this argument is most familiar from Georg Lukács’s ‘The Ideology of Modernism’ (1957), a document itself so comprehensively of its time that its denunciation of modernist individualism might not be wholly reducible to the politics of the Iron Curtain. Without minimizing the importance of the backlash against modernism as such (or, more precisely, against a radically antisocial and obscurantist modernism of the mid-century’s symptomatic exaggeration), we might supplement that canonical story by considering how the period around the Second World War made realism not merely the customary generational revolt against immediate literary predecessors or simply a default position for second-tier novelists, but a positive and self-conscious decision.
The mid-century re-energizing of realism obviously touches on matters of primarily literary-historical interest such as the relationship between mid-century writing and the end of modernism, but it had considerable moral and political as well as literary urgency in its own time. Although one could disagree with sociolinguist Deborah Cameron’s attribution of Movement writers’ prescriptivist attitudes to language to the socially insecure conformism arising from their non-elite backgrounds—the ‘verbal hygiene’ she describes demonstrably pre-existed and exceeded the Movement—it is certainly true at mid-century that ‘putting language to rights becomes a surrogate for putting the world to rights’.20 Anxieties about language in this period are substantially anxieties about something else. Even the attack on modernism is frequently a way of articulating fundamentally political worries, motivated by a war-haunted feeling that modernist individualism had come to look less like the emancipation it had once promised than a validation of debilitating atomization. ‘We live, as we dream—alone,’ Conrad’s Marlow had announced in a famous line from Heart of Darkness, but, as Watt pointed out, surely no writer had tried as strenuously as Conrad to mitigate the condition he had diagnosed.21 I have already quoted Watt’s claim that ‘the dominating question in Conrad’ is ‘alienation, yes, but how do we get out of it?’
By the late 1940s, individualization is represented as an imprisonment—as in the title of Patrick Hamilton’s tragicomic The Slaves of Solitude (1947). In a boarding house in the middle of the war, the Nazi-sympathizing Mr Thwaites and his German housemate Vicky Kugelmann bait the novel’s intelligent and likable spinster heroine almost to the point of nervous collapse. What is most telling about The Slaves of Solitude is how explicitly it ties social fracture to problems of language, for Hamilton’s novel is primarily concerned with what John Mepham identified as ‘bad talk’.22 The chief weapon of Miss Roach’s tormenters is their peculiar idiolect: they can speak only in phrasings that are sometimes excruciatingly banal, littered with ersatz medievalisms and obsolete slang, and sometimes ominously oblique and insinuating. ‘Be sporty, old thing…You must learn to be sporty, Miss Prude,’ spurts Vicki in the colloquialisms of twenty years earlier, as she flirts with Miss Roach’s American serviceman admirer.23 Meanwhile, Mr Thwaites’s archaisms keep sliding from merely foolish and irritating to aggressive: ‘And what of my Lady of the Roach?’, he asks Miss Roach about her plans for the day: ‘She goeth, perchance, unto the coffee-house…there to partake of the noxious brown fluid with her continental friends?’24 Importantly, Miss Roach, the ‘English Miss’, as the bullies nickname her, in a slight against her supposed lack of sophistication, is not only a good liberal humanist and committed social democrat but the only major character in the novel whose words mean no more nor less than they are intended to mean. Instructively, the linguistically fastidious Miss Roach is an assistant in a publishing house, and words are her work.
Much of Hamilton’s fiction is concerned with misuses of language. In his oddball pre-war satire Impromptu in Moribundia (1939), the inhabitants of the planet Moribundia think only in the language of advertising, while the grotesque comedy of Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse (1952) depends substantially on the unrelieved awfulness of the characters’ witlessly automatized verbal mannerisms. The novel’s funniest set pieces include a colonel’s gullible and snobbish widow, besotted by the conman Gorse, writing in her diary in a pseudo-literary style (‘Whither shall I turn? What woman, ever, was in such woeful or wildering pass? Shall I or shall I not? Do I or do I not? Yes or no? Aye or Nay?’) and a retired Army Major (Staff) attempting to compose his annual Armistice poem: ‘Mention of Passchendaele, he felt, would be most inspiring…Next to Passchendaele, the Major was tremendously anxious to use Ypres. But here, when it came to rhyming, he was totally stumped.’25 But it is in his novels set during the war that Hamilton outlines with diagrammatic clarity the mapping of politics on to verbal style that will dominate the early post-war period: bad speech is opaque, and it goes with fascist politics, while good speech is precise and unambiguous, and a reliable index of authenticity and political intelligence.
The Nazi politics of the German Vicki Kugelmann are implied rather than definitively shown—a Kugel is a bullet—and Mr Thwaites’s Nazi sympathies are unambiguous. In Hamilton’s wartime Hangover Square (1941), too, the most verbally impenetrable character, the narcissistic Netta, is a fascist sympathizer. What Hamilton’s fiction shows is verbal expression going politically wrong: language becomes second-hand mannerism; it comes unmoored from ordinary common-sense meanings not for modernism’s exuberantly defamiliarizing aesthetic effects, but rather to advance bullying political ends. The transparency of language has become a categorically new interest, and what happens to verbal communication in Hamilton’s claustrophobic wartime pubs and boarding houses is, his novels imply, merely mimicking what is happening in the political world outside.
In this insistence on a link between bad speech and unspeakable politics, the under-read Hamilton is a wholly representative mid-century figure. He is among those novelists whose insistence on realist concreteness in the early post-war period can be seen as a way of dramatizing and contradicting the willed illegibility of war language, a particularly urgent matter in the new contexts provided not only by totalitarianism but also by the ugly and obscuring jargon of the democracies that fought them. Hamilton’s own realist narrative style, with his deployment of a decisive and knowing narrator whose ideological and moral perspectives are always both legible and legitimate, suggests a way out of the linguistic ordeals his heroes and heroines are forced to undergo. While we are privy to and sympathize with the characters’ inner lives and can reconstruct their almost journalistically specific environments as a result of the kind of circumstantial detail Watt cast as the hallmark of ‘formal realism’, Hamilton’s perhaps outdated-seeming replay of what Watt called ‘realism of assessment’ means that we are never subjected to the protagonists’ uncertainties about what the other characters are up to.
Some writers’ responses, then, to the misuses of language—the development of perniciously anti-referential forms of language—were not portentous declarations about the difficulties of articulation but a renewal of realism, with its drive towards clarification and its belief in the possibility of rational communication. The effort to repair what these writers understood to be a war-broken relationship between words and things dominated mid-century prose. Particularly among those whose victimization had been abetted by fraudulent speech, notions of the inevitability of communicative failure seemed a gratuitous betrayal of their experience. ‘According to a theory fashionable during those years, which to me seems frivolous and irritating, “incommunicability” supposedly was an inevitable ingredient, a life sentence inherent to the human condition,’ Primo Levi wrote in The Drowned and the Saved: ‘To say that it is impossible to communicate is false; one always can.’26 ‘Modern intellectuals quarrel a great deal about their communication difficulties and in the process talk a lot of pure nonsense, which would better remain unsaid,’ wrote former political prisoner Jean Améry.27
Perhaps writers like Hamilton have fallen into obscurity because after modernism they might look exceedingly old-fashioned, as if they were trying to channel Austen in entirely the wrong century. Nevertheless, we might see them instead as the writers most responsive to the conditions of their post-war time. This pressing new attention to problems of reference means that Bradbury’s virtually Stunde Null version of the mid-century British novel is nowhere near as extravagant as it initially sounds: ‘so strong was the general air of collapse that, when the task of the novel resumed in post-war conditions, it resembled the task of beginning all over again.’ Small wonder, then, that Raymond Williams should have speculated at mid-century that ‘the eighteenth-century novel is formally most like our own’.
Prose and the Problem of Truthfulness
In the age of totalitarianism the possibility of language attaining a kind of independence acquired darker associations than it had for modernists in the 1920s. As the interwar period goes on, attention to the materiality of language mutates into a pervasive fear that language is somehow rotting, and, in its decay, is attaining zombie autonomy of a more ominous kind. This feeling of a threatened language animated many discussions of the endangered literary artist. In his Munich-era Enemies of Promise (1938), Cyril Connolly argued that the degradation of political discourse was destroying the integrity of linguistic reference. In terminology shadowed by the economic troubles of the 1930s, he singled out journalism as a major culprit in the depreciation (his metaphor) of language:
The perfect use of language is that in which every word carries the meaning that it is intended to, no less and no more. In this verbal exchange Fleet Street is a kind of Bucket Shop which unloads words on the public for less than they are worth and in consequence the more honest literary bankers, who try to use their words to mean what they say, who are always ‘good for’ the expressions they employ, find their currency constantly depreciating.28
Distinguishing good writing from bad is a matter of the relative degrees of ownership the author takes over his or her words; as all economic crises remind us, it is because economic disasters are also social and moral ones that the metaphor works so effectively to speak of language in relation to our responsibilities to people we cannot personally know. Among the most treacherous of Connolly’s ‘enemies of promise’ was the attraction of his generation’s writers to political activism; the politically minded writer must avoid getting dragged into creativity-sapping activities in committees and on platforms. The writer’s political mission, Connolly argued instead, is as ‘a lie-detector who exposes the fallacies in words and ideals before half the world is killed for them’.29
Connolly’s friend Christopher Isherwood had made a similar point about what he considered the contemporary depreciation of language in Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935), the first of his novels set during Germany’s catastrophic collapse. The vocabulary of economic crisis represents both a public language legitimizing political dishonesty and an unaccountable culture industry that licenses political irresponsibility:
The murder reporters and the jazz-writers had inflated the German language beyond recall. The vocabulary of newspaper invective (traitor, Versailles-lackey, murder-swine, Marx-crook, Hitler-swamp, Red-pest) had come to resemble, through excessive use, the formal phraseology of politeness employed by the Chinese. The word Liebe, soaring from the Goethe standard, was no longer worth a whore’s kiss. Spring, moonlight, youth, roses, girl, darlings, heart, May: such was the miserably devalued currency dealt in by the authors of all those tangoes, waltzes, and fox-trots which advocated the private escape.30
Here, the perceived emptying-out of language haunts both political engagement (‘traitor, Versailles-lackey . . .’) and the attempt to escape from politics (‘Spring, moonlight . . .’). Among all the novelists of the 1930s, Isherwood has always been admired for the conversational lucidity of his prose—‘a camera with its shutter open’, as in the famous opening of Goodbye to Berlin (1939)—and in comments like these it becomes clear why the pursuit of transparency was so high a priority for him.31
Or we might call it the pursuit of ‘purity of diction’, after the title of a symptomatic mid-century critical work by an author whom Watt as departmental chair appointed to a professorship at Stanford. (As an undergraduate he had brought Isherwood to speak to his College literary society: decisions made in the course of institutional life betray our own critical preferences and prejudices as visibly as our writing does.) A book about the undervalued grace of eighteenth-century English poetry, Donald Davie’s Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952) argues that ‘pure diction can be found where a poet has tried to revivify the dead metaphors of studied conversation or artless prose’.32 In keeping with the conversational ordinariness of much mid-century literary language, Davie shows eighteenth-century poetry taking on qualities of good prose. This is prose in a descriptive rather than a pejorative sense, following what Northrop Frye, also writing in the 1950s, called ‘the antique snobbery about the superiority of metre which has given “prosy” the meaning of tedious and “prosaic” the meaning of pedestrian’.33 But prose can have positive connotations as well. We might think here of dissident Milan Kundera’s admiring definition of ‘prose’ as denoting ‘the concrete, everyday, corporeal nature of life’, or Margaret Doody’s praise for this ‘ultimate literary vernacular, the expression of the demotic, the democratic’.34
Both Kundera and Doody mean ‘prose’ in the ordinary sense—they are writing about the novel—but draw upon the word’s richer range of associations: the empirical, the contemporary, the material, the lived, the everyday, and the un-sublime. This is the kind of writing that dominates the late 1940s and 1950s in an assertively politicized way. According to Orwell, now perhaps the period’s most canonical spokesperson, his was an age that not only ‘forces’ politics upon writers, but in doing so ‘raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness’.35 To Orwell’s mind, political and literary imperatives were inextricably connected under the banner of truthfulness. Had he been writing in an earlier era, Orwell supposed, he could have been the kind of writer only too ready to surrender to the strictly aesthetic pleasures of language—of the ‘ornate’ and the ‘merely descriptive’ for their own sake—but ‘as it is, I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer’.36
‘The art of prose is bound up with the only régime in which prose has meaning, democracy,’ Jean-Paul Sartre announced in an obscure but historically indicative declaration of 1948: ‘When one is threatened, the other is too.’37 For Sartre, ‘prose’ means truthful articulation of a kind that cannot exist under a dictatorship; and perhaps the combination of verbal obscurity here with his own blind spots about dictatorship ironically confirms his point. In any case, the fundamental distinction he draws is not the usual one between prose and poetry—Sartre explicitly exempts poetry from discussions of political writing—but between prose and lying. Less cryptically, he explained that ‘prose is, in essence, utilitarian’, because ‘its substance is by nature significative—that is, the words are first of all not objects but designations for objects’.38
‘The solid world exists, its laws do not change’, Winston Smith reminds himself: ‘Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward the earth’s centre.’39 In his famous discussion of the corrosive effects of power on language, Orwell argued that to write well is to think well, and that clarity of expression ‘is a necessary first step towards political regeneration’; with that in mind, it was high time to take a stand against the ‘swindles and perversions’ of bad writing.40 His examples of bad writing are obviously expressive of the totalitarian 1940s: real verbs such as ‘break, stop, spoil, mend, kill’ should replace ‘pretentious diction’ along the lines of ‘exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate’ in order to say what is being done to real bodies.41 In The Abolition of Man (1943), C. S. Lewis—a writer to whom Orwell had a predictably conflicted attitude—had already noted the connection between contemporary euphemism and the transformation of human beings into un-persons: ‘Once we killed bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements.’42 His famous list of rules includes avoiding cliché and periphrasis, but for Orwell the most important quality of good prose is concreteness, a quality most dangerously lost from political writing. ‘As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract.’43
‘The concrete melts into the abstract’: Watt offered advice of exactly the same kind as Orwell’s for wireless listeners in the winter of 1950–1. Instructively enough, Watt’s series of Forces broadcasts on the BBC’s Light Programme was titled ‘Plain English’. In a talk with the altogether leading title of ‘Concrete or Abstract?’ broadcast early in 1951, Watt summed up a typical lesson: ‘I said there were two things to watch in abstract words; one was—watch yourself; the other—watch other people when they use them. But there’s another—and it’s the most important of all. Don’t use them at all unless you really have to.’44 He returned to the need for absolute precision in the final talk, ‘Every Word Has a Meaning’. ‘There’s nothing more annoying than people who always exaggerate, always use a stronger word than they should. Using too weak a word may be not quite so bad; but its [sic] worth avoiding all the same.’45
Watt’s dislike of overblown language was so total that it compelled the one substantial criticism he made of Conrad. Conrad may have tried to convey ‘not only the immediacies of his subject, but their perspective in the whole tradition of civilization’, but ‘the actual prose in which some of the loftier elements of this perspective are conveyed, however, is a good deal more grandiloquent than we can today happily stomach’; he complains in the same essay of Conrad’s ‘somewhat portentous magniloquence’.46 Not at all surprisingly, Watt admired the ‘fine intensity’ with which Orwell ‘demonstrated the necessary connections among literature, language, and the collective life’, and like many writers of this moment shared Orwell’s scepticism about the social unaccountability of linguistic grandeur.47 ‘It is better to renounce revealed truths, even if they exalt us by their splendor’, wrote his contemporary Levi, in a passage that reminds us of the relationship between his career as a writer and his background in applied science: ‘It is better to content oneself with other more modest and less exciting truths, those one acquires painfully, little by little and without shortcuts, with study, discussion, and reasoning, those that can be verified and demonstrated.’48
Verification and demonstration reflect attitudes toward the external world and they are also ways of talking about it. In Politics and the Novel, a work exactly contemporary with The Rise of the Novel, Irving Howe wrote of Nineteen Eighty-Four that the concrete and unadorned prose style disparaged by ‘many readers’ of Orwell as ‘drab or uninspired’ ‘would have been appreciated by someone like Defoe, since Defoe would have immediately understood how the pressures of Orwell’s subject, like the pressures of his own, demand a gritty and hammering factuality’; for Orwell, Howe went on, ‘things took on reality…only as they were particular and concrete’.49 One reason why Orwell’s spare prose and insistent materiality would have been recognizable to Defoe is that mid-twentieth-century writers like Orwell were, with differing degrees of self-consciousness, replaying a conversation about language from centuries earlier, from a moment when, as Ryan Stark puts it, ‘a group of experimental philosophers—by creating a new understanding of style, and of language in general—brought about a paradigm shift in the English rhetorical tradition’.50 Writing of Defoe’s ‘readability’ (RN 104), Watt attributed the ‘simple and positive quality of Defoe’s prose’ (RN 102) to his Dissenters’ academy. This style is traditionally associated with the linguistic reforms of the Royal Society, which, as Thomas Sprat famously put it in his 1667 work of institutional propaganda, was attempting a ‘return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things, almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their members, a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear sense.’51 This may have been the passage that Connolly had in mind when he identified the writer as the ‘honest banker’, with a quantity of words denoting a quantity of objects. Indeed, Defoe is among the writers Connolly names when he identifies a period of exemplary prose ‘at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century’: ‘when words expressed what they meant and when it was impossible to write badly.’52
Taking the Side of ‘Things’
Among the distinctive features of mid-century fiction and criticism, then, is a half-conscious reprise of the empirical climate that Watt and others saw as a critical factor in the emergence of the novel, and a recasting of the eighteenth century through the mid-century’s own preoccupations with and understanding of realism. Writing of Defoe, John Richetti points out that the word realism comes ultimately from the Latin res, ‘a thing’, and Paul Hunter relates the eighteenth-century novel’s empiricism to the practice of ‘occasional meditation’:
Diarists learned to ‘meditate’ on earthly objects by imitating the printed meditations of figures like Robert Boyle, Edward Bury, and John Flavell, who encouraged readers to observe all the details of everyday life and preserve their thoughts on everything. Bury, for example, himself meditated on such objects as snails, toads, apples, falling leaves, and ‘a Tuft of green Grass’.53
Watt was extremely interested in a mid-century counterpart to those diarists meditating on ‘snails, toads, apples’, the French poet Francis Ponge, whose Occupation-era Le Parti pris des choses (1942), ‘Taking the Side of Things’, is a collection of short prose poems each focusing on a particular object, either a living thing such as an oyster, a snail, or an orange, or an equally perishable manmade one—a cigarette, a loaf of bread.
In the light of my argument that criticism and creative writing were similarly concerned with empiricism at this moment, it seems especially significant that on the sole occasion Watt wrote about Ponge it was as a model for literary criticism. The occasion was an address to the Modern Language Association:
I have always found my own attitude to literature, and to the institutional context with which that attitude coexists, much simpler, much more intuitive, and much less amenable to discussion or theoretical formulation, than it seems to be for most of my colleagues. If I look for an image that can bridge this gap between the public and the private and enable me to express something of my own sense of the prospects of English departments, I must go back some three decades, and to the Parisian left bank, where I found myself again after an absence of seven years in the army. In the talk I heard then, four new words struck me. I soon got tired of the first three: Engagé. Authentique. Absurde; but the fourth—Les Choses—seemed somewhat less fly-blown.54
Watt then describes a public lecture in which Ponge had ‘circled amiably around his dislike of the common hyperboles about literature, his sense of being sickened at general theoretical and public propositions, and how in his own writing, finding it impossible to put the great literary subjects into words, he had determined, like a man at the edge of a precipice, to fix his gaze on the immediate object—a tree, the balustrade, the next step—and try to put that into words instead’.55 Apparently Ponge ended his lecture by embracing the table in front of him because ‘if I love it, it’s because there’s absolutely nothing in it which allows one to believe that it takes itself for a piano’.56 Ponge’s devotion to the particularity of objects through a language that allows the human being to ‘express his fraternity with the objects of his world’, in Watt’s words, becomes a model for the kind of literary studies that Watt tries to practise. What is required is ‘an intellectual recognition of just what I am modestly but directly attending to; an aesthetic appreciation of the object of my attention for what it exactly is; a direct commitment of my feelings to that object; and lastly, perhaps incidentally, an attempt to express all of the first three things in words’.57 Abstraction and systematization miss the point of reading, he avers, for ‘it is the concreteness of literature which it is characteristic strength…the stubborn resistance of the particularities of the other’.58
‘So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information,’ Orwell had explained in ‘Why I Write’.59 In his admiring 1950 review of Orwell’s posthumous work, E. M. Forster commended Orwell’s love of ‘small things’, ‘little immediate things’.60 And so against the fraudulence of public language in Orwell’s fiction are the truths of the material world, and Winston Smith’s literally felt contradiction of the Party’s claim to have improved people’s lives: ‘the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different.’61 But Ingsoc has abolished what the confected traitor Goldstein’s book sums up as ‘the empirical method of thought’.62 Its success is evident when even Winston Smith proves so comprehensively schooled in abstraction that he cannot interpret empirical evidence. When he quizzes the old prole in a pub, for example, he fails to discern that the prole’s private memories are actually supplying the information he wants. His question about top-hatted aristocrats—Party ‘history’ claims that only aristocrats wore top hats—has been answered by the old man’s meandering reminiscences about wearing a top hat to a funeral. Winston does not pick up on this evidence that the Party has falsified the past once more.
Watt writes that Winston Smith ‘finds himself defeated by the random but invincible concreteness of what the old man remembers’, notwithstanding Winston’s ‘love of the particular’—and this is a phrase Watt uses with palpable approval no fewer than three times in a single paragraph, in support of his resoundingly humanistic assertion that ‘Winston Smith is the only person in the novel who makes any sort of stand for the simple intellectual and moral values which, for over two millennia, have had the majority of the literate and the decent on their side’.63 Watt could hardly sound much more like Orwell here, with that conversational (‘any sort of stand’) but uncompromising appeal to common values that are self-evident to ‘the literate and the decent’. For Orwell and Watt, as for Jake’s fictionalized Hugo in Iris Murdoch’s mid-century debut Under the Net (1954), attention to the particular has become a moral matter. As Hugo explains: ‘the movement away from theory and generality is the movement towards truth. All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular.’64 This passage probably explains why Murdoch is the solitary novelist discussed in George Watson’s survey of British literary theory: ‘If there is a connective thread, it lies in the Primacy of the Instance: the recognition that a theoretical claim is seen to be true only by testing it against known cases.’65
‘The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods,’ Murdoch’s Hugo announces; Hugo believes that the most one can say truthfully of an experience at the time ‘would be perhaps something about one’s heart beating’.66 Orwell’s similar insistence on what Winston Smith knows through his body is profoundly characteristic of this period’s particular style of political writing. In a phrase that would serve for many mid-century writers, Shoshana Felman argues that Albert Camus’s The Plague ‘offers its historical eyewitnessing in the flesh’.67 In her famous essays on the Nuremberg Trials and their aftermath, British novelist Rebecca West would reflect on eyewitnessing in the flesh when she identified the chasm between the linguistic abstractions and the human experiences of totalitarianism. The first essay in West’s series reports on the trial at Nuremberg of the major Nazi war criminals, but in the second, ‘Greenhouse with Cyclamens II’ (1949), she describes meeting a group of Berlin women living under the Soviet Occupation. ‘To say in this room, “I was at the Nuremberg trial,” would have meant nothing to any of these women, and, indeed, it would have presented them with an argument less developed than their own’:
There [at Nuremberg] men had made a formal attack on the police state. But here these women had incarnated the argument. They were discussing the matter with their bodies as well as their minds. Because it would not do if the wrong people read the letter to brother Hans in Cologne, the tired legs had to trudge down the tenement steps and up the street and over to the Western Sector and back, the old shoes letting in the water and rubbing the corns. Because the man from the Eastern Zone with a message from Grandmama in Magdeburg could not come to the granddaughter’s home, lest the spy in the tenement should see him, she had to go a long way to meet him in a café where she was not known, and the fare and the price of the coffee left her short of what would have bought sausages for supper.
By tired feet and leaking shoes, and by the watering of mouths over missed meals, these women had learned with their whole being that justice gives a better climate than hate.68
‘Nuremberg’ has turned into mere verbiage and cliché, and West believes that nothing she can say about the evil uncovered there can make totalitarianism feel real. Only by being forced to live in a police state that affects them at the level of wet feet can they comprehend what totalitarianism means. West’s essay was first published in the same year as Nineteen Eighty-Four and shares its fierce empiricism. The most compelling argument against totalitarianism is an ‘incarnated…argument’, not actually verbal at all; that one best knows the wrongness of totalitarianism through one’s own body, and even concrete description (‘tired legs…old shoes…corns’) will always come second to the dreary daily experiences to which it refers.
Haunting the Courtroom
Like Orwell, too, West keeps returning to the period’s distinctively bad uses of language. Her Nuremberg essays appear in a volume of her journalism about legal trials, and even the least obviously political reports are concerned with the problem of a sinisterly automated speech. ‘Mr Setty and Mr Hume’, on a seedy 1949 torso murder, notes the significance of witnesses demonstrating a ‘simple and economical use of language’: people who ‘said “no” and “about” instead of “definitely no” and “approximately” ’, and who, thanks to their plain speech, conjured up the literally material aspects of an otherwise baffling case: ‘a trail of five-pound notes, a carpet, a prescription, a carving knife, a cup of tea, a piece of rope’.69 Not surprisingly, West’s attention to good and bad speech is even more explicit in her many reports on the Second World War and early cold-war treason trials. On one end of the political spectrum, she finds in The Meaning of Treason (1947) that the traitor John Amery’s superior education (Amery’s father was a well-regarded Conservative MP) has done nothing for his capacity to speak—or think: ‘Words flowed from Amery’s mouth in the conventional groupings of English culture, but he had no intelligence, only a vacancy round which there rolled a snowball of Fascist chatter.’70 Her essay ‘The Better Mousetrap’ reports on the trial of Foreign Office radio worker William Marshall, who had been passing secrets to the USSR so ineptly that he looked to have been set up by the Soviets. For West, Marshall’s all-encompassing political stupidity is reflected in his trite and formulaic expressions, as when he speaks of having ‘exchanged cultural information on Moscow’: ‘This perfect specimen of Daily Worker English dashed and depressed the court. Such words would come naturally only to a young man who had taken a linguistic tan from exposure to the fierce rays of Communist prose.’71
Arthur Koestler outlined and ridiculed the features of that prose in the 1954 instalment of his memoirs, where he described how joining the Communist Party in the early 1930s had changed his language:
My vocabulary, grammar, syntax, gradually changed. I learnt to avoid any original form of expression, any individual turn of phrase. Euphony, gradations of emphasis, restraint, nuances of meaning, were suspect. Language, and with it thought, underwent a process of dehydration, and crystallised in the ready-made schemata of Marxist jargon. There were perhaps a dozen or two adjectives whose use was both safe and mandatory, such as: decadent, hypocritical, morbid (for the capitalist bourgeoisie); heroic, disciplined, class-conscious (for the revolutionary proletariat); petit-bourgeois, romantic, sentimental (for humanitarian scruples); opportunist and sectarian (for Right and Left deviations respectively); mechanistic, metaphysical, mystical (for the wrong intellectual approach); dialectical, concrete (for the right approach); flaming (protests); fraternal (greetings); unswerving (loyalty to the Party).72
No judgement or selection is necessary when your sentences simply complete themselves. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell had called it ‘duckspeak’, and it is first named when Winston watches two Party members in apparent conversation:
Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man’s brain that was speaking; it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.73
Among the many other mid-century non-fiction writers who remarked upon this kind of anti-language was Watt’s friend Leslie Fiedler. Also in the context of Communism, Fiedler wrote of verbal automatism as ‘ready-made epithets…released like a dog’s saliva at the ting of a bell’.74 His controversial reflections on the trial of the Rosenbergs for cold-war treason are in the same family as West’s trial reportage in their attention to failures of expression reflecting more fundamental failures of thought. Outrageously, he argued that Ethel Rosenberg’s letters showed her to be ‘hopelessly the victim not only of her politics, but of the painfully pretentious style that is its literary equivalent’; the Rosenbergs were martyrs to neither their political convictions nor their Jewishness, but ‘only to their own double talk, to a handful of banalities’.75
Orwell names it duckspeak, Fiedler understands it as Pavlovian drooling, and West uses similarly passive images of suntanning and snowballs; what their metaphors share is an alarm at the extent to which agency disappears the moment the speaker succumbs to readymade formulae. Hannah Arendt had frequent recourse to the image of Pavlov’s dog around this time in The Origins of Totalitarianism, where she argued that ‘Pavlov’s dog, the human specimen reduced to the most elementary reactions, the bundle of reactions that can always be liquidated and replaced by other bundles of reactions that behave in exactly the same way, is the model “citizen” of a totalitarian state’.76 In this instance, Arendt was speaking about the effects of the concentration camp (‘such a citizen can be produced only imperfectly outside of the camps’), but he or she is the ideal of all totalitarian regimes: ‘a world of conditioned reflexes, of marionettes without the slightest trace of spontaneity’.77 Political true believers are ‘robots’ who ‘can be reached by neither experience nor argument; identification with the movement and total conformism seem to have destroyed the very capacity for experience’.78
The image of the war criminal as automaton found famous expression in her subsequent reflections on ‘the strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil’ in her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann.79 ‘The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think’, she remarked early in the book, describing Eichmann’s recourse to stock phrases and clichés: ‘No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.’80 Novelist Muriel Spark had also attended the Eichmann trial—the backdrop to her novel The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)—and had been no less struck that he ‘could only come out with these banal phrases, he never grasped the evil he had perpetrated’.81 Spark’s attention to the violence enabled by automated speech gives a deeply sinister edge to her 1960s fiction. A character in her war-set The Girls of Slender Means (1963) is likened to ‘a speaking machine that had gone wrong’, and the novel is full of characters thinking and speaking only in prefabricated phrases.82 Most consequential is beautiful Selina, whose seemingly silly course of auto-suggestion (‘Poise is perfect balance, an equanimity of body and mind, complete composure whatever the social scene’) helps to condition her into the inhuman presence of mind required to steal another girl’s dress from a burning hostel while her friends await their deaths by fire there.83
Arendt places Eichmann’s bad speech in the context of the ‘language rule’ (‘itself a code name; it meant whatever in ordinary language would be called a lie’) prevailing in Nazi Germany, whereby what was happening to Jews could never be named as such:
The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, ‘normal’ knowledge of murder and lies. Eichmann’s great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, made him, of course, an ideal subject for ‘language rules’.84
When, at the end of the book, Arendt reports upon Eichmann’s hanging and notes that even on the gallows he was capable only of speaking in muddled clichés, she realizes that ‘the lesson’ of Eichmann and his trial consists of ‘the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil’.85 Automated speech has gone from being bizarre and sinister to nothing short of evil itself. Arendt’s ‘task’, writes Lyndsey Stonebridge, was to find a way ‘of thinking in the wake of Eichmann’s profound thoughtlessness’.86
‘Eichmann’s trial had made the activity of thinking, and its absence, newly and politically conspicuous.’87 It is striking how many instances of empty, thoughtless political language are coming from mid-century writings about trials: Nuremberg, Eichmann, the cold-war spies. ‘I find it a little uncanny to discover how my imagination has always haunted the courtroom,’ mused Fiedler. 88 It is less uncanny than it might be, surely, given that Fiedler had been trained during the war as an interpreter for interrogating Japanese prisoners of war. As Allan Hepburn has shown in an important essay on Elizabeth Bowen’s 1949 novel The Heat of the Day, questions of legality—punishment, complicity, culpability—were of powerful importance at mid-century.89 Indeed, we might usefully see the renewed interest in novelistic realism in the light of what Hepburn identifies as the ‘postwar perplexity about law’ reaching back to the fraudulent Russian show trials of the 1930s: a concern with authenticity, particularity, and truth-telling.90 As the Soviet instance implies, any parallel between law and realism makes realism even more problematic because of the ease with which the appearance of authenticity can be conjured up through the procedures that were meant to underwrite it.
So it is less surprising than it might otherwise seem that legal procedures give The Rise of the Novel one of its foundational analogies for formal realism. Noting that realism has long-standing connotations of criminality (‘Moll Flanders is a thief, Pamela a hypocrite, and Tom Jones a fornicator’), Watt insists that nonetheless ‘the novel’s realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it’ (RN 11). But here, too, we are haunting the courtroom, for Watt draws a telling juridical parallel to explain what he means by realism as a mode defined by ‘particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and at particular places’:
The novel’s mode of imitating reality may therefore be equally well summarised in terms of the procedures of another group of specialists in epistemology, the jury in a court of law. Their expectations, and those of the novel reader coincide in many ways: both want to know ‘all the particulars’ of a given case—the time and place of the occurrence; both must be satisfied as to the identities of the parties concerned, and will refuse to accept evidence about anyone called Sir Toby Belch or Mr Badman—still less about a Chloe who has no surname and is ‘common as the air’; and they also expect the witnesses to tell the story ‘in his own words’. The jury, in fact, takes the ‘circumstantial view of life’ (RN 31).
Realism is, ‘like the rules of evidence, only a convention’ (RN 32), but Watt endorses Hazlitt’s claim that the experience of Clarissa ‘is like reading evidence in a court of Justice’ (RN 34). The metaphor is particularly apt in this instance, of course, given that the text of Clarissa is a substitute for the legal remedies that its heroine will not pursue.
As Ros Ballaster observes, ‘the role of the disinterested “jury member” ’ is ‘the defining characteristic of the eighteenth-century reader for Ian Watt’.91 We might attribute this quasi-legal understanding of the novel in part to the prevalence of notions of public redress in the 1940s and 1950s, the era of the Nuremberg and Tokyo War Trials and their successors. This is the modern era’s ‘juridical unconscious’, in the title of Felman’s study of the relationship between law and trauma, whereby, post-Nuremberg, the law has been recruited in an ‘unprecedented and repeated’ way ‘to cope with the traumatic legacies and the collective injuries’ of historical events.92 Felman’s and Dori Laub’s landmark Testimony explains the central importance of testimonial articulation to the representation of the Second World War, ‘the watershed of our times’.93 ‘Testimony’ itself, they remind us, is in the first instance a legal term that speaks to a ‘crisis of truth’ and ‘a crisis of evidence’.94
Allegories of Imprisonment
Watt’s ‘The Ways of Guilt’ is testimonial writing in this sense: with a powerful aura of the unresolved and incompletely processed, it also asks to be taken as verifiable truth: ‘Every prisoner of the Japanese who worked on the railway in the summer of 1943 will recognise each detail I have set down below.’95 The mid-century canon often insists like this upon truthfulness—not lifelikeness, but truthfulness. Witness the case of Camus’s The Plague, in which the first-person narrator Dr Bernard Rieux turns the novel into quasi-omniscient narration in order to create the authority that a necessarily subjective and partial first-person narration lacks.96 In the end, the novel has it both ways: when the protagonist Dr Rieux unveils himself as the novel’s real narrator, he also attains the different authority of the testifying witness. The juridical language is the novel’s own here too. ‘Summoned to give evidence regarding what was a sort of crime, he has exercised the restraint that behooves a conscientious witness,’ Camus’s narrator writes: ‘To be an honest witness, it was for him to confine himself mainly to what people did or said and what could be gleaned from documents.’97
Camus’s novel asks many of the same questions as prisoner-of-war writings: about individualist amorality, the struggle for communitarian feeling, and the shoring-up of social order through rhetoric itself (‘it was up to him to speak for all’).98 Like Defoe, and indeed like Watt, Camus is concerned with how people respond to catastrophe on the grand scale. On the one hand there is the perversely lonely quality of a communal suffering that chills your capacity to feel pity for others (‘the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship’). On the other, there is the competing pull towards discipline in order to stabilize a community falling apart in the face of mass death (‘The thing was to do your job as it should be done’99). But at the level of style, too, the novel is connected to a legalistic kind of circumstantial realism, with its insistence upon reportage as a corrective to the ‘epical or prize-speech verbiage’ of public messages to the suffering city.100 Avowedly fond of ‘fine speech’, the eloquent, sinister narrator of Camus’s The Fall admits that ‘style, like sheer silk, too often hides eczema’.101
‘It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not,’ reads the epigraph of The Plague, quoting Defoe’s Serious Reflections on Robinson Crusoe. The epigraph captures the ambiguous truthfulness of both books: acutely circumstantial, based on real events but not exactly real, allegorizing historical events and experiences (the German Occupation of France, the French Occupation of Algeria, Defoe’s personal isolation) through fictional narrative. The reportage style as well as the substance owes much to Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, with its blurring of the factual and the fictional.
To some, these events will seem quite natural; to others, all but incredible. But, obviously, a narrator cannot take account of these differences of outlook. His business is only to say: ‘This is what happened,’ when he knows that it actually did happen, that it closely affected the life of a whole populace, and that there are thousands of eyewitnesses who can appraise in their hearts the truth of what he writes.’102
From Defoe, Camus takes the idea of ‘vigilance’: ‘It may be proper to ask here, how long it may be supposed, Men might have the Seeds of the Contagion in them, before it discover’d it self in this fatal Manner; and how long they might go about seemingly whole, and yet be contagious to all those that came near them?’103 The important mid-twentieth-century difference, however, is that Camus has transformed vigilance into a linguistic category, as when the anti-capital-punishment activist Tarrou concludes that ‘all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language. So I resolved always to speak—and to act—quite clearly.’104
Among the other major fablers of the early post-war period, wartime naval officer William Golding also found Defoe an inspiration for war-set works like Lord of the Flies (1954) and Pincher Martin (1956). The destroyer on which Christopher Hadley Martin is sailing sinks off the Western Isles of Scotland, and he attempts to survive on a barren rock eating shellfish and collecting rainwater. The comparison with Robinson Crusoe is explicitly invited from the outset (‘The first thing to do’, thinks Christopher Martin, ‘is to survey the estate’), while, Crusoe-like, Martin’s plan for survival takes the rational, schematic form of a numbered catalogue of needs, priorities, and potential difficulties, with language itself becoming a form of domestication when he starts naming his surroundings.105 ‘I am busy surviving,’ he tells himself: ‘I am netting down this rock with names and taming it.’106 As Richetti points out, to organize the external world mentally is a way of surviving for Robinson Crusoe, for ‘enumeration is the beginning of practical knowledge, a laying out of what is available and of possibilities for survival’; or, as he writes elsewhere, for Defoe’s characters, ‘the exact apprehension of the world is a technique for survival and not an end in itself’.107 As Martin waits there—not knowing that he is already dead—he recalls his ruthlessly individualistic past, which he revisits through a remembered anecdote about a Chinese delicacy, where a fish is buried in a tin until the maggots emerge from the corpse:
‘The little ones eat the tiny ones. The middle-sized ones eat the little ones. The big ones eat the middle-sized ones. Then the big ones eat each other. Then there are two and then one and where there was a fish there is now one huge successful maggot. Rare dish.’108
The cannibalistic anecdote reflects both Martin’s selfishness and the self-destructive predicament to which it has led: he may be the top maggot, but his purpose is to be eaten. Like Defoe’s characters, of whom Watt wrote that they all belong on Crusoe’s island, or the character in Ballard’s Concrete Island who is told that he was on an island long before he got to his present one, Martin comes to a similar realization: ‘Because of what I did I am an outsider and alone.’109
Adding collectivity to similar concerns with survival, cruelty, and cannibalism is what makes Lord of the Flies read so much like a prisoner-of-war book. A war continues in the background; the children are evacuees whose plane has been struck; an atomic bomb has been dropped; and a uniformed officer in a military cruiser is finally responsible for the boys’ rescue in what reads like a paradigmatic camp liberation scene, with filthy scarecrow prisoners and the mingled compassion, shock, and shame of the crisply dressed liberating officer. Levi describes the ‘strangely embarrassed’ Red Army soldiers who reached Buna-Monowitz in January 1945, who ‘seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint’: ‘that shame we knew so well…the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist’.110 Among those dealing with the liberated camps in the Far East in September 1945, British officer Lieutenant-Colonel Nicholas Read-Collins reported to the Tokyo Tribunal that ‘his first reaction on visiting the camps was that he was in another world and talking to people who had already died’.111 Late in Ballard’s Empire of the Sun Jim is almost at the point of collapse when liberation begins to look possible, and he is urged by a former stalwart of the expatriate community in Shanghai to show a bit of the national stiff upper lip (‘Remember you’re British’), which has Jim reflect that it is ‘sad that he should have been so demoralized that all he could do to reassure Jim was to remind him that he was British’.112 The scene is surely recalling the end of Lord of the Flies when the liberating officer remonstrates awkwardly with the young savages: ‘I should have thought that a pack of British boys—you’re all British, aren’t you?—would have been able to put up a better show than that—I mean—.’113
On Golding’s island the boys replicate the conflict between the will to order and the threat of disorder so central to prisoner-of-war books. Among the victims is Simon, who seems, on the one hand, to be the portentous Christ figure of mid-century fiction but, on the other, reads as Jewish, with his profound Old Testament insights and his quasi-instinctive apprehension of the logics of persecution (‘that ancient, inescapable recognition’ when he looks at the demonic lord of the flies: ‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’).114 The other victim of persecution is the rationalist Piggy (‘We could experiment’), who works out how to make a smoke signal; there is no hope of Piggy surviving in a social environment that has turned its back on reason.115 It is as if Golding is arguing that in this mid-century totalitarian dystopia in miniature an empiricist like Piggy is as ‘inevitable’ a casualty as the tragically insightful Simon. (There is no longer a word for science on Airstrip One either.)
Like Ballard and Camus, Golding reminds us how amenable was Robinson Crusoe, the novel that supposedly inaugurated the realistic tradition of prose fiction, to being rewritten as a fable. In language recalling summaries of the Royal Society style, Samuel Hynes claims that war writers are typically ‘realists, adopting a common style that would come as close as language can to rendering the things of the material world as they are…a plain, naming vocabulary, describing objects and actions in unmetaphorical terms, appealing always to the data of the senses’.116 Ballard’s, Golding’s, and Camus’s prose insists on reportage, however extreme the limit-events it is used to report. All these mid-century writers’ indebtedness to Defoe goes beyond content and into style—that plain, referential, anti-rhetorical language.
The referentiality and materialism of mid-century writing would come to look passé in the 1960s. Although Ballard’s stock continued to rise, thanks to the marked postmodernity of much of his subject matter—virtuality, the media, the post-human, the melding of flesh and machine—mid-century realism would be treated as merely the work of a literary culture that had exhausted its fictional resources but persisted anyhow in the old style. In his famous essay ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’, John Barth could not have been clearer about the break between his generation of novelists and those of the immediately post-war period. Orwell had very famously written that ‘Good prose is like a window pane’, and Barth revived that metaphor when he distinguished between realism and postmodernism as the contrast between ‘the Windex approach to language’ and ‘the stained-glass approach’.117 But, if the renewed commitment to the fiction of concretely described things presented an easy target for the playfully self-referential writers who followed, it was also historically overdetermined. The return to realism was driven by a sense of moral accountability that was perhaps unprecedented in the novel’s history. In the same years, the concern with truthtelling was conveyed with no less commitment in the critical writing of the novel’s best readers. And so, in correspondence with Brigadier Toosey, Watt summed up what his profession meant to him: ‘whatever other disadvantages it has, one is never selling oneself, or saying or writing things other than for what one believes to be the objective truth.’118
Ian Watt in 1963, by the temporary School of English Studies at UEA. Students had borrowed the ‘Watts Court’ street sign from a Norwich alleyway of the same name.
1 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001), 305.
2 Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel (London: Penguin, 1993), 221.
3 W. B. Carnochan, ‘ “A Matter Discutable”: The Rise of the Novel’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 12/2 (2000), 181.
4 Gerald Graff, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 124.
5 Colin McGinn, ‘Philosophy and Literature in the 1950s: The Rise of the “Ordinary Bloke” ’, in Zachary Leader (ed.), The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie, and their Contemporaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 130.
6 Hough, Image and Experience, 123.
7 Watt, ‘Writing about Literature’, 3.
8 William Empson, ‘The Hammer’s Ring’, in Empson, Argufying, 221.
9 William Empson, ‘Basic and Communication’, in William Empson, The Strengths of Shakespeare’s Shrew: Essays, Memoirs and Reviews, ed. John Haffenden (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 164. William Empson, ‘Basic English and the Modern World’, in The Strengths of Shakespeare’s Shrew, 175.
10 William Empson, Selected Letters, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 222.
11 Watt, ‘Serious Reflections on The Rise of the Novel’, 5, 6.
12 Watt, ‘Flat-Footed’, 68.
13 E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (London: Phaidon, 2006), 7.
14 Gombrich, The Story of Art, 377, 66, 67. Obviously much more could be said about the Jewish–German Gombrich and the 1940s. See, for example, the final chapter of his classic children’s book A Little History of the World, in which he recalls his experiences in anti-Semitic Vienna, his war work in England translating German broadcasts into English, and his realization that the Holocaust had actually happened. E. H. Gombrich, A Little History of the World, trans. Caroline Mustill (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 273–84.
15 George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, in The Complete Works of George Orwell, xvii, ed. Peter Davison assisted by Ian Angus and Sheila Davison (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), 426.
16 Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, 424–5.
17 Bernard Bergonzi, The Situation of the Novel (London: Macmillan, 1970), 19.
18 Bergonzi, The Situation of the Novel, 15.
19 Bradbury, The Modern British Novel, 279, 281.
20 Deborah Cameron, ‘ “The Virtues of Good Prose”: Verbal Hygiene and the Movement’, in Leader (ed.), The Movement Reconsidered, 142.
21 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 33.
22 John Mepham, ‘Varieties of Modernism, Varieties of Incomprehension: Patrick Hamilton and Elizabeth Bowen’, in Marina MacKay and Lyndsey Stonebridge (eds), British Fiction after Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 67.
23 Patrick Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude (New York: New York Review of Books, 2007), 129.
24 Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude, 66.
25 Patrick Hamilton, Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, in Patrick Hamilton, The Gorse Trilogy (London: Black Spring, 2007), 435, 287.
26 Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 88–9.
27 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 4–5.
28 Connolly, Enemies of Promise, 10–11.
29 Connolly, Enemies of Promise, 138.
30 Christopher Isherwood, Mr. Norris Changes Trains, in The Berlin Novels (London: Vintage, 1999), 108.
31 Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, in The Berlin Novels, 243.
32 Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse (London: Chatto & Windus, 1952), 32.
33 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 71.
34 Milan Kundera, The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, trans. Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 8. Doody, The True Story of the Novel, 187.
35 George Orwell, ‘Why I Write’, in The Complete Works of George Orwell, xviii, ed. Peter Davison assisted by Ian Angus and Sheila Davison (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), 320.
36 Orwell, ‘Why I Write’, 319.
37 Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 69.
38 Sartre, What Is Literature?, 34, 35. The tendentiousness of this 1940s figuration of the prose/poetry distinction is exposed by how easily it was reversed. ‘A poem is, so to speak, a democratic state, whereas a prose discourse—mathematical, scientific, ethical, or practical and vernacular—is a totalitarian state. The intention of a democratic state is to perform the work of state as effectively as it can perform it, subject to one reservation of conscience: that it will not despoil its members, the citizens, of the free exercise of their own private and independent characters. But the totalitarian state is interested solely in being effective, and regards the citizens as no citizens at all; that is, regards them as functional members whose existence is totally defined by their allotted contributions to its ends; it has no use for their private characters, and therefore no provision for them’ (John Crowe Ransom, ‘Criticism as Pure Speculation’, in Donald A Stauffer (ed.), The Intent of the Critic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 108).
39 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: Signet, 1977), 81.
40 Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, 421, 425.
41 Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, 423–4.
42 C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Las Vegas: Lits, 2010), 43. Orwell deplored the politically reactionary thrust of Lewis’s Christian apologism, but nonetheless admired his dystopian novel That Hideous Strength (1945), which fictionalizes ideas from The Abolition of Man.
43 Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, 423.
44 Ian Watt, ‘Concrete or Abstract?’ Forces Educational Broadcast, 1951. This talk was broadcast on 23 January 1951 on the BBC’s Light Programme. Stanford University Special Collections, SC401-ACCN 1990-131, Box 41, Folder ‘BBC: Past’.
45 Ian Watt, ‘Every Word Has a Meaning’, Stanford University Special Collections, SC401-ACCN 1990-131, Box 41, Folder ‘BBC: Past’.
46 Ian Watt, ‘Conrad Criticism and The Nigger of the “Narcissus” ’, in Watt, Essays on Conrad, 68, 65.
47 Watt, ‘Winston Smith: The Last Humanist’, 225.
48 Primo Levi, ‘Afterword’, trans. Ruth Feldman, in Levi, The Reawakening, 229.
49 Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (New York: Horizon Press, 1960), 237, 242.
50 Ryan J. Stark, ‘Language Reform in the Late Seventeenth Century’, in Tina Skouen and Ryan J. Stark (eds), Rhetoric and the Early Royal Society: A Sourcebook (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 94. Watt would have inherited this view of the Royal Society, but see also Brian Vickers, ‘The Royal Society and English Prose Style: A Reassessment’, in Brian Vickers and Nancy S. Streuver, Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth: Language Change in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1985), 1–76.
51 Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2003), 113.
52 Connolly, Enemies of Promise, 11.
53 Richetti, The Life of Daniel Defoe, 191. Hunter, Before Novels, 200.
54 Ian Watt, ‘On not Attempting to Be a Piano’, Profession (1978), 13.
55 Watt, ‘On not Attempting to Be a Piano’, 13.
56 Watt, ‘On not Attempting to Be a Piano’, 13.
57 Watt, ‘On not Attempting to Be a Piano’, 13.
58 Watt, ‘On not Attempting to Be a Piano’, 14.
59 Orwell, ‘Why I Write’, 319–20.
60 E. M. Forster, ‘George Orwell’, in E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1967), 61, 62.
61 Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 73.
62 Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 193.
63 Watt, ‘Winston Smith: The Last Humanist’, 218, 221, 227.
64 Iris Murdoch, Under the Net (London: Penguin, 1982), 80.
65 George Watson, Never Ones for Theory? England and the War of Ideas (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2000), 24.
66 Murdoch, Under the Net, 60, 59.
67 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 109; emphasis in original.
68 Rebecca West, ‘Greenhouse with Cyclamens II’, in Rebecca West, A Train of Powder: Six Reports on the Problem of Guilt and Punishment in our Time (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 159.
69 Rebecca West, ‘Mr Setty and Mr Hume’, in West, A Train of Powder, 194.
70 Rebecca West, The Meaning of Treason (London: Reprint Society, 1952), 130.
71 Rebecca West, ‘The Better Mousetrap’, in West, A Train of Powder, 279.
72 Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing: The Second Volume of an Autobiography: 1932–40 (London: Vintage, 2005), 32–3.
73 Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 55, 54.
74 Leslie Fiedler, ‘Afterthoughts on the Rosenbergs’, in Fiedler, Collected Essays, i. 39.
75 Fiedler, ‘Afterthoughts on the Rosenbergs’, 40, 44.
76 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 456.
77 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 456, 457.
78 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 363, 308.
79 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin, 1994), 288.
80 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 49.
81 Quoted inJames Bailey, ‘ “Repetition, Boredom, Despair”: Muriel Spark and the Eichmann Trial’, Holocaust Studies, 17/2–3 (Autumn–Winter 2011), 188.
82 Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means (New York: New Directions, 1998), 41.
83 Spark, The Girls of Slender Means, 50.
84 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 85, 86.
85 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 252.
86 Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 59.
87 Stonebridge, The Judicial Imagination, 62.
88 Leslie Fiedler, ‘Introduction to the Second Edition of An End of Innocence’, in Fiedler, Collected Essays, i, xix.
89 Allan Hepburn, ‘Trials and Errors: The Heat of the Day and Post-War Culpability’, in Kristin Bluemel (ed.), Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 131–49.
90 Hepburn, ‘Trials and Errors’, 140.
91 Ballaster, Seductive Forms, 40.
92 Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 2.
93 Felman and Laub, Testimony, xiv.
94 Felman and Laub, Testimony, 6.
95 ‘As a relation to events, testimony seems to be composed of bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled into understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be constructed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our frames of reference’ (Felman and Laub, Testimony, 5).
96 Camus, The Plague, 3.
97 Camus, The Plague, 301, 302.
98 Camus, The Plague, 302.
99 Camus, The Plague, 41.
100 Camus, The Plague, 138.
101 Camus, The Fall, 5, 6.
102 Camus, The Plague, 6.
103 Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, 189.
104 Camus, The Plague, 253, 254.
105 William Golding, Pincher Martin (London: Faber, 1956), 77, 81.
106 Golding, Pincher Martin, 86.
107 Richetti, The Life of Daniel Defoe, 191. John Richetti, ‘Defoe as Narrative Innovator’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 131.
108 Golding, Pincher Martin, 136.
109 Golding, Pincher Martin, 181.
110 Levi, The Reawakening, 15, 16, 16.
111 Quoted in Russell, Knights of Bushido, 169.
112 Ballard, Empire of the Sun, 186, 187.
113 William Golding, Lord of the Flies (New York: Perigee, 1954), 201–2.
114 Golding, Lord of the Flies, 138, 143.
115 Golding, Lord of the Flies, 130.
116 Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, 25–6.
117 Orwell, ‘Why I Write’, 320. John Barth, The Floating Opera and The End of the Road (New York: Anchor, 1988), v.
118 Letter from Ian Watt to Brigadier Philip Toosey dated 19 January 1969, Stanford University Special Collections, SC401-ACCN 1994-106, Box 24, Folder 12.