First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

5 Responses to “Writing the nation”

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• 1 Terrence O'Keeffe

  March 27, 2008 at 4:22 pm

  Philip Hensher is on to something important and something which often escapes the notice of both everyday book reviewers and more ambitious literary critics. In my understanding of what he has written here, he has struck a successful blow against an approach to writing which uses a cheap stratagem (i.e., one requiring little intellectual effort) and which settles for subject matter that writers believe to be attractive to contemporary readers, in this case readers whose birth-dates are close to the writer’s. The approach consists of nothing more than creating a pervasive climate of what might be called “instant nostalgia” for the recent past or the period of adolescence and young adulthood of the writer and his ideal readers (thus we get an endless series of rather jejune and disappointing Bildungsromans by young authors; older writers do this better.) Yet there must be a line which demarcates successful, necessary deployments of the cultural markers of the recent past (e.g., styles of music, major political events including scandals, colloquial expressions and slang, fashions in dress and in conversation, etc.) from those casual usages of the same things to establish some kind of false authenticity (and sappy poignancy) about such a period. As Mr. Hensher notes, it is difficult to write about the recent past because most people who have just lived through it lack perspective on it and therefore emphasize (through selective diminishments as well as the more obvious enhancements) the wrong things at the wrong places and wrong times. The most telling flaw of such recollections of life recently lived is the narcissism, not to say solipsism, of most people when they discuss such matters, including writers.
  Mr. Hensher himself seems to view a state-of-the-nation novel as having to delve into the recent past (rather than, say, being a sort of “instantaneous snapshot” of a society at any given moment). This is reasonable and indispensable to those readers who feel that novels should deal with the mystery of the passage of time, a mystery which is always in the mind of the beholder, so that the “novel of self-consciousness” apprehends it almost automatically, while the social novel must be more explicit in the details of narratives that take us through time. The deracinated snapshot approach might be valid if it is the author’s intention to reveal something like “how it feels right here and now, regardless of how we got here”, since these two considerations are logically and artistically capable of being separated. In either case, as Hensher notes, what ought to be of paramount importance to the author is writing well. And he’s on the right track when he notes that a symbolic-allegorical or historically displaced version of the present (“see how similar to them we are in spite of all the apparent differences” being the unspoken message) is also an effective way to write a state-of-the nation novel. As an example I would suggest that the story of the Austro-Hungarian Army’s “spy of the century”, Colonel Alfred Redl, has been used as a template for several state-of-the-nation works of art. In a piece of famous 1924 “reportage” and a subsequent play and movie script, the Czech journalist E. E. Kisch viewed the case as an indictment of late Austro-Hungarian society (the court, the military, the General Staff, and their factions in the press). John Osborne’s play on Redl, A Patriot for Me, had a great deal to do with the condition of English life and politics (and the author’s dissatisfactions with both) in the 1950s and 60s, and its audience was well-prepared by events to understand it in this way (I am indebted for this characterization to Luc Gilleman’s critical biography John Osborne, Vituperative Artist.) In 1984 the Hungarian director Istvan Szabo used the same materials in his film Oberst Redl to transform the story into both a peculiarly personal tale of betrayal alluding to the compromises of artistic life and careers in Communist societies, and a tale of “national betrayal” as well (i.e., the manipulation of the Hungarians by the Habsburg dynasty.) Hungarians of that time were also well-prepared to understand its representation of the present and the recent past through a narrative that took place two or three generations earlier and which touched Hungary only marginally at the time (in this unstated equation substitute Moscow and its local minions for the Habsburgs and their supporters.) And, more recently, the talented Slovakian novelist Pavel Vilikovsky created the surrealistic character “Alfredl” (a homosexual colonel in military intelligence who is also known as K.U.K., a spectral emblem of the vanished Dual Monarchy, hovering in the backs of the minds of various central European peoples) in his farcical novella Ever Green Is . . . The comical use of this historical character as the focus of ironical meditations about the “state of the nation” of Slovakia and its immediate neighbors, all once-Habsburg and then again once-Communist, and all equally deformed by the pretences and practices of this common past, illustrates Nietzsche’s aphorism that “A joke is an epitaph on the death of a feeling” — from 1913 to 1984 the Redl story excited the imaginations and evoked the resentments of several nationalities, but in Vilikovsky’s handling it has been reduced to a wry comment on the defects of human nature, a series of pratfalls, and a host of insults directed at the cupidity and stupidity of the reading audience. What also makes this novella interesting in a broader perspective is that from the 1960’s to 1990 the “Central European novel” was inevitably a “state of the nation” work, given the inescapability of the political framework and top-down cultural controls of the societies depicted; this is a period when writing (and film) were considered to be matters of real and spiritual life and death in those societies, a position that art can no longer realistically claim. The fall of the old regime deflated the public importance of art, although the various impending crises of capitalist societies, unpromising geopolitical trends, and ecological exhaustion could just as rapidly re-inflate it. For the time being Vilikovsky’s novella plays to an audience with (reasonably) diminished expectations of life and of art.
  The category “state of the nation novel” (a descriptor that, in particular cases, could also be applied to a poem, short story, movie or play) is bound to be fairly capacious and its boundaries are thereby likely to be elastic. And, as with any other artistic genre, there’s a great deal of variability in the quality of works which have a conscious intention of commenting on the state of a nation. Right now in the U.S. the situation is ripe for state-of-the-nation novels that take on the peculiarly diminished sense of reality surrounding the “war on terror” – although the Bush administration wants us all to believe that history began afresh on 9/11, few people feel or act if this was the case. With the exception of the families of those killed on that day and the deceased and wounded soldiers (and of course the population of Iraq) this brutal and costly war hardly affects anyone. Other than their tax dollars most people have little to nothing invested – intellectually or emotionally – in the war or its possible outcomes. The administration’s pronouncements and the media coverage of the war have become, for most people here, something like the background buzz of conversation at a party. In several novels written since 2001 references to 9/11 and the idea that “everything changed” on that day feel feeble and unsubstantiated – they don’t add any depth to the thinking or development of characters and they usually point to a failed (and transparently manipulative) attempt at “profundity”. The right way to approach this has not yet been found by American writers. To step back a generation (and to view a similar disjunction between outer and inner realities), was the equally ballyhooed and reviled novel American Psycho a clever parable of the 1980s tropes of greed which were exalted on Wall Street and by conservative commentators in the newspapers and the broadcast media, a nice depiction of the dark implications of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”, or was it just a trashy, violent jape? I don’t know myself, and I’m not planning to re-read it in order to come to a judgment about the matter. But I do know that the state-of-the-nation-novel category can reasonably be seen to embrace a work like this, or the works of a pop-sociologist “realist” like Tom Wolfe, or any of the many novels in which the authorial voice completely withdraws from a society of which it disapproves into an abyssal self, or the far more interesting and better-crafted “Rabbit” trilogy of John Updike, in which there is a steady progress of character development in response to a shifting social scene. The category itself may be a little too protean to accommodate a single kind of well-defined success.

• 2 Barry Larking

  March 29, 2008 at 2:11 pm

  Mr Henscher begins by lamenting the absence of an English national identifying story and then embarks on a wide survey of contemporary fiction whose subject is the recent past, seemingly in order to show the consequences of that loss on the imaginative capacity of novelists. I am doubtful about the utility of a national, establishing text. (Further, I somewhat doubt that ‘War and Peace’ somehow establishes a Russian identity, literary or otherwise. Where or how does Pierre Bezukhov fit in Putin’s Confederation?)

  What does emerge from this survey (for someone who long ago abandoned reading the contemporary English novel) is the confirmation of an outlook amongst the tribe at once oppositional and convergent. English novels today even when written by non-English writers accept a common world view which informs the novelist’s mental landscape. Picking up a contemporary English novel is to be confirmed in a church of the Dismal Outlook. Dysfunctional, morally bankrupt or plain corrupt – these apparently are the hallmarks of ‘lived’ reality in England today. Drugs, guns, extremism and emptiness are compelling in fictional terms; in a country like England no one wants to read about the actual texture of life as it affects the bookish, those whose acquaintance with these issues is by and through print.

  Around the national dining table through this period (and continuing today on BBC TV’s ‘Newsnight Review’, a class of the recently emancipated and upwardly mobile trailed their credentials in unexplored enthusiasms for outrage; breaking off from accounts of their children’s progress into middle classlessness, foreign property buying forays and investment successes to endorse fervently the kind of political solutions which required other people to make sacrifices. Novelists come from this class by and large and sell their descriptions back to it.

  England does not have a national identifying text because it does not need one. It’s great genius was inventing these for other people. But one thing it once did supremely well was spot the insincere; the spectacle of people in Orwell’s phrase “screaming for something they do not want.” Or describing something which they do want for themselves.

• 3 Don Phillipson

  March 29, 2008 at 2:14 pm

  The topic is important, we may agree, but Philip Hensher’s execution includes such piffle that we need not take him seriously.
  For example: “The Idylls of the King was probably several centuries too late to take on the role, and we are struck now by its failure to address what was evidently of burning interest to Tennyson: his age’s dynamism and technological innovation.” This suggests it is an error for an author with a “burning interest” to fail to include it in everything he writes: or else readers of Tennyson’s Idylls are unaware of In Memoriam, Ulysses, and the rest.
  More generally, someone writing about varieties of the national myths of England who omits Robin Hood and Churchill is simply not paying close enough attention to his topic.

• 4 calum oneal

  March 30, 2008 at 11:18 am

  Oh, well; we didn’t have The Inquisition, Franco, Mussolini or Stalin’s Terror either, so the lack of a ‘National Epic’ seems a minor flaw.

• 5 Dining Tables

  January 7, 2009 at 9:17 pm

  Thats a really good post, some interesting ideas there. Some of these comments are great, well done guys!