LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

II/8. MALCOLM BRADBURY (7 September 1932-2000)

● Malcolm Bradbury is basically an ironist, which makes him a Desperado. Irony is the key to plot and character. He appears to entertain, when in fact he analyses, dissecting with his irony. His characters are academics and writers, touching upon an idea more obvious in poetry than prose, namely that literature and criticism, poetry mainly, are practised inside the walls of universities, are academic achievements. In this direction, we could name David Lodge, Alan Brownjohn (more or less, as his activity is broader than teaching), John Fowles.

● Comedy lies basically in the approach to character. Bradbury laughs kindly, though, he never bites with bitterness. He avoids being sucked into emotion. His characters are funny, but the author forbids us to sympathize, because our sensibility must not be involved. We must keep our thoughts free to laugh.

● Humour focusses more on the language than on character or plot, but humorous situations come up all the time. Names and titles show comic genius. The comic perception of society leads to relaxed, comfortable reading. Behind the serene mockery, each character has a skeleton in his cupboard, and Bradbury allows us to catch a glimpse at it, so our laughter is not exactly light-hearted in the end.

● Bradbury seems to be fascinated with the iron curtain, but not so much in order to create dystopias, as to find a source of irony in it. He always has at least one character fleeing from communism. Rates of Exchange is a description of a communist country, with dystopical elements which are comically introduced, but do not fail to scare and sadden the reader, who sighs among peals of laughter, wondering how bad it really can get.

● The novel is a small, confusing world devoid of any rules. The author himself describes contemporary literature as a constant polemic with other works, which means he is aware of the Desperado attempt to be dissimilar at all costs. He himself argues with other manners of writing, tacitly, in his novels. Mensonge is a brilliant annihilation of structuralism, of Deconstruction, of criticism that tends to outsmart the work. Nobody is involved with anybody else, and nothing leads to anything. The bushy plot, if it can be called that, kills suspense. Bradbury tries to write uneventfully, and to make us follow stripped of all expectation. He creates the uneventful text.

● Bradbury finds one Desperado theme which we could also find in Ishiguro, Swift, Lodge: he sees England trotting to America, with the same zest that Henry James’ characters put into defecting to Europe. The direction has changed. Europe is now the ugly sister. Although Europeans view America tongue in their cheeks, the New World certainly offers better conditions to writers and academics. It is also much trickier, and Bradbury notices all the ropes behind academic benevolence. He laughs at human nature, but is not happy to unveil the skeletons they have hidden. All his characters are ultimately destroyed by the writer’s psychology, which pulls just a corner of the veil, and we do not get to see ugliness entirely, but one glimpse seems to be enough. The writer stops at the point where we can still laugh.

● Bradbury’s heroes are all enigmatic. He does not reveal their psychology, deliberately building them passive and blank. Mensonge is his ideal hero, practically non-existent. He is a dystopian of criticism. His description by Bradbury proves in the end the uselessness of incomprehensibility. All that the author wants and strives to achieve in everything he writes, is to make sense.