LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

I. THE DESPERADO AGE

I/1. POSTMODERN OR DESPERADO?

There are two major directions in 20th century literature: the stream of consciousness and the Post-stream of consciousness, the latter being known as Postmodernism (Post-Postmodernism and the rest). Considering that any trend has its posterity, post-movements or post-trends have been known to exist as long as literature has existed. Those which had a clear meaning attached to them also acquired a name that stayed with us. Quite a number of critics have tried to formulate one Postmodern theory or another, and the so-called Postmodernist movement has struggled for its life for a number of decades. At present, all the numberless opinions slowly dismember.
The specific feature of the period 1950-2004 in literature, maybe not only literature, in fact, is auctorial individualism, the denial of group psychology. The word is ‘each for himself,’ everybody their own trend. This time of utmost literary solitude and bravery, of everyone creating what and how they please and taking the audience their hostage, keeping the reader at their mercy, I have called the DESPERADO AGE.
I will try to outline the essential features of Desperado literature, dividing them into nine sections, but this will be in no way an attempt at exhausting the field.

1. Plot (in all genres, but mainly fiction)

● The Desperado writer comes back to the story, focusses on plot again, relies heavily on suspense. After Joyce and Virginia Woolf had flooded fiction with lyricism and imposed the rule of the word, reducing plot to the adventures of the word or the lyrical trips into the self that remembers according to subconscious associations, another generation follows. Alasdair Gray, Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, John Fowles and many other writers understand that the novel was about to die, and reinstate story-telling. Had Joyce continued the path opened by Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, the novel would not have survived long. Terrified, Lawrence Durrell made a passionate comeback to exciting incidents. The breathtaking story is back, but it must be added that the Desperado suspense is much more than mere suspense: it is an emotional and intellectual grip that leaves the reader helpless.

● The Desperado suspense has a peculiar nature, springing from the fact that the plot is fragmentary and the pattern is not to be found. The plot, the story, is no longer a classical sequence of past, present and future. This story is not even, as it used to be for the stream of consciousness, an amalgamated knot of events. Like everything Desperado, plot itself is a puzzle: as we go along, we find fragments of time, and we have to make them fit together in a larger image, unknown, unsuspected at first. From the first words, the work exhales its own expectations, which, as far as time is concerned, could be named the confusion of chronology.

● Whether the narrative is in the first or the third person, the story inevitably slips into the biography of a character who narrates. Repeatedly, in Doris Lessing, David Lodge, Martin Amis, the story relies on the pattern of one life. Not several equally important lives, as in Galsworthy’s impressive architecture, as in Dickens even. Just one life, which swallows everything else. The peculiarity of the Desperado hero, the hold of plot on the reader resides in the individualizing narrative. Incidents flow into the basket of one hero’s biography, and all the rest are mere pretexts for the show to go on.

● Although the incidents that make up the plot reach our consciousness in a disorderly manner, there is a sense of chronology and we cannot ignore it. The author does not basically violate chronology, he merely ignores its traditional representation, the progress from past to future. The time sequence no longer is the support of causality, it no longer rules the plot, imposing its logic on incidents and characters, on the reader’s perception of literature. Quite the reverse, the author painstakingly pieces together a dishevelled plot, a sophisticated chronology. The main hero, the only one we are expected to understand – this effort is no lesser just because there is only one important hero, it is actually more intense – , thinks according to rules his mind makes, and these rules destroy all pre-existing patterns, all order, all attempts at clarification or final explanation by means of ordering the flashes chronologically or according to any other law.

● The Desperado plot always has an open end. The author refuses to have any say as to where the interaction book-reader should stop. He stops provisionally, having exhausted one set of incidents, unwilling to go on for now. All Desperado novels end in a last indecisive page: some poetic symbol induces a meditative mood, the reader may be overwhelmed with doubt as to the real meaning of what he has read, or an abrupt ending cuts expectation short and actually heightens the desire to go on reading, sharing the newly found universe of the book. Whatever the case may be, the open ending, by hook or by crook, is an insurance policy of the text, which survives in rereading. The Desperado author makes sure the readers will never forget, because they will never leave the text. Creation becomes a timeless trap.

● The universe the author imagines is gradually revealed. The reader is educated in the spirit of growing patience. The author imposes an ascetic reading. Joyce, Woolf, T.S. Eliot were elliptical, refused to explain, made a deliberate plan to require the reader to piece up the work using its fragments. The stream of consciousness mechanically did away with all connecting words and thoughts, but coherence and order survived underground. A Desperado is a writer for whom order is meaningless. The reader no longer feeds on the creator’s plan, he no longer reorders planned disorder. Desperado literature bars the reader from experiencing the joy of discovering at the very last a logical, coherent whole. The Desperado denies the tyranny of logic and lives in alogicality.

● Paul Valéry used to say, ‘An obstacle is a sun!’ The Desperado author finds his sun, his joy of creation, in using all known conventions till they are exhausted. The novel smashes happy-ends, romance, emotional involvement in the story, even accessibility, to a certain degree. Subconsciously, the text means to outsmart already used devices, but that is not always possible. This kind of suicidal story, which kills its own reasons to survive, makes the reader despair, but also gives him the strength to struggle and find out the source and flow of this Desperado plot, which, as most interviews with the authors themselves state, only means to entertain, although it actually intrigues.

2. Character

● After the stream of consciousness had smashed characters into tiny words (keeping them painfully alive, all the same), splinters of thought, reflex gestures and cultured meditation, Desperado literature brings palpable characters back into the story. The author imagines somebody in flesh and blood. It does not matter that the imagined person behaves oddly, has an intimidating past, entertains such tangled thoughts that nobody in the text or outside it can order them. Tragic or funny, more or less energetic, the odd hero is very much alive, too, apparently coherent, in fact all the more appealing as its enigmatic side keeps growing and growing.

● The Desperado author rejects explicit psychological analysis, possibly because it was the major discovery of Henry James and then of the stream of consciousness. More than thoughts, which are there all right, it is actions that speak. The hero is incident addicted. His inner monologue is rich, but it evolves from act to act more than from one idea to another. Caught in the web of the plot, this one hero, since one is enough for a plot, appears as a magnified memory. Inert and all puzzled, he is the ultimate witness. His inner and outer life are one. Life happens to him, and he endures far beyond what his being can take. Reality devours him. Thought is his last resort.

● Characterization relies heavily upon rememoration. The Desperado author repeatedly uses certain essential moods: disarray, alogicality (or logic abandoned), abolished (un)happiness, false resignation accompanied by existential malaise, irritation, in short all sorts of suffering. The hero himself exposes his private life, or allows it to be exposed, almost masochistically. Compared to the flamboyant love of life of a James Joyce, the emblematic experience of the Desperado hero, whether joking or in earnest, is existence as an ordeal, not as joy.


3. Style

● The style of Henry James, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, the style of the stream of consciousness was heavy with lyricism, exasperating readers with its elliptical secrecy. The reader’s major concern was to find the literal meaning first, and the symbols were investigated only after the text had been clarified. The Desperado style blinds us with colloquial clarity. Julian Barnes and Alasdair Gray, for instance, state that all they want is to make themselves understood. This shows us that Desperado authors have learnt the lesson of the stream of consciousness, they have learnt from previous disastrous experience that the reader comes first, that creation should focus on reading. The Desperado author affords a comfortable reading experience, although meaning is far from obvious. The reader’s comfort is a consequence of the more than accessible language the writer uses, a language that rejects sophistication, welcomes familiarity, cleans words from far-fetched associations or encoded symbols. Encoding, ambiguity have lost the ground they had gained and kept for several decades. Difficulty is not lost. We find it in a complicated order of detail, which is actually part of the plot, but is mirrored in style too, in the fact that apparently understanding is free and easy, when in fact it is greatly slowed down by the imperative need to remember whatever is written on the page. Every little word will sometime come in handy. To a large extent, the Desperado author creates the mnemotechnical reading. The Desperado novel trains our ability to activate words we thought insignificant at a first reading, words which, a chapter later, turn out to be the key to an otherwise inexplicable incident.

● Some authors plunge into lyrical effusion, poetry, reverie, sympathetic mood, and push the reader into emotion. Desperado fiction may convey tenderness, nostalgia, compassion. This tender text is vulnerable, the best prey for the sensibility of a reader exhausted by mysteries, ingenious demonstrations and intellectual triumphs. Ishiguro is such a hypersensitive author. Ironical Barnes himself has one emotional novel. The excellent narrator Graham Swift dives on and off into the soul of his hero and compels us to feel with him. These trips into the turmoil of the soul are a sign that distant narration, blank fiction, mocking fiction (poetry) have had the revelation that reading is complex and, just as it happens in life, it has its moments of sweetness.

● The Desperado authors are is quite fond of four-letter words. They rebelliously rend shyness, defying the previous bravery, upgrading it, so to say. Beyond the analysis of a mind in progress, Desperadoes instinctively slip into a public confession of the darkest secrets. Whether we are faced with taboo thoughts which are unveiled with masochistic brutality, or physical life is so bluntly conveyed that it borders on vulgarity, utter honesty is a Desperado manner. In order to shatter and rape the reader’s understanding, the author breaks all interdictions. The shameless style makes for sharpness of the text. Without an aesthetic motivation, shamelessness might turn into pornography. As it is, the result of deliberate freedom from shyness leads to a firm text, which reaches psychological depth by shocking propriety. Alasdair Gray states in an interview that he cannot reread his own novel because, after finishing it, he became again the shy person he was before writing that particular novel. Other authors are verbally very decent, but reveal shocking moral or emotional ugliness. Whether stylistically or emotionally, the Desperado writer is in love with inciting, intriguing abnormality.

● Every Desperado is painfully aware that language definitely cannot be an obstacle in his type of narrative, which is not the easiest thing in the world to grasp, mainly because it resorts to the order of memory and exaggerates, perfects what the stream of consciousness merely discovered. Superficial clarity is accompanied by indirectness. Narration is far more than story-telling. Henry James inaugurated ambiguous narration, at the end of which the readers hardly knew which hero they should side with, who was to blame and who was not. For Desperadoes, all heroes are blameless to start with, they are all indisputably right. The most concrete incidents cohere in a story of the mind, the hidden mechanisms of initial thoughts are unveiled. Unuttered feelings must be guessed at. Desperado reluctance to verbalize the soul goes hand in hand with apparent verbal shamelessness. Feelings merely hinted at show us how certainty is replaced by guessing. The author falls prey to the temptation of hiding, because by being indirect he can complicate things and the text glimmers with life, even if all this takes place behind the stage of a clear style, which becomes the only traffic sign in a maze of roads. The Desperado paradox is born out of the despair to complicate, associated with the determination to be accessible, easily understood.

4. Relationship with the critic

The Desperado author is very much interested in being accepted, praised, and dislikes (who doesn’t?) being found at fault, all the more so as he claims he could not care less. Julian Barnes emphatically states it is the easiest thing in the world to ‘quit’ criticism. Sophistication of the work amounts actually to claiming the critics’ attention, making sure the reader is a fan, not an enemy. All Desperadoes are addressing an initiated reader, who is far more than a mere relaxed reader. The Desperado writer creates the challenging text. It is a deliberate challenge, its effects are expected, planned, very much unlike the turmoil of revolt in the Stream of consciousness. The author’s ambition is both to manipulate emotionally the common reader and make the intelligent critic surrender, exhaust his attack strategies. This may be the reason why most Desperado authors wish for commonsensical critics, traditional, possibly thematic, fond of depth not deconstruction or technicalities. It is quite strange that the challenging Desperado text has not yet created a Desperado critical approach. For the time being, creation has the upper hand for a while.

5. Relationship with the reader

● The Desperado writer likes to think he is in close contact with his reader, that he is welcomed by an involved reader. All Desperado devices aim at manipulating the reader’s emotions and intellect, despite the fact that no Desperado is willing to subscribe to this guilty intention. Quite the reverse, the writers state with determination they hate to manipulate their audience, the work writes itself, no premeditation involved. Actually, they attempt a deliberate involvement of the reader (triggered by the complication of the work). Consequently, reading Desperado literature can be, actually is, exasperating, bewitching and, more often than not, disarming.

● The reader’s role is to decode. As he unravels devices, he becomes the author’s confessor. He accedes to the story, by means of which the author traps him, but he is constantly intrigued, by every step forward, every obstacle which bars a traditional approach. The reader has been promoted from the passive school to the active school of reading (which process was started by the stream of consciousness). The Desperado reader is, in the end, a shock addict. When a text looks too accessible, it most certainly hides something missed at first sight. This reader can be defined thus: ‘Tell me how intrigued you are, and I will tell you if you really are a Desperado.’

6. The author in his work

A Desperado is ironical above everything else. Irony overwhelms plot, characters, style and readers. Without irony, which belongs to both author and reader, the Desperado work is nothing. Irony ensures the high quality of the text. It supports the detachment of this author who complicates without getting involved, or not directly involved, anyway. The author is discreet, he avoids sounding personal, refuses the intimacy of confession, replaces it with an imaginary brotherhood. The Desperado author has a strong imagination, behind which he takes shelter at all times. He hides what the reader finds out in the end, and the game is repeated over and over again, because the Desperado work is an eternal beginning. It always leaves behind the bitter sweet taste of inconclusiveness...

7. Displacement

● The Desperado author can be identified by his repeated attempt at leaving one space and moving into another, leaving one age for another, or simply by leaving and then finding another fixed point (often much worse than the previous, but refreshingly new). The passage, travel, departure and shipwreck, the discovery of the island, are compulsory for these restless writers starving for the unusual.

● As a consequence of the fact that the authors travel, go on endless pilgrimages, the Desperado works are pervaded by an acute need for a home, by a feeling of rootlessness. Some authors come to the English language from other geographical areas (India, Japan, Africa), and their roots become inessential. The fact that they were born elsewhere entitles them to feel they belong everywhere and nowhere at the same time, they exist in a literary utopia, without borders such as space, language, time. The Desperado work aspires at being international, although it focusses on the haunting fear that it can find no refuge anywhere.

●The displaced hero complains of an inner void which menaces all coherence. This inner void explains and supports the inexplicable side of his psychology, the maze of thoughts and feelings which the reader has to cross when he tries to piece up the hero.

●All Desperado heroes are intensely solitary. Not even love can bring them together, and other feelings are apparently mere shadows of traditional passionate turmoils. Which does not mean lack of intensity. Quite the reverse. Intensity is exacerbated. Detached from reality, yet handcuffed to it, inert yet crucified to the narrative, slashed into numberless captivating incidents, the people of these paradoxical books are paradoxical themselves, contradictory beings who are finally unexplained and inexplicable on the whole, incomplete circles, mouths opened to utter a last unheard word.

●The authors are oppressed by the constant struggle for survival. Life is a burden, more than mere joy, even in the humorous books. The heroes long for the peace and carelessness of childhood, they feel driven away from an unknown paradise which they subconsciously long for incessantly. The Desperado hero is restless, his world-wide sadness is lyrical in nature, and it projects a meditative halo around all characters.

●All displaced beings go through several basic experiences: the struggle to emulate natives, the fear of rejection or despising attitudes, the risk of never being understood properly. These experiences result in a nightmarish atmosphere (see Kazuo Ishiguro in The Unconsoled, Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children), a nightmare of alienation. The heroes build themselves islands of familiarity, dreams, loves, sentimentality, but their life mostly unfurls in an inimical world, a hostile universe. The displaced Desperado authors experience a subtle, incurable frustration. Irony and tragedy join hands.


8. Dystopia

●The Desperado author’s favourite space is dystopia, black, negative utopia. The long line of dystopians actually begins with Huxley (Brave New World) and Orwell (1984), and continues with most contemporary writers. Dystopia is more frequent than writing poetry in adolescence or than falling in love. Whenever a Desperado creates his own world, it inevitably turns out to be a dystopia. Most novels since the 1950s to the turn of the millennium have a dystopic air, which is unmistakable and must not be ignored because it is an essential, very significant symptom of emotional estrangement.

●The list of dystopian authors is long. It starts with the stream of consciousness, with T.S. Eliot and his Waste Land. Beginning with Huxley, we can talk about Desperadoes. Besides Brave New World, Huxley also imagined Ape and Essence. Others follow: William Golding (Lord of the Flies), Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange, Honey for the Bears), Doris Lessing (The Good Terrorist, The Fifth Child, The Memoirs of a Survivor), Malcolm Bradbury (Rates of Exchange, Mensonge), Alasdair Gray (Lanark, Poor Things), David Lodge (Nice Work), Julian Barnes (Staring at the Sun, The Porcupine), Peter Ackroyd (Hawksmoor, Chatterton, English Music), Kazuo Ishiguro (The Unconsoled), Alan Brownjohn (The Long Shadows), and many more. We are not always faced with science fiction. Quite the reverse, the surroundings are most often than not apparently common. The dystopia begins insidiously, with a defamiliarization of the familiar. The familiar present, exaggerated and blackened, is projected into future indeterminacy. Defamiliarization is accompanied by a maximized fear. In a nightmarish, yet very real world, heroes live naturally. Gray even confesses that it was his aim to see how far he could go, how hard he could stretch the hero’s rationality, and he placed his character in abnormal circumstances, boasting with the character’s very natural reactions to the unusual.

● The basic feature of Desperado dystopias (unlike Jonathan Swift, with his country of the Houyhnhnms, for example) is the victory of imagination, which renders the terrifying appealing to us. Whoever reads Lanark by Alasdair Gray feels very reluctant to leave the world of the novel, would rather linger there after the last page spells ‘GOODBYE’, they all go back and reread, reconsider the first time around. Lingering and rereading are the defining particularities of Desperado dystopias.

● The aim of Desperado dystopias is broader than before, because traditional dystopias merely warned that nightmare could become reality. Contemporary dystopias are copiously inventive of non-experience. Desperado authors imagine a wealth of details, worlds of all kinds. Desperado dystopias are: political (the most accessible and obvious), science-fictional (the nightmare of technology, as opposed to the SF dream), moral and philosophical (human nature, teenage violence), apocalyptic (the atomic threat), old age, the crisis of civilization (death used as food for further life).

● Terror has an opposite pole in Desperado dystopias: the author uses literature in order to rehabilitate ugliness, and he does so much more efficiently than T.S. Eliot did in his aesthetics of the ugly, in 1922. The writer imagines frantically, allows himself to be carried away by his own imagination, and this message of the joy of living the dystopia is that whatever the imagination can hold is alive, consequently the dystopia becomes an apology of life, a kind of life that knows no border between beautiful and ugly, a life in which mere existence (it is irrelevant to call it good or bad) counts.

● Dystopia is the result of the Desperado instinct to intrigue and shock the reader at all costs. From defamiliarization, through imagination, the reader comes to accept a multitude of alien worlds. The message is not fear or despair; the reader learns to adapt himself to the dystopic world, whatever that may be, and his mind practises survival in this way. As so many times and in so many ways before, the Desperado author finds his way across despair (despair of existence, or creation), towards hope. A Desperado never despairs of anything. A Desperado hunts the unusual (and not only), he is a mind in progress, ceaselessly discovering new literary and even existential modes.


9. The hybridization of literary genres

The mixture of literary genres became a major literary mode with the stream of consciousness, at the beginning of the 20th century. It was the great invention of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, alongside with the cultured text (intertextuality). The Desperado writes poetic novels and fictional poems, contaminated with drama, essay, literary criticism and literary history. Any technique is good, all techniques must be combined, as many as possible in the same text, no matter what age they belong to or what literary genre. Desperado literature is a merry-go-round of techniques: realism, oneirism, symbolism, stream of consciousness, absurd. The word is handled with an eye wide open to preserving clarity, but to the one aim of making it proof of personality. A sum total of all trends, devices he knows (whatever age they belong to), the author who could qualify for the Desperado community flatly refuses being enrolled in any collectivity, group, movement, because he feels utterly different from all the rest, so he proclaims himself his own trend.

A Desperado text is a composite text, a text within a text within a text, a multitude of texts in one. The cultured text is also very pragmatic at the same time. Contraries meet. The Desperado rewrites all literature. He deals with literature according to his own laws, doing everything in his power to go against the grain. If he makes the law, he is his own and only ruler. What makes us discuss a contemporary Desperado community is that, true enough, birds of a feather flock together: they are all unbelievably similar in their despair to be dissimilar.