LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

I/2. THE DESPERADO FREEDOM

I. Previous bondage to previous conventions

The stream of consciousness, which precedes the Desperado age (starting in the early 1950s) in time, was an illusion of freedom. The desire to struggle free from 19th century realism, from traditional omniscience, from the order of the predictable plot and characters, ended in a frenzy of defiance. The character was no longer a story for Joyce, Woolf, Conrad: he was a stream (of thoughts, emotions, memories). Virginia Woolf’s famous essay on Modern Fiction was an act of rejection. She turned her back on Galsworthy, Bennett and Wells, but she was not really prepared for a substantial change. Many critics have noticed that she discovered denial, nothing else. I should say she replaced the old convention of predictability, the old horizon of strong expectations, by a new convention of defiance. If readers had grown too addicted and accustomed to peaceful, gratifying reading, she decided to wake them up: she used symmetrical opposition and came up with the imperious need for unpredictability. The stream of consciousness novel is what we do not expect to see on page, whether it is in point of structure (plot, character, chronology, all shattered, reshuffled, different from what centuries of literature had made them into), or, more confusing, in point of style. If plot, character and chronology had a gift of rearranging themselves in the reader’s mind according to old patterns once he had done reading, the style slipped dangerously into lyricism, made understanding arduous, and we can safely say that the novel suffered for fifty years from the malady of the word.

The features of a novel such as Ulysses or Mrs. Dalloway are: complicated architecture of memories, emotions and verbal associations, supported by a hidden intention, a concealed plan, the compression of all meanings by means of a language which left the purpose of mere communication, straying into poetry. The encoded style led to an encoded meaning, and on the whole, the stream of consciousness text refuses accessibility. This refusal began as an absence of incident, which was replaced by emotion and thought. More emotion with Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, more thought (etymology included, as a philosophy of the word) in James Joyce. The destiny of heroes is no longer a body – which Woolf noisily refused – but a mind in progress. If there is no story, then there is no sense of closure either. The reader who finishes a stream of consciousness novel is left afloat in an open space of the soul. Reading is threatened, it will soon have to change. Briefly, in Woolf’s own terms, love interest has to die. I must say she proclaims this but never manages to kill it right in her novels. Once the reader has come out of the text, love and story are back in his mind, and he remembers characters who are very much in love. Yet it is now, with Joyce, Woolf and Eliot that the idea of the couple, of family and loving/ loveless endings begins to fade. The horizon of expectation has to change, to accommodate these new, defiant novels, apparently deprived of what was the basic food of literature for at least nineteen centuries. We used to form an intimacy with the hero as we read his story and expected the suspense, the absolute end. We are no longer supposed to expect anything. We form an intimacy with the author, who baffles us and confuses the text. If the novel used to be a statement, it is a question mark now, and it is the reader who must find his own answers or stay forever displeased.

20th century realism (Galsworthy is the best representative) still hopes to please the reader. Forsyte Saga is a consummate architecture of conventional devices, from perfect chronology to plot and character. Its main rule is logic. The reader’s guide is his own understanding, which passively travels across the incidents, all connected and meaningfully built into a pyramid longing for an attainable future. The horizon of expectation in such novels has been the same for twenty centuries and more: something begins and ends, and we see the interim. This is what the Desperado refuses to do. He rejects both the convention of order (traditional novel) and that of deliberate disorder (stream of consciousness). We could easily sum up the main moments of a novel by Dickens, Cervantes, Petronius (to go backwards). The chronological sequence makes sense. The same attempt at restoring chronology to a Desperado novel leaves us in the dark. If we take Joyce and restore order to the planned confusion of his whirling incidents (because something happens in all fiction, at all times), we find ourselves in the exhilarating world of etymological genius. Before the Desperado, fiction was always in bondage to convention, and it accepted the artificiality. The Desperado is the first to say, I am different and I am free.


II. What does it take to be a Desperado?

(1) Irony is the key to writing a good Desperado book. Joyce, Woolf and T.S. Eliot (all stream of consciousness) went as far as denying previous conventions, using previous texts while belittling them, debunking other works (see The Odyssey in Ulysses and Shakespeare, among a crowd of other writers, in The Waste Land). When Alasdair Gray – just one random example – or Julian Barnes resort to other texts, they destroy those texts with their grin, their irony tells us: Do not trust them do not trust me, no other text but mine can be taken seriously, and even my text has to be viewed with a smile, with the love of game in your mind. Irony is the mother of the text as a challenging game.

(2) In interviews, Desperadoes are fond of denying the question. You say they love to play with their readers and they reply, I love my readers and want to impress them, not challenge. A Desperado is always in denial: he denies statements, he denies first impressions, he builds his always present suspense on denying the reader’s horizon of expectation. He even denies denials (see Ishiguro denying the denial of love in The Remains of the Day). A Desperado states in the negative: the baffling hero, the confusing incident are his major means of communication.

(3) Although writing No on every page, the Desperado expects us to fervently welcome him with a Yes. He needs the reader’s approval and courts us, while apparently grumpy and eager to displease. The reason for their anxious desire to be different and take us by surprise is to silence us into loving, amazed acceptance.

(4) When the plot is at its peak, it is ruthlessly suspended and the reader is left breathlessly hopeless. The Desperado work never ends happily or unhappily, and never even considers an open ending. It ends unexpectedly. The character in Lanark leaves no room for speculation, he dies, but he dies enigmatically, with a mere ‘GOODBYE.’ Ishiguro’s painter in An Artist of the Floating World ends the exam of his consciousness (which is the book) by merely gazing at the new generation and shaking his head in helpless disapproval, after he has enjoyed a certain kind of power and fame his whole life. We would not expect him to be that gentle. Fowles plays with his endings in full view, in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Since the couple is discarded, the future looks useless and the end is a dead device. Its only role is to create anxiety, which it amply does.

(5) Desperadoes pine for love, yet mistrust it as the pillar of any story. Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is all about the absence of love, while proclaiming the freedom of women from men. Waterland is an image of old age and faint reminiscences of the trouble caused by young love, now all but vanished. The stream of consciousness discredited love theoretically, yet still clung to it (see V. Woolf, who would not breathe without emotion). The Desperadoes snicker when they should sympathize, love is a source of fun. Their irony is dry, although they are very much concerned with the reader’s emotional involvement in the work. Barnes, Swift, Lodge, Bradbury, Amis, Gray, all of them, actually, deny their characters shared emotions. Since the hero is ultimately and mainly alone, love is a forbidden form of communication.

(6) A Desperado must be new at all costs. He must be new in the context of all literature, and he must also be new in relation to his previous work. Being new implies surprising the reader, and the Desperado longs to catch us unaware.

(7) A writer who aspires to the status of a Desperado should be advised: Be faithful to the Desperado dream, namely be one of your kind, if possible the best, rise overnight and amaze everyone.

(8) Be clear in style and devious in thought. Use the mnemotechnic style, make readers responsible for their own capacity of remembering each word, which may become the key to later developments.

(9) Make a clean breast of all the skeletons in your cupboard and do not mince words about it : be shameless.

(10) Be both sympathetic and arrogant, in a mixture known only to yourself.

(11) Be alive and kicking while talking about all kinds of mortifications.

(12) Be CONTRADICTORY: argue with yourself.

(13) Be FREE from everybody else’s words. Which brings us to:


III. Desperado freedom above all

1. Where to be free
● Handle language irreverently, use words that did not use to belong to the written page, use them as a matter of fact, not to shock, just to give an air of informal speech to your carefully planned linguistical traps.
● Innovate the structure of the text, do not reject plot, chronology and character, but use them in such a way as to mystify whoever might claim has understood you or has access to your truth.
● Feel free to help yourself to hulks of the past, since intertextuality is an accepted practice and everyone is used to that now.
● Do not get all excited about what Martin Amis used to call the literary genres ‘bleeding’ into one another, be a good surgeon of fiction and use the scalpel of hybridization in cold blood, because if you get all fidgety about the least discovery (as the stream of consciousness did), you risk being thrown into jail on a charge of inaccessibility.
● From the most abstract idea of literature, from the text written out of and even about other texts, squeeze the least drop of life, and claim this life is your major concern (even though it is convention that you covet).

2. How to be free
● Be different, no matter what. Be different from all other writers, and do not be ashamed to differ from yourself (Eliot was the first who begged to differ from his own youth, and it took him a lifetime to do it. Do it sooner, do it more often and to hell with readers who expect the Ishiguro flavour, the Barnes witticism, the Swift lyricism, the Lodge fun, etc.).
● Ignore all rules but those you make as you go along, and stick to them only for as long as it is absolutely necessary. Italians have this saying: once the law is made, hurry to break it.
● If interviewed (which happens, what can you do), refuse stubbornly all affiliation, avoid flocking into groups, proclaim your uniqueness, but do not leave aside the statement that all you want is to make your readers comfortable (far be that thought from you, but do not let anyone know the tough truth).
● Resent critics, pretend to ignore their attempts at including you in a category. No theory must be valid but your own.
● Write with both your soul and memory (especially literary). If you mean to appeal to emotions, to life (so you always say), smash all intermediary conventions.
● PS. Do not forget, someone should write on your books, ‘Handle with care’, because with all this freedom, you may turn literature into a time bomb.

3. Why be free
● Because you must find yourself by escaping all preconceived patterns.
● Because you need all your strength to allure readers.
● Because you are on the verge of the most wonderful discovery ever: the perfect work.
● Because you know better that to conform to older minds.
● Because you cannot find anything new and amazing by using old cannons: discard old tracks and set out for the New World (Columbus did not come up with the right name for it, but you might, and if you do not, Desperado will be a dead word).
● Because YOU CAN DO IT, whatever it is, and because you are worth it (advertisement is the soul of communication, and we must never ignore Public Relations).