LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

I/6. THE FUTURE AS A MEMORY, IN DESPERADO LITERATURE





I. The Desperado Hero

The return of the hero
The stream of consciousness hero was more an emotional and thoughtful halo than a real life, although life kept happening to him, life was all over him and he could hardly deal with its intricate twists and turns. Clarissa Dalloway mixed ‘memory and desire’ (T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land), an elaborately remembered past, a minimal present and a disturbing apprehension for the future. Virginia Woolf preached the abolition of love interest and chronological causality, but stuck fiercely to them, all the more so as she was unable to build a classical plot and perceived her inability. I suspect that she preached what she preached only to justify her lyrical narratives, which limped but constantly fantasized about walking. That must also be the reason why, after reading them, we remember her novels as chronological stories that would not exist if we deny them love interest. To put it in a nutshell, after all, Virginia Woolf did stick to love interest and chronological causality.

After Joyce’s heroes, to whom everything happened before happening, before the actual utterance, in the area of preverbalization, the unutterable became the realm of fiction. Leopold Bloom exposes shame shamelessly (Ulysses). Lord Jim (Conrad) reveals the unspeakable ‘horror’ which is mentioned even more insistently in Heart of Darkness. Lawrence’s heroes grapple with a private hell of inexplicable impulse. James hopes for justice and fairness in a crooked world whose only hope is the mind of his heroes, which switches the plot of the novel from the incident to verbalization (meaning statement and understatement) of the act. Speculation and decoding are stream of consciousness practices. Between lines, between words, there lies a meaning that has to be followed closely and unmasked.

Modernism melted the hero into the effort of expressing him. The living being evaporated into words, and the word was the absolute beginning of the world, it was light and it was life. It was both God and His creation. The Desperado age reclaims the right of the hero to be flesh and blood. The word is still important because it must be remembered, because, if forgotten, it can become an obstacle to the understanding of the whole book. The hero leads a real life and the Desperado author prides himself on having brought the novel back to reality. What he does not admit is that the life of the hero reaches us through his memory, via his mind. An Artist of the Floating World (Ishiguro) has a palpable story, on the one hand: we learn that the hero was a painter who supported the imperialist campaign, thus indirectly bringing the atomic bomb onto Japan, and in the process he sent to jail another fellow painter who saw things differently. But the truth comes to us filtered by the artist’s mind, and we take a while to wind our souls away from him and give the book the chance of a second, detached reading. The second time round, the charm no longer blinds us and we see the ugly reality for what it is, and we notice every little detail, every word apparently uttered at random, actually very significant in the construction of the novel (such as ‘suicide’, which suggests the artist’s unavowed sense of guilt at having brought the bomb and ensuing defeat and poverty onto his country). The Desperado hero has learnt from the modernist hero that he must be a mind above all, but he refuses to leave his body behind. Clarissa Dalloway was a breeze of memories and emotions. Lanark describes the physical agony of every little incident. His mind is the key to the meaning, but his body gives that meaning substance. David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury, Julian Barnes mock at sentimentality, record the defeats of the heroic body, only their very irony relies on a very concrete life: the hero’s mind mocks at his expectations of happiness in love, career, family, society at large. There is no happiness. The past devours the future. The mind (the past) gives birth to a life that is both true and hopeless (futureless). Life is back into the novel, but governed by intellectual retrospection or (at times) intellectual projection of the present into a future which is a multiplied suspicion of several roads that can be travelled at once.

Bringing back a hero with an eventful life, the Desperado novel is this hero’s diary. Winston Smith (1984) dreams of a real diary whom beings-to-come (inhabitants of a future he cannot bring himself to expect) will read:

‘To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone – to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:
From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of double think – greetings!’

Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet is a mixture of diaries. Doris Lessing writes The Golden Notebook relying heavily upon the idea of life as a daily business that does not exist until it is put down to paper. Desperado writing is actually the recording of the daily ordeal. No Desperado hero is ever light-hearted or happy. Fowles does not resort to a diary so much, but the ordeal and the daily ratio of frustration is always there. He places a diary at the core of his Collector, but that diary is just a dead memory of youth, an impossible return. Other heroes, in novels by Barnes, Ishiguro, Gray, Bradbury, Lodge live from day to day, even though they do not write down their experiences. The diary is their own memory, which records patiently. It is a disabused recording, hopeless and helpless. Ackroyd derives some power from his lyricism and escapes into other texts, other stories, the same as Graham Swift. Martin Amis advances through days with theatricality. What all these Desperado authors have in common is the day. The unit of the novel is no longer a life with a past, a present and a future: it is a life made up of days. Joyce and Woolf, even Eliot, invented the one-day novel/ poem (Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway, The Waste Land). They meant to abolish (or wished they did) chronological causality. It must be added that they longed for it anyway, and the reader perceived their sense of loss and reacted by bringing chronology back surreptitiously. Desperadoes do not long for old patterns. Twenty centuries of epic (from Homer on) go down the drain. What was and whatever will come out of what was no longer matters. We live on what is going on now, at this very moment. No one – not even the author – can possibly know what will come up after this paragraph.

The Desperado hero, who has returned to the novel to live – not just to think and verbalize, differs from all previous heroes when it comes to expectations. The heroes created by Homer, Fielding, Dickens, Galsworthy, even Joyce, Woolf, Conrad expected something to happen to them and close the novel, even though the stream of consciousness refused to express that expectation. Whether put into words or not, the novel had a closure. The Desperado novel is confusing for those readers who expect the old pattern, because expectation is forbidden these days. What are the expectations of Winston Smith, Justine, Anna Wulf, Alex, Charles, Oliver, Stevens, Lanark, Robyn Penrose, Hawksmoor, John Self, Tom Crick (all heroes of the previously mentioned Desperado novelists)? All the heroes Lessing ever created lived in and for the present, enduring the burden of futurelessness. Fowles’s heroes struggle with the need for suspense which the expectation of a happy ending might fulfill, but they are denied that happy ending and are left with the suspense, which in Fowles’s case is unbearable (just like the denial of all expectations, which is not only deliberate but also worked into a famous device by now – see the famous scene of the author looking at himself while facing his hero:

‘Now the question I am asking, as I stare at Charles ...: what the devil am I going to do with you? I have already thought of ending Charles' career here and now; of leaving him for eternity on his way to London. But the conventions of Victorian fiction allow, allowed no place for the open, the inconclusive ending; and I preached earlier of the freedom the characters must be given.’

That is a general feeling, or rather justification of all Desperadoes: the hero must be free. The suspense of the Desperado text does not in the least come from the hero’s expectations being fulfilled, then; it comes from an endless complication of his real or suspected diary (his mind), which can easily ruin (and does so, really) all hope for happiness. The Desperado hero bears the burden of his own inability to live.

Indeed, this hero is a passive and resigned being, very much unlike the energetic achievers of the realistic novel, or of the oldest epics ever. All Kazuo Ishiguro’s heroes, for instance, bear what existence burdens them with: a Japanese woman has two daughters who leave her (one commits suicide, the other leaves home without an explanation) alone and empty, a Japanese painter loses his hour of glory and for a minute even wonders if he would not be better off committing suicide, an English butler is unable to enjoy even the remains of a day he has wilfully missed, a pianist cannot make sense of absurd reality (and that reality actually is absurd, Kafkaesque, or in the South American vein), a detective fails to find the meaning of life. Five novels describe five failures, or rather, mental recordings of the inability to use the freedom the author allows the hero. Where Ulysses, David Copperfield, the Forsytes struggled and won or lost, the Desperado heroes merely endure. They do not even wait. They simply are. Resignation to the present is the Desperado hero’s lot.

The charm of the Desperado hero
Peter Ackroyd told in an interview, ‘The mind is the soul.’ This answer explains the charm of the Desperado hero. Although incident-addicted, although besieged with constant action, never reduced to the mere birth of his words (as Joyce did, or Eliot), the Desperado hero is a mind within a soul, which means to say all his recorded experiences turn lyrical at a certain point, and he becomes a huge poem. An enormous amount of incidents is confused by the hero’s mind in an exasperating (suspense-bound) narrative, rendered painfully vulnerable by a sensibility always laid bare. All Durrell’s heroes are helplessly in love and helplessly hurt by their own feelings. Barnes’ heroes are defiant, yet their wounds cry out loud: however ironical Barnes may be, his characters are no less vulnerable and no less hurt, in spite of their witticisms and derisions. It is the revenge action/ the plot takes on the heroes that used to ride it high and mighty. The plot is still there, but it refuses to be second best any more. The readers no longer race through the plot, obsessed by the fate of the hero. In Desperado novels, the hero has no fate, we might say. It is the acts that create a hero and leave that hero dangling when the author decides he wants to stop imagining. Lanark swims in a sea of presents, experiences a mass of present incidents, and cannot put them behind: he cannot conceive of a past. He is equally unable to see his future, to imagine there is anything in store for him. Each new incident takes him by surprise and the book ends with a final ‘GOODBYE’ before there has been any time for anyone to react. Desperado heroes are inert. If they do anything, it is to charm the reader by appealing to his love, sympathy, approval. Desperado novels are not about energetic achievers and settled plots. They are all about the reader’s sharing and caring. Once we identify with the hero, the author rests his case and the sentence no longer matters. ‘The mind is the soul’ has won: the writer’s mind has enslaved us to his soul, we feel and understand at the same time. Joyce, Woolf and Eliot dreamed this hybridization of poetry and fiction would happen, but it never came true for them. The Desperadoes win us over more than the stream of consciousness technique, because they turn a device into a mood, the Desperado mood of identifying with the written page till we can no longer see the difference, we are the page.

The technicalities of the Desperado hero
We can only understand the Desperado meaning if we memorize every little word on the page. There is no knowing which word will come in handy and when. The stream of consciousness devised the recurrent image, the idiosyncratic word, the word loaded with psychological revelations. No such thing for Desperado authors. Every word is just as good. The only prerequisite is its duration in the reader’s memory. It may be a word borrowed from other texts – a dialogue with other minds (see Ackroyd) – , or a commonplace word, apparently dropped at random. Such is the word ‘bantering’ in The Remains of the Day (Ishiguro). It appears on the first and last pages, but is also referred to in between, in opposition to how the butler used to enrich his vocabulary in order to be able to talk aristocratically to his former master, Lord Darlington. It seems an unobtrusive, insignificant, blunt word – and yet it is the root of an upheaval. Stevens’s whole life has been turned upside down, he has changed masters, and the American who bought Darlington Hall has bought him, too, and means business. He prompts Stevens to go on a motoring trip, he goes right to the heart of the matter when he mocks at Stevens’s interest in Miss Kenton (Mrs Ben, now), which is by no means purely ‘professional’ (another important word), but deeply emotional and private. The whole novel is a battle between public and private meanings, between public and private words.

Ishiguro plans his key words carefully. Other writers dash down details, and words are not so loaded with symbolism. Barnes fills Flaubert’s Parrot with random remarks, which prevent all understanding of what is going on in case they are ignored by rapid reading. Eliot made much noise around his famous recurrent images (the ‘objective correlatives’), such as the sea, the garden, water, the yew tree, etc. The Desperadoes prefer the unobtrusive. They sneak into the text and watch us rushing where angels fear to tread. We are the fools if we ignore the least word, the least remark. Lanark is a mass of details that seem to be unimportant, but which we go on reading nevertheless. They do not build a code, it is no longer the time of ciphers. They mass together and create a mountain of recorded incidents. With Desperadoes, unlike the stream of consciousness, it is more a matter of quantity than quality. The word – and this is the major Desperado technicality – need not be exemplary, but suggestive in itself. With Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, the word created its system of reference. It triggered the mechanism of decoding and it set the reader on the right track, helping him to unveil the author’s plan. The Desperadoes also have a plan. It is hard to conceive of a work without a plan, unless we are talking about a bad work. The difference between stream of consciousness and Desperado authors is that the plan was a hidden meaning with the former, and it is more of a complicated technicality with the latter. The Desperado author plans complication and confuses deliberately.

Desperado heroes usually address the reader directly. Even when they do not speak in the first person, they open up for the reader to look. The stream of consciousness had barriers, expected the reader to overcome an architecture of symbols, hints, oblique statements. Desperadoes mainly rely on free access to interiority. This inner life feeds on the daily incidents, which replace the previous chronological plot, rooted in the past and lived in the light of the future. The Desperado lives mainly in the present and is not the achiever of the plot (closure of the past in the future), but its life, its reality. Desperadoes experience a hysteria of the real. Virginia Woolf stated again and again that life escaped realistic novelists like Galsworthy, and she meant to bring the novel closer to reality. She merely stated what Desperadoes achieve: the novel is now a huge present, a day-to-day experience. The heroes’ directness is equivalent to the stress placed on the present. The direct line running between reader and hero, with or without the author’s voice in between (Lodge, Bradbury, Gray, Swift, Lessing use third person narrative, while very few use first person direct address), is the best proof that the hero has come back to life, that Desperado novels may have learned from the stream of consciousness technically, but have devised a whole new soul of their own to match their minds. For the stream of consciousness, the mind was the main delight, newly found and avidly explored. The Desperadoes bring back the old novel of the soul, but do not really go back to the old tradition of writing it: they achieve a simultaneity, an identification of feeling and technique, and they conclude just like Peter Ackroyd, ‘The mind is the soul.’

II. The Hero’s Past

In regular novels, the present uses the past, and the future uses the present. Eventually past and present serve the future. David Copperfield uses his past to build a present and we constantly wait to see what is going to happen to him in the future. What happens next is the concern of all novels before the stream of consciousness. Stories used to focus on what was going to happen in the end. When the novel closed in happiness or unhappiness, the story had served its purpose and the novelist rested his case. Galsworthy is actually – far more than Virginia Woolf realized – a danger to that regular novel, because he wrote a saga, which means he was unwilling to close, to see one ending as final. Realistic as he may have looked, he was innovative in his own way: his long cycles of novels actually demonstrated that life was a flow, an endless business. Virginia Woolf called it a halo. Her stress was placed more on emotion than incident. Balzac saw the flow, too, but he focussed on an end for each life. Galsworthy felt he had to offer his readers more than just a (social or individual) philosophy of happiness or unhappiness: he suspected the novel could be moved from the realm of incident to the realm of psychology. His short sketches reveal him an extraordinary stream of consciousness experimenter. By the turn of the nineteenth century, writers had grown tired of what was going to happen next, and were already looking for a new focus, whether they wrote in the old picaresque manner or invented new approaches. The future was losing ground in favour of a prolonged present.

In Desperado novels, the present drags its feet, and the future never matters. The real power is in the past. This past is a drug which benumbs the present into sleep. The hero does nothing but remember, and the past entrances him, makes him discover all sorts of tricks of memory: from hazard (realism) to psychoanalysis (stream of consciousness). The delights of memory are mixed with the joy of the present in Alexandria Quartet, and the plot is very much alive, but governed by the perspective of the past upon the future. It does not matter so much what is happening now, as long as the future can be seen in many colours, all of them mirrors of one image of the past or another. To Lawrence Durrell, past incidents are the key and the God. Fowles’s present reconsiders the past constantly and lives by this retrospection. The Collector, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Daniel Martin, The Magus, all live by repeated meditations on the past. Something that happened haunts Fowles’s present, and is turned in the hero’s mind over and over again, till a spark of present action shines and the plot advances one step. Fowles’s present is more a demonstration of technique than a pillar of the plot. He demonstrates how the author can have a dialogue with both reader and hero (the gap of centuries in time never matter), or how he can use a past diary to push the present into incident. Barnes plunges into Biblical or literary history (Flaubert’s Parrot, The History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters), so his past is not even individual. Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled drowns in past memories that never manage to connect, thus creating an absurd text, whose meaning is rather an under-meaning, a guess, a mood. The Remains of the Day feeds on a complicated order of revealing memories, just like An Artist of the Floating World. Ishiguro’s present is minimal. Its sap rises in the plot from what was lost, or, as Eliot put it, ‘In memory only, reconsidered passion’ (Gerontion). Actually, more than Virginia Woolf in her Modern Fiction, we find Eliot’s verse unwillingly theorizing on the future of the novel, on Desperado techniques, on the sleepiness of the present and the poignancy of the past.

Since the present is so slow and deprived of the thrill of expectation, the only –exacerbated – suspense comes from the order in which past incidents are recollected. Lanark, An Artist of the Floating World, Waterland, Hawksmoor are just a few examples. Even Ishiguro’s latest novel, When We Were Orphans, relies heavily on the value of recorded incidents reinterpreted in a confused present. It is not the present which is the guiding light of the past, but the past which reinvents the present. Joyce made the mind analyse itself in the present. Bloom dissected the way his present thoughts slipped from a pre-verbal to a verbal state, the way a thought came into being, the way a word was born out of innumerable associations of languages, ideas, emotions, the way a text was actually written. Joyce indirectly analysed the process of writing a text, and gave it the body of his heroes. The stream of consciousness was more thesis than practice, and when it came to practice, it was rather a struggle with tradition than a victory over it. Desperadoes reach a step farther, they make the order of memory the essence, the tyrant of Desperado technique.

Whether it shapes the plot (The Remains of the Day, Waterland) or haunts an active present (Lessing, Fowles), memory is the man. Apparently, Lessing, Lodge, Bradbury, Amis, Barnes write in and only about the present. In fact, their heroes are burdened with the sleep of what can no longer happen because it has already taken place, and is past now. Anna Wulf is haunted by her dead love, dead belief in communism, lost childhood of her daughter (who chooses boarding house). Robyn Penrose does not have a past burden and it maims her, she seems unable to build a present precisely because she cannot claim a past loss; deprived of past pains, she lives an empty present, in which irony reigns and nothing is expected of anyone. Things keep happening for Bradbury, too, but they are all trifles, massed in the parody of a plot. Mensonge, the brilliant anti-deconstruction little story, claims the death of the present, the non-existence of the main hero. The present seems active for Amis (Money, The Information) and Barnes (Staring at the Sun), but it is informed by a hopelessness that seems to say, There is nothing ahead, your only chance is to look back. Look Back in Anger was a very good title for the beginning of this Desperado age. The angry young men were so because their present had changed, had become void. The Desperado heroes are still amazingly angry, from Lessing to Burgess, Fowles, Barnes, Ishiguro, Gray, Amis, Swift. Anger is a face of memory, we might say. What cannot be remembered hurts, and very few memorable things happen in this Desperado present:

‘... innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe...’ (Modern Fiction, Virginia Woolf, 1919).

The sentence does not ring true for Woolf’s own novels. The Waves hangs from the lips of the future, has love interest written all over it, is deeply tragic, stamped by inner catastrophes. But Woolf’s statement describes the Desperado text perfectly. Memory is the hero, memory is the author, memory is the reader. We are all a huge recollecting mood.

Relying entirely on the past for suspense (the appeal of the story), blocking out both present and future, the hero becomes an introvert, which is a clear consequence of the stream of consciousness, but only comes true in Desperado novels. Leopold Bloom, Clarissa Dalloway, Lord Jim, the hyacinth girl were theatrical and picturesque in a new way; they wanted to impress the reader even more than Homer, Dickens, Galsworthy, but actually expected to trigger the same emotional reading, or rather a much more intense one. The Desperado hero is not in the least theatrical. He is modest, shy, keeps as much of his inner world to himself as he can. He keeps his distance from the reader, as his author claims to be doing. Joyce’s heroes are free to tango with their thoughts. Desperado heroes are diffident and shy. So are their authors, especially when interviewed. Some, like Julian Barnes or Fowles, mock at the idea of an interview or at literary criticism, and, behind their irony, insecurity looms. Others are simply modest, likable and tolerant of any questions (Gray, Lodge, Swift, Ackroyd). In both cases, the reader is perceived as a threat.

The reason why the reader is perceived as a threat that must be propitiated by all means is directly connected to the major difference between the Desperado age and the rest of the literary ages (stream of consciousness included). In most texts, the past is crammed inside the hero, the story, the author: the reader is invited to challenge the text and conquer the meaning. Dickens, for instance, was an extrovert, delighted at the so-called independence of his heroes from him. He received letters from readers, begging for the happy fate of one hero or another. His imagination ran wild and made its own rules. His inspiration was self-assured and considered itself master of writing and reading. The Desperado hero, on the other hand, the same as the Desperado author, is deeply dependent on the reader/ critic’s caring. Tom Jones was alive whether the reader approved of him or not. Galsworthy’s characters are themselves and we can understand them all – psychologically speaking, which bitterly questions Galsworthy’s separation from the stream of consciousness – , even though we may dislike Soames at first, or disapprove of many others. The Desperado hero goes the other way round. He parades indifference as to the reader’s attitude. Lanark could not care less whether we approve of him. Robyn Penrose feels she is strong and does not need anyone to commiserate with her. Tom Crick refuses melodramatic responses, his words are calm and cold. But the truth is previous literary ages could afford being cold, while Desperado texts cannot. The Desperado hero seems to be saying: Learn my past and approve of me, or I am lost. The pianist in The Unconsoled is disagreeable but deeply in need of human contact with the reader. We feel much more oppressed when we read a Desperado text. The other texts allowed us an intellectual and emotional freedom which we have lost. And we have lost our freedom precisely because Desperadoes are emotional beggars, because their heroes, unless comforted by the reader’s total addiction to the text, are insecure and use their past as baits.


III. The Hero’s Present

The Desperado present is sleepy and confused. John the Savage (Brave New World) cannot find his bearings and commits suicide, which is his only action after the exclamation ‘O brave new world!’, which comes from Shakespeare and ends in the fifth millennium, by Huxley’s standards. Simon and Ralph (Lord of the Flies) almost die because the mob of hungry, cruel children need to kill and eat; killing is Golding’s major concern. The plot illustrates it by the mere helplessness of the present versus the fierce instincts surviving from the past, haunting the ‘hunters’, sacrificing Piggy, the ‘true friend’, and Simon, who finally understands who the ‘Beast’ and the Lord of the Flies are. Lessing’s heroines see so much going on that their minds give in. Anna Wulf (The Golden Notebook) is overwhelmed by the fear she is going mad – which means confusion stifles her – and it is a different kind of lunacy from the theatrical disarray of Eliot’s heroes in The Waste Land, but the feeling of lost bearings starts with him all right. Alex (A Clockwork Orange) does nothing but killing – or the next best to it – and giving up violence is his only real act in Burgess’s novel. Actually he abandons violence because he is trying to have a family and knows that his son will carry it on, so Burgess’s view of the future of the world is not peaceful, even though the present promises a short break. Burgess’s present is a nightmare which immobilizes all heroes involved, aggressor and aggressed to the same extent. Ishiguro’s present is a motoring trip, a daughter’s short visit, plans for a wedding, a nightmarish visit to an absurd location. When the novelist tries a more active present (When We Were Orphans), the plot suffers, looks more superficial and the text is qualified as a ‘detective novel’, which it is not; it is merely a plot with a plan, and many of his readers have already read novelists who are better at the realistic game than Ishiguro. Lanark crosses the night of his adventures with no feelings at all; he is constantly puzzled, and the reader is discouraged from any attempt at understanding. He dies with the same empty heart as he had started, and even the realistic part of the novel, which describes his past in a real city, with real incidents and real people, is monotonously lifeless. The whole novel is, to my mind (although the author states he meant to amuse and engross the reader in adventures), a huge metaphor for the idea of growing old. It has the ageing mood written all over it, the lack of passion and the loss of expectation. If it comes to that, in fact, all Desperado novels are novels of old age. The romance of youth is not part of their authors’ charm or intention. When Eliot called Yeats ‘pre-eminently the poet of middle age’, he meant to say that Yeats desperately wanted to stay young and made a show of his losing battle with life. Desperadoes go very gentle into ‘that good night’, they do not ‘rage’ (Dylan Thomas), they do not even object. Tom Crick (Waterland) and Hawksmoor advance through their lives, mixed with the past as they come, as in a dream of powerlessness. All these heroes’ minds seem threatened by a madness of memory and they try to relieve it in the present by simply diminishing the importance of all incidents.

The incident-addicted Desperado hero is in fact past-addicted (all meaningful incidents belong to the past) because the present plot would be nothing without its past echoes. Even for the plots that do move in the present there is a past scaffolding or a past explanation. Hawksmoor would be nothing without his past counterpart, with whom he melts into a final lyrical symbol of picturesque, ambivalent evil. When We Were Orphans would not exist without the haunting bits of memories which finally bring to light a horrible truth (the plot is in fact too weak to carry the intensity of the horror, and this is probably the major drawback of the novel). The Collector happens very much at the time of narration, Miranda dies a prisoner and she truly dies in the present, as a failure of her attempt at escaping from the dungeon devised by her abductor (who, once more, is insane), but her story would be nothing unless it were centred on her past diary of youth and love. Actually, what makes The Collector Fowles’s best novel (to my mind) is the perfecting of this device of juxtaposing past and present and letting the past win. The Golden Notebook is also a book of the present, but once more it feeds on a diary recording the past, and even more than that, it proves that the present cannot win precisely because of past failures. Anna Wulf loses both her love and her belief in communism, and the present world makes no sense. She adapts to the system, replaces belief in communism by belief in capitalism (or at least tries to), looks for another affair, but she feels utterly confused and really sees no way out. Expectation is on fire and only ashes survive. These Desperado heroes pay the price of their infatuation with the past. The English Patient, on the contrary, resorts to the past in order to bring life to the present, but Ondaatje, just like Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children) has the Indian gift for story-telling, and the situation is somewhat different from Waterland, for instance. Graham Swift, the same as Ishiguro (Japanese as he may have been born), Ackroyd or Lessing, creates a present that would starve to death without the crumbs of the past, while Ondaatje and Rushdie conjure up a past that needs a present to feed. In both cases, whether the present or the past is stronger, they cannot exist separately, as successive moments in time. In both cases there is a simultaneity of wisdom (the past) and confusion (the present), which makes life look like a future building which is right now, at the time of reading, a past scaffolding for a present dark room. The real project will only be seen clearly when rereading brings a faint light to the text. The effect is that the reader becomes insecure, uncertain of the power of his memory, and incident-addiction turns into an addiction to an eternal simultaneity with the past.

The Desperado books which really live in the present are definitely inferior to classical realistic novels, to George Eliot, John Galsworthy. Nice Work is redeemed by irony, The Fifth Child is emotional and mythical, The Magus is uselessly but charmingly confusing, Lanark is a delightfully untrue nightmare (dystopia), Barnes waters an emotional dryness with witticism (statement which does not hold true for his very sentimental Staring at the Sun). This confrontation of techniques (the technique of the expectant present, which is the essence of fiction till the twentieth century, versus the technique of past flashes flooding all time) shows the roots of Desperado complication. Unable to build a present any more, Desperadoes take refuge in the past, in the mind (this is the lesson of the stream of consciousness), and renew this device by imposing upon the past an ulterior/ present motivation. We go backwards in novels like An Artist of the Floating World, which changes the past, while the present is immovable. If we may say so, the Desperado author grafts expectation upon the trunk of the past and only rereading can show the young buds coming out. Reading – concentration on the present, which actually leads nowhere – is insufficient, deficient. Rereading is far from repetition of the first time round: it is the real beginning of the text in the reader’s mind. The author holds out his hand. It is up to us to take it or fail to enjoy Desperado literature.

The moods imposed by this view of fictional time are two. The present gets irony, the past gets lyricism. Comedy and poetry mingle. The present may be ironical, humorous, but it is never merry or happy: it is slowed down by a burden of past pain and the fact that the future is at most an apprehension does not help, either. There is not much suspense in the present: there is only an uninteresting flow of common incidents, which do not require emotional involvement from the reader. The caring is all for the past. The present is loveless both for heroes and for the readers. Can that be the mood Virginia Woolf was dreaming of in 1919? She talked about the absence of plot, love interest, catastrophe. The present consequently lost its livelihood. It used to be so well built and enticing, but no more. In the third millennium, because of a hyperactive past (which floods the narrative in all possible guises), the present is devitalized. The novel has indeed survived, but for how long?


IV. The Hero’s Future as a Memory

It is by now fairly obvious why Desperado plots end in the present, with no expectation of future fulfillment. Up to the stream of consciousness, the future was a construct of the present. The present was energetic and decidedly on the go. The plot was built on the foundation of chronological causality (past causes present, and present causes future, so suspense relies on what will happen next). The stream of consciousness rebels against this convention of an ending in the future (of suspense as a result of love interest, of happy or unhappy closure of the present in a gratified expectation of what comes next). Yet the emotional load of the stream of consciousness works leads that way, lives on plot and love interest, and chronology. Desperadoes move emotionally from the present into the past, so the future is all of a sudden empty: anything can happen there, but it is pathetically unimportant. It is consequently mentioned in passing from the very beginning, as one of the many commonplaces of the present. As an extension of the present, which it can still be, the future holds no promise, it is blank. No Desperado hero, from Huxley to Golding, Orwell, Durrell, Lessing, Burgess, Fowles, Barnes, Ishiguro, Gray, Bradbury, Lodge, Ackroyd, Amis, Swift is ever excited by the future or looks forward to it. Some authors fight the happy ending with dystopia (Huxley, Orwell, Golding, Lessing, Gray, Burgess, Barnes), others merely produce disenchanted tales (Fowles, Ishiguro, Lodge, Bradbury, Amis, Swift). The fairy tale tradition has at last died for good. The best illustration is Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, which is wildly charming and picturesque, but which self-destructs because the thirst for too many endings kills the reader’s interest in any ending at all. The seducing Justine ends old and forgotten, and we almost feel rage at the end of a captivating novel that explodes in our faces. Too many mirrors (Justine sees herself in several mirrors at once, this being the key metaphor defining the technique of the novel) confuse and eventually kill all expectation. Lawrence Durrell shows best how the death of the fairy tale can kill the joy of reading. What else is there to be added, than, ‘Desperadoes, beware’ ?

The only future that appeals to the hero (but not to the reader – this is dangerous territory the Desperado text covers) is that of past moments, the memory of expectation, the thrill which is baffled by present unfulfillment. The axis of time in Desperado plots is from future to the present and from there, at long last, into the past. The book ends in an ideal understanding of the past, and looks upon the future as a mere memory. We remember something was going to happen to the hero, but, compared to the intensity of the past and the desperate confusion of the present, the future fades precisely because it has not been internalized by memory yet. The future is more the reader’s memory than the hero’s. The Desperado reader, for once, knows more than all previous readers, because he does not have to scurry to the last page for closure. He finds it on the first page. Why does he read then? Simply to see if the future can really be treated as a memory? Travels in time are still a matter of science fiction. Desperado literature would not even dream of accepting such a status, yet it does precisely what we see time travellers do in cheap novels and especially films. The novel is preparing for an arduous journey into the unknown. It has conscientiously abolished plot, love interest, closure, chronological causality and the thirst for a pacifying future. There is only one small matter left: Will the reader board such a book?