LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

I/4. THE POST-TIME OF THE DESPERADO WORK

I. REAL TIME

Real time, the concrete time of the Desperado work, the interval during which the plot begins and ends (stops, rather) and the hero struggles with indecision (too little is clear and certain in such works), is the present. Like any present, the Desperado present is under various threats. It steals from the pockets of the narrative or the lyrical approach of the writer a kind of contorted, reversed and very confused chronology. Lessing’s heroines fall on all fours, pushed by the story into this confusing present. Ishiguro’s heroes find themselves floating up in the air, in a present that devours them, denies them, tears them to pieces. Alasdair Gray’s Lanark realizes it is time for him to die. Graham Swift’s history teacher suddenly loses his profession, is not a history teacher any more. Ackroyd’s heroes are also restless, escape into other bits of time, apparently more auspicious. The heroes of Barnes, Bradbury and Lodge feed on irony in order to forget that the present is elusive, that real time never lasts long enough. No present is perceived as a lasting state.

Since the Desperado work is a constant crossing of chronological directions, which are governed as much by now as by then, mostly ago, real time feeds incessantly on imaginary duration, which, in its turn, breaks and reforms under our own eyes. Imaginary duration makes the past roots of the present bloom, while real time, when the reader could try to sum up what he has been reading, is almost suffocated. A Desperado work can never be summarized. We can state briefly the plots devised by Dickens, Austen, Galsworthy, even Conrad at times, but we will find it impossible to utter a few sentences about what is really going on in the Desperado present. Ishiguro’s butler in The Remains of the Day has a meager ratio of here and now, which he does not know how to use and his powerlessness makes him cry. Alasdair Gray’s Lanark ends his race with the past just to die with a capitalized ‘GOODBYE’. The history teacher in Graham Swift’s Waterland runs away from his real life, from the concrete present of his history class, in order to unveil the mystery of his whole life, to reveal his origins and his very substance. This present of the page – which we can hardly put into words, as a matter of fact – springs from what is now past (a past that can by no means be summed up with a critical eye, but which is fertile soil for stories, author and heroes), while the future is inconclusive, open and never closed. The Desperado present is a ghost present.

If we make up our minds to find this present, all the same, we find a time peopled by confused heroes, with confusing stories. The doctor in Flaubert’s Parrot, whom Julian Barnes makes investigate Flaubert with almost detective greed, is in fact an unhappy man, who has helplessly witnessed his wife’s death, his wife having been the only woman he loved, while he was by no means the only man in her life, which the doctor very well knows. When interviewed, authors such as Graham Swift, David Lodge, Alasdair Gray perform a subtle gymnastics of avoiding a clear-cut statement. In their subconscious, if not otherwise, these writers need the freedom to keep changing. Their own writing present, the same as their heroes’, is chameleonic. They answer enigmatically that life is enigmatic, that there are answers nowhere, and therefore an author cannot afford to state. The Desperado author guesses, fumbles within a present which he keeps rejecting, because his narrative strength lies in the past. Galsworthy’s heroes were very busy knitting their present, they were constantly besieged by incidents. They had a past, but this past kept changing according to what each new day might bring. Even Virginia Woolf, despite her intense need to change the novel (adapt it to her sensibility), does not neglect the present, no matter how often she rushes into the past. She creates a present past. Half a century later, Desperado authors like Peter Ackroyd, Doris Lessing, Graham Swift are obsessed with a past present.

The hero’s mind is a radar focussed on was. Unlike stream of consciousness authors, Desperadoes swim in awareness. They are not so much interested in the subconscious teeming with monsters. The Desperado author writes logically, provides clear explanations, avoids the confusion of the unuttered. If there is confusion in his text, it is caused by the narrative manner, which is contorted, indirect and slow to find its words. The painter in An Artist of the Floating World, by Ishiguro, thinks clear thoughts and is introduced in clear sentences. Confusion stems from the order in which he brings up and comments on his memories. Only at the very last does he mention the key-memory, which finally makes it clear why we have disliked him all along, why the book actually accuses him. A while ago, in the times of Japanese imperialist dreams, he sent to prison a left-wing fellow-painter. Japan is seen in the novel as submitted to the Americans, the former left-wing convict is now in what used to be Kuroda’s shoes, when the famous painter was aspiring to a Japanese empire. The wheel has turned and Kuroda, in his small present circle of reality in the novel, looks around in astonishment, out of place, apparently just a harmless little old man now. Not so when he was young and famous, though. The narrator draws the line under all times and gives a moral verdict. Ishiguro’s verdict is actually an intransigent one: however free the reader thinks he is to interpret and rearrange present or past, in the end the author will not allow any other judgment but his. He does not encourage creative reading. Reading must be careful, observant of every little word. The past detail is carved in the present discourse. This present discourse, which does not aim at modifying the past, is dominated by a clarity which imposes itself upon rememoration and (most often indirect) explanation. The clarity of the Desperado style must by no means be overlooked. The narrative pattern may be exasperating, but the sentences that lead us to it are crystal clear. The Desperado novel, the Desperado present is apparently accessible. In essence, it is a very hard nut to crack for the reader’s memory and ability to put pieces together. This reader is exhausted at the end of a book, fed up quite often, discouraged at the lack of prospects: since there is no solid present, the future is even more shaky, almost lost sight of.

The Desperado present is a past present, a second, even third degree present, according to the generation it belongs to. The real present can be located elsewhere, in moments once present but no more so, which the author prompts the reader to reenact. The book becomes a maze of past presents. This is Peter Ackroyd’s forte. Hawksmoor, English Music, Chatterton are all landslides of the present into something else. The narrative opens with something we are tempted to take for the present of the book, then it dives unexpectedly into previous centuries, the perfume of the long gone by. The author watches us sink, and this trance of the man whose feet no longer tread the solid ground is Ackroyd’s aim in point of narrative craft. Less aggressive, yet essentially to the same purpose, Alan Brownjohn mixes presents in The Long Shadows and makes us wonder: is this a book within a book, are these paper heroes or living beings? The border between present and past, however obnubilated, was there for the stream of consciousness. James, Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Conrad, and even more so Dickens and Galsworthy, know exactly when they slip into the past and all this time the present of the work is allowed to go ahead, slowly, all dressed in memories. To put it plainly, something happens in the present, no matter what. Desperadoes choose two directions: either something does happen, but, with endless irony, the story is put down (see Huxley, Orwell, Burgess, Lodge, Bradbury), or the present is annihilated as present (because it cannot change the future in the slightest), and it becomes a past present, a perfect reenactment (see Ishiguro, Swift, Ackroyd, Barnes, Lessing, Gray, Ondaatje, Rushdie). More clearly, classical authors write with a future in view, while Desperadoes refuse to think of the future, unless they project it as a dystopia. The Desperado future withers precisely because the real present is so faint. The Desperado present is, in conclusion, just a question mark.


II. AUCTORIAL TIME

In the Desperado novel, the author’s time, the author’s source of inspiration is part and parcel of the past. The author transfers on to the hero his need to feed on memory, to model memory. When the hero remembers, he does so erratically, implicitly, almost independently, it would seem (but only seem so), from a concrete present, when something might happen as a result of his rememoration. The Desperado hero experiences a perfect past, a past within the past and for the sake of the past.

As the author sinks in this whirlpool which precedes reality, in what once was real and can only be reenacted, remembered, he meanders among a number of narrative devices. He never gives up entirely the stream of consciousness, and therefore we come across connections which look absurd to us at times, which are based on a law of memory that goes deeper than the logic of the narrative. This invading lyricism is old fashioned and not many authors now give way to it, but Peter Ackroyd, for instance, resorts with ostentation to unpredictable associations, of thoughts or even of mere words. In Hawksmoor, a chapter ends with a sentence that opens the very next chapter, the two chapters being situated, by the general narrative pattern of the whole novel, many centuries apart. As a rule, though, the Desperado author is fond of wakefulness, which urges him to resort to the diary (see Orwell or Lessing) or to intertextuality (see the trips into other texts in Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot, Gray’s Lanark, Ackroyd’s English Music). When Lessing’s heroine wants to dissect the past present, she mentally writes a page of a diary. It is her way of updating the past, of contaminating the present with past intensity. The author imagines in reverse, he projects what was into what will never be, and this is the reason why the last page, the end of a book no longer really matters. The consequences for the reading of such a book are of utmost importance, mainly because the reader’s horizon of expectation changes drastically. We find the same refusal of an ending in the dystopic mood of the Desperado author. Rather than imagine anything taking place in the future, he would prefer to die, and so he does: he visualizes himself in a negative space, in dystopia. Huxley envisions the fatal culmination of technology and the atomic apocalypse (Brave New World, Ape and Essence), Orwell kills his heroes by leaving them in the marsh of a generalized communism (1984), Burgess populates London with criminal teenagers who speak Anglo-Russian slang (A Clockwork Orange), Lessing detects the absurdity of anticapitalist protest (The Good Terrorist) or foretells the death of civilization (The Memoirs of a Survivor), Gray fights ageing and chooses death before old age (Lanark), Ishiguro experiences the dread of losing memory (The Unconsoled). Some imagine ironic dystopias beyond the iron curtain: Burgess (Honey for the Bears), Brownjohn (The Long Shadows), Bradbury (Rates of Exchange), Barnes (The Porcupine). Whatever the mode, the heroes are dislocated from the present and sent either into the past or into a hostile, half-real now. The Desperado author’s dilemma is which to choose between realism and irony. He ends up using them both, of course, either in order to obliterate, or to discredit the present, at least.

Under these conditions, uncertain as to how to move into the past without losing his present, his actuality, the author escapes literary conventions before him, and creates his own convention (more or less new, but that is of no consequence). Each author struggles free in his or her own way from realistic time, and narrates at his own pace, in his own mode of rememoration. The past is invested with many values. Some heroes resort to reverie, and from there to memory, which leads to the core of life. Others stand back from sentimental memory by creating a rational past. Quite a number of heroes take refuge in uncertainty, not unlike Henry James. Many characters withdraw into the past only in order to weaken reality, the present. In none of these cases do we find any ordering of the past, even though this past looks accessible to understanding at first sight. The Desperado past is dishevelled and lures readers like a swamp. The only one who is allowed to carry the key to this past, who knows what really happened and when, is the author. This author chooses, however, a neutre stand: he offers the reader incidents, feeds him narratives, all coming straight from the hero’s mouth. In this way the author might be trying to demonstrate to the reader that the novel is being written under his own eyes, with his necessary help, that it is unimportant if classical narrative (which was totally independent of the reader) self-destroys itself, because it is the experience that ultimately matters, not the literary convention. The novel is no longer a mirror of life, the novel is life itself, and the author can claim no more than be its reporter. In reality, the reins of the narrative are well hidden somewhere, the convention must be found out. And this is how the novel ceases to be a closure of a chronological plot in an ending which usually implies the fate and future of a couple. It becomes a convention hunt, at the end of which no couple, no future awaits, but a reality emptied of all expectations, a hundred percent real, if we are to believe what Desperado authors claim.

Considering that the author is enigmatic and all explanations come from the past, the hero appears almost absurdly helpless. The hero’s memory is in the hands of the narrator and this narrator hands it to the reader himself. The only action the hero is allowed is rememoration. He does not act, can never object to anything. There are two kinds of heroes in the Desperado novel: the helpless heroes (see Ishiguro, Lessing, Gray, Swift, Ackroyd, Huxley, Orwell) and the cocky heroes (see Barnes, Lodge, Bradbury, Fowles). The helpless heroes bear the burden of rememoration with resignation and some lyricism. The cocky heroes bathe in irony and sarcasm, only to end in the same place: rememoration. Once in a while, some novel resorts again to classical narration, chronological causality, but ends up mocking at it, after a breathless race in which nobody wins. John Fowles, for instance, builds up an unbearable sense of suspense which is never gratified. Chronological narrative is dead, but the author’s past keeps finding new conventions. Because the author cannot part with the past, the Desperado novel loses even the slightest intention of chronology, the merest semblance even of an ending, the (un)happiness of the couple, the very idea that a novel/ literature mirrors life in any way. The Desperado author does not create literature: he claims – should we take his words at their face value? – that he overcomes all patterns (chronology included) and creates the very essence of life.


III. THE POST-TIME OF THE DESPERADO WORK – READING

Faced with the contradiction between the Desperado author’s wish to create reality and his need to stand back from whatever has been used before (to reject the conventions of the real that have been used by literature for twenty centuries), the reader learns to be cautious. The time of reading becomes a kind of post-time. Although many authors ardently wish for emotionally involved readers (as Graham Swift declared in an interview he gave me), the reader cannot help but feel an intruder. He did feel involved in the works where times mixed (Joyce, Woolf, Conrad), where he managed to find an ordering clue in the end. In the Desperado novel, time is not only complicated, but also illogical; the departure from chronological logic, from the structure of the hero and the plot that relied on a past-present-future axis, creates the post-time of reading. The reader perceives the text as atemporal, always the same. The Desperado work has a logic of irony and emotion that undermines the need for chronological causality, freeing reading.

Post-time is, therefore, equivalent to a trusting reading. The reader’s memory must swallow everything when the book is first read. No decoding is envisaged, consequently no active reading. What a Desperado requires is an agglutinating reading. The effort comes after the feast. The reader proves himself in the re-reading. There he becomes initiated in the post-time. The feeling of post-time comes up when the reader is left with a plot that has no ending. The hero lives in a post-past, post-present, post-future, all independent from one another. Anything can come next, we can interpret whatever, however we wish, so interpretation is useless in the end. We prefer to take the writer’s word for granted. This is how the Desperado author disarms the critical spirit. Julian Barnes confessed to me in an interview that he has ‘quit criticism’ because it did not help him write better. Here are the roots of an absence: the absence of Desperado criticism. It does not mean that literary criticism has given up. It must be looking for new strategies, the same as reading. The only weapon of reading for the time being is re-reading.

Re-reading does not clarify, it familiarizes. The Desperado work is an incessant defamiliarization, a dislocation, a dystopia which the reader fights in a post-time – meaning after the work has been read and finished – and he is well aware of that.

Re-reading is meant to help the reader adapt to abnormality, which is the natural result of all Desperadoes pining to be different (the only feature, maybe, that brings them together). The reader follows each new book. Each new reading is an unexpected initiation. The post-time of re-reading means that the reader leaves his self and enters the Desperado self, the self of whatever author he happens to be reading at the time.