Disaffection and Realpolitik in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day

Abstract

ABSTRACTElizabeth Bowen’s quintessential Blitz-era novel, The Heat of the Day (1948), is also an artefact of the nascent Cold War. The novel casts Cold War international relations as a problem of literary realism’s presentation of a ‘whole’ picture, and it stages disaffection with literary realism in order to object also to Soviet-style realpolitik. For Bowen, both political and literary realism are Machiavellian in their emphasis on effect. Both assume that the end justifies the means because both argue that comprehension of a ‘whole’ picture, whether of a struggle for power in realpolitik or of a reality effect in literary realism, renders moot the specific method for arriving at this result. The Heat of the Day’s disaffection with literary realism testifies to Bowen’s postwar desire for a returned focus on means – that is, to a ‘principled’ liberal internationalism rather than realpolitik. By looking at the composition history of The Heat of the Day and at Bowen’s postwar reviews of existentialist fiction, particularly by Jean-Paul Sartre, this essay shows how Bowen’s method originates in a surprising source: existentialism. The Heat of the Day testifies to how, in the immediate postwar era, internationalist response was seen as a product of individual responsibility.