Introduction: Obituaries of History and the Thirties Sublime

Abstract

The constitution of ‘reality’ or ‘truth’ by the performative power of the hyperreal is a familiar topos of today’s Postmodern fiction and, equally, of Poststructuralist theory. Graham Swift’s photoreporter in Out of This World foreshadows Jean Baudrillard’s pronouncements on the Second Gulf War of 1991, discussed below: ‘it goes without saying that a task force of cameras should accompany the task force to the Falklands. As if without them it could not take place… As if the camera no longer recorded but conferred reality’.1 In the Postmodern condition, the media do not only inform our perception of events ideologically; for much of the time, reality cannot happen outside their validating gaze. However, writers were already tangling with this paradox in the thirties. The venal journos of Auden and Isherwood’s play The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935)2 anticipate Swift’s and Baudrillard’s point, and it is arguable that thirties media awareness was itself an early symptom of cultural transition to Postmodernity. Indeed, in the purely chronological, if not theoretically-laden, sense, thirties writers were the first Postmodern generation. Their sense of reality was in crisis under the full impact of early twentieth-century technologies, as well as awesome stirrings in geopolitics heralding the globalisation of economic power (postwar corporate multinationalism itself being foreshadowed by the worldwide success of Hollywood). I intend to show that the so-called ‘anti-modernism’ of the thirties can indeed be read as a transitional phase between Modernism and Postmodernism. As we shall see, the epistemological doubts raised by Modernist art, and at first apparently refuted by thirties writers, were subsequently intensified by their own encounter with media technology and international Realpolitik.