No End of History: Evidence from the Contemporary English Novel

Abstract

Price, a student in Tom Crick's course on French Revolution in Graham Swift's novel Waterland, disrupts class and sets off Crick's rambling but fascinating discourse on of East Anglian fens with a challenge that is all too familiar to teachers of history, literature, and virtually every other academic subject: What matters . . . is here and now. Not past. . . . The only important thing about history, I think, sir, is that it's got to point where it's probably about to (6-7). Price has some distinguished and more articulate company. According to such diverse critics and philosophers as Jean Baudrillard, Francis Fukuyama, and Fredric Jameson, we are at or beyond end of history: there stands before or about us only a perpetual present: a world defined only spatially, no longer in terms of development through time. The grand syntheses, meta-narratives, myths that once informed our consciousness of world, have been discredited and become obsolete. One product of end of history is literary postmodernism, for whose exponents, according to David Bennett, the past as referent has been effaced, time has been textualized, leaving only representations, texts, pseudo-events, images without originals: a spatial, rather than temporal, order of simulacra (262). In rarefied intellectual atmosphere inhabited by post-Saussurean theorists and postmodern critics notion of end of history may appear to have some validity, but in more pedestrian regions of bookstore and fiction shelves of library, and concept of are alive and well, particularly as subject and theme in recent English fiction. Indeed, a significant number of more ambitious English novels of 1980s and 1990s have in common an acute consciousness of and a sharp focus on its meanings or potential for meaning. These novels are, for most part, products of an identifiable generation of writers who were born in Forties or early Fifties and came of age professionally in Eighties: first generation of post-World War II era. An exception to this generalization is A. S. Byatt (born in 1936), but her novel Possession (1990) could be said to exemplify this type of contemporary English novel most directly and clearly, if not most provocatively. The other novelists I have in mind include Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, and, pre-eminently, Graham Swift. Swift's Shuttlecock (1981), Waterland (1983), Out of This World (1988), and Ever After (1992), Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (1984), Ishiguro's The Remains of Day (1989), and Ackroyd's Hawksmoor (1985), Chatterton (1987), First Light (1989), and English Music (1992) are characterized by a foregrounding of historical consciousness, most often through a dual or even multiple focus on fictional present and one or more crucial pasts. Their narrators or protagonists are for most part explorers of (in broadest sense) by profession or avocation. Swift's narrator Prentis in Shuttlecock is a police archivist, Waterland's Tom Crick is a teacher, Harry Beech of Out of This World is a photojournalist, and Bill Unwin of Ever After is an English lecturer engaged in editing an ancestor's memoirs; Barnes's Geoffrey Braithwaite is a retired physician who is an amateur student of life and works of Flaubert; central characters in contemporary plot of Byatt's Possession are literary scholars; Ackroyd's protagonists include a police detective, an archaeologist, and a failed poet who is writing a life of Thomas Chatterton. Those without a professional interest in are driven to confront it in their attempts at self-definition, self-actualization, or self-avoidance: Ishiguro's aging, emotionally crippled butler in The Remains of Day is an obvious example. Linda Hutcheon has described a genre which she calls historiographic metafiction (xiv), and Alison Lee in her book on postmodern British fiction has identified Flaubert's Parrot and Waterland as examples (36). …