Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After by Andrzej Gasiorek

Abstract

Given the sources, antiquarian and dialect formulations occur frequently. There are many anticipations of what would later echo familiarly through Hardy’s own diction: prepositions used as prefixes (“upstayed” [Wordsworth] for supported), nouns pressed into service as verbs (“it fortuned” [Spenser]), prefixes upending the words to which they are attached (“uncrudded” and “uncomely” [Spenser], “unbegot” [Shakespeare]). As in Hardy’s poetry, the obsolete often sounds like idiosyncratic new coinage: “transmew” for “trans­ mute” (Spenser), “decore” for “decorate” (Drummond of Hawthornden). Hardy’s distinctive stylistic tics are well represented in lists that on occasion sound like the lexical equivalents of his practice of sketching out metrical schemes into which to fit as yet unwritten potential poems. As Pamela Dalziel has herself already suggested (see “Hardy’s Sexual Eva­ sions: The Evidence of the ‘Studies, Specimens &c.’ Notebook,” Victorian Poetry 31 (1993): 143-55), one of the notebook’s more intriguing features is its revelation of the young Hardy’s caution (not to say fastidiousness) in the transcription of phrases relating to sexual matters. Even though this odd miscellany was presumably intended for his eyes alone, dashes and, more frequently, the shorthand he had recently been learning are both called into service in the cause of transcriptional circumspection. While this is indubitably a “slim volume” (89 pages of text spaced gen­ erously to match the pagination of the notebook itself, 63 pages of identificatory annotations, and 7 pages of textual notes), its publication is a milestone in the expansion of knowledge about Hardy’s early shaping as a writer. Hardy specialists and general readers alike are fortunate that the task fell to two such accomplished textual scholars as Pamela Dalziel and Michael Millgate. keith wilson / University of Ottawa Andrzej Gasiorek, Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (London: Edward Arnold, 1995). vi, 202. $18.95 (U.S.) paper. The topic of realism is presented ambivalently in modernism and postmod­ ernism. Virginia Woolf and James Joyce ranged themselves against the realistic naturalism of Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy. Postmodernists claim that there is no reality outside of language. All the more remarkable therefore is this exploration of a broad but judicious selection of post-war British fiction in which realism is positively presented as a creative mode, aware of its contradictions and branching out into new forms — for Gasiorek emphasizes that there are many realisms, not one Realism. Nevertheless, Realism is the reference point in the discussion of a selection of paired writers: Henry Green and Ivy Compton-Burnett as experimental 120 modernist precursors concerned with social themes; V.S. Naipaul and George Lamming as paired opposites in the context of postcolonialism; John Berger and Doris Lessing in the context of Socialism/Marxism; Angus Wilson and John Fowles in an exploration of the relation of contemporary fiction to social history; Angela Carter and Sara Maitland in feminist historical revisionism and the subjection of myth; and the trio Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, and Salman Rushdie in the confrontation of narrative with the postmodern apocalyptic denial of the representability of the historically real. Gasiorek’s discussion of Swift, Barnes, and Rushdie is the occasion for a confrontation with the postmodern prioritizing of language — a confronta­ tion that clarifies the most polemical aim of his book. A fairly vigorous defence of the claims of realism against postmodern thought emerges in the final sections. However, the main body of his book is a more disengaged exploration of the many dimensions and versions of realism in British post­ war fiction. Gasiorek’s pairings of authors reveal the contradictions within realism as well as its forms. Henry Green, an earlier modernist precursor of post­ war realism, is shown to combine concepts of impersonality — ideas that were emphasized by modernists like Hulme, Eliot, or Joyce and preserved through techniques of cinematic presentation requiring minimal dialogue — with thematic social concerns for losses of social position in the welfare state. Ivy Compton-Burnett presents a similar perspective upon the condition of England and the fall of powerful elite linked to an exploration of the role of language in mediating power. With V.S. Naipaul and George Lamming, however, Gasiorek rather dif­ fuses his thesis in a very critical opposition of Naipaul’s colonialist dismissal...