The Internationalization of English Literature, XIII: 1948-2000 by Bruce King

Abstract

MLR, IOI.2, 2oo6 529 The Internationalization of English Literature, XIII: I948-2000. By BRUCE KING. (Oxford English Literary History) Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2004. xiv+386 pp. 030. ISBN o-I9-8I8428-x. This book is remarkable on two counts. First, tomap the many divergent strands of an 'internationalized' English literature over the past half-century is in itself an achievement, demonstrating impressive knowledge and stamina. Second, the conse quent story which is told displays no indication that the author has been touched at all, intellectually, by the vast tranches of imaginative literature that he has read. Despite his immersion in literatures which have been given life by their hybrid formations, Bruce King himself remains resolutely uncreolized, his sensibilities as demonstrably English as if this were a literature that had never occurred. King takes for his object authors writing in English, whose origins were in some sense displaced from England, but who none the less have lived and worked in the country. This provides some tight boundaries to the idea of an 'internationalized' English literature, but in order to offer an initial mapping, itmakes good enough sense. The opening chapter, which takes the arrival of Windrush as its symbolic starting-point, surveys the twenty years from I948. This comprises a condensed historical narrative, and then separate sections devoted to prose, poetry, and drama. The I970s, I980s, and i990s, respectively, are then accorded similar treatment in the three chapters which follow, decade by decade. King has assembled a colossal amount of information: I cannot imagine a reader not learning something new from these pages. There are, as one might expect in such a venture, a number of errors. Some of these will disturb only the specialist. The fact that C. L. R. James was not present at the Pan-African Conference inManchester in I945, despite King's claim to the contrary, does not much affect the substance of the story he tells. That he believes that itwas 'Mandy Rice' who was engaging in an erotic dalliance with both John Profumo and the Soviet naval attache in London suggests a curious abstraction from the imperatives of popular knowledge. That Frantz Fanon' s most celebrated work is given thewrong title ismore worrying. Inevitably, section by section, the reader is invited to absorb a dizzying quantity of plot summaries. Helpful perhaps as a point of reference, it does not make for good reading. The entries on V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, or Hanif Kureishi, for example, will be familiar; those on lesser-known writers too condensed to do much more than suggest an inkling of what they might be about. There are few quotations from the novels, which makes the texture of the fiction difficult to get hold of-though the reproduction of more extensive passages from the verse is of considerably more interest. The principal difficulty, however, is thatKing's overall narrative isbereft of ideas not least of the ideaswhich compelled an entire generation to create a fiction organized by new aesthetic and political principles. This results in a dogged relaying of one author after the next. It results too in ameasure of artlessness. The I970s, he informs us, 'began badly'. Or, referring to the same decade, he claims that 'Not everyone liked the way England was changing'. The putative general reader, whom the series invokes, deserves better than this, as does the specialist. But, more than that, bland generalizations of this kind suggest that he has barely listened to the fiction of the period, where conflicting passions about the fate of England were dramatized to high effect. In similar manner King suggests that theWest Indian migrants, when they first confronted actually existing England, were 'surprised'. Perhaps so. But the literature they bequeathed offers a complex, lived and theorized, conception of what English civilization was about, and how it operated. It brought into question exactly the pre suppositions which underwrite Bruce King's narrative: of an essentially Whiggish 530 Reviews England, where multicultural life is an achieved fact and where future migrants, once they overcome their initial querulousness, will ease themselves into happy assimila tion. QUEEN MARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON BILL SCHWARZ Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation. By...