A Little History of Literature (30 page)

The most influential dystopia of our time has been George Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. So influential, in fact, it has added at least one word to our language: ‘Orwellian’. The novel was conceived in 1948 and, some would say, is as much about that period as the then-distant year of the title. Britain had emerged from the Second World War exhausted and impoverished. No end was in sight – it would be austerity for ever.

But Orwell had bigger targets in view. The war had been fought against ‘totalitarian’ states (Germany, Italy, Japan) and their all-powerful dictators. The allies who emerged victorious were ‘democratic states’. Their major eastern partner, the USSR, however, was as totalitarian a state as pre-war Germany itself. While the war was going on, that did not matter. He would make an alliance with the Devil, said Churchill, if Lucifer was anti-Hitler. But what about afterwards?

Orwell prophesied that Soviet-style dictatorship and a global balance of co-existing totalitarian superpowers was the shape of things to come. In the novel, Britain is ‘Airstrip One’, a province in the ‘Oceania’ superpower. It is under the total domination of a Stalin-like dictator (even down to the famed moustache) – ‘Big Brother’ – who may or may not exist. Orwell's original title for the novel was ‘The Last Man in Europe’. The last man is the novel's hero, Winston Smith, who is destined to be liquidated after he has been ‘re-educated’. The state is all-powerful and always will be, forever more.

Nineteen Eighty-Four
was wholly wrong in predicting a future of continuous, grinding austerity: compared to 1948 when the novel was written, 1984 was a land of milk and honey. And the last totalitarian superpower, the USSR (‘Eurasia’ in the novel), collapsed in 1989. Orwell was entirely wrong about that. But in other ways the ‘Orwellian’ future has, indeed, come about.

To take just one example of Orwellian accuracy. Orwell, like Bradbury, was fascinated by the arrival of television. But what, he wondered, if the TV set could watch you? This, the two-way television set, is the principal means by which the ‘Party’ enforces its tyranny in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. Which country in the world has most CCTV cameras? You've guessed it. Airstrip One. We live in an ‘Orwellian’ future. As predicted.

CHAPTER
31

Boxes of Tricks

COMPLEX NARRATIVES

Fiction can do many things other than entertain. It can, for example, instruct. What many of us know about science might have come from reading science fiction. Fiction can enlighten and change minds – as
Uncle Tom's Cabin
changed America's thinking about slavery. Fiction can popularise the central ideas of a political party: what is now the central belief of British Conservatism was worked out in a series of novels by Benjamin Disraeli in the 1840s. Fiction can, if targeted the right way, bring about urgent social reform. In the early twentieth century Upton Sinclair's novel
The Jungle
(1906) about the horrors of the meat-processing industry brought about legislation. In innumerable other ways, fiction can do things that go well beyond keeping the reader turning the pages before they catch their plane or turn off the bedside lamp.

When Anthony Trollope was asked what good all his novels did (he published close on fifty of them), the great Victorian novelist replied that they instructed young ladies how to receive proposals of marriage from the men who loved them. On the face of it, Trollope's
remark sounds flippant, but it wasn't. We do pick up things from fiction which help us in our lives – at its very grandest, literature can point us towards what are the most important things in life. Novelists of that kind are the ones who are likely to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (Chapter 39).

One could go on. But one of the most interesting things that fiction does is to explore itself, play games with itself and test its own boundaries and artifices. Fiction is the most self-conscious and playful of genres. In this chapter we'll look at what I've called fiction's ‘boxes of tricks’. You could call them novels about novels.

We think of this interest in trickery as a modern thing which, generally, it is. But we can find examples of it as far back as the point at which the novel itself became a dominant literary form, in the eighteenth century, in the work of Laurence Sterne. Critics call the kind of fiction Sterne wrote ‘self-reflexive’. It's as if the writer is constantly asking himself, ‘What, exactly, am I doing here?’

Laurence Sterne's great work,
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
(first published in 1759), is as slippery as a basket of eels – which, once you get into it, is its irresistible attraction. Sterne's novel is constantly poking fun at itself and posing conundrums for the reader to wrestle with. Top of the list of conundrums is, as the old proverb puts it, how to get quarts into pint pots.

Sterne was writing when the novel was genuinely novel. It had only just started on its long journey to post-modernism (which, more or less, is where the experimental edge of fiction is now). But the author of
Tristram Shandy
foresaw the fundamental problem for anyone setting out to write a novel: how to fit it all in. It can't be done. Tristram, Sterne's hero-narrator (a comic version of Sterne himself ), sets out to tell the story of his life. It's a typical project in fiction. Tristram, sensibly enough, decides to begin at the beginning. But he finds that, to explain how Tristram became what Tristram now is, he has to dig back past his childhood, past his christening (why the odd name ‘Tristram’? There's a long riff on that), past his birth, to the moment of his conception – when sperm met egg. By the time he has got back to this starting point, he finds
he has used up most of his novel. And so it goes. He has fallen at the first fence. He concludes, ruefully:

In other words, Tristram is living his life 364 times faster than he can record his life. He will never catch up.

The problem played with so wittily by Sterne (how to pack everything necessary into the novel for the journey it's about to take when you have ten times more clothes than suitcases) has never been solved. Nor does Sterne himself try to solve it. What he does is to play entertaining games with the impossibilities, for our amusement. Other novelists, of loftier artistic ambition, devise schemes of selection, symbolism, compression, organisation and representation to get round the problem of ‘how to get everything in the suitcase’. It all adds up to the art of fiction – more properly, the artifice of fiction. And that, of course, is the point Sterne is making.

This chapter is called ‘Boxes of Tricks’. Let's look at a selection of the fictional toys that novelists have offered for our pleasure, and to tease our reading brains. We can start with another basic problem. Narrative presumes a narrator, the ‘teller of the tale’. Who is it? The author? Sometimes it seems to be, sometimes it clearly isn't. Sometimes we are left uncertain. Jane Eyre is not Charlotte Brontë, for example, but there seem to be clear connections, biographically and psychologically, between author and heroine.

But what about a modern novel like J.G. Ballard's
Crash
(1973) in which the main character is called James Ballard, who happens to be a man with a wholly sinister interest in car accidents and the unpleasant things they do to human flesh? Is this a confession of some sort? No. It's the author playing a very sophisticated literary
game not ‘with’, but ‘against’ the reader. It's rather like two friends playing a competitive game of chess.

Ballard's most famous work of fiction (thanks, largely, to Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning film), is
Empire of the Sun
(1984). It's about a little boy who gets separated from his parents in Shanghai, on the outbreak of World War Two, and finds himself in an internment camp whose horrors will form (deform?) his personality for the rest of his life. The hero is called ‘James’, and James's experiences match exactly those of James Ballard as recorded in the author's autobiography. So is it fiction? Are we in a ‘James = James’ situation? Yes and no. Don't even try to work it out, the novel implies. Just take it in.

In his novel
Lunar Park
(2005), Bret Easton Ellis goes even further, with a hero called Bret Easton Ellis (a very depraved fellow, as it happens) who is pursued by the serial sex-killer of Bret Easton Ellis's earlier, very notorious novel,
American Psycho
. (Got it? Neither did I.) Ellis elaborates the trickery by having Ellis (in the novel) be married to a (fictional) film star called Jayne Dennis, for whom he created a straight-faced, apparently real-life website which many readers were taken in by. Martin Amis performs the same trick, just as cunningly, in his novel
Money: A Suicide Note
(1984) in which the hero (called John Self ) makes friends with Martin Amis who warns him, as a friend, that if Self carries on as he is, he's going to come to a very bad end. Probably suicide.

Several authors over the years have narrated their novels through the eyes of a dog. Julian Barnes goes one better by having the first chapter of his novel (so to call it)
A History Of The World in 10½ Chapters
(1989) narrated by a woodworm on Noah's ark. It gets zanier.

Novelists are nowadays expert mechanics of the machine they are working with. They love to take it apart and put it back together again in many different ways. Sometimes they leave the job of putting things back together to the reader. John Fowles, for example, in his neo-Victorian but ‘new wave’ novel,
The French Lieutenant's Woman
(1969), offers the reader three different endings. Italo Calvino, in
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
(1980), offers ten different openings to the narrative, testing how nimble
his readers are on their feet. Are they as nimble as he is as a taleteller?
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
opens: ‘You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel,
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
. Relax.’ The joke is you
can't
relax – he's done what post-modernist critics call a ‘defamiliarisation’ job on you. It's unsettling.

Calvino's opening chapter goes on to ponder ideal sitting positions for ‘your’ reading of the book. ‘In the old days they used to read standing up, at a lectern’, advises the novel, but this time why not try a sofa and cushions with a pack of cigarettes and coffee-pot nearby? You'll need them. It dawns on you that ‘you’ are an actor, not a spectator, in this theatre of reading. Calvino's novel ends with one of its main characters telling the reader to ‘turn off the bedside lamp and go to sleep’. There's no point going any further. ‘Just a moment’, the reader (you, that is) thinks, ‘I've almost finished
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
by Italo Calvino’. But has Calvino finished it? No. In a sense he never started it.

The American Paul Auster is the master of a similar kind of Calvinoesque trickery.
City of Glass
(1985), the novel that made his name, is a ‘metaphysical detective story’ set in New York. The narrative begins with a midnight phone call: ‘It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.’ The not-someone is, we discover, ‘Paul Auster, of the Auster Detective Agency’. The recipient of the call is the thirty-five-year-old author, Daniel Quinn. For reasons Quinn himself cannot explain he pretends to be Paul Auster and takes on the case. It gets even trickier.

The lover of fiction takes the same kind of pleasure in the ‘tricksy’ novelist as in a conjuring act when a performer comes on stage, states ‘My next trick is impossible’, and then goes ahead and does it – pulling a dozen rabbits from a hat, or sawing his assistant in half. But sometimes there is deeper significance in the trick. Thomas Pynchon's post-modernist classic (to mix up our terms horribly),
Gravity's Rainbow
(1973), starts with a realistically-described London, in the last months of the Second World War. It's done vividly and accurately. Except for one thing. V2 rockets,
which were indeed falling on the city in late 1944, seem to be falling everywhere the American soldier hero, Slothrop, becomes sexually excited. He is controlling the rockets' targeting. It is, of course, ‘paranoia’ – that disordered state of mind where you think everything in the world is a conspiracy against you personally. Pynchon is fascinated by paranoia. It emerges as the novel's ‘theme’, insofar as one can simplify things.

More straightforward are the games played by Pynchon's fellow American, Donald Barthelme, many of whose short stories could quite well have come from the pages of
Mad
magazine. In one of them the legendary gorilla, King Kong, is appointed an ‘adjunct professor of art history’ at an American university. Barthelme's most famous story takes the Snow White fairy tale (originally German, recycled most famously by Walt Disney) and turns the fair maiden-heroine into something very un-maidenly indeed. It's laugh-out-loud funny but, at the same time, Barthelme is shaking to pieces our conventional thinking about literature. Other novelists have
literally
shaken their novels to pieces, like B.S. Johnson, whose
The Unfortunates
(1969) was published as a boxed set of unbound pages which the reader can put together in any order they please. It is literally a box of tricks.
The Unfortunates
drives librarians to distraction. Readers too.