Authors: Malcolm Bradbury
As soon as I started the book, I began having strange feelings of discomfort. For Mann’s book opens with a nice young man, Hans Castorp, well meaning, naive, unassuming (in other words,
just like myself), sitting alone with a book in the grey-upholstered compartment of a trans-European train, bag on the rack, coat on the hook, a book on the seat. Eighty years ahead of me,
he’s beginning his quest for life in a disordered world, leaving the flatlands and off to the uplands on a very short visit that will last a long time. His view of the world is about to
change completely; the world itself is about to change too. After a few minutes I put down the book and stared through the window. The train was crossing the Burgenland, once Austria’s
Russian zone. To my left were the lowlands of the Danube plain – marshes, long fields, small tractors, little villages with onion-domed churches (perhaps a building with a cabbage on the top
wasn’t so odd after all). To my right high hills sloped up to the great grey crags and whitened tops of the Eastern Alps. Grey mist blew across the plain to my left; the mountains on the
right were dark with storm and wintry cloud. Behind me lay Vienna, baroque and deceptive; not far ahead lay the Hungarian frontier, at Hegyeshalom, recently a grim border through which the refugees
of 1956 and 1989 had poured, but now, they told me, no problem, no problem at all.
Feeling slightly uneasy, I pushed Mann’s book away and looked round the neat compartment. In front of me was a small table, rubbish bin underneath, on which lay a couple of papers left by
the kind management for sophisticated international travellers like myself. One was a small blue rail timetable, which stated with precision and conviction the various arrival and departure times
of the Salieri Express. The other was a small Austrian tabloid newspaper of no distinction, the
Kurier
, dated Freitag, 23 November, 1990 (the day, of course, on which I was travelling). I
picked it up and began to read. Now, as I told you earlier, I don’t exactly read German, but there are times – late at night, after a drink or two, and especially when I’ve spent
a couple of days in a German-speaking country – when it seems very nearly comprehensible. The headline for the day was a long one, and it read: ‘Die Eiserne Lady gibt auf:
Rücktritt nach 11 Jahren. Eine Ära ist zu Ende.’
I was sharp enough to realize that, unless the world contained some more Iron Ladies that I didn’t know about, this almost certainly referred to Britain’s then Prime Minister, Mrs
Margaret Thatcher, under whose regime I had grown accustomed to live. So I tuned my intelligence and set to work on the sentence. It seemed to say: ‘The Iron Lady Takes Off, Fed Up After
Eleven Years. An Era Is At An End.’ Was this true, I asked myself, amazed; could I be interpreting the words correctly? Now what you must understand is that I myself was one of the great
brood of Thatcher’s Children. I was hardly past the hard acned days of puberty when she marched into 10 Downing Street in 1979, pronouncing in her loud clear voice, ‘Now there is work
to be done.’ Her life and work shaped mine. The ups and downs, the highs and lows, the booms and recessions, the Big Bangs and Small Crashes of her three terms of office were nothing less
than the swings and cycles of what I liked to call my adult life. With my soul and my overdraft, my professional ambitions and my mountain bike, I was spawned from the era of what the Austrian
newspaper in front of me described as ‘Der Thatcherismus’ – a term that, incidentally, sounded far more impressive in German than it ever possibly could in English.
So she’d gone, stepped down, gabbed off? How could she? Was it possible, how had it happened? I turned over the pages of the tabloid; and there inside, right across a double-page spread,
was the fuller story, headed ‘Des Ringen um die Nachfolge.’ This sounded just like one of the Wagner operas Lavinia had been threatening me with in Vienna; but what did it mean? The
Battle of the Night Birds? And if there had been a great drama, where was the cast? I looked down the page, and there they all were, set out as if in some opera programme, with photographs and
brief descriptions. There was, I saw, Michael Heseltine,
der Opportunist
; well, I understood that. Then there was Douglas Hurd,
der alte Routinier
(the old what? Truck driver?), Sir
Geoffrey Howe,
der Totengraber
(the Grave-snatcher?), and John Major,
der Senkrechtstarter
(what could that be? Kickstart?). Not quite, I found, scuffling hastily through my
dictionary. The opera was The Struggle for the Succession, and the principal characters were the Opportunist, the Wise Old Hand, the Gravedigger, and the Vertical Take-Off Aircraft, who, I
gathered, triumphed in the end. Add book by Martin Amis, celestial-sounding music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, oedipal dreams by Freud, a chorus or two of ‘Don’t Cry for Me,
Argentina’, and Vienna’s newest musical extravaganza was plainly all ready to play.
Well, fine for them; but where, I thought, a young man in a grey-upholstered compartment, did all these dramas and dénouements leave me? Just yesterday I’d been a poor youth without
a history, a neophyte at the mysteries, as Professor Codicil had put it in his typically grandiloquent way. I was just another simple lad who didn’t even know why the Blue Danube had to be
blue. Now, over the course of a single sleepless night (and mine, I realized, could hardly have been the only one), I had somehow acquired a little history after all. It was a modest portion, true
enough – nothing compared with what had upturned Europe just a year before: the tumbling of the Berlin Wall, the ending of the Cold War, the opening up of the Eastern frontier I was just
about to cross. In Britain, after all, we don’t hurry at history like that; but change had come, just the same. And the Iron Lady had made history, no doubt about that. Her rise, and now her
fall, had been a great performance, made of conspiracy and pride, hubris and treachery, the ideal stuff for the media’s endless narrative, some of which I had written myself. Yes, for me too,
Eine Ära ist zu Ende; an era had come to an end.
So what, then, would follow Der Thatcherismus? I looked again at the Austrian tabloid, and at once found the answer. What followed Der Thatcherismus was, of course, Der Post-Thatcherismus, the
smart new epoch of which I had suddenly become a paid-up member. The thought made for strange emotions. Say what you would, the Thatcher Age had had a peculiar solidity; now the world seemed
curiously indeterminate, no longer as stable and sure as it had been yesterday. I thought back again to the tour of Vienna that dear young Gerstenbacker had subjected me to the day before, when he
was so desperately trying to please his master by diverting my mind from thoughts of Bazlo Criminale with the spectacles of a
fin-de-siècle
age. And it occurred to me now that, when
centuries end, old orders do have a way of shaking and tumbling. In fact, when one considered it, there is nothing like observing a past suddenly slipping away and a great new millennium coming
along for stirring the mind with troubled, if exciting, notions of change.
So, sitting there in my grey-upholstered compartment, I began to think about how different European centuries had ended. I recalled, for instance, that in 1889, one hundred years before the
Berlin Wall came down, the Eiffel Tower went up. It went up because just a hundred years before that, in the turbulent ending of the previous century, the French Revolution had exploded, the world
had turned upside-down, even the calendar had briefly begun anew. And so, in the same year as the Mayerling tragedy, when Vienna became so modern and so gay, the French decided to celebrate, as the
French do, by building an edifice, and turned to M. Gustave Eiffel. Why not? He was their greatest bridge-builder, and his triumphs were many. He had built an amazing span across the River Douro at
Oporto, designed the locks for de Lesseps’ Suez Canal, built the Observatory at Nice, even put up a charming railway station in Budapest, into which I hoped I would shortly be stepping. He
could therefore be counted on to put up some fine modern buildings for the Centennial World Fair, and maybe throw a fine iron bridge across the Seine that would give Parisians better access to
their favourite cafés,
boîtes,
museums and artists’ studios. They gave him the commission.
What they didn’t know was that Eiffel’s thoughts had recently shifted from sideways to upwards. In a matter of months Eiffel got out his ironwork and built his tower. One morning in
1889 Parisians woke up and there, by God, it was. You couldn’t miss it; but, like a building that had a cabbage on top of it, it seemed to make no sense at all. It was fairly evidently a
monument to something, but unfortunately there was nothing written on it to say what it was a monument to. It looked like the spire of a great cathedral, but the nave was missing, and there was no
altar to worship at and no particular deity mentioned. It resembled the great new American business skyscrapers going up in the cities of Chicago and New York, but because there was no inside to
its outside, there was not too much hope of doing any real business in it. Thirteen years earlier, to celebrate the centennial of another revolutionary war, the American War of Independence, the
French had shipped across the Atlantic another great memorial. This was the Statue of Liberty, sculpture by Bartholdi, interior ironwork by Gustave Eiffel. But its meaning was absolutely clear, its
message, to the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, perfectly plain. This time Eiffel seemed to have omitted something, in fact everything. He had given Paris the ironwork without the statue,
the engineering without the sculpture, the torch without the liberty, the bones without the flesh.
Today, of course, high on our fine postmodern wisdom, we know exactly what Gustave was all about. Eiffel’s Tower was a monument to only one thing: itself. It was a spectacle, and there was
nothing much to be done with it, except look up at its head from its feet, or down at its feet from its head, or clamber up and down in it, staring at the panorama of Paris it opened up and
controlled on every side. So of course it annoyed the classicists, affronted the romantics, angered the realists, infuriated the naturalists, and offended almost everyone, with the exception of the
Douanier Rousseau. Leading writers hated it, including Guy de Maupassant, who always dined afterwards in its restaurant, because it was the only place in Paris you couldn’t see the tower
from. The shopkeepers demanded that the tower be pulled down before it fell on them – a familiar fate of monuments to something, or indeed, in this case, nothing. And when, a couple of years
later, Eiffel, in some complicated and very French financial scandal, was accused of picking the locks on the Suez Canal, and nearly went to prison, most people thought it served him more or less
right.
Then, a decade or so later, the French suddenly discovered what the Eiffel Tower was really for. It made the perfect radio transmitter, and this meant it was a perfect act of prescience on
Gustave’s part, because radio hadn’t even been invented when he put it up. Instead of putting him in prison, Eiffel was fêted and given the Légion d’Honneur, and the
tower, far from meaning nothing, came to mean everything, became the symbol of modern, future-hungry Paris itself. And so, a hundred years on, in 1989, when it once again came time for
end-of-the-century celebration, the Bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution also became the Centennial celebrations of the Eiffel Tower. The much-hated monument of modernity was now
lovingly restored (by, I believe, the firm of Eiffel, which survives). Of course the French also celebrated, as the French do, by putting up an edifice. They therefore went to a postmodern
Chinese-American architect, I.M. Pei, ours being a multicultural age. Pei’s thoughts were moving neither sideways nor upwards. He looked downwards, into the labyrinths and catacombs of the
Louvre, exposed foundations and dungeons, the theme-park of old history, and then capped the lot with a small crystal pyramid of latticed precision.
And why not? Don’t we live now not in modern but post-modern times, the age of pluristyle, form as parody, art as quotation, the era of culture as world fair? In Berlin Honecker’s
wall was coming down and turning into art-work, everywhere politics and culture were becoming spectacle. So, that July, lit by lasers and beamed worldwide (courtesy the transmission facilities of
the Eiffel Tower), an international soprano sang the Marseillaise, and in the Champs-Elysées Egyptian belly-dancers gyrated with Caribbean limbo dancers, gays danced with lesbians,
Structuralist philosophers bunny-hopped with feminist gynocritics, Hungarian security men tangoed with French riot cops, in a great multiplication of images and styles and cultures and genders, so
that everything was everything and nothing at the same time. And I know this, because this time I was there myself, writing some smart Deconstructive piece about it for my Serious Sunday. Great
changes, great changes; we had learned how to live in the age of virtual reality, or so I said in my piece. And great changes need new philosophies, I observed also, mentioning the names of various
new pioneers of thought: Lacan and Foucault, Deleuze and Baudrillard, Derrida and Lyotard, and – it now all came back to me – Bazlo Criminale himself.
But even the thought that new times needed new thoughts was not itself all that new. For example, I remembered, when Gustave was pushing up his great phallic tower over Paris in 1889, a young
philosopher named Henri Bergson was publishing his book
Time and Free Will
, which argued that the inner life of human consciousness had its own strange clock, quite different from that of
daily historical time – a very modern notion which was found very appealing by his relative by marriage, the even younger Marcel Proust. Meanwhile back in Vienna, which was becoming so modern
and so gay, the young Doktor Sigmund Freud was having rather similar thoughts. He was not yet a great professor, he had not yet moved to his famous consulting rooms at Berggasse 19, which I had so
conspicuously been trying to avoid in my last night’s dream-work, and the secret of dreams had not yet revealed itself to him as he bicycled through the Vienna Woods. But in 1889 he had
already put out his plate, and was already trying out the method of free association – later to be known as the talking cure – on the contorted mental interior and labyrinthine psychic
dungeons of a certain Frau Emmy von N.