Postmodernism

Postmodern Literature

has come to provide both the dominant paradigm within contemporary cultural theory and the most important conceptual framework for our understanding of the literature of the present.

 

This account of Postmodern literature is divided into the following sections:

1. After All: The Context of European Postmodernism.
2. Postmodernism: A Theoretical Project.
3. The Self-Conscious Text: From the Nouveau Roman to Metafiction.
4. The Politics of Ritual: The Theatre of the Absurd.
5. Self, History, Myth: The Literature of Magic Realism.
6. Structures of Subjectivity: Postmodernism and the Poetic Text.
7. Written as the Body: Feminist writing and Post-Modernism.
8. Pressing To Be Said: Contemporary Writing in Europe.
9. Postmodernism: An Annotated Bibliography.

 

 

 

1. After All:

The Context of European Postmodernism

 

Literature in Europe after 1945 was dominated by the diplomatic and material traumas caused by of the Second World War. Not only had a major part of the continent been destroyed, its land pillaged and its economies ruined; but the war had culminated in two events that were to remain as open wounds within the collective consciousness of the peoples of Europe: the sickening disclosures of the extermination camps at Auschwitz and Treblinka in March 1945, and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, six months later. Arthur Koestler was later to view the dropping of the Bomb as the ‘single most important date in the history of the human race’. It was the day on which humanity was confronted with ‘the prospect of its extinction as a species’. André Malraux was equally pessimistic. As he gloomily observed in 1948, ‘Europe’s current drama is the death of man. With the atom bomb […], we came to realise that what the nineteenth century called ‘progress’ had extorted a heavy ransom. We realised that the world had become dualistic again, and that man’s immense, unmortgaged hope for the future was no longer valid’. Not fear but collective shame, and an inkling of a complicity that was to be felt well beyond Germany, attended the liberation of the extermination camps. The moral outrage and horror to which they gave rise was to affect an entire generation. As the French novelist, Jean Cayrol, noted in 1950: ‘the emotional shock grows with the years, with whiffs from that extreme of misery finding their way even into the most hidden corners of peace: the smell of the concentration camp is stronger than ever’. In England, George Orwell sought to remind his readership of the continuing prejudice against Jews in Britain; whilst the French Existentialist (now turned radical politician) Jean-Paul Sartre made resistance to antisemitism the test of a writer’s political credibility in his What is literature? (1948). Was the horror of Auschwitz too momentous to discuss in civilised language? The German literary theoretician and cultural critic, Theodor Adorno, thought it was, believing that literature should simply fall silent in the face of such an outrage. As he uncompromisingly argued, ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. German writers, in particular, from Heinrich Böll and Paul Celan to Rolf Hochhuth and the Swiss writer, Max Frisch, entered upon a painful confrontation with their past (a process called in German Vergangenheitsbewältigung), seeking to account for the involvement (or at least the complicity) of an entire nation in the attempted extermination of the Jews. All would have accepted as self-evident the words of Günter Grass who wrote, thirty years after a disbelieving world first learnt of the horror of the camps, that for the Germans of the post-war period no amount of economic prosperity could conceal ‘the moral vacuum engendered by their incomparable guilt’.[1]

The legacy of the Second World War produced amongst many writers of this period a radical mistrust of political ideologies, irrespective of whether they were liberal, socialist or nationalist in nature, and a scepticism regarding notions such as civilisation and progress. The mood was well captured by the first novels of two English writers: Malcolm Lowry and William Golding. Lowry’s visionary (if over-encoded novel) Under the Volcano (1947), captured the widespread moral disillusionment of the post-war generation. Set in the 1930s, in a politically unstable Mexico, it dramatises the predicament of a group of cynical, world-weary characters, wavering between a commitment to politics (the Spanish Civil War is raging in Europe), and the easier solutions of alcoholism and suicide. In spite of their differing personal philosophies, they are all are engaged in a studied flight from the ‘horrors of the present’. A similar pessimism regarding the sustainability of ideals in the modern world is evident in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), which tells of a group of English schoolboys who, stranded on a desert island, gradually give themselves over to barbaric customs and murderous deeds. The novel is a succinct parable on the precarious and superficial nature of civilised morality which, as the Fascist experience in Europe showed, is often unable to resist the call of the wild, irresistibly drawn to a world where no moral voice is heard, ‘no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws’.[2]

 

The novels of Lowry and Golding gave literary shape to a distinctive end-game mentality, a mood of termination, of arrival without further departure, which was widespread throughout the literature of the immediate post-war period. It was particularly prevalent in German and Italian writing, discernible in the former country in novels such as Hans Erich Nossack’s Interview with Death (1948), Wolfgang Koeppen’s Doves in the Grass (1951) and Gerd Gaiser’s Final Ball (1958), all of which deal with characters who are both alienated from the past and fearful about the future. This was, in the words of their most famous representative, Heinrich Böll, a ‘literature of war, of homecoming and of rubble’, written in the ‘Zero Hour’ (Null-Punkt) of German history. Böll’s own novels, The Train was on time (1949), Tomorrow and Yesterday (1954) and The Bread of our early Years (1955), were central texts in this genre. Their focus is not upon triumph but upon survival, not upon actions which follow pre-existing value structures but upon individuals living, however precariously, with compromise, indecision and defeat, working ‘out of fear and desperation’ and forced to exchange ideals for sustenance. In all of Böll’s novels, including his later Billiards at Half-Past Nine, 1958, and The Clown, 1963, which target in a more consistent way the emerging political inequalities of West Germany, and criticise an establishment preoccupied with power, self-publicity and wealth, the past looms as a presence that has not been and perhaps cannot be fully exorcised. The conduct of the war, its loss, and its morality, was further explored in Alfred Andersch’s Flight to Afar (1957) and Siegfried Lenz’ The German Lesson (1968), both of which speak of the psychological impediments to a retrospective admission of collective guilt.[3]

 

Italian writers were likewise compelled to come to terms with the moral and political bankruptcy of their nation, ‘having’ (as the novelist, Italo Calvino, described it) ‘emerged from an experience, a war and a civil war that had spared no one’. Like their German counter-parts, writers such as Cesare Pavese, Vasco Pratolini, Leonardo Sciascia, Franco Fortini, Paolo Volponi and Elio Vittorini moved towards a neo-realist style in their writing. Some of leading names here were Grouped around the journal Il Politecnico, founded by Vittorini in 1945, the neo-realists rejected the Modernist hermetic style that had been dominant in Italy prior to the war, wishing to see in its place a type of literature that would be historical and political, and deal with the issues of the day. There were, certainly, exceptions to this general trend. One of the most popular novels of post-war Italy was Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958), which conjures up, sometimes with nostalgia, but always with realism, the travails of a family during the period of the Risorgimento. But it was the present, not the past, that preoccupied the great majority of writers of this generation. Some focussed upon the peasant South, with its backwardness, misery, political and religious contradictions (tensions well captured in Sciascia’s Salt in the Wound, 1956); whilst others wrote about Northern urban Italy, dominated by increasing mechanisation, industrial conflict and the easy temptations of a new consumerist society. This is the type of society that is depicted in the industrial novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s, notably in Paolo Volponi’s Memoriale (1962), Goffredo Parise’s The Boss (1965), and Pasolini’s A Violent Life (1959), which takes as its context the harsh world of Rome’s Lumpenproletariat. Like their German counterparts, the Italian neo-realists also wrote about the war; but in their case guilt was balanced by a positive assessment of the part played by the resistance in its struggle against fascism. Some of the most noted novels here were Vittorini’s Men or Not (1946), Calvino’s The Path to the Nest of Vipers (1947), and (with an intent to complicate the picture) Pavese’s The House on the Hill (1948). The plight of those victimised by the fascist regime, forced into inner emigration and exiled, formed the focus of Carlo Levi’s Christ stopped at Eboli (1945); whilst the complex motives that gave rise to the fascist mentality in Italy were treated by Alberto Moravia in his The Conformist (1951). Finally, the literature of neo-realism engaged with both the Italian and German treatment of Jews, in Primo Levi’s account of his experiences in Auschwitz, If this is a Man (1947), and with greater distance by Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi Continis (1962). Even the noted Hermetic poet, Salvadore Quasimodo, felt the need to abandon his earlier cryptic symbolism to write poems such as ‘Auschwitz’ (1954), giving voice in his later verse to that ‘limp / pain that memory leaves/ to its silence without irony or anger’.[4]

 

In the immediate post-war period, there were many who deliberately remained aloof from the social and political issues of the day (the catchphrases were qualunquismo in Italy, and ohne mich in Germany). Particularly in the late 1940s and 1950s, this retreat from the public realm seemed to be encouraged by successive conservative governments in Britain, France and Germany, who sought to win over the electorate through a mixture of welfare state legislation and the stimulation of consumer consumption. Helped by the Marshall plan of 1948, Germany experienced a Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle). The success of that nation and of others, such as Italy, seemed to suggest that capitalist society was, after all, able to solve the kinds of political problems that had almost destroyed it in the inter-war period. The revolutionary politics of those days had now gone: transition not revolution, pragmatism not idealism, were the policies promoted by early post-war governments throughout Europe. The result was a culture that many found to be parochial and self-satisfied, and permeated, as John Osborne, author of the iconoclastic play, Look Back in Anger (1956), wryly noted, with ‘the odour of anaemic self-righteousness, the lifeless whine, the lack of rigour or gift of even petty decision’. In England, literary manifestoes such as Robert Conquest’s introduction to his anthology, New Lines (1956), advertised their work as being ‘free from mystical and logical compulsions’ and committed to ‘real rather than ideological honesty’. As Karl Miller observed in his retrospective anthology of English literature of this period (published in 1968), the writers of post-war sobriety ‘were tired of the international, experimental avant-garde and of mandatory modernity; they were tired of romantic individualism, the religiosity, the martyred sensitiveness that had been favoured by writers during the war; they were sceptics; and they were democrats’. This was a literature of bathos, less politically self-conscious and lacking the moral anxiety of contemporary German and Italian writing, but working, nevertheless, within the same minimalist ethos that grew out of the political and economic realism of post-war Europe. It is represented by novels such as Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and the stories in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959); David Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960); John Braine’s, Room at the Top (1957) and Stan Barstow’s, A Kind of Loving (1960); by plays such as Arnold Wesker’s Chips with Everything (1962) and Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1958), and by the poetry of the Movement group, best represented by Philip Larkin (The Whitsun Weddings, 1964). Set in a working or lower middle-class milieu (often in the north of England), and dealing with individuals struggling against the machinations of family life and class prejudice, the new British Realism offered a literature without illusions and political bias, but also without visions and blue-prints for the future: the self-confidence and energy expressed by the heroes of this literature cannot hide the fatalism and quietism that resides beneath the surface of their lives. Larkin put their predicament succinctly in his poem ‘Wants’ (1955): ‘despite the artful tensions of the calendar/ The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites, / The costly aversion of the eyes from death -/ Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs’.[5]

 

To a large extent, this rediscovery of the parochial was a consequence of the loss of world-power status that many European countries suffered in the period between 1945 and 1970. During this time, France lost control over Indo-China, in 1954, and Algeria, in 1962; Great Britain granted independence to India, in 1947, and Nigeria, in 1963; Belgium, the Congo, in 1960; and Portugal, Goa, in 1961. Such changes to the colonial hegemony of Europe reflected the new global order that had emerged out of the Second World War, whose precarious fulcrum was a hostile balance between the Western Allies (now clearly led by the United States) and the Soviet Union, the ideological differences between whom formed, in the words of Churchill’s famous speech of March 1946, an ‘Iron Curtain’. Countries such as Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, which had been liberated in 1945 from one totalitarian neighbour, now found themselves consigned to the dependency of even more powerful one, which was equally uncompromising in its denial of basic human rights, political liberty and freedom of speech. Soviet Imperialism, which appeared at its most blatant in the suppression of popular uprisings in Hungary in 1956, East Germany in 1961 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, compelled many former adherents of Communism, such as Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender and André Malraux, to revise their long-held allegiances. These now concluded that Communism and the hope for Socialism in Europe was, in the words of Richard Crossman’s famous volume, a god that had failed. It had been a Utopian movement, which artists and writers had joined out of social despair, moral guilt or intellectual naivete, hoping, by aligning themselves in an ‘active comradeship of struggle’ with the working classes, to become part of the forward march of history. The sight of the tanks of the Soviet Union on the streets of Prague and Budapest had brought, as Günter Grass noted, that ‘dream of Socialism’ to an abrupt end.[6]

 

Acts of resistance to the military hegemony in Eastern Europe of the Soviet State were supported, even from within that nation, by attacks against its moral credibility. In 1962, Alexander Solzhenitsyn published his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which became, after Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957), the single most influential Russian novel of the post-war period. Solzhenitsyn’s novel, describing a single day in the life of a political prisoner in a Siberian prison camp under Stalin, takes place in a closed society dominated not only both by physical cruelty and by torture, but also by a regime of custom and ritual which deadens the senses and destroys the spirit. It is a world without transcendence, populated by those who survive simply because they have abandoned all ideals, and who have given up believing ‘in paradise or in hell’. The moral minimalism and quiet despair to which Solzhenitsyn’s novel gives voice links it to the Null-Punkt literature written elsewhere in Europe. But One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, written in the brief period of cultural liberalisation that set in between the death of Stalin in 1953 and the resumption of state control over the arts initiated by the Brezhnev era ten years later, can also be seen as an act of protest, a gesture of defiance against a political regime responsible for perpetuating the misery of concentration camp life even as it denied its existence. As such, the novel took its place beside a growing genre of oppositional literature in Russia, which included Ilya Erenburg’s The Thaw (1954), Vladimir Dudintsev’s Not by Bread alone (1956), and the poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, particularly his ‘Babi Yar’ sequence of 1961. Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the same will to self-expression and the same creative circumnavigation of political despotism gave rise to an impressive literature of protest and inner emigration. Poland was able to produce not only the novels of Marek Hlasko, such as The Graveyard (1958) and Tadeusz Borowski’s concentration camp stories (Farewell to Maria and The World of Stone, both 1948), but also the poetry of the Nobel Prize winning Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert, and the drama of Absurdists such as Slawomir Mrozek and Tadeusz Rozewicz; whilst in Czechoslovakia, the fiction of Ladislav Mnacko, The Taste of Power (1966) and the early fiction of Milan Kundera were able to be published, as were the plays of Vaclav Havel and Josef Topol. Collectively, these writers helped bring into existence a body of writing that sought to merge the sense of moral seriousness characteristic of the politically engaged writers of the 1920s and 1930s, with a Postmodern openness to the fantastic and to fabulation. They created in the process often highly personal modes of literary statement that was able to withstand that ‘distorted rationality’ which underscored the ‘compulsory duties, evasions and concessions’ (intellectual and political alike), which dominated life in the Eastern Bloc for most of the post-war period.[7]

 

The Communist parties of Western Europe were deeply affected by the declining status of the Soviet Union. By the time of his death in 1964, Palmiro Togliatti had steered the Italian Communist Party (of which he had been the leader since 1927) away from its Stalinist past and into a future of electoral responsibility, seeking to reach, in the words of its subsequent leader, Enrico Berlinguer, an ‘historical compromise’ (compromesso historico) with the new priorities of a rapidly modernising Italy. Communist parties throughout Europe now surrendered their radical initiative to Maoist, Trotskyist and anarchist groups, who worked largely beyond the party system. It was these groups who provided the dynamo for the events that took place in Germany, Italy, England and, above all, in France in May 1968, where workers, students and intellectuals combined in an attempt to destabilise the state. In the final analysis, the politics of these oppositional forces were strategically naive; in the face of the tear gas of the CRS and the strong-arm tactics of Europe’s para-military police forces, the revolutionary agenda of this generation disappeared, forced to give way to a course of European politics that in the governance of Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990), Helmut Kohl (1982-1998) and François Mitterand (1981-1995), restored conservatism to power with an even more trenchant right-wing bias. It was precisely the failure of the events of May ‘68 that forced a fundamental re-think amongst oppositional groups in Europe. After that date, as the English dramatist, David Edgar, later noted, ‘revolutionary politics was seen as being much less about the organisation of the working class at the point of production, and much more about the disruption of bourgeois ideology at the point of consumption’. Radical politics now took two diverging directions: towards terrorism, with the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany and the Red Brigade in Italy; and towards collaborative-parliamentarian politics, which was the path adopted by the Green movement and by many Feminists. These groups acted according to a new definition of the political, one that remained inherently suspicious of all master narratives and ‘-isms’, whether from the Right or the Left. Such groups also evinced a greater awareness of the symbolic forms through which power is exercised, and of the cultural channels through which consciousness is formed and de-formed. They drew here upon cultural commentators such Theodor Adorno and Hans Magnus Enzensberger in Germany, Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams in England, and Pierre Bourdieu and Louis Althusser in France. Neo-Marxist (or Marxist-revisionist) in the main, these cultural critics viewed power as something that is not only produced by economic and class realities, but also reproduced by institutions such as the media and education. To effect lasting political change, it was necessary to intervene into those linguistic and symbolic apparatuses that secure the ideological hegemony of the ruling class. This was the thesis developed by Enzensberger in his seminal essay ‘The Industrialisation of the Mind’ (1962), where he argued that the structures of capitalist society perpetuated themselves through the manufacture of consciousness, interpellating even the supposed watchdogs of the cultural system, intellectuals and artists, as ‘accomplice[s] of a huge industrial complex’.[8]

 

Many writers had arrived at the same insights but through different routes. In the theatre, dramatists such as Peter Weiss (The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, 1964), Peter Handke (Offending the Audience, 1966), Dario Fo (Accidental Death of an Anarchist, 1970), Edward Bond (Lear, 1971), and Heiner Müller (The Hamletmachine, 1977) focussed on the personal politics of power, showing how dominance and submission, control and exploitation, were inscribed into the theatricality, into the rituals and ceremonies of everyday life. Such plays also embodied an awareness of the institutional parameters in which politics imposes itself upon culture: the nature of the audience, the ownership of the theatre, the controlling presence of censor and state. It was a perception which encouraged many playwrights into a form of ‘constructive sabotage’ of the system. As Heiner Müller argued, the stage should be a ‘laboratory of social fantasy’, a context in which to experiment with possibilities for concrete change. His words sum up not just the political content of the Postmodern position, but also its attitude to politics. In this respect, he spoke for many of his East German compatriots, such as Johannes Bobrowski, Stefan Heym, Ulrich Plenzdorf, Christa Wolf and Christoph Hein, who likewise charted a course between inner emigration and cultural revolt, producing in the process a body of writing whose province was not high-moral seriousness but deflationary intellectualising, not ideological rigour but playful irony, not spiritual abstinence but consumption and jouissance.[9]

 

The waiting game played by these writers and others in the Eastern Bloc in the post-war period finally brought results in the late 1980s, when rigid structure gave way to movement, intellectually, diplomatically and physically, across the numerous frontiers of central Europe. Talk was now of perestroika and glasnost rather than imperialism or state control. The most tangible symbol of this process of political liberation was the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Its dismantlement, engineered by a populace intoxicated by the sudden advent of liberalisation throughout Eastern Europe, was greeted by many who witnessed the event, novelists such as Christoph Hein (The Foreign Friend, 1982, and The Last Days of Horn, 1985) and Stefan Heym (The King David Report, 1972, and Ahasver, 1981) as the first step in the ‘transformation’ of German society. But for Europe, as a whole, the event was equally significant. Forty years earlier, the Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz had exclaimed in his ‘Child of Europe’ (1946): ‘The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason/ The passionless cannot change history’, condemning the quietism of many of his contemporaries faced with the political status quo. Now those passions had, in spite of their inchoate nature, reasserted themselves, had helped dismantle those monolithic structures that had grimly oppressed so many since the end of World War Two. What the demolition of the Berlin Wall, carried out in a spirit of almost carnival abandon, seemed to indicate was that European history, after almost half a century of moving around a fixed point of moral and political anguish, had finally given way to energies and values that were genuinely populist in their origins, and which were phrased, not in the language of guilt and recrimination but in that of optimism and confidence, and which spoke not of the past but of the future.[10]

 

 

2. Postmodernism:

A Theoretical Project

 

The literature of post-war Europe was enthused by a multiplicity of styles, schools and genres, which ranged from the Magic Realism of writers such as Günter Grass and Salman Rushdie, through to the Theatre of the Absurd of Eugène Ionesco and Jean Genet, and the literature of political protest written by writers in Eastern Bloc countries, such as Milan Kundera, Václav Havel and Zbigniew Herbert. In spite of differences in intent and theme, this literature converged upon a shared literary strategy and a common aesthetic that came to be known as ‘postmodernism’. The term first made its appearance not in Europe but in the United States, amongst a group of critics attempting to demarcate the lines between the high-culture of Modernism and the more experimentalist, minimalist, self-reflexive aesthetic of the contemporary period. The main voices here were Ihab Hassan, Leslie Fiedler, John Barth and Irving Howe. They observed that much contemporary American fiction, such as William Burrough’s The Naked Lunch (1959), Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America (1967), and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), broke both with the epic narratives of nineteenth century Realism which, they argued, sought to totalise experience and assert closure, and with the Modernist revalorisation of individual agency and the subjectivist workings of the mind that was so evident in the stream of consciousness techniques used by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. In spite of their different perspectives, both Realism and Modernism assumed that human experience, however orderly or disorderly it might appear, could be made to reveal its inherent structure through the productive agency of creative language. The literature addressed by the theorists of Postmodernism, on the contrary, resisted any notions of aesthetic order, preferring fragmented structures, disconnected and episodic narratives and forms of characterisation that dispensed with psychological coherence and rounded personalities. It was a literature without illusions, which proclaimed its proximity to the terminal state of Western high-culture, positively cultivating in Barth’s words ‘an apocalyptic ambience’. ‘Waste’, ‘exhaustion’ ‘silence’ were amongst the critical metaphors used to appropriate such literature, productive negativities that also opened onto ‘self-parody, self-subversion, and self-transcendence’.[11]

 

In establishing the intellectual parameters of postmodernist literature, the American theorists were able to draw upon the writings of a body of European philosophers, cultural theorists, literary critics and linguists, such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard. Their work, deepened through the influence of the philosophies of Nietzsche and Heidegger, articulated issues central to the Postmodern mentality, issues relating to the abolition of distinctions between high and popular culture, to the non-sustainable nature of Enlightenment models of universalist reason and logo-centric thinking and to the problematic relationship between individual intentionality and the determining discourses of language and ideology. This was a set of issues addressed as early as the 1950s by the French Structuralists. The latter traced their project back to the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure (Course in General Linguistics, 1916), who had foregrounded in his work the conventional, non-representational nature of language.   In works such as Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero (1953) and Mythologies (1957), Gerard Genette’s Figures (3 vols, 1967-1970), Tzvetan Todorov’s Literature and Signification (1967), A-J Greimas’ Structural Semantics (1966) and Julia Kristeva’s Semiotics (1980), the Structuralists attempted to apply de Saussure’s insights to areas as diverse as semiotics, the poetics of narrative and discourse theory. As Roland Barthes explained, Structuralism was ‘not a school nor even a movement’, but an ‘activity’, a form of textual analysis which ‘takes the real, decomposes it, then recomposes it’, attempting to uncover those conventions that exist behind the signifying processes that we use to make sense of the world.[12]

The Structuralists sought to raise awareness about the agency of language, and about the relationship between literature and its readership, actual and imagined. Their initiative was most notably taken up by the proponents of the New French Novel (Nouveau Roman), such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and, with a greater sense of the political implications of this methodology, Philippe Sollers, editor of the innovative journal Tel Quel (1960-1982). But Structuralism also influenced the work of Italian novelists and theorists, particularly those, such as Umberto Eco and Renato Barilli, who formed Group 63. The Structuralist view that language is never naive but always inscribed with certain ideological values was also adhered to by Magic Realist writers, such as Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie and Milan Kundera, and by a generation of feminist authors, from Simone de Beauvoir to Doris Lessing, Angela Carter and Hélène Cixous. In spite of obvious differences in their methodologies and political priorities, these writers shared a common set of assumptions about the relationship between literature and the world. They all rejected the idea that language could simply re-present the external reality; few, if any, believed in the possibility of transcendence in a world without God (or even Marx); all viewed individual subjectivity as something problematic, a torn entity, which finds itself formed and deformed (the current term was ‘decentred’) by conflicting semiotic systems; and all, particularly the feminists (but also Grass), sought to uncover the inherent repressiveness of master narratives, which exclude women, ethnic minorities and other groups from involvement in the processes of cultural self-definition.

 

That coming to terms with such issues required a framework broader than the purely literary was obvious to all. As Milan Kundera, the author of Life is Elsewhere (1969), attested, literature had to remain open to the ‘historical dimension of human existence’. With this new sense of historical responsibility came a new definition of the political, one that would have been unrecognisable to most of the writers of the 1920s and 1930s. The Postmodernists rejected the doctrinaire nature of the ideologies espoused by that earlier generation, remaining suspicious (as Harold Pinter put it) of the ‘warnings, sermons, admonitions, ideological exhortations, moral judgements [and] defined problems with built-in solutions’ favoured by the committed Left and Right during that time. Writers in the Postmodern period, feminist writers, in particular, such as Christa Wolf, Doris Lessing, Angela Carter and Marguerite Duras, moved well beyond the nineteenth century identification of politics with party factionalism or policy, to focus upon the personal realm, upon the mechanics of desire, aiming (in Carter’s case) at a ‘demystification of the flesh’ and of the sexual relations that prevent the ‘real relations between man and his kind’ being understood. D.M. Thomas (The White Hotel, 1981), Christa Wolf (Cassandra, 1983), and Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984) followed a similar trajectory. They too explore the complex relationship between personal desire and political agency, working towards an historicised form of cultural anthropology. In their fiction, power is seen not as some foreign agency imposing itself from without, but as a set of psychic dispositions, which are articulated wherever notions of individual identity and self-hood are being asserted or contested, defined or marginalised.[13]

 

These initiatives took the literature of Postmodernism away from the largely linguistic focus of Structuralism and into the ambit of its successor: Post-structuralism. The intellectual parameters of that movement were broad: it included the later work of Roland Barthes (S/Z, 1970, The Pleasure of the Text, 1973, and Camera Lucida, 1980); the Freudian revisionist psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan (Writings, 1966) and, above all, the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida (Writing and Difference, 1967). Where the Structuralists of the 1960s had looked for the systemic patterns, narrative and generic, which govern the production of meaning within texts and assure their comprehensibility, the Post-Structuralists focussed upon the aporia, indeterminacies and ambivalences that they saw within all attempts to articulate textual meaning. Pierre Macherey (A Theory of Literary Production, 1966), and Julia Kristeva (‘The System and the Speaking Subject’, 1973) argued from their different points of view against the homogenising notion of structure favoured by the Structuralists, and against the presumption of the latter to rational analysis, which was held to foreclose avenues to the formally and politically indeterminate qualities within texts. Correspondingly, the Post-Structuralists emphasized not discourse but the spaces between discourse, not semantic clarity but those elements of meaning that exist in the margins of a text, seeking out that ‘real and necessary discontinuity’ which reveals the ruptures and dislocations of consciousness, individual and collective, that are always at play in the literary process. To the critique of metaphysical presence undertaken by Derrida and others, the philosopher, Michel Foucault, added an important historicising perspective, mapping out in his The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (3 volumes, 1976-1984), both the conceptual and the institutional terrain upon which knowledge and power have covertly been exercised.[14]

 

Postmodernism was represented in different European countries in different ways. In Sweden, major literature came from the poets Gunnar Ekelöf (Ferry Song, 1941 and Guide to the Underworld, 1967) and Erik Lindegren (The Man without a Way, 1942 and Winter Sacrifice, 1954), and from Stig Dagerman (the stories, Games of the Night, 1947, and the novel, A Burnt Child, 1948). In spite of Lindegren’s moments of visionary insight, and Ekelöf’s mysticism, these are works of dark introspection, which cultivate a minimalist aesthetic that brings such literature close to the end-game mentality of Samuel Beckett and others. Historical factors inhibited the development of a distinctively Postmodern literature in Spain, which remained under the dictatorship of Franco until 1975, where, with the work of Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio (Jarama, 1956) and Juan Goytisolo (The Young Assassins, 1954), a modernised form of urban Realism, close to the Italian verismo, reigned. Scope for formal experimentation was not great. Nevertheless, novelists such as Camilo José Cela (The Hive, 1950), Luis Martín Santos (The Time of Silence, 1962), and Miguel Delibes (Parable of the Drowning Man, 1969), showed that they had learnt much from the narrative techniques of Joyce and Döblin. Similar political obstacles existed for writers in post-war Greece, which was forced to sustain the political rule of fascist regimes between 1936 and 1952, and again between 1967 and 1975. But it was precisely such conditions that helped produce the work of a trio of remarkable poets: Odysseus Elytis (To Axion Esti, 1960), Nanos Valaoritis (Central Stoa, 1958) and Yiannis Ritsos (‘The Moonlight Sonata’, 1956, The Prison Tree and the Women, 1963, and Fourth Dimension, 1977). Ritsos’ work fuses native Greek traditions and iconography with a distinctly Postmodern idiom. His poetry registers the pressures of political and historical change upon the individual, in a language (as he notes in his poem ‘The Meaning is one’, 1970) that seeks to be ‘dense, determined/ vague, insistent, simple, suspicious’, because these are the only values that can keep consciousness alive in an unliberated world.[15]

 

It is, perhaps, in this concern with the political and historical parameters of individual experience that European Postmodernism differs most conspicuously from its North American counterpart. In works such as Don De Lillo’s White Noise (1985), Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote which was a dream (1986), and in the cut-ups of William Burroughs, American Postmodernist writing has become increasingly preoccupied with the media-technological paradigm that is all-pervasive in American culture. These novels and others draw our attention to the capability of the media to fashion and re-fashion personal identity, as it dispenses with notions of authenticity in favour of radical chic and the ever- repeating simulacrum. The theorist of this obsession with the media image is Jean Baudrillard. In his many theoretical pronouncements, such as Simulacra and Simulations (1981), he has argued that we are now the victims of an aesthetic over-determinism, a totalising ambit of media aestheticism, which sees everything as text: history, politics, the body, psychology, and notions of the self; they are all ‘simulacra’, images worked and reworked through other images, which refer to nothing other than themselves. As Baudrillard explains: in Postmodernist culture ‘it is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself’.[16]

 

Postmodernism in Europe has taken such insights to heart, as it has the ludic and relativistic mode of American Postmodernism. But it has also registered a greater critical distance from the celebration of the surface that such an aesthetic implies. The difference lies in an attitude to time, temporality and history; Postmodern culture in America is the product of the philosophy and life-style of ‘nowism’, locked, as Jean-Francois Lyotard, one of the earliest observers of the movement, has noted, into the ‘paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo)’, in which past and future are bracketed out so that the texture of the present may emerge in its distinctive grain. The major writers of European Postmodernism, novelists such as Günter Grass, Milan Kundera and Christa Wolf; playwrights such as Heiner Müller and Edward Bond; and poets such as Paul Celan, Zbigniew Herbert and Vasko Popa, embody the same disregard for master narratives and the same suspicion of the totalising frameworks of the past; but anchor that disregard and suspicion within a broader historical context that allows notions of memory and identity, love, loss and death, to be treated as continuing realities. This larger framework is evident both in the work of Wolf, Herbert and Kundera, who argues that ‘history itself must be understood and analysed as an existential situation’, particularly in the postmodern age, which is a ‘period of terminal paradoxes’. These writers refuse to abandon ethical seriousness, that ‘feeling of responsibility for the condition of people’s consciences’, maintaining faith (in the words of Wolf) with that ‘urge to go forward into those still unchartered regions in which the structure of the moral world of man living in society is open to question’. It is here that the distinctive contribution to European Postmodernism lies: in the work of a generation of writers determined to merge the open possibilities of the Postmodernist text with the positive values of a post-war and post-Cold War humanism.[17]

 

 

3. The Self-Conscious Text:

From the Nouveau Roman to Metafiction

 

In many respects, postmodernist fiction begins with James Joyce’s prodigious novel, Finnegans Wake (1939), which in its playful intertextuality and semantic profusions (that ‘savage economy of hieroglyphics’ praised by Samuel Beckett), and in its aleatory monumentalism, opened up new possibilities for writing. The influence of Joyce’s novel is evident in those of Arno Schmidt, whose The Republic of Savants (1957), KAFF, or Mare Crisium (1960), and Bottom’s Dream (1970) extend Joyce’s technique through experimentation with phonemes, morphemes and syntagms, and in the work of the Italian writer, Carlo Emilio Gadda, author of That Awful Mess on Via Merulana (1957). The latter novel structures its narrative around a complex web of archaisms, neologisms, word-play, technical and obsolete vocabulary, slang, puns and lexical obscurities, in striking anticipation of the ‘multi-lingualism’ approach (plurilinguismo) that Gadda’s compatriot, Sebastiano Vassalli, was to use in his novel Narcissus (1968). In Britain, Christine Brooke-Rose used typographical diversification in her novel, Between (1968), and Anthony Burgess invented a sui generic Russified English in A Clockwork Orange (1962), whilst B.S. Johnson experimented with different linguistic registers in his Albert Angelo (1964) and Trawl (1966), ‘inventing, borrowing, stealing or cobbling from other media forms which will more or less satisfactorily contain an ever-changing reality’.[18]

 

Literary self-consciousness was most systematically explored in France by a group of novelists who produced a fictional genre known as the Nouveau Roman (New Novel). They included Alain Robbe-Grillet, Natalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon. They took as their starting point a repudiation of the nineteenth century Realist novel, particularly as it was written by Balzac in his The Human Comedy. The writers of the Nouveau Roman rejected both the totalising effect of Balzac’s fiction, the fact that it draws protagonists and reader alike into a realm of all-inclusive energy, and the intellectual assumptions upon which it was based: a belief in the objective status of the real world and its independence from a viewing subject; the conviction that language can unproblematically transcribe reality; a belief in the centrality and individuality of human experience, which they saw inscribed into the Realist’s concern for character and character development; and a confidence in the teleological shape of experience, which they saw as reflected in the linearity and closed nature of the typical Realist narrative. As Robbe-Grillet, the leading theoretician of the movement, explained in his treatise, For a New Novel (1963), such assumptions had no place in the Postmodern period: they were part of ‘the fixed significations, the ready-made meanings which afforded man the old divine order, and subsequently the rationalist order of the nineteenth century’, and as such had to be rejected.[19]

 

The writers of the nouveau roman projected a new type of writing that could accommodate both the aleatory nature of human experience (its essential randomness), and its lack of metaphysical depth. In their novels, the techniques that had prevailed for a century and more were replaced by an alternative aesthetic: the omniscient narrator of the Realist novel forced to give way to viewing positions which were often limited, internally incoherent and mysterious in their origin (see, for example, Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur, 1955); the notion of character deprived of psychological depth and reconstituted as something impressionistic and fragmented (as in Sarraute’s The Planetarium, 1959), or, even more minimally, reduced to pure nominalism (as in Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, 1957); and the relationship between narrative and causal time uncoupled, so that events come to be repeated, narrated out of order and often left incomplete: Claude Simon’s The Flanders Road (1960) and Butor’s Passing Time (1956) are the most significant examples of this technique. Even the plots of these novels resist easy interpretation, which often centre on a paradox, an enigma, or some other unresolved issue. This is the case with the detective story in Robbe-Grillet’s The Erasers (1953), where false clues are fed to the reader; and the novel within a novel in Sarraute’s The Golden Fruits (1963), whose content is never revealed. These devices and others help create a world whose ultimate purpose and meaning remains for the characters ultimately unfathomable. Faced with pure enigma, the reader is forced out of passivity into activity, into a practical collaboration with the text, participating in the ‘invention of the world and of man, constant invention and perpetual interrogation’, a process that is a sine qua non for both aesthetic and personal freedom.[20]

 

The nouveau roman constituted itself as a practice of writing not simply by removing omniscient narration or by obscuring and problematising sources of perspective, but also by incorporating the poetic itself as a function within the text (as Robbe-Grillet does with the native songs in Jealousy, or Sarraute with her imaginary novel in The Golden Fruits.) By using such devices, these novels offer themselves as ‘meta-texts’, as texts about texts, as statements on the rules of literary writing and upon the conventionality and artificiality of language per se. Metafiction became one of the major trends within the fiction of the Postmodern period. Examples include John Fowles’ novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), in which the narrator interrupts the otherwise Realist narrative at one point to proclaim that the story is perhaps only a ‘game’, the work of an author who is no longer ‘omniscient and decreeing’ and concerned ‘with freedom (as) our first principle, not authority’. Metafiction appears as a sharp moment of self-reflexivity in Fowles’ novel, allowing the reader to return to the main story line sceptical of the sweeping generalisations and totalising vision of the narrator. Similar devices are also used by Julian Barnes in Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), where fact and mythology combine to produce an image of the author, who may or not be real; by Umberto Eco in his playful and semiotically self-conscious The Name of the Rose (1980); and by Georges Perec in his compendious Life, A User’s Manual (1978), a work that includes, in its complex panorama of a day in the life of a Parisian apartment block, literary puzzles and allusions, radio transcriptions, restaurant menus and acrostics, celebrating, as Perec’s cryptic preface to the novel indicates, the dialectic between ‘the organised, coherent, structured signifying space of the picture and the ‘inert, formless elements’ that characterise real life. These novels are also supreme examples of the novel as ‘intertext’, a term coined by Julia Kristeva to describe those works of fiction that are made up of ‘a mosaic of quotations’ drawn from a multitude of secondary texts, echoes, transpositions and parodies. It was intertextuality that allowed the Postmodernist novel to obtain that richness of detail and that polyphonic perspectivism that the Realist novel had achieved in the nineteenth century through the creation of multiple characters.[21]

 

That metafiction could accommodate both the humanist concerns of traditional fiction and the self-conscious formalism of Postmodernist writing was demonstrated in Italo Calvino’s intriguing novel, If on a Winter’s Night a traveller. Published in 1979, Calvino’s novel came towards the end of a body of writing which had been largely devoted towards exploring the relationship between text and world. As he explained in the 1967 preface to his first novel: ‘reading and experience of life are not two universes, but one. Every experience of life, in order to be interpreted, calls on certain readings and is fused with them. The fact that books are always born from other books is a truth, and only apparently in contradiction with that other truth: that books are born from practical life and from relationships with human beings’. Calvino’s fiction, from the early The Path to the Spiders’ Nests (1947), to his last work, Mr Palomar (1983), gives shape to this position, moving between neo-realism and science fiction, parodies of medieval literature and futuristic travelogues, as in the trilogy: The Cloven Viscount (1952), The Baron in the Trees (1957), and The Nonexistent Knight (1959). The later Cosmicomics (1965) and t zero (1967) are works of pure fantasy, which complete Calvino’s break with the traditions of European Realism. All of these novels problematise the categories and codes by which we grasp, both visually and cognitively, the world, in order to provide (as with the cities visited by Marco Polo in Invisible Cities (1972) that ‘catalogue of forms’ that constitutes the world and which is inexhaustible but, ultimately, un-namable.[22]

 

Calvino’s literary self-consciousness found its fullest expression in his novel, If on a Winter’s Night a traveller. Its subject is ‘the book’, as a creative artefact, as a tool, as an object of desire, as a stimulus, as merchandise and as a sham and as a piece of cultural capital. At the centre of the narrative is the Reader, a directly invoked ‘you’, whose task it is to track down the real book that is If on a Winter’s Night a traveller in the midst of a multitude of novels and genres, from detective fiction to Japanese pornography, that masquerade as Calvino’s original text. The novel plays with all the conventions of the discourse of literary fiction, with psychological characterisation, linear narratives and the assumption that a real world is being transcribed. All these assumptions are abandoned in favour of a pure playfulness, which is manifested through the novel’s fusion of ‘real’ and imagined scenes, its false correspondences, its microscopic depiction of objects and bodily gesture and its leit-motivic, almost, musical narrative structure. And yet behind these small fictions lie the bigger ‘fictions’ of everyday life, those existential patterns that manifest themselves in ‘the continuity of life, the inevitability of death’. These are revealed through the gentle humanism of Calvino’s novel, and through a perspective that remains in spite of its endemic formalism, supremely alive to the open nature of lived experience and to the invigorating banalities of ordinary life.[23]

 

 

4. The Politics of Ritual:

The Theatre of the Absurd

 

Roland Barthes saw the New French Novelist as a revolutionary figure, who had rewritten the rules of fictional expression. As he explained in his essay ‘Objective Literature’ (1954), ‘Robbe-Grillet’s importance lies in the fact that he attacked the last bastion of our traditional art of writing: the organisation of literary space. His endeavour is equal to that of surrealism against rationality or that of the avant-garde theatre (Beckett, Ionesco, Adamov) against the bourgeois stage’. Barthes’ parallels were well chosen. The plays of Beckett, Ionesco, and Adamov did indeed take up the aesthetic of the nouveau roman, retaining its critical impetus, and transposing it to a realm where its implications for larger metaphysical questions would become apparent. These dramatists took their cue from the existentialist philosophy of Albert Camus, theoretician of the absurd. In his Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Camus had observed that ‘in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and of light, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy, since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity’. Eugene Ionesco, Ferdinand Arrabal and Jean Genet (the French school of Absurdist drama) endeavoured to make their readers recognise this existential fact, seeking to give voice to what the Romanian-French writer, Eugène Ionesco, called the ‘malaise of existence’, ‘an experience of the ‘strangeness of the universe, the banality of ordinary life shot through by horror’. As Ionesco explained in his essay ‘Experience of the Theatre’: ‘we need to be virtually bludgeoned into detachment from our daily lives, our habits and mental laziness, which conceal from us the strangeness of the world […] The real must be in a way dislocated, before it can be reintegrated’. Ionesco, accordingly, structured his plays around grotesque images that attain absurdity by being framed within the discourse of normalcy. In The Lesson (1951), an otherwise innocuous tutorial between a professor and his student becomes the context for a murder; whilst in The Bald Prima-Donna (1950), social roles are reduced to linguistic clichés. In Rhinoceros (1959), Ionesco described a society that had, through the gathering momentum of collective opinion, decided to turn itself into a community of rhinoceros. The target of the play is the ethos of consensus, whether that emanates from the common-sense convictions of normal life or the explicitly totalitarian ones of Fascism and Communism. Ionesco seeks here to demystify all ideologies that seek to obliterate the distinction between individual discernment and collective belonging. His goal was to make visible, as he later noted in an essay, the ‘collective hysteria’ that lurks beneath the surface of reason.’[24]

 

Lacking the recognisable social context of Ionesco’s plays, but perhaps possessing a greater sense for the metaphysical import of Absurdist themes, is Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953). On a formal level, Beckett’s play is paradigmatic of the non-representational and non-psychological trajectory of Absurdist drama: it posits action not as linear but as circular, character not as psychological but as emblematic, and the stage not as a simulation of an external reality but as a space for fantasy. The origins of the play lie not in the theatrical gravitas of main-stream European drama but in clowning and slapstick, mime, verbal gaming and other tricks drawn from boulevard theatre. Like other Absurdist plays, Waiting for Godot, with its slender plot structured around the confrontation between the two tramps, Estragon and Vladimir, and two other characters, the master and his slave, Pozzo and Lucky, is dominated by a mood of uncertainty and circularity: ‘nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful’. The characters, the oppressed and oppressors alike, are caught between an unspecified past and a perpetually postponed future, living out their lives through comic and sinister rituals, trapped (as Robbe-Grillet noted in an early review of the play) on the ‘frontiers of dissolution’, in a world of suggestive negativity where ‘less than nothing’ happens.[25]

 

Beckett moved later towards an ever-greater reduction of action and human agency in Endgame (1957), Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) and Happy Days (1961), plays which explore blindness, permanent immobility and the inability of memory to restore identity and sense of self. The sombre undertones of Beckett’s plays, his characters’ often cruel exercise of power over one another and their desire to subjugate and be subjugated, is heightened into ritualistic violence in the work of other Absurdists, such as Fernando Arrabal and Jean Genet. The latter had already anticipated Absurdist themes in his novels, Our Lady of the Flowers (1943) and Miracle of the Rose (1946), which fuse erotic fantasy and violence in their explorations of the homosexual and transsexual world of the Parisian demimonde. But it was in his plays, The Maids (1947), The Balcony (1957) and The Blacks (1959), that the ritualistic element in Genet’s treatment of power and eroticism emerged most assertively. As the author himself explained, these plays took place ‘in a realm where morality is replaced by the aesthetics of the stage’. Absurdity here is not simply an existential fact, an irrevocable part of the human condition or the consequence of the loss of religious transcendence; it is intimately connected to the artificial ways that personal identity is made and unmade in the social process: it is part of the theatricality of self. Whether it is the temporary exercise of power in The Maids, the assumption of revolutionary political ethics in The Balcony, or slaves dissimulating confrontation with their white masters in The Blacks, individual attempts at self-assertion and personal autonomy in Genet’s plays are seen to be purely theatrical gestures: they require the gaze of the other for their legitimation and hence affirm the code of repression that the protagonists inherently long to accept, even as they are seemingly revolting against it. In this respect, Genet’s theatre of cruelty is close to the work of the Spanish dramatist, Fernando Arrabal, whose plays, Picnic on the Battlefield (1959) and The Car Cemetery (1966), transpose the melodramatic element of Genet’s treatment of ritual onto a terrain that is at once more impersonal and more surreal. Like Ionesco before him, Arrabal seeks to bring to the surface the cruelty and violence that he sees as part of the exercise of conventional morality. He brings the two realms together in characters such as Fando in Fando and Lis (1955) who regard the torture they inflict upon their respective spouses as necessary components of filial duty. Arrabal’s later work, such as The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria (1967), is characterised by a dream logic that seeks to act out and give objective representation to the phobias and complexes that dominate the subconscious self.[26]

 

The Theatre of the Absurd found a powerful echo throughout Europe. In Britain, Harold Pinter explored the countless rituals and customs, gestures and acts of phatic-communion with which we seek to impose coherence upon the incoherent, sense upon what is senseless, emphasising the potential for violence that exists beneath the surface of quotidian intercourse in The Birthday Party (1958), The Dumb Waiter and The Caretaker (both 1960); Brendan Behan dealt with the powerlessness of the social outsider in The Quare Fellow (1954) and The Hostage (1958); Joe Orton the susceptibility of individuals to erotic manipulation in Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964) and Loot (1965); and Tom Stoppard, the inherent theatricality of all behaviour and the centrality of role playing to social life in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead (1966), Jumpers (1972) and (with a sharper historical focus) in Travesties (1974). Collapsing the distinction between dream and reality, conventional morality and criminality, role playing and authenticity, and forgoing the conventional stage in favour of one that combined the circus, puppet show and religious ceremony, was a trajectory followed by dramatists throughout Europe in the Postmodern period. It is evident in authors as diverse as the German playwright Wolfgang Hildesheimer (The Dragon’s Throne, 1955), the German-Swiss author, Max Frisch (The Fire Raisers, 1958), the French playwrights Jean Tardieu (Word for Word, 1950) and Boris Vian (The Empire Builders, 1959), the Italian, Dino Buzzati (A Clinical Case, 1953). Even in Eastern Europe, where Stalin’s death in 1953 had opened up possibilities for new literary forms, Absurd theatre flourished. In Poland, the main names were Slawomir Mrozek (The Police, 1958, and Tango, 1965), and Tadeusz Różewicz (The Card Index, 1968); whilst in Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel emerged as the most avant-garde playwright of his generation with The Garden Party (1963) and The Memorandum (1965). These playwrights were able to draw upon a rich vein of indigenous mime and popular carnivalism, which was consciously revived in the slap-stick boulevard antics of Jerzy Afanasjew’s ‘Green Goose’ Theatre. To this tradition and to that of the French school of Absurdists, the plays written in the Eastern Bloc added a deep mistrust of abstractions, ideologies and political slogans, and a Kafkaesque focus upon the arbitrary nature of power and justice as exercised by the state and its anonymous bureaucracy. After 1968, when the thaw gave way to a new ice age of Soviet dominance, such plays could only be circulated in clandestine form as samizdat writing, their oppositional fervour and challenging Absurdism forced underground in a totalitarian society that was becoming (in the words of Havel, compelled into inner exile and then prison) increasingly ‘merciless, gloomily serious, Asiatic, hard’.[27]

 

In Western Europe, the political potential of Absurdist drama was exploited with greater freedom by Peter Handke in Austria, and Dario Fo in Italy, whose work has clear affinities with the popular tradition of mime and circus favoured by Polish and Czech dramatists of the Absurd. Plays such as Archangels don’t play pinball (1959), He had two Guns with black and white eyes (1960), and He who steals a foot is lucky in love (1961) are iconoclastic, parodistic and irreverent, targeting the Church, the State and the Media. The formal qualities of such plays, their impromptu textual status, their widespread use (as Fo himself has explained it) of that ‘rich cultural heritage of popular culture, satire and grotesque farce’, mark them as comedies. But with his most famous play, The Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970), which deals with the framing and likely defenestration by the police of an anarchist suspected of complicity in a bombing incident, the political implications of Fo’s absurdist mode became apparent. The details of the anarchist’s crime are reconstructed within the play by a confidence man, whose own investigations in to the case reveal a legal system that is founded on deception and self-deception. Fo’s later plays, Can’t pay? Won’t pay! (1974) and Fanfani Kidnapped (1975), are indebted to the agitprop tactics of the 1920s, although they retain the comically-disruptive elements from the Theatre of the Absurd.[28]

 

Fo’s iconoclasm is also evident in the plays of the Austrian, Peter Handke, but the ironicising anarchism of the former’s work is replaced here by a more theoretically sophisticated and less populist re-configuration of the relationship between the theatre and its public. In his essay, ‘Literature is Romantic’ (1966), Handke advanced a new definition of politicised writing, one which eschewed the priorities of traditional committed theatre for a literature of direct intervention which would use the streets, factories and offices as the places for its performances. He called the plays that he wrote in the spirit of this theory ‘speak-ins’ (Sprechstücke), where the plot and character of the traditional stage is replaced by a discourse that makes use ‘of swearing, of self-indictment, of confession, of testimony, of interrogation, of justification, of evasion, of prophesy, of calls for help’. Handke’s most famous play, Offending the Audience (1966), for example, contains neither dramatic action nor dramatis personae, but structures its minimalist progress around a verbal confrontation between the ‘actors’ on the stage and the audience, who are made the subject of a process of accelerating vilification. Handke’s plays are didactic, but they possess no clear message.   His goal is, as he says in his preface to Offending the Audience, ‘not to revolutionise the audience but to make it aware’, conscious of itself as an ideological construct. This goal is also evident in Handke’s subsequent plays, such as Kaspar (1968) and The Ride across Lake Constance (1971), which likewise focus upon the complex relationship between knowledge and power, demonstrating how definitions of selfhood come through the understanding and manipulation of language.[29]

 

More recent drama in Europe has combined the gestural politics of Fo and Handke with the Absurdist exploitation of the ritualistic and the surreal, producing in the process a complex body of work that both raises important issues of a social and existential nature, while problematising the conventions of the stage and its relationship to the public. This trajectory is evident in the work of the Germans, Heiner Müller (Germania: Death in Berlin, 1971, and The Hamletmachine, 1977), Botho Strauss (Rendezvous Trilogy, 1976, and Kalldewey, Farce, 1981), and Tankred Dorst (Toller, 1968, and Ice Age, 1973); in British playwrights such as Edward Bond (Lear, 1971), Trevor Griffiths (The Comedians, 1975), David Edgar (The Shape of the Table, 1990), and David Hare (Plenty, 1978); and in France in the plays of Georges Michel (Aggression, 1967, and A little Love Nest, 1970), Jean Claude Grumberg (Dreyfus, 1974, and The Atelier, 1979) and Michel Vinaver (Iphigenia Hotel, 1960). All take eclectically from the themes and techniques of Absurdist and post-Absurdist drama, but combine them with a revitalised theatre of political engagement, seeking to demonstrate (in Edward Bond’s words) how ‘knowledge and experience of the real world illuminate and reform subjective individuality’.[30]

 

 

5. Self, History, Myth:

The Literature of Magic Realism

 

Roland Barthes saw the new French novelist as a revolutionary figure who had broken not only with the literary sensibility of our ‘ancestral reflexes’ but also with traditional conceptual categories of time, space and causality. Authors such as Robbe-Grillet had successfully de-anthropomorphised the object world, and opened up a literary space in which a ‘new structure of matter and movement’ could emerge. The phenomenological project outlined here by Barthes, which sought to deny any absolute distinctions between surface and depth, object and subject, was brought to fruition by a body of novelists whose style came to be characterised as ‘Magic Realist’. They included some of the most productive figures in Postmodernist literature: Günter Grass, Italo Calvino, Salman Rushdie, J.G. Ballard, Thomas Bernhard, Michel Tournier and D.M. Thomas. As a genre, Magic realism had its origins in South America, in a body of writing that sought to locate notions of unreality and surreality within the texture of everyday social life. Its seminal texts included Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps (1953), Carlos Fuentes, Where the Air is clear (1958), Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions (1944), and Gabriel Marcía Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). Salman Rushdie defined Magic Realism as a ‘development out of Surrealism that expresses a genuinely ‘Third World’ consciousness’, reminding us not only that the style had its origins in South American literature, but that it embodies that feeling of otherness that many ethnic minorities and other groups marginalised by the Western intellectual tradition have experienced. The French author, Michel Tournier, offered a broader, more metaphysical definition. He characterised his writing as a ‘cosmic’ comedy, which knows that ‘the real world, rife with contradictions and bristling with absurdities, is a fabric full of holes’, a porous weave that can only be stopped through the agency of the active imagination. Such sentiments were shared by Italo Calvino, who described his own ‘phenomenological’ approach as the result of a desire ‘to break through the screen of words and concepts and see the world as if it appeared for the first time to our sight’. The magic realist novel retained both the representational import of Realism and its humanist focus upon suffering, moral choice and historical tragedy, but refracted such concerns through such Postmodernist techniques as the self-conscious narrator, the abandonment of linear narrative and the drawing of apsychological characters. Above all, the magic realist novel collapsed traditional distinctions between the fantastic and the normal, the supernatural and the natural, the objective and the subjective, in an attempt to demonstrate, using myths and recurrent symbols, how these spheres interact to determine private lives and national destinies.[31]

 

Magic Realism did not, however, emerge ab ovo. A tradition of fabulation and fantasy had long existed in European literature, in the Gothic fiction of the late 18th and 19th century, which ran from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), through to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and the science fiction of H.G. Wells and Zamyatin. This tradition re-emerged in the Postmodern period. It is evident in the hallucinogenic novels of Aldous Huxley (Island, 1962), in the neo-medieval cultism of Tolkien’s (Lord of the Rings, 1954-1955), in Doris Lessing’s psychiatric explorations (such as her Briefing for a Descent into Hell, 1971), and in the work of new-age science-fictionists, such as J.G. Ballard (The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970, Crash, 1973, and Myths of the Near Future, 1982), and the Polish writer, Stanislaw Lem (Solaris, 1961, The Cyberiad, 1965, and Imaginary Magnitude, 1973). These novels make the cross-over between high and popular culture, using contemporary scientific theory to form a bridge between the two realms. Ballard, in particular, frames his project within the context of philosophical challenges to the status of the stable mechanical world. As the author has noted: ‘we live inside an enormous novel. For the writer, in particular, it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent reality’. That this reality is polymorphous as well as ontologically ambiguous is clear from the contexts of Ballard’s own fiction, which moves between the urban tribalism and motorised manias of the modern city (in High Rise, 1975), through to Ballard’s autobiographical account of his childhood in war-torn China in Empire of the Sun (1984). Throughout these discrete worlds runs an apocalyptic mood that avoids fatalism only by invoking the possibility of escape through technology, creative fantasy and ‘the dream’s awareness of its own identity’.[32]

 

The ambit of Magic Realism was broad. It included writers as diverse as Italo Calvino (The Cloven Viscount, 1952, The Baron in the Trees, 1957, and The Nonexistent Knight, 1959); Miguel Delibes (Parable of the Shipwrecked Man, 1969); Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children, 1981, and Shame, 1983); Thomas Bernhard (The Gargoyles, 1967, and Extinction, 1986); Michel Tournier (The Erl-King, 1970 and Gemini, 1981); D.M. Thomas (The White Hotel, 1981); Jeanette Winterson (The Passion, 1987, and Sexing the Cherry, 1989); and the prolific output of Günter Grass. Magic Realism brought the mythopoetic logic of fantasy into worlds that were historically and socially recognisable, such as Grass’ Third Reich in his Tin Drum, and Rushdie’s Pakistan in his Midnight’s Children. In many of these novels, the moral, social and political shortcomings of these societies are exposed through the perspectives of quasi fairy-tale figures, such as the ogre in Tournier’s The Erl-King, the boy-dwarf, Oskar, in Grass’ The Tin Drum, or the nun in Calvino’s The Non-existent Knight. Such characters are empowered with magical gifts that allow them to impose their fantasies upon the real world. These narratives conflate memory and desire, and use shifting and contradictory points of view, circular and repetitive time scales, labyrinthine plots, the doubling of events and the use of the Doppelgänger motif (as in the mirror-protagonists of Tournier’s Gemini) to conjure up worlds where rationality is replaced by the deeper logic of dream and fantasy. As Rushdie noted with respect to his own novel, the material world appears in these novels in fantastic guises; ‘trivial things seem like symbols, and the mundane acquires numinous qualities’. They are symbols for a people ‘obsessed with correspondences’.[33]

 

In spite of their insistence upon the importance of subjective myth-making, the exponents of Magic Realism were committed to a recognisable ‘historical project’, to a ‘confrontation with history’, both of the immediate past but also of the present. The political objectives of the Magic Realist school are most evident in the writings of Günter Grass. His early ‘Danzig trilogy’: The Tin Drum (1959), Cat and Mouse, (1961) and Dog Years (1963) was set in the Third Reich, and dealt with the values, rituals and absurdities of National Socialist ideology. In his later fiction, most notably Local Anaesthetic (1969), From the Diary of a Snail (1972), The Flounder (1977) and Headbirths, or the Germans are dying out (1982), Grass applies the techniques of Magic Realism to the issues of the present. The contemporary world may be less under threat from totalitarian politics, but it is, nevertheless, in danger of becoming a victim of new obsessions, new irrationalities, every bit as dangerous as National Socialism: ‘technological mysticism, aggressions spawned by the mass media, terrorism, productivity [and] the parallel increase of pollution and prosperity’. Grass’ opposition to such threats is unambiguously resolute. And yet, in spite of their avowal of democratic-socialist, feminist and ecological points of view, these novels evince a more pessimistic and even apocalyptic tone, which is a product of the author’s perception of a future, which he sees ‘altogether shrouded in mist, open at most to speculation’.[34]

 

Grass’ later work seeks to demonstrate that individuals are irrevocably embroiled in the public sphere of politics even when they believe themselves defined through the purely personal realm. It is precisely this relationship between private fantasy and historical nightmare that D.M. Thomas explores in The White Hotel, which tells of the opera singer, Lisa Erdman, of her career, her personal life, and her extended psycho-analytic treatment by Freud. Lisa is a two-fold victim: as a Jew, she suffers under the Nazi occupancy of Russia, dying at Babi Yar; but as a patient of Freud, she undergoes an uncovering of the self that is equally barbaric, being subject to practices that were (according to the author) ‘pathetic metaphors of the real hallucinations of an event such as Babi Yar’. Thomas attempts to link the personal and political realms by combining fictionalised private journals, reports from psychiatric doctors, with Freud’s non-fictional case studies and letters, and poetry. The result is a novel that gives shape to a notion of personal identity as something that is both inherently complex and historically conditioned, a product of that collective ‘libidinous fantasy’ with which Thomas, and Magic Realist novelists, in general, sought to bring their readers into contact.[35]

 

 

6. Structures of Subjectivity:

Postmodernism and the Poetic Text

 

The bond between poetry and the Romantic notion of poetic creativity had already been severed in the Modernist period, by poets such as Paul Valery and Gottfried Benn, who refused to see their work as simple expressions of the creative self, agreeing with T.S. Eliot that the poetic act represented an ‘escape from personality’. In a period endemically suspicious of all humanist paradigms, these tendencies were intensified and put on a theoretical basis by French Structuralists such as Roland Barthes (‘The Death of the Author’, 1967), and Michel Foucault (‘What is an author?’, 1969), who subjected notions such as authorial intentionality and artistic expressivity to a sustained critique. The notion of ‘the author’, they argued, was simply a convenient construct, produced by literary critics seeking to reduce complicated patterns of meaning to unambiguous authorial intention; the real author of texts (called by Barthes a ‘scriptor’) was, on the contrary, part of a complex linguistic process whose ambit was the ‘eternally written here and now’, and whose product was the book as a polysemic entity that resisted ultimate interpretation, being a ‘tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred’.[36]

 

For many poets in the Postmodern period, this problematisation of the Romantic notion of subjectivity closed down certain avenues of writing, as it opened up others. The Italian poet and film-maker, Pier Paolo Pasolini, for example, embraced the dissolution of the authorial subject, but sought its reconstitution through the agency of language. As he noted in his essay ‘From the laboratory’ (1965): ‘I, by speaking – in the pure and simple act of speaking – live a structure that is in the process of being structured: I myself contribute to such a structuration, and I know it, but I don’t know what it is founded on, and what it will be’. His own poetry (Gramsci’s Ashes, 1957, The Religion of my Age, 1961, and Poetry in the form of a Rose, 1964) is firmer in voice than this statement would suggest; nevertheless Pasolini’s idiom reflects the self-removal of the artistic subject, which seemed to him to be the precondition for that stark, impersonal language, which alone was capable of capturing (as in ‘The Ditch digger’s Tears’, 1957), the ‘humble/ sordid, confused, immense reality’, swarming in the slums of a swiftly urbanising Italy.[37] For certain poets, the surrender of subjectivity entailed a near mystical dissolution of the self in the phenomenal world. This was the case with the most important French poet of this period, Yves Bonnefoy. In On the Motion and the Immobility of Douve (1953), In Yesterday’s Desert Dominion (1958), Words in Stone (1965) and The Lure of the Threshold (1975), Bonnefoy attempted to realise the Symbolist dream of returning the world to magic by purifying language of its quotidian banalities. As he argued in an essay of 1977, words must be made to ‘detach themselves, as words of communion, of meaning, from the web of concepts’; this alone permits the ‘advent of being in its own absoluteness’. The Lure of the Threshold, in particular, charts this struggle to make language transparent with the radiance of the object-world, containing poems which are self-contained verbal icons, dislocated from syntax and linearity. One such text is ‘The Clouds’, the concluding words of which point both to the defeat and the triumph of Bonnefoy’s vision: ‘Here is the task/ I cannot finish. Here, the words/ I will not speak. /Here, the black/ Pool, in the storm-cloud/ Here, the blind spot/ In the glance of an eye’.[38]

 

Hermetic, paradoxical and verging on the surreal, Bonnefoy’s poetry tried to capture modulations of self and identity barely accessible to consciousness. A similar trajectory was followed by the Jewish Rumanian-German writer, Paul Celan. His poetry, published in Poppy and Memory (1952), From Threshold to Threshold (1955) and The Gates of Language (1959), is both exhortation and lament, a complex emotional position that seeks to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive, not directly but through powerfully charged allegory as in the famous, ‘Fugue of Death’ (1948). Celan described his work as ‘language actualised, set free under the sign of a radical individuation which, however, remains as aware of the limits drawn by language as of the possibilities it opens’. This is a poetry which speaks eloquently whilst remaining fully aware of the impossibility of full speech. Celan called the gap between the assertion of the poetic statement and its withholding through insecurity or incomprehensibility ‘the turning point-of-breath’ (Atemwende). The exhortation made in the poem ‘Speak, you also’ (1955): ‘Speak – / But keep yes and no unsplit, / And give your say this meaning:/ Give it the shade’, was one that he himself followed throughout a body of work that was committed to areas of experience, personal and historical, that must necessarily remain beyond the easy grasp of intelligibility.[39]

 

Celan’s influence was immense. It is evident in the work of the Egyptian-French writer (of Jewish descent), Edmond Jabès (The Book of Questions, 1976-1983), as it is in the sombre, understated verse of the Austrian poet, Ingeborg Bachmann (Time Suspended, 1953, Invocation of the great Bear, 1956), as it is in the work of the East German, Johannes Bobrowski (Sarmatian Time, 1961, and Weathersigns, 1967). The difficulty of witnessing, the loss of language through emigration, the problem of speaking of the suffering of self without pathos, are also themes explored by the Russian Nobel prize-winning poet, Joseph Brodsky. Castigated as a ‘social parasite’ in his native country, Brodsky was forced into American exile in 1972, from where he published some of his most important poems. In Elegy for John Donne (1967) and A Part of Speech (1980), Brodsky explored the relationship between language, exile and identity, those ‘borderline situations’ that exist for the émigré caught between assimilation and alienation. The stoicism, but also the residual optimism that such displacement gave rise to is evident throughout his verse, such as the autobiographical poem ‘May 24, 1980’ (1980): ‘Now I am forty./ What should I say about life? That it’s long and abhors transparency. / Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelette, though, makes me vomit./ Yet until brown clay has been crammed down my larynx,/ Only gratitude will be gushing from it’. In the final analysis, Brodsky’s poetry can be read, as Brodsky noted with respect to the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva, as a ‘plea for the cause [of those condemned to experience] existence on the edge’.[40]

 

A similar perspective is evident in poets writing in the Eastern Bloc countries. Polish poets such as Tadeusz Różewicz (Anxiety, 1947, and The Red Glove, 1948), the Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz (City without a Name, 1969, Hymn of the Pearl, 1982, and facing the River, 1994), and Zbigniew Herbert (Chord of Light, 1956, A Study of the Object, 1961, and Report from the besieged City, 1983) attempted to find an idiom that could register the pain of their predicament without dissolving into self-pity. In a context in which self-expression was a political (but often a politically impossible) act these poets of inner exile look ironically upon heroic constructions of the artistic subject. As Herbert confides in ‘The Knocker’ (1957): ‘my imagination/ is a piece of board/ and to complete the instrument/ I have a wooden stick/ I strike the board/ and it answers/ yes – yes/ no -no’. But Herbert’s board was heard by many who were aware of the menace, fear and moral turpitude that surrounded them, and who, like poet, also chose to ‘obey the counsels of the inner eye/ [and] admit no one’.[41]

 

Elsewhere in Europe, poets tried to win through to a deeper notion of personal identity, evoking in the process atavistic or mythic notions of the self. Representative of this trend was Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, in England and Ireland, László Nagy, in Hungary, and Vaska Popa, in Serbia. In their work, Hughes and Heaney had the example of the great Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, before them. Thomas’ poems such as ‘And death shall have no dominion’ (1933), ‘The force that drives the green fuse drives the flower’ (1934), ‘Poem in October’ (1945) and ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’ (1946) possess a strikingly elemental quality, which derives from the poet’s faith in the continually renewing, continually regenerating power of spirit in nature. Hughes (Hawk in the Rain, 1957, Lupercal, 1960), and Heaney (Death of a Naturalist, 1966, and North, 1975), also look to nature as a source of authenticity; but here there is a soberer articulation of the relationship between mankind and the phenomenal world. Hughes, in particular, grants a special autonomy to the brute facticity of the animal kingdom, celebrating in poems such as ‘The Hawk in the Rain’ (1957) and ‘An Otter’ (1960) the raw vitality of the animal spirit, as if it alone is able to achieve unity of self in a Post-modern age marked by doubt and confusion. Hughes deepened this position into a virtual animism in Crow (1970), whose central character (half animal, half myth) articulates his uncompromising philosophy of the world ‘from a buried cell of bloody blackness’. These poems constitute a paean upon the raw energies of nature, in which procreation and death, renewal and destruction inextricably belong (in Hughes’ thinking) to the same amoral universe.[42]

 

In his poetry, the Hungarian, László Nagy (The Bride of the Sun, 1956, and Hymn for Anytime, 1965), finds a perspective upon the troubles of his contemporary Hungary by identifying himself with those rituals and customs that inform the popular mind, and which help make sense of life in periods of confusing historical change. His outlook is at its most genial (almost Larkenesque) in ‘Pleasuring Sunday’ and ‘Wedding’ (both 1956), which celebrate the ‘sudden urge to create anew’, biologically and culturally, amidst the ‘stone scriptures’ of the past and present. Vasko Popa (Bark, 1953, The Unrest Field, 1965) also attempts to link the personal and the historical, in his case by grafting the symbolism and iconography of his native Serbia onto a highly personal cosmography. As Ted Hughes notes, in Popa’s poetry ‘heads, tongues, spirits, hands, flames, magically vitalised wandering objects, such as apples and moons, present themselves, animated with strange but strangely familiar destinies’. Popa’s object-world is a hieroglyphic system, the key to which is now personal, now historical, as in the ‘Song of the Tower of Skulls’ (from the volume Earth Erect, 1972), which begins: ‘For the great-eyed sunflower you gave us/ Blind stone your unface/ And what now monster/. You made us one with yourself/ With the emptiness in your empty poison-tooth/ With your dock-tailed eternity/ Is that all your secret?’. Often without punctuation, diacritics or familiar syntax, Popa’s poetry hovers between statement and question, focussing upon archetypal images of birth and destruction, as if his goal is to reach the source of the collective unconscious of his people, and (indeed) of human kind, in general.[43]

 

There were poets, however, who granted neither history nor nature a determining presence in their poetic discourses, but language itself, conceived of in its pure materiality, as a textual reality on the page. The French poet, Francis Ponge, was one such poet. His writing over a period of half a century consistently accorded a unique respect to the typographical dimensions of the poetic utterance. Ponge believed that the poem was not and never could be a finished object, a verbal icon, but was simply one point in an ongoing process of writing, an evolving intertext. Consequently, his publications, Taking the Side of Things (1942), Proêmes (1948) and The Making of the Pré (1971), are largely revisions and commentaries on an Urtext that does not and possibly never will exist. The Making of the Pré is typical of his work. Around a central poetic narrative, Ponge structures a diary account of the genesis of the poem, speculations regarding the etymology of its key terms, quotations from linguistic philosophers, photographs, drawings and paintings, all of which are interwoven in an elaborate textual process, which is given structure by a continuous system of punning on the two meanings of title ‘pré’ (meaning both ‘before’ and ‘meadow’). The result is both a Postmodern version of the Dinggedicht (favoured by Modernist poets such as Rilke), and a gentle paean to the ‘marvellously tedious/ Monotony and variety of the world, / In short, its perpetuity.’[44]

 

Ponge’s The Making of the Pré was, in many respects, a supreme example of one of the most popular genres within Postmodern versification: concrete poetry. The genre attracted some of the most linguistically creative minds of this generation: Ernst Jandl in Austria; Ian Hamilton Finlay in Britain; Lamberto Pignotti and Nanni Balestrini in Italy; Helmut Heissenbüttel and Max Bense in Germany; and Eugen Gomringer in Switzerland. Gomringer described concrete poetry as a ‘reality in itself, not a poem about something or other’, a definition expanded by Bense who typified it as a ‘style of material poetry’ that was ‘not subject to the conventional rules of grammar and syntax’ but was ruled by ‘unique visually and structurally oriented models’. These goals seem realised in his Text Books, 1-11 (1960-1987) Heissenbüttel. There were poems of autotelic formalism, texts constructed around the repetition of key words, and formed into a series without punctuation or syntax (the so-called perpetuum mobile). Bereft of conventional stanza encasement, such poems become free-floating semantic units, creative possibilities rather than finally formed utterances, whose sheer indeterminacy forces the reader into new ways of reading and interpreting.[45]

 

Heissenbüttel believed that the stark and confusing form of his poetry contained a necessary political moment; dislocating expectations of form and structure it was a demonstration against those normalising ideologies that foreclose analysis and action. The Italian poets, Alfredo Giuliani and Nanni Balestrini (members of the 1960 ‘novissimi’ group) and Lamberto Pignotti (founding member of ‘Gruppo 63’) foregrounded the political implications of this textual interrogation. Pignotti sought to create not only a different type of poetry but also a different space for what he termed ‘seen poetry’ (poesia visiva). The publication of such poetry would not be exclusively through the traditional channels of book and journal, but through the juke box, media advertisements, loud speakers at sporting events and even matchboxes. The poetry of Hans Magnus Enzensberger is less radical in its formal procedures, but he too writes anti-poetry that is critical of consumer society and technological civilisation. His most important work, In defence of wolves (1957), Mausoleum (1975) and Future Music (1991), is both politically committed and simultaneously conversational in tone and terminology. Not poetic transport, but the refusal of flight, not intoxication, but sobriety, not the loss of critical acumen but its sharpening through ideological and linguistic vigilance is the goal of this verse. Such concerns are evident in his best-known poems, such as ‘In a Textbook for the Twelve Form’ (1957), ‘Social partners in the armament’s industry’ (both 1957), ‘Portrait of a Pimp’ (1964), ‘Song of those for whom everything is relevant and who know everything already’ (1967), and ‘The Shits’ (1971), whose very titles indicate both the controlled anger of Enzensberger’s verse and its rejection of traditional poetic themes. The Postmodernist direction of Enzensberger’s writing is most evident in The Sinking of the Titanic (1980), an extended narrative on the sinking of the famous ship, which includes not only an account of the genesis of the poem but also theoretical meditations on his own narrative, as well as upon literature, history and historiography. The poet’s disclosure: ‘it is my pleasure to recover a text/ that probably never existed. I fake my own work’, draws our attention to the purely fabulatory status of Enzensberger’s project.   It is a gesture of honesty that might be read in sharp contrast to the elaborate process of self-deception and self-aggrandisement that surrounded the public promotion of the unsinkability of the Titanic three-quarters of a century earlier.[46]

 

 

7. Written as the Body:

Feminist writing and Post-Modernism

 

Postmodernism was not simply a literary movement or category of scholarly classification; it was also a complex philosophical and cultural movement that sought to explicate and re-define the relationship between political agency and notions of subjectivity and selfhood. In the immediate post-war period, the terms of this process of definition were largely Marxist, the product of a rediscovery of the work of Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukács and Theodor von Adorno. These were sophisticated theorists of the Left, who refracted their analysis of the classic tropes of Marxist analysis, categories such as class, ideology and false consciousness, through an awareness of the determining influence of aesthetic and symbolic forms. Their work was further developed by neo-Marxists such as Louis Althusser (For Marx, 1965), and by post-Marxists such as Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish, 1975), who emphasized the local technologies of power, ‘how things work at the level of on-going subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviours’.[47]

 

This interrelationship between politics in the public sphere and the exercise of power in the private was also explored by writers in the Postmodernist period, such as the Czech novelist, Milan Kundera. His novels, The Joke (1967), Life is Everywhere (1969), and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978), deal with the tensions between private morality and public definitions of the truth in political states that are closed to flexibility and criticism. That the governments in such societies exercise their control over individuals through the manipulation of the inner lives of people as much as through direct force is the theme of Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, published in 1984. The novel constitutes a meditation upon the relationship between the private sphere (here love between a man and a woman), and historical change (the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia), describing characters who move back and forth between living for themselves (lightness), and a commitment to higher moral and political choices (weight). Like the nations of which they are a part, these individuals must establish their place in a world that remains both energised but also, in a strange way, terrorised by that infinite ‘realm of possibility’ that is historical change.[48]

 

The most systematic and, perhaps, the most ethically persuasive exploration of this relationship between the personal and the political was, however, undertaken by a generation of women writers working in Europe and, most notably, in France. Some of the major figures here were Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous. Supported by initiatives from within the Anglo-American women’s movement, and represented by seminal texts such as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (both 1970), these feminist theorists sought to make visible the otherwise excluded presence of women in history and society. In the process, they gave a central place in their thinking to the concept of ‘Otherness’, which they identify with those disruptive energies that resist assimilation into those ordered systems of phallocentric thought that have traditionally governed Western thought. The major statements of European feminism include de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the other Woman (1974), Annie Leclerc’s Word of Woman (1974), Hélène Cixous’ ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976), and Julia Kristeva’s Polylogue (1977). These studies move between analysis and critique, empirical classification (Beauvoir) and post-structuralist speculation (Irigaray), giving particular weight to the agency of language, which is held to work largely at the level of the unconscious, in positioning and defining female (and male) subjectivity. In the work of these writers, the body is lent a particular potency, visceral, productive and sometimes irrational. Recuperating this realm is both a social and ecological necessity. Cixous puts their message in her characteristically imperative mode; ‘write your self. Your body must be heard. only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth’. On the back of this theoretical re-valorisation of gender identity, what has been traditionally conceived of as alien otherness, and located to that ‘place reserved for the guilty’, can now be rearticulated as ‘native strength’, as a speech that opens into a new vision of that which can be. [49]

 

Given the diversity and complexity of the feminist movement, it is not surprising women writers engaged with this agenda in diverse ways. In England, Iris Murdoch took up philosophical themes in Under the Net (1954), The Bell (1958), and The Sea, the Sea (1978), which largely derive from her interest in Existentialism and the writings of Sartre; whilst Muriel Spark, the author of Momento Mori (1959) and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) added to Murdoch’s concern with the dangers of false orders a theological focus on guilt and retribution. Female characters figure prominently in such novels, but the problems they encounter are not specifically women’s issues, as they are in the novels of Edna O’Brien (The Country Girls, 1960, and The Girl with green Eyes, 1962), and Margaret Drabble (Jerusalem the Golden, 1967, and The Ice Age, 1977), which frequently explore the tension between female self-assertion and the confinements of the patriarchal family and prescribed female roles. Similar themes were taken up by the French writer Françoise Sagan in her best-selling Bonjour Tristesse (1954), and by the Italian writer, Natalia Ginzburg, in her Family Sayings (1963). Another Italian writer, Elsa Morante, painted on a broader canvas, positioning her women within the sweep of contemporary history, in novels such as House of Liars (1948), Arturo’s Island (1957) and, particularly, History: A Novel (1974). Morante’s novels give voice to a form of humanism that emerges through a feminine, but not necessarily feminist, perspective. The same might be said of the fiction of Doris Lessing, whose novels, from The Grass is singing (1950), and The Children of Violence sequence (published between 1952 and 1969), through to Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) work through insights gleaned from a variety of contexts, political, post-colonial and psychoanalytic. The central text of Lessing’s corpus, The Golden Notebook (1962), brings these diverse concerns together in the figure of Anna Wulf. Her search for womanhood is at the same time a search for artistic and personal self-fulfilment, which she achieves, moving from self-destructive emotions, such as anger and resentment, to a more positive welcoming of experience, arriving at that ‘delight one feels at whatever is alive, the delight of recognition’.[50]

 

Feminist literature in Europe may have lacked the programmatic force of American feminist fiction in this period, as evident, for example, in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), or Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (1977), in which women are victims of a hostile male world resistant to change and accommodation. Nevertheless, writers such as Marguerite Duras in France, Christa Wolf in Germany, Elsa Morante in Italy, Gerd Brantenberg in Norway, Montserrat Roig in Spain, and Angela Carter in England, did take up issues that were both theoretically complex and socially urgent, issues relating to the politics of eroticism and pornography, the commercialisation of the female body and the issue of bi- and trans-sexuality. Duras’ work, from The Square (1955), Moderato Cantabile (1958) and the film script Hiroshima, mon amour (1960) through to The Lover (1984), opened a space for a uniquely female voice in literature, for a style of writing, a ‘feminist literature’ (écriture feminine), that was, as Duras explained, ‘really translated from blackness, from the unknown, like a new way of communicating rather than an already formed language’. The Lover bears witness to this new style; hovered ambiguously between autobiography and fictional narrative, between confession and analysis, it forms its account of the formation of female subjectivity within the bourgeois family through a bricolage of images, memories and descriptions of feelings that engage directly with Oedipal complexes, incest taboos and inter-racial relationships. Duras’ aim in her novel was to deconstruct the myth of heterosexuality, to free those who are caught within its confines both from their utopian longing for the ‘perfect duality of desire’, but also from an endemic role playing that requires a violence to the self and to others for such a myth to be maintained. The contribution of image and self-image to the exercise of sexual power is also a theme of much of Angela Carter’s fiction, most notably The Magic Toyshop (1967), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), The Bloody Chamber (1979), and Wise Children (1991). Throughout Carter’s corpus runs the concern to break with essentialist notions of femininity and with systems of social classification that allocate women to a narrow range of biologically-fixed roles, such as the protectress, the helper, the wife, seductress or mother. In The Bloody Chamber, Carter re-writes fairy stories such as ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’, transforming them into parables of sexual conflict and transgression; whilst in The Magic Toyshop, familial relationships are posited as the sources for control and definition of gender. In these works and others, women are installed as ‘beings of power’, as active agents in the imaginary worlds that govern sexual and political discourses, alike.[51]

 

That resistance to patriarchy would involve active struggle was a premise accepted by every feminist writer, from Duras to Christa Wolf. As a militant philosophy, it is stated in its most radical form by the French writer (resident in America), Monique Wittig. Wittig espouses what she calls a ‘materialist lesbianism’ which has at its motivating energy the desire to ‘destroy politically, philosophically, and symbolically the categories of “men” and “women” ’. As such, she makes cause with the other feminist writers who view sexuality not as a fixed grid but as a fluid reality, a spectrum on which individuals are located between the artificial poles of masculinity and femininity. It is a vision of gender beyond biological determinism. In her two works of fiction (The Warriors, 1971, and The Lesbian Body, 1973), Wittig dramatically reverses those phallocentric paradigms which juxtapose woman as the Other, as Unreason, as Darkness, to the ‘parameter of the One, of Male, of Light’.   In The Warriors, Wittig celebrates the militancy and resourcefulness of her Amazonian heroines, whilst in The Lesbian Body, it is the female form itself, for so long purely the object of male discourse, which comes to the fore, transformed into virtually a speaking subject in its own right, with its unique syntax and grammar. In the former text, masculinity is openly eliminated; in the latter it is actively transcended, displaced by a vision of a new society that will merge the ‘fictional, symbolic and the actual’ on the basis of a shared sexual communality.[52]

 

The German feminist, Christa Wolf, on the other hand, sought to keep a dialogue between men and women open, not for sentimental or romantic reasons (although there is no refusal of heterosexuality in her work), but from a pressing recognition that Realpolitik: the exercise of political and military power by men is a reality that women must learn to understand and come to terms with. This concern may not be directly evident in Wolf’s early novels (The Quest for Christa T., 1968, and A Model Childhood, 1976), although both works explore the proximity between the evolution of their heroines and patriarchal political systems: East German Communism in the former text, and Nazism in the latter. These novels are certainly written from a distinctive female perspective, but it is only in Cassandra (1983) that a clear statement in defence of feminist politics emerges. The novel combines a fictional account of the tribulations of the Trojan priestess, who was gifted with foresight but shunned by her countrymen, with an extended autobiographical account of how Wolf chose and developed her theme during a visit to Greece. Around this complex weaving of fact and fiction, Wolf develops a sophisticated critique of the scientific, rationalist, utilitarian, mechanistic ‘hierarchal male reality principle’ that the author in common with many feminists holds responsible for that ‘leaning toward self-destruction’ that is a consequence of patriarchal power. Castigated as an eccentric, her prophesies deprecated and neglected, Cassandra fails to steer the community of which she is a part away from military catastrophe. Her fate, Wolf argues, must not be shared by the women of today, many of whom likewise find themselves witnesses of ecological ruin and impending nuclear disaster. Patriarchal discourse must be opened, its terms of reference re-written, alternative sources of self-assertion and legitimation created, both for men and women alike, and grandiose dreams of militarist expansion elided in favour of those more modest satisfactions which centre on the ‘inconspicuous, the precious everyday, the concrete’. Upon this basis a new humanism is possible, one which will not only retain matriarchal values, rather than banning them into an alien otherness, but will also prove capable of absorbing the workings of difference/différance, political, sexual and linguistic, into a serviceable strategy for survival.[53]

 

 

8. Pressing To Be Said:

Contemporary Writing in Europe

 

Make-it-new is an imperative that has for more than two centuries enthused successive movements in European literature, movements that have typically been accompanied by extensive theoretical writing intended to establish their provenance, their singularity and their topicality, their status as “isms” within the literary self-consciousness of the period. Contemporary writing in Europe (the literature that has emerged over the past twenty to thirty years) conspicuously lacks that theoretical framework: there is no “post-post-modernism”. This is not to say that individual writers have not reflected upon what they have been doing or have not drawn on theoretical work. From the many interviews that the German author, W.G. Sebald (The Emigrants, 1992, The Rings of Saturn, 1995, Austerlitz, 2001) gave outlining his often pained relationship to his past, the past of his country and the role of historical memory in that relationship, through to the essays of the British dramatist, Howard Barker, collected in his Arguments for a Theatre (1997), which argues for a “catastrophic theatre” of provocation and excess, today’s writers have been just as assiduous as their predecessors in clarifying the goals and ambit of their work.[54] But they have done so upon their own singular terrain: these writers do not suggest that they are part of a collective phenomenon or that they are speaking on behalf of a “movement”. Even when tags appear to describe their writing, as in that of “extrême contemporain” to position the work of the French novelists Michel Chaillou (The Belief of Thieves, 1989, Virginity, 2007), Pascal Quignard (All the Mornings in the World, 1991, The Roving Shadows, 2002) and Michel Houellebecq (The Map and the Territory, 2010, Submission, 2015), or that of “Neo-Orphism” to describe the direction in contemporary Italian poetry represented by Biancamaria Frabotta (High Tide, 1998), Cesare Viviani (To Believe in the Invisible, 2009) and Silvio Ramat (Elis Island, 2015), it could well be argued that the heterogeneity of the writing included under such rubrics serves to move individual texts well beyond the parameters of such categories.

Contemporary writing is no less aesthetically self-conscious than previous modes of literature, but that self-consciousness belongs to, emerges through the text, not through theory (and even less, Theory). Contemporary writing develops the open, aesthetically value-free quality of postmodernism. It is radically eclectic, encompassing at one end of the “new” spectrum the experimental work of the Russian novelist, Dmitry Glukhovsky, whose novels, Dusk (2007), Tales about the Motherland (2010) and Futu.re (2013), and whose Metro series fuses (and markets) literature in book format with computer games (as in Metro 2033 MP3 CD) and multimedia art work, the “Theatre Anthropology” of the Italian-Norwegian, Eugenio Barba, as well as the work of writers at the more established end of the “new” spectrum who have kept faith with the potential of the traditional novel, such as (to focus on Britain alone) A.S. Byatt (Possession, 1990), Ian McEwan (Atonement, 2001), Martin Amis (Money, 1984) and Julian Barnes (Flaubert’s Parrot, 1984).

The absence of an encompassing rubric for contemporary literature has made it possible for authors to rediscover substantive moral and political issues that postmodernism, at least in its minimalist, self-reflexive mode, had tended to exclude: the Holocaust and its legacy, the continuation of totalitarianism in post-war Eastern Europe, the internal military conflicts within and between European countries, and the mass migrations of the early twenty-first century, events which have raised issues relating to the past and collective guilt, to ethnicity and the nation state, and to the individual need for political conscience and civil courage. Those who have been forced to live through these wasting realities have produced some of the most compelling literature of the period. The German-Romanian writer, Herta Müller (Nadirs, 1984, The Land of Green Plums, 1994), has written, in tones of controlled pathos, about what it means to live in a dictatorship, the psychological impact on the self-worth of the individual, and the fear and the bad faith of those who participate in the system of rule, themes explored in a different context by the Albanian writer, Ismail Kadare (The Palace of Dreams, 1981, The Pyramid, 1992), who focuses both on the material mechanisms of control in a totalitarian state (secret police, media manipulation) and on its manipulation of myth and symbol to legitimise its actions. The Hungarian-born writer Agota Kristof (who writes in French) has explored the mechanics of survival in such societies in her trilogy The Notebook (1986) The Proof (1988) and The Third Lie (1991).

The Holocaust has left a dark legacy for the European mind, one that is cloaked, as W.G. Sebald argues, in “a conspiracy of silence”.[55] Novels such as Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow (1991), Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader (1995) and Sebald’s own Austerlitz have attempted to undo that silence, writing about a phenomenon that was unique in its barbarism, “not in its cruelty, nor in its cowardice, but in its style – in its combination of the atavistic and the modern”.[56] Their work was preceded by Primo Levi’s memoir If this is a Man (1947), Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962), Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar (1970 and D.M. Thomas’ The White Hotel (1981). Ultimately, these novels are not only acts of witness; they also serve to remind us of the difficulties involved in reconstituting historical memory beyond the optic of individual perspective, and draw attention to the psychological mechanisms of evasion, displacement and repression involved in historical memory, a complex ambivalence encapsulated in the German phrase, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which means both to come to terms with the past but also at the same time to overcome it: to defeat and dispense with the threatening object that is the past. The Austria writer, Thomas Bernhard, confronts this mechanism of evasion in Extinction (1986), whose protagonist attempts to remain critically distant from the culture of his native country, convinced that it has learnt nothing from its involvement with Nazism a generation earlier.

After World War Two, the ethnic hatred and religious intolerance that fuelled the Holocaust continued to burn in Europe, most notably in the erstwhile Yugoslavia, in the Basque region and in Northern Ireland. Historians conventionally bring these conflicts under the rubric of “The Troubles”, an understatement for a process that involved systematic religious persecution, torture and summary executions. Within the Irish context, the brutal furies of those who perpetrated such deeds have been explored by Anne Devlin, Ourselves Alone (1985), Eugene McCabe, Christ in the Fields (1993) and Colin Bateman, Cycle of Violence (1995). The even darker Yugoslav war, which saw the systematic extinction of entire ethnic groups, is represented by literature from erstwhile Yugoslavians, such as the Bosnian Semezdin Mehmedinović, Sarejevo Blues (1992), the Croatian, Dubravka Ugresic (Museum of Unconditional Surrender, 1998), and the Serbian, David Albahari (Gotz and Meyer, 2003). Alexander Karasyov has written about Russia’s bloody military engagements in his Chechen Stories (2008) and Traitor (2011). These are texts that often cross boundaries between fact and fiction, as they attempt to find a form for a history whose brutality would otherwise resist literary statement.

The plight of ethnic minorities, their acceptance or non-acceptance in their chosen communities, the tension between dominant and “marginal” cultures, the challenge for immigrants of retaining their native identities and the trauma of displacement, have all been explored by migrant writers themselves. France alone has produced (or more accurately given shelter to) writers from its former colonies and overseas possessions, including (from Morocco) Tahar ben Jelloun, Child of the Sand (1985), Patrick Chamoiseau (Martinique), Texaco (1992), Assia Djebar (Algeria), So vast is the Prison (1999) and Amin Maalouf (Lebanon), The Rock of Tanios (1993). The pressure of the migrant voice can also be heard in writing around the peripheral territories of Europe. In the Basque and Galician regions, novelists such as Manuel Rivas (The Carpenter’s Pencil, 1988), Suso de Toro (Tick-Tock, 1993) and Bernardo Atxaga Obabakoak (1988), The Lone Man (1996) and The Fighter (2012), have produced works of post-modern fabulation in their native languages. In Greece, Sotiris Dimitriou uses dialect in his narratives depicting immigrants and ethnic minorities, using the idiolect and vocabulary of the Northern Epirot, Albanian, and Romany populations, as in God tells them All (2002).

The contemporary novel has followed a broad and discrete variety of directions, as if moving away from a centre of cultural intelligibility that does not exist. It continues to explore the personal terrain of relationships, sexuality and the psych-morality embedded in them, as in the Danish writer Jens Christian Grøndahl’s Lucca (1988) and Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), where memory figures both to transmit and betray desire. In France, Christine Angot has developed a form of “autobiographical” fiction/faction in Incest (1999), whilst in Greece Ersi Sotiropoulos attracted notoriety through her sexually charged Zigzag Through the Bitter-Orange Trees (2000). In Italy, Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Rimini (1985) and Separate Rooms (1989), wrote sharply observed vignettes of relationships formed during the period of AIDS, a disease to which he succumbed in 1991. The absence of theoretical frameworks, which have so often been generated by a cohort of nations within Europe, has perhaps encouraged writers in what were traditionally seen as peripheral countries to produce work that intrigues and challenges, including (to be painfully selective) in Hungary Péter Esterházy, The Book of Hrabal, 1990), in Holland, Herman Koch The Dinner (2009), in Sweden, Stieg Larsson, The Millennium trilogy (2005-2007), in the Czech Republic, Love and Garbage (1986) by Ivan Klima, and in Poland, Olga Tokarczuk The Journey of the Book-People (1993).

If much fiction in Europe seems borne down by the weight of history, contemporary poetry might be seen as a flight from history, from the gravitas of ideology and political causes, as a return to the more residual imperative of the to be said. This is not to overlook the work of poets such as the Bosnian, Senadin Musabegović (The Maturing of Homeland, 1999) or the Serbian, Dragan Jovanović Danilov (Deep Silence, 1996), for whom memories of bloody internecinity will not go away, or the Greek poet, Yiorgos Chouliaras (Roads of Ink, 2005), who looks back to a recent Junta past, reliving its crimes and exploring the theme of exile. It is not to ignore such history that other poets have chosen distance and insouciance in their verse, but to recover their idiom from a new perspective. The Scottish poet, Don Paterson (40 Sonnets, 2012) perhaps speaks for many when he writes in a poem from his first book, Rain (2009): “…forget the ink, the milk, the blood/ all was washed clean with the flood/ we rose up from the falling waters/the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters/and none of this, none of this matters”.[57] Contemporary British poetry moves across a complex array of discourses. J.H. Prynne (Poems, 4th edition, 2015, Each to Each, 2017, Of the Abyss, 2017), filters in his writing the physical significance of a closely observed world. Alice Oswald in Dart (2002) combines verse and prose and a visceral engagement with nature reminiscent of the poetry of Ted Hughes, a reputation she has consolidated with Memorial (2011) and Falling Awake (2016). Michael Hofmann (Selected Poems, 2008), Mick Imlah (Birthmarks, 1988) and Denise Riley (Selected Poems, 2000) have produced work that is urbane, conversational and eloquent.

Paterson’s tone of pained sobriety can be heard in the work of other poets in Europe. In Germany, Durs Grünbein (Mornings in the Grayzone, 1988, After the Satires, 1999, Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems, 2005) writes poetry that possesses the muted pathos of late coming, of a recognition of ending, the termination of ideals in post-war Germany and perhaps in Europe. As his persona wryly concludes in “Biological Waltz”, “if it is true that we are difficult animals/We are difficult animals because nothing more is true”. Grünbein is a major voice in German poetry, as is Kurt Drawert (Where it Was, 1996, Idylls, Seen Backwards: Poems from Three Decades, 2011) and Uwe Kolbe (Bornholm II, 1986, The Colours of Water, 2001, Final Songs, 2012).

Contemporary poets are aware of their position in history, or at least possess a severe self-consciousness about history, and use that awareness as an opportunity to start again. As the Italian poet, Franco Buffoni, asks himself (and possibly his fellow poets) in his poem “On Poetry”, “Haven’t you already filled/ the exercise book? Like a root in a gravel bed/ the real maze is to be found inside you, / and if it isn’t called brain/ it’s called belly”.[58] The belly is a broad one in Italy. It covers the work of Milo de Angelis (Distant as a Father, 1989), as well as that of Lello Voce (Muses, 1985) and Biagio Cepollaro (The Green Camera, 2012), the two founding members of “Gruppo 93”, whose poetry consciously cultivates the non-“poetical”, drawing upon technical language, slang and dialect, gestures of speech, which resist integration into a coherent narrative. A quite different voice can be heard in the poetry of Patrizia Cavalli (My Poems Won’t Change the World: Selected Poems 1974–2013) whose treatment of common experiences is informed by an ethos of modesty and minimalist survival.

Contemporary Spanish poetry is marked by a heterogeneity of styles and subject matter, some of which cohere (or are made to cohere) into categories such as “neo-realism”, “metaphysical” or the “poetry of conscience”, a diversity represented in a 1986 anthology, Postnovisimos, edited by Jorge Riechmann. Riechmann himself wrote ecologically concerned poetry such as Song of Erosion (1987). Without the self-conscious political ethos of Riechmann, but nevertheless attuned to social issues (particularly those concerning his regional homeland, Granada) is the work of Javier Egea (Rare Moon, 1990, Sonnets of the Golden Tooth, published posthumously in 2006). Together with Álvaro Salvador and Luis García Montero, he helped found the group “The Other Sentimentality”, which promoted poetry as a form of radical historicity, an art inextricably connected to place and people. In Scandinavia, the Swede, Bruno Keats Öijer, is perhaps best known as a performance poet, but his work has also been published in text form: The Mist of It All (2001), Black as Silver (2008), And the Night Whispered Annabel Lee (2014). In Norway, Cathrine Grøndahl (Crushed between Night and Day, 1996, I Put my Hope to the World, 2009), and in Denmark Adda Djørup (Monsieur’s monologues, 2005) and Pia Tafdrup (Spring Tide, 1989, Queen’s Gate, 2001) have written poetry that has received international recognition. Elsewhere in Europe, post-modernism has merged with post-totalitarianism to produce poetry that basks in its freedom of expression but nevertheless retains the gravitas of ethical and social conscience. In Poland, Ewa Lipska focuses on the need to demystify language on a political and personal level. Her works (Living Misanthrope Holidays, 1993, Hours beyond Hours, 1998) place her, along with Stanislaw Baranczak (159 Poems, 1990) and Andrzej Sosnowski (Lodgings: Selected Poems, 1987–2010, 2011), as a major representative of the “New Wave” in Polish poetry. That the only humour appropriate in an age of recurrent wars and political repression is dark humour is borne out by the work of Otto Orban (The Blood Of The Walsungs, 1993). We should, however, not begrudge it to his younger compatriot, Krisztina Toth (Universal Adapter, 2016) that she prefers light over darkness.

Állatságok (2007) After Beckett. Watt now? Contemporary European drama must reinvent itself, with the giant shadows of the past, from Beckett to Genet, Pinter to Havel, behind it. And it does this without the theory that allowed its predecessors to move from the political stage of the 1930s and 1940s and to the Kitchen Sink realism of the 1950s to the Absurdist theatre of the 1960s and 1970s. But none of these have been excluded from a contemporary stage that is, above all, eclectic: as with the novel and poetry, what is pressing to be said finds its appropriate form. Thomas Bernhard has added to his probing novels of disenchantment, vitriolic plays that are no less disturbing and controversial, such as Heroes Square (1988), in which he castigates his fellow Austrians for what he sees as their residual anti-Semitism. Britain may lack the inherited guilt of the Holocaust, but its dramatists nevertheless remain alive to the virulence of bigotry, the exercise of petty power, manipulation and bad faith, as in the stringent studies of social life in Martin Crimp’s The Country (2000), Face to the Wall (2002), Cruel and Tender (2004) and In the Republic of Happiness (2012). Sarah Kane explores phobias and the darkness of the self in Blasted (1995), whose cannibalistic excesses shocked at its first performance, Phaedra’s Love (1996, a modern rewriting of the Greek tragedy), Cleansed and Crave (both 1998) and 4.48 Psychosis (2000). Howard Barker, who styles his work as “a theatre of catastrophe”, gives voice to a bleak pessimism in Victory (1983), The Europeans (1987) and The Dying of Today (2008), whilst Mark Ravenhill brings to explicit life the sexual soul of modern Britain in Shopping and Fucking (1996), Some Explicit Polaroids (1999) and Mother Clap’s Molly House (2001).

Elsewhere in Europe, the plays of Jon Fosse (the most popular Norwegian dramatist since Ibsen) revolve around characters facing one another in enclosed spaces that are menacingly ritualistic in The Name (1995), Nightsongs (1997), Autumn Dream (1999) and I Am the Wind (2007). The Swedish dramatist, Lars Norén, is perhaps more conventional in his dramaturgy, but his plays Blood (1994), and Terminal Pieces 1-9 (2006), also explore the threat of extreme situations, stark confrontations between different worldviews (the terrorist and the doctor, for example, in Act), particularly between individuals brought into contact with death. Amongst the central European countries, Poland’s long tradition of innovative drama continues into the present with Malgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk, whose plays take critical moments in recent history and dramatise the different values and ideologies involved as in The Death of the Squirrel-Man (2001, about Ulrike Meinhof), Loose Screws (2007. a dark comedy about terrorism) and Popieluszko (2011, focuses on the murder of a Solidarity activist). Other Polish dramatists include Dorota Masłowska, A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians (2006) and Snow White and Russian Red (2010), and Michal Walczak, The Sandbox (2001), Journey to the Inside of the Room (2002) and The Divine Affair (2012).

 

In all contemporary writing for the theatre, the traditional interaction between playwright, director, actors and spectators has become increasingly flexible, as has the relationship between the pre-existing written play and its source as an impromptu performance text. In many theatres, stage and proscenium no longer constitute a physical barrier between actors and audience: the former is increasingly elided in favour of a collective space that draws all into the theatre as an event. The emphasis upon the need to bring alive its social responsibilities and to make it relevant to the human context, to those who enjoy it and participate in it, but also to the wider community, is shared by companies throughout Europe, such as the group around the Italian-Danish playwright and theatre director, Eugenio Barba. He is the founder of the “Odin Theatre”, which promotes the practice of theatre as “barter”, as an interactive process with the local community, and the “International School of Theatre Anthropology”, which promotes a “Third Theatre”, exploring “marginality, autodidacticism, the existential and ethical dimension of the craft”, within a diversity of multicultural themes and techniques on a collaborative stage as in Mythos (1998), Andersen’s Dream (2005) and The Chronic Life (2012).[59] In Germany, the “Munich Kammerspiele”, since 2010 under the guidance of the Dutch theatre director, Johan Simons, provides performance opportunities for previously unknown dramatists, such as the young Dutch playwright, Lot Vekemans, Poison (2009), and for previously marginalised groups to participate, such as the “Open Border Ensemble Festival” (2016), which offered immigrants into Germany a venue for expression.

These theatres not only experiment with new ways of creating drama; they also project a radical political ethos founded around notions of community and social and gender equality, as with the “Théâtre du Soleil” in France and the “Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio” in Italy. The “Théâtre du Soleil” is a Parisian avant-garde stage ensemble founded by Ariane Mnouchkine and Philippe Léotard in 1964, whose members, artistic and technical, have an equal say in the running of the company and receive equal pay. Many of the productions of the “Théâtre du Soleil” return to history with a new perspective, as in the 1974 production of the drama and then film of the French Revolution, 1789, bringing the revolution back into the social history of ordinary people. This rewriting of an often exclusive canon has remained a key element in their dramaturgy, and continues in their adaption of Greek and Shakespearean plays. Their work also has a firm feel for contemporary issues, as The Last Caravan Stop (2003), which utilises letters and interviews collected by Mnouchkine and her colleagues from refugee camps around the world.

The “Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio” (based in Cesena, Italy) was founded by Claudia Castellucci, Romeo Castellucci and Chiara Guidi. Their earliest jointly authored productions included the satirical plays Dyads versus Monads (1981) and Pigs old and shabby (1982), but in their later work, the group expanded conventional dramaturgy to include rock music, film, television, comics, and animals and machines. The “Socìetas” has developed its own polylingual idiom, lingua generalissima, a cryptic language that first made its appearance in Kaputt Nekropolis (1984). Rather than simply seek to provide a realisation (a “performance”) of pre-existing texts, the members of the “Socìetas” improvise, invent and fabulate from a minimal base, attempting to create a synergy between actors and spectators, in a theatrical process whose goal is ultimately the abolition of the distinction between the two. Between 2002 and 2004, the Socìetas staged the Endogonidic Tragedy, the various episodes of which were addressed to the communities of the different European cities in which they were staged, including Berlin, Brussels, Paris, Rome, London, Strasbourg, where each episode was set. The notion of performance as movement within a public space emerges most clearly in the theoretical writing of Claudia Castellucci, in her School of Theatrical Descent (1995) and Stoa: School of Physical Movement and Philosophy of Cesena (2008), where she argues that theatre should rediscover its archaic roots in civic ritual and ceremony, in a theatre where the individual body would become part of a communal ethos.

 

Postmodernism:

An Annotated Bibliography

 

Postmodernism is a concept, complex, amorphous and, for many, replete with internal contradictions, its creative writing ‘quarrelsome, abundant, various’ (Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Towards a Postmodern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, p. 248), yet it has come to provide both the dominant paradigm within contemporary cultural theory and the most important conceptual framework for our understanding of recent literature. The term was first used by American critics seeking to demarcate new writing in North and South America from the dominant tradition of European Modernism. The key texts in this re-evaluation were Irving Howe’s essay ‘Mass Society and Post-Modern fiction’ (which first appeared in Partisan Review in 1959, and is reprinted in Decline of the New, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970, pp. 190–207), Harry Levin’s ‘What was Modernism?’, in Refractions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 271–295), Leslie Fiedler’s ‘Cross the Border – Close the Gap: Post-Modernism’, published in The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler, two volumes (New York: Stein and Day, 1971, vol. 1, pp. 461–485), Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1966), John Barth’s ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’ (The Atlantic Monthly, August 1967, pp. 29–34) and Frank Kermode’s ‘The Modern’ in Continuities (London: Routledge, 1968, pp. 1–32).

 

What these critics were trying to identify was not only an original type of literature but an entirely new attitude to literary culture, one that rejected, as Fiedler explained in his 1965 essay ‘The New Mutants’ (in Fiedler, 1971, vol. 2, pp. 379–400), notions such as ‘cultural continuity and progress’, indeed the entire ‘bourgeois-Protestant version of Humanism’ (Fiedler, pp. 383 and 385). In its place, young American writers such as John Barth, Ken Kesey and Thomas Berger were seeking to create work that was, as Howe argued in ‘The New York Intellectuals’ (in Howe, 1970, pp. 211-265) ‘forceful, healthy, untangled’, a literature which ‘chooses surfaces against relationships, the skim of texture rather than the weaving of pattern’, and which seeks to ‘collapse aesthetic distance on behalf of touch and frenzy’ (Howe, pp. 254 and 256).

 

In his The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Towards a Postmodern Literature, Ihab Hassan attempted to give the Postmodern aesthetic a lineage, which ran from the Marquis de Sade to Kafka, Genet and Beckett. For Hassan, Postmodernist literature centred on ‘the two accents of silence’: ‘the negative echo of language, auto-destructive, demonic, nihilist [and] its positive stillness, self-transcendent, sacramental, plenary’ (Hassan, p. 248). In his subsequent Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of the Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), the American critic formulated a typology of the Postmodern, describing literature which ‘cancels itself’, ‘deprecates itself’, ‘becomes a self-reflexive game’, ‘orders itself loosely, even at random, and refuses interpretation. Fancy pretends to be fact. And vice versa’. For Hassan, the Postmodern, vis-à-vis Modernism, is more playful, more self-conscious, and expands upon the tropes of urbanism, primitivism, technologism and eroticism that underscored that earlier movement. As he explains, ‘postmodernism may be a response, direct or oblique, to the Unimaginable that Modernism glimpsed only in its most prophetic moments’. ‘Post’, in Hassan’s scheme of things, suggests a distinctive qualitative change in the identity of contemporary culture rather than a simple chronological development (Hassan, pp. 21 and 47). The most influential analysis of this culture was Jean-Francois Lyotard’s highly influential La Condition postmoderne (published in 1979, and translated into English as The Postmodern Condition, in 1985). Lyotard defined Postmodernism as ‘an incredulity towards meta-narratives’, those systems of explanation, which range from Kantian Idealism to Marxism, that seek to make sense of human behaviour in terms of a single, monolithic methodology. In the Postmodern period, in societies dominated by fragmentation of discourse, the de-centring of subjectivity, and the proliferation of (manipulated) aesthetic forms, such systems have lost both their intellectual credibility and their hermeneutic validity (Lyotard, 1985, p. xxiv).

 

In its break from mainstream Modernism, postmodernist writing combined literary theory, philosophy and aesthetics into a relationship that was often exhilarating, at other times unconvincing.   Simon Malpas offers an overview of the multiplicity of the postmodernist aesthetic in The Postmodern (London: Routledge, 2004), as does Tim Woods, Beginning Postmodernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999, reprinted 2002), Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Towards a Postmodern Culture (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1988), and the volume by Matei Calinescu and Douwe Fokkema, Exploring Postmodernism (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1987). Naill Lucy gives a selection of the key theoretical texts in his Postmodern Literary Theory: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).

 

As a specifically literary category, Postmodernism has received widespread treatment by scholars moving across the related terrains of Anglo-American and European writing. Those with a European focus include Christopher Butler, After the Wake: An Essay on the Contemporary Avant–Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), Colin Falck, Myth, Truth and Literature: Towards a True Post-Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987), edited by Edmund J. Smyth, Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction (London: Batsford, 1991), edited by Hans Bertens, International Postmodernism: Theory and Literary Practice (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997). In his World Postmodern Fiction: A Guide (London: Longmans, 1993), Christopher Nash offers a survey of some of the major literary texts, as does Stephen Baker, The Literature of Postmodernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000) and, with a greater focus on the contemporary, the essays included in Thomas Vaessens and Yra van Dijk (eds), Reconsidering the Postmodern: European Literature beyond Relativism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) and Andrew Hammond, The Novel and Europe: Imagining the Continent in Post-1945 Fiction (Palgrave, 2016). Postmodernism acted both as an imperative and an analytical category.

 

Those who most enthusiastically formulated the aesthetic of Postmodernism argued for the abolition of distinctions between high and popular literature, foregrounding, as in Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington; Indiana UP, 1986), the centrality of film, television, pop music and street art to contemporary culture. This hybrid framework is further explored in The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature, edited by Brian McHale and Len Platt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), which offers a wide-ranging collection of essays that goes well beyond the apparent focus of its title to include essays on punk rock, the visual culture of Japan and the art market in the 1990s.

 

Despite differences of approach and methodology, studies of Postmodernism seek to uncover a common aesthetic, one that is suspicious of unreflective representationalism, master narratives and of all discourses that seek to foreclose the free play of subjectivity and the unpredictable trajectories of desire. In the final analysis, Postmodernism was, even in its most pointedly political form, essentially a ludic movement. Its province was not high-moral seriousness but deflationary critique, not ideological rigour but playful irony, not spiritual abstinence but consumption and jouissance, values which energised the present as they held open avenues to the future. But has postmodernism, like the owl of Minerva, who spreads its wings only at dusk, taken flight, never to return? As the 1980s and 1990s gave way to a new millennium the indications were that it had, and that the ‘post’ (a clumsy simple temporal prefix at the best of times that had us looking backwards to see what we could find in Modernism that was not self-referential, minimalist or ludic) had run its course, and we should now be reading it as a ‘pre’ to something that as yet we have no name for. In the absence of ‘that which has no name’ (other than the anodyne ‘contemporary’), it is understandable that we should want to hang on to what we have. Steven Connor, in the introduction to the collection of essays included in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), dismisses suggestions that postmodernism ‘must be nearly at an end’ (p. 1), but almost contemporaneous with the Cambridge volume appeared a further collection of essays, edited by Klaus Stierstorfer, and with a title that allowed for no equivocation: Beyond Postmodernism: Reassessments in Literature, Theory, and Culture (Berlin/ New York,Walter de Gruyter, 2003), in which some of the seminal theorists of postmodernism, Hassan, for example, look back to the past in the hope of finding something new for the future. The terminal cry of postmodernism is sounded with even greater fervour in Postmodernism. What Moment? edited by Pelagia Goulimari (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007) and in Supplanting the Postmodern: An Anthology of Writing on the Arts and Culture of the Early 21st Century, edited by David Rudrun and Nicholas Stavris (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), a work that gestures positively towards a future, indeed, towards a present, when art and literature may flourish beyond an ‘ism’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Koestler, Bricks to Babel: A Selection from 50 Years of his Writings (New York: Random House, 1980), p. 507; Malraux, afterword to The Conquerors [1949], trans. Stephen Becker (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), p. 188; Cayrol, ‘Pour un romanesque lazaréen’ in Les corps étrangers (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964), p. 201; Adorno, Prisms (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), p. 34; and Grass, ‘What shall we tell our children?’ [1979], in On Writing and Politics, 1967-1983 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 76.

[2] Lowry, Under the Vulcano (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 11; and Golding, Lord of the Flies (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), p. 188.

[3] Böll, ‘In Defense of Rubble Literature’ [1952] in Missing Persons and other Essays, trans. Leila Vennewitz (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1977), p. 127; and Böll, ‘Number Seven, Hülchrather Street’ [1971], in Missing Persons, p. 16.

[4] Calvino, The Path to the Nest of Spiders, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (New York: Ecco Press, 1976), p. v; and Quasimodo, Selected Poems, trans. Jack Bevan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 102.

[5] Osborne, A Better Class of Person: An Autobiography, 1929-1956 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 168; Conquest, New Lines: An Anthology (London: Macmillan, 1956), p. xv; Miller, Writing in England Today: The last Fifteen Years (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 13; and Larkin, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 42.

[6] Crossman, in The God that failed, ed. Richard Crossman (London: Hamilton, 1949), p. 11; and Grass, ‘Open Letter to Anna Seghers’ [1961], reprinted in Grass, Two States – One Nation? (Harcourt Brace; London, 1990), p. 93..

[7] Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, trans. Ralph Parker (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 139; and Havel, ‘On Evasive Thinking’ [1965], in Open Letters: Selected Prose, 1965-1990 (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), pp. 16 and 17.

[8] Edgar, ‘Ten Years of Political Theatre, 1968-1978’, in The Second Time as Farce: Reflections on the Drama of Mean Times (London; Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), p. 26; and Enzensberger, The Consciousness Industry: On Literature, Politics and the Media (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), p. 15.

[9] Müller, ‘Ein Brief’, in Theater-Arbeit (Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1975), p. 121; and Müller, ‘Ein Brief’, in Theater-Arbeit, p. 126.

[10] Hein and Heym in ‘Wir sind das Volk’: Flugschriften, Aufrufe und Texte einer deutschen Revolution, ed. Charles Schüddekopf (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1990), p. 207; and Milosz, Collected Poems (1931-1987), (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 88.

[11] Barth, ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’, The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 220, no. 1 (August 1967), 33; and Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus : Towards a Postmodern Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 258.

[12] Barthes, ‘The Structuralist Activity’ [1963], in Critical Essays, (Evanston: Northweston University Press, 1972), pp. 213 and 215.

[13] Kundera, ‘Dialogue on the art of the novel’ [1983], in The Art of the Novel (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 32; Pinter, Plays, 3 vols (London: Eyre Methuen, 1976), vol. 1, p. 12.; and Angela Carter, The Sadean Women: An Exercise in Cultural History (London: Virago, 1979), p. 19.

[14] Machery, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 122.

[15] Ritsos, Selected Poems, trans. Nikos Stangos (Penguin; Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 168.

[16] Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 4.

[17] Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge [1979] (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984), p. 81; Kundera, ‘Dialogue on the art of the novel’, p. 86; Herbert ‘Why the Classics’ [1967], in The Poetry of Survival: Post-war Poets of Central and Eastern Europe, ed. Daniel Weissbort (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 332; and Wolf, ‘The Reader and the Writer’, in The Reader and the Writer: Essays, Sketches, Memories (Berlin: Seven Seas, 1977), p. 200.

[18] Beckett, ‘Dante…Bruno. Vico…Joyce’, in Our Exagmination round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress [1929] (New York: New Directions Books, 1972), p. 15; and Johnson, Aren’t you rather young to be writing Your Memoirs? (London; Hutchinson, 1973), pp. 16-17.

[19] Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 141.

[20] Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel, p. 161.

[21] Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (London: Panther, 1977), p. 86; Perec, Life, A User’s Manual, trans. David Bellos (London: Collins Harvil, 1987), p. xvii; and Kristeva, ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel [1966], in Desire and Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia U.P, 1980), p. 66.

[22] Calvino, Preface to The Path to the Nest of Vipers, p. xvi; and Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1974), p. 139.

[23] Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (London; Picador, 1982), p. 204.

[24] Barthes, ‘Objective Literature’, in Critical Essays, p. 23; Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Signet, 1955), p. 5; Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal, transl. Jean Stewart (New York: Grove Press, 1969), p. 19; and Ionesco, Notes and Counter Notes, trans. Donald Watson (London: John Calder, 1964), p. 206.

[25] Beckett, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), p. 41; and Robbe-Grillet, ‘Samuel Becket, or Presence on the Stage’ [1953], in For a New Novel, p. 116.

[26] Genet, ‘Letters to Roger Blin’ [1966], in Reflections on the Theatre, trans. Richard Seaver (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 20.

[27] Vaclav Havel, ‘Second Wind’ [1977], in Open Letters, p. 9.

[28] Fo, Introduction to Knock, Knock! Who’s There? Police! in File on Dario Fo, ed. Tony Mitchell (London: Methuen, 1989), p. 45.

[29] Handke, Author’s note to Self-Accusation and Offending the Audience, trans. Michael Roloff (London: Methuen, 1971), p. 7.

[30] Bond, ‘If we were here’, in The Worlds with The Activist Papers (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 142.

[31] Barthes, ‘Objective Literature’ [1954], in Critical Essays, p. 23; Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991 (London: Granta Press, 1991), p. 301; Tournier, The Wind Spirit: An Autobiography [1977] (Boston: Beacon Books, 1988), p. 164 and 129; and Calvino, ‘The Written and the Unwritten Word’, New York Review of Books, 12 May 1983, 38-39.

[32] Ballard, Introduction to Crash [1973] (London: Granada, 1985), p. 8; and Ballard, ‘The Overloaded Man [1961], in The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1978), p. 123.

[33] Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, p. 12; and Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (Jonathan Cape; London, 1981), p. 300.

[34] Salman Rushdie and Günter Grass, ‘Fictions are lies that tell the truth’, The Listener, 27 June 1985, 14-15; Grass, ‘Writers and the Trade Unions’, in On Writing and Politics, p. 116; Grass, Headbirths, or the Germans are dying out (London; Secker and Warburg, 1982), p. 135.

[35] Thomas, Memories and Hallucinations: A Memoir (New York: Viking Press, 1988), p. 40; and Thomas, The White Hotel (London: Victor Gollancz, 1981), p. 13.

[36] ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ [1919] in T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), p. 21; and Barthes, in Image, Music, Text, ed. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 145 and 147.

[37] Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism (Bloomington: Indiana Press, 1988), p. 71; and Pasolini, Poems, trans. Norman Macafee (New York: Random House, 1982), p. 31.

[38] Bonnefoy, Le Nuage Rouge: Essais sur la poétique (Paris: Mercure de France, 1977), p. 279; and Bonnefoy, Poems, 1959-1975, trans. Richard Pevear (New York: Random House, 1985), p. 145.

[39] Celan, ‘The Meridian’ [1960], in Collected Prose, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1986), pp. 49 and 47; and Celan, Selected Poems trans. Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 43.

[40] Brodsky, To Urania : Selected Poems, 1965-1985 (Farrar, Straus, Giroux; New York, 1987), p. 3; and.Brodsky, ‘A Poet and Prose’, in Less than one: Selected Essays, (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1986), p. 188.

[41] Herbert, ‘Knocker’ in The New Polish Poetry, ed. Milne Holton and Paul Vangelisti (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978), p. 9; and Herbert, ‘Study of the Object’ [1961], from Post-War Polish Poetry, trans. Czeslaw Milosz (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 113.

[42] Hughes, ‘Crow Hears Fate Knock on the Door’, in, Crow: From the Life an Songs of the Crow (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 23.

[43] Nagy, Love of the Scorching Wind: Selected Poems, 1953-1971, trans. Tony Connor and Kenneth McRobbie (London: Oxford UP, 1973), pp. 54 and 53; and Popa, Collected Poems, 1943-1976, trans. Anne Pennington (Manchester: Carcanet, 1978, pp. 4 and 117.

[44] Ponge, The Making of the Pré [1971], trans. Lee Fahnestock (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979), p. 228.

[45] Gomringer, ‘From Line to Constellation’ [1954], in Concrete Poetry: A World View, ed. Mary Ellen Solt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), p 67; and Bense, ‘Concrete Poetry’ [1965], in Solt, p. 73.

[46] Heissenbüttel, ‘Über den Einfall’, in Über Literatur: Aufsätze und Frankfurter Vorlesungen (Munich: dtv, 1966), p. 215; and Enzensberger, The Sinking of the Titanic: A Poem, trans. by author (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), p 18.

[47] Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), p. 97.

[48] Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 34.

[49] Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Summer 1976), p. 880.

[50] Lessing, The Golden Notebook (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962), p. 488.

[51] Susan Husserl-Kapit, ‘An Interview with Marguerite Duras’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, (Winter 1975), p. 423; Duras, Practicalities: Marguerite Duras speaks to Jéröme Beaujour [1987], (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), p. 35; and Carter, The Sadean Women: An Exercise in Cultural History (London: Virago, 1979), p. 36.

[52] Wittig, preface to The Straight Mind and other Essays (New York: Beacon Press, 19920, pp. xiii-xiv; Wittig, The Straight Mind, p. 56; and Wittig, The Lesbian Body [1973] (Boston; Beacon Press, 1975), p. 9.

[53] Wolf, Cassandra: A Novel and four Essays , trans. Jan van Heurck (London: Virago, 1984), pp. 257, 258 and 270.

[54] Howard Barker, Arguments for a Theatre (Manchester, 1993), p. 71.

[55] The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald, ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (New York, 2007), p. 44.

[56] Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow, or The Nature of the Offence (London, 1991), p.176.

[57] Don Paterson, Rain (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), p. 61.

[58]Italian Poetry 1950–1990, eds. Gayle Ridinger and Gian Paolo Renello (Boston, 1996), p. 325.

[59] Eugenio Barba, Theatre: Solitude, Craft, Revolt (Black Mountain Press, 1999), p. 169.

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