and certainly also to Pym's) it is not surprising that these writers, daughters of wartime and its consequent austerity, have found it difficult to get out of England in their most deeply felt work. These writers share no jingoist certainty that 'there will always be an England.' They grew up with images of ruin and destruction, and came of age as novelists (Pym included) in the two decades during which England undertook to redesign itself through radical reforms: the welfare state, the comprehensive education movement. Theirs is the generation that rebuilt London and redesigned English society. It is natural that they remain interested in-committed to-the place.
Mass Culture, High Culture he middle ground between popular success and critical acclaim that all the novelists discussed in this chapter to some degree have occupied may explain two frequent targets of their irony: mass culture on the one hand and high culture on the other. Critical resistance to popular forms of narrative is implied, for instance, by several major characters (Edith Hope in Brookner's Hotel du Lac; Mary Fisher in Weldon's Life and Loves of a She- Devil) who are writers of best-selling romance novels but cannot achieve an equivalent romantic triumph in their private lives; or by such characters as Bill Potter, the Leavis-like academic in Byatt's -944- Virgin in the Garden (1978) who in a comic rage burns his daughter's treasured cache of Georgette Heyer Regency romances. In Lively's Moon Tiger (1987), Claudia Hampton (herself a best-selling historian) nonetheless feels scorn for the former lover who has made a fortune producing historical documentaries for the mass audience of television: 'By the time we have reduced everything to entertainment we shall find that it was no joke after all.' Drabble has also created characters (Charles Headleand, for instance, in The Radiant Way [1987]) who shape public opinion through television documentaries-popular entertainments no more innocent than romances, for documentaries also manipulate the mass audience primarily (though more covertly) through appeals to the emotions. Pym's references to mass culture are typically bemused and dry: in A Few Green Leaves (1980), Emma Howick notes the proximity of an automobile graveyard to the Anglican burying ground and reflects, 'Was there not something significant and appropriate about this particular kind of graveyard being opposite the church-a kind of mingling of two religious faiths, the ancient and the modern? 'A Note on the Significance of the Abandoned Motor-Car in a West Oxfordshire Village' might pin it down, she thought.'
While Angela Carter's fiction abounds in friendly references to popular forms of entertainment-the variety and specialty acts featured in vaudeville, the peep show, pantomime, the music hall, the striptease, the wild-West show, the sideshow, the séance, the circus-she is not herself providing such easily categorized performances: like other contemporary women novelists, Carter links popular culture to seductive yet fraudulent representation. In Nights At The Circus (1984), flying heroine Sophia Fevvers may well be a fake; in Carter's darker satire The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman (1972), sadistic and fantastic plot lines have been foisted on the world by a mad scientist who, like a novelist, is empowered to simulate 'reality,' defined as a theatre of the cruel in which lifelike characters serve only to flesh out and enact, under Hoffman's sadistic gaze, their own enslaving desires.
If marking varying degrees of distance from mass culture's facile promise of mindless pleasure, these novelists show an even greater distrust of high culture and high seriousness. Sensitive or bookish characters fail in these novels when they choose the emotional isolation engendered by vicarious living only in the literary or historical past: lost in their dreams, such characters fail to seize their own day. Byatt's Roland Michell in Possession (1990), for instance, researches a Victori-
-945- an poet (tellingly named 'Ash') in dusty regions of the British Library: his desk at home is dominated by a large framed photograph of the poet's death mask. In Byatt's comic climax, Roland (now, like his epic namesake, completely mad) joins a band of frenzied academics who-dignity and restraint cast aside-dig up Ash's grave. Anita Brookner's shy, expectant protagonist in Lewis Percy (1989) is likewise an academic who has great difficulty living his own life: Lewis labors over an ambitious thesis on nineteenth-century fiction ('The Hero as Archetype') while a habitual inertia causes hope to wither around and within him. In A Few Green Leaves (1980), the last novel published by Pym before her death, the rector's sister Daphne Dagnall turns even more decidedly from the here and now, pining for a primitive Greek culture glimpsed during her brief holidays in the Cyclades. Yet Daphne, who would love to be metamorphosed like her mythical namesake, can change little about her life. Comically doomed to central heating rather than the harsh sunlight of eternal summer in Greece, Daphne escapes Oxfordshire-but only as far as 'a delightful wooded common' in suburban Birmingham.
If contemporary women writers in Britain commonly set themselves at varying distances both from mass culture and from the kind of high seriousness that estranges people from the here and now, they share an equal ambivalence toward the cultural avant-garde. All write almost aggressively accessible fiction, and several (notably Penelope Lively and Angela Carter) have written with great success for children. All these writers (in Possession, even Byatt) reject modernism's privileging of innovations in technique and purity of form. They can seem almost defiantly 'un-new,' openly reusing plots and characters from their own earlier work-or even (in an implied commentary on the arbitrary nature of plot-building) stealing plots from earlier canonical fiction. What must be an intimidating literary heritage-two centuries of superlative British writing by and about women-combines with this shared rejection of high modernism (and its emphasis on new forms) to encourage the ironic replaying of traditional plots among these writers, and their frequent reincarnation of classic characters (or reassignment of classic names).
Recapitulation of characters from the literary canon may be seen, for instance, in Barbara Pym's naming against type in The Sweet Dove Died (1978): Pym's point in calling her central character Miss Eyre is apparently to stress how little her character has in common with Charlotte -946- Charlotte's heroine: Pym's Miss Eyre is a cold-hearted, aging beauty, a model of perfect grooming and a collector of Victorian objects. Her rival for the affections of an attractive younger man is Miss Sharpe, a slovenly, earnest young writer who stands as an equally false echo of Thackeray and Vanity Fair.
Angela Carter likewise specializes in ironic contact with the literary canon, although the literary monuments she parodies or appropriates are outside as well as within the insular British canon. In her most allusive novel, The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman, Carter juxtaposes plot lines and characters not only from E. T. A. Hoffman but also Voltaire (Candide), Poe, Borges, de Sade, Swift (voyage 4 of Gulliver's Travels) and American science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Carter is something of a special case in her conspicuous hospitality to vernacular, popular style; her characters are often Cockney castaways speaking the demotic English of the music hall. Yet one of Carter's lessons is that appearances can be deceiving. The colloquial can simultaneously be the 'literary,' as when Dora in Wise Children cries 'What larks' and raises the ghost of Joe Gargery in Dickens's Great Expectations. Carter's fiction achieves its energy through such superimpositions and juxtapositions. Her central characters are half-breeds (the narrator of Dr. Hoffman), freaks or frauds (Fevvers in Nights at the Circus), bastards (Dora Chance of Wise Children): literal embodiments of the clashing cultures and values (high and low, «civilized» and 'primitive,' idealized and carnal) Carter seeks to dramatize and in her last two novels (Nights at the Circus and Wise Children) even to reconcile.
Postmodernism and the «Playgiarized» Classic The strong shared element of parodic allusion in plot, characterization, and style shows the influence of the post -1960 movement in aesthetics known as postmodernism, for what Raymond Federman has termed «playgiarism» is a hallmark of postmodern style. Whether in architecture or in fiction, a chief characteristic of the postmodern is its eclecticism, its rejection of the austerities of high modernism with its emphasis on functionalism of form. Rejection of modernism is seen in these writers' hybridized texts: their forms are the collage (the alternations of viewpoint and time frame in Lively's Moon Tiger), the pastiche (the extensive selection of neo-Victorian poems and fairy tales incorporated into Byatt's Possession), the burlesque (the caricatures of male mid-life -947- crisis and feminist consciousness-raising in Weldon's Life and Loves of a She-Devil), the parody (the retelling of Austen's Emma in Pym's, A Few Green Leaves). A rejection of high modernism may also been seen among these writers when apparently realistic fictions remain pointedly uneventful (as in Brookner's Brief Lives [1990]) — so that form serves no apparent function-or when an eventful narrative is left deliberately unresolved (as in Drabble's Ice Age [1977], which concludes with its likable protagonist, Anthony Keating, indefinitely confined to an
