Eastern European prison camp).
In Postmodernism, a work generally critical of the claims of postmodern aesthetics, Fredric Jameson nonetheless notes that indeterminate plot lines and a patchwork of allusions to past traditions (popular and 'high') in postmodern art do not proceed from simple nostalgia but rather from «resistance» to the earlier material appropriated: 'What was the delectation with a fantasy past now turns out to look more like the construction of a Utopian future.' Seen in this light of 'resistance,' Pym's often-noted revisitings of Jane Austen (seen by most critics as possessing-as Jean Baudrillard has said dismissively of Borges-only the 'discreet charm of second-order simulacra') appear in a more transgressive light, as a stealing of Austen's fire. Emma Howick, heroine of Pym's Few Green Leaves, for instance, has not only been named by her mother in the absurd hope that 'some of the qualities possessed by the heroine of [Austen's Emma] might be perpetuated'-as if one's reading somehow mutated one's genes-but also, as Jane Nardin writes in her Twayne guide to Pym, is comically 'doomed to relive a modernized version of the earlier story… the tale of a young woman who thinks she loves the socially suitable candidate for her affection [selfish Frank Churchill in Austen; selfish Graham Pettifer in Pym] but who finally discovers that she really loves an older man whose virtue is his strongest attraction.'
Yet a motive of dissimulation-common among these writers-suggests the satiric intention behind this blatant simulation of Austen's plot by Pym. Dragged into the unheroic present, Austen's comic masterpiece can only mock its own monumentality: the genial old plot drapes loosely around these reduced modern characters. Pym's updated George Knightley, for instance, is Tom Dagnall, a clergyman who features in the thoughts of several cultured characters solely as 'poor Tom.' Though his story is no tragedy on the scale of Edgar's in King Lear, Pym's 'poor Tom' does suffer the effects of being usurped by the fraud-948- ulent-a bastardized English culture if not a bastard brother. For in 1980, Tom Dagnall is an anachronism, an intelligent and well-meaning rector whose traditional duties have been subsumed by social workers, National Health Service physicians, the providers of council housing, and even American-style discount shopping centers. (None but the shabby-genteel shop at Tom's jumble sales: in 1980 the poor can afford new clothing made from hideous synthetic fabrics). Only when the eccentric Miss Lickerish dies does Tom Dagnall feel the satisfaction of being needed by his community; but it is a sad business to be needed chiefly as a speaker of words over the dead. From these depressing circumstances, Tom (like his sister Daphne and so many characters in these novels) escapes into the distant past in his quest to uncover the ruins of a 'D.M.V.' (deserted medieval village); with an absurdity he is aware of, he nonetheless sees himself as a reincarnation of the antiquary Anthony U+00EO Wood (d. 1695).
If Austen's Mr. Knightley-principal landholder near Highbury village and a person of commanding presence and rectitude besides-is the center of all authority in Emma, then 'poor Tom' Dagnall is the center of no authority at all. What is postmodern about A Few Green Leaves is Pym's draining of power from Austen's classic-especially from Austen's hero. (This is not to mention Pym's surgical removal of any heroic glamour from the auras of Shakespeare and Anthony U+00EO Wood.) Ihab Hassan has identified such subversions of canonical works as 'de-canonization,' one of his eleven hallmarks of postmodern style: '[De-canonization] applies to all… conventions of authority… a massive 'delegitimization' of master-codes, a desuetude of the masternarratives… Derision and revision are versions of subversion' (Exploring Postmodernism). In A Few Green Leaves, the marble mausoleum of the defunct family of de Tankerville, in need of constant upkeep yet the only handsome monument in a churchyard now cluttered with cheap headstones and plastic flowers, is Pym's bittersweet image of the cultured past (gorgeous but inert) and the rather decadent invitation it extends to the vulgar present: the inviting 'idea of chilly marble on a hot summer day.'
Dissimulating Portraits: Womens' Plots Beyond gender, British nationality, their shared portion of historical time, and their common tendency to view both popular and «high» cul-949- ture (past and present) with postmodern irony, these writers between the publication of Margaret Drabble's first novel (A Summer Bird-Cage, 1962) and Angela Carter's last (Wise Children, 1991) have been engaged primarily in experiments in characterization, creating their novels around exemplary viewpoints rather than experiments in form. These are portrait artists, though they work in a diversity of media and styles: the miniature or cameo (Brookner's Lewis Percy, 1989), the stylized group portrait (Pym's Quartet in Autumn, 1977), the caricature (Weldon's Life and Loves of a She-Devil, 1983), the surreal (Carter's Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman, 1972), the neo-real (Drabble's Ice Age, 1977). Byatt's two best novels have experimented with the doubleexposed portrait: in The Virgin in the Garden (1978), the boast of young Elizabeth I-'I shall not bleed'-is dramatized in more than one sense by a group of young people rehearsing a play about the first Elizabeth during England's celebration of Elizabeth II's coronation in June of 1953. In Possession (1990), the erotic secrets of two Victorian poets are literally unearthed by twentieth-century counterparts: Byatt's nineteenth- and twentieth-century couples mirror each other, for both are drawn into sexual intimacy by shared literary passions. Penelope Lively, too, double-exposes past on present: in City of the Mind (1992) the protagonist, Matthew Halland, is haunted by the history of the London buildings he must renovate or raze in order to complete his own designs, just as he must somehow redesign himself to manage his grief over the breakdown of his marriage.
Many of these novels are primarily portraits of women (Carter's Wise Children; Brookner's Hotel du Lac). Recently, there has been a tendency to expand, using group portrayals (Brookner's Latecomers [1988], about two Holocaust survivors) or a global canvas (Drabble's The Gates of Ivory [1992], in which the English playwright Stephen Cox-also a character in The Radiant Way and, A Natural Curiosity-vanishes in Pol Pot's Cambodia). Yet this shift to a wider canvas has occurred without a sacrifice of the idiosyncratic voice. In Moon Tiger (1987), Lively's narrator Claudia Hampton is writing (as she dies in a hospital bed) a 'history of the world, yes. And in the process, my own… I shall… flesh it out.' Brookner, an expert in the emblematic portraits of Watteau, Greuze, and David, is another clear example of the portrait artist, interested in the novel primarily as a vehicle of character study, as is Pym. (Once asked what novel she would bring to a desert island, Pym chose not the expected Austen novel but Henry James's Golden Bowl.) -950- Byatt, whose early fiction has an academic tendency to telegraph its message, thematizes this concern by opening The Virgin in the Garden with a scene set in the National Portrait Gallery in 1968; the disillusioned poet Alexander Wedderburn 'consider[s] those words, once powerful, now defunct, national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language, history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.' Likewise, the work of these seven novelists is a gallery of contemporary 'national portraits.' All have been intent on defining a central figure or group so powerfully that, as in a good portrait, the social and aesthetic values behind the posing of the group (the artist's, the subject's, the culture's) also are implicitly examined. Some portrait artists flatter; others are plainly or cruelly accurate or grotesquely distorting. The same spectrum between sentiment and satire is seen in these novels: most of these writers, in fact, exhibit a curious facility for portrayals that blend the satiric with the palliative and sentimental.
In 'Emphasis Added,' Nancy K. Miller has argued that a preoccupation with ironic portraiture is characteristic of fiction by women and is often accompanied by a lack of interest in dramatically «satisfying» or architectural plotting: this feminist reading of women's writing parallels a postmodern reading (which interprets the lack of interest in architectural plotting as a resistance to high modernism and its emphasis on form as function). Indeed, reviewers have sometimes judged these novels harshly because of digressive plotting or resistance to dramatic closure. In a New Yorker review, John Updike in 1976 complained of Margaret Drabble that 'she does not encompass her material; rather she seems half lost within it-mystified by her characters, ruminative where she should be expository, expository where she should be dramatic, shamelessly dependent upon coincidence, lackadaisical about locating her themes, and capable, for long stretches, of blocking in episodes devoid of dynamic relevance to what one takes to be the action.' Such criticisms could never be applied to the minimalist and tightly constructed novels of Pym or Brookner, but they have been criticized for the relentless uneventfulness of their fiction-another way to refuse Updike's expectation of 'dynamic relevance' and 'action.'
While Weldon and Carter have produced narratives crammed with glorious incident (Life and Loves of a She-Devil; Wise Children), they have done so in mockery of that expectation of a shapely plot that causes Updike's exasperation with Drabble: in both those novels the plots -951- are driven by a continuous stream of bizarre coincidence. Weldon's novel is based on a series of apparent coincidences (the seemingly unrelated mishaps that combine to destroy the husband who has rejected the 'she-devil,' Ruth Patchett). Yet it is Ruth herself-not Nemesis-who is grimly crafting this vindictive plot and meting out poetic justice. This updated
