The Columbia History of the British Novel

book? History tells us that these people were saved, but the painting doesn't, and Barnes's most eloquent pages concern this terrible doubt of art. Is that golden glow a sunrise or a sunset; is the tiny ship on the horizon coming or going? Worse, is it perhaps a sunrise but not for these people? A raft could then be defined: a failed ark. And then why do the survivors in this painting look so healthy? Who are these muscled folks, where are the withered and bedraggled castaways we have a right to expect? Even the corpses look like athletes. Barnes's answer is that Géricault wants to take us 'beyond mere pity and indignation' into a realm where even the mightiest of human efforts are not necessarily vain but are always unanswered-or answered only by pitifully inadequate gestures.

There is no formal response to the painting's main surge, just as there is no response to most human feelings. Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) — how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. -975-

A lively, much-loved, unfaithful woman commits suicide, leaving her doctor-husband to mourn in the cramped but loyal way that is all his nature affords. This is the plot of Mme Bovary and also of Flaubert's Parrot, a witty and graceful work that is part novel, part stealthy literary criticism-just as A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters is part fiction, part memoir, and part art history. 'It was the fault of destiny,' Charles Bovary says at the end of his story, unwittingly assuming a sort of grandeur through the very hollowness of the phrase. Barnes's English protagonist says: 'I loved her; we were happy; I miss her. She didn't love me; we were unhappy; I miss her. There is a limited choice of prayers on offer; gabble the syllables.' Charles Bovary, however, had not read the novel he was in, and Geoffrey Braithwaite has. He is a devotee of Flaubert, a visitor of shrines and statues. He is moved by the sight of the tumbler Flaubert took his last drink from, of the handkerchief with which he last mopped his brow. For the writing of 'Un coeur simple,' where a parrot merges with the Holy Ghost in the mind of a dazed and dying servant-woman, Flaubert borrowed a stuffed parrot from the local museum. Where is it now? Well, two places in and near Rouen claim to have it, and there are still other dusty candidates. Does it matter, since surely the real parrot is in the text? No, only the textual parrot is in the text, and Braithwaite takes the elusive identity of the historical parrot as a model for many larger questions, including all the questions he cannot directly face concerning his dead wife. 'How do we seize the past?… Why should it play our game?… What knowledge is useful, what knowledge true?'

Was the stuffed parrot (whichever parrot) a symbol of Flaubert's voice, as Braithwaite likes to think, a silenced squawker, a travesty of what a writer does? Parrots, as Flaubert knew, are prone to epilepsy. Braithwaite writes notes on the animals in Flaubert's letters and novels; gives us what he imagines is Louise Colet's version of her stopping-and-starting romance with the novelist; answers what he (wrongly) takes to be 'the case against Flaubert'; gives the reader an examination; lampoons many fetishes of contemporary fiction. Barnes hides discreetly behind Braithwaite like a parrot vanishing into a description, giving his book an elusive air that neatly mimes its subject. How delicate or how serious is Barnes's mockery of the good doctor? How tender is the writer's pity for his character's flat and intractable grief? What is sure is that the writing is unfailingly sharp and often very funny. 'She was, it seems, a bit fist; though speed, of course, is always exaggerated by those standing still.' -976-

The world didn't end at Nagasaki (or in the fens of Waterland, or with the Ark, or at Rouen), but it could have, and what Maggie Gee austerely calls 'the final violence' is the subject and the resolution of her brilliant novel The Burning Book (1983). The work recounts the terminal life and times of the Ship family, a sort of cartoon assembly of dippy, strangled Englishness, the text interspersed with quotations about Hiroshima and armaments. Gee's pathos stems from the fact that even her cartoons feel pain and can die, stranded as many people must be in this particular nightmare, 'in a novel too late to be bought.' The deaths of the family, and of countless others, are followed by three black pages, an intimation of burning and mourning; but those pages in turn are followed by a chapter 'against ending': 'Always beginning again, beginning against ending.' Against the one ending feared above all, of course, but also against other unacceptable endings, against the very assumption that beginning again is always possible, as if a novel could never be too late.

Midnight's Fictions

'London is full of short stories walking round hand in hand,' the narrator says in Martin Amis's Money (1984). And not just London. The 1980s witnessed an astonishing rebirth of storytelling in British fiction. The stories might be desolate, or even insane, but there were plenty of them, and they were full of emotional or intellectual energy, untapped for generations while novelists attended to more serious matters. 'Oh dear, yes,' Forster had said, 'the novel tells a story'-a regrettable necessity rather than any sort of challenge. What vanishes in recent British writing is the note of polite regret, to be replaced by a slightly febrile excitement: everyone has a story, always has had, what are we waiting for.

This shift cannot be attributed to a single writer, but if it could that writer would be Salman Rushdie, whose Midnight's Children (1980) effected a massive, garrulous liberation in British fiction-the tall tales of Waterland, for instance, are scarcely imaginable without it. Rushdie himself declared his debt to Günter Grass ('he opened doors in my mind'), and wrote appreciatively of García Márquez, and has predictably been labeled a magic realist. The debts are real enough, but the label is misleading. Fiction for Rushdie, in Midnight's Children as in Shame (1983) and The Satanic Verses (1988), is a means of interrogating the real rather than celebrating its variety. -977-

The central fable of the early novel, a telepathic generation of 1,001 children born in the first hour of India's independence in 1947, which is also the first hour of the partition of India and Pakistan, is a metaphor for missed possibilities rather than found marvels. They are the India that might have been, the promise that difficult midnight was unable to keep. This is what the narrator calls 'the fantastic heart' of his story:

Reality can have a metaphorical content; that does not make it less real. A thousand and one children were born; there were a thousand and one possibilities which had never been present in one place at one time before; and there were a thousand and one dead ends. Midnight's children can be made to represent many things…

And again: 'Who am I? Who were we? We were are shall be the gods you never had.' That, despairing as it may seem, is the optimistic reading, and at other times Rushdie's generally cheery narrator has darker thoughts: 'Midnight has many children; the offspring of Independence were not all human. Violence, corruption, poverty, generals, chaos, greed… I had to go into exile to learn that the children of midnight were more varied than I-even I-had dreamed.'

India itself is imaginary for Rushdie, 'a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will-except in a dream we all agreed to dream.' But then the imaginary is not opposed to the real, it is a large part of it. Agreed dreams are just what countries are, India is exemplary but not exceptional, and Rushdie's later work, addressing the dictatorship in an imaginary nation that much resembles Pakistan, and the crazed redrawings of the world in which fundamentalisms of all kind indulge, continues to mingle fiction and history, or rather to confront those two forms of narrative with each other, revealing the (rather tawdry) novels that pass for historical fact, and the deep historicity of what seem to be wild imaginings.

The terrible fate of The Satanic Verses, banned in India and many other countries, burned by Muslims in Bradford, England, announces the even worse fate of its author, sentenced to death by an outraged Iranian government, and at the time of this writing still living in hiding, with round-the-clock police protection. Such a situation confirms Rushdie's own darkest intuitions. In this sprawling and bustling novel, which takes us from Bombay to South London, from Argentina to Everest, a group of monsters, humans half-turned into tigers, demons, snakes, wolves, water buffalo, meet up in a hospital, and offer a simple -978- explanation of their monstrosity. 'They describe us,' the monsters say. They: the others, the white, the normal, the officers of a homogenized culture. We might add: the tyrants, the bigots, all who care more for their own mythologies than for the discernible reality of others. 'That's all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct.' We succumb. There is passivity here and Rushdie is implicitly arguing against it, but there is also a precise evocation of how description works when it becomes effective currency, or the only currency; how difficult it is to escape even the most fantastic and unlikely identity once it is firmly ascribed to you. And once someone has a stake in the ascription.

Rushdie's fiction tells a story, but it also tells the story's story; the narrator narrates his narrating. It could not be otherwise in a world so saturated with stories, and yet Martin Amis manages to go Rushdie one better. His