Modern British Writers In A World Of Fear - Essay Example

Modern British Modern British in a World of Fear Modern British 2 Modern British in a World of Fear The world that has been created since the incidents on 11 September 2001 in New York city in the United States has created a world-wide domino effect of reaction and social currents that influence all artistic efforts. Literature reflects social cultural climates that propose to influence the way in which a climate reacts to occurrences and the consequences of those occurrences to culture. In Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, a reflective style to the Victorian Era, and the use of the novel Howard’s End, written by Edward Forster, creates a historically rich undercurrent for a contemporary novel. The aesthetics of a world that is defined by the microcosm view of two families and their intellectual quarrels, allows for a socially relevant platform to comment on current life. In Millennium People, J. G. Ballard comments on a world that is reacting to a fearful climate and a paranoid atmosphere. The novel allows for a reactionary public that attacks as if cornered and wounded. In the current British fiction being produced post-2000, the underlying fear and voyeuristic pressures of anxiety that permeate society are a running commentary and cultural focus. In Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, a study is made about cultural and social connections within the example of two intellectual and culturally diverse families. Zadie Smith, a young author of Jamaican descent, creates a multi-level examination of intellectual pomposity and culturally infused choices. Competition creates a backdrop for the conflict, extolling the basis for larger conflicts that influence sociological aspects of the academic community. According to Frank Rich (2009), in a review for The New York Times, “Smith is merciless about both Howard and Monty, the fatuous postmodernist and Modern British 3 the self-satisfied capitalist alike”. In developing the two patriarchal focal points within her novel, she has created vessels for her commentary on the view from the academic world in relation to the Western world view on connectivity, in collaboration with the examples of diversity that give enrichment to that connectivity. Elizabeth Macleod Walls (2002), in an article for Rhetoric Review, discusses how the modernists were connected to the Victorian use of the family setting to examine and promote social change. She makes a comparison to the Victorian era women’s literature that used this setting to promote change that was accomplished from the depiction of the family as a microcosm of the state of the world. Issues of suffrage, critiques of marriage, and commentary on “domestic feminism” could be approached within fiction that was based on family interaction. She says that “By exploring the possibility of enacting change within the domestic space, New Woman novels generated a rhetoric of resistance within Victorian society that with some exceptions promoted change without enacting or demanding feminist revolution” (Walls 2002, p. 229-230). Walls examples Virginia Wolfe as a writer who was connected to this esthetic. Modern female writers are continuing to use this model in order examine social evolution and to promote change based on preconceptions that hold that evolution still. This use of the family, by Smith in her novel, is a device of commentary that can be translated between cultures and outside of a direct confrontation with social radicalism. As Walls (2002 p. 233) states in reference to the way in which Virginia Wolfe used her work to “promote the idea that collective human consciousness, like modern art, blends and moves together, forming one larger, collaborative of the human Modern British 4 condition”, examining the family allows for issues of the human condition to be exposed. Smith attaches her work to both the Modernist and, by the connection that the Modernists had to their influences, to the Victorians by using the work by Edward Morgan Forster, Howard’s End, as a model for the novel that she has created. Kevin Mahoney (2006) in his commentary on Smith’s work references her influences and on the overtones of the current fears that are exampled in Forster’s work then mirrored in Smith’s. Mahoney says that “Smith seems to be taking her cue from Elaine Scarry’s essay “On Beauty and Being Just” (which Zadie does acknowledge to be one inspiration for the title of this novel). Scarry’s thesis starts out with the observation Beauty leads to replication - the artist sees a beautiful bird, which leads artists to paint the beautiful bird beautifully.” The use of Howard’s End as a model for her novel allows her to explore the concept of fear and its relationship with beauty. Mahoney says that “Current day America is analogous with Great Britain at the end of the Victorian Era. This always seems most evident when you compare the popular culture of the two. Back in the Victorian era, good old Blightly was suspicious of threats from the East, and enamored of youthful American strength, (if Bram Stoker’s Dracula is anything to go by)”. The question that is posed in reference to these problems of fear and suspicion is, “Can Beauty ever be reached in an inherently unjust society?” (Mahoney 2006). In this current age, fears are centralized in ways that are built on a lack of confidence in governing parties to protect society. The American take on the world is paranoid and fearful of betrayal that lurks beneath layers of relational experiences and that nothing in the world is as it seems. Mahoney (2006) says that in modern fiction a Modern British 5 sense that “now the Federal government is itself something to be feared, and who knows what demon may be lurking amongst your friends or lovers?” inhabits the prose with a firm commentary on the underlying culture of fear that has erupted post 9/11. The influence of 9/11 has created a fear that boils underneath the surface of most of the writing that has been done since that time. The millennia has developed into a time of great struggle that affects the literary works of the time as they reflect the undercurrents that lay just under the surface of the human condition. Richard J. Williams (2004), in his book, The Anxious City, he describes Liverpool, in its current economic state and the affects to that city. He says that “its continued existence was both rhetorically and actually in doubt, and vast areas of it, from Toxteth, to Wavertree to Vauxhall, were ruinous, creating anxious space”. This community wide state of anxiety has become the atmosphere of a world that is infused with fear and trepidation. Every choice is colored by this fear. The influence of fear is a powerful motivator. Living in a society that is under threat creates a world that is nothing but foreshadowing followed by a contrasting post-something (anything that was contextually the incident that caused the fear) reaction. Since the century has turned past the year 2000, the accumulation of catastrophes, followed by news reports that are filled with sensationalism, popularized by marketing buzz phrases and ‘theme music’ associations that continue this atmosphere, promoting insecurity and a need to embody habitually voyeuristic addictions to the need to know, have infused the global community with the need to know, moreover a fear of not knowing. The social implications of creating a world that has become the ’adult’ after the Modern British 6 glow of the post World War II innocence of a burgeoning technological world, brimming with the hope of a perfected and refined future is exemplified by Dora Chance in Angela Carter’s Wise Children, as quoted by Philip Tew. Dora Chance, the narrator of Angela Carter’s Wise Children (1991), writes after seeing a film version a Midsummer’s Night Dream in which she had acted. “I understood the thing I’d never grasped back in those days, when I was young, before I lived in history. When I was young, I’d wanted to be ephemeral, I’d wanted the moment, the rush of blood, the applause. Pluck the day. Eat the peach. Tomorrow never comes. But, oh yes, tomorrow does come all right, and when it comes it lasts a bloody long time, I can tell you.” (Tew 2004, 4) This new world, reminiscent of the world during and just after the devastation of each war that preceded this time, is different in that the information available is timely and constantly barraging the senses of the public. This creates a social curvature toward a perpetuating anxiety that is invasive. Tomorrow has come. In Millenneum People (2003) by J. G. Ballard, a running commentary on the dichotomy of influential human instincts between violence and intellectualism creates a backdrop for the examination of the reaction of society against the currents of the social implications of a fearful atmosphere. According to Paul Green (2003), “Ballard deep-focuses these episodes against a sharply defined mise-en-scene of twenty-first century London life.” Green believes that this contrast creates a clean view of the new environment of social interaction. “The urban middle classes are indeed burnt out - by overwork, by colossal debt, by an overload of conflicting responsibilities and consumerist lusts, by overstretched self-expectations, by imagistic overdose” (Green 2003). Green says that these influences find their education in the protests of the 1960’s that were just a Modern British 7 practice revolution for the new needs that are overwhelming the populace. Andre Gasiorek (2005 p.42-43), in his essay, “Refugees from Time”, discusses the nature of writing in the 1990’s. He says that “the ‘postmodern modernity’ we inhabit is marked by a reflexivity that has none the less dispersed the various hopes previously associated with nascent modernity, with the result that the temporal stasis is attributed to social existence,”. He goes on to quote Neithammer as saying that this existence is seen as a “mortal life lived without any seriousness or struggle, in the regulated boredom of a perpetual reproduction of modernity on a world scale. The problematic of post history is not the end of the world, but the end of meaning” (Neithammer 1992, p. 3 as quoted by Gasiorek 2005, p. 43). However, post 9/11, this complacency has become a fear to act. Social injustice has not been faced by riotous revolution and acts of social dissent. The struggle is met with a fear to act - a fear that the power of the governing bodies exceeds that of the people, leaving them impotent and weakened by their powerless cultural state. Mahoney (2006), describes images from Millennuium people in their industrial and technological forms that refer to war-driven imagery, inciting the fearful nature of the sight of twisted metal with its capacity to disfigure and kill being present in that visual representation. He says that “A typical image from Millennium People, like the disabled-driver controls of a wrecked Saab (belonging to Markhams invalid wife) refers back to the twisted instrument panels of Crash and the cockpits of derelict Zero fighters in Empire of the Sun”. By use of the visual imagery of a man-made destruction, he keeps his commentary out of the natural world and into the created world of technology. With this device, the running commentary that exists in many of Ballard’s books is exposed as Modern British 8 he “ represents a further development of Ballards preoccupations with survival, our biological inheritance and the fragility of social infrastructures” (Mahoney 2003). Furthermore, the importance of the internal need to challenge the human capacity for danger, allows for circumstances in Ballard’s novel to evolve into a commentary on the dichotomy that exists between the humanistic need to depend on instincts of survival and the need to live in a world where survival does not depend on killing the beast, but on serving in order to pay the guy who kills the beast. The middle-class is targeted by Ballard as the object of his commentary. Mahoney (2005), says that “the author gives it a new urgency by putting Londons educated liberal middle classes at the centre of the resulting social implosion.” Ballard insinuates a reaction that has not been seen, but that has a possibility of existence after the experiences of catastrophic magnitude that create social shifts. Ballard’s “millenic revolutionary zealots are bank managers, barristers, media studies lecturers and TV producers, eagerly dismantling the spectacle of their overworked consumerist lifestyles. He is, in effect, depicting his target readership in the throes of committing cultural self-immolation” (Mahoney 2005). In this way, Ballard addresses his readers and challenges them directly. Social consciousness has deteriorated to a place where society puts metaphorical hands up and out front, attempting to create a shield between world events and the low, constant hum of daily existence. This contrasts sharply to the hand that is raised over head, rising as a voice that begs to be counted as it was raised during the revolutions of the 1960’s. Zadie Smith, in her novel White Teeth, declares that “The Book of Revelation is Modern British 9 the last stop on the nutso express” (Crowther 2005, p. 144). However, the apocalyptic world has been experienced since the turn of our most recent century by many across the world, which not only include the American victimization on 9/11, but the experience of a Category 5 hurricane that devastated the city of New Orleans, and the tsunami that killed tens of thousands in Sri Lanka in 2004. The paralyzing fear of terrorists and of natural disasters, all of which seem out of human control, has paralyzed society further into complacency in regard to speaking out against questionable acts. As literature reflects society, the conflicted emotional current created by a fearful world becomes conflicts and uprisings within the pages of literature The pervasive fear of this post-9/11 world has caused a reflection toward the commentary used in Victorian novels that would quietly influence its readers to promote social change. The use of the family by authors like Zadie Smith, and the reintroduction of subtlety in that commentary is indicative of the fearful world that waits for larger governing bodies to save them from the beasts that are stalking them in the underbrush. Conversely, there are novels available like Ballard’s Millennium People that challenge the human instincts of survival and righteousness into an observance of the capacity of the human being to act. In a world where fear is the underlying current that sparks most decisions and influences action and reaction, and even the lack of action, current British literature is infused with the environment that has been created by a diversity of cultural confusion over what the future will mean. As authors approach the world to integrate it into their work, this understanding of the prevalence of fear is understood and examined for context and purpose. Modern British 10 Bibliography BALLARD, J. G. (2003). Millennium people. London, Flamingo. BUTLER, R. (2005). Slavoj Žižek: live theory. New York, Continuum. CROWTHER, H. (2005). Gather at the river: notes from the post-millennial South. Southern literary studies. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press. FORSTER, E. M. (1921). Howards End. New York, A.A. Knopf. FREUD, S., & HUBBACK, C. J. M. (1922). Beyond the pleasure principle. International psycho-analytical library, no. 4. 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