Stewart Donovan

Riding the paradigm from Joyce to Cronenberg: or art, culture and politics in a millennial mood.

In his 1990 collection of essays Nothing if not Critical the art critic Robert Hughes summed up the difference between his world and that of the 1890's,

 But the real disjuncture between the 
 fins de siecle lies deeper than this.
 A hundred years ago, painting and
 sculpture were still social] dominant
 forms: they continued to supply, to an
 extent now all but lost to us, the
 visual codes by which one interpreted
 the world.

And the world now to be interpreted? Barry Sanders paints a Blade Runner future in his 1994 A isfor Ox : The Collapse of Literacy and the Rise of Violence in an Electronic Age:

 Today, we have more on our hands than
 just the end of the century.  God is 
 dead.  The author has passed away. The
 written page is being deconstructed. 
 Word processors have turned everyone 
 into ghostwriters, so that technology,
 like a hard-wired vampire, has sucked
 the very essence out of life. Look
 around.  Young people prowl the streets
 as if in mouming.  They dress entirely
 in black, like spectators waiting at any
 moment to be summoned to a funeral.

Gore Vidal in his nineties book United States: Essays 1952-1992 reminds us that as far back as 1956 he announced (reluctantly) that as a socially dominant art form the novel was dead (or at least very ill):

 One senses, too, in academic dialogues
 and explications the unstated burden of
 the discussion that, at last, all the
 novels are in.  The term is over, the
 canon assembled if not ordered, the door
 to the library firmly shut to the
 irrelevance of new attempts.  After some
 three hundred years the novel in English
 has lost the general reader (or rather
 the general reader has lost the novel),
 and I propose that he will not again 
 recover his old enthusiasm.

Notlong after this proclamation Vidal was in Rome on the set of Ben-Hur as an assistant screen-writer where he watched with interest and amusement as Stephen Boyd (Messala) played a gay scene with Charleton Heston without Heston's knowledge. William Wyler didn't want his Ben Hur to know, Vidal informs us in another of his nineties books, Palimpsest(1995), because the director feared that all that lumber might come crashing to the ground. Meanwhile, several doors down the hallway, Frederico Fellini was engaged in the new socially dominant art form, filming La Dolce Vita.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Vidal never said the novel was dead, he merely suggested that it was no longer socially relevant; like poetry, in Auden's famous lines, it "makes nothing happen: it survives/In the valley of its making where executives/Would never want to tamper, flows on south/ From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,/ Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,/ A way of happening, a mouth." But how has the novel survived? Early in the paradigm shift, in its Modernist avant-garde form it brought young Sergei Eisenstein to Paris to visit an all but blind Irishman who would soon be disappointing his friend and greatest supporter with a Work In Progress. But as Hugh Kenner pointed out in Joyce's Voices, the seeds of revolt had been sown earlier: "But with the eleventh episode, called "Sirens," something changed, and so radically that the author's staunchest advocate, Ezra Pound, was dismayed. (Would these events really lose, Pound wrote to ask, by being told in 'simple Maupassant'?" A half a century later scholars and readers still ask: Why did he write Finnegans Wake? Why indeed. To the untrained eye Ulysses was a book written by an author who had been given a million dollars and Finnegans Wake a work composed by the Irishman who had spent it. The million dollars (or its equivalent) was donated by Harriet Shaw Weaver and Kenner has a fine tribute to her in his Historical Fictions (1990). For Terry Eagleton (Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, 1995) the Wake is a form of post-colonial revenge, its author, or self, a supercharged Stephen Dedalus on steroids, packing a weapon that wasn't a gun, a rebel with a clause:

 Yeats and Synge sought to enrich the 
 English language; Moran and the Irish
 Irelanders struggled to stem its
 corrupting influence. There was,
 however, a way of combining both
 projects -of at once outstripping
 and overturning English linguistic
 accomplishments, deploying the
 language with such breathtaking
 virtuosity that you simultaneously
 took it apart.  The name for this
 alternative strategy was Finnegans
 Wake, the non -Irish speaking Irish
 author's way of being unintelligible
 to the British.  If the high-minded
 Yeats envisaged a dialogical relation
 between cultures, the camivalesque
 Joyce pressed this to the point of
 promiscuity.  This was one reason,
 indeed, why he proved so scandalous to
 the Scrutineers.  For the Leavisian
 ideology assumes an intimate relation
 between the peculiar qualities of
 theenglish language, and a
 distinctively English form of
 experience. To use English to give
 voice to non-English experience, in the
 manner of colonial and post-colonial
 writing, is then to drive a dangerous
 wedge between signifier and signified.
 Joyce turns the medium of English
 against the nation which nurtured it,
 thus reversing the colonial power
 relation at the level of discourse.
 If the cultural separatists fearthat
 the English tongue will appropriate
 their native experience, Joyce
 impudently appropriates that language
 for his own egregiously non-English
 ends. In thus estranging the English
 language in the eyes of its
 proprietors, he struck a blow on
 behalf of all of his gagged and
 humiliated ancestors.

Eagleton's observations help to explain, among other things, the argot, dialect, anger and anguish of Welsh, Kelman and the Beats of Edinburgh, they shed new light too on a Scots pioneer not bottled for export-Hugh MacDiarmuid. In his Oxford lectures, The Redress of Poetry (1995), the latest Irish Nobel Prize winner, the "king of the cats" in Yeats' phrase, pays homage to Christopher Murray Grieve(while still noting his MaGonagallish traits) and reminds us that "His linguistic overweening was hugely encouraged by the example of Joyce." MacDiarmuid, too, invented a language: he called it Synthetic Scots. Heaney points up the connection between MacDian-nuid's "act of cultural resistance in the Scotland of the 1920's and the literary self-possession of writers such as Alasdair Gray, Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead and James Kelman." Heaney could now add Irvine Welsh and his political masterpiece Trainspotting to the list. In Welsh's novel cultural resistance is also class rebellion, a rebellion made explicit when the young hero, Renton, is in court for stealing books. Here, to the relief of non-Scots readers like myself, the Scots dialect and punk argot Renton normally rants in is quickly dropped for a version of BBC English:

   -Mr Renton, you did not intend to sell
    the books? 
   -Naw.  Eli, no, your honour. They were
    for reading.
   -So, you read Kierkegaard. Tell us
    about him, Mr Renton, the patronizing
 cunt sais.
   -I'm interested in his concepts of
  subjectivity and truth, and
  particularly his ideas concerning
  choice; the notion that genuine choice
  is made out of doubt and uncertainty,
  and without recourse to the experience
  or advice of others.  It could be argued,
  with some justification, that it's
  primarily a bourgeois, existential
  philosophy and would therefore seek to
  undermine collective societal wisdom.
  However, it's also a liberating
  philosophy, because when such societal
  wisdom is negated, the basis for social
  control over the individual becomes
  weakened and ... but I'm rabbeting a bit
  here.  Ali cut myself short.

There is not much difference here between the world portrayed by Irvine Welsh and that recorded by the English working-class poet Tony Harrison, especially in poems like "On Not Being Milton"

 Read and committed to the flames, I
 call these sixteen lines that go back
 to my roots my Cahier d'un retour au
 pays natal, my growing black enough
 to fit my boots.

 The stutter of the scold out of the
 branks of condescension, class and
 counter-class thickens with glottals
 to a lumpen mass of Ludding morphemes
 closing up their ranks.  Each swung
 cast-iron Enoch of Leeds stress clangs
 a forged music on the frames of Art,
 the looms of owned language smashed
 apart!

 Three cheers for mute ingloriousness!

 Articulation is the tongue-tied's fighting.
 In the silence round all poetry we quote
 Tidd the Cato Street conspirator who wrote:

 Sir, I Ham a very Bad Hand at Righting.

Like Harrison's working class narrator Weish's character also knows that language is class. But like MacDiannuid and the wily Joyce before him, Welsh knows too that there is a long hidden and long denied racial cardthe card before class- and the one made widely visible by Jim Sheridan in his controversial film In The Name ofthe Father (controversial in Britain and Canada but nowhere else) and by his compatriot Neil Jordan in The Crying Game. The one political passage that was able to make it into Danny Boyle's film is also one of Weish's most pointed-a testament to the post-colonial undercurrent of the text:

 It's nae good blamin it oan the English
 fir colonising us.  Ah don't hate the
 English. They're just wankers. We are
 colonized by wankers.  We can't even
 pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture
 to be colonized by.  No. We're ruled by
 effete arseholes.  What does that make
 us?  The lowest of the fuckin low, the
 scum of the earth.  The most wretched,
 servile, miserable, pathetic trash that
 was ever shat intae creation.  Ah don't
 hate the English.  They just git oan wi
 the shite thuv goat.  Ah hate the Scots.

Cape Bretoners might not want to have Irvine Welsh as an artist in residence at the Gaelic College but, then again, they might. It is one thing to fetishize Scots culture in haggis westerns like Braveheart and Rob Roy to ease the angst of a forgotten Scots diaspora, it is quite another to deconstruct the class ridden and riven world of post-modem Edinburgh.

In the late 1980's Hugh Kenner suggested that the Island, Britain, was sinking. It now seems that if (or rather when) it does indeed go down it will be missing its stem orbow. Tom Naim, the Scots Nationalistcultural and political critic, believes England (yes, England) will rise again. Naim's essay in the London Review of books was the last of a series on the impact of the Cronenberg-like-Crash that took place in the Pont de l'Alma underpass. Others who wrote on Britain's September of 97, included the unremarkable Ross McKibbin and the insightful Ian Sinclair. ButNaim was the best and his insights suggest that while the England of Philip Larkin and Geoffrey Hill may be going, going, another country, one known to D.H. Lawrence and Mike Leigh, might surface:

 What the crowds wanted was enigmatic,
 but it felt as though they had gathered
 to witness auguries of a coming time,
 without knowing what these might be. 
 England is due a future-one that can
 smartly exorcise the ghosts of Balmoral
 and Windsor.  During the years 1992 to
 1997 that wish for a future had become
 locked onto the figure of Lady Diana. 
 But the fixation was temporary.  Her
 death released it, and since 31 August
 it has been walking the streets.
   It may be the world of Edmund Burke
 which lies rotting in the grass: the
 deeper identity structure founded by
 Great Britain's defeat of the French
 Revolution.  The scholarship of David
 Cannadine and Linda Colley has shown
 how this was done and how vital the
 monarchy was to the process.  The
 rigged royal institution was the
 mechanism for weening an unruly,
 half-revolutionary people away from
 its own past.

Mike Leigh's award winning film Secrets and Lies (1997) hints at one dimension of the future that Naim believes might come, but this is not to say that the old one will go out with a whimper: what do we make, for instance, of Jeremy Lewis, Cyril Connolly's critically acclaimed biographer (yes, accl aimed)? Here he is in the October/November(I 997) issue of the London Magazine (not, exactly, an obscure journal):

 Connolly had met Jean Bakewell in Paris
 in 1929; she was eighteen, and came
 from Baltimore, and they were married
 the following year.  A dark,
 strong-featured girl with the looks of a
 genial Red Indian squaw [ my italics];
 Jean was, by all accounts, warm, witty
 and extremely good company; but she was
 a heavy drinker, inclined to
 stoutness....

It would be unfair to link Lewis with the Duke of Edinburgh and his infamous reference to the Chinese as a slant-eyed people. Lewis has, perhaps, more in common with John Ford who (the late apologia and apologetics of Cheyenne Autumn aside) could never regard the Native peoples as First Nations; for Ford the land was, in Robert Frost's now notorious phrase, "unstoried, artless, unenhanced" ("The Gift Outright"). American scholars have begun the long overdue deconstruction of Hollywood's demonising of Native Americans. Michael Rogin in his seminal essay for The London Review of Books: " How Dirty Harry beat the Ringo Kid" traces the genocidal wanderings of John Wayne through "Indian country", a land made mythic and popular by John Ford (that quintessential Irish-American, remember The Quiet Man) but a land too, Rogin reminds us, that existed outside the stage sets of Death Valley:

 The wartime Hollywood assembly-line
 turned out Westerns and war films
 interchangeably; over one-third of
 the movies made from 1941 to 1945
 were war-related.
  Wartime Westerns and warfilms made
 John Wayne increasingly visible.  They
 established the foundation for his
 great years of movie stardom, the
 years of the Cold War consensus....
 Neither cowboy nor soldier, John Wayne
 was the right star to restore the
 frontier to the country which had lost
 it in history more than half a century
 earlier and in film during the Great
 Depression.  More than any other single
 man, John Wayne would reconnect urban
 and suburban, blue and white collar,
 Cold War America to its in thic
 national past.
 From 1948 to 1968, the years of John
 Wayne's eminence, war films and
 Westerns were America's most popular
 entertainment.
 Every year from 1949 to the eve of
 US defeat in Indian country'
 in 1974, John Wayne was among
 Hollywood's ten biggest boxoffice
 stars.... In Red River, a
 black-hatted John Wayne,
 fanatically given to driving his men,
 repudiates his 'son' and stalks him
 with intent to kill after the younger
 cowboy takes control of the cattle
 drive.In naming the avuncular Abilene
 cattle-buyer 'Melville', [Howard]
 Hawks alludes to Moby- Dick; a few
 years later in The Searchers, obsessed
 with the 1-ndians who had massacred his
 brother's family and abducted his niece,
 John Wayne repeated his Captain Ahab
 role.  Roberts and Olson [John Wayne:
 American, 19971 remark that if Tom
 Dunson had been homicidal in Red River,
 Ethan Edwards had upped the ante to
 genocidal'.  But along with Martin
 Pawley, the Young part-Cherokee
 civilized Indian whojoins Ethan in his
 q'uest, the audience finds itself
 caught up in the chase.  We may
 finally break with Ethan, as Martin
 does,-when, discovering that his niece
 is cohabiting with the Indian ringleader,
 he determines to kill rather than rescue
 her.  Nonetheless, the condition for our
 initial sympathy is that primal scene,
 the falsification that spawned American
 history, myth and Cold War politics, the
 massacring Indians.... The Cold War
 ideology that retrospectively justified
 Indian genocide, mythiciseci the
 permanent wareconomy, sanctioned
 Vietnam and made Orange County the
 centre of the United States was also
 responsible for its moments of great
 art.

It is a grim conclusion that Rogin offers us and while we may take some solace from David Thompson's fierce critique of John Ford's opus (Biographical Dictionary of Film, 1992) we also remember that Thompson (arguably the greatest living film critic in English) all but demolished John Huston as well- Hollywood's most liberal early film maker. All of this while he praised and still praises John Wayne as a great actor, a great artist. In his defence, Thompson was not the first to write panegyrics on the Western, the young critics of Cahier du Cinema (Francois Truffaut among them) granted John Ford the status of an artist if not an auteur- a title they rightly reserved for Howard Hawks. Charting the progress of the 'new' socially dominant art form is problematic: we may, as Hugh Kenner recently remarked in the Toronto Star, be able to ignore the politics of Ezra Pound and still appreciate the art in The Cantos, but it is not so easy to slide into aesthetics when it comes to plumbing the depths of a Leni Riefenstahl or a John Ford. Still, there is hope that "cineliteracy"-the term coined by Charles Eidsvik in his Cineliteracy: Film Among the Arts, 1978,-is successfully making its way among the eight thousand or so courses in film and television now available at over 600 American colleges and universities.

In his note on the novel from 1956 Gore Vidal offered some hope for would be novelists: "The novel is left only the best things: that exploration of the inner world's divisions and distinctions where no camera may follow.... It may well be that, with unpopularity, the meretricious and the ordinary will desert entirely, leaving only the devoted lashed to the mast."

Martin Amis has been lashed to the mast for some time. And before we voyage any further as Canadian post-colonials, we might as well hang our heads and confess that literary self-possession still belongs, above all, to the English. It explains why Auden (pretending to be an American the way Henry James pretended to be British) didn't care when he was told that his name appeared on a particular page of Finnegans Wake. Martin Amis' The Information (1995) was a long time coming. And the bad boy of British letters' 1986 attack on Joyce and Ulysses in The Atlantic can now be seen as the confessions of a fifth columnist. Amis called Joyce a spoiled brat because he believed the million bucks he got from Harriet Weaver destroyed the Irishman's need for an audience. He wrote only for himself once he got the cash. Almost a decade after this declaration, the son of the author of Lucky Jim was accused by critics, fans, and fellow novelists of the same thing. Indeed he did accept the cash, the lolly as they say in England, and a fine chunk of change it was too. But given the quality of the product who's to say the book's not worth it? The Information is, among other things, the greatest stylistic tour de force (and much of the time farce) in the English language since Ulysses. Two passages by way of opening the catalogue, both descriptions of Chicago, Saul Bellow's city (no longer):

 They heaved on, five yards per heave,
 along Kennedy Expressway.  The five
 lanes coming into the city were all
 blocked and the five lanes going out of
 the city @ere a] I blocked; between
 these two great metal Mississippis of
 steam and suffering, of spiritual
 durance, there lay a railtrack on which
 brightly lit and entirely empty trains
 sped past in both directions.  No one
 ever used the trains.  They had to be
 in the cars.  Americans were martyrs to
 the motors; autos were their
 autos-da-fe.  Never mind what cars have
 in store for us globally, biospherically;
 carss-our cars-hate us and humiliate us,
 at every turn, they humiliate us.... And
 then at last they were in the city or
 under the city, with its halls and chutes
 and stanchions of steel, and you were a
 lab-rat in the rat-trap of steel Chicago.
 Richard suddenly felt that American cities
 were the half-moutfis of lower jawbones
 and held a monstrous acreage of wedged
 dentition; with those big teeth they have
 no wonder their gums whine with permanent
 maintenance and repair, all the deep
 scaling and root-canal work, the cappings,
 bridgings, excruciating extractions. 
 Now they were engulfed by the sounds 
 of this desperate periodonture, and for
 a moment Richard's teeth felt like claws,
 seized in his gums.

Change the setting to Toronto and you have half of the script of David Cronenberg's Crash. Not a comfortable confession for Canadians and their most "livable" city, peopled by such naive citizens in 1946, that the Ontario film censors went to work on Howard Hawk's The Big Sleep: the scene where Bogart burrows under the dash for his hidden guns was deemed too frightening (or something) for the gentle inhabitants of Cabbage Town. Decline and Fall? Martin Amis has said his story is one of decline, a story about middle age: Richard Tull, the hero, is turning forty (tomorrow) and the information he receives is telling him "to stop saying hi and to start saying bye." It is a book about us (or rather some of us). It is a book, too, about the decline of Britain:

 Instead it reassumed a postwar identity
 of rationing and rent books.  Offered
 colour, it stayed monochrome; even the
 Asians and west Indians who lived there
 had somehow become Saxonized-they loped
 and leered, they peed, veed, queued,
 effed and blinded, just like the
 locals .... There were Irish families
 crammed into basements, and pregnant
 housewives chain-smoking on the 
 stoops .... They even had whores up
 there on the comer- a little troupe
 of them.

It is also a narrative, of course, about the decline of the planet, about there being nowhere else to go: "It would seem that the universe is thirty billion light years across and every inch of it would kill us if we went there. This is the position of the universe with regard to human life." And Amis' narrator also reminds us that "Each of us, after all, has the same address." And, that "Kant figured it all out, sitting in his armchair. What's the phrase? The principle of terrestrial mediocrity."

The Information could only have been written in England (with a book tour to America); it is a self-conscious post-modem text. It has a style that would have met with Joyce's approval if not Calvino's: in The Nonexistant Knight the great Italian insisted that "A page is good only when we turn it and find life urging along." Amis in New Writing (1992) went on record as to why he writes the way he does:

 Style is not an icing but an ingredient,
 perhaps the main ingredient of your way
 of perceiving things.... I don't like
 this clear-as-amountain-creek kind of
 writing, this vow-of-poverty prose....
 What I want from a plot or a structure
 is something that will let comic
 invention flow, and interesting
 situations.... What makes you an
 individual as a writer is something else,
 a kind of flow which is to do with the
 voice.  Once you get that going it's your
 job to cultivate that, not suppress it,
 and say 'wait a minute, th@s paragraph
 should not necessarily be in this book.'
 Never mind about that.  There are always
 going to be plenty of people who can
 write those formal books with nice decor
 and everything.  Anyone who has done it
 knows it's not the most difficult thing.
  The most difficult thing is that kind
 of flow.

The Information is a book about flow, it is also a book about the here and now, about the middle aged inhabitants of Wyndham Lewis'cosmo(politan) world. A world like America and America, we learn, is bad for British writers:

 They twirled right out of control,
 like Dylan Thomas and Malcolm Lowry,
 done in by dread and drink.... But
 the question is: who are they leaving
 behind?  If Americacan do that to
 frowning hookworms from middfe England,
 what was America doing to Americans 
 who, on the whole, hadn't spent three
 years at twelfth-century universities
 with Paradise Lost on their
 laps,and who had no home Counties to
 come from or go home to.  They never
 had a lifetime elsewhere to protect
 them from it, from America and the
 fever of possible change.

Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (1993), and James Kelway, How Late It Was, How Late (1994), also write aboutpeople who'veneverhad alifetime elsewhere. Martin Amis knows what's north of London: "Who was telling him that he could get Gwyn killed for a thousand- for eight book reviews! Some trog from up north would do it." We imagine the trog to be Begbie from Trainspotting beating up the hero of How Late it was, How late. This is not a digression: the Scots' demotic and post-colonial angst and argot of Irvine and Welsh is also about decline (though from these ashes something must rise). If their flow is a little harder to follow than Amis' it's because they as well have not had the luxury of Paradise Lost on their laps. All they've had is Moneypenny on the telly.

As in the work of his younger Scots contemporaries Amis too relies on sex for comedy, both high and low. Here's his anti-hero Richard and his wife excusing their lack of a sex life:

 In the early weeks-they were still all
 shy and green, finding their way-they
 explored the theme of tiredness; and
 then they reexplored it. As in "Just
 tired, I suppose" and "I suppose I'm
 very tired" and " You must be very
 tired" and "So tired." There they lay
 together, yawning and rubbing their
 eyes, night after night, working their
 way through the thesaurus of fatigue:
 bushed, whacked, shattered, knackered,
 zonked, zapped, pooped. . . As excuses
 went, tiredness was clearly a goer,
 amazingly versatile and athletic; but
 tiredness couldn't be expected to
 soldier on indefinitely.  Before very
 long, tiredness made a natural
 transition to the sister theme of 
overwork, and then struck out for
 the light and space of pressure,
 stress and anxiety.

The passage presents Amis' "style", his delicate touch that makes him such a modem master, but it also identifies his true progenitor- the Dubliner he loves to hate. His subject is not, as many have suggested, literary envy, it is, rather, survival amidst decline. It is a Cosmic, as opposed to a Divine, Comedy, and the comic preparations are heralds for Waterworld and the world of Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains: "In a million millennia, the sun will be bigger. It will feel nearer. In a million millennia, if you are still reading me, you can check these words against personal experience, because the polar ice caps will have melted and Norway enjoys the climate of North Africa."

Like Ulysses, The Information is also about the art and act of writing: it is about Literature writ big:

Consider. The four seasons are meant
 to correspond to the four principal
 literary genres.  That is to say,
 summer, autumn, winter and spring
 are meant to correspond (and here
 I list them hierarchically) to
 tragedy, romance, comedy and satire.
 Close this book for a second and see
 if you can work it out: which season
 corresponds to which genre.
 It's obvious, really, once you've got
 comedy and tragedy right, the others
 follow.

Part of Amis' authority lies in his ability to effortlessly bring us in and out of his house of fiction and yet still have us convinced that danger -high realism-is both near and lethal. How easily we suspend our disbelief is a tribute to the tone of his text. Like Steme in Tristam Shandy the narrator confesses to having difficulty with representation (in Amis' case it always concerns women) but unlike that earlier Irish master, his pages are never blank, though they are often black.

The Information is not epic but mythic, and its territory is the city and the mind: a Freudian labyrinth of dreams, desires and thought. Can Richard Tull- obsessed by literary envy- really get gangsters to beat up his friend Gwyn? Do characters as morally complex and, yes, sympatheticand pathetic- as Richard behave this way? This too becomes a problem of presentation, or rather representation, but he solves it in the same way the young Tarantino does in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. In the opening of Reservoir Dogs, the dogs (ruthless killers) consider the merits of tipping waitresses as one of them does not tip on principle. The social debate that follows is satirical, intellectual and comically disarming as these 'gentlemen/businessmen' head out for their days 'work'. After having civilly broken bread with each other they slaughter and/ or torture innocent passersby, policemen and finally each other. But we still identify with these characters because Tarantino has rendered them as fully realized human beings and not caricatures. Similarly, in Pulp Fiction, two killers engage in moral debates about social justice, the presence of grace, and the customs and social mores of different, non-American, societies. All of this before and after they have blown away middle class college kids flirting with a world they imagined they knew.

Like Quentin Tarantino and David Cronenberg, Martin Amis' imagination is partly fuelled by the world of violence, his early novels are a testament to this, as is his latest work, Night Train (1997). What does this violent world of the imagination have to do with the real world Barry Sanders so painstakingly records inA is for Ox? Fact: "Since 1990, 60,000 people in this country [the United States] have been killed by handguns, more than all the Americans who lost their lives in Vietnam." Fact, reel world: "Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Jean-Claude Van Damme are fully realized terminators representing the new, pumped-up ideal of human agency as interpreted by popular culture. They represent socially acceptable, larger-than-life gang-bangers." While it is true that Irving Welsh's Trainspotting opens with a comic paean to Van Damme, are the actions on screen of the Belgian-body-builder-tumed-ersatz-orientalAmerican socially acceptable on the streets of Edinburgh? The behaviour of that home grown Scots character without a fuse, Begbie, suggests that it exists in its own form but does this make it acceptable or just expected? Andrew O'Hagan in his critcally acclaimed book The Missing, 1995 (inspired by the two- year- old child, James Bulger, abducted from a mall in Liverpool and murdered by two ten-year-olds in 1993) has the following passage early on in his story:

Our America was from television, and from
 films shown on television.  I remember
 the afternoon some godly electrician
 brought the huge colorthing into our
 lives.  We lived then in ahousing project
 outside Glasgow.  We were inside this
 day, inside out of the rain, and fooling
 around with plastic guns.  The televison
 set was twenty-six inches square. 
 It looked to us like a cinema screen.
 My mother told the electrician he'd made
 a mistake; we didn't order a color
 television. We waited behind her skirts,
 transfixed.  We were dying to plug it in.
 The man was certain; it was definitely
 for us.  My father had ordered it. It was
 rented from a place called Harris's-an
 electrical shop in a town just up the
 coast. We would travel there by bus every
 few weeks to pay what we owed on the
 telly.  So it was ours to watch. My father
 came in from work and switched it on. 
 We dissolved in and out of innocence in
 front of that television.  It pushed our
 capacity for wonder to the very hilt; like
 nothing else, it offered a heightened
 sense of glamour and human variety; and,
 in the end, it educated us in the multiple
 arts of falsehood.  We loved our
 television, though it may have taught us
 new ways to hate.
 That was the beginning of our America. 
 We grew up with it.

Andrew O'Hagan was bom in 1968, a true child of the electronic age. His book is about the missing-children as well as adults-and it is a sad, frightening and moving chronicle about our modern world and the forbidden cities we call home, where parks are dangerous and sidewalk play is shunned for fear of loss. Dismayed by a public and officialdom sickened with desire for revenge, O'Hagan recalls his own childhood in all its Goldingesque glory and horror. He recalls how at the age of eight he and some other children beat and almost drowned a toddler: "We got him to sit down in the marsh, and started trying to press him in deeper with the poles. He was crying, and soaking, and we would cuddle him better then put him back in. We didn't know what we were doing, I think, but we knew it was dangerous and it was giving a dangerous thrill." The boy is not killed but taken home, O'Hagan and his friends pretending to the parents that they saved him from drowning. He continues:

 One or two of the boys assiduously
 built bridges between this sort of
 behaviour and the ways of adult crime,
 but the great majority did no such
 thing. They were never perceived to be
 problem kids, just kids who sometimes
 went too far with things.  They grew up
 and mostly forgot this aspect of what
 it was like being a child, and they
 didn't take it along with them. That
 was the norm.

O'Hagan's book is not exclusively about children, about The Lord of the Flies. It also concerns the world of adults who go missing, whether by abduction or by choice. Most of those who go by choice are women, or rather girls, girls from the pages of Joyce Carol Oates' Foxfire, girls who can't take it at home and school, girls who've had enough, "when the burning excitement of childhood had turned into the routine angst of adolescence." O'Hagan never returns directly to television to comment, to pass judgement, but he uses the blue light of tv and the aerial towers as recurring images, symbols of lost and anonymous lives connected, falsely re-tribalized if you will, in the urban wastelands we call home.

It may be fanciful to believe that as America recedes further into third world status, it will-or should lose-something of its cultural influence. But violence is the staple of action movies, so adored by the young as Sanders stresses, and this influence may not recede as quickly as we might hope. This may seem overly harsh or border on demonizing a place where people are trying their best to get on with life, on with surviving. But it is well to remember that the L.A. of Tarantino is not the New York of Woody Allen, Tarantino is not ghettoized, his camera includes all space and all class. In his latest film, Jacky Brown, the climax, the money exchange, takes place in the largest mall in America. The superficial aspects of American culture pervade our own, they make us feel the same as them even though (when we grow up) we know we are not. As 0 Hagan remarks "the good and bad thing about malls-is that you have to come out the other end sometime. It's like coming out of the cinema, or out of an especially sexy dream: you're suddenly there in the world you actually live in". And America is not our world, is it?

To return to Martin Amis. The world of violence, the landscape of Amis' earlier books haunts The Information. Even if Richard Tull's envy never quite reaches the dark depths of an lago, the villains of the book, in their sincerity and terror, still convince us that Richard does indeed have a dark side. But how seriously are we to take Richard, he is after all is said (so little is done) a comic figure, pathetic not tragic. It is, again, part of Amis' great achievement that we identify with this sad excuse for a character, even though we know that we are being manipulated.

Born amid the controversy of cash and fame, this great book has not yet been given the critical recognition it deserves. Like Ulysses but unlike Lolita it will slowly develop a following, a following which is not the long line Amis' fans desire. They prefer the master of the dark brood, the author of Dead Babies, Money, The Rachael Papers, Times Arrow and, most recently Night Train. Could this middle aged enfant terrible have another Ulysses in his satchel or, possibly -God help us- a Home county's Finnegans Wake?

Gore Vidal's prediction (or hope) that with unpopularity the meretricious and ordinary novelists would give up the trade and go home does not seem to have been prophetic. The plethora of fat nineteenth century novels, regional books written by folks from the urban centers, or those 'historical' (hysterical) novels freudinizing our ancestors seem to be getting all the attention these days. We all know them so there's no need to print names. Almost all of these novelists write as if Woolf, Joyce or Nabakov never lived. Is it that we simply live in a poor critical time (Hughes)? Or is our fear of the loss of literacy (Sanders) our justification for the printed word, no matter how poorly it is packaged? Or is it simply that people are writing this way for the same reason that, as McLuhan observed, they strip the paint off old fumiture-an act of nostalgia, an attempt to connect with the past?

Connecting with the past while remaining completely contemporary in expression is a delicate and demanding task, yet it is exactly what Bernhard Schlink has done in his small masterpiece, The Reader (1995, translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway, 1997). What makes Schlink's achievement even more remarkable is his subject-German guilt and the Holocaust. How do you present something uncliched and unhackneyed on this subject post Primo Levi, Gunter Grass, Jerzy Kosinsky, Eli Weisel, Geoffrey Hill or Steven Speilberg, to mention a few?

Schlink's plot is simple. On the frame of what we think is a Bilddungsroman, a novel about a young man's coming of age sexually, Schlink places the superstructure of post-Holocaust German guilt. This alone is not enough to make the book special. It is- above all else- the style that matches and makes the content of this story what it is. Amis, who has written a Holocaust book of his own, Times Arrow objects, as we have seen, to "clear-as-a-mountain-creek kind of writing, this vow-of-poverty prose." It is difficult not to agree with Amis, yet in Schlink's case, as with Hemingway before him, the style determines the subject as much as the subject determines the style.

Part 0 e of The Reader focuses on the love between the teenage boy, Michael, and the older woman, Hanna:

 Since our nights together on the
 trip, I had longed every night to feel
 her next to me, to curl up against her,
 my stomach against her behind and my
 chest against her back, to rest my hand
 on her breasts, to reach out for her
 when I woke up in the night, find her,
 push my leg over her legs, and press my
 face against her shoulder.  A week alone
 at home meant seven nights with Hanna.

Hanna leaves her young lover and the town without explanation at the end of Part One and when Michael next sees her years have passed: he is a law student, she is standing in the dock, a former member of the SS and a camp guard accused of Nazi war crimes. Michael is at the courtroom because his law professor has made this case the subject of a seminar. The case concerns a group of Jewish women who were locked in a church after a forced march from a concentration camp near Cracow. The allies bomb the town, the church goes up in flames, the doors are locked and all but two, a mother and a daughter, are burned to death. The state wants to find someone who was in charge, several of the other women in the dock accuse Hanna, one says that she wrote the report. Hanna admits to having done so, but Michael knows that this is not possible because Hanna is illiterate:

 If Hanna's motive was fear of
 exposure-why opt for the horrible
 exposure as a criminal over the
 harmless exposure as an illiterate?
  Or did she believe she could escape
 exposure altogether?  Was she simply
 stupid?  And was she vain enough, and
 evil enough, to become a criminal
 simply to avoid exposure?
 Both then and since, I have always
 rejected this.  No, Hanna had not
 decided in favor of crime.  She had
 decided against a promotion at Siemens,
 and fell into a job as a guard.  And
 no, she had not dispatched the delicate
 and the weak on transports to Auschwitz
 because they had read to her; she had
 chosen them to read to her because she
 wanted to make their last month
 bearable before their inevitable
 dispatch to Auschwitz.  And no, at the
 trial Hanna did not weigh exposure as
 an illiterate against exposure as a
 criminal.  She did not calculate and
 she did not manoeuvre.  She accepted
 that she would be called to account,
 and simply did not wish to endure
 further exposure.  She was not
 pursuing her own interests, but
 fighting for her own truth, her own
 justice.  Because she always had to
 dissimulate somewhat, and could never
 be completely candid, it was a pitiful
 truth and a pitiful justice, but it
 was hers, and the struggle for it was
 her struggle.

Michael wishes to intervene for Hanna, to show that she could not have written the report and does not deserve the life sentence she eventually gets. He is thinking about going to see the judge to explain matters, but before he does this he seeks advice from his father, a professor of philosophy who lost his job in Nazi Germany because he taught Spinoza:

 When he answered, he went all the way
 back to the beginnings.  He instructed
 me about the individual, about freedom
 and dignity, about the human being as
 subject and the fact that one may not
 turn him into an object.  "Don't you
 remember how furious you would get as
 a little boy when Mama knew better
 what was good for you?  Even how far
 one can act like this with children is
 a real problem, but philosophy does
 not concern itself with children. It
 leaves them to pedagogy, where they're
 not in very good hands.  Philosophy
 has forgotten about children."

His father recommends that he talk directly to Hanna, but Michael is unable to do this so he goes to see the judge instead. The judge is delighted to see the young law student and after reminiscing about his own youth he lets Michael go, the subject of Hanna never arises. Just before the judge stands up to say goodbye Schlink inserts a small descriptive paragraph that is emblematic of the novel's style and narrative pace, its symbolic and metaphysical movement: "The window was open. In the parking lot, doors were being slammed and engines turned on. I listened to the cars until their noise was swallowed up in the roar of the traffic. Then children came to play and yell in the emptied parking lot. Sometimes a word came through quite clearly: a name, an insult, a call."

In his famous short story, "Tbe Big Two-Hearted River", Hemingway describes his hero, Nick Adams, fishing, making camp, eating and smoking. That is it. And the style is the polished white pebbles in a brook Hemingway style, the one he became famous for, the one everyone-yes, everyone- tried to imitate at some point or other throughout most of this century. What these imitators missed about the famous style was its resonance. Nick Adams renders meaning and purpose to simple actions in the north woods of the United States because he has just participated in the single greatest slaughter of human kind in recorded history-World War One. So when Bernhard Schlink's children come to play in the empty parking lot the names, insults and calls all reverberate throughout the land of the holocaust, the world of German guilt generation after generation. A children not forgotten by philosophy.

It is children that mosts concerns Barry Sanders in A is for OX, children deptivedof orality: "Orality makes social and emotional development possible. As many psycholinguists have argued, one's basic perception is molded by speech." Sanders argues that the end of orality means the death of literacy and this, he insists, robs us of the self as we have come to define it from the days of Gutenberg. He relates the following story:

 A small boy who had normal hearing
 but deaf parents, remained indoors
 most of the time because of a severe
 case of asthma.  His parents, who
 communicated with him in American Sign
 language, placed him in front of the
 TV set every day so he could learn
 English.  By age three, he could sign
 with ease, but could neither understand
 nor speak English.  After studying this
 child for years Moskowitz reached the
 only conclusion possible.  Just as
 bottles of poison come banded with
 skulls and crossbones, her conclusion
 should be plastered across every TV
 set. She writes: "A television set does
 not suffice as the sole medium for
 language leaming because,even though
 it can ask questions, it cannot
 respond to a child's answers. A child,
 then, can develop language only if
 there is language in her environment
 and if she can employ that language to
 communicate with other people in her
 immediate environment."

Sanders raises many disturbing points about McLuhan's once sleeping giant that is now fully awake: "the average child from the ages of six to eighteen will have watched sixteen thousand hours of television". His book is about the impact of tv, film and computers, and there is much that is familiarto us, the legitimate charges against violence and sex forexample. But Sanders is primarily concerned with inner city violence, with the underclass of young gang-bangers and their cult of death. His summing up claim is convincing:

 The fact that gang-bangers cannot
 read or write very well does not
 mean much, unless we are prepared
 to understand and act on our
 understanding-that gang life is
 itself constructed from a struggle
 with literacy, as I have been using
 the term.  To be illiterate in a
 literate society is to feel both
 outside the system and at the same
 time to feel persecuted by it. As
 schools teach reading and writing
 today, young people treat literacy
 both as something irrelevant, and as
 an insurmountable obstacle. They
 have a hard time seeing literacy as
 a playful activity, because most
 young children have missed their time
 in orality, a time when a desire for
 linguistic play begins to develop. 
 Without that experience of delight 
 and joy in language, leaming to write
 looks like leaming so many rules - 
 and reading gets reduced to cracking
 an impossibly difficult code. As a
 result, young people feel that they 
 stand outside a social system that
 they perceive as both authoritarian
 and unfair.

When Sanders refers to most young children he does not mean only those of the inner city underclass, he means our children as well. Remember Andrew O'Hagan's wide-eyed wonder at the giant telly. There is aluddite buried in Sanders and not too deeply either: he suggests forming small "textual" communities to discuss the "time bomb that has already gone off'. It is one strategy for survival, for coping, but where does it leave us? The world we inhabit is post-literate so that the classroom from kindergarten to post-graduate is dominated by the image: both Neil Postman and Sanders, among others, have lamented this state and have highlighted its consequences. They are especially concerned with the underclass and the workingclass of America,butpost-literacy isdemocratic andegalitarian. Sanders' most disturbing research, his best questions, are those that focus on orality. It is an all or nothing conclusion: if orality is lost then literacy or the chance for literacy- is lost. But what about those who experience orality, the vast middle-class that makes it through the highschools and moves on to the classrooms of vocational colleges and universities? We lament their writing skills but ours were lamented too. Does their resistance to literacy mean they are incapable of critical thought, of sustained argument? Their knowledge and culture, as McLuhan predicted, is received almost totally via the image. Are they different beings from the literate dinosaurs, the surviving platypuses, crocodiles and gila monsters who continue- and will continue- to inhabit the globe? McLuhan also hinted that they were. Where does a term, a state, like cineliteracy leave literacy, the individual imagination, novelists and the lonely artist? Where does it leave education and the word? To ask these questions is to be like Joseph Heller's Yossarian from Catch 22: "Yossarian knew it was a good one because Yossarian was a collector of good questions and had used them to disrupt the educational sessions...... McLuhan knew too that he had to ask questions: " In 1936, when I arrived at Wisconsin, I confronted classes of freshmen and I suddenly realized that I was incapable of understanding them. I felt an urgent need to study their popular culture: advertising, games, movies.... To meet them on their grounds was my strategy in pedagogy: the world of pop culture."

At the end of his note on the novel for 1956 Gore Vidal confesses that as artists, as story tellers, the novelists were not the first to find themselves banished into the wilderness: "the poets long ago preceded us into exile, and one can observe them up ahead, arms outstretched to greet the oldenemy, their new companions atthe edge of the known world." Will the exile fornovelists, painters, sculptors and, to a lesserdegree, dramatists, bepermanent? Writers likemartin Amis, in theirheartof hearts, believe the novel still has mass appeal. This we all wink and nod to, knowing that it is really not the case: Vidal and his friends are right but we pretend, and the novelists, booksellers and librarians let us pretend because we want them to. The book is an artifact now in a museum called a bookstore and like museums they will always be with us, and we may (or may not) take some solace from the fact that they will always be included on the school tour. The Great Book people, of course, tell us in their cheerless way that present trends are not inevitabilities. I prefer the words of Laugh In's Goldie Hawn: "Mr. McLuhan how are you doin'?"

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