A Short History of British and American Literature: Part 2

 

Victorian literature develops from, rather than reacting against, romantic literature, and the poets of this age (1830 to the end of the century), such as Tennyson and Browning, are the heirs of the romantics. They cannot, however, sustain the romantics' confidence in the autonomy of their own imaginations. There is no longer the same ability to create a vision of order and unity. Instead, there is a far more dominant impression of the world as fragmented, of life being too complicated and painful for any real sense of order to be found. The feeling of confusion and despair that characterizes a lot of Victorian poetry has much to do with the religious doubts and uncertainties of the period. Literature might have been explicitly secular from the late seventeenth century onwards, but it is only in the Victorian period that a certain traditional religious confidence disappears, and, with the disappearance of this confident faith in a controlling deity, the world begins to seem much more confusing, depressing, and even chaotic. In addition, society itself was becoming increasingly complex, something that is reflected in the Victorian novel. The Victorian period is the great age of the novel, possibly because the novel was the only form that could expand enough to cope with the scale and complexity of Victorian society as it, too, expanded and changed with the growth of industrialization. The great novelists of the age are Dickens and George Eliot, both of whom seek to create a full and intricate picture of a complex social world. They are fully aware of the disorder, injustices and hardships of the world they live in, yet at the same time there is a confidence in their writing that the novel can confront the whole of life. It is a confidence that subsequent novelists cannot sustain. 

 

As we move towards the twentieth century we find an increasing sense that life is overwhelmingly confusing and complicated. In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, for example in the novels of Hardy, Conrad, Joyce and Lawrence and in the poetry of T. S. Eliot and Yeats, there is a feeling that the world has become so baffling that it is impossible to make sense of it, particularly as the decline, and in many cases the total eclipse, of religious faith robs writers of any secure perspective or framework of shared values from which they can interpret and make sense of experience. The central historical event of the early years of the twentieth century is the First World War (1914-18), a war so terrifying and tragic that it seems to sum up a world that is closer to chaos than to any sane order.

 

Yet the early twentieth century is a period of extraordinary creativity in all the arts - not only in poetry and the novel, but also in music and painting, and even drama is revitalized after many years of stagnation. What this points to again is the fact that rapid social change, an alteration in the whole structure of society, almost always stimulates the production of great art. The text which perhaps best exemplifies the age is T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (1922), which presents a vision of a fractured society where the poet can find no order or consolation. As with so many works of the period it is innovative and experimental in form: it seems to be built out of fragments of poetry, reflecting a world where the artist can no longer impose confident and comprehensive control over the facts he encounters. A term often applied to the formally innovative works of this period is modernist: modernist works, such as Eliot's or Joyce's , are often difficult to read, but they become less difficult If we see that the difficulty simply enacts the problems the artist is having in making sense of the world. T. S. Eliot was an American, and at this time it makes sense to start looking at British and American literature together.

 

We could trace a lengthy history for American literature, but as far as most readers are concerned American literature really comes to life around 1850. Significant works are the essays of Emerson and the poems of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, but it is perhaps most rewarding to focus on the development of the American novel from about 1850. The most important texts in this context are Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) and Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Unlike the English novel, which emerges from and comments on a long-established society, the American novel is not immersed in society in the same sort of way. Instead it often takes the form of a symbolic journey, which can be a journey into the unknown territories of the mind.

 

American novels are often referred to as 'romances', for the writers, unlike their English counterparts, tend to turn their backs on society and go off into conjecture, dream and myth. What we witness in the second half of the nineteenth century, then, is the development of a distinctively American novel. As American literature moves into the twentieth century, however, it establishes a closer link with European culture. This is first evident in the novels of Henry James, published between 1875 and 1904, which present the lives of young American idealists and their experiences in the English social world. Later novelists such as Fitzgerald and Faulkner, while having distinctively American qualities, are heavily indebted to the example of Joyce, but it is a two-way exchange, for the American poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are domiciled in London and help shape the whole course of English poetry at this time.

 

After the modernist era, however, which can be said to come to an end in the twenties, American literature is by and large far more adventurous than British literature. It is as if British writers do not know how to advance from the experiments of the twenties, and so retreat into safer waters. W. H. Auden and Graham Greene are the two best-known names from the thirties and forties, yet neither is a writer of the first order. Throughout the fifties, sixties and seventies, the English novel, with the exception of the works of William Golding, settles down into a fairly conventional realistic pattern. Similarly, the poetry of this time, apart from the interesting work of Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney, remains unexcitingly modest.

 

In a relatively unambitious period of British literature the one exception has been in drama; the last thirty years have been an exciting period for the English theatre. There are both established dramatists such as John Osborne, Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, and newer writers such as David Hare, Howard Brenton and Trevor Griffiths who together offer an important discussion of the state of contemporary Britain. Here again the pattern that is in evidence is one of writers trying to order their impressions of a complex society undergoing change, and in Britain since the Second World War (1939-45) it seems to be the theatre that has provided the most suitable forum for discussing these changes. This is possibly because the questions that have had to be faced are political questions about the way society orders itself, and drama is the form that lends itself best to this sort of political or social debate.

 

America has also produced impressive drama in the period from 1930 to the present day, for example the works of Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller. In America though, unlike in Britain, the same period has been an equally strong one for poetry and the novel. There is the poetry of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, and America continues to be the source of the most energetic and original poetry in English, for example in the works of Robert Lowell, John Berryman and John Ashbery. Even in the realistic novel a writer such as Saul Bellow offers us the impression of an author who is exploring new territory while so many British novelists seem to be retracing familiar ground.

 

America has also set the pace in experimental fiction, as in the novels of Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon can be described as a post-modernist writer: the term suggests an experimental form of writing, which can be found in poetry and drama as well as in fiction, which moves beyond the methods of the modernists in finding a new way of writing about the experience of living in a very confusing world. It is not until the late seventies that English fiction begins to catch up with these developments, when, as in the works of Ian McEwan, D.M. Thomas and Salman Rushdie the English novel moves out of its realistic rut and begins to find fresh confidence.