The Sense of History in Malcolm Bradbury's Work

Abstract

The postmodern fiction and criticism have regarded history as an enfant terrible of our age, either treating it as a finished project or revisiting it and finding each time new associations and connotations. The cultural and literary aspects of Britain's contemporary history are lucidly and realistically depicted in Malcolm Bradbury's fiction and criticism. The two aspects of his work blend in a homogeneous mixture offering him the possibility to analyse the phenomenon both with the objective scrutiny of a chronicler and with the inventive, ludic quill of the writer. What we aim is to analyse the manner in which postmodern critical theory reconsiders history as an abstract concept but also as a scriptural recording and the manner in which literature has registered all these phenomena in a more or less realistic manner, in a parodic or metafictional manner. Our paper also aims at presenting the manner in which his critical works registered the history of England and America decade by decade, the manner in which he theorized upon the literary principles that helped the making of a new type of fiction which cannot evade history, but also the manner in which his novels represent vivid, realistic portraits of the age they depict and the manner in which they manage to create characters that are a perfect reflection of the age they inhabit, cultural products of the great machine that history is. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Headnote

Keywords: realism, metafiction, Thatcherism, liberalism

Abstract:

The postmodern fiction and criticism have regarded history as an enfant terrible of our age, either treating it as a finished project or revisiting it and finding each time new associations and connotations. The cultural and literary aspects of Britain's contemporary history are lucidly and realistically depicted in Malcolm Bradbury's fiction and criticism. The two aspects of his work blend in a homogeneous mixture offering him the possibility to analyse the phenomenon both with the objective scrutiny of a chronicler and with the inventive, ludic quill of the writer.

What we aim is to analyse the manner in which postmodern critical theory reconsiders history as an abstract concept but also as a scriptural recording and the manner in which literature has registered all these phenomena in a more or less realistic manner, in a parodic or metafictional manner.

Our paper also aims at presenting the manner in which his critical works registered the history of England and America decade by decade, the manner in which he theorized upon the literary principles that helped the making of a new type of fiction which cannot evade history, but also the manner in which his novels represent vivid, realistic portraits of the age they depict and the manner in which they manage to create characters that are a perfect reflection of the age they inhabit, cultural products of the great machine that history is.

Motto:

History is a theme park. Nothing is wasted.

(Malcolm Bradbury - To the Hermitage, p.28)

1. History - a finished project (?)

Political history has always dictated a new trend and direction in the epistemologica! dimension of life, fiction or criticism. Why then should there be voices that state that history came to an end? Is man living in time but outside of history?1 Some voices simply hail the secularization of history or the postmodern manifest entitled "suspicion of historical chronology" because it has now become an anthology of diverse styles and traditions. Others state that we do not feel history for we have passed beyond it propelled by the acceleration of technology and media. Terry Eagleton advances three possible hypotheses for the actual ending of history3: we either have triumphantly solved all of its problems, or we perceive them as pseudoproblems, or we have given up the task of solving anything all together. Francis Fukuyama has his own theory regarding the end of history - this seems to have been caused by the achievement of the ideals of universal freedom and justice.4 Malcolm Bradbury himself quotes Fukuyama in The Modern British Novel with his theory of the introduction of a new theory of the new world (dis)order:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of government, (p. 447)

Bradbury seems to agree to this assertion and the triumph of the values of free society, the independent nation and the humanist self but concludes that by the beginning of the nineties these had started to wane.

While Fukuyama's theory is debatable, one thing is for sure - perceived as first or last, modern or postmodern man is culturally constructed and historically conditioned, so how could we speak about the end of history? What comes in its stead? Others claim that we assist a "crisis in historicity"1 which dictates a return to the organization of time and temporality because nowadays a purely historical novel

can no longer set out to represent the historical past: it can only "represent" our ideas and stereotypes about the past (which thereby at once becomes 'pop history"). [...] If there is any 'realism' left here that is meant to derive from the shock of grasping that confinement and of slowly becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach.2

This is the reason for which in postmodernism we assist a feeling of loss of the past, a feeling of replacement with all-pervading (non-)values of the present and a retrieval of the past only as a fad of fashion. Thus, it was said that postmodern fiction merely reproduces the past as nostalgia, transforming history in another good to be consumed on the new market. History was denied a true existence in postmodern fiction because of the new linguistic referentiality that severs the work from objective historical reality. More or less artistically, Malcolm Bradbury observes that

we belong [...] not to Age of History, but to the End of History. Ours is no longer a time of ideology; in fact it's the Age of Shopping. Politics have turned into lifestyle, Star Wars to Nintendo, history into retro. (To the Hermitage, p. 86)

In The History Man too Bradbury observes that "history itself seems momentarily to falter and stop" (p. 1) as the world is caught in daily chores, occupations and routine and because the new generation and typology of "passionate, liberated, consciousness-conscious" (p. 4) living-on-the-spur-of-the-moment people cannot feel the pressure of a past history but only live in the present. The only history written in contemporary times seems to be the one dealing with "relevant forms of interaction" (p. 6) working under the principle of creative mixture in an attempt to create the (not grand) narrative of the individual as "true citizens of the present", (p. 2)

Only Linda Hutcheon attempts a fervent reinstating of history in its rightful place by underlining the double process of using and abusing history. Postmodern fiction problematizes the making of both fiction and history, thus denying neither.

Despite the more or less contesting debates of this notion, theorists seem to agree that there cannot be any full denial of the presence of history in our lives, art and politics or any other aspect. The human being or a nation cannot renounce the search for history as it cannot renounce his/ her/ its defining of or search for cultural identity. The more logical conclusion would be that:

What postmodernism refuses is not history but History - the idea that there is an entity called History possessed of an immanent meaning and purpose which is stealthily unfolding around us even as we speak."3

The kind of history which is being promoted is one of "plurality, free play, plasticity, open-endedness"4 leaving space for a free movement, multiplicity of meanings and overlapping of registers. Paradoxically enough this thing had been anticipated in a study dating as far back as 335 BC. Aristotle in his Poetics had established the differences between the poet and the historian, by giving credit to the poet for he writes not "of what has happened", but "of things that might happen"5 treating not particular facts as the historian does, but universal truths. It is perhaps in this final concept of "universal truths" that Aristotle ceases to be "postmodern" in his thinking, but otherwise, forcing the comparison a bit, he is not far from Lyotard's theory which expresses his disbelief in the mission of the historian and heralds the end of history. This notion does mean, of course, that life has ended and that future will not come, but, as Keith Jenkins puts is, rather that we have surpassed now the manner in which the past was historicised6, we have gone beyond the seduction of the past. Thus, the production of events has not stopped, but our need to narrativize them has. The postmodern novel registers a shift from using mere historiography between its pages (as "the transcription of past events into some kind of narrative"7) to using rather historicity which "involves the interior temporality of any historical referent or element of being"1 but participating at the same time to some extent to the making of cultural history.

Thus, some critics posit that it is not that history does not exist anymore in postmodernism, but that it is regarded differently. Some see it "a tale of progress" - a presentation of the evolution of the state of affairs or of the artistic and political matters, not on a universal scale, but at the level of smaller, finite histories; others consider it "a story of struggle, scarcity and exploitation" - they insist mainly on the belligerent or activist side of history; and last but not least there are the ones who consider it as lacking any plot as most of the postmodern texts.2 One way or another, these texts cannot truly evade history because in the attempt to paint an unhistorical picture they build a metanarrative which bears the traits of the very grand narrative they had been trying to disown and this because the unilinearity, the progressiveness and determinism of history cannot be evaded let alone broken. What is broken however is its fixity and sense of closure of each of its episodes - nowadays it has become "a galaxy of current conjectures, a cluster of permanent presents"3 which vouches for its mutability, and open endedness in the fuzziness of contemporaneity.

Other times, history was fashionably promoted on account of the popularity of a particular cultural trend at a particular time, but this process of oi/erhistorisizing brought with it an t/ndemistoricizing since it flattened out varieties and complexities.4 Postmodernist history brought a new dimension by manifesting as a "unidimensional" entity which squeezes the stratified structure of time "for the sake of the short run, the contemporary context, the immediate conjecture"5 the most-up-to-the-minute report of events, shifting "from the written text to a vast infoculture"6 in which it is seen as a spectacle. The artists want to stress the importance of now, characters seem to be living in a sequence of permanent nows not seeking anymore for a support and confirmation in the past and not (necessarily) thinking of a future purpose.

2. Postmodern fiction - history revisited

Motto:

History is a fickle mother, and sometimes she is bad father as well.

(Malcolm Bradbury, Why Come to Slaka?)

One constant, almost universally accepted truth has been the one that history is repeating or it is even being brought back as postmodernism seems to have frequently visited the past "as a 'dialogic' space of understanding and self-understanding"7 in order to illuminate the present. Malcolm Bradbury and Richard Ruland announced this in From Puritanism to Modernism in which a survey of American literature revealed for them

that our critical philosophies of structuralism and deconstruction were not just explorations but revelations of our awareness both of philosophical and historical indeterminacy - ambiguous, half-destructing products of an age that needed to replenish itself by turning toward the future while recreating what was salvageable from the past. (pp. 392-393)

They discuss this phenomenon both historically and artistically - from the first perspective any age brings with it some events backgrounded onto the same large frame - "human beings have systematically injured, plundered and enslaved one another" and "history, for the great majority of men and women who have lived and died, has been a tale of unremitting labour and oppression, of suffering and degradation."8; from the second, it can be observed that "today more conservative styles return to fashion, intellectually and artistically through experiment", (p. 393)

These phenomena are most of the time rendered in postmodern fiction, termed by Linda Hutcheon "historiographie metafiction"9, ironically, or by means of fragmentation, in a mixture of magical and realistic events, with unreliable narrators instead of reliable chroniclers telling the story. Built mainly as a parody of earlier literary and historical works, postmodern fiction "challenges traditional ideas of narrative construction, verisimilitude and historical truth."1 No matter that it is done under the form of a parodie presentation, history is revisited and brought back within the novel. Malcolm Bradbury asserts firmly that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, very often taken as a temporal boundary for the beginning of a new era, did not bring history to its denouement: "this was no End of History, but a return to history." ("What Was Postmodernism?", p. 763) And we consider that he speaks here of history in the traditional way not through the perspective of Eagleton's or Fukuyama's theories of history as a not universally accepted granthose entity. Bradbury does believe that history, especially when used as a mirror of and for the present, still has some lessons to teach. He may have been a nostalgic, but he also may have aimed at adding through such a strategy to the efforts that writers, as educators of the spirit, have to make so that the postmodern man might come back to previously discarded values so as to find a balance in the heavily technologized, commercialized world.

These are the bases on which Malcolm Bradbury builds his new people of Slakans in Rates of Exchange, these are some aspects presented in To the Hermitage through the figure of Catherine the Great of Russia and this is what he seems to have wanted to do in his unfinished novel Liar's Landscape. So as to support such a perspective here is how he presents the making of people of Slaka in Rates of Exchange:

It is a land that has frequently flourished, prospered, been a centre of trade and barter, art and culture, but has yet more frequently been pummelled, fought over, raped, pillaged, conquered and oppressed by endless invaders, (p. I)

After reading the entire novel this perspective proves to be highly parodie but this does not diminish in any way the author's perfect discourse in creating the history of a people. More than this, in an attempt to create an even more verisimilar portrait of the nation, in the introductory chapter to the novel - Visiting Slaka: A Few Brief Hints - Bradbury allegedly quotes from "a certain reputable encyclopaedia" which "authoritatively observes" that

no certain historical data exists for the period prior to the Xth. An obscure passage in a chronicle by Nostrum, Monk of Kiev, suggests a possible origin for these people somewhere in the region of the Bosphorus, but even this is much disputed. The people are generally finely built, dark in the southern part of the country, fair in the northern, inclined to spectacular deeds of heroism, but somewhat deficient in energy and industry. Long periods of outside occupation depressed the people, until the national wakening of the XIXth., led by Prince Bohumil the shy, and celebrated by the poet Hrovdat, killed on his horse in 1848 as he declaimed epic verse in battle. The earliest specimen of language occurs in a psalter of the Xlth., but some seventeen different regional languages presently exist in the country. Salt, gypsum and iron ore are mined. Principal cities are Slaka, the ancient capital; GNt, a seat of learning; and Provd, and industrial city. (pp. 2-3)

The presentation of the country has all the ingrethents which should be present in a history book: documentary, occupational, industrial, topographical. However, in pure postmodernist style, irony permeates the presentation of this heroic yet somehow sluggish people, whose prince died in battle while declaiming verse, and whose main seat of learning is a city whose name - Glit - is similar to an English interjection for expressing displeasure ("shit", "goddamn it"1) or to a Scottish word meaning "pus", "filth", "slime"2. This is a people that can find its truth ("provd" bears a high resemblance with the Russian word "pravda" meaning "truth") in the mechanisms of an industrial city.

But this aspect of parodie presentation is not the only one exploited by Bradbury. He also renders the newer, "more" postmodern aspect of history in the novel of the 1990s in which he chooses to visit the past in an encyclopaedic undertaking. It is the case of To the Hermitage about which the author testifies (or leads us to believe) that it "draws a great deal on history; but as history is the lies the present tells in order to make sense of the past" he has "improved it where necessary" (p. xxi). The style of the novel is more befitting a reference book than a work of fiction. The novel is built as an accumulation of episodes arranged as an alternation between the present (marked in the title of each chapter by the deictic "now") which informs us how a group of professors attempt a re-creation in 1993 of Diderot's project of creating an allencompassing encyclopaedia and the past (marked after the same practice with the deictic "then") of Diderot's expedition and tutorial mission to the court of Catherine the Great of Russia.

The historical chapters, interspersed with pedantic and at the same time jovial commentaries of the Enlightenment philosophy and Russia's history, paint a sarcastic picture of the Enlightenment spirit showing how vanity, political decisions and erotic impulses played a great role in a nation's achievements and a historical figure's becoming. However, Bradbury seems to have managed in being "Posterity's spin-doctor" (as he claims in the Preface) because the enlightenment reason is not totally discarded and Bradbury's lenient presentation of the "Ageing Sage" as a confused and sometimes blundering character is balanced with the philosopher's witty remarks, interpretations of political decisions or wonderfully witty dialogues with the tsarina, dialogues that he initiates and supports dealing with issues such as the nature of man, the prerogatives of a sovereign, the way to acquire knowledge ("Knowledge is a long journey", p. 177), or the art of the philosopher launching challenging questions but never offering answers. Bradbury manages in this manner to paint a full, (both fictionally and historically) accurate picture of a "thoughtful, reason-inspired, light-filled, positively electrical new age" (p. 17) and he recreates the flavour of a seventeenth-century Russia with its

loud boyars, boasting generals, pleading gentlefolk, prancing hussars, conspiring chamberlains, flattering ambassadors, adulterous maids-in-waiting, hirsute priests, fearsome black monks and ambitious nobles from remote provinces. (To the Hermitage, p. 138)

It is only in the last note to the novel that after quoting some of his referential sources (history books, biographies, letters) he admits to have cheated on some issues but quickly rectifies his intended historical impropriety by quoting a reliable source and reinstating somehow the historical value of the partly documentbook:

I cheated with Eugene Onegin; my references are not to any libretto but to James Falen's translation of the poem (Oxford World's Classics, 1995). I cheated too over the reburial of Laurence Sterne. A more truthful version (giving the fine sermon of canon Cant) may be found in Arthur H. Cash and John M. Stedmond (eds.), The Winged Skull: Bicentenary Conference Papers on Laurence Sterne (London, 1971). (To the Hermitage, p. 498)

The philosophy which seems to have taken Bradbury to the path of writing such a book is the one expressed in the preface of the novel: "past, present and future eternally interfere and interface with each other." (p. xxi)

But Bradbury also registers pages of contemporary, genuine history, crudely and boldly presenting the manner in which the spectacle of the news registers the collated apocalyptic problems of the postmodern age and reconstructs the contemporary vocabulary. Leaving aside the addiction that people have towards watching their predicament being broadcast, we observe the way in which the author manages to synthesize the consequences of the postmodern type of living, discarding completely the issues of sustainable development:

Faces shone out of the sets, faces of people competing for money, competing with people for power in an endless competition for fame. There were trials and heart transplants, riots and bomb-blasts. At Chernobyl Russian nuclear reactor erupted and sent its lethal radiation across most of Northern Europe. Industrial pollution poured down the major rivers and corrupted the seas. Acid rain deforested the hillsides, and car exhaust emissions were burning off the protective ozone layer. AIDS was spreading epidemically, along with cervical cancer, meningitis and innumerable untreatable viruses. Famine was growing, drought and desolation multiplying, small wars erupting, and terror was coming out of the always fundamentalist Middle East to threaten the newly fundamentalist West. Manufacturing industry was declining, jobs for the young were disappearing, financial speculation was increasing, and everyone was waiting for the Big Bang. Rape and child-murder was increasing, crime figures escalating, the centres of great cities deteriorating. Sex was lethal, smoking abhorrent, drinking dangerous, food destructive, and indeed the only pleasure left to make life worth living, if it was at all, was money, poor little paper money, which was trying to do all the work. (Cuts, pp. 84-85)

We need to add at this point the observation that Cuts was considered one of Bradbury's weakest novels, but such samples of objective unforgiving presentation of the contemporary world are so truthful twenty years after the novel was written that, in the limits of common sense, the author can be regarded as almost a visionary, a forerunner that has heralded for us a long time ago the trajectory that we are nowadays following. He seems to have flawlessly anticipated in 1987 the plague that would mar our planet, the mentalities (Middle East vs. West) that would clash.

Another willingly accepted aspect of history was its many-sidedness brought about by the permanent change in the reconsiderations or changing of positions of terms in the triplet race-class-gender. Each new historical/ cultural/ political period established a new angle upon such matters giving priority to one or other or making up for past mistakes that have now become the subject opprobrium - the matter of slavery for instance - but may easily be still practised in a disguised form.

3. Thatcherism

Motto:

Eighties Britain was a fast-changing scene.

(Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel, p. 445)

The history of contemporary Britain in the period that Bradbury wrote, deployed its forces mainly under one (we do say great) name - that of Margaret Thatcher (which Bradbury considered "often unpopular, yet unquestionable the most influential political figure in Britain since the Second World War" (The Modern British Novel, p. 446)) and the Conservatory party and a series of policies that promoted business, consumerism, and the new entrepreneurs. Thatcher's years in power brought radical reforms in political life by a clear cut division between the left and the right, and also such measures as: "privatization of nationalised industries, regulation of professions such as medicine and teaching, an end to strike-bargaining, and a curtailment of union power."1 The Poll Tax was introduced, monopoly privatisation in key sectors of society (coal, steel, electricity, gas, telecommunication, council housing, transport, water) was given green light, and marketplace took over - Britain lived its heyday of "enterprise culture". This combined with a heavy industrialisation led to the increase of unemployment, but at the same time it also brought changes concerning the legislation relating to women's rights, childbirth, marriage and sexuality bringing a tone of liberalism, with some limits however (we mention here the lack of total support towards sexual minorities). These apparently decentralizating measures did little to reduce the power of the state a fact which was largely condemned.

These types of social changes determined changes in the perception of identity in relation to sexuality, ethnicity, and gender both in literature and in popular culture. This also led to a more clearly made differentiation between "high" and popular culture, having on the one hand the awareness of the literary tradition, and on the other the new experience of Welfare State, the Cold War, television, and the rock music. The society was witnessing great changes concerning "social attitudes, sexual mores, religious consciousness, and youth movements, underpinned by a growing movement of Americanization of the British culture"2 and the novel, as a bearer of issues such as questioning boundaries and transgressing borders, is still a radical culture force by performing a delivery of all these social stances. Shortly, if Margaret Thatcher had rarely been perceived as a friend or connoisseur of the arts, Thatcherism had an immense effect upon the British fiction since the 1970 by becoming a rich source for social critique and satire in a mainstream of realist fiction.

This period gave rise to a gamut of characters regarded by some as being "united in their unambiguous odiousness."3 This remark is perhaps exaggerated for Malcolm Bradbury's fiction that contains highly comic and ridiculous characters (Henri Babbacombe from Cuts) or strangely likable ones despite their nastiness (Howard Kirk from The History Man) perhaps excusable because of the political and social environment whose prevailing ideology could not bring forth but such characters.

Malcolm Bradbury also registers the period of Mrs. Thatcher's "reign", narrowing it especially to the decade 1979-1989, in a special chapter in The Modern British Novel which he entitles "Artists on a Floating World". The critic is very direct in emphasizing the important economic aspect of the age brought on by the political measures that were adopted by the government: "The Eighties spoke the language of economics, read culture with a discourse based on myths of money." (p. 442) He now speaks about the appearance of "economic fictions", the commodification of the book, but also a promotion of the individual, of the enterprise and entrepreneurship. These measures however had as a negative consequence upon "declining universities, closing theatres, under-endowed schools and struggling hospitals" (p. 444) But one could also see that

public spaces deteriorated, parks closed, crimes increased, drugs problems intensified, and the sociologists observed, along with a growth in personal wealth and the endless multiplication of designer commodities, the rise of the new 'underclass'. [...] Old manufacture was dying, historic male employment falling away. In parts of the nation gentrification and growth advanced: hi-tech industries, service industries, traffic, motion, travel, leisure, fast food and gourment eating all boomed, (pp. 444-445)

The general atmosphere was one of flood of the new technologies, and erotics of trading and consumption.

Bradbury's "university novel" registers clearly the Thatcherite period as the eccentric microcosm of the university which had registered the routine menu of human characteristics and idiosyncrasies but the university is replaced in Cuts, for example, with the glitzy, profit-driven world of screen writing. The process of decision making does not belong so much to the main character, but this academic of a small provincial university is rather pushed into it by the symptom of the political changes which determined the closing of unproductive departments in universities. The movement from the world of intellectuals (as limited as they may have been pictured with Henry Babbacombe as an epitome) is presented under the form of farce and the novel still possesses the strong tones of the incisive satire with which Bradbury had accustomed us and it paints a truthful picture of a society heading towards the superficiality of image consumption. Thus, the Vice-chancellor of the university where the main character worked

had been trying to get all the chairs in the university endowed, by commercial organizations, or even private individuals: the Westland Chair of Anglo-American relations, the Kingsley Amis Chair of Women's Studies, and the Durex Chair of French Letters were only some of the ideas he was presently developing. Stirred by pressure form the government to bring in more relevant subjects, he was trying to disestablish ancient departments like Classic and English altogether, and replace them by more modern one, such as a Department of Snooker Studies. (Cuts, p. 45)

The weakness of a bumbling, blundering character who is blameless in his predicament and is ironically presented as "a great model of Thatcherite enterprise" (p. 53), seems to create the illusion of a weak, flawed novel, but the introductory chapter, a state-of-the-nation piece in which Bradbury's linguistic inventiveness in creating the semantic field of the verb "to cut" (that registered all the economic and cultural movements in the Thatcherite period) is at its best (by registering 43 verbs synonyms of or from the same semantic field as the verb "to cut" and giving 6 other uses for the same verb in only one and a half pages) and proves that the farce that follows truly wants to chastise the superficiality of a world ruled but the myth of the cut of the slate as in film-editing.

This is a novel that registers the highs and (very) lows of an "Age" which seems to have remained "the unceasing, perhaps irremovable, core element of the British social, economic and political fabric" even after the departure of the one who had initiated it. Thus, in between comic, parodie references to the world of film-making, the novel also presents scraps of journalistic-like reports on the society changes or merely inserts play upon words in the account. In the summer of 1986, when "'privatization' was, along with 'buzzword', the great buzz-word'" (p. 44)

they were cutting the numbers of students, cutting the courses, cutting the secretaries, cutting the porters; they were cutting the playing fields, cutting the student accommodation, cutting the library, cutting the teaching buildings. They were also cutting the staff, (ibidem)

The author continues later with a deadly serious topic on the matter - the migration of the intellectual population because of these extreme measures registered in the educational system:

There were those who suspected that the people in the university administration - who, as it happened, were not on the whole being cut - were undertaking the exercise with almost an excess of enthusiasm, as if they had been longing for the day when the troublesome professoriate, the finicky lecturers, the annoying readers, would pass on to pastures new, mostly in the United States, (ibidem)

4. Liberalism

Motto: If God had been a liberal, we wouldn't have had the ten commandments. We'd have the ten suggestions.

(Malcolm Bradbury, The After Dinner Game, p. 57)

"Postmodern culture is much taken with change, mobility, open-endedness, instability."1 This is the tenet that Malcolm Bradbury applied in his novels by expressing the liberal anxieties of an England which should have looked for and drawn its inspiration more from across the Ocean.

The new condition of (post)modernity brought a vision upon the world of mankind in which individuals are almost absolutely bound not to see in the same way in any matter. This sovereignty of the individual choice has triggered a plurality of thought and opinions which required and conditioned the appearance of liberalism as the only valid doctrine to accommodate a plurality of conceptions.

One of the main aspects of liberal thinking is the politics of difference. What is paradoxical is the fact that while liberalism and this system of thought have to develop such universale as the rights to "equality, rule by law, freedom, and democratic participation"2, one of the fundamental premises of postmodernism is the discarding of universale. Theorists of culture such as Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner are of the opinion that for a true democracy to be achieved man needs such institutionalized, political universale. But this double-sided dilemma creates exactly the propitious terrain for the successful exploitation of irony and parody. This double sided democracy in which man is encouraged to manifest absolutely freely, yet being asked to do it by the rule, is the territory on which postmodernist fiction treads creating a character who lives in a(n) (alien)nation of the present hesitance and loss and the future uncertainty and fear.

Liberalism brought with it a new fetish - sexuality or the body. As Eagleton puts it "from Lyotard to leotards, [...] from Berkley to Brighton the body has become one the most recurrent preoccupation of postmodern thought" and one can truly acknowledge that "there's nothing more sexy than sex." And this because the body seems to offer "a mode of cognition more intimate and internal than a now much-scorned Enlightenment rationality."3 It is the wonderfully complicated system of the body and the complexity of the passions that it yields that is resonant with a clearer division between culture and nature. It is only now by liberating the body that man can truly understand and establish the equilibrium between the primitive side of civilization and the redemption brought by culturalism. The new gain is that if in modernism the only existential prerequisite of human beings was a cultural one, now there has been added this perspective of the life of the body.

Following Bradbury's deeply rooted beliefs almost all of his characters believe in the liberal movement and in the triumph of liberal thinking in daily life. James Walker before and after having "stepped westward" openly testifies to such a type of mentality on account that it promotes the individual, though, in his case, he did seem capable of taking advantage from such a possibility of liberty offered by contemporary society: "He believed in democracy and liberalism because they diminished political belief and stressed individualism and debate. People over politics; that was Walker's cry." (p. 219) but fails to use the prerogatives of such a creed and all this because he is on foreign territories "away from his household gods", "living in a world of someone else's ethics" (p. 224). That is why the effusions of liberal thinking pass over him quickly and he returns to being a man swallowed by history and not managing to affirm himself: "People believed in the broad sweeps of history, not in moments of individual decision." (p. 225)

5. (The) Subject(ivity) in history

The experiencing "I" occupies a central role in modernism, but whether or not at the heart there is a "thinking I" that experiences, conceptualises and interacts with the world is a fact questioned or utterly denied in postmodernism. At the same time, subjectivity in terms of ethics, politics, representation, reliability, and historical, social or linguistic structuring of the subject, has been a term heavily debated upon in social sciences. How much of the individual is personally, specifically determined, how much of him is culturally determined, and how we can know that our knowledge of and experiences in the "real" world" are the same as other people's knowledge and experiences thus forming a more or less objective frame, are all issues theorised upon in sometimes bulk treatises and reflected in the works of artists.

If modernism encouraged the notion of "the (patriarchal) entrepreneurial subject", postmodernism rejected the myth of Man as "a rational, unified, powerful and controlling being"1 who replacing desire as "the vital force of creativity"2 gave freedom to desire as the "libidinal drives in the individual that subvert the power of reason."3 The subverting of reason by desire led to the postmodernist rejection of the humanist concept of a unified self existing at the core of the cultural process. The postmodern subject is

a fragmented being who has no essential core of identity, and is to be regarded as a process in a continual state of dissolution rather than a fixed identity or self that endures unchanged over time.4

(S)he (the introduction of the feminine is compulsory for the identity of the postmodern subject) is a dehumanised cyborgian product of techno-science, a libidinal bisexual (comprising elements of both sexes) creature, cogs in the machine of capitalism. Thus, in postmodernism more than ever, the subject and his identity are a social, cultural, technological and linguistic product of the society (s)he inhabits. From this new perspective, "the relationship between the modern and the postmodern is based on a continual renegotiation and disruption of the subjective identity."5 He is no longer a self-sufficient being both because he is inescapably trapped in the mechanisms of a society that created so many dependencies for him, and because of the aphrodisiacal luring need of integrating himself within the social system.

6. Conclusions

The most interesting thing to observe in our analysis has been the Protean position from which Malcolm Bradbury performed his analyses or put into the practice of fiction his principles and the principles that he observed as being at work in the contemporary age. Thus, scriptwriter or pamphleteer, reviewer or editor, critic or novelist, he researched the phenomenon in its small or large scale manifestations, in its national or international overturnings being both a close observer of the social, economic and political movements and clearly stating his preferences for a liberal doctrine which would seem to confer the largest freedom of thinking, manifesting and moving to the individual, and granting him the liberty of making his own decisions and falling the victim of a system and also a juggler with the notions of truth and value, culture and knowledge, or myth and history. This organisation had its imperfection but, fact is, it is this type of thinking that allowed Bradbury to take the trip towards America and appropriate part of the mentality from there. I believe that it is the American freedom of speech that urged Bradbury into giving utterance to his dissatisfactions towards the English (Thatcherite) system and the mixing with the characteristic English humour and sarcasm led, in the end, to a unique combination.

Footnote

1 Cf. a title of a chapter from Keith Jenkins (1999): Why History: Ethics and Postmodernity, Routledge, p. 1.

2 Richard Kearney (1998): The Wake of Imagination, Routledge, p. 20.

3 Terry Eagleton,(1996/ 2007): The Illusions of Postmodernism, Blackwell Publishing, p. 19.

4 Francis Fukuyama (1992): The End of History and the Last Man, apud Simon Malpas (2005): The Postmodern. The New Critical Idiom, Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, London and New York, p. 90.

Footnote

1 Fredric Jameson (1991/1993): Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso, London, p. 25.

2 Ibidem.

3 Terry Eagleton, op. cit., p. 30.

4 Idem, p. 64.

5 Aristotle, Poetics, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.mb.txt.

6 Keith Jenkins, op. cit., p. 57.

7 Thomas Docherty (1990/ 1996): After Theory, Rotledge, p. 9.

Footnote

1 Ibidem.

2 Cf. Terry Eagleton, op. cit., p. 34.

3 Idem, p. 46.

4 Idem, p. 49.

5 Idem, p. 50.

6 Victor E. Taylor; Charles E. Windquist (2001/ 2005): Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, London and New York, p. 181.

7 Matei Cälinescu (1987): Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, Duke University Press, Durham, p. 282 NC apud Hans Bertens (1995/ 2005): The Idea of the Postmodern. A History, Routledge, London and New York, p. 57.

8 Terry Eagleton, op. cit., p. 52.

9 Linda Hutcheon, (1989): The Politics of Postmodernism, Routledge, London and New York, pp. 14-15.

10 Simon Malpas, op. cit., p. 101.

Footnote

1 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=glit.

2 http://www. websters-online-dictionary.com/translation/russian/glit.

Footnote

1 Peter Childs (2005): Contemporary Novelists. British Fiction since 1970, Palgrave Macmillan, p. 5.

2 Idem, p. 10.

3 Richard Bradford (2007): The Novel Now. Contemporary British Fiction, Blackwell Publishing, p. 33.

Footnote

1 Terry Eagleton, op. cit., p. 34.

2 Steven Best; Douglas Kellner (1991/ 2002): Postmodern Theory. Critical Interrogations, Palgrave Macmillan, p. 243.

3 Terry Eagleton, op. cit., pp. 69-70.

Footnote

1 Stuart Sim (ed.) (1998/ 2006): The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, second edition, Routledge, Taylor &Francis Group, London and New York, p. 312.

2 Victor E. Taylor; Charles E. Windquist (2001/ 2005): op. cit., p. 94.

3 Stuart Sim (ed.) (1998/ 2006): op. cit., p. 197.

4 Idem, p. 312.

5 Simon Malpas, op. cit., p. 79.

References

References

Bertens, Hans (1995/ 2005): The Idea of the Postmodern. A History, Routledge, London and New York.

Bradbury, Malcolm, (2000): Cuts: A Very Short Novel, Picador, London.

Bradbury, Malcolm, (1992): From Puritanism to Postmodernism. A History of American Literature, with Richard Ruland, Penguin Books.

Bradbury, Malcolm (1983): Rates of Exchange, Seeker & Warburg, London.

Bradbury, Malcolm (1968): Stepping Westward, Penguin Books in association with Seeker & Warburg.

Bradbury, Malcolm, (1988): The After Dinner Game, Arena.

Bradbury, Malcolm (1990): The History Man, Vintage, London.

Bradbury, Malcolm (2001): The Modem British Novel. 1878-2001, Penguin Books, London.

Bradbury, Malcolm (2001): To the Hermitage, Picador, London.

Bradbury, Malcolm (1997): Why Come to Slaka?, Arena, London.

Bradbury, Malcolm (1995): "What was Postmodernism? The Arts in and after the Cold War" in International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-), vol. 71, no 4, Special RIIA 75th Anniversary Issue, October 1995, pp. 763-774, Royal Institute of International Affairs via (links. Jtsor.org)

Bradford, Richard (2007): The Novel Now. Contemporary British Fiction, Blackwell Publishing.

Childs, Peter (2005): Contemporary Novelists. British Fiction since 1970, Palgrave Macmillan.

Docherty, Thomas (1 990/ 1 996): After Theory, Routledge.

Eagleton, Terry (1996/ 2007): The Illusions of Postmodernism, Blackwell Publishing.

Linda Hutcheon, (1989): The Politics of Postmodernism, Routledge, London and New York.

Kearney, Richard (1998): The Wake of Imagination, Routledge.

Jameson, Fredric (1991/1993): Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso, London, New York.

Jenkins, Keith (1999): Why History: Ethics and Postmodernity, Routledge.

Malpas, Simon (2005): The Postmodern. The New Critical Idiom, Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, London and New York.

Taylor, Victor E.; Windquist, Charles E. (2001/ 2005): Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, London and New York.