Absurdity is a strong theme in American postmodernism, as is the feeling of apocalypse: Walker Percy has said of one of his novels that what seemed important to him were ‘certain elements of self-hatred and self-destructiveness which have surfaced in American life . . . This accounts for the apocalyptic themes of the book: love in the ruins, end of the world, being among the few survivors etc.’ Given these themes, the traditional notion of character is also rejected. Hawkes says: ‘I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme’; and Ronald Sukenick: ‘I don’t think the kind of books I’m interested in are interested in characterisation anymore’, and: ‘The contemporary writer who is acutely in touch with the life of which he is part is forced to start from scratch: Reality doesn’t exist, time doesn’t exist, personality doesn’t exist.’ Hawkes also is prepared to bracket the whole of existence: I can’t help but think of fictions as artefacts created out of always the nothingness and always pointing toward that source of zero, a sort of zero source. That is why for one reason among others I admire John Barth, because the more elaborate the fiction gets, the more you create, the more you know exactly the nothingness it inhabits. Barth himself tells ‘complicated stories simply for the aesthetic pleasure of complexity, of complication and unravelment, suspense and the rest’; John Gardner, who thinks that Walt Disney, apart from his sentimentality, was one of the greatest American artists, and tries in his work to create ‘cartoon’ characters (he praises Stanley Elkin for doing the same), is similarly interested in telling stories for their own sake: ‘What you have to do, I think, is tell an interesting story. That means a plot that’s kind of neat and that’s got characters who are kind of neat and it happens in places that are made by the writer’s imagination into ‘kind of neat . . . That’s what I think fiction now is about. It’s about, creating circus shows.’ William Gass has stated his preference for the formal over the empirical, a preference shared by many other novelists: when asked if he ever did research for his novels he replied: No research. I collect words. Twelve different names for whore among the Romans. Thirty five names for cloth and silk stuffs. Etc. Sometimes I even use what I’ve collected. Or an old book will suggest something. But there are no ‘scenes’ to revisit . . . because my choice of factuality . . . was purely formal Similarly John Hawkes has said: ‘I resist and resent very much the idea of associating research with fiction writing. It seems to me a bizarre incongruity to even think of researching something which is real in order to create a fiction which is a fiction’. The fictionality of fiction and its inability to reflect reality is echoed by Donald Barthelme: ‘Art is not about something but is something’, and by Gilbert Sorrentino: ‘The novel must exist outside the life it deals with; it is an invention, something that is made; it is not the expression of ‘self’; it does not mirror reality’. Sukenick also expresses a similar view: ‘Rather than serving as a mirror or redoubling on itself, fiction adds itself to the world, creating a meaningful ‘reality’ that did not previously exist’. This ‘reality’ is seen by these novelists to be purely a verbal one; William Gass has said: ‘That novels should be made of words and only words is a bit shocking really. It is as though you had discovered that your wife was made of rubber .’ Gass’s professed concern is ironic, as is shown by another comment: ‘the novelist, if he is any good will keep us kindly imprisoned in his language – there is literally nothing beyond’. On similar lines, Raymond Federman has written: fiction can no longer be reality or a representation of reality, or an imitation, or even a recreation of reality; it can only be A REALITY - an autonomous reality whose only relation with the real world is to improve that world. To create fiction is, in fact, a way to abolish reality, and especially to abolish the notion that reality is truth Federman, in an insert in his novel Double or Nothing, which is titled ‘Some Reflections on the Novel in Our Time’, also says: the novel is nothing but a denunciation, by its very reality, of the illusion which animates it. All great novels are critical novels which, under the pretense of telling a story, of bringing characters to life, of interpreting situations, slide under our eyes the mirage of a tangible form . . . The essence of a literary discourse - that is to say a discourse fixed once and for all - is to find its own point of reference, its own rules of organisation in itself, and not in the real or imaginary experience on which it rests. Stanley Elkin has also emphasised the purely verbal aspect of his work: when asked what he liked most about it he replied: What I like best about it, I suppose, are the sentences.’ And Gerald Graft has also noted that postmodernist writers and their critics ‘have taken as their subject the problematic status of their own authority to make statements about anything outside the systems of language and convention in which they must write’. No wonder a 1970s book about the American novel was called City of Words. All these comments point towards a rejection of the traditional liberal humanist basis of the novel. As Malcolm Bradbury has put it: the model of a cybernetic world has led to an art in which the human figure exists itself as a parody - as a role-player, a formless performer, a cardboard cut-out. From this, we may draw a dark conclusion: that many modern writers feel they can yield to us only a post-humanist model of man. The American critic Leslie Fiedler does not see this conclusion as being dark at all; he sees post-humanism as the goal towards which the youth of America are striving, not as something which is being foisted on them by novelists: ‘the tradition from which they strive to disengage is the tradition of the human, as the West . . . has defined it, Humanism itself’. Ihab Hassan, one of the leading apologists for and theorists of postmodernism comes to the same conclusion, though he seems more ambivalent about it: ‘We need to understand that five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end, as humanism transforms itself into something we must helplessly call posthumanism.’ The avant garde American novel and its apologists seem therefore to have abandoned the liberal humanist viewpoint and realist aesthetic which have traditionally characterised the novel, and the post-war French novel seems also to have moved towards post-humanism. Immediately after the Second World War, John Lehmann, visiting Paris, noted that France’s intellectual vitality was as remarkable as ever, but it seemed to me to a large extent to be turning in a void. Whether it was the result of the shock of defeat and the humiliation of Nazi occupation, or of some deeper reason that went further back, the dominant spirit was, I thought, anti-humanistic, even nihilistic. And, of course, the postwar French novel had the influence of such figures as Radiguet, Roussel, Queneau and Blaise Cendrars as well as the influence of Dada and Surrealism at a time when the British novel was turning away from Modernism. The French also had the impetus of Existentialism to add to the heritage of Symbolism, a tradition of stylistic innovation and refinement extending back at least as far as Flaubert’s desire to write a novel about nothing, and the example of a series of mostly misanthropist writers rejecting and reviling bourgeois humanist values, extending, at least, through de Sade, Lautréamont, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Céline and Genet. The French nouveau roman, while it has many differences from the American postmodernist novel, has generally been based on post-humanist premises (Nathalie Sarraute is, I think, an exception), and this was continued by younger writers such as J.M.G. le Clézio, Monique Wittig and Patrick Modiano. Speak: but from the far side of language, too, from then side of those who create it. Each word needs to be turned inside out like a glove, and emptied of its substance. Each speech should wrench itself from the ground like an aeroplane and smash through the surrounding walls. Up till now you have been slaves. You have been given words to obey, words to write slavish poems and slavish philosophies. It is time to arm words. Arm them and hurl them against the walls. Perhaps they will even reach the other side. Alain Robbe-Grillet has polemicised the rejection of humanism in the novel, with its anthropomorphic analogies and pananthropism which ‘humanises’ inanimate things and posits a shared human nature. Robbe-Grillet rejects the old ‘myths of depth’. We know that all literature used to be based on them, and on them alone. The role of the writer traditionally consisted in burrowing down into Nature, into excavating it, in order to reach its most intimate strata and finally bring to light some minute part of a disturbing secret. The writer descended into the chasm of human passions and sent up to the apparently tranquil world (that of the surface) victorious messages describing the mysteries he had touched with his fingers. And the sacred vertigo which then overwhelmed the reader, far from causing him any distress or nausea, on the contrary reassured him about his powers of domination over the world. There were abysses, it was true, but thanks to these valiant speleologists, their depths could be sounded. The old concept of character in the novel must change, since the concept of character in life has changed: the creators of character in the traditional sense can now do nothing more than present us with puppets in whom they themselves no longer believe. The novel that contains characters belongs well and truly to the past, it was peculiar to an age - that of the apogee of the individual. Since ‘the present age is rather that of the regimental number’, of mass society, the novelist who creates characters is not writing about present society but about the past. Like the Americans already quoted, the noveaux romanciers saw language as having its own reality rather than reflecting a reality outside itself. Claude Simon has written: ‘There is no need to look beyond what is written. There is only what is written’. And Philippe Sollers, taking this one step further, said ‘we are nothing other, in the last analysis, than our system of reading and writing’. Sollers is a good example of the interaction between theory and practice in the French novel, being both novelist and theoretician, and associated with the Tel Quel journal. The view of man as a product of linguistic forces only is typical of postwar developments in French philosophy and linguistics, which have had far more influence on French fiction than Anglo-Saxon philosophy has had on English fiction. (Indeed, in some cases, such as Edmond Jabés and Derrida’s Glas, the borderline between philosophy and fiction is deliberately blurred.) These philosophical developments have tended to be explicitly or implicitly anti-humanist. Lévi-Strauss said in The Savage Mind that the ultimate aim of the human sciences was not to constitute man but to dissolve him, and many others have followed him in this. Foucault said that ‘man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a simple fold in our knowledge, and that he will disappear as soon as that knowledge has found a new form’, and Derrida advocated a criticism which ‘tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology - in other words, through the history of all his history - has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the game’. The thrust of the criticism and semiotics of Barthes (Who points to 1848 as the beginning of the end of bourgeois humanist illusions), Riffaterre, Macherey, Kristeva, Sollers and the Tel Quel group, the philosophy of Derrida, the political sociology of Althusser, the literary sociology of Goldmann and the psychoanalysis of Lacan had consistently been to deny the individual a unique personal identity independent of social and linguistic influences, let alone a soul. The individual becomes the ‘subject’, the ‘decentred’ conjunction of ideological and linguistic lines of force; a point in a system rather than the originator of truth and value, which, if they have any meaning at all, reside in the system not the individual. Given these philosophical premises, the novel based on them will naturally tend not to try to uncover moral and universal truths or try to penetrate to the depths of ‘character’, which are both seen as illusions which the novelist should pierce. Neither this philosophy and its associated criticism, nor the novel it entails have ever really taken root in Britain, as the earlier American New Criticism did not, and the result is an entirely different type of novel. The British novel, with its predominantly liberal humanist base has, in contrast to this, often seemed to claim to provide truths about society, morals and character, certainly since its move away from modernism in the forties and fifties. Although the English novelists of this period wrote about contemporary social problems, few of them experimented with the form and style of their novels; nor did they incorporate the techniques of Joyce, Virginia Woolf or other experimental novelists into their own styles. Most of the postwar writers conscientiously rejected experimental techniques in their fiction as well as in their critical writings and turned instead to older novelists for inspiration. And, despite the undoubted revival of interest in the experimental novel, these comments still applied at the end of the 1970s. There is, when one thinks about it, a certain felicity about Jane Austen’s having dominated the bestseller list in 1975 with Sanditon (it sold 22,000 in the first ten weeks and eventually 30,000 in hardback . . .). For the kind of fiction Austen practised lives on. The English novel, as exemplified by Drabble, Snow, Angus Wilson, Elizabeth Taylor et al, is still very much about Sense and Sensibility, Pride, Prejudice and Persuasion. Consciously and often proudly so, one might add. Not only humanism but realism were seen by many, including the novelists themselves, to be an indispensable part of the novel, and the writers often seemed to feel a part of a long and valuable tradition which, unlike the Americans and French, they had little desire to overturn. Long after Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis was saying ‘what I think I am doing is writing novels within the main English-language tradition. That is, trying to tell interesting, believable stories about understandable characters in a reasonably straightforward style: no tricks, no experimental tomfoolery’. David Lodge had similarly said that his novels ‘belong to a tradition of realistic fiction (especially associated with England) that tries to find an appropriate form for, and a public significance in, what the writer has himself experienced and observed’, and Margaret Drabble, despite her collaboration with B.S. Johnson on the collective novel London Consequences, had spoken of her preference for being ‘at the end of a dying tradition which I admire’ rather than ‘at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore’. Drabble also made it clear that the title of her novel The Middle Ground is meant to refer both to the audience at which she is aiming, and her own approach to fiction, a view echoed by a very different English writer, John Fowles: ‘l suspect the crucial thing, in the novel, is how novelist conceives of audience. My own preferred contact is in the middle ground’.