BACKGROUND

Little scholarly work has been done on the novels of Beryl Bainbridge despite their wide publication and readership. Apart from a few articles in literary journals¹ and a discerning interpretative chapter, dealing with six of her novels in David Punter's The Hidden Script,² there is, to my knowledge, only one book-length study. This is a textual study which provides a detailed comparison of the original and revised editions of two of Bainbridge's novels, and discusses the stylistic changes made in the second versions of these novels.³

Despite the fact, then, that Beryl Bainbridge has written a number of TV scripts and documentaries, published a collection of short stories, a short novel written in her teens, a documentary, and thirteen novels, the main body of critical commentary to date consists of reviews, interviews, and brief references in bibliographies and literary history surveys.⁴ The present thesis is an attempt to redress in part this lack of academic attention. The reason for the academic neglect is perhaps displayed in the assessment that “Beryl Bainbridge is hardly a writer who will be the object of scholarly interest or given a place in literary history—for that she is probably too ‘simple’.”⁵ The motivation for my interest in Bainbridge's writing is a wish to explore the workings of simplicity in her novels. In this way, I also hope to contribute to the current contesting of the hierarchical order of study objects implied above, and of the criterion of unexamined simplicity as grounds for relegating texts to the academic periphery.⁶ For, the apparent simplicity of Bainbridge's fiction contains a degree of subtlety that warrants attention. In this respect, a study of her fiction might serve to contribute to the ongoing discussion of textual significance and the validity of the canon, to which the growing interest in non-canonical forms of discourse, not least feminist re-evaluation, bears witness.

Bainbridge's fiction represents a narrative form that is based on ‘life as experienced’, and rooted in the mimetic tradition which is characterized by “chronological time as the medium of a plotted narrative, an irreducible individual psyche as the subject of its characterization, and above all, the ultimate concrete reality of things as the object and rationale of its description.”⁷ Asked to comment on her writing, Bainbridge explains:

As a novelist I am committing to paper, for my own satisfaction, episodes that I have lived through. If I had had a camera forever ready with a film I might not have needed to write. I am not very good at fiction … it is always me and the experiences I have had. …

I think writing is a very indulgent pastime and I would probably do it even if nobody ever read anything.

I write about the sort of childhood I had, my parents, the landscape I grew up in: my writing is an attempt to record the past.⁸

In this mimetic sense, Bainbridge's fiction may be seen as a traditional and straightforward form of novel writing. And in comparison with the notable influx of avant-garde writing in the same period, which demonstrates the impossibility of recording ‘lived experience’ adequately, it may seem even more so.

Against the background of the emergence of postmodernism in literature as a reaction to and development of both realism and modernism, and in the context of the theoretical challenges to humanist notions of subjectivity, history and language, it is not surprising, therefore, that Beryl Bainbridge's fiction might be considered academically peripheral. It does not draw attention to itself as an artefact with frame-breaks, exposure of fictional conventions or comments on the writing process; it does not openly parody other texts; it does not flaunt the instability of language by playful practice; subjective consciousness is not demonstrably at stake, and there are no challenging typographical experiments or strikingly innovatory features. It is, in other words, not an example of the self-reflexive fiction that covertly or overtly demonstrates the linguistic and ideological foundation and fictive status of any representation.

However, it is my contention that, simultaneously with their apparent mimetic simplicity and their allegiance to the referentiality of language, her novels display gestures and properties in their modes of construction, presentation and representation that not only produce a recognizable style or characteristic formula, but also emphasize the transforming potential of narrative fiction. In addition, they can also, to some extent, be read as sharing the postmodern characteristic function of increasing reader awareness of reality as a social construct. In other words, although the novels simply seem to mimetically reflect reality as dramatized expressions of the author's personal outlook and experiences, thus inviting a literal reading in terms of verisimilitude, their gestures and properties work to transform the material in such a way that the biographical context of the author and the horizon of literal reference become of subordinated interest.

These concerns are superseded by a consciousness-raising effect that provokes the reader to reflect on the function of construction, narration and interpretation in fiction and in life. Instead of simply serving as the mirrors of reality before which the reader may test whether or not these reflect or correspond to his/her own views and experiences, her novels lead the reader to examine his/her own modes of ‘constructing’, ‘narrating’ and ‘interpreting’ life. Compared with the more demonstrably provocative contemporary writings, Bainbridge's novels achieve a similar effect. But it is achieved by a different route and with a different implication. The Bainbridge provocation serves to recentre rather than decentre the contradictory humanist notion that both asserts the autonomy of the individual and relates the individual to the “social whole” in terms of a “universalized human nature.”⁹ This recentring takes the form of asserting the inviolable autonomy of individuality but also its inevitable dependence on the social whole for its development and fulfilment.

The consciousness-raising quality of her writing and its humanistically normative stance have largely been overlooked in the critical reception, which instead focuses on characteristic features of style and content, and the moral or immoral quality of her novels. While the features of style have generally attracted appreciative comments, the evaluation of the novels in terms of moral significance has varied. Indeed, the latter aspect proved an initial stumbling-block in her writing career. Beryl Bainbridge's first novel Harriet Said (written in 1958; first published in 1972) was, for instance, rejected on moral grounds by several publishers, one of whom commented that the characters were “repulsive beyond belief” and that one scene in the book was “too indecent even for these lax days.”¹⁰ The manuscript was then misplaced by a publisher and only resurfaced after A Weekend with Claud and Another Part of the Wood, which were written in a different style from Harriet Said, had been published without attracting much attention. The rediscovered manuscript was shown to the Haycrafts at Duckworth, where Beryl Bainbridge at the time was employed. They immediately recognized her talent, and not only published the novel, but encouraged her to abandon the rambling and elaborate style of the two previous novels in favour of the tauter and simpler style of Harriet Said. The publication of Harriet Said (1972) was therefore the beginning of “a series of original and idiosyncratic works,”¹¹ which has been called the Duckworth Bainbridge line: Harriet Said (1972), The Dressmaker (1973), The Bottle Factory Outing (1974), Sweet William (1975), A Quiet Life (1976), Injury Time (1977), Young Adolf (1978), Winter Garden (1980), Watson's Apology (1984), An Awfully Big Adventure (1989), The Birthday Boys (1991),¹² and the rewritten versions of Another Part of the Wood (1979) and Weekend with Claude (1981).

Although described as a “family of gifted eccentrics”¹³ and no longer dismissed on moral grounds, this body of texts somehow defies description and understanding beyond the similarities in content and in the style which was heralded in Harriet Said. Gloria Valverde's comparative study of the original and the rewritten versions of the first published novels shows that the difference between them is primarily the result of deletions. Cuts were made in narrative descriptions, explanations, critical commentary, and in analysis of and delving into character action and behaviour. Also numerous didactic passages were omitted. As a consequence of these alterations, the revised editions constitute a reversion to what Valverde defines as Bainbridge's original and personal style, which is now generally seen by critics as characteristic of her production, that is, “that of being objective and detached,” and with an ability to “select details and discard peripheral material.” These features also make “the wry humour, an important element of her style, more pronounced.”¹⁴ Although she does not analyse its implications, Valverde also recognizes that, despite the deletion of the many didactic passages in the original versions, there is still a moralizing tendency although “it is more subtle.”¹⁵

The combination of the laconic, detached style and the pervading bleakness of the world depicted tends to obscure the reader's recognition of the consciousness-raising quality as well as the kind of moral aspect that Valverde discerns. Valentina Yakovleva, for instance, declares her growing discontentment with Bainbridge's works:

The more I read Bainbridge novels the more disappointed I grew in her attitude to the surrounding reality and in her choice of characters. She deliberately strives to remain ‘outside the story’, an impartial observer. Yet the personality of the author cannot be hidden—the very striving after complete objectivity, the abstaining from judgements, from taking sides, from any commitment is in itself a ‘position’, a revelation of the writer's world outlook and of her moral principles.¹⁶

In contrast to Valverde, Yakovleva sees the detached style and the depiction of the world as signs of lack of morality. These positions are partly balanced by Krystyna Stamirowska who draws attention to the “complex responses that Beryl Bainbridge's fiction generates” in the way it elicits the reader's sympathy for the situation of the characters despite their unpleasantness and the detached narration.¹⁷ “Complex responses” do, in fact, characterize the reviews on Bainbridge's novels, and this per se suggests a degree of ambiguity and subtlety in her works.¹⁸

Thus, the characteristic features that Yakovleva sees as examples of an apparent lack of commitment, Valverde sees as implying a subtle moralizing quality, and Stamirowska as forming a deterministic framework that evokes sympathy. David Punter, however, recognizes the consciousness-raising quality as he convincingly shows in his Lacanian approach that the characteristic features are the result of unconscious structures of signification that speak of gender differentiation, deprivation of love, and continual defeat of expectation and knowledge. The effect of this, he concludes, is that

this fiction which apparently makes little concession to the modernist habit of self-consciousness produces a highly self-conscious reader: because we are made increasingly aware that, in gazing at the squirmings of these Others, we too are looking only at parts of ourselves, that all these enactments are ones in which we too have shared or will share, objective correlatives for the dilemma of maturation.¹⁹

What Bainbridge's critics in their various focuses—on text as expression of the author, on text as linguistic style, on text as narrative display, and on text as structures of signification—have failed to emphasize is that the intriguing effect of Bainbridge's fiction is the tension between the firm allegiance to realism and the implicit challenge of the premises that underpin it. In the context of this tension, it is useful to remember, as Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth reminds us, that realistic fiction does not necessarily suggest a naive acceptance of referentiality, but that both “referential and reflexive functions [are] at work in realism.”²⁰ In other words, realistic fiction, in the descriptive sense of the term, as a mode of writing that through its conventions creates the illusion of ‘truthful’ imitation of commonsensical reality, like other modes of writing, also serves to contribute to our understanding of how the world is constituted by its texts and by conventions. Consequently, the realistic illusion in Bainbridge's novels not only displays the myth of realism as the objective representation of reality in their artistic transformation of ‘lived experience’, but it also emphasizes the functions of myth as both illusory conception and as narrated interpretation of life. In doing this, the novels achieve the twin effect of increasing awareness of the formative function of conceptualizing reality, and reasserting the reality of the mundane and the sublime.

Notes

1. For instance, Valentina Yakovleva, “On Reading Beryl Bainbridge: A Voice from the Public,” Soviet Literature 11. 440 (1984): 141-149; Karl Miller, “A Novelist Worth Knowing,” New York Review of Books 16 May 1974: 25-28; Krystyna Stamirowska, “The Bustle and the Crudity of Life: The Novels of Beryl Bainbridge,” Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny 35. 4 (1988): 445-456.

2. David Punter, The Hidden Script: Writing and the Unconscious (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985). This study deals with J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, Kurt Vonnegut and Beryl Bainbridge. Although Punter sees Bainbridge as set apart from this group through her naturalistic mode and contemporary settings, he argues that her novels contain similar materials of deprivation and entrapment.

3. Gloria Valverde, “A Textual Study of Beryl Bainbridge's Another Part of the Wood and A Weekend with Claude,” 2 vols., diss., Texas Tech U, 1985.

4. See, for instance Lorna Sage, “Female Fictions: The Women Novelists,” The Contemporary English Novel, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 18 (London: Arnold, 1979) 85; Robert Barnard, A Short History of English Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984) 206; Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig, Women and Children First: The Fiction of Two World Wars (London: Gollancz, 1978) 279-281.

5. Inger Hullberg, rev. of Sweet William, by Beryl Bainbridge, Nerikes Allehanda 7 Sep. 1983: 4 (my translation). As the Bibliography and other references to reviews will show, page references will not always be given. The reason for this is that the major part of my review material is copies made from various clipping files and this information was not always available.

6. In A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978) 3-4, Pierre Macherey divides “criticism-as-explanation” into the two categories of “criticism as appreciation (the education of taste) and criticism as knowledge (the ‘science of literary production’).” This thesis attempts to apply the latter focus by asking how Bainbridge's fiction works in terms of its formative principles rather than in terms of success and failure.

7. Ronald Sukenick, “The Death of the Novel,” The Death of the Novel and Other Stories (New York: Dial, 1969) 41.

8. As quoted by Val Warner in Contemporary Novelists, ed. James Vinson and D. L. Kirkpatrick (London: St. Martin's 1976) 79-80.

9. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, New Accents Series (1989; London: Methuen, 1990) 13. For further accounts of the poetics and politics of postmodern fiction, see, for instance, Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988); Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. New Accents Series (London: Methuen, 1984); Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide, ed. Larry McCaffery, Movements in the Arts 2 (New York: Greenwood, 1986), and Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987).

10. As quoted in World Authors 1970-1975, ed. John Wakeman, The Wilson Authors Series (New York: Wilson, 1980) 49.

11. The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble, (London: Guild, 1987) 60.

12. This thesis will not include a consideration of The Birthday Boys, not because it deviates from the claims I make about Bainbridge's fiction, but because it appeared too late for inclusion.

13. Diane Johnson, rev. of Young Adolf, by Beryl Bainbridge, Times Literary Supplement 1 Dec. 1978: 1385.

14. Valverde 91, 183-184.

15. Valverde 93.

16. Yakovleva 143.

17. Stamirowska 456.

18. Reviewers frequently comment on the mixed feelings that reading Bainbridge occasions and characterize her novels in oppositional terms: they are described as neither wholly comic, nor wholly tragic; they are both real and surreal, macabre and authentic, simple and complex, subversive and cheering, entertaining and instructive, convincing and unimaginable, comic and sinister, witty and depressing, funny and appalling, farcical and menacing, very odd and totally relevant, thought-provoking and unnerving, grotesque and pitiful.

19. Punter 77.

20. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel

    (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983) xiii. A similar point is made by David Lodge in “The Novel Now: Theories and Practices,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 21. 2-3 (1988): 133, where he suggests that “it would be false to oppose metafiction to realism; rather, metafiction makes explicit the implicit problematic of realism.”