eJournals REAL 32/1

REAL
0723-0338
2941-0894
Narr Verlag Tübingen
2016
321

“The musique concrète of civilization”: Responding to Technological and Cultural Change in Postwar British Literature

2016
Ingo Berensmeyer
I NGO B ERENSMEYER “The musique concrète of civilization”: Responding to Technological and Cultural Change in Postwar British Literature They came quite suddenly out of the wood onto the wide expanse of grass near the drive. The great scene, the familiar scene, was there again before them, lit by a very yellow and almost vanished sun, the sky fading to a greenish blue. From here they looked a little down upon the lake and could see, intensely tinted and very still, the reflection in it of the farther slope and the house, clear and pearly grey in the revealing light, its detail sharply defined, starting into nearness. Beyond it on the pastureland, against a pallid line at the horizon, the trees took the declining sun, and one oak tree, its leaves already turning yellow, seemed to be on fire. 1 In this scene from Iris Murdoch’s novel The Bell from 1958, the reader encounters an over-emphatic description of a “very yellow” sunset, a description that is itself “intensely tinted and very still.” Set in the peaceful and placid grounds of Imber Court, a religious lay community in the late 1950s, the scene prepares a semi-embrace between the novel’s homosexual characters, Michael and Toby. Yet before this transgression of the moral code can happen, the autumn idyll is disturbed by yet another experience, described in rather heavy-handed style: Then as they neared the lake another sound was heard. Michael could not at first think what it was; then he recognized it as the rising crescendo of a jet engine. From a tiny mutter the noise rose in an instant to a great tearing roar that ripped the heavens apart. They looked up. Gleaming like angels, four jet planes had appeared and roared from nowhere to the zenith of the sky above Imber. They were flying in formation, and at this point still perfectly together turned suddenly upward and climbed in line quite vertically into the sky, turned with an almost leisurely movement onto their backs and roared down again, looping the loop with such precision that they seemed to be tied together by invisible wires. Then they began to climb again, standing upon their tails, absolutely straight up above the watchers’ heads. Still roaring together they reached a distant peak and then peeled off like a flower, each one to a different point of the compass. In another second they had gone, leaving behind their four trails of silver vapour and a shattering subsiding roar. Then there was complete silence. It had all happened very quickly. 1 Iris Murdoch, The Bell (1958; London: Vintage, 2004), 130-31. I NGO B ERENSMEYER 170 Michael found himself open-mouthed, head back and heart thumping. The noise and speed and beauty of the things had made him for a moment almost unconscious. Toby looked at him, equally dazed and excited. Michael looked down and found that he had fastened both his hands onto the boy’s bare arm. Laughing they drew apart. What has happened in this passage, which is just as “enchanting and slightly absurd” as the singing of a madrigal that the characters overhear immediately before it? In this rhythmic but rather slow dance of prose, the markedly different speeds of human, technological and literary agencies are uneasily intertwined. The connection between the two characters is mediated by their witnessing a technological spectacle, a modern miracle even, that evokes a physical sensation similar to religious or indeed sexual ecstasy - “head back and heart thumping,” “almost unconscious” - and that is described in the register of the sublime: “a great tearing roar,” “shattering,” “gleaming like angels.” This is a Miltonic ‘war in heaven,’ but its description is also interspersed with the discourse of the beautiful: “noise, speed and beauty.” The romantic, perhaps Turneresque (“rail, steam and speed”) echoes in Murdoch’s prose express a fascination with technology that is about to replace, or has already unseated, traditional forms of the numinous or sacred, literally splitting the sky and human ears with supersonic, superhuman possibilities, and thus breaking apart the boundaries of the human life-world as previously known. 2 The sheer noise of the jets interrupts human conversation; it is an emblem of technology transcending the scale of humanity - a key topic in the postwar world. It inspires awe and admiration but is also potentially destructive. These are by far not the only jet planes in postwar British literature. Jets and other technological innovations such as jukeboxes and TV sets not only stimulated Miltonic survivals in the otherwise overly familiar form of the novel; in fact, as I am going to demonstrate, they also challenged established modes of writing in what was then sometimes referred to as the ‘Jet Age.’ 3 My concern is not so much with a particular theory of literature and cultural change, but with a mid-twentieth-century constellation or configuration: a period in which traditional forms of literature (understood as imaginative works of fiction, as novels, plays and poetry) became both attracted to 2 The aerial display in The Bell may have been inspired by “a display at Giddington, Oxford’s airfield, which had fascinated” Murdoch, as well as by her residence, in the late 1950s, close to “the big airfield at Upper Heyford, leased to the USAF and very noisy”: Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life (London: HarperCollins, 2001), 410-11. 3 The term ‘jet age’ was first used in the US in the late 1950s, e.g. in Jet Age Planning: A Report of Progress and Developments as of July 1957 (Washington, DC: United States Civil Aeronautics Administration, 1958). Later, it came to be used more widely to describe phenomena of modernity, e.g. in Hugh Trevor, Jet-Age Japan (London: Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 1970). “The musique concrète of civilization“ 171 and challenged, or perhaps surpassed and superseded, by new technologies, new forms of mass communication and mass entertainment, and new forms of social interaction. Literary responses to technological change can perhaps be understood in terms of inertia, commonly defined as “an object’s tendency to resist any change in its motion.” 4 Scholars of modernist literature are very familiar with such developments, for instance when they examine the competition between narrative literature and photography, and the anxieties of writers like Henry James (as in his preface to the Golden Bowl, 1909) about the potential superiority of photography over narrative prose, or when they study the arrival of the wireless or the relationship between the novel and cinema, as in the striking passages in Henry Green’s 1929 novel Living that try to describe the effect of “picturegoing” in words that leave conventional requirements of grammar and syntax behind in order to capture a new grammar of experience. Without judging this ‘literary inertia’ as something to be deplored or praised in relation to social and cultural changes driven by new technologies, I wish to observe the different temporalities, the different magnitudes of velocity with which literature (in my case, particularly the novel) responds to technological change in the postwar era, especially in the late 1950s. 5 In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), a plane writes letters in the sky out of white smoke - a reminder that war technology was quickly used for advertising in a commercial consumer society. 6 While new media such as photography, radio and cinema, and new technologies such as cars and airplanes, are wellestablished topics in modernist studies, this is arguably less the case with studies of the postwar period in Britain: the Forties, Fifties and Sixties, in which we witness the advent of jet planes, television, and rock ‘n’ roll. These new technologies or new uses of older technologies - remembering Friedrich Kittler’s quip that electrified music is an “abuse of army equipment” 7 4 Giles Sparrow, Physics in Minutes (London: Quercus, 2014), 12. - challenge traditional definitions of communication, social behaviour, and cultural 5 See, for instance, Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); J. Hillis Miller, Illustration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Reaktion, 1992); Stuart Burrows, A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography, 1839-1945 (Athens, GA/ London: University of Georgia Press, 2008); Andrew Shail, The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2012). 6 Modernist writers’ fascination for aviation is well-documented; see Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 186-87, 460. 7 Mißbrauch von Heeresgerät: Friedrich Kittler, Grammophon Film Typewriter (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1986), 149; English trans. as Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 96. Kittler quotes this phrase from Hasso von Wedel, Die Propagandatruppen der deutschen Wehrmacht (Neckargmünd: Vowinckel, 1962), 12. I NGO B ERENSMEYER 172 self-understandings in a changing world. How they are adopted in literature, both on the level of form as well as content, is the topic of this essay. * The postwar period is generally marked by an optimistic belief in technology and technocratic solutions to social problems. It is the age of urban planning, suburban consumerism and increasing affluence, jet propulsion, amplified music and television. Technology is experienced as empowering, as beautiful, and as a tool in human control, as one can see in an advertisement by the British Iron and Steel Federation from 1957. In this image, a sleek silver jet plane is being held in what is probably a female hand, like a toy or an expensive piece of jewellery against a cosmic background showing Saturn and other planets, with the earth barely discernible at the bottom of the image but nonetheless providing a firm and safe footing to this enterprise (fig. 1). Fig. 1: “The shape of steel to come,” The Listener, January 17, 1957, 106. “The musique concrète of civilization“ 173 In this vision of “The shape of steel to come,” science fiction imagery transforms the jet plane into a safe vehicle for interstellar travel. The advertisement’s text stresses the qualities of steel as a product securing “Britain’s scientific progress,” looking “confidently towards a great future” and to such achievements as breaking “the ‘heat barrier’” and building “new plant [sic] for atomic power stations.” 8 Here, then, we see a fascination with control, with cybernetics and the ability of the human kybernetes to gently steer a plane capable of supersonic flight, as dramatised in David Lean’s film The Sound Barrier (1952), scripted by Terence Rattigan, in which a former fighter pilot in postwar England becomes a test pilot for a newly developed jet plane called the “Prometheus.” Here, too, the mythic dimensions of the natural ‘barrier’ broken by human ingenuity and engineering are emphasised, as they are in the image accompanying the British Steel ad. This image might be read as a reinterpretation, indeed an inversion, of Michelangelo’s image of the creation of humanity, where the Creator’s finger touches Adam’s to give him life. In the advertisement image, the human (and strikingly feminine) hand gently lifts the airplane to cross the boundary of planetary space and to transport it upwards into the ‘heavens’ of interstellar space. In the late 1960s, this combination of phallic technology with (pubescent) femininity will have become part of the image repertoire of pop culture, as in the cover art of the eponymous album by the English supergroup Blind Faith. 9 It is not surprising, given its prominence in the socio-cultural imaginary of the Fifties, that the jet plane also features in numerous literary texts randomly picked from the late Fifties - not as a necessary plot device that propels the narrative forward, but for the most part as an accidental or ornamental element, fulfilling an almost decorative or (paradoxically) retardational function, but nevertheless serving as a symbol of modernity and a harbinger of the future. As we have seen, in Iris Murdoch’s The Bell, the jet plane is a superhuman presence that evokes an ecstatic but also potentially destructive, “shattering” experience. It is a curious moment in the novel, which otherwise rarely refers to modern technology, and then only in an instrumental manner (e.g. the members of the community discuss whether to buy a mechanical cultivator for their vegetable garden). And its appearance leaves behind “complete silence,” a silence pointing to the possibility that conventional 8 For historical surveys of British postwar optimism, see Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London: Abacus, 2005); Peter Hennessy, Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties (London: Allen Lane, 2006). 9 I owe this reference to Tore Rye Andersen (Aarhus). The image, easy to find online, could by then be understood as an ironic comment on the decline of British aerospace industry, first and foremost the de Havilland Aircraft Company, which had pioneered the passenger jet service in the early 1950s but became defunct in 1964. I NGO B ERENSMEYER 174 literary language may not be able to represent this ultramodern phenomenon adequately. What kind of agency, in a Latourian sense, does a jet plane have in such texts? As in The Sound Barrier, technology is a source of fascination, providing a limit-experience of a physical and spiritual nature: to break the sound barrier is to break the boundaries of the human life-world, its ne plus ultra. It is certainly no accident then that in his Mythologies, Roland Barthes singles out the “jet-man” (l’homme-jet) as a new type of hero, one who no longer has an experience of speed or adventure but undergoes a “condition” of motionlessness, one in which the myth of the aviator “loses all humanism” but “effects a kind of anthropological compromise between humans and Martians”. 10 When he wrote this, Barthes could not yet have watched Howard Hughes’s film Jet Pilot starring John Wayne and Janet Leigh (1957), but it would probably have done little to change his assessment of the jet pilot as a posthuman “reified hero” characterized by “pure passivity”. 11 As a footnote to this, even a rather staid detective novel such as Agatha Christie’s 4: 50 from Paddington (1957), better known for its murder on a train, contains a reference to jet planes. In the novel’s penultimate chapter, Christie’s characters self-consciously reflect on their being “rather an anachronism” In contrast to the classic adventurer, the “jet-man” is no longer himself an active agent but a mere tool, a function of the machine itself. 12 “Oh, of course,” said Miss Marple, “there’s noise everywhere, isn’t there? Even in St Mary Mead. We’re now quite close to an airfield, you know, and really the way those jet planes fly over! Most frightening. Two panes in my little greenhouse broken the other day. Going through the sound barrier, or so I understand, though what it means I never have known.” in the modern postwar world (the novel also contains a few scathing remarks - uttered, as it turns out, by the murderer - about such modern innovations as the NHS): 13 The obliging Bryan never gets to explain what the sound barrier is because the dénouement is near and the murderer about to be revealed. Here the reference to the jet plane seems to have an ornamental function. For the historical reader, it was probably intended to work as a sign of modernity, in order to connect the pre-war ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction to the realities of postwar Britain. But also in this case, breaking the sound barrier is to go beyond human understanding and communication. The speed of these developments and their accompanying cultural changes pose a challenge to the usually more sedate pace of literature, exert- 10 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Vintage, 2009), 81, 83. 11 Ibid., 83. 12 Agatha Christie, 4: 50 from Paddington (New York: Harper, 2011), 340. 13 Ibid. “The musique concrète of civilization“ 175 ing pressure on established habits of reading, notions of cultural value, and related ideas of belonging and social class - a problem that Daniel Hartley has referred to as the “torsion of the old” by the arrival of the new. 14 This general observation exceeds the discussion of jets in particular, as is evident, for example, in Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957), a book that is often regarded as the birth document of cultural studies in Britain. Hoggart, a student of F.R. Leavis’s, laments the decline of working-class cultural standards when he describes teenagers gathering around the juke-box in a suburban milk bar, listening to prerecorded American music rather than, for instance, engaging in live singing. It is open to debate what is worse for Hoggart - the fact that no one sings anymore, or that the music they listen to comes from the US. 15 “Sensation without commitment” is Hoggart’s judgement on these new, “shiny” and insipid forms of entertainment. Mass culture and pop culture have arrived in Britain, as have cybernetic entertainment machines that interact with - and constitute - audiences: put some money into the jukebox and choose the record you think you want to listen to. (It is astonishing that in German literature, the jukebox is more an object of nostalgia, with Peter Handke’s Versuch über die Jukebox published as late as 1990.) 16 I have already passed uncounted hours half-hypnotised by the jiggling and noisy images. Sometimes I wonder if I am going out of my mind. We have been told that the worst is over after about four years, but long before that my outlook will have A similar argument is made about television in J.B. Priestley’s essay “Televiewing,” in which he recounts his own experience in front of a TV set. Priestley’s description of passivity and stupor resembles that of the jet pilot as diagnosed by Roland Barthes at the same moment: 14 See his essay in the present volume. 15 In Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), the “sweet hot jazz” and the “nasal voices” of popular crooners are among Lolita’s “beloved things”: “The Lord knows how many nickels I fed to the gorgeous music boxes that came with every meal we had! ”, exclaims Humbert Humbert in some exasperation (Vladimir Nabokov, Novels 1955-1962, New York: Library of America, 1996, 137-38). Thanks to Jed Esty for reminding me of this passage. See Barbara Wyllie, “Resonances of Popular Music in Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada,” in: Lisa Zunshine, ed., Nabokov at the Limits: Redrawing Critical Boundaries (New York/ London: Garland, 1999), 43-68. - Even before jukeboxes became widespread after World War II, Horkheimer and Adorno deplored the consequences of mass culture in standardizing and homogenizing music as a form of “psychotechnique, a procedure for manipulating human beings” (Horkheimer/ Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, 133). 16 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments (1957; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 202-205; see Stefan Collini, “Richard Hoggart: Literary Criticism and Cultural Decline in Twentieth- Century Britain,” Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies, ed. Sue Owen (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 33-56. I NGO B ERENSMEYER 176 been so completely changed that I shall be a different person. I shall probably be removed to an old man’s home. Let us hope these places are equipped with good TV sets. 17 Technological optimism and cultural pessimism are coupled in many leftleaning arguments from the period. They were united with the right in condemning such modern phenomena as rock’n’roll, which a psychiatrist of the time compared to “the hysterical dancing mania which occurred in Europe in the fourteenth century” and certain US evangelical groups handling poisonous snakes. 18 In contrast, Thom Gunn’s 1957 poem about the voice of Elvis Presley “unreeling from a corner box” is much less depressed about popular culture, pronouncing it almost irrelevant whether Elvis’s comportment is a “stance” or a “pose.” 19 17 J.B. Priestley, “Televiewing” (1957), Essays of Five Decades (London: Heinemann, 1969), 232-236, 232. The TV industry at the time also addressed “the harm that wrong viewing can do,” meaning by this, however, visual problems of the “correct viewing distance” and “reflection” on the screen; Natasha Kroll, “Designing a Room for Television,” Radio Times, 8 March 1957, 57. Rather than isolating themselves from their own class, as Hoggart observes, Gunn’s collective of listeners express their experience in the first person plural: “We keep ourselves in touch with a mere dime” (l. 9) as Elvis “turns revolt into a style” (l. 10). As a literary response to rock music and popular culture, Gunn’s poem constitutes a more optimistic vision compared to the older generation, represented here by Hoggart and Priestley, and at times can even sound celebratory when compared to the discussions about rock’n’roll in the popular press - especially when the first regular tele- 18 William Sargant, Battle for the Mind. A Physiology of Conversion and Brain-Washing (Melbourne/ London/ Toronto: Heinemann, 1957), 120; cf. plates 22 and 23, n.p. for the visual comparison between spiritual ecstasy and “the recent craze for ‘Rock and Roll’.” It should be noted that a similar ‘culture war’ was waged earlier about the deleterious effects of jazz (which is more likely the music Hoggart had in mind when writing Uses of Literacy). In a marriage advice book from the early 1950s, for example, Leonora Eyles expresses her disapproval of dancing to jazz music in strongly racialised terms: “the dancing and its accompany [sic] music that have come to us from the jungle, the be-bop and such-like, are not fit for the British temperament. These dances are often accompanied by drugging and in some cities bring people of different races (not nations, that is all to the good) too intimately and too provocatively together: the rhythms of the jungle dances, the throbbing drums, the repetitive tunes or the langorous [sic] swaying may be all very well in the jungles of Africa and the West Indies [...]But this is all too strong meat of [sic] the young people of our cold, grey land; their pulse-rate, their blood pressure can’t stand it”; Leonora Eyles, Sex for the Engaged (London: Robert Hale, 1952), 35-36. 19 Thom Gunn, “Elvis Presley,” The Sense of Movement (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 31, l. 2, 14. “The musique concrète of civilization“ 177 vision show to feature rock’n’roll music and dancing, Six-Five Special, launched in February 1957. 20 How does postwar British literature respond to the challenges of manmachine interfaces, cybernetic control mechanisms, and other new technologies? If a book is “a machine to think with,” as I.A. Richards held already in the 1920s, 21 and can hence be described as a kind of interface in its own right, how did British writers of the 1950s and 1960s envisage the future of this traditional interface in connection with emerging new media, new cultural techniques and new technologies? 22 It is a challenge taken up most obviously and directly in the (rather marginal) experimental fiction of this period, and definitely more in the 1960s than in the 1950s: think only of B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969), a novel with 27 unbound sections that can be read in any order chosen by the reader (apart from the first and last chapter, which are specified); in this case, the boundaries of the traditional book are being transcended in the direction of a literary juke-box, emphasizing the nature of the novel as an interface. Nonlinear forms of narrative, such as the cut-up technique of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs, are also used in the work of J.G. Ballard, especially in his The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), a sequence of short narrative segments that trace the mental breakdown or psychosis of the protagonist, Traven, who begins to experience the world as a vast continuum of geometric correspondences, making sense of random events such as the Kennedy assas- What is the impact of these cultural changes on the level of literary form? 20 Controversy raged in the letters pages of the Radio Times. Consider, for example, what this viewer from Penarth, Glamorgan, had to say on 22 March 1957, 58: “Before making any comment in respect of Six-Five Special, I wish to make it quite clear that I am not a prude. I have daughters, sons, and grandsons, and could not care less if they engage in any amusement in moderation. But I have looked in at one or two of these shows, and feel thoroughly disgusted to think that the powers that be give time to exhibitions such as these. I cannot imagine that any decent-minded girl would permit herself to be pulled around in such a way, even to the extent of allowing herself to be thrown at times over the shoulders of the males taking part.” Responding to an earlier broadcast, a reader from London asked himself “[h]ow any sane person [...] can find pleasure in cavorting and jerking about in a raucous cacophony of jungle noises, in a manner which proves conclusively that the usual decent inhibitions have been swamped by sensual and emotional strain” (4 January 1957, 7). 21 I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), 1. 22 The modern meaning of the ‘interface’ arises in this period in electronics and computer technology as “an apparatus designed to connect two scientific instruments, devices, etc., so that they can be operated jointly” (OED, “interface, n.”, 2.b, first citation 1966) and in a figurative meaning as “a means or place of interaction between two systems, organizations, etc.” (2.a). For the latter meaning, the OED’s first citation is from Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy (1962). It is surprising to see the metaphorical usage emerge before the technical. I NGO B ERENSMEYER 178 sination or the accidental death of his wife in a gruesome car crash by overlaying them with a psychotic system of order. Although his later novels are more conventionally structured, Ballard’s unique way of combining modern technology, social satire and surrealism in his fiction constitutes one of the most impressive achievements of postwar British literature when it comes to responding to challenges of modern technological change. In Crash (1973), the car, an emblem of technological progress and mobility, becomes a site of carnage and mayhem, a symbol of the imminent breakdown of so-called Western civilization - a breakdown that was widely feared and expected during the Oil Crisis of the early seventies. In the media history of literature, these examples are more than merely another turn of the screw of postmodernist self-reflection, but paradigmatic markers of the way in which literature responds to technology and redraws its own boundaries as a medium of communication or as what Jürgen Link has called a ‘reintegrating interdiscourse.’ 23 In his science fiction story “The Sound-Sweep” (1960), J.G. Ballard envisages a culture in which classical music has been replaced by “ultrasonic music” that transcends the range of human hearing, making opera singers obsolete. “Ultrasonic music [...] provided a direct neural link between the sound stream and the auditory lobes, generating an apparently sourceless sensation of harmony, rhythm, cadence and melody uncontaminated by the noise and vibration of audible music.” 24 A place of strange echoes and festering silences, overhung by a gloomy miasma of a million compacted sounds, it remained remote and haunted, the grave-yard of countless private babels. In contrast to the silence of this new music, the world of the story is filled by the relentless noise of everyday urban life: “a frenzied hypermanic babel of jostling horns, shrilling tyres, plunging brakes and engines” (41) that has to be removed from walls and surfaces with a kind of vacuum cleaner, the sonovac. In a key moment of the story, the mute sonovac operator Mangon and the ex-opera singer Madame Gioconda drive out to the “sonic dumps” in which the sound-sweeps’ collections are stored: The first of the sonic dumps appeared two or three hundred yards away on their right. This was reserved for aircraft sounds swept from the city’s streets and municipal buildings, and was a tightly packed collection of sound-absorbent baffles covering several acres. [...] Only the top two or three feet were visible above the dunes, but the charged air hit Mangon like a hammer, a pounding niagara of airliners blaring down the glideway, the piercing whistle of jets jockeying at take-off, 23 Jürgen Link, “Literaturanalyse als Interdiskursanalyse,” Diskurstheorien und Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Jürgen Fohrmann and Harro Müller (Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 284-307. 24 J.G. Ballard, “The Sound-Sweep,” The Four-Dimensional Nightmare (London: Gollancz, 1963), 41-79, 48. “The musique concrète of civilization“ 179 the ceaseless mind-sapping roar that hangs like a vast umbrella over any metropolitan complex. (61-62) Ballard’s narrator goes on to describe this “unbroken phonic high” in terms that echo but intensify the sublimity associated with the sound of jet turbines in the passage from Murdoch’s The Bell quoted at the beginning of this essay: it is invisible but nonetheless as tangible and menacing as an enormous black thundercloud. Occasionally, when super-saturation was reached after one of the summer holiday periods, the sonic pressure fields would split and discharge, venting back into the stockades a nightmarish cataract of noise, raining on to the sound-sweeps not only the howling of cats and dogs, but the multi-lunged tumult of cars, express trains, fairgrounds and aircraft, the cacophonic musique concrète of civilization. (62) Ballard’s story may remind its readers that the musical avantgarde of the postwar era embraced electronics, noise and cacophony in previously - literally - unheard ways, moving beyond traditional concepts of beauty or even humanity in its search for radically new forms of artistic expression. 25 In the way it relates the human media of the singing or speaking voice to the superor post-human sounds and noises of “cars, express trains, fairgrounds and aircraft” (62), Ballard’s story is alive to the changing relationship between human beings and modern technology that transcends human capacities of rational understanding and control. 26 My next two literary ‘probes’ from the late 1950s extend this problematic to the making of fiction itself. Inspired by typically postwar styles of thought, in particular behaviourism and cybernetics, Muriel Spark’s first novel, The Comforters, and N.F. Simpson’s first play, A Resounding Tinkle (both from 1957) decentre traditional notions of literary authorship and envisage new modes of writing that not only thematise modern topics but also use new techniques based on the model of the feedback loop popularised in cybernetics. In Spark’s novel, interaction between characters and the author-narrator of the novel lead to interesting moments of metalepsis in which the main character hears the tapping of the author’s typewriter. In Simpson’s absurd ‘comedy of the abstract’, authors are given audience feedback data to improve the effectiveness of their writing. What Iris Murdoch in The Bell and Richard Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy hint at - that ‘man’ in the postwar world may no longer be the measure of all things, that established values and forms of living together have come under immense pressure - is perhaps most fully developed in “The Sound-Sweep”. 25 On “The Sound-Sweep,” see Simon Sellars, “Stereoscopic Urbanism: J.G. Ballard and the Built Environment,” Architectural Design 79.5 (2009): 88-91. I would like to thank Sonja Schillings for drawing my attention to this story. 26 Without invoking the nuclear bomb, arguably the defining invention of this era; see the essay by Sonja Schillings in this volume. I NGO B ERENSMEYER 180 A highly unusual and daring first novel, The Comforters breaks with the postwar realist consensus in narrative fiction, taking inspiration from the French nouveau roman in its disruption of mimetic illusion and point of view - described by Michael Gardiner as “a destruction of myths of depth and of cinematic ideologies of perception” 27 and an experiment of literary address that questions and subverts the norms of social realism in the novel, if not “the fundamental intellectual principles of British consensus” 28 based on empiricism and logical positivism. Spark’s experiments with perspective and metafiction in The Comforters culminate in those scenes in which the female protagonist, the artist Caroline Rose, becomes aware of an authorial presence telling her story. Thus, as Gardiner explains, “the writing of scenes is linked to the writing done in scenes, complicating perspective by turning perspective itself into narrative.” 29 The area of Caroline’s mind which is composing the novel becomes separated from the area which is participating in it, so that, hallucinated, she believes she is observant of, observed by, and in some degree under the control of, an unknown second person. In fact she is in the relation to herself of a fictitious character to a story-teller. Evelyn Waugh’s description of these scenes in his review of the novel is particularly perceptive: 30 The disembodied story-teller’s voice, however, is accompanied by the mundane sound of a typewriter; it is “a voice that is quite certainly not numinous”. 31 This de-romanticized authorial presence is not the artist as a Tolkienesque ‘subcreator’ of a fictional world but rather as a craftswoman whose fictional creations can gain the ability to stand their own ground, as Caroline Rose does when she tells her boyfriend, Laurence Manders, “I won’t be involved in this fictional plot if I can help it. In fact, I’d like to spoil it. If I had my way I’d hold up the action of the novel. It’s a duty. [...] I intend to stand aside and see if the novel has any real form apart from this artificial plot. I happen to be a Christian.” 32 This is not the place to discuss the religious dimension of The Comforters in any detail. Like Caroline in the novel, Spark had recently - in 1954 - converted to Catholicism, and the topic of the relationship between the free will 27 Michael Gardiner, “Body and State in Spark’s Early Fiction,” The Edinburgh Companion to Muriel Spark, ed. Michael Gardiner and Willey Maley (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 27-39, 29. 28 Gardiner, “Body” 28. 29 Ibid. 29. 30 Evelyn Waugh, “Something Fresh: The Comforters,” Spectator 22 February 1957, 256; cit. in Martin Stannard, Muriel Spark: The Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009), 179. 31 Paddy Lyons, “Muriel Spark’s Break with Romanticism,” Edinburgh Companion, ed. Gardiner and Maley, 85-97, 87. 32 Muriel Spark, The Comforters (1957; London: Virago, 2009), 93. “The musique concrète of civilization“ 181 of human beings and the will of God is clearly mapped onto Caroline’s hallucinatory experience with ‘her’ author in the novel. More importantly in this context, The Comforters is an indirect critique of what Waugh derisively termed “the Amis-Wain-Braine” school 33 of social realism; this is discernible in her choice of protagonists, her focus on an aspiring woman artist, and above all in her experiments with narrative voice and the novel form, all of which are in stark contrast to the prevailing realism in literature of the mid- 1950s. In the choice of a woman protagonist, an intellectual interested in “Form in the Modern Novel,” 34 and in its genre-bending mixture of “detective story, crime, social satire, adventure, violence, psychological novel, young love, domestic tale, gothic novel,” 35 The Comforters is a highly unusual work. Manuscripts reveal that Spark already at an early stage in the novel’s conception emphasised the metafictional aspects of confronting a character with her place in a fictional plot, of “[t]rying to make a plot out of a life | Giving our lives a plot | Plotting our lives,” 36 and she repeatedly refers to Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty in her notes: “that it is forever impossible in the nature of things to determine the position and velocity of an electron at the same time for by the very act of observing its position is changed.” 37 The interference between the observer (in this case, the ‘author’) and the observed (in this case, the character) becomes audible in the novel as the sound of the mechanical typewriter: “Caroline hears typewriter tapping. ‘They are changing us merely by observing us. They can never know what we are really like [...] or what we were doing before they started observing.[’] Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty.” 38 Observation and its impact on the observed, the feedback loop between an audience and a performer or producer of literature along behaviourist and cybernetic lines is also a topic in N.F. Simpson’s play A Resounding Tinkle, a piece of absurdist comedy about a suburban couple and two comedians that 33 Evelyn Waugh cited in Douglas Lane Patey, The Life of Evelyn Waugh. A Critical Biography (Oxford/ Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 321. The reference is of course to Kingsley Amis, John Wain, and John Braine, all writers typically identified as ‘Angry Young Men’ in the 1950s. 34 Spark, Comforters, 47. 35 Manuscripts of The Comforters, Muriel Spark Collection, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, box 13.6, 26. 36 Muriel Spark Collection, box 13.7, Notebook 1, 15, underlining changed to italics. 37 Ibid., 38. 38 Ibid., 39. The Heisenberg reference is not included in the finished novel, but Heisenberg’s theory is briefly explained on the previous page of the notes (38): “Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty states that it is forever impossible in the nature of things to determine the position and velocity of an electron at the same time: for by the very act of observing its position is changed.” On metafiction in The Comforters (and in general), see Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Methuen, 1984), 55, 121; on metafiction and the uncertainty principle, 3. I NGO B ERENSMEYER 182 turns into a self-reflexive “comedy of the abstract” 39 about the nature of comedy and drama. At the start of Act One, Scene 2, the ‘author’ appears on stage to tell the audience about the mutual relationship between actors and audience: “We are all spectators of one another, mutual witnesses of each other’s discomfiture” (30). 40 The couple, Mr and Mrs Paradock, and the comedians discuss the theory of laughter by Henri Bergson; since Bergson argues that the human imitation of a mechanic automatism is a source of laughter, Mr Paradock, with the help of the comedians, is transformed into a ‘comptometer,’ an early form of electronic computer. Because the comedians argue that machines are a source of comedy, imitating a typewriter would not be enough in this respect: “Typewriters don’t make out too good comedy-wise, I guess,” says the second comedian, whereupon Mr Paradock asserts that he wants “to be made up to look like an electronic computer. I want to raise a laugh.” However, as the first comedian explains, “[i]t’s no good looking like an electronic computer. You’ve got to be an electronic computer” (34, emphasis original). The comedian then fumbles in Mr Paradock’s pocket and pulls out a “three-point plug attached to a length of flex” (SD, 35). Plugged in and switched on, Mr Paradock turns into an electrified version of Lucky in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: he begins to sputter a rapid sequence of words, numbers, and calculations in a nonsensical combination before he short-circuits and has to be unplugged again: “Paraparaparallelogrammatical. Eighteen men on a dead man’s chest at compound interest is not what it’s for for four in the morning when the square on the hypotenuse is worth two in the circle two in the circle two in the circle two in the circle ...” (35) Before the argument between Paradock and the comedians about who is to blame for this failure can properly get going, Mrs Paradock saves the situation by suggesting: “I expect you’d all like some coffee after that” (36). Shortly after this, a technician appears who tells the audience about new techniques of recording audience responses and matching these to the writing of theatrical texts, with the aim of building up “in microfilm a library 39 N.F. Simpson, A Resounding Tinkle (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), 33. Subsequent quotations are referenced in parentheses in the text. 40 On Simpson’s comedy, see Gordon Collier, “Norman Frederick Simpson. A Resounding Tinkle (1957),” Das zeitgenössische englische Drama. Einführung, Interpretation, Dokumentation. ed. Klaus-Dieter Fehse and Norbert H. Platz (Frankfurt/ Main: Fischer Athenäum, 1975), 25-42; Hans-Jürgen Diller, “N.F. Simpsons A Resounding Tinkle als philosophische Satire,” Die Neueren Sprachen 16 (1967): 357-361; Peter Paul Schnierer, “Absurdität und Komik: N.F. Simpson, A Resounding Tinkle (1958),” Modernes englisches Drama und Theater seit 1945: eine Einführung (Tübingen: Narr, 1997), 38-43. See also my brief summary in Ingo Berensmeyer, “Simpson, Norman Frederick: A Resounding Tinkle,” Kindlers Neues Literaturlexikon, addenda 2014, online. Why academics in Germany seem to have been so much more interested in Simpson than those in England or anywhere else in the world is an open question that cannot be explored further in this essay. “The musique concrète of civilization“ 183 which will embody the case histories in terms of audience reaction of a sufficiently large and representative number of productions of all kinds to do away with the need for inspired guesswork on the part of author or producer” (37-38) to ensure “maximum response” and “optimum spontaneity” (37) - even taking into account different types of audience such as “viscerotonic endomorphs” and “cerebrotonic ectomorphs” (28). 41 The scientific jargon used here is typical of constitutional psychology and also of the behaviourism developed by B.F. Skinner. Its approach to classification and control can also be detected in major social trends in postwar Britain (e.g. nationalisation of major industries, urban planning, and the NHS). When cybernetic mechanisms of audience feedback are built into the writing of plays, as envisaged in A Resounding Tinkle; when the noise of the author’s typewriter becomes audible to the characters in Muriel Spark’s The Comforters, these are indications of more than merely formal playfulness or experimentalism in drama and the novel; they are indications of the culture, ‘Stimmung’ or - better - ‘structure of feeling’ of the 1950s and its literature, which responds to the pressure of other media and other forms of entertainment in a manner that stresses the ambivalence about the connections between technological advances and social progress. Far from merely criticising, embracing or trying to accommodate new technologies, these texts reflect the technological conditions of modernity as a configuration for new forms of writing. Such forms can border on the grotesque or absurd, as they do in Ballard, Spark and Simpson, or they can be treated with greater seriousness, as is the case in Murdoch’s The Bell. They can also be tinged with nostalgia and critique, as they are in Hoggart and Priestley, certainly in Christie. It might be productive to think about these differences in tone and mood in the light of generational patterns, 42 as well as in terms of periodization (late modernist or postmodernist); to do so, however, would exceed the boundaries of this essay. All of the examples discussed here attest to the strong presence and pressure of new technologies on literature in form as well as content in the late 1950s. The texts respond to these developments in distinct but relatable ways, condemning or embracing what Ballard in “The Sound- Sweep” called “the musique concrète of civilization,” 43 41 These terms were not invented by Simpson but refer to the “somatotypes” as defined by the American psychologist William Herbert Sheldon in his Atlas of Men: A Guide for Somatotyping the Adult Male at All Ages (New York: Harper, 1954). not merely ‘sounding out’ cultural change in trying to distinguish music from sound, information 42 The authors discussed in this essay represent three generations: the older ones are Christie (born in 1890) and Priestley (1894); then come Hoggart and Spark (both 1918) and Murdoch and Simpson (both 1919). A younger postwar generation is represented by Ballard, born in 1930. 43 Ballard, “The Sound-Sweep,” 62. 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