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1.1. Who is Penelope Lively?
Penelope Lively, born Low, is the daughter of Roger Vincent and Vera Maud Low. Born in 1933 in Cairo (Egypt), she spent her childhood among exotic creatures like jackals and mongooses but also among soldiers and tanks1. A lonely childhood then, without friends or siblings, which will be forever linked in her mind with the "sights, smells, sounds, tastes"2 of Egypt and the fantasies she lived out of the books she read3.
She did not have a formal education. Lucy, her nanny, provided to instruct her following the Parents' National Education Union's kit for expatriates' children. Thus, she was "vaguely educated at home by a method which involved intensive reading and not a great deal else" (Making 8). The
1 In 1941, General Rommel's German troops advanced across Libya and in 1942 entered Egypt,
arriving till El Alamein, seventy miles from Alexandria.
2 Moran 1993, p. 8.
3 Just to mention some: Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass,
Andrew Lang's Tales from Greece and Rome which is the Victorian re-telling of the great mythologies. "Part of the fascination was that I was right in there anyway – Penelope – and since at eight or nine years old your grasp of the distinction between fact and fiction is somewhat frail, I simply felt that all this had a direct personal relevance [...]. The trouble was that I was in there with the wrong role. [...] So I did some expedient re-jigging of Andrew Lang, re-wrote Penelope's part, and brought things a bit more up to date [...] (Making 9).
method proved perfect for a child who was in fact attracted by books and libraries. She was only 12-year-old when her parents divorced and she moved to London to live with her paternal grandmother. "It was to be a grim rite of passage" (OJ vii) writes Lively in Oleander, Jacaranda, the autobiographical account of her childhood in Egypt.
Childhood was definitely an important period in Lively's life: it was then she unconsciously – and somewhat paradoxically – developed the idea of the influence of the past.
Egyptians had had two thousand years of foreign occupation, reflected now as then in the emotive wealth of the landscape, in which everything happens at once – Greek temples and Roman forts and the mosques of the Mamelukes and eventually the great cosmopolitan jumble of Cairo. With the unimaginable reach of the pharaonic centuries beyond. (OJ 21)
She "perceived with excitement the chasm between past and future, the perpetual slide of the present" (OJ 1). This feeling was reinforced when she arrived in London, where she could witness the juxtaposition between testimonies of the past and modern buildings.
I had been born in Egypt and knew nowhere else; England was a vague memory of a cold, damp place visited when I was very young. (MIU 3)
The impact with the cold weather and the British landscape and life was particularly strong. She felt she belonged neither to England nor to Egypt anymore, "[t]hroughout her adolescence, Lively felt herself very much an outsider, almost a refugee"4.
The stimulating dialectic relationship with her maternal grandmother had a great influence on the shaping of her view of elderly people and on her religious feeling. As a matter of fact, it was during her adolescence that she began to feel the stirrings of agnosticism and the confrontation with her Christian grandmother upon theological issues helped her to "articulate and solidify her emerging agnosticism"5.
Soon after her arrival in England, she was sent to a boarding school whose philistine and repressive atmosphere immediately appeared unsuitable for her character.
So that was early education – totally unstructured, indulgent in all sorts of ways, and it did me no harm at all. When eventually I arrived at a school at the age of thirteen – a barbaric establishment on the south coast – I felt as though I'd been flung into purgatory. It had never occurred to me that reading books was something people grumbled about, and yet here I now was surrounded by other thirteen year olds who hated the sight of them and furthermore by teachers who subtly connived at this. (Writer 5)
It was only when she arrived at university that she could find other people interested in the same passions. She read Modern History at St. Anne's College, Oxford and in 1954 took the B. A. For the first time, she had a very active social life:
I was rather frivolous: very sociable, but with quite the wrong sort of people – wrong in the sense that I wouldn't have anything in common with them now.6
Despite this, the study of history formed her. "It didn't make me a novelist, but it determined the kind of novelist that I have become. It
5 Moran 1993, p. 12.
6 Hardyment, Christina. “Time out of Mind: Penelope Lively Talks to Christina Hardyment”, Oxford Today 2, no. 3, 1990, quoted in Moran 1993, p. 12.
formed a climate of mind"7. At that time, women, even if graduated at Oxford, were not expected to pursue careers: they were told to take a course in shorthand and typing. At that time, Lively had no idea of becoming a historian or a writer, therefore she attended a secretarial school and worked as a tutor for a couple of children. After six months, she was offered the position of research assistant of Race Relations at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. She worked there for three years. In 1957 Professor Jack Lively joined the academic teaching staff. They met and married in six months time. At 25 she had her first child, a daughter called Josephine and she decided to devote herself entirely to her and to Adam, born three years later. Mindful of her lonely childhood under Lucy’s care – the nanny who was a sort of "surrogate mother" (OJ 9) – she intended to look after her children in the first person. The rather tranquil life she was granted by her husband’s job also allowed her to carry on her interest in literature. She read a huge amount of books – and a great deal of them were children's fiction – for a period of about eight years and when the children went to school she started writing juvenile fiction.
From 1970 onward, she published roughly a book a year and in 1977 her first novel for adult readers appeared, The Road to Lichfield. The interest in children's fiction slowly faded and she went on writing for adults.
In 1998 her husband died. She presently lives in Islington and has six grandchildren. Her new book is being published and she has already planned another one. As Penelope said during our interview: "Novelists never retire".
1.2. Weltanschauung
Though necessarily brief, this biographical account strikes some important points in Lively's life which, beyond any doubt, had a great influence in shaping her personality and contributing to the kind of writer she is: her Egyptian childhood, the educational system, the move to London, the relationship with parents and grand-parents, with her children and her husband. All these experiences resulted in a rather determined and down to earth, practical woman. She has once described herself as "rather intense and not particularly easy going"8.
Moran defines her pervaded by "agnosticism and secular spiritualism"9. Adam, her younger son, has said: "I suppose I've got from her – and my father – a vague kind of liberal humanism, anti-religious feeling"10.
Being an agnostic for Lively is acknowledging that what was once fate, now is chance.
I am very conscious that you cannot control life. The crucial events in life, like the people you end up with or your associates, are an extraordinarily fortuitous process.11
It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.12 8 Coles 1988, p. 11. 9 Moran 1997, p. 106. 10 Coles 1988, p. 14. 11 Levin 1988, p. 68. 12 In http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/p/penelope_lively.html, 14/05/2006.
No God to thank or to blame, we must count on ourselves only. Reality is chaos, our existence is precarious. The difference between us and Middle Ages people is that we cannot believe any more in a divine reason behind the apparently arbitrary blows of fortune. We must find a way to cope with it, or, to put it another way, we must try and give a structure "to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history" (T. S. Eliot). In her own words:
In writing fiction I am trying to impose order upon chaos, to give structure and meaning to what is apparently random. People have always sought explanations and palliatives for the arbitrary judgements of fate. I am an agnostic, and while I would not suggest the construction of fiction as an alternative to religious belief, it does seem to me that many writers – and I am certainly one – look at it as an opportunity to perceive and explain pattern and meaning in human existence. I am also deeply conscious of the limitations of experience – the sense in which the writer is fettered by gender, age, social and historical context. It seems to me that the challenge of writing novels and short stories is to transcend and translate personal experience, to try to give a universal and comprehensible significance to things which seem part of fortuitous scenery of one's own life. But a view of the world is essentially and inevitably a personal one, conditioned by circumstance; I write within the English tradition of saying serious things in a relatively light-hearted way.13
Despite her deeply-rooted agnosticism, Lively intuits a spiritual dimension to reality. This is well described by certain epiphanic moments her characters experience, moments that are perceived as symbolic and timeless. Moran names them "secular epiphanies", because they are generated by an intense immersion of the character in the physical world and act as a counterpart for the lack of sense in life.
Such a down-to-earth person, Lively honestly admits the absence of meaning and the existence of evil while asserting the possibility to trust
other human beings and the beauty of the world. She does not reject existentialist anxieties nor resigns to them. She believes we can contrast them and that literature can be a useful tool for that purpose.
Lively has a very moral view of literature. She believes it can help one with the process of living ‘by illuminating [life's] conflicts and its ambiguities. We read to find out more about what it is like to be a human being... [...]’14.
Similarly, William Friedman writes about the psychology of time and argues that:
Some of the most satisfying moments for any reader of literature come from recognizing in the characters feelings that had previously seemed unique to us. But there is also great attraction to narratives that portray experiences very different from our own.15
Therefore, fiction can help humans to feel less alone and to understand certain patterns in life. It can help readers to widen their knowledge, to experience alternative points of view.
Reality is made up of a set of elements which are experienced differently from each of us. This is expressed by Lively through the metaphor of the kaleidoscope: we need as many points of view, and kaleidoscope images, as possible to try to achieve the most complete image, "each version of the event, like each new kaleidoscope design, is different from the preceding one and yet contains intricate traces of it."16
14 Moran 1993, p. 6. 15 Friedman 1990, p. 111. 16 Moran 1993, p. 4.
A further concern of Lively is with the nature of evidence. She describes it as tenuous and thoroughly subjective; yet, paradoxically, our subjective perceptions shape the world and give it existence, as they do to history. Although it is not possible to write objective history because the account is always inevitably fettered by the writer's idiosyncrasies, there is a sense in which history could not exist without the mind that thinks about it.
1.3. Lively's genres
Lively is a prolific writer. Not only does she write roughly a book per year but she has also written radio and television scripts, presented a radio program and she regularly contributes reviews and articles to various newspapers and journals.
Her narrative production includes: fiction, non-fiction, short stories, children's fiction and short stories, autobiography, drama and radio drama, screenplays.
1.3.1. Children's fiction
As briefly mentioned in the biographical account, Lively did start writing children's fiction in 1970 and only in 1977, after eight books, she turned to adults' fiction.
Lively believes it is a difficult task that of writing for children, since they are as sensitive as adults but their world is yet unstructured. They have no preconceptions or assumptions.
Why shouldn't animals talk? As adults, we live within the straitjacket of accepted and defined reality; the child does not.17
During childhood, the borderline between reality and fantasy is blurred, "suspension of disbelief is a natural part of childhood"18. In her writings for childhood, Lively intends to respect children's vision of the world while trying to expand their horizon, to make them conscious of the subjectivity of points of view and of the real existence of the past.
Many of her children's novels deal with, and anticipate, the themes and narrative techniques that characterize her adult fiction. The difference rests mainly in the way themes are introduced into the plot. For example, the complex interaction between past and present in children's fiction arises from the introduction of supernatural phenomena, whereas in adults' fiction it mainly comes from the intellectual activity of the characters.
The most recurring themes are the nature of time, the influence of the past, the reality of history, the different perception of life in children and adults. The protagonist, usually a 10- or 12-year-old youngster, must resolve a mystery, the occurrence of some supernatural phenomenon. In doing so, he is helped by other children or by an elderly person. Adults are capable of neither understanding nor accepting the supernatural explanation of the problem. But there are also lighter and more humorous books which focus on talking animals, as well as easy-to-read illustrated short books for very young readers.
Lively’s writings for children may be divided into three categories according to three different age ranges: books for children from 7 to 9, from 8 to 10, and from 12- to 15.
Among the first category one might mention Boy without a Name, the
Fanny books19, Dragon Trouble, Debbie and the Little Devil, Uninvited
Ghosts and Other Stories.
The Fanny books are a series of three novels set in the mid-nineteenth century, whose protagonist is young Fanny Stanton. Many of Lively’s children books are set in the past and only few have contemporary settings. This serves the purpose of characterizing the past as a living dimension.
The second age range includes her major children production, with such titles as The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, which has by now become a classic,
The Whispering Knights, The Driftway, A Stitch in Time and many others.
The third group includes two juvenile novels: The House in Norham
Gardens and Going Back. Both anticipate in the form and themes the first
adults' novels, published only a few years later. Significantly enough,
Going Back has recently been switched to the adult literature category.20
19 Fanny's Sister, Fanny and the Monsters and Fanny and the Battle of Potter's Piece. 20 For a complete account of Lively's fiction for children see Moran 1993, pp. 15-22.
1.3.2. Fiction
Lively has written 14 novels21 whose main concern is in Le Mesurier's words:
one overriding theme: the living presence of the past in landscape and individual consciousness. [...] Yet in spite of the singularity of her interest each of her works has managed to explore a distinct aspect of her theme.22
We cannot deny that one of Lively's main preoccupations is with the past and the operations of memory, yet I think that her oeuvre is far less mono-thematic than has been so far recognized. As I shall try to show in Chapter Three, Lively's texts deal with several, though recurrent, themes.
In her production novels where realistic features prevail side with others in which "this realism gives way to the foregrounding of postmodern ontological concerns about the nature of reality"23, thus resulting in a much more experimental prose. Examples of the latter type are Moon Tiger, City
of the Mind, Cleopatra's Sister, The Photograph, and Making It Up.
The others, such as Treasures of Time, Heat Wave, Next to Nature, Art often support the exploration of serious themes with satirical comedy-of-manners scenes. Lively is particularly good at satire and social criticism, as
21 Including Making It Up (2005), a fictional anti-memoir in the form of a collection of short
stories.
22 Le Mesurier 1990, p. 36. 23 Moran 1997, p. 102.
for example in Next to Nature, Art where she criticizes a superficial commitment to art.
Moran acknowledges a Barbara Pym-like strand in novels such as
Passing On and Judgement Day, in which the setting is a quaint village and
characters are vicars and spinsters, but also debts to Austen, Hardy and Forster have been acknowledged.
[...] she shares with Austen and the eighteenth century an amused, sardonic view of humanity, a strong moral streak, and an interest in nature, art, and the picturesque; with George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and the Victorians a compassionate attitude toward human beings' struggles against life's misfortunes and vagaries; with Woolf, Forster, and the modernists an interest in secular epiphanies and in experimental narrative techniques; and with her own times an agnostic outlook and an awareness that there is no absolute reality.24
Hereafter I will provide a very brief description of each of her novels:
The Road to Lichfield (1977) tells the story of Anne Linton, whose
father is dying in a nursing home in Lichfield, and the jolting discovery of a different version of her father's life which will change her perception of reality.
Treasures of Time (1979) centres on a young biographer, Tom Rider,
who is studying the life of an eighteenth century antiquarian. It is a novel about the uses and abuses of the past as well as the subjective nature of evidence.
Judgement Day (1980) is set in a village, Laddenham, where villagers
are caught up with a fund-raising campaign for saving the medieval Doom painting of the local church. In-between a large group of main characters emerge Clare Paling, who has recently joined the community, and the Prufrockian vicar George Radwell.
Next to Nature, Art (1982) is a satirical novel about a commune of
artists who organizes weeklong creative courses.
Perfect Happiness (1983) describes Frances Brooklyn's slow recover
from her husband's sudden death thanks to new encounters and old friendships.
According to Mark (1984) is another novel centred on a biographer,
Mark Lamming, who becomes obsessed with the subject of his research, the writer Gilbert Strong, and eventually falls in love with his granddaughter.
Moon Tiger (1987) focuses on a woman journalist's reflections on her
unconventional life as she lies dying in a hospital bed, while her mind retrieves memories of her family and love affairs.
Passing On (1989) describes the manipulation of two siblings' lives by
their mother and their attempt at learning how to live without her after her death.
City of the Mind (1991) focuses on London, seen through the eyes of
seeing beyond the mere surface of things and perceiving the real existence of history.
In Cleopatra’s Sister (1993), an imaginary Middle Eastern country called Callimbia is the subject of the work of Howard (a palaeontologist) and Lucy (a journalist), who both fail to comprehend the landscape in which they find themselves trapped.
Heat Wave (1996) centres on Pauline, now an established copy-editor,
who reflects on her daughter's failed marriage and recalls her personal experience.
Spiderweb (1998) is the story of Stella Brentwood, a retired
anthropologist, struggling to settle in a small village in Somerset after a lifetime spent travelling through Egypt, Greece and the Mediterranean.
The Photograph (2003) tells of a chance discovery that reveals the
secrets of a woman's life and the power of the past.
Lively’s latest book, Making it Up (2005), is a form of anti-memoir, in which she imagines alternative outcomes to her life25.
25 For a more detailed survey of all Lively adults' novels up to City of the Mind (1991), I suggest
the reading of Moran's Penelope Lively (1993). It contains summaries of plots and an analysis of themes.
1.3.3. Short stories
Short stories have appeared in Cosmopolitan, Encounter, Good
Housekeeping, Options, The Literary Review, The Observer, Vogue, Woman's Own and other magazines including foreign periodicals. A
number have also been read on the BBC and on Australian Radio.
The first two collections of short stories, Nothing Missing but the
Samovar (1978) and Corruption (1984), have been published together in Pack of Cards, Stories 1978-1986 (1986). Beyond the Blue Mountains, a
collection of 14 short stories, ranging from the fantasy of Scheherazade to a dazzling example of chaos theory, appeared in 1997.
Her latest book Making It Up (2005) can also be considered a collection of short stories, although, as we shall later see, it is difficult to classify it under a single label.
According to Lively, short stories are born in a different way from novels. They are triggered by something one sees, or overhears and do not need much background work. As a consequence, they deal with a wider range of themes, settings and characters. Themes include stories of outsiders, eccentrics, offbeats as well as social satire, adolescents' troubles and the clash between generations. There are also stories concerned with the operation of memory, the subjective nature of reality, the fascination of time.
Short stories are often inspired by personal memories: episodes are suddenly retrieved by memory and short stories record such episodes, without intellectual elaboration, as if they were just "little slices of life"26.
I take the short story very seriously. I find it is very much a complement to writing novels. There are some ideas that I think can only be expressed in the short story, and there's also a curious way in which I find the short story is more autobiographical – not in the sense of telling the story of your life, but arising much more from little things, something seen, something heard, some incident that at the time appears to be quite without significance and yet will surface quite possibly years later, and you see some way to give it a significance that transcends your own personal experience and becomes, you hope, something that has a universal reverberation of a meaning.27
1.3.4. Non-fiction
Lively has written 3 non-fiction books which are also autobiographical works. The first, The Presence of the Past: An Introduction to Landscape
History (1976), deals with the evolution of her concept of history.
Her second non-fiction book is Oleander, Jacaranda (1994), the account of her childhood in Egypt. It alternates personal flashbacks with explanations and considerations about her own childhood and childhood in general.
The third, A House Unlocked (2001), takes as starting point the family home of Golsoncott in West Somerset. It is used as a mnemonic spur to solicit personal and historical memories.
I decided to use the house as the prompt for a book about time and change, about war and peace, about town and country – an eccentric kind of memoir.28
26 Moran 1993, p. 23. 27 Smith 1988, p. 48.
1.3.5. TV, radio and journalism
As a literary journalist, Lively has reviewed regularly and written articles for Encounter, the Sunday and the Daily Telegraph, the
Independent, the Times, the Sunday Times, the Observer, the New York Times, Books and Bookmen, The Literary Review, The Times Educational Supplement, the Standard and other journals and newspapers.
She has written radio and television scripts and was the speaker for a BBC Radio 4 programme on children's literature.
1.4. Acknowledgements
Lively has won several prizes. She has been shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize, winning once for Moon Tiger (1987)29, which was also shortlisted for the Whitbread Award. The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973)
won the Carnegie Medal. A Stitch in Time (1976) was awarded with the Whitbread Award. Nothing Missing but the Samovar (1978) and Treasures
of Time (1979), won respectively the Southern Arts Literature Prize and the
Arts Council National Book Award.
She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a member of PEN and the Society of Authors, of which she was a former chairman. In 1989 she was awarded the OBE and in 2001 the CBE.
From what we have so far illustrated, Lively turns out to be an all-round writer who has allowed herself to experiment with different typologies of texts. It is not always easy to draw clear boundaries between different genres and subgenres in her works. From this point of view, she is perfectly in tune with the typically Postmodernist attitude which tends to blur the distinctions between genres and to produce texts whose main characteristic is hybridization and pastiche.
29 The other two books which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize are The Road to Lichfield
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2.1. Hating labels and definitions
[...] all acts of categorization or boundary-drawing are
strategic. That is, they are all made in view of some
purpose on the definer's part; they are all apropos of something else.
(Brian McHale)
"I hate labels": such a categorical statement was Penelope’s reply to one of my questions during our interview when I asked her whether she was at ease with her being defined a “Postmodernist writer”.
I think she was referring to the widespread, somewhat wild, fad of labelling adopted by certain critics. Such an activity could be particularly irritating, especially when the person at issue is one who avows the subjective quality of experience. But there is a sense in which a moderate and reasoned form of labelling is the only chance to get out of the impasse of relativism; the only way to build up a coherent – though subjective – literary landscape.
Many are, in fact, the labels attached to Lively's name, among which the most recurrent are realist, postmodernist, feminist, all of them followed by the word writer, the only definition she never argues about. She is a writer concerned about writing and that is all; she is no literary theorist or critic, no psychologist or palaeontologist.
2.2. Realism(s)
Bradbury's essay The Open Form: The Novel and Reality30
tackles the
difficult issue of defining literary realism. I would like to relate such concern to the study of Lively's novels and to the possibility of defining her as a realist writer.
Traditional nineteenth century novels depended
on a degree of relative stability in three separate areas: the idea of reality; the nature of the fictional form; and the kind of relationship that might predictably exist between them [...]. It goes without saying that for many twentieth-century novelists and critics this assumption is no longer credible [...]31
Nineteenth century novels had to provide plausible worlds and passions, in other words "some basic appeal to reality"32. The latter was then considered as truthfulness to a shared perception of man, society and religion; a reality which was not questioned but owned its order and rules according to which one was expected to act and judge. One of the elements at the basis of this drift towards realism was the development of science and technology which seemed to provide objective languages for the description and interpretation of reality33.
But as it [the novel] enlarges its realism through expanding its social sweep, it suffers from the inevitable loss of control over reality and finds that it cannot maintain its notional community, cannot command and master experience. Hence it suffers crises of form, being unable to relate individual to society or to experience; these coincide
30 Bradbury 1973, pp. 3-27. 31 Ibid., p. 15.
32 Ibid., p. 10.
spectacularly with modernism, which is not so much a technical or perceptual development as the discovery that reality is no more than personal.34
Hence the paradox of fictional Realism: language sustains such a representative enterprise but its object progressively withdraws becoming every day more and more distant.
This presses us towards the inept conclusion that fiction is the product of the perceptual limitations of a society, is a symptomatic communal illusion, leaving critics with the task of unweaving the logic by which the novelist manifests the guilty perceptual system of his culture. 35
As Bradbury observes, fiction is a social product and in this sense a shifting category. Both the perception of reality and reality itself are continually changing while the novel attempts to portray it, to imitate it. Realistic novels are anyway fiction and writers have always known that fiction is not real and that “literary realism is a tantalizing contradiction in terms”36. What can be achieved is just a realistic effect. "Realism is a relative concept; relative, that is, to the purpose of the writer and the effect on the reader. The only thing which matters in fiction is the illusion of real experience [...]”37. The realistic enterprise has its roots in narrative devices which must achieve effects of credibility, verisimilitude, authenticity, objectivity, and vividness.
34 Bradbury 1973, p. 17. 35 Bradbury 1973, p. 16.
36 Quoted in Hutcheon 1980, p. 4. 37 Leech and Short 1987, p. 152.
This type of fiction can be further subdivided and we could even speak of realisms inasmuch as every author faces it in his own way. The list of
realisms could be infinite, since
[o]nce you start on this sort of analysis, you discover that no writer's 'realism' is actually like anyone else's; you also find yourself defining this realism according to all sorts of different languages (realism is empiricism; it is moral scepticism; it is a documentary attentiveness based on research, itself perhaps managed according to hypotheses or procedural categories; it is a pursuit of a moment of authentification; etc. etc.) – which makes it very patent you are talking of fiction.38
One of the possible ways of classifying realisms is Hutcheon's distinction between mimesis of process and mimesis of product:
[...] the realism of the nineteenth century, which is based almost entirely on what will be called a mimesis of product, will be seen more as a reductive limitation of novelistic mimesis than as the paradigm or the defining characteristic of the genre – as Auerbach, Watt, and many others have insisted. [...] Modern metafiction is largely what shall be referred to here as a mimesis of process; but it grows out of that interest in consciousness as well as the objects of consciousness that constitutes the “psychological realism” of Woolf, Gide, Svevo, and Proust at the beginning of the century.39
The mimesis of process shows to the reader all thoughts and events as filtered through the character’s mind. The Modernist “unity of action was replaced by the unity of personality – here, the artistic personality”.40 In the mimesis of product, on the contrary, “the reader is required to identify the products being imitated – characters, actions, settings – and recognize their similarity to those in empirical reality, in order to validate their literary
38 Bradbury 1973, p. 20. 39 Hutcheon 1980, p. 5. 40 Ibid., p. 12.
worth."41 The prevalence of one of the two types of mimesis constitutes a dialectical and diachronic process.
Hutcheon identifies mimesis of process as a metafictional feature but I think it can be spread out to Lively's novels too, though she is not a metafictional writer.
I would like now to put forward two more definitions of realisms. In the first place, J. P. Sterne's middle-distance realism, "a form of address to the material and the reader which feels no need to assert by verbal or modal self-consciousness that it is basically a construct of words and perspectivized distances."42 It is a recurrent poise in the history of literature between fiction and reality, where no problematic perception of reality is foregrounded. Sterne’s middle-distance realism corresponds to Hutcheon's mimesis of product. It aims to adhere to the social external reality giving for granted its plausibility. Such a view explains realism "as the product of sociological, cultural, philosophical, and ideological causes"43 because realism "depends on the way all acts of language and structure become real, win the nod of assent, in a given culture"44. This is suitable for nineteenth century Realism but can also account for much of contemporary realist fiction which focuses on the mimesis of product.
41 Hutcheon 1980, p. 38. 42 Bradbury 1973, p. 19. 43 Ibid., p. 14.
On the contrary, zero-distance realism seeks to present the internal subjective perception of reality. This type of realism springs from a ‘zero-distance’, an adherence to the subjective perception of the character's world. This kind of psychological realism is often conveyed through what are regarded as experimental forms, that is such narrative techniques as the stream of consciousness.
Michel Butor, studying the nouveau roman, values the narrative form as a mean of achieving realism. He says that:
in a changing world traditional narrative techniques are incapable of dealing with new relations, and that hence formal invention is the only basis of greater realism, for the inner parts of the novel – the relationships of grammar, narrative sequence, temporal order, inside the work – constitute an inner symbolism.45
Hence formal innovations are not always indexes of experimentalism. It is, however, difficult to understand where to draw the line between these two narrative modalities. They often overlap and it is our task, as readers, to decide according to our knowledge and interpretation.
All that said, it seems to me that we must regard Lively as a synthesis between the two modalities. Her novels combine mimesis of product with mimesis of process, middle-distance with zero-distance realisms. On the one hand, her Modernist psychological realism is proved by her constant preoccupation with the reproduction of the wanderings of memory and
mind. She wants to portray the way in which our mind is often dissociated from our body experiencing different times and places at the same time.
Thus he coasts through the city, his body in one world and his head in many. (CM 2-3)
She accomplishes this task by deleting the distance between the reader and the character's mind – assuming a zero-distance – and playing with perspectives.
Tony Brace peers into the haze in search of known point of reference.
But Matthew's eyes are upon the river. He looks down at the wide, glittering and empty roadway. He sees it reaching away to Tilbury, to the sea, to the rest of the globe. Reaching into time and space. (CM 15)
On the other hand, there is the realism of plot, setting and characters which provide the basis for the representation of the activity of the mind and for playing with chronology and points of view.
Settings are always well-described and they are often British – the city of London and the English countryside – ; but there are also foreign sceneries, like Egypt.
When high summer arrives in the west of England the arteries begin to clog. The M5 is an oozing river of vehicles that thrusts down through Somerset to disgorge into the heartlands of Devon. The A39 crawls, day after day, clotted with caravans, trailers, cruisers. The coastal cliffs wear a mantle of campsites; each cove, each bay, each stretch of sand is peppered with human flesh. Anywhere with a cathedral and pedestrian shopping precinct on offer is awash. The Exmoor car-parks are spilling into the heather, there are timed visits only to Lynmouth and Lynton, a three-day waiting list for Clovelly, Cornwall was declared closed on 10 August. (SW 211)46
46 Lively makes a great deal of background work before actually starting to write a novel. Notice
Characters are even more accurately described than settings. Lively's flair for psychological introspection results in rounded credible and complex characters:
She is almost frighteningly perceptive and her books reveal her ability not only to understand but to describe with laserbeam accuracy the nuances of a whole range of human emotions, particularly those of women.47
She can be convincing even when writing from a male point of view and she has been highly praised for her skill in portraying children. What follows is an excerpt from a dialogue between Matthew Halland and his daughter Jane in City of the Mind (1991):
'You're not listening,' she cries. 'I said what's that thing for?' She breaths on the glass case, draws a J for Jane in the fog she has made.
'It's an instrument people used to use at sea for finding which direction to go by measuring the position of the sun or the stars.'
Jane sighs, massively. 'I'm feeling just a little bit sick.'
'I told you a second helping of chips wouldn't be a good idea,' says Matthew.
'Not very sick. Shall we go into the park again? You said you thought there were swings somewhere. (CM 44)
To further enhance the characters' credibility, she places them firmly in a plausible context, usually a familiar or a working one. Very often her characters are professionals belonging to academic intellectual fields (biographers, historians, anthropologists, architects).
As regards plots, she usually creates simple narratives in which the action develops mainly inside the characters' mind. Sometimes, she adds subplots juxtaposing or integrating the main one. In City of the Mind, for
example, the main story of Matthew Halland alternates with four subplots, creating an organic whole.
Psychological realism is beyond any doubt Lively's primary concern, but the traditional realism of plot, settings and characters strengthens and further enhances the overall realistic effect.
2.3. Postmodernist?
Postmodernism once more - that breach has begun to yawn!
(Ihab Hassan)
Further necessary steps have to be taken to approach Lively’s world. The author was born in the 1930s and a great deal of her production began to be published during the 1970s. Her birthday makes her a citizen of postmodernity. But what about including her in the club of Postmodernist writers? The answer to this question will be the subject of this section.
The gist of the Postmodernist diatribe is a problem of definition, both of diachronic and synchronic boundaries. This means that there is still a great fuss about when and where and why we are calling ourselves Postmodernist. The only certainty is that the Modern period is expired by now: as Ceserani maintains "che il salto nel postmoderno ci sia stato […] è dimostrato dal fatto che sono divenute possibili le ricostruzioni complessive della modernità."48
A first major problem is one of critical distance: we are called to argue about the period we are living in; in a word, we are the beholder of
ourselves. Thus it becomes extremely difficult – if not impossible – to assume a critical perspective.
Another controversial issue is nomenclature. If it is now commonly accepted that Postmodernism and postmodernity do not coincide, it is still difficult to distinguish clearly between their domains. Postmodernism can be defined as a cultural phenomenon, a cultural dominant, whereas postmodernity refers to a historical periodization, the contemporary society and the stage of technological and economic organization it has reached.
Molte delle difficoltà con cui si è scontrato il dibattito sono dovute, io credo, alla continua confusione tra postmodernità e postmodernismo, tra la sostanza storica e materiale del cambiamento e i livelli di coscienza, comprensione e ricostruzione ideologica di chi ha cercato di farsene interprete, contrastarlo o assecondarlo e perfino in taluni casi anticiparlo.49
Anyway, even if the confusion continues to be perpetrated, no great harm is done. The characteristics of postmodernity influenced the development of Postmodernism and thus often the two overlap.
With regards to the term Postmodernism, other discussions are brought to the fore, in particular those concerning the enemy it brings within, that is Modernism. Postmodernism "evokes what it wishes to surpass or suppress [...], its enemy within, as the terms romanticism and classicism, baroque and rococo, do not".50 Where Modernists affirmed positively their will to part from the past, we cannot but place ourselves in a line of continuity upon which to point out the differences. We have not succeeded in
49 Ceserani 1997, p. 120. 50 Hassan 1997, p. 96.
providing a constructive and positive definition of our period and episteme (maybe due to the lack of critical distance). All springs from the comparison and contrast with our forerunners. In Ceserani's view:
Il nome è parso a taluni discutibile, ma di fatto non si tratta neppure di un nome mal trovato, proprio per la connessione ambigua che instaura con il periodo precedente della modernità e per l'incapacità che denuncia, nel nuovo periodo, di darsi un nome proprio e originale e la tendenza, in esso evidente, a qualificarsi semplicemente come posteriore al moderno.51
Hassan is of a different opinion. He holds that the term Postmodernism is still in its "brash adolescence" and thus ventures to put forward alternative terms such as "Age of Indetermanence"52.
I will not indulge further on terminology, neither do I intend to delve into the problem of periodization. Suffice it to say that the beginning of postmodernity is commonly acknowledged to date back to the decade between the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, I would like to point out the different features of Modernism and Postmodernism, for this will later help me to focus specifically on Lively's work.
Hassan is convinced that the two main features of Postmodernism are indeterminacy and immanence; thus he coined the term indetermanence:
Of these two poles indeterminacy stands primarily for the results of that decentering, of the total disappearance of ontology; immanence stands for the tendency of the human mind to appropriate all of reality to itself (this, too, is of course made possible by decentering).[...] Whereas indeterminacy leads to fragmentation, tribalization, immanence leads to globalization, through the more and more uniform language of the media – "the immanence of media now effects the dispersal of Logos".53
51 Ceserani 1997, p. 10.
52 Indetermanence stands for indeterminacy + immanence which Hassan reckons as the two main
features of Postmodernism.
Other critics, such as Harvey (1989), agree in the description of this double movement: decentering, which supports the emergence of "a fragmented politics of divergent special and regional interest groups"54 – fragmentation – but from which also springs the opposite reaction, that is "the search for personal or collective identity."55
Harvey further argues that nowadays "[t]he annihilation of space through time has radically changed the commodity mix that enters into daily reproduction"56 with the general implication that "through the experience of everything from food, to culinary habits, music, television, entertainment, and cinema, it is now possible to experience the world's geography vicariously, as a simulacrum."57 "The simulacra can in turn become the reality."58
Baudrillard has an even more apocalyptic view:
Dappertutto lo stesso effetto stereofonico, di prossimità assoluta del reale: lo stesso effetto di simulazione.
Per definizione, questo vanishing point, questo punto al di qua del quale c'era storia,
c'era musica, è irreperibile. Dove deve fermarsi la perfezione stereo? I limiti di essa
si spostano continuamente, perché sono quelli dell'ossessione tecnica. Dove deve fermarsi l'informazione? A questa fascinazione del «tempo reale», equivalente dell'alta fedeltà, si può muovere solo un'obiezione morale, che non ha un gran senso. Il superamento di questo punto è quindi irreversibile… Non ritroveremo più la musica pre-stereofonica (se non grazie a un effetto di simulazione tecnica supplementare), non ritroveremo più la storia di prima dell'informazione e dei
media.59
54 Harvey 1989, p. 114.
55 Ibid., p. 115. "'Think globally and act locally', was the revolutionary slogan of the 1960s" (p.
115).
56 Ibid., p. 112. 57 Ibid., p. 113. 58 Ibid.
Hassan’s provisional solution for the postmodern conundrum is pluralism. In his view a pluralistic approach is the only way to account for the semantic and historical instability of this literary concept, to which, maybe, we are simply too close to understand it fully.
The Postmodernist acknowledgement of the dissolution of the concept of Truth, in favour of truths, and of the impossible relationship between the subject and the external world becomes the attempt to re-create this relationship playing with language and texts, through irony and parody.
For Ceserani, the difference between a Modernist and a Postmodernist text is that in the former the narrative deconstruction serves an hermeneutic cognitive function, it does not want to cause the reader to lose his bearings but to achieve a multiplication of perspectives, whereas the latter puts forward ontological doubts about the world(s) it describes.
An overriding distinction is that made by Brian McHale (1987). He holds that there has been a change of dominant between the two periods: the dominant, according to the definition given by Jakobson, is "the focusing component of a work of art: it rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components"60. The description of changing dominant accounts also for the description of the process of literary-historical change, because this shifting explains the foregrounding and backgrounding of the elements
of the literary system. The pivotal thesis of McHale's work is that the two dominants implied the different catalogues of features attributed to Modernism and Postmodernism are respectively an epistemological and an ontological one.
[...] the dominant of modernist fiction is epistemological. That is, modernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions such as those mentioned by Dick Higging in my epigraph: "How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?" Other typical modernist questions might be added: What is there to be known?; Who knows it?; How do they know it, and with what degree of certainty?; How is knowledge transmitted from one knower to another, and with what degree of reliability?; How does the object of knowledge change as it passes from knower to knower?; What are the limits of knowledge? And so on.61
Whereas:
[...] the dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological. That is, postmodernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions like the ones Dick Higgins call "post-cognitive": "Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?" Other typical postmodernist questions bear either on the ontology of the literary text itself or on the ontology of the world which it projects, for example: What is a world?; What kinds of worlds are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ?; What happens when different kinds of world are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated?; What is the mode of existence of a text, and what is the mode of existence of the world (or worlds) it projects?; How is a projected world structured? And so on.62
Therefore, transition from epistemology to ontology is what characterizes the 20th century and the birth of postmodernity; the transition in the opposite direction, on the contrary, happened at the end of the 17th century, with the "rise of the novel"63.
Intractable epistemological uncertainty becomes at a certain point ontological plurality or instability: push epistemological questions far enough and they "tip over" into ontological questions. By the same token, push ontological questions far enough
61 McHale 1987, p. 9. 62 Ibid., p. 10.
and they tip over into epistemological questions – the sequence is not linear and unidirectional, but bidirectional and reversible.64
McHale believes that both the Modernist and the Postmodernist writer mimic the world in which they and their readers live and experience. Thus, the Postmodernist turns to ontological strategies in the text, highlighting the fact that a work may well comprise epistemological and ontological concerns at the same time, but inevitably one of them will prevail upon the other.
According to McHale, Postmodernist fiction is characterized by the following features:
World under erasure. Creation of alternative ontologies. This is possible
because the worlds that are created are purely textual, subjected to erasure and contradiction and multiple endings and non-endings.
Chinese box worlds. Embedding narratives, a strategy that multiplies
worlds in a "recursive structure." Each change of narrative level in a recursive structure also involves a change of ontological level, a change of world.
Trompe-l'oeil effects. Postmodernist texts tend to "deliberately mislead
the reader into regarding an embedded, secondary world as the primary, diegetic world."65
Strange loops. Moving through a hierarchical system, you can find
yourself back where you started unexpectedly. This is called metalepsis and foregrounds the "ontological dimension of recursive bedding."66
_______________
Let us now turn to Lively and try to establish her relationship with Modernism and Postmodernism. The Modernist season is highly experimental as far the form of the novel is concerned and equally breaking from the point of view of themes. Schematically Modernist fiction deals with the following themes: the feeling of an unknowable reality; disillusionment; the rejection of history and its substitution with a mythical past; the special role of the artist in society; the celebration of subjective experience; epistemological concerns. From a formal point of view, it exploits such devices as: open form, discontinuous narrative, juxtaposition, intertextuality and borrowings from other cultures and languages; stream of consciousness and interior monologue; multiple points of view.67
Lively's novels emphasize a Modernist epistemological relativism. Her characters portray the solipsistic human condition, the restricted point of view from which everyone sees the world. Hence we find examples of stream of consciousness and interior monologue, shifting points of view,
65 McHale 1987, p. 115. 66 Ibid., p. 120.
67 This list, and the one that will be given for Postmodernist features, do not aim to be exhaustive,
open endings, discontinuous narrative and juxtaposition. From the point of view of form, Lively is highly Modernist; as for themes, she deals with time and the subjectivity of experience. In The Photograph (1998), for example, Glyn reflects about what he thinks he knew about his wife Kath, now dead, and how much in reality he did not know, thus pointing out the subjectivity of experience and the restricted point of view from which we look at the world.
It is the sub-texts that signify, the alternative stories that lurk beyond the narrative. The fragmented versions of those years; his and hers. His own version has different facets. There is his life with Kath and his life without her. [...]
And what about Kath's sub-text? For, of course, she too led this dual existence. And he knows nothing, now, of either, it seems. And her evidence is irretrievable, wiped, lost.
While his own is now fatally distorted. There is what he knows, and there is the lethal spin imposed by the photograph and that scribbled note. (TP 23-24)
Lively's works are also perfect representatives of the time revolution operated by Einstein and Bergson. Modernist novels represented the fracture of time through the stream-of-consciousness technique, and the fracture between the self and the world by presenting the same episode from different points of view. Lively frequently uses these techniques in order to foreground the internal mechanisms of the mind. In the following excerpt, Matthew Halland (CM) is visiting the National History Museum with her daughter Jane. A guiding voice pours out information:
Scientists are unable to agree about the reasons for the extinction of the dinosaurs. It is possible that there was some global catastrophe –perhaps the earth was struck by a meteor– or there may have been an ecological disaster. If I had asked her not to, thinks Matthew, if I had said, no, please don't, please let's go together to Cornwall, to Spain, to anywhere. But I didn't. I said, yes, that seems a good idea, why don't you? There is controversy also as to whether the dinosaurs were hot- or cold-blooded. Undoubtedly many dinosaurs were swift-moving creatures, not sluggish like the
reptiles of the modern world. And then when she came back we had somehow stopped sleeping together, without any decision, without anyone rejecting or prevaricating, we just weren't making love any more. (CM 73- 74)
In Treasures of Time we find an example of the same episode narrated from different points of view. Hugh Paxton and Laura announce their engagement to Laura's spinster sister, Nellie, who secretly loves Hugh. The first passage is told from Nellie's point of view; the second from Laura’s:
They come toward me, walking side by side. There is a wind and it blows Hugh's hair upward from his face, an inverted fringe. I start to say, "Sorry to be so late, there was a...," and she slips her arm through his, through his crooked elbow, and calls out "You're just in time, Mary's coming over for lunch, and the Sadlers, it's a celebration, Nellie, we've got something to tell you, we're going to get married, Nellie."
He says nothing. They have stopped. He looks wooden, standing beside her. He is wearing grey flannel trousers and a blazer. The trousers are baggy at the knee. I say nothing.
(Lively's ellipsis)
* * * * * * * * * *
Nellie gets out of the car, she is all blown out, she must have driven with the top down, she looks a mess. Hugh's arm is around me; we walk together toward her; I say to him, "Darling, you tell her." I kiss her and say, "You're just in time, it's a celebration, Nellie, Hugh's got something to tell you." Hugh says, "Well, Nellie, there's going to be a wedding, we want you to know first of all."
I am wearing my New Look dress – long, long. I feel it brush my calves when I move. It has a petticoat that rustles.
Nellie says, "I'm not entirely surprised. Congratulations. That's marvellous." She takes her suitcase out of the car... She goes into the house; there are creases all across the back of her skirt. (TT, p. 26-27)
Another typical Modernist feature is the use of epiphanies. Lively's characters experience epiphanies similar to those described by Joyce and Woolf: moments in which the imagination transcends the physical world to establish a kind of empathy with either nature or other human beings. In contrast with Modernist epiphanies, which describe moments of revelation, Lively's are moments of peace with the world. Perfect Happiness, like
Judgement Day, presents a number of such redeeming moments that seem
to exist outside "the straitjacket of time" (PH 50).
Is for one of them, for two, perhaps for several, a moment outside time, one of those moments when the needle gets stuck, when what happens goes happening down the years, again and again, recorded messages of glassy clarity. (PH 2)
Ebel finds that "[t]he modernist's distinction between 'clock-time' and 'mind-time' is taken up in Lively's fiction [...]".68
He heads now for his office, to clear up the day's work, to finish with time in which he is at the disposal of others and enter time that belongs to him. (CM 30)
She has been surprised too by time. At World's End time become two-pronged. There is the controlled and measured time of the flashing green digits on appliances [...]. And there is the time that happens beyond the window which unrolls in terms of leaves and flowers [...] – a primitive and elemental form of time untamed by Greenwich or the Gregorian calendar. (HW 86)
There is time, which is supposed to be linear, and there are seconds and minutes and hours which are supposed to be of a particular duration. And there are also days, in which we live. The day on which Zoe went into hospital was not linear, neither was it composed of minutes or hours that bore any resemblance to one another. They raced, or they crept. Occasionally the day stopped altogether [...]. The day folded back and forth; she was no longer in real time, just as she was no longer in the real world. (PH 165)
As far as Postmodernist features are concerned, we can sum them up as follows: subjective nature of experience, history as fiction, no unique Truth, but many different truths; spatial and temporal confusion, textualization of experience, centrality of the concept of identity (gender and postcolonial issues), ontological concerns.
Lively has made of the first two of these features the hallmark of her production, together with the subjective experience of time. Yet, albeit her narratives do not often follow a chronological sequence of events and different temporal planes are juxtaposed, there is no feeling of temporal confusion. The experience is concrete but filtered through the characters' consciousness. Moran traces the Postmodernist concept of history in Moon
Tiger:
Claudia's [...] ideas about history writing grow out of postmodernist theory concerning the relationship between verbal constructs and reality: specifically the theory that our experience of reality is mediated and shaped by language and that reality is thus in a sense a text, or fiction.69
As a matter of fact, the novel contains frequent remarks upon the fictionality of life:
One resents being axed from the narrative. (MT 184). The story continues; I am still in it. (MT 204)
We are no longer in the same story. (MT 206)
Fiction can seem more enduring than reality. Pierre on the field of battle, the Bennet girls at their sewing, Tess on the threshing machine – all these are nailed down for ever, on the page and in a million heads. (MT 6)70
At the formal level, Postmodernist features are: discontinuous narratives, intertextuality, parody, hybridization of genres, stream of consciousness, multiple points of view; embedding narratives, strange loops, trompe l'oeil effect, alternative ontologies.
69 Moran 1997, p. 110.
70 Respectively, the four quotations are pronounced by Gordon, Claudia's brother; Tom, Claudia's
If we except McHale's Postmodernist devices, we find that even of the rest Lively makes just a moderate use. Each of her works is a world apart: for example, in Spiderweb she creates a pastiche by inserting in the main narrative excerpts from local newspapers, letters, diaries and transcriptions of telephone calls. In Making It Up she blurs the boundaries between different genres by creating a hybrid text in which traditional short stories are embedded in autobiographical narratives.
Moran finds in Moon Tiger, City of the Mind and Cleopatra's Sister the kind of nonchronological structure that Joseph Franck, in his landmark essay "Spatial Form in Modern Literature", describes as spatialised [...] This structure [...] replaces linear narrative with discontinuous, fragmented, and incongruously juxtaposed scenes, the purpose is to enable the reader 'to apprehend [the] work spatially, in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence.71
This is true also for Modernist texts and as a matter of fact Franck’s definition was originally applied to Proust, Joyce, Woolf as Moran herself writes.
Moran finally hypothesizes the occurrence of what McHale calls 'ontological flicker', that is an intrusion of the real world in the fictional text with destabilizing effects. She finds an instance of ontological flicker in
Moon Tiger when Claudia and Tom visit Cairo Zoo and among the children
there is "a small girl in blue frock, matching hair ribbon, white ankle socks, [who] stares beadily at them as they pass" (MT 105-106). The child
corresponds to the description which Lively makes of herself in Oleander,
Jacaranda (1991).
So far, we have seen that Lively's novels combine Modernist and Postmodernist features. While Moran believes in this double definition72, the German critic Kerstin Ebel affirms that Lively cannot be considered a Postmodernist writer:
Having established that Lively's fiction is certainly comparable to other postwar novels, the question remains in how far it can also be regarded as postmodernist. An examination against the criteria established earlier reveals that apart from Heat Wave, all her novels are characterized by multiperspectivity. Many show a disrupted concept of time, especially concerning the chronology of memories and flashbacks. Treasures
of Time, According to Mark, Moon Tiger, City of the Mind, and, to a lesser degree, The Road to Lichfield, Judgement Day, Perfect Happiness, and Cleopatra's Sister
also contain metafictional elements and can be grouped as explicit historiographic metafiction. [...] the mixture of genres and intertextuality are no obvious trademarks of Lively's fiction. As is often the case, clear boundaries are difficult to draw. While most of Lively's novels certainly belong to the category of historiographic metafiction, in how far you want to consider them postmodernist apart from this classification depends on your definition.73
Again we are facing a problem of definition: what Moran regarded as Postmodernist features belong, according to Ebel, to the category of historiographic metafiction, which will be examined in the following section.
If, on the other hand, we were to follow Ceserani's distinction between Modernist and Postmodernist texts, we should consider Lively's production as Modernist. This is because she does not want to cast doubts on the world
72 "Lively's fiction, then, reveals the influence of modernism and postmodernism at the same time
that it demonstrates an allegiance to the traditional novelistic qualities of plot, character, and verisimilitude." (Moran 1997, p. 117)
she describes, she does not want to trouble the reader; on the contrary she wants to reassure him/her about the incredible complexity and beauty of the world we inhabit. We reach the same conclusion if we consider McHale's theory of the dominant: Lively's novels are very much concerned with epistemological problems, she deals with the nature of knowledge, how it differs from knower to knower, from time to time. There are also Postmodernist ontological concerns in her novels, but they are never put to the fore.
By way of conclusion, I endorse the view of the contemporary presence of Modernist and Postmodernist elements in Lively’s works but only insofar as we reckon the weight of the realistic enterprise in both the mimesis of product and process. All her books are committed to achieve an overall effect of realism by exploiting mainly Modernist narrative techniques and dealing with Modernist and Postmodernist issues without actually questioning the reality in which it is rooted. Whether Modernist or Postmodernist features prevail varies according to the novel at issue.
2.4. Metafiction and historiographic metafiction
There is still another possible route to take at Lodge's crossroads: that of the problematic novel, which he later acknowledged as the metafictional novel (The Novelist Today: Still at the Crossroads?, 1992).
The novelist who has any kind of self-awareness must at least hesitate at the crossroads; and the solution many novelists have chosen in their dilemma is to build
their hesitation into the novel itself. To the novel, the non-fiction novel, and the
fabulation, we must add a fourth category: the novel which exploits more than one of these modes without fully committing itself to any, the novel-about-itself, the trick-novel, the game-trick-novel, the puzzle-trick-novel, the novel that leads the reader (who wishes, naïvely, only to be told what to believe) through a fair-ground of illusions and deceptions, distorting mirrors and trap-doors that open disconcertingly under his feet, leaving him ultimately not with any simple or reassuring message or meaning but with a paradox about the relation of art to life.74
In 1992 Lodge includes his How Far Can You Go? (1980) in the list of novels "which have a strain of metafiction in them" and "in some cases actually introduce the author into the text".75
Linda Hutcheon in Narcissistic Narrative (1980) sees metafiction as the natural development of a congenital narcissistic tendency of the novel to look and reflect upon itself. A tendency which has existed since the early days of the rise of the novel. “The narrator-novelist has, from the start, unrealistically entered his own novel, drawing his reader into his fictional universe.”76
74 Lodge 1971, p. 22. 75 Lodge 1992, p. 207.
