based on Thomas Hardy’s locales and situations but lit by the dark light of Freud
and a delight in the improper underside of Victorian life. Following the ideas of
Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes, Fowles provides more than one ending:
luckier than the readers of 1869, those of 1969 were free to choose. (Dickens wrote
two endings to Great Expectations(see page 295) but published only one.) A simple
interest in the dilemmas of the Victorian love-triangle is trumped by a modern
understanding which the reader is invited to share with the author. The double
perspective is piquant but less satisfying than a real Hardy novel. Fowles’s reputation
seems unlikely to increase, but he was one of the pioneers of the fabulous mode of
improbable fiction which has flourished since his day. Similar perspectives work
better in two recent ‘Victorian’ novels,Possession(1990) by A(ntonia) S(usan) Byatt
(1936– ), about the dangers of poetic research, and Oscar and Lucinda (1988) by the
Australian Peter Carey, based on Edmund Gosse’s Father and Sonand episodes of
colonial history. All these novels borrow either from history or from historical
fiction, and make us conscious that they are playing with the categories of the docu-
mentary and the fantastic.
Jim Dixon, of Kingsley Amis’s first novel,Lucky Jim(1953), Jimmy Porter ofLook
Back in Anger(1956) and Joe Lampton of John Braine’s Room at the Top(1957) were
called ‘Angry Young Men’ by journalists. Fiction is not fact, but this fiction focused
on some newly emerging social facts. Whether the protagonists rose like Joe or stuck
like Jimmy, they were not content with notions of social inferiority, as applied to
themselves. Anti-establishment voices were heard in various accents in the novels of
William Cooper, Colin MacInnes, Alan Sillitoe and John Wain. William Cooper’s
Scenes from Provincial Life(1950) was an early example of this return to social
reportage. It can be argued that the significance of these writers is broadly a social
one:fo r a prevalent upper middle-class point of view and/or subject-matter is
substituted for the point of view of the lower middle class or the working class. To
point to such a shift in the class orientations of authors, their subject-matter and the
expec tations of their readers, might seem too crude to explain very much. But fiction
ofthis kind took it for granted that the subject of the novel was social reality, as it
had been in the heyday of the English novel in the 19th century: a subject which
pr esented itselfas a moral obligation. The social realism of Arnold Bennett was
explicitly preferred by C. P. Snow, Kingsley Amis and John Wain, to that of James
Joyce. William Cooper explained that ‘the Experimental Novel’ had to be ‘brushed
out of the way before we could get a proper hearing’.
A similar right to dismiss has often been claimed by those who think of them-
selves as speaking for a group which has gone unheard or been improperly repre-
sented. Such groups might be majorities (provincial have-nots), but are more
usually minorities: of all kinds, from university-educated women coming to
London from the provinces (the subject-matter of Margaret Drabble) to ethnic or
even sexual minorities. If fiction is directly mimetic of social fact, as social commen-
tators readily assume, then social shifts drive the changes taking place in literature.
Snow represented the scientist in the corridors of bureaucratic power, Alan Sillitoe
(a more talented writer) the world of the Nottingham factory worker, Graham
Storey that of the professional player of Rugby League in northern England, Simon
Raven the mores of the more decadent of the old upper classes. Such fiction
confines itselfto giving an image and a voice to an excluded, or unpublicized,
section of society, with varying accuracy and with more or less of moral sentiment.
If the aim of such minority fiction is to make a minority understood, it has to be392 14 · BEGINNING AGAIN: 1955–80