fatherhood: ‘the pram in the hall’, one of Cyril Connolly’s ‘enemies of promise’ (for
a writer). But was Adrian’s suicide, given a rational justification in the note he left
for the coroner, noble? Or pointless? Might it even, as one character suggests, be
both? Or was it cowardice? Three readings of this sad and skilfulconte philosophique
do not yield answers.‘Post-modernism’
Barnes’s planned ambiguity and uncertainty suggests that his book, which takes its
title from a work of literary criticism by Frank Kermode, is not only a story but also
an experiment in narratology. This therefore is the place for a digression on ‘post-
modernism’, a term often used in discussions of contemporary literature. It ought to
mean what came after modernism, but it carries also a suggestion (like post-Marxist,
post-structuralist and post-colonial) of progress: that it improves on what it super-
sedes, making modernism old hat. In its aggressive early phase, the modernist liter-
ature which peaked in 1922 clearly sought to displace what had gone before.
‘Post-modernist’ is offered and sometimes accepted as a similarly revolutionary
gesture. Literary phases must succeed each other, yet deserving work from the previ-
ous phase – once the revolution has revolved – will return. Tennyson returned;
Arnold Bennett is returning.
It can be said that the modernists were ambitious, reaching towards universals,
whether real or ideal, and towards the grandly historical; whereas what has followed
is less ambitious, settling for less, or unsettling for less. One of the few things that
can be said with certainty about post-modernism is that it gave a positive value to
uncertainty; it can even take pride in the impossibility of knowing anything for
certain.But to be positive that we cannot be certain of anything is bad logic, and may
encourage timidity and triviality. The high modernists, Pound, Eliot, Joyce and
Lawrence, knew that their formulations of absolutes were inadequate. Post-
modernism mistrusts the ambition of these daunting ancestors, as John Fowles
(see p. 391) did that of the Victorians. The claim is sometimes heard that post-
modernism is more democratic than modernism. It is certainly less ambitious and
more liber al:choose your ending, choose your sense. But if the ambitions of the
more extreme forms of modernist literature were too demanding for some readers,
the same goes for the poetry of the leading American post-modernist poet, John
Ashbery, whose work perplexes since it is so confidently inconsequential. The ‘more
democratic’ argument does not persuade. It seems better, then, to take ‘post-
modernist’ not as an explanatory term of much substance but as a label of conven-
ience, referring to self-consciously puzzling writing of the post-1968 period of a
mildly experimental sort: a more doubtful and domesticated modernism. It fits the
‘French’ fictions of Julian Barnes, but may be more helpful outside literature, apply-
ing better to some of the extreme conceits of modern art. A more positive view of
this large subject is presented in Christopher Butler’s book,Postmodernism (2002).Some novelists
Discovering which novels are any good is not much helped by sorting novelists into
gr oups on the grounds of superficial similarities and treating the groups as if they
were illuminating categories. The following discussion of novelists of the 1980s and
after is therefore taken in a roughly chronological order.414 15 · CONTEMPORARIES