Writing at a loss: Nation and nuclearism in the twentieth-century English novel (Ford Madox Ford, Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, Raymond Briggs, Doris Lessing, Zimbabwe)

Twentieth-century English literature often reflects a profound sense of loss, both personal and collective. Besides novels that deal with loss thematically (e.g., war, illness, religious or ideological disillusionment), certain texts encode loss on a structural or stylistic level without explicitly acknowledging its object or accounting for the kinds of desire it produces. This second group can be said to participate in what psychoanalytic accounts define as “melancholia”: a state of unresolved mourning in which the grieving subject is unable, or refuses, to relinquish the lost object and to seek emotional substitutes for it. Successful mourning or working through of loss requires narrating it, finding words that stand for—and eventually stand in for—sorrow and fear. A narrative melancholia therefore works paradoxically, and in opposition to normative models of consolation-through-storytelling: it preserves a sense of unbearable longing for the lost object within and beyond the novel's demands of coherence, chronology, closure, and resolution.; This study explores two types of loss that resist individual and social attempts at mourning: one loss incurred in the past, and one threatened in the future. The devolution of the British empire overturned long-cherished beliefs in Englishness as an omnipotent, benevolent, and civilizing force in the world. Part I of the project, “Old Intimacies: Englishness After Empire,” looks at Ford Madox Ford's 1915 novel The Good Soldier and Julian Barnes's England, England (1998) as hybrids of elegy and satire, narrative surveys of the fragmented legacy of Englishness that avoid the temptation to pick up the pieces through a fictional re-imagining of coherent nationality. Part II of the study, “Nuclearism: Mourning the Future,” turns to the Cold War fears of nuclear destruction that culminated in England in the mid 1980s, which generated a collective sense of being bereft of a future. Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (1962), Graham Swift's Waterland (1983), and a 1982 comic book entitled When the Wind Blows, by Raymond Briggs, each stage the melancholia of a future cut short through a prophetic voice that seeks relief in storytelling but simultaneously undermines the consolatory functions of its own narrative.