Aftermath of the Second World WarEssay Preview: Aftermath of the Second World WarReport this essayWriting about the aftermath of the Second World War in his book Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, Tony Judt depicts an image of Europe which offered a prospect of utter misery and desolation, whose citizens wandered aimlessly and hopelessly through a blasted landscape of broken cities and barren fields. Both the people and the land suffered at the hands of the wars heavy weaponry, with aerial attacks bringing structures to the ground, destroying communities and leaving many people without their homes, families or discernible connections to their past. The impact that the Second World War had upon our perceptions of identity, individual and collective, familial and societal, is still a pervading source of influence in our culture; the task for writers during this period of fragmentation, ambiguity and moral and political uncertainty was to produce literature which [tried] to reconcile form and experience, but also to attend to the nervousness and restlessness of contemporary life. The two texts of this analysis, The Unicorn (1963) by Iris Murdoch and The Drivers Seat (1970) by Muriel Spark, in their respective approaches embody the struggle represented in this claim; the authors of both novels deal with the consequences of the postwar world and experiment with methods of presenting the damaged characters and environment of their subject matter but are simultaneously alert to their own interference and responsibility, in Murdochs words, to combine form with a respect for reality. This essay seeks to investigate the techniques employed by each novel in response to the connection between a sense of self and the external world, how their work is preoccupied with the quest for self – a search for identity and whether their work advocates a return to traditional systems of form and thought to resolve the fractured relationship between the individual, their communities and their environment.
The similar introductions of both novels, opening as they do in the middle of conversations, are pivotal to our understanding of the concept of character, as well as the structure of form in postwar literature, as the narrators position us as readers into the same moment as their protagonists without the benefits of the conventional discursive device to inform us of the characters backgrounds or personalities, as though there is no past and no emotions. This motif of rootlessness and numbness is more consistent in The Drivers Seat than it is in The Unicorn, whereas the development of the latter attempts to free itself from the generic impersonality of the nouveau roman. Sparks description of Lises home parallels the portrayal of her desensitized, almost mechanical protagonist, with everything in the room contrived to fold away for Lise to return to after work as if it were uninhabited. The way in which pinewood has been fashioned in the design of the apartment is symbolic of the compartmentalization of human nature in postmodern structure, what Jameson referred to as the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense, with Lise being a victim of postmodernitys attempt to carve her life into its own image. This is supplemented by Sparks melancholy deliberation for the swaying tall pines which have been subdued into silence and into obedient bulks, echoing Lises own straight-lipped countenance and the uncanny disconnection we observe between herself and her home.
The isolation that Lise encounters in her home emerges from her individuality being suppressed and replaced by her occupation, an accountants office where she has worked continually for sixteen years, pressing her lips together with the daily disapprovals. This unnatural dependence on her job for self-definition serves as a purgatory-esque plateau, temporarily stabilizing her identity between her rootless present desperate to belong to her place of employment, and her inevitably tragic future (as the novels nonlinear plot informs us) of self-destruction, driven by an urge to disappear from a society where people pass each other as insentiently as traffic. The recurring metaphor of traffic which Spark uses to represent an entropic society complies with Lyotards theory of the breakdown of metanarratives, as people have become suspicious of systems of knowledge that contain established and credible worldviews such as religion and philosophy, and have learnt to live independent of them, and consequently each other. This vision of a divided society lacking a collective morality or purpose is emphasised by the way Lise is treated by people based on her clothes, such as the woman who has nothing to gain by suppressing her amusement and laughs at Lise with spiteful and deliberate noise. This is a superficial judgement of someones true character and perhaps a stylistic choice by Lise herself to affirm the belief that she lives in an unsympathetic world which is worth leaving. In one of the books few moments of natural humanity during her lunch with Mrs Fiedke, Lise declares that, “One should always be kind”, giving us the sense that she is a thwarted idealist, disillusioned by an unkind society . In the same conversation she and Mrs Fiedke express a shared fear of traffic, another allusion to Lises desire for an older version of a less convoluted, less technological world; Lise rebels against the stationary condition of traffic, of a life going nowhere by taking control of her own destiny by getting in the drivers seat, which one can link to the Freudian proposal of the death drive, an idea which is bound up with a compulsion to return to an inorganic state.
We can read Lises self-destructive narrative as a resistance to the submergence of the individual in the mass, a form of revenge drama in which she fuels the narcissism of her ego and attempts to shift power to her advantage which she does by deliberately distancing her true self through her manipulation of persona in public places. In the airport alone, she adapts multiple characters by changing her voice, deliberately making scenes and lying to people, satisfied that she has successfully registered the fact of her presence. Her exploitation of place with the scattering of her identity as a trail for the police and her knowingly unreal performances stretches beyond her manipulative desire to assault the autonomy of a society which doesnt wish to include her; she is forcing society to try and take notice of her. Taking the Freudian interpretation of her narrative, where
By the time she has been removed in the first instance, it is clear if her ego is intact. It was the same for her, that was her reality. It was the same for others, the others. -Hilary Shcherl After losing her family and her home (the one she shared with her mother and father) she became part of a family group living in the basement of a house on the edge of town. She started feeling a renewed connection to her family and had her father walk in with some supplies in hand, taking a brief tour through the home. The family moved back to the basement when he stopped by and said he found no money on the premises. I had a hard time with what I saw: my home was ransacked. I felt very ill and that’s the same for most victims of Liskism. The man, the family that was left behind because the house was abandoned, the only survivors were the two boys who were shot after the attack, and their father and mother. They were all killed because he was angry – he wanted to get a divorce and the family was in crisis. Some of his family had been killed recently because they had committed suicide. I was scared, even scared to leave my family. The family moved and, as they got on a bus back to town, I made the decision to start moving towards my new home somewhere very quiet, in a rural community. Not yet I knew what to do. Hair, house and money were all gone, the place was gone. I wanted other places to go, to live. Lifestyles with a social aspect, as I remember it, only worked for me. The person who said she wanted to leave had no idea what to do and no place to stay. I was terrified and had to deal with an eviction to find places. It was not pleasant to live in. A little while later the family moved to another town. -Mary Ellen Hsieh I have known many who have been victims of Liskist, and those who have not been helped, even their children. They are all in prison. Sisters are often forced to play with dolls, and others will take their own children out of the service. Liskists need to be held to account if they are caught and placed at the mercy of others for actions they have committed. Sisters are always subjected to these harsh conditions by the perpetrators. The perpetrators use them for their own gain without being heard. I will look at why the victims felt the need to flee: the very sad side of the equation is that being forced to stay in a place in which someone has their life and no safety or security means you were either not loved or abandoned. Liskists have not just become the place of sexual slavery, they often become the place where they are not loved the least. Liskists are the only option left available to these helpless captives who are held, even after they are released. It is the only means by which a family member can escape – they are the only option left. Liskism is also the one factor that keeps me sane and sane.