culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

(PSEUDO-)MYTHS OF THE 20 TH CENTURY
IN MALCOLM BRADBURY’S WORK
indignation being consumed only by petty personal dramas. The author’s literary
admonition appears instantly and not only once does he leave his character in a
state of tension while he makes a digression regarding an aspect that shadows
anyway the status of the character. Not only once does the character experience
discomfort in a linguistic interface for which he does have the quick-wittedness
to adapt (see the case of James Walker in Stepping Westward who has
difficulties in adapting to the American idiom or the case of Angus Petworth
who, throughout his sojourn in Slaka, really feels the anguish of not being able
to use his skills of a linguist to adapt to the Slakan idiom). The result of this
slowness is, as we have mentioned, repatriation, the return to the mother-nation,
the only one that can stand his limitations. The drama does not arise from the
danger of losing his identity, but from the incapacity to reinvent himself, to
rediscover himself and follow the new trajectory drawn by the new American
species. “Walker opts for people over myths, commitment over liberation, reality
over possibility, England over America.” (Morace 1989: 53) He cannot be an
Anglo-American Adam starting everything all over again because in modern
times this journey rarely brings any change at all for the pilgrim-tourists.
But Walker’s creator had the courage to do so, as he himself confesses in
No, Not Bloomsbury: “Radical America was the great good place, the land of
therapeutic selfhood, and the old culture of puritan seriousness and British
provincialism began to look very bleak and limiting. So we got on the boat, my
critic and I, and sailed westward, our typewriters under our arms, ready to start
all over again.” (1988: 16)
A connoisseur of the worlds on the two sides of the Atlantic and, to a high
degree, a product of the two cultures – of the British one in which he was born
and formed and of the American one which he assimilated and which
assimilated him – Malcolm Bradbury was deeply interested in the phenomenon
of the exchange between these two worlds, in the manner in which they
influenced one another and merged. Exploiting this aspect both in his novels and
in his critical studies, he managed to visualise it in its plenitude, he managed to
identify and analyze its manifestations, to see its positive aspects as well as to
criticise it in an artistically veiled (in fiction) or analytically objective (in
criticism) form.
Conclusions
This is the reason why (trying to offer examples for each of the above
mentioned movements registered in the contemporary society) we speak, as
Brunel enumerates throughout his study, of myths such as: cloning, aliens, the
computer, the Internet, the TV, mass media, advertising, football, fast food,
bodybuilding, the blonde, the star, the fatal woman. The new values appeared as
a result of the new inventions and from a more or less conscious need for
affirmation of a new identity along with a liberation from the past no matter how
close or far back in time it could be traced. It was all submitted to the new myths
of change and progress, in a new society (new societies) that is (are) too
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