School of Distance Education

Vile Bodies 

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
63 
(1930), for example, or Anthony Powell’s 
Afternoon Men
(1931), and riffle through it, to see a 
great difference, just in the way the pages are laid out. 
There is a great deal more dialogue in proportion to 
description, and direct speech is clearly marked off from 
the narrative discourse by conventional indentation and 
quotation marks. the stylistic turn of the novel, away 
from depth to surface, was connected with the 
emergence of a new narrative medium in the twentieth 
century—cinema. Compared with prose fiction or 
narrative poetry or drama, film is most tied to 
representing the visible world, and least well adapted to 
representing consciousness, which is invisible. The 
principal means
by which film conveys the thoughts and feelings 
of its characters are:
(1)
dialogue—though in the era of silent 
movies this was restricted to a few captions
(2)
nonverbal 
acting—gesture, 
body 
language, facial expressions, and so forth—by the 
performers
(3)
suggestive imagery in the setting of the 
action or the way it is lit and photographed
(4)
music.
The combination of all these channels of 
communication operating together and sometimes 
simultaneously can have a very powerful emotional 
effect. But it is not capable of the precise descriptions 

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
64 
and subtle discriminations of a character’s mental life 
that we find in the classic and modern novel. In film, the 
subjective inner life of the characters has to be implied 
rather than explicitly verbalized.
There are many postmodernisms, and they are 
not all experimental. Some were simply anti-modernist. 
The dominant British novelists of the 1950s, for 
instance—Kingsley Amis, John Wain, C. P Snow,
William Cooper, John Braine, Angus Wilson, 
Alan Sillitoe—used fictional forms which harked back to 
the Victorian or Edwardian novel of social realism, and 
several of them mounted critical attacks on modernist 
literary 
experiment. 
Their 
representation 
of 
consciousness was entirely traditional in method. The 
later work of Waugh, Powell, and Isherwood, for 
instance, maintains a conservative balance between 
surface and depth. Graham Greene’s work always did.
Metafiction has been a favorite resource of many 
postmodernist novelists, as different as John Fowles,
Muriel Spark, Malcolm Bradbury, John Barth, and Kurt 
Vonnegut. By openly admitting and indeed drawing 
attention to the fictionality of their texts, they free 
themselves to use all the conventions of the traditional 
novel, 
including 
omniscient 
insights 
into 
the 
consciousness of their characters. There does seem to be 
an increasing reluctance among literary novelists to 
assume the narrative stance of godlike omniscience that 
is implied by any third-person representation of 
consciousness. they prefer to create character as a 
“voice,” reporting his or her experience in his or her own 

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
65 
words. Where third-person and first-person narration are 
combined, the latter usually has the last word. IN
Atonement
(2001), Ian McEwan, who has tended 
to favor first-person narration in his previous novels and 
stories, seems to be telling his story in a rather old-
fashioned way, entering into the consciousness of 
several different characters, and rendering their 
experience in third-person discourse that makes 
extensive use of free indirect style. Even Philip Roth, 
who in his impressive trilogy
American Pastoral, 
I Married a Communist
, and
 
The Human Stain 
addresses the social and political 
history of postwar America with something of the scope 
and ambition of classic nineteenth-century fiction, 
prefers to use his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman as 
narrator, rather than claim direct authorial knowledge of 
the minds and hearts of his characters. Zuckerman 
reports, reconstructs, imagines the inner lives of the 
characters just as a novelist would—because he is a 
novelist. But he is also an alibi that the author can claim 
if held to account for any of the opinions stated in the 
text.
Postmodernism” is sometimes used in a very 
broad sense to include a whole range of cultural styles, 
attitudes, 
and 
arguments: 
deconstruction, 
post 
industrialism, consumerism, multiculturalism, quantum 
physics, cybernetics, the Internet, and so on. Most of 
these phenomena and ways of thinking deny the 
existence of universals in human nature. They regard the 
concepts of “soul” or “spirit,” and even the secular idea 
of the “self” which humanism developed from the 

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
66 
Judeo-Christian religious tradition, as culturally and 
historically determined. One must concede that the 
Western humanist concept of the autonomous individual 
self is not universal, eternally given, and valid for all 
time and all places, but is a product of history and 
culture.