Proto-Postcolonial? Angus Wilson and the Languages of Liberalism

All fiction for me is a kind of magic and trickery--a confidence trick, trying to make people believe something is true that isn't. (1) Sir Angus Wilson, novelist, critic, journalist, playwright, and professor, has always been seen as that very English figure: all-round man of letters. In his novels of fifties and sixties he minutely dissected moral and psychological crises of English middle classes, so his early seventies adventure global, postmodern, postcolonial novel was, to say least, unexpected. Although knighted for his services to literature, Wilson is much less read than he once was, and decline of his reputation may be dated from publication of this seventh novel, As if by Magic (1972). (2) Taking English liberalism into global contexts, Wilson shows how postcolonial English sensibilities have colluded with neocolonial exploitation and economic Realpolitik. The novel has two parallel narratives and two heroes. One narrative strand follows Alexandra, a graduate of a new university who, finding herself pregnant, pursues hippie trail to Goa late sixties, along with her two partners, working-class Ned and nouveau riche Rodrigo. In second strand, Alexandra's gay godfather, plant geneticist Hamo Langmuir, travels around Asia to witness effects of his experiment, miracle-yield rice Magic. Aside from these concerns of personal and professional development, we are told by subheadings that Alexandra and Hamo are on other missions: Alexandra is in search of a hero, Hamo search of the perfect youth. Partaking as it does of sexual freedoms of sixties, witnessed at first hand by Wilson while a professor at radical University of East Anglia, novel was never going to be free from risk for a novelist of middlebrow seriousness his late middle age. The novel, however, formally enacts this freedom, dissolving omniscient third-person narration of Wilson's early fiction into a series of pastiches: Dickens, de Sade, Forster, Old Testament, Angry realism, and so on. It is tempting indeed to describe this as a postmodern novel, except that As if by Magic ridicules jargonistic critical approaches, caricaturing literary smugness as itself a brand of colonization of art. When heiress Alexandra is asked to finance an avant-garde film, we are told that had no idea what a meta-movie might be, but if it had anything to do with then she didn't wish to have anything to do with it. (3) Here, narrative seems to have itself become metafictional, but while metafiction has some critical currency, meta-novel is a neologism; it only sounds like a critical term, such as might be applied, for example, to work of Christine Brooke-Rose (with whom Wilson worked at wartime code-breaking headquarters at Bletchley Park) or B. S. Johnson, who, ironically, had dismissed Wilson as a social realist: I'm sure social historians future will look to Angus Wilson ... and say, 'Yes, that's what it must have been like to live then. (4) The trap for postmodern reader is clear: global, narratively unstable As if by Magic may allude to meta-novels and allow its audience to congratulate themselves on their recognition of a self-referential device, only to realize that they are being sent up along with Alexandra's pretentious friends. Alexandra's allusion to meta-novel links her to her mother, Zoe, who represents overtly middlebrow, Sunday-supplement sector of Wilson's original readership, and demonstrates their misguided intellectual complacency. She embarrasses Alexandra--and reader--when she attempts to engage with her daughter's interests: 'But I thought character novel had been dissolved.' 'Oh, Mama, please!' 'Yes, I know, darling, not neo-trad and all that ...' (62). Shame at Zoe's desire to parade her limited knowledge is evident Alexandra's attempt to silence her, but Alexandra's desire to distance herself from her mother is defeated by their shared social class, explicit their forms of address--Alexandra's Mama is matched by Zoe's darling. …

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