Abstract
Discussion of the merits and failings of socialism is one of the major features of post-1945 European literature. Although the literary right has dominated fiction in the West, left-wing writing has persisted into the twenty-first century, offering a powerful critique of the neoliberalism that has established control over continental integration. Andrew Hammond examines this critique through a study of Elizabeth Wilson’s The Lost Time Café (1993), a British dystopian thriller set at the millennium’s end. Delving into the history of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Wilson argues that the radical tradition is necessary for understanding and for solving the crises of the late twentieth-century, challenging the poverty, inequality and austerity of the post-welfarist European Union with a more socialist vision of united Europe.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Quoted in Case, ‘Being European’, p. 116.
- 2.
Quoted in Alex Callinicos, The Revenge of History: Marxism and the East European Revolutions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 26.
- 3.
Quoted in Erik van Ree, ‘Heroes and Merchants: Joseph Stalin and the Nations of Europe’, in Wintle, ed., Imagining Europe, p. 53.
- 4.
MacClancy, ‘The Predictable Failure of a European Identity’, in Axford, Berghahn and Hewlett, eds, Unity and Diversity, p. 116.
- 5.
Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1996), p. 230.
- 6.
Judt, Postwar, p. 197.
- 7.
Kevin Morgan, Gidon Cohen and Andrew Flinn, Communists and British Society 1920–1991 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 2007), p. 14.
- 8.
Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. by Deborah Furet (1995; Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. x. As Couze Venn writes, ‘[t]he end of the Cold War/Third World War has released capitalism from needing to respond to calls for responsibility […]. It has lost the ability to respond to suffering’ (quoted in Bauman, Europe, p. 24). A similar point is made by one of Ingo Schulze’s characters: ‘We, in the East, had been the guarantors that capitalism in the West had worn a human face’ (Schulze, New Lives, p. 194).
- 9.
Bonnett, Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York and London: Continuum, 2010), p. 35.
- 10.
M. Keith Booker’s remark in the 1990s that the suppression of British left-wing culture ‘has been one of the major cultural/political phenomena of the century’ is relevant to many other national cultures (Booker, The Modern British Novel of the Left: A Research Guide (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 3).
- 11.
Quoted in Williams, Writing Postcommunism, p. 24.
- 12.
Croft, ‘Authors Take Sides: Writers and the Communist Party 1920–56’, in Geoff Andrews, Nina Fishman and Kevin Morgan, eds, Opening the Books: Essays on the Social and Cultural History of British Communism (London and Boulder: Pluto Press, 1995), p. 83.
- 13.
Quoted in ibid., p. 85.
- 14.
de Beauvoir, The Mandarins, trans. by Leonard M. Friedman (1954; London: Collins, 1957), p. 239; Taher, Love in Exile, trans. by Farouk Abdel Wahab (1995; Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2001), p. 56. With similar despair, Anita Konkka describes a character as ‘one of the rare people who still believed in the socialist revolution’ and Victor Serge has a Russian character say ‘[n]o one will forgive us for having begun Socialism with so much senseless barbarity’ (Konkka, Fool’s Paradise, p. 66; Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, trans. by Willard R. Trask (1948; New York: New York Review of Books, 2004), p. 286).
- 15.
Juraga and Booker, ‘Introduction’ to Juraga and Booker, eds, Socialist Cultures, p. 3.
- 16.
Christa Wolf quoted in Williams, Writing Postcommunism, p. 11; Jürgen Habermas, ‘The New Obscurity: The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies’, in Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (1985; Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. 51.
- 17.
Davies, Europe East and West, p. xi; David Priestland, The Red Flag: A History of Communism, new edn (2009; New York: Grove Press, 2009), p. xv.
- 18.
See Kate Hudson, European Communism since 1989: Towards a New European Left? (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 145–6; and Ronald Kowalski, European Communism 1848–1991 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 225.
- 19.
Quoted in Adam Burgess, Divided Europe: The New Domination of the East (London: Pluto Press, 1997), p. 109. The irony of ‘democratisation’ is captured by a left-wing character in one of Eugen Ruge’s novels: ‘now we’re not supposed to think about alternatives to capitalism! So that’s your wonderful democracy’ (Ruge, Times of Fading Light, p. 265).
- 20.
Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, p. 498.
- 21.
See Ronald Kowalski, European Communism 1848–1991 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 187; and Günter Kunert, ‘The State of Europe’, Granta, Vol. 30 (1990), p. 161.
- 22.
Quoted in Callinicos, Revenge of History, p. 15; Murdoch, Under the Net, new edn (1954; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 99.
- 23.
Callinicos, Revenge of History, p. 3. See also Douglas Kellner, ‘The Obsolescence of Marxism?’, in Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg, eds, Whither Marxism?: Global Crises in International Perspective (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 14–15.
- 24.
Quoted in Raphael Samuel, The Lost World of British Communism (London and New York: Verso, 2006), p. 19. In a publication of 1998, Croft commented that ‘almost nothing is known about the specific cultural histories of the British Communist Party’ (Croft, ‘Introduction’ to Croft, ed., A Weapon in the Struggle: The Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1998), p. 2).
- 25.
Scribner, Requiem for Communism (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2005), p. 9.
- 26.
Ibid., pp. 10, 3.
- 27.
See Walter Benjamin, ‘Left-Wing Melancholy’, in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg, eds, The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 304–6.
- 28.
Wilson, The Lost Time Café (London: Virago Press, 1993), pp. 6, 78, 4, 3, 3. Further page references to the novel will be given in the text.
- 29.
Gilroy, ‘Foreword: Migrancy, Culture, and a New Map of Europe’, in Heike Raphael-Hernandez, ed., Blackening Europe: The African American Presence (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), p. xx.
- 30.
The effects of privatisation are exemplified by the local university, now run for the benefit of shareholders, which has sacked its porters (‘permanently employed men who belonged to trade unions’) and hired cheap student labour (Wilson, Lost Time Café, p. 41).
- 31.
See Lynn Guyver, ‘Post-Cold War Moral Geography: A Critical Analysis of Representations of Eastern Europe in Post-1989 British Fiction and Drama’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Warwick, 2001), p. 64.
- 32.
Wilson, Lost Time Café, pp. 75, 227, 86, 224, 47. Although European culture is the major influence, it is only one feature of the globalisation reshaping city space, with American and Asian influences also apparent. As Justine says of the post-modern topography that results, Kakania is ‘many cities in one, all cities in one’ (ibid., p. 25).
- 33.
Ibid., p. 19. Although unconnected to Justine’s divided selfhood, Wilson herself admits to being prone to internal divisions, writing about how her flights into ‘escapist identities’ have come into conflict with the pragmatism of the committed protester, who only ‘live[s] fully in the present’ on political demonstrations (Wilson, Mirror Writing: An Autobiography (London: Virago, 1982), pp. 82, 1).
- 34.
Wilson, Lost Time Café, p. 170. One ex-member of the CPGB once termed the Party ‘a little private world of our own, or [a] large or extended family’ (Samuel, Lost World of British Communism, p. 13).
- 35.
Bonnett, Left in the Past, p. 169. See also Svetlana Boym’s notion of ‘countermemory’, a clandestine recording of the past that ‘point[s] at seams and erasures in the official history’ (Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 61).
- 36.
See Frederick Kranz, ‘George Rudé and “History from Below”’, in Krantz, ed., History from Below: Studies in Protest and Popular Ideology, new edn (1985; Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 3–6.
- 37.
Marquand, ‘After Socialism’, Political Studies, Vol. 41 (1993), p. 51; Wilson, Lost Time Café, p. 134.
- 38.
Kingdom’s real background helps to explain the novel’s reference to the Forest Brothers, which were a collection of nationalist resistance movements in the Baltic States fighting a guerrilla war against Soviet occupation in the 1940s and 1950s (see Mart Laar, The Power of Freedom: Central and Eastern Europe after 1945 (Brussels: Centre for European Studies, 2010), pp. 77–83).
- 39.
Callinicos, Revenge of History, p. 135.
- 40.
See Roberts’s The Aachen Memorandum (1995), Aldiss’s Super-State (2002) and Grant’s Incompetence (2003).
- 41.
Wilson, Lost Time Café, p. 64.
- 42.
Peter Rietbergen, Europe: A Cultural History (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 464. For the estimate of capitalism’s ruinous impact, see Mark Sandle, Communism (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2012), p. 124. As one of Christian Jungerson’s characters argues, ‘Socialists aren’t responsible for as many people dying as those who support the policies of the US and Europe, policies that reinforce poverty’ (Jungerson, The Exception, trans. by Anna Paterson (2004; London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006), p. 385).
- 43.
Quoted in Luisa Passerini, ‘Dimensions of the Symbolic in the Construction of Europeanness’, in Passerini, ed., Figures d’Europe: Images and Myths of Europe (Bruxelles: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2003), p. 28. In 1990, Salman Rushdie commented that ‘liberal capitalism […] will require novelists’ most rigorous attention, will require re-imagining and questioning and doubting as never before’ (Rushdie, ‘Is Nothing Sacred’, Granta, Vol. 31 (1990), p. 109).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hammond, A. (2016). The Dilemmas of ‘Post-Communism’: Elizabeth Wilson’s The Lost Time Café . In: Hammond, A. (eds) The Novel and Europe. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-52626-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-52627-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)