Aftermath of the Second World War

Writing 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 war's 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 Driver's 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 Murdoch's 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 Driver's 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'. Spark's description of Lise's 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 postmodernity's attempt to carve her life into its own image. This is supplemented by Spark's melancholy deliberation for the 'swaying tall pines' which have been 'subdued into silence and into obedient bulks', echoing Lise's 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 novel's 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 Lyotard's 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 someone's 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 book's 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 Lise's 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 driver's 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 Lise's 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 doesn't wish to include her; she is forcing society to try and take notice of her. Taking the Freudian interpretation of her narrative, where