The chaos of politics, the searing divisions through society, the promised demise of faith in democracy: it might look like the country is in an unprecedented state of strife and upheaval over Brexit. But writers have been talking about this stuff for centuries.
King Lear's shuffle into dementia as he tears apart his kingdom on a vain whim. Dickens's revolutionary bloodshed in A Tale of Two Cities conjuring tensions within and across borders. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman challenging the imperialist march of the Nazis in Casablanca. How does culture sort out the bloody mess of social, political and geographical divisions? Politicians and bureaucrats don't have the answer. The man down the pub doesn't have the answer. So maybe it's time we look to literature.
Ali Smith's Autumn – the first in her seasonal quartet (the third in the cycle, Spring, has just come out) – is perhaps the first “Brexit novel” (what a terrifying label!), written in the immediate wake of the 2016 referendum. Its opening lines wave to Dickens: “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.” Too right, Ali. “That's the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will.” Here a nod to Yeats's A Second Coming. Yeats, Smith, Dickens, Shakespeare: they're all rife with images of separation, objects torn asunder. Yeats writes:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned
All too apt for today. In last year's National Theatre production, Ian McKellen's King Lear actually tears up the map of his kingdom in a haphazard, manically whimsical way. Dickens's evocation of “Madame La Guillotine”, sensuously and seductively worshipped by the revolutionaries in A Tale of Two Cities, replacing crucifixes and covering the streets with blood, is an object that literally and metaphorically separates. And this is a thread taken up by Smith in the literary descriptions of collage art scattered across Autumn: beautiful and haphazard like fallen leaves, but also artistically juxtaposing separation and difference.
These works show the chopping up of society along multiple axes. Politics. Class. Nationality. Age. A Brexit checklist.
There is a widely held perception that it was the baby boomers who swung the 2016 referendum in favour of Leave, the older generation who have a lot less to lose. This generational divide reverberates through cultural depictions of divided nations too.
Shakespeare's King Lear is a play about madness and politics, shown through the failings of a father. Lear decides to bequeath his three daughters different portions of his kingdom according to how much they love him; or rather, how convincingly they can express their love for him. Literature is all about conflict. So perhaps it's unsurprising that not all of Lear's daughters go along with this display of pride and vanity.
The first two, Goneril and Regan, egged on by their greedy husbands, eagerly flatter their father. But when it comes to the third, Cordelia – the youngest and the favourite – the voice of reason prevails. She tells her father that she loves him just as much as a dutiful daughter should but that there's no need to flatter his delusion of a good Brexit deal. Ahem. The need for a healthy sized dowry with which she can attract a good husband.
King Lear is so convinced of his worth and his children's performance of love for him, that he makes the biggest booboo possible just as he's on the decline: he chops up his kingdom and pisses off his loved ones. The UK is so convinced of Europe's desperation to be friends, we've made the booboo of expecting an Ali Baba Cave of Wonders with the Brexit deal. And it's about as realistic an expectation as Ali Baba's treasure.
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