Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Summary
‘We are at the end of an age. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is nearly over.’ The words were spoken in the 1980s, but refer to the 1960s. The stoned prophet at the end of Bruce Robinson's film Withnail and I (1987) notes that the decade has just ninety-one days to run. The imminent ending is not merely calendrical. The commercial appropriation of the counterculture – ‘they're selling hippy wigs in Woolworths’ – signals to him the close of an era.
The 1960s is the most fabled of all decades. Ian Jack (2009) considers that the potency of that decade's projections of itself has determined our entire contemporary tendency to slice time in ten-year cycles. The mythologies also produce mourning. Few decades have been publicly reviewed so often. We observed in the Introduction that the New Right defined itself against the 1960s, as an era whose permissiveness needed to be revoked. Among those with a more positive stake in the 1960s, the decade also provokes regret; not that it happened, but that it had to end. This can involve pure nostalgia for a lost garden of youth and innocence. Or it can more ambivalently register the failures of the decade, as Withnail's hippy does, positing the end as the time when the decade went wrong. Joan Didion, who had made much of her reputation as a chronicler of the era, could write in the 1970s about ‘the morning after the Sixties’, and debate whether they had ended in 1969 with Charles Manson's murders, or in 1971 when, less traumatically, Didion moved house (1979: 205, 47).
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- Information
- Literature of the 1980sAfter the Watershed, pp. 209 - 218Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010